malaise
malaise's JournalThe Miss USA hopeful sued by Don the Con - what Trump’s shock-and-awe legal tactics could mean
in an Oval Office setting
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/04/sheena-monnin-donald-trump-miss-usa-lawsuit
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During that competition, according to Monnin, another contestant, Karina Brez of Florida, insisted to several women backstage mid-pageant that she already knew who the top five final contestants would be, and specifically, that she had seen the names of the pre-selected women listed in a notebook at the back of the stage.
Though Monnin never saw such a notebook herself, when contestants Brez had predicted were later selected, Monnin came to the conclusion that the pageant was rigged.
The Trump Organization denied allegations of favoritism and Brez later said what she had seen was a “rehearsal list” and that she was “joking”. Brez did not return the Guardian’s requests for comment.
But this year, Miss Universe judge Jeff Lee admitted in GQ that Trump – who from 1996 to 2015 owned or co-owned both Miss Universe and Miss USA – frequently had a say in which women made the final round. According to the story’s author, Burt Helm: “Lee will tell you that from 2005 until Donald Trump sold the Miss Universe pageant last year, the billionaire quietly handpicked as many as six semifinalists – ‘Trump cards’, they were called.” Helm said that lower-level beauty pageant picks were so often subject to “massaging” that this was considered an “open secret” among former contestants.
Trump and Atlantic City: the lessons behind the demise of his casino empire
Read more
If so, this “open secret” had not been shared with Monnin, and she resigned her Miss Pennsylvania crown in protest.
Let's Undo Don the Con's bullshit
&feature=youtu.beThis is how you destroy assholes.
Serena Williams earns 307th Grand Slam match victory
One to go to have the most grand slams wins in the Open era - female and male
Serena Williams cruises into U.S. Open fourth round1:10
Another win, another milestone for Serena Williams who rolled into the U.S. Open last 16 on Saturday by crushing Sweden's Johanna Larsson 6-2, 6-1 to collect Grand Slam victory number 307 - the most by a woman in the Open era.
As in the majority of her victories at the majors, Williams operated with ruthless efficiency but displayed little fire as she coolly dispatched the 47th-ranked Swede in exactly one hour.
The win moved the 34-year-old American past Martina Navratilova and level with Roger Federer for most Grand Slam victories by a man or woman.
Must Read -Facing my fear: when I moved back to America, I felt like a foreigner
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/02/facing-my-fear-moving-to-america-inequality-experience<snip>
I was at a red light in east Baltimore when I noticed a cop in my rearview mirror. I thought nothing of it and pulled away when the light changed. Then I saw him start to follow me, flashing the lights on his patrol car.
What did I do, I thought? It was 1985, and I’d just moved from Montreal to start medical school at Johns Hopkins. Puzzled, I pulled my cherry-red BMW to the curb and waited.
Tell us about a time you faced your fear
I watched him approach, his hand on his holster.
“I got you, boy!”
I was stunned. “You got me? I said. “What are you talking about?”
“License and registration,” he chuckled.
I handed him my license and registration, which were from Quebec. He looked at them suspiciously. He went back to his car and got on the radio.
After what seemed like an eternity, he returned. He threw my license and registration back at me. “Go on your way,” he snarled.
This story is familiar for many African American men. But it was the exact opposite of what I’d come to expect from police growing up in Montreal where, as a seven-year-old boy, two cops came to my rescue and retrieved my stolen bicycle. That made a big impression on me as a kid.
But I still had an American dream. Although I lived in Canada, I actually was an American, born in East Baltimore not far from where the cop stopped me. My family moved when I was two years old.
So when I had the chance to attend medical school in America, I took it. I’d always had a strong affinity for the black experience in the United States, almost like a homing signal calling me back to Baltimore.
But as a medical student working in the ER at the height of both the crack and Aids epidemics, I discovered a very different America from the one in my dreams. And despite my efforts and my imaginings, my worst fear came true: I did not feel American.
These were my people, but no amount of pills or surgery could cure what plagued the community
I felt no connection to the city of my birth – no familiarity with its norms. I had been plunged into a harsh dystopian American reality that was deeply segregated, fractured, polarized and unwelcoming. I did not sense a role for me. I felt like a “brother from another planet”.
Growing up in Canada as the son of West Indian immigrants, I had a very different perspective on issues like race and class than my African American classmates at John Hopkins. I never felt like I didn’t belong where I lived.
Hermine's destruction and her dangerous road ahead
Residents look at Alligator Point Road, which collapsed during the storm surge from Hurricane Hermine at Alligator Point, Florida on September 2, 2016. (Mark Wallheiser/Getty Images)
Hermine is being fed by unusually high amounts of atmospheric water vapor, and continues to dump very heavy rains along its path. According to the 11 am Saturday NOAA Storm Summary, the top rain amount in North Carolina was 13.34” at Cedar Island; South Carolina’s highest was 9.93” at Myrtle Beach AFB, and Georgia’s highest amount was 6.37” at Alma. Hermine had already dumped 3.95” on Virginia Beach, Virginia, with more rain to come.
Hermine’s strange journey ahead: a unusual danger for the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast coast
Despite its new classification as a post-tropical system, Hermine will continue to be tracked through advisories by the National Hurricane Center until it no longer poses a threat to land. They will have a difficult job: over the next few days, Hermine will take one of the oddest and most unsettling trajectories in memory for a named storm along the U.S. East Coast. The upper-level trough that pulled Hermine northeastward is now leaving it behind, and steering currents will become very weak. As a result, Hermine will spin for several days in the region east of the Mid-Atlantic and south of New England, gradually working its way northward. Because Hermine will be slowing to a crawl close to the north edge of the Gulf Stream on Sunday and Monday, it will be near or atop sea-surface temperatures of 26-28°C (79-82°F), which is at least 2°C above average and more than warm enough to support tropical development. Instability in the atmosphere will be enhanced by some residual cold air aloft, a fragment of the departing trough. As a result of all this, Hermine is likely to re-organize from Sunday into Monday into a more symmetric, warm-core system, perhaps embedded within the weak upper low fragment.
Jane Mayer - Roger Ailes, the Clintons, and the Scandals of the Scandalmongers - brilliant
http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/roger-ailes-the-clintons-and-the-scandals-of-the-scandalmongers<snip>
his election year, the big question was supposed to be whether Hillary Clinton would shatter the glass ceiling. Instead, it has become the year in which one of the country’s most towering glass houses has shattered. Few people may remember it now, but Fox News, which Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation launched in 1996, became a ratings leader largely because of its gleefully censorious coverage of Bill Clinton’s sex scandals. Now the network is mired in its own scandal. Last month, Roger Ailes resigned as Fox News’s chairman and C.E.O. in the face of multiple allegations of sexual harassment, including a lawsuit filed against him by the former anchor Gretchen Carlson. (Ailes has denied Carlson’s allegations.) The unfolding embarrassment at the network poses a host of questions—not the least of which is how the network’s executives justified their Javert-like pursuit of Clinton’s extramarital affairs, given their boss’s own repeated sexual misconduct. If you go back and look carefully at the chronology, some of Ailes’s most egregious alleged harassment of women was taking place at the same time that Fox News was suggesting that Clinton deserved to be impeached. Sexual harassment is a serious issue, and it merits serious coverage, but it’s hard to believe that the suits at Fox were motivated by genuine concern, given their own corporate culture.
Gabriel Sherman, in his 2014 book “The Loudest Voice in the Room,” describes how brilliantly and relentlessly Ailes exploited Clinton’s scandalous affair with the White House intern Monica Lewinsky in order to build Fox News’s brand. Sherman writes, “Whatever else it was, the scandal was a media bonanza, and no medium benefited from it more than cable news—and no cable channel more than Fox News.” Within hours of the Lewinsky story breaking, in January, 1998, Ailes inaugurated a new nightly show devoted to the melodrama, and assigned five producers and correspondents to cover it. No detail was too sordid for Fox to cover. With Ailes, a former Republican political operative, at the helm, Fox covered the affair as a criminal act, and rode the story straight up the cable-ratings charts. “Monica was a news channel’s dream come true,” John Moody, Fox’s executive editor, once admitted.
Fox News has devoted considerably less attention to its own sex scandal. When the network announced Ailes’s departure, his alleged improprieties were not mentioned. Carlson’s attorneys told the Guardian that at least twenty women have accused Ailes of sexually harassing them throughout his career. Carlson and the anchor Megyn Kelly, who has also reportedly alleged that she was harassed by Ailes, are the best known among these women, but the story of Laurie Luhn, the former head of booking for Fox News, is especially damning.
Luhn’s account, if true, suggests that, at precisely the same time Ailes was leading Fox’s breathless coverage of the Clinton-impeachment proceedings, Ailes, who was married, was paying Luhn—who was single, broke, and decades younger—to service him sexually. In a recent blockbuster interview with Sherman, in New York, Luhn said that she met Ailes in 1988. Soon afterward, Ailes began paying her a monthly retainer, for sex and for private research on his competitors. When he helped launch Fox, in 1996, Luhn said, Ailes offered her a staff job in “guest relations.” Over time, her job descriptions at Fox changed, but Ailes, whom Luhn described as a “predator,” did not. She told Sherman that her twenty-year involvement with Ailes had been “psychological torture.” As she grew increasingly unhappy, she said, Ailes grew more controlling, insisting that she tell no one of their sexual relations. Luhn told Sherman that Ailes kept an incriminating videotape of her in a safe-deposit vault, as a form of insurance. By 2011, however, Luhn said, she had informed Fox’s general counsel that Ailes had sexually harassed her for decades. All of this might sound hard to believe, and Luhn has acknowledged a history of psychological difficulties. But Ailes and his lawyers declined an invitation from Sherman to rebut Luhn’s story. Moreover, in 2011, Fox agreed to pay Luhn an astounding $3.15-million severance agreement, which included nondisclosure clauses. It looks a lot like hush money, paid for with corporate funds and handled by multiple Fox executives. Yet, if silencing Luhn was the aim, it hasn’t worked. Luhn was reportedly among the first women to contact investigators hired by Fox, in the wake of Carlson’s lawsuit, to straighten out the twisted truth about sexual harassment at the company.
Fox viewers were, of course, left in the dark about Ailes’s personal life as the network relentlessly exposed Clinton’s private life. The campaign was nearly successful. On December 19, 1998, the Republican-ruled House of Representatives voted to impeach Clinton on two articles, for perjury and obstruction of justice, contending that he had lied under oath about his extramarital affair with Lewinsky. The Senate eventually acquitted Clinton, after a highly partisan trial.
Read it all - how did I miss this??
By the way the other corporate media has not given this enough coverage
Let's be clear
ReTHUGs want Don the Con to win the election.
Think about that - they want this racist, fascist, unethical con man who will not even declare his taxes
Man uses police 'most wanted' picture
for his Facebook Profile - police use it to track him down
Bwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!
http://crime.blog.palmbeachpost.com/2016/09/01/stuart-police-man-uses-own-wanted-poster-for-facebook-profile-photo/
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Stuart police arrested Mack Yearwood Tuesday on outstanding warrants from Citrus County, on Florida’s Gulf Coast. Officers say Yearwood used his “Wanted of the Week” poster from that county as his Facebook profile photo.
Police used the photo to help identity him as a suspect in a reported disturbance from Monday night at a home in Stuart. An officer who responded to the disturbance informed other investigators of Yearwood’s warrants, a department spokesman said. An officer checked a Facebook page, where Yearwood appeared to proudly display his wanted status.
Yearwood was located Tuesday and arrested on two warrants. He asked to put on a pair of jeans lying on the floor near his bed. As he got dressed, a bag of marijuana fell out of his pocket, police said.
A charge of possession of cannabis under 20 grams was added. Jail records indicate that Yearwood works as a carpenter for a construction company in Jupiter. He was wanted by Citrus County authorities for violation of probation on two counts of battery, police said.
Obama makes climate change personal with call for action in home state Hawaii
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/sep/01/obama-climate-change-hawaii-nevada<snip>
Barack Obama has issued perhaps his most personal plea yet to overcome the existential threat posed by climate change.
The US president gave two major speeches on climate change in the space of a day, one in Nevada and another in Hawaii, after Air Force One managed to safely dodge two hurricanes lurking in the Pacific.
“No nation, not even one as powerful as the United States, is immune from a changing climate,” Obama told an audience of Pacific island leaders in Honolulu.
“I saw it myself in our more northernmost state of Alaska, where the sea is swallowing villages and eating away at shorelines, where the permafrost thaws and the tundra is burning. Where glaciers are melting at a pace unprecedented in modern times. It’s a preview of our future if the climate changes faster than our efforts to address it.”
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GObama!
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