Welcome To aBlackWeb

The Official World Politics Thread

https://www.mediaite.com/online/pau...randy-iron-stache-bryce-is-raising-big-money/

Paul Ryan’s Underdog Challenger Randy ‘Iron Stache’ Bryce is Raising Big Money

House Speaker Paul Ryan’s Wisconsin Democrat challenger Randy Bryce announced his campaign raised $2.1 million at the end of the last fundraising quarter, which amounts to $4.75 million in total contributions.

As reported by Roll Call, Bryce’s push to flip Wisconsin’s 1st District includes $2.3 million in cash on hand, which — coupled with his recent fundraising achievements — mean the “Iron Stache” has raised more money than any other Ryan challengers in the past two decades.

“Paul Ryan has never been more vulnerable,” said Bryce campaign spokeswoman Lauren Hitt. “The Speaker is facing a well funded, well organized opponent with broad support, locally and nationally, in an extremely anti-incumbent environment. He may just want to put those rumors to rest and bow out gracefully now.”

However, Ryan won his last race in a blowout, so Bryce still has an uphill battle to face in defeating the top GOP congressman. In 2016, Ryan won the district with nearly 65 percent of the vote, on top of Donald Trump winning the area by double digits.

In response to the challenge, Bryce’s team pointed to last month’s PA-18 special election as an example, since underdog Democrat candidate Conor Lamb won the Pennsylvania district despite Republican success in 2016.

“Trump only won our district by 10, he won PA-18 by 19,” stated Hitt.
 
i’m not putting the dreamers cause over mine and my people, but i support those who support us. i’ll walk with them too the cliff. i ain’t going the extra mile to jump off. it’s not my fight but i can acknowledge when they're being wronged

i don’t have any beef with the dreamers and i’m not sure why some of us do
 
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/third-woman-void-trump-non-disclosure-agreement

Third Woman Seeks To Nullify Trump-Related Non-Disclosure Agreement

A third woman is seeking to void a non-disclosure agreement linked to President Donald Trump in order to speak freely, according to a Monday morning Bloomberg report.

Jessica Denson, an employee of the 2016 Trump campaign who worked on Hispanic outreach, has filed a lawsuit in a federal district court to nullify the agreement so she can speak out about what she describes as harassing behavior by one of her superiors, according to Bloomberg.

She had previously filed a discrimination lawsuit against Donald Trump for President Inc. in New York state court, Bloomberg reports, but was blocked when the campaign sought to enforce the confidentiality agreement by filing an arbitration claim.

Denson joins the ranks of adult film star Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal, both of whom are attempting to rid themselves of the secrecy pacts and go public with their experiences with the President.
 
i’m not putting the dreamers cause over mine and my people, but i support those who support us. i’ll walk with them too the cliff. i ain’t going the extra mile to jump off. it’s not my fight but i can acknowledge when they're being wronged

i don’t have any beef with the dreamers and i’m not sure why some of us do

For myself I don't have any beef just feel its not my business nor my fight so I just let them do them on that and let their chips fall where they may.
 
https://www.mediaite.com/online/sin...-news-commentaries-misleading-and-defamatory/

Sinclair Responds to Criticisms of ‘Fake News’ Commentaries: ‘Misleading’ and ‘Defamatory’

Sinclair Broadcasting Group is defending itself in light of the news that they order local news networks to peddle scripted pro-Trump propaganda to their audiences.

The media company has been under enormous pressure recently after a video from Deadspin showed local anchors sharing the same anti-media talking points all over the country. The news has been condemned by Sinclair-affiliated reporters along with many other media figures, but CNN obtained a memo from Sinclair senior vice president Scott Livingston, who defended the initiative as a “corporate news journalistic responsibility promotional campaign.”

Livingston’s memo praises the expansion of their news operations while slamming the “misleading, often defamatory stories” about the company over the last few days. Livingston also insisted that his campaign was just trying to warn against unsubstantiated stories that can rapidly spread throughout the internet, sometimes with serious repercussions.

“We are focused on fact-based reporting. That’s our commitment to our communities,” the memo states. “We hold ourselves to the highest standards of accuracy and fact checking.”

Livingston also swung at media critics by saying that they never do any original reporting of their own on the company:

Do you ever notice that a story written about Sinclair from a west coast publication will include a lot of the same talking points—often the same wording— as a story written a week earlier on the east coast? These reporters aren’t producing original journalism; they are aggregating often-flawed-reporting-content published by other media outlets, without fact checking it—or calling us to confirm any of it. By contrast, we have hundreds and hundreds of journalists in Sinclair, who go into the field each day, conduct their own original interviews –face-to-face—and create truly original content for our their local audiences.”

 
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/democrats-oversight-legal-defense-fund-trump-aides-russia

House Dems: Legal Defense Fund Allows ‘Secret Donations’ To Trump Aides

Democrats on the House Oversight Committee are calling for greater transparency of a legal defense fund created to assist Trump campaign and White House staffers with costs stemming from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.

Eighteen Democrats signed the letter sent Monday to Acting Director of the Office of Government Ethics David Apol. “The structure of the Fund appears to allow secret donations to these individuals, and it raises serious concerns about whether it complies with ethics, tax, and elections laws, as well as OGE guidance,” the letter reads.

According to the letter, the Patriot Legal Expense Fund Trust, LLC was formed on February 27 to help “an employee, consultant, fundraiser or volunteer” of the Trump campaign, administration or transition team with legal costs should he or she be pulled into Mueller’s investigation.

The Democrats are asking for information about identifying and vetting donors to the fund, how the expenditures will be reported and capped, and how the fund was initially created. In the letter, they request that the documents be delivered by April 12 with a corresponding briefing the next day.
 
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/scalias-goal-of-unwinding-voter-protections-is-becoming-a-reality

Scalia’s Goal Of Unwinding Voter Protections Is Becoming A Reality

In a Supreme Court term already bursting with election cases, from two partisan gerrymandering disputes to a fight about the permissibility of Ohio’s voter purges to a lawsuit challenging bans on political clothing in Minnesota polling places, it’s easy to overlook yet another significant voting appeal the Court will hear later this month. In Abbott v. Perez, the Court will examine whether the state of Texas violated the Voting Rights Act and the United States Constitution when it drew congressional and state legislative district lines in ways that hurt Latino and African-American voters. The protracted and difficult litigation involves redistricting plans from way back in 2011 and shows how much was lost when the Supreme Court killed another key provision of the Voting Rights Act in its 2013 Shelby County v. Holder case.

Abbott v. Perez could well preview what’s likely to come in the next few years. All three branches of government have pulled back on protecting voting rights, and the effects of that move are becoming clear. We may soon fulfill the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s vision of an emasculated Voting Rights Act and much weaker protections for minority voters by the federal courts.

In the pre-Shelby days, the Voting Rights Act offered two main tools to protect minority Voting Rights. Under Section 5, states which had a history of racial discrimination in voting had to get “preclearance” (or pre-approval) from the U.S. Department of Justice or a federal court in Washington, D.C. before making any changes in voting rules and procedures. States had to show the DOJ or the court that any changes would not worsen the condition of minority voters. Under Section 2, the U.S. government or private plaintiffs could bring suit anywhere in the U.S. arguing that a redistricting plan (or other voting rule, like a state voter id law) deprived minority voters of the same opportunity as white voters to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice. Section 2 litigation can be successful, but the burden is on the plaintiff to prove a violation, the standard is tough to meet, the cases are expensive to bring, and they usually take a long time to litigate.

The Roberts Court’s record on reading and enforcing the Voting Rights Act has been a disappointing one, which is no surprise given that Chief Justice John Roberts himself was an opponent of a strong Voting Rights Act when he worked in the Reagan Administration to weaken minority voter protections in Section 2. The worst thing the Roberts Court has done came in the 2013 Shelby Countycase, where the Court created a new constitutional theory that states are entitled to “equal sovereignty” and held that Congress violated it by subjecting only some states to Section 5 preclearance based upon old racial discrimination data.

Even before Roberts became chief justice, the Court already had a relatively weak record enforcing Section 2. It has held that the Act cannot be used to challenge the power of minority-preferred representatives within legislative bodies, cannot be used to challenge the number of members of a legislative body so as to assure some minority representation, and it does not give minority voters the right to require the state to draw “influence” districts when the group of minority voters is not large and compact enough to make up a majority in a district. And that’s all aside from non-Voting Rights Act cases cutting back on voting rights such as a 2008 case rejecting challenges to the constitutionality of discriminatory voter identification laws.

The Texas case that the Court will hear this term shows just how hard it is to protect minority voting rights. Texas’ 2011 redistricting plans originally could not be put in place because a federal court had not precleared it under Section 5. A separate lawsuit sought to block parts of the plans under Section 2, and the same federal court issued an interim remedy, which led to Texas passing a similar discriminatory plan in 2013 claiming the re-enactment solved Voting Rights Act problems. The Section 5 lawsuit went away when the Supreme Court decided Shelby County, but the Section 2 lawsuit has dragged on, and the three judges hearing that case issued hundreds of pages of detailed opinions trying to figure out exactly when and how Texas violated the Act.

It has been 7 years, and the cases are only now getting to the Supreme Court, with the potential for a final remedy to be in place for just a single election before the 2020 round of redistricting arrives, and, with it, could well start this all over again.

Since the case started, it is hard to find friends for the Voting Rights Act in any of the three branches of government. The Department of Justice, which came in on the side of minority voters in the Texas litigation, has switched sides now that the Trump Administration has taken over. That means U.S. Solicitor General Noel Francisco will be arguing in favor of Texas’s position in the case at the Supreme Court.

Congress, meanwhile, has not acted to fix the formula for deciding which states need to get Section 5 preclearance, even though the Court in Shelby Countyinvited Congress to try.

And the Supreme Court is poised to make things worse. With rumors circulating that perennial swing Justice Anthony Kennedy could retire as soon as this term, the Court is likely to lurch to the right. As I argue in my new book, The Justice of Contradictions: Antonin Scalia and the Politics of Disruption, the late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia took an even narrower view of Voting Rights than the Court as a whole, and now, after his death, Justice Scalia’s influence is only growing. If President Trump gets another appointment to the Supreme Court to replace Justice Kennedy, expect the next Justice (like new Justice Neil Gorsuch) to emulate Justice Scalia’s approach and weaken voting rights even further.

Justice Scalia openly expressed disdain for the Act, expressing the view at the Shelby County oral argument that Congress renewed the Act in 2006 by overwhelming majorities because of “a phenomenon that is called perpetuation of racial entitlement.” He believed that Section 2 could well be an unconstitutional racial preference, and argued that, regardless, Section 2 should be read not to apply to redistricting matters at all.

The bottom line is that the Court’s mixed record on enforcing the Voting Rights Act could soon get worse if Trump gets another Court appointment. Minority voters, already at a disadvantage in many parts of the country because of enduring racism and the unwillingness of white voters to support minority candidates for office, could soon have tougher political battles ahead. And the scariest part is that, thanks in part to Justice Scalia’s influence, the courts may soon no longer be there as a backstop.
 
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/zi...roportionately-purged-native-american-workers

Zinke’s Interior Dept Disproportionately Reassigned Native American Workers

Nearly a third of the senior Interior Department (DOI) career officials reassigned under Secretary Ryan Zinke in a major agency reshuffling are Native American, even though Native Americans make up less than 10 percent of the Department’s workforce, a review by TPM has found.

The finding comes days after Democratic lawmakers demanded an investigationinto whether Zinke discriminated when he reassigned 33 career officials last summer, and follows on reports that Zinke has repeatedly told DOI officials he doesn’t care about diversity — which prompted one member of Congress to accuse Zinke of working to create a “lily-white department.”

Former government officials tell TPM that they see the reassignment of top Native American staffers as part of an effort to remove internal opposition to Zinke’s plan to open up more tribal and public lands to the fossil fuel industry.

Thanks to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by Katherine Atkinson, a lawyer for ousted DOI climate scientist Joel Clement, the agency has begun to release emails and other documents related to the reassignments, including a listof the 33 reassigned officials.

Government documents and news reports reviewed by TPM show that at least ten are members of Native tribes. The list includes workers who have served in government for many years, like Chickasaw Nation member Stanley Speaks, Oglala Sioux member Michael Black, and Miami Nation member Darren Cruzan.

Several others on the list are Black and Latino, online records show.

“I am particularly concerned that the employees affected were disproportionately minority,” Sen. Tom Udall (D-NM), the top Democrat on the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, told TPM in a statement. “The diversity of a government workforce is a good thing and should be celebrated not denigrated, particularly for agencies such as the Department of the Interior, whose workforce should represent the broad geographic diversity of the people it serves.”

The Interior Department did not respond to TPM’s inquiry as to why Native American workers were disproportionately represented on the reassignment list. The agency previously denied reports that Zinke made comments dismissing the importance of hiring a diverse workforce.

The DOI reassignments are currently under investigation by several government agencies, including the Government Accountability Office, the Interior Department’s Inspector General, and the Office of Special Counsel.

Singling workers out for political reasons or because of their race would violate federal law. Additionally, DOI’s Indian Preference rules state that the agency must give “absolute preference in employment to American Indians and Alaska Natives” in several of its offices. Those rules specifically apply to reassignments as well as hiring decisions.

“If Zinke had made his diversity comment in the private sector, it would have been one thing, but the Interior Department actually has a legal obligation to diversity,” Atkinson said. “Interior is supposed to prioritize hiring Native Americans, not pushing them out.”

The mass reassignment of Native American senior officials comes amid ongoing tension between tribal groups and Secretary Zinke. The secretary has launched an effort to open up land that is sacred to Native Americans for drilling, mining, and logging, and endorsed President Trump’s budget, which would have slashed half a billion dollars from the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Bryan Newland, who served as a senior policy adviser at the BIA under the Obama administration, and is now the tribal chairman of the Bay Mills Indian Community in Michigan, sees the disproportionate reassignment of the veteran BIA officials he worked with as part of a bigger effort to remove barriers to those extractive industries.

“If you have experienced people who understand the U.S. government’s responsibility to Indian tribes, they’re more likely to stand up and say, ‘Hey, we have an obligation to our 567 tribes, and you can’t just open everything up to mining and drilling,'” said Newland. “Those folks were moved to get them out of the way so that the oil- and gas-centric policy can move quickly.”

Under the Trump administration, Interior Department agencies that serve Native Americans have also been plagued by understaffing and leadership vacancies. Trump’s nominee to lead the BIA has sat unconfirmed for months due to an ethics investigation into her possible conflicts of interest. And Trump’s pick to run the Indian Health Service (IHS) withdrew his nomination in February after reporters found he lied on his resume. A GAO report last summer found more than 1,500 vacancies in the IHS alone, as well as severe staff shortages across the bureau’s other offices, leading to years-long delays for tribes applying for federal grants and projects.

Newland told TPM that the backlog has personally impacted his community.

“We had a request for funding pending at the DOI for more than a year,” he said. “It’s a fairly routine request, but it just sat there. We recently heard that it finally made its way to political leadership at Indian Affairs, so I called them, and I learned our request had been denied. We never received anything in writing. There’s just a lack of person-hours to handle these requests, so they are going unaddressed.”

“I think it’s intentional,” Newland added. “If something is a priority, you spend time on it. You put good people on it. They’re not spending time on it.”
 
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/amy-mcgrath-pulls-campaign-ads-from-local-sinclair-channel

Dem Candidate Pulls Campaign Ads From Local Sinclair-Owned Channel

A Kentucky Democratic congressional candidate has pulled all of her campaign advertisements from her local, Sinclair Broadcasting-owned news channel after the controversy that exploded when anchors all over the country echoed the same script warning of fake news and biased reporting.

Amy McGrath is challenging incumbent Republican Andy Barr in Kentucky’s 6th Congressional District. “Today, I have instructed my campaign team to cease and pull all campaign advertising on WDKY-TV (Channel 56), the Sinclair-owned television station in our congressional district, as soon as possible,” she wrote in a Facebook post on Monday. “Sinclair’s corporate-mandated ‘must-read’ right-wing script on its nearly 200 television stations about ‘fake news’ is itself an extreme danger to our Democracy and eerily mimics the propaganda efforts that authoritarian regimes often use to control the media in their own country.”

In the post, she called on all Democratic candidates to join in her boycott.

Administrators from WDKY-TV did not immediately respond to TPM’s requests for comment.

 
https://www.mediaite.com/online/tru...ntials-be-pulled-embarrasses-himself-and-cnn/

Trump 2020 Campaign Manager Suggests Jim Acosta’s Credentials Be Pulled: Embarrasses ‘Himself and CNN’

It’s no secret that President Donald Trump and the White House staff are not exactly members of the Jim Acosta fan club. But now, the man who’s running Trump’s reelection campaign is going so far as to actually suggest the CNN chief White House corespondent have his credentials revoked.

Trump 2020 campaign manager Brad Parscale took to Twitter Monday to call for Acosta to be suspended and for his White House press credentials to be pulled.

Parscale made his comment following the publication of a Daily Caller article and accompanying video which showed Acosta asking questions of Trump on the White House lawn Monday morning, as the president spoke briefly to reporters during the annual Easter egg hunt.

“Didn’t you kill DACA, sir?” Acosta said, shouting his query towards Trump so as to be heard above a band playing nearby. “Didn’t you kill DACA.”

The incident evidently constitutes “breaking protocol,” as far as Parscale is concerned.

“He continues to embarrass himself and @ CNN,” the Trump campaign manager wrote. “Pull his credentials for each incident.”



 
Back
Top