Today, the President pushed for a quick confirmation of his nominee for CIA Director, General Michael Hayden. Various Senators have already come out and rubber-stamped the President's choice. I must admit, this rush to judgment seems paradoxical since program after program is being exposed that should stall--if not kill--the General's nomination.
First, it was the "terrorist surveillance program" that was represented by Hayden as being limited in nature. We still don't know who initiated the program. Reports suggest that it may have been Hayden who unilaterally implemented the extrajudicial spying program, before executive authorization.
Now, we learn that Hayden was the architect of a much broader program, one that has cataloged billions of calls made by innocent Americans.
While Hayden's supporters shrug off this massive data collection, they ignore a critical question: did Hayden break the law? And if so, how can they overlook that and vote for his confirmation?
The fact is that, depending on the exact contours of the program, this program may have already been banned by Congress. And if so, Hayden's resurrection of that program should cast the death blow to any nomination.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, Hairspray von Clownstick had better hope the old saw about there being no such thing as bad publicity is true. Armando can’t resist taking a shot at him, either. UT Regents wrestle with campus carry implementation. Shopping, like banking, requires having $ to save $.
White police officers shooting unarmed Black men is nothing new. Families of police shooting victims suing city police departments and the subsequent denial of wrong doing is nothing new. And the families of police shooting victims receiving monetary settlements certainly isn’t new either. But the city and police department offering an apology to the family and a memorial to the victim? And the victim’s children being fellow law enforcement officers of the perpetrators? That’s pretty new.
The family of 67-year old Eugene Ellison was set to go to trial in a federal wrongful death lawsuit against the City of Little Rock this past Monday, May 9 when the city settled at the 11th hour. Little Rock Police Department officers Donna Lesher and Tabitha McCrillis had been working off-duty as security guards at the Big Country Chateau Apartment Complex in December of 2010. While patrolling the complex they say they noticed an open door on a second floor unit. Thinking it was odd that a door would be ajar on a chilly evening the officers entered the unit where Ellison was sitting on his couch. Ellison told the officers he was fine but the officers, noting that Ellison’s apartment appeared to be in disarray, refused to leave and continued to question Ellison. That’s when they say he became agitated and charged them. The Ellison family’s lawyer says the Navy veteran who had served in Vietnam was simply moving to show the officers out of his home and shut his front door. That’s when “all hell broke loose,” as they say. Lesher and Willis were ultimately cleared by the department of any wrongdoing. Lesher, also, just happened to be married to the sergeant of Little Rock PD’s Detective Division, which handles the criminal investigation aspect of officer-involved shootings. A recap of the events, including links to testimony from the officers, can be found here.
Ellison’s sons—Troy, who is currently a Little Rock Police Department detective, and Spencer, who is a former detective who now teaches criminal justice—initiated the lawsuit and say that the apology was the most important thing. A video of Troy speaking to ABC local affiliate station KATV is below the fold.
Mike Laux, the Ellison family attorney, says the $900,000 settlement from the city (combined with a settlement from the apartment complex) represent the largest civil rights settlement ever paid in the state’s history. A formal apology and a memorial in honor of the victim are probably also unheard of. Hopefully, other cities and their police departments will not see a need to duplicate this case.
If, at the start of the 2008 primary season, you had told someone that Hillary Clinton was going to pick up California, and New York, and Pennsylvania, and Florida, and… well, I think you’d have had a hard time predicting that she wouldn’t have walked into Denver as the nominee. But Barack Obama won, clearing the line with just 40 delegates to spare.
That, people, was a close primary season. And what do you know, here we are with another.
So how do the Democratic primaries in 2016 compare to those in 2008? Take a look above. The outer portion of each hex represents states captured by Obama or Clinton in 2008. The inner area is how things divide up between Clinton and Sanders in 2016.
Why is Clinton ahead in this round? Because she took that whole swath of southern states that went for Obama in 2008, while holding on to most of the states she won that year. Yes, there are some yellow-on-green hexes up there showing places where Bernie nabbed 2008 Clinton states, but there are a lot more of the green-on-orange spots.
Yes, with proportional distribution of delegates in most states, this is a crude measure, but it’s an interesting reflection of how the candidates operated. Both Sanders and Obama ran insurgent campaigns, counting on masses of volunteers, high turnout, and caucus participation. In both seasons, Clinton ran a more traditional campaign, with a lot of reliance on relationships and the support of local candidates and organizations.
But the big switch in the South makes for a big difference compared to eight years ago.
Since this first popped up in the recent list, I’ve made some modifications to the map. First, I corrected a state colored incorrectly. I’ve also removed the silly attempt to place geographic features like rivers, mountains, etc. over the infographic. That was pretty hideous. I’ve shifted Connecticut and Rhode Island to better reflect their actual positions. Finally, I recolored the primary vs. primary map, making Obama’s 2008 states a lighter color in hopes that this works better for folks with color perception difficulty. Please let me know what else I’ve screwed up. Thanks.
Yep, that’s right, the guy who’s sooooo rich and sooooo principled that he couldn’t possibly be bought like the other politicians is getting ready to sell himself to the highest bidders, reports Julie Bykowicz.
Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, recently hired a national finance chairman, scheduled his first fundraiser and is on the cusp of signing a deal with the Republican Party that would enable him to solicit donations of more than $300,000 apiece from supporters.
His money-raising begins right away.
The still-forming finance team is planning a dialing-for-dollars event on the fifth floor of Trump Tower in New York, and the campaign is at work on a fundraising website focused on small donations. In addition to a May 25 fundraiser at the Los Angeles home of real estate developer Tom Barrack, he'll hold another soon thereafter in New York.
Why now? Poor Donald’s suffering from sticker shock. The price tag of a general election can end up being around a billion dollars. So just to be clear, this may be one of the only things Trump has done this election cycle that seems to be grounded in relatively sane thinking.
It’s also a blatant flip-flop from the primary… very Washington insider, no? So much for being the ultimate outsider—the buck stops here (pun intended). Although Trump has proven to make wildly inconsistent shoot-from-the-hip proclamations on nearly everything from one day to the next, he’ll likely stick with this flip flop because, where’s the fun in being a bankrupt billionaire?
But other than financing his campaign, he’ll surely go back to business as usual—having the least predictable, most incoherent ‘policies’ imaginable.
This pencil lead broke. Add the Ticonderoga people to the list.
This pencil lead broke. Add the Ticonderoga people to the list.
Honestly, for all this talk of being something new, Trump is a completely standard, traditional Republican candidate. The wealthy son of a wealthy father who likes to talk about himself in third person; he could be just about any GOP leader from the past three decades. But Trump does things that are even more traditional. One might even say things that are completely presidential.
Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has found himself with quite a few critics, and as it turns out, his campaign is keeping track of those who’ve slighted him.
Politico reported over night that as Trump’s team begins to take over the RNC apparatus, “some campaign aides and allies are pushing him to block lucrative party contracts from consultants who worked to keep him from winning the nomination.” The article added that the “blacklist” would mostly target “operatives who worked for Never Trump groups, but also some who worked for Trump’s GOP presidential rivals or their supportive super PACs.”
Trump’s enemies list already includes every Republican who ever signed onto a #NeverTrump campaign, every Republican who worked for any of his opponents, and every Republican who worked for an opposition PAC. That’s … every Republican.
"All right, so this year it's agreed we'll freak out about bathrooms. I feel good about this choice."
"All right, so this year it's agreed we'll freak out about bathrooms. I feel good about this choice."
The Texas Republican Party continues to be Absolutely Bouncingly Insane. The good news is that the party "narrowly" decided to perhaps not demand a statewide referendum on whether Texas even wants to be part of the United States anymore; the bad news is that there's not much else they could refrain from wedging into their new state party platform.
“We support public school facilities such as restrooms, locker rooms and showers be reserved for the use of students based on biological birth gender,” the document states.
The anti-trans bathroom plank is one of several new anti-LGBT measures in the platform, as the culture wars have again dominated this year’s convention.
Among those other anti-LGBT measures: A declaration that homosexuality "is contrary to the fundamental unchanging truths that have been ordained by God in the Bible," opposition to marriage equality, and support for "sexual orientation change" therapy.
That isn't the only part of the platform to run directly contrary to federal law, of course. Other demands:
"Abolishing" the Internal Revenue Service as well as the Departments of Education, Energy, Housing, Commerce, Health, Interior (the BLM is singled out in particular), Transportation, and the ATF. It may have been simpler on their part to list whatever parts of the federal government they would allow to remain.
A full repeal of the 1965 Voter Rights Act. Also opposed outright, for various crackpot Jade Helm-ish reasons we won't go into here: the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. (The United Nations and "foreign law" is warned against in a number of places—again, the short answer is that the Jade Helm people are well and truly represented in the Texas Republican Party, and they're pretty sure the United Nations is hiding in their cupboards.)
An "immediate and orderly" phase-out of Social Security, and an immediate and we-don't-give-a-damn-if-its-orderly repeal of "Obamacare."
That "equal treatment" be given in schools to "all sides" of scientific theories like creation and environmental change.
Demands to end abortion outright are littered throughout the document, including the demand that the Texas Legislature "ignore and refuse to enforce" federal statutes and court rulings contrary to that stance.
A declaration that all federal laws and court orders that restrict or infringe on gun rights "shall be considered null and void" in Texas.
Melissa Sargent, Wisconsin State Assemblywoman, District 48
Melissa Sargent, Wisconsin State Assemblywoman, District 48
I recently asked five questions of Wisconsin Assemblywoman Melissa Sargent. I attended high school with Melissa, and we have become good friends since the Wisconsin Uprising. She gained a bit of fame during the Uprising for standing up for her children’s right to free speech in the state Capitol. She is, in my opinion, one of the strongest Democratic voices in Wisconsin today. Rep. Sargent was born and raised in Madison, Wisconsin, and is a graduate of East High School and the University of Wisconsin—Madison. She was first elected to the Dane County Board of Supervisors in 2010 and then in 2013 began serving as a state representative. Rep. Sargent also owns and manages a small business, OPA Color, LLC. She is a wife and also a mother of four sons, Devin (18), Bailey (16), Keanan (11), and Trystan (7). I honestly don’t know how or when she finds the time to sit down and take a breath, but she still finds the time to read, practice photography, and has been known to knit on the Assembly floor.
Mark E Andersen: Right now things look pretty bleak for the Democratic Party in Wisconsin. The Republicans hold the governor’s office and gerrymandered their way into the majority in the Assembly and Senate. How do you and your fellow Democrats in the Assembly and Senate keep your heads up and continue to try and stop some of the horrible Republican legislation that comes up for a vote? Have any bills authored by Democrats even come up for a vote?
Representative Sargent: It’s difficult in Wisconsin, right now, to be a Democrat. The gerrymandering that occurred in 2011 has tilted the scales in such a way that winning a majority in the Assembly is nearly impossible. Assembly Democrats had 150,000 more votes than Assembly Republicans in 2012 yet the GOP retained a huge majority in terms of seats. What that means in terms of governing is that the Republicans have full control of the agenda, including committees and floors sessions.
I’ve been successful in working with Republicans on pieces of legislation where we have common interests. I’ve passed five bills into law over the course of the last two sessions. While I won’t agree with those across the aisle on much, we’ve found shared goals on Fourth Amendment issues.
As far as stopping horrible legislation from passing, the power often comes from the public.
Donald Trump’s ascent to presumptive Republican presidential nominee doesn’t necessarily mean the Republican Party’s infighting is over and done. No, it could mean financial trouble for some of the consultants and vendors who worked to oppose Trump in the primary:
“The Never Trump vendors and supporters shouldn’t be in striking distance of the RNC, any of its committees or anyone working on behalf of Donald Trump,” said a Trump campaign official.
It’s not only consultants who worked on #NeverTrump. Those who were involved in some of the more significant hits against Trump by his primary opponents and their Super PACs could also face the wrath.
If Trump’s team makes good on the blacklist, it could elevate a whole new crop of vendors, while penalizing establishment operatives who attacked him, often in deeply personal terms. But it also could put Trump’s campaign at a competitive disadvantage as it scrambles to quickly beef up capabilities in highly technical campaign tactics that it largely eschewed in the primary, including voter data, direct mail and phone banking.
A key question is how much Trump’s campaign will scramble to become a real, 21st-century campaign, how much he’ll rely on the Republican National Committee to do the grunt work of campaigning, and—if the RNC is shouldering a lot of the work—if he’ll really have the pull to get the party to cut off vendors with whom it’s done millions of dollars of business over the years just because they opposed him in the primary.
The government assistance programs Walmart workers need to make ends meet because of their low wages aren’t the only way Walmart relies on the government to subsidize its business model. A major Tampa Bay Times expose finds that local Walmarts are basically using the police as a private security force.
Law enforcement logged nearly 16,800 calls in one year to Walmarts in Pinellas, Hillsborough, Pasco and Hernando counties, according to a Tampa Bay Times analysis. That’s two calls an hour, every hour, every day.
Local Walmarts, on average, generated four times as many calls as nearby Targets, the Times found. Many individual supercenters attracted more calls than the much larger WestShore Plaza mall.
When it comes to calling the cops, Walmart is such an outlier compared with its competitors that experts criticized the corporate giant for shifting too much of its security burden onto taxpayers. Several local law enforcement officers also emphasized that all the hours spent at Walmart cut into how often they can patrol other neighborhoods and prevent other crimes.
In line with the overall understaffing that’s been a problem for Walmart in recent years, stores don’t have uniformed security guards who might discourage the kind of minor problems—small-scale shoplifting, panhandling, suspected truancy, and the like—that account for a majority of the calls to police. This is a major drain on the resources of law enforcement agencies:
In August, a Walmart employee called the department after a 33-year-old man stole a $6.39 electric toothbrush. The officer arrived in three minutes, talked to a Walmart employee, arrested the man, and then made the 19-mile trip to the Land O’Lakes jail. After finishing the paperwork, the officer was free to take another call.
Total elapsed time: 2 ½ hours.
Walmart: as bad for local communities as it is for its own workers.
Anna Lee Rain Yellowhammer of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe is 13. And already she's a fighter.
Anna Lee Rain Yellowhammer of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe is 13. And already she's a fighter.
For a decade, indigenous activists in Canada and the United States have been in the forefront of opposition to fossil-fuel projects, including coal terminals and pipelines, the most famous of which is the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. President Obama rejected that pipeline last November after a long formal review punctuated by protests that included mass civil disobedience. Many of the indigenous activist groups—permanent ones such as the Canadian-founded Idle No More and ad hoc alike—owe their existence and tactics to strong women leaders.
On the Standing Rock Sioux reservation, the sixth largest in the United States, which straddles the border between North and South Dakota, a 13-year-old girl leader, Anna Lee Rain Yellowhammer, has gotten into act. She’s started a petition asking Assistant Secretary of the Army Jo-Ann Darcy, who is in charge of the Army Corps of Engineers, to stop another pipeline, the building of which the Army Corps has partial jurisdiction over. Her project is part of a bigger anti-pipeline protest at Standing Rock, known by its Twitter hashtag: #RezpectOurWater. So far, the petition has nearly 91,000 of the 150,000 signatures Anna Lee and about 30 of her young friends hope eventually to get.
In the letter sent along with her petition signature at Change.org, Anna Lee wrote:
I’m 13 years-old and as an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, I’ve lived my whole life by the Missouri River. It runs by my home in Fort Yates North Dakota and my great grandparents original home was along the Missouri River in Cannon Ball. The river is a crucial part of our lives here on the Standing Rock Reservation. [...]
“My friends and I have played in the river since we were little; my great grandparents raised chickens and horses along it. When the pipeline leaks, it will wipe out plants and animals, ruin our drinking water, and poison the center of community life for the Standing Rock Sioux.
The pipeline at issue is the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). The $3.7 billion, 1,154-mile, 30-inch-diameter conduit is slated to run from the fracked oilfields of North Dakota’s Bakken Shale formation to existing pipelines in Illinois. DAPL’s maximum capacity is set at 570,000 barrels of oil a day. That’s about half the current daily production in North Dakota. There are tribal pipeline foes not just at Standing Rock, but also among the other six Oceti Sakowin, together known as the Seven Council Fires of the Great Sioux Nation. Many non-Indian environmentalists are allies in the fight.
Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee after last week’s primary. Much has been made about his differences with the GOP establishment, but those differences are mostly cosmetic, particularly of the bottled tan variety.
I’m no campaign strategist, but it would probably be a good idea to take every opportunity to link Trump with the also hugely unpopular Republican brand rather than treat the two as separate entities. He is their standard-bearer after all.
Hey, guess what guys! The House Republicans are going to have an Obamacare replacement plan! Soon, they say. And not so much a legislative plan, but you know, ideas and such.
Details of the plan have been mostly kept quiet, but Rep. Joe Pitts (R-Pa.), the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce health subcommittee, told The Hill that other elements include allowing insurers to sell across state lines and "beefing up" health savings accounts.
Pitts also floated a tax credit to help people afford coverage and high-risk pools for people with pre-existing health conditions.
Those ideas are similar to a proposal put out by a group of senior Republican lawmakers in the House and Senate last year called the Patient Choice, Affordability, Responsibility and Empowerment (CARE) Act.
However, the coming plan will not take the form of legislative text but instead will be a "white paper," Pitts said. That means the plan will not actually be voted on by the House and won't be as specific as a bill would be, making it harder to assess factors like the cost of the plan or how it will affect the number of people with coverage.
The document of ideas is expected to be released "in the next couple weeks," House Energy and Commerce Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) said Wednesday at an event hosted by The Hill.
This time, though, they have a real reason to do it, says Upton: "The idea has been that whoever our nominee is, so now our nominee Donald Trump, we're going to have it on the shelf ready for our nominee." No doubt Trump is on the edge of his seat, waiting to see what they come up with for him.
