Sunday, August 05, 2018
Opinion: Calling The Press The Enemy Of The People Is A Menacing Move : NPR - #ManchurianPresident needs someone to explain the First Amendment to him. "Amendment I Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."
"BRIDGEWATER, N.J. — President Trump on Sunday offered his most definitive and clear public acknowledgment that his oldest son met with a Kremlin-aligned lawyer at Trump Tower during the 2016 campaign to “get information on an opponent,” defending the meeting as “totally legal and done all the time in politics.”
It is, however, against the law for U.S. campaigns to receive donations or items of value from foreigners, and that June 2016 meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and Natalia Veselnitskaya is now a subject of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s Russia probe.
While “collusion” is not mentioned in U.S. criminal statutes, Mueller is investigating whether anyone associated with Trump coordinated with the Russians, which could result in criminal charges if they entered into a conspiracy to break the law, including through cyber-hacking or interfering with the election.
“Fake News reporting, a complete fabrication, that I am concerned about the meeting my wonderful son, Donald, had in Trump Tower,” the president wrote in one of several early morning tweets Sunday, many of which took aim at the media. “This was a meeting to get information on an opponent, totally legal and done all the time in politics — and it went nowhere.”
He concluded by further distancing himself from the meeting his son arranged, writing: “I did not know about it!”
Trump was responding to a Washington Post report this weekend that although he does not think his eldest son intentionally broke the law, he is worried that Trump Jr. may have unintentionally stumbled into legal jeopardy and is embroiled in Mueller’s investigation largely because of his connection to the president.
The Trump Tower meeting also included Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and his campaign chairman at the time, Paul Manafort, who is on trial over tax and bank fraud charges after being indicted by Mueller.
Trump’s tweet, however, conflicts with a statement that Trump Jr. had released to the New York Times in July 2017, as the newspaper prepared to report about the meeting. In that statement, Trump Jr. had indicated that the meeting had been “primarily” about the issue of the adoption of Russian children by Americans.
Amid public uproar over the meeting, the president’s son was forced to release follow-up statements, ultimately acknowledging that the meeting’s true purpose had been to get dirt about Hillary Clinton from a lawyer he had been told was working for the Russian government.
The Washington Post reported a few weeks later that Trump Jr.’s initial misleading statement had been “dictated” by Trump.
The president’s attorneys at first denied that Trump’s involvement in drafting the response to the Times, but months later, in a letter intended to explain why Mueller should not interview Trump, they agreed that the president had, in fact, authored the statement. They described the statement, which had not mentioned that the Russian lawyer was expected to bring damaging information about Clinton, as “short but accurate.”
And they said that Trump Jr., Kushner and White House staff had made a “full disclosure” about that session to Mueller and Congress.
Trump Jr.’s testimony to Congress contained a similar defense as his father’s Sunday tweet, indicating that he saw no reason not to accept a meeting that could yield important information about Clinton, even though he was told that it was part of an effort by the government of a hostile power.
In addition to weighing in publicly on the Trump Tower meeting, the president also unleashed angry tweets against the media Sunday morning from his 11-day working vacation in Bedminster, N.J.
In one tweet, he declared the media the “Enemy of the People” and accused them of sowing division and distrust. “They can also cause War!” Trump wrote. “They are very dangerous & sick!”
In another, he expressed frustration with both the media and Mueller’s probe. “Too bad a large portion of the Media refuses to report the lies and corruption having to do with the Rigged Witch Hunt — but that is why we call them FAKE NEWS!”
Trump acknowledges, defends 2016 meeting between son, Kremlin-aligned lawyer - The Washington Post
Saturday, August 04, 2018
Ving Rhames’s Terrifying Run-In with Police & An Egyptian Zoo’s Fake Zeb...
White males will never understand what it is like to he Black and to always be in fear that a stupid, bigoted White person can and often will cause your life to be terminated, without any provocation or warning. This is the nature of the American caste system which supersedes the class system struggle in America. Whites by being Whites, have the privilege of not being subject to this type if aggression. The American Revolution was fought for far less oppression.
Restraint Chairs and Spit Masks: Migrant Detainees Claim Abuse at Detention Centers - The New York Times
"VERONA, Va. — Guards at a juvenile detention center for troubled immigrant teenagers had many ways of handling serious problems. At times, they resorted to the chair. Other times, the mask.
According to migrant teenagers and a former worker, the high, hard-backed metal chair had wheels so it could be tilted and moved like a dolly through the halls of the Shenandoah Valley Juvenile Center, a northwest Virginia facility that houses American and undocumented migrant youths who have emotional, behavioral and psychological issues.
Teenagers as young as 14 were strapped to the chair — some stripped down to their underwear — with their feet, arms and waist restrained by cushioned leather straps and loops, they said.
Those who guards feared might spit on staff, said one former worker, got the mask — a mesh hood that covered their entire faces and heads. Sometimes, the detainees said, they were forced to wear it while in the chair.
Uses of the chair and mask are among the more extreme examples of complaints that have emerged from inside a handful of detention centers that house teenage migrants with a history of violence, mental health problems or, in some cases, gang affiliation. A few hundred a year are held in this separate network of jail-like facilities that also hold American juveniles who have been sent there for a range of behavioral issues and crimes, including assault and murder.
The centers have tougher security measures than the immigrant-only shelters where the vast majority of the migrant teenagers are sent after entering the country illegally, either on their own or with their families.
For years, the government has sent the most troubled migrant youths to these more restrictive facilities, and many complaints about these sites came well before the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration. Others, though, have been lodged in the wake of the recent surge of detained immigrant children and teenagers, accusations that include use of the restraint devices, injections of psychotropic drugs and long periods in solitary confinement.
In sworn statements at the center of a class-action lawsuit against the Shenandoah Valley facility and the government commission that receives millions of federal dollars to run it, six former detainees paint a hellish portrait of daily life inside.
“They locked me in a room that was 8x10, or maybe 8x16, for 23 hours a day, all by myself,” said one detainee identified only as R.B. in the suit. Originally from Guatemala and now 18 and living with his mother in Texas, he had a pre-existing mental illness and was transferred to the Shenandoah Valley facility because of “behavioral problems,” according to the lawsuit. He said he often got into fights with other detainees and guards because he felt so isolated and angry over his fate. Punishment was the chair and mask, he said."
Restraint Chairs and Spit Masks: Migrant Detainees Claim Abuse at Detention Centers - The New York Times
Friday, August 03, 2018
Thursday, August 02, 2018
Wednesday, August 01, 2018
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