February 28, 2017


News and Views


http://occupydemocrats.com/2017/02/28/washington-post-just-dropped-new-fbi-trump-russia-bombshell/
Washington Post Just Dropped A New FBI-Trump-Russia Bombshell
BY COLIN TAYLOR
PUBLISHED ON FEBRUARY 28, 2017

The Washington Post has just announced that the Federal Bureau of Investigation ordered former MI6 agent Christopher Steele to continue his investigation into the notorious “golden showers” dossier following the confirmation that the Russians had interfered in the United States 2016 election on behalf of Republican Donald Trump.

There was even talk of payments for him to continue his work – but those discussions were quickly canned as the report leaked to the public and a firestorm of curiosity – and mockery – dominated the news cycle.

Steele is considered a credible source and was instrumental in the FBI’s exposing of a massive corruption scandal within the governing body of international soccer, FIFA.

The Post remarks that crucially, the “FBI’s arrangement with Steele shows that bureau investigators considered him credible and found his line of inquiry to be worthy of pursuit.”

The continued Republican refusal to investigate the Trump-Russia connection means that they are putting the word of a pathological liar over the carefully considered assessment of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and are thus putting our national security in grave danger.

The fact that Republicans, at the behest of Trump, went to the FBI and begged them to bury the Russia story is clear evidence of their own complicity in this potentially treasonous scandal.

The dossier, parts of which have been collaborated by intelligence wiretap s, alleges that the Russian government has compromising video and audio of President Donald Trump engaged in…some unusual acts.

Those acts allegedly involve Donald Trump paying prostitutes to urinate on a bed once slept in by President Obama and First Lady Michelle in a petty act of vengeance from Obama’s mocking of Trump at the 2013 White House Correspondents’ Dinner and a St. Petersberg orgy with still more Russian prostitutes. The Federal Security Service (FSB) allegedly has film and audio of both incidents.

“[the] Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years” says Steele.

The new revelations are yet another indication that there is something very real behind Trump’s Russian scandal. Between the hacks of the Democratic National Committee servers and the email account of Clinton campaign manager John Podesta, the secret communications between the Trump team throughout the campaign and after the election, there are too many red flags for this to be swept under the rug.

The vehemency of Trump’s denials is just the caviar on this blini.


COLIN TAYLOR

COLIN TAYLOR IS THE MANAGING EDITOR OF OCCUPY DEMOCRATS. HE GRADUATED FROM BENNINGTON COLLEGE WITH A BACHELOR'S DEGREE IN HISTORY AND POLITICAL SCIENCE. HE NOW FOCUSES ON ADVANCING THE CAUSE OF SOCIAL JUSTICE AND EQUALITY IN AMERICA.



http://www.cbsnews.com/news/rosie-odonnell-slams-media-in-anti-trump-speech/
Trump nemesis Rosie O'Donnell leads rally outside White House
CBS NEWS February 28, 2017, 8:52 PM

One of President Trump’s longtime foes, Rosie O’Donnell, gave a President Trump-like speech filled with accusations and blaming the media at a rally outside the White House on Tuesday ahead of Mr. Trump’s speech before Congress.

The rally, called “A Resistance Address: Defending American Values in a Time of Moral Crisis, was attended by a number of groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, MoveOn.org Civic Action, the Hip Hop Caucus and DailyKos, according to NBC Washington.

Clinton brings up Trump's past remarks about women
Play VIDEO
Clinton brings up Trump's past remarks about women

O’Donnell kicked things off by saying “look at this crowd of 1.8 million people,” which she called “Donald Trump math” for a crowd that appeared to be about 200 people. “You say it, the media buys it,” she said.

O’Donnell quoted from the Declaration of Independence, and then said insisted “this is not Russia.” O’Donnell attacked the media for not reporting “the truth,” and she insisted “we will go down and dirty from now on, just Donald Trump.”

“We have seen what you have done, sir,” O’Donnell yelled. “We have seen your connections with Russia – the game is over. The Internet rules – all media is universal. The truth matters, even if our major media companies will not call him a liar, we will. He lies!”

The feud between O’Donnell and Mr. Trump goes back more than a decade. O’Donnell sparked Mr. Trump’s ire back in 2006, when she made jokes about him on “The View,” including calling him a “snake-oil salesman” and slammed his multiple marriage. He responded by calling her a “real loser,” an accusation he continued to lobby against her on Twitter, even after she left “The View.” In 2014, she told People that “the Trump stuff” was “the most bullying I have ever experienced in my life.”

At a Republican debate in 2015, Megyn Kelly asked Mr. Trump about describing women with language such as “fat pigs,” “dogs,” slobs” and “disgusting animals,” Mr. Trump responded “only Rosie O’Donnell.” And in 2016, Mr. Trump referred to her again in a debate with Hillary Clinton, saying that he said very tough things to her and I think everybody would agree she deserves it and nobody feels sorry for her.”



http://www.cbsnews.com/news/more-than-100-generals-sign-letter-warning-against-budget-cuts/
More than 100 generals sign letter warning against budget cuts
By KYLIE ATWOOD CBS NEWS
February 28, 2017, 12:40 AM

More than 120 retired generals are making what may seem like a surprising defense of government spending on diplomacy. Their unified perspective is expressed in letter to congressional leadership and was prompted by an announcement of major cuts to the non-defense budget and a corresponding increase of $54 billion to defense spending.

The generals quoted Defense Secretary James Mattis to illustrate their point that foreign policy is not monolithic, and that diplomacy and defense are equal partners in U.S. policy.

“As Secretary James Mattis said while commander of U.S. Central Command, ‘If you don’t fully fund the State Department, then I need to buy more ammunition.’”

In Mr. Trump’s first address as president, terror topped his foreign policy agenda.

Previewing President Trump's first address to joint session of Congress
Play VIDEO
Previewing President Trump's first address to joint session of Congress


“We will reinforce old alliances and form new ones -- and unite the civilized world against radical Islamic terrorism, which we will eradicate completely from the face of the Earth,” he declared in his inaugural address. Now, through his continued rhetoric and this budget announcement, it is evident that in Trump’s eyes, defending the nation means giving the military all the muscle that they need, to the detriment of diplomatic funding.

The signatories of this letter disagree that foreign policy should be approached purely as a militaristic endeavor. One signer is Marine Gen. John R. Allen, a retired United States Marine Corps four-star general, former top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, and 2014-2015 Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL appointed by President Obama.

“Cutting the State Department budget by 30 percent is consigning us to a generational war. We cannot fight our way out of this. It is an issue which can be decided by decisive diplomacy and enlightened development,” General Allen told CBS News.

“If [the president] wants to eradicate radical Islamic terrorism, his only hope of doing it is not through an interminable war on Islam. It is by funding the very things in the State Department that give us the capacity to work with other countries and to help, in the context of development, to change the human condition in places in the world where young men and women are radicalized by virtue of the social environments they are in. They are pushed into the arms of extremists who we must fight.”

Other prominent generals who signed the letter include former NSA chief Gen. Keith Alexander and former Army Chief of Staff Gen. William Casey.

What is the United States' priority in the war against ISIS?
Play VIDEO
What is the United States' priority in the war against ISIS?

The letter was coordinated by the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition, a group of business executives, foreign-policy experts and retired senior military officials who advocate for using diplomacy with defense -- not instead of it. They addressed their letter to House Speaker Paul Ryan, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. There were also copies sent to the State Department, the Department of Defense and Trump’s national security adviser, H.R. McMaster.

“We know from our service in uniform that many of the crises our nation faces do not have military solutions alone -- from confronting violent extremist groups like ISIS in the Middle East and North Africa to preventing pandemics like Ebola and stabilizing weak and fragile states that can lead to greater instability,” the generals wrote.

Specific numbers regarding the State Department cuts have not been made public, but State Department employees are on edge. They don’t want to see a sledgehammer approach applied to the funding for their diplomatic work. Some fear that these cuts will lead to a destruction of government rather than what Trump’s Chief White House Strategist Steve Bannon calls “a deconstruction of the administrative state.”

“The Department is working with the White House and OMB to review its budget priorities,” wrote Mark Toner, acting State Department spokesperson. “The Department remains committed to a U.S. foreign policy that advances the security and prosperity of the American people.”

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright declared the proposed cuts will “undercut American diplomacy, which is important for national security.” She made those comments on Monday night on a panel for J-Street, a group of liberal pro-Israel Americans.

Though Trump is not known for listening closely to critiques, he has shown some inclination toward the generals he has among his own staff and Cabinet, including national security adviser Gen. H.R. McMaster.




http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017/02/27/pro-trump-town-riled-up-after-immigration-officials-arrest-popular-restaurant-manager.html

IMMIGRATION
Pro-Trump town riled up after immigration officials arrest popular restaurant manager
Published February 27, 2017
· Associated Press

Photograph of airport scene, (AP)

WEST FRANKFORT, Ill. – A southern Illinois community that solidly backed President Donald Trump has rallied behind a Mexican restaurant manager who doesn't have legal permission to live in the U.S. and has been detained by immigration officials.

Letters of support for Juan Carlos Hernandez Pacheco have poured in from West Frankfort's mayor, police chief, high school athletic director and the county prosecutor. They describe Hernandez as a role model and praise his robust civil involvement, including funding school scholarships, benefit dinners for families in need and hosting a law enforcement appreciation event.

ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT TAKES REFUGE IN DENVER CHURCH TO AVOID DEPORTATION

Hernandez, 38, came to the U.S. in the 1990s but didn't obtain legal status, according to friends. He has been the manager of La Fiesta Mexican Restaurant for a decade in the community with coal mining roots, about 100 miles southeast of St. Louis.

He was arrested at his home earlier this month and remains in custody at a U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement facility outside St. Louis. ICE officials did not explain why Pacheco was arrested, but noted his drunken-driving convictions from 2007.

Some residents in the community of roughly 8,000 didn't know Hernandez lacked legal status in the U.S. until word spread of his arrest.

IN FACE OF RISING DEPORTATION, IMMIGRANTS INCREASINGLY
FORCED TO FIGHT ALONE

Though the community largely backed Trump — who has made an aggressive stance on immigration central to his agenda and has promised to deport millions of immigrants who have no permission to live here — many residents of West Frankfort said Hernandez' case has complicated their views on immigration policy.

"I think people need to do things the right way, follow the rules and obey the laws, and I firmly believe in that," Lori Barron, the owner of a beauty salon, told The New York Times. "But in the case of Carlos, I think he may have done more for the people here than this place has ever given him. I think it's absolutely terrible that he could be taken away."

DHS DEPORTATION SHIFT FUELS MEXICO TENSIONS AHEAD OF TILLERSON TRIP

Hernandez' attorney is pushing for him to be freed on bond until his case can be heard.

His wife, Elizabeth Hernandez, and three children are U.S. citizens. She told The (Carbondale) Southern Illinoisan that she hopes her husband can come home and "continue his efforts on becoming an American citizen, something that he has wished for a very long time."



https://www.yahoo.com/gma/man-tried-stop-kansas-shooting-says-more-happy-115609456--abc-news-topstories.html
Good Morning America
Man who tried to stop Kansas shooting says he was 'more than happy' to risk his life to save others
KARMA ALLEN, Good Morning America
February 27, 2017

A Kansas man who’s been called a hero for trying to stop a deadly shooting last week said he was "happy" to risk his life to save others and that he's grateful for how his community has united following the incident.

Ian Grillot, 24, intervened to stop a gunman who witnesses said yelled "get out of my country" before shooting two Indian men in Olathe, Kansas last Wednesday, killing one.

Adam Purinton, a 51-year-old Navy veteran and former air traffic controller, is being charged with murder and attempted murder in the shooting that killed Srinivas Kuchibhotla and wounded Alok Madasani, both 32-year-old employees of the technology company Garmin.

Authorities are investigating if the shooting was a hate crime. Purinton is being held on a $2 million bond and is scheduled make his first court appearance on Monday.

“This is a very bad way of it happening, but, I'm so grateful that it is actually bringing the community together instead of driving them apart," Grillot said in an interview posted on the University of Kansas Hospital's YouTube page on Sunday. “It is such a beautiful thing. I love it.

“I was more than happy to risk my life to save the lives of others,” Grillot said. “I thank everybody for drawing together and supporting me and the other families affected by this.”

Grillot said he is recovering from gunshot wounds to his hand and chest. He said he was “doing a lot better,” but still sore and feeling the aftermath from “the bullet lodged in my ribs.”

People traveled from as far as India and Washington, D.C. to attend a prayer vigil for Kuchibhotla and the other victims in Olathe on Sunday.

Representative Kevin Yoder (R-Kan) attended the vigil and posted about it on his Instagram account, calling the incident a "great tragedy" and saying "thousands of concerned citizens came together to support one another and the Indian community."

He also urged people to remember Kuchibhotla’s life as well as Grillot’s “heroism.”

Many of the vigil’s attendees, including Mike Johns of Olathe, said they were there to rally for peace.

“This isn’t Selma, but this is close,” Johns told ABC affiliate KMBC on Sunday. “We’re marching, just like Dr. Martin Luther King [Jr.] did, for peace.“

ABC News' Devin Villacis and the Associated Press contributed to this report.




http://www.businessinsider.com/bernie-sanders-trump-healthcare-complicated-obamacare-2017-2
Bernie Sanders burst into laughter at Trump's claim that 'nobody knew healthcare would be this complicated'
Bob Bryan
February 28, 2017

Photographs – Cooper and Sanders
PLAY VIDEO also.

During a meeting with US governors on Monday, President Donald Trump said the reason for the slowdown on the repeal and replacement of the Affordable Care Act was in part because "nobody knew healthcare could be so complicated."

Sen. Bernie Sanders disagrees.

When asked by CNN's Anderson Cooper on Monday night about the "complicated" comment, Sanders immediately burst into laughter.

"Some of us who were sitting on the health and education committee, who went to meeting after meeting after meeting, who heard from dozens of people, who stayed up night after night trying to figure out this thing, yeah, we got a clue," Sanders said. "When you provide healthcare in a nation of 320 million people, yeah, it is very, very complicated."

Trump said in interviews before he took office that he wanted to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, the healthcare law better known as Obamacare, within weeks of his inauguration. At a press conference on January 11, however, Trump said the repeal-and-replace process would be "very complicated stuff."

Recently, the timeline for a replacement bill has stretched out. Republicans are facing issues within their own party, as different factions of lawmakers disagree on how best to overhaul the healthcare system.

"Maybe now, maybe the president and some of the Republicans understand you can't go beyond the rhetoric," Sanders said. "'We're going to repeal the Affordable Care Act, we're going to repeal Obamacare, and everything will be wonderful.' Well it's a little more complicated than that."

Sanders, the independent Vermont senator who ran as a Democrat in the 2016 presidential campaign and who caucuses with Democrats, has been fighting with the party against the repeal, pointing to the more than 20 million people who have gained insurance under provisions of the ACA.

"You mean to say that Democrats should work with Republicans to repeal this legislation?" Sanders said. "No, I don't think our job is to work with them to repeal the legislation — our job is to work with them to improve the legislation."




“NOT AS THOROUGH …” DOES THIS MEAN UNDESIRABLE SECTIONS HAVE BEEN EDITED OUT?

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/department-of-homeland-securitys-intel-wing-in-crisis-mode-over-travel-ban/
Dept. of Homeland Security's intel wing in crisis mode over travel ban
By JEF?F PEGUES CBS NEWS
February 28, 2017, 5:46 PM

Play VIDEO -- Trump delays travel ban as top cabinet secretaries head to Mexico
Play VIDEO -- What we know about Trump's upcoming immigration order’


WASHINGTON -- CBS News has learned that the intelligence arm of the Department of Homeland security is now in crisis mode.

The Office of Intelligence and Analysis was originally tasked with producing an intel document tied to the Executive Order which temporarily instituted a travel ban on people from seven countries. But leaks caused the process to spill out into the public amid concerns the intelligence assessments were being tainted by politics.

Former and current government sources say DHS’s intelligence unit is splitting in two, and there is currently no way of resolving the standoff. The atmosphere has been described as toxic, and some of those involved are considering seeking whistleblower status or legal representation.

The initial assessment found that citizenship was “likely an unreliable indicator of [the] terrorist threat to the United States.”

The document, which was leaked to the AP last week, also found that citizens of the seven countries impacted by the executive order were “rarely implicated in U.S. based Terrorism.”

When it was leaked, DHS officials claimed that the document was not as thorough as they would have liked it to be, even though it had been prepared by experienced intelligence officers.

Plans were made, with the blessing of the White House, to draft another assessment with the help of other intelligence agencies. Some of the contributors to the original report refused to work on the final product because they were concerned that the process had been tainted by politics.

With the White House preparing to re-introduce the travel ban Executive Order Wednesday, sources say the administration was seeking to bolster the order with intelligence documents pointing to the threat. But the original assessment was rejected by DHS officials.

On Tuesday, in response to questions about the discord in the intelligence unit, a spokesperson told CBS News, “DHS stands by its previous statements on the incomplete intelligence document.”

The spokesperson added, “This was an open source document deemed to be incomplete as an intelligence product by I&A leadership. Other federal law enforcement agencies did not concur with this product because classified and sensitive law enforcement information was needed to provide a complete intelligence assessment.”

The Office of Intelligence and Analysis serves both the federal government but also cities across the country. Its mission is to provide intelligence and information to keep the nation safe and secure. The disarray could have an effect on the intelligence information disseminated to agencies nationwide.



http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/27/politics/donald-trump-white-house-staffer-cell-phones-leaks/index.html
Sources: Trump signed off on checking White House staffers' phones
By Jeff Zeleny and Daniella Diaz, CNN
Updated 1:43 AM ET, Tue February 28, 2017

VIDEOS CNN NEWS STAFF


HO HUMMMM. LISTEN TO ADVICE?

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/trump-ignores-some-good-advice-counter-terrorism
Trump ignores some good advice on counter-terrorism
02/28/17 11:15 AM
By Steve Benen

Photograph -- Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump talks with press on Sept. 5, 2016, aboard his campaign plane, while flying over Ohio, as Vice presidential candidate Gov. Mike Pence looks on. Photo by Evan Vucci/AP

George W. Bush and Barack Obama disagreed on many issues, but both understood that combating terrorism by shouting “radical Islam” at every available opportunity was counter-productive. This, for deeply foolish reasons, has driven many Republicans increasingly batty.

For much of the right, the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism” has taken on magical qualities: to keep Americans safe, the argument goes, one must embrace the phrase and use it constantly. As conservatives have been reminded many times, this plays directly into the strategy ISIS and al Qaeda prefer.

Donald Trump doesn’t care. As a Republican candidate, Trump went so far as to argue, in all seriousness, that President Obama “should resign in disgrace” unless his rhetoric matches exactly with what the right wants to hear. As a Republican president, Trump and his aides have already used “radical Islamic terrorism” repeatedly.

In an interesting twist, however, the amateur president is getting some good advice on the matter from his new National Security Advisor. Politico reported this morning:

President Donald Trump’s new national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, advised him in a closed-door meeting last week to stop using a phrase that was a frequent refrain during the campaign: “radical Islamic terrorism.”

But the phrase will be in the president’s speech to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night, according to a senior White House aide – even though McMaster reviewed drafts and his staff pressed the president’s chief speechwriter and senior policy adviser, Stephen Miller, not to use it.

This isn’t surprising, but it’s nevertheless disheartening. After Michael Flynn was forced to resign, Trump brought in McMaster, a decorated and respect career officer, to advise him on matters of national security. The president, however, apparently remains more committed to dumb campaign rhetoric than his NSA’s expert guidance.

Note, this isn’t the first time McMaster has brought up the issue since joining Trump’s White House team. In a story that was first broken on “The Rachel Maddow Show,” we learned that McMaster told the staff of the National Security Council – during his first meeting in his new post – he has no use for Trump’s framing. As the New York Times reported, McCaster told his team “that the label ‘radical Islamic terrorism’ was not helpful because terrorists are ‘un-Islamic.’”

The question isn’t who’s right, because we already know McMaster’s approach is the sensible one. Rather, the question is whether Trump will prioritize good advice on national security from his hand-picked expert or partisan nonsense.

Explore:
The MaddowBlog, Counter-Terrorism, Donald Trump, Islam and National Security


TRUMP DONE GOOD HERE – UNLESS BEING UNDER HIS PROTECTION ISN’T A REALLY GOOD THING …

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-issues-executive-orders-on-hbcus-environmental-regulations/
Trump issues executive orders on HBCUs, environmental regulations
By JACQUELINE ALEMANY CBS NEWS
February 28, 2017, 5:00 AM

Play VIDEO -- What to expect in President Trump's address to joint session of Congress


President Trump will sign an executive order to bolster historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) on Tuesday. The order will do this by moving the moving the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities, which was previously part of the Department of Education, back to the White House.

The administration says this action will encourage strategic partnerships with other agencies and outside groups by giving it greater visibility. The United Negro College Fund had requested that Mr. Trump move the Initiative to the White House and be led by a person “who reports to a senior advisor to the president,” according to The Washington Post.

Dozens of HBCU leaders gathered at the White House on Monday where they briefly met Mr. Trump in the Oval Office before meeting with Vice President Mike Pence. The order is a signal that the Trump administration plans to make HBCUs a priority, boosting Trump’s “urban agenda,” a senior White House office told reporters in a briefing.

The White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities was started by President Jimmy Carter, but the Trump administration says the office has “lost track because they didn’t have the full force of the White House behind it.”

Mr. Trump, who is expected to list campaign promises he has fulfilled and executive orders he has signed during his first Presidential address, will also sign an executive order that will instruct a review of the Waters of the U.S. Rule (WOTUS) by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

The order is aimed to dismantle the Obama administration’s Clean Water Rule that expanded federal protection of wetlands, streams, and waterways throughout the country.

Scott Pruitt, the new head of the EPA, filed an anti-WOTUS lawsuit against the EPA in 2015 when he was the Oklahoma Attorney General. Mr. Trump also vowed to kill various environmental regulations on the campaign trail.

The pen-happy President will also sign two bills: the Inspiring the Next Space Pioneers and Innovators and Explorers Act (INSPIRE) act and Promoting Women in Entrepreneurship Act. INSPIRE, first introduced by Virginia Congresswomen Barbara Comstock, authorizes NASA to encourage women to pursue careers in engineering, science, and mathematics.

The Promoting Women in Entrepreneurship Act authorizes the National Science Foundation to provide support for women’s entrepreneurial programs.



http://www.cbsnews.com/news/jewish-centers-cope-with-bomb-threats-officials-plan-headstone-repairs/
Jewish centers cope with bomb threats, officials plan headstone repairs
CBS/AP
February 28, 2017, 12:12 AM

Photograph -- cemetery.jpg, Damaged headstones rest on the ground at Mount Carmel Cemetery on Monday, Feb. 27, 2017, in Philadelphia. JACQUELINE LARMA, AP
Play VIDEO -- Jewish cemetery vandalized in Philadelphia
Play VIDEO -- Vice President Mike Pence visits vandalized Jewish cemetery in Missouri

Jewish centers and schools across the nation coped with another wave of bomb threats Monday as officials in Philadelphia made plans to repair and restore hundreds of vandalized headstones at a Jewish cemetery.

Jewish Community Centers and day schools in at least a dozen states received threats, according to the JCC Association of North America. No bombs were found. All 21 buildings -- 13 community centers and eight schools -- were cleared by Monday afternoon and had resumed normal operations, the association said.

It was the fifth round of bomb threats against Jewish institutions since January, prompting outrage and exasperation among Jewish leaders as well as calls for an aggressive federal response to put a stop to it.

In Cherry Hill, New Jersey, a Jewish Community Center was evacuated Monday morning after a threatening call, CBS News’ Jeff Pegues reported. Since the beginning of the year, there have been at least 90 similar phone calls across 30 states and one Canadian province.

A U.S. official says the calls appear to be coordinated. Some may be originating from overseas. They range from individuals phoning in threats to machine-generated or altered calls.

The phone threats have targeted Jewish Community Centers in waves from East to West coast. They usually come around late morning when centers are in full use, Pegues reported.

“The Justice Department, Homeland Security, the FBI, and the White House, alongside Congress and local officials, must speak out -- and speak out forcefully -- against this scourge of anti-Semitism impacting communities across the country,” said David Posner, an official with JCC Association of North America. “Members of our community must see swift and concerted action from federal officials to identify and capture the perpetrator or perpetrators who are trying to instill anxiety and fear in our communities.”

The FBI and the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division are probing the threats.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions called the vandalism and bomb threats serious, unacceptable behavior and said the department will “do what it can to assist in pushing back ... and prosecuting anybody that we can prove to be a part of it.”

“We are a nation that is a diverse constituency, and we don’t need these kind of activities,” Sessions said.

In Philadelphia, police investigated what they called an “abominable crime” after several hundred headstones were damaged during the weekend at Mount Carmel Cemetery, a Jewish cemetery dating to the late 1800s, said Steven Rosenberg, chief marketing officer of the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia.

Police said the vandalism appeared to be targeted at the Jewish community, though they cautioned they had not confirmed the motive. Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney said authorities were doing everything possible to find those “who desecrated this final resting place.”

“I’m hoping it was maybe just some drunk kids,” said Aaron Mallin, who discovered the damage during a visit to his father’s grave. “But the fact that there’s so many, it leads one to think it could have been targeted,” he told WPVI-TV.

Following the vandalism, nearly 200 interfaith leaders from several religions gathered at the Lutheran Seminary in the Germantown section of Philadelphia to stand in solidarity, CBS Philly reported.

People from all backgrounds have stood up in solidarity, including some in the Muslim community like Salaam Bahatti, who said his community knows what it is like to be targeted.

“Any targeting of any faith is an attack on all faiths ... If they come for the Jews they will come for us soon enough,” Bahatti said.

The vandalism came less than a week after a Jewish cemetery in suburban St. Louis was targeted. More than 150 headstones there were damaged, many of them tipped over.

Both acts of vandalism spurred offers of help.

The Philadelphia Building & Construction Trades Council, an umbrella group for more than 50 union locals that work in the construction industry, offered to repair the damage at Mount Carmel free of charge, calling it a “cowardly act of anti-Semitism that cannot be tolerated.” A community cleanup organized by the Jewish Federation was to begin Tuesday with as many as 50 volunteers per hour.

And in Missouri, a Muslim crowdfunding effort to support the vandalized Jewish cemetery near St. Louis had raised more than $136,000 by Monday, with organizers announcing they would use some of the money for the Philadelphia cemetery.

Monday’s bomb threats caused no physical damage but were no less worrisome.

“There’s plenty of people who are scared,” said Rosenberg, who denounced the hoaxsters as “an embarrassment to civilized society.”

Some 200 people were evacuated from a Jewish Community Center in York, Pennsylvania, after a caller told the front desk there was a bomb in the building, said Melissa Plotkin, the York JCC’s director of community engagement and diversity. Police entered the building and cleared it, she said.

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf, who has long ties to the York center, having served on its board, called the bomb threats and cemetery vandalism reprehensible.

“These acts are cowardly and disturbing,” Wolf told reporters in a conference call Monday. “We must find those responsible and hold them accountable for these hate crimes.”

Jewish centers and schools in Alabama, Delaware, Florida, Indiana, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Rhode Island and Virginia also were threatened, according to the JCC Association of North America.

Paul Goldenberg, director of the Secure Community Network, a nonprofit founded by several national Jewish groups to bolster security in the Jewish community, said Jewish Community Centers and other Jewish institutions have extensive security protocols in place.

After dealing with Monday’s threats, he said, the “Jewish community is back in business.”



TODAY’S GOOGLE DOODLE PAKISTANI PHILANTHROPIST

https://www.yahoo.com/news/google-doodle-honors-pakistani-humanitarian-115446049.html

Google Doodle Honors Pakistani Humanitarian Abdul Sattar Edhi
Vishakha Sonawane
International Business Times
February 28, 2017

Photograph -- Abdul Sattar Edhi is credited with the establishment of Pakistan’s largest volunteer ambulance network — the Edhi Foundation

Google celebrated the life and work of late Pakistani humanitarian Abdul Sattar Edhi with a doodle on his 89th birthday Tuesday. He is credited with the establishment Pakistan’s largest volunteer ambulance network — the Edhi Foundation.

Edhi, who was born Feb. 28, 1928 in the western Indian state of Gujarat, moved to the Pakistani city of Karachi after the country was formed in 1947. After shifting to Karachi, he noticed an abject lack of medicine, proper educational institutions and other essentials, prompting him to serve the people. In 1951, he established the Edhi Foundation — funded by private donations.

The foundation is currently the largest welfare organization in the South Asian country and has rescued over 20,000 abandoned babies, helped about 50,000 orphans and trained over 40,000 nurses so far.

In 2005, Edhi’s foundation raised $100,000 in aid relief for the victims of Hurricane Katrina.

Edhi died last July in Karachi due to renal failure. He insisted on being treated at a government hospital in Pakistan, refusing an offer to be treated abroad.

Here are a few quotes by Edhi:

“People know that I have adopted four principles in living my life: simple living, punctuality, hard work and prudence.”

“No religion is higher than humanity.”

“You have to care for all beings created by God...My mission is to help any person in need.”

“I believe in nature and humanity and am here to serve the common people of Pakistan. There is a great deal of suffering in this country and I'm here to help.”

“My religion is humanitarianism, which is the basis of every religion in the world.”

“I do not have any formal education. What use is education when we do not become human beings? My school is the welfare of humanity.”

“So, many years later there were many who still complained and questioned, ‘Why must you pick up Christians and Hindus in your ambulance?’ And I was saying, ‘Because the ambulance is more Muslim than you’.”

“Those who believed in changing the world were either hungry by circumstance or practiced deprivation by choice.”

“Appearance is a distraction, surrendering it develops truth and humility in abundance.”

“I do this work for the common people and part of that work is creating a general awareness of such problems as they exist because my work is beyond class, religion and creed.”

Related Articles
•Google Honors African American Sculptor Edmonia Lewis
•Bessie Coleman, First Black Woman Pilot, Honored By Google

February 27, 2017


News and Views


AN INCH AT A TIME, THERE IS PROGRESS.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/house-intel-white-house-interference-nunes/
Dems cry WH interference as House Intel committee probes Trump-Russia ties
By NANCY CORDES CBS NEWS
February 27, 2017, 7:32 PM

Play VIDEO -- FBI probing Russia ties of Trump's campaign inner circle
Play VIDEO -- What's next in investigation of Trump team's possible Russia contacts?


WASHINGTON -- House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes is leading the House investigation into possible collusion between Trump campaign officials and Russian operatives.

He insisted there was nothing wrong with him and his Senate counterpart Richard Burr making a few calls at the request of Trump aides.

“What would be the problem of the White House sending me a number of a press person to call?” Nunes said Monday.

“All it was was a White House communications person passing a number and a name of a reporter over for me to call, following up on what I had already told all of you in the days before that,” he said.

But that, combined with reports that White House officials made similar requests to the CIA director and FBI officials, prompted fresh accusations from Democrats of White House tampering.

“We have to do this investigation bipartisan,” said Virginia’s Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee.

“We have to not let a White House or any other political interference get in its way, because it’s too important,” Warner said.

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer would not confirm or deny that CIA Director Mike Pompeo was asked to defend the campaign.

“I’m not going to discuss what we did internally,” Spicer said.

And Nunes argued the probe is probably a dead end anyway.

“What I’ve been told by many folks is there’s nothing there,” he said.

“First of all, we haven’t obtained any of the evidence yet,” said Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.

“We can’t draw any conclusions. And nor should we. We shouldn’t be prejudging where the facts lead,” he said.

Schiff added that he’s not convinced the FBI will share all its information with Congress. CBS News has confirmed that the FBI Counterintelligence Division is leading the investigation into whether Trump associates coordinated with Russian officials during the 2016 campaign.



http://www.cbsnews.com/news/did-5-carmakers-knowingly-use-unsafe-takata-air-bags/

Did 5 carmakers knowingly use unsafe Takata air bags?
CBS/AP
February 27, 2017, 3:37 PM

DETROIT - Japanese auto parts maker Takata pleaded guilty on Monday to a criminal charge and agreed to pay $1 billion for a scheme to conceal a deadly defect in millions of its air bag inflators. In addition, plaintiffs in dozens of lawsuits against the air bag maker and five automakers allege the car companies knew that Takata’s products were dangerous yet continued to use them for years in order to save money.

Takata admits to hiding problems that can cause inflators to explode with too much force, hurling shrapnel into drivers and passengers. U.S. prosecutors still are seeking extradition of three former Takata executives from Japan to face criminal charges.

Detroit federal Judge George Caram Steeh accepted a guilty plea to a fraud charge Monday. It was entered by the company’s chief financial officer, Yoichiro Nomura, on Takata’s behalf. Nomura also agreed that Takata will be sold or merge with another company.

Takata has agreed to pay $850 million in restitution to automakers, $125 million for victims and families and a $25 million criminal fine. Separately, the company faces dozens of consumer and state lawsuits that could run into millions of dollars.

The allegations against Honda (HMC), Toyota (TM), Ford (F), Nissan (NSANY) and BMW were made in a filing Monday with a federal court in Miami, which is handling pretrial evidence-gathering in lawsuits against Takata and the automakers. The filing says documents produced in the case show the auto companies had independent knowledge that Takata’s air bag inflators were unsafe before putting them in millions of vehicles.

The allegations came just hours before Takata entered a guilty plea to one criminal charge and agreed to pay a $1 billion penalty at the hearing in Detroit.

The inflators are blamed for at least 16 deaths worldwide and more than 180 injuries. The problem touched off the largest automotive recall in U.S. history involving 42 million vehicles and up to 69 million inflators.

Former Takata executives indicted for fraud and conspiracy
Play VIDEO
Former Takata executives indicted for fraud and conspiracy

Unlike most other air bag makers, Takata uses the explosive chemical ammonium nitrate to inflate air bags instantly in a crash. But the chemical can deteriorate when exposed to prolonged airborne moisture.

Monday’s filing says that after an inflator ruptured in 2009, one of the auto companies described the problem as “one in which a passenger protection device was transformed into a killing weapon.” The company was not identified in the document.

The court filing marks the broadest allegation so far that automakers knew about Takata’s problems yet continued to use the inflators and put their customers in danger. The lawyers are trying to counter the auto companies’ assertion that they shouldn’t be liable because they, too, were deceived by Takata.

“The automotive defendants were aware that rupture after rupture, both during testing and in the field, confirmed how dangerous and defective Takata’s air bags were,” the attorneys allege in the court filing, called a “status report.”

But the automakers have pointed to Takata’s plea agreement, in which the Justice Department says Takata got the car companies to keep buying its inflators “through submission of false and fraudulent reports and other information that concealed the true and accurate test results.”

In addition to the deaths and injuries caused by Takata air bags, lawyers allege that vehicles sold by the automakers declined in value because they kept using the Takata equipment.

The filing Monday includes specific allegations that each of the automakers knew about Takata’s problems:

Honda, Takata’s largest customer, was intimately involved in designing Takata inflators, and two Takata inflators exploded and ruptured at Honda facilities in 1999 and 2000. “Before Honda initiated its first narrow recall in 2008, at least eight ruptures had occurred in Honda vehicles,” the lawyers allege.
Toyota had quality concerns about Takata in 2003, the same year that an inflator ruptured at a Toyota testing facility, the document says. At least 15 inflators in Toyotas blew apart by 2014, when the company issued a nationwide recall.

Ford picked Takata inflators over the objections of its own inflator expert because Takata was apparently the only company that could provide the number of inflators Ford needed, the lawyers wrote. One document obtained through the pretrial process said that Ford had a “gun to its head, so it had to accept ammonium nitrate.”

Nissan, the document said, switched to Takata inflators “primarily, if not solely” to save about $4 per inflator. Another automaker told Nissan about the risky inflators in 2006, eight years before Nissan began a national recall, the document said.

At BMW, documents show the company went to Takata seeking cost savings. As early as 2003, a Takata inflator ruptured in a BMW in Switzerland.

BMW and Nissan said they couldn’t comment on pending litigation. Toyota declined to comment. Honda was preparing a statement. A message was left Monday with Ford.

Takata, which also makes seatbelts, has racked up two straight years of losses over the recalls but said it hopes to start turning a profit again this fiscal year.

Volkswagen will pay billions in fines for emissions rigging
Play VIDEO
Volkswagen will pay billions in fines for emissions rigging

Takata’s penalty is small compared with the one imposed on Volkswagen, which must buy back cars and pay up to $21 billion in penalties and compensation to owners over its emissions-cheating scandal.

Karl Brauer, executive publisher of Kelley Blue Book, said authorities may have kept the penalty manageable so Takata could stay in business and continue to carry out the giant recall.

“My sense is there has been more kid-gloves treatment of Tataka simply because destroying them makes the problem much worse,” Brauer said.


CONCERNING IMPEACHMENT OF DONALD TRUMP AND MICHAEL PENCE – THREE ARTICLES

https://www.change.org/p/the-us-senate-the-legal-removal-of-the-president-vice-president-et-al-for-misprision-of-treason?recruiter=303521361&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=autopublish&utm_term=mob-xs-share_petition-reason_msg

Petitioning THE US SENATE and 8 others

The legal removal of The President & Vice President, et al., for Misprision of Treason
Ray S. Cline Washington, DC

FEBRUARY 24, 2017 OR LATER – THIS DATE COMES FROM THE FIRST COMMENTER, AND I AM UNABLE TO FIND THE OFFICIAL DATE OF THE PETITION, THOUGH THERE CERTAINLY SHOULD BE ONE.

A Petition for:

The legal removal of The President & Vice President, et al., for Misprision of Treason

Regarding known and recorded activities of:
D.J. Trump Sr., M. Pence, S. Bannon, P. Manafort, C. Page, Gen. M. Flynn, R. Stone, R. Tillerson, S. Miller, S. Mnuchin, J.C. Kushner, J. Kushner, R. Giuliani, J. Comey, M. McConnell, P. Ryan, J. Chaffetz, B. Epshteyn, J. Sessions, K. Conway, S. Spicer, R.L. Mercer, R. Mercer, D. Mercer, C. Koch, D. Koch, K. Rove, W. Deng Murdoch, A. Scaramucci, C. Lewandowski, D.J. Trump Jr., E. Trump, I.M. Trump, I.M. Trump, M.K. Trump, John & Jane Doe; et. al. (1-100)

That the above parties having had certain knowledge of relationships of one Donald John Trump with numerous Russian oligarchs and one Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, a former high ranking KGB officer, who is the current President of the Russian Federation, (a nation that has clearly positioned itself as the foremost geopolitical and military enemy of the United States, NATO and EU); did not find patriotic merit in informing any US authorities of the 'clear and present US national security threat danger' posed when said individual Donald John Trump ran for President of the United States, are thus guilty of :

18 U.S. Code § 2382 "Misprision of Treason"

"Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States and having knowledge of the commission of any treason against them, conceals and does not, as soon as may be, disclose and make known the same to the President or to some judge of the United States, or to the governor or to some judge or justice of a particular State, is guilty of misprision of treason and shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than seven years, or both."

(June 25, 1948, ch. 645, 62 Stat. 807; Pub. L. 103–322, title XXXIII, § 330016(1)(H), Sept. 13, 1994, 108 Stat. 2147.)

Its is therefore our desire that the above individuals as named above, be charged, brought to swift trial, impeached, if guilty, punished according to all applicable US statutes, and prevented from holding any further US public office, forever.

So that the nightmare of having traitors to our nation, in charge of our nation's affairs and our nuclear deterrent forces, might be swiftly rectified, we additionally request that Clinton / Kaine be simply declared the overall victors of the 2016 popular count election and installed immediately.

The Clinton / Kaine overwhelming popular vote majority of 2.9 million (65,844,954 (48.2%) to 62,979,879 (46.1%) was an overwhelming majority and must be respected as such, so that rational, sane, secure, continuity of government might prevail even as the current emergency is simultaneously resolved.

VERIFIABLE FACTS:

The head of NSA, Admiral Michael Rogers, said that there shouldn’t be “any doubt in anybody’s mind” that another country tampered with the U.S. election.

During the election time period, ODNI publicly revealed that elements of Russian intelligence agencies, namely GRU, (Main Intelligence Agency of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation / Гла́вное разве́дывательное управле́ние), had covert interest in the US Presidential campaign of Donald John Trump. The most sensitive activity of the GRU is gathering intelligence on American leaders.

Furthermore it was known by the above individuals that Donald John Trump's main advisor, one Paul Manafort, had previously worked extensively on behalf of Putin's ally, pro-Russian Ukrainian dictator Yanukovych between 2007 and 2012. For those services, Manafort received $12.7 million in cash payments from Yanukovych’s political party.

It was also known by the above individuals that General Michael T. Flynn, was the personal dinner guest of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin in Moscow. General Michael T. Flynn was the person selected by Donald John Trump to be National Security Advisor.

Subsequently, the Democratic National Committee was cyber-attacked by parties connected to the Russian state security service GRU, who stole US emails (in violation of US laws) who then forwarded doctored versions to Julian Assange's WikiLeaks in Europe; as part of a GRU intelligence campaign of 'Active Measures' (активные мероприятия) to spread disinformation among the US voting electorate, to help Donald John Trump during the 2016 US presidential election.

During that same time period, computer experts determined that there were continuous, covert, computer communications via KGB founded Russian Alfa Bank and Donald John Trump's campaign.

On 29 December 2016, the White House sanctioned the GRU and the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation known as FSB, (Федеральная служба безопасности Российской Федерации - ФСБ) for alleged tampering and disinformation during the 2016 US presidential election.

In addition, the Department of State also declared 35 Russian diplomats persona non grata and denied Russian diplomatic staff access to two Russian government-owned compounds in Maryland and New York.

The White House also sanctioned several GRU officials including GRU Chief Igor Valentinovich Korobov, Deputy Chief Sergey Aleksandrovich Gizunov, and First Deputy Chiefs Igor Olegovich Kostyukov and Vladimir Stepanovich Alexseyev.

On that same day, December 29, 2016, during the Obama administration, Flynn spoke personally with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak, the very same day the Obama administration announced retaliatory measures in response to Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential campaign; if there was intent to interfere with or defeat said measures, this clearly constitutes a felony violation under the Logan act. Trump's incoming press secretary, Sean Spicer, said he doubted that Flynn and Kislyak discussed the retaliatory measures.

The Wall Street Journal reported on January 22, 2017, that Flynn was under investigation by U.S. counterintelligence agents for his numerous communications with Russian officials. On February 9, 2017, U.S. intelligence officials shared an account of Flynn's interactions with Kislyak, which indicated that he did discuss the sanctions placed on Russia by the Obama administration, and Flynn's spokesman released a statement that Flynn “indicated that while he had no recollection of discussing sanctions, he couldn’t be certain that the topic never came up.”

It is now further proven by US intel intercepts that Donald John Trump personally, and his representatives individually, and severally (such as Gen. Flynn and Manafort) have personally visited, communicated with, and taken monetary (and in kind) payments from officials of the Russian state, as well as oligarchs and organizations during the 2016 campaign. This was in direct violation of numerous US laws pertaining to election tampering, espionage, diplomacy, and treason.

During the campaign we have heard Donald John Trump, on numerous occasions, oddly praise Russian President Putin, while condemning US allies as Germany, Japan, Ukraine, NATO and the EU, as well as excoriating the US Intelligence Community, insulting our Armed Forces' hard working and experienced battlefield troops and their general officers, and even bashing the Gold Star Mother of Capt. Khan, who died while preventing a suicide attack upon a mess hall near Baqubah, Iraq, and was posthumously awarded a Purple Heart and Bronze Star.

As if all of that was not tragic enough, the Trump administration is also doing serious harm to America’s longstanding global intelligence partnerships. A mere three weeks after the inauguration, Donald John Trump has repeatedly gone out of his way to delegitimize our nation's brave intelligence officers (who have served this nation in secret, faithfully, and with honor, since Nathan Hale in 1776), mocking these thousands of quiet, brave, men and women publicly, and in demeaning their precious work, he has even incredibly blown off receiving the PDB (President's Daily Briefing), a brief of the most important daily classified information on national security collected by our 17 U.S. intelligence agencies and given to the President of the United States every morning precisely at 0745 hours, as it has been with every Commander in Chief since JFK.

"Since January 20, we’ve assumed that the Kremlin has human ears inside the White House Situation Room... There’s not much the Russians don’t know at this point,” an unnamed US intelligence official added in deep frustration."

On January 29, 2017, Donald John Trump restructured the National Security Council's "Principals Committee" assigning a permanent invitation to Steve Bannon, White House Chief Strategist, while at the same time eliminating the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Director of National Intelligence, thus depriving both the Pentagon and US Intelligence Community of any direct way to advise, consent, or dissent to any actions planned by the President and remaining NSC members, 'in the room', face to face. In the modern history of our nation, this is the first time that the Pentagon and the Intelligence Community have been removed from the direct decision making process.

In an era when the entire world can be wiped out in in a thermonuclear exchange and 9200 U.S. and Russian strategic nuclear weapons (on high-alert) can be launched in 2 to 3 minutes, and a mass extinction event occur, removal of the Pentagon and the Intelligence Community from the NSC as brakes upon accidental war, or to prevent a "Pearl Harbor Style" sneak attack upon the US (or our NATO & EU allies), is just highly illogical, and profoundly disturbing.

In these ways and others, Donald John Trump (and cohorts) have clearly adhered to the enemies of the United States while simultaneously weakening United States defense, intelligence, and geopolitical posture. There is no question that these individuals have seriously violated the Hatch and Logan Acts and committed acts of treason, and clear concealments of treason under: 18 U.S. Code § 2382 "Misprision of Treason"

IN CONCLUSION

What we have here before us is Vladimir Putin's concerted attempt at a permanent political and military realignment and reversion of United States policies towards Russia via purported blackmail influence over the Trump Presidency. If left unchecked, the Destruction of America & NATO from WITHIN via Donald John Trump, shall be the end result of Putin's determined chess game.

This destruction of the United States, NATO, and the EU shall finally facilitate Putin's decades long dreams of an expansionist 'Greater Russia' not only in predominate control of Eastern Europe but also of Western Europe and the United States, as well.

After the significant revelations of the Putin / Trump / Manafort / Panama Papers.... the apparent quid pro quo between Trump & Putin for Ukraine / Baltics / NATO / EU, the failure of Trump to publicly reveal sources of income in his taxes, etc.; it must be clearly affirmed that no one, not even the President of the United States is above the "Laws of the Land", up to and including, "TREASON".

This petition will be delivered to:
THE US SENATE
The US Congress
Department of Justice

Letter to
THE US SENATE
The US Congress
Department of Justice
The Joint Chiefs of Staff
Director of National Intelligence
United States Office of Special Counsel
Director of Central Intelligence
Director of NSA
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Justice Sonia Sotomayor The Supreme Court of the United States
The legal removal of The President & Vice President, et al., for Misprision of Treason

TOPIC
Impeach Trump
14 petitions

https://www.change.org/p/senate-intelligence-subpoena-trump-s-tax-returns?source_location=topic_page



Washington Post’s motto: Democracy Dies in Darkness. Let’s remember that.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/bannons-dangerous-deconstruction/2017/02/26/0d1aab0e-fad2-11e6-be05-1a3817ac21a5_story.html?utm_term=.ac74939d284c

Opinions
Bannon’s dangerous ‘deconstruction’
By E.J. Dionne Jr. Opinion writer February 26 at 8:49 PM

Photograph -- White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon spoke during the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Maryland on Thursday. (Susan Walsh/Associated Press)
[What ‘President Promise-Keeper’ should say on Tuesday night]
See what President Trump has been doing since taking office
View Photos The new president’s tumultuous first weeks have been marked by controversial executive orders and conflicts with the media.
[Trump’s takeover of conservatism is complete]


Just when you despair that only chaos animates the Trump administration, along comes Stephen K. Bannon, the White House ideologue, to offer the Rosetta Stone illuminating what this circus is all about.

And when you realize what Trump & Co. might really be up to, your despair turns to alarm.

There is no way of knowing how much President Trump truly cares about the ideas that Bannon holds close to his heart. Trump seems far more obsessed with attacks on him from many directions — and genuinely worried that investigations of his team’s ties to Russia could pose a mortal threat to his power.

After Bannon had offered his Deep Thoughts on Trumpism at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Thursday, there was Trump on Friday morning back to his usual grubby business of using Twitter to denounce his enemies. His target in this case was the FBI. He accused the agency of being “totally unable to stop the national security ‘leakers’ ” and being guilty of leaks of its own.

Trump’s anxiety was likely heightened by word that Reince Priebus, his chief of staff, asked the FBI to deny reports that several members of Trump’s team had contacts with Russian agents during the 2016 campaign. Priebus’ intervention raises serious questions about whether the White House is trying to shut down or influence inquiries that are plainly in the national interest.

Bannon predicts there will be an ideological 'fight every day' Play Video1:34

White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon and White House chief of staff Reince Priebus spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Feb. 23. Bannon said the media is "adamantly opposed to" the president's agenda. (Photo: Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)

Bannon, appearing with Priebus, may have had this in mind when he told the assembled conservatives that “every day, it is going to be a fight” and pushed Team Trump’s attacks on the media to a new level. Trump picked up on the theme in his own CPAC remarks on Friday, echoing countless authoritarians in repeating his condemnation of “fake news” outlets as “the enemy of the people.” Trump’s survival may depend on his supporters ignoring a lot of bad news and inconvenient facts.

But it is Trump’s opponents and the not yet committed who need to pay close attention when Bannon, the president’s visionary chief strategist, promises an ominous-sounding “new political order.” Philip Stephens, a Financial Times columnist, had a nice description of Bannon’s job, characterizing him as “the ideologue who informs Mr. Trump’s impulses.” And Bannon actually made sense of Trump’s seemingly bizarre habit of naming people to head up agencies whose missions they openly oppose.

When Bannon listed the administration’s central purposes, the first two were unsurprising: “national security and sovereignty” and “economic nationalism.” But then came the third: the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” Bannon explained that officials who seem to hate what their agencies do — one thinks especially of Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, who has sued it repeatedly to the benefit of oil and gas companies — were “selected for a reason, and that is deconstruction.”

Thus did Bannon invoke the trendy lefty term “deconstruct” as a synonym for “destroy.”

This is a huge deal. It reflects a long-standing critique on the right not just of the Obama and Clinton years but of the entire thrust of U.S. government since the Progressive Era and the New Deal. Critics of the administrative state — “the vast administrative apparatus that does so much to dictate the way we live now,” as Scott Johnson, a conservative lawyer and co-founder of the Power Line blog, put it in 2014 — see it as unconstitutional because regulatory agencies make and enforce rules based on authority they claim was illegitimately ceded by Congress.

That’s the theory. In practice, this is a war on a century’s worth of work to keep our air and water clean; our food, drugs and workplaces safe; the rights of employees protected; and the marketplace fair and unrigged. It’s one thing to make regulations more efficient and no more intrusive than necessary. It’s another to say that all the structures of democratic government designed to protect our citizens from the abuses of concentrated private power should be swept away.

It’s a very strange moment. Trump and Bannon are happy to expand the reach of the state when it comes to policing, immigration enforcement, executive-branch meddling in the work of investigative agencies, and the browbeating of individual companies that offend the president in one way or another. The parts of government they want to dismantle are those that stand on the side of citizens against powerful interests.

In his CPAC presentation, Bannon accused Trump’s foes of being “corporatist.” But, in the truest sense of the word, the real corporatists are in the White House.

Read more from E.J. Dionne’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.
Read more on this topic:

Kathleen Parker: Bannon is Trump’s conscience
David J. Rothkopf: The danger of Bannon on the NSC
Fareed Zakaria: Bannon’s words and actions
Greg Sargent: Steve Bannon’s first major play is shaping up as a full-blown fiasco



TURCOPOLIER: ECHO, OR REBUTTAL? REGULATIONS KEEP THE CONSTITUTIONAL PRINCIPLES REAL, UP TO DATE AND PRESENT IN ALL PARTS OF THE NATION AND POSSESSIONS, TERRITORIES AND REGIONS, ALL OF WHICH CAN AND SOMETIMES DO MAKE ILLEGAL CONSTRUCTIONS OF THAT LAW WHICH IS SUPPOSED TO GOVERN US ALL IN EQUAL FAIRNESS. IT ALSO KEEPS THE NUMBER OF FLY PARTS IN PEANUT BUTTER DOWN TO A MINIMUM, AND SUCH THINGS. THERE PROBABLY ARE THINGS FOUND IN REGULATIONS THAT ARE NO LONGER NEEDED – LAWS AND LIFE DOES CHANGE AFTER ALL – BUT WE NEED OUR REGULATIONS IN MUCH THE SAME WAY WE NEED THE SUPREME COURT – TO KEEP OUR COUNTRY FAIR FOR ALL AND WELL-ORDERED.

http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/
27 February 2017

" ... But then came the third: the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” Bannon explained that officials who seem to hate what their agencies do — one thinks especially of Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, who has sued it repeatedly to the benefit of oil and gas companies — were “selected for a reason, and that is deconstruction.”

Thus did Bannon invoke the trendy lefty term “deconstruct” as a synonym for “destroy.”

This is a huge deal. It reflects a long-standing critique on the right not just of the Obama and Clinton years but of the entire thrust of U.S. government since the Progressive Era and the New Deal. Critics of the administrative state — “the vast administrative apparatus that does so much to dictate the way we live now,” as Scott Johnson, a conservative lawyer and co-founder of the Power Line blog, put it in 2014 — see it as unconstitutional because regulatory agencies make and enforce rules based on authority they claim was illegitimately ceded by Congress.

That’s the theory. In practice, this is a war on a century’s worth of work to keep our air and water clean; our food, drugs and workplaces safe; the rights of employees protected; and the marketplace fair and unrigged." Washpost

Well, this is interesting, and I think correct in the appreciation of just what it is that Bannon and company seek as a reward for their efforts.

It should be noted that Trump's expected budget proposal will not seek to reduce the benefits involved in Medicare and Social Security. These were campaign promises and he evidently will honor them. In any event SS is not insolvent and does not contribute to the present federal budget deficit.

What Bannon seems to propose is a roll-back of federal function to levels that he thinks reflect the amount of power ceded by the original states when they ratified the constitution.

Would this be such a bad thing?

For the Progressive Left it is a HORROR! The Left is wedded to the idea tht the federal government should administer our lives.

It will be interesting to learn if the majority of Americans share the love the "administrative state" as much as the Left does. pl

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/bannons-dangerous-deconstruction/2017/02/26/0d1aab0e-fad2-11e6-be05-1a3817ac21a5_story.html?utm_term=.2ee8977cccb3



ANOTHER IDIOTIC, GROTESQUE AND POINTLESS CRIME AGAINST LIFE HAS OCCURRED. SEE BELOW:

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/anger-in-el-salvador-after-gang-kills-beloved-hippo-gustavito-at-zoo/
Anger in El Salvador after gang kills beloved hippo "Gustavito" at zoo
AP February 27, 2017, 6:07 PM

Photograph -- In this frame grab from video taken on March 10, 2014 and released by El Salvador’s Canal 9, a hippopotamus named Gustavito is fed at the San Salvador Zoo in El Salvador. Zoo director Vladan Henriquez said at a news conference on Monday, Feb. 27, 2017 that the animal was covered with bruises and puncture wounds after apparently being attacked with metal bars, knives and rocks. The attack occurred on Tuesday night, Feb. 21, 2017. Zookeepers did not discover the hippo’s injuries until Thursday because he did not leave his pool, and he died late Sunday, Feb. 26. AP

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador - El Salvador’s widespread violence reached an unsuspected corner with the brutal and fatal beating of the national zoo’s beloved hippopotamus Gustavito.

Even among a population numbed by a staggering human death toll due to gang violence in recent years, the animal’s death late Sunday stirred outrage.

Salvadorans mourned through social media and some left flowers at the gate of the zoo, which has been closed until further notice.

“Here we’re used to seeing the dead every day,” Martin Castillo, a street vendor in the capital’s historic downtown, said Monday. “They kill us like flies, but this tops it all. They killed an animal that only entertained us.”

Zoo director Vladan Henriquez said at a news conference that the hippo was covered with bruises and puncture wounds after apparently being attacked with metal bars, knives and rocks.

The attack occurred last week, sometime Tuesday night. But zookeepers did not discover the hippo’s injuries until Thursday because he did not leave his pool. Gustavito died the injuries late Sunday.

Justice Minister Mauricio Ramirez Landaverde said an investigation had been opened.

El Salvador is one of the world’s most violent countries, recording 5,278 homicides last year, or an average of 14 people killed per day. Most of the killings have been blamed on powerful street gangs.

Gustavito was born and raised in Guatemala, but was brought to El Salvador 13 years ago.

“We’re angry,” said Carmen Rogel, who often brings her grandson to the zoo. “We didn’t know they had killed Gustavito and were surprised when we arrived and the gate was closed.”



THERE IS AN EXTREMELY BEAUTIFUL STATUE IN THE THOMASVILLE, NC PUBLIC LIBRARY WHERE I WORKED, WHICH IS CLEARLY OLD – VICTORIAN ERA AT LEAST. I ASKED THE ASSISTANT LIBRARIAN WHERE IT CAME FROM AND SHE SAID, “I’M NOT SUPPOSED TO SAY WHERE THE LIBRARY GOT IT.” AMERICAN SOLDIERS ALSO TOOK ART FROM EUROPE AT THAT TIME. IT’S A SHAME.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/artworks-looted-by-nazis-in-1939-returned-to-poland/
Artworks looted by Nazis in 1939 returned to Poland
AP February 27, 2017, 2:47 PM

Photograph -- This photo taken Sunday, Feb. 26, 2017 in Krakow, Poland, shows an old picture of Renaissance-era of the southern Polish city of Krakow, that together with two other artworks, was returned to Poland Sunday by Austria’s Horst von Waechter, whose family had looted them from Krakow during World War II. Waechter’s father, Otto von Waechter, was a Nazi governor of the occupied city. AP
Photograph -- ap-17058591497627.jpg, This photo taken Sunday, Feb. 26, 2017 in Krakow, Poland shows an 18-century map of Poland built into a small table and two old drawings that were returned to Poland Sunday by Austria’s Horst von Waechter, whose family had looted them from Krakow during World War II. Waechter’s father, Otto von Waechter, was a Nazi governor of the occupied city. AP


WARSAW, Poland - In a gesture welcomed in Poland, the son of a Nazi official has returned three artworks that his family had looted from the southern Polish city of Krakow during World War II.

Polish officials said Monday they hoped the gesture by Horst von Waechter of Austria would inspire other Nazi descendants to follow suit.

In the ceremony Sunday in Krakow, von Waechter returned an 18th-century map of Poland, built into a small table, and two historic drawings that his mother, Charlotte von Waechter, had appropriated there in late 1939. It was shortly after her husband, Otto von Waechter, had become governor in the southern Polish city occupied by German and Austrian Nazis during the war.

The handover took place at the office of the Krakow provincial governor and was the result of efforts by Polish historian and politician Magdalena Ogorek, according to Krzysztof Marcinkiewicz, spokesman for the governor.

He said one of the paintings had Charlotte von Waechter’s handwritten pencil inscription saying it came from the Potocki Palace in Krakow, where the Waechters resided during the war.

Ogorek told The Associated Press she spotted some Poland-related objects at Horst von Waechter’s castle in Austria while she was doing research there about his father, who died in 1949 at the Vatican while waiting to be smuggled to Argentina to avoid facing justice.

She said von Waechter returned the objects to Krakow for no compensation.

“He gave a good example to others and we should be happy about this,” Ogorek said.

Poland was severely damaged during World War II, its palaces, museums and libraries bombed and plundered by the Nazis and by the Soviet Red Army from 1939-45. The government continues trying to retrieve looted artworks and the Culture Museum has posted a list of many of them.

Some of the artworks occasionally surface at auctions around the globe, leading Poland to negotiate the terms of their return.



EMBARRASSING, BUT INNOCENT, I’M SURE.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/moonlight-oscar-winners-barry-jenkins-tarell-alvin-mccraney-on-best-picture-mix-up/

"Moonlight" Oscar winners weigh in on best picture mix-up
By DAVID MORGAN CBS NEWS
February 27, 2017, 11:17 AM

NEWS VIDEO – INTERVIEW WITH JENKINS AND MCCRANEY, BOTH OF WHOM ARE BLACK. HOPEFULLY THIS INDICATES A SHIFT IN THE BELIEVED HOLLYWOOD RACIALISM.
Photograph -- moonlight-oscars-barry-jenkins-tarell-alvin-mccraney-promo.jpg, Writer-director Barry Jenkins and co-writer Tarell Alvin McCraney on the stunning Academy Awards gaffe. CBS NEWS
Photograph -- moonlight-best-picture-win-getty-645726598-620.jpg, “La La Land” producer Jordan Horowitz holds up the winner card reading the name of the actual Best Picture winner: “Moonlight.” KEVIN WINTER/GETTY IMAGES


Hollywood’s top movies racked up honors last night at the Academy Awards ceremony, with “La La Land” taking home six Oscar, and “Moonlight” following with three, including best supporting actor and best adapted screenplay.

And “Moonlight” won the most prestigious award, best picture, after a now-infamous, on-stage mix up, when the wrong envelope was given to presenters Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway. After announcing “La La Land” had won, the envelope containing the Best Picture winner was brought on stage, and the stunned crowd watched as the “Moonlight” filmmakers were announced the winners.

“Very clearly, very clearly, even in my dreams, this could not be true,” said the film’s writer-director Barry Jenkins. “But to hell with dreams, I’m done with it, ‘cause this is true. Oh my goodness!”

On “CBS This Morning,” Jenkins and co-writer Tarell Alvin McCraney were asked if the mix-up diminished their celebration.

“I don’t know if it diminished the celebration for us; it just made it much more complicated,” Jenkins replied. “As you said, I think the celebration is bound up now between our film and ‘La La Land’ and the Academy in a very complicated way.”

He likened the turn of events to a “Shakespearean tragedy.”

McCraney said, “It was difficult to say all the thank-yous we had to say, but at the same time it showed the camaraderie and love we have for both of the films.”

“Did you think it was a joke?” asked co-anchor Gayle King.

“I didn’t think it was a joke at all,” Jenkins said. “I could see in Jordan [Horowitz]’s face that he was telling the truth. The first thing I did was give him a hug. I’ve probably given him too many hugs at this point because they were so gracious and compassionate in the way they handled it.

“But backstage, it was just -- there were two things. One, we were trying to find each other, you know, to sort of share the moment, but also, two, to find the other side of the aisle, to give them whatever comfort they needed.”

Co-anchor Anthony Mason asked, “Did the Academy in any way try to explain what happened to you at that point?”

“I think everybody was just trying to make sure we were all on the same page and safe,” McCrary said. “When something like that happens, you want to make sure that everybody is categorically okay, and I think they did a great job of that. At one point this guy, Thomas, held my hand and walked me through the back. I was like, I don’t know what’s going on, help me out! Once I found Barry, I think everything sort of settled in.”

How the Oscars Best Picture flub unfolded
Play VIDEO
How the Oscars Best Picture flub unfolded

“I thought it was so great how the ‘La La’ team handled it, too,” King said. “There they were on stage in the middle of an acceptance speech and everyone tried to correct the problem right away. I thought your side was gracious, I thought their side was gracious. It was nice to see something good come out of really an awful moment.”

“I think that goes back to the award season,” Jenkins said. “Typically the award season is very contentious, but we’ve been spending a lot of time together going through the same trials and tribulations, I would say. And so I looked up at the stage and saw Jordan’s face. I could see if I was in his place how they would feel, and I think they looked over at us and they saw how we had felt as well.”

“Moonlight,” adapted from McCraney’s story “In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue,” is a coming-of-age tale of a black man in Florida, told in three stages with three actors of different ages.

Shot in just 25 days for less than $5 million, the film also won the Golden Globe for Best Picture-Drama.

The glow of “Moonlight”
Actress Naomie Harris, director Barry Jenkins on humanity of “Moonlight”
“Moonlight” writer on the inspiration and message of the film
What Mahershala Ali hopes “Moonlight” audiences will take away
Oscars Not So White: Barry Jenkins makes history with nominations

Of Jenkins’ film, McCraney said, “I think what Barry did in the film that’s so impressive, that’s served as a lightning rod, he put his full self in it. He really took a story about memories that I had given to him and made it an experience about those memories, made it an intimate experience. And I think that will (and continues to) be the reason why people have seen the film and will continue to see it. I hope more people see it now. That’s really exciting.”

He said that the first time he saw the film, “I felt like he had gone into my head and took pictures in my memories and spread them across the screen. So now to have it out in the world and have it be -- it won best picture! You did that, brother! Sort of amazing!”

When asked what the accolades the film has received from critics, the industry and audiences mean to him, Jenkins replied, “In a certain way, everything. Maybe I have to think more of myself. I don’t mean that in the sense that the movie won Best Picture, but, you know, I had all these hopes of what I could do with my life, and now the ceiling on that has been radically changed.”



CLEARLY IT WOULD HAVE BEEN OKAY IF THEY WERE IRANIAN. I DO WISH ALL RELIGIOUS AND GOVERNMENTAL BODIES DOWN TO THE CITY COUNCIL, POLICE DEPARTMENTS, AND SCHOOL BOARDS WOULD SPEAK OUT AGAINST THIS WILLINGNESS TO KILL OR ATTACK OR DESECRATE HOUSES OF WORSHIP FOR ANY REASON WHATSOEVER. THE MESSAGE THAT IT REALLY ISN’T ACCEPTABLE IN THE USA NEEDS TO GET OUT ALL OVER THE COUNTRY. IN THIS COUNTRY, WE TEND TO EMPHASIZE CRIMINALITY, WHEN SO OFTEN THE PROBLEM IS IMMORALITY FIRST AND FOREMOST. IT’S NOT REALLY THAT TRUMP HAS SPECIFICALLY SAID AMERICANS “SHOULD” DO THAT, BUT THAT THINGS LIKE HIS RIDICULOUS NAZI SALUTES AND HIS APPOINTING OF AN OLD SOUTHERN RACIST AS ATTORNEY GENERAL, A LEADER OF THE ALT-RIGHT VIA BREITBART AS HIS PRIMARY ADVISOR, A WOMAN FROM TEXAS WHO IS ACTIVELY TRYING TO KILL THE PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEMS AND INSTITUTE IN THEIR PLACE CHURCH RUN AND OTHER FOR PROFIT SCHOOLS WHOSE TUITIONS WILL NOT BE AFFORDABLE TO THE VERY POOR, AND IN DOING THAT DEPRIVE OUR GROWING CHILDREN OF THE GUARANTEE OF A PRIMARY AND HIGH SCHOOL ACHIEVEMENT LEVEL WHICH WILL BE SOLID ENOUGH TO ENABLE THEM TO DO COLLEGE WORK. AFTER THAT, HOPEFULLY BERNIE SANDERS WILL BE PRESIDENT AND FREE BACHELOR LEVEL COLLEGE TUITION AT STATE COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES WILL BE THE LAW THEN!!

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/kansas-bar-shooting-suspect-said-he-thought-he-killed-iranians-911-call-reveals/
Kansas bar shooting suspect said he thought he killed Iranians, 911 call reveals
By CRIMESIDER STAFF CBS/AP
February 27, 2017, 3:13 PM

Play CBS news video.
Photograph -- srinivas-kuchibhotla-kansas-shooting-2017-2-24.png, Srinivas Kuchibhotla was shot and killed at a bar in Olathe, Kansas. KCTV
Photograph -- adam-purinton-960.jpg, Adam Purinton WIBW
Photograph -- alok-madasani-shot-kansas-2017-2-24.png, Alok Madasani, who was shot in a bar in Olathe, Kansas, on Wednesday, was released from the hospital on Thursday. KCTV


CLINTON, Mo. -- A Missouri bartender told a 911 dispatcher that a patron said he killed “two Iranian people” just hours after a shooting 70 miles away at a suburban Kansas City bar left one Indian man dead and another hurt.

In a recording of the Henry County, Missouri 911 call made early Thursday, the bartender at the Applebee’s in Clinton, Missouri, is heard saying the man made her promise she wouldn’t call police.

Fifty-one-year-old Adam Purinton was arrested soon afterward. He’s charged with murder and attempted murder in the shooting in Olathe, Kansas, that some witnesses said was racially motivated.

In the 911 call, the bartender told the dispatcher a man had come into the bar and said he’d done something “really bad” and was on the run from the police.

The bartender tells the dispatcher that the man initially said the shootings occurred at a gas station, not a bar.

She says the man asked if he could stay with her and her husband. The bartender warned police not to approach the building with sirens blaring or the man would “freak out” and “something bad’s going to happen.”

Witnesses said Purinton yelled at the two Indian men to “get out of my country” before pulling the trigger in the attack that also wounded a third man who tried to help. A bartender at Austins Bar and Grill in Olathe said Purinton used racial slurs before firing.

“OK, so I’m a bartender at Applebees and I had this guy come into my bar and he told me that he had done something really bad and he was on the run from the police, and he asked if he could stay with me and my husband,” the bartender says in the call. “He wouldn’t tell me what he did. I kept asking him and he said he would tell me if I agreed to let him stay with me. I finally got him to tell me. He said he shot and killed two Iranian people in Olathe, and I looked it up on the news and there was this shooting like three hours ago...”

The men who were shot were identified as Srinivas Kuchibhotla, 32, who died at a hospital, and 32-year-old Alok Madasani and 24-year-old Ian Grillot, who were hospitalized, police said. Kuchibhotla and Madasani were H1B visa holders, according to GPS-maker Garmin, where both men worked.

In India, the father of one of the wounded men called the attack a hate crime, but authorities on Friday declined to discuss a motive as they investigated the shooting, which stoked fears about the treatment of immigrants in the U.S. Authorities have declined to discuss if they were investigating it as a possible hate crime.

FBI spokesman Bridget Patton said the agency had no new information to release Friday. She said the FBI’s role is to work jointly with Olathe police to determine if a civil rights violation occurred.

Madasani, one of the wounded men, said Sunday he wished the killing of his best friend during the attack had all been a dream.

He addressed a crowd of hundreds during a vigil at the Ball Conference Center in Olathe, Kansas. He described the fatal shooting of his friend and co-worker Kuchibhotla as “a senseless crime,” the Kansas City Star reported.

“The main reason why I am here is that’s what my best friend, Srinivas, would have done,” Madasani said. “He would have been here for me.”

Still walking on crutches, Madasani drew applause when he called the shooting “an isolated incident that doesn’t reflect the true spirit of Kansas, the Midwest and the United States.”

Purinton appeared in court Monday wearing a safety smock meant to keep him from harming himself.

A public defender waived a formal reading of the charges against Purinton, who was seen in the courtroom through closed-circuit television wearing the green smock.

A Johnson County Sheriff’s Department spokesman, Master Deputy Rick Howell, says suspects who make statements during initial jail processing that could suggest they might harm themselves are required to wear the smocks until mental health professions say otherwise.

Howell would not disclose what Purinton said at the time he was being processed or whether he is considered a suicide risk.

February 26, 2017


News and Views


PEREZ DOES SEEM TO BE A GOOD DEMOCRAT, IN REGARD TO CIVIL RIGHTS AND LABOR, PLUS HE SELECTED ELLISON AS HIS SECOND IN COMMAND. THAT’S MUCH BETTER THAN THE DEBACLE AT 2016 DNC NOMINEE SELECTION PROCESS. GOOD GOING, FOLKS!

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/who-is-tom-perez-dnc-chairman/

Who is Tom Perez?
By REBECCA SHABAD CBS NEWS
February 25, 2017, 4:48 PM

Tom Perez was elected Saturday as chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) after a competitive race against Rep. Keith Ellison, becoming the first Latino to lead the party.

Perez, 55, left the Obama administration last month after serving as labor secretary since July 2013. In that job, he helped push for new overtime rules to ensure workers get overtime pay, extended overtime protections for home care workers and extended minimum wage protections.

Tom Perez elected DNC chair, appoints Keith Ellison deputy chair
Play VIDEO
Tom Perez elected DNC chair, appoints Keith Ellison deputy chair

He also helped establish worker safety rules, and under his leadership the department provided paid sick leave and ensured employment protections for federal contractor employees, according to his biography on the department’s website.

He was elected Saturday in Atlanta, receiving 235 votes and surpassing the 218-vote threshold to win. Ellison, a Minnesota Democrat and the first Muslim elected to Congress, received 200 votes. Perez appointed Ellison as deputy chairman immediately after the results were announced.

“We are united as a party,” Perez said after his election, with Ellison standing by his side. “We have so much work ahead of us because across America, people are fearful. People are fearful for our future. Democrats united are the hope for our future.”

Will Democrats rally around Tom Perez?
Play VIDEO
Will Democrats rally around Tom Perez?

Perez is a native of Buffalo, New York, and received a bachelor’s degree from Brown University, a law degree from Harvard Law School and a master’s of public policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

His parents were immigrants from the Dominican Republic. His dad died when Perez was only 12 years old, according to his biography on his campaign website, and he later put himself through college by working on the back of a garbage truck.

Larry Sabato: Democrats seem willing to reunify
Play VIDEO
Larry Sabato: Democrats seem willing to reunify

He started his career as a civil rights attorney at the Department of Justice and later served as special counselor to Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Massachusetts. Under Attorney General Janet Reno, Perez served as deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights, and toward the end of the Clinton administration, he was the head of the Office of Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services.

Before President Obama nominated Perez to his Cabinet, succeeding Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, he returned to the Justice Department in 2009 to serve as assistant attorney general for civil rights.



http://www.cbsnews.com/news/ohio-governor-john-kasich-says-house-conservatives-will-be-a-problem-obamacare/

Ohio Gov. Kasich says House conservatives may cause "problem" passing Obamacare replacement
By EMILY SCHULTHEIS CBS NEWS
February 26, 2017, 11:09 AM

As Republicans try to figure out how to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Ohio Gov. John Kasich says they’ll encounter “a problem” passing replacement legislation with some House conservatives if it still includes any vestiges of the original law. Because of that, he said, the GOP will need to reach out to Democrats to be successful.

Kasich was asked whether he agreed with former House Speaker John Boehner’s recent characterization of the issue: “Most of the Affordable Care Act, in the framework, is going to stay there,” Boehner said, adding that Republicans are “basically going to fix the flaws and put a more conservative box around it.”

But that won’t necessarily work given the hardline position of some House conservatives who want to throw out the entire law, Kasich said, regardless of what the plan for replacement is.

“There’s going to be a problem in the House of getting anything out of there that still provides coverage to people,” Kasich told CBS’ “Face the Nation.” “That’s why the Republicans have to reach out to some of the Democrats. I don’t know whether this is going to happen.”

Kasich said it will be very difficult to get some conservative GOP House members to vote for a replacement plan if it includes any of the key components of Obamacare.

“I think there are some very conservative Republicans in the House who are going to say, ‘just get rid of the whole thing’... and that’s not acceptable when you have 20 million people, or 700,000 people in my state, because where do the mentally ill go? Where do the drug addicted go?”

Kasich said it’s a “political impossibility” for Republicans to repeal the law without a replacement.

“The fact of the matter is you can’t just repeal without repealing and replacing at the same time,” he said. “It just becomes a political impossibility and there’s no reason to do it any other way than that.”

He said the voter anger and frustration at recent town hall meetings across the country is proof that citizens are paying attention to what Congress does on the issue.

“I think it’s having an impact from the standpoint of, ‘hey, people are watching,’” Kasich said. “I don’t think they mind reform, but don’t take everything away.”

Asked about recent intelligence leaks, a topic on which President Trump has been vocal, Kasich said leaks from the House and Senate Intelligence Committees are “not acceptable.”

“When people take an oath to be secret in the Intelligence Committee, which is the committee that doesn’t get any publicity, thank goodness -- but it’s the committee that’s at the root of the security of our country,” he said. “When people leak there, they need to really be held accountable... leaks are not acceptable out of the Intelligence Committee.”

Kasich, who met Mr. Trump on Friday, said he was pleased that the president “responded very positively to a number of the ideas” he presented. Kasich said he wants Mr. Trump to succeed, despite his past criticism of the president.

“I’m on a plane and he’s the pilot and, you know, the fact is I want the pilot to be successful,” he said. “But you know what, every once in a while -- I was thinking about this last night, you need to yell into the cockpit.”

“My job is when you do a good job, praise you,” Kasich continued, “and when do something I don’t agree with -- and I feel compelled, I’m going to speak out.”



http://www.cbsnews.com/news/ex-cia-director-john-brennan-trump-travel-ban-wont-help-significant-way/

Ex-CIA Director John Brennan says Trump travel ban won't "help in any significant way"
By EMILY SCHULTHEIS CBS NEWS
February 26, 2017, 12:00 PM

With President Donald Trump expected to release his revised travel ban this week, former CIA Director John Brennan said Sunday that he doesn’t believe it will make the country significantly safer.

“I don’t think the travel ban is going to help in any significant way,” Brennan told CBS’ “Face the Nation” in his first media interview since leaving the CIA.

Referring to the Department of Homeland Security’s report released last week, which found that citizens of the seven countries included in the travel ban are “rarely implicated” in U.S.-based terrorism, Brennan said the White House needs to consider more than just a person’s country of origin when crafting plans to prevent terrorists from entering the U.S.

“I do think that report puts its finger on it by saying that citizenship is not the indicator of a potential terrorist action,” he said, adding that “the vetting process that needs to go on has to take into account multiple factors, not just countries of origin or where they may be departing from.”

Brennan said there are also downsides to the travel ban, including what it signals to the rest of the world.

“It sends a very bad message to individuals that are being singled out because of their nationality,” he said, adding that it gives a “clear impression” that the Trump administration is placing its focus on Muslims.

Asked about reports that White House chief of staff Reince Priebus asked FBI Director James Comey to publicly dispute reports about Trump campaign staffers’ contact with Russia, Brennan said such requests were “verboten” in previous administrations.

Fmr. CIA Director says new head of NSA, Gen. McMaster has a "stellar reputation"
Play VIDEO
Fmr. CIA Director says new head of NSA, Gen. McMaster has a "stellar reputation"

“The White House needs to understand that the interaction with the FBI on criminal investigations is something that really they need to steer clear of,” he said, both because of the “impropriety of doing it, but also the appearance... that there might be some unwarranted interference.”

In his work across previous administrations, both Republican and Democratic, Brennan said no one ever made such a request of him in his capacity as CIA director.

“I never did that on behalf of the White House request,” he said. “And the White House never made a request of me in that regard.”

President Trump has dismissed as “fake news” the reports suggesting his top aids asked the FBI to dispute the Russian contacts, without addressing the allegations specifically.

With regard to recent intelligence leaks, Brennan said it’s important to differentiate between classified and unclassified leaks -- and that classified leaks are “appalling and they need to be investigated, they need to stop.”

Still, he said it’s “premature to be pointing fingers at anybody” for recent leaks, noting that many people had access to the information in question -- including the leaks about ex-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s contact with Russia.

“I do think it’s important to be able to stop those leaks, but the information could be coming from any number of quarters whether it be the intelligence community, White House, Congress,” he said.

Brennan said this interview was his first time speaking with the media -- on or off the record -- since he left the CIA, and that he is not responsible for any of the recent intelligence leaks.

“Anybody who thinks I’m responsible for that is dead wrong,” he said.

He also offered praise for incoming National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, saying he has a “stellar” reputation in the national security community.

“General McMaster has a stellar reputation not just as a military officer and leader but also as a very, very thoughtful national security specialist,” he said.

Brennan added that McMaster’s suggestion that the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism” is not helpful -- despite it being a favorite phrase of Mr. Trump -- gives him hope in McMaster’s ability to have a positive influence on the president.

McMaster’s position on the issue, “gives me even greater confidence that he is going to do what he needs to do as national security adviser and hopefully be able to sway the thoughts and ideas and inclinations of some of the individuals who work with him in the White House complex.”



REPUBLICANS TEND TO THINK THAT ANYTHING THAT DOES NOT FURTHER THE ENRICHING OF BIG BUSINESS AND BILLIONAIRES TO BE “UNNECESSARY.”

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-signs-executive-order-targeting-regulations-that-are-deemed-unnecessary/

Trump signs executive order targeting regulations that are deemed unnecessary
By REBECCA SHABAD CBS NEWS
February 24, 2017, 3:08 PM

Photograph -- U.S. President Donald Trump is surrounded by business leaders as he delivers remarks before signing an executive order on regulatory reform at his desk in the Oval Office at the White House, U.S. February 24, 2017. REUTERS/JONATHAN ERNST

President Trump on Friday signed an executive order that calls on all executive agencies to evaluate federal regulations and identify any that are unnecessary, according to the White House pool report.

“Excessive regulations are killing jobs, driving companies out of our country like never before,’’ Mr. Trump said with a dozen or more CEOs standing behind him in the Oval Office.

“Today, this executive order directs each agency to establish a regulatory reform task force. It will ensure that every agency has a team of dedicated people to research all regulations that are unnecessary, burdensome and harmful to the economy, and harmful to the creation of jobs and business.’’

The language of the order is not yet posted on the White House’s website.

“Every regulation should have to pass a simple test: Does it make life better or safer for American workers or consumers. If the answer is “no,’ we will be getting rid of it and getting rid of it quickly.’’

Mr. Trump added that his administration is working on rolling back the regulatory burden on business owners, factory workers and coal miners.

The executive order comes after the president’s speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) Friday morning in which he discussed how he’s executing on his campaign promises, including getting rid of regulations that he said are crushing the economy and jobs.

“We are going to put the regulations industry out of business,” he said.



MOST OF US WHO DON’T WANT PIPELINES ARE AFRAID OF LEAKS, SO WHAT LOGIC IS THERE TO SHOOTING HOLES IN IT?? HOPEFULLY ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVISTS WON’T BE PLANNING SABOTAGE THAT IS DANGEROUS TO THE EARTH AND THE PEOPLE ON IT. THE WAY THIS MAN IS DESCRIBED, HOWEVER, HE SEEMS TO BE DERANGED, SO I SHOULDN’T EXPECT LOGIC.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/police-shoot-man-citrus-county-florida-seen-shooting-natural-gas-pipeline/

CBS NEWS February 26, 2017, 1:34 PM
Police kill man reportedly seen shooting at gas pipeline

Photograph -- Deputies at the scene of a crash on U.S. Highway 41, south of Floral Park Drive, Floral City, after which the Citrus County Sheriff’s Office says a male suspect was fatally shot by officers, Feb. 26, 2017. CITRUS COUNTY SHERIFF

Police in Citrus County, Florida said Sunday that a man reportedly seen shooting at a natural gas pipeline had been fatally shot by officers after a vehicle chase.

Citrus County Sheriff Mike Prendergast was quoted in a statement on his office’s Facebook page as saying no police were injured. He said officers from Citrus County, Marion County and the Florida Highway Patrol were involved. The chase began in Marion County and ended with a “crash” near Floral City in Citrus County, according to the statement.

“This is where the suspect engaged the deputies and was subsequently shot and killed,” it said.

“We know that the suspect was armed and extremely dangerous, and pending the examination of the evidence at the scene, we will be able to determine what other weapons he had in his possession at the time of the shooting,” Prendergast was quoted as saying.

The sheriff’s office did not identify the slain man, pending notification of his next of kin, nor the officers involved in the shooting, who were to be “placed on administrative leave while the Florida Department of Law Enforcement actively investigates this incident.”

The initial call to police came into Marion County, where, according to the statement, witnesses said a man was shooting at the Sabal Pipeline natural gas pipeline and associated equipment, with what they believed to be a “high power rifle.”



http://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-announces-he-wont-attend-annual-white-house-correspondents-dinner/

Trump announces he won't attend annual White House correspondents' dinner
By REBECCA SHABAD CBS NEWS
February 25, 2017, 5:24 PM

President Trump announced on Twitter Saturday that he doesn’t plan to attend the annual White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner at the end of April.

Follow
Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump
I will not be attending the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner this year. Please wish everyone well and have a great evening!
4:53 PM - 25 Feb 2017
21,922 21,922 Retweets 102,736 102,736 likes

Despite his decision, the dinner will go on without him, according to Jeff Mason, the president of the White House Correspondents’ Association.

“The White House Correspondents’ Association looks forward to having its annual dinner on April 29. The WHCA takes note of President Donald Trump’s announcement on Twitter that he does not plan to attend the dinner, which has been and will continue to be a celebration of the First Amendment and the important role played by an independent news media in a healthy republic. We look forward to shining a spotlight at the dinner on some of the best political journalism of the past year and recognizing the promising students who represent the next generation of our profession,” Mason said in a statement.

The president’s move comes after the White House barred journalists from a slew of top news organizations Friday from attending an off-camera briefing with press secretary Sean Spicer.

Earlier in the day Friday, Mr. Trump delivered a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), where he bashed what he called “the dishonest press” and said that “fake news” is “the enemy of the people.”

“They have no sources, they just make it up,” Mr. Trump said, adding that he’s “not against” the media or the press and that he doesn’t mind bad stories about him.

“The fake news doesn’t tell the truth,” he said. “It doesn’t represent the people. It never will represent the people. We’re going to do something about it.”

Mr. Trump’s announcement also comes after reports that Bloomberg had decided to not host an afterparty event after the dinner this year and CNN was reportedly debating whether to attend the dinner.

The correspondents’ dinner began in 1920 and has usually included an appearance each year from the sitting president, including President Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. The first president to attend the dinner was Calvin Coolidge in 1924.



BERNIE AND THE QUEEN (SEPARATELY)


BERNIE’S NOT EASILY FOOLED

http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/26/politics/sanders-dnc-election/
Sanders: Not 'impressed' with DNC election process
Eric Bradner
By Eric Bradner, CNN
Updated 5:30 PM ET, Sun February 26, 2017

(CNN)Bernie Sanders said on "State of the Union" Sunday that he doesn't believe his candidate for Democratic National Committee chairman, Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison, was defeated Saturday because the election was rigged, but the system could use some retooling.

The Vermont senator was responding to a question from CNN's Jake Tapper about whether President Donald Trump had a point when he tweeted early Sunday: "Bernie's guy, like Bernie himself, never had a chance."

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Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump
Congratulations to Thomas Perez, who has just been named Chairman of the DNC. I could not be happier for him, or for the Republican Party!
5:02 PM - 25 Feb 2017
25,928 25,928 Retweets 108,657 108,657 likes

"No, he doesn't have a point," Sanders said, before offering a criticism of an election process that put the party leadership decision in the hands of the mere 447 voting members of the DNC. "That's what the system is -- and one of the things [new DNC Chairman Tom Perez] is going to have to change is to figure out how we elect national Democratic leaders. I'm not quite impressed with the process that exists."

The race for DNC chair had come to be seen as a proxy war between Sanders' progressive wing of the party and the Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton centrist supporters, who backed Perez.

Perez wins DNC chairmanship

Sanders also implied in response to Tapper's questioning that he would not give the DNC his presidential campaign's massive email list, which shattered previous records by raising $218 million online from 2.8 million donors.

The list will be used "to transform the Democratic Party into a party that stands for working families," he said, implying that he wants his new group, Our Revolution, to decide which candidates will get access to that list and reap its benefits.



http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bernie-sanders-just-shut-down-trump-in-the-most-hilarious-way_us_58b1c462e4b060480e0879c5

Bernie Sanders Just Shut Down Trump With A Brutal Reality Check
By Nina Golgowski
POLITICS 02/25/2017 02:52 pm ET

If President Donald Trump is in need of an ego boost on Saturday, Twitter may not be the place to find it.

The president was slapped with a scalding reality check, compliments of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), after suggesting his supporters have their own rally.

“It would be the biggest of them all!” Trump proclaimed on Twitter Saturday.

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Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump
Maybe the millions of people who voted to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN should have their own rally. It would be the biggest of them all!
7:25 AM - 25 Feb 2017
32,139 32,139 Retweets 142,160 142,160 likes
Exciting idea, except that Trump had a rally just last month, for Inauguration Day, as Sanders reminded him.

“They did. It wasn’t,” Sanders smartly snapped.

View image on TwitterView image on Twitter
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Bernie Sanders ✔ @SenSanders
.@realDonaldTrump They did. It wasn't.
8:56 AM - 25 Feb 2017
197,920 197,920 Retweets 491,889 491,889 likes

Sanders, backing up his pointed statement, shared side-by-side photos showing Trump’s patchy inauguration crowd compared with what appears to be the Women’s March on Washington, which took place a day later.

Crowd-counting experts have said the women’s march drew three times more people than Trump’s swearing-in.

Adding some sizzle to Sanders’ burn, Trump’s tweet got 83,000 likes and 19,000 retweets as of Saturday afternoon, which may seem “yuge,” but not compared with Sanders, whose tweet earned 152,000 likes and 61,000 retweets.

Ouch.

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https://www.rawstory.com/2017/02/democrats-must-overhaul-party-and-attack-big-business-bernie-sanders/

Democrats must overhaul party and attack big business: Bernie Sanders
REUTERS
26 FEB 2017 AT 14:56 ET

Bernie Sanders on The View (Photo: Screen capture)

Former U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders on Sunday urged a major overhaul of his party, calling for more aggressive efforts to court working-class voters and fight big businesses from Wall Street to the pharmaceutical sector.

Sanders, who spoke a day after Democrats chose Tom Perez, a veteran of former President Barack Obama’s administration, as their new party chairman, said it was also crucial for progressives to do more to mobilize grassroots supporters to take on Republican President Donald Trump.

“We need a total transformation,” the 75-year-old U.S. senator from Vermont said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

“We need to open up the party to working people, to young people and make it crystal clear that the Democratic Party is going to take on Wall Street, it’s going to take on the greed of the pharmaceutical industry, it’s going to take on corporate America that is shutting down plants in this country and moving our jobs abroad,” he added.

Democrats are struggling to recover from an electoral rout in November in which they lost not only the White House, but both chambers of the U.S. Congress. Republicans won the governor’s office in 33 states, up from 31, and increased their dominance in state legislatures.

The unexpectedly strong challenge from Sanders, a Democratic socialist, to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary laid bare the fissures within the party.

Sanders’ calls to rein in big businesses echoed a campaign theme that energized his supporters during the Democratic primary.

Sanders had backed U.S. Representative Keith Ellison, a liberal from Minnesota, to lead the Democrats but threw his support behind Perez after Saturday’s vote. Perez promptly made Ellison his deputy after the election.

Trump seized on the result to reprise a favorite phrase from the presidential campaign, calling the race for Democratic National Committee chairman “totally rigged.”

“Bernie’s guy, like Bernie himself, never had a chance. Clinton demanded Perez!” he said in a Twitter post on Sunday.

Perez, who was labor secretary under Obama, promised to rebuild the Democratic Party and redefine its mission from the grassroots up.

“That’s what we have to do as Democrats, help elect people in statehouses, presidency, local government and everywhere in between,” Perez said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Democrats did not invest enough in their party infrastructure and grassroots organizing and ignored large swathes of rural America, Perez said in a round of television appearances.

Trump swept those areas and the Rust Belt region in the Midwest with his talk of bringing jobs back to America and renegotiating the trade deals many blamed for their loss.

Perez cited the angry town halls some Republican lawmakers have faced recently and said it was important for Democrats to harness that energy into the ballot booth.

(Additional reporting by Doina Chiacu; Writing by Doina Chiacu; Editing by Caren Bohan)



QUEEN ELIZABETH NEWS TODAY

http://royalcentral.co.uk/uk/thequeen/queen-elizabeth-ii-appoints-first-woman-in-history-to-head-scotland-yard-76981
BRITISH ROYALS 24TH FEBRUARY 2017 Queen Elizabeth II appoints first woman in history to head Scotland Yard
Laura McCallen LAURA MCCALLEN
CHIEF REPORTER

Photograph – The Queen waving to crowd, POLIZEIBERLIN - SARILING GAWA (OWN WORK) CC BY-SA 4.0

On Wednesday, 22nd February 2017, Cressida Dick was appointed by Queen Elizabeth II as the first woman in its 187-year history to head London’s Metropolitan Police Service as Commissioner. The appointment followed a recommendation by British Home Secretary, Amber Rudd.

Also known as Scotland Yard and the Met, the Metropolitan Police Service is the largest police force in the United Kingdom with approximately 43,000 employees.

The current head of the Met – Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe – is due to retire next year, when the post will be taken up by Dick, who is currently a director general at the Foreign Office. Commissioner Hogan-Howard publicly shared congratulations with his replacement via the Metropolitan Police Twitter feed where he said: ‘My warmest congratulations to Cressida Dick. She’s achieved an incredible amount & deserves the post – a very talented person.’

Formerly an assistant commissioner of the force Dick said she was ‘thrilled and humbled’ to have been chosen for the role and that ‘this is a great responsibility and an amazing opportunity.’

In a statement, British Home Secretary Amber Rudd said that ‘Cressida Dick is an exceptional leader, and has a clear vision for the future of the Metropolitan Police and an understanding of the diverse range of communities it serves…she now takes on one of the most demanding, high-profile and important jobs in U.K. policing, against the backdrop of a heightened terror alert and evolving threats from fraud and cyber crime.’

Mayor of London Sadiq Khan – whose opinion on the appointment was also sought by Rudd – said in a post on Twitter: ‘On behalf of all Londoners, I warmly welcome Cressida to the role and I very much look forward to working with her to keep our capital safe and protected.’

Dick first joined the Met in 1983 and then went on to join Thames Valley Police in southeastern England. She returned to the Met in 2001 in the role of commander and has since held a number of senior roles including assistant commissioner responsible for fighting terrorism, assistant commissioner for specialist crime and deputy commissioner.


ACCORDING TO HIS BIOGRAPHY BELOW, BACHCHAN IS DEDICATED TO INCLUSIVENESS AND FREEDOM OF WORSHIP IN INDIA. HIS BRIEF LEGISLATIVE CAREER WAS AS A MEMBER OF A CENTER LEFT PARTY, BUT HE WAS DISAPPOINTED IN HIS ABILITY TO PERFORM ALL HIS PROMISES, AND RESIGNED. HIS NAME WAS MENTIONED A POLITICAL SCANDAL, BUT HE WAS CLEARED OF ANY WRONGDOING. THERE IS NO EVIDENCE IN HIS BIOGRAPHY OF ANY MALICE TOWARD THE UK OR THE QUEEN. I SUPPOSE, SOMETIMES, PEOPLE REALLY DO HAVE PRIOR PLANS. SEE BELOW:


Amitabh Bachchan says no to rare invitation from Queen Elizabeth II
Amitabh Bachchan has turned down an invitation from Queen Elizabeth II to the Buckingham Palace.
IANS | Edited by Ananya Bhattacharya
New Delhi, February 24, 2017 | UPDATED 17:45 IST

Amitabh Bachchan has turned down an invitation from the Buckingham Palace

Amitabh Bachchan will not be able to attend the reception of UK-India Year of Culture, a "rare invitation", which was sent to the megastar by Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh.

Amitabh was invited by the royals for a special reception to launch the UK-India Year of Culture later this month.

His publicist said in a statement, "Yes, Mr Bachchan has been given a rare invitation by Queen Elizabeth and Buckingham Palace to grace the UK-India Year Of Culture reception, but unfortunately due to prior commitments, he will be unable to attend."

Currently, the actor is gearing up for the launch of Ram Gopal Varma's Sarkar 3 trailer, scheduled for the first week of March.

His upcoming projects include Ayan Mukerji's tentatively-titled film Dragon that will see him alongside Ranbir Kapoor, Kabir Khan's production Thugs Of Hindostan where he is working with Aamir Khan and Aankhen 2, that will see him working with Arjun Rampal and Anil Kapoor.


Amitabh Bachchan

http://hollowverse.com/amitabh-bachchan/
The Hollowverse
The religions and political views of the influentials.

Amitabh Bachchan was born and raised in Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh, India.

Bachchan has been described as “one of the most secular human beings in the Indian film industry.”1 But that statement does not mean what us anglophiles might think: a lack of religion. Rather it refers to his dedication to religious and social tolerance.

And in fact, Bachchan is quite spiritual, but not in a traditional way. Although most sites list his religion as Hindu,2 it seems as though he throws some other faiths into the mix.

On his blog he described a morning in which he visited two Mosques and two Hindu temples. He went on to describe the portraits of the Sikh Guru Nanak that line the walls of the temple in his house. He then he meditated on the grand benefit of religion–all religion:

“But here it is the supreme power, one that beckons without calling, dictates without telling, listens without letting us know that it hears. When you look at the edicts that they prepared for us – the Ramayan, the Geeta, the Bible, the Quran, the Granth Saheb Ji, you wonder at these feats of godliness. . . . It is the marvel of their existence, it is the marvel of their thought and belief that subjects us into awe and reverence.3”

And when he received a threat on his cell phone about his inclusive religious practices, Bachchan shot back an angry and defiant reply saying he “abhorred the existence of such elements in society” that would criticize religious freedom and tolerance.4

Politics of Unity

Bachchan’s involvement in politics was brief and intense. He was handily elected to the Parliament in the 1980s through the Nationalist Congress Party, a center-left political party emphasizing secularism, federalism, and social justice among other things. But the political life didn’t suit him too well; he resigned after only a few years.5

Many point to his alleged involvement in the Bofors Corruption Scandal, of which he was later cleared of all charges, as the reason for his resignation, but on his blog he claims it was with respect to his Bollywood devotees that he quit. After a fan told him that he was being criticized by fellow partisans for supporting the actor even though he belonged to a different political party, Bachchan decided he couldn’t continue on his political path:

“I felt for 25 years I had tried to woo my audience to love me as an artist as an actor. And once I had accomplished that I was now telling them to love my politics as well. . . . It was wrong. I was wrong. . . . My reticence from politics is ruled and governed by that incident and it is the reason why I shall never ever go in that domain again.6”

These days Bachchan prefers to preach unity and encourage Indians to overcome divisions of race, caste, and religion.7 Sounds like a good plan to me.