There was a disgrace to the United States of America last night, and Bob Schieffer knows what it was. In the post-debate analysis Schieffer mentions three things: 1. Bringing women allegedly in a “relationship” with the opponent’s spouse. 2. Threatening to put an opponent in jail. 3. Turning a contest for the highest office in the… Continue reading “Both sides do it!”
Alex Jones, Trump confidante:
Trump ally Alex Jones says high-level sources confirmed to him that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are demons: https://t.co/Dph05bmi3F pic.twitter.com/979PAFTSnq
— Media Matters (@mmfa) October 10, 2016
“Why, we just call that an Alabama howdy!”
Interviewed in the spin room after the presidential debate in St. Louis, in which Trump brushed off the comments as “locker room talk,” the Alabama senator noted that the real estate mogul already apologized for his “very improper language.”
“But beyond the language, would you characterize the behavior described in that as sexual assault if that behavior actually took place?” the Weekly Standard asked.
“I don’t characterize that as sexual assault,” Sessions replied. ”I think that’s a stretch. I don’t know what he meant—“
“So if you grab a woman by the genitals, that’s not sexual assault?” the Weekly Standard pressed.
“I don’t know. It’s not clear that he—how that would occur.”
You just grab them by the whatever and yell, “HOWDY!”
This stuff makes my heart ache. No one gives a shit about this kids, just about making the NRA happy.
I mean, it’s just getting worse.
Oh, and if you have wingnut relatives, like I do, they will tell you the square miles of the world’s ice cover actually increased.
That’s right. As it melted, the ice became thinner and spread out over a wider area. Get it?
You see, Trump is doing his foundation a favor!
Trump bought the painting at a charity auction in 2014, with a winning bid of $10,000. Later, he paid with a check from the Donald J. Trump Foundation — a small charity, whose tax records show no personal donations from Trump himself since 2008.
By law, tax experts said, the portrait then belonged to the Trump Foundation, and Trump was required to find a charitable use for it. If he did not, Trump risked violating laws against “self-dealing,” which prohibit leaders of nonprofit groups from using their charities’ money to buy things for themselves or their businesses.
Epshteyn’s explanation was, in effect, that Trump hadn’t used his foundation to buy his resort some art. Instead, Trump’s resort was helping the foundation — which has no employees or office space of its own — find a place to store its possessions.
Tax experts were not impressed by this reasoning.
“It’s hard to make an IRS auditor laugh,” Brett Kappel, a lawyer who advises nonprofit groups at the Akerman firm, said in an email. “But this would do it.”
Experts said that the Internal Revenue Service had actually ruled on a similar issue in 1974, in a case where a major donor to a private foundation took paintings belonging to that foundation and hung them in his home. (The rules against “self-dealing” apply to both major donors and to foundation officers, like Trump.) The IRS determined that this was, indeed, self-dealing — because the homeowner was using the foundation’s assets to benefit himself.
Since the 1950s, right wing groups and foundations laid the groundwork to defund public schools and push everyone into for-profit private schools or charters, because poorly educated students become easily-manipulated voters. Look at the results:
Veteran journalist Alan Miller tells the story of the high school students who, years after the fact, didn’t know that Osama bin Laden had been killed. These were seniors, no less — in a journalism class at a well-regarded New York City charter school.
“Their reaction was ‘Wait, what? He’s dead?’ ” said Miller, who won a Pulitzer Prize as a reporter for the Los Angeles Times.
His story, though, has a happy ending. After immersion in the News Literacy Project, a Bethesda-based nonprofit organization that Miller founded to give teenagers the tools to know what to believe in the digital age, the students became news junkies. They were seriously annoyed if their classroom copies of the New York Times didn’t show up on time.
Every bit as dead as bin Laden, it sometimes seems, is many American citizens’ basic knowledge of news. Young people, especially, get their news in isolated bursts on their phones (the experts call this disaggregation). That makes it harder than ever to tell established truth from opinion, propaganda or pure fiction.
I always thought this is where people like me would find a niche. People so immersed in news, readers would pay for someone to filter out the rest. That happened for a while, but not enough to make a living.
You could see that last week when, during NBC’s commander-in-chief forum, moderator Matt Lauer didn’t even raise a skeptical eyebrow as Donald Trump claimed — again, and falsely — to have opposed the war in Iraq from the start. Although, as a broadcast pro, Lauer should have been far better prepared to parry this and other politically expedient flights of fancy, his ailment — apparent ignorance — is a common one. (Consider Libertarian Party presidential nominee Gary Johnson’s query in an MSNBC interview: “What is Aleppo?”)
“There’s a cacophony of untrue information out there,” and it’s drowning out what’s dependable and accurate, said Leonard Downie Jr., former Washington Post executive editor, whose new book, “The News Media: What Everyone Needs to Know,” provides some help in question-and-answer form. (For example: “How dependent is journalism on leaks?” and “How are private interests trying to manage news now?”)
TAMPA — Carlos Garcia lay bleeding on the street in front of his family’s mailbox.
“Yes, ma’am. I just had a man attack me in my front yard,” Nick Julian IV told a 911 operator on Sept. 19, 2015.
“He attacked me and I had to use force,” said Julian. “I was afraid for my life.”
“Well who used the gun?” the operator said.
“I did,” Julian said.
In the background, Garcia’s ex-wife screamed: “Why would you do this?”
” ‘Cause he charged me and I was in fear of my life,” said Julian, then 26.
He said that he needed to call his lawyer. It was 2:05 a.m.
Before Garcia, a 37-year-old father of three, had even been declared dead, the man who shot him was already on the phone with the U.S. Concealed Carry Association.
The association offers a 24-hour hotline, an attorney on retainer, bail money and a wallet-sized card instructing members on what to say after a shooting — starting at just $13 a month.
It’s one of a handful of organizations that says they can help its members strengthen their claim of self-defense from the moment they pull the trigger.
“This is basically preparing people: You’re going to kill someone and you need to know what to do,” said University of Miami law professor Mary Anne Franks.
https://twitter.com/NowIKnoEvrythng/status/775810542321577986
Trump’s campaign manager Kellyanne Conway defended Donald’s right to privacy when it comes to his medical records and then attacked Hillary Clinton for not being forthcoming about her pneumonia. Conway is making the cable TV rounds today and she’s in rare form. On CNN she was belligerent and on MSNBC with Andrea Mitchell she was nonsensical.… Continue reading “Medical disclosure for thee but not for me”
