Each week’s worth of news is arranged in its own page, sorted by date. To move from week to week, click the page numbers at the bottom.
Your $1-5 PayPal monthly subscriptions are what keep me and this website going… Please use the PayPal button in the top left panehttps://web.archive.org/web/20191213141706/https://www.paypal.me/blog42 to subscribe! Bookmark this page. I update at least 3-4 times daily!
Tip:
When searching for a particular article, please use your browser’s search function (Control-F) instead of scrolling.
President Donald Trump on Monday attacked Democrats for holding up a disaster aid deal, and reupped his claims that Puerto Rico is receiving too much federal assistance.“Puerto Rico has been given more money by Congress for Hurricane Disaster Relief, 91 Billion Dollars, than any State in the history of the U.S,” Trump said in a tweet, in which he also claimed Democratic lawmakers are withholding aid from other states recovering from hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfire and flooding.
Puerto Rico has been given more money by Congress for Hurricane Disaster Relief, 91 Billion Dollars, than any State in the history of the U.S. As an example, Florida got $12 Billion & Texas $39 Billion for their monster hurricanes. Now the Democrats are saying NO Relief to……
“The Dems don’t want farmers to get any help,” he added. “Puerto Rico should be very happy and the Dems should stop blocking much needed Disaster Relief!”
Top senators negotiating the deal said last week they are nearing an agreement after Republicans laid out a proposal behind closed doors that would increase Puerto Rico’s access to federal recovery cash. Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.), one of the Trump’s congressional allies, said last week the president was “on board” with the GOP’s offer.
President Donald Trump’s meeting with Republican senators on trade last week did nothing to unstick his stalled trade deal with Mexico and Canada.
Senate Finance Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said Monday that the president once again refused to lift steel and aluminum tariffs on U.S. allies when pressed, a requirement that Grassley has laid out to consider the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement to replace NAFTA. Trump also refused to rule out imposing tariffs on foreign automakers, Grassley said.
Trump also threatened in recent days to impose 25 percent tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars of Chinese goods, a move that raised further fears of a retaliatory tit-for-tat with China.
The meeting left the president’s long-sought trade deal with a grim prognosis in the immediate future.
President Trump on Monday signed an executive grant of clemency, a full pardon, to a former Army first lieutenant convicted of murdering an Iraqi prisoner.
The White House released a statement announcing Trump’s decision to pardon Michael Behenna, who was sentenced in 2009 to 15 years for shooting and killing Ali Mansur Mohamed. The move comes after repeated requests from Oklahoma’s attorney general for Trump to pardon Behenna.
“Mr. Behenna’s case has attracted broad support from the military, Oklahoma elected officials, and the public,” the White House said, noting that more than two dozen generals and admirals as well as numerous Oklahoma officials have expressed support for Behenna, who hails from the state. The statement added that Behenna has been “a model prisoner.”
“In light of these facts, Mr. Behenna is entirely deserving of this Grant of Executive Clemency,” the statement read.
A mayor of an overwhelmingly whitecity outside of Atlanta is facing calls to resign after the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that she stopped considering a candidate for city manager because he is black, reportedly remarking to another city employee that “the city isn’t ready for this.”
According to records obtained the Journal-Constitution, Theresa Kenerly, the mayor of Hoschton, GA, a city of fewer than 2,000 people located 50 miles outside of Atlanta pulled Keith Henry’s application from a group of four finalists for the city manager job. During a closed-door meeting on March 4, Kenerly reportedly told city council member Hope Weeks that she disqualified Henry’s application “because he is black, and the city isn’t ready for this.”
Weeks repeated the comment back to Kenerly after the meeting.
In parts of California, seniors are the fastest growing part of the homeless population.
Rising housing costs compounded by insufficient retirement income and life’s calamities are driving more seniors, such as 71-year-old Carl Russell, onto California’s streets.
Each night, Russell sleeps sitting up. A sleeping bag on a concrete sidewalk is his bed. The front of San Diego’s Gary and Mary West Senior Wellness Center is his headboard.
He is among the rapidly growing number of homeless seniors across the nation.
As the baby-boom generation has aged, the number of homeless people 62 and older jumped 68.5% across the country from 2007 to 2017, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
If that trend continues, thousands more elderly Californians could join Russell.
”I can’t sleep solid because I don’t want to get my throat cut,” said Russell. “I lost a friend here who got stabbed to death.”
A majority of Americans say socialism is incompatible with American values, and only 10 percent of voters in a new poll have a positive view of socialism.
A Monmouth University Poll survey released Monday found that 57 percent of voters believe that socialism is incompatible with American values, compared to 29 percent who said it is compatible.
The poll found that 42 percent of respondents have a negative view of socialism, 45 percent are neutral and only 10 percent have a positive view.
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders (I), a self-described democratic socialist, is the only 2020 presidential candidate to openly embrace the term “socialist.”
Still, Republicans have sought to cast all of the Democratic contenders as socialists, pointing to “Medicare for All,” the Green New Deal and other policies as evidence of the Democrats’ leftward lurch.
At the same time, the poll found some support for policies that have been criticized as socialist.
For instance, 58 percent of respondents either strongly or somewhat support a “universal health care system,” while only 37 percent say they oppose the idea. A majority, 53 percent, say universal health care is not a socialist idea, against 37 percent who say that it is.
“We may be in a period of flux with how these economic systems are viewed,” said Monmouth pollster Patrick Murray. “Socialism still carries a stigma, but many Americans feel they are being left behind by the current capitalist system. Policies that have traditionally been seen as socialist may be getting more popular even if the term itself is not.”
Meanwhile, 39 percent of respondents have a positive view of capitalism, 40 percent are neutral and 17 percent have a negative view.
Presidential campaigns are resorting to unusual tactics to qualify for the Democratic debate stage thanks to the new donor threshold.
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand sank a ping-pong ball into a cup of water — a spin on the drinking game, beer pong — and turned the moment into a digital ad urging $1 donations to her presidential campaign. Washington Gov. Jay Inslee is hawking bumper stickers for $1 donations and used his recent CNN town hall to make a televised plea for more campaign contributions. Former Rep. John Delaney promised to give $2 of his own money to charity for each of the next 100,000 individual donors who gave to his campaign.
The unconventional, often gimmicky fundraising arms race is part of a desperate scramble to make it past a new threshold set by the Democratic National Committee, 65,000 individual donors, to the first primary debates in June and July. The televised debates could be make-or-break showcases for the 2020 presidential candidates, and the requirement has reshaped the strategy of candidates struggling to cross the donor mark, changing spending priorities and altering the path of their campaigns.
Such is the importance of the debates that some presidential campaigns have decided to prioritize Facebook advertising over hiring staffers in early states, several campaign aides said. Others noted that the rules prioritize chasing viral moments early in the campaign over building traditional vote-getting infrastructure in Iowa and New Hampshire. But defenders of the new rules say that they have just forced campaigns to prove they can compete in the 21st century before the election year.
‘A lot of people don’t know who he is on this side of the country or what he stands for,’ says one top South Carolina Democrat.
ORANGEBURG, S.C. — Pete Buttigieg wants to have a conversation with African American voters. But he can’t seem to reach them.
He scheduled a meet-and-greet Monday in Orangeburg — a city that is 76 percent black — but only a dozen or so people of color showed up in a crowd of more than 100. At a town hall the night before — held at a North Charleston high school where minority enrollment is 97 percent in a city that is roughly half-black — it was another overwhelmingly white audience.
The composition of his audiences is a familiar issue for Buttigieg, who has surged in recent national and state polls but struggled to make inroads with one of the party’s most important constituencies.
Recent polling shows Buttigieg winning only 2 percent among African Americans, so he needs to begin addressing the issue quickly to have any hope of contending for the Democratic nomination — or competing in South Carolina, an early primary statewhere African Americans cast roughly 60 percent of primary votes in 2016.
Children across the country aren’t able to leave the juvenile criminal justice system when administrative fines and fees pile up. A new bill in Congress would end this.
WASHINGTON — Shyara Hill’s five-year struggle with the criminal justice system started because she hit a boy at school who had been bullying her little brother.
Hill was 16 years old and a student at Upper Darby High School, a Philadelphia-area school with more than 3,500 students. She was sent to the office of a vice principal who never showed up. She says that after hours of waiting, she tried to leave, and that’s when security guards blocked her. When she tried to push past them, they charged her with assault.
“Every time I tried to squeeze between them, they’d say ‘Assault one, assault two,’” she said in an interview with BuzzFeed News.
She pleaded guilty and was sentenced to community service and a year of probation.
“They told me that if I just pled guilty to whatever they said I did, I would just have a record and it would be gone when I turned 18. And I wouldn’t have to worry about anything,” she said. “Then I found out that’s not true.”
At 20 years old, she was still on probation. Not because she had reoffended but because she hadn’t paid hundreds of dollars in administrative fees. Most jurisdictions across the country allow courts to charge youths with administrative fees, public defender fees, probation supervision fees, fines, and an array of other charges.
Often, paying these fees is a condition for being cleared from the system. If a family can’t afford the fees, the child can end up trapped in indefinite parole. More parole can mean more supervision and court fees, pushing a resolution even further away. In some scenarios, not paying the fees can even lead to incarceration, according to Jessica Feierman, senior managing director of the Pennsylvania-based Juvenile Law Center.
Because there has been little federal attention paid to the issue, “we just don’t have a really comprehensive sense of how widespread the problem is,” said Feierman, but black and Hispanic youths are believed to be disproportionately affected.
In 2018, California became the first state to ban all fees for incarceration, court appearances, probation, or drug testing. Contra County reimbursed hundreds of people who had paid such fees. Washington state also passed legislation, and bills have been introduced in Nevada and Maryland.
The social network has created a team in Dublin to counter wrongdoing, but political ads and misinformation are still reaching voters.
DUBLIN — In a sparsely decorated office in the center of the Irish capital, dozens of Facebook staffers are working to protect the upcoming European election.
The group of twentysomething coders, engineers and content specialists sit hunched over multiple screens, scanning the platform for potential illegal behavior. Wall-mounted television monitors keep them up to date on the latest chatter on the world’s largest social network, Instagram and WhatsApp. A single European Union flag hangs on the wall, next to a poster emblazoned with the slogan “New Ways of Seeing.”
Yet despite Facebook’s 40-person European election “operations center,” which got underway on April 29, the tech giant is struggling to keep on top of the threats.
Political groups from Hungary to Spain have been able to circumvent Facebook’s new political transparency tools to quietly buy partisan social media advertising aimed at swaying potential voters, according to an analysis by POLITICO. That includes paid-for messages by Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister, Verein Recht und Freiheit (Association for the Conservation of the Rule of Law and Civil Liberties), a support group for right-wing politicians in Germany and Petra De Sutter, a Belgian candidate for the Green Party.
Far-right groups like Germany’s Alternative for Germany and France’s National Rally also still dominate political discussion on Facebook ahead of this month’s vote.
