More despicable behavior by Putin’s Bitch –
Monthly Archives: August 2017
The Difference Between Being a Good Neighbor…And a Chumph
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Mexican soldiers rolled across the border in a 45-vehicle convoy and set up camp at the former Kelly Air Force Base near San Antonio. They served victims 170,000 meals, distributed 184,000 tons of supplies and conducted hundreds of medical consultations. Mexico also shipped humanitarian aid to New Orleans, and former President George W. Bush met with Mexican Marines to thank them.
Despire repeated provocations, grandstanding, and churlishness by the Chumphshit – Mexico is again taking the high road in providing help to the victims of Hurricane Harvey. It is, after all, what good, mature, and responsible neighbors do.
The Chumphshit is doing what racist loser do.
Abbott says Texas will accept Mexican offer of Hurricane Harvey relief
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said Wednesday the state is accepting Mexico’s offer to help get Texas back on its feet in the wake of Hurricane Harvey.
“Yes. I have, and we are,” Abbott said from Austin when journalists asked him about the topic. “We had a list of aid and assistance that they have offered to provide that we are accepting.”
Carlos Gonzalez Gutierrez, the consul general in Austin, applauded the governor’s decision. He said vehicles, boats and food will start arriving in Texas within days.
“We are very pleased with Governor Abbott’s response,” Gutierrez said. “Mexico looks forward to doing its share.”
With Mexico being one of the highest crime Nations in the world, we must have THE WALL. Mexico will pay for it through reimbursement/other.
Mexico, in a diplomatic note Tuesday, provided a long list of items it could supply, including troops, convoys of food, medicine, portable showers and water.
“Texas and Mexico share more than half the border,” Carlos Sada, Mexico’s undersecretary for North American relations said. “There are families, marriages, businesses that bind our two sides. This is about being good neighbors.”
In Washington, following a meeting at the State Department, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson thanked Mexican Foreign Secretary Luis Videgaray Caso for its “wide range of assistance.”
“It was very generous of Mexico to offer their help at a very, very challenging time for our citizens back in Texas,” he said.
Videgaray responded: “You’re absolutely welcome. We are here to help. We are friends. We are neighbors, and that’s what friends do.”
We are in the NAFTA (worst trade deal ever made) renegotiation process with Mexico & Canada.Both being very difficult,may have to terminate?
President Donald Trump has not responded publicly to Mexico’s aid, though on Tuesday he accepted an offer from Singapore to lend four of its CH-47 Chinook helicopters for rescue efforts. Trump spoke by phone with Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong as he flew to Texas, and accepted the offer, according to Lee’s office. Singapore’s Air Force has trained since 1995 with the Texas Army National Guard.
Mexico’s offer of help comes at a crucial time for the U.S.-Mexican relations, which in many ways is largely shaped by Texas, home to nearly 11 million Hispanics, the majority of them of Mexican heritage. Houston is one of the most diverse cities in the United States, with a population of more than 600,000 unauthorized immigrants, according to the Pew Research Center.
To unauthorized immigrants seeking shelter from Harvey’s devastation, Sada said: “Don’t be afraid to come out. There is no deportation operation underway. We have the assurance of Gov. Abbott and the mayor of Houston.”
Beginning Friday, activists are set to launch statewide protests on two fronts. They plan to rally against the state’s new ban on so-called sanctuary cities, a law taking effect Friday. They also plan demonstrations to register growing fears that President Donald Trump will soon end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, created by the Obama administration to block deportation of undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children.
Moreover, negotiations between the U.S., Mexico and Canada to overhaul the North American Free Trade Agreement — from which Trump has repeatedly threatened to pull the U.S. — will resume Friday. No other state has more at stake in those talks than Texas, where nearly half a million jobs depend on the deal.
“Mexico’s desire to be humane at a time of such great need contrasts the character and the churlishness coming out of Washington, D.C., and NAFTA,” said Tony Garza, a prominent Republican and former U.S. ambassador and now legal counsel with White & Case in Mexico City. “In Texas, given the Legislature’s focus these past few months on sanctuary cities sends a clear signal to hundreds of thousands of Texans, particularly Latinos along the Gulf Coast and in Harris County, that we’re not with you and in an increasingly purple state, that may mean something.”
Garza recalled Mexico taking “the high road” in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina. Mexican soldiers rolled across the border in a 45-vehicle convoy and set up camp at the former Kelly Air Force Base near San Antonio. They served victims 170,000 meals, distributed 184,000 tons of supplies and conducted hundreds of medical consultations. Mexico also shipped humanitarian aid to New Orleans, and former President George W. Bush met with Mexican Marines to thank them.
It’s unclear how Trump, who arrived in Texas on Tuesday to survey Harvey’s catastrophic damage, will react to Mexico’s offer to help. The president and Mexico have had an acrimonious relationship dating back to Trump’s first day as a presidential candidate, when he referred to Mexicans as rapists, murderers and criminals.
“We know that Trump is intensely disliked by Mexicans, but in the end Mexicans see us as a neighbor, a place where Americans are good, decent people,” said James Taylor, a partner at Vianovo, an Austin-based consulting firm, and chairman of the Aquila Alliance, a Texas group dedicated to promoting closer relations between Texas and Mexico. “Mexicans are demonstrating they care about their neighbor — especially their immediate neighbor, Texas.”
On Sunday, as waters rose across southeast Texas, Mexico reached out to Texas. Trump, meanwhile, bullied Mexico on Twitter to pay for his promised border wall. On Monday, he repeated his threat the the U.S. would at some point kill NAFTA.
“We’re in a critical and delicate negotiation with NAFTA,” said Ricardo Ainslie, director of the Mexico Center at the University of Texas at Austin. “Mexico has been the brunt of a lot of highly pressured, hostile rhetoric. So I think it’s very interesting that Mexico is saying in so many words ‘Hey, we’re present, and we’re critical to things that happen in Texas.’ They’re showing real political maturity.”
Texas has its own dicey issues with Mexico. The recently signed SB4 was scheduled to go into effect Friday until a federal judge blocked its implementation late Wednesday. SB4 effectively outlaws sanctuary cities — places where local law enforcement limits or refuses cooperation with federal immigration agents — and gives police the right to ask the immigration status of people they detain. Mexico’s vast immigrant population would be affected.
In 2015, Texas and 25 other states blocked the Obama administration, through a federal court ruling, from extending deferred action to an estimated 5 million undocumented parents of children who were citizens or legal residents, as well as to young immigrants who arrived between 2007 and 2010. The ruling was upheld on appeal, and last year, the Supreme Court split 4-4, leaving the lower court’s decision in place.
Texas leads a group of 10 states pressuring the Trump administration to end DACA, and in recent days Trump has signaled he may do so. A legal challenge could come as early as Sept. 5. Most affected immigrants live in either Texas or California.
“Yes, we know about Sept. 1 and Sept. 5, but our decision, our willingness to help Texas isn’t based on politics,” Sada said. “This is a spontaneous reaction to a neighbor in need, and we, based on our own experiences with natural disasters, know recovery periods can take months, years. So we’re here with one message: Texas, Mexico is ready to help.”
Already, volunteers from the Mexican Red Cross, firemen from the border state of Coahuila and rescue teams from Guanajuato began arriving in Houston to assist.
Cop – “We only kill black people”
Cop’s (probably) sarcastic answer to a white woman he had stopped refusing to reach in her glove compartment for fear of getting shot lands him in hot water.
In these heightened times of racial animosity driven by the white-wing, even an attempt at gallows humor may go wrong. What the controversy shows is that the white live matter efforts by some Police Unions and supporters is eroding the trust in the Police nationwide.
More Pieces Falling Into Place on Chumph-Russia Treason
The Chumph’s sellout to the Russians, and his treason are getting bigger in Mueller’s scope, with new revelations almost every day.
Hope Mueller finishes soon, before Putin’s Bitch totally compromises the country.
Quite frankly I can’t wait for them to Impeach, Convict, and Hang this POS.
Russiagate’s Second Smoking Gun
“Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it,” a Trump associate wrote last year
Ever since he glided down the escalator at Trump Tower two years ago to announce his presidential campaign, Donald Trump has said it again and again. “I have nothing to do with Russia, folks,” he proclaimed at a campaign rally last fall. A few months ago, in an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt, he said, “I have nothing to do with Russia. I have no investments in Russia, none whatsoever. I don’t have property in Russia.” And, just in case anyone missed the point, last January he tweeted in all caps, “NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA – NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING!”
Well, not exactly. For three decades, Trump, key members of his family and several first-rank aides to the Trump Organization sought repeatedly to strike deals with top Russian banks and billionaires to build Trump-branded properties in Russia, and Trump’s real estate properties have engaged nonstop with Russian oligarchs who’ve bought lavish houses and apartments in New York, Florida and elsewhere. And now we know, thanks to bombshell revelations by The New York Times and The Washington Post this week, that the most recent effort by Trump & Co. came last year, at the height of his campaign for president. In late 2015 and early 2016, just as the Republican primary was gearing up, two key aides – his top lawyer, Michael Cohen, and a shady business partner, Felix H. Sater – were deep in talks with Russian investors about building what The Post called a “massive Trump Tower in Moscow.”
Sater, a career criminal who’d been convicted of slashing someone’s face in a bar with the broken stem of a margarita glass and who’d also been found guilty in a $40 million stock fraud case, emailed Cohen positively giddy about his real estate negotiations in Russia – and in terms that, were you Robert Mueller, the dogged special counsel investigating Russiagate, you might consider a smoking gun. “Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it,” emailed Sater. “I will get all of Putin’s team to buy in on this, I will manage this process.”
If we’re counting smoking guns, this one should be Number Two. Number One, of course, was the revelation last month that in June 2016 three Trump intimates – Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and then campaign manager Paul Manafort – had met in Trump Tower with a Russian delegation promising to deliver dirt on Hillary Clinton that came straight from Russian intelligence and the Russian state prosecutor. (“I love it!” responded Trump Jr.) Both are being folded into Mueller’s high-powered inquiry, along with parallel investigations by Senate and House intelligence committees, which are looking to determine not whether Russian spies meddled in the 2016 election – that’s taken for granted now, and was conclusively verified by the U.S intelligence community in a January report – but whether Trump and his allies cooperated or colluded with Russian efforts to throw the election to him.
Ever since Mueller empaneled a Washington, D.C., grand jury and ordered a predawn raid on Manafort’s stately Virginia home, revelations have been piling up. (Though not from Mueller’s office, which is notoriously tight-lipped, doesn’t have a website and issues no press releases.) No one knows the full story yet, since what we know consists of scattered media reports and incomplete testimony from some of those involved. But for Trump, who’s intervened at least seven times to slow down or obstruct justice in the investigation – not least by firing FBI Director Jim Comey in May – the Mueller investigation must look not unlike the Terminator: unstoppable. There’s no timetable for its conclusion yet, but in the end Mueller’s report could lead to indictments of top Trump allies, a devastating report on Trump-Russia collaboration and even a recommendation that the president be impeached. Yes, it’s that serious.
Among the recent revelations:
—A series of reports in the Wall Street Journal reveal that Peter W. Smith, a GOP operative who claimed to be working with General Mike Flynn, actively sought cooperation with Russian hackers to obtain Clinton emails in 2016. (Flynn, of course, was Trump’s chief national security aide during the campaign, and he served as the president’s national security adviser for less than a month before being fired, in February, because of undisclosed conversations with Russia’s ambassador to the United States.) “We knew the people who had these [emails] were probably around the Russian government,” Smith – who committed suicide two weeks later – told the Journal. Mueller, says the paper, is investigating the report.
—The Washington Post revealed that George Papadopoulos, an eager young Trump aide, repeatedly offered to set up meetings between Russian officials, including President Vladimir Putin, and Trump campaign officials in 2016. One email, to seven Trump aides, was titled “Meeting with Russian Leadership – Including Putin.” Apparently, Papadopoulos’ work got no takers from the campaign, although investigators working with the congressional committees are looking into it. “Putin wants to host the Trump team when the time is right,” wrote Papadopoulos.
—CNN reported that top Trump official Rick Dearborn, who now serves as deputy chief of staff in the White House, sought to arrange a meeting between Putin and Trump campaign officials in June 2016, around the time Trump Jr., Kushner and Manafort were meeting with Russians in New York. Dearborn and an unnamed Republican in West Virginia sought to bring Trump and Putin together over their “shared Christian values,” CNN reported. Many American conservatives, who support Trump’s overtures toward Moscow since taking office, believe Putin’s reputed strong Russian Orthodox Christian ties make him a likely partner against external enemies, including Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.
While any one of these leads – plus, no doubt, many more that have yet to surface from inside the Mueller investigation – could prove not to be incriminating, taken together they make a convincing case that Team Trump knowingly had multiple contacts with Russia in 2016 even as the Obama administration began to uncover evidence that Russia’s GRU spy service was involved in the hack attack against the Democratic National Committee and the email account of Clinton campaign manager John Podesta. Among the other officials under scrutiny – besides Flynn, Manafort, Cohen, Sater, Kushner, Trump Jr., Dearborn and Papadopoulos – there’s also Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who had to recuse himself from overseeing the Russiagate inquiry after it was revealed that he had a series of still unexplained meetings with Sergei Kislyak, then Russia’s ambassador. Dearborn served as Sessions’ chief of staff.
Mueller has unleashed a flurry of subpoenas since establishing his grand jury last month, aimed at many of those Trump officials and their aides and associates. And Mueller is not restricting himself to collusion with Russia alone, but he’s digging deep into the Trump-Kushner real estate and financial empire. In addition, he’s investigating whether President Trump tried to obstruct justice by blocking the investigation, firing Comey, threatening to dismiss Sessions and asking U.S. intelligence officials to defend him against Russiagate charges. Most recently, according to NBC, Mueller is “keenly focused” on reports that Trump help craft a misleading statement issued by Trump Jr. when reports of the Trump Tower meeting first surfaced.
And Sater, the convicted felon who worked with Trump over a period of years to find deals in Moscow, could be a prime target. “Michael,” Sater wrote to Cohen, Trump’s attorney, “I arranged for Ivanka to sit in Putin’s private chair at his desk and office in the Kremlin. I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected.”
And maybe impeached.
NBC’s Fair Haired Girl a Flop
Whoops! NBC fired successful and popular host Tamron Hall and replaced her with Megyn Kelly, much to the consternation of many fans.
Things are not working out too well…
Goodbye Tamron…Hello Failure
NBC in ‘total panic’ as Megyn Kelly attracts only old white people after firing popular black host Tamron Hall
NBC executives are concerned that Megyn Kelly’s forthcoming morning show will not pull in ratings with younger people and non-whites after the network fired a popular black host, Tamron Hall, to make room for the former Fox News star.
The Daily Beast reported on Wednesday that the performance of Megyn Kelly’s Sunday night program has left executives in a “total panic” about her morning show, which will debut on Sept. 25. The network made room for Kelly by axing the 9 a.m. hour of the longrunning Today Show.
“A lot of people were watching the [Sunday] magazine show to try to get a sense of her appeal to the daytime demographic and a sense of how she would be outside of the Fox environment,” one insider told The Daily Beast. “Fox News skews very male… I always tend to think of her as more of a guy’s girl than a girl’s girl… It’s extremely challenging, and I’m not sure Megyn’s personality really connects with women.”
According to television news analyst Andrew Tyndall, “The Sunday show laid such an egg that any claims that she had automatic star power, to get people in the door to see what she was doing, have been disavowed… The stardom of the celebrity anchor was a phenomenon of the 1980s back when [flamboyant ABC News president] Roone Arledge was around. In this day and age, the shows make the anchors, not the other way around.”
In the meantime, Hall is planning a daytime talk show with the backing of Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein. She has also hosted a crime show on the Discovery Channel since leaving NBC.
Following Hall’s exit from NBC, the National Association of Black Journalists accusedthe network of “whitewashing” its on-air talent.
“The National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) is saddened by Tamron Hall’s departure from NBC. She broke ground as the first black female Today show cohost and was enjoying ratings success alongside Al Roker during the show’s third hour of programming,” a statement from the NABJ said at the time. “NBC has been a leader for diversity in broadcasting, but recent reports that Hall and Roker will be replaced by former Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly are being seen by industry professionals as whitewashing.”
CEOs Quit Chumph Cyber Security Commission
Unable to stand the lies and bullshit any longer, as well as Putin’s Bitch’s sellout of our national cyber infrastructure to Russia…The first 8 CEOs have quit the Chumph’s advisory panel.
Eight members of the National Infrastructure Advisory Council resigned last week, citing inadequate attention by the Trump Administration to address growing cybersecurity threats facing the United States.
President Donald Trump’s Administration has “given insufficient attention to the the growing threats to the cybersecurity of the critical systems upon which all Americans depend,” according to a resignation letter signed by eight members of the President’s private-public National Infrastructure Advisory Council (NIAC).
The members of NIAC also said they resigned in protest to the Trump’s response to deadly clashes in Charlottesville earlier this month between white nationalists and Antifa protesters. The move is similar to resignations within two White House business councils that were also disbanded earlier this month over concerns by members over Trump’s response to the Charlottesville violence.
“The moral infrastructure of our Nation is the foundation on which our physical infrastructure is built. The Administration’s actions undermine that foundation,” read the resignation letter (PDF) first published by NextGov.
NIAC is a public-private government council which advises the President on cybersecurity systems in finance, transportation, energy and manufacturing. The original 30 members were appointed by previous administrations and included leaders from the private sector, academia and state and local government. It was founded by George W. Bush administration’s executive order in 2001 and was extended until Sept. 30, 2017 by the Obama administration.
Resigning members cited Trump’s failure “to denounce intolerance and violence of hate groups” in the wake of “horrific violence in Charlottesville.” They also pointed to the Trump Administration’s move to withdraw from the Paris Agreement as part of their reasoning to resign.
“Additionally, your decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, your intent to revoke flood-risk building standards, and your many other actions to ignore the pressing threat of climate change to our critical infrastructure also point to your disregard for the security of American communities,” they wrote.
Cybersecurity expert Edgard Capdevielle, CEO of Nozomi Networks, said the move will have a negligible impact on U.S. cybersecurity defenses. “While the National Infrastructure Advisory Council (NIAC) provides the President through the Secretary of Homeland Security with advice on the security of critical infrastructure, the actual standards and frameworks for securing critical infrastructure come from the National Institute of Standards and Technology.”
The resignations come just before the commission held a quarterly business meeting. The agenda of that meeting was to approve a report titled “Securing Cyber Assets: Addressing Urgent Cyber Threats to Critical Infrastructure (PDF)” released Monday.
The draft report warns that the country’s cyber defenses and readiness is falling short when it comes to defending critical systems against cyberattacks. Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, came to a similarassessment earlier this year. And just last week at an Arizona State University’s Cybersecurity Conference U.S. Senator John McCain (R-AZ), Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee said “Unfortunately, leadership from the executive branch on cybersecurity has been weak.”
“As America’s enemies seized the initiative in cyberspace, the last administration offered no serious cyber deterrence policy and strategy. And while the current administration promised a cyber policy within 90 days of inauguration, we still have not seen a plan,” McCain said.
In total, eight of the 28 current NIAC members resigned. Three Obama-era officials were among those that took to Twitter to announce their resignations. They included White House Chief Data Scientist DJ Patil, Office of Science and Technology Policy Chief of Staff Cristin Dorgelo, and White House Council on Environmental Quality Managing Director Christy Goldfuss.
Earlier this month the Trump Administration disbanded the Committee on the Arts and Humanities and the Manufacturing Council and Strategic and Policy Forum when members resigned en masse.
“I continue to believe that public-private collaboration is vital for addressing gaps we face in security across all U.S. infrastructure sectors. I remain committed to applying my experience and expertise to advance American security and prosperity through other means,” wrote the resigning members of NIAC.
More Russian Support for Putin’s Bitch
Russia is still supporting the Chumph…And seeking to create a Civil War within the US.
This is why CEOs quitting Putin’s Bitch’s “Cyber Security Commission.
Russian Bots Are Trying to Sow Discord on Twitter After Charlottesville
Although the recent events in Charlottesville happened 5,000 miles from Moscow, Russia didn’t sit this one out. As has become almost routine after every polarizing U.S. political event in the past 12 months, online Russian propagandists quickly got involved. This time around, they took to Twitter with an army of bots to promote and share extremist right-wing tweets and disinformation.
The Alliance for Securing Democracy, a project of the German Marshall Fund that tracks efforts to undermine democratic governments, monitors a collection of 600 Twitter accounts that are known to be linked to Russian influence, including openly pro-Russian users, accounts that take part in Russian disinformation campaigns, and automated bot accounts that parrot Russian messaging. They found these accounts busy at work in the days after Charlottesville. “PhoenixRally,” “Antifa,” and “MAGA” were among the most common hashtags used by these accounts this week. One of the central themes shared by the Russian-linked accounts after Charlottesville was an accusation, propagated by both the Russian news agency Sputnik and American far-right media personality Alex Jones, that the left-leaning philanthropist George Soros had supported the counterprotesters.
One example of a likely bot was an account under the name Angee Dixson, opened on Aug. 8, the Tuesday before the Charlottesville rally started, as reported by ProPublica. Described in her Twitter bio as a conservative Christian, Angee sent about 90 tweets out a day, in which she vigorously defended President Trump’s response to the rally and shared pictures that allegedly showed violence on the part of counterprotesters in Charlottesville. The account has now been shut down.
“BUSTED! Craigslist Ad Exposes Firm Hiring #AltLeft “Protesters” for $25/Hr,” read one of Dixson’s tweets. That was one of five tweets she sent in one minute, according to the archive link of her account. All those tweets contained links that had been shortened using a URL shortener, which usually requires going to a separate website to enter the URL and generate a new link, and that takes time. The tremendous speed with which Dixson was able to send her tweets indicates that Angee Dixson was most likely an automated bot, not a real human. Even the account’s profile picture was stolen: ProPublica linked it to a photo of a model that at one point was rumored to have dated Leonardo DiCaprio. Though it’s hard to directly link any one bot to its source, “Angee’s” tweets were reported to use similar language from Russian government–backed outlets Sputnik and RT.
The same Russian social media machine that blanketed Twitter with pro-Trump posts during the 2016 presidential election were reportedly at work after Charlottesville, too. Bots were weaponized during the presidential debates to give a false impression of a groundswell of grass-roots support for Trump. Bots sharing pro-Trump–related content outnumbered pro-Clinton bots by 7 to 1 during the third debate between the Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump, according to research from Oxford University’s Project on Computational Propaganda. In the timespan between the first and second debates, more than one-third of the pro-Trump tweets were found to came from automated bot accounts.
Bots also showed up in the days before this year’s French election, when the campaign of the winning candidate Emmanuel Macron reported it was the victim of a massive email hack. The documents spread like wildfire across Twitter, but it was soon reported that an overwhelming number of the tweets spreading news of the hack were from bots. About 40 percent of the tweets containing #MacronGate were found to be actually coming from only 5 percent of accounts using the hashtag. That tremendous amount of activity from such few accounts is usually a clear sign that humans aren’t the ones doing the tweeting. One account reportedly tweeted 1,668 times in 24 hours, or more than one tweet per minute with no sleep. Unless that account was manned by three people who don’t take bathroom breaks, that was probably a bot. Though, again, it’s incredibly difficult to tell how much of this bot traffic can be linked directly to Russia, but there is evidence that it was Russia was behind the Macron campaign hack. In April, the cybersecurity firm Trend Micro found that the same Russian government–linked hacking group behind the infiltration of the Democratic National Committee also targeted the Macron campaign with email phishing attempts and malware.
Bots are becoming a staple of social media as Western countries find themselves embroiled in polarized political debates. Trump’s Twitter followers, after all, are about 59 percent bots or fake accounts, according to TwitterAudit, a website that measures the authenticity of Twitter followers. All of which goes to show that retweets, likes, trending hashtags, and followers shouldn’t be taken as a strong indication of public opinion—and moreover, that virality is hardly a demonstration of genuineness.
Fox News Removed From UK
Somebody find a toy shovel to get enough dirt to bury that pig.
Fox News removed from UK airwaves
RIP Fox News Britain. The end has come to the conservative network in Great Britain after failing to garner viewers.
CNN reported Tuesday that Rupert Murdoch and his sons have decided to pull the network rather than to trying to continue to attract an audience. The network also caused a major problem as the Murdoch family tried to conduct a $15 billion takeover of Sky News.
“Fox News is focused on the U.S. market and designed for a U.S. audience and, accordingly, it averages only a few thousand viewers across the day in the U.K.,” 21st Century Fox said in a statement.
“We have concluded that it is not in our commercial interest to continue providing Fox News in the U.K.,” it added.
The final broadcast in the U.K. will be Tuesday at 4 p.m. local time.
Houston – You Have a Problem
There are a series of manmade issues which have resulted in the massive damage we are seeing in the Houston region of Texas. The major contributor is the lack of Zoning Laws which would require developers to use certain standards in location and construction. Much like what happened in Florida during Hurricane Andrew some years back, there are no laws requiring builders not to build on floodplains, or to utilize special construction. As such a lot of the lessons from Andrew, and Katrina (I worked on parts of the Katrina recovery) were ignored.
The second problem is the US Government and FEMA. While FEMA is really strict on rules for coastal homes built along the ocean, and insurance rates are sky high (if you can get it at all) – they take a highly permissive approach to insuring homes and property a few miles inland – even when that property is located on a floodplain which repeatedly floods. I live in a coastal area, designated as a “flood zone”. I was required to utilize certain building methods. For instance the roof and siding are designed to survive a Category 5 hurricane – 140 MPH winds. The house is on “stilts” 13′ above the ground, which were driven 20′ or more into the earth. It has survived 4 Hurricanes, including a direct hit by a Cat 5 with no significant damage despite a 12′ Storm Surge and flooding. Indeed as I write this, my area is being pounded by a Tropical Storm moving up the East Coast, and we are expecting 60 MPH winds and 2-4 inches of rain.
FEMA has paid on properties which repeatedly flood – far in excess of the property values. Properties and localities with no storm mitigation systems.
The National Flood Insurance Program, established in 1968 was meant to protect and indemnify people without creating economic catastrophe. Instead of avoiding the floodplain, insurance allowed people to build within it, within management constraints recommended by FEMA. In theory, flood-hazard mitigation hoped to direct development away from flood-prone areas through the disincentives of risk insurance and regulatory complexity. It isn’t working – especially in areas where there was substantial construction before the law (NOLA), and in Texas where there is no Zoning.
In Houston’s case, catastrophic floods have been anticipated for some time. The combination of climate change, which produces more intense and unpredictable storms, and aggressive development made an event like this week’s almost inevitable. The Association of State Floodplain Managers has called for a national flood risk-management strategy, and the Houston Chronicle has called flood control the city’s “most pressing infrastructure need.” A lack of funding is often blamed, and relaxed FEMA regulations under the Trump Administration won’t help either.
The famously “un-zoned” city has allowed developers to pave over natural areas that provide resilience to floods, and build homes in the way of cataclysm. According to a 2016 analysis by ProPublica and the Texas Tribune, 166,000 acres of coastal prairies have been destroyed by development since 2001.“More people die here than anywhere else from floods,” Sam Brody, a Texas A&M University at Galveston researcher, told us last year. “More property per capita is lost here. And the problem’s getting worse.”
Not counting the Harvey’s devastation in Houston, in the past two years, 16,000 buildings have been flooded, and $1 billion in damage was caused by the so-called “Tax Day” and “Memorial Day” floods. In 2001, Tropical Storm Allison killed almost two dozen people and caused $5 billion in damage in Harris County, which includes Houston.
The next problem is Houston’s road system. Those giant highways are impervious surfaces which cause rapid rainfall runoff. In the case of the major superhighways in Houston, that runoff is along the road filling underpasses – making evacuation nearly impossible.
After Hurricane Sandy 36 Republican Senators refused to vote in favor of funding relief, including the two Senators from Texas. The political ramifications of that are floating around in the political miasma.
Maybe we need to take a different view of how to pay for this. The State, which is responsible for the laws leaving citizens defenseless – should bear a greater responsibility for its actions. Second – maybe we should put relocation on the table. Those buildings that have repeatedly flooded should be torn down, the owners should be provided FEMA Insurance money – but only to build elsewhere or to build with significant mitigation strategies. Ergo – the State, County, and City has to put a plan of mitigation on the table before a dime is spent for rebuilding.
New Video From Charlottesville Show KKK Shooting at Black Protester
Another of the Chumphshit’s “Fine people”.
Stormfront Gets Grounded
Hosting and promoting racist violence for years, the white supremacist oldest site on the Internet got shot down last night.
The invisible war against hate continues.
Expect the KKKChumph and Jefferson Davis Sessions to jump on their swaback white nags at any minute to ride to the rescue.
Stormfront, the internet’s oldest major racist website, has domain suspended
Liberal activists have been filing complaints against hate websites — and they’ve been working
Stormfront, the oldest neo-Nazi and white nationalist website on the English-speaking internet, has now become the second far right website to be blocked by its web domain registrar, Network Solutions, from being accessed by the public.
The action appears to have been taken at the instigation of the left-leaning Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights under its Stop Hate Project which lodged a complaint about Stormfront to Network Solutions on Aug. 22.
According to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the organization which administers all web domains, Network Solutions blocked Stormfront’s domain on Friday at 1:00 a.m. Eastern Time. The site’s registration has been put on hold by the registrar. According to ICANN, this hold status is “uncommon” and “is usually enacted during legal disputes, non-payment, or when your domain is subject to deletion.”
In operation since 1990 as a bulletin board and 1995 as a web forum, Stormfront claimed to have over 300,000 registered members. The site’s owner, former Ku Klux Klan leader Don Black, is officially opposed to violence, but several of his members have been linked to various murders.
Stormfront has become the second major neo-Nazi website to find itself blocked from its web domain in recent weeks after a-fascist allegedly struck and killed a counter-protester at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The Daily Stormer, the most popular neo-Nazi website, has found itself banned by multiple registrars including GoDaddy, Google, Namecheap as well as by the network security service Cloudflare.
Joe Biden Evicerates the Chumph’s Racism
Obama, following the custom of ex-Presidents not going after their successors, no matter how illegitimate – has gone very easy on Putin’s Bitch despite the continued attacks on his record and lies.
Biden has decided, enough is enough.
‘We Are Living Through a Battle for the Soul of This Nation’
The former vice president calls on Americans to do what President Trump has not.
In January of 2009, I stood waiting in Wilmington, Delaware, for a train carrying the first African American elected president of the United States. I was there to join him as vice president on the way to a historic Inauguration. It was a moment of extraordinary hope for our nation—but I couldn’t help thinking about a darker time years before at that very site.
My mind’s eye drifted back to 1968. I could see the flames burning Wilmington, the violence erupting on the news of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, the federal troops taking over my city.
I was living history—and reliving it—at the same time. And the images racing through my mind were a vivid demonstration that when it comes to race in America, hope doesn’t travel alone. It’s shadowed by a long trail of violence and hate.
In Charlottesville, that long trail emerged once again into plain view not only for America, but for the whole world to see. The crazed, angry faces illuminated by torches. The chants echoing the same anti-Semitic bile heard across Europe in the 1930s. The neo-Nazis, Klansmen, and white supremacists emerging from dark rooms and remote fields and the anonymity of the web into the bright light of day on the streets of a historically significant American city.
If it wasn’t clear before, it’s clear now: We are living through a battle for the soul of this nation. The giant forward steps we have taken in recent years on civil liberties and civil rights and human rights are being met by a ferocious pushback from the oldest and darkest forces in America. Are we really surprised they rose up? Are we really surprised they lashed back? Did we really think they would be extinguished with a whimper rather than a fight?
Did we think the charlatans and the con-men and the false prophets who have long dotted our history wouldn’t revisit us, once again prop up the immigrant as the source of all our troubles, and look to prey on the hopelessness and despair that has grown up in the hollowed-out cities and towns of Ohio and Michigan and Pennsylvania and the long-forgotten rural stretches of West Virginia and Kentucky?
We have fought this battle before—but today we have a special challenge.
Today we have an American president who has publicly proclaimed a moral equivalency between neo-Nazis and Klansmen and those who would oppose their venom and hate.
We have an American president who has emboldened white supremacists with messages of comfort and support.
This is a moment for this nation to declare what the president can’t with any clarity, consistency, or conviction: There is no place for these hate groups in America. Hatred of blacks, Jews, immigrants—all who are seen as “the other”—won’t be accepted or tolerated or given safe harbor anywhere in this nation.
That’s the America I know. That’s who I believe we are. And in the hours and days after Charlottesville, America’s moral conscience began to stir. The nation’s military leadership immediately took a firm stand. Some of America’s most prominent CEOs spoke out. Political, community, and faith leaders raised their voices. Charitable organizations have begun to take a stand. And we should never forget the courage of that small group of University of Virginia students who stared down the mob and its torches on that Friday night.
The greatness of America is that—not always at first, and sometimes at enormous pain and cost—we have always met Lincoln’s challenge to embrace the “better angels of our nature.” Our history is proof of what King said—the long arc of history does “bend towards justice.”
A week after Charlottesville, in Boston, we saw the truth of America: Those with the courage to oppose hate far outnumber those who promote it.
Then a week after Boston, we saw the truth of this president: He won’t stop. His contempt for the U.S. Constitution and willingness to divide this nation knows no bounds. Now he’s pardoned a law-enforcement official who terrorized the Latino community, violated its constitutional rights, defied a federal court order to stop, and ran a prison system so rife with torture and abuse he himself called it a “concentration camp.”
You, me, and the citizens of this country carry a special burden in 2017. We have to do what our president has not. We have to uphold America’s values. We have to do what he will not. We have to defend our Constitution. We have to remember our kids are watching. We have to show the world America is still a beacon of light.
Joined together, we are more than 300 million strong. Joined together, we will win this battle for our soul. Because if there’s one thing I know about the American people, it’s this: When it has mattered most, they have never let this nation down.
Hispanic Lawn Jockey Tries to Defend the Chumph
I guess Paris Dennard and the black Lawn Jockeys for Chumph needed some recuperation and healing time from the serial beatdowns the last two weeks. So while those clowns are laid up getting patched with a new layer of paint…Time to trot out the Hispanic Lawn Jockey…
The Lawn Jockey uses the usual right-wing racist rationale and deflection trying to characterize something out last real President Obama did as wrong, in pardoning people.Theren he tries the “but it’s the Democrats! deflection to not have to answer the direct questions…Ramo as usual was polite…Ana wasn’t having any of that.
Ana Navarro, as usual – wasn’t tlerating the bullshit
Non Hate-Wing Gun Clubs Grow Rapidly
Arming up for the Chumph’s Civil War
Here are 6 gun groups that aren’t for white right-wingers
I have a theory that the quickest way to get legislative gun control in this country would be to start a movement that successfully convinces millions of black folks to join the NRA. I’m not pro-gun, I just know that a gun rights movement fueled largely by white fright would suddenly see the logic in gun restrictions if more people that didn’t look like them carried firearms.
That’s what happened in the late 1960s when the Black Panther Party for Self Defense started patrolling Oakland’s black neighborhoods while openly carrying guns, which was perfectly legal according to California law. It took only a few months of that for the state legislature to draft the Mulford Act, aimed at ending open carry in the state. After 24 Panthers showed up at the state Capitol armed to the teeth to protest the bill, Gov. Ronald Reagan couldn’t sign it fast enough.
The point is, throughout American history, the Second Amendment has mostly been an obsession of the right, but there are moments when it’s served the left as well. This is one of those moments. Having a president who sympathizes with neo-Nazis and fascists has helped mobilize and invigorate hate groups and other violent racists, inspiring some who oppose them to take up arms. To be clear, I am not in support of arming this country, and I’ve never thought throwing guns at the gun problem was a way to solve it. But with so much violence coming from the right, it’s unsurprising that some have decided to battle them on their own playing field. “We didn’t argue our way into white supremacy and slavery,” Drexel University professor George Ciccariello-Maher told Shadowproof, “we’re not going to argue our way out of white supremacy.”
So here are six gun groups that aren’t just for white right-wingers.
1. Redneck Revolt and John Brown Gun Club
According to Dave Strano, one of the founders of Redneck Revolt, the John Brown Gun Club was founded in the aughts to offer gun training to “the radical community and also to distribute free anti-racist literature at gun shows in Kansas and Missouri.” In 2009, as the Tea Party was coalescing in reaction to the election of the first African-American president, Strano saw the right-wing movement as a collection of angry, working-class whites who were being duped by wealthy conservatives. He wrote a manifesto in 2009 that declared the white working class “an exploited people that further exploits other exploited people…used by the rich to attack our neighbors, coworkers, and friends of different colors, religions and nationalities.” Inspired by the Young Patriots, the radical, white working-class collective that worked with groups including the Black Panthers and Young Lords in the 1960s, Redneck Revolt was born the same year. Its membership is almost wholly comprised of white radicals whom Strano says grew up in “poor or working-class white communities, in trailer parks and rundown apartment buildings, surrounded by redneck culture.”
According to its website, Redneck Revolt has nearly 40 chapters around the country. It describes itself as “pro-worker” and “anti-racist,” with a mission to “incite a movement amongst white working people that works toward the total liberation of all working people, regardless of skin color, religious background, sexual orientation, gender identity, nationality, or any other division that bosses and politicians have used to fragment movements for social, political, and economic freedom.” The John Brown Gun Club still offers firearms training (a lot of members grew up hunting), with an emphasis on aiding defense practices among “communities of color and LGBTQ folks.” Members also show up with guns to act as a protective force for anti-fascist protesters, and were visible at events from Charlottesville to Trump’s recent rally in Arizona.
2. Pink Pistols
The Pink Pistols membership got massive bumps on the heels of two recent national events: the massacre of 49 people at LGBT nightclub Pulse in Miami, and the election of Donald Trump. Founder Doug Krick established the group after reading a 2000 Salon article by gay journalist Jonathan Rauch, who was sickened by a series of hate crimes against the LGBT community, including the murder of Matthew Shepard. “Thirty-one states allow all qualified citizens to carry concealed weapons,” Rauch noted. “In those states, homosexuals should embark on organized efforts to become comfortable with guns, learn to use them safely and carry them. They should set up Pink Pistols task forces, sponsor shooting courses and help homosexuals get licensed to carry….Homosexuals have been too vulnerable for too long. We have tried to make a political virtue of our vulnerability, but the gay-bashers aren’t listening. Playing the victim card has won us sympathy, but at the cost of respect. So let’s make gay-bashing dangerous.”
Its website describes the Pink Pistols’ goal plainly: “We teach queers to shoot. Armed queers don’t get bashed.” The group’s motto is, “Pick on someone your own caliber.”
3. National African American Gun Association
Like other groups on this list, the National African American Gun Association saw its membership soar after Trump’s election; the organization’s numbers doubled to 14,000 after November 8. Philip Smith, the group’s president, has noted that while Trump is an unexpected recruitment boost, the racists emboldened by the president have also driven up membership. “Two years ago, fringe groups were just that: fringe groups,” Smith told CNN. “But now those fringe groups are kind of like, ‘It’s cool to be racist’…our community sees that, and it scares us. You know what, let me get a gun just in case something happens, just to make sure.”
Among incoming members, the most significant demographic leap is in the increase in women. (A Washington Post article from March points to anecdotal evidence that black women are buying guns and learning to shoot at rates far higher than in the past.) Smith notes that it can be doubly dangerous for black Americans to arm themselves due to the disparate treatment of white and black gun owners, as exemplified by the police murder of licensed gun owner Philando Castile. But as Smith points out, the need for protection can outweigh those fears. “We don’t want to bother anyone, but we’re not gonna let anyone come and break into our house at two in the morning and sit there and wait for the police to come, and get killed in the interim,” Smith told a guns-focused news site. “We’re gonna protect ourselves.”
4. Liberal Gun Club
Lara Smith, the spokesperson for the Liberal Gun Club, says the group’s membership jumped “well over” 10 percent after Trump took the White House. “There is suddenly a significant uptick in the number of liberals realizing that we may, in fact, have a tyrannical government on our hands and the Second Amendment protects them too,” Smith said in an interview.
Founded in 2008 by Mark Roberts, LGC came into being to serve gun owners turned off by the NRA’s aggressively right-wing culture. Lefty gun owners often feel uncomfortable talking openly about their political outlook thanks to the hyper-conservative views that pervade gun culture, which makes LGC, oddly, a gun-filled safe space of sorts. And while America’s gun obsession and refusal to impose even the most commonsense gun controls are the cause of an astounding number of tragedies each year, Smith—who told the Miami Herald that LGC has worked collaboratively with Pink Pistols and Black Guns Matter—argues that gun fatalities point to graver issues society refuses to address. “We should be looking at suicide prevention, health care, systemic poverty and racism, the war on drugs,” Smith told Mic. “These are the real problems, and when you focus on the guns you don’t focus on the underlying issues.”
5. Huey P. Newton Gun Club
Last year, the Bureau of American Islamic Relations—a deceptively named group of Islamophobes—staged a protest outside of a Dallas mosque. There to counter them were members of the Huey P. Newton Gun Club, named for the legendary Black Panthers co-founder. The club was co-founded by Charles Goodson and Darren X, two native Texas activists working to put an end to police violence against communities of color. The group has three explicit goals: to “arm all black, brown and poor men/women across the United States who can ‘legally’ bear arms,” to “end black on black violence” and to stop “police terrorism and murder of the people.”
Huey P. Newton Gun Club
“We accept all oppressed people of color with weapons,” Darren X told Vice in 2015 “The complete agenda involves going into our communities and educating our people on federal, state, and local gun laws. We want to stop fratricide, genocide—all the ‘cides.”
6. Black Guns Matter
Maj Toure is a politically conservative African American who started Black Guns Matter because of anti-black police violence. “Black Guns Matter came about because of the amount of murders of African American people, especially by corrupt police officers,” Toure told NBC News. “I don’t have to convince anyone that my life matters but I’m going to have the tools to defend my life because it matters to me.”
It’s odd to transform the phrase Black Lives Matter, created by a group that is staunchly anti-gun, into a pro-gun effort. And right-wing pundits drool over Toure because of his libertarian attitude toward guns. But he argues that his mission is to “educate urban communities on their Second Amendment rights and responsibilities through firearm training and education.” He’s lectured in venues around the country on gun laws and safety, including resolution and de-escalation tactics.
What is With These Racist Angry White Female Trumpazoids?
There has been a long series of Trumpazoid white women acting out in public displaying their racism.
This one gets in the face of the wrong white woman when she objected to Trumpazoid’s rant.
Lot of white folks getting tired of this racist shidt.
‘Using my white privilege for the right reasons’: Florida woman justifies brutal beatdown of racist woman
The Florida woman seen cursing and beating an elder (sic) female in a hotel lobby after the victim reportedly made a racist comment about Haitians, has claimed that she was standing up for minorities by using her “white privilege.”
The viral video, which was posted to Facebook by a user named Austin, showed Colleen Dagg launching herself at the woman and punching her to the ground while cursing her.
According to Austin, “Ok so lady in the blue sundress said something super racist about how ‘you know these Haitians’ and sis in the gray was not having it. She then lied to the police and said the other girl started it, when everything was caught on video.”
Following the fight, police were reportedly dispatched to the hotel.
After the video went went viral, Dagg took to Twitter to give her side of the story.
“This is a young country built on racism,” Dagg wrote. “Black people have been disenfranchised for over 250 years. The faster white people accept and validate the truth, the closer we’ll come to a place of peace and understanding.
“Fighting racism is dependent on me using my white privilege for the right reasons,” she added.
“The white woman tried to use her white privilege on me, the fact that I am white too seemed to have slipped her mind,” she wrote, adding, “If you see it, say something.”
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