Elizabeth Warren Calls for Border Wall Money to Be Redirected to Fight Coronavirus

Elizabeth Warren Calls for Border Wall Money to Be Redirected to Fight Coronavirus

Sen. Elizabeth Warren said that funds being used to construct the president’s border wall with Mexico should be redirected to help contain coronavirus, a quickly spreading epidemic with origins in China.

“I’m going to be introducing a plan tomorrow to take every dime that the president is now taking to spend on his racist wall at the southern border and divert it to the coronavirus,” the candidate said during a CNN town hall on Wednesday evening.

The senator also had harsh words for the president earlier in the week, posting tweets accusing him of “absolutely bungling” the United States’ response to the spreading virus. She accused Trump of “putting our public health and our economy at risk” and said that is “why we need a real plan and an adult in charge.”

A woman raised $170,000 for Elizabeth Warren by dangling gossip.

A woman raised $170,000 for Elizabeth Warren by dangling gossip. The idea caught on.

Charlotte Clymer was on her way home from drinks with a friend on Sunday night when her thoughts drifted to how much she’d hated the finale of a TV show she was once “super invested in.”

It seemed like a relatable moment. So Clymer, a spokeswoman for the Human Rights Campagn fired off a tweet to her 277,000 followers, describing how she still gets mad thinking about how the show ended. She left it unnamed, not wanting to risk hurting the writers’ feelings. But everyone kept asking.

Finally, Clymer threw out an unlikely proposition: If her followers raised $10,000 for Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign in the next hour and a half, she wrote, “I’ll reveal the name. But it has to be that much! If we hit $9,999, it’ll remain a secret forever.”

“I put it out on a whim, and it started blowing up,” Clymer said, adding that neither she nor the Human Rights Campaign have made formal endorsements. “Before I knew it, it went viral."

By midnight, they had not only hit the goal but exceeded it, raising $27,000. She named the show (“Girls”) and returned to Twitter on Monday night, half-jokingly, with another offer. She would reveal the senator with whom she’d had a “terrible interaction” — this time for $100,000 in donations to Warren (D-Mass.) by midnight Wednesday.

[...]

Introducing The President Trump Foundation Line

If you haven't seen it, you owe it to yourself to take a minute to watch

Introducing The President Trump Foundation Line (2nd video at link, run time 53 secs)

Alice Allison Dunnigan -- Teacher, Journalist, Civil rights activist

Alice Allison Dunnigan

Alice Allison Dunnigan (April 27, 1906 – May 6, 1983) was an African-American journalist, civil rights activist and author. Dunnigan was the first African-American female correspondent to receive White House credentials, and the first black female member of the Senate and House of Representatives press galleries. She wrote an autobiography entitled Alice A. Dunnigan: A Black Woman's Experience. She also has a Kentucky State Historical Commission marker dedicated to her.

Alice chronicled the decline of Jim Crow during the 1940s and 1950s, which influenced her to become a civil rights activist. She was inducted into the Kentucky Hall of Fame in 1982.

During her time as a reporter, she became the first black journalist to accompany a president while traveling, covering Harry S. Truman's 1948 campaign trip.

[ ... ]

As a writer for the Associated Negro Press news service, Dunnigan sought press credentials to cover Congress and the Senate. The Standing Committee of Correspondents (newspaper reporters who ran the congressional press galleries) denied her request on the grounds that she was writing for a weekly newspaper, and reporters covering the U.S. Capitol were required to write for daily publications. Six months later, however, she was granted press clearance, becoming the first African-American woman to gain accreditation. In 1947 she was named bureau chief of the Associate Negro Press, a position she held for 14 years.

In 1948 Dunnigan was one of three African Americans and one of two women in the press corps that followed President Harry S. Truman's Western campaign, paying her own way to do it. Also that year, she became the first African-American female White House correspondent, and was the first black woman elected to the Women's National Press Club. Her association with this and other organizations allowed her to travel extensively in the United States and to Canada, Israel, South America, Africa, Mexico, and the Caribbean. She was honored by Haitian President François Duvalier for her articles on Haiti.

During her years covering the White House, Dunnigan suffered many of the racial indignities of the time, but also earned a reputation as a hard-hitting reporter. She was barred from entering certain establishments to cover President Eisenhower, and had to sit with the servants to cover Senator Taft's funeral. When she attended formal White House functions, she was mistaken for the wife of a visiting dignitary; no one could imagine a black woman attending such an event on her own. During Eisenhower's two administrations, the president resorted first to not calling on her and later to asking for her questions beforehand because she was known to ask such difficult questions, often about race. No other member of the press corps was required to submit their questions before a press conference, and Dunnigan refused. When Kennedy took office, he welcomed Dunnigan's tough questions and answered them frankly.

[ ... ]

just saw Hillary and Chelsea on Late Late Show

Don't know if it's a re-run or not, but James Corden just had Hillary and Chelsea Clinton on the Late Late Show. It was hilarious.

Damn, we were robbed!

superbowl on CTV and C-band FTA

If you have a C-band satellite dish and receiver, you can watch the superbowl on the Canadian satellite feed:

107.3W 4020 30000 V

It's probably on Ku band also but mine's screwed up.

GOP trying to eliminate trans people

Whose body? The GOP wants total control.

South Dakota May Criminalize Lifesaving Healthcare for Trans Youth in Latest Attack on LGBTQ Rights

[ ... ]

It’s the third bill targeting trans youth introduced in South Dakota this year alone and one of more than 25 anti-LGBTQ bills introduced around the country. We speak with Chase Strangio, deputy director for transgender justice with the ACLU’s LGBT & HIV Project, and the award-winning director Yance Ford, who became the first openly transgender director nominated for an Academy Award for his film “Strong Island” in 2018. “It never ceases to amaze me how determined people are to erase trans people — even when they’re children,” Ford says.

[ ... ]

AMY GOODMAN: And I want to get to that, the other legislation. But first, Chase Strangio, in 2016, you wrote a piece on the ACLU’s blog titled “If I Were a Student in South Dakota, Chances Are I Would Not Survive into Adulthood.” You talked about suicidality. Can you give us the figures on trans youth taking their own lives?

CHASE STRANGIO: Yeah, no, it’s staggering. And I wrote that piece in 2016 because South Dakota was in the exact same position, considering a bill to bar trans young people from accessing the restroom consistent with who they are. And we’re talking about a community that has documented rates of suicidality that are close to 50%. And those documented rates are directly tied to discrimination that people face in every aspect of life. And when you have government officials with the most power in the state telling young people that they either don’t exist or that they shouldn’t, we know that that exacerbates the rates of suicide.

And what we do also know is that when young people are given access to the very medication that is being criminalized by this bill, those suicide rates drop to being comparable to nontransgender peers. And so, we have lawmakers equipped with information about how young people can either live or die, and they are choosing, quite clearly, the path of increasing the likelihood that our communities suffer serious harm, including early death. And, you know, I think about myself as a young person, and I struggled so much, but I didn’t have lawmakers telling me that my care should be criminalized. Now we’re in a context where that’s what lawmakers are saying to the youth who are watching. And we know that they are hurting because of it.

no it is not possible

I am not talking about the type of verification you may have learned about in CS. None of the examples you give are election systems.

With paper ballots (physical tokens):

* Paper ballots allow the voter to verify that the ballot represents the voter's vote.

* The general public can verify that the voter cast a ballot, without having to know the vote.

* The general public can verify that the paper ballots are not tampered with while waiting to be counted.

* The general public can observe and verify the count of the ballots.

In electronic voting (abstractions, not physical tokens):

- The voter cannot verify that the internal state of the device represents the voter's vote. (This is true no matter how many pre-election or post-election tests are performed on the device).

- The general public cannot observe or verify that the voter cast a ballot. (The electorate has a critical, prime responsibility to observe and verify this).

- The general public cannot observe or verify the (abstract, invisible, electronic) ballots are true to the forms (state) they were in when cast.

- The general public cannot observe or verify the (invisible, electronic) count of the (abstract, invisible, electronic) ballots.

Elections are far more important than the check-out line at the grocery store, bank or Amazon. Verification is needed by the individual voter, by the rest of the electorate, and by the general public while still maintaining a secret ballot. Physical tokens that human beings can perceive are required.

Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon makes it simple enough for GOPers

Puppet Trump wanted his own puppet in Ukraine

Putin's puppet, Donald Trump, wanted to be like his daddy Vladdy. He pounced on the new president of Ukraine in the hope of having his own puppet, partially to impress and please Putin, but also to show that he's a powerful dictator, too.

The investigation of the Bidens and 2016 was not as important as having the head of a foreign state announce an investigation. The announcement could be pointed to by Trump over and over for as long as there was no conclusion from the sham investigation. With no actual investigation or conclusions, it would provide fodder for unending right-wing conspiracy theories and incitement.

If Ukraine's President Zelensky had done this one favor for Trump, the next favor would be easier to secure and Trump would have his very own puppet. Trump would no longer be the odd man out in the ring of dictators he so admires.

The whistleblower blew up the wannabe dictator's "perfect" plan. Trump got caught. Is it any wonder he rages about the whistleblower?