Tag Archives: house

Elizabeth Warren Slams Donald Trump’s "Huge Conflicts of Interest"

by RollandPardo Posted on June 3, 2016

Mother Jones

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

Earlier this week, Mother Jones reported that Donald Trump’s loans from the German-based Deutsche Bank—totaling at least $100 million and possibly much more—would pose a significant conflict of interest, should Trump, the GOP’s presumptive nominee, become president. After all, the bank was recently caught manipulating markets around the world (and had to pay $2.5 billion in fines), and it has has tried to evade US laws aimed at curtailing risky financial shenanigans and has attempted to influence the US government via lobbying.

Richard Painter, an attorney who teaches at the University of Minnesota and who was the chief ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush from 2005 to 2007, noted that Trump’s relationship with the overseas financial giant was disturbing: “having a president who owes a lot of money to banks, particularly when it’s on negotiable terms—it puts them at the mercy of the banks and the banks are at the mercy of regulators.” He added, “that is a potentially very troublesome business model for someone in public office.”

In response to the article, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) says that Trump’s dealings with Deutsche Bank—and his connections with other major financial institutions—could indeed pose trouble, were he to win the White House. In a statement to Mother Jones, the senator slammed Trump’s relationship with the bank:

The job of the President is to enforce the law fairly. If a serial lawbreaker like Deutsche Bank is caught manipulating markets again, how would Trump hold it accountable knowing that the bank had the power to pull the plug on his own businesses? That’s a question that should worry every American. These financial entanglements—along with many of his other ongoing business concerns and arrangements—present huge conflicts of interest.

In recent months, Warren has repeatedly challenged Trump. In a string of tweets in March, she listed all the ways Trump has been a “loser” (Trump University, bankruptcies, attacks on women, narcissism, bullying). On Stephen Colbert’s show, she declared, “The truth is that Trump inherited a fortune from his father, he kept it going by cheating and defrauding people, and then he takes his creditors through Chapter 11.” In a speech two weeks ago, she denounced the mogul for having said he was delighted to have made money off the 2008 economic crash: “Let’s face it: Donald Trump cares about exactly one thing—Donald Trump. It’s time for some accountability because these statements disqualify Donald Trump from ever becoming president. The free ride is over.” Trump has retorted by calling Warren “Pocahontas” and deriding her as “a woman that’s been very ineffective other than she’s got a big mouth.”

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for a comment regarding Warren’s remarks about his Deutsche Bank loans—or what Trump would do about his financial relationships if elected president.

More:  

Elizabeth Warren Slams Donald Trump’s "Huge Conflicts of Interest"

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Elizabeth Warren Slams Donald Trump’s "Huge Conflicts of Interest"

The Cast of the Original "Roots" Knows All About Hollywood’s Diversity Problem

by WallyLUDCfn Posted on June 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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

The Roots miniseries that aired back in 1977 had the largest black cast in the history of commercial television—and the biggest audience numbers, too. It drew more than 100 million viewers in the United States, and millions more internationally. This unprecedented success seemed to herald new possibilities for black employment in television and film, and optimism that more black-themed shows would cross over to white audiences. But nearly four decades later—think #OscarsSoWhite—that dream remains unfilled. With History’s Roots remake now making headlines, it’s useful to look to the original series as a cautionary tale on the pace of progress in Hollywood.

Roots failed to change the racial dynamics of the industry primarily because Hollywood executives perceived it as a unique black story they could pitch to white audiences. In discussing the casting, the creators emphasized that Roots would have to appeal to whites to succeed commercially. Alex Haley’s best-selling book, the basis for the saga, contained no major white characters—but that was never seriously considered as an option for television.

Producer David Wolper argued that hiring white “television names” was the only way to ensure that Roots wouldn’t be marginalized. “If people perceive Roots to be a black history show—nobody is going to watch it,” he said. “If they say, ‘Let me see, there are no names in it, a lot of black actors and there are no whites’…It looks like it’s going to be a black journal—it’s all going to be blacks telling about their history.”

Wolper, whose son Mark produced the new Roots, was a white TV veteran who had pitched and developed programs for two decades before Roots came along. He understood as well as anyone the logic of race and demographics that governed Hollywood in that era. For Wolper and for ABC, it was simple arithmetic. “Remember, the television audience is only 10 percent black and 90 percent white,” Wolper said following Roots‘ record-breaking run. “So if we do the show for blacks and only every black in America watches, it is a disaster—a total disaster.”

Roots was successful in many ways. It sparked a national conversation about race and slavery. It helped legitimize the miniseries format and begat several follow-up projects—Roots: The Next Generation (1979), Roots: The Gift (1988), and Alex Haley’s Queen (1993). It also paved the way for unrelated miniseries such as Holocaust (1978), The Thorn Birds (1983), and Winds of War (1983). It made ABC (and Doubleday books) a ton of money to boot. But what Roots didn’t do was persuade the suits to greenlight more shows with black leads.

Roots‘ black cast members felt this failure acutely. “We were so fabulous I thought we would have jobs up the wazoo,” Leslie Uggams, who played Kizzy, told Wendy Williams in 2013. “And there were no jobs. I didn’t get another job until two years later when I did a show called Back Stairs at the White House. We were very disappointed, because we had all these accolades; it was like we did our quota, and now that’s it for the rest of time.” Lynne Moody, who portrayed Alex Haley’s great-great-grandmother in the original, said she “thought Roots would skyrocket me,” but when those acting jobs failed to materialize, “I felt the color of my skin” and fell into a “deep depression.”

When an interviewer asked John Amos, the actor who portrayed the grown-up Kunta Kinte, whether he’d reaped any rewards from Roots, Amos joked, “Yeah, the unemployment office.” Even David Wolper conceded that Roots‘ success had limits. “I don’t think it changed race relations,” he told an interviewer in 1998. “I think for a moment it had an impact. Did it help African American actors? No. A lot of them couldn’t get work even after Roots came on. Did more stories about African Americans show on television? No.”

The new series plays out, of course, in a very different cultural landscape. The Black Lives Matter movement has drawn national attention to the mistreatment of African Americans by the police. And the #OscarsSoWhite social media campaign called out the problematic lack of color in Hollywood’s production pipeline with help from watchdogs like UCLA’s Bunche Center, whose annual “Hollywood Diversity Report” compiles data showing how people of color are underrepresented as actors, directors, and writers in film and television.

America is far more racially and ethnically diverse today than it was in 1977, but Hollywood has been slow to catch up, particularly at the cineplex. And while the success of recent black-led television shows, including How to Get Away With Murder, Blackish, Empire, and Underground, is a hopeful sign, there’s no guarantee this trend will continue.

If Roots proved anything, it’s that high ratings aren’t enough. There have to be more people of color (and women, for that matter) in the writer’s room, behind the camera, and, crucially, in positions of power at the studios and talent agencies that determine what America watches. The Roots remake, though well worth watching, is an apt reminder that the road to equal opportunity is a long one.

Originally posted here – 

The Cast of the Original "Roots" Knows All About Hollywood’s Diversity Problem

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Cast of the Original "Roots" Knows All About Hollywood’s Diversity Problem

Here’s the real story behind Trump’s drought denial

by MikaylaBazile Posted on June 1, 2016

A little fishy

Here’s the real story behind Trump’s drought denial

By on Jun 1, 2016 10:09 amShare

Over the weekend, Donald Trump told voters in California, a state that is now suffering through its fifth year of drought, that “there is no drought.” Instead, Trump says, the state is suffering from harmful policies crafted by environmentalists. Or, in Trump-speak, “they’re taking the water and shoving it out to sea.”

A lot of outlets pilloried the remarks.  The Atlantic said they were “beneath contempt.” Slate called them “oblivious.”

But Trump has gotten far too much credit. He’s not being his usual creative self. He’s just repeating an argument that’s been popular among conservatives for years. Ex-Republican-darling Carly Fiorina made this same argument repeatedly during her brief presidential run, calling the California drought nothing more than a “man-made disaster.” Conservative media, including Fox News, National Review, and the Wall Street Journal, have long taken aim at environmentalists for exacerbating the drought.

Think of it as off-brand climate denialism. Drought deniers believe overzealous environmentalists got California into this mess. State and federal conservation laws call for a certain minimum level of freshwater to flow through the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta in Northern California, where two of the state’s largest rivers meet. Drought deniers say there’s an easy fix to the state’s water problems – take away those laws and divert more of that water to the agriculture industry.

The longstanding symbol at the center of this fight is the delta smelt, a three-inch-long fish protected under the Endangered Species Act.

Roughly half of the water that flows through the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta is supposed to be left to sustain the delta smelt and the broader environment, and the rest is to be divided for human uses like agriculture and household consumption. But that’s in a normal year; in recent drought years, California has already been making exceptions to regulatory safeguards. The U.S. House of Representatives is now considering a bill to amend the Endangered Species Act and allow even more water to be redirected to the dry Central Valley and Southern California. Even Senate Democrats are  considering a bill that would give the federal government more leeway to divert water for human use.

But as water from the delta makes its way out to the ocean, it doesn’t just nurture the delta smelt.  By supporting the whole ecosystem, it supports fishing industries as well. The health of the delta smelt population is a rough approximation of the health of the ecosystem and other species in it, including salmon, and right now that health is poor. Ironically, even the quality of human drinking water would be negatively affected by diverting more water from the delta for human use.

Letting farmers and other interests use as much water as they want wouldn’t begin to solve the larger problems posed by drought and climate change. It wouldn’t suddenly mean there is more snowpack and rain. It wouldn’t make California any less hot. In fact, this Band-Aid approach might only make California worse off in the decades to come, as megadroughts become a reality; if the state doesn’t figure out how to conserve water now, it will only have more problems down the road.

So it isn’t as simple as Trump promises: “If I win, believe me, we’re going to start opening up the water so that you can have your farmers survive.”

Trump and other drought deniers have another thing in common: They tend to ignore the role of climate change in making California’s drought more extreme, and reject climate science altogether. They are certain that the drought is man-made, but they’re still unconvinced that humans have caused climate change.

Share

Get Grist in your inbox

View article – 

Here’s the real story behind Trump’s drought denial

Posted in alo, Anchor, Citizen, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, ONA, Paradise, solar, The Atlantic, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Here’s the real story behind Trump’s drought denial

Quote of the Day: The Conservative Fight to Become First Gnat

by XEYJanette Posted on May 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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

From conservative Jim Geraghty on the ongoing spat between right-wingers about who’s selling out to whom in the great Facebook War of 2016:

I’m pretty darn sure that throwing around accusations of gutlessness and useful idiocy are far more about deciding who should be deemed First Gnat than they are about actually changing behavior in Silicon Valley.

The ostensible subject of this war is whether Facebook is deliberately suppressing conservative stories in its Trending Topics feed. A bunch of conservatives met with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg about this, and when it was all over Glenn Beck praised Zuckerberg for listening while Tucker Carlson insisted that Beck was a Zuckerberg toady. It went downhill from there.

But here’s what gets me. Unless I’ve missed something, this entire squabble is based on the claims of one (1) anonymous former member of the team responsible for Trending Topics. That’s it. Am I wrong about this? Has there been any other serious evidence one way or the other about Facebook’s alleged bias? Are conservatives really rending their garments over something so thin?

Of course, we liberals are going through the same thing on a larger scale in the current war between Hillarybots and Berniebros (or whatever we call them these days). But at least that’s tediously normal, since it happens every time Democrats are competing for the White House. I recommend that conservatives go back to fighting over Donald Trump. At least that matters.

Taken from: 

Quote of the Day: The Conservative Fight to Become First Gnat

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Quote of the Day: The Conservative Fight to Become First Gnat

How Global Warming Is Making Some Diseases Even Scarier

by ModestoBrickhou Posted on May 14, 2016

Mother Jones

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

Americans should expect a surge in deaths from heat waves, flooding, and respiratory disease as the climate warms, according to a wide-ranging White House report released last month. And what spells disaster for humans could also be a boon to infectious microbes and the animals that transmit them.

The guest on this week’s episode of Inquiring Minds is Ben Beard, associate director for climate change at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He’s one of more than 100 researchers who contributed to the report, and his specialty is vector-borne diseases. These illnesses—which include Lyme disease, dengue fever, and Zika virus—are transmitted by other animals, especially insects such as mosquitos and ticks. Beard talks with co-host Indre Viskontas about how global warming is poised to alter their spread and whether the changes we’re already seeing can be attributed to climate change. “These diseases are emerging in the United States,” he says. “There are more and more cases every year.” You can listen to the full interview with Beard below:

It’s no coincidence that vector-borne illnesses are among the most “climate-sensitive” diseases, he adds, increasing in range and incidence when environmental conditions are favorable to the critters that harbor them. In some regions of the United States, recent decades have brought longer, warmer summers and shorter, milder winters. That’s played a role in the northward creep of tick-transmitted Lyme disease and seasonal flare-ups of the West Nile virus, which is carried by mosquitos. But the issue isn’t simply the expanding range of those diseases; at warmer temperatures, mosquitos can speed up their life cycles, Beard explains. Under hotter conditions, viruses like West Nile will typically replicate faster in the cold-blooded mosquito, making it more likely to be transmitted through each bite.

US Global Change Research Program

There’s also concern, Beard says, about local transmission of diseases typically associated with the tropics—he points to recent cases of dengue and chikungunya in Florida (both are transmitted by mosquitos). But he cautions that the precise causes remain poorly understood; the recent uptick could be linked as much to increases in global trade and travel as it is to changes in the climate.

But one takeaway is clear. “The brunt of this will be borne by the poorer, more tropical regions of the world,” Beard says. These are communities with climates that are already hospitable to disease-bearing insects, and in which the basic layers of prevention—from air conditioning to insect repellent—are scarce. They’re also less likely to have access to quick diagnosis and treatment, he says, which can increase the likelihood that mosquitos or other vectors will spread the illness from one infected individual to an entire household.

Inquiring Minds is a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and Kishore Hari, the director of the Bay Area Science Festival. To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow, like us on Facebook, and check out show notes and other cool stuff on Tumblr.

See original article here – 

How Global Warming Is Making Some Diseases Even Scarier

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on How Global Warming Is Making Some Diseases Even Scarier

Here’s what Obama’s new methane rule won’t cover

by SelmaGuercio13 Posted on May 13, 2016

Here’s what Obama’s new methane rule won’t cover

By on May 13, 2016 4:44 amShare

On Thursday, the Environmental Protection Agency released its final regulations aimed at cutting methane emissions from new oil and gas infrastructure built after 2015. But as impressive as they sound on paper, the rule doesn’t answer the tough question: What is the United States doing about all the methane emissions from its existing infrastructure?

Between the new rule and a related set of 2012 regulations, EPA has suggested that we are currently on course for a 20 to 30 percent cut in methane emissions by 2025. However, the Obama administration has promised a 40 to 45 percent cut by that year, meaning more action is needed.

Thursday’s regulations only cover new and modified wells, and Environmental Defense Fund research suggests that by 2018, nearly 90 percent of methane emissions from the oil and gas sector will come from sources that existed before 2012.

As for these sources, EPA has issued a request that will “require oil and natural gas companies to provide extensive information needed to develop regulations” targeting emissions from existing infrastructure. Those regulations, however, likely won’t begin development until the next administration cozies up in the White House. (And depending on the administration, may never be developed at all!)

In the grand scheme of U.S. emissions, methane makes up about 11 percent of our greenhouse gases, and about one-third of that figure is from oil and gas. This is where the existing infrastructure starts to feel a little more pressing: If we take the EDF’s projection at face value, that means that the new rule will only address the sources of less than 1 percent of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

Ignoring other greenhouse gases, even the methane front alone looks a little dismal. The United States has around 3 million abandoned wells, many of which are probably leaking the gas. The natural gas sector already loses about 1 to 3 percent of its product (which is mostly methane) due to leakage.

The regulations also neglect the agricultural sector, which accounts for about 9 percent of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Methane emissions from agriculture increased 11 percent between 1990 and 2014, largely because of a 54 percent spike in greenhouse gas emissions from livestock manure management systems. Globally, agriculture is the largest source of emitted methane. EPA is currently barred from requiring livestock producers to report their emissions.

The EPA regulations do represent a step forward for curbing emissions — as well as for slashing emissions of smog precursors known as volatile organic compounds — but they’re by no means the one-size-fits-all plug for our methane leaks.

Share

Find this article interesting?

Donate now to support our work.

Get Grist in your inbox

Original source – 

Here’s what Obama’s new methane rule won’t cover

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, organic, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Here’s what Obama’s new methane rule won’t cover

Former CIA Deputy Director: Trump Would Be a "Hard Brief"

by LorrieNuyts Posted on May 6, 2016

Mother Jones

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

The veteran CIA official who once provided intelligence briefings to presidential candidates—including Gov. George W. Bush in 2000 and Sen. John Kerry in 2004—says briefing Donald Trump, the presumptive GOP nominee, could be rather difficult.

“It’s an extraordinary year and Trump doesn’t fit any mold at all,” John McLaughlin, the former deputy CIA director who served as acting head of the agency in 2004, tells Mother Jones. “I think he’d be a hard brief.”

To McLaughlin, Trump looks like an inflexible candidate who might not take well to information that contradicts or undercuts his own positions. “As an intelligence briefer, you’d probably be telling him a fair number of things that are at odds with his stated views,” he notes. “And then you would find out how well he absorbs discordant information…Trump’s public statements don’t suggest that he’s someone who easily deals with things that strongly disagree with his view.”

Other intelligence officials have expressed similar concerns since Trump became the all-but-certain GOP standard-bearer this week. “Given that Trump’s public persona seems to reflect a lack of understanding or care about global issues, how do you arrange these presentations to learn what are the true depths of his understanding?” former CIA and National Security Agency director Michael Hayden told the Washington Post. There’s also the possibility that Trump will blurt out classified information on the campaign trail. McLaughlin says candidates—and any aides they may want to bring into intelligence briefings—aren’t required to obtain security clearance to participate in the briefings. Lengthy and detailed background checks are the norm for government officials granted access to classified material.

The White House referred questions on the intelligence briefing process to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which carries out the briefings. That office has said it won’t provide further details until after the nominating conventions in July. Candidates do not receive intelligence briefings until they are officially nominated.

The White House has ultimate say over what information goes into the briefings, and McLaughlin says President Barack Obama could even decline to offer briefings to the candidates. But he believes that would be unlikely. His hunch is that in the case of Trump, the White House would take extra steps to stress to Trump and his aides the sensitive nature of the information and the need to protect it. “But who knows?” McLaughlin adds. “We don’t know who Trump is.”

View the original here:  

Former CIA Deputy Director: Trump Would Be a "Hard Brief"

Posted in alternative energy, Anchor, Casio, Everyone, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, solar, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Former CIA Deputy Director: Trump Would Be a "Hard Brief"

Here’s How the White House Shapes Foreign Affairs Coverage

by DeniceQBJxtzjf Posted on May 6, 2016

Mother Jones

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

In the New York Times Magazine this week, David Samuels has a long profile of Ben Rhodes, the chief messaging guru for foreign affairs in the White House. Generally speaking, Rhodes seems like my kind of guy, but what’s most interesting about the profile isn’t really Rhodes himself, but his take on modern journalism. For example:

It is hard for many to absorb the true magnitude of the change in the news business — 40 percent of newspaper-industry professionals have lost their jobs over the past decade….Rhodes singled out a key example to me one day, laced with the brutal contempt that is a hallmark of his private utterances. “All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

Or this on how to spin the news:

Ned Price, Rhodes’s assistant, gave me a primer on how it’s done. The easiest way for the White House to shape the news, he explained, is from the briefing podiums, each of which has its own dedicated press corps. “But then there are sort of these force multipliers,” he said, adding, “We have our compadres, I will reach out to a couple people….And I’ll give them some color,” Price continued, “and the next thing I know, lots of these guys are in the dot-com publishing space, and have huge Twitter followings, and they’ll be putting this message out on their own.”

….In a world where experienced reporters competed for scoops and where carrying water for the White House was a cause for shame, no matter which party was in power, it was much harder to sustain a “narrative” over any serious period of time. Now the most effectively weaponized 140-character idea or quote will almost always carry the day, and it is very difficult for even good reporters to necessarily know where the spin is coming from or why.

Or this:

Rhodes developed a healthy contempt for the American foreign-policy establishment, including editors and reporters at The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker and elsewhere, who at first applauded the Iraq war and then sought to pin all the blame on Bush and his merry band of neocons when it quickly turned sour. If anything, that anger has grown fiercer during Rhodes’s time in the White House. He referred to the American foreign-policy establishment as the Blob. According to Rhodes, the Blob includes Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates and other Iraq-war promoters from both parties who now whine incessantly about the collapse of the American security order in Europe and the Middle East.

….Barack Obama is not a standard-issue liberal Democrat. He openly shares Rhodes’s contempt for the groupthink of the American foreign-policy establishment and its hangers-on in the press. Yet one problem with the new script that Obama and Rhodes have written is that the Blob may have finally caught on.

The Blob “catching on” means that a lot of members of the foreign policy establishment have decided that maybe they don’t like Obama so much after all. He’s just too unwilling to send in the military when there’s a problem somewhere. At least, that seems like their big complaint to me.

Anyway, the whole thing is worth a read—not so much for what it says about Rhodes or Obama, but for what it says about the news business circa 2016. In a way, nothing has changed: presidents always try to shape the news, and they use whatever tools are at hand in their particular era. But in another way, everything has changed. It’s not just the tools that have changed this time, it’s the entire press corps.

Source article – 

Here’s How the White House Shapes Foreign Affairs Coverage

Posted in alternative energy, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, solar, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Here’s How the White House Shapes Foreign Affairs Coverage

The Highest Ranking Republican Just Refused to Endorse Donald Trump–For Now

by IsabellOmn Posted on May 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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

House Speaker Paul Ryan said on Thursday that he is “not ready” to endorse Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president.

“I’m just not ready to do that at this point,” Ryan told CNN‘s Jake Tapper.

“I think what a lot of Republicans want to see is that we have a standard bearer that bears our standards,” he added.

In December, Ryan condemned Trump’s inflammatory plan to ban all Muslims from entering the country.

Continue at source: 

The Highest Ranking Republican Just Refused to Endorse Donald Trump–For Now

Posted in alternative energy, Anchor, Everyone, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, solar, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Highest Ranking Republican Just Refused to Endorse Donald Trump–For Now

Obama drinks to his first Flint visit since lead poisoning crisis

by SilviaLamar6141 Posted on May 4, 2016

U.S. President Barack Obama drinks a glass of filtered water during a visit to Flint. REUTERS/Carlos Barria – RTX2CVDN

Obama drinks to his first Flint visit since lead poisoning crisis

By on May 4, 2016Share

President Obama’s first visit to Flint, Michigan since declaring a state of emergency was heavy on the optics from the start. Flanked by Flint residents and Michigan Governor Rick Snyder, Obama worked to restore faith in a city that’s been totally betrayed by local, state, and federal levels of government over its water crisis.

The details of the trip appeared to be up in the air until the very last minute. Particularly the detail of whether Obama would drink the tap. The day before, staffers from Snyder’s office (who’s in the midst of a 30-day pledge to only drink Flint’s filtered tap water, in an effort to convince residents it’s safe) told the press he hoped Obama would drink from the tap while in town. Speaking from Air Force One this morning, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said it was “unclear” whether Obama would drink it.

In the end, the president tried the filtered water from the Flint public water system — twice.

“Generally, I haven’t been doing stunts, but here you go,” Obama said, taking a sip from a glass on a table after a meeting with federal officials at a food bank. “Filtered water is safe and it works.”

Later in the day, POTUS had a coughing fit during a speech at Northwestern High School and asked for another glass. This time it wasn’t a stunt. “I really did need a glass of water,” he insisted. “This is not a stunt.”

The trip was on the same day that the Michigan legislature appropriated an additional $128 million in aid for Flint, some of which will go towards replacing the city’s lead pipes — a process that could take another two years.

Flint residents aren’t letting local or state officials off the hook: One city and two state officials were recently hit with criminal charges. Governor Snyder — who says he can’t eat in a public restaurant these days without being heckled — was basically booed off the stage at Northwestern High School while introducing the President.

Speaking to a restless crowd of around 1,000 people at the high school, Obama did his damnedest to stay positive and constructive. He encouraged Flint residents to flush contaminants from their pipes by running the water in sinks in bathtubs, part of the “Flush for Flint” program — “not the most elegant title,” POTUS quipped, to some laughs. He also announced expanded Medicaid access for Flint residents though a state and federal collaboration, and strongly urged parents to get their kids checked.

But Obama also acknowledged the government’s failure to protect Flint. “This is a man-made crisis,” the President said.

Share

Find this article interesting?

Donate now to support our work.

Get Grist in your inbox

Originally posted here:

Obama drinks to his first Flint visit since lead poisoning crisis

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, ONA, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Obama drinks to his first Flint visit since lead poisoning crisis