Three days after Hurricane Katrina: Where was Michelle Obama? pic.twitter.com/hjwhsxHdq5
— Bikergirl4trump (@TrumpResponders) February 23, 2017
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis announced Tuesday that he is freezing the implementation of President Trump’s ban on transgender people serving in the military, saying that he will first establish a panel of experts to provide advice and recommendations on how to carry out Trump’s directive.
The Pentagon confirmed the move in a statement attributed to Mattis, saying that he will first develop a study and implementation plan “as directed” by the president in a memorandum released Friday. Soon-to-be arriving political appointees at the Defense Department “will play an important role in this effort,” Mattis added. The plan will address both the potential for transgender people looking to serve in the military for the first time and transgender troops who already are serving.
This framing is an extreme mischaracterization of the facts. Mattis did not “freeze” the trans ban, and he is not “buy[ing] time” in some potentially insubordinate effort to buck Trump. In reality, the secretary is doing exactly what Trump directed him to do in a recent memo.
Watch Christopher Tin conduct “Baba Yetu” – his Grammy Award-winning theme song written for Civilization IV. Performed by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the Angel City Chorale, Prima Vocal Ensemble, and Lucis at Cadogan Hall in London, July 19, 2016.
“What a crowd, what a turnout,” Trump said from atop this firetruck, addressing hurricane victims. pic.twitter.com/0EdsLctHDi— Christina Wilkie (@christinawilkie) August 29, 2017
Take a break from the steady diet of hopelessness and read this.
On CNN's New Day, Alysin Camerota interviews Jim "Mattress Mack" McIngvale, owner of Houston's Gallery Furniture, who took in Katrina victims five years ago and is now welcoming Harvey flood victims.
She asked how many people he had in his stores today.
"We have two stores, one of them has about 360 people, the other one has 400," he said. "So we've got lots of people displaced from the horrible flooding and we're thrilled to have them."
(I'm sorry, I'm trying really hard not to compare this with Joel Osteen's response.)
New statement from @JoelOsteen and Lakewood Church in regards to Hurricane Harvey backlash pic.twitter.com/KLMNYysc6s
— Anastasia (@AnastasiaElyseW) August 29, 2017
The Trump administration is preparing to lift a controversial ban on the transfer of some surplus military equipment to police departments whose battlefield-style response to rioting in a St. Louis suburb three years ago prompted a halt to the program.
The new plan, outlined in documents obtained by USA TODAY, would roll back an Obama administration executive order that blocked armored vehicles, large-caliber weapons, ammunition and other heavy equipment from being re-purposed from foreign battlefields to America's streets.
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| In this Aug. 9, 2014 file photo, a police tactical team moves in to disperse a group of protesters in Ferguson, Mo. (Photo: Jeff Roberson, AP) |
I'm not surprised Trump pardoned racial profiler Arpaio. White Nationalists, KKK, & Duke celebrated Trump's election b/c he is one of them!
— Maxine Waters (@RepMaxineWaters) August 26, 2017
In my judgment, the previous Administration failed to identify a sufficient basis to conclude that terminating the Departments' longstanding policy and practice would not hinder military effectiveness and lethality, disrupt unit cohesion, or tax military resources, and there remain meaningful concerns that further study is needed to ensure that continued implementation of last year's policy change would not have those negative effects.
So Trump’s true legacy may well be defined not by the laws he does or more likely doesn’t pass, but by his decision to put Scott Pruitt in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency.
As Oklahoma’s attorney general, Pruitt effectively acted as a servant, not of the public, but of polluting industries. That’s not an accusation; it’s confirmed by his own email trail.
Now, at a time when much of the Trump administration seems paralyzed by lack of leadership and key personnel, Pruitt is firing on all cylinders — but not because he’s making the E.P.A. more effective. On the contrary, he’s engaged in sabotage from the top, moving quickly to undermine his own agency’s mission — not just its efforts against climate change, but its role in protecting the environment across the board.
Hurricane Harvey is strengthening as it approaches the Texas coast, and the massive storm is underscoring another big disturbance on the way: the battle over President Donald Trump’s proposed cuts to the National Weather Service.
Charged with providing weather forecasts and warnings, the National Weather Service also makes its data available to hundreds of companies that use it for everything from smartphone applications to agricultural equipment. Trump earlier this year proposed cutting its budget by 6 percent and that of its parent agency, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), by a mammoth 16 percent. It was an unprecedented proposal in the National Weather Service’s storied history that extends back to 1890, when it was founded as the U.S. Weather Bureau.
Trump also proposed huge subcuts for programs that engage in computer modeling of storms, as well as observation of storms and dissemination of data. Tsunami research and prediction would be cut, along with supercomputing investments and a program to extend more accurate modeling to 30 days from 16, which could have huge benefits for everything from the insurance to the transportation industries.
I'm going to change the channel and skip the tweets, posts and articles about Clinton's book because I'm sick to death of hearing the media demand that she don yet another hair shirt and flagellate herself for their amusement. I've never seen anyone in politics so relentlessly required to repeatedly debase himself before the media. It's beyond uncomfortable at this point. It's sick.
Hillary Clinton’s book about the 2016 campaign, “What Happened,” won’t be out for a few weeks, but this morning a few brief excerpts from the audiobook were played on “Morning Joe.” And as usual, a great deal of the focus is on whether Clinton is taking sufficient responsibility for her defeat.
So we need to ask ourselves: Why is it so important to so many people that Clinton perform a ritual of self-abasement?
If you don’t recall a chorus of angry calls for Mitt Romney or John McCain or John Kerry or Al Gore to get down on their knees and beg forgiveness for their failures every time they appeared in public after losing their presidential elections, that’s because it didn’t happen. Only Hillary Clinton is subject to this demand.
And when she takes responsibility, as she has before, her words are carefully scrutinized to see if she’s being self-critical enough. When she said in May that she took responsibility for her loss but also pointed out that she would have won had James B. Comey not made that dramatic email announcement 11 days before the election — which is almost certainly true — the comments were greeted by a round of scolding from reporters who obviously felt that she was not sufficiently humbled.
"The Flat Earth Society has members all round the globe"
Kyle Chapman was sitting in a dimly lit Irish pub about 20 minutes outside of Boston, where Saturday afternoon’s so-called “Free Speech Rally” had just been shut down by tens of thousands of counter-protesters.
“The white man is one of the most discriminated against people in this entire country right now,” he explained.
Chapman—a muscly right-wing organizer who went viral earlier this year after video footage showed him swinging a heavy wooden stick at liberal Berkley demonstrators—had been scheduled to speak at the rally on Boston Common. But organizers ended up pulling the plug early, he said, when the crowd of counter-protesters grew too large. After being escorted to safety by police, he and other attendees retired here to lick their (metaphorical) wounds.
“I was definitely concerned for my safety and the safety of the other attendees,” Chapman said. “The barricades [that police] set up were four-foot barricades and … there would have been no way to stop the alt-left domestic terrorists if they decided to attack us.”
Chapman, for example, told me he did not under any circumstances consider himself a white nationalist. “But I can tell you that there is a war against whites,” he said. “Whites are discriminated against en masse. I personally have been the victim of multiple hate crimes. As a people, we do have our own grievances, we do have our own story to tell.” Until it becomes safe to discuss that reality in mainstream political circles, he argued, victimized whites will continue to gravitate toward the alt-right.
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| Photo: NASA |
Margarita Woc Colburn’s childhood memories of a July 1991 total solar eclipse in Central America are of a social gathering for excited adult relatives who spent hours waiting for an event that was over in minutes.
But the future veterinarian’s gaze was drawn earthward.
“I was looking down on a valley in Guatemala, and I just remember the flock of birds, this massive thing going down to the trees getting ready for nesting, just like what you see at night,” Woc Colburn said, describing a short span when the moon completely obscured the sun. “Then, it felt like a new day. Birds came out and were singing.”
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| Image: Eclipse 2017.org |
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| Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin. Photo:Gage Skidmore, via Wikimedia Commons |
“When you go back a couple of hundred years, in most instances the only textbooks that were in our public schools were in the Bible,” Bevin claimed.
“And it’s interesting that the more we’ve removed any sense of spiritual obligation or moral higher authority or absolute right and wrong, the more we’ve removed things that are biblically taught from society, the more we’ve seen the kind of mayhem that we were just discuss[ing],” he continued.
“And why are we trying to replicate our education system from hundreds of years ago,” Mehta added.
“The weekend following Gov. Matt Bevin’s prayer plan was marred by violence, leaving four dead in just three days,” the Courier-Journal noted.
Nine additional homicides have been committed in Louisville since that tragic weekend.
Tweeting the morning after 13 people were killed in Barcelona after a van plowed through crowds in a busy pedestrian area, President Donald Trump called on American courts to "give us our protective rights back" to stop "Radical Islamic Terrorism."
While it's unclear what "protective rights" the president was referring to, he has previously advocated for an expansion of the US' mass surveillance capabilities, and Trump's top intelligence officials, including CIA director Mike Pompeo, have fought even narrow restrictions on the surveillance state.
Earlier this week, the president refused to label an attack on a group of protesters by a white supremacist in Charlottesville terrorism, even though the Justice Department is investigating the crime as an act of terror.
Nearly two-thirds of Americans consider the attack that led to loss of life in Charlottesville an act of "domestic terrorism," a view that spans partisan lines. But President Trump's response to Charlottesville finds more division.
He gets majority disapproval overall for his response to the events, while most Republicans approve. Republicans interviewed following Tuesday's press conference also feel Mr. Trump is assigning blame accurately in the matter, while Democrats and Independents, and the country overall, disagree.
Brand new trailer for God's Own Country. In UK cinemas 1st September. You're welcome pic.twitter.com/VHxmAfylk1
— God's Own Country (@gocfilm) August 11, 2017
So when anybody, especially the president*, talks about what happened in Charlottesville, Virginia, over the weekend, from the Citronella Putsch on Friday night, to the violence on Saturday morning, to the graphic fulfillment of the philosophy behind these lunatic laws on Saturday afternoon, tells you that what happened in Virginia has anything to do with "polarization," or that it is a problem equally shared by Both Sides, that person is trying preemptively to pick history's pockets.
Every Republican who ever played footsie with the militias out west owns this bloodshed.
Every Republican who ever spoke to, or was honored by, the Council of Conservative Citizens and/or the League of the South owns this bloodshed.
Every Republican administration that ever went out of its way to hire Pat Buchanan, and every TV executive who ever cut him a check, and every Republican who voted for him in 1992, and everyone who ever has pretended his views differed substantially from the ones in the streets this weekend, owns this bloodshed.
Every Republican president—actually, there's only one—who began a campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, to talk about states rights, and who sent his attorney general into court to fight for tax exemptions for segregated academies, owns this bloodshed.
Every Republican who ever played footsie with the militias out west owns this bloodshed.
Every Republican politician who followed the late Lee Atwater into the woods in search of poisoned treasure owns this bloodshed.
Every conservative journalist who saw this happening and who encouraged it, or ignored it, or pretended that it wasn't happening, owns this bloodshed.
The U.S. Justice Department, currently headed by Attorney General Sessions, has demanded DreamHost—the company currently hosting disruptj20.org—to provide all information available about the website, it’s owner and its visitors.
On July 12, a search warrant was issued by the Superior Court of the District of Columbia that required DreamHost disclose a significant amount of information that would be stored on the company’s servers. The warrant included a request for all files associated with the site, email accounts the contents of those accounts associated with the site and contact and billing information of the person who registered the site.
The warrant also demanded DreamHost disclose any information it had about people who simply visited the website. The Justice Department asked for the IP addresses of visitors, which would generally provides information about a visitor’s location and other potentially identifiable information, as well as contact information of people who used the site.
"Foxes are just cat software running on dog hardware." pic.twitter.com/bKgLycMsC7
— Fluff Society (@FluffSociety) August 7, 2017
Donald Trump’s campaign for his 2020 re-election has released a new ad attacking Democrats, the media and “career politicians” just one day after the president refused to denounce white supremacism.
“Democrats, obstructing – the media, attacking our president,” the ad begins, displaying imagery featuring Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Elizabeth Warren, Maxine Waters, various hosts and commentators at MSNBC, CNN and others. “Career politicians, standing in the way of success. But President Trump’s plan is working.”
The propaganda-fueled video then proceeds to tout job creation, the stock market and a strong military as Donald Trump’s successes, noting that “the president’s enemies don’t want him to succeed.”
In late August, in a speech delineating white nationalist support for Donald Trump, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton unveiled a new title for Russian President Vladimir Putin: “The Grand Godfather of Extreme Nationalism.” With the sinecure, Clinton sought to directly link the odious policies of her Republican counterpart — namely, mainstreaming a racialized, white supremacist discourse the United States had not seen at such levels in a generation — to those brought to bear under Putin’s third term.
The epithet built upon one of the pillars of Clinton’s campaign which, in turn, built upon the primary campaign of former GOP contender, and current Ohio governor, John Kasich. That is, in addition to Trump’s outright praise for Putin’s leadership, as well as his murky, secretive financial ties to those close to the Kremlin, Clinton tied Trump to the Kremlin’s campaign of stoking hyper-nationalistic movements throughout the West.
As a rhetorical device, the title remains a flurry of brilliance. Not only does the terminology help highlight the Kremlin’s kleptocratic coterie — with Putin as don, as mafioso — but it also further emphasized Clinton’s grasp of Moscow’s policies, and the motivations therein. As seen with Hungary’s Jobbik, with France’s National Front, with Greece’s Golden Dawn, those far-right movements sprouting throughout Europe have found a counterpart in Trump’s hostile takeover of the Republican Party. And much as Trump has aped the rotted, regressive policies of Putin-friendly leaders throughout Europe — see: Hungary’s Viktor Orban — so, too, has he helped give a national platform to the groups and movements that have not only fueled a resurgence of white nationalism in the United States, but who have gone out of their way to praise, of all international leaders, Putin. These groups, as noted in Clinton’s speech, include the “alt-right,” a gathering of fascists and white nationalists who would Balkanize the United States or who would return the country to a bygone era of white supremacy, but also extend to the secessionists and Christian fundamentalists further propping Trump’s campaign.
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| Peter Cvjetanovic |
“I came to this march for the message that white European culture has a right to be here just like every other culture,” Cvjetanovic opined. “It is not perfect; there are flaws to it, of course. However I do believe that the replacement of the statue will be the slow replacement of white heritage within the United States and the people who fought and defended and built their homeland. Robert E Lee is a great example of that. He wasn’t a perfect man, but I want to honor and respect what he stood for during his time.”
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| Image via Digby |
"We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides," he said, repeating the final phrase for emphasis.
"It's been going on for a long time in our country; it's not Donald Trump, it's not Barack Obama," he added, without specifying what "it" referred to.
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| Image: Right Wing Watch |
On his radio program today, extremist anti-LGBTQ pastor Kevin Swanson and his co-host Bill Jack declared that “sexualized public schools that violate God’s law with high levels of flagrancy” should be burned to the ground.
Swanson and Jack were outraged by the fact that Washington state public schools teach students about gender identity issues, with Swanson at one point connecting this issue to a rape allegation against an employee at the state’s Department of Fish and Wildlife.
“Rape is also against God’s law and I guess it must be against state law; I’m not getting why, though,” Swanson said. “Why in the world is a sexual crime against the law in the state of Washington if the other forms of crimes are not against the law in the state of Washington? See, this is confusing to me.”
Swanson and Jack agreed that if parents from the 1950s saw what was happening in the schools today, “they would want to burn them down.”
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| Image vie Joe.My.God. |
CNN fired conservative commentator Jeffrey Lord on Thursday after he tweeted a Nazi salute at a critic.
A network spokesperson confirmed that Lord was no longer with the network and said “Nazi salutes are indefensible.” The statement came hours after Lord tweeted the Nazi slogan “Sieg Heil!” at the head of a liberal advocacy group, Media Matters for America.
Lord said in a telephone interview Thursday night that he respected CNN and its journalists, but fundamentally disagreed with the network’s decision to fire him. He said his “Sieg Heil!” tweet was not an endorsement of Nazism or fascist tactics, but was meant to mock Media Matters and its use of boycotts of advertisers of conservative voices such as Sean Hannity, which Lord equated with fascism.
He called himself a “First Amendment fundamentalist” and called CNN’s decision disappointing. “From my perspective CNN caved on the First Amendment of all things. I disagree. I respectfully disagree.”
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| NRA TV, via Joe.My.God. |
An NRA television host has apologized for suggesting that one of America’s enemies abroad could switch their sights from the Western Pacific to liberals in the U.S.
“Let's send a note to North Korea that Sacramento changed its name to Guam!” NRA TV personality Grant Stinchfield posted on Twitter Friday morning.
It was not immediately clear why Stinchfield suggested Northern California as a possible substitute for the destruction that Pyongyang has threatened against America’s territory east of the Philippines.
“It was meant as a joke and I regret it,” he said by phone.
. . .
Stinchfield previously used his show to blast liberal opponents’ focusing on President Trump in the North Korea situation, saying that “there is nothing funny about an attack on America.”
Critics of President Trump have repeatedly warned of his potential to undermine American democracy. Among the concerns are his repeated assertions that he would have won the popular vote had 3 to 5 million “illegals” not voted in the 2016 election, a claim echoed by the head of a White House advisory committee on voter fraud.
Claims of large-scale voter fraud are not true, but that has not stopped a substantial number of Republicans from believing them. But how far would Republicans be willing to follow the president to stop what they perceive as rampant fraud? Our recent survey suggests that the answer is quite far: About half of Republicans say they would support postponing the 2020 presidential election until the country can fix this problem.
Nevertheless, we do not believe that these findings can be dismissed out of hand. At a minimum, they show that a substantial number of Republicans are amenable to violations of democratic norms that are more flagrant than what is typically proposed (or studied).
I wanted to clarify that I believe the Bible, especially Romans 13, does give President Trump moral authority to use whatever force necessary, including assassination or even war, to topple an evil dictator like Kim Jong Un. And I believe the Bible is very clear about that.
And one thing I know about President Trump after being around him for the last two years is this: unlike his predecessor, when President Donald Trump draws a red line, he’s not going to erase it, move away from it, or back down from it.
Staff at the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) have been told to avoid using the term climate change in their work, with the officials instructed to reference “weather extremes” instead.
A series of emails obtained by the Guardian between staff at the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), a USDA unit that oversees farmers’ land conservation, show that the incoming Trump administration has had a stark impact on the language used by some federal employees around climate change.
If you wanted to destroy the Fox News, you really wanted to destroy them, what would you do? Well you would send some salacious material, ostensibly from one of their popular co-hosts or hosts and you’d send it out and then get it publicized and then you have some woman complain that she had gotten this salacious material from this co-host and then she would come to Fox, and Fox is so averse to any kind of legal action that they would immediately take the person off the air, so before long you would have decimated the prime time line up of all the Fox hosts. Easy to do? Absolutely. Is it being done? Probably.
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| This graphic shows the results of a breakthrough discovery called tissue nanotransfection. In laboratory tests at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, researchers were able to heal the badly injured legs of mice in just three weeks, with no other treatments, simply by touching the legs once with a high-tech silicone chip. |
Researchers have developed a device that can switch cell function to rescue failing body functions with a single touch. The technology, known as Tissue Nanotransfection (TNT), injects genetic code into skin cells, turning those skin cells into other types of cells required for treating diseased conditions.
“It takes just a fraction of a second. You simply touch the chip to the wounded area, then remove it,” said Chandan Sen, PhD, director of the Center for Regenerative Medicine and Cell-Based Therapies at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. “At that point, the cell reprogramming begins.”
In a series of lab tests, researchers applied the chip to the injured legs of mice that vascular scans showed had little to no blood flow. “We reprogrammed their skin cells to become vascular cells,” Sen said. “Within a week we began noticing the transformation.”
By the second week, active blood vessels had formed, and by the third week, the legs of the mice were saved—with no other form of treatment.
“It extends the concept known as gene therapy, and it has been around for quite some time,” said study collaborator James Lee, PhD, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Ohio State. “The difference with our technology is how we deliver the DNA into the cells.”
Why did Obamacare survive? The shocking answer: It’s still here because it does so much good. Tens of millions have health coverage — imperfect, but far better than none at all — thanks to the Affordable Care Act. Millions more rest easier knowing that coverage will still be available if something goes wrong — if, for example, they lose their employer-sponsored plan or develop a chronic condition.
Which raises a big question: Why did the prospect of health reform produce so much popular rage in 2009 and 2010?
The question then becomes why so many people believed these lies. The answer, I believe, comes down to a combination of identity politics and affinity fraud.
Whenever I see someone castigating liberals for engaging in identity politics, I wonder what such people imagine the right has been doing all these years. For generations, conservatives have conditioned many Americans to believe that safety-net programs are all about taking things away from white people and giving stuff to minorities.
And those who stoked Obamacare rage were believed because they seemed to some Americans like their kind of people — that is, white people defending them against you-know-who.
The betting was that law-and-order Attorney General Jeff Sessions would come out against the legalized marijuana industry with guns blazing. But the task force Sessions assembled to find the best legal strategy is giving him no ammunition, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.
The Task Force on Crime Reduction and Public Safety, a group of prosecutors and federal law enforcement officials, has come up with no new policy recommendations to advance the attorney general’s aggressively anti-marijuana views. The group’s report largely reiterates the current Justice Department policy on marijuana.
Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey introduced legislation this week to eliminate marijuana’s status as a Schedule 1 drug, decriminalizing it at the federal level.
In late June, Serbia’s Ana Brnabic became the world’s fifth-ever openly gay prime minister. Ireland’s Leo Varadkar took office in May. Luxembourgian Prime Minister Xavier Bettel, who is married, took office in late 2013. Icelandic Prime Minister Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir (also married) was in office from 2009 to 2013. Belgian Prime Minister Elio Di Rupo was in office from 2011 to 2014.
This week on Facebook, D’Souza said, "FACT: Hitler got many of his destructive, genocidal ideas from American Democrats."
On Amazon, his book's page reads:
What is "the big lie" of the Democratic Party? That conservatives—and President Donald Trump in particular—are fascists. Nazis, even. In a typical comment, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow says the Trump era is reminiscent of "what it was like when Hitler first became chancellor."
But in fact, this audacious lie is a complete inversion of the truth. Yes, there is a fascist threat in America—but that threat is from the Left and the Democratic Party. The Democratic left has an ideology virtually identical with fascism and routinely borrows tactics of intimidation and political terror from the Nazi Brownshirts.
"What we're seeing is that hotlines are being set up by units of government for the purpose of encouraging people to call in and rat on their fellow man to report a hate crime," Bachmann blathered, clearly confusing hate crimes with hate speech.
"What they're trying to do is implement anti-blasphemy laws. They're trying to implement Islamic Sharia law locally in order to quiet churches and quiet anybody who would talk about what the truth is about Islam."
Installed during June, the hotline immediately received " viable" reports of assault, property damage, and " harassing behaviors." However, Bachmann maintained that the hotline is an act of "civilization jihad" against good Christian folk like herself who just want to tell Muslims how evil they are.
I've written about Sinclair Broadcasting many times. But this look at the latest from Media Matters shows it's starting to get very, very weird:
Local television news giant Sinclair Broadcast Group has been making headlines in recent weeks as it seeks to both double down on its requirement that its stations run mandated conservative commentary segments and vastly expand its reach into new major cities across the United States.
Plenty of recent major profiles of Sinclair have discussed its unusual tactic of designating certain conservative commentary segments it produces in its national studios as “must-runs,” meaning that every Sinclair-owned local television news station -- all 73, across 33 states and the District of Columbia -- is required to air them. The Sinclair brand has been openly right-wing for decades, causing controversy when executives similarly mandated the airing of an anti-John Kerry documentary and chose not to run a Nightline episode they viewed as critical of George W. Bush in the early 2000s.
The latest Sinclair profiles often focus on the “Bottom Line with Boris” segments starring former Trump aide Boris Epshteyn, who is now employed as Sinclair’s chief political analyst. Epshteyn has been producing 60- to 90-second commentary segments several times a week since Sinclair hired him in April. Last month, Sinclair announced it would be upping Epshteyn’s segments from airing three times per week to nine.
Employees at Sinclair stations across the country, from Seattle, WA, to Washington, D.C., are expressing concerns about the clearly conservative must-run segments pushed by Sinclair executives.
Anchors at individual local news stations owned by Sinclair are seemingly not required to introduce the segments in any particular way before running them; in fact, employees at at least one station have said they try to run the segments along with commercials “so they blend in with paid spots.” The on-air segments themselves have no built-in disclosure that Epshteyn was until recently employed by the same White House he now regularly lavishes with on-air praise (online versions of his commentary note his White House connection). Viewers also might not know that Sinclair’s efforts to expand to new cities across the country and corner the markets in mid-sized cities in battleground states are possible only because of the deregulatory efforts of the administration Epshteyn loves so dearly.
The Black Lives Matter movement, which grew out of the Trayvon Williams shooting in 2013, gained momentum after Ferguson, as did various organizations working on policing reform. Awareness seemed to be growing that the drug war had become a real war. As the ACLU report, “The War Comes Home” stated:
All across the country, heavily armed SWAT teams are raiding people’s homes in the middle of the night, often just to search for drugs. It should enrage us that people have needlessly died during these raids, that pets have been shot, and that homes have been ravaged.
Our neighborhoods are not warzones, and police officers should not be treating us like wartime enemies. Any yet, every year, billions of dollars’ worth of military equipment flows from the federal government to state and local police departments. Departments use these wartime weapons in everyday policing, especially to fight the wasteful and failed drug war, which has unfairly targeted people of color.
For a brief moment it felt as if there might be the political will to put a stop to some of these excesses. But of course for every action there’s a reaction, and a backlash against Black Lives Matter and police reform grew as well. When Donald Trump came along promising to be the “law and order” president and won the election, whatever progress was being made stalled out completely.
The national NAACP has issued its first travel advisory for any state after recent violent incidents and threats against people of color. The advisory comes in part as a response to police shootings nationally and in anticipation of immigration legislation in Texas and Arizona[.]
American voters say 68 - 27 percent, including 55 - 39 percent among voters in military households, that transgender people should be allowed to serve in the military, according to a Quinnipiac University national poll released today.
Republicans opposed transgender service 60 - 32 percent, but every other party, gender, education, age or racial group supports transgender service by margins of 22 percentage points or higher, the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) University Poll finds.
By an 89 - 8 percent margin, American voters say it should be illegal for an employer to discriminate against an employee based on sexual orientation.
More acceptance of transgender people would be "a good thing for the country," 46 percent of voters say, as 14 percent say it would be "a bad thing" and 39 percent say it would not make much difference. . . .
"They put on uniforms and face the same risks as their brothers and sisters in arms for little reward other than protecting their country," said Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll.
"Voters say a soldier is a soldier, no matter what his/her gender identity is.
"Voters say, 'Let them serve.'
Some background on Taylor via his Wikipedia entry:
Taylor is an American white nationalist and white supremacist. He is the founder and editor of American Renaissance, a magazine often described as a white supremacist publication. Taylor is also an author and the president of American Renaissance’s parent organization, New Century Foundation, through which many of his books have been published. He is a former member of the advisory board of The Occidental Quarterly, and a former director of the National Policy Institute, a Virginia-based white nationalist think tank. He is also a board member and spokesperson of the Council of Conservative Citizens.
Yes, that’s the same National Policy Institute that threw a party for neo-Nazi leader Richard Spencer at which audience members delivered Nazi salutes in the name of Donald Trump.
A tiny baby elephant got trapped in a water trough, and lions were closing in — when the most amazing thing happened 🐘💞 pic.twitter.com/URK2wfUAlp
— The Dodo (@dodo) July 31, 2017
Three Cheatham County Sheriff's deputies have been placed on administrative leave after a Pegram teen filed suit in federal court accusing them of using excessive force while he was being held at Cheatham County Jail.
Jordan Elias Norris, 19, has filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court accusing the deputies of deprivation of civil rights, citing the use of excessive force and failure to protect after he was repeatedly stunned with Tasers in the jail in November 2016. He suffered more than 40 pairs of Taser burns, many of which are unaccounted for by authorities, the lawsuit states.
After seeing media reports and videos not previously viewed, [Cheatham County Sheriff Mike] Breedlove said he immediately directed supervisors to examine the Sheriff's Office's current Use of Force policy. He also contacted District Attorney General Ray Crouch Jr. to request an independent investigation by the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.
"As Sheriff, I want our citizens to know that any inappropriate behavior that may have violated an individual's rights will not be tolerated. I have placed the employees involved on administrative leave while the investigation is conducted," he said in the statement. "We will work closely and cooperatively with the TBI and District Attorney's Office to ensure all facts are provided and all angles of this incident are thoroughly investigated."
