Saturday Open Thread

Posted on December 26, 2015 by rikyrah

Good Morning, Everyone.

Hope you are enjoying the weekend with Family and Friends.

LOL @ this video.

This entry was posted in Open Thread, Politics and tagged , , . Bookmark the permalink.

38 Responses to Saturday Open Thread

  1. rikyrah says:
    December 27, 2015 at 10:11 am

    Obama’s team says the GOP earned Donald Trump

    Loyalists say that after two terms of obstruction, Republicans are getting the anger candidate their rhetoric created.

    Inside the White House, poetic justice looks a lot like Donald Trump.

    Past and present aides to President Barack Obama are gloating that a Republican leadership they say defined themselves by blustery opposition—and used it to win the House, then the Senate, and stand in the White House’s way at every turn—is getting devoured by a candidate personifying the anger agenda.

    Obama insiders would rather have immigration reform signed than lament knowingly on Sunday talk shows that the Republicans will keep losing elections until they deal with the issue. They’d rather have a longer-term approach to government spending, or more of the entitlement and tax reform deals Obama said he was eager to cut.

    But on everything from guns to reproductive health to opening up Cuba, Obama’s team says it has been battling for years the very politics that paved the way for Trump’s ascendance this election cycle.

    Still, Obama’s team refuses to see Trump’s political success as some kind of backlash against the president.

    “In the long sweep of history, this chapter is all pretty simple: the country actually switched from one dominant culture that was in charge for 240 years to one that’s multicultural,” said one Obama campaign veteran. “And that wasn’t going to go easy. But now we’re in the middle of it, so it seems chaotic and complicated.”

    They also won’t concede that Trump might win. The billionaire real estate developer’s six months atop the GOP primary race have coincided with arguably the most successful year of Obama’s presidency – scoring deals with Iran and Cuba and on climate change and trade, and seeing previous efforts on Obamacare and gay marriage secured by the Court. That this all happened simultaneously with Trump’s rise demonstrates how little support Trump politics has in the country, Obama’s aides say.

    “It’s not that the country has changed, it’s that a narrow band of mostly white, low- and middle-income Americans are supporting a candidate who is speaking to their anxiety about being left behind in this economy,” said Bill Burton, a former deputy White House press secretary. “Under no circumstances could Trump get a majority of Americans to support the nonsense and intolerance that he espouses.”

    http://www.politico.com/story/2015/12/obama-trump-republicans-217144#ixzz3vWlpNt1s

    Reply
  2. rikyrah says:
    December 26, 2015 at 11:14 pm

    This is RIDICULOUS.

    ………………….

    Edward Clarkin Is The Most Important Man In Journalism Today — And He’s Probably Not A Real Person

    BY JUDD LEGUM DEC 25, 2015 8:32 PM

    A week ago, no one had ever heard of Edward Clarkin. Today he has inspired multiple parody Twitter accounts, prompted one journalist to quit his job after 22 years and has been the subject of intense speculation in elite media circles.

    This is how Edward Clarkin went from an unknown to the center of the world of journalism.

    Who Is Edward Clarkin?

    Edward Clarkin holds himself out to be a reporter for the New Britain Herald, a small paper in Connecticut with a circulation of about 7500. Prior to this month, Clarkin’s only articles for the New Britain Herald were four effusive restaurant reviews published in 2011. “If A Taste of Poland is anything like Warsaw or Krakow, I’m buying an airplane ticket tomorrow,” Clarkin wrote.

    Then, on December 1, Clarkin published a nearly 2,000 word article on the performance of business courts, which specialize in corporate issues. Oddly, the article not only covered Connecticut business courts but included ten paragraphs criticizing Elizabeth Gonzalez, a state judge in Nevada. Clarkin wrote that Gonzalez’s rulings “appear inconsistent and even contradictory” and her conduct “undermines the rationale for the creation of such courts in the first place.”

    ………………………………………………………………

    Is Edward Clarkin A Real Person?

    All signs point to no.

    “There is no record of an Edward Clarkin in Connecticut on state voting rolls, property records, lawyer registries or various social-media sites, and several current and former newspaper employees said they never met anyone by that name,” the Hartford Currant reported.

    The New Britain Herald staff numbers in the single digits — but no one can recall ever meeting or talking to Clarkin.

    Michael Schroeder, the publisher of the New Britain Herald, said that he has “no comment on our newsgathering, story selection or writers” and “declined to provide information about Clarkin.”

    Schroeder told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that he had “no idea” how to reach Clarkin.

    Schroeder does have an unusual connection to Clarkin, however. Schroeder’s middle name is Edward and his mother’s maiden name is Clarkin.

    ………………………………………………………

    What else should I know about Michael Schroder?

    Michael Schroder is the manager for News + Media Capital Group LLC, a company created by conservative billionaire Sheldon Adelson to purchase the Las Vegas Review-Journal earlier this month.

    In other words, he is now the boss of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, answering to Adelson.

    ……………………….

    Does Sheldon Adelson have a special interest in Judge Elizabeth Gonzalez?

    Yes.

    Judge Gonzalez is overseeing a case against Adelson and his gambling company by a former attorney who alleges “he was fired for trying to break the company’s links to Chinese organized crime triads.” The employee also claims “Adelson turned a blind eye to prostitution and other illegal activities in his resorts there.”
    Adelson has clashed with Gonzalez as the case has progressed. At one point, Adelson refused to answer a routine question and Gonzales told him, “Sir, you don’t get to argue with me. You understand that?”

    Gonzalez has fined Adelson’s companies hundreds of thousands of dollars for withholding documents. Adelson offered financial support to candidates willing to run against Gonzalez and unseat her, according to the Review Journal.

    Reply
    • rikyrah says:
      December 26, 2015 at 10:54 pm

      The Cheese Kitty @WhoFdTheStork
      Can we agree on two things: #BobbyDaniels did not point gun at the police AND again police statements are lies not matching witnesses/facts

      Misty @MistyMorin
      Now that cops have shot a Navy veteran, what will their excuse be, since they can’t call him a thug? #BobbyDaniels

      VCubed @VV4Change
      Black men get shot and killed by cops even for being heroes and saving lives. #BobbyDaniels Navy vet, father, RIP. https://twitter.com/RawStory/status/680820412117315584 …

      Reply
  5. rikyrah says:
    December 26, 2015 at 10:51 pm

    DALAYYYY @TheToast2015
    After fomenting racial hate against President Obama for 7 years, the MSM trots out a black to shame Obama into kissing angry whites @$$es.

    Reply
  6. rikyrah says:
    December 26, 2015 at 10:50 pm

    The Associated Press ✔ @AP
    BREAKING: Chicago police: 55-year-old woman killed by police early Saturday was ‘accidentally struck’

    Reply
  7. SouthernGirl2 says:
    December 26, 2015 at 2:09 pm

    My son overheard a black man in Walmart saying he’s not about to shop for a toy gun & have cops come in to shoot him dead like John Crawford.

    Reply
  8. rikyrah says:
    December 26, 2015 at 12:42 pm

    Guess the complexion of the Government Agent that wasn’t believed…

    and the complexion of the Drug Lord..

    I’m just sayin.

    ………………………..

    The Tax Sleuth Who Took Down a Drug Lord

    Gary L. Alford was running on adrenaline when he arrived for work on a Monday in June 2013, at the Drug Enforcement Administration office in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. A tax investigator, he had spent much of the weekend in the living room of his New Jersey townhouse, scrolling through arcane chat rooms and old blog posts, reading on well after his fiancée had gone to sleep.

    The work had given Mr. Alford what he believed was the answer to a mystery that had confounded investigators for nearly two years: the identity of the mastermind behind the online drug bazaar known as Silk Road — a criminal known only by his screen name, Dread Pirate Roberts.

    When Mr. Alford showed up for work that Monday, he had a real name and a location. He assumed the news would be greeted with excitement. Instead, he says, he got the brushoff.

    He recalls asking the prosecutor on the case, out of frustration, “What about what I said is not compelling?”

    Mr. Alford, a young special agent with the Internal Revenue Serviceassigned to work with the D.E.A., isn’t the first person to feel unappreciated at the office. In his case, though, the information he had was the crucial to solving one of the most vexing criminal cases of the last few years. While Silk Road by mid-2013 had grown into a juggernaut, selling $300,000 in heroin and other illegal goods each day, federal agents hadn’t been able to figure out the most basic detail: the identity of the person running the site.

    It ultimately took Mr. Alford, 38, more than three months to gather enough evidence to prevail upon his colleagues to take his suspect seriously. After he convinced them, though, the man he identified, Ross W. Ulbricht, was arrested and Silk Road shuttered. The night of the arrest, Mr. Alford got an email from one of the other special agents at the center of the case: “Congrats Gary, you were right,” it said.

    Mr. Alford’s experience, and the lag between his discovery and Mr. Ulbricht’s arrest, were largely left out of the documents and proceedings that led to Mr. Ulbricht’s conviction and life sentence this year.

    Previous examinations of the Silk Road investigation have generally focused on the role played by special agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security, who infiltrated the website, arrested important deputies and gathered reams of crucial information, but not enough to find Mr. Ulbricht — until Mr. Alford came along.

    The other agencies involved in the investigation declined to comment on Mr. Alford’s work, but several people briefed on the investigation, who were not authorized to speak about it publicly, confirmed the basic outlines of Mr. Alford’s story.

    Back in the summer of 2013, it was not hard, even for Mr. Alford, to understand why it took him time to win over the others on the case. He had joined the investigation relatively late and was on a team that hadn’t previously found much of value. He also lacked the sophisticated technological experience of colleagues at the F.B.I. On a more personal level, Mr. Alford could come across as overeager.

    But Mr. Alford also detected the sort of organizational frictions that have hindered communication between law enforcement agencies in the past. Within the I.R.S., Mr. Alford had heard tales of his agency being ignored and overshadowed by more prominent organizations like the F.B.I. The story that resonated with Mr. Alford most strongly was that of the tax agent Frank J. Wilson, who brought down the gangster Al Capone, but who was forgotten in the movie versions of the investigation, which tended to focus on Eliot Ness, the flashier Bureau of Prohibition agent.

    “They don’t write movies about Frank Wilson building the tax case,” Mr. Alford said in an interview at the I.R.S.’s Manhattan headquarters. “That’s just how it is.”

    Reply
  10. Liza says:
    December 26, 2015 at 12:02 pm

    Y’all deserve a treat. “That’s How I Got to Memphis” is one of my favorites from way back, written by Tom T. Hall. I’ve always liked it because it is so, so sad…

    Reply
  13. SouthernGirl2 says:
    December 26, 2015 at 10:26 am

    I’m missing the Christmas songs already. I so enjoyed them. The days went by fast.

    Reply
  16. SouthernGirl2 says:
    December 26, 2015 at 9:10 am

    Chicas, after all was done I was worn out. But we had a good time.

    Reply
  18. rikyrah says:
    December 26, 2015 at 7:54 am

    Good Morning, Everyone :)

    Have to work today, but it’s all good.

    Have a great day!

    Reply
  19. Tyren M. says:
    December 26, 2015 at 1:10 am

    Good Morning 3Chics,
    Before I go to bed, I want to wish you all a Merry Christmas. I appreciate you all.

    Reply

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