Tuesday Open Thread | Richard Collins III, 23, Murdered in Possible Hate Crime


Family has identified man murdered on UMD campus as Richard Collins the third. He had just been commissioned a Lieutenant in the US Army.

Police, FBI investigating University of Maryland killing as possible hate crime
by Carrie Wells
The Baltimore Sun

A black Bowie State University student who was set to graduate this week may have been killed over the weekend in a random, racially-motivated attack by a white University of Maryland, College Park student, officials said Sunday.

UM’s police chief said Sunday that the suspect, Sean Christopher Urbanski, of Severna Park, was a member of an offensive, racist Facebook group. An FBI official, who said the federal agency will assist with UM’s investigation, said officials are investigating it as a possible hate crime, but that they have not made a formal determination of a motive.

Artie Lee Travis, Bowie State’s vice president for student affairs, said the campus is in mourning.

“We are looking forward to the quickest investigation as possible,” he said. “Hate has no place in America. Hate has no place on a college campus where young minds are coming together to try to change the world.”

Witnesses said the suspect was intoxicated and incoherent at the time of the attack. Police have said it was random and the victim and suspect did not know each other.

Officers were called to the scene around 3 a.m. Saturday, and they found Collins wounded on the sidewalk. Urbanski was arrested there and officers recovered a folding knife, police said.

The unprovoked attack was captured by surveillance cameras, said Sgt. Rosanne Hoaas, spokeswoman for the campus police.

Collins was waiting for an Uber ride with two Maryland students near a bus stop on campus when he was attacked, police said. He died at the hospital.

According to charging documents, Collins’ friends heard Urbanski scream as he approached them from next to the trees near the bus stop.

Urbanski said “Step left, step left if you know what’s best for you,” the documents say. Collins said “no” and Urbanski continued to approach before stabbing him once in the chest, they say.

THIS is Trump’s America.
ALT-RIGHT is nothing but WHITE SUPREMACY.
Where are you, Attorney General White Citizens Council?
Here is a young man, full of promise. Doing what’s right. Killed for his EXISTENCE!!
Don’t give me any bull about his murderer being a ‘lone wolf’. He’s no ‘lone wolf’. He’s NOT mentally ill. Don’t even begin with that foolishness.

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75 Responses to Tuesday Open Thread | Richard Collins III, 23, Murdered in Possible Hate Crime

  1. rikyrah says:

    Brennan’s explosive testimony just made it harder for the GOP to protect Trump
    By Sarah Posner May 23 at 3:41 PM

    n his testimony before the House Intelligence Committee hearing Tuesday morning, former CIA director John Brennan bluntly told lawmakers that during the 2016 election, he reviewed intelligence that showed “contacts and interactions” between Russian actors and people associated with the Trump campaign. By the summer of 2016, Brennan said, he was “convinced” that Russia was engaged in an “aggressive” and “multifaceted” effort to interfere in our election — and as a result, he believed “there was a sufficient basis of information and intelligence that required further investigation” by the FBI.

    With this testimony, Brennan just made it a whole lot harder — politically, at least — for the GOP to continue in its efforts to protect Trump, even as scrutiny of his campaign intensifies on the part of the FBI, and now, special counsel Robert Mueller. Yet if Tuesday’s hearing is any guide, congressional Republicans are still intent on shielding Trump by undermining the investigation in the mind of the public.

    And so, again and again, Republican members of the committee, particularly South Carolina’s Trey Gowdy, tried to get Brennan to say that no evidence of Trump campaign collusion with Russian meddling in the election exists. But Brennan repeatedly refused to render a judgment on whether there was collusion. Instead, he only repeated his refrain that, because the CIA is not a law enforcement agency, he turned over its intelligence gathering about contacts between the Trump camp and Russians to the FBI, so that the FBI could conduct its investigation into whether there was collusion.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2017/05/23/brennans-explosive-testimony-just-made-it-harder-for-the-gop-to-protect-trump/?utm_term=.8f6edfed9630

  2. rikyrah says:

    Mitch McConnell and Vladimir Putin Want the Same Thing
    by John Stoehr May 23, 2017 1:00 PM

    I have thought for a while that “the Russia thing” will provide strategic clarity that wasn’t apparent in the aftermath of the 2016 election. Many tried to puzzle through what happened and calculate Democratic strategy based on that assessment. But when Donald Trump sacked FBI Director James Comey, the man chiefly responsible for investigating the president’s ties to Russia, all that puzzling seemed moot.

    For the Democrats, the choice isn’t between “identity politics” and “economic populism.” It’s between wise policies that benefit Americans versus policies that benefit a hostile foreign power. Specifically, the task ahead is getting voters to see that Republican priorities are Vladimir Putin’s priorities.

    Some would say this sounds like “McCarthyism,” and God knows Katrina vanden Heuvel and her intellectually deranged husband Stephen Cohen are saying precisely that. Their arguments, like so many in The Nation, appear frozen in amber, an effort to re-litigate mummified anti-Communist arguments that died long, long ago. But this isn’t a witch hunt. The Russians did attack our country by mounting a massive social-media campaign to sway public opinion. The Trump campaign did communicate with the Russians months ahead of November. The GOP leadership did know about Russia’s influence before Trump was the party’s nominee. If there’s ever a time for Democrats, liberals, progressives and anti-anti-American leftists to punch left, this is that time.

    This is a fateful moment for the Democrats.

    Our history suggests we live up to our ideals, usually, when we are faced with external threats. America was not a “melting pot” before the First World War. But the federal government’s recruitment shortage forced it to open the armed forces to Jews and “white ethnics” in ways it never did before. And to encourage such men to volunteer, the government mounted its own propaganda campaign to persuade all Americans of all backgrounds that out of many, we truly are one.

    Same thing happened after the Second World War. The federal government did not care if Southern states were violating the constitutional rights of their black citizens or were maintaining a system of apartheid in which murder was legal. But after defeating two nations whose explicit aim was to enslave the world according to insane theories of racial superiority, the US found itself looking in the mirror and gasping with horror.

    We are now in a similar period, one could argue, in which conservative forces have again paralyzed the nation. From gun violence to social welfare, from climate change to the assault on democratic institutions, the conservatives have claimed power where they do not have a majority and, thanks to judicial appointments, will maintain power long after white Americans have become a demographic minority. If nothing changes, we can expect the Russians to attack our election process for years to come. If nothing changes, someone is going to benefit. That someone is not the American people.

    So the Democrats need to get voters to see that Republican priorities are Vladimir Putin’s priorities. Consider for instance, health care. What better way of wounding your enemy than by taking away insurance for tens of millions of Americans? The Republicans, in replacing Obamacare with a vastly inferior product, are moving to do that. And Putin is smiling.

  3. rikyrah says:

    Mulvaney Lies to Justify the Destruction of the Social Safety Net
    by Nancy LeTourneau May 23, 2017 12:02 PM

    ………………………

    One way they try to sell this myth is by insinuating that if you can’t visibly see a disability, it doesn’t exist. Beyond that, the cases of fraud are infinitesimal.

    After an audit of disability insurance in 2013, the Government Accountability Office estimated that in fiscal year 2011, the Social Security Administration made $1.29 billion in potential cash benefit overpayments to about 36,000 individuals who were working and making more than $1,100 a month (the limit to receive disability benefits).

    The 36,000 people receiving improper payments, while a lot on paper, represent about 0.4 percent of all beneficiaries, the report said.

    None of these arguments will make any difference to the Trump administration in general or to Mick Mulvaney in particular because they already have access to this information. When they try to justify these cuts, they are simply telling lies, and it is very likely that they know it.

    What these people can’t do is tell the truth—which is that they don’t support the idea of helping children, the elderly or the less fortunate in our society. They think everyone should simply fend for themselves as best they can in a dog-eat-dog world. If they suffer…so be it. Using that argument would not be politically prudent. So they lie.

    • Liza says:

      I just saw some speech Mulvaney was giving on MSNBC, he’s blathering about compassion. Compassion must be two ways, he says. The people paying the bills need compassion.

  4. rikyrah says:

    The White Nationalist Appeal of Trump’s Budget
    by Nancy LeTourneau
    May 23, 2017 4:45 PM

    As I was writing earlier about the lies OMB Director Mick Mulvaney is telling about Trump’s budget, I was wondering how all of this would fly with his white working class supporters. We are sure to see the requisite number of articles about how they would be hurt by it. But that is not necessarily representative of how his supporters see things.

    Then I ran across this from an article about the budget by Damian Paletta and Robert Costa:

    The budget, in its deeply conservative framework, risks alarming some of the president’s supporters…

    But a White House official, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said Trump saw the shrinking of the “welfare state” as a necessary component of his nationalist, working-class appeal and part of his pledge to “drain the swamp.”

    I’d be willing to bet some money that the White House official is Steve Bannon (or someone on his team). He is the one who sees himself as the champion of the “forgotten man,” which is his way of talking about people in the white working class. So it’s worth looking at how the shrinking of the “welfare state” would appeal to nationalist working class voters and how it fulfills Trump’s pledge to “drain the swamp.”

    First of all, I am reminded that Bannon once told Kimberly Strassel that the Trump administration would “bring capitalism to the inner cities.” Before watching the documentary Bannon made with David Bossie titled “Generation Zero,” I wasn’t sure what that meant. Here’s what I figured out afterwards:

    The problem Bannon and Bossie zero in on is the idea that government should intervene in capitalism to level the playing field for those who would otherwise be subjected to exclusion and marginalization. What they are suggesting is that true capitalism that leads to the survival of the fittest is best. In their view, our form of self-government has no obligation to the commonwealth.

    It is important to note that for Bannon, this applies primarily to inner cities, which is code for people of color.

    That kind of argument works once you have identified the recipients of government programs as the undeserving “them” who are separate from the deserving “us.” That is the divisive lie that Paul Waldman zeroed in on today.

    The whole point here is to set “taxpayers” against the supposedly undeserving whose scams and schemes can be stopped with only indiscriminate cuts to social programs. Watching Mulvaney answer questions from the press this morning, that idea came through again and again. Every time he’d get a question about a specific cut the administration proposes — to Social Security disability, to food stamps, to Medicaid — Mulvaney would say that the only people who would suffer would be those who don’t deserve to get the benefit in the first place. “We are not kicking anybody off of any program who really needs it,” he said.

  5. rikyrah says:

    Trump wastes little time breaking his key promises in a cruel budget
    05/23/17 01:05 PM
    By Steve Benen

    When Donald Trump rode down a New York escalator and announced his presidential campaign two years ago in front of an audience featuring people paid to be there, the Republican made international headlines by arguing that Mexican immigrants are rapists.

    But in the same speech, Trump was careful to break with GOP orthodoxy on some of the nation’s most popular social-insurance programs. He said, if elected, he would “save Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security without cuts.” Trump added, “Have to do it.”

    Those who actually believed his rhetoric fell for an unfortunate scam. Indeed, Trump has made many of his defenders look quite foolish with the unveiling of his first federal budget.

    …………………………………………………..

    Trump’s budget, in other words, targets benefits for the poor and the sick, while cutting taxes for the wealthy, boosting an enormous Pentagon budget, and setting aside billions for a border wall.

    The plan also intends to eliminate the deficit within 10 years by relying on math that doesn’t make any sense.

    It even cuts Social Security, despite Trump’s promise, by cutting Social Security Disability Insurance by billions. Asked how to reconcile the president’s pre-election assurances with his in-writing budget plan, Mick Mulvaney argued to reporters yesterday that Trump’s promise came with fine print: Trump was talking about retirees’ benefits, not benefits for the disabled.

    Before anyone panics, it’s important to realize that there’s approximately zero chance Congress will approve Trump’s budget plan. Lawmakers in both parties have already announced their opposition to the White House’s blueprint, and some have even begun mocking it.

    And for some, that effectively ends the conversation. If Trump’s budget will be ignored by lawmakers, the argument goes, than it doesn’t much matter what it says.

    I disagree. There’s an old cliché that a budget is a moral document, and the adage endures for a reason: it’s true. This blueprint is a vehicle for Trump and his team to show what kind of country they want to build. The president is obsessed with making America “great,” and this budget explains – in black-and-while detail – what exactly the White House means when it uses the adjective.

    This is, in other words, Trump’s vision for the nation’s future – and it’s more than a little terrifying.

    Putting aside legislative prospects, it matters that the president, just four months in office, is already breaking the core promises of his campaign. It matters that he’s deliberately targeting some of the nation’s most vulnerable. It matters that many of those who’d be hit hardest by Trump’s plan are many of the same people who voted for him.

  6. Ametia says:

    Only in AMERIKKKA can a mediocre, ignorant, old, with man become president, be riddled with scandals, his campaign be under investigation for obstruction & colluding with a foreign government, while he continues to fly under the radar, on one hand, and his administration and cabinet set out to destroy, criminalize, demonize the poor, the helpless, the elderly, and minorities, on the other hand.

  7. rikyrah says:

    DOJ ethics experts have cleared Mueller to lead the Trump-Russia probe https://t.co/UD5u7OPdDoSo this potential WH strategy is blocked https://t.co/Ly1YDe72HM— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) May 23, 2017

  8. rikyrah says:

    Mulvaney Lies to Justify the Destruction of the Social Safety Net
    by Nancy LeTourneau
    May 23, 2017 12:02 PM

    ………………………………………………….

    The tax cuts for the uber wealthy are breathtaking. The top 1% will get a $250,000 tax cut per year. But the 400 richest Americans who make over $300 million per year will get a tax cut of at least $15 million annually.

    As I’ve watched stories appear over the last few weeks about this budget, I haven’t commented much. That’s because this is merely the president’s proposal and has no chance of becoming law. The real action will come with what Congress does over the next few months.

    But there is a way in which this one is important: It is a strong statement of the Trump administration’s priorities and values. The person who is tasked with defending those values is OMB Director Mick Mulvaney. As a reminder, he is the one who suggested that the Meals on Wheels program doesn’t work. He is also the one who made this morally repugnant statement about people with pre-existing conditions.

    Here is what Mulvaney said in defense of this budget:

    Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget, said the spending plan, titled “A New Foundation for American Greatness,” is focused on protecting taxpayer money and cutting spending on programs that are ineffective or encourage people not to work.

    He singled out the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the modern version of food stamps, which grew rapidly after the financial crisis and had 44 million beneficiaries in 2016.

    “We need people to go to work,” Mulvaney said. “If you are on food stamps and you are able-bodied, we need you to go to work. If you are on disability insurance and you are not supposed to be, you are not truly disabled, we need you to go back to work. We need everybody pulling in the same direction.”

    Once again, he is making a morally repugnant argument. It would be possible to write volumes to support that judgement, but I’ll focus on just three of the most egregious examples.

    First of all, I wonder how children who are fed by SNAP and/or provided health insurance by CHIP/Medicaid are supposed to go back to work. I’m sure Mulvaney would say that it is their parents who need to go back to work. But an increasing number of them already are. Here’s the data with respect to health insurance:

  9. rikyrah says:

    Weird world in which liberals trust the FBI, CIA, NSA, and Pentagon, while so-called conservatives prefer Julian Assange, Kim Dotcom & RT— David Frum (@davidfrum) May 22, 2017

  10. rikyrah says:

    The GOP Is Quietly Scheming to Gut Medicaid While You Weren’t Looking
    Congressional Republicans want to make Medicaid even less generous than it was before Obamacare.

    by Joel Dodge
    May 23, 2017

    While the White House implodes from Russia scandals, congressional Republicans are plugging away at repealing the Affordable Care Act. And while few are watching, they are getting ready to gut one of the country’s most important health care programs: Medicaid.

    Medicaid provides healthcare coverage to nearly one hundred million Americans, making it the country’s largest health insurance program. It is run jointly by the states and the federal government: Washington covers at least half the cost of each state’s Medicaid program, and as much as 73 percent in poorer states. The federal government also pays for nearly all of the cost of Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion in the nineteen states that have agreed to insure everyone up to 133 percent of the poverty line.

    Of course, any repeal of the ACA will reverse that expansion. But Republicans aren’t simply trying to return to the status quo; they want to make Medicaid less generous than it was before Obamacare. Specifically, they aim to shrink Medicaid’s funding by capping the amount of money that the federal government pays to the states. Instead of paying a percentage of each state’s ultimate Medicaid costs, the federal government would prospectively give each state either a lump sum of funding or a set allotment that the feds will pay for each enrollee. Either way, these limits would deliberately reduce the amount that the federal government spends on Medicaid. This leaves states on the hook to make up the funding gap by either raising taxes or offering fewer benefits to fewer people.

    To put this in numbers, the House health care bill imposes progressively deeper cuts over the next decade, slashing federal Medicaid spending by 26 percent by 2026. Even these cuts, which the White House has blessed, are not severe enough for some hardliners in the Senate, who want even greater reductions. They would achieve this by tying federal funding to a lower measure of inflation than the one currently used, which would cause the real value of the block grants to erode over time and cover less and less of the states’ expenses.

  11. rikyrah says:

    California Just Got the Price Tag for Single Payer Health Insurance
    by Nancy LeTourneau
    May 23, 2017 8:00 AM

    ……………………….

    Many proponents of single payer shifted their focus to the work that is being done on a proposal in California. It is often suggested that the problems in Vermont were related to the fact that it is so small and that would be mitigated in the the nation’s most populous state. But according to a report in the Sacramento Bee, the same challenge is emerging as they apply the numbers to their proposal.

    It would cost $400 billion per year to remake California’s health insurance marketplace and create a publicly funded universal heath care system, according to a state financial analysis released Monday.

    California would have to find an additional $200 billion per year, including in new tax revenues, to create a so-called “single-payer” system, the analysis by the Senate Appropriations committee found. The estimate assumes the state would retain the existing $200 billion in local, state and federal funding it currently receives to offset the total $400 billion price tag.

    As was the case in Vermont, that $200 billion per year is roughly equivalent to the state’s entire annual budget.

    But here’s where it gets both more promising and more challenging.

    Employers currently spend between $100 billion to $150 billion per year, which could be available to help offset total costs, according to the analysis. Under that scenario, total new spending to implement would be between $50 billion and $100 billion per year.

  12. rikyrah says:

    Texas GOP Chairman’s Resignation May Spell Trouble
    by Martin Longman
    May 22, 2017 3:51 PM

    I don’t really keep up with the machinations of the Texas Republican Party so I don’t know much of the backstory on this, but it’s notable that the party’s state Chairman, Tom Mechler, announced his resignation on Saturday and that he took the opportunity to make some comments that indicate some internal squabbles are causing problems. Among other things, Mr. Mechler noted that the GOP “needs to work harder than ever to come together” and that “a party that is fractured by anger and backbiting is a party that will not succeed.” He appears to be supporting Rick Figueroa as his replacement, and he wrote that “If we do not engage in the diverse communities across Texas, we will lose the state, then the nation, and there may be no coming back.”

    I don’t know if it’s really appreciated that the presidential election in Texas was closer than it was in Iowa. Of course, President Obama carried Iowa twice but never really came close to making Texas competitive. While it’s true that something horrible obviously has happened to the Democrats in the Hawkeye State, it would be a much bigger deal for our national politics if Texas were to turn blue.

    There were polls early on in the presidential contest that predicted that Clinton might be able to put Texas in play. More recent polls have indicated that Senator Ted Cruz might be genuinely vulnerable when he seeks reelection next year. More than that, when the DCCC put together a list of House seats that might be competitive, a surprising number of them were in Texas. In fact, they’re quite serious about contending for at least three supposedly safe districts in the Lone Star State.

    That the GOP chairman quit and gave out a warning that a failure to engage with the diverse communities in Texas might doom the party nationally indicates to me that the threat is real, that it is appreciated, and that the state’s Republicans aren’t currently on the same page on what to do about it.

  13. rikyrah says:

    Trump administration gives sea-level study a little touch-up
    05/23/17 10:22 AM
    By Steve Benen

    It would make sense for Republicans, like all Americans, to be concerned about rising sea levels. But in recent years, GOP officials’ concerns have been limited to squelching the discussion about the environmental problem instead of addressing it.

    As regular readers may recall, in 2012, Republicans in North Carolina tried to prohibit a state-appointed science panel from relying on the scientific evidence related to sea levels. Around the same time, Republican state lawmakers in Virginia commissioned a study on climate change and the state’s Eastern shore, but “sea-level rise” was to be omitted. The GOP sponsor of the study pointed to “sea-level rise” as an example of “liberal code words.”

    That kind of thinking appears to have reached the Trump administration. The Washington Post reported yesterday:

    On Thursday, a group of scientists, including three working for the U.S. Geological Survey, published a paper that highlighted the link between sea-level rise and global climate change, arguing that previously studies may have underestimated the risk flooding poses to coastal communities.

    However, three of the study’s authors say the Department of Interior, under which USGS is housed, deleted a line from the news release on the study that discussed the role climate change played in raising Earth’s oceans.

  14. rikyrah says:

    Trump’s sabotage takes its toll on the health care system
    05/23/17 11:01 AM
    By Steve Benen

    Late Friday, with much of the political world focused on dramatic developments in the Russia scandal, the White House said Donald Trump was considering a radical move in the health care debate. The Republican president, reports indicated, was prepared to scrap cost-sharing reductions, deliberately destabilizing insurance markets, and taking coverage from millions.

    Trump had until yesterday to pull the trigger on this threat, but he apparently decided to take a different course. Instead of ending the cost-sharing reductions, the administration said it would delay a final decision by 90 days – which had the effect of leaving industry and its stakeholders in limbo while Republicans plot their next move.

    In case this isn’t obvious, insurance companies hate arbitrary uncertainty. It’s in conflict with their business model. In fact, CNBC reported yesterday that the White House’s political games will end up costing American consumers quite a bit of money.

    Delay, delay, delay means Obamacare customers will pay, and pay, and pay a lot more next year.

    The Trump administration’s move Monday to avoid for 90 days – yet again – making a decision on a major court challenge to key Obamacare subsidies paid insurers by itself will alone add up to 20 percent or more to the price of individual health plans next year, experts said Monday.

    Andy Slavitt, who until January oversaw Obamacare for the federal government, told CNBC that President Donald Trump has guaranteed higher insurance prices in 2018 by his indecision on what will happen to the $7 billion in subsidies insurers have counted on from the government.

  15. rikyrah says:

    Donald Trump makes the wrong impression at Yad Vashem
    05/23/17 11:31 AM
    By Steve Benen

    When American presidents travel abroad, especially for the first time, they make a lasting impression. Yesterday, for example, Donald Trump raised more than a few eyebrows with some inexplicable comments about Israeli intelligence, which he soon after followed up by suggesting Israel isn’t in the Middle East.

    Today, Trump visited Yad Vashem, Israel’s principal Holocaust memorial and museum – the American president scheduled a brief visit, that did not include a tour of the museum – and did little to improve upon yesterday’s showing.

    President Trump’s message in a guestbook at Israel’s main Holocaust memorial and museum has drawn some ridicule for its failure to demonstrate sensitivity to the atrocities memorialized at the site.

    “It is a great honor to be here with all of my friends – so amazing + will never forget!” Trump wrote during his visit to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, today.

    Raoul Wootliff, a reporter for the Times of Israel, posted on Twitter, “He forgot: ‘See you next summer.’”

    ………………………..

    My point isn’t to mock Trump’s obvious limitations, but rather, to emphasize that moments like these make a difference. The fact that Americans elected an inexperienced television personality to the nation’s highest office meant Trump started his presidency with a credibility deficit, especially abroad. Politico last week quoted a German observer who said of the American president, “People here think Trump is a laughingstock.”

    • Ametia says:

      Ha ha ha ha ha old turd, trying to hold on to her hand, because he can’t gain his balance.

    • vitaminlover says:

      What in this world has he done recently to tick her off so strongly? Now I know he is vile and repugnant. I wonder what he said also?

  16. rikyrah says:

    Supreme Court strikes down North Carolina gerrymandering
    05/23/17 08:40 AM
    By Steve Benen

    North Carolina Republican leaders may be radicalized to an alarming degree, but they’re also competent enough to achieve their goals. It’s not easy, for example, to take a state where voters are roughly divided evenly between the parties, and then draw the congressional district lines so that Republicans hold 10 of the state’s 13 seats, turning roughly 50% of the vote into 77% of the power.

    That is, however, precisely what GOP officials in North Carolina did in one of the most ridiculous contemporary examples of gerrymandering in the country. It’s also a map that the U.S. Supreme Court struck down yesterday as illegal.

    The U.S. Supreme Court Monday threw out North Carolina’s maps for two of the state’s 13 congressional districts, a ruling that former attorney general Eric Holder called “a watershed moment in the fight to end racial gerrymandering.”

    In drawing the boundary lines for both districts, race was the predominant factor and the state failed to offer a compelling justification, the court said.

  17. rikyrah says:

    House Republicans May Have to Vote on Trumpcare Again

    But really, it didn’t matter that they didn’t get those CBO scores.

    By Jim Newell

    As the House was voting on the American Health Care Act on May 4, some Democratic members shouted “WHERE’S THE SCORE?” at their colleagues across the aisle. They were voting on a major piece of legislation without fully knowing its ramifications, since the Congressional Budget Office had yet to score its final version. Republicans’ choice to plow ahead anyway has earned them grief in interviews, at town halls, and even from some of their Republican colleagues in the Senate.

    House Republicans’ response to the public and their Senate peers was: Don’t worry. The final, unscored amendments didn’t really matter.

    “This is kind of a bogus attack from the left,” House Speaker Paul Ryan said on ABC’s This Week three days after the bill passed. He pointed out that the CBO had twice scored the AHCA and that the final amendment—introduced by Rep. Fred Upton, which plugged another $8 billion into the bill—was a mere “three pages long. It takes you 30 seconds to read.” The most recent CBO score, he said, showed that the bill was “perfectly in compliance with the Senate budget rules,” and the Upton amendment would not “dramatically alter that score.”

    “It was narrow changes to the bill,” he said.

  18. Ametia says:

    Mark Zuckerberg Hates Black People

    Black Facebook users are having their accounts banned for speaking out against racism.

    There’s a well-known saying in the Black community: “You have to be twice as good to get half as much.” This is sometimes referred to as the “Black tax.” It means that Black people have to work twice as hard as white people to receive a fraction of the payoff. So, for example, if I’m attending college, I have to get straight A’s in order to obtain an internship that Chad could get with a 2.0. If I’m interviewing for a job, I need to be twice as qualified as Hannah before advancing far enough in the interview process to fail my drug test. And, if I’m community organizing on social media, I have to have twice as many Facebook accounts as white activists, because Mark Zuckerberg straight up hates Black people.

    Or so it seems.

    As I write this, I’m currently serving two simultaneous Facebook bans. I, like many Black organizers, have taken to maintaining two accounts — a primary and a backup. It’s infuriating and tedious, but I chalk it up to the Black tax. Since Black organizers are more likely to have their content flagged and removed for “violating community standards,” we’ve had to find workarounds to sustain our online presence and engagement. Currently, my primary and backup accounts are both banned for “promoting hate speech.” That means bigoted trolls lurked my page reporting anything and everything, hoping I’d be in violation of the vague “standards” imposed by Facebook. It’s kinda like how white people reflexively call the cops whenever they see a Black person outside. Except in this case it’s not my physical presence they find threatening, it’s my digital one.

    https://medium.com/@thedididelgado/mark-zuckerberg-hates-black-people-ae65426e3d2a

  19. rikyrah says:

    Powerful.
    Q: Why should we care?
    BRENNAN: Our ability to choose our elected leaders as we see fit is an inalienable right we must protect. pic.twitter.com/Ry7o8CKXlx— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) May 23, 2017

  20. rikyrah says:

    SurveyUSA Poll: Ossoff opens lead over Handel in 6th District runoff https://t.co/gMyhnEuR9g

    — Ga Politics News (@GAPoliticsNews) May 23, 2017

    #BREAKING – Channel 2 to host LIVE primetime debate between 6th District candidates @karenhandel & @ossoff https://t.co/UFOFS9jAFn #GA06 pic.twitter.com/xW33gpPqKY

    — WSB-TV (@wsbtv) May 22, 2017

  21. Ametia says:
  22. rikyrah says:

    RIP Roger Moore.
    He was 89.
    My favorite Bond movie of his was Live and Let Die

  23. rikyrah says:

    Here is the information that @OversightDems are now pushing @jasoninthehouse to subpoena the White House for:https://t.co/Er4DNv3TEo pic.twitter.com/72I7z9q0HE

    — Greg Sargent (@ThePlumLineGS) May 23, 2017

  24. rikyrah says:

    $360 billion in deals – so Saudis want Trump to rescind 9/11 lawsuit law:
    “Saudi officials have been quietly lobbying the administration and Congress to overturn the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act,
    which led more than 800 families to file suit in New York in March. The problem: Trump supported the bill and can’t do much to change it even if he wanted to. (http://www.rawstory.com/2017/05/saudis-gave-the-us-360-billion-in-deals-now-they-want-trump-to-rescind-911-lawsuit-law/)

  25. rikyrah says:

    I’m not sure people truly appreciate the Madoff-level accounting fraud involved in Trump’s budget. Bear with me… 1/

    — Seth Hanlon (@SethHanlon) May 23, 2017

    The fraud here goes beyond “rosy” forecasts. It even goes beyond “voodoo economics”–the debunked theory that tax cuts pay for themselves. 2/

    — Seth Hanlon (@SethHanlon) May 23, 2017

    But wait – it’s actually worse than that. Not only is the $5.5 trillion cost of the tax cuts not included in the budget numbers… 4/

    — Seth Hanlon (@SethHanlon) May 23, 2017

    So in other words, they are claiming that tax cuts WILL PAY FOR THEMSELVES—something no credible economist believes—AND THEN SOME. 6/

    — Seth Hanlon (@SethHanlon) May 23, 2017

    @gregleiserson Bears repeating: Trump budget claims that the tax cuts, whose cost is est. by @BudgetHawks at $5.5T, will actually INCREASE rev. by $2T. 8/

    — Seth Hanlon (@SethHanlon) May 23, 2017

  26. yahtzeebutterfly says:

    https://twitter.com/splcenter/status/866836080888344576
    Excerpt from article linked in above tweet:

    The three who face firing are Officer Caesar Goodson, who was driving the van where an autopsy determined Gray suffered fatal injuries; and supervisors Lt. Brian Rice and Sgt. Alicia White, according to sources with knowledge of the case.

    Officers Edward Nero and Garrett Miller, who made the initial arrest of Gray, face five days suspension without pay.

    Meanwhile, Officer William Porter, who was criminally charged with manslaughter, is not facing any internal discipline.

    The internal charges come after investigators from the Montgomery and Howard county police departments finished their review of the case earlier this month. The Baltimore Police Department asked them to handle the investigation to avoid a conflict of interest.

    All of the officers can accept that punishment or elect to contest the charges before a “trial board,” an internal disciplinary panel comprised of police officers. The board has the power to acquit the officers or uphold the charges. If the charges are upheld, Police Commissioner Kevin Davis would have the final say on punishment.

    • yahtzeebutterfly says:

      What a powerfully tragic image… *tears*

    • Ametia says:

      So incredibly sad. Another beautiful black man’s light snuffed out by hate.

      They can’t KILL US ALL.

    • rikyrah says:

      The chair broke my heart all over again.

    • Liza says:

      I honestly do not know how the families of children and young adults who are victims of race killings bear that burden for the rest of their lives.

      I totally agree with Rikyrah, this is Trump’s America. No other American, absolutely no one else in the 21st century has done more to unleash the hatred that seethes in the bodies and souls of these white supremacists. That hatred is being transformed into thuggery and assault and murder by people who believe that white supremacy is winning and will prevail because look who won the election, the Birther King.

  27. rikyrah says:

    Every person who voted for Trump owns this. This is on them.https://t.co/yDesE4Sfny pic.twitter.com/56woavu0br

    — Nerdy Wonka (@NerdyWonka) May 23, 2017

    Horrific cuts to programs that help kids, poor, disabled, and the elderly. According to the GOP, that’s how to MAGAhttps://t.co/yDesE4Sfny pic.twitter.com/h9rdnGtP1I

    — Nerdy Wonka (@NerdyWonka) May 23, 2017

    Shame on every single person who cast a vote for this monster.https://t.co/Y6zepH7yto

    — Nerdy Wonka (@NerdyWonka) May 23, 2017

    Donald Trump in 2015 v. Donald Trump today.

    Bravo, conservatives on “Making America Great Again.” pic.twitter.com/P0wSD5l1el

    — Nerdy Wonka (@NerdyWonka) May 23, 2017

  28. This handsome young man, so full of promise, murdered for nothing. It pains the soul.

    • yahtzeebutterfly says:

      So deeply heartbreaking.

    • majiir says:

      What also deeply concerns me about this is the right-wingers’ callous attitude about his death. If a white college male with a future career in the military had been killed a few days before graduation, they would have made all kinds of noise and ugly comments demanding that PBO address the matter. This child had his whole future taken away by a white supremacist, and they’re saying nothing. THESE are those who call themselves the bestest Christians. I’ve been a Christian for over 60 years now, and nothing about these persons aligns with the Christian values I practice. Nothing. They’re liars and hypocrites who always choose their political party over Jesus and use Christianity to abuse others. My dearly departed parents would have described them using the adage, “They’re going to die and bust hell wide open.”

  29. rikyrah says:

    Good Morning,Everyone😐😐😐

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