With another Government Shutdown looming tonight if Congress cannot figure out a way to do their job and pass a spending bill, let’s take a look at some of the utter nonsense Republicans and Democrats packed into said spending bill – a massive $1.1 trillion spending package that would fund the government through September.
Baltimore Police, apparently trying to eliminate the threat of a woman and her cell phone camera, tased and arrested
the woman as she recorded them arresting another man.
Video of the March 30 melee surfaced online this week. Police erased the 135-second recording from the woman’s phone, but it was recovered from her cloud account, according to the Circuit Court for Baltimore City lawsuit (PDF), which seeks $7 million.
Kianga Mwamba was driving home from a family gathering in March. Stopped in traffic, she began filming the nearby arrest of a man who she says was kicked by police.
We didn’t need anymore proof that ISIS was ruthless, or sub-human, but trying to sell the remains of a decapitated James Foley further shows that we are not dealing with human beings here, but some rather a group of cold-hearted and disgusting creature.
Three sources in contact with ISIS or its associates told BuzzFeed News that it wants to sell the remains of James Foley, the U.S. journalist whose August death was the first in a series of high-profile executions of Western hostages by ISIS hands.
They said ISIS wants $1 million for Foley’s body, which it would deliver across the border to Turkey, and that the group was willing to provide a DNA sample to facilitate a deal.
If true, the attempted sale would highlight the ruthlessness behind the hostage-taking enterprise that has provided ISIS with deep reservoirs of funds and publicity — as well as the group’s cold calculation as it works to raise more cash.
It’s the argument of racists, or ignorant people who refuse to acknowledge the fact that blacks and other minorities suffer considerably more profiling and sometimes death from some police officers. And that argument, that blacks kill blacks was on full display last night on Fox’s O’Reilly Factor.
Bill O’Reilly was interviewing Russell Simmons and the two were “discussing” the recent Eric Garner and Mike Brown grand jury decisions, when O’Reilly chimed in his ignorant talking point: “You are not acknowledging, astronomical crime rate among black men,” as if the fact that blacks die at the hand of other blacks, mean police brutality against the rest of the community is okay. Simmons came back with the argument that war on drugs program has also been detrimental to the black and minority communities.
But Reilly wasn’t hearing none of it, and the discussion quickly sunk to levels more familiar to Fox News and the O’Reilly Factor. “You have not been there condemning the black drug gangs for gunning down 13- and 14-year-old kids,” O’Reilly shot back at Russell, still trying to justify police brutality because “blacks kill blacks.” After the show reached the doldrums O’Reilly wanted, he told his guest, “You are so desperately wrong it pains me to talk to you.” Simmons shot back, “I feel the same way about you.”
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Yes, Cheney threw George Bush under the bus with his recent revelation in a Fox interview, when he said that the former president knew all the gory details of their torture program.
Fox News anchor Bret Baier asked the former vice president whether the agency deliberately kept Bush in the dark about its so-called enhanced interrogation techniques.
“Not true. Didn’t happen,” Cheney responded. “Read his book, he talks about it extensively in his memoirs. He was in fact an integral part of the program, he had to approve it before we went forward with it.”
Asked if there was ever a point where he knew more about the CIA’s activity than the President, Cheney said “I think he knew everything he needed to know and wanted to know about the program.”
Baier then asked if the former President knew about the “details” of the program. The report — which Cheney called “full of crap” — described brutal interrogation methods including waterboarding, extensive sleep deprivation, threats to harm detainees’ families and “rectal feeding.”
“I think he knew certainly the techniques, we did discuss the techniques,” Cheney said. “There was no effort on our part to keep him from that.”
“The notion that the committee’s trying to peddle, that somehow the agency was operating on a rogue basis, and we weren’t being told or the President wasn’t being told, is just a flat out lie,” he later added.
An air ball so ugly, it made the one of the announcers ask, “did the goal move?” The same announcer then begged the baker to “put that roll back in the oven!” It clearly wasn’t ready.
The baker in this case was none other than Brooklyn Nets’ Cory Jefferson, as he lobbed a three pointer from well within shooting range. Something happened along the way and the ball fell way short.
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Torture is a serious crime and the interest in the newly released torture report is necessary and warranted. And it is a perfect diversion for a congress determined to fatten their own pocket.
Two measures were snuck into the must-pass spending bill this week — all without formal debate.
The first was a rider that essentially overturns the District of Columbia’s ballot initiative legalizing marijuana, which passed by a more than 2-to-1 margin last month. (Remember, D.C. doesn’t even have elected House or Senate members.)
The second measure Congress snuck into the spending the bill will be more galling to some, because it amounts to a pay raise for the two unpopular political parties: It raises the $32,400 maximum that donors could give the Democratic National Committee or Republican National Committee to a whopping $324,000 per year, gutting what’s left of the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law. The Washington Post says this was inserted on page 1,599 of a 1,603-page bill (!!!). These two measures — and probably more like them — will become law because they were jammed into a must-pass spending bill to keep the government open.
