https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Lazo


Ralph Lazo, middle row, first on the right

Ralph Lazo (November 3, 1924 – January 1, 1992) was the only known non-spouse, non-Japanese American who voluntarily relocated to a World War II Japanese American internment camp. His experience was the subject of the 2004 narrative short film Stand Up for Justice: The Ralph Lazo Story.

Biography
Ralph Lazo, born in 1924 in Los Angeles, was of Mexican American and Irish American descent. His mother died when he and his sister were young, leaving them in the care of their father, who found work painting houses and murals.

As a Belmont High School student at age 17, Lazo learned that his Japanese American friends and neighbors were being forcibly removed as part of the Japanese American Internment and incarcerated at Manzanar. Lazo was so outraged that he joined friends on a train that took hundreds to Manzanar in May 1942. Manzanar officials never asked him about his ancestry.

"Internment was immoral," Lazo told the Los Angeles Times. "It was wrong, and I couldn't accept it." "These people hadn't done anything that I hadn't done except to go to Japanese language school."

Lazo attended school at the camp, and also spent time entertaining orphaned children who had been forcibly relocated to Manzanar. In 1944, Lazo was elected president of his class at Manzanar High School. After his graduation, he remained at the camp until August of 1944, when he was inducted into the US Army. He served as a Staff Sergeant in the South Pacific until 1946, helping liberate the Philippines. Lazo was awarded the Bronze Star for heroism in combat. The film Stand Up for Justice: The Ralph Lazo Story documents his life story, particularly his stand against the incarceration.

After the war, Lazo returned to Los Angeles, where he graduated from UCLA with a degree in sociology and earned a master's degree in education from Cal State Northridge. Lazo spent his career teaching, mentoring disabled students and encouraging Hispanics to attend college and vote. Lazo also helped raise funds for a class-action lawsuit to win reparations for Japanese-Americans interned during the war, which resulted in the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. This act offered an apology to interned Japanese Americans on behalf of the U.S. government and stated that the internment was based on "race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership."

Lazo died in 1992 from liver cancer.

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https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/regional/the-west/article238287238.html

BY KATE IRBY
DECEMBER 14, 2019 08:00 AM

WASHINGTON
Rep. Devin Nunes’ critics have obsessed over how he is paying for the six lawsuits he filed this year, but there are no public records showing how he has paid his Virginia lawyer.

That means Nunes is either paying for the lawsuits out of his own pocket, promising to pay his lawyer a portion of any money they’re awarded in court at a later date, or flouting House Ethics rules that would require him to publicly disclose who is funding the legal work.

Nunes, R-Tulare, has filed lawsuits against Twitter, anonymous social media users known as Devin Nunes’ Cow and Devin Nunes’ Mom, a Republican political strategist, media companies, journalists, progressive watchdog groups, a political research firm that worked for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and a retired farmer in Nunes’ own district.

All but one of those lawsuits — the one filed in California by Nunes’ campaign against retired farmer Paul Buxman, who accused Nunes of being a fake farmer — is still active. Nunes filed most of the cases in Virginia.

All were filed by Virginia attorney Steven Biss, alleging the journalists, media companies and political operatives conspired to defame Nunes or undermine his ability to lead the House Intelligence Committee.

The only lawsuit with a public record indicating payment is the one against Buxman, which Nunes withdrew within weeks of filing it.

Nunes’ third quarter campaign finance report filed with the Federal Election Commission showed he paid a Fresno law firm representing him in that suit about $3,400.

Nunes campaign finance reports with the FEC do not have records of any payments that appear affiliated with Biss.

Nunes has also said he will “definitely” be filing a seventh lawsuit against AT&T, Verizon and House Democrats for releasing records of phone calls that showed Nunes communicated with allies of President Donald Trump who are now central figures in Democrats’ impeachment inquiry. Democrats published the records in a report summarizing evidence they collected at impeachment hearings.

Neither Nunes’ office nor his lawyer responded to requests for comment.

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https://twitter.com/Strandjunker/status/1205839423377674240
Andrea Junker @ Strandjunker

Allison
Ana
Anne
Avielle
Benjamin
Caroline
Catherine
Charlotte
Chase
Daniel
Dawn
Dylan
Emilie
Grace
James
Jack
Jesse
Jessica
Josephine
Lauren
Madeleine
Mary
Noah
Olivia
Rachel
Victoria #SandyHook

Maybe if we rename every gun to vagina, the GOP will be quicker to regulate them.

8:18 AM - Dec 14, 2019

https://www.tampabay.com/opinion/2019/12/13/the-case-for-impeachment-editorial/

By Tampa Bay Times Editorial Board

With reluctance, we conclude the U.S. House of Representatives has enough reason to justify the impeachment of President Donald Trump. We harbor no illusions that the president’s impeachment by the House will lead to his removal from office by the Senate. But we hope the impeachment process and a trial in the Senate will give voters a more complete picture of Trump’s conduct, because they will deliver the ultimate judgment on his performance in November.

The House Judiciary Committee wisely limited the impeachment charges to abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. They focus exclusively on Trump’s actions regarding Ukraine and his efforts to undermine the House’s impeachment inquiry. The fundamental facts presented by the House through witness testimony and documents are not in dispute by the president or his key supporters.

At Trump’s direction, this summer the administration bottled up $391 million that Congress had approved for military and security assistance to Ukraine. Meanwhile, Trump kept brushing aside efforts by the president of Ukraine to arrange a meeting at the White House. Ukraine, under the shadow and constant threat from Russia, was desperate for the financial assistance and the public display of support.

The rough transcript of the July 25 telephone call between Trump and Ukraine’s president makes clear what Trump wanted as a “favor.’’ He wanted Ukraine to announce an investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden, a key Democratic opponent, and into work Biden’s son had performed for a Ukraine gas company. He also continued to press for an investigation into the discredited claim that Ukraine meddled in the 2016 U.S. election, even though the nation’s intelligence community and Congress concluded Russia was behind the interference.

Trump contends the July telephone call was “perfect’’ and there was no quid pro quo. But documents and testimony by former and current Trump administration officials show a direct connection. The evidence is clear: The president withheld financial assistance and public support in an attempt to force Ukraine to announce investigations of a political rival and to advance a false narrative about interference in the 2016 election.

By itself, this attempt to extract personal political favors from a foreign country in return for American support merits impeachment. That effort undermined America’s national security, because it put Ukraine’s fragile democracy at greater risk. Trump put his own political interests ahead of America’s foreign policy.

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https://twitter.com/RojavaIC/status/1205819115920928769
Rojava Information Center @ ojavaIC

- 281 civilians killed in the course of Turkish offensive

- 1040 civilians injured, 10 kidnapped

- 810 schools closed, 86,000 students missing studies

- Loss of 2,200 shops and 31 factories

Source: research by local NGO 'Institute for Human Rights - Jazira', seen by @RojavaIC

6:57 AM - Dec 14, 2019

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Hook_Elementary_School_shooting



The Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting occurred on December 14, 2012, in Newtown, Connecticut, United States, when 20-year-old Adam Lanza shot and killed 26 people, including 20 children between six and seven years old, and six adult staff members. Before driving to the school, he shot and killed his mother at their Newtown home. As first responders arrived at the school, Lanza committed suicide by shooting himself in the head.

The incident remains the deadliest mass shooting at either a primary or secondary school in U.S. history, the second-deadliest U.S. school shooting overall, and the fourth-deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history. The shooting prompted renewed debate about gun control in the United States, including proposals to make the background-check system universal, and for new federal and state gun legislation banning the sale and manufacture of certain types of semi-automatic firearms and magazines with more than ten rounds of ammunition.

A November 2013 report issued by the Connecticut State Attorney's office concluded that Lanza acted alone and planned his actions, but provided no indication why he did so, or why he targeted the school. A report issued by the Office of the Child Advocate in November 2014 said that Lanza had Asperger syndrome and as a teenager suffered from depression, anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder, but concluded that they had "neither caused nor led to his murderous acts." The report went on to say, "his severe and deteriorating internalized mental health problems ... combined with an atypical preoccupation with violence ... (and) access to deadly weapons ... proved a recipe for mass murder".

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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/13/opinion/sunday/trump-democracy.html

Seeing what Trump is doing to America, many find it hard to fight off despair.

By Michelle Goldberg
Opinion Columnist

Dec. 13, 2019

The despair felt by climate scientists and environmentalists watching helplessly as something precious and irreplaceable is destroyed is sometimes described as “climate grief.” Those who pay close attention to the ecological calamity that civilization is inflicting upon itself frequently describe feelings of rage, anxiety and bottomless loss, all of which are amplified by the right’s willful denial. The young activist Greta Thunberg, Time Magazine’s 2019 Person of the Year, has described falling into a deep depression after grasping the ramifications of climate change and the utter refusal of people in power to rise to the occasion: “If burning fossil fuels was so bad that it threatened our very existence, how could we just continue like before?”

Lately, I think I’m experiencing democracy grief. For anyone who was, like me, born after the civil rights movement finally made democracy in America real, liberal democracy has always been part of the climate, as easy to take for granted as clean air or the changing of the seasons. When I contemplate the sort of illiberal oligarchy that would await my children should Donald Trump win another term, the scale of the loss feels so vast that I can barely process it.

After Trump’s election, a number of historians and political scientists rushed out with books explaining, as one title put it, “How Democracies Die.” In the years since, it’s breathtaking how much is dead already. Though the president will almost certainly be impeached for extorting Ukraine to aid his re-election, he is equally certain to be acquitted in the Senate, a tacit confirmation that he is, indeed, above the law. His attorney general is a shameless partisan enforcer. Professional civil servants are purged, replaced by apparatchiks. The courts are filling up with young, hard-right ideologues. One recently confirmed judge, 40-year-old Steven Menashi, has written approvingly of ethnonationalism.

In “How Democracies Die,” Professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt of Harvard describe how, in failing democracies, “the referees of the democratic game were brought over to the government’s side, providing the incumbent with both a shield against constitutional challenges and a powerful — and ‘legal’ — weapon with which to assault its opponents.” This is happening before our eyes.

The entire Trump presidency has been marked, for many of us who are part of the plurality that despises it, by anxiety and anger. But lately I’ve noticed, and not just in myself, a demoralizing degree of fear, even depression. You can see it online, in the self-protective cynicism of liberals announcing on Twitter that Trump is going to win re-election. In The Washington Post, Michael Gerson, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush and a Never Trump conservative, described his spiritual struggle against feelings of political desperation: “Sustaining this type of distressed uncertainty for long periods, I can attest, is like putting arsenic in your saltshaker.”

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https://twitter.com/mkraju/status/1205581472033325057
Manu Raju ✔ @mkraju

Max Rose, a Democratic freshman from a swing NY district, announces his support for both articles of impeachment.

3:13 PM - Dec 13, 2019

https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton/status/1205518366083039232
Hillary Clinton ✔ @HillaryClinton

I've done my share of interviews in my lifetime, but nothing like this. I surprised myself a few times while participating in this documentary. Maybe you'll be surprised, too.

hulu ✔ @hulu
Who does she think she is? March 6. #HillaryOnHulu

Embedded video

11:02 AM - Dec 13, 2019