Friday, March 25, 2016

University Idiot Cartoon


Students terrified by 'Trump 2016' chalk drawings

Has America brought up a Nation of Idiots?

Emory University in Atlanta is under siege at this hour from a chalk-wielding Donald Trump supporter who caused a massive outbreak of micro-aggressions among frightened students.
Terrified collegians are hunkered down in their safe spaces – traumatized by whoever wrote “Trump 2016” and “Accept the Inevitable: Trump 2016” on campus sidewalks.
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“That was a bit alarming,” one panicked student told The Emory Wheel. “What exactly is inevitable? Why does it have to be accepted?”
Another student whimpered that she did not feel safe.
“I’m supposed to feel comfortable and safe [here],” she told the campus paper. “But this man is being supported by students on our campus and our administration shows that they, by their silence, support it as well…I don’t deserve to feel afraid at my school.”
The Emory Latino Student Organization posted a Facebook message calling the drawing “an act of cowardice.”
“They did not do this merely to support the presidential candidate, but to promote the hate and discrimination that goes along with him,” they wrote.
Oh, the humanity!
Dozens of students protested the chalk drawings in the university’s quad – demanding the administration take action against the pro-Trump supporter.
“You are not listening! Come speak to us, we are in pain,” students shouted as reported by the campus newspaper. “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.”
I’m not a clinical psychologist, but those kids are freaking nuts, folks.
Emory University President Jim Wagner later met with the protestors and acknowledged in an email that they had voice “genuine concern and pain in the face of this perceived intimidation.”
“I cannot dismiss their expression of feelings and concern as motivated only by political preference or over-sensitivity,” he wrote in an email to students. “Instead, the students with whom I spoke heard a message, not about political process or candidate choice, but instead about values regarding diversity and respect that clash with Emory’s own.”
President Wagner vowed to launch an investigation and round up the pro-Trump graffiti artists, the newspaper reported.
He said if the individuals are students they will go through a conduct violation process and if they are not students they will face trespassing charges.
Meanwhile, Fox Sports reports that the university’s student government association is providing “emergency counseling for students triggered by the Trump 2016 campus chalkings.”
That’s actually not a bad idea. Based upon my observations there are many students at Emory University in dire need of professional help.
The student newspaper also took a few jabs at Mr. Trump – calling him “an offensive man” who has made “racist, sexist and xenophobic statements.”
Mr. Trump is also a close friend to New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick – but that’s a topic for another day.
But Editor-in-Chief Zak Hudak also defended free speech and suggested that the protesters should be allowed to protest and the chalkers should be allowed to chalk.
“If we shut down the opposition, we lose our purpose as a university,” he opined. “We lose the courage to inquire, and we lose the ability to engage with the contention that we will encounter outside of the Emory community.”
Ironically, there was no outrage from liberal students or the university administration or the campus newspaper in 2014 when protesters drew chalk outlines of bodies during a Black Lives Matter demonstration.
I reckon at Emory University black lives do matter, but the lives of Trump supporters do not.
It’s unclear at this point when the unrest at Emory will subside. It may be necessary for Georgia’s governor to call out the National Guard.
And there are unconfirmed reports that a FEMA caravan was spotted traveling South on Interstate 75 – with piles of baby blankets and crates of pacifiers.
But a source at the Centers for Disease Control tells me there are grave concerns that what happened at Emory University is not an anomaly.
And they fear that if the Republicans nominate Donald Trump – it could spawn an epidemic of micro-aggressions on university campuses across the United States.

Federal appeals court slams IRS in Tea Party case, demands documents


In a blistering rebuke of the IRS, a Cincinnati-based federal appeals court has ordered the tax-collecting agency to quit stalling and produce the names of organizations it targeted based on their political leanings.
The unanimous ruling by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit gave the IRS two weeks to turn over the documents sought as part of a class-action lawsuit brought by the NorCal Tea Party Patriots.
“The lawyers in the Department of Justice have a long and storied tradition of defending the nation’s interests and enforcing its laws … The conduct of the IRS’s attorneys in the district court falls outside that tradition,” the opinion said.
Mark Meckler, president of Citizens for Self-Governance which is funding the class-action lawsuit, applauded the court's bold comments.
“We are very pleased that the 6th Circuit had smacked down the IRS and its thuggish DOJ lawyers,” Meckler told FoxNews.com, adding that he felt the IRS is an “unredeemable organization.”
The NorCal Tea Party Patriots sued the IRS in 2013 after a Treasury inspector general concluded the IRS had unfairly singled out for extra scrutiny conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
For the civil suit, the NorCal Tea Party Patriots requested information from the IRS detailing the organizations targeted -- information  they say they have not received or has been wrapped up in legal red tape. The panel of federal judges agreed.
“The lawsuit has progressed as slowly as the underlying applications themselves: at every turn the IRS has resisted the plaintiffs’ requests for information regarding the IRS’s treatment of the plaintiff class, eventually to the open frustration of the district court,” the judges claimed in court documents.
The IRS has pushed back on the allegations and maintains that handing over the names and organizations on its “Be on the Look Out” list would violate privacy laws.  A lower district court has twice ordered the IRS to produce the documents. In response, the IRS sought a “writ of mandamus” to block the court order.
Tuesday’s angry reprimand by the federal appeals court is in response to the IRS’s writ of mandamus.
“The district court ordered production of those lists, and did so again over an IRS motion to reconsider. Yet, almost a year later, the IRS still has not complied with the court’s orders. Instead the IRS now seeks from this court a writ of mandamus, an extraordinary remedy reserved to correct only the clearest abuses of power by a district court,” Judge Raymond Kethledge wrote. “We deny the petition.”
The panel of judges gave the IRS two weeks to start handing over the documents.
In the 17-page opinion, Kethledge laid out a list of requests NorCal made to the IRS that were either ignored entirely or stuck in a legal runaround. In one, the IRS demanded NorCal provide 3,000 pages of what the inspector general called unnecessary information. In turn, the IRS then claimed it would be "unduly burdensome" for it to provide such information as the names of IRS employees who worked on the case.
The IRS told FoxNews.com it does not comment on pending litigation.

Plot twist: Long ignored, California could be deciding factor in GOP race



Just one month before the Republican presidential convention, the fate of the party's primary race could be determined in the unlikeliest of battlegrounds: California. 
The state, voting alongside several others on June 7, was never expected to be a major factor this year due to its late position on the primary calendar. But now, the tight state of the race means territory long known as a bastion for liberal Democratic politics will have incredible sway over the GOP contest.
With 172 delegates in play, the largest haul of any state on the primary map, California could help decide whether Donald Trump is able to clinch the nomination before the July convention -- or whether the party will be looking at a floor fight in Cleveland.
“We’re not used to talking about California being an important state in the general or primary election -- particularly the Republican side in the primaries. But this year, every delegate matters, and California, which is sitting right at the end of the calendar on June 7, is a huge prize,” said Nathan Gonzales, head of the Rothenberg & Gonzales Political Report, an election handicapper.
While California is the land of Reagan, the imperative to court the state's voters represents an obvious challenge for Republican candidates.
Hollywood, San Francisco ... these aren't exactly hubs of the conservative cause. But the state is vast -- 163,000 square miles -- and candidates will have to figure out where their message plays best.
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Bill Whalen, politics research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, said the battle will be waged across a diverse population, which ranges from the Latino strongholds of Southern California to the wealthy Silicon Valley tech elites in the north to the socially conservative evangelicals of the "inland empire."
The successful candidate here will have to navigate those ramparts and everything in between.
The most recent poll shows front-runner Trump with the edge.
According to a Public Policy Institute of California poll of likely voters taken in the 12-day period leading up to Marco Rubio’s departure from the race on March 15, Trump had a comfortable lead in the state with 38 percent, followed by Ted Cruz with 19 percent and John Kasich with 12 percent. After Rubio suspended his campaign, the PPIC recalculated, taking Rubio out of the mix and working in voters' second choice. This gave Cruz a bump to 27 percent and Kasich to 14 percent, while Trump remained at 38 percent.
Whalen, though, said Cruz could have an advantage.
“There’s going to be a premium on the ground organization and that favors Cruz,” he said.
As of this week’s contests, Trump has 739 delegates, Cruz has 465, and Kasich has 143. One of these candidates has to reach 1,237 to win the nomination outright, or else the process moves to a contested convention this summer.
The way California's primary system is set up, the winning candidate there has the potential to take home a huge stash of delegates.
That's because the 172 delegates will be awarded by congressional district, meaning the three delegates in each of the 53 districts go to the winner of that district -- plus 13 bonus delegates to the candidate who gets the most votes statewide.
“I think California is going to matter a lot,” Gonzales said, adding, “It’s going to be a challenge for these candidates. There are hundreds of miles of opportunity to make their mark.”
Candidates stand to win or lose not only in the state’s few GOP bastions like the Central Valley 23rd District -- home to House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy -- but in congressional districts that are typically a no-go for Republicans, like the 13th, which includes Berkeley and Oakland and went 87 percent for President Obama in 2012.
It doesn’t matter the district; each has three delegates in play.
While candidates will have difficulty traveling to each district and television media in the state is expensive, resources will have to concentrate on direct mail and targeted email, Internet advertising and social media, said Gonzales. Candidates will need a game plan to solidify the voters already in their corners, and reach out to new ones who could help tip the scales on June 7.
California also is a closed primary, which means only Republicans can vote -- a potential plus for Cruz, who has done better in closed state primaries and caucuses.
So what does the California Republican look like?
According to David Brady, political science professor at Stanford University, it depends where you go.
“California Republicans are somewhat divided, with the majority being fiscal conservatives, but more socially liberal than Republicans in other regions of the country,” he said. “This is particularly true in the coastal populated regions while the interior has more social conservatives which is associated with evangelicals.”
He predicted "Cruz will do well in the interior regions" and could pick up support from voters opposing Trump. "However, in terms of pure ideology, most coastal Republicans are closer to Kasich,” he said.
As far as issues go, Whalen noted that what plays in the rest of the country is resonating in California, too. “The California Republican Party is a microcosm of the national GOP,” he said. “The party is struggling over immigration.” Brady added that the economy and terrorism continue to be hot-button issues in the state, with the water shortage of local importance.

Belgian government admits errors hindered effort to stop Brussels attacks


Belgium's government admitted Thursday that more could have been done to prevent Tuesday's suicide bombings in Brussels, as two high-ranking ministers offered to resign over law enforcement's failure to act on a warning from Turkey last year that it had arrested one of the would-be bombers. 
Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel asked Interior Mininster Jan Jambon and Justice Minister Koen Geens to stay on, given the current challenge the government is facing. However, Geens admitted to reporters that authorities "don't have to be proud about what happened," adding, "We perhaps did things we should not have done."
The attacks on the Zaventem airport and a subway train killed at least 31 people and injured 250 others. Revelations that the attacks were carried out by the same ISIS cell behind last November's attacks in Paris that killed 130 people have led to uncomfortable questions for Belgian counterterrror intelligence and policing.
Many of the questions were prompted by Turkey's disclosure Wednesday that it had apprehended one of the airport suicide bombers, Ibrahim El Bakraoui, near Turkey's border with Syria, in June 2015. El Bakraoui was deported to the Netherlands at his request, but was later set free by the Dutch for lack of proof of his involvement with jihadis.
Turkey said it had warned Belgium that it had flagged El Bakraoui as a "foreign terrorist fighter." El Bakraoui had a criminal record in Belgium at the time he went to Turkey, but Belgian authorities also could find no links to terrorism.
Geens appeared on a Belgian TV news show and was asked who was to blame for the failure to follow up on the Turkish warning.
"It is clear it is not one single person, but it is true that we could have expected from Ankara or Istanbul a more diligent communication, we think, that perhaps could have avoided certain things."
"Our own services should perhaps have been more critical about the place where the person had been detained," he added, referring to Turkey's border area with Syria.
"When someone is arrested there in a city few people know, it is clear enough for insiders that it could be a terrorist," Geens said. "Here, though, he was not known as a terrorist. It is the only moment we could have linked him to it. And that moment, perhaps, we missed."
The justice minister acknowledged that "we have to be very self-critical."
But Geens added that "such events have also happened in nations with the best intelligence services in the world," pointing to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States.
Authorities had been unable to find Salah Abdeslam, one of the Paris ringleaders and described as one of Europe's most wanted men, until a breakthrough led them to a Brussels apartment where he was arrested Friday.
Abdeslam evaded police in two countries for four months before his capture, and the attackers in Brussels may have rushed their plot because they felt authorities closing in.
The intelligence shortcomings have prompted European authorities to once again call for quicker and more efficient intelligence cooperation.
Rob Wainwright, the head of Europe's police agency Europol, told the Associated Press his agency is trying to make sure investigators have access to needed information.
"You have a fragmented intelligence picture but we're trying to help with that," he said. "Our databases contain thousands of names of suspected foreign fighters which have been submitted by member states, and even the United States. But we also have records on arms smuggling, money laundering, forgery and other elements which are particularly relevant given that many of these guys had petty crime backgrounds."
He said the threat goes beyond France and Belgium and that it is impossible to reduce it to zero.
"We are looking at large numbers of foreign fighters who have returned as potential terrorists," he said. "And we are faced with a strategic decision by the Islamic State to aggressively target Europe. These are all very challenging dimensions. As for how large the community is and who has been sent back - that is the golden question."

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