kpete
kpete's JournalWoman Cites Religious Freedom Law To Defend Her Right To Feed The Homeless
Joan Cheever of San Antonio has been serving meals to the city’s homeless for 10 years. But last week, police officers handed her a ticket with a potential fine of $2,000. Despite having a food permit for the food truck she cooks out of, which she calls the Chow Train, she was cited for transporting and serving it from a different vehicle.
But that hasn’t stopped her from continuing to hand out three-course meals to the homeless. On Friday, she went back to Maverick Park with 50 supporters to hand out food, and this time she wasn’t ticketed. Cheever has argued that she has a right to feed the homeless under Texas’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act because she considers it exercising her religious beliefs.
Her situation has caught the attention of the city council. Councilman Ron Nirenberg called for a hearing on how city police deal with its homeless population, which numbers nearly 3,000, saying, “We need to do what we can to identify smart policy that helps us encourage compassion, rather than discourage it.” Their tactics have come under scrutiny before after an investigation found that in under two years, they had handed out more than 12,000 citations to the homeless themselves for violating ordinances aimed at criminalizing homelessness. Offenses range from “aggressive panhandling” to sitting or lying down in a public right of way.
MORE:
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2015/04/18/3648616/san-antonio-feed-homeless/
Mission Accomplished: "We Must Make America Somewhere No One Wants to Live"--Mitch McConnell
Appearing with House Speaker John Boehner, McConnell said that, in contrast to President Obama’s “Band-Aid fixes,” the Republican plan would address “the root cause of immigration, which is that the United States is, for the most part, habitable.
“For years, immigrants have looked to America as a place where their standard of living was bound to improve,” McConnell said. “We’re going to change that.”
Boehner said that the Republicans’ plan would reduce or eliminate “immigration magnets,” such as the social safety net, public education, clean air, and drinkable water.
yes it is satire - yet so close to truth:
http://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/republicans-unveil-immigration-plan
FORMER DEM SENATOR CHRIS DODD ADVISED EXECS TO GIVE TO GOP: “FUNDRAISING DOES HAVE AN IMPACT”
Chris Dodd’s first career was as the liberal U.S. Senator from Connecticut, a self-professed champion for working families and a Democratic presidential contender in 2008. But hacked emails from Sony offer new insight into how he operates in his second career, as the head of the Motion Picture Association of America, a lobby group for the movie industry.
On January 28, 2014, Dodd emailed executives from major motion picture studios to share two news articles. One revealed that Google had shifted its campaign donation strategy, giving more to Republican lawmakers, and another projected that the GOP would likely perform well in the midterm elections that year.
The articles, Dodd wrote, “underscore the point I’ve been trying to make, which I’m sure you all understand – while loyalty to a person and/or party is admirable, we also need to be smarter about being supportive of those who are and will be in positions to make decisions that affect this industry.”
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/04/17/chris-dodd-former-dem-presidential-aspirant-advises-clients-give-gop-fundraising-impact/
FBI overstated forensic hair matches in nearly all trials before 2000
The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000.
Of 28 examiners with the FBI Laboratory’s microscopic hair comparison unit, 26 overstated forensic matches in ways that favored prosecutors in more than 95 percent of the 268 trials reviewed so far, according to the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) and the Innocence Project, which are assisting the government with the country’s largest post-conviction review of questioned forensic evidence.
The cases include those of 32 defendants sentenced to death. Of those, 14 have been executed or died in prison, the groups said under an agreement with the government to release results after the review of the first 200 convictions.
The FBI errors alone do not mean there was not other evidence of a convict’s guilt. Defendants and federal and state prosecutors in 46 states and the District are being notified to determine whether there are grounds for appeals. Four defendants were previously exonerated.
more:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/fbi-overstated-forensic-hair-matches-in-nearly-all-criminal-trials-for-decades/2015/04/18/39c8d8c6-e515-11e4-b510-962fcfabc310_story.html?hpid=z1
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Neil deGrasse Tyson: Politicians Denying Science Is ‘Beginning Of The End Of An Informed Democracy’
What will you be doing on Monday, 4/20, at 11 p.m.?Perhaps watching the premiere of acclaimed astrophysicist and author Neil deGrasse Tyson’s new show StarTalk. Tyson, who may be best known for hosting the reboot of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series in 2014, will now be appearing weekly on the National Geographic Channel in what may be the first late-night science talk show.
You can’t just cherry-pick data and choose what is true about the world and what isn’t.
Going forward, can you predict where the conversation around climate change will be in a decade or two? And maybe where we’ll be in meeting the challenges it poses?
Neil deGrasse Tyson: I can’t predict where it will be, but I can suggest where it should go. The conversation that needs to happen — here it is: you have conservatives and liberals in a room, people with power, let’s say they are representatives or senators. They shake hands and say, “ok humans are changing the climate of this planet, this is the consensus of scientific experiments being conducted, what policy and legislation should we debate in the face of the information?”
The Republican is thinking different suggestions from the Democrat, and that is the healthy political conversation that should unfold. Should there be carbon credits or not? Should there be trade regulations or not? Should we invest in solar panels rather than clean coal?
That would be a fruitful debate that could be held in the political arena. But the moment the politicians start saying they are in denial of what the scientists are telling them, of what the consensus of scientific experiments demonstrates, that is the beginning of the end of an informed democracy.
Lots more:
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/04/18/3647978/neil-degrasse-tysons-new-show-will-blow-your-mind-on-4-20/
Here's a little game: substitute the word "serious" for cold and see how it sounds.
Here's a little game: substitute the word "serious" for cold and see how it sounds. And then ask yourself whether it's laughable that a virtually unknown man who's quixotically running for president is criticizing a rival for wanting to be the center of attention.:
CHAFEE: We served together in the Senate and we served on the Environment and Public Works
Committee together. I worked on a couple of bills with her.
COLMES: What’s your impression?
CHAFEE: She’s as everyone said a policy wonk, she can be cold.
COLMES: Cold personally? Not a warm fuzzy human being?
CHAFEE: Yeah, when we worked on some of these issues, she likes to be the center of attention.
The truth is that we should want leaders who work hard and can keep their heads and stay focused. We don't need them to come up with cute nicknames for everyone or seem like the kid of person you'd want to have a beer with. Being "cool" (or "cold" if you insist) is an asset not a liability in a leader.
There are plenty of legitimate things over which to criticize Clinton and it's kind of sad (and idiotic) that the completely predictable sexist trope of "cold bitch" is still the go-to insult among so many people.
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2015/04/cool-vs-cold.html
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