Trump Appointee Who Tweeted About "Some Muslim Piece Of Shit" Fired

A massage therapist and former Donald Trump campaign operative with a history of making disparaging remarks about Muslims on Twitter is no longer employed with the Department of Energy, following a BuzzFeed News inquiry, and a story from Greentech Media, about his tweets and status, a department spokesperson told BuzzFeed News his employment at the agency ended on Friday.

According to two employees at the nuclear weapons agency, who asked to remain anonymous, Sid Bowdidge, 60, began working at the department following President Trump’s inauguration. An internal department database identified the New Hampshire Trump campaign worker as “assistant to the secretary,” a nebulous title given to political appointees at varied levels of responsibility.

Though such assistants may or may not be involved in science or policy decisions, this week he attended a staff meeting for the Office of Technology Transitions, an office established two years ago to help private companies incorporate technology developed at the department’s national labs — among the world’s premier physics and nuclear weapons research facilities — in their products.
In the summer of 2015, Bowdidge identified himself as a massage therapist to NBC News during a viewing party at the Trump campaign’s New Hampshire headquarters in Manchester for the first GOP primary debate. BuzzFeed News also found an ad for his massage services on Backpage.com.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/dinograndoni/trump-appointee-who-tweeted-about-some-muslim-piece-of-shit?utm_term=.mk6qm6mMg#.yoYBvevMO


Way to bury the lede... A motherfucking massage therapist was special assistant to the Secretary of Energy??

MEANWHILE, in Los Angeles...

"Stories" like this make me want to stab something

When wrongful convictions affect blacks more than whites, can we call it a justice system?

Racial disparities have long been evident in the U.S. criminal justice system, but a new report drilling into statistics on wrongful convictions points up exactly how nefarious the problem is. African Americans are much more likely to be wrongfully convicted of a murder, sexual assault or drug offense than whites.

The report, by the National Registry of Exonerations, found that “innocent black people are about seven times more likely to be convicted of murder than innocent white people,” and thus also account for a disproportionate share of the growing number of exonerations. African Americans who were convicted and then exonerated of murder charges also spent four years longer on death row than wrongfully convicted whites (and three years longer for those sentenced to prison).

According to the report, African Americans convicted of murder “are about 50% more likely to be innocent than other convicted murderers,” and that such wrongful convictions, even when later corrected, expands the impact of violence on African American communities.

“A major cause of the high number of black murder exonerations is the high homicide rate in the black community — a tragedy that kills many African Americans and sends many others to prison,” says the report, written by Samuel R. Gross, a University of Michigan law professor, and registry researchers Maurice Possley and Klara Stephens. “Innocent defendants who are falsely convicted and exonerated do not contribute to this high homicide rate. They — like the families of victims who are killed — are deeply harmed by murders committed by others.”

Bias in the system becomes clear when looking at the races of the arrested suspects as well as the victims. Blacks are more likely to be wrongfully convicted of murder when the victim is white: “Only about 15% of murders by African Americans have white victims, but 31% of innocent African American murder exonerees were convicted of killing white people.”

Chillingly, black prisoners later exonerated of the crimes for which they were convicted were 22% more likely to have been targeted by police misconduct, a function of everything from malevolent individual racism by law enforcement and prosecutors to institutional discrimination.

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/opinion-la/la-ol-wrongful-convictions-race-20170307-story.html

Georgia Republicans Pass Racial Gerrymander to Kick Black Voters Out of GOP Districts

Georgia is starting to look like a swing state, and Republicans aren’t happy about it. In 2016, Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton by just 5 points, and demographic trends may continue to erode Republicans’ grasp on the state. Yet because of the state Legislature’s egregious gerrymandering, Republicans hold a near-supermajority in the state House. They’d like to regain an actual supermajority in 2018. So last week, the House passed a bill that would kick black voters out of several GOP districts, trading them for Republican-friendly white voters. The bill will become law with the approval of the Republican-controlled Senate and the signature of Republican Gov. Nathan Deal—both of which seem likely given the enthusiasm that the Georgia GOP has already shown for the measure.

As Aaron Gould Sheinin notes in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the gerrymandering bill was introduced with no prior notice and passed in just two days. Its Republican sponsors didn’t even bother to inform Rep. Sheila Jones, a Democrat, about it—despite the fact that it takes two (predominantly white) precincts from her district and gives her two (predominantly black) precincts in return. Republican Rep. Rich Golick will receive Jones’ white precincts. He, along with several other recipients of white-majority precincts, has seen his margins of victory narrow in recent years, hence the desire for more white voters.

Is this legal? Almost certainly not! Under the Equal Protection Clause, Georgia is barred from using race as the “predominant factor” in redistricting. Indeed, last Wednesday, the very same day Georgia Republicans introduced the bill, the Supreme Court affirmed that a gerrymander violates equal protection when a state “subordinates traditional race-neutral districting principles to racial considerations” and views race as the key criterion in redistricting.

Georgia Republicans do not even pretend to have a legitimate reason for this gerrymander. Indeed, they haven’t really attempted to explain why the bill is necessary at all. The timing is very strange—redistricting typically occurs after each decade’s census—and the purpose is obvious: to bolster Republicans’ electoral advantage by removing black voters from their districts and replacing them with whites.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2017/03/07/georgia_republicans_pass_racial_gerrymander.html


http://www.myajc.com/news/state--regional-govt--politics/democrats-cry-foul-house-republicans-redraw-district-lines/sOOXVi3vMCWJCB7gpAntTN/

Blackmail... Russian Hackers Said to Seek Hush Money From Liberal Groups

Russian hackers are targeting U.S. progressive groups in a new wave of attacks, scouring the organizations’ emails for embarrassing details and attempting to extract hush money, according to two people familiar with probes being conducted by the FBI and private security firms.

At least a dozen groups have faced extortion attempts since the U.S. presidential election, said the people, who provided broad outlines of the campaign. The ransom demands are accompanied by samples of sensitive data in the hackers’ possession.

In one case, a non-profit group and a prominent liberal donor discussed how to use grant money to cover some costs for anti-Trump protesters. The identities were not disclosed, and it’s unclear if the protesters were paid.

At least some groups have paid the ransoms even though there is little guarantee the documents won’t be made public anyway. Demands have ranged from about $30,000 to $150,000, payable in untraceable bitcoins, according to one of the people familiar with the probe.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-06/russian-hackers-said-to-seek-hush-money-from-liberal-u-s-groups

 Donald Trump Is Trying to Play Black Americans

Last week, Donald Trump stood in front of a joint session of Congress and announced his guest, Jamiel Shaw Jr. As the camera zoomed in on him, Shaw smiled with humility, and those around him stood up and clapped in his honor. “Jamiel’s 17-year-old son was viciously murdered by an illegal immigrant gang member, who had just been released from prison,” Trump said. “Jamiel Shaw Jr. was an incredible young man, with unlimited potential, who was getting ready to go to college where he would have excelled as a great quarterback. But he never got the chance.”

The joint session wasn’t Shaw’s first appearance with Trump. He tagged along with him on the campaign trail and even appeared in a Willie Horton–style campaign ad that touted Trump’s tough-on-immigration approach. “Trump is the only one saying: ‘You’re gonna be dealt with,’” Shaw says in the ad. But, as Bustle pointed out, between 2010 and 2014 the Department of Homeland Security counted only 121 people charged with murder after having been previously held by immigration officials, about 0.001 percent of the total number of undocumented immigrants in this country.

Trump chose to highlight Shaw’s case not because he wanted to emphasize the tragedy that is murder, or even just to stir up unfounded fears about the criminality of undocumented immigrants generally. He was doing something else too, something nefariously brilliant. By using Shaw, Trump was specifically pitting black Americans against undocumented immigrants, telling us that brown, undocumented immigrants will kill our families too. In doing so, Trump told us that our families matter, that we are Americans. For once, black Americans weren’t the subtext of dog-whistle politics but the intended audience.

The cynicism of this move comes into focus when we look at Trump’s actual agenda for black communities. Outside of the tragic stories like Shaw’s, black Americans don’t place quite as high on the chain anywhere else in Trump’s America. Take, for example, his recent executive order doubling down on and expanding protections for police officers. The order, Preventing Violence Against Federal, State, Tribal, and Local Law Enforcement Officers, will “enforce all Federal laws in order to enhance the protection and safety of Federal, State, tribal, and local law enforcement officers,” and “define new federal crimes, and increase penalties for existing federal crimes, in order to prevent violence” against officers. The order also aims to create definitions of “new crimes of violence” against officers and establish mandatory minimums for existing ones. Billed as a way to bolster safety and protection, the order is really a reaction against the Black Lives Matter movement and the Department of Justice’s agenda under President Obama, which investigated and scrutinized police departments across the country for infringing upon the civil rights of black and brown Americans.

https://www.thenation.com/article/donald-trump-is-trying-to-play-black-americans/

FCC blocks rules that stop internet providers from secretly selling your data

Federal officials have moved to block rules set out by the Obama administration requiring internet providers to protect customer data -- a day before they were expected to come into effect. The rules would have prevented internet providers, such as AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon, from selling customer data without their consent. Advertisers are increasingly pushing to gather more information on consumers, such as gender and race, as well as browsing history and the websites they visit, to better target advertising,

The rules, set out in October 2016, would impose stronger restrictions on internet providers who wish to provide customer information and data to advertisers. The rules also carve out data security requirements and compel internet providers to inform customers of data breaches. The rules say that customers have to explicitly opt-in to allow sharing of web browsing data, geolocation data, and health and financial information.

But FCC chairman, Ajit Pai, a Republican who previously served as a top Verizon lawyer, moved to prevent those rules from coming into effect. In a brief statement last month, Pai said that one of the previous administration's privacy rules "is not consistent" with the Federal Trade Commission's privacy standards. His argument was that the rules gave websites the ability to collect more customer data than internet providers, giving websites the edge in advertising.

Last year, when he voted against the rules under former Obama-appointed FCC chairman Tom Wheeler, Pai said in his dissenting opinion that consumers "should not have to be network engineers to understand who is collecting their data and they should not have to be lawyers to determine if their information is protected."

http://www.zdnet.com/article/fcc-chairman-moves-to-undo-rules-to-let-internet-providers-secretly-sell-your-data/

Bill introduced to ban Howard Zinn books from Arkansas public schools

The deadline for new legislation is fast approaching and it can't come too soon. Just in from Sen. Rep. Kim Hendren: Legislation to prohibit any publicly supported schools (you, too, charters) from including in curriculum or course materials any books or other material authored by Howard Zinn.

(Actually, anything Zinn wrote before 1959 is not covered.)

Zinn, who died in 2010, was a Ph.D. historian, social activist and more who wrote the best-selling "A People's History of the United States." A version for young readers came out in 2007.

He inspired a movie, documentaries and song. Dangerous stuff for the Arkansas student in one legislator's view.

http://m.arktimes.com/ArkansasBlog/archives/2017/03/02/bill-introduced-to-ban-howard-zinn-books-from-arkansas-public-schools

Final answer: Spain is a bunch of deviated preverts

Predictions abound of a Westworld-style near future, where sex robots are "normal" and holiday resorts offering sex dolls and x-rated androids operate in every city. The first signs? Barcelona has just become home to Europe's first sex-dolls agency.

Promoting itself as the first of its kind, Lumi Dolls offers four models of extremely realistic, large-breasted silicone dolls on its website: European Kati, blond with big lips and piercing green eyes, Asian Lili, African Leiza and blue-haired Aki, modeled after Japanese anime.

A session with one doll is around €120 per hour and the cost of each doll is $5,500.

“They are totally realistic dolls both in their movements and in their "feel," and they will allow you to fulfill all your fantasies without limits,” the website promises.

To make the experience “more pleasant and erotic,” the new business offers to dress and position the doll according to the client's desires, and in a private room where said client can listen to sensual music or watch pornography on a big plasma television.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ceciliarodriguez/2017/02/28/sex-dolls-brothel-opens-in-spain-and-many-predict-sex-robots-tourism-soon-to-follow/#6df269654ece

https://www.inverse.com/article/28508-sex-doll-brothel-robot-barcelona-lumi-dolls