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Houston Police announced Saturday the homicide investigation "has taken a new direction" after authorities apprehended two men they say are connected to Barnes' tragic death. The new direction? Both suspects are black — not white like earlier reports suggested, stirring racial motives on social media.
In a statement early Sunday, homicide investigators with the Harris County Sheriff's Department announced the arrest of 20-year-old Eric Black Jr. Police have charged him with capital murder, according to KRIV-TV. Black has admitted to taking part in the shooting.
...
Initial reports made this a high profile case with “race” a main factor. Race Baiters like Shaun King and friends wanted so bad for this to be another picture of “Trumps America” but ironically, he ended up helping lock up black men...
As commenter Jay Smith said:
‘’This has perfectly illustrates my complaint with the arbitrary label of “hate crime”.
This sweet, precious little angel was senselessly, brutally murdered while shopping with her family. What difference does it make that the killers were black and not white?
At first, the media thought it was a case of a white killer, perhaps taking this child’s life because of her race. Are we really to believe that it’s somehow less evil now that we learn that the killers were actually black and that they probably just took her life because her life had absolutely no value to them and she just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time? Does someone seriously want to make the case that her murder is somehow less horrific now that we know her killers were black?
Hey, here’s an idea! How about if we just start treating ALL acts of senseless violence as “hate crimes”, regardless of the race of those involved? Because... #AllLivesMatter’’
“Donald Trump and his Make America Great Again followers… are older, less educated, less prosperous, and they are dying early. Their life spans are decreasing, and many are dying from alcoholism, drug overdoses, liver disease, or simply a broken heart.”
For @Braineack , who genuinely believes that the Washington Post has a pro-liberal agenda, and only criticizes GOP politicians while acting as a mouthpiece for socialists:
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s very bad defense of her falsehoods
In a wide-ranging interview with CBS News's “60 Minutes,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said there’s “no question” President Trump is a racist.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) has made a bigger splash than any freshman in the 116th Congress — in either the House or Senate. And a big reason is an often-overzealous conservative effort to knock her down a few pegs. The congresswoman has put on a PR master class in using those efforts to build her profile and social media following. (Her retort to the overblown dancing-video kerfuffle last week has been viewed nearly 20 million times.)
But she’s also shown a tendency to exaggerate or misstate basic facts. And her defense of this in a Sunday interview with “60 Minutes” was very bad.
When Anderson Cooper confronted her with The Washington Post Fact Checker’s Four-Pinocchio verdict on her claim about $21 trillion in waste at the Pentagon, Ocasio-Cortez offered this (emphasis added):
COOPER: One of the criticisms of you is that-- that your math is fuzzy. The Washington Post recently awarded you four Pinocchios --
OCASIO-CORTEZ: Oh my goodness --
COOPER: -- for misstating some statistics about Pentagon spending?
OCASIO-CORTEZ: If people want to really blow up one figure here or one word there, I would argue that they’re missing the forest for the trees. I think that there’s a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right.
COOPER: But being factually correct is important--
OCASIO-CORTEZ: It’s absolutely important. And whenever I make a mistake. I say, “Okay, this was clumsy,” and then I restate what my point was. But it’s -- it’s not the same thing as -- as the president lying about immigrants. It’s not the same thing at all.
The first problem here is that Ocasio-Cortez is really minimizing her falsehoods. Four Pinocchios is not a claim that Glenn Kessler and The Post’s Fact Checker team give out for bungling the “semantics” of something. It’s when something is a blatant falsehood. It’s the worst rating you can get for a singular claim.
In the case of the $21 trillion, Ocasio-Cortez was suggesting that this was all Pentagon waste and that cleaning it up could pay for two-thirds of the estimated $32 trillion price tag for single-payer health care, which she and others are referring to as Medicare-for-all.
“$21 TRILLION of Pentagon financial transactions ‘could not be traced, documented, or explained,’" Ocasio-Cortez wrote in a tweet that still appears on her timeline and has been shared more than 26,000 times. "$21T in Pentagon accounting errors. Medicare for All costs ~$32T. That means 66% of Medicare for All could have been funded already by the Pentagon.”
But that $21 trillion estimate isn’t necessarily waste; it’s just sloppily accounted for, according to that study. It’s also not just money the Pentagon spends; it includes money coming into the Pentagon. And that $32 trillion price tag is an estimate for the first 10 years of Medicare-for-all, while the Pentagon number accounts for a 17-year period. Ocasio-Cortez’s numbers weren’t just wrong on the margins; her conclusion made no logical sense in light of the actual facts. What’s more, this isn’t the only claim she’s made that has been debunked; The Post’s team documented five false claims she made during an August media blitz following her primary upset of Rep. Joseph Crowley (D-N.Y.).
What might be most problematic about Ocasio-Cortez’s defense, though, is the idea that people should care less about specific facts and more about being “morally right" — as if this is a zero-sum game in which the two can be weighed against one another. She’s practically saying, “Well, maybe I was wrong, but at least my cause is just.”
But this is the slipperiest of slopes — the kind of attitude you can use to justify pretty much anything to yourself. And it also just so happens to be the underlying ethos of the entire Trump presidency.
Trump has made more than 7,000 false claims as president, and to the extent his base of support processes those false claims, it has essentially dismissed them as unimportant in the scheme of things. Most recently, this has taken the form of saying or suggesting terrorists are flooding the U.S.-Mexico border, despite Trump’s own State Department saying there is no evidence that even one has crossed. Trump’s base would probably argue that this stat is nitpicking — that it’s unimportant since his underlying goal to build the border wall and protect the American people is “morally right.” But the fact remains that this claim leads to a badly skewed sense of the actual dangers Americans face and could lead to a misplacement of priorities.
And you can apply this approach to many of the biggest Trump falsehoods. If the ends justify the means and the policy is “right,” you can excuse pretty much anything.
None of this is to compare Ocasio-Cortez’s falsehoods to Trump’s; she’s right that there is no comparison. Trump’s are both exponentially more numerous and more impactful, coming from the president of the United States. But just because something is worse doesn’t mean something else can’t be bad. People need to recognize that “morally right” is a subjective definition, and there need be no choice between making your case and using actual facts. Using exaggerated or made-up facts actually suggests your cause is weak — and that you haven’t done your homework. If politicians misunderstand these very basic and crucial distinctions, how can we trust them to know what’s best about the underlying policies? How much have you really studied this thing?
Taking Trump “seriously, not literally" has always been a false choice, and that’s true for Democrats, too.
For @Braineack, who genuinely believes that the Washington Post has a pro-liberal agenda, and only criticizes GOP politicians while acting as a mouthpiece for socialists:
Ocasio-Cortez was just trying to get into the spirit of congressional deficit irresponsibility
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) outside the Capitol building, Jan. 4.
Even before Democrats took control of the House Thursday, things had gotten lively. Rep. Ro Khanna (Calif.) and Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), the avatars of an increasingly muscular progressivism within the Democratic Party, announced that they would oppose the rules package proposed by incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The sticking point was “pay as you go,” a.k.a. paygo, a rule that requires new programs to be paid for either by raising taxes or cutting other spending.
Paygo isn’t a new idea; it has been around, off and on, either as a statute or an internal congressional rule, since 1990 — though since Congress can undo any law or rule Congress makes, it has often been honored in the breach.
In a better world, a rule like this would be no more controversial, or necessary, than a rule requiring legislators to breathe at regular intervals. Over the long run, inflow must match outflow, and a prudent government tries to make them match in the short term, too.
In the actual world, the actual U.S. government abandoned prudence decades ago. The most recent federal budget surplus occurred in 2001, and it came courtesy of two historical accidents: a dotcom bubble that sent tax revenues soaring, and a Republican takeover of the House that made it difficult for the Clinton administration to spend the windfall.
The surplus was an aberration. The federal government has been running significant budget deficits for most of the past 50 years, and unless something drastic changes, it’s only going to get worse. Yet Republicans were allergic to fiscal discipline during their just-ended unified control of Congress and the White House, and that binge followed an Obama administration that ran the largest deficits since World War II.
Of course, President Barack Obama was also presiding over the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, circumstances in which most economists, left and right, agreed that the government ought to be running substantial deficits. But, as the economy recovered, Obama didn’t do enough to reduce the deficit, and his administration gamed the budget-scoring process to pass an expensive new health-care entitlement that will strain federal finances for decades to come.
But without the excuse of an economic crisis, the administrations of Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and now Donald Trump gifted the nation with giant tax cuts without correspondingly giant spending reductions. Each successive tax cut has been less economically and politically justifiable than the one that preceded it.
Supply-side sympathizers might retort that there’s a difference between deficit-financed tax cuts and deficit spending. And they wouldn’t be entirely wrong, because too-low tax rates are a lot easier to fix than too-high spending.
After all, the remedy for inadequate tax rates is pretty obvious: Raise the rates. That’s not politically easy, but it’s child’s play compared with cutting a major spending program. New spending programs give rise to new interest groups, who stand ready to fight like tigers if you try to cut their government payouts.
But, just as important, government-provided services crowd out the private institutions that had been providing them. If the government takes over the provision of health insurance, for example, then all the underwriting and administrative expertise that insurers have spent decades building will quickly go stale and eventually disappear. Those private institutions cannot spring back overnight if the government exits the sector again. So costly new spending programs effectively leave legislators with the choice of continuing a program forever or throwing voters into the void their predecessors created. Which is no choice at all.
That said, deficit spending on tax cuts still has to be repaid by future taxpayers, with interest. Republicans have been ignoring that fact ever since the Reagan administration pushed through large tax cuts paired with what came to be known as the budgetary “magic asterisk”: spending cuts to be identified later. And modern Republicans are worse: The Tax Cut and Jobs Act of 2017 didn’t even gesture at fiscal responsibility. Their logic was purely and entirely We want this now; let our children and grandchildren figure out where the money will come from.
Progressives on Thursday took the same approach in opposing the paygo plan. If they had to raise taxes to pay for Medicare and a Green New Deal and all the rest of their ambitious spending plans, their agenda would die on the vine. Why should they sacrifice their priorities to fiscal rectitude when Republicans clearly won’t return the favor?
To her credit, Pelosi ignored their pleas and put forward the rules package with paygo intact; it passed with few defections. But she won’t be around forever, and with the progressive wing growing in voice and power, there’s a real chance that she’ll be replaced by a Democratic successor who will eschew the strictures of paygo — or by a Republican who almost definitely will.
Either way, the American taxpayer will be in for a lively time. Though not, I think, a happy one.
Each successive tax cut has been less economically and politically justifiable than the one that preceded it.
que?
This is why reporters are reporters and not economists. And this is weak reporting on top of it. If you don't understand how something works as a reporter you either ask or read about it until you do and state the facts. You don't choose to interject opinion in a non-opinion piece. Lousy reporter doesn't pass the sniff test.
Democrats don't like AOC because she exposes how dumb the party and platform is.
You don't see them writing opinion pieces about how dementia Pelosi is.
Its easy to write low-hanging-fruit pieces about AOC so then you can be like look we aren't a mouthpiece. In the past week they've written like 100 stories about how dumb she is.
AOC is literally on their most popular banner on the top of the page. Search their site for Hank Johnson and they wrote ZERO stories about his awful language the other day. In fact, looking at their entire landing page, there's not one negative story about a democrat.
Hank Johnson? Really? In a battle of wit my money is on AOC. I don't believe she would ever suggest concern over an island capsizing.
So because AOC is wittier than Hank Johnson, the WP should not write one single article on how a sitting Representative recently called Trump voters:
"older, less educated, less prosperous, and they are dying early. Their life spans are decreasing, and many are dying from alcoholism, drug overdoses, liver disease, or simply a broken heart."
said they want to:
"return America back to a time where white men and white privilege were unchallenged"
and that a the system that's elected 44 presidents before Trump is:
"I wanted to make the point that our democracy is under severe threat, that freedom is threatened, and that if we are not vigilant we can allow tyranny to set in"
But you do think it's worthy of WP to publish these articles about the wittier OAC in the last 24hr?
"return America back to a time where white men and white privilege were unchallenged"
Based on the unspoken assumption that you disagree with this, is there a reason why you support the use of chemtrails to disperse autism-causing agents over areas with large minority populations?
In all seriousness though, I actually do agree with part of your conclusion. The fact is that the media will cover whoever and whatever is most absurd / alarming at any given moment. Up until recently, the President has been the most absurd thing going on, and so he's been the focus of a lot of media attention. (Same as when Bernie Sanders was still relevant.) Now, we have someone even more outrageous to look at, and so it seems obvious that that's where the cameras are pointing.
The TL;DR is that he's been charged with extortion.
Seriously, this guy is crooked even by Chicago standards. He's been using his power as Alderman to grease the wheels of things like permitting and approval for companies which, in turn, did business with his law firm, for decades. And kind of... not making things especially easy for companies which didn't.
It's a big story here right now.
Technically, he's not guilty of any firearms stuff, despite the fact that City Hall is a gun-free zone, because of an 1872 law which designates city Aldermen as Peace Officers.
Last edited by Joe Perez; 01-09-2019 at 09:13 AM.
Reason: 1872, not 1972
Guatemalan Migrant Housed by Refugee Charity Charged With Burglary, Intended Sex Offense
Local media reports that a Guatemalan migrant housed by a local refugee charity was arrested after entering the room of another refugee and groping her under her clothes.
Francisco Maldonado Tojin, a Guatemalan migrant housed by the refugee charity Annunciation House in El Paso, Texas, was arrested after he was found by charity workers in the room of a female migrant, groping her, as she tried to bathe her child.
Police said she was bathing her child when she saw Tojin, whom she doesn’t know, in the room. Police said the door had been left unlocked so that volunteer workers could freely walk in and out of the room.
Tojin was allegedly told to leave but he surprised the victim by groping her under her clothing and pressed himself against her in a lewd manner. As volunteers responded to the woman’s screams, Tojin ran out of the room, police said.
They said he was found in his motel room, where he too had been placed by Annunciation House, along with his 6-year-old son.
“The women and children on that border that are trying to seek refuge and seek opportunity in the United States of America with nothing but the shirts on their back are acting more American than any person who seeks to keep them out ever will be.”
01-07-2019, 08:10 AM
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