From Salon...

In an interview with Marie Claire’s Allison Glock, comedian Amy Schumer revealed that her first sexual experience was not consensual. The man is no longer in her life.

The 35-year-old told Glock that she lost her virginity at 17, and that the experience “was not a good one.” It wasn’t “until I started reading my journal again” that she realized what she’d experienced.

“When it happened, I wrote about it almost like a throwaway. It was like, and then I looked down and realized he was inside me. He was saying, ‘I’m so sorry’ and ‘I can’t believe I did this.'”

However, she added that “this was 17 years ago” and “there are just so many factors. “I had another time with a boyfriend where I was saying, ‘No, stop,’ and it was just completely ignored,” Schumer said.

http://www.salon.com/2016/07/14/amy_schumer_reveals_her_first_sexual_experience_was_not_consensual/

There are way too many girls whose first time was non-consensual. smh

Veteran Washington lawyer Arthur B. Culvahouse methodically scrutinized John McCain's five-man shortlist in 2008, only to have Sarah Palin added last-minute, a chaotic process that some fear is repeating itself.

Culvahouse is again at the helm of the operation sniffing through VP contenders, this time for Donald Trump, and critics question whether the lengthy primary, early convention and seemingly frantic finish created an unhelpful crunch.

Rick Davis, McCain's 2008 campaign manager, said he sees signs that the Trump campaign wouldn't have had time to do the polling and research that typically supplements the background check. "They are starting their vetting process where we picked up with Sarah Palin,” Davis said. "It's going to be less rigorous.”

That’s assuming Trump confines himself to the choices Culvahouse vetted at all.
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"Like anything, it's more about the client than the lawyer," said Stuart Stevens, a top strategist on Mitt Romney's 2012 campaign, which also used Culvahouse to vet potential running mates. "Anything involving Donald Trump is usually chaotic and somewhat incoherent. I think the world of AB, but his advice is only as useful as the degree to which it's taken."

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/07/donald-trump-vp-vetting-culvahouse-225363#ixzz4ET5PtAvC

Youbetcha there's still no actual announcement!

Source: Politico

By Kyle Cheney
07/14/16 11:46 PM EDT

CLEVELAND -- Efforts to block Donald Trump’s nomination — hyped for months by proponents as a growing grassroots movement among Republican activists attending next week’s convention — turned out to be a flop.

During key votes on Thursday evening, only 12 hardcore holdouts continued to resist Trump’s nomination as they were when members of on the powerful 112-member Convention Rules Committee considered a proposal to prevent delegates from rejecting Trump. A long-anticipated “conscience clause” proposal intended to stymie Trump fizzled with similarly minimal support.

The twin setbacks seemed to cripple what is likely to be the last concerted attempt to deny Trump the GOP nomination.

“Anti-Trump people get crushed at Rules Committee,” Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manafort boasted on Twitter. “It was never in doubt: Convention will honor will of people & nominate @realdonaldtrump.”
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The pro-Trump victory was the main event of the Republican rules fight that ended at 11:30 p.m. on Thursday when the committee passed a package of rules that will govern the party for the next four years. Despite all the tension surrounding the rules fight, very little actually changed.



Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/07/donald-trump-convention-rules-win-225586

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Okay. It's REAL. One of our two major political parties has chosen a mentally-unstable, racist, anti-semitic, misogynistic xenophobe who believes himself to be God as its candidate to take possession of our nuclear weapons on January 20, 2017.

Think about that a moment. This is the United States of America. How in the Hell have we gotten to this point?

Source: Politico

By Alex Isenstadt and Shane Goldmacher
07/14/16
7:02 PM EDT

CLEVELAND – Millions of dollars short and running out of time, organizers of the Republican National Convention have written an urgent request for $6 million to Las Vegas billionaire couple Sheldon and Miriam Adelson to cover the bills for next week’s festivities.

In a letter addressed to the Adelsons, obtained by POLITICO, the Cleveland 2016 Host Committee revealed the names of more than two dozen prominent corporations and individuals who have reneged on a collective $8.1 million in pledged donations.

The letter represents the most public acknowledgement to date that Donald Trump has directly cost convention organizers millions of fundraising dollars.

“Over the past couple months, negative publicity around our potential nominee resulted in a considerable number of pledges backing out from their commitments,” the letter says.

It goes on to list the companies and wealthy individuals who have withdrawn their financial commitments. Among those who have canceled their donations, according to the letter, are David Koch ($1 million), FedEx ($500,000), Visa ($100,000) and both Pepsi ($500,000) and Coca-Cola ($1 million).



Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/07/rnc-begs-adelson-for-6-million-to-cover-convention-shortfall-225571

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Real headline: Anti-Welfare Party Asks For Handout

Source: Huffington Post

07/14/2016 06:31 am 06:31:09 | Updated 2 hours ago

Amy Schumer’s first sexual encounter “was not a good one,” the comedian recently told Marie Claire’s Allison Glock for the magazine’s August issue.

In the interview, where they also discussed Schumer’s career, her upcoming book and her family, the 35-year-old revealed that when she lost her virginity at 17, it was not consensual. Schumer said that, at the time, she didn’t realize what had happened.

My first sexual experience was not a good one. I didn’t think about it until I started reading my journal again. When it happened, I wrote about it almost like a throwaway. It was like, And then I looked down and realized he was inside me. He was saying, “I’m so sorry” and “I can’t believe I did this.”

Schumer told Glock that the man is no longer in her life and she doesn’t feel the need to punish him for what he did. “This was 17 years ago. There are just so many factors,” she said, adding: “I had another time with a boyfriend where I was saying, ‘No, stop,’ and it was just completely ignored.”





Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/amy-schumer-says-her-first-sexual-experience-was-not-consensual_us_57867ce9e4b03fc3ee4ee418?section=

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The first time for way too many girls is non-consensual. smh

Source: Jerusalem Post

By JPOST.COM STAFF 07/14/2016 09:35

The former chief-of-staff to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was taken in for questioning by Israel authorities Thursday morning after he arrived at Ben Gurion Airport.

Ari Harrow, who served as the premier's top adviser in 2014, was asked by Israel Police's National Fraud Investigators Unit to voluntarily give a statement concerning alleged financial abuses reportedly connected to Netanyahu, according to Channel 2.

Police emphasized that Harrow was not arrested or being investigated, but was called in to give testimony.

Attorney-General Avichai Mandelblit announced earlier this week that he had ordered an initial probe of Netanyahu as part of a wider unspecified investigation.

Read more: http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Report-Former-Netanyahu-chief-of-staff-arrested-at-Ben-Gurion-Airport-460353?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

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I doubt this will happen, but I'd love to see Bibi get busted. He has poisoned Israeli politics and perverted ours!

Jul 13, 2016 at 6:48 PM

At 6 this morning, Quinnipiac University released a set of surveys of Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania with the best polling news Donald Trump has gotten in a long time. In the version of the polls that includes third-party candidates — that’s the version FiveThirtyEight uses — Trump led Hillary Clinton by 5 percentage points in Florida, 1 percentage point in Ohio and 6 percentage points in Pennsylvania.

The results run in contrast to the preponderance of national polls, which show Clinton ahead by roughly 5 percentage points, on average. And some of the other polls released today weren’t as bad for Clinton. Some were even good for her, in fact. A Monmouth University poll showed her up by 13 percentage points in Colorado, while Fox News had her up by 9 points there. And a Marist College poll, contradicting Quinnipiac, had her up 8 points in Pennsylvania.

Nonetheless, the bevy of state polls today worked strongly to Trump’s benefit overall. His chances of winning the Electoral College are up to 29 percent, from 23 percent on Tuesday, according to our polls-only model. And they’re now 33 percent, up from 27 percent, in our polls-plus model, which also accounts for economic conditions. FiveThirtyEight’s forecasts are generally conservative until late in the race, so those qualify as fairly big changes by our standards.

Ordinarily, this is the point at which I’d urge a little patience. There’s been a lot of news over the past two weeks — the conclusion to the FBI’s investigation into Clinton’s emails and the Dallas shootings of police officers, in particular — and it would be nice to see how the polls settled in after a couple of slow weeks on the campaign trail. However, we’re entering a period of rapidly moving political news. Bernie Sanders endorsed Clinton only Tuesday. Trump is expected to name his VP later this week. And then we’ll have the party conventions. The prospects definitely look better for Trump than they did a week or two ago, but the landscape also looks blurrier, and it may not be until mid-August that we have a chance to catch our breath.

So for the rest of this article, I’m going to focus mostly on the Quinnipiac polls — both to explain why our model reacted relatively strongly to them, when some of the other data wasn’t so bad for Clinton, and as an example of how you might think about “unexpected” polling results as they arise over the next few weeks. If you’re a poll junkie, this situation will seem familiar. You think you have a pretty good idea of where the race stands, but then a couple of splashy polls come out that contradict that impression. You have to figure out how much to incorporate the new polls with the data you had previously.

More

Great analysis!

Published on 13 Jul 2016



Sounds like Scientology.

Source: Mic

By Kathleen Wong July 13, 2016

On July 7, former high school English teacher Louizandre Dauphin was fed up with the news cycle and decided to drive to a quiet place to do some reading.

Sound suspicious? Residents that saw him in his car thought so and, naturally, they called the police, who stopped the black New Brunswick, Canada, resident as he drove back home.

In his subsequent Instagram post about the incident, Dauphin said the officer told him that locals had reported a suspicious black man sitting in a parked car.

In the post, he explains that the week's string of racially charged violence in the United States, compounded with his own personal struggles, left Dauphin "stewing in my apartment," he wrote to his Instagram. So he decided to blow off steam with some nature and reading.

On his drive home, Dauphin was going slightly under the speed limit, so he was confused when an officer pulled up behind him with his lights on. The cop was "kind and respectful," wrote Dauphin, verified his information, asked him the "usual questions" and then asked whether Dauphin was in Janeville earlier that night. When Dauphin expressed shock at being reported for just hanging out in his car, the officer replied, "Well, you know, it's a small town."

Read more: https://mic.com/articles/148519/this-black-man-was-stopped-by-police-for-sitting-in-his-car-reading-c-s-lewis#.k2NbHnTBH

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Okay, so maybe Canadians are a tad bit more racist than I thought. Still doesn't come close to our level, though.

Published on 13 Jul 2016