From [HERE] Texas filed a lawsuit [complaint, PDF] Tuesday against the Food and Drug Administration [official website] to force it to decide whether an impounded shipment of a drug used for executions should be delivered to the Texas prison system, which has carried out more lethal injections than any other state. The lawsuit was filed in the US District Court for Southern District of Texas in Galveston. A 1,000-vial shipment of sodium thiopental purchased by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice was detained in July 2015 at Houston Bush Intercontinental Airport. The drug package remains in federal custody with the FDA claiming three legal grounds allowing it to detain the drug and consider its legality. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice, in its complaint, claims that the delay is unreasonable. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton [official profile] stated in a press release:
There are only two reasons why the FDA would take 17 months to make a final decision on Texas' importation of thiopental sodium: gross incompetence or willful obstruction. ... The FDA has an obligation to fulfill its responsibilities faithfully and in a timely manner. My office will not allow the FDA to sit on its hands and thereby impair Texas' responsibility to carry out is law enforcement duties.
The FDA has made no statement on this case. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice asked the court to declare the FDA's delay unlawful and compel the agency to decide whether to admit the drugs.
Presently, Texas' death row is 73% non-white [MORE]
From [HERE] In a preemptive move designed to protect the religious liberty of Muslim Americans, Senate Democrats are prepping legislation that would hobble any attempt by President-elect Donald Trump to create a “Muslim registry.”
According to the Washington Post, Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) is preparing to introduce legislation that would block Trump or any future president from establishing a registry based on religion, national origin, nationality, or other classifications—an idea the president-elect and his staff have floated at various times. Co-sponsors of the bill include Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Brian Schatz, Patty Murray, Jeff Merkley, Ed Markey, and Mazie Hirono.
“Our legislation would block Donald Trump and subsequent administrations from infringing on religious liberty by creating an immigration-related religious registry,” Booker told the Post. “Forcing people to sign up for a registry based on their religion, race, or national origin does nothing to keep America secure.”
“While I know that this effort faces difficult prospects in a Republican-dominated Congress, this is an issue of fundamental American values, freedom of religion, and nondiscrimination.”
Booker acknowledged that passing the proposal is a long shot given the GOP majority in both houses of Congress, but insisted that protecting the rights of American Muslims is a bipartisan issue.
“While I know that this effort faces difficult prospects in a Republican-dominated Congress, this is an issue of fundamental American values, freedom of religion, and nondiscrimination,” Booker said. “It’s important that we make a stand.”
Although Trump’s proposal to ban Muslims from entering the country remains clear, the exact dimensions of his much-discussed Muslim registry remain vague, and have changed over the course of the past few months. The business mogul explicitly backed the idea while on camera in November 2015, but his transition team later denied that he ever supported it. Yet his advisors have since endorsed a registry of Muslim immigrants, citing widely-condemned Japanese internment during World War II as precedent. Trump himself declined a chance to nix the idea after ISIS-affiliated terrorists killed dozens in Berlin last month: when asked whether he still intended to create a database to store names of people hailing from nations with a history of terrorism, he replied, “You know my plans.”
That's Murder in Any Civilized Place. From [HERE] and [HERE] An Israeli soldier who killed a wounded Palestinian in the West Bank city of Hebron in March was been found guilty of manslaughter Wednesday. The three-judge military panel in Tel Aviv ruled against Sgt Elor Azaria. Chief judge Col Maya Heller gave a lengthy verdict reading in which the court ruled that accounts [Guardian report] of the incident that he had given were "unreliable and problematic." The panel rejected the defense's arguments. "We found there was no room to accept his arguments," the Chief judge said. "His motive for shooting was that he felt the terrorist deserved to die."
The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has joined calls for an Israeli soldier to be pardoned after being convicted of manslaughter for shooting dead a severely wounded Palestinian attacker in the West Bank city of Hebron last year.
As soon as the verdict was handed down on Wednesday at the end of one of the country’s most polarising court cases in recent memory, there were calls from Israeli ministers demanding that Sgt Elor Azaria, an army medic who was 19 at the time of the shooting, be granted an immediate pardon by the Israeli president, Reuven Rivlin, as others accused the Israeli military of abandoning the soldier.
In a short statement, Netanyahu said: “This is a difficult and painful day for all of us – and first and foremost for Elor and his family, for IDF soldiers, for many soldiers and for the parents of our soldiers, and me among them.
“We have one army, which is the basis of our existence. The soldiers of the IDF are our sons and daughters, and they need to remain above dispute.”
The three-judge military court sitting in Tel Aviv said Azaria had acted outside the military’s rules of engagement when he killed Abdel Fattah al-Sharif by shooting him in the head as he lay on the ground, shortly after Sharif and another Palestinian had stabbed and wounded a soldier at an Israeli military checkpoint.
Reading for more than two hours from the verdict, the chief judge, Col Maya Heller, said Azaria shot Sharif out of revenge. The court ruled that accounts of the incident that he had given were “unreliable and problematic” and his defence contradictory and flawed.
“We found there was no room to accept his arguments,” she said. “His motive for shooting was that he felt the terrorist deserved to die.”
The other Palestinian involved in the knife attack was shot and died immediately, but Sharif was still alive, badly injured and posing no threat when Azaria shot him, the judges ruled.
As the verdict was read out, Azaria’s mother shouted at the panel of judges: “You should be ashamed of yourselves.” Other members of Azaria’s family clapped as the decision was delivered, shouting: “Our hero!”
Outside the court there were clashes between Azaria’s supporters – some notorious fans of Beitar football club, which is known for its anti-Arab followers – and the police. Some supporters chanted death threats against the Israeli army chief, Gadi Eisenkot, insinuating he would face the same fate as Yitzhak Rabin, the former prime minister killed 20 years ago by an ultranationalist Israeli.
Sharif’s father welcomed the verdict. “For me, a just verdict will be one that is similar to the verdicts our sons [in Israeli prisons] get … [a] life sentence,” Yusri al-Sharif said. “But Israel is trying its own son, so there is a possibility it will be lenient.”
Initially prosecutors had called for Azaria to be charged with murder but instead settled on a lesser charge of manslaughter, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years. Sentencing is expected in about a month.
The end of the trial has coincided with one of the most febrile periods in recent Israeli politics, with the two-state solution on its last legs and the US president-elect, Donald Trump, threatening to move the US embassy to Jerusalem.
A resurgent and pro-settler far right, emboldened by Trump’s imminent inauguration, has been pushing Netanyahu’s rightwing government on issues from the Azaria case, Jewish settlement expansion and calls to annex large parts of the occupied Palestinian territories.
Analysis Elor Azaria: the Israeli soldier who exposed the country's faultlines
The case of the ‘Hebron shooter’ who killed a wounded Palestinian attacker has elicited both sympathy and condemnation
Among the earliest calling for a pardon was the leader of the far-right Jewish Home party, Naftali Bennett. Describing the trial as politically “contaminated from the beginning”, Bennett said: “Today a soldier who killed a terrorist who deserved to die, who tried to slaughter [another] soldier, was placed in shackles and convicted as a criminal.”
Israel’s culture minister, Miri Regev – a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party – said she would also work to win a pardon. “That’s not how you act toward a soldier [who belongs] to all of us,” she said.
However, the defence minister, Avigdor Lieberman – who has previously supported Azaria – said he “didn’t like the verdict” but Israelis should respect it.
Commenting on the demands for a pardon, Rivlin’s office said such requests could only be “submitted by the applicant themselves, or by one with power of attorney, or an immediate relative, following a conclusive judicial ruling” – in other words at the end of all appeals.
The shooting on 24 March last year, captured on video by a Palestinian human rights activist, prompted international condemnation. In the footage, the wounded Sharif is surrounded by soldiers, medics and settlers. Azaria then appears and unslings a weapon before shooting Sharif in the head.
The discussion at the heart of the case was whether Azaria was justified in killing Sharif.
Heller rejected the defence’s two central but contradictory claims, the first suggesting that Sharif was already dead at the time of the shooting, and the second that Azaria felt threatened, telling the court: “You can’t have it both ways.”
Prosecutors had argued Azaria’s motive was expressed in comments witnesses said he had made: that Sharif “deserved to die” for wounding a comrade. The court accepted this account, noting that the words carried “serious significance” in its ruling.
Azaria’s defence team said it would appeal against the verdict, and a family spokesman said the court had ignored evidence indicating the soldier was innocent. “It was like the court was detached from the fact that this was the area of an attack,” said Sharon Gal. “I felt that the court picked up the knife from the ground and stabbed it in the back of all the soldiers.”
Lt Col Nadav Weissman, a military prosecutor, said the verdict was “important, clear, decisive and speaks for itself”. He added: “This is not a happy day for us. We would have preferred that this didn’t happen. But the deed was done, and the offence was severe.”
The rare case of an active serviceman being charged had been seen as a test of Israeli military justice.
It also exposed deep divisions in Israeli society, not only between left and right, but between the Israeli military’s most senior officers – who pushed for the prosecution – and nationalist political figures, who have campaigned for Azaria’s acquittal.
On Tuesday, however, the Israeli military’s chief of staff pushed back at the most recent campaign slogan of Azaria’s supporters, which claims the soldier was “the child of us all”.
Speaking at a conference in Herziliya, Gen Gadi Eisenkot warned that the attempt to portray Azaria as immature and confused “undermines the most fundamental values that we look for in our soldiers”.
Among the pages of commentary in the Israeli media and on social media during the trial, perhaps most bizarre was the decision by Makor Rishon’s Profile magazine to declare Azaria one of its men of the year for “sparking the stormiest argument in Israeli society”, complete with a cover picture of the accused soldier posing with a gun.
The video of the killing was filmed by a Palestinian volunteer for the Israeli rights group B’Tselem, which accused the security forces of “routine whitewashing” in a statement after the verdict.
“The fact that one soldier was convicted today does not exonerate the Israeli military law-enforcement system from its routine whitewashing of cases in which security forces kill or injure Palestinians with no accountability,” B’Tselem said.
“The exception of a much-publicised trial, marked by a rare instance of video documentation, is not enough to change this norm.”
Another do-gooder, deluded devil [Trump] worshipper spreading her delusions to any racist who will listen.
Neely Fuller says that most white people have made racism/white supremacy their religion and have made themselves the God of that religion. Do you believe in it?
Christ-Inanity - mythological stories infused with fear, greed, cunning, awe, sorcery, debauchery and fictional literary action-figure characters used to confuse the unsuspecting and unthinking into religious gullibility and fundamentalist fanaticism.
Jesusize - to believe in something (or someone—real, mythologized or imagined) or even worship it, based on little (scant and sketchy) to no evidence in support of it (single-source propaganda), and uncorroborated accounts that fly in the face of knows history, facts and science. 2) to turn fiction or fictional accounts into fact and history through propaganda, indoctrination coercion and violence. Just because a man called "Jesus" did not exist in history does not mean that you cannot become the Christ you are awakening in (or at least to) the Divine Mystery. (See: Jesus Seminar & Christ Consciousness)
From LA Times. Congressional Republicans, evidently hoping that by repeating an untruth they’ll convince American voters, and perhaps themselves, that it’s a truth, on Wednesday said the Affordable Care Act has “failed.”
The undistilled version of this view came from House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), who emerged Wednesday from a meeting with Vice President-elect Mike Pence to assert: “This law has failed. Americans are struggling. The law is failing while we speak. … Things are only getting worse under Obamacare. … The healthcare system has been ruined — dismantled — under Obamacare.”
Every one of those statements is demonstrably untrue. How do we know this? We know because every measure of healthcare spending, access and cost has improved since the passage and implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Timothy McBride of Washington University in St. Louis has done the heavy lifting of pulling together the relevant charts and graphs, and posting them online in a series of 12 tweets compiled on Storify. We’ve culled some of the most important, and present them here.
We should add, first, that Ryan also pledged, once the GOP repeals the law, to “make sure that there is a stable transition to a truly patient-centered system. We want every American to have access to quality, affordable health coverage”
This is nothing but fatuous gobbledygook. The GOP has had six years to come up with an alternative plan, and never has done so. Its current strategy is to repeal the Affordable Care Act now, and then cook up a replacement sometime in the next two, three, even four years. (They can’t even agree on a time frame.) What exactly is a “patient-centered system,” anyway?
Here are the charts, courtesy of professor McBride.
From [HERE] "Freedom is a three-dimensional phenomenon. The first is the physical dimension: you can be enslaved physically. And for thousands of years man has been sold in the marketplace just like any other commodity. Slaves have existed all over the world. They were not given human rights; they were not really accepted as human beings, they were subhuman. And they are still being treated as subhuman. In India there are sudras, the untouchables. One-fourth of India is still living in slavery: these people cannot be educated, these people cannot move into other professions than those decided by the tradition five thousand years ago, and to think of them as human is impossible... Even to touch them makes you impure: you have to take a bath immediately. Even if you don’t touch the man, but only his shadow – then too you have to take a bath.
And all over the world the woman’s body is not considered equal to the man’s body. She is not as free as man is. In China for centuries the husband had the right to kill his wife without being punished because the wife was his possession. Just like you can destroy your chair or you can burn your house because it is your chair, it is your house, it is your wife. In Chinese law there was no punishment for the husband if he killed his wife because she was thought to be soulless; she was just a reproductive mechanism, a factory to produce children.
So there is physical slavery and there is physical freedom – that your body is not enchained, that it is not categorized as lower than anybody else’s, that there is an equality as far as the body is concerned. But even today this is not true.
Freedom of the body will mean that there is no distinction between black and white, that there is no distinction between man and woman, that there is no distinction of any kind as far as bodies are concerned. Nobody is pure, nobody is impure: all bodies are the same. This is the very basis of freedom.
Then there is the second dimension: psychological freedom. There are very few individuals in the world who are psychologically free... because if you are a Mohammedan you are not psychologically free; if you are a Hindu you are not psychologically free. Our whole way of bringing up children is to make them slaves – slaves of political ideologies, social ideologies, religious ideologies. We don’t give them a chance to think on their own, to search on their own. We force their minds... we stuff their minds with things which we are also not experienced in. Parents teach children that there is a God – and they know nothing of God. They tell their children that there is heaven and there is hell – and they know nothing of heaven and hell.
You are teaching your children things that you don't know yourself. You are just conditioning their minds because your minds were conditioned by your parents. This way the disease goes on from one generation to another generation.
Psychological freedom will be possible when children are allowed to grow, helped to grow to more intellect, more intelligence, more consciousness, more alertness. No belief is given to them. They are not taught any kind of faith, but they are given as much incentive as possible to search for truth. And they have to be reminded from the very beginning: your own truth, your own finding, is going to liberate you; nothing else can do that for you.
Truth cannot be borrowed. It cannot be studied in books. Nobody can inform you about it. You have to sharpen your intelligence yourself, so that you can look into existence and find it. If a child is left open, receptive, alert, and given the incentive for search, he will have psychological freedom. And with psychological freedom comes tremendous responsibility. You don’t have to teach it to him; it comes like the shadow of psychological freedom. And he will be grateful to you. Otherwise every child is angry at his parents because they spoiled him: they destroyed his freedom, they conditioned his mind. Even before he asked any questions, they filled his mind with answers which are all bogus because they are not based on his own experience.
Ohio's current death row population is 53% Black. From [HERE] The US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit on Friday ruled [opinion, PDF] that manufacturers of drugs used for lethal injections may remain anonymous in Ohio. The lawsuit, Fears v. Kasich, was brought by death row inmates who claimed that barring discovery that would lead to the identity of such manufacturers unlawfully prevented prosecution against those who administer lethal injections in the state, including Ohio Governor John Kasich . The inmates claimed that a protective order barring such discovery allowed for "unknown laboratories using unknown testing protocols to evaluate drugs manufactured or compounded by an anonymous source," thereby preventing a demonstration of potential harm caused by the use of such drugs. In a 2-1 decision, the justices disagreed and affirmed the lower court's ruling that the state's interest in protecting the drug manufacturers from anti-death penalty-related violence outweighed the inmates' concerns. In a dissenting opinion, Justice Jane Stranch noted that the evidence that such a threat existed was limited to a single email sent to a pharmacy from an anti-death penalty advocate in Oklahoma. [MORE].
OSHO says, "These nuts think they are democratic."
This is how man goes on saying one thing and goes on doing just its opposite. He talks about being civilized, cultured – he is not civilized, not cultured. The death penalty is a proof enough.
This is the rule of a barbarous society: An eye for an eye, and a head for a head. If somebody cuts off one of your hands, then in a barbarous society, this is a simple law: one of his hands should be cut off.
The same has been carried down the ages. The death penalty is exactly the same law: An eye for an eye. If a man is thought to have murdered somebody, then he should be murdered. But it is strange: if killing somebody is a crime, then how can you remove crime from society by committing the same crime again? There was one man murdered; now there are two men murdered. And it is not certain that this man murdered that man, because to prove a murder is not an easy thing.
If murder is wrong, then whether it is committed by the man or by the society and its court, makes no difference.
Killing certainly is a crime.
The death penalty is a crime committed by the society against a single individual, who is helpless. I cannot call it a penalty, it is a crime.
And you can understand why it is committed: it is a revenge. Society is taking revenge because the man did not follow the rules of the society; the society is ready to kill him. But nobody bothers that when somebody murders, it shows that man is psychologically sick. Rather than sending him to imprisonment or to be executed, he should be sent into a nursing home where he can be taken care of – physically, psychologically, spiritually. He is sick. He needs all the compassion of the society; there is no question of penalty, punishment.
Yes, it is true, one man is murdered; but we cannot do anything about it. By murdering this man do you think the other will come back to life? If that were possible, I would be all in support of this man being removed – he is not worth being part of the society – and the other should be revived.
But that does not happen. The other is gone forever; there is no way to revive him. Yes, you can do one thing, you can kill this man too. You are trying to wash blood with blood, mud with mud. You are not aware of what has happened in history in many cases. [MORE]
From [HERE] Since President-elect Donald Trump won the election, he has continued his campaign habit of making inconsistent, unverifiable, or even just obviously false statements. The American public is left to rely on the media to learn the truth and make sense of his proclamations.
That’s exactly what the media is supposed to do with any politician—when the President lies, it is the press’ obligation to tell the public. But it’s doubly important with a politician like Trump, whose entire political career has often been punctuated by flagrant lies.
But when Trump lies, the Wall Street Journal—the second largest paper by circulation in the country—will not call it a lie, according to the its editor-in-chief Gerard Baker.
“I’d be careful about using the word, ‘lie.’ ‘Lie’ implies much more than just saying something that’s false. It implies a deliberate intent to mislead,” Baker told Chuck Todd on Meet the Press on Sunday.
Instead, Baker said the paper would investigate the claim, and then present both sides: What Trump said, and what the paper found. Then, the readers will be left to decide which account is correct.
As an example, Baker cited one of Trump’s more outrageous lies: When he claimed that thousands of Muslims in New Jersey gathered on rooftops to celebrate 9/11. Baker noted that the WSJ investigated his claim and found it baseless.
“I think it’s then up to the reader to make up their own mind to say, ‘This is what Donald Trump says. This is what a reliable, trustworthy news organization reports. And you know what? I don’t think that’s true.’ I think if you start ascribing a moral intent, as it were, to someone by saying that they’ve lied, I think you run the risk that you look like you are, like you’re not being objective,” he said.
Yet the example Baker cites is itself a clear lie. Trump didn’t just say that thousands of Muslims celebrated 9/11 on rooftops in New Jersey, he said that he saw it with his own eyes and that he watched it on television. Yet despite exhaustive attempts to find evidence that it happened, there is none — though Trump also said it was “well covered at the time.”
Instead of calling it out as a lie, though, Baker seems chiefly concerned with maintaining the appearance of his paper’s objectivity.
Other news sites have taken the opposite approach — namely, choosing to call a lie a lie. In an interview with NPR, New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet explains why it’s an important practice.
“I think the moment for me was the birther story, where he has repeated for years his belief that President Obama was not born in the United States. That’s not an obfuscation, that’s not an exaggeration. I think that was just demonstrably a lie, and I think that lie is not a word that newspapers use comfortably,” said Baquet, agreeing with Baker that “lie” is a difficult word for newspapers because it ascribes intent behind the falsehoods.
Calling a lie a lie wasn’t telling people how to think, said Baquet — just telling them the truth.
“No, I think if you look up lie in the dictionary it’s pretty clear. Actually [lie is] a synonym of falsehood. No, it would almost be illiterate to have not called the birther thing a lie.”
Despite increased attention to fact-checking Trump’s claims, the media often spreads his false version of reality before finding out the truth.
When Trump took credit for saving a Ford plant in Kentucky, many headlines reiterated his claim word-for-word without checking — the plant was never in any danger, though it was going to shift productions. The same happened when Trump claimed to save over 1,000 Carrier jobs in Indiana (the actual number was smaller, and came at a huge taxpayer cost), and took credit for new jobs at Sprint.
Each time, by the time the truth came out, the news cycle had moved on — letting the lie stand in millions of people’s minds.
And surveys show that many Americans, when faced with a discrepancy between what Trump tells them and what a “reliable, trustworthy news organization reports,” will believe what Trump says over the media’s reporting. According to a nationally representative survey of Trump supporters by PPP, 40 percent of Trump voters think that the business mogul has more credibility than the New York Times. Forty-one percent of Trump voters think that he has more credibility than CNN.
Trump supporters are also likely to ascribe to any number of falsehoods: 67 percent of Trump voters think that unemployment increased during the Obama administration (it decreased), and 39 percent think the stock market went down during Obama’s time in office (it went up). Thirteen percent believe in Pizzagate, the bizarre conspiracy theory that alleges that Hillary Clinton has ties to a child sex trafficking ring run out of a local DC pizzeria (there is absolutely zero credible evidence that the pizzeria is anything but a pizzeria).
Connection: Owned By Jared Kushner, Trump’s Son-In-Law
The Observer is a news site owned by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Under Kushner’s leadership the Observer has been an unabashed pro-Trump megaphone. The paper was one of only three national papers to endorse him during the primary election. The outlet’s close relationship with Trump forced their national political reporter, Ross Barkan, to resign because he felt “a line had been crossed” with both the endorsement and their editor-in-chief’s secret involvement with the campaign.
Since Trump’s victory, the Observer has moved toward becoming a propaganda outlet for the incoming administration. On December 2, the Observer published an op-ed from University of Texas-Austin adjunct professor Austin Bay calling for the FBI to conduct a “detailed investigation” into the “political thuggery” of anti-Trump protests after the election.
The Observer also recently argued for the release of Julian Assange. Assange’s organization, WikiLeaks, released -- with the probable assistance of the Russian government -- wave after wave of mundane emails stolen from Democratic politicians and operatives, which were endlessly spun by right-wing media into increasinglybizarre, and dangerous misinformation.
Right Side Broadcasting Network
Connection: Helped Trump With Pre- And Post-Debate Spin; CEO Said “Trump Built RSBN”
Right Side Broadcasting Network (RSBN) is a relatively new “news” network that announced on December 6 that it would “become a 24-hour network very soon” and it would be “in the White House” and “at the press briefings” during the Trump presidency. According to Foreign Policy magazine, there are several steps a news outlet must go through to get White House press credentials, but the president can evade those by simply inviting the outlet to attend and allowing them to ask friendly questions, as President George W. Bush allowed a conservative reporter to do during his administration.
RSBN developed such a close relationship with Trump during the primary and general elections that The Washington Post’s Callum Borchers has described them as “the unofficial version of Trump TV” since last summer. Borchers reported that the Trump campaign had “teamed up with Right Side to produce pre- and post-debate analysis shows that streamed on Trump’s Facebook Page.” Right Side Broadcasting CEO Joe Seales hosted an “ask me anything” session on Reddit in which he told pro-Trump redditors that “Trump built RSBN” and they should “continue to discredit” mainstream media and instead tune into “media outlets like us and the other conservative sources like Breitbart.”
The National Enquirer
Connection: Owned By David Pecker, Trump’s Long-Time Friend
The National Enquirer is owned by David Pecker, Trump’s close friend, and was, along with his son-in-law’s paper and Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, the only other national outlet to endorse Trump. New York magazine’s Gabriel Sherman reported that while Trump’s “scandal-filled personal life would be yuge! for the supermarket tabloid,” he has been “exclusively celebrated in the Enquirer’s pages.” Trump himself has even written op-eds exclusively for the Enquirer, where he explained “I am the only one who can make America great again!”
The National Enquirer also undertook a strange and savage campaign against Trump’s electoral opponents. With thin sourcing, often only from noted liar/Trump supporter Roger Stone, the Enquirer alleged that Jeb Bush celebrated his father’s presidential win with a cocaine binge, that Hillary and Chelsea Clinton “covered up Bill’s cocaine rehab,” and that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) had affairs with multiple women. Their most outrageous pro-Trump lie was that Cruz’s father was somehow involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The Enquirer made this claim based on one blurry photograph, but that did not stop Trump from touring cable news shows to hype the absurd smear.
Breitbart News
Connection: Operated By Trump’s Chief Strategist, Steve Bannon, Who Described The Site As The “Platform For The Alt-Right,” Which Includes White Supremacy
Breitbart.com was founded by Andrew Breitbart along with Trump’s current chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, who in 2014 described Breitbart as the “platform for the alt-right,” a term commonly used to describe people who embrace white nationalism, misogyny, and anti-Semitism. Breitbart News is infamous for headlines like “Bill Kristol: Republican Spoiler, Renegade Jew,” “Young Muslims In The West Are A Ticking Time Bomb,” and “After The Pulse Club Massacre, It’s Time For Gays To Come Home To The Republican Party.” Breitbart even undertook campaigns of online harassment directed at Facebook’s trending news team for their perceived “bias;” these campaigns were directed by Milo Yiannopoulos, who was permanently banned from Twitter for leading a harassment campaign against Saturday Night Live and Ghostbusters actress Leslie Jones.
During the 2016 election, reporters and even former Breitbart employees repeatedly criticized the site for attempting a “rebranding of white supremacy … through Trump.” Former Breitbart writer Ben Shapiro accused the site of embracing “a movement shot through with racism and anti-Semitism,” and his former colleague Kurt Bardella similarly labeled Bannon a “dangerous” and “combative” “pathological liar.” Bardella resigned from Breitbart on March 11 when Trump’s then-campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, grabbed Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields at a Trump event. Rather than defending their Fields, a Breitbart employee hurriedly worked to “make sure that [the incident] doesn’t turn into a big story.”
Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson has repeatedly said illegal guns and gang violence are responsible for the surge in shootings that occurred in 2016. But Johnson and his predecessor Garry McCarthy are starting off the new year by blaming another source: anti-police sentiment.
“In Chicago, we just don’t have a deterrent to pick up a gun,” Johnson said.
McCarthy, who was booted from his position in response to the fatal shooting of Laquan McDonald, echoed Johnson’s claims.
“So what’s happening, and this is ironic, is that a movement with the goal of saving black lives at this point is getting black lives taken, because 80 percent of our murder victims here in Chicago are male blacks,” he said, during a New Year’s Day radio interview, adding that BLM fuels lawlessness by advocating “non-compliance” with police. “The simplest way to describe it is that we have created an environment where we have emboldened criminals and we are hamstringing the police.”
In 2016, the number of fatal shootings in Chicago climbed 50 percent and outnumbered those in Los Angeles and New York City combined.
“Criminals watch TV, pay attention to the media,” Johnson said. “They see an opportunity to commit nefarious activity.”
But the claim that BLM is contributing to violent crime has no basis in reality.
BLM activists have said, time and time again, that the organization isn’t anti-police. The organization is specifically opposed to police violence and outspoken about crime within the black community itself.
“The idea that black-on-black crime is not a significant political conversation among black people is patently false,” reads BLM’s website. “The continued focus on black-on-black crime is a diversionary tactic, whose goal is to suggest that black people don’t have the right to be outraged about police violence in vulnerable black communities, because those communities have a crime problem. The Black Lives Matter movement acknowledges the crime problem, but it refuses to locate that crime problem as a problem of black pathology. Black people are not inherently more violent or more prone to crime than other groups.”
“Police officers are people. Their lives have inherent value. This movement is not an anti-people movement; therefore it is not an anti-police-officer movement,” the website says. “Thus the Black Lives Matter movement is not trying to make the world more unsafe for police officers; it hopes to make police officers less of a threat to communities of color.”
Election Hoax 2016FACT: The white population is rapidly declining in the U.S. and worldwide. At the same time, Latino, Asian and Black populations in the U.S. are growing inexorably. Numerical inadequacy and vulnerability fuels the practice of racism here and abroad. [MORE] Racists must practice racism to survive. This election was the first post Voting Rights Act election and Jim Crow was in effect.
FACT: 'The GOP's white votary is not large enough to elect Donald Trump. That is, it is too small unless the GOP quietly builds a secret blacklist of millions of voters, especially voters of color, and systematically and quietly wipes out voter registrations.
In 2016 the voter erasing system was built and GOP operatives put it into action. Its name: Interstate Crosscheck. Crosscheck along with thousands of votes intentionally not counted in Black voting areas, such as Flint & Detroit chose the president and determined who controls Congress.' [MORE]
According to investigative journalist Greg Palast millions of non-white voters were purged by Interstate Crosscheck. Crosscheck has nothing to do with electronic voting or Russians.
The program, launched by racist suspect, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, was designed as a method to counter voter fraud through so-called "double voting." Double voting occurs when the same person registers to vote in more than one state and then casts multiple ballots on election day in different states. It is a felony criminal offense. With no factual basis or evidence of actual fraud - that is no prosecutions, arrests or convictions, the GOP has claimed that double voting is rampant in the US.
Interstate Crosscheck removes a voter from the voter list if the voter's name appears to be registered in more than one state. Around 7 million names were put on the list of “potential double voters” before the 2014 election. Crosscheck then compares each state’s list with lists from other states in the program (30 states participate). Specifically, according to Palast, the Crosscheck list contains 7,264,422 voters.
Although the Crosscheck program aims to prevent individuals from voting in more than one state in the same election, Crosscheck has been doing the exact opposite and is used to remove legitmate voters from voting rolls. Greg Palast has claimed that before a single vote was even cast, the election was already fixed by Trump operatives who eliminated millions of legitimate African American, Latino and Asian voters from the voter rolls in North Carolina, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
An investigation in Rolling Stone found that Crosscheck uses a biased and questionable methodology that puts voters with African-American, Latino, and Asian names in greater danger of being purged from the voter list and being falsely accused of double voting. Crosscheck supposedly matches first, middle and last name, plus birth date, and provides the last four digits of a Social Security number for additional verification.
However, in practice a quarter of the names on the list did not have a middle name match or were only partially the same name. The list contained thousands of errors. The system also neglected to take into account designations of Jr. and Sr., and did not include any Social Security numbers to croscheck whether the suspected voter is the same person.
How was the list manipulated? An overwhelmingly disproportionate number of non-whites have been removed who have typical Black, Latino and Asian last names and who reside in predominately minority zip codes. Names such as Jackson, Garcia and Wong in areas such as Detroit, Milwaukee and Philadelphia. U.S. Census data shows that minorities are overrepresented in 85 of 100 of the most common last names. “If your name is Washington, there’s an 89 percent chance you’re African-American,” says Palast. “If your last name is Hernandez, there’s a 94 percent chance you’re Hispanic.” Finding these common names the GOP targeted non-white voters and put them on the list and then stopped them from voting on election day.
For instance, if the common name "Jose Garcia" appears on voter rolls in Wisconsin and Michigan it was removed from the rolls in both states without any cross referencing for middle name or social security number. When "Jose Garcia" appeared to vote on election day he would be given a provisional ballot -which would never get counted.
This inherent bias in the Crosscheck database results in an astonishing one in six Hispanics, one in seven Asian-Americans and one in nine African-Americans landing on what Palast dubs “Trump’s hit list.” His investigators calculated 1.1 million non-white people, many spread over crucial swing states were deprived of their right to vote on election day. Thus far, Palast's claims have not been refuted.
Trump victory margin in Michigan: 13,107
Michigan Crosscheck purge list: 449,922
Trump victory margin in Arizona: 85,257
Arizona Crosscheck purge list: 270,824
Trump victory margin in North Carolina: 177,008
North Carolina Crosscheck purge list: 589,393
Enough votes to swing the election away from the Hillary Clinton victory predicted in polls – explaining suspicious exit polls inconsistencies – and towards a "suprising" result for Trump and Republican victory in the Senate. [MORE] and [MORE]
Electionomist Greg Palast explains that Michigan officials declared in late November that Trump won the state's count by 10,704 votes. Yet a record 75,355 ballots were not counted. The uncounted ballots came mostly from Detroit and Flint, majority-Black cities that vote Democratic. The votes went uncounted because Blacks in Detroit and Flint voted on old, broken down voting machines. An astonishing 87 machines broke down in Detroit, responsible for counting tens of thousands of ballots. Many more were simply faulty and uncalibrated. Detroit is bankrupt, so every expenditure must be approved by "emergency" GOP overlords appointed by the Republican governor. The GOP operatives refused the city's pre-election pleas to fix and replace the busted machines. [MORE] and [MORE]
Deterring Democracy Here & Abroad. Chomsky explains the U.S. has been interfering with elections in other nations for decades and has proudly boasted about it. [MORE] and [MORE]
From [FUNKTIONARY] Jesusize - to believe in something (or someone—real, mythologized or imagined) or even worship it, based on little (scant and sketchy) to no evidence in support of it (single-source propaganda), and uncorroborated accounts that fly in the face of knows history, facts and science. 2) to turn fiction or fictional accounts into fact and history through propaganda, indoctrination coercion and violence.
From [NPR] The darkest moment for American police this year was July 7 in downtown Dallas, when police officers doing security for a peaceful protest march suddenly found themselves under attack. And those weren't the only cops targeted this year. Deadly ambushes followed in Baton Rouge, Des Moines and Palm Springs.
As a result, many police will remember 2016 as a grim chapter in what many call "the War on Cops." These ambush-killings of officers created a sense that they were under siege, threatening to poison the post-Ferguson debate over police reform.
"There has been an increase in the total number," says Seth Stoughton, a former cop who is now an assistant professor of law at the University of South Carolina. Stoughton been tracking premeditated murders of law enforcement officers — what he calls police assassinations — and he says the number of police killed like this jumped from five or six last year, to somewhere in the neighborhood of eight to 12, this year.
That's a subset of the total number of officers "feloniously killed" on duty, most of whom were killed in the course of police work, but not targeted just because they were police. (Official 2016 statistics aren't available yet; the FBI says 41 were killed feloniously in 2015.)
"It looks like a huge increase — and it is a huge increase, but it's a huge percentage increase involving very small numbers," he says.
Twelve deaths, horrible as they are, have to be put into the statistical context of a country with close to a million law enforcement officers. Stoughton says that statistical context is important.
"On the other hand, it's not helpful at all because police officers don't feel any less under siege, don't feel any less threatened because I pull up a spreadsheet," he says.
That's where this gets tricky. For the last couple of years, academics and police reform groups have been pushing back against the idea of a war on cops by citing big-picture statistics — for instance, the fact that, overall, far fewer police are killed on duty now than a generation ago. But cold stats aren't enough to change perceptions.
Maj. Max Geron says he hears the phrase "war on cops" a lot from his fellow officers.
"They use it in social media, they use it in their discussions, and for many officers, there is that belief," he says.
Geron himself doesn't like the phrase "war on cops," but he understands where it comes from, especially where he works, in the Dallas Police Department.
The human brain is a narrative processor and the stories and the things that these officers, particularly, witnessed, served to reinforce the idea that they are being victimized, that they are being attacked, whether that is in fact the overall case or not," he explains.
The belief in a war on cops can have real political consequences. It's been used as an argument against police reform movements such as Black Lives Matter, and it also led many rank and file officers to support Donald Trump during this year's presidential campaign. And it's not just a left-right thing; gun control groups are making an issue of police deaths, too. Without going so far as talking about a "war on police," the group Everytown for Gun Safety says shootings of police are an argument for stricter background checks on gun sales.
"What we're seeing is more cops are being shot in states without background check laws," says Sarah Tofte, Everytown's research director. "And I think a piece of that is that fewer dangerous individuals are able to get easy access to firearms."
Politics aside, the "war on cops" is also having a practical effect on everyday policing. In Dallas, Maj. Geron says officers there are being more cautious: they're more likely to wait for backup — which he thinks is good. But he doesn't want caution to become something darker.
"Along with the discussions about safety and security, we as the leaders need to continue to push the message of empathy with our citizenry, they're not the enemy," he says.
After an attack like the one in Dallas, he says police have to fight the tendency to see the job as a matter of "us versus them."
Where's the Dallas bodycam and "bomb robot" video?
Thursday, January 5, 2017 at 09:22PM 
