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BOILER ROOM – EP #50 – 1 Year Anniversary Extravaganza!!! | Tune in to the Alternate Current Radio Network (ACR) for another LIVE broadcast of The Boiler Room starting at 6 PM PST | 9 PM EST every Wednesday. Join us for uncensored, uninterruptible talk radio, custom-made for barfly philosophers, misguided moralists, masochists, street corner evangelists, media-maniacs, savants, political animals and otherwise lovable rascals.Join ACR hosts Hesher, & Spore along with Randy J of 21Wire, Jay Dyer from Jays Analysis, Branko Malic of Kali Tribune fame and Daniel Spaulding of Soul of the East. Tonight the Boiler Gang is in celebration mode as we ve hit our one year broadcast anniversary, accolades will be given, classic clips will be played and new analysis will be found on Brussels, Syria, Palmyra We re going over media fakery with Jay Dyer an the crew, be it in Brussels, Paris, Boston or San Bernardino. If you want to participate, bring something interesting to throw into the boiler Join us in the ALTERNATE CURRENT RADIO chat room.BOILER ROOM IS NOT A POLICTALLY CORRECT ZONE! LISTEN TO THE SHOW IN THE PLAYER BELOW ENJOY! REFERENCE LINKS: | 1real |
How Yelp Reviews Can Help Improve Patient Care - The New York Times | Hospitals and many insurance carriers care about patient satisfaction. It especially matters to hospitals because insurance payments can be influenced by how patients rate the care they receive, as well as by the health of the patient, which hospitals usually report. Many people in the health care profession are put off by this. They argue that patient satisfaction scores aren’t necessarily aligned with outcomes. Moreover, they say that trying to improve satisfaction is a waste of time. It’s possible, however, that patient satisfaction is being rewarded already, and that the efforts we are making to highlight it aren’t helping as much as we think. Almost every study on patient satisfaction uses the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (H. C. A. H. P. S.) survey. Studies show it is correlated with clinical measures of quality, although some other studies dispute this. Collecting such information is costly, but there may be other sources for quality assessments that don’t require investment from the health care system. In 2012, researchers in the Journal of General Internal Medicine examined online reviews from RateMDs. com and Yelp. They found that a majority of reviews were positive. They noted, however, that patients reported on aspects of care that extended beyond the encounter. They were concerned about staff, access to the hospital and convenience. They also cared greatly about the bedside manner of the doctors they encountered. Dr. Naomi Bardach, associate professor of pediatrics and health policy at U. C. S. F. Benioff Children’s Hospital San Francisco, and her colleagues looked at Yelp to determine how consumer ratings compared with those of the hospital consumer assessment survey. Of the almost 3, 800 hospitals with survey and other data, about 25 percent also had ratings on Yelp. The correlation between Yelp and the survey was quite strong. Moreover, high ratings at Yelp were correlated with lower mortality for myocardial infarctions and pneumonia — and fewer readmissions for those problems as well as heart failure. A recent study in Health Affairs expanded on this work. Researchers compared the content of Yelp narrative reviews with the factors considered important in the hospital consumer assessment survey. They found that Yelp reviews did cover most things the survey tallied. But they also covered an additional 12 criteria not in the survey. These included the cost of a visit insurance and billing scheduling compassion of staff family member care and the quality of many staff members. All of these things were important to patients, and all might be correlated with outcomes. More important, nine of the 15 most prevalent criteria in reviews were not included in the survey. The use of metrics like the hospital consumer assessment survey assumes that those in the health care system have figured out how best to measure patient satisfaction. They also assume that all the information we need should come from patients or from the medical record. That’s not how the real world works. In a more recent study, Dr. Bardach found that the perceptions of other family members matter and can also be powerful because they focus on safety in a way that patients may not be able to do. The same is true of those who help care for patients at home and help make medical decisions for them. Their opinions are ignored by the survey. Those publicly available data may even be more comprehensive than that gathered at the behest of payers. The next question is whether the health care system needs to measure satisfaction — maybe the publicly available data, like at Yelp, is sufficient. Could those data be used alone to incentivize providers? A couple of weeks ago, my colleague Austin Frakt wrote a column on hospital quality and market share. He argued that people could improve their health by choosing a hospital that has a higher quality rating. He also underscored that patient satisfaction scores are often aligned with quality and with better outcomes. He highlighted a paper published in The American Economic Review that looked at how performance of hospitals was related to market share. Conventional wisdom holds that patients lack information on quality and that they cannot tell, or favor, providers who seem better. But researchers found that hospitals that performed better, on both outcomes and measures, tended to have greater market share, and experienced greater market growth. Further, they found that as patients shifted to hospitals with higher performance, that change alone drove a significant amount in the improvements seen in overall survival rates for a number of conditions. Overall survival improved, in part, just because patients shifted from hospitals with lower quality to higher quality. If patients had the ability to choose between hospitals, they tended to gravitate to those with higher performance. In other words, this may be an area of health care where the free market is working. When allowed to choose, patients seem able to discern quality — as they define it — and gravitate toward it. It’s not clear that we need to be forcing the issue with measurement and reimbursement. It’s important to recognize, though, that this was a study of Medicare patients, all of whom arguably have more flexibility in terms of hospitals and doctors than those with private insurance. Those with private insurance often are restricted by “narrow networks” and directed to a few facilities and offices. Americans cry out for more choice in their health care. This sometimes gets translated to mean a choice of insurance companies. But Americans with Medicare, who have the least choice of insurers, have the most choices when it comes to providers. And they seem to use that freedom to choose providers who perform better. I asked Dr. Bardach about this. “It’s still unclear how people are getting the information to choose the hospitals, but the power of stories is likely an important part of why Yelp and other online reviews are compelling,” she said. “Stories add nuance and context to the otherwise somewhat sterile numbers that the H. C. A. H. P. S. produces. ” Research shows that patients reward quality on their own — when they can. We might just need to make it easier for more of them to do so. | 0fake |
WOW! CHILD RAPE VICTIM That Hillary Laughed About Comes Forward: “I can never forgive her” [Video[ | The audio of Hillary Clinton laughing about getting a child rapist a lighter sentence is pretty shocking for a couple of reasons: The accent on Hillary is very different from the many other accents she s presented to the public. It s strange because she s from Illinois! What the heck! Check it out and tell us what you think. The other thing that s so shocking is Hillary s blatant disregard for the victim in this case. It s actually really sickening to hear her speak of the 12-year old with such disregard. It s rare that we get a glimpse into the REAL Hillary so here it is in all its glory pretty scary huh?A child rape victim says she cannot forgive Hillary Clinton for defending her rapist in court 40 years ago, saying the Democratic presidential candidate attacked her credibility despite knowing that her assailant was guilty and later laughed about it in a taped interview.Kathy Shelton was just 12 years old when a 41-year-old drifter raped her on the side of a desolate Arkansas road in 1975.Now, four decades later, she has agreed to be named and pictured for the first time in this Daily Mail Online exclusive because she is furious that her rapist s defense attorney Hillary Clinton has been portraying herself as a lifelong advocate of women and girls on the campaign trail. It s put a lot of anger back in me, said Shelton, now 54, in an exclusive interview at her Springdale, Arkansas, home in August. Every time I see [Clinton] on TV I just want to reach in there and grab her, but I can t do that. In 1975, Clinton served as the defense lawyer for Thomas Alfred Taylor, a 41-year-old factory worker accused of raping Shelton after luring her to his car.Taylor pleaded down to unlawful fondling of a minor and served less than a year in prison after Clinton was able to block the admission of forensic evidence that linked her client to the crime.In a lengthy interview with the Daily Mail Online, Shelton said Clinton is lying when she claims to be a lifelong defender of women and girls. HILLARY LAUGHS WHEN DISCUSSING GETTING CHILD RAPIST OFF WITH LIGHT SENTENCE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tor00iWUhDQRead more: Daily Mail | 1real |
null | Oh golly , they put a fifty dollar security camera on a copy of a drone from 1970. Ain't they clever. | 1real |
10 Engaging Proposals, From the Rooftop to the Subway - The New York Times | “Will you marry me?” Hundreds of thousands of potential grooms and brides pop that question every year, and yet the logistics of delivering that momentous phrase — where to do it, when to do it and how much of a surprise should it be — remains among the most important decisions anyone planning on getting married has to make. Some of the couples whose wedding announcements were featured in the pages of The New York Times this past year, or whose weddings The Times learned about, got engaged in unusual spots — from a Manhattan rooftop to a subway construction site below the city’s streets — and one proposal even involved seeking advice from President Obama. And, of course, at least several can now be found on YouTube. Here are 10 of our most engaging stories of the year. Mr. Litman, who first began dating Ms. Michelis in the eighth grade at the Horace Mann School in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, proposed in November 2015 in Montauk, N. Y. the entire scene captured by a drone hovering above on an unusually warm day at the beach. With waves rushing the shore and the Montauk Point Lighthouse in the distance, Ms. Michelis can be seen from a windblown aerial view playfully running beneath the drone before turning back to Mr. Litman. As she runs closer, he drops to his knee, engagement ring in hand. Momentarily shocked at the sight, she drops her purse as he asks her to marry him, and the two then fall into each other’s arms. “The first thing that came to my mind was, I can’t wait to show it to our kids,” Ms. Michelis said. They were married Oct. 8. The couple first met in fall 2011 while working on the digital team for Mr. Obama’s campaign. After the president’s victory, Mr. Fallsgraff became the digital director of Organizing for Action, the nonprofit organization that manages the social media and digital accounts for Mr. Obama. In 2015, Mr. Fallsgraff and his team were filming a video with Mr. Obama at a hotel in Washington during the Organizing for Action Spring Organizing Summit. Knowing he was planning to leave in June, Mr. Fallsgraff took the opportunity to talk with the president, and told him that he was bent on proposing (which he would do three months later). “You got a rock picked out and all that?” he recalled Mr. Obama asking. Mr. Fallsgraff told him he had yet to get the ring and asked if the president had any advice. Mr. Obama suggested that Mr. Fallsgraff get help from someone Ms. Wilson trusted and who understood her taste. When Mr. Fallsgraff suggested that he was thinking of asking Ms. Wilson’s best friend, the president responded, “I think that’s the right strategy, but you’ve got to swear her to secrecy. ” The next time Mr. Fallsgraff saw Ms. Wilson’s best friend, he pulled her aside. “I told her I had a mission for her from the president of the United States,” he said. Mission accomplished. Mr. Fallsgraff and Ms. Wilson were married July 3. The couple, who met in June 2015 through a dating app called the League, went to Paris six months later for a New Year’s celebration. While at a restaurant there, Mr. Purcell ordered a bottle of Champagne for what he thought was 110 euros, the equivalent of about $119. But when the bill arrived after dinner, he realized he had mistakenly ordered a bottle of vintage Champagne — the 2003 Dom Pérignon Rosé — at a cost of 1, 100 euros, a total at the time of roughly $1, 195. In May, Mr. Purcell invited Ms. Bui to the rooftop of his apartment building in San Francisco to enjoy the unobstructed view that included the Golden Gate Bridge. As they took in the view, Mr. Purcell surprised Ms. Bui by breaking out an expensive bottle of the same vintage Champagne he had mistakenly bought in Paris. It was all a part of a special occasion, he told her, and then he surprised her again, this time with an engagement ring. They were married Nov. 26. The couple, who met in 2007 while they were working for the New York City Department of City Planning, became engaged in May 2014, when Mr. Meagher proposed while they were on a tour of the construction site of the 86th Street station, part of the Second Avenue subway. The tour, conducted below street level, included residents who live near the new subway line as well as officials with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. “We’re both passionate about cities and infrastructure,” Mr. Meagher said. And about each other, as the group learned when Mr. Meagher, wearing a hard hat and an orange safety vest, got down on one knee and asked Ms. Grossman, who was wearing the same gear, to marry him. Gasps, then applause, broke out among the tour group, as well as from the bride’s parents, who had also shown up for the occasion. They were married Jan. 9. The couple met in August 2014 during a performance of the Broadway musical “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder. ” Mr. Fogelman, who was there alone, tried to move to an empty seat next to Ms. Phillips to get a better view of the stage. “Not in the middle of a song,” said Ms. Phillips, who was there with a friend. Mr. Fogelman waited until after the song to switch seats, and at intermission, he apologized profusely to her for his poor theater etiquette. She forgave him, he sat down next to her, and they began talking. They were soon dating, and in August 2015, while sitting in those same seats, Mr. Fogelman turned to Ms. Phillips at intermission and proposed. “It turned out to be a wonderful at the theater,” Ms. Phillips said, “one that I will never forget. ” They were married Sept. 4. Mr. Whelden, a plumber in Boston who sings with two professional touring a cappella groups (Five O’Clock Shadow and Overboard) proposed during his performance at a New Year’s Eve concert in Rockport, Mass. The crowd roared when he sang “Fall in Love,” a song he wrote for his future bride that included the words “will you marry me. ” “It was the most amazing, romantic proposal I could’ve ever imagined,” Ms. Delaney said. They were married May 7. The couple, who were both living in Park Slope, Brooklyn, met through OkCupid in early 2011. They immediately became a couple. In July 2015, they moved into a together in Bay Ridge. On their first day in the new place, Ms. Roth put in motion her proposal while Ms. Marini was at work. She was hiding when Ms. Marini returned, and watched her follow a path of lighted candles to a makeshift bed where Chinese food boxes had been placed across the floor, leading to a smaller box. (“Melina had always idealized the movie trope of people moving into a new apartment that’s not yet furnished, and having to eat Chinese food on the floor, ” Ms. Roth explained.) When Ms. Marini opened the smaller box, which contained an engagement ring, she started sobbing. Along with the ring was a note that said: “Will you marry me? Check yes or no. ” Ms. Marini checked “yes,” and she and Ms. Roth, who came out of hiding, cried in each other’s arms. “I’m not the type of person who wants to see ‘Will you marry me?’ splashed across a Jumbotron,” Ms. Marini said. “This was much more intimate to me, and much more meaningful. ” They were married Aug. 6. The couple met on March 11, 2005, while shooting pool in what Ms. Powell described as a dim, smoky bar on Avenue B in Manhattan. They shared several beers, then a single kiss outside the bar. Mr. Albertson, 23 at the time, was beyond taken with her, but Ms. Powell, then 20, was not quite ready for a serious relationship. They settled on becoming friends. Ms. Powell eventually married another man, and fell out of touch with Mr. Albertson. By May 2014, however, Ms. Powell was divorced and dating Mr. Albertson, often telling him that the word “marriage” now frightened her. On March 11, 2015, 10 years to the day they met, they were back on Avenue B and heading into that same dim, smoky bar when Ms. Powell looked down and saw a huge chalk mark indicating the spot where she had first kissed him. She turned to find him down on one knee, holding her engagement ring. “I was freaking out,” she said. “I just started crying and hugging him. ” He proposed but managed to avoid scaring her by leaving out the word “marriage. ” “I was wondering,” he said, “if you wanted to hang out with me forever. ” They were married March 11. Mr. Turke, who proposed in February, chose to give his future bride a full day of bliss, rather than a single moment of happiness. An hour after he sneaked out of their apartment at 6 a. m. he called her with instructions to go into their kitchen, where she found a huge bouquet of white lilies with several notes that he had left for her, including one that read, “Today is the day that we get engaged,” and another that read, “Enjoy the moments ahead of you, have fun and say ‘yes. ’” What ensued was a dizzying series of events that first took Ms. Helmling to the NoMad Hotel in Manhattan, where she found her three best friends waiting at a breakfast table. A waiter then gave them a note with instructions to walk across the street to a spa, where they each enjoyed Champagne and a massage before being whisked away for manicures and pedicures. Later in the day, Ms. Helmling was chauffeured over the George Washington Bridge to a small park in New Jersey overlooking the Hudson River — the spot where Mr. Turke had first asked her out in September 2013. “When she arrived, we hugged and cried and she told me all about her day,” said Mr. Turke, who also presented a slide show that included every photo that had both of them in it, arranged in chronological order as a way of telling their story. Then he proposed, and Ms. Helmling cried some more. They were married Nov. 13. The couple met online in 2008. At the time, Mr. Stucky was living in Somerville, Mass. and going through a divorce. They were soon dating, but their relationship began to sputter. In the space of three years, each of them proposed to the other, and each was soundly rejected. In June 2014, Ms. Mathiowetz was partying with friends in New York when she consumed too many psychedelic mushrooms. The episode left her paralyzed for nearly six hours — and longing again for Mr. Stucky, whom she was no longer seeing. “I can’t believe I haven’t been telling you every day that I love you,” she called to tell him the moment she got back on her feet. Mr. Stucky was feeling much the same way, as he too had had a experience, he said, a nightmare in which he was on his knees and looking up at a stranger who was telling him he had only 24 hours to live. Completely shaken, he awoke and began taking into account all the things in life that mattered most to him, and quickly realized that Ms. Mathiowetz was at the top of that list. Those shared experiences brought them back together, and in January 2015, Mr. Stucky proposed to Ms. Mathiowetz, for a second time, during a weekend trip at a in Portsmouth, N. H. This time, she accepted. They were married June 11. | 0fake |
Turkey to suspend flights to Northern Iraq from Friday: statement | ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkey will suspend flights to the northern Iraqi cities of Erbil and Sulaimaniya starting on 1500 GMT on Friday, in response to a Kurdish independence referendum held earlier this week, the Turkish consulate in Erbil said in a statement. It also said work was going on to increase capacity of flights until Friday. The decision will impact Turkish Airlines (THYAO.IS), Pegasus (PGSUS.IS), and Atlas Global flights. Shares of Turkish Airlines fell 4.7 percent, while shares of low-cost rival Pegasus fell 2.9 percent immediately after the statement. | 0fake |
Previously Deported Alien, Brother Busted With 200 Pounds of Meth | A joint law enforcement task force arrested a previously deported criminal alien and his brother for allegedly transporting nearly 200 pounds of methamphetamine. [U. S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) agents teamed up with deputies from the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office to arrest two brothers who were allegedly smuggling a large volume of methamphetamine, according to information obtained by Breitbart Texas from ICE officials. The task force attempted to arrested Jayor 34, a Mexican national with a prior criminal history that includes prison time and at least two deportations, and his brother Hernan 28, after observing them loading a suspicious box into one of their vehicles. Officials listed the younger brother as a Phoenix resident. The made no mention of his citizenship, nationality, or immigration status. Officers surveilling the two brothers followed them to a storage facility where they removed a large box and placed it into Jayro’s SUV. After following the two vehicles for several miles, officers attempted to stop both vehicles. Hernan stopped his vehicle, but Jayro fled from the law enforcement officers in his SUV. During the pursuit, Jayro allegedly caused two traffic collisions. After the second crash, Jayro abandoned his vehicle and fled on foot. Officers quickly caught up with the illegal alien and placed him in custody. An inspection of his vehicle revealed a large box containing nearly 200 pounds of methamphetamine. Officers arrested the two men and seized the drugs and vehicles. Court records obtained by Breitbart Texas reveal that immigration officials deported Jayro on at least two previous occasions. Border Patrol agents apprehended the Mexican national on at least three other occasions. A court sentenced him to prison after one of the incidents of illegally crossing the border and a second time for using a fraudulent document to cross the border illegally. The court sentenced him to two years in prison for that charge. “It takes cooperation and coordination across agencies to keep our communities safe,” said Maricopa County Sheriff Paul Penzone. “MCSO is committed to working with our partners in law enforcement to make it tough for drug gangs to operate and endanger our communities. We’re pleased with a very successful outcome. ” “This case is a direct result of the ongoing collaborative efforts by HSI with its federal and local partners,” acting special agent in charge for HSI Phoenix Louie Garcia said in a written statement. “Drug smuggling poses both a security and a public safety concern in our communities. We’re continuing to use all of the resources and tools at our disposal to address these threats. ” The two men each face prison sentences of between five and ten years if convicted on the state drug charges. Jayro also faces charges of resisting arrest and fleeing law enforcement. 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 |
House Speaker Ryan says he is not ready to endorse Trump: CNN | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan said on Thursday he is not ready to support or endorse Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. “I’m just not ready to do that at this point. I’m not there right now,” Ryan, a Republican, said in an interview with CNN. Ryan, who added he hoped to support Trump’s candidacy, was making his first public comments since Trump’s Republican primary rivals dropped out of the race for the White House this week. | 0fake |
Israel recalling UNESCO ambassador | October 27, 2016 Israel recalling UNESCO ambassador
Following its passing of another controversial resolution seen as anti-Israeli by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has instructed Israeli Ambassador to UNESCO Carmel Shama-Hacohen to return to Israel for consultation.
| 1real |
North Carolina Just Came Up With The Most Ludicrous Reason Yet To Stop Early Voting | North Carolina, which is still butthurt over the Supreme Court s decision not to allow their voter suppression law to go into effect before the election, is getting a touch creative with their reasons not to allow early voting. What if a person votes, and then dies?We wish we were making this up.Alas, though, we aren t. Dallas Woodhouse, North Carolina s GOP executive director, tried his best to sound extremely worried about this non-existent crisis when he spoke to Fox 8 about it: We have a situation here where you have to be alive on Election Day. If you vote early, you still have to be alive in a very close race you could literally have dead people voting. We have a situation here. Har de har har. Dead people voting has been one of the GOP s drumbeats regarding voter fraud for a long time, and, of course, on their planet, voter fraud actually only occurs when Democrats are able to vote. Early voting is one of those areas, but absentee voting, for some reason, isn t.Gee, could it be because the majority of people who cast absentee ballots in North Carolina are white, elderly and Republican? The majority of people who cast ballots during early voting are primarily minority and Democrat. From a reasonable perspective, if North Carolina were really worried about dead people voting, they should be targeting absentee voting, not early voting.North Carolina does have a law requiring that voters be alive on Election Day for their votes to be counted, even if they cast an early or absentee ballot. There are, however, contingencies in effect should someone who voted early die before Election Day. They re outlined by North Carolina Board of Elections general counsel Josh Lawson, below: All early voting is done on retrievable ballots, he said. If a person dies, the county board of elections is notified by the Social Security Administration or the Registrar of Deeds. They have a pretty good system for tracking deaths. When we become aware of it, we remove that ballot.' North Carolina is busy what-iffing itself off the edge of the sanity cliff here. With each comment, they increasingly prove that their voter suppression law was all about suppressing the minority vote.Featured image by Sara D. Davis/Getty Images | 1real |
BROKE City of Chicago Spends Taxpayer Money Sticking It To Trump With HUGE ‘F YOU’ Installed Right Outside His Luxury Hotel | The Windy City is under fire for turning public art into a political message using taxpayer dollars! The BROKE City of Chicago installed a golden sculpture that spells out Real Fake right smack in front of Trump International Hotel and Tower in the city s downtown area. So the city spent money they don t have to slam President Trump? No wonder people are leaving the city in droves Filmmaker @ImAndrewMarcus (me) reacts to #RealFake sculpture that #RealBroke Chicago PAID to install outside Trump tower. #RealDumb pic.twitter.com/2ap792wxF0 Andrew Marcus (@ImAndrewMarcus) June 30, 2017 Any questions about the artist s intention or the artwork s background should be directed to the artist s gallery Kavi Gupta, wrote Christine Carrino, the communications director for the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events. The statue is bolted into a large public sidewalk space in front of Trump Tower, an area that over the past year has been commonly used for Trump protesters who gather to demonstrate and for tourists and supporters who want a picture in front of the glistening blue sky scraper. Art at its best makes a statement. And this piece certainly makes a real statement. Spokesperson for Chicago Mayor Rahm EmanuelCarrino did not respond to questions about the placement of the sculpture. The Chicago Tribune reports in an article that Carrino said the artwork is up for interpretation. Yes, we ve interpreted it alright. Does the city of Chicago want to lose even more money if tourists boycott the already broke city? Americans who voted for Trump might just have to do that Read more: FOX News | 1real |
CHEVY CHASE ADMITS To Using Position At SNL To Push Democrats Over Republicans To Millions Of Viewers | Comedian Mark Dice explores the influence so-called comedians have on their viewers when it comes to pushing their political views on fans. As part of his example, Dice shows his viewers a clip from a 1980 interview with leftist comedian Chevy Chase. Chase is not only unapologetic for using his position as a writer for SNL to push his liberal propaganda down the throats of unsuspecting viewers, he s actually quite arrogant about the power he believed he had over his fans on SNL.In the 1980 interview with CNN, Chevy Chase admits to using his position to affect the outcomes of the Gerald Ford Jimmy Carter election. Chase admits to wanting to take down Gerald Ford and to promote Jimmy Carter: I just went after him [Ford]. And uh I certainly, and obviously my leanings were Democratic and I wanted Carter in and I wanted him out. And I figured look, we re reaching millions of people uh..every weekend, so why not do it? The CNN reporter seems stunned by Chase s admission asks, Wait a minute! You mean to tell me that in the back of your mind you were thinking, Hey I want Carter and I m gonna make him [Ford] look bad? Chase, who seemed very pleased with his arrogant self bragged, Oh yeah! Mark Dice goes on to expose and destroy the credibility of modern day comedians/propagandists Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel.Watch: | 1real |
Chaos Ensues After Man Accidentally Shoots Himself And Wife In Church During Gun Safety Talk | Maybe thoughts and prayers aren t the remedy following a shooting, after all. At the First United Methodist Church in East Tennessee, about 20 senior citizens gathered around for a holiday meal. After the meal, the group of elderly churchgoers decided to discuss gun safety. There has, after all, been a spate of mass shootings recently as many as 317 so far this year. They got the idea for the conversation reportedly after a nearby county s sheriff s department held similar seminars at its local churches, according to Tellico Plains Police Chief Russ Parks. Well, I ve got my gun on me, an 81-year-old member of the church in Tellico Plains said, according to Parks, The Washington Post reports. The man then pulled out his holster in which he had a .38-caliber Ruger handgun. He promptly removed the magazine for everyone to see, then cleared the chamber and showed the gun to his fellow parishioners.The churchgoers discussed how to safely bring guns to church, then spoke of the deaths with recent mass shootings, like, for example, the recent Texas massacre in which a gunman shot 26 people dead as they sat in church.The 81-year-old man put the magazine back into the gun and put the gun back in the holster, Parks explained, but then later, while parishioners were cleaning up, one church member who had missed the demonstration asked the man to see the firearm and that s when everything turned chaotic inside the church.The 81-year-old accidentally pulled the trigger without realizing the gun was loaded, then a bullet fired across the palm of the man s hand and toward his 80-year-old wife, who was sitting in a wheelchair next to him, entering her lower left abdomen, then it went out of the right side of her abdomen, into her right forearm and out the backside of her forearm. Following that, the bullet then ricocheted off the wall and landed under his wife s wheelchair, Parks said.That prompted panic in the church because some of the folks thought an active gunman was on the premises. They had their backs to it, Parks said. Somebody hollers, He s been shot! She s been shot! Call 911! Due to a lot of panic during the calls to 911, the dispatcher assumed someone had entered the church and was shooting, so several schools were put on lockdown.The injured husband and wife were flown to the University of Tennessee Medical Center where they are listed critical condition.We re waiting for the NRA to say, If only the wife had a gun, she could have protected herself. Image: Ken Wilcox via Flickr, under Creative Commons license 2.0. | 1real |
Características de la nueva Nintendo Switch | Características de la nueva Nintendo Switch EL PRINCIPAL ENTRETENIMIENTO QUE OFRECE ES MONTAR SUS 357 COMPONENTES
Nintendo presentó hace pocas semanas su nueva Nintendo Switch, una consola mezcla en un mismo aparato las características de una sobremesa con una portátil. En los últimos días, se han ido desgranando nuevas características y prestaciones.
· Se puede acoplar a un aparato de televisión o a un hijo.
· Sirve como consolador asegurando diversión para toda la familia.
· Sale un montón de mierda de dentro.
· Puedes quitarle piezas y usarla de botón para la camisa.
· Si se le acoplan todos los periféricos, el jugador puede construirse un pequeño refugio e introducirse en el interior de la consola.
· Según cómo se monte, parece una Super Nintendo.
· Suena una alarma si la consola detecta que el usuario está haciendo el ridículo en público.
· Puedes llevarla a las fiestas y seguir jugando a solas tu partida mientras los demás se divierten.
· Los cartuchos desmontables son compatibles con los rifles AK- 47.
· Se puede acoplar a la Play 4 para jugar a juegos buenos.
· Es posible jugar 24 horas al día con ella, en cualquier sitio y sin hacer absolutamente nada más hasta fenecer de inanición o agotamiento.
· Incluye una ranura en la que depositar donaciones para que Nintendo salga adelante.
· Pueden jugar mujeres.
· Existe la posibilidad de pagarla a plazos o por componentes, lo que permite hacerse con una consola en 632 meses.
· Cuando ya se tienen todas las piezas, la consola es un Transformer que cobra vida e intenta destruir el planeta.
· Permite formar gobierno con la abstención del PSOE.
· Le falta una pieza que viene de Alemania. | 1real |
Scrabble Spells Doom for the Racial Hypothesis of Intelligence | 11 27
Top three nations with elite Scrabble players on the WESPA ratings list. Nigeria is on top, despite constant travel visa rejections to play in world tournaments.
Besides Nigeria, countries like Kenya, Ghana and Uganda also contribute players to the world top 100.
An even more astonishing picture of African performance unfolds when we look beyond the English-speaking African countries.
Scrabble in French?
In 2015, Nigel Richards, an English-speaking professional Scrabble player from New Zealand, confirmed his reputation as perhaps the greatest Scrabble player in history by winning the French World Scrabble Championship, after memorizing the French dictionary in nine weeks. His goal in 2015 was apparently to hold both the English and French world championships simultaneously. He was robbed of his full glory by the Nigerian Wellington Jighere in the English version, but managed to pull off a more phenomenal victory in the language he does not speak!
Nigel Richards is said to have an authentic photographic memory .
What caught my eye in all the frenzied media reports was the name of the person Richards defeated in the finals (I was fully expecting a French name): Schelick Rekawe. An African (from Gabon) had reached the finals of the French world championships? How?
When I looked into the history of the French Scrabble World Championships, I was stunned to find that Francophone African countries have been even more dominant in French Scrabble, and over a longer period, than Nigerians have become in English Scrabble, despite a very active expert Scrabble club culture in France and other native French-speaking countries.
The full list of the top players in the 2015 French Scrabble championship that Richards won gives a clear picture of this African dominance: 2015 French World Championships final standings. Source: French Wikipedia
A look at Gabon’s demographics makes the Scrabble achievement of Gabon impossible to explain under the present racial hypothesis.
Gabon has a population of 1.7 million and a reported national IQ of 64.
If the world champion needs an IQ of just 140 (it should probably be higher than that, given the level of gender disparity at the very top), then there is statistically no one in Gabon who should ever come anywhere close to the world championship. Three made it to the top 10 in 2015.
Note that the strongest version of the genetic hypothesis is contradicted even before you do the math: the very existence of such high interest in a mathematical game can not be predicted from a genetic theory that claims heritability of (cognitive or other) human interests, if it is indeed true that Africans have the lowest genetic endowment in mathematical (or even verbal) ability.
Is French Scrabble perhaps less mathematical than English Scrabble? Not at all. The very fact that someone could successfully cross from English Scrabble to French Scrabble (Nigel Richards) should indicate that it requires similar cognitive skills. But I still looked at some profiles of the top French Scrabble players in Europe just to make sure, and found clear signs to confirm this. For example, the French Wikipedia entry on France’s best player (the last French player to keep the French World Championship from Africans, and the only one to have won it twice) says:
Christian Coustillas, professeur agrégé et génie des mathématiques, est un joueur français de Scrabble.
I do not know any French, but I can bet that there is the word ‘mathematics’ somewhere in there and perhaps even an academic career in it!
In 2016, Nigel Richards returned to defend his World Championship title and this time the Africans vowed to keep the crown from him. Like the year before Richards stole the French championship, the two finalists in 2016 were both Africans again; Richards was fourth, behind three Africans. The French math professor and former world champion, Christian Coustillas, could not make it to the top ten as more Africans dominated the chart: 2016 French World Championships final standings. 8 /10 positions are African. Source: French Wikipedia
Notice that the names of the 2016 top Gabonese players are different from the ones in 2015, which defies the probability projections from their population and national IQ even further. Senegal (population 13 million, IQ 76), which has probably had the most success at the world championships historically, achieved this with a literacy rate of only 40%!
Something Special about Scrabble for Africans Perhaps?
The man who won the French World Scrabble championship in 2014, Julien Affaton from Benin, also happens to be a top master draughts (checkers) player in his country. This should immediately suggest that whatever he is using to win his Scrabble games probably has something in common with what is needed to be a master in checkers, because it is highly improbable to be that exceptional in two different areas that require unrelated skills.
The question can then be asked: if this is true, then why aren’t Africans also very good in checkers at the world level, just as they are with Scrabble? Isn’t checkers an even more natural field for Africans since it is cheaper to make a checkers set?
Meet Baba Sy.
Baba Sy breaking world record for simultaneous draughts play.
Back in 1960, a draughts expert from France was visiting the French colony of Senegal when he decided to watch some of the street games in poor communities after the French settlers had introduced the game to the black natives. He could not believe the accuracy and speed of their calculations, despite their lack of exposure to theory, and he decided to expose one of the stronger players to his homeland of France where there was a strong checkers club culture among the mathematically-inclined elites. To the utter shock of everyone in France, the young Senegalese player, Baba Sy, defeated every single expert in France and instantly achieved national fame by becoming the national champion of France!
France had once been the most dominant nation in the world of international draughts, before the Netherlands (briefly) and then the Soviet Union (permanently) took this honor from them through the latter’s state-sponsored program of monetarily professionalizing chess and checkers careers. With the phenomenal rise of Baba Sy, the French thought they had the chance of recapturing the World Championship from the Soviets by using this brilliant talent from one of their colonies.
Baba Sy participated in the 1960 World Championship tournament and shocked the Soviets by coming second in the world, in a variant of draughts he had just been introduced to that was different from his Senegalese one. Sy was not convinced that there was a human who was better than him at any form of checkers, so he decided to challenge the world champion in a more decisive one-on-one World Championship match instead of an open tournament of cumulative points against different players. But by the time this match was supposed to happen, Baba Sy had gained enough mastery of this standard variant to convincingly demolish the best of the Soviets, including their reigning champion and best match play genius at the time, Iser Kuperman. This made the Soviet government reluctant to allow the official World Championship match to take place, apparently for fear of the international embarrassment this title loss would cause, given their heavy investment in the game (they had the same fears over Bobby Fischer in chess). On the day of the match, the Soviet champion simply did not show up, and thus began a long contentious diplomatic standoff between the governments of the Soviet Union and Senegal, as the world of international draughts hotly debated who the rightful champion of the world was for many years. It was only fully resolved posthumously for Baba Sy. List of Draughts World Champions. Source: Wikipedia
Again, a person like Sy should not exist outside the realm of science fiction if the racial hypothesis is correct. In 1960, Senegal’s population was 3 million, and IQ 76. The population of France was 47 million, and the population of Russia was 120 million, with national IQs of 98 and 97, respectively.
It should be impossible for a Senegalese champion to beat just the high school champions of either France or the Soviet Union. The reason we have never seen a child become world champion in checkers or Scrabble (or anything) is probably because their brains are not fully developed (brain development continues to 25 years of age); and yet the racial hypothesis tells us that the fully developed African brains are on average the mental age equivalent of the white 12 year olds. So why do (the smartest of) Africans produce world champion level players and the smartest of the white 12 year olds (or even the much more “superior” 18/19 year olds) never do?
Baba Sy was not some freakish anomaly in African draughts. Former African colonies of France have continued to offer the biggest challenge to Russia’s traditional dominance of the game, even though, like Scrabble players, most of them still have little access to international tournaments to raise their ratings (the fact that many of them come from lower income communities even by African standards makes it harder for them to obtain travel visas.) In 2015, Jean Marc Ndjofang , a Cameroonian player who has migrated to Europe, managed to qualify as the challenger to the Russian world champion (by defeating everyone else, including other Russians), and only came short of ending the iron grip of the Russians on the world title through a tie-break, as the two failed to beat each other after seven games of normal classical match play. The 2015 World Champion, Alexander Georgiev, in a heated tournament game against the Vice-World Champion, Jean Ndjofang.
American Checkers.
Americans play a different variant of draughts called English checkers or American checkers; the different variants mainly differ on the number of squares on the board. Although the game is mostly popular with children in the US, there is a whole world of professional checkers players who also have a clear endowment in mathematical ability. Thus, the most famous world champion in the history of American checkers was a distinguished math professor, Marion Tinsley . (There are now two variants of Anglo-American checkers: the normal Go-As-You-Play or GAYP and one called 3-move, in which the first three moves are pre-chosen, to prevent memorized opening plays that increase probabilities of draws).
After Tinsley’s indomitable reign, the most dominant English-checkers player in the world became the appropriately named Ron King, who won American championships and 12 world championships. At the height of his dominance, Ron King faced the biggest challenge of his career from an unknown player named Lubabalo Kondlo. King was able to retain the title after a grueling match that was later made into a documentary . Kondlo happens to be a black man from a very poor area in South Africa. Ron King is also black, from Barbados, and he is known as the Muhammad Ali of checkers for his “trash talking.” At the height of his career, King entered the Guinness Book of World Records for playing an unbelievable 350 simultaneous games and winning them all!
Ron King successfully defended his World Championship against strong Russian players who had shifted to the Anglo-Saxon checkers, including Alexander Moiseyev , a grandmaster in three variants of the game. Moiseyev, a computer programmer, finally snatched the crown from King in the 3-move variant in 2003.
Incredibly, Ron King held on to the World Championship of the GAYP variant until 2014, when he forfeited it to an Italian grandmaster, Sergio Scarpetta , when he failed to show up for the last four games of the World Championship match. South Africa’s Kondlo has continued his quest for the world title; he qualified again to play the World Championship match in 2015 in 3-move checkers (after defeating a strong field including Scarpetta), but lost the match to the world champion, Italian Michele Borghetti.
Canadian Checkers.
Canada also has its variant of checkers. The 2015 Canadian Champion is a Senegalese immigrant, Souleymane Keita. He defended his title against (a-Russian-immigrant-sounding name) Vladimir Lubarsky.
In summary, a player from sub-Saharan Africa was the finalist or world champion of 2015, in International Draughts, American checkers, Canadian checkers, English Scrabble and French Scrabble.
Why aren’t Africans also dominant in chess?
The simple reason seems to be that, unlike Scrabble and Checkers, master level chess requires access to a very large body of ever-growing literature in chess theory (even ignoring the difficulty of making homemade chess pieces); it’s no longer possible to teach yourself grand master level chess, without memorizing these long chess openings. Africans do not have this access to chess materials (which now includes computer programs) for the same reason that they have no access to mathematics text books and other educational materials in schools or public (I would be surprised if even 1 percent of Africans have ever seen the word “library” on a building anywhere; they simply don’t exist). Chess has become more resource-demanding than any school subject.
Fischer himself decried the increasingly heavy reliance of top-level chess on familiarity with professionally analyzed theoretical opening lines that the Soviet chess machine engendered (Fischer had to learn Russian just to keep up with the countless Russian opening analyses), and he ultimately invented a variant of chess (called Fischer Random chess) that basically rearranges the pieces at the start of a game. But standard chess continues to be the most popular in the world and Africans continue facing a training deficit for as long as there are no books there.
Thus when the New York Times reported on the incredible Grandmaster achievement of an amateur Zambian chess player in 2007, their article was revealingly titled “Zambian with Little Training Stands Poised to Make History.” (By contrast, re women in chess, a 1992 book about the best chess playing female trio in history, was skeptically titled “The Polgar Sisters: Genius or Training? ”).
The resource disadvantage of Africa in chess still does not mean, as some racial hypothesis bloggers seem to constantly suggest, that African chess teams relatively perform at a level that “confirms” their low national IQ scores. On the contrary, Zambia has a stronger national chess team than either Japan or South Korea, for example. Thus, Zambia (population 15 million, national IQ 78) quite easily defeated South Korea (population 50 million, national IQ 106) last time they met at the Chess Olympiads, with the former not even featuring its grandmaster. (China, on the other hand, is now an East Asian chess powerhouse, although it should be mentioned that they achieved this through a semi-Soviet-style professionalization program dubbed “ Big Dragon Project ”, initiated by an Asian billionaire in collaboration with Chinese officials, with the explicit aim of raising East Asian chess performance). South Africa’s first chess grandmaster, Kenny Solomon.
Even within some historically multiracial countries, you can find some hints of anomalies to the racial hypothesis: South Africa has produced only one chess grandmaster in its history, and he happens to come from the black community. The fact that the black population of South Africa is larger shouldn’t really matter; after all, the top swimmers in South Africa are all white (for likely genetic reasons), and the fastest runners in white majority multiracial societies are black.
What about American blacks?
The vast majority of observations that have led to the conclusions of the racial hypothesis are based on the intellectual performance of blacks in America, where a historical IQ gap of one standard deviation seems to be intractable.
Indeed the game of expert Scrabble itself appears to confirm the ethnic conclusions of Jensen et al within America because black Americans perform (on Scrabble) exactly as predicted by IQ data. Top black American experts generally perform lower than white American women at the top expert level.
The best male native black American Scrabble player, Marlon Hill, has apparently made it his open mission to beat whites at Scrabble, a story that has not escaped Rush Limbaugh ‘s amusement. He has so far failed to convincingly establish his racial “superiority.” His rating does not appear on the top 1000 players of the world (WESPA) or even on the top 100 rated players in North America (NASPA). (By contrast, Marlon Hill’s old training partner , Sammy Okosagah, a Nigerian immigrant, has been ranked as high as number one in North America at his peak in 2004, and was one of the highest performing American duo, with David Weigand, at the 2013 World Championships when he came third in the world.) Lisa Odom, the highest ranked native Black American player.
Quite surprisingly, there are some signs that the well-known gender reversal of intelligence that has been observed in black Americans may be slightly confirmed in Scrabble. A female black expert, Lisa Odom, does not appear on the recent international WESPA ratings list (although she has qualified in the past to play at the world championships) but she appears on the North American top 100 NASPA list . She is presently 59 th on that list (it changes frequently), which makes her not only the highest ranked native black American, but also one of the highest ranked women of any race in North America. (Incidentally, the third highest ranked player on the entire North American list at the time of this writing is a Kenyan immigrant, Patrick Gitonga Nderitu, who is ranked just above the Stanford wonderkid, Mack Meller.)
A Jewish Rule?
One simple informal test of the “g-loadedness” or cognitive intensity of any intellectual field is the presence of Jewish over-representation at the very top of the game, so to speak. This rule seems to work for the game of Scrabble.
One of the highest rated Scrabble players in the world, second only to the great Nigel Richards in official rating at the time of this writing, is an Australian player named David Eldar. Eldar attended a special school called King David High School, whose Wikipedia description sounds like it was exclusively formed to serve the Australian Jewish community. Ashkenazi Jews are only 0.5% of that country. Although Eldar has not yet won the world championship, the odds are highly in his favor, as the second highest rated player in the world.
Someone who has won the World Championship is Joel Sherman, who is one of only three Americans to have held the coveted title. Even without digging further for more Jews on the long list of highly rated players in North America, these examples are already sufficient to establish Jewish statistical over-representation on Scrabble super-achievement. And we have a strong reason to believe that there are even more. In a 2005 interview where he was asked to confirm his Jewish roots after he appeared on a list of Jewish sports figures, Sherman disclosed:
… Several other North American Scrabble ® Champs have been Jewish and they’re not listed, presumably because the Wikipedia contributor who compiled that list found my Jewishness mentioned in “Word Freak” and the same info is not readily available about them. I won’t “out” them because I don’t know how they would feel to share that listing as well. My own feeling is ambivalent: it’s nice to be noted, but I’d rather my born religion was not the criterion for my inclusion, as I have been an atheist since even before my Bar Mitzvah…
Seven years before Sherman’s statement, a 1998 New York Times report on computers playing Scrabble against human experts, contained a revealing sentence in the long article: “The leading Scrabble players, many of whom are Jewish, …”
The over-representation of Ashkenazi Jews at the top of such cognitively demanding games might also put in doubt any suggestions of steep declines in real Jewish IQ in the 20 th century.
The game of checkers does not escape this Jewish rule (no pun intended). I found that the greatest checkers match player in the Soviet Union at the height of Soviet sponsorship of the game, the man the Soviets were apparently shielding from Senegal’s Baba Sy, Iser Kuperman, was Jewish . This means that the two Russians who held the World Championship in chess and checkers at this time of Soviet dominance were both Jewish (the great Mikhail Botvinik was the chess world champion at this time in the early 1960s).
It is said that this ambitious Soviet promotion and glorification of chess and checkers was originally instituted by Stalin to keep the most intelligent elites of his country, especially the Jews, occupied with something that would keep them from meddling in politics (in more recent years, Gary Kasparov, an Ashkenazi Jew, has indeed become quite troublesome for the Russian government after retiring from chess). It was of course also later used for propaganda purposes to convey the intellectual “superiority” of the Soviet system internally and internationally.
Jewish brilliance has not left the world of checkers to this day. Alexander Moiseyev, the Russian who ended the World Championship reign (in 3-move American checkers) of the Barbadian Ron King, is of Jewish descent . (The 2015 finalist against Senegalese Souleymane Keita in Canadian checkers, Vladimir Lubarsky, is also almost certainly Jewish .)
The bottom line is that if the cognitive hierarchy under the racial hypothesis was true, there should be no single popular intellectual activity in the world in which Africans and Ashkenazi Jews are both over-represented at the top (just as there is no single world athletic activity requiring high speed, in which the slowest populations and the fastest populations are both over-represented at the top). Scrabble and Checkers are in violation of that logical axiom.
Jewish over-representation at the top of such games (checkers, scrabble, chess, etc) also puts in doubt any conclusions that the male advantage over females has to do specifically with visuospatial abilities, as Jews are not exceptional in that regard. It would seem that the advantage has to just do with general intelligence.
No East Asians in Scrabble? National School Scrabble championships, source: Wikipedia
East Asians have the reputation of being good at math in school and college, but their dominance does not extend to the highest award in math (the Field’s Medal), so it is not an anomaly for Scrabble that they are not over-represented at the world championships (especially those born in English-speaking nations). The question still is: why aren’t they good at Scrabble in school, since they are so conspicuously good in math at that stage? Does their failure at this stage pose a problem for Scrabble as a math game?
Actually, they do quite as well at Scrabble as they do in school mathematics.
It appears that there has been an East Asian name among the winners of the highly competitive National School Scrabble Championships in four of the last six years! (They are only 6% of the US population). Notice that only one female name has appeared (Aune Mitchell, 2007) even at this stage. I did not investigate the Jewishness of the other names, but it would not be surprising if there were a few. First team to win National Scrabble School Championship twice, Andy Hoang and Erik Salgado SAT math scores by gender and ethnicity in 2015. Source: AEI
Discussion
“For expert players, the game requires the simultaneous interplay of verbal, visuospatial, and mathematical abilities under speeded conditions. There are no other games that require the simultaneous, rapid use of all of these abilities.” Halpern and Wai, The World of Competitive Scrabble , Psychology Today.
Spearman’s hypothesis , an idea used by Arthur Jensen to demonstrate the biological nature of the black-white performance gap, predicts that the gap should expand the more you use a test that relies on more raw brain power or ‘g’. Scrabble involves much more mental manipulations than the simpler well-known “WordSum” Vocabulary test and the latter shows a wide gap between blacks and whites (in America). This gap does indeed appear to grow even further when you replace WordSum test with Scrabble, but only when you limit “black” to native black Americans. The gap appears to reduce and even reverse when you introduce black Africans, which is an anomaly for the racial hypothesis. The fact that we are talking about the most elite players should actually make it even more impossible for this to happen since the black-white gap should be even more conspicuous (in favor of whites) at higher ends of cognitive performance.
In the same vein, the game of draughts (especially its speeded up form, called “blitz draughts”) is much more g-loaded than a simple “ Reaction Time ” test that is used by cognitive psychologists to test natural brain power differences by comparing how long it takes one to react to certain simple stimuli. Blitz draughts does not only demand your quick reaction to the move of your opponent, it includes the added mental challenge of calculating your reaction move based on assessing a constantly changing position. Besides playing the World Championship match in the slow classical draughts, an African player reached the top two slots of the super-elite world championships in blitz draughts for both 2015 and 2016 .
If Africans are doing well on these games because of some special environmental reason, then that contradicts the genetic racial hypothesis. If Africans in Africa are outperforming others due to some environmental reason, then black American performance on Scrabble can also be raised by environmental methods; if black American Scrabble performance can be raised to equal whites, then black American math performance can also be raised by environmental intervention. If it can’t, then the fallacy of the hereditarian position has been to assume that native black Americans are cognitively representative of blacks everywhere.
The global racial hypothesis is therefore not just contradicted by these findings, it is logically refuted . Under this hypothesis, there should not be even one single cognitive field where the top blacks are equal or more over-represented than the top whites, especially when white participation in such fields is elite enough to result in a wide gender performance gap in favor of males even with relatively high numbers of female participants. The additional presence of Jewish over-representation at the top of a field should only reinforce the impossibility of black dominance or equality under that hypothesis. You have the opposite empirical result in Scrabble and checkers since you get increasing African over-representation with rising cognitive selectivity, suggesting a reversal of the gap, if anything.
The falsifiable part of the racial hypothesis is duly falsified.
REFERENCES Downie, J. (2011). Why are Most Scrabble Champions Male? New Republic Fatsis, S. (2002). Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players. Penguin. Halpern, D., Wai, J. (2007) The World of Competitive Scrabble: Novice and Expert Differences in Visuospatial and Verbal Abilities . Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied 2007, vol.13 no.2 79-94 Lynn, Richard (1994). “Sex differences in intelligence and brain size: A paradox resolved”. Personality and Individual Differences . 17 (2): 257–71 Pinker, S. (2009). The sexual paradox: Men, women and the real gender gap . Simon and Schuster. | 1real |
U.S. Treasury Secretary urges Congress to act on Puerto Rico | SAN JUAN (Reuters) - U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew on Wednesday said that while the Obama administration was ready to do all it could to help debt-ridden Puerto Rico, only Congress could deliver truly effective change. Lew, speaking in San Juan where he met with the island’s governor, Alejandro Garcia Padilla, as well as business and labor leaders, last week urged Congress to urgently pass legislation by the end of March to help the island struggling with $70 billion debt. He has called for legislation to allow Puerto Rico to restructure its debts paired with independent fiscal oversight. “We will leave no stone unturned in looking for things we can do both administratively and using our convening authority to ... help solve these problems,” Lew said at a press briefing on Wednesday morning. “But using all the tools we have still won’t be as effective as Congressional action. That’s why the time for Congress to act is now.” Puerto Rico has begun to default on some of its bond issues and is negotiating with creditors to restructure its borrowings, but is facing a lawsuit from bond insurers who backed its debt. Extending Chapter 9 to Puerto Rico, which currently does not have the ability to put its public agencies into bankruptcy, has been long debated. Democrats have been generally supportive of proposals but a number of Republicans have shown skepticism. Lew reiterated there would be no federal bailout, saying Puerto Rico won’t be able to find a “path out of insolvency and back to growth” unless creditors make sacrifices in an orderly restructuring. Still, he stressed the Treasury was doing all it could. Speaking to reporters later on Wednesday, Lew said the Treasury has bolstered its team dedicated to Puerto Rico, providing technical assistance on issues such as revenue collection. “The Treasury team is part of a broader administration-wide effort jointly led by the White House,” he said. Lew added that a restructuring could also help Puerto Rican retirees. The island’s main pensions face a roughly $45 billion unfunded liability that stands to be depleted by 2019. “Coming out of a comprehensive restructuring, I think that pensioners could end up with more security than they have right now,” Lew said. A legislative solution could also include introducing a control board for the island. Lew said that any oversight would have to be done in a way that is respectful of Puerto Rico’s system of self-government. | 0fake |
President Trump Plans Monday Morning Blitz with New Immigration Executive Order | President Donald Trump will release a new executive order on immigration Monday morning, sources with knowledge of these matters tell Breitbart News. [The new order comes after the first one — temporarily suspending the refugee program and barring travel into the United States from seven countries — was met with backlash in the court system, with a district court and the ninth circuit court of appeals shutting it down. This new order is slightly different from the first one, sources say, and moves Iraq — one of the seven countries from the first order — to a different category. It’s not entirely clear what the new category is or how Iraq will be handled in this new order at this time. It’s also unclear what other changes may be made from the first order, including in particular how the new one will handle the refugee program. When Trump rolled out his first order, he was met with weekend protests in airports nationwide by progressive activists and members of the Muslim community in his first full weekend as president. Then acting Attorney General Sally Yates refused to enforce the order, and President Trump swiftly fired her for failing to serve the Department of Justice honorably by enforcing the law as she previously had agree to do when she accepted the position. Since then, Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama has been confirmed as the new Attorney General and sources tell Breitbart News that he and other cabinet members including Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly — a former Marine Corps general who led U. S. Southern Command before his nomination and confirmation — have been consulted on this executive order. At a White House press briefing back on Feb. 23, Press Secretary Sean Spicer said the new order was “finalized” and the administration was working to implement it. “What we are doing is now in the implementation phase of working with the respective departments and agencies to make sure that when we execute this, it’s done in a manner that’s flawless,” Spicer said. While Spicer also made clear that the administration believes the first order was lawful, done in compliance with U. S. code and authority granted to the president, and that it will succeed eventually in the legal process in overturning the ninth circuit ruling, he said that the new order does take into account the appeals court’s decision. Spicer said: We’ve taken the Court’s opinions and concerns into consideration, but the order is finalized. It’s now awaiting implementation. What we want to do is make sure that we’re working through the departments and agencies so that any concerns or questions are handled on the front end. But we are acting with appropriate haste and diligence to make sure that the order is done in an appropriate manner. It was originally thought that President Trump would sign the new order on Wednesday this past week, but reports surfaced that he called it off amid the positive reception he received after his highly successful address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night. | 0fake |
How News on a Times-Affiliated Site Drew Praise From Glenn Beck - The New York Times | The conservative radio host Glenn Beck called the Women’s March in Washington an “AstroTurf” rally funded by the liberal billionaire George Soros. He complained that the news media refused to acknowledge this fact. But there’s one news organization he praised as an exception: The New York Times. As evidence, he pointed to a piece by Asra Q. Nomani, a liberal feminist and Trump voter, who claimed to document the extensive financial ties Soros had to march partners. The conservative website Breitbart News tied the piece to The Times in a prominent headline. And the site The Daily Stormer wrote about the piece under a headline that referred to Soros as an “International Jew. ” Suddenly, The Times was a crowd pleaser. Only it wasn’t The Times that ran this article. It was published on a site affiliated with The Times — but completely distinct from the paper — called Women in the World. The site is part of an events organization founded by Tina Brown (of The Daily Beast and The New Yorker fame). The Times is a business investor in Women in the World and provides the website’s digital platform, but the two have separate editorial operations. None of that was apparent to many readers who wrote in, confused about whether the story was the work of The Times. Here’s one from Susan Kruglinski of New York: It’s easy to be confused. I was. At the top left corner of the website, for example, there is the familiar “T” logo of The New York Times, and the URL has “nytimes” in it. Click the stylized “T” and you’ll be taken to The Times’s website. If you scroll to the very bottom of the Women in the World home page, squint to find the “About Us” link, and click, you’ll be taken to a page that, in the fourth paragraph, explains the relationship between The Times and Women in the World. For the most part, the site publishes news and features about women that don’t seem particularly controversial. This one, which was labeled Opinion, was more ideologically charged and made The Times the perfect foil for conservative news sites. Adam Bryant, who oversees the newsroom’s role in conferences, was sympathetic to the idea that something more might need to be done to make evident the degree to which the two organizations are separate. “As part of the The New York Times’s business relationship with Women in the World, we currently provide the digital platform for them, but we have separate editorial operations,” he said. “We strive to avoid any confusion on the part of our readers, so we are going to look again to see if there is more we can do to explain our relationship to Women in the World in their articles. ” Glad to hear it. Updated 12:12 p. m. January 27, to clarify Soros’s connection to the march. | 0fake |
Trump Revives Keystone and Dakota Access Pipelines | 21st Century Wire says Tuesday, President Donald Trump signed an executive action removing legal obstacles holding up the completion of the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines. This story will certainly be a hot button for a lot of people. Reactions will likely depend on one s perspective on Trump, understanding of land issues, thoughts on cultural preservation, energy, US jobs, water quality and ecological harmony.With Progressive Leftwing attacks in full overdrive, post Trump s inauguration, many people are looking to the Trump administration to either confirm their worst fears or their greatest hopes, with every move he makes. But remember, Trump s Art of the Deal, is in play now and things may not always be black/white or good/bad, as this administration performs their first set of actions setting the foundation for the next 4-8 years.Many following the issue are not taking into consideration that the pipeline is more than 90% complete when Obama put a hold on the completion of the DAPL via the US Army Corps of Engineers. Obama s move was hardly one of stopping development of this pipeline but was likely politically motivated.It is worth noting that they had previously approved all plans for the completion of the DAPL in June of 2016 and appears to have been put a hold on the completion in the wake of the elevated protests at the Standing Rock location and the US Presidential election.Regardless, both pipeline projects are divisive political hot potato issues which have now fallen into the hands of Donald Trump. Expect Trump s reaction to generate renewed protests and opportunities for negative press.RT explores the topic further in the report below:RTPresident Donald Trump ordered the removal of obstacles to the construction of two major oil and gas pipelines, which the Obama administration had reluctantly blocked after protests from environmentalists and Native Americans.The construction will be subject to terms and conditions to be negotiated by us, Trump said, citing as an example the need for pipe components to be built in the US.Other presidential actions signed on Tuesday included expediting environmental reviews for critical infrastructure projects and streamlining the extremely cumbersome regulatory process for domestic manufacturing. The regulatory process in this country has become a tangled-up mess, Trump said.Tuesday s actions weren t technically executive orders but presidential memoranda, an executive action ranked just below but with equal force. Unlike an executive order, a presidential memorandum does not have to be numbered, include a cost estimate, or cite the authority under which it is issued.White House spokesman Sean Spicer reminded reporters on Tuesday that the Dakota Access Pipeline is 93 percent complete. Trump intends to sit down with all the parties involved with the pipeline, including Native Americans, and negotiate the best deal that benefits everyone, Spicer said.The new administration wanted to start on the Keystone XL approval process as soon as possible, Spicer said.TrumpDAPLReactions Trump s decision was quickly condemned by environmentalists, Native American activists, the American Civil Liberties Union and a number of Democratic lawmakers. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) said the US can t afford to build new pipelines that lock us into burning more fossil fuels and vowed to do everything to stop both pipelines.A lawyer for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe said the decision was made hastily and irresponsibly. The tribe said it intended to pursue legal action against Trump s order, adding that the pipeline posed a risk not just for their water supply but also for millions of Americans living downstream.One of the leading organizations in the Standing Rock protests, the Indigenous Environmental Network, called Trump s actions insane and extreme, and nothing short of attacks on our ancestral homelands. Trump is portraying his true self by joining forces with the darkness of the Black Snake pipelines crossing across the culturally and environmentally rich landscape of the prairie lands of America, the IEN said in a statement.The North Dakota Petroleum Council, representing the state s oil producers, hailed the presidential action as a great step forward for energy security in America, the organization s president Ron Ness told Reuters.Keystone XL is a shortcut proposed for the existing system that carries oil and gas from Alberta s shale fields in Canada to Steele City, Nebraska. The segment would have run through Montana, South Dakota and Nebraska. Despite being initially in favor of the pipeline, the Obama administration rejected it in November 2015, citing its overinflated role in [US] political discourse. Obama likewise blocked the final stretch of the Dakota Access (DAPL) pipeline in December, after US military veterans joined Native Americans protesting the construction under Lake Oahe, the principal water source for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in North Dakota. Most of the 1,172-mile-long pipeline from North Dakota s Bakken shale fields to Illinois has already been completed.Asked about #DakotaAccessPipeline & #Keystone, Spicer says #Trump's focus is jobs, the economy & using US resources https://t.co/m96ivKU6bR pic.twitter.com/10MSqpx5YL RT America (@RT_America) January 23, 2017Both Trump and his nominee for Energy Secretary Rick Perry held shares in Energy Transfer Partners, the company building DAPL, but have since divested of them, according to their attorneys.Following media reports that Trump would revive the pipeline projects, shares of TransCanada, Energy Transfer Partners LP and Energy Transfer Equity LP went up 1.1 percent, 3.3 percent and 1.7 percent respectively, Bloomberg noted.Continue this report at RTREAD MORE TRUMP NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire Trump FilesSUPPORT OUR WORK BY SUBSCRIBING & BECOMING A MEMBER @21WIRE.TV | 1real |
BREAKING: CLEVELAND POLICE CHIEF Asks Ohio Governor To DECLARE STATE OF EMERGENCY…Suspend Open Carry Laws During RNC | Obama s war on America just got real These acts of terror need to be treated as such.BREAKING: Cleveland police union chief calls on Ohio governor to declare state of emergency, suspend open carry firearms laws during RNC Reuters Top News (@Reuters) July 17, 2016Does anyone else find it odd that most of America doesn t even know where the DNC is hosting their convention in two weeks? | 1real |
Let’s make the South stop lying: The right’s war on our history — and truth — must be defeated now | The final vote in the state House was a lopsided 94-20, but flag apologists didn’t go quietly. Debate lasted 13 hours before exhausting itself around 1 a.m. Thursday. The leader of the dead-enders was Republican state Rep. Michael Pitts, a 60-year-old white male, Baptist, retired cop and NRA devotee heretofore best known for backing South Carolina’s “Second Amendment Weekend” (in which the state waives sales taxes on rifles and handguns) and a loopy plan to replace U.S. paper currency with silver and gold coins minted by the state.
Pitt insists Confederate soldiers only knew “what they heard in the general store, that Northern States were attacking Southern States.” He said he learned as a child to call the Civil War the “War of Northern Aggression.” He didn’t say if he calls it something else now, but he did accuse foes of “scrubbing history.” It was a favorite theme of flag defenders. Rep. Eric Bedingfield said he’d “bathed this thing in prayer” and “called my pastor to pray for me,” from which he learned “you can’t erase history.” Rep. J. Gary Simrill accused the removers of “almost a cultural genocide.” For sheer oddball color, no one beat Senate Majority Leader Harvey Peeler, who summed things up in these lovely words: “To remove the flag… and thinking it would change history would be like removing a tattoo from the corpse of a loved one and thinking it would change a loved one’s obituary.”
For 150 years, folks like Pitts, Bedingfield, Simrill and Peeler rewrote the history of the South. When South Carolina declared war on the Union, 57 percent of its citizens were African-American slaves; all scrubbed from every tale of “Southern heritage.” Even the most pious ancestor worshipper knows the Confederate flag is the flag of racism, slavery and sedition. It took years of arduous scrubbing and lies of satanic ingenuity to get anyone to think otherwise. The truth won’t be restored overnight.
In the aftermath of the terrorist attack on the Emanuel AME church there are efforts across the South to remove Confederate monuments. New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu wants to take down four. Three honor Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and P.G. T. Beauregard. The fourth honors a post-Civil War revolt against Louisiana’s reconstruction government by a band of ex-soldiers called the White League. My money is on Landrieu, but the mere fact that such a monument still stands suggests how hard it’ll be getting the South to face up to its past. It won’t be easy anywhere.
On the day South Carolina voted to lower the flag, the even loonier Republicans in the U.S. House pushed to display it on Confederate Memorial Day — a holiday in nine states — and sell it in souvenir shops on federal lands. A fearful John Boehner shut them down, but in the months and years ahead, as the memory of Charleston fades and fewer mayors, governors and House speakers see a need to spend political capital, the fight may get harder. And this is just the fight to keep the state from spreading lies. The harder fight will be to get not just the South but the whole country to commit to telling the truth, and not just about the Civil War.
For years, the right has waged a war on history every bit as relentless as and even more effective than its war on science. George Orwell famously observed that “who controls the past controls the future.” In America few outside the political right took his point. It has carried the fight to colleges, media, government and especially public schools. An ineluctable lesson of Charleston is that the left must finally fight back.
As far back as the early`80s the religious right sought to elect its people to school boards, often instructing them to conceal their views until after they were elected. Sex education was their top priority, but they also dove into history and other social studies. In her book “As Texas Goes: How the Lone Star State Hijacked the American Agenda,” New York Times columnist Gail Collins tells the story of the Texas School Board. Only she could make this chilling tale amusing. Texas is America’s second biggest purchaser of textbooks and the state controls the purchasing so publishers have long bowed to its dictates on content.
The board was always conservative but when real fanatics took it over they began furiously rewriting curricula, substituting ideological cant for scholarship wherever possible. 2010 was a banner year for them. They bumped Thomas Jefferson from a list of “influential thinkers”—they felt him misguided in the mater of the separation of church and state—but promoted Phyllis Schlafly to take his place. They also encouraged study of George Wallace, the NRA, the Moral Majority, Jefferson Davis’ inaugural address and the Heritage Foundation and told schools to tell kids Joe McCarthy was right about communists infiltrating government.
The right does its most insidious work in classrooms but it wages war on history almost everywhere. You may recall that in the mid-’90s the Smithsonian planned an exhibit on the Enola Gay, the B29 aircraft that dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The American Legion was instantly up in arms and the rest of the right soon followed. Perhaps they feared word of the bombing would get out or that Trotskyites at the Air and Space Museum would use the incident for propaganda purposes. The exhibit was killed. After 89 brave members of Congress called for his head, the museum’s director was forced to resign.
As evidenced by Dylann Roof and millions who share his views if not his soul sickness, the right has been most effective and destructive in reweaving the history of the Confederacy. In a piece in the Washington Post this week, James Loewen describes the decades’ long work of Southern “historians’” to turn the Civil War from an insurrection mounted to defend human slavery into a ‘war between the states’ sparked in large part by an imperious federal government bent on robbing the South of its liberty. Loewen reminds us of how hard Civil War apologists work to shape our collective memory. Kentucky is a border state that never joined the confederacy; 90,000 Kentuckians volunteered for the Union army, nearly triple the number that fought for the rebellion. Today Kentucky has 2 Union monuments and 72 Confederate monuments. It may be that conservatives care more about the past or are more susceptible to nostalgia. But erecting all those monuments took effort. The right is willing to make it because, like Orwell, it sees the point of controlling the past. Republicans are even fonder of twisting the story of America’s birth. In 1984 Ronald Reagan added the word ‘shining’ to the phrase “city on a hill” from John Winthrop’s famed sermon to Puritans bound for Massachusetts. Winthrop’s message to his flock was to behave, because the whole world was watching: “We shall be as a city upon a hill; the eyes of all people are upon us.” Reagan’s message was almost the exact opposite; that whatever America did must be good because God chose it to be the envy of all nations, a notion Winthrop would have heard as sinful pride and that helped inspire the reckless self-reverential folderol known as “American Exceptionalism.” (John Kennedy was the first modern president to invoke the sermon. In a lustrous speech in Boston days before his inaugural he perfectly echoed Winthrop’s call to rise to the challenge of the hour.) Our founding has so much to teach us but so much of what is taught now is false. Since Reagan’s death the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project, brainchild of noted social-contract shredder Grover Norquist, has labored to name something after Reagan in every county in America. I’d say they’re halfway there. They also want his name on currency, and a federal holiday in his honor. Norquist thinks the more stuff he names after Reagan the more taxes he can cut. I think he’s right. Such is the power of propaganda. Of course, the price of propaganda is ignorance. The more we fete Reagan, the harder it is to tell people what a train wreck his fiscal policies were; harder still to make them believe he ever apologized to Gorbachev for calling Russia an evil empire—he did– or went to Reykjavik boldly hoping to dismantle both the U.S. and Soviet nuclear arsenals. He did that, too; we just don’t know it. You’d think a left rife with college professors and other readers of books could fight this battle at least to a draw, but outside academia it barely put up a fight. A few lonely voices—Lewis Lapham and Stacy Schiff spring to mind–urged all who are in any sense progressive-minded to fight those who propagandize history. But up to now it was a tough sell. Among the many horrid lessons of Charleston is a new awareness of the price we pay for our neglect. We know now if we didn’t before just how many stand at the ready to pour hate into the vacuum of ignorance. The myth of the Confederacy may be the worst lie we tell, but countless others need correcting. There are lots of ways to do it, all with practical impact. If you fear the erosion of the right to privacy or the rule of law, you might think it time to remove J. Edgar Hoover’s name from the FBI headquarters in Washington. (Feel free to consider this essay a Kickstarter for that project.) We are right to celebrate the heritage of millions of Italian Americans who came to our shores. But what of the millions of Americans who got here 10,000 years before them? Might not Columbus share his weekend with those whom we systematically exterminated? And speaking of heritage, the deal to lower the flag at South Carolina’s capitol included a promise to spend millions on a shrine to it somewhere off premises. Shouldn’t such a shrine await construction of a bigger one to the millions of proud South Carolinians who spent the Civil War years in bondage? The right says the left wants only to disparage America. If nothing else, the last few weeks should teach us to question the depth of the right’s oft-proclaimed love of country, just as we’d question the spirituality of the publicly pious. It seems when the right isn’t busy kicking other people out of America, it’s busy threatening to leave. (See the borderline secessionist and outright nullification sentiments voices by so many Republican presidential candidates.) The funny thing is there is so much about this wonderful, diverse nation that, given the chance, liberals could teach conservatives to love. You can’t really love what you don’t really know. The poet William Blake had a theory that we all move from innocence, a joyous state in which all chimney sweeps seem happy and well, to experience, a sadder one in which we perceive their ill health and general misery. But Blake said there’s a third state we can attain in which we see suffering but still rejoice in life. He called this state, for some reason, organized innocence. We need a patriotism that is the moral equivalent of Blake’s organized innocence, an informed patriotism that lets us see all that we are, the bad and the good; a mature love of country that begins as it should in our love for one another and in our devotion to truth. It is to such patriotism that a true knowledge of history invites us. | 0fake |
Architecture Firm Unveils Plans for Space Skyscraper Hanging from Asteroid - Breitbart | Clouds Architecture Office has designed a skyscraper that would stretch toward Earth from the sky, suspended from an orbiting asteroid. [The New York architecture firm wants to build a skyscraper 31, 068 miles above the Earth. Analemma Tower is a project meant to “apply design thinking on a planetary scale” to create “the world’s tallest building ever. ” The building will float in a massive figure eight through the northern and southern hemispheres, passing over several major cities as it goes. The firm’s plan suggests building in Dubai specifically because of the country’s ability to craft massive superstructures for about the cost of building in the U. S. Analemma would employ a Universal Orbital Support System (UOSS) to hang by “high strength cable” from the aforementioned asteroid. And if it becomes reality, Analemma would be a sectional world all its own. Business centers would dominate the lower levels, with apartments situated above. Gardens, religious areas, as well as commercial and entertainment areas all have their place. The tower is full of engineering, including windows that adjust their height for differences in temperature and air pressure. Solar panels placed on the uppermost levels will harness energy to keep the whole thing running, while fresh water is harvested from the clouds below. Of course, they’ll need to position an asteroid of appropriate size to accomplish their science fiction Wonderland. The firm cited the European Space Agency’s “Rosetta” mission and NASA’s 2021 asteroid retrieval mission as evidence that the concept doesn’t stray too far from modern realities. Follow Nate Church @Get2Church on Twitter for the latest news in gaming and technology, and snarky opinions on both. | 0fake |
U.S. trying to promote crisis in Venezuela: foreign minister | NEW YORK (Reuters) - The United States is trying to promote a humanitarian crisis in Venezuela by imposing new sanctions, Foreign Affairs Minister Jorge Arreaza said on Friday after the sanctions were announced by the White House. Speaking at the U.N. headquarters in New York, Arreaza said “threats” and “supposed sanctions” from the United States are “uncivilized politics.” He said Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro will not attend the annual gathering of world leaders at the U.N., scheduled for next month. | 0fake |
UNREAL! THREE REPUBLICAN SENATORS Kill Republican Healthcare Bill in Midnight Vote [Video] | It s clear that some Republicans never wanted Obamacare to die Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and John McCain of Arizona killed the Republican skinny bill in a 49-51 vote. McCain could be seen walking into the room with a thumbs down to case his vote. You could hear shocked reaction in the room Sen. John McCain votes NO to defeat Obamacare: John McCain says he voted to reject a so-called skinny repeal healthcare bill in the Senate because it would not accomplish the goal of effectively replacing Obamacare. Issuing a statement the senator said he dramatically voted no in the small hours of Friday morning because he did not believe in forcing through the changes without at least some Democrat support.John McCain statement in full explaining, why he killed Donald Trump s skinn healthcare repeal bill From the beginning, I have believed that Obamacare should be repealed, and replaced with a solution that increases competition, lowers costs and improves care for the American people. The so-called skinny repeal amendment the Senate voted on today, would not accomplish those goals. While the amendment would have repealed some of Obamacare s most burdensome regulations, it offered no replacement to actually reform our health care system and deliver affordable, quality health care to our citizens. The Speaker s statement that, the House would be willing to go to conference does not ease my concern, that this shell of a bill could be taken up and passed at any time. I ve stated time and time again that one of the major failures of Obamacare was that, it was rammed through Congress by Democrats, on a strict-party line basis without a single Republican vote. We should not make the mistakes of the past, that has led to Obamacare s collapse, including in my home state of Arizona where premiums are skyrocketing, and health care providers are fleeing the marketplace. We must now return to the correct way of legislating, and send the bill back to committee, hold hearings, receive input from both sides of aisle, heed the recommendations of nation s governors, and produce a bill that finally delivers affordable health care for the American people. We must do the hard work our citizens expect of us and deserve. The defeat of the healthcare reforms dealt a serious blow to Donald Trump s reform agenda. Senate Republicans made clear that, unable to even pass the skinny version of their repeal bill, any kind of healthcare reform might prove impossible. This is clearly a disappointing moment, said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. I regret that our efforts were not enough, this time. It s time to move on, he said. Mr McConnell put the health bill on hold and announced that, the Senate would move onto other legislation next week.Mr Trump responded on Twitter: 3 Republicans and 48 Democrats let the American people down. As I said from the beginning, let Obama Care implode, then deal. Watch! | 1real |
Nota conceptual para la presidencia de Rusia | Reunión del Consejo de Seguridad de 28 de octubre de 2016
Nota conceptual para la presidencia de Rusia Red Voltaire | Nueva York (EE.UU.) | 27 de octubre de 2016 français English русский عربي 中文 Cooperación entre las Naciones Unidas y las organizaciones regionales y subregionales en el mantenimiento de la paz y la seguridad internacionales: Organización del Tratado de Seguridad Colectiva, Organización de Cooperación de Shanghái y Comunidad de Estados Independientes Como actividad central durante su Presidencia en el Consejo de Seguridad, la Federación de Rusia tiene previsto celebrar un debate el 28 de octubre de 2016 sobre el tema “Cooperación entre las Naciones Unidas y las organizaciones regionales y subregionales en el mantenimiento de la paz y la seguridad internacionales: Organización del Tratado de Seguridad Colectiva, Organización de Cooperación de Shanghái y Comunidad de Estados Independientes”.
El carácter mundial de los desafíos y amenazas actuales y la elaboración de los enfoques colectivos necesarios para abordarlos eficazmente hacen necesario mejorar la cooperación entre las Naciones Unidas y las organizaciones regionales y subregionales en la esfera del mantenimiento de la paz y la seguridad.
Las Naciones Unidas pueden aportar, en primer lugar, su carácter universal, tanto en lo que respecta a su composición como a sus actividades, así como su legitimidad mundialmente reconocida. Por su parte, las organizaciones regionales suelen tener una comprensión más profunda de la situación en su ámbito de responsabilidad. Además, en muchos casos, estas cuentan con mecanismos de prevención y de mantenimiento de la paz adaptados a las realidades locales. Al mismo tiempo, es importante garantizar que las actividades de las organizaciones regionales estén dirigidas a hallar una solución política por medios pacíficos a los nuevos conflictos.
En este contexto se hace muy pertinente una “comparación de notas” sistemática con los principales asociados regionales de las Naciones Unidas sobre cuestiones relativas al mantenimiento de la paz y la seguridad internacionales. Por ejemplo, el Consejo de Seguridad celebra periódicamente reuniones sobre la cooperación con la Unión Africana, la Organización para la Seguridad y la Cooperación en Europa y la Unión Europea. En los últimos años se han realizado exámenes sobre las relaciones con la Liga de los Estados Árabes, la Asociación de Naciones de Asia Sudoriental, la Unión de Naciones Suramericanas y otras entidades regionales.
Como se sabe, la cooperación entre las Naciones Unidas y sus asociados regionales abarca un abanico cada vez más amplio de cuestiones. A las tareas de mantenimiento de la paz y consolidación de la paz, ahora se han sumado las de la lucha contra la proliferación de armas de destrucción en masa, las corrientes ilícitas de armas pequeñas y armas ligeras, el ciberterrorismo y la migración ilegal, ámbitos en los que la cooperación entre las Naciones Unidas y las mencionadas organizaciones está cobrando impulso. Esta cooperación reviste una importancia fundamental para el mantenimiento de la paz y la seguridad en todo el territorio de Eurasia y especialmente en la región de Asia Central.
Es precisamente en este ámbito en que trabajan tres organizaciones relativamente nuevas que operan en la vasta región que va desde Europa Oriental hasta el Lejano Oriente: la Organización del Tratado de Seguridad Colectiva (OTSC), la Organización de Cooperación de Shanghai (OCS) y la Comunidad de Estados Independientes (CEI). Estas organizaciones están consolidando su influencia política en el mundo y contribuyendo significativamente al fortalecimiento de la seguridad regional e internacional.
En las deliberaciones, se centrará la atención en la contribución de la OTSC, la OCS y la CEI a la lucha contra las amenazas a la paz y la seguridad en la región, en particular a la lucha contra el terrorismo, el tráfico de drogas y la delincuencia organizada. Este evento también ofrecerá una oportunidad a estas tres organizaciones para reafirmar su compromiso con el objetivo de establecer una colaboración práctica con las Naciones Unidas, en particular con su Centro Regional de las Naciones Unidas para la Diplomacia Preventiva en Asia Central.
La Organización del Tratado de Seguridad Colectiva (OTSC) es una estructura de vectores múltiples, capaz de responder resueltamente a la amplia gama de desafíos y amenazas que afrontan actualmente sus Estados miembros. En este sentido, la cooperación que se está desarrollando entre las Naciones Unidas y la OTSC en la esfera del mantenimiento de la paz tiene muy buenas perspectivas. La OTSC está trabajando intensamente para crear capacidades propias para el mantenimiento de la paz, que, entre otras cosas, se utilizarían en las operaciones de mantenimiento de la paz de las Naciones Unidas. Además, la OTSC contribuye activamente a las iniciativas internacionales encaminadas a la reconstrucción del Afganistán. La OTSC contribuye activamente a los esfuerzos internacionales para la reconstrucción del Afganistán y a la lucha contra la amenaza de las drogas provenientes del territorio de ese país.
Las relaciones entre la OTSC y las Naciones Unidas se han desarrollado con éxito en varios ámbitos, como la lucha contra el terrorismo y el tráfico de drogas, el mantenimiento de la paz y la lucha contra la delincuencia organizada. La OTSC mantiene y desarrolla contactos productivos con las estructuras especializadas de las Naciones Unidas, en particular el Comité contra el Terrorismo del Consejo de Seguridad de las Naciones Unidas y la Oficina de las Naciones Unidas contra la Droga y el Delito.
La Asamblea General aprueba cada dos años la resolución sobre la cooperación entre las Naciones Unidas y la Organización del Tratado de Seguridad Colectiva. Se ha previsto que en su septuagésimo primer período de sesiones, la Asamblea General aprobará una resolución sobre ese tema en el marco del debate sobre el tema del programa titulado “Cooperación entre las Naciones Unidas y las organizaciones regionales y de otro tipo”.
El marco jurídico para la cooperación entre las Naciones Unidas y la Organización de Cooperación de Shanghai (OCS) sobre las cuestiones relativas a la paz y la seguridad internacionales fue establecido, de conformidad con el artículo VIII de la Carta de las Naciones Unidas, tras la firma en 2010 de una declaración conjunta sobre la cooperación entre las secretarías de las dos organizaciones. En la actualidad, la OCS y las Naciones Unidas están cooperando activamente en ámbitos como la prevención y la resolución de conflictos, la lucha contra el terrorismo (la Estructura Regional contra el Terrorismo se ha establecido en el marco de la OCS con esa finalidad), la no proliferación de las armas de destrucción en masa, la lucha contra la delincuencia transnacional y el tráfico ilícito de drogas, y la protección de la seguridad de la información internacional.
En este contexto, la OCS apoya activamente las iniciativas de la comunidad internacional y las entidades de las Naciones Unidas para restablecer la paz en el Afganistán, y siempre ha estado a favor de que las Naciones Unidas mantengan su función de coordinación central en el proceso de solución afgana.
La cooperación para garantizar la seguridad y hacer frente a los desafíos y amenazas actuales ha sido siempre y seguirá siendo una de las esferas prioritarias de la cooperación integradora entre los Estados miembros de la Comunidad de Estados Independientes.
La cooperación constructiva de la CEI con las organizaciones internacionales es también un factor fundamental en la lucha contra las nuevas amenazas. Los Estados de la CEI son partes en todos los principales instrumentos internacionales que rigen la cooperación en las esferas de la seguridad, el desarme, y la lucha contra los desafíos y amenazas actuales, y contribuyen de manera efectiva a su aplicación.
En la aplicación de medidas conjuntas se tienen en cuenta la función rectora de las Naciones Unidas y la necesidad de establecer una asociación constructiva con otros organismos internacionales y sus estructuras especializadas, como el Comité contra el Terrorismo del Consejo de Seguridad, la Oficina de las Naciones Unidas contra la Droga y el Delito, la Interpol, la Organización Internacional para las Migraciones, la Oficina del Alto Comisionado de las Naciones Unidas para los Refugiados, y el Grupo de Acción Financiera sobre el Blanqueo de Capitales.
Seguir fortaleciendo y estrechando la cooperación entre las Naciones Unidas y la OTSC, la OCS y la CEI, sobre la base del artículo VIII de la Carta de las Naciones Unidas, contribuirá de forma constructiva al logro de los objetivos de las Naciones Unidas y, en particular, a la lucha contra los desafíos y amenazas actuales. En este contexto, estas organizaciones regionales, por una parte, deben posicionarse activamente de modo que pueda aprovecharse su potencial en interés de las Naciones Unidas. Por otra parte, las Naciones Unidas deben seguir prestando la atención necesaria al fortalecimiento de la coordinación y la cooperación con esas organizaciones, con estricta observancia de las prerrogativas de las Naciones Unidas y su Consejo de Seguridad.
En este sentido, quisiéramos proponer a los Estados Miembros de las Naciones Unidas que presenten su propia visión de los medios de fortalecer la seguridad en la región de Eurasia sobre la base de los mecanismos regionales existentes. Es evidente que la estabilidad en esta macrorregión sentará las bases para el crecimiento económico y la consolidación del Estado de los países euroasiáticos. Por esa razón, agradeceríamos que las delegaciones transmitieran sus consideraciones al respecto, en particular sobre la relación entre la seguridad y el desarrollo. Estamos convencidos de que aquí, en el marco de las Naciones Unidas, organización que goza de una legitimidad universal, podremos proponer de manera colectiva enfoques innovadores sobre las cuestiones relativas a la estabilización de las regiones vulnerables, que posteriormente podrán aplicarse en otras partes del mundo que sean objeto de la atención del Consejo de Seguridad.
En el debate formularán declaraciones el Secretario General de las Naciones Unidas, Excmo. Sr. Ban Ki-moon, el Secretario General de la Organización del Tratado de Seguridad Colectiva, Excmo. Sr. Nikolai Bordyuzha, el Secretario General de la Organización de Cooperación de Shanghai, Excmo. Sr. Rashid Alimov, y el Vicepresidente del Comité Ejecutivo de la CEI, Excmo. Sr. Sergey Ivanov. También están invitados a participar en la reunión los Estados miembros de las organizaciones regionales mencionadas y los representantes de otros Estados interesados. | 1real |
Trump: Market has not fully digested tax cut changes | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump said he believed the financial markets have not fully absorbed the tax cut changes in legislation expected to be passed by Congress on Wednesday. “They’re thinking that the market hasn’t fully digested what they’ve got here,” he said, referring to his economic advisers. “I don’t think the market has even begun to realize how good these are, like for instance, full expensing.” | 0fake |
FLASHBACK: LORETTA LYNCH’S PARTING SHOT: “Waves of hatred, intolerance and injustice still blowing in this country” [Video] | PLEASE GO TO THE 2:00 MARK IN THIS VIDEO WHERE LYNCH SPEAKS ABOUT OUR BABIES AKA MINORITY CHILDREN:So it s no surprise that Lynch stood before a black congregation today and spoke of WE NOT as in ALL Americans but just the black community. Her true racist colors are showing She DID say something about those of us who re not of the black community and it was rooted in the fear mongering that people like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton pushed in the black churches for so many years.It s so sad that even our own black president for the past 8 years said it never thought we could be post racial .Well, most Americans don t feel that way. Communities across America are dismissing the TIRED rhetoric pushed at them. WE UNITED ALREADY DIDN T WE? Americans united to vote in Donald Trump .Americans of all backgrounds can t wait for a new administration that won t drag us all back into the same tired rhetoric | 1real |
U.S. intelligence chief Clapper says spoke with Trump about media leaks | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said he spoke with President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday evening to discuss media leaks of a classified intelligence briefing on Russian hacking that Trump received last Friday. Clapper said in a statement that he does not believe the U.S. intelligence community leaked a private security document alleging Russian intelligence operatives have compromising information on Trump. “I emphasized that this document is not a U.S. Intelligence Community product and that I do not believe the leaks came from within the IC,” Clapper said. | 0fake |
Paul Ryan Claims GOP Wouldn’t Try To Have Democrat Facing Similar Charges To Trump Impeached | Sometimes you get the feeling that Paul Ryan has forgotten exactly who he works for. Despite the fact that while campaigning, Donald Trump had his supporters chant Lock her up! in reference to Hillary Clinton using a private email server, Ryan believes that Republicans wouldn t call for the impeachment of a Democratic president accused of actions similar President Trump s.While James Comey confirmed in his hearing before a senate committee that he has no doubt that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election and that Trump tried to influence a criminal investigation, in response to a question from a reporter at his weekly Capitol press conference as to whether Republicans would be in favor of impeachment at this point, Ryan s answer was one of simple denial. No. I don t think we would, actually. I don t think that s at all the case, Ryan said, despite belonging to a party that impeached a president over oral sex.Ryan admitted on MSNBC the previous night that it was obviously inappropriate to ask for the then-FBI director s loyalty, but claimed during the Capitol press conference that he felt sympathy toward Trump when it came to the topic of James Comey telling the president that he personally wasn t under investigation. What I got out of that testimony is, we now know why he was so frustrated when the FBI director told him three times there s no investigation of him, yet that speculation was allowed to continue, said Ryan.Maybe if the president wasn t so self-centered and perhaps a little smarter he would ve reworded his question, because Comey made the point clear during his testimony The FBI has no individual file on Donald Trump, thus Trump himself wasn t personally under investigation. His campaign, on the other hand, is and that consists of more people than just Donald Trump. And if Trump became a person of interest and was directly under investigation, it would create a duty to publicly correct the record.But since when has Donald Trump ever really thought about anybody besides Donald Trump?Featured image via Olivier Douliery Pool/Getty Images | 1real |
Hillary Clinton Just Took Sean Spicer And Bill O’Reilly To The Woodshed, And It Is Beautiful (VIDEO) | While delivering the closing remarks at Tuesday s Professional Business Women of California conference in San Francisco, Hillary Clinton couldn t resist the urge to tell Team Trump to go f*ck themselves for their treatment of women. Just look at all that s happened in the last few days to women who were simply doing their jobs, Clinton told the crowd, cutting into White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer for the condescending attitude he had toward a reporter who shook her head as Spicy lied to her: April Ryan, a respected journalist with unrivaled integrity, was doing her job just this afternoon in the White House press room when she was patronized and cut off trying to ask a question. Clinton also took aim at Trump ally, Fox News host Bill O Reilly, for his insanely racist joke about a black congresswoman s hair: One of our own California congressmen Maxine Waters was taunted with a racist joke about her hair. Too many women, especially women of color, have had a lifetime of practice taking precisely these kinds of indignities in stride. But why should we have to? Clinton asked rhetorically. And any woman who thinks this couldn t be directed at her is living in a dream world. This administration s treatment of women, Muslims, people of color, anyone whose skin color is darker than a fresh piece of classroom chalk, and people in general, is abysmal.Clinton warned us this would happen. More people should have listened.Watch her remarks below:WATCH: And here's the video of @HillaryClinton defending WH reporter @AprilDRyan and Congresswoman @MaxineWaters pic.twitter.com/VPK9doFxTe Yashar (@yashar) March 28, 2017Featured image via screengrab | 1real |
Raqqa/Mosul: Politicians Fiddle As Middle East Burns | Written by Daniel McAdams While Americans were obsessing about tomorrow's election, the Obama Administration launched a serious military escalation in Syria. US Special Forces on the ground and jet fighters in the air are deployed in an operation to take Raqqa from ISIS control. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dunford announced over the weekend that the US and Turkey agreed on a long-term plan for "seizing, holding and governing" the Syrian city. Is this the beginning of a US-recognized rival Syrian government, as Benghazi was in Libya? We discuss in today's Liberty Report: Copyright © 2016 by RonPaul Institute. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit and a live link are given. | 1real |
Swiss dismiss ETA activist's asylum bid, but she is free to stay | ZURICH (Reuters) - A Swiss federal court has dismissed the asylum appeal of a woman convicted in Spain of supporting the Basque separatist group ETA, but said she was now free to remain in Switzerland after Madrid dropped her sentence. The case of Nekane Txapartegi, who said she was tortured while in custody in Spain before fleeing in 2007, has drawn considerable attention in Switzerland, with members of a Free Nekane movement staging rallies in Zurich and other cities. The United Nations special rapporteur on torture and Amnesty International had also urged Swiss authorities not to extradite Txapartegi to Spain. On Friday the Swiss court said the asylum issue was no longer relevant because Spain s High Court had ruled that her sentence - initially 11 years in jail, later reduced to 3-1/2 years - had reached its statute of limitations. As with every European citizen, Ms. Txapartegi may stay in Switzerland within the rules of free movement, a spokesman for the State Secretariat for Migration said. Switzerland is not in the European Union but EU citizens can settle there provided they are in gainful employment or can prove they have sufficient funds to support themselves. Swiss authorities arrested Txapartegi in Zurich in April 2016 after they discovered she had been living under an assumed name in Switzerland since 2009. They agreed in March this year to extradite her but freed her in September after the Spanish decision to drop her jail sentence. Txapartegi had told Swiss authorities she was tortured into confessing support for ETA while in Spanish custody. The Swiss Federal Office of Justice said at the time she could not credibly show that she was actually tortured . On Friday the Swiss court said that, given the conditions prevailing in Spain at the time of her arrest, she may well have been subjected to physical and psychological abuse, but said it no longer needed to evaluate her claims. ETA, which killed more than 850 people in a decades-long campaign to carve out a separate state, effectively ended its armed resistance this year when it surrendered its weapons. | 0fake |
Clinton voices concern about Russian interference in election | HAMPTON, Ill. (Reuters) - Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton on Monday expressed concern about “credible reports” of Russian interference in the U.S. election and accused Donald Trump of being fixated on dictators including Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Taking questions from reporters for more than 20 minutes on her campaign plane, Clinton said both Democrats and Republicans should be concerned about Russia’s behavior. “The fact that our intelligence professionals are now studying this and taking it seriously raises some grave questions about potential Russian interference with our electoral process,” Clinton said. “We are facing a very serious concern. We’ve never had a foreign adversarial power be already involved in our electoral process. ... We’ve never had the nominee of one of our major parties urging the Russians to hack more,” she said. Trump, the Republican nominee, has praised Putin, the president of Russia, and has called on Moscow to dig up tens of thousands of “missing” emails from Clinton’s time as head of the U.S. State Department. He later said his comments were meant to be sarcastic. Clinton has previously tied Russian intelligence services to the cyber hack on the Democratic National Committee. Asked on Monday if she believed the Russian government was trying to help elect her opponent, Clinton paused. “I often quote a great saying that I learned from living in Arkansas for many years: If you find a turtle on a fencepost it didn’t get there by itself,” she said. “I think it’s quite intriguing that this activity has happened around the time Trump became the nominee.” Clinton, a former secretary of state and a former first lady, has drawn criticism for not holding regular press conferences. On Monday she took questions on an array of topics for more than 20 minutes. Clinton dismissed concerns about her health as one of many conspiracy theories that were lobbed against her. She blamed seasonal allergies for a sustained coughing fit at an earlier event in Ohio. During the question and answer session on her plane, she also had to step away because of persistent coughing. Clinton, whose use of a private email account during her time as secretary of state has dogged her 2016 presidential campaign, said she understood and took classification seriously when she was President Barack Obama’s top diplomat. Clinton said that the attacks on her family’s foundation were not rooted in fact and sidestepped a question on whether her daughter, Chelsea, should step down from the foundation’s leadership if she is elected in November. | 0fake |
Factbox: Legal issues in Supreme Court immigration case | (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday heard arguments in a challenge brought by Texas and other states to President Barack Obama’s executive action on immigration. The eight justices confronted a series of legal questions beginning with whether Texas and the other state challengers even had grounds to bring the case. Obama’s November 2014 orders affect immigrants in the country illegally whose children are U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents or who themselves have been in the United States since they were children. Here is a look at some of the key legal questions in the case: To bring a case, challengers must first demonstrate that they have legal “standing,” arising from some injury or negative consequences. In this case, that means the states need to show that they would be hurt by the Obama administration’s deferral of deportation for immigrant parents and children with deep ties to the United States but who are in the country illegally. The state of Texas has taken the lead in the lawsuit against the Obama administration to block the president’s actions. Texas asserts that it has standing largely because of the expected financial cost to the state of processing temporary driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants with new authorization to live in the United States. Texas subsidizes the cost of processing driver’s licenses and contends Obama’s actions would cost it millions of dollars. The Obama administration rejects that basis for standing to file suit, asserting that any such costs are “incidental” and could be avoided by the state. Obama administration lawyers say Texas could eliminate the subsidies for these driver’s licenses and eliminate the harm claimed by the state. If a majority of the justices finds that Texas lacked a sufficient injury to sue, the case of United States v. Texas ends there and the Obama administration wins. RULE-MAKING REQUIREMENTS If the justices agree that Texas has standing to bring the case, they then would consider whether deferred-deportation policies that were part of Obama’s actions violated rule-making requirements in a federal law called the Administrative Procedure Act. Under that law, federal agencies typically must issue a general notice of a proposed rule and give interested parties a chance to comment. Obama administration lawyers say the deferred deportation practices are not binding rules subject to the Administrative Procedure Act. Rather, they characterize these policies as an outgrowth of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s discretion in determining deportation priorities. The administration contends that the homeland security secretary should be able to focus his department’s limited resources on deporting serious criminals and securing the border. There is also the question of whether the deferred deportation violates a dictate of the U.S. Constitution that presidents must “take care” to “faithfully execute” the nation’s laws. Texas and the other states that brought the lawsuit say Obama, in taking executive action that bypassed Congress, crossed that line because Congress is in charge of deciding who is a lawful or unlawful immigrant. The Obama administration says it was faithfully executing the authority to determine priorities under immigration law. | 0fake |
Labor powerhouse AFL-CIO backs Clinton, vows 'targeted campaign' | (Reuters) - The largest labor federation in the United States, the AFL-CIO, endorsed Hillary Clinton for president on Thursday, vowing to throw the full weight of more than 50 unions representing 12.5 million members behind the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. “Hillary Clinton is a proven leader who shares our values,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said in a statement. “We will run a sophisticated, targeted ground campaign. And with the dire consequences Donald Trump poses for America’s working families, it has to be.” While the federation generally does not endorse a Democratic candidate until there is an official nominee, Trumka has warned for months that he believes Republican presumptive nominee Donald Trump would be disastrous for working people if elected. After the endorsement, Clinton pledged to spend more on public infrastructure and to fight to improve schools. She vowed to increase the federal minimum wage, offer paid family leave and ensure that women receive equal pay. “As president, I will stand proudly with the AFL-CIO and fight to protect the rights and values that helped build the mighty American middle class. Workers will always have a seat at the table and a champion in the White House,” Clinton said in a statement. The AFL-CIO has already run digital ads criticizing Trump’s candidacy and will now work to boost Clinton’s campaign on the ground. Working America, one AFL-CIO affiliate that deals with nonunion workers, already has teams in crucial so-called battleground states. In response to the federation’s endorsement of Clinton, Trump’s campaign said the AFL-CIO no longer represents the interests of American workers. “I will fight harder for American workers than anyone ever has,” Trump said in a statement. Trump attacked Clinton for supporting free trade agreements and said he would win a majority of votes from U.S. union families. | 0fake |
STUDENTS SENT HOME From School For Wearing Traditional Swiss Clothing Considered “racist” | You certainly don t want to get caught showing pride for your nation Kinda reminds us of the kids who got sent home from school for wearing an American flag on their shirts because they offended the Mexican immigrant students Ten pupils at a secondary school in Gossau turned up for their lessons wearing an edelweiss shirt on Friday.A teacher was very unhappy at the sight of this typically Swiss clothing; he asked them to go and put something else on.According to the SonntagsZeitung , the teacher considered that this manner of dress conveyed racist and xenophobic ideas. The ten pupils decided to come to school wearing peasant shirts and to sing patriotic songs to show their pride in being Swiss .Tensions with classmates of Balkan origin are said to be at the origin of this initiative, reports the German-speaking weekly. The school s headmaster is trying to calm things down. Patrick Perenzin points out that peasant shirts do not violate any institutional dress code and that they are not forbidden. But he adds that, in his view, the ten pupils behaved badly. When worn by one pupil, this clothing is not insulting. But when ten pupils decide to wear it at the same time, they are trying to send a message , says the headmaster. Via: 20min.com | 1real |
Concern Mounts as Over 250 Earthquakes Hit Border - Breitbart | What originally seemed an isolated group of 100 small earthquakes on New Year’s Eve has now grown to “more than 250 earthquakes,” and apprehension is running high. [On January 1 Breitbart News reported 100 earthquakes hit in the area of Brawley, CA. ABC 7 reported that the largest of the quakes was about 3. 9 magnitude. They also reported that scientists said larger quakes in the region were possible, and that “the shaking [could] continue for several days. ” Seismologist Lucy Jones said there was an outbreak of quakes in the same region in 2012, and that the 2012 outbreak was larger. Map of today’s quakes (pink) with quakes in much bigger 2012 swarm. From Caltech pic. twitter. — Dr. Lucy Jones (@DrLucyJones) January 1, 2017, The New Year’s Eve earthquakes occurred roughly 30 miles from the San Andreas Fault, and were not expected to cause large quakes. But the additional 150 quakes since Saturday have people on edge, including some scientists. CBS San Francisco reports that the movement and shifting related to the quakes is now concerning. Scientists say the “seismically active” area “is the region that connects the San Andreas and Imperial faults,” and that “both faults can produce devastating earthquakes. ” AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and host of “Bullets with AWR Hawkins,” a Breitbart News podcast. He is also the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart. com, | 0fake |
Austrian coalition talks begin in earnest with hunt for savings | VIENNA (Reuters) - Coalition talks between Austrian conservative Sebastian Kurz s party and the far-right Freedom Party began in earnest on Monday as they combed through the nation s finances in search of billions in savings to fund planned tax cuts. Kurz, who is just 31, needs a coalition partner to form a stable government since his People s Party won this month s parliamentary election but fell well short of a majority. He started coalition talks with the third-placed Freedom Party last week. Although both parties similarly hard lines on immigration dominated the campaign, they have also promised billions in tax cuts and said much of the funding will come from greater efficiency in Austria s administration, which includes a generous welfare state. Having laid out a roadmap for negotiations at their first round of talks on Wednesday, an overview of the country s finances was the main order of business at their second meeting, on Monday. What we can say today is that there is a significant potential for greater efficiency and that of course we will sound out in the coming days what can be done politically, Elisabeth Koestinger, chairwoman of Kurz s party and part of his negotiating team, told a news conference after Monday s talks. Neither she nor the Freedom Party s envoy to the joint news conference would be drawn on where those savings would be found. We did not find any holes, the Freedom Party s deputy leader, Norbert Hofer, who came close to winning last year s presidential election, told the news conference. The issue will be better administering this state, reducing loss-causing inefficiencies and then making this released potential available through (tax) relief, he added. Talks in the 10-person group that includes Kurz and Strache will continue through the week and negotiations in 20 more specialized groups will begin on Tuesday, Koestinger said. We had a rough overview (of the public finances) from civil servants in the Finance Ministry and we will go into more detail in the coming days, Koestinger said. Little of substance has emerged from the talks so far. Kurz has said he hopes a deal can be reached before Christmas, and the atmosphere has appeared to be good. Freedom Party leader Heinz-Christian Strache said last week the talks made a very, very good start . Kurz said on Wednesday that he and Strache, 48, address each other with the informal German du . Strache told tabloid daily Kronen Zeitung the same day that they are on first-name terms, adding: He calls me HC. | 0fake |
ARMY VETERAN’S Incredible Thanksgiving Smack Down Of Spoiled Brat NFL Anthem Kneelers Goes Viral | On this Thanksgiving, I would like to address an open letter to the multimillionaire National Football League players who continue to take a knee when The Star-Spangled Banner is played.Dear kneeling brothers,As a proud Army veteran, mom and black American, I thank God that I live in the greatest nation on Earth. For me, Thanksgiving doesn t just come once a year. I m thankful 365 days a year.You make far, far more money than almost all Americans regardless of race. Kids look up to you as heroes. You appear on TV and in the media.Yet, you keep on protesting refusing to rise and respect our national anthem and respect the men and women like me who serve or have served in our military.I was willing to die for my country when I put on the Army uniform. And you re not even willing to stand up for a short song? This is too much of a sacrifice for you?One of the many lessons I ve learned along the way is that there is no place on the planet like America. She is not perfect, because we are not perfect. Yet, she is a consummate beacon of light, set upon a hill, for nations who look to her for hope, dignity and direction.You big guys should appreciate that and pause for a few moments to express your patriotism and love for our great nation when our national anthem is played and our flag flies before thousands of people who have paid good money to see you run around a field chasing a little ball.Let me tell you about me. I m not as big and strong as you, but I stepped forward to join the Army to fight for your right to play games in peace.Weeks before I graduated from the Army s basic training program, I had an epiphany: I could be deployed to war. Would I go? Would I put my life on the line for someone else?It didn t take me long to come to a resounding Yes! If called, I would go.But I gave myself an assignment. If I was going to potentially give life or limb to defend this great country, I would need to know what, exactly, I was defending. I am still learning.One of the lessons I ve learned about America is more of a personal lesson. I am not a victim. My two beautiful black babies are not victims. Black Americans are not victims.We are victors not so much because of anything we have done, but because of those who came before us. Slaves in chains, treated like farm animals, to be owned by others. And after Emancipation, those who endured the humiliation of drinking out of the dirty water fountain or taking their child into the colored restroom.Those who were spat upon or cursed out solely because they were deemed the wrong color. Those who had to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar to be eligible to vote, notwithstanding their college education.Those who were hosed down, billy-clubbed across the head or attacked by trained dogs just because they walked across a bridge.Those who were aroused from their sleep to see hate-filled men covered in white sheets, a cross burning in their front yard and their neighbor calling out for their son.Those who, oftentimes, paid the ultimate sacrifice not for their own benefit, but for the joy that was set before them.We, today, are the joy that was set before them. And, how do you repay them for their sacrifice to be treated as equal under the law? You have chosen to take a knee.If you followed the rhetoric we hear today, America is not far removed from those Jim Crow days of legalized discrimination against black people.If you closed your eyes and just listened to the blistering speeches coming from Antifa, the Black Lives Matter folks and many politicians, you would think we re not even 40 years removed from slavery itself.The narrative behind Hands Up, Don t Shoot perpetuates the storyline that around every street corner there s a police officer waiting to shoot a black man. It is these narratives that have given life to you NFL players kneeling during our national anthem.If there was truth behind these narratives, then I would readily support you black millionaire athletes using your national platform to shine a bright light on the systemic racism against the black community.But we re not living in 1850 or 1950. Racism is certainly not dead, but it s not the powerful monster backed by all the resources of government either. And you guys are not exactly downtrodden, going hungry, being shoved to the back of the bus, or used for target practice by Ku Klux Klansmen dressed up like cops.Allow me to make a few suggestions to you as an alternative to continuing to disrespect our country and flag. If you want to make a real difference that extends beyond getting your picture on a magazine cover, please consider doing the following.First, invest in black urban schools, to help them pay for the educational programs and enhanced learning opportunities that wealthy suburban schools have to help their students succeed.Second, commit to providing mentoring and college scholarships for 20, 10 or even just one child in the inner city, from elementary school through high school and into college. You will change their futures.Third, take $1 million or $2 million not all of your vast wealth and invest it into creating jobs, businesses and entrepreneurial internships to help black people achieve the American Dream. Find ways to personally take your millions directly into a distressed community and invest.Fourth, take a family out of the inner city by giving them a mortgage-free home. Consider the ripple effect of good this stand would have on the lives of an entire family for generations to come.Fifth, educate yourselves and then others on what the Democratic Party has done to the black community. I have yet to find an inner city run by conservatives. Yet I see one Democratic politician after another representing some of the most distressed communities. These politicians themselves usually do not live in those distressed communities and often live in expensive homes while their kids attend private schools.Teach yourselves and others to hold elected officials accountable. Be determined to no longer fall prey to their sleight-of-hand manipulations that only serve to distract you from their lack of effort to make real changes in the black community.Doing just one of these things would make an indelible imprint on any community, especially the black community.So instead of taking a knee, take a stand to stomp out poverty by investing in businesses, by creating an environment that promotes family stability, and by fanning the flames of hope, dignity and direction into the lives of some of our most depressed citizens.By the grace of God, I was never called into war during my Army service. I know many others who were. Some did not return whole. So, while I can t play pro football, I have two legs, two arms and a brain that tells me to appreciate and love the United States of America.For all this I am thankful, and I think you should be too.Happy Thanksgiving,Kathy Barnette | 1real |
Trump fires campaign manager in shakeup for election push | NEW YORK/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Donald Trump fired Corey Lewandowski, the campaign manager who helped him win Republican presidential nominating contests but clashed with other advisers on how to appeal to the broader general electorate, several people with knowledge of the decision said on Monday. The firing on Monday morning was another shakeup for a campaign already at odds with many senior Republican figures over the presumptive nominee’s policies, with the party’s nominating convention in Cleveland less than a month away. But it may also prove a step toward calming concerns among party leaders about Trump, a wealthy businessman and political outsider, and the conflicting advice he was getting from senior aides, as he battles presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton ahead of the Nov. 8 election. Trump said Lewandowski did “a great job” but “it’s time now for a different kind of a campaign.” “We ran a small, beautiful, well-unified campaign. It worked very well in the primaries. I think I’m probably going to do some of that,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News, in which he did not say if Lewandowski had been fired. Three people close to the campaign said some of Trump’s staff viewed Lewandowski as opposing strategic changes and staff hires urged for the general election campaign by Paul Manafort, a strategist hired in April partly for his experience on presidential campaigns that Lewandowski lacked. The three, a campaign staffer and two people in regular contact with Trump advisers, spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized by Trump to discuss the firing. Manafort will take over as campaign manager, said Carl Paladino, co-chairman of the campaign’s operations in New York state. “Paul’s in charge,” Sean Spicer, the Republican National Committee’s communications director, said in an interview. Trump’s decision to fire his manager came in part at the urging of his daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, who have powerful advisory roles in the campaign, the two people in contact with Trump aides said. Hope Hicks, who single-handedly fields Trump’s media inquiries, disputed reports she had complained about Lewandowski to Ivanka Trump. “That is entirely untrue,” she said. Lewandowski, 42, had been a near-constant presence at Trump’s side since the New York developer launched his campaign on June 2015. In a brief statement read on CNN, Lewandowski said: “I stand by the fact that Mr. Trump is a great candidate and is better than Hillary Clinton ever will be.” Lewandowski denied there were any tensions between him and Trump’s family in an interview with CNN. Later on Monday, a campaign adviser resigned after reveling in Lewandowski’s exit on his Twitter account, CNN reported. “Ding dong the witch is dead!” Michael Caputo, the adviser, wrote shortly after reports of the firing emerged. He later released a statement to CNN saying he had resigned. “In hindsight, that was too exuberant a reaction to this personnel move,” his statement said. The RNC spokesman did not think there would be a change in Trump’s tone. “It’s going to be more of a streamlined effort and more of an understanding of the difference that a general election has,” Spicer said. Clinton’s campaign has hundreds more staff than that of Trump. In contrast to her unsuccessful 2008 presidential bid, there has been no public sign this time of any significant infighting among her advisers. The former U.S. secretary of state has also spent millions of dollars on television commercials in recent weeks. Trump has not aired any paid advertisements since becoming the presumptive nominee, preferring to spread his message through his Twitter account and in media interviews. Trump has faced setbacks in the past two weeks. His renewed calls to temporarily ban Muslims from entering the United States have drawn heavy criticism from Republican politicians in Washington and prompted corporate sponsors like Apple and JPMorgan Chase to withhold funding from the party’s July 18-21 convention. Recent opinion polls show at least half of all voters approve of the Muslim ban. Lewandowski, a former New Hampshire field director for a conservative advocacy group, argued that Trump’s unconventional campaigning style did not need to be changed after it proved successful in the last few months of primary contests. Lewandowski repeatedly defended that strategy with a line that became his mantra: “Let Trump be Trump.” Known for his brusque manner, Lewandowski was accused of manhandling a female reporter in Florida during the primary campaign, but the battery charge against him was later dropped. He is still scheduled to attend the Cleveland convention as chairman of New Hampshire’s delegation. The Democratic National Committee said Lewandowski’s exit was unlikely to change Trump. “It wasn’t Corey Lewandowski who called for a ban on Muslims entering the United States,” Mark Paustenbach, a party spokesman, said in a statement, “it was Donald Trump.” | 0fake |
Tired Of Things Going Well, Marco Rubio Makes Promise To Destroy America Again (VIDEO) | Listening to several of the Republican candidates for president, one could wonder if they ve been in a cryogenic sleep for the past seven years, and they re still talking about how badly George W. Bush screwed things up. However, no, they keep repeating the lie that the nation is so much worse now than it was at the brink of a recession before President Obama took over. Republican voters should honestly be insulted by this, being treated like idiots absent from reality. Although, maybe they are idiots absent to reality, and these Republican candidates are just being opportunistic.Repeating this lie of seven disastrous years of Obama, Marco Rubio took to the media branch of the GOP, Fox News, to give a quick campaign message and offer his well wishes for the new year. Hi, this is Marco Rubio, a senator from Florida, and a candidate for President of the United States. As we leave 2015 behind and look forward to 2016, with the elections that are coming up in November, this is the year where we re going to have a chance to turn America around. After seven disastrous years of the current president, we have a chance to reclaim the American dream, and that s why I m running for president. And my resolution for 2016 is to do everything I can to not just restore the American dream, but to expand it to reach more people and change more lives than ever before. So that this, the greatest country in the world, can be greater than it s ever been. So, what America does Rubio want to go back to, exactly? One where people are losing their homes? One where jobs are lost at a rate of 750,000 per month? One where people could be denied healthcare for a preexisting condition? One where the 14th amendment is ignored and marriage equality doesn t exist? One where Osama bin Laden is still alive? One where credit card companies can still screw customers over left and right?Honestly, what does Rubio want to do to turn America around, because it sure as hell looks as though we are headed in the right direction, and if anything could stand a candidate to continue Obama s progress and advance it further.Rubio apparently wants an America where Wall Street runs the show, people die or go bankrupt from lack of health coverage, and Americans aren t treated equally under the law. So, if that s the America Rubio wants thanks, but no thanks. .@marcorubio: This is the year where we re going to have a chance to turn America around. #FoxNews2016 https://t.co/yvze0WpCKg Fox News (@FoxNews) January 1, 2016 Video/Featured image: Twitter | 1real |
Julian Assange: The CIA Director Is Waging War on Truth-Tellers Like WikiLeaks - Breitbart | Writing at the Washington Post, WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange argues the CIA is declaring war on free speech by targeting WikiLeaks in retaliation for the exposure of embarrassing information included in the organization’s Vault 7 data dump on the CIA:[Mike Pompeo, in his first speech as director of the CIA, chose to declare war on free speech rather than on the United States’ actual adversaries. He went after WikiLeaks, where I serve as editor, as a “ hostile intelligence service. ” In Pompeo’s worldview, telling the truth about the administration can be a crime — as Attorney General Jeff Sessions quickly underscored when he described my arrest as a “priority. ”News organizations reported that federal prosecutors are weighing whether to bring charges against members of WikiLeaks, possibly including conspiracy, theft of government property and violating the Espionage Act. All this speech to stifle speech comes in reaction to the first publication in the start of WikiLeaks’ “Vault 7” series. Vault 7 has begun publishing evidence of remarkable CIA incompetence and other shortcomings. This includes the agency’s creation, at a cost of billions of taxpayer dollars, of an entire arsenal of cyber viruses and hacking programs — over which it promptly lost control and then tried to cover up the loss. These publications also revealed the CIA’s efforts to infect the public’s ubiquitous consumer products and automobiles with computer viruses. When the director of the CIA, an unelected public servant, publicly demonizes a publisher such as WikiLeaks as a “fraud,” “coward” and “enemy,” it puts all journalists on notice, or should. Pompeo’s next talking point, unsupported by fact, that WikiLeaks is a “ hostile intelligence service,” is a dagger aimed at Americans’ constitutional right to receive honest information about their government. This accusation mirrors attempts throughout history by bureaucrats seeking, and failing, to criminalize speech that reveals their own failings. Read the rest of the story at the Washington Post. | 0fake |
BRITISH TV PERSONALITY: Don’t Blame Trump For Muslim Ban Comments , He Speaks For The Masses…Who Can Blame Americans For Not Wanting To End Up Like UK? [VIDEO] | He [Obama] makes me want to wrap a suicide vest around my head and text BOOM to my brain On the Brit s desire to be politically correct about Muslims invasion of UK: You are too busy gazing at the fluff in your navel to see the gangrene in your foot Trump is terrifying. We have seen the future and it is bleak said one reporter.In turn, thousands are busy clicking on a hideously impotent petition to BAN TRUMP FROM GREAT BRITAIN .What exactly are they achieving? Having their say? Joining in the outrage bus?No doubt petition sites like change.org are on their web favourites, right up there with erectile dysfunction.co.uk. and single.com.They may as well calm down. We are not banning Donald from the UK.And even if Trump were elected President, he wouldn t be able to ban Muslims from his shores even if he wanted to.Ask yourself: how could he possibly make it work?America struggles to control its southern border as it is. It is not going to be able to change the global passport system and get your religion stamped on your passport or your head to establish your faith.What s the Christianity test going to be? Snurfling a hot dog whilst singing Give me joy in my heart, keep me praising ? After a Muslim couple gunned down 14 residents of San Bernardino, California, Americans looked for strong leadership. Just like after 9/11 when Bush made like a dog of war and took the fight to the terrorists.They didn t get from dreary Obama. He makes me want to wrap a suicide vest around my head and text BOOM to my brainDon't demonise Trump. He speaks for millions of Americans.And who can blame them for not wanting to end up like us?https://t.co/5SaKwd02Hu Katie Hopkins (@KTHopkins) December 9, 2015It took the President a couple of days to even admit the attack was terror and when he did finally address a nervous nation on Sunday night his tone-deaf message was that Muslims were their friends, neighbours and sports heroes. In contrast, Trump IS providing leadership. He knows some of his grand-standing is hot air. But he is articulating a sentiment held by millions and reinforcing himself as a protector of the American people.It s the reason Trump is the Republican front runner. He has spent just $330,000 on broadcasting to Jeb Bush s $42.5 million which is indicative of how much America is enthralled by this new voice.I hear cries that he is a blithering idiot. I have often been called a deranged fool. But if this were true you could ignore me, ignore us, imaging the two of us shouting naked at the rain.It s because we articulate sentiments repressed by the politically correct consensus that we have a voice.Trump said: We have places in London so radicalised that police are afraid for their lives. Within moments the Met Police, Prime Minister David Cameron, and the clownish Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, jumped to defend the reputation of the UK and distance themselves from this glaring truth.Yet, at the time of writing, no less than five bobbies on the beat have come forward to confirm that there ARE estates where they will only patrol out of uniform.There is fear among the police AND the public.I work with a team of cameramen in town who text their wives and partners on the hour to confirm they are safe.My family is not keen for me to be in the capital.Some friends will no longer come to London.How do you feel about the security of the city s shopping centres right now, after what happened in Paris?I watch the BBC news, our national broadcaster, ramming home messages of inclusiveness.Today they gave platform to a representative of the Muslim community telling Trump he is an Islamophobe and is not welcome here.But that s not my voice. That is not the voice of a nation. All Brits don t think that way.Being force-fed multi-culturalism brought us to this place. When the only permitted message is acceptance, any views to the contrary result in a label to shame you into silence.Racist! Islamophobe! Nazi!Don t just stick a label it. Be curious. Wonder, how has Trump come to articulate the views of a majority of Republicans across the States?Because I don t buy into the clear divide between extremist Muslims and peaceful ones. I don t see these as two separate entities. It is a sliding scale, a spectrum. From utterly peaceful, to ambivalence to sympathising, to extremist, to a man blowing up buses in Woburn Place.It is the same slippery slope which sees regular mosque attendees from Luton slip off to Syria to join ISIS. And suddenly a tight knit Muslim community knows nothing.Not the local imam, not local families, no one. No one denouncing terrorism. Just a wall of silence. In our country.Hate hidden behind walls we are told to accept and tolerate because we are multi-cultural. Repeat after me. Multi-cultural.History teaches us lessons were refuse to learn.The IRA would not have enjoyed decades of success without many among the Northern Irish Catholic population acting just the same way as the imams and family and friends of extremists in Luton today.We have gone too far and lost control of vast swathes of our country. In part we ARE a radicalised nation and it does nobody any favours to deny the obvious.Trump wants to call a temporary halt to Muslim immigration until America figures out what is going on.Adversaries may be quick to jump on Trump and make him the problem.But look around. You are too busy gazing at the fluff in your navel to see the gangrene in your foot.You lost sight of terrifying.It isn t a big, brash American untroubled by the need to be loved. It is the march of ISIS and the so-called Islamic State.You may want to distance yourself from Trump. You may want to carry on navel gazing.But for many Americans, Europe is rapidly becoming an example of everything they never want to be. Via: UK Daily Mail | 1real |
Tillerson, Trump, ‘Beauty and the Beast’: Your Friday Evening Briefing - The New York Times | (Want to get this briefing by email? Here’s the .) Good evening. Here’s the latest. 1. President Trump stood by his wiretapping claim at a news conference with Angela Merkel. The background: On Thursday, his top spokesman, Sean Spicer, had repeated an unverified claim that Britain’s spy agency monitored Mr. Trump during the campaign at the behest of President Barack Obama. The British were furious, but Mr. Trump made clear that he saw no reason to apologize. During the Obama years, Ms. Merkel, the German leader, had been angered by reports that the U. S. had tapped her phone. Turning to her at the White House on Friday, Mr. Trump said, “At least we have something in common, perhaps. ” _____ 2. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said for the first time that the Trump administration might take action if North Korea’s nuclear threat reached an unacceptable level. During a visit to South Korea, Mr. Tillerson ruled out negotiations with the North over its nuclear and missile programs. Whether he takes a hard line with China — where he is headed next — over its support for North Korea will be closely watched, as will be the response of China. _____ 3. More grim developments in Syria and Yemen: In Syria, the country’s armed forces fired missiles at Israeli warplanes near Palmyra, in what appeared to be the most serious clash between the two militaries in years. The U. S. military denied reports that it had bombed a Syrian mosque, but confirmed that a nearby building was struck. A human rights group said 42 people were killed. Above, the volunteer rescue group the White Helmets dug through the rubble. Off the coast of Yemen, more than 30 Somali migrants were killed when a military helicopter opened fire on their boat. Yemeni officials blamed a military coalition for the attack. _____ 4. As a Marine sergeant, James LaPorta once led an intelligence team in Afghanistan. Now, as a private citizen, he is tracking the moves of a Facebook group that has been secretly compiling and sharing nude photos of hundreds of women in the Marine Corps. “The Marine Corps can’t do this alone. The internet is too huge,” Mr. LaPorta said. “We need to police ourselves. ” _____ 5. The Nobel laureate Derek Walcott died at 87. His poetry captured the beauty of the Caribbean and the harsh legacy of colonialism. Here are some lines from his work: _____ 6. A new heart drug could be a but it comes with a high price: $14, 523 a year. Those who took the drug Repatha were significantly less likely to have heart attacks or strokes, researchers found in a new study. The drug, manufactured by Amgen, has the potential to help millions of Americans with heart disease, which is the nation’s leading killer. Robert Johnson, above with his daughters, says he feels “much safer” taking the drug. His father died of a heart attack at 42. _____ 7. Our personal finance writer delves into our nation’s maddeningly complex system of financial aid for higher education. His conclusion: “If you have a child who is already walking and talking and you will not be able to write a check to pay tuition, it’s best to start studying up on it now or finding a political candidate to support who will blow it all up. ” _____ 8. We explored the beautiful, eerie world beneath the ice in northern Quebec to hunt for fresh mussels. In the coldest months of the year, when the ice is thickest and unusually large tides empty the bay under it, some Inuit people venture into the luminous ice caves. The mussels, a welcome winter treat these days, were at one time a lifesaving source of food. _____ 9. Happy St. Patrick’s Day. We assembled a collection of recipes you might want to explore this weekend, including traditional fare like corned beef, Guinness pie and soda bread. And then there are some green dishes that don’t require food coloring, like the Green Goddess dressing of herbs, garlic and anchovies above. _____ 10. Finally, what to watch this weekend? Here are some ideas: the movies that influenced “Get Out” new original content on Amazon and the N. C. A. A. tournament. “Beauty and the Beast” also opens in theaters. Jimmy Kimmel used his for the new movie to take another swipe at the president. Have a great weekend. _____ Photographs may appear out of order for some readers. Viewing this version of the briefing should help. Your Evening Briefing is posted at 6 p. m. Eastern. And don’t miss Your Morning Briefing, posted weekdays at 6 a. m. Eastern, and Your Weekend Briefing, posted at 6 a. m. Sundays. Want to look back? Here’s last night’s briefing. What did you like? What do you want to see here? Let us know at briefing@nytimes. com. | 0fake |
This Really Happened: Fox Interrupted Trump To Criticize Him And Praised Obama | If today on Fox News was any indication at all, Donald Trump may have finally gone too far, even for some of his base, when he tweeted this Thursday morning about Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski:I heard poorly rated @Morning_Joe speaks badly of me (don t watch anymore). Then how come low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came.. Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 29, 2017 to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year s Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 29, 2017While his spokespeople have been working overtime defending the indefensible and sexist tweets, even Fox News thought it was over the top and even Fox News is beginning to see how much better we had it under President Obama.Scarborough and Brzezinski s network, MSNBC, along with CNN, was airing live remarks by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin during a White House press briefing, but Fox uncharacteristically broke away to talk instead about the tweets with Republican National Committee chair Ronna Romney McDaniel:McDaniel defended the president, arguing that his tweets were a natural response to the constant criticism he receives from Brzezinski and co-host Joe Scarborough. Today, the president acted like a human, and he pushed back, she said.Fox News anchor Julie Banderas wasn t buying the excuse. Listen, she replied, you don t need to stoop to the level, obviously. I don t care who you are. You don t stoop to the level of that. I mean that s like me scolding my 4-year-old for using a bad word and then me repeating it. That s just not how you run a country or you parent a 4-year-old. I mean I have to be honest, you know, if you see this negative commentary on a show, change the channel. Ignore it. I mean that s what I tell my kids: When somebody s mean to you, don t fight back. Just walk away. Source: Washington PostThat s not even the best part, Banderas, who s hardly a token liberal (just yesterday she blamed Democrats for the fact that Republicans can t pass Obamacare repeal), went on to compliment President Obama. People used to call President Obama stupid, she said. People used to call him a Muslim. People used to call him underqualified, a sellout to America, a hater of Israel. I mean they called him every name in the book, but you didn t see him lash out. No, you didn t. As Trump keeps embarrassing the Republican Party, you re going to see a lot more people distancing themselves.Featured image via Win McNamee/Getty Images | 1real |
British civil servants' union calls nationwide strike ballot | LONDON (Reuters) - British civil servants will vote next month on nationwide strike action to put pressure on the government to abandon its 1 percent cap on public sector pay rises, their main trade union said on Wednesday. Prime Minister Theresa May s government is considering lifting the cap for at least some public-sector workers later this year, according to media reports earlier this week, as disquiet grows over pay restraint that has lasted since 2010. But on Wednesday May would not commit to lift the cap for nurses - who are widely thought likely to get an increase - after opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn challenged her in parliament over wages in the public and private sector. The Public and Commercial Services union (PCS), the main union for civil servants, said it would ballot nearly 200,000 members between Oct. 9 and Nov. 6 to assess appetite for what would be their first nationwide strike since October 2014. If there are no concessions on pay after the first ballot, the union will hold a second ballot to confirm support for specific strike action. Pay misery for public servants must end and the government must restore public-sector pay to levels that allow working people to live with the dignity and security they deserve, Mark Serwotka, the PCS s general secretary, said in a statement. The PCS said it wanted pay rises of at least 5 percent for all public-sector workers. Average weekly earnings in the public sector rose by 1.3 percent over the past year, compared with a 2.2 percent rise in private-sector wages. Consumer price inflation was 2.6 percent over the same period. Some 5.4 million Britons work in the public sector, of whom just over 400,000 work in the civil service. Most public-sector staff work as teachers or in the National Health Service. | 0fake |
TRUMP COMES BACK ROARING: Calls Out “Alt-Left” and “Fake News” [Video] | President Donald Trump ripped the media today and it was great to see. He said he didn t want to comment on the events over the weekend in Charlottesville, Va., until he knew the all of the facts. He said, you still don t know all of the facts Well done Mr. President!Trump spoke in Trump Tower today trying to discuss the infrastructure plan for America. Questions from reporters were instead about Charlottesville and his reaction to the violence there. The press kept asking why he didn t respond to the events faster POTUS: It takes a little while to get the facts. You still don t know the facts, and it s a very, very important process to me. THE BEST PART -He pulled out the statement from Saturday:To clarify what he said on Saturday, Trump pulled out his remarks from that night and read them over for the press. He said, Before I make a statement, I need the facts. So I don t want to rush into a statement, so making the statement when I made it was excellent. TRUMP TAKES A SWIPE AT THE MEDIA CLASSIC! There was no way of making a correct statement that early. I had to see the facts unlike a lot of reporters. Frankly, people still don t know all of the facts. He hit back at the salivating press with such great force GREAT JOB PRESIDENT TRUMP! | 1real |
OBAMA: ‘There’s little difference between communism and capitalism’ [Video] | Riiiight just choose from what works | 1real |
Congress readies votes Friday on bill to avert government shutdown | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Congress is set to debate legislation that would extend until May 5 the deadline for a deal on federal spending through September and head off a feared government shutdown at midnight on Friday. The House Rules Committee, in a late-night meeting, voted 8-2 to send the legislation to the full House of Representatives for debate and votes on passage on Friday, just hours before expiry of a deadline for funding many federal agencies. If the measure passes the House, as expected, the Senate would be prepared to promptly take up the bill, in the hope of also passing it and sending it to President Donald Trump to be signed into law. The measure would give Republican and Democratic lawmakers an additional week to work out differences on about $1 trillion in funding for the government through Sept. 30, the end of the current fiscal year. Without the extension or a longer-term funding bill, federal agencies will run out of money by midnight Friday, likely triggering abrupt layoffs of hundreds of thousands of federal government workers until funding resumes. The last government shutdown, in 2013, lasted for 17 days, and many lawmakers were nervous about the prospect of another. “I’m confident we will be able to pass a short-term extension” of funding for programs for the fiscal year that began nearly seven months ago, House Speaker Paul Ryan told reporters early on Thursday. House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi warned that the purpose of the stopgap measure was to tie up loose ends of a deal to provide around $1 trillion in money for the fiscal year ending Sept. 30 and not for “kicking the can down the road to have this same back-and-forth” over funding disputes. House Appropriations Committee Chairman Rodney Frelinghuysen expressed optimism in a statement that a final funding package will be completed soon. In the midst of the delicate negotiations, Trump took to social network Twitter to blast Democrats. “As families prepare for summer vacations in our National Parks - Democrats threaten to close them and shut down the government. Terrible!” Trump tweeted in a series of tweets. Negotiators were racing against the clock to resolve remaining disputes in the massive spending bill amid talks that have already handed Democrats at least two major victories, despite Republican control of Congress. Trump, a Republican, gave in to Democratic demands that the spending bill not include money to start building the wall he wants to erect on the U.S.-Mexico border. His administration also agreed to continue funding for a major component of Obamacare, formally known as the Affordable Care Act, despite vows to end the program. It remained unclear whether Republicans would prevail in their effort to sharply hike defense spending without similar increases for other domestic programs. Trump has proposed a $30-billion spending boost for the Pentagon for the rest of this fiscal year. Such funding disputes could resurface later in spending bills for the next fiscal year. Disagreements remaining to be ironed out include funding to make a healthcare program for coal miners permanent and to plug a gap in Puerto Rico’s Medicaid program, the government health insurance program for the poor. | 0fake |
Obama’s Press Secretary Just Got A New Job; Trump’s Going To HATE It (VIDEO) | Donald Trump is soon going to be unleashing even more fake news attacks on the media than ever before.It turns out that former President Barack Obama s Press Secretary, Josh Earnest, just got a new job and it s definitely going to piss the entire Trump administration off. While most Americans miss seeing Earnest s press briefings especially because he s been replaced by pathetic Sean Spicer we will now be able to see him speak regularly as a political contributor for NBC News and MSNBC!NBC News President Noah Oppenheim and MSNBC President Phil Griffin made this announcement on Monday, and it s clear that they couldn t be happier with Earnest joining the team, considering his extensive political experience under Obama. The memo they circulated this morning said: We are pleased to announce that Josh Earnest will join NBC News and MSNBC as a Political Analyst. As you may have seen, he made his debut this morning on Today and Morning Joe. Josh recently completed a ten-year run with President Obama, most recently serving as White House Press Secretary from 2014-2017.Josh joined the Obama presidential campaign in March 2007 as the Iowa communications director, and went on to serve as deputy communications director during the 2008 general election. Josh has also worked on numerous national, statewide and local campaigns over the course of his twenty years in politics. As expected, Earnest s debut was nothing but epic, and it s just what we would expect from the former Press Secretary after working closely with Obama for so many years. Earnest marked his first day in his new role in NBC s Today, where he didn t hesitate to talk about what a massive failure Trump was and how pathetic the GOP s plan to repeal and replace Obamacare was.You can watch Earnest s debut here:Featured image via Gage Skidmore / Flickr | 1real |
Trump Supporters Lose Control, Violently Harass Reporters At Rally (VIDEO) | 0 407
An unidentified supporter of Republican presidential candidate and alleged unregistered sex offender Donald Trump took to violently harassing members of the media at a Saturday night rally held in Phoenix, Arizona.
The man, wearing a “Hillary for Prison” t-shirt, screamed into the press area, “You’re going down! You’re the enemy! You’re the ones working for the devil!,” before adapting the crowd’s “USA” chant into “Jew-s-a,” all the while continuing to scream at the members of the media in the press pen.
Candace Smith, of ABC, was one of the reporters to capture the man’s disturbing behavior on tape. She posted video of the disturbing press area encounter to Twitter, a video which is featured below. This is the man who started chanting “JEW-S-A” at the media pen. Does anyone know what those hands signs mean? pic.twitter.com/64yseZFSVZ
— Candace Smith (@CandaceSmith_) October 29, 2016
Smith included in the text accompanying her video post a question, saying in reference to seemingly intentional hand gestures on the part of the Trump supporter, “Does anyone know what those hand signs mean?”
Smith got at least a couple noteworthy and credible responses.
Clayton Swisher, whose Twitter bio reads that he is an “investigative reporter and author,” suggested that the Trump supporter’s hand gestures are a variation of the “88” hand sign used by white supremacists and described by the Anti-Defamation League as follows:
‘One of the most popular white supremacist symbols is the numeric symbol 88, which stands for “Heil Hitler” (substituting letters for numbers, 88 means HH, i.e., “Heil Hitler”). It is thus not surprising that white supremacists occasionally attempt to display 88 as a hand sign.’
— Clayton Swisher (@claytonswisher) October 30, 2016
A Twitter user identified as Marisel Morales suggested that the hand gestures were the “Scwhurhand,” which is a German salute used in court. @CandaceSmith_ It's a German salute known as Schwurhand
— Marisel Morales (@57MCM) October 29, 2016
A Twitter user with the username “@puppymnkey” countered, however, that the Trump supporter’s hand gestures didn’t quite match the Schwurhand, and instead pointed to a hand gesture version of the number “666” employed by conspiracy theorists, a group almost certainly the man at the Trump rally. @57MCM @CandaceSmith_ nope. That salute is with pinky and index finger touching. It could be this given he's Infowars idiot pic.twitter.com/u953UYor2K
— Boycott Trump SCION (@puppymnkey) October 30, 2016
Nick Corasaniti of The New York Times was another member of the press to capture the man’s disturbing behavior on film.
His video, which runs a bit after Smith’s video concludes, is featured below.
In this second video, the man can be heard saying that “We’re run by the Jews, okay?” Guy chants “Jew-S-A” in front of press pen pic.twitter.com/2yqgA6dD4k
— Nick Corasaniti (@NYTnickc) October 29, 2016
At the same rally, Politico’s Ben Schrekinger captured an image of a man he said “had been staring at the press for some time” and was “holding an object.”
Security, Schrekinger says, was notified of the man’s behavior. Bearded man's been staring at press for some time. Television reporter said he is holding object + notified security pic.twitter.com/phDvXFGgGw
— Ben Schreckinger (@SchreckReports) October 29, 2016
Trump has long targeted the press in his incitement antics, as put on full display in his campaign rallies. He claims that the media has collaborated to “rig” the election against him by supposedly dishonest coverage of his campaign on their part. | 1real |
New Poll Finds Donald Trump Almost Caught Up with Hillary Clinton | Republicans have rallied behind Donald Trump in recent weeks, as the businessman and reality-TV star cleared an all but assured path to the party’s presidential nomination. Trump has narrowed Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s lead to 3 percentage points, according to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. The margin of error for the poll is plus-minus 3.1 percentage points.
Clinton leads trump 46 percent to 43 percent, marking a significantly smaller margin between the two likely nominees and the first time Clinton has not led Trump by double digits since December. In April, Clinton led Trump by 11 percentage points, 50 percent to 39 percent, according to a NBC News/WSJ poll.
Insofar as individual polls mean anything, the swell of support for Trump could suggest that Republican voters are accepting their presumptive nominee after his win in the Indiana primary earlier this month, and after Senator Ted Cruz, Trump’s final primary opponent, dropped out.
The poll comes out amid new bitterness in the Democratic primary battle. NBC points out just 66 percent of Democratic voters who prefer Sanders will support Clinton in a matchup against Trump, underscoring the challenge she faces in winning over necessary votes in the general election.
According to the poll, Clinton and Trump have one thing in common: both are currently the two most unpopular likely presidential nominees, with 54 percent of registered voters who have a negative opinion of Clinton and 58 percent having a negative opinion of Trump. If nominated at such rates, they would also be the most unpopular candidates since the poll began in 1984. | 0fake |
Trump vows crackdown on immigrants who overstay visas if elected | DES MOINES, Iowa (Reuters) - U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump offered fresh details of how he would tackle illegal immigration on Saturday, saying he would crack down on those who overstay their visas as he sought to quiet criticism from conservatives. In a campaign speech in Des Moines, Iowa, Trump also cited the shooting death of a cousin of NBA star Dwyane Wade to urge African-American voters to rally behind him, calling it an example of violence that has to be addressed. Trump, speaking on the Iowa State Fairgrounds with hay bales stacked behind him, sought to clarify his views on how to overhaul the U.S. immigration system after saying earlier in the week that he was softening on his plan to deport all 11 million illegal immigrants. That stance drew fire from conservatives who wanted him to stand fast after he won the Republican presidential nomination in large part by a hardline stance that would include building a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico. In his speech, Trump said he would seek to institute a tracking system to ensure illegal immigrants who overstay their visas are quickly removed, and would propose an e-verify system to prevent the illegal community from gaining access to welfare and other benefits. “If we don’t enforce visa expiration dates, then we have an open border – it’s as simple as that,” he said. In outlining his views, Trump said addressing illegal immigration is important to helping Americans find jobs. “Every time an African-American citizen, or any citizen, loses their job to an illegal immigrant, the rights of that American citizen have been violated,” he said. “Equal protection under the law must include the consistent application of our immigration laws.” Trump said his first priority upon taking office next January would be the immediate deportation of thousands of illegal immigrants who remain in the United States despite having committed crimes. “These international gangs and cartels will be a thing of the past. Their reign of terror will be over. In this task, we will always err on the side of protecting the American people – we will use immigration law to prevent crimes, and will not wait until some innocent American has been harmed or killed before taking action,” he said. He did not explain how his plan would affect many of the illegal community who have been in the United States for decades and obeyed U.S. laws. Trump said the death in Chicago of Wade cousin Nykea Aldridge, 32, a mother of four, was an example of turmoil in U.S. inner cities. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, a former chief of staff to Democratic President Barack Obama, has struggled in particular to contain violence in his city. The incident permitted Trump to bring up again his desire to be a “law and order” president and underscore his drive to appeal to African-American voters who traditionally vote Democratic and overwhelmingly support Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. “It breaks all of our hearts to see it, it’s horrible,” Trump said. “And it’s only getting worse. This shouldn’t happen in our country. This shouldn’t happen in America. We send our thoughts and our prayers to the family, and we also promise to fight for a much, much better tomorrow.” Trump raised the subject after sending out tweets earlier in the day that prompted charges of insensitivity to the death and accusations he sought to exploit it for political purposes. The New York businessman was the headline speaker at “Joni Ernst’s Roast and Ride,” a charity event for military veterans run by U.S. Senator Joni Ernst, a Republican. Ernst and most other speakers offered praise for Trump, a rarity at a time when many Republican political leaders have distanced themselves from his candidacy due to his incendiary rhetoric. Trump is running neck and neck with Clinton in polls in the state with 72 days until the Nov. 8 election. | 0fake |
U.N. tiptoes around Trump stance on torture, refugees | GENEVA (Reuters) - The United Nations reaffirmed on Friday that torture is illegal and that refugees deserve protection, while ducking any direct criticism of remarks made by new U.S. President Donald Trump. Major human rights groups have denounced Trump’s stance on torture and warned against restoring a CIA secret detention program for interrogating terror suspects. Trump is also reviewing spending, including at the U.N., where the United States is the largest donor. “International human rights law is clear on the absolute prohibition on torture,” U.N. human rights spokesman Rupert Colville told a news briefing. Pressed repeatedly to comment on Trump’s remarks this week that torture “works”, Colville noted that prominent U.S. Senators including Republican John McCain, himself a torture victim, and Democrat Dianne Feinstein, who chaired an inquiry on the CIA program under former President George W. Bush, had spoken out. It was still very early days in terms of how the U.N. human rights office interacts with the new administration, he said. “We have to work out strategically what is going to be effective.” The UNHCR was also tepid in its comments on Trump’s moves to restrict refugees. He is expected to sign an executive order that would include a temporary ban on all refugees, and a suspension of visas for citizens of Syria and six other Middle Eastern and African countries. “Of course UNHCR believes that refugees should be offered assistance, protection, opportunities for resettlement, regardless of their race, religion or ethnicity,” UNHCR spokeswoman Vannina Maestracci said. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has temporarily halted trips by staff to interview refugees abroad ahead of a likely shakeup of refugee policy by Trump, two sources said on Thursday. During the election campaign, Trump decried former President Barack Obama’s decision to increase the number of Syrian refugees admitted to the United States over fears that some fleeing the country’s civil war might carry out attacks. Some 25,000 refugees were resettled in the United States between October and year-end under UNHCR’s program for the most vulnerable, Maestracci said. A host of U.S. federal government agencies are involved and extensive background checks are carried out, she said. “I think it’s fair to say that refugees coming into the United States to be resettled are some of the most vetted individuals entering the United States,” Maestracci said. | 0fake |
TRUMP SUPPORTERS Will Get Extra Special Protection During Republican Convention [Video] | Who better to protect Trump supporters than bikers who ve supported Trump throughout his campaign. We love these guys! They were there during the Washington shut down and they ve been huge supporters of The Donald Go get em! | 1real |
Texas Sheriff Threatens To Jail Truck Owner For Anti-Trump Sticker (SCREENSHOTS) | Good news everyone! All crime in Texas has been solved. How do we know this? Because Fort Bend County Sheriff Troy E. Nehls has announced that he s going on a crusade against protected political speech.Apparently, the Sheriff saw someone s anti-Trump sticker he placed on his truck and decided to take action pleasing the tortured little snowflakes who contacted him about it but also showing that not only he but an unnamed prosecutor is corrupt as f*ck. I have received numerous calls regarding the offensive display on this truck as it is often seen along FM 359. If you know who owns this truck or it is yours, I would like to discuss it with you, the Sheriff posted on Facebook Wednesday. Our Prosecutor has informed us she would accept Disorderly Conduct charges regarding it, but I feel we could come to an agreement regarding a modification to it. Yes, disorderly conduct. For a sticker. Because it s anti-Trump.Sorry, Sheriff. No agreement is necessary, as it is not a crime to criticize the President or people who voted for him. Naturally, Americans stopped by to laugh at the sheriff who claims that saying mean things about Trump constitutes an immediate breach of the peace : Unfortunately for the Sheriff, this matter was decided in the 1971 Supreme Court case, Cohen v. California. A man was convicted for disturbing the peace by wearing a f*ck the draft jacket, but the Supreme Court told those who would abuse the justice system by punishing protected political speech to f*ck off.Unfortunately, the goal here isn t to successfully prosecute someone. It s to make sure that the owner of the truck pays for being mean to Trump.Featured image via screengrab | 1real |
Trump on Election Victory: ’Never Underestimate the People’ - Breitbart | During his speech at CPAC on Friday, President Trump stated of his election victory, “they all underestimated the power of the people, you, and the people proved them totally wrong. Never — and this is so true, and this is what’s been happening, never underestimate the people, never. ” Trump said, “The media didn’t think we would win. … The pundits didn’t think we’d win. The consultants that suck up all that money, oh, they suck it up, they’re so good. They’re not good at politics, but they’re really good at sucking up people’s money, especially my opponents, because I kept them down to a minimum, but the consultants didn’t think we would win. But they all underestimated the power of the people, you, and the people proved them totally wrong. Never — and this is so true, and this is what’s been happening, never underestimate the people, never. I don’t think it’ll ever happen again. ” Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett | 0fake |
U.S. plan to move Israel embassy sign of 'failure', Iran's leader says | BEIRUT (Reuters) - U.S. plans to move its Israel embassy to Jerusalem are a sign of incompetence and failure, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said on Wednesday. U.S. President Donald Trump is expected to announce that the United States recognizes Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and will move its embassy there, breaking with longtime U.S. policy and potentially stirring unrest. That they claim they want to announce Quds as the capital of occupied Palestine is because of their incompetence and failure, Khamenei said, using the Arabic name for Jerusalem, according to his official website. He made the remarks to a group of top Iranian officials, regional officials and religious figures attending a conference in Tehran. Iran has long supported a number of Palestinian militant groups opposed to Israel. The issue of Palestine today is at the top of the political issues for Muslims and everyone is obligated to work and struggle for the freedom and salvation of the people of Palestine, Khamenei said. At the same gathering, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said, Quds belongs to Islam, Muslims and the Palestinians, and there is no place for new adventurism by global oppressors, according to Mizan, the news site for the Iranian judiciary. Iran wants peace and stability in the region but will not tolerate the violation of Islamic holy sites, Rouhani said. No Muslim population, including Iran, will tolerate the violation of oppressors and Zionists against Islamic holy sites, Rouhani said, according to Mizan. The United States has not been able to reach its goals and seeks to destabilize the region, Khamenei said. On the issue of Palestine, (U.S.) hands are tied and they cannot advance their goals, Khamenei said, saying the Palestinian people would be victorious. American government officials have said themselves that we have to start a war in the region to protect the security of the Zionist regime (Israel), Khamenei said. Certain rulers in the region are dancing to America s tune Khamenei said, an indirect reference to Iran s main regional rival Saudi Arabia. Whatever America wants, they ll work against Islam to accomplish it, he said. | 0fake |
U.S. State Dept. Spox: ‘Everybody wants Assad out five years ago’ | 21st Century Wire says At Tuesday s U.S. State Department briefing, spokesperson Heather Nauert, once again, displayed her servitude to Washington s geopolitical agenda in Syria.Watch as Nauert, in an overly assuming and flippant style, proclaims how everybody in this room and in this building wants Assad out five years ago in her exchange with NBC News correspondent Andrea Mitchell. The sheer audacity begins at the 39 minute mark. This is all just more scripted servitude from U.S. State Department talking heads on the topic of Syria as Washington s war plan there continues to crumble. READ MORE SYRIA NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire SYRIA FilesSUPPORT OUR WORK BY SUBSCRIBING & BECOMING A MEMBER @21WIRE.TV | 1real |
Oscars ’In Memoriam’ Segment Pays Tribute to Living Producer | The 89th Academy Awards may well be remembered for its epic Best Picture gaffe ending — but that wasn’t the only mistake made on the broadcast. [During the annual In Memoriam segment Sunday night, a tribute to costume designer and nominee Janet Patterson was botched when the Academy mistakenly used a photo of Australian producer Jan Chapman. The error was noticed quickly by dismayed Australian film industry veterans. “Oh dear. The #Oscars put up what I think is a photo of Jan Chapman, instead of Janet Patterson, for the In Memoriam segment,” film reviewer Rhett Bartlett wrote on Twitter. Oh dear. The #Oscars put up what I think is a photo of Jan Chapman, instead of Janet Patterson, for the In Memoriam segment. pic. twitter. — Rhett Bartlett (@dialmformovies) February 27, 2017, Others noted that Patterson is still “very much alive. ” Pic of my pal Jan very much alive — was just featured in In Memoriam. #Oscars, — Virginia M Moncrieff (@VMMoncrieff) February 27, 2017, hey @TheAcademy you need to pull this and replace with a photo of Janet Patterson, not very much alive Jan Chapman https: . — palace films (@palacefilms) February 27, 2017, As it turns out, both Patterson and Chapman were very close friends and longtime collaborators, according to the Hollywood Reporter. But the photo gaffe wasn’t the only issue with the traditional segment. According to the Daily Mail, the segment left out actress Alexis Arquette, comedian Garry Shandling, producer Dan Ireland, actress Doris Roberts and actor Robert Vaughn. The in memoriam gaffe came before the chaotic and disastrous end to Sunday’s ceremony that saw Moonlight win the prestigious best picture award — but only after La La Land was mistakenly handed the statuette. For more from the Oscars, including the full list of winners, check out Breitbart News’s livewire. Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter: @JeromeEHudson | 0fake |
Kyrgyzstan vote count problems "significant": OSCE-led observers | BISHKEK (Reuters) - European observers said on Monday there had been numerous and significant procedural problems during the vote count in Kyrgyzstan s presidential election on Sunday, but praised the orderly transfer of power in the volatile Central Asian nation. The vote was competitive and candidates could, in general, campaign freely, although cases of misuse of public resources, pressure on voters and vote-buying remained a concern, the observer mission led by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) said in a statement. | 0fake |
This Is Great! ONE BRUTAL IMAGE Perfectly Captures The Hypocrisy Of The Left | You re gonna love this!The left has been screaming for decades about the government interfering in their right to kill their babies. Because after all, even though it s a human life in its earliest stages of development; it s growing inside their womb, so the government has no business protecting the innocent life of that baby in THEIR bodies.Strangely enough, the left is angry about Trump s decision to let the states decide if they will or will not force its citizens to share a bathroom or public shower with a person who claims to be a certain gender contrary to what their genitals say they are. Clearly the hypocritical left can t make up their mind when it s okay, or when it s not okay for the government to tell citizens what they can or cannot do | 1real |
Trump, frustrated by Afghan war, suggests firing U.S. commander: officials | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump’s doubts about the war in Afghanistan has led to a delay in completing a new U.S. strategy in South Asia, skepticism that included a suggestion that the U.S. military commander in the region be fired, U.S. officials said on Wednesday. During a July 19 meeting in the White House Situation Room, Trump demanded that his top national security aides provide more information on what one official called “the end-state” in a country where the United States has spent 16 years fighting against the Taliban with no end in sight. The meeting grew stormy when Trump said Defense Secretary James Mattis and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Joseph Dunford, a Marine general, should consider firing Army General John Nicholson, commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, for not winning the war. “We aren’t winning,” he told them, according to the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity. RELATED COVERAGE Commentary: Steve Bannon is right on Afghanistan Commentary: The road to Afghanistan peace does not lie in Kabul In addition, once the meeting concluded, Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, got into what one official called “a shouting match” with White House national security adviser H.R. McMaster over the direction of U.S. policy. Some officials left the meeting “stunned” by the president’s vehement complaints that the military was allowing the United States to lose the war. Mattis, McMaster and other top aides are putting together answers to Trump’s questions in a way to try to get him to approve the strategy, the officials said. The White House had no comment on the accounts of the meeting. Another meeting of top aides is scheduled on Thursday. Although Trump earlier this year gave Mattis the authority to deploy U.S. military forces as he sees fit, in fact the defense secretary’s plans to add around 4,000 more U.S. troops to the 8,400 currently deployed in Afghanistan are being caught up in the delay surrounding the strategy, the officials said. “It’s been contingent all along informally on the strategy being approved,” a senior administration official said of the troop deployment. Trump has long been a skeptic of lingering U.S. involvement in foreign wars and has expressed little interest in deploying military forces without a specific plan on what they will do and for how long. Officials said Trump argued that the United States should demand a share of Afghanistan’s estimated $1 trillion in mineral wealth in exchange for its assistance to the Afghan government. But other officials noted that without securing the entire country, which could take many years, there is no way to get the country’s mineral riches to market, except to Iran. Trump complained that the Chinese are profiting from their mining operations, the officials said. | 0fake |
LOL! New York Times Publishes Lengthy Article On Dem Senator’s Corruption Trial…Leaves ONE CRITICAL DETAIL Out Of Their Story | While Facebook has hired an entire team of employees to weed out fake news , their crack-team of censorship stooges consider news sources like the New York Times to the be the gold standard for the industry The New York Times published an almost 1300-word news story on Monday night about Democratic New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez s corruption trial, without ever mentioning Menendez s party affiliation.Both in print and on social media, the NYT failed to inform its readers that Sen. Menendez is a Democrat. For the first time in 36 years, a sitting United States Senator is facing a federal bribery trial, read a NYT tweet promoting the story, which was titled: Menendez Trial Set to Begin With Tensions High and Washington Watching. The NYT wasn t without opportunities to inform its readers which party Menendez belonged to: the paper referred to Menendez 29 times in the story, without once ever mentioning that Menendez is a Democrat.The paper referred to him as The senator, Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, and Mr. Menendez, a senior senator, before referring to him as Mr. Menendez or the senator for the rest of the story. Only after a barrage of online criticism did the NYT note that Menendez is a Democrat, adding in the identifier in the fourth paragraph. Daily Caller | 1real |
WIKILEAKS JULIAN ASSANGE Reveals Hillary’s Connection To ISIS And Discusses Emails That Could Put Her In Jail [VIDEO] | Afshin Rattans goes underground inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London with Julian Assange. He talks to the founder of Wikileaks, Julian Assange about how his recent DNC leaks have no connection to Russia. Plus what are Hillary Clinton s connections to ISIS and Russia. | 1real |
Washington’s Intent is Economic Destabilization and “Regime Change” In Venezuela | By Stephen Lendman
Venezuela’s oil-dependent economy suffers greatly from low crude oil prices and US economic warfare – waged to destabilize the country, create enormous hardships, mobilize majority opposition to President Nicolas Maduro’s leadership, and end nearly 18 years of economic and social progress. The collapse in the price of crude oil was the result of a carefully designed speculative operation.
Neocons in Washington want control over Venezuela’s vast oil reserves, among the world’s largest. With full US support and encouragement, the right wing opposition which controls the National Assembly want Maduros ousted – its latest tactic by recall referendum as constitutionally permitted.
On October 18, Venezuela’s Supreme Court ruled valid signatures of 20% of voters in each of the nation’s 24 states must be collected to proceed with a process against Maduro.
“(F)ailure…will render the call for the presidential recall referendum as nullified,” the High Court said in its ruling.
On October 21, Venezuela’s National Electoral Council (CNE) suspended the referendum until further notice, following Supreme Court allegations of fraud. Over 30% of signatures collected had irregularities – including listing over 10,000 deceased persons.
A previous article explained how Venezuela’s recall referendum works. Article 72 of Venezuela’s Constitution states “(a)ll magistrates and other offices (including the president) filled by popular vote are subject to revocation.”
“Once half (their) term of office…has elapsed, 20% of (registered) voters (by petition may call for) a referendum to revoke such official’s mandate.”
“When a number of voters equal to or greater than the number of those who elected the official vote in favor of revocation (provided the total is 20% or more of registered voters), the official’s mandate shall be deemed revoked…”
Signatures collected must be verified for authenticity before proceeding further with the recall process. If achieved, it’ll be organized within 90 days. Removing Maduro requires support from more than the 50.6% of voters supporting his 2013 election.
Timing is important. If held by January 10, 2017, a new election will be called if Maduro loses. If things go against him after this date, Vice President Aristobulo Isturiz will serve as president until January 2019, when his term expires.
In response to CNE’s suspending the recall process, the factions controlling the National Assembly barely stopped short of urging coup d’etat action to remove Maduro forcefully.
Last Sunday, they said they’ll impeach him for “violating democracy.” The body has no legal standing after ignoring the Supreme Court’s October 18 ruling.
United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) leader Hector Rodriguez mocked them, saying parties violating the “rules of the game come and talk about democracy…There will be no recall referendum in 2016 because of fraudulent signatures collected.”
Violent demonstrations may follow, similar to what occurred in 2014 – perhaps another US coup attempt.
On October 24, WaPo editors disgracefully headlined “How to derail Venezuela’s new dictatorship.” What followed was a disgraceful litany of misinformation, exaggeration and Big Lies.
WaPo: Maduro “made clear (he and his government are) prepared to shred what remained of the country’s constitutional order…(They) stripped the opposition-controlled national assembly of its powers, imprisoned several top leaders and tried to slow” the recall process.
Fact: Maduro and Venezuela’s CNE observe the letter of constitutional law. No opposition powers were “stripped.” Their imprisoned officials plotted to remove Maduro by coup d’etat.
Collecting fraudulent signatures “slow(ed)” the recall process, not administration officials.
WaPo: Opposition National Assembly members “issued a declaration saying Mr. Maduro had staged a coup. That is accurate – and it ought to provoke a consequential reaction from the United States and Venezuela’s Latin American neighbors.”
Fact: No Maduro “coup” occurred, nor is one in prospect. WaPo calling for “consequential” action sounds ominously like urging Washington to oust him forcefully.
WaPo: “The recall referendum the opposition was pursuing offered a democratic way out of what has become one of the worst political and humanitarian crises in Latin America’s modern history.”
Fact: US dirty tricks and economic manipulation leading to disruptions in the distribution of food, bear much responsibility for hard times in Venezuela. Real problems exist. Hunger isn’t one of them. WaPo lied claiming “(t)he vast majority of low-income families say they are having trouble obtaining food.”
Venezuelans changed their dietary practices because of the scarcity of commonly eaten foods, at times consuming less than earlier. Profiteers hoarding and diverting foodstuffs for resale are responsible, along with high inflation resulting economic manipulation.
WaPo: “(T)he United States should be coordinating tough international action.”
Fact: Neocon WaPo editors want Maduro toppled and replaced. Do they mean by coup d’etat by calling for “tough international action?”
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net . His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.” http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com .
Source: Global Research
| 1real |
Germany: Iraqi Asylum-Seeker Convicted of Raping Chinese Students | BERLIN (AP) — A German court has convicted a Iraqi man of raping two Chinese college students in the western city of Bochum. [The dpa news agency reported Tuesday that the court sentenced the man to 11 years in prison. The defendant, who wasn’t identified by name, acknowledged in court that he assaulted the women in August and November last year. DNA evidence linked him to both crimes. The defendant came to Germany as an more than a year ago with his wife and children. The victims, who were 21 and 27 years old at the time, had been studying at Bochum university. The case was one of several that fanned a national debate in Germany about how to respond to a rise in violent crimes committed by migrants. | 0fake |
Trump to seek quick progress with Japan's Abe on replacement trade deal | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump will seek quick progress toward a bilateral trade agreement with Japan in place of a broader Asia-Pacific deal he abandoned this week, when Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visits the White House next month, an official in the Trump administration said on Thursday. “I see Abe’s visit being more about finding a follow-through, a replacement for TPP,” said the official, referring to the Trans-Pacific Partnership that Trump ditched on Monday. “Given the domestic political capital (Abe has) expended on TPP, there’s going to be an effort to work with him on a follow-on,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. Trump, who took office last Friday, reiterated on Thursday he would strike numerous bilateral deals, as opposed to multilateral accords like the TPP. He said they would include clauses to allow a 30-day termination notice if the United States was not treated fairly. The TPP, which took years to negotiate among 12 countries, has often been described as being, at its core, a deal between the United States and Japan, the world’s largest and third-largest economies respectively. Trump called it bad for American jobs, but proponents worry that abandoning the project could further strengthen China’s economic hand in the region. Japanese media have said Abe is expected to meet Trump in Washington on Feb. 10, although no official announcement has been made as to the timing of the trip. The administration official said it “was clear what the outlines and the contours” of a deal with Japan would be, but did not go into details. “I don’t know if there needs to be this protracted long-term negotiation, and there may be some initial steps that are implemented prior to an official Free Trade Agreement,” he said. “It’s pretty clear what the problems are on the trade side and it’s pretty clear what the opportunities are. I don’t think it’ll be particularly difficult to get some movement on a couple of different aspects of the trade side relatively quickly.” The White House declined comment on the official’s remarks. “We look forward to Prime Minister Abe’s upcoming visit and a productive relationship with Japan,” a White House official said. Abe has touted TPP as an engine of economic reform and a counterweight to a rising China but said on Thursday it was possible Tokyo and Washington could hold bilateral free trade talks. “Japan will continue to stress to the U.S. the importance of the TPP but it is not totally unfeasible for talks on EPA (Economic Partnership Agreement) and FTA (Free Trade Agreement)” with the United States, Abe told parliament after being asked about trade talks between the two nations. Japan’s Kyodo news agency said Abe also suggested Japan would advocate retaining some form of tariffs on rice and four other key agricultural products in any trade negotiations with the United States. “We will thoroughly protect what we should protect...I want to carry out bilateral negotiations properly, based on the thinking that agriculture is the foundation of this country,” it quoted him as saying. | 0fake |
Twitter has been looking into the future: read the best 16 predictions | Next Prev Swipe left/right Twitter has been looking into the future: read the best 16 predictions Predictions are notoriously unreliable, even when they’re backed up by expert knowledge and thorough research. It’s fair to say that the good people of Twitter have used neither of these but they’ve still come up with some startling visions of the future.
Here are the best 16 tweets. 1. The year is 2017, Marmite is the UK's official currency, old people are burned as fuel, an evil clown is PM, Brexit still means Brexit.
— Mitten d'Amour (@MittenDAmour) October 12, 2016 2. The year is 2018. Facebook is just one long clip of James O'Brien talking to some Leave-voting idiot and hammering his head on the desk.
— Alan White (@aljwhite) October 13, 2016 3. The year is 2020.
A Buzzfeed article titled "President Trump's Wars Summarised In 13 AMAZING Cat GIFs" wins the Pulitzer Prize.
— Dai Lama (@WelshDalaiLama) September 27, 2016 4. | 1real |
Trump BETRAYED: GOP Rep. DEFENDS Refugees Against His Muslim Ban | Republican Congressman Charlie Dent represents a district with one of the largest Syrian refugee populations in the country, and he is not happy about Trump s Muslim ban. He spoke to The New York Times Jonathan Martin, saying: I urge the administration to halt enforcement of this order until a more thoughtful and deliberate policy can be instated. One of Dent s constituents is a family that was detained in Philadelphia, despite having all the necessary paperwork, including green cards, to enter the country. This has been the story all over the U.S. people held, or even turned around, despite having all of the necessary legal paperwork to enter the U.S.And there are protests erupting all over the place because of this. People are demanding U.S. Customs release those they ve detained, even though Customs officials have to follow Trump s edicts.But Dent seems to be primarily alone in his party. Republicans on Capitol Hill seem to be keeping their mouths shut on the issue, probably because they thought it was a good idea and now can t admit they might have been wrong about what would happen. Or they re still delusional. The New York Times Glenn Thrush said they haven t been this quiet since the last positive jobs report under Obama. The few that have spoken about it say it s necessary to prevent terrorists from entering the U.S., but what they re totally missing is that this is just going to provide more fodder for radical elements like ISIS to recruit new members. It also splits families up, prevents people from coming home even if they live here perfectly legally, has already sparked backlash from Iran, and is an overall mess.One immigration expert calls this illegal because of a 1965 law that prohibits discriminating against people based on their race, sex, nationality, place of residence, or place of birth. So where are Republicans?Except for Dent, they seem to be hiding.Featured image by Pete Marovich via Getty Images | 1real |
Secret Service manpower shortage as campaigns ramp up | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Secret Service, tasked with simultaneously protecting President Barack Obama and some of the Republican and Democratic candidates now running to replace him next year, is facing a manpower shortfall at a time of peak demand, the agency told Congress on Tuesday. Secret Service Director Joseph Clancy told a House Appropriations panel the agency is focused on “human capital needs across the organization” and accruing enough agents to ease overtime demands on the existing force. The Secret Service hopes to have 7,600 agents in its ranks by fiscal year 2019, up from the current figure of approximately 6,200, Committee Chairman John Carter of Texas said during Tuesday’s hearing. While Clancy said the Secret Service was making progress in hiring more agents, “we have yet to see the desired impact on our overall staffing levels due to increased attrition.” Clancy testified at a hearing to review the agency’s funding needs for the fiscal year starting on Oct. 1. Demands of the mission are peaking, he added, with Republican and Democratic presidential nominating conventions slated for this summer, the general elections in November and presidential inaugural events in January. Carter cited the loss of 19 agents in the last four months and the large amounts of overtime hours agents have had to put in on the president’s detail, on the campaign trail and in the uniformed division. Carter, a Republican, questioned whether the service’s hiring goals were “obtainable” with the agency “losing more agents than they have brought on board.” Clancy responded that the agency is exploring initiatives to lure more applicants and retain current agents. The Secret Service was rocked in 2012 when it surfaced that some agents working a presidential trip to Colombia were involved with prostitutes. In 2014, agents failed to stop a man who jumped the White House fence, ran across the lawn and made it into the mansion before he was apprehended. More recently, during a rally for presidential candidate Donald Trump in Radford, Virginia, a Time magazine photographer was grabbed by the neck and shoved to the ground by a Secret Service agent. An agency spokeswoman said the service is investigating the incident. Besides protecting the president and presidential candidates, Secret Service agents investigate financial crimes such as counterfeiting of U.S. currency and credit card and fraud. | 0fake |
MILLENNIAL Drops Awesome TRUTH BOMB On Her Generation: “We idolize people like Kim Kardashian and then we shame people like Tim Tebow” [VIDEO] | One millennial is 100% FED Up! with her generation. It all started when millennial Alexis Bloomer watched an elderly man limping into the post office, and watched two young men walk by him and not even offer to help him. Here s part of what Alexis had to say: We re just existing, we re not really contributing anything to society. Our generation doesn t have the basic manners that include no mam and yes mam . We don t respect our elders. We don t even respect our country. We re stepping on our flag instead of stepping up to volunteer. And we idolize people like Kim Kardashian and then we shame people like Tim Tebow. We re lazy, we re really entitled, and we want to make a lot of money and have free education but we re not really willing to put in the work. We re more divided as a country than ever before, and I think our generation has a lot to do with it. Everything that used to be frowned upon is now celebrated. Watch Alexis explain her motivation and reason for filming her apology to elders rant: | 1real |
’Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy: The Telltale Series’ - OFFICIAL TRAILER - Breitbart | Starlord, Gamora, Drax, Rocket, and Groot face off against villain Thanos in Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy: The Telltale Series. [Telltale Games, the developer behind the critically acclaimed episodic adventure video game adaptations of The Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us, and Game of Thrones, is tackling Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy just in time for the theatrical release of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. The studio describes the game’s plot: In the wake of an epic battle, the Guardians discover an artifact of unspeakable power. Each of the Guardians has a reason to desire this relic, as does a ruthless enemy who will stop at nothing to tear it from their hands. From Earth to the Milano to Knowhere and beyond, this episodic series puts you in the boots of in an original Guardians adventure. The first episode comes out April 18 on Xbox One, Playstation 4, PC, and mobile devices. | 0fake |
Russian Defense Minister meets U.S. envoy to Moscow, discuss security: TASS | MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and U.S. Ambassador to Russia Jon Huntsman met on Thursday to discuss bilateral relations and international security issues, TASS news agency cited Russia s defense ministry as saying. The meeting took place at the ministry, the agency reported, giving to further details. | 0fake |
The New York Times Pushes Another Phony Labor Shortage - Breitbart | Another day, another phony labor shortage. [The New York Times on Sunday published an article with the startling headline: “Lack of Workers, Not Work, Weighs on Utah’s Economy. ” “After eight years of steady growth, the main economic concern in Utah and a growing number of other states is no longer a lack of jobs, but a lack of workers,” the Times reports. The story goes on to report a number of anecdotes about alleged labor shortages. One construction company, for instance, claims it has raised its starting wage by 10 percent to $17. 50 an hour but has been unable to attract sufficient workers. But data is not the plural of anecdote. And the actual data don’t support the idea of a labor shortage. While there has been some upward movement in recent months there has not been the kind of dramatic upswing in construction wages that would be associated with a genuine labor shortage. If anything, the recent movement looks very much like the normal volatility within the normal range. The average weekly earnings of all employees engaged in construction in Utah stood at $970. 52 in April, 2017, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That a rise of just 3. 25 percent from a year ago. Four years ago, average weekly earnings were $980. 39. Those numbers are not adjusted for inflation, which means the actual decline in wages from four years has been even steeper. Between then, the numbers have bounced around a lot and mostly been lower. Data on average hourly earnings also fail to show anything that looks like a labor shortage. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, average hourly wages in April were up just 2. 7 percent compared with a year ago. That’s a far cry from the 10 percent reported by the company mentioned in the New York Times article. Much deeper into the story, the New York Times actually explains that the supposed labor shortage is really nothing more than workers reacting to a lack of wage growth. In other words, companies are not offering wages that are high enough to attract workers. There is no “lack of workers” — there is only a lack of will to pay workers enough to get them to agree to work. In short, what we are seeing is something more akin to a wage strike by employers who hope that if they hold out long enough against waging raises the government will step in and solve the problem. How could the government do that? By opening up the country to more immigrants. That is really what’s at the bottom of these alleged labor shortages: a campaign to get the government to loosen up on immigration so that employers can keep paying low wages. | 0fake |
Trump Gets Busted For Using $12,000 Of Charity Funds To Buy Sports Memorabilia For Himself | It s illegal to use money meant for charity to purchase stuff for yourself and it looks like Donald Trump definitely broke the law.In 2012, the Republican nominee participated in a bidding war over an autographed Tim Tebow football helmet and eventually won with a bid of $12,000. Clearly, Trump overpaid for the item.The auction was in support of the Susan G. Komen Foundation, which suffered a serious backlash the same year when it tried to take funding away from Planned Parenthood in protest of abortion, thus depriving women of breast cancer screenings that the money paid for. The ensuing outrage forced the Komen organization to reinstate the funding.The Koman Foundation lost a lot of support over the scandal but Donald Trump pumped $12,000 into the organization for a worthless helmet. There normally wouldn t be a problem with that. After all people can spend their money on anything they want. But Trump didn t personally pay for the helmet himself. Instead, he took funds out of his own charity to pay for it.That s right. Trump did not pay for the item with a single dime of his own personal fortune. He used money donated by other people to his Donald Trump Foundation to make the purchase.Well, the Washington Post consulted some tax experts to find out if Trump broke the law and this is what they had to say: That would be a classic violation of the prohibition on a charity being operated for the private inurement (benefit) of the charity s creator, wrote Brett G. Kappel, an expert on tax-exempt organizations at the Akerman law firm in Washington. The Trump Foundation does not appear to have offices of its own. It is headquartered at Trump s business offices in New York and has no full-time staff.The best case for Trump, experts said, would be if he had given the helmet and jersey away to another charity, perhaps to be auctioned off at another fundraiser. If the foundation paid for it, and they owned the helmet, and the helmet was given to someone as a charitable activity, that would be enough, said John Edie, now retired, who was the longtime general counsel at the Council on Foundations.Edie said Trump could not get off the hook by simply giving the memorabilia to a friend. Spending $12,000 for a helmet and then giving it to a golfing buddy is not charity, Edie said.In short, Trump is clearly hiding his tax returns for a reason or multiple reasons that could seriously damage his already sinking campaign. And by the way, the man who claims to be great at making deals clearly failed to see the bad deal he was making when he bought a football helmet signed by a guy who couldn t hack it in the NFL. The Washington Post reports that Trump s $12,000 memorabilia is now only worth just over $400 today. And if you ask me, that price is still too high.Featured Image: Ralph Freso/Getty Images | 1real |
TOUGH MESSAGE From Serious Women Who Don’t Use Genitalia As Reason To Vote For Next President : “We Don’t Feel Safe” [VIDEO] | The women in this video are serious minded voters. They are moms who fear for the safety of their children and grandchildren. They speak for so many of us who are sick and tired of living under a government who puts the safety and security of our nation after political correctness.We are living in perilous times, and it s comforting to know that there are so many female voters who believe our nation s security should take priority over the genitalia of our next President. There s more to choosing a leader of the greatest nation on earth than the abortion issue. It won t matter if you can take the life of an innocent child in your womb up to the moment of conception if you re living under an oppressive Sharia Law or under Communist rule.Here s a newsflash for our media and the Femi-Nazi s who would go into a polling place and vote for Hillary simply because she s a woman: Russia, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia and China don t care if our next President is pro-abortion or if she has a vagina | 1real |
OOPS! SHEILA JACKSON LEE Called The Woman She Kicked Out of First Class A Racist…Too Bad She Didn’t Know This ONE IMPORTANT Thing About The Passenger | I noted that this individual came toward me and took a picture. I heard later that she might have said I know who she is. Since this was not any fault of mine, the way the individual continued to act appeared to be, upon reflection, because I was an African American woman, Sheila Jackson Lee (@JacksonLeeTX18) December 26, 2017Via Washington Times:The woman Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee accused of racism is a celebrated photojournalist who helped document human-rights abuses in war-torn Guatemala during the 1980s.Jean-Marie Simon, whose first-class seat on a United Airlines flight was given to Ms. Jackson Lee, Texas Democrat, lived and worked in Guatemala during the turbulent decade that saw the military seize control of the government in a coup. Hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans were killed or disappeared during the conflict.Now a teacher, Ms. Simon, 63, is the author of Guatemala: Eternal Spring Eternal Tyranny. A 2012 blog post on Amnesty International saidMs. Simon donated 1,000 copies of her book to schools and universities in Guatemala to keep the truth of what happened alive. [ ]After bartering with Ms. Simon over the amount of the voucher she would receive as compensation, United eventually placed the disgruntled passenger in Economy Plus. The airline has yet to apologize for the incident. I was the last passenger on the plane, Ms. Simon wrote on Facebook. A Texas congressman, a nice guy, sat down next to me. He said was glad I had made it on the flight. I showed him my boarding pass with my seat, 1A, printed on it. He said, You know what happened, right? Do you know who s in your seat? I said no. He told me that it was Jackson Lee, a fellow U.S. congresswoman who regularly does this, that this was the third time he personally had watched her bump a passenger. | 1real |
U.S. lawmaker says House intel panel near consensus on NSA spy program | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Members of the U.S. House of Representatives Intelligence Committee are close to an agreement on how to overhaul a controversial National Security Agency surveillance program and hope to complete legislation soon, the top Democrat on the panel said on Wednesday. Representative Adam Schiff said he had proposed a compromise that would let intelligence agencies query a database of information on Americans in national security cases without a warrant, but would require a warrant to use the information in other cases, such as those involving serious violent crime. “This would prevent law enforcement from simply using the database as a vehicle to go fishing, but at the same time it would preserve the operational capabilities of the program,” Schiff told reporters. At issue is Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows the NSA to collect vast amounts of digital communications from foreign suspects living outside the United States. U.S. intelligence officials consider Section 702 among the most vital of tools at their disposal to thwart national security threats. But the program, classified details of which were exposed in 2013 by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, incidentally gathers communications of Americans, such as when they compete with foreigners. Currently, those communications can then be subject to searches without a warrant. Congress must renew Section 702 in some form by Dec. 31 or the program will expire. Schiff said he believed the compromise would be acceptable to many lawmakers, as well as the intelligence community and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It is similar to legislation backed by the House Judiciary Committee. However, there are still deep divides in both the Senate and the House over what to do about Section 702, as lawmakers balance demands for more privacy protections with spy agencies’ desire to preserve what they see as a valuable tool. There are different renewal proposals in the House and Senate. One Senate bill would not require any warrants, which Schiff said he did not think could pass the House. It was not clear whether lawmakers will vote on a standalone 702 bill or whether it would be part of a broader must-pass bill, such as a spending measure Congress must pass next month to keep the government open. Another possibility would be a short-term extension to keep the current surveillance system in place and give Congress more time to come up with a solution that could become law. | 0fake |
Телемедицина — лечебный прорыв или фикция? | Здоровье » Здоровье и профилактика Гос д ум е предстоит рассмотреть законопроект о телемедицине . В каких случаях врачам следует разрешить консультировать пациента дистанционно? Можно ли ставить диагноз на расстоянии? Что сейчас препятствует развитию телемедицины в России? Об этом в прямом эфире видеостудии Pravda.Ru рассказал член правления Общества врачей России Айрат Ханов. 0 комментариев 0 поделились Фото: Fotodom.ru/DP
— Каковы аргументы "за" и "против" телемедицины ? Что медики понимают под телемедициной, и не расходится ли это понимание с тем, что представляют себе авторы законопроектов?
— Если придерживаться буквы определения, то телемедицина — это дистанционные медицинские услуги. По факту, практически каждый врач и многие из граждан нашей страны телемедицинскими услугами пользуются уже много лет. Телефонные консультации, например, — это также телемедицина, потому что врач на расстоянии по телефону дает рекомендации пациенту. Например, врач может увеличить дозу препарата, заменить его на другой препарат или же пригласить больного к себе на прием.
Медицина развивается в связи с тем, что появляются современные средства передачи любой информации — визуальной, письменной и так далее. Ведь интернет развивается.
В настоящее время во всем мире телемедицина движется вперед уже большими темпами. И как нам показывают цифры зарубежных источников, там при этом экономят до 40 процентов средств на медицинских услугах. К сожалению, у нас пока это все хотя и не запрещено, но и не разрешено, не прописано законодательно.
— Медикам действительно нужно, чтобы это явление узаконили? Или, в принципе, как они работали без этого, так и будут нормально работать?
— Я думаю, что нужно, чтобы это узаконили.
— А почему?
— Потому что в медицинском процессе участвуют два человека, две стороны: врач и пациент. И в этой ситуации важно сделать новое максимально удобным , чтобы это облегчало работу врача, улучшало ее и было удобно для пациента. Без этого могут возникнуть юридические проблемы.
Например, когда пациент что-то не так поймет, сам сделает что-то не так, как врач прописал, и из-за этого будут какие-то осложнения, потом он может предъявить врачу юридические претензии. И вот тут возникает проблема, потому что у нас телемедицина не регламентирована.
— То есть может иметь значение, что рекомендация была дана по телефону или по интернету? А если бы сидели офлайн, претензий бы не было?
— Да, потому что информация может исказиться по ходу донесения. Не так услышал, не так понял.
— Но это же может это и в очном разговоре случиться?
— Конечно, но это будет рассматриваться в юридических органах на основе регламентирующих документов, законов. А если порядок не прописан, то сложностей для всех возникнет намного больше. Сейчас в России, согласно законодательству, по лицензионным требованиям медицинская услуга должна оказываться по месту действия лицензии, то есть вот только в этом здании, даже не в соседнем.
— В каких случаях может применяться телемедицина без ущерба для качества лечения?
— Телемедицина нужна, конечно, в первую очередь, для приближения медицинской помощи. Если где-то населенный пункт расположен за 500-700 километров от центральной районной больницы, нет медицинского работника рядом, — чтобы до него добраться, нужны сутки или двое. А если есть связь — телефонная или интернет, — и человеку страждущему нужно оказать помощь именно сейчас, телемедицина может сильно помочь, приблизить лечение.
Во-вторых, телемедицина нужна, когда нужно решить медицинские вопросы между врачом и пациентом уже, например, для уточнения каких-то позиций — результатов анализов или корректировки назначения лечения. Бывает также, что иногда пациенты едут за сотни километров, чтобы получить от врача одноминутную консультацию, хотя сейчас ее легко можно получить по телефону или через интернет. Через современные телемедицинские системы в письменном виде на сайте это сделать особенно легко и удобно.
— Но врачу, что бы минуту уделить пациенту очно, по интернету или телефону, все равно нужно эту минуту выделить. То есть здесь получается проблема — не нагрузят ли врачей, если им теперь дополнительно онлайн консультировать? Где им взять еще время?
— Вот как раз закон и нужен для того, чтобы наш Фонд обязательного медицинского страхования прописал в перечне услуг эту статью — телемедицинская консультация и за нее финансировал лечебные учреждения. Нужен закон. Если визит повторный, уточняющий, почему бы, если пациент находится где-то далеко, не использовать возможности телемедицины? Тогда можно сэкономить на времени пациента и врача. И тогда врач в сэкономленное время может принять другого больного. Кстати, в мировой практике очень много приборов, подсоединенных к телемедицинским портам.
— Какие это дает возможности?
— Во-первых, можно снять кардиограмму, отправить ее врачу за тысячу километров, где он может расшифровать кардиограмму и прислать свои советы. Можно прибором, который присоединен к специализированному порталу, измерить сахар в крови. Можно измерить артериальное давление, пульс, пульсосимметрию сделать…
И в мире уже есть тысячи различных приборов, которые прикрепляются к телу и могут измерять показатели круглые сутки.
— А у нас как дело с этим обстоит? Насколько мы отстаем от Запада?
— Мы отстаем именно потому, что у нас нет соответствующего закона, нет систематизации этих вопросов. К сожалению, в этом направлении движения мы немного отстаем и по приборной базе, по программным продуктам, но закон дал бы толчок к ускорению этих процессов.
Беседовала Лейла Мамедова
Подготовил к публикации Юрий Кондратьев Телемедицина – лечебный прорыв или фикция? | 1real |
HILLARY Mentions Support For Country She And Bill Screwed…Starts Coughing Again…”It Chokes Me Up” [VIDEO] | Watch:Here s the truth about the Clinton Foundation and how they helped the Haitians:https://youtu.be/26GC23zZi2A | 1real |
Trump attacks FBI on leakers of Russia reports: 'FIND NOW' | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump criticized the FBI on Friday for failing to stop leaks of national security information to the media and directed the agency to find those who pass on classified information. Trump’s comments come amid media reports saying the FBI refused a White House request to knock down news stories saying members of Trump’s team were in frequent contact with Russian intelligence agents during the presidential campaign. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, the nation’s top law enforcement agency, did not answer a request for comment on Trump’s remarks on Twitter. “The FBI is totally unable to stop the national security ‘leakers’ that have permeated our government for a long time. They can’t even find the leakers within the FBI itself. Classified information is being given to media that could have a devastating effect on U.S. FIND NOW,” Trump wrote. News reports by CNN and The Associated Press said White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus asked Andrew McCabe, the FBI deputy director, to deny a Feb. 14 New York Times report that said Trump’s presidential campaign advisers had been in frequent contact with Russian intelligence officers. The request came after McCabe told him privately the report was wrong. A senior administration official said on Friday that FBI Director James Comey also told Priebus later the story was not accurate. Priebus asked if the FBI could set the record straight, but Comey said the bureau could not comment. Priebus asked if he could say intelligence officials assured him the story was inaccurate, and Comey said he could, the official told reporters. The FBI is investigating Russian interference in the Nov. 8 U.S. election. FBI counterintelligence agents are also examining financial transactions by Russian individuals and companies who are believed to have links to Trump associates. “There are investigations that are going on and those investigations must find out exactly what Russia was doing in the United States,” Senator Ben Cardin, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told CNN on Friday. “We need a complete investigation and we certainly don’t want the White House at all trying to influence that investigation.” U.S. Representative John Conyers said any White House attempt to influence the FBI was “deeply troubling.” “The White House is simply not permitted to pressure the FBI to make public statements about a pending investigation of the President and his advisors,” Conyers, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, said in late on Thursday. | 0fake |
U.S. energy head: Nuclear power rescue helps national security | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. energy secretary defended his plan to reward nuclear plants with incentives against criticism it would manipulate markets by telling a congressional hearing on Thursday that a strong domestic nuclear industry boosted national security. Rick Perry pushed the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on Sept. 29 to issue a rule within 60 days that would reward aging nuclear and coal-fired power plants that store 90 days of fuel on site. He has said those plants should be supported for their ability to boost the reliability of the U.S. power grid. Many U.S. representatives at the hearing, including Democrat Frank Pallone, said the plan favored aging industries, killed free markets and would saddle consumers with higher power bills. One lawmaker pointed to a study by ICF Consulting that said power bills could rise $800 million to $3.2 billion annually if FERC issued Perry’s plan. But Perry said the federal government had disregarded nuclear power for decades at a risk to national security. “If we lose our supply chain, if we lose our intellectual chain of supply of bright scientists because we basically pushed the nuclear industry back, then we’re going to lose our role as a leader when it comes to nuclear energy in the world,” Perry said. That in turn could hurt the country’s ability to address nuclear nonproliferation, Perry said. The United States has more nuclear power reactors than any other country. But Russia, China and other countries are rapidly building nuclear plants and some in the industry worry those countries could become the world’s top nuclear innovators. Perry’s plan has divided the energy industry, with coal and nuclear interests squaring off against natural gas drillers, solar and wind power, and consumer groups. It is unclear what FERC will decide on the plan. The agency, an independent arm of the Energy Department, declined a request to lengthen a comment period on Perry’s plan. Republican Representative Pete Olson suggested that Perry was more in favor of free energy markets when he was governor of Texas. But Perry said the notion that energy markets were free and without subsidies was a “fallacy.” Pallone said a study that Perry had directed Energy Department staff to conduct concluded the grid was already reliable and that most recent grid outages were caused by problems in energy transmission, not by power plants. Several coal plants were forced to shut by recent hurricanes because their mounds of coal supply were soaked by heavy rains. Perry said his plan was a directive for FERC, but he added that he initiated it to start a conversation about protecting people from outages during extreme storms. | 0fake |
Elizabeth Warren Gives Trump Bad News After He Mocks Her For Not Getting VP Spot (TWEETS) | Hillary Clinton announced her choice of Virginia Senator Tim Kaine as her vice-presidential selection on Friday and, of course, Trump used the moment to mock Elizabeth Warren.In yet another effort to divide Democrats as the DNC Convention in Philadelphia approaches, Trump took to Twitter on Saturday morning to bully the Massachusetts Senator because she wasn t picked as Clinton s running mate. Pocahontas wanted V.P. slot so badly but wasn t chosen because she has done nothing in the Senate, Trump wrote before adding, Also, Crooked Hillary hates her! Pocahontas wanted V.P. slot so badly but wasn t chosen because she has done nothing in the Senate. Also, Crooked Hillary hates her! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 23, 2016Once again, the Republican nominee mocked Warren s Native American heritage and belittled her effort to fight for poor and middle class Americans in the US Senate.But Warren didn t let Trump get away with it and she responded by giving Trump bad news. I m right where I want to be, @realDonaldTrump, she wrote. Calling you out & holding you responsible for your reckless vision for America. I m right where I want to be, @realDonaldTrump: Calling you out & holding you responsible for your reckless vision for America. Elizabeth Warren (@elizabethforma) July 23, 2016One would think Donald Trump had learned his lesson about attacking Elizabeth Warren by now. After all, when he threw a temper tantrum by call her lazy, as well as a fraud and Pocahontas last weekend because she shredded his veep choice Indiana Governor Mike Pence, Warren ripped him a new one for it with a series of tweets that were a direct hit on how Trump is the REAL fraud.Here s just a few of them.You want to talk about who s a fraud, @realDonaldTrump? How about this? https://t.co/5UB05u8L4x pic.twitter.com/sTQrNKOoA1 Elizabeth Warren (@elizabethforma) July 17, 2016 Or this, @realDonaldTrump? https://t.co/HPPihIjqpX pic.twitter.com/dbhtFbhYF0 Elizabeth Warren (@elizabethforma) July 17, 2016Or this, @realDonaldTrump? https://t.co/Ji9khMUbw6 pic.twitter.com/buEtsLMjfn Elizabeth Warren (@elizabethforma) July 17, 2016 Or this, @realDonaldTrump? https://t.co/3ernRrO7q3 pic.twitter.com/wld65MAdsj Elizabeth Warren (@elizabethforma) July 17, 2016Seriously, I could do this all day, @realDonaldTrump https://t.co/Q6Tv3m1SdX pic.twitter.com/Me3CULGxTI Elizabeth Warren (@elizabethforma) July 17, 2016 You re nothing but a thin-skinned bully and a lousy, cheating businessman, @realDonaldTrump. The sham is over. Elizabeth Warren (@elizabethforma) July 17, 2016Seriously, Donald. Stay down. Elizabeth Warren has already kicked your ass several times. You don t want to mess with her. Unless you like getting destroyed by strong women. In that case, just wait till November and you ll receive the biggest beating of all.Featured image via Jeff Swensen/Getty Images | 1real |
Scottish lawmakers call for international recognition for Catalan independence | EDINBURGH (Reuters) - Pro-independence Scottish lawmakers have presented a motion in their devolved parliament urging international recognition of Catalonia s unilateral declaration of independence from Spain, putting pressure on Scotland s leader to endorse the movement. Scotland s pro-independence First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has criticized Madrid s handling of the crisis with its northern region but refrained from backing the declaration. The European Union, which she would like to see admitting a future independent Scotland, has backed Spain s central government. According to the website of the Scottish parliament, the lawmakers motion called on the international community to recognize the vote of the Catalan parliament for an independent republic of Catalonia . Catalonia declared independence unilaterally last week after holding a vote banned under Spain s constitution. Spain has since sacked the autonomous Catalan government and called regional elections. The motion was signed by 21 of the 63 lawmakers in the Scottish National Party which runs the devolved government in Scotland. It was also signed by one lawmaker from the Scottish Greens but is unlikely to go further as it requires support from three parties to be debated in the Scottish parliament. The move, aimed at drawing attention to the Catalan situation, comes amid nervousness about the future of Scotland s stalled independence drive, which still has the support of around 45 percent of voters, according to polls. Some nationalists last month called on First Minister Sturgeon, who has made comments in support of Catalonia and its right to self-determination, to recognize Catalonia s independence, but to no avail. We cannot recognize Catalan independence because, much as we would like to be, we are not a sovereign state, a Scottish government source said at the time. The Times reported on Thursday that the Catalan breakaway government had asked for support from the Scottish government but received no reply. The Scottish government could not immediately be reached for comment. Sturgeon s Scottish National Party lost one third of its seats in a June election for Britain s national party in London, and has blamed the mistiming of a fresh drive for an independence referendum for the result. Scots rejected independence by a 10-percentage point margin in 2014 but Britain s vote to leave the European Union has exposed fresh divisions in the United Kingdom. Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to stay in the EU, while Wales and England voted to leave. | 0fake |
BREAKING: HILLARY CAUGHT MOCKING Bernie Sanders Supporters In Leaked Audio…Donors Laugh [Audio] | We all know by now that Hillary Clinton will morph into whatever she needs to be to win votes to get back to the White House. Here s EXHIBIT 1 on just how far she ll go While speaking to a group of donors last February, Hillary mocked Bernie Sanders supporters and admitted the free college and free healthcare are just a ploy to win the votes of millennials The Intercept had this to say about Clinton s flip flopping:Clinton has been inconsistent in the past about espousing political labels. She has at times touted herself as stalwart liberal. For instance, she said last July: I take a backseat to no one when you look at my record in standing up and fighting for progressive values. But a few months later, she told a group in Ohio: You know, I get accused of being kind of moderate and center. I plead guilty. AUDIO OF CLINTON MOCKING BERNIE SUPPORTERSCLINTON: Some are new to politics completely. They re children of the Great Recession. And they are living in their parents basement. They feel they got their education and the jobs that are available to them are not at all what they envisioned for themselves. And they don t see much of a future. I met with a group of young black millennials today and you know one of the young women said, You know, none of us feel that we have the job that we should have gotten out of college. And we don t believe the job market is going to give us much of a chance. So that is a mindset that is really affecting their politics. And so if you re feeling like you re consigned to, you know, being a barista, or you know, some other job that doesn t pay a lot, and doesn t have some other ladder of opportunity attached to it, then the idea that maybe, just maybe, you could be part of a political revolution is pretty appealing. So I think we should all be really understanding of that and should try to do the best we can not to be, you know, a wet blanket on idealism. We want people to be idealistic. We want them to set big goals. But to take what we can achieve now and try to present them as bigger goals. | 1real |
Al Michaels Does Commentary On Who Didn’t Stand for National Anthem at NFL Opener | It was a surreal moment at Thursday night s NFL season opener when NBC announcer Al Michaels provided commentary on who didn t stand for the playing of the national anthem. Watch below:It s the trend that needs to end Colin Kaepernick started this whole kneeling thing and now some other NFL players have sat or kneeled during the national anthem at games. It s caused many Americans to turn away from supporting the NFL which hurts the players in the end. Bringing politics into football needs to end if the NFL wants a future. People are fed up with this attitude.The Washington Free Beacon reported: Life imitates South Park The NFL season kicked off Thursday night with the New England Patriots hosting the Kansas City Chiefs. After Maren Morris concluded singing The Star Spangled Banner, Michaels immediately said, For the record, the only player we saw not standing was cornerback Marcus Peters of Kansas City. The 20th season opener of South Park last year satirized NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick s national anthem protests, which have drawn considerable media attention. At the beginning of the episode, announcers provide breathless commentary as to which athletes at a grade-school volleyball game will stand or kneel for the national anthem.They just need to get back to playing the game enough already! | 1real |
Trump's travel bans spook some students, fan fears of broader chill | SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Ramin Forouzandeh had applied to 13 PhD economics programs in the United States, but after President Donald Trump signed his first travel ban in January, the 25-year-old Iranian turned to Canada for other options. He said he had focused on U.S. schools because they hosted most of the world’s top 20 economics programs. “Before the travel ban, I never really considered other alternatives.” By late March, U.S. courts had halted two versions of Trump’s travel ban, yet Forouzandeh signed for University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management and turned down the University of Minnesota’s prestigious PhD program. His countryman, Mahdi Ebrahimi Kahou, 30, was well into his first year of the Minnesota program when he decided to transfer to the University of British Columbia because of Trump’s executive orders that banned travel from seven and later six Muslim-majority countries, including Iran. “I lost my motivation to work completely,” he said. A Reuters survey of 19 Canadian universities showed a spike in international applications, most notably from Iran and India. Five top Canadian economics and business PhD programs are getting at least half of their new Iranian students this fall because of the ban, based on interviews with universities and students. Most of those, like Forouzandeh and Ebrahimi Kahou, are opting out of U.S. programs in a field where the United States both dominates and relies on foreign talent. While those programs represent only one field and a fraction of the U.S. student population, they offer early evidence of the direct impact of Trump administration policies. Academics fear they may also be a sign of things to come if the chilling effect of Trump’s “America First” agenda spreads beyond any specific field of study or nationality. “This strikes at the heart of what has made U.S. higher education the envy of the world,” said Mary Sue Coleman, chair of the Association of American Universities. “It’s this notion that the U.S. is no longer a welcoming place for the best and the brightest.” Iranians are by far the biggest group among students directly affected by the bans and form a small but notable part of the talent pool in areas such as engineering and economics, where U.S. academic institutions excel. Iranians ranked sixth last year among international students enrolled in U.S. graduate programs, according to the Institute of International Education. A survey conducted jointly by five U.S. higher education associations in February showed 38 percent of U.S. colleges reporting a drop in foreign applications, with those from the Middle East down the most, while 27 percent saw no change - a significant cool-down after nearly a decade of steady growth. In 2015, at least 35 percent of graduate students at U.S. universities granting graduate degrees in science, engineering and health were foreigners, according to the National Science Foundation. (For a graphic on U.S. universities, global brains, click tmsnrt.rs/2qLARio ) This year, about 60 percent of graduating PhDs from the top 10 U.S. economics departments come from other countries, a Reuters analysis shows. “You’ve got an issued order that’s been temporarily blocked that applies to six countries. But the destabilization of the whole situation for international students and faculty could not be overstated,” said Rice University President David Leebron. He said that for foreign students everything from getting a visa on time to employment opportunities had been thrown into question. According to Rice’s dean of graduate and postdoctoral studies, this year’s PhD programs will have slightly fewer Chinese, Indian and Middle Eastern students than expected. More Iranian students declined offers of admission than usual, with several saying that they decided to study in another country because of concerns about getting a U.S. visa. There is no evidence of a mass exodus of foreigners - indeed, Rice will have more students than expected from Europe and Latin America, offsetting declines elsewhere - but academics cite dozens of examples where Trump’s policies had an impact. At Arizona State University, for example, Iranians would typically make up a fourth of the economics PhD program, but there will be none in the incoming class this fall. Of those already enrolled, two are moving to Canada. One student who visited his family in Iran over the Christmas break still has not been able to return, leaving the university scrambling to cover the classes he was supposed to teach. “The effects of this are big,” said Gustavo Ventura, ASU’s economics department chair. “These people, not just the ones that come to us - anyone who comes to a PhD program abroad - are the cream of their student population.” The University of Illinois now has 10 Iranians in its PhD program, and while it’s not certain why, none of the Iranians whom it offered admission are among the 22 students from 11 countries entering in the fall. At Indiana University’s economics program, three Iranians withdrew their applications almost immediately after the travel ban, said Todd Walker, director of the department’s graduate studies. “We also had many more international applicants turn us down this year relative to the last three years,” he said. “I cannot say definitively how much of this is attributable to the travel ban, but I suspect it played a role.” In British Columbia, the Simon Fraser University has admitted 20 percent more international students for the fall term, according to Associate Dean Jeff Derksen. He said queries he had received and an online survey suggested more graduate students were considering alternatives to U.S. programs. “This indicates that the international map of academic knowledge production has changed.” The prestige of the U.S. programs remains a big draw, but those committed to a U.S. career are more aware of risks. For example, Soheil Ghili, who is getting a PhD in economics from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management this month and will start as a post-doctoral fellow at Yale this summer, is hedging his bets. “Let me put it this way: I will be more careful to not miss networking opportunities with people from Toronto and London.” | 0fake |
Republican Party Targets Four California Democrats in 2018 - Breitbart | The National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) has named four Democratic California congressmen it plans to target and defeat in next year’s midterm elections. [According to the Los Angeles Times, the NRCC’s “top offensive targets” are Reps. Ami Bera ( Grove, 7th district) Salud Carbajal ( Barbara, 24th district) Scott Peters ( Diego, 52nd district) and Raul Ruiz ( Springs, 36th district). Bera was barely able to secure his seat in the district’s expensive race against Republican candidate Sheriff Scott Jones last year. He beat Jones by just over 6, 000 votes, or approximately three percentage points. The Times notes that Carbajal, 52, a freshman congressman, won his seat by six points against Republican challenger Justin Fareed, 28. He reportedly started off the 2018 cycle with just over $52, 000 in his war chest. Democrats held an advantage over Republicans in Carbajal’s district before the election. The Times also reported last month that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee had released a list of seven California Republicans they are planning to target including Reps. Jeff Denham ( 10th district) David Valadao ( 21st district) Steve Knight ( 25th district) House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce ( 39th district) Mimi Walters ( 45th district) Dana Rohrabacher ( Mesa, 48th district) and Darrell Issa ( 49th district). Clinton also carried the districts listed above during the general election. Among the Republicans targeted by the Democrats, Reps. Issa, and Denham won against their challengers by the smallest margins. Issa was able to secure his seat by just 1, 621 votes against Democrat Douglas Applegate. Denham beat Democrat Michael Eggman by 8, 201 votes. Applegate has announced he plans to run against Issa again in 2018. According to the Times, Denham, Issa and Valadao were also among the top spenders in California on a basis in the November election, spending well above $30 per each vote they received. Follow Adelle Nazarian on Twitter and Periscope @AdelleNaz | 0fake |
Acting on Instinct, Trump Upends His Own Foreign Policy - The New York Times | PALM BEACH, Fla. — The images were heartbreaking: Children gasping and choking for breath, their mouths foaming. A father, cradling the lifeless bodies of his two children, swaddled in white blankets. But they were also familiar, a harrowing flashback to 2013, when the Syrian government unleashed the last major poison gas attack on its own people. This time, though, a new American president was seeing the pictures and absorbing the horror. Donald J. Trump has always taken pride in his readiness to act on instinct, whether in real estate or reality television. On Thursday, an emotional President Trump took the greatest risk of his young presidency, ordering a retaliatory missile strike on Syria for its latest chemical weapons attack. In a dizzying series of days, he upended a foreign policy doctrine based on putting America first and avoiding messy conflicts in distant lands. Mr. Trump’s advisers framed his decision in the dry language of international norms and strategic deterrence. In truth, it was an emotional act by a man suddenly aware that the world’s problems were now his — and that turning away, to him, was not an option. “I will tell you,” he said to reporters in the White House Rose Garden on Wednesday, “that attack on children yesterday had a big impact on me — big impact. That was a horrible, horrible thing. And I’ve been watching it and seeing it, and it doesn’t get any worse than that. ” Appearing again the next evening at his Florida estate, Mr. Trump said that President Bashar of Syria had “choked out the life of innocent men, women and children. It was a slow and brutal death for so many. Even beautiful babies were cruelly murdered in this very barbaric attack. No child of God should ever suffer such horror. ” It was difficult to reconcile the anguished president with the snarky critic of American engagement who, from the comfort of private life, advised President Barack Obama not to strike Syria after a chemical weapons attack in the suburbs of Damascus three years ago. “President Obama, do not attack Syria,” Mr. Trump said on Twitter in September 2013. “There is no upside and tremendous downside. Save your ‘powder’ for another (and more important) day!” And it is not easy to square Mr. Trump’s empathy for the victims of a single chemical weapons attack with his refusal to take in thousands of Syrian refugees from years of strife that have turned that country into a charnel house. Relaxing that policy did not come up in the president’s deliberations over striking Syria, his advisers said. As a candidate, Mr. Trump said that forcing Mr. Assad out of power was not as urgent a priority for the United States as vanquishing the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. He claimed, somewhat erroneously, that he had always opposed the Iraq war. He criticized Mr. Obama and Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state who was Mr. Trump’s opponent in the election, as plunging heedlessly into foreign entanglements, drawn by misplaced idealism and the substitution of other nations’ interests for America’s. “One day, we’re bombing Libya and getting rid of a dictator to foster democracy for civilians,” Mr. Trump said during a major foreign policy speech in April 2016. “The next day, we’re watching the same civilians suffer while that country falls and absolutely falls apart. Lives lost, massive moneys lost. The world is a different place. ” “We’re a humanitarian nation,” he continued, “but the legacy of the interventions will be weakness, confusion and disarray, a mess. We’ve made the Middle East more unstable and chaotic than ever before. ” The contrast between Mr. Trump and his predecessor could not be starker. In the early days of his presidency, Mr. Obama made the case for America’s moral responsibility to intervene militarily on humanitarian grounds. “Inaction tears at our conscience and can lead to more costly intervention later,” he said in accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009. Yet when Syria slipped into a deadly civil war, Mr. Obama focused more on the costs of intervention than the risks of inaction. Even after Mr. Assad’s forces killed hundreds in a poison gas attack in August 2013, Mr. Obama did not carry out a threatened missile strike because, he said, he had not gotten Congress to sign off on it. Mr. Trump’s action, only 77 days into his term, hardly settles the question of when he might intervene in future crises. He has not articulated criteria for humanitarian interventions and, even if he did, it is not clear that he would stick to his standards any more than Mr. Obama did. Firing dozens of Tomahawk cruise missiles into Syria also deflects attention from Mr. Trump’s lengthening list of troubles at home, from the investigation of his campaign’s murky ties with Russia to his failed health care legislation. The president’s advisers insisted his decision was guided by strategic considerations. They were clearly uncomfortable with the suggestion that Mr. Trump was acting impulsively. “I do not view it as an emotional reaction at all,” Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson said. Mr. Trump had looked back on Mr. Obama’s decision not to carry out a strike and decided that the United States “could not yet again turn away, turn a blind eye,” Mr. Tillerson added. Mr. Tillerson and the national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, laid out a case that sounded eerily similar to Mr. Obama’s three years earlier, when he drew his fateful “red line” against Mr. Assad’s use of chemical weapons. These weapons violated the rules of war and the Chemical Weapons Convention, they said. Allowing Syria to wield such weapons with impunity risked normalizing them and might embolden others to use them. Mr. Trump’s aides described a deliberative process, with meetings of the National Security Council, presentations of military options by the Pentagon and a classified briefing for Mr. Trump held under a tent erected in to secure the communications with Washington. They spoke of phone calls to American allies, consultations with lawmakers and the diplomatic engagement that would follow the Tomahawk cruise missiles. What is clear, however, is that Mr. Trump reacted viscerally to the images of the death of innocent children in Syria. And that reaction propelled him into a sequence of actions that will change the course of his presidency. Mr. Trump’s improvisational style has sometimes seemed ill suited to the gravity of his office. In this case, it helped lead him to make the gravest decision a can make. “I now have responsibility, and I will have that responsibility and carry it very proudly, I will tell you that,” the president said of Syria on Wednesday. “It is now my responsibility. ” | 0fake |
POLITICAL AGITATOR: Globalist George Soros Linked to Over 50 ‘Partners’ of the Women’s March on Washington | 21st Century Wire says More than 50 NGO partners of the Women s March on Washington were found to be tied to social movement financier George Soros. While the DC gathering was billed as a grassroots movement for women s rights in America, it was anything but as a string of multi-million dollar Democratic Party-affiliated NGO s organized what was clearly an anti-Donald Trump event following the US presidential inauguration this past week. DIVIDE BY DESIGN (Photo illustration 21WIRE s Shawn Helton)As we ve stated before here at 21WIRE, this kind of political protest is designed to first cause public disruption, while also fomenting a form of socially-engineered cultural, gender and class warfare.In the case of the Women s March on Washington, a militant style of identity politics was on a full frontal display. Enter stage left the celebrities This was never more apparent than the hate filled diatribe of Hollywood actress Ashley Judd, whose angry rhetoric was eclipsed only by famed singer Madonna, who during her obscenity laced speech admitted to harboring violent thoughts directed at the White House. Consequently, the Material Girl is now reportedly under Secret Service investigation for her bomb related threat this past Saturday.Watch how both Judd and Madonna are driven by rage during their politically divisive speeches at the Women s March on Washington https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-5ZkrQHyNcDuring an interview with ABC NEWS, Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway didn t see the point, of the Women s March. Additionally, Conway underscored that 29-30 million women across America voted for Trump and their voices were heard in the 2016 election https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVEiGcT9wD4QUESTION: Was the heavily organized Women s March on Washington just another example of a radical globalist and cultural Marxist progressive agenda at play?Historically speaking, many social movements have worked to erode the legitimacy of a democratically elected government through a series of artificial color upheavals (color revolutions), and where possible weakening a country s national sovereignty through forced dependency on multilateral globalist institutions like the UN or IMF, while presenting shock and awe imagery in order to manipulate the public s political perspective.This is how the US and its CIA conduct their destablization color revolution campaigns overseas, and now astute observers will recognize these exact same methods being deployed here inside the US.Overseas, Washington tends to use the same cast of NGO fronts to build-up pro-US political opposition groups, as well as plan and generate civil unrest. They include the Albert Einstein Institute (AEI), National Endowment for Democracy (NED), International Republican Institute (IRI), National Democratic Institute (NDI), Freedom House and later the International Center for Non-Violent Conflict (ICNC), and the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the financial and contractor arm of the Department of State.Inside the US, deep state actors in Washington generally work through Democratic Party affiliated organizations like MoveOn.org, as well as through labor union organizations like AFL-CIO, and UNITE HERE. These, along with many other similar organizations have been involved in organizing this latest protest movement in America.While it still remains to be seen if Trump s stated political vision for America can unite an embattled nation, one thing is clear many NGO groups operating inside the US will continue their organized opposition to the newly elected president over the course of his time in the White House. BITTER PILL Madonna s waning singing career gives way to cultural upheaval and demagoguery. (Image Source: Extra.ie)Other partners for the march included the American Atheists and UniteWomen.org, who ran a public relations campaign which featured videos with the hashtags #ImWithHer, #DemsInPhily and #ThanksObama. Once again, all road lead back to billionaire Hillary Clinton financier, George Soros and his Open Society NGO empire.Writer Asra Nomani expands on the Soros web here: By my draft research, which I m opening up for crowd-sourcing on GoogleDocs, Soros has funded, or has close relationships with, at least 56 of the march s partners, including key partners Planned Parenthood, which opposes Trump s anti-abortion policy, and the National Resource Defense Council, which opposes Trump s environmental policies. The other Soros ties with Women s March organizations include the partisan MoveOn.org (which was fiercely pro-Clinton), the National Action Network (which has a former executive director lauded by Obama senior advisor Valerie Jarrett as a leader of tomorrow as a march co-chair and another official as the head of logistics ). Other Soros grantees who are partners in the march are the American Civil Liberties Union, Center for Constitutional Rights, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. March organizers and the organizations identified here haven t yet returned queries for comment. NOTE: See her full story below.The Free Thought Project illustrates the contrived socially engineered nature behind the Women s March on Washington in lengthy passage below:Washington, D.C. An investigation by a New York Times affiliate has revealed that billionaire globalist financier George Soros, who recently called Donald Trump a would-be dictator during an interview at Davos, and whose Open Society Foundation works to finance and forward progressive causes across the world, and is intimately connected to numerous color revolutions, the Arab Spring, and various other political uprisings across the globe, has been revealed to be connected to more than 50 of the groups that organized the nationwide Women s Marches that saw millions of Americans take to the streets across the country.The march s official website says, We stand together, recognizing that defending the most marginalized among us is defending all of us. Many people turned out to be a manifestation of that ideal, but it s important to understand the reality of what is happening on a strategic political level as an inorganic politically contrived and funded event. This, in no way, takes away from the validity of standing up for women s issues but is important to note that women are being used as pawns in a larger ideological political game that has international overtones of power politics.These marches were largely billed as spontaneous and grassroots actions, by publications like The Guardian and Vox. However, the reality exposed by an investigation by self-described liberal feminist Asra Q. Nomani, writing for New York Times affiliate Women in the World, revealed that after studying the funding, politics and talking points of the some 403 groups that are partners of the march, contrary to the non-partisan rhetoric used in these marches, they were not really women s march but were rather for women who are anti-Trump. Nomani reveals that the Women s Marches were actually organized as political tools to be used to strategically forward a progressive political agenda against President Donald Trump exposing the protests to largely be an organized, top-down driven political operation and not an organic movement of concerned Americans taking to the streets as reported by the mainstream media. More from the NY Times affiliate Women in the World below SOROS MARCH? The Women s March in Washington DC revealed some deep NGO pockets lurking behind the scenes. (Image Source: thefederalist.com). Asra Q. Nomani NY Times Women in the WorldIn the pre-dawn darkness of today s presidential inauguration day, I faced a choice, as a lifelong liberal feminist who voted for Donald Trump for president: lace up my pink Nike sneakers to step forward and take the DC Metro into the nation s capital for the inauguration of America s new president, or wait and go tomorrow to the after-party, dubbed the Women s March on Washington ? The Guardian has touted the Women s March on Washington as a spontaneous action for women s rights. Another liberal media outlet, Vox, talks about the huge, spontaneous groundswell behind the march. On its website, organizers of the march are promoting their work as a grassroots effort with independent organizers. Even my local yoga studio, Beloved Yoga, is renting a bus and offering seats for $35. The march s manifesto says magnificently, The Rise of the Woman = The Rise of the Nation. It s an idea that I, a liberal feminist, would embrace. But I know and most of America knows that the organizers of the march haven t put into their manifesto: the march really isn t a women s march. It s a march for women who are anti-Trump. As someone who voted for Trump, I don t feel welcome, nor do many other women who reject the liberal identity-politics that is the core underpinnings of the march, so far, making white women feel unwelcome, nixing women who oppose abortion and hijacking the agenda. To understand the march better, I stayed up through the nights this week, studying the funding, politics and talking points of the some 403 groups that are partners of the march. Is this a non-partisan Women s March ?Continue the NY Times article here READ MORE ELECTION NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire 2016 FilesSUPPORT 21WIRE SUBSCRIBE & BECOME A MEMBER @21WIRE.TV | 1real |
Texas ‘Responsible Gun Owner’ Brings REAL Weapon To Water Gun Fight, Shoots Teen Girl (VIDEO) | A teenage girl in Texas was sent to the hospital Saturday after one of her responsible, gun owning relatives turned a simple family gathering into an afternoon of terror. While the NRA encourages gun owners to take their weapons everywhere, to act as the last hope if a bad guy with a gun rears his ugly head, a simple Spring family barbecue serves as the latest example of why the hero-worship of everyone who straps a piece of metal to their thigh (or wherever) is not only irresponsible it s dangerous. It was crazy, like you would never expect somebody to bring a gun to a barbecue or a family gathering at all, said neighbor Micah Stewart, who witnessed the shooting.Neighbor Rasheed Seals says that the incident all began with two people at the gathering having a water gun fight. Unfortunately, one of the participants brought a real gun to the party: We come around here to get home and there s two people playing, like they re having a water gun fight. Stewart says that the responsible gun owner proved himself to be anything but responsible as he was drying off: The man went over there to his car to get his dry clothes and he must have had the gun so he started playing with it and tried to do this and I thought he probably had it on safety and he accidentally shot the girl in her collar bone area. The bullet struck a mere inch from the 15-year-old victim s neck. A stray bullet also hit a car about five houses away. Fortunately, no one else was hurt.Harris County Constable Lt. Daniel Garza explained that Cy Creek EMS tended to the female who is reported to be in stable condition, though it is not clear if the shooter surely a good guy with a gun the NRA and its acolytes will immediately disavow will be charged with a crime.Watch a report on the shooting below:Featured Image via screengrab | 1real |
Jason Chaffetz Just Got Hit With An Ethics Complaint For FBI Hillary Smear Campaign | Comments
The Democratic fury at FBI Director James Comey’s frustratingly decision to throw a wrench into election with his obviously partisan decision to reignite the “email” non-scandal keeps growing by the day.
It’s becoming clear that Republican Congressmen, horrified at the way their candidate slides lower and lower in the polls, put undue pressure on Comey to give them an official, public, and entirely unnecessary “update” on the new emails that are – let’s reiterate – not to or from Hillary Clinton, are not related to her private email server, and were found on a cellphone belonging to Anthony Wiener, as part of a separate investigation into his illicit sexually-charged chats with a minor.
In light of that, the Democratic Coalition Against Trump has filed an ethics complaint against Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) with the Office of Congressional Ethics:
“Representative Chaffetz, in an ill-planned partisan attempt, released information that compromised the integrity of the FBI, when he irresponsibly tweeted out that the case investigating Secretary Clinton’s emails had been reopened, when in fact it had not been.
Members of Congress are elected to make our country a safer, better place- not to use their power to work with leaders such as Comey in a partisan fashion. I hope that both are held accountable for their actions.”
The complaint refers to this extremely misleading tweet, which fundamentally misrepresents what actually occurred. FBI Dir just informed me, “The FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation.” Case reopened
— Jason Chaffetz (@jasoninthehouse) October 28, 2016
Jason Chaffetz and the rest of the self-appointed inquisitors on the House Oversight Committee have wasted millions of dollars in taxpayer funds and Congressional time prosecuting fruitless investigations against the character of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. It’s high time we held them all accountable for abusing their power for undemocratic hit-jobs against their political opponents. | 1real |
Hayward: 9 Vital Principles for Obamacare Repeal - Breitbart | Republican leaders are trying to line up votes for another Obamacare repeal bill, with a vote possibly coming later this week. It’s also possible the new repeal effort will collapse, sending legislators back to the drawing board. Here are some principles to keep in mind, based on what Republicans have been saying to their constituents since 2010, and what happened when they made their first run at repeal in 2017. [Take your time: Congressional Republicans and the White House have already paid the political price for the failure of their first repeal effort. They bought themselves time, which they should invest wisely. Granted, something needs to be done before the insurance industry implodes completely, but there is enough time to craft a good bill. It’s also important to take the time needed to sell the bill, to both legislators and their constituents. President Obama put a great deal of effort behind the politics of pushing Obamacare through. He lost interest in managing the program after it passed, leading to the inexcusable launch debacle, but no one can fault him for a lack of hard work and careful preparation in guiding the Affordable Care Act through Congress. The American people should be brought on board with a combination of fearless, trenchant criticism of Obamacare plus touting the benefits of the repeal bill. The previous effort had all the energy and enthusiasm of a petulant child reluctantly taking his medicine. Sure, everything Obama and his cronies said about the Affordable Care Act in 2009 and 2010 was a lie, but they lied with vigor and conviction. Conservatives mock Big Government leftists for their arrogance, and for appalling results that make a mockery of their unjustified sense of superiority, but one should never underestimate the appeal of the moral conviction that animates the Left. They’re absolutely convinced they are doing the right thing — they will occasionally dip a toe into religious rhetoric and claim they’re doing the Lord’s work — and anyone who opposes them is a monster. Conversely, congressional Republicans and the Trump White House displayed no air of conviction during the first Obamacare repeal debacle. They acted like they were checking off a box on a list. They looked insincere. It brought the party some ribbing for never being serious about its copious promises to repeal Obamacare over the ears, or the many phony bills they sacrificed to Obama’s veto pen. Time and political effort are needed to lay the groundwork for a repeal bill the public will take seriously. Democrats will act like crusading heroes trying to prevent the selfish Republicans from killing poor people by taking away their health care. Conviction and moral preening will come easily to the other side. If Republicans can’t muster a comparable level of moral authority, they might as well skip a political battle they are destined to lose. Part of the price paid for the hasty initial effort to repeal Obamacare was a significant slide in GOP poll numbers on health care a slide helped along by theatrics at town hall meetings. Efforts by political action groups to pressure Republican legislators into climbing back aboard the repeal train are misguided. Pressure the Democrats, make recalcitrant Republicans feel like this is a fight they can win, and they’ll get back on board. Promote the free market and attack collectivism: One of the big problems with that first doomed effort is that it conceded too many vital arguments about health insurance reform to the Democrats. The most crucial of these arguments is the false belief that insurance (and medicine itself) cannot be entrusted to the free market. This contention is the gateway on the road that leads inexorably to the eternal hell of nationalized medicine. Most Republicans love to talk about the superior efficiency of the free market at allocating resources, and the moral superiority of free capitalist choices over collectivist solutions imposed by force. Sadly, that conviction tends to evaporate when leftists start yelling about how conservatives enjoy killing people by taking away their “free” benefits. Conceding the point that capitalism is cruel and mercilessly exploitative is dangerous, and will presage the loss of much more than the freedom to buy decent insurance at reasonable prices. The Left uses healthcare as its wedge issue to indict freedom as cruelty because it knows people have strong emotional responses to the prospect of poor and sick people “left to die. ” It knows the public believes everyone involved in medicine and health insurance is making obscene profits. It knows few voters truly understand medical science. They’re understandably afraid of getting sick, and they find the huge and complex medical industry incomprehensible. They don’t understand why a tiny little pill, or half an hour of a doctor’s time, has to cost so much. The crucial weakness of healthcare capitalism, exploited relentlessly by the Left, is that people don’t view medicine as a commodity. They think it should be immune to the laws of supply and demand because everyone needs it. Paying for medical treatment is not celebrated as scoring a hot deal for a great product, the way people think of purchasing retail goods, even really expensive items like houses and cars. Buying medicine feels more like losing a bet, getting penalized, adding the insult of medical bills to the injury of sickness. People have been persuaded not to view health insurance as a commodity, either. No one really enjoys “shopping for a good deal” in health insurance, because they don’t understand the complexities of the industry, let alone the complexities of the medical treatment paid for by insurance plans. (It’s interesting that the Affordable Care Act hucksters felt the need to weave capitalist language about freedom of choice and a positive Obamacare “shopping” experience into their pitch, risibly comparing the ACA web exchanges to shopping at Amazon. com. They know it’s important to flatter Americans’ vestigial appreciation for free markets, even as they plot to subvert and destroy them.) One of the most effective arguments against those who insist healthcare is a “right” that should be provided for “free” or at heavily subsidized prices by the State, is to ask them why the even more universally essential need for food should not be satisfied the same way. They never have a good answer for why food shouldn’t be provided by the government, even though most people need food even more urgently than medicine or health insurance. The reason for their silence is the lingering fear that voters know exactly what happens when governments handle food distribution. Nobody wants to schlep to a grim food dispensary to wander among bare shelves with ration card in hand. And yet, that’s precisely what is happening to health insurance under Obamacare. We didn’t get a rainbow of choices between competitive plans at great prices. We’ve got insurers bailing out of the market left and right, leaving effective monopolies in some areas. Prices are way up, and quality is down. Only lavish subsidies hide the real price of Obamacare insurance plans … turning Americans into welfare dependents in the process. Fight for capitalism and free markets, Republicans. Show people that you truly understand and believe in their power and righteousness. Healthcare and insurance were ripened for takeover by decades of Big Government meddling to drive up prices, separating buyers from providers with layers of bureaucracy. Reverse that process, let honest competition bring prices down for everyone, and then make reasonable accommodations for the small number of truly needy customers who cannot afford even those low prices. Shift the political center of gravity: Ever since the Tea Party wave election in 2010, pundits have debated the political wisdom of Obamacare. Democrats paid an enormous political price in 2010, 2014, and arguably 2016 for passing the bill, but they also got something in return for that price. It was no small achievement: they might have changed the relationship between American citizens and their government forever. Obamacare extended government control over a major sector of the U. S. economy, gobbling up student loans along the way. As noted above, it has turned a vast swath of the middle class into welfare dependents, which gives the Party of the State future leverage over their votes. The loss of essential insurance subsidies can and will be used as a threat against voters who dare to call for smaller government. The first dollar of spending cuts will be portrayed as coming out of insurance subsidies, much as we currently hear that the first dollar of spending cuts means cops, teachers, firefighters, and paramedics will get pink slips. Obamacare is the largest single step the Left has ever taken towards its dream of total control over medicine, forever. Countries with socialized health care tend not to have significant “conservative” parties, in any sense Americans of 2008 or earlier would recognize. When the State controls the very health of its citizens, nationalizing the vast amount of money and authority represented by the medical community, it no longer has any reason to fear the wrath of those citizens. We’re getting a taste of that right now with the Obamacare repeal drama. The Affordable Care Act may have been unpopular throughout its life, but it commands more than enough money and influence to defend itself. Was all of that worth Democrats losing the House and Senate for a few years, especially when the Republican majorities were mostly occupied with trying to slow Barack Obama’s roll? Was it worth the surprising loss of the White House to Donald Trump? If the Republicans still can’t repeal the ACA even with the House, Senate, and White House, the price that will be extracted from them by angry and dismayed GOP voters will offset some of the Democrats’ losses. The Democrats lost their entire wing under Obama, dragging the party far to the Left. It’s much too early to judge whether that was a bug in the Obamacare program, or a feature, especially since they dragged a good deal of the electorate to the Left in their wake. They reasonably hope they moved the “Overton window of political possibility” permanently, while their electoral setbacks will eventually be reversed. Democrats did something big with Obamacare and paid a big price. That’s a strategy likely to achieve success against opponents who only pay small prices to accomplish small things. This is not just a policy argument, but a clash of philosophies. If the GOP tinkers with a few policy details while leaving the core philosophy behind Obamacare intact, any victory they might claim will prove to be . Don’t become accomplices to Obamacare: Ever since the passage of the Affordable Care Act, Democrats have been desperate to get some Republican fingerprints on it. They love to complain about Republican resistance to the Obama agenda as the driving force behind Obamacare’s failure, but that’s a smokescreen to distract the American people from the cold, hard truth that it’s a 100 percent Democrat program. If Republicans cave into Democrat pressure to “fix” the Affordable Care Act, they will instantly become full partners in its failure. Contrary to what some of the squishier Republicans might be thinking, that will not make Democrats less likely to blame them for everything that goes wrong with health care. Quite the reverse. Future political campaigns will be fought over which party is a better steward for the corporatist health insurance industry that both parties ratified. Republicans are not likely to win that argument, and they’ll have a hard time resisting Democrat pressure to expand the system they signed on to. Don’t be intimidated by factoids about people “losing insurance”: When Barack Obama told the biggest lie in modern political history — “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan” — his primary goal was to falsely portray the Affordable Care Act as a voluntary program. He boasted the program would be such a huge success that Americans would voluntarily abandon their plans and buy his plans instead. He promised better quality at lower prices. Obama’s big fib had a secondary purpose — he needed to conceal how many people would lose their insurance under his plan. Millions of people lost their insurance plans because of the Affordable Care Act. Quite a few people have lost more than one insurance plan because of disruptions to the market since 2010. The total number of lost plans is hotly debated, but it surely compares to phony Democrat talking points about how many Americans would supposedly lose coverage under current repeal proposals. It’s not reasonable to assume that all of those losses would be catastrophic and permanent, any more than it is reasonable to say Obamacare’s destroyed insurance plans don’t count at all because most of those people eventually found other coverage. Democrats claim the number of people who lost insurance under the Affordable Care Act is irrelevant because most of them ended up buying new (and very often worse) plans to replace their lost coverage. Senator Ted Cruz ( ) once compared this to vandals smashing windows, offering to sell replacement windows to their victims, and bragging about the high volume of window sales under their business model. The same is true of any Obamacare repeal proposal — most of the people who “lose” insurance will obtain new plans, and if the free market is allowed to function properly, those plans will be cheaper and better. Republicans should always and everywhere push back against the false narrative that insurance lost under Obamacare doesn’t count because most of the losses were temporary, but only insurance that might be lost under repeal proposals counts, and all of those losses must be treated as permanent. If that ridiculous argument isn’t killed during the Obamacare repeal debate, reformers will face a new version of it every time they attempt to scale back any government program. It’s a key element of the “progressive” strategy to ensure that ground seized by the State is never returned to the people. Another aspect of that strategy is the notion that only benefits provided or subsidized by the government really count. Expecting people to pay for their own stuff is tantamount to “denying them access” to whatever progressives think they have a “right” to. This new ideological weapon was rolled out in a big way during the 2012 presidential campaign, but many Republicans seem to have missed its significance or dismissed the “paying for my own contraceptives = oppression” argument as too silly to merit a response. They were wrong, and if they don’t persuade voters to resume viewing health insurance as a market commodity instead of a “right” that should be administered by the sacred temples of the holy State, they’re going to have a hard time restoring what the Obama Democrats took away from the private sector. Bring back analysis: Politicians are eternally at war with two key economic concepts: the law of supply and demand, and analysis. In their daily lives, people understand that costs are important, even when a particular good or service is highly desirable. Politicians specialize in making them forget such common sense, stampeding voters into agreeing that certain goals are so righteous or urgent that cost is irrelevant. Those who ask hard questions about the cost or wastefulness of sacred government programs are denounced as heartless penny pinchers. It matters very much that Obamacare is absurdly expensive and wasteful. That’s real money being siphoned from our productive private economy and thrown around by the bureaucracy. A repeal plan that saves American taxpayers billions of dollars is a good thing and should be promoted to the people who pay all those taxes, insurance premiums, and deductibles as such. During the previous Obamacare repeal effort, the Congressional Budget Office said the repeal bill would increase the number of people without health insurance by 24 million while saving $337 billion. Cries of “24 million people will lose insurance under the GOP plan!” were highly dishonest — that’s not actually what CBO said — but just for the sake of argument, divide $337 billion by 24 million people and you come up with over $14, 000 a head. That doesn’t speak well of Obamacare’s cost efficiency, does it? The amount paid per individual “helped” by the Affordable Care Act is ludicrous. Republicans should never tire of pointing that out. Using the free market to make insurance and medicine more affordable for everyone, and then spending more modest sums to help the needy obtain those reasonably priced goods, is far more efficient than a bloated, government control scheme, and it’s far more respectful of our money and freedom to boot. Attack the core rationales of Obamacare: Speaking of analysis, one of the core rationales for the Affordable Care Act — almost the only convincing point in its favor, for many average Americans — was the argument that uninsured people still receive health care for free at hospitals, because they are not allowed to turn sick people away. The rest of us were supposedly paying an exorbitant cost for this “ ” through taxes and higher insurance premiums. Imposing a government regulatory scheme that forces everyone to buy insurance makes sense to many Americans, at least in theory. The Obama White House described as a “hidden tax” of at least $1, 000 a year on every American insurance customer. How else could we possibly alleviate the crisis, without tossing uninsured sick people onto the streets? Versions of this argument are heard to this very day, even though Obamacare supposedly “fixed” the problem — that was one of its primary objectives, along with ensuring access to insurance for people with conditions, who are guaranteed that callous insurance companies would rather not cover at reasonable prices. Neither one of those core issues was remotely as serious as Democrats made them out to be, and Obamacare is not the optimal means of addressing either. This is partly a matter of analysis: total up the time and money spent on Obamacare compliance, divide by the number of people who were truly by insurance, and you could afford to not only cover those peoples’ insurance needs but buy each one of them a car. Research produced late in the Obamacare debate showed that was never as big of a problem as we were led to believe — certainly not a $1, 000 secret tax, or a problem big enough to justify the costs in dollars and liberty imposed by the Affordable Care Act. It was easy for Democrats to exaggerate the size of the problem because the insurance industry and its lobbyists have always pushed mythology as a convenient excuse for high insurance premiums. Everyone involved in dumping Obamacare on us knew was a seemingly logical argument they could sell to a vast number of moderate voters. It was even invoked as an argument in favor of preserving the individual mandate before the Supreme Court. There are much less expensive and intrusive ways we could address the problem — and frankly, Obamacare isn’t really addressing it, because reports from the Obama Administration itself found uninsured visits to hospital emergency rooms had scarcely been reduced at all. One of the big reasons for that is something Democrats are extremely reluctant to talk about: a great deal of the burden comes from illegal immigrants. Another reason is that even people who have insurance will rush to the emergency room instead of waiting for their doctors to become available. Republicans should mercilessly hammer the fact that Obamacare did very little to address one of the key arguments presented in its favor. Also, zero in on the fact that much of the “increased coverage” provided by Obamacare is really coming from Medicaid, and speak fearlessly about the problems facing that program — from fiscal crises to the poor access to doctors it offers many enrollees. Point out that if Democrats wanted to radically expand Medicaid, they should have honestly discussed it with the American people in 2009 and 2010, rather than hiding behind the smokescreen of private insurance reform. Covering people with conditions is a much more complicated issue. Again, it’s popular with Americans because they think it just doesn’t make sense to leave people with serious health conditions without access to affordable insurance — even though selling coverage to people who are guaranteed to generate more costs than income doesn’t really fit the logical definition of “insurance. ” Be honest with the American people: We ought to be more focused on securing affordable health care for patients with conditions, instead of cramming them into the same market that sells bona fide “insurance” against the risk of illness and injury to healthy customers. Forcing insurance companies to cover the cost of care for customers with existing conditions, and allowing them to recoup those costs through a mixture of taxpayer subsidies and higher premiums for everyone else, is a far more serious “ ” problem than the one employed as a sales pitch for Obamacare. Republican reformers should stress the need for more honesty in our opaque and confusing medical and insurance systems, which became even more opaque under Obama’s plan. The true costs of medicine are more obscure than ever to average consumers, and the network of shifted and hidden costs to cover them is more complex. Be honest about the needs of people with conditions, and healthy people who can’t afford even the inexpensive coverage that true market competition will provide. Present the taxpayers with a clean, understandable invoice for handling the needs of those people, in the most streamlined and efficient manner possible, with the lowest bureaucratic overhead. Don’t fumble around with schemes to give them “insurance” — worry about the medical care they need, and how our society can best provide it. Let the cost be spread thin, fair, and clear among us all. We’ll pay it. If there’s one thing polls have proven beyond question, it’s that Americans do not want sick people to lack adequate care, or be financially ruined by paying for it. The political class needs to stop dreaming up elegant schemes to pick our pockets and line the pockets of their cronies. Just give us an honest, efficient plan to do what the American people have clearly stated they want to do. Don’t be afraid to take a few hits: Those who cringe at the first sign of a raised fist rarely win fights. The previous repeal effort would have given us Obamacare Lite, and yet its authors and supporters were still excoriated as inhuman monsters by the Left, their modest restructuring of the Affordable Care Act depicted as a plot to murder the poor. This should serve as yet another lesson — why are any more needed? — that no matter what Republicans do, they’ll be hit with a cyclone of hysterical attacks by the Left, especially in the current hyperventilating “Resistance” political environment. That means even the smallest reform will carry much the same political price as a major overhaul. So why not swing for the fences and do something truly meaningful? Why shouldn’t the GOP focus on giving its voters what they want, instead of worrying about tantrums from the people who lost the last election? Why make deals to appease an opposition that cannot be appeased? Republican strategists should be able to learn a lot by studying the last repeal battle. It should be easy to anticipate Democrat and media lines of attack against a bold repeal plan. Be ready for those attacks with sharp responses, focused on selling the GOP plan to voters who clearly believe Obamacare isn’t the best way to handle health insurance. Be prepared to shoot down misleading factoids and relentlessly hammer everything people don’t like about the insurance landscape. Repetition is your friend, Republicans — look at how relentlessly Democrats jackhammered away at every weak spot in the health care system when they were laying the groundwork for passing the Affordable Care Act. (Of course, they were well prepared for the effort because many of those weaknesses were deliberately created by government regulations over a span of decades — the Left was hitting weak spots it had long ago created.) | 0fake |
Trump, South Korea's Moon agree to boost defenses: White House | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump and South Korean President Moon Jae-in agreed to strengthen their defense posture amid rising tensions with North Korea, the White House said on Friday. Trump and Moon, who met on Thursday, committed to strengthen their “combined defense posture, including through South Korea’s acquisition and development of highly advanced military assets” and “agreed to the enhanced deployment of U.S. strategic assets in and around South Korea on a rotational basis,” the White House said in a statement. | 0fake |
(VIDEO) HILLARY CLINTON: RELIGIOUS BELIEFS MUST BE CHANGED TO ACCOMMODATE ABORTION | 1real | |
JUST IN: JUDICIAL WATCH Claims Comey’s FBI Hid and “Blacked Out” Records Of Secret Loretta Lynch Meeting With Bill Clinton On Tarmac | Remember when President Barack Obama s Attorney General Loretta Lynch just happened to get a surprise visit in Phoenix, while on the tarmac at the airport, from the husband of the Democrat candidate for President, former President Bill Clinton? Have Americans already forgotten, that the secret meeting between Lynch and Bill Clinton took place only hours before the DOJ was about to release their report on Benghazi? Remember when Loretta Lynch told the media that their secret meeting was primarily social and was mostly about grandchildren and golf? Primarily? Watch:As previously reported by Gateway Pundit, Judicial Watch forced the FBI to admit it has 30 new documents related to the infamous Clinton-Lynch tarmac meeting in mid-October.This is after the FBI originally told Judicial Watch they couldn t locate any records related to the tarmac meeting.Fitton blasted the FBI! The FBI is out of control. It is stunning that the FBI found these Clinton-Lynch tarmac records only after we caught the agency hiding them in another lawsuit. Judicial Watch will continue to press for answers about the FBI s document games in court. In the meantime, the FBI should stop the stonewall and release these new records immediately. Previous tarmac meeting documents released were redacted by the DOJ not Obama s DOJ, Trump s DOJ under Jeff Sessions! The talking points are completely blacked out you heard that right. They re blacked out. Again, they weren t blacked out by Attorney General Lynch, they weren t blacked out by James Comey, they weren t blacked out by Barack Obama. They were blacked out by the Justice Department run by Attorney General Sessions, an appointee of President Trump. Isn t that outrageous? Today, Judicial Watch president, Tom Fitton blasted James Comey, and the FBI for lying about the documents they were hiding about the Clinton-Lynch tarmac meeting on Twitter:FBI Hid Clinton/Lynch Tarmac Meeting Records. But the cover-up begins to end thanks to @JudicialWatch the day after tomorrow. @RealDonaldTrump needs to clean house at FBI/DOJ. https://t.co/tytBp28sYL Tom Fitton (@TomFitton) November 28, 2017 | 1real |
An American Stands on the Shoulders of a Gladiator - The New York Times | RIO DE JANEIRO — About the same time that the future United States Olympic volleyball player Carli Lloyd was born 27 years ago, her uncle was discovered by a talent scout in a Southern California gym. Galen Tomlinson was invited to try out for a new show called “American Gladiators” for a chance to be one of the superheroes, taking on mortal contestants in an imaginative series of physical contests. Tomlinson won a role. He was rechristened Turbo and became a cult hero. But the bravest role he played was far off camera: stepping in to help raise Lloyd and mold her into an Olympic athlete. It is debatable which one is more famous, today’s United States Olympian or yesterday’s American gladiator. But it is clear how much they mean to each other. “She understood his belief in her, and it made her believe in herself, and those two went off and conquered the world,” Cindy Lloyd, Carli’s mother and Tomlinson’s half sister, said. “It was awesome to sit back and watch. ” The United States women’s volleyball team is trying to win a gold medal at the Olympics for the first time. Carli Lloyd, often confused with the American soccer star with the same name, is a backup setter. Tomlinson, still as fit as a gladiator at 55, with tiny streaks of gray in his dark hair, is a big presence in the stands. “I attribute me being here to him more than anyone else,” Lloyd said. They are practically inseparable. He was her first coach and her constant workout partner. When she moved on to other coaches and left for college, he was still there at every match, sitting in his usual spot, giving nods and signals in a language that only the two of them share. Lloyd calls him “Uncle. ” But Tomlinson is the only father figure she has ever known. Lloyd was 4 when her father committed suicide, leaving Cindy Lloyd to raise three children on her own. Tomlinson, by then a father and a star on “American Gladiators,” had time on his hands. The show taped for three weeks a year, and his only job the rest of the time was to stay fit. Tomlinson and his daughter, then 10, moved in with Cindy Lloyd and her three children in Bonsall, Calif. north of San Diego. The move was considered temporary, to help Cindy get her life reorganized. Tomlinson never left. “After a couple of months, it dawned on me, and I said after the kids went to bed, ‘Cindy, I want to talk to you,’” Tomlinson said. “I said: ‘Everyone’s getting really comfortable with this. I think it would be wise for us to either leave now, before they lose another male role model, or we’ve got to make a commitment that our extracurricular activities get put on hold until the youngest’ — Carli — ‘graduates high school. ’” Tomlinson and Cindy Lloyd, who had the same father but different mothers, still live together more than 20 years later. “I can’t get rid of him,” Lloyd said with a laugh. “Why would I leave?” Tomlinson asked. “Now the kids are all gone, she’s got the biggest one left at home. ” When Tomlinson’s daughter, Kourtney, was in fifth grade, she wanted to play volleyball. Lloyd’s oldest daughter, Coral, about a year younger, followed. Tomlinson soon decided he could do a better job than their coaches. He taught himself the intricacies of the game and studied respected coaches at tournaments. When Carli started playing the game a few years later, Tomlinson was an experienced coach. “Unfortunately for the older ones, they were the test subjects,” Tomlinson said. “By the time Carli came around, she was able to hit the ground running. ” Tomlinson also oversaw her workouts. From the beginning, he trained her in track and field, his first love among sports. Lloyd became a standout hurdler and long jumper in high school. “Through high school and into college, you could tell just by looking at her that there was a maturity in her muscles that other kids just did not have,” Tomlinson said. “It’s because she’s been lifting with me since she was 8 years old. ” There were no summers off. Eventually, Lloyd’s only request to her uncle was to do the workouts early and quickly so she could move on with her day. Hurt me as much as you want, she would tell him, but do not make me stay out there long. Tomlinson appreciated her willingness. “I said, ‘If you don’t want to put your head on the pillow when you’re 30 years old and wonder what if, then this is the stuff that has to be done now,’” he said. “And she bought into it. ” It was not always harmonious. The relationship between a child and a parent who also coaches can be fraught with frustration, disappointment and resentment. “I wouldn’t say it was perfect,” Lloyd said. “We’re both pretty sensitive and stubborn. But it works. I love him, and he loves me, and it works because we want it to. ” The biggest disagreement came when Lloyd was 15. She made a nationally ranked club team. Tomlinson became an assistant coach and asked the head coach if he thought Lloyd, now had a better future as a setter or an attacker. The coach said she could be a great college hitter but an elite setter. That was enough for Tomlinson. He told Lloyd that she would immediately devote herself to becoming a setter. It is a position not unlike point guard in basketball, or catcher in baseball — an leader controlling the pace and distributing the ball to others. “For the first month, she was really unhappy with me,” Tomlinson said. “Everyone wants to hit the ball. That’s the fun stuff. It wasn’t until the first tournament, where she was running the team as a setter, a little sophomore with these seniors out there, that she realized it was a good thing. ” When Lloyd got to Fallbrook Union High, Tomlinson left club team coaching behind to go with her. His niece was his best player, on her way to an career at the University of California, Berkeley, where Lloyd helped the Golden Bears to the best stretch in their history. There were two trips to the national quarterfinals, one to the semifinals and another to the national final. Lloyd was named national player of the year as a senior. Tomlinson saw every match from the stands (preferably down the right line at the end, eye level with the top of the net) except one, when his daughter got married. Lloyd has spent winters playing professionally in Italy, and Tomlinson has gone with her, for at least a few weeks each time, to help her settle in. His presence has not always been welcomed by coaches, but it is by Lloyd. “Galen is so honest, brutally honest,” Cindy Lloyd said of her half brother. After a match, she said, she will offer unmitigated praise. Tomlinson will offer unvarnished opinions. “And she just really appreciates that,” Cindy Lloyd said. “Just the other night against the Netherlands, I heard her say, ‘Uncle, what did you think?’ To this day, she values what he’s saying. I’ve watched this relationship develop. And it’s worked. ” There have been strains. A combination of stress fractures in her shins and struggles fitting in with the United States national team, coached by the volleyball legend Karch Kiraly, sent Carli Lloyd into a spiral of depression. Lloyd, with Tomlinson’s encouragement, had grown up setting with quick movements of her fingers and wrists. The team wanted her to adopt a method with more arm extension — a change of form not unlike asking a pitcher to alter a throwing motion or a basketball player to adjust a shot. Lloyd struggled. Her standing on the national team dropped in a couple of years, until it looked as if her longstanding Olympic aspirations had evaporated. She was in a kind of funk that Tomlinson had never seen. “I remember telling her mom: ‘I’ve lost my little girl. She’s not the same,’” Tomlinson said. But Lloyd pulled through during the past year, developing the mental toughness to match the physical prowess that she had always had. By last winter in Italy, she seemed to Tomlinson to be her old self, dedicated to trying to make the Olympic roster. “I’m going to make their decision as hard as I can,” she said. In July, Kiraly named his team. Three setters, instead of the usual two, made the squad. Lloyd was one of them. Kiraly said she represented a new breed of physical setter — fast enough to chase every ball, big enough to block and hit. Now the gym that Tomlinson hangs around is the Maracanãzinho, Rio de Janeiro’s famous volleyball arena. People — men, mostly — still ask if he used to be Turbo. But far more attention is on today’s Olympian, not yesterday’s gladiator. Still, Tomlinson cannot help but think that Lloyd would have fit right in on the old television show. “She’d have killed it,” he said with a smile. “Killed it. ” | 0fake |
TUCKER CARLSON Shocked At Lawyer’s Delusion On Rejection Of Voter ID Law In Texas [Video] | A Texas federal judge appointed by Obama has again rejected the 2011 Texas voter ID law, stating that the legislators meant to discriminate against minority voters.Tucker Carlson interviewed one of the lawyers involved in the case. The reasoning is beyond flawed! The only people being discriminated against are the LEGAL voters of this nation! Why is this activist judge assuming that minorities are being discriminated against? You will find her reasoning to be biased and racist. The Court of Appeals even came back with this statement: some of the evidence used by the judge wasn t relevant. U.S. District Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos made this same ruling in 2014, which forced an appeal. The Fifth Circuit issued a stay against the order. The Supreme Court stepped in and allowed Texas to use the voter ID law.But last July the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans asked the judge to re-examine the decision since the judges found that some of the evidence used by the judge wasn t relevant. The two sides reached a deal for the 2016 election, which allowed a voter to sign a declaration swearing that he or she has had a reasonable difficulty that prevented obtaining one of the accepted forms of photo identification. Ramos went back to the drawing board but came to the same conclusion.The Texas Tribune reported:After weighing the evidence again, she came to the same conclusion, according to Monday s ruling. Her decision did not identify what some have called a smoking gun showing intent to discriminate, but it cited the state s long history of discrimination; virtually unprecedented radical departures from normal practices in fast-tracking the 2011 bill through the Legislature; the legislation s unduly strict terms; and lawmakers shifting rationales for passing a law that some said was needed to crack down on voter fraud. The Court holds that the evidence found infirm did not tip the scales, Ramos wrote. Civil rights groups and others suing the state offered evidence that established a discriminatory purpose was at least one of the substantial or motivating factors behind passage of SB 14, she added.The law requires a voter to use one of seven forms of identification when they vote. The voter can use a driver s license, concealed handgun license, military ID, passport, or a state-issued personal ID card.Democrats and civil rights activists claimed the Republican legislators departed from procedural norms in passing the law, including classifying it as emergency legislation, cutting debate short and bypassing the ordinary committee process in both chambers. But Republican officials, which includes Governor Greg Abbott, insists the law stops voter ID and strengthens the integrity of elections.From The New York Times:They said that the law was aimed at preventing voter fraud and that the departures from the normal legislative process were made to prevent Democratic lawmakers from manipulating procedural rules to thwart passage. They maintained that opponents had turned up no evidence that any legislator had intended to discriminate against blacks and Hispanics.Texas lawmakers have not announced how they ll respond, but they can choose to appeal again.Fox News reported:Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton did not immediately react to the ruling, although the state could once again appeal, which is what one of Paxton s top deputies appeared to suggest would happen while testifying to lawmakers just as the ruling came down. Brantley Starr, a deputy first assistant attorney general, acknowledged that Texas could be dragged back under preclearance but noted there was little precedent. It s possible. It s our belief that you d have to have multiple instances of discriminatory purpose, he said. | 1real |
HILLARY’S NEW AMERICA: Uniformed Police Officers NOT ALLOWED On DNC Floor [VIDEO] | Meanwhile, police officers were outside the walls of the DNC literally putting out fires started by Bernie s flag burners and protecting the very people who mock and scorn them inside. Unimaginable hate, and violence was directed at the same police officers who have been treated like the enemy of the DNC on the streets and outside of the enormous fence erected by the DNC to keep legal citizens out. This is Hillary s America. It s the same America Obama has worked tirelessly to create. Is this the America we want to leave to our children and grandchildren? Thursday on Fox News Channel s Fox & Friends, in an appearance from the site of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani called the convention the most anti-police and the most anti-law enforcement he had ever seen.However, he also said that according to high-ranking police officers in Philadelphia, uniformed law enforcement was not allowed on the floor of the convention.WATCH:Rudy Giuliani: Last night was the Democrat insider fantasy land, they didn't talk about one world problemhttps://t.co/6DhXRBrG50 FOX & friends (@foxandfriends) July 28, 2016Via: Breitbart NewsRudy Giuliani: This is the most anti-police, anti-law enforcement convention I've ever seen in my whole life.https://t.co/sHnZAAE430 FOX & friends (@foxandfriends) July 28, 2016 | 1real |
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