What’s interesting in the news today?
1. Wanna be a total partisan hack while you grocery shop?
There’s an app for that!
From TheWeek “If the thought of buying a product that might benefit a political party you can’t stand makes you recoil in horror, the BuyPartisan app is for you.
The goal of this free app is to let people find out more information about the brands they purchase and the ideologies of their leaders and employees. After downloading the app, a user just has to scan a bar code using their phone’s camera, and then wait for the information to pop up: the number in red is for contributions to the Republican Party, blue for the Democratic Party, and green for others.”
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2. Federal aid for businesses destroyed/damaged in the Ferguson riots?
From TheGatewayPundit “On Saturday August 9, 2014, 18 year-old Michael Brown was shot to death by a Ferguson police officer after he had earlier robbed a local convenience store. As a result of his death protesters in Ferguson have caused mass destruction in the community.
Several dozen businesses were damaged in the looting and violence. Here is an interactive map of the attacks, shootings, lootings, and destruction. Many of the local businesses were looted not just once, but twice.
Now this…
St. Louis County officials are discussing disbursement of federal aid to the more than 100 businesses that suffered financial losses during the Ferguson riots.”
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3. Not shocking. So when can we expect some arrests?
From FoxNews “Lois Lerner’s BlackBerry was intentionally destroyed after Congress had begun its probe into IRS targeting of conservative groups, a senior IRS lawyer acknowledged in a sworn declaration.
Thomas Kane, Deputy Assistant Chief Counsel for the IRS, wrote in the declaration, part of a lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch against the IRS, that the BlackBerry was “removed or wiped clean of any sensitive or proprietary information and removed as scrap for disposal in June 2012.”
That date – June 2012 – is significant because by that time, ex-IRS official Lerner had already been summoned before congressional staffers who interviewed her about reports of the IRS’ targeting of conservative groups.”
“”If you intentionally destroy evidence, that is a crime. If you make a statement in court saying the evidence is not available and it is, that is also a crime,” said Jay Sekulow, Chief Counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice.”
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4. Huh. And all this time we’ve been told these were “unaccompanied minors.”
From CNSNews “The mayor of Lynn, Mass. says that some of the illegal aliens from Guatemala who are enrolled in her city’s public schools are adults with graying hair and “more wrinkles than I have.”
“They are not all children,” Judith Flanagan Kennedy told reporters at a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday.
“One of the things that we did notice when we were processing some of these students coming in was that they were adults,” she said.
She added that the federal government will not allow school officials to verify their ages, even though one of the students turned out to be 35 years old.”
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5. Meanwhile….
From TheWashingtonExaminer “Two top federal judges Wednesday said the nation’s immigration courts are in chaos, with the backlog of cases at an historic high of 375,000 for just 227 judges, leading to a minimum three-year delay in hearings for illegal immigrants.
In Washington to take advantage of the current crisis to demand a new court system, the judges accused the Justice Department of treating their courts like Cinderella’s abusive family by starving them of money and support and blamed the insufficient Justice funding for letting illegals “linger” in the country.
“Immigration courts are the forgotten stepchild,” said Immigration Judge Dana Leigh Marks of San Francisco. She was speaking on behalf of the National Association of Immigration Judges, which she is president of.
Fellow Judge Denise Noonan Slavin, the vice president of the judge’s union, said that the courts have the “status of Cinderella,” having to scrounge for supplies, support and money. She said that the lack of money forces judges to delay cases and that is “allowing those who are not entitled to be here, linger.”
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6. Do you doubt for a second this won’t happen? Me neither.
From TheHill “A coalition of public health, labor and immigrant rights groups is urging President Obama to extend health coverage to immigrants allowed to remain in the United States under the administration’s controversial deferred action program.
The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA), initiated via executive action in 2012, allows certain immigrants who came to the United States illegally as children to stay in the country and work.
But under guidance and regulations issued that year, those immigrants — often called “Dreamers” in reference to the stalled DREAM Act — are not entitled to health coverage under the Affordable Care Act, federal Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program.”
Roughly 80 national organizations, including the AFL-CIO, the National Council of La Raza and the American Public health Association, note in a letter to Obama that tax dollars from the DACA grantees help support those programs.”
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7. There’s been a lot of hypocrisy from Democrats over the BK/Horton’s merger. But this guy and his “husband” take the cake.
From TheFreeBeacon “Democratic congressional candidate Sean Eldridge lashed out on Tuesday at fast food company Burger King for supposedly dodging U.S. taxes, but his husband, whose fortune is financing the congressional run, stands to benefit financially from the move.
Echoing Democratic talking points on tax policy, Eldridge called Burger King’s attempts to reduce its tax burden “unpatriotic.”
The company announced this week that it will acquire Canadian fast food chain Tim Horton’s and shift its corporate headquarters north of the border. The move, commonly known as a tax inversion, will allow Burger King to pay Canadian corporate tax rates, which are substantially lower than American ones.
Eldridge did not say whether investors in the deal are also unpatriotic. They include his husband, Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, who owns between $50,000 and $100,000 in Tim Horton’s stock, according to Eldridge’s financial disclosure forms.”
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8. A disturbing story from the UK on the political correctness run amok, and the devastating consequences for the victims.
With a CONTENT WARNING!!!! for adult subject matter.
From TheDailyMail “At least 1,400 girls were left to be abused by Asian men because the authorities were too scared to admit there was a race issue, a report said yesterday.
Over a 16-year period, children as young as 11 were sexually exploited by gangs of men – most of them of Pakistani origin. But police and council officials suppressed evidence of the crimes because they feared being labelled racist.
Concerns about damage to community cohesion were put above the need to protect the vulnerable. Police treated the victims with contempt, turning a blind eye to their plight and in many cases holding them responsible.
Despite the appalling failures in the case, no one in authority has been sacked or even disciplined.
MPs and charities said the scale of the abuse was almost ‘incomprehensible’ and called for a criminal investigation into those who helped cover it up.”
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Wandering Views 
5. Lets face it no matter where people work, they like to complain their section gets the short end of the stick. It may well be true but lets take claims like these with a grain of salt. Or I could tell you how intermediate teachers get shafted and the primary/junior teachers get all the funds.
6. I would think all legal residents, citizen or non-citizen, are entitled to the same rights and responsibilities under the law. And thus they should be entitled to the benefits. I’m sure some pay taxes or have paid taxes and eventually they will become citizens.
7. If he’s the co-founder of Facebook, I’m sure he or his husband have no clue that he has $100,000 in Tim Horton’s stock — thats loose change for them and they hire people to take care of that. Granted, politicians and anyone with strongly held ideological beliefs should be more careful. A bit of a gotcha move here.
8. In part there is fear of being called racist but there is also a prevalent attitude among many urban police forces esp in Europe to let immigrant groups police themselves since they are seen as “different”. The police also have different expectations of how some immigrant groups will behave and make allowances for this behavior. Thus, there is a fear of being called racist, but also a sense of complacency toward immigrant behavior. And finally there’s an ironical twist in which the police’s own racist bias allows them to back off and accept it.
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hwesseli
#8. Your explanation for the police backing off on doing their job, while it may be correct, shows how lame this “multi-culturalistic” policing is. According to the article, many to most of these girls are “white” not “Asian” (Pakistani). Does the Koran condemn or condone this behavior?
All religions are not equal. All religions are not good. No other religion compares favorably with Christianity.
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1. When it comes to shopping, color me purple.
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Oh boy…
“Declaring that Russian troops had crossed into Ukraine, President Petro O. Poroshenko on Thursday canceled a planned visit to Turkey and convened a meeting of the national security council to focus on the “marked aggravation of the situation” in the southeast of his country.
The meeting of the national security council will focus on shaping a response, and Ukraine will also request a meeting of the United Nations Security Council.
Mr. Poroshenko made his comments as the leader of the main separatist group in southeastern Ukraine said that up to 4,000 Russians, including active-duty soldiers on leave, had been fighting against Ukrainian government forces and NATO released images that show Russian artillery units and about 1,000 soldiers operating in Ukraine.”
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hwesseli, your points on 6 and 8 seem to contradict each other.
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Have you ever thought about that first “Red State” “Blue State” map in the news paper? Why were the Republicans given red? Because giving red to the Democrats would have been bad for those poor Democrats; it would have tied the socialist too closely to the Communists. It certainly must have crossed the minds of the editors and reporters of that conniving newspaper.
I really dislike being associated with the Commies…
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kbells — you’re right they do contradict but i’m only explaining the logic behind their actions nor necessarily agreeing with them. I do agree with #6 but not #8. I just felt its too simplistic to say its fear of being called racist which has cops backing off …. they also just don’t care about immigrant groups. And they don’t care about working class girls or girls in “the system” either.
aj — Putin surprises me, I thought he was more rational. There’s no logical geopolitical reason to escalate this nonsense yet he does. In part I think he is captive to his own propaganda. After months of calling Ukrainians neo-Nazis and even terrorists, he simply can’t abandon the Russian speakers in the east without facing repercussions from nationalists back home. However, there’s nothing of value in the east. Crimea made sense this does not.
bob — the color coding system hadn’t been standardized until 2000. Since the election dragged on, color association stuck. Prior to 2000, newspapers and television alternated or even used different colors. In Europe the right wing parties generally use blue or black while the left wing parties generally use red or pink with the middle centrist parties settling for yellow. In Canada, blue is Conservative, red is Liberal (a centrist party) and orange is New Democratic (left wing).
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On Red states and Blue states (Republicans were once blue and Dems were once red):
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/when-republicans-were-blue-and-democrats-were-red-104176297/?no-ist
” …That’s right: In the beginning, blue was red and red was blue and they changed back and forth from election to election and network to network in what appears, in hindsight, to be a flight of whimsy. The notion that there were ‘red states’ and ‘blue states’—and that the former were Republican and the latter Democratic—wasn’t cemented on the national psyche until the year 2000.
“Chalk up another one to Bush v. Gore. Not only did it give us ‘hanging chads’ and a crash course in the Electoral College, not only did it lead to a controversial Supreme Court ruling and a heightened level of polarization that has intensified ever since, the Election That Wouldn’t End gave us a new political shorthand. …
“ ‘For years, both parties would do red and blue maps, but they always made the other guys red,’ said Chuck Todd, political director and chief White House correspondent for NBC News. ‘During the Cold War, who wanted to be red?’
“Indeed, prior to the breakup of the Soviet Union little more than two decades ago, ‘red was a term of derision,’ noted Mitchell Stephens, a New York University professor of journalism and author of A History of News. …
“At this point—three presidential elections after Bush v. Gore—the color arrangement seems unlikely to reverse any time soon. Not only have ‘red states’ and ‘blue states’ entered the lexicon, partisans on both sides have taken ownership of them. … “
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