***Official Political Discussion Thread***

[EddieDoyers]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4326212/Trump-s-Irish-Proverb-quote-Nigerian-poet.html

Trump's favorite 'Irish proverb' which he read out during visit by the country's prime minister is actually a quote from a NIGERIAN poet

 

[whywesteppin]

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2...edge-fund-tycoon-behind-the-trump-presidency/

Probably the most illuminating article about the election that I have read. It's about Robert Mercer and how he and Bannon have used their money and influence to get trump elected and are likely controlling him. The article is long but well-worth the read if you want to understand what's going on.

Two quick notes: First, there is a lot of selection bias here, i.e. trump happened to win, but it's not like Mercer has a magic bullet to control all elections (he initially backed Cruz). Second, this points to the level of analytics needed to take back the white house. We can talk all day about this and that, but we need a cold, detached quantitative analysis to target voters and win elections. That said, it's funny how these tech/science people (Mercer and his family and friends) are so prone to scientific fraud (they don't believe in climate change and they don't think a nuclear war would be that harmful to humanity). And you wonder why we're provoking N. Korea...

 

[kdawg]

Press were told Donny was having meetings at his club.

So, why's he wearing a golf glove then?

 

[harlemtothebronx]

Pen grip.

 

[rustlenomics]

i wonder if dude is still butt hurt about this. 

http://muppet.wikia.com/wiki/Ronald_Grump_(human)

 

[frenchbreadbuilds]

Isn't this their approach to everything though? Instead of taking steps to reduce poverty like investing in education and opportunity which are proven to eat away at poverty, they criminalize poverty by punishing people for the situation they were born into instead.

 

[whywesteppin]

i wonder if dude is still butt hurt about this. 

http://muppet.wikia.com/wiki/Ronald_Grump_(human)

of course he is. so that's why he's getting rid of pbs funding?

in one of the other clips, they say Donald Grump "built a swamp in one day."

prophetic!

his name is on every piece of trash in town.

 

[trueprada]

zo gif 

 

[seandon23]

Hearing these republicans talk about healthcare reform is just awful man. Paul Ryan needs to get the **** knocked out of him for pushing for this BS

 

[MalcolmNewton]

[h1]Kellyanne Conway’s Husband Is Set to Lead Justice Department Division[/h1]

 

[eracism]

I wish I knew the Donald so he could hook me up with a j-o-b. Make me the head of any damn dept with a 200k flat salary and I'm good papi.

 

[gry60]

Lying on the fly. Remember that video of Trump with the VA secretary?

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-brief...or-meeting-on-veterans-affairs-never-happened

Check this out too:

http://m.chicagoreader.com/chicago/...g-housing-discrimination/Content?oid=25705647

But through a review of Cook County deeds records and interviews, the Reader identified three out-of-state companies that began selling homes through contract-for-deed agreements in Chicago in the wake of the foreclosure crisis: Harbour Portfolio Advisors, Vision Property Management, and Battery Point Financial, a New York-based company founded by a former Goldman Sachs mortgage trader that has attracted a reported $40 million in private equity funding. Copies of the contracts, obtained by the Reader and reviewed by housing experts and lawyers, reveal that they share key similarities that may stack the deck against customers from the get-go. All three companies identified in the research require customers to purchase properties "as is" and make all repairs in addition to paying property taxes and home owner's insurance. Despite assuming the responsibilities of home owners, customers are not granted the same protections. According to federal regulations established by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) in 2013, banks can't foreclose on home owners until they're 120 days delinquent on their mortgage payments. Under Illinois law, banks must also sue for foreclosure in court. But contract sellers, according to the agreements, can often declare a customer in default as soon as she misses a single payment.

 

[dragicon]

^ the whole admin are habitual liars. I wonder what the percentage of things they say are actually true.

 

[gry60]

http://m.chicagoreader.com/chicago/...ation-noble-rauner-money/Content?oid=25865224

Back in 2012, when Chicago Public Schools teachers went on strike, Juan Rangel, the CEO of the UNO Charter School Network, proudly told reporters his schools were open.


And they had plenty of vacancies, so parents pissed off at the striking Chicago Teachers Union should come on down and enroll their kids. A similar note was sounded by other charter operators—and the subtext was hard to miss.

Charter school teachers don't want a union, wouldn't join one if they could, and, as one prominent business leader put it, don't even need one.

"The good teachers know they'll do fine," Bruce Rauner said in a speech shortly after the strike. "It's the weak teachers. It's the lousy, ineffective, lazy teachers that—unfortunately, there are a number of those—they're the ones that the union is protecting."

Man, how things have changed.

Rauner—now our governor—is still singing his same antiunion song. But Rangel's long gone from UNO, having been ousted after a contracting scandal. And UNO's teaching force is now unionized.

In fact, teachers at 32 of the city's 125 charter campuses are unionized. Last week, the teachers at one of these charters, Aspira, came close to going on strike before settling for a two-year contract with annual raises of 3 and 3.5 percent.

And now, teachers at Noble schools have announced they're taking the first steps to forming a union at their 17 Chicago campuses.

Last year Melissa Sanchez, an enterprising sleuth at the Chicago Reporter, secured a copy of Noble's payroll after filing a Freedom of Information Act request with the school.

Give Noble credit for turning over the payroll and not stonewalling—as Mayor Rahm, CPS, Governor Rauner, and other charter operators have been known to do with FOIA requests.

Sanchez discovered that Noble paid its teachers less than what CPS paid its unionized workforce. "On average, full-time Noble teachers make about $52,000 per year in salaries, $5,500 in performance bonuses and $2,000 in stipends for taking on extra responsibilities," Sanchez wrote.

 

[IATT]

 

[gry60]

Completely clueless. [emoji]128514[/emoji][emoji]128514[/emoji][emoji]128514[/emoji]

WASPing the last 50 years of 'Murica is going to be next to impossible for these fools.

 

[RustyShackleford]

I wish Kander had won last year. I don't agree with all this politics but dude seemed like he would be a great attack dog.

 

[Belgium]

The party of religious freedom can't have young muslims praying in a room where other religions also pray. But thankfully the Texas AG is taking action to stop this horrific crime

/s

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...-for-muslims/?utm_term=.011e0b687c75#comments

 
Every day at lunch, a handful of teenagers in Frisco, Tex., would pop into room C112, face a whiteboard and kneel for one of their five daily prayers.

It was just a spare classroom, used for everything from teachers’ grading to Buddhist meditation, school officials say. But Muslims at Liberty High seemed to like it.

“Takes like five minutes, instead of having to leave school, get in a car and go to my parents,” junior Sarah Qureshi told the school news site early this month.

“This is the seventh year we’ve been doing this, and we’ve never had one issue,” school principal Scott Warstler said.

Last week, however, top state officials learned about the room — and suddenly Liberty High had a big issue indeed.

The Texas attorney general’s office — famous for once suing a middle school principal  to keep a Bible quote on a door — sent the Frisco school district superintendent a letter Friday raising “concerns.”

“It appears that the prayer room is ‘dedicated to the religious needs of some students,’” a deputy attorney general wrote in the letter,  quoting an article written by an 11th grade student, “namely, those who practice Islam.”

In a news release the same day, the attorney general’s office went further: “Recent news reports have indicated that the high school’s prayer room is … apparently excluding students of other faiths,”  the release said.

That would be a constitutional violation, the Texas AG’s office noted.

And totally untrue, according to Frisco Independent School District officials, who say state officials didn’t even ask them about the prayers before the letter ended up in Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s tweet.

“This ‘press release’ appears to be a publicity stunt by the OAG to politicize a nonissue,” schools superintendent Jeremy Lyon wrote in reply to the state. “Frisco ISD is greatly concerned that this type of inflammatory rhetoric in the current climate may place the District, its students, staff, parents and community in danger of unnecessary disruption.”

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has often criticized what he calls anti-Christian discrimination in Texas schools. In 2015, Paxton joined 15 other states in opposing an atheist society’s lawsuit to stop school board officials from reading religious prayers before public meetings.

Paxton attracted national attention last December when he waded into a dispute in Killeen, Tex., between a middle school principal and a nurse’s aide who put up a six-foot poster in the school with a quote from the classic animation special “A Charlie Brown Christmas” that read: “For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior which is Christ the Lord.”

After the principal told the aide to take the poster down, Paxton wrote to the Killeen school district: “These concerns are not surprising in an age of frivolous litigation by anti-Christian interest groups … Rescind this unlawful policy.”

When the school district refused, Paxton helped the nurse’s aid sue, and won.

Three months later, his eye fell on Frisco.

We “recently became aware of Liberty High School’s prayer room,” Deputy Attorney General Andrew Leonie wrote to the schools superintendent — about two weeks after the room was profiled in the student newspaper. “Our initial inquiry left several questions unresolved.”

It sounded like the state had been investigating the matter, but school officials said they were blindsided when reporters started calling on Friday.

“What initial inquiry are you referring to?” the superintendent wrote in his reply to Paxton’s office, asking for evidence that the school was breaking any rules, and whether the state had made any attempt to find out before going public.

A week before the attorney general’s letter, Liberty High’s principal had welcomed all students to use the room in an interview with KERA public radio.

“All sorts of folks use it,” school district spokesman Chris Moore told The Washington Post on Saturday. “Muslims pray, Baptists pray, Catholics pray, Buddhists pray, Hindu students pray.”

Moore said he called and emailed Paxton’s office after learning about the letter, but had not received a reply.

The Post asked Paxton’s office what led the state to become concerned about the prayer room, and what inquiries state officials had made after learning about it. A spokesman for the attorney general replied with a statement that did not directly answer most of the questions:

“The letter was sent to the school district via email prior to issuance of a press release,” the spokesman wrote. “We sent the letter to clarify unresolved questions in the interest of protecting religious liberty in public schools across Texas (the same interest we sought to protect in the Charlie Brown matter).”

But as of Saturday, school officials in Frisco were still trying to figure out exactly what Paxton’s issue was.

“We hadn’t been contacted by right-wing groups, left-wing groups or in-between groups,” Moore said. “Getting that question yesterday from the attorney general was surprising.”

Regardless, he said, the room would be open for prayer as usual come lunchtime Monday — as it has for many years.

 

[elpablo21]

lulzzz

 

[IATT]

 

[whywesteppin]

"Where's your evidence for this claim?" is the alt-right's March version of February's "Fake News."

 

[frink85]

"Where's your evidence for this claim?" is the alt-right's March version of February's "Fake News."

^ asking for evidence, the irony and hypocrisy is thick

 

[whywesteppin]

It closely echoes Mick Mulvaney's argument that we should cut funding for Meals on Wheels because there's no evidence it works: https://lawstreetmedia.com/blogs/po...y-no-evidence-kids-fed-school-perform-better/

And, when we do provide mountains of evidence (climate change and vaccines), they find the one scientific fraud or quack doctor who argues against it and somehow that invalidates all the evidence.

 

[trueprada]

 

[IATT]