Beet L. Jooz

A deputy saw the man put something in his mouth during the traffic stop, the story says.

Between 2007 and 2008, Barrera was deported to Mexico three times, according to ICE

5.3 magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of southern California

The Atlantic‘s firing of Kevin Williamson over his views on abortion sent political Twitter abuzz this week. Conservatives and libertarians generally condemned the cowardice involved, and the swarming pushback from progressives captured the pitch-perfect drone of the hive mind.

Perhaps there is a lesson here. Despite having achieved their goal, progressives felt it necessary with a torrent of widely-varying but equally flimsy rationales in support of the firing. Here is a handy guide to the seven most common (and dumbest) attempted defenses of the firing.

1. National Review Doesn’t Hire Progressives.

This response is based on the faulty premise that The Atlantic is the same as outlets like National Review. In reality, The Atlantic‘s founding motto was, “Of no party or clique.” It still pretends to this motto; otherwise, editor Jeffrey Goldberg would not have hired Williamson in the first place.

In contrast, National Review was founded precisely because conservative views were marginalized in the establishment media. Goldberg’s cowardly cave-in demonstrates the necessity for conservative media, even though marginalizing roughly half of America has corrosive effects on left and right alike.

2. You Conservatives Are Snowflakes.

This response is not really a defense so much as a counter-attack. As counter-attacks go, it’s remarkably stupid for at least two reasons.

First, it is obvious that the “snowflakes” in this situation are the whiny leftists who demanded The Atlantic exist as a “safe space” free from Williamson’s ostensibly controversial views. This despite the fact that no one would be forced to read his views on any subject.

Second, the claim essentially doubles down on the leftist intolerance. In this view, it’s not just Williamson who is out of bounds — it’s anyone who would defend the value of debating provocative ideas in a free society, even if they disagree with Williamson (as I do).

3. Williamson Advocates Lynching Women.

This response and its variants rely on gross mischaracterizations of Williamson’s comments. Williamson described how he would like abortion to be treated as a matter of law. He did not advocate lynching, which is an execution without due process of law. He did not advocate punishment for women who already had abortions under the current legal regime.

Williamson mentioned hanging, which his opponents have taken out of context. This reference relates to his “squishy” position on capital punishment. Williamson’s argument was that if one truly supports capital punishment, the State should be honest enough to be truly violent, instead of treating an execution like a medical procedure.

A fair reading of Williamson suggests he wrestles more with the question of when it’s appropriate for the public to legally kill someone who has received due process of law (a rare event) than his critics wrestle with the morality of taking hundreds of thousands of innocent human lives annually.

Williamson’s biggest opponents really object to his premise that abortion should be a crime. Yet a recent Pew poll suggests that some 40 percent of the public believes abortion should be illegal in all or most cases. Williamson’s position on who should be responsible and the severity of the punishment are mostly a target of opportunity for those who wanted him fired.

A subset of this group also objects that Williamson would place women in danger of death for exercising a Constitutional right. But Williamson does not believe such a right exists. And the objection ignores the breadth of legal scholars — including some who favor legal abortion as a matter of policy — who find Roe v. Wade to be as poorly reasoned as Constitutional law.

It is easy for critics to ignore these points because they have insulated themselves and others from opposing arguments. They are responses either based on ignorance and laziness, or dependent on an audience with those qualities.

4. Williamson is Inciting Violence Against Women.

This response could be considered a variant of the”lynching” argument, but it has its own unique defects.

If Williamson’s critics want to cling to the Supreme Court, note the Court’s decision in Brandenburg v. Ohio holds that the State cannot “forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.” Williamson’s comments do not constitute incitement, let alone of imminent lawless action.

Conversely, you could ask how many of Williamson’s critics believe they should bear the moral responsibility for the hundreds of thousands of abortions performed annually in the United States. Probably not many, outside the extremists who attach no moral weight to abortion in the first place. Increasingly, the left wants to conflate speech with violence — but only in cases of speech they don’t like.

5. What About Miscarriages or Frozen Embryos?

This category of response at least pretends to engage the consequences of Williamson’s position, but it is also a badge of ignorance. To ask these questions is not to win the argument or discredit Williamson. Rather, these are questions that have been long debated within the pro-life community. Williamson’s critics would know this if they were not so busy burying their heads in the sand.

6. Williamson Harshly Refused to Acknowledge Abortion as a Painful Decision.

It is true that Williamson did not mince words in his comments. It is also true that Williamson has written about his sympathy for women who become pregnant unexpectedly and why abortion is not the proper response to that situation.

In contrast, Williamson’s critics not only ignore the totality of his writings on abortion, but also tend to avoid explaining why they think abortion is a painful decision. This supposed response allows the critics to pose as people who agonized over a morally difficult decision, while attempting to exclude from the mainstream those who follow the logic of the opposite conclusion, as though the decision was easy.

7. Williamson is an A–hole.

Frankly, Williamson might plead guilty to this one. Certainly, his abrasive style and his willingness to challenge conservative dogmas can infuriate even those who enjoy reading his work.

However, as noted previously, compelling writing generally requires a writer willing to challenge the audience — and that in turn usually requires a willingness to risk offense. Progressives embrace this principle when they are celebrating their own provocations as “edgy” or “transgressive.” They reject the principle when convenient. Accordingly, Williamson’s critics might earn the same vulgar epithet — but they lack his abilities as a writer and a thinker, as their lame defenses of their intolerance demonstrate.

'Limiting the retention period for Mark's messages'

Authored by Alex Christoforou via TheDuran.com,

Russia’s UN envoy blasted the UK’s attempt to blame the poisoning Sergei and Yulia Skripal on Moscow, describing the entire hoax as a “theater of absurd.”

The extraordinary UN Security Council meeting was requested by Russia, following the announcement made by the secretive British Porton Down chemical laboratory, that it had not established that the Novichok nerve agent used in the poisoning was of Russian origin.

According to RT, top British officials explicitly cited the Porton Down laboratory when pinning the blame on Moscow, so following this revelation their theory started to fall apart, said Vasily Nebenzia, noting that the UK’s secret agencies rushed to help the government, producing new claims based on some “intelligence data.”

Nebenzia asked a series of questions pointing to inconsistencies of the UK’s narrative.

“I don’t even know how to comment on this. It’s some sort of the theater of absurd. You couldn’t have come up with better fake story?”

“Why did we have to wait eight years and [then] decided to [attack the Skripals] two weeks before the elections and several weeks before the world cup? Why did we release him from the country in the first place? Why do that in extremely public and dangerous fashion.”

The fact that the victims of the nerve agent, which is believed to be among the deadliest, managed to survive the attack has also raised serious questions, Nebenzia said.

As RT reports, it could be explained only if an antidote had been administered to them immediately after the exposure. British officials, however, insisted that no antidote was used, since none existed in the first place. The Skripals managed to walk around for four hours after the exposure, according to the version by the British authorities, yet the police officer who found them lost consciousness immediately.

There are also different versions of how the poison was delivered, leaked and speculated in the British media.

“There are so many versions in wake of the lack of facts and evidence. House of Skripal, the door knob, flowers, buckwheat, or, in fact, the bay leaf?” Nebenzia said.

As the cornerstone allegation that the nerve agent originated from Russia turned out to be without merit, the whole narrative fell apart, Nebenzia said. Arguments that the Novichok nerve agent family originates from Russia, and therefore it was Moscow to blame do not hold water either, the diplomat added.

“We want to state urbi et orbi, Novichok is not copyrighted by Russia,” he stressed.

While the British authorities try to make fun of different theories expressed by Russia-based experts and media, Nebenzia said, Moscow does not have any version of the events due to glaring lack of facts available.

The Russian diplomat stated that the level of intellectual justification used by the UK authorities, namely by the Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, “does not invoke even a smile.”

“Boris Johnson, who constantly proclaims his Russophile [nature], produces an absurd, to use the nicest word I can, absurd and immoral premise that the incident was necessary for Moscow to bring the people together before the [presidential] elections,” Nebenzia stated.

“His comparison of Russia’s Football World Cup with the Berlin Olympics of 1936 was equally immoral,” he continued, adding that unlike the Soviet Union, a large British delegation took part in those Games.

UK envoy Karen Pierce stood by her government’s firm belief that there is “no plausible alternative explanation” and that that Russia was “highly likely” behind the Salisbury incident. She called it part of a “wider pattern of irresponsible Russian behavior” and accused Moscow of constant “aggression” over the recent years.

“Russia seeks to undermine the international institutions which have kept us safe since the end of the Second World War,” Pierce said.

The two envoys also resorted to literary references in sparring with each other, with Nebenzia illustrating the British position by quoting the Red Queen from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, who demanded “sentence first, verdict afterwards.”

Pierce retorted that another quote from the same book, about “believing six impossible things before breakfast,” suited her Russian colleague better, though it matched her own government’s case built on assertions and rhetoric.

All of which, as Tom Luongo suggests, points to the imminent demise of May's government.

The United Kingdom is headed for a break-up.  Not today or tomorrow, mind you but, sooner than anyone would like to handicap, especially in this age of coalition government at any cost.

By responding to the alleged poisoning of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia with histrionics normally reserved for The View, Theresa May’s government has set the stage for its own collapse.

Government’s fall when the people lose confidence in them.  May has bungled everything she has touched as Prime Minister, from Brexit talks and her relationship with Donald Trump to her response (or lack thereof) to the escalating level of domestic terrorism and her pathetic campaign during last year’s snap election.

When I confront such obvious ineptitude it’s not hard to believe that wasn’t the plan to begin with.

Since her initial meeting with Donald Trump after his election where it looked like the two would get along, May has become more and more belligerent to both him and his base.  While he continues to affirm our special relationship “The Gypsum Lady” as I like to call her makes mistake after mistake.

The latest of which is pushing everyone east of the Dneiper River in Ukraine to denounce the Russians and President Vladimir Putin personally for this alleged poisoning in Salisbury a month ago.

The result of which was the largest round of diplomatic expulsions in a century, if not ever.

And now that the whole “Russia did it” narrative has been skewered by May’s own experts at Porton Downs, she stands alone along with her equally inept and embarrassing Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson and Defense Secretary Gavin Williamson.

The calls for their jobs will only intensify here.

The Republican said he's counting down the trips to the airport before the congressional session is over.

The mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., has mostly disappeared from national headlines, outside of several student activists making television appearances. With the national media focusing on President Trump and other events, the local media has tried to hold Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel and his department accountable for failures […]

A reporter at the Chicago Tribune says that First Lady Melania Trump isn't doing her "job" in a column the newspaper published this week.

The Wednesday night (April 4) shooting killed two men and injured a woman and a toddler, according to the NOPD.

City Councilman Jared Brossett has introduced an ordinance that would bar city officials from booting vehicles for fewer than three parking tickets.

Two women from New Orleans on Thursday morning dressed up as crawfish and chained themselves inside

Wowza!

The change limits short-term rentals in neighborhood commercial zones.

(Daily Caller) A city in Illinois is making a gun control activists’ dreams come true.

The Village Board of Trustees in Deerfield, Ill., a suburb of Chicago, approved an ordinance to ban “assault weapons” and large capacity magazines, Cleveland 19 News reports.

Violators will face a hefty fine. If the owner of an assault weapon lives in the town does not voluntarily turn over their banned weapon, he will be fined $1,000 a day until the weapon is confiscated.

(WSAV) A Virginia Beach teenager is planning a “March for Our Guns” rally.

15-year-old Aidan Jackson said he was inspired to hold the rally after seeing recent rallies held around the country in support of tighter gun control.

“When I saw the ‘March for Our Lives,’ I saw a lot of people for gun control. Not every youth believes that. Gun control is not the answer,” he said.

Aidan, who is a freshman at Ocean Lakes High School and a member of the Virginia Beach Young Republicans, said he participated in his school’s walkout day.

He said he did not agree with the other students’ messages, so he made his own sign that read, “Gun control is not the answer.”

Sara and Amanda Eldritch would take showers that lasted upward of 10 hours.

"Never has so much power been concentrated in the hands of so few people," said Breitbart's editor-in-chief.

New scientific report says levees, channelizing likely aggravated floods in two states

Taylor Conrad wanted to be a special education teacher.

If successful in the House, the change would go before voters in the fall.

Amid Donald Trump’s beef with the United States Postal Service for Amazon’s supposedly overly cheap shipping costs, Republican Congressman Dan Donovan of New York plans to put forward legislation requiring post offices to show pictures of the president and vice president.

Donovan, who is the only GOP lawmaker representing New York City, wants USPS locations to display the portraits of the two executive branch officials, reports The Hill. His inspiration for the bill came after a Staten Island resident alerted him to a New York post office flaunting pictures of Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

As for Trump’s personal beef with the USPS, he’s recently taken to ranting about the service as he claims Jeff Bezos’ online sales giant Amazon is making a killing using the public shipping method.

“We’re giving a subsidy to Amazon, and we’re talking about billions of dollars a year, the real cost,” Trump said yesterday. “They said $1.47, I believe, or about that for every time they deliver a package, the United States government, meaning the post offices, lose $1.47.”

He continued: “That’s not fair to the United States. It’s not fair to our taxpayers and Amazon has the money to pay the fair rate at the post office.”

While the intentions behind Donovan’s presidential picture legislation are not entirely clear, he is currently in an aggressive primary race with disgraced ex-lawmaker Michael Grimm — the same Michael Grimm who is fresh-off serving an eight-month prison sentence for tax fraud issues and threatening to toss a journalist over a balcony railing — who is looking to outflank Donovan from the right by loudly voicing his support for Trump.

Given Trump’s own infamously large ego, the offer of his picture being featured in every post office might just be enough for the more moderate Donovan to win the president’s support over his crazed GOP adversary.

[images via screengrab]

Follow the author on Twitter (@calebecarma).

A haunting video has shaken the media since going viral over the weekend: in it, news anchors at stations across the country owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group are seen reciting a propagandistic script about “the troubling trend of irresponsible, one sided news stories plaguing our country.” The video provides a chilling look at the impact corporate-owners of local TV stations can have on a free and fair press when they decide to use those networks to promote a political agenda rather than to simply report the news.

However, instead of sticking together and fighting against an agenda backed by billionaire conservatives and right-wing politicians, the Fourth Estate is attacking itself from the inside, with some of the biggest voices in media condemning the journalists — instead of the corporation itself.

MSNBC’s Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski has repeatedly slammed Sinclair anchors throughout the week for repeating the script, saying on Monday “this was a disgrace across the board on the part of the journalists involved.”

“For some of the people in those boxes that we saw, who might be starting out, there may be a pass given, but I don’t understand reading that,” Brzezinski said Monday. “I don’t understand reading that, just acting it out like they did. Those were seasoned journalists. You are the front-line of defense in terms of telling the truth to your audience — you have to be able to push back.”

She later recalled a moment from 2007 in which she refused to read a report about Paris Hilton on Morning Joe, laughing as she shredded a script about the celebrity in a seemingly unscripted move.

In some ways, she and other viewers are right to criticize the anchors featured in the video. The controversial script they read echoes many of the sentiments President Donald Trump has expressed about the media: “The sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media,” the anchors are seen reciting. “More alarming, some media outlets publish these same fake stories… stories that just aren’t true, without checking facts first.”

How America's largest local TV owner turned its news anchors into soldiers in Trump's war on the media: https://t.co/iLVtKRQycL pic.twitter.com/dMdSGellH3

— Deadspin (@Deadspin) March 31, 2018

Lambasting reporters doesn’t help prevent against Sinclair and other corporate owners further encroaching on the daily operations of TV stations nationwide, however. In fact, Brzezinski’s comments only help to further undermine the press — at a time when its already being attacked by conglomerate entities, corporate interests and the president himself.

Brzezinski also fails to acknowledge how journalists working for Sinclair have been secretly fighting back ever since the corporation began forcing anchors to recite scripts and play “must-run” segments on the Deep State conspiracy theory and other conservative talking points. Many reporters in Sinclair newsrooms have been leaking details about the “must-runs” and daily operations with journalists who are unaffiliated with the corporation. They’ve spoken out not only in the hopes that other journalists will share what is happening at their jobs, but that the American public will also care enough to demand a grinding-halt of Sinclair’s direct involvement at those stations.

Several employees at Sinclair-owned networks have quit since the most-recent developments, citing an “obvious bias.” “This is almost forcing local news anchors to lie to their viewers,” one morning TV producer at KHGI TV told CNN after leaving the network. “I didn’t go into news to give people biased information.”

Still, not every reporter or Sinclair employee is in a position to just quit their jobs — especially in an industry as competitive and strenuous as the news. Several reports detail the draconian punishments anchors at Sinclair-owned stations may endure should they decide to quit, including a penalty fee equivalent to 40 percent of their annual salaries and non-compete agreements that bar them from working in competitor’s newsrooms throughout their local regions. Sinclair is also the largest owner of TV stations nationwide, with nearly 200 total stations.

Not to mention, there are known examples of Sinclair going after journalists who quit their jobs at local stations. Journalist James Beaton was sued by the corporation after quitting in 2015, telling Los Angeles Times he felt he was made to do “politically biased” reporting.

“I’d ask loaded questions like, ‘How much do you disagree with Obama this year?'” he said. “It was disguised as real journalism. But I’m a Republican, and I was still pissed by it.”

The lawsuit originally asked Beaton to pay $25,000, though he only made $44,000 a year. The suit remains ongoing after Sinclair reportedly said it would settle if he paid $1,700 and signed a gag order vowing not to speak about the company to media outlets.

Meanwhile, the average journalist reportedly makes just over $39,000 a year; many are barely in a position where they can afford their monthly bills and rent payments. To argue that a reporter should quit a job in television or face being fired, then pay thousands of dollars in penalties, move hundreds of miles away to oblige by non-compete agreements and then suffer the pressures of finding a new job in an entirely different market is not only an impractical and unrealistic demand, but also represents a deep unawareness of what it’s like being a journalist in modern America.

Brzezinski would never have had to endure any of these painful situations, even if she were fired from her job in television for ripping up a script about Hilton, as she now claims she feared. The 50-year-old journalist is the daughter to former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski and comes from an extremely well-connected family; one of her brothers, Mark Brzezinski, was the U.S. Ambassador to Sweden; the other, Ian Brzezinski, is a military expert. Her cousin, Matthew Brzezinski, was a journalist and author writing for the New York Times and The Guardian. Granted, she worked at multiple local outlets before joining CBS as an anchor and correspondent, and her trajectory in media does not appear to have been handed to her; it likely took hard work and a wealth of knowledge about journalistic ethics. But her positioning and safety net would have also provided her the ability to speak out about anything she deemed appropriate, whether it be Hilton or a right-wing script. That’s a freedom just about everyone wishes they had in their own careers, but often lack the power or support to follow through.

It’s somewhat easier for those of us in this industry without Brzezinski’s connections to understand how the anchors at Sinclair perceive their job stability as a matter of life and death. For many of us, reporting isn’t just a fun job: it’s the only thing we know. Our passions for storytelling and investigating are what wakes us up in the morning and pays our bills at the end of the month.

Some of the journalists working for Sinclair are diligently moving the conversation forward, pushing back by keeping the national media informed on the latest developments from within the newsroom. We owe it to them and the industry to support their plight. Many are in the process of seeking out new opportunities, or deciding how to break their contracts while enduring the potential for massive penalty fees. They could use help from the most prominent voices in media, instead of further blanket attacks. Perhaps Brzezinski stand with the countless folks calling for change from Sinclair, rather than continuing to punish the people enduring such challenging conditions.

[image via screengrab]

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Follow Chris Riotta (@ChrisRiotta) on Twitter

'We built this feature and it's very useful. There were a lot of people using it up until we shut it down today'

A pilot with the U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds died when his F-16 crashed jet near Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada.