turbinetree
turbinetree's JournalMexico candidate shot while posing for selfie in latest murder of politician
Source: The Guardian
Fernando Purón had just finished an election debate with his rival congressional candidates in the Mexican border city of Piedras Negras, when a well-wisher asked to join him for a selfie.
But as he posed for the photograph outside the auditorium, a bearded gunman stepped up behind the pair and shot Purón in the head.
The cold-blooded murder on Friday – captured by a CCTV camera – has cast a harsh light on the stunning levels of violence in Mexico and the risk taken by those who run for elected office in the country.
Purón was the 112th political candidate murdered in Mexico since September 2017, according to Etellekt, a risk analysis consultancy.
And the country is bracing for more bloodshed before 1 July elections, when voters will pick a new president, renew congress and fill hundreds of state and local positions.
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/12/mexico-election-politicians-killed-fernando-puron-selfie
'The bromance of the century': Trump's bizarre trailer for his summit with Kim
The US president presented North Korea’s leader with an action-movie trailer as part of their Singapore meeting. The Guardian’s chief film critic isn’t impressed
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/jun/12/trump-bizarre-trailer-for-the-summit-with-kim-singapore-bromance
*Deep bass voice* “In a world … where can-do guys and deal-makers get betrayed at every turn by whiny Canadians, finger-wagging Germans and traitorous so-called reformist uncles who sadly needed to be executed for their own good, two men stood tall. Two friends. Two heroes.”
“They knew that together they could save the planet. The world was against them. The fake news media had placed a lot of undue emphasis on out-of-context remarks like ‘little rocket man’ and ‘dotard’. But only these hombres could denuclearise the Korean peninsula. Or some of it anyway. This summer … check out the bromance of the century. Check out Kim and Donald’s Potent Summit. They feel the need. The need for diplomacy. Get some!”
What have Trump and Kim signed? We read between the lines
Source: The Guardian
The wording of the document signed by Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un on Tuesday falls some way short of the dramatic billing the president gave it at the end of the leaders’ historic summit in Singapore.
Trump described it as a “very comprehensive” agreement that would “take care of a very big and very dangerous problem for the world”.
There is significance, of course, in the fact that the two men met at all, and ended their five hours together with the genesis of what could lead to more substantive moves towards denuclearisation. But as it stands, the document does not differ greatly from the agreement issued by Kim and the South Korean president, Moon Jae-in, after their meeting on the southern side of the demilitarised zone at the end of April.
The Trump-Kim document contains four main points:
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2018/jun/12/trump-and-kim-document-analysis-singapore-agreement-denuclearisation
basically sells out allies.............................where was South Korea in Singapore.................
Trump's agreement with North Korea is big on promise but short on detail
This agreement looks a lot like the one Pyongyang signed with South Korea months ago.
D. PARVAZ JUN 12, 2018, 7:55 AM
After months of acrimony and a few weeks of weird uncertainty, President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un signed a denuclearization agreement on Tuesday that essentially did nothing more but affirm the April 27 Panmunjom Declaration signed by North and South Korea in April.
As with the Panmunjom Declaration, there’s nothing in the agreement — a joint letter, really — that actually defines any of the goals or how they will be achieved, just a commitment, on both sides, to “to work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”
There was no mention of sanctions, long-range missiles, a peace treaty, or a time frame in what the president called a “pretty comprehensive” agreement that is less than one and a half pages long.
However, in a press conference on Tuesday, President Trump mentioned that North Korea had agreed to total denuclearization and that the sanctions would remain in place.
Trump said he couldn’t be sure that Kim would follow through, and that he might be wrong to trust him.
“I don’t know that I’ll ever admit that, but I’ll find some kind of an excuse,” he said.
-snip-
Apparently, Seoul was caught off guard by the promise to cease the joint military drills, which Trump called “provocative” and “a waste of money.” Shortly after the press conference, South Korea’s Blue House issued a statement saying, “At this moment, the meaning and intention of President Trump’s remarks requires more clear understanding.”
I guess when the Traitor of another allies says that he will cease joint protective exercises and that standing agreement with out telling the other country ...................wasn't a "clear understanding" is a way to save ones face for letting this traitor to just sell out your country................history repeating itself............think World War II, what could possibly go wrong....................
CFPB changes office logo, affirming name change amid Mulvaney's crusade to burn it all down
Big day for name changes.
ADDY BAIRD JUN 11, 2018, 6:47 PM
IHOP lit up the internet Monday after announcing it will now offer burgers and changing its name to the much stupider “IHOB” — International House of Burgers, rather than the International House of Pancakes.
There’s another name change, though, that’s getting less attention. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is actually the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection (BCFP).
CFPB head Mick Mulvaney has grown increasingly frustrated with people calling the agency by the wrong name, but AP Style, which most news outlets follow, hasn’t changed its guidance and thus the agency is still consistently referred to in the media as the CFPB. (Political appointees at the bureau have reportedly gone so far as to ask the AP to change its guidelines.)
At any rate, the logo at the CFPB officially was officially changed Monday. The nonprofit Public Citizen tweeted a photo and joked, “Welcome to the… Best Consumer Fraud Place? Or perhaps the Bureau for Corrupt Financial Predators?”
https://thinkprogress.org/consumer-protection-agency-changes-logo-under-trump-632f22954d52/
-snip-
Mulvaney has also refused to even request funding for the agency, which is allowed to request whatever funding it believes it needs from the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve is then required to fulfill that request. For his first fiscal quarter, Mulvaney requested $0 for the agency and said it would use emergency funding to operate.
Another asshole that should be in jail and impeached
Gorsuch just wrote an opinion so radical that Clarence Thomas wouldn't join it
Not even Justice Thomas would sign onto the paean to the Gilded Age that Gorsuch enshrined in his most recent dissent.
IAN MILLHISER JUN 11, 2018, 4:19 PM
For more than a quarter century, Justice Clarence Thomas served as the Supreme Court’s daft old uncle. Under Thomas’ reading of the Constitution, federal laws ranging from child labor laws, to minimum wage laws, to the ban on whites-only lunch counters are all unconstitutional. Thomas once argued that the First Amendment does not apply to high school students because eighteenth century fathers behaved like petty tyrants.
But Thomas may have just been dethroned. Dissenting in Sveen v. Melin, Neil Gorsuch tells Thomas to hold his beer.
Sveen is the sort of routine clean-up case that the justices often hand down after a lower court goes too far out on a limb and needs to be reined in. It involves a Minnesota law that, among other things, governs how life insurance policies should handle divorces.
If one spouse lists the other as the beneficiary on their insurance policy, and then the couple divorces, Minnesota law automatically revokes that designation. The theory is that “the average Joe does not want his ex inheriting what he leaves behind,” but in practice, many forget to fill out the paperwork to remove their spouse as a beneficiary. Minnesota law does not forbid someone from designating their ex-husband or ex-wife as an insurance beneficiary, but it does require them to refile the paperwork to do so after the divorce.
There is a robust policy debate among states about whether this sort of automatic revocation is a good idea, but, as Justice Elena Kagan explains on behalf of every member of the Court who doesn’t occupy a seat that was held open for a year until Donald Trump could fill it, Minnesota’s law is clearly constitutional.
https://thinkprogress.org/neil-gorsuch-sveen-v-malin-most-radical-opinion-yet-233125a182f6/
-snip-
Epic Systems involved employment contracts that forced workers to sign away many of their rights to sue their employer, often under penalty of termination. Yet Gorsuch’s opinion rested on the fiction that these coerced agreements were voluntary contracts.
Indeed, Gorsuch’s willful blindness to the power differential between workers and their employers closely resembles the logic of one of the Supreme Court’s most infamous decisions, Lochner v. New York, which struck down a New York law prohibiting bakery owners from overworking their workers.
These workers often labored for 13 hours a day or more, in squalid conditions, for meager weekly pay. Nevertheless, the Court held in Lochner that the state could not intervene to give such workers a more humane workload because “there is no contention that” bakery workers were unable “to assert their rights and care for themselves without the protecting arm of the State.”
The fact that Gorsuch’s Epic Systems opinion was joined by four justices is a worrying sign that the Court’s present majority no longer recoils against Lochnerian ignorance of how the workplace functions. Gorsuch’s Sveen opinion is worrying for a different reason. It suggests that Gorsuch is eager to implement an anti-government agenda that would even make Justice Thomas cringe.
This asshole really needs to be impeached..................I mean really.....................
Jeff Flake's criticism of Trump's G7 antics is a sham
Talking the talk, but not even trying to walk the walk.
AARON RUPAR JUN 11, 2018, 10:06 AM
On the heels of the Trump administration’s unhinged, ad hominen attacks against Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau over the weekend, Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) responded by tweeting, “Fellow Republicans, this is not who we are. This cannot be our party.”
It was far from the first time Flake has tweeted basically that same thing.
Flake is among a group of Republican senators who took to Twitter to signal moral opposition to Trump’s latest attack on an American ally — one that included John McCain (R-AZ) and Susan Collins (R-ME).
But while Republican senators are willing to talk about how they oppose Trump, they seem to be unwilling to actually do anything to stop him.
It’s not as though it’s an impossible task. With the U.S. Senate currently including 51 Republicans, all it would take is one Republican to break from the majority and form a coalition with the chamber’s 47 Democrats and two independents that could effectively hold up Trump’s agenda.
https://thinkprogress.org/jeff-flake-susan-collins-john-mccain-donald-trump-sad-tweets-6d45b029a020/
This asshole will confirm this traitorous presidents court nominees......................that is his job description and he is an asshole and he is an enabler of treason, if there is lame duck session just watch how this Flake, Collins and McCain vote on the judgeship's to the bench .....................
The Supreme Court just cleared the way for the mass disenfranchisement of voters
Large numbers of voters could be blocked from casting ballots in November if they haven't participated in recent elections.
KIRA LERNER JUN 11, 2018, 11:52 AM
With its ruling Monday upholding Ohio’s practice of removing infrequent voters from its rolls, the U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for the mass disenfranchisement of low-income, minority voters across the country.
In a 5-4 ruling, Justice Samuel Alito found that the National Voter Registration Act does not prevent Ohio from purging from the rolls voters who do not participate in federal elections for two years. If inactive voters do not respond to a mailer asking them to verify their address and do not vote for two more years, they are purged from the rolls.
The ruling will have implications beyond Ohio.
“Today’s decision threatens the ability of voters to have their voices heard in our elections,” said Stuart Naifeh, senior counsel at Demos, which challenged the state’s practices.
https://thinkprogress.org/the-supreme-court-just-cleared-the-way-for-the-mass-disenfranchisement-of-voters-14caef8ffae3/
How convenient that Alito got to write the majority opinion................this asshole knows what it was like during the Vietnam War, he got deferments, and he knows that men were going over to Nam and did not have the right to vote, and then in 1969 they got the right to vote, what a fucking asshole, and then Thomas he got deferments and then failed the medical and he also knew what it was like, what an asshole, and then Kennedy having been in the California National Guard, and he also knew, what a asshole, .........................and then there is Neil Gorsuch. never spent one minute in the military either as a kid or an adult ................................they are all traitors to the Constitution, just like the installed president by a foreign power, who by the way is a sexual predator.
And lets not forget that they gutted the Voting Rights Act..................its that simple
November 2018 cannot get here fast enough.......................go out and register and vote, and register people to vote
The 'God Damn' Tree That Nearly Brought America and North Korea to War
In 1976, two American soldiers were axed to death over a poplar tree. What came next threatened to change the course of history.
URI FRIEDMAN JUN 10, 2018
PANMUNJOM, South Korea—Meters from where the leaders of North and South Korea recently planted a pine tree to memorialize their blossoming bid for peace, North Korean soldiers once crushed the skulls of two U.S. soldiers with the blunt end of their axe heads. The attack came after the Americans tried to trim a poplar tree. The men’s disfigured bodies were left beside the tree.
In May, just days after the spectacular inter-Korean summit had occurred there, I visited the truce village of Panmunjom, also known as the Joint Security Area, on the border between North and South Korea. The atmosphere was like that of a church the morning after a wedding where, but for some stray flowers and a forgotten shawl, there is no sign of the previous evening’s festivities—just an austere sanctuary. The pine tree of peace, at one end of a row of blue and silver conference buildings for negotiators, was propped up by what appeared to be wooden support rods, a rather too on-the-nose metaphor for the shaky state of diplomacy with North Korea. Flanked by a trio of stone-faced South Korean guards staring into North Korea, flies buzzed about the cracked concrete slab that Kim Jong Un had crossed to become the first North Korean leader to step into the South.
North Korea had shut off its propaganda loudspeaker around the time of the summit, which made the place “considerably less surreal,” Matt Farmer, the commander of the United Nations Command Security Battalion, which represents the U.S. and South Korea in the Joint Security Area, told me at the site of the axe murders. But, he said, “we’ll always be steady and we’ll always be ready … in case something changes.” Being there, I had the gnawing feeling that something might—that I was still standing at the last front of the Cold War, not the new frontier for a peaceful and denuclearized Korean peninsula. Not yet.
“When you get [to the Joint Security Area], you’ll see how easy it is for something small to flare up into something bigger if you allow it to spread,” Farmer had warned me before I made the hour’s drive from the headquarters of U.S. Forces Korea in Seoul to the Demilitarized Zone, past countless guard posts, rings of barbed wire, and aspirational highway signs for “Pyongyang.” John Burzynski, the deputy secretary and international-relations adviser at the United Nations Command Military Armistice Commission, which supervises the 1953 ceasefire that halted the Korean War, had offered another tip. The Korean peninsula, he counseled, is “a spontaneous place.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/06/axe-murder-north-korea-1976/562028/
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