Showing posts with label US society. Show all posts
Showing posts with label US society. Show all posts

Saturday 7 September 2019

Tweets of the Week


*Unfortunately this was a Trump impersonator 

Saturday 23 June 2018

US President Donald Trump takes a well-deserved hit in the cojones


This little girl couldn't fight back against the full weight of Donald J. Trump's cruel racism.

Time magazine cover for 2 July 2018 issue

Until an American late night show expressed its opinion...........




If only real life delivered such swift justice for little children.

Sunday 25 March 2018

The American Resistance has many faces and these are just three of them (21)



Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), media release, 20 March 2018:

Washington—A federal judge today granted Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) summary judgement in its landmark case against the Federal Election Commission (FEC), the second time the Court has ruled against the FEC for dismissing CREW’s complaint against a dark money group that spent millions in federal elections.

Judge Christopher Cooper ruled in September 2016 that the FEC acted “contrary to law” by dismissing a complaint against American Action Network (AAN), which spent millions on ads without revealing its donors, finding that the FEC’s analysis “blinks reality” and returning the case to the FEC to correct its error. Nevertheless, the three Republican commissioners once again blocked action against the organization, leading Judge Cooper today to correct the commissioners on their continued failure to follow the law.

This decision will have a major impact on disclosure by dark money groups, as the FEC can no longer ignore organizations’ spending on ads that air just before an election that try to hide their political purposes behind a sham “call” for viewers to contact their representatives about legislation.

“This decision marks a major victory not just for CREW but for believers in an open and transparent political process,” CREW Executive Director Noah Bookbinder said. “We hope to see a major change in the way the FEC approaches investigations of nonprofit organizations engaged in politics.”

The case revolves around clearly political ads aired by AAN which the FEC decided were not meant to influence an election. The judge wrote in the first decision that “it blinks reality to conclude that many of the ads considered by the Commissioners in this case were not designed to influence the election or defeat of a particular candidate.” Yet the FEC still failed to act. The judge wrote in today’s decision, “The controlling Commissioners did not find that this ad (nor any others mentioning healthcare) had an election-related purpose…Seriously?”

“It’s a shame we have to keep taking the FEC to court to make it do its job,” Bookbinder said. “Unfortunately, they have given us no other choice. If they do not want to keep losing in court, they should start enforcing the law.”

Click here to read the decision

Sunday 14 January 2018

The thirty-eight minutes in which Hawaii thought Trump had finally pushed North Korea too far


The New Yorker, 13 January 2018:

Residents of Hawaii received this warning on their smartphone screens 
Saturday morning from the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency.
Photograph Caleb Jones / AP

A little after 8 a.m. today, Hawaii standard time, an alert was sent to cell phones in Hawaii: “ballistic missile threat inbound to hawaii. seek immediate shelter. this is not a drill.” The message was also broadcast on local television and radio.

Nearly forty minutes passed before a second message went out: “There is no missile threat or danger to the State of Hawaii. Repeat. False Alarm.” Later, the governor of Hawaii, David Ige, told CNN, “It was a mistake made during a standard procedure at the changeover of a shift, and an employee pushed the wrong button.”……

Our apartment looks out over the international airport and Pearl Harbor. Whenever there’s fighter-jet activity, it goes right by our lanai. There’s been a lot of exercises recently. The local news has been reporting why so many fighter jets are running around, and the stories described the name of the exercises: Sunset Aloha. Apparently, they’re military drills. What it meant, for us, is F-22s and F-35s have been screaming through the skies over the past two weeks.

“We were sitting out on the lanai when the announcement came over the building speaker that there was an inbound ballistic missile to Hawaii. And that it wasn’t a drill. They repeated that. I got a text from a friend who’s an airline pilot who runs a Honolulu route and happened to be in town saying, ‘Did you guys see this?’ My wife called a friend of hers on the Big Island to see whether it was something that was just Honolulu, just Oahu, or the entire state. She was able to get through, and her friend said ‘Yes, it’s for the entire state.’

“At that point, we secured all the windows and all the doors. We started filling the tubs and every container we could with water. And texting family and friends. There’s been an increasing amount of information in Hawaii about what to do in case of a ballistic missile, over the last few months, clearly tied to tensions with North Korea. Everybody in Hawaii is very aware that after Guam we’re the next-closest target. We’re the only part of the U.S. that’s been a target of a military attack by a foreign power in the past century. And, of course, coming from New York, being the target of a non-military attack, that resonated with us in the worst possible way. Hawaii has also started doing monthly air-raid drills.

“It took me maybe a minute to process that this was actually happening. It was an ‘Oh my god, but I need to execute, I need to get things done’ kind of feeling. ‘Is this real? Can this really happen? They’re gonna shoot it down, right? What happens if our building collapses and we can’t get to our little girl?’

“After about five minutes, we were visibly upset. My wife was crying, and George, our daughter, wanted to know why. We asked her to come over for a family hug. We explained that we’d heard very bad news that something very, very bad was happening and it had us really, really upset. I don’t think she really understands nuclear Armageddon or ballistic missiles, but she certainly understands that Mommy and Daddy are really upset.

“We continued to fill every container we could find with water for maybe another fifteen or twenty minutes. We tried calling people. My wife tried her father in Chicago three times, got a busy signal. I texted my mother and my twenty-one-year-old daughter. We texted the rest of my wife’s family to say there’s a ballistic missile coming towards Hawaii and it’s not a drill.

“I’m not a religious person. There are no prayers to God in our household.

“At eight twenty-nine, we got a text back from my wife’s sister-in-law saying it was a hoax. Half an hour had passed, roughly. Then I checked and started seeing reports on Twitter from Tulsi Gabbard and other reps, from the governor, saying this was a false alarm. Then we got an alert over the building loudspeaker also saying it was a false alarm. Then we got the cell-phone alert. At that point, I was able to get through to my mother on the phone. She reported that what she saw on the news in the mainland was nothing until finally they said, ‘Oh, there’s a false alarm of a missile coming into Hawaii.’ Meanwhile, everyone over here is really upset and thinks they’re all going to die. Our friend the pilot was in a hotel saying the lobby was full of crying children.

“We began to relax a little and start to deal with the aftereffects of a severe adrenaline rush. I’m still shaking, though. My wife is still having waves of goose bumps and chills periodically….. 

From Twitter Moments, 14 January 2018:

Wednesday 8 November 2017

The American Resistance has many faces and this is just one of them (16)



* The US Fox Nertwork LLC entered a contract to sshow this political advertisement. It has withdrawn this advertisement from Fox News on or about 28 October 2017.