Month: May 2019

A group of around 50 leftists, organized by the far-left, pro-Communist organization, Code Pink, has taken up residence in the Venezuelan embassy in Washington, D.C., in order to “prevent” the new Venezuelan government from taking over from Nicolas Maduro’s team of diplomats, who vacated the embassy last month.

Towards the end of last week and over the weekend, Venezuelans who support opposition leader Juan Guaido, also began protesting around the embassy in an effort to educate the mostly white, uniformly American demonstrators inside on the realities of Maduro’s dictatorship.

The Code Pink protesters were, reportedly, not amused.

The dueling protests have clashed, sometimes violently, since Thursday of last week, when the pro-opposition protesters joined together to form a human chain around the Venezuelan embassy, preventing new Code Pink and pro-Communist occupiers from entering the building, and blocking deliveries of food. Fox News reports that the Code Pink-ers retaliated by playing pro-Communist anthems, screaming taunts into bullhorns, and sitting down in front of the Venezuelans.

The Code Pink group, led by longtime leftist stalwart Medea Benjamin, says they have no plans to leave until the embassy has returned to Maduro’s hands, and that they have permission from the Maduro government to remain inside. Officials tied to the Maduro government have even provided them keycards and security codes for the building.

“We feel that the elected government and the government that holds power and the government that’s recognized by the United Nations is the Maduro government, and they deserve to have their embassy here,” Benjamin told Fox News in an interview late last week. “That’s why we’ve been here.”

Photos of Benjamin’s cohorts show a mostly non-Venezuelan crew, and the Venezuelan protesters have noticed, often referring to the Code Pink protesters as “occupiers,” according to one reporter from Vox who spent the day at the protest last week.

“We’re doing our part from wherever we are around the world to bring light into the Venezuelan plight. And there’s invaders in our embassy that are not Venezuelans,” one pro-Venezuelan protester even told CNN. “This is the Venezuelan people for Venezuelan democracy; this is not about right or left in the world. I hope and I beg that people don’t use my country and the suffering of my people for their own personal flags that have nothing to do with what’s going on.”

Occasionally, Benjamin and others, including Code Pink co-president Ariel Gold, will try to “educate” the Venezuelan ex-pats — an effort that often results in embarrassing confrontations like the one captured by Vox Media, in which an elderly, white, American protester attempts to explain Venezuela to a Venezuelan.

WATCH:

Indicative of the kind of discussions happening outside the Venezuelan embassy right now. pic.twitter.com/LhNGDhkiBa

— Alex Ward (@AlexWardVox) May 2, 2019

Other pro-Communist protesters have tried doing public relations for Maduro. Kevin Zeese, the 63-year-old career leftist in charge of the pro-Maduro group, Popular Resistance,” explained to Vox’s reporter (while clad in a Hugo Chavez tee shirt that read, “Chauvistas”) that Maduro is not a dictator and that he had friend who had visited the country and found only limited poverty.

Over the weekend, pro-Venezuelan protesters tried fighting back against the taunts by reading aloud a list of people killed by Maduro’s regime.

The State Department called Benjamin’s crew, “trespassers,” but admitted that they can’t remove the group by force since the embassy is technically Venezuelan territory. Even the Secret Service, which is guarding the embassy and trying to diffuse tension between the two groups of protesters, can’t go inside.

Socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) embarrassed herself on Monday after she tried to attack Sen. Rick Scott’s (R-FL) “critical thinking” abilities over comments Scott made but was unable to understand that Scott was being sarcastic.

Scott weighed in on Democrat presidential candidate Cory Booker saying that he wanted to create a federal gun licensing system.

“BREAKING: the latest terrible idea to come out of the Democrats’ 2020 primary is a federal gun registry,” Scott tweeted. “If you want to buy a gun, @CoryBooker wants you to register with the federal government. This would be scary if Booker had any chance of becoming President.”

“What’s next? Will we have to register sharp knives? Maybe @AOC will make us register every time we buy meat as part of her #GreenNewDeal,” Scott continued. “The Democrats are officially the @BernieSanders Party. They want America to be less prosperous and less free.”

Ocasio-Cortez responded by tweeting: “That a sitting US Senator can say something lacking so much critical thinking + honesty is embarrassing to the institution. If you were a female candidate, maybe you’d be called ‘unlikeable,’ ‘crazy,’ or ‘uninformed.’ But since you’re not, this inadequacy is accepted as normal.”

Scott responded: “That a sitting Congresswoman doesn’t understand sarcasm would be embarrassing to the institution if you hadn’t embarrassed yours to the point of irrelevance already. America rejects socialism and will continue to.”

Scott’s statement that America rejects socialism is accurate according to a new Monmouth University Poll poll released Monday.

“A majority of Americans say socialism is incompatible with American values, and only 10% of voters in a new poll have a positive view of socialism,” The Hill reported, adding that the poll found that “57% of voters believe that socialism is incompatible with American values.”

On Tuesday, despite the specter of Hollywood actors pushing for a boycott, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp will sign the “heartbeat” abortion bill, according to Fox News.

Kemp told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC), “I can’t govern because I’m worried about what someone in Hollywood thinks about me. I ran the last two years on these issues, and I got elected with the largest number of votes in the history of the state of Georgia, and I’m doing what I told people I would do … Our business environment’s good. We cannot change our values of who we are for money. And we’re not going to do that. That’s what makes our state great.”

Staci Fox of Planned Parenthood Southeast told AJC, “We warned them – we will see you in court, Governor Kemp. And we are coming for their seats.”

AJC noted that Georgia hosted 455 productions last fiscal year, generating $9.5 billion in economic impact and $2.7 billion in direct spending.

The “heartbeat Bill,” H.B. 481, states that the “full value of a child begins when a heartbeat exists”; requires “physicians performing abortions to determine the existence of a detectable human heartbeat before performing an abortion,” states “it shall be the policy of the State of Georgia to recognize unborn children as natural persons,” and asserts “unless otherwise provided by law, any natural person, including an unborn child with a detectable human heartbeat, shall be included in population based determinations.”

As The Daily Wire reported in late March, 50 actors who fancied themselves paragons of morality sent a letter written by abortion advocate Alyssa Milano to Georgia House Speaker David Ralston and Georgia Governor Brian Kemp threatening the state of Georgia with a boycott if the state passed H.B. 481, the Living Infants Fairness and Equality (LIFE) Act, also known as the “heartbeat bill.”

The letter stated:

As actors, our work often brings us to Georgia. We’ve always found your state to be populated with friendly and caring people. We’ve found the hotels in which we stay and restaurants in which we dine while filming there to be comfortable and of a high quality. We’ve been glad to bring millions of dollars in revenue to support Georgia’s schools, parks and communities. But we cannot in good conscience continue to recommend our industry remain in Georgia if H.B. 481 becomes law.

This dangerous and deeply-flawed bill mimics many others which have already been deemed unconstitutional. As men who identify as small-government conservatives, we remind you that government is never bigger than when it is inside a woman’s body or in her doctor’s office. This bill would remove the possibility of women receiving reproductive healthcare before most even know they are pregnant and force many women to undergo unregulated, hidden procedures at great risk to their health.

We can’t imagine being elected officials who had to say to their constituents, “I enacted a law that was so evil, it chased billions of dollars out of our state’s economy.” It’s not the most effective campaign slogan, but rest assured we’ll make it yours should it come to pass. This is the precipice on which you stand. We want to stay in Georgia. We want to continue to support the wonderful people, businesses and communities we have come to love in the Peach State. But we will not do so silently, and we will do everything in our power to move our industry to a safer state for women if H.B. 481 becomes law. You have a choice, gentlemen. We pray you make the right one.

A new report from The Daily Caller claims that the city of Flint, Michigan, which has suffered from a headline-commanding water crisis for half a decade, may have steered tens of millions in aid money meant to help replace lead water pipes to a contractor that had no experience, but who did have a close relationship with Flint city officials.

The controversy may go straight to the top: to the Flint mayor’s office.

The Caller reports that $22 million in “water crisis aid” was directed to a company with ties to city officials, even though that company didn’t have experience replacing leaded water pipes — what the aid money was meant to help do.

Administrators in charge of the project also ignored cost-saving models that would have allowed water replacement companies to test for older pipes before digging up huge swaths of land, opting instead to follow a plan that had contractors digging up yard after yard to replace water pipes, even if they found copper or new piping underground.

“The city prohibited contractors from using an efficient method of digging holes known as hydrovac excavation,” a Flint councilwoman told the Caller. “That leveled the playing field for a contractor, WT Stevens, with no experience or the appropriate equipment — and let it bill far more to taxpayers, she says. All of these factors, [the councilwoman] adds, needlessly led to more waiting for anyone who actually has lead pipes.”

They “chose to dig up yards that they knew were copper, and they decided to hand dig instead of hydrovac,” the councilwoman said. “That was because WT Stevens didn’t have the ability, and you get more money [digging by hand]. It costs $250 [to hydrovac] versus thousands to dig a large hole without the equipment.”

Flint’s mayor, Karen Weaver, and one key Flint city councilman, Eric Mays, both appear to have cozy relationships with WT Stevens, and supported the contractor even when the work looked shoddy. The pair were also behind the decision to dig up every yard looking for lead pipes, even though a University of Michigan study was able to predict where the problematic lead pipes were with stunning 94% accuracy.

The “predictive model” could be extrapolated, Flint clean water activists said, but WT Stevens dug up areas where there were no predicted lead pipes in “exploratory” projects.

This latest revelation is one of just a handful of discoveries that have called aspects of the nearly billion-dollar Flint clean water rescue program into question. Flint’s water systems had a lead problem that came to light when state administrators made the decision to shift Flint from the costly Detroit water system to a cheaper local system in an effort to save the city from descending into bankruptcy. Once the shifts began to occur, authorities discovered that Flint’s infrastructure had been completely neglected for decades, leaving Flint citizens exposed to dangerous levels of lead in their drinking water.

Since then, state and federal officials estimate that more than half a billion dollars has been allocated to alleviate Flint’s water issues, but that a great deal of that money has been mismanaged. Besides the $22 million in pipe replacement contracts and a similarly mismanaged wastewater contract, a whistleblower lawsuit is currently making its way through federal court, alleging that Flint’s mayor, Karen Weaver, diverted money meant to help Flint’s citizens to her campaign coffers.

Flint’s water has been safe to drink since early 2017, according to the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, and the amount of lead in the water has continued to fall to where it is now well below levels considered “safe” by the federal government and the National Resources Defense Council.

A large delegation from the Trump administration, including several U.S. ambassadors and other officials, happened to be visiting Israel during the weekend’s Palestinian rocket attacks, and issued a statement of solidarity from there.

Many of the ambassadors and officials had also been part of the administration’s official delegation to the March of the Living in Auschwitz, Poland, last week — the first such delegation sent by any U.S. administration.

They met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and were hosted by U.S. ambassador to Israel David Friedman.

Tech giant Microsoft is taking a step into the world of election security, offering a new open-source software called “ElectionGuard,” which it claims is an  “end-to-end” voting verification system to “modernize” elections.

AP News reports that Microsoft is entering the world of election security with the introduction of new open-source software called “ElectionGuard.” The name of the new software seems quite close to Microsoft’s partner NewsGuard, the browser extension bundled with the Microsoft Edge mobile browser that purports to be the arbiter of reliability in media. In practice, NewsGuard has repeatedly verified hoax Russian election tampering stories as true while blacklisting multiple conservative news websites as “fake news.”

Now, Microsoft is offering to step in to make voting more secure and transparent, according to the company. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in an announcement on Monday at a Seattle developer’s conference that the software would help to “modernize all of the election infrastructure everywhere in the world.”

A new report from the New York Times revealed that Boeing offered a crucial warning light as an optional add-on on their 737 Max airplanes.

The report revealed that only 20 percent of the 737 Max planes that were sold to airlines included the crucial warning light indicator that Boeing offered as an optional feature. Two planes, Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, crashed as the result of faulty “angle of attack sensors.” The faulty sensors activate an anti-stall software that sent both planes into a nose-dive.

In a statement from Boeing, the company acknowledged that the warning light indicator was not a standard feature on the 737 Max planes.