90 Miles From Tyranny

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Wednesday, August 22, 2018

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The DNC Promised Answers On Keith Ellison's Domestic Abuse Allegations -- They're Doing The Exact Opposite

  • One week after pledging to review domestic abuse allegations against Rep. Keith Ellison, the DNC has yet to provide any answers to the public on where it stands.
  • Ellison is the deputy chair of the DNC and the Democratic Party’s nominee for Minnesota attorney general.
  • One of Ellison’s former primary opponents on Monday called law enforcement to investigate the Ellison allegations.
  • Karen Monahan claims to have video proving Ellison’s abuse but has yet to make it public.
One week after the Democratic National Committee (DNC) announced it was “reviewing” domestic abuse allegations against Minnesota Democratic Rep. Keith Ellison, the DNC has yet to provide the public with any updates on the allegations against him.

Ellison, the deputy chair of the DNC, is accused of physically and emotionally abusing his ex-girlfriend, liberal Sierra Club activist Karen Monahan. Ellison has vehemently denied Monahan’s allegations.

The DNC released a statement Aug. 14, just hours before Ellison locked up the party’s nomination for Minnesota attorney general, pledging to review the Ellison allegations, which the committee said “should be taken seriously.”

“These allegations recently came to light and we are reviewing them,” the DNC said in a statement, after initially remaining silent for 72 hours after the allegations came to light. “All allegations of domestic abuse are disturbing and should be taken seriously.”

But one week later, the DNC has yet to provide the public with any updates on its review, raising questions about just how seriously the committee is about addressing the controversy. The DNC did not respond to The Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for an update on the Ellison allegations.

Adding to those questions is DNC chairman Tom Perez’s relaxed attitude toward the Ellison allegations.

Perez dismissed the notion that Democrats’ electoral chances would suffer as a result of the domestic abuse allegations against the Democratic Party’s number two official — allegations at which Perez assured reporters the DNC is “absolutely taking a careful look.”

One of Ellison’s former Democratic primary opponents, Tom Foley, argued in an op-ed Monday that the Ellison allegations “deserve a serious investigation by local law enforcement as well as by the DFL Party and the Democratic National Committee (DNC).”

Foley noted that the allegations — and Democrats’ timid response to them — could seriously the Democratic Party’s claims to take sexual and domestic abuse seriously. 

“Will Democrats, quietly hoping the abuse video does not exist or other possible victims never step forward, risk wearing heavily the crown of hypocrisy by applying a double standard because the alleged abuser is one of ‘our’ guys? Will this affect DFL efforts to become the majority in the state House? Will the integrity of the attorney general’s office be undermined if...

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Washington Post Hits Trump For ‘Strong-Arming’ Erdogan Over Imprisoned Pastor, Praises Erdogan as ‘Unbowed’

The Washington Post is apparently so anti-President Donald Trump that its writers and editorial staff can’t even find it within their news sensibilities to support the White House’s strong stand against Turkey over that Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s false imprisonment of a Christian pastor.

The news staff had to find cause to ding Trump, and support Erdogan.

What kind of world are we living in when the media in America can’t even side with the safety of a wrongly imprisoned Christian pastor, over that of a brutal Muslim dictator?

As Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch wrote:

Washington Post Hits Trump For ‘Strong-Arming’ Erdogan Over Imprisoned Pastor, Praises Erdogan as ‘Unbowed’

The Post also wrote: “But Erdogan’s ability to benefit from the crisis has raised questions about whether Trump underestimated the Turkish leader, a ‘nimble tactician’ who is convinced that Western powers are bent on crippling Turkey because of its status as a strong Muslim nation.”

It doesn’t matter to the Post that Erdogan is busy dismantling Turkish secularism, or that he had Turkish mosques call for jihad as his military moved against the Kurds. They don’t care that he has laid claim to the lands once ruled by the Ottoman Empire. They don’t care how repressive or aggressive he is. He is against Trump, and that makes him the Washington Post’s friend, no matter what.

“WaPo Says Trump ‘Strong-Arming’ Turkish Islamist President Erdogan. Then It Offers This Description Of Erdogan,” by Hank Berrien, Daily Wire, August 20, 2018:

The Washington Post, in a seeming effort to undermine President Trump, published a story on Sunday night in which Trump’s efforts to get Turkey to release a detained American pastor were referred to as “strong-arming,” while Turkish Islamist President Recip [sic] Erdogan’s resistance was limned as heroically “unbowed.”

The Post wrote Trump initiated “market-rattling economic sanctions and humiliating public rebukes” but “Erdogan, for the moment, appears unbowed.”

The Post opines that Erdogan has used Trump’s aggressive posture to rally domestic support to his side, thus vitiating the anger against him for Turkey’s failing economy. The Post delightedly quotes Erdogan huffing that Turkey “will not surrender to ...

Your Straw-man Argument Is Invalid...


Facebook Is Ranking Users’ Trustworthiness Without Telling Them

Facebook has reportedly been ranking users on their “trustworthiness” by giving them a score between zero and one, according to a report in The Washington Post.

A Facebook product manager, Tessa Lyons, explained to The Post that Facebook’s new reputation ranking is to help crack down on people who report news stories as being fake because they disagree with them politically.

She explained that it is “not uncommon for people to tell us something is false simply because they disagree with the premise of a story or they’re intentionally trying to target a particular publisher.” The score is reportedly one of “thousands” of different behaviors Facebook takes into account to determine whether an account is maliciously flagging behavior.

“I like to make the joke that, if people only reported things that were false, this job would be so easy!” Lyons explained. “People often report things that they just disagree with.”

The Post put the new revelations about Facebook’s ranking system into the context of the recent actions the site, and its competitor Twitter, took against Alex Jones:
The system Facebook built for users to flag potentially unacceptable content has in many ways become a battleground. The activist Twitter account Sleeping Giants called on followers to take technology companies to task over the conservative conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his Infowars site, leading to a flood of reports about hate speech that resulted in him and Infowars being banned from Facebook and other tech companies’ services. At the time, executives at the company questioned whether the mass reporting of Jones’s content was part of an effort to trick Facebook’s systems.

The Post also asserted “experts” claim people on the right coordinate “harassment campaigns” through mass reporting.

To assuage fears about the ranking system, Lyons said that the system is not an “absolute indicator of a person’s credibility,” according to the paper’s assessment of the situation.

Explaining the concept more, Lyons said, “[...] if someone previously gave us feedback that an article was false and the article was confirmed false by a fact-checker, then we might weight that person’s future false-news feedback more than someone who indiscriminately provides false-news feedback on lots of articles, including ones that end up being rated as true.”

Facebook is cautious about telling reporters how its behavioral signals are...

Former head of the FEC blows up media narrative that Trump broke the law, by referring to the actual law

No sooner had Michael Cohen pleaded guilty than a Democrat lawmaker called for a new investigation to determine if President Donald Trump committed a crime.

Rep. Joaquin Castro accused Trump of being an “unindicted co-conspirator” and called on Congress to launch a probe into possible criminal action by the president.



“For years Michael Cohen was Donald Trump‘s fixer. And today he became America’s fixer, by letting us know in court that we have an unindicted co-conspirator of a federal crime sitting in the Oval Office,” the Texas Democrat said on MSNBC’s “All In” with Chris Hayes on Tuesday, reacting to news that Trump’s former personal lawyer pleaded guilty to charges including tax fraud and campaign-finance violations which he claimed were at Trump’s direction.

“And now the question is what will the US Congress do about that,” Castro, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said. “I believe that the judiciary committee in both the House and the Senate should open an investigation tomorrow morning.”

But conservative author and radio-TV host Mark Levin provided a hard lesson in how the law actually works, noting how what the president is accused of doing is not even illegal.

“I want to help the law professors, the constitutional experts, the criminal defense lawyers, the former prosecutors and of course the professors and I want to help them understand what the law is,” Levin told Fox News’ Sean Hannity on Tuesday.

The general counsel for the Clinton mob family Lanny Davis, he had his client plead to two counts of criminality that don’t exist,” he added. “It is a plea bargain between a prosecutor and criminal. A criminal who doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life in prison. That is not precedent. That applies only to that specific case. Nobody cites plea bargains for precedent.”

“Just because a prosecutor says that somebody violated a campaign law doesn’t make it so. He is not the judge. He is not the jury. We didn’t adjudicate anything,” Levin argued, using an example to drive home his point.


“Say a candidate had said we owe vendors a whole lot of money. We have had disputes with them. But I want you to go ahead and pay them. I’m a candidate, I don’t want the negative publicity. So he says to the private lawyer, you pay them, I’ll reimburse you, get it done,” Levin explained. “Is that illegal? It’s perfectly legal. Yet according to the prosecution of the Southern District of New York, it’s paid at the direction of the candidate to influence the election. Yes, Mr. Prosecutor, how stupid is your...

Mollie Tibbetts murder suspect ID'd as Cristhian Rivera, 24, living in US illegally

An illegal immigrant alien from Mexico stands accused of killing college student Mollie Tibbetts and dumping her body in an Iowa cornfield — after he allegedly accosted her during a July 18 jog and she threatened to call police.

Cristhian Bathena Rivera, 24, was charged with first-degree murder Tuesday in Tibbetts' death, officials confirmed.

Cristhian Bahena Rivera, 24, was charged with first-degree murder Tuesday in the death of Mollie Tibbetts, a missing 20-year-old college student from Iowa. (Iowa Department of Public Safety)

Authorities said Rivera, who lived in the rural Poweshiek County area, is being held on a federal immigration detainer. He's believed to have been in the area for four to seven years.

The body of Tibbetts, a 20-year-old University of Iowa student, was found Tuesday in a field covered with corn stalks. Her father and two sources confirmed to Fox News on Tuesday morning that Tibbetts was found dead; investigators said later in the day they were working to formally identify the body.

Investigators said they used surveillance footage to track down Rivera. The video showed Tibbetts jogging in a rural area near her hometown of Brooklyn, and also showed Rivera's car. She was last seen around 7:30 p.m. on July 18 after she went for a jog around a neighborhood in Brooklyn.

Tibbetts' family pleaded for her safe return and had remained hopeful she would be found alive. Her father, Rob, previously told Fox News that "somebody knows something."

Brooklyn, according to her father, is a small city and “you can’t do anything there without someone seeing it.”

Iowa's Division of Criminal Investigation received more than 4,000 tips during the investigation, and had roughly 30 to 40 investigators working on the case.

Investigators followed "hundreds" of those leads — interviewing several hundred people and canvassing a nearby hog farm, cornfields and other properties for traces of the college student. Two items Tibbetts typically took with her — a Fitbit and cellphone — remained missing.
Investigators announced last week that they were focusing the search on five locations in and around Brooklyn, which included a car wash just a block away from the city’s main commercial strip and a TA truck stop next to Interstate 80, which runs across the entirety of Iowa.

Mollie Tibbetts was reported missing from her hometown in the eastern Iowa city of Brooklyn in July 2018. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)

Brooklyn, a town of just 1,400 people, was shaken by Tibbetts' disappearance. Blake Jack, the brother of Tibbetts’ boyfriend, told Fox News on Aug. 8 there was no sign of a struggle at the Brooklyn home she was staying in at the time.

Dalton, Tibbetts' boyfriend of two years, said he believed the doors of the home where his girlfriend last stayed had been left unlocked.

“It’s Brooklyn. You don’t lock your doors,” Dalton said. “We lock our doors now. Every night.”

Vice President Mike Pence said he's "heartbroken" about Tibbetts' death, and called the college student an "amazing young woman." He tweeted that "justice will be served" against the murder suspect.

"We will never forget Mollie Tibbetts," the vice president added.
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds shared similar sentiments, calling the news about Tibbetts "heart-wrenching," and said that Iowans "are angry that a broken immigration system allowed a predator like this to live in our community."

"Mollie Tibbetts, our hearts are...

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