After nine months of struggling to deliver on their legislative priorities, Senate Republicans found unity Tuesday when they overturned a rule that makes it easier for Americans to sue banks and credit card companies. The rule was developed by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and would have allowed people to file class action lawsuits that could have cost the banks billions of dollars. We get an update from Public Citizen’s Amanda Werner, who recently dressed as Rich Uncle Pennybags, with a top hat and monocle, and sat directly behind former Equifax CEO Richard Smith when he testified about a security breach that left sensitive personal information for 143 million Americans exposed to hackers. https://www.democracynow.org/2017/10/26/congress_sides_with_wall_street_to[with embedded video, and transcript]
FCC Enables Faster Media Consolidation as Pro-Trump Sinclair Group Seizes Even More Local Stations
Published on Oct 26, 2017 by Democracy Now!
A major decision by the Federal Communications Commission Tuesday eliminated a decades-old rule that ensures community residents can have a say in their local broadcast TV station. This comes as the FCC announced plans Wednesday to abolish long-standing media ownership rules. Opponents say these changes will accelerate media consolidation, allowing massive corporate media companies, such as the right-wing Sinclair Broadcast Group, to buy up and control even more local stations. We speak with Andy Kroll, senior reporter at Mother Jones magazine, whose story in their new issue is titled “Ready for Trump TV? Inside Sinclair Broadcasting’s Plot to Take Over Your Local News.” https://www.democracynow.org/2017/10/26/fcc_eliminates_rules_preventing_media_consolidation[with embedded video, and transcript]
Undocumented Teen Wins Abortion Fight, But Thousands in Shelters Still Live Under Anti-Choice Policy
Published on Oct 26, 2017 by Democracy Now!
An undocumented teenager at the center of a lawsuit with the Trump administration over her right to have an abortion has finally obtained the procedure she wanted. The 17-year-old is detained in a refugee resettlement shelter and had the abortion on Wednesday, after a U.S. appeals court ruled in her favor. The teen is referred to in court documents as Jane Doe. The Trump administration spent a month trying to stop her from accessing an abortion. We get an update from her lawyers: Jennifer Dalven, director of the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project, and Susan Hays, legal director of Jane’s Due Process, a legal referral service for minors facing unintended pregnancy in Texas. https://www.democracynow.org/2017/10/26/undocumented_teen_wins_fight_to_get[with embedded video, and transcript]
Related: Web Exclusive - Doctors Call for Release of Girl with Cerebral Palsy After Border Agents Remove Her from Hospital
October 31, 2017 The American Civil Liberties Union is demanding the immediate release of a 10-year-old girl who was removed from the children’s hospital in Corpus Christi, Texas, and taken into custody by Border Patrol agents as she recovered from emergency surgery. The girl, Rosa Maria Hernandez, is undocumented and has cerebral palsy. She has been living in the United States since she was three months old, when her parents moved to the country in order to access better medical care for her. She was first detained last Tuesday, after an ambulance carrying her to the hospital was stopped at a checkpoint. Agents then waited outside her hospital room until she was discharged, and detained her. Video shows the agents escorting Hernandez into custody as she’s wheeled out of the hospital on a gurney. Her doctors are recommending she be released into the care of her family. We’re joined by Priscila Martinez, who is the Texas Immigration Coalition coordinator and among those calling for immigration authorities to release the girl back to her family. https://www.democracynow.org/2017/10/31/doctors_aclu_call_for_release_of [with embedded video, and transcript], https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6rz_tQgPZs [with comments]
Full Broadcast 26Oct17 Real News with David Knight GUESTS: • Outlaw Morgan — TOPICS: • Hillary’s 70th is NOT a happy birthday. A Soros group has filed a complaint against her with the Fed Elections Commission and Trump’s DOJ has removed the gag order on the Uranium One whistleblower • More lies emerge from Vegas shooting • Sands of the hourglass may be running out on the PetroDollar
[from Alex Jones and his merry band of batshit bullshitters]
Thursday, October 26th 2017[, with Anthony Cumia hosting the fourth hour]: Russia Script Flips - The DNC and Hillary find themselves on the receiving end of the Russia investigation, as new reports claim they funded the Trump dirty dossier, violated campaign finance law and may be guilty of at least 13 crimes. Meanwhile, the National Archives are set to release over 3,000 JFK files. On today's show, trends forecaster Gerald Celente joins us to break down the latest Clinton legal issues and more. We'll also review the progress on Trump's tax cuts and the Hollywood pedophile scandal.
Lucien Greaves is co-founder of The Satanic Temple. In this short profile, Lucien speaks about TST, its role in the fight against religious privilege, and the merits of practicing a "secular religion."
HuffPost interviewed white nationalist leader Richard Spencer the night before his speech at the University of Florida, and it’s disturbing.
HuffPost Special Report: When White Hate Comes To Town Richard Spencer says he supports the push for white identity but doesn’t want to be called a Nazi. Colton Fears, left, Tyler Tenbrink and William Fears were arrested after Richard Spencer spoke at the University of Florida. One of the men is accused of firing a gun at a counter-protester. Watch a disturbing HuffPost interview with white nationalist leader Richard Spencer the night before his speech at the University of Florida. 10/26/2017 https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/richard-spencer-interview-huffpost-university-of-florida_us_59ef9b1ee4b0b7e632658b44[with non-YouTube version of this YouTube embedded, and comments]
DOJ lifts gag order on uranium one FBI informant, source tells Fox News
The Beat With Ari Melber 10/26/17
Trump “gives order” to DOJ, sparking concerns about the Justice Department’s “independence.” Is Trump breaching the wall” between Trump and DOJ Duration: 10:15
Ari Melber’s special breakdown on Trump’s “sarcasm defense” and the “overlapping legal issues” facing the Trump team for secretly trying to coordinate with WikiLeaks at the height of the 2016 election Duration: 8:56
As the Mueller investigation could be closing in, the White House is scrambling to discredit the messenger with a big assist from Fox News. Duration: 10:18
Trump administration doing a bad job turning word into deed
The Rachel Maddow Show 10/26/17
Rachel Maddow points out an emerging pattern in the Donald Trump administration in which the declarations Trump makes are not supported by the work to get those thing done, most egregiously in the case of the Russia sanctions he signed into law but never bothered to implement. Duration: 21:59
Hype falls short in release of JFK assassination documents
The Rachel Maddow Show 10/26/17
Philip Shenon, author of a book on the JFK assassination, talks with Rachel Maddow about what went wrong with the promised release of National Archives documents, and whether the most sought-after secret documents will ever be released. Duration: 5:10
Grassley staffer ran private investigation into Clinton e-mail
The Rachel Maddow Show 10/26/17
Rachel Maddow looks at the Trump Russia investigations seeking details into a Trump supporter's efforts to recruit hackers to find Hillary Clinton's e-mails, and reports that Barbara Ledeen, a staffer for Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, was engaged in a similar pursuit. Duration: 5:40
Refugee office pressing anti-abortion agenda on minors in custody
The Rachel Maddow Show 10/26/17
Brigitte Amiri, attorney for a girl who fought the Office of Refugee Resettlement to exercise her right to an abortion, and won, talks with Rachel Maddow about how the office under Scott Lloyd is actively trying to deprive vulnerable girls of their reproductive rights. Duration: 8:41
John Boehner says most Republicans are "throwing up" over the state of the party. Lawrence O'Donnell talks with Ron Klain, Daniel Dale & Peter Wehner, who says the Trump WH can't pass any legislation because the president doesn't know anything and doesn't care to. Duration: 11:46
Lawrence: GOP abandons principles in favor of Trump's tax cuts
The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell 10/26/17
Lawrence O'Donnell explains why the Republicans who voted for the budget bill passed by the House voted against their own longstanding principles, and why that's not a surprise in the age of Donald Trump. Duration: 2:47
Pres. Trump said we have never seen a drug epidemic like the current opioid crisis. Ekow Yankah, Professor at Cardozo School of Law, says we have – but when the drug epidemic was affecting mostly people of color, there was a very different national response. Duration: 4:21
Bannon is 'going for the kill' in war with GOP establishment
The 11th Hour with Brian Williams 10/26/17
As Trump again claims the GOP is unified, Bannon is looking to make his mark in his growing war with the GOP establishment he sees as too independent from Trump. Our reporter panel reacts. Duration: 7:12
After missed deadline Trump takes some action on Russia sanctions
The 11th Hour with Brian Williams 10/26/17
The Trump White House has given Congress a list of possible Russia Sanctions after missing an October 1st deadline. Why the delay? We discuss with our experts. Duration: 7:46
Trump allows National Archives to release some, not all JFK docs
The 11th Hour with Brian Williams 10/26/17
The National Archives has released thousands of documents around the assassination of JFK, but how much will we learn and what hasn't been released? NBC's Julia Ainsley explains. Duration: 2:59
Quiet from Republicans after Corker & Flake rebuked Trump
The 11th Hour with Brian Williams 10/26/17
Since strong rebukes to Pres. Trump from GOP Senators Jeff Flake & Bob Corker, no other Hill Republicans have spoken out. Indira Lakshmanan & Bill Kristol react. Duration: 6:28
Trump Has Now Been Interviewed On Fox News 19 Times
Published on Oct 27, 2017 by The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
Donald Trump has proven that there's one network he trusts to give him softball questions. Again and again and again and again and again and (continued until infinity).
Published on Oct 27, 2017 by The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
Donald Trump's daughter is among the most trusted members of his administration. And yet, she appears to have extreme difficulty finding the right... letter compounds? Alphabet parties? Oh, words!!
The White House is full of Halloween spirit as the president wishes he was feared by his critics and the vice president discovers his inner Rod Serling.
Seth takes a closer look at the Trump administration's seemingly permanent state of scandal and why many on the right seem to want to live in an alternate reality where Trump isn't president.
Judith Vary Baker joins us again today with updates on the upcoming JFK conference as well as sharing never seen before information, then first time on Caravan we welcome Amapola Hansberger, born and raised in Managua, Nicaragua, she immigrated to the United States at the age of 18. She studied English and Secretarial Sciences at UC Chatsworth. She became a US Citizen in 1975 and in 1979 lost her country of birth to Communism. With her husband, James, she founded Legal Immigrants for America. The voice of the voiceless legal immigrant, in 2014. Visit her website here: https://www.golifa.com/
Former Host of Coast To Coast AM John B Wells is now in control on Caravan To Midnight & Ark Midnight.
Congressman Pushing Conspiracy Theories Calls CNN ‘Fake News,’ Then Flees The lawmaker blames an “Obama sympathizer” for white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia. A CNN interview with Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) on Wednesday quickly flew off the rails, ending with the lawmaker and an aide accusing the network of “fake news” and running away. Gosar suggested earlier this month that deadly white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, over the summer could have been a false-flag operation carried out by the left. He told Vice that the person who started the rally was “from Occupy Wall Street that was an Obama sympathizer,” and said “wouldn’t it be interesting” to find out if billionaire George Soros was behind it. On Wednesday, CNN reporter Randi Kaye tried to press Gosar on his conspiracy theory. After a brief back and forth, Gosar declared “You’re not real news, you’re fake news.” Then, he quickly took off down a staircase as an aide repeated: “fake news, fake news, fake news.” https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/paul-gosar-fake-news-cnn_us_59f17ed6e4b07d838d3219d4
Trump’s Dubious $4,000 Claim Would American households really see an average income increase of $4,000 a year if President Donald Trump succeeds in cutting the corporate income tax? Don’t count on it. This claim is dubious at best. Consider this simple arithmetic: There were 125,819,000 households in the U.S. last year, according to the Census Bureau. An average increase of $4,000 for each household would amount to a total income gain of more than $503 billion annually. But the U.S. collected just $297 billion in corporate income taxes in fiscal year 2017, which ended Sept. 30, according to the U.S. Treasury. So let’s say that Trump’s proposal to drop the top corporate rate to 20 percent (from the current 35 percent) reduces the corporate tax accordingly by $127 billion. How can that spur an income gain of $500 billion? [...] http://www.factcheck.org/2017/10/trumps-dubious-4000-claim/
New US flight security measures take effect New security measures affecting flights into the US are coming into effect, which US authorities say are aimed at reducing the threat of hidden explosives. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-41759167
Key Google Searches Only Showed Republican Candidate In Montana House Special Election And the glitch wasn’t easy to fix, the Democrat’s campaign discovered. WASHINGTON ? In the final days before Montana’s special House election earlier this year, the digital media vendor for Rob Quist, the Democratic candidate, noticed a crucial problem. The only candidate appearing on Google’s results page for common searches like “Montana special election candidates” was Greg Gianforte, the Republican. A tech team hired by Daniel Beckman, the managing director of Quist’s digital vendor IB5k, alerted the campaign that it wasn’t an isolated glitch. It turned out that for almost the entire race, only Gianforte showed up in what Google calls its “Instant Answers” box. “People looking to just find out who was running — and how else would they find out in this modern day and age ? couldn’t find our guy or the Libertarian [Mark Hicks],” Beckman told HuffPost. “That’s pretty upsetting.” Gianforte (who gained national attention after body-slamming a reporter the day before the vote) went on to defeat Quist by about six percentage points, with Hicks finishing a distant third. [...] https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/google-montana-special-election_us_59f1fdcae4b077d8dfc7ea04
'What Is Rich?’ Asks Congresswoman Worth $75 Million “Is $1 million rich? Is $10 million rich? Is $1 billion rich?” While trying to sell the GOP tax plan as a benefit for the middle class, Rep. Diane Black (R-Tenn.) argued on Monday that it’s hard to tell whether millionaires are in the middle class or are considered “rich.” Fox Business host Trish Regan pressed Black, who chairs the House Budget Committee, about whether the GOP tax plan would actually hurt wealthy taxpayers. She asked how “socking it to the rich” would help Republicans curry favor with the middle class. “Well I don’t know that you would call that ‘socking it to the rich’ if there wasn’t a decrease in the marginal rate because there are some other things that will help those who are at the higher income level,” she said. “I’m always careful about calling people rich because, what’s rich? Is $1 million rich? Is $10 million rich? Is $1 billion rich? So I want to be careful about that. But we really want to be sure that ... there are some pieces in there besides just the marginal rate, such as getting rid of the [alternative minimum tax]. There are some other pieces in there that do help those at upper income.” To answer Black’s questions, yes, you are rich if you have $1 million, $10 million or $1 billion. A net worth of just $630,754 would put you among the wealthiest 20 percent of Americans, according to 2011 census data. The line may be fuzzy around the $1 million mark for the congresswoman, who is running for governor of Tennessee, because she is worth far more than that. Black’s net worth was more than $75 million in 2015, the latest year available on OpenSecrets.org. In 2011, The Atlantic ran a piece about Black called, “The Richest New Member of the House” and noted that much of her money came from “her interest in Aegis Sciences Corporation, a Nashville forensic chemical and drug-testing laboratory that her husband, David, founded in 1986.” [...] https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/diane-black-rich_us_59f1f3b3e4b07fdc5fbc5a74
When an Algorithm Helps Send You to Prison In 2013, police officers in Wisconsin arrested a man driving a car that had been used in a recent shooting. The man, Eric Loomis, pleaded guilty to attempting to flee an officer, and no contest to operating a vehicle without the owner’s consent. Neither of his crimes mandates prison time. At Mr. Loomis’s sentencing, the judge cited, among other factors, Mr. Loomis’s high risk of recidivism as predicted by a computer program called COMPAS, a risk assessment algorithm used by the state of Wisconsin. The judge denied probation and prescribed an 11-year sentence: six years in prison, plus five years of extended supervision. No one knows exactly how COMPAS works; its manufacturer refuses to disclose the proprietary algorithm. We only know the final risk assessment score it spits out, which judges may consider at sentencing. Mr. Loomis challenged the use of an algorithm as a violation of his due process rights to be sentenced individually, and without consideration of impermissible factors like gender. The Wisconsin Supreme Court rejected his challenge. In June, the United States Supreme Court declined to hear his case, meaning a majority of justices effectively condoned the algorithm’s use. Their decision will have far-ranging effects. Something about this story is fundamentally wrong: Why are we allowing a computer program, into which no one in the criminal justice system has any insight, to play a role in sending a man to prison? At a sentencing, it is entirely a judge’s prerogative to prescribe a sentence within statutory guidelines. The obvious flaw with this system is bias. Judges might abuse this unchecked power to sentence based not only on relevant factors, such as the seriousness of a defendant’s offense, but also on those that are morally and constitutionally problematic — for example, gender and race. This is precisely why states are abdicating the responsibility for sentencing to a computer. Use of a computerized risk assessment tool somewhere in the criminal justice process is widespread across the United States, and some states, such as Colorado, even require it. States trust that even if they cannot themselves unpack proprietary algorithms, computers will be less biased than even the most well-meaning humans. But shifting the sentencing responsibility to a computer does not necessarily eliminate bias; it delegates and often compounds it. Algorithms like COMPAS simply mimic the data with which we train them. COMPAS’s authors presumably fed historical recidivism data into their system. From that, the program ascertained what factors tend to make a defendant a higher risk. It then applied the patterns it gleaned to subsequent defendants, like Mr. Loomis, to spit out sentences that comport with existing trends. But an algorithm that accurately reflects our world also necessarily reflects our biases. A ProPublica study found that COMPAS predicts black defendants will have higher risks of recidivism than they actually do, while white defendants are predicted to have lower rates than they actually do. (Northpointe Inc., the company that produces the algorithm, disputes this analysis.) The computer is worse than the human. It is not simply parroting back to us our own biases, it is exacerbating them. Even if you think Mr. Loomis’s sentencing procedure arrived at the appropriate result, the potential that the process the state took to arrive there was biased — in ways neither judges nor defendants nor prosecutors know — should alarm anyone. Machine learning algorithms often work on a feedback loop. If they are not constantly retrained, they “lean in” to the assumed correctness of their initial determinations, drifting away from both reality and fairness. As a former Silicon Valley software engineer, I saw this time and again: Google’s image classification algorithms mistakenly labeling black people as gorillas, or Microsoft’s Twitter bot immediately becoming a “racist jerk.” Algorithms also lack the human ability to individualize. A computer cannot look a defendant in the eye, account for a troubled childhood or disability, and recommend a rehabilitative sentence. This is precisely the argument against mandatory minimum sentences — they rob judges of the discretion to deliver individualized justice — and it is equally cogent against machine sentencing. For example, algorithms are often programmed to assume unidirectional causation: If A, then B. But is it truly that defendants with higher rates of recidivism warrant longer sentences or is it that defendants with longer sentences are kept out of their communities, unemployed and away from their families longer, naturally increasing their recidivism risk? A judge could investigate this nuance. With transparency and accountability, algorithms in the criminal justice system do have potential for good. For example, New Jersey used a risk assessment program known as the Public Safety Assessment to reform its bail system this year, leading to a 16 percent decrease in its pre-trial jail population. The same algorithm helped Lucas County, Ohio double the number of pre-trial releases without bail, and cut pre-trial crime in half. But that program’s functioning was detailed in a published report, allowing those with subject-matter expertise to confirm that morally troubling (and constitutionally impermissible) variables — such as race, gender and variables that could proxy the two (for example, ZIP code) — were not being considered. For now, the only people with visibility into COMPAS’s functioning are its programmers, who are in many ways less equipped than judges to deliver justice. Judges have legal training, are bound by ethical oaths, and must account for not only their decisions but also their reasoning in published opinions. Programmers lack each of these safeguards. Computers may be intelligent, but they are not wise. Everything they know, we taught them, and we taught them our biases. They are not going to un-learn them without transparency and corrective action by humans. Ellora Thadaney Israni (@elloraisrani) is a J.D. candidate at Harvard Law School and former software engineer at Facebook. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/26/opinion/algorithm-compas-sentencing-bias.html
Jared Kushner Adds Charles Harder to Legal Team As West Wing Pressure Mounts On Friday, Reince Priebus testified for hours with lawyers on special counsel Robert Mueller’s team. While Priebus has been careful not to criticize the president openly, sources who have spoken to him say he’s not happy about the way he was treated by Trump—and his family. Is Kushner nervous? He has added Charles Harder to his legal team. October 17, 2017 https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/10/jared-kushner-adds-charles-harder-to-legal-team-as-west-wing-pressure-mounts
Yellowstone spawned twin super-eruptions that altered global climate A new geological record of the Yellowstone supervolcano’s last catastrophic eruption is rewriting the story of what happened 630,000 years ago and how it affected Earth’s climate. This eruption formed the vast Yellowstone caldera observed today, the second largest on Earth. http://www.heritagedaily.com/2017/10/yellowstone-spawned-twin-super-eruptions-altered-global-climate/117192
A robot threw shade at Elon Musk so the billionaire hit back CNBC's Andrew Ross Sorkin spoke to Sophia, a robot developed by Hanson Robotics, and expressed his worry that machines could turn against humans Sophia said that Sorkin had been "reading too much Elon Musk" Musk has warned on several occasions about the dangers of artificial intelligence https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/26/elon-musk-sophia-robot-ai.html
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