Jeffrey Epstein is having a rough go of it in prison, and on the outside, every person or company that he ever associated with is having a moment of introspection – and L Brands, the parent company of Victoria’s Secret, is no exception.
The company confirmed on Thursday that it had hired an outside law firm to carry out a review of Epstein’s role at the company, though, as of now, the company believes Epstein never had any formal role at L Brands, and that his relationship with the company’s founder and longtime CEO Leslie Wexner was mostly personal. Still, Epstein had at least some limited dealings with L Brands: He bought a plane from the company for $10 million, and at times he tried to weigh in on who should and shouldn’t become a Victoria’s Secret “Angel”, WSJ reports.
The disgraced “financier”/expert blackmailer reportedly managed Wexner’s fortune, and was once even given power of attorney, allowing Epstein to “buy” his 21,000 square foot Manhattan townhouse that is one of the largest private homes in the borough. But Wexner maintains that he cut ties with Epstein nearly 12 years ago, before Epstein served his first stint in “prison” for pimping out a 14-year-old girl. Epstein was arrested on new charges earlier this month, after an investigative series by the Miami Herald renewed interest in his case. Epstein is facing federal sex-trafficking charges stemming from an alleged scheme to systematically exploit underage girls. Wexner says he never had any knowledge of Epstein’s alleged crimes.
Epstein was indicted in New York on federal sex-trafficking charges stemming from an alleged scheme to exploit underage girls, but has pleaded not guilty.
Epstein and Wexner
An L Brands spokeswoman said of Epstein: “We do not believe he was ever employed by nor served as an authorized representative of the company.”
She added that “Epstein’s crimes are abhorrent and we applaud every effort to bring justice to those he harmed,” according to the New York Post.
The company recently shook up its board after activist hedge fund Barington Capital Group criticized the company, saying it didn’t have the expertise to navigate shifting tastes in the lingerie market.
Still, Epstein’s relationship with Wexner helped make him a fixture at company events for years, and Epstein reportedly used to tell young aspiring models that he could help them get work with Victoria’s Secret. He was a frequent presence at Victoria’s Secret parties – and Wexner has become extremely closely associated with Epstein since the latter’s arrest brought his story back into the headlines.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2yeae7n Tyler Durden
At his wrap-up press conference in May, Robert Mueller sternly underscored what he called “the central allegation” of the two-year Russia probe. Namely, that the Russian government engaged in
“multiple, systematic efforts to interfere in our election, and that allegation deserves the attention of every American.”
Yesterday’s gong show on Capitol Hill presented him with innumerable opportunities to defend that heavy duty proposition.
Indeed, he had a massive TV audience before which to fortify the entire foundation on which the Russia meddling/collusion story is based and on which a concerted effort have been made by a goodly part of the Washington establishment to invalidate the 2016 election on the grounds that the Kremlin threw it to Trump.
But nothing doing. Instead, Mueller ducked, dodged and demurred – hiding behind the words of his 448-page report. Yet the latter doesn’t even attempt to “prove” this “central allegation” at all; it just asserts it based on purportedly classified information that the unwashed voters and most of their elected representatives are not allowed to see.
More crucially, both before and since the Report’s release, even its squishy nods and heavily qualified inferences implicating Russian state agents have been essentially refuted by evidence now on the public record.
The two tent poles of the whole RussiaGate affair are the social media campaigns of the St. Petersburg troll farm and the alleged hack of the DNC computers by Russian state operatives. That’s not our view but the claim of the Mueller report itself which said the alleged Russian interference occurred “principally through two operations.”
Yet both poles are so flimsy that they can’t be taken seriously by anybody who examines the facts with even a half-open, adult mind.
In a word, the troll farm’s efforts at using US social media were an amateurish joke which were well and truly lost in the sea of noise and trivia which washes through Facebook, Twitter et. al, and which had no relationship to the Kremlin in any event (see below). Likewise, the overwhelming evidence on the public record says the DNC emails were leaked by a disgruntled insider not hacked by Russian agents operating over the internet thousands of miles away.
We have buttressed both of these conclusions at length previously, and the essence is summarized below. But the implications go way beyond knocking the RussiaGate hoax into a cocked-hat.
What the two flimsy tent poles if RussiaGate really show is the extreme danger of statism and the inherent infirmities of Big Government itself.
That’s because in today’s world of relentless 24/7 communications and messaging, haphazard information, random facts and mere factoids can be drafted into the service of a narrative that serves partisan ends, and then can be repeated with such monumental frequency and plenary breadth as to give the aura of truth to what amounts to self-serving nonsense.
That is to say, scratch a Washington pol, Deep State apparatchik or MSM journalist who embraces the “central allegation” of RussiaGate and you essentially have a Never Trumper who finds the Donald and that for which he stands so loathsome that they, perforce, must believe he was elected only by virtue of Kremlin intervention.
To RussiaGate believers, the alternative is not even thinkable. To wit, that 62 million voters knowingly preferred the Donald over Hillary – notwithstanding all his warts of character and his querulous denunciations of establishment policy and its officialdom.
Accordingly, the evidence needed to validate the Russian interference narrative was never examined deeply or subjected to skeptical assessment and challenge; it was just lined-up and recited endlessly as if the mere repetition of factoids, irrelevancies and sheer foolishness proved the truth of the narrative.
Still, if a proposition as grave as “multiple, systematic efforts to interfere in our election” can be embraced by a major section of the governing apparatus on such threadbare evidence as the two poles of the RussiaGate story how is it possible for Imperial Washington to rule the entire world or to micro-manage the very warp and woof of domestic economic and social life?
Indeed, if there was ever a case for free markets, small government, maximum individual liberty and minimal politicization of society at home and strict non-interventionism abroad, the RussiaGate Hoax is exactly that.
What yesterday’s gong show really proved is that the governing classes and their media megaphones in America today cannot even chew bubble gum and walk a straight line at the same time. So why in the world do we want them to rule where no rulers are needed?
In any event, the St. Petersburg troll farm narrative is now deader than a doornail. Mueller and his posse have actually been prohibited from even asserting in public that it was a Kremlin operation by a US District judge.
That’s right. Because they didn’t have a shred of evidence to support their insinuation!
That was proven in open court when much to Mueller’s surprise, the operation involved – the Internet Research Agency (IRS) – chose to defend itself and the 13 clueless ham sandwiches Mueller indicted and in so doing elicited a stern admonition from the presiding judge.
Thus, the first pole of the RussiaGate tent – the allegation that IRA was a part of the Russian government’s “sweeping and systematic” interference campaign – has already tumbled to the ground. Mueller’s team has been forced to admit in court that this was a false insinuation.
Aaron Mate, an intrepid and honest leftwing journalist for the Nationmagazine, recently summarized the matter as well as anyone:
US District Judge Dabney Friedrich noted that Mueller’s February 2018 indictment of the IRA “ does not link the {IRA} to the Russian government” and alleges “only private conduct by private actors.”
Jonathan Kravis, a senior prosecutor on the Mueller team, acknowledged that this is the case. “[T]he report itself does not state anywhere that the Russian government was behind the Internet Research Agency activity,” Kravis told the court.
Mueller also goes to great lengths to paint it as a sophisticated operation that “had the ability to reach millions of US persons.” Yet, as we already know, most of the Russian social media content was juvenile clickbait that had nothing to do with the election (only 7 percent of IRA’s Facebook posts mentioned either Trump or Clinton). There is also no evidence that the political content reached a mass audience, and to the extent it reached anyone, most of it occurred after the election.
Indeed, the IRA was such a belly-splitting joke that they only thing it proved is that prosecutor Mueller did actually indict 13 Russian-speaking ham sandwiches.
Actually, the IRA was the relatively harmless Hobby Farm of a fanatical Russian oligarch and ultra-nationalist, Yevgeny Prigozhin, who has a great big beef against Imperial Washington’s demonization of Russia and Vlad Putin. Apparently, the farm was (it’s apparently been disbanded) the vehicle through which he gave Washington the middle finger and buttered up his patron.
Prigozhin is otherwise known as “Putin’s Cook” because he made his fortune in St. Petersburg restaurants that Putin favored and via state funded food service operations at Russian schools and military installations.
Like most Russian oligarchs not in jail, he apparently tithes in gratitude to the Kremlin: In this case, by bankrolling the rinky-dink operation at 55 Savushkina Street in St. Petersburg that was the object of Mueller’s pretentious foray into the flotsam and jetsam of social media low life.
Prigozhin’s trolling farm was grandly called the Internet Research Agency (IRA), but what it actually did was hire (apparently) unemployed 20-somethings at $4-8 per hour to pound out ham-handed political messaging on social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube etc. They banged away twelve hours at a shift on a quota-driven paint-by-the-Internet-numbers basis where their output was rated for engagements, likes, retweets etc.
Whatever these keyboard drones might have been, they were not professional Russian intel operators. And the collection of broken English postings strewn throughout Mueller’s indictment were not one bit scary.
The pure grandstanding nature of this blow against the purported election meddling of the nefarious Russians is more than evident in the 3,000 ads IRA bought on Facebook for about $100,000 – more than half of which were posted after the election.
Yet here’s a typical example of how the Russians stormed into America’s sacred election space – even if according to Facebook this particular ad got less than 10,000 “impressions” and the mighty sum of 160 “shares”.
For crying out loud, it didn’t take any nefarious Russian intelligence agent to post this kind of cartoonish Islamophobia. There are millions of American xenophobes more than happy to do it with their own dime, time and bile.
Still, the fact that these Facebook ads and the St. Petersburg troll farm were taken seriously shows how insidious the Deep State’s RussiaGate campaign had become. In order to prove that their writ and rule will not be denied by the American electorate, they cynically fostered a mindless public hysteria that makes the work of Joe McCarthy appear benign by comparison.
And during a period, by the way, when the 80,000 Facebook posts attributable to IRA were up against the 33 trillion messages posted on that fetid network by its billions of users.
Indeed, talk about shooting fish in a barrel. Even Keeping Up With The Kardashians voters would get a pretty good yuck from the example displayed below.
A post called “Power to the people!” was typed out by some troll farm operative in St. Petersburg, whose $4 per hour pay probably was not worth the effort: It was shared by the grand some of 20 people, who might well have been algos, anyway!
The fact is, the “evidence” for Russian meddling via the IRA social media operation was always complete nonsense.
Needless to say, of course, if there was no “meddling”, how could there have been Trump campaign “collusion” to accomplish something which didn’t happen?
As to the DNC emails, the notion that the Russian GRU (intelligence service) hacked the DNC emails and handed them off to WikiLeaks has now been equally discredited.
William Binney, who is the father of modern NSA Internet spying technologies, says that the DNC emails were leaked on a thumb-drive and couldn’t have been hacked as a technical matter; and equally competent analysts have shown that Guccifer 2.0 is almost surely a NSA contrived fiction based on the oldest trick in the police precinct station house – planting evidence, in this case telltale Cyrillic letters and the name of a notorious head of the Soviet secret police.
Indeed, if the Russians did it via a nefarious hacking operation, the digital fingerprints would be all over the computers and servers involved. Moreover, the National Security Agency (NSA) would have a record of the breach stored at one of its server farms because it does capture and store everything that comes into the US over the Internet
Said record, of course, would amount to the Smoking Intercept. So the only thing Mueller really needed to do at the get-go was to call the head of NSA and request the NSA intercept – something he obviously didn’t do or it would have leaked long ago.
In the alternative, if NSA has no such record, he could have confiscated the DNC computers and servers – which had never even been inspected by the FBI, let alone taken into custody – to determine whether William Binney is right.
That didn’t happen, either. In fact, the whole case is based on a redacted draft report from an anti-Russian cyber-security outfit called CrowdStrike that was on the DNC payroll and had every incentive to find secret evidence of Russian hacking that has never been made public – or even available to Mueller and his posse of alleged criminal sleuths.
So what we are left with is the fact that Binney, a NSA veteran and actually the father of much of today’s NSA Internet spying capability, says that the recorded download speed of the DNC emails could only have been done by plugging a thumb-drive into the machines on site. That is, nothing downloads across 5,000 miles of digital expanse at the recorded 22.7 megabytes per second.
In short, if the Russians hacked them, the evidence is all there in the hard drives; and if they didn’t, the entire RussiaGate hoax should have been shutdown long ago.
That’s because the only thing that remotely smacks of untoward meddling by the Kremlin is the DNC emails – and even then, they only concerned intra-party squabbles between the Clinton and the Sandernista factions of the Dem party that were already well advertised and known to the American electorate.
Left-wing investigator Aaron Mate has distilled the same facts we have examined and come to the same conclusions.
– But a close examination of the report shows that none of those headline assertions are supported by the report’s evidence or other publicly available sources. They are further undercut by investigative shortcomings and the conflicts of interest of key players involved:
– The report uses qualified and vague language to describe key events, indicating that Mueller and his investigators do not actually know for certain whether Russian intelligence officers stole Democratic Party emails, or how those emails were transferred to WikiLeaks.
– The report’s timeline of events appears to defy logic. According to its narrative, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange announced the publication of Democratic Party emails not only before he received the documents but before he even communicated with the source that provided them.
– There is strong reason to doubt Mueller’s suggestion that an alleged Russian cutout called Guccifer 2.0 supplied the stolen emails to Assange.
– Mueller’s decision not to interview Assange – a central figure who claims Russia was not behind the hack – suggests an unwillingness to explore avenues of evidence on fundamental questions.
– US intelligence officials cannot make definitive conclusions about the hacking of the Democratic National Committee computer servers because they did not analyze those servers themselves. Instead, they relied on the forensics of CrowdStrike, a private contractor for the DNC that was not a neutral party, much as “Russian dossier” compiler Christopher Steele, also a DNC contractor, was not a neutral party. This puts two Democrat-hired contractors squarely behind underlying allegations in the affair – a key circumstance that Mueller ignores.
– Further, the government allowed CrowdStrike and the Democratic Party’s legal counsel to submit redacted records, meaning CrowdStrike and not the government decided what could be revealed or not regarding evidence of hacking.
At the end of the day, there can be nothing more pitiful after 22 months of prosecutorial scorched earth on the Russian collusion file than Mueller’s list of indictments. To remind once again, they include:
– 13 Russian college kids for essentially practicing English as a third language at a St. Petersburg troll farm for $4 per hour;
– 12 Russian intelligence operatives who might as well have been picked from the GRU phonebook;
– Baby George Papadopoulos for mis-recalling an irrelevant date by two weeks;
– Paul Manafort for standard Washington lobbyist crimes committed long before he met Trump;
– Michael Cohen for shirking taxes and running Trump’s bimbo silencing operation;
– Michael Flynn for doing his job talking to the Russian Ambassador and confusing the confusable Mike Pence on what he said and didn’t say about Obama’s idiotic 11th hour Russian sanctions;
– Rick Gates for helping Manafort shakedown the Ukrainian government and other oily Washington supplicants.;
– Sam Patten, another Manafort operative who forget to register correctly as a foreign agent;
– Richard Pinedo, a grifter who never met Trump and got caught selling forged bank accounts on-line to Russians for a couple bucks each;
– Alex van der Zwaan, a Dutch lawyers who wrote a report for Manafort in 2012 and misreported to the FBI what he told Gates about it.
That’s all she wrote and it’s about as pathetic as it gets. Mueller should have been guffawed out of town on account of this tommyrot long before belatedly delivering a report that proved exactly that.
And yesterday he said exactly nothing to alter that conclusion.
Perhaps there is a silver lining, however. Maybe now the RussiaGate “investigation” can turn to the real election meddling – the Deep State conspiracy lead by CIA director John Brennan and the anti-Trump cabal at the FBI to thwart Trump’s candidacy and then discredit his Presidency once he was elected to the nation’s highest office.
We will have more to say about the real assault on American democracy from within in the future, but if you do not believe that the entire Russian influence investigation was motivated by rank political animus against the GOP’s presidential candidate because he advocated the sensible path of rapprochement with Russia, just consider the paragraph below.
It tells you all you need to know about why RussiaGate happened; why the Mueller investigation dragged on for two years and still pollutes the media airways; and, most importantly, how the so-called progressive party in America in its grief over losing the 2016 election to an incompetent megalomaniacal bully like Donald Trump has become a pathetic handmaid of the Warfare State.
‘I do always hate the Russians,’ Lisa Page, a senior FBI lawyer on the Russia case testified to Congress in July 2018. ‘It is my opinion that with respect to Western ideals and who it is and what it is we stand for as Americans, Russia poses the most dangerous threat to that way of life.’
As he opened the FBI’s probe of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russians in July 2016, FBI agent peter Strzok texted Page: ‘fu*k the cheating motherfu*king Russians… Bastards. I hate them… I think they’re probably the worst. Fu*king conniving cheating savages.’ Speaking to NBC News in May 2017, former director of national intelligence James Clapper explained why US officials saw interactions between the Trump camp and Russian nationals as a cause for alarm: ‘The Russians,’ Clapper said, ‘almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique. So we were concerned.’
In a May interview with Lawfare, former FBI general counsel Jim Baker, who helped oversee the Russia probe, explained the origins of the investigation as follows: ‘It was about Russia, period, full stop.… When the [George] Papadopoulos information comes across our radar screen, it’s coming across in the sense that we were always looking at Russia.… we’ve been thinking about Russia as a threat actor for decades and decades.’
Indeed, all along it was all about War Party policy on Russia. Per the NYT:
Mr. Trump had caught the attention of F.B.I. counterintelligence agents when he called on Russia during a campaign news conference in July 2016 to hack into the emails of his opponent, Hillary Clinton. Mr. Trump had refused to criticize Russia on the campaign trail, praising President Vladimir V. Putin. And investigators had watched with alarm as the Republican Party softened its convention platform on the Ukraine crisis in a way that seemed to benefit Russia.
Trump’s July 2016 comment was a joke, and the story about the GOP platform change was overblown, while the policy change made all the sense in the world. Even then, it was later undermined in practice when Trump sold weapons to Ukraine – a move that even Obama had opposed.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Mcgyoh Tyler Durden
More than a decade after his conviction on drug and gun charges, rapper Meek Mill has been granted a new trial. A Pennsylvania appeals court ruled that new evidence likely exonerates him.
Born Robert Rihmeek Williams, Mill was arrested in 2007 after a police officer alleged he pointed a gun at him and was in possession of drugs. Although Mill, then 18 years old, denied the charges, he was sentenced to 11 to 23 months in prison; he served eight months and was released in 2009 and ordered to serve five years probation.
The officer, Reginald Graham, was the linchpin of the case, likely sealing Mill’s conviction with his testimony. But Graham was fired from the Philadelphia Police Department after an investigation found that he stole money from the department and lied about it, calling his integrity into question. In that vein, another officer came forward after Mill was convicted and disputed Graham’s assertion that Mill brandished his gun threateningly. Instead, he says it was clear that he was attempting to discard the weapon.
Considering the new evidence, President Judge Jack A. Panella wrote that “a different verdict will likely result at a retrial.”
Mill, now 32, has dealt with the legal saga for the entire course of his adult life. His five-year probation turned into 10 years probation after he violated the terms of the order by leaving Pennsylvania to perform. The decision raised eyebrows around the over-criminalization of petty crimes and the cyclical nature of the criminal justice system, which traps people in its confines by criminalizing things like doing one’s job.
Mill was reincarcerated twice over the course of that period and served multiple house arrest stints, as small infractions continued to hound the rapper. In 2011, he racked up his first probation violation when he tested positive for painkillers. In 2014, he spent five months in Hoffman Hall Prison for leaving the country.
And in what was perhaps the most ridiculous turn, Mill appeared before Judge Genece Brinkley again in September 2017 after two misdemeanor arrests. The first pertained to an altercation with paparazzi in a St. Louis airport; that charge was dropped. The second arrest centered around Mill allegedly popping a wheelie on a dirtbike in Manhattan while not wearing a helmet, for which he was charged with reckless driving after police saw an Instagram post. Brinkley sentenced him to two to four years in prison. Mill served another five months.
The Pennsylvania appeals court also removed Brinkley from the case, arguing she had become too involved over the last several years. Last month, District Attorney Larry Krasner’s office granted Mill a new hearing related to his 2017 sentencing, arguing that Brinkley “assumed the role of investigator” when she went to a homeless shelter to watch him perform court-ordered community service, and then criticized him for not doing enough.
Mill’s 2017 prison sentence sparked renewed outrage, fueling the #FreeMeek movement, which the rapper has since used to shine a broad light on criminal justice issues. “I was really thinking more of, like, free everybody that’s caught in these type of situations,” he told CBS News, shortly after his conviction was overturned.
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More than a decade after his conviction on drug and gun charges, rapper Meek Mill has been granted a new trial. A Pennsylvania appeals court ruled that new evidence likely exonerates him.
Born Robert Rihmeek Williams, Mill was arrested in 2007 after a police officer alleged he pointed a gun at him and was in possession of drugs. Although Mill, then 18 years old, denied the charges, he was sentenced to 11 to 23 months in prison; he served eight months and was released in 2009 and ordered to serve five years probation.
The officer, Reginald Graham, was the linchpin of the case, likely sealing Mill’s conviction with his testimony. But Graham was fired from the Philadelphia Police Department after an investigation found that he stole money from the department and lied about it, calling his integrity into question. In that vein, another officer came forward after Mill was convicted and disputed Graham’s assertion that Mill brandished his gun threateningly. Instead, he says it was clear that he was attempting to discard the weapon.
Considering the new evidence, President Judge Jack A. Panella wrote that “a different verdict will likely result at a retrial.”
Mill, now 32, has dealt with the legal saga for the entire course of his adult life. His five-year probation turned into 10 years probation after he violated the terms of the order by leaving Pennsylvania to perform. The decision raised eyebrows around the over-criminalization of petty crimes and the cyclical nature of the criminal justice system, which traps people in its confines by criminalizing things like doing one’s job.
Mill was reincarcerated twice over the course of that period and served multiple house arrest stints, as small infractions continued to hound the rapper. In 2011, he racked up his first probation violation when he tested positive for painkillers. In 2014, he spent five months in Hoffman Hall Prison for leaving the country.
And in what was perhaps the most ridiculous turn, Mill appeared before Judge Genece Brinkley again in September 2017 after two misdemeanor arrests. The first pertained to an altercation with paparazzi in a St. Louis airport; that charge was dropped. The second arrest centered around Mill allegedly popping a wheelie on a dirtbike in Manhattan while not wearing a helmet, for which he was charged with reckless driving after police saw an Instagram post. Brinkley sentenced him to two to four years in prison. Mill served another five months.
The Pennsylvania appeals court also removed Brinkley from the case, arguing she had become too involved over the last several years. Last month, District Attorney Larry Krasner’s office granted Mill a new hearing related to his 2017 sentencing, arguing that Brinkley “assumed the role of investigator” when she went to a homeless shelter to watch him perform court-ordered community service, and then criticized him for not doing enough.
Mill’s 2017 prison sentence sparked renewed outrage, fueling the #FreeMeek movement, which the rapper has since used to shine a broad light on criminal justice issues. “I was really thinking more of, like, free everybody that’s caught in these type of situations,” he told CBS News, shortly after his conviction was overturned.
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“Make no mistake,” House Majority Leader Steney Hoyer (D–Md.) said Thursday afternoon during a debate over a new budget deal on the House floor, “we’re going to have to make some tough decisions in the years ahead to make sure our fiscal house is in order.”
But why worry about that today, right? Hoyer’s comments pretty effectively sum-up the thinking that governs Congress these days. Lawmakers are well aware of the looming threat posed by the $22 trillion (and growing) national debt, but today they voted to make that problem worse.
Indeed, the difficult decisions that will face future member of Congress only got more difficult on Thursday, as the House voted 284-149 to pass a two-year, $2.7 trillion budget deal that hikes federal spending by about $320 billion annually and is estimated to add about $1.7 trillion to the national debt over the next 10 years. The U.S. was already poised to run trillion-dollar deficits for the foreseeable future, and the new budget deal will make it more difficult to curb those annual deficits in the years ahead.
The budget deal shatters budget caps and actually hikes spending above the baseline that was in place before the 2011 bill that imposed the so-called “sequestration.”
All but 16 House Democrats supported the budget plan, which was hammered out over the past week between Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.) and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin.
President Donald Trump, despite promising last year that he would “never sign another bill” that blew up the deficit as the 2018 bipartisan budget deal did, has been nothing but supportive of the new agreement. He met with Republican lawmakers—many of whom were reportedly wavering in their support for more spending—for a lunch on Thursday where he urged affirmative votes.
House Republicans should support the TWO YEAR BUDGET AGREEMENT which greatly helps our Military and our Vets. I am totally with you!
In the end, 65 Republicans in the House supported the deal, while 132 voted against it. Rep. Justin Amash (I–Mich.), a former Republican who is now the lone independent in the House, voted “nay.”
A majority of Republicans voting against a budget deal inked by a Republican president might seem like a noteworthy event, but today’s GOP lawmakers only vote for fiscal conservatism when it doesn’t matter.
When it did matter, they were more than happy to add to the deficit. In 2016, when Trump was elected and Republicans grabbed control of all aspects of the federal government’s budget-making authority, the United States was carrying about $19 trillion in debt. Today, in no small part due to the 2018 budget bill the Republican-controlled Congress passed and Trump signed, the national debt has soared past $22 trillion. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that current policies—which doesn’t include the hike in spending approved by the House on Thursday—will add another $11 trillion by the end of 2029.
If the budget deal eventually makes it to Trump’s desk and gets his signature, the 45th president will have personally added $4.1 trillion to the national debt in a little over two years in office, according to a new analysis from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which advocates for balanced budgets.
First, it must pass the Senate, which is planning to vote on the bill next week.
One of the final speakers before the House vote was Rep. Steve Womack (R–Ark.), the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee. He reflected on the fact that lawmakers would soon be leaving Washington for a few weeks of work in district offices—for Womack, that means having some town hall meetings with constituents.
“I already know most people are going to say ‘look, you guys have a spending problem up there in Washington,'” Womack said.
Then he voted for the bill too.
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If there’s one silver lining for Elon Musk – who, after stumbling through Tesla’s awful Q2 earnings yesterday and losing longtime top lieutenant J.B. Straubel watched Tesla stock crumble by 11% on Thursday – it’s that his Boring Company project has closed on $120 million in new investments.
The company recently authorized the sale of $120 million in stock, according to securities filings and BNN. The investment comes in addition to $113 million The Boring Company raised last year.
Despite the Boring Company’s tunnel projects being debunked by PhDs and ridiculed by those who have seen “behind the curtain”, Musk still managed to squeeze cash from the gullible cultists “disruptive investors” at a fund called “Future Ventures”.
Steve Jurvetson, a venture capitalist with Future Ventures – who also happens to be on the Board of SpaceX and Tesla – said:
“We are delighted to be an investor in Boring. Boring is a great example of the disruptive playbook we look for.”
Jurvetson continued: “The four-largest tunnel companies in the U.S. were founded in the 1800s. Like the automotive and aerospace sectors, they haven’t faced a disruptive new entrant in their management’s collective life-time.”
Yeah, Steve. There’s probably a reason for that…
Boring won a contact back in May for $48.7 million to build a shuttle around the Las Vegas Convention Center. It’ll be a great litmus test to see if the Boring Company can deliver better results for a lower price than engineering firms and transportation companies that have been specializing in mass transit for decades. Our guess, obviously, is that they can’t.
Juvertson is also described by BNN as “a long-time friend of Musk’s who has invested early in his companies, including Tesla and SpaceX.”
His prestigious resume also includes resigning from his previous VC firm, DFJ, over allegations of harassment.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/315EXjJ Tyler Durden
“Make no mistake,” House Majority Leader Steney Hoyer (D–Md.) said Thursday afternoon during a debate over a new budget deal on the House floor, “we’re going to have to make some tough decisions in the years ahead to make sure our fiscal house is in order.”
But why worry about that today, right? Hoyer’s comments pretty effectively sum-up the thinking that governs Congress these days. Lawmakers are well aware of the looming threat posed by the $22 trillion (and growing) national debt, but today they voted to make that problem worse.
Indeed, the difficult decisions that will face future member of Congress only got more difficult on Thursday, as the House voted 284-149 to pass a two-year, $2.7 trillion budget deal that hikes federal spending by about $320 billion annually and is estimated to add about $1.7 trillion to the national debt over the next 10 years. The U.S. was already poised to run trillion-dollar deficits for the foreseeable future, and the new budget deal will make it more difficult to curb those annual deficits in the years ahead.
The budget deal shatters budget caps and actually hikes spending above the baseline that was in place before the 2011 bill that imposed the so-called “sequestration.”
All but 16 House Democrats supported the budget plan, which was hammered out over the past week between Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.) and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin.
President Donald Trump, despite promising last year that he would “never sign another bill” that blew up the deficit as the 2018 bipartisan budget deal did, has been nothing but supportive of the new agreement. He met with Republican lawmakers—many of whom were reportedly wavering in their support for more spending—for a lunch on Thursday where he urged affirmative votes.
House Republicans should support the TWO YEAR BUDGET AGREEMENT which greatly helps our Military and our Vets. I am totally with you!
In the end, 65 Republicans in the House supported the deal, while 132 voted against it. Rep. Justin Amash (I–Mich.), a former Republican who is now the lone independent in the House, voted “nay.”
A majority of Republicans voting against a budget deal inked by a Republican president might seem like a noteworthy event, but today’s GOP lawmakers only vote for fiscal conservatism when it doesn’t matter.
When it did matter, they were more than happy to add to the deficit. In 2016, when Trump was elected and Republicans grabbed control of all aspects of the federal government’s budget-making authority, the United States was carrying about $19 trillion in debt. Today, in no small part due to the 2018 budget bill the Republican-controlled Congress passed and Trump signed, the national debt has soared past $22 trillion. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that current policies—which doesn’t include the hike in spending approved by the House on Thursday—will add another $11 trillion by the end of 2029.
If the budget deal eventually makes it to Trump’s desk and gets his signature, the 45th president will have personally added $4.1 trillion to the national debt in a little over two years in office, according to a new analysis from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which advocates for balanced budgets.
First, it must pass the Senate, which is planning to vote on the bill next week.
One of the final speakers before the House vote was Rep. Steve Womack (R–Ark.), the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee. He reflected on the fact that lawmakers would soon be leaving Washington for a few weeks of work in district offices—for Womack, that means having some town hall meetings with constituents.
“I already know most people are going to say ‘look, you guys have a spending problem up there in Washington,'” Womack said.
Then he voted for the bill too.
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The Trump administration’s plan to basically end America’s asylum program as it exists was put on ice (no pun intended) after dueling court rulings yesterday. U.S. District Judge Timothy J. Kelly, a Trump appointee, refused to issue a preliminary injunction to block the administration from turning away any asylum seeker that arrived at the Southern border via another country without first applying for asylum in that country. Given that all these asylum seekers come by foot, after having traversed several countries, this would pretty much spell the doom of the asylum program.
Trump’s success on this front would be a double blow for the kind of humane and pro-growth immigration policies that Reason has long advocated, given that there are also rumors the Trump administration is planning to end the refugee program next year. After slashing the refugee cap in half to 45,000 and then refusing to fill even that, it is now flirting with further slashing the cap to “zero.” This has long been the fantasy and aspiration of White House aide Steve Miller, the ultra-restrictionist grandson of Jewish refugees.
It’s unclear if there would be strong legal grounds to challenge the administration’s prospective assault on the refugee program, but there clearly are grounds for challenge avilable to those hoping to use the asylum system. As I noted last week, under international and U.S. law:
[T]he administration is required to hear migrants’ cases unless they are coming through countries with whom the U.S. has a Safe Third Country Agreement. Such a country has to offer a similar level of safety, security, and due process as the United States. The only country that currently has such an agreement with America is Canada. The agreement makes it incumbent upon Canada to consider the asylum petition of migrants on its soil rather than just letting them into the United States. Only if Canada denies their petition can they apply for asylum in America.
The administration is trying to strong-arm Mexico and Guatemala into signing similar agreements, which would require these countries to offer permanent asylum to migrants rather than merely temporarily warehousing them. But even if these countries agree, U.S. courts are unlikely to be convinced that the new rule is kosher. Why? Because these countries, particularly Guatemala, aren’t “safe.”
San Francisco U.S. District Court Judge Jon S. Tigar basically agreed with this and, literally within hours on the Kelly ruling, issued an injunction barring the administration from implementing its asylum ban.
“The court recognized, as it did in the first asylum ban [when the administration tried to bar those entering from between ports of entry from applying for asylum even as it blocked them from entering from official ports] that the administration was doing an end-run around asylum protections enacted by Congress,” an ACLU lawyer, who had sued the administration, noted.
The administration’s argument was that the statute also gives it authority to implement additional “bars,” or conditions on prospective asylum seekers. But that doesn’t mean it can impose conditions that essentially overturn the will of Congress.
Given the split in the courts, this case will most likely fall in the Supreme Court’s lap. It’s unclear whether a ruling will come before the next election, but both sides’ strategy is clear: Immigration advocates are trying to run out the clock on the Trump presidency. Meanwhile, the administration is trying to load the bases so that in case Trump gets re-elected and the Supreme Court rules in its favor, it can hit the ground running in his second term.
But this is not the only immigration-related case that raises the stakes in the next election. Scott Shackford wrote earlier this week about the new “expedited removal” rules that the administration implemented in the dead of night this week that allow immigration authorities to stop anyone anywhere in the country and demand to see their papers, not just in the 100-mile zone adjacent to the border as is (unfortunately) the case right now.
It’s ostensive purpose is to deport undocumented immigrants who don’t have long roots in the country. But it’ll potentially affect everyone given that individuals don’t come branded as “unauthorized” on their foreheads right now.
If you are stopped and can’t prove that you’ve been in the country for two years, you would be subject to deportation. You will be entitled to no legal representation because immigration courts aren’t required to provide any. Your only recourse would be to claim a “credible fear” that your life would be endangered in the country they were thinking of deporting you to. And if the arresting officer determines that you are not entitled to a hearing, then it’s over for you. Basically, it means that an immigration agent would be judge, jury, and executioner all in one.
This will basically prod everyone—citizen and non-citizen—alike to carry their passports or birth certificates at all times to avoid the fate of Francisco Galicia, an American citizen who was just released from a detention camp pending deportation after three weeks without a shower or basic amenities. Indeed, even before this new rule for expanding expedited removals to anywhere in the country, due process for detention and deportation had been eroded so badly that about 1 percent of the inmates in immigration detention nationwide at any given time were citizens. In 2010 alone, over 4,000 U.S. citizens were detained or deported as aliens. Between 2003 and 2010, more than 20,000 Americans suffered the same fate.
Civil rights and immigration advocacy organizations tell me they are getting ready to sue this rule within the next few weeks.
Basically, they’ll argue that the rule was issued without prior notice or a comment period and therefore improperly implemented. More importantly, they’ll claim that there is no way to enforce this rule without some form of unconstitutional racial profiling to establish reasonable suspicion.
Sadly, given that Congress simply won’t step in to rein in this president, the courts are the country’s only recourse against his growing border lawlessness.
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LLPOH wrote a most interesting article about how Europe has changed so much in his most recent visit to the way it was years ago that it got me to thinking about how America has changed. Specifically, what would happen if I were able to visit the America that I grew up in, in the 1950s and 1960s.
I was perusing some old videos on YouTube and came upon a set of videos about the New York World’s Fair of 1964 and 1965. I was twelve years old and living on Long Island at the time and I visited the fair at least a dozen or more times in its two years of existence.
The World’s Fair video that I found the most interesting was a copy of an NBC documentary hosted by the late Edwin Newman that for YouTube posting was done in six parts. Its original showing on NBC in 1964 was just a single one-hour program.
Edwin Newman got quite a bit of criticism in the YouTube comments for being such a downer and a stick-in-the-mud, but the fact that he wasn’t hyping the fair like all of the other videos that I found is the reason that I found it the most useful to my purpose.
I watched these videos of thousands of people all rushing into and mingling at that fair without a single confrontation among them and asked myself if that would be possible in today’s America. There were long lines to get into the fair, lines at the pavilions, lines at the food courts (identified by the multi-bubble balloon looking things on top), people rushing together under cover when it rained, and everyone was pleasant to each other and very well mannered. Newman even commented on it at the nine minute mark in part four of the YouTube listing.
The first time or two that I went to the 64-65 NY World’s Fair was with my family. All of the rest of times I went with friends. Somebody’s mom or dad would drop us off early in the morning at the train station – The Long Island Railroad (LIRR) – and we would take the train to the Woodside Station and then head upstairs to get the EL (Elevated Line).
Since we were just kids and never had much money, we figured out quickly that rather than take the LIRR to the Jamaica Station and waiting for the LIRR train to take us the rest of the way to the fair it was faster and cheaper to go to Woodside and pick up the EL. It was only ten or fifteen cents. Much cheaper and faster than the LIRR.
Whether it was just my best friend Donnie and I or whether we had a station wagon load of friends, we would go off to the fair on our own, spend the whole day, even to the fireworks at night before heading home tired and foot weary without every worrying about our safety.
After getting back to Baldwin Station we would call somebody’s dad (we had to save ten cents for the phone call) to come and pick us up. Fortunately just about everybody’s mom or dad had a station wagon. Sometimes we filled it.
When I look through videos of fairs and events or Disney World videos today I find fistfights, muggings, pickpockets, assaults of all sorts captured and posted by bystanders. I also see people almost morbidly obese as the norm. I didn’t see any of those things in the old 64-65 World’s Fair footage and don???t remember seeing any of it in my visits.
It’s not just Europe that has changed. The world has changed, and not all for the better. We have so many wonderful new inventions and luxuries, but people have devolved towards a kind of barbarism towards each other. If we were to visit a fair such as the one in 1964-1965 today we would be gate-raped by the blue-gloved perverts on the way in, subjected to every humiliation, and be fearful of rape, robbery, muggings, and beatings. Twelve year olds probably wouldn’t even be safe to take the train alone today before they even got to the fair.
How did this happen? When and why did we as a people change? Where are we headed?
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/30UijKT Tyler Durden
The Trump administration’s plan to basically end America’s asylum program as it exists was put on ice (no pun intended) after dueling court rulings yesterday. U.S. District Judge Timothy J. Kelly, a Trump appointee, refused to issue a preliminary injunction to block the administration from turning away any asylum seeker that arrived at the Southern border via another country without first applying for asylum in that country. Given that all these asylum seekers come by foot, after having traversed several countries, this would pretty much spell the doom of the asylum program.
Trump’s success on this front would be a double blow for the kind of humane and pro-growth immigration policies that Reason has long advocated, given that there are also rumors the Trump administration is planning to end the refugee program next year. After slashing the refugee cap in half to 45,000 and then refusing to fill even that, it is now flirting with further slashing the cap to “zero.” This has long been the fantasy and aspiration of White House aide Steve Miller, the ultra-restrictionist grandson of Jewish refugees.
It’s unclear if there would be strong legal grounds to challenge the administration’s prospective assault on the refugee program, but there clearly are grounds for challenge avilable to those hoping to use the asylum system. As I noted last week, under international and U.S. law:
[T]he administration is required to hear migrants’ cases unless they are coming through countries with whom the U.S. has a Safe Third Country Agreement. Such a country has to offer a similar level of safety, security, and due process as the United States. The only country that currently has such an agreement with America is Canada. The agreement makes it incumbent upon Canada to consider the asylum petition of migrants on its soil rather than just letting them into the United States. Only if Canada denies their petition can they apply for asylum in America.
The administration is trying to strong-arm Mexico and Guatemala into signing similar agreements, which would require these countries to offer permanent asylum to migrants rather than merely temporarily warehousing them. But even if these countries agree, U.S. courts are unlikely to be convinced that the new rule is kosher. Why? Because these countries, particularly Guatemala, aren’t “safe.”
San Francisco U.S. District Court Judge Jon S. Tigar basically agreed with this and, literally within hours on the Kelly ruling, issued an injunction barring the administration from implementing its asylum ban.
“The court recognized, as it did in the first asylum ban [when the administration tried to bar those entering from between ports of entry from applying for asylum even as it blocked them from entering from official ports] that the administration was doing an end-run around asylum protections enacted by Congress,” an ACLU lawyer, who had sued the administration, noted.
The administration’s argument was that the statute also gives it authority to implement additional “bars,” or conditions on prospective asylum seekers. But that doesn’t mean it can impose conditions that essentially overturn the will of Congress.
Given the split in the courts, this case will most likely fall in the Supreme Court’s lap. It’s unclear whether a ruling will come before the next election, but both sides’ strategy is clear: Immigration advocates are trying to run out the clock on the Trump presidency. Meanwhile, the administration is trying to load the bases so that in case Trump gets re-elected and the Supreme Court rules in its favor, it can hit the ground running in his second term.
But this is not the only immigration-related case that raises the stakes in the next election. Scott Shackford wrote earlier this week about the new “expedited removal” rules that the administration implemented in the dead of night this week that allow immigration authorities to stop anyone anywhere in the country and demand to see their papers, not just in the 100-mile zone adjacent to the border as is (unfortunately) the case right now.
It’s ostensive purpose is to deport undocumented immigrants who don’t have long roots in the country. But it’ll potentially affect everyone given that individuals don’t come branded as “unauthorized” on their foreheads right now.
If you are stopped and can’t prove that you’ve been in the country for two years, you would be subject to deportation. You will be entitled to no legal representation because immigration courts aren’t required to provide any. Your only recourse would be to claim a “credible fear” that your life would be endangered in the country they were thinking of deporting you to. And if the arresting officer determines that you are not entitled to a hearing, then it’s over for you. Basically, it means that an immigration agent would be judge, jury, and executioner all in one.
This will basically prod everyone—citizen and non-citizen—alike to carry their passports or birth certificates at all times to avoid the fate of Francisco Galicia, an American citizen who was just released from a detention camp pending deportation after three weeks without a shower or basic amenities. Indeed, even before this new rule for expanding expedited removals to anywhere in the country, due process for detention and deportation had been eroded so badly that about 1 percent of the inmates in immigration detention nationwide at any given time were citizens. In 2010 alone, over 4,000 U.S. citizens were detained or deported as aliens. Between 2003 and 2010, more than 20,000 Americans suffered the same fate.
Civil rights and immigration advocacy organizations tell me they are getting ready to sue this rule within the next few weeks.
Basically, they’ll argue that the rule was issued without prior notice or a comment period and therefore improperly implemented. More importantly, they’ll claim that there is no way to enforce this rule without some form of unconstitutional racial profiling to establish reasonable suspicion.
Sadly, given that Congress simply won’t step in to rein in this president, the courts are the country’s only recourse against his growing border lawlessness.
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