October 13, 2018

the "babysitting while black story". 911 call released

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6271163/Shocking-911-call-woman-reported-black-babysitter-released.html

Disheartening 911 audio released Friday hears an Atlanta woman who called to report a black man babysitting two kids tell the operator she has a 'funny feeling' about him.

The unidentified caller first said in the call, in which she sounds concerned: 'Hi there, I'm in the Walmart parking lot at Barrett Parkway and I just got my nails done... and I see this black gentleman with these two little white kids and I just had a funny feeling.'

The woman said she began driving around while closely watching the behavior of the man, since identified as Corey Lewis, who believes he was racially profiled by the stranger.

Lewis had been caring for Addison, 10, and Nicholas, six, on Sunday, while their parents, David Parker and Dana Mango, went out for dinner.

'I rode around and I just came back and saw the girl get in and the little boy... and I said, "Are these kids OK? Do you know these kids?,"' the caller said. 'And he goes, "why wouldn't I?" and I said "let me see the little girl" and he goes, "No."'

She told the operator, who was silent during most of the call, that she continued to ask to speak with Addison about Lewis.

The woman then told the dispatcher 'it could be nothing' but if she didn't report the sighting she 'would be up all night.'

The operator asked the woman if she wanted to meet with a police officer, and she said yes, insisting a welfare check needed to be done for the kids.

The woman then asked: 'He just got gas and now he's pulling away... should I follow him?'

The operator replied to the woman: 'No, ma'am... I'd recommend not following him.

She added: 'I think he knows I'm watching him. I'm right behind him... and if I'm wrong, that's great. I'm thrilled.

'And maybe he knows their mom, I don't know, but I don't know that he knows them.'

October 13, 2018

Top GOP funding group snubs GOP incumbents Rohrabacher and Walters 3 weeks before midterm election

http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-gop-money-20181012-story.html

In a worrisome sign for two endangered Orange County lawmakers, a major Republican Party funding group has passed over the pair in its opening round of broadcast television advertising across Southern California.

The omission of Reps. Dana Rohrabacher and Mimi Walters by the Congressional Leadership Fund, a political action committee closely aligned with House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), comes at a crucial inflection point in the midterm election when the two parties begin assessing their likely winners and losers.
The decisions are particularly acute for the GOP, which is facing a tsunami of Democratic campaign cash ahead of a feared blue wave on Nov. 6.

“Republicans are taking a cold-blooded look at races to decide where to put resources and where to withdraw resources to put somewhere else,” said Stuart Rothenberg, a nonpartisan election analyst who has spent decades sizing up campaigns.

The GOP has already cut loose several incumbents, including Reps. Mike Coffman in the Denver suburbs and Mike Bishop in southern Michigan.

Democrats need a gain of 23 seats nationwide to take control of the House, which they surrendered after a blowout loss in the 2010 midterm election.

October 12, 2018

Tribal officials will create street addresses at the polls - to thwart GOP voter suppression

Native American voting rights activists in North Dakota have launched an audacious plan aimed at pushing back against a Supreme Court ruling that threatens the reelection of Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.) — and that could decide the fate of the Senate in the process.

The high court decided 6 to 2 Tuesday to leave in place a state law that requires residents to provide an ID displaying a residential address rather than a P.O. box number to vote. Republican lawmakers who pushed for the measure say the rule is designed to combat voter fraud.

But tribal officials and Democrats say it appears aimed at making it harder for thousands of Native Americans to vote, particularly those who live on reservations without conventional street names. The law specifically bans the use of P.O. boxes as an alternative form of address, rendering many tribal ID cards invalid.


Native American activists have responded with plans to create addresses on the spot for those who need them on Election Day.

Tribal officials will stand outside polling stations on Nov. 6 with laptops and access to rural addressing software and a shared database of voter names. North Dakota is the only state that does not require voter registration, meaning eligible voters can generally show up at the polls and cast a ballot so long as they have proper identification.

O.J. Semans, chief executive of Four Directions, a national Native American voting rights group, said the strategy was “legally watertight” and necessary to counter the “devastating” court ruling.

“Even if it doesn’t change the overall result, it’s about fighting back,” Semans said. “We have to fight back.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/in-senate-battleground-native-american-voting-rights-activists-fight-back-against-voter-id-restrictions/2018/10/12/7bc33ad2-cd60-11e8-a360-85875bac0b1f_story.html?utm_term=.423144552822

October 12, 2018

Republican voters don't care about Trump's corruption -- and here's why

Republican voters don’t care about Trump’s corruption — and here’s why
Republicans have convinced themselves that Democrats are dirty, so they feel entitled to be even dirtier

T
he past couple of weeks of the news have served up a hefty reminder not just of the deep corruption of Donald Trump, but of the entire Republican Party. On top of the headline-dominating story about Republicans ignoring all sorts of ethical concerns to place Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, there was also a blockbuster New York Times report showing that Trump amassed his massive fortune not through hard work or business acumen, but old-fashioned tax fraud and corruption. Meanwhile, there's a pileup of stories indicating that Republicans intend to shore up their prospects in the November midterms through blatant and racist cheating, using a series of Jim Crow-style strategies to keep black and Native American voters from the polls in November.

To add to this already disturbing situation, there's the shady behavior Trump is displaying around the disappearance and likely murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist who has run afoul of Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia and big buddy of presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner. Saudi Arabia is widely believed to be behind the attack, but Trump — who himself is overtly hostile to the free press — seems reluctant to do anything about the situation, citing his unwillingness to spike an arms deal with Saudi Arabia. It's a stance made even more disturbing by the fact that arms deal isn't even real, but more like a fantasy unlikely to come to fruition. There is also reason to believe that Trump is personally enriching himself off the Saudi government, which likely factors into his decision-making.

Despite all this, in a story that's become all too predictable, Trump's approval ratings don't budge, lingering a few percentage points north or south of 40 percent. He's not popular and never has been, but it's clear that the 40 percent of voters who love him really do not care if he's a crook. And despite the GOP's widespread corruption, FiveThirtyEight still gives the party a four-in-five chance of holding a Senate majority in the midterm elections.

It's easy to chalk off this widespread indifference to criminality and corruption among Republican voters as evidence that such voters are themselves amoral. But that reading is overly simplistic. It's highly unlikely that 40 percent of the country thinks it's no big deal to cheat or steal or lie under oath or shrug off a murder likely ordered by your son-in-law's friend. Nor is it satisfying to simply blame partisanship. Democratic voters are also highly partisan, but don't seem to have nearly the same tolerance for immoral behavior being conducted in their name.


Instead, the likeliest reason for this willingness of Republican voters to indulge all sorts of wicked behavior in pursuit of power is that they've convinced themselves that the "other side" does it just as much. It's an attitude called "what-about-ism," and it allows Republican voters to tell themselves that their side can be as shady and corrupt as they want to be, because Democrats do it, too.

Of course, the fly in that particular ointment is that Democrats do not, in fact, do it too. Barack Obama did not put an accused sexual predator on the Supreme Court after that person repeatedly lied under oath, nor did he shrug it off when an American journalist was killed because he happened to be fond of the alleged murderer. Democrats are not trying to steal elections through widespread cheating. Hillary Clinton was no tax fraud and was able to prove it by releasing her tax returns, something Trump continues to refuse to do.

https://www.salon.com/2018/10/12/republican-voters-dont-care-about-trumps-corruption-and-heres-why/

October 12, 2018

More Americans disapprove of Kavanaugh's confirmation than support it, new poll shows

More Americans disapprove of Brett M. Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court than approve, and a narrow majority says congressional investigation of the new justice should not end with his elevation to the court, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

The Senate’s 50-to-48 vote last week to approve the 53-year-old Kavanaugh’s lifetime appointment was the closest on a Supreme Court justice since the 1880s, and the poll shows the public’s reaction was almost as divided.

It also suggests the tumultuous battle over his nomination could harm the court’s reputation as the nonpartisan branch of government.

The survey, conducted during Kavanaugh’s first week on the bench, shows that 43 percent of Americans believe the court’s rulings will be more politically motivated with President Trump’s second nominee on the court, compared with 10 percent who said they will be less political. To 39 percent of the public, Kavanaugh’s presence will make no difference in the degree of partisanship.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/more-americans-disapprove-of-kavanaughs-confirmation-than-support-it-new-poll-shows/2018/10/12/18dbf872-cd93-11e8-a3e6-44daa3d35ede_story.html?utm_term=.bebac48ac716

October 12, 2018

So many people have had their DNA sequenced that they've put other people's privacy in jeopardy

http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-dna-genealogy-privacy-20181012-story.html

Everyone’s DNA sequence is unique. But for those who wish to maintain their genetic privacy, it may not be unique enough.

A new study argues that more than half of Americans could be identified by name if all you had to start with was a sample of their DNA and a few basic facts, such as where they live and how about how old they might be.

------------

To test the growing power of these sites, researchers led by Columbia University computer scientist Yaniv Erlich set out to see whether they could find a person’s name — and thus, his identity — if all they had to go on was a piece of his DNA and a small amount of biographical information.

They started with a full DNA sequence from a person whose genetic information was published anonymously as part of an unrelated scientific study. (They had actually identified this woman in a previous study, but for the purposes of this work, they pretended they didn’t know who she was.)

Erlich and his collaborators uploaded her genetic code to GEDmatch and ran a search to see if she had any relations on the site.They found two: one in North Dakota and one in Wyoming.

The researchers could tell they were all related because they shared a number of single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs. These are single letters in specific spots among the roughly 3 billion A’s, Cs, Ts and Gs that make up the human genome.The more SNPs people share, the more closely related they are.

By comparing the DNA of all three relatives, Erlich’s team was able to find a common ancestral couple that were the Utah woman’s great-grandparents.

Next, the researchers scoured genealogical websites and other sources for additional descendants of that long-ago couple. They found 10 children and hundreds of grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Then they started culling their massive list of descendants. They eliminated all the men from the sample, then those who were not alive when the Utah woman’s DNA was sequenced. The authors also knew that their subject was married and how many children she had, which helped them zero in on their target.

After a long day of painstaking work, they researchers were able to correctly name the owner of the DNA sample.
http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-dna-genealogy-privacy-20181012-story.html

October 12, 2018

Kansas Republican Official Michael Kalny resigns after slur against Dem Sharice David

A GOP official in Kansas stepped down from his post after threatening to send a Native American congressional candidate “packing to the reservation” in a Facebook post.

Michael Kalny, of Shawnee, resigned from his position as a Republican precinct committee member on Wednesday after sending the message Monday regarding Democratic candidate Sharice Davids to Anne Pritchett, the president of the Johnson County Democratic Women group, the Kansas City Star reports.

“Little Ms. Pritchett – you and your comrades stealth attack on Yoder is going to blow up in your leftist face,” Kalny wrote. “The REAL REPUBLICANS will remember what the scum DEMONRATS tried to do to Kavanaugh in November. Your radical socialist kick boxing lesbian Indian will be sent back packing to the reservation!!!!!!!!!”

Johnson County Republican Chairman Mike Jones confirmed Kalny’s resignation.

“He reflected an apologetic attitude and didn’t want to bring negative attention on the party or candidates running in this area,” Jones told the newspaper.

https://nypost.com/2018/10/11/gop-official-resigns-after-message-threatening-lesbian-indian-democrat/

Other GOP officials swiftly condemned Kalny’s remark, saying it represented the “same type of rhetoric” that prompts Republicans to criticize Democrats.

“We must do better than this,” Kansas GOP director Jim Joice told the newspaper.

Pritchett, meanwhile, said she was “stunned” by Kalny’s comment, which she said could have been a response to messages she left in comments on the Facebook page of Davids’ opponent, incumbent Republican Rep. Kevin Yoder.

If elected, Davids — an attorney who has previously dabbled in mixed martial arts — would be the first openly gay member of Kansas’ congressional delegation and the first female Native American lawmaker in Washington, according to the newspaper.

Kalny’s message, according to Davids, doesn’t “represent Kansas values,” as well as those of other Republicans, many of whom support her campaign, she said.

Kalny, for his part, was less than apologetic when asked about the message by the Kansas City Star, although it’s unclear exactly whom he was referring to, according to the newspaper.

–– ADVERTISEMENT ––



“What is this lady trying to accomplish?” Kalny said.

FILED UNDER GOP , KANSAS , POLITICS , SOCIAL MEDIA FAILS , US HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
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October 12, 2018

Dana Zeigler reaction to seeing a black teen at her front door

She recalled the initial moments when she noticed Brennan walking toward her home.

Zeigler was arrested and charged with assault with intent to murder and possessing a firearm

‘I was screaming as loud as I possibly could, saying somebody is breaking into my house,’ she said.

‘I saw a black person standing at my door and I screamed at him and I asked him what he was doing there.

‘He tells me that he is going to school and at that point he approaches the door, forward momentum, comes forward, opens the screen door, and puts his hand on the door handle again, as though he's coming into my house.’

Dana Zeigler testified that she panicked. Her screams woke up her husband, Jeffrey Zeigler, who was in a deep sleep.

She said Brennan did not look like an innocent student.

‘He didn't look like a child,’ she told the court.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6267725/Surveillance-video-shows-retired-fireman-shooting-black-teen-rang-doorbell.html

Jeffrey Zeigler said that it wasn’t until he watched the surveillance video that he realized the person who came to his porch was a 14-year-old boy.

‘I felt extremely remorseful. I was - I was just shocked,’ he said.

He was then asked what, if anything, he would have done differently.

‘I would have given him a ride to school,’ Zeigler said.

October 12, 2018

the saddest part about Trump bringing a mentally ill rapper to the White House ...

the saddest part about Trump bringing a mentally ill rapper to the White House to take the media's focus off climate change, the election, and his tax evasion is that it totally worked

https://twitter.com/MattOswaltVA/status/1050447183214862336

October 11, 2018

Trump, no longer ratings gold, loses his prime-time spot on Fox News

Trump, no longer ratings gold, loses his prime-time spot on Fox News
In a crucial period with the midterms less than a month away, some in the White House are worried that the president is losing a megaphone to his base.

President Donald Trump loves to brag about ratings, but he’s not getting them anymore.

As he’s ramped up his rally schedule ahead of the midterms, viewership numbers for the raucous prime-time events have been roughly similar to — sometimes dipping below — Fox News’ regular programming, and the network has recently stopped airing most evening events in full.

During three Trump rallies last week, Fox News showed clips and highlights from his speeches but stuck largely with its normal weekday prime-time programming. On Saturday, when “Fox Report Weekend” and “Justice with Judge Jeanine” would ordinarily air, the network showed Trump’s speech from Topeka, Kan., in full. But on Tuesday, a rally in Council Bluffs, Iowa, was particularly hard to find — it was not aired live on any major network, and even C-SPAN cut away for other news. And on Wednesday night, as Trump took the stage in Erie, Pa., at 7 p.m., Fox News stuck with its coverage of Hurricane Michael.

Since Trump took office, CNN and MSNBC have mostly declined to air his campaign rallies, though, like Fox News, they’ll typically carry any presidential speeches or comments to reporters.

Fox still provides livestreams of the campaign events online, but during a crucial period, with the midterms less than a month away, some in the White House are worried that the president is losing a prime-time megaphone to his base.

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/10/10/trump-tv-ratings-fox-news-891621