pecosbob

pecosbob's Journal

December 6, 2018

Mueller, For First Time Publicly, Nods To Cleric Flynn Allegedly Plotted To Remove

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/for-first-time-publicly-mueller-nods-to-cleric-flynn-allegedly-plotted-to-remove

I've been waiting for this to come back into the news...

The sentencing memo that special counsel Robert Mueller filed Monday for Michael Flynn marked the first time in public filings that Mueller referenced a U.S.-based Turkish cleric who was the target of a kidnapping plot that the former National Security Advisor allegedly discussed with Turkish officials in 2016.

“The defendant’s false statements impeded the ability of the public to learn about the Republic of Turkey’s efforts to influence public opinion about the failed coup, including its efforts to effectuate the removal of a person legally residing in the United States,” Mueller’s filing said.

On a side note, guess who was also at that meeting? Everyone's favorite obstructionist Devin Nunes.

Also interesting to me is where Flynn chose to publish...The Hill, everyone's favorite right wing disinformation source.

December 6, 2018

Chairwoman Of PAC That Ran Racist Ad Appointed To Minority Affairs Office

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/pac-chairwoman-that-ran-racist-ad-appointed-to-minority-affairs-office

West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice appointed Jill Upson, chairwoman of a PAC called Black Americans for the President’s Agenda, to head West Virginia’s Herbert Henderson Office of Minority Affairs just months after her organization ran a racist ad about Democrats lynching black men.

The ad, which ran in late October for Rep. French Hill (R-AK), featured two seemingly black women discussing the likelihood that white Democrats would start lynching black men as part of the #MeToo movement.

Both Hill and Upson denounced the ad — Upson tried to wash her hands of any responsibility. “Upon listening to the ad last night, I contacted the organization’s founder and demanded that it be removed from the air and no longer played,” she wrote in a Facebook post. However, her words seemed to have had no effect on the playing of the ads.

December 6, 2018

Hey Michiganders...on Monday Michigan Republicans voted to take dollars out of your pocket

Michigan Republicans Just Repealed a Minimum Wage Increase During a Lame-Duck Session

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/12/michigan-republicans-minimum-wage-sick-leave-lame-duck-rick-snyder-gretchen-

Late this summer, it seemed almost inevitable that Michigan would be one of a handful of states this election cycle to pass ballot initiatives to increase the minimum wage and require paid sick leave. Both proposals received more than the required number of signatures to get on the ballot. But in early September, the state Legislature preempted the ballot measures and adopted the proposals. What would have seemed like a win for organizers quickly brought concern. Advocates feared that the Republican-controlled state Legislature had only made the decision so it could gut those new laws in the lame-duck session following the election.

And they were right. With just weeks before their majority dwindles in the state’s House and Senate and Michigan’s Republican Gov. Rick Snyder is replaced by Democrat Gretchen Whitmer, the GOP-stacked Legislature is rushing to rewrite the laws it previously adopted. Less than a week after a set of weakened versions of the minimum wage and paid sick leave laws passed the Senate, the House passed them late Tuesday evening as protests from the gallery echoed through the chamber. The bills now just await Snyder’s signature.

My question to Michiganders is what are you going to do about it?

December 5, 2018

Public servants...what non-pols would you like to acknowledge for their contributions to our society

Not talking celebrities here, but people who have proven themselves to be outstanding public servants despite not holding office.

I would like to take a step forward and celebrate the long years of public service by Amy Goodman, author, journalist and host of "Democracy Now'. I listened to Pacifica Radio in Houston as a boy and through the decades as Ms. Goodman (and Bill Moyer) brought 'real news' to all who might listen....all the stories the main stream press refused to cover. The KKK bombed the local transmitter and offices multiple times over the years for their efforts, but for almost fifty years I have been able to find the truth there, without any corporate slant or agenda. Kudos to Ms. Goodman and all those that work with her.

Just my wasted post of the day...

December 5, 2018

Rohrabacher's climate denial helped swing conservative California district, survey shows

https://thinkprogress.org/rohrabachers-poor-record-on-climate-helped-swing-conservative-california-district-survey-finds-72ba723e43fd/

California’s historic wildfires, combined with the climate denial views of one Republican incumbent, appear to have helped sway voters in the state to elect a Democrat in a longtime conservative congressional district during the midterm elections, new analysis shows.

On November 6, real estate developer Harley Rouda (D) defeated Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), a 15-term incumbent, to represent the 48th congressional district of California, which stretches along the Pacific coastline of Orange County from Seal Beach to Laguna Beach.

For the survey, voters in the district were asked questions about the election and the impact of the advertisement, titled “Fire & Smoke.” The script of the advertisement focused on wildfires and climate change:

While it gets hotter and fire and smoke choke our air, Dana Rohrabacher is radically opposed to efforts to fight climate change. He says that “global warming is a fraud.” Rohrabacher sided with fossil fuel companies and voted against a plan to reduce carbon dioxide pollution, saying they don’t hurt people’s health.

More than two thirds of voters in the district — including 71 percent of swing voters — recall having seen the climate advertisement.

The respondents cited Rohrabacher’s stance on climate change as a main reason for their opposition, along with his ties to Putin’s Russia, his opposition to the Affordable Care Act, the presidency of fellow Republican Donald Trump, and Rohrabacher’s 30-year tenure in Congress.

I hope this is a major part of the Dem platform for 2020...

December 5, 2018

FCC Chair Says 'Russian Email Addresses' Submitted Public Net Neutrality Comments

Though the Federal Communications Commission on Monday denied reporters’ requests for records relating to millions of public comments submitted last year about net neutrality, Chairman Ajit Pai made a surprising claim in justifying his decision: The Russians did it.

Oh, yeah? That's not what you said last year...

The FCC’s net neutrality decision-making process has been subject to scrutiny for months. Pai falsely claimed last year that the FCC’s public comment system had been the victim of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. In reality, according to an inspector general’s report, there were no such attacks, just a massive wave of comments, many due to a segment calling for public comments by HBO’s John Oliver.

Near the end of his statement justifying not releasing the comment data, Pai referred to a dissenting Democratic colleague on the commission, Jessica Rosenworcel, and noted “the fact that the half-million comments submitted from Russian e-mail addresses and the nearly eight million comments filed by e-mail addresses from e-mail domains associated with FakeMailGenerator.com supported her position on the issue!”

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/fcc-chair-says-russian-email-addresses-submitted-public-net-neutrality-comments

December 4, 2018

NC GOP Trying Again To Cement Control Of Local Elections Boards During Election Years

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/nc-gop-trying-again-to-cement-control-of-local-elections-boards-during-election-years

Even after a court called such a scheme unconstitutional, the GOP-controlled North Carolina legislature will try again to design county election boards to guarantee that Republicans have the chair in election years.

The new legislation would, in odd-numbered years, make the chair a board member who is from “the political party with the highest number of registered affiliates,” which are the Democrats in North Carolina. In even years, when statewide elections are held, the chair would be a board member who is from “political party with the second highest number of registered affiliates,” i.e. the GOP, under the legislation.

Do they know how bad this looks to the average voter?

December 4, 2018

'Ajit Pai has been able to escape scrutiny as head of Trump's FCC. That's about to change'.

Inside House Democrats’ Plans to Investigate the FCC and Net Neutrality

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/12/fcc-ajit-pai-house-democrats-investigations-net-neutrality-sinclair-att/

Comedians and the Federal Communications Commission have not always been the best of friends. But the conflict between HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver and the agency in charge of regulating the nation’s communications sector had nothing to do with the seven dirty words. Instead, it all started when Oliver told viewers to submit comments to the agency in an effort to revive net neutrality. The next day, the FCC claimed that an onslaught of comments following the segment had overwhelmed the agency’s comment system and had caused it to crash. The agency’s then-Chief Information Officer David Bray determined the large volume of comments had been the work of bots, the result of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, despite having experienced similar outages in 2014 after a different segment where Oliver urged his viewers to write the agency.

The problem? The alleged DDoS never happened. Over a year later, after an internal investigation into the matter was made public, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai admitted to Congress that the initial report that bots were responsible had been wrong; the system crashed because it couldn’t handle the number of authentic comments inspired by Oliver’s segment. After months of accusations from the press and lawmakers that the FCC had deceived the public about the attack, an answer was reached. But net neutrality was already dead. According to the agency’s own inspector general, the “FCC made several specific statements that we believe misrepresent facts about the event or provide misleading information [to Congress].”

December 2, 2018

Time Has Come

November 29, 2018

Thank you...a short note of appreciation for all of the little cogs that helped bring us to this day

All the people at Justice and Interior and State and other government departments that fought back against the GOPs attempts to dismantle the regulatory agencies of our government; the people that protected the vote during the mid-terms; all the people that stood up and said "No, that's not true," as they told us day was night and night was day.

The liars and the despoilers will now get their time in the barrel...people like Pruitt and DeVos and Prince and Kavanaugh and Manafort and Stone and Corsi, Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, ad infinitum. Yeah, Lindsey...you're next.

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Member since: Wed Oct 26, 2016, 05:18 PM
Number of posts: 7,534

About pecosbob

Don't take what I say too seriously...I'm a dumb-ass.

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