Month: July 2018

Whataburger Assailant Arrested After Assaulting Teen, Stealing MAGA Hat

A 30-year-old man who threw soda onto a table of teenagers at a San Antonio Whataburger has been arrested for stealing 16-year-old Trump supporter Hunter Richard’s red MAGA hat, according to local news outlet MySanAntonio.com

Kino Ahuitzotl Jimenez was taken into custody at his home in Universal City without incident by robbery task force detectives on a warrant for theft of person, according to the San Antonio Police Department. Bail has not been set according to the county magistrate’s office.

In a video which went viral Wednesday and Thursday, Jimenez can be seen throwing a soda on Richard and two friends at 2:35 a.m. on the 4th of July. As he walks away with the teen’s red MAGA hat, he can be heard shouting “this is gonna go great in my fucking fireplace, bitch,” before walking out of the eatery with another man who filmed the encounter. Footage of the incident taken by one of the victims had just under 8 million views as of this writing. 

Following the incident, Richard says he wants to sit down and have a conversation with Jimenez to “come to some sort of agreement or neutral ground.” 

Whataburger issued this statement on Thursday morning following the incident: 

“We were shocked to see this video and certainly don’t condone this type of customer behavior in our restaurants. To be clear, no Whataburger employees were involved or witnessed the incident, and we ask that questions be directed to San Antonio PD as we continue supporting their efforts.”

Shortly after the video went viral, Jimenez was fired from his job at San Antonio bar Rumble – which posted the following message on Facebook before they made their account private. 

Hello friends,

It came to our attention earlier this evening that a part-time employee was captured on cell phone video assaulting another person at a local eatery. The assault took place, presumably, because this employee did not agree with the other individuals political stance.

We have since terminated this employee, as his actions go against everything that this establishment stands for.

Rumble has, and always will be, a bar that is as inclusive as any establishment could possibly be. THIS BAR IS A SAFE SPACE FOR EVERYONE! No matter your race, creed, ethnicity, sexual identity, and political stance, you are welcomed here!

We do not condone the actions or behavior that were displayed in the cell phone video, and we never will.

If you have any questions or concerns please message us privately. We support and appreciate your business.

According to a Bexar County clerk court records search, Jimenez has a criminal record spanning 2008 – 2016 which includes vehicle burglary, marijuana possession and a DUI.

Teens anonymously accused of racist remarks

And in a strange development – a report began circulating Thursday morning that an anonymous family eating at the Whataburger, at 2:35 a.m., claimed to have witnessed the three teens making racist remarks before the incident. Several outlets which carried copies of the report have since removed the quotes after the claims didn’t hold water. The following editor’s note now accompanies this CBS affiliate KENS5 version of the article, for example: 

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story included quotes from the alleged witness. Those have been removed from this copy due to concerns about the legitimacy of the statements. –KENS5

Updated at 7:59 p.m.: A version of this article included quotations from a man who said he saw teenagers at a San Antonio restaurant before a hat was stolen. KENS-TV, which first reported the man’s words, has withdrawn the specific comments “due to concerns about the legitimacy of the statements.” –Dallasnews.com

 The young man who shot the viral video hit back at the article – claiming this “never happened.” 

On Thursday afternoon, Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign manager, Brad Parscale, said “I would love to send this teenager a signed @realDonaldTrump hat and stand with him in  … Don’t let a few left bullies stop you from showing your !”

As we noted on Thursday, the attack comes amid escalating tensions over President Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy of enforcing existing immigration laws, which has resulted in several members of the Trump administration suffering harassment in public and at their homes – most notably Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who was ejected from the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, VA after the owner’s gay employees became uncomfortable in Sanders’s presence. 

In response to the spate of public harassment last month, Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters (CA) called for Democrats to form into mobs and physically confront members of the Trump administration if they see them out in public. 

“If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere,” said Waters. 

The next weekend, a massive skirmish broke out in Portland between Trump supporting “Proud Boys” and members of Antifa – who showed up to protest a conservative rally attended by the Proud Boys and the right-wing “Patriot Prayer” Group. At one point, a Proudboy known as Rufio (seen at 1:00 in the video below) knocks out an Antifa member cold. 

Where is this headed?

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Conservatives Bid Scott Pruitt a Fond Farewell: Reason Roundup

PruittEmbattled Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt is out. President Donald Trump accepted his resignation Thursday.

Pruitt stood accused of a litany of petty abuses of power: wasting public dollars on lavish trips, renting a condo from a lobbyist, using his position to find a job for his wife, making his aides pay for stuff, holding off-the-books meetings. According to CNN,

Pruitt left EPA having faced more than a dozen inquiries or reviews into his practices at the agency….A spokesman for the EPA’s Office of Inspector General told CNN that ongoing or pending reviews of Pruitt will continue, even though he has resigned.

“Any ongoing or pending OIG reviews related to the Administrator and/or his team will continue—regardless of the Administrator’s resignation,” the spokesman said.

Pruitt was a committed deregulator, though, and had worked to undo the Obama administration’s aggressive approach on climate change. Many conservatives were sad to see him go:

Conservative commentator S.E. Cupp disagreed, writing, “Pruitt is not a hill to die on. He was graft personified. I talk to his ex-staffers, more will come out and it will be awful. Save your powder for other battles. He was a despicable abuse of power that no conservative should defend.”

FREE MINDS

Nineteen Cornell University law professors have sent a letter to the administration imploring them to end a Title IX investigation into student Yogesh Patil and let him graduate. (Title IX is the federal state understood by the Education Department to require schools to adjudicate sexual misconduct.) An unnamed female student—”LA”—accused Patil of “retaliation” because he defended the reputation of his advisor, Professor Mukund Vengalattore, whom LA had accused of sexual harassment.

Patil operates a website that compiled information about LA’s Title IX case against Vengalattore, according to The Cornell Daily Sun. If anyone is guilty of retaliation, it’s LA, who retaliated against Patil for defending the professor, writes Cornell Law Professor Kevin Clermont:

All the website did was publicly discuss a case of immense academic importance. Yogesh’s involvement comprised only “good faith actions” to question Cornell’s treatment of his professor and to pursue his own professional self-interest so impacted by Cornell’s actions against his lab. Restrained speech of this sort should not be deemed suppressible by a university.

If there was retaliation in this sequence, it was the complaint made by her against Yogesh, retaliating for his actively supporting his professor’s case against Cornell, for being an honest witness against the complainant during the investigations into her allegations against the professor, and for having lodged complaints against her with Cornell’s Judicial Administrator and other University officials as well as with the federal Office of Civil Rights. The circumstances of her new complaint are suspicious: After waiting months or years, she filed on May 23, 2018. Yogesh’s parents and brother were en route from India and Australia to see him graduate. At the last moment, he learned that Cornell, without investigation, was automatically withholding his degree in response to her mere filing of the complaint. Indeed, there is the injustice: the automatic withholding of a degree based on a complainant’s say-so.

This is another example of a troubling aspect of Title IX investigations: Criticizing Title IX is frequently held to constitute a violation of the underlying policy.

FREE MARKETS

Trump’s massive tariffs on Chinese goods went into effect this morning. China has already retaliated. The results could be catastrophic for the economy, reports The New York Times:

The escalation of the trade war from threat to reality is expected to ripple through global supply chains, raise costs for businesses and consumers and roil global stock markets, which have been volatile in anticipation of a prolonged trade fight between the United States and almost everyone else.

On Thursday, President Trump showed no signs of backing down from his fight, saying aboard Air Force One that the first wave of tariffs on $34 billion in goods would quickly be followed by levies on another $16 billion of Chinese products. And Mr. Trump continued to threaten Beijing with escalating tariffs on as much as $450 billion worth of Chinese goods.

For now, it is unclear how—or whether—the trade war might conclude. Mr. Trump’s threats have been met with vows from China to retaliate, a stalemate that will require one side to blink first in order to avoid a protracted fight. With no official talks scheduled between the two countries, and disagreements within the Trump administration about how best to proceed, a quick resolution seems increasingly unlikely.

No one knows exactly what Trump hopes to achieve with all this. Tanking the economy is one of the surest ways to doom his reelection chances.

QUICK HITS

  • Ed Schulz, the former MSNBC news anchor and current host of a program on Russia Today, has died:
  • “I stopped going to the gym because of Trump. Now I can’t open jars.”
  • Chris Brown was arrested in Florida due to an outstanding warrant.
  • New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is willing to issue more food cart permits, which would shrink the city’s booming black market.
  • Pokemon Go turns two years old today. Do you remember life without it?
  • A Michigan State University professor says Latino students are perpetuating “colorblind racism” by emphasizing hard work and self-reliance.

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Debunking The First Piece Of Nonsense In Skripal 2.0

Authored by Rob Slane via TheBlogMire.com,

Elizabeth Gardens in Salisbury is a rather lovely park. Situated next to the river, and overlooking the Water Meadows, it is a wonderful place to take an early morning stroll, and then to walk along the town path, where you get a wonderful view of the towering 13th Century gothic cathedral from the very spot where Constable painted his famous Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows.

Yet, like the centre of the City, it is now apparently a place synonymous with poisoning. According to latest reports, it is apparently the place at which Dawn Sturgess and Charlie Rowley became poisoned on Friday 29th June. This from The Mail:

“Police are hunting for the deadly syringe or vial laced with Novichok that poisoned a couple in Salisbury as they finally evacuated homes five days after they fell catastrophically ill. Dawn Sturgess, 44, and her boyfriend Charles Rowley, 45, became critically ill within hours of visiting Salisbury on Saturday – the site of the murder attempt on Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia. The authorities are still searching for the container carrying the nerve agent, which could kill anyone who found it, and the homeless shelter where Dawn lived in Salisbury and Charlie’s home in Amesbury have now been screened-off and residents evacuated.

A security source told the Evening Standard: ‘It could have been picked up by anyone, including a child. There’s no doubt it will be contaminated still’, adding the poison could be deadly ‘for decades’ if kept dry.

Salisbury Hospital chief executive Cara Charles-Barks has revealed the victims remain in a critical condition in intensive care and are ‘acutely unwell’ but added that nobody else has been poisoned.

One friend of the couple, who were known to be drug users, believes they may have found a syringe believing it contained heroin rather than the deadly poison used by assassins Britain claims were sent by Russia.

‘It was definitely an accident. I think they found a package and it looked like drugs’, she said.

Dawn and Charlie collapsed after a visit to the Queen Elizabeth Gardens on Friday, an area not searched or decontaminated after the Skripals were poisoned in March, raising serious questions about the quality of the clear-up operation four months ago.”

Okay, so this one is pretty easy to debunk, and I think I can save the media the trouble of going on about this for days on end, only to have to shift their explanation away from the vial/syringe in Queen Elizabeth Gardens to another door handle perhaps, or a car, cemetery, restaurant, bench, or even porridge.

The article points your attention to the apparent expert, who is able to assure us that the substance A-234, which prior to March 2018 was reckoned to be highly volatile, is able to survive in a syringe/vial for donkeys’ years. Here’s my advice: Don’t pay any attention to what he’s saying! Why? Because it’s a complete and utter red-herring, which – either wittingly or unwittingly – turns your attention away from a rather obvious reason why this is complete nonsense. And what is that?

It is this: Queen Elizabeth Gardens is nowhere near Christie Miller Road. Even if you had accepted the Government narrative that the Skripals were poisoned by a military grade nerve agent (of a type 5-8 times more toxic than VX), which was poured (or now presumably squirted from the syringe) onto the door handle of Mr Skripal’s front door, by professional assassins not wearing HazMats – all of which requires much cognitive dissonance – what are you now being asked to believe? That the professional unHazMatted Russian assassins, after leaving Chez Skripal, decided not to leg it to Heathrow or Gatwick pronto, but to drive to Elizabeth Gardens.

As I say, it’s a beautiful park, and one which I would encourage people to visit, although you may find that quite tricky just at the moment. But here’s the thing:

How likely do you suppose it to be that the alleged professional Russian hitmen, after undertaking their dangerous and potentially deadly assignment, decided to drive from Christie Miller Road to Elizabeth Gardens, which is out of the way, and certainly not the way you’d drive if you wanted to get to an airport quickly, where they parked their car, got out and then went for a walk to drop their deadly (but non-lethal) Novichok-laced syringe in the gardens, where it lay undetected for four months.

I’d put the chances of that at zero, and not a smidgen more.

But that’s apparently what we’re being asked to believe. Until of course they change the narrative tomorrow.

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Russia Joins Global Trade War – Imposes Tariffs On US Energy, Mining Imports

Whether this is a coordinated response is unclear – and certainly on a much smaller scale – but Bloomberg reports that Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev signed a decree this morning imposing higher tariffs on U.S. products in retaliation for U.S. duties on metals imports, according to Economy Ministry statement.

Reuters reports that Russia’s additional duties will apply to imports of fiber optics, equipment for road construction, oil and gas industry, metal processing and mining, according to an economy ministry statement.

Russia will impose duties on goods which have Russian-made substitutes, Economy Minister Maxim Oreshkin is quoted as saying in the statement.

“The compensation measures will be applied in the form of additional, higher rates of import duties ranging from 25% to 40% of the price of imported goods. Duties will be imposed on some U.S. goods, the analogues of which are produced in Russia. In particular, the measures cover some types of road construction equipment, oil and gas equipment, metalworking machines, rock drilling equipment, and optical fiber,” Minister Maxim Oreshkin said as quoted by the ministry.

“The financial damage inflicted on Russian exporters by the U.S. trade restrictions amounts to $537.6 million. This is the amount of additional duties that Russian suppliers have to pay in the U.S.

The current increase of duties allows us to compensate for only part of the damage amounting to $87.6 million. This is compensation that Russia has the right to recover under the WTO rules,” he said.

Russia will be able to compensate for the remaining part in three years since the introduction of the U.S. duties or after approval of the WTO dispute settlement body if it finds the U.S. restrictions violating the organization’s rules, the ministry said.

Makes you wonder how long Russia will stay with WTO – just like Trump – if this is all the response “you’re allowed.”

Shots fired…

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June Jobs Increase: All Part-Time Workers As Full-Time Jobs Drop

While the headline prints in today’s jobs report were solid with the exception of hourly earnings, which disappointed consensus expectations on both a monthly and annual basis, however not too dramatically earning the report a “goldilocks” name, a look below the surface reveals at least one ugly side to today’s jobs report: all the job gains were for part-time workers, while full-time employment dipped modestly.

In June, the number of part-time workers rose by 145K to 27.028MM, while the full-time workers declined by a modest 89K to 128.658MM.

On a longer-term basis, however, this month’s jump in part-time workers appears to be an outlier, with the bulk of job additions in the past year manifesting in the form of full time jobs.

Finally, the part-time print may merely be a statistical anomaly, because on an unadjusted basis full-time workers surged by over 900K, while part-timers actually dropped by just under 500K.

Still, this is a series worth keeping an eye on as an increase in part-time workers at the expense of full-timers may explain the ongoing inability of a tight labor market to translate into higher wages, which as a reminder, was the biggest disappointment in this jobs report.

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‘Goldilocks’ Jobs Print Sparks Dollar Dump, Bond & Stock Buying

Update: Maybe not so Goldilocks after all…

*  *  *

Amid the low liquidity of a holiday week, US equity futures continue to kneejerk up and down (up in this case) after a so-called ‘Goldilocks’ jobs print that was just bad enough to leave The Fed on its slow path to normalization. Bond yields and the dollar are also sliding…

Quite wild ride for Dow futures in the last 12 hours…

 

Treasuries are bid with 10Y yields at 2.80% – the lowest since May…

 

And the dollar has dropped to its lowest since mid-June’s Fed/ECB spike…

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US Trade Deficit Plunges Most In 10 Years – Is Trump Winning?

Confirming the advance trade balance, it could be argued – by those of a particular persuasion – that Trump’s trade policies are working as the US trade deficit has collapsed to its lowest since September 2016.

The US trade balance for May printed a smaller deficit than expected at $43.1 bn (vs $43.6bn exp) and well down from the revised $46.1bn in April.

This is the lowest trade deficit since October 2016 and biggest 3-month reduction in the deficit in 10 years.

Exports of goods and services climbed to a record high, outpacing a pickup in imports.

Under the hood, the biggest driver of the improvement was US soybean exports rose 90% MoM in May.

Overall exports increased 1.9 percent to $215.3 billion as soybean shipments overseas almost doubled to $4.1 billion. Exports of civilian aircraft, a category that tends to be volatile, rose $1.9 billion in May.

Imports rose 0.4 percent to $258.4 billion, boosted by a record value of capital goods shipments from overseas.

However, the report also showed the trade gap with China, the world’s second-biggest economy, widened to $32 billion in May from $30.8 billion.

This is the biggest trade gap with China for a May since records began.

Finally, ex-Petroleum, this is the smallest trade deficit since March 2017…

 

We would expected to see GDP models updated positively shortly as improvement in the trade gap may be a positive for second- quarter growth.

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Payrolls Rise 213K, Stronger Than Expected But Hourly Earnings Disappoint Again

Ahead of today’s payrolls report, there was some confusion: will Trump tweet about it (like he did last month), or won’t he, and if not, is it because the number will be a disappointment?

Well, moments ago the BLS gave us the answer, and contrary to whispers of a miss to the 195K consensus expectation, in June the US labor market continued to chug along, with some 213K jobs created, stronger than expected, while May’s 223K payrolls were also revised higher to 244K.

Yet while the payrolls report was solid, there was some disappointment in the Average Hourly Earnings print, which missed expectations of a 2.8% Y/Y increases, rising by 2.7%, unchanged from last month, with the monthly increase of 0.2% also missing the expected number of 0.3%.

Meanwhile, the broader unemployment rate also surprised, rising from 3.8% to 4.0%, missing consensus of an unchanged print…

… with the rise in the unemployment rate largely a function of the increase in number of unemployed people, which increased from 6.065MM to 6.564MM, and the rise in the labor force participation rate, which edged higher from 62.7% to 62.9%

Developing

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Wales Legalizes Take-Home Abortion Pills: New at Reason

Last week, the Welsh government approved take-home abortion pills, meaning most medical, non-surgical abortions can be done at home, without the supervision of a doctor.

Currently, Scotland, Sweden, and France have similar protocols in place, though England lags behind on this front. Given that around three-fourths of the total abortions performed in Wales last year were medical, this recent change could mean easier abortion accessfor women who live in remote parts of the country, writes Liz Wolfe.

View this article.

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