text
stringlengths 1
143k
| label
int64 0
1
|
|---|---|
VIENNA (Reuters) - Austria s center-right People s Party (OVP) led by Sebastian Kurz and the anti-immigration Freedom Party (FPO) have agreed to form a coalition government. The deal marks a major victory for a European far-right party after a flurry of elections this year, in which right-wing parties have made gains but failed to enter coalitions elsewhere in Western Europe. Here are the main figures in the new government: Kurz became a conservative junior minister at 23, Europe s youngest foreign minister at 27 and leader of the People s Party at 30, moving it further to the right of the political spectrum. He has yet to complete his law degree while he pursues politics. An early critic of German Chancellor Angela Merkel s open-border policy as Europe s migration crisis escalated in 2015, he infuriated Berlin when he spearheaded the closure of the Balkan route into Europe. Known for his slicked-back hair, he speaks eloquently but often eschews discussing policy details in public. He won October s parliamentary elections promising to break with Austria s decades-old political consensus which shares power among conservatives, Social Democrats, labor and employer associations. HEINZ-CHRISTIAN STRACHE (FPO), VICE-CHANCELLOR The 48-year-old former dental technician is the longest-serving party chief in Austria and enters government for the first time. During the campaign he accused Kurz of stealing the FPO s ideas, but Strache toned down his rhetoric during coalition negotiations stressing joint political targets. Strache is keen on ridding his party of its neo-Nazi image, portraying it as a mainstream defender of the middle class. He has called for zero immigration and wants to ban political Islam. The multilingual Middle East and international law expert got her new job on an FPO ticket. She has never been a member of the FPO, which has expressed sympathy for Israel s desire to host embassies in Jerusalem and has close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin s party. Kneissl, 52, has criticized Merkel s open-door policy toward refugees and has called the European Union s migrant deal with Turkey nonsense in newspaper comments. Kneissl, who owns a farm in Lower Austria province, worked in the foreign ministry under a conservative minister in the 1990s. The Freedom Party s general secretary is seen as its mastermind and powerbroker who wields influence in all party matters. The 49-year-old future police supremo, who started his career as speechwriter for charismatic late FPO chief Joerg Haider, is known for his sharp tongue. The political hardliner has been a member of parliament for more than a decade. The hardliner inherits a legal dispute with Europe s largest aerospace company Airbus over a 2003 fighter jet purchase and will soon have to decide how to modernize the neutral country s aerial defenses. Kunasek, 41, called for a night-time curfew for asylum seekers in 2016 and curbing asylum seekers access to health services in 2015, according to human rights group SOS Mitmensch. Last year, he published an article in Die Aula, a magazine linked to Austria s right-wing extremist scene, according to the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance that researches the far right. Loeger has no university degree, but over 30 years of experience in the insurance sector, where he has been the chief executive of Uniqa s Austrian unit since 2013. The 52-year-old manager, a surprise ministerial appointee who has not held public office before, enjoys sports and art. A close ally of Kurz s, whom he knows from their time in the conservatives youth wing, 36-year-old Bluemel studied philosophy in Austria and France, focusing on Christian social teachings . After various posts in the party he became chief of the conservatives in Vienna, a traditional Social Democratic stronghold, in 2015. He is in charge of the party s media portfolio.
| 1 |
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Four Republican members of Congress on Monday urged U.S. auto safety regulators to convene an industry-wide effort to prevent possible attacks on computer systems in vehicles. The lawmakers addressed their concerns in a letter to the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. While there have been no reported cases of vehicle hacking, researchers have shown they could take remote control of vehicle functions such as car horns, brakes and power steering. The letter cited work published in August by Wired magazine by two researchers who were able to force a Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV 2014 Jeep SUV to perform in an “erratic and unsafe manner” after accessing its on-board diagnostics (OBD) port. Automakers have been required to install the port in all vehicles since 1994 to test for emissions compliance. The letter from Representative Fred Upton, a Michigan Republican who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and three others said the port “as it currently exists creates a growing risk to the safety and security of passengers.” Fiat Chrysler said in August the demonstration published by Wired required “a computer to be physically connected into the vehicle’s” port. The company emphasized that owners should “not connect any unknown or untrusted devices to the OBD port.” NHTSA didn’t immediately comment on the letter. The safety agency has said it plans to release cybersecurity guidelines to the auto industry in the coming weeks. The U.S. government is taking the issue seriously. On Friday, the U.S. Justice Department said it has formed a threat analysis team to study potential national security challenges posed by self-driving cars, medical devices and other internet-connected tools. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and NHTSA issued a bulletin in March warning that motor vehicles were “increasingly vulnerable” to hacking.
| 0 |
These are shocking revelations that have essentially taken place while America and our elected representatives slept.ALL Of A Sudden Before Obama there was virtually no outlandish presence of Islam in America. Only 7 years later, here are some observations made by a 75 year old American:1. All of a sudden, Islam is taught in schools. Christianity and the bible are banned in schools and in our military.2. All of a sudden we must allow prayer rugs everywhere and allow for Islamic prayer in schools, airports and businesses.3. All of a sudden we must stop serving pork in prisons.4. All of a sudden we are inundated with law suits by Muslims who are offended by American culture.5. All of a sudden we must allow burkas to be worn everywhere even though you have no idea who or what is covered up under them.6. All of a sudden Muslims are suing employers and refusing to do their jobs if they personally deem it conflicts with Sharia Law.7. All of a sudden the Attorney General of the United States vows to prosecute anyone who engages in anti-Muslim speech .8. All of a sudden, Jihadists who engage in terrorism and openly admit they acted in the name of Islam and ISIS, are emphatically declared they are NOT Islamic by our leaders and/or their actions are determined NOT to be terrorism, but other nebulous terms like workplace Violence. 9. All of a sudden, it becomes policy that Secular Middle East dictators that were benign or friendly to the West, must be replaced by Islamists and the Muslim Brotherhood.10. All of a sudden our troops are withdrawn from Iraq and the Middle East, giving rise to ISIS.11. All of a sudden, America has reduced its nuclear stockpiles to 1950 levels, as Obama s stated goal of a nuke-free America by the time he leaves office continues uninterrupted.12. All of a sudden, a deal with Iran must be made at any cost, with a pathway to nuclear weapons and HUNDREDS of BILLIONS of dollars handed over to fund their programs.13. All of a sudden America APOLOGIZES to Muslim states and sponsors of terror worldwide for acts of aggression, war and sabotage THEY perpetrate against our soldiers.14. All of a sudden, the American Navy is diminished to 1917 Pre-World War I levels of only 300 ships. The Army is at pre-1940 levels. The Air Force scraps 500 planes and planned to retire the use of the A-10 Thunderbolt close air support fighter. A further draw down of another 40,000 military personnel is in progress.15. All of a sudden half of our aircraft carriers are recalled for maintenance by Obama rendering the Atlantic unguarded, NONE are in the Middle East.16. All of a sudden Obama has to empty Guantanamo Bay of captured Jihadists and let them loose in Jihad-friendly Islamic states. He demands to close the facility.17. All of a sudden America will negotiate with terrorists and trade FIVE Taliban commanders for a deserter and Jihad sympathizer.18. All of a sudden there is no money for American poor, disabled veterans, jobless Americans, hungry Americans, or displaced Americans but there is endless money for Obama s Syrian Refugee Resettlement programs.19. All of sudden there is an ammunition shortage in the USA.20. All of a sudden, the most important thing for Obama to do after a mass shooting by two Jihadists, is disarm American Citizens.21. All of a sudden, the President of the United States cannot attend the Christian funerals of a Supreme Court Justice and a former First Lady because of previous (seemingly unimportant) commitments.Finally And all of a sudden, I m sick to my stomach. I m not sure the majority of Americans recognize the seriousness of the situation and how much progress has been made by Islam these last 7 years, a very brief time compared to a 75 year lifetime!This was sent to 100% FED UP! by a fan of our Facebook page.
| 1 |
For the last few weeks, rumors have been swirling that delegates at the Republican National Convention have been concocting a plan to thwart Donald Trump s nomination and broker the convention, ushering in a candidate who isn t completely hated by the American people.Reince Priebus denied it. Donald Trump denied it. All Republican insiders denied it and said things were on their merry way to Columbus.But as it turns out, the delegate coup is concrete, and is currently in motion. Anti-Trump delegates, concerned for the future of their party (and their power), are requesting a rule change for the convention that will allow delegates pledged to Trump to opt out, and instead vote their conscience.In other words, this rule change would turn every delegate into a super delegate.The letter, sent by Colorado delegate Kendal Unruh, asked the committee to adopt a conscience clause into the rules, thus circumventing the delegate rules and procedures set up by the states:If any such delegate notifies the secretary of his or her intent to cast a vote of conscience, whether personal or religious, each such delegate shall be unbound and unconstrained by these rules on any given vote, including the first ballot for the selection of the president of the United States, without the risk of challenge, sanction or retribution by the Republican National Committee (RNC).The letter went on to justify how a delegate, who is bound by the rules of the state to represent the will of the people, could possibly decide they want to vote another way:Allowable personal reasons shall include the public disclosure of one or more any grievous acts of personal conduct by a nominee candidate, including but not limited to, criminally actionable acts, acts of moral turpitude or extreme prejudice, and/or notorious public statements of support for positions that clearly oppose or contradict the policies embodied in the Republican Party s platform as established at the national convention.So far, 30 delegates have been in the works to thwart the presumptive nominee, but a rule change from the RNC could spur more action if delegates felt, all of a sudden, a change of conscience.Running a group called the Free the Delegates, Unruh is hoping to secure a majority vote from the 112 member Rules Committee.Such an action would expose a very real and very damning rift within the Republican party. As former Bush official endorse Clinton, Republican lawmakers back away from endorsing Trump, and the public continues to disdain the nominee, the White House may remain blue.Featured image via Jeff J. Mitchell/Getty Images
| 1 |
Leave a reply
Bill Still – Good evening, I’m still reporting on an ongoing counter-coup being run by patriotic members of 17 U.S. intelligence agencies to stop the Clinton Crime syndicate from proceeding with the rigging of the coming election.
According to a 4 minute video, done by Dr. Steve Pieczenik, a Harvard and MIT-educated psychiatrist who has written 26 New York Times Best Sellers, the Clinton coup has been put down by an intelligence community counter-coup, effective at noon today.
Dr. Pieczenik has great contacts in the American intelligence community. He put the following video up on his YouTube channel at noon today and says that the channel was down twenty minutes later.
Currently, that channel is up, so perhaps our channel will not be harmed.
I believe what you are about to see is true because of the nature of the recent WikiLeaks revelations. To me, hackers could not have done this. To me, white hats at NSA had to have been involved.
Having spent my adult life working around the community, I knew that folks who were at most of these agencies – exempting DHS and CIA – are American patriots who would not allow this nation to be destroyed by the Clinton Crime Syndicate.
[insert]
This may well be the reason President Obama yesterday had his press secretary praise the work of Jim Comey, head of the FBI, at the very moment that Hillary Clinton was speaking in Florida deriding Comey. Let us all pray that Comey has actually turned away from being subservient to Obama and the Clintons and has now joined forces with the vast majority of the American military/intelligence community and Obama has decided – for his own preservation – to not fight them. I’m still reporting from Washington; good evening.
Bill Still is a former newspaper editor and publisher. He has written for USA Today, The Saturday Evening Post, the Los Angeles Times Syndicate, OMNI magazine, and has also produced the syndicated radio program, Health News. He has written 22 books and two documentary videos and is the host of his wildly popular daily YouTube Channel the “Still Report”, the quintessential report on the economy and Washington. Share this:
| 1 |
Is there a law against waterboarding Republican Senators who continue to be re-elected even though it s pretty clear they should be running on the Democrat ticket Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) praised former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Wednesday the day after the House Select Committee on Benghazi issued its final report. She s an intelligent and capable person, no question about it, McConnell told Time Warner Cable News, adding that he had worked well with her in the Senate and would be able to work with her as president.The Benghazi report details a pattern of incompetence, negligence, and dishonesty by Clinton and her associates. She failed to provide adequate security for U.S. diplomats in Benghazi; failed to take action to save U.S. personnel under attack on Sep. 11, 2012; and then falsely blamed an anti-Islamic YouTube video for inciting a protest that supposedly led to the attack.In addition, the Benghazi investigation uncovered the existence of Clinton s private email server, which violated State Department policies and may also have broken laws regarding the handling of classified information. Clinton seems to have used the server to evade Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, possibly in connection with fundraising for her family s private foundation while in office, including solicitations from foreign donors and governments. She has misled the public repeatedly about the email server, claiming falsely that she did not share classified information and that she had turned over all work-related emails to the government.Yet McConnell did not rule Clinton out. Instead, he said her presumptive Republican opponent, Donald Trump, had not yet proven himself qualified:Sen. Mitch McConnell: Trump clearly needs to change, in my opinion, to win the general election. What I ve said to him both publicly and privately: You re a great entertainer. You turn on audiences. You re good before a crowd. You have a lot of Twitter followers. That worked fine for you in the primaries. But now that you are in the general, people are looking for a level of seriousness that is typically conveyed by having a prepared text and Teleprompter and staying on message. So my hope is that he is beginning to pivot and become what I would call a more serious and credible candidate for the highest office in the land. Geoff Bennett: At the moment, though, I hear you saying he does not meet that threshold of credibility? McConnell: He s getting closer. Getting closer. Via: Breitbart
| 1 |
Take action! CALL these 18 RINO s and ask them why they voted at 1 A.M. on Friday morning to give Obama a no-limit credit card. Let them know you ll be working to replace them in the next election! This past Friday at one o clock in the morning, 18 Senate Republicans joined all of the Democrats in voting to bust the budget caps and to completely suspend the national debt limit until March of 2017.These Republicans, led by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), surrendered to President Obama and gave him an unlimited credit card for the remaining 15 months of his term.REPUBLICAN SENATORS: Lamar Alexander (R-TN) Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) John Barrasso (R-WY) Shelley Moore-Capito (R-WV) Thad Cochran (R-MS) Susan Collins (R-ME) John Cornyn (R-TX) Lindsey Graham (R-SC) Orrin Hatch (R-UT) Mark Kirk (R-IL) John McCain (R-AZ) Mitch McConnell (R-KY) Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) Pat Roberts (R-KS) Mike Rounds (R-SD) John Thune (R-SD) Thom Tillis (R-NC) Roger Wicker (R-MS)+ Every Democrat SenatorThis debt vote is significant because it is the 20th time in the past 10 months that the new Republican majority allowed a bill to pass that was supported by a majority of Democrats and opposed by a majority of Republicans.If you didn t know otherwise, you would think the Democrats still controlled the Senate. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) was right when he said McConnell is the most effective Democratic leader in modern times. It s no surprise that a new Gallup poll found that more Republican voters now view McConnell unfavorably (35%) than view him favorably (30%). Republicans are beginning to see that he doesn t share their values.Senator McConnell has broken so many promises and betrayed the party s core principles so often that more Democrats now approve of the Republican-controlled Congress (13%) than Republicans (9%).All of this is causing many Senate Republicans to question McConnell s leadership. Rather than looking out for their political interests, he continues to pressure them to support unpopular liberal legislation.TAKE ACTIONIf you have not cast your vote of no confidence against Senator McConnell, please click here to add your name.Also, please call the 18 Republicans who voted with all of the Democrats to give President Obama an unlimited credit card for the next 15 months.Click here for a list of their phone numbers.Tell them that you re disappointed in their vote and will be working to replace them with a true conservative.It s very important that these senators see strong opposition to their debt limit vote so they will be less inclined to betray us next time. They also need to better understand the political liability McConnell is for them.Thank you for standing strong for freedom.Ken Cuccinelli II President Senate Conservatives ActionVia: Senate Conservatives Action
| 1 |
The parents of Kathryn Steinle have received the to sue the federal government over Kathryn’s July 2o15 death she was killed by an illegal alien holding a gun issued to a federal agent. [U. S. Magistrate Joseph Spero said Steinle’s parents can sue but stressed that the suit may be dismissed if there is no evidence that the illegal alien — Juan Francisco — stole the gun from a federal agent. The gun in question came from the car of a federal agent — a car from which the gun was stolen. On August 28, 2015, Breitbart News previously reported that the . 40 caliber round that killed Steinle was fired from a Sig Sauer handgun that had been stolen from a Bureau of Land Management agent. However, it appears the case will turn on whether stole the gun himself. On July 7, 2015, told he shot Steinle, but he said it was an accident. He said he found the gun “lying on the ground wrapped in a ” and that it “went off by accident when he picked it up. ” But the San Francisco Chronicle reports that Spero said the Steinle family “can sue the federal government for negligence because a ranger allegedly left the gun used in the shooting in his unlocked car. ” He added, “Leaving a gun loaded makes (its) capability for harm readily accessible in the same way as leaving the key in the ignition of a vehicle. ” Spero dismissed Steinle’s parent’s suit against the City of San Francisco, even as he gave the for the suit against the federal government. He “rejected [her parent’s] claims that the city was legally responsible for releasing without contacting the federal government and that federal immigration officials, who had known the city was holding him, had a duty to pick him up and deport him. ” 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.
| 0 |
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. Senate tax reform proposal unveiled on Thursday does not eliminate a $7,500 electric vehicle tax credit as Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives have proposed. Killing the credit could hurt automakers like General Motors Co, Volkswagen AG, Tesla Inc and Nissan Motor Co. Current law allows automakers to use the credit, which phases out after an automaker hits 200,000 plug-in vehicles sold. Electric vehicles have expensive batteries that make them pricier than gasoline-powered vehicles.
| 1 |
Congressional Republicans are so pathetically desperate to harm Hillary Clinton that they are now turning to Fox News in order to secure more witnesses to testify at yet another Congressional investigation into the Benghazi attacks.On the May 11th edition of Special Report, Fox host Adam Housley brought on anonymous sources that swore there were military assets that could have been used to save our diplomatic compound in Benghazi on the night it was attacked in 2012. There was absolutely zero evidence given by Fox during the broadcast, other than shadowy figures reading off a list of what Fox wanted them to say. This apparently was good enough for Republicans.On the May 12th edition of Special Report, host Doug McKelway reported that Trey Gowdy who is the failed ringleader of months and millions of dollars worth of Benghazi busts actually contacted Fox News and urged these witnesses who spoke to Fox News to talk to his committee.Gowdy did this despite the fact that Housley, the one who miraculously found these fake witnesses, has a documented history of using admitted liars and fraudsters as expert witnesses about the events that happened that night in Libya.One of Housley s worst actors was Dylan Davies, who played a central role in Housley s journalistic fraud. Davies claimed he personally scaled the wall at Benghazi that night, and engaged in one-on-one combat with terrorists. Later he admitted that he completely lied about the entire thing. Housley has also used unnamed sources (liars) to push similar fake stories about Benghazi in the past, all of which were debunked by literally every relevant governmental agency, as well as every previous Republican-led Benghazi hearing.You can understand, in a way, Fox s desire to talk about anything other than Donald Trump and the impending self destruction of the Republican Party. Congressional Republicans, though, have no excuse.Think about it like this. The exact same Republicans on the exact same committee are using the exact same witnesses that their own investigations proved to be liars, as witnesses in another Benghazi investigation. What the hell do you even say to this? Illogical? Insane? Both?Featured image via YouTube screen capture
| 1 |
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Annual employee surveys released by the FBI on Wednesday show former Director James Comey was highly regarded, contradicting President Donald Trump’s claim when he fired Comey this year that he had lost the confidence of the agency’s workers. The voluntary survey conducted in 2017 showed Comey received top marks on all but two of more than 90 questions. He scored high marks for expressing a compelling vision for the Federal Bureau of Investigation and helping morale, with respondents strongly agreeing that they would choose to work with him again. The findings contradict statements made by Trump and White House officials at the time of Comey’s firing on May 9. Trump insisted he fired Comey because of job performance and told a news conference the FBI chief “was very unpopular with most people.” Trump portrayed the FBI under Comey as being a mess. Comey told a Senate panel that White House claims the FBI was in disarray and poorly led were “lies, plain and simple.” Other senior FBI officials praised Comey and said they were proud to have worked with him, but the workplace surveys were the first broad measure of employee sentiment toward him. Trump’s reasons for firing Comey shifted over time, and he told one interviewer the investigation into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election was on his mind when he made the decision. Comey told lawmakers he thought he was fired because of the Russia investigation. His firing is now part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into ties between Russian officials and Trump’s political campaign.
| 1 |
WASHINGTON/NEW YORK (Reuters) - President-elect Donald Trump will nominate Vincent Viola, an Army veteran and founder of a high-speed trading firm, to be secretary of the Army, adding another figure from the business world without government experience to his Cabinet. Viola is a West Point graduate who founded the highly profitable high-frequency trading firm Virtu Financial Inc in 2008, Trump’s transition team said in a statement on Monday. Viola is a former chairman of the New York Mercantile Exchange, where he began his financial services career, and is a leader in electronic trading. Along with Virtu CEO Douglas Cifu, he bought the Florida Panthers of the National Hockey League in 2013. In the Army, Viola trained as an Airborne Ranger infantry officer and served in the 101st Airborne Division, the transition team said. “Whether it is his distinguished military service or highly impressive track record in the world of business, Vinnie has proved throughout his life that he knows how to be a leader and deliver major results in the face of any challenge,” Trump was quoted as saying in a transition team statement. After the Sept. 11, 2001, al Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington, Viola helped found the Combating Terrorism Center at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. “A primary focus of my leadership will be ensuring that America’s soldiers have the ways and means to fight and win across the full spectrum of conflict, Viola said in the statement. As Army secretary, Viola would oversee 473,000 active duty soldiers. Trump met with Viola on Friday as the Republican president-elect considered candidates for top posts in his administration, which begins on Jan. 20. Cabinet positions yet to be filled include secretaries of agriculture and veterans affairs and the U.S. trade representative. Viola, 60, whose net worth is $1.8 billion according to Forbes magazine, is the latest wealthy financier or businessman tapped to join Trump’s administration. Those nominees, with little or no experience in government, include Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson for secretary of state, Goldman Sachs chief operating officer Gary Cohn for director of the National Economic Council, private equity firm owner Wilbur Ross as commerce secretary and Andrew Pudzer, CKE Restaurants Inc chief executive as labor secretary. FROM WEST POINT TO HIGH-SPEED TRADING Viola was a leading figure in the emergence of high-frequency trading, in which rapid-fire machines place thousands of very short-term bets, making markets and profiting on tiny price imbalances. In 2014, Virtu Financial received a letter of inquiry from New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman as part of a wider investigation of such firms, which came amid heightened attention to such trading after the publication of author Michael Lewis’ book “Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt.” The firm was never charged with anything and has always backed more regulation for trading and market making. If Viola is confirmed by the Senate as secretary of the Army, his ownership stake in the Panthers would be placed in a trust, while Cifu would take over Viola’s role as chairman and governor of the team’s parent company, Sunrise Sports and Entertainment, the Panthers said in a statement. Cifu currently has the role of vice chairman and alternate governor of the club. Viola was born to Italian immigrant parents in New York’s Brooklyn borough, and was the first in his family to attend college. He left the Army after five years because his father suffered a massive heart, he told the West Point Center for Oral History, which he helped fund. Friends in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn where Viola grew up pointed him to Wall Street after he failed to find work elsewhere. Viola stood out on entering the trading pits in 1982 as a “local” on the New York Mercantile Exchange, as many of the floor traders did not have a college education. Viola has said the principles of West Point - duty, honor, country - are overwhelming and become ingrained. “It’s very hard to come here and not leave not having a selfless sense of what duty means, what honor is, and the importance of your country,” Viola said in 2011 the Oral History interview.
| 0 |
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Former White House National Security Adviser Michael Flynn has told the Senate Intelligence Committee he will begin turning over some documents subpoenaed by the panel, according to a government source familiar with the matter. Flynn’s representatives told the committee in an email on Tuesday that they would start turning over some subpoenaed documents in time to meet a deadline set by the panel, and that more documents will be turned over later. The committee, which is investigating alleged Russian interference in last year’s U.S. presidential election, issued subpoenas to two of Flynn’s businesses after Flynn had declined to comply with a subpoena issued to him personally.
| 1 |
Shaquille O’Neal, you have brought this upon yourself. [After joining Kyrie Irving in stating his belief that he too thinks the Earth is flat, (Yes, do not adjust your clocks, this is 2017) Shaquille O’Neal drew from fellow NBA legend Charles Barkley. Appearing on the Rich Eisen Show, Shaq’s “Inside The NBA” Charles Barkley knocked the Big Aristotle down a peg for his podcast rant. Not only that, Barkley told the story of another instance of Shaq’s interstellar confusion: Here’s the video of that particular episode of “Inside The NBA”: Follow Dylan Gwinn on Twitter: @themightygwinn
| 0 |
ADEN (Reuters) - A suicide car bomber blew himself up at a security checkpoint in the southern Yemeni port city of Aden on Sunday, killing 15 people and wounding at least 20, residents and a security official said. Islamic State militants claimed responsibility for the assault, without providing evidence. The attack occurred outside the main security headquarters in Aden s Khor Maksar district, according to Aden residents and the security official. The blast was heard across the city and a plume of smoke could be seen from miles away. Clashes erupted in the area immediately afterward, witnesses reported. It was unclear who was behind the attack or the clashes that followed. Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack in a statement posted on the internet, though without immediate evidence to back up its assertion. IS said at least 50 people had been killed by the blast and in clashes. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the local branch of the global Islamist militant network, has been the most active jihadist group in southern Yemen in recent years. Aden is the interim headquarters of Yemen s internationally recognized government, which had to move there when Houthi rebels took control of the capital, Sanaa, in 2015 during Yemen s civil war. More than 10,000 people have been killed in the conflict since the Houthis advanced on Aden, forcing President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi to flee and seek help from Saudi Arabia. Aden is dominated by Yemeni forces backed by the United Arab Emirates, a key member of the Saudi-led coalition that intervened in Yemen s war to restore Hadi. Saudi Arabia s air defense forces intercepted a ballistic missile fired from Yemen over the capital, Riyadh, on Saturday, state news agencies reported. The missile was brought down near King Khaled Airport on the northern outskirts of the city and did not cause any casualties.
| 1 |
NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) thinks he s the boss of you! He banned all non-essential travel to Mississippi after the state passed a religious liberty bill that he called a hateful injustice against the LGBT community. Can you believe this guy? The bill, known as House Bill 1523 or the Protecting Freedom of Conscience from Government Discrimination Act, was signed into law by Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant (R) Tuesday and will go into effect July 1.The legislation guards against the discrimination of individuals, religious organizations and certain businesses who have sincerely held religious beliefs or moral convictions that marriage should be recognized as the union of one man and one woman. Under the law, religious leaders can decline to solemnize any marriage or provide wedding-related services based on religious or moral objections. In addition, Mississippians can decided whether or not to hire, terminate or discipline an individual whose conduct or religious beliefs are inconsistent with their own ideals.After the passage of the new law, Cuomo issued an order Tuesday that requires all New York State agencies, departments, boards and commissions to immediately review all requests for state funded or state sponsored travel to Mississippi.Last month, Cuomo did the same thing for travel to North Carolina.Read more: The Blaze
| 1 |
BUENOS AIRES (Reuters) - Argentine President Mauricio Macri s preferred candidate was leading former President Cristina Fernandez in an election for a Senate seat in Buenos Aires province, with 24.5 percent of polling booths counted. Esteban Bullrich, Macri s former education minister, had 42.9 percent of the vote counted compared with 35.9 percent for Fernandez in the province that is home to nearly 40 percent of voters.
| 1 |
New video has surfaced adding to the mountain of evidence that while working alongside his father, Fred Trump, young Donald Trump was part of a real estate business that discriminated against minority applicants.As part of an investigation by NBC News, Stanley Leibowitz, who worked as a rental agent for the Trump Organization, told the news network that he personally witnessed the elder Trump explicitly lay out a racist policy for their apartment properties.In the interview, Leibowitz said that Trump told him I don t rent to the n-word, and indicates that Trump made this statement with Donald Trump in the room and that the younger Trump affirmed the policy.The revelation comes at the same time that the Clinton campaign has released a video highlighting Trump s run-in with the federal government over discrimination.Undercover investigators were sent to Trump properties, and there they repeatedly ran into a policy where black applicants with identical financial backgrounds to white applicants were systematically denied housing. The white applicants were allowed into the Trump properties.One bit of testimony determined that Trump property managers indicated applications from blacks by putting a C on the documents for colored, and that was a sign that they should be denied.The Trumps denied the allegation, but later settled with the government over the policy without admitting wrongdoing.Donald Trump s involvement with his father s business is key to the entire story of his rise to prominence in the real estate world and the media, as is his father s $14 million dollars that he gave to Trump to start his business. But if you accept that, the Trump Organization s history of racial discrimination and the legal entanglements that come with that are also part of the story, and no matter how Trump may try to wave it away it s still there.Featured image via screen capture
| 0 |
WASHINGTON — The chairman of the Republican National Committee has privately urged members of the party’s rules committee not to make changes to the guidelines governing the presidential nominating process, an effort to avoid the appearance that the party is seeking to block Donald J. Trump from becoming its nominee. The chairman, Reince Priebus, whom associates describe as increasingly frustrated by Mr. Trump’s criticism of the process, sent a text message last week to multiple rules committee members strongly suggesting that they not alter the convention rules when the party convenes next week for its spring meeting in Florida, according to two who received the message. Separately, a group of influential rules committee members held a conference call Thursday to prepare for the meeting and reached a consensus that they would derail any attempt at the gathering to make changes to the how the convention is conducted, according to a committee member on the call. “We’re not going to do anything with the rules next week,” said Rob Gleason, chairman of the Pennsylvania Republican Party and a longtime member of the rules committee. “There’s no point because new rules will be written at the convention. ” The matter of convention is the sort of arcane intraparty business that rarely draws attention from even the most committed political enthusiasts. But with the prospect of a contested convention and a divisive waging a campaign against the party apparatus, issues of how individual states select their delegates and who can or cannot be placed in nomination have become a drama. With Mr. Trump and his supporters on the lookout for any maneuvering that can be construed as a backdoor attempt to cheat him of the nomination, Republicans see little to be gained by tinkering with procedures that could well be disregarded before the July convention. While the standing rules committee of the party can set nominating guidelines, they are effectively only suggestions. It is a rules committee comprising 112 delegates that actually writes the rules governing the convention, and those are only implemented if they are approved by a full vote of all the Republican delegates in Cleveland. Further, with 17 states still left to vote in the Republican primary campaign — and considerable uncertainty about whether and by how much Mr. Trump will fall short of attaining a delegate majority before the convention — it is not even clear what rule changes could be made now that would diminish his chances if party insiders even wanted to tilt the playing field. “What upside is there for us to muck around with the rules,” said Steve Duprey, the New Hampshire Republican committeeman and a rules committee member. The committee, under pressure to conduct a transparent campaign and irritated at Mr. Trump’s claims of unfairness, is moving more aggressively to explain how the primary works and pointedly rebutting their own . “The rules surrounding the delegate selection have been clearly laid out in every state and territory, and while each state is different, each process is easy to understand for those willing to learn it,” Sean Spicer, a senior party official, wrote in a memo released to the public on Friday. “It ultimately falls on the campaigns to be up to speed on these delegate rules. ” But Mr. Trump shows no sign of curbing his complaints, and his campaign appears to be only escalating its argument. In an essay published in Friday’s Wall Street Journal, Mr. Trump argued that Senator Ted Cruz’s efforts to elect his supporters as delegates to Cleveland so they may support him at a convention after they are no longer bound to the results of their state’s vote amounted to “ scheme. ” “Voter disenfranchisement is not merely part of the Cruz strategy — it is the Cruz strategy,” Mr. Trump wrote, inveighing against “ ‘ ’ delegates who reject the decision of voters. ” Mr. Trump’s assault on the Republican Party and the nomination process it oversees is seen by some in the party as the makings of a strategy to gain an advantage with those delegates who will be unbound, and therefore political free agents, on the first ballot. These delegates could be pivotal if Mr. Trump narrowly falls short of 1, 237 delegates at the end of the primary season and needs a handful more to help him clinch the nomination on the first vote in Cleveland. But one leading Republican from a state that will send 54 unbound delegates to the convention suggested that such tactics would not be effective. “We’re not playing beanbag,” said Mr. Gleason, the Pennsylvania chairman. “This is for president of the United States. ”
| 0 |
Kathy Griffin probably thought this would be great publicity for her. Nope, not funny not funny at all. Twitter was abuzz over the photo shoot by shock photographer Tyler Shields of Kathy Griffin holding a beheaded Trump. Drudge Report called Griffin out on her tasteless photos and even liberals took to twitter to voice their outrage in tweets below.Does anyone at all find that funny? Nope we didn t think so. Check out the twitter responses on this photo shoot literally EVERYONE is going after her! The best tweet so far: TMZ got the scoop on the disgusting photo shoot by edgy photographer Tyler Shields. It s too bad Harvey Levin didn t refuse to promote this horror. We hope this gets Griffin a pink slip from CNN. Not funny!1/ I caption this there was blood coming out of his eyes, blood coming out of his wherever Also @tylershields great Photog/film maker. pic.twitter.com/eKqr44NOl6 Kathy Griffin (@kathygriffin) May 30, 2017
| 0 |
Thankfully, Chris Christie proved he was beyond shame when he endorsed Donald Trump for president, but this moment had to sting a little bit.In a humiliating moment for the one-time Republican presidential candidate, a hot mic captured the way Donald Trump treats his new lap dog and it isn t pretty.At a rally, Christie seemed to think he would share the stage with Trump during Trump s portion of the event, but apparently the idea of sharing a spotlight with a former rival wasn t something Trump was about to let happen. Shaking Christie s hand, Trump leans in and whispers, Get on the plane and go home. It s over there. Go home. Christie at first continues waving, then simply says Okay and walks towards the exit.Here s the video:Whether Trump was trying to be nice by sparing Christie yet another stump speech is not clear, but what is clear is that Trump would much prefer it if his friends avoided trying to take too much of the attention away from him.It s probably a tough pill to swallow, but Christie must surely realize by now that by endorsing Trump, he doesn t get to share in the Republican front-runners spotlight. Viciously jealous, astoundingly egotistical, Trump has always been a one-man operation. He will share his fame with no one.Christie, of course, knows all of this. Months ago he was loudly suggesting that Trump was not presidential material. And just 19 days before saying this There is no one who is better prepared to provide America with the strong leadership that it needs both at home and around the world than Donald Trump, Christie said, he is looking at the five people on that stage last night the clear standout and the person who will do exactly what needs to be done to make America a leader around the world again. Christie was saying this Bravado, by itself, is not a plan, he said, I like him, he s a good person, he s just not the right person to be President of the United States and not the person that we d want representing our country. Now that Christie needs to take orders from Trump, mockery was quick on social media.Trump to Christie. https://t.co/MWgqPSr2sF deray mckesson (@deray) February 28, 2016Too good. https://t.co/dtSXNDji3l Michael Moore (@MMFlint) February 28, 2016And now Trump appears to tell Christie to go home https://t.co/ePO3KdfAia Zeke Miller (@ZekeJMiller) February 27, 2016Christie's face when Trump tells him to go home .Crestfallen. https://t.co/3GTvTwaqqY Peter Hasson (@peterjhasson) February 28, 2016Will Christie be relieved to go back home to New Jersey? It doesn t seem likely. Having been on the road for the last few months, Christie has gotten the luxury of forgetting the mess that he left behind in the state he is supposed to be governing. But now it appears he doesn t have much choice. Get on the plane and go home, Christie.Featured image via ABC News screengrab
| 0 |
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President-elect Donald Trump is in for a quick wake-up call and will have to adjust his temperament when he confronts the realities of his new job on Jan. 20, President Barack Obama said on Monday. In a news conference at the White House, Obama said the freewheeling Trump could not be as outspoken as he was during the long and bitter campaign that ended last week with the Republican’s surprise win over Democrat Hillary Clinton. Subdued and carefully choosing his words, Obama gave what appeared to be dispassionate advice to his successor free of much of the partisan rancor that marked the election campaign. “This office has a way of waking you up,” Obama said. “Those aspects of his positions or predispositions that don’t match up with reality, he will find shaken up pretty quick because reality has a way of asserting itself.” The two men met in the Oval Office last week to begin the transition of power. Obama said on Monday he believed Trump would be pragmatic in office and not approach the country’s problems from an ideological perspective. “There are going to be certain elements of his temperament that will not serve him well, unless he recognizes them and corrects them,” Obama said. “Because when you’re a candidate and you say something that is inaccurate or controversial it has less impact than it does when you’re president of the United States. Everybody around the world is paying attention. Markets move,” he said. Obama declined to wade into a controversy over Trump’s appointment of right-wing firebrand Stephen Bannon as his chief strategist, saying it would “not be appropriate” for him to comment on Trump’s appointments. But Obama, who criticized Trump’s temperament during the campaign, said it was important for Trump to send signals of unity after the hard-fought campaign. He said the political gifts that allowed the Republican to upset Clinton would be put to good use in the White House. “I’ve been encouraged by his statements on election night about the need for unity, his interest in being president for all people,” Obama said. “In an election like this that was so hotly contested and so divided, gestures matter.” The president-elect, a businessman who has never held public office, and his transition team are working on picking members of his Cabinet and the heads of federal agencies. Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani has emerged as a leading candidate for secretary of state, a source familiar with the process said. John Bolton, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, is also being considered for the job of the nation’s top diplomat, the source added. Giuliani became one of Trump’s closest advisers during the campaign, functioning as his most vocal defender on cable news programs and introducing him at many rallies. Giuliani has also been mentioned as a possible attorney general or homeland security secretary. A Trump transition team official denied media reports on Monday that Trump was seeking security clearance for three of his children and his son-in-law. Such clearance would allow Trump to discuss matters of national security with his daughter Ivanka, sons Eric and Donald Jr. and son-in-law Jared Kushner. Federal law prohibits him from hiring family members to serve in his administration, but all four played key advisory roles through the campaign. Trump has insisted that to avoid conflicts of interest, his children would run his sprawling business operations once he assumed the presidency. Democrats, civil rights groups and even some Republicans slammed Trump for choosing Bannon as a key aide, saying it would elevate the white nationalist movement into the top levels of the White House. Making his first appointments since last week’s upset win, Trump picked Bannon as his chief strategist and counselor, and Washington insider Reince Priebus as his chief of staff on Sunday, saying the two would share the task of steering his administration as “equal partners.” The choice of Priebus was seen as a conciliatory signal of Trump’s willingness to work with Congress. But critics blasted the selection of Bannon, who spearheaded a shift of the Breitbart News website into a forum for the “alt-right,” a loose online group of neo-Nazis, white supremacists and anti-Semites. “There should be no sugarcoating the truth here: Donald Trump just invited a white nationalist into the highest reaches of the government,” said Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley, who called on Trump to rescind the choice. The Democratic leader in the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, said Bannon’s appointment sent “an alarming signal that President-elect Trump remains committed to the hateful and divisive vision that defined his campaign.” Even some conservatives and Republicans voiced dismay on Bannon. Evan McMullin, who ran as a conservative independent presidential candidate, wondered on Twitter if any national Republican leaders would condemn the pick of “anti-Semite” Bannon. John Weaver, a top strategist for Republican Ohio Governor John Kasich, tweeted that the “racist, fascist extreme right is represented footsteps from the Oval Office. Be very vigilant America.” Kasich was one of 16 Republican presidential hopefuls Trump defeated in the party primaries. Priebus defended Bannon on Monday, calling him a wise and well-educated former naval officer and saying he had not encountered the sort of extremist or racist views that critics are assailing. “He was a force for good on the campaign,” Priebus said on Fox News, adding they were in agreement on “almost everything” in terms of advising the president-elect. Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s former campaign manager and a senior adviser, told reporters in New York she was offended by the reaction to Bannon, describing him as a “brilliant tactician.” Police in New York on Monday were investigating two cases involving swastikas drawn or painted in public spaces, as civil rights activists said there had been a surge in hate crimes following last week’s election. Local media reported hundreds of students walked out of a high school to protest Trump on Monday in Silver Spring, Maryland, and students gathered at the University of Washington in Seattle to protest Trump.
| 1 |
1 |
|
While others try to brag their way to the Oval Office, one Republican has quietly, thoughtfully, paying attention to what matters.
BEAUFORT, S.C. — On Boundary Street leading into the city, Sgt. White’s Diner is just past the lights at the intersection of Ribault Road across from Municipal Court and alongside a vacant Bail Bonds office. Hours before the polls opened and people voted in the Republican primary here there was a steady stream of customers for the pit cooked barbecue chicken and barbecued ribs and, it seemed, more interest in what might happen over the long haul leading to November than who would win Saturday.
The woman behind the counter put Ms. Jenkins’s order in a bag and Ella Mae walked to her car parked in a lot alongside a Piggly Wiggly market that’s been out of business for some time. She spoke briefly about her husband’s disability due to being badly wounded nearly 50 years ago at a place called Quang Tri City in a country then called South Vietnam.
She said she had little interest in politics and paid hardly any attention to what the candidates were saying and that she would be happy when the campaign went to another state: “Then I can watch my shows without seein’ all these fools on my TV.”
In the sky above, two F-18 Hornets cut through a low ribbon of haze heading to Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort just up the road from Sgt White’s Diner. The noise and power of their engines filled the air but Ms. Jenkins never looked up because their appearance is part of daily life here, where the reality of America’s military, its cost and duties as well as its existence are the framework for so many proud families who are charged with paying the price for loose political rhetoric.
A few miles east, past the causeway above the Harbor River and down Malecon Drive, is the main gate at Marine Corps Recruit Depot East at Parris Island. Here the pine trees line much of the approach, some stretching 50 feet and higher and, then, on the Island there are fewer of them and the wind, warm now in mid-February, meets no obstacles as it whips through the day fluttering flags on the buildings that house the young who someday will be asked to fight for the dreams of the old who send them to war.
Here, in South Carolina, memory is part of the cement of a culture rooted in service to the country. And here on Parris Island with roads named for bloodshed and lives lost in places like Chosin, Guadalcanal, Bataan and Quang Tri, the cheap chatter of candidates talking tough is merely muffled noise when measured against the drills and preparation of those who could be sent to places where polls and political ambition are meaningless. Here, the dreams and desires of those on the ballot live in a universe totally estranged from the future of the men and women who might one day face a bullet.
Listening to some of the Republican candidates for president is like eavesdropping on men trying to earn their letter sweater with worthless phrases: carpet bombing, crushing ISIS, as if words alone will accomplish the mission and the lives of those sent into the fight are merely an anonymous squadron of props used to advance a political agenda. The world is on fire, a dangerous place, and too many seeking to lead appear to be clueless or ignorant of what is required to keep the country secure.
In the harbor, Fort Sumter is a constant reminder of the first shots fired in the Civil War. And the distant echoes and impact of that war can sometimes still be felt in the air all these years later.
The USS Yorktown is also here at Patriots Point Naval Museum here. It was commissioned in 1943, named after the Yorktown sunk by Japanese at the Battle of Midway in June 1942. Today it is a museum and Friday night, hours before South Carolina voted, John Kasich, the governor of Ohio, came to talk to about 300 people who had gathered below deck.
Kasich is an interesting candidate. He knew his chances in a state dominated by evangelicals and anger were not great but he arrived with a smile on his face and a sound of contentment in his voice because it was not in him to feed the beast of those filled with rage and despairing of the future.
He stood on a stage with a huge American flag hanging behind him. He told the people he’d been at a Town Hall rally earlier in the day and could sense the worry that many have about the direction of the country and the frustration and failure of politics in Washington.
“I looked out in the crowd, looked at the faces in that room and I saw my family. Right there in the third row. Saw my family sitting there listening to me. Oh, they weren’t my family but I knew them. I know what worries them and I know what worries you but we live in the greatest country God ever created and we’re going to be even greater if we stop listening to all this doom and gloom we’re getting. I’m here to tell you we can do this, but we have to do it together. Together. All of us. Together.”
“I meet with them one on one,” Kasich was saying. “And I cry with them. I’m not embarrassed to tell you I cry. I just wish we’d pay more attention to what war costs and I wish more of us would talk about what it means to be Commander-in-Chief. That phrase is more than words. It’s the ultimate responsibility of a president. We’re cheating people by not talking enough about that role. Shame on us and shame on this process we have of electing a president the way we’re doing it now. We’re better than this and people deserve more than what they’re getting from us. From all of us.”
| 0 |
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Emails between U.S. diplomats in Islamabad and State Department officials in Washington about whether to challenge specific U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan are at the center of a criminal probe involving Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified information, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday. The 2011 and 2012 emails were sent via the “low side” -government slang for a computer system for unclassified matters - as part of a secret arrangement that gave the State Department more of a voice in whether a CIA drone strike went ahead, according to congressional and law enforcement officials briefed on the FBI probe, the Journal said. Some of the emails were then forwarded by Clinton’s aides to her personal email account, which routed them to a server she kept at her home in suburban New York when she was secretary of state, the officials said, according to the newspaper. Investigators have raised concerns that Clinton’s personal server was less secure than State Department systems, and a recent report by the State Department inspector general found that Clinton had broken government rules by using a private email server without approval, undermining Clinton’s earlier defenses of her emails. The still-secret emails are a key part of the FBI investigation that has long dogged Clinton’s presidential campaign, the officials told the Journal. Clinton this week clinched the Democratic presidential nomination for the Nov. 8 election and was endorsed by President Barack Obama on Thursday. The White House rebuffed questions by reporters on Thursday on whether Obama’s endorsement might be seen as unduly influencing a criminal investigation by the U.S. Justice Department involving Clinton. White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters that Obama “has reiterated his commitment to this principle that any criminal investigation should be conducted independent of any sort of political interference.” The emails, which did not mention the “CIA,” “drones” or details about the militant targets, were written within the often-narrow time frame in which State Department officials had to decide whether or not to object to drone strikes before the CIA pulled the trigger, the officials said, according to the Journal. Law enforcement and intelligence officials said State Department deliberations about the covert CIA drone program should have been conducted over a more secure government computer system designed to handle classified information, the Journal reported.
| 0 |
This is not a war we can expect our children to fight on their own. We are in a war with a leftist academia who has lost sight of why we are paying for our children to attend their schools. We are not paying for our children to sit in a classroom and talk about the evils of capitalism, the plight of the trans-sexual, the injustices of the minority student who is apparently no better off today than the slaves of the 18th century in America. We are not paying for teachers to convince our children that success should be punished or that choosing a heterosexual, monogamous relationship is selfish and short-sighted. We are paying them to give our children a quality education period. And that is what our children deserve How radical, weird and out of touch have liberals on college campuses gotten since Obama came into office? It s worse than you ever thought and although there is an almost unlimited number of problematic incidents to choose from, these 15 are particularly effective at getting across how bad things have become.1) College Students Say Remembering 9/11 Is Offensive to Muslims. The everything-is-offensive brand of campus activism has struck a new low: Students at the University of Minnesota killed a proposed moment of silence for 9/11 victims due to concerns insulting, childish concerns that Muslim students would be offended. 2) Portland State University Offers Course Teaching How to Make Whiteness Strange According to Portland State University Professor Rachel Sanders White Privilege course, whiteness must be dismantled if racial justice will ever be achieved. The course description states that whiteness is the lynchpin of structures of racial meaning and racial inequality in the United States and claims that to preserve whiteness is to preserve racial injustice. Students taking the course will endeavor to make whiteness strange. In order to make whiteness strange, the description says students must interrogate whiteness as an unstable legal, political, social, and cultural construction. 3) A University in the San Francisco Area Actually Told Students To Call 911 if They Were Offended .Administrators at a Catholic university in the San Francisco Bay Area have rescinded an official school policy instructing students to clog up the regional 9-1-1 emergency reporting system to report bias incidents. The school is Santa Clara University, reports Campus Reform Until this month, however, Santa Clara administrators have been instructing students to report bias incidents using the emergency service reserved for dispatching police, firefighters and ambulances. If the bias incident is in progress or just occurred: ALWAYS CALL 911 IMMEDIATELY, the Santa Clara website instructed students in fierce, all-capital letters. Mizzou Police Sent a Campus Wide Email to students during protests: CALL POLICE if someone says something hurtful to you4) Educators in the Volunteer State are very concerned that students might be offended by the usage of traditional pronouns like she, he, him and hers, according to a document from the University of Tennessee Knoxville s Office of Diversity and Inclusion. For all you folks who went to school back when there were only him and her here s a primer: some of the new gender neutral pronouns are ze, hir, zir, xe, xem and xyr. 5) A Professor at Polk State College has allegedly failed a humanities student after she refused to concede that Jesus is a myth or that Christianity oppresses women during a series of mandatory assignments at the Florida college. According to a press release from the Liberty Counsel, a non-profit public interest law firm, Humanities Professor Lance Lj Russum gave a student a zero on four separate papers because the 16-year-old did not conform to his personal worldviews of Marxism, Atheism, Feminism, and homosexuality. The law firm has called for a full, private investigation of the professor and the course curriculum. 6) College Codes Make Color Blindness a Microaggression wait, what? . UCLA says Color Blindness, the idea we shouldn t obsess over people s race, is a microaggression. If you refuse to treat an individual as a racial/cultural being, then you re being aggressive. 7) The phrase politically correct is now a microaggression according to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. The university s Just Words campaign is the work of UWM s Inclusive Excellence Center and aims to raise awareness of microaggressions and their impact microaggressions like politically correct or PC. 8) ) American, illegal alien, foreigners, mothering, and fathering are just a handful of words deemed problematic by the University of New Hampshire s Bias-Free Language Guide .Saying American to reference Americans is also problematic. The guide encourages the use of the more inclusive substitutes U.S. citizen or Resident of the U.S. The guide also tries to get students to stop saying Caucasian, illegal Immigrant, mother, father and even the word healthy is said to shame those who aren t healthy. 9) Late yesterday afternoon, ACLJ filed a lawsuit on behalf of Brandon Jenkins against officials of The Community College of Baltimore County (CCBC) in Maryland for denying Brandon admission to its Radiation Therapy Program in part due to his expression of religious beliefs. As one faculty member explained to Brandon, on behalf of CCBC, the field [of radiation therapy] is not the place for religion. 10) A California school co-founded by a firebrand who once called for an intifada in the U.S. has become the nation s first accredited Muslim college. 11) According to Coastal Carolina University, sex is only consensual if both parties are completely sober and if consent is not only present, but also enthusiastic. This is a troubling standard that converts many ordinary, lawful sexual encounters into sexual assault, and it should frighten any student at CCU. 12) Clemson University apologizes for serving Mexican food Students took to Twitter to call the event culturally insensitive and to question the school s efforts to promote diversity .Clemson Dining issued an apology to offended students after hosting a Maximum Mexican food day. 13) All-Women s College Cancels Vagina Monologues Because it Excludes Women Without Vaginas. 14) The Black Lives Matter leader who landed a teaching gig at Yale University delivered a lecture this week on the historical merits of looting as a form of protest, backing up his lesson with required reading that puts modern-day marauders on par with the patriots behind the Boston Tea Party. 15) Assistant Dean (at Cornell) Tells a Project Veritas Investigative Journalist that the University Would Allow an ISIS Terrorist to Hold a Training Camp on Campus, Saying: It Would be Like Bringing in a Coach to do a Training on a Sports Team.' Watch here:Via: Townhall
| 1 |
November 8, 2016 UN climate chief: No doubt world will shift to low emissions
Climate negotiators started work Monday on implementing the Paris Agreement on global warming amid uncertainty over how the U.S. election will impact the landmark deal as temperatures and greenhouse gases soar to new heights.
U.N. climate chief Patricia Espinosa told delegates in the rain-soaked Moroccan city of Marrakech that “no politician or citizen, no business manager or investor” can doubt that the world is determined to shift toward a “low-emission, resilient society.”
So far, 100 countries have formally joined the agreement adopted last year in Paris, including top polluters China, the United States, the European Union and India.
However, U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has said he would “cancel” the deal if he wins the election this week. His opponent, Hillary Clinton, backs the climate policies of President Barack Obama’s government.
The upcoming election seemed to be on everyone’s mind at the start of the two-week conference in Marrakech, where even security guards at the sprawling conference center were overheard discussing the potential implications for the world and efforts to fight climate change in particular.
| 1 |
SOCHI, Russia (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday accused Washington of not fulfilling its obligations under nuclear and chemical weapons treaties. Putin said that despite calls to cooperate on global issues, the United States had demonstrated a selfishness that had seen Russia s national interests ignored in the nuclear sphere.
| 1 |
Several white supremacist hate groups have been able to exploit federal law and raised millions while disguising themselves as charities, according to a new report. Espousing a hate message that advocates for a whites-only America where minorities are removed from the country, these groups are not subtle about what they believe in. Yet they were still able to pretend to be charitable groups in the eyes of the government.The federal government has allowed four groups at the forefront of the white nationalist movement to register as charities and raise more than $7.8 million in tax-deductible donations over the past decade, according to an Associated Press review.Already emboldened by Donald Trump s popularity, group leaders say they hope the president-elect s victory helps them raise even more money and gives them a larger platform for spreading their ideology.With benevolent-sounding names such as the National Policy Institute and New Century Foundation, the tax-exempt groups present themselves as educational organizations and use donors money to pay for websites, books and conferences to further their ideology. The money also has personally compensated leaders of the four groups.The IRS actually has the power to exclude hate groups from being awarded a non-profit designation, but some experts believe that recent complaints about the IRS scrutinizing conservative scam groups that registered as non-profits has scared off the agency. They also don t have the full resources necessary to police these sort of groups.Even worse, the incoming Trump administration has coddled these groups, inviting them to cover his campaign and the 2016 Republican National Convention. In all likelihood rooting out hate groups using the tax code to give tax breaks to racist funders is unlikely to be a major target for the Trump team. It will fall to bureaucrats in the IRS and outside investigations to expose these groups.Featured image via Wikimedia Commons
| 0 |
Reverend Al Sharpton thinks that in order to win elections, Democrats must stop trying to get the “Archie Bunker” vote and instead focus on maximizing the party’s minority vote. During a Friday afternoon MSNBC appearance, Sharpton railed against elected officials and consultants who want Democrats to “try and become elephants with donkey skin on,” emphasizing that it was pointless to appeal to “Archie Bunker” voters who support President Donald Trump. Sharpton insisted that these “Archie Bunker” voters will never cast their ballots for Democrats. He made his remarks a day after Republican Greg Gianforte won his special election for Montana’s open House seat by six points even after he allegedly a reporter the day before the election. In a recent interview with BuzzFeed, Sharpton said Hillary Clinton’s biggest mistake in 2016 “was that she did not mobilize in the black community. ” “You lost Michigan, by what, 15, 000, 20, 000 votes? You could’ve got that if you mobilized two housing projects or three churches,” he told the outlet. “Never touched them. So in many ways I think that the whole question of, ‘Oh we gotta reach out to the Appalachian and the blue collar workers and stop the identity politics’ — well, that’s one strategy. But what I’m saying is that you never worked your own base. You took your base for granted, so it’s not that you need to go another way, you didn’t identify with those in identity politics, that’s why you had the lowest turnout you had around blacks in a long time. ” Sharpton said though Clinton came to his National Action Network convention, her campaign “never engaged us in the campaign. ” “And I think that’s where they did the wrong math in the Clinton campaign. They assumed that we’ll go get all of this because everybody will stay here: young voters, black voters, Latino voters, like Obama, and it didn’t happen,” he said. As Democrats plot their electoral strategies for 2018 and 2020, the party is split between those who want to double down on identity politics and those who think Democrats need to appeal more to white voters.
| 0 |
It turns out we re not as divided as people make us out to be Really?
| 0 |
Latest News Justifying the Saudi Slaughter in Yemen One of Obama's biggest failures is letting his policy in Syria be determined primarily by the ambitions of Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey Share This
The Obama administration has carried out a deliberately deceptive campaign accusing Iran of covertly sending arms to the Houthis by sea, a claim that Washington cites to help justify the Saudi massive air attack against the Houthis that began last year.
By repeating the accusation over and over, the administration has been largely successful in turning a dubious allegation into accepted fact, even though it is contradicted by evidence that is well-documented on the public record.
Secretary of State John Kerry introduced the new variant of the Obama administration’s familiar theme about Iran’s “nefarious activities” in the region two weeks after Saudi Arabia began its bombing in Yemen on March 26, 2015. Kerry told the PBS NewsHour, “There are obviously supplies that have been coming from Iran,” citing “a number of flights every single week that have been flying in.” Kerry vowed that the United States was “not going to stand by while the region is destabilized.”
Later, the administration began accusing Iran of using fishing boats to smuggle arms to the Houthis. The campaign unfolded in a series of four interceptions of small fishing boats or dhows in or near the Arabian Sea from September 2015 through March 2016. The four interceptions had two things in common: the boats did have illicit weapons alright, but the crews always said the ship was bound for Somalia – not Yemen and the Houthis.
But instead of acknowledging the obvious fact that the weapons were not related to the Iran-Houthi relationship, a U.S. military spokesman put out a statement in all four cases citing a U.S. “assessment” that the ultimate destination of the arms was Houthi-controlled territory in Yemen.
The choice of wording was significant. The intelligence community says that it “assesses” that something is true only when it does not have clear-cut proof on the matter. In the case of the alleged Iranian use of fishing dhows to smuggle arms to the Houthis, the U.S. spokesmen did not cite a single piece of evidence for that “assessment” in any of the four cases. In fact, when asked for some justification for it, the military spokesman refused.
The first fishing dhow was intercepted in the Arabian Sea on Sept. 25, 2015, by a member of a 31-nation coalition called the Combined Maritime Forces patrolling the Arabian Sea and nearby waters for piracy. The coalition ship found the dhow to be carrying 18 Konkurs anti-tank missiles, 71 other anti-tank shells and 54 missile-launchers.
Blaming Iran
The U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet later issued a statement that said, “Based on statements from the dhow’s crew the port of origin of the dhow and its illicit weapons cache is believed to be Iran.” It also said the anti-tank missiles were thought to be of Iranian and Russian origin, and that the papers on the ship had indicated that it had been checked by ports and customs officials in Iran’s Sistan and Baluchistan province.
But the crew of the vessel had said that it was bound not for Yemen but for Somalia, as the spokesman for the U.S. Fifth Fleet acknowledged to The Associated Press . A Saudi military spokesman suggested that Iran intended to reroute the arms later from Somalia to Yemen, but offered no evidence.
On Feb. 27, 2016, an Australian ship intercepted a second fishing dhow off the coast of Oman. The Australians found 1,989 AK-47 assault rifles, 100 rocket-propelled grenades and 40 PKM machine guns on board. The Australian Defense Force issued an official statement on the seizure that did not mention Iranian involvement. It said the boat appeared to be “stateless” and that its cache of weapons was “destined for Somalia.” The Australian Defense Force spokesman explained to CNN that the conclusion was based on interviews with crew members.
But a spokesman for U.S. Naval Forces, Central Command, Lt. Ian McConnaughey gave an entirely different political slant to the interception. In an e-mail to NBC News, McConnaughey said. “Based on the dhow’s course, Iran is believed to be its port of origin and the source of the illicit weapon,” he said. McConnaughey said the crew was “assessed” to be Iranian – implying that the crew itself had not indicated that.
McConnaughey acknowledged to NBC and The Telegraph, “According to coalition forces it is believed that the vessel’s destination was in the vicinity of Somalia.” But the CENTCOM spokesman indicated that it didn’t matter; the U.S. was insisting on its narrative about covert Iranian arms to the Houthis.
“[T]he initial U.S. assessment is the weapons’ final destination was likely to be the Houthis in Yemen,” McConnaaughey told NBC and The Telegraph.
When this writer asked McConnaughey by e-mail why the U.S. “assessed” that the weapons were intended for Yemen, despite the evidence to the contrary, he responded, “We are not going to discuss the intelligence and other information that led us to our assessment.”
A Third Shipment
On March 20, a French navy destroyer intercepted a third fishing dhow off the Island of Socotra in the northern Indian Ocean and found several hundred AK-47 assault rifles, machine guns and antitank weapons. The official statement on the seizure from the Combined Maritime Forces stated categorically, “The dhow was spotted heading toward Somalia.”
And because the weapons were “deemed to be destined for Somalia,” it explained, they “were seized under the United Nations Security Council mandated arms embargo in accordance with UNSCR 2244(2015).” That Security Council resolution mandates an embargo on Eritrea.
Australia and other states participating in the Combined Maritime Forces were thus challenging the U.S. propaganda line. But again the U.S. military used the news media to reinforce the line about Iran smuggling arms to the Houthis. Commander Kevin Stephens, a spokesman for the Fifth Fleet, told CNN that “according to a U.S. assessment,” Yemen was the “likely destination” of the arms.
A fourth interception – the third in three weeks – occurred on March 28 by a U.S. Navy ship that was not operating as part of Combined Maritime Forces but directly under U.S. Naval Forces Central Command. That allowed the Naval Forces Central Command to issue its own news story on April 4.
In its lead paragraph, the report said the United States “assessed” that the shipment of illicit arms on board the dhow “originated in Iran and was likely bound for Houthi insurgents in Yemen.”
An Earlier Ruse
The Obama administration also had sought to promote the charge that Iranian was covertly sending weapons to the Houthis by sea more than two years earlier. In January 2013, the Yemen client government backed by the United States and Saudi Arabia had claimed that its forces had intercepted a ship with a large cargo of weaponry that came from Iran and was on its way to Yemen to deliver them to the Houthis.
The Obama administration supported that charge in briefings to journalists. After the Saudi air war against Yemen began in 2015, the U.S. pushed for a report by an experts group on sanctions against Iran that would give the charge credibility.
But the 2013 claim was soon exposed as a ruse. A Security Council Monitoring Group on Somalia and Eritrea revealed in a June 2013 report that the crewmembers had told diplomats who interviewed them that ship’s cargo of diesel fuel was bound for Somalia, not Yemen. And, since the weapons were hidden under the diesel fuel tanks, the weapons could be accessed only after those tanks had been emptied, in other words after the ship docked in Somalia.
The monitoring group learned from authorities in the Puntland region of Somalia, where most of the smuggled weapons have entered the country, that this was a widely used method of smuggling arms into the country.
Furthermore, the monitoring group determined that the wide range of types of weapons on board the ship, which was intercepted in January 2013, as well as of their original sources indicated that the weapons cache had been assembled by arms merchants. Authorities in Puntland provided data to the monitoring group showing that most of the shipments of weapons into Puntland in the months before January 2013 had come from politically well-connected arms merchants in Yemen.
Some of the fishing boats that were intercepted with illicit arms on board in 2015-16 had Iranian owners. But the monitoring group report reveals that the real reason is the role of such Iranian fishing vessels in illegal fishing in Somali waters. The vast majority of the hundreds of fishing vessels involved in such illegal fishing networks were either Iranian or Yemeni. As many as 300 were believed to be Yemeni-owned, while Iranian-owned 180 of them.
The monitoring group said it was investigating unconfirmed reports that some of those illegal fishing vessels were also being used to carry out arms smuggling and that it had established “other connections between the illegal fishing networks and networks involved in the arms trade and connected to al-Shabaab in northeastern Somalia.”
But the Obama administration has no interest in the considerable evidence gathered by the monitoring group that provides a more credible explanation for the arms found on those four fishing dhows.
Such an explanation isn’t political useful, whereas the accusations of Iranian smuggling of arms to the Houthis fulfilled multiple political and bureaucratic interests, justifying Saudi Arabia’s bloody U.S.-backed air campaign over Yemen and endless Washington alarms about “Iranian aggression.”
Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist specializing in US national security policy, received the UK-based Gellhorn Prize for journalism for 2011 for articles on the U.S. war in Afghanistan. His new book is Manufactured Crisis: the Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare . He can be contacted at .
Reprinted from the Middle East Eye with the author’s permission. Read more by Gareth Porter
| 1 |
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump’s leading choice to run the Federal Trade Commission is a Washington lawyer who served at the agency as a top official under President George W. Bush, a person briefed on the matter said on Wednesday. Joseph Simons, a partner at the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison LLP, is the leading choice to run the FTC over Acting FTC chairman Maureen Ohlhausen, who has been running the agency since January. Bloomberg News reported the leading choice of Simons earlier on Wednesday. The timing of a formal presidential nomination is not clear. Simons was head of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition from June 2001 to August 2003 and has been involved in a number of major antitrust cases and acquisitions in private practice. Ohlhausen previously headed the FTC’s Office of Policy Planning. A veteran of the law firm Wilkinson Barker Knauer, LLP, Ohlhausen is expected to remain on the FTC as a commissioner, the source said. The FTC, which has five commission seats, now has only Ohlhausen and Commissioner Terrell McSweeny, a Democrat. Two of the empty seats may go to Republicans, but the remaining seat must go either to a Democrat or an independent. A leading candidate for another Republican slot is Noah Phillips, an aide to Senator John Cornyn, according to the person briefed on the matter. White House spokeswoman Lindsay Walters said Wednesday the administration has “no announcement at this time.” Simons did not immediately return requests for comment. An FTC spokeswoman had no comment. The FTC has two main missions. One is to fight scams and deceptive advertising and the other to review mergers to ensure they comply with antitrust law. The FTC is currently reviewing Amazon.com Inc’s (AMZN.O) proposed $13.7 billion acquisition of Whole Foods Market Inc WFM.O. The FTC sued Qualcomm Inc (QCOM.O) in January over allegations of anticompetitive behavior to maintain a monopoly on the chips that let cell phones connect to mobile data networks. The FTC has sued to stop mergers deemed illegal, such as Staples’ attempt to buy rival Office Depot. It is in the process of deciding if Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc (WBA.O) will be allowed to merge with Rite Aid Corp (RAD.N) to create the largest U.S. drugstore chain. In June, fantasy sports companies FanDuel and DraftKings scrapped a plan to merge following an FTC legal challenge.
| 1 |
Top congressional Republicans and Democrats say they've reached a deal to allow President Obama to negotiate trade deals subject to an up-or-down vote from Congress.
The "fast-track" legislation comes as Obama seeks a sweeping trade deal with 11 Pacific nations. It would renew presidential authority to present trade deals that Congress can endorse or reject, but not amend.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership proposes a trade agreement involving the United States, Japan, Vietnam, Canada, Mexico and seven other Pacific-rim nations.
Labor unions and others say the Pacific pact would hurt U.S. job growth and encourage other countries to abuse workers and the environment. The Obama administration rejects those claims, and says U.S. goods and services must have greater access to foreign buyers.
| 0 |
A large cache of documents hacked from French Presidential Candidate Emmanuel Macron’s campaigning team have been dumped on the internet, with just hours to go until polling opens in the final round of voting. [The information includes genuine staffers’ personal and professional emails as well as campaign finance material and contracts, all of which were taken by anonymous hackers some weeks ago, Macron’s En Marche movement confirmed in a statement. However, they added that false documents had been mixed in to the file dump to “seed doubt and disinformation. ” Staffers said they would “take all measures” to uncover what happened. The incident is embarrassing for the campaign, which had previously denied reports that staff emails had been hacked. They were also unable to point out which documents were false. Links to the documents were posted to the internet chat site 4Chan shortly before midnight in France, just as the Presidential election entered a mandated media blackout. Traditionally no public discussion of the election takes place on the eve of polling day, nor on the day itself, to give voters time to make their own assessment of the campaign and vote accordingly. Consequently, Macron rival Marine Le Pen’s campaign team were unable to comment formally on the leak. However, Florian Philippot, one of Le Pen’s main advisors, asked in a tweet, “Will the #Macronleaks teach us something that investigative journalism deliberately buried?” He added “[I] fear democracy is wrecked”. Les #Macronleaks des choses que le journalisme d’investigation a délibérément tues ? Effrayant ce naufrage démocratique. — Florian Philippot (@f_philippot) May 5, 2017, France’s electoral commission moved quickly following the release of the documents to issue guidelines asking French media to refrain from covering the leaks. “Free and fair elections are at play,” a statement said, adding that penalties for rebroadcasting forged documents could include criminal charges. It also confirmed that it will be holding a meeting early Saturday to address the hack and leak. The incident arose just hours after the commission confirmed in a separate statement that it had called on the Interior Ministry to investigate claims by the Le Pen campaign that ballot papers nationwide are being tampered with nationwide, to the benefit of Macron, The Le Pen campaign said electoral administrators in several regions who receive ballot papers for both candidates have found the Le Pen ballot “systematically torn up. ”
| 0 |
House Democrats did something extraordinary today: they broke parliamentary procedure on the House floor and literally shamed Republicans after they blocked an important LGBT amendment from passing.Now this should come as no surprise. Republicans have always been hostile towards LGBT rights, and Democrats have been fighting them on the issue for decades. So what changed this time?Well, for starters, the amendment originally was slated to pass, with 218 members voting YEA, with more than 30 Republicans crossing the aisle to join every Democrat. The bill would have barred federal contractors from obtaining government work if they were found to discriminate against anyone in the LGBT community. This is something that has enjoyed broad bipartisan support for years.And it looked as though it was going to pass, and the issue could be a thing of the past.But then the TV voting monitor posted on C-SPAN showed that some of the votes from the Republicans were rescinded. The amendment narrowly failed 212-213. Republicans successfully convinced some of their colleagues to take the pandering cowards way out and turn their backs on those in the LGBT community, thus giving the green light for federal discrimination.Democrats, rightfully so, didn t like that. After thunderous boos from every Democratic member, they decided to publicly shame the Republican cowards by literally chanting shame while pointing their fingers at them from across the aisle.When the chair said There will be order, Democratic Rep. Gwen Moore shouted back, No there will not be. Democrats then set out a witch hunt to figure out who changed their votes. They were:Their offices haven t commented, so there is no telling as to why they changed their vote, who convinced them, and their reasoning for doing so. But if keeping to their history of being bigots, that s all the reason they need to be bigots.Watch House Democrats put Republicans in their place: Featured image via Win McNamee/Getty Images
| 1 |
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. lawmakers are pressing the nation’s top intelligence official to estimate the number of Americans ensnared in email surveillance and other such spying on foreign targets, saying the information was needed to gauge possible reforms to the controversial programs. Eight Democrats and six Republicans made the request to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper in a letter seen by Reuters on Friday, reflecting the continued bipartisan concerns over the scope of U.S. data espionage. “You have willingly shared information with us about the important and actionable intelligence obtained under these surveillance programs,” wrote the lawmakers, all members of the U.S. House of Representatives’ Judiciary Committee. “Now we require your assistance in making a determination that the privacy protections in place are functioning as designed.” They requested that Clapper provide the information about data collected under a statute, known as Section 702, by May 6. That law, set to expire at the end of 2017, enables an Internet surveillance program called Prism that was first disclosed in a series of leaks by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden some three years ago. Prism gathers messaging data from Alphabet’s Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple and other major tech companies that is sent to and from a foreign target under surveillance. Intelligence officials say data about Americans are “incidentally” collected during communication with a target reasonably believed to be living overseas. Critics see it as “back-door” surveillance on Americans without a warrant. A recently declassified November opinion from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a secretive body that oversees the legality of U.S. spy programs, rejected a constitutional challenge to rules permitting the FBI to access foreign intelligence data for use in domestic criminal investigations. The Republican-controlled House has voted overwhelmingly since the Snowden leaks to require U.S. agencies obtain a warrant before searching collected foreign intelligence for data belonging to Americans, but those proposals have gained minimal traction in the Senate. Civil liberties groups and Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, have previously requested information on the extent of U.S. data caught up in the foreign surveillance program. The Obama administration, however, has said it cannot provide a precise answer and that any estimate would require reviewing communications in a manner that would raise privacy concerns. In their letter to Clapper, the lawmakers said officials have demonstrated the feasibility of providing an estimate and that any one-time privacy concerns were acceptable in light of the importance of the information. James Sensenbrenner, Darrell Issa, Jim Jordan, Ted Poe, Jason Chaffetz, and Blake Farenthold were the Republicans to sign the letter. Jerrold Nadler, Zoe Lofgren, Hank Johnson, Ted Deutch, Cedric Richmond, Suzan DelBene, David Cicilline and John Conyers signed for the Democrats. Conyers is the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee.
| 1 |
WASHINGTON/NEW YORK (Reuters) - A U.S. congressional committee has demanded that former drug executive Martin Shkreli appear at a hearing on drug prices to testify about his former company’s decision to raise the price of a lifesaving medicine by more than 5,000 percent, congressional aides said on Wednesday. Shkreli, who is separately facing federal criminal charges that he defrauded investors, has been served with a subpoena to appear on Jan. 26 before the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the aides said. The Senate’s Special Committee on Aging, which is also investigating the company’s drug pricing practices, said on Wednesday that Shkreli has invoked the U.S. Constitution’s Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination, and has refused to produce subpoenaed documents. Shkreli, 32, fired back at lawmakers on Twitter, writing on Wednesday that the House was “busy whining to healthcare reporters about me appearing for their chit chat next week. Haven’t decided yet. Should I?” He declined an interview request. The outspoken entrepreneur sparked a firestorm last year after he raised the price of Daraprim, a decades-old treatment for a dangerous parasitic infection, to $750 a pill from $13.50 after acquiring it. The medicine once sold for $1 a pill. Shkreli pleaded not guilty last month to criminal charges that he ran his companies like a Ponzi scheme, using each subsequent company to pay off defrauded investors from a prior company. After his arrest, he stepped down as chief executive of Turing Pharmaceuticals and was fired as chief executive of KaloBios Pharmaceuticals Inc. KaloBios also filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Shkreli’s past companies also include Retrophin Inc, which sued him for alleged mismanagement. Testifying before Congress is risky for someone facing criminal charges because of the chance they could say something prosecutors would later use at a trial. For that reason, many such witnesses invoke the Fifth Amendment and refuse to answer questions. To even travel to Washington, Shkreli is required to first get the sign-off of a federal judge because his release on bond restricts him to certain parts of New York state. However, judges typically grant temporary travel waivers to white-collar defendants. U.S. Representative Elijah Cummings of Maryland, the top Democrat on the oversight committee, said the hearing will give Shkreli a chance to explain his views on drug pricing. “I have been trying for the better part of a year to get information from Martin Shkreli about his outrageous price increases, and he has obstructed our investigation at every turn,” Cummings said in a statement.
| 0 |
1 |
|
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The National Federation of Independent Business, a powerful lobbying group for U.S. small businesses, on Thursday threw its support behind a Republican tax reform bill in the U.S. House of Representatives after a key lawmaker proposed changes. “We are very grateful to Chairman Brady for listening to our concerns and working with NFIB to ensure that tax reform benefits the greatest possible number of American small business owners,” NFIB President Juanita Duggan said in a statement, referring to Representative Kevin Brady, who heads the House tax-writing panel. Earlier, Brady released an amendment to his own tax bill that would reduce the tax rate on the business income of small business owners.
| 0 |
(Reuters) - Former Wisconsin sheriff David Clarke, an African-American who criticized the Black Lives Mater movement and was previously under consideration for a position with the Trump administration, has joined a super political action committee that backs the president, officials said on Tuesday. Clarke, 61, will serve as spokesman and senior advisor for America First Action, his office and the political action committee said in two separate statements. “I will help make sure we elect the candidates who will do what they promise in support of President Trump’s agenda,” Clarke said in a statement from his office. “Just as important, I will see to it that the will of the American people is not derailed by the left or the self-serving Washington establishment,” he added. Clarke, who spoke at the Republican National Convention last summer and campaigned for then-presidential candidate Donald Trump, resigned his job on Thursday and said he would announce his plans this week. The 38-year law enforcement veteran was appointed Milwaukee County sheriff in 2002 and re-elected several times. Although he ran as a Democrat, he moved steadily to the right. “David Clarke is an American patriot, and we are very proud to welcome him,” America First Action President Brian Walsh said in the political action committee’s statement. Clarke has become one of the most polarizing critics of the Black Lives Matter movement, which grew out of protests against police killings of unarmed black men. Clarke said in May he was taking a job as assistant secretary in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, but the following month media reported he had withdrawn his acceptance of the job.
| 0 |
(Editor’s note: This story contains language that may offend readers in the fourth paragraph) By Scott Malone BOSTON (Reuters) - Years before Donald Trump dominated the news cycle with his style of angry politics, Maine Governor Paul LePage made headlines with a similarly brash approach. Since he was elected in 2010, the Republican has told critics of his decision to skip a civil rights breakfast to “kiss my butt” and accused a Democratic rival of forcing budget measures on taxpayers “without Vaseline.” But when LePage, the second U.S. governor to endorse Trump, recently left an obscenity-laced voicemail message for a lawmaker who he believed had called him a racist, he put his career in jeopardy. LePage’s widely circulated verbal attack, in which he called Democratic State Representative Drew Gattine a “little son-of-a-bitch, socialist cocksucker,” sparked the most intense firestorm of criticism the second-term governor has seen. Even legislative leaders from his own party called him into a closed-door meeting to discuss his future. The reaction shows that not all politicians can get away with the kind of bellicose approach that helped Trump wipe out his primary rivals and win the support of angry voters who feel U.S. politicians do not care about their problems. “Trump is a master of media and LePage is not. They are very different at the end of the day,” said Michael Franz, chairman of the government and legal studies department at Maine’s Bowdoin College. “Trump says he hates the media, but he works it very well. LePage just hates it.” The governor infamously joked in 2013 that he would like to blow up the offices of the Portland Press Herald newspaper, which he felt treated him unfairly. On Wednesday, LePage told reporters he had met with Gattine and apologized, and that he had no plans to resign from office. Asked what might change about his governing style, LePage responded that he would no longer speak with reporters. “I will no longer speak to the press ever again after today,” LePage said. “I’m serious. Everything will be put in writing. I am tired of being caught, the gotcha moments.” That came a day after LePage openly discussed the idea of stepping down in a regular monthly interview with a Maine radio station. He later backed away from his comments, and paraphrasing Mark Twain, said in a Twitter post, “The reports of my political demise are greatly exaggerated.” LePage endorsed Trump’s run in February, shortly after New Jersey Governor Chris Christie did. “I was Donald Trump before Donald Trump became popular,” LePage said at the time, saying that the wealthy New York businessman and reality TV star “could be one of the greatest presidents if he sits down and puts together a good team.” Trump has also praised LePage, saying that he would offer him a role in his administration “if he were available.” Both men describe their political styles as authentic and off-the-cuff and accuse more measured rivals of being career politicians who are out of touch with the needs of average voters. LePage’s brusqueness played well in Maine until recently. He won re-election in a three-way 2014 race with the support of 48 percent of voters with a wider margin of victory than the 38 percent he garnered in his first run, also a three-way race. Neil Levesque, executive director of the New Hampshire Institute of Politics said that success, coupled with Trump’s rise, could have emboldened LePage to double down on attack politics. “Almost anything goes now. You can call your opponents almost anything, you can threaten them,” Levesque said. “This is the new norm in American politics.”
| 0 |
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work said the Pentagon’s plan to truncate the Littoral Combat Ship program at 40 ships instead of 52 reflected budget pressures and was “not an indictment” of the program. Lockheed Martin Corp (LMT.N) and Australia’s Austal (ASB.AX) each build different models of the smaller, fast coastal warships. Carter said he wants the Navy to have a competition and pick just one supplier for future ships. Work said the Pentagon decided to buy two of the ships in fiscal 2017, instead of scaling orders back to just one ship as Defense Secretary Ash Carter had ordered in a memo late last year, at the Navy’s request. He said the move was meant to help ensure a smooth transition to a future competition by keeping both shipbuilders working for another year.
| 1 |
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter called his Japanese counterpart on Saturday to express regrets after an American working at a U.S. military base in Japan was arrested on suspicion of dumping the body of a Japanese woman. The case in Okinawa has sparked a protest from Tokyo and could add to resentment of the large U.S. military presence on the island, where Japanese have long been upset by crimes committed by Americans. It also is likely to stir anti-U.S. sentiment as President Barack Obama visits Japan next week. In his call to Japanese Defense Minister Gen Nakatani, Carter “extended his sincere apologies to the victim’s family and friends,” Defense Department spokesman Peter Cook said in a statement. “He also expressed his sympathies to the people of Japan,” the statement said. A 32-year-old American working at the base on Okinawa admitted to abandoning the corpse of a 20-year-old Japanese woman but did not comment about whether he had killed her, an Okinawa police spokesman said earlier this week. The Pentagon has said the man was a contractor but did not name him. The Pentagon statement said the Defense Department would cooperate with the Japanese government in the investigation and work to prevent similar incidents. Obama is going to Japan for a Group of Seven summit and also will become the first U.S. president to visit Hiroshima, a city destroyed by a U.S. atomic bomb 71 years ago in World War Two. Okinawa, the site of a bloody World War Two battle, hosts the bulk of U.S. military forces based in Japan since the war with U.S. installations taking up about 18 percent of the island. Earlier this year, a U.S. serviceman stationed in Okinawa was arrested on suspicion of raping a woman. In the most infamous post-war case involving Americans on Okinawa, three American servicemen raped a 12-year-old girl in 1995.
| 0 |
COLUMBUS, Ohio/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Voting is no easy task for Roland Gilbert. The 86-year-old retired Ohio lawyer, who is legally blind, completes his absentee ballot with help from a machine that magnifies the print. So the registered Democrat was not completely surprised to learn he had made an error in filling out his 2014 ballot, entering that day’s date in the birthdate field. What surprised him was that it cost him his vote. Local election officials rejected it because it did not perfectly match his registration information on file. “It didn’t seem right,” Gilbert said. “I felt foolish for making a silly mistake.” Laws passed by the Republican-led Ohio state legislature in 2014 require voters to accurately fill out their personal information on absentee or provisional ballots or they will be rejected - even if the votes are otherwise valid. The laws are being applied in a presidential election for the first time this year. A Reuters analysis found that where a voter lives can determine whether their provisional or absentee ballot counts in Ohio. The law requiring a perfect match on information such as name, address, birthdate, signature and ID number has been enforced unequally county to county, federal data and court documents show, with local officials sometimes using wide latitude in applying the standards. The disparity could hurt Democrats in Ohio, a vital battleground in the Nov. 8 election between Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton. The 14 Ohio counties with the most restrictive enforcement accounted for 53 percent of Ohio’s total vote in 2012 and gave Democratic President Barack Obama 60 percent of the votes he won in Ohio. More than half of the provisional and absentee votes discarded for minor errors in 2014 came from five large, Democratic-dominated urban counties: Lucas, home to the city of Toledo; Cuyahoga, which includes Cleveland; Franklin, home to the state capital, Columbus; Summit, which includes Akron, the fifth-largest city in the state; and Hamilton County, home of Cincinnati. While the number of votes rejected for technical reasons was small in the 2014 congressional election, when nearly 3,000 absentee and provisional ballots were thrown out, those totals are likely to swell in a presidential election, when more people will vote. The number of discarded ballots could go even higher in Ohio after a court ruled that tens of thousands of voters who had been purged from the state voter rolls can cast provisional ballots, expanding the possible pool of disputed votes. A provisional ballot is used to record a vote when there are questions about a voter’s eligibility. Election boards, split evenly between Republicans and Democrats in Ohio, then examine the provisional ballots to determine if the vote should count. “There are going to be thousands of indisputably registered and eligible voters in Ohio who are going to be disenfranchised solely because they made trivial, immaterial errors and omissions on forms,” said attorney Subodh Chandra, who has led a court challenge to the laws on behalf of a homeless coalition and the Ohio Democratic Party. A federal district judge threw out the provisions requiring a perfect match on personal information as discriminatory earlier this year, but most were later restored by the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The appeals court did remove the requirement that voters accurately fill in their address and birthdate on the absentee form - any vote cast by mail or in person prior to Election Day - but kept the requirement for the other fields on both types of ballots. The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday rejected without explanation a request for an emergency stay of the appeals court ruling that would have allowed ballots with those technical mistakes to be counted. A spokesman for Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, a Republican, said the 2014 laws were aimed at finding a balance between making it “easy to vote and hard to cheat” and that officials were striving to be more consistent in the law’s application. The office has issued a directive that mistakes in the address and birthdate fields of provisional ballots should not be the sole basis for rejection if a board can still identify the voter. Chandra and other critics say the Ohio laws are aimed at low-income and minority voters who move more often and have less flexibility with schedules, making them more likely to cast absentee or provisional ballots. They also are more likely to back Democrats. “It’s a clever scheme to shave off Democratic votes,” said Chandra, arguing the laws create a modern-day literacy test by requiring voters to read, write and understand voting forms without making any errors or leaving out information. Republican backers of the Ohio law reject the claims of racial or partisan bias. “It is just nonsense,” said Ohio State Senator Bill Coley, lead sponsor of one of the bills. “We aren’t trying to disallow their ballot, we are trying to make sure that every ballot that is cast was cast by an actual registered voter and you are cutting down on opportunities for shenanigans.” U.S. Election Assistance Commission records show Democratic-leaning Franklin, the state’s second-largest county, was the most strict in 2014, throwing out 651 ballots for technical errors including missing or incorrect Social Security numbers, zip codes, birthdates, cities or street names. Officials tossed five ballots because the voter wrote their name in cursive. Another seven were rejected because the voter mixed up two digits of their Social Security number, the federal data showed. Some 256 were rejected because the voter did not provide a birthdate. “We are not allowed to do anything other than what the law says,” said David Payne, deputy director of the Franklin County Board of Elections. “We can’t be arbitrary.” In Democratic-leaning Lucas County, the elections board rejected an absentee ballot in 2014 because the street name was misspelled as “Cuthberth” rather than “Cuthbert,” according to evidence presented in the lawsuit. Many smaller, heavily Republican rural counties did not reject any ballots for those reasons. In Wyandot County, ballots examined for the lawsuit found officials approved ballots without a valid street address, city or zip code, a wrong or missing birthdate, or a misspelled name. “We’re not monsters. We want to count everybody’s vote,” said Deb Passet, elections director for Wyandot County, a sparsely populated county south of Toledo where Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney won 59 percent of the vote in 2012. Election officials in rural, Republican-leaning Adams County are also more likely to forgive voters who make a mistake. “If there is an opening and they can help the voter out, that’s the way they will go,” said Mary Fannin, director of the county’s board of elections. Other states have tried to introduce similar exact-match information requirements. Georgia and Wisconsin also faced recent challenges that led to adjustments in laws requiring voters to provide letter-perfect personal identification information. The battle over the Ohio law is just one of several voting rights disputes complicating election forecasts in the state. In the last year, courts have also allowed the state to eliminate a period of early voting, known as Golden Week, when voters could register and cast a ballot on the same trip - a convenience that has been popular with minority voters. “People should not have to jump through all these hoops to get their votes counted in Ohio,” said Ohio Democratic Rep. Kathleen Clyde.
| 1 |
It is truly a shame that our nation has $25 MILLION dollars to waste on phony climate change. That money could have gone a long way in helping children and adults who are suffering and dying of malnourishment. This President and the Democrats who support his phony war on climate change should be ashamed of themselves. A $25 million U.S.-funded project to help Guatemala combat global warming is being slammed as another taxpayer-backed boondoggle after a new audit highlighted a series of problems including numerous inaccuracies in the group s work and a failure to produce a required long-term plan.Without the plan, the government audit warned, the funds could be wasted. The grant for the Climate, Nature and Communities in Guatemala Program was awarded to the nonprofit Rainforest Alliance in February 2013 by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) as part of a broader effort to fight climate change abroad.Meanwhile, Guatemala is ranked as the 7th poorest nation in the world. Parentless children like Elvin USAID s Office of Inspector General, which issued the audit last month, said the program was set up to help organizations and small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Guatemala improve climate-change strategies and strengthen local NGOs so the country s environment could be conserved without future U.S. assistance. The report noted that as of February 2015, $10.5 million had been disbursed so far.The audit acknowledged the program was making some progress, but it also alleged a laundry list of violations including that the reported results were not accurate.The watchdog reported that data-testing revealed 22 errors in the accounting of whether the program was on track.One example given was that the Rainforest Alliance reported 162,356 hectares of land now devoted to timber and nontimber products such as cacao and honey. But a review found the group had counted the same hectares multiple times.The Rainforest Alliance also reported it had created 30,149 part-time and permanent jobs generated through new sustainable, productive activities undertaken by program-assisted community-based organizations and SMEs. However, the audit found 23,936 of those jobs may have lasted no more than a day.The audit also found that a required comprehensive sustainability plan on how the program will continue after USAID s assistance ends was not completed, despite it being required and the project having been underway for two years. Without a sustainability plan, the funds used to help the Guatemalan Government and other partners manage the country s natural resources to mitigate the harmful effects of climate change could be wasted, the report said.The report was first flagged by Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group which called the project an egregious waste of taxpayer dollars and par for the course with virtually all of the Obama administration s green ventures, which have largely failed after getting hundreds of millions in federal funds. Among other violations, the audit also found that while the Rainforest Alliance was supposed to contribute at least $3.75 million as a form of cost-sharing, the $1.79 million it reported as having contributed by December 2014 included $26,708 of U.S. funds it received under a separate project.The auditors also found that participants didn t undergo background checks, breaking a government funding rule that background checks must be performed on anyone seeking to participate in USAID-sponsored training. FOX NewsIf you d like to help one or more of these malnourished children in Guatemala, click HERE to donate.
| 0 |
TAIPEI (Reuters) - Taiwan’s policy making body on China, the Mainland Affairs Council, said on Saturday that China should look at the call between U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen “calmly”. “We call on China to face the new situation in the Asia-Pacific region and work with us towards developing a benign cross-strait relationship and create a new way that will benefit the development of peace, prosperity and stability for the region,” it said in a statement.
| 0 |
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House and U.S. intelligence chiefs Wednesday backed making permanent a law that allows for the collection of digital communications of foreigners overseas, escalating a fight in Congress over privacy and security. The law, enshrined in Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, is due to expire on December 31 unless Congress votes to reauthorize it, but is considered vital by U.S. intelligence agencies. Privacy advocates have criticized the law though for allowing the incidental collection of data belonging to millions of Americans without a search warrant. The push to make the law permanent may lead to a contentious debate over renewal of Section 702 in Congress, where lawmakers in both parties are deeply divided over whether to adopt transparency and oversight reforms. “We cannot allow adversaries abroad to cloak themselves in the legal protections we extend to Americans,” White House Homeland Security Adviser Tom Bossert wrote in an editorial published in the New York Times newspaper on Wednesday. U.S. Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, speaking on behalf of other intelligence agency leaders, also told the Senate Intelligence Committee panel on Wednesday that the statute should be made permanent, saying it was necessary to keep the United States safe from national security threats. NSA Director Rogers added that the law had been vital to preventing terrorism in allied countries as well. Fourteen Republican senators, including every Republican member of the Senate intelligence panel, introduced a bill on Tuesday that would make part of Section 702 permanent. The statute, which grants the National Security Agency a considerable freedom in the collection of foreigners’ digital communications, normally comes with a “sunset” clause, meaning that roughly every five years lawmakers need to reconsider its impact on privacy and civil liberties. Intelligence Director Coats said it was not feasible for the NSA to provide an estimate of the number of Americans whose communications are ensnared incidentally under Section 702. Coats and other officials had previously told Congress they would attempt to share an estimate publicly before the statute expires. A frustrated Democratic Senator Ron Wyden, who has asked for such an estimate for several years, said Coats “went back on a pledge.” Privacy advocates criticized the push to make Section 702 permanent, arguing that regular reviews of the law were necessary to conduct appropriate oversight and prevent potential abuses. “After months of criticizing the government for allegedly spying on his presidential campaign, President Trump is now hypocritically endorsing a bill that would make permanent the NSA authority that is used to spy on Americans without a warrant,” said Neema Singh Guliani, legislative counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union. Disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden in 2013 revealed the sweeping nature of 702 surveillance, prompting outrage internationally and embarrassing some U.S. technology firms shown to be involved in a program known as Prism. Last week, Facebook (FB.O), Amazon (AMZN.O), Alphabet Inc’s Google (GOOGL.O) sent a letter to Congress urging lawmakers to adopt several reforms to the law, including codifying the recent termination of a type of NSA surveillance that collected Americans’ communications with someone living overseas that merely mentioned a foreign intelligence target. Making the law permanent without changes would preclude codifying that change. Reuters reported in March that the Trump administration supported renewal of Section 702 without any changes, citing an unnamed White House official, but it was not clear at the time whether it wanted the law made permanent. (This version of the story corrects paragraph 14 to add dropped words “embarrassing some U.S. technology firms involved in”)
| 1 |
Home This Month Popular Is Western Civilization Worth Saving? Is Western Civilization Worth Saving? Beau Albrecht
My father was a high-ranking student radical poobah and still thinks Castro is the bees' knees. Although this makes me technically a red diaper baby, I rejected all that baloney early on. These days, I write stories - mostly comedy science fiction - as well as maintain a blog mainly about dating advice, political commentary, and my writing projects. November 4, 2016 Politics
By 2050, it’s predicted the USA will no longer have a white majority, which in 1960 was 90%. For this, we can thank Ted Kennedy’s Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which the politicians swore up and down wouldn’t change the American ethnic composition. In Europe, due to declining native birth rates and mass immigration , this will eventually come to pass for several other nations later this century, all according to the Coudenhove-Kalergi Plan . The leftists, with their really big hearts , think all this will be wonderful.
Globalism and cultural Marxism are the driving forces behind population replacement policies, but unawareness and apathy are almost as much of a problem . Some think that if Western civilization will go down the toilet, they should just “go with the flow” and enjoy the ride all the way down the tubes. Thanks to media propaganda and educational indoctrination, they have no idea that their own civilization is worth anything, and don’t have the slightest concern for their own posterity. Still, they’re pretty naive to believe that things can’t turn far worse within their own lifetimes. Why this is bad (for those who need reminding) In the future, is this going to get better, or worse?
If trends continue unabated, the founding peoples will lose control over their destiny. History shows that when this happens, the results are not good. Pillaging and plundering is a more genteel affair in modern times (though not always ) but you’re still not going to like it. Will your new rulers say, “Since things have changed so much, how about we abolish Affirmative Action and set-asides to show we’ve transcended race?” Don’t count on it. More likely, they’ll double down on these preferential treatment programs, and come up with new ones, and you will have no chance to block the spoils systems.
That’s just the beginning, too. The “ diversification ” of cities for the last several decades has been bad—Detroit, need I say more?—and riots really are getting out of hand. Now imagine what it will be like when you have no hope of influencing things like Section 8 housing moving into your neighborhood, or if you’ll get any real police protection.
This is what we’re facing if the Aztlán crowd takes over the Southwest, the community agitators get in charge of the big cities, and together their constituency has an electoral majority controlling the Federal government. (Also remember that they’ve been told since the 1960s that you’re evil oppressors responsible for all their problems.) Parts of “flyover country” might be able to hold out for a while, but nothing short of forming their own country will stop the advance of “progress”. If it were ever to come to secession, they’ll be surrounded, outnumbered, and outgunned. Let’s keep things from getting to that point. Is there any hope? “Refugees” have taken on the characteristics of invaders
I’ve painted a grim picture, but I have to be realistic. As for what will happen later, things only look worse; Jean Raspail’s Camp Of The Saints describes a bleak future like that. This isn’t just the USA on the line, but Western Europe too, and perhaps Eastern Europe and Australia in time. If we want to keep from disappearing into the endless night, the time to act is now.
Sometimes, with luck, sovereignty can be regained: for example, the Spanish Reconquista, or the nations of the Balkans rising after a few centuries under the Turkish yoke. However, the results aren’t guaranteed; some nations may never recover. In these examples, the “dhimmis” were subjugated under military occupation, but they were not outnumbered in their own lands. The founding populations must not allow themselves to be dispossessed in their own countries in the first place.
Granted, the dark forces of globalism are very powerful—and they’d like us to think they’re invincible—but they must be stopped. They also want you to think they’re smarter than you and know what’s good for you . (If they’d simply focus on getting richer, and cease their social engineering, they’d have far less to answer for.) Not only has our political establishment failed us, they’re working against the public . It won’t be easy, but we must reassert control over our destiny. Do we deserve to be dispossessed? Brainwashed SJWs welcoming their own destruction
Some will even say—often with haughty condescension—that if we lose our countries, then we deserve this fate. Ignoring for a moment the sheer snottiness, as well as the “might makes right” argument incongruent with the usual rhetoric of fairness by the “prepare to be assimilated, resistance is futile” crowd, let’s consider the following facts: In the 1920s, a Communist propaganda campaign was launched in the Western world. In the 1930s, this mutated into cultural Marxism and kicked into high gear during the 1960s. Most people have no idea of the scope of it all, or where things like political correctness came from. Only senior citizens remember what it was like living in a fairly normal country. Even fewer never grew up exposed to this propaganda in one form or another. The rest of us have been indoctrinated from an early age by the mass media and educational establishment. The Western political tradition lately is about openness and democracy. For this reason, we don’t conduct political change by torches and pitchforks these days. We play fair, even if our enemies often don’t . Further, political correctness encourages the “disadvantaged” to have solidarity, but vilifies the same in the majority. This is one reason why we’re on the defensive, and (for now) usually losing. Most people only have a vague idea about the extent of managed democracy and sheer corruption. Those against population replacement policies mostly put their faith in the mainstream opposition parties, not realizing that they’ve sold out to deep-pockets globalists too. “Mainstream” conservatism is a controlled opposition , providing token resistance at best.
So with that extent of treachery, disinformation, limited options for resistance, and managed democracy, it’s grotesquely dishonest for the defeatists to tell us that we’re losing a fair fight! As for their opinion that we should just give up, I have one word: No.
Whenever you hear the defeatists crowing that this is inevitable or that we “deserve” it, remember that they want to demoralize you and anyone else listening. (The same goes for when they tell you that loving your people and wanting your posterity to survive is “hatred”.) Suppose someone is losing his home by a devious swindle, orchestrated by crooks widely lauded for their fairness, caring, and honesty. It would be the height of arrogance to tell the defrauded that he deserved it and should shut up about it and let it happen. The depopulation and population replacement agenda “First, the EU has to accept at least a million asylum-seekers annually for the foreseeable future… The EU should provide 15,000 euros ($16,800) per asylum-seeker for each of the first two years to help cover housing, health-care and education costs—and to make accepting refugees more appealing to member states.”
Don’t be fooled: this isn’t happening because some vague, invisible force called “progress” is pushing things inevitably in this direction. No, it’s being actively promoted by globalist interests that have adopted cultural Marxism as a means of control.
Why are native fertility rates declining below replacement level? The major factors are: Women are encouraged to spend their 20s partying and their 30s trying to get rich in a cube farm. Encouraging them to to make starting a family last priority often leaves them very unhappy over the long term, and many will miss the chance to begin. Good economy tends to be positively correlated with higher fertility rates. During recessions, births go down. The implications are obvious. If less tax money was taken from working citizens for costly social services programs and spit-in-your-eye wars, then they’d be able to afford more children. Sending the guilty to prison (instead of bailing them out) when they crash the economy might be a good indirect measure too. About a third of American babies conceived end up aborted . (Thanks, feminism!) The same leftists who think this is wonderful will scream bloody murder whenever a savage killer on Death Row is executed, but all that’s another matter.
Because of declining fertility rates, the globalists tell us that we must open the floodgates of Third World immigration to prop up the population and support the aging citizens. So they’ve fed us poison, and to soothe the symptoms, they want to feed us another kind of poison. To hell with that!
Granted, keeping Social Security going in the USA will be a challenge. Still, it’s pretty uncertain that newly-arriving immigrants—if they become the majority—will be able or willing to support millions of elderly “gringos”. As for future European retirees, will they be well cared for by “refugees” from Africa and the Middle East? The way things are now, many of them prefer rioting , looting, and collecting welfare over working. So these are going to be the people propping up the European retirement programs?
Dispossession is inevitable only if we let it happen. For now, we must educate the rest of the public about what’s going on, and convince them that their future is worth saving and their posterity is worth preserving. Once we’ve achieved critical mass, we can confront the political establishment and get the government to start working for us rather than against us What’s in it for us? Whenever someone writes that Western civilization is nothing but injustice and oppression, they’re using technology we invented to complain about us.
It’s fashionable—especially in academia—to bash Western civilization. We’re not perfect, but nobody else is either. The truth is that we’re a creative, dynamic, and industrious people. Some of us are under the impression that we don’t have any culture (only other people do) but that’s mistaken. I could spend all day listing our major artists, composers, poets, philosophers, writers, theologians, and the like, but I only would scratch the surface.
Other cultures have made notable contributions—particularly East Asia and the Middle East—but the fact is that the majority of science and technology that makes life comfortable today originated in the Western world. Electricity, motorized transportation, refrigeration, telecommunications, computers (need I go on)? Yep, that was us. We shared our medical advances with the rest of the world, increasing longevity and quality of life around the globe. Whether the world’s future looks more like Star Trek or more like Blade Runner may have a lot to do with whether or not our people survive.
Finally, most of us are going to live out our lives in our native countries. Do we want them to stay the same nations we grew up in? Some time in the future, today’s youth will be running the show while we’re elderly. What kind of a place do we want it to be by then? Western civilization is great; let’s keep it going.
| 0 |
What happens when the most vile, sexist chauvinist is elected President of the United States (after 11 women accuse him of sexual harassment)? Women take to the streets, and fight for their right to be treated like human beings.And that s exactly what happened.It s no secret: Donald Trump s inauguration had poor attendance (250,000 compared to Obama s 1.8 million). He promised that it would be a huge and glorious event, and it wasn t not by a long shot.But do you want to know was a huge a glorious event?The Women s March.According to the Washington Post:Organizers, who originally sought a permit for a gathering of 200,000, said Saturday they now expect as many as a half million participants potentially dwarfing Friday s inaugural crowd.The March is expecting up to 500,000 attendees, doubling that of the President of the United States inauguration. A mom from Hawaii started it all on Facebook just after the election, and she has successfully beaten out the efforts of a $200 million inauguration for the leader of the free world.Say that out loud if need be.The D.C. Metro was swamped, forcing long and crowded lines that took several hours to overcome, and parking in the downtown Capitol Hill area had been full as early as 8 a.m., forcing other protestors to seek parking miles away.You didn t see any of this at Trump s inauguration.This is what happens when Republican men mess with the women of America. Ask Clarence Thomas and Todd Aiken what it s like. Now Donald Trump can be added to that good old boys club that s going to blow it for the GOP in 2018.Trump has put the Violence Against Women on the chopping block and is now being sued in court by one of his accusers, and women are more than ready to take him on full force and this march is just the beginning.Feminist icon Gloria Steinem was amazed by the size of the crowd, saying, This is the upside of the downside. This is an outpouring of democracy like I ve never seen in my very long life. When Gloria Steinem who has participated in hundreds of women s marches in her life is amazed, that says something.The resistance is being led by the women of America.Hell hath no fury like a scorned woman, and Trump and the Congressional GOP are soon going to realize that.Featured image via Twitter
| 1 |
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio might easily win a second term, all thanks to the state and federal prosecutors clearing two separate probes into his campaign fundraising practices. [Addressing the decision Thursday afternoon in City Hall, de Blasio repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, deflecting reporters’ questions by responding “the issue has been exhaustively investigated” and told reporters this would be the final time he would discuss this matter. “It simply confirms what I’ve said all along and I was obviously pleased to see the issue closed,” de Blasio said in a combative news conference with reporters. “My staff, my colleagues and I have acted in a manner that was legal and appropriate and ethical throughout. What matters is the fact that this was extensively investigated for a year and no charges have been brought and this is the end of the matter. ” De Blasio has been the subject of multiple federal and state investigations since taking office in 2014. Federal investigations centered around the mayor’s scheme with donors who contributed to his 2013 mayoral election campaign, while the state focused on de Blasio’s fundraising operation of his unsuccessful efforts to help Democrats regain control of the State Senate in 2014, along with his 2013 nonprofit campaign ‘Campaign for One New York.’ The surprise Thursday morning announcement from both federal and state prosecutors, issued just minutes apart, announced that neither would bring any criminal charges against the mayor or his aides. In a statement released Thursday morning, acting U. S. Attorney Joon H. Kim, said a “thorough investigation” was conducted regarding the mayor soliciting donations from those who sought political favors and found “difficulty in proving criminal intent in corruption schemes where there is no evidence of personal profit. ” The Manhattan District Attorney’s office announced its decision in a letter to the state Board of Election. The critical and detailed letter of the “extensive investigation” resulted in the conclusion not to bring charges since the mayor and his aides relied “on the advice of counsel. ” However, Vance emphasized the lack of an indictment didn’t constitute “an endorsement of the conduct at issue. ” When questioned about Vance assessment that criticized his action, de Blasio said he doesn’t “share their assessment. ” “They have an assessment, I don’t share their assessment,” de Blasio responded. “They had to make a judgment on whether anything inappropriate happened and their judgment was it did not. ” The move to conclude de Blasio parallel criminal probes came just days after Preet Bharara, the U. S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, was fired by President Trump. Bharara led the investigation into the mayor fundraising after a lead investigator at the state Board of Elections asked prosecutors to investigate whether de Blasio broke the law by funneling campaign contributions to Democratic state Senate candidates through state committee groups to evade donation contribution limits. Just last month, de Blasio met with Bharara voluntary for four hours regarding the probe. The meeting was considered to be the final step in determining whether or not charges would be brought. Since the meeting with Bharara, de Blasio repeatedly refused to go into detail about what was discussed due to the matter being an active investigation. Now with the investigation closed, half the questions the mayor faced during Thursday press conference were about disclosing the details of the interview. “What matters is the fact that this was extensively investigated for a year and no charges have been brought and this is the end of the matter,” de Blasio responded. De Blasio refused to comment on whether it was a coincidence that Bharara was fired just days before the investigation was dropped and his personal feelings towards the former U. S. attorney. “Again, I am not going to comment on [Bharara] at this moment,” de Blasio said. “Personally, I appreciate him and his office conducting a diligent investigation and made the determination on a timely basis. ” Regarding his scheme of donors calling him for a favor, de Blasio defended the issue, arguing that it is “normal” for him to receive concerns from any individual and approach the city agencies to “assess the situation. ” If anyone brings an issue to me, an elected official, community leader, a business person, an individual, we pass that to an agency to assess the situation to come up with a determination,” de Blasio said. “I think it is normal for an elected official to receive concerns from people and pass them along for an agency to assess. That’s how we have done things, that’s how we will continue to do things. ”
| 0 |
You just can t make this level of cronyism up. It s a blatant disregard for laws, rules and just about everything else unethical. But this is the Clintons so the rules don t apply to them. They are sickeningly corrupt grifters who have been able to get away with just about everything for decades. It s time to call them out and hold them accountable for their lawlessness. The American people need to be able to trust their government will follow the rule of law. The time is now President Trump tweeted out to call out the FBI s Andrew McCabe on his cronyism with the Clintons and misuse of FBI email:President Trump tweeted Sunday that FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe allegedly used his official agency email account to promote his wife s failed 2015 attempt to win, as a Democrat, a Virginia state Senate seat..@FoxNews-FBI s Andrew McCabe, in addition to his wife getting all of this money from M (Clinton Puppet), he was using, allegedly, his FBI Official Email Account to promote her campaign. You obviously cannot do this. These were the people who were investigating Hillary Clinton. Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 24, 2017 The president has long been a critic of the FBI s cronyism with the Clintons. Our previous report on what went on when Andrew McCabe s wife ran for Virginia state senate is unbelievably corrupt:OUR REPORT ON THE CLINTON CRONY BACK IN OCTOBER SPELLS OUT THE CORRUPTION:How much more criminal activity are American voters willing to overlook? Have we, as Americans gotten to the point that no crime committed by Hillary or anyone attached to Hillary will disqualify her from being elected to the highest office in our nation? Are we willing to accept that we can no longer trust anyone working for a government organization in America? The political organization of Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, an influential Democrat with longstanding ties to Bill and Hillary Clinton, gave nearly $500,000 to the election campaign of the wife of an official at the Federal Bureau of Investigation who later helped oversee the investigation into Mrs. Clinton s email use.Campaign finance records show Mr. McAuliffe s political-action committee donated $467,500 to the 2015 state Senate campaign of Dr. Jill McCabe, who is married to Andrew McCabe, now the deputy director of the FBI.The Virginia Democratic Party, over which Mr. McAuliffe exerts considerable control, donated an additional $207,788 worth of support to Dr. McCabe s campaign in the form of mailers, according to the records. That adds up to slightly more than $675,000 to her candidacy from entities either directly under Mr. McAuliffe s control or strongly influenced by him. The figure represents more than a third of all the campaign funds Dr. McCabe raised in the effort.Mr. McAuliffe and other state party leaders recruited Dr. McCabe to run, according to party officials. She lost the election to incumbent Republican Dick Black.A spokesman for the governor said he supported Jill McCabe because he believed she would be a good state senator. This is a customary practice for Virginia governors Any insinuation that his support was tied to anything other than his desire to elect candidates who would help pass his agenda is ridiculous. Among political candidates that year, Dr. McCabe was the third-largest recipient of funds from Common Good VA, the governor s PAC, according to campaign finance records. Dan Gecker received $781,500 from the PAC and $214,456 from the state party for a campaign that raised $2.9 million, according to records; and Jeremy McPike received $803,500 from the PAC and $535,162 from the state party, raising more $3.8 million that year for his candidacy.The governor could recall only one meeting with Mr. McCabe when he and other state Democrats met with the couple on March 7, 2015, to urge Dr. McCabe to run, according to the spokesman.The FBI said in a statement that during his wife s campaign Mr. McCabe played no role, attended no events, and did not participate in fundraising or support of any kind. Months after the completion of her campaign, then-Associate Deputy Director McCabe was promoted to Deputy, where, in that position, he assumed for the first time, an oversight role in the investigation into Secretary Clinton s emails. FBI officials said that after that meeting with the governor in Richmond on March 7, Mr. McCabe sought ethics advice from the bureau and followed it, avoiding involvement with public corruption cases in Virginia, and avoiding any campaign activity or events.Mr. McCabe s supervision of the Clinton email case in 2016 wasn t seen as a conflict or an ethics issue because his wife s campaign was over by then and Mr. McAuliffe wasn t part of the email probe, officials said. Once I decided to run, Dr. McCabe said, my husband had no formal role in my campaign other than to be a supportive husband to me and our children. As a federal official everyone who participated in our campaign understood and respected that he could not participate. Mr. McCabe is a longtime FBI official who focused much of his career on terrorism. His wife is a hospital physician who campaigned in northern Virginia, where the couple live with their children.The 2015 Virginia State senate race was Dr. McCabe s first run for office and her campaign spent $1.8 million. The race was part of Mr. McAuliffe s failed effort to win a Democratic majority in the Virginia legislature, which would have given him significantly more sway in Richmond, the state capital.Mr. McAuliffe has been a central figure in the Clintons political careers for decades. In the 1990s, he was Bill Clinton s chief fundraiser and he remains one of the couple s closest allies and public boosters. Mrs. Clinton appeared with him in northern Virginia in 2015 as he sought to increase the number of Democrats in the state legislature. For entire story: WSJ
| 0 |
Lady Gaga, who protested in front of Trump Towers against Trump s election and mocked Melania Trump for wanting to work on the prevention of bullying in schools, says it s important to have tolerance for others in the video below: Comedian Kathy Griffin goes on expletive rant. We re not sure how many times she tells Trump to, F*ck off, but it s quite a few. We re pretty sure her outrageous behavior based on her abject hate for Donald Trump would be considered bullying by teachers and parents alike. But then again, Hollywood celebrities and those on the Left are experts at telling us and our children how to behave. Rules and socially acceptable behavior just don t apply to them.Watch full-fledged bully Kathy Griffin s embarrassing anti-Trump, F*ck You rant:(WARNING*** Vile language***)In a much less offensive tweet, Adam Levine had this to say about Donald Trump on Twitter (you know social media, where the celebrities in the anti-bully video warn kids are bullied).Donald Trump is one slip into a vat of toxic waste away from becoming an ACTUAL comic book super villain. Adam Levine (@adamlevine) November 8, 2012Here s Cher calling Trump a F*cking idiot and Hitler in front of a crowd of Hillary supporters. Remember, she s a role model for kids of how not to bully other people right?
| 0 |
At a rally last year, Donald Trump said there was a 100 percent chance he would save the jobs at Carrier, the heating and air-conditioning manufacturer. The deal wasn t a very good one because Indiana taxpayers will shoulder some of the costs of Trump s unfortunate attempt to promote himself. At the same Carrier factory where Trump boasted of having crafted the deal to save jobs, it has begun laying off workers. 338 employees were just laid off. One female employee did an interview with The New Yorker and she didn t hold back.Brenda Darlene Battle, 55, worked at the Carrier Corporation for the past 25 years. Trump came in there to the factory last December and blew smoke up our asses, Battle told The New Yorker. He wasn t gonna save those jobs. And, if that s the case, he would have saved us and Rexnord, a company around the corner from us that makes parts. She said that Trump supporters at the factory have gone quiet since the layoffs began. We had a mix of Trump supporters and Clinton supporters at the factory, I d say. The ones that really supported him are quiet right now, she said. Some of them got let go yesterday, too. She said that some of them wore the hats. Not anymore, though, in reference to the red Make America Great Again hats. Personally, I think the President is a rubber room politician. He s crazy. He needs a straitjacket. He s in there for his self. He s not in there to help America keep jobs. Because if he was we wouldn t be in the predicament that we re in every day, she continued. He keeps howling, Make America great. But he can t make America great if all the jobs are leaving the States and going to Mexico. People can t support their families. As for Trump s visit last December to Carrier, she said she thought it was all for show. I think the C.E.O. of Carrier and Trump was in bed together the whole time, she said. That day Trump came to Carrier, those two were too chummy. The way they sniggled and giggled. That sneaky kind of sh*t-eating grin. As for Ms. Battle s plans now, she said she s going to be taking it very easy for a few months and do some of the things that my dad wants to do. She added that her 77-year-old father thinks Trump blew smoke up our asses, too.The layoffs must really sting for the Trump supporting Carrier employees during Made in America week.Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images.
| 1 |
Harney County resident Jarvis Kennedy has a message for the out-of-state terrorists who have taken over Oregon s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. Get the hell out of here. Mr. Kennedy, who is a Burns Paiute Tribal Councilman, spoke at a meeting of the council on Wednesday, saying the armed militants occupying the wildlife refuge are unwelcome and unwanted. His comments were met with a round of thundering applause from those in attendance. We as Harney County citizens don t need some clown to come in here and stand up for us, Kennedy said. They just need to get the hell out of here. Councilman Kennedy began his remarks by comparing the government s treatment of Natives to those of the terrorist organization occupying Malheur. I got a question for the world, he said. What if it was a bunch of Natives that went out there and overtook that or any federal land? What would the outcome be? Think about that. What would happen? Would they let us come into town and get supplies and re-up? For those unfamiliar with the history, Malheur National Wildlife Refuge was settled by the Paiute and other Native American tribes some 11,000 years before it was declared a sanctuary for native bird species by president Theodore Roosevelt, in 1908.Mr. Kennedy s ancestors were removed from the land by the federal government.The hypocrisy of those who support the YallQaeda terrorists knows no bounds. These are people who deny that the federal government has authority to remove people from their land. Clearly, if that is the case, the land belongs to the local tribes that had lived there for thousands of years before the federal government removed them, not ignorant militiamen from Nevada, Florida, Arizona or any other state of the non-Oregon variety. We don t need them to back us up, Councilman Kennedy told the crowd. We didn t ask them here. We don t want them here. Mr. Kennedy made it clear that, in spite of right wing propaganda to the contrary, the armed men occupying the wildlife refuge are terrorists. They say they don t want to bother the community, he said angrily. But you know what? Our little kids are sitting at home right now, when they should be at school. They re jeopardizing and they re scaring everyone. Watch Councilman Kennedy s speech published by KGW in Portland via YouTube: Local tribal members are not the only Harney County residents enraged over the out-of-state terrorist occupation of Malheur.A long list of organizations have denounced the Bundy terrorists, including groups that represent Harney County farmers and ranchers, such as the Oregon Cattleman s Association and the Rural Organizing Project.The group Oregon Wild sternly denounced the Bundy s and their supporters as domestic terrorists, holding a community hostage for their own political gain. The dictionary definition of the word terrorism is the use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims. This word should not be used lightly, but it is exactly what the extremist group currently occupying Malheur National Wildlife Refuge is attempting to do, said Oregon Wild Executive Director Sean Stevens.Even the Hammonds, the two men these terrorists are supposed to be defending, have made it clear that they do not agree with or support the actions of the men who are terrorizing Harney County.As Portland, Oregon s KGW reports here, Groups representing businesses, wildlife and residents in Harney County have released statements about the protest. None supported the armed occupation at the wildlife refuge. The men holed up in Malheur National Wildlife Refuge have deluded themselves into believing that they are heroes, fighting for people not strong enough to fight for themselves.Harney county residents make it clear that these armed lunatics are living in a fantasy world. They neither want or need help from the delusional nut jobs that have descended on their community. The citizens see these men for exactly what they are, domestic terrorists attempting to exploit the Hammonds conviction for poaching and arson, in order to further their own political agenda.As Harney County Sheriff David Ward points out here, the Bundys and their followers are not there to help anyone but themselves and their anti-government agenda. These men came to Harney County claiming to be part of militia groups supporting local ranchers, when in reality these men had alternative motives to attempt to over throw the county and federal government in hopes to spark a movement across the United States. Instead of defending the local citizens, as the Bundy terrorists claim they re doing, they are terrorizing a small community that never asked them to come and very clearly wants them to leave.Featured image via screencapture
| 0 |
LONDON (Reuters) - British defense minister Gavin Williamson said on Wednesday it was up to Prime Minister Theresa May to decide who serves in her top team, responding to a question about the political future of aid minister Priti Patel. The prime minister makes her own decision on actually who is serving in her cabinet, and they re only the prime minister s decisions, he told reporters in Brussels.
| 0 |
Two years ago, it seemed almost impossible that Tracy Morgan would ever perform comedy again: On June 7, 2014, he was critically injured in a car crash when a struck the back of a luxury van he was traveling in. A fellow passenger, James McNair (known as Jimmy Mack) was killed three other passengers were injured and Mr. Morgan was airlifted by helicopter to a hospital. A monthslong recovery process followed. Incredibly, just over a year later, Mr. Morgan was back at “Saturday Night Live,” the NBC sketch comedy series where he broke through as a cast member in the late 1990s, hosting its broadcast of Oct. 17, 2015. He revisited popular “S. N. L. ” characters he had performed in the past and reunited with his “30 Rock” Alec Baldwin, Jane Krakowski, Jack McBrayer and Tina Fey, the “30 Rock” creator and “S. N. L. ” alumna. On Thursday, Mr. Morgan received an Emmy Award nomination as an outstanding guest actor in a comedy series for the “Saturday Night Live” episode he hosted. In a phone interview, he spoke candidly and emotionally about his road to this moment. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation. How are you feeling today? Kind of emotional. Very thankful. Just overwhelmed. I’ve been crying all morning. Because when I got the word, my whole last two years — my whole life, really — just flashed right before me. It just brought to mind what my family went through, what the doctors went through, what my fans went through. What Jimmy Mack’s family went through. What everybody went through. It’s been difficult. It’s still overwhelming to me. I’m trying to fight it right now. Win or lose, this one is for Jimmy Mack. This one is for my boy. What was it like to be asked to come back to host “Saturday Night Live”? It wasn’t even like that. For many years, Lorne Michaels is like a dad to me. That’s just the way our relationship is. The minute it happened, Lorne called my wife a million times to see what was going on. He’s always been there for me. I remember being in my car one day, talking to Lorne Michaels on the phone, and I just broke down and I said, “Lorne, I want to come home. ” And he said to me, “The door’s always open. ” And a week later, I got the call: You’re hosting on Oct. 17. I love Lorne Michaels like I love my daddy. He’s always taken care of me. Were you anxious on the night of your show? It felt like the first day I was ever there. I was nervous. When you’re doing the dress rehearsal, there’s a wardrobe person — her name is Donna — she pulls you from set to set, because you have to change. So I started to get in my own head, and thinking that the audience was looking at me like I was crippled or something was wrong with me. In between dress and air, I spoke to Lorne. I said: “Lorne, I don’t know if I can do this. It seems like the audience is feeling sorry for me. ” He said, “Tracy, they don’t care about the funny — they’re just happy you’re here. ” [chokes up] In that moment, I shed my tears, and I said, I’m going to let go. This young cast is giving me 100 percent, and I’m going to give them 150. And we had fun. You’ve continued to perform comedy in clubs and theaters. How has that been going? I just want to spread my love. God gave me a tool to do it — it’s called a sense of humor. You go down to earth, and you spread your love with your comedy. Now I’m going hard, giving them everything I got, every show. The world that we live in today, we need it. We stop being angry and hateful and just laugh together. Is there rehabilitation work that you continue to do? Every day. I just got out of the gym with my therapist just now, five minutes ago. Working on my legs. But more than that, it’s my emotions. I realized, and I told my wife, “Baby, that wreck made me an emotional wreck. ” I had to deal with that. People don’t deal with things, and then they explode later. It manifests itself in other ways, like alcohol and drugs. No! I want to deal with it! My sense of humor is my way of dealing with things, so I had to get back onstage. People sometimes say it’s an honor just to be nominated — I imagine you know what that feels like now? You know, people don’t come back from an accident like that and host “Saturday Night Live” 14 months later. Most people that suffer the injuries we suffered are in vegetative states. I’m very happy to be alive to see my daughter and my sons grow up. I’m just happy to here. And for all the comedy gods that came before me, starting with Richard Pryor, Jackie Gleason and Lucille Ball, Lenny Bruce, Flip Wilson, Bernie Mac, Robin Williams, Robin Harris, Joan Rivers. All of them. [begins to cry] I love you. Please guide us and protect us. As long as I do comedy in the spirit of them, I know I’m protected. For me it is glorious. [crying] Thank you.
| 0 |
| October 29, 2016 at 10:52 am | Reply
The Great Climate Change Bamboozle
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” H. L. Mencken
Earth’s carbon cycle contains 46,713 Gt (E15 gr) +/- 850 Gt (+/- 1.8%) of stores and reservoirs with a couple hundred fluxes Gt/y (+/- ??) flowing among those reservoirs. Mankind’s gross contribution over 260 years was 555 Gt or 1.2%. (IPCC AR5 Fig 6.1) Mankind’s net contribution, 240 Gt or 0.53%, (dry labbed by IPCC to make the numbers work) to this bubbling, churning caldron of carbon/carbon dioxide is 4 Gt/y +/- 96%. (IPCC AR5 Table 6.1) Seems relatively trivial to me. IPCC et. al. says natural variations can’t explain the increase in CO2. With these tiny percentages and high levels of uncertainty how would anybody even know?
Mankind’s modelled additional atmospheric CO2 power flux (W/m^2, watt is power, energy over time) between 1750 and 2011, 261 years, is 2 W/m^2 of radiative forcing. (IPCC AR5 Fig SPM.5) Incoming solar RF is 340 W/m^2, albedo reflects 100 W/m^2 (+/- 30 & can’t be part of the 333), 160 W/m^2 reaches the surface (can’t be part of the 333), latent heat from the water cycle’s evaporation is 88 W/m2 (+/- 8). Mankind’s 2 W/m^2 contribution is obviously trivial, lost in the natural fluctuations.
One popular GHE theory power flux balance (“Atmospheric Moisture…. Trenberth et al 2011jcli24 Figure 10) has a spontaneous perpetual loop (333 W/m^2) flowing from cold to hot violating three fundamental thermodynamic laws. (1. Spontaneous energy out of nowhere, 2. perpetual loop w/o work, 3. cold to hot w/o work, 4. doesn’t matter because what’s in the system stays in the system) Physics must be optional for “climate” science. What really counts is the net W/m^2 balance at ToA which 7 out of 8 re-analyses included in the above cited paper concluded the atmosphere was cooling, not warming (+/- 12.3 W/m^2). Of course Dr. Trenberth says they are wrong because their cooling results are not confirmed by his predicted warming, which hasn’t happened for twenty years. (“All of the net TOA imbalances are not tenable and all except CFSR imply a cooling of the planet that clearly has not occurred.”)
Every year the pause/hiatus/lull/stasis continues (IPCC AR5 Box TS.3) IPCC’s atmospheric and ocean general circulation models diverge further from reality.
As Carl Sagan observed, we have been bamboozled, hustled, conned by those wishing to steal our money and rob us of our liberties. Hardly a new agenda.
BTW I have a BSME same as Bill Nye so I’m as much a scientist as he is.
| 1 |
ISTANBUL (AFP) — Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan took the country’s lawmakers to task Friday over an “ugly” brawl in parliament during a vote on a hugely controversial bill bolstering his powers left several injured. [The fight broke out on Thursday as lawmakers voted on parts of the bill to change the constitution to create an executive presidency, with one deputy suffering a broken nose and another claiming his leg was bitten. “A very ugly situation like breaking the nose of our deputy friend and biting the leg of another is not suitable for any member of parliament,” Erdogan said in a televised remarks in Istanbul. One MP was held in a chokehold while another was left bleeding from the head. The fighting saw chairs and punches thrown while an ornamental flower pot was also seen flying through the air. But the tensions so far do not appear to have slowed the new constitution’s passage which is being debated article by article and will have two readings. While critics say the move is part of a power grab by Erdogan for rule, supporters say it will put Turkey in line with France and the US and is needed for efficient government. Eight of the 18 articles have now been approved with the majority required for it to be submitted to a referendum expected late March or early April. The ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has sufficient votes thanks to an alliance with the opposition Nationalist Movement Party (MHP). But the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) is fiercely against the changes and has boycotted the vote. Erdogan said Friday after the fighting that if parliament “is incapable of working” then snap elections could be on the agenda. “It (early elections) could be conceivable. We could think about it,” he said. The CHP and AKP blamed each other for the fighting. AKP lawmakers took to Twitter to slam “the scumbag” who left tooth marks on their fellow MP. The biter’s identity was not made clear. There were reports Friday that a heavy and very expensive microphone seized from the chamber’s lectern had been broken off and used as a weapon during the rumpus. Despite the tensions, all articles of the bill have been passed easily so far and Erdogan said he believed the first round of voting would be “completed within the week”. “The real owners (of the constitution) are the people. They will decide on this,” he said about the referendum.
| 0 |
LONDON (Reuters) - Britain will pay not a penny more, not a penny less than what the government thinks its legal obligations are to the European Union as the country leaves the bloc, foreign minister Boris Johnson said on Friday. Talking to BBC Radio Four, Johnson said his comment that the EU could go whistle on its demands for payment was in response to being asked whether Britain would pay 100 billion euros or pounds , and not a suggestion that the government would not pay. A financial settlement is set to be one of the most difficult issues to resolve in negotiations to unravel more than 40 years of union, and the EU has said it is one of three areas the two sides must make progress on before starting talks on a future relationship, including trading arrangements. Some of the sums that I ve seen seem to be very high. Of course, we will meet our obligations, Johnson said. We should pay not a penny more, not a penny less of what we think our legal obligations amount to.
| 1 |
Prowling Amur tiger nabbed near Vladivostok October 27, 2016 TASS animals , russian far east , vladivostok The Amur tiger is on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Source: Yuri Smityuk/TASS
A full-grown Amur tiger has been caught near the Russian Far Eastern city of Vladivostok and sent for rehabilitation to a special center. The large feline predator is a male weighing 170 kilograms (roughly 375 pounds) that had killed a cow in the town of Artyom about 40 kilometers from Vladivostok, the Amur Tiger Center’s press service reported.
"On the morning of Oct. 26, a resident of the Artyom town suburb reported to the police that a tiger had killed a cow… That same evening a response team from the hunting supervision agency spotted the tiger using an infrared camera. The predator was immediately caught and brought to the Tiger Rehabilitation and Reintroduction Center in the Alekseyevka settlement," the Amur Tiger Center said.
The tiger will stay at the rehabilitation center while experts determine his future. He may be released into the wild in an area far from human settlements but inhabited with enough ungulates (or hoofed mammals). Ecologists had a similar experience last year, when a tiger named Uporny (or ‘Persistent’) who had been attacking dogs in the Khabarovsk region, was caught and later released into a distant area. Tiger cub found prowling the streets of Vladivostok
Only a few days ago, another male tiger was caught 20 kilometers away from Vladivostok. The predator not only walked near the city but also entered the city territory. He, too, has been sent to the rehabilitation center. It is a young male tiger weighing 140 kilograms (roughly 308 pounds) who is likely to be released into the wild.
Several weeks ago reports of a tiger were received from Vladivostok’s neighboring town of Artyom but the search ended without any success.
The Amur tiger is on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. According to the last year’s data, at present only 480-540 members of this species live in the wild, with 90 percent of them inhabiting Russia’s Far Eastern Primorye and Khabarovsk regions.
| 1 |
Evergreen State College Professor Bret Weinstein claimed that it may be unsafe for him to return to campus in his second interview with Tucker Carlson, which aired on Monday night.[ Professor Bret Weinstein made a second appearance on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News program on Monday evening to speak on the status of the chaos that erupted after he gently pushed back against Evergreen State College’s “Day of Absence” event, which encouraged white community members to leave campus for a day. Carlson began the interview by claiming that Weinstein has relocated his family for their safety. Weinstein claimed that he has not returned to campus because the administration has yet to acknowledge the danger that their handling of the protests has put Weinstein and his family in. He also suggested that returning to campus may not be safe at this moment. Weinstein claimed that he has received tremendous support from the public outside of the college, but lamented the fact that only one of his colleagues had publicly condemned the witch hunt. “Not leaving meant that you were not an ally,” Weinstein said, referencing the backlash he received to his refusal to participate in the “Day of Absence. ” “On a college campus, people should be equally free to be on campus, irrespective of their skin color,” Weinstein added. Tom Ciccotta is a libertarian who writes about economics and higher education for Breitbart News. You can follow him on Twitter @tciccotta or email him at tciccotta@breitbart. com
| 0 |
Hillary shows her true colors when a female student speaking broken English accidentally refers to Barack Obama as Mr. Clinton . Her overreaction to this woman s innocent error shows what really happens when you unintentionally displease the Queen of the Democrat party We re doing our part to expose this video she never thought would surface. Here it is:
| 1 |
By Smoking Mirrors on October 29, 2016 Smoking Mirrors — Oct 29, 2016 Dog Poet Transmitting……. Chances are better than not that Trump might win this election. Of course, with the Soros voting machines and the collective hatred of the privileged toward those being ground to dust beneath their hobnailed boots, it’s a no brainer that the election will be hijacked no matter what. The biggest enemy of humanities liberation from the cesspools of manufactured darkness has been human ignorance. For whatever the reason, in this apocalypse, people are waking up and becoming angry. They are seeing Clinton for the international mass murderer and criminal that she is. It turns out to be less a vote for Trump than it is a vote against Hillary. The key evidence to support this particular argument is that few people are showing up for Hillary rallies and speeches and large crowds are attending Trumps. The degree of anti-Trump bias in the media is beyond anything previously seen and the polls, as we know, are bullshit. I haven’t spoken to a single person here, on our aborted trip, or anywhere that was not for Trump and… I have spoken to a lot of people. It’s pretty good crowd sampling as it covers several states and pedestrian locations in those states. An associate of mine named Bill Juhas tells me that as he sees it, Obama plans on pardoning Hillary for all of her crimes and in return, Hillary will appoint him to the Supreme Court. That makes a strange kind of sense. I do not doubt the possibility of anything these fiends might attempt to throw at us. What Obama has done to American culture is about as obscene as it gets. He should be locked in a very small gender neutral bathroom with a bipolar tranny for all eternity. My only hesitation in passing this on to the authorities who control these placement duties is that he might like it. Our trip was aborted because the psychic and ethereal, material ethers were vibrating with a type of manic panic, the like of which I have not previously encountered. Turning around and heading back the way we came had an immediate salutary effect on all of our senses of well being and the potential lack thereof. Your friendly author has not always exercised the common sense and native judgment that was available to him. We’re trying transform that tendency into something useful out of the shards of former stupidities. There have been a few dustups in these environs of late and some amount of crazy email spamming as well (these are not connected). We didn’t bother to read the emails and we tried to exercise detachment in respect of the former. Now we will turn to the point of this exercise which is only tangentially associated with the garbage time antics of a handful of dysfunctional psychopaths, or what they may be planning to do to screw things up for the rest of us; not the least of which is to generate an economic disaster of Godzilla like proportions, to render us terrified and malleable. Economic disasters do not come about on their own. They are manufactured by Satanists and as we have said here on more than one occasion, one does not have to be an initiated Satanist to be a Satanist. Anyone who behaves like one is one. What we would like to talk about, here, in the waning moments of same old same old, is a most subjective thing. It has to do with my own intuition. It has to do with what I am feeling, as I scan what I am able to see of the world around me; close at hand and at a further remove. It has to do with the way information feeds into my consciousness and then reassembles itself into projections for the future. As we know, there really is no such thing as the future but… for the sake of argument… I feel no apprehension whatsoever. I feel as if it is all in the process of working itself out in a most wonderful and serendipitous way. This does not mean that millions will not die, due to this possible schematic or that possible schematic. We live in a collected universe in which we are all a universe unto ourselves and the possibilities of what might and might not happen are endless, as is the pointlessness of speculation. We live in a time of experts who can’t find their ass with both hands. Let us consider that hundreds of millions, billions will die whether anything happens or not because that is the nature of mortal terms of being. That is the nature of each of our individual leases on life. A catastrophe can sweep the planet. A ruinous war can escalate to the point of no return, by which few or none return from it. Anything might and might not happen in this unpredictable world but what I do know is that it is all under control and in the hands of the most far seeing and benevolent power; the most absolute and unassailable power that there is or ever was. I had been told this a long time ago; a long time ago in relative terms and a tiny blip of time otherwise. I heard it but I did not hear it because I did not understand it but now I do. I have come to understand the meaning of it. The experience of comfort that I take from this is immense. Everything is under control!!! Surely we all remember the scripture that says; “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father’s consent.” Nothing takes place here that is not permitted or engineered by the master of all things. It is a peculiar disconnect in this life that we can hear and not hear. We can understand the intellectual meaning of a statement but the force of it escapes our awareness. Of course, an atheistic would dismiss the validity of this. They believe that there is nothing beyond our presence here and once we are gone we are gone forever. They believe that life is an accident of some form of evolution of consciousness and form. There is not a great deal that I know but… I know that this is not true. I have direct experience otherwise and that has occurred more times than I can remember. I know that God is real. My perception of God is most certainly flawed but the existence of God is beyond any doubt in my heart and in my mind. I feel a terrible sense of loss when I consider the fate of an atheist, as I do when I think of all the wasted lives that pass like drunken marionettes before my eyes. I am powerless to effect a change in their destinies since in the majority of cases our paths will never cross. You and I and anyone can only affect those that fortune has put in our way. Usually we influence others through the operation of our desires and appetites, or through the various traumas that we visit on one another. Occasionally we might inspire another, if we ourselves are inspired and therein lies the heart of the matter. It is up to us who and what we seek out for inspiration. If we are dedicated and determined we will attract the attention of an angel of light, who is employed by the origin of light and we will be influenced by that light and we will transmit that light into the lives of others. I can think of no greater and more meaningful employment of our energies in this life. Nothing else seems to contain anything of value. It is just the rotating wheel of endless futility. It is the dance of Sisyphus. I look at all the alternatives in life and these options fill me with horror. To me, Hell is a consciousness devoid of the almighty. Hell is the absence of God. I do not intend to define what God is. That is beyond the capacity of any human mind and it is the source of never ending contention as well as immeasurable cruelties that take place each day because so many of us have made presumptions upon the nature of the ineffable. It is not our job to delineate the composition of the divine. It is our job to ‘host’ the divine and the result of that hosting is that we are filled with the spirit and presence of the divine and thereby the divine is inclined to express through us to the degree that we permit this to occur. The divine is present, after a fashion in every one of us because we could not be alive otherwise but… we preempt this with the shadow of the false self and it is thicker or thinner depending on the individual involved and what they get up to. This shadow is made denser and less dense according to the manner in which it is employed. Some activities are dark indeed. I believe that nothing positive is served by worry and fear. Fear displaces Love and without Love one has no guidance and no protection. Love not only casts out fear but it arrests the potential of all of the events that fear exists in the apprehension of. We each have some understanding of the meaning of love but the meaning of Love it far too deep for us to comprehend more than a fragment. If Love is housed in our being and allowed to guide and direct us, it will drive everything that is not Love far away from it. You will walk and live and breathe in confidence and every moment you will come closer to Love and Love will come closer to you. Let us turn our minds away from every specter that this world generates in order to confound and distress us. Focus on the great and unassailable power of the ineffable and let the rest of it go its way according to the people and situations it applies to. These other phantasms are of no concern to us, unless we make them so. End Transmission…….
| 1 |
HOUSTON (Reuters) - Texas on Monday edged toward recovery from the devastation of Hurricane Harvey as shipping channels, oil pipelines and refineries restarted some operations and authorities lifted an evacuation order for the area around a once-burning chemical plant. Port operations across the U.S. Gulf Coast oil and gas hub were resuming, although many still had restrictions on vessel draft, according to U.S. Coast Guard updates. U.S. gasoline prices fell in expectation that the area can get back on its feet after Harvey cut a path of destruction across more than 300 miles (480 km). The storm’s record rains and flooding killed as many as 60 people, according to local officials, and displaced more than 1 million. Benchmark U.S. gasoline futures fell by more than 3 percent on Monday. The Coast Guard allowed some barge traffic to enter Port Arthur, Texas, home of the country’s largest oil refinery, and is considering allowing ships to enter on Tuesday, a spokesman said. Flooding from Harvey caused fires at the Arkema SA chemical plant in Crosby, some 25 miles (40 km) northeast of Houston. But on Monday, the company said the Crosby Fire Department had lifted a 1.5-mile (2.4-km) evacuation zone around the plant, allowing people to return to their homes. The lifting of the order may help residents like Paul Mincey, a 31-year-old tugboat engineer who has been kept out of the ranch home he shares with his girlfriend, return to normal. “It could be full of snakes for all we know. We have no idea what’s in there,” Mincey said from aboard a tugboat in the Houston Ship Channel, which he said was polluted by floating railroad ties, trees and trash strewn by the storm. Like others forced from the evacuation zone, Mincey said he was eager to assess water damage and begin repairs while hoping for financial aid to deal with property damage. (To view a graphic on Harvey's energy impact, click tmsnrt.rs/2xzso1S) As the recovery from Harvey picked up speed, Puerto Rico Governor Ricardo Rossello declared a state of emergency and activated the National Guard in preparation Irma, a dangerous Category 4 hurricane closing in on a string of Caribbean islands. Irma could pummel the U.S. territory on Wednesday and it also poses a threat later in the week to the Dominican Republic, Cuba and Florida, which declared a state of emergency on Monday evening. The U.S. National Hurricane Center cautioned that it was too early to forecast the storm’s exact path or what effect it might have on the U.S. mainland. But some weather models show Irma entering the Gulf of Mexico, where Harvey dealt a major blow to the most important energy hub in the United States, taking up to one-fourth of the country’s oil refining capacity offline and driving up fuel prices. Colonial Pipeline Co on Monday said it restarted one of its fuel lines shut because of Hurricane Harvey, with another line scheduled to restart on Tuesday. Colonial is the biggest U.S. fuel system, with pipelines that connect refineries along the U.S. Gulf Coast to markets in the Northeast, transporting more than 3 million barrels a day of gasoline, diesel and jet fuel. With more pipelines coming on line, concerns about supply should ease. Most ports in Texas were open on Monday, some with restrictions on traffic and vessel size, said Colonel Lars Zetterstrom, head of the Army Corps of Engineers’ regional office in Galveston. (To view a graphic on storms in the North Atlantic, click tmsnrt.rs/2gcckz5) The question of how to pay for hurricane recovery was consuming Washington after Texas Governor Greg Abbott on Sunday increased his damage estimate to between $150 billion and $180 billion. Abbott on Monday requested seven additional Texas counties be added to the Federal Disaster Declaration previously granted by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). That would bring the total number of counties receiving assistance to 43. Some 190,000 homes were damaged and another 13,500 destroyed, the Texas Department of Public Safety said. At least 33,000 people sought refuge in Texas shelters overnight, with another 1,300 doing so in Louisiana, the American Red Cross said. Republicans and Democrats returning to Washington after a month-long break will need to put differences aside in order to approve an aid package. U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on Sunday challenged Congress to raise the government’s debt limit in order to free up relief spending. The U.S. House of Representatives will vote Wednesday on $7.85 billion in emergency relief funds for the FEMA and the Small Business Administration and plans another vote later this month on a separate $6.7 billion sought by President Donald Trump. In one indication of funding needs, the Texas Department of Public Safety on Monday estimated damage to public property at $382.3 million. (To view a graphic on Hurricane costs, click tmsnrt.rs/2vGkbHS)
| 0 |
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration declined to name any major trading partner as a currency manipulator in a highly anticipated report on Friday, backing away from a key Trump campaign promise to slap such a label on China. The semi-annual U.S. Treasury currency report did, however, keep China on a currency “monitoring list” despite a lower global current account surplus, citing China’s unusually large, bilateral trade surplus with the United States. Five other trading partners who were on last October’s monitoring list - Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Germany and Switzerland - also remain on the list, ensuring that the Treasury would apply extra scrutiny to their foreign exchange and economic policies. The Treasury report recognized what many analysts have said over the past year, namely that China has recently intervened in foreign exchange markets to prop up the value of its yuan currency, not push it lower to make Chinese exports cheaper. Foreign exchange experts told Reuters last week that a manipulator label was unlikely for Beijing. Trump, who on the campaign trail blamed China for “stealing” U.S. jobs and prosperity by cheapening its currency, repeatedly promised to label the country as a currency manipulator on “day one” of a Trump administration - a move that would require special negotiations and could lead to punitive duties and other action. The report did call out China’s past efforts to hold down the yuan’s value, saying this created a long-term “distortion” in the global trading system that “imposed significant and long-lasting hardship on American workers and companies.” The Treasury also warned that it will scrutinize China’s trade and currency practices very closely and called for faster opening of China’s economy to U.S. goods and services and a shift away from exports to more domestic consumption. “China will need to demonstrate that its lack of intervention to resist appreciation over the last three years represents a durable policy shift by letting the RMB (yuan) rise with market forces once appreciation pressures resume,” the report said. The report shows the Trump administration is taking an approach to foreign exchange based on data rather than politics, said Nathan Sheets, a former U.S. Treasury under secretary for international affairs during the Obama administration. “This isn’t the report that Donald Trump had in mind on Nov. 8,” said Sheets, who is now with the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. “But it lays out legitimate complaints. It’s a clear statement to the Chinese that they need progress.” The Treasury did not alter its three major thresholds for identifying currency manipulation put in place last year by the Obama administration: a bilateral trade surplus with the United States of $20 billion or more; a global current account surplus of more than 3 percent of gross domestic product, and persistent foreign exchange purchases equal to 2 percent of GDP over 12 months. No countries were determined to have met all three of these criteria, but Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Germany and Switzerland all met two of them. The Treasury warned Japan against resuming currency interventions, saying that these “should be reserved only to very exceptional circumstances with appropriate prior consultations, consistent with Japan’s G-7 and G-20 commitments.” (For graphic on currency manipulation, click tmsnrt.rs/2p7aUox) (Link to the Treasury report: bit.ly/2pgnNAm)
| 0 |
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump and the chief executives of 12 large companies discussed tax, regulations and trade on Monday and the business leaders will return in 30 days with a series of actions to help U.S. manufacturing, Dow Chemical CEO Andrew Liveris said. “We listened very carefully and he listened to us about the agenda that this administration has put forward to really revitalize the American manufacturing economy,” Liveris told reporters after the meeting. “The conversation honed in on tax, regulatory and trade.”
| 1 |
A former FBI informant who blew the whistle on a high-profile bribery case involving a Russian energy company was intimidated by Obama administration lawyers into dropping a civil suit against the government last year, his attorney says.WATCH: @BillHemmer's full interview w/ Victoria Toensing, the attorney for @FBI informant allegedly threatened by the Obama Administration. pic.twitter.com/MkBlH7Ilq0 Fox News (@FoxNews) October 27, 2017Victoria Toensing spoke to Bill Hemmer This Morning regarding threats to the FBI informant from Obama s DOJ: President Obama thought it was just okay to threaten a witness who wanted to give information about corruption. Fox News Updated: LIBERTY AND REPUTATION IN JEOPARDY Victoria Toensing, the lawyer for the informant, told The Daily Caller s Vince Coglianese that Obama Justice Department lawyers told her client that his reputation and liberty [was] in jeopardy if he did not drop a lawsuit against the government.On Wednesday, the Trump Justice Department released the informant from a confidentiality agreement, clearing the way for him to testify before several congressional committees about his undercover work at Uranium One, a Canada-based energy company that has ties to Bill and Hillary Clinton and their family foundation.In 2010, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), an inter-agency governmental committee that reviews applications for foreign purchases of companies, granted the Russia-owned energy company Rosatom the right to purchase Uranium One. Via: Daily Caller
| 0 |
0 Add Comment
President-elect Donald Trump is giving a lucky 3 million people the unique chance to escape the United States before it resembles the sequel to Mad Max Fury Road, WWN can reveal.
Speaking to CBS, Trump confirmed his intention to deport over 3 million illegal immigrants who have a criminal record when he assumes office in January, prompting many American citizens to curse illegal immigrants’ good fortune.
“Many desperate people who are currently living in fear will not be as lucky as these deportees,” confirmed political expert Conor Franken, outlining just how fortunate some illegal immigrants are.
The fallout from the announcement has already been met with widespread derision coming from Trump’s political opponents as he revealed the figure of 3 million was plucked directly from his arse. However, signs are emerging that many people have welcomed the news.
“How do I get deported?” querzied US citizen and LA native Max Schulmann, “Do you think I’ll be one of the lucky ones if I just rip up my passport, get a parking fine and start speaking Spanish?”
Large queues of people seeking to win big with deportation have already begun forming at the Mexican and Canadian borders. Sadly, many have been turned away for not meeting the minimum requirement Trump has placed on qualifying for deportation which requires people to be a murderring rapist drug dealer from Mexico who bleeds the economy dry by signing up to Obamacare.
In the wide ranging interview with CBS, Trump also took the time to row back on over 200 elections pledges he made including stances on a border wall, Hillary Clinton and Obamacare.
“The days of politicians lying and cheating the American people are over, it’s now Donald’s turn,” Trump said, concluding the interview.
| 1 |
LANGUAGE WARNING! A woman at Walmart gets into it with a guy who was paying with Food Stamps:
| 1 |
Major insurers everywhere have dumped massive cash into lobbying against the ACA. Their corporate-owned Republicans have insisted it would destroy America in any number of strange and unusual ways. Now a new study reveals why they say helping sick people afford to see a doctor is bad for the country.Data has become available for 2014 and 2015 enrollees to Blue Cross and Blue Shield, who were picked up through the Affordable Care Act s health insurance exchanges. It shows that the people who the ACA was specifically created to help are actually going to the doctor and using medical services. Huge shock, right? The entirety of the Republican and corporate establishment s opposition to the ACA resides in a single thing money. More for them, and none for regular people. If the poor and middle class suffer and die needlessly, that s just their cost of doing business.People who got back into the insurance market, thanks to the ACA, were shown to have a 22 percent higher medical cost than those with employer-based coverage in 2015. The average monthly spending numbers for the new enrollees was $559 in 2015 compared to $457 for group members who had it through an employer. The same new enrollee segment increased from $501 in 2014 to the previously mentioned $559 in 2015.The irony of the situation is that the very corporations who are whining about having to pay the bills of sick people were the primary engineers of their own self-imposed disaster. These are the same corporations that spiked health insurance costs, causing people to be unable to afford it. They are also the same corporations that outright refused to sell people coverage, because of pre-existing conditions. Pre-existing conditions that could be literally anything they wanted them to be. After sometimes decades of unmanaged health issues, these new enrollees are consuming services at elevated rates. Insurers basically screwed themselves for short-term profits, and now they have to pay some of it back. Pardon me if I am less than sympathetic towards them.This shows just how desperately needed the ACA is, and how incredibly dishonest health insurers are about their business model. The fact insurance payouts rose as much as they did in as short a time is proof just how many Americans were suffering without need. That is where the darker truth of the health insurance industry comes into plain view. These companies are still wildly profitable. They just want to keep more money for themselves. Simply put, they ve become a caricature of their own greedy reputations.The tragedy of this all is that the same data showing how desperately needed the ACA is, also is being used as misinformation to completely lie to America about how bad it is for the country. The only tidbit being presented is that it is increasing costs to insurance companies, which does mean their premiums might go up. However, the overall increase in premiums is at a slower rate than before Obamacare became law, even with the increased payouts for more consumption of services.Right wingers and unscrupulous insurance companies are taking the very truth about why it is a good law, and perverting it into a lie about how it is bad by purposefully omitting all context until the truth is whatever they want it to be. If you add in the fact that initial expenditures are going to be higher until we catch up with decades of a lack of care, you can argue a case that premiums would have actually dropped if all other things were equal, due to massive amounts of new customers spreading out the cost burden.As more new data becomes available, and initial over-consumption tapers off, the last arguments to be made against the law will ultimately boil down to profit over people. If anything will prove how obsolete the American health insurance industry is, and why single-payer is needed, that will be it.Featured image via Joe Raedle / Getty
| 0 |
Hillary Clinton is just fine .
She’s not sick. That weird neurological problem she had? All cured.
Pneumonia? Done.
Blurry vision? Concussion? Not a problem.
Right?
Well, maybe not.
Because if Hillary Clinton is in tip-top health, then why does she need help making her way up one little step.
In this video from The American Mirror , we can see Clinton heading up to a podium to make an appearance in Lake Worth, Texas.
As she attempted to take a step up to a small riser, an aide quickly offered her support – which she clearly needed.
Take a look: Hillary heads over to the overflow area to say hello to the crowd in Lake Worth, Florida. But ya know, no enthusiasm there. 🙄 pic.twitter.com/3cUDK245XK
You can also clearly see another assistant standing behind her, just in case she doesn’t make it up all the way.
Twitter had a field day: @HillBroYo The Mystery Medic is back pic.twitter.com/qkURGDbzeW
— Captain Chaos (@tonyr951) October 26, 2016 @HillBroYo how come she needs a hand to step on a small platform?What's wrong with her?
| 0 |
There are no words for these selfish sub-humans Here are a couple of profiles from Twitter of the people tweeting about BLM being ignored because of Nice terror tragedy. They have both made their Twitter accounts private:We found this sweet self-described Georgia Peach listed as a Fashion Contributor at company called xoNecole.com Feel free to send a message to her boss on their Facebook page. Click HERE for link.Here s another pathetic Twitter user: @_nehoda_ who whined about the attention victims of the Nice terror attack were taking from the BLM movement. She s lists herself as living in London, but calls Egypt the motherland ?? Hmmm How does a Muslim woman living in London get hooked up with BLM terrorists in US?And then there s the other Muslim living in London who s a bit more brash with his tweets: Don't #PrayForNice we are fighting a civil war against whites. #BLM Andre Johnson (@LarryKingfisher) July 15, 2016Here are a few replies to Omar s tweet:Here are a few of this Muslim punk s remarks threatening a caliphate and boasting about how the Muslims have already won the war against the West:Here s real bright guy who s got nothing better to do than take to Twitter complaining about the plight of black people on the day after a major terror attack that killed over 80 people. Never mind that people just lost their husbands, wives, children, kids, friends, relatives or co-workers.Some white people die in Europe and now the media can ignore the plight of black people being exterminated #blacklivesmatter #NiceAttack Bob Schmidt (@bobschmidt857) July 15, 2016We tryna rise up for equality n somehow a 'muslim' attacks people? #BlackLivesMatter #FakeShit #NiceAttack Daye Hazit (@YurBoyDW) July 15, 2016The real tragedy about the #NiceAttack is that it takes the spotlight away from #BlackLivesMatter TheAltRightProfessor (@NationalistProf) July 14, 2016And finally this guy nails it:Nice job with PR #BlackLivesMatter Nothing makes people want to support you like whining about "getting the limelight stolen" by #NiceAttack Pink Snow kitty (@HugoThePinkCat) July 15, 2016
| 1 |
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Senate is under no obligation to consider President Barack Obama’s nomination of Judge Merrick Garland to the U.S. Supreme Court, U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan, a Republican, said on Wednesday. “This has never been about who the nominee is. It is about a basic principle. Under our Constitution, the president has every right to make this nomination, and the Senate has every right not to confirm a nominee,” Ryan said. Ryan said he supported Senate Republican leaders’ decision not to move forward with the confirmation process after Democrat Obama sent his nomination of Garland to the Senate on Wednesday.
| 1 |
SEOUL/TOKYO (Reuters) - Detonating a nuclear-tipped missile over the Pacific Ocean would be a logical final step by North Korea to prove the success of its weapons program but would be extremely provocative and carry huge risks, arms control experts said on Friday. North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho suggested leader Kim Jong Un was considering testing “an unprecedented scale hydrogen bomb” over the Pacific in response to U.S. President Donald Trump’s threat at the United Nations to “totally destroy” the country. “It may mean North Korea will fire a warhead-tipped (intermediate range) Hwasong-12 or Hwasong-14 intercontinental ballistic missile and blow it up a few hundred kilometers above the Pacific Ocean,” said Yang Uk, a senior researcher at the Korea Defence and Security Forum in Seoul. “They may be bluffing, but there is a need for them to test their combined missile-bomb capability. They could have already prepared the plan and are now trying to use Trump’s remarks as an excuse to make it happen,” said Yang. Such an atmospheric test would be the first globally since China detonated a device in 1980, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Tests of nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles are rarer still. The United States’ only test of an operational ballistic missile with a live warhead was fired from submarine far out in the Pacific Ocean in 1962. China was widely condemned for a similar test with a missile that exploded over its Lop Nur test site in the country’s west in 1966. North Korea’s six nuclear tests to date have all been underground, the most recent earlier this month by far its largest. “We have to assume they *could* do it, but it is exceedingly provocative,” said Vipin Narang, an associate professor of political science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “To put a live nuclear warhead on a missile that’s only been tested a handful of times, overflying potentially populated centers. If it...doesn’t go exactly as planned....it could be a world changing event.” North Korea has fired two ballistic missiles over Japan’s north Hokkaido region in the past month as part of a series of tests that experts say have illustrated unexpectedly rapid advances. “They said Pacific Ocean, which pretty much means firing a missile over Japan,” said Melissa Hanham, a senior research associate at the U.S.-based Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, California. “They want to shut us all up for doubting they could build it.” While a missile would be the most ideal means of delivery, it is also possible to put a bomb on a ship and detonate on the surface of the ocean or in the sea, the experts said. Either way, the radioactive fallout could be significant, as well as the diplomatic backlash from around the world. North Korea’s recent missile launches over Japan especially drew stern rebukes from Tokyo and the international community. Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga called Pyongyang’s remarks and behavior “completely unacceptable”. Narang said a test high enough over the ocean would limit the radioactive fallout but risks included damage from an electro-magnetic pulse, something Pyongyang has hinted it might employ on an attack on the United States or its allies. “If it doesn’t go exactly as planned and the detonation occurs at a lower altitude we could see some EMP-like effects for anything in the area. A lot of dead fish too.” Pyongyang has launched dozens of missiles this year as it spurs a program aimed at mastering a nuclear-tipped missile that can strike the United States, in addition to its Sept 3 nuclear test. If Kim’s threat materializes, it will be a “tipping point” for China, and may prompt many other countries to demand an “end to the regime,” said David Albright, founder of the non-profit Institute for Science and International Security in Washington. “No one has tested above ground for decades and the radioactive fallout could be terrifying to many,” Albright said. Other experts said such an atmospheric nuclear test is unlikely for now due to its substantial technical and diplomatic risks. Joshua Pollack, editor of the Washington-based Nonproliferation Review, said it would be an “end-to-end demo of everything.” “But I would be surprised if this were their very next move. They have yet to test an ICBM at full range into the Pacific,” said Pollack. “That will probably come first.”
| 0 |
LONDON (Reuters) - British police said on Wednesday they had issued an arrest warrant for the brother of a suicide bomber who killed 22 people in an attack on a pop concert in Manchester in May and prosecutors had asked Libya to extradite him. Salman Abedi, a 22-year-old Briton born to Libyan parents, blew himself up at the end of a show by U.S. singer Ariana Grande in the deadliest militant attack in Britain for 12 years. His victims included seven children among the victims while more than 500 were injured. Assistant Chief Constable Russ Jackson, who is responsible for counter-terrorism in northwest England, said police had now applied for and been granted an arrest warrant for Abedi s younger brother Hashem for murder, attempted murder and conspiracy to cause an explosion. Hashem Abedi is currently detained in Libya and the CPS (Crown Prosecution Service) has now requested that Libyan authorities consider his extradition back to the United Kingdom, Jackson said. We are grateful for the Libyan authorities considering this request. He added that detectives had not found any evidence of the involvement of any wider network. Islamic State said it was responsible in the immediate aftermath of the bombing but security services have always treated the claim with scepticism. Days after the attack Libyan counter-terrorism investigators arrested Hashem Abedi and the brothers father Ramadan. In June, the Special Deterrence Force (Rada), a counter-terrorism force aligned with the U.N.-backed government in Tripoli, said Hashem Abedi had told them that his brother had been radicalised in Britain in 2015. They had both flown from Britain to Libya in April and Hashem said he had helped buy the equipment necessary for the attack although he had not known that Salman was planning a bombing, Rada said. British police say Salman Abedi returned to Manchester on May 18, four days before his attack. The family had emigrated to Britain during the rule of the late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, moving from London to the Fallowfield area of south Manchester where they lived for more than a decade. The brothers parents returned to Libya during the country s 2011 revolution. Jackson said their investigation was still running at a very fast pace and the inquiry had involved a trawl through 16,000 hours of closed circuit TV (CCTV) footage and more than 8 million lines of telephone communications data. Police have previously said they believed Salman Abedi had built the bomb himself and CCTV showed him buying nuts from a hardware store that were used as shrapnel as well as the tin that was believed to contain the explosives.
| 1 |
Patrick Henningsen 21st Century WireHere we go again. There seems to be no end to the escalation of tensions between North Korea and the United States and its allies.Yesterday, Pyongyang s state broadcaster came out declaring what it claims is another successful test , this time with a hydrogen bomb, which they say could be mounted on to their still as yet nonexistent intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).Seizing the moment, state news anchor Ri Chun Hee proudly announced that the test was a perfect success, and symbolises the country s final step on the long road to attaining a state nuclear force. All very exciting.Still, there has been no independent verification of the claim, but why let that get in the way of a promising international security crisis? Kim Jung Un: Looking at shiny objects, pointing, generally looking busy. North Korea s alleged test is said to have happened just hours after Pyongyang state-run media released images of leader Kim Jong Un inspecting (looking, pointing) something which looks like it could be a hydrogen bomb, but no one is really sure.We re also told that this was ready to be placed on top of an ICBM, however no one has actually seen a real operational ICBM yet. That s kind of an important detail in this grand plot, but one which is routinely overlooked by legions of western mainstream experts on CNN and NBC. So far, the DPRK only has a series of botched tests of their short-range Hwasong-12 rockets (glorified Scud missiles) to show the world. Still, the western media insist that this constitutes a potential threat to the US.So confident was this mainstream media outlet, that they ve seemed to have hedged their bets on the authenticity of the DPRK state claims, leaving the offending H Bomb in quotes SEE ALSO: North Korea and The Unintended Consequences of TrumpThis wouldn t be the first time North Korea exaggerated its WMD credentials. Last January they exaggerated claims of a successful H-bomb test. Despite their dodgy record, the western media, and politicians who are fed by defense contracts are lapping up Pyongyang s latest pig s breakfast.Whatever this latest test was, it s hardly an act of war. Meanwhile, South Korea wasted no time retaliating by showing off its new toys purchased out of its US dollar reserve account, launching multiple missiles for the cameras. Seoul insists that it s ready to activate four Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile batteries. It also carried out a major joint drill (likely pre-planned anyway) with F-15K fighter jets and surface-to-surface ballistic missiles. This posturing by South Korea has excited the western media to no end. Everyone is loving it, because nothing brings eye balls and ratings like a good crisis.Guardian reporter Justin McCurry confirms: South Korea has carried out a simulated attack on North Korea s nuclear test site in a huge show of force in response to Pyongyang s detonation of what it claims is a hydrogen bomb.Seoul has also approved the complete deployment of a US anti-missile system in another sign that it intends to address North Korean provocations with reminders of its own military firepower, while keeping the door open to dialogue. You can be certain that CNN absolutely loves this latest crisis too, wailing this morning: South Korea strengthened the deployment of a controversial US-made missile defense system and launched a huge show of military might on Monday in response to North Korea s hydrogen bomb test. Naturally, not a word of condemnation from the western media about South Korea s real provocations broadcast in colour around the world.How Serious is the Threat?At the time of publishing this piece, members of the UN Security Council are already convening emergency sessions about what to do next. In the final analysis, there will have to be some clear and present threat in order to justify some harsh response from the UNSC.Can such a rational evaluation be made with so much theatre on both sides?Washington s UN Ambassador Nikki Haley gave a predictable hawkish speech claiming that, He is begging for war. Of course Haley is all too eager to oblige.Once again, western media outlets are treating claims by North Korea s state-run KCNA media agency as good as gold (ratings gold, that is).For the US, this latest move by North Korea has been PR gold. It s helped to revive and reenergize the dying conversation of a nuclear standoff between The Good Guys and The Bad Guys. And to deal with those bad guys, you need tough guys.Enter US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who swiftly moved in with tough new sanctions against the DPRK, warning that this isn t the time for just talk. A novel approach.Eager to win back some approval points and stop the political hemorrhaging that seems to be draining all of the mojo Trump had when he whipped-up the campaign trail crowds promising to drain the swamp, the President took to Twitter, to do what he thinks his base wants, which is to be Kim s bad cop .Kim and The Donald, two iconic frontmen, both being played like a marionette by the generals off camera.Cue Trump North Korea has conducted a major Nuclear Test. Their words and actions continue to be very hostile and dangerous to the United States, wrote Trump.Tough. North Korea is a rogue nation which has become a great threat and embarrassment to China, which is trying to help but with little success. South Korea is finding, as I have told them, that their talk of appeasement with North Korea will not work, they only understand one thing! Tougher.Trump also tries to slam the door shut on any chance of bilateral negotiations:South Korea is finding, as I have told them, that their talk of appeasement with North Korea will not work, they only understand one thing! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 3, 2017Toughest.Of course, Trump s comments appear to be winding up Pyongyang. A vicious circle of fighting talk. Are there any adults left in the room?Not to be outdone, here comes a good cop. Enter US Defense Secretary James Mad Dog Mattis, who is still earning his nickname meant to resemble an unstable, rabid house pet. After his meeting with President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence on Sunday, the Mad Dog, wearing a purple tie (the same colour as Hillary s revolution), read his military decree on the White House lawn: We have many military options, and the president wanted to be briefed on each one of them. We made clear that we have the ability to defend ourselves and our allies, South Korea and Japan, from any attack, and our commitments among the allies are ironclad, said Mattis.What a relief, he sounds moderate compared to Trump. But wait Before exiting the podium, he said: We are not looking to the total annihilation of a country, namely North Korea, but as I said, we have many options to do so. This is a unique breed of lunatic.Talking tough, and talking of options for annihilating a country. Normal people would say this is an idiotic proposition because the fall-out would be much worse than any of Kim apocalyptic sabre rattling. All this looks very familiar. Quite simply, what we are seeing here in Washington is Neoconservativism reasserting itself through one of its flagship planks the preemptive strike. Above all other military strategies, this is always the most favorable for the Pentagon because it doesn t require any real justification or accountability for a preemptive action. All that s required is a sufficient amount of media fear-mongering and political hype about the threat we all face and how we must act and then simply fire away and sift through the rubble, reforming the narrative afterwards. In the meantime, the ruling parties can call it a success, and claim that many lives were saved by this valiant action etc. It s clean and straightforward, albeit in the short term, but extremely messy in the long term.As much as hawks in Washington would love to test out their new toys right now, a conflagration is not likely to happen by the hand of the US in the Pacific Rim. There are too many powerful players in the immediate vicinity (South Korea, Japan, China, Taiwan, Philippines and Russia, too) and the fall-out from any rash US-led geopolitical pissing contest, surgical or kinetic action could be detrimental to all parties. Better to get someone else to start it for them, but that s not easy either.There was a time when people had high hopes for Mattis. He was affectionately referred to as the warrior monk, with many FOX News pundits drooling over his apparent Sun Tzu prowess, as was rumoured that he has actually read some historical books and was really smart and really wise apparently a rarity in Washington military circles these days. But no matter how many books people think he s read about the Peloponnesian Wars, it s should be pretty clear by now that Mattis, like his predecessor Ash Carter, is acting as kind of an executive sales rep for the military industrial complex. That s essentially what the position of Defense Secretary has become in America. It s a straightforward deal: you ll keep your job, as long as you do and say what s required to keep international tensions high at all times. This translates into profits, and shareholder dividends for industry stakeholders. If you re not with the program, then you ll have to tender your resignation. Just ask Chuck Hagel.What Americans should really understand is that the generals with whom Trump is so enamored, and who he trusts with all our bombs and silos have left nothing but a string of military failures in their wake. Between Generals James Mattis and Major General H.R. McMaster, you have a collective 30 plus years and two of the worst military and foreign policy boondoggles in US history, Afghanistan and Iraq, underscored by successive failed surges. Add to these, a total defeat in Syria, blowing billions of US taxpayer dollars on a proxy war that s arguably created a new generation of Islamist extremists (although no one will admit it). Impressive, isn t it? So why do the media continue to elevate the military brass? Not every General is a good general. As with any other position or profession, some are good, and some are corrupt, and many are incompetent, or promoted for playing ball. General David Petraeus is a good example of this. The media can t get enough of him. He was the architect of the surge we re told, which means he was around when Obama-Bush ordered up another 30,000 troops for Iraq in a futile effort to fix what they broke. Still, the media will bend over backwards in an almost worshipful mode whenever his name is mentioned, forgetting that Petraeus was found guilty of the same crime for which half of America wanted Hillary Clinton locked-up. Despite bringing his name and his office into disrepute, Petraeus was rewarded board positions with mega Wall Street firms like KKR, and a perennial seat at Bilderberg.Men like Mattis, McMaster and Petraeus can, and will run rings around this President who has already signaled his weakness for those chevrons on the shoulder. And,this President will happily defer everything to these men. Should we be surprised if they keep getting it wrong?Let s just pray that they don t get it wrong with North Korea, too.*** Patrick Henningsen is an American-born writer and global affairs analyst and founder of independent news and analysis site 21st Century Wire and host of the SUNDAY WIRE weekly radio show broadcast globally over the Alternate Current Radio Network (ACR).READ MORE NORTH KOREA NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire North Korea FilesSUPPORT OUR WORK BY SUBSCRIBING & BECOMING A MEMBER @21WIRE.TV
| 0 |
CAIRO (Reuters) - British authorities have lifted a ban on carry-on electronic devices on planes arriving from Cairo airport, Egypt s Ministry of Civil Aviation said on Friday. The United States and Britain in March imposed restrictions banning electronic devices from being carried on planes coming from certain airports in Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East and North Africa. Authorities lifted the ban after confirming that security procedures on Egypt s flights meet the requirements of the British Transportation Security Administration, the ministry said in a statement.
| 1 |
A combat veteran with PTSD wasn’t allowed to fly with her service dog. So she sued. ‹ › Since 2011, VNN has operated as part of the Veterans Today Network ; a group that operates over 50 plus media, information and service online sites for U.S. Military Veterans. Vertical Pools Help Heal Wounded Combat Veterans Seeks Positive Doers To Help Make It Happen By VNN on October 31, 2016 The Vertical Pool was inspired by the anticipated need of the returning wounded, and veterans of all past conflicts, who have limited options for recovery and healing at home. Even if they’re within an hour of a VA hospital, it can be a challenge to get there without assistance. A heated, sanitized, filtered, compact pool in the back yard, house, garage, means convenient, private, daily immersions for exercise, traction, rehabilitation, and recovery. These pools should be available to veterans without convoluted forms and wait times. Simply a doctor’s prescription should put them on a list for immediate consideration. VetPools.org (an effort to raise funds to donate these pools to vets) was formed with the specific objective of helping improve upon the methods and manners by which America receives and treats her returning wounded. The most formidable military force in the world deserves a commensurate comprehensive recovery, reintegration program focused on body, mind, and spirit for those who require assistance. The purpose of this message is to inform interested and connected parties of the desire to hand this product and mission off to veterans who would then become The Vertical Pool LLC and VetPools.org . They could be instrumental in healing themselves and their fellow veterans, as well as civilian America from the physically challenged to the physically fit. Interestingly, while initially intended for veterans, the retail market has turned out to be women. As only one person, innovator/owner of The Vertical Pool and founder/director of VetPools.org , I cannot fulfill this objective alone. The R&D, pool product, and non-profit are all paid for in full, no debt or encumbrances. This “on-demand” pool can be manufactured as needed without excessive, costly inventory and/or storage space. I do not advertise this product because one person cannot build, deliver, and install more than 5 pools in two months. Career options with this DME device and non-profit include owning, manufacturing, marketing, selling, donating, fund-raising, case managing, delivering, installing, and teaching The Vertical Pool’s diverse functions and benefits. This pool is efficient in energy, water, and space; critical qualities in this, the 21st century. A group or collective of 3 to 7 individuals might be prudent to start the program. I would remain teacher, mentor, and guide for years to come while others slip into the ownership of this product and its sister non-profit organization. Please share this idea with any and all contacts who might have the connections to give some veterans a lead to a worthy endeavor and career. To get involved contact; Director, Peter G. Hold
| 1 |
KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - Police in Malaysia have arrested seven youths in connection with a fire at an Islamic boarding school in Kuala Lumpur that killed at least 23 people, mostly teenagers. The seven, aged 11 to 18, were brought to court and remanded for seven days, Kuala Lumpur police chief Amar Singh told reporters at a news conference on Saturday. I can assure you now that the case is solved with the arrest of the seven of them, Singh said. It was the most deadly incident of its kind in Malaysia in two decades, and has outraged the public, some of whom have called for greater safety and tougher regulation at such religious schools. The arrested include students from the surrounding neighborhood, and some have tested positive for consuming marijuana. The police are treating the case as one of murder and mischief by fire. The blaze erupted early on Thursday in a top-floor dormitory at the three-storey boarding school where most of the students were sleeping in bunk beds, with many of the windows covered by metal grilles. Asked if the suspects had planned to kill the victims, Singh said: Intention was to burn, but it could be because of their age or because of their maturity levels, perhaps they may not have known that it would cause deaths. Two gas cylinders were brought up from the kitchen to the second floor, he said.
| 1 |
KANGIQSUJUAQ, Quebec — For eight months a year, the flat bay around the village of Kangiqsujuaq in far northern Quebec freezes beneath a white expanse of ice and snow, leaving ravens and foxes as rare signs of life, along with Inuit and their dogs. Throughout the winter the Inuit hunt seal and caribou, and they fish through the ice for arctic char. But in the coldest months, when the ice is thickest, some venture beneath the ice to gather mussels. Every two weeks the pull of the moon combines with the geography of this region to create unusually large tides. The water falls as much as 55 feet in some places, emptying the bay under the ice along the shore for an hour or more. That’s when some Inuit climb aboard their snowmobiles and head out onto the bay. Watch a 360 video of the mussel collecting mission. One recent day I joined two of them, Tiisi Qisiiq, 51, and Adami Alaku, 61, who identified a void and chopped a hole into the ice. Underneath is a beautiful, eerie world of bending ice, glowing blue from the sunlight outside. The sound of trickling water fills the humid, air. On my recent trip it was 20 degrees below zero (minus 29 degrees Celsius) but a balmy 32 degrees Fahrenheit (0 degrees Celsius) beneath the ice. The men lowered themselves through the hole to the bay floor. The ground was covered with kelp, the occasional crab and edible clumps of roe from the fourhorn sculpin, which the Inuit call the ugly fish. But Mr. Qisiiq and Mr. Alaku came for fat blue mussels that cling to the rocks. Using lamps to light the way, they pulled the frigid mussels free with their hands. Before long, the sound of ticks and pops signaled the returning tide as it lifted the ice on the bay. Soon, the water would fill the caverns. The flood tide is deceiving, starting slowly until it rises more than a foot (30 centimeters) a minute. The men headed for the hole and climbed out into the clear, cold air. I first heard of mussel gathering under the ice when I lived in Shanghai and my son was given a children’s book called “Very Last First Time,” by the Canadian author Jan Andrews. It tells the enchanting tale of an Inuit girl’s first time under the ice alone. Ever since, I’ve wanted to go under the ice myself. Now I have, and I saw the bay floor’s bounty brought to the surface. The book’s drawings depict a colorful, cavernous space beneath the ice, far different from the cramped and narrow confines that I discovered. The colder the winter, the thicker and more stable the ice and the larger the spaces left by the ebbing tide. Mr. Qisiiq’s mentor, Lukasi Nappaaluk, remembers gathering mussels as a child in caverns of ice with ceilings 20 feet high. But global warming is making the ice less predictable and more prone to buckling. Warm water currents thin the ice from below, making the snowmobile crossings increasingly dangerous. The mussels are a welcome winter treat these days, but at one time they were a lifesaving source of food during the lean frozen months. Raw meat, with its abundance of vitamins, has allowed the Inuit to live for centuries on a diet almost devoid of fruits and vegetables. The only preparation for the mussels is pulling off their beards, the strings of protein that mussels make to cling to rocks, and then rinsing them. The Inuit still eat a lot of “country food,” caribou and seal and whale and fish that they prefer to eat raw while sitting on the floor. Mussels are no exception. Mr. Qisiiq and his wife, Siasi Qisiiq, shucked the bivalves using the edge of a shell. They scraped out the meat and squeezed it in their fist, wringing out the salty seawater, before eating them as is. Ms. Qisiiq boiled some of the mussels for me. They were rich and meaty, salty with no seasoning, and steaming — welcome warmth after hours outside. I had some of the raw mussels, too, still chilled from the bay. They tasted a lot like raw oysters, but with a bitter finish. I would prefer them marinara style.
| 0 |
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - An opposition alliance in Mexico wants to launch a universal basic wage to combat the poverty that blights the lives of almost half the population, touting an experimental reform discussed globally as a solution to job losses from automation. The center-right National Action Party and center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution are running on a joint ticket with the leftist Citizens Movement (MC) for next July s presidential election, and the income plan is a key part of their manifesto. Officials inside the alliance say details of the plan are still being worked out, though its contours are emerging. A basic income of 10,000 pesos ($537) per year for everyone, including children, could be provided by consolidating funds from federal, state and municipal welfare programs, Jorge Alvarez, an MC congressman working on the plan told Reuters in a recent interview. If you multiply that by four or five, which is the typical size of a Mexican family, you get an annual income of 40,000 to 50,000 pesos per family, Alvarez said, adding that providing the income to children could be conditional on school enrollment. Home to the richest man in Latin America, Carlos Slim, Mexico is laden with oil and minerals, boasts a large manufacturing base and has the world s 15th biggest economy. But poverty has remained stubbornly stuck above 40 percent of the population for decades. Government social development agency Coneval defines poverty as a person living on no more than 2,925 pesos a month in cities and 1,892 pesos in rural areas. The agency also takes into account other factors like healthcare and education. Getting to 40,000 or 50,000 pesos per family could be achieved without increasing taxes, Alvarez said. Still, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development argues that providing an unconditional basic income to everyone of working age would do little to combat poverty if not funded by extra taxes. The idea of universal basic income has gained currency due to the increasing robotization of the workforce. Finland is running a pilot project to test whether unconditional payments could serve as a plausible alternative welfare model. Mexico has seen job growth in recent years thanks to a manufacturing boom, and could face a smaller workforce as robots take over more tasks. Swiss voters rejected a basic income plan in a referendum last year, while the defeated Socialist candidate in France s presidential election this year, Benoit Hamon, championed it, saying it would be funded by a tax on robots that replace human labor. Mexican gross domestic product was worth $1.046 trillion in 2016, according to the World Bank, but some 53.4 million Mexicans, or 43.6 percent of the population, live below the poverty line, according to Coneval. ($1 = 18.6239 Mexican pesos)
| 0 |
— The Dishonorable DJT (@AceofSpadesHQ) October 27, 2016
Remember that WSJ story we told you about on Sunday that reported on a Gov. Terry McAuliffe super PAC that donated to the wife of a senior FBI official who just happened to take over Hillary Clinton’s email investigation?
Yeah … it just got a whole lot worse. Apparently Hillary Clinton herself was the one who raised the money for the super PAC that set off this entire chain of events in the first place! Alana Goodman of the Daily Mail reports: EXCLUSIVE: Clinton headlined fundraiser for McAuliffe group before it gave $500K to wife of FBI boss https://t.co/zOdL6yo8a2
Not only that, but Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook used to work for the McAuliffe’s super PAC:
Virginia election records show that Clinton’s campaign manager Robby Mook, a former McAuliffe aide, was also on the Common Good VA payroll before he joined her presidential campaign
Another coincidence? Again, nothing to see here…move along, anoint her president and let's be done with it. Unreal. #tcot #lnyhbt https://t.co/pthO0dqqNr
| 1 |
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Krassi Nikov evacuated his Houston home with more than 2 feet (61 cm) of water inside of it on Tuesday after Tropical Storm Harvey devastated Texas’ Gulf Coast. He now plans to collect on his flood insurance for the second time this year and rebuild. But the future of the federal government-run flood insurance program on which Nikov, 63, and other property owners in vulnerable areas depend rests with the U.S. Congress. Congress will soon be asked to renew the National Flood Insurance Program, which expires at the end of September. While a simple extension of the program has wide bipartisan support, some lawmakers are calling for broad reform. The program had received 35,000 claims from Texas by midday on Wednesday, according to Roy Wright, its administrator, who described it as a “very fast” pace. Wright said he was confident Congress would reauthorize the program, but he added that the program would only be prevented from selling new policies or renewing existing ones if it were to lapse. “It does not affect ability to accept claims,” Wright said. Republicans advocating changes to the program want private companies to write the policies, which they say would result in premium prices that more accurately reflect risks. Additionally, they want the U.S. government to stop charging the program interest, with the savings to be used for flood mitigation. That could set up a difficult battle. Conservatives have voiced concerns that the insurance program has about $25 billion of debt, while Democrats say the Republicans’ plan to allow private-market plans would be more expensive for homeowners. A bipartisan group of lawmakers from coastal states including Senators Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, have been pushing for changes to the program. The NFIP has been reauthorized 17 times since it was created in 1968, with the last time occurring in 2012. It has been allowed to lapse just four times. Many lobbyists believe Congress is unlikely to attempt a sweeping reform of the program before the end of September, given a busy legislative schedule that includes approving funding to avoid a government shutdown and raising the debt ceiling. Congress also faces pressure to pass an aid package to help the devastated Gulf Coast. Goldman Sachs said in a research note on Tuesday that early estimates suggested Harvey would cost “in the range of $30 billion.” Instead, most observers expect Congress to pass a short-term extension of the program, ranging from three months to a year. Leaders in Congress are weighing whether to attach it to another piece of legislation such as a continuing resolution to fund the government, according to several lobbyists following the issue. House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan’s office said it was confident the program would be reauthorized. U.S. Representative Jeb Hensarling, a Republican who chairs the House Financial Services Committee, said in a Bloomberg television interview on Monday that he hoped his package of reforms could gain full approval before the end of next month. Hensarling wants to renew the program for five years if private insurers are allowed to write the flood policies. But a business lobbyist who consults for many large American companies and follows the issue closely said Hensarling lacked the support to get his package passed by the House when Congress left for its August recess. “I don’t think they’re at the point now where they have the votes,” the lobbyist said. He added that trying to overhaul the program would be a distraction for federal emergency officials and the flood insurance program. “Even if there was a package of reforms ready to go, (the agencies) are not going to have the bandwidth to deal with some kind of reform package,” he said. In a letter to Ryan and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi sent on Monday, 100 House Democrats expressed concerns about the Hensarling package, saying they would not vote for the full package despite believing flood insurance reauthorization was crucial. “Most of these bills do not meet the goals of affordability, availability, increased mitigation efforts or improved mapping,” the letter said. Jerry Howard, head of the National Home Builders Association, said the group had endorsed Hensarling’s package and was hopeful the bills would pass quickly. Emily Naden of the Building Owners and Managers Association, which in Houston alone represents owners and managers of 312 million square feet of office space and accounts for 43,000 jobs, said the organization had been pushing for reforms but must prioritize avoiding a lapse in coverage. “For us, we absolutely need the program to be re-upped without a lapse – a lapse is incredibly detrimental to all of our policy members,” she said.
| 0 |
Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi ( ) passed blame on to the press for giving attention to revelations uncovered by WikiLeaks, which made public emails by top Clinton aide John Podesta and the Democratic National Committee. When asked by host Jake Tapper if Barack Obama could have done more to strike back against Russia, who is widely believed to be responsible for the WikiLeaks material, Pelosi called the press “accomplices. ” “Well, I think that President Obama handled it as he received information of that — of the highest confidence,” she said. “I do think, with all due respect in the world for the press, that the press could have done a better job, instead of printing every email that came out, and saying this comes to you from Vladimir Putin, they were, hah, hah, hah, John Podesta said this or that. I think the press were accomplices in the undermining of our election by the Russians by not pointing out this stuff is worthless because it comes from an undermining of our election, or at least reminding the public where this — these emails, the leaking of these emails came from. So, I can’t speak to the timing of what President Obama said. I wish he — it had all happened in a time where the public could know that this had an impact on the election. A lot of things have an impact on the election. This certainly was one of them. “So, I can’t speak to the timing of what President Obama said. I wish he — it had all happened in a time where the public could know that this had an impact on the election,” Pelosi continued. “A lot of things have an impact on the election. This certainly was one of them. But what’s important to note is that it doesn’t happen again and that people in other countries are — realize what they are going to be susceptible to when the Russians come in to undermine their elections. ” Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
| 0 |
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump views Germany as an important U.S. ally and gets along very well with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the White House said on Tuesday. Speaking at a news briefing after Trump intensified a dispute with Germany by calling Berlin’s trade and spending policies “very bad,” White House spokesman Sean Spicer said: “They get along very well. He has a lot of respect for her. ... And he views not just Germany but the rest of Europe as an important American ally.”
| 0 |
When the Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery Act was adopted unanimously by Congress in December, it was widely praised as a necessary tool to help the heirs of Holocaust victims recover art stolen from their families during World War II. Now the efficacy of the HEAR Act, as it is known, may get an early test in New York State Court, where the heirs of Fritz Grunbaum, an Austrian Jewish entertainer, are citing it in efforts to claim two valuable colorful drawings by Egon Schiele. Grunbaum’s extraordinary art collection has been generating controversy almost since the Nazis confiscated it from his Vienna apartment in 1938 and shipped him to his death in the Dachau concentration camp. For years, his heirs have argued that the collection, which included 81 Schieles, was stolen by the Nazis. Collectors, dealers and some museums, however, have countered that the art was inventoried by the Nazis but not stolen, and that Grunbaum’s sold 53 of the Schieles in a legitimate transaction, to a Swiss art dealer, in 1956. They say that previous courts have found that the Schieles were not stolen and that no further claims should be considered on those works. But the Grunbaum heirs contend that the previous claims, in this case and others, were settled on legal technicalities, not the merits of the argument that the art was looted by the Nazis, and that this is just the sort of case the law was enacted to address. Arguing for the legislation last year, one sponsor, Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, said that it would ensure that “claims to art are not unfairly barred by statutes of limitations and other similar nonmerits defenses. ” The law created a federal statute of limitations for such claims: six years from the time of “actual discovery” of the art’s whereabouts. It is in line with the spirit of two international proclamations stating that technicalities should not be employed to prevent stolen property from being returned to rightful owners. The legislation has also been cited by lawyers for the estate of Alice Leffman, in a federal suit against the Metropolitan Museum of Art, seeking restitution of a valuable Picasso painting, “The Actor. ” In court filings, the museum has asked that the case be dismissed, and has stated that it does not believe that the Picasso was stolen. The two Schieles now being pursued, “Woman in a Black Pinafore” (1911) and “Woman Hiding Her Face” (1912) were part of the 1956 sale to the Swiss dealer. But Raymond Dowd, a lawyer for the Grunbaum heirs — Timothy Reif, David Fraenkel and Milos Vavra — argues that the circumstances of that transaction have never been fully explored and that his clients did not discover the lost works until they were noticed for sale at an art fair in 2015. Mr. Dowd and one of the heirs, Mr. Vavra, previously pursued the restitution of another Schiele drawing from the Grunbaum collection, “Seated Woman With Bent Left Leg (Torso). ” In that litigation, filed in 2005, the court ruled in favor of a Boston businessman, David Bakalar, who had bought the work in 1963. It said too much time had passed since the Grunbaum heirs had made their claim, causing evidence to be lost. Mr. Dowd appealed the ruling, but lost. In 2015 Mr. Bakalar, who paid $4, 300 for the work, sold it at auction for $1. 3 million. Mr. Dowd filed his new suit in November of that year, after learning that Richard Nagy, a London art dealer and Schiele specialist, was trying to sell “Woman in a Black Pinafore” and “Woman Hiding Her Face” at an art fair at the Park Avenue Armory. The two drawings are valued together at roughly $5 million, according to Mr. Dowd. Mr. Nagy has fought the claim, arguing in court papers that he acquired both artworks “in good faith and in a commercially reasonable manner” after the United States Supreme Court declined to hear Mr. Dowd’s appeal of the “Bakalar” case. His lawyers argue that previous court rulings about the Schieles from the Grunbaum collection were based on a finding that they had been properly conveyed in 1956. Still, last year Judge Charles Ramos of the New York State Supreme Court ordered that the two drawings be held by Mr. Nagy’s shipping agent, pending the resolution of the legal action. Mr. Nagy and his lawyer, Thaddeus Stauber, have appealed. In an interview, Mr. Stauber said the case against Mr. Nagy should be dismissed. “It is what we call ‘Bakalar 2,’” he said. “It’s the same case being brought by these heirs and their counsel over the exact same art collection, so the case shouldn’t go forward. ” He said Mr. Dowd was wrong to invoke the act because the law says it does not apply to cases where there has already been a final judgment the Bakalar case, he said, had determined that the Grunbaum Schieles weren’t stolen. Mr. Stauber added: “It’s kind of offensive to everybody who’s been involved in this field, claimants and otherwise, to keep touting something which the courts have decided. You had your trial. Evidence was presented. It’s over. ” But Agnes Peresztegi, the president and legal counsel of the Commission on Art Recovery — an organization founded by the billionaire art collector Ronald S. Lauder to encourage the restitution of artworks stolen during World War II — said in an interview that she agreed with Mr. Dowd. The “Bakalar” case was not decided on the merits, she said, but on the technical issue that too much time had passed to pursue a claim. She said she welcomes the use of the new law in deciding whether many of the Grunbaum collection’s Schieles, including the two owned by Mr. Nagy, were stolen. “My view,” she said, “is that all claimants that have a nonfrivolous case will have a day in court, and cases without facts to support them will be dismissed. ” Mr. Dowd remains optimistic for his clients. “We believe that the expert report and scholarship of Dr. Jonathan Petropoulos, the world’s leading expert in this field, will persuade the court that the evidence shows that Fritz Grunbaum was a victim of Nazi art looting,” he wrote in an email.
| 0 |
The whiner-in-chief struck again with yet another early morning Twitter tantrum.Donald Trump can t handle the fact that he lost the popular vote, especially to a woman.Hillary Clinton s margin of victory in nearly 3 million votes, but Trump stole the election with the help of Russian hackers. Even his electoral vote win is one of the smallest in the last 100 years.But even after the Electoral College wrongly certified him to be president, Trump is STILL complaining about losing the popular vote and is making excuses to explain the loss rather than moving on and focusing on the huge job he s about to take over in January.Campaigning to win the Electoral College is much more difficult & sophisticated than the popular vote. Hillary focused on the wrong states! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 21, 2016I would have done even better in the election, if that is possible, if the winner was based on popular vote but would campaign differently Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 21, 2016Trump is even bitching about not being praised by the media for not spending as much money to win. Of course, why spend money on advertising when you can promise favors for Putin in exchange for help spreading propaganda on the Internet?I have not heard any of the pundits or commentators discussing the fact that I spent FAR LESS MONEY on the win than Hillary on the loss! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 21, 2016Apparently, we re going to be hearing Trump whine about the popular vote for the next four years because his ego can t handle losing.And Twitter users were quick to put Trump in his place.@realDonaldTrump remember when you said the electoral college was bad Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) December 21, 2016@realDonaldTrump Losing the popular vote is eating you up like that worm Khan dropped in Chekov s ear. pourmecoffee (@pourmecoffee) December 21, 2016.@realDonaldTrump Also: pic.twitter.com/98rH2ODahZ Lauren Duca (@laurenduca) December 21, 2016@realDonaldTrump Really? That s not what you said in 2012 pic.twitter.com/zSKLHHydPE Sharika Soal (@LadyThriller69) December 21, 2016@realDonaldTrump You won the Presidency of the United States of America, yet you still sound like a complete loser. Cody Johnston (@drmistercody) December 21, 2016@realDonaldTrump Looks like you still can t get over the fact that an overwhelming majority of Americans rejected you. Cristian ? (@cristianafarias) December 21, 2016@realDonaldTrump On January 20th I hope they drive you to the old set of The West Wing and leave you there with a bunch of actors. Justin Hendrix (@justinhendrix) December 21, 2016@realDonaldTrump yes Donald, you won. Continue to gloat. We all know your win is unpresidented. Why not spend time doing something for USA? ? (@VeeVee) December 21, 2016@realDonaldTrump This really gets to you, doesn t it? You re a fucking child. Your ego is ruining the country and it s still not enough. Jon Bershad (@JonBershad) December 21, 2016@realDonaldTrump pic.twitter.com/Dz675z5dPn marisa kabas (@MarisaKabas) December 21, 2016For weeks, Trump has been bitching about how people should move on after the election, but he can t even do that himself. Now Saturday Night Live will have even more material to mock him with when the show returns. For now, we ll have to settle for the roasting Twitter just delivered.Featured image via Steve Pope/Getty Images
| 0 |
Home | World | Analyst: Why Turkey Opening Border to Millions Migrants into Europe is a Good Thing Analyst: Why Turkey Opening Border to Millions Migrants into Europe is a Good Thing By Gazi 25/11/2016 11:28:20
ANKARA – Turkey – The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Friday has vowed to throw open Turkey’s borders to illegal migrants after the European Parliament voted to back a freeze in membership talks with Ankara, and have reneged on a visa deal that was promised by the EU a few months ago.
With all these broken promises, Turkey is fully justified in opening the floodgates into Europe once again, where the Schengen zone is an effective unguarded corridor not only for illegal migrants, but drugs, arms and other contraband.
This mass deluge of human traffic into Europe will be good for the United Kingdom’s Brexit stance, as an estimated 5 – 10 million migrants will push their way from Turkey directly into the European heartland, causing further unrest and problems for the EU, which has already been inundated with millions of migrants from South East Asia, Syria, and Africa.
The open border with Greece, all the way up to the Black Sea will once again be open to traffic, and as more millions come, news will spread and even more migrants will make the journey.
Turkey’s stance should be applauded in the destruction of the EU, as there will be limited capacity or enthusiasm for even more migrants.
The numbers of migrants could easily increase to 20 million or 50 million migrants within a year or so, depending on the efforts of the Turks and their open door policy, as well as the forced reception within EU countries residing in the Balkans and Eastern Europe.
Most migrants will naturally gravitate towards the leading EU nations of Germany and France, however there could be an increased bottleneck scenario occurring around Calais as some try to reach the UK.
The Turks must be fully commended in their push for the destruction of the EU, and the increase in sentiment for Brexit, however it is the Schengen zone created by unelected eurocrats which will be their own undoing..a beautiful and just end to the masochistic EU, who engineered their own destruction through their own socialist utopian dreams. Share on :
| 1 |
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump lashed out at what he called the party’s “rigged” delegate selection rules on Monday after rival Ted Cruz swept all of Colorado’s 34 delegates over the weekend. The New York billionaire, who has been outmaneuvered by Cruz in a series of recent state meetings to select national convention delegates, said the process was set up to protect party insiders and shut out insurgent candidates. “The system is rigged, it’s crooked,” Trump said on Fox News on Monday, alleging the Colorado convention results showed voters were being denied a voice in the process. “There was no voting. I didn’t go out there to make a speech or anything, there’s no voting,” Trump said. “The people out there are going crazy, in the Denver area and Colorado itself, and they’re going absolutely crazy because they weren’t given a vote. This was given by politicians - it’s a crooked deal.” Trump has 743 bound delegates to 545 for Cruz, according to an Associated Press count, in the battle for the 1,237 delegates needed to win the nomination on the first ballot and avoid a messy floor fight at the Republican National Convention from July 18-21. But both are at risk of not acquiring enough delegates for a first-ballot victory, leaving many free to switch their votes on later ballots. That has set off a fierce scramble by Republican candidates to get their supporters chosen as convention delegates and brought new scrutiny to the selection rules, which vary by state. Trump, who has brought in veteran strategist Paul Manafort to lead his delegate-gathering efforts, complained about Cruz’s recent success at local and state party meetings where activists pick the actual delegates who will attend the national convention. Trump accused Cruz, a U.S. senator from Texas, of trying to steal delegates in South Carolina. Trump won the state primary in February, but Cruz supporters got four of the first six delegate slots filled at congressional district meetings on Saturday, according to local media. Cruz also succeeded at getting more of his supporters chosen as delegates in Iowa, where he won the caucuses in January, and at last week’s state convention in North Dakota. “Now they’re trying to pick off those delegates one by one,” Trump said. “That’s not the way democracy is supposed to work. They offer them trips, they offer them all sorts of things and you’re allowed to do that. You can buy all these votes.” Trump distributed a video of what he said was a Colorado voter setting his Republican Party registration on fire in protest of the process. “Great people being disenfranchised by politicians,” Trump said on Twitter, adding the Republican Party was “in trouble.” Guy Short, a Cruz backer in Colorado who was elected as a Republican national convention delegate for the sixth time, disputed Trump’s allegations. “Donald Trump is a liar,” Short told Reuters in an email. “Nobody was offered anything. In fact, I spent thousands of dollars of my own money campaigning to become a delegate because it’s that important to make sure Donald Trump is NOT our nominee.” Republican National Committee spokesman Sean Spicer told Fox News the process for choosing delegates had been set by states for more than a year and was no secret. “Not understanding that is one thing, but it’s hardly rigged when it’s done right out in the open,” he said. Cruz campaign spokeswoman Alice Stewart said Trump was insulting the process to distract from his losses. “He has a pattern of whining when he isn’t winning,” she said in a statement. Trump’s organizational troubles even extend to two of his children. Eric Trump, 32, and Ivanka Trump, 34, missed the deadline for registering as Republicans to vote in next week’s New York primary. State records show both are registered voters who are not enrolled in a party, ABC News reported. For already registered voters, any request to switch party affiliation must have been made by early October. The deadline for new voter registrations was March 25. Trump was the target on Monday of a new ad by the Democratic front-runner, Hillary Clinton, that listed Trump’s comments on women, Mexican immigrants and Muslims. Both Clinton and rival Bernie Sanders, a U.S. senator from Vermont, have tried to position themselves as the Democrat most capable of defeating Trump. “Donald Trump says we can solve America’s problems by turning against each other,” Clinton’s ad said. “It’s wrong and it goes against everything New York and America stand for.”
| 1 |
BERLIN (Reuters) - The leader of Germany s Social Democrats (SPD) pledged to have U.S. nuclear weapons withdrawn from German territory if, against the odds, he defeats Angela Merkel to become chancellor next month. Addressing a campaign rally in Trier late on Tuesday, SPD leader Martin Schulz also said he, unlike Merkel, would resist demands by U.S. President Donald Trump for NATO members to increase their defense spending. Trump wants nuclear armament. We are against this, Schulz said, apparently trying to differentiate his party from Merkel s more hawkish Christian Democratic Union (CDU). As chancellor, I will commit Germany to having the nuclear weapons stationed here withdrawn from our country, he said. About 20 U.S. nuclear warheads are thought to be stationed at a military base in Buechel, in western Germany, according to unofficial estimates. The U.S. embassy in Berlin said it does not comment on nuclear weapons in Germany. Taking advantage of Trump s extreme unpopularity in Germany, Schulz also said he would use the money Merkel had earmarked for increased military spending for other purposes. What to do with our money is the central question of this election, he said, referring to a 30 billion-euro tax surplus. Trump demands that 2 percent of GDP, 30 billion euros, should go to military spending, and Merkel agreed to that without asking German citizens. Germany and other NATO members had already pledged to raise their defense spending to 2 percent of gross domestic product before Trump was elected. While most of them have increased spending on their militaries, only a few have reached the 2 percent goal, and Germany is not one of them. Most recent polls show Schulz s party polling at around 24 percent, some 14 percentage points behind Merkel. Most expect a booming economy and low unemployment will carry her into a fourth term in Sept. 24 elections. However, with Germans historically wary of using military force since World War Two, Schulz s message may resonate among the SPD s core voters. After 12 years in office, Merkel has become increasingly confident on the global stage. She has pushed for Germany to become more militarily self-reliant, partly in response to Trump s hinting that he might abandon NATO allies if they do not spend more on defense. Earlier this year, Merkel said the times when Germany could rely on others to defend it were to some extent in the past .
| 1 |
BETHLEHEM, West Bank (Reuters) - A small group of Palestinian protesters on Sunday set fire to placards printed with images of U.S. Vice President Mike Pence and Middle East negotiator Jason Greenblatt outside Jesus s traditional birthplace, days before their arrival in the region. With Bethlehem s illuminated Christmas tree behind them, about 30 people stood quietly holding candles at Manger Square next to the Church of the Nativity, the site Christians believe marks Jesus s birthplace, before setting the placards alight. Bethlehem welcomes the messengers of peace, not the messengers of war , read some placards with pictures of Pence and Greenblatt as they went up in flames. The U.S. vice president is due in the region later this week but the Palestinians have said he is not welcome and President Mahmoud Abbas will not meet him during his visit, Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad Al-Maliki said last week, a move the White House described as unfortunate . Greenblatt, who has held several rounds of discussions with Israeli and Palestinian officials during the past few months in an effort to restart peace talks that have been frozen since 2014, is also due to arrive this week. Violent protests have been held almost daily in the Palestinian territories over U.S. President Donald Trump s Dec. 6 announcement in which he overturned long-standing U.S. policy on Jerusalem and said he was recognizing it as Israel s capital. Palestinian militants have also increased the firing of rockets at Israel since Trump s announcement and two were launched on Sunday. One landed in an Israeli community close to the Gaza border and damaged property but no casualties were reported initially, a police spokesman said. Most countries consider East Jerusalem, which Israel annexed after capturing it in a 1967 war, to be occupied territory and say the status of the city should be decided at future Israeli-Palestinian talks. Israel has welcomed Trump s announcement as recognizing political reality and biblical Jewish roots in Jerusalem. It says that all of Jerusalem a city holy to Jews, Muslims and Christians is its capital, while Palestinians want East Jerusalem as the capital of a future independent state.
| 1 |
Donald Trump s lewd and predatory remarks about women is causing him to lose support with Republicans but his conservative followers just don t care. What s really alarming about this is that we even have to have a discussion to explain that sexual assault is a bad thing.The Daily Show s Jordan Klepper just confirmed that when visiting a Trump rally in Pennsylvania to get his supporters take on the reality-show-star-turned-GOP-presidential-candidate s Grab them by the pussy comments.Klepper asked if Trump had finally crossed the line. One supporter said, You know what? So what if he wants to grab pussy. I want to grab pussy. I wish I could grab pussy as much as he is. Klepper wondered how they felt about the candidate casually talking about sexual assault. One supporter said it was just locker room talk. What do you mean?, Klepper asked. Guys in a bar talk that way when they see a pretty girl, the man answered.One female Trump supporter said she s heard worse. Another woman said, It s locker room talk. That s what boys do. It s worth noting here that Trump was not a boy when he made those remarks. He was 60 years old.Klepper told her, I don t talk like that then asked her if she has children. I do, the woman said. When asked if her children talk like that, she said no. So not those boys, Klepper said. Do you have a husband? he asked the woman. She said she is married. Does he talk like that? he asked. No, she said. So not that boy, he said.Klepper asked a young man if he uses that language and he said he did not. He asked whether his father talks like that and the young Trump supporter said no. So who talks like that? he asked of the man. Well obviously Donald Trump, he said.A couple was approached and asked the same question. As it happens, no one with any sense of decency talks like that but every Trump supporter excused their candidate s behavior.One man said, Grab it while you can, Trump. When asked if there s anything the GOP presidential candidate could say that would make them not vote for him, one man said no while a woman said No matter what he says, I will vote for Donald Trump. One was was asked if Trump said the n-word, would she still vote for him. She said that she would.One man said he spoke to a lot of women at the rally and half of them would love to have their pussies snatched by Trump. One man s sexual assault, he said is another man s flirtation. Here s the video:These are actual voters. Be sure to grab them by the ballots on election day. Trump has emboldened the very worst in our society.Featured image via screen capture
| 0 |
21st Century Wire says This latest diplomatic development certainly appears positive on its surface, this week s declared Syrian Ceasefire a three-way agreement between Washington, Russia and the Syrian government (and begrudgingly by the West s other regional stakeholders ) looks increasingly like it may just be the latest attempt to buy time so that Washington, Turkey and Saudi Arabia can re-arm and replenish various militant fighting groups currently laying waste to Syria.Since the entrance of the Russian Air Force into the Syrian conflict theatre last October, the Washington-led Axis has gradually lost proxy-control of a number of key terrorist strongholds in Northern Syria, namely in Aleppo, and thus are unable to dictate crucial facts on the ground required to dictate the international media and political narratives. Unable to craft and package these narratives, the West and its dubious coalition are completely unable to sell an escalation of military violence in Syria.The fact that the Washington Axis has already threatened to move to a Plan B even before the agreement has been implemented, indicates that this diplomatic effort may in fact be dead on arrival . Before the ink was even dry on the agreement, sources inside the CIA and the Pentagon went public with a preemptive statement claiming that, Russia cannot be trusted to uphold the ceasefire . The scene is now set.Watch as 21WIRE founder and editor Patrick Henningsen speaks to Sean Thomas from RT International about why the ceasefire deal may not survive the spring . Patrick Henningsen talks Syria Ceasefire with RT International (2016) from 21wire on Vimeo.READ MORE SYRIA NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire Syria Files
| 1 |
Put this one under Shit You Just Can t Make Up :A U.S. Air Force base in Georgia was forced to pull a flyer advertising a Martin Luther King Jr. Day fun shoot after public outcry, reports WMAZ.The flyer featuring the face of the civil rights icon promoted a noon gathering on Jan. 18 for the Robins Air Force Base Trap and Skeet Club, where participants would get two rounds of shooting and lunch for $20. Air Force officials pulled this provocative MLK Day Fun Shoot flyer: https://t.co/F65HoNYfwu #gapol pic.twitter.com/trss95PIcJ Greg Bluestein (@bluestein) January 14, 2016 Officials at the base insist that the whole thing was just an honest mistake and, aw shucks, they didn t mean nothin by it! They were just some good ol boys never meanin no harm. The official apology cleared the whole thing up: We realized the inappropriateness of the advertisement several days ago and immediately began removing the flyer. There was no malice of forethought in the flyer s creation and it was never the base s intention to portray Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in a negative light, It continued. It was an honest mistake, to which we ve personally counseled the parties involved and will provide them with remedial training and appropriate oversight to prevent this sort of inattention from occurring in the future. If it was a state less prone to overwhelming racism, the apology might be believable. But this was Georgia. And it was the Air Force, the branch of the military most heavily infested with Christian extremism. If you weren t aware of it, the Christian Right has been trying to turn the United States military into a religious institution for decades. They ve had the most success in the Air Force so far.Unsurprisingly, where there is Christian extremism, there s systemic racism as well. So, keeping these facts in mind, the MLK Jr. Fun Shoot starts to take on a much more ominous tone. Context is everything.Featured image via screencap.
| 1 |
An unidentified photographer is reported to have fallen backwards off a press riser at Donald Trump s rally in Bethpage, New York.About 8,000 people were reported to be in attendance at the rally, which was held at Grumman Studios. Video published by The New Civil Rights Movement shows that about 20 minutes into his speech, Trump began referring to the media as dirty and awful people. As he did so, the audience began booing and jeering at members of the media who were packed together or press risers, calling the losers. NBC National News correspondent Peter Alexander tweeted:Image credit: screen capture Peter Alexander on TwitterAssociated Press reporter Jonathan Lemire also reported on Trump s attack on the media, quoting the candidate on Twitter:Image credit: screen capture Jonathon Lamire on TwitterReuters reporter Emily Flitter also posted about the incident.Image credit: screen capture Emily Flitter via TwitterDavid Badash of The New Civil Rights Movement reports that shortly after this disturbing scene took place, the unidentified reporter fell backward from the press riser.Multiple news outlets report that the crowd broke out into cheers when the person fell.Screen capture Emily Flitter via TwitterChris Dignam attributed the reporters fall to the fact that the press risers were overcrowded.Image credit: screen capture via Chris Dignam on TwitterThis isn t the first time that Donald Trump has endangered members of the press during one of his rallies. He often targets the media during his rants, inciting his followers to turn on the press. At other rallies, he s called the media dishonest and scum. He has also forced reporters to remain inside fenced-off pens. At a December 21 rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Trump told his audience I would never kill [journalists] but I do hate them. His hatred vehement hatred toward the press is not just ugly and wrong, it s dangerous to every reporter, journalist and photographer in America. The idea that Trump is creating a nationwide mob of potentially violent, media-hating followers is chilling.In August of last year, Allison Parker, a reporter with Virginia s WDBJ-TV was shot and killed on live TV. The man who shot her was a former coworker who had mental health issues. We can only guess how many of Trump s followers have similar mental health issues.Judging by the reaction of the crowd when the reporter fell from the risers, I d say a lot.Credit: Andrew Renneisen / Stringer Getty Images News
| 1 |
WASHINGTON/PORTLAND, Me. (Reuters) - Supporters of Republican Donald Trump urged him to get back on message on Thursday after a week of dropping opinion poll numbers and a war of words with ranking Republicans over his U.S. presidential campaign. In response to the criticism, Trump pledged to focus more on Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, who emerged from last week’s Democratic National Convention with a lead in the polls and who has been consistently attacking him as temperamentally unfit for the presidency. At a rally in Portland, Maine, on Thursday, Trump kept his attention on trying to undermine Clinton’s candidacy. He said the fact that she has moved past a scandal over her use of a private email server as President Barack Obama’s secretary of state was “probably the greatest accomplishment that she has ever had in politics.” Since formally accepting the Republican nomination two weeks ago, Trump has exasperated many supporters by getting bogged down in a public spat with the parents of an American soldier killed in Iraq and some fellow Republicans. Billionaire investor Wilbur Ross said he still backed Trump, but urged him to stop engaging in exchanges that benefit the Democrats and make the real estate mogul’s behavior the issue in the campaign. “This election is Donald’s to lose and so far the Democrats have been clever about baiting him and he generally has bitten,” Ross said in an email to Reuters late on Wednesday. U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan, who has endorsed Trump but has not received a reciprocal endorsement from the New York businessman in his re-election bid, told WTAQ radio host Jerry Bader in Green Bay, Wisconsin, that Trump has “had a pretty strange run since the convention.” “You would think we ought to be focusing on Hillary Clinton, on all of her deficiencies. She is such a weak candidate that one would think we’d be on offense against Hillary Clinton, and it is distressing that that’s not what we’re talking about these days,” he said. Michael Caputo, a former Trump adviser who still supports him, said Trump still has time to right the ship. “Staying on message is absolutely key,” Caputo told Reuters. “After 30 years of speaking his mind, Mr. Trump has to understand that the general election for president of the United States is all about staying on message.” Actor and director Clint Eastwood, a prominent celebrity supporter of the Republican Party who appeared at its 2012 U.S. presidential nominating convention, offered an alternative view, saying Trump says some “dumb things” but that Americans should get over it. “He’s onto something because secretly everybody’s getting tired of political correctness, kissing up,” the acclaimed actor and director told Esquire magazine. “That’s the kiss-ass generation we’re in right now.” At the same time, Trump’s lukewarm support for the NATO alliance drew criticism from 37 national security experts from both Democratic and Republican administrations. “We find Trump’s comments to be reckless, dangerous, and extremely unwise,” they wrote in a statement. Obama, at a Pentagon news conference, dismissed Trump’s statements that the election could be “rigged” against him. “Of course, the elections will not be rigged,” he said. Trump’s rough patch has contributed to a dip in support in some battleground states. A WBUR/MassINC poll in New Hampshire showed Clinton leading Trump, 47 percent to 32 percent. Other polls showed Trump down 11 percentage points to Clinton in Pennsylvania and 6 percentage points in Florida, two states that are important to his chances of winning the election. Trump’s troubles are emboldening Democrats to think big. Speaking with reporters after a Clinton campaign event in Las Vegas, U.S. Senator Harry Reid, the Senate Democratic leader, said he believed traditionally Republican-leaning states such as Arizona and Georgia are going to be competitive this election, and he expects Clinton to campaign there. In Portland, some people at Trump’s rally said the candidate should stop getting distracted. “I don’t like how he gets off track,” said Bill Devine, 65, of Bath, Maine. “He needs to stay focused on his campaign.” Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort told CBS’s “This Morning” that the campaign is comfortable where it stands now and said the news media have built a false narrative in which Democrats are controlling the race to the Nov. 8 election. Manafort said that Trump’s dropping poll numbers “were expected” and that he expected the numbers to even out soon. “The framework of this election favors Donald Trump. If we run the campaign that we plan on running, we think we’re going to win,” he said. Concern about Trump has spilled into at least one congressional race. U.S. Representative Mike Coffman, a Colorado Republican, has released a campaign ad in his own re-election bid promising to “stand up” to Trump if Trump is elected. “People ask me, ‘What do you think about Trump?’ Honestly, I don’t care for him much. And I certainly don’t trust Hillary,” Coffman said in the ad. U.S. Representative Charlie Dent, a Pennsylvania Republican, told MSNBC he could not endorse Trump because of “all these unforced errors” that Trump was making. “It just seems that he’s, at times, hell-bent on losing a very winnable election to a very seriously flawed candidate: Hillary Clinton,” Dent said.
| 0 |
Obama just couldn t keep quiet. He released a statement via Facebook today lashing out at President Trump s decision to rescind his DACA executive action, labeling the move as cruel in an immediate admonition of his predecessor following the move. The DACA program is unlawful: Just listen to Obama s own words at a 2011 town hall with Univision:The DACA program is unlawful. For an explanation, look no further than President Obama s own words at a 2011 town hall with Univision. pic.twitter.com/E4MxN5JZD9 ForAmerica (@ForAmerica) September 5, 2017Obama defended DREAMers people brought here illegally as children as patriots who are American in their hearts and cast Trump s move as political decision WAS IT NOT A TOTALLY POLITICAL DECISION FOR OBAMA TO SIGN THE EXECUTIVE ORDER ON DACA? To target these young people is wrong because they have done nothing wrong, Obama wrote in a Facebook post published hours after Trump announced his decision in a written statement following a speech by Attorney General Jeff Sessions. It is self-defeating because they want to start new businesses, staff our labs, serve in our military, and otherwise contribute to the country we love. And it is cruel. No, what s cruel is having open borders to allow these people in. What s cruel is to have this unConstitutional policy that now Trump has to deal with. President Trump is the adult in the room of a bunch of lawless cowards.OBAMA S STATEMENT: Immigration can be a controversial topic. We all want safe, secure borders and a dynamic economy, and people of goodwill can have legitimate disagreements about how to fix our immigration system so that everybody plays by the rules. But that s not what the action that the White House took today is about. This is about young people who grew up in America kids who study in our schools, young adults who are starting careers, patriots who pledge allegiance to our flag. These Dreamers are Americans in their hearts, in their minds, in every single way but one: on paper. They were brought to this country by their parents, sometimes even as infants. They may not know a country besides ours. They may not even know a language besides English. They often have no idea they re undocumented until they apply for a job, or college, or a driver s license. Over the years, politicians of both parties have worked together to write legislation that would have told these young people our young people that if your parents brought you here as a child, if you ve been here a certain number of years, and if you re willing to go to college or serve in our military, then you ll get a chance to stay and earn your citizenship. And for years while I was President, I asked Congress to send me such a bill. That bill never came. And because it made no sense to expel talented, driven, patriotic young people from the only country they know solely because of the actions of their parents, my administration acted to lift the shadow of deportation from these young people, so that they could continue to contribute to our communities and our country. We did so based on the well-established legal principle of prosecutorial discretion, deployed by Democratic and Republican presidents alike, because our immigration enforcement agencies have limited resources, and it makes sense to focus those resources on those who come illegally to this country to do us harm. Deportations of criminals went up. Some 800,000 young people stepped forward, met rigorous requirements, and went through background checks. And America grew stronger as a result. But today, that shadow has been cast over some of our best and brightest young people once again. To target these young people is wrong because they have done nothing wrong. It is self-defeating because they want to start new businesses, staff our labs, serve in our military, and otherwise contribute to the country we love. And it is cruel. What if our kid s science teacher, or our friendly neighbor turns out to be a Dreamer? Where are we supposed to send her? To a country she doesn t know or remember, with a language she may not even speak? Let s be clear: the action taken today isn t required legally. It s a political decision, and a moral question. Whatever concerns or complaints Americans may have about immigration in general, we shouldn t threaten the future of this group of young people who are here through no fault of their own, who pose no threat, who are not taking away anything from the rest of us. They are that pitcher on our kid s softball team, that first responder who helps out his community after a disaster, that cadet in ROTC who wants nothing more than to wear the uniform of the country that gave him a chance. Kicking them out won t lower the unemployment rate, or lighten anyone s taxes, or raise anybody s wages. It is precisely because this action is contrary to our spirit, and to common sense, that business leaders, faith leaders, economists, and Americans of all political stripes called on the administration not to do what it did today. And now that the White House has shifted its responsibility for these young people to Congress, it s up to Members of Congress to protect these young people and our future. I m heartened by those who ve suggested that they should. And I join my voice with the majority of Americans who hope they step up and do it with a sense of moral urgency that matches the urgency these young people feel. Ultimately, this is about basic decency. This is about whether we are a people who kick hopeful young strivers out of America, or whether we treat them the way we d want our own kids to be treated. It s about who we are as a people and who we want to be. What makes us American is not a question of what we look like, or where our names come from, or the way we pray. What makes us American is our fidelity to a set of ideals that all of us are created equal; that all of us deserve the chance to make of our lives what we will; that all of us share an obligation to stand up, speak out, and secure our most cherished values for the next generation. That s how America has traveled this far. That s how, if we keep at it, we will ultimately reach that more perfect union. Read more: DM
| 0 |
The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) claims to manage public land for the “common good.” However, their actions as a federal agency consistently show that they really serve private interests,...
| 1 |
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump picked Wall Street financier Anthony Scaramucci, a long-time supporter, to be his White House communications director on Friday, a White House official said. Currently at the Export-Import Bank, Scaramucci is expected to start his new job in August, the official said. No other changes were immediately expected in a communications operation that includes press secretary Sean Spicer and his deputy, Sarah Sanders, the official said. The appointment comes as the White House deals with questions around a special counsel probe and several congressional investigations into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and potential collusion with Trump’s campaign. The communications position has been vacant since Michael Dubke resigned in May as communications director. Spicer has been serving a dual role as press secretary and communications director since Dubke left. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Scaramucci was interviewed by Trump on Friday morning and the job had been offered and accepted. Scaramucci, a Republican fundraiser and founder of Skybridge Capital, was earlier offered the post of U.S. ambassador to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris.
| 1 |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.