"Analysis: Elizabeth Warren has ‘a plan for that’ — more than 50 expensive ones" by Larry Edelman Globe Staff, December 7, 2019
Sorry to have to tell you this, but the anal-ysis will be a theme throughout today's Globe.
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren has built her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination around the idea that the time has come for “those who have done really well in the last few decades to pay their fair share” so others don’t have to struggle as much to get by. She would use the trillions in new revenue to pay for an ambitious set of social programs, but after carrying her into the top tier of candidates, Warren’s momentum has stalled amid pushback from moderate Democrats who worry that some of her proposals — especially Medicare for All, the largest and most costly by far — are too extreme and will alienate crucial middle-of-the-road and swing voters.
This is more than a disagreement over the best political strategy to deny President Trump a second term. It’s a tug-of-war for the soul of a Democratic Party split over just how far left it should tack to rein in what many voters see as out-of-control capitalism that has allowed the rich to get richer, the poor to get poorer, and the middle class to inexorably wither.
What is the fair “fair share” for one percenters and corporate America to pay? How much control over markets and business should the government wield?
Where Democrats land on these questions will have profound implications not only for the 2020 election, but for how the country charts its future economic course.
Senator Bernie Sanders, who in many ways blazed the economic populist trail for Warren, is a self-proclaimed socialist who has long wanted to dismantle some core elements of capitalism and start anew. Warren, who labels herself a capitalist, wants to recalibrate the markets, through aggressive regulation and taxation.
Yet the two candidates have much in common, including a unified theory of everything: The US political and economic systems are rigged to keep wealth and power in the hands of the elite.
Every four years we get this argument, and then it is back to bu$ine$$ a$ u$ual.
Her most-discussed revenue generator is a wealth tax. Critics of the wealth tax, including some Democrats, raise concerns not only about fairness, but also its effectiveness and potential to hurt the economy. Larry Summers, the former president of Harvard University who served as Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton, is a high-profile opponent of wealth taxes. In a blog post, Summers and Natasha Sarin, an assistant law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote that Warren’s plan would likely not raise as much money as the candidate estimates, and would not dilute the economic and political clout of the richest Americans as she intends.
“Investing substantial political capital into a tax model that is untried in the United States and has failed internationally strikes us as unwise,” they said.
He was Obama's brain trust, and it showed.
Btw, who remembers Brooksley Born?
Wealth taxes were once popular in Europe, with 12 countries using some form of the levy in 1990. Today, Norway, Spain, and Switzerland are the only European governments that still collect them.
Beyond the wealth tax, Warren also wants to change how the rich pay capital gains taxes, and expand the federal tax on inherited wealth to fund most of a $500 billion affordable housing plan, and then there is Social Security, known as the third rail of American politics because efforts to touch it are dangerous. Warren proposes to increase benefits for all current and future recipients by $2,400 a year, and change rules to boost benefits for lower-income families, women, people with disabilities, public-sector workers, and people of color.
$ocial $ecurity is now for the rich.
Again, the money to do this would come from the affluent, and in another Trumpian echo, she would push to manage the value of the US dollar — that is, lower it relative to other currencies — to support US manufacturers by making their products cheaper for foreign buyers.
It's being called ‘economic patriotism,’ and it means that buck of yours will purchase less.
In a move that would disrupt the higher education sector in Massachusetts and across the country, Warren has proposed forgiving student loan debt and making tuition at public colleges and universities free. The idea is to make a good education accessible to more students, and redirect money now going to tuitions and paying down debt into the economy, but college leaders worry the initiative could swamp already resource-strained public institutions while further limiting the appeal of private liberal arts schools.
You $ee, kids, the bankers, the auto companies, the airlines, they all can get bailouts. Not you, though.
Consider it part of your edu¢ation.
Medicare for All has emerged as the most divisive issue among candidates and Democrat voters. The prospect of being forced into a government plan scares many Americans who have good coverage through their jobs. The “public option” — making Medicare for All a choice under the Affordable Care Act rather than a mandate — is favored by moderates such as former vice president Joe Biden and Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar.
They didn't want a public option when the health indu$try wrote the bill back when.
Moreover, a single-payer system would not only put many private insurers and their employees out of business, it is likely to squeeze many doctors, hospitals, and other service providers as the government leverages its buying power to drive down costs.
In Massachusetts, hospitals such as Massachusetts General and Beth Israel Deaconess are large employers. Despite the state’s strong liberal bent, trade groups representing health care providers and insurers have said they oppose Medicare for All.
Her environmental outlook is not good given current political realities.
Even if Warren becomes president, many of her proposals would require the approval of Congress and, in the case of the wealth tax, maybe even a Supreme Court ruling that it is constitutional.
In other words, it's all hot air.
Progressives young and old say that Trump can be dislodged only with a promise of bold change. They argue that requiring the wealthiest people to shoulder the cost of bread-and-butter programs like universal child care and student-loan forgiveness will appeal to people in both parties who are struggling to get by.
“Is she too radical for the party?” Michael Dukakis, the party’s 1988 candidate, said in an interview. “No, this is basic Democratic stuff.”
Dukakis said that when he ran against George H.W. Bush, wealth inequality was nowhere near as severe as it is now.
After years of cutting taxes for the rich, he said, “We shouldn’t be surprised that there is an enormous amount of resentment out there, including among Trump voters.”
Uh-huh, and I'm not even a Trump voter.
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It's become obvious that the Globe has hooked their star to Warren and not Deval Patrick.
"The focus now isn’t on Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. It’s on the judge, the attorneys, and the jurors" by Milton J. Valencia Globe Staff, December 7, 2019
For the first time in the Boston Marathon bombing case, all eyes won’t be on the perpetrator — and the odds may be tilting his way.
More than four years after Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, now 26, was convicted and sentenced to death for his role in the city’s worst terrorist attack, the proceeding has shifted to the federal appeals court in Boston. The focus will now be on the conduct of prosecutors, defense attorneys, the presiding judge — even the jury — with one central question at issue: Did Tsarnaev get a fair trial?
Oral arguments before three judges of the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit are slated for Thursday. Tsarnaev is not expected to attend. Instead, lawyers are set to joust for two hours over legal questions such as whether the trial should have been held in Boston, and whether jurors failed to reveal their anti-Tsarnaev biases to the judge.
Defense attorneys will also argue that trial Judge George A. O’Toole Jr. erroneously withheld evidence from jurors that Tsarnaev’s older brother and accomplice, Tamerlan, had brutally killed three people two years earlier.....
They are referring to the Waltham murders on 9/11 (why would he be hanging out with them?).
That's where the turn-in comes where the argument is that Tamerlan was the mastermind of the bombing, and for the first time the trend line in the case is leaning in favor of the younger Tsarnaev — a pattern that could force the trauma of a trial once again with “very big risks in keeping the case in Boston due to the extraordinary set of circumstances” of the first terrorist condemned to death by a jury in the United States in the post-9/11 world.
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It's enough to make you crap your pants.
(stench from below)
"Boston’s school bathrooms are a big mess" by Bianca Vázquez Toness Globe Staff, December 7, 2019
Eleven-year-old Louisiana vividly remembers sitting in her fourth-grade math class one afternoon two years ago, rocking back and forth and shaking one leg. She needed to distract her mind from her uncomfortably full bladder. It had been hours since she’d gone.
She has long relied on what she called the “pee dance” to help her avoid the bathrooms at Blackstone Elementary in the South End. Urine coated the floor and toilet seats. The sink faucets were broken. She avoided the space whenever, and however, she could, but this time the pee dance failed Louisiana. Feeling a wetness in her pants, she called her teacher over to her desk and asked to go to the nurse’s office for a change of clothes.
Louisiana shouldn’t be embarrassed, but perhaps Boston should. Filthy, unsanitary, and often lacking basics like toilet paper and hot water, the bathrooms of the city’s public schools are, far too frequently, in appalling condition. It is not a conventional measure of success or failure in the city’s schools, but it is a telling one: What does it say to the children of the schools that they are expected, as they strive to learn, to put up with such facilities? Or avoid them at all cost — and great discomfort?
More: What does it say about a system that tolerates such conditions? Is it really asking too much to have soap at every sink?
And yet public authorities and public officials extoll how much they care about the kids!
Btw, don't drink the water, either.
The record of subpar performance, and utter failure, on this score is thick and disheartening, a Globe review found. Last year, city public health inspectors found problems — from nonflushable toilets to obnoxious odors — in 89 of 111 Boston Public School buildings they visited, and the vast majority of the more than 30 students, parents, and teachers interviewed in recent weeks by the Globe described the bathrooms as gross, even dangerous, citing the prevalence of missing soap and toilet paper, urine stench, and leaks — even feces and sanitary pads strewn on the floor.
Visits by Globe reporters to five schools over the last six months confirmed these generally drab and depressing conditions.
Can you kids spell failure?
Data from the health inspections also suggest some inequities in access to appropriately maintained facilities. When inspectors visited the Higginson/Lewis K-8 School in Roxbury, where 93 percent of students are black or Latino, they found no toilet paper in 17 out of 18 stalls.
By contrast, at the Kilmer K-8, where half the students are white, inspectors reported well-stocked toilet paper dispensers and no significant sanitary concerns.
Systemwide, shabby conditions are so commonplace that the Boston Teachers Union took the rare step of making clean, well-stocked student bathrooms one of its contract demands in 2017.
“It’s a matter of public safety and health,” said Boston Teachers Union president Jessica Tang. “We shouldn’t have to advocate for things like that, but we did.”
Boston school officials said that custodians are now better trained and expectations are clearer: All bathrooms should be thoroughly cleaned and restocked every night and there are extra supplies on hand in each building. At some schools, bathrooms are “touched up” during the day. Tang said she has heard fewer complaints from teachers since the changes.
Oh, good, I'm glad they cleaned that up.
The sorry state of Boston’s school bathrooms is not a total anomaly in the metro region or among large urban school systems, but parents, educators, and students who have had the experience of visiting school bathrooms in both the city and suburbs said Boston’s are particularly bad.....
That's when I flushed it.
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At least you aren't shitting in the streets, kids.
A2 brings the World to me (the ads are basically the same each week).
{@@##$$%%^^&&}
"In prisoner swap, Iran frees American held since 2016" by Michael Crowley New York Times, December 7, 2019
WASHINGTON — Iran on Saturday freed an American graduate student who had been imprisoned in Tehran for more than three years on suspicion of being a spy, in an exchange of prisoners at a moment of high tensions with Washington.
The American, Xiyue Wang, was flown in a Swiss government airplane from Tehran to Zurich, where he was met by Brian Hook, the State Department’s special representative for Iran, according to two senior US officials.
Wang, 38, was a fourth-year Princeton University graduate student conducting research in Iran when he was arrested there in August 2016. He was charged with espionage and sentenced to 10 years in prison. American officials deny that Wang, who had been locked in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison, was a spy.
In exchange for Wang’s release, the United States freed Masoud Soleimani, an Iranian scientist who was arrested at a Chicago airport last year and was convicted on charges of violating US trade sanctions against Iran. The Justice Department has dropped those charges. American officials said that Soleimani’s release was a low price to pay for Wang’s freedom because Soleimani was expected to be released from prison as early as next month under a plea agreement.
The White House confirmed the prisoner swap early on Saturday with a statement from President Trump. Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, also confirmed the deal on Twitter and posted photos of himself accompanying Soleimani home on an Iranian jet.
The senior American officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said they saw no indication that the exchange portended a larger dialogue with Iran, but another senior administration official who briefed reporters on Saturday said he was “hopeful” the trade could signal a future willingness by Iran to discuss its broader relationship with Washington.
The transaction is likely to command the close attention of Trump, who has shown a particular interest in prisoner and hostage releases, which he has marked with showy events at the White House.
The New York Times couldn't resist ripping him even here!
Trump administration officials believe Iran may have released Wang to soften its image and deflect attention from a recent brutal crackdown on mass domestic protests. American officials believe the unrest has left hundreds dead and as many as 7,000 imprisoned, drawing condemnation from around the world.
Really? Where? I haven't seen any.
I think the rest of the world is coming to grips with the endless destabilization campaigns and color revolutions.
Hook, working through Swiss intermediaries who often serve as a diplomatic channel between Washington and Tehran, negotiated the prisoner exchange.....
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They got their spy back, yay.
Related:
"US peace envoy Zalmay Khalilzad on Saturday held the first official talks with Afghanistan’s Taliban since President Trump declared a near-certain peace deal with the insurgents dead in September. The talks will initially focus on getting a Taliban promise to reduce violence, with a permanent cease-fire being the eventual goal, said a US statement. Khalilzad is also trying to lay the groundwork for negotiations between Afghans on both sides of the protracted conflict. Sitting with the Taliban at the negotiating table was Anas Haqqani, one of three senior Taliban freed last month in exchange for kidnapped American University of Afghanistan professors — American Kevin King and Australian Timothy Weeks, Taliban’s political office spokesman Suhail Shaheen tweeted. Tweeting that talks will resume on Sunday, Shaheen also said, “We discussed matters related to the signing of the agreement,”without elaborating (AP)."
What a joke, and how many have been murdered in the interim?
"Iraqi officials said Saturday the casualty toll had risen to 25 dead and 130 wounded after a bloody night of attacks by unknown gunmen that targeted anti-government demonstrators in the capital. Influential Shi’ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, the head of parliament’s Sairoon bloc, said a drone had targeted his home in the holy city of Najaf on Saturday, according to statements from the political party. The health and security officials spoke on condition of anonymity in line with regulations. The attack Friday was among the deadliest since Oct. 1, when thousands of Iraqis took to the streets calling for sweeping political reforms and the end of Iran’s influence in Iraqi affairs. Security forces regularly use live rounds and tear gas to disperse the demonstrations, leading to heavy casualties. Three among the dead were policeman and the rest were protesters, the officials said (AP)."
We know what that is.
Time to sit down to an A4 meal:
"A crime of pasta, but the suspects’ lips are sealed" by Jason Horowitz New York Times,December 7, 2019
BARI, Italy — The grandmothers set up shop early. Out of ground-floor kitchens that opened directly onto the street, they came out singing old songs, sweeping the stone floor, and scattering their homemade orecchiette, the city’s renowned ear-shaped pasta, on the mesh screens of wooden trays.
As the pasta dried in the sun along with the sweat pants, T-shirts, and bath towels draped from the balconies above, Nunzia Caputo, 61, sat making more with her mother. A local man popped by to buy a kilo, which Caputo weighed out on an old-fashioned scale.
“Here it’s always fresh,” she said, in a kitchen cluttered with simmering pots of sauce, sacks of semola flour, and a muted television. “If nobody buys them, we eat all of them. And this happens,” she said, pointing at her belly.
The scene — the grannies, the handmade pasta, the curved stone street — evoked the southern Italy of popular imagination.
The orecchiette makers of via dell’Arco Basso in the southern coastal town of Bari have drawn cruise ship tourists, and contributed to Lonely Planet naming Bari one of Europe’s top 10 destinations, but local officials suspect that the pasta street, in the historical part of town known as Old Bari, is the scene of a crime that has prompted the orecchiette crackdown scare of 2019.
According to the mayor’s office, in mid-October police inspectors busted a local restaurant for serving untraceable orecchiette, a violation of Italian and European Union regulations that require food in restaurants to be clearly sourced. Police fined the restaurateur and forced him to trash about 7 pounds of pasta.
The November news reports (“Strong hand against the handmade orecchiette in Old Bari” wrote La Repubblica) immediately worried the sharp-elbowed women of Bari, who are permitted to sell small plastic baggies of pasta for personal use, but who are not licensed to deliver large, unlabeled shipments to restaurants.
The women don’t earn much to begin with, and fear having to wear hairnets, issue receipts, and pay taxes. People here are asking if the Italian zeal for regulations, however often ignored, will end up overpowering the local pride in a custom that has brought Bari — where many families have their go-to pasta lady — tourists and much-needed good press.
The mayor, Antonio Decaro, has promised to work something out. In the meantime, he has apparently advised the grannies to lay low.
Another nonna, an 82-year-old who spent a recent morning singing old songs and would only be identified as Vittoria, threatened a reporter for asking too many questions, the neighbor across the street blasted AC/DC’s rock anthem “Thunderstruck,” which he called “self-defense” against her constant singing and sharp tongue. “She’s nice if you are passing by for two minutes,” the neighbor said, but added that she was hard to live across from.
Time to cross the street.
Until 20 years ago, Old Bari was known as “Mugging-town,” a forbidden zone run by criminal clans. Theft has a long tradition here. In 1087, Barese sailors looking for a pilgrimage attraction stole from present-day Turkey the bones of St. Nicholas, the model for Santa Claus and now one of Bari’s patron saints. (And the patron saint of, among other things, thieves.) The relics are still in Bari’s San Nicola basilica.
More recently, Vito Leccese, the mayor’s chief of staff, said his boss received a police bodyguard after taking on criminally linked street-food vendors and upset some traditionalists for prohibiting locals from selling raw mussels rinsed in seaport water.
Before pasta, he said, many of the city’s older women sold contraband cigarettes from Montenegro.
“We are trying to help them,” he said, adding that the administration was looking into the possibility of making the area a free-trade zone and that there was nothing wrong with them selling a couple of kilos to the occasional orecchiette user off the books. “It doesn’t hurt anyone,” he said.
The law did not seem of primary concern to many around town. Many locals argued that the regulations represented the real threat.....
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Well, I'm full up and feeling queasy!
"UK halts torture case against former first lady of Liberia" by Elian Peltier New York Times, December 7, 2019
LONDON — A British judge has dismissed torture charges against the ex-wife of a former Liberian president before her trial next month over accusations relating to the country’s civil war.
Agnes Reeves Taylor, the ex-wife of former President Charles Taylor, was arrested in London in 2017 and charged with eight counts of torture and conspiracy to commit torture as part of her husband’s National Patriotic Front of Liberia, which in the 1990s participated in one of Africa’s bloodiest recent civil wars, but a judge at the Old Bailey in London, the central criminal court for England and Wales, ruled Friday that there was not enough evidence to prove that the group had governmental control in the areas where the atrocities were said to have taken place — a requirement for the case to be tried in Britain.
The case had been viewed as an important test for those seeking to see torture in other countries punished in British courts. The country’s supreme court decided in a landmark ruling last month that members of nonstate groups that exercised “the functions of government” during armed conflicts could be prosecuted in Britain.
More than 200,000 people died in clashes and atrocities as the National Patriotic Front of Liberia led an insurgency in the 1990s. Taylor was elected in 1997 but went into exile in 2003. At a trial in The Hague in 2012, he was sentenced to 50 years in prison after he was found guilty of crimes against humanity and war crimes.
That's where they billeted him without context.
Reeves Taylor had been accused of ordering soldiers to rape women and to beat a 13-year-old boy, among other crimes.
British court documents also said that she had ordered soldiers to tie up and torture a woman who refused to be raped by one of Taylor’s local commanders, and that she later shot and killed the woman’s two children, saying, “See, if you refuse an order, this will happen.”
Reeves Taylor, 54, has denied the accusations and said that she had never held any official position in the National Patriotic Front of Liberia.
Reeves Taylor watched the ruling by video link from a prison in Britain, according to the BBC and the Associated Press, and was set to be freed.
She claimed asylum in Britain in 2007 but her application to remain indefinitely was rejected in 2016 because of suspicions that she might have committed a crime against humanity or war crimes, according to court documents.
The decision Friday was “heartbreaking for the victims who have waited more than 20 years for their stories to be heard by a court and for justice to be done,” said Emmanuelle Marchand, the head of legal analysis at Civitas Maxima, a group that seeks to provide legal representation for victims of international crimes.
Along with the Liberia-based Global Justice and Research Project, Civitas Maxima provided the British authorities with the initial information to conduct an investigation into Reeves Taylor, but Marchand and other representatives of rights groups said that despite the dismissal Friday, the supreme court decision in November could still pave the way for further prosecutions of members of nonstate groups.....
That means groups like “ISIS and the Taliban can be prosecuted for torture under UK law,” but not Israeli war criminals.
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Just wondering when Bush, Cheney, or Bloody Gina will be appearing before the bar.
Time to file out onto Avenue A6:
"France’s weekend of discontent: Yellow vest and pension protesters gather" by Aurelien Breeden New York Times, December 7, 2019
PARIS — One protest movement started a year ago in France and drew hundreds of thousands at its peak to roundabouts across the country in angry yellow vest demonstrations against planned increases in gas taxes.
Another — a nationwide strike expressing fury over President Emmanuel Macron’s plans to overhaul the pension system — began last week. On Saturday, it continued to paralyze parts of the country.
Even as the strength of the long-running yellow vest protests has dissipated over the year, the movement’s simmering anger at the president ran smack dab this weekend into the latest turmoil over his pension plans.
Both events have harnessed broader discontent with the policies of Macron, who is viewed both by both yellow vest protesters and labor activists as arrogant and disconnected from their daily struggles. At their most violent, the yellow vest protests saw people break shop windows, police fire tear gas and rubber bullets, and Macron consider a state of emergency.
Those committing violence are known as agent provocateurs, a term the French understand all too well.
More yellow vest rallies were expected in Paris and other cities Saturday, and so were traditional union demonstrations against unemployment, but the size and impact of both are uncertain, and though neither is directly tied to the pension demonstrations, both could get a boost from the latest social unrest.
There is little sign of any coordination among any of those causes, but the pension fight has given new energy to both movements, and some yellow vest protesters took part in last week’s labor marches, a stark contrast to last year, when they rejected unions as inefficient and archaic, and the government was gearing up for more protests in the coming week.
Macron has promised to standardize 42 public and private pension schemes into one state-managed, point-based plan, but for many protesters, nothing less than the future of their vaunted social safety net is at stake. Many fear losing money and having to work longer before retiring.
The protests have already unleashed days of public transportation chaos that halted trains and led to canceled flights.
On Saturday, the impact of the continuing strike was limited, since weekday workers did not have to commute, but train traffic was still heavily disrupted across France, and some businesses have started expressing worries that the strike could affect Christmas shopping.....
SACRE BLEU!
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Meanwhile, the New York Times blew the whistle on the Hong Kong protesters.
{@@##$$%%^^&&}
Speaking of whistles:
"Florida gunman showed mass shootings videos at party" by Eric Schmitt, Frances Robles and Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs New York Times, December 7, 2019
The Saudi trainee who attacked a Florida naval base showed videos of mass shootings at a dinner party the night before he carried out the shooting, according to a person briefed on the investigation but not authorized to speak publicly.
The gunman, who killed three people and injured eight others, did not have any apparent ties to international terrorist groups and appeared to have radicalized on his own, according to a senior American official who was also not authorized to speak publicly.
See: Saudi pilot trainee kills 3 in shooting at Florida naval base
Saudi pilots learning to fly planes, huh?
This comes on the heels of the Pearl Harbor shooting and its patsy, and raises many questions about the messages being sent with this obvious perception management propaganda whatever it may be.
The gunman, identified as Second Lieutenant Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani, was killed by a sheriff’s deputy who responded to the attack. Alshamrani initially entered the United States in 2018, according to initial assessments by intelligence and counterterrorism officials, but at some point Alshamrani returned to Saudi Arabia and then reentered the United States in February.
They always are, aren't they?
The lieutenant reported for training program at the naval air station about three days before the shooting, according to the officials. It was unclear what Alshamrani was doing between February and when he reported for training but he was apparently living in the Pensacola area for much of that period.
Did he have Mossad agents living next door like Atta?
Six other Saudi nationals were detained for questioning near the scene of the shooting, which took place over two floors in a classroom on the base. Three of the Saudis who were detained had been seen filming the entire incident, according to another person briefed on the investigation.
Were they dancing?
It was not known whether the six Saudis detained were students in the classroom building and there was no immediate indication that those filming the incident were connected to the gunman, the person said.
Authorities have said that there is no credible threat to the Pensacola community and one of the senior officials said that all Saudi trainees on base had been accounted for.
Oh, now this starting to stink of a fictitious event for propaganda purposes!
How could they know that so quickly?
On Facebook, family members identified Joshua Kaleb Watson as one of the victims. Adam Watson wrote in a post that his youngest brother “saved countless lives today with his own.”
Oh, now we get the supposed confirmation from facebook crisis actors, okay.
Senator Rick Scott, Republican of Florida, and Representative Matt Gaetz, a Republican whose district includes Pensacola, both described the shooting as an act of terrorism, but federal law enforcement officials said it was too early to establish the gunman’s motive.
C'mon!
Where is the toilet, 'eh?
The SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors jihadist activity, cited a Twitter account with a name matching the gunman that had posted a “will” calling the United States a “nation of evil” and criticizing its support for Israel.
Now we know this is all Jewi$h war propaganda!
“I’m not against you for just being American,” the posts said. “I don’t hate you because your freedoms, I hate you because every day you supporting, funding and committing crimes not only against Muslims but also humanity.”
The account could not be independently verified.
Of course not.
The lieutenant was a trainee with the Saudi Air Force. Saudi pilots have trained at the Pensacola base since 1995.
The gunman used a locally purchased handgun with an extended magazine and had four to six other magazines in his possession, according to one of the people briefed on the investigation.
Kinsella said that about 200 international students were training at the base. They are from countries like Italy and Norway, in addition to Saudi Arabia, and are trained to fly helicopters or F-15s, according to a Navy pilot familiar with the program. Americans and Saudis go through initial training together before embarking on separate programs.
Defense Secretary Mark Esper said Saturday that he had directed the Pentagon to look at vetting procedures for foreign nationals who came to the United States to study and train with the American military.....
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Okay, so what we have is what I perceive to be many agendas at work in this incident meant to be a mental trigger for Americans. On the lower levels it is about tightening vetting and gun control laws based on the end of the article.
What is more alarming is the timing of the event and to what it led.
Could we be looking at a second 9/11 this Chri$tma$?
After the Democraps give you their A14 Christmas present, of course:
"Behind the scenes of impeachment: crammed offices, late nights, cold pizza" by Mark Leibovich and Nicholas Fandos New York Times, December 7, 2019
WASHINGTON — History can get cluttered sometimes. The rooms are littered with empty soda cans, pie leftover from Thanksgiving, and boxes pulled from shelves containing files from past impeachments. There are recurrent calls for tech support, caffeine, and blankets, because the rooms can get cold, like the pizza.
Norman L. Eisen, one of the Democrats’ special oversight counsels on the Judiciary Committee, is consulting through the weekend with a procession of staff and lawmakers, while Jerrold Nadler, the New York Democrat who’s the Judiciary chairman, has been shuttling in recent days between the workspaces of his committee and the Capitol offices of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the final decision maker on the wording of an expected two to four articles on presidential abuse of power, obstruction of justice and obstruction of Congress, and an accompanying impeachment report that could stretch to hundreds of pages.
Why am I not surprised?
“I have 50 e-mails telling me, ‘Here’s what needs to be in the articles,’” said Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and a member of the Judiciary Committee. “Go broader! Go narrow! Everybody wants to have their say.”
This weekend, as in previous weeks, Democrats are also holding practice hearings inside the grand Ways and Means Committee room, which also serves as the backup House chamber and is kept at a perpetual frosty chill.
“We’re trying to avoid open-mic night,” said Representative Eric Swalwell of California, who is a member of both the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees. Saturday, they also released a 52-page report, “Constitutional Grounds for Presidential Impeachment,” based on weeks of staff research in dusty files to inform the coming debate.
The latest rehearsals are to prepare for a marathon hearing in the same room beginning Monday morning. Democratic lawyers for the Judiciary and Intelligence Committees will formally present the case for impeachment to lawmakers, while Republicans will be allowed equal time to rebut them. By the end of the week, the Judiciary Committee is likely to vote on the articles of impeachment, with a final vote on the floor of the House expected shortly before Christmas.
They really are rushing this scripted shit show through, aren't they?
If Pelosi has resisted one thing above all else, it is fostering the impression that Democrats relish impeachment as a strategic imperative allowing them a chance to flex their constitutional muscle against a rampaging president. Republicans say Pelosi is running a grandstanding spectacle but she continues to describe it as a solemn duty, performed, she has said, in sadness, but all that solemnity can be exhausting, and Democrats on the Judiciary Committee have turned to a text chain for moments of levity, exchanging GIFs, attaboys, and morale check-ins by phone.
Don't mess with her, either!
The Judiciary Committee is not the only center of action. The Intelligence Committee housed the investigation for its first two months, its members and staff sleeping little as they worked mostly in windowless chambers three stories below the Capitol.
That is what is known as a star chamber.
As with the Judiciary Committee hearings, as little as possible was left to chance before the cameras came on for five days of often-dramatic testimony. California Representative Adam B. Schiff, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, remains closely involved as aides from his committee and the judiciary panel work with Pelosi on drafting the articles of impeachment.
And it still failed!
Inside the Judiciary Committee offices, the all-nighter faces of the back-room ensemble belie the notion that they are engaged in a glamorous pursuit, however historic. The prep work unfolds in rooms that are accessible by haphazardly functioning key cards, and personal space is in short supply: The Democrats have packed their offices with extra desks and new shelving to hold all the paperwork they need at the ready......
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I'm wondering where the pizza came from, what with the Total Wine Ad on page A15 (while the state lies about the vapes that could kill you), and did you know that on this day in 1998, struggling to stave off impeachment, President Bill Clinton’s defenders forcefully pleaded his case before the House Judiciary Committee.
"Trump wants a review of toilets: Americans are flushing ‘10 times, 15 times’' by Johnny Diaz New York Times, December 7, 2019
President Trump is taking on Americans’ flushing habits and the country’s water efficiency standards.
“We have a situation where we’re looking very strongly at sinks and showers and other elements of bathrooms, where you turn the faucet on — in areas where there’s tremendous amounts of water, where the water rushes out to sea because you could never handle it — you turn on the faucet, you don’t get any water,” he said Friday at a White House meeting about small businesses and reducing red tape.
Trump also noted that “people are flushing toilets 10 times, 15 times as opposed to once” and that “they end up using more water,” according to a transcript of the discussion.
WTF is he talking about?
He said the federal Environmental Protection Agency was looking at the issue at his suggestion.
“So we’re looking at, very seriously, at opening up the standard. And there may be some areas where we’ll go the other route — desert areas. But for the most part, you have many states where they have so much water that it comes down — it’s called rain — that they don’t know, they don’t know what to do with it,” he said.
So what are we going to be told, let the shit sit in the toilet?
Or are we going to have to weigh it for carbon tax purposes?
Older toilets use as much as 6 gallons per flush, according to the EPA website. The agency also notes that recent advancements allow low-flow toilets to use 1.28 gallons or less per flush.
“This is 20 percent less water than the current federal standard of 1.6 gallons per flush,” the agency said.
In 1994, the National Energy Policy Act — part of which said that new water fixtures, including toilets, shower heads, and bath and kitchen faucets, had to have water-saving designs — went into effect.
Over the years, there has been criticism from conservative groups and regulatory opponents about the government regulating water flow as it relates to toilets and other plumbing fixtures that save water.
Forget about the lead and all the other shit in the water.
At the meeting on Friday, Trump also talked about new efficiency standards for light bulbs.
“They got rid of the light bulb that people got used to,” he said. “The new bulb is many times more expensive, and I hate to say it, it doesn’t make you look as good. Of course, being a vain person, that’s very important to me.”
“It gives you an orange look. I don’t want an orange look,” he added, to laughter at the table. “So we’ll have to change those bulbs in at least a couple of rooms where I am in the White House.”
That is when the light went on for me.
Why am I reading this shit?
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There is gold in that pooh yo know:
"Trump administration plans huge fee hikes for immigration records regarded as vital by genealogists" by Sydney Trent Washington Post, December 7, 2019
WASHINGTON — At a time when researching family history is booming, the nation’s immigration and citizenship agency has proposed dramatically hiking fees to access records from the first half of the 20th century. The move has outraged professional and amateur genealogists, who argue that the increase would effectively put valuable immigration information out of reach for many.
Just be careful with the test.
The waves of western and southern Europeans who came through Ellis Island at the turn of the century are included in the records, as are Jews who sought refuge from Nazi Germany before World War II and Mexican guest farmworkers who helped stem the labor shortage during the conflict. They were followed by Holocaust survivors and those fleeing Communist rule in Central Europe and the Soviet Union.
At least you know which interests the pre$$ look out for.
The files sometimes include hundreds of pages, documenting long waits at Ellis Island or, in the case of Japanese, Italians, and Germans who lived in the United States during World War II, FBI reports about the immigrant’s friends, family, and political activities.
The fee increase ‘‘has to be very important to anyone who does hobbyist genealogy. It would make it impossible for most average people to access’’ the files, said Rich Venezia, a Pittsburgh-based professional genealogist who teaches courses on how to obtain the US Citizenship and Immigration Services records.
Venezia is spearheading a public campaign to persuade the agency, now under the leadership of acting deputy homeland security secretary Ken Cuccinelli, to withdraw the fee hikes before the window for public comment closes Dec. 16.
US Citizenship and Immigration Services officials declined to explain exactly how they arrived at the new fee amounts, but the agency has said that it must increase fees across the board — including substantial hikes for green card and citizenship applications — to avoid a $1.26 billion annual budget shortfall. By law, USCIS must fund itself through fees.....
All of this was brought about by the search of Mendelsohn and Calzareth, who discovered precisely why his divorced great-grandparents had remarried after escaping the German invasion of Czechoslovakia and immigrating to the United States in 1940 after calling as a witness their rabbi who testified that they were still married under Jewish law.
Pretty much what we are living under now when you think about it.
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"When a DNA test says you’re a younger man, who lives 5,000 miles away" by Heather Murphy New York Times, December 7, 2019
Chris Long of Reno had become a chimera, the technical term for the rare person with two sets of DNA. The word takes its name from a fire-breathing creature in Greek mythology composed of lion, goat, and serpent parts. Doctors and forensic scientists have long known that certain medical procedures turn people into chimeras, but where exactly a donor’s DNA shows up — beyond blood — has rarely been studied with criminal applications in mind.
Uh-oh!
Tens of thousands of people get bone marrow transplants every year for blood cancers and other blood diseases including leukemia, lymphoma, and sickle cell anemia. Although it’s unlikely that any of them would end up as the perpetrator or victim of a crime, the idea that they could intrigued Long’s colleagues at the Washoe County Sheriff’s Department, who have been using their (totally innocent) colleague in IT as a bit of a human guinea pig.
The implications of Long’s case, which was presented at an international forensic science conference in September, have now captured the interest of DNA analysts far beyond Nevada.
The average doctor does not need to know where a donor’s DNA will present itself within a patient. That’s because this type of chimerism is not likely to be harmful. Nor should it change a person. “Their brain and their personality should remain the same,” said Dr. Andrew Rezvani, medical director of the inpatient Blood & Marrow Transplant Unit at Stanford University Medical Center, but for a forensic scientist, it’s a different story. The assumption among criminal investigators as they gather DNA evidence from a crime scene is that each victim and each perpetrator leaves behind a single identifying code.....
I believe people remain the same after transfusions; otherwise, certain behavior would have changed.
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Yeah, it's getting to the point where I am gasping for breath due to the stench.
I wonder if Epstein played video games.
Now back to business, and as for the rest of us, may all your Christmas wishes come true as Santa tallies the votes so don't boil over with frustration (at least Mussolini made the trains on time).
Enjoy the Dolly Parton show, for it is in Dolly they trust.
