THE HILL - Two prominent progressive groups are calling on Sen. Al Franken to resign in the wake of sexual misconduct allegations against him.
Credo Action and Indivisible called for Franken’s resignation Monday after a second woman accused Franken of groping her without her consent.
“Sen. Al Franken had the chance last week to take full responsibility for past sexual harassment, sexual assault and any other behavior that demeaned women. He failed to do so,” Credo said in a statement. “We believe that Sen. Franken should immediately resign from the U.S. Senate and that Gov. Mark Dayton should appoint a progressive woman to replace him. Emphasis mine.”
THE HILL - Workers took the Keystone oil pipeline offline on Thursday after it spilled 5,000 barrels of oil in rural South Dakota, officials said.I guess what we need is more deregulation
A TransCanada crew shut down the pipeline at 6 a.m. Thursday morning after detecting an oil leak along the line, the company said. The leak was detected along a stretch of the pipeline about 35 miles south of a pumping station in Marshall County, South Dakota.
The South Dakota Department of Environment and Natural Resources heard about the leak at about 10:30 a.m. Thursday, ABC affiliate KSFY reported.TransCanada estimates the pipeline leaked 5,000 barrels of oil, or about 210,000 gallons, before going offline. The company said it's working with state regulators and the Pipelines and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration to assess the situation.
TransCanada is seeking to expand its Keystone pipeline network. President Trump this year signed a presidential permit allowing the company to build the Keystone XL pipeline, which would transport as much as 830,000 barrels of crude oil a day from Alberta, Canada, to Nebraska {emphasis mine}, where it would join existing pipelines that feed refineries elsewhere in the United States.
Keystone XL, if built, would cut diagonally through South Dakota. State regulators have already granted construction permits for the pipeline.
Nebraska regulators will announce their decision on the project next week.
Washington (CNN) - Ivanka Trump spoke out for the first time against embattled Alabama Senate Republican candidate Roy Moore, who has been accused of pursuing sexual relationships with teenagers when he was in his early thirties. Her father, President Donald Trump, meanwhile, has largely stayed mum on the issue.
"There's a special place in hell for people who prey on children," Trump told The Associated Press in an interview otherwise focused on tax reform published Wednesday.
Kellyanne Conway spent several minutes Sunday morning refusing to say whether she believes the four women who have accused Alabama’s GOP Senate candidate Roy Moore of sexual misconduct, including one who just 14 years old at the time. Again and again, Conway would only say to ABC News’ This Week host Martha Raddatz that Moore should step aside “if the allegations are true.” But then, toward the end of the conversation, she went a step further. “If there’s anyone currently in public office who has behaved that way to any girl or woman, maybe they should step aside. In a country of 330 million people, we ought to be able to do better than this,” Conway said.
More HERE.
Yesterday I wrote that Roy Moore’s behavior was in keeping with hardcore conservative evangelical culture of sanctioned patriarchal sexual abuse. I have also stated that the release of the Access Hollywood tape almost certainly actually helped Trump with some evangelicals because, despite being a philandering adulterer, Trump established a more fundamental cultural rapport with their moral value system. I have similarly pointed that that the abuses of the Harvey Weinsteins of the world, far from being the product of liberal sexual revolution, are the product of patriarchy and capitalism, and that conservative religious orthodoxy tends to amplify rather than curtail the abuse.
These are admittedly controversial positions. But they’re also hard to refute after today’s polling shows that 37% of Alabama evangelicals are actually more likely to vote for Roy Moore after hearing the allegations against him, and 34 percent said it would make no difference:
More HERE
After the release of Bill O'Reilly, the Media has been gunning for Sean’s head. If only they knew how to use a gun they’d have a fighting chance. Clearly they don’t know the man, he loves a battle.
For months, Sean has been dodging bullets in the form of falsified reports of sexual harassment. Stories flooded in from all directions, only to be later retracted. Now, the Liberal Advocacy Group publicly called on advertisers to boycott Sean Hannity's show after he revealed his cure to erectile dysfunction live on-air.
On his show, Sean told a story about a conversation he had with a former host, Bill O'Reilly. He said Bill gave him some of these Testo-Max HD capsules he has been raving about. Bill called them "Boosters", they allow him to bang for hours and hours -- at will. Sean went on air and stated "I've tried them all - Viagra, Levitra, you name it - they don't work like this stuff. And I feel great when I take them. It gives me a little boost of energy also. The very first time I tried Testo-Max HD, I was impressed how good it worked, amazing stuff.”
After the episode aired, media went ballistic. These statements combined with other accusations gave the left the ammunition they were looking for. Rachel Maddow didn't hesitate to blast him on her show... “I am happy Sean and the other guys at Fox all brag about this Testo-Max HD for their “downstairs problem”, but this is unprofessional, and he needs to be OUSTED!”
More HERE
From THE HILL - A former colleague of GOP Senate candidate Roy Moore said Saturday that it was "common knowledge" that the Alabama Republican dated high school girls when he worked in the Etowah County District Attorney's Office in the 1980s.
In a statement to CNN, Teresa Jones, who served as deputy district attorney for Etowah County, Ala., from 1982 until 1985, said that multiple people thought it was unusual that Moore dated high school girls, but that no one ever raised the matter with him.
"It was common knowledge that Roy Moore dated high school girls, everyone we knew thought it was weird," Jones told CNN. "We wondered why someone his age would hang out at high school football games and the mall ... but you really wouldn't say anything to someone like that."
Moore, now 70, served as the assistant district attorney for Etowah County from 1977 until 1982.
Jones's comments come two days after an explosive Washington Post report detailed allegations that Moore pursued sexual and romantic relationships with teenage girls when he was in his early 30s.
One of Moore's accusers, Leigh Corfman, told the Post that the former Alabama Supreme Court justice initiated a sexual encounter with her in 1979, when she was just 14 and he was 32.
Moore has vehemently denied Corfman's allegation. But in an interview on Sean Hannity's radio program on Friday, he did not rule out that he dated girls in their late teens when he was in his 30s, saying that he did not remember doing so.
On Saturday, in his first public appearance since The Washington Post report was published, Moore said that the allegations were politically motivated, and that he had never engaged in any sort of sexual misconduct.
Still, the allegations have prompted condemnation from many Republican lawmakers and officials, who have called on Moore to step aside in Alabama's special Senate election if the accounts are true.
From LAW NEWZ - Embattled Alabama Senate Republican candidate Roy Moore once cast the lone vote in favor of a man accused of raping a four-year-old boy.
In 2015, Roy Moore was performing his second stint as a justice sitting on the Alabama Supreme Court–Moore was previously removed from office for ignoring a federal court order mandating the removal of a Ten Commandments monument from the state judicial building.
The Alabama Supreme Court had the opportunity to hear the case of one Eric Lemont Higdon, a man accused and convicted of two sodomy charges due to sexual assault against a four-year-old at Mama’s Place Christian Academy in Clay, Alabama.
One of those convictions was first-degree sodomy of a child less than 12 years old. The other conviction was first-degree sodomy by forcible compulsion. Essentially, the first conviction was for statutory rape; the second for forcible rape.
Higdon’s conviction on the forcible rape charge was eventually overturned on appeal. The state, by way of prosecutor Luther Strange, appealed that decision and the Alabama Supreme Court took the case up for review.
Eight of the nine justices on the panel found that the appeals court had erred. Their legal logic was such that a 17-year-old’s sexual assault of a four-year-old was enough to produce in the mind of the four-year-old, an “implied threat of serious physical injury.” The decision was reversed and remanded and Higdon’s conviction was reinstated.
Roy Moore dissented from that opinion. He wrote:
Because there was no evidence in this case of an implied threat of serious physical injury…or of an implied threat of death, Higdon cannot be convicted of sodomy in the first degree “by forcible compulsion.”
Conservatives, be careful. Don’t dismiss the claims. While I don’t know if the allegations are true, I’m deeply troubled on a number of grounds.
First, these women didn’t seek out the press. According to the Post report, its reporters reached out to them after hearing that “Moore allegedly had sought relationships with teenage girls.” So far as we know, they weren’t put forward by the opposing campaign, and the woman who made the most serious allegations against Moore says that she voted for Trump in 2016. None of the women have donated to Moore’s primary or general-election opponent.
Second, if you read the report, it includes validation from a number of witnesses who say that they were aware of the relationships at the time. While this isn’t proof of guilt of course, it bolsters the credibility of the accusers.
Third, the youngest accuser’s explanation for her decision not to come forward earlier rings tragically true. She told the Post that “she did not share her story about Moore partly because of the trouble in her life. She has had three divorces and financial problems.” It’s a sad and terrible truth that childhood abuse can have catastrophic effects on young lives — effects that last for years.
She told reporters, “I felt like I had done something bad. And it kind of set the course for me doing other things that were bad.” This is so very often the case. An ambitious abuser sails on, accumulating fame and fortune. In the meantime, his victims are left shattered, picking up the pieces as the power imbalance only grows and grows. One person spirals downward. The other person climbs upward.
We are in the midst of a unique and important national moment. Each day seems to bring a new story of yet another powerful person facing a string of accusations. While there is a danger of a witch hunt, the presence of multiple claims of misconduct from multiple sources should always make us pause — regardless of whether the alleged abuser comes from the Left or the Right. It’s a moral imperative that we not determine the veracity of the allegations by the ideology of the accused.
Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon on Thursday likened a report that Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore had a sexual encounter with a 14-year-old girl to last year’s publication of the infamous Access Hollywood tape, telling a New Hampshire audience that The Washington Post, which published both, is “part of the apparatus of the Democratic Party.”
"The Bezos-Amazon-Washington Post that dropped that dime on Donald Trump, is the same Bezos-Amazon-Washington Post that dropped the dime this afternoon on Judge Roy Moore. Now is that a coincidence?” Bannon said in remarks in Manchester that were reported by CBS News. “That's what I mean when I say opposition party, right? It's purely part of the apparatus of the Democratic Party. They don't make any bones about it. By the way, I don't mind it. I'll call them out every day."
Twenty-six people shot dead in Sutherland Springs, November 5.
Fifty-nine people shot dead in Las Vegas, October 1.
Forty-nine people shot dead in Orlando, June 12 of last year.
They are three of the five worst mass shootings in modern U.S. history. All happened in the last two years. Two occurred within the same two months.
Diseases spread between individuals, but the contagion of mass shootings seems to spread through broadcast media. In an interview with The Atlantic in 2015, Sherry Towers, the ASU paper’s lead author, hypothesized that television, radio, and other media exposure might be the vectors through which one mass shooting infects the next perpetrator. Like a commercial, each event’s extraordinary coverage offers accidental advertising for depravity. One reason why mass-media coverage of shootings might inspire more shootings is that public glorification inspires some mass murderers. Eric Harris, the central planner of the Columbine murders, wrote Ich bin Gott—German for “I am God”—in a school notebook.
Mass shootings are often committed by lonely and unrooted men, suffering from both grandiose aspirations and petty grievances. The postmortem descriptors are practically rote: He was cold, weird, withdrawn, a loner (and, one must note, always “he”). It’s astonishingly rare to read the antonyms: He is almost never warm, welcoming, the most popular kid in school. Even when they are not, strictly speaking, terrorism, mass shootings still seem to adhere to a sort of dark and nearly invisible ideology of oppressive self-aggrandizement, a bid for greatness that requires the destruction of others. Just because there is no formal institution like ISIS to symbolize this strain of white rage doesn’t mean that the rage isn’t ideological. It’s possible that many instances of white-male mass-shooting violence are, in fact, driven by a media-inspired religion of grievance and greatness, a mass-distributed sickness for which male outcasts are most vulnerable to infection.
“This isn’t a guns situation,” President Donald Trump claimed on Sunday in a brief address from Tokyo. But the statistics offer no doubt. There are more gun deaths in America because, simply, there are more guns. The American rates of firearm homicide, child-firearm mortality, and gun-related suicide are far higher than in any other industrialized country. The United States, home to 5 percent of the industrialized world’s population under 15 years old, accounts for 87 percent of its unintentional firearm fatalities involving that age group, according to a 2003 paper. Mass killings are an epidemic that so many leaders refuse to name, or even to see. If America cannot amend the laws that facilitate such violence, it should at least commit more resources to studying why this seems to be a paradoxical age of historically low crime, yet contagious mass murder.
Three Republican U.S. lawmakers called on Friday for Robert Mueller to resign as special counsel investigating Russia and the 2016 U.S. election, the latest in a series of conservatives’ criticisms of the FBI and Justice Department during the probe of how Moscow may have influenced the campaign.
Representatives Matt Gaetz, Andy Biggs and Louis Gohmert accused Mueller of a conflict of interest because he was director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation when former President Barack Obama’s administration approved an agreement allowing a Russian company to buy a Canadian company that owned 20 percent of U.S. uranium supplies.
President Donald Trump’s fellow Republicans have been calling for an investigation into the Uranium One deal, amid news of Mueller’s first indictments of Trump associates as the special counsel investigates allegations that the Trump campaign colluded with Moscow.
