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Trump Warns Republicans That if They Vote to Impeach He Will Campaign for Them Like He Did in Louisiana |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=9160"><span class="small">Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker</span></a>
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Monday, 18 November 2019 13:22 |
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Borowitz writes: "Delivering an ominous threat to members of his own party, Donald J. Trump warned congressional Republicans on Monday that if they vote for impeachment he would come to their states and campaign for their reelection."
Eddie Rispone and Donald Trump. (photo: WP)
Trump Warns Republicans That if They Vote to Impeach He Will Campaign for Them Like He Did in Louisiana
By Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
18 November 19
 The article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column, "The Borowitz Report." 
 elivering an ominous threat to members of his own party, Donald J. Trump warned congressional Republicans on Monday that if they vote for impeachment he would come to their states and campaign for their reëlection.
In a series of intimidating, early-morning tweets, Trump made it clear that if Republicans wobble on impeachment, “I will hold rallies in your state and support you with everything I’ve got.”
Making it clear that his threat was far from hollow, Trump tweeted an image of a “Keep America Great” banner and warned, “I used these in Louisiana and Kentucky. Don’t think I won’t use them in your state!”
Trump’s threat to campaign enthusiastically for disloyal Republicans had an immediate impact on Monday, as several G.O.P. congresspeople who had previously called the President’s actions toward Ukraine “troubling” revised their assessment to “probably no big deal, now that I think about it.”
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Here's the Waiver Colin Kaepernick Was Asked to Sign to Get Back on the NFL's Plantation |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=44501"><span class="small">Michael Harriot, The Root</span></a>
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Monday, 18 November 2019 13:22 |
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Harriot writes: "While NFL insiders have said that Kaepernick looks as good or better than many of the 115 quarterbacks who have signed contracts to play in the NFL since Kaepernick was whiteballed, the signal-caller remains unsigned."
Colin Kaepernick. (photo: Jake Roth/Reuters)
Here's the Waiver Colin Kaepernick Was Asked to Sign to Get Back on the NFL's Plantation
By Michael Harriot, The Root
18 November 19
 hortly before the NFL held a sham one-man slave auction combine for Colin Kaepernick, the league presented the embattled activist and quarterback with a waiver that essentially torched the prospect of Kaepernick participating in the public relations hoax reportedly concocted by Jay-Z, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, and NFL owners.
To be clear, this was a publicity stunt.
NFL teams are free to evaluate, work out and sign players at their discretion. But after reaching out to every team in the league, there hasn’t been a single team interested in even talking to Kaepernick or watching a workout. Yet last week, without any prompting, the NFL’s front office suddenly demanded suggested that the teams who, again, had shown no interest in the former 49er QB—and who had to pay him millions in a grievance settlement—should head to Atlanta less than 24 hours before game time to watch Kaepernick exercise.
“I’m a little bit pessimistic because I’ve talked to all 32 teams,” Kaepernick’s agent Jeff Nalley said to CBS. “I’ve reached out to them recently, and none of them have had any interest. I’ll tell you this: No team asked for this workout. The league office asked for this workout.”
Aside from the suspicious timing, ESPN’s Howard Bryant notes that the league also prohibited Kaepernick’s team from filming the workout, a stipulation that is almost unheard of.
The issue that led to the impasse was the NFL’s insistence that Kaepernick sign an “unusual” waiver. Kaepernick has reportedly been mulling a collusion lawsuit against the NFL. Contrary to popular belief, Kaepernick has never challenged the NFL in a court of law. While news outlets have called Kaepernick’s previous settlement a “lawsuit,” it was technically an NFL Players Association grievance that was settled through arbitration, as required by the NFLPA union contract.
ProFootballTalk’s Mike Florio, who is also a lawyer, reports:
The three-page, 13-paragraph documents contains several specific provisions that could be relevant to the question of whether the NFL was trying to parlay the waiver into a release of any claims for collusion/retaliation that Kaepernick could make as a result of his ongoing unemployment by the league since settling his first collusion case in February…
If I were representing Kaepernick, and if the goal were to have a genuine workout aimed at enhancing his chances of being signed by an NFL team, I would have asked immediately for the document to be revised to specifically clarify that any and all potential employment rights would be preserved. If the league had refused, I wouldn’t have signed it, because the language leaves the door sufficiently ajar for a subsequent defense to a collusion/retaliation case that signing the waiver extinguished the claims.
According to Sports Illustrated, rapper, NFL partner and heralded capitalist, Jay-Z was “disappointed with Colin’s actions and believes he turned a legitimate workout into a publicity stunt.” Of course, Sports Illustrated didn’t name its “sources” but some have speculated that the quote came from the Official Entertainment Minstrel of the National Football League: Shawn Corey Carter.
While NFL insiders have said that Kaepernick looks as good or better than many of the 115 quarterbacks who have signed contracts to play in the NFL since Kaepernick was whiteballed, the signal-caller remains unsigned.
ESPN blowhard and Great Value Jason Whitlock, Stephen A. Smith, who explained that Kaepernick worked every day and spent his own money to show off his skills because Kaepernick wanted to be “a martyr,” remains a fucking joke.
Some people will undoubtedly take issue with the implication that Kaepernick was, or is, a slave. But that’s not how analogies work. For instance, if I called Stephen A. Smith the Michael Jordan of sellouts, that does not mean that I think Shuck and Jive Hall-of-Famer Stephen Asswipe Smith (I’m pretty sure that’s his real name—or at least his rap handle) is a great basketball player.
But if I did compare the NFL to a plantation, then Jay-Z would probably insist that working for Massa is better than freedom.
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Shut Down the School of the Americas |
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Written by
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Monday, 18 November 2019 13:22 |
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Excerpt: "The School of the Americas/WHINSEC in Fort Benning, Georgia, has become notorious for training and enabling torturers, dictators, and massacres throughout the Western Hemisphere. But the SOA's crimes aren't a thing of the past - the school is still training the human rights abusers of today, especially through ICE and the Border Patrol."
Students from the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (formerly School of the Americas) and students from the Naval Small Craft Instruction and Technical Training School conduct a joint assault on a simulated narcotics camp during a field training exercise. (photo: US Navy)
Shut Down the School of the Americas
By Dévora González and Azadeh Shahshahani, Jacobin
18 November 19
The School of the Americas/WHINSEC in Fort Benning, Georgia, has become notorious for training and enabling torturers, dictators, and massacres throughout the Western Hemisphere. But the SOA’s crimes aren’t a thing of the past — the school is still training the human rights abusers of today, especially through ICE and the Border Patrol.
 n November 16, 1989, the US-trained and funded Salvadoran Atlacatl Battalion entered the grounds of El Salvador’s Central American University (UCA) and brutally murdered six Jesuit priests, sixteen-year-old Celina Ramos, and her mother, Elba Ramos. Nineteen of the twenty-five Atlacatl Battalion soldiers were graduates of the US Army School of the Americas (SOA) — a combat training institution with the ostensible aim of instructing Latin American militaries in control tactics over armed counterinsurgent groups.
SOA was founded in the Panama Canal Zone in 1946 and expelled from Panama to Fort Benning near Columbus, Georgia, in 1984. The slain Jesuit priests worked in solidarity with El Salvador’s poor and marginalized and were outspoken critics of the country’s military dictatorship. They are among the 75,000 civilians murdered during the US-backed war in El Salvador between 1980 and 1992.
The SOA has trained more than 83,000 Latin American security forces since its founding. Notorious graduates of the SOA — including nearly a dozen dictators and some of the worst human rights violators in the continent — are guilty of using torture, rape, assassination, forced disappearance, massacres, and forced displacement of communities to wage war against their own people. Former Panamanian president Jorge Illueca stated that the School of the Americas was the “biggest base for destabilization in Latin America.” US-led and supported state violence abroad has ravaged and devastated communities in Central and South America, many of whose people are forced to migrate north.
On September 20, 1996, under intense public scrutiny, the Pentagon released the SOA training manuals, which advocated torture, extortion, blackmail, and the targeting of civilian populations. The release of these manuals proved that US taxpayer money was used to teach Latin American state forces how to torture and repress civilian populations.
A US congressional task force reported that those responsible for the 1989 UCA massacre in El Salvador were trained at the US Army School of the Americas, and as public pressure mounted to close the SOA, the Department of Defense responded by replacing the School of the Americas with the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC) in January 2001. The measure passed when the House of Representatives defeated a bipartisan amendment to close the school and conduct a congressional investigation by a narrow ten-vote margin. The opening of WHINSEC is not grounded in any critical assessment of the training, procedures, performance, or consequences of the training program it copies. Further, it ignores congressional concerns and the public outcry over the SOA’s past and present links to human rights atrocities.
To this day, WHINSEC continues to train Latin American security officers — including immigration officials.
In 2015, the first US Border Patrol agent graduated from the infamous training facility. On October 24 of this year, a contract between Border Patrol and Winchester Ammunition became public, confirming that Border Patrol purchased 33 million rounds of bullets and could purchase more than 330 million additional rounds over the next five years. Training of Border Patrol staff at Fort Benning coupled with their increased firepower is setting the stage for US state agents to wage war against undocumented migrants and refugees at border crossings and within the United States.
Over the past fifteen years, nearly one hundred people have been killed by US Border Patrol as a direct result of their excessive use of force, including the cross-border killings of fifteen-year-old Sergio Adrián Hernández Güereca in 2010 and sixteen-year-old José Antonio Elena Rodríguez in 2012. Both teenagers were on Mexican soil when they were shot at and killed by US Border Patrol agents located on US soil. Not a single Border Patrol agent has ever been held legally accountable for these crimes. According to a recent internal government report obtained by Quartz, criminal misconduct by border officers is at a five-year high.
In addition to US Border Patrol agents now being trained at the location notorious for instructing Latin American security forces in civilian-targeted warfare, on September 9 of this year, an unredacted Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) report revealed that ICE agents will also begin training there. The report divulged that ICE contracted New Mexico training systems company Strategic Operations for almost $1 million to build realistic models of US cities at Fort Benning. This will be a training facility meant to simulate raids that ICE teams would carry out in places like Chicago and Arizona, and the ICE Special Response Teams will be trained to deal with immigrants crossing the border.
There are already extremely detailed designs of buildings meant to imitate the kinds of places that ICE teams will raid, such as a two-story brick residential building typical of Chicago and a single-family six-room home typical of Arizona, complete with “set props” such as furniture, clothing, and toys. According to the contract, the plans include expansion for the future, with as many as fifty more buildings to be added to the training facility.
ICE agents have carried out violence against immigrants across the country. In July, video surfaced of ICE officers in Kansas City assaulting a man named Florencio Millan-Vazquez in front of his children and girlfriend; they smashed his car window and dragged him out to arrest him after claiming there was a warrant for his arrest, despite not providing evidence of this. More recently, an immigrant man was shot by ICE agents in Nashville, Tennessee, this past September and had to be hospitalized. ICE remains a human rights threat across the United States.
The United States is directly implicated in training and financing the perpetrators of gross human rights violations. In South and Central America, this violence is marked by military, economic, and political intervention, in addition to training proxy fighters at the SOA/WHINSEC. Now, US Department of Homeland Security agents are being trained at the same location in the same tactics of civilian-targeted warfare. The results are already clear: lethally trained and heavily militarized state security forces that target civilian populations, specifically communities of color, without meaningful oversight or accountability.
On the thirtieth anniversary of the UCA massacre, human rights organizations are continuing to call for the closure of the SOA/WHINSEC training facility at Fort Benning. The school’s crimes aren’t just evident in the atrocities of the past — they’re also still found in the horrors along the US-Mexico border and through the atrocious violence of ICE today. Those who are horrified by the crimes of the Border Patrol and ICE should join the call to shut down the SOA/WHINSEC and similar training centers.
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FOCUS: Mike's Journalism 101 |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=35918"><span class="small">Michael Moore, Michael Moore's Facebook Page</span></a>
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Monday, 18 November 2019 11:42 |
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Moore writes: "Media, please - start using the correct language when describing people and events."
Filmmaker Michael Moore. (photo: Sacha Lecca)
Mike's Journalism 101
By Michael Moore, Michael Moore's Facebook Page
18 November 19
 ike’s Journalism 101. First edition.
Media, please — start using the correct language when describing people and events. Whenever you say “El Chapo” you always precede it with “drug lord.” Do the same for these:?
1. Always refer to a “School shooting” as school terrorism or an act of gun terror at school.
?2. Always refer to Rudy Giuliani as “Trump’s PERSONAL Attorney. ?” Just saying his name keeps Trump’s crimes one step separated from the actual criminal.
3. Do not use State Dept-speak by calling what Sondland and Giuliani were doing in Ukraine an “irregular channel.” It was a shadow operation and a bribery attempt.
4. Stop with the “quid pro quo.” In English it is called extortion.
5. Deval Patrick may be “the former governor of Massachusetts,” but he is CURRENTLY the Managing Director and a Co-Partner at Bain Capital — Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital, the private equity firm that has closed businesses and destroyed towns. Say what he is NOW. (HuffPost has it right — they call him the “Foreclosure Mogul”).
6. Sorry if this one isn’t popular, but getting a seat on the Boards of both a Ukrainian and a Chinese mega-company while your father is VP of the USA is the first cousin of getting your kids into USC when they don’t know how to row a boat. (Note: there is NO equivalency between Biden’s son and Trump’s criminal actions which have cost the lives of Ukrainians as he tried to rig another American election. THAT is treason. Do not let the Republicans force you to change the subject — the only subject.)
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f this really is Attorney General William Barr’s final go-round as a servant to radical conservative power, and we can only pray to god that it is, he’s certainly going out with a bang. In the past two weeks, he’s given two speeches that are so stunningly detached from political reality, and so basically and fundamentally un-American, that they were probably best given from atop a milk crate in Washington Square, and not from respectable rostrums provided by powerful and influential institutions. In short, Barr has become something of a raving maniac. 
