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CALDAS, Colombia — Mélida was only 9 when guerrilla fighters lured her away with the promise of food as she played on the floor. For the next seven years she was held hostage by the rebels, forced to become a child soldier. Her family thought she had died in battle. Then Mélida suddenly returned to her village at 16, carrying a pistol and a grenade. Only her grandfather recognized her — from a birthmark on her cheek. The very next day, the military surrounded her house, called by an informant seeking the bounty on her head. “I found out my own father had turned me in,” she recalled. Colombia is nearing a peace agreement with the rebels to end a of fighting, one of the longest conflicts in the world. More than 220, 000 people have been killed, leaving a country bitterly divided over what role, if any, former rebels should play in society once they drop their weapons for a new, unarmed life outside the jungle. That includes thousands of rebel fighters who were raised since childhood to carry out armed struggle. Many of them know little else but war. “There are times when I think about returning to the guerrillas because this life is hard here,” said Mélida, now 20, who, like other former child soldiers, asked that her last name not be used because she fears reprisals over her links to the rebels. She is now caught between two worlds, she says, belonging to neither. “True, we were children waiting for our deaths. But I’m always thinking about returning. ” The rebels, known as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, say they don’t recruit children. Yet during a recent visit to a FARC camp by The New York Times, a soldiers as young as 15 said they had been recruited by the rebels only months earlier. In government rehabilitation centers throughout Colombia, minors told similar stories of being spirited away to camps by rebels. Now they face a future for which they are thoroughly unprepared. Fabio said he was kidnapped by rebel fighters at the age of 9. By the time he was 13, he said, his commanders began sending him on solo missions to slit the throats of government soldiers as they slept. He said his own family did not look for him or inform the authorities of his abduction. “They would have been killed,” said Fabio, who is now 19. Freddy said he joined the FARC at 14 to avenge the killing of a cousin by paramilitary forces. He deserted at 16 with two dozen other soldiers. But he said his aunt, fearing reprisals from the guerrillas, told him never to return to his village. Finding a place for these former soldiers is vital to the success of any peace deal, analysts say. “If poor or botched reintegration programs fail to offer opportunities to former child combatants, Colombia’s powerful paramilitaries and trafficking groups may offer them a tempting alternative,” said Adam Isacson, a senior analyst at the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights group. At the rebel camp, one FARC commander, who goes by the name Teófilo Panclasta, defended the use of child soldiers, saying that many joined to escape trouble at home. “If a girl comes at 15 as a prostitute and wants to join us to stop being a whore, what are we going to say?” he asked. Mélida said that when her captors came to her house along the river, they drew her attention by saying they had soup in their canoe. The guerrillas brought her up the river until they reached a distant camp. She woke up alongside several other children, each around 10 or 11. Their first lesson was hiding in trenches during bombings by the military. Mélida’s father, Moisés, a traditional healer of the Amazon’s Cubeo group, was away at the time and did not return to their village for another month. He quickly left again to find the girl. Moisés went to the guerrilla camp near the village and asked to meet the commander, a tall FARC fighter in fatigues. “I said, ‘I came for my daughter,’ ” Moisés recalled. “He said she wasn’t there. ” In the camp, Mélida had been renamed Marisol and began her schooling. A Dutch woman who had joined the fighters and spoke broken Spanish taught lessons on the history of communism, the FARC and Darwin’s theory of evolution, something Mélida had never learned in her indigenous village. Mélida was also learning to make land mines. One “looked like a fish” and was triggered with a tripwire made of string, she said. Another was called the “quiebrapatas,” or the “” because it maimed rather than killed its victim. “I said, ‘I want to go home,’ ” she remembered saying. “But they told me, ‘Once you enter a camp, you cannot leave.’ ” Mélida said she saw the fate of runaway fighters firsthand. Once, a and his sister disappeared before dawn and soon found themselves trapped on the edge of a muddy river. They had not learned to swim. Mélida joined the search for them. When the pair were found, they were shot dead. “First the brother, then the sister,” Mélida recalled. She remembered feeling no remorse that day. “I said to myself, ‘Yes — yes they should be killed.’ ” She was 12 years old. Years after she was kidnapped, FARC rebels passed through her village and mentioned Mélida to her family. “They said she had died in an attack,” her father recalled. “After that, I just forgot about her. I thought it was best to forget. ” In reality, a commander in his 40s had taken an interest in her. At first, he followed her around the camp. Then one day, when she was 15, he asked her to wash his clothes in his tent. “Give me a kiss,” she recalled him saying. “I don’t know how,” she said. “Then I’ll teach you,” the commander said. She was later given a birth control implant in her arm and the commander forced her into a relationship, she said. “Imagine waking up next to someone who was that old when you are that young,” she said. At 16, she asked the commander if she could visit her family. She was surprised when he agreed. Carrying the pistol and the grenade, she made her way back home for what was meant to be a short reunion. The village was unrecognizable. A warship was now stationed near the dock. The home from which she had been abducted was abandoned. “I told the first person I saw that I was Mr. Moisés’ daughter, and they said I couldn’t be because that daughter was dead,” she said. Mélida says she does not know why her father turned her in to the military the next day. “He wanted me not to go back perhaps,” she said. “He wanted the best for me. ” But Moisés, sitting in his daughter’s living room on a recent afternoon, offered another explanation. “I wanted to buy a motorcycle,” he said. After a moment he added, “They never gave me the reward I was promised. ” The soldiers interrogated Mélida at one base after another, she said. What was her real name, they asked? Who were her commanders? Where were the FARC bases? After two weeks, Mélida was taken to a government rehabilitation center for indigenous youth who had left the FARC. It was on a mountainside in an alien part of the country for Mélida, who had never seen the Andes before she was captured. The center was home to about 20 other former child soldiers. Daily classes and chores, meant to adjust them to civilian life, were new to her. Other requirements, like another birth control implant, reminded her of the FARC. War was constantly on Mélida’s mind. “When I would get up, I would reach beside me to take my rifle and realize there wasn’t one there,” she said. Víctor Hugo Ochoa, the center’s director, said Mélida arrived angry and often threatened to run away. “It was hard to intervene,” he said. “She formed her own constellation of kids who turned on us. ” At night, Mélida began sneaking out of the center with a man named Javier, whose mother was a cook there. He was nine years older than Mélida, but the two would go out drinking and partying in a nearby town. Javier had a bad history with the rebels. In 2004, his brother, a soldier, was killed by a FARC sniper. His family never forgave the guerrillas, a tension at the heart of any peace deal. Despite this, Mélida and Javier realized they were falling in love. “Why did it have to be her?” he said. “From the people who killed my brother?” Mélida was forming another relationship — with her father, who began visiting to get to know her again. After turning Mélida in, Moisés now wanted a role in his daughter’s life. But even communicating was a challenge: Mélida had lost some of her fluency in Cubeo, the indigenous language they had spoken when she was a child. “She was just some young lady I didn’t know,” he said. The new ties were changing her, Mr. Ochoa said. She was getting to know her two cousins, María and Leila, themselves former FARC members who had left the center. Javier’s mother, Dora, was teaching Mélida to cook and clean, taking on a mother’s role. Dora took Mélida’s FARC history in stride. “My daughter is married to a policeman another is with a soldier,” she said. “Javier is with an . The only thing we’re missing in this family is a paramilitary. ” One day Mélida’s birth control implant failed and she became pregnant. Dora pulled Mélida aside. “I told her, ‘Now you have something to fight for that’s not the revolution.’ ” Her daughter, Celeste, was born last year. The daily tasks of motherhood consumed Mélida for weeks. But the anger remained. “She told me she was raised for war, not to care, not to be a lover,” Javier said. “She would tell me, ‘I love you, but understand my life hasn’t been easy.’ ” One day, Javier returned to find that Mélida and the baby were gone. Days before, Mélida had mentioned returning to rebel territory to see her sister, but now Javier thought it was a ruse to return to the FARC fold. It wasn’t the case. Instead, her bus had been stopped at a checkpoint by rebels who questioned each of the passengers. “I thought they would catch me again,” said Mélida, who realized then she did not want to go back, at least not that day. Mélida’s relationship with her father remains strained. They rarely talk about her life in rebel hands. On a recent day, Mélida was recovering from a blow to her face. “She started to argue with me and I hit her,” said Moisés, looking at the ground. Recently, Mélida’s cousin Leila, the former FARC member, committed suicide. Mélida sometimes travels to visit the unmarked grave. Dora says Mélida is too strong to take her own life. But she worries Mélida might return to the guerrillas. “She is a good mother and puts her daughter first,” Dora said. “But she also tells me she is bored and doesn’t like this life. And I tell her: ‘If you want to leave, then leave. But think of the girl. Leave Celeste with me.’ ” | 1 |
Как пишет Life.ru, Зельдин доставлен в одну из московских больниц.Актер является старейшим из ныне живущих народных артистов СССР и самый взрослый действующий актер планеты. В прошлом году ему исполнилось 100 лет.
Российским зрителям Владимир Зельдин хорошо известен по ролям более чем в 40 кинокартинах, среди которых «Карнавальная ночь» (1956), «Десять негритят» (1987), «Дядя Ваня» (1970), «Принцесса на горошине» (1976), «Тридцать первое июня» (1978) и многие другие.
Напомним, в прошлом году актер Зельдин при прохождении обследования в научном центре имени Бакулева сел мимо стула и упал, получив перелом шейки бедра, после чего был успешно прооперирован.
Правда.ру ранее писала, что операция, проведенная народному артисту СССР Владимиру Зельдину , была успешной, сообщил начальник Управления культуры Минобороны России Антон Губанков.
Напомним, Владимир Зельдин отметил 100-летний юбилей в феврале этого года . Поздравительную телеграмму актеру направил президент Владимир Путин . По традиции, день рождения именинник отметил бенефисом - в родном Центральном академическом театре Российской армии.
Зельдин является лауреатом множества наград, в том числе ордена Трудового Красного Знамени, ордена Красной Звезды. В мае этого года Владимир Путин лично вручил Зельдину орден "За заслуги перед Отечеством" I степени . Выпускник театрального училища при театре имени МОСПС (сейчас театр имени Моссовета), он работал несколько лет в этом театре, затем в Центральном театре транспорта и в Русском драматическом театре Алма-Аты, а с 1945 года неизменно служит в труппе Центрального театра Российской армии (ранее - Советской армии). Всенародную известность и популярность он получил за работы в фильмах «Свинарка и пастух», "Сказание о земле Сибирской", "Дядя Ваня", "Карнавальная ночь", "Десять негритят" и др. Накануне своего юбилея в декабре в Театре Российской армии состоялась премьера спектакля "Человек из Ламанчи", где Владимир Зельдин исполнил роль Дон Кихота. "Роль Дон Кихота - это моя давняя мечта. И я рассматриваю это как самый дорогой подарок своему юбилею. Но на этом я не собираюсь завершать свою карьеру и буду репетировать роль Кутузова в спектакле "Давным-давно", где когда-то в молодые годы я играл поручика Ржевского. Этот спектакль будет ставить главный режиссер нашего театра Борис Морозов", - сказал в интервью РИА "Новости" Владимир Зельдин.
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The president and Hillary Clinton share a “stubborn desire” to avoid scrutiny. November 4, 2016 Lloyd Billingsley
The President of the United States, the most powerful man in the world, is working three shifts for his designated successor, former First Lady and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. As the FBI continues its investigations and Clinton emails continue to emerge, it is worth recalling the mysteries in the president’s narrative.
Last year, “Obama’s narrator,” as the New York Times called David Axelrod, released his massive Believer : My Forty Years in Politics . The author recalls a “perfectly timed” and unexpected call that would change his life.
“David, it’s Barack,” said the voice on the phone. “I’m thinking about what I want to do next, and was wondering if we could talk.” This call took place in 1992, which explains the perfect timing.
On February 8, 1992, the president’s maternal grandfather Stanley Dunham passed away at 73. So “Gramps,” as the narrator called him, was no longer around to offer insights on family history, correct any accounts that might appear, or write one of his own.
In the 1995 Dreams from My Father, Gramps “might” say that a Kenyan foreign student looks a lot like Nat King Cole. Actually, Gramps might not. The Kenyan student Barack H. Obama bears little resemblance to Cole, who passed away in 1965 but enjoyed a revival in the 1990s through daughter Natalie’s “Unforgettable” album.
The narrator of Dreams from My Father invokes “a stubborn desire to protect myself from scrutiny” and he “doesn’t fault people their suspicions” if they fail to take him at “face value.” His elusive father is a “prop in someone else’s narrative” and “an image I could alter on a whim or ignore when convenient.” The narrative itself is a “myth,” a “tale,” and a “useful fiction.”
Dreams from My Father has no photo section, no index, and key characters get only a first name. These include “Frank,” who gets 2,500 words. Back in 1995, the president himself identified this person as Frank Marshall Davis, the Stalinist Paul Kengor regards as the president’s mentor, as he explained in The Communist: The Untold Story of Frank Marshall Davis .
In Dreams from My Real Father , documentarian Joel Gilbert made a case that Davis is the president’s biological father. Malik Obama, son of the Kenyan Barack H. Obama, sees a strong physical resemblance . That also holds true on the policy side. Professor Kengor found “remarkable similarities” between the writings of Davis and the policies of president Barack Obama.
The Kenyan Barack Obama, though a man of the left, was not a pro-Soviet Communist. Had he been pro-Soviet, he would have attended Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow. Indeed, Obama warned his fellow Kenyans about Soviet meddling in Africa.
The Kenyan Obama would have found strange the president’s 2009 cancelation of missile defense for European allies. An outspoken man, he would not have supported the kind of high-tech harassment Sharyl Attkisson described in Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation and Harassment in Obama’s Washington .
The Kenyan Barack H. Obama had issues with strongman types such as Jomo Kenyatta, who ruled Kenya from 1963 until his death in 1978. In keeping with his country, and most of Africa, the Kenyan Barack Obama is not on record as a supporter of homosexual causes. Frank Marshall Davis, on the other hand, was certainly on board. As Davis wrote in his 1992 memoir Livin’ the Blues :
“During the dramatic civil rights demonstrations of the 1960s, I often thought we ought to form a united front with joint sit-ins at cafes. In my mind I envisioned the result. An indignant white restaurant manager frantically phoning the police, ‘Get here in a hurry! We got niggers at our counters and our washrooms are loaded with fairies and lesbians!’ Or perhaps there might have been a joint March on Washington waving banners: Blacks and Homos, Arise!”
That, and Davis’ pornographic novel, Sex Rebel: Black , might explain the president’s stubborn desire to protect himself from scrutiny. It could also have something do with what the narrator calls the “less flattering aspects of my father’s character.”
In Dreams from My Father , the Kenyan is raised a Muslim but in The Audacity of Hope he is “a confirmed atheist, thinking religion to be so much superstition, like the mumbo-jumbo of witch doctors that he had witnessed in the Kenyan villages of his youth.”
In Audacity , the narrator explains that he went to a “predominantly Muslim school” in Indonesia. He does not indicate whether atheists, Lutherans, Jews, or Buddhists also attended the school. Registration records were supposedly destroyed by flooding.
The predominantly Muslim school also emerges in Believer , but Axelrod does not indicate if students of other faiths attended. Frank, Ann Dunham, Stanley Dunham, and even the Kenyan Barack Obama are missing from this account, but it proves enlightening in other ways.
In a 2008, Brian Williams of MSNBC asked presidential candidates what steps they would take in the event of a simultaneous terror attack on major American cities. As Axelrod explains, “Obama neglected to include that he would pursue the perpetrators.”
Hillary Clinton did likewise in 2012, passing off what she privately regarded as a terrorist attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi as a spontaneous protest over a video. Like the president, Clinton has always shown a stubborn desire to protect herself from scrutiny. With BleachBit , hammers and lies, Hillary and her handlers did their best to make more than 30,000 emails disappear.
The contents remain something of a mystery, just as mysteries linger about the president and his background. On the other hand, by now some things are perfectly clear.
The POTUS and former FLOTUS both decline to identify Islamic terrorism. Both are shrink-wrapped in statist superstition. And both lie with the greatest of ease. On these counts, like the critters in Orwell’s Animal Farm, one can find it “impossible to say which was which.”
Back in July, the party faithful were chanting “Four more years!” during the president’s speech at the Democratic National Convention. | 0 |
Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” during a panel discussion about the alleged Russian hacking efforts intended to influence November’s presidential election, CNBC contributor Rick Santelli took on a panel led by show moderator Chuck Todd and consisting of New York Times columnist David Brooks, MSNBC anchor Andrea Mitchell and former Rep. Donna Edwards ( ). During the discussion, Santelli accused Todd of “picking sides” and dismissed Mitchell’s defense of the attention given to the Russian hacking controversy by the media. Partial transcript as follows: DAVID BROOKS: Putin is a guy who murders journalists, who has destroyed the democratic process in his own country and now suddenly he feels the freedom to try to do that in our country. It’s not normal statecraft. (CROSSTALK) RICK SANTELLI: To see Russians happy because Trump won — on election night, I never saw you so unhappy. You pick sides. Everybody picks sides. ANDREA MITCHELL: That’s not true, Rick. CHUCK TODD: Who picks sides? MITCHSLL: That’s just not true. Let’s get back to the facts here. SANTELLI: What are the facts? We were hacking [Angela] Merkel’s phone. Everybody does it. MITCHELL: Rick, here’s the difference. We do it, they do it. What made this different is that the Russians weaponized it by transferring it through intermediaries to WikiLeaks. They dumped it out. We do it and hold it. They do it and hold it. (CROSSTALK) MITCHELL: Let me finish my sentence — WikiLeaks was out from the end of the summer and it was being investigated. SANTELLI: So where were these headlines then? (CROSSTALK) MITCHELL: There was plenty of headlines. There was no proof of who did it. SANTELLI: People in charge of intelligence are political as well. DONNA EDWARDS: What happened here is the intelligence gathering that normally takes place was operationalized by the Russians to interfere with our elections. If you look at the report — MITCHELL: They did it in Ukraine. They’re doing it in Germany. EDWARDS: They’re doing it in Germany right now and this is really serious. We’re not going to get over by just saying everybody does it. SANTELLI: Right, we should be solving the problem instead of making it a political hot potato. Let me see the Cuban missiles on the island picture. Trump needs to see it before networks need to see it. MITCHELL: I went to the hearing — SANTELLI: Oh the hearing. There’s hearings on everything. They’re kabuki theater. MITCHELL: Well Rick, if you had been there you would have seen something very different. Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor | 1 |
Nice Admin Lady | 0 |
Financial Markets , Gold , Market Manipulation , Precious Metals , U.S. Economy dollar collapse , silver , silver eagles , stock bubble admin
Gold is powering higher because the dollar is dropping. The dollar index is down 1.7% in the last 3 1/2 trading sessions. It’s down 2.3% vs the euro in the last 5 1/2 days, down 2.1% vs the yen in the last 3 days and down nearly 2% vs. the Swissie since Sunday night.
This is NOT about the political chaos connected to the U.S. election. That’s a sideshow distraction to the real problems going on behind the scene.
The U.S. economy is starting to collapse. This is becoming glaringly evident from most of the data, notwithstanding the highly manipulated economic reports like auto sales.
The movement back into non-fiat assets is starting again – anything connected to debt, like housing, is a de facto fiat asset. The best indicator of this is not gold, but silver. Silver was correlating with SPX for most of October, when the investment “thesis” was “a strengthening economy is good for industrial metals.”
The graph below illustrates this. It shows silver’s movement vs. the SPX for the last 3 months:
Silver correlated almost perfectly with the movement of the SPX for most of October (shaded area on the graph). But silver has moved up while the SPX has been selling off (including today, Nov 2nd) the past 4 trading sessions. This signals a switch from silver performing as an “industrial” metal to silver functioning as a “monetary” metal.
Certainly based on the gold-silver ratio, silver is extraordinarily cheap to gold and thus represents a prototypical “value” trade as the markets begin to accept and reflect economic reality and reject the politically-charge propaganda about a “healthy” economy coming from the Fed, the White House and the Democratic candidates.
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X Dear Reader! VDARE.com isn’t just a website. We are the voice of the Historic American Nation . Our goal is nothing less than to develop a full spectrum media network to speak up for our people during this difficult time for our country. Part of that means building institutions which are offline and in the real world. There’s something about a paper journal that suggests permanence, which inclines people to take it more seriously. And because the news cycle is so fast, some of the most important, substantial, and potentially influential writings fall through the cracks and don’t get the attention they deserve. For that reason, we’re proud to announce the creation of VDARE QUARTERLY, a print journal featuring the best material from our webzine. This will replace our yearly anthologies and ensure that the information and analysis you really don't want to miss will get in front of you as quickly as possible. However, we need your help. For us to unveil this exciting new product we need 600 magazines ordered to cover the print expenses. Fill out the form below to instantly receive a digital copy of VDARE QUARTERLY, and when we have the number of necessary subscribers it will go to print and your exclusive paper copy will ship directly to you! Depending on the package you choose, you will receive multiple paper copies (provided enough readers support the community effort). We encourage you to pass these around – they serve as an excellent gift for friends and family, while at the same time helping to build our community. VDARE QUARTERLY is aesthetically pleasing as well as ideologically powerful. But this isn’t just a service we are providing. VDARE QUARTERLY is a tangible manifestation of your investment in us, and in our country. A subscription is one of the most effective ways you can help us build our media network, expand our influence, and build the kind of movement we will need to take back our country and ensure our children have a recognizable America.
We count on your support! Yours sincerely, Peter Brimelow, Editor of VDARE.com VDARE QUARTERLY countdown: 167 already ordered, 433 still to go | 0 |
Deputy Assistant to the president Dr. Sebastian Gorka, formerly national security editor for Breitbart News, reviewed the Trump administration’s first 100 days on Friday’s Breitbart News Daily. [Gorka said one of the greatest accomplishments of the first 100 days was President Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress, which he described as a moment when the mainstream media’s “reportage, the politically spun reportage, was just blown out of the water”: I don’t know if you recall — on that day and the day before, for 24 hours — there was this, “he’s going to go soft on this, they’re not going to keep their promises, they’re not going to talk about the threat as it really is. ” It’s very, very interesting to go back and not just read the transcript, but watch the video, and that moment when the pauses, looks straight at the camera, and says, “the enemy is radical Islamic terrorism. ” “We’ve set the marker down that we’re going to take politics out of the threat assessment. We’re no longer going to allow political correctness to distort who the enemy is, and how we report about them,” he declared. “I’m biased because I worked on that for years at Breitbart and elsewhere,” he admitted cheerfully. “Number Two is a broader issue that spans everything, whether it’s North Korea, whether it’s Moscow, whether it’s ISIS, or anybody else, and it’s the different way of going around and doing national business that the president has brought to the table,” Gorka continued. He promised: Here I mean the complete rejection of leading from behind, of “strategic patience. ” When the vice president last week gave that address on the deck of the USS Ronald Reagan and said “the era of strategic patience is gone. The world is a dangerous place, and it is a safer place when we are helping guide and lead reactions to those threats” — not, and this is really important for your listeners, not as neoconservatives. This is not a third Bush term. But we will lead, and when people do things such as use chemical weapons against women and children, the president will take action. Dr. Gorka’s protégé and successor as Breitbart News, national security editor Frances Martel, noted that President Trump has been criticized for insisting on using the language of “radical Islamic terrorism,” but is given little credit for his outreach to Middle Eastern allies like Egypt. She asked if Gorka was satisfied with the level of engagement between the Trump administration and America’s allies. Gorka responded by inviting listeners to Google the meeting between President Trump and President Abdel Fattah of Egypt and “just look at the expression” on the latter’s face. “He’s sitting down with the leader of the free world. The smile, the body language, the positivity,” Gorka said. “We did our Muslim partners in the region a great, great disservice in the last eight years. We did not assist them in fighting the jihadis in their backyards. Think about what’s going on in the Sinai right now, with Beit an ISIS affiliate in Egypt. ” “We did some very bad things,” he recalled. “If you look at the JCPOA, the Iran deal, if you look at the unleashing of billions of dollars to Tehran, the people who are most on the frontline of the war with groups like ISIS and — our Sunni friends — felt like they had simply been left by the wayside. They felt that the last administration had chosen a side in this war, and it was the Shia extremists in Tehran. ” “We’ve changed all that. The president is clear: we are not going to fight anybody’s wars for them. We will help our friends and allies fight their own wars for themselves — with trainers, with advice, with intelligence as required. We are there for our Sunni allies: Egypt, Jordan, the Emiratis, even the Kurds of the region,” he declared. “I think what we have achieved in just the last 14 weeks, as compared to the last 8 years, sends a very clear message. We’re not about invading other people’s countries. We’re not about occupying them, but we will help our friends. There’s a certain Marine division that interestingly has supplied two of our cabinet members, and that Marine division has a very interesting motto: ‘No better friend, no worse enemy.’ I think people understand that we have started a new era in relations around the world,” said Gorka. Turning to the other major foreign policy crisis of the moment, Gorka said the Trump administration would follow “classic strategic behavior” in dealing with North Korea. “You send messages overtly, you send them implicitly,” he elaborated. “I think everybody by now understands the MOAB attack in Afghanistan, the cruise missile attack in Syria — neither of those uses of force by the president are just about the countries in which they occurred. ” “So we send implicit messages, explicit messages, but we don’t give the playbook away,” he continued. “People constantly ask me, ‘So what’s next in North Korea? What’s next with regard to relations with Russia?’ and so forth. We’re not going to give that away because that’s astrategic. When you play poker, you don’t show your hand to the people sitting around the table. ” Breitbart News Daily host Alexander Marlow joked that his propensity for showing his cards to everyone else at the table might explain his long losing streak at poker. “President Clinton did that in the Balkans in . He told the Milosevich regime what he was going to do and what he wasn’t going to do,” Gorka recalled. “And the last administration did it with Mosul, telegraphing when we’re coming and when we’re not coming, and what we’re going to do. That is a way to lose, not a way to win, and this president is all about winning. We know that. ” “The general principles will stand: American leadership is back. We have certain red lines we will act upon them should they be breached. We understand that we have inherited a world on fire,” he said. “There’s one metric I love to use: when we took office — this is according to the United Nations, hardly a hotbed of analysis — the United Nations has stated there are 65 million refugees in the world today. That is a world historic record. We had less refugees in 1945 at the cessation of hostilities that was World War II,” he pointed out. “So we know the world is a dangerous place, but we’re going to make it less dangerous by exercising strategic leadership — not in a sense, but in a patriotic sense that supports our friends and allies,” Gorka averred. Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a. m. to 9:00 a. m. Eastern. | 1 |
Her shoes were bedazzled platform moon boots. Her outfit was encircled by a tutu tilted at a particularly rakish angle. Her capelet, cresting in tusklike spikes, appeared to be from aluminum foil. Jeremy Scott, the fashion designer, leaned forward and fixed the contestant, Alyssa Edwards, with a look. “I will just come out of the closet here and say, This is fashion,” he said. And because this is also “RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars” — one of the reality TV shows in the empire overseen by RuPaul Charles, the drag “supermodel of the world” — Ms. Edwards, a drawling diva out of Mesquite, Tex. accepted the compliment and went on to Taylor Dayne’s “Tell It to My Heart. ” For the uninitiated, “RuPaul’s Drag Race” is a competition on the Logo network to find “America’s next drag superstar. ” It is a campy, joyful pastiche of “Project Runway,” “America’s Next Top Model” and “America’s Got Talent,” requiring its superstars to sing, dance, act, strut and for the title. Along the way, in and out of drag, contestants design and make their own dresses, spackle on their own makeup and merrily talk trash about, and to, one another. Is it any wonder that it has become the fashion industry’s favorite show? “I’ve seen every episode,” said Marc Jacobs, who, like Mr. Scott, has been a guest judge on the show. (Mr. Charles and his friend and sidekick, Michelle Visage, are two of the constant judges, with a rotating roster of regulars and guests.) “It makes me laugh, it makes me cry. There’s a lot of power in it, and I’m not a big reality TV show fan at all. ” It was first recommended to him by the photographer Steven Meisel. Since its premiere in 2009, “Drag Race” has grown from minor curiosity into niche touchstone, largely by word of mouth and social media. This month, after being ignored by most major awards for years, Mr. Charles won his (and the show’s) first Emmy, for best host. Its audience is growing along with its acclaim. The first episode of the eighth season of “Drag Race,” its most recent, which concluded in May, was the most streamed in the history of the series. Viewership for the second season of “Drag Race All Stars,” in which previous contestants come back for a second chance at a crown, airing now, is up 28 percent over “Drag Race” (and more than 50 percent over the first season of “All Stars”). Winners and have gone on to perform around the world, record albums and music videos, team up with cosmetics companies and, in at least one case (Laganja Estranja, Season 6) debut a line of fashion, accessories and dog clothes. In some circles, the show has been celebrated for its politics of affirmation and visibility. In fashion circles, it is celebrated for this, too — but also for minting a class of who look great in a dress. “It’s happening,” said Miss Fame, 31, a contestant on Season 7. “The doors have been opening. ” Since being on “Drag Race,” she has attended New York Fashion Week (and will attend Paris’s this season) and made beauty videos for L’Oréal, which sent her to the Cannes Film Festival, where she walked the red carpet in a Zac Posen gown. Mr. Charles’s queens are now guests at fashion shows and fashion week parties, adored by the biggest names in the industry. Pat McGrath, the doyenne of runway makeup artists, posts images of contestants on her social media accounts. Miu Miu flew several contestants to Paris for a party to celebrate its perfume last July. They also appear in magazines and ad campaigns. Mr. Meisel was on the vanguard when he shot Carmen Carrera (an early contestant who has since announced she is transgender) for W magazine in 2011. In the years since, more have followed. Pearl, a contestant from Season 7, signed with Wilhelmina Models in 2015. This year, Mr. Jacobs featured Dan Donigan (better known by his nom de drag, Milk) a contestant from Season 6, in his spring ads, wearing his women’s collection. And in April, Naomi Campbell gave a to Naomi Smalls, a Season 8 who chose a drag name in Ms. Campbell’s honor. “I’m loving Naomi Smalls,” Ms. Campbell told a crowd in London. “It’s a kind of ” said Violet Chachki, 24, the winner from Season 7. “There’s a strong crossover there. ” Known on the show as a “fashion queen” (as opposed to a “comedy queen” or a “pageant queen”) Ms. Chachki’s signature look involved corseting herself to a so extreme that one of her accessories was an oxygen tank. Since her win, she has been invited to fashion shows by Mr. Jacobs and Mr. Scott, and was among those flown to the Miu Miu party in Paris (“” she said). The photographer Steven Klein shot her for Interview magazine, alongside the runway model Anna Cleveland, and for Italian Vogue, alongside other “Drag Race” alumni, for an article about the club promoter Susanne Bartsch. “I think that a lot of people in the fashion world have an eye on me, because I do have that crossover,” Ms. Chachki said. “It seems so normal to me now, but even three years ago I never would have imagined it. Now it seems I’m segueing into that world, more so than the drag world. ” “That world” is watching, and discussing. “I was on set shooting an ad campaign a few days ago, and I think half the set watched the show,” said the designer Jason Wu. “It was totally the topic of the day. Between the makeup artist and the set designer, we’re all huge fans. ” Mr. Wu has a long history with RuPaul as a doll designer before he worked in fashion, Mr. Wu worked on a series of RuPaul dolls. “There are many weekly discussions in the office,” said the designer Joseph Altuzarra, who called RuPaul “the heir apparent to Oprah. ” “A lot of people go into fashion — a lot of designers, certainly — because they love clothing, they love makeup and hair and beauty. And I think ‘Drag Race’ is such an extreme version of it that it only makes sense that people in this industry can appreciate it and latch on. ” Bianca Del Rio, 41, the winner of Season 6 and one of the show’s most visible stars, said, “Fashion people understand drag. ” She has toured the world with her comedy act, and stars in a new independent film, “Hurricane Bianca,” that comes out this week. “It’s a process, and you get to create absolutely anything you want. The only difference with a fashion show is it’s 15 minutes. For us, it’s usually two hours. ” Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, two of the executive producers of “Drag Race,” are also documentarians who directed “In ‘Vogue’: The Editor’s Eye. ” “We were a little anxious they might find out that we made ‘Drag Race,’” Mr. Bailey said about his initial meetings with Vogue editors. “The reverse was completely true. The embrace was fantastic, because they all watch it. ” The affection is mutual. Asked who else from the fashion industry he would most like to have on the show — besides Mr. Scott and Mr. Jacobs, the models Gigi Hadid and Chanel Iman have appeared — Mr. Charles said: “How fabulous would it be if we got Anna Wintour on the judges panel?” Of course, drag fashion is not runway fashion. Most of the queens on the show make or commission their outfits, only occasionally straying into designer pieces, which rarely come in regular women’s sizes, let alone ’s sizes. (“I can definitely make sample size work,” said Ms. Chachki dryly, “which is more than most. ”) More to the point, drag fashion satirizes high fashion as much as it celebrates it. “That’s part of the bohemian creed,” Mr. Charles said. “You reserve the right to simultaneously love something with all your heart and absolutely hate it to your core. I love creativity and beauty. Fashion is absolutely that. ” Which may in part explain why the fashion industry has found “Drag Race” easy to love. Runway fashion, with very few exceptions, exists in a state of permanent seriousness drag sends it up mercilessly, worshiping its extremes while mocking its pretensions with impunity. It comes as a relief. And that is exactly how some use it. After the grueling production of his most recent fashion week show, Mr. Jacobs said, he dragged himself home and got in bed. “I couldn’t move, I was so wiped out,” he said. “Eight o’clock came around I was like, ‘Oh, my God, we get to watch ‘Drag Race All Stars.’ What could be better? Lying in bed, eating pretzels with peanut butter stuffed inside them, watching ‘Drag Race’ with my boyfriend. ” | 1 |
Originally appeared at Waking Times
Americans are sleepwalking into World War III , and as events in Syria are shaping up it could come any moment as the biggest October surprise ever. At this stage in the conflict, we are one minor event away from all out war between the world’s major super powers, an event which would most certainly result in nuclear war. All that is needed is for the right type of false flag event to serve as provocation.
“In naval warfare, a “false flag” refers to an attack where a vessel flies a flag other than their true battle flag before engaging their enemy. It is a trick, designed to deceive the enemy about the true nature and origin of an attack.” [ Source ]
As the world pretends to be ruled by democratically elected governments, and as the world’s people feign freedom under an ever-expanding surveillance, police and warfare state, some semblance of pretext is needed in order to manufacture sufficient consent for the oligarchy’s standing plans of forcing us into expansion of the Orwellian Permanent War . A brief look at how this tactic has historically been used helps to predict what is certainly forthcoming in Syria, as paraphrased from James Corbett of the Corbett Report .
1780’s – The Swedish-Russian War of 1788-1790 began when Swedish troops were intentionally dressed up as Russian troops then sent to attack their own border with Finland, effectively tricking the public into believing Russia had attacked, thereby kicking off a war will killed thousands.
1931 – The Japanese army deliberately destroyed a portion of a Japanese owned railway, then blamed it on Chinese dissidents to justify the military occupation of Manchuria .
1939 – Nazi war engineers dressed up Polish prisoners in Polish military uniforms and directed them to attack a German radio station. They prisoners were shot dead and their bodies left on the scene as evidence of Polish aggression, leading to Hitler’s invasion of Poland, signifying the official start of World War II.
1954 – Operation Susannah was an Israeli effort to convince the British military to continue their military presence in the Suez Canal, in support of Israeli interests. Egyptian patsies were hired to detonate bombs in American and British civilian targets, then blamed on the Muslim Brotherhood.
1962 –“In 1962 the US Joint Chiefs of Staff authored a document called Operation Northwoods calling for the US government to stage a series of fake attacks, including the shooting down of military or civilian US aircraft, the destruction of a US ship, sniper attacks in Washington, and other atrocities, to blame on the Cubans as an excuse for launching an invasion. President Kennedy refused to sign off on the plan and was killed in Dallas the next year.” [ Source ]
1964 – A U.S. destroyer patrolling the Gulf of Tonkin was attacked by torpedoes, ostensibly by the North Vietnamese, thereby causing President Johnson the authorization of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, thus beginning U.S. military involvement in Vietnam. It is now known that no attack actually occurred and that the NSA was involved in fabricating this event.
1967 –“In June 1967 the Israelis attacked the USS Liberty , a US Navy technical research ship, off the coast of Egypt. The ship was strafed relentlessly for hours in an apparent attempt to blame the attack on Egypt and draw the Americans into the Six Day War, but amazingly the crew managed to keep it afloat. In 2007 newly released NSA intercepts confirmed that the Israelis knew they were attacking an American ship, not an Egyptian ship as their cover story has maintained.” [ Source ]
1999 – A series of devastating bombings on civilian apartment buildings in Russia were blamed on Chechen terrorists, although Russian FSB agents were later caught using the exact same type of bombs in what was publicly called a security exercise.
2001 – The 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington were blamed on 19 Al Qaeda terrorists and immediately used the pretext for beginning the Global War on Terror , of which the political doctrine for this was already in place and in play. 15 years later , information about the true nature of the attacks is still surfacing, proving that the 9/11 Commission was a whitewash to help catalyze public support still ongoing wars which were planned prior to 9/11 .
“Further, the process of transformation [of the military], even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event––like a new Pearl Harbor.” –[ Source ]
Furthermore, other examples of historical significance demonstrate how minor or ambiguous events are seized on and deliberately used as propaganda to achieve the greater objective of drawing nations into war.
1915 – The sinking of the British ocean liner The Lusitania off the coast of Ireland, which was carrying tons of war materials from America, was blamed on German u-boats, leading to a severe diplomatic row which brought the United States into World War I. Speculation remains as to what exactly happened to the Lusitania, however, the official explanation is highly suspicious , and the event was used to achieve the objectives of war financiers to broaden the conflict.
1933 – A German parliamentary building in the Reichstag was set ablaze one month after Hitler’s election to the office of Chancellor. It is believed that three Bulgarian communists were to blame, however this is contentious among historians. The event was heavily propagandized by the Nazi party to galvanize support for war.
One can also include in this list an ever-growing growing handful of European and American domestic terror attacks such as the London bombings of 2005 , and the Bataclan theatre massacre of Paris in 2015 . To further expand on the historical precedent of using false flag attacks to propel agendas of state aggression, many instances of assassination and military intervention into the politics of sovereign nations around the world in order create consent for militarism could be included. Final Thoughts
As the U.S. continues to aid and support ISIS, Al-Nusra and other terrorist organizations in its ploy to overthrow the Assad government for the primary benefit of Israel, a false flag event signaling the beginning of a direct confrontation with Russia could come at any time. At present it looks as though the most likely scenario would be something along the lines of the USS Liberty attack, which would involve the deliberate targeting of our own forces while creating the perception of a Russian attack on U.S. or NATO components.
The situation in Syria is ripe for exactly this kind of covert, subversive tactic. There is historical precedence to suggest that a Syrian false flag event is imminent, therefore people the world over must prepare to resist and to survive this. Did you enjoy this article? - Consider helping us! Russia Insider depends on your donations: the more you give, the more we can do. $1 $10 Other amount
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By Melissa Dykes This has already been the craziest election in the history of the country, with the most overt corruption and fraud the American... | 0 |
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2016 has been an eventful year for Prince George. From meeting the US president to his first day of nursery school, but none of these moments made him smile more than yesterday’s Halloween festivities, when he finally got to wear his favourite costume accessory – a necklace of human ears.
“He has been asking us all year if he could wear them,” Duchess of Cambridge Kate Middleton told press reporters yesterday afternoon, “George really, really likes Halloween. It’s actually scary how much he likes the whole thing. Myself and William were woken up at 4am this morning to a dead bird at the end of our bed. He means well, and I’m sure he thought it was a nice present to give, but I’ll be glad when Halloween is over”.
Little is known about the owners of the ears, but sources believe they were a present from his great granddad, Philip, and were originally gifted to the 95-year-old from a tribe of New Guinea cannibals in 1946.
“George loves searching through great granddad’s old memorabilia,” Royal nanny Maria Cantwell explains, “When he found the necklace, his little eyes lit up.
“They’re very close and he loves listening to Philip’s stories about the Nazis and the Bengal famine in India. They’re like the same person inside”.
Later asked by reporters what he wants from Santa for Christmas, the little dote replied ‘Putin’, clapping manically and repeating the Russian president’s name, over and over again, before then chomping down on one of his ears.
“He’s teething,” insisted the red faced Duchess as she quickly ushered him away. | 0 |
Frank Ancona, the professed leader of the Traditionalist American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, was shot and killed in Missouri last week in what officials called a “tragic and senseless act of violence. ” His wife and stepson were charged in his death on Monday. His body was found on a riverbank on Saturday with gunshot wounds to the head, according to the Washington County coroner, Brian DeClue, who called the death a homicide. In an interview, he said that Mr. Ancona, 51, was killed with “a shotgun of some sort. ” Jerrod Mahurin, the prosecutor in the case, said Mr. Ancona was also shot in the head with a handgun. On Monday, Mr. Ancona’s wife, Malissa Ancona, 44, and stepson, Paul Jinkerson Jr. 24, were charged with a range of crimes in connection with the killing, including murder and the abandonment of a corpse, according to the St. Francois County Sheriff’s Department. The sheriff said Mr. Ancona was killed at his home last Thursday, and his body was then left at a remote location. Mr. Mahurin said he believed the killing happened because of a marital dispute and was not connected to Mr. Ancona’s membership in the K. K. K. The Washington County Sheriff’s Office said that it learned of Mr. Ancona’s disappearance on Friday, shortly before his vehicle was discovered on land owned by the United States Forest Service. His body was found on the banks of the Big River in Belgrade, Mo. the next day by a family who had gone to fish. In an interview with The New York Times this month, Mr. Ancona said he had been a member of the Klan for more than 30 years. He formed the Traditionalist American Knights in 2009. There are at least 29 separate, rival Klan groups currently active in the United States, and they compete with one another for members, dues, news media attention and the title of being the true heir to the Ku Klux Klan, said Mark Potok, a researcher at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremism in the United States. Most recently, Mr. Ancona was accused by rival Klansmen of being secretly Jewish. “It is endless infighting,” Mr. Potok said. Mr. Ancona’s group was not considered the largest or the most influential iteration of the Klan, but he was skilled at attracting the spotlight. During the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Mo. after the police killing of Michael Brown, Mr. Ancona’s group passed out leaflets in the city, vowing to use “lethal force” against protesters. The fliers got him invited on MSNBC. Shortly after, Mr. Ancona explained his beliefs in an interview with a member of the hacker group Anonymous, which later claimed to have gained access to his group’s files and released his personal information. This year, the group also distributed fliers in several towns in Maine, far from its base in Park Hills, Mo. Mr. Ancona pointed to these operations as a sign of his group’s popularity and reach, but Mr. Potok said it had no more than a few dozen members in chapters in three states: Missouri, Idaho and Pennsylvania. Mr. Ancona promoted the Klan as a nonviolent fraternal organization for white Christian men, something akin to a group that endorsed the separation of the races and opposed what he called “equality propaganda. ” “I don’t focus on the negative history,” Mr. Ancona said, adding that he did not understand why people were afraid of the Klan. “What Klansman do you ever see go out and see terrorize anyone?” But the group’s website and fliers contained a more violent message, including images of hooded Klansmen brandishing nooses, racist cartoons of and the letters “KKK” engulfed in flames. In one picture, which appeared to be manipulated, Mr. Ancona stood before a burning cross. “They want to portray us as all toothless, redneck tobacco chewers,” Mr. Ancona said this month. “Some of us are! But some of us are college educated. I am a business owner,” he said. “We just believe in promoting traditional American values. ” Mr. Ancona dismissed the Klan’s violent history as the work of “a few bad apples” in another era. He said killings attributed to the group during the civil rights era were the work of government agents, like those who infiltrated civil rights groups at the time. “I’d say that operation cointelpro really never ended,” he said. In reality, the K. K. K. has killed scores of people since it was founded in 1865, the vast majority of them . Many of the crimes believed to be committed by the Klan were not investigated, so the precise number of its victims may never be known. “Frank Ancona posed as the kinder, gentler Klansman, but he was really none of those things,” Mr. Potok said. “A lot of these characters seem like jokes — and some of them really are — but that doesn’t mean they’re not incredibly dangerous. ” | 1 |
The Tales of Bodies and Blood That Surround a Front Line in Syria By Robert Fisk
The Independent " - We arrived so soon after Jabhat al-Nusras retreat from the village that one man and his family had only just buried the remains of four Islamists at the bottom of their field. We found them at the back and they stank so much that we had to get rid of them, Mohamed Kenjo said. So we took the remains and put them under a covering of earth away from our home.
But the house he once shared with his wife and six children had been looted everything, from the washing machine and the water tank, to cups and saucers and kettles and the homes of Kenjos neighours lay in ruins, broken open by shells and rockets. This was the front line north of Hama, a city whose history lay in the blood of insurrection more than 34 years ago.
So close to the front line, in fact, that the fighter bombers were still howling over our heads to attack the Islamists Ahrar al-Sham, Nusra, all the usual suspects in the next village to the north-west. The Syrians say you can only see their jets, that the Russian fighter-bombers are so fast its impossible to catch them with the naked eye. You could make out the spray of anti-missile flares that the aircraft released, four or five bright stars that drifted through the imperial blue sky like fireworks.
But then, as the planes turned one after the other from their bombing runs, you could just see them as the sun caught their swept-back wings, daggering up into the heavens to the south before their bombs exploded with a loud, hollow sound like two giant wooden planks banging together on the ground. Amid the soldiers, sweating, tired, a general turned up, steel helmet over his eyes, marching briskly with his officers through the ruins. I wanted to know how many of the Nusra men had died.
Many, many, he replied. But when I asked how many of his Syrian soldiers had been killed in the broken, smashed village of Soran, his answer came without hesitation. We had 42 martyrs, he said bleakly. I didnt doubt the figure. And when soldiers tell the truth, it means they are winning. But thats a lot of men to lose for one dust-covered hamlet. The Syrian armys death toll in six years of war is a state secret. But Ive been given a reliable figure for the government armys fatalities in this terrible war: around 75,000. These are the dead, not the hundreds of thousands of wounded. Soldiers expect to die. They live by the sword.
Civilians on both sides are the innocents whose lives should be spared. Their mortality statistics come from all sides, including the United Nations. Is it 250,000 or 300,000 as the UN now states? Or 400,000 as the experts in faraway cities now claim? Whatever the figure, add another 75,000 to it.
The ruins of the village of Soran north of Hama (Nelofer Pazira)
The Nusra men and their allies had only captured this place two and a half months ago. House after house in what had been Soran had been blown apart. Some remained, their doors ajar, the bougainvillea still spilling over their concrete walls. But always, when I walked inside, there were cupboards torn open by the retreating Islamists, piles of childrens clothes and toys and clocks and family snapshots scattered across the floor. One picture showed a baby smiling from a cot, another a husband and wife surrounded by their children. The Islamists had probably been looking for money hidden in the cupboards. But why did the looters want a washing machine? Did they plan to lug this rubbish away in their retreat? What happened to those who lived here?
There was no doubt of the tragedy of one middle-aged man. He stood forlornly in the street beside a huge bomb crater surrounded by heavy, jagged pieces of steel casing that lay at his feet. I am a policeman in Hama, he said. My father stayed behind. He was an old man. And on the day they left, the killers murdered him. They shot him at the back of his home. And he led me into his fathers blackened house and pushed open the door to a small, darkened closet. We found him there, on the floor, he said.
Other Syrian villagers, returning now that the Islamists had fled, told similar stories, of missing women, of bodies in the wreckage. Highways seem to survive wars, as if history insists that the basic geography of a society should remain mapped out amid the ruins for a villages later reconstruction. So on the main road, those who had fled the invaders last August had turned up in pick-up trucks and old cars to see what remained of their homes, to collect what detritus was left.
In the neighbouring village of Maardes, I found a woman and her daughter her name was Qamar, which means moon, and they had returned to a real moonscape. She and Qamar found part of a wardrobe and a mat carpet which they loaded pathetically onto a pick-up which a relative had brought up from Hama. In a different age, in 1982, the Muslim Brotherhood a pale ghost compared to the Islamists of today had staged a fearful insurrection in the city, put down with more than equal ferocity by Hafez al-Assads army all those years ago.
The statistics of those long dead civilians who had died in the governments reprisals are as slippery as todays death toll. Was it five or six thousand? Or 20,000 as we journalists claimed at the time?
Many of the ruins of Hamas old city were bulldozed away to make room for new apartment blocks and a luxury hotel. But a few ancient houses remain beside the ancient nouriah water wheels that still wail and creak away in this haunted city. Its Sunni Muslim citizens are quiet now. Maybe they have learned their terrible lesson. Or maybe the government learned to treat them with respect, leaving new generations with their new-found trade and wealth and schools. Today, its market packed with shoppers, it feels like a memory of the old, dubiously safe dictatorship that dominated Syria before this war; content, subdued, careful, aware to use an old British wartime maxim that careless talk costs lives. Brotherhood prisoners back in 1982 were later slaughtered in a prison massacre at Palmyra.
The Ibrahim mosque still displays a three-decade old shell hole in its minaret. But Nusra has not let the city forget its past. Less than a month ago, a suicide bomber set off a truck load of explosives outside the Baath party headquarters. One governor has been assassinated. Its a relief to drive north again to a wooded hillside whose burned trees and massive earth revetments show that it was an artillery position until a few days ago. Two 120mm guns stand on a parapet above the plain of Hama.
On top of the hill, there stands the almost untouched shrine of Ali Ibn Hussein al-Abdin, the fourth Imam who survived the seventh century battle of Kerbala, a Shiite holy place the Alawi sect to which the al-Assads belong is Shia and soldiers had arrived from the battlefront to pray and kiss the black marble shrine beneath its cupola of antiquity. A major later stood outside the courtyard and pointed to the horizon. You could see 30 perhaps 40 miles across the flat, featureless countryside where around 7,000 armed opponents of the Assad regime are still fighting to retake the lost villages and cut the desert military supply road to Aleppo. Are they all Nusra men? A few Isis members, no doubt. Perhaps they were the moderate rebels whom David Cameron, a former British prime minister seemingly invented.
And how long before the Syrian army could recapture all those lands which ran seventy miles to Aleppo and linked up to the Turkish border north of the city? The major looked across this vast expanse of territory. Then he pointed to the sky and opened his hands. The gesture said it all. Only God knows. | 0 |
OUT OF LEFT FIELD Gingrich slut-shames Megyn Kelly Adele M. Stan: Misogyny isn't just baked into the Trump brand, it is the Trump brand Published: 54 mins ago
(American Prospect) — When, as a campaign surrogate and once-powerful white man, you answer allegations that your candidate may be a sexual predator with a sex-laced attack on your female interviewer, you’re probably a misogynist. A desperate misogynist.
That’s what former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is looking like this morning.
During a Tuesday discussion of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s sinking poll numbers, Gingrich accused Fox News Channel host Megyn Kelly of being “fascinated with sex” when she dared to mention that Trump’s fortunes began falling after the now infamous Access Hollywood video, featuring Trump boasting about his self-proclaimed prerogative to sexually assault women, became public on October 7, and nearly a dozen women came forward to allege that Trump had either assaulted them or otherwise taken liberties with their bodies. | 0 |
Matter and antimatter, simultaneously. By BEC Crew
Almost 80 years ago, an Italian physicist proposed that a particle could exist as both matter and antimatter at the same time. Called the Majorana fermion, this mysterious state of matter set off a decades-long hunt, with scientists finding the first real evidence of its existence earlier this year .
And now physicists in China have discovered that an elusive type of quasiparticle can behave just like a Majorana fermion, and it could help us to finally understand this incredibly weird phenomenon.
If you’re not familiar with the Majorana fermion , it was first proposed by Italian theoretical physicist Ettore Majorana in 1937. He predicted that a type of particle called a fermion could act as its own antiparticle.
In the standard model of physics, every particle has an antiparticle. These antiparticles are usually an entirely separate particle, with the same mass but opposite charge of their partner.
Even electrically neutral particles have antiparticles, such as the neutron, which is made of quarks, and the antineutron, which is made of antiquarks.
In very rare cases, a particle with no mass and no charge can act as its own antiparticle, and we’ve only identified a few examples of these so far – photons (light particles), hypothetical gravitons , and WIMPs .
Majorana fermions, if they exist, fall into this final category, and if we can find them and harness them, it would change everything about how we record and process information in the next generation of quantum computers.
“The search for this particle is for condensed-matter physicists what the Higgs boson search was for high-energy particle physicists,” physicist Leonid Rokhinson from Purdue University noted back in 2012 . “It is a very peculiar object because it is a fermion yet it is its own antiparticle with zero mass and zero charge.”
Unlike regular computers that use bits of 0 and 1, quantum computers use quantum bits that can exist in a state of 0, 1, or a superposition of both.
The problem with building a computer out of quantum bits (or qubits) is that it’s incredibly difficult to make a record of what state they previously held once they’ve been switched, and there’s no point having a computer that can’t retain information.
But physicists think Majorana fermions could be the key to solving all of that.
“Information could be stored not in the individual particles, but in their relative configuration, so that if one particle is pushed a little by a local force, it doesn’t matter,” said Rokhinson .
“As long as that local noise is not so strong that it alters the overall configuration of a group of particles, the information is retained. It offers an entirely new way of dealing with information.”
In April this year, a team from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee discovered the first real proof of the existence of Majorana fermions in something called a quasiparticle.
Unlike a regular particle, which is a physical object that makes up an atom, a quasiparticle is an entity that has some characteristics of a distinct particle, but is made up of a grouping of multiple particles instead. Finding a Majorana fermion quasiparticle is one thing, but the real goal is finding a Majorana fermion particle.
Fast-forward to now, and physicists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences say they’ve identified another type of quasiparticle that behaves just like a Majorana fermion, called Majorana zero modes (MZMs).
The team was able to synthesise these quasiparticles inside a quantum simulation, and manipulate them in ways that would work within a quantum computer system. Most significantly, they showed that they could retain information encoded in their Majorana zero modes, even when errors and ‘noise’ were applied to the system.
“[W]e demonstrate the immunity of quantum information encoded in the Majorana zero modes against local errors through the simulator,” they describe in their paper, published in Nature Communications.
If the team’s simulation can be replicated in experimental conditions, it means we could have another candidate for Majorana fermion-like behaviours on our hands, and another shot at something to build the quantum computers of the future with.
In the meantime, here’s more on those elusive Majorana fermions:
Source: Science Alert
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PARIS (AP) — Police in the French Riviera city of Nice have arrested a man behaving strangely at an Easter Mass in a church not far from the promenade where a truck attack last year killed 86 people. [advertisement | 1 |
JERUSALEM — The two headlines told very different stories about Secretary of State John Kerry’s lengthy address about Middle East peace. In the view of the Jerusalem Post: “Kerry exits locked into failed assumptions. ” For the Haaretz: “A very Zionist, speech. ” As it turns out, the phenomenon is not unique to the United States. In Israel, the reaction to the events of recent days, including Mr. Kerry’s speech castigating the government’s policies and a United Nations resolution condemning Israeli settlements, made it clear that Israelis are just as polarized as Americans. To borrow an analogy, there is a blue, or more Israel that thought Mr. Kerry offered painful but necessary truths in the spirit of friendship that indicted the failed leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. And there is a red, or more conservative, Israel that thought the secretary of state was delusional and insulting, divorced from the harsh reality of the only real democracy in the Middle East struggling to preserve itself in a hostile neighborhood. Just as in the United States, many Israelis cling to their own facts, retreat to their own media outlets, advance their own narratives, and basically just talk with people who think like they do. The result is a politics that is almost as internally divided as the relationship with Palestinians is externally. “Either you’re in my group or the other group, my team or the other team,” said Abraham Diskin, an emeritus associate professor at Hebrew University and longtime student of Israeli society. “It’s a universal phenomenon. Always the other team is to be blamed. ” The divide seems to have grown in recent years. At Shabbat dinners in more leftist homes, where many disapprove of the occupation of the West Bank and the construction of settlements, the talk sometimes turns to when it will all prove too much, when it might be time to finally leave Israel for the United States, Canada or Europe. In more rightist homes, frustration grows at Palestinian violence, at European haughtiness and now at what is seen as an American betrayal, all fueled by a suspicion that lies at the core of these acts. A people split over issues so fundamental to their nation is one that has also turned away from a solution once pursued so adamantly. While a majority of Israelis still support the creation of a Palestinian state as part of a solution, there is despair among many that it will ever happen — and plenty of disenchantment among others who now conclude that it should not. The idea of two states side by side was at the heart of the Oslo peace accords signed in the 1990s, and it was the core of the various agreements that President Obama and his two most recent predecessors, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, tried to broker. It was the centerpiece of deals offered by prime ministers like Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert, only to be rejected by Palestinian leaders, who had their own internal divisions to worry about. But now the idea has soured, like hummus left in the sun too long. Mr. Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, both still formally support the concept, but each defines it differently and neither seems to consider it realistic anytime soon. The election of Donald J. Trump means there will no longer be a strong advocate for this approach in the White House. A survey last summer by the Israel Democracy Institute and the Palestinian Center for Polling and Survey Research pointed to the broader schism in Israeli society. Fully 88 percent of those on the left supported a hypothetical agreement. But such a deal drew the support of just 10 percent on the right. It was backed by 59 percent in the political center. That disparity helps explain why Mr. Netanyahu has repeatedly failed to forge a coalition government with the opposition leader Yitzhak Herzog, chairman of the Zionist Union. Israel had multiple governments through the 1980s, but the prospect today seems remote. Instead, when Mr. Netanyahu needs to shore up his coalition, he tacks to the right, as he did this year by bringing in Avigdor Lieberman as defense minister. But it is easy to go overboard in this analysis, and to the extent there are different camps with different narratives, they are not necessarily equal or equivalent. Asher Cohen, a professor at University who has specialized in Israeli culture, noted that there was a large political center in Israel, its size increasing at the expense of the shrinking left. And some of Mr. Kerry’s points, especially making East Jerusalem the capital of a Palestinian state, rankle Israelis across ideological lines, he said. “Even if Kerry’s remarks were close to their own views, centrists and leftists did not appreciate the of the speech and the asymmetry in the blame assigned to Israel and to the Palestinians,” Mr. Cohen said. Still, Israel is undergoing significant demographic changes that are fraying the idea of a common Israeli identity. Jerusalem feels increasingly religious and traditional, quiet during Shabbat when stores and businesses close each week, while Tel Aviv is a bustling, sophisticated center of nightclubs, art galleries and . Different sectors in Israeli society have their own neighborhoods, their own community centers, even their own newspapers. There are also separate school systems, one for each of the major sectors. “Israel is increasingly polarized into different groups that have little to do with one another, despite its tight geography,” said Robert Danin, a former State Department official who worked on Middle East issues. President Reuven Rivlin highlighted the changing Israeli society in a speech last year. Many Israelis, he said, still think of their country as consisting of a large secular Zionist majority with three minority groups: Arabs, Jews and a national religious community more akin to Modern Orthodox in American terms. But today, he noted, “the reality has totally changed. ” He noted that about 38 percent of classes in Israel were secular Jews while about a quarter were Arabs, close to a quarter were and about 15 percent were national religious. “The demographic processes that are restructuring or redesigning the shape of Israeli society have, in fact, created a new Israeli order — a reality in which there is no longer a clear majority, nor clear minority groups,” Mr. Rivlin said, just “tribes,” as he called them. A study by the Pew Research Center this year showed that Israeli Jews live within their own separate worlds. Most secular Israeli Jews thought democratic principles should take precedence over Jewish law on questions like marriage, while most Jews thought the other way around. Roughly a third of those surveyed thought settlements hurt Israeli security, another third thought they helped and the rest said they made no difference. Amid this division is an uncertain future. Mr. Rivlin has urged bridging the gaps and bringing Israelis together. That did not happen in 2016. So when Mr. Rivlin offered his annual New Year’s message on Thursday, his optimism was tempered. He hoped 2017 would be known as the “year of mutual respect. ” | 1 |
Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Sen. Rand Paul ( ) said President Donald Trump has been “fed a bill of goods” by House leadership on the proposed House Republican health care legislation to repeal and replace Obamacare. Paul said, “You know, I think that he has been told things by House leadership that frankly just are not accurate. He’s been told this is the only vehicle, and Paul Ryan’s been saying it for weeks, ‘it’s a binary choice, you either take it, it’s my way or the highway,’ I think he’s been fed a bill of goods on this thing, and I do believe that there’s something that could pass, that actually would bring down insurance costs, but this bill doesn’t do it. I’ve fought against Obamacare for six years, I am a physician and I want to repeal it, but I don’t want to repeal it and replace it with something that just as bad or doesn’t work. ( Grabien) Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN | 1 |
When Dan Diamond was 12, his mother gave him a book titled “It All Begins With a Date: Jewish Concerns About Intermarriage. ” At the time, it seemed a bizarre gift for someone so young, but its aim was clear. Mr. Diamond was expected to marry a Jewish woman one day and raise Jewish children, a view his mother later reinforced, he said, by asking the religion of every girl he dated. Then, in November 2012, Mr. Diamond, a psychotherapist, met Ashley Mask, a doctoral student researching art museum education. At that time, Ms. Mask had started to reconnect with her Presbyterian upbringing. But after falling in love with Mr. Diamond, she agreed, should they marry, to raise their future children as Jewish. “I had this naïve sense that since we had the same creation story, it wouldn’t be hard,” said Ms. Mask, 38. But it was. As the relationship progressed, she feared abandoning important holiday traditions. At synagogue services, she said, she felt lost. She worried she would always be an outsider. Interfaith couples represent a swiftly rising demographic. Before 1960, only 19 percent of American married couples were of two different religions, according to a 2015 study by the Pew Research Center. Today, it’s nearly 40 percent. As a result, there are a number of new programs providing support to these couples. Given that a 2013 Pew study reported that since 2000, 72 percent of Jews have married outside their faith, it is not surprising that many of the resources are sponsored by Jewish organizations. “There’s a deep fear in the Jewish community about losing Jews, about assimilation,” Mr. Diamond said. He and Ms. Mask chose to work through some of their issues by signing on with Honeymoon Israel, an organization in Buffalo that offers interfaith partners, including gay and lesbian couples, subsidized trips to Israel. The trips cost $1, 800 a couple — or about 20 percent of the total cost — with the remainder picked up by a Jewish family foundation in Boston (which prefers to be unnamed) as well as by Jewish organizations in the cities where Honeymoon Israel operates. Once in Israel, the couples, who are organized into groups of 20, are encouraged to explore Jewish culture and religion. They stay in upscale hotels, lounge by the Mediterranean and visit Jewish, Christian and Muslim historic sites. They also bond with their fellow travelers, other committed couples also struggling to figure out what role religion should play in their marriages, their homes and in the lives of their future children. “The train has left the station,” said Avi Rubel, a founder of Honeymoon Israel, which expects to send 360 couples this year. Mr. Rubel said the program has no political or religious agenda. “We don’t care what you believe in,” he said. “You married into our family, so you’re in our family. We want couples to explore the issues on their own terms. We’re not trying to dictate how anybody feels about being Jewish or about Israel. ” Ms. Mask and Mr. Diamond went to Israel in February, three months after their wedding, with the first group organized out of New York City. Ms. Mask was especially relieved to meet so many other Christians in her situation. “It helped address this fear that I will lose part of my identity,” she said. For Mr. Diamond, the trip “was all about an to the idea that there are many kinds of Jewish families,” he said. “That’s not something I’ve been exposed to most of my life: a celebration instead of a grudging acceptance. ” Seth Preminger, 31, and Tracy Lyons, 30, each assumed they would marry within their own faiths. Dr. Preminger, a child and adolescent psychologist in Chicago who was raised Jewish, and Dr. Lyons, a pediatrician in Chicago who was raised Catholic, met in July 2011. “As a little girl, the only thing I’d ever planned for my wedding was what church I’d get married in and what church music I’d have,” Dr. Lyons said. Neither realized how stressful planning an interfaith wedding would be. The Catholic clergyman who agreed to be an officiant wanted to marry them in a church, but that made Dr. Preminger uncomfortable. It was difficult to find a rabbi willing to be part of a joint ceremony. After much searching with Google, they found the Interfaith Family School in Chicago, run by Catholics and Jews. The school, which offers a curriculum for children whose families consider themselves “both,” and which also has a couple’s counseling group, invited Dr. Lyons and Dr. Preminger to attend a student presentation. “It was really exciting for us to hear these kids talk about growing up in an environment that supports both faiths, especially as we were planning our wedding,” Dr. Lyons said. “They help you explain the different traditions to extended family. ” Dr. Preminger said their wedding in May 2015 at the Kenmare Loft, a former factory in Chicago, raised a few eyebrows, but everyone eventually came around. Another organization, InterfaithFamily, which is overseen by rabbis, demonstrates the ripple effect of this new attitude. The nonprofit started as a website, interfaithfamily. com, to help couples plan interfaith weddings and find rabbis willing to jointly officiate ceremonies. Within the last five years, the organization has opened offices in eight cities, where the group hosts couples discussion groups, religious services and social events. “Couples need safe spaces to be with others just like them,” said Rabbi Ari Moffic, who heads the Chicago branch. “If you Google ‘interfaith marriage,’ you’ll still find negative headlines. ” “The American Jewish community sees this as a public concern for Jews at large,” said Helen Kim, an associate professor of sociology at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash. “They want to mobilize the larger community. ” Dr. Kim is a who was raised without religion and adopted Judaism after marrying Noah Leavitt, an associate dean at Whitman. The couple recently wrote a book, “JewAsian: Race, Religion, and Identity for America’s Newest Jews. ” There are no hard statistics, but Dr. Kim, who said she has noticed a rise in marriages, has also found that Asians in the United States, who are mostly Christian, aren’t concerned about “dilution of the population” the way Jews are. On balance, there are fewer resources for couples seeking a more equitable arrangement. Many organizations “say they’re friends of interfaith, but they have a tiny asterisk that says, ‘We want you to have a Jewish home,’” said Eileen O’Farrell Smith, the founder and director of the Interfaith Union, which holds workshops for and couples in Chicago. In New York, a group called Interfaith Community runs couples workshops, private counseling sessions and an elementary school curriculum that teaches the fundamentals of Judaism and Christianity for interfaith families. “In this multicultural, global, diverse world, where people are bringing many differences into a family, the old War II paradigm, where you married the boy next door and everyone went to the same church, has completely changed,” said Sheila Gordon, the group’s president. Some 100 children are enrolled in Interfaith Community’s educational programs, Dr. Gordon said, but the number of couples in the premarital workshops has declined, even as the percentage of interfaith marriages has increased. At least for younger couples, “the millennial ethos of fairness and respect means they don’t feel threatened by entering into this kind of partnership,” she said. So these couples do not think workshops are necessary. And yet, such programs can be vital for some couples, who do face challenges in joining different faiths. “It helps to know other people in the same boat,” said Kamran Khan, a Muslim who joined Ms. O’Farrell Smith’s group with his Christian fiancée, Corinne Atty. Their wedding, planned for September in Chicago, has caused a rift, with Mr. Khan’s parents disapproving of his relationship and refusing to talk about it or to attend the wedding. But Mr. Khan wants to discuss the difficult questions with Ms. Atty now, “instead of seven years from now,” he said. Being a part of the group at Interfaith Union, he added, has given him a sense of pride about creating a different kind of family. “We can blaze a trail for others,” Mr. Khan said. “We’re at the forefront of something. ” | 1 |
NASA have left members of the public scratching their heads after claiming that they were about to make an imminent ‘amazing’ announcement regarding their New Horizons mission to the tiny ice planet of Pluto, before promptly denying that they had ever intended to make an announcement at all.
Via UsualRoutine
Only around 10% of all available data gathered together by the New Horizons mission has been processed by NASA so far. However, what they had found in this relatively short space of time was enough for Dr. Alan Stern, a senior scientist leading the New Horizons mission, to publicly express his excitement at what they had discovered.
He claimed that NASA had news for the public that would amaze them and described the micro planet as being ‘alive’. He said that NASA had forbidden him from speaking publicly about the so-called ‘news’ before they made their official press conference but he did tell an audience assembled for a university lecture that Pluto.
Scroll Down For Video Below! Has weather, it has hazes in the atmosphere, active geology. Every week, I am floored. The world is alive.
The cryptic nature of Dr. Stern’s speech on what the New Horizons mission had discovered had led some to eagerly anticipate the expected announcement. There was great speculation about what NASA was about to announce, with some believing that they might have even discovered life in the smallest planet in this solar system.
However, to their immense disappointment, NASA have now released a tweet on their official New Horizons account saying that there will be no announcement. They claimed that the story of a conference was nothing more than a false rumour and that Dr. Stern’s had been totally misinterpreted. This is despite the fact that Dr. Stern explicitly said that NASA would be making an amazing announcement, which leaves little room for interpretation mistakes.
Now, people are beginning to wonder what the space agency are trying to hide from the general public.
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NEW ORLEANS — An illegal immigrant once in federal custody but was released is now accused of raping and murdering a New Orleans mother in her home. [Irwin a illegal immigrant from Honduras, is facing murder charges after he allegedly raped, strangled, and stabbed Nancy Yahaira Gonzalez Rodriguez to death, according to . Before 2015, was arrested by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency in Texas for being in the U. S. illegally. However, ’s case was dismissed. Then, in April 2015, was arrested by the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) and charged with allegedly kidnapping, raping, and strangling a woman. The charges against though, were later dropped because of inconsistencies in the statements by the alleged victim, according to the district attorney. In that case, was allegedly friends with the victim when he entered her home. After speaking for about 30 minutes, said he was going to use the bathroom, but when he came back, he had a knife and forced the victim into a bedroom where he allegedly raped and strangled her. Now, is accused of murdering Gonzalez Rodriguez, whom police say he raped, strangled, and stabbed more than 20 times. When the victim was found, her son was sitting next to her crying. Under ICE’s newest enforcement policies in accordance with Trump administration’s crackdown, the agency places a ‘detainer’ on any illegal immigrant who is arrested by authorities. The detainer alerts local and state police that the arrested suspect is an illegal immigrant and must be turned over to ICE before being released from custody. But, in 2015, under the Obama administration’s lax enforcement of immigration, ICE only placed detainers on illegal immigrants who were convicted of a crime. This, according to ICE, is why there was no alert to the NOPD back in 2015 that was an illegal immigrant when he was arrested and charged for the rape and strangulation of his alleged previous victim. ICE does have a detainer on now. If for any reason the illegal immigrant is let out of New Orleans officials’ custody, he will be handed over to ICE for deportation. John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart Texas. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder. | 1 |
Share This: BY NILE BOWIE T he outcome of strangest and most consequential election cycle in recent American history will soon be upon us. Regardless of who becomes the next president, this election will forever be synonymous with the rogue candidacy of Donald Trump and the demographic shifts that have emboldened the right. Though it may be a close election, it is widely presumed that public antipathy towards Trump – the first major party candidate who is near-universally opposed by both major parties – will tilt the odds in Hillary Clinton’s favour. Nonetheless, Trump’s support base of primarily white, blue-collar Americans will be a major factor for the political establishment to contend with in the years ahead. These voters are frustrated by their economic marginalisation wrought by neoliberal trade deals and economic policies and are contemptuous of traditional political elite, their internationalism and liberal identity politics. For these voters, fear of immigration is entwined with the precarity of being working class, their troubling prejudices notwithstanding. Economic disempowerment and political disenfranchisement have accelerated under President Obama, to the detriment of the American middle class. White, blue-collar Americans have witnessed the offshoring of their jobs and the erosion of their status in society, and Trump has masterfully stroked their resentment and discontent by playing on their fears of Muslims, immigrants and minorities. Trump’s views often contain unusual contradictions and seem to be delivered impromptu. What remains consistent are his authoritarian views on crime and justice, vows to close the borders to refugees, Muslims and economic migrants, scepticism of overseas ‘democracy promotion’ and America’s role in international alliances, foreign policy views both isolationist and belligerent and of course, his distinctive megalomaniacal hubris. Trump’s real problem with the Washington establishment is that he isn’t part of it. His campaign represents an insurgent faction of the oligarchical class that aims to displace and replace the standing political elites. Bipartisan opposition to Trump is grounded in the belief that he would be an unreliable proxy and a liability, someone too narrow and unpredictable to manage the common affairs of the ruling class and the US deep state. Moreover, the US establishment is not interested in being led by such a contentious figure, who would draw protest and public opposition in a way that more conventional establishment candidates largely do not. For example, Trump’s rhetoric on immigration seems to engender more public outrage than the immigration policy under Obama, who has deported more people than any other president in history. That being said, Hillary Clinton is a more dangerous candidate in many ways. Trump understands that the political system is rigged and the economy is oriented to serve various elite interests, a message that resonates across the political spectrum, even with anti-Trump segments of the electorate. As a hated political outsider not tied directly into the power and the money structure of the political system, there would be no shortage of gridlock and checks on the authority wielded by Trump in the unlikely event that he becomes president. By contrast, Clinton wields enormous political influence inside the corridors of political and corporate power through personal relationships and connections. Policy and legislation shaped by donor money, lobbyist groups and special interests have been a hallmark of the Clintons’ time in public office. The very fact that she is standing for office while being investigated by the FBI, having committed actions that would have ended the careers of other politicians and government employees, speaks for itself. It has been reported by various sources that the FBI’s recent decision to reopen the investigation into the Clinton email scandal less than two weeks before election day has been motivated by an internal backlash within the agency’s rank and file, forcing FBI director James Comey’s hand as a means of addressing internal critics who believe he buried the Clinton probe for political reasons. Clinton’s email scandal is not the real issue. She has spent her political career ruthlessly advancing the interests of high finance, the military industrial complex and corporate America, with dramatic repercussions for minorities and the marginalised inside the United States, and the civilian populations of countries targeted for US military intervention and destabilization during the her time as an influential first lady, senator and secretary of state. Clinton has spent her long career advocating hawkish US military supremacy and banking deregulation, expanding the private prison industry to the detriment of impoverished African-American communities, dismantling the social safety net that marginalised families rely on, and enabling the consolidation of corporate power through secretive trade agreements. On the campaign trail, she has characterised her work as advancing the interests of women and families. Rather than addressing the political substance of revelations uncovered by WikiLeaks, the Clinton campaign, backed by Obama administration officials, has reverted to neo-McCarthyism by labelling opposition voices as surrogates of Russia, explicitly accusing Moscow of meddling in the US election process. The Clinton campaign has repeatedly evoked the historic struggle for civil rights and aspirational rhetoric of ‘breaking glass ceilings’ in the interest of a faux-feminism which prioritizes the equal opportunities of women to lead the nation’s highest office, while at once tone-deaf to the consequences faced by women and families on the receiving end of executive policies. The Democratic Party has become a parody of moral posturing, self-relishing its candidates with rhetoric that has no connection with policies in reality. It is the party of establishment insiders and corporate donors who openly engineer the presidential nomination process to favour their preferred candidate by virtue of the undemocratic super-delegate system. Bernie Sanders, whose campaign inspired millions of Americans for good reason, has proven himself to be tepid and cowardly in the face of practices that have proven beyond doubt that the Democratic Party establishment conspired against him. Bernie’s campaign centred around a rather modest, comparatively tame centre-left progressive platform that did not seriously question US militarism and the values of American exceptionalism. For the Democratic Party at large, the Sanders campaign represented a concession too far. The Clinton campaign even had the impudence to directly hire disgraced Democratic chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz after leaked emails exposed her partisanship. Rather than addressing the political substance of revelations uncovered by WikiLeaks, the Clinton campaign, backed by Obama administration officials, has reverted to neo-McCarthyism by labelling opposition voices as surrogates of Russia, explicitly accusing Moscow of meddling in the US election process. Accusations of Russian interference without accompanying evidence are at best a short-sighted means of deflecting responsibility for the corrupt actions of the Clinton campaign and Democratic Party insiders. The next American president will have to confront the realities of strained relations with Russia. Clinton is known for her public enmity toward Russian President Vladimir Putin and would at best perpetuate the status quo of mutual distrust and limited cooperation. At worst, her policies could risk a military confrontation with Russia should she pursue the establishment of a no-fly zone over Syrian airspace, which she publically advocated during the presidential debates. Trump is the most prominent American political figure to advocate détente with Russia, openly breaking with his neoconservative running mate Mike Pence. Trump has criticised Clinton for supporting anti-government insurgents in Syria and called for jointly targeting ISIS with the Russian, and by extension, Syrian militaries. Trump, being very critical of Iran, also signalled he was willing to fight against ISIS on the same side as Tehran. He has also offered support for the establishment of a safe zone inside Syrian territory, potentially in cooperation with the Syrian government and its allies. Both candidates would pursue a different policy approach from the incumbent administration in Syria, but Clinton’s no-fly zone holds greater potential to deepen military hostilities between major powers. Clinton has generally been critical of Obama’s foreign policy in Syria and elsewhere for not asserting US power strongly enough. Despite the differences in style and demeanour, the range of policies offered by the entrenched two-party system is limited to varying shades of centre- to far-right. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are the least trusted and most unpopular presidential candidates in modern history. Despite the public disillusionment with major party candidates, it remains to be seen whether American voters will cast ballots for third parties such as the Libertarian Party or Green Party, which are seeking to garner 5 percent of the popular vote to become eligible to receive public campaign funding. More likely than not, American voters will cast their ballots ‘against’ Trump by voting for Clinton and vice versa, fueling the cyclical politics of the lesser evil that have been a feature of American presidential elections for decades. More than any other US election in recent history, the candidates represent the rot of an American political establishment marred by scandal, hypocrisy and the relentless pursuit of hegemony. To advocate one over the other is ultimately defeatist. NOTE: ALL IMAGE CAPTIONS, PULL QUOTES AND COMMENTARY BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS PLEASE COMMENT AND DEBATE DIRECTLY ON OUR FACEBOOK GROUP CLICK HERE ABOUT THE AUTHOR Nile Bowie is a columnist with Russia Today (RT) and a research assistant with the International Movement for a Just World (JUST), an NGO based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Note to Commenters Due to severe hacking attacks in the recent past that brought our site down for up to 11 days with considerable loss of circulation, we exercise extreme caution in the comments we publish, as the comment box has been one of the main arteries to inject malicious code. Because of that comments may not appear immediately, but rest assured that if you are a legitimate commenter your opinion will be published within 24 hours. If your comment fails to appear, and you wish to reach us directly, send us a mail at: [email protected]
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BEIJING — For years, the United States and others have pressed China’s leaders to suspend imports of coal from North Korea to push the reclusive state to abandon its nuclear weapons program. For years, the Chinese leadership resisted — until Saturday, when it suddenly announced in a terse statement that it would do just that. But if Beijing was sending a message to North Korea, it was also directing one at President Trump, who has complained that China was not putting enough pressure on North Korea. Now President Xi Jinping of China has essentially said: We have done our part in enforcing sanctions. Over to you, Mr. Trump. The challenge comes at a tantalizing moment. For weeks now, plans have been afoot for a North Korean government delegation to meet in New York in early March with a group of former United States officials who have long been involved in North Korea policy. Will the Trump administration issue visas to the North Koreans, a move that would suggest the new president is interested at least in hearing from Pyongyang through informal channels? There have been indications that Mr. Trump was willing to take a quite different tack from President Barack Obama. During his campaign, Mr. Trump said he was interested in sharing a hamburger with the leader of North Korea, Kim . He seemed to suggest he had a smidgen of respect for, or at least curiosity about, the maverick leader, the most recent incarnation of a longstanding dynasty. Mr. Trump’s response to the recent North Korean missile test was restrained, perhaps the result of Mr. Obama’s warning after the November election that North Korea would be the incoming president’s most dangerous foreign policy challenge. “If the visas are issued, it will be a clear message that the Trump administration is prepared to go the extra mile and engage North Korea,” said Evans J. R. Revere, a former principal deputy assistant secretary of state. There should be little expectation, he warned, of any policy shift by the North, which has shown every indication of wanting to continue building its nuclear program. The planned meeting, sponsored by the National Committee on American Foreign Policy, headed by Donald S. Zagoria, falls far short of talks between the two governments and has been designed as an initial sounding board. “I have been organizing such meetings with the North Koreans since 2003, and our goal is to increase mutual understanding as well as to encourage the kind of frank dialogue that may not be possible in official talks,” Mr. Zagoria said. The gathering would be the first of its type in New York in five years because the Obama administration opposed holding even informal talks on American soil given North Korea’s expansion of its nuclear weapons program. That North Korea is holding two Americans hostage was another impediment. Meetings with North Korean officials arranged by Mr. Zagoria and other groups were held in world capitals during the Obama era, including Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Berlin last year. The decision whether to allow the meeting to proceed in New York is now freighted with more than the usual complications. Over the last 10 days, North Korea has shown its full colors. First, the regime flaunted its expanding nuclear capabilities with the test of an ballistic missile that uses a technology that will make it easier for the country to hide its arsenal. Then, last week, Kim the half brother of the North Korean leader, was assassinated in Malaysia in a crowded passenger terminal at Kuala Lumpur International Airport. The South Korean government has publicly accused North Korea of the killing, and six North Koreans have been linked to the plot. Without these two incidents, the Trump administration could have won praise for breaking the logjam with North Korea by allowing the New York meeting to go ahead, said a former participant in such meetings who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the topic. But the assassination of Kim would allow opponents of North Korean engagement to charge that granting visas only rewarded bad behavior, the person said. Soon after the killing, Republican and Democratic members of Congress called for the United States to return North Korea to its blacklist of states that sponsor terrorism, from which it was removed nine years ago. The Trump administration faces another, perhaps more profound, decision on how to handle North Korea. Annual joint military exercises, set for March between South Korea and the United States, are expected to involve an American aircraft carrier, advanced stealth fighters, and bombers and a nuclear submarine, according to South Korean news reports. This annual show of force, not far from the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea and off the Korean coast, has traditionally been viewed by North Korea as an American preparation for an attack against its forces. With the heightened tensions on the Korean Peninsula, and Korean relations at a low point, the risk of a strong response by the North to the exercises — through the launch of missiles or a nuclear test — is higher than usual, said Peter Hayes, the executive director of the Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability in Berkeley, Calif. Last year, for example, the North conducted its fifth nuclear test during joint Korean military exercises. “We are likely entering a new and extremely dangerous phase of the Korean conflict,” Mr. Hayes said. He suggested ramping down the exercises to “avoid inadvertent clashes and escalation to nuclear war, and to probe North Korean intentions. ” China would like the Trump administration to deal directly with North Korea. Beijing’s suspension of coal imports from North Korea was a signal that China was being tougher than usual, offering Mr. Trump a concession to bring Washington to the table with the North. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has stepped up his contacts with Chinese officials in recent days. On Tuesday he spoke by telephone with Yang Jiechi, China’s top diplomat, and among the topics they discussed was how to handle North Korea. But how much impact a suspension of coal imports would have on the rudimentary and seemingly resilient North Korean economy was far from clear. The Foreign Ministry insisted Tuesday that the suspension of coal imports was a bureaucratic procedure. In the first six weeks of 2017 China had already imported almost all its annual quota of coal allowed under the United Nations sanctions, the ministry said. Zhang Liangui, an expert on North Korea at the Central Party School of the Communist Party, said he was not optimistic that any talks with North Korea, formal or informal, would result in a diminishing of the North’s nuclear capabilities. “North Korea has said more than 50 times that it will not participate in any talks that have denuclearization on the agenda,” he said. “I don’t think President Trump could pull this off and talk the Koreans out of it. ” | 1 |
A fiercely contested battle among United States airlines to be the first to schedule flights to Havana, Cuba’s capital, in more than 50 years is coming to a close. Eight carriers — most with flights departing from the Miami and New York metropolitan areas — received tentative approval from the Transportation Department on Thursday to operate direct flights to José Martí International Airport in Havana. Twelve airlines had submitted requests for a combination of 60 flights a day, but only 20 daily routes were available under an arrangement between the governments. The decision was made a year after the United States and Cuba diplomatic relations. The United States Department of Transportation announced last month that it had approved routes to nine other Cuban cities, but it delayed authorizing the Havana routes because of competition among the major airlines. The department awarded the routes to serve markets with substantial populations and crucial aviation hub cities. Among the winners was American Airlines, which will operate five direct flights to Havana, four flights from Miami and one from Charlotte, N. C. American, which was approved for more flights than any other airline, had operated charter flights to Cuba for 25 years. “American has a rich history in the Cuban market, and we are excited to continue to be the leader in providing air service between the United States and Cuba,” Andrew Nocella, American’s chief marketing officer, said in a statement. Alaska Airlines is the only carrier that will fly to Havana directly from the West Coast. It will operate a flight from Los Angeles. While American tourism to Cuba is still technically prohibited, the federal government in March relaxed travel restrictions to allow “people to people” educational trips without special permission from the government. Those trips must fall under one of 12 categories, like visiting family members or for humanitarian projects. About 3. 5 million people worldwide visited Cuba last year, according to state news media, and the number is expected to increase sharply as scheduled flights from the United States resume for the first time in 50 years. At the same time, Cuba’s private and state businesses are straining to accommodate the influx of travelers. “Where are all of these people going to stay?” said John S. Kavulich, president of the U. S. Trade and Economic Council. “Cuba won’t have the hotel rooms for these people. The interest may be there, but the ability to provide them with rooms won’t be. ” Six direct flights will be offered from Miami each day, and three flights from the New York metropolitan area. Delta Air Lines and JetBlue Airways will each offer a daily flight from Kennedy International Airport, and United won a route from Newark Liberty International Airport. Other flights originate from Fort Lauderdale and Tampa, Fla. and Atlanta and Houston. Spirit Airlines and Southwest Airlines also won routes. Applications from four small airlines, Silver Airways, Dynamic International Airways, Eastern Air Lines and Sun Country Airlines, were not approved. “There will be comments and there will be appeals,” Mr. Kavulich said. “It’s likely there will be adjustments to the routes. ” The airlines and other stakeholders have until July 22 to submit formal objections to the routes, and the Transportation Department plans to complete its decisions this summer. The first flights are expected to take off as early as September. | 1 |
At Planned Parenthood’s centennial gala this week, Hillary Clinton cited feminist novel The Handmaid’s Tale to urge supporters of the abortion chain not to relinquish the right to abortion, but — as it turns out — the Democrat Party has succumbed and abandoned many of its principles to become the “handmaid” of the abortion industry. [Planned Parenthood awarded the former Democratic Party presidential nominee its “champion of the century” award in New York City Tuesday evening as the organization held yet another celebration of its centennial anniversary. The Hollywood Reporter noted that, in her remarks at the event, Clinton cited Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian feminist novel, The Handmaid’s Tale. A new television production of the novel — about a totalitarian theocracy that forces women to procreate — can be seen courtesy of Hulu. “To paraphrase Margaret Atwood, ‘We can never let them grind us down,’” Clinton said. “In The Handmaid’s Tale, women’s rights are gradually, slowly stripped away. As one character says, ‘We didn’t look up from our phones until it was too late. ’” “It is not too late for us,” Clinton added. “But we have to encourage the millions of women and men who support Planned Parenthood to keep fighting. ” Democratic National Committee (DNC) chairman Tom Perez also recently announced that his party’s commitment to abortion is “not negotiable,” and that the Democrat Party would exclude candidates for office. Perez’s autocratic remarks came after abortion lobbying group NARAL America slammed the DNC for its embrace of Heath Mello, an Omaha mayoral Democratic candidate who had previously voted as a state lawmaker with his conscience. “The actions today by the DNC to embrace and support a candidate for office who will strip women — one of the most critical constituencies for the party — of our basic rights and freedom is not only disappointing, it is politically stupid,” fumed NARAL’s president, Ilyse Hogue. In the wake of Perez’s comments, many Democrats have attempted to correct the optic of their party’s subservience to the abortion industry. While the party has attempted to portray itself as built upon morally upright virtues — such as diversity and inclusiveness — Perez’s statement clearly indicates the opposite. Democrats are now “newly divided … as they attempt to decide who they will welcome, and who they will exclude, amid soul searching over how the party should rebuild after its 2016 loss,” observes Clare Foran at the Atlantic, who interviewed Democrats such as Sens. Claire McCaskill (MO) and Joe Donnelly (IN) who objected to Perez’s exclusion of candidates. In a column at Jesuit magazine America, Robert David Sullivan also observed, “Abortion is proving that the Democratic Party can outdo Republicans in . ” The author continued: Abortion is now the single issue defining the Democrats, and Ilyse Hogue, the president of NARAL America, is the de facto head of the party. This gives the Republicans a major advantage in holding off electoral losses if the Trump administration continues to founder. Realizing the potential threat of a divide in a party that is already struggling, individuals such as Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards are attempting to smooth over the perhaps harsh reality that the abortion industry is running the Democratic Party. Richards appeared with MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace this week, reports Newsbusters’ Katie Yoder. “Is it difficult right now to be a Democrat?” Wallace asked Richards. “Do you guys make it difficult?” “Oh, I don’t think so,” she replied. “Abortion is one of these issues that it is — I think shouldn’t be politicized. ” Yoder notes, of course, that Planned Parenthood donated $38 million to Clinton’s campaign. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi — known for simultaneously touting her Catholic faith and her views — also tried to soften Perez’s dictum that all Democrats must promote abortion. “This is the Democratic Party. This is not a party,” she told the Washington Post, in response to a question about Perez’s exclusive statement. Pelosi, however, also acknowledged her doubt whether, at this point in time, a true candidate could ever win a Democratic presidential primary. She suggested, in fact, Democrats lost in the 2016 election races because their positions on social issues did not appeal to average Americans who ended up voting for Donald Trump. “You know what? That’s why Donald Trump is president of the United States — the evangelicals and the Catholics, equality, . That’s how he got to be president,” she said. “Everything was trumped, literally and figuratively by that. ” The Post’s Karen Tumulty, however, reports Pelosi’s comment again drew the wrath of NARAL’s Hogue. “Encouraging and supporting candidates leads to bad policy outcomes that violate women’s rights and endanger our economic security,” Hogue reportedly said in an email. Stephanie Schriock, the president of Democrat super PAC EMILY’s List, also reasserted the importance of abortion as a major issue for Democrats at her abortion lobbying group’s gala event this week. “They want us arguing about whether we’re a party focused on elevating diverse voices or a party focused on appealing to the white working class,” Schriock said, reports Roll Call. “And, from what I can tell, a lot of people in the Democratic Party are happy to have that argument. Well, I’m not one of them. ” “I don’t buy the argument that Democrats have to decide whether we’re a party of white men in rural America or a party of women in the big cities, a party of immigrants or a party of feminists,” Schriock said. “Democrats should be the party of working people. But we shouldn’t make the mistake of equating ‘working people’ with ‘white men. ’” At the Planned Parenthood event, Clinton — using the common euphemism “reproductive health care” — said about abortion, “[A]nyone who wants to lead should also understand that fundamentally, this is an issue of morality. ” The abortion industry appears to have succeeded at turning its “handmaid,” the former party of the “working class,” into one whose most cherished goal is ensuring women can end their pregnancies as they demand. Neither Perez nor the DNC responded to Breitbart News’s request for comment. | 1 |
On an overcast Friday morning last January, longshoremen all over New York Harbor walked off the docks, bringing the port nearly to a stop for a day. What were the longshoremen’s grievances? What were their demands? Many of the men seemed not to know. They hung around the food trucks and milled about the parking lots, unsure why they had stopped working and unsure what it would take for work to resume. “No one knew what that was about,” one recalled recently. A year later, the reason for the strike remains unclear, even as the agency tasked with ridding the waterfront of organized crime, the Waterfront Commission, has questioned dozens of longshoremen under oath. One told the commission he learned of the strike early that morning, when it was too dark to see the face of the man giving the order. It could have been anyone. It was the old D D — Deaf and Dumb, the classic longshoreman’s response, popularized in the 1954 film “On the Waterfront. ” In that movie, the longshoremen were reluctant, even frightened, to talk to the authorities, whether a priest or a detective, because the mob controlled the waterfront. In the years since, much has changed around New York Harbor the heavy lifting is done not by hand but by cranes, and human voices are scarcely heard amid the beeping of the straddle carriers, giant insectlike machines that move containers back and forth. But even as New York and New Jersey’s increasingly valuable shoreline is claimed by luxury development, investigators say the mob is still present. It is where the daughter of one of the mobsters made famous in the 1997 film “Donnie Brasco” is up for a job where the nephew of another famous mobster pulled down more than $400, 000 in a single year because he was almost never off the clock, not even when he was at home sleeping where three consecutive presidents of a Newark longshoremen’s union were convicted of extortion. There is physical evidence as well, like the $51, 900 wrapped in cellophane that was discovered buried in the backyard of a longshoreman. It was, according to federal agents in a 2010 affidavit, the tribute that a group of Newark longshoremen paid the Genovese crime family each Christmas. “You will need another generation or two to get the mob out of this port, because they are very well entrenched,” said one longshoreman who requested anonymity because of a concern for his safety and his livelihood. Those who step out of line, he said, face being reassigned from jobs unloading container ships to the cruise ship terminals, where the work and the pay is far less. While investigators say the mob and the waterfront remain entwined, both institutions are much diminished today, pushed to the margins of New York City. The finger piers that once extended from much of Manhattan and Brooklyn are mostly gone. These days the most famous shipping line in the city is the Circle Line, which does sightseeing tours. Container ships generally head across the harbor to New Jersey, toward the ports of Elizabeth, Newark and Bayonne. They unload at a number of terminals, one of which is owned by a Canadian teachers’ pension fund. The pay is pretty good on the docks — plenty of longshoremen make well over $100, 000 — but the work is often dreary and dangerous. “It’s a funny thing about this port,” a hiring agent at Port Newark named Pasquale Pontoriero was overheard saying in a 2009 wiretap, a few years before his license was revoked because he had associated with organized crime figures. “I call it the Broadway of broken dreams. ” Perhaps the starkest difference at the port today is in how many machines there are, and how few people. A century ago New York Harbor employed 40, 000 longshoremen, who unloaded ships with hook and sling and brawn. Today, the entire workforce is just under 3, 400 longshoremen, many perched behind the controls of cranes and straddle carriers. Yet amid all the transformation, some investigators say, racketeers and mobsters are still as present as the barnacles attached to the piers. In the view of Walter M. Arsenault, the executive director of the Waterfront Commission, the fundamental relationship between the waterfront and the mob remains unchanged since “On the Waterfront. ” “The only difference is now, it’s in color,” Mr. Arsenault said. He based that assessment on several indicators, such as the number of relatives of figures who continue to hold choice jobs, many of which involve little work and pay unusually high salaries, like the union shop steward position held by Ralph Gigante, the nephew of the boss of the Genovese family, the late Vincent (Chin) Gigante. Ralph Gigante earned $419, 000 in 2014, and has said he believes he holds the union office for life — “until death do us part. ” There is also the fact that some of the same New York and New Jersey union officials whom federal prosecutors have in the past accused of racketeering have since risen to the top ranks of the East Coast waterfront union, the International Longshoremen’s Association. One is Harold J. Daggett, the garrulous president, who owns a yacht, the Obsession, and has been spotted by his members riding in a Bentley. One longshoreman said he had been surprised to catch sight of a holster strapped to Mr. Daggett’s ankle during a meeting. The Justice Department, which has lost two cases against Mr. Daggett, has described him as an “associate” of the Genovese crime family whose rise through the union ranks was part of the mob’s plan. A good portion of the Justice Department’s evidence against him came from the testimony of an aged mob turncoat, George Barone, who had once been a waterfront enforcer for the Genovese family and who described Mr. Daggett as thoroughly under the mob’s control. But Mr. Daggett, on trial in 2005, took the witness stand and portrayed himself as a mob target, describing a 1980 episode in which Mr. Barone had put a gun to his head and threatened to kill him and his family — an incident that so terrified Mr. Daggett he urinated in his pants, according to news accounts. During that trial, one of Mr. Daggett’s a reputed mobster named Lawrence Ricci, went missing. Several weeks after the men were acquitted, Mr. Ricci’s decomposing body was found in the trunk of a car outside a New Jersey diner. The murder, which Mr. Arsenault said is the last known waterfront killing, remains unsolved. Mr. Daggett declined, through the longshoremen’s association’s spokesman, to be interviewed. But alluding to his brushes with the Justice Department, Mr. Daggett joked at a union conference in Puerto Rico in 2015 that when he was invited to the White House for a labor meeting, “I thought I might have a better chance ending up in the big house, but there I was, your I. L. A. president, at the White House. ” But Mr. Daggett’s lawyer in that 2005 trial, George Daggett (his cousin) said in a recent interview that “the mob on the waterfront is a myth” — something that has not been true for half a century. Mr. Daggett, who frequently represents longshoremen in litigation with the Waterfront Commission, said that the agency prefers to pretend “we’re still in the ’50s. ” “They can’t say, ‘We got rid of the mob,’ because then there’s no reason for them to be in existence,” George Daggett said. “I challenge them to prove mob influence on the piers. What have they come up with? A couple of guys here and a stray guy there?” The mob’s grip over the New York waterfront began nearly a century ago and was predicated on a few simple facts: The work was uneven, depending on a ship’s arrival time, and yet the cargo needed to be unloaded quickly, so that produce did not spoil and the shelves of America’s stores could remain stocked. Gangsters quickly realized that the piers were the choke point of the economy, and that a dizzying array of rackets were available to them. They pilfered cargo as it came ashore and extorted truckers who had come to collect cargo or drop it off. And, most cruelly, the mob controlled which of the longshoreman would be selected to work. Theirs was some of the most dangerous work in the country, but longshoremen had to beg to get it. At the on the piers, where longshoremen would gather each morning in the hope of joining the group that would work on an arriving ship, it was common for a man to place a toothpick behind his ear, a signal that he would kick back some of his pay. All this began to change with containerization, as goods were no longer shipped loose but packed into containers that stacked efficiently, and transferred easily between ships and trucks and trains. With cranes doing the lifting, the number of longshoremen plummeted by more than 90 percent. Today, advances in automation threaten to reduce the number of longshoremen even further. As the workforce dwindled, the remaining jobs became well paid. This was a result of a shrewd move by the longshoremen’s association: The union negotiated a flat fee, today roughly $5 a ton, that the shipping industry would pay into various funds to provide an income for longshoremen and supplement the benefits and income of those who would work fewer hours as a result. As global trade has soared, the few longshoremen who remain have seen their paychecks grow. The waterfront today has largely receded from the city’s consciousness and even its geography. And to some extent, so has the mob. Decimated by mass prosecutions over the last three decades, New York’s five crime families have struggled to adapt. While there have been some new, profitable ventures, like online gambling, the waterfront still exerts its own pull. Mr. Arsenault referred to the waterfront as the mob’s “last candy jar. ” In recent years, the union has brazenly recommended friends or relatives of organized crime figures for jobs on the docks, said Phoebe S. Sorial, the general counsel for the Waterfront Commission. She said the union has sought waterfront jobs for “people who posted bail for organized figures” and “people who are in business with organized crime figures,” along with any number of relatives. In 2014, for instance, the union recommended the daughter of one of New York’s most famous mobsters, Benjamin (Lefty) Ruggiero (played by Al Pacino in the film “Donnie Brasco”) Mr. Arsenault said, adding that other such cases abound. “You can’t throw a rock on either side of the waterfront without hitting a brother, son or daughter of a made member,” Mr. Arsenault said, using the terminology for someone who has been inducted into a crime family. The Waterfront Commission was formed in 1953 to fight organized crime on the docks. For many years, before it came under new leadership in 2008, it was a and sleepy agency. Since then it has focused on extensive background checks, mapping the familial relationships between mobsters and longshoremen — an elaborate genealogy project. The Gigantes, for instance, have 10 relatives — mostly nephews, and grandsons — working on the waterfront, according to the commission. This kind of blatant nepotism was impressive if not especially unusual. And yet Mr. Daggett, the union president, objects to the assumption that these sorts of arrangements necessarily signal corruption. “There is an old saying,” he once proclaimed at a public hearing, slightly stretching the degree of kinship in the adage, “‘The son or a nephew should not carry the sins of a father or an uncle. ’” Many of those with relatives in organized crime say the insinuation that they themselves are mixed up in racketeering is hurtful, untrue and yet maybe inescapable. “When I started out, people were a little standoffish because of fear, because of my ancestors,” James Anastasio said. His father’s uncle was Albert Anastasia, once the head of what the press called Murder, Inc. he was “Lord High Executioner,” as his 1957 obituary in The Daily News put it. “Although once they got to know me and realized I had nothing to do with that, they treated me as a normal person. ” Mr. Anastasio, who runs a training institute for longshoremen and is also an executive at a crane company, said that in his long career on the waterfront, “I’ve never really come across the mob. ” “As far as I know, no, the mob is no longer on the waterfront,” he added. “I can’t say there are not small pockets of bad people, but as far as big influence — not that I’ve seen in my lifetime. ” George Daggett, the lawyer and cousin of the union president, said that the Waterfront Commission has taken to harassing some longshoremen with relatives reputed to be organized crime figures. He cited a lawsuit he had brought on behalf of a longshoreman in New Jersey named Pasquale Falcetti Jr. Mr. Falcetti, he said, was denied a port registration card by the Waterfront Commission for no other reason, apparently, than “who this kid’s father is” — Pasquale (Uncle Patty) Falcetti, a convicted racketeer and reputed leader in the Genovese family, currently finishing a federal prison sentence. The union has complained about such aggressive tactics, and the longstanding antipathy between the longshoremen’s association and the Waterfront Commission may have been the driving force behind the strike last year. And yet a spokesman for the longshoremen’s association, James McNamara, said the union did not give the order for the strike and urged the longshoremen to return to work. “What we had heard,” Mr. McNamara said, “was the men were seemingly protesting against the Waterfront Commission and what was perceived as harassment. ” As for the presence of organized crime along the waterfront, Mr. McNamara said the mob had no influence anymore. “They just don’t,” he said. “It’s a highly automated, highly sophisticated industry. ” He added, “You just don’t hear about that at all anymore. ” But another viewpoint was offered two years ago by Sabato (Sal) Catucci, a legendary waterfront figure who operated the stevedoring company that ran the Red Hook docks in Brooklyn until 2011. At a public hearing before the Waterfront Commission in 2010, he protested investigators’ insinuation that the ports were under mob control. He was so wary of being tarred as a mobster that he even chose what to wear with care. “I didn’t come in here with a black shirt today, because I don’t feel that I wanted to be stereotyped,” he said. Yet just a few years later, Mr. Catucci, now locked in a battle over a contract to operate the Red Hook port, accused the longshoremen’s union of threatening him during negotiations. He had been told he would be taken out “in a box,” according to a lawsuit he filed. One vice president of the union “shoved me and threatened to knock me out,” Mr. Catucci said in a 2014 affidavit, in which he claimed that some of the waterfront’s most powerful figures “are, or are associated with, thugs who get their way by intimidation and force. ” Investigators insist that the same rackets that gave life to “On the Waterfront” continue today. Mr. Arsenault checked off the various forms of thievery and extortion, both big and small, that he learned of through his investigations. containers occasionally disappear, most likely the result of theft. Truckers, in order to be allowed to retrieve their container and leave the port, have been encouraged to buy overpriced bottles of water, or even Girl Scout cookies from the longshoremen, he said. Robert Stewart, a longtime anticorruption prosecutor who until last year had worked in a role for 13 years to rid a longshoremen’s local in Bayonne of organized crime, said that mob influence on the waterfront was “a tad better” than in the past. “You don’t have bodies showing up,” he said. But he said he wondered whether the mob had not simply directed its attention to a different source of income. For years, investigators have suspected that the mob’s most lucrative targets on the waterfront are the longshoremen benefit funds, including what is known as the “container royalty fund,” the fund that pays extra wages to longshoremen each year as compensation for the diminished work that came with containerization. The funds are worth a great deal of money one received more than $95 million in 2014. They also tend to be rather opaque. “It is an awfully inviting target, and knowing the cast of characters involved here, to think they’re not getting a piece of this is unrealistic,” Mr. Stewart said. The list of employees at the benefits fund, said one law enforcement official, include an accountant and a director of operations who are the children of dead organized crime figures. But John Nardi, the president of the New York Shipping Association, a trade group that has a role in managing the funds, said he had seen no evidence of misconduct. “Based on people’s names you can make a lot of assumptions,” he said. However, he said, “All monies are accounted for. ” | 1 |
Goldman Sachs Endorses Hillary Clinton For President For Goldman Sachs, was there really any other choice this cycle? | October 27, 2016 Be Sociable, Share! Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, is greeted by Hillary Clinton at a panel discussion at the Clinton Global Initiative, Sept. 24, 2014 in New York.
Published in partnership with Shadowproof .
He’s with her. On Sunday, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton earned the endorsement of Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein —an endorsement she had been working toward for years.
As was revealed by Wikileaks, Hillary Clinton spent the run up to her presidential campaign giving speeches to Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street banks, where she praised their talents and explained her positions on financial regulation.
On October 24, 2013, Clinton told Goldman Sachs that Dodd-Frank had to be done mostly for “political reasons” because Congress needed to look like it was doing something about the crisis. She said, “There’s nothing magic about regulations, too much is bad, too little is bad. How do you get to the golden key, how do we figure out what works? And the people that know the industry better than anybody are the people who work in the industry.”
Yes, she essentially endorsed Wall Street writing the rules because Wall Street knows its business best and complained to Goldman Sachs that regulations had frightened bankers.
“I mean, right now, there are so many places in our country where the banks are not doing what they need to do because they’re scared of regulations, they’re scared of the other shoe dropping, they’re just plain scared, so credit is not flowing the way it needs to to restart economic growth,” Clinton said. “So people are, you know, a little — they’re still uncertain, and they’re uncertain both because they don’t know what might come next in terms of regulations, but they’re also uncertain because of changes in a global economy that we’re only beginning to take hold of.”
Music to Wall Street’s ears. For Goldman Sachs, was there really any other choice this cycle? After all, they did pay Hillary Clinton $675,000 for those three speeches, and have generously supported her political career.
Despite her private comments to Goldman Sachs, Hillary Clinton has taken a tough public position on Wall Street during the campaign, likely due to Senator Bernie Sanders’ success in the primaries. Of course, Wikileaks also revealed that Clinton told the National Multi-housing Council in a private speech that “you need both a public and a private position.”
So the real question is, what do Blankfein and Goldman want in return and what is Clinton’s private position on giving it to them? Be Sociable, Share! | 0 |
Terry Jones, an original member of Monty Python, has a form of dementia that is affecting his ability to communicate, his family said in a statement. The statement, published on Thursday on the website of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts in Wales, also known as BAFTA Cymru, said: “Terry has been diagnosed with primary progressive aphasia, a variant of frontotemporal dementia. This illness affects his ability to communicate, and he is no longer able to give interviews. ” On Friday, Ben Timlett, a producer on one of Mr. Jones’s films, said in an email that Mr. Jones’s son Bill confirmed that the statement had been released to BAFTA Cymru on behalf of the family. BAFTA Cymru chose Terry Jones — a Welsh comedian known for his Python characters like a doting mother of a coal worker son criticized for being a slacker by his playwright father and an everyday Superman who needs his bicycle repaired — to receive its award for Outstanding Contribution to Film and Television. Hannah Raybould, the director of BAFTA Cymru, said a retrospective of Mr. Jones’s work starting from 1969 would still be celebrated at an awards ceremony in Cardiff on Oct. 2. “Terry is proud and honored to be recognized in this way and is looking forward to the celebrations,” the statement said. Lydia Jones, a spokeswoman for BAFTA Cymru, said Friday that the organization had been told there would be no further details on Mr. Jones’s condition. Primary progressive aphasia is a rare nervous system syndrome that affects a person’s ability to express his or her thoughts and understanding, or to find words, according to the Mayo Clinic. Symptoms begin gradually, often before age 65, and worsen over time. The news of the diagnosis was also reported by the BBC and Britain’s National Press Association. The announcement of Mr. Jones’s illness dominated Monty Python fan sites on Friday, where it was described as “sad” and “terrible” news. Eric Idle, a of the ribald, outrageous and internationally acclaimed British troupe, tweeted thanks to fans for their support while noting Mr. Jones’s participation in the 2014 stage reunion of the comedy gang. Mr. Jones, 74, was born in Colwyn Bay, a seaside community on the north coast of Wales. He has written and directed dramas, presented documentaries, composed operas and penned short stories, as BAFTA Cymru noted. But it is his work in the Monty Python television series, which was brought to the stage in London in 2014, that arguably contributed most to his fame. He worked on some of the troupe’s films, including “Life of Brian,” 1979 (director and a writer) “The Meaning of Life,” 1983 (a writer and, with Terry Gilliam, a director) and “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” 1975 (a writer and ). Last year, Mr. Jones released the documentary “Boom Bust Boom,” about how the economy cycles through periods of growth and collapse. “This film is about the Achilles’ heel of capitalism,” Mr. Jones says at the opening of the film. “How human nature drives the economy to crisis after crisis, time and time again. ” A review in The New York Times called it ominous but enjoyable. In addition to Mr. Jones helped to direct the project. | 1 |
WASHINGTON, D. C. — At approximately the time that the U. S. House of Representatives was supposed to vote on Speaker Paul Ryan’s Obamacare replacement bill — the American Health Care Act (AHCA) — news broke that the vote had again been canceled. [Reporter Bob Costa posted news of the bill’s cancellation: President Trump just called me. Still on phone. ”We just pulled it,” he tells me. — Robert Costa (@costareports) March 24, 2017, ”I don’t blame Paul,” Trump tells me, — Robert Costa (@costareports) March 24, 2017, CNN reported that the bill was pulled at President Donald Trump’s request despite earlier reports that the President wanted a vote — whether or not the bill had the votes to pass. Later reports indicated it was Ryan who urged Trump that the bill needed to be pulled. It was unclear as of Friday afternoon who was ultimately responsible for the decision to pull the bill. The vote was previously scheduled for Thursday evening, but was canceled within hours of the White House assuring that there would be a vote. Vice President Mike Pence had canceled Friday plans to travel and promote the AHCA in two states to remain in Washington, D. C. and work with the President. White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney said Thursday that if the House Leadership’s bill failed, Obamacare would remain, according to several reports. “There were a lot of emotional pleas last night that might cause people to take off their thinking hats and react with their hearts, rather than their heads, and support what we all know is bad legislation,” Rep. Mo Brooks ( ) said on Friday morning to SiriusXM host Alex Marlow on Breitbart News Daily. Follow Michelle Moons on Twitter @MichelleDiana | 1 |
COLONIA BERLIN, Bolivia — A few months ago, a representative from Cargill traveled to this remote colony in Bolivia’s eastern lowlands in the southernmost reaches of the vast Amazon River basin with an enticing offer. The American agricultural giant wanted to buy soybeans from the Mennonite residents, descendants of European peasants who had been carving settlements out of the thick forest for more than 40 years. The company would finance a local warehouse and weighing station so farmers could sell their produce directly to Cargill the man said, according to local residents. One of those farmers, Heinrich Janzen, was clearing woodland from a plot he bought late last year, hustling to get soy in the ground in time for a May harvest. “Cargill wants to buy from us,” said Mr. Janzen, 38, as bluish smoke drifted from heaps of smoldering vegetation. His soy is in demand. Cargill is one of several agricultural traders vying to buy from soy farmers in the region, he said. Cargill confirmed the accounts of colony residents, and said the company was still assessing whether it would source from the community. That decision would depend on a study of the area’s productivity and land titles, said Hugo Krajnc, Cargill’s corporate affairs leader for the Southern Cone, based in Argentina. “But if a farmer has burned down its forest we’ll not source from that grower,” he said. A decade after the “Save the Rainforest” movement forced changes that dramatically slowed deforestation across the Amazon basin, activity is roaring back in some of the biggest expanses of forests in the world. That resurgence, driven by the world’s growing appetite for soy and other agricultural crops, is raising the specter of a backward slide in efforts to preserve biodiversity and fight climate change. In the Brazilian Amazon, the world’s largest rain forest, deforestation rose in 2015 for the first time in nearly a decade, to nearly two million acres from August 2015 to July 2016. That is a jump from about 1. 5 million acres a year earlier and just over 1. 2 million acres the year before that, according to estimates by Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research. Here across the border in Bolivia, where there are fewer restrictions on land clearance, deforestation appears to be accelerating as well. About 865, 000 acres of land have been deforested, on average, annually for agriculture since 2011, according to estimates from the nongovernmental Bolivia Documentation and Information Center, an area nearly the equivalent of Rhode Island in size. That figure has risen from about 366, 000 acres a year, on average, in the 1990s and 667, 000 acres a year in the 2000s. Now, a new study by an environmental advocacy group points to fresh indications of by Bolivian and Brazilian farmers who trade soybeans with Cargill. That organization, Mighty Earth, used satellite imaging and mapping information from the Stockholm Environment Institute, an environmental think tank, to identify deforestation in Brazil where two food giants, Cargill and Bunge, are the only known agricultural traders. The mapping by the environmental institute uses customs, shipment and storage data, as well as production data from Brazilian municipalities to trace agricultural exports back to producers. According to Mighty Earth’s analysis, the Brazilian savanna areas in which Cargill operates, a region called the Cerrado, saw more than 321, 000 acres of deforestation between 2011 and 2015. Mighty Earth also linked Bunge, the other agricultural giant, to more than 1. 4 million acres from 2011 to 2015. In Bolivia, where mapping is not available, Mighty Earth sent employees to areas where Cargill operates. The organization used drones to record the clearing of forests and savannas in areas where Cargill operates silos. The study was funded by the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation and a nongovernmental organization, Rainforest Foundation Norway. A reporter for The New York Times independently traveled to remote areas of Bolivia described in the environmentalists’ report and interviewed farmers engaged in deforestation who said they sold soy to Cargill. The farmers described what they called Cargill’s push to increase its purchases of locally produced soy and its attempts to enhance bonds with local producers. The reports of fresh deforestation come despite a landmark deal signed three years ago by Cargill and other companies that included a target of “eliminating deforestation from the production of agricultural commodities like palm oil, soy and beef products by 2020. ” Experts at the time said the deadline, laid out in the New York Declaration of Forests, would require companies to start straightaway to make their sourcing more sustainable. Both Cargill and Bunge said the report seemed to inflate its role in the region’s deforestation. Cargill’s share of soy in the Bolivia municipalities in which it operates came to about 8 percent, Cargill said. Meanwhile, in Brazil’s Matopiba region, Bunge’s share was about 20 percent, the company said. And soy is just one crop behind deforestation, said Stewart Lindsay, Bunge’s vice president for global corporate affairs. “One company alone cannot solve this issue,” Mr. Lindsay said. “A positive step would be for more companies to adopt zero deforestation commitments, apply controls to block crops grown in illegally cleared areas from entering their supply chains, report publicly on progress and invest millions of dollars to support sustainable land use planning efforts, all of which Bunge has done. ” (Bunge, however, is not a signatory to the New York Declaration of Forests.) In an interview, Cargill chief executive David MacLennan said the company was studying the allegations of deforestation in Bolivia and Brazil linked to the company. “If there’s something there, if it’s substantiated, we’ll do something about it,” Mr. MacLennan said. “If that’s accurate, it’s not acceptable. “We’re going to honor our obligations and our commitments,” he continued. “We’ve committed to ending deforestation and to do our part in ending deforestation. Our word is our bond. ” Forest loss is detrimental to the earth’s climate. The clearing of woodlands and the fires that accompany it generate of all global warming emissions, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, making the loss of forests one of the biggest single contributors to climate change. Only about 15 percent of the world’s forest cover remains intact, according to the World Resources Institute. The rest has been cleared, degraded or is in fragments, wiping out ecosystems and displacing indigenous communities, scientists say. Behind the rise in deforestation is a strategy by multinational food companies to source their agricultural commodities from ever more remote areas around the world. These areas tend to be where legal protections of forests are weakest. The Brazilian Amazon, a poster child for the global movement, has enjoyed increasing protections, like a moratorium announced in 2006 on forest clearing for soy production. Between that time and 2015, Brazil reduced Amazon deforestation by almost according to estimates by Mongabay, the environmental news site, based on data from the Brazilian National Institute of Space Research and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. The uptick in forest loss since then, however, has raised concerns that the progress is far from secure. Brazil was aware of the challenge of keeping deforestation at bay, Everton Lucero, the secretary of climate change and forests of Brazil’s Ministry of the Environment, said in an interview. “We are very uncomfortable with the bad news that we had a rise in deforestation, and we are taking every possible measure to reverse it next year,” Mr. Lucero said. Budget shortfalls amid Brazil’s recent economic and political turmoil, he said, had wreaked havoc with its policing of its rain forests. When traveling to remote regions, “Sometimes our command and control units were without fuel for helicopters,” he said. “Hopefully we are on a recovery path. ” Bolivia, on the other hand, presents a different situation. President Evo Morales, a socialist, has made securing “food sovereignty” a major part of his agenda, driving Bolivia’s agricultural expansion. There are relatively few forest protections, and the government’s Forestry and Land Authority is tasked with the potentially conflicting roles of regulating land use, forestry and agriculture, and issuing concessions for logging and farming. The landlocked country has declared that it expects to clear almost 14 million more acres of forest by 2025, to convert into farmland. Bolivia’s greenhouse gas emissions levels per capita exceed that of many European countries, despite having a far lower per capita income. Deforestation is responsible for more than 80 percent of Bolivia’s total carbon dioxide emissions, according to a recent study by researchers at Insead, a graduate school based in Fontainebleau, France. A major culprit is the cultivation of soy, which has jumped more than 500 percent in Bolivia since 1991, to 3. 8 million hectares in 2013, according to the most recent agricultural censuses. Little of that soy is consumed domestically. The vast majority is processed and exported as animal feed in a commodities trade that serves a global appetite for hamburgers, chicken and pork. “The forest is seen as useless land that needs to be made useful,” said Nataly Ascarrunz, executive director of the Bolivian Institute of Forestry Investigation, a Bolivian nongovernmental organization that monitors and researches the country’s forests. “There’s a lot of pressure for economic development,” Ms. Ascarrunz said. “When resources are flowing, production is happening and people have work. It’s very hard to argue with that. ” Victor Yucra, the director general of Bolivia’s forest and land management at the Forestry and Land Authority, stressed the need for the Bolivian government to balance the protection of its forests with the needs of its agricultural sector. “Our concern is in ensuring that intensive agricultural production takes place within a framework that also provides for sustainable forestry and protection for standing forests,” Mr. Yucra said. Mr. MacLennan, the chief executive of Cargill, described a business trip to Brazil last year, during which he saw the Amazon from a plane window. “You look down and you see this beautiful forest,” he said. “Kilometers and kilometers of forest. But you also see these big chunks of dirt. “The brown really contrasts with the green,” he continued, comparing the forest and deforested areas. “When you see it, it’s like, ‘Holy cow. That’s what’s happened.’ It just hit me when I saw it in broad daylight — the impact the deforestation has. ” Mr. MacLennan initially garnered praise among environmentalists for pledging to extend the pledge it had made regarding palm oil to cover every commodity the company handles. Cargill’s commitment was called one of the most sweeping environmental pledges ever made by a large agricultural company. It earned Mr. MacLennan a photo opportunity with Ban the United Nations secretary general at the time. Even before the New York Declaration, Cargill had made significant efforts to buy palm oil sourced only from land not linked to fresh deforestation, according to a expert with extensive experience working on Cargill’s global sustainability efforts. The expert spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying that to do so openly would jeopardize professional relations with the company. Cargill continued to invest millions of dollars adding extra staff members and hiring auditors to verify that the palm oil was coming from established fields, not farmland freshly carved from the forest, he said. But Cargill has been less aggressive with other commodities, he said. Part of the issue was Cargill’s decentralized setup, the expert said. Another problem was the resistance from commodities traders, whose incentive is to seek supplies from as many sources as possible in order to drive down costs. Buying only sustainably grown commodities would mean a more limited supply. Now, environmental groups accuse Cargill of backtracking on its 2020 deadline. In recent statements, Cargill has adopted a 2030 deadline for elimination of deforestation from its supply chain — a separate deadline, mentioned elsewhere in the New York Declaration, that was meant to apply to ending all forms of deforestation, not just those related to agricultural commodities. “They’re willfully misinterpreting the Declaration,” said Glenn Hurowitz, chief executive of Mighty Earth. “They’re breaking their own pledge. ” Cargill is committed, Mr. MacLennan said, to eliminating by 2020 deforestation from its production of palm oil, a commodity widely used in food, detergents and cosmetics. But, he said, Cargill had always understood the declaration to give all signatories until 2030 to tackle deforestation. “I don’t think I or others appreciated the vast complexity of the task,” Mr. MacLennan said. “Let’s say that we are trading or buying and selling soybean meal. Where did the soybeans come from? And did they come from deforested land? Maybe we weren’t buying the soybeans directly. I don’t know. ” Holly Gibbs, an expert in tropical deforestation and agriculture at the University of called the 2030 deadline interpretation devastating. “If we were to wait until 2030,” Ms. Gibbs said, “there would be no forest left. ” In Mr. Janzen’s newly cleared field, a long strip of land flanked by vivid vegetation, smoke drifted from a smoldering landscape. The Mennonites, who live amid buggies and farmhouses that wouldn’t look out of place in rural Ohio or Pennsylvania, trace their origins to Protestant reformists who migrated to Russia, the United States, Canada, Belize and Mexico in search of farming opportunities and religious freedom. Some moved to Bolivia in the last century, and about 57, 000 Mennonites now live in 55 secluded settlements here, eschewing some aspects of 21st century technology, like modern cars, but enthusiastically embracing others, such as tractors and genetically modified seeds. Their trade with companies like Cargill has transformed their communities into a bloc of relatively prosperous landowners. But in recent years, they have also been targeted by land reforms enacted by Mr. Morales, who has pledged to reverse the centuries of subjugation of Bolivia’s indigenous majority. The farmer, Mr. Janzen, with the help of two laborers, spent the day digging roots from the earth, between smoking woodpiles. There was a brown jumble of slender trees, saplings, shrubs, bushes, vines and roots. Occasional larger trees showed gashes where the bulldozer first made contact, pushing them to the ground. Farther downfield lay more long, neat cordons of debris, waiting to be burned. “If the rain holds off, I’ll burn the rest tomorrow,” he said. | 1 |
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In what Democrats and the Left hoped would be a steal reclaiming control of both the House and Senate on the coattails of a much-anticipated Clinton victory, Republicans firmly held their ground retaining control of both chambers of Congress as Donald Trump wins the presidency.
With all 435 seats up for reelection in the 247-seat Republican-dominated House of Representatives, Democrats made only moderate gains picking up a net total of only five districts with only a few races remaining undecided as of Wednesday afternoon but not enough to alter the balance of power.
Unsurprisingly, Paul Ryan, who has been critical of his party's own presidential nominee and now President-elect Donald Trump, easily won his reelection, defeating Democrat opponent Ryan Solen in a landslide with 65 percent of the vote. Although Ryan is favored to be reelected Speaker of the House for the incoming 115th Congress, he is also likely to receive opposition from both Democrats on the Left and Trump-Republicans who disagree with the speaker on his support for “free trade” agreements — namely, the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
It still remains to be seen whether House conservatives or President-elect Trump will push Ryan from the speakership in favor of another Republican congressman. However, in a statement posted on Facebook, Ryan congratulated Trump on his victory and vowed to work with the president-elect. “We are eager to work hand-in-hand with the new administration to advance an agenda to improve the lives of the American people. This has been a great night for our party, and now we must turn our focus to bringing the country together,” Ryan said.
Among Republican losses and Democrat gains in the House was the ouster of incumbent 12-term Florida GOP Congressman John Mica, who maintains a lackluster cumulative score of 57 percent from The New American 's " Freedom Index ," which measures congressmen’s fidelity to the Constitution based on the votes they cast. Mica lost his reelection bid to Democrat challenger Stephanie Murphy, the first Vietnamese-American women elected to Congress.
Also in Florida, former Republican governor-turned-Democrat Charlie Crist defeated incumbent freshman Republican Congressman David Jolly, who holds al Freedom Index score of 48 percent.
The most disappointing race for conservatives was the defeat of seven-term New Jersey Republican Congressman Scott Garrett, who lost to Democrat challenger and former Clinton-speech writer Joshua Gottheimer. Garrett rates a cumulative Freedom Index score of 76 percent, which is the highest for any congressman from New Jersey, but far less than ideal. All constitutionalist top-tier Freedom Index score recipients in Congress easily won their reelection campaigns.
In Michigan, where Trump is expected to win the state's 16 electoral votes, libertarian/constitutionalist Republican Congressman Justin Amash crushed his Democrat opponent Douglas Smith 59 to 38 percent with 100 percent of precincts reporting. Amash, boasts an impressive Freedom Index score of 93 percent, second only to Thomas Massie of Kentucky who has a near-perfect score of 98 percent. Massie also blew out his Democrat opponent with an even wider electoral margin of 71 to 29 percent. Both Amash and Massie have made reputations for themselves as heirs to former Congressman Ron Paul as leaders in the liberty movement in Congress. Amash and Massie have firmly opposed reauthorization of the Patriot Act, have vigorously opposed indefinite detention and unconstitutional surveillance-state measures, and have championed pro-liberty causes such as auditing the Federal Reserve as a step towards eventually abolishing the Fed and restoring sound money, i.e. a gold-standard currency.
Other incumbent constitutionalists such as Congressmen Alex Mooney of West Virginia and David Brat of Virginia easily won their races against their Democrat rivals. Congressmen Amash, Bratt, Massie, and Moonie have also expressed deep reservations about and oppostition to the TPP agreement advocated by both President Obama and House Speaker Ryan.
In the Senate, Rand Paul was easily reelected with 57 percent of the vote, garnering over one million votes compared to Democrat challenger Jim Gray who received only 813,224 votes, 43-percent. Looking forward, Senator Paul optimistically told Fox News on Wednesday morning, “The one thing I’m excited about in the Trump presidency is I think in the very first weeks of this next Congress, the Republican Congress is going to repeal some regulations. I hope a half a dozen regulations or more and we’ll get them onto Trump’s desk and I think he’ll sign them.”
In Wisconsin, in what was a rematch and ultimately a repeat of the 2010 U.S. Senate race, incumbent Republican Senator Ron Johnson defeated Democrat opponent former Senator Russ Feingold. Johnson’s reelection victory was an upset to Democrats who hoped to unseat him as part of an effort in one of five states they sought to flip from Red to Blue in order to regain control of the Senate.
The only Republican loss in the Senate, which is hardly a loss for conservatism and constitutionalist principles, was in Illinois where RINO (Republican in name only) incumbent Senator Mark Kirk lost to two-term Democrat Congresswoman Tammy Duckworth. Kirk has the lowest Freedom Index score of any Republican in the U.S. Senate with a dismal 35-percent. He was defeated by Duckworth, who received 54 percent of the vote.
As far as what to expect from the new Congress, Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky told reporters early Wednesday morning that repealing ObamaCare is a “pretty high item on our agenda, as you know.” McConnell went on to call President Obama’s landmark health insurance legislation the “single worst piece of legislation” from Obama’s first term.
Trump’s victory, coupled with Republicans maintaining control of both chambers of Congress, sends a clear anti-establishment message to Washington that Americans want a cooperative Congress to work with a President Trump and Vice President Pence to finally and fully repeal ObamaCare, nominate constitutionalist judges to the Supreme Court, and put an end to anti-sovereignty trade deals such as the TPP, Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), Trade in Services Agreement (TiSa), and the still-under-negotiation and little-known U.S.-China Bilateral Investment Treaty (BIT). Of course, none of this will happen without the same steadfast tenacity and commitment to contacting and urging Congress to take these appropriate steps as was utilized when working toward achieving these historic wins on Election Day.
In a post-election message from The John Birch Society, Vice President of Communications Bill Hahn impassionedly stated: The John Birch Society has never been closer to victory as we are today. Think of the opportunity that has been afforded to us. Here we have a president that has been talking on many issues that we have called attention to, especially illegal immigration and trade agreements. When in recent memory have we had a presidential nominee even mention Americanism or advocating for scaling back our involvement within the UN? We all realize the faults that Trump has and where his views on issues differ but let’s not use that as an excuse to not get involved. If you are waiting for a better candidate or a better time in the future they do not exist.
Hahn optimistically implored listeners and constitutionalist grassroots activists that “we have a tremendous opportunity to advance our action projects, turn the tide of globalism, and put our country back onto a track of less government, more responsibility, and with God’s help a better world.” Emphatically, Hahn urged activists to “place twice the amount of time, energy, money, and gusto into The John Birch Society than you did with this election. Your efforts paid off, so let’s double down and strike while the iron is hot.”
With the obstructionist roadblock of a globalist Democrat president removed from the equation, the incoming 115th Congress has the potential of either moving in the constitutionalist direction or becoming a huge disappointment in the fight for liberty. Only time will tell whether the new Congress, in conjunction with President Donald Trump in the White House, will keep its campaign promises. One thing, however, is certain, as Hahn stressed: This is a tremendous opportunity for those seeking to roll back government and advance the cause of liberty. Please review our Comment Policy before posting a comment
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In reaction to student demands, Pepperdine University will remove the statue of Christopher Columbus from its campus. [School president Andrew Benton said they will “relocate the statue to the Pepperdine campus in Florence, Italy. ” Benton announced the statue’s removal in a letter to students, The letter began: In 1992 a group of men and women representing the Columbus 500 Congress presented a statue of Christopher Columbus to Pepperdine University. For years the story of Columbus and the fascinating exploration that brought him to the new world was taught in schools across America. It was heroic and exciting. Later, as the impact of the arrival of explorers was assessed more fully, especially as those impacts related to indigenous people, a different view formed. Today, for many, including those within our campus community, stories of conquest and the art associated therewith are painful reminders of loss and human tragedy. He went on to discuss the intentions of those who gave the statue to the school, describing them as “good men and women” and saying he knows they were not trying to “offend. ” Benton plans a meeting later in February where students can discuss the removal of the statue and “other national issues relevant to diversity on [Pepperdine] campuses. ” 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. | 1 |
For Najairee Davis, high school was synonymous with bouts of anger and frustration. She had the hallway fights, suspensions and detention to prove it. Early in Ms. Davis’s high school career, her father was incarcerated on manslaughter charges. “I was just angry,” Ms. Davis, 18, recalled. “I wouldn’t talk to anybody. I wasn’t feeling good about anything. ” Academics were no longer a priority she shut everyone out. And if pressed on anything, she said, she would pick fights with classmates. Ms. Davis got a bad reputation at school, and said it was not long before teachers simply assumed she was to blame for any confrontation. Everyone else went unpunished, she said. Her principal at Frederick Douglass Academy in West Harlem suggested she might benefit from transferring to a different school, one designed for students who struggle in more traditional education settings. Her boyfriend had attended such a school, and compared the experience to being surrounded by a supportive family. “A family at school?” she recalled telling her boyfriend. “I’m not really into people that much. ” But in September 2015, Ms. Davis took a chance and enrolled at the Brooklyn High School for Leadership and Community Service, a transfer school for students who are falling short of the credits they need to graduate. The school is a joint venture between New York City’s Education Department and Brooklyn Community Services, one of The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund’s eight beneficiary organizations. “I just felt like I wasn’t that excited about school anymore,” Ms. Davis said. “It wasn’t exciting to me anymore, until I came to Leadership. ” At her new school, she received support from teachers who were compassionate and understanding and knew every student by name. She was also assigned an advocate counselor, who was on call to help with problems Ms. Davis had outside school. It became clear, she said, that Leadership was going to be a different kind of place to learn. “I have to do better,” Ms. Davis said. “It can’t be like my old school. It has to be different. ” Her classmates became friends, not targets of fights. After she became pregnant last year and the pregnancy started to show, teachers and students did not judge her as she walked the halls, she said. Instead, they fawned over her baby bump and wanted to know about her baby shower. Ms. Davis gave birth to her son, Kyree Cooper, in July. “There’s not one day he doesn’t make me happy,” she said. Recently, she moved out of a home in Brownsville, Brooklyn, where she had lived with the grandmother who raised her. She moved in with Kyree’s father and grandfather. It was important that Ms. Davis’s grandmother not feel pressure to raise Kyree, she said. Ms. Davis earns money through a internship with Educational Video Center, a program run by the Leadership school. “I don’t want to be depending on anyone,” she said. “Even if it isn’t the most money in the world, I want to get things for myself that I purchased with my money. ” Brooklyn Community Services has continued to help. Recently, it used $300 in Neediest Cases funds to buy winter clothing for Ms. Davis and Kyree. Ms. Davis is on track to graduate by March. And she has fixed her sights on a career as an ultrasound technician. “After becoming pregnant, I felt that job was a good job,” she said. “I can be part of other people’s milestones, see their baby’s heartbeat for the first time. ” Newfound independence has so far proved more liberating than frightening. Even with the pitfalls of parenting she knows she will encounter, she said, she is determined to evolve and improve with each challenge she surmounts. “I just want to experience stuff on my own,” Ms. Davis said. “I want to make mistakes on my own. I know how it is having a parent saying, ‘That’s not how you do it.’ I want to learn that’s not how you do it. I want to try new things and be different. ” About her son, she said, “I want to raise him the way I want to raise him. ” | 1 |
We will never know just how wrong we were about Donald Trump. Did he have a 1 percent chance to win when he descended the escalator of Trump Tower last June? Twenty percent? Or should we have known all along? Was Mr. Trump’s victory a black swan, the electoral equivalent of World War I or the Depression: an unlikely event with complex causes, some understood at the time but others overlooked, that came together in unexpected ways to produce a result that no one could have reasonably anticipated? Or did we simply underestimate Mr. Trump from the start? Did we discount him because we assumed that voters would never nominate a star for president, let alone a provocateur with iconoclastic policy views like his? Did we put too much stock in “the party decides,” a theory about the role of party elites in influencing the outcome of the primary process? The answer, as best I can tell, is all of the above. I do think we — and specifically, I — underestimated Mr. Trump. There were bad assumptions, misinterpretations of the data, and missed connections all along the way. But I also think Mr. Trump was a tremendous long shot when he entered the race, and even for months thereafter. Victory wasn’t inevitable — and it took a lot to go his way. If there was anything that should have signaled that “this time would be different” from the very start, it was 17: the number of Republican candidates who entered the race. The sheer number kept many donors and officials on the sidelines, waiting to see who would emerge as a strong contender. It diffused whatever power the “party elite” had to influence the outcome. It created a huge collective action problem, in which none of the Republican candidates had a clear incentive to attack Mr. Trump — just their rivals for their niche of the Republican Party. The effect was to legitimize Mr. Trump as an ordinary candidate and to damage the others. And at just about every stage, there were too many candidates to mount a truly effective effort. By New Hampshire, there were still nine. In South Carolina, there were six. On Super Tuesday, there were five. The race narrowed to three candidates only after of all of the delegates to the Republican convention had been awarded. It became a race only after Mr. Trump had effectively secured the nomination. Maybe Mr. Trump really did have a “ceiling” at various stages. There was evidence for it in public polling and in the actual results. We’ll never know. Another result of the large field was that Mr. Trump’s opposition was always far less organized and underfunded than it would otherwise have been. A candidate like Marco Rubio never had a chance to take advantage of the benefits that usually accompany elite support he didn’t have time. It was clear from the start that Jeb Bush was a weak establishment . I never thought much of Mr. Rubio’s chances. And Scott Walker, on paper the best of the bunch, quickly raised doubts about his preparedness. It was also obvious that the “mainstream” candidates could face serious challenges on their flanks: from John Kasich on the left and Ted Cruz on the right. The notion that successful factional candidates could prevent a mainstream candidate from building a broad coalition was also discussed at several times, even in the specific context of Mr. Kasich. It’s basically what happened to Mitt Romney in 2008. But what wasn’t really discussed was what ultimately happened with Mr. Kasich. He was strong enough to prevent Mr. Rubio from consolidating the of the Republican Party, costing him states like Virginia on Super Tuesday. But he wasn’t strong enough to become a plausible contender in his own right, like Mr. McCain in 2008. In the end, Mr. Kasich was strong enough only to block a viable mainstream candidate, leaving Mr. Cruz as the sole remaining candidate to defeat Mr. Trump. This, to me, is a “World War I” black swan advantage for Mr. Trump — parts of it were foreseeable, but not the totality of what ultimately happened. The failure of a broadly appealing candidate to break out left Mr. Trump with one rival: Mr. Cruz. I think we got a lot wrong about Mr. Trump, but I think we nailed Mr. Cruz. He was strongly opposed by party elites and had so little appeal to voters who didn’t consider themselves “very conservative” that he couldn’t win the nomination. It was a lucky break for Mr. Trump. Who knows what would have happened if Mr. Rubio hadn’t stumbled in that debate ahead of New Hampshire, and come in second instead of Mr. Kasich. Perhaps Mr. Kasich and Mr. Bush would have left the race, allowing Mr. Rubio to consolidate the of the party — and maybe even win it all? We’ll never know. The first big article I wrote on the Republican race wasn’t about the importance of endorsements or party elites. It was about Republicans. In recent cycles, they had backed the establishment against conservative candidates. They were a big reason I believed that an candidate had an advantage against a conservative outsider, despite the turn toward Tea Party conservatives in Congress. Polling data showed they were well educated and moderate — natural allies for the establishment. To some extent, this view has been vindicated. Mr. Cruz, this year’s conservative outsider, was pummeled in the blue states. But it was completely wrong in a far more important sense: The Republicans in these states were no allies of the establishment, at least not against Mr. Trump. The Republicans gave him his first win in New Hampshire, and later, they put him over the top. This could just be the result of a simple analytical error: conflating opposition to ideologically consistent conservatives with an affinity for candidates. Or perhaps they would have voted against Mr. Trump if someone other than Mr. Cruz had been the principal opponent to Mr. Trump. Either way, I thought the party’s establishment could count on these voters, and instead they were among Mr. Trump’s strongest backers in the end. There’s an important lesson here: These aren’t liberal or moderate Rockefeller Republicans. These are voters who showed a surprising tolerance for Mr. Trump’s extreme comments on immigration, women and other issues. I didn’t consider myself that much of a “party decides” disciple at the beginning of the race, but I was sure of one thing: It would be extraordinarily hard to win if a candidate were deemed unacceptable by the party’s elected officials, donors and operatives. Such a candidate would lack the resources and staff to run an effective campaign. He or she would face both a chorus of vocal opposition from credible leaders and a fight to the end. In the end, Mr. Trump didn’t face many of the challenges that outsiders usually do. His limited resources were irrelevant — he had unlimited free media. His weakness at delegate selection conventions could have cost him the nomination, but he ultimately won enough contests to ensure victory. An even bigger surprise was the complete failure of Republican elites to firmly and consistently denounce Mr. Trump. It’s why I thought he was done after his comments dismissing John McCain’s status as a war hero I thought a “chorus of Republican criticism of his most outrageous comments and the more liberal elements of his record” would follow, but it simply didn’t. It never did. The Republican elite treated Mr. Trump as it would have treated a fairly ordinary candidate, even as he said extraordinary things. That’s a big part of why he won. I did not expect that the party would cede its biggest prize to an outsider who had so many dissenting policy views and who faced so many questions about his fitness for the presidency. Maybe because I never cared much about pop culture and don’t watch much television, I never would have guessed that Mr. Trump would be able to sustain nonstop dominance of television media for the entire campaign season. The tremendous news media coverage of Mr. Trump was a big reason he looked like a “boom, bust” candidate, like Herman Cain in 2012. But Mr. Trump’s media coverage never faded. If you had told me about the persistence of the coverage, I wouldn’t have dismissed his chances. After all, the media was the fuel of his rise from the start. Mr. Trump benefited from party rules and a calendar that made it far easier for him to win the nomination. If the Republicans had delegate rules like those of the Democrats, Mr. Trump would not yet be the nominee. He would be counting on superdelegates. He was also helped by this year’s calendar. of all of the delegates were awarded in the 45 days after Iowa, making it important for the party to narrow the field quickly in a year when it was not positioned to do so. Even when it looked as if Mr. Rubio might benefit from unified Republican support, he had only a week for and to try to build a strong organization ahead of Super Tuesday. With the calendar from 2012, he would have had five weeks. We were just overconfident. There haven’t been very many presidential elections in the modern era of primaries. There certainly haven’t been enough to rule out the possibility that a true outsider could win the nomination, even if it seemed very incongruent with what had happened in the era. That’s a lesson to keep in mind heading into the general election. | 1 |
By Allison Vincent Election 2016 , News , Politics , Right-Wing Terrorism , Videos November 4, 2016 Seth Meyers Takes ‘A Closer Look’ At The GOP’s Threats Against Hillary And It’s Terrifying! (VIDEO)
There are only a few days left in this election and Republicans are growing more and more desperate, using what Seth Meyers called “increasingly unhinged rhetoric” during Thursday’s Late Night segment of A Closer Look.
“‘Republicans are using increasingly unhinged rhetoric to warn about the consequences of electing Hillary,’ Meyers said. ‘Many are even threatening to impeach her without any evidence of a crime before she ever takes office and if they can’t do that, they’ll settle for the next best thing – preventing her from filling any vacancy on the Supreme Court for her entire four year term.'”
But that’s not all they’ve done — there have also been more death threats and calls to violence. Former Congressman Joe Walsh, who, like Donald Trump, enjoys Twitter WAY more than he should, tweeted this on November 1:
Another shocking GOP turn is from Ted Cruz, who just a few short months ago, during his speech at the RNC, refused to endorse Trump, but just today he hopped on Trump’s plane to go campaign for him in Iowa. This, after Trump accused Cruz’s father of killing JFK and also said horrible things about his wife. Remember that “baked bean teeth” comment Trump made? Yeah. Just plain nasty.
It’s really unfortunate that Cruz caved, but the GOP is so terrified of losing control, that they are willing to forget their own pride and pull out all the stops to keep Clinton out of office.
Watch Seth Meyers break it all down. It’s pretty terrifying.
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2016 presidential campaign by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
Barack Obama tried to woo Republicans into a “Grand Bargain” that would have gutted Social Security. Bill Clinton let loose the banks. But Donald Trump’s destruction of the Republican Party will allow Hillary Clinton to “gather the whole of the ruling class under the same party banner, in one Big Tent, where the grandest of bargains can be conceived and achieved without crossing an aisle.” The rich are about to get their best deal yet. Hillary’s “Big Tent” is Obama’s “Grand Bargain” on Steroids by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
“ The exodus from the GOP has suddenly transformed the Democratic Party into the primary political instrument of the ruling class.”
When Donald Trump took a wrecking ball to the Republican Party he provided the unexpected catalyst for completion of the corporate project begun by Bill Clinton, Al Gore and other white Democrats in the 1980s, with the founding of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). To counter relentless attrition of whites to the GOP in their home states, these beleaguered, mostly southern Democrats sought national corporate funding to turn their party decisively to the right. They reckoned, correctly, that a steady stream of corporate capital would allow them to control the new wave of Black voters and politicians that had been mobilized by Rev. Jesse Jackson’s two presidential campaigns, while strengthening the hand of the South in national Democratic Party calculations.
Bill Clinton became the first DLC president in 1992, and moved swiftly and methodically to narrow the ideological differences between the duopoly parties. He completed much of Ronald Reagan’s agenda, claiming it as his own; destroyed welfare “as we knew it”; vastly expanded the mass Black Incarceration regime; pushed NAFTA through Congress over the objections of majorities in his own party; engineered the corporate monopolization of broadcast media; and removed the last safety straps from Wall Street banks.
“Clinton arranged the deployment of thousands of foreign jihadists to Bosnia and Kosovo.”
In foreign affairs, Clinton initiated what was to become the doctrine of “humanitarian” military intervention, dismantling and partially occupying the socialist nation of Yugoslavia. In the process, Clinton arranged the deployment of thousands of foreign jihadists to Bosnia and Kosovo, thus keeping operational the network created by the U.S., Saudi Arabia and Pakistan during the previous decade in Afghanistan. In Africa, Clinton conspired with Uganda and exiled Tutsi rebels to overthrow the Hutu majority government in Rwanda, setting off a bloodbath in 1994, followed two years later by an invasion of Congo that has killed more than six million people -- and still counting.
Barack Obama was the second DLC president (although he lies about his membership). He, too, moved with unseemly haste to reach a “Grand Bargain” with the GOP -- not of necessity, since he had won a huge electoral mandate with the overwhelming financial backing of Wall Street, but as a matter of ideological principle. In January of 2009, before even taking the oath of office, Obama told the editorial boards of the New York Times and the Washington Post that all “entitlements,” including Medicare and Social Security, would be “ on the table ” for cutting in his administration. Obama’s first project, now considered the centerpiece of his legacy, was to resurrect the rightwing Heritage Foundation’s corporate health insurance scheme, adopted by Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole in 1996, and made into state law by Republican Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, in 2006. Obama’s Affordable Care Act was, literally, written by lobbyists for the insurance and drug industries, and is now collapsing like a poorly constructed house at the end of its mortgage.
“For the better part of two years Obama debased himself, all but begging the Republicans to consummate his ‘Grand Bargain.’”
With the Democratic majority in Congress in no mood to tamper with Social Security and Medicare, Obama tried to maneuver the targeted entitlements into a financial crisis trap. He named two dependable reactionaries, Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, as co-chairmen of his National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility, also called the Commission on Deficit Reduction. They dutifully recommended $4 trillion in budget cuts, mostly to social programs, including cuts to Social Security. Although the full commission did not endorse the chairs’ recommendations, and the Congress failed to pass bills modeled on the document, Obama used the Simpson-Bowles formula as a basis for negotiating what he hoped would be a “bipartisan” (GOP plus Obama and a minority of Democrats) massacre of entitlements. For the better part of two years Obama debased himself, all but begging the Republicans to consummate his “Grand Bargain.” Congressional Black Caucus chairman Emanuel Cleaver, of Kansas City, called the deal a “ Satan’s Sandwich ,” but Obama continued to pursue a political marriage made in hell until the 2012 reelection campaign clock called a halt to the spectacle.
“A de facto super-party of the bourgeoisie.”
The quest for a Grand Bargain was Barack Obama’s failed attempt to best Bill Clinton in erasing the distinctions between the two major parties – to create a de facto super-party of the bourgeoisie. It was the Republicans who ran away from the altar. And the Democrats did eat much of the Satan’s Sandwich, through sequestration and austerity that ravaged social programs by other means.
Why did the Republicans reject the deal? Although both halves of the duopoly ultimately answer to Wall Street, the Republicans, like any other party, have an institutional interest in winning office. It is true that Obama had crafted a deal that any Republican would love, but it was still his deal, and he planned to run for reelection as an historical dealmaker. Probably just as importantly, the Republican Party is the White Man’s party, meaning, white supremacy is its organizing principle, central to its identity among much of the masses. To embrace Obama, no matter how advantageous to their big business patrons, was a hug too far for the GOP. Racism doomed the Grand Bargain – Hallelujah!
A New, Bigger Bargain
Recently released Wikileaks emails reveal Hillary Clinton speaking to bankers at Morgan Stanley in 2013, a year after the debacle. “The Simpson-Bowles framework and the big elements of it were right,” she said.
Thanks to Donald Trump’s demolition of the Republican Party, the conditions have been created for Hillary Clinton, as DLC President #3, to achieve what #1 and #2 could not: gather the whole of the ruling class under the same party banner, in one Big Tent, where the grandest of bargains can be conceived and achieved without crossing an aisle. With most of the ruling class and its attendants having vacated the building, the Republican Party has been reduced to Donald Trump and his “deplorables,” as Hillary calls them. Trump’s opposition to corporate trade deals violated the Holy Grail against prohibiting capitalists from moving money and jobs around the world as they see fit, and his reluctance to support regime change as an inherent right of American exceptionalism has frightened and outraged the military industrial complex, the national security establishment, and all sectors dependent on the maintenance of empire.
“An inherently unstable arrangement.”
Clinton’s Big Tent is not a temporary, election season dwelling. It is how she plans to govern. The exodus from the GOP has suddenly transformed the Democratic Party into the primary political instrument of the ruling class, while at the same time the party nominally represents most of the folks who are abused and misused by that ruling class. It is an inherently unstable arrangement, and will soon be wracked by splits, as a post-Trump GOP attempts to lure its fat cats back and the darker and poorer constituencies consigned to the latrine area of Hillary’s high class tent break to the Left for air.
But in the interim, Clinton will have a unique opportunity to cut grand austerity deals with all the “big elements” of Simpson-Bowles, to renege on her corporate trade promises, and to wage war with great gusto in the name of a “united” country. Ever since the Democratic National Convention it has been clear that the Clintonites are encouraged to consider everyone outside of their grand circle to be suspect, subversive, or depraved. Their inclusive rhetoric is really an invocation of a ruling class consensus, now that Trump has supposedly brought the ruling class together under one banner. In Hillary’s tent, the boardrooms are always in session. BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at [email protected] . | 0 |
By Hrafnkell Haraldsson on Thu, Oct 27th, 2016 at 7:56 am Trump used undocumented labor to build Trump Tower and workers told The Washington Post in 2015 they were working on his hotel illegally
So Donald Trump has responded to Hillary Clinton’s accusation that he used undocumented workers to build his new D.C. hotel, a 263-room luxury hotel just blocks from the White House. Trump claims he used no undocumented workers – and as we saw earlier , oh yeah, Hillary Clinton sleeps three days at a time.
Trump’s decision to attend the grand opening rather than campaign raised many eyebrows, not just in the Clinton camp. Republican strategist Steve Schmidt told MSNBC,
“He is not doing any of the normal activities that you’d be doing 13 days out in a presidential race for somebody who’s competitive. You don’t take a time-out to tend to your business interests.”
As Libby Nelson wrote at Vox , “Clinton is making her closing argument. Trump is making infomercials.”
All this seems to have stung the thin-skinned Trump, who previously set aside his campaign to open a golf course in Scotland. As CBS News’ Sopan Deb tweets , Trump’s defense was a little odd, to say the least: Trump's riff on his hotel is worth your time to read. Denies ever using undocumented immigrants and says Clinton sleeps for 3 days at a time pic.twitter.com/Rlsbebzk2Y
— Sopan Deb (@SopanDeb) October 27, 2016
The Republican nominee protested to CNN’s Dana Bash , “For you to ask me that question is actually very insulting because Hillary Clinton does one stop, and then she goes home and sleeps.” It is literally impossible for Trump to hear criticism without responding by attacking somebody else.
Trump’s defense reveals a man who is overly sensitive to criticism: he “works all the time” while Clinton sleeps “for three days.” He says he took “an hour off” (it was a bit more than that) to open his new hotel while “she wants to sleep all the time.”
He says Clinton gives one speech and then sleeps for three days. In fact, Clinton made two “Get Out the Vote” stops in Florida yesterday; she makes an appearance with the president and first lady today in North Carolina and has two appearances scheduled in Iowa for the day after.
And Trump’s heated denial of using undocumented workers is unconvincing, considering his track record in that regard.
It is a fact, as Hillary Clinton said yesterday, that Donald Trump “once again” used undocumented labor to build a hotel. He used undocumented labor to build Trump Tower . And The Washington Post reports that “Trump’s new downtown D.C. hotel was built thanks to the efforts of a large workforce that included Hispanic construction workers, including some workers who say they are undocumented .” Said one worker in 2015, “The majority of us are Hispanics, many who came illegally.”
The old saw about the man who protests too much comes to mind, in reading Trump’s denial. This is a man who has a history of exploiting undocumented immigrants and according to the workers themselves, this remains true.
Nonsensical talk about his opponent sleeping for three days straight is pure deflection, and it won’t work. Trump already has his clothing lines made in China, Mexico, and elsewhere, and he has used undocumented labor even while railing against the loss of American jobs.
Trump is a hypocrite, and hissy fits and deflection are no answer to the allegations against him, and certainly no recommendation for the office of president. | 0 |
Don’t CLICK that, stupid! Is this email from March 2016 how ‘hackers’ accessed #PodestaEmails21 and others? Posted at 11:22 am on October 28, 2016 by Sam J. Share on Facebook Share on Twitter
Baby Boomers and the Interwebz.
Dear John and other people who have been living under a rock, Google wouldn’t send you an email called, “Someone has your password.” Likely it would be a message about a possible breach or some urgency about changing your password but they wouldn’t send you something like this.
And never, EVER EVER EVER click a link in an email, especially if it’s one you don’t recognize. Okay – is this a copy of the phishing email to Podesta on March 19? pic.twitter.com/1jqUvafUpk
— Jamie Dupree (@jamiedupree) October 28, 2016
A bit.ly link for you to click to change your password.
John, don’t be stupid.
Couldn’t someone in Homeland Security or the NSA or one of those other fancy Federal agencies have taken some time to tell these people the do’s and don’t of being online? *smh* @jamiedupree Actually, wait, I didn't see the bit.ly link. (and I ain't gonna fire it up to see!) Could be the phish, yeah.
Typically most people are apprehensive to click a bit.ly link from someone they KNOW, let alone some odd email from Google telling you someone has your password. Trending It's official, she's NUTS! Donna Brazile thinks Democrats can turn THIS state blue (hint: no way in Hell)
*don’t click it* @jamiedupree That's likely it… check out where the bitly link goes: https://t.co/yKjaZzCxo9 (Chrome warns the site is malicious.) pic.twitter.com/7WACDWQwfS
— Kyle Wilson (@nosliwelyk) October 28, 2016
Yikes. Shocked Kyle clicked it … hope he didn’t have anything signed in or important in that browser or app. @jamiedupree Most definitely. For many reasons. One being that google does not use @Bitly
— SETH WEATHERS (@sethweathers) October 28, 2016
Surely Podesta is like, “NOW YOU TELL ME.”
Heh. @jamiedupree Looks like 'that sort of thing',However, | 0 |
So you want to talk to Mark Cuban on the latest Hillary email thing eh?
You ought to try someone with a bit of credibility. You see, Mark Cuban is not ignorant and his appearance this morning on CNBC did not contain “mistakes.”
He was lying.
This “newly discovered” laptop is very likely to be literal nuclear waste for Hillary and everyone around her, including the Clinton Foundation and all of Hillary’s “advisers” such as Podesta.
Mark Cuban said that Huma used Outlook and IMAP (for Yahoo and similar.) True.
But then he said this was unlikely to lead to “new” evidence in the form of the emails.
That’s a lie .
It’s a lie because Cuban knows he’s full of crap; he knows enough about the technologies involved to be fully aware that he was peddling nonsense.
IMAP and Exchange are email protocols. (So is POP3, but that’s pretty much deprecated everywhere for good reason.) Exchange, when available, is often preferred by business people because it syncs not just email but also calendars and contact lists, which can (and does) include both phone numbers and email addresses.
IMAP is typically used by clients like Thunderbird because it doesn’t know to speak Exchange. There’s a plug-in for calendars using the davical protocol and another (the SoGo connector) for contacts, but no integrated Exchange support.
Outlook can use IMAP, but where the server supports it (like Clinton’s “homebrewed” email server) Exchange would normally be used instead as a preferred choice. It both does more and also does a far better job of threading conversations (which is very convenient) and thus is almost-always preferred when it is available.
Here’s the problem for the Clintons: Both of these protocols will sync any folder they are told to monitor and can be told to pull local copies of emails . By default both will typically do so on a desktop or laptop environment because WiFi is usually available and it has enough bandwidth to make that efficient. Mobile devices sometimes are configured to only grab email headers by default but increasingly, with 4g service, they’re set up to get full messages too, sometimes including all attachments.
The reason to do this is that it is a lot faster to search messages locally than over the wire, and it’s convenient to be able to search messages. In addition pulling full copies (including attachments) allows you to work offline (when there’s no WiFi or other network available), and then re-sync when you get back in range.
Here’s the problem for Hillary — when the server had emails deleted and then was “Bleached” it had already been taken offline and was never returned to service . As such the laptop client would have been unable to connect back to it and thus it would never be told to remove anything.
Without that machine (Weiner’s laptop) being under remote administration such as Domain Policy control (which we can reasonably assume it was not as Huma claims “she didn’t know about it” and it was allegedly a private laptop) there is no remote capability to wipe or otherwise get into said computer and remove the emails either. In fact there’s a decent chance it’s running an operating system edition (if Windows) that lacks domain control capability entirely.
This means that the odds are extremely high that all of the deleted emails to which Huma was a participant are on that computer.
Every.
Single.
One.
If that examination shows that work product, or worse, classified information was sent and/or received and the evidence intentionally destroyed via the “Bleachbit” process then everyone involved is cooked. Remember, the claim was that the emails deleted were nothing more than yoga chat and similar; all “personal” content that the government had no right to and implicated no national security interest. Further, Huma claimed twice (once during her exit from State, and again under oath when questioned) that she had turned over all devices that might or did have US Government work product on them and had retained no copies .
If that is proved to be a lie, or worse, proof of felony conduct such as influence peddling or (God forbid for them) something like the rumored link to Epstein’s Lolita Express is found in those archives then a whole bunch of people are going straight to prison not only on the original acts evidenced in the emails themselves but also on felony obstruction of justice and perjury charges.
Yes, folks, this is a very big deal because it is the first discovery of a computer that appears to have been sync’d against the Clinton server but was neither tampered with or destroyed , and thus it likely contains all of the pertinent evidence to which Huma was a part.
I argue that the media is lying and soliciting others to lie. Mark Cuban knows all of this as he’s well-aware of how email works on the Internet. I’m aware of it too, having run an ISP during the early 1990s, having run corporate, personal and ISP-level email servers both before and since up to and including the present day, and I can confidently state that unless someone took affirmative action to alter the record the odds are extremely high that every single email chain Huma participated in is likely on that laptop, whether Hillary and her friends tried to delete it or not.
I’m a subject matter expert in this regard folks.
Yeah, CNBC, I’m not your biggest fan. But you (and the rest of the media) know damn well I can get to a studio in about an hour and a half and if you call I will be happy to don a suit (ok, at least the top half that the camera can see) and scoot on over to correct the record from a technical level on exactly what has been found and what is likely now in both the FBI’s and the NY State Police/NYPD’s hands.
Consider this an open invite to any of the MSM folks to do exactly that; you folks all still have my phone number and I can only conclude it hasn’t rung because you are not interested in the truth from someone who has the technical competence to explain it to your viewers.
Report the news, media wonks, instead of trying to shape it. Delivered by The Daily Sheeple
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Contributed by Karl Denninger of Market Ticker .
Karl Denninger is the author of Leverage: How Cheap Money Will Destroy the World . You can follow his daily commentary on capital markets at The Market Ticker and his weekly Ticker Guy Blog Talk Radio broadcasts. | 0 |
Among those killed last Friday in an attack on Coptic Christians that resulted in 30 deaths was Atef Mounir Zaki, who had recently renovated a local mosque for free. [According to Coptic academic Iz Tawfiq, who spoke with the website Al Arabiya, Zaki was a renovations contractor from the town of Abou Karkass in the Minia district where the attack on a bus of Coptic pilgrims occurred last Friday. Zaki was also used to provide equipment and workers to construction sites. Several months ago, when the Altaqwa Mosque in his city needed renovations due to cracks that endangered the structure, Zaki was asked by the mosque’s managers to do the required work. Zaki agreed and, according to witnesses, did the best job possible. Upon completion of the task, when the managers wanted to pay for the work, Zaki refused to take the money and said, according to Tawfiq, that he “contributed to the renovation of a house belonging to Allah” and his work “was a contribution for Allah. ” According to the report, he wasn’t killed in the bus itself because he traveled to the monastery where the Coptic pilgrims’ bus was headed in his private vehicle. During their escape from the area of the attack, and after a malfunction in their vehicle, a number of terrorists stopped Zaki and shot him and those with him in the car before stealing his vehicle and using it to flee. According to the Al Arabiya report, Zaki’s funeral was very large and attended by many Muslims. Copts, including many children, were killed in the attack. Almost all the deaths occurred after armed men disguised as Egyptian security personnel stopped the bus on its way to the St. Samuel the Confessor Monastery in the Minia district south of Cairo. | 1 |
Oct 26, 2016 4:26 PM 0 SHARES
There was a sudden burst of confusion heading into today's Tesla earnings. As Bloomberg reported , a change in the way Tesla Motors Inc. will report quarterly results after today’s market close has created a bit of a last-minute headache for analysts, with earnings estimates varying widely. The electric-car maker is phasing out most of the non-GAAP adjustments it’s traditionally made, including ones for resale value guarantees or vehicles leased through banking partners. Starting today, when the company discusses third-quarter adjusted non-GAAP earnings per share, it plans to exclude only stock-based compensation.
The SEC in recent months has raised concern that public companies may be straying too far too often from Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. Though Tesla has telegraphed its plan for weeks, many analysts are only now revising forecast models and some are sitting out the guessing game entirely this time. That means it may be challenging to draw firm conclusions about whether Tesla missed or beat Wall Street expectations - giving added importance to what Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk says on a follow-up conference call about cash or production plans.
So heading into today's earnings, the average estimate in a Bloomberg survey of analysts stands at an adjusted loss of 54 cents a share, based on seven forecasts that have comparable methodologies that the firms say take the new practice into account. While all seven of those projected a loss, there are others who say the company may post a profit.
Well, those who expected a profit got just that, because momnets ago Tesla not only reported revenue of $2.3 billion, far higher than the $1.9 billion expected, but also reported its first quarterly profit of $74 cents, smashing consensus estimate of a 54 cent loss.
Since there will be much confusion over how these numbers make any sense, here is what the company said:
Starting this quarter, our financial releases no longer include the non-GAAP revenue disclosures that we historically provided. To simplify our financial reporting, we add back non-cash stock-based compensation (SBC) to calculate non-GAAP results. Consistent with previous quarters, non-GAAP automotive gross margin will also exclude ZEV credit sales.
Total Q3 GAAP revenue was $2.30 billion, up 145% from Q3 2015, while total Q3 gross margin was 27.7%, compared to 21.6% in Q2.
Total automotive revenue was $2.15 billion on a GAAP basis, up 152% from Q3 2015. Our final Q3 delivery count was 24,821, over 300 more than the estimated delivery count we shared on October 2nd. Deliveries increased 114% from the third quarter of 2015, and was comprised of 16,047 Model S and 8,774 Model X vehicles. In addition, 5,065 vehicles were in transit to customers at the end of the quarter. These vehicles will be delivered in Q4.
Our Q3 GAAP net income was $22 million, or $0.14 per share on 157 million diluted shares, while our non-GAAP net income was $111 million, or $0.71 per share on a diluted basis, after adding back $90 million of SBC. Both figures include an $0.08 per share loss of other expense, net, primarily related to foreign currency transactions and the conversion of most of our 2018 convertible notes.
Confused? So are we, and sadly charting the results does not help:
And here are the company's GAAP revenues:
Alas, even looking at the company's cash flow does not provide much apples to apples color. Here's why:
We hope that Elon Musk can provide some clarity on just what is going on here, because Wall Street has no idea.
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Going back to its core business, said that its final Q3 delivery count was 24,821, over 300 more than the estimated delivery count we shared on October 2nd. " Deliveries increased 114% from the third quarter of 2015, and was comprised of 16,047 Model S and 8,774 Model X vehicles. In addition, 5,065 vehicles were in transit to customers at the end of the quarter. These vehicles will be delivered in Q4."
It added the following:
During the quarter, we opened 17 new stores and service centers to increase our customer support network to 250 locations globally. We believe new product variants such as the P100DL, additional Model X seating variants, new product capabilities such as Enhanced Autopilot and hardware for Full Self-Driving Capability, Autopilot 8.0 software, and new store and service center openings should continue to drive strong vehicle order growth.
The company also said that it had "achieved record production levels in Q3, rising to 25,185 vehicles for an increase of 37% from Q2 and an increase of 92% from Q3 last year"
TSLA said 4Q deliveries were “just over” 25k, had 3Q deliveries of 24.5k, forecast 2H deliveries of 50k. The company also said that the Model 3 remains on plan for volume deliveries in second half of 2017. Here is the full outlook:
We maintain our guidance of 50,000 new vehicle deliveries for the second half of 2016, with a Q4 plan of just over 25,000 deliveries, despite the challenges of winter weather and the holiday season. We expect about 30% to 35% of these deliveries to be accounted for as leases for revenue recognition purposes.
As previously provided in our second quarter update, we guided a 2 to 3 percentage points improvement in automotive gross margin on a GAAP and non-GAAP basis by the end of 2016. Automotive gross margin on a non-GAAP basis excludes ZEV credits and SBC. We are on track to meet this guidance.
We also guided in our second quarter update that full year 2016 operating expenses, both on a GAAP and non-GAAP basis, would grow approximately 30% from 2015. We are also on track to meet this guidance.
We now expect our capital expenditures in 2016 will be approximately $1.8 billion as we continue to focus on capital efficiency. Capital expenditures for the past three quarters totaled $759 million.
While an apples-to-apples analysis is clearly missing the report, for now the algos love the headline, and have sent the stock surging after hours. | 0 |
BC and AD mean nothing to these idiots. Seventh century founded religion has priority and historical significance over Judaism and Christianity which predate 0 year and centuries earlier? Again, the UN should go the way of the League of Nations. | 0 |
Much is being made of Hillary Clinton’s private email server, which she used when she was Secretary of State. To me, the real issue is not that Hillary endangered national security by sending classified information in the clear. No – the real issue is that the Clintons act as if they are above the rules and laws that apply to “the little people.” They are superior and smug, totally devoted to themselves and their pursuit of power and the privileges that come with it. It’s a matter of character, in other words. Hillary’s evasiveness, her lack of transparency, her self-righteousness, her strong sense of her own rectitude, make her a dangerous candidate for the presidency.
My second point is this: The issue of classification should be turned on its head. The real issue is not that Hillary potentially revealed secrets. No – the real issue is that our government keeps far too much from us. Our government uses security classification not so much to keep us safe, but to keep the national security state safe – safe from the eyes of the American people.
As The Guardian reported in 2013 :
“A committee established by Congress, the Public Interest Declassification Board, warned in December that rampant over-classification is ‘imped[ing] informed government decisions and an informed public’ and, worse, ‘enabl[ing] corruption and malfeasance’. In one instance it documented, a government agency was found to be classifying one petabyte of new data every 18 months, the equivalent of 20m filing cabinets filled with text.”
Nowadays, seemingly everything is classified. And if it’s classified, if it’s secret, we can’t know about it. Because we can’t be trusted with it. That’s a fine idea for an autocracy or dictatorship, but not so fine for a democracy.
Government of the people, by the people, for the people? Impossible when nearly everything of any importance is classified.
Too bad Hillary didn’t send everything in the clear – what a service she would have done for the American people and for democracy!
William J. Astore is a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF). He taught history for fifteen years at military and civilian schools and blogs at Bracing Views . He can be reached at [email protected] . Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author’s permission.
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Christians Look What Has Happened In Houston In 2014 and Today in Georgia Tweet
Pastor Steve Riggle addresses his congregation at the Grace Community Church in Houston. Riggle was one of five pastors who received a subpoena from Houston’s city government asking him to turn over any sermon that addressed homosexuality, gender identity or Mayer Annise Parker. On Nov. 2, Grace Church will host the “I Stand Sunday” event where Christians nationwide will show their support for the pastors.
Although much has been reported regarding the ethics and legality behind the city of Houston’s subpoena of five Houston-area pastors that had asked them to turn over all of their sermons that address homosexuality, gender identity, and the city’s first openly-lesbian mayor, little attention has been given to who those five pastors actually are and the ministries they operate.
So I guess they have spies going to church , this is beyond anything I ever thought I would see in my life time , freedom of religion I guess is for WHO
Georgia Demands Pastor Surrender Sermons After Filing Federal Religious Discrimination Claim Read more at
http://www.christianpost.com/news/georgia-demands-pastor-surrender-sermons-after-filing-federal-religious-discrimination-claim-171121/#EHpqdCx2v1cPGXo9.99
This is the moment I wrote about in my book, “God Less America.” I predicted that the government would one day try to silence American pastors. I warned that under the guise of “tolerance and diversity” elected officials would attempt to deconstruct religious liberty.
Sadly, that day arrived sooner than even I expected. | 0 |
MUMBAI, India — Three years before the 2008 global financial crisis, an Indian economist named Raghuram G. Rajan presciently warned a skeptical audience of top economic thinkers that excessive risk threatened the entire global financial system. As Mr. Rajan stepped down on Sunday as India’s top central banker, following intense criticism at home, he offered a new warning: Low interest rates globally could distort markets and would be difficult to abandon. Countries around the world, including the United States and Europe, have kept interest rates low as a way to encourage growth. But countries could become “trapped” by fear that when they eventually raised rates, they “would see growth slow down,” he said. Low interest rates should not be a substitute for “other instruments of policy” and “various kinds of reforms” that are needed to encourage growth, Mr. Rajan said in a recent interview with The New York Times. “Often when monetary policy is really easy, it becomes the residual policy of choice,” he said, when deeper reforms are needed. His warning comes at a time when the world’s central banks appear to be at a loss about how to get global growth moving again. A growing number of voices say that low rates are not doing the job and that governments must take other, more politically difficult steps to reinvigorate growth. The warning by Mr. Rajan, now 53, came as he stepped down from a position that had helped make him something of a rock star — albeit a controversial one — in India. He disputed the view that his tight monetary policies had cost him the support of the government, and he said that his departure was based on his inability to reach an agreement with the government on serving longer but not serving another full term. Mr. Rajan is a celebrity in a country where taxi drivers and vegetable sellers are as likely as business owners and bankers to be immersed in debate on the local economy. A blunt speaker who has laid out the case for tighter monetary policies in more than 30 public speeches over the last three years, he was called “the Ranbir Kapoor of banking,” a reference to a Bollywood superstar, by one of the country’s columnists. Mr. Rajan, whose term expired on Sunday, is credited with helping stabilize the Indian economy. It was fighting inflation, a weakening of its currency and a plunging stock market when he took the job in 2013. But he also leaves bruised after a barrage of public attacks from the political base of conservatives and interests of India’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party. They complained that he choked business by keeping interest rates high and requiring banks to clean up bad debts, which made credit expensive and hard to come by. The attacks turned vicious and personal in the weeks before Mr. Rajan announced in June that he would not continue for a second term, with a B. J. P. lawmaker declaring that Mr. Rajan was “mentally not fully Indian,” in part because he holds a United States green card, allowing him to work and live there. Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, later denounced the attacks, but only after Mr. Rajan said he was leaving the job. With Mr. Modi preparing for contentious local elections, some observers have said the government did not want Mr. Rajan to stay because it needed a looser monetary policy to bolster growth. India has the large economy in the world, at an annual rate of 7. 1 percent for the most recent quarter, but that is still far slower than the rate of a decade ago and not fast enough to create jobs for the more than one million people who enter the work force each month. Mr. Modi won election in 2014 promising economic growth and jobs. Mr. Rajan, leaning back in his chair and laughing at times during the interview, disputed that claim. “I don’t think it’s fair to say that it’s because of tight policy that the government wanted to move on,” he said. He cited the government’s move after he announced his departure to set a low inflation target of 4 percent for the next five years. He said his successor, Urjit Patel, a central bank deputy governor who takes over this week, played an important role in setting the country’s tough inflation targets. Mr. Modi has said little in public about Mr. Rajan’s departure except to defend him as “someone who loves his country” and “will continue to serve it. ” Mr. Modi’s spokesman declined in a telephone interview on Sunday to explain why Mr. Rajan was leaving, other than to say: “There is a tenure and the tenure has ended. Why should the prime minister of India even be brought into this discussion?” Mr. Rajan said his tight monetary policy had helped bring India’s rate of inflation — currently about 6 percent — down to the upper end of the government’s target range. “I think we’ve done exactly what was needed,” he said. Mr. Rajan said the central bank should continue to prioritize low inflation. He said he hoped the country would finish “the process of bank cleanup which is underway. ” Under Mr. Rajan, India’s banks, after decades of loose lending to corporations, had to own up to bad debts. The restriction was intended to shore up the stability of banks, but in the short term it has reduced the pace of lending to businesses. In discussing the Indian economy in the interview, Mr. Rajan offered a endorsement of the government’s emphasis on manufacturing in India — what the prime minister has called his Make in India campaign. Mr. Rajan said he did not support the view of critics that it was too late in world economic history for India to become a manufacturing hub. But he also said that he would not focus exclusively on manufacturing as the solution to joblessness. If India improves infrastructure and reduces government regulations, manufacturing might take off in a big way, but it “could also be services. It could be agriculture also. ” Although China’s economy has overshadowed India’s in recent decades, Mr. Rajan said he was still a believer in democracy as the better system to create growth. “India’s strengths to some extent comes also from its democracy,” he said. “Things can get bad in India, but not beyond a certain point, because the democratic process asserts itself. And we have a change in government. ” Mr. Rajan, who served as chief economist of the International Monetary Fund from 2003 to 2006, will return to his longtime job as a professor at the University of Chicago’s business school. He grew momentarily wistful when comparing the job of central bank governor with his past positions, which were more advisory. “So better to be a doer than an adviser. Of course being an adviser sometimes has effects, important effects, but you don’t see it as much immediately. Here you can see what you’re doing and in the years to come. ” | 1 |
The veteran television personality Jane Pauley will replace Charles Osgood as the anchor of the highly rated CBS show “Sunday Morning. ” Mr. Osgood, who is retiring, announced the news on his last show on Sunday. Ms. Pauley’s first day in the role will be Oct. 9, and she will become only the third anchor of the show, which started in 1979. For Ms. Pauley, 65, a return to the anchor role for a morning television show represents an unexpected comeback. And by selecting her instead of a younger CBS is clearly trying to ease the transition from Mr. Osgood, 83, whose folksy delivery has been a mainstay on the show for more than two decades. In a statement, the president of CBS News, David Rhodes, said, “Charles Osgood is a television news legend — and so is Jane Pauley. ” Ms. Pauley first catapulted to fame at age 25 when she replaced Barbara Walters as an anchor of the “Today” show 40 years ago. She remained with “Today” through the late 1980s until the notoriously messy handoff in 1989, when Ms. Pauley left the show and was replaced by Deborah Norville. Ms. Pauley later was a host of NBC’s newsmagazine “Dateline” from 1992 to 2003. But for much of the next decade, television opportunities dwindled for Ms. Pauley, though she had a daytime talk show that lasted a season and she made appearances on “Today. ” She became a CBS contributor two years ago and has filled in for Mr. Osgood on “Sunday Morning” and for Scott Pelley on the “CBS Evening News. ” She has reported stories for the Sunday morning show, including the only television interview with David Letterman in the to his retirement last year. The transition is an important one for the network. “Sunday Morning” is a powerful ratings machine: It attracts nearly six million viewers and is by far the Sunday morning news show. Its big viewership has helped the show that follows it, “Face the Nation,” remain the Sunday morning public affairs show. (“Meet the Press” on NBC attracts the most viewers in the to bracket coveted by advertisers.) And this is the second consecutive year that CBS has had a peaceful Sunday morning handoff, something that can be rare for morning shows. (Recall the departures of Ms. Pauley or Ann Curry from “Today,” or David Gregory’s firing from “Meet the Press. ”) Last year, Bob Schieffer introduced John Dickerson on the air as the new anchor of “Face the Nation,” just as Mr. Osgood did with Ms. Pauley on Sunday. “Charles Osgood set the standard for ‘CBS Sunday Morning,’” Ms. Pauley said in a statement. “And it’s a great honor to be given the chance to further our show’s legacy of excellence. I look forward to bringing loyal viewers the kind of engaging, original reporting that has made the broadcast so irresistible for so long. ” | 1 |
The Algemeiner reports: American Jewish actress Mayim Bialik published on Wednesday a refutation of activist Linda Sarsour’s recently made claim that one cannot be a Zionist feminist. [“Zionism is the belief in the right of the Jewish people to have an autonomous state in Israel,” Bialik — a star in the CBS comedy series “The Big Bang Theory” and a distant relative of the late famous Hebrew poet Hayim Nahman Bialik — wrote on her GrokNation website. “I am a Zionist. Feminism is the belief that a movement can bring about race, class and gender equality and that women deserve all of the rights and privileges afforded to men. I am a feminist. ” She continued: “There are Zionists who are critical of certain Israeli policies and those who are not there are Zionists who are and there are Zionists who are and there are Zionists who fall between these extremes. The definitions of Zionism and feminism are not in conflict with each other. At all. ” Read more here. | 1 |
Almost six years have passed since the death of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi – a death that changed Libya forever. Arguably, once a stable country, it now fights an inner disease, known as Daesh or ISIL.
Via AnonHQ
However, the murder of the Libyan leader was orchestrated, some say because of his plan to question the standard money system. Gaddafi also wanted to introduce actual gold in the form of money – as the African Gold Dinar. This Dinar wouldn’t be just paper money, but would represent value in the form of tangible precious metals itself, rather than within the government’s vault. Gaddafi also wanted to trade oil for gold, not the American Dollar.
Apart from Libya being the largest oil producer in the upper African region (when under Gaddafi) and wanting the returns in gold (which obliviously made the west very upset) – Gaddafi’s death makes things a bit different. If you remember his murder, then you would remember how he begged for mercy while covered in wounds and blood, and it going viral on the Internet. While these videos raced across the entire world, for all to see; this wasn’t the case for another so-called terrorist, out of respect for the burial customs of the locals. Osama bin Laden, who was a supposed open threat to the United States, who was, at the time held accountable for the 9/11 attacks, had his body taken and thrown into the ocean without the humiliating torture and degradation posed in front of the world.
According to an article published by The Guardian , a completely different story emerged from the men who were present during Gaddafi’s death. Mansur Dhao, one of the men present, who was in control of the defenses for Gaddafi, stated that Gaddafi never wanted to leave his country, nor was he running away, as it was portrayed in the blurry clip. Dhao said that Colonel Gaddafi changed locations every few days, and a few days before his death, Sirte (the place where he died) was under heavy siege. Therefore, it was unlikely for anyone to enter the city.
Apart from this, in the early hours of the morning, the defector force known as the Transitional National Council (TNC), took control of the final territory in Sirte and in an area no larger than 840 yards, Gaddafi’s loyalists were ready to break out.
Having said that, when NATO hit the convoy, they were unaware that Gaddafi was in one of those cars, and according to a NATO official, those heavy vehicles were forcing their way out of Sirte, heading to the outskirts of the city. These vehicles had heavy weapons mounted on them; the locals were fearful, and NATO aircraft fired upon them. The attack destroyed more than twelve cars, and as a reaction, the convoy was scattered into several groups, with the members of TNC following those cars.
Many people from inside those cars that were fired upon, jumped, and Gaddafi was amongst them. Heavily wounded, he went into hiding, leaving behind a trail of blood, which led TNC members to his hiding place.
Here is an interesting documentary that gives details on the events that lead to the death of Colonel Gaddafi. https://t.co/0RcP7aydtS
— Anon.Dos (@anondos_) October 28, 2016
There were many people present that day, and several videos of Gaddafi’s death are easily found. Fighters say that when they found Gaddafi, he was begging for them not to shoot him. Others, on the other hand say that Gaddafi’s last words were, “What did I do to you?”
Source: The Guardian , The Mirror | 0 |
Home › POLITICS | WORLD NEWS › RESEARCHER FINDS LINK BETWEEN BANKERS & WIKILEAKS AFFILIATES MURDERS RESEARCHER FINDS LINK BETWEEN BANKERS & WIKILEAKS AFFILIATES MURDERS 0 SHARES [10/26/16] CHRISTOPHER KEMMETT – Julian Assange, founder and Editor-in-Chief of WikiLeaks, is the man responsible for the daily release of emails showing the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign to be an unprecedented machine whose tentacles and snitches reach into Wall Street, big corporations and big media . Earlier this year, WikiLeaks released emails showing that the Democratic National Committee had maliciously conspired to undermine the presidential campaign of Clinton challenger, Senator Bernie Sanders, in order to elevate Hillary Clinton to the top of the ticket.
Now it has emerged that two of the top lawyers representing Assange, John Jones in London and Michael Ratner in New York, died within less than a month of each other this year. And, Assange’s closest confidant in London and a Director of WikiLeaks, Gavin Macfadyen, died just yesterday.
Wall Street On Parade has carefully investigated the similarly unprecedented banker deaths over the past two and one half years. What is noteworthy about the banker deaths is that at the time of the deaths, Wall Street banks and their global brethren were under the largest investigations for criminal rigging of markets to occur in the past century. Even during the Senate investigations of the early 1930s when crooked business journalists touting fraudulent Wall Street stocks and crooked Wall Street bank execs manipulating stock prices were regularly revealed through subpoenaed documents, there was no similar rash of deaths or series of alleged suicides. (See related articles below.)
Now there is WikiLeaks leaking emails and documents that show that the same kind of cartel-like behavior that has corrupted Wall Street to its core has also infested the top of the Democratic Party. And, amazingly, three key members of the Assange/WikiLeaks support network have died within six months of each other this year. The statistical probability of this being a natural occurrence is slim. Post navigation | 0 |
The debate may be in the books, but the spin goes on. Kellyanne Conway, Donald J. Trump’s campaign manager, accused Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia of having an “obsession” with Mr. Trump. For his part, Mr. Trump, who repeatedly interrupted Hillary Clinton during the first debate, said that Mr. Kaine’s constant interruptions of Mr. Pence should not have been allowed but that his running mate “won big” anyway. Mrs. Clinton’s team seized on Mr. Pence’s strategy of appearing to forget much of what Mr. Trump has said on the campaign trail and criticized Mr. Pence with a video featuring him denying statements that his running mate has made publicly. While pundits generally agreed that Mr. Pence was the winner of the debate, he was careful on Wednesday not to take too much of the limelight, and he took to Twitter to dispel concerns that he had not sufficiently defended Mr. Trump. The early favorite for most memorable debate moment was Mr. Pence’s use of the phrase “that Mexican thing. ” In a rare moment of frustration at Mr. Kaine’s barrage of attacks on Mr. Trump’s contentious statements on Hispanic immigrants, Mr. Pence shot back, “Senator, you’ve whipped out that Mexican thing again. ” The line #ThatMexicanThing quickly became a popular hashtag on social media, where Mr. Pence was criticized for showing a lack of sensitivity. Mr. Pence went on to make the case that Mr. Trump’s focus has been on immigrants who are in the United States illegally. Recent polls of Ohio voters have shown that the Buckeye State might be slipping away from Mrs. Clinton’s grasp, but a Monmouth University survey released on Wednesday shows that the Democratic nominee still has a chance there. A poll of likely voters showed that 44 percent back Mrs. Clinton and 42 percent support Mr. Trump. Mrs. Clinton had a advantage in August. (The poll had a margin of error of plus or minus 4. 9 percentage points.) After showing signs of struggling in Ohio, it appeared that Mrs. Clinton might be giving up in the crucial swing state. However, she is making another push and plans to campaign with President Obama in Cleveland on Friday. According to the Monmouth poll, she is not doing as well as Mr. Obama did in 2012 with minority voters, so their joint appearance could help her solidify that base of support. The next pivotal moment in the race arrives on Sunday night, when Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton hold their second debate. Republicans have been on edge since Mr. Trump’s uneven first debate and his erratic behavior in the aftermath of that performance. The Times reported on Wednesday evening that Mr. Trump is slipping in several swing state polls and that members of his party could start to distance themselves from him if he falters again on Sunday out of concern that their hopes of maintaining control in Congress could be on shaky ground. Independents, in particular, have been especially turned off by Mr. Trump in the last week and there is growing concern about an exodus of female voters. Mr. Trump has heaped praise on Vladimir V. Putin for months, calling him a strong leader and a potential ally. Mr. Pence struck a different note on Tuesday night, describing the Russian president as a “small and bullying” leader who the United States should not hesitate to confront. The remarks made it appear that the Republican ticket might not be on the same page when it comes to Russian policy, and in an interview Wednesday with CNN, Jason Miller, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, was careful not to shed much light on the campaign’s official line on the matter. “We have to be able to stand up to foreign leaders,” Mr. Miller said. “There’s also no reason why we can’t work with foreign leaders, for example to defeat ISIS. ” New data from Nielsen showed that the debate drew 37 million television viewers, the smallest audience since Dick Cheney and Joe Lieberman debated in 2000. Although that does not capture people who viewed the proceedings online, it paled when compared to the first presidential debate between Donald J. Trump and Hillary Clinton. That drew 84 million viewers, according to Nielsen. Mr. Pence and Mr. Kaine are both relatively candidates who are not overly combative and their showdown lacked the fanfare that the top of the ticket has received. The most watched debate remains the one from 2008, when Sarah Palin took on then Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. Russia appears to be taking advantage of the period of uncertainty before the American presidential election to deepen its presence in Syria and its support of President Bashar ’s government. | 1 |
American taxpayers will spend more than $4. 1 billion in the 2017 budget to support the 519, 018 refugees who have been resettled by the federal government in the United States since October 2009, according to a cost estimate by Breitbart News. [To put that very large number in context, $4. 1 billion can buy 10, 677 new homes for $384, 000 each, which is the average price of a new home sold in the United States in December 2016. Or it could buy 170, 124 new autos for $24, 100 each, which is the manufacturer’s suggested retail price for a 2017 Chevrolet Malibu. Even if the Trump administration were to entirely shut down the flow of refugees into the United States in FY 2018 and beyond, the refugees who have already arrived in the country will cost at least another $3. 5 billion in 2018, and about $2 billion to $3 billion annually thereafter until FY 2022 and beyond. The annual $4. 1 billion cost of these refugees is about eight percent of “the total annual fiscal impact of first generation [immigrants to the United States] and their dependents, averaged across ” which the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, in September 2016, estimated “is a cost of $57. 4 billion. ” That report offered this summary of the characteristics of all immigrants to the United States between 1995 and 2014: “For the period, the net cost to state and local budgets of first generation adults [who have immigrated to the United States] is, on average, about $1, 600 each,” the National Academies report found. The analysis that estimates a $4. 1 billion annual cost of refugees is based on the same methodology and data used in a November 2015 study from the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) which concluded that “in their first five years in the United States each refugee from the Middle East costs taxpayers $64, 370 — 12 times what the UN estimates it costs to care for one refugee in neighboring Middle Eastern countries. ” The CIS study focused on cost estimates for refugees arriving from ten Middle Eastern countries derived from the 2013 Annual Survey of Refugees contained in the Office of Refugee Resettlement’s Annual Report to Congress FY 2013 published by the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families. The ten Middle Eastern countries included in the 2015 CIS study were Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, and Yemen. Those countries accounted for 155, 865 of the 519, 018 refugees who have been resettled in the United States since FY 2010, according to the State Department’s interactive website. Breitbart used the data in that same 2013 Annual Survey of Refugees for all countries who send refugees to the United States (more than one hundred countries) and applied the same methodology CIS used to determine the costs for the Middle Eastern refugees within that group. Our analysis shows that over a five year period, American taxpayers pay $59, 251 per refugee, or $5, 119 less than the average Middle Eastern refugee over the same period of time. The 2015 CIS study limited the cost estimates to five years because the 2013 Annual Survey of Refugees data was limited to refugees who had been in the country for five years or less. The survey, then, is of refugees who were resettled in the United States between FY 2009 and FY 2013. In the Breitbart News estimate, we assumed that those costs would diminish to 50 percent of the annual average for years 1 through 5 in year 6, 25 percent in year 7, 10 percent in year 8, and zero in years 9 and beyond for each refugee. It is reasonable to assume that overall welfare usage will decline the longer a refugee is in the country. For instance, per the 2014 Annual Survey, 95 percent of refugees here for a year or less are in the SNAP (Food Stamps) program. By contrast, after 5 years of residence 60 percent of refugees are in the SNAP program — about 4 times the national average. Leaving aside the inadequate rate at which refugees are leaving some welfare programs, in at least one significant welfare program the rate goes up with each year in the country. SSI, a cash welfare program for the disabled or elderly, is used by about 14 percent of refugees in the first year of arrival. Slightly more than 29 percent of refugee families who have been here for five years have one or more members receiving SSI, a lifetime benefit in most cases. Each year of residence brought an increase in the rate of SSI usage, as Table 1 below, taken from the Office of Refuge Resettlement’s 2014 Annual Survey of Refugees (where it is listed as Table ) shows. Source: Office of Refugee Resettlement 2014 Annual Survey of Refugees, Table . The November 2015 CIS study calculated a dizzying array of twelve specific federal programs which provide direct and indirect financial benefits to refugees. Table 2 below, a truncated version of the same table that appeared in the CIS study, shows the amount of money the average Middle Eastern refugee receives from each of these twelve programs over their first five years in the United States, which totals $64, 370. SOURCE (from the November 2015 CIS Study): Rates for SSI, TANF, SNAP, general assistance, and housing are from the 2013 Annual Survey of Refugees (ASR) and are . Figures for Medicaid and lack of health insurance are also from the ASR, but reflect individual use rates. Average payments for SSI, TANF, and SNAP are from Census Bureau data. Average payments for some programs come from administrative data and other sources. Average education costs are from the National Center for Education Statistics. We estimate that 28 percent of refugees are (1. 12 students per household). See text for additional explanation for how estimates were made. The Breitbart News estimate of a $59, 251 cost to taxpayers over five years for the average refugee resettled in the United States simply applies the actual use rates for each of these twelve programs found in the 2013 Annual Survey of refugees for all refugees, and applies it on a basis to the calculations first used in Table 2 by CIS. To illustrate this metholodogy, the average use rate for SSI among Middle Eastern refugees was 32. 1 percent, according to the 2013 Annual Survey of Refugees. In the same table of that report, the average use rate for SSI among all refugees was 21. 1 percent, hence, the five year cost for all refugees for SSI is estimated at $3, 559, as opposed to $5, 414 for Middle Eastern refugees. Here are the use rates for all refugees by cost category used in the Breitbart News estimates, as found in the 2013 Annual Survey of Refugees: TANF, 19. 0 percent. SNAP, 74. 2 percent. General Assistance, 12. 4 percent. Housing, 22. 8 percent. WIC, 16. 2 percent. School Lunch, 23. 9 percent. Medicaid, 56. 0 percent. Without Health Insurance, 20. 2 percent. Public Education, 28. 0 percent. Table 3 summarizes the Breitbart estimate of $4. 1 billion annual costs to taxpayers for resettled refugees in FY 2017: Table 3: FY 2017 Cost to U. S. Taxpayers of Resettled Refugees, *The cost for the first five years is estimated at $59, 251. Years 6 through 8 add an additional $8, 503 in costs, bringing the total to $67, 754. The November 2015 CIS report offered a number of caveats, including the following: For help in sorting out that dizzying array of twelve federal programs that provide financial benefits to refugees, the November 2015 CIS report offers the following (with emphasis added): State Department Expenditures. The State Department reports that 69, 926 refugee were admitted to the United States in 2013. While the State Department also helps refugees overseas, the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM) within the State Department spent $310 million on resettling refugees in the United States in 2013. This means that an average of $4, 433 was spent per refugee in 2013. These figures include costs for the “overseas processing of refugee applications, services, and initial reception” and “housing, furnishings, clothing, food, medicine, employment, and social service referrals”. In this analysis we assume the amount spent by PRM per Middle Eastern refugee is the same as for refugees from the rest of the world. Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). The ORR spent nearly a billion dollars in 2013, but a significant share went to help the resettlement of unaccompanied minors and their families from Central America. Expenditures on new refugees and other related groups such as entrants and asylees were $613, 963, 000 in 2013. Asylees and entrants are essentially eligible for the same programs as refugees. Dividing this amount by the 128, 000 individuals that ORR reports are covered by its programs (excluding unaccompanied minors) means that $4, 797 was spend per refugee by ORR in 2013. In general, ORR only provides assistance to local communities, charities, and the refugees themselves in the first year after they arrive in the country or are awarded asylum. After a year, charities and state and local social service agencies are expected to care for them. Refugees and Welfare. Unlike other new legal immigrants, refugees are eligible for all welfare programs upon arrival. Further, there are several programs, such as Refugee Cash Assistance (RCA) and Refugee Medical Assistance (RMA) for which only refugees and other humanitarian immigrants are eligible. Refugees have the most generous access to welfare programs of any population in the country. The ORR conducts the Annual Survey of Refugees each year and the 2013 survey provides a detailed profile of the and economic characteristics of refugees who entered the country in the prior five years, including use of many of the nation’s major welfare programs by sending region. We use information published by ORR on Middle Eastern refugees’ welfare use as the basis of our cost estimates. Welfare Use Rates. The 2013 Annual Survey of Refugees shows the following welfare use rates for Middle Eastern refugee households: 32. 1 percent receive Supplemental Security Income (SSI) 36. 7 percent receive Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) 17. 3 percent receive General Assistance, 91. 4 percent receive the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, also called food stamps) and 18. 7 percent live in public housing. The refugee survey also reports that 73. 1 percent of individual Middle Eastern refugees are on Medicaid or Refugee Medical Assistance. It should be kept in mind that the survey reports welfare use for all Middle Eastern refugees who arrived in the last five years, not just new arrivals. Many refugees get RMA and RCA, but then transition to Medicaid and other cash programs like TANF or SSI after the eligibility window for RMA and RCA runs out. So, for example, use of TANF is likely lower for the first eight months than the 36. 7 percent reported above. To be sure, some refugees access cash welfare or Medicaid in the first eight months. But for those refugees who have been in the country for more than eight months the rate is higher than 36. 7 percent. The 36. 7 percent represents the use rate for all Middle Eastern refugees in the Annual Survey of Refugees who arrived in prior five years averaged together. For this reason, it is possible to estimate costs for welfare programs based on published information from the survey, but it is not possible to estimate welfare costs for, say, the first year after arrival. It should be noted that published figures from the refugee survey provide only use rates, not payment amounts received by refugees. It is necessary to estimate payments using other data sources. Average Welfare Payments and Costs. To estimate welfare payments and costs by household we use Census Bureau data and other information. To get costs for programs reported at the household level, we divide by four based on the assumption that average Middle Eastern refugee households receiving welfare consist of four people. This assumption is based on the Annual Survey of Refugees … To estimate average payments by household for SSI, SNAP, and TANF we use the files of the 2013 to 2015 Annual Social and Economic Supplement of the Current Population Survey (ASEC CPS) collected by the Census Bureau. We match the countries listed as being part of the Middle East to the ORR list of countries from that area using the country of birth reported in the ASEC CPS. 8 The ASEC CPS shows an average payment of $13, 494 from SSI for immigrant households from the Middle East (refugee and ) using the program. For TANF, the same data shows an average payment of $5, 061, and for SNAP it was $4, 039. 9 It should be noted that the ASEC CPS generally underestimates welfare use. 10 Because we do not adjust for this undercount, actual average payments are likely higher than that reported here. All payment figures are rounded to nearest dollar. To estimate payments from general assistance programs, we average state payment figures compiled by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP). The average annual benefit across states for this program is $2, 885. 12 (We assume that there is only one person per refugee household receiving this program.) For the average cost of housing programs we use the Housing and Urban Development (HUD) website, which shows an average cost per unit of public or subsidized housing of $637 per month ($7, 644 per year). The Annual Survey of Refugees does not provide estimated use rates for the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) nutrition program or the free or subsidized school lunch program. For completeness, we include estimates for these small programs by assuming that the use rates for these two programs among Middle Eastern refugees is proportional to their use of SNAP … [T]he school lunch program and WIC add only modestly to the average costs per individual. However, refugee use of these programs still would cost millions of dollars annually. Health Insurance Coverage. Healthcare coverage is reported at the individual level in the refugee survey, not the household level. There are three types of “coverage” that create costs for taxpayers: the Refugee Medical Assistance program, Medicaid, and those refugees who are uninsured. Costs for the RMA program are covered by ORR and are included in the expenditures for that agency reported above. For the Medicaid cost we use the average costs figure reported in the Office of the Actuary for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services annual report. In 2013, the program cost was $6, 897 per enrollee. The refugee survey reports 12. 7 percent of individual Middle Eastern refugees had no medical coverage in any of the previous 12 months. Based on information from the Kaiser Family Foundation on the without health insurance, we estimate that uninsured refugees cost $1, 943 on average annually. Public Education. Data is not reported in the refugee survey on the share of Middle Eastern refugees who are in primary or secondary school. However, the refugee survey does show that 65. 1 percent of all refugee households who arrived in the previous five years, not just those from the Middle East, have children under age 16. The State Department also reports that 24. 1 percent of Iraqi and 33. 6 percent of Afghan refugees were (five to 17) the two largest groups of Middle Eastern refugees for which there are statistics in fiscal year 2013. 19 Based on these figures, we estimate that 28 percent of new Middle Eastern refugees are and enrolled in public school. This means that there is slightly more than one child in public school per Middle Eastern refugee household. The National Center for Education Statistics reports that average expenditures in the United States are $12, 401. 20 There are certainly added expenses associated with helping refugee children in school, such as helping those who have emotional issues due having been traumatized. We do not include those costs here partly because we do not have any reliable figures for how much extra it costs to educate these children. We also do not include them because some share of these costs are paid for, at least in the first year, by ORR grants and are included above in that agency’s expenditures in the first five years. Sources familiar with the federal refugee resettlement program who have reviewed the Breitbart News estimate say that estimate probably significantly underestimates the cost of refugees to federal and state taxpayers. | 1 |
On a Sunday morning in early June, Senator Mark Kirk rolled into an uptown Chicago bar in his wheelchair to take part in the city’s 47th annual L. G. B. T. Pride Parade, wearing a red polo shirt, charcoal khakis and the abashed of a man who has already assessed his long odds of blending in. He hoisted himself up and made his way into the crowd, leaning on the cane he has used since suffering a severe stroke four years ago. A few young people wearing robin’ blue Equality Illinois approached him. They shook his hand and thanked him for being one of the few Republican senators to sponsor the Equality Act, which would extend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to prohibit discrimination against L. G. B. T. people. The encounters tended to be brief, because even in the most favorable circumstances Kirk has always been a somewhat awkward conversationalist. Crowded up against a woman wearing a rainbow tutu, he offered: “My friend has a granddaughter who wears nothing but tutus. It’d be good to get her one of those. Good for, er, political purposes. ” On his way out the door, Kirk found his path impeded by another politician: Representative Tammy Duckworth, his Democratic opponent in November’s election, who lost both of her legs to a grenade as an Army helicopter pilot during the Iraq war. The two wincingly shook hands — “Whenever you run into your opponent,” he told me later, “there’s always that fake smile” — but said nothing. Out on North Broadway, where the festivities were about to begin, Kirk climbed into the gray Mustang convertible that would ferry him through the parade. Before long, Duckworth materialized nearby. The congresswoman wore a several beaded necklaces and a halo of flowers in her hair. “Woo hoo!” she hollered as onlookers called out her name. Meanwhile Kirk — a man who is palpably of, by and for the northern suburbs of Chicago — sat in the passenger seat of the Mustang and cast a pensive gaze at the gray clouds gathering overhead. Kirk is refreshingly unvarnished as senators go and did not bother pretending to be in the parading spirit. Less than four months before Election Day, the senator’s own polls have him 3 points behind Duckworth. More than a year ago, Beltway odds makers were already rating Kirk as one of the likeliest to lose among the senators up for in 2016. Illinois is a resolutely blue state that becomes even more so in a presidential cycle, when black and Hispanic turnout in the Chicago area is especially high the last Republican from the state to hold a United States Senate seat for more than one term was Charles Percy, who left office in 1985. Although Kirk was a congressman for a full decade before winning in 2010 the Senate seat once held by Barack Obama, to this day he lacks a national or even statewide profile. And all of this was before a certain real estate tycoon decided to run for president. In a more ordinary presidential election year, a vulnerable senator like Kirk would be inclined to look to the top of the ticket for campaign support. But what happens when that position is occupied by Donald Trump — a candidate who has proposed banning Muslim immigration, has made a seemingly endless series of statements offensive to Hispanics, Jews, blacks and women and, according to Gallup polls, currently enjoys a favorable rating (31 percent) not seen since the nadir of Jimmy Carter’s presidency? The ticket has prompted gleeful Democrats to coalesce around a message that will tie every Republican office seeker to the nominee. Meanwhile, Republican leaders like Speaker Paul Ryan and the 2012 presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, have gone to the extreme of repeatedly condemning the behavior of their party’s implicitly urging Republican candidates to do whatever is necessary to avoid an Election Day apocalypse. The friction between the nominee and his party became jarringly apparent during a meeting at the Capitol Hill Club on July 7 between Trump and 41 Republican senators. A few of them accused Trump of jeopardizing the party’s prospects in November Trump fired back with insults, labeling Kirk — who was not present but has publicly criticized Trump — a “loser. ” The meeting was especially charged given the acute vulnerability of the Senate. The party currently holds a majority. Of the 34 seats up for this year, 24 are occupied by Republicans. Six of those, including Kirk’s, are in states to which the Republicans managed to lay claim in the Tea Party tsunami of 2010, but that President Obama won two years later. If Hillary Clinton wins the presidency, the Democrats need to retake only four of those six to control the Senate (because the vice president gets a Senate vote in the event of a tie). Presidential election years have increasingly brought out nonwhite voters, so 2016 was sure to be an unpleasant one for Kirk and his Republican colleagues regardless. With Trump, who has disparaged, threatened or otherwise offended many of those same voters in the past year, their collective migraine has become a yearlong cluster headache. “I have to respect the will of the voters,” Kirk said, referring to Trump’s primary victories. “If you win the election, you won the election. ” Still, he added, “In this case, I do disagree with the decision the voters made. ” Last September, as the idea that the Trump candidacy was something more than an ephemeral novelty began to sink in, Ward Baker, the executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, sent a memo to his senior staff. “Let’s face facts,” Baker wrote. “Trump says what’s on his mind, and that’s a problem. Our candidates will have to spend full time defending him or condemning him if that continues. And that’s a place we never, ever want to be. ” Baker’s memo, which was leaked to The Washington Post, instructed candidates to “run your own race” and to “show your independence” from the man he described as a “mis guided missile” — but at the same time, he cautioned, be mindful of the fact that “Trump has connected with voters on issues like trade with China and America’s broken borders. ” Even eight months before Trump effect ively claimed the nomination, Baker grasped the uniquely fraught terrain the party’s unexpected had laid out before the Republicans who would be sharing a ticket with him in November. The connection between presidential nominees and candidates is historically clear, and has become more so as the country has become more polarized. That’s especially the case when it comes to the Senate. With (for the most part) increasing frequency since 1913 — the year the 17th Amendment was passed, designating that senators would be elected by popular vote rather than by state legislatures — voters have tended to elect Senate candidates who belong to the same party as the presidential candidate they favor. Both parties still hold close the memories of the exceptional examples of this phenomenon, the bonanza years and the catastrophes. In 1980, Ronald Reagan’s victory over Carter was the crest of a tidal wave that also gave Republicans 12 Senate seats and control over the upper chamber for the first time in almost three decades. In 1964, Barry Goldwater’s support for “extremism in the defense of liberty” cost Republicans of both the Senate and the House. But Trump presents a much more complex weather system for his to navigate than either of these cases. His views are not wedded to a coherent ideological movement within his party (as Goldwater’s were) nor is his unpopularity a simple judgment on his record (as Carter’s was). Instead, Trump is a sui generis figure who must be accepted or rejected on his own terms, not artfully hedged around in the way politicians are accustomed to doing. And while Trump was undoubtedly the most popular Republican primary contestant in a field of 17, it’s still not clear how many of his opponents’ supporters will vote for their party’s pick on Election Day. For an Republican senator this fall, to back away from Trump is, by extension, to snub his millions of loyalists, the one group of party voters that is sure to show up on Nov. 8. But to go for Trump is to take leave of your Republican bona fides and embrace life as a Trump — a gamble that not a single Republican senator up for this fall appears to have the stomach for. None of this seems to overly concern Trump. When I asked him recently whether the party’s maintaining its majority in the Senate meant anything to him, he replied: “Well, I’d like them to do that. But I don’t mind being a free agent, either. ” Trump has shown similarly little interest in helping his party’s committees build the sort of war chests typically required in a campaign year. After winning the presidential nomination on a shoestring budget and with fewer paid staff members than the average candidate for governor, he has been visibly reluctant to help build much in the way of national campaign infrastructure, sending a clear message to his fellow Republicans: This fall, you’re on your own. As Ryan Williams, a strategist with the 2012 Romney presidential campaign, told me: “Traditionally, the nominee has a robust campaign that absorbs the R. N. C. effort and works in tandem with the campaigns. We did that with Romney in 2012. This time around, there’s a complete void at the presidential level. Trump’s trying to play a game of baseball and hasn’t put out an infield. ” In addition to Kirk, there are five Republican incumbents running in states that Obama won in 2012 whose fortunes are now lashed to those of the Trump campaign: Kelly Ayotte in New Hampshire, Ron Johnson in Wisconsin, Marco Rubio in Florida, Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania and Rob Portman in Ohio. In May, Ayotte offered her “support” for Trump, but a spokeswoman quickly clarified to reporters that Ayotte “hasn’t and isn’t planning to endorse anyone this cycle. ” Johnson supplied messaging advice to the Trump campaign during the Wisconsin primary in April and declared the day after Trump vanquished Ted Cruz on May 3 that “I am going to certainly endorse the Republican nominee. ” Two weeks later, however, Johnson ratcheted down his endorsement to “support,” warily adding that he would “be concentrating on the areas of agreement with Mr. Trump. ” Rubio, meanwhile, has remained in a state of torment ever since his drubbing in the presidential primaries. Before announcing that he would run again for the Senate, Rubio said that he would be “honored” to help his party’s nominee, but later hedged, saying he did not expect to speak at the Republican convention on Trump’s behalf — and finally declaring he would not attend the convention at all. “I think that the Senate needs to fulfill its role as a check and balance on the president, no matter who it is,” he said last month. This was clearly intended to suggest that, if he would not blindly do the bidding of a President Trump — a notion that has prompted belittlement from Rubio’s Democratic opponents. “What’s so funny about that premise is that Rubio’s the only Senate candidate we’re running against who has proven he’s ineffective at standing up to Donald Trump,” Sadie Weiner, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s communications director, told me. Toomey and Portman, for their part, have both distanced themselves from, among other things, Trump’s claim that Gonzalo Curiel, the federal judge who is presiding over a lawsuit against Trump University, would show bias against him on account of his being “Mexican. ” But denouncing and renouncing are two different things. Come November, both Portman and Toomey may need Trump — or rather, Trump’s voters. As Steven Law, the chief executive of the conservative “super PAC” American Crossroads, told me: “According to research we’ve seen, there were demonstrably voters in 2012 who stayed home in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Specifically, there were white voters who were discouraged by the perception that Romney was a wealthy plutocrat. ” As evidenced by exit polls taken early in the primary season across the Rust Belt, Trump’s message of aggrievement has especially resonated with the voters that Law says Toomey and Portman cannot afford to alienate. Even comparably comfortable incumbents like Richard Burr of North Carolina and Roy Blunt of Missouri are ahead by narrow enough margins that one more particularly incendiary Trump statement could plausibly spell defeat in November. John McCain, whose valor as a prisoner of war Trump has mocked (“I like people who weren’t captured,” Trump told an audience in Iowa last July) this year finds himself once again struggling to avoid a primary upset at the hands of a more conservative challenger he offered his support of the nominee in May, saying of Trump’s supporters, “I think it would be foolish to ignore them. ” To donors at a private event (which was recorded and leaked to Politico) however, McCain acknowledged, “If Donald Trump is at the top of the ticket, here in Arizona, with over 30 percent of the vote being the Hispanic vote, no doubt that this may be the race of my life. ” Putting a brave face on it, some Republicans like Law insist that at the very least, Trump’s constituency is devoted enough to be counted on to show up to the polls in November. By contrast, they say, Clinton’s failure to earn the support of millennials (who went for her primary opponent, Bernie Sanders, by a staggering margin) could result in a decline in turnout that might swing some races their way. In other words, the depth of Clinton’s support is as questionable as the breadth of Trump’s, or so goes the argument. As Law — whose American Crossroads has spawned an offshoot organization, One Nation, that has made large ad buys in the states with vulnerable Republican Senate seats — told me: “In our research, we’ve found that upward of 30 to 40 percent of voters currently have a preference but aren’t satisfied with that preference. So I think there’s risk on both sides. ” I asked Law if he thought the risks really were that comparable. After all, while Clinton’s current disapproval rate is a bleak 55 percent, Trump’s is 15 points worse. In a Senate race, won’t the greater dislike of Trump make a difference? “At this stage of the game, I’m not sure you can say that,” Law replied. Of course, at this stage of the game, American Crossroads is investing huge amounts in such races, running ads that have plenty to say about Hillary Clinton and nothing about Donald Trump. ’u2009A handful of Republican senators, as a matter of principle or political prophylaxis or both, have completely disassociated themselves from their party’s nominee. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina has variously termed Trump a “ xenophobic religious bigot” and a “jackass. ” Jeff Flake of Arizona has urged his colleagues to withhold their endorsement of Trump “there are certain things you can’t do as a candidate,” he said on CBS’s “Face the Nation. ” Ben Sasse of Nebraska has described Trump’s attacks on Curiel as “the literal definition of racism” and has called for a alternative. But Graham, Flake and Sasse aren’t up for this year. Among the avowed Trump refuseniks, only Mark Kirk is. Kirk came by his opposition status belatedly. The former Naval intelligence officer is an unassuming centrist with an unfortunate knack for narrowly missing out on national attention. In April 2013, he became the second Republican senator to support marriage, after Rob Portman (whose son is gay). Three months before that, Kirk was the first of his party’s senators to support legislation with Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat, after the Newtown massacre — but because Kirk’s standing with the National Rifle Association was already abysmal, Manchin sought out a more Republican ally in Pat Toomey as a for his bill. Still, Kirk is not without political acumen. He inveighed against Obamacare just enough to win in 2010, when Republicans largely succeeded in making House and Senate races into referendums on Obama’s legislative agenda. Six years later, Kirk took note of Trump’s ascent and fell in behind the presumptive nominee in March, though two different Kirk advisers described his support to me as “tepid” from the beginning. But, Kirk told me, he had trouble envisioning Trump as the kind of steady hand who could manage global crises the way President George Bush did during Kirk’s Navy days. “If it had been President Trump, I would have had problems,” he said. “Is he going to get angry? Is he going to start bombing?” Kirk saw his opening when Trump aired his views of Curiel. “After much consideration,“ Kirk said in a statement on June 7, “I have concluded that Donald Trump has not demonstrated the temperament necessary to assume the greatest office in the world. ” Since then, the senator has spent as much time denouncing Trump as he has Clinton. “I joke to Ben Sasse that if Trump wins, he’ll be my roommate at Gitmo,” he told me. Unendorsing Trump was perhaps a more politically viable option for Kirk than for his fellow endangered Republican senators. “I’m probably the only one around here who absolutely embraces the ” he said, referring to “moderate. ” And as the Crain’s Chicago Business columnist Rich Miller recently wrote, in Illinois “independent suburban women have been the deciding factor in just about every statewide race since 1990. ” Given Trump’s 70 percent disapproval rating among women over all, criticizing the nominee may prove not only useful to Kirk, but also — especially against a female opponent like Duckworth — imperative. Kirk’s campaign strategists have chosen to view Trump, in a sort of way, as a perverse gift for their candidate. Every outburst by Trump offers an opportunity for Kirk to hurl himself into the spotlight as a Trump denouncer. But as Duckworth’s deputy campaign manager, Matt McGrath, told me, “If the Kirk campaign is of the mind that having daily or weekly opportunities to condemn Donald Trump is going to win this election for him — well, good luck with that. ” The alternative is to somehow ignore the presidential candidate in modern political history — an approach that every vulnerable Republican senator aside from Kirk has adopted. The preferred strategy is to keep their politics local, “talking to voters like they’re running for sheriff,” as Ward Baker, the National Republican Senatorial Committee’s executive director, put it to me. The exemplar of this “Mayberry R. F. D. ” strategy is Kelly Ayotte, New Hampshire’s junior senator. Ayotte, like Kirk, won office in 2010 in what had recently been a swing state she now faces one of the Democratic Party’s top Senate recruits, the state’s sitting governor, Maggie Hassan. Ayotte has been a relentless presence in her state’s diners, farmer’s markets and pageants this year. “In a close race like this one, I think that actual interaction with voters matters,” she told me in late June. We were sitting in Ayotte’s Senate office, where I had gone in hopes of finding out what it means to “support” but not “endorse” Trump. Although she entered politics as an apolitical state attorney general who had served in both Republican and Democratic administrations, Ayotte’s Senate victory in 2010 probably would not have occurred without the endorsement of Sarah Palin, who dubbed her the Granite Grizzly. Once in office, however, Ayotte quickly allied herself with establishment Republicans like McCain and Graham. Mitt Romney named her as a potential candidate in the 2012 race, and as a female legislator in a swing state she would very likely have fared similarly this year were the Republican nominee Rubio, Jeb Bush or someone other than Trump. When I asked the former prosecutor to explain her position on the nominee, she offered a sort of smile, then proceeded into a thicket of noncommittal verbiage. “Yeah, I think, um, that, I will — basically, the way I look at ‘support versus endorse’ is: I will be voting for him,” she began. “I obviously, when I endorse someone, I’m out campaigning, I’m endorsing and asking other people — people should vote their conscience in this election. That said, it doesn’t matter — it matters, but my point is, whoever wins, I’ll be working with them on things that’ll be good for New Hampshire and the country, and I’ll be in opposition to them on things that I think aren’t good for New Hampshire and the country. ” I asked if this meant she would not be campaigning with Trump when he showed up this fall to compete in her state. “You know,” she replied, “I’m going to be focused on getting my message out to New Hampshire voters. And that means being out there with New Hampshire voters. ” She added, “I don’t anticipate, really, campaigning with other folks. ” Ayotte’s quest to establish the appropriate distance from Trump is not purely a matter of political expedience. Since her arrival in Washington, the senator — who is married to an Iraq war veteran — has styled herself as a specialist. In this arena, she said to me of Trump, “I have many disagreements with him,” before hastening to add, “I have more with the Democratic nominee. ” The of Trump’s global vision — calls to “bomb the [expletive] out of ISIS” and to reintroduce waterboarding on the one hand, a general aversion to foreign intervention and historical alliances on the other — seems anathema to a hawk like Ayotte. On these matters, her insistence to the contrary aside, the New Hampshire senator seems far more in sync with the former secretary of state than she does with the New York developer. Still, she has been willing to venture into Trump’s zone on occasion, mocking Obama for “being politically correct about how we define our enemies” and describing his military strategy against ISIS as an electoral stunt. Ultimately, the Ayotte campaign’s objective is to avoid a referendum altogether by advertising her practical skills as a bipartisan senator. Along these lines, Ayotte has made a point of emphasizing her support of the E. P. A. ’s Clean Power Plan, which seeks to address climate change by restricting emissions. (When Ayotte first ran for Senate in 2010, she spoke of climate change as an unproven theory. Since that time, she told me, “I’ve really looked at the issue and studied it further. ”) She also points to her vote for the Senate’s bipartisan legislation in 2013 — a position that ended her support from Palin, who called her a “ ” — and says that today, as she put it to me, “I want to be in the camp of solving the problem. ” Her campaign operatives also reminded me that Ayotte denounced Senator Ted Cruz last year for using the threat of a government shutdown as leverage for defunding Planned Parenthood — though this was really a tactical objection on her part, given that Ayotte has voted on six occasions to stop federal funding for the organization. Ayotte’s opponent, Hassan, intends to cite the incumbent’s votes against Planned Parenthood and her opposition to a hearing for Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, as among the reasons that she is out of step with New Hampshire voters. The looming presence of Trump amounts to a bonus for Hassan. As her campaign manager, Marc Goldberg, told me, “Trump will be just one part of this race — though maybe a significant part. ” Speaking of Ayotte, he said, “It will definitely make her life difficult on a basis. ” On that point, Ayotte’s supporters reluctantly agree. “If we had Rubio or Jeb at the top of the ticket, I’m sure the Democrats would try to tie our candidate in New Hampshire to policies they deem unpopular,” says the former Romney strategist Ryan Williams. “The difference is that Trump goes beyond the pale with statements he makes on a daily basis. He seems not to care what effect it has on the other candidates. He seems not to understand the responsibility that comes with the mantle. ” Fifteen years after his landslide defeat, Barry Goldwater penned an autobiography that he titled “With No Apologies. ” The Arizona senator in fact harbored a few regrets — among them, that he had staked out an ideological opposition to the Civil Rights Act, and that his losing candidacy (which also brought down 36 House and two Senate seats) paved the way for the four years later of Richard Nixon, whose Watergate scandal would bring dishonor to their party. But Goldwater held himself largely blameless for the outcome of the 1964 election. It was his own party’s fault, he asserted, for demonizing a conservative vision that would, 16 years later, be validated by Reagan. “By the time the convention opened,” he wrote of his fellow Republicans, “I had been branded as a fascist, a racist, a warmonger, a nuclear madman and the candidate who couldn’t win. ” By the time the 2016 Republican convention opens in Cleveland this month, Trump will also have been branded — by fellow Republicans who now revere Goldwater as a movement godfather — as a racist madman who cannot win. Some of them may show up to Cleveland in hopes of staging a delegate upheaval and in that way thwarting Trump’s coronation. But many other party notables, like Ayotte and Kirk, have already found excuses not to attend the convention. Trump did not seem particularly concerned that he might be shunned or subverted at the convention when he spoke to me by phone one recent afternoon. “I have a lot of support from senators,” he insisted. “And then some of them are neutral. ” New Hampshire’s junior senator fell squarely in the latter category, he acknowledged: “Kelly Ayotte has been silent, more or less. Honestly, I don’t mind that she’s silent. ” Somewhat cryptically, he added, “We can both be silent, to be honest with you. ” As for Kirk, Trump said he had reason to believe that the Illinois senator’s distaste for him was feigned, but he would not share his evidence for the record. He reminded me that he had won both Kirk’s and Ayotte’s states during the primaries and predicted that he would repeat that feat in November. If the two senators felt it wise to separate themselves from their party’s leader, then Trump would support, if not endorse, the idea. “I want them to do what they need to do,” he said of the vulnerable senators. “It’s fine with me. It won’t hurt me. I think it’ll hurt them, frankly. ” | 1 |
Border Patrol agents in southern California have arrested a previously deported, aggravated felon who had been convicted of homicide but has not served his sentence. [The agents detected two men walking along the International Border fence near Calexico, California. After they had detained the suspects, the agents determined they were illegal aliens who had no lawful right to be present in the United States. They arrested the men and transported them to the El Centro Border Patrol Station for processing. The El Centro Station has four border patrol stations and is responsible for surveying and protecting 70 miles of the U. S. border. When they reached the station and conducted background checks on the two men, the search revealed that one of them was Humberto . Alonso is a Guatemalan national previously convicted of felony homicide in 2003. A court sentenced him to a prison term. “This arrest of a convicted felon, demonstrates the importance of the mission of the Border Patrol,” said Assistant Chief Patrol Agent David S. Kim in a written statement obtained by Breitbart Texas. “The hard work and dedication of our agents is a shield for our communities against a threat like this. ” The U. S. Attorney’s Office is expected to prosecute for the crime of after removal as a convicted felon. Although agents discovered the Guatemalan national as part of routine border patrol prevention, detection, and apprehension duties television, print, and online media have recently been ablaze with reports of immigration officials’ roundup of criminal illegal aliens. Open borders advocates and complicit news organizations have used the routine operations to advance their agenda with messages of misinformation and fear. They have painted pictures of sweeping raids and government retaliation under the new presidential administration. These arrests however, are part of routine U. S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations to protect the public from criminal foreign nationals. As reported by Breitbart Texas, ICE agents targeted illegal aliens in Operation Cross Check in May 2015 because they had felony convictions. Officials arrested 2, 059 criminal aliens, and 1, 000 of them had felony convictions for voluntary manslaughter, child pornography, robbery, sexual assault, and kidnapping. of those apprehended were known gang members, and 89 were convicted sex offenders. A roundup in December netted 71 criminal illegal aliens. These criminals had convictions for drug trafficking, burglary, fraud, driving under the influence, weapons violations, and domestic violence. Another national operation in September put 36 more criminal aliens in jail. An operation called Operation Safe Nation and Operation No Safe Haven III apprehended 17 illegal immigrants who were thought to pose a public safety threat. Officials in foreign countries issued warrants for 19 individuals arrested during the operation for suspension of committing human rights violations. Officials with the University of Texas Immigration Clinic in Austin, Texas, has used recent ICE operations in the city to spread their political messages and cause panic. One of the operators of the clinic, Denise Gillman, told the Austin that there has been an increase in activity by ICE officials. She added, “there’s a much bigger presence than the one that’s been acknowledged by ICE. ” She also was reported to say, “they’re making their presence known, driving around immigrant neighborhoods. ” Officials in the democratic city like Councilman Gregorio Casar has made Facebook posts that state: “I believe ICE is out in public arresting people in order to retaliate against our community for standing up for our values against people like Abbott and Trump. ” Open borders advocates have continued their fake news campaign against ICE, but generating panic places communities and law enforcement officers in unnecessary danger, say ICE officials. | 1 |
English patriotism is on the rise, with increasing numbers of people identifying as predominantly English rather than British, a survey has found. [According to the recent YouGov poll, nearly of those questioned described themselves as English instead of British — a rise of 5 per cent on 2015 figures. Last year, just 18 per cent of those surveyed said they felt only British or more British than English, but 35 per cent said they were English not British or more English than British. The number of people saying they feel equally English and British rose from 35 to 38 per cent between 2015 and 2016. Numerous polls during and after the European Union (EU) referendum showed that those who felt mostly English were more likely to vote for Brexit. Speaking to The Telegraph shortly after his election, UKIP leader Paul Nuttall described how he aimed to appeal to this renewed sense of Englishness, particularly following the devolution of other UK nations. “The next big issue that’s going to come up in British politics beyond Brexit is Englishness,” he said. Adding: “There is a value that unites that vast majority of British people away from the small metropolitan clique, and that value is patriotism. ” The former Labour cabinet minister John Denham, who now heads the University of Winchester’s Centre for English Identity and Politics, led the study. He said he found a growing correlation between identity and political behaviour. “Voters who most strongly identify as English are much more likely to reject Labour as a party and key Labour messages, like support for the EU,” Mr. Dunham explained. “Without a change in Labour’s appeal, rising English identity may make attracting key groups of voters even harder. ” On Tuesday, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn attempted to appeal to patriotism, claiming he was not “wedded” to the principle of EU free movement. However, he refused to say he would limit numbers and insisted that current levels of migration were not too high. His only solution was to say that labour reforms would “probably” reduce the incentive to come to the UK. | 1 |
Police arrested a prominent Democratic leader and staff member for New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio on child pornography charges, according to the New York Post. [On Friday, the Post said that court documents stated that Jacob Schwartz allegedly kept thousands of photos and nearly one hundred videos on a laptop depicting horrifying acts with “young nude females between the approximate ages of 6 months and 16, engaging in sexual conduct … on an adult male. ” Schwartz, 29, faces charges of “possession of a sexual performance by a child and promoting a sexual performance by a child,” according to the New York Daily News. (Jacob Schwartz: Facebook) Schwartz previously served as president of the Manhattan Young Democrats. A biography of Schwartz reveals he worked for Obama’s 2012 campaign: Jacob was born and raised in the heart of Greenwich Village, and was involved in political organizing from a young age. Some of his oldest memories are handing out leaflets for his father, as he campaigned for District Leader. More recently, he helped start the New Democratic Alliance in New York City, and, in 2012, worked for the Obama campaign as a Field Organizer in the Lehigh Valley. A graduate of Lehigh University with an M. S. in Energy Systems Engineering and a B. S. in Electrical Engineering, Jacob currently works for the New York City Department of Design and Construction on their Build It Back Hurricane Sandy recovery and resiliency program. He is also the founder and executive director of a climate education called Common Climate, and previously served as Issues Assembly and Policy Director for MYD. Most mentions of Schwartz on social media were scrubbed around the time of his arrest. An archive of his deactivated Twitter account shows a photo with him and former Hillary Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook taken on August 26, 2016. The Manhattan Young Democrats touted the event on their Twitter profile beforehand: Incredibly proud to be honoring @HillaryClinton Campaign Manager #RobbyMook at #YGID2016 https: . pic. twitter. — Manhattan Young Dems (@gomyd) August 23, 2016, According to attorney James Roth, Schwartz was released on $7, 500 bail Thursday. Schwartz works as a “computer programmer analyst in the city Department of Design and Construction,” the Post reports. | 1 |
ObamaCare is Great. We Just Need to Punish People for Not Using It October 27, 2016
But...but... I thought we were trying to help people.
ObamaCare visionary Jonathan "Stupidity of the American Voter" Gruber is back. When last we heard from the man with the same name as the Die Hard villain, he was being ushered off the scene after explaining how stupid everyone was .
An architect of the federal healthcare law said last year that a "lack of transparency" and the "stupidity of the American voter" helped Congress approve ObamaCare. In a clip unearthed Sunday, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Jonathan Gruber appears on a panel and discusses how the reform earned enough votes to pass.
He suggested that many lawmakers and voters didn't know what was in the law or how its financing worked, and that this helped it win approval. "Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage,” Gruber said. "And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass." Gruber made the comment while discussing how the law was "written in a tortured way" to avoid a bad score from the Congressional Budget Office. He suggested that voters would have rejected ObamaCare if the penalties for going without health insurance were interpreted as taxes, either by budget analysts or the public. "If CBO scored the [individual] mandate as taxes, the bill dies," Gruber said.
Now the Gruber is back... and ready to explain why the only problem with ObamaCare is the lack of severe beatings .
“There is no sense in which” the law “has to be fixed. The law is working as designed. However, it could work better. And I think probably the most important thing experts would agree on is that, we need a larger mandate penalty. We have individuals who are essentially free-riding on the system, they’re essentially waiting until they get sick and then getting health insurance. The whole idea of this plan, which was pioneered in Massachusetts, was that the individual mandate penalty would bring those people into the system and have them participate. The penalty right now is probably too low, and that’s something I think ideally we would fix.”
Ideally we would penalize Gruber and everyone involved in inflicting this monstrosity on the public. But predictably Gruber's proposal is to offer up more beatings until morale improves. While pretending that anyone who isn't on ObamaCare is just a "free rider". | 0 |
Un nuevo fuerte sismo de magnitud 6,1 sacude el centro de Italia Publicado: 26 oct 2016 19:34 GMT | Última actualización: 26 oct 2016 19:54 GMT
Un nuevo fuerte sismo de magnitud 6,1 ha sacudido el centro de Italia. Síguenos en Facebook
Un nuevo sismo de magnitud 6,1 ha sacudido este miércoles el centro de Italia, informa el Servicio Geológico de EE.UU. ( USGS , por las siglas en inglés).
El temblor se ha registrado a 2 kilómetros al nornoroeste de la localidad de Visso, en la región de las Marcas. El foco se ubicó a 10 kilómetros de profundidad.
Dos horas antes la parte central de Italia fue sacudida por un sismo de magnitud 5,6, según informa GEOFON . El temblor se registró a 66 kilómetros de Perugia. El foco se ubicó a dos kilómetros de profundidad y el epicentro se situó 37 kilómetros al oeste de la localidad de Ascoli Piceno —gravemente afectada por un fenómeno similar el pasado 25 de agosto— y 132 kilómetros al nordeste de Roma, la capital del país, en donde también se ha sentido .
Más información en breve. | 0 |
The Getty Center museum in Los Angeles was evacuated Tuesday afternoon after an unidentified caller reportedly called in a bomb threat. [The museum’s official Twitter account sent out a message at 4:16 p. m. local time warning that it would close early due to a “threatening phone call” on the advice of the Los Angeles Police Department. Getty Center is closing early today due to threatening phone call. Visitors are currently leaving on advice from @LAPDHQ staff to follow. — J. Paul Getty Museum (@GettyMuseum) April 18, 2017, LAPD officer Tony Im told the Los Angeles Daily News that the call came in just before 3 p. m. “Somebody stated, ‘There is a bomb. Get out,’” Im said. At least one video surfaced on social media which appeared to show visitors being evacuated from the museum, which is located at 1200 Getty Center Drive. Evacuated because of a bomb threat. We are and far away. pic. twitter. — Devin Altieri (@DevinAltieri) April 18, 2017, According to KTLA, an LAPD bomb squad was sent to the museum to investigate the threat, but no device or suspect had been located as of 5:00 p. m. PT. The museum was scheduled to remain closed for the remainder of Tuesday evening. Follow Daniel Nussbaum on Twitter: @dznussbaum | 1 |
Despite Widespread Concerns, DOJ Spreads Election Monitors Thin 2013 gutting of Voting Rights Act means fewer full-access election observers will be stationed at polling places. | November 8, 2016 Be Sociable, Share! Inflatable figures direct voters at the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters, Oct. 24, 2016, in San Jose, Calif.
The 2013 gutting of the Voting Rights Act means the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) will deploy just 500 election monitors to polling places in 28 states on Tuesday—hundreds less than in 2012, and imbued with limited powers.
The DOJ made its announcement Monday amid escalated concerns about voter intimidation and discrimination .
“The bedrock of our democracy is the right to vote, and the Department of Justice works tirelessly to uphold that right not only on Election Day, but every day,” said Attorney General Loretta Lynch. “The department is deeply committed to the fair and unbiased application of our voting rights laws and we will work tirelessly to ensure that every eligible person that wants to do so is able to cast a ballot.”
But the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder , which struck down parts of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA), means that work will be curtailed as compared with previous years.
The 500 personnel will be deployed in 67 jurisdictions across 28 states; in 2012 there were 780 monitors sent to 51 jurisdictions in 24 states.
Not all the DOJ officials will have the full powers of election “observers.” As Reuters explains : Most of those states will receive Justice Department staff who have no statutory authority to access polling sites as a result of a 2013 Supreme Court decision that struck down parts of the Voting Rights Act, curtailing the department’s ability to deploy election observers with unfettered access to the polls. […] Courts have granted the Justice Department permission to deploy full-access observers in five states: Alaska, California, Louisiana, New York, and Alabama. But the court order for Alabama only pertains to municipal elections and it is not on the list of states where the Justice Department is deploying poll watchers this year. The Justice Department staff who are deployed to the other 24 states on Tuesday will be election “monitors”, who must rely on local and state authorities to grant them access to polling locations.
Bloomberg notes that the DOJ was able to send observers to 13 states in 2012.
According to the DOJ, the agency’s Civil Rights Division will monitor the election on the ground in the following 67 jurisdictions: Bethel Census Area, Alaska; | 0 |
In conversations over the last several months with chief executives and other business leaders, the discussion invariably turns to the presidential election. And with few exceptions, at some point, most of the executives say something critical, even derogatory, about Donald Trump — but it is quickly followed by, “I could never say that on the record. ” Almost as quickly, I ask why. The answer is almost universal: fear. Which brings us to Reid Hoffman, the of LinkedIn and celebrated venture capital investor who had one of the first stakes in both Facebook and Airbnb. Unlike many of his peers, Mr. Hoffman has taken to publicly denouncing Mr. Trump. Last week, he pledged to donate $5 million to a veterans’ group if Mr. Trump released his tax returns before the last presidential debate in October. And now he has gone so far as to release a card game, “Trumped Up Cards: The World’s Biggest Deck” that pokes fun at Mr. Trump. The website that sells the game describes it as “a multiplayer card game where players need really big hands to win. ” The game, which is modeled after “Apples to Apples” or “Cards Against Humanity,” includes a free pass called, “Play the women card” and uses the tagline: “This is a game, democracy isn’t. ” The box, in tiny print, says, “Made in China, just like ties, dress shirts, suits, cuff links, eyeglasses, pens, lamps, mirrors, salad bowls, body soap and teddy bears. ” But Mr. Hoffman said he almost didn’t make his political views — and the card game — so public because he worried, as did his family and friends (who originally counseled him against it) that he might become a target for Mr. Trump and his Twitter account — or worse. “People are fearful that, especially in a circumstance where he might be in a position of extreme power as a potential presidential candidate, that that would be used in a retaliatory way, that would be used in vengeful way,” Mr. Hoffman told me in an interview. “Everyone gets worried about being attacked, and part of the logic and mechanics of bullies is that they cause people to be fearful that they’ll be singled out and attacked. ” Mr. Hoffman continued: “It’s the same thing like on school grounds, when people won’t go help the kid who is being bullied because they’re worried that the bully will focus on them. ” Mr. Hoffman articulated a view that is often whispered within the business community — among those who are voting against Mr. Trump — but rarely spoken aloud. I have talked to some of the top executives of the Fortune 500 companies in recent months, and I’d be to name one who didn’t at least roll his or her eyes when Mr. Trump’s name was mentioned. Technology companies are afraid that Mr. Trump might criticize their approach to privacy, as he did with Apple. Wall Street banks worry he might seek to break them up. Health care companies are nervous that he might attack them over pricing. Multinationals are worried about trade. All of these are valid issues on the campaign trail — but with Mr. Trump, unlike other politicians, the criticism seems more personal and vitriolic. “I’ve had a whole bunch of those kinds of concerns from people around me,” Mr. Hoffman said. “People who have legitimate concerns about, ‘Would LinkedIn become a target for Trump’s ire and attacks? Would he make Second Amendment jokes about your friends and family? ’” That is not to say that all chief executives have remained silent this election season. A new survey I wrote about several weeks ago in this column showed just how influential those political positions can be, even if they are simply a signal to others. Chief executives like Howard Schultz of Starbucks, who has endorsed Hillary Clinton, have said positive things about the candidate they support — without going negative on the other candidate. However, only a handful of executives — mostly retired ones or entrepreneurs who work for themselves (think Mark Cuban, who has come out against Mr. Trump, or Kenneth Langone, who has castigated Mrs. Clinton) or those who seem to have been granted a special status (think Warren Buffett, a Trump foe) have been openly critical of either side. Mr. Hoffman said he had a theory for the silence. “There’s two sets of things that cause people to be quiet,” he said. “One is there’s a culture in America that business leadership is to be apolitical. It’s like Michael Jordan’s comment, ‘Republicans buy Nikes too. ’” (Mr. Jordan was quoted as saying that in “Second Coming,” the 1995 Sam Smith book about the athlete, about why he sought to avoid taking political positions publicly. Mr. Smith cited one of Mr. Jordan’s friends as the source.) Another reason for reticence in the business community, Mr. Hoffman said: “It’s fear for themselves, or fear they’re attentive to bringing their communities into it. ” While these undercurrents are always there during big elections, they seem more pronounced than usual during this ferociously contentious cycle. “I feel sympathetic to the folks, compassionate to the folks who fall silent in that fear,” said Mr. Hoffman, who then proceeded to issue a call to arms. “I think the only thing I would say is that precisely when you feel that fear, it’s precisely the time where if you aspire to be a courageous leader, that fear is a signal to you that you should step forward. ” After all, if those who can afford to make their voices heard do not do so, who will? “If you are in a position of power and in a position of being able to make a difference and you are feeling fearful, think what everyone else is feeling,” Mr. Hoffman said. All these sentiments dovetail with the reactions Mr. Hoffman said he had received about his card game. “I’ve had a number of Republicans actually think it was terrifically funny,” he said, explaining that he had asked some of them to provide promotional quotes about the game. “I’m hopeful maybe in the next week or two I might be able to persuade a couple of them, but thus far all of my requests to my friends for public quotes have been demurred — maybe out of fear of retaliation. ” | 1 |
Trump swept to victory by fans of poor quality 80s action films 09-11-16 MEN who love the films of Chuck Norris and Steven Seagal are responsible for Trump’s election victory, it has emerged. An unusually high voter turnout among people whose favourite films are Missing in Action , Death Wish 2 or Lone Wolf McQuade is believed to have sealed America’s fate. Trump voter Wayne Hayes said: “I believe masculine 80s action films, featuring a foreign baddie and one sex scene shot in silhouette, are the pinnacle of cinema and a template for how to live. “I particularly like it if they have a paranoid theme, like Invasion USA . I’ve even written a script called Blood Hunter II: Midnight Revenge Attack about a former POW killing gang members with his metal hand. “He has a dog called Maverick that wears an eye patch.” He added: “They should show Under Siege in schools, because if you’re a chef on a big boat and it’s attacked by terrorists, you need to be able to save the sexy woman.”
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There are many jobs that are commonly understood to be dangerous to your health. Many people know the risk of these positions and continue to do their jobs diligently nonetheless. After all, we all have to make a living, and many people love what they do.
However, a recent study may cause us to rethink some of the things we thought we knew about which jobs are safe and which are not. It could also cause some to rethink their career goals. These researchers did their due diligence, and through a very scientific process, put together a list of the most unhealthy jobs in America.
While many on the list would surprise no one– nuclear medicine technologist, for example– there are some that may surprise even the people in the positions. Possibly the most shocking on the list was their number one most unhealthy career in America: dentists, dental surgeons and dental assistants.
Other surprises on the list include flight attendant, veterinarian and podiatrist. While many of these may not seem to make sense at first, after a closer look, one begins to understand the thinking and the process behind the rankings. For some, it includes the unusual amount of time spent sitting down. For others, factors like possible exposure to infectious disease explain their place on the list. Unfortunately for dentists, they hit a double-whammy on those factors plus several other aspects of the job that are viewed as unhealthy.
The list also includes several of the old hits like chemical plant and systems operator, radiologist and derrick operators. However, even the order of some of these and the dangerous attributes attributed to them can be surprising.
Perhaps I shouldn’t admit this, but there were even some on the list that were surprising simply because of their existence. One of those was histotechnologist; I didn’t even know that was a thing. In case you are more or equally uneducated as I, a histotechnologist is part of a medical laboratory team that prepares tissue for analysis and diagnosis of disease. If you did know that, you probably are a histotechnologist.
The information used in determining this list comes from the Occupational Informational Network, or O*Net. O*Net is a U.S. Department of Labor database that contains detailed information about hundreds of careers and occupations. It provides a host of useful facts for job seekers, human resources professionals, students and researchers.
In order to analyze occupations by the possible impact they could have on workers’ health, the researchers used O*Net measures of six different health risks and averaged them together. The types of risk include: Exposure to contaminants Exposure to disease and infection Exposure to hazardous conditions Risk of minor burns, cuts, bites and stings Time spent sitting | 0 |
ABC News reports that the illegal immigrant population in the United States could face deportation as a result of the executive order President Donald Trump signed on Wednesday, according to legal experts. A 2014 Pew Research Center study estimated the number of illegals in the U. S. to be at least 11 million. [From Julia Jacobo and Lauren Pearle at ABC News: The order delineates several categories of undocumented immigrants who are priority for removal from the United States including those who have been “charged with any criminal offense” or those who have “committed acts that constitute as a chargeable offense. ” On the campaign trail, Trump has vacillated several times on the issue, at first indicating that all undocumented immigrants would be sent back” if they’ve done well they’re going out and they’re coming back in legally. ” Then he tempered his remarks to focus on undocumented immigrants who committed crimes. But Trump’s executive order appears to extend beyond this. “Many aliens who illegally enter the United States and those who overstay or otherwise violate the terms of their visas present a significant threat to national security and public safety,” the order states. “This is particularly so for aliens who engage in criminal conduct in the United States. ” Anyone who came to the U. S. illegally — that is without passing through border inspection committed a criminal misdemeanor and could fall into the priority removal category, legal experts tell ABC News. Read the rest here. | 1 |
In the fall of 2012, a fisherman and carver named Terry St. Germain decided to enroll his five young children as members of the Nooksack, a federally recognized Native American tribe with some 2, 000 members, centered in the northwestern corner of Washington State. He’d enrolled his two older daughters, from a previous relationship, when they were babies, but hadn’t yet filed the paperwork to make his younger children — all of whom, including a set of twins, were under 7 — official members. He saw no reason to worry about a bureaucratic endorsement of what he knew to be true. “My kids, they love being Native,” he told me. St. Germain was a teenager when he enrolled in the tribe. For decades, he used tribal fishing rights to harvest salmon and sea urchin and Dungeness crab alongside his cousins. He had dozens of family members who were also Nooksack. His mother, according to family lore, was directly descended from a Nooksack chief known as Matsqui George. His brother, Rudy, was the secretary of the Nooksack tribal council, which oversaw membership decisions. The process, he figured, would be so straightforward that his kids would be certified Nooksacks in time for Christmas, when the tribe gives parents a small stipend for buying gifts: “I thought it was a situation. ” But after a few months, the applications had still not gone through. When Rudy asked why, at a tribal council meeting, the chairman, Bob Kelly, called in the enrollment department. They told Rudy that they had found a problem with the paperwork. There were missing documents ancestors seemed to be incorrectly identified. They didn’t think Terry’s children’s claims to tribal membership could be substantiated. At the time, Rudy and Kelly were friends, allies on the council. At the long oval table where they met to discuss Nooksack business, Rudy always sat at Kelly’s right. But the debate over whether Rudy’s family qualified as Nooksack tore them apart. Today, more than four years later, they no longer speak. Rudy and his extended family refer to Kelly as a monster and a dictator he calls them pond scum and con artists. They agree on almost nothing, but both remember the day when things fell apart the same way. “If my nephew isn’t Nooksack,” Rudy said in the council chambers, “then neither am I. ” To Rudy, the words were an expression of shock. “It’s fighting words,” he said, to tell someone they’re not really part of their tribe. At stake were not just his family’s jobs and homes and treaty rights but also who they were and where they belonged. “I’ll still be who I am, but I won’t have proof,” Rudy said. “I’ll be labeled a . So yeah, I take this very personally. ” To Kelly, the words were an admission of guilt, implicating not just the St. Germains but also hundreds of tribal members to whom they were related. As chairman, he felt that he had a sacred duty: to protect the tribe from invasion by a group of people that, he would eventually argue, weren’t even Native Americans. “I’m in a war,” he told me later, sketching family trees on the back of a copy of the tribe’s constitution. “This is our culture, not a game. ” The St. Germains’ rejected application proved to be a turning point for the Nooksack. Separately, the family and the council began combing through Nooksack history, which, like that of many tribes in the United States, is complicated by government efforts to extinguish, assimilate and relocate the tribe, and by a dearth of historical documents. An international border drawn across historically Nooksack lands only adds to the confusion. There were some records and even some living memories of the ancestors whose Nooksack heritage was being called into doubt. But no one could agree on what the records meant. In January 2013, Kelly announced that, after searching through files at the Bureau of Indian Affairs office in nearby Everett, he had reason to doubt the legitimacy of more than 300 enrolled Nooksacks related to the St. Germains, all of whom claimed to descend from a woman named Annie George, born in 1875. In February, he canceled the constitutionally required council meeting, saying it would be “improper” to convene when Rudy St. Germain and another council member, Rudy’s cousin Michelle Roberts, were not eligible to be part of the tribe they’d been elected to lead. A week later, he called an executive session of the council but demanded that St. Germain and Roberts remain outside while the rest of the council voted on whether to “initiate involuntary disenrollment” for them and 304 other Nooksacks, including 37 elders. The resolution passed unanimously. “It hurt me,” Terry St. Germain said later. Even harder was watching the effect on his brother, Rudy. “It took the wind right out of him. ” Two days after the meeting, the tribal council began sending out letters notifying affected members that unless they could provide proof of their legitimacy, they would be disenrolled in 30 days. Word and shock spread quickly through the small, reservation. The disenrollees, now calling themselves “the Nooksack 306,” hired a lawyer and vowed to contest their expulsion. “I told ’em, ‘I know where I belong no matter what you say,’’u2009” an woman who, in her youth, had been punished for “speaking Indian” at school, said. “’u2009‘You can’t make me believe that I’m not. ’’u2009” The Nooksacks who want the 306 out of the tribe say they are standing up for their very identity, fighting for the integrity of a tribe taken over by outsiders. “We’re ready to die for this,” Kelly would later say. “And I think we will, before this is over. ” Outside the lands legally known as “Indian Country,” “membership” and “enrollment” are such blandly bureaucratic words that it’s easy to lose sight of how much they matter there. To the 566 federally recognized tribal nations, the ability to determine who is and isn’t part of a tribe is an essential element of what makes tribes sovereign entities. To individuals, membership means citizenship and all the emotional ties and treaty rights that come with it. To be disenrolled is to lose that citizenship: to become stateless. It can also mean the loss of a broader identity, because recognition by a tribe is the most accepted way to prove you are Indian — not just Nooksack but Native American at all. Efforts to define Native American identity date from the earliest days of the colonies. Before the arrival of white settlers, tribal boundaries were generally fluid intermarriages and alliances were common. But as the new government’s desire to expand into Indian Territory grew, so, too, did the interest in defining who was and who wasn’t a “real Indian. ” Those definitions shifted as the colonial government’s goals did. “Mixed blood” Indians, for example, were added to rolls in hopes that assimilated Indians would be more likely to cede their land later, after land claims were established, more restrictive definitions were adopted. In the 19th century, the government began relying heavily on blood quantum, or “degree of Indian blood,” wagering that, over generations of intermarriage, tribes would be diluted to the point that earlier treaties would not have to be honored. “’u2009‘As long as grass grows or water runs’ — a phrase that was often used in treaties with American Indians — is a relatively permanent term for a contract,” the Ojibwe author David Treuer wrote in a 2011 for The Times. “’u2009‘As long as the blood flows’ seemed measurably shorter. ” Even for those early rolls, though, determining blood quantum was tricky it was not a measure that tribal people used or something they kept track of. Government agents compiling base rolls in the 1800s sometimes simply guessed at the percentage of Indian blood at the time, anthropologists used feet and hair width as a “scientific” test of blood degree in indigenous tribes. Many traditionalist Indians, known as “irreconcilables” or “blanket Indians,” were so suspicious of the government that they refused to be enrolled at all, making all their descendants unenrollable as well. In 1988 the historian Kent Carter coined a term for the millions who claim Indian ancestry but who, for a variety of reasons, don’t sort neatly into today’s official boxes: people with mixed tribal heritage people whose ancestors were denied recognition by early government agents or died before registration was complete people whose tribes, in the face of the federal government’s attempts to extinguish them, didn’t maintain the cohesion that same government would later require for recognition. Carter called them the “outalucks. ” Contemporary Indian identity is refracted through a tangled accumulation of and understandings of biology and race, as well as several centuries’ worth of conflicting federal policies. The Constitution uses the word “Indian” twice but never bothers to define it. A congressional survey in 1978 found that, in addition to the different requirements used by tribes and individual states, federal legislation defined Native Americans in at least 33 ways. In 2005, one frustrated judge, quoting an earlier decision, described the legal definitions of as “’u2009‘a complex patchwork of federal, state and tribal law,’ which is better explained by history than by logic. ” Given the web of criteria, courts are sometimes called upon to decide whether individuals, or even tribes, are “authentically” Indian. This has led to weighing things like whether 128ths constitutes a “significant degree” of Indian blood (a federal court ruled in 2009 that it did) whether someone who was “Indian in an anthropological or sense” was also Indian for the purposes of criminal jurisdiction if his tribe isn’t federally recognized (the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decided he was not) and whether behaviors like eating fast food and driving cars show that a tribe’s culture had been abandoned and its land rights “extinguished” (in 1991, a Canadian court said that they did the ruling was later overturned). Modern Native Americans — who in 2017 are still issued cards by the federal government certifying their “Degree of Indian Blood” — are used to, if not necessarily comfortable with, the need to “prove” their identities in ways that may seem strange to people of other ethnicities. Tribes set their own membership requirements, but in order to be recognized by the federal government, they must also prove their historical continuity and have generally hewed to the methods it has established. Tribes have on occasion been warned that federal recognition, and thus their rights, can disappear if their membership becomes unclear. When, in 1994, the Blackfeet Nation considered doing away with its requirement, a Bureau of Indian Affairs official warned that a tribe that “diluted” its relationship with its members might find that “it has ‘ ’ its sovereignty away. ” Today, most tribes use direct descent from tribal members listed on historical rolls and blood quantum. For a 2003 book, “Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America,” the Cherokee scholar Eva Marie Garroutte interviewed Native people about what it felt like to be defined in this way. Many said they saw blood quantum as a helpful guidepost and a guard against fraud or against people who identify as Indian without cultural understanding. Others regarded it as odd, even offensive. An Ojibwe man joked that he is also “part white, but I don’t have the papers to prove it. ” A woman replied, “I don’t like being talked about in a vocabulary usually reserved for dogs and horses. ” Lately, though, old debates about identity have taken a harsh new direction. Loss of tribal acceptance, which was once rare and seldom permanent, has become increasingly common over the last two decades. David Wilkins, a professor of American Indian studies at the University of Minnesota who has followed the phenomenon since the says there has been a surge in disenrollment that involves between 5, 000 and 9, 000 people in 79 tribes across 20 states. Even the dead have been disenrolled and, in some cases, exhumed from their graves, against tradition and taboo, to have their DNA tested. The ejection of tribal members is most prevalent in small tribes with casinos on their land “per capita” profit shares go further when split fewer ways. Many of the most famous cases have been in California: Following the opening of a new tribal casino in 2003, the Chukchansi, in Coarsegold, disenrolled more than half of approximately 1, 600 tribal members, and battles among factions eventually led to an armed takeover of the casino. But disenrollment also happens where casino money isn’t a major factor (the Nooksack have one casino and another recently closed, but don’t make enough money from gaming to issue per capita payments) or isn’t a factor at all, as in tribes where factions hope to consolidate political power or settle grudges or simply believe that people were mistakenly let in. Robert Williams, chairman of the Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy Program at the University of Arizona, told me that some tribes have recently begun to hire membership consultants to help trim their rolls. “It’s almost become an industry in some parts of Indian Country,” he said. The National Native American Bar Association issued a resolution in 2015 denouncing loss of membership without due process, while the Association of American Indian Physicians warned that such loss of identity could cause serious grief and depression. In general, though, the voices against disenrollment have been few. A 1978 Supreme Court decision, Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez, held that, due to its sovereignty, a tribe cannot be sued for discrimination for accepting the children of male members who married outside the tribe but not those of female members who did. It has been widely interpreted as giving tribes the right to determine their membership requirements, even if individual rights are compromised. The Bureau of Indian Affairs, out of respect for sovereignty, has repeatedly declined to intervene in internal membership disputes. Native leaders, leery of inviting scrutiny that could undermine tribal sovereignty, have been reluctant to speak out. “They tend to view any interference in such matters as an intrusion of the thin end of an infinitely expandable wedge against which they must exercise constant vigilance,” writes Garroutte. Ron Allen, the chairman of the Jamestown S’Klallam — a Western Washington tribe that disenrolled six members for insufficient blood quantum — says that “the topic is rising” and eliciting strong emotions, but it’s not appropriate to tell other tribes what to do: “It would be like Oregon saying to Washington, ‘You’re not managing your affairs properly. ’’u2009” Of the sweeping lands that historically made up Nooksack territory — it once stretched from the glaciated heights of Mt. Baker to the rocky shores of Puget Sound — the tribe now owns about 2, 500 acres, bought from private owners in the last 50 years. The reservation is centered in Deming, an unincorporated town of a few hundred people, with pockets of tribal housing scattered beyond it. Most Nooksack tribal members do not live on the reservation many of them, or their ancestors, followed opportunities in the more developed southern Sound or in other parts of the country. Adelina 64, lives across the Sound, closer to the Olympic Mountains. A of Annie George, the common ancestor who unites the Nooksack disenrollees, and a cousin of Rudy and Terry St. Germain’s mother, she was among the first of the 306 accepted as Nooksack decades ago. One afternoon as we sat on her porch watching ships come and go from Seattle, she showed me the letter the tribe sent her in 1983, announcing her new membership. Overhead, a bald eagle wheeled inside, her husband, a painter, made sketches for a portrait of Annie George. He was working from an old, grainy photograph that he wasn’t sure depicted George. A relative found it in a shed, and the features were indistinct. “Once you title something,” he said, laughing, “it is what you say it is. ” After she got her letter of acceptance, recalled, she was quick to tell her family, and then to write back to the enrollment director: “We were all jubilant, laughing, full of joy, jumping, screaming, crying, and the greatest overwhelming feeling of belonging somewhere. ” She was proud, she wrote, to finally know where she came from, “and prouder still to be a Nooksack Indian. ” didn’t set out to be a member of the Nooksack tribe. She grew up well south of Nooksack lands, following her parents as they sought work in the fields, orchards and canneries of Washington State. Her father was Filipino and her mother was Indian, raised on a Shxway reserve in British Columbia. Her mother always said she was part Shxway, a Canadian band within the Stolo nation, through her grandfather, and part Nooksack, through her grandmother Annie George. Annie George’s three daughters — ’s grandmother and her two aunts — all married Filipino farmworkers. The family spoke Halkomelem, a native language that was widely spoken in what is now British Columbia but also in the Nooksack River valley until the century it eventually largely replaced the original Nooksack language, Lhechalosem. As a child, would sometimes drive north with her mother to visit family, and they would stop off in Nooksack territory to visit a man they called Uncle Louis. In 1983, her mother and one of her decided they wanted to learn more about their heritage. They went to the Bureau of Indian Affairs office in Everett, Wash. and then to the Nooksack enrollment office in Deming, to work on a family tree. ’s mother told the enrollment director that her grandmother’s name was Annie George, and that her grandmother’s siblings had been named Louis, Amanda, Frank and William. Annie George wasn’t on the family trees the tribe had, and she wasn’t listed on any of the censuses it used, but Louis George was on a Nooksack tribal census from 1942. In a probate document, they found Annie’s name: Four interviewees described her as Louis’s half sister. The enrollment director encouraged the women to apply for membership, and they did. Within a month, the council sent them word that they had been accepted. was the 777th enrolled member of the Nooksack tribe. Many of her relatives quickly followed. (Some also enrolled, separately, as Shxway.) As more houses became available, more members of the three families moved to reservation lands. Before long, the descendants of Annie George became an influential voting bloc, and their members were being elected to council seats and hired to run tribal offices. While some elders welcomed them, others were skeptical. The sisters had never lived on Nooksack land. Some elders had no memory of them others remembered them visiting but thought of them as Shxway. Kelly heard, indirectly, that elders in British Columbia didn’t remember the sisters’ being born there, but rather, showing up suddenly as young children — the beginning of his suspicions that, though they “had teachings,” the sisters weren’t Annie’s real daughters at all but children she had taken in. Roberts showed me copies of two of the sisters’ birth certificates, reissued later in their lives, listing Annie and her husband as their parents. Other members of the tribe remembered knowing some of the 306 further south in the 1950s, when their families were doing agricultural work at the time, they said, the families identified as Filipino. They certainly hadn’t been around in the 1960s or ’70s, when the tribe was writing its constitution — when, as Kelly put it, the council “took a look around at who was here when they passed it, and they wrote their criteria for that, based on who was here — this is who Nooksack’s going to be. ” The debate continued into the 1990s, when the tribe did an enrollment audit of one of the three families descended from Annie’s daughters, the Rabangs. They were ultimately found to be enrollable, but not before an ugly confrontation. In 2000, after a number of Rabangs were arrested for smuggling marijuana into the United States from Canada, some elders told The Associated Press that “a clan of outsiders masquerading as Nooksacks” was “controlling tribal government. ” Bob Kelly now calls and the other first enrollees from her extended family “Trojan horses. ” The Nooksack, as is the case with many tribes, have not always been known by their modern name. Rather, Nooksack, which is also rendered Noxwsá7aq, was the name of one of many villages scattered along what is now called the Nooksack River. When white settlers arrived in the century, they applied the name of the village to all the people in the valley. Noxwsá7aq translates to “always bracken fern roots,” on which people of the village are said to have subsisted during a time of famine. One tribal member told me that she thinks the name captures something of what it means to be Nooksack. It makes her feel like a survivor. That’s a fair description of Nooksack history, especially in the last few hundred years. For centuries, the people fished their own river valley but also traveled regularly, including to what is now Canada’s Fraser River, to fish for salmon or gather shellfish. They intermarried and formed alliances with their neighbors on both sides of what is now an international border. When white settlers arrived and introduced new diseases, many of the Nooksack died. By some counts their numbers plummeted to 450 from perhaps 1, 200. In the 1855 Treaty of Point Elliot, in which Coast Salish tribes ceded their lands to the federal government in exchange for small reservations and the right to continue fishing, hunting and gathering, the Nooksack received no reservation. Instead, as settlers moved onto their lands, they were told to go live with the Lummi, in their new reservation by the coast. Most refused. Of those who remained, some filed homestead claims on their own lands others scattered in search of a livelihood. For the next hundred years, as far as the federal government was concerned, the tribe essentially ceased to exist. This is not an unusual story. The federal government used the law as “a mighty, pulverizing engine to break up the tribal mass,” as Teddy Roosevelt said to Congress in 1901. He was referring to the General Allotment Act, under which tribally owned land was carved into small parcels and handed out to individuals. It was a huge blow to the stability and sovereignty of tribes: Within 20 years, Native people lost ownership of 90 million acres. It was also the beginning of the government’s reliance on blood quantum to determine Indian status. Those deemed “ ” or less were regarded as more responsible and given more freedom to handle their land. Even many “progressive” reformers saw assimilation into white society as the best way to transform tribal members into citizens. “Kill the Indian in the student so we can save the man!” went the famous slogan of a superintendent at one of the 500 boarding schools that Native children, forcibly separated from their families, were made to attend. Some Nooksack people, unrecognized by the federal government, stayed on their lands and continued to operate as a tribe. In the 1920s, they joined other Northwest tribes to sue the federal government for lands lost in the 1930s, even though they weren’t considered eligible to participate, they voted to accept the Indian Reorganization Act, in which the government backed away from its assimilationist policies and instead encouraged tribes to be and . (A decade later the United States ended its relationships with tribes and returned to promoting assimilation, before changing its policies and pushing again.) In the 1960s, a committee of Nooksacks opened a bid for federal recognition. They gained title to one acre of land in Deming, the first Nooksack Reservation, in 1970, and full federal recognition in 1973. Like many tribes, they adopted a constitution based on a model that the Bureau of Indian Affairs developed during the reorganization period in the 1930s. The new constitution restricted Nooksack membership to recipients of early land allotments, recipients of a 1965 government settlement or people who appeared on a 1942 tribal census. Their direct descendants could also be enrolled, provided they had “at least ( ) degree Indian blood. ” The Nooksack weren’t alone in seeing applicants turn up after the tribe was officially recognized. Ron Allen, the tribal chairman of the Jamestown S’Klallam, told me it was common, in the last decades of the 20th century, for the “ communities” of northwestern tribes to be surprised by a “wave” of people who started coming back to places their families once left. He credits the political advancement of tribes, which made members of the broader society feel that it was “O. K. to be Indian. ” Tribes generally welcomed the new arrivals, he said, but still, “it was like, ‘Where are all these Indians coming from? ’’u2009” The most outspoken critics of disenrollment call it a form of genocide. Others don’t go quite so far but still view the practice as an outgrowth of policies designed to suppress Native American identity — “to control us, to assimilate us, and ultimately, to extinguish us,” as John McCoy, a Washington State senator and member of the Tulalip Tribes, neighbors to the Nooksack, wrote in an for the Indian Country Media Network earlier this year. Robert Williams, of the University of Arizona, argues that disenrollment is a remnant of “colonialism and good American racism, with Indians left to deal with the mess. ” In a 2015 tweet, Sherman Alexie, the Spokane and Coeur d’Alene author, put it even more emphatically: “Dear Indian tribes who disenroll members, you should be ashamed of your colonial and capitalistic bullshit. ” The first person to reply to Alexie’s tweet — thanking him for speaking out when others were silent — was Gabe Galanda, a member of the Round Valley Indian tribes in California and the lawyer whom the Nooksack 306 hired to represent them. The next replies came from some of Galanda’s other clients: former members of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, who were disenrolled in 2014. Grand Ronde was formed in 1857 when the federal government forced at least 27 tribes and bands to leave their homelands, which ranged from California to Washington, and move to a reservation in Oregon. The 86 Grand Ronde disenrollees descend from a man known as Chief Tumulth, who signed one of the treaties that created the reservation. Decades after they enrolled, tribal officials noted that Chief Tumulth failed to appear on the official base roll, made the year it was founded. It was true: He was hanged the year before, by a lieutenant of the U. S. Army. I thought of this last spring as I watched leaf through old letters and family trees, newspaper clippings and documents. “We didn’t make the laws,” she said. “We just got stuck in the middle. ” After the first disenrollment letters went out to Nooksack members, Galanda appealed to tribal courts and the Department of the Interior and managed to delay the disenrollment hearings. Meanwhile, the 306 tried to make sense of what documents they could find to illuminate their past. They had no birth certificate for Annie, so they turned to old censuses and to church records kept by the Archdiocese of Vancouver, marking the sacraments of birth, marriage and death. They found that Annie’s birth mother, Marie Siamat, was buried in December 1875, two days after giving birth to Annie, and that her father (variously recorded as Chief Matsqui, George Kot kro itmentwh, George Roelkwemeldon, George Tekwomclko, George Matsqui and so on) remarried a woman named Madeline Jobe. Indian censuses taken during Annie’s childhood repeatedly recorded her living with George and Madeline. Michelle Robert’s grandmother remembers her mother, Annie, referring to Madeline as the woman who raised her and as “Mother. ” The 306 think this is compelling evidence Madeline adopted Annie. The council remains unconvinced. Kelly says that citing Madeline as an ancestor — their only tie to recognized base rolls — was a blatant lie. If Madeline didn’t count, the family responded, they should still qualify for membership under Section H of the Nooksack constitution, which allows the enrollment of “persons who possess at least ¼ Indian blood and who can prove Nooksack ancestry to any degree. ” Records indicate that Matsqui was considered a Nooksack village even after the Canadian border was established to the south, and Matsqui George was a chief of the village. In a U. S. census from 1910, Louis George indicated that both his parents, Madeline and Matsqui George, were Nooksacks from Washington, and that he was a Nooksack. Besides, the 306 like to point out, Kelly’s own family was adopted by the Nooksacks it is originally from a different Canadian tribe. Kelly suggested that the 306 disenroll themselves and reapply under Section H. But he soon called for a referendum to remove Section H from the Nooksack constitution. He said later that this change was unrelated to the 306 and was instead a tightening of loose enrollment laws that could have let “almost anybody” in. The amendment passed with 61 percent support. As part of their defense, the 306 produced letters from anthropologists. One cited not just the requirements for Nooksack membership provided in tribal code but “historical documents, family oral history and concepts of identity, affiliation and membership within anthropology regarding the social organization of the Coast Salish peoples. ” But for some tribal members, this only served to undermine his case. “It’s not a club,” a woman named Mary Brewer, who recently gave up her membership in the Lummi tribe to enroll as a Nooksack, told me. “My mom has about 10 different tribes in her ancestry, and she meets the requirements for only two. ” Their family lost title to 80 acres on the Yakima reservation because they didn’t have high enough blood quantum to be enrolled there they were sorry to lose the land, she said, but respected the rules by which modern tribes operate. Brewer’s mother, Diane, said she had two grandchildren whose blood quantum is . “We’ve been telling them, better marry Native or else it’ll die out,” she said. “The 306 say, ‘Disenrollment isn’t traditional,’’u2009” Mary said. “Well, enrollment was never traditional!” It is, however, the way things work now. “It’s not, ‘this guy took care of me, and that’s how we did it in the olden days,’’u2009” Brewer continued. “If you don’t have documentation, then you’re not Indian. ” In more than 30 years of membership, Annie’s descendants became interwoven in the life of the tribe. They married other Nooksacks and had kids those kids had kids. But once the disenrollment process began, people chose sides. “It was just like a light switch,” Elizabeth Oshiro, one of the 306, told me. People she knew for years “all of a sudden had a different heart. ” With the hearings repeatedly delayed as lawsuits made their way through the tribal court system, both sides formed Facebook groups to argue their cases and regularly debated or taunted each other online. (Their competing slogans were “We Belong” and “We Are Nooksack. ”) “While some people challenge the idea of tribal enrollment, referring to it as ‘Western thinking’ and an imposed system on American Indians,” posted Katrice Romero, the tribe’s housing director, “that tribal enrollment number is what holds the United States government accountable to the American Indian people and its trust responsibility to tribes a responsibility that my ancestors fought, struggled and sacrificed for. ” On the reservation, Michelle Roberts found that people who babysat for her as a child or attended her wedding would no longer make eye contact with her. “The most important thing isn’t friendship,” says Diane Brewer, who no longer speaks to her former best friend, one of the 306. “The most important thing is the tribe. ” In the summer of 2013, Roberts was fired from her job as the manager at the Nooksack River Casino. Later, when she tried to count the number of disenrollees and their allies who lost tribal jobs, she got to 58. At first, Kelly told me he wouldn’t comment on personnel decisions but later said, “We got rid of all them a long time ago. ” Rudy St. Germain was fired from his job as the casino’s landscaping manager and had to move his two boys into a relative’s house when he couldn’t make rent. “Those were dark days,” he told me. Today he works in a plant. Roberts and St. Germain couldn’t find resolution in the council. Kelly began insisting that meetings be held over the phone. He’d received threats, he said, and it wasn’t safe to meet in person. When St. Germain and Roberts spoke, no one seemed to be able to hear them. I asked Kelly whether he muted them. He shrugged and said: “Probably. I muted a lot of people. ” (He says they weren’t supposed to be on the call in the first place.) The following winter, Kelly scheduled the first council meetings in months on the Friday, Saturday and Monday of Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend the Nooksack constitution allows for council members to be removed from office if they miss three monthly council meetings in a row. St. Germain and Roberts, who were out of town, tried to reach the council by phone or email. At the third meeting, the council declared their seats empty and appointed two new members to replace them. “It was the only way we could get them off council,” Kelly told me later. Rudy said, “I was lost for words. ” By that time, Kelly was calling the 306 scam artists. “Nobody stepped forward and claimed them!” he told me repeatedly. “You don’t show up and just insert yourself into someone else’s family tree. ” With an election looming and four of eight council seats expiring, the council asked the tribal court judge to keep pending disenrollees from voting. After the judge refused, the council declined to schedule the elections. The incumbents remained in office, but some argued that, without an elected quorum, the tribe had no viable government. Several lawsuits, including one called Kelly v. Kelly, brought by a group that included the chairman’s sons, were filed to force elections, but amid litigation, the council abruptly fired the tribe’s judge. The council also barred Galanda from practicing in the tribe’s courts, saying he’d behaved unethically by citing an opinion he wrote while serving as a judge for another tribe the court began to return all of his filings unopened. An appellate court directed the chief of police to arrest and imprison the court clerk if she continued to reject filings when the chief of police refused, the appellate court held him in contempt, began levying a fine of $1, 000 a day and wondered, in its ruling, if “at Nooksack, the rule of law is dead. ” (The council contends that, because the courts are under the jurisdiction of the council, these fines and rulings are meaningless.) Two of the remaining council members whose seats did not expire and who have resisted disenrollment (one is the mother of Kelly’s sons and is now married to one of the 306) were targeted with petitions calling for their recall. One of the recalls succeeded. The charge was treason. In July, some of the disenrollees and their allies scheduled what they called a general council meeting. To avoid the tribal police, they met on the grounds of an old logging show. Several people showed me text messages they received from tribal employees who said they’d been warned that they would be fired if they attended. Later, thinking Kelly might consider the meeting a kind of coup, I asked him what he thought of it. He shrugged. “It was meaningless,” he said. “It’s not real. It’s . ” George Adams, who taught Lhechalosem language classes for the tribe until he was fired early last year (he’s such a fervent supporter of the 306 that he likes to call himself “307”) called the meeting to order he spoke in Lhechalosem, though he is considered the only remaining fluent speaker. (He learned the language by studying old recordings a quarter century after the last native speaker died.) Adams charged four witnesses with committing the proceedings to memory in order to later share what happened. “Remember these names,” he told the crowd, “because this is how we survived for thousands of years. ” People rose to speak. “My enrollment number is six, so there you go,” said one man, by way of introduction. Another said, “I’m 71 years old, and I’m kind of ashamed to call myself a Nooksack right now. Years ago, our people never asked, ‘Where you from?’ They welcomed you to their table. ” A woman asked how the decisions of this council could be considered valid when there were so few people, around 200, present. People began to speak of shutting down the tribe altogether, to force the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which had consistently declined to intervene, to call new elections. Adams asked for a vote. The crowd decided that the four expired seats on the tribal council were vacant, that everything the government had done since the canceled elections was invalid and that they should vote in four new officers — none of them disenrollees — from their own ranks. “This has to do with 10 generations from now,” one of the newly elected officers said. He described the scenario: for lots of people to be cut off from the tribal community, “to be just a person roaming around, trying to figure it out for themselves. ” The new treasurer, Bernadine Roberts, a short, woman (“Stand up please,” Adams told her. “Oh! You are standing! ”) who enrolled three years after the tribe was officially recognized, told me that until she moved to the reservation from Seattle, she “was one of those urban Indians that didn’t know much. ” She gave a brief acceptance speech about what it meant to her to reconnect to her family’s past. “My grandmother said we were going home, and I didn’t know what she was talking about,” she said. “But I know now. ” In July, after the meeting at the logging show, some of the Nooksack 306 joined in the intertribal Canoe Journey, an annual event in which hundreds of members from dozens of Northwest tribes spend weeks paddling the coast to and from one another’s lands for meals, dancing and ceremonies. They named their canoes — with seating for 15 — for Annie’s daughters, and shared them with people of the Shxway band. Some Nooksacks told me this was ridiculous: the sharing with the Shxway, the names, participating at all. The Nooksack, they said, are known for racing narrow, fast war canoes, not paddling wide traveling canoes. Near the end of the journey, the canoes crossed Puget Sound and came to shore on a sandy beach in Seattle. George Adams, in the center canoe, stood and addressed two elders from the Muckleshoot tribe, which was hosting that day. “We are all one,” he said, “carrying on the tradition of knowing who you are and where you come from. ” The following month, the 306 celebrated what they saw as a hopeful precedent when the Grand Ronde Tribal Court of Appeals overturned the disenrollment of Chief Tumulth’s descendants, holding that it was unfair to subject tribal members to “such an extreme sanction” after accepting them for nearly three decades. Elsewhere, a few tribes have rejected disenrollment altogether. The Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria in California amended their constitution to ban disenrollment in 2013. The Spokane tribe of Washington did the same in 2015, as part of more than two dozen constitutional changes meant to better reflect the historical complexity of the tribe. But the Nooksack dispute dragged on. In October, the Bureau of Indian Affairs informed Kelly that it would not recognize any actions of the tribal council because it failed to hold elections in March 2016, stressing that it wasn’t telling the tribe who counted as a member but simply responding to the “exceedingly rare situation” of a council’s lacking a quorum. The tribe scheduled new elections and certified the results of a referendum to disenroll the 306. But the bureau would not recognize the results: by excluding pending disenrollees from voting, the tribe had violated its constitution and the rulings of its court of appeals. So when the 306 received letters informing them that their disenrollment hearings had finally been scheduled to take place on the phone in November, they weren’t sure what to do. Some, including Rudy St. Germain, refused to participate on the grounds that the hearings were illegitimate. Others scheduled their appointments, then called in to tell the council they didn’t recognize its authority. Michelle Roberts called from Canada, where she was staying with Shxway friends. “Annie George was Nooksack because her father was Matsqui George, and he was Nooksack,” she said. “We are all Nooksack. I am Nooksack. I can’t say that more and mean it more. ” A voice came on the line. It was Bob Solomon, who holds one of the expired council seats and is a descendant of Madeline Jobe: “I have never heard anybody say that you were adopted by Madeline Jobe. You are not my relative through Madeline. ” “Yes, we are,” Roberts said, her voice rising. “The document proves it, my grandmother proves it, the oral history proves it. ” “That’s your story,” he said. “That’s not mine. ” A week later, the day before Thanksgiving, Kelly announced that the tribe had removed the names of “ who had been erroneously enrolled in the Tribe” from its membership list. Those who called and those who didn’t, all were gone. “It’s finally over,” he wrote. But of course it wasn’t over. The departments of Housing and Urban Development and Health and Human Services, which enforce the government’s treaty responsibilities to provide housing and health care to the tribe, did not recognize the disenrollment of the 306 and maintained they were still entitled to their services. In late December, the Bureau of Indian Affairs warned that the tribe’s failure to hold valid elections put all its federal funding at risk. There were now two sides offering two competing realities, each telling the other it was illegitimate. The 306 would be another chapter in the long, strange history of who decides who is — and who isn’t — an Indian. | 1 |
MasterCard is currently testing a credit card with a fingerprint scanner embedded within it, creating an extra layer of biometric authentication to keep the accounts of their customers as safe as possible. [Convenience and security are the two key benefits of the new system that MasterCard have highlighted. While contactless payment technology offers speed, no authentication is usually needed. PIN numbers are more secure, but they take a greater amount of time, can be forgotten, and can easily be seen if the keypad is not obscured from prying eyes. The fingerprint system provides the best of both worlds at least in MasterCard’s opinion. Previous iterations of biometric cards required a separate fingerprint scanner, limiting their usefulness, as the special equipment needed to be provided by the store, which only a small minority did. This new generation of cards only needs to be inserted into the standard terminal, with the fingerprint authentication bypassing the need to enter a PIN number. A MasterCard spokesperson did say that “If the finger is too greasy or sweaty and the biometric doesn’t go through, the cardholder would experience a small delay and then asked to put in their PIN to complete the transaction,” which is a small price to pay for the benefits. Contactless payment technology will be implemented in future versions “adding to the simplicity and convenience at the checkout. ” However, to enroll their fingerprint on the system, customers must visit their bank and register their prints there. Usually, bankcard users are mailed their card, not requiring the extra journey to visit their local branch. MasterCard is “exploring ways to make remote registration possible” at this moment in time, but remote registration may open vulnerabilities in the security system. Karsten Nohl, chief scientist at Berlin’s Security Research Labs, also raised concerns about how secure the system may be. “All I need is a glass or something you have touched in the past,” he told the BBC. If the information is stolen, “you only have nine fingerprint changes before you run out of options. ” Nohl was however cautiously optimistic despite this, saying that it is “better than what we have the moment”: With the combination of chip and PIN, the PIN is the weaker element. Using a fingerprint gets rid of that … Fingerprints have helped us avoid using terrible passwords, and even the most gullible person is not going to cut off their finger if [a criminal] asks nicely. This is not the first time MasterCard has experimented with biometrics to increase security and ease for their customers. Last year, they launched MasterCard Identity Check, colloquially known as “selfie pay,” where users would be able to authenticate online transactions by snapping a quick photo of themselves using the camera on their phone or tablet. Given that the fingerprint verification can only be used in store, customers could use the two systems in tandem for their different shopping needs. Full consumer rollout is expected at the end of this year, after two successful trials in South Africa further trials in Europe and East Asia are likely to occur as well, to fully check the functionality of the system. Jack Hadfield is a student at the University of Warwick and a regular contributor to Breitbart Tech. You can like his page on Facebook and follow him on Twitter @ToryBastard_ or on Gab @JH. | 1 |
A Wall Street News poll released Monday found growing disapproval of Speaker of the House Paul Ryan. [Forty percent of Americans hold an unfavorable view of Ryan, compared to only 22% who view him positively, according to the poll. The numbers represent a major decline in popularity since February, when Ryan’s net favorability was only one percentage point negative. The same drop in support is mirrored among Republican poll respondents, with net favorability falling from to 23 in the same period. Ryan’s drop in popularity was more significant than that among the low rating for Congress as a whole. The percentage of those with a favorable view of congressional performance fell from 29 to 20 since February. The drop among Republicans was more significant, falling to a mere 31% from the high 40s. This outpouring of disapproval comes after Speaker Ryan spearheaded the abortive effort to repeal and replace Obamacare with his own “American Health Care Act. ” The bill had to be withdrawn for lack of support and drew criticism from across the spectrum of Republican politics. The perception of Ryan’s ability to deliver legislative victories in the House took a major hit in the aftermath of his health care bill’s demise, with some members of Congress calling for his replacement. Other legislative initiatives have stalled under Ryan’s leadership. He has repeatedly stated that tax reform will likely to be possible only after the precarious health care situation is untangled. At the moment, the House is embroiled in a struggle to pass a budget to keep the government running, with contention over the funding of President Donald Trump’s signature border wall apparently stalling this often routine measure. As Congressional Republicans approach the mark of the Trump presidency, Speaker Ryan is unable to point to any major legislative accomplishment. Negotiations are ongoing to revive the momentum for implementing the GOP’s agenda, but the Wall Street News poll suggests the electorate is losing confidence in the Republican leadership’s ability to do so. | 1 |
Captain America star Chris Evans shared his feelings about Donald Trump’s presidency in a interview this week, explaining that he still finds the Republican billionaire’s political rise “unbelievable. ”[“I feel rage. I feel fury,” the actor told Esquire for the magazine’s April cover story. “It’s unbelievable. People were just so desperate to hear someone say that someone is to blame,” he added. “They were just so happy to hear that someone was angry. Hear someone say that Washington sucks. They just want something new without actually understanding. I mean, guys like Steve Bannon — Steve Bannon! — this man has no place in politics. ” Evans — who supported Democrat Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign — has been an outspoken critic of Trump on social media. The actor has criticized the president’s executive orders on immigration, and last year accused him of “energizing lies. ” Shortly after the election, Evans called for an end to the Electoral College, which secured Trump’s victory even as Clinton won the popular vote. Evans told Esquire that he is aware it may not be smart for him, from a business perspective, to be so outspoken about his political beliefs. “Look, I’m in a business where you’ve got to sell tickets. But, my God, I would not be able to look at myself in the mirror if I felt strongly about something and didn’t speak up,” he told the magazine. “I think it’s about how you speak up. We’re allowed to disagree. If I state my case and people don’t want to go see my movies as a result, I’m okay with that. ” Still, the actor acknowledged the possibility that people could be turned off to differing opinions if rhetoric becomes too heated, explaining that instead of yelling about one’s views, it is now a “time for calm. ” “Because not everyone who voted for Trump is going to be some horrible bigot,” he said. “There are a lot of people in that middle those are the people you can’t lose your credibility with. If you’re trying to change minds, by spewing too much rhetoric you can easily become white noise. ” Elsewhere in the long interview, Evans revealed that he may hang up the Captain America shield after his upcoming appearances in Avengers: Infinity War and its planned sequel, which will shoot beginning in April. Read Evans’ full interview with Esquire here. Follow Daniel Nussbaum on Twitter: @dznussbaum | 1 |
John Oliver’s Smear Tactics Exposed As Establishment Propaganda | 0 |
CHARLESTON, S. C. — Dylann S. Roof, a young white supremacist who killed nine black parishioners last year when he opened fire during a assault on Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, was found guilty by a federal jury here on Thursday. Mr. Roof, 22, stood, his hands at his side and his face emotionless, as a clerk read the verdict aloud in Federal District Court, where he had been charged with 33 counts, including hate crimes resulting in death. Mr. Roof, whose lawyers conceded his guilt, will face the same jurors when they gather on Jan. 3 to begin a more suspenseful phase of his trial to decide whether he will be sentenced to death or life in prison without parole. The jury deliberated for only about two hours on Thursday afternoon, and as a clerk began to read the guilty verdicts, one after the next, a few women in the courtroom nodded with satisfaction. After the court adjourned, the two adult survivors of the attack, Felicia Sanders and Polly Sheppard, shared a long embrace. “I wasn’t expecting anything less,” Ms. Sanders told reporters later. “I knew it was going to be guilty, guilty, guilty, all the way through. ” Ms. Sanders’s husband, Tyrone, called Mr. Roof “pure evil” as he held his wife’s hand. “My thoughts were if I could get to him, what would I do,” said Mr. Sanders, whose son died in the attack. “But the Lord kept me from charging. ” The outcome seemed a foregone conclusion from the first minutes of the trial, which began on Dec. 7 and included a swift acknowledgment from the chief defense lawyer, David I. Bruck, that Mr. Roof was responsible for the “astonishing, horrible attack” on June 17, 2015. Mr. Roof had chillingly confessed to investigators nearly 18 months earlier and revealed his purpose in a blatantly racist manifesto that he published online. His choice of targets seemed intensely premeditated — he scouted the church half a dozen times — although he also researched other black churches and a festival elsewhere in South Carolina before settling on Charleston because, he wrote, it is the “most historic city in my state. ” Prosecutors and defense lawyers agreed on the basic contours of Mr. Roof’s march toward racial animosity. He belonged to no hate groups and acted alone in Charleston, but they said he had been an avid consumer of racist materials online. “You can easily give him way too much credit for thinking of this stuff if you don’t see where it came from,” Mr. Bruck said of Mr. Roof, who had declared in his writings that he had not been “raised in a racist home or environment. ” In a closing argument, an assistant United States attorney, Nathan S. Williams, depicted Mr. Roof as “a man of hatred, a man who’s proven to be a coward and a man of immense racial ignorance. ” The prosecutor’s voice often rose in outrage, and the jurors were again shown photographs of the carnage Mr. Roof left behind: blood, bodies, and tables. “He must be held accountable for each and every action he took in that church,” Mr. Williams urged. Mr. Roof has said he intends to represent himself during the penalty phase, so Mr. Bruck, as he has done throughout the trial, did his best on Thursday to suggest that his client was unstable, and thus not fully accountable. Mr. Bruck, who called no witnesses, peppered his closing argument with words like “abnormal,” “delusional,” and “suicidal. ” Mr. Roof told the F. B. I. in a confession shortly after being arrested that he had saved ammunition to kill himself if, as he expected, he confronted the police when he left Emanuel. The Wednesday night assault on the oldest A. M. E. congregation in the South began less than an hour after Mr. Roof entered through an unlocked side door and took a seat at a weekly Bible study meeting. The congregants, including the church’s pastor, the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, were studying the parable of the sower. When the congregants closed their eyes for a familiar benediction, the sound of gunfire roared through the fellowship hall. When they looked up, they saw Mr. Roof holding a semiautomatic pistol he had bought about two months earlier and concealed in a pack on his waist. Mr. Pinckney was the first wounded, and the churchgoers began diving below the room’s circular tables. Mr. Roof kept firing, striking the victims at least 60 times. One photo showed a table bearing an opened Bible, a study sheet and an empty magazine. It was one of the most unfathomable racial attacks in decades, and it upended the notion of a postracial America that some had imagined after the election of the country’s first black president. But fears of street violence eased when family members of five victims appeared at Mr. Roof’s bond hearing less than 48 hours after the killings and expressed forgiveness for the accused. President Obama flew here for Mr. Pinckney’s memorial service and delivered a eulogy in the form of an indignant and sorrowful meditation on race. This elegant port city where half of all slaves disembarked and the Civil War began soon assumed a mantle of racial healing, although some in the community found the good feelings a superficial papering over of inequities in education, law enforcement and poverty. The victims of the attack at Mother Emanuel, as the church is known, were Mr. Pinckney, Cynthia Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lee Lance, the Rev. DePayne Middleton Doctor, Tywanza Sanders, the Rev. Daniel Lee Simmons Sr. the Rev. Sharonda and Myra Thompson. The three survivors were Ms. Sanders, Ms. Sheppard and Ms. Sanders’s granddaughter. During turns on the witness stand, Ms. Sanders and Ms. Sheppard described the havoc that turned a house of worship into a scene. Ms. Sheppard told jurors that Mr. Roof had approached her and asked whether she was wounded. She was not. “I’m going to leave you to tell the story,” Mr. Roof replied, according to Ms. Sheppard. Mr. Roof was arrested the next morning in Shelby, N. C. where F. B. I. agents questioned him for about two hours and began to piece together his descent into racist thinking and how, over the course of six months, he planned his assault. But before Mr. Roof spoke of his beliefs, which he had detailed in a handwritten journal and an online manifesto, he admitted to the attack. “I did it,” Mr. Roof said. The confession served as the centerpiece of the prosecution’s case. Prosecutors also introduced an array of technical evidence, such as phone records and GPS data, to demonstrate Mr. Roof’s premeditation and document his views on race. He wrote that he mounted the attack in Charleston because no one else would take a stand against what he perceived as an epidemic of crime and the relegation of white Americans to status. He called himself a white nationalist, as well as a white supremacist, and said he subscribed to ideologies advanced by Klansmen and Nazis. Mr. Roof wore a jacket bearing patches of the flags of South Africa and Rhodesia and posed in photographs with the Confederate battle flag. In a consequence that he surely did not anticipate, that flag was removed from the grounds of the South Carolina State House in response to the church killings. The decision to try Mr. Roof was a subject of some dispute because he had offered to plead guilty in exchange for a life sentence. Ms. Sanders and Ms. Sheppard both supported such an agreement, as did many family members of the victims. But they welcomed the verdict on Thursday, even as they girded for the next round. “We were overjoyed that the jury saw fit to give us this triumph,” said the Rev. Sharon Risher, Ms. Lance’s eldest daughter. “It gives us an opportunity to start the healing process and we just thank God. ” | 1 |
LONDON — President Obama has called on the British people not to vote for an exit from the European Union, writing in an opinion article published upon his arrival in London late Thursday night that “the European Union doesn’t moderate British influence — it magnifies it. ” In the article in The Telegraph, Mr. Obama, making a case he has made numerous times before in Washington, wrote that the United States would prefer Britain to remain a full member of the European Union. Britons will vote on June 23 in a referendum on whether to remain in or leave the bloc. The last such referendum was in 1975, and Britons voted by nearly two to one to stay. But the vote is expected to be closer in June, and some prominent British advocates of quitting the European Union have criticized Mr. Obama’s intervention. London’s mayor, Boris Johnson, one of the public leaders of the campaign for Britain’s exit, has accused Mr. Obama of hypocrisy because the United States does not share sovereignty with its neighbors the way Britain now does with the European Union. In the article, Mr. Obama responded directly to that criticism, asserting that the challenges facing Europe are not different from the ones facing the United States. “And in today’s world, even as we all cherish our sovereignty, the nations who wield their influence most effectively are the nations that do it through the collective action that today’s challenges demand,” the president wrote. Mr. Obama starts the first of four days in Europe on Friday by paying homage to one of its most enduring institutions, making his first visit to Windsor Castle to attend a royal lunch with Queen Elizabeth II a day after her 90th birthday. But he arrives with a grim warning that he will deliver in a series of meetings with several political leaders: Europe is in danger of being pulled apart by threats to its security and economy that can be overcome only by greater cooperation and a unity that appears increasingly elusive. In the article, Mr. Obama praised the creation of what he called “international institutions and initiatives” to promote peace and democracy, including the European Union and NATO. “Today, we face tests to this order — terrorism and aggression migration and economic headwinds — challenges that can only be met if the United States and the United Kingdom can rely on one another, on our special relationship, and on the partnerships that lead to progress,” Mr. Obama wrote. Terrorist attacks like the ones in Brussels and Paris have exposed shortcomings in the gathering and sharing of intelligence that have left Europe vulnerable and scared. War in Syria, where the most recent appears to be failing, has produced a flood of migrants that is causing political and economic turmoil in Europe. The aggression in Ukraine has raised new questions about the effectiveness of the NATO alliance. And the vote in June threatens to cleave Britain from the European Union, potentially stalling one of the world’s most successful economic powerhouses. “Because of a host of issues — from migration to sluggish economic growth to the terrorist threat — the European Union today faces challenges from populism and other threats to its ” said Charles Kupchan, a senior adviser to Mr. Obama for European issues. “The E. U. is one of the great accomplishments of the War II era. It has succeeded in helping remove war from Europe, and we are concerned about the health and vitality of that experiment. ” Mr. Obama traveled to Britain after a series of meetings in Saudi Arabia, where he said Thursday that the United States would continue to enhance security cooperation with its allies in the Persian Gulf, while encouraging them to carry out domestic reforms and bolster their ability to defend themselves. During those meetings, he discussed a variety of issues with the members of the Gulf Cooperation Council — Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and Oman — including the civil wars in Yemen, Syria and Libya, military and economic cooperation, and the fight against terrorist groups like the Islamic State. But Mr. Obama left without announcing any concrete plans or initiatives on any of those matters. In a meeting planned for Friday afternoon with Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain, Mr. Obama will urge his counterpart to increase intelligence sharing and cooperation among European countries so that they can better counter terrorist threats, including attacks by the Islamic State and Al Qaeda, aides to the president said. On Sunday, Mr. Obama will discuss the Syrian migration crisis with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany. Benjamin J. Rhodes, the president’s deputy national security adviser, said Mr. Obama would applaud Ms. Merkel for her efforts to absorb Syrian refugees, even at great political cost. And he will pledge United States support for the recent deal that the European Union made with Turkey to accept Syrian migrants. Then on Monday, the president will meet with the leaders of Britain, France, Germany and Italy. Among the messages for the group will be his contention that they must take more responsibility for their own security. That will be a familiar refrain to Mr. Obama’s colleagues, who will recall that he made a similar — if more blunt — observation in a recent article in The Atlantic in which he accused some European allies of being “free riders” who rely on help from the United States instead of investing in their own militaries. “There’s this greater sense of unraveling, if you will, of the European project,” said Heather Conley, a former State Department official and the senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. That concern is likely to be set aside during Mr. Obama’s visit with the queen, and during his dinner on Friday night with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge at Kensington Palace. | 1 |
New York City is undergoing a rare explosion in city government: More people now work for the city — 287, 002 employees as of July — than at any other point in its modern history, with thousands more scheduled to join them. The projected growth finds few parallels in other major American metropolises most, like New York, trimmed their numbers after the financial crash of 2008. Some have rehired, though not at the level that New York has under Mayor Bill de Blasio. But behind all the job growth is a complicated set of factors that explain the possible benefits and costs to the city, the mayor and his supporters. Unions will see new jobs for their members, but the city will see future pension costs rise. And even if the city fails to fill all its projected job openings, there is a benefit: An unfilled job can be taken off the budget, enabling the de Blasio administration to claim savings from the absence of thousands of workers who were not hired. Every major agency is growing under Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat, but some expansions seem to stand out: His latest budget would have the Sanitation Department’s number of civilian employees increasing by a third since 2014 the Department of Citywide Administrative Services’ by 20 percent and the city information technology department’s by more than 50 percent. The growth in staffing has worried some budget experts, who fear a lack of fiscal discipline at City Hall, and greater pension obligations down the road. “Every hire is $100, 000 a year, in cost of compensation,” said Carol Kellerman, the executive director of the nonpartisan Citizens Budget Commission. “If they didn’t hire any of the people who were planned for 2017, that’s a billion dollars. ” Indeed, the administration, while hiring at a breakneck pace, may be projecting a higher number of city jobs than it intends to fill, a shrewd, if not entirely transparent, maneuver that budget experts say will allow city agencies to find savings by choosing not to fill surplus jobs. In the city said in budget documents that it anticipated 320, 569 and equivalent positions by the end of the month. But by the month’s end, the city had still left 7, 000 positions unfilled, nearly all of them postings. “Any head count that an agency doesn’t reach, that’s authorized, of course I’m going to bank it of course I’m going to make it savings,” Dean Fuleihan, the head of the mayor’s Office of Management and Budget, said in an interview. He acknowledged that any unfilled positions may be cut entirely when the budget is adjusted in November. “It is a big number, I’m not denying that, and my instinct is, I’m pretty sure you’ll see that adjusted down,” Mr. Fuleihan said. (City Hall officials later disputed the notion that the count was intentionally inflated to take savings later.) The discrepancy has been greeted with some raised eyebrows among the city’s budget watchers. “The difference between the last projection and actual number has grown substantially under Mayor de Blasio,” said Doug Turetsky, the chief of staff for the city’s Independent Budget Office. “It can create a savings, a kind of fiscal cushion. ” Even if the city writes down some of its planned hiring this year, the most recent head count of 287, 002, recorded at the end of June, is still a record. The number exceeds the city’s previous peak, recorded before the financial crash of 2008, and rivals the population of entire cities, including Pittsburgh and Cincinnati. No two cities are alike, and New York’s government performs many of the tasks that in other areas are handled by the local counties. But the swift growth in its work force — up from 271, 767 workers in July 2014 and driven by spending on new teachers, correction officers and a police force expansion — appears to be unique among large cities. In Chicago, for example, there has been little change over the past three years in the number of city workers, which has hovered around 34, 000 after dropping from more than 40, 000 before the crash. The city work force in Los Angeles was 46, 237 as of June, down 3, 000 workers from its recent peak, in 2009. The Houston city government has employed roughly the same number of people, around 22, 000, for several years. Phoenix has steadily cut jobs since 2008. “Will the days of the city ever return? No, and they shouldn’t,” Ed Zuercher, the Phoenix city manager, said in a statement, adding that the city was stronger because of “the sacrifices that were made. ” Ron Galperin, the Los Angeles comptroller, said the city’s “dedicated employees are doing more with less. ” City Hall officials pointed to other cities, including Washington, Seattle and San Antonio, where the size of the municipal work force in 2015 was larger than before the recession. Mr. de Blasio’s administration has called for even more hiring by the middle of next year, with another 10, 000 workers to be added to the rolls, according to the most recent budget. The expansion has cheered the leadership of the city’s municipal unions. They did not rally behind Mr. de Blasio until after his 2013 primary win, but have since been won over by his policies, which have also included the settling of outstanding contracts. The unions have been major donors to Mr. de Blasio’s political causes, including the nonprofit Campaign for One New York and the 2014 effort to elect State Senate Democrats. for those efforts is now under investigation by state and federal prosecutors. The United Federation of Teachers has grown by roughly 5, 700 members since Mr. de Blasio took office, replenishing ranks that had been reduced by 7 percent during the recession. Though the number of teachers still lags behind that of 2008, the union has made up the difference with teaching assistants known as paraprofessionals, whose ranks have swelled under Mr. de Blasio. District Council 37’s membership also grew as agencies piled on the nonuniformed employees, particularly at the Police and Sanitation Departments, and began using city workers to perform information technology tasks that had been previously handled by outside contractors. About 300 positions were added to replace those contractors, a move that City Hall officials expect to save money over five years by lowering contracting costs. The union had roughly 125, 000 members in its latest count, according to a spokesman, about 3, 200 more than it did before Mr. de Blasio took office. The Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, a frequent antagonist of the mayor’s, has grown along with the New York Police Department. Mr. Fuleihan said the city’s current $82. 1 billion budget included some overestimation in order to dampen the blow of unanticipated events that have, in recent years, had huge effects on the budget: the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks the 2008 stock market crash and Hurricane Sandy in 2012. “You build against that happening,” he said. “We are a very rapidly growing city with new demands,” he said. “We believe that we’re being thoughtful about this. ” Mr. Fuleihan pointed to the billion dollars set aside in reserves and pension obligations that are set to be amortized by 2032, while observing the mayor’s agenda to address income inequality. City Hall officials highlighted the endorsements of its budgeting practices expressed by ratings agencies. “We put forward dramatic expansion,” Mr. Fuleihan said. “And we’re going to be constantly modifying that, to the extent that we can. ” | 1 |
Home / News / Hillary Insisted America Fact Check Her, So We Did…Here’s 6 Huge Lies From The Debate Hillary Insisted America Fact Check Her, So We Did…Here’s 6 Huge Lies From The Debate fisher 4 mins ago News Comments Off on Hillary Insisted America Fact Check Her, So We Did…Here’s 6 Huge Lies From The Debate Hillary Insisted America Fact Check Her, So We Did…Here’s 6 Huge Lies From The Debate Hillary Clinton stood before millions of Americans last night and told numerous lies, then said things like “Google it”, suggesting we fact check her…so we did and found 6 major lies, plus others. FACT CHECK #1 – Hillary Clinton claimed that Planned Parenthood “provides cancer screenings” and therefore should not be de-funded, in spite of controversy about abortion. Fact-Check: MOSTLY FALSE This is a repeated claim deployed in defense of Planned Parenthood, but it is not true, at least as regards breast cancer. As the left-leaning Washington Post ’s fact-checker wrote in 2015: When Democratic lawmakers or other supporters assert that Planned Parenthood “provides” mammograms, this is highly misleading language because it could be interpreted to mean that the group directly administers the X-rays. The group does not “provide” mammograms. Rather, the situation is similar to other clinics where patients are referred to a licensed facility that can provide biopsies, X-rays or other specialized services. It is slightly more accurate to say that women have “access” to mammograms via Planned Parenthood, though it’s still slippery language. FACT CHECK #2 – Hillary Clinton responded to a question about Supreme Court and gun rights by saying, “I support the Second Amendment.” Fact-Check: FALSE When Clinton made this statement she was responding to a question about the District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) decision: a decision dealing with the foundations of the Second Amendment; the very roots of what it protects. In the Heller ruling, SCOTUS reaffirmed that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms. This decision has become a bulwark against leftists who have spent decades in academia, politics and journalism trying to persuade Americans that the Second Amendment protects a collective right. (If collective, the left could tie gun ownership to service in the militia and bar gun ownership for anyone save those who serve in the militia or today’s military or police forces.) So Heller is crucial. In fact, it is so crucial that it is not be a stretch to say the entire Second Amendment rests on it. Yet Hillary disagrees the Heller ruling. Her spokesman Josh Schwerin said Hillary believes Heller was “ wrongly decided .” So how can a woman who does not believe in an “individual” right to keep and bear arms support the Second Amendment? She can’t. Incidentally, Clinton made this point evident during the debate when she said her disagreement with the Heller decision was the way the SCOTUS applied the Second Amendment in that case. For those of you who may not know, Heller centered on Washington DC’s gun ban–which was subsequently struck down via the SCOTUS decision. To oppose the application of the Second Amendment in Heller is to oppose the fact that a gun ban was overturned. That is not supporting the Second Amendment. FACT CHECK #3 – Hillary Clinton said during the third presidential debate in Las Vegas on Wednesday that she “will not add a penny to the debt” if elected president. Fact-Check: FALSE Indeed, Hillary Clinton’s claim is not even close to true. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget predicts that under Clinton’s policies , the debt would increase by $9 trillion over a decade. “Clinton’s plan would increase both spending and revenue,” the Washington, D.C.-based independent non-profit’s analyst said . “Under our preliminary updated central estimate, she would increase primary spending by $1.65 trillion over the next decade, including about $500 billion of spending on college education, $300 billion each on paid family leave and infrastructure, and significant new health-related spending.” FACT CHECK #4 – Hillary Clinton claimed that “33,000 people a year…die from guns.” Fact-Check: FALSE This is a claim Clinton often makes to make gun violence appear to be raging out of control; to justify the government stepping in with more rules and regulations to keep the American people safe. However, a Fact-Check shows Clinton’s claim is not only false, but is exaggerated by 66 percent. She is using figures from 2013, and reporting them in a way that distorts what really happened with guns that year. Clinton first began making this claim in November 2015, repeated it in April 2016, and has since repeated it again and again. In April Breitbart News highlighted the method Clinton used to swell the numbers: In 2013, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported 11,208 firearm-related homicides in the United States. An additional 505 accidental firearm-related deaths occurred in the US–a figure that pales in comparison to the 38,851 deaths by accidental poisoning or the 30,208 deaths caused by falls. So Clinton and gun control proponents who think like her increase these figures by adding in suicides. In this way, 11,713 firearm-related deaths–homicides and accidental deaths–quickly become 32,888 “gun violence” deaths in 2013 and an impetus for gun control. FACT CHECK #5 – Hillary Clinton praised President Obama ’s economic performance, adding: “He has cut the deficit by two-thirds.” Fact-Check: FALSE This repeated Democratic canard relies on fraudulent accounting that only starts more than halfway through Obama ’s first year in office, after the $862 billion stimulus, the massive omnibus spending bill (“porkulus”), and the deployment of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), which was signed by Obama ’s predecessor but for which he voted. As Breitbart News noted when President Obama claimed in January to have cut the deficit by “almost three-quarters”: This is pure fiction. Obama has doubled the national debt, and it’s not because he cut the deficit. Rather, he spent staggering amounts of money in his first months in office–which he assigns, dishonestly, to the previous fiscal year, under George W. Bush. He “cut” (i.e. spent more gradually) from that spending, but only under protest, after Republicans took the House in 2010. The truth is that Obama vastly expanded the deficit in a doomed and ill-conceived experiment in Keynesian stimulus spending, much of which was wasted on priorities that helped Obama ’s political supporters — especially the public sector unions — but did little for the economy. FACT CHECK #6 – Hillary Clinton said “We at the Clinton Foundation spend ninety percent — ninety percent — of all the money that is donated on behalf of programs of people around the world and in our own country.” Fact-Check: FALSE Indeed, Clinton’s “ninety percent” claim is false according to her troubled charity’s own t ax filings . Peter Schweizer, president of the Government Accountability Institute , Breitbart News Senior Editor-at-Large, and author of Clinton Cash said the Clinton Foundation has spent as little as six percent of its total income on actual charitable endeavors. “If you actually look at the numbers of their filings and 990s, that’s what it indicates,” Schweizer said last month in an interview with SiriusXM host Alex Marlow on Breitbart News Daily . “The Clinton Foundation will say, ‘We assisted or facilitated in 100,000 kids getting immunizations.’ Well, okay, what does that mean? And they don’t really tell you. They don’t really explain to you how it works.” “So the number is absolutely correct, that six percent goes to other charities,” Schweizer continued. “The other 94 percent is in this stew of marketing, and management, and travel expenses, and sort of all these obscure things, that it’s really hard to dissect what is the end result of that 94 percent being spent.” What’s more? Political analyst Sean Davis, the co-founder of The Federalist and a former adviser to Sen. Tom Coburn and Gov. Rick Perry, examined the Clinton Foundation’s 2013 tax filings and found that “ Hillary Clinton’s non-profit spent more on office supplies and rent than it did on charitable grants.” “The Clinton Foundation spent nearly $8.5 million–10 percent of all 2013 expenditures–on travel,” Davis contends . “Nearly $4.8 million–5.6 percent of all expenditures–was spent on office supplies.” (Source: Check out over 20 more Fact Checks at Breitbart) So there you have it, folks. It was hard to narrow it down to just 6, but these were among the biggest lies of the night. | 0 |
Peculiar supernatural activity which is suspected to involve alien creatures has been occurring in the vicinity of Russian submarines ever since the days of the Soviet Union. However, it appears as though the Russian authorities are very keen to keep whatever is going on under wraps and all files on the subject have been sealed. Now, two researchers named Paul Stonehill, and Phillip Mantle is determined to get to the bottom of these mysterious occurrences.
Russian military commanders speak out about underwater alien lifeforms
In the course of their research, these two men have examined the veil of secrecy surrounding some extraordinary claims relating to underwater extra-terrestrial activity by eliciting a huge amount of eye-witness testimony. They say that these bizarre incidents have involved UFOs duping aircraft into the sea, encounters with underwater creatures which are believed to be of extra-terrestrial origin and highly unusual objects found under the later.
Perhaps the most stunning of the claims comes from Major General V. Demyanenko, a Russian commander of the Military Diver Service. The Major claimed that he and his crew encountered a race of humanoid aliens who were nicknamed ‘the Swimmers’. These creatures are said to be approximately three meters in height, who garb themselves in silvery suits and spherical helmets and live in the icy waters surrounding the Russian territory of Siberia. When Soviet Navy divers attempted to capture one of these creatures for investigation, they were apparently flung to the surface of the water by a powerful source .
Stonehill and Mantle have also documented several other bizarre encounters. In 1965, the crew of the steamship Raduga witnessed an enormous fireball shooting up from the depths of the Red Sea. The crew also noted an unidentified flying object in the vicinity of the fireball and the gigantic pillar of water it thrust into the air upon ejection. They have also collected data from the Russian chief of the Pacific fleet’s intelligence department, Admiral V.A. Domislovsky who claimed to have an object of approximately 900m in length in the ocean. They have also examined claims made by other former Russian military commanders about underwater alien activity surrounding the infamous Bermuda Triangle.
Mr. Mantle said that this is not the first time that multiple witnesses have attempted to speak out about the highly unusual activity that they have witnessed underneath Earth’s ocean. However, any attempts to speak out previously have tended to result in their silencing and public ridicule.
Disclose TV
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by Lambert Strether
By Lambert Strether of Corrente .
The FT’s Izabella Kaminska (“ The autoignition temperature of manual cars is much higher than Fahrenheit 451 “) brings McKinsey’s report on self-driving cars to our attention (“An Integrated Perspective on the Future of Mobility,” PDF ). Bloomberg, writing on the report , put the key fact-like price comparison in the deck:
Autonomous taxis one-quarter the price of New York cab ride
And then quoted the following eye-popping fact-like dollars-and-cents figure:
The self-driving vehicles being pioneered by Tesla Motors Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s Google and others are poised to dramatically lower the cost of taxis, potentially making them cheaper than buses or subways, according to a joint report by Bloomberg New Energy Finance and McKinsey & Co. Having no driver to pay could reduce taxi prices to 67 cents a mile by 2025 , less than a quarter of the cost in Manhattan today, the report found.
(The word “could” seems to be doing rather a lot of work in the second sentence.) But how were those figures “found”? On what basis did McKinsey, the “the trusted advisor and counselor to many of the world’s most influential businesses and institutions” , come to its conclusions?
And here, readers, I went wrong. I thought I would try to understand the business ratios and income statements of today’s taxi industry ( NAICS code 4853 ; income statement from Yellow Cab of Missoula, MT[ 1]) and use those as a baseline to evaluate McKinsey’s analysis. That was a time-consuming mistake, and here is why.
Let’s look at the report, starting by having searched the PDF on “67.” Here is the source for Bloomberg’s quote, Exhibit 10:
I’ve helpfully highlighted the “67”; interestingly, a PDF search reveals that this is the only place where “67” appears. There is, for example, no table or equation showing the calculations through which McKinsey arrived at that figure.[2] Nevertheless, we look for some explanation, and the best I can find is in the text adjacent to Exhibit 10, on pages 23 and 25. (I’ve pasted a snippet from page 23 in at the top of page 25, and helpfully highlighted some of the text, and footnote 17):
Now, the $0.67 figure in Exhibit 10 applies only to the case of an “individual use” self-driving taxi (the chart says “self-driven,” but the caption is correct). That is, Jane Coder calls up a self-driving taxi to get to work, and when she’s done with her commute, the freed-up taxi responds to a call from Joe Coder to go home, and so on. The taxi is not shared. This use case is described in the paragraph marked “[1]”. Here is that paragraph:
For many drivers ride-hailing would nonetheless become the economic alternative. An on-demand, self-driving vehicle could also replace most current shared-mobility business models such as car sharing, carpooling, and ride-hailing: it could drive itself to the next customer, to a designated parking space, or back to the point of origin.
Do you see any calculations there — indeed, any numbers at all — that would justify the $0.67 figure? No? (Notice also that “could” and “would” are working hard in this paragraph, too.)
We move on to the paragraph marked [2]:
If a private consumer were open to sharing a ride with another traveler, the economics become even more attractive: on average, using a self-driving, electric, pooled taxi could be 30–60 percent cheaper per mile than a private vehicle, depending on the number of people sharing the ride. By 2025, a private car would cost $0.43/mile, whereas a consumer could use a self-driving, pooled taxi for as little as $0.17/mile–$0.29/mile 17 .
Here at least we see claims with numbers in them, but none of them are relevant to the “individual use self-driving taxi” case, and so the $0.67 figure remains a mystery, as yet unexplained. We move on to the paragraph marked [3]:
Compared with public transport, it appears that in various US cities public transport remains about as twice as cheap as human-driven taxi pooling with a cost of $0.64/mile in 2015.
The same applies; the $0.67 figure remains inexplicable. But wait! There’s that footnote 17 in the paragraph marked “[2]”:
Costs are estimated the total cost of ownership, assuming 70,000 miles driven annually[3], average driver salaries, 10 percent overhead costs and a 10 percent required rate of return on invested capital for the fleet operator. We assume a utilization factor of 50 percent for taxis and 70 percent for pooled cars. This does not take into account a price premium for any additional journey time required to pick up multiple passengers.
(I’ve helpfully underlined the weasel words, along with words that make me ask “How do you know that?”) Do you see a source for any of this? No? Why would that be? (Contrast footnote 17, in the left column, to footnotes 18, 19, and 20 in the right column, all of which provide sources.
Wishing to give McKinsey the benefit of the doubt, I looked for their editorial policies, which I found on page 64, on the About page. In relevant part:
So this really is the best part, isn’t it?
The information contained in this publication is derived from carefully selected sources we believe are reasonable.
Well, I should hope so! (“Trusted advisor and counsellor,” et cetera et cetera.) So that’s alright then! Although one could wish that the “reasonable” and “carefully selected” sources were named.[4]
* * *
So, I’ve managed to emulate the classic bad New Yorker article; I followed the ornithologists into the swamp, because when they said they heard the call of a rare bird, I believed them. But they didn’t find the bird! So, we still don’t know where McKinsey got its sixty-seven cents ($0.67) a mile figure for its “self-driving taxi” use case. (What the Bloomberg reporter thought they were doing when they repeated it is another question.) And we don’t know know why its “report” didn’t provide an explanation for it. Explanations that occur to me:
1. An editorial disaster . Nobody checked footnote 17 to add the sourcing the for sixty-seven cents ($0.67) a mile figure. This strikes me as unlikely, given the level of attention given to the reports design.
2. A public relations scam . McKinsey simply made up the sixty-seven cents ($0.67) a mile figure out of whole cloth. This strikes me as unlikely, given the whole “trusted advisor” schtick.
3. A bait and switch . The source of the calculations for sixty-seven cents ($0.67) a mile figure is internal and proprietary, and McKinsey won’t reveal anything until you engage them. This strikes me as unlikely, dittoez.
‘Tis a puzzlement!
NOTES
[1] I don’t want to whinge about this, but when I was a sprat, twenty years ago, and I wanted industry ratios and company reports, I’d go down to the Boston Public Library’s Business Branch , display my library card, and get the information for free . Google was awfully good at displaying results from “industry research” firms that demand a fee , but not so good with, er, “free stuff.” Am I looking for stats in all the wrong places?
[2] Why 67? Why not 65? Or 70? I’d hate to think McKinsey guilty of spurious precision.
[3] New York’s Taxicab Factbook estimates that the average cab travels 70,000 miles per year.
[4] There’s also “We do not guarantee its accuracy or completeness and nothing in this document shall be construed to be a representation of such a guarantee,” but I assume Bud from Legal insisted that go in, and I don’t hold it against them.
APPENDIX
I like this too. From page 49:
And the text:
Within the mobility sector itself, an on-demand self-driving taxi could replace most current shared-mobility business models. Adding a self-driving component to car-sharing operations, ridehailing services, and taxi services makes the business models indistinguishable.
Indeed it “could”! Exactly in the way the wizards of Unseen University nailing magic broomsticks under Sam Vimes’s horse-drawn coach made it “indistinguishable” from an airborne, supersonic vehicle! 0 0 0 0 0 0 | 0 |
The weekly Wednesday Oil follies from 10:20 (starting with the pre-report misdirection fake-out) to 11:15 are a now-familiar occurrence, and should be viewed, IMO, as a mild 55 minute weekly annoyance, an artifact of just how poor intraday volume/liquidity remains, rather than the main driver of today’s action. Similar to post-FOMC action thru 2:30, it merely allows stops to be run so that machines can enter pre-planned directional trades for greater profit, in this case a powerful Russell short was the main goal (the index lacks a big oil presence). So, we’ll agree to disagree on this one, but I always enjoy your comments. | 0 |
WASHINGTON — President Trump on Thursday dismissed reports about his associates’ contacts with Russia last year and vigorously defended his performance in his first four weeks in office, in a contentious news conference that showcased his unconventional and unconstrained presidency. At a hastily organized White House event — ostensibly to announce a new nominee for labor secretary, R. Alexander Acosta — Mr. Trump engaged in an extended attack on the news media and insisted that his new administration was not a chaotic operation but a “ machine. ” Any challenges, he said, were not his fault. “To be honest, I inherited a mess,” he said. In addition to his cabinet announcement, the president revealed that he had asked the Justice Department to investigate government leaks and said he would sign an executive order next week restricting travel to the United States. He promised to produce by March a plan to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, followed by another plan to overhaul the tax system. But his news conference was dominated by an extraordinarily raw and angry defense of both his administration and his character. At times abrupt, often rambling, characteristically boastful yet seemingly pained at the portrayals of him, Mr. Trump kept summoning the spirit of his successful campaign after a month of grinding governance to remind his audience, again, that he won. For a president who has already lost a court battle, fired an acting attorney general and a national security adviser, and lost a cabinet nomination fight, Mr. Trump was eager to demonstrate that he was still in command. He attacked judges for blocking his original travel order and Democrats for obstructing his nominations. He denied being even when no one accused him of it. With the latest Pew Research Center poll showing that just 39 percent of Americans approve of the job he is doing, Mr. Trump at one point plaintively pleaded for understanding. “The tone is such hatred,” he said, referring to the commentary about him on cable television. “I’m really not a bad person. ” Mr. Trump disputed any contention that the White House was out of control or not fully functional, and boasted of a flurry of actions intended to create jobs, curb regulations and crack down on illegal immigration. “There has never been a presidency that has done so much in such a short period of time,” he said. “And we haven’t even started the big work yet. That starts early next week. ” The enactment of a temporary ban on refugees and all visitors from seven predominantly Muslim countries, he maintained, was “perfect,” despite widespread confusion and subsequent court rulings blocking it. “We had a very smooth rollout of the travel ban,” he said. “But we had a bad court. ” Mr. Trump offered his first account of his decision to fire Michael T. Flynn, his national security adviser, for misleading Vice President Mike Pence and others in the White House about the contents of a conversation with Russia’s ambassador in December. He said he was not bothered that Mr. Flynn had talked with the ambassador about American sanctions on Russia before arriving at the White House. “I didn’t direct him,” he said, “but I would have directed him, because that’s his job. ” The problem, he said, was that Mr. Flynn had told Mr. Pence that sanctions did not come up during the conversation, an assertion belied by a transcript of the call, which had been monitored by American intelligence agencies. “The thing is he didn’t tell our vice president properly, and then he said he didn’t remember,” Mr. Trump said. “So either way, it wasn’t very satisfactory to me. ” But he said reports that his campaign aides and other associates had contacts with Russia were “a joke” and “fake news put out by the media. ” The New York Times reported this week that phone records and intercepted calls showed repeated contacts between some of his associates and Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election. “Russia is a ruse,” Mr. Trump said. “I have nothing to do with Russia. To the best of my knowledge, no person that I deal with does. ” However, Mr. Trump said, all the pressure on Russia may ruin any future negotiations with President Vladimir V. Putin. “Putin probably assumes that he can’t make a deal with me anymore because politically, it would be unpopular for a politician to make a deal,” he said. Like presidents before him, Mr. Trump was peeved at a series of leaks, including about Mr. Flynn’s call and his own conversations with foreign leaders. In addition to requesting the Justice Department investigation, he confirmed that he might assign a New York billionaire, Stephen A. Feinberg, to conduct a broad review of the intelligence agencies. “He’s offered his services, and you know, it’s something we may take advantage of,” Mr. Trump said. But he added that it might not be necessary because “we are going to be able to straighten it out very easily on its own. ” Mr. Trump returned again and again to his contest with Hillary Clinton, replaying key events from the 2016 campaign and reviving his favorite attacks. He repeated a claim that Mrs. Clinton gave Russia access to American nuclear fuel supplies. “I’ve done nothing for Russia,” he said. “Hillary Clinton gave them 20 percent of our uranium. ” The State Department did sign off on the purchase of a Canadian company by a Russian state firm that gave Russia control of of America’s uranium production capacity, as did eight other agencies. But Mrs. Clinton was not in a position to approve or reject the deal when she was secretary of state, and it is not known if she was briefed on the matter. Mr. Trump spent much of the conference berating reporters and their news organizations. Clearly exasperated by coverage of him, he said he did not watch CNN but then gave a detailed critique of one of its shows. He cited specific articles in The Times and The Wall Street Journal that he called “fake,” even harking back to one from last year’s campaign. “The press is out of control,” he said. “The level of dishonesty is out of control. ” He added later, “The public doesn’t believe you people anymore. ” The acrimony grew so sharp at one point that CNN’s Jim Acosta felt the need to tell Mr. Trump, “Just for the record, we don’t hate you. ” But that did not assuage him. At one point, he called on Jake Turx, an Jewish reporter from Ami Magazine. “Are you a friendly reporter?” he asked. “I haven’t seen anybody in my community accuse either yourself or anyone on your staff of being ” Mr. Turx said. But, citing bomb threats against Jewish centers, he said, “What we haven’t really heard being addressed is an uptick in and how the government is planning to take care of it. ” Mr. Trump bristled, taking it as a suggestion that he was even though the reporter specifically said the opposite. “I am the least person that you’ve ever seen in your entire life,” Mr. Trump said. Mr. Turx protested that he was not suggesting otherwise. “Quiet, quiet, quiet,” Mr. Trump said. “See? He lied. He was going to get up and ask a very straight, simple question. ” Instead, Mr. Trump said, the question was “repulsive” and “very insulting. ” He later accused Democrats of posing as supporters and holding up offensive signs at his rallies to smear him. When April Ryan of American Urban Radio Networks asked whether he would meet with the Congressional Black Caucus to discuss his urban agenda, Mr. Trump again seemed piqued. “Do you want to set up the meeting?” he challenged her. “Are they friends of yours?” “I’m just a reporter,” said Ms. Ryan, who is . “Well, then, set up the meeting,” Mr. Trump said. That exchange and others included claims that were false or disputed. Mr. Trump told Ms. Ryan that he had planned a meeting with Representative Elijah E. Cummings, an Democrat from Maryland, but that Mr. Cummings had said: “It might be bad for me politically. I can’t have that meeting. ” Mr. Cummings later denied that. “I have no idea why President Trump would make up a story about me like he did today,” he said. “I was actually looking forward to meeting with the president about the skyrocketing price of prescription drugs. ” Similarly, Mr. Trump asserted that his Electoral College victory was the largest since Ronald Reagan’s. But he won fewer Electoral College votes than three of the four presidents since Reagan: Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and George Bush. When a reporter pointed that out, Mr. Trump brushed it off. “I was given that information,” he said. | 1 |
By Claire Bernish U.S. Navy veteran, Petty Officer 1st Class Kash Jackson, came to North Dakota with one imperative in mind — to uphold the... | 0 |
THE ENTIRE CLINTON FAMILY COULD GO TO JAIL: HUGE SECRET REVEALED ABOUT THE CLINTON FOUNDATION
“Basically what IRS just revealed is that Clinton Foundation is one huge Ponzi Scheme!!!
This is insane! Practically not just Hillary, but whole Clinton family is going to jail!
Just 5.7 percent of the Clinton Foundation’s massive 2014 budget actually went to charitable grants, according to the tax-exempt organization’s IRS filings. The rest went to salaries and employee benefits, fundraising and “other expenses.” The Clinton Foundation spent a hair under $91.3 million in 2014, the organization’s IRS filings show. But less than $5.2 million of that went to charitable grants.
That number pales in comparison to the $34.8 million the foundation spent on salaries, compensation and employee benefits. Another $50.4 million was marked as “other expenses,” while the remaining almost $851K was marked as “professional fundraising expenses.”
Despite taking in an additional $30 million in 2014, the Clinton Foundation spent 40 percent less on charitable grants in 2014 than in 2013. Even as it slashed charitable spending, the foundation increased the amount spent on salaries, employee benefits and compensation by $5 million in 2014. The foundation also spent $5 million more “other expenses” in 2014.
Sean Davis at The Federalist notes, “the bulk of the charitable work lauded by the Clinton Foundation’s boosters — the distribution of drugs to impoverished people in developing countries — is no longer even performed by the Clinton Foundation. Those activities were spun off in 2010 and are now managed by the Clinton Health Access Initiative, a completely separate non-profit organization.” (RELATED: Clinton Foundation Deceived IRS On Tax Exemption From The Start)
As first reported by The Daily Caller, the IRS launched an investigation into the Clinton Foundation this past July after 64 House Republicans called the foundation a “lawless ‘pay-to-play’ enterprise that has been operating under a cloak of philanthropy for years and should be investigated” in a letter to the IRS, FBI and Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
These Clintons are nastier than El Chapo Guzman family members!
But El Chapo never portrait himself as some huge persona, Clintons are with a mask of Mother Theresa but with heart and soul of a Russian mobster!
If you agree, please share and comment below.
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By Jacob Devaney / upliftconnect.com
Overwhelm is a constant state of being for many of us, but it doesn’t need to be. Most of us are under a deluge of responsibilities like running errands, responding to emails, keeping up with house-chores, hurrying to meetings, and more. Though this is normal in our modern lives, our nervous system struggles to keep up. If we don’t make a conscious effort to relieve this kind of stress, our adrenals get depleted, and sometimes we get sick. Luckily overwhelm is not about how much is going on in your life, it is all about how you manage things. Let’s dissect overwhelm from a neurological perspective and explore ways to reduce its impact on our lives.
When life’s circumstances overwhelm our ability to cope or integrate, our nervous system goes into a stress response. It doesn’t need to be a life-threatening incident for the nervous system to trigger a fight, flight or collapse response. The interesting thing is that it is purely subjective. It can be as simple as a “perceived threat”, like being embarrassed in public, imagining that you will get fired for being late, or having a squirrel run in front of your car. Regardless of how big or small the incident is, our system can go into overwhelm, causing our brain to release all the stress hormones that accompany it.
It can be as simple as a “perceived threat” like imagining that you will get fired for being late. Self Awareness to the Rescue
We pride ourselves in being busy. Many of us feel like something is wrong if we are tired, or feeling lazy and want to lay on the couch and stare at a wall. Actually, this is the parasympathetic, restorative nervous system that is inviting us to step out of our constant ‘go-go-go’ state so that we can unwind. Laying in the grass and looking at the clouds is actually much better for us than being on a couch staring at a wall, but we rarely make a conscious decision to do so. Instead, we collapse right in the middle of cleaning our house and then beat ourselves up for being lazy.
Humans have a very different way of coping with stress than all other primates. In order to conquer fire (a trait that has allowed humans to climb to the top of the food chain), we had to develop regions of the brain that suppress our fear so that we can overcome it. The stress hormones associated with fear are still released even if we don’t indulge them. Animals instantly discharge these hormones, but humans need to do this consciously. In other words, we have to make a choice to actively engage in practices that reset our nervous system. As we have explored in How to Relieve Stress Stored in our Bodies , this process can be a whole lot of fun and very rewarding on many levels.
In any dark time, there is a tendency to veer toward fainting over how much is wrong or unmended in the world. Do not focus on that. Do not make yourself ill with overwhelm. -Clarissa Estes
Humans have a very different way of coping with stress than all other primates. Information Overwhelm
We live in a time of extreme bombardment of information, along with a desire to wake up socially and address the many problems facing the world. There is no effective solution when we come from a constant state of overwhelm. Being relaxed and clear-minded is the only way to approach these seemingly insurmountable issues. This research is well documented in the Uplift article Will Humanity Choose Love or Fear? Is the information you are reading an immediate threat to your survival… Probably not.
Information overload occurs when a person is exposed to more information than the brain can process at one time. – Lucy Jo Palladino , Ph.D Hemispheric Disconnect
The right hemisphere of our brains is great for creativity and spirituality, it is where we go when we ponder the eternal nature of things, yet it doesn’t comprehend time sequencing. Understanding this is paramount to taking the reigns on our overwhelm and positioning us to have greater coping skills. This unconscious, biologically-wired, stress response is explored in Get to Know Your Amygdala .
The right hemisphere processes experience differently from the left – non-verbally through body sensations, visual images, emotions, and holistically – it processes the gestalt of someone’s face or energy globally, all at once, rather than in a linear data bit by data bit mode. The right hemisphere is where we get our “gut” intuitive sense of things and the gestalt of things as a whole. The right hemisphere is the seat of the social and personal self. The right hemisphere regulates the sub-cortical limbic system and is dominant for social-emotional processing. -Linda Graham
We live in a time of extreme bombardment of information. How Do We Get Past Overwhelm?
Step One is as simple as recognizing that you are operating from a state of overwhelm. Self-awareness breaks us out of unconscious patterning, and this is central to the practice of mindfulness. Learning to check in with one’s self by pausing is also a great way to develop emotional intelligence.
Step Two is to take a few deep breathes after recognizing that you are overwhelmed. This also works if you are angry, sad, or reacting out of fear. Since the emotional response is rooted in the right hemisphere, it always feels immediate. By breathing you are helping your mind integrate the threat level into time synchronisation, which is a left-brain process that will help relax your nervous system.
Step Three is to remind yourself that you are safe, and to develop strategies to call on this sense of safety when needed. This is known as resourcing one’s self, and there are healthy ways of doing it, as well as unhealthy ways. Hint: reaching for a cigarette, or indulging in television, drugs, or junk-food is not as effective as 5 minutes of stretching, mindful breathing, or taking a moment to connect with nature.
Step Four is to help your body let go of any stress hormones that may have been released into your system at the first moment of panic/overwhelm. Shake like a dog, jump up and down or do some psoas stretches to discharge the nervous system and help you reset your physical body as well as your emotional body.
Self-awareness breaks us out of unconscious patterning.
Overwhelm has a whole lot to do with our perceptions. We expand our mental-emotional container to be able to integrate larger and larger amounts of information without succumbing to overwhelm in the first place. The steps above will help you deal with overwhelm when it hits you, but a daily mindfulness practice will help you reduce the instances when you are thrown into overwhelm. The ability to respond without reacting, to observe without indulging, will help you increase success in your life on many levels. It will also be a valuable skill in rapidly changing times!
Jacob Devaney - Founder and director of Culture Collective, creative activist, musician, and producer. 0.0 · | 0 |
Chicago ‘Hits Back,’ Strips Trump of Honorary Street Designation Fran Spielman, Chicago Sun-Times, October 25, 2016
Chicago aldermen on Tuesday hit Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump where it hurts–in his formidable ego–for using a spike in homicides and shootings to paint a “distorted caricature” of the city.
The City Council’s Transportation Committee unanimously agreed to strip Trump of a recognition he covets: “Trump Plaza,” the honorary designation for the east side of Wabash Avenue between Illinois Street and the Chicago River, outside the 96-story Trump International Hotel & Tower.
“We can actually use his own words against him: ‘When you hit us, we hit back,’ ” said Transportation Committee Chairman Anthony Beale (9th).
“You’ve hit Chicago numerous times. . . . When you hit Chicago, Chicago hits back.”
{snip}
As for the honorary street designation, one of the Trump Plaza signs already has been stolen. So only one more needs to be removed. That will be done post-haste, if the full City Council approves the punishment, thanks to a so-called “pending passage” letter that Beale promised to sign.
Reilly said Trump no longer deserves the honor after making political hay at Chicago’s expense in a way that has damaged the city’s reputation on the global stage.
Trump’s decision to portray Chicago as a “war zone” that needs stop-and-frisk during the first presidential debate was the final straw.
“He was comparing us to a war-torn, third-world country. That was a set of comments that didn’t just insult me. It insulted anyone who loves this great city,” Reilly said.
{snip} | 0 |
It was recently noted that superhero costumes were far outpacing princess ones as children’s Halloween outfits of choice this year . But what would be dead last? Probably the hackneyed political groan-inducer dreamed up by Liz Cheney for her daughter.
For inexplicable reasons, Liz Cheney – daughter of America’s most detestable former vice president, Dick – decided to staple a bunch of pieces of office scrap paper onto her daughter and send her to school as “Hillary Clinton’s deleted emails.” Ugh.
On social media, proud mom Liz even boasted about the costume. Trick or treat? Our daughter Gracie went to school in the scariest of Halloween costumes: Hillary Clinton’s deleted emails. #HappyHalloween pic.twitter.com/Gs33p78FJT
— Liz Cheney (@Liz_Cheney) October 31, 2016
It’s hard to imagine a less “cool” thing to go as than the living embodiment of a manufactured right-wing scandal that only aging conservatives cared about in the first place. Teens, whom already lean heavily liberal, probably won’t spontaneously become registered Republicans because a classmate showed up covered in paper. Making matters worse, the costume’s gimmick isn’t even obvious. Kids will have to go up to Gracie and ask “So what are you supposed to be?” And she will have to respond, time and again, “I’m Hillary Clinton’s deleted emails. Those things your grandfather was yelling about at the family reunion and quite literally nobody else is interested in.”
And because irony died and was buried in a shallow grave this year, Liz Cheney didn’t bother to justify her own father’s carelessness with emails. Forget the 33,000 emails, the Bush Administration “lost” or “deleted” over 22 million. Guess whose emails “disappeared” most often?
Most troubling, researchers found a suspicious pattern in the White House email system blackouts, including periods when there were no emails available from the office of Vice President Dick Cheney. “That the vice president’s office, widely characterized as the most powerful vice president in history, should have no archived emails in its accounts for scores of days—especially days when there was discussion of whether to invade Iraq—beggared the imagination,” says Thomas Blanton, director of the Washington-based National Security Archive.
I guess stapling 22 million emails to her daughter would be a bit impractical, though. Maybe they should have stuck with a superhero costume.
Featured image via Twitter | 0 |
In something that could’ve been scripted by George Orwell, President-elect Donald Trump just has pretty much every major media personality and/or outlet over to Trump Tower for a closed-door meeting.
The NY Post stated :
“The hour-long session included top execs from network and cable news channels. Among the attendees were NBC’s Deborah Turness, Lester Holt and Chuck Todd, ABC’s James Goldston, George Stephanopoulos, David Muir and Martha Raddatz,
Also, CBS’ Norah O’Donnell John Dickerson, Charlie Rose, Christopher Isham and King, Fox News’ Bill Shine, Jack Abernethy, Jay Wallace, Suzanne Scott, MSNBC’s Phil Griffin and CNN’s Jeff Zucker and Erin Burnett.”
Before the meeting, everyone was speculating as to what was going on. Why is Trump colluding with the media? Is he trying to control the conversation and form some sort of state sponsored media?
Well, speculate no further. Trump called everyone to his tower to scold them like the Henry the 8th he is very much turning out to be.
According to one source who confided in the NY Post :
“It was like a f–ing firing squad…Trump started with [CNN chief] Jeff Zucker and said ‘I hate your network, everyone at CNN is a liar and you should be ashamed.”
Adding:
“The meeting was a total disaster. The TV execs and anchors went in there thinking they would be discussing the access they would get to the Trump administration, but instead they got a Trump-style dressing down.”
It was basically Trump throwing a hissy fit and talking down to everyone in the media to tell them how very awful they are to him. Even though they were pretty soft on him throughout the course of his campaign, often given him an open forum and hours of free airtime to tout his craziness.
Another source said:
“The meeting took place in a big board room and there were about 30 or 40 people, including the big news anchors from all the networks.”
Further:
“Trump kept saying, ‘We’re in a room of liars, the deceitful dishonest media who got it all wrong.’ He addressed everyone in the room calling the media dishonest, deceitful liars. He called out Jeff Zucker by name and said everyone at CNN was a liar, and CNN was [a] network of liars…Trump didn’t say [NBC reporter] Katy Tur by name, but talked about an NBC female correspondent who got it wrong, then he referred to a horrible network correspondent who cried when Hillary lost who hosted a debate – which was Martha Raddatz who was also in the room.”
Some of the media did try to get a word in edgewise, but it was pretty much all for naught. Trump was there to scold and not get a lesson from the media in freedom of the press and speech.
NY Post reported a source saying:
“[CBS Good Morning co-host Gayle] King did not stand up, but asked some question, ‘How do you propose we the media work with you?’ Chuck Todd asked some pretty pointed questions. David Muir asked ‘How are you going to cope living in DC while your family is in NYC? It was a horrible meeting.”
According to Kellyanne Conway, however, it all went really well. Yet, it’s hard to believe a word that comes out of the Trump camp, because they will say only what they want people to hear, and most of the time there’s barely a sliver of the truth involved.
No word as to who the source is that spoke to the NY Post .
It’s pretty clear Trump wants to control the narrative of the press, why else would he have so many big news names over to his palace tower? He wanted to scold them and likely tell them how they should be operating, and we should all be very, very mortified that he even had them over in the first place.
After all, if you control the press, you control what the people hear. If you control what the people hear, you can tell them anything you want, even if it’s not in their best interests. It’s horrifying, to say the least, absolutely Hitler-esque, if we’re going to be honest.
The press need to be counted on to hold Trump accountable for everything that he says or does, and if they don’t someone needs to hold the press accountable as well. This is a scary time we’re entering into and hopefully the Constitution will not be shredded and honesty with accountability will prevail.
Featured Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images | 0 |
Home / Be The Change / Flex Your rights / Brother of Clinton’s Campaign Chair is an Active Foreign Agent on the Saudi Arabian Payroll Brother of Clinton’s Campaign Chair is an Active Foreign Agent on the Saudi Arabian Payroll Claire Bernish October 26, 2016 Leave a comment
Tony Podesta — brother of the now-disgraced Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, whose files Wikileaks has been publishing — is not only a powerful Democratic Party lobbyist, but a registered foreign agent receiving a hefty monthly paycheck from the nefarious government of Saudi Arabia.
No — as tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorist as it might sound — that scenario is the absolute truth.
In 1988, John and Tony Podesta formed the Podesta Group and have used their bigwig party-insider status to lobby and influence government policies — while, at various times, simultaneously holding positions of power — which has created a number of glaring conflicts of interest.
According to the March 2016 filing made in accordance with the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, Tony Podesta is an active foreign agent of the Saudi government with the “ Center for Studies and Media Affairs at the Saudi Royal Court ,” and acts as an officer of the Saudi Arabia account.
At this point, the web of pay-for-play between the Washington, political heavyweights, and foreign governments comes lurching into the spotlight.
For starters, the Podesta brothers’ lobbying firm receives $140,000 every month from the Saudi government, which, in no uncertain terms — and despite a status as privileged U.S. ally — wages a bloody campaign of censorship, murder, suppression, human rights abuse, and worse against its civilian population, while bombing hospitals, schools, and aid convoys in neighboring nations.
John Podesta previously served as President Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, founded the think tank Center for American Progress (which oh-so-coincidentally touts the need to reframe Saudi Arabia’s hopelessly tarnished image), counseled President Obama, and now chairs Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
Tony Podesta acts as a foreign agent for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia — lobbying to influence government policy in favor of the Kingdom — while also contributing to and bundling for Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
Think about that for a moment.
One brother uses the influence of money to both affect United States foreign policy and infuse the Clinton campaign with cash — while the other wields the influence of power as a political insider for the same entities.
As the Washington Post reported months ago in July, Tony Podesta’s lobbying efforts “raised $268,000 for the campaign and $31,000 for the victory fund.”
“The Saudis hired the Podesta Group in 2015 because it was getting hammered in the press over civilian casualties from its airstrikes in Yemen and its crackdown on political dissidents at home, including sentencing blogger Raif Badawi to ten years in prison and 1,000 lashes for ‘insulting Islam,’” Alternet reported . “Since then, Tony Podesta’s fingerprints have been all over Saudi Arabia’s advocacy efforts in Washington DC. When Saudi Arabia executed the prominent nonviolent Shia dissident Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, causing protests throughout the Shia world and inflaming sectarian divisions, The New York Times noted that the Podesta Group provided the newspaper with a Saudi commentator who defended the execution.”
Notably, the Saudis’ reputation has only worsened as further atrocities pile up — concerning not only a record number of barbaric beheadings this year, but suspiciously reckless and errant U.S.-backed coalition bombings of civilian sites in several regions of active conflict.
Additionally, Tony Podesta’s status as a registered foreign agent for Saudi Arabia is at least obliquely discussed in an email from April 15, 2015 — ironically revealed by Wikileaks’ publishing of his brothers personal communiques — in which former Clinton Foundation chief development officer and now campaign national finance director Dennis Cheng wrote to a small group of insiders:
“Hi all – we do need to make a decision on this ASAP as our friends who happen to be registered with FARA [Foreign Agents Registration Act] are already donating and raising.
“I do want to push back a bit (it’s my job!): I feel like we are leaving a good amount of money on the table (both for primary and general, and then DNC and state parties)… and how do we explain to people that we’ll take money from a corporate lobbyist but not them; that the Foundation takes $ from foreign govts but we now won’t. Either way, we need to make a decision soon.”
To which general counsel to the Clinton campaign, attorney Marc Elias, replied [all errors original and emphasis added],
“Responding to all on this. I was not on the call this morning, but I lean away from a bright line rule here. It seems odd to say that someone who represents Alberta, Canada can’t give, but a lobbyist for Phillip Morris can. Just as we vet lobbyists case by case, I would do the same with FARA. While this may lead to a large number of FARA registrants being denied, it would not be a flat our ban. A total ban feels arbitrary and will engender the same eye-rolling and ill will that it did for Obama.”
As the exchange continues, how to precisely handle the campaign’s image with potentially controversial donors — while, at all costs, maintaining the flow of cash — becomes even more apparent. As strategist and campaign manager Robby Mook responds,
“Where do we draw the line though?”
Elias suggests a particularly intricate solution:
“If we do it case by case, then it will be subjective. We would look at who the donor is and what foreign entity they are registered for. In judging whether to take the money, we would consider the relationship between that country and the United States, its relationship to the State Department during Hillary’s time as Secretary, and its relationship, if any, to the Foundation. In judging the individual, we would look at their history of support for political candidates generally and Hillary’s past campaigns specifically.
“Put simply, we would use the same criteria we use for lobbyists, except with a somewhat more stringent screen.
“As a legal matter, I am not saying we have to do this – we can decide to simply ban foreign registrants entirely. I’m just offering this up as a middle ground.”
Mook eventually decides plainly,
“Marc made a convincing case to me this am that these sorts of restrictions don’t really get you anything…that Obama actually got judged MORE harshly as a result. He convinced me. So…in a complete U-turn, I’m ok just taking the money and dealing with any attacks. Are you guys ok with that?”
All of this political wrangling appears to have had the desired effect — despite increasing calls for the United States to either rein in or sever completely its support for the bloody Saudi regime — the U.S. approved a stunning $1.29 billion sale of smart bombs to the Kingdom in November 2015.
Tony Podesta’s specific contract with the government-run Center for Studies and Media Affairs at the Saudi Royal Court, which will earn $1.68 million by year’s end, does, indeed, suggest the infusion of a pro-Saudi message into the U.S. media propaganda machine.
“Saudi Arabia is consistently one of the bigger players when it comes to foreign influence in Washington,” Sunlight Foundation spokesman Josh Stewart told the Washington Post . “That spans both what you’d call the inside game, which is lobbying and government relations, and the outside game, which is PR and other things that tend to reach a broader audience than just lobbying.”
That broader audience — the American public — has indeed been manipulated courtesy of at least the thoroughly-corrupt Clinton campaign if not surreptitiously by the Saudis, as well.
As The Free Thought Project has repeatedly reported , the evidence of collusion among the Democratic National Committee, Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and the mainstream presstitutes is indisputable — including no less than 65 so-called journalists listed by name in various leaks as darlings of the campaign.
Although this level of corruption and collusion would be considered intolerable in nearly any other nation on the planet. And yet, at the center of this shit storm of contention is an official nominee for the White House — who will not be held responsible for any number of questionable and criminal acts.
The system isn’t rigged — it’s performing exactly as intended — and always will as long as the vote validates its existence. Share Social Trending | 0 |
Representative Steve King, a Republican from Iowa who has a history of making inflammatory statements viewed by many as insensitive or outright racist, was roundly criticized on Sunday for his apparent endorsement of white nationalism. Mr. King made the remark on Twitter when he shared a story by the Voice of Europe website about the Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who wants to end Muslim immigration and ban the Quran and who has called Moroccan immigrants “scum. ” Critics said that Mr. King echoed the principles of white nationalism, the belief that national identity is linked to the white race and its superiority to other races. white nationalists emerged as a small but vocal group during the candidacy of Donald J. Trump, celebrating his promises to crack down on illegal immigration and ban Muslims from entering the United States, as well as heralding his presidential victory as a chance to preserve white culture. David Duke, the white nationalist and former Ku Klux Klansman who called Mr. Trump “by far the best candidate” during the campaign, celebrated Mr. King’s comments. But many people quickly condemned Mr. King. “You, Congressman, are simply a bigot,” one person replied. Another person wrote, “You know that you were ‘somebody else’s baby’ too, right? Or do you not understand how this works?” Representative Carlos Curbelo, Republican of Florida, responded from his personal Twitter account, asking Mr. King to explain himself. Representative Ted Lieu, a California Democrat who was born in Taiwan, shared a photo of his sons on Twitter. And Miriam Amer, the executive director of the Iowa chapter of the Council on Relations, called on Republican Party leaders in the state and nationwide to repudiate the message. “This racist tweet crosses the line from politics to white supremacist advocacy,” she said in a statement. A representative for Mr. King did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Mr. King, who was elected to Congress in 2002, questioned what nonwhites have contributed to civilization at a panel discussion in July about the racial makeup of the Republican Party. “I’d ask you to go back through history and figure out where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people that you are talking about,” he said. “Where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?” The month before, he tried to block an effort to put Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill. In 2013, Mr. King said that for every successful child of undocumented immigrants, there were 100 others who were drug mules with “calves the size of cantaloupes” from hauling marijuana. | 1 |
GENEVA (AP) — The United States and other countries criticized Poland at the U. N.’s Human Rights Council on Tuesday for new laws that are seen as limiting the independence of the judiciary and public media. [Several Western nations also criticized Poland for its restrictive abortion laws, calling on the mostly Roman Catholic nation to give women the right to safe and legal abortions. And they highlighted a rising xenophobic atmosphere that has resulted in more crimes against foreigners. The European Union has voiced concern about the Polish government since the conservative Law and Justice party assumed power in 2015 and moved quickly to consolidate power by limiting the independence of the Constitutional Tribunal and public media. The debate Tuesday in Geneva marked the first time that the country’s recent record was reviewed by the world human rights forum. All U. N. members face such periodic reviews. The U. S. representative at the session, Sheila Leonard, said her country was concerned about the developments in Poland. “We remain deeply concerned about judicial independence,” Leonard said. “We are also concerned about the continued discrimination and incidents targeting minorities in Poland, including homophobic, xenophobic and speech and acts. ” Polish officials defended their record, saying the changes Law and Justice introduced were in line with European norms. The leading Polish representative, Renata Szczech, an undersecretary of state at Poland’s Foreign Ministry, reported that the government has reduced childhood poverty levels dramatically with new cash bonuses for families. Several delegates said they recognized the reduction in childhood poverty and urged Warsaw to show improvements in the other areas. Turkey’s delegate expressed concerns over an mood in Poland, while Russia’s delegate criticized a recent spate of vandal attacks on memorials to Soviet soldier who died in World War II. | 1 |
Политика
Дмитрий Анатольевич Медведев знаком российскому обществу не как целомудренный политик, а как человек, ставящий превыше всего здоровье и хорошее настроение. Но на днях людям открылась другая грань главы правительства – в его душе, оказывается, затаился ярый патриот-кофеман, жаждущий всеми силами вырваться наружу.
Никто бы не обратил внимания, что Дмитрий Анатольевич 16 ноября зарядился дозой здоровья и отправился на подписание соглашений по результатам заседания Евразийского межправительственного совета, Глава правительства предложил переименовать кофе «американо» в «русиано».
А началось все с белорусов. Российский премьер не смог удержаться и не похвалить белорусских коллег за конструктивное поведение во время заседания. Белорусский премьер Андрей Кобяков в ответ на похвалу ответил, что его адекватное поведение вызвано чашечкой кофе (вполне возможно, что если бы Кобяков выпил пару чашек кофе, то с легкостью нашел бы лекарство от рака, поборол на планете голод и наладил бы связи с внеземными цивилизациями). Медведев заметил, что слово «американо» звучит неполиткорректно, и предложил изменить название напитка, отвечающего за конструктивное поведение. Уже через секунду тишину нарушило славное, мелодичное, а главное – крайне патриотичное слово «русиано». Ну, звучит же!
И никого не волнует, что словом «американо» изначально был назван способ приготовления кофе. Да и придумали его вовсе не американцы, а итальянцы для окупировавших их страну военных из США.
Только представьте, теперь, желая заказать в кафе бодрящий напиток, вам не придется вспоминать это ужасное слово, пропитанное духом капитализма, буржуазии и хорошей жизни. Ведь есть новая исконно русская замена, которая олицетворяет всю могучесть и силу русской речи. Русиано – вместо тысячи слов…
Русиано затмило собой все достижения совета и стало главным событием дня. Пользователи сети начали гадать, сколько же спирта будет входить в новый напиток и будет ли в нем сам кофе. Между тем, всплыли новые подробности – предложение о переименовании «американо» внес Медведев, а вот «отцом» русиано является армянский премьер.
Но запущенный механизм было уже не остановить. Одно екатеринбургское кафе мгновенно отреагировало на идею переименования кофе. В баре с обнадеживающим названием «Огонек» не только появилось русиано, но и исчезли все англоязычные позиции в меню. Виски Jack Daniels переименовали в «Жора Денисов», а стейк New York — в «Воронеж». Забавно, что из всех российских городов организаторы решили, что именно Воронеж имеет больше всего сходств с Нью-Йорком. Гордый Manhattan превратился в «Марьину рощу», а Bronx отныне величают «Бирюлево».
Странно только, что чувство патриотизма у отечественных политиков однобокое. Они прославляют импортозамещение и не любят американские названия, но это не мешает им носить айфоны и приобретать недвижимость в Америке. | 0 |
ROCHESTER, N. H. — The young women, soon to be mothers, gathered around a big kitchen table, chatting excitedly about due dates and baby names and even morning sickness. But these were not typical expectant mothers. They had used opioids, mostly heroin and fentanyl. Many had been incarcerated. Few had families they could turn to for help, and the fathers of their babies were out of the picture. Most of these women — tough, sassy, vulnerable — were destined to go through their pregnancies in a shelter, jail or even on the street, fending for themselves as they had often done before. Instead, here they were last week, in the cozy kitchen of a classic 1856 New England farmhouse where the aroma of cornbread filled the air. Set before them was a comfort lunch of tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches. It was opening day at Hope on Haven Hill, a private house that its owner, Dr. Colene Arnold, had moved her own family out of so these women could move in. “This place is crazy pretty,” said an Ariel Robbins Perkins, 24, who is 12 weeks pregnant and arrived here straight from jail. (The New York Times conducted a Facebook Live interview with Ariel that day.) Hope on Haven Hill, financed by $480, 000 in federal funds and more than $150, 000 in private donations, provides a safe, supportive environment where eight women who are either pregnant or newly postpartum can live while receiving comprehensive treatment and counseling for substance use disorders. Their days will be highly structured, with group therapy, private counseling, childbirth classes, life skills coaching, recovery support services and enrichment programs. Medicaid will reimburse Hope on Haven Hill for the services. Because opioid users are vulnerable to relapsing after they deliver, the women can stay at Hope on Haven Hill for up to a year after giving birth. If they have other children under 5, those children can live here, too. This is part of Haven Hill’s philosophy of keeping mothers and babies together and alleviating the widespread fear among pregnant drug users that if they seek help, their children will be taken away. New Hampshire has two other small facilities for pregnant women with substance use issues. But as the opioid epidemic has worsened, both have long waiting lists. The need is growing, as evidenced by the sharp rise in the number of babies born with neonatal abstinence syndrome, in which the newborn suffers withdrawal from the mother’s drug use. In 2000, the syndrome was diagnosed in 1. 5 babies per 1, 000 births in New Hampshire by 2012, that rate had soared to 15 babies per 1, 000 births, said Dr. Bonny L. Whalen, a newborn pediatrician at Children’s Hospital at Medical Center in Lebanon, N. H. The rate now, she said, is even higher. New Hampshire’s rate is almost triple the national average, but it is still a major problem across the country. As of 2012, the federal government says, one baby was born suffering from opioid withdrawal every 25 minutes. That national rate, too, is higher now. The federal government said last week that opioid deaths had continued to surge in 2015 and for the first time in the nation’s history surpassed the number of deaths from gun homicides. Emma Lee, a tiny infant born with neonatal abstinence syndrome, was the first baby to arrive at Hope on Haven Hill on opening day last week. She had spent all 32 days of her life in a neonatal intensive care unit because her mother, Amanda, 31, who was homeless for the first six months of her pregnancy, had used heroin for most of that time and then went on methadone. At birth, babies like Emma Lee suddenly lose their opioid supply. Some go into withdrawal and require methadone or morphine to control their symptoms until they can be weaned off. “Her withdrawals were pretty severe,” said Amanda, who did not want her last name used, as she cradled Emma Lee in their sunny bedroom at Hope on Haven Hill. While in the hospital, the baby had difficulty eating. Her hands and legs shook with tremors. “It was really hard as a mom to see your new baby go through that,” Amanda said. “I know for myself, I know what it feels like to withdraw, and it’s pretty terrible to imagine a tiny helpless baby going through that. ” Hope on Haven Hill does not accept active drug users. Most of the women have only recently stopped using opioids — in New Hampshire these days, that usually means heroin and fentanyl. But they cannot detox, because going through withdrawal causes dehydration and increases the risk of miscarriage or of the mother’s with opioids to stave off the painful effects of withdrawal. So most of these women are on some kind of medication assisted treatment, either methadone or buprenorphine, which is marketed as Suboxone or Subutex. Erica Vallee, 24, who is five months pregnant, is among those at Hope on Haven Hill on Subutex. She has used heroin since she was 18 and has been in and out of rehab and jail. She says becoming pregnant was “the only thing” that made her stop using illegal drugs. But like others here, she is afraid of relapsing. “I can’t be left alone because I don’t trust myself,” she said as she scrubbed the dishes in the kitchen sink after lunch. The hope is that the stable, nurturing environment of Haven Hill will provide enough support and encouragement for these women to maintain their sobriety. Dr. Arnold, who owns the Haven Hill house, planned the program with Kerry Norton, a prenatal nurse with whom she worked at a nearby women’s health center. About two years ago, the health center started seeing more and more pregnant women with addiction issues who were not being treated for one reason or another. “They didn’t have prenatal care,” said Dr. Arnold, an obstetrician and gynecologist. “They’d show up at the birth center and deliver and have nothing, and their child would be taken out of their custody and they’d be out on the street again. ” Among those who showed up at the health center was Abi Lizotte. She was homeless, pregnant and had been using heroin for at least six years, after her older sister had died from an overdose. Ms. Norton, whose own son had overdosed around this same time, took an interest in her, but Ms. Lizotte skipped appointments and Ms. Norton could not find a treatment program that would take her. “I’m an educated nurse who knows the system, and I couldn’t navigate it,” Ms. Norton recalled. “I thought, ‘What is everyone else doing?’ And it blew my mind when I realized what everyone else was doing, which was dying. ” In June 2015, after a lengthy and exhaustive struggle, Ms. Norton got Ms. Lizotte — by this point eight months pregnant — into treatment in Nashua. That night, Ms. Norton, an insomniac, went home and took to Facebook, where she asked if anyone knew Ellen DeGeneres or Oprah Winfrey or anyone rich enough to establish a treatment program for pregnant women derailed by drugs. Dr. Arnold, a fellow insomniac, wrote back: “I don’t know Ellen and I don’t know Oprah, but I have this house and I’ve wanted to do this same thing for three years now. ” The two started brainstorming and conceived the plan for Hope on Haven Hill. They credit Ms. Lizotte, now 24, sober and the mother of a healthy boy, as their inspiration. Since then, they have overcome mounds of red tape, secured the home’s financing and achieved nonprofit charitable status. In September, Dr. Arnold moved her family — her husband, two children, two dogs and a cat — to a smaller home while workers renovated the Haven Hill house to meet the building codes for a residential center. Workers refinished the pine floors, and volunteers came in with buckets of paint as new furniture, beds and linens arrived. After a ceremony last week, Timothy Rourke, the chairman of the New Hampshire Governor’s Commission on Alcohol and Drug Abuse, said in an interview that while there was much to celebrate, it was important to remember that the state is in the middle of a crisis. “We’re still looking at a death rate that is way too high and wait lists that are way too long, and many people are asking for help that doesn’t come fast enough,” he said. “Hope on Haven Hill should be a call for all of us to do better. ” Its doors barely open, Hope on Haven Hill already has a lengthy waiting list of its own. | 1 |
President Trump announced Saturday afternoon that he will be holding a rally that happens to be the same night as the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. [Next Saturday night I will be holding a BIG rally in Pennsylvania. Look forward to it! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 22, 2017, “Next Saturday night I will be holding a BIG rally in Pennsylvania. Look forward to it!” Trump wrote on Twitter. The announcement comes after Trump made the decision to skip the annual dinner in February, breaking with the tradition presidents in recent years have set by attending the event. The rally will be held April 29 in Harrisburg, the same day as Trump marks the 100th day of his presidency, Politico reported. A senior White House official said the decision to hold the rally that day had more to do with how Trump planned to spend the hours of the 100th day than the correspondents’ dinner. “The media is trying to make this about them when — respectfully it has nothing to do with you guys,” said the official. “It’s about focusing on the people. ” No White House staff will attend the dinner either as a show of solidarity with Trump, and outlets such as Vanity Fair, TIME, People, Bloomberg, and the New Yorker have canceled their parties. Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein will headline the event in Trump’s place to present journalism awards. | 1 |
Germany: Moslem Pulls Over Bike to Masturbate at White Girls, Police Say He Did Nothing Wrong
Andrew Anglin Daily Stormer October 27, 2016
Everyone in the Western world must ask themselves the question: what do I love most about diversity?
For me, it’s a very, very difficult question to answer.
But when it comes right down to it, I have to say that I think the greatest benefit of diversity is the vibrancy.
Since Wednesday is the sex Gangster (27) of Longerich is a permanent topic of conversation in social networks. Now heâs taken!
That same evening he was arrested by police in Longerich and brought in for questioning.
According EXPRESS information he should be a Persian, which is reported in a [] camp. He is said to have at least three cases exposed and masturbating in front of women. Two of the women (28, 41) have filed a complaint.
…
After questioning the man was released. âInvestigation against him were initiated. But since there are no grounds for detention, he was after the interrogation go again,” said a police spokesman.
It’s disgusting that a full 2/3rds of German women will file a complaint against a diverse vibrant who is doing absolutely nothing by expressing his rich cultural heritage in the form of a unique historical tradition which reflects his incredible cultural identity.
I long for the day when German Nazism finally ends, and these White sluts learn to shut their filthy infidel whore mouths. | 0 |
Actor Michael Keaton took to Twitter Monday and slammed President Donald Trump’s executive order temporarily suspending the U. S. Refugee Admissions Program, calling it “another recruitment tool” for ISIS. [Big thank you to Trump for handing ISIS ANOTHER recruiting tool. Nice job Birther Boy! — Michael Keaton (@MichaelKeaton) January 30, 2017, The Academy Award nominated actor also said there is “no end in sight” for the Trump administration’s “mayhem. ” This administration creates Mayhem with no end in sight. — Michael Keaton (@MichaelKeaton) January 30, 2017, Keaton also encouraged his social media followers to be ready to “speak out” against President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee. “Keep the resistance WELL THOUGHT OUT AND SPECIFIC and prepare to speak out if necessary on Supreme Court nominee! !” the Spotlight star wrote on Twitter. Keep the resistance WELL THOUGHT OUT AND SPECIFIC and prepare to speak out if necessary on Supreme Court nominee!! — Michael Keaton (@MichaelKeaton) January 30, 2017, Keaton’s scathing critique of the administration’s policies follows protests in New York City on Sunday and a slew of searing speeches aimed at the President during the SAG Awards. President Trump announced via Twitter on Monday that he’s set to name his United States Supreme Court nominee. “I have made my decision on who I will nominate for The United States Supreme Court. It will be announced live on Tuesday at 8:00 P. M. (W. H.),” Trump wrote. Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter: @JeromeEHudson | 1 |
Hillary’s secret agenda is not so secret. In short, she plans to destroy America’s borders. She will be fulfilling the globalist agenda of making America an open country. An open country whose resources are ripe for the picking.
Listen to Dave Hodges describe how America will take its final breath as a nation if Clinton is elected.
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A casting call obtained by Fox News on Wednesday was apparently sent out by an “up-and-coming conservative media network currently in development.”
According to the casting call, the upstart network is searching the U.S. for hosts, reporters, and right-wing well-spoken contributors.
The notice stresses that on-air talent “must be knowledgeable about conservative viewpoints, current events, and the presidential election,” adding applicants must also “look upscale and intelligent,” and should be “outspoken and energetic.”
The network is holding auditions at a secret New York City studio on November 7, just before election day.
And while the casting call does not disclose the identity of the mystery employer, it does suggest that the network’s first programming will be streamed online. Coincidentally, the Trump campaign has just set up it’s online Facebook live feed, where his aides have been broadcasting Trump events and counter news programming.
Vanity Fair was the first to report in June that Trump was thinking about starting his own media network.
In September, the Financial Times reported that Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner started making inquiries into launching a new media company after the election to capitalize on his father-in-law’s political movement.
However, Trump has openly dismissed the idea, and told the Washington Post last month:
“I want to win the presidency, and I want to make America great again. It’s very simple. I have no interest in a media company.”
Wouldn’t it be funny if one of his kids just so happened to start a media company after the election?
Or perhaps Donald Trump just does it under his name, after all, it’s not as if he’s ever had a problem with lying, especially when it comes to business.
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Despite decades of fervent student protests that reached a peak last fall, the president of Yale announced on Wednesday that the university would keep the name of a residential college honoring the politician and white supremacist John C. Calhoun. The president, Peter Salovey, also said the university would name its two new residential colleges for Anna Pauline Murray and Benjamin Franklin. The selection of Ms. Murray, a legal scholar and civil rights activist who graduated from Yale Law School in 1965, represents the first time the school has honored either an or a woman with the naming of a college. Many students were perplexed by the selection of Franklin, who received an honorary degree from Yale. Franklin, like many other founding fathers, was once a slaveholder himself before he became involved in the abolitionist movement. Mr. Salovey explained that Franklin was a “personal hero and role model” of Charles B. Johnson, a businessman and Yale alumnus who donated $250 million to pay for the new buildings — the largest gift in the school’s history — and who suggested the honor. In a conference call with reporters on Wednesday, Mr. Salovey said that while Mr. Johnson’s gift was not contingent upon naming the college after Franklin, “I really want you to remember this is the largest single gift ever given to Yale. ” In addition, the faculty leaders of all Yale residential colleges will shed their title of master they will now be called heads of college, acknowledging the discomfort many students and faculty members felt toward a title that conjures the country’s history of slavery. As part of the resolution, Yale will start a historical study examining the “ people, events and narratives behind the familiar facades seen on campus,” beginning with an appraisal of Mr. Calhoun’s legacy. The various decisions came in consultation with the Yale Corporation, the university’s governing body. On Wednesday night, the Black Student Alliance at Yale issued a statement calling the naming of Murray College and the abandonment of the master title “ first steps towards creating a better and more inclusive Yale. ” Retaining the name Calhoun, they said, “is a regression. ” Mr. Salovey defended the Calhoun decision as the best possible way for the university to confront its history. “Universities have to be the places where tough conversations happen,” he said. “I don’t think that is advanced by hiding our past. ” Similar heated discussions about historic ties between universities and their racist pasts have inflamed campuses across the country. Princeton’s board of trustees decided this month that the name Woodrow Wilson would remain on its buildings and school, despite vociferous student objections. Mr. Wilson was an admirer of the Ku Klux Klan and reinstated segregation in the federal government. Yale has long grappled with the legacy of Mr. Calhoun, who advocated slavery as “a positive good,” but the issue found footing last fall after an online petition demanding that the college’s name be changed garnered around 1, 500 supporting signatures. The dispute over Calhoun College, founded in 1933, that ensued soon revealed deeper discontent among students and professors over more substantive issues regarding race, in particular what many saw as the university’s lack of commitment to faculty diversity and the alienation experienced by many minority students. A group of student activists — operating under the name Next Yale — handed Mr. Salovey a list of demands last year that included increasing the number and tenure of diverse faculty members increasing the budgets for ethnic and racial cultural centers abolishing the title of master and naming the two new residential colleges after minorities. Those demands were met in part, but students have largely remained skeptical. In November, the university announced that it was committing $50 million to a initiative, an effort to address the fact that less than 3 percent of its Faculty of Arts and Sciences is black. Among Yale’s roughly 5, 400 undergraduates, 11 percent identify themselves as black or . Karléh Wilson, a senior from Louisiana who has helped organize the Next Yale protests, said she felt the university did not go far enough to meet student demands. “There are more than enough alumni of color who the naming committee could have drawn from,” Ms. Wilson, 22, said. Crystal Feimster, a professor of studies, agreed, saying she was “deeply disappointed with the decision not to rename Calhoun” and found the selection of Franklin “a missed opportunity. ” Still, she lauded the choice of Ms. Murray, whom she called “a relentless advocate for racial equality and women’s rights. ” Jonathan Holloway, the college’s first black dean of students, called this year “a moment of reckoning” that he hoped would strengthen the university. “We’re trying to reconcile our current values and aspirations with these names,” he said. “We will have failed if we do not do that work going forward. ” | 1 |
By Rahul Manchanda, Esq. on November 10, 2016 There has never been a better-suited and more experienced President when it comes to these issues...
by Rahul Manchanda, Esq.
Now that Donald Trump has been elected President of the United States of America, there are a lot of things he needs to do.
He has seen firsthand the unseemly underbelly of the various Deep State actors that have fought tooth and nail to both undermine and character assassinate him, as well as destroy him personally and professionally.
But Donald Trump is made of legendary stuff, and not only endured these constant and underhanded attacks, but also exposed and destroyed them all, one by one.
However the problems facing him and his administration still exist, and part of his mandate needs to not only “make America great again,” but to also ensure that the cancers that plague American society are dealt with and destroyed, once and for all:
The Media
Donald Trump needs to somehow dismantle and break up control of the American media by only 6 major corporations.
He needs to light a fire under the collective asses of the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) and force them to do their job.
No agency in the United States is so important but has been so asleep at the wheel than this one.
Problems with the FTC and its lack of teeth or motivation has resulted in some of the most heinous consolidations of illicit power in the hands of an evil greedy few, devastating and hurting the American people, and Donald Trump and his family as well.
Large behemoths such as the Hillary Clinton/Deep State allies such as Google and the Major Media need to be first on the chopping/neutering block.
The Big International Banks
Similarly, the awesome power and monetary capital of the big banks, hedge funds, investment banking houses, and other financial institutions have also been left to their own devices, allowed to grow like a cancer without any FTC or Treasury oversight, to the point where they literally threaten American democracy and its people on a daily basis – indeed they, just like the Major Media, got behind Hillary Clinton, even in the face of all her crimes and conspiracies, to unseat Donald Trump to ensure that he never got into Presidential Office. Hillary Clinton’s Wall Street Fundraising Benefited From Loophole In Federal Anti-Corruption Rule
This lesson Donald Trump should never forget – because as long as they are allowed to continue their domestic and global hegemony unchallenged, they will also pose an existential threat not only to the American people and their civil liberties/human rights/constitutional guarantees, but also to Donald Trump and his efficiency as President himself.
One of his first orders of business should be the reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall Act , previously repealed by Bill Clinton in 1998, which separates investment banking money from mom and pop checking/savings accounts, so that risky investments by banking houses will, and should, result in their bankruptcy, rather than being bailed out by the American taxpayer.
Many argue that this repeal, coupled with the forced reduction of credit standards of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by Bill Clinton through his HUD Director Andrew Cuomo to buy a home, created the mortgage crisis and crashed the American economy (some say deliberately) in 2008. Goldman Sachs sickeningly created a reverse credit swap derivative, betting on the impending housing mortgage crisis, and made billions in the Glass-Steagall repeal that was pushed by their own Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, and Gene Sperling, when they were US Treasury Secretaries and Economic Policy Advisors under Bill Clinton. RUBIN, GREENSCAM, AND SUMMERS
Donald Trump also needs to take on the Federal Reserve, audit them, and if he finds any irregularities or shady behavior (which he most assuredly will), then he needs to immediately repudiate and/or renegotiate the insanely ridiculous 23 Trillion Dollars in American Debt, delivering the American People from the yoke of financial and tax slavery by the Central Bankers of America, Europe, and Overseas.
Optimally he might consider issuing American currency from the US Government, rather than by a secret closed-off cabal of illicit and greedy private international citizens/corporations. President Bill Clinton promotes NAFTA at the United States Chamber of Commerce in November, 1993.
Bring Industry and Manufacturing Jobs Back to the USA
As Donald Trump so effectively and succinctly repeated while on the campaign trail over the past 2 years, the North American Free Trade Agreement (“NAFTA”) was single-handedly one of the most devastating and disruptive treaties ever placed on the books of American jurisprudence, thus resulting in the mass loss of tens of millions of American jobs, industries, manufacturing facilities, revenue, and self-confidence of the American people –
Donald Trump needs to rebuild and re-establish American pre-eminence in industry, manufacturing, and hardcore goods for services, all made and manufactured in the United States of America.
Stupid Foreign Wars
Donald Trump has also echoed the American overwhelming cry of anti Neo-Conservative bloodlust by keeping America out of stupid, foreign wars geared only for the benefit and power of a few, endangering the safety and welfare of the many.
To do this Donald Trump must revamp and refresh the US Department of Defense, the Pentagon, the Intelligence Services, and the Military.
He must ensure that not one single drop of American blood be shed for another hopelessly stupid war – if the United States has become a National Security State with its greatest source of income and revenue being the weapons, artillery, and products of the Military Industrial Complex (“MIC”) then he needs to find alternative and supplemental sources of revenue such as what was described above in terms of manufacturing and industrial jobs and factories being re-established within the United States. Section 60 of Arlington National Cemetery Offers Tragic Testimony to America’s Most Recent Wars
Donald Trump needs to value the heroism and self-sacrifice of American soldiers, military and veterans, and stop sending them on unnecessary stupid wars for the sake of the wealth and power of the Deep State, and also to ensure that once our soldiers return home, that they are treated like the true heroes and privileged class that they are, and always should be (jobs, health care, benefits, and utmost respect).
No one has better described the predicament facing the American People in this regard than Dr Paul Craig Roberts in his stellar work, “The Neoconservative Threat to World Order.”
This also means developing working and effective relationships with other great world powers such as Russia, China, and India, in the spirit of mutual respect and friendship, to jointly take on the world’s problems and terrorists together, based on mutual consultation and consensus, rather than with the United States “policing the entire world.”
Reversing Divide and Conquer
One of the first things that Donald Trump said upon accepting his election as President was that he wanted to listen to everyone, and bring everyone together under the fabric of the United States of America.
Right off the bat, he declared that he would be a uniter, and not a divider.
To that end he needs to now undo the “special protected classes,” chock full of con-artists and whiners who use their protected class status to get special privileges, abuse others, trample on the right of others not lucky enough to be different, or oppress the constitutional, civil, and human rights of the rest of America. From undermining the Second Amendment and influencing elections to sponsoring color revolutions in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, the ominous footprint of George Soros is everywhere.— reclaimourrepublic
These protected classes have been revealed to be the “henchmen” and agents of the Deep State, by the likes of such men as arch-manipulator and “color revolution” social engineer, George Soros, who use these unwitting “protected classes” to do their dirty work, in their ongoing assault on the American people with their “divide and conquer” rhetoric, pitting men against women, children against their own parents, gays against straights, minorities against majorities, and different races/religions against one another.
The only ones who benefit from this intra-American infighting have always been the Ruling Class Deep State Plutocrat Elite, who have watched with smiles, rubbing their hands, as they kept the American people fighting amongst themselves, so that the People are too busy fighting and killing each other to notice or challenge the crimes and conspiracies of the Deep State Elite themselves.
Criminal Justice and Family Court Reform
No single “American Industry” has been so lucrative to the Deep State Elite, and debilitating to the American People, than the horrific butchering process known as the American Criminal Justice and Family Court system – indeed many would argue that the dismal state of race relations in America have their origins in the disparate treatment of racial and religious minorities by the state-sanctioned and wholesale criminality of the American Police State as implemented by Bill Clinton and Joseph Biden’s Crime Bill of 1994 and its corresponding draconian legislation pertaining to the family and criminal courts and its privatized prison industrial complex. Surrounded by lawmakers, President Bill Clinton hugs then-Sen. Joseph Biden after signing the $30 billion crime bill at the White House on Sept. 13, 1994. Dennis Cook/AP
All too often, fundamental constitutional rights and guarantees have been squelched and squashed by the “American Stasi ” as formulated by the 1994 Crime Bill, and its corresponding US Department of Justice state-sanctioned “Community Oriented Policing” gang-stalking program, resulting in 1/3 of all African-Americans, 1/6 of all Latinos, and 1/10 of all Whites having been unfairly and without due process, probable cause, or evidence arrested, incarcerated, with families destroyed, resulting in over 70 million Americans with permanent criminal records (more than the entire population of France) – something is wrong here, and Donald Trump needs to do something about the fact that Biden and Clinton et al have transformed our once great and proud country into a “Nation of Criminals.”
Donald Trump needs to take the immediate measures and remedies to undo and reverse the American Police State as described by John Whitehead in his seminal book and treatise, “Battlefield America.”
Foreign Relations
As Donald Trump echoed while on the campaign trail, he is a subscriber to the Thomas Jefferson school of thought of “Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations – entangling alliances with none.” I am sometimes asked if I have any regrets about publishing our book. As of today, my only regret is that it is not being published now. After the humiliations that Obama has endured at the hands of the Israel Lobby and the Hagel circus, we would sell even more copies and we would not face nearly as much ill-informed criticism. — Stephen Walt, co-author of the book.
Donald Trump is an “America-Firster,” and will not allow the United States to get embroiled and enmeshed in unnecessary foreign stupid wars, treaties, and other entanglements which tend to negatively affect American sovereignty, weighing us down like a rock around our collective necks – foreign nations need to put their “big boy pants” on and deal with their own internal skirmishes, civil wars, financial problems, and other internecine conflicts on their own, without the constant hand-holding (and financial and military support) of the United States and its hard working taxpayers.
Unless the sovereignty or security of the United States is directly at risk, the USA needs to stay the hell out of the worlds’ problems and to focus on our own people, economy, and issues.
The sentiments echoed herein can be attributed to legendary libertarian statesmen such as Dr Ron Paul and his protege Daniel McAdams.
Re-injecting and Reinforcing American Moral Standards
No area of American life has been so undermined and impacted as the deterioration of fundamental American values, morals, and character in the past few decades of American society, disastrously affecting American individuals, families, cities, states, and eventually the nation itself.
This has been augmented and exacerbated by the constant, irresponsible, and disgusting messages in the American media, movie industry, Hollywood, by the undermining of organized religion in America, and the disruption of common value systems as brought on by unregulated mass immigration and non-assimilation by various foreign elements.
A nation’s moral health and compass is absolutely essential for it to be considered a “Shining City on a Hill” as described by legendary President Ronald Reagan himself.
For this, Donald Trump must use his “bully pulpit” as a leader to identify, isolate, target, and then take on the purveyors of common filth and disrepute by the American Hollywood movie and television industry, media, and other enemies of common human decency and morality.
American Infrastructure
As Donald Trump is the ultimate and consummate “builder,” it will be awe-inspiring to watch him re-build American infrastructure, such as our railroads, transportation systems, airports, roads and highways, hospitals, schools, buildings and cities.
There has never been a better-suited and more experienced President when it comes to these issues, and Donald Trump will not disappoint in this very important arena of America’s pride, patriotism, self-confidence, and self-respect. Incumbent Attorney General Loretta Lynch
Cleanse The Judiciary
It is no secret that the last 8 years of steady Obama appointments have stocked the American Judiciary, federal state and local, with either Deep State bankster agents, or their “protected class” useful idiot appointees, who all report back to the same Deep State Oligarchy/Plutocracy anyway.
The only thing these appointees have in common is that they generally have no respect for or understanding of the US Constitution or the Bill of Rights.
The direct Deep State judicial appointees, usually hailing from the big law firms who in turn represent the big banks/corporations, know exactly who their masters are, while the ambitious “protected class” judicial appointees are either imbalanced activists, or too stupid to realize that their biased, unconstitutional judicial opinions serve the same Deep State Elite anyway, as they help to eviscerate and destroy the protections afforded and guaranteed by the US Constitution.
Either way, a major house cleaning is in order, and Donald Trump needs to re-stock the judiciary with learned, educated, and constitutionally minded judges in the federal and state courts all throughout America, beginning with the major cities first, “pruning the judicial tree” as he goes along.
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In a settlement that could help thousands of families avoid eviction, New York State will substantially increase the monthly rent subsidies it provides to families with children in New York City, a move that could help reduce the number of people in homeless shelters. The public assistance program, known as the Family Eviction Prevention Supplement, has remained flat since it was established in 2004, even as rents have skyrocketed. Under the settlement, a family of three eligible for $850 per month, for example, would now be eligible for $1, 515, a 78 percent increase. The increase, which could go into effect as early as April, was agreed to on Monday and settled a lawsuit filed in December 2015 by four single mothers — two in the Bronx, one on Staten Island and one in Manhattan. The women said they faced eviction because the monthly public assistance they received from the state was “grossly inadequate” and far below rent. In 2015, rent was $1, 571 for a apartment, and it is now $1, 637. Represented by the Legal Aid Society and Hughes Hubbard Reed, the women were seeking increases in the Family Eviction Prevention Supplement for families with children who are under the threat of eviction and another benefit, known as the “shelter allowance,” for families with children on public assistance. “I feel happy that it’s going to help other women with children,” said Daniela Tejada, 27, one of the plaintiffs, who lives in a apartment in the Bronx with her daughters, ages 6 and 2. “It’s really hard out here. All these rents are superhigh. ” The settlement stops short of increasing the basic shelter allowance, which is $400 for a family of three, but focuses on families in imminent danger of losing their housing by greatly increasing the subsidies and expanding eligibility for the program. The program is currently restricted to families with minor children who have been sued by a landlord. Now, victims of domestic violence will be included, even if they are not in court. The new eviction prevention subsidy will put a “substantial dent” in homelessness, Kenneth R. Stephens, a supervising lawyer with the Legal Aid Society, said in an interview. “It is probably the first real positive proposal on a scale that’s consistent with the crisis that we’re facing,” he said. New York City, the most populous city in the United States, has the largest number of homeless people, though most are sheltered. As of last Tuesday, there were 60, 061 people living in shelters overseen by the city’s Department of Homeless Services. That number does not count thousands of other people staying in specialized shelters overseen by other agencies for domestic violence victims and young people. About 51, 000 people were in homeless shelters when Mayor Bill de Blasio took office in 2014. The surge in homelessness has been nearly intractable for the de Blasio administration, which has struggled to find additional shelter and often uses commercial hotels as an expensive stopgap. Mr. de Blasio is expected on Tuesday to unveil a plan to open more shelters so that the city can move people from hotels and eventually transition them to permanent housing. Steven Banks, the former attorney in chief of the Legal Aid Society and the commissioner of the Department of Social Services, has pointed to the outdated rental assistance program as one of the drivers of the city’s ballooning homeless population. In an effort to move people out of shelters and to prevent others from being evicted, the city has put in place an array of rental assistance programs, including its own Family Eviction Prevention Supplement. But that program has confused tenants and landlords since the eligibility, caps and amounts differ from the state’s. Under the settlement, the state and city programs will be consolidated. There are about 10, 000 families in the state program and an additional 1, 000 in the city program, according to the Legal Aid Society. The settlement will be converted to a class action to cover those families and others, though three of the initial plaintiffs no longer receive public assistance and will not benefit. Ms. Tejada will see a bump in her subsidy, which is now limited to $850. Her apartment rents for $1, 050, which was lowered from $1, 300, after she fought her landlord in housing court. Currently unemployed, Ms. Tejada, who had worked in a dental office, cobbled together the rent with the Family Eviction Prevention Supplement and child support. “Before, everything would go to the rent,” she said. “Now, at least, I can save and pay for school. ” Ms. Tejada said she would like to become a sonographer. This month, Mr. de Blasio and Melissa the City Council speaker, announced that the city would double — to $93 million — the funds allocated to help tenants fight landlords in court. “This settlement, combined with adding access to counsel, is really going to be a game changer,” said Judith Goldiner, a lawyer with Legal Aid. Tenants can win in court, but they still need to pay the rent. “A lawyer can’t keep you in your home without the benefits to keep you in your home,” she said. | 1 |
CHICAGO — During Memorial Day weekend, this city reopens its Lake Michigan beaches, regular fireworks displays start at Navy Pier, and the downtown streets and Riverwalk are crowded with tourists. But the holiday weekend is often seen here as the start of heightened violence as well. That has been particularly worrying this year to community leaders and city officials, as they grapple with a rise in gun violence that has traumatized some neighborhoods and left city officials searching for new ways to subdue street crime. “If something doesn’t change, if we don’t get jobs for these kids, if we don’t change the economic situation, I’m worried that we could be looking at a blood bath,” said the Rev. Corey Brooks, a pastor on the city’s South Side, a mostly area where some of the shootings have been concentrated. “If something doesn’t happen, I fear that we’re potentially looking at one of the worst summers we’ve ever had. ” As of Friday morning, homicides in Chicago were up 52 percent in 2016, compared with the same period a year ago, and shootings had increased by 50 percent, though the pace of violence had slowed in recent weeks, the police said. Only five months into the year, at least 233 people had been killed. Officials are struggling with the problem and are using a range of strategies as the murder rate in Chicago, the nation’s city, outpaces that of New York and Los Angeles. Over the weekend, the Chicago police increased the number of officers on the streets. About a week after a gang sweep that led to the arrests of 140 people, the police said they planned to have extra foot patrols in parks and neighborhoods and more officers on bicycles. They are also using social media to track potentially troublesome house parties. “I think you all know how important this weekend is,” the police superintendent, Eddie Johnson, said on Friday afternoon at a meeting with his top command staff. On Friday evening, people gathered at more than 100 gymnasiums, parks and churches around the city to call for gang members and others to stop the violence that has long plagued some Chicago neighborhoods. The activities were the start of Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s third annual Summer of Faith and Action initiative, which promotes safety and urges people to put down their guns. “If we all come together and reclaim our streets, reclaim our parks, there’s no room for the gangbangers,” Mr. Emanuel said, stopping by one of the gatherings on Friday night on the Southwest Side, where people played basketball and painted murals. “I would also say to the gangbangers what Eddie Johnson said,” Mr. Emanuel said, referring to his recently appointed superintendent. “There’s a small percentage creating an overabundance of the gun violence. The Police Department knows who you are. They know where you live. And they know what you’re doing. ” For a few hours on Friday evening, under periods of pounding rain, the peace held, and the police scanners were filled with mundane reports of disturbances and problems after a Beyoncé concert. But by Saturday evening, the police reported, 19 people had been shot, four fatally, including a girl. Last year during the Memorial Day weekend, there were 46 shootings in Chicago, and 14 people were killed, the police said. Other years have been quieter in 2013, there were 22 shootings and six deaths. Some community leaders are concerned about what may lie ahead because of how widespread the shootings and killings were even before the warm summer months, historically the most violent time of year in Chicago. The Rev. Michael Pfleger said on Friday that residents seemed to be “hunkering down” because they expected bad things to happen. “It’s almost like everyone’s saying a hurricane is coming,” said Father Pfleger, whose parish, the Faith Community of St. Sabina, is on the South Side. “What we really need to be doing is getting out, walking around. Don’t board up your house. Be out on your block. Be vigilant. Fear either paralyzes you or it motivates you. We could have this be the safest weekend of the summer if everyone was out talking to one another. ” The worries about summer come at an extraordinarily complicated time for Chicago, which is facing parallel crises: a drastic spike in violent crime and a Police Department viewed with suspicion, even derision, in some neighborhoods. relations between the Chicago police and residents, especially boiled over after the November release of a dashboard camera video showing a white officer shooting a black teenager, Laquan McDonald, 16 times. In the months afterward, Mr. Emanuel faced calls for his resignation, the police superintendent was fired and the Justice Department began an investigation into the Police Department’s practices. Last month, a task force appointed by Mr. Emanuel issued a scathing report saying that racism had contributed to a long pattern of institutional failures by the department and that the department had lost the trust of residents. That mistrust, some here say, has made it harder to solve crimes on the streets: Witnesses and victims often choose not to share information with the police. “People think that to get justice, they have to take the law into their own hands,” said the Rev. Marshall E. Hatch, the pastor of New Mount Pilgrim Missionary Baptist Church, on the West Side. Some here expressed concern about focusing on preparations for violence on a particular weekend — Memorial Day or otherwise. “The fact is that it’s constant and relentless, and that you don’t know when it’s going to happen,” said Dr. Kimberly Joseph, a trauma surgeon at John H. Stroger Jr. Hospital of Cook County, where some shooting victims are taken. “Try to imagine what it must be like for a trying to go to school every day and not knowing what’s going to happen. ” No one knows for sure why Chicago’s violence has increased this year, but the police say it is largely the result of a small number of people involved with the city’s increasingly splintered set of gangs, and a rising number of disputes playing out on social media. A new area of concern is shootings along the expressways, where the authorities say gang feuds are spilling out of the neighborhoods. There have been 20 shootings along expressways this year, the police said, and no arrests. “This has all amped up from what I’ve ever seen,” Father Pfleger said. “There’s a boiling point, and guns have become part of America’s wardrobe. People out here presume everyone has one, and they’ll tell you, ‘I’m going to draw mine before I get laid down.’ ” Chicago’s population of 2. 7 million is nearly equally split among whites, blacks and Hispanics, but most of the shootings have taken place in black and Hispanic neighborhoods on the city’s South and West Sides, and the majority of the victims have been . For many who live in these neighborhoods, a recent poll showed, crime and gangs have become overriding concerns. More than 20 people under 18 have been killed this year. A number of bystanders have also been shot. Zarriel Trotter, 13, who appeared in an video last year, was injured by a stray bullet in March. Janaé Bonsu, the national public policy chairwoman for Black Youth Project 100, said she was hopeful that city leaders would address the increase in violence by investing more in community groups focused on better jobs and increased educational opportunities, rather than just bolstering the police. “The City Council, the mayor, nobody is being brave enough to say that maybe our efforts are concentrated in the wrong place,” Ms. Bonsu said. “When you don’t have much going for yourself, whether it be work, whether it be school, your options are on the block. ” | 1 |
posted by Eddie You’ve heard of “Schindler’s List,” but have you heard of Sugihara’s visas? Oskar Schindler, the subject of the film “Schindler’s List,” is credited with saving around 1,200 Jews during World War II. But have you ever heard of this humble diplomat-turned-lightbulb-salesman who was a hero to an estimated 6,000?! His name was Chiune Sugihara. It was 1939. The brink of World War II. Germany had annexed Czechoslovakia and invaded Poland. Jewish refugees from Poland were flooding the surrounding countries. At that time, a third of Lithuania’s urban population were Jews. In 1940, Sugihara was the vice consul of the Japanese consulate in Lithuania. Hundreds were coming into Sugihara’s office begging for visas that would give them passage to Japan and away from encroaching war, persecution, and almost certain capture … and death. He knew a way to help. Visas. The rules to get a visa were strict. And Sugihara’s bosses back in Tokyo told him to follow the strict rules they’d made. But if he followed the rules, the chances of getting visas to those in need went down. Too far down. Actually, it’s more accurate to say that if Sugihara wasn’t issuing the visas, the people’s chances of getting the visas virtually disappeared . The Japanese embassy in Lithuania was ordered to close, all while Sugihara sought permission to approve the visas (as many as three times) and was denied permission from the foreign ministry in Japan. So, after consulting with his family, Sugihara decided to ignore the rules and issue visas without permission: “People in Tokyo were not united. I felt it silly to deal with them. … I knew that somebody would surely complain about me in the future. But, I myself thought this would be the right thing to do. There is nothing wrong in saving many people’s lives.” by Nick Shepley So, he set to writing. Back then, that was how visas — especially these very special and more or less “illegal” visas — got made. By hand. A copy of one of Sugihara’s handwritten exit visas. Image via Huddyhuddy/Wikimedia Commons. Pen stroke by pen stroke, he saved lives by giving thousands passage across the Soviet Union, through Japan, and onward. These refugees weren’t headed specifically to Japan but to Curaçao and Dutch Guiana (now Suriname) and had to pass through the Soviet Union and Japan to get there. From the end of July to the end of August, until his consulate in Lithuania was scheduled to close in early September (about a month!), Sugihara issued visas, completely ignoring the rules. 45 years after he signed the visas, Sugihara was asked why he did it. He liked to give two reasons: “They were human beings, and they needed help,” he said. “I’m glad I found the strength to make the decision to give it to them.” He didn’t stay involved in government after the war ended. To support his family, he became an interpreter and translator and even did a stint as a door-to-door lightbulb salesman. He wound up managing an export company for the last 20 years of his life. He was just an average working man … with a huge, dramatic, bittersweet, and wonderful secret. On a memorial built for Sugihara in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo, Sugihara is seated on a bench holding a visa. The quote that accompanies his statue is from the Talmud: “He who saves one life, saves the entire world.” He doesn’t have a movie, but wow. What a story. Score one for humanity! Source: | 0 |
A request for data detailing the relationship between crime and immigration in Sweden has been blocked by the government. [The Sweden Democrats (SD) called for an investigation into the subject after a recent study showed that Swedish women feel increasingly insecure, and are hesitant to leave the house, fearing sexual harassment. Figures on the proportion of crimes that are carried out by people born abroad have not been available since 2005, but with the arrival of a huge number of migrants in recent years, the populist party hoped a report could shed some light on whether women’s growing insecurity is connected to the influx. Justice minister Morgan Johansson denied the need for updated statistics on immigration and crime because it would be unlikely to herald any new information. He told SVT News: “Sweden’s earlier figures and numerous international studies all show much the same thing. Minority groups are often overrepresented in crime statistics, but when controlling for socioeconomic factors this [the overrepresentation of minority groups] disappears almost entirely. ” The minister’s statement was slammed by Kurdish economist Tino Sanandaji, who outlined the flaws in the study to which Johansson referred, and wrote: “It is illogical to deny the criminality of migrants with the argument that criminal migrants are poor. ” The SD initiative gained support from only one person in another party, Centre Party MP Staffan Danielsson, who dissented from his party’s line to argue that it would be counterproductive to keep the information concealed. “There were reports in 1996 and 2005. Now it’s 11 years on and we have migration that’s on an entirely different level. “There are people who believe that almost no Swedes commit crime, and that it’s only who do. Apparently this isn’t true. Facts are the only thing I’m after,” he told SVT. Sweden’s criminology establishment has been accused of deliberately concealing the relationship between immigration and crime, which critics say denies authorities the chance to prevent crime and learn from previous mistakes. | 1 |
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