“He always pictured himself a libertarian, which to my way of thinking means “I want the liberty to grow rich and you can have the liberty to starve.” It’s easy to believe that no one should depend on society for help when you yourself happen not to need such help.”— Isaac Asimov on Robert A. Heinlein and libertarian ethics
(via bibliophile20)Isaac Asimov Shadiest/Diva Moments Compilation
Kyle Rittenhouse, the gunman that shot two people in Kenosha, Wisconsin over the summer, has now gone missing after he gave prosecutors the wrong address. This is just the latest drama to unfold around the child, and it is further proof that prosecutors absolutely mishandled this case from the start and allowed the young white boy to act like he was above the law. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins discusses this.
Vice President Kamala Harris cast her first-ever tie-breaking vote in the Senate early Friday morning on a budget resolution that’s a key step toward fast-track passage of President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief plan without Republican support.
“The yays are 50. The nays are 50. The Senate being equally divided, the vice president votes in the affirmative. And the concurrent resolution as amended is adopted,” she declared around 5:30 a.m. to the applause of fellow Democrats.
The Democrats technically have the majority, counting the tie-breaking vote of Harris, but with the chamber split 50-50, Republicans – united – could hold up legislation in committees.
This also means that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer may need to shore up the support from centrists in his caucus – including Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia – to ensure he has the 50 votes needed. He can’t lose one Democrat in his caucus in order to pass legislation.
Still, Harris indicated that she hopes her trips to the Senate Chamber are seldom, as she said the Biden administration instead aims for “common ground” on legislation through bipartisanship.
“The goal is to not have to pass everything with 51 votes,” a source told CNN. “If they’re going to be votes in the Senate where the outcome isn’t known … She basically has to stay in DC. International trips, national trips to small businesses or wherever – that can’t really be happening, which is a new dynamic they’re going to have to deal with.”
Another source spoke about it in more personal terms.
“It doesn’t help her make friends long term, you know. If she’s thinking about (running in) 2024 or 2028, she’s got to think about what senators she’s going to need,” the source said.
Following more than 14 hours of votes on nonbinding Republican amendments that often had nothing to do with coronavirus relief, the Senate early Friday morning approved along party lines a budget resolution that sets the stage for construction of a pandemic aid package containing up to $1.9 trillion in spending on direct payments, expanded unemployment benefits, vaccine distribution, and more.
The House is expected to act on the Senate-passed resolution on Friday, jumpstarting committee work on a filibuster-proof reconciliation bill amid unified Republican opposition.
In a floor speech just ahead of the resolution’s passage—which Vice President Kamala Harris pushed over the finish line with a tie-breaking vote—Senate Budget Committee Chairman Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said that “we have the opportunity not only to address the pandemic, to address the economic collapse, to address the reality that millions of our kids have seen their education disrupted.”
“But we have the opportunity to give hope to the American people and restore faith in our government by telling them that… we understand the pain that they are experiencing and we are gonna do something very significant about it,” said the Vermont senator.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) applauded passage of the budget resolution in a statement early Friday, calling it “a giant first step” toward providing the public with desperately needed coronavirus relief.
“We cannot underscore enough how much help America needs during this awful crisis, and we cannot miss the point that we still have a long way to go,” said Schumer. “We will keep working as hard as we can to pass this legislation through the House, through the Senate as we go through the reconciliation process and hopefully put it on the president’s desk.”
Passage of the budget blueprint came at the end of a marathon “vote-a-rama” session in which Senate Republicans put forth hundreds of messaging amendments in the hopes of forcing Democratic lawmakers into taking positions perceived as politically harmful or divisive. Eight Democrats, for example, joined the GOP in approving Sen. Todd Young’s (R-Ind.) amendment calling for exclusion of undocumented immigrants from direct relief payments.
As Bloomberg reported, the Senate stripped out that amendment—as well as GOP amendments on the Keystone XL pipeline and fracking—just ahead of the budget resolution’s final passage.
An investigation by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada has found that New York–based technology company Clearview AI contravened federal and provincial privacy laws by engaging in “mass surveillance” of Canadians and sharing information from their facial recognition technology with law enforcement, including Toronto police.
In a report released on Wednesday, Privacy Commissioner Daniel Therrien says Clearview allowed law enforcement and commercial organizations “to match photographs of unknown people against the company’s databank of more than 3 billion images,” including children, scraped from the internet.
The Privacy Commissioner’s report says that under Canadian privacy laws people have a “reasonable expectation” that photographs they may post on the internet or that are posted by others will not be used by third parties for “identification purposes”. The Privacy Commissioner says consent is required. But his report says Clearview did not attempt to receive consent for use of the images collected by users of their services.
The investigation, which included the offices of the privacy commissioners of Québec, British Columbia, and Alberta, found that “Clearview collected, used and disclosed Canadians’ personal information for inappropriate purposes”. Those purposes include the “creation of biometric facial recognition arrays” for law enforcement.
The Privacy Commissioner’s office says it presented its findings to Clearview. And that Clearview argued, among other things, that the information they were using was “publicly available” and that “significant harm is unlikely to occur for individuals” from its sharing of information with law enforcement.
But the Privacy Commissioner’s report states that “Information collected from public websites, such as social media or professional profiles, and then used for an unrelated purpose, does not fall under the ‘publicly available’ exemption in privacy laws.”
Clearview also argued, according to the Privacy Commissioner, that Canadian laws do not apply to the company because it “does not have a ‘real and substantial connection’ to Canada.”
But the Privacy Commissioner’s report says the company “actively marketed” its services to law enforcement in Canada, including the RCMP. (A related investigation by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner into the RCMP’s use of Clearview AI’s facial recognition technology remains open.) According to the Privacy Commissioner’s report, Clearview had accounts with some 48 law enforcement “and other organizations” in Canada.
The actress was responding to a video mashup shared on Twitter that shows President Biden, Vice President Harris and Democratic Georgia Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock all calling for speedy legislation granting the American people $2,000 checks at various campaign rallies.
COVID-19 aid legislation passed late last year included $600 direct payments to taxpayers. Biden’s current $1.9 trillion coronavirus proposal includes a round of $1,400 checks, meant to bring the total to $2,000.
“Where are the $2K checks you promised @JoeBiden @KamalaHarris @ReverendWarnock @ossoff? At a time when only 39% of Americans could afford a $1,000 emergency & over 15 million have lost employer-sponsored health insurance, the diff between $1,400 & $2K is a matter of survival,” Sarandon wrote.
A budget resolution that would be the first step in passing the coronavirus relief bill while bypassing the 60-vote legislative filibuster cleared the Senate in a 50-50 party-line vote early Friday morning, with the tie broken by Harris.
In addition to the $1,400 checks, Biden’s plan calls for a $400 per week federal unemployment benefit, $350 billion for state and local governments, a minimum wage hike to $15 per hour and more money for child care and schools.
Police said Mark Tiffany, 45, also made racist comments before and after he pointed the long BB gun with a scope at Demetric Boyd.
In previous testimony, Boyd said he feared for his life and thought the BB gun was a real rifle. He said Tiffany used racist language in the past.
Tiffany was convicted of ethnic intimidation.
Kent County Circuit Judge Mark Trusock admonished Boyd.
“You made very racist remarks. Not only at the scene, but also in the back of a police cruiser as they were transporting you to jail,” Trusock said, MLive reports. “To make these hurtful, racist statements simply because of the color of a person’s skin is unacceptable and outrageous. One of our basic principles is that all people are created equal. No one should have to tolerate your racist comments.”
Tiffany won’t return to jail because he received credit for the 222 days he already spent in jail awaiting sentencing.
The judge warned Tiffany that he would end up back in jail if he uses racist language again.
On Tiffany’s Facebook page, he made other racist comments, including that Black people’s culture should be eliminated, police said.
Mexican authorities have arrested a former state governor on charges that he ordered the illegal arrest and torture of a prominent reporter who investigated his protection of a paedophile ring.
Mario Marín, the former governor of Puebla state, was scheduled to appear before a judge on Thursday after he was detained the previous day in Acapulco.
Marín, of the Institutional Revolutionary party, took office as the governor of Puebla state in 2005. In the same year, the reporter Lydia Cacho published a book, The Demons of Eden, which implicated several wealthy businessmen in a paedophile ring.
In December 2005, Marín sent police from Puebla to arrest Cacho in Cancún on defamation charges. She was driven 20 hours to Puebla, during which time police taunted her, threatened her with rape and forced a gun into her mouth.
The case became a national scandal after a taped telephone conversation was leaked in which Marín was heard scheming with one of the men named in Cacho’s book.
“Yesterday I gave that old bitch a good old slap,” Marin said. “She’s been going on and on, so let’s see whether she gets the message and learns her lesson.”
For years, Marín moved freely in public despite Cacho’s allegations. Finally, in 2019, a judge in Quintana Roo state issued a warrant for his arrest.
Leopoldo Maldonado, a lawyer with the Artículo 19 press freedom organization and a representative of Cacho, told Milenio TV on Thursday that Marín was now held in the same Cancún prison where the businessman Jean Succar Kuri, already convicted of his role in the ring, is serving his sentence.
“The accomplices reunite again, but now in very different conditions,” Cacho wrote via Twitter on Thursday. “There’s no more luxury party, nor girls turned victims at the hands of the pederasts. There is no toast nor celebration. Journalism is the way toward justice.”
Cacho was subject to threats for years and now is living outside the country after intruders broke into her home, stole reporting equipment and files and killed her two dogs. She took her case to international bodies when the Mexican justice system failed to act.
In 2018, the UN Human Rights Committee recognized the violation of Cacho’s human rights. In January 2019, the current Mexican administration publicly apologized to Cacho for her arbitrary arrest. At the time, Cacho said, “we want all and each one of the masterminds on trial.”
“Lydia is very excited, but conscious that the risk increases,” Maldonado said on Thursday.
Fox Business has canceled “Lou Dobbs Tonight,” the weekday show hosted by one of former President Donald J. Trump’s most loyal media supporters that became a frequent clearinghouse for baseless theories of electoral fraud in the weeks after Mr. Trump lost the 2020 presidential race.
The end of Mr. Dobbs’s decade-long tenure as an afternoon mainstay of the network came a day after a defamation lawsuit was filed by the election technology company Smartmatic against Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Corporation and Fox News. The suit, which seeks damages of at least $2.7 billion, named Mr. Dobbs as an individual defendant, along with two other Fox anchors, Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro.
Mr. Dobbs, 75, who rose to fame as a CNN anchor, began hosting his Fox program in 2011 and gained an influential fan: Mr. Trump, who shared his hard-line views against immigration and later came to see Mr. Dobbs’s program as required viewing, even patching in the television host during policy discussions with his White House staff.
Mr. Trump, who was barred from Twitter, has been circumspect since leaving the White House in what subjects he comments on. But roughly an hour after the news broke of Mr. Dobbs’s departure, the former president issued a comment to The New York Times about the anchor.
“Lou Dobbs is and was great,” Mr. Trump said in a statement. “Nobody loves America more than Lou. He had a large and loyal following that will be watching closely for his next move, and that following includes me.”
Fox News did not elaborate on why it had decided to abruptly cancel Mr. Dobbs’s program. But the network said in a statement on Friday that it regularly reviews its programming lineup.
“Plans have been in place to launch new formats as appropriate postelection, including on Fox Business,” the network said. “This is part of those planned changes. A new 5 p.m. program will be announced in the near future.”
For now, a rotating group of hosts will replace Mr. Dobbs in his 5 p.m. time slot. The anchors Jackie DeAngelis and David Asman will sit in for Mr. Dobbs next week. “Lou Dobbs Tonight” had also been repeated at 7 p.m.
The lawsuit that names Mr. Dobbs cited a false claim, made on a November episode of Mr. Dobbs’s show on Fox Business, that Hugo Chávez, the deceased president of Venezuela, had a hand in the creation of Smartmatic technology, designing it so that the votes it processed could be changed undetected. (Mr. Chávez, who died in 2013, did not have anything to do with Smartmatic.)
The Chávez claim was made by Sidney Powell, who worked as a lawyer for Mr. Trump. She was also sued by Smartmatic on Thursday, along with another Trump lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani. Mr. Dobbs was also cited in the lawsuit for using the phrase “cyber Pearl Harbor” to describe a supposed vote-fraud conspiracy, borrowing language used by Ms. Powell.
