January 9, 2019

Trump escalates threats to cut off FEMA money to California

https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/09/politics/trump-california-fire/index.html

rump revives threats to withhold FEMA funds from California fire recovery

Washington (CNN)President Donald Trump revived his criticism of California on Wednesday, insisting again the state has mismanaged forest management programs and allowed wildfires to rage.

Trump's threat to withhold Federal Emergency Management Agency funds from recent wildfire survivors drew a swift rebuke from California Sen. Kamala Harris, a potential Democratic challenger to Trump for the White House in 2020, as well as the state's other top Democrats, newly elected Gov. Gavin Newsom and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who represents the Bay Area.

When Trump has made that argument in the past, firefighters across the nation chided him for misunderstanding the issue and fire experts in the state have deemed his claims false. State officials have also pointed out that more than half of the California's forests are owned and managed by federal agencies.

Still, Trump has not backed off, and on Wednesday appeared to escalate his threats to withhold federal dollars if unspecified programs are not reformed.

January 9, 2019

Democrat wins Northern Va. state Senate seat vacated by Jennifer Wexton

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/democrat-wins-northern-va-state-senate-seat-vacated-by-jennifer-wexton/2019/01/08/3922db46-12e4-11e9-90a8-136fa44b80ba_story.html

The Virginia state Senate seat formerly held by Jennifer Wexton will remain in Democratic hands after progressive state Del. Jennifer B. Boysko beat former Republican delegate Joe T. May in a special election Tuesday.

Boysko easily defeated May, 81, a moderate who served 20 years in the House of Delegates but lost his Loudoun County seat in 2013 after conservative Republicans said the $3.5 billion transportation funding law he wrote was out of step with their agenda.

Boysko, 52, declared victory 45 minutes after the polls closed, based on returns in the Loudoun County majority of Senate District 33. She did even better in Fairfax County, ending up with an unofficial margin of about 70 percent to 30 percent.

January 9, 2019

compilation of all the huffing and snorting

https://twitter.com/williamlegate/status/1082882240307052544

January 8, 2019

Media exec spent part of Tuesday in strategy sessions about how to respond to the lies

When it comes to the border and the wall, his willful estrangement from reality is so profound that network executives and newspaper editors spent part of Tuesday in strategy sessions about how to respond to his inevitable barrage of falsehoods. Should there be a crawl of words on the bottom of the television screen that correct him in real time? Could fact checkers work speedily enough to post rebuttals online within minutes of his misrepresentations, before they took root? This is where we find ourselves. Other presidents have been untrustworthy, and others have had to be called out on it. But not like this. This is surreal.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/08/opinion/trump-speech-border-wall.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

January 8, 2019

Alabama authorities warn motorists not to eat chicken tenders they find on the highway

Authorities in Cherokee County, Ala., are warning motorists they could be prosecuted if caught eating chicken tenders they find on Highway 35.

The roughly 26,000 person county’s emergency management agency posted a note on its Facebook page after an 18-wheeler hauling poultry bits crashed, spilling its cargo onto the highway. According to the government warning, the street meat is not only illegal to consume, but unhealthy as well.

“Those cases have been on the ground for over 24 hours and are unsafe to consume,” the Cherokee County Emergency Management Agency warned after the crash on Sunday. “Anyone who is caught could be facing charges.”

https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/ny-news-alabama-highway-chicken-crime-eat-accident-20190108-story.html

January 8, 2019

Florida Ex-Felons Can Finally Register to Vote It could lead to the largest expansion of new voters

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Desmond Meade fills out a voter registration form with his wife, Sheena, at the Supervisor of Elections office on January 8.John Raoux/AP


“This Is What Democracy Is All About”: Florida Ex-Felons Can Finally Register to Vote
It could lead to the largest expansion of new voters since the Voting Rights Act.

On Tuesday morning, Desmond Meade went down to the the Orange County elections office in Orlando, Florida, and registered to vote for the first time in decades. Since being released from prison, where he was held on a gun possession charge, in 2005, Meade had been unable to vote because of a Florida law preventing ex-felons from casting a ballot even after they’d paid their debt to society.

In 2018, Meade—now president of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition (FRRC)—led the effort to pass a ballot initiative overturning the felon disenfranchisement law. It passed on November 6 with 64 percent of the vote. The initiative, known as Amendment 4, went into effect Tuesday morning.

“It was a very, very emotional moment,” Meade said on Facebook after he submitted his voter registration form, his eyes welling up with tears. He was surrounded by his wife and kids and wore a “Let My People Vote” t-shirt. “Across the state of Florida, our democracy is being expanded. That’s a great thing.”

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/01/florida-voting-rights-ex-felons-register-amendment-four-voting-rights-act/

January 8, 2019

DO NOT reach in or climb in donation bins. DO NOT DO IT

they need to redesign these things:

https://nypost.com/2019/01/08/woman-found-dead-in-clothing-donation-bin/



Canadian officials are investigating a woman’s death after finding her corpse partially inside a clothing donation box, police said.

Cops received reports of a body inside a bin outside a Salvation Army in Toronto at 1:30 a.m. Tuesday. Authorities cut open the metal box to get the woman out and paramedics administered CPR, but later pronounced her dead at the scene, Global News reported.

Police did not release the woman’s identity, but said she was 35 years old, the Canadian Press reported.

The death appears to be accidental, police told CBC.

This is not the first time someone has died after attempting to climb into a donation bin. The bin’s hatches, designed to keep thieves out, can also trap people climbing inside.

At least seven Canadians have died after getting trapped in bins since 2015, leading some to nickname the boxes “death traps,” the Canadian Press reported last week.

January 8, 2019

the "wall has become a symbol of a kind of rolling cultural & demographic extinction event"

The real national emergency is the threat of Trump’s collapse

But if you read between the lines of all the coverage, it is overwhelmingly clear that the real national emergency that Trump and his allies have discerned is an emergency that threatens him.

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But Trump’s public case for the wall has collapsed entirely, and much of the rest of the political system has rejected it, boxing him into a political corner with no escape. That’s the emergency. The formal declaration of a national emergency, allowing him a shot at building it unilaterally, might end up being the only way of bailing out the wall — and with it, bailing out himself.

We know all of this to be the case, because the basic facts are all out there confirming it, but it’s all so saturated in madness and bad faith that we grope for ways to convey it faithfully. The big story, which is everywhere for all to see, is that Trump and his advisers cannot justify the wall as Trump envisions it in any remotely credible way; that this is becoming harder to mask with lies; and that for Trump Nation, this really is an emergency.

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Trump’s national emergency and the ‘Calamity Thesis’

The wall’s “symbolic power” to Trump’s “core voters” is key to why Trump keeps insisting on it. But the corollary to this is that the collapsing case for it — and the possibility that it might not get built — is itself an emergency of sorts. You can’t watch Fox News without grasping the force of this looming threat:

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Whether this is why Trump won is beside the point. Trump did campaign endlessly on the invocation of existential threats of all kinds. For untold numbers in Trump’s base, particularly white evangelical Christians, the need for a wall has become a symbol of a kind of rolling cultural and demographic extinction event and of Trump’s ability to defend them from it. However many people do or do not believe this, Trump plainly thinks there are a lot of them out there.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/01/08/real-national-emergency-is-threat-trumps-collapse/?utm_term=.913ba3233317

January 8, 2019

shutdown victim establishes Gofundme to pay rent. exceeds her goal of $5,000

Being a contracted government worker, I’m losing pay every day that this government shutdown continues. I’ve taken on extra shifts at my 2nd job but it isn’t going to pay rent and all my bills. Being a single mom, I’m in panic mode right now. If you’d like to help, any donations are appreciated.

https://www.gofundme.com/shutdown-story

Burr, a federal contract worker for the Department of Transportation in Kansas City, Missouri, said she also isn't expecting to get paid for hours she has already worked. That's because she can't submit her time sheet since there is no one to approve it in the office where she works.

"I just want to get back to work. I just want the government to be back up and running and I want to get back to work and earn my paycheck and that's what I think a lot of people feel like," she said.

When asked to respond to President Trump saying he "can relate" to government workers who are going without pay, Burr didn't agree with Trump's sentiments.

"I find it hard to believe that a billionaire could relate to anyone who lives possibly paycheck to paycheck, which many of the American people do," she replied.

The federal government has been partially shut down for 16 days.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/07/us/federal-contract-worker-without-pay-cnntv/index.html

January 7, 2019

flub or slur? Meterologist fired over "Martin Luther Coon King Jr. Park"

Seems like a flub to me. I can't imagine he intentionally meant to say that.

http://www.newser.com/story/269612/meteorologist-booted-over-apparent-slur-he-calls-a-flub.html?utm_source=part&utm_medium=uol&utm_campaign=rss_top

– A TV meteorologist has been given the boot over an apparent racial slur used on air. Jeremy Kappell, former chief meteorologist at Rochester, New York's WHEC, can be heard in video posted to social media as seeming to refer to a local park as "Martin Luther Coon King Jr. Park" during Friday's broadcast, the AP reports. Critics including the local mayor called for Kappell to be fired, but Kappell himself insists he's "never uttered those words in my life" and both he and his defenders say he simply stumbled over his words, the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle reports. In a statement posted Monday, WHEC's VP and general manager apologized for airing the slur, saying it "disheartens and disgusts me" that the blunder "was not caught immediately."

Fox News notes that Kappell has not yet made a formal statement, but has been tweeting about the incident quite a bit, calling it a "flub" and comparing it to a similar situation in which an ESPN radio host made a similar mistake. Responding to one critic, Kappell wrote, "You are out of your mind to think I would jeopardize future of my family and career to insert a racial slur against the GREATEST civil rights leader of all time?!?! #Ridiculous #Hateful #Judgemental and #youdontknowthefirsthingaboutme!" But the Rochester Association of Black Journalists says in a statement the words broadcast are "completely unacceptable and contrary to all standards of broadcasting." (A black police officer was recently suspended for using the n-word.)