UCDSU President Ascough impeached

Katie Ascough has been impeached as University College Dublin Students’ Union (UCDSU) President. Voting took place over the past two days, and 69% voting in favour of impeachment while 31% voted for her to remain as the union’s president.
 
The result was announced tonight just after 12.40am at the Student Centre in UCD and comes after an eventful three week campaign. The quorum of 2,455 was safely surpassed with 6,572 turning out. Students were asked to vote “that the current UCDSU President be removed from office”. Acough, who is pro-life, had said that she would delegate issues relating to abortion information as UCDSU is mandated to support the pro-choice campaign.

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The petition to impeach Ascough reached over 1,200 signatures, and over the 3.5% union membership needed to initiate an impeachment referendum. When launching the petition, Crean spoke to Trinity News: “The petition was started because Ascough has acted undemocratically; she went against the other exces to redact the information from the original handbook, and put her personal politics before the wellbeing of the students she is supposed to represent.”
 
The impeachment campaign added that Ascough cut funds from the UCDSU Repeal campaign. Ascough said that as President, she questioned the need for a €500 increase to the fund.

I see Tad "Ukraine" Devine is surfacing again on MSNBC. He must think the Mueller coast is clear ?

Bearing in mind his Manafort Ukraine association...

https://twitter.com/ericgarland/status/822277064057294849

Hillary interviewed on Irish TV, really good chat.

You can watch the full interview here (starts about 1hr 8mins in, but ads) Duration is about 22mins. Nice interview with Irish comedian Dara O'Briain at the start as well, for those of you who wouldn't have seen him on UK tv)

https://www.rte.ie/player/ie/show/the-late-late-show-68/10782165/

otherwise snippets

Preet Bharrara's new podcast That Time President Trump Fired Me

I'm listening to That Time President Trump Fired Me (with Leon Panetta) - 20/09/2017 on Stay Tuned with Preet with TuneIn.

#NowPlaying http://tun.in/th8kuV

Trump sends lawyers to to Irish court to have 14k ruling against him thrown out.

Get the popcorn for this one....

Donald Trump sent lawyers to a tiny West of Ireland courthouse on Tuesday in a bid to overturn a €14,000 court judgement against him.

The billionaire US President went head-to-head with civil engineer John V Lennon, who racked up the bill objecting to Trump’s plan for a 200,000-tonne rock barrier at his Co Clare golf resort.

He sent the invoice to the President and when it went unpaid secured a court judgement in June forcing the property magnate to cough up.

But lawyers for the world’s most powerful man asked a judge in Kilrush district court in Clare to set the €14,095 bill aside.

Mr Lennon, from Cork, said he had the court order with him yesterday.

He had previously stated the €14,095 sum arose from work he put into lodging an objection against plans for a “rock wall” at the President’s famous Doonbeg golf course.

Trump later withdrew the barrier plan in favour of a scaled down planning application which is currently before Clare County Council.

Mr Lennon claims the US President wasted his time as he lodged a written six-page objection to the large scale plan.

When the case was called yesterday, barrister Pat Whyms, appearing on behalf of the billionaire, told the judge: “It is my application to set aside judgement.”

He said his application “is dealt with on submissions but there are complex issues and it could take up to 30 minutes”.

Mr Lennon represented himself in court and told Judge Durcan: “An order was made for me to collect €14,095 and €725 costs against Donald J Trump.”

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The case was adjourned until December 12 for hearing in Ennis.

Mr Lennon previously clashed with the Trump firm through his involvement in a planned wind-farm at Doonbeg that was shot down by planning appeals chiefs An Bord Pleanala in 2015.

Zuckerberg/2020 and Facebook/Russia. The appalling vista is

What do Facebook know and when did they know it ?

When did Zuckerberg know about Russian interference, using Facebook, and why did he sit on his hands ?

Zuckerberg has been putting out noises of a 2020 run, but his company's inaction in 2016 (and denials up to last week), will come back to haunt him. Perhaps he saw exactly how the Russians worked the data from Facebook, and plans to do the same ?

What was admitted last week WILL be the tip of the iceberg, and the hard questions will be asked whether Facebook knowingly withheld that information from Federal authorities because of the revenue it was bringing in.

One other thing, one would have assumed with in a young Tech company, that there would have been supporters of the Democratic Party who knew what was going on.

Why Little England Brexiteers miss the point of the European Union

When Voltaire suggested that “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him,” he was not denying the existence of God. Or, as some of his followers have argued, cynically putting down religion. On the contrary, the line forms part of a poetic polemic against atheism. And his point is that a God is an imperative to good social order, a necessary foundation of ethics, morality and co-operation: “This sublime system is necessary to man. It is the sacred tie that binds society.”


Which brings me, convinced atheist, somewhat improbably you may think, to Brexit and to the fundamental flaw in the UK’s negotiating position: its inability to come to terms with the reality, pace Voltaire, that, in this age of globalisation and sovereignty-sharing, “If the European Union did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it.”


Or reinvent it by another name, in broadly the same form, a process we are painfully witnessing in Brussels in the Brexit talks, and the reason why the British are finding it so difficult plausibly to explain where they stand.

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Take Theresa May’s apparently visceral hatred of the EU’s European Court of Justice (and of the Council of Europe’s European Court of Human Rights – ironically, in no small measure, a creature of British initiatives). The prime minister considers the involvement of foreign judges in ruling on “British” law anathema – so one of the UK red lines consists of no longer having to abide by this court.


But the UK wants to do a trade deal post-Brexit with the EU, and all trade deals now involve some means of judicial arbitration between the parties over disputes of interpretation. So it is inevitable that the UK will have to agree to establish and accept the jurisprudence of an international tribunal staffed in part by “foreign” judges, British judges and, heaven spare us, EU judges. An ECJ by another name.

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You don’t have to love the European Union to acknowledge its necessity in some form in the modern age. Yes, it has a democratic deficit. Yes, it appears to work more for business than for ordinary citizens. But Brexiteers’ Little Englander obsession with the idea itself, with its otherness, misses the point.

Sassy Trump

Randi Rhodes did a great segment on her show about Manafort's daughters and

the darknet website leaking of texts between them. I hadn't heard of this before but Politico did a story on it back in March

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/02/manaforts-ukrainian-blood-money-caused-qualms-hack-suggests-235473

Manafort’s Ukrainian ‘blood money’ caused qualms, hack suggests

Trump, Yanukovych work concerned the family of Trump’s former campaign chairman, texts appear to show.

Paul Manafort’s family expressed misgivings about the political consultant’s work for both Russia-aligned Ukrainian strongman Viktor Yanukovych and Donald Trump, according to text messages allegedly hacked from one of his daughters' phones.

The texts, posted on a darknet website run by a hacktivist collective, appear to show Manafort’s family fretting about the ethics, safety and consequences of his work for Yanukovych. And they reveal that Manafort’s two daughters regarded their father’s emergence as a key player on Trump’s presidential campaign with a mixture of pride and embarrassment.

In one exchange, daughter Jessica Manafort writes “Im not a trump supporter but i am still proud of dad tho. He is the best at what he does.” Her sister Andrea Manafort responded by referring to their father’s relationship with Trump as “The most dangerous friendship in America,” while in another exchange she called them “a perfect pair” of “power-hungry egomaniacs,” and asserted “the only reason my dad is doing this campaign is for sport. He likes the challenge. It's like an egomaniac's chess game. There's no money motivation.”

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In one March 2015 exchange that appears to be between the two sisters, Andrea Manafort seems to suggest that their father bore some responsibility for the deaths of protesters at the hands of police loyal to Yanukovych during a monthslong uprising that started in late 2013.

“Don't fool yourself,” Andrea Manafort wrote. “That money we have is blood money.”

In another hacked exchange a few months later with someone else, Andrea Manafort wrote that her father’s “work and payment in Ukraine is legally questionable.”

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In a text exchange in early April, Jessica Manafort tells her sister that her father, who maintained an apartment in Trump Tower, where the campaign is located, seemed to be thriving on the campaign.

“Dad and Trump are literally living in the same building and mom says they go up and down all day long hanging and plotting together,” Jessica Manafort wrote. “Gross,” Andrea Manafort responded, prompting Jessica Manafort to come to their father’s defense.

“Its really amazing opportunity at 67 years old. And he is basically running the campaign now He is so happy,” Jessica Manafort wrote.

When WikiLeaks released a massive tranche of hacked emails from the DNC ahead of Clinton’s nominating convention in late July, Jessica Manafort seemed to assume that it was her father’s doing, texting her sister “Dad is brilliant.” Andrea Manafort responded “Well it wasn't dads doing. It was hackers,” adding “But dad has to be thrilled about this. It's overshadowing the whole convention.”

Philippe Coutinho hands in transfer request....damn

He's going then.