What To Do When You're Stopped By Police - The ACLU & Elon James White
Know Anyone Who Thinks Racial Profiling Is Exaggerated? Watch This, And Tell Me When Your Jaw Drops.
Saturday, August 18, 2018
Friday, August 17, 2018
The extraordinary bias of the judge in the Manafort trial - The Washington Post
"Nancy Gertner, a retired U.S. District Court judge in Massachusetts, is a lecturer at Harvard Law School.
It is not unusual for judges to intervene in court proceedings from time to time — to direct the lawyers to move the case along or to admonish them that evidence is repetitive. The judge's role is to act not as a "mere moderator," as the Supreme Court noted in Herron v. Southern Pacific in 1931, but as the "governor of the trial" responsible for ensuring the proper conduct of all participants.
The performance of U.S. District Court Judge T.S. Ellis III in the trial of Paul Manafort on bank fraud and tax evasion charges has been decidedly unusual.
During the trial, Ellis intervened regularly, and mainly against one side: the prosecution. The judge's interruptions occurred in the presence of the jury and on matters of substance, not courtroom conduct. He disparaged the prosecution's evidence, misstated its legal theories, even implied that prosecutors had disobeyed his orders when they had not."
The extraordinary bias of the judge in the Manafort trial - The Washington Post
Thursday, August 16, 2018
James Lovelock, the Prophet Eminent scientist says global warming is irreversible – and over 6 billion people will perish at the end of the century
"At the age of eighty-eight, after four children and a long and respected career as one of the twentieth century’s most influential scientists, James Lovelock has come to an unsettling conclusion: The human race is doomed.
“I wish I could be more hopeful,” he tells me one sunny morning as we walk through a park in Oslo, where he is giving a talk at a university. Lovelock is a small man, unfailingly polite, with white hair and round, owlish glasses. His step is jaunty, his mind lively, his manner anything but gloomy. In fact, the coming of the Four Horsemen – war, famine, pestilence and death – seems to perk him up. “It will be a dark time,” Lovelock admits. “But for those who survive, I suspect it will be rather exciting.”
James Lovelock, the Prophet – Rolling Stone
Opinion | John Brennan: President Trump’s Claims of No Collusion Are Hogwash - The New York Times
"That’s why the president revoked my security clearance: to try to silence anyone who would dare challenge him.
Mr. Brennan was director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 2013 to 2017.
When Alexander Bortnikov, the head of Russia’s internal security service, told me during an early August 2016 phone call that Russia wasn’t interfering in our presidential election, I knew he was lying. Over the previous several years I had grown weary of Mr. Bortnikov’s denials of Russia’s perfidy — about its mistreatment of American diplomats and citizens in Moscow, its repeated failure to adhere to cease-fire agreements in Syria and its paramilitary intervention in eastern Ukraine, to name just a few issues.
When I warned Mr. Bortnikov that Russian interference in our election was intolerable and would roil United States-Russia relations for many years, he denied Russian involvement in any election, in America or elsewhere, with a feigned sincerity that I had heard many times before. President Vladimir Putin of Russia reiterated those denials numerous times over the past two years, often to Donald Trump’s seeming approval.
Russian denials are, in a word, hogwash.
Before, during and after its now infamous meddling in our last presidential election, Russia practiced the art of shaping political events abroad through its well-honed active measures program, which employs an array of technical capabilities, information operations and old-fashioned human intelligence spycraft. Electoral politics in Western democracies presents an especially inviting target, as a variety of politicians, political parties, media outlets, think tanks and influencers are readily manipulated, wittingly and unwittingly, or even bought outright by Russian intelligence operatives. The very freedoms and liberties that liberal Western democracies cherish and that autocracies fear have been exploited by Russian intelligence services not only to collect sensitive information but also to distribute propaganda and disinformation, increasingly via the growing number of social media platforms.
Having worked closely with the F.B.I. over many years on counterintelligence investigations, I was well aware of Russia’s ability to work surreptitiously within the United States, cultivating relationships with individuals who wield actual or potential power. Like Mr. Bortnikov, these Russian operatives and agents are well trained in the art of deception. They troll political, business and cultural waters in search of gullible or unprincipled individuals who become pliant in the hands of their Russian puppet masters. Too often, those puppets are found.
In my many conversations with James Comey, the F.B.I. director, in the summer of 2016, we talked about the potential for American citizens, involved in partisan politics or not, to be pawns in Russian hands. We knew that Russian intelligence services would do all they could to achieve their objectives, which the United States intelligence community publicly assessed a few short months later were to undermine public faith in the American democratic process, harm the electability of the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, and show preference for Mr. Trump. We also publicly assessed that Mr. Putin’s intelligence services were following his orders. Director Comey and I, along with the director of the National Security Agency, Adm. Michael Rogers, pledged that our agencies would share, as appropriate, whatever information was collected, especially considering the proven ability of Russian intelligence services to suborn United States citizens.
The already challenging work of the American intelligence and law enforcement communities was made more difficult in late July 2016, however, when Mr. Trump, then a presidential candidate, publicly called upon Russia to find the missing emails of Mrs. Clinton. By issuing such a statement, Mr. Trump was not only encouraging a foreign nation to collect intelligence against a United States citizen, but also openly authorizing his followers to work with our primary global adversary against his political opponent.
Such a public clarion call certainly makes one wonder what Mr. Trump privately encouraged his advisers to do — and what they actually did — to win the election. While I had deep insight into Russian activities during the 2016 election, I now am aware — thanks to the reporting of an open and free press — of many more of the highly suspicious dalliances of some American citizens with people affiliated with the Russian intelligence services.
Mr. Trump’s claims of no collusion are, in a word, hogwash.
The only questions that remain are whether the collusion that took place constituted criminally liable conspiracy, whether obstruction of justice occurred to cover up any collusion or conspiracy, and how many members of “Trump Incorporated” attempted to defraud the government by laundering and concealing the movement of money into their pockets. A jury is about to deliberate bank and tax fraud charges against one of those people, Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman. And the campaign’s former deputy chairman, Rick Gates, has pleaded guilty to financial fraud and lying to investigators.
Mr. Trump clearly has become more desperate to protect himself and those close to him, which is why he made the politically motivated decision to revoke my security clearance in an attempt to scare into silence others who might dare to challenge him. Now more than ever, it is critically important that the special counsel, Robert Mueller, and his team of investigators be allowed to complete their work without interference — from Mr. Trump or anyone else — so that all Americans can get the answers they so rightly deserve.
John O. Brennan was director of the Central Intelligence Agency from March 2013 to January 2017."
Opinion | John Brennan: President Trump’s Claims of No Collusion Are Hogwash - The New York Times
Wednesday, August 15, 2018
Opinion | Documenting ‘Slavery by Another Name’ in Texas - The New York Times
"Americans who grew up with the fiction that slavery was confined to the South — and that the North had always been “free” — learned differently in 1991, when construction workers stumbled upon the skeletal remains of more than 400 Africans at a site in New York City that has since been designated the African Burial Ground National Monument. The catalog of injuries etched into the bones of the men and women who labored to build, feed and protect Colonial-era New York includes muscles so violently strained they were ripped away from the skeleton, offering a grisly portrait of what it was like to be worked to death in bondage.
A similar portrait is emerging in Sugar Land, Tex., a suburb southwest of Houston, where researchers are examining the remains of about 95 African-Americans whose unmarked graves were discovered this year. The dead are almost certainly victims of the second system of slavery that arose when Southerners set out to circumvent the 13th Amendment of 1865, which outlawed involuntary servitude except as punishment for criminal conviction.
Those states imposed what the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Douglas Blackmon rightly describes as “slavery by another name” — sweeping Negroes into custody for petty offenses like vagrancy, then turning them over to plantation owners and others who sometimes notified the local sheriff in advance of how much labor they needed. This practice, which persisted in various forms up to World War II, stripped African-Americans of the ability to accumulate wealth while holding them captive in dangerous, disease-ridden environs that killed many of them outright. The Sugar Land site offers present-day Americans a look at this shameful period from an unusual vantage point.
Opinion | Documenting ‘Slavery by Another Name’ in Texas - The New York Times
Trump Calls Omarosa Manigault Newman ‘That Dog’ in His Latest Insult - The New York Times
"WASHINGTON — President Trump added his former White House aide, Omarosa Manigault Newman, on Tuesday to the growing list of African-Americans he has publicly denigrated on Twitter, calling her “that dog” and a “crazed, crying lowlife” after her allegations against him of mental deterioration and racism.
Even for a president who consistently uses Twitter to assail his adversaries, the morning tweet about Ms. Manigault Newman was a remarkably crude use of the presidential bully pulpit to disparage a woman who once served at the highest levels in his White House.
In an interview on MSNBC, Ms. Manigault Newman responded that Mr. Trump treats women differently from men because he “believes they are beneath him” and that he talked in derogatory ways about minorities.
“He has absolutely no respect for women, for African-Americans,” she said.
In recent weeks, Mr. Trump has called Don Lemon, a CNN anchor, “the dumbest man on television.” He has questioned the intelligence of LeBron James, a star basketball player for the Los Angeles Lakers. And he has repeatedly said that Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California, has a “low I.Q.”
Mr. Trump has also deployed the “dog” insult for white people, including Arianna Huffington, a founder of HuffPost. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Mr. Trump tweeted that a onetime political rival and fellow Republican, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, “lies like a dog.”
Tuesday morning’s tweet was the latest in what has become an increasingly personal and malicious stream of Twitter posts from Mr. Trump, many of which are responses to his critics or aimed at questioning the integrity of the continuing investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and whether Mr. Trump or his aides were complicit in it. In recent days, the president has again used Twitter to lash out at his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, and at an F.B.I. agent who helped oversee the Russia investigation and who was fired for sending texts critical of Mr. Trump.
Mr. Trump’s advisers and allies described the tweet about Ms. Manigault Newman, in particular, as a reaction to the accusations that she makes about the president in “Unhinged,” her tell-all book about her year in the West Wing. Scholars called it an ugly historical echo of the country’s racial divisions.
“It’s important to understand the legacy, the history of the attack on black intelligence as a way of justifying our dehumanization,” said Eddie S. Glaude Jr., the chairman of the African-American studies department at Princeton University. He said there was “something deeply racial” about the way Mr. Trump described Ms. Manigault Newman on Tuesday.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, disputed the idea that Mr. Trump’s tweet about Ms. Manigault Newman was driven by racial animus, and defended the president by pointing out his willingness to lash out at people of all races.
The White House Press Secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said that President Trump had denied using the racial slur and that he had never used it in her presence.Published OnAug. 15, 2018CreditImage by Doug Mills/The New York Times
“The fact is the president’s an equal opportunity person that calls things like he sees it,” Ms. Sanders told reporters. Under persistent questioning by reporters, Ms. Sanders said she could not guarantee that Mr. Trump had never used the N-word, but said that he had denied using it and that he had never used it in her presence.
She said White House employees would not continue to work with him if they thought he was a racist. “If at any point we felt that the president was who some of his critics claim him to be, we certainly wouldn’t be here,” Ms. Sanders said.
She told reporters they should focus instead on the fact that Mr. Trump created 700,000 jobs for African-Americans in less than two years, far more than the 195,000 jobs for blacks that she said were created during the eight years of the Obama administration.
In fact, Labor Department statistics showed that African-American employment grew by about three million during President Barack Obama’s two terms. Hours after her briefing, Ms. Sanders made a rare apology, tweeting that her numbers were off.
The 487 People, Places and Things Donald Trump Has Insulted on Twitter: A Complete List
A detailed list of the journalists, politicians and places President Trump has insulted since declaring his candidacy.
Jan. 28, 2016
“Jobs numbers for Pres Trump and Pres Obama were correct, but the time frame for Pres Obama wasn’t,” she wrote, citing information that she had interpreted incorrectly from the White House Council of Economic Advisers. “I’m sorry for the mistake, but no apologies for the 700,000 jobs for African Americans created under President Trump.”
During a decades-long career in real estate and reality television, Mr. Trump has at times been embraced by African-American celebrities who have vouched for his willingness to look past racial stereotypes. Michael Jackson and Don King, the boxing promoter, at times called Mr. Trump a friend.
Ms. Manigault Newman became a celebrity herself on “The Apprentice,” Mr. Trump’s reality television show. Later, as a top White House aide, she often defended the president against charges of racial bias or xenophobia.
In addition to the tweet praising his chief of staff, John F. Kelly, for “quickly firing that dog,” Mr. Trump also called Ms. Manigault Newman “Wacky and Deranged Omarosa” in another tweet this week. And in yet another, the president said she was hated by other staff members inside the White House and was known to be “vicious, but not smart.”
Linda-Susan Beard, the director of Africana Studies at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, said there is a long history in the United States of black women being compared to dogs.
“He’s drawing on a history of discourse that is so hate-filled and so historic that it all came together in these 34 words,” she said of Mr. Trump’s tweet about Ms. Manigault Newman, which was actually 35 words. “The statement is brilliant in its ability to do double duty: to offer an attack that is simultaneously racialized and gendered.”
On Tuesday, CBS News released a recording that Ms. Manigault Newman said was of two Trump campaign aides discussing how to react if a tape emerges with Mr. Trump using the N-word. Trump campaign officials had denied that such conversations took place.
A day earlier, NBC released a tape that Ms. Manigault Newman made of her speaking to Mr. Trump, which she said was recorded the day after she was fired. In the recording, the president said he knew nothing about the decision to fire her and told her, “I don’t love you leaving at all.”
Advertisement
In December, Mr. Kelly fired Ms. Manigault Newman in the Situation Room, the most secure conference room in the White House. Ms. Manigault Newman has released a recording of that conversation, as well.
Ms. Manigault Newman has said she has more audio recordings, and in an interview on Monday on MSNBC’s “Hardball,” said she would cooperate with Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel leading the Russia investigation, if asked. “Anything they want, I’ll share,” she said.
The president’s latest attack on Mr. Sessions was packaged with other tweets assailing the Russia investigation, which Mr. Trump regularly calls a “witch hunt.” He said the inquiry never would have started if “we had a real Attorney General,” an apparent reference to the decision by Mr. Sessions to recuse himself in the Russia inquiry.
Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, is currently on trial, accused of tax and bank fraud crimes. He is the first person to be prosecuted by the special counsel. Mr. Manafort’s lawyers rested on Tuesday without presenting a defense.
Blaming Mr. Sessions for not shutting down the investigation is not a new tack for Mr. Trump. Mr. Mueller is already reviewing some of Mr. Trump’s tweets about Mr. Sessions as part of a wide-ranging inquiry into whether the president has tried to obstruct justice in the investigation.
Mr. Trump also questioned why the Russia investigation would not end with the firing of the F.B.I. agent, Peter Strzok.
“Strzok started the illegal Rigged Witch Hunt — why isn’t this so-called ‘probe’ ended immediately?” Mr. Trump tweeted.
A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 15, 2018, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Trump Belittles A Female Critic As ‘That Dog’."
Trump Calls Omarosa Manigault Newman ‘That Dog’ in His Latest Insult - The New York Times
When it comes to lying, Trump is nonstop - The Washington Post
“Everybody in politics lies,” Hollywood mogul David Geffen once said of Bill and Hillary Clinton. “But they do it with such ease, it’s troubling.” Geffen had a point — but he had not yet seen President Trump in action. With apologies to Lin-Manuel Miranda, when it comes to lying, the man is nonstop. On June 1, just less than 500 days into the president’s term, The Post had counted 3,251 false or misleading claims by the commander in chief. Trump continued that dizzying pace during Thursday’s NATO news conference, and then launched his visit to Britain by trashing that country’s prime minister and brazenly lying about it a few hours later. “I didn’t criticize the prime minister,” Trump said, shortly after criticizing the prime minister. He blasted Theresa May’s handling of Brexit and declared that her fiercest political rival, Boris Johnson, “would be a great prime minister.” Hours later, Trump dismissed the reprinting of his own words as “fake news,” even though the Rupert Murdoch-run Sun tabloid had his attacks on tape. Trump’s bizarre denials mirrored a claim the president made a week earlier when he tweeted that he had never supported a GOP-drafted immigration bill, this despite tweeting three days earlier, in all caps, that “HOUSE REPUBLICANS SHOULD PASS THE STRONG BUT FAIR IMMIGRATION BILL.”
Soon after the second tweet was posted, Esquire’s Ryan Lizza wryly noted: “He didn’t even bother to delete the old one.” As with Tolstoy’s Prince Vasili, the president “like a wound-up clock, by force of habit said things he did not even wish to be believed.” But unlike Richard M. Nixon and Bill Clinton — our previous standard-bearers in presidential prevarication — Trump’s lies are not a defensive response to protect a political legacy. Trump’s lies are his legacy. The former lifelong Manhattan Democrat captured Republicans’ attention in 2011 when he swallowed whole and spit out the “birther conspiracy” that claimed President Barack Obama was born in Kenya. That cynical lie catapulted Trump into the Republican presidential conversation four years later. Trump would then launch his campaign for president by calling Mexicans “rapists” and warning that Mexico was “beating us at the border.” His “American carnage” inaugural address would repeat that latter claim 18 months later and set up a battalion of straw men that could easily be knocked down — if only Trump supporters had access to Google and 60 seconds to spare.
But the incoming president simply continued spreading his dark fantasy of open U.S. borders, while cursing a supposed rising tide of illegal immigration that made necessary the building of a border wall and the implementation of brutal policies — climaxing in a callous family-separation program. Never mind that Trump entered office at a time when more illegal immigrants were moving back to Mexico than were entering the United States; never mind that the number of illegal immigrants in the United States declined by more than 1 million in the decade leading up to his election. Never mind that the social ill that propelled the 45th president to power was nothing more than a grim fairy tale. The incoming president also touted the twisted tale that America was being ripped apart by rising crime rates. In his inaugural address,
Trump vowed to “make America safe again.” But even the fact-challenged incoming president by then had to know — this particular lie was corrected again and again in the press — that the United States was already celebrating record-low crime rates. His own hometown of New York City was experiencing a lower crime rate than at any time since accurate records began being kept during the 1950s. Another political plank, another lie. Trump’s campaign was also built on the bogus belief that the American military machine was in danger of being eclipsed by hostile forces. In his “carnage” speech, Trump assured Americans that he would “make America strong again.” But as Obama told Congress during his final State of the Union address,
“The United States is the most powerful nation on Earth. It’s not even close. We spend more money on our military than the next eight nations combined.” For those tempted to shout “Fake News” at Obama’s claim, do yourself a favor. Go next door, ask to borrow your neighbor’s Google machine , and look it up. Then, perhaps, you might stop repeating this former reality TV host’s lies, start focusing on what really ails America and leave the dark, twisted fantasies to Donald Trump.
When it comes to lying, Trump is nonstop - The Washington Post