Month: January 2019

When Heidi Mann and her husband Karam took a leap of faith 15 years ago and purchased a Subway franchise in Seattle, they had no idea that one day their dreams could be shattered by the city’s required increases in the minimum wage.

Nine years later, the Manns bought a second Subway sandwich shop in Kirkland, Washington, a suburb east of Seattle.

But now their businesses are struggling as a direct result of the steady rise of the minimum wage in Seattle, now up to $16 an hour.  

The couple predict they will be forced to close their Seattle location by March 2020.

“Labor costs are too high, our profit margin is too tight, and there is no relief for small business owners like us,” Heidi Mann said.

Mann, 34, spoke Wednesday at a private event held by The Heritage Foundation and the Employment Policies Institute to examine firsthand effects that she and her husband, 38, experienced from government-mandated hikes in the minimum wage.

The Manns’ Subway shop in Seattle is situated right on the edge of the city in a middle-class neighborhood, but is stuck in a high-wage market that includes major companies such as  Amazon.

The Seattle City Council passed legislation mandating that the minimum wage rise to $11 an hour in 2015, then $13 in 2016. For companies such as Subway with 500 employees or more, the minimum wage is now $16.

It has been a slow, painful process for Heidi and Karam Mann, their business plans, and their employees. They also have three children, ages 4, 6, and 15.

During the Heritage event, Heidi Mann said:

We started this business believing in the essential truth of the American dream. But our dreams of being our own boss, earning a living wage for our family, and helping others through meaningful employment is slowly becoming a pipe dream and less and less reality as each piece of legislation is passed.

As the minimum wage began to climb, the Manns faced tough decisions.

First, they were forced to cut expenses, which meant letting go four of seven employees at the Seattle shop. They had to raise prices, and sales fell. They cut store hours as a result of having fewer employees.

The Manns’ two remaining employees are ages 35 and 60, Heidi Mann said, because the couple has been forced to hire more experienced workers.

They can’t afford to hire and train entry-level high school and college students, something she lamented.

When she was 16, she worked at a Taco Bell in Federal Way, Washington, for a much lower minimum wage.

She worked her way up to management, learning important skills along the way such as customer service, handling money, and conflict resolution.

“Small business owners are what make America strong,” Mann said. “They are the heart of the economy and are a front line of defense, taking on the brunt of raising a solid workforce as employees navigate into careers and higher-paying positions.”

(CNSNews.com) – Louisiana state Rep. Katrina Jackson (D) told attendees at the 46th annual March for Life on Friday that when people ask her why she, as a black female Democrat, is pro-life, she says it’s because she’s a Christian first.

“I tell people in my state when they ask me why are you a black female Democrat fighting for life. I say, because I’m a Christian first, and then I tell them that Proverbs say God hates the shedding of innocent blood,” she said. 

“There’s no blood more innocent than an unborn child who’s never sinned, who never knew sin, and so for them we will continue to together regardless of being Democrat, Republican, black, white, male or female, we will fight (for life),” Jackson said.

 

“Louisiana is the number one pro-life state in the nation and mainly because in Louisiana, it doesn’t matter if you’re Democrat, Republican, black or white, we fight for life,” she said.

The lawmaker led the crowd in a call and response.

“So my Louisianians know this. Anytime you hear me say, ‘We fight.’ You should say, ‘for life.’ So what do we do? We fight–”

“For life,” the crowd shouted.

“We don’t do it for ourselves, because someone has already chosen our life. We fight (for life) for those who cannot speak for themselves. We fight (for life), because it’s the right thing to do, and we fight (for life), because we know that for everyone who doesn’t speak out, their silence means consent,” Jackson said.

“So we speak out, and we fight (for life) so that we’re never silent on the shedding of innocent blood,” she said.

Tyler O’Neil at PJ Media reports that Vice President Mike Pence took aim at the “mainstream media” today and their reporting that his wife Karen Pence took a job teaching art at an elementary Christian school that — horrors — bars employees from engaging in “homosexual activity” and does not condone “transgender identity.” 

On the show Washington Watch with Tony Perkins, the host asked “are you concerned about this effort to marginalize people of faith” by reporters? Pence said the attacks did not surprise him, but he did condemn the media for stigmatizing Christian education.

“Karen and I have been in and around public life for almost two decades, and so to be honest with you we’re used to the criticism,” the vice president said. “But the attacks on Christian education by the mainstream media have got to stop.”

“We cherish the freedom of religion in this country. This administration stands four-square for the freedom of religion of people of all faiths, and to see the mainstream media criticize my wife because she’s choosing to return to the classroom of an elementary Christian school is wrong,” Pence declared.

“Again, the attacks on Christian education must end,” he repeated.

The “moderate” take on this controversy comes today from Washington Post culture blogger Alyssa Rosenberg in an article titled “Karen Pence’s worldview horrifies me. Her return to work is still a feminist victory.” It’s a “ludicrous relic of a former age” that the wives of presidents and vice presidents can’t hold jobs. (The Post especially likes liberal First Ladies given the task of reinventing the health care system, for example.) 

I feel awful for students at Immanuel Christian who might grow up to gay or bisexual, and who might face expulsion and harassment as a result. And Pence’s choice to teach there reaffirms my deep opposition to the Pences’ worldview and their efforts to make their values a reality.

Schools that “believe the Bible,” as Perkins describes it, enforce “values I find abhorrent,” writes Rosenberg. It’s easy to put those two concepts together. The Bible….is abhorrent. That’s the “mainstream” media consensus. 

This was her second trip over the shutdown, her first was to Hawaii to a luxury resort.

Via Daily Caller:

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy criticized Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Thursday for even considering traveling abroad during the fourth week of the partial government shutdown.

Pelosi was scheduled to leave Thursday afternoon for a trip to Belgium, Egypt and Afghanistan, but President Donald Trump sent a letter to the speaker informing her that she would not be allowed to use military aircraft for her trip. Trump’s decision to ground Pelosi appeared to be in retaliation for her announcement that she was postponing the State of the Union address because of the government shutdown.

House Minority Leader McCarthy responded to the decision by questioning why Pelosi was planning the trip in the first place.

“Why would she want to go overseas with government shut down, with people missing their paychecks? And if we don’t get this back open they could miss their paycheck again by next week, so I think it’s appropriate that we would get back together. It would not take long, and we could solve this problem,” McCarthy told reporters on Capitol Hill.

Keep reading…

Facebook’s popular “10 Year Challenge” could potentially be a data mining ploy under the guise of a harmless Internet meme. The data could be used to train machines to better recognize age-progression characteristics, according to Wired magazine.

If you’ve scrolled through your social media feeds recently, you may have noticed a popular new Facebook trend known as the “10 Year Challenge,” in which users upload two photos of themselves side-by-side, one current photo alongside one photo from a decade ago.

The hat was cool back then, still is.#10YearChallenge ✅ pic.twitter.com/J5U8i17Sqa

— Brendan Murray (@brendan_m96) January 17, 2019

At first, the trend may seem like an innocent Facebook meme, but social media users may actually be unknowingly aiding potential data mining to train machines for facial recognition, specifically having to do with aging, as first speculated in a Wired op-ed by Katie O’Neill.

“Imagine that you wanted to train a facial recognition algorithm on age-related characteristics and, more specifically, on age progression,” says O’Neill in her op-ed, “You’d want a broad and rigorous dataset with lots of people’s pictures. It would help if you knew they were taken a fixed number of years apart.”

The writer notes that critics of this speculation could say that it wouldn’t matter, because the company already has decade-old photos of its users, as they have already uploaded them to Facebook.

While that may be true, photos uploaded ten years ago could be of anything. They could be pets, memes, sunsets, or even “throwbacks.”

Not every individual on Facebook uses the platform in the same way — unless they’re participating in a popular trend — so by joining in on the 10 Year Challenge, social media users are already doing the work for the tech giant themselves, clearly labeling which photos are of them, and how many years apart they were taken.

O’Neill says a Facebook spokesperson insists that the photo challenge was not started by the social media company, and was “a user-generated meme that went viral on its own.”

“Facebook gains nothing from this meme,” says the spokesperson, “As a reminder, Facebook users can choose to turn facial recognition on or off at any time.”

Despite the company insisting that its users have autonomy, many have not yet forgotten about last year’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, when Facebook was scrutinized for allegedly allowing the data mining company to misuse data for 50 million of its users.

“Regardless of the origin or intent behind this meme, we must all become savvier about the data we create and share, the access we grant to it, and the implications for its use,” writes O’Neill, “humans are the richest data sources for most of the technology emerging in the world.”

You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Twitter at @ARmastrangelo and on Instagram.

Abby Johnson, a former abortion clinic director at Planned Parenthood, spoke to Alex Marlow on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily on Thursday, explaining that she became a pro-life advocate after witnessing an abortion.

The interview came ahead of the 2019 March for Life, scheduled for January 18 in Washington, DC.

Johnson said, “I worked for Planned Parenthood for eight years. I was a clinic director. I left in 2009 after a couple of things. One, I was told that my job was to double the amount of abortions — so double our abortion quota — that we had in our clinic, which was troubling to me because I was told for all of these years that our goal was to reduce the number of abortions, and here I am being told to double our quota.”

LISTEN:

Johnson then described her participation in and witnessing of an abortion procedure.

Johnson recalled, “Then, about a month later, I was asked to help participate in an ultrasound-guided abortion procedure. Ultrasounds are generally not used during the actual abortion procedure itself, but we had a new physician in our clinic that day, and he wanted to show us what this looked like. He thought it would be a good learning opportunity for us. I watched as a 13-week-old fetus fought and struggled for his life against the abortion instrument. I knew then that there was humanity in the womb, and abortion was taking the life of this innocent human being, and I decided to leave Planned Parenthood.”

Marlow invited Johnson’s comments on science as the theme of this year’s March for Life.

“I love the theme of the March this year,” replied Johnson. “I often — every day — talk to people who support abortion, and one of the things that they cannot deny is the science of the human fetus. That really bothers them, the fact that they want so bad to say, ‘It’s not human,’ and then when you really challenge them and ask, ‘Well, what species is it? Is it feline? Is it canine? What is it?’ That really gets to the heart of the issue. Science is on our side.”

Johnson added, “For those of us who are faithful people, for those of us who are believers, we know where science comes from. We know that science comes from our Creator. None of us who are Christian should have a problem with helping other people understand the science of a human person in the womb because we know the science was given to us by Christ.”

Johnson continued, “It’s a great opportunity. We see more and more people who are secular [and] atheist coming into the pro-life movement because of the science, and that’s a beautiful thing.”

Marlow asked if Planned Parenthood’s position is that an unborn child’s humanity is contingent on the pregnant woman’s desires.

Johnson explained how Planned Parenthood shifted its public statements on abortion over time.

“When I worked at Planned Parenthood, we sort of changed our phrasing back in about 2008,” stated Johnson. “So it used to be, ‘Oh, you don’t have to worry about it. It’s just a blob of tissue. It’s just fetal matter.’ Then it sort of changed. More and more women were having ultrasounds. Sixty percent of women who have abortions already have children at home, so these weren’t women who were ignorant to the fact that they were pregnant with a baby.”

Johnson went on. “So we had to change the way that we talked about abortion. So it became, ‘It’s not a baby until the woman decides she wants to keep the baby.’ And these women are so desperate for any sort of justification for their abortion. They believe whatever you tell them. Then it became, ‘Abortion is a sacrificial choice. It’s a choice that a woman makes because she cares about herself, her current family, and her future family.’ That was the language that we were told to start using in about 2008, and that’s the language that continues within Planned Parenthood.”

Marlow asked about contemporary left-wing sloganeering related to abortion — including “Shout Your Abortion” and actress Lena Dunham’s claimed wish to have had an abortion.

Johnson remarked, “Even in the past more than nine years that I’ve been out of Planned Parenthood, I’ve seen a shift in the way they talk about abortion and the way that they encourage our society and women who’ve had abortions to talk about their abortion.”

Johnson added, “When I worked at Planned Parenthood, we kept the abortion brochures behind the counter. Women had to ask for them to get them. Now, the discussion about abortion is just so brazen. I went to the Women’s March two years ago just to have a pro-life there, with a sign that said, ‘True feminists are pro-life.’ I went there, and I could not believe the vulgarity that I saw among these women. It was embarrassing to me that I was part of a movement like this. It really has changed over the past nine years.”

Johnson concluded, “We see that Planned Parenthood is more vocal about their support of abortion. Their current president, Leana Wen, two days ago, coming out on Twitter and saying, ‘Planned Parenthood is focused on providing abortion.’ Great. Get it out in the open. Stop trying to hide behind this false three percent number. Let’s be honest about the number of abortions you’re providing. Stop saying it’s only three percent. We all know that’s a lie. Just be honest and come out with it.”

Johnson will be a featured speaker at the March for Life. She plans to discuss her forthcoming film, Unplanned, scheduled for release in March.

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Lawyer Harmeet Dhillon discussed Breitbart News’ latest Google leak on Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight, Wednesday, highlighting Google’s threat towards democracy.

On Wednesday, Breitbart Tech Senior Reporter Allum Bokhari published details about a leaked Google internal discussion thread, proving the company regularly adds search results, including negative results about prominent left-wing figures, to a blacklist on its platform YouTube.

“The term ‘abortion’ was added to a ‘blacklist’ file for ‘controversial YouTube queries,’ which contains a list of search terms that the company considers sensitive. According to the leak, these include some of these search terms related to: abortion, abortions, the Irish abortion referendum, Democratic Congresswoman Maxine Waters, and anti-gun activist David Hogg,” Bokhari reported. “The existence of the blacklist was revealed in an internal Google discussion thread leaked to Breitbart News by a source inside the company who wishes to remain anonymous. A partial list of blacklisted terms was also leaked to Breitbart by another Google source.”

After announcing that she would discuss the leak on Tucker Carlson Tonight, Dhillon appeared on Carlson’s show, Wednesday, to warn viewers about the threat Google poses to democracy.

Will be discussing this tonight on @TuckerCarlson @foxnews https://t.co/yYfUug51Z7

— Harmeet K. Dhillon (@pnjaban) January 16, 2019

“Why is nobody covering this? That’s a great question. And this question as well: Google’s manipulation… why isn’t that a violation of campaign finance law? The company’s YouTube blacklist, for example, allegedly suppressed negative videos about Maxine Waters. Why is that not a contribution to Maxine Waters?” asked Carlson on his show. “Harmeet Dhillon, unlike us, is an attorney and she joins us tonight. So, Harmeet, you just saw a guy plead to a felony because he paid off his client’s girlfriend with private funds in the middle of a campaign. That was considered a campaign finance violation. Here you have the most powerful company in the world putting its thumb on the scale on behalf of candidates, but that’s not a campaign contribution? How?”

“Well it is a campaign finance violation, and if anybody thinks that this is some sort of aberration, Google has been doing this and bragging about it internally even in the last election,” Dhillon replied. “One internal person at Google, a manager at Google made a silent campaign contribution by turning out the vote and contributing turn out the vote efforts in several states that were swing states for Hillary Clinton, and specifically targeting Latino voters. I think people should be encouraged to do democratic activities like this, on both sides, and help with elections, but when a corporation does it, with its corporate assets, it needs to be disclosed as a campaign finance violation.”

“Here, you have the one example of Maxine Waters, but let’s just play this out. You have twenty plus Democrats running for the Democratic nomination. If Google decides to bump up the search engine results in a positive way for Beto O’Rourke in response to, for example, ‘Democratic candidates for president 2020,’ and then bump down Tulsi Gabbard or some others for example, that’s going to be a contribution, in my opinion, to those candidates who benefit from it, and a very valuable one,” she explained. “If it isn’t being disclosed as such, then that is a fraud on our democracy. And again, imagine what they’re doing to Donald Trump. They’re already doing it to Republicans as you have previously reported with regard to search engine results for Republican women, for Californian Republican Party, for various other Republicans.”

“This is a particularly shocking and alarming story that we really need to see our members of Congress, Senators, and the White House wake up about this issue, because otherwise, we aren’t going to be talking about a democracy in the next two election cycles,” Dhillon warned. “We’ll be talking about what it used to look like before we let Big Tech take over and control the outcome.”

Tucker then raised the possibility of President Trump even failing to be re-elected if Big Tech continues to influence politics at the current extent, and declared, “I wonder why the White House wouldn’t… they do control the executive branch of government… wouldn’t have been awakened to that.”

Dhillon responded, “We have seen Donald Trump, actually, tweet about this issue in September 2018. He tweeted, practically, about the subject matter of today’s story from Breitbart and people called him a conspiracy theorist, that it isn’t true, when now we see the evidence that they are doing this manipulation. And Sundar Pichai lied to Congress about it.”

“But these companies skilfully spread the money around, not just to members of Congress, but also people working in the administration who are looking for their exit and thinking, well, maybe I’ll work for the other side of tech policy and make a bunch of money advising Google on how to speak conservative to conservatives,” Dhillon concluded. “And that’s how it happens.”

Charlie Nash is a reporter for Breitbart Tech. You can follow him on Twitter @MrNashington, or like his page at Facebook.