If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed. -- Benjamin Franklin
Texas police shot dead two gunmen who opened fire on Sunday outside an exhibit of caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad that was organized by an anti-Islamic group and billed as a free-speech event.
The shooting in a Dallas suburb was an echo of past attacks or threats in other Western countries against art depicting the Prophet Mohammad. In January, gunmen killed 12 people in the Paris offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in revenge for its cartoons.
Sunday's attack took place at about 7 p.m. in a parking lot of the Curtis Culwell Center, an indoor arena in Garland, northeast of Dallas. Geert Wilders, a polarizing Dutch politician and anti-Islamic campaigner who is on an al Qaeda hit list, was among the speakers at the event.
The exhibit was organized by Pamela Geller, president of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI). Her organization, which is described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group, has sponsored anti-Islamic advertising campaigns in transit systems across the country.
Organizers of the "Muhammad Art Exhibit and Contest" said the event was to promote freedom of expression. They offered a $10,000 prize for the best artwork or cartoon depicting the Prophet, as well as a $2,500 "People's Choice Award."
Depictions of the Prophet Mohammad are viewed as offensive in Islam, and Western art that portrays the Prophet has sometimes angered Muslims and provoked threats and attacks from radicals.
"May the 4th be with you" is a full-fledged unofficial holiday, "Star Wars Day."
Actually, as far as Lucasfilm and Disney are concerned, it's quite official.
So why this day, and what is there to do other than watch it trend on Twitter? (After all, it's apparently important enough to send hardcore fans into a tizzy when they feel it's been mistreated.)
As legend has it, and according to the origin story recognized by Lucasfilm, the phrase was first used on May 4, 1979, the day Margaret Thatcher took office as UK prime minister. The Conservative party allegedly placed an ad in the London Evening News which read, "May the Fourth Be With You, Maggie. Congratulations."
It took off in the social media age (where it has become a big deal every year) and finally expanded to real-life with events in Toronto. Now, there are events celebrating the day worldwide.
There are online and in-store deals on "Star Wars" merchandise and gaming, "Star Wars" food galore and events where fans are encouraged to dress up or play "Star Wars" trivia or just enjoytheir favorite film franchise.
Ms. Ravel, who led California’s state ethics panel before her appointment as a Democratic member of the commission in 2013, said that when she became chairwoman in December, she was determined to “bridge the partisan gap” and see that the F.E.C. confronted such problems. But after five months, she said she had essentially abandoned efforts to work out agreements on what she saw as much-needed enforcement measures.
Now, she said, she plans on concentrating on getting information out publicly, rather than continuing what she sees as a futile attempt to take action against major violations. She said she was resigned to the fact that “there is not going to be any real enforcement” in the coming election.
“The few rules that are left, people feel free to ignore,” said Ellen L. Weintraub, a Democratic commissioner.
Republican members of the commission see no such crisis. They say they are comfortable with how things are working under the structure that gives each party three votes. No action at all, they say, is better than overly aggressive steps that could chill political speech.
“Congress set this place up to gridlock,” Lee E. Goodman, a Republican commissioner, said in an interview. “This agency is functioning as Congress intended. The democracy isn’t collapsing around us.”
As a lawyer in Silicon Valley who went after ethics violators in California during her time there, Ms. Ravel brought to Washington both a reformer’s mentality and a tech-savvy background, and she has used Twitter and other media to try to attract young people and women to politics.
But her aggressive efforts have angered some Republicans, who charged that an F.E.C. hearing she scheduled for next week on challenges facing women in politics was not only outside the commission’s jurisdiction but a thinly veiled attempt to help the presidential bid of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Ms. Ravel called the accusations “crazy.”
Rep. Sam Johnson (R-Texas) introduced a bill, the Wasteful EPA Programs Elimination Act, which he said is a money-saving measure, citing a Heritage Foundation forecast that it would save $7.5 billion over 10 years.“As a fiscal conservative, I believe Washington should be respectful of taxpayers’ dollars and live within its means,” Johnson said in a Thursday statement.
“American taxpayers certainly don’t need to be paying for the EPA’s empty and unused buildings and its wasteful programs,” he said. “This bill does right by the hardworking folks in my district and across the country and is part of my ongoing effort to get our fiscal house in order.”
The measure would force the EPA to close all of its field offices, sell or lease certain properties, cut various climate change programs and stop its environmental justice activities.
It would also stop the EPA from regulating ground-level ozone and from limiting the greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles and power plants, the subject of the most controversial EPA programs recently.
So this isn’t about love. It’s about a deal between Clinton and liberals. It’s strictly business, and it’s about work. The work of maintaining Democratic control of the White House and keeping the loony right at bay for another four or eight years. The work of trying to move the country forward to a post-supply side economic paradigm. And, yeah, the work of electing our first woman president.
If you don’t love Hillary, let me offer you two things to love:
1. A liberal majority on the Supreme Court for the next 30, 40 years. You know that the next president may name three or four new justices. Two liberals, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, will likely retire soon. A Republican president would be able to expand the conservative majority to seven, replacing the two aforementioned with two more Alitos or Scalias. Sit with that.
President Clinton, on the other hand, will replace them with liberals and may replace Anthony Kennedy or Antonin Scalia, or both, with liberal justices (I’m not wishing illness on anyone here, just being actuarial about things). We haven’t had a liberal Supreme Court majority in this country in 35 years. Such a court would reverse loads of terrible Rehnquist-Roberts era decisions—it would restore voting rights, reverse school re-segregation, revisit the Second Amendment; at the same time it would uphold Roe, defend affirmative action, endorse workplace anti-discrimination policies for LGBT people, and on and on. And those are just the things the Court does that generate the big headlines. Corporate personhood; workers’ rights; campaign finance laws;campaign finance laws (right, I wrote that twice). If you are a liberal and these things aren’t awfully important to you, well, it’s hard to understand exactly what sort of liberal you are.
2. A coming civil war in the Republican Party, and the hope/prayer of a little moderation on its part. When a party loses two consecutive presidential elections, the losses can be chalked up to the appearance of a charismatic candidate and, then, the powers of his incumbency. But three; that’s when people have to start looking hard in the mirror.
Certainly, there will be some in the GOP who’ll trot out the “we weren’t conservative enough” argument if their side loses. But say Clinton wins with somewhere between Obama’s 2008 total of 365 electoral votes and his 2012 performance of 332; say 347 (Obama’s ’12 map plus North Carolina). A party that has won 173, 206, and 191 electoral votes, respectively, in the last three elections is a party that’s simply never going to have a prayer of hitting 270 without some major changes.
For one thing this would be great fun to watch. If the party goes crazy(er), it could split in two. And if it decides to respond with sanity, there’s a great silver lining in that for Democrats and for the country: Tea Party power will wane, non-extreme Republicans won’t fear Club for Growth-financed primary challengers so much, and some of them will actually make compromises and legislate!
I could go on, but you get the idea. What I’m talking about here is not just a handful of policies. I’m talking about the bulk of the Reagan-Gingrich-Bush legacy. Obama could not undo it because he had to deal with the Great Recession. But eight more years of a Democratic presidency can do exactly that—undo it, across a whole range of fronts.
The event at WKU featured Agriculture Commissioner James Comer, Louisville businessman Matt Bevin, and former Louisville Metro Councilman Hal Heiner.
If elected, all three pledged to dismantle the state’s health insurance exchange known as Kynect.
Comer said the state took on a lot of responsibility that it can’t afford.
"Eighty-two percent of the people who got on Kynect ended up on Medicaid," Comer explained. "What Kynect became for Governor Beshear was a way to greatly expand Medicaid to the point to where we have 25 percent of the state on Medicaid, one out of four people. That's not sustainable."
As governor, Comer said he would get more Kentuckians into private health coverage while changing eligibility requirements for Medicaid.
Matt Bevin said he would transition those who signed up on Kentucky’s exchange to the federal exchange.
"Frankly, it's a level of redundancy we can't afford. It's as simple as that," Bevin suggested. "We were lured into participation through the use of federal dollars."
Starting in 2017, the state must begin bearing a share of the cost of expanding Medicaid. Currently, the federal government is picking up the entire tab.
Hal Heiner suggested tying the Medicaid expansion to workforce training so people could get a job, get off of Medicaid, and obtain private insurance. He criticized the Medicaid expansion for lacking any level of personal responsibility.
"It doesn't have what you're seeing conservative governors in other states adopt in their plans which build in incentives to use preventive care, to use primary care providers rather than emergency care, and to make healthy lifestyle choices to reduce the overall cost," Heiner stated.
On Thursday’s edition of “The O’Reilly Factor,” Bill O’Reilly opined that Baltimore rioters are out on the street because they are disrespectful, uneducated gangs of entitled victims. Not because Freddie Gray is dead and there is an oppressive system of justice that criminalizes blackness.
“The litany of excuse-making is excruciating,” O’Reilly said before mocking the excuses.”The rioters are angry because America is a country of mass incarceration. People who burn down buildings and loot are just misdirected folks who feel hopeless, and if you feel hopeless, it’s ok to riot. You see it’s really not the fault of those who commit crimes, it’s the fault of America because we don’t provide jobs for everyone.”
“Instead of pinpointing the real problem and then trying to solve it, you get crazy theories in an attempt to provide justification for Americans hurting other Americans,” he continued. “Here’s the truth: how can anyone provide a job that pays a decent salary to somebody who can barely read or write? To somebody who can’t speak English? To somebody that has tattoos all over their body? Who’s defiant, disrespectful, and who doesn’t even want to work because they have a sense of entitlement that says they’re victims and you owe me.”
Nearly 44 percent of Americans live in areas with dangerous levels of ozone or particle pollution, according to the American Lung Association's annual "State of the Air" report, published yesterday.
The good news is that's actually an improvement over last year's report, which showed that 47 percent of the population lived in these highly polluted places. Overall, the air has been getting cleaner since Congress enacted stricter regulations in the 1970s, and the American Lung Association report, which looked at data from 2011 through 2013, showed a continuing drop in the air emissions that create the six most widespread pollutants.
But don't pat yourself on the back just yet. Many cities experienced a record number of days with high levels of particle pollution, a mixture of solid and liquid droplets in the air that have been linked to serious health problems. Short-term particle pollution was especially bad in the West, in part due to the drought and heat, which may have increased the dust, grass fires and wildfires. Six cities—San Francisco; Phoenix; Visalia, California; Reno, Nevada.; Yakima, Washington; and Fairbanks, Alaska—recorded their highest weighted average number of unhealthy particle pollution days since the American Lung Association started covering this metric in 2004.
Baltimore State's Attorney Marilyn J. Mosby announced on Friday that she had filed murder, manslaughter, and assault charges against city police officers following the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray.
Gray died on April 19 after being injured while in police custody.
"The manner of death deemed a homicide by the Maryland state medical examiner is believed to be the result of a fatal injury that occurred while Mr. Gray was punrestrained by a seat belt in the custody of the Baltimore police department wagon," Mosby said at a morning news conference.
Cheers could be heard in the crowd when Mosby announced that "we have probable cause to file criminal charges."
She said that six officers would face charges, including second-degree murder, manslaughter and assault, and that a warrant had been issued for their arrest at about 9:30 a.m. Friday.
“We will not obey.”
That’s the blunt warning a group of prominent religious leaders is sending to the Supreme Court of the United States as they consider same-sex marriage.
“We respectfully warn the Supreme Court not to cross that line,” read a document titled, Pledge in Solidarity to Defend Marriage. “We stand united together in defense of marriage. Make no mistake about our resolve.”
“While there are many things we can endure, redefining marriage is so fundamental to the natural order and the common good that this is the line we must draw and one we cannot and will not cross,” the pledge states….
“Yes, I’m talking about civil disobedience,” Staver said. “I’m talking about resistance and I’m talking about peaceful resistance against unjust laws and unjust rulings.”
That’s quite a shocking statement. So I asked Mr. Staver to clarify his remarks.
“I’m calling for people to not recognize the legitimacy of that ruling because it’s not grounded in the Rule of Law,” he told me. “They need to resist that ruling in every way possible. In a peaceful way - they need to resist it as much as Martin Luther King, Jr. resisted unjust laws in his time.”
Jeb Bush on family breakdown: "My views on this were shaped a lot by Charles Murray's book." He means the more recent one, not Bell Curve
— Benjy Sarlin (@BenjySarlin) April 30, 2015
Focusing on whites to avoid conflating race with class, Mr. Murray contends instead that a large swath of white America—poor and working-class whites, who make up approximately 30% of the white population—is turning away from the core values that have sustained the American experiment. At the same time, the top 20% of the white population has quietly been recovering its cultural moorings after a flirtation with the counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s. Thus, argues Mr. Murray in his elegiac book, the greatest source of inequality in America now is not economic; it is cultural.
He is particularly concerned with the ways in which working-class whites are losing touch with what he calls the four "founding virtues"—industriousness, honesty (including abiding by the law), marriage and religion, all of which have played a vital role in the life of the republic.
Gov. Greg Abbott is hoping to assure Texans that martial law will not be imposed during an upcoming military training exercise that has triggered a cascade of conspiracy theories.
The Republican governor ordered the Texas State Guard to monitor the two-month-long Jade Helm 15 exercise that will take place in Bastrop County this summer, reported KUT-FM.
A U.S. Army spokesman answered questions for about two hours Monday from concerned residents who voiced fears that the federal government would gather intelligence on them, confiscate their guns and other property, or conduct psychological operations on them.
He also knocked down concerns that foreign fighters – such as Islamic State militants – would be brought in subdue the population.
The spokesman tried to assure residents that the military has conducted similar exercises before without violating constitutional protections or U.S. law, but the overflow crowd remained highly suspicious.
“I think historically, it’s much more common for governments to be tyrannical and infringe on other’s rights,” Daniel DuCloux, a Bastrop County resident, told the radio station. “So when you see a large military build-up like this, I think it’s our duty as citizens to question what’s going on and to find answers. I mean, if we don’t, then who will?”
During Tuesday’s marriage equality arguments in the Supreme Court, several of the Court’s conservative members suggested that same-sex couples should not be given equal marriage rights because these couples have not enjoyed those rights for most of the past. As Justice Antonin Scalia summed up this argument, “for millennia, not a single society” supported marriage equality, and that somehow exempted same-sex couples from the Constitution’s promise of equal protection of the law.
Not long after her conservative colleagues raised this argument, however, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg explained exactly why marriage was long understood to be incompatible with homosexuality in just five sentences:
[Same-sex couples] wouldn’t be asking for this relief if the law of marriage was what it was a millennium ago. I mean, it wasn’t possible. Same-sex unions would not have opted into the pattern of marriage, which was a relationship, a dominant and a subordinate relationship. Yes, it was marriage between a man and a woman, but the man decided where the couple would be domiciled; it was her obligation to follow him.
There was a change in the institution of marriage to make it egalitarian when it wasn’t egalitarian. And same-sex unions wouldn’t — wouldn’t fit into what marriage was once.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R), a potential presidential candidate in 2016, on Monday placed blame on the media for his low approval ratings.
During an interview with NJ101.5 radio's "Ask the Governor," Christie dismissed the hit he has taken in the polls since the Bridgegate scandal broke.
"If you're going to have relentlessly negative coverage from the media, it's going to affect your poll numbers," Christie said, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Christie's approval ratings sunk to the lowest of any governor this year in an April Quinnipiac poll. Fifty-six percent of New Jersey voters said they disapproved of the job Christie is doing, while just 38 percent said they approved.
David Wildstein, a former ally of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie who ordered intentional traffic jams near the George Washington Bridge, is scheduled to plead guilty to criminal charges on Thursday, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.
Wildstein is set to appear in federal court in Newark, where grand jurors have heard testimony in secret for months about gridlock over four mornings in Fort Lee, New Jersey, according to the person, who requested anonymity because the matter isn’t public. He would plead guilty to a charging document known as a criminal information, the person said. It was unclear what the specific charges would be.
Wildstein lawyer Alan Zegas and Fishman spokesman Matthew Reilly didn’t immediately return e-mails and calls seeking comment on the scheduled plea. Zegas has said “evidence exists” that Christie knew of the traffic jams at the time.
The Pew Research Center spent the last month collecting data on responses to its 12-question news quiz. And the results are, um, humbling for those of us who spend every day writing, talking and thinking about politics.
The overriding message? People don't know so much about current affairs with political tinge. Here are two examples.
1. The Senate
Presented with four options about the current partisan makeup of the Senate, roughly half (52 percent) got the answer right. (It's option number 4 above. Duh.)
Pretty good, right? Not so much. Consider that a straight-up guess would give you a 25 percent success rate since Pew provided four options for people to choose from. Given that, you'd (or maybe I'd) expect a lot more people to get it right. What did the 48 percent who got it wrong choose? One in five people (21 percent) said that Republicans controlled 61 seats while one in ten thought Democrats held the Senate majority (option #3). Six percent said the Senate was tied 50-50.
2. Elizabeth Warren
Again, roughly half (51 percent) of those who participated in the news quiz knew that Warren was the woman pictured on the lower left above. Ok, so, yes, Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin (top right) does look a little bit like Warren. But, Nancy Pelosi (bottom right but you already knew that) looks nothing like Warren. And, even if you have no idea who Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) is (top left), she still looks NOTHING like Warren.
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