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Meet the People Trying to Prevent Minority Voters From Bailing on Trump

by FlorPilgrim353 Posted on August 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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With less than 100 days to go until the election, the Donald Trump campaign will officially launch its outreach effort to black voters on Sunday at a church in Charlotte, North Carolina. For some of the prominent Trump backers taking part in the event, it’s the culmination of a monthslong fight to keep minority support for the Republican candidate from crumbling altogether amid a seemingly endless series of scandals that have prompted charges of racism.

The National Diversity Coalition for Trump, a group originally conceived after a contentious meeting between Trump and black ministers last year, began operations in April. The coalition, a volunteer effort that is not formally connected to the Trump campaign, is the brainchild of a handful of vocal Trump supporters. Bruce LeVell, a black businessman and Georgia delegate to the Republican National Convention, serves as the organization’s executive director. Michael Cohen, the executive vice president of the Trump Organization, and Darrell Scott, a black Cleveland-area pastor, are also leaders of the group. Omarosa Manigault, a former Apprentice contestant who serves as Trump’s director of black outreach and will deliver a sermon at Sunday’s event, was vice chair of the coalition prior to joining the campaign. The group’s advisory board includes leaders of groups such as American Muslims for Trump, African-American Pastors for Trump, and Korean Americans for Trump.

Despite abysmal poll numbers, members of the coalition contest the perception that Trump is struggling among nonwhite voters. “There are a lot of minorities who are for Trump, but the media doesn’t report that,” Dahlys Hamilton, a coalition adviser and the founder of the conservative group Hispanic Patriots, says in an email. Hamilton is currently helping the group plan its Hispanic outreach strategy.

Coalition members have become some of Trump’s most reliable media surrogates, frequently making appearances on television and radio in an effort to cast the candidate in a better light. It’s not surprising that media bookers turn to them, given the dearth of prominent Trump supporters of color.

The coalition is attempting to reverse a precipitous slide in minority support for the Republican Party. After Mitt Romney’s loss in 2012, party insiders wrote an “autopsy” of the election that called for bringing more nonwhite voters into the party, and Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus announced a $10 million minority outreach initiative the next year to aid in the effort. This year, polls in some states show minority support for Trump far below Romney’s numbers. (An online poll conducted by Florida International University and Adsmovil and released Wednesday found Trump with one-third the support among Latinos in Florida that Romney had.) Earlier this week, Sally Bradshaw, a longtime adviser to Jeb Bush and one of the co-authors of the autopsy, said she would leave the Republican Party rather than support Trump. “Ultimately, I could not abide the hateful rhetoric of Donald Trump and his complete lack of principles and conservative philosophy,” she told CNN.

Even within a party that has struggled to attract voters of color, Trump has seemed to go out of his way to turn off one minority group after another. First, of course, there was his wall to prevent Mexican “rapists” and drug dealers from entering the country. Then came his ban on Muslim travel, his frequent retweeting of white supremacists, skirmishes between black protesters and Trump supporters at rallies, his suggestion that a federal judge was biased because of his Mexican heritage, and, most recently, a feud with the parents of a Muslim American Army captain killed in combat in Iraq.

“There is a deliberate effort by the Clinton campaign to label him as a racist,” says Paris Dennard, a member of the coalition’s advisory board and a black outreach staffer at the White House during George W. Bush’s second term. “Hillary Clinton can only win this election by voter suppression, by stopping Republicans, independents and moderates from voting for Trump.”

Members of the coalition say Trump hasn’t been given a chance to explain how his policies will help minority communities and argue that the candidate’s racially charged rhetoric on the campaign trail does not match his behavior in private meetings. They believe his business experience, his stance on criminal justice reform, his positions against free trade and outsourcing, his call for limiting immigration, and his support of school choice will appeal to conservative nonwhite voters frustrated by the Obama presidency. (Trump’s campaign website does not list a specific justice reform platform, but the candidate has said he wants a return to “law and order,” using misleading interpretations of crime data to argue that “this administration’s rollback of criminal enforcement” has caused an increase in crime.)

Changing the narrative around the Trump campaign hasn’t been an easy task. At times, the coalition has been hindered by its lack of official status in the campaign. According to NBC, when the group held its launch meeting at Trump Tower in April, members spent more time going through security than interacting with Trump. Last month, BuzzFeed reported that Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s campaign manager until June, complicated the diversity coalition’s attempts to guide Trump’s minority outreach strategy when he “made the decision that the campaign would not launch outreach initiatives in favor of a broader message aimed at the entire country.” NBC notes that when the coalition met with Trump in April, Lewandowski was not in attendance.

In July, with Lewandowski gone, several members of the group spoke onstage at the Republican National Convention, and the Trump campaign has reportedly hired several staffers to work on minority outreach efforts. At a press conference last week, Trump told reporters that his campaign would hold a news conference discussing its Hispanic outreach effort sometime “over the next three weeks.” On Sunday, Manigault told NPR that the campaign has created a “76-page strategy” targeting black voters. Manigault did not respond to a request for comment.

But the outreach efforts have come against the backdrop of an exodus of minority staffers from the GOP leadership. The Republican National Committee’s director of Hispanic media relations left the organization in June amid reports that she was “uncomfortable” working with the Trump campaign. In March, the RNC’s director of African American outreach became the fourth black staffer to leave the committee in the past year, although people who know her said she didn’t leave because of Trump.

The Trump campaign has turned down numerous invitations to speak before prominent minority organizations like the NAACP, the National Association of Black and Hispanic Journalists, and the National Urban League. In June, the National Council of La Raza, one of the largest Hispanic civil rights organizations in the country, announced that it would not invite Trump to speak at its annual conference, citing his “indiscriminate vilification of an entire community.” A meeting with Hispanic community leaders in Florida has been rescheduled multiple times in the past month, and an event with Hispanic business leaders in Texas was scrapped entirely.

If recent polls are any indication, the coalition faces an uphill climb as it tries to win over minority voters. A June Washington Post/ABC News poll found that 89 percent of Hispanic voters surveyed viewed Trump negatively, suggesting that despite an ongoing debate over the accuracy of polls measuring Trump’s level of support among Latinos, it is unlikely that he will win more Latinos than the roughly 40 percent George W. Bush managed in 2004 or the 27 percent won by Romney in 2012. Among black voters, things are even worse: Last month, an NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist poll showed zero percent support for Trump among African Americans living in Ohio and Pennsylvania, key battleground states this year.

An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released Thursday showed Trump garnering 17 percent support among nonwhite respondents nationwide. Among black voters, Trump had just 1 percent support.

The National Diversity Coalition is unfazed by those numbers. “You can pick a poll and find what you want,” says Dennard. “There are a lot of black people that will not come out and say that they will support Donald Trump, but will pull the lever for him in November.”

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Meet the People Trying to Prevent Minority Voters From Bailing on Trump

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Trump’s Economic Adviser Said the Economy Was Fine—Right Before It Imploded

by Ezekiel2332 Posted on August 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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Following a tumultuous week in which Donald Trump’s poll numbers tanked and reports of staff unrest dogged his campaign, the GOP nominee is trying to change the conversation by focusing on his economic vision. On Friday, ahead of a big economic policy speech Trump is expected to deliver next week, the Trump campaign released a list of his economic advisers. The roster of 13 men—all are men and five are named Steven or Stephen—includes a handful of billionaires and financial moguls, several of them longtime Trump friends. Also on Trump’s economic brain trust is an economist, David Malpass, who downplayed concerns about the economy shortly before his firm collapsed and the economy cratered.

Malpass is a former economic adviser to Ronald Reagan whom the Trump campaign touts as having “extensive private sector experience.” That experience includes serving for 15 years as the chief economist for Bear Stearns—the Wall Street firm that was deeply enmeshed in the subprime mortgage market—in the lead-up to the investment bank’s spectacular March 2008 collapse.

The fall of Bear Sterns lit the fuse on the economic crisis. And perhaps more so than its competitors, the 85-year-old investment bank came to exemplify the excesses and short-sighted economics that led to the financial meltdown. If Trump is counting on Malpass for economic advice, he had better hope it’s an improvement on the wisdom the economist dispensed as the financial system hurtled toward a cliff. Nine months before his company fell apart, Malpass wrote a column for the Wall Street Journal titled “Don’t Panic About Credit Markets.” He derided the “hyperventilation over the coming U.S. economic slowdown” and wrote:

The slowdown talk weighing on equities also reflects the Wall Street view that debt, mortgage and takeover businesses have replaced General Motors as the economy’s bellwether. According to the bears: As goes the credit market, so goes the economy. Fortunately, Main Street is not that fickle. Housing and debt markets are not that big a part of the U.S. economy, or of job creation. It’s more likely the economy is sturdy and will grow solidly in coming months, and perhaps years.

So, that was wrong.

Malpass did fine, though. He currently sits on the board of New Mountain Capital, a multi-billion-dollar private investment firm, and runs his own market research firm.

Malpass is not the only person on Trump’s list of economic advisers who played a controversial role during the economic crisis.

In July 2008, several months after Bear Sterns fell apart, the federal government was forced to take over Indy Mac, which was overwhelmed by the bad mortgages it had issued. The government was eager to get rid of the bank’s assets, and Steve Mnuchin, who serves as the Trump campaign’s finance co-chairman and is a member of his economic team, swooped in. Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs banker and hedge funder, made much of his current fortune by organizing a new bank, called OneWest, to buy IndyMac’s portfolio of mortgages. Part of the deal was that the federal government and taxpayers would cover any losses if more mortgages went bad, and OneWest would make the profits on anything that didn’t. Mnuchin’s bank would become infamous for its hardball tactics and willingness to foreclose on struggling homeowners.

Perhaps the biggest name on Trump’s economic team is John Paulson, a hedge fund manager whose firm foresaw the subprime mortgage meltdown and made billions betting against the big banks that were heavily invested in mortgage-backed securities. In 2010, Paulson’s fund made more than $5 billion, setting a record. Previously, Paulson was a major donor and fundraiser for Mitt Romney and the super-PAC backing his 2012 presidential run.

The defining characteristic of Trump’s team of economic advisers seems to be that they are friends of the GOP nominee, financial backers of his campaign, or both. That includes Tom Barrack, who has been friends with Trump for decades, ever since negotiating the sale of the Plaza Hotel in New York City to Trump. Barrack is well known in financial circles for getting involved with unorthodox deals—in one case, he arranged oil sales between Saudi princes and Haitian dictator Baby Doc Duvalier, giving the autocrat his watch to help smooth the deal.

It’s unclear how extensively Trump will be relying on the counsel of his brain trust. Last year, when asked whom he consults with on foreign policy matters, Trump remarked that his top adviser was himself.

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Trump’s Economic Adviser Said the Economy Was Fine—Right Before It Imploded

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The Sad But Lucrative End of Jet.com

by SamMotsinger Posted on August 3, 2016

Mother Jones

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This is from the Wall Street Journal:

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is in talks to buy online discount retailer Jet.com Inc., according to people familiar with the matter, in what would mark a disappointing end for one of the most ambitious challengers to Amazon.com Inc.

….It isn’t clear how much Wal-Mart would pay, but a person familiar with the matter said Jet could be valued at up to $3 billion in private markets. Jet, barely a year old, has drawn more than $500 million in capital from the likes of venture firms New Enterprise Associates and Accel Partners.

Let me get this straight. Jet is one year old. Venture funds have invested “more than” $500 million (actually around $800 million). They will sell themselves to Walmart for about $3 billion. And this is a “disappointing end.”

I get it: they wanted to take over the world and they didn’t. That’s disappointing. At the same time, it appears that investors are going to quadruple their money in 12 months, give or take. And the founders are going to do even better. If they own, say, 20 percent of the company, they’ll walk away with $600 million for a year’s work.

Can I please sign up for a slice of this disappointment?

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The Sad But Lucrative End of Jet.com

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Trump Auctions Himself Off to Wall Street

by JordanSeely Posted on July 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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Check this out:

Donald Trump has told prospective donors that, if elected president, he plans to nominate former Goldman Sachs banker Steve Mnuchin for U.S. Treasury Secretary.

That’s according to Anthony Scaramucci, a high-profile hedge fund manager and Trump fundraiser….Earlier this year, the 53-year-old Mnuchin joined Donald Trump’s campaign as national finance chairman.

Trump’s message to Wall Street is: The guy calling you for donations is going to be Secretary of the Treasury in a few months. So no worries: treat him right and he’ll treat you right.

This comes via Jordan Weissmann, who has about the right take on things: “Promising to pick a Wall Street banker whom you have charged with the task of raising money for your campaign from other Wall Street bankers to head the Treasury Department may be the single most straightforward way a presidential candidate could auction himself off to the financial services sector.” Trump is quite the man of the people, no?

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Trump Auctions Himself Off to Wall Street

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What Fools Have Never Heard of Cynthia Ozick?

by FrederiHanes Posted on July 16, 2016

Mother Jones

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Mention Cynthia Ozick to a group of friends and you’ll likely get a sprawling array of responses. For some, she’s an icon—this camp included the late David Foster Wallace, who famously asserted that she, Cormac McCarthy, and Don DeLillo were America’s premier living fiction writers. Others might give you a blank look. Irrespective of her place in the American canon, Ozick has a distinctive and notable voice. Including her 1966 debut novel, Trust, the lifetime New Yorker has put out 18 books that include poetry, fiction, and criticism, and grapple with capital “t” Themes—Jewish identity, the divine, art’s role in our culture—packaged in some of the most arresting and unforgettable sentences of the past half-century.

Her latest work, Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays, is a powerful collection that laments the downward spiral of the once-exalted literary form. I caught up by email with the 88-year-old Ozick, who still lets no one off easy.

Mother Jones: Does one type of writing hold your heart above all others?

Cynthia Ozick: Yes. The type that I can no longer do. In my 20s and early 30s I was driven to write poetry. In 1992, Epodes, a boxed collection, was published by the Logan Elm Press and Paper Mill, a part of Ohio State University Press, and illustrated by Sidney Chafetz. The paper was hand-milled. My introduction spoke of “the bruises and thwartings and insatiable wantings of the young woman who once wrote these poems in the fever of her desire.” The boxes were crafted by a local dentist. But nowadays, between stories and essays, it is story that claims the fever of my desire.

MJ: After your first novel, it seems as though you gained increased recognition steadily—maybe it felt more like “slowly”—over the years. How might this delayed success have contoured your relationship to acclaim and positive feedback, now that you have 18 books to your name?

CO: How can these words—”recognition,” “positive feedback,” and especially “acclaim” and “success”—stand beside what I’ve so often encountered, which is the seriously diminishing “I never heard of her before”? Certainly your coming into view at this moment counts as highly welcome “positive feedback,” but how many decades have passed in the absence of print interviews such as this one? I offer this not as whine or grievance, which I would furiously deplore, but as simple fact. As for “acclaim” and “success,” they rightly characterize writers with abundant and active international readerships—Alice Munro, for instance, honored by her Nobel, and Philip Roth, long a significant household name. But recognition is something else. Every writer aspires to it, and it comes entirely privately, without public fanfare, each time a piece of work is judged worthy of publication.

Eighteen books? Slim pickin’s. There ought to have been more. Seven years dedicated to the ephemera of theater? Even with the privilege of Sidney Lumet as director? Admittedly an exciting interval. But finally: Ah, waste.

MJ: Back in 1999, David Foster Wallace called you one of the nation’s foremost living writers of fiction. What did that feel like?

CO: I learned of it about a year ago, having stumbled on a photocopy (on the internet) of the flyleaf of, I think, The Puttermesser Papers, on which Wallace had listed a long column of words, apparently new to him, culled from its pages. I was stunned and touched and puzzled. (How could this be?) It put me in mind of similar studious vocabulary lists in Kafka’s notebooks when he was learning Hebrew: Hebrew words laboriously translated into German.

MJ: My impression is that you are disenchanted with the current state of fiction. Can you speak to that? What has gone wrong? Is it a reflection on the literary project itself, the writers, the readers? Who bears the blame?

CO: I can’t claim to be disenchanted “with the current state of fiction” because I read so little of it. My reading is mostly drawn to history—I’ve just finished East West Street, by Phillipe Sands, a study of the origin of the term “genocide” and its influence since—and older novels and stories. Recently I’ve been immersed in the brilliantly rich work of W.D. Howells, and wondered at his neglect, and his dismissal as a minor writer. What’s impossible not to notice, though—it’s all around us—is the diminution of American prose: How pedestrian it has become. Pick up any short story and listen to its voice, the tedious easy vernacular that mistakes transcription for realism. This would display an understandable pragmatism if it were a pandering to common-denominator readers; but it is, in fact, a kind of hifalultin literary ideology, the less-is-more Hemingway legacy put through an up-to-the-minute industrial blender. Also, if ideas are what feed serious literature and arresting language, who today is writing a novel of ideas (which can often mean comedy)? I think of Joshua Cohen. Who else?

MJ: What do you think of literature’s place between the poles of the academy and the reading public? Do you intend to identify with one group over the other?

CO: Much of the academy on the humanities side, English departments in particular, no longer write what can pass for normal English. Judith Butler, for example, has been awarded first prize in the celebrated Bad Writing Contest for a sentence so clotted with incomprehensible barbarisms that it might be taken for the ravings of a fake preacher speaking in tongues. Is it possible that those fellow academics who pretend to have understood her are lying sycophants?

MJ: In the Amazon era, everyone is equally capable of rating a book by clicking between 1 and 5 stars, and books that have the largest median fan base become the most celebrated. Do you think this has changed literature and criticism? Or has it discouraged writers from big, creative risk taking?

CO: Always respecting the exceptions among them, one notes that too many of these consumer reviewers misunderstand the inmost nature of what literature means. It does not mean “liking.” Novels are routinely denigrated when characters are not found to be likable. Is Raskolnikov likable? Is King Lear? The plethora of such naive readers testifies to a failure of imagination—the capacity to see into unfamiliar lives, motives, feelings—and this failure must, at least in part, be the failure of the teaching of literature in the schools. Writers who witness these lame “reviews” may sigh, but no seriously aspiring writer will be discouraged. Somewhere there lives the ideal reader.

MJ: Do you think the infusion of technology writ large has contributed to the fading star of literature and imagination? As in, do you think there has been a value shift from the high-minded literary intellectualism of decades past toward mere entertainment?

CO: Advances in technology neither impede nor augment literature. Would Shakespeare on a computer keyboard surpass his quill’s eloquence? Both Milton and George Eliot were obliged to dip their pens repeatedly, frequently several times within the same sentence. It isn’t the instrument that influences High-Minded or Low-Minded; it’s the quality of Mind itself.

MJ: Do you think potential young writers are being shepherded into the creation of digital products and tech startups because they’re being told that that is the new avenue of creation expression?

CO: I have no answer for this. It’s true that the young who now flock to script writing, or producing and directing, to fulfill the demands of these new devices would, in an earlier period, have been submitting to magazines and working on their first novels. But even in the midst of all these “digital products,” the wonder of it is that there are still so many young writers who continue to believe in the venerable print novel as the corridor to fame and fortune.

MJ: What do you think of reality TV?

CO: Clueless. I’ve never seen it.

MJ: With young writers especially, there’s a fierce sense of disavowal of one’s previous self; something written a year prior feels as if it came from an entirely different person, often one whose work is excruciating even to consider. At your age, do you feel any sense of alienation from your previous selves?

CO: In certain pragmatic choices as a writer, yes, I look back on them as mistakes and wish I had done things differently. I wish I had gone into the Great World to pursue literary journalism, rather than hole up for too many years with an overly ambitious never-to-be-finished novel. I wish I hadn’t been faint-heartedly loyal for more than four decades to an agent whose professionalism was wanting. But all this is external to the writing itself. What I felt then I feel now: the inexorable, unchanging interior hum of doubt and hope.

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What Fools Have Never Heard of Cynthia Ozick?

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Playing Pokémon Go? The internet has some advice for you.

by Jim Bow Posted on July 15, 2016

snorlax attention

Playing Pokémon Go? The internet has some advice for you.

By on Jul 15, 2016Share

Soon after Pokemon Go hit the App Store, reports started rolling in of the dumb lengths people have gone to in order to capture the little guys — like playing at the Holocaust Museum, Ground Zero, a funeral, or — more commonly — the middle of the street. Concerned about potential accidents caused by zombie-like trainers with their heads in their screens, the National Safety Council urged people to exercise caution playing the game. “No race to ‘capture’ a cartoon monster is worth a life,” wrote the Council. Clearly, they’ve never seen a Charizard.

Naturally, both players and haters alike took to Twitter to remind people to look up from their screens every once in awhile — and, for once, we recommend listening to them. And if you need a reminder, well, there’s an app for that, too.

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Playing Pokémon Go? The internet has some advice for you.

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Pence Isn’t Going to Solve Trump’s Money Problems

by HenrietTKQ Posted on July 15, 2016

Mother Jones

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Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, known for his staid manner and his short-sleeved-shirt-and-tie combinations, might have been chosen as a steady counterweight to Trump’s flamboyant provocative style. But when it comes to adding weight to the Trump campaign’s wobbling fundraising operation, he might have been the worst pick Trump could have made. Newt Gingrich, for instance, has a devoted backer in Las Vegas billionaire Sheldon Adelson, the single biggest source of cash for Mitt Romney’s efforts in 2012 who has yet to commit significantly to Trump’s operation. And New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is known to have been a darling of some of Wall Street’s biggest names.

But Pence? He isn’t exactly a star with the party’s regular fundraisers and donors—the people who have always been the backbone of GOP financial support. It’s true that Pence has ties to both the political empire of the conservative billionaire Koch brothers and some tea party grassroots organizations. But if Trump thought he could tap into those connections to fuel his presidential campaign, he might have been mistaken.

Over the course of his career, Pence’s biggest source of campaign cash has been the Republican Governors Association, which has put more than $2.6 million into supporting his gubernatorial aspirations. The RGA’s main job is to funnel money from wealthy Republicans nationwide into potentially pivotal governor’s races, and much of the organization’s success in doing that hinges on the connections and interests of the RGA’s executive director. In 2012, the director was a party operative named Phil Cox, who went on to become a close Christie ally, running the presidential super-PAC that raised more than $20 million this year. If Cox stays with Trump, it won’t be because of Pence. (Christie’s relationship with Trump, meanwhile, may be going through a rocky stretch.)

Pence did spend 12 years in Congress, but he never really made his mark as a fundraiser there. His largest source of support, according to the campaign finance tracker OpenSecrets.org, were donations fundraised on his behalf by the Club for Growth, the tea-party-aligned group that relies heavily on its expansive grassroots fundraising operation. It’s an organization that has devoted a great deal of time and energy this election to trying to destroy Donald Trump. Almost immediately after kicking off his presidential campaign, Trump picked a fight with the group, accusing it of trying to extort him for $1 million. That’s a rift that all of Pence’s past goodwill with the group probably won’t be able to overcome.

If Trump can’t rely on Pence to hook him up with any fundraising networks, perhaps he can call on some of Pence’s sugar-daddy donors? Notably, Pence has had two billionaires backing his political aspirations, Indiana businessman Dean White and industrialist David Koch, but neither looks promising for Trump.

Koch personally contributed $300,000 to Pence’s war chest, a much more direct investment in a candidate than he usually makes. (David and his brother Charles are known to be major backers of dark-money groups that operate independent of any candidate, and their direct contributions to candidates are generally not so large.) But if part of the Trump campaign’s calculation in picking Pence is that he could rope in the Kochs, it’s probably not going to happen. Both brothers have expressed serious doubts about Trump, and almost immediately after word leaked that Pence was the choice, the Koch organization threw cold water on the idea that the move would endear them to Trump.

White, who is not a household name like Koch, is actually the individual who has done more for Pence’s political career than anyone else, according to campaign finance filings. White has shoveled at least $775,000 into Pence’s two bids for governor of Indiana, including $350,000 already this year. Those numbers, while eye-popping for the average American, are actually not that extraordinary for White, who has given hundreds of thousands of dollars in recent years to various Republican candidates in Indiana.

But despite being worth more than $2.3 billion, White is not a major player on the presidential level. The one noteworthy donation he’s made when it comes to presidential politics is a $1 million contribution in 2012 to Karl Rove’s American Crossroads super-PAC, which backed Romney. Rove’s animosity toward Trump and the fact that White also gave directly to Romney (who has spoken out against Trump) suggest that White will not automatically transfer his allegiances, or his deep pockets, to Trump.

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Pence Isn’t Going to Solve Trump’s Money Problems

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The Dallas Police Shooter Bought an AK-47 Via Facebook

by emiliachavez422 Posted on July 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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In 2014, Micah Johnson, who killed five police officers and injured seven in an ambush in Dallas last week, purchased an AK-47 rifle in a deal arranged through Facebook and finalized in a Target parking lot, according to the New York Daily News. In an interview with the Daily News, the seller, 26-year-old Colton Crews, said that Johnson “didn’t stand out as a nut job. He didn’t stand out as a crazy person at all.” In fact, because Johnson had been a US military service member, Crews said that “he was like your first pick when you’re selling a gun to somebody.”

The AK-47 was apparently not used in the Dallas attack. Citing an unnamed law enforcement official, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that Johnson used an Izhmash-Saiga 5.45mm rifle, an AK-style variant, in the shooting. But news of the sale highlights just how easy it is to acquire a gun through Facebook. The social media giant has come under fire from activists who say the company isn’t doing enough to make sure the site isn’t used as an online weapons bazaar. In Texas, where Johnson purchased the AK-47 from Crews, background checks are not required in private sales, and Facebook pages dedicated to selling firearms are ubiquitous.

In the wake of the Orlando massacre last month, a disparate collection of individuals began taking to Facebook to report pages and individuals advertising gun sales in an attempt to get them kicked off the site for violating its user rules. In January, Facebook banned users from coordinating unregulated gun sales, but it has left the enforcement of the ban entirely to users who report violators.

In his interview with the Daily News, Crews said, “First off, it was my belief Johnson would have passed a background check. He didn’t seem weird in any way, just a normal guy.” At the Target parking lot where the deal was finalized, they made small talk. They checked out the AK-47, making sure it was in working condition, and Crews’ stepdad thanked Johnson for his service. Johson made a comment about how he missed the rifle’s firepower since returning home from Afghanistan. “He seems like he’s 100 percent on the up and up.”

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The Dallas Police Shooter Bought an AK-47 Via Facebook

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Tesla wants to be your renewable energy everything

by ToddLording Posted on June 24, 2016

Tesla wants to be your renewable energy everything

By on Jun 24, 2016 5:04 amShare

Elon Musk — future Mars settler, founder of Tesla – stepped into the solar business earlier this week with Tesla Motor’s $2.5 billion bid to buy SolarCity, the top home solar company in America.

Shareholders from both companies still have to approve the deal. And if they do, Tesla promises the results will be awesome. Musk says that he never wanted Tesla to be just a carmaker. Buying SolarCity will turn Tesla into a company that will sell you an electric car and the power to charge it. “This would start with the car that you drive and the energy that you use to charge it, and would extend to how everything else in your home or business is powered,” Tesla wrote in its company blog.

Then Wall Street frowned. The day after the announcement, Tesla’s stock slumped 10 percent, and Morgan Stanley cut its rating on Tesla’s shares.

So what gives? Does Wall Street not have the vision to get with Musk? Is the most futuristic car company in America about to drive off a cliff?

Here are a few ways of looking at it:

This whole thing is really a family drama.

Lyndon Rive, SolarCity’s co-founder and CEO, is Musk’s cousin. Is there some kind of family power struggle taking place? According to Eric Weishoff, founder of Greentech Media, Rive “didn’t sound happy enough for a man that just got $77 million dollars wealthier.” And why should Tesla buy Solar City when the two companies have been collaborating on batteries for half a decade now?

Tesla’s stock is sinking because Wall Street doesn’t get Silicon Valley.

Tesla was born in the startup culture of Silicon Valley, where it’s all about taking bold stands and getting big or going home. In Silicon Valley, companies eat other companies for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and late-night snack.

Worriers, however, have good reason to wonder why Tesla wants to get into the solar business so badly when it has 375,000 pre-ordered Tesla Model 3s that it’s supposed to be making. There’s the also the example of Sun Edison, an actual energy company that went bankrupt after a massive company-buying spree.

This smushing together could actually work, because, you know, synergy!

Tesla’s current clientele is, to put it mildly, loaded. Three-quarters of Model S buyers make more than $100,000 a year. It’s entirely possible that they are exactly the kind of people who might wander into a showroom, order a car, and impulse-purchase an entire solar installation to go along with it.

Solar City sells 100,000 solar installations a year to a wide demographic. If the price of the Tesla Model 3 manages to drop from the current sticker price of $35,000 and keep dropping, it’s imaginable that SolarCity’s current customers could be persuaded to choose a Tesla for their next car.

What we really need are lots of little Teslas, not a bigger Tesla

It’s been clear for a long time that Musk is a crazy dreamer of the Steve Jobs variety. But building a big company, even a really cool big company, cannot get America to low-carbon car heaven alone. The Big Three automakers — GM, Ford, and Chrysler — arose out of a Cambrian stew of automotive experimentation in the workshops of Detroit. Many have made the point (including me) that three still wasn’t enough to create the kind of competition that the American automotive industry needed to avoid getting its ass kicked by automakers in Germany and Japan.

This sale — if it goes through — might lead to great things. But what the world really needs are many Teslas, enough to create a large ecosystem of entrepreneurs working on cars, batteries, and solar. We need this a lot more than we need to buy solar panels from a car company.

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Tesla wants to be your renewable energy everything

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Trump Just Gave His Sharpest Anti-Clinton Speech Yet

by DKHUwe71121 Posted on June 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump escalated his attacks on Hillary Clinton during a lengthy speech in New York on Wednesday, calling the presumptive Democratic nominee a “world-class liar” and potentially “the most corrupt person ever to seek the presidency.”

Trump claimed Clinton had “perfected the politics of personal profit and even theft,” accusing her of taking money from banks, special interests, and “financial backers in Communist China” in return for influence. He slammed her for ignoring “radical Islam” and allowing American diplomats to be killed in Benghazi in 2012. “She lacks the temperament, the judgment, and the competence to lead,” he said.

A large chunk of Trump’s case against Clinton rested on items pulled from Clinton Cash, a book by conservative academic and Breitbart News Senior Editor-at-Large Peter Schweizer. The book alleges that Clinton used her position as secretary of state to funnel money to herself and the Clinton Foundation in return for friendly treatment for foreign governments including Russia, China, and Persian Gulf countries that Trump said “horribly abuse women and LGBT citizens.” Trump also claimed that Clinton’s use of private email server was an attempt to hide such corruption from public view.

Trump also blamed Clinton for toppling friendly governments in the Middle East and allowing the rise of ISIS by (unsuccessfully) supporting military action against the Syrian government. “In just four years, Secretary Clinton managed to almost single-handedly destabilize the entire Middle East,” Trump charged. “ISIS threatens us today because of the decisions Hillary Clinton has made.”

The presumptive GOP nominee made a direct plea to Bernie Sanders supporters, casting Clinton as a corrupt insider being challenged by another pro-working class, anti-Washington populist. The speech was filled with Sanders-like references to a “rigged system” and attacks on Clinton’s speeches to Wall Street firms and her support for major trade deals including NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, both of which Trump said harm American workers and enrich large banks and corporations. “The insiders wrote the rules of the game to keep themselves in power and in the money,” Trump said. “That’s why we’re asking Bernie Sanders’ voters to join our movement, so together we can fix the system for all Americans.”

For all of the sharp attacks on Clinton, the speech was maybe Trump’s most measured public appearance of the campaign. Trump stuck to his prepared text and included the kind of standard-issue political platitudes—”everywhere I look, I see the possibilities of what our country could be”—that he rarely employs at his rallies and press conferences.

Yet the speech contained numerous falsehoods. Trump claimed again that the United States was the highest-taxed nation in the world; lied about opposing the war in Iraq before it started; claimed the government spends “hundreds of billions” on bringing refugees to America; said hundreds of immigrants have been convicted of terrorist activity; charged that Clinton would “end virtually all immigration enforcement;” and said that Clinton’s email server had been hacked by foreign governments.

The speech seemed to represent the dramatic shift that’s apparently taken place in the Trump campaign this week since Trump fired campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, who reportedly encouraged Trump’s penchant for offensive, off-the-cuff remarks and blocked attempts to expand Trump’s staff. Reporters noted an immediate change in the campaign’s tactics on Tuesday, with Trump’s staff sending out fundraising appeals and hitting back at comments by Clinton with “rapid response” email blasts to reporters rather than tweets by Trump himself. Both are considered standard campaign actions, but Trump hadn’t used either before this week.

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Trump Just Gave His Sharpest Anti-Clinton Speech Yet

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