January 9, 2017

Gavin Newsom understates Californias big drop in gun homicides

http://www.politifact.com/california/statements/2016/nov/16/gavin-newsom/gavin-newsom-understates-californias-rapid-drop-gu/

SNIP

Our ruling

California Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom said California has seen a "56 percent decline in the gun murder rate" since it enacted strong gun control laws in the 1990s.

Newsom appears to have mixed up the gun murder rate with the gun death rate. California’s gun murder rate dropped 67 percent between 1993 and 2014, according to a review of fatal injury report data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

A similar, though somewhat smaller, drop in the gun murder rate took place nationwide during this period.

Newsom’s overall point is correct: Gun deaths, including gun homicides, have dropped significantly in California since the state imposed the new laws.

We are not fact-checking the cause of this drop. Gun rights and gun control groups have different opinions on this.

What is clear is that gun homicides have declined significantly, and even faster than what Newsom stated.

His claim needs this key clarification.

We rate it Mostly True.

January 7, 2017

US ethics office struggled to gain access to Trump Team, emails show

The office tasked with overseeing ethics and conflicts in the federal government struggled to gain access to leaders of the Trump transition team, and warned Trump aides about making decisions on nominees or blind trusts without ethics guidance, according to new emails obtained by MSNBC.

Office of Government Ethics Director Walter Shaub emailed Trump aides in November to lament that despite his office's repeated outreach, "we seem to have lost contact with the Trump-Pence transition since the election."

Trump aides may also be risking "embarrassment for the President-elect," Shaub warned, by "announcing cabinet picks" without letting the ethics office review their financial information in advance.

The perils for White House staff were even more severe, Shaub argued, because they might begin their jobs without crucial ethics guidance, raising a risk of inadvertently breaking federal rules.

http://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/07/us-ethics-office-struggled-to-gain-access-to-trump-team-emails-show.html

January 7, 2017

New App Alerts Stockholders To Trumps Tweets

From the makers of the smartphone app Trigger:

We are excited to announce the release of our latest trigger type: Trump Triggers! This trigger gives you the ability to trade stocks based off of Trump’s tweets about public companies. This one-of-a-kind trigger notifies you when President-Elect Trump tweets about a publicly traded stock that you own in real time. These triggers can help you capture moves or manage your holdings based on the market’s reaction to the future President’s remarks.

While it’s no surprise that Trump has been actively tweeting since the election, no one anticipated that a single tweet could potentially eradicate billions of dollars in market cap from large companies. His tweets on prices and contracts with public companies have had significant market moving events that make it more difficult for the everyday investor to stay on top of their investments.

This increased political “tweet” risk is familiar to professional investors and hedge funds on Wall Street, which have traders 24/7, smart algorithms and models to account for this tweeting risk. However, individual investors do not have the appropriate tools to react in an automatic fashion, until now, with Trigger.
[link:http://thehill.com/policy/finance/312882-new-app-alerts-users-when-trump-tweets-about-stocks-they-own|
More from The Hill:]

http://thehill.com/policy/finance/312882-new-app-alerts-users-when-trump-tweets-about-stocks-they-own

January 7, 2017

Binary Stars To Merge, Explode In 2022

The prediction? Two stars, which are actually a contact binary (two stars that orbit each other, and also share a common atmosphere), about 1,800 light-years away in the Cygnus constellation, will merge and explode around 2022, and the event, which will lead to the formation of a red nova, will be visible to the naked eye when it occurs.

http://www.ibtimes.com/binary-stars-merge-explode-2022-first-its-kind-scientific-prediction-says-2471489

January 7, 2017

Whitelash

New Year’s day I wrote a full page letter to twenty of my friends stating if they supported Trump, and I knew three did, then there would be no further communication from me, ever. I detailed all the reasons, , treasonous, intolerant, xenophobic, misogynist, woman hating and abusing, racist, white supremacist, white nationalist, violent neo-Nazi, science denying, Russian apologist, Putin puppet etc. All but five responded positively to my letter, leaving the balance to be Trump supporters.

Two of those supporters have called me and we talked for about 30 minutes each. The gist of both conversations was that I was correct in my assessment, and this was why Trump was elected, and they were proud of it. They were proud to have the chance to destroy what Obama “has done to our country” by tearing down the government and remaking it into something totally different, and they hoped that now I would feel the way they have felt for the past eight years.

We are facing an annihilation level event here. From NC changing the power of the new governor, the apparent witch hunts of government agencies and the expected use of the Holman Rule to fire those they don’t like, no transition for ambassadors, killing congressional ethics, defunding PP, and the list goes on and on. They are not only going to get their way, they intend to exterminate all resistance in the future as payback for the last eight years.
The seething hatred of Obama crossed lines of politics into religion, sexual orientation, gender, AND race. I was surprised by the fact the conversations revolved around Obama and never once was Hillary mentioned. Is it racial hatred or policy hatred?

January 4, 2017

Dont Help Republicans Govern

by Adam Lee

[For 2017, I made a New Year’s resolution to make sure my elected officials hear from me more often. To hold myself accountable to that pledge, and hopefully to inspire others to do the same, I intend to post the letters I send on Daylight Atheism. I sent a version of this letter to my senators, Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand. Feel free to reuse it or adapt it for your own purposes.]

Dear Senator:

After Barack Obama was inaugurated in 2009, Mitch McConnell declared that Republicans’ top priority was to make him a one-term president. Over the following eight years, the GOP did their best to fulfill that promise by waging an unprecedented campaign of obstruction, including a constant drumbeat of phony scandals, frivolous lawsuits, concocted crises, and voting and filibustering in lockstep to block every Democratic idea, culminating in the absolute refusal to even consider President Obama’s eminently qualified Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/daylightatheism/2017/01/lww-01-dont-help-republicans-govern/

January 4, 2017

Trump wants federal help to stop Chicago gun violence. He should consider federal gun control.

The past year was very bad for gun violence in Chicago: The city had 762 murders and 4,331 shooting victims in 2016, with homicides increasing by 57 percent over 2015.

Donald Trump apparently wants to do something about it. In a vague tweet sent out earlier this week, the president-elect suggested that Chicago’s mayor should ask for “federal help” to deal with the city’s extraordinary levels of gun violence.

It’s unclear what kind of federal intervention Trump is referring to in his tweet, though his transition team said on a Tuesday press call that it’s open to ideas from the FBI. (In the past, Trump has brought up Chicago’s violence to justify a call for “tough on crime” policing tactics.)

But there is one way Trump could help curb gun violence in Chicago: a federal gun control law.

Trump, of course, is on the record opposing stricter gun control measures, often calling himself “a Second Amendment person.” But if he’s serious about stopping gun violence in Chicago, he should reconsider his stance — because the research shows that stricter gun control measures really do help reduce gun violence.

http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/1/4/14157438/trump-chicago-murder-guns

January 4, 2017

Creationist: Story of Beowulf is an Eyewitness Account of Humans Interacting with Dinosaurs

Charles Wolford, a reporter for Louisville Magazine, visited Ark Encounter on its opening day this past July, and his article about the experience is now available online. While most of it is about his day at the attraction and some background on Answers in Genesis — not news to anyone who’s been following this site — there’s one conversation Wolford had with AiG’s director of research Andrew Snelling that is just unbelievable, even for Creationists.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2017/01/03/creationist-the-story-of-beowulf-is-an-eyewitness-account-of-humans-interacting-with-dinosaurs/

January 4, 2017

Whats To Be Done About Donald Trumps Constant Tweeting?

A handy guide for journalists.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-twitter-journalists_us_586c037fe4b0eb58648ad66a

Since it would appear that President-elect Donald Trump is not going to give up using his Twitter account ― which is probably the one good thing the social media company’s share value has going for it ― it would seem that journalists have a new problem: figuring a way to keep Trump’s insomniac utterances from making a complete hash of their work.

snip

Back when Washington Post reporter David Weigel was writing for the Washington Independent, he faced a similar conundrum with former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who by the end of 2009 had taken to using Facebook as her communications medium of choice. As Weigel pointed out in a piece titled, “Why I Don’t Write About Sarah Palin’s Facebook Posts,” it was a key ingredient in a rather shrewd media strategy:

The problem is that Palin has put the political press in a submissive position, one in which the only information it prints about her comes from prepared statements or from Q&As with friendly interviewers. This isn’t something most politicians get away with, or would be allowed to get away with. But Palin has leveraged her celebrity — her ability to get ratings, the ardor of her fans and the bitterness of her critics — to win a truly unique relationship with the press. She is allowed to shape the public debate without actually engaging in it.


snip

Of course, at some point Trump will gain access to “@POTUS,” the legacy Twitter account established by the Obama administration. No matter how Trump uses it, It’s going to become tempting to view tweets from that account as the real deal ― the authentic voice of the White House. You might be inclined to accord that account full faith and credit. Don’t do this! As I said back when the Obama White House first built this infernal contraption, it doesn’t produce authentic events, either:

Anyone who thinks that this new outlet is going to be a venue for the president’s unvarnished, sincere opinion needs to get his head examined. And yes, that cute little exchange between Obama and former President Bill Clinton was absolutely a tidy bit of Oval Office kayfabe. Anything that gets posted to the @POTUS account will be vetted [by White House communications staff] within an inch of its life, and anything remotely interesting will be stripped out and watered down.

January 3, 2017

Another market mover tweet by Drump - blasts General Motors

GM shares, which were at $34.38 in premarket trading before the tweet, fell to a session low of $34.22, or about a $244 million hit to its market value. However, shares have since come back to about half of where they were before the tweet.
http://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/03/trump-blasts-general-motors-make-chevy-cruze-model-in-us-or-pay-big-border-tax.html

Ref: http://www.democraticunderground.com/10028344908#post31