Tag Archives: venta

Ted Cruz Defends His Plan to Patrol "Muslim Neighborhoods"

by ScottSelffum Posted on March 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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

Ted Cruz stood by his proposal to patrol “Muslim neighborhoods” during CNN’s town hall in Wisconsin on Tuesday night, repeating his assertion that this strategy worked in New York City.

Host Anderson Cooper pressed Cruz repeatedly on his stance, noting that New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton had criticized Cruz’s proposal. “It is clear from his comments that Sen. Cruz knows absolutely nothing about counterterrorism in New York City,” Bratton wrote in an op-ed in the New York Daily News. But Cruz stood firm, describing Bratton as a member of the administration of “left-wing radical” New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio.

Watch the exchange, starting around the 8-minute mark.

Link: 

Ted Cruz Defends His Plan to Patrol "Muslim Neighborhoods"

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Ted Cruz Defends His Plan to Patrol "Muslim Neighborhoods"

The Surprising Gaps in HIV Care for Louisiana Prisoners

by PhyllisFontenot Posted on March 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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

With the highest diagnosis rate of any state, Louisiana is a hotbed for new HIV cases, and the groups at greatest risk of infection are the same as those most likely to be imprisoned in the state’s sprawling corrections system: people who inject drugs, sex workers, the poor and racial minorities. But a new report from Human Rights Watch found that for some HIV-positive Louisiana prisoners, medical care is delayed or non-existent, depending on the facility where they are housed.

Louisiana’s nine state-level prisons operate testing programs and transfer inmates to HIV case management resources when they are released. However, only a handful of the state’s 104 parish jails conduct regular testing, with some HIV-positive inmates experiencing treatment that is “delayed, interrupted, and in some cases denied altogether,” according to the report.

That’s significant because more than 40 percent of Louisiana’s incarcerated population is housed in parish jails—including 16,877 convicted offenders and a whopping 12,602 pre-trial detainees at the end of last year. Officials in the Louisiana Department of Corrections told Human Rights Watch that all HIV-positive inmates are transferred from parish jails to states prisons. Yet, Human Rights Watch researchers found that jail inmates don’t get HIV care in state prisons unless the inmates already know their status and choose to disclose it, or until they develop symptoms.

What’s more, in some cases, when inmates did disclose their status, some still did not receive testing or medication unless a friend or family member could bring their pills into the jail. Although the East Baton Rouge Correctional Center has a large medical staff, it does not test new arrivals, the jail’s director of medical services Linda Otteson told researchers. “We cannot afford to treat them if they are positive,” Otteson said.

The result? Parish jail inmates can go weeks or months without treatment, potentially resulting in higher viral loads, increased resistance to medication, and a greater likelihood of infecting others, according to the report.

Source: 

The Surprising Gaps in HIV Care for Louisiana Prisoners

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Surprising Gaps in HIV Care for Louisiana Prisoners

Supreme Court Seeks Compromise in Contraceptive Showdown

by CarmelBignold Posted on March 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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

On Tuesday afternoon, the US Supreme Court issued an order in Zubik v. Burwell, one of two critical reproductive rights cases currently before the court. In this case, several religious groups—including the Little Sisters of the Poor—contend that the Affordable Care Act’s current protocol for religious groups seeking to opt out of covering contraceptives for their employees still violates their religious beliefs.

In their order, the justices asked both sides to present ideas for how contraceptive coverage can be provided for employees without any direct involvement by the religious employer. That’s because the plaintiffs—which also include groups of priests, bishops, and several religious universities—take issue with even tangential involvement in facilitating birth control coverage, saying that the form they must complete to opt out of Obamacare’s birth control mandate violates their beliefs because it requires them to help employees get birth control elsewhere.

The order suggests one workaround: The employer could voice their opposition to birth control in its initial contracts with insurance companies, and then leave the rest to the insurer. The insurance company would then be responsible for facilitating alternative birth control coverage, eliminating the need for groups to file any additional forms opting out of birth control coverage on religious grounds.

Still, the distinction here is quite thin: If notifying the government violates a religious group’s beliefs, it’s unclear how shifting the process to one where they notify the insurance company instead will do much to alleviate their concerns.

Visit site: 

Supreme Court Seeks Compromise in Contraceptive Showdown

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Supreme Court Seeks Compromise in Contraceptive Showdown

The FBI Has Lots of Agents Investigating Hillary Clinton

by LayneSteward Posted on March 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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

During a Democratic debate in October, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders said that the American people were “sick and tired of hearing about Hillary Clinton’s damn emails.” That did a lot to diffuse a story that had plagued the former Secretary of State throughout the summer. But the ongoing FBI investigation into her handling of classified information and the use of her private email server located in the basement of her New York residence has never disappeared, even if it has receded into the background. This weekend, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times each published stories highlighting the latest developments in the case.

Whether or not Clinton and her senior aides face criminal charges, the stories demonstrate that the allegations that began nearly a year ago will continue to present a serious problem for the Democratic front-runner. As the Washington Post explains: “From the earliest days, Clinton aides and senior officials focused intently on accommodating the secretary’s desire to use her private email account, documents and interviews show…Throughout, they paid insufficient attention to laws and regulations governing the handling of classified material and the preservation of government records, interviews and documents show. They also neglected repeated warnings about the security of the BlackBerry while Clinton and her closest aides took obvious security risks in using the basement server.”

Here are some key takeaways from the newest reports:

Clinton’s closes aides will soon be asked to meet with FBI investigators: According to the LA Times, a federal prosecutor has contacted the attorneys for Clinton aides to try and set up interviews. The story didn’t specify which lawyers had been contacted, but it did note that the attorneys for longtime aides Huma Abedin, Cheryl Mills, Jake Sullivan, and Philippe Reines did not respond or declined to comment when contacted by reporters. Federal prosecutors have already granted immunity to Bryan Pagliano—the Clinton aide who set up the private email server and maintained it—after Pagliano told a Congressional panel in September that he would invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. According to the LA Times, prosecutors will try to set up a meeting with Clinton as well. Brian Fallon, a spokesman for the Clinton campaign, said that Clinton is ready to work with the investigators and has offered to meet with them since last August.

The FBI has devoted extensive resources to this investigation: The Post story states that 147 FBI agents have “been deployed” to help work the case (although it’s unclear if that means 147 have worked the case full time or that 147 agents have worked it at one time or another) but after the story was published that number has been challenged. “The FBI has accelerated the investigation because officials want to avoid the possibility of announcing any action too close to the election,” the Post wrote.

Clinton was warned about her BlackBerry phone by government security officials and continued to use it: One of the key issues in this saga is that Clinton and her aides didn’t want her to have to give up her BlackBerry because, “as a political heavyweight and chief of the nation’s diplomatic corps, she needed to manage a torrent of email to stay connected to colleagues, friends and supporters,” writes the Post. “She hated having to put her BlackBerry into a lockbox before going into her own office” which was in a secure area of the State Department known as ‘Mahogany Row.’

Clinton’s staff and the State Department’s security officials tried to work out a solution, but the security officials weren’t convinced they could provide her a BlackBerry that she could use in her office securely. According to the Post, Clinton never had a government BlackBerry, personal computer, or email account. The story describes how “the State Department security officials were distressed about the possibility that Clinton’s BlackBerry could be compromised and used for eavesdropping,” and wrote a memo outlining the range of risks, including the likelihood that Clinton’s use of her phone would lead other employees to do the same.

That worry triggered a memo from Assistant Secretary for Diplomatic Security Eric Boswell “with the subject line ‘Use of Blackberries in Mahogany Row.’” Boswell wrote: “Our review reaffirms our belief that the vulnerabilities and risks associated with the use of Blackberries in the Mahogany Row redacted considerably outweigh the convenience their use can add” because these devices are “highly vulnerable in any setting to remotely and covertly monitoring conversations, retrieving e-mails, and exploiting calendars.” According to the Post, nine days after Boswell’s memo, Clinton wrote him saying she understood the importance of what he was describing, especially “the sentence that indicates (Diplomatic Security) have intelligence concerning this vulnerability during her recent trip to Asia.”

Clinton’s server might have been operating for at least two months without standard encryption, among other security issues: Neither story published this weekend proves that Clinton’s email server was hacked. But the Post does note that for two months the server operated without basic Internet encryption, at least according to an analysis performed by an outside cybersecurity firm (the server might have had other encryption measures employed). Emails or any other data passing through the server was doing so in plain text, which means they could be read by anyone who intercepted them. Additionally, the server included features that “made it vulnerable to talented hackers, including a software program that enabled users to log on directly from the World Wide Web,” according to the Post.

The Clinton campaign told the Post that the security of the server “was taken seriously from the onset” and that “robust protections” were in place.

The private server was also controversial because Clinton and her lawyers tried to “wipe” it before turning it over to the FBI, forcing the agency to employ forensic techniques to retrieve the data. The Times writes that the FBI has recovered “most, if not all” of the emails that Clinton and her lawyers deleted from the server before turning it over to the FBI in August.

Despite concerns raised by government security officials at the time, and independent experts consulted for these stories, the chances of criminal charges are slim: Even with all the concerns about the security of the server and her use of a private account, prosecutors would have to prove that Clinton and her aides knowingly mishandled classified information and shared it with people who weren’t cleared to see it, “a high hurdle in the Clinton case,” according to the Post. Comparisons have been made to the cases against Gen. David Petraeus—who shared classified information with his mistress and then lied to FBI investigators about it—and the late Sandy Berger, a national security adviser for President Bill Clinton who was caught trying to smuggle classified documents from the National Archives in his pants.

Clinton’s case is not nearly as serious as Petraeus’, according to the Times, nor as blatant as Berger’s. “Those cases are just so different from what Clinton is accused of doing,” Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at American University, told the Times. “And the Justice Department lawyers know it.”

Read more: 

The FBI Has Lots of Agents Investigating Hillary Clinton

Posted in alternative energy, Anchor, Cyber, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, solar, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The FBI Has Lots of Agents Investigating Hillary Clinton

US Capitol on Lockdown as Gunshots Are Reported

by MagaretArledge Posted on March 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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

The US Capitol complex is on lockdown after gunshots were reported at the Capitol Visitor Center on Monday afternoon.

The Capitol’s sergeant at arms said that the shooter had been caught shortly after reports of the gunshots first surfaced.

Senate offices have received a notice urging everyone in the vicinity to seek shelter:

The White House was reportedly also locked down:

But the White House lockdown was soon lifted:

This is a breaking news post. We will update as more news becomes available.

Read this article: 

US Capitol on Lockdown as Gunshots Are Reported

Posted in alternative energy, Anchor, Everyone, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, solar, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on US Capitol on Lockdown as Gunshots Are Reported

This Is What It’s Like to Try to Sue Donald Trump

by VickiGerard366 Posted on March 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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

Of the many targets of Republican presidential contenders’ attacks on Donald Trump—and there have been plenty to choose from—one of their favorites has been Trump University. The now-shuttered educational enterprise (forced to change its name to the Trump Entrepreneur Initiative after the New York education department found its moniker to be misleading) is accused, in three separate lawsuits, of defrauding thousands of students into taking on massive debt they now can’t pay back by falsely marketing itself as a road to Trump-level wealth and business success.

But Trump University isn’t the only Trump endeavor that has landed in court. The tycoon has launched—or lent his name to—a slew of business ventures that have yielded frustrated customers and investors who have sought legal recourse. There are hundreds of lawsuits extending over 43 years that name Trump or one of his businesses. Here’s an incomplete list of some of those legal skirmishes that began when Trump joined his father’s business and continue through his run for the GOP nomination.

Trump Management: In 1973, the Department of Justice brought a lawsuit against Donald Trump and his father’s company, Trump Management, for alleged violations of the Fair Housing Act in connection with 39 buildings it operated. The DOJ alleged that building administrators racially coded apartment applications to secretly ensure that black applicants would be denied. The case was settled in 1975, without an admission of guilt from Trump Management.

Trump Tower: In 1980, Trump hired a contractor to demolish an old building to clear the way for Trump Tower, the midtown Manhattan skyscraper that today houses Trump’s main digs and the headquarters of the Trump Organization. To meet Trump’s deadline, the contractor hired 200 undocumented Polish laborers and kept them off the books, paying them $4 or $5 an hour—the minimum wage in 1980 was $3.10—and often requiring that they work 12-hour days with no overtime. In 1983, members of the local Wreckers Union filed a class action lawsuit against Trump for $4 million in unpaid union pensions and other contributions that would help increase benefits for some of the Polish workers. Many of the workers also alleged that they hadn’t been paid the full wages they were due. Throughout the case and even recently, Trump has insisted that he wasn’t aware his contractor had hired these Polish workers. The courts didn’t buy it. “We find that a conspiracy to deprive the funds of their rightful contributions has been shown,” wrote the district court judge in a 1991 ruling. “There is strong evidence of tacit agreement by the parties…to employ the Polish workers and to deprive them of the benefits ordinarily accorded to non-union workers on a union job, including contributions to the funds based on their wages.” The case was settled in 1999 for an undisclosed amount and sealed, but Rubio brought it up several times during a GOP debate in February.

Trump’s Atlantic City casinos: Between 1991 and 2009, four Trump ventures declared bankruptcy, three of them involving his hotel and casino empire in Atlantic City, New Jersey. These bankruptcies spawned a number of lawsuits. Here are three, including one from his own lawyer:

Trump was sued by a market analyst who predicted the bankruptcy of the Trump Taj Mahal casino years before it opened in 1990: When Trump was planning the Taj Mahal in the late 1980s, a market analyst named Marvin Roffman made it clear that he thought the venture wouldn’t succeed. Two weeks before the casino’s opening, after his dismal prediction about the casino’s future was quoted in the Wall Street Journal, a furious Trump called the Philadelphia brokerage firm where he worked, Janney Montgomery Scott, demanding an apology and threatening to sue. Roffman issued an apology, rescinded it, and was then fired. First Roffman sued his former firm for wrongful termination—settling for $750,000—and then, in July 1990, he sued Trump, later settling for an undisclosed amount.
Trump’s shareholders begged the bankruptcy court to derail Trump’s plan to reorganize his Atlantic City casinos as a “basket of goodies” for himself: In 2004, Trump Hotel & Casino Resorts declared bankruptcy. When the company and the bankruptcy court came up with a plan to reorganize the business, stockholders in the company filed documents with the bankruptcy court asking the judge to cut off Trump’s exclusive right to direct the reorganization of the casinos. They wrote in their filing that the current plan gave a “basket of goodies” to Trump—including a $2 million-a-year salary for his job as chairman—leaving virtually nothing for investors. Ultimately, the shareholders’ appeals were acknowledged and Trump Hotel & Casino Resorts agreed to pay the investors $17.5 million. It is unclear what happened to Trump’s salary.
A law firm won $50 million for Trump Entertainment but then had to sue its former client after Trump Entertainment tried to avoid paying its legal fees by claiming bankruptcy: In 2008, the law firm Levine Staller began filing tax appeals for the Trump Taj Mahal, Trump Plaza, and Trump Marina. Its work saved Trump’s company lots of money: In 2012, Levine Staller won a settlement that returned $35 million in overpaid taxes and cut $15 million from the company’s future liabilities, leading to a total savings of $50 million for the corporation. Trump agreed to pay $7.25 million to the law firm in legal fees, but then only paid Levine Staller $6 million before trying to claim the rest as unsecured debt in ongoing bankruptcy proceedings. In response, Levine Staller sued its former client, Trump Entertainment, and in 2014, a judge rejected Trump Entertainment’s request to be absolved of this debt and told the company to pay up.
Two Trump casino dealers filed (and later lost) a sex discrimination case after they were fired for wearing ponytails: In 1996, two male casino dealers at Trump Plaza in Atlantic City got fired after repeatedly refusing to comply with a new grooming policy at the casino that required men’s hair to be no longer than “mid-collar.” Both dealers wore ponytails, and received multiple warnings before being terminated. Once officially fired, they filed a case against Trump Plaza alleging that sex-differentiated hair policies are discriminatory, as well as several other charges. Both a lower court and the superior court of New Jersey ruled on behalf of Trump Plaza, saying that the hair length policy did not constitute sex discrimination.

Trump SoHo: In 2010, a group of buyers who had purchased condos at Trump SoHo, a luxury hotel and condo building in lower Manhattan, sued the Trump Organization, which managed the building, and the group of developers who had constructed it. They alleged that they were duped into buying these properties by representatives of Trump SoHo, who had exaggerated the building’s sales and instilled a false sense of confidence in future buyers about the project’s potential for success. The building was planned as a mixed-use condo and hotel project: Buyers could live in their properties only for a designated number of days each year, and the rest of the time their homes would be rented to hotel guests, with the buyer and Trump SoHo sharing rental revenue. In their complaint, the buyers said that they had been misled in the personal pitches and statements to the press made by representatives of Trump SoHo, who said the project was “30, 40, 50, 60 percent or more” sold. In reality, only 16 percent of the building’s units were sold—just 1 percent more than is needed to start an offering plan, a document for buyers that outlines the details of a construction project that is under development. A year later, the buyers settled with the sponsors of Trump SoHo after they promised to refund 90 percent of the apartment deposits. Trump SoHo was completed in 2010 and was purchased by CIM Group in 2014 after going into foreclosure proceedings because it couldn’t find enough buyers. Roughly two-thirds of the units still haven’t been sold.

Trump Tower Tampa: In 2009, a group of at least 20 condo buyers sued Trump for overselling his role in the development of a luxury condo project in Tampa that was ultimately never built and remains an empty lot to this day. Buyers put down 20 percent deposits on 190 units that cost between $700,000 and nearly $6 million, in part because the project’s marketing materials persuaded them that Trump was behind the development of the building. In fact, he had only lent his name to the project through a licensing agreement. The case was ultimately settled, with some buyers getting back as little as $11,115, after investing hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Trump Baja: Tampa was not the only place where condo buyers sued Trump for overselling his role in a project. In 2010, over 100 condo buyers sued Trump after they lost millions of dollars in deposits they’d put down on apartments in Trump Ocean Resort Baja, a planned luxury oceanfront hotel and condo building near Tijuana, Mexico, that was never built. The property was foreclosed on in 2008, in the midst of the financial crisis, before construction had begun. Buyers had been given the impression that Trump was developing the property—a selling point for many—but when the project was foreclosed on, it turned out that he had merely licensed his name to the venture. The lawsuit accused Trump of fraud and violating federal disclosure laws, among other charges, and a confidential settlement was secured in 2013.

Trump Model Management: In October 2014, Jamaican fashion model Alexia Palmer filed a lawsuit against Trump’s modeling agency. She alleged that Trump Model Management had engaged in “fraudulent misrepresentation” and violated immigration and labor laws when it agreed, as part of her visa application, to pay her a $75,000 annual salary, but then didn’t pay anywhere close to that amount. Palmer says she was paid just $3,880.75 over three years. Trump Model Management filed a motion to dismiss the case, and a New York district judge dismissed the case in March 2016.

The chefs: In June 2015, while announcing his candidacy for the Republican nomination, Trump memorably described Mexican immigrants as criminals and “rapists.” On July 8, acclaimed restaurateur José Andrés announced that he was pulling his restaurant from Trump’s planned Washington, DC, hotel due to the candidate’s comments. Shortly after, Geoffrey Zakarian, a second chef with an agreement to open an eatery at the hotel, also withdrew. In July and August, Trump sued Andrés’ company and Zakarian‘s firm for breach of contract, asking each for $10 million in damages and lost rent. About a month later, both chefs counter-sued Trump, alleging that the real breach of contract was on his side. As Andrés explained in his lawsuit, which sought $8 million in damages, Trump’s decision to disparage immigrants made it difficult to run a Spanish restaurant associated with his name. From Andrés’ complaint: “The perception that Mr. Trump’s statements were anti-Hispanic made it very difficult to recruit appropriate staff for a Hispanic restaurant, to attract the requisite number of Hispanic food patrons for a profitable enterprise, and to raise capital for what was now an extraordinarily risky Spanish restaurant.” BLT Prime, a steak restaurant chain, has since agreed to open a location in Trump’s DC hotel.

In February, as proceedings in the Andrés-Trump legal battle moved forward, internal Trump organization emails were submitted as part of court proceedings. After an email from Andrés’ company said the company was getting blow-back over Trump’s statements on immigrants, a Trump Organization vice president sent an email to Ivanka Trump. “Ugh,” the vice president wrote. “This is not surprising and would expect that this will not be the last that we hear of it. At least for formal, prepared speeches, can someone vet going forward? Hopefully the Latino community does not organize against us more broadly in DC/across Trump properties.”

Originally posted here:  

This Is What It’s Like to Try to Sue Donald Trump

Posted in alternative energy, Anchor, ATTRA, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, solar, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on This Is What It’s Like to Try to Sue Donald Trump

Hillary Email Scandal Continue To Be Dumb But Non-Scandalous

by CEEVerna673 Posted on March 27, 2016

Mother Jones

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

Over at the Washington Post, Robert O’Harrow Jr. has a deep dive into the roots of Hillary Clinton’s email troubles. As near as I can tell, once you cut through the weeds it’s the story of a senior official who’s technically illiterate and didn’t want to change her email habits. Both Clinton and her inner circle of advisers were “dedicated BlackBerry addicts,” but apparently neither the NSA nor anyone else was willing to help them make their BlackBerries safe. So, like millions of us who have tried to stay under the radar of our IT departments, Hillary just kept on using hers, hoping that eventually everyone would forget the whole thing. In the meantime, she grudgingly obeyed rules that required her to leave her phone behind when she entered her 7th floor office, but used it everywhere else.

That remains inexplicably dumb, but hardly scandalous. Nonetheless, we have this:

The FBI is now trying to determine whether a crime was committed in the handling of that classified material. It is also examining whether the server was hacked. One hundred forty-seven FBI agents have been deployed to run down leads, according to a lawmaker briefed by FBI Director James B. Comey. The FBI has accelerated the investigation because officials want to avoid the possibility of announcing any action too close to the election.

147 agents! To track down leads on one email server whose location and purpose have been known for two years. That’s crazy. It’s gotta be time for the FBI to either bring some charges or shut this thing down. Enough’s enough.

More – 

Hillary Email Scandal Continue To Be Dumb But Non-Scandalous

Posted in alo, alternative energy, Everyone, FF, GE, LG, ONA, PUR, solar, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Hillary Email Scandal Continue To Be Dumb But Non-Scandalous

The Podcast Where Icons Like Iggy Pop, U2, Björk, and Wilco Get to Totally Geek Out

by NicholHeavener Posted on March 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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

The seeds of the popular podcast Song Exploder were sown in the mid-2000s, when Los Angeles musician Hrishikesh Hirway first sat down to remix other people’s songs and found himself spellbound by the nuances and complexities of the individual tracks within. “It felt like such a privileged listening experience,” he recalls.

About a decade later, in January 2014, Hirway launched the podcast—which, over two-plus years and 68 episodes, has earned him a devoted fan base and interviews with superstars such as U2, Björk, and the National. Each episode deconstructs a single song, mashing up musical elements with audio snippets of the creators geeking out on gear or talking about what drives them to make music. It’s an experience dense with sounds, ideas, and narrative momentum that culminates in the fully assembled song. But Song Exploder transcends mere music. “It’s about how you take an idea from nothing to something fully realized,” the host explains.

Hirway is familiar enough with the process. He began recording as a college junior, calling himself “The One AM Radio.” Since relocating from his Peabody, Massachusetts, hometown to LA in 2006, he’s written scores for several films. And in 2013, he co-founded the hip-hop group Moors with rapper-actor Keith Stanfield of Straight Outta Compton fame.

Hirway at home in Los Angeles. Courtesy Song Exploder

At first, Hirway recruited musician friends as his podcast subjects, but he soon began reaching outside his social circles: an email to an address he found online led to an interview with composer Jeff Beal, known for his work on House of Cards. Persistence and luck—and help from fans of the podcast—have kept the big names rolling in. Last fall, while struggling to reach Wilco, Hirway remembered that the son of bandleader Jeff Tweedy had recently followed the podcast on Twitter; the episode came together within days.

Much of the podcast’s appeal lies in Hirway’s uncanny ability to bypass journalistic awkwardness in favor of honest and intimate conversations about music and life. A single episode will introduce you to an artist, but listening religiously offers something more: a glimpse into the nature of creativity and the eccentric ways musicians cultivate it. In one arresting episode, multi-instrumentalist Nick Zammuto of the experimental duo the Books tells Hirway how he plucked the lyrics of “Smells Like Content” from educational TV shows and the facade of the Brooklyn Public Library. “People labor over lyrics a lot, but really they’re kind of all around us all the time,” Zammuto says.

In another episode, members of the noise band Health explain how a programming error—”the whole song glitches, basically”—ended up in the chorus of “Stonefist.” Again and again, Hirway’s listeners encounter artists who are learning to embrace accidents, imperfections, and curveballs that collaborators throw their way. Shared, too, is the artists’ palpable thrill in describing how some songs emerge seemingly of their own accord. “You sit back and go, ‘How did I do that?'” says Wilco’s Tweedy.

Ultimately, Hirway aims to provide an experience that even someone without a note of musical training can relate to. After all, “Creativity is not this opaque box, this laboratory that is only accessible to a chosen few…All you really need is an idea and the will to see it through.”

Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy talks music with Hirway during a taping. Courtesy of Song Exploder

Explain That Tune

Being asked to choose your favorite Song Exploder episode is like being asked to name your favorite child. But these five selections offer a good taste of what Hirway’s podcast has to offer:

The Books’ Nick Zammuto, “Smells Like Content“: If you thought there were limits to what constitutes music, Zammuto will prove you wrong. He describes his use of such humble materials as PVP pipe and vinyl records—not the music on the records, but the records themselves—in this seminal early episode.

Courtney Barnett, “Depreston“: Barnett had a big 2015. The Australian rocker’s debut album, Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit, received rave reviews, and Barnett was nominated for the “best new artist” Grammy. In this episode, Barnett breaks down the track “Depreston” with characteristic wit and insight.

MGMT, “Time to Pretend“: If you’ve left your fortress in the last eight years, you’ve undoubtedly heard this song. Written when the band members were still in college, “Time to Pretend,” an anthem to imaginary stardom, had the surprise effect of making its creators famous. In this episode, MGMT recounts the song’s evolution—and how it felt to perform in druid capes on David Letterman.

Natalia Lafourcade, “Hasta la Raíz“: While Song Exploder has featured plenty of famous artists, Hirway also sees it as a vehicle for introducing accomplished musicians to a broader public. Mexican singer-songwriter Natalia Lafourcade was the perfect candidate: She won four Latin Grammys last year and an American Grammy in February, but is still little-known north of the border.

Ramin Djawadi, Game of Thrones theme: If you could somehow conjure up the musical equivalent to the word “epic,” it might sound like this. Composer Ramin Djawadi describes how he crafted the signature theme to the hit HBO show Game of Thrones, and what it was like to see the melody become an internet phenomenon, interpreted by fans and musicians around the world.

Source article:  

The Podcast Where Icons Like Iggy Pop, U2, Björk, and Wilco Get to Totally Geek Out

Posted in alternative energy, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Presto, Radius, solar, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Podcast Where Icons Like Iggy Pop, U2, Björk, and Wilco Get to Totally Geek Out

Matt Taibbi’s Case Against Hillary Clinton Is Surprisingly Weak

by EliseNivison076 Posted on March 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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

Long post ahead. Sorry.

I think I’ve made it clear that I generally support Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders in the Democratic race. I don’t make a big deal out of this because I like Bernie too. My preference for Hillary is clear but fairly modest. Without diving into a long and turgid essay about this, here are few quick bullet points explaining why I like Hillary:

Her entire career has demonstrated a truly admirable dedication to helping the least fortunate.
Unlike her husband, she obviously doesn’t enjoy the cut and thrust of partisan campaigning. Yet she soldiers on after taking decades of sewage-level abuse that would overwhelm a lesser person. This demonstrates the kind of persistence that any Democrat will need governing with a Republican Congress.
She takes policy seriously and she’s well briefed. She doesn’t pretend that one or two big ideas can suddenly create a revolution.
She’s a woman, and yes, I’d like to see a woman as president.
Special pleading to the contrary, a moderate candidate is almost certain to be more electable in November than a self-declared democratic socialist.
In the Senate she demonstrated that she could work with Republicans. Yes, it was always on small things, the GOP being what it is these days. Still, she built a reputation for pragmatic dealmaking and for her word always being good.

Needless to say, Hillary also has weak points. She has decades in the public eye, and voters usually prefer candidates with more like 10-15 years of national exposure. What’s more, she obviously comes with a lot of baggage from those decades. On a policy level, I don’t get the sense that her foreign policy instincts have changed much based on events since 9/11, and that’s by far my biggest complaint about her. Finally, I’m not thrilled with political dynasties.

OK. That’s the throat clearing. The real point of this post is Matt Taibbi’s article explaining why he disagrees with Rolling Stone’s endorsement of Hillary. It’s hardly surprising that Taibbi is a Bernie fan, but I was little taken aback by the thinness of his argument. Here’s the nut of it:

The implication of the endorsement is that even when young people believe in the right things, they often don’t realize what it takes to get things done. But I think they do understand….The millions of young voters that are rejecting Hillary’s campaign this year are making a carefully reasoned, even reluctant calculation about the limits of the insider politics both she and her husband have represented.

For young voters, the foundational issues of our age have been the Iraq invasion, the financial crisis, free trade, mass incarceration, domestic surveillance, police brutality, debt and income inequality, among others. And to one degree or another, the modern Democratic Party, often including Hillary Clinton personally, has been on the wrong side of virtually all of these issues.

Let’s go through those one by one.

The Iraq invasion: This one is totally fair. Hillary did support the invasion, and it was the wrong call. What’s more, this is a good proxy for her general hawkishness, which is her weakest point among millennials and her weakest point among an awful lot of older voters too.

The financial crisis: Taibbi doesn’t even bother making an argument for this aside from some snark about the speeches Hillary gave to Goldman Sachs. But that’s just petty point scoring. Beyond that, it’s plainly unfair to blame her by association for legislation signed by Bill, which she had no hand in. And look: the only Clinton-era law that probably had a significant effect on the financial crisis was the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which was supported by 83 percent of the House and 100 percent of the Senate. Even Bernie voted for it. The truth is that Hillary’s positions on Wall Street reform are reasonably solid.

Free trade: This is a “foundational issue” for millennials? Starting in the late 90s, there was a 3-4 year period of anti-globalization protests, and that was about it for high-profile attention. Most millennnials were barely in their teens at that point. A recent Gallup poll asked Americans if increased trade was good or bad, and 35 percent said it was bad. Among millennials, it was 32 percent, lower than most other age groups. Trade is getting a lot of attention lately thanks to TPP and Donald Trump, but it’s just never been a foundational issue for millennials.

Mass incarceration: This again? Taibbi says that Bill Clinton “authorized more than $16 billion for new prisons,” and slams Hillary because she “stumped for that crime bill, adding the Reaganesque observation that inner-city criminals were ‘super-predators’ who needed to be ‘brought to heel.'” The truth: Bill Clinton had barely any effect on incarceration; Hillary’s “super-predator” remark was reasonable in context; and both Clintons have long since said they regretted the carceral effects of the 1994 crime bill—which, by the way, Bernie Sanders voted for. Give it a rest.

Domestic surveillance: Taibbi doesn’t actually say anything further about this, but I’ll grant that I prefer Bernie’s instincts on this issue, just as I prefer his instincts on most national security issues. But anyone who thinks Bernie could make a dent in this is dreaming. In concrete terms, mass surveillance enjoys substantial public support and virtually unanimous support among elites and lawmakers—and that’s after the Snowden revelations, which were basically the Abu Ghraib of mass surveillance. It’s really not clear that in practice, Bernie would do much more about this than Hillary.

Police brutality: Bernie barely even mentioned this until he was the target of protests from Black Lives Matter a few months ago. It’s hardly one of his go-to subjects, and there’s no real reason to think Hillary’s position is any less progressive than his. In any case, this is almost purely a state and local issue. As president, neither Hillary nor Bernie would be able to do much about it.

Debt and income inequality: Once again, Taibbi doesn’t bother to say much about this. Here’s his only actual argument: “Hillary infamously voted for regressive bankruptcy reform just a few years after privately meeting with Elizabeth Warren and agreeing that such industry-driven efforts to choke off debt relief needed to be stopped.” But this is just plain false. And while there’s no question that Bernie is stronger than Hillary on Wall Street issues, both rhetorically and in practice, Hillary has generally been pretty strong on all these issues too. And her proposals are generally a lot more serious and a lot more practical than Bernie’s.

Put this all together and here’s what you get. Hillary’s instincts on national security are troublesome. If that’s a prime issue for you, then you should vote against her. It’s certainly the issue that gives me the most pause—though I have some doubts about Bernie too, which I mention below.

She also lags Bernie in her dedication to bringing Wall Street to heel. But this is a much trickier subject. Bernie has thunderous rhetoric, but not much in the way of plausible plans to accomplish anything he talks about. Frankly, my guess is that neither one will accomplish much, but that Hillary is actually likely to accomplish a little more.

In other words, there’s just not much here aside from dislike of Hillary’s foreign policy views. That’s a completely legit reason to vote against her, but it’s hard to say that Taibbi makes much of a case beyond that.

Bernie Sanders too often lets rhetoric take the place of any actual plausible policy proposal. He suggested that his health care plan would save more in prescription drug costs than the entire country spends in the first place. This is the sign of a white paper hastily drafted to demonstrate seriousness, not something that’s been carefully thought through. He bangs away on campaign finance reform, but there’s virtually no chance of making progress on this. The Supreme Court has seen to that, and even if Citizens United were overturned, previous jurisprudence has placed severe limits on regulating campaign speech. Besides, the public doesn’t support serious campaign finance reform and never has. And even on foreign policy, it’s only his instincts that are good. He’s shown no sign of thinking hard about national security issues, and that’s scarier than most of his supporters acknowledge. Tyros in the Oval Office are famously susceptible to pressure from the national security establishment, and Bernie would probably be no exception. There’s a chance—small but not trivial—that he’d get rolled into following a more hawkish national security policy than Hillary.

I’m old, and I’m a neoliberal sellout. Not as much of one as I used to be, but still. So it’s no surprise that I’m on the opposite side from Taibbi. That said, I continue to be surprised by the just plain falseness of many of the left-wing attacks on Hillary, along with the starry-eyed willingness to accept practically everything Bernie says without even a hint of healthy skepticism. Hell, if you’re disappointed by Obama, who’s accomplished more than any Democratic president in decades, just wait until Bernie wins. By the end of four years, you’ll be practically suicidal.

Continue reading:

Matt Taibbi’s Case Against Hillary Clinton Is Surprisingly Weak

Posted in alo, alternative energy, Citizen, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, solar, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Matt Taibbi’s Case Against Hillary Clinton Is Surprisingly Weak

Justice Department Takes Steps to Protect Transgender Prisoners

by ArletteMcknight Posted on March 25, 2016

Mother Jones

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

Amid several proposals in Republican-controlled statehouses to limit protections for transgender residents came a glimmer of hope from the federal government on Thursday. The Department of Justice issued new regulations clarifying guidelines it set in 2012 for the treatment of transgender inmates in prisons. The 2012 guidelines required prison and jail staff to consider inmates’ gender identity when deciding where to place transgender inmates, but many prisons continue to follow state rules that assign inmates housing according to their genitalia, the Guardian US reports. The new DOJ guidelines state that any “written policy or actual practice that assigns transgender or intersex inmates to gender-specific facilities, housing units, or programs based solely on their external genital anatomy” is in violation of the federal standard, which mandates that prisons consider both inmates’ gender identity and personal concerns about their safety when assigning them to a housing facility.

A survey conducted by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2011 and 2012 estimated that 4 percent of state and federal prison inmates and 3 percent of jail inmates reported being sexually assaulted by other inmates or staff in the previous year. But more than a third of transgender inmates in prisons and a third in jails said they had been sexually assaulted during the same time period. Transgender women housed in men’s prisons are at even greater risk for sexual assault. A California study found that nearly 60 percent of transgender women inmates housed in men’s prisons reported being sexually assaulted, compared to just 4 percent of non-transgender inmates in men’s prison. The BJS estimates that there are 3,200 transgender inmates in US prisons and jails.

The new guidelines are largely symbolic—they are not legally binding—but they make plain the federal government’s stance on the housing of transgender inmates, the National Center for Transgender Equality and Just Detention International said in a joint statement. “The new guidance, posted online today by the National PREA Resource Center, sends the clearest message yet that current housing practices in prisons and jails are in violation of PREA and put transgender people at risk for sexual abuse,” they said, according to Guardian US.

Last year, the Department of Justice wrote to a Georgia court in support of Ashley Diamond, a transgender woman who sought a transfer to a women’s prison. Diamond claimed she had been sexually assaulted multiple times at several men’s prisons during her three-year incarceration. She also requested a court order forcing the Georgia Department of Corrections to give her access to the hormones and medications she had been taking for years to treat her gender dysphoria prior to incarceration. (Diamond has since been released.) But most states have been slow to catch up.

There’s one state that’s ahead of the pack. Last year, California became the first state to adopt a policy of providing gender-affirmation surgery to transgender inmates for whom a doctor had determined the surgery was medically necessary. Months before adopting the policy, the state had agreed to pay for gender-affirmation surgery—at an estimated cost of between $15,000 and $25,000—for transgender inmate Michelle Norsworthy, after a judge ruled the state was constitutionally obligated to provide it to her under the Eighth Amendment. Norsworthy was released on parole before receiving the treatment.

Read this article – 

Justice Department Takes Steps to Protect Transgender Prisoners

Posted in alternative energy, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, solar, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Justice Department Takes Steps to Protect Transgender Prisoners