January 22, 2020

Warren campaign hires pair of top Castro aides

Elizabeth Warren has hired two senior officials from Julián Castro’s presidential campaign: campaign manager Maya Rupert and political director Natalie Montelongo, a Warren official told POLITICO Tuesday.

Rupert, who previously was a senior policy adviser for Castro at the Department of Housing and Urban Development and before that worked at the National Center for Lesbian Rights, will be a senior adviser and serve as a campaign surrogate. Montelongo, who previously worked at the ACLU and in Nevada and Colorado during Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, will be a senior strategist focusing on political and constituency outreach along with the campaign’s surrogate program.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/01/21/warren-campaign-castro-aides-101670

January 19, 2020

@TulsiGabbard challenged to a push-up contest at a Manchester Town Hall (video)

https://twitter.com/JeanWMUR/status/1217975768208347136

January 19, 2020

Sanders campaign knocks Biden on Social Security track record

TheHill.com
Sanders campaign knocks Biden on Social Security track record
BY MARTY JOHNSON - 01/18/20 07:28 PM EST 1

Just In...

Sen. Bernie Sanders' (I-Vt.) campaign continued its battle with former Vice President Joe Biden by criticizing Biden's track record on Social Security.

"Joe Biden should be honest with voters and stop trying to doctor his own public record of consistently and repeatedly trying to cut Social Security," Sanders' campaign manager Faiz Shakir said Saturday in a statement.

"The facts are very clear: Biden not only pushed to cut Social Security -- he is on tape proudly bragging about it on multiple occasions."

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/478948-sanders-campaign-knocks-biden-on-social-security-history

January 18, 2020

Rod Rosenstein says he made call to release Strzok-Page texts

Former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein authorized the release to the media of text messages between two highly placed FBI employees who exchanged criticism of then-candidate Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign, the Justice Department has revealed in a new court filing.

Rosenstein also said in the court filing submitted shortly before midnight Friday that he made the decision to share the messages with the press in part to protect FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI attorney Lisa Page from the drip effect of incremental releases of the texts by lawmakers or others.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/01/18/rosenstein-strzok-page-texts-100776

January 13, 2020

Inspector General Warns Public About New Twist To Social Security Phone Scams

https://blog.ssa.gov/inspector-general-warns-public-about-new-twist-to-social-security-phone-scams/

Social Security, Gail S. Ennis, is warning the public that telephone scammers may send faked documents by email to convince victims to comply with their demands. The Social Security Administration Office of the Inspector General (OIG) has received reports of victims who received emails with attached letters and reports that appeared to be from Social Security or Social Security OIG. The letters may use official letterhead and government “jargon” to convince victims they are legitimate; they may also contain misspellings and grammar mistakes.

This is the latest variation on Social Security phone scams, which continue to be widespread throughout the United States. Using robocalls or live callers, fraudsters pretend to be government employees and claim there is identity theft or another problem with one’s Social Security number, account, or benefits. They may threaten arrest or other legal action, or may offer to increase benefits, protect assets, or resolve identity theft. They often demand payment via retail gift card, cash, wire transfer, internet currency such as Bitcoin, or pre-paid debit card.

Inspector General Ennis urges continued vigilance against all types of phone scams no matter what “proof” callers may offer. As we continue to increase public awareness of phone scams, criminals will come up with new ways to convince people of their legitimacy. Social Security will never:

threaten you with arrest or other legal action unless you immediately pay a fine or fee;
promise a benefit increase or other assistance in exchange for payment;
require payment by retail gift card, cash, wire transfer, internet currency, or prepaid debit card; or
send official letters or reports containing personally identifiable information via email.

If there is ever a problem with your Social Security number or record, in most cases Social Security will mail you a letter. If you do need to submit payments to Social Security, the agency will send a letter with instructions and payment options. You should never pay a government fee or fine using retail gift cards, cash, internet currency, wire transfers, or pre-paid debit cards. The scammers ask for payment this way because it is very difficult to trace and recover.

If you receive a call or email that you believe to be suspicious, about a problem with your Social Security number or account, hang up or do not respond. We encourage the public to report Social Security phone scams using our dedicated online form, at https://oig.ssa.gov. Please share this information with your friends and family, to help spread awareness about phone scams. For more information, please visit https://oig.ssa.gov/scam.

January 7, 2020

Is Iran a Rational Actor? We're About to Find Out

Bobby Ghosh
BloombergJanuary 6, 2020
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Caveat emptor: Anybody who claims to know how Iran will respond to the killing of Qassem Soleimani is either a liar or a fool. The history of the Islamic Republic provides few meaningful pointers, because it has never been here before. None of its foreign enemies has taken out a figure of comparable importance to the Tehran regime.

No Iranian military commander of Soleimani’s standing was killed in the 1980-88 war with Iraq. The nuclear scientists assassinated — presumably by Israel — in the 2010s were important to the regime, but hardly as influential as the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ elite Quds Force.

The 1988 downing of Iran Air 655 by an American warship provoked similar outrage, but the military and political impact of Soleimani’s death exceeds even the collective weight of the 290 people killed on that aircraft. So it’s not safe to conclude that, because Iran never acted on solemn oaths of revenge then — “The criminal United States should know that the unlawfully shed blood in the disaster ... will be avenged in the same blood-spattered sky over the Persian Gulf” — that it will not do so now.

Its response to Soleimani’s death-by-drone will answer a question that has attended every discussion about Iran since 1979: is the Islamic Republic a rational actor?

Plenty of smart people — including military men such as General Martin Dempsey, former Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff — say it is. Other foreign-policy thinkers take the more nuanced view that Iran is rational without being reasonable: It has different priorities from those of its enemies, but its behavior is entirely logical in the context of those priorities.

My own view is that the regime has just one priority: its own perpetuation. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has demonstrated repeatedly in his three decades in charge that his sole objective is to preserve the peculiar form government that vests him with vast power over his people with little accountability. But his pursuit of that priority is as likely to be informed by ideology as it is by logic, as much by paranoia as it is by pragmatism.

Consider the regime’s visceral hostility toward Israel, with which Iran has no borders and no history of conflict — and, indeed, a record of mutually beneficial cooperation until the Islamic Republic chose to make it a bogeyman. A pragmatic Khamenei would, at the very least, ignore Israel; only ideology, and an imagined enmity, prevents this.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/iran-rational-actor-were-131008912.html

January 6, 2020

The one play which sealed Seahawks victory over Eagles...

https://www.seahawks.com/news/russell-wilson-spectacular-in-seahawks-wild-card-win-at-philadelphia

January 5, 2020

My dream candidate exists - and her name is Elizabeth Warren

If I was going to invent a dream candidate, she would be grounded in small-town, rural or heartland America but able to hold her own in the citadels of power on the coasts. She would comfort the afflicted with the same passion with which she afflicts the comfortable, and she would understand the causes of those afflictions and have good ideas about how to remedy them. She would be moved by compassion but wouldn’t ask us to rely on compassion; she would have tangible strategies for widening our distribution of income, healthcare, education and opportunity, and she would be smart about the intersections of race, gender, class and the rest.

Warren doesn't just frighten billionaires – she scares the whole establishment
Robert Reich
Read more
She would have been around long enough to remember that since the 1980s the government has dismantled a lot of systems that made us more safe and more equal, and she’d be fresh enough to imagine new ways out of the consequences of that catastrophic dismantling. Also she would have to be funny and have big plans to address climate change. OK, she already exists, and I’m talking about Elizabeth Warren. She is, to me, a better candidate for president than I ever expected we’d have.

My dream candidate would’ve been a woman of color with all these qualities, and my dreamiest dream candidate would be a woman of color with Medusa hair who could turn the entire Republican Senate to stone with a glance, but Warren is who’s left in the race, and she is magnificent, and superheroes from Megan Rapinoe to Roxane Gay agree. Also, she pretty much turned Wells Fargo’s CEO into stone in a 2016 Senate banking committee hearing, more than a decade after she became one of the most outspoken experts telling Wall Street why it’s vicious and half a decade after she endorsed Occupy Wall Street. The strength of her candidacy is shown by how she’s made it to the front of the race despite misogyny from across the political spectrum, the wrath of the billionaires pouring money – and themselves – into the race, and the smears and distortions of the mainstream media.

Really I see her as a combination of three superpowers: wonkiness, radicalness and what for lack of a better term I would call Big Structural Mom Energy. The wonkiness is how she set new standards in primary campaigns with those famous plans – far more detailed, with the costs accounted for, than was usual before she arrived. The depth with which she understands the economic system – taxes, banks, bankruptcies, credit cards, home and student loans, redlining – is the depth with which she can change it.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/31/2020-dream-candidate-elizabeth-warren-democrats

January 4, 2020

Gen. Petraeus on Qasem Soleimani's killing: 'It's impossible to overstate the significance'

Q: Would you have recommended this course of action right now?

A: I'd hesitate to answer that just because I am not privy to the intelligence that was the foundation for the decision, which clearly was, as was announced, this was a defensive action, that Soleimani was going into the country to presumably approve further attacks. Without really being in the inner circle on that, I think it's very difficult to either second-guess or to even think through what the recommendation might have been.

Again, it is impossible to overstate the significance of this action. This is much more substantial than the killing of Osama bin Laden. It's even more substantial than the killing of Baghdadi.

https://www.pri.org/stories/2020-01-03/gen-petraeus-qasem-soleimani-s-killing-its-impossible-overstate-significance?fbclid=IwAR1TRggBoSyN-la1qkv013IY2k4ZybZhXoA8KMlI-1ZYIUg-mi0tUoKhbYg

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Factual Reporting: HIGH

December 29, 2019

Is Betelgeuse, one of the sky's brightest stars, on the brink of a supernova?

One of the sky’s brightest lights is losing its shine.

Since the start of December, the star Betelgeuse — the gleaming right shoulder of the constellation Orion — has been rapidly growing dim. Just 650 light-years from Earth, it’s usually the ninth most luminous star in the sky. Right now, it wouldn’t even break the top 20.

Betelgeuse is a “variable” star, known for wild fluctuations in its brightness, but scientists have never recorded it changing quite so fast. Such strange behavior from a beloved star has them wondering: Is this a sign that Betelgeuse is about to explode?

Astronomers know that day is bound to come. Betelgeuse is at least 15 times more massive than the sun and wide enough that, if we moved it to our solar system, it would extend past the orbit of Jupiter. “Supergiants” like this tend to live fast and die young, and Betelgeuse’s red color indicates that it has already moved to one of the last stages of a star’s life: fusing helium atoms into ever-heavier elements, which it occasionally spews into space. The carbon in your cells and the oxygen in your lungs was made this way, borne across the universe on the sighs of a dying sun.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/12/27/is-betelgeuse-one-skys-brightest-stars-brink-supernova/