Demovictory9
Demovictory9's JournalTrump doesn't care about Eddie Gallagher and the Navy SEALs. He cares about what they represent
Trump needs to keep the type of raucous patriots who would support Gallagher onside. They are a large part of his core base. Failing to back a Navy SEAL could play badly, and he doesn’t want to take that risk when going into an election.Spencer reportedly tried to propose a private deal with the White House: that one way of sorting out the Gallagher problem was to restore his rank and allow him to retire as a SEAL. At another time, we might speculate that Donald Trump would love nothing more than a one-on-one meeting with the Navy Secretary to seal an agreement, one he could bring up later as proof that he often meets behind closed doors to talk shop and solve problems with respected and respectable servicepeople. The suggestion that this request was refused and then used against Spencer speaks a lot about the president’s latest domestic strategies.
Of course, Trump’s main concern right now is impeachment. And with impeachment, if not removal, now a virtual certainty — possibly even before Christmas — he needs voter attention to be focused elsewhere. Manufactured outrage over the treatment of a convicted Navy SEAL is the perfect example. It allows Trump to appear loyal to his base and means he can flex his muscles as the commander-in-chief. Protocol and institutional norms be damned, he can say, I’ll stand up for the guys who go to war for America.
Officers, including former secretary Spencer, had made clear that an intervention by the president before all precedent had been followed would undermine "good order and discipline" in the ranks and allow the military to become too politicized. You could argue that Spencer going in front of reporters on Friday when he was still on active duty counts as insubordination. But it’s clear he was trying to make sure protocol was followed. The bigger issue is that Trump does not care which institutions or rules he has to trample over to keep himself afloat with his supporters now.
From flouting international convention over the legal status of Israeli settlements in the West Bank to the contents of his “perfect” phone call with Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump only knows one way: his. The theatrics he brings to the role of president will never go away — particularly when distraction is one of his key weapons in ensuring he makes it into a second term in the White House.
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/trump-navy-seal-eddie-gallagher-trial-war-crimes-a9217666.html
"Trump got his wall after all" - immigration down 70%
In the two years after Trump took office, denials for H1Bs, the most common form of visa for skilled workers, more than doubled. In the same period, wait times for citizenship also doubled, while average processing times for all kinds of visas jumped by 46 percent, even as the quantity of applications went down. In 2018, the United States added just 200,000 immigrants to the population, a startling 70 percent less than the year before.
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Senior adviser Stephen Miller is usually regarded as the White House’s immigration mastermind, but his maneuvering is only a sliver of the story. The most fine-grained and consequential changes would never have been possible without a group of like-minded figures stationed in relevant parts of the government—particularly the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service, the agency within DHS that administers visas. Early in Trump’s presidency, said the former DHS official, there was a “strategic sprinkling” of people who “shared a common vision and were ready to outwork everybody.” They included Gene Hamilton, Miller’s “terrible sword at DHS” (his actual title was senior counselor to the secretary), and Francis Cissna, the soft-spoken former head of USCIS whom colleagues describe as “an encyclopaedia of immigration law” and “a total immigration nerd.” “If you said to him, what’s on page 468, second paragraph” of the Immigration and Nationality Act, another former DHS official marveled, “he would quote it to you.”
Amidst the chaos at DHS, the restrictionists have already radically scaled back America’s asylum and refugee programs for years to come. But no category of immigrant has escaped the uptick of denials and delays—not the Palestinian student with a Harvard scholarship who was deported upon landing in Boston, or the Australian business owner forced to leave after building a life here. Not the Bolshoi Ballet stars who somehow failed to meet the criteria of accomplished artists, or the Iraqi translators who risked their lives for the U.S. military and whose annual admissions went from 325 to just two after the change in administration. Then there are the consequences that are harder to capture in headlines or statistics: the couples whose marriages broke down when the foreign spouse was forced to wait far longer than usual in their home country, and the unknown number of people who have abandoned the attempt to stay because of financial hardship or the strain of living with a level of uncertainty that becomes untenable.
“What became clear to me early on was that these guys wanted to shut down every avenue to get into the U.S.,” the first former senior DHS official said. “They wanted to reduce the number of people who could get in under any category: illegals, legals, refugees, asylum seekers—everything. And they wanted to reduce the number of foreigners already here through any means possible.” No government in modern memory has been this dedicated to limiting every form of immigration to the United States. To find one that was, you have to go a long way back, to 1924.
https://www.huffpost.com/highline/article/invisible-wall/
WeWork chairman posts extravagant dinner on Instagram one day after mass layoffs
https://twitter.com/BenjaminGoggin/status/1198274552293445632
Just one day after the startup laid off 2,400 employees, WeWork chairman Marcelo Claure was eating Michelin-starred pasta — and sharing it on Instagram.
New York Times reporter Amy Chozick tweeted a screenshot from Claure's Instagram story: a photo of the $110 tasting menu from New York City restaurant Babbo with the caption "Pasta overdose" (accompanying wines with the tasting menu add an additional $80 per person). A screen recording tweeted by Business Insider reporter Benjamin Goggin shows a video Claure also posted of the lavish meal.
On Thursday, WeWork confirmed that it had cut 2,400 jobs — about 20 percent of its workforce — after a failed IPO attempt that caused its value to tank from $47 billion to about $8 billion.
This is not the first time WeWork has appeared tone-deaf in the handling of layoff announcements. Back in September, former WeWork CEO Adam Neumann somberly announced mass layoffs at an all-hands meeting, and then minutes later brought in Darryl McDaniels of hip-hop act Run-DMC to perform a set and passed around tequila shots to employees.
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/WeWork-layoffs-chairman-nyc-marcelo-claure-14861275.php#photo-16923343
Trump looks like an angry clown. Does he not own a mirror?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/11/25/how-richard-spencers-firing-illustrates-some-trumps-most-corrupt-impulses/
Russian fighter with freakish biceps easily defeated in MMA fight by opponent 20 years older
https://nypost.com/2019/10/22/russian-fighter-with-freakish-biceps-easily-defeated-in-mma-fight/?utm_source=zergnet.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=zergnet_4590374
A Russian bodybuilder known as “Popeye” was destroyed in an MMA fight in three minutes by an opponent 20 years his senior.
Kirill Tereshin, 23, injected his muscles with highly dangerous synthol and developed huge, Popeye-like arms. But his ridiculous 24-inch biceps could not help him defeat blogger and actor Oleg Mongol at a gym in Abakan in Russia.
The former soldier was submitted in an MMA bout in the first round. Tereshin came out swinging and connected with some early punches, but was later clinched to the cage, taken down and tapped out after a choke.
The loss comes after Tereshin was beaten by Russian slapping champion Vasiliy “The Dumpling” Kamotskiy earlier in the year. Kamotskiy flattened Tereshin with his first punch, proving that fighting may not be his calling.
Dr. Yuriy Serebryanskiny warned Tereshin about the dangers of injecting synthol.
It can cause pulmonary embolisms, nerve damage, infections, sclerosing lipogranuloma, stroke and oil-filled cysts or ulcers in the muscle and could result in amputation.
A White Officer Shoots a Black Colleague, Deepening a Racial Divide A
A White Officer Shoots a Black Colleague, Deepening a Racial Divide
Although they all wear blue, white officers and black officers experience strained relations in St. Louis’s Police Department.
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Mr. Green’s shift as a community liaison officer with the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department had ended hours earlier, and he was spending a quiet evening helping a friend work on his pickup truck. Then a sedan came screeching around the corner and ended up near his front yard. Another sedan pulled up in a hurry, and Mr. Green felt a brief sense of ease when men in police vests hopped out. They were fellow officers. Sort of.
Mr. Green had been a police officer for more than a decade. And while he had bonded with colleagues across the department, he also had come to see distinct differences between black officers like himself and white officers like those involved in the pursuit that night. He had heard his share of racially insensitive remarks at work, but on that balmy evening in 2017, Mr. Green’s outlook on the differences between black and white officers would be damaged beyond repair.
He heard a bang. He felt a sting in his right forearm. A white colleague had shot him.
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On the night Mr. Green was shot, he said, he did what he thought he had to: He sprang into action when he saw an armed man on the run. As he confronted the suspect, though, he heard someone order him to drop his weapon. Mr. Green tossed down his gun and belly-flopped onto the grass. A white detective recognized him a few moments later and warned the others that Mr. Green was a police officer, too.
Mr. Green got up and ambled toward the detective who knew him, his gun pointed down in his right hand. He held out his badge so there would be no confusion. He had grown up on the city’s North Side and had been stopped plenty of times by the police for no good reason before he had gotten his badge, he said.
He took a few steps and then again heard a voice yell for him to drop his weapon, followed almost immediately, he said, by a gunshot. He clutched his right forearm and looked over at the white officer who had shot him.
“Man, you done shot me,” Mr. Green recalled saying before blood started spouting from his arm. He became weak and dropped to his knees.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/24/us/st-louis-race-police.html
Toddler on vegan diet dies
https://m.sfgate.com/news/article/A-baby-kept-on-a-vegan-diet-died-His-parents-14855623.phpThe parents of an 18-month-old boy who died in September from malnourishment have been arrested by Florida police on charges of manslaughter and child neglect.
On Sept. 27, around 4 a.m., Sheila O'Leary nursed the child briefly and, she told authorities, became worried when he began breathing shallowly, the Florida Fort Myers News-Press reported. Rather than call for help, though, the O'Learys went to sleep.
The paramedics who responded to a 911 call later that day pronounced the boy dead at the Cape Coral, Florida, home; he weighed just 17 pounds when he died, according to police reports, significantly under the average weight for a child his age, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Sheila and Ryan O'Leary told investigators that the vegan family only eats fruit, vegetables and raw foods, such as mangoes, rambutans, bananas and avocados, according to the News-Press. The parents supplemented the toddler's diet with breast milk.
The child, who was home-birthed had never seen a doctor.
Eric Trump uses father's impeachment hearing to promote his wine
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/eric-trump-wine-impeachment-sondland-evidence-a9211691.htmlEric Trump uses father's impeachment hearing to promote his wine
‘It is a perfect day for a nice bottle of this,’ says US president’s second son
Eric Trump reacted to damning testimony against his father at the impeachment hearings by promoting the family wine business.
The US president’s second son tweeted on Wednesday that it was “a perfect day” for a bottle of 2016 vintage Trump Meritage Monticello red.
“These people are insane,” he added, along with a picture of the branded product and a plug for the Trump Winery Twitter account.
The Yale-Harvard football game has been delayed because of students taking over the field at halftim
https://twitter.com/JoshuaPotash/status/1198325343997829126Penn State molester Jerry Sandusky resentenced to 30 to 60 years
He answered 'absolutely' when asked if he still denied the charges as he entered the courthouse on Friday in a mustard prison jumpsuit, clutching a folder of legal papers.
However Judge Maureen Skerda upheld the original term.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7714449/Sandusky-expected-court-new-sentencing-abuse-case.html
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