Archived threads in /news/ - Current News - 53. page

>Experts say they are concerned about the voter-fraud commission's activities. Some said the request appeared to be politically motivated, ProPublica reported on Thursday night. One expert, according to reporter Jessica Huseman, was especially skeptical of Kobach, who has spent years focusing on voter fraud in his current role as Kansas' secretary of state. Dale Ho, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Voting Rights Project, said of Kobach:

>"I have every reason to think that given the shoddy work that Mr. Kobach has done in this area in the past that this is going to be yet another boondoggle and a propaganda tool that tries to inflate the problem of double registration beyond what it actually is."

>Vanita Gupta, head of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, torched the commission Thursday night: "Pence and Kobach are laying the groundwork for voter suppression, plain & simple," Gupta said.

How US states are responding

>Election officials and lawmakers from at least five states called out Kobach's request.

>California Secretary of State Alex Padilla said it is his duty to ensure election integrity and protect voters' privacy. "I will not provide sensitive voter information to a commission that has already inaccurately passed judgment that millions of Californians voted illegally," a statement from Padilla said.

>Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Grimes also pushed back, saying "I do not intend to release Kentuckians' sensitive personal data to the fed. gov't." Grimes also offered a sharp rebuke of Trump in her statement, calling the president's voter-fraud claims a "lie."

>Denise Merrill, Connecticut's secretary of state, said she would provide "publicly available information" to the commission, but sharply criticized Kobach, who she said "has a lengthy record of illegally disenfranchising eligible voters in Kansas." Given that history, Merrill said, "we find it very difficult to have confidence in the work of this Commission."

>Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe said, "I have no intention of honoring this request."

>Massachusetts Secretary of State William Galvin told Commonwealth Magazine, "They’re not going to get it. It's not a public record."

>The Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity will hold its first meeting in Washington D.C. on July 19, a statement from Pence's office said.

Goddamn what a retard lol. This kind of shit would have had conservatives going full pitchfork if it was proposed last year.

As you can see by the excellent "Kevorkian Illinois" map that accompanies this column, this plan is visionary.

The alternative is hell. Illinois hasn't had a state budget for years. The state continues to spend money it doesn't have, and the state's credit ratings have dropped, increasing the cost of borrowing more money we don't have to keep the rotten shebang going.

Bills pile up; Moody's Investor Service says taxpayers are on the hook for $251 billion in unfunded public union pension liabilities.

Boss Mike Madigan, king of the Democrats who control things, wants tax increases but no real structural reform to bring stability to The Venezuela of the Midwest.

And the whispers of bankruptcy won't help the average (remaining) taxpaying chumbolones like you and me who don't want to leave our homes but who'll get stuck with the bills.

Since our neighboring states are doing better, taking Illinois jobs and businesses and Illinois workers and taxpaying families, they might as well just take the rest of Illinois, too, dammit.

Wisconsin can have Chicago and begin calling it "South Milwaukee."

Naturally, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel will fight this. He needs a job. And he'll most likely beg his friends at The New York Times and the Washington Post to write angry editorials to save him. And these will be full of concern for the republic and those dispossessed Midwestern salt-of-the-earth taxpaying Americans, as if.

Sadly, Wisconsin probably won't want Rahm, either. So to spare hurt feelings, I propose carving out 40 acres around the mayor's home so Rahm might be prince of his own country:

Rahmonia.

And Cook County Board President Toni "Taxwinkle" Preckwinkle will fight it, too, so she needs something to soothe her ambitions:

A grant of land as large as a case of the soda pop she taxes, so that she might stand on it and proclaim herself Queen of Taxwinkletopia.

If there are portions of Illinois that the other states don't want, they may be left as federal territory, a wilderness where only the strong survive and peasants and friendly propagandists kneel and beg for crumbs. You already know the name of this wasteland:

Madiganistan.

And in return for taking care of our politicians, Wisconsin will probably demand assets. Like the Milwaukee Cubs. The Beloit Blackhawks. The Sheboygan Bulls and the Fond du Lac Bears.

Indiana may want a large curvy slice of the former Illinois, so the state will be shaped more like a basketball. This will please Hoosiers to no end.

And Indiana also gets the Indianapolis White Sox and the hottest soccer team in America, the Indianapolis Fire.

Why not? Indiana is a great state, with friendly people and Mitch Daniels and Kilroy's in Bloomington.

Iowa can have part of the west. Missouri may also get a small piece. Kentucky can take southern Illinois, considering many on both sides of the border share Kentucky DNA, as did Abraham Lincoln.

A colleague told me he had reservations about sharing Illinois with the Bluegrass State.

"I wouldn't give Kentucky anything because A) it's the South and the former Illinois needs to stay in the Midwest, and B) their state government is a mess, too, with a governor who refuses to talk to certain reporters."

But beggars can't be choosers. If Illinois is dissolved as planned, we won't have a say in anything.

And though some in Kentucky might not respect "the media," the state does have excellent bourbon. I would allow Kentucky to send me countless barrels of its fine sipping spirit so that I might hold it in escrow, to make sure everything goes as planned.

I promise to sip their bourbon and light a cigar, and hum a few sad bars from that song of the former Illinois that no one sings anymore:

By thy rivers gently flowing, Illinois, Illinois

O'er thy prairies verdant growing, Illinois, Illinois

Comes an echo on the breeze, rustling through the leafy trees, Boss Madigan has us on our knees, Illinois, Illinois

Boss Madigan has us on our knees, Illinois.

>>153185
I was gonna click the link but then I was like
>CNN

oh wow
notice how both the communist propaganda poster and a cookie cutter campaign poster featuring Obama are colored with red, white, and blue?
coincidence?
or something more?

>>153204
Notice how they both feature words, and likenesses of human beings. It's obviously the zionists trying to brainwash us into speaking english. Hey - I think it's working!!!!!!!

>>144926
how exactly is this different to every republican calling for obama's impeachment the second he was elected into office? oh right russia hacked the election with meme magic. how much foreign money did hillary get again?

>>144926
And all this time nobody stops to think about the person would take Trump's place if he gets impeached.

>>144942
He can be dealt with next if he shows himself to be just as incompetent.

Absolutely no way this could go wrong.

>>152959
Dude... weren't you aware? We *are* the simulation. The real world is out there, somewhere, beyond the code.

It's not a very good one, though. Or did you think that people would REALLY act like they do around here?

Same predictions like hillarys 99% chance to win?

Turns out giving the government control over everything is not a good idea.

Turns out Socialism doesn't work. Who would have thought.

Well shit, if only they had you there to tell them that.

>>152667

I've got a better idea. how about we send Bernie Sanders. He seems to know A LOT about Socialism. Maybe he can bring their country back to prosperity and safety.

MAYBE HE CAN MAKE IT WORK

>"At a time when we do not need any more religious conflict and divisiveness in the world and in this country, it violates the First Amendment promise of religious liberty to all," Rita Sklar, the group's executive director, told NPR. "By placing a monument to a particular set of religious beliefs, it appears that the state enforces one particular set of beliefs over others and over no religion. And it makes people who fall into those categories — no religion or other religion — feel like second-class citizens in the state of Arkansas, which they are not."

>The monument suggests that the Commandments are the basis for American and Arkansas law, she says, even though "several of the commandments are wholly religious in nature, like 'having no other gods before me,' or keeping the Sabbath. Those have no purpose in U.S. or Arkansas law."

>Rapert has made headlines with his legislation before. In 2013, he sponsored the country's strictest abortion law, which was eventually blocked by a federal appeals court. And earlier this year, he sponsored a bill to take Bill and Hillary Clinton's names off the Little Rock airport.

>Does Rapert believe in a separation of church and state?

>"We have freedom of religion, that's not freedom from religion," he tells NPR. "You have to remember, the State of Arkansas, through a legal process, said that they want to have a monument to the Ten Commandments for the Capitol grounds."

>He calls the expected lawsuit by the ACLU "foolhardy."

>"The ACLU has a history of what I call frivolous lawsuits. It's very sad in this day and time," he says. "The Supreme Court of the United States has said these monuments don't violate the Establishment Clause. This is America, and if they want to spend their money on this, they can do that. But it's not the right thing to do."

>Sklar says the ACLU of Arkansas has won similar battles over the Ten Commandments in classrooms and courtrooms, and she says the Van Orden decision doesn't protect the new monument at the state capitol, either.

>The court distinguishes between longstanding, historically significant buildings, she says, "that have had religious monuments or symbols for decades and decades, which is the case in Texas, and erecting a completely new religiously divisive monument [like that at] the Arkansas State Capitol. The Court sees a huge difference between the two, and so do we."

>And she says that it's Arkansas lawmakers who are wasting money – taxpayer money. "It cost the state hundreds of thousands of dollars when we challenged their abortion ban. Talk about foolhardy."

>Sklar says the Ten Commandments monument does what she believes Rapert and others intend: to assert "that Christianity in part has some special place in American tradition, has a higher place, has a more important role."

>"It does what it sets out to do, which is to get people from other religions to feel unwanted and unequal."

Stupid. If republicans truly wanted to honor the "moral foundations for law", why isn't Hammurabi getting any attention? What, humanity's first documented attempt at codified law isn't good enough or something?

>A 30-year-old pregnant woman was shot dead by police officers who were responding to her call about a break-in at her Seattle apartment, authorities said.

>Charleena Lyles was shot multiple times inside her home, where her four children were present. Police said the woman confronted them with two knives as they questioned her about a reported burglary.

>The department released an audio tape of Sunday’s encounter in which officers can be heard shouting, “Get back! Get back!”

>"We need help," an officer says into his radio. “A woman with two knives."

>At one point, Lyles says, “Get ready motherf***ers,” according to a transcript of the tape provided by Seattle police.

>“There were several children inside the apartment at the time of the shooting, but they were not injured,” the department said in a statement.

>The shooting is under investigation, police said. The officers involved were not identified and both have been placed on administrative leave, authorities said.

>Lyles’ relatives said she was three months pregnant and had been experiencing mental health issues and may have been having some kind of breakdown when she phoned police for help.

>“Even if my sister had a knife in her hand, she weighs like nothing, even if she’s soaking wet,” Monika Williams told reporters at a Sunday evening vigil," Lyles’ sister said.

>“There’s no way you could’ve taken a Taser and taken her down? There’s no way you could’ve taken a baton and knocked the knife out of her hand?”

>A GoFundMe page established by her family has raised more than $60,000.

>According to the audio, one officer tells the other to “Tase her.”

>“I don’t have a Taser,” the second cop says. “Get back! Get back!”

>Lyles had a previous run-in with police after calling them to her apartment, authorities said.

>On June 5, she reported a domestic violence incident involving the father of two of her children, police said.

>When officers arrived, she was sitting on the couch with a 4-year-old daughter and holding a large pair of scissors, police said.

>“Ain’t none of y’all leaving here today,” Lyles told the cops, according to a police report of the incident. The woman also made “unusual comments” about wanting to “morph into a wolf” and “cloning her daughter,” the report said.

>Eventually, Lyles surrendered the scissors and was arrested on a charge of harassment. Her family, called by officers to care for Lyles’ children, told police she had “experienced a recent sudden and rapid decline in her mental health,” according to the report.

>Lyles’ case should be forwarded to a mental health court, the report said.

>It was not clear what happened after that recommendation. A message left for the Seattle Police Department by InsideEdition.com Tuesday was not immediately returned.

Be American
Get shot.

>>152485
Washington Post isn't allowed on /news/ It's aids cancer and John Podesta works there and he's a rapist pedo

didn't know that my bad. regardless lets discuss all things shkreli related. He's kind of a champ and I feel like a thread about him is overdue

>>152506
I'm sorry, you thought this site was a safe space? 8D

>"KKK" was scrawled on an Emmett Till Memorial Highway sign in 2006. And in October, the marker at the Tallahatchie River where Till's body was found was riddled with bullet holes.

>"These are easy targets, a low-risk outlet for racism," Dave Tell, who works on the Emmett Till Memory Project, told the newspaper.

>Hammons told the AP, he doesn't know whether the latest defacement of the Till sign is racially motivated or just random vandalism.

Good.

>>152646
Why?

>The real problem with the Washington report, however, isn’t economic but political: The UW economic team that produced it has been held up as the ultimate arbiter on the effect of Seattle’s minimum wage.

>The group’s initial report, issued last July and covering the first phase of the wage increase in April 2015 to as much as $11 an hour, found that the city’s low-wage workers earned more, but that effect was muted by reduced hours, and the effects canceled each other out almost completely. This was hailed by the minimum wage lobby as a data point in its favor, especially because it was supplemented by a finding that the higher minimum wage hadn’t driven employers out of business. You don’t hear such huzzahs this time around, when the core takeaway from the report is that “the minimum wage ordinance lowered low-wage employees’ earnings by an average of $125 per month in 2016.”

>It’s difficult to reverse course and flatly declare the latest findings erroneous, as many in the minimum wage camp did almost immediately. “Their findings are not credible and drawing inferences from the report [is] unwarranted,” asserted UC Berkeley economist Michael Reich, who had issued a report on the Seattle initiative just days earlier, finding opposite effects — “Wages in food services did increase. … Employment in food service, however, was not affected.”

>At the pro-labor Economic Policy Institute, Ben Zipperer and John Schmitt stated that the Washington paper suffered from data and methodological problems “that bias the study in the direction of finding job loss, even where there may have been no job loss at all.” And Jared Bernstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and former chief economist to Vice President Joe Biden, judiciously pronounced the study “curious” and observed, as did other critics, that its findings are way out of line with other research on the minimum wage’s employment effects. It’s unwise, Bernstein said, to come to conclusions “based on one extreme outlier study with some eyebrow-raising quirks.”

>The University of Washington researchers, led by economist Jacob Vigdor, defend their results, which are based on confidential data they see because they’re on a study contract from the city but which hasn’t been available to previous researchers in the field.

>The controversy does underscore a familiar feature of the minimum wage debate: The subject is so multifaceted that there may be no single answer to the question of where the wage should be. The answer will be different depending on the nature of the local economy, the prevailing wage, local politics and numerous other factors, including ideology.

>he most common standard is that the minimum wage should be about half the median wage. But as Zipperer and Schmitt observe, that would place the optimum minimum for Seattle at about $13 — so why that wage should have such pronounced effects is a mystery.

>It may be impossible to solve the mystery until the UW study is peer-reviewed and its underlying data scrutinized more widely, if then. But a few points certainly are true. One is that its findings are out of line with almost all other studies of the minimum wage employment effect. That doesn’t make them suspect, exactly, but it does warrant a close examination of the methodology to see whether the researchers missed or misinterpreted something. Another issue is that Seattle’s unusually, and perhaps uniquely, strong economy may be warping the findings.

>Then there are the limitations that even the UW researchers acknowledge. One is that their study left out multisite employers such as fast-food and retail chains because they simply don’t have sufficient data to include them. This group is among the biggest employers of low-wage workers, accounting for about 38% of the workforce, so its absence leaves a big gap. The study’s critics say it’s an especially important gap because chain employers have an easier time adjusting to higher hourly wages and can move workers from one place to another, so UW may have overstated the job losses.

>Researchers also say they’re unable to capture earnings in the informal or “contract” sectors — cash employees or Uber drivers, for instance. It’s possible that some of the lost jobs have been shifted to these arrangements.

>“Donald Trump: The ‘Apprentice’ is a television smash!” the big headline said. Above the Time nameplate, there was another headline in all caps: “TRUMP IS HITTING ON ALL FRONTS ... EVEN TV!”

>This cover — dated March 1, 2009 — looks like an impressive memento from Trump’s pre-presidential career. To club members eating lunch, or golfers waiting for a pro-shop purchase, it seemed to be a signal that Trump had always been a man who mattered. Even when he was just a reality-TV star, Trump was the kind of star who got a cover story in Time.

>But that wasn’t true.

>The Time cover is a fake.

>There was no March 1, 2009, issue of Time Magazine. And there was no issue at all in 2009 that had Trump on the cover.

>In fact,the cover on display at Trump’s clubs, observed recently by a reporter visiting one of the properties, contains several small but telling mistakes. Its red border is skinnier than that of a genuine Time cover, and, unlike the real thing, there is no thin white border next to the red. The Trump cover’s secondary headlines are stacked on the right side — on a real Time cover, they would go across the top.
>And it has two exclamation points. Time headlines don’t yell.

>“I can confirm that this is not a real TIME cover,” Kerri Chyka, a spokeswoman for Time Inc., wrote in an email to The Washington Post.

>So how did Trump — who spent an entire campaign and much of his presidency accusing the mainstream media of producing “fake news” — wind up decorating his properties with a literal piece of phony journalism?

>The Trump Organization did not respond to questions this week about who made the cover and why it was displayed at Trump clubs. White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders declined to say whether Trump had known the cover wasn’t real.

>“We couldn’t comment on the decor at Trump Golf clubs one way or another,” Sanders wrote in an email.

>The cover seems to fit a broader pattern for Trump, who has often boasted of his appearances on Time’s cover and adorned his Trump Tower office with images of himself from magazines and newspapers. Trump has made claims about himself — about his charitable giving, his business success, even the size of the crowd at his inauguration — that are not supported by the facts.
> …

>>152809
If this happened in the US the ghost would have already been shot. Thai police need to step up their game.

>>152818

Please, the last American ghost was killed in 1912.

>Washington Post reporter David Fahrenthold, who broke the story, said he had tallied seven locations where the cover was spotted as of Wednesday morning, and was continuing to look for additional sightings.

>Scott Keeler, a photojournalist for the Tampa Bay Times, posted a photo on Twitter of the framed Time cover hung on the wall of Trump’s Palm Beach resort Mar-a-Lago.

>Despite the fake cover, Trump has appeared on the front of the magazine several times. First, before he got into politics, Trump appeared on a 1989 cover holding an ace of diamonds next to his face.

>The teaser read, “This man may turn you green with envy — or just turn you off. Flaunting it is the game, and Trump is the name.”

>After announcing his campaign to become president and his election, Trump has appeared on the cover of Time in both photos and illustrations more than a dozen times.

>newsworthy

>The tirade came in response to a question from Charlie Spiering, a reporter for Breitbart, the rightwing online publication once run by top White House aide Steve Bannon.

>On Tuesday the president went on yet another early morning Twitter tirade against CNN for “fake news” in the wake of the resignations of three journalists at the network over a story about a Trump aide’s ties to Russia. The story was posted to the CNN website on Thursday and was removed, with all links disabled, on Friday night. CNN said the piece did not receive sufficient editorial scrutiny, and was considered “a breakdown in editorial workflow.”

>Trump posted three tweets in a two-hour period referring to CNN’s “fake news”, and retweeted a photoshopped graphic in a fourth tweet saying the same thing. In the White House press briefing, Sanders complained: “The constant barrage of fake news directed at this president, probably, that has garnered a lot of his frustration.”

>Sanders also engaged in a heated back-and-forth with reporter Brian Karem at the briefing, when the journalist said her attacks on the media were “inflaming everybody right here and right now with those words”.

>Karem went on to assert that “any one of us, if we don’t get it right, the audience has the opportunity to turn the channel or not read us.” The administration had “been elected to serve for four years at least. There’s no option other than that. We’re here to ask you questions. You’re here to provide the answers.”

>The White House spokeswoman responded: “If anything has been inflamed it’s the dishonesty that often takes place by the news media, and I think it’s outrageous for you to accuse me of inflaming a story when I was simply trying to respond to his question.”

>>152612

Nobody cares faggot.

Sage

>>152624
I'm sorry, but /news/ is not your safe space.