turbinetree
turbinetree's JournalJoni Ernst Plays "Cute" with Her NRA Backing
At a recent townhall, when asked if her weak bill about school safety (one that completely omits guns) had anything to do with her $3 million in support from the NRA, she gave one of those flippant replies that politicians often give when they have contempt for voters. She said, “We don’t receive dollars from the NRA. That would be illegal, and I’d be driving a nicer car.”
Isn't she just adorable?
And that, ladies and gentleman, is yet another example of why so many Americans hate politicians.
https://crooksandliars.com/2018/08/joni-ernst-claims-plays-cute-her-nra
She would be driving a nicer car....................she owns a fucking pig farm that makes millions, and she has the audacity to basically flip off the young man that had something to say about the murders in schools, because after all one day he /or she will be parent and there future kids will have to live in fear if they go to school because Joni Ernst wished that she had a fucking nicer car...................
FUCK YOU Joni Ernst.................and the National Russian Association( NRA) terrorist organization that funds you from the Russian oligarchs money they get to give to you, because after all they don't give a shit if people in this country kill people, just so longs as it is here, that is worried about having a nicer car .............
Dereliction Of Political Duty In A Tweet
August 10, 2018 2:53 am / 0 Comments / Climate Change, Disasters, Featured Post, Politics, White House
Reprinted with permission from Creators.
It’s been policy hereabout to ignore presidential tweets of no national consequence. Whether Donald Trump likes Roseanne or dislikes Rosie matters not. But Trump’s tweets about the catastrophic California fires do. They demonstrated remarkable ignorance and cowardice. And in the words that weren’t there, they showed a collapse of the leadership needed to defend this country from the onrushing disaster of climate change.
“Bad environmental laws,” he tweeted, have diverted needed water “into the Pacific Ocean,” making the wildfires “so much worse.” That’s the ignorance part.
The claim that firefighters don’t have enough water is not true, and to a moronic degree. “We’re having no problems as far as
access to water supply,” said Scott McClean, deputy chief of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
Rob Stutzman, a prominent Republican strategist in California, called that tweet “nuts,” as well as “frightening” in its dumbness. Water plays a surprisingly small part in fighting wildfires. The main weapons are flame-retarding chemicals dropped from planes and creating physical fire breaks.
http://www.nationalmemo.com/dereliction-of-political-duty-in-a-tweet/
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“It’s a sad state of affairs when journalism is reduced to chasing the uninformed, unsupervised tweets of the president,” Brown’s spokesman told Politico.
He’s not wrong about that, generally. But unsupervised and dangerously ignorant tweets from someone who still is president do require attention. A dereliction of national duty cannot be brushed off.
Why Betsy DeVos Shuns The American Flag On Her $40M Yacht
August 10, 2018 2:53 am / 0 Comments / Far Right, Inequality, Taxes, Top News, White House
Reprinted with permission from Shareblue.
Trump often roars about the need to respect the flag in his racist rants against NFL players who kneel during the national anthem. Yet as it turns out, embattled Education Secretary Betsy DeVos refuses to fly the American flag on at least one of her family’s ten yachts.
Devos’ 164-foot yacht — the one that was recently untied and set adrift — flies the flag of the Cayman Islands, not the stars and stripes.
And this foreign flag isn’t just an unpatriotic decorating choice. It’s also a scheme that helps DeVos “avoid taxes, regulations, transparency requirements and domestic employment laws,” Newsweek reports.
Newsweek estimates that the DeVos empire would owe the state of Michigan roughly $2.4 million if it registered the $40 million yacht there, rather than in the Cayman Islands.
http://www.nationalmemo.com/why-betsy-devos-shuns-the-american-flag-on-her-40m-yacht/
Suspect behind massive California wildfire was steeped in conspiracies
From 9/11 to QAnon, there appears no conspiracy theory too strange for Forrest Clark.
CASEY MICHEL AUG 10, 2018, 12:42 PM
Southern California’s Holy Fire, sparked on Monday, has already scorched more than 18,000 acres as of Friday morning and forced over 20,000 residents to flee.
Now, authorities have identified the man suspected of igniting the massive blaze.
On Wednesday, local officials arrested 51-year-old Forrest Gordon Clark, charging him with two counts of felony arson, as well as another felony charge of threatening to terrorize.
After the charges were announced, the Washington Post reported that Clark had texted a local firefighter before the fire that the area was “going to burn just like we planned.” (It was unclear who else Clark may have been referring to). Clark is currently being held on $1 million bond.
https://thinkprogress.org/suspect-behind-massive-california-wildfire-was-steeped-in-conspiracies-ad251ea66ac4/
No insanity defense.................
The dark conspiracy theory that helped create QAnon
Satanism, child abductions, and shadowy "Deep State" actors have been a part of American folklore for centuries.
LUKE BARNES AUG 10, 2018, 8:00 AM
A shadowy group of powerful figures are secretly in control of the United States. They’re abducting children and subjecting them to lurid, Satanic abuse. Our only hope lies with a single brave source, one with first-hand experience of the horrifying conspiracy, to expose the plot.
This may sound like a brief description of the QAnon conspiracy theory, which, after spending a year bubbling at the fringes of the internet, suddenly burst into the mainstream last week at a Trump rally in Tampa, Florida. But it’s actually a description of another conspiracy theory that gripped America in the early 1980s, one that led to the most expensive trial in California’s history and was eventually proven to be utterly false.
In 1980, Canadian psychiatric patient Michelle Smith co-wrote a book with her psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder — whom she later married — titled Michelle Remembers. In the book, Michelle claimed to “remember,” via hypnosis, that her mother was actually a member of a Satanic cult and had forced her to endure horrific abuse. Michelle claimed that she was caged, was forced to watch the cult slaughter kittens, and endured 81 straight days of abuse in an effort to summon Satan himself.
Michelle Remembers created a full-blown moral panic in America about Satanic Abuse. The book earned hundreds of thousands of dollars, spawned copycats, and helped usher in a series of unfounded claims.
https://thinkprogress.org/qanon-america-conspiracy-theories-satanism-63e20eadc0dd/
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In Rev. Antony’s opinion, QAnon’s only agenda appears to be leaving “breadcrumbs” online and watching others get led on wild goose chases. He’s also noted that while some baby boomers readily buy into QAnon’s tales of child trafficking, they ignore abuses made by Christian institutions or politicians who share their political leanings.
“People are malleable, biased, manipulative and manipulated. Satanists acknowledge that there’s an invisible war out there, and armed with skepticism and pragmatism are able to navigate and exploit it when necessary,” he claimed. “There certainly is a Satanic Elite in the world, but conspiracies like QAnon are barking up the wrong pyramid.”
Getting By With A Little Help From A Friend
FEMA Recommendations Stand to Benefit Agency Chief’s Former Employer
By Jonathan Larsen, TYT Investigates
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is calling for greater involvement by the private sector in disaster preparedness and response–which could directly profit the agency’s former employer, federal documents show.
In July, FEMA Administrator William “Brock” Long signed off on an agency report assessing its performance during the 2017 hurricane season. As TYT previously reported, the report drew attention for accepting blame–but not for its suggested remedy of leaning more heavily on local governments and private contractors.
In his letter prefacing the report, Long writes, “As a nation, closer partnerships with the private sector are crucial in providing commodities and support to survivors.” Such partnerships stand to benefit not just the private sector broadly, but also, potentially, Long’s former employer.
For more than six years, up until his confirmation by the Senate in June 2017, Long served as an executive vice president at Hagerty Consulting, a disaster preparedness firm. Hagerty Consulting clients include the kinds of local governments that FEMA suggests should form partnerships with the private sector.
https://www.dcreport.org/2018/08/09/getting-by-with-a-little-help-from-a-friend/
And then there is the VA and the three amigos from Mar a Lago, and then orange shit stain, getting his tiny hands into the illegal pie of having one Marvel , one doctor, and one attorney, that have not been confirmed to the senate.....................................to have there hands in the VA pie, to privatize it through a back door process................what the fuck.............
Native Americans may have arrived in the Americas via several routes
Eileen Drage O'Reilly
In the long debate over how and when the first Native Americans arrived in the Americas, a group of scientists is arguing that multiple viable possibilities exist, according to a new study in Science Advances Wednesday.
Why it matters: Although there are many circulating theories, research over the past 20 years leans toward the idea that Native Americans arrived via a coastal route around 20,000 years ago. But, this team says they've reviewed enough evidence to indicate another theory is equally or even more strongly true — that they arrived via an inland route. Plus, they say, the earliest they arrived was closer to 16,000 years ago.
"We objected, in part, to assertions of certainty, with respect to positive arguments for coastal routes and negative arguments against interior routes. ... [T]he current data cannot definitively reject either route, and indeed, both routes may have been used."
— Ben Potter, study author
Background: The "peopling of the Americas," as scientists call it, is of great interest and debate. Advances in genome and artifact dating are transforming research but there is still no clear picture of how and when the different Native Americans, such as Amazonian Indians, the Native American tribes of North America, and Inuit tribes in Alaska and Canada, came to the Americas and when they diverged.
What they found: One of the problems is that there aren't a lot of sites that have been discovered with human remains. The oldest human remains located so far are: the 12,700-year-old Anzick Child found in Montana along with tools belonging to the Clovis culture, the 11,500-year-old remains of infants found in central Alaska, and the 8,500-year-old Kennewick Man located in Washington State (whose discovery actually led to a legal tug-of-war).
Other sites have artifacts and animal bones which can indicate human activity, such as: the discovery in Monte Verde, Chile, of 18,500-year-old stone tools and charred animal bones, the findings in the Channel Islands of California of 13,000-year-old stone tools and shell fragments, and most recently, what could be pre-Clovis artifacts found in Texas dated to around 16,000–20,000 years of age.
https://www.axios.com/how-native-americans-came-to-the-americas-debate-e06bcacb-894a-4cbe-bb62-77baaf377fed.html
All the ways Brett Kavanaugh is going to help Betsy DeVos
Kavanaugh's confirmation could do irreparable damage to public education and students.
SCOTT SARGRAD AUG 9, 2018, 3:02 PM
Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh has faced opposition from advocates of abortion rights, workers’ rights, and voter rights, all of whom have pointed out the disastrous effect he could have on crucial protections. But little has been said about Kavanaugh’s potential impact on public education and the irreparable damage he could do to students.
Since her confirmation, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has pushed for private school vouchers at every opportunity, dismantled civil rights protections, and defended for-profit colleges at the expense of students and taxpayers — and all evidence points to Kavanaugh sharing her agenda.
DeVos’ continued support for vouchers is particularly egregious, considering the overwhelming research that shows their harmful effect on student learning. In voucher programs, states or cities use taxpayer dollars to pay the tuition costs for students to attend private schools. As a result, vouchers funnel money away from the public schools that serve approximately 90 percent of students.
The impact of Washington, D.C.’s federally sponsored voucher program on student learning, for example, was equivalent to missing 68 days of school. Voucher programs in Louisiana, Indiana, and Ohio fare similarly. What’s more, vouchers are meaningless for students in rural states like Alaska, Maine, and North Dakota, where there are few alternatives to local public schools — and any loss of students could end up decimating the public system.
https://thinkprogress.org/brett-kavanaugh-betsy-devos-education-school-choice-5d3e792e0c70/
After all the Federalist Society, wants to privatize everything..................especially ripping off the public commons, that are in the Preamble of the Constitution..............they hate the Constitution...................they really do.........
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America................
A judge in Arkansas makes $147,000 a year for turning poor people into indentured servants
District Judge Mark Derrick is running an egregiously unconstitutional debtors' prison and bragging about it, a new lawsuit documents.
ALAN PYKE AUG 9, 2018, 3:27 PM
The dirt-poor residents of a hardscrabble Arkansas county are routinely sent to jail for being broke by a judge who earns $147,000 a year.
District Judge Mark Derrick routinely violates core principles of the Constitution and sometimes even flouts black-letter laws of the state itself, a lawsuit filed Thursday by the Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights Under Law says.
Derrick’s practices help keep the White County Detention Center filled to bursting. Although the Constitution forbids the jailing of people simply for being too poor to pay fines, and laws therefore require judges to ascertain a person’s realistic ability to repay court debts before establishing fine levels and repayment schedules, thousands of people unlucky enough to get a traffic ticket or other minor violation in Derrick’s 23rd Judicial District have been repeatedly tossed into cells for missing payments scheduled without any regard for their income, the suit says.
For every three days Kimberly Snodgrass has been alive in the past four years, she’s spent one in the White County jail thanks to Derrick’s practices. Snodgrass is one of six named plaintiffs in the suit, but lawyers are bringing it as a class action on behalf of what they say are more than 20,000 similarly afflicted locals.
https://thinkprogress.org/arkansas-pays-this-judge-147000-a-year-to-lock-tens-of-thousands-of-people-up-for-being-poor-527cfc1d2eca/
What a fucking asshole...................
Justice Sotomayor: 'We have stopped being a civilized nation and accepted barbarism'
The Supreme Court just ruled that a man may be tortured to death
IAN MILLHISER AUG 9, 2018, 4:16 PM
Justice Sonia Sotomayor concludes her dissent in Irick v. Tennessee with the kind of rhetorical flourish that is rarely seen in judicial opinions. “If the law permits this execution to go forward in spite of the horrific final minutes that” the inmate at the heart of this case is likely to experience, “then we have stopped being a civilized nation and accepted barbarism.”
The justice reaches this conclusion after her Court effectively ruled on Thursday that Billy Ray Irick, a death row inmate, could be tortured to death. This result is not surprising — the issue at stake in Irick largely tracks the issues presented in Glossip v. Gross, a 2015 decision upholding Oklahoma’s use of a drug cocktail that almost certainly subjects death row inmates to excruciating pain as their paralyzed body slowly dies.
The state of Tennessee, like Oklahoma, uses a three-drug cocktail in its executions. The first drug, midazolam, is supposed to prevent inmates from feeling pain. The second drug paralyzes the inmate, while the third eventually causes a fatal heart attack.
Yet there is considerable evidence that midazolam is not an effective painkiller, even when inmates receive enormous doses of the drug. As Sotomayor noted during the 2015 argument in Glossip, an Arizona inmate who received the three-drug cocktail spent two hours in apparent agony despite being given a massive dose of midazolam.
https://thinkprogress.org/justice-sotomayor-we-have-stopped-being-a-civilized-nation-and-accepted-barbarism-ca4652d4a938/
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