December 5, 2018

cop who choked Eric Garner to death to be indicted soon.

https://newsone.com/playlist/eric-garner-daniel-pantaleo-chokehold-indictment/?utm_source=moengage&utm_campaign=garner_indictment&utm_medium=push


Eric Garner’s Killer Will ‘Probably’ Be Indicted Soon, Former NYPD Legal Bureau Chief Says

December 4, 2018

Asylum denials hit record-high in 2018 as Trump administration tightens immigration policy

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/immigration-asylum-denials-hit-record-high-2018-trump-administration-immigration-syracuse-trac-report-today/

Immigration judges rejected a record-high number of asylum cases this year, refusing 65 percent of immigrants seeking the refugee status, according to a recent report published by Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC). More than 42,000 asylum cases were decided in the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, 2018, the most since the group began tracking the data in 2001.

The rise marks the sixth consecutive year that the denial rate has increased, according to TRAC's data. In 2012, the refusal rate was 42 percent; 2018's rejection rate is nearly 50 percent larger, according to TRAC's data. The group obtained data from the Department of Homeland Security through Freedom of Information Act requests.

TRAC pointed out the increase "largely reflects asylum applicants who had arrived well before President Trump assumed office."



Immigration court asylum decisions, between fiscal years 2001 and 2018, shown in a graph provided by Syracuse University.TRAC VIA SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY

December 4, 2018

Time Person of the Year odds & Time magazine poll

odds
Jamal Khashoggi 3.00 3.00
Christine Blasey Ford 4.00 4.00
Donald Trump 5.00 5.00
Colin Kaepernick 8.00 8.00
Elon Musk 12.00 12.00


http://time.com/5454447/person-of-the-year-2018-poll/?utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=time&xid=time_socialflow_twitter

December 4, 2018

Trump's latest tweets cross clear lines, experts say: Obstruction of justice and witness tampering

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/12/03/trumps-latest-tweets-cross-clear-lines-experts-say-obstruction-justice-witness-tampering/?utm_term=.f7309b8457f8

President Trump took to Twitter Monday morning, haranguing special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and witnesses to his ongoing Russia investigation. His tweets have become a common morning occurrence, particularly in recent weeks. But legal experts are calling Monday’s missives a newsworthy development that amounts to evidence of obstructing justice.

Trump’s first statement went out after Michael Cohen, his former personal attorney who pleaded guilty last week for lying to Congress about the president’s real estate project in Russia. In his tweet, Trump alleged that Cohen lied to Mueller and called for a severe penalty, demanding that his former fixer “serve a full and complete sentence.”

After the overt attack on Cohen came a tweet encouraging Roger Stone, a longtime adviser to Trump, not to become a witness against him:

“’I will never testify against Trump.’ This statement was recently made by Roger Stone, essentially stating that he will not be forced by a rogue and out of control prosecutor to make up lies and stories about ‘President Trump.’ Nice to know that some people still have ‘guts!’”


Norman Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said that the most striking thing about Monday was that there were two statements in proximity.

“It comes very close to the statutory definition of witness tampering,” he said. “It’s a mirror image of the first tweet, only he’s praising a witness for not cooperating with the implication of reward,” he said, adding that Trump has pardon power over Stone.

December 4, 2018

Republicans Brazenly Gut Voting Rights in Lame Duck Before They Lose Power -4 states

Four states are taking unprecedented steps to strip power from Democrats and make it harder to vote.

The 2018 election saw historic victories for voting rights. Seven states passed ballot initiatives that will make it easier to vote and harder to gerrymander. And some of the biggest cheerleaders for restricting access to the ballot, such as Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, lost their gubernatorial races.

But now Republicans in four key swing states—Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and North Carolina—are undertaking unprecedented efforts in lame-duck legislative sessions to strip newly elected Democratic officials of their power to oversee state voting laws and rushing to pass new laws that will make it harder to vote.

On Friday afternoon, Wisconsin’s Republican-held Legislature introduced a 141-page bill to strip two newly elected Democratic officials, incoming Gov. Tony Evers and Attorney General Josh Kaul, of core powers before they take office. In addition, the bill would make it harder for Wisconsinites to vote by cutting early voting and preventing Evers from making the state’s voter ID law less restrictive.

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In Michigan, voters expanded voting rights last month by overwhelmingly passing a ballot initiative enacting automatic and Election Day registration. They also elected Jocelyn Benson, an election law expert, as the first Democratic secretary of state since 1994.

But a new bill introduced by Michigan Republicans would cut off voter registration 14 days before the election, effectively overturning the Election Day registration initiative. A separate proposal would strip power from Benson by removing oversight of campaign finance laws from the secretary of state’s office, instead giving the authority to a state panel composed equally of Democrats and Republicans. Benson said the proposal would “lead to more gridlock and less enforcement of our already weak campaign finance laws” and called the lame-duck moves an “insult” to voters.

The Ohio Legislature is going a step further and introducing legislation to make it nearly impossible for citizen-led groups to amend the state’s constitution. In May, Ohio voters overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment that will make it more difficult for legislators to gerrymander congressional districts during the next redistricting cycle. Ohio is one of the most heavily gerrymandered Republican states in the country.

In response, the Republican-controlled Legislature is fast-tracking a bill that would require 60 percent support from voters to change the state’s constitution, instead of a simple majority. It also states that signatures gathered for a citizen-led initiative are valid for only 180 days—previously they didn’t expire—and must be submitted by the beginning of April before a November election, instead of July, meaning that signature drives will have to take place during the frigid winter months in Ohio, when it’s toughest for groups to organize. The proposed changes “would make it nearly impossible for grassroots activists to amend the constitution at the ballot,” tweeted Mike Brickner, Ohio state director for All Voting Is Local, a voting rights group.



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Now the North Carolina Legislature is at it again. It originally passed a voter ID law in 2013 that the federal courts said targeted black voters “with almost surgical precision.” After that law was struck down in court, the Republican Legislature put a constitutional amendment on the ballot in 2018 requiring government-issued photo ID to vote. It passed with 60 percent support on Election Day, but because Republicans lost their legislative supermajority in 2018, they’re rushing to pass a bill implementing the amendment in the lame-duck session so Cooper will be unable to veto it.

December 3, 2018

Woman in wheelchair left alone at Chicago airport overnight after flight canceled

http://www.trbimg.com/img-5c0592e0/turbine/ct-1543869148-1ey7ark1wr-snap-image/750/750x422

Olimpia Warsaw has Parkinson's disease and diabetes and uses a wheelchair because she has trouble walking. Warsaw traveled from Detroit to Chicago for her ex-husband's funeral, and right away things went wrong, her family says. Her luggage was lost and she ended up missing part of the service as a result.

Then on her way back home to Detroit, Warsaw experienced an even worse travel nightmare. Her family told CBS Chicago an airport porter left her alone in her wheelchair overnight after her flight was canceled.

Claude Coltea said he and his mom went to the airport together after his father's funeral last week. "I walked with her all the way to her gate," he told the station. "I confirmed with the gate agent that the flight was on time. Everything was OK. She said, 'Yup, all's fine. We'll take good care of your mom.'" Coltea then went to his gate for a flight leaving shortly after his mother's flight was supposed to depart.

But it turned out, Warsaw's flight was not going to depart. It was canceled.

Coltea said American Airlines assigned a porter to take Warsaw back to the front of the airport. She was offered a hotel room since her flight was canceled, but they weren't willing to take her there. Warsaw has trouble communicating and couldn't arrange her own transportation to the hotel.

Instead of helping, the porter told her his shift was over and he couldn't do anything. Then her family says he just left her there.

"She actually had to find a random passenger to help her out just to go to the bathroom because the porters had already left for the night," Warsaw's other son, Julian Coltea, told CBS Chicago.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/woman-in-wheelchair-left-alone-ohare-airport-overnight-after-flight-canceled/

December 3, 2018

Here's how Trump's proposed Moscow project is even dirtier than it looks

Here’s how Trump’s proposed Moscow project is even dirtier than it looks
Just another real estate deal, you say? Not quite: Trump’s deal with a Kremlin-owned bank was blatantly illegal

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The most realistic analysis is that Trumpers are being deliberately ignorant about a vast series of crimes with our current president at the center of a nefarious confederacy that could easily be defined as the Trump crime family. This is absolutely a somethingburger, stacked high with all the fixin’s -- and we haven’t really seen the lion's share of the details yet.

Trump supporters have been belittling the news as just another real estate deal by a real estate mogul: Nothing to see here, they say. This would be not unlike calling the U.S. Civil War just another case of “regional tensions.” They fail to grasp that the president repeatedly lied about his ties to Russia, and that he was doing so because he was obviously trying to keep this deal from being revealed to his Republican voters during the Republican primary season in 2015 and 2016.

Even a cursory glance at the record of denials shows that Trump and his surrogates vehemently rebuffed any and all suggestions about business with Russia, as well as earlier reports about Trump Tower Moscow -- now known as the “Moscow Project” -- before it was finally tossed to the back burner in June of 2016 (as far as we know). Anyone existing in the real world can see how the deal and its secrecy, then and now, exposed Trump to potential blackmail by the Russian government, which itself faced a series of economically crippling sanctions by the U.S. and our allies. Consequently, Trump was and is beholden to Putin, with the Moscow Project as at least one of the Russian anvils dangling over the president’s head. And we still don’t know whether the Moscow Project is set to be reanimated after Trump finally leaves office. It could be that Trump is carrying a torch for the project until all this blows over.

But it wasn’t just the overall hush-hush nature of the Moscow Project that poses such a threat to American national security. The true smoking gun at the center of the Trump Tower Moscow prong of the Russia story happens to be a Russian bank known as VTB. Those who haven’t been following the day-to-day developments (hello, Red Hats) might not know that 60 percent of VTB is controlled by the Kremlin.

https://www.salon.com/2018/12/03/heres-how-trumps-proposed-moscow-project-is-even-dirtier-than-it-looks/

What the nothingburger crowd won’t say out loud is that VTB has been subject to American sanctions since July 2014, after Putin invaded Ukraine and seized Crimea in the wake of the Sochi Olympics. Simply put, it’s illegal for any Americans or American corporations, including the Trump Organization, to do business with VTB and other entities under sanction. Trump, Cohen and Sater did it anyway.

No wonder Trump and his people wanted to keep the deal secret. Sanctions were potentially violated, and Putin appears to have been bribed with a $50 million apartment. If that’s a nothingburger, I’d hate to see what an actual burger looks like.

https://www.salon.com/2018/12/03/heres-how-trumps-proposed-moscow-project-is-even-dirtier-than-it-looks/

December 3, 2018

another confusing moment for trump - not sure when filmed

https://twitter.com/The_UnSilent_/status/1069383665350774784

December 3, 2018

Ken Berry dies at age 85 (F Troop, Mama's family, Mayberry RFD)

December 1, 2018

Amber Guyger charged with murder of Botham Shem Jean

https://www.npr.org/2018/11/30/672430998/ex-dallas-officer-charged-with-murder-of-unarmed-black-neighbor

The white former Dallas police officer who shot and killed her unarmed black neighbor in his apartment, which she says she had entered it by mistake, was indicted on a murder charge by a grand jury Friday.

Four-year police veteran Amber Guyger, 30, was originally charged with manslaughter three days after the Sept. 6 slaying of Botham Shem Jean, 26, a native of the Caribbean island of St. Lucia and Dallas accountant.

As NPR reported on the aftermath of the controversial killing,

"An affidavit for an arrest warrant says the officer found the door ajar at what she thought was her own apartment. It says it was dark inside, she saw the silhouette of a man, and she gave him orders that he didn't follow. She told investigators she thought the man was a burglar.

"An attorney for the family disputed that version of events, according to WFAA TV. Lee Merritt said he talked with two witnesses who said they heard knocking at a door and a woman they believed to be the officer saying, 'Let me in.' He also said Jean had placed a red mat at his door to differentiate his apartment from the others...