July 1, 2016

The Twit's funniest tweet. Here's my nomination. What's yours?

https://twitter.com/mcdonaldjtrump/status/640698884998590464

My grandparents didn't come to America all the way from Germany to see it get taken over by immigrants. Not on my watch.

June 30, 2016

Bernie has asked for 2nd extension on filing his financial disclosures,

saying he has been too busy.

Both Hillary and the Don, who are busy running as the presumptive nominees, have filed their forms.

We know how he earned his money as US Senator. The question appears to be about Jane's income.

http://www.kansascity.com/entertainment/article86828487.html

Bernie Sanders has asked for and received another 45 days to disclose information about his personal finances.

Still a Democratic candidate for president, Sanders is required to file the paperwork. He has not been campaigning since the beginning of June, when Hillary Clinton effectively locked up the nomination.

But the Vermont senator's lawyer is telling the Federal Election Commission that Sanders' "current campaign schedule and officeholder duties" are causing delays in filing the personal finance paperwork; the lawyer gave a similar reason when seeking the first 45-day extension at the end of April.

The documents would provide a snapshot of how he and his wife, Jane Sanders, earned money last year.

June 30, 2016

CA update: the state is officially unflippable.

Only 368K votes uncounted, and Hillary's ahead by 400K+.

The 368K includes voters from all parties -- D's , R's, small parties, and non-affiliated.

http://vote.sos.ca.gov/returns/president/party/democratic/

http://elections.cdn.sos.ca.gov/statewide-elections/2016-primary/unprocessed-ballots-report.pdf

June 30, 2016

"I didn't know how racist America was until it elected its first black President."

Me, neither.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/30/politics/why-black-america-may-be-relieved-to-see-obama-go/

Richardson-Hall has restrained herself more than she ever expected in the past eight years. She fumed when she saw a poster of Obama dressed as an African witch doctor, online images of First Lady Michelle Obama depicted as a monkey, and racist Facebook comments by white people she thought she knew. Now, as Obama approaches his final months in office, she and others have come to a grim conclusion:

I didn't know how racist America was until it elected its first black president.

"What has happened over the past eight years -- there's no way to unlive or unsee it," says Mashaun D. Simon, a political blogger and teaching assistant at Emory University's Candler School of Theology in Atlanta.

There's been a lot of talk about angry white Americans and the rise of Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. But what about the anger that many blacks and others have felt over the treatment of Obama? What might that anger give rise to, and how is it changing them?

A psychological shift is taking place among many blacks, and it can be heard in countless conversations over dinner tables, in barbershops and on social media. Some say they've never felt so much pessimism about white America, such hopelessness.

SNIP

June 30, 2016

Liz Warren. Why the Cherokee rolls can be used to prove but NOT to disprove heritage.

She has been mocked for being proud of her Cherokee heritage when an ancestral link to the nation hasn't been proven. However, those lists are not comprehensive. And even a sibling of someone on a list wouldn't be considered a Cherokee if they were not listed themselves. Many people descended from actual, living Cherokee people don't meet the standards the Nation uses today.

And DNA ancestry tests are also unreliable.

http://www.allthingscherokee.com/know-im-cherokee-prove/

It is one thing to know you have Cherokee ancestry, but it is quite another to prove Cherokee heritage. Unfortunately there were very few records kept of the Cherokee people prior to their relationship with the United States, and even then the records were hardly complete. As a result, finding proof of Cherokee heritage is very challenging.

SNIP

There were eighteen rolls which recorded the Cherokee and Cherokee Freedman from 1817-1949. The rolls were often taken as a result of land or money distribution due to new treaties or US policies relating to the Cherokee. These rolls, coupled with the Federal Census of Indian Territory in 1860 and 1900 and the Cherokee Nation Census of 1880, are the only official records of those people who lived in both eastern and western Cherokee territories.

Finding your ancestors on these rolls means that your family is Cherokee, plain and simple. However, nothing in Cherokee genealogy is that simple, and thus I arrive at the complicated part — if you do not find your ancestors on these records it does not mean that you are not Cherokee. Err…that was a triple negative and poorly worded. In a nutshell, these records were not complete.

Why? Well, many Cherokee moved away from the Nation for various reasons (intermarriage, immigration, treaties…). Because they were not living within the boundaries of the Nation, they would not be recorded on the Cherokee rolls. Also, some Cherokee who were living within the Nation boundaries decided not to enroll on later rolls because they’d grown weary of the broken treaties and false promises that often accompanies them.

http://www.medicaldaily.com/dna-ancestry-tests-are-meaningless-your-historical-genealogy-search-244586

Genealogy tracking has become big business, with many companies charging up to $300 to trace your DNA to specific historical figures or ethnic groups in the distant past by analyzing ancestry tests.

A group of scientists now offers a public warning that these ancestry tests have little scientific backing, and are often so unreliable and inaccurate that they amount to "genetic astrology."

Though advertisements for some ancestry testing companies give the impression that your unique DNA genealogy can tell you a specific story about your ancestry, the scientists say that the same history you get could be given to thousands of other people with a similar ethnic background, and that any number of different possible interpretations could come from your DNA results.

June 30, 2016

CA: Only 456K ballots uncounted (D's, R's and Indie combined). Hillary ahead by 400K+.

http://elections.cdn.sos.ca.gov/statewide-elections/2016-primary/unprocessed-ballots-report.pdf

June 29, 2016

I've lost the respect I had for Greg Palast, unfortunately.

I won't be able to take seriously anything he says about the general.

His basis for claiming that Sanders could "flip" California? He estimated that all outstanding ballots were from no party voters, and that Bernie would win them with a margin at least 40%. In actuality, more than half of the votes counted since election day were cast for R's; and in the Dem primary Bernie has had only a slight lead in votes counted since then.

Current vote counts have Hillary ahead by almost 400k votes, with 350K votes -- of all parties -- remaining to be counted.

http://vote.sos.ca.gov/returns/president/party/democratic/

http://elections.cdn.sos.ca.gov/statewide-elections/2016-primary/unprocessed-ballots-report.pdf

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/06/27/still-sanders-activists-cling-to-hope-of-flipping-california/

According to Palast, those ballots had the potential to flip the election. Based on a call to the secretary of state's office, he estimated that all of the outstanding ballots were from "no party preference" voters; based on a pre-primary poll, he estimated a 40 percentage point margin for Sanders among those ballots.

"Bernie Sanders got at least 1.25 million votes from that pile," Palast said. "The good news is that Bernie won California. ... If you count every ballot, Sanders would win by 100,000."

But that was not how the ballots broke down. First, more than a half-million of the votes counted since Election Day were cast for Republicans. Since June 7, Trump has added 429,509 votes to his total; Kasich has added 68,641 votes, and Cruz has added 60,246.

Many more ballots were counted in the Democratic primary. They just did not break dramatically for Sanders. Since June 7, Clinton has added 692,629 votes, for a total of 2,633,209 statewide. Sanders has added 703,176 votes for a total of 2,205,219. On Election Day, Clinton appeared to win the state by 438,537 votes; as of today, her lead is 427,990 votes. (For comparison, Clinton defeated Barack Obama in the 2008 California primary by 421,522 votes.)

June 29, 2016

If Elizabeth Warren were the VP nominee, how about Duval Patrick for Senate?

The two-term former Governor.

There's also a Kennedy grandson who won his seat in the House with 61% of the vote.

In Massachusetts an opening would have to be filled by a special election called 145-160 days after a resignation letter is submitted. Warren could submit it a day after the election, the clock would start running them and the temporary appointment by the Governor would only have a few months in office.

June 28, 2016

CA update: only 520K votes all parties uncounted; Hillary ahead by more than 400K.

The 520K is the total figure including Dems, Repubs, unaffiliated, and other parties.


http://elections.cdn.sos.ca.gov/statewide-elections/2016-primary/unprocessed-ballots-report.pdf

http://vote.sos.ca.gov/returns/president/party/democratic/

June 25, 2016

Hillary was a "one woman army" fighting for Children's health insurance.

http://www.politicususa.com/2016/06/25/hillary-clinton-one-woman-army-fighting-childrens-health-insurance.html

It seems only right that a country this wealthy and powerful should take care of its children. But just like the battle for Obamacare, the battle Clinton and Kennedy and others fought for universal healthcare was an uphill battle against Republicans. That battle was lost, but the warriors for healthcare didn’t give up.

Nexon wrote of Kennedy’s fight, “… but Senator Kennedy didn’t wage this fight alone; he had a key ally inside the Clinton administration. Hillary Clinton was there when it counted. As Senator Kennedy said, ‘The children’s health program wouldn’t be in existence today if we didn’t have Hillary pushing for it from the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.'”

SNIP

There is a reason Republicans have been trying so hard to malign Hillary Clinton’s person; it’s because they can’t fight her on the issues. If Republicans came out and said, “Hey, we don’t think your kids should be entitled to food and healthcare, it costs too much money and that is money we want to give to Big Oil and the Big Banks and Mitt Romney types as tax breaks and bailouts, so sorry not sorry” it would be very hard to get votes.

So they don’t say what they are doing. Instead they attack the person. They have been doing this to Clinton for decades in an attempt to whittle away her power and standing. This has been the real goal of the relentless and fruitless Benghazi investigations, which keep showing that no deliberate wrong doing or cover up exited. It was a horrible tragedy, yes. But not a scandal for Obama or Clinton.

SNIP