Tag Archives: citizen

Carson Joins Trump Idiocy About Jersey City, Then Backs Away

by DorcasScrymgeour Posted on November 23, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The latest from la-la land:

Republican presidential hopeful Ben Carson joined GOP rival Donald Trump in claiming that he, too, saw news footage of Muslim-Americans cheering as the World Trade Center towers fell on Sept. 11, 2001 — despite the fact that no such footage has turned up yet. “I saw the film of it, yes,” Carson told reporters at a Monday campaign event, adding that it was documented by “newsreels.”

Newsreels? What is this? 1943? But wait. We have breaking news via Twitter from Jon Karl of ABC News:

@RealBenCarson spox Doug Watts: Carson was mistaken when he said he saw film of Muslims celebrating on 9/11 in Jersey City….”He doesn’t stand behind his comments on New Jersey and American Muslims,” Watts told ABC’s @KFaulders….”He was rather thinking of the protests going on in the Middle East and some of the demonstrations” there on 9/11.

This is nuts. These guys are trying to put the Onion out of business for real. “We have investigated and discovered that East Jerusalem is not on the Hudson River after all.” But hell, at least Carson is willing to admit his error. One brownie point for that—though it does raise some questions about his vaunted memory. Trump will continue to insist forever that he saw it, and his supporters will continue to believe him because you can never trust the mainstream media, can you? They’re always covering up for Jersey City’s Muslim community.

Jump to original:  

Carson Joins Trump Idiocy About Jersey City, Then Backs Away

Posted in Citizen, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Carson Joins Trump Idiocy About Jersey City, Then Backs Away

France Goes to War on Civil Liberties

by DrusillJnb Posted on November 23, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

In the wake of the Paris terror attacks, many in France have said they finally understand what things were like for Americans just after September 11, 2001. The attacks have emboldened France’s conservatives, and pushed liberal and moderate factions rightward. On Friday, the French parliament voted to extend a nationwide state of emergency for another three months, granting authorities broad powers to limit civil liberties in the name of combating terrorism. The French public overwhelmingly supports the move.

The rise of a police state in France may come as a surprise to Americans old enough to remember when France stood out as Europe’s greatest critic of President George W. Bush’s War on Terror—a spat that peaked in 2003 when, in response to French opposition to the invasion of Iraq, the House of Representatives cafeteria rebranded its French fries “Freedom Fries.”

Nowadays, of course, just about everyone looks with disfavor on that war, which is credited with giving ISIS a foothold. Though France bombed targets in Syria on November 15, it has so far stopped short of sending in ground troops against ISIS. And, while it’s too early to tell, there’s no evidence its intelligence services are abducting or torturing terror suspects.

Continue Reading »

Link:

France Goes to War on Civil Liberties

Posted in Anchor, Casio, Citizen, Everyone, FF, GE, Green Light, LAI, LG, Mop, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on France Goes to War on Civil Liberties

Father Coughlin Is Alive and Well in Today’s GOP

by AlonzoPrinsep20 Posted on November 22, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Let’s see. Over the past few days and weeks, Donald Trump has said:

The Obama administration is deliberately sending Syrian refugees only to red states as an act of political retribution.
Obama wants to take in 200,000 Syrian refugees, despite being told repeatedly that he’s off by a factor of ten or twenty.
If you’re a Christian refugee from Syria, the Obama administration won’t let you in. Obama only wants Muslim refugees.
We should have tight surveillance on mosques and might need to close some down.
We may have to think about creating a government registry of all Muslims.
On 9/11, there were thousands of people in Arab sections of Jersey City cheering when the World Trade Center went down.

More generally, Trump has said that we’re going to have to do things that were “unthinkable” a year ago. Considering the list of things he apparently believes are perfectly thinkable right now, that sends chills down your spine. And yet, this man continues to lead the GOP race and appears to be gaining momentum from his Father Coughlinesque brand of xenophobia and fearmongering.

How does this happen? A big part of it is because other high-profile Republicans are too cowardly to fight back. Nearly every Republican governor has jumped on the vile, big-talking bandwagon of refusing to allow any Syrian refugees to settle in their states. Every Republican presidential candidate favors a ban on accepting further Muslim Syrian refugees. Jeb Bush thinks we should only accept Christian refugees from Syria. Ted Cruz isn’t a fan of “government registries” but otherwise thinks Trump is great. Straight-talking Chris Christie dodges when he’s asked if existing Syrian refugees should be kicked out of New Jersey. Marco Rubio dodges when he’s asked if we might have to close down mosques.

Overall, with the semi-honorable exception of Jeb Bush, no Republican candidate has been willing to seriously push back on either Trump’s old Mexican demagoguery or his shiny new Muslim demagoguery. All this despite the fact that Mexican immigration is down and the United States hasn’t suffered a significant attack from overseas terrorists in over a decade. All it took to wake this latent hysteria was some terrorist activity in other countries. God help us.

View original post here:  

Father Coughlin Is Alive and Well in Today’s GOP

Posted in Citizen, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Father Coughlin Is Alive and Well in Today’s GOP

Take a Tour of Battlefields, Protests, and Prisons With These Photography Legends

by MarieJefferson Posted on November 22, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Photographers working with Magnum Photos—the premier photo collective founded after World War II by Henri Carter-Bresson, Robert Capa, George Rodger, and David “Chim” Seymour—have been exceptionally busy this year releasing a trove of photo books. Among them, a few showcase longtime Magnum Photos members like Eli Reed, Hiroji Kubota, and Danny Lyon. The books—a reprint of Lyon’s classic Conversations with the Dead and massive retrospectives from Kubota and Reed, are joined by the book version of Postcards From America’s Rochester project and a graphic novel treatment of Robert Capa’s famous D-Day landing photo. Here’s a quick look.

Long Walk Home
Reed’s retrospective shows how and why he has earned his status as one of the best photojournalists of the late 20th century. This is the work that put him in Magnum and won him a Leica Medal of Excellence (1988) and a W. Eugene Smith Grant (1992), among many other awards. It’s great to catch up with his work in this hefty, beautiful retrospective, a collection of refreshingly frank, top-notch black-and-white photojournalism. I love a good complex, layered, emotional image as much as the next photo editor, but seeing Reed’s work—direct, strong, and matter of fact—offers a bit of visual fresh air.

This spans Reed’s career, from 1980s images of Central American wars, Haiti, and Lebenon—bread and butter for photojournalists at the time—to work focused closer to home. He also captured arresting images of homeless people and had a unique perspective on the Million Man March. There are far too few African American photojournalists. Reed’s perspective on the world—not just the quality of his images, but how he approaches stories and the subjects on whom he focuses—stands apart. (University of Texas Press)

A selection of Reed’s work from Long Walk Home is on display at the Leica Gallery in San Francisco until December 31, 2015.

Hiroji Kubota Photographer
Kubota’s book is a beastly retrospective, with more than 500 pages spanning 50 years of work. A versatile photojournalist in his own right, Kubota routinely served as a fixer for Western photographers visiting Japan in the early ’60s. That list included a few Magnum photographers, such as Elliot Erwitt, who wrote the preface to this book. Kubota himself joined Magnum Photos in 1965 and, judging from the work in this book, quickly became a prolific, world-traveling photojournalist.

The work here is fairly classic ’70s and ’80s style magazine photography from all over the world. Flipping through the book is almost like browsing through old issues of LIFE without any text. It’s great photography of daily life, protests, wars, and landscapes—both in color and black and white. Kubota gives us a truly unique look at the transition of the world from the tumultuous ’60s to the 2000s. It’s the work of a photographer for whom making an excellent picture seems second nature. Kubota makes it look easy.

One of the best parts is the interview with Kubota that is peppered throughout the book. It gives readers insight into how he got into photography, plus how, where, and why he traveled. It’s a wonderful look at a photojournalist’s adventures, hopscotching around the world to cover stories—a way of life that fires up young photographers’ imaginations but is far more rare these days. (Aperture)

USA. Chicago, Illinois. 1969. The Black Panthers. Hiroji Kubota/Magnum Photos

USA. NYC, New York. 1989. An aerial view of Manhattan. Hiroji Kubota/Magnum Photos

USA. Washington, DC. 1963. Demonstrators sing in protest in front of the Washington Monument. Hiroji Kubota/Magnum Photos

Japan. Asakusa. 1967. Sanja Matsuri Festival. Hiroji Kubota/Magnum Photos

Photos from Hiroji Kubota Photographer are on view at the Aperture Gallery in New York from November 19, 2015, through January 14, 2016.

Conversations with the Dead: Photographs of Prison Life With the Letters and Drawings of Billy McCune #122054
Phaidon’s reprinting of Danny Lyon’s classic 1971 book Conversations with the Dead is a body of work that couldn’t be made today. At 26 years old, Lyon spent 14 months in 1967 and 1968 taking photographs in Texas prisons. The access he had is as fascinating as the photos. He was in the cells, in the yard, out in the fields on work details and in the visiting rooms. And of course, with this kind of access come some truly memorable images. Prisons have changed considerably since the late ’60s.

The work in this book was made after Lyon spent years covering the civil rights movement and notably, the lives of the Outlaws bike gang, which resulted in the equally classic book The Bikeriders (reprinted by Aperture in 2014). Lyon applied new journalism reporting techniques to photography, which back then was still a relatively novel idea: spending months at a time with your subject(s), fully immersing yourself in their lives, camera always at the ready.

In Conversations, Lyons focuses on a few prisoners he met while doing this project, most prominently, Billy McCune, whose writings and drawings are featured at the end of the book and on the cover. From today’s perspective, it’s tempting to see these images as a snapshot of a simpler era, an age when serving prison time was seemingly less harrowing than it is for some inmates today. That is, until you get to images of inmates on work details being carried off a field or thrown in the back of pickup trucks because of heat exhaustion. And McCune’s writing brings home the utter unpleasantness of spending time in these prisons. (Phaidon)

Seven years flat on a 20-year sentence Danny Lyon/Magnum Photos

Visiting room Danny Lyon/Magnum Photos

Billy McCune rap sheet From Conversations With the Dead

Shakedown Danny Lyon/Magnum Photos

Rochester 585/716: A Postcards From America Project
Postcards From America is an ongoing project, started in 2011, in which a group of Magnum photographers packed themselves into a motorhome and hit the road to document a part of the United States, whether a leg of a long road trip or, as was the case of this project, a specific city. As the title suggests, 10 photographers (Jim Goldberg, Bruce Gilden, Susan Meiselas, Martin Parr, Paolo Pellegrin, Alessandra Sanguinetti, Alec Soth, Larry Towell, Alex Webb, and Donovan Wylie, plus Chien-Chi Chang, who documented the documentarians) went to Rochester, New York, home of Eastman Kodak, in 2012. That was the year the once-mighty American corporation declared bankruptcy. Each photographer was given an assignment: shoot and assemble 100 photos from Rochester to create the basis of an archive of images documenting the city at this precipitous moment. The 1,000 images created for the Rochester project make up this book. Each copy of this book contains a loose print from the 1,000 images created.

As a documentation of a place at a very specific time, it’s a marvelous project. The range of styles provides an interesting contrast, seeing how some of the world’s best photojournalists each take on the city of Rochester. The layout and presentation of the work, however, leaves something to be desired. The final book, rather than providing what could have been a beautifully contoured picture of a city, feels clinical—more of a catalog of images than a portrait of a place.

(Aperture, published in collaboration with Pier 24, San Francisco)

USA. Rochester, New York. 2012. Downtown Rochester. Alex Webb/Magnum Photos

USA. Rochester, New York. 2012. Hickey Freeman factory. Make and trim pant corners. Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos

USA. Rochester, New York. 2012. Bottle collection show at the fair and expo arena. Martin Parr/Magnum Photos

USA. Rochester, New York. 2012. Man praying. Last frame on a roll of handrolled Tri-X film. Larry Towell/Magnum Photos

USA. Rochester, New York. 2012. A man is arrested by the Rochester police after having assaulted his father with a samurai sword. Paolo Pellegrin/Magnum Photos

Omaha Beach on D-Day: June 6, 1944
The publisher that brought you the The Photographer, a graphic novel of Didier Lefevre’s time as a photojournalist in Afghanistan during the ’80s, First Second Books delivers another photojournalism-related graphic novel. Omaha Beach on D-Day: June 6, 1944 tells the story of Robert Capa’s time photographing the D-Day landing in World War II, with writing by Jean-David Morvan and Séverine Tréfouël and illustrations by Dominique Bertail.

Reading this book, I couldn’t help but think of it as a preview of the upcoming television series Magnum, about the early days of the Magnum Photos collective. Like the TV dramatization, Omaha Beach is an interesting exercise in storytelling. It offers a graphic novel interpretation of Capa’s assignment that day, and gives readers a look from behind the viewfinder on Omaha Beach. However, the book then moves into providing the backstory, showing Capa’s original photos from that day—the 10 images that survived a darkroom accident that ruined most of what he shot. And finally, closing the circle, Omaha Beach on D-Day gives a quick biography of Capa, put in context with a handful of historical essays. The book is packaged as a graphic novel, but it really gives unique (and easily digested) context to one of the most famous war photos, and the photographer who took it.

First Second Books

First Second Books

First Second Books

Visit site:

Take a Tour of Battlefields, Protests, and Prisons With These Photography Legends

Posted in alo, Anchor, Citizen, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Take a Tour of Battlefields, Protests, and Prisons With These Photography Legends

How Good a Dealmaker Is Donald Trump, Anyway?

by HildredRMXD Posted on November 22, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Here is Donald Trump on who he listens to regarding economic issues:

Honestly, I feel that I have such a vast feeling for it that I really—you know, Milton Friedman was good—but I don’t really listen to anybody. I just put it in and I have a feeling for, it’s almost common sense, it’s a business instinct.

Translation: Milton Friedman is the only conservative economist he can think of. And he probably wouldn’t listen to the guy if he were still alive anyway. Why mess with his killer instincts?

Which raises two questions. First: How good a developer is Donald Trump? Seriously. My sense is that he’s about a 5 on a scale of 1-10. He’s had some successes, he’s had some failures, and he seems to have found a decent—but hardly dazzling—niche in golf resorts. Overall, he started with a lot of money and has since grown his business at roughly the rate of the economy. Not bad, but nothing to crow about.

And second: why is it that we seem to have heard nothing about Trump from other developers? They’d have the best read on how good he really is, after all. If he were truly brilliant, I figure he would have been soliciting testimonials all over the place. I haven’t seen any. But if he’s a second-rater with a big mouth, I figure we would have heard that too. But I haven’t. I haven’t really heard anything. Do developers not like to talk smack about each other because they never know where their next deal might come from? Do they just generally shun publicity? Do they genuinely not know much about Trump because he doesn’t really do much business these days aside from golf courses, branding deals, and TV shows?

What’s the deal here? Trump must have a reputation within the New York developer community. So what is it?

Source: 

How Good a Dealmaker Is Donald Trump, Anyway?

Posted in Citizen, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on How Good a Dealmaker Is Donald Trump, Anyway?

These 18 Photos of Grizzly Bears Will Make You Want to Get in Your Car and Drive to Yellowstone Right Now

by JustineBallou Posted on November 21, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

By the end of the year, the federal government will likely propose taking the grizzly bear off of the endangered species list. To some, this would mark an unprecedented victory: the resuscitation of perhaps the most iconic large mammal on the continent. In 1975, when it first gained endangered species protection, the grizzly bear population in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, one of the few areas grizzly bears still exist in the continental United States, dwindled to 130. Today, the population stands at around 750. But despite this resurgence, many scientists, conservationists, and indigenous people say taking away its protection could spell disaster for the species.

This latter camp includes award-winning wildlife photographer Thomas D. Mangelsen, who has lived in Jackson Hole, Wyo., on the edge of Great Teton National Park, since the 1970s. He has captured the return of the grizzlies to Greater Yellowstone with his lens for nearly a decade, since his most famous subject, the mother grizzly bear known as 399, first appeared in Teton Park. The bear quickly became a wildlife star, raising several sets of cubs in close proximity to popular tourist spots within Grand Teton National Park while almost never threatening humans.

Using 399 and her offspring as an entry point, Mangelsen and his longtime friend and journalist Todd Wilkinson explore the controversy surrounding grizzly bears and how humans should treat them in a gorgeous coffee table book, Grizzlies of Pilgrim Creek: An Intimate Portrait of 399, that comprises Mangelsen’s photos of 399 and her family (some of which are included here), along with a narrative by Wilkinson.

Mengelsen and Wilkinson recently sat down with Mother Jones to talk about their experiences with 399, the threats she and other grizzlies face, and why we should care about what could happen if the US Fish and Wildlife Service takes away their Endangered Species Act protection.

Thomas D. Mangelsen

Thomas D. Mangelsen

Thomas D. Mangelsen

Mother Jones: Tom, tell me about what it was like when 399 showed up in Grand Teton National Park near to where you live.

Thomas D. Mangelsen: : 399’s arrival was big news in 2006 because up until then grizzly bears hadn’t been seen in Teton Park. I had been there 27 years when she showed up, and I had never seen a grizzly bear in Teton Park, and I had seen very few grizzlies in Yellowstone.

I live on the edge of Teton Park, next to the Snake River, and in 2005 I awoke in the middle of the night because my dog was going crazy. I bolted up, adrenaline rushing, and I look up and I see this bear standing face-to-face thorough the glass, looking at Loup (my dog). I looked and I saw this big hump on his back or her back, and I said hmm, that’s not a black bear, that’s a grizzly bear. But because I had never seen one there (this was before 399 showed up) I still thought it had to be a black bear.

The following year, in 2006, I started hearing stories that a mother with three cubs had been seen a couple of times in Teton Park in Oxbow Bend, which is a famous overlook, and a great place in Teton Park for wildlife. I went up there later in the summer and I saw her and her three cubs feeding on a moose carcass. I didn’t think too much about it, I thought they will be gone soon because it’s turning into fall.

Thomas D. Mangelsen

Thomas D. Mangelsen

She grew on me. I watched her a little later in the season chase elk calves in early June in the Willow Flats, which is near Oxbow Bend. She started drawing these crowds of people because she would come there every afternoon and she would play rope a dope with these herds of elk and their calves. She would be out there playing and nursing the calves, not paying attention to the elk, it looked like. Then these elk would come up closer to her to keep an eye on the predator, and all of a sudden she would bolt and run and chase them and split the herd. The elk would run into the willows and then 399 would just turn around and go back like a herd dog and pick off these elk calves.

I was excited because I knew immediately that it was a great opportunity for people to learn about bears and see them in a natural state. I’ve spent a lot of time in Africa over the years, and it was very similar to the Serengeti, seeing a lion or a cheetah chasing wildebeest.

Thomas D. Mangelsen

Thomas D. Mangelsen

MJ: Grizzlies have been protected under the Endangered Species Act since the ’70s, but many are still shot every year. Why?

Todd Wilkinson: There is an elk hunt that’s been in Great Teton National Park, the only sanctioned big game hunt of its kind in the lower 48 in a national park, and that perennially puts bears at risk because elk are getting killed in the park, the grizzlies are feeding on the remains—the gut piles—and then hunters are bumbling into them. So every season that goes by with 399 and her 15 descendants, it’s a miracle in some ways that they remain alive, because she and her offspring are walking through these land mines.

TDM: In the national parks, you can’t leave a coke can on a picnic table—you would get a ticket—but you can leave these gut piles, and you cut the legs, limbs, heads, off and leave them in the field.

Thomas D. Mangelsen

Thomas D. Mangelsen

Thomas D. Mangelsen

MJ: Why would it be a bad idea to take away grizzly bears’ Endangered Species Act protection?

TW: The federal government is saying that bears have surpassed their carrying capacity and basically the ecosystem is bursting at the seams in terms of bear numbers, so they are pushing out.

In the book, we talk about a scientist named David Mattson, who is a veteran of the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team, the premier large mammal research unit in the world. He has advanced a counter narrative, which is that, as a result of declines in their four main food groups, grizzly bears are having to range wider to find their food.

One of those key foods is whitebark pine seeds. Within the last decade, the 18-million-acre whitebark pine forest ecosystem has collapsed—it’s functionally extinct as a reliable food source. Climate change has exacerbated insect infestation so we’re now getting two beetle reproductive cycles in the course of a single year when in the past we might get one.

Thomas D. Mangelsen

Thomas D. Mangelsen

The second thing that’s happened is 25 or 30 years ago, someone introduced lake trout into Yellowstone Lake, and that has beaten back native cutthroat trout that spawn in the streams that come out of Yellowstone Lake. The bears seize upon the fish, it’s a great source of protein. Because cutthroat has been decimated that has impacted a huge number of bears, 60 to 80 bears.

And then on top of that, there is a third food source called the army cutworm moth (also known as the miller moth). They are treated as an agricultural pest, and so you have lots of pesticides thrown at the moths in farm country. Those moths migrate hundreds of miles to the high mountain talus slopes to drink the nectar of high mountain flowers. We know from climate change that those high alpine and subalpine areas are in danger, so if the flowers go away, what’s going to happen to the moths? Or if the moths get hammered by pesticides, they disappear. They are high fat sources, grizzlies eat tens of thousands of them in a sitting.

Thomas D. Mangelsen

As a result of bears losing those key foods and having to forage further, not only are females being forced to feed on carcasses, but they are also having negative encounters with cattle in the area—we have seen a spike in the number of encounters with livestock.

The one thing we know about climate change is that it is making the wild apron of ecosystems shrink. You have climate change that is asserting its impact on Greater Yellowstone at the same time you have record visitation to the national parks and a record inundation of lifestyle pilgrims moving to the ecosystem, pressing in on the outside edges. So you got this constricting ecosystem, and on top of it you have climate change. The future of grizzly bears is really uncertain.

TDM: People in the scientific community, private citizens, and conservationists are saying what’s the rush (to take away Endangered Species Act protection from the grizzly bears), let’s see how this plays out.

Thomas D. Mangelsen

MJ: What’s in store for 399 while we wait to see if grizzly bears’ protection is taken away?

TW: 399 is 19 years old. She’s been seen with male bears this summer, and so very likely when she comes out of the den late winter next year, she’ll have a new set of cubs as a 20-year-old mother.

Thomas D. Mangelsen

Thomas D. Mangelsen

Thomas D. Mangelsen

Thomas D. Mangelsen

View original:

These 18 Photos of Grizzly Bears Will Make You Want to Get in Your Car and Drive to Yellowstone Right Now

Posted in alo, Anchor, Citizen, FF, Free Press, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Pines, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on These 18 Photos of Grizzly Bears Will Make You Want to Get in Your Car and Drive to Yellowstone Right Now

Indiana Managed to Keep One Syrian Refugee Out. Here’s Why That Won’t Happen Again.

by LanoraZTAkxul Posted on November 21, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Earlier this week, a Syrian family of four on their way to the United States received an unexpected surprise: their long-awaited resettlement to Indiana was, with less than 24 hours to go, being shifted to Connecticut, because Indiana Gov. Mike Pence had demanded that no Syrian refugees be allowed into his state.

The case got widespread national attention as a symbol of the backlash against Syrian refugees following last week’s terror attacks in Paris. But nonprofit groups that help resettle refugees across the country say the case wasn’t a sign of things to come, but a one-off that won’t be repeated.

“We’re not going to capitulate to this,” says Carleen Miller, executive director of Exodus Refugee Immigration, the Indianapolis resettlement organization that was handling the Syrian family’s case. “We intend to resettle Syrians.” Wendy Johnson, the communications director for Episcopal Migration Ministries, the national group that works with Exodus, was equally firm. “The case in Indiana was a one-time occurrence,” she remarks.

Miller says Pence’s gambit worked because of short notice. Her office received a letter from the Indiana Family and Social Services Administration on Tuesday saying the state wouldn’t provide resettlement funds for Syrian refugees. Those dollars help pay for a variety of services, including English classes, counseling, and food assistance. By the time the letter arrived, the family was on its way to the United States, and Miller says she didn’t have time to scramble for other resources. “The decision I made to redirect the family to Connecticut was because the family was coming in less than 24 hours and all this had erupted, and nobody told me what the governor could or couldn’t do that would disrupt services or benefits to the client,” she says. Rather than giving the family an uncertain welcome, she chose to send them to another destination where resources were fully available.

If a resettlement group has more time to prepare, it can find private money to make up for state aid that is taken away, Miller explains. She adds, “That’s what we need to know, that families will be welcomed by us and that we’ll have the resources to provide what they need.”

Officials at resettlement agencies haven’t yet received definitive word on what state governors can actually do to prevent refugees, but they insist that moves by Pence and other governors who have refused Syrian refugees are illegal on several counts. “If this was to be implemented, we’re going to be in default of our international covenants,” says Erol Kekic of Church World Service, a resettlement agency. “Article 31 in the UN refugee convention basically says we can’t discriminate based on nationality or membership in a particular religious group, and this is exactly what we’re doing.”

Even the supposed state refugee funds that governors control aren’t strictly theirs to manage: States receive that money from the federal government. The cash is typically doled out by a state refugee coordinator, but that’s not mandatory. “It’s actually at the discretion of the director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement of the Department of Health and Human Services to decide who administers these funds,” Kekic says. “They’re not state funds.”

This Syrian family’s quick shift to Connecticut was motivated by logistics and not a fear of local backlash, according to refugee advocates, but that doesn’t mean refugees feel safe. Resettlement agencies say their local offices have fielded numerous calls from nervous refugee families and have also received reports of harassment. Carleen Miller of Exodus reports that one Syrian refugee family in Indiana expressed concern about the signal conveyed by Pence’s move. At school, the couple’s child was confronted by another student. “The classmate said, ‘Are you a supporter of ISIS?’…It’s really disturbing on a variety of levels.” Another refugee in Louisville, Kentucky, reported a death threat. “We have had one report of a Middle Eastern client…getting off the bus and somebody yelling, ‘I will kill you!'” says Kekic, from Church World Service. “So the guy went home and shaved his beard and cried, and then called the agency to say, ‘I don’t know what to think anymore. I didn’t do anything to anyone. Here I am, what do I do next?'” Local resettlement offices have also received threats, Kekic points out.

Many refugee families now live in a constant state of tension, according to resettlement officials. “They feel afraid, they’re not sure what to do, they don’t know if they belong there anymore, how should they behave,” Johnson say. But refugee assistance groups also note that local communities have mostly been welcoming.

In Connecticut, the Syrian family of three—they have so far declined to give their names to media outlets—arrived in New Haven on Wednesday and was greeted by Democratic Gov. Daniel Malloy, one of the few politicians to publicly welcome Syrian refugees in the past week. “Americans sometimes overreact to issues, but in the end they come back and find center,” he reassured the family, according to Chris George, the executive director of Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services, the group that inherited the case from Exodus.

Then, after Malloy left, the family prepared for their first night in their new homeland.

Visit source:

Indiana Managed to Keep One Syrian Refugee Out. Here’s Why That Won’t Happen Again.

Posted in Anchor, Casio, Citizen, FF, GE, LAI, LG, Mop, ONA, oven, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Indiana Managed to Keep One Syrian Refugee Out. Here’s Why That Won’t Happen Again.

Prostitution Scandals, Police Chases, and an Alleged Love Child: Welcome to the Louisiana Governor’s Race

by AlanStarling Posted on November 20, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

On Saturday, Louisiana voters will elect a new governor—Republican Sen. David Vitter or Democratic state Rep. John Bel Edwards. They’ll also celebrate the end of one of the strangest campaigns in recent history. It has included prostitutes, an alleged love child, a coffee-shop spying scandal, a low-speed foot chase, an IHOP affidavit, the FBI, Santa Claus, and a fake terrorism scare.

Edwards is leading in most polls by double digits in the deep-red state—a testament to the supreme unpopularity of the current Republican governor, Bobby Jindal, and to Vitter’s own shortcomings. In some ways, they’re not so different. The Democratic challenger is, like Vitter, anti-abortion and pro-gun, and he asked President Barack Obama to halve the resettlement of Syrian refugees in Louisiana. (The Pelican State has thus far accepted 14.)

But Edwards has also backed accepting federal money to expand Medicaid with no strings attached. (Vitter has said he would not take expansion “off the table” but did not want to create an incentive for people to stop working.) Democrats hoping for off-year electoral successes suffered a major blow when Obamacare critic Matt Bevin was elected governor of Kentucky earlier in November. In Louisiana, they have a chance to quietly offset that loss and put a lot more folks on the Medicaid rolls. That’s a big deal.

But the race is memorable for less substantive reasons. These are all real things that have happened over the final month of the campaign:

One week before the October election—Saturday’s runoff vote between the top two October finishers was triggered because no candidate received majority support—a Louisiana blogger named Jason Berry published a video interview on his website, American Zombie, with a former prostitute who alleged that Vitter paid her $5,000 a month for three years, gave her jewelry, got her pregnant, and told her to get an abortion. The former prostitute, Wendy Ellis, told Berry she was coming forward because she was dying of lupus and wanted a clean conscience.
Berry would not reveal exactly how he found Ellis but admitted he’d gotten in touch with her through a professional political researcher.
On the eve of the first election, a private investigator employed by a law firm paid by the Vitter campaign was caught secretly filming a group of Edwards supporters, including Jefferson Parish sheriff Newell Normand, during a regular coffee meeting at the Royal Blend cafe in Old Metairie.
When a member of the group took a photo of the P.I., he fled on foot through a succession of vacant properties. The Edwards supporters pursued the P.I. through the neighborhood, and found him hiding behind an air-conditioning unit. He was arrested and charged with criminal mischief.
The private investigator told sheriff deputies that he was not spying on the sheriff, but rather “on an assignment to conduct surveillance on a subject with a white beard.”
The “subject with a white beard” revealed himself to be a New Orleans lawyer and Edwards supporter named John Cummings, who told the Baton Rouge Advocate, “The stupid son of a bitch was supposed to find Santa Claus in the cafe; that’s the guy with the white beard.”
Cummings added, “You can tell David Vitter that he doesn’t get anything for Christmas. He’s been naughty.”
The deputies found a LexisNexis dossier inside the private investigator’s car about Berry, the American Zombie blogger who published the story about Vitter and his alleged love child.
Berry told reporters that he had seen the private investigator outside his own house two days earlier. “I don’t know whether it was incompetence, whether he’s like Inspector Clouseau, or whether the guy actually wanted me to see him, but it was pretty clear what was going on when I made eye contact with him and he smiled at me,” he told WWL-TV.
Unbeknownst to Vitter’s P.I., the opposition researcher who helped Berry track down Ellis was also at the Royal Blend. The investigator, Danny Denoux, told the Advocate that he had been retained by an anonymous businessman.
Edwards’ first ad of the runoff election, aired during a Louisiana State University football game, stated, “David Vitter chose prostitutes over patriots. Now, the choice is yours.”

Vitter told reporters he sent documents to the FBI and the local US Attorney’s office accusing Cummings (“the guy with the white beard”) of paying a witness to make false statements against him. (Cummings has denied this.)
The next day, Normand, the Jefferson Parish sheriff who chased Vitter’s P.I. through the streets of Metairie, held a press conference to announce that he had recovered video footage from the private investigator’s phone, depicting a 30-minute interview at an IHOP with an acquaintance of the prostitute. The investigator on the tape was attempting to persuade Ellis’ friend, an unidentified woman, to sign an affidavit discrediting Ellis’ claims. Norman read aloud several excerpts from the meeting. “I’d like you to say Jason Berry made payment to several witnesses,” the investigator told the woman. “If I could show then Jason Berry paying people off, that would kind of kill this story.” Normand told reporters he was going to turn the tapes over to the FBI. (Berry has denied paying sources for material.)
Vitter returned to the scene of the crime, holding a private meeting with donors at—of all places—the Royal Blend cafe in Metairie, where his P.I. had filmed Normand’s coffee meeting.
After Vitter took umbrage at the ad about the prostitutes during their debate, Edwards told Vitter, “If it’s a low blow, it’s only be­cause that’s where you live, senator—it’s 100 percent truthful”:

Citing “those extracurricular activities that you don’t want to admit to,” the Democrat continued, “You’re a liar and you’re a cheater and you’re a stealer and I don’t tolerate that.” (Vitter has denied being a liar and a stealer.)
Trailing in the polls by double digits, Vitter wrote an open letter to Obama warning him that a Syrian refugee who had resettled in Louisiana had gone “missing.” The Louisiana GOP picked up Vitter’s talking point and emailed supporters, “There is an unmonitored Syrian refugee who is walking around freely, and no one knows where he is.”
There was no missing Syrian refugee.
Normand, who can’t not comment about these things, told the Gambit that “somebody’s going to get killed” as a result of Vitter’s misinformation.

Link: 

Prostitution Scandals, Police Chases, and an Alleged Love Child: Welcome to the Louisiana Governor’s Race

Posted in alo, Anchor, Citizen, FF, GE, Jason, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Prostitution Scandals, Police Chases, and an Alleged Love Child: Welcome to the Louisiana Governor’s Race

Friday Cat Blogging – 20 November 2015

by DanielaKenneall Posted on November 20, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

This has sure been a crappy week, and Hilbert and Hopper agree. As you can see, they decided to flee upstairs to the bedroom and adopt disapproving looks. Those are for Donald Trump. They are hoping that us human types can do more than just glower, so let’s get to it.

Excerpt from:

Friday Cat Blogging – 20 November 2015

Posted in Citizen, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Friday Cat Blogging – 20 November 2015

Hillary Clinton’s Strange Definition of "Middle Class"

by AlissaDCBftg Posted on November 20, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Hillary Clinton’s campaign has spent much of the past week trumpeting her pledge to protect the middle class from tax increases. Clinton has “proposed a bold, aggressive agenda,” campaign press secretary Brian Fallon said in a statement this week, “but when it comes to paying for it, she will make sure the wealthiest Americans finally start paying their fair share, not force the middle class to pay even more than they already do.”

The former senator and secretary of state hasn’t been shy about using that pledge to bludgeon her Democratic opponents, Sen. Bernie Sanders and former Gov. Martin O’Malley, as too eager to take money away from the middle class. “If you are truly concerned about raising incomes for middle-class families, the last thing you should do is cut their take-home pay right off the bat by raising their taxes,” Fallon said. “Yet Bernie Sanders has called for a roughly 9-percent tax hike on middle-class families just to cover his health care plan, and simple math dictates he’ll need to tax workers even more to pay for the rest of his at least $18-20 trillion agenda.” Twitter accounts affiliated with Clinton’s campaign have eschewed subtlety to attack Sanders and O’Malley on this point.

There’s a problem with Clinton’s line of attack: She is promising to exempt a lot indisputably rich people from paying more in taxes. Clinton pledged last week that, should she become president, she wouldn’t allow taxes to be raised on households earning less than $250,000 per year—by any measure a very high ceiling for the middle class.

The middle class is one of those nebulous terms with no clear-cut definition. But a glance at the distribution of income across the country makes it hard to argue that that anyone earning close to $250,000 a year could be considered part of the “middle” of the income range.

Continue Reading »

Link:  

Hillary Clinton’s Strange Definition of "Middle Class"

Posted in Anchor, Citizen, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Hillary Clinton’s Strange Definition of "Middle Class"