Another Chumph Lackey Agrees to Talk – Gates Squeals

Another Chumph insider takes the deal….

Think Gates need to do a bit better than just squealing on Manafort. So I would have to believe this deal includes the dirt on the Chumph traitor.

Especially since this comes at a time when additional charges are being filed.

Report: Former Trump Adviser Rick Gates Finalizing Plea Deal With Mueller

Rick Gates, one of a handful of former advisers to Donald Trump indicted amid the ongoing Russia probe, is reportedly finalizing a plea deal with investigators. Citing sources close to the investigation, CNN reports that Gates has been in talks with special counsel Robert Mueller’s team about a potential plea deal for about a month. During that time, he reportedly provided prosecutors with information, though it’s unclear whether it concerned Trump’s campaign or financial dealings not connected to the White House. The news comes as investigators are reportedly preparing new charges against Gates and his longtime business partner, former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort. Both Manafort and Gates pleaded not guilty to financial crimes in late October. Gates’ potential plea deal is expected to turn the tide of the Russia investigation and put more pressure on Manafort to cooperate. The White House has shrugged off Gates’ negotiations with investigators, however. “If Gates cooperates against Manafort that’s nothing to us,” a White House official was quoted as saying by CNN. Gates would be the third known former Trump aide cooperating in Mueller’s investigation. Former Trump aides George Papadopoulos and Michael Flynn have also reportedly made plea deals after pleading guilty to lying to the FBI.

 

Getting Freaky in the Courtroom

A judge ordering drugs from the bench?

A Texas judge is suspended after admitting she sexted her bailiff and used him to buy drugs

A Texas judge has been suspended amid accusations that she sexted in the courtroom, used her bailiff to buy drugs, hired prostitutes and once brought home marijuana seized from a defendant.

Hilary H. Green’s lawyer called the ruling by the state Supreme Court “frustrating and surprising.” He pointed out that many of the accusations had long been public, and yet voters overwhelmingly reelected Green as a Harris County justice of the peace.

“She’s very popular in the precinct,” Chip Babcock told The Washington Post. “Lots of communication in the community is about how horrible this is.”

Green, who has not been charged with a crime, was immediately suspended Friday from the Houston court where she oversaw misdemeanors, traffic cases and small civil suits since 2007.

She was once married to one of Houston’s most powerful officials, City Controller Ronald C. Green, with whom she has a child.

Their divorce battle gave rise to allegations that ultimately led to her suspension.

Accusations of threesomes, drugs and black market cough syrup

The Greens accused each other of various misdeeds in their filings, the Houston Chronicle reported in 2015.

While the judge claimed her husband had cheated on her and concealed assets, according to the paper, Ronald Green called his wife a drug addict who “operates daily with impaired judgment as evidenced by her presiding over cases in which she has ongoing sexual relationships with litigants and witnesses.”

As the Texas Commission on Judicial Conduct would later explain, those accusations prompted it to file a formal complaint against the judge — the first of several that informed its 316-page recommendation to suspend her this year.

More allegations came from Claude Barnes, whom Green acknowledged as her ex-lover — though she denied his testimony that they had hired prostitutes for threesomes.

When he appeared before the commission early last year, Barnes recalled an alleged rendezvous in a Crowne Plaza hotel room.

An escort walked in, Barnes said. “Well, she’s cute,” the judge remarked, according to his testimony.

“The three of us sat,” Barnes testified. “We smoked marijuana. We had a couple drinks and then three of us had sex.”

The couple did ecstasy on other occasions, Barnes said.

And, he added, he repeatedly helped Green buy prescription cough syrup on the black market.

One time, Barnes alleged, the judge came to his house with a bag of marijuana and “told me they took it off a kid in her courtroom … one of the bailiffs gave this to me.”

The commission said it obtained hundreds of texts between Green and a bailiff. (Green’s lawyer would later argue that her husband broke into her phone and stole texts.)

Many of the messages excerpted in court records are explicitly sexual — “That sounds like a very good dream/fantasy,” Green admitted writing to her bailiff. “You know I’m all about oral.”

At least one text appears to describe a drug purchase by the two court officials, according to court records.

“Had to marry some folks outside yesterday,” Green wrote to the bailiff in 2013. “On another note, did you hear back from ‘lover boy?’”

In a letter to the commission, Green acknowledged sending the text and clarified that “lover boy” was a supplier of cough medicine, which she said she later gave the bailiff $500 to buy.

While she denied hiring prostitutes, Green admitted to abusing drugs “almost every night” for several years, according to court records.

Once she paid her bailiff to get them, she wrote; sometimes she went herself — sometimes to “a gas station on the southwest side of Houston.”

The commission briefly questioned Green in person in February.

“I’m just thinking that you’re the judge and here you are abusing drugs,” an interrogator told her. “Judging these people for the crimes that they have committed, and yet you were committing that same crime.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the judge replied….

 

UN Finally Admits Role in Cholera Epidemic in Haiti

The whole truth of this, as I suspect a lot of things in the 3rd world, has never been admitted. Having been in Haiti working when the epidemic started, I think the numbers provided by the world press are off by 5 or more. Indeed, one person I know who was in position to say – put the number of dead the first two days at double the claimed total number today.

The Haitians figured out pretty quick where the cholera came from. A disease which Papa Doc had eliminated in the country. The UN promptly went into cover-up mode, even when it was found that the sewage trenches dug by their soldiers from Nepal were leaking directly into the river. And even after it was discovered by DWB that the strain of cholera was native to the Nepal region of Asia. Even when it was shown that those soldier hadn’t been screened for cholera and other infectuous diseases (which is a UN requirement) prior to deployment.

Haitian despise the UN’s Minustah which is their “Peacekeeping” Military force – and this is just one of the reasons.

U.N. Admits Role in Cholera Epidemic in Haiti

For the first time since a cholera epidemic believed to be imported by United Nations peacekeepers began killing thousands of Haitians nearly six years ago, the office of Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has acknowledged that the United Nations played a role in the initial outbreak and that a “significant new set of U.N. actions” will be needed to respond to the crisis.

The deputy spokesman for the secretary general, Farhan Haq, said in an email this week that “over the past year, the U.N. has become convinced that it needs to do much more regarding its own involvement in the initial outbreak and the suffering of those affected by cholera.” He added that a “new response will be presented publicly within the next two months, once it has been fully elaborated, agreed with the Haitian authorities and discussed with member states.”

The statement comes on the heels of a confidential report sent to Mr. Ban by a longtime United Nations adviser on Aug. 8. Written by Philip Alston, a New York University law professor who serves as one of a few dozen experts, known as special rapporteurs, who advise the organization on human rights issues, the draft language stated plainly that the epidemic “would not have broken out but for the actions of the United Nations.”

The secretary general’s acknowledgment, by contrast, stopped short of saying that the United Nations specifically caused the epidemic. Nor does it indicate a change in the organization’s legal position that it is absolutely immune from legal actions, including a federal lawsuit brought in the United States on behalf of cholera victims seeking billions in damages stemming from the Haiti crisis.

But it represents a significant shift after more than five years of high-level denial of any involvement or responsibility of the United Nations in the outbreak, which has killed at least 10,000 people and sickened hundreds of thousands. Cholera victims suffer from dehydration caused by severediarrhea or vomiting.

Special rapporteurs’ reports are technically independent guidance, which the United Nations can accept or reject. United Nations officials have until the end of this week to respond to the report, which will then go through revisions, but the statement suggests a new receptivity to its criticism.

In the 19-page report, obtained from an official who had access to it, Mr. Alston took issue with the United Nations’ public handling of the outbreak, which was first documented in mid-October 2010, shortly after people living along the Meille River began dying from the disease.

The first victims lived near a base housing 454 United Nations peacekeepers freshly arrived from Nepal, where a cholera outbreak was underway, and waste from the base often leaked into the river. Numerous scientists have since argued that the base was the only plausible source of the outbreak — whose real death toll, one study found, could be much higher than the official numbers state — but United Nations officials have consistently insisted that its origins remain up for debate.

Mr. Alston wrote that the United Nations’ Haiti cholera policy “is morally unconscionable, legally indefensible and politically self-defeating.” He added, “It is also entirely unnecessary.” The organization’s continuing denial and refusal to make reparations to the victims, he argued, “upholds a double standard according to which the U.N. insists that member states respect human rights, while rejecting any such responsibility for itself.”

He said, “It provides highly combustible fuel for those who claim that U.N. peacekeeping operations trample on the rights of those being protected, and it undermines both the U.N.’s overall credibility and the integrity of the Office of the Secretary-General.”

Mr. Alston went beyond criticizing the Department of Peacekeeping Operations to blame the entire United Nations system. “As the magnitude of the disaster became known, key international officials carefully avoided acknowledging that the outbreak had resulted from discharges from the camp,” he noted.

His most severe criticism was reserved for the organization’s Office of Legal Affairs, whose advice, he wrote, “has been permitted to override all of the other considerations that militate so powerfully in favor of seeking a constructive and just solution.” Its interpretations, he said, have “trumped the rule of law.”

Mr. Alston also argued in his report that, as The New York Times hasreported, the United Nations’ cholera eradication program has failed. Infection rates have been rising every year in Haiti since 2014, as the organization struggles to raise the $2.27 billion it says is needed to eradicate the disease from member states. No major water or sanitation projects have been completed in Haiti; two pilot wastewater processing plants built there in the wake of the epidemic quickly closed because of a lack of donor funds.

In a separate internal report released days ago after being withheld for nearly a year, United Nations auditors said a quarter of the sites run by the peacekeepers with the organization’s Stabilization Mission in Haiti, or Minustah, that they had visited were still discharging their waste into public canals as late as 2014, four years after the epidemic began.

“Victims are living in fear because the disease is still out there,” Mario Joseph, a prominent Haitian human rights lawyer representing cholera victims, told demonstrators in Port-au-Prince last month. He added, “If the Nepalese contingent returns to defecate in the water again, they will get the disease again, only worse.”

In 2011, when families of 5,000 Haitian cholera victims petitioned the United Nations for redress, its Office of Legal Affairs simply declared their claims “not receivable.” (Mr. Alston called that argument “wholly unconvincing in legal terms.”)…More…

 

How the Republicans Started the “War on Drugs” to Target Black People

A stunning quote, and the truth at last…

“You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” – John Erlichman, counsel and Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under President Richard Nixon

Nixon Aide Reportedly Admitted Drug War Was Meant To Target Black People

“Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

An eye-opening remark from a former aide to President Richard Nixon pulls back the curtain on the true motivation of the United States’ war on drugs.

John Ehrlichman, who served 18 months in prison for his central role in the Watergate scandal, was Nixon’s chief domestic advisor when the presidentannounced the “war on drugs” in 1971. The administration cited a high death toll and the negative social impacts of drugs to justify expanding federal drug control agencies. Doing so set the scene for decades of socially and economicallydisastrous policies.

Journalist Dan Baum wrote in the April cover story of Harper’s about how he interviewed Ehrlichman in 1994 while working on a book about drug prohibition. Ehrlichman provided some shockingly honest insight into the motives behind the drug war. From Harper’s:

“You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

In other words, the intense racial targeting that’s become synonymous with the drug war wasn’t an unintended side effect — it was the whole point.

The quote kicks off Baum’s “Legalize It All,” the cover story for Harper’s April 2016 issue. Read the whole article, which is a comprehensive argument for drug legalization, here.

Baum explained to The Huffington Post why he didn’t include the quote in his 1996 book, Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure.

“There are no authorial interviews in [Smoke and Mirrors] at all; it’s written to put the reader in the room as events transpire,” Baum said in an email. “Therefore, the quote didn’t fit. It did change all the reporting I did for the book, though, and changed the way I worked thereafter.”

The quote does, however, appear in the 2012 book The Moment, a collection of “life-changing stories” from writers and artists.

Baum also talked to HuffPost about why Ehrlichman would confess such a thing in such blunt terms.

“It taught me that people are often eager to unburden themselves, once they no longer have a dog in the fight,” Baum said. “The interviewer needs to be patient sometimes, and needs to ask the right way. But people will often be incredibly honest if given the chance.”

 

Missouri Again…Missouri Town Supports Child Rapist Blaming 5 YO Victim

In quite possibly one of the most disgusting instances of the “reality dysfunction” affecting America, this MIssouri town has taken the side of a Church trustee who has admitted to raping a girl since she was 5 years old…Citing their “belief in God”. These folks are despicably sicker than your average Republicans.

Missouri townspeople shun sex abuse victim as a liar — even after ‘good man’ admits to raping her

A child sex abuse victim says she’s been denied housing after accusing a “good man” of molesting her for years — and Missouri prosecutors are mystified that so many community members are supporting the admitted sex offender.

Darren Paden was sentenced to 50 years in prison Friday after pleading guilty in August to two counts of first-degree statutory sodomy — but friends, family members, church elders and community leaders begged a judge to go easy on him.

Prosecutors said the 52-year-old Paden sexually abused the girl up to 300 times over a decade, beginning before she was 5 years old. His 28-year-old son, Anthony Paden, was also charged with sex abuse, although his case remains pending.

But community members have turned their backs on the girl, who is now 18 years old and testified against her abuser in court, and rallied around Paden.

“There are certainly a few good people in this community who have offered support to this young victim,” said Platte County Prosecuting Attorney Eric Zahnd. “It is shocking, however, that many continue to support a defendant whose guilt was never in doubt. If it takes a village to raise a child, what is a child to do when the village turns its back and supports a confessed child molester?”

Community members simply don’t believe the girl, reported the Kansas City Star.

“Only God, Darren and (the victim) know what truly happened,” said Gene Blankenship, a trustee at the New Market Christian Church in Dearborn. “I feel Darren may have admitted to things he did not do after hours of interrogation and all the pressure to admit guilt.”

Blankenship was among about 16 community members who sent letters to the court since September, praising Paden for his service in the Gulf War and a junior deacon at New Market Christian Church.

“Darren is one of the most admirable people I know,” wrote friend Adele Brightwell. “He holds fast to his morals.”

Others begged the judge for leniency, arguing that Paden had already suffered enough.

“I truly believe that Darren has already suffered extensively for his actions by being kept away from his young children and his home life, and by not being able to provide for this family,” wrote supporter Darla Hall Emmendorfer. “Because of the significant difficulties that will face his innocent family, I would ask you, Judge Van Amburg, to grant Darren a sentence of probation or at least the lowest possible sentence.”

The victim, who said she only came to understand after seeing a presentation in middle school that her relationship with Paden should be considered abuse, said she cut herself and considered suicide in high school and still suffers nightmares.

Paden told police shortly after his arrest that he began watching pornographic videos with the girl in 2001 or 2002 and abused her once or twice a month for the next 10 years, but he refused to plead guilty as he publicly accused the girl of lying.

The victim is hurt that community members still refuse to believe her claims, even after Paden confessed to police, wrote letters of apology to the victim and his own family and — finally, after two years — admitted his guilt in court.

“I called a lady about a house she was renting, and I told her my name, and she said, ‘What’s your name again?’ and I told her and she said, ‘I don’t want to rent to you,’ and then hung up on me,” the victim told the Star.

She spoke directly at Paden’s sentencing to some of those community members who made her feel “unwanted.”

“I was genuinely terrified to go into our new café in town because I was scared someone was going to yell at me or refuse to serve me,” the victim said. “I was even scared they would tamper with my food. I feel so unwelcomed in a town that I have grown up in. I feel like an outsider that just strolled in and everybody is giving their own analysis on, and making up gossip that people believe instead of just coming up and talking to me.”

“Try dealing with that on top of being called a liar every day,” she added.

Paden’s great-aunt said she would “feel sorry for the girl” if she had been abused — but she doesn’t believe the victim’s claims and instead sees the case as a test of the community’s religious faith.

“Our community is one that we deeply believe in God and we’re not going to buckle under anything,” said 82-year-old Dixie Wilson. “We’re not going to let it destroy all of us. We’re going to keep doing our good works and doing what we believe and rely on each other.”

Something indeed stinks in Missouri…Perhaps there are a lot more like the convicted.

 

Doomsday Minister Confesses to “Erroneous Teachings”

This guy has convinced his followers and listeners for more than 30 years that…

The end was near.

Apparently, being a lot closer to the day he may well have to meet God – he’s trying to straighten things out before facing the “Pearly Gates”. I can think of a few more Televangelists who might want to consider following Mr. Camping’s example sooner…

Rather than later.

Family Radio Founder Harold Camping Repents, Apologizes for False Teachings

With his speech sounding somewhat slurred and labored, Family Radio Stations Inc. founder and chairman Harold Camping sought to address in a recent message why Christ failed to return on Oct. 21 as the Bible teacher had predicted. Camping confessed, after decades of falsely misleading his followers, that he was wrong and regrets his misdeeds.

In addition to attempting to correct his erroneous teachings on the Rapture and God’s day of final judgment on the world, Camping, 90, also confessed, “incidentally,” that he was wrong to claim that God had stopped saving people after May 21 – the date which God’s so-called “spiritual” judgment had begun.

This is undoubtedly a radical shift for Camping, who has staunchly claimed since 1992 that he had discovered a special numerical system in the Bible that allowed him to calculate the exact dates of certain events, such as the Great Flood, the Crucifixion and the day of Jesus Christ’s return to Earth.

Camping first falsely predicted that the world would end on Sept. 6, 1994, then again on May 21, 2011, and finally on Oct. 21.

When Camping’s final doomsday predication failed to come to pass, Family Radio soon removed its teachings regarding the failed May 21 rapture, which also included the claim that God had stopped saving people after that date and that the world was headed for a final judgment on Oct. 21.

On Oct. 24, 2011, The Christian Post also reported in anexclusive interview with a member of Camping’s Bible ministry that the Alameda, Calif., Bible teacher was no longer able to lead Family Radio or his ministry.

 

Vatican Nixxes “Pope in a Phone” Ap

The real Pope...Not Pope Jobs!

Dang! And here I thought the Vatican was joining the 21st Century by using the power of the Internet…

Thought this was fairly cool for “Sinners on the go.” Can you imagine if the Corleone Family had this in the Godfather!

“Yo! Pope Jobs – Sorry about that dead horse in the bed thing…”

Can’t wait for the AT&T versus Verizon TV ad on this one. “Only our network allows you to lie to your significant other… And be absolved at the same time! There’s an ap for that!”

Vatican: You Cannot Confess by iPhone

So much for instant absolution: The Vatican today emphatically stressed that Catholics cannot confess by iPhone, one day after news of the “Confession: A Roman Catholic App” emerged, reports the AFP. “It is essential to understand that the rites of penance require a personal dialogue between penitents and their confessor. It cannot be replaced by a computer application,” said a Vatican spokesman. Should that not be clear enough: “I must stress to avoid all ambiguity, under no circumstance is it possible to ‘confess by iPhone’.”

It’s worth noting, however, that the company that created it did explain that the app—approved for use by Catholics by an Indiana bishop—walks users through the process of confessing and offers a “personalized examination of conscience,” but did not say that it replaced the confessing-to-a-priest part.

 

 

 

Philly – White Cop Shoots Himself – Blames Black Man Resulting In Massive Manhunt

Amazing…

PHILADELPHIA – A white city police sergeant made up a story about being shot by a black man while on patrol last month and actually intentionally shot himself for unknown reasons, the city’s police commissioner said Tuesday.

Sgt. Robert Ralston, 46, confessed to making up the story and will have to pay the costs of the massive manhunt that followed, Commissioner Charles Ramsey said. Ralston has been suspended with intent to dismiss, but will not face criminal charges because granting immunity was the only way to obtain his confession, Ramsey said at a news conference.

The case was especially troubling, Ramsey said, because Ralston identified his supposed attacker as black. When Ralston confessed Tuesday, he said he made the claim so his story would be more believable, Ramsey said.