Monday, November 28, 2016

@realdonaldtrump Donald Trump and the Emoluments Clause, explained

Barring a major and unexpected change of course, Donald Trump will run the risk of violating the US Constitution on January 20, 2017 — the very first day he is sworn into the US presidency.

The breach stems from the massive conflicts of interest between his presidency and his business empire. Trump has a huge stake in a real estate holding underwritten with a loan from the Chinese government. He has tens of millions of dollars riding on building projects in Saudi Arabia. Foreign diplomats have already admitted to spending money at his hotels to curry favor with the president.

Trump has said that the president is exempted from the federal conflicts of interest regulations that usually bind elected officials — and he's right about that.

But that answer misses another big barrier presented by Trump's clinging to a sprawling business empire: that it will directly violate the Constitution.

The Constitution says that no elected official can take an "emolument" of "any kind whatever" from a king, prince, or foreign state. The restriction, known as "the Emoluments Clause," is intended to prevent political officials from receiving gifts from foreign governments.

Trump is putting himself on a course to do exactly that. The president-elect rode to office promising to "drain the swamp" and tamp down on corruption in Washington, DC. At least in the eyes of legal scholars, he instead looks poised to begin his presidency by breaking the highest law of the land for private gain.

And unless the Republican Party wants to do something about it, there's basically nothing standing in his way.

Why scholars think Donald Trump is on course to break the Constitution's Emoluments Clause

Now, a word of caution: There is not unanimity among scholars on the question of whether Donald Trump would be violating the Constitution by allowing foreign governments (and companies backed by foreign governments) from doing business with his private company.

But there does seem to be a fairly broad consensus forming. The issue comes down to the meaning of the "emolument" clause of the Constitution in Article I, Section 9. An "emolument" refers to compensation for a service or labor, according to the New York Times, which raises the question of whether foreign payments to Trump-owned businesses constitute forbidden emoluments.

On its own, scholars say, simply having his businesses continue to interact abroad may not necessarily mean Trump is running afoul of the Constitution. One issue is that no American president has ever had anything close to resembling Trump's international business ties. Nor is there any real case law or precedent for knowing how the courts would interpret the clause, since previous presidents have voluntarily chosen to either invest their assets in a blind trust or else in diversified index funds so the issue wouldn't arise.

"Trump's just dropped out of the sky here, and we don't know what happens when someone does that," says Bob Biersack, a senior fellow at the Center for Responsive Politics.

But Richard Painter, a constitutional lawyer and George W. Bush's former ethics lawyer, told ThinkProgress that the instant Trump's business sells anything above "fair market value" to a foreign government that it's clearly then considered a gift — and therefore a violation of the emoluments clause. (This was the same answer given to the Times by Norman Eisen, who was the chief White House ethics lawyer for Obama from 2009 to 2013. It's also one three separate experts agreed with in interviews with me on Tuesday.)

There's almost no way to imagine that this won't happen under the current arrangement. Trump's wide-ranging business will involve thousands of interactions across multiple countries, and in countries whose foreign governments' will have clear incentives to curry favor with the president. We'd have to believe that not a single one of them will ever do something that disproportionately helps Trump's private business — an idea which doesn't pass the laugh test.

"It's clearly prohibited," says Steven Schooner, a George Washington University law professor.

"The president cannot get a gift from a foreign government," says Jordan Libowitz, of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. "And it looks like he's going to do exactly that."

Painter also told ThinkProgress that the president-elect's name may alone jack up the "fair market value" of a property. Therefore, Trump products may already be considered a violation of the emoluments clause even if there's no direct proof that the foreign governments paid more than some abstract "fair market rate:"

Painter said, "I don't think you can take into account the value of the name Trump in calculating fair market value." The diplomats are not staying in one of Trump's expensive luxury hotels because Trump is charging their nations a reasonable market rate for a night's stay. They are staying in the hotel because of the added value that comes from doing business with the President of the United States.

One dissenter from this consensus has been Seth Barrett Tillman, a lecturer at the Maynooth University Department of Law in Ireland. Tillman has argued that Trump isn't on the hook here because the Constitution doesn't specify that the president is subject to the Emoluments Clause — an argument that both Fordham Law Professor Zephyr Teachout and Harvard's Laurence Tribe have dismissed.

Others have argued that the constitutional Emoluments Clause is clearly intended to be about gifts, and that merely having foreign investments does not appear to have been something the founders were particularly concerned with.

"This constitutional provision prevents the president (and any other federal officer) from accepting gifts or compensation from foreign states," David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey, two former George H.W. Bush administration officials, wrote today in the Washington Post. "It does not limit Trump's ability to benefit from dealings with non-state foreign entities."

Trump has an easy way out if he wants it — but he doesn't seem to

There is a solution to this mess, one Trump could easily find by looking at the actions of his predecessors.

In 2008, Barack Obama decided to liquidate his assets and convert them into treasury bonds and index funds. Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush all placed their assets in a blind trust. Even Jimmy Carter insisted on turning his Georgia peanut farm over to a trustee.

Instead, Trump's campaign has said that he's going to turn his company over to a "blind trust" managed by his kids.

The problem is that this setup isn't even in the same universe as a blind trust. The Trump children will certainly be in touch with him, if not serving informally or even formally in his administration. But even if we grant him that having his kids run the enterprise is a meaningful act of separation, there'll be nothing "blind" about it — Trump's name is emblazoned all over his buildings and hotels, and so it will be visible to everyone whether a foreign government can help his private business.



rest at http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/23/13715150/donald-trump-emoluments-clause-constitution

@realdonaldtrump Trump Lies That Millions Voted Illegally, And Mainstream Outlets Uncritically Echo Him

Media outlets failed to hold President-elect Donald Trump accountable for his false claim that "millions of people" illegally voted in the 2016 presidential election by failing to state in their headlines and tweets -- which are what most news consumers see -- that the allegation was a lie. The claim, which Trump used to dismiss his loss in the popular vote and to attack a recount effort in Wisconsin, was originally pushed by far-right "conspiracy-theory hawking" websites. Even though fact-checking organizations debunked the idea, numerous mainstream media outlets writing about the issue on social media and in headlines either reported Trump's lie without noting that it was false or hedged by writing only that it lacked evidence.

Trump Baselessly Claims Millions Voted Illegally In Election

Trump: "Millions Of People" Voted Illegally For Clinton. President-elect Donald Trump responded to an election recount in Wisconsin initiated by the Green Party by falsely claiming, "In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.'' The Los Angeles Times reported that the claim was "immediately denounced" by "election experts." From the November 27 article:

Donald Trump falsely claimed Sunday that he won the popular vote, alleging in a tweet — without evidence — that "millions" of people had illegally voted for his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.

"In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally," Trump wrote, hours after he tweeted his opposition to a recount in Midwestern states initiated by the Green Party.

Election experts, who say election fraud is rare, immediately denounced Trump's claim.

"There's been no evidence produced of millions – or thousands – or even hundreds – of noncitizens voting for president in 2016," tweeted Rick Hasen, a professor of law and politics who writes for the Election Law Blog. [Los Angeles Times, 11/27/16]

Trump's Claim Came From "Conspiracy-Theory Hawking" Right-Wing Media And Has Been Debunked

Wash. Post's "The Fix": Trump's False Claim Came From A Tweet Picked Up By Infowars And The Drudge Report. The Washington Post's Philip Bump noted that Trump's claim came from "a random tweet" by a former Texas state official named Gregg Phillips claiming "3 million votes ... were cast by noncitizens," which was "quickly picked up by the conspiracy-theory hawking site InfoWars" and "was linked out at the top of the Drudge Report on Nov. 14." Bump pointed out that "the rumor-debunking site Snopes looked at Phillips's claim and found no evidence for it." From the November 27 article:

In fact, this claim that millions of illegal immigrants voted is itself the result of a random tweet.

On Nov. 13, Gregg Phillips, a former Texas Health and Human Services Commission deputy commissioner, tweeted about there being 3 million votes that were cast by noncitizens.

Phillips claims in another tweet that his organization (it's not clear which organization, but it may be True the Vote) has a database of 180 million voter registrations and he confirms that 3 million of the people in that database who voted are noncitizens. He has been asked to provide evidence for that claim repeatedly, without having done so.

[...]

Regardless, the story was quickly picked up by the conspiracy-theory hawking site InfoWars, a story that was linked out at the top of the Drudge Report on Nov. 14.

[...]

The rumor-debunking site Snopes looked at Phillips's claim and found no evidence for it. (It also noted that Phillips has a history of implying that Obamacare will lead to the registration of millions of immigrants here illegally.) Phillips replied on Twitter, "One might imagine someone would have called me." That's easier said than done; when I was looking at this earlier this month I couldn't find a way to contact Phillips. An email to True the Vote, a conservative group focused on the issue of voter fraud (for which Phillips claims to be a board member), did not receive a reply. [The Washington Post, 11/27/16]

PolitiFact: "'Obscenely Ludicrous'" Claim That 3 Million Voted Illegally Is "Undermined By Publicly Available Information." PolitiFact examined Phillips' claim and rated it "false," finding that "Phillips will not provide any evidence to support his claim, which happens to be undermined by publicly available information." The PolitiFact article also quoted an election law expert who called the claim "fake news" and "obscenely ludicrous." From the November 14 article:

While we have no idea how Phillips arrived at his claim that 3-million noncitizens voted, people who have made similar claims in the past have cited a 2014 report that claims 6.4 percent of non-citizens voted in 2008 and 2.2 percent of non-citizens voted in 2010 midterm congressional elections.

That report was based on data from a Harvard survey of people. But the data was flawed, which created flaws in the subsequent report.

[...]

Richard Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Irvine, called Phillips' claim "fake news."

"There is no credible evidence I have seen to show large numbers of noncitizens voting in U.S. elections anywhere," Hasen said. "The idea that 3 million noncitizens could have illegally voted in our elections without being detected is obscenely ludicrous."

[...]

Reports claim 3 million "illegal aliens" cast votes in this year's election.

The articles point back to tweets from Gregg Phillips, who has worked for the Republican Party and has a voter fraud reporting app. But Phillips will not provide any evidence to support his claim, which happens to be undermined by publicly available information. [PolitiFact, 11/14/16]




rest at http://mediamatters.org/research/2016/11/28/trump-lies-millions-voted-illegally-and-mainstream-outlets-uncritically-echo-him/214628

Saturday, November 26, 2016

Right-Wing and Fake News Writers Are Now Going After Elon Musk

Fake news galvanized US president-elect Donald Trump's supporters, and sullied his enemies. Now it may be Elon Musk's turn. Quartz adds: The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX has his fair share of detractors, but a new era in a public relations battle to discredit him appears to be taking shape. Bloomberg reports that hard-right groups are lining up to back misleading websites and fake journalists who attack Musk's business empire. Many of the attacks on Musk begin with something factual: His businesses were built, legally, with the help of billions in government contracts and incentives for renewable energy and space transport. But they go on to accuse Musk of fraud and wasting taxpayer dollars; some compare him to a convicted felon. At least three conservative sites have run negative pieces about Musk -- by a nonexistent writer named "Shepard Stewart" -- that include "Elon Musk Continues to Blow Up Taxpayer Money With Falcon 9" and "Elon Musk: Faux Free Marketeer and National Disgrace." Two later retracted the stories. "There's a very obvious precedent" for this, says Sam Jaffe, managing director of Cairn Energy Research Advisors. "That's Hillary Clinton." Musk tweeted this week, "Can anyone uncover who is really writing these fake pieces?"

rest at https://yro.slashdot.org/story/16/11/25/036202/right-wing-and-fake-news-writers-are-now-going-after-elon-musk

Some Fake News Publishers Just Happen to Be Donald Trump’s @realDonaldTrump Cronies

The extraordinary phenomenon of fake news spread by Facebook and other social media during the 2016 presidential election has been largely portrayed as a lucky break for Donald Trump.

By that reckoning, entrepreneurial Macedonian teenagers, opportunists in Tbilisi and California millennials have exploited social media algorithms in order to make money — only incidentally leading to the viral proliferation of mostly anti-Clinton and anti-Obama hoaxes and conspiracy theories that thrilled many Trump supporters. The Washington Post published a shoddy report on Thursday alleging that Russian state-sponsored propagandists were seeking to promote Trump through fabricated stories, independent of the candidate himself.

But a closer look reveals that some of the biggest fake news providers were run by experienced political operators well within the orbit of Donald Trump's political advisers and consultants.

Laura Ingraham, a close Trump ally currently under consideration to be Trump's White House press secretary, owns an online publisher called Ingraham Media Group that runs a number of sites, including LifeZette, a news site that frequently posts articles of dubious veracity. One video produced by LifeZette this summer, ominously titled "Clinton Body Count," promoted a conspiracy theory that the Clinton family had some role in the plane crash death of John F. Kennedy, Jr., as well as the deaths of various friends and Democrats.

The video, published on Facebook from LifeZette's verified news account, garnered over 400,000 shares and 14 million views.

Another LifeZette video, picking up false claims from other sites, claimed that voting machines "might be compromised" because a voting machine company called Smartmatic, allegedly providing voting machines "in sixteen states," was purchased by the liberal billionaire George Soros. Soros never purchased the company, and Smartmatic did not provide voting machines used in the general election.

One LifeZette article misleadingly claimed that the United Nations backed a "secret" Obama administration takeover of local police departments. The article referenced Justice Department orders that a select few police departments address patterns of misconduct, a practice that, in reality, long predates the Obama presidency, is hardly secret, and had no relation to the United Nations.

Another LifeZette article, which went viral in the week prior to the election, falsely claimed that Wikileaks had revealed that a senior Hillary Clinton campaign official had engaged in occult rituals. Ingraham's site regularly receives links from the Drudge Report and other powerful drivers of Internet traffic.

But LifeZette, for all its influence, pales in comparison to the sites run by Floyd Brown, a Republican consultant close to Trump's inner circle of advisers. Brown gained notoriety nearly three decades ago for his role in helping to produce the "Willie Horton" campaign advertisement, a spot criticized for its use of racial messaging to derail Michael Dukakis's presidential bid. Brown is also the political mentor of David Bossie, an operative who went to work for Trump's presidential campaign this year after founding the Citizens United group. In an interview this year, Brown called Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway a "longtime friend."

Brown now produces a flow of reliably pro-Trump Internet content through a company he owns called Liftable Media Inc., which operates a number of high-impact, tabloid-style news outlets that exploded in size over the course of the election. One of Brown's sites, Western Journalism, is the 81st largest site in the U.S. with 13 million monthly unique page views, according to rankings maintained by the site Alexa. Another, called Conservative Tribune, is the 50th largest site with over 19 million monthly unique visitors.

Brown's sites churn out bombastic headlines with little regard to the truth. One viral piece shared by Brown's news outlets claimed that President Obama had redesigned the White House logo to change the American flag to a white flag, "a common symbol for surrender, which has many people wondering if Obama was trying to secretly signal to America's enemies that he was surrendering." The Facebook post touted the article with the line, "We all know Obama hates the United States, but what he just did to the White House logo is beyond the pale."

As the fact-checking website Snopes was quick to note, it was no signal of surrender and the bleached white version of the White House logo, complete with a white flag, was not even an Obama creation. The white logo dates back to as early as 2003, under the Bush administration, which used it for official documents.

The Conservative Tribune and Western Journalism provide a steady stream of similarly deceptive, eye-catching headlines.



rest at https://theintercept.com/2016/11/26/laura-ingraham-lifezette/

Trump's presidential hires and advisors own a hell of a lot of fake news sites


clintonbodycount-293x300

Floyd Brown invented the Reagan-era Willie Horton lie, helped create the Citizens United group, and now owns Liftable Media, including sites like Conservative Tribune (50th most-trafficked site in the USA) and Western Journalism (81st), whence came fake news stories like the lie that Obama had altered the White House logo to include a white flag of surrender (the logo change came from GWB's White House); the lie that Muslims had been "ordered" to vote for Hillary; the lie that Obama had encouraged millennial non-citizen Latin@s to vote without fear of reprisals; the lie that Clinton had a Vegas "drug holiday" before the debate; the lie that Obama's birth certificate was not accepted by experts as genuine -- Brown's sites are all included in Facebook's verified news sources.

Brown is a Trump advisor, also identified by Trump's spokesperson as "a close friend."

Laura Ingraham is another Trump ally who's been tapped to be his presidential secretary: she owns the Ingraham Media Group, including sites like Lifezette, which produced the hoax video "Clinton Body Count," which accused the Clintons of conspiring to crash John F Kennedy, Jr's airplane and of complicity with many other deaths, a video that was shared 14,000,000 times after its successful viral debut on Facebook.

Lifezette also produced a viral hoax video about George Soros buying a voting machine company whose products were widely used in counting US ballots (Soros didn't invest in the company, nor does that company supply US ballots). Other Lifezette hoaxes include a story asserting that a Wikileaks-published document linked Clinton to occult rituals.

Most significant of all, though, is Trump's presidential chief strategist Steve Bannon, whose Breitbart News is a font of hoaxes and slanders:

Breitbart News blends commentary and journalism with inflammatory headlines, in many cases producing fake stories sourced from online hoaxes. The site once attempted to pass off a picture of people in Cleveland celebrating the Cavaliers as a massive Trump rally. The site furiously defended Trump's false claim that "thousands" of Muslims in New Jersey were "cheering" the 9/11 attacks, a claim that multiple fact-checking organizations have thoroughly debunked.

Some Fake News Publishers Just Happen to Be Donald Trump's Cronies [Lee Fang/The Intercept]



rest at http://boingboing.net/2016/11/26/trumps-presidential-hires-an.html

In Scotland, Trump Built a Wall. Then He Sent Residents the Bill.

BALMEDIE, Scotland — President-elect Donald J. Trump has already built a wall — not on the border with Mexico, but on the border of his exclusive golf course in northeastern Scotland, blocking the sea view of local residents who refused to sell their homes.

And then he sent them the bill.

David and Moira Milne had already been threatened with legal action by Mr. Trump's lawyers, who claimed a corner of their garage belonged to him, when they came home from work one day to find his staff building a fence around their garden. Two rows of grown trees went up next, blocking the view. Their water and electricity lines were temporarily cut. And then a bill for about $3,500 arrived in the mail, which, Mr. Milne said, went straight into the trash.

"You watch, Mexico won't pay either," said Mr. Milne, a health and safety consultant and part-time novelist, referring to Mr. Trump's campaign promise to build a "beautiful, impenetrable wall" along the border and force the Mexicans to pay for it.

The Milnes now fly a Mexican flag from their hilltop house, a former coast guard station that overlooks the clubhouse of Trump International Golf Links, whenever Mr. Trump visits.

Continue reading the main story

So do Susan and John Munro, who also refused to sell and now face an almost 15-foot-high earthen wall built by Mr. Trump's people on two sides of their property.

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Continue reading the main story

Michael Forbes, a quarry worker whose home sits on the opposite side of the Trump property, added a second flag — "Hillary for President" — perhaps because Mr. Trump publicly accused him of living "like a pig" and called him a "disgrace" for not selling his "disgusting" and "slumlike" home.

As many Americans are trying to figure out what kind of president they have just elected, the people of Balmedie, a small village outside the once oil-rich city of Aberdeen, say they have a pretty good idea. In the 10 years since Mr. Trump first visited, vowing to build "the world's greatest golf course" on an environmentally protected site featuring 4,000-year-old sand dunes, they have seen him lash out at anyone standing in his way. They say they watched him win public support for his golf course with grand promises, then watched him break them one by one.

A promised $1.25 billion investment has shrunk to what his opponents say is at most $50 million. Six thousand jobs have dwindled to 95. Two golf courses to one. An eight-story, 450-room luxury hotel never materialized, nor did 950 time-share apartments. Instead, an existing manor house was converted into a 16-room boutique hotel. Trump International Golf Links, which opened in 2012, lost $1.36 million last year, according to public accounts.

"If America wants to know what is coming, it should study what happened here. It's predictive," said Martin Ford, a local government representative. "I have just seen him do in America, on a grander scale, precisely what he did here. He suckered the people and he suckered the politicians until he got what he wanted, and then he went back on pretty much everything he promised."

Alex Salmond, a former first minister of Scotland whose government granted Mr. Trump planning permission in 2008, overruling local officials, now concedes the point, saying, "Balmedie got 10 cents on the dollar."

Sarah Malone, who came to Mr. Trump's attention after winning a local beauty pageant and is now a vice president of Trump International, disputed some of the figures publicly discussed about the project, saying that Mr. Trump invested about $125 million and that the golf course now employed 150 people.

"While other golf and leisure projects were shelved due to lack of funds," she said, "Mr. Trump continued to forge ahead with his plans and has put the region on the global tourism map, and this resort plays a vital role in the economic prosperity of northeast Scotland."

Mr. Salmond said that Mr. Trump's impact on business in Scotland might actually be a net negative because his xenophobic comments have appalled the Scottish establishment so much that the Royal & Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews, known simply as the R&A, is unlikely to award his other Scottish golf course, the world-renowned Trump Turnberry, another prestigious golf tournament like the Open anytime soon.

To see what Trump will do to America, look to his disastrous walled Scottish golf course




rest at http://boingboing.net/2016/11/26/to-see-what-trump-will-do-to-a.html

Trump International Golf Links was built on the site of a protected 4,000-year-old sand dune; he bullied anyone who wouldn't sell their homes to him to build it and then sent the holdouts a bill for the 15-foot-high wall he built around their homes to block their view of the ocean; he promised a $1.25B investment and ended up investing no more than $50m; he promised 6,000 jobs and created 95; he promised two golf courses and only opened one; he promised to build a 450-room luxury hotel and 950 apartments and built neither -- and now he does everything he can to prevent the creation of clean-energy wind-turbines off the coast.

Trump publicly ordered Nigel Farage, whose UK Independence Party has not won a single Scottish election, to bully the Scottish government into giving him more favourable treatment, a move greeted with hearty laughter by the ruling Scottish National Party, who cordially and publicly hate Trump (though their former leader, Alex Salmond, once gave Trump help, which he now publicly repudiates).

Trump's Scottish neighbours fly enormous Hillary Clinton and Mexican flags when he visits his golf course.

The golf course has been open since 2012 and is still losing money -- $1.36M last year.

Worse still, Trump's odious remarks and obnoxious personality have prompted the Scottish golfing establishment to boycott his other course, costing the town hundreds of millions of pounds.

The wind turbines, whose foundations are expected to be laid next year, still seem to rankle Mr. Trump. In a meeting right after his election victory, Mr. Trump urged Nigel Farage, the leader of the populist U.K. Independence Party — which has failed to win a single seat in Scotland — to fight offshore wind farms in Scotland on his behalf.

"To actually believe that having a conversation with Nigel Farage and his henchmen about wind energy is going to change Scottish government policy is on the outer limits of possibility," Mr. Salmond said.

As a presidential candidate who was caught on a hot microphone bragging about sexually assaulting women, Mr. Trump found little sympathy among Scotland's political leaders, most of whom happen to be women.

Nicola Sturgeon, Mr. Salmond's successor, has called Mr. Trump's comments "deeply abhorrent" and stripped Mr. Trump of his membership in the Global Scot business network. Kezia Dugdale, who runs the Scottish Labour Party, commented after Mr. Trump's election that a "misogynist" would move into the White House, while Ruth Davidson, the leader of the Scottish Conservatives, described him as a "clay-brained guts, a knotty-pated fool."

Wednesday, November 23, 2016

Trump Names Two Opponents of Net Neutrality To Oversee FCC Transition Team


President-elect Donald Trump has appointed two new advisers to his transition team that will oversee his FCC and telecommunications policy agenda. Both of the new advisers are staunch opponents of net neutrality regulations.

Jeff Eisenach, one of the two newly appointed advisers, is an economist who has previously worked as a consultant for Verizon and its trade association. In September 2014, Eisenach testified before a Senate Judiciary Committee and said, "Net neutrality would not improve consumer welfare or protect the public interest." He has also worked for the conservative think-tank American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and in a blog post wrote, "Net neutrality is crony capitalism pure and simple."

Mark Jamison, the other newly appointed adviser, also has a long history of battling against net neutrality oversight. Jamison formerly worked on Sprint's lobbying team and now leads the University of Florida's Public Utility Research Center.

Both Eisenach and Jamison are considered leading adversaries of net neutrality who worked hard to prevent the rules from being passed last year. For the uninitiated, the rules passed last year prevent companies internet providers from discriminating against any online content or services. For example, without net neutrality rules, internet providers like Comcast and Verizon could charge internet subscribers more for using sites like Netflix. The FCC's net neutrality rules would protect consumers from paying exorbitant fees for internet use.

President-elect Trump has also been a vocal opponent of net neutrality. In 2014, he tweeted:

The latest news from Trump's transition team spells bad news for more than just the open internet. In addition to opposing net neutrality, Jamison has also publicly opposed FCC chairman Tom Wheeler's attempts to open up the cable industry's monopoly on set-top boxes. Jamison recently wrote that chairman Wheeler's reason for revisiting cable set-top box rules relied on "bad math and falsehoods masquerading as facts."

The appointments should be startling to regular internet users because both advisers are like for deregulation. As it stands, most Americans have only one or two choices for broadband providers. With less regulation, it could encourage companies that are practically running monopolies to start price-gouging consumers. Back in February, four million people sent emails to the FCC in favor of passing net neutrality rules—but it now appears that those rules could soon be revised by a new administration.



rest at http://gizmodo.com/trump-names-two-opponents-of-net-neutrality-to-oversee-1789231918

Trump: I'll Ditch TPP Trade Deal on Day One of My Presidency

US President-elect Donald Trump has confirmed that the US will pull out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)—a trade deal involving 12 Pacific Rim nations—"on day one" of his presidency.

Trump, in a YouTube video outlining plans for his first 100 days in office, said: "I'm going to issue our notification of intent to withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a potential disaster for our country."

He added: "Instead, we will negotiate fair, bilateral trade deals that bring jobs and industry back on to American shores."

An emphasis on bilateral trade deals may call into question both the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA), involving dozens of nations, and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). Although the latter is between the US and the European Union, the complex political structure of the EU means that effectively 28 nations are involved and can influence the outcome of the deal. This was demonstrated by the dramatic intervention of the Walloon regional government in the signing of CETA, the bloc's trade deal with Canada.

The UK government will doubtless welcome this shift to bilateral trade deals, but one reason why Trump may view them favourably is because it places the US in the driving seat as the larger player. This means that a post-Brexit UK will be in a weak position when it comes to negotiating a deal on its own with the US. For all its many flaws, TTIP has the virtue of a more even balance between the US and the EU, since the two economies are comparable in size.

During the video message—which lasted less than three minutes—Trump touched on a number of areas that are likely to be of interest to Ars readers. However, his only explicit mention of the digital world was of its darker side: "I will ask the Department of Defense, and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, to develop a comprehensive plan to protect America's vital infrastructure from cyberattacks."




rest at http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/11/trump-to-ditch-tpp-trade-deal-day-one-of-presidency/

Monday, November 21, 2016

Vice president-elect Mike Pence has a long history of restricting rights

hard-sell con that cleaned out its desperate victims: behind the $25,000,000 Trump University settlement


Victims of the Trump University con were roped in by an initial free class endorsed by "the most celebrated entrepreneur on earth" that would, in Trump's words, "turn anyone into a successful real estate investor, including you."

The marketing materials said that Trump reviewed the curriculum and picked the instructors, but the president-elect didn't do either -- instead, he let other people do the homework and then he took the credit for it. The "instructors" were really ropers for a deeper con: their job was to evaluate attendees to figure out just how much money they could raise -- for example, by borrowing from family and maxing out their credit cards -- and then hard-selling them to attend "seminars" that would clean them out.

This was laid out in writing, in a document called the "Trump University Playbook" that told employees it was their job to push the victims to go into debt to pay for more courses. The tactics set out in the playbooks are a mix of a timeshare hustler's hard-sell and cult tactics that will be familiar to students of Scientology and similar ripoffs.

Ronald Schnackenberg, one of Trump University's salesmen, filed an affidavit in the case that revealed that he was reprimanded for refusing to pressure a disabled man into borrowing money to attend a $35,000 seminar, though he believed that the man couldn't afford it. This prompted him to quit.

Clinton's press secretary Brian Fallon nailed it when he wrote, Trump U is devastating because it's metaphor for his whole campaign: promising hardworking Americans way to get ahead, but all based on lies."



rest at http://boingboing.net/2016/11/21/a-hard-sell-con-that-cleaned-o.html

Thursday, November 17, 2016

US Military Plans to Dump 20,000 Tons of Heavy Metals and Explosives Into the Oceans

The US Navy has been conducting war-game exercises in US waters for decades, and in the process, it has left behind tons of bombs, heavy metals, missiles, sonar buoys, high explosives and depleted uranium munitions that are extremely harmful to both humans and marine life.

Truthout recently reported that the Navy has admitted to releasing chemicals into the oceans that are known to injure infants' brains, as well as having left large amounts of depleted uranium in US coastal waters. Now, the Navy's own documents reveal that it also plans to use 20,000 tons of heavy metals, plastics and other highly toxic compounds over the next two decades in the oceans where it conducts its war games.

According to the Navy's 2015 Northwest Training and Testing environmental impact statement (EIS), in the thousands of warfare "testing and training events" it conducts each year, 200,000 "stressors" from the use of missiles, torpedoes, guns and other explosive firings in US waters happen biennially. These "stressors," along with drones, vessels, aircraft, shells, batteries, electronic components and anti-corrosion compounds that coat external metal surfaces are the vehicles by which the Navy will be introducing heavy metals and highly toxic compounds into the environment.

Just some of the dangerous compounds the Navy will be injecting into the environment during their exercises are: ammonium perchlorate, picric acid, nitrobenzene, lithium from sonobuoy batteries, lead, manganese, phosphorus, sulfur, copper, nickel, tungsten, chromium, molybdenum, vanadium, trinitrotoluene (TNT), RDX [Royal Demolition eXplosive] and HMX  [High Melting eXplosive], among many others.

"None of these belong in the ocean's food web, upon which we all depend," Karen Sullivan, a retired endangered species biologist who cofounded West Coast Action Alliance, which acts as a watchdog of Naval activities in the Pacific Northwest, told Truthout. "Nor will the Navy be willing to clean it up, or even contribute to medical tests for people whose health may suffer."

To see more stories like this, visit "Planet or Profit?"

A worrying example of that fact: In August of this year, a lawmaker in Pennsylvania urged 70,000 residents across three counties whose drinking water was contaminated by the Navy to sue them, just to get funding to pay for blood tests to see how sick they had become.

Other examples of US citizens being treated as collateral damage abound. Just this October, the BBC reported on an Air Force Base leaking toxic chemicals into the sewer system, and the port of San Diego filed a federal lawsuit against the Navy for injecting an underground plume of toxic chemicals that threatens to contaminate the entire bay.

But stories like these are only the tip of an impending iceberg.

Experts Truthout spoke with warn that if the Navy gets its way, the next 20 years will see them causing far more environmental degradation and destruction up and down US coastal areas by way of widespread chemical and toxic contamination.

Insidious Contamination

The Navy is, like all the other branches of the US military, ridiculously well-funded. Recent history shows that US military spending dwarfs the rest of the planet's military spending.

"For the last half-century, US military spending has purchased the annihilation of millions throughout Southeast Asia, the Arab world, and Central Asia," Mozhgan Savabieasfahani, an environmental toxicologist and winner of the 2015 Rachel Carson prize for her work on depleted uranium (DU) and heavy metal contamination, told Truthout. "Accompanying that human annihilation has been environmental devastation and birth defects, from Vietnam to Iraq."

Her strong words are backed by clear, cold facts that come from even mainstream media sources in the US, like Newsweek magazine, which in a 2014 article titled "The US Department of Defense Is One of the World's Biggest Polluters" stated:

The US Department of Defence [sic] is one of the world's worst polluters. Its footprint dwarfs that of any corporation: 4,127 installations spread across 19 million acres of American soil. Maureen Sullivan, who heads the Pentagon's environmental programs, says her office contends with 39,000 contaminated sites.

Even as far back as 1990, the US Department of Defense had already admitted to creating more than 14,000 suspected contamination sites across the planet.

The US Safe Drinking Water Act defines "contaminant" as: " ... any physical, chemical, biological or radiological substance or matter in water. Drinking water may reasonably be expected to contain at least small amounts of some contaminants. Some contaminants may be harmful if consumed at certain levels in drinking water. The presence of contaminants does not necessarily indicate that the water poses a health risk."

Thus, contamination being a matter of scale, the government creates a "not-to-exceed" level based on what it knows about each contaminant, in order to minimize human exposure to each item on its massive list of contaminants.

However, the contamination guidelines don't account for the kind of pollution perpetrated by the US Navy.

"What do you do when it's massive quantities of contaminants in the ocean, and not your drinking water?" asked Sullivan, who worked at the US Fish and Wildlife Service for more than 15 years and is an expert in the bureaucratic procedures the Navy is supposed to be following.

She pointed out how "contamination," or water pollution, is defined as "environmental degradation that occurs when pollutants are directly or indirectly discharged into water bodies without adequate treatment to remove harmful compounds."

On that point she said, "None of the dangerous compounds being dumped into our waters by the Navy have ever been treated or removed, which leads to hearing this false choice: The cost of cleanup or removal would be exorbitant. Therefore, we should continue dumping as always, in perpetuity."

Navy spokesperson Sheila Murray told Truthout that depleted uranium on the seafloor was no more harmful than any other metal, a statement that flies in the face of numerous scientific studies that have proven otherwise. Sullivan believes that, by making that statement, the Navy "has disavowed responsibility for all of this toxic ocean pollution."

Savabieasfahani said that while the Navy may be content to add depleted uranium to the environment that already has high levels of man-made pollutants, we should not share its complacency.

"A cluster of worsening environmental phenomena go hand-in-hand with that accumulation of pollutants," she told Truthout. "Global warming, mass extinctions, ecosystem collapse, food-web modification, physical and biological changes in organisms, endocrine disruption, and a pandemic of neurodevelopmental disorders in children accompany those rising background pollution levels. Peer-reviewed research is already showing steep declines in the biodiversity of ecosystems."

How Much Contamination?

According to Sullivan, who studied the EIS, the Navy plans to introduce 20,000 tons of contaminants into the environment, which is the equivalent of dumping a load of toxins the size of a Yorktown-class aircraft carrier scattered throughout the seas and sounds of coastal Washington, Oregon and Northern California.

As staggering as that amount is, it does not even include contaminants that have been released over the last six decades of Naval exercises in oceans around the globe (the plans mentioned in these documents are limited to Pacific Northwest waters).

The aforementioned list of toxic compounds the Navy has, is and is planning to release into the environment via its exercises are documented in EPA Superfund site lists as known hazards and all of them are highly toxic at both acute and chronic levels.

For example, perchlorates are highly soluble in water and according to the EPA, "generally have high mobility in soils." They have been found in breast milk, target the thyroid gland and affect children and fetuses more than they affect adults.

Lithium causes behavioral changes that, in large animals and humans, can be fatal. Ingestion of merely one to two grams of picric acid would cause severe poisoning. TNT remains active underwater, can bioaccumulate in fish, including salmon, and can cause developmental and physiological problems, according to scientific studies. HMX and RDX explosives are both well documented to be extremely toxic and dangerous.

Sullivan says all of this raises questions about why there are no regulations preventing the creation of Superfund sites (polluted locations that require intensive clean-up) in the ocean. "We depend on salmon, yet the Navy is creating massive ecosystem-wide pollution right under our noses," Sullivan said. "How can they not see that it will be generations from now who reap the bitter harvest?"

Savabieasfahani agreed and took it a step further, issuing a dire warning.

"Toxic metals, such as lead and uranium, are biomagnified," she explained."'Biomagnification' means that toxins get more concentrated in an organism which ingests plants or animals containing that toxin. For example, contaminated fish can pass on large doses of toxin to their human consumers."

The 20,000 tons of contaminants the Navy plans to release into the ocean in the coming years do not include the additional 4.7 to 14 tons of "metals with potential toxicity" that will be "released" annually in the inland waters of both Puget Sound and Hood Canal, according to Naval documents. Given that those numbers are for one year only, in 20 years, between 94 and 280 tons of heavy metals will be released inland (in addition to what will be released in the open ocean).

It is also worth noting that two actual Superfund sites along Washington's inland shorelines are both on Naval property.


rest at http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/38374-us-military-plans-to-dump-20-000-tons-of-heavy-metals-and-explosives-into-the-oceans

What's Happened To The University? A Sociological Exploration Of Its Infantilisation

As Frank Furedi compellingly argues in this deeply perceptive and important book, these phenomena are not just harmless fads acted out by a few petulant students and their indulgent professors in an academic cocoon. Rather, they are both a symptom and a cause of malaise and strife in society at large. At stake is whether freedom of thought will long survive and whether individuals will have the temperament to resolve everyday social and workplace conflicts without bureaucratic intervention or litigation.

Mr. Furedi, an emeritus professor at England's University of Kent, argues that the ethos prevailing at many universities on both sides of the Atlantic is the culmination of an infantilizing paternalism that has defined education and child-rearing in recent decades. It is a pedagogy that from the earliest ages values, above all else, self-esteem, maximum risk avoidance and continuous emotional validation and affirmation. (Check your child's trophy case.) Helicopter parents and teachers act as though "fragility and vulnerability are the defining characteristics of personhood."

The devastating result: Young people are raised into an "eternal dependency." Parenting experts and educators insist that the views of all pupils must be unconditionally respected, never judged, regardless of their merit. They wield the unassailable power of a medical warning: Children, even young adults, simply can't handle rejection of their ideas, or hearing ones that cause the slightest "discomfort," lest they undergo "trauma."

It is not surprising to Mr. Furedi that today's undergraduates, having grown up in such an environment, should find any serious criticism, debate or unfamiliar idea to be "an unacceptable challenge to their personas." ...



rest at http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2016/11/whats-happened-to-the-university-a-sociological-exploration-of-its-infantilisation.html

These Professors Make More Than a Thousand Bucks an Hour Peddling Mega-Mergers


If the government ends up approving the $85 billion AT&T-Time Warner merger, credit won't necessarily belong to the executives, bankers, lawyers, and lobbyists pushing for the deal. More likely, it will be due to the professors.

A serial acquirer, AT&T must persuade the government to allow every major deal. Again and again, the company has relied on economists from America's top universities to make its case before the Justice Department or the Federal Trade Commission. Moonlighting for a consulting firm named Compass Lexecon, they represented AT&T when it bought Centennial, DirecTV, and Leap Wireless; and when it tried unsuccessfully to absorb T-Mobile. And now AT&T and Time Warner have hired three top Compass Lexecon economists to counter criticism that the giant deal would harm consumers and concentrate too much media power in one company.

Today, "in front of the government, in many cases the most important advocate is the economist and lawyers come second," said James Denvir, an antitrust lawyer at Boies, Schiller.

Economists who specialize in antitrust — affiliated with Chicago, Harvard, Princeton, the University of California, Berkeley, and other prestigious universities — reshaped their field through scholarly work showing that mergers create efficiencies of scale that benefit consumers. But they reap their most lucrative paydays by lending their academic authority to mergers their corporate clients propose. Corporate lawyers hire them from Compass Lexecon and half a dozen other firms to sway the government by documenting that a merger won't be "anti-competitive": in other words, that it won't raise retail prices, stifle innovation, or restrict product offerings. Their optimistic forecasts, though, often turn out to be wrong, and the mergers they champion may be hurting the economy.

Some of the professors earn more than top partners at major law firms. Dennis Carlton, a self-effacing economist at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business and one of Compass Lexecon's experts on the AT&T-Time Warner merger, charges at least $1,350 an hour. In his career, he has made about $100 million, including equity stakes and non-compete payments, ProPublica estimates. Carlton has written reports or testified in favor of dozens of mergers, including those between AT&T-SBC Communications and Comcast-Time Warner, and three airline deals: United-Continental, Southwest-Airtran, and American-US Airways.

American industry is more highly concentrated than at any time since the gilded age. Need a pharmacy? Americans have two main choices. A plane ticket? Four major airlines. They have four choices to buy cell phone service. Soon one company will sell more than a quarter of the quaffs of beer around the world.

Mergers peaked last year at $2 trillion in the U.S. The top 50 companies in a majority of American industries gained share between 1997 and 2012, and "competition may be decreasing in many economic sectors," President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers warned in April.

While the impact of this wave of mergers is much debated, prominent economists such as Lawrence Summers and Joseph Stiglitz suggest that it is one important reason why, even as corporate profits hit records, economic growth is slow, wages are stagnant, business formation is halting, and productivity is lagging. "Only the monopoly-power story can convincingly account" for high business profits and low corporate investment, Summers wrote earlier this year.

In addition, politicians such as U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren have criticized big mergers for giving a handful of companies too much clout. President-elect Trump said in October that his administration would not approve the AT&T-Time Warner merger "because it's too much concentration of power in the hands of too few."

During the campaign, Trump didn't signal what his broader approach to mergers would be. But the early signs are that his administration will weaken antitrust enforcement and strengthen the hand of economists. He selected Joshua Wright, an economist and professor at George Mason's Antonin Scalia Law School, to lead his transition on antitrust matters. Wright, himself a former consultant for Boston-based Charles River Associates, regularly celebrates mergers in speeches and articles and has supported increasing the influence of economists in assessing monopoly power. "Mergers between competitors do not often lead to market power but do often generate significant benefits for consumers," he wrote in The New York Times this week.

A late Obama administration push to scrutinize major deals notwithstanding, the government over the past several decades has pulled back on merger enforcement. In part, this shift reflects the influence of Carlton and other economists. Today, lawyers still write the briefs, make the arguments and conduct the trials, but the core arguments are over economists' models of what will happen if the merger goes ahead.

These complex mathematical formulations carry weight with the government because they purport to be objective. But a ProPublica examination of several marquee deals found that economists sometimes salt away inconvenient data in footnotes and suppress negative findings, stretching the standards of intellectual honesty to promote their clients' interests.

Earlier this year, a top Justice Department official criticized Compass Lexecon for using "junk science." ProPublica sent a detailed series of questions to Compass Lexecon for this story. The firm declined to comment on the record.

Even some academic specialists worry that the research companies buy is slanted. "This is not the scientific method," said Orley Ashenfelter, a Princeton economist known for analyzing the effects of mergers. Referring to one Compass study of an appliance industry deal, he said, "The answer is known in advance, either because you created what the client wanted or the client selected you as the most favorable from whatever group was considered."

In contrast to their scholarship, the economists' paid work for corporations rests almost entirely out of the public eye. Even other academics cannot see what they produce on behalf of clients. Their algorithms are shared only with government economists, many of whom have backgrounds in academia and private consulting, and hope to return there. At least seven professors on Compass's payroll, including Carlton, have served as the top antitrust economist at the Department of Justice. Charles River Associates boasts at least three.

"There are few government functions outside the CIA that are so secretive as the merger review process," said Seth Bloom, the former general counsel of the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee.



rest at https://www.propublica.org/article/these-professors-make-more-than-thousand-bucks-hour-peddling-mega-mergers

Wednesday, November 16, 2016

Nestlé and Coca-Cola Attempt to Block National Parks From Banning Bottled Water Sales

Truthout is funded by readers, not by corporations, lobbyists or government interests. Help us publish more stories like this one: Click here to make a tax-deductible donation!

In 2015, Congressman Ken Calvert, a Republican from California's 42nd house district, received a $1,000 campaign contribution from the political action committee of the International Bottled Water Association (IBWA), whose members include the biggest beverage companies in the world, such as Nestlé, Coca-Cola and Pepsi.

That same year, the IBWA's CEO, Joseph Doss, thanked Calvert for his efforts on behalf of the IBWA during their annual business conference. Calvert was their featured speaker.

"We need leaders like you in Washington who will work to help ensure that visitors from all over the world can choose the healthiest packaged beverage product when they and their families visit our nation's beautiful national parks," Doss remarked.

What Doss was referring to was the efforts of Calvert and other House Republicans, such as Keith Rothfus from Pennsylvania, who also received a $1,000 donation from the IBWA PAC and whose state is home to a $5.5 billion bottled water industry. Rothfus introduced an amendment into an Interior Appropriations bill that would have made it illegal for the National Park Service to implement or maintain bans on the sale of bottled water at any national park. National Park Service officials had been working for years to reduce plastic waste in the parks in order to meet sustainability goals.

According to Corporate Accountability International -- a nonprofit organization that works to ensure public funding for water systems and to counter what it says are misleading marketing claims by the bottled water industry -- during the summer of 2015, over 350,000 people contacted their members of Congress asking them to oppose the amendment. Then, in December, 2015, 34 members of Congress, led by Democratic Representative RaĂşl Grijalva from Arizona, sent a letter to National Park Service Director Jon Jarvis, voicing their support for bottled-water-free policies.



rest at http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/38402-nestle-and-coca-cola-attempt-to-block-national-parks-from-banning-bottled-water-sales

A Very Long List of Dumb and Awful Things Newt Gingrich Has Said and Done

Trumpism is in many ways not a new political phenomenon. Notably, it is bringing back to the stage old, once-scandal-ridden politicians with checkered histories, including Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani. Gingrich, the former House speaker, in particular, has a long record of misdeeds and foul statements that Mother Jones has covered for decades. We were the first media outlet to dig into his early days, when Gingrich dumped the first of his (so far) three wives and brought her divorce papers to sign while she was in the hospital recovering from cancer surgery. We have explained the ethics scandals—note the plural—that ensnared him when he was in the House. During his 2012 presidential campaign, we published "Your Daily Newt," which featured bizarre episodes from his past. (One headline: "Your Daily Newt: Space Sex.") But despite his past imbroglios and his failed 2012 bid, Gingrich is back in the game. With Giuliani and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, he was part of Trump's top surrogate triumvirate. (What a coincidence—all of them have been socked by scandals involving the abuse of power.) Gingrich was mentioned as a possible secretary of state for Trump, though on Sunday he said he had no interest in that job. (The top candidates at the moment are Giuliani and John Bolton.) Gingrich has previously declared his desire, should Trump become president, to be a "senior planner for the entire federal government," whatever that means.

So with Gingrich back in play, we are revising a guide we assembled in 2011 that reviewed 33 years of Gingrich's rhetorical bomb throwing, such as when he encouraged his fellow Republicans to refer to Democrats as "traitors." There have been whoppers and beyond-the-pale statements from Gingrich since we compiled this, and we apologize if this list does not do him full justice. But it certainly provides a strong sense of a mean-spirited fellow overly impressed with his own intelligence who just might become the United States' ambassador to the world.

*****

Newt Gingrich likes to present himself as an ideas man. He is a former college professor and the architect of the ideology-driven 1994 Republican Revolution. But for all his references to Camus and Clausewitz, there's another side to the former House speaker—a verbal bomb-thrower who's never met a political crisis he couldn't analogize to the annexation of the Sudetenland.

Gingrich was first elected to the House of Representatives in 1978. He learned quickly that a back-bencher in the minority party could distinguish himself and gain attention in Washington by employing extreme rhetoric. Ever in attack-mode, Gingrich swiftly moved up the ranks within the House GOP caucus. Democrats accused him of practicing "skinhead politics," and a 1989 Washington Post profile declared him "notorious" and "defiant." But his political thuggery worked, and he led the GOPers in their historic retaking of the House and became speaker. He did not last long in the post. After a rocky stint—marked by a government shutdown, his party's sex-and-lies impeachment crusade against President Bill Clinton, and several ethics controversies involving Gingrich—the GOP lost seats in the 1998 election, and Gingrich resigned as speaker and left the House. (During this time, he was having an extramarital affair with a congressional aide who would eventually become his third, and present, wife.)

In his post-House years, Gingrich, at times, toned down the rhetoric. He worked with Hillary Clinton on health care IT issues. He sat on a couch with Nancy Pelosi to highlight their joint support for climate change action. After the 2008 election, he called for policymaking that would unite Democrats, Republicans, and independents. He blasted a candidate for GOP chairman who circulated a parody song called "Barack the Magic Negro." Still, he wasn't able to escape the siren call of overheated oratory. He repeatedly bashed the "secular left" for attempting to destroy the country, and as he has moved closer to declaring a presidential bid, he increasingly has returned to the hooligan ways of his past.

So here's a rather incomplete guide to Gingrich's greatest (or worst) hits of the past 33 years. As he might say, it's the most accurate, predictive model for his future behavior.

1978 In an address to College Republicans before he was elected to the House, Gingrich says, "I think one of the great problems we have in the Republican party is that we don't encourage you to be nasty. We encourage you to be neat, obedient, and loyal and faithful and all those Boy Scout words." He added, "Richard Nixon…Gerald Ford…They have done a terrible job, a pathetic job. In my lifetime, in my lifetime—I was born in 1943—we have not had a competent national Republican leader. Not ever."

1980 On the House floor, Gingrich states, "The reality is that this country is in greater danger than at any time since 1939."

1980 Gingrich says, "We need a military four times the size of our present defense system." (See 1984.)

1983 A major milestone: Gingrich cites former British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain on the House floor: "If in fact we are to follow the Chamberlain liberal Democratic line of withdrawal from the planet," he explains, "we would truly have tyranny everywhere, and we in America could experience the joys of Soviet-style brutality and murdering of women and children."

1983 He compares Democratic Speaker Tip O'Neill to Chamberlain: "He may not know any better. He may not understand freedom versus slavery…in the tradition of [former British Prime Ministers] Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain, whose only weakness was they left their nation with war with Nazi Germany."

1984 "I am not a super hawk."

1984 Gingrich takes advantage of the arrival of C-Span to deliver scathing condemnations of his colleagues. He accuses Democrats of appeasement and distributing "communist propaganda," and threatens to press charges against them for writing a letter to Nicaraguan dictator Daniel Ortega. House Speaker Tip O'Neill calls it "the lowest thing that I've ever seen in my 32 years in Congress."

1984 Gingrich touts a study being compiled by conservative House Republicans, noting it "will argue that it is time to stop challenging or seeming to challenge the patriotism of Democrats and liberals. Enough historical evidence exists."

1984 "It used to be called socialism. It is now just sort of liberal Democratic platform pledges."

1985 Gingrich calls Reagan's upcoming meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev ''the most dangerous summit for the West since Adolf Hitler met with Chamberlain in 1938 at Munich.''



rest at http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/11/very-long-list-dumb-and-awful-things-newt-gingrich-has-said-and-done

Trump's Top Environmental Adviser Says Pesticides Aren't Bad for You

To lead the transition of the Environmental Protection Agency, President-elect Donald Trump settled on notorious climate change denier Myron Ebell. The decision rattled climate activists—see Julia Lurie's interview with Bill McKibbon and David Roberts on Vox. But it isn't just greenhouse gas emissions that are likely to get a free ride under an Ebell-influenced EPA. Farm chemicals, too, would likely flow unabated if Ebell's agenda comes to dominate Trump's EPA.

Ebell directs the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. The group runs a  website, SafeChemicalPolicy.org, that exists to downplay the health and ecological impacts of chemicals.

If the incoming EPA takes its cues from Ebell's group, the agency's coming decisions on some widely used farm chemicals won't be hard to predict.

Take the class of pesticides called neonicotinoids. An ever-accumulating weight of evidence links declining honeybee health with neonicotinoids, which have exploded in use since the late 1990s. Yet CEI completely denies any harm to bees from the chemicals and rejects any role for government action in protecting bees.

The EPA has been in the middle of a long, slow review of the chemicals, produced by pesticide giants Syngenta and Bayer. Last January, the agency released its assessment of the most prominent one, Bayer's imidacloprid, which is heavily used on cotton and soybean fields. The result: EPA scientists found the chemical so harmful to bee colonies, at the levels commonly found in cotton fields, that the agency "could potentially take action" to "restrict or limit the use" of the chemical by the end of this year, an agency spokesperson told me in an emailed statement. So far, the EPA has not taken such an action.

As for soybeans, a massive user of imidacloprid, the EPA simply lacked the data from Bayer to assess it—even though the pesticide has been approved for use since the 1990s.

The agency is committed to releasing a slew of other neonic assessments in 2017—and intervening to restrict their use if they harm honeybees. If the Competitive Enterprise Institute's view of things holds sway, expect very little, if any, action to come of this effort.

Then there's atrazine, perhaps the most controversial pesticide that's used widely on US farm fields. Banned in Europe, it's an endocrine disrupter, a term used for chemicals that mimic hormones and "produce adverse developmental, reproductive, neurological, and immune effects in both humans and wildlife," according to the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

Widely found in streams and drinking water near farms where it's used, atrazine triggers sex changes in frogs at extremely low levels, according to research from University of California-Berkeley scientist Tyrone Hayes—work that has earned Hayes a long harassment campaign from the chemical's maker, Syngenta.




rest at http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/11/trump-epa-pesticides

Tuesday, November 15, 2016

Google Surfaces Fake News About Election Results

from https://politics.slashdot.org/story/16/11/14/2056250/google-surfaces-fake-news-about-election-results

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Last week, Facebook faced criticism that the platform's habit for surfacing fake news contributed to the election of Donald Trump -- a claim Mark Zuckerberg denied. This week, Google faces a similar problem, as its search algorithm surfaces fake election results. As Mediaite's Dan Abrams first reported, when you search "final election numbers" or "final vote count 2016," the first result in Google's "in the news" box is from a scrappy-looking Wordpress blog called 70 News that appears to be run by one person. The article, posted on November 12th, features the headline "FINAL ELECTION 2016 NUMBERS: TRUMP WON BOTH POPULAR ( 62.9 M -62.2 M ) AND ELECTORAL COLLEGE VOTES ( 306-232)HEY CHANGE.ORG, SCRAP YOUR LOONY PETITION NOW!" First, the numbers in this post are inaccurate. Though millions of votes have yet to be counted, but Clinton has already been shown to be leading the popular vote by a sizable margin. Current counts have her ahead by around 668,000 total votes, with some polling experts projecting Clinton will ultimately rack up a 2 million-vote lead. Second, the writer of the 70 News post claims that the source material for the article is "Twitter posts," specifically, this tweet from a user named Michael. Michael, on the other hand, is sourcing an article from the ultra-conservative tabloid USA Supreme, which argues that Clinton might win the number of votes "counted" but will not win the number of votes "cast" because of ignored Republican absentee ballots. (Michael also believes that Trump has been singled out by God to be president of the United States, a conspiracy theory popular with 4chan users who believe that Pepe the Frog is a reincarnation of an ancient Egyptian deity.) And yet Michael -- by way of 70 News, by way of Google -- has become the sole source for a story squatting at the top of Google's search results. 70 News has since updated its post with a single line admitting that CNN is showing different numbers -- the headline and the body of the post remains the same.

Clay, W. Va,. mayor racist post about 1st Lady gets her ass fired


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A racist facebook post describing First Lady Michelle Obama as "a Ape in heels" was so satisfying to read it made Clay, W. Va,. mayor Beverly Whaling's day.

Pamela Ramsey Taylor, who runs a local non-profit group in Clay County, referred to the first lady as an "ape".

"It will be refreshing to have a classy, beautiful, dignified first lady in the White House. I'm tired of seeing a Ape in heels," she said.

Local mayor Beverly Whaling responded with "just made my day Pam".

Ms Whaling is mayor of the town of Clay, which has a population of just 491.

It has no African American residents, according to the 2010 census. In Clay County as a whole, more than 98% of its 9,000 residents are white.

Taylor was immediately fired after the exchange was spotted by local newshounds at WBAZ. Taylor says her words could be "interpreted as racist, but in no way was intended to be," and she's going to sue someone over it all for slander. Whaling told the Washington Post that "My comment was not intended to be racist" and apologies for it "getting out of hand."



rest at http://boingboing.net/2016/11/15/west-virginia-mayor-glad-to-se.html

As Trump's racist regime takes power, FBI reports a surge in hate crimes against Muslims and others

The FBI today reported that hate attacks on Muslims in America are surging, as "a wave of racially charged assaults, graffiti attacks and other episodes" sweeps the country in the days since Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential elections.

Trump finally said something about the spike in racist attacks by whites on people of color during a "60 Minutes" interview broadcast on Sunday night.

A demonstrator holds a "Love Trumps Hate" placard during a candlelight vigil against President-elect Donald Trump's election, in Lafayette Park, near the White House, in Washington, U.S., November 12, 2016.           REUTERS/Mike Theiler

A demonstrator holds a "Love Trumps Hate" placard during a candlelight vigil against President-elect Donald Trump's election, in Lafayette Park, near the White House, in Washington, U.S., November 12, 2016. REUTERS/Mike Theiler

From the New York Times:

In its report Monday, the F.B.I. cataloged a total of 5,818 hate crimes in 2015 — a rise of nearly 340 over the year before — including assaults, bombings, threats and property destruction against minorities, women, gays and others.

Attacks against Muslim Americans saw the biggest surge: 257 reports of assaults, attacks on mosques and other types hate crimes against Muslims last year, a jump of about 67 percent over the year before. It was the highest total since 2001, when the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks saw more than 480 attacks.

Attacks against transgender people also sharply increased, the data showed.

Law enforcement officials acknowledge that the statistics give an incomplete picture because many local agencies still have a spotty record of reporting hate crimes, 26 years after Congress directed the Justice Department to begin collecting the data.



rest at http://boingboing.net/2016/11/14/as-trumps-racist-regime-take.html#more-494216