March 31, 2016

The Disappearance of Hillary Clinton's Healthcare Platform

What would happen if the media lifted the curtain on Clinton's healthcare platform and introduced any level of scrutiny to her proposed improvements on the Affordable Care Act?

In an extraordinary magic trick, performed on a national scale, Hillary Clinton's healthcare platform has been disappeared. While policy analysts, news anchors, and columnists have been engaged in an intense debate over Bernie Sanders’s “Medicare for All” proposal, Clinton’s incremental alternative has escaped almost all scrutiny - even among those who say they prefer it.

Combining the election-season writings of our most prolific, liberal-leaning columnists at the New York Times, Huffington Post, Vox, Mother Jones, Politico, The American Prospect, etc. you’ll find dozens of articles critiquing Sanders's single-payer plan. None have mentioned a single Clinton healthcare proposal as a point of comparison - merely that she supports a philosphy of incremental reform.

Read More: http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/03/30/disappearance-hillary-clintons-healthcare-platform

March 31, 2016

Donald Trump Withdraws His Pledge To Support The GOP Nominee

Republican front-runner Donald Trump said Tuesday he doesn’t plan to honor his pledge to support the party’s nominee for president if it’s not him. Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas) and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, Trump’s rivals, also backed away from similar pledges, inserting a new kind of acrimony into the already heated race.

“No, I don’t anymore,” Trump told CNN’s Anderson Cooper during a town hall event in Wisconsin, when Cooper asked if Trump still planned to adhere to the pledge he signed last fall.

“I have been treated very unfairly” by the Republican National Committee, Trump said without elaborating.

Read More: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-republican-pledge_us_56fb3223e4b083f5c6060042

March 30, 2016

Trump Reverses on Abortion Ban, Saying Doctors Would Be Punished

Source: Bloomberg.com


Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump walked back his statement that there would “have to be some form of punishment” for women who have abortions if the procedure were outlawed in the U.S.

The comment, which immediately riled abortion-rights supporters, came during a week where Trump is fighting to defend himself on women’s issues on multiple fronts ahead of a key primary in Wisconsin, and led his campaign to issue two clarifications on Wednesday afternoon.

"This issue is unclear and should be put back into the states for determination," Trump said in a written statement e-mailed to Bloomberg Politics Wednesday afternoon. "Like Ronald Reagan, I am pro-life with exceptions, which I have outlined numerous times."

As his initial remarks continued to draw scrutiny, Trump issued a second statement later in the day.


Read more: http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-03-30/trump-says-abortion-ban-should-carry-punishment-for-women

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psychotic fascist flip flopper

March 30, 2016

Hard Proof That Hillary Clinton Has Been Losing to Bernie Sanders for a Month Now

"In the first month of the current, five-and-a-half month Democratic primary season, Hillary Clinton scored 60 percent of the available delegates — 59.8 percent, to be exact.

Since then, Clinton has edged Sanders in the delegate hunt by a mere 2.2 percent — 51.1 percent to 48.9 percent.

For the sake of brevity, let’s say that it’s been a 51 percent to 49 percent race since March 1st.

If the rather conservative projections for the upcoming Wisconsin and Wyoming votes turn out to be correct, that post-March 1st Clinton lead will narrow to 50.5 percent to 49.5 percent — a one percent differential — heading into the big primary in New York on April 19th. If Sanders over-performs in these two pre-New York votes to any degree — keeping in mind that in Alaska, Hawaii, and Washington he out-performed projections by between 40 and 50 points — he will pull ahead in the post-March 1st delegate count."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/seth-abramson/hard-proof-that-hillary-clinton-has-been-losing-to-bernie-sanders-for-a-month-now_b_9567212.html


This is one heck of an article worth reading.

March 30, 2016

Twelve Detroit Principals Charged With Swiping $1 Million in School-Supplies Kickback Scheme

Source: Slate

A two-year corruption investigation into the Detroit Public Schools led to federal charges Tuesday for a dozen current and former principals who stand accused of stealing nearly $1 million in a bribery-and-kickback scheme based on the school system’s procurement of school supplies from an outside vendor. The Detroit Public School System is the largest in the cash-strapped state and needed emergency-funding legislation signed on Tuesday by the governor to keep the schools open through the end of the school year.

Here’s the crux of the corruption scheme from the Associated Press:

Fraudulent invoices were submitted for chairs, paper and other supplies. Some supplies were never delivered, and in other cases, the quantity of supplies delivered was less than ordered. The vendor, Allstate Sales, received $2.7 million from the cash-strapped district, while the school officials, who apparently didn’t know others were involved in the scheme, received kickbacks of more than $900,000 in cash, gift cards and checks.

More at link and a lot more at the ABC News site:
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/snyder-signs-487m-emergency-aid-detroit-schools-38003784

Read more: http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/03/29/twelve_detroit_principals_charged_in_school_supplies_kickback_scheme.html

March 30, 2016

I can't stand the undecided.

How do people who say they are undecided show up at a caucus? If they're that wishy washy not to even check on candidates to see what they're about what are they doing getting up early and going to a caucus?

Then when the groups talk to them about the pluses and minuses they pick the candidate who is against all they say they are for.

I don't get it. I feel like they're people who show up to purposely get attention.

I'd prefer spending my time with a trump voter, a gun nut, a cruz fanatic.... than an undecided. At least the list of people I can't stand won't come off as completely ingenuine and dishonest. They can pick a friggen direction and be open about it.

I moved this here from General discussion because it's political.

March 29, 2016

How Hillary Clinton's State Department Sold Fracking to the World

CommonDreams threw this 2014 article up on their page today. I thought it was worth repeating:


One icy morning in February 2012, Hillary Clinton's plane touched down in the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, which was just digging out from a fierce blizzard. Wrapped in a thick coat, the secretary of state descended the stairs to the snow-covered tarmac, where she and her aides piled into a motorcade bound for the presidential palace. That afternoon, they huddled with Bulgarian leaders, including Prime Minister Boyko Borissov, discussing everything from Syria's bloody civil war to their joint search for loose nukes. But the focus of the talks was fracking. The previous year, Bulgaria had signed a five-year, $68 million deal, granting US oil giant Chevron millions of acres in shale gas concessions. Bulgarians were outraged. Shortly before Clinton arrived, tens of thousands of protesters poured into the streets carrying placards that read "Stop fracking with our water" and "Chevron go home." Bulgaria's parliament responded by voting overwhelmingly for a fracking moratorium.
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Clinton urged Bulgarian officials to give fracking another chance. According to Borissov, she agreed to help fly in the "best specialists on these new technologies to present the benefits to the Bulgarian people." But resistance only grew. The following month in neighboring Romania, thousands of people gathered to protest another Chevron fracking project, and Romania's parliament began weighing its own shale gas moratorium. Again Clinton intervened, dispatching her special envoy for energy in Eurasia, Richard Morningstar, to push back against the fracking bans. The State Depart­ment's lobbying effort culminated in late May 2012, when Morningstar held a series of meetings on fracking with top Bulgarian and Romanian officials. He also touted the technology in an interview on Bulgarian national radio, saying it could lead to a fivefold drop in the price of natural gas. A few weeks later, Romania's parliament voted down its proposed fracking ban and Bulgaria's eased its moratorium.

The episode sheds light on a crucial but little-known dimension of Clinton's diplomatic legacy. Under her leadership, the State Department worked closely with energy companies to spread fracking around the globe—part of a broader push to fight climate change, boost global energy supply, and undercut the power of adversaries such as Russia that use their energy resources as a cudgel. But environmental groups fear that exporting fracking, which has been linked to drinking-water contamination and earthquakes at home, could wreak havoc in countries with scant environmental regulation. And according to interviews, diplomatic cables, and other documents obtained by Mother Jones, American officials—some with deep ties to industry—also helped US firms clinch potentially lucrative shale concessions overseas, raising troubling questions about whose interests the program actually serves.

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/09/hillary-clinton-fracking-shale-state-department-chevron

March 27, 2016

The Huffington Post nearly skips Bernies wins today

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

check it out.

And what do they tell us first when we click into see the results - they say it's all about the delegates.

A completely deflating view of Bernies win.

March 24, 2016

Microsoft Chat Bot Goes On Racist, Genocidal Twitter Rampage

Source: Huffington Post

Here’s a clear example of artificial intelligence gone wrong.

Microsoft launched a smart chat bot Wednesday called “Tay.” It looks like a photograph of a teenage girl rendered on a broken computer monitor, and it can communicate with people via Twitter, Kik and GroupMe. It’s supposed to talk like a millennial teenage girl.

Less than 24 hours after the program was launched, Tay reportedly began to spew racist, genocidal and misogynistic messages to users

"To be clear, Tay learned these phrases from humans on the Internet. As Microsoft puts it on Tay’s website, “The more you chat with Tay the smarter she gets, so the experience can be more personalized for you.” Trolls taught Tay these words and phrases, and then Tay repeated that stuff to other people."

Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/microsoft-tay-racist-tweets_us_56f3e678e4b04c4c37615502