Source Article from https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/26/us/california-power-shutoff/index.html

Members of Congress and guests pay their respects to the late Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg as her casket lies in state during a memorial service in her honor in Statuary Hall of the U.S. Capitol.

Olivier Douliery/Pool/AFP via Getty Images


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Members of Congress and guests pay their respects to the late Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg as her casket lies in state during a memorial service in her honor in Statuary Hall of the U.S. Capitol.

Olivier Douliery/Pool/AFP via Getty Images

Thousands of mourners paid their respects to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg during the two days her casket rested at the top of the Supreme Court steps, including former President Bill Clinton, who nominated her to the high court in 1993, and President Trump.

On Friday, Ginsburg lay in state at the U.S. Capitol, the first woman and the first Jewish person to be given that honor in the nation’s history.

Ginsburg, who died at the age of 87 from pancreatic cancer, was only the second woman to be nominated to the Supreme Court.

We take a look at the past three days of remembrance for Ginsburg in photos.

Weds., Sept. 23, 2020:

Thurs., Sept. 24, 2020:

Fri., Sept. 25, 2020:

Source Article from https://www.npr.org/sections/pictureshow/2020/09/26/917122411/photos-remembering-supreme-court-justice-ruth-bader-ginsburg

Women’s March co-founder Tamika Mallory calls Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron a ‘sell out’ and tells him she has ‘no respect for your black skin’

  • Tamika Mallory made the remarks at a press conference on Friday in Louisville
  • Compared Cameron to ‘sell-out N**roes’ who facilitated the slave trade
  • Cameron is Kentucky’s first black attorney general and a rising star in the GOP
  • Mallory said to Cameron that she has ‘no respect for your black skin’

Tamika Mallory, the co-founder of the Women’s March, has harshly criticized Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron, comparing him to ‘sell-out N**roes’ who participated in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. 

Mallory spoke at a press conference in Louisville, Kentucky on Friday, where she blasted Cameron over a grand jury’s decision not to directly charge officers in Breonna Taylor‘s killing. 

‘Daniel Cameron is no different than the sell-out N**roes that sold our people into slavery and helped white men capture our people to abuse them and to traffic them,’ she said. ‘That is who you are Daniel Cameron.

‘You are a sell-out, and you were used by the system to harm your own mama, your own black mama,’ she continued. ‘We have no respect for you, no respect for your black skin because all of our skinfolk ain’t our kinfolk and you do not belong to black people at all.’

‘Daniel Cameron is no different than the sell-out N**roes that sold our people into slavery,’ said Women’s March co-founder Tamika Mallory at a press conference on Friday

Cameron is Kentucky’s first black attorney general, and is considered to be a rising star in the Republican party. He was included on President Donald Trump’s shortlist of potential Supreme Court nominees, and praised by the president, who said he handled the Taylor case ‘very well’.

On Wednesday, Cameron announced the grand jury findings in Taylor’s March 13 death. She was fatally shot by police during a drug raid, after cops returned fire when her boyfriend shot at and struck one officer.

Cameron presented the evidence to a state grand jury, which found Taylor’s shooting death justified. The grand jury indicted one of the three officers who opened fire for wanton endangerment, over alleged wild shots that entered a neighboring apartment. 

Mallory pointed out that Cameron announced the grand jury finding on September 23, the same date that in 1955 an all-white jury acquitted two defendants in the murder of Emmett Till, a black boy who was lynched in Mississippi.

On Wednesday, Cameron announced the grand jury findings in Taylor’s March 13 death. The grand jury did not directly charge officers with her killing

‘Now I don’t know if it’s just that Daniel Cameron is stupid or that he is very, very, very clear about history and made a decision to wait six months and come forward with this announcement, this garbage that we received on the exact same day that Emmett Till’s family received the same results,’ she said. 

A spokesperson for Cameron’s office said that he understands that the outcome of the grand jury proceedings was not what protesters had hoped for.

‘Regarding today’s statements at the press conference, everyone is entitled to their opinion, but prosecutors and Grand Jury members are bound by the facts and by the law,’ the spokesperson said in a statement. 

‘Attorney General Cameron is committed to doing everything he can to ensure the integrity of the prosecution before him and continue fulfilling his ethical obligations both as a prosecutor and as a partner in the ongoing federal investigation.’ 

The comments below have been moderated in advance.

The views expressed in the contents above are those of our users and do not necessarily reflect the views of MailOnline.

Source Article from https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8775011/Womens-March-founder-Tamika-Mallory-calls-Kentucky-Attorney-General-Daniel-Cameron-sell-out.html

Trump said this week that ByteDance “will have nothing to do with it. And if they do, we just won’t make the deal.”

Meanwhile, Beijing will likely need to green light the deal. 

ByteDance has applied for an export license with the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Commerce and is awaiting a decision. It’s unclear what exactly ByteDance has applied to export given it has previously said it will not transfer technologies or algorithms to Oracle as part of any deal.

However, the Chinese technology firm did say that Oracle could inspect its source code.

In August, China updated its export restrictions list to include technologies “recommendation of personalized information services based on data analysis.” While ByteDance wasn’t named, this was seen to relate to the core recommendation algorithm that makes the app suggest videos to users. 

All eyes will be on whether Beijing gives approval for this and the actual terms of the deal.

Source Article from https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/25/tiktok-deal-timeline-the-latest-in-the-messy-saga-as-ban-looms.html

Black North Carolina voters are seeing their ballots rejected at twice the rate of white residents in North Carolina, a study by a University of Florida (UF) elections expert reported.

Black voters in the state are seeing around 4 percent of ballots rejected. Voter advocates say this is because a higher proportion of Black voters are voting by mail for the first time, leading to minor mistakes that nullify votes.

The data was collected by the U.S. Elections Project and managed by Michael McDonald, a UF professor who specializes in American elections.

The race of voters is disclosed in the data because voters can list their race when registering in North Carolina.

Elections officials report the three most common mistakes leading to ballot rejection are omitted signatures, lack of a witness signature, or blank address lines, according to Bloomberg.

T. Anthony Spearman, president of the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP, told Bloomberg that African Americans had favored voting in person in past elections, adding for many “this is their first time” voting by mail.

“These mistakes are prone to happen,” Spearman said.

Anyone who has their ballot rejected will be notified and given the opportunity to make corrections, elections officials said. Around 55 percent of ballots that have been received came from Democrats, and 16 percent came from Republicans.

Hilary Harris Klein, an attorney with the voting rights group Southern Coalition for Social Justice, said despite the ability to rectify invalidated ballots, “There is cause for concern when you look at the racial disparity.”

North Carolina started mailing ballots to voters on Sept. 4 and received more than 198,000 returned through Thursday morning, according to figures from the election board.

Nearly 1 million of North Carolina’s 7.2 million registered voters have requested vote-by-mail ballots, marking 12 times the amount from late September 2016, the Board of Elections reported.

 

Source Article from https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/518292-black-north-carolina-voters-mail-in-ballots-rejected-at-twice-the-rate

“Real Time” host Bill Maher blasted the mainstream media for dismissing his years-long warnings about President Trump possibly refusing to leave office if defeated in November.

Trump caused shockwaves in the media this week after declining to commit to a peaceful transition of power, suggesting mail-in ballots could delegitimize the election results. Amid a public outcry by both Democrats and some Republicans, the White House later stated he would uphold a peaceful transition of power after a “free and fair election.”

During his panel discussion on Maher’s show, the host began by singling out The New York Times for burying Trump’s remarks on “page 15” of the newspaper.

“This is not the paper that I grew up with,” Maher said. “I would put that on the front page. That’s just crazy me. They wrote, ‘The once-unthinkable notion that the president might refuse to accept the results of an election.’ Well, it wasn’t unthinkable to everybody!”

BILL MAHER MOCKS GUESTS’ CONFIDENCE IN BIDEN: ‘YOU GUYS ARE WHISTLING PAST THE GRAVEYARD’

“I’m going to shut up about it, but it does f—ing stick in my craw that nobody listened to me and that I got no help from The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN — mainstream media should have amplified … I got no help amplifying the point I was making,” he told the panel.

Maher, who has long predicted that Trump won’t leave the White House if he loses in November, then played a montage of himself offering such warnings on his show — dating to April 2018.

“I get it that, you know, these mainstream media people don’t like me … people who walk outside the boundaries like I do. We don’t just, you know, take it, bend the knee, and parrot the one true opinion,” Maher continued. “We’re bad people, so they don’t cover this show. But on this one, you could’ve given me a little help.”

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The HBO star then credited Trump for being the one person who “amplified” his warnings, playing another montage of the president mocking the “Real Time” host’s apocalyptic prediction at his rallies.

Maher then asked his panel what they think will happen. CNN political analyst Bakari Sellars predicted delayed election results with either an “election week” or “election month” to follow. Podcast host Coleman Hughes said if Trump’s defeated he “will leave” but will “complain and won’t concede” — with 30 percent of the country agreeing with him, a prediction Maher called “optimistic.”

Both Maher and Hughes agreed that regardless of who wins, there will likely be “trouble in the streets.”

Source Article from https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/maher-rips-nyt-cnn-for-dismissing-his-warnings-about-trump-not-leaving-office

Women’s March co-founder Tamika Mallory calls Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron a ‘sell out’ and tells him she has ‘no respect for your black skin’

  • Tamika Mallory made the remarks at a press conference on Friday in Louisville
  • Compared Cameron to ‘sell-out N**roes’ who facilitated the slave trade
  • Cameron is Kentucky’s first black attorney general and a rising star in the GOP
  • Mallory said to Cameron that she has ‘no respect for your black skin’

Tamika Mallory, the co-founder of the Women’s March, has harshly criticized Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron, comparing him to ‘sell-out N**roes’ who participated in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. 

Mallory spoke at a press conference in Louisville, Kentucky on Friday, where she blasted Cameron over a grand jury’s decision not to directly charge officers in Breonna Taylor‘s killing. 

‘Daniel Cameron is no different than the sell-out N**roes that sold our people into slavery and helped white men capture our people to abuse them and to traffic them,’ she said. ‘That is who you are Daniel Cameron.

‘You are a sell-out, and you were used by the system to harm your own mama, your own black mama,’ she continued. ‘We have no respect for you, no respect for your black skin because all of our skinfolk ain’t our kinfolk and you do not belong to black people at all.’

‘Daniel Cameron is no different than the sell-out N**roes that sold our people into slavery,’ said Women’s March co-founder Tamika Mallory at a press conference on Friday

Cameron is Kentucky’s first black attorney general, and is considered to be a rising star in the Republican party. He was included on President Donald Trump’s shortlist of potential Supreme Court nominees, and praised by the president, who said he handled the Taylor case ‘very well’.

On Wednesday, Cameron announced the grand jury findings in Taylor’s March 13 death. She was fatally shot by police during a drug raid, after cops returned fire when her boyfriend shot at and struck one officer.

Cameron presented the evidence to a state grand jury, which found Taylor’s shooting death justified. The grand jury indicted one of the three officers who opened fire for wanton endangerment, over alleged wild shots that entered a neighboring apartment. 

Mallory pointed out that Cameron announced the grand jury finding on September 23, the same date that in 1955 an all-white jury acquitted two defendants in the murder of Emmett Till, a black boy who was lynched in Mississippi.

On Wednesday, Cameron announced the grand jury findings in Taylor’s March 13 death. The grand jury did not directly charge officers with her killing

‘Now I don’t know if it’s just that Daniel Cameron is stupid or that he is very, very, very clear about history and made a decision to wait six months and come forward with this announcement, this garbage that we received on the exact same day that Emmett Till’s family received the same results,’ she said. 

A spokesperson for Cameron’s office said that he understands that the outcome of the grand jury proceedings was not what protesters had hoped for.

‘Regarding today’s statements at the press conference, everyone is entitled to their opinion, but prosecutors and Grand Jury members are bound by the facts and by the law,’ the spokesperson said in a statement. 

‘Attorney General Cameron is committed to doing everything he can to ensure the integrity of the prosecution before him and continue fulfilling his ethical obligations both as a prosecutor and as a partner in the ongoing federal investigation.’ 

The comments below have been moderated in advance.

The views expressed in the contents above are those of our users and do not necessarily reflect the views of MailOnline.

Source Article from https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8775011/Womens-March-founder-Tamika-Mallory-calls-Kentucky-Attorney-General-Daniel-Cameron-sell-out.html

In 2012, the political scientist Ross Baker spent a sabbatical brushing up on his congressional knowledge by spending time in the office of Harry Reid, the then Democratic majority leader in the US Senate. Baker vividly remembers Reid telling him a story about Mitch McConnell, his opposite number in the Republican party.

“Reid told me he couldn’t get McConnell to go to the White House with him,” Baker recalled. “McConnell would say, ‘I don’t want to go to that place.’ Reid specifically told me, ‘Mitch hates to go there.’”

For Baker, the distinguished professor of political science at Rutgers University, that exchange about McConnell’s resistance to even visiting Barack Obama in the White House provided a telling insight into how rigid in its partisanship the modern Republican party under his leadership had become. It resonated with McConnell’s comment two years previously, that “the single most important thing we have to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president”.

Such a visceral determination to oust a sitting president was not in the spirit of the Senate as it had historically been conceived. The world’s “greatest deliberative body”, as the now fraying cliché goes, was meant to rise above party political point-scoring.

“The Senate was once the place where problems got solved, where senators were able to converse across party lines,” Baker told the Guardian. “It was the place for the grown-ups. They thought of themselves as special. Well, they’re not special any more.”

Just how far from special the US Senate has become has been exposed this week in the wake of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death. McConnell lost no time in pressing ahead with a ruthless overturning of a precedent that he himself had invented in 2016.

In that year, the majority leader refused to hold hearings on Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the US supreme court on grounds that it was a presidential election year and that the people should decide by choosing the next incumbent of the White House. Yet this year McConnell has had no hesitation in applying the opposite rationale – that Donald Trump, not the people, should decide Ginsburg’s successor – even though the election is less than two months away.

The gambit is all but assured to go ahead after leading Republican senators signaled their willingness to fall in line. It would secure a 6-3 conservative stranglehold on the nation’s top court that could imperil core constitutional rights, including a woman’s right to an abortion under Roe v Wade.

McConnell’s less than subtle volte-face has been widely condemned as rank hypocrisy. But for Sabeel Rahman, president of the advocacy group Demos Action, it is far more serious than that.

“This is a brazen power grab by the far right of the conservative party. They are shameless about using the exact opposite argument of the one they used last time because they want to control the courts for a generation,” Rahman said.

The US Capitol building is seen from the Russell Senate Office Building. Photograph: Sarah Silbiger/Reuters

The move rankles all the more deeply among progressives and Democratic supporters given the profoundly uneven representation in the US Senate. Under the chamber’s reductionist formula, each state in the Union is awarded two seats – irrespective of population.

As a result, a single Californian voter has one-fortieth the representative power of a voter from Montana, given that California (population 40m) has the same number of Senate seats as Montana (population 1m). The polite justification for this discrepancy has been that the Founding Fathers wanted to give minority views and smaller states a voice.

But realpolitik came into it too, in the form of a compromise needed to persuade the southern slave-owning states to join the fledgling nation. “What the world wanted from the US – cotton for the spinning mills of Manchester and Leeds – came from the south. So the slave states had to be bribed,” Baker said.

Those inauspicious beginnings are reflected in the composition of the Senate, which over its 231 years has had a woeful record on diversity. In all those years, there have been almost 2,000 senators, of whom a paltry 10 have been African American (the current tally is three – the Democrats Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, and the Republican Tim Scott).

Baker had a striking way of looking at the Senate through the lens of gerrymandering, the tactic widely used by Republicans to draw district boundaries for the House of Representatives and state assemblies in such a way as to artificially increase white voters’ electoral power. “The modern Senate is like one great gerrymander because of the vastly inflated representation it gives to white voters,” he said.

With the advent of the industrial revolution and the urbanization that followed, the perversity of the slavery-soiled two-seats-per-state rule has become exacerbated. A few Democratic-controlled highly urbanized states with dense and diverse populations now have the same Senate representation as many increasingly depopulated predominantly white and Republican rural states.

David Birdsell, dean of Baruch College’s Marxe School of Public and International Affairs, estimates that by 2040, Senators representing 70% of the American population will hold only 30% of the seats in the Senate. As a result, the original vision for the body has become increasingly distorted.

“Yes, the founders intended to protect minority opinions,” Birdsell said. “But they did not intend to create a dictatorship of the minority that prevents the majority from moving forward with sensible policies that benefit everybody.”

The widening electoral deficit has a direct impact on the composition of the US supreme court – as we are now witnessing. The last justice of the court to be nominated by Trump, Brett Kavanaugh, was confirmed by the Senate in a vote of 50 to 48.

All but one of those 50 senators were Republican, many from smaller states with largely white electorates. Between them, they represented a mere 44% of the American people.

The same pattern is likely to play out in the current storm over Ginsburg’s replacement. A president elected through the electoral college by a minority of the American people (Trump attracted 3m fewer votes than Hillary Clinton in 2016) will nominate a justice who will be confirmed by Republican senators representing a minority of the American people.

The outcome will be a US supreme court whose 6-3 majority of staunch conservative justices will reflect a minority of public opinion on many of the key issues facing the country – from the climate crisis to abortion to racial justice.

“This is a measure of how anti-democratic American democracy is right now,” Rahman said. “The central pillars of our democratic infrastructure are increasingly controlled by the right wing of a minority party that is overriding the urgent needs of most Americans. This is unsustainable – if this continues, we don’t get to call ourselves a democracy.”

Source Article from https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/25/us-senate-supreme-court-democracy-minority

“I’d be stupid to say that I don’t expect someone to come in with some type of nefarious motives,” he said. “The moment that we see it, we will say something. We will be pointing that out to the authorities.”

In Louisville, right-wing groups have also returned to the streets, with militia members carrying rifles and standing outside downtown businesses. It was a scene that paralleled recent events in Kenosha, Wis., where 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse has been charged in the killing of two people after he arrived in the city with a rifle and vowed to protect businesses from demonstrators, who were protesting the police shooting of Jacob Blake.

On Friday, family and lawyers of Ms. Taylor took aim at the Kentucky attorney general, demanding that he release further evidence of his role in a case that culminated this week when a grand jury indicted one officer for his role in the botched raid on Ms. Taylor’s home but declined to press charges against the two police officers who shot her.

“Release the transcripts!” the group shouted, standing in a square in downtown Louisville and wearing face masks featuring Ms. Taylor’s name.

Speaking publicly for the first time since the grand jury’s decision, Ms. Taylor’s mother, Tamika Palmer, released a statement denouncing Daniel Cameron, a rising Republican star and the first Black attorney general in Kentucky history, for being on the “wrong side of the law.”

“He knew he had the power to do the right thing,” she said in a statement, which was read by Bianca Austin, Ms. Taylor’s aunt. “He had the power to start the healing of this city. He had the power to help mend over 400 years of oppression. What he helped me realize is it will always be us against them. We are never safe.”

Sarah Mervosh contributed reporting from New York, and John Eligon from Louisville, Ky.

Source Article from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/25/us/portland-proud-boys-antifa-protests.html

Zhang Yiming, chief executive officer and founder of ByteDance Ltd., poses for a photograph in Beijing, China in 2019.

Bloomberg/Gilles Sabrie/Bloomberg via Getty Images


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Zhang Yiming, chief executive officer and founder of ByteDance Ltd., poses for a photograph in Beijing, China in 2019.

Bloomberg/Gilles Sabrie/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The Trump administration is accusing the the chief executive of ByteDance, the owner of video-sharing app TikTok, of being “a mouthpiece” for the Chinese Community Party and alleging that the tech company has a close relationship with Beijing authorities that endangers the security of Americans.

The Justice Department on Friday night filed the Trump administration’s most thorough explanation of its push to ban TikTok in a legal filing in response to TikTok’s lawsuit asking a federal judge to stop Trump’s ban from taking effect on midnight Sunday.

U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols has scheduled a hearing for 9:30 a.m. Sunday to decide whether the Trump administration’s ban will take effect.

In the submission to the court, Justice Department lawyers say ByteDance CEO Zhang Yiming has made public statements showing he is “committed to promoting” the agenda of the Chinese Communist Party.

TikTok has for months distanced itself from its corporate owner, ByteDance, asserting that data on the more than 100 million U.S. users is stored primarily in Virginia, with backup in Singapore.

But the Trump administration says it has evidence that some data is being transmitted to China, claiming such information can be accessed by Chinese authorities to track Americans and build dossiers that could be deployed for blackmail.

Furthermore, Justice Department officials say ByteDance is beholden to Chinese laws that may require the company to assist in surveillance and intelligence operations at the direction of the Chinese government.

TikTok strenuously denies it ever has or will in the future cooperate with any demands from China’s authoritarian regime. But the Trump administration said Friday that a recent study showed that 37% of the IP addresses TikTok’s Android users connect to are based in China.

The Trump administration, however, did not offer any direct evidence that TikTok’s U.S. data has ever been assessed by Beijing officials.

The Justice Department filed all of the documents under seal earlier Friday, an unusual move for a government response to a motion for a preliminary injunction. Several hours later, Justice Department lawyers re-filed the documents with a number of sections redacted pertaining to how exactly TikTok allegedly transmits Americans’ data to China.

The Justice Department’s federal court filing in response to TikTok’s lawsuit seeking a preliminary injunction to block Trump’s ban from taking effect.

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The United States District Court for the District of Columbia

The Justice Department’s federal court filing in response to TikTok’s lawsuit seeking a preliminary injunction to block Trump’s ban from taking effect.

The United States District Court for the District of Columbia

In another document newly public on Friday that the Trump administration submitted as an attachment to its primary filing, the Commerce Department detailed its concerns with TikTok in an intelligence and security assessment.

Trump officials point to a number of instances that allegedly show that ByteDance has a cozy relationship with Beijing authorities.

ByteDance, according to the document, employs 130 Chinese Communist Party members, who are embedded at ByteDance’s Beijing office.

In June 2018, according to the Commerce Department memo, ByteDance employees organized a party in which they faced a Chinese Communist Party flag, “raised their right hand, clenched their fists, and reiterated their guarantee as a party member and vowed to never betray the party.”

Trump officials allege that though ByteDance CEO Zhang Yiming is not a member of the Chinese Communist Party, he issued a public apology to the government in April 2018 over one of ByteDance’s apps that appeared to have irked authorities. “Our product took the wrong path, and content appeared that was incommensurate with socialist core values,” Yiming said then.

In its own filing, TikTok has maintained that U.S. user data never goes to Chinese soil. According to the company, the data on Americans is “sharded” or broken up into unidentifiable bits and stored across many different servers.

Roland Cloutier, TikTok’s global chief security officer, said in a sworn statement to the court that sensitive information like names, birthdays, home addresses phone numbers and contact lists are encrypted.

“It is impossible to decrypt this encrypted user data without a key that has been generated and managed…by our security team in the United States,” Cloutier wrote.

Other revealing details emerged Friday in the Commerce Department memo, including that ByteDance allegedly has spent $1 billion on ads on competing apps Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat in order to boost its user base. TikTok has nearly 700 million active monthly users worldwide.

Trump said he gave a deal to save TikTok involving companies Oracle and Walmart his tentative blessing, but an agreement never materialized, as the U.S. firms and ByteDance appear at odds over a number of details, including what firm would hold the largest stake in the new company. TikTok acquisition talks are ongoing.

Source Article from https://www.npr.org/2020/09/26/917134452/new-doj-filing-tiktoks-owner-is-a-mouthpiece-of-chinese-communist-party

In a 2006 speech to Notre Dame graduates, she spoke of the law as a higher calling. “If you can keep in mind that your fundamental purpose in life is not to be a lawyer, but to know, love and serve God, you truly will be a different kind of lawyer,” she said.

But during her 2017 confirmation hearing, she affirmed that she would keep her personal views separate from her duties as a judge. “If you’re asking whether I take my faith seriously and I’m a faithful Catholic, I am,” she told senators. “Although I would stress that my personal church affiliation or my religious belief would not bear in the discharge of my duties as a judge.” She was confirmed on a 55-to-43 vote, largely along party lines.

As a law professor, Judge Barrett was a member of Faculty for Life, an anti-abortion group, and wrote skeptically about precedent in Supreme Court rulings, which both sides in the abortion debate took to mean she would be open to revisiting Roe v. Wade.

“I tend to agree with those who say that a justice’s duty is to the Constitution and that it is thus more legitimate for her to enforce her best understanding of the Constitution rather than a precedent she thinks clearly in conflict with it,” she wrote in a Texas Law Review article in 2013.

She later criticized Chief Justice Roberts for his opinion preserving Mr. Obama’s Affordable Care Act, saying he went beyond the plausible meaning of the law. As an appellate judge, she joined an opinion arguing on behalf of an Indiana law banning abortions sought solely because of the sex or disability of a fetus, disagreeing with fellow judges who struck it down as unconstitutional.

Conservative and liberal interest groups did not wait for Mr. Trump’s announcement to open the battle over Judge Barrett’s confirmation. Each side prepared multimillion-dollar campaigns to introduce her to the public and frame the debate to come in the Senate, with an eye on the November contest.

Several polls over the past week have shown that most Americans, including many Republicans, believe the next justice should be selected by the winner of the November election, not by Mr. Trump in the meantime.

Source Article from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/25/us/politics/amy-coney-barrett-supreme-court.html

The Trump administration has pledged repeatedly to lower drug costs, yet drug makers have raised the price of hundreds of medicines amid the coronavirus pandemic.

The announcement of the cards came after talks with the pharmaceutical industry’s major lobby broke down this month, prompting Trump to move ahead with his own plan to slash drug costs — a point of friction between the administration and the industry.

In mid-September, he signed a new executive order for a “most favored nations” plan, which would tie Medicare payments for certain drugs to the significantly lower costs of treatments abroad. The White House said it would use savings from this program – which has not been enacted – to offset the cost of the drug coupon cards.

Public Citizen, a watchdog and consumer advocacy group, slammed the move as a “pathetic attempt to bribe [seniors] for their votes.”

“The solution to outlandishly high pharmaceutical prices is not to give people money to offset extortionate drug prices; the solution is to end price gouging altogether,” Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, said in a statement.

The White House had urged pharmaceutical companies to pay for $100 drug coupons. The industry balked, as pharmaceutical executives were uncomfortable with the optics of “Trump cards” so close to the election, The New York Times reported.

Trump’s revival — and enlargement — of the discount cards caught the health care industry by surprise, according to lobbyists who described themselves baffled as to what the president was talking about, and how he could claim authority to spend so much money on the effort.

Source Article from https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/24/trump-drug-coupons-seniors-421511

New bodycam footage reveals the tense moments in which a Louisville cop involved in Breonna Taylor‘s fatal shooting was moved from the scene after being injured by gunfire. 

Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly was struck in the femoral artery and later had to undergo surgery following the shooting that killed the 26-year-old black EMT in March, according to Fox News

Mattingly had been shot by Taylor’s boyfriend Kenneth Walker who claimed he only fired because the cops didn’t identify themselves.  

His lawyer posted the video to Twitter, hitting out that Mattingly had been branded ‘a “murderer,” when all he did was defend himself’. 

Scroll down for video 

Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly is allegedly seen on the ground outside Breonna Taylor’s apartment after being shot in the leg by her boyfriend Kenneth Walker in the raid that killed her

 An officer pulls him injured from the ground to bring him for medical treatment

Mattingly’s lawyer Todd McMurtry threatened those who continue to call the cop a ‘murderer’

Earlier this week, a Kentucky grand jury decided not to indict Mattingly of any crime in relation to the shooting. 

His attorney Todd McMurtry claimed those who still branded him a murderer after the decision needed to ‘retract and apologize immediately’.  

McMurty told Fox News that he represents ‘John in his affirmative claims against people who slandered him by calling him a “murderer”‘. 

In the bodycam footage, which McMurtry says he received from the officer, Mattingly can be seen lying on the ground while his colleagues purportedly escort him away from the scene of the shooting for medical attention. 

Other cops can be saying to ‘grab under his arms’ and ‘cover him, let’s go’ as they attempt to move the injured Mattingly. 

‘Go a little faster’, another officer says, although no ambulance is seen. 

The cops attempt to bring the bleeding Mattingly to the top of a vehicle’s trunk to get him away from the scene.  

The car then drives away toward the exit of the apartment complex.  

According to Wave 3, the footage picks up just after officers had applied a tourniquet on Mattingly’s leg. 

Officers seemed to be unaware if there was still any danger. 

An officer is seen helping Mattingly from the ground as he is bleeding heavily 

The cop then brings Mattingly to a vehicle to bring for treatment for his injury

As they moved Mattingly, Taylor was lying inside her apartment after being struck six times and EMS crews had not yet responded. 

On Wednesday, as he announced the grand jury’s decision on her death, Attorney General Daniel Cameron said that she likely died within a minute or two of being shot. 

Wave 3 reported that Mattingly’s wife said he’d undergone surgery for five hours while doctors attempted to repair his femoral artery after the shooting. 

Louisville Police Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly

He allegedly had to receive multiple blood transfusions because he lost so much blood. 

The Louisville Metro Police Department has not previously denied that there was bodycam footage from the night but claimed that there is none of Taylor’s shooting.  

Protests gathered across America on Wednesday as soon as the Kentucky grand jury’s decision over Taylor’s death were revealed as thousands – including her family – voiced outrage over the cops not facing murder charges. 

Taylor, 26, was killed on March 13 when Sgt Jonathan Mattingly and Detective Myles Cosgrove and Brett Hankison burst down the door to her home in Louisville while executing a botched late-night raid and shot her six times.

The black EMT died in the bungled raid after officers fired 32 rounds into her home and neighboring addresses. 

Taylor’s boyfriend Walker first fired a shot at officers when they entered her apartment with a ‘no knock’ warrant. 

Charges of attempted murder and assault against Walker were dropped earlier this year.  

Walker was never the target of the probe and had no criminal record. He had a license to carry fire arms and had fired a single shot that struck Mattingly. 

Breonna Taylor is pictured above with her boyfriend Kenneth Walker. He opened fire on the officers who stormed into Taylor’s apartment and the officers returned fire

Breonna Taylor was shot six times in the late-night raid in March

The search warrant for  Taylor’s home related to a drugs investigation over her ex-boyfriend who was not present at the property and who had been arrested at a different address earlier that night. 

Officer Brett Hankison, who was fired in the aftermath of the shooting, was charged with three counts of wanton endangerment, Attorney General Daniel Cameron said at a news conference Wednesday.

When he was fired in June, his letter of termination said he showed ‘an extreme indifference to the value of human life’.  

The first-degree charge, a Class D felony which carries a penalty of up to five years in prison, relates to Hankison shooting into the neighboring apartments during the incident. 

They do not relate to the shooting death of Taylor. 

Hankison’s two colleagues, Mattingly and Detective Myles Cosgrove, were not charged because the investigation found their actions were justified, the attorney general said. Fired Louisville detective Brett Hankison was charged with three counts of wanton endangerment in connection to the police raid on the night of March 13

Officers Myles Cosgrove (left) and John Mattingly who were present during the police raid on March 13, were not charged on Wednesday. Brett Hankison (pictured left) was fired from the LMPD while the other two officers were placed on administrative assignment 

Those two other officers were reassigned to administrative duties in the aftermath of the shooting.  

In creating his account of Taylor’s death, the attorney general said his investigators had no video footage from the shooting.

‘Therefore, the sequence of events had to be pieced together through ballistics evidence, 911 calls, police radio traffic and interviews,’ Cameron said.

The three officers involved did not take part in the obtaining of the warrant, he said. 

They knocked on Taylor’s apartment door and announced their presence outside, which Cameron said was corroborated by a neighbor who witnessed the arrival. 

Getting no answer, they ‘breached the door.’ 

Mattingly entered first, and at the end of a corridor saw Taylor and her boyfriend, with Walker pointing a gun.

Walker fired, injuring Mattingly in the thigh. Mattingly returned fire, and his colleagues began shooting soon after, Cameron said. 

Hankison fired 10 bullets. Six bullets hit Taylor but there is no ‘conclusive’ evidence that any came from Hankinson’s gun, Cameron said. 

Bullets fired by Hankison traveled into a neighboring apartment which led to the charges against him. 

Source Article from https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8772931/Video-shows-moments-cop-struck-gunfire-responding-Breonna-Taylors-apartment.html

WILMINGTON, Del. — The final stretch of a presidential campaign is typically a nonstop mix of travel, caffeine and adrenaline. But as the worst pandemic in a century bears down on the United States, Joe Biden is taking a lower key approach.

Since his Aug. 11 selection of California Sen. Kamala Harris as his running mate, Biden has had 22 days where he either didn’t make public appearances, held only virtual fundraisers or ventured from his Delaware home solely for church, according to an Associated Press analysis of his schedules. He made 12 visits outside of Delaware during that period, including a trip to Washington scheduled for Friday to pay respects to the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

THE TOPICS MODERATOR CHRIS WALLACE WILL BRING UP AT NEXT WEEK’S FIRST BIDEN-TRUMP PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE

During the same time, President Donald Trump had 24 trips that took him to 17 different states, not counting a personal visit to New York to see his ailing brother in the hospital or weekend golf outings.

Biden’s aides insist his approach is intentional, showcasing his respect for public health guidelines aimed at preventing the spread of the coronavirus and presenting a responsible contrast with Trump, who has resumed large-scale campaign rallies — sometimes over the objections of local officials. Still, some Democrats say it’s critical that Biden infuse his campaign with more energy.

Texas Democratic Party Chairman Gilberto Hinojosa said not traveling because of the pandemic was a “pretty lame excuse.”

“I thought he had his own plane,” Hinojosa said. “He doesn’t have to sit with one space between another person on a commercial airline like I would.”

Hinojosa argued that Biden prioritizing visits to Texas and Arizona could boost Latino turnout and potentially reduce the pressure on him to sweep Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — where he has focused much of his travel so far.

“We are campaigning safely and effectively, and our message is reaching voters in battleground states and generating the enthusiasm and energy we need to beat Donald Trump,” said Biden spokesman TJ Ducklo.

The race between Biden and Trump has been generally consistent for months. Biden has maintained a comfortable lead in most national polls and has an advantage, though narrower, in many of the battleground states that will decide the election.

But polls that showed competitive races or even Democratic advantages in traditionally Republican states proved to be false indicators for Democrats in 2016.

FIERCE FIGHT OVER SUPREME COURT NOMINATION ADDS NEW TWIST TO FIRST BIDEN-TRUMP DEBATE

Four years later, Biden faces persistent questions about whether his campaign is organizing and connecting with voters. When he visited Charlotte, North Carolina, on Wednesday for a Black economic summit, Collette Alston, chairwoman of the local African American Caucus, said she only found out with one day’s notice — when she saw it on TV.

Just 16 people attended the event and Alston warned that Biden wasn’t reaching locals she thinks he needs to — “the people that are like, I don’t care, I really don’t want to vote.”

“I do believe that he can win North Carolina,” Alton said. “Can he win it based on what he’s doing right now? No. That’s not the way to win it.”

Biden’s swing state visits often seem tailor-made for a television package: A small, socially distanced roundtable or town hall, always with fewer than 25 people; occasionally a stop at a local business or a visit with first responders; and then hours of back-to-back local media interviews.

Beyond traveling more, Biden is being urged by some Democrats to expand his message. While he has given standalone speeches on issues like criminal justice reform, climate change and, last weekend, the Supreme Court vacancy, Biden largely ignores those issues during his campaign stops. When he appears before voters, he’s generally laser-focused on the virus and the Trump administration’s mismanaging of it.

When a grand jury decided Wednesday not to bring charges against police officers directly involved in the killing of Breonna Taylor, he offered condolences to her mother but declined to comment about the specifics of the case on camera. He later issued a more detailed written statement.

David Axelrod, Barack Obama’s former strategist and adviser, said the Biden campaign is “wise” to concentrate on the pandemic because it’s an “anchor around the President’s neck.” But he said it would be a “missed opportunity” for Biden if he didn’t speak up more about the Supreme Court going forward, especially the impact it could have on healthcare.

“The future of the Affordable Care Act and particularly the future of protections for people with preexisting conditions is a very close issue, and it’s what drove Democrats to victory in 2018,” Axelrod said.

Biden’s aides say the relatively light schedule, small events and message discipline reflect the biggest issue still confronting most Americans today: the coronavirus pandemic. Biden also has sought to offer a responsible contrast to Trump and his rallies, where thousands forgo masks.

“Every time Trump shows up and has a mask-less rally and says this thing is overblown, Democrats are winning the COVID battle,” said Jim Kessler, an executive vice president of the moderate Democratic group Third Way.

Biden maintains a vigorous schedule even when he’s not traveling. His campaign has become a fundraising powerhouse through largely virtual events. He raised a record $364 million in August that has allowed him to blanket the airwaves across the country and outspend Trump.

Still, Trump sees the contrast in travel as an opportunity to argue that his packed schedule shows he’s outworking Biden. The president seized on the Biden campaign’s announcement shortly before 9:30 a.m. Thursday that he wouldn’t have any public events for the day.

Biden spent the day preparing for his first debate against Trump next week.

“Did you see he did a lid this morning again?” Trump said of Biden during a rally Thursday night at an airport hangar in Jacksonville, Florida. “A lid is when you put out word you’re not going to be campaigning today. So he does a lid all the time. … I’m in Texas. I’m in Ohio. I’m in North Carolina, South Carolina. I’m in Michigan. I’m all over the place.”

Biden’s aides counter that they see evidence in public and private polling that the virus remains top of mind for most voters, and that they have a compelling case to make that much of the crisis is Trump’s fault. They also say their focus on small, high-impact events gets results.

Still, the cautious approach isn’t shared by Biden’s wife, Jill, who has already ventured as far away as Maine and spent Thursday making four stops in Virginia. She’s going to Iowa, another state her husband has yet to visit in recent months, on Saturday.

Hillary Scholten, a Democrat seeking an open House seat in Michigan, spent a morning last week touring a food bank in Grand Rapids, the state’s second-largest city, with Jill Biden. She’s aware that Joe Biden may not follow suit.

“People would want to see him here,” Scholten said. “That being said, there is a global pandemic.”

Source Article from https://www.foxnews.com/politics/bidens-low-key-campaign-style-worries-some-democrats

President Donald Trump will fly back to Washington, D.C. to visit his hotel for just 85 minutes for a campaign fundraiser on a day that takes him to three swing states. 

The president woke up in Florida at his Trump National Doral Miami and hosted a ‘Latinos for Trump’ roundtable before heading to Georgia, back to D.C., and then onto Virginia for a Friday night rally.  

‘So I’m thrilled to be back in Doral, I never knew if I was gonna even see it again, this is nice,’ he told a crowd at his a.m. campaign event. 

President Donald Trump will hit three swing states on Friday: Florida, Georgia and Virginia – and stop back in Washington, D.C. for a fundraiser. He started his day at his Miami Doral property participating in a ‘Latinos for Trump’ event

After a stop in Atlanta, Georgia Friday afternoon, President Donald Trump is scheduled to spend 85 minutes at his Washington, D.C. hotel to participate in a roundtable with supporters before heading to Virginia for a rally Friday night 

The president hit his political rival, Joe Biden, telling the crowd the Democrat ‘sold out the Hispanic American community’ by offshoring jobs. 

Trump referred to himself as a ‘wall’ – like the wall he’s trying to construct between the United States and Mexico. 

‘I’m like a wall between the American dream … between the American dream and chaos, and a horror show,’ the president said.   

He also predicted that he would win the 2020 presidential election, citing a number of polls at the top of his remarks.  

‘I think we’re going to win it big,’ Trump said.   

Nationally, Biden has a 6.6 point edge, according to the Real Clear Politics polling average. In Florida, polling shows the race extremely tight, with the RCP average giving Biden a slight edge of 1.3 points. 

Playing to his audience, he called the Russia investigation into his 2016 campaign a ‘coup.’ 

‘And you know, you never think of this country as a coup,’ Trump said. ‘You think of certain South American countries for coups.’  

From Miami the president will travel to Atlanta, Georgia – a state Democrats want to flip this cycle – where he’ll deliver remarks on ‘Black Economic Empowerment.’

He then returns to Washington, D.C., and is scheduled to spent 85 minutes at his Pennsylvania Avenue hotel.

He’s slated to attend a roundtable with supporters. 

And the schedule seemingly gives him time to eat dinner as well. 

Biden and the Democrats significanly outraised the president and Republicans last month.  

The president will then get back on Air Force One to fly to Newport News, Virginia for a 9 p.m. campaign rally.  

While Virginia is likely to stay blue, Newport News is close enough to the North Carolina media market, for the president to benefit there too. 

President Donald Trump held a rally in Jacksonville, Florida Thursday night where he mocked Joe Biden for having a lighter campaign schedule than the president, who’s held large rallies despite the coronavirus pandemic 

He made a stop in Charlotte, North Carolina Thursday to give a speech on healthcare before his Thursday night rally in Jacksonville, Florida. 

He held rallies on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday, travels to Virginia Friday night, and then heads to Pennsylvania Saturday night after nominating a new Supreme Court justice. 

Biden, on the other hand, has kept his campaign events small, his schedule light and continues to greet donors virtually, due to the coronavirus pandemic. 

The president has interpreted Biden’s caution as evidence the candidate is ‘low energy.’ 

‘Did you see he did a lid this morning again? Lid. Lid. Do you know what a lid is?’ Trump asked his crowd Thursday night in Jacksonville. ‘A lid is when you put out the word that you’re not going to be campaigning today. That he won’t be working today.’ 

The former vice president was prepping for his Tuesday debate with Trump.  

Trump suggested Biden could be ‘right’ when it came to this tactic. 

‘Think of it, supposing he never campaigns and he wins, do you know how badly I’m going to feel?’ he asked the audience. ‘I’m working hard.’  

Source Article from https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8773163/Trump-fly-Washington-visit-hotel-just-85-minutes.html