Trump statement on Khashoggi reveals dark secret of US policy – Business Insider
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Mueller uses George Papadopoulos’ tweets against him in court filing
“Following the defendant’s sentencing, he made a variety of public statements that appear to be inconsistent with his stated acceptance of responsibility at sentencing,” they wrote.
In one instance prosecutors pointed to, Papadopoulos tweeted from his public Twitter account that the FBI’s investigation was “the biggest case of entrapment!” The next day, Papadopoulos said he was considering withdrawing his guilty plea because he believed he was framed.
Several days later, he tweeted that he had been sentenced “while having exculpatory evidence hidden from me.”
…And on November 9, prosecutors wrote, Papadopoulos tweeted that his “biggest regret” was pleading guilty.
…His lawyers argued in their motion that he should be allowed to stay out of prison “pending appeal,” but Mueller’s office said there is no pending appeal in his case.
Mueller uses George Papadopoulos’ tweets against him in court filing – Business Insider
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Facebook Admits To Targeting Billionaire George Soros In PR Attack
Facebook officials on Wednesday
Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s head of communication and policy, published a blog post detailing the company’s decision to hire Definers Public Affairs, a
opposition research firm, and why it aimed its effort at the company’s critics, including Soros.
Last week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg denied having any knowledge of the company’s PR campaign against Soros until the Times investigation, which also found negative campaigns aimed at Apple and Google, was made public.
Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s chief operating officer, also denied having knowledge of the hiring of Definers. However, in a statement supplementing Schrage’s blog post, she said she recently learned that the PR company’s work had “crossed my desk.”
Facebook Admits To Targeting Billionaire George Soros In PR Attack | HuffPost
hmmmm
Snoop Dogg Thanks Himself in Hollywood Walk of Fame Speech
Snoop Dogg Thanks Himself in Hollywood Walk of Fame Speech
On the up side, this happened.
Coast Guard orders massive 14-year oil spill to be cleaned up
The Coast Guard has ordered the company responsible for an oil spill that has been leaking into the Gulf of Mexico for 14 years to clean up the environmental catastrophe or face a $40,000 per day fine.
…Taylor allowed a broken oil platform off the coast of southeast Louisiana to leak an estimated 10,500 gallons to 29,000 gallons of oil per day, five to 13 times larger than the government’s initial estimates.
…Taylor’s oil spill has been a source of concern for some time. The site — Mississippi Canyon-20, which lies south of the Mississippi River delta — took a hit from Hurricane Ivan in 2004. The storm wrecked Taylor’s platform and triggered the massive spill, resulting in years of legal back-and-forth between the company and the Interior Department, which has contended that Taylor has an obligation to fix the oil wells at the site.
…Taylor no longer produces oil and a trust account was established in 2008, which the government required in order to allow the company to decommission its wells. Nine of the 28 wells at the Mississippi delta site have been plugged and Taylor says it can’t reach the others without risking more spillage. The company now wants the rest of the $666 million trust to be returned to it, arguing it has done everything it can, but the Interior Department says Taylor needs to finish plugging the remaining wells.
Coast Guard orders massive 14-year oil spill to be cleaned up – ThinkProgress
Disgusting this was allowed to go on for 14 years. George Bush may not have liked black people but (sadly) BHO didn’t give a flying fuck about the Gulf Coast either.
$40,000 a day is chump change com paired to the long-term costs of cleaning it up. There should be criminal charges filed by this point.
Pluggin nine of twenty-eight well is not even close to “everything it can” do and it sure as shit doesn’t even get close to resolving the problems the company created by themselves. Make a mess? Clean it up. All up. Completely. Or face much more dire consequences than a fine to a trust fund should be the rule of law.
A remote Indian island, its fiercely isolationist inhabitants, and the death of an American missionary
It’s not the nicest thing to speak ill of the dead but seriously… What a fucking asswipe douchebag this guy was!
‘Unwanted subject’: Kirkland yogurt shop employees called 911 because they and (unless Kirkland fires them and comes out against their actions) their employer are racist AF
Ragland, 31, is both a court-appointed special advocate and a visitation supervisor, so his job is to oversee meetings between kids and the parents who have lost custody of them.
That’s what he was doing at the store — he was supervising an outing between a mother and her 12-year-old son. The boy wanted ice cream, so the three drove to Menchie’s, arrived together and had been sitting there for about half an hour, visiting, when Ragland looked up to find two police officers standing at the table.
Speaking of….
Shame on you Seattle Times! That headline was apologist AF!!!!
Nancy Pelosi is too old and too unpopular to be speaker. She’s also too good at the job to pass over
Some Democrats are trying to stop the nomination and election of current party leader Nancy Pelosi. Their reasons are understandable, but not persuasive.
…In part, her unpopularity stems from her issue positions. Conservatives think she’s too progressive. Some among her caucus think she’s not progressive enough.
…Congress is unpopular. The institution has a 21% approval rating, while Republicans, Democrats, Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) are all way underwater in the public opinion surveys. Which not only puts Pelosi’s rating into context, but also raises a pertinent question: How much more popular would another Democrat be?
…Despite her occasional stumbles, the Democrats have plenty of evidence that Pelosi is up to the task of leadership. Notice that she just led her party to massive gains in the midterm elections.
…She is the Democrat best equipped to handle the institution’s main job, the crafting of laws.
The Affordable Care Act is the prime example. Pelosi shepherded it to passage when many thought that it was dead. Whoever takes the gavel in January will need that kind of skill. The presidency and the Senate are in the hands of the opposite party. Negotiating with Senate Majority Leader McConnell will be a particularly daunting challenge. He may be unpopular, but he is formidable: An inexperienced newcomer would be at risk of being eaten alive.
hmmm….
…Not for nothing but some of the younger, more inexperienced Congresspeople who want the job don’t strike me all that savvy. Take Seth Moulton for example. It takes a special kind of idiot not to have any idea how badly a particular individual’s campaign will be received in the state right next door to you. …And make no mistake, he was a big part of the colossal mistake that was his school chum’s carpetbagger campaign for congress in New Hampshire this cycle. If he wasn’t aware of how poorly that would be received in his own backyard, what does that say about his ability to assess what is and what is not feasible in DC? I’ll answer that one for you. Not frigging much.
Thanksgiving Biscuits: The Secret to the South’s Recipe
In modern food distribution, seasonality and origin are often lost entirely from the foods Americans buy. If it’s cold where you live and you want a banana anyway, there’s nothing stopping you from having one. In that context, soft wheat flour’s stubborn regionality is almost charming. According to Phillips, biscuits likely developed as a southern staple food specifically because the flour necessary to make them was (and still is) made from the kind of wheat that’s farmed there.
Most of North America’s hard wheat is grown on the plains, from Kansas north to Canada, but because of climate differences, the South has always had the softer kind, and cooks in the late 1800s didn’t have food-service giants like Sysco trucking in mass-produced flour from thousands of miles away. As a result, biscuits are uniquely southern, and they seem determined to stay that way.
Thanksgiving Biscuits: The Secret to the South’s Recipe – The Atlantic
hmmmm
Anti-vaccination stronghold hit with chickenpox outbreak
Chickenpox has taken hold of a school in North Carolina where many families claim religious exemption from vaccines.
Cases of chickenpox have been multiplying at the Asheville Waldorf School, which serves children from nursery school to sixth grade in Asheville, North Carolina. About a dozen infections grew to 28 at the beginning of the month. By Friday, there were 36, the Asheville Citizen-Times reported.
…Asheville Waldorf has one of the highest religious vaccination exemption rates in the state, according to data maintained by the state’s Department of Health and Human Services.
The private school has a higher rate of exemption on religious grounds than all but two other North Carolina schools, the Citizen-Times reported. During the 2017-18 school year, 19 of 28 kindergartners were exempt from at least one vaccine required by the state. Of the school’s 152 students, 110 had not received the chickenpox vaccine, the newspaper reported.
Anti-vaccination stronghold hit with chickenpox outbreak
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Ivanka Trump used personal email account to send emails about government business – Chicago Tribune
Ivanka Trump sent hundreds of emails last year to White House aides, Cabinet officials and her assistants using a personal account, many of them in violation of federal records rules, according to people familiar with a White House examination of her correspondence.
…White House ethics officials learned of Trump’s repeated use of personal email when reviewing emails gathered last fall by five Cabinet agencies to respond to a public records lawsuit.
…”There’s the obvious hypocrisy that her father ran on the misuse of personal email as a central tenet of his campaign,” Evers said. “There is no reasonable suggestion that she didn’t know better. Clearly everyone joining the Trump administration should have been on high alert about personal email use.”
Ivanka Trump and her husband set up personal emails with the domain “ijkfamily.com” through a Microsoft system in December 2016, as they were preparing to move to Washington so Kushner could join the White House, according to people familiar with the arrangement.
The couple’s emails are prescreened by the Trump Organization for security problems such as viruses but are stored by Microsoft, the people said.
Trump used her personal account to discuss government policies and official business less than 100 times – often replying to other administration officials who contacted her through her private email, according to people familiar with the review.
Another category of less-substantive emails may have also violated the records law: hundreds of messages related to her official work schedule and travel details that she sent herself and personal assistants who cared for her children and house, they said.
…Her husband Jared Kushner’s use of personal email for government work drew intense scrutiny when it was first reported by Politico last fall. The revelation prompted demands from congressional investigators that Kushner preserve his records, which his attorney said he had.
But Trump had used her personal email for official business far more frequently, according to people familiar with the administration’s review – a fact that remained a closely held secret inside the White House.
…Trump used her private email to initiate official business.
In April 2017, she used her personal email to write to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s chief of staff, Eli Miller, suggesting that he connect with her chief of staff, Julie Radford. The email chain, obtained by American Oversight, was copied to Radford’s government account.
“It would be great if you both could connect next week to discuss [redacted],”she wrote. “We would love your feedback and input as we structure.”
Ivanka Trump used personal email account to send emails about government business – Chicago Tribune
Ivanka Trump Used Private Emails With Treasury Officials
Ivanka Trump and Kushner’s use of private email accounts for White House business has been previously reported by Newsweek and others. They are believed to have used at least three private accounts. The White House in October announced it was launching an investigation into the use of private accounts for official business.
Ivanka Trump Used Private Emails With Treasury Officials
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Trump Administration Temporarily Blocked From Banning Asylum Seekers
A federal judge barred the Trump administration on Monday from refusing asylum to immigrants who cross the southern border illegally.
…Trump issued a proclamation on Nov. 9 that said anyone who crossed the southern border would be ineligible for asylum.
…“Individuals are entitled to asylum if they cross between ports of entry,” said Baher Azmy, a lawyer for the Center for Constitutional Rights. “It couldn’t be clearer.”
Trump Administration Temporarily Blocked From Banning Asylum Seekers | HuffPost
hmmmm
Living in a cold, dark climate linked to heavy drinking. Or not.
One expert attending, Prof Jurgen Rehm from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, cast doubt on any link between temperature, light and alcohol consumption.
He told BBC Scotland that research in Europe had found the highest rates of alcohol consumption and harm in a central belt of countries such as Ireland, the UK, Germany and Poland.
Lower alcohol use was found in countries to the north – such as Norway, Sweden and Finland – and further south in places like Italy, Malta and Greece.
He said: “Basically, we have found within Europe that this correlation that has been found in another study globally, plays no role.”
Living in a cold, dark climate linked to heavy drinking – BBC News
hmmmm
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