Zira
Zira's JournalDonald Trump Wants To Remind White People That Gun Violence Is A Black Problem
Source: Huffington Post
WASHINGTON — Nailing down specifics about Donald Trump’s policies is exhausting. He makes things up, changes his mind and neglects details. One of the six issues he’s actually fleshed out on his campaign website concerns gun rights, where he says he will combat gun violence by bringing back measures like Project Exile, a 1990s-era state-federal partnership.
Trump doesn’t seem to realize that Project Exile never really ended — it still exists, and parts of it have expanded nationwide. His proposal doesn’t really make sense, but it does serve his purposes: It focuses on cities, where his overwhelmingly white base doesn’t live. It locks up “drug dealers and gang members,” not “law-abiding gun-owners.” It doesn’t address other routine forms of gun violence, like shootings by toddlers, family members, domestic abusers, countless legal gun owners, or mass shooters such as Dylann Roof and Elliot Rodger. And for people like Trump, it also makes a great racist dog-whistle. (The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.)
“Violent crime in cities like Baltimore, Chicago and many others is out of control,” Trump warns in his online pitch for resurrecting the still-extant program, citing two of the American cities with the highest number of black residents. “Drug dealers and gang members are given a slap on the wrist and turned loose on the street.“
Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-gun-violence-black-problem_us_56fd7a72e4b0a06d58053e40
The CRUX of the story:
"The program created a partnership between state and federal law enforcement that pushed for certain firearms cases to be prosecuted in federal court, where defendants faced harsher prison sentences. The possibility of getting locked up without bail or the possibility of parole and being shipped to a federal prison far from home — or “exiled” — was supposed to convince people to put down their weapons. The initiative included a public information campaign warning Richmonders that “an illegal gun will get you five years in federal prison.”
“Based on the way those programs are implemented ... you are going to have a significantly higher number of minorities, specifically black and African-American minorities, negatively impacted,” said Robyn McDougle, an associate professor of criminal justice at Virginia Commonwealth University. But those communities were also more likely to be victimized by violent crime, she added, so focusing resources there made sense."
"Supporters celebrated Project Exile’s success. “Drug dealers, gangs and felons stopped carrying guns,” NRA chief Wayne Lapierre said in 2013, at a congressional hearing where he repeatedly touted the program. The NRA was a big backer of Project Exile in the ‘90s, and it remains one of the few gun enforcement measures that the group regularly supports."
"Trump claims the initiative was “tremendous” and plans to “bring back and expand” programs like it.
Top Black Staffers Leave The Republican National Committee
Source: Huffington Post
The Republican National Committee is losing the person who leads the GOP’s outreach to black communities, as first reported by NBC News and confirmed by The Huffington Post.
Kristal Quarker-Hartsfield, the national director of African-American Initiatives at the RNC, is leaving the organization to work for Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) as his director of intergovernmental affairs. Her last day is set to be Friday, and she is the second black top staffer to depart the RNC this month.
Quarker-Hartsfield joins several other staffers of color who have departed the RNC recently. Orlando Watson, communications director for black media, left earlier this month. Tara Wall and Raffi Williams, son of Fox News political analyst Juan Williams, both left their press positions at the RNC late last year.
Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/rnc-black-staffers_us_56fd4b3fe4b083f5c6070348
Maybe just a few are moving around to reach out to more Republicans.
I think the point of the article is that if Trump gets elected they may find working there is a problem.
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
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
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
psychotic fascist flip flopper
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.
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
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.
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.
.
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
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.
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