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It seems as though he cited a 'Center for Security Policy' poll in his call to end muslim immigration.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CVp44uGXAAAVrMV.png:large
That same CSP has invited Trump to speak at their National Security Action Summit in Nevada on Dec. 14th. It will be interesting to see if he'll show since the GOP debate is the next night.
That speech will define Trump going forward. Islamophobia will be his campaign platform.
Here's what the Aussies think of our gun laws
That's another way of saying that gun control laws are seriously restricting your right to be murdered by an enraged stranger.
Lax gun policies are hitting America where it hurts
San Bernardino shooting
SACRAMENTO — It may be a while before we know everything about the San Bernardino butchery, but the central detail was clear from the start: The culprits were guns.
Not Muslims. Even so-called radical Islamic terrorists cannot kill 14 and wound 21 with knives or ball bats.
Bombs, maybe. But those two holiday party killers preferred guns because, in America, guns are so easy to obtain and use.
Not mental illness. Anyone who murders is a sicko. But it's insulting and intellectually dishonest to equate all killing with the severely mentally ill.
"Contrary to popular belief, mental illness by itself is not a leading contributor to interpersonal firearm violence," Dr. Garen J. Wintemute, a longtime UC Davis gun violence researcher, wrote in a recent report.
"Severe mental illness is a risk factor, but the risk is small," Wintemute told me. "Age and sex — young men — are much higher risk factors."
Yes, the mentally ill need treatment. Governments have been derelict. And the most gravely ill should be kept from firearms because these people, Wintemute says, are a huge risk for suicide.
But murderers? The mentally ill always have been convenient culprits, if you listened to the weapon worshipers. There has been no indication, however, that the two San Bernardino assassins — Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, and Tashfeen Malik, 29 — were clinical cases.
True, they were Muslims. But there is roughly one mass shooting — four or more victims — each day in America. And here's betting that few of the assailants are Muslim and most were raised Christian. The common denominator is that they were all blazing away with guns, the preferred killing tool.
America has only 4.5% of the world's population but 41.5% of its civilian-owned firearms. We have by far the highest gun ownership rate on Earth. What results is no surprise: No other developed nation comes close in firearms fatalities.
Blame it on all of us. Long ago, we decided to let potential killers arm themselves with practically any weapon they choose.
You know, all those law-abiding people — like that quiet Redlands couple — who are law-abiding until they're not.
"I've thought a lot about it and have come down to this," says Wintemute, an emergency room physician who has treated countless gunshot wounds. "We know there's a predisposition to use high-capacity weapons in mass shootings. But we, as a country, have made a series of policy decisions to make those weapons available to the widest number of people.
"We are now reaping the harvest of those decisions. These weapons are being used in precisely the way they're designed."
We're told the assault rifles fired at the office party were purchased legally. That's the problem. They should have been illegal.
California, Chicago and Washington, D.C., can pass tough gun laws. But they'll always be the victims of lax bordering states where bad guys can go load up.
So blame us because we haven't pressured Congress to pass strong nationwide laws — such as banning large-capacity ammunition magazines and requiring universal background checks.
National Rifle Assn. scare propaganda to the contrary, no one is advocating the confiscation of all weapons. But that's where we're headed eventually unless the gunners wake up and compromise on some realistic solutions to the daily slaughter.
Solutions such as requiring smart guns — firearms that can be used only by their rightful owners, not by thieves or crooks buying weapons in the underground.
Also, solutions like requiring background checks for ammo purchases. And limiting the buys. Farook and Malik fired up to 75 rounds during their killfest and 76 while exchanging fire with police. Cops found 4,500 rounds at their home and 1,600 in their car.
Nobody needs that many bullets unless they're arming for mass mayhem.
Another solution: A well-funded government buyout program that offers financial incentives for people to dump guns they really don't care about but are sitting ducks for thieves or accidents.
If it makes you comfy, keep a gun for self protection. But caution: A firearm at home is 22 times more likely to be used in a domestic homicide, suicide or accidental shooting than in self-defense, according to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.
Blame some Democrats, too — moderates cowed by the powerful gun lobby.
Gov. Jerry Brown has vetoed major gun bills. One would have banned the sale of firearms capable of holding detachable, high-capacity magazines. Another would have led to registration of ammunition sales.
Some liberals don't have clean hands. Last year, they pushed a ballot measure that, among other things, reduced from a felony to a misdemeanor the penalty for stealing most handguns. Voters passed it.
They'll get an opportunity to correct that mistake next November. Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom is sponsoring an initiative to return all gun thefts to a felony while significantly tightening California's firearms laws.
Newsom's proposal would ban possession — not just sales — of magazines holding more than 10 rounds. It also would require instant background checks — the first in the nation — for every ammo purchase.
"We're at a tipping point in this country," Newsom says. "What do we value? We value our safety and our liberty. How do we balance both? Change has to start from the bottom up, with the public, not from the top down. I have zero optimism about Congress."
Gun violence can't be stopped. But it can be reduced if we're smarter about our asinine arsenal.
by George Skelton of the LATimes
http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-pol-cap-guns-column.html
My thoughts and prayers are for you, conix.
Don't Let Terrorists Divide America
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2015/12/07/dont_let_terrorists_divide_america_128953.html
I suppose that is good enough for you two hayseeds, but the party establishment is cringing at the new Triumvirate of Trump, Cruz and Carson combining for 66% of the GOP vote.
Planned Parenthood: Myth Vs. Fact
http://www.theonion.com/graphic/planned-parenthood-myth-vs-fact-51982
Pretty sinister, F6. I'm afraid if we left it up to the Evangelicals, we'd still be arguing about whether it's ok to have sex at any age.
Kill life ?
What is that, exactly. Please elaborate
Well good, they should completely outlaw mandatory transvaginal ultrasound testing from taxpayers. I absolutely agree.
And you are right, Abortions will never end.
So, how about an agreement on a viable fetal heartbeat...
Should it be what Roe v. Wade established (between 24 and 28 weeks) or something less?
So, do you think it is ok to cantor up to a woman, put her in stirrups and insert a transvaginal ultrasound wand to be sure she's not breaking the fetal heartbeat law?
Not going for it, Red. Bigotry doesn't belong here.
You posted it, so you own it.
I'm no social justice crusader, but there's nothing funny about racist jokes anymore.
Ha Ha Ha... I wonder how many who read this board can't wait til they get to the clubhouse and tell their friends your joke?
Justin Rose
Yep. Is that a smirk or a grimace?... he must be a Hunter S. wannabe.
I think Trump got some of his best stuff from @GSElevator... I never give money to homeless people. I can't reward failure in good conscience.
It's great to see competition at this level as far as SpaceX and Blue Origin goes. Musk is truly a rare ideal among the rocket science impresarios.
Jeff Bezos Historic Rocket Landing
Why Women Don't Get Promoted on Wall Street
Sexism in the workplace is the Chrissy Teigen of liberal causes -- so hot right now. It's right up there with inequality and white privilege. I worked in investment banking and thrived in a male-dominated culture that laughs in the face of political correctness, and occasionally basic human decency (illuminated on Twitter as @GSElevator), so I've seen plenty of examples first hand.
One of my first bosses (he's still at Citigroup) referred to the practice of banks encouraging the hiring of more women as The Office Beautification Project. He wasn't joking either; he only made time to interview female candidates.
One day, he gleefully held up the résumé of a woman he was about to meet. "It says 'One of Glamour Magazine's Collegiate Women of the year.' Sounds promising."
While a typical investment banking interview can run 45 minutes or longer, he came back within 15 minutes. "Well, I guess looks weren't among Glamour's criteria." Everyone within earshot laughed. [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-lefevre/why-women-dont-get-promoted-on-wall-street_b_7812038.html]
The wage gap is largely a myth...
We hear a lot about gender inequality and specifically, the pay gap. "Today, the average full-time working woman earns just 77 cents for every dollar a man earns... That's an embarrassment." That's President Obama, and this kind of rhetoric is probably more detrimental to gender equality than the Office Beautification Project.
If women actually got paid 23 percent less than men for the same work, then every shareholder-conscious CEO in the country would hire only women. It's not dissimilar to the logic behind sending jobs overseas. And instead of being vilified, that CEO -- most likely a white man, and probably named John -- would be named Jezebel's Person of the Year.
The wage gap myth is an insult to anyone with access to Google. Women in their 20s earn more then men in their 20s. Of course, women also tend to be better educated. Even women in their 30s and 40s without kids earn more than their male equivalents. Speaking unscientifically, I'd say that's because these women are especially dedicated, while older men without kids are quite often drunks and losers.
Men also tend to exhibit more aggression and less empathy, while women demonstrate greater compassion and parental instincts -- traits that correlate to how much or little someone gets paid, regardless of gender. This behavior has even been observed in monkeys, where, when left with a pile of toys, the females generally prefer stroking and holding baby dolls while the males gravitate to the trucks and toy hammers.
This is perhaps why women don't negotiate their salaries as aggressively as men. Ellen Pao, interim CEO of Reddit has a solution for that -- banning salary negotiations. To me, that sounds like banning bedtime stories (a professor in the UK recently suggested it, albeit somewhat hyperbolically) because it's unfair to children with deadbeat parents.
Moreover, women have a better sense of work/life balance. Generally, they choose to prioritize family over work, often deciding that raising and shaping human lives is more important and rewarding than a career. And that's no bad thing -- kids with a full-time parent outperform academically and emotionally. But when you opt for shorter hours and prioritize family, you end up with less experience, and a smaller paycheck. In fact, a recent study revealed that many women don't even want that promotion.http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/business/assets_c/2012/11/Henry_Blodget_Text-thumb-615x262-105766.jpg
But there's still a huge problem...
My misogynist boss in London is not evidence of gender inequality. He's a single anecdote -- a data point. However, my office was filled with data points just like him. Many women might say this doesn't apply just to Wall Street; it's a universal fact of corporate life. That's probably true. But, the locker room culture on Wall Street is not only more pronounced, it's celebrated.
I experienced a work environment that is subtly exclusionary. Colleagues bond with their superiors over drinks or other social activities that aren't often conducive to women. Over time, given the disparate number of opportunities that sprout from this basic connectivity, the dynamic of inherent disadvantage snowballs. After a few years, the guys like me who can binge drink with clients and are good at golf get more deal experience, promoted more quickly, and paid more. That's a "meritocracy."
Sometimes the exclusion is intentional. We had a Director who generated a lot of revenue for the firm and was making a big push for promotion to Managing Director. The only mark against him was that he had a reputation for being "a bit of a scoundrel." In an effort to be taken more seriously as an officer of the firm, he simply stopped working with or including any female bankers on his deal teams. Something similar allegedly happens in Congress.
It could just be that the Congressmen like telling dirty jokes as much as bankers do. I can't tell you how many times a conversation between a group of men in a bullpen or trading floor will change (or cease) as soon as a woman entered or left the group. This behavior is so common across the corporate spectrum that we often don't even think about it. These scenarios are universal, but Wall Street takes it to another level.
And then there's fairly common practice of using women as "tethered goats" -- taking an attractive female subordinate to a client meeting as eye candy. I've even had hedge fund clients request that we bring specific female colleagues to meetings or drinks. She might get the short-term benefit of attending some meetings ahead of her male or lesser-attractive peers, and think her contribution is being valued, but it's not going to help her build a career. In reality, it's just a running joke.
The notion of women not realizing that they're the joke is consistent theme. A group of bro bankers I worked with liked making "high stakes" wagers on anything from the score on a football game to how long an MD could go without yelling at an analyst. It didn't matter what they were betting on, the stakes were always the same. The loser had to invite a female analyst, typically "the ugliest one" as chosen by the other bros, out for dinner and a movie, and pretend to be totally sincere.
Worse still, these attitudes are contagious. When one of our credit traders deemed my new analyst to be too timid for the trading floor, he took it upon himself to toughen the kid up. He made him take a poll of all the guys on the trading floor, asking them to rank the credit sales girls in order of "most f*ckable." The kid then had to make a one-page PowerPoint presentation of his results to a small group of guys. The torch had been passed to the next generation of bankers.[http://www.businessinsider.com/gselevator-john-lefevre-women-wall-street-goldman-sachs-elevator-2015-7 ]
Perhaps, these scenarios help explain why women don't want to get promoted; their ambition is often crushed.
Solving the problem...
There's no easy solution, but it helps to stop lying about the facts and have an honest conversation about what the real issues are. Last week, a Brooklyn bar announced that they will start charging women only 77 percent of their bar tab in order to raise awareness for gender inequality. Instead of addressing the problem, the bar is chiseling away at the seriousness and credibility of the issue.
Forcing or pressuring companies to promote women based on anything other than merit is simply a different form of prejudice. There's also no point unless there are substantive changes in company policy and corporate culture. We need to acknowledge and embrace the differences between men and women, instead of trying to pretend that we're all the same. Supporting women who choose family and a healthy work/life balance is the only way to get more women into senior positions, and that's the only way to change the corporate culture.
Copyright ©2015 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
I would expect someone who gets upset by a couple of guys commenting about a beauty pageant, would surely feel insulted by a presidential candidate who just seems to delight in insulting women.
I got a kick out of this little chunk of the last debate:
You must have missed Stephanopoulos's “This Week" on ABC. Otherwise I'm sure you would have been offended at The Donald's anti-feminist remarks: Hillary is a person who doesn’t have the strength or the stamina, in my opinion, to be president. She doesn’t have strength or stamina. She’s not a strong enough person to be president.
From the governors objections to the fear-mongering drumbeats of FoxNews, it's showing a tremendous degree of ignorance about how the screening process actually works.
(...) the Obama administration has pledged to bring in 10,000 refugees over the next year. So far, fewer than 2,000 have come in. The numbers remain relatively low because of the arduous security screening process that's in place, with coordination among federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
Administration officials say those procedures involve a review of all known biographical and biometric data. For Syrian refugees, there is a special layer of screening that includes in-person interviews with specially-trained staff to elicit testimony credibly. On average, it takes a Syrian refugee 18-24 months to gain admittance into the U.S.
http://www.npr.org/2015/11/17/456336432/more-governors-oppose-u-s-resettlement-of-syrian-refugees
House Dems Back GOP On Bill To Pause Admittance Of Some Refugees
They supported the legislation despite White House opposition.
Elise Foley
WASHINGTON -- Forty-seven House Democrats broke with the White House on Thursday to vote for a bill aimed at pausing admittance of Syrian and Iraqi refugees by adding requirements to an already lengthy screening process, and putting pressure on intelligence, law enforcement and homeland security officials to act with caution.
The Obama administration threatened a veto on Wednesday evening. But a number of Democrats peeled off anyway, under significant pressure from constituents to act after terrorist attacks in Paris last week. The bill passed 289-137 -- with enough support to override a veto, should there be one.
Some Democrats said the legislation simply wasn't as bad as the administration made it out to be, even after a briefing earlier in the day with White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough and Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson.
"It isn't what it was characterized as, so why would we oppose that?" Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.). He voted for the bill Thursday.
They also expressed frustration that the White House hadn't better explained the refugee vetting process, which many agreed is already extensive, with voters and politicians.
"I've seen better presentations in my time here," Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.), who voted with Republicans Thursday, told reporters. "They may have strong arguments on their side, but they're not expressing those strong arguments sufficiently."
An aide in the room said Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-N.Y.), who also voted for the bill Thursday, was particularly outspoken in asking for a better explanation from administration officials on why he should oppose the bill.
"A lot of us went in with open minds and really wanted to understand administration's position on this," Maloney told reporters afterward. "But if you read the bill, you have a pretty simple certification process sitting on top of an existing and extensive screening process. Some of us just don't understand why you can't verify that and you can't do it fast."
The vote was on the first of what will likely be several pieces of legislation in response to last week's terrorist attacks in France. The House decided to initially take aim at the refugee resettlement program, based on the argument that terrorists might try their luck at getting to the U.S. through that cumbersome, typically 18- to 24-month process rather than coming to the country through other methods.
The Obama administration said the House bill would "unacceptably hamper our efforts to assist some of the most vulnerable people in the world."
It may already be the end of the road for the bill. Never mind the veto threat; Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) told reporters that the bill "won't get passed" in the upper chamber. Senators are expected to leave town as soon as Thursday afternoon for a week and a half, and by the time they come back, the frantic push to block Syrian refugees may have eased.
"The initial reaction was overreaction," a senior Senate Democratic aide said, "and cooler heads will probably prevail when Congress reconvenes after Thanksgiving."
Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), the third-ranking GOP senator, told reporters on Wednesday evening that the chamber would be unlikely to vote on anything before the Thanksgiving break.
Some senators have proposed focusing on limiting the visa waiver program instead, which currently allows people from certain countries to come to the U.S. without a visa. A bill set to be introduced by Sens. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) would block anyone who has visited Iraq or Syria in the past five years from entering the U.S. without a visa through that program. Most of the Paris attackers, including the Belgian national who allegedly planned them, were citizens of visa waiver countries.
Other senators are pushing measures that do target refugee resettlement -- including one from GOP presidential candidate and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz that would block nearly all refugees from countries with a heavy terrorist presence.
Obama has been heavily critical of efforts to limit refugee resettlement, although he and other administration officials said they are open to ideas to strengthen the screening process. He has said he remains committed to his previous plan to admit 10,000 Syrians in the 2016 fiscal year, as long as they go through the screening process.
He said the rhetoric coming from Republicans -- and some Democrats -- would only hurt the country's security.
"I cannot think of a more potent recruitment tool for ISIL than some of the rhetoric that's been coming out of here during the course of this debate," Obama said Tuesday.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/house-syrian-refugees_564df0fae4b031745cf00f5c
Fascinating to reflect that today's market move means absolutely nothing to most Americans.
Russell Henley
The headache usually begins when the campaign manager has to follow up with, "What the candidate meant to say is ..."
Hillary doesn't like being on defense and really hates to be caught off guard, as evidenced when she nearly went off the rails during the exchange.
Saudi Arabia as the leader of the UN human rights council is mystifying... the hypocrisy behind this arrangement hardly needs to be stated.
More deporable is the revelation from Wikileaks that secret cables showing the British government negotiating with Saudi Arabia to back its elevation to the world’s top human rights body, despite the fact it is one of the worst human rights violators:
http://www.mintpressnews.com/wikileaks-exposes-secret-deal-to-get-saudi-arabia-on-un-human-rights-council/210117/
Bernie Sanders is disappointed that CBS has decided to put more emphasis on terrorism, foreign policy, and national security into tonight's debate. He should take a copy of this piece by Charlie Pierce to the podium.
A good wife should not moan if her husband is not all she hoped he would be. It's not his fault she has bad taste.
Are you married? Is your relationship all you hoped and dreamed it would be?
Age has nothing to do with it, now does it, Peg? Do you feel uncomfortable - answering a question with a question? Do you feel yoga pants demean women and objectifies their anatomy?
Just trying to be nice.
Girls, please get over yourselves. How many yoga pants do you own?
LOL!
So much butt, so little time.