President Joe Biden said Monday that the United States would be willing to intervene militarily if China were to invade the self-governing island of Taiwan. Shortly after the president’s comments, a White House official appeared to walk back the declaration that the U.S could intervene militarily. The Morning Joe panel discusses.
A non-binary Texas high schooler is rallying fellow students and community members to oppose their school district’s ban on LGBTQ websites, which includes suicide prevention websites.
Cameron Samuels, a senior in the Katy Independent School District (KISD) of southeast Texas, says the district does little to address anti-LGBTQ bullying and slurs. The district also has an internet filter that blocks content related to “Human Sexuality” from school computers.
KISD said the filter was implemented to comply with the Children’s Internet Protection Act, a federal law meant to protect children from online predators. But the filter specifically blocks access to LGBTQ resources, including The Trevor Project, an organization dedicated to preventing suicide among LGBTQ youth.
District officials told Samuels that KISD blocked the Trevor Project because of the “chat capabilities” on the organization’s website. However, the district’s web filter still allows students to access social media platforms, including Twitter and Facebook. Both websites have chat capabilities that have been used by online sex traffickers to exploit children.
“The assumption that people communicating on the Trevor Project are predatory is bigoted and homophobic,” Samuels wrote for The Los Angeles Blade.
School officials also told him that students can still access non-LGBTQ suicide prevention resources. However, Samuels doesn’t understand why the district wouldn’t want its students to have complete access to any resources that might help save lives.
The web filter allows access to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, to websites covering heterosexual marriage, as well as to Alex Jones’s rabidly anti-LGBTQ disinformation website InfoWars.
However, the filter blocks access to LGBTQ news websites, the Human Rights Campaign and LGBTQ community resource centers.
Students struggling with their LGBTQ identities may rely on private, free computer access provided by schools to safely search for queer-affirming resources away from their families, Samuels added. By denying students access, the district prevents students from supporting their emotional and mental well-being, they said.
“School officials have said sites with LGBTQ+ content are not part of the educational curriculum or common classroom activities,” Samuels continued. “Yet they won’t explain how People magazine, ESPN, Gun Show Trader, or Breitbart meet this same standard.”
For almost a year now, Samuels and their classmates have asked district and school board officials to un-block the resources. The officials have promised to do so, but have yet to follow through on their promises.
So the students have launched a petition calling for the unblocking of LGBTQ sites and the inclusion of sexual orientation and gender identities in KISD’s publicly available non-discrimination statements. The school districts of Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston and San Antonio have all included them in their statements.
He lists the taxes he claims poor or retired people don’t pay but if they buy something they pay the tax. They don’t get to skip it; he is lying to make it seem the good Republican base pays all the taxes and no one else does. Second he says there is low worker participation, but it is the lowest unemployment is a very long time, so he is lying again. But mostly listen to what he says about wanting to force people back to work. The people he wants to force back to work are the disabled and the seniors in retirement. To do that he wants to cut their income and tax the remaining bit they get. Why? Because employers in the US love and need a desperate work force struggling to survive that will take any low paying job under any harsh conditions so they can eat / live. Remember who Rick Scott is, a multimillionaire who stole from Medicaid to become wealthy. When he was governor of Florida he ruined the unemployment system so it wouldn’t work, which caught the state in the ass when Covid shut everything down. He tried to privatize everything he could and slashed taxes on the wealthy and corporations by moving the burden of funding the state to the lower incomes, adding to their already crushing burden. Hugs
I listen to three podcasts Allison Gill does. She is smart, funny, and has a great grasp of politics and the law. But her story here in this short interview shows the incredible harm of the Republicans taking away the right of full body autonomy for healthcare and abortion from women. She was drugged and raped as a young service member. She became pregnant with the rapist child. Her command told her if she reported the rape by a married man, she would be the one charged and punished, not him. There was no plan B or pills to end the pregnancy back then. She was looking at being a single woman in the military trying to carry a rapist baby to term and give birth, how could she do her job, would she be discharged? Thankfully, she was in a place where there was a Planned Parenthood, and she could get an abortion. She doesn’t complain about this but I damn sure will, she had to pay for it herself. Drugged, raped, unwanted pregnancy, and still she had to come up with the money to have the abortion while the married rapist faced no penalty for his actions. Damn it people this is the world the Republicans, at the urging of the hyper religious, are dragging us back to. Where men can force themselves on women, make them pregnant, leave them with the life destroying problem, and walk away happy to have used a woman’s body to have sex and cum in. I have been raped. As a child repeatedly. As an adult three times. The only saving grace is that I cannot get pregnant. I never faced that issue. This beyond me how any decent people can be OK with this. I said before these anti-abortion rights people have an image in their minds of a year old bouncing baby or a toddler that is being aborted. But it is not. In most cases it is a clump of cells, it is something smaller than a gold ball. No matter what trimester it has no consciousness, never drew a breath, never had a dream of its future, never desired anything in life, never experienced anything, yet Republicans and the rabid right want to make that thing more important than a woman that has done all of those. I just don’t understand. Hugs
Really splendid video on how the republicans want a white Christian 1950 nation back. Definitely worth watching. They talk about how exstremest have taken over the Republican party. Hugs
Rep. Markwayne Mullin, who is a Senate hopeful in Oklahoma, wants to overturn the House’s vote to impeach Trump for inciting the Jan. 6 riot.
Sam Brodey
Congressional Reporter
EXCLUSIVE
Bill Clark
Listen to article2 minutes
Congressional Republicans have found yet another way to demonstrate their fealty to Donald Trump: attempting to “expunge” his impeachment after the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
A stalwart member of the party’s MAGA wing, Rep. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK), is expected to introduce legislation on Wednesday to expunge Trump’s second impeachment vote in the House, according to an email his office sent to fellow GOP lawmakers on Tuesday morning.
“The Democrats’ weaponization of impeachment against President Trump cannot go unanswered in the history books,” Mullin’s office declared, in an attempt to garner more cosponsors for the measure.
Such a resolution faces no chance of passing the Democratic-led House, or even receiving a vote.
But Mullin, who was photographed trying to fend off the mob from the House floor on Jan. 6, is running for the U.S. Senate seat in Oklahoma being vacated by GOP Sen. Jim Inhofe.
In that deep-red state, the June 28 GOP primary will likely determine who is Oklahoma’s next senator. Mullin faces a crowded field of Republican hopefuls, which includes Luke Holland, Inhofe’s former chief of staff, and a number of candidates with ties to Trump and the far right.
The resolution, as described by Mullin’s staff, is full of MAGA red meat that would play well to primary voters.
It decries the “rabid partisanship the Democrats displayed in exercising one of the most grave and consequential powers with which the House is charged.”
More notably, in a sympathetic nod to baseless election fraud conspiracies and the violence that they unleashed, the resolution also details “the legitimate concerns held by protesters.”
The text of the resolution, obtained by The Daily Beast, is full of grievances regarding the allegedly haphazard process of the impeachment that Trump faced for inciting the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. Ten Republicans joined all Democrats in voting in favor of impeachment.
It also proudly boasts that Trump received more votes than any incumbent president in over 100 years, omitting the fact that Joe Biden received more.
Mullin’s office did not provide comment.
Scoop from @sambrodey here — Rep. Markwayne Mullin is introducing a bill to expunge Trump's Jan. 6 impeachment. On Jan. 6, Mullin fended off rioters at the House doors, but now he's in a Senate primary against MAGA die-hards, one backed by Roger Stone. https://t.co/IKM68EHt5V
— Roger Sollenberger (@SollenbergerRC) May 17, 2022
Wild story: A Republican congressman has been asking US diplomats for help moving large amounts of cash to fund an amateur helicopter rescue mission into Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.
Do you notice a theme to what I have been posting. All tRump’s campaign people were demanding changes to the Republican platform as they lobbied for foreign countries. From the top down they were working for other countries. And taking large sums of money to do it. Think of tRump’s first National Security Director Michael Flynn. He was working for Turkey and breaking US laws. tRump’s son in law went to the Russian embassy and asked their help setting up a private unmonitored back channel to Russia. Many people have forgotten that. tRump and crew were not working for the US and now the majority of Republicans are not either. Hugs
The Department of Justice today filed a civil enforcement action in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, seeking to compel Stephen A. Wynn, a U.S. businessperson and hotelier who previously served as the CEO of Wynn Resorts, to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) as the agent of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and a senior official of the PRC’s Ministry of Public Security (MPS). Wynn was advised to register as an agent by the department but declined to do so.
“The filing of this suit – the first affirmative civil lawsuit under FARA in more than three decades – demonstrates the department’s commitment to ensuring transparency in our democratic system,” said Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen of the Justice Department’s National Security Division. “Where a foreign government uses an American as its agent to influence policy decisions in the United States, FARA gives the American people a right to know.”
According to the complaint, from at least June 2017 through at least August 2017, Wynn contacted the then-President and members of his administration to convey the PRC’s request to cancel the visa or otherwise remove from the United States a Chinese businessperson who left China in 2014, was later charged with corruption by the PRC and sought political asylum in the United States.
Wynn engaged in these efforts at the request of Sun Lijun, then-Vice Minister of the MPS. Wynn conveyed the request directly to the then-President over dinner and by phone, and he had multiple discussions with the then-President and senior officials at the White House and National Security Council about organizing a meeting with Sun and other PRC government officials.
During the time that he engaged in this conduct, Wynn’s company owned and operated casinos in Macau, a special administrative region in the PRC. The department alleges that Wynn acted at the request of the PRC out of a desire to protect his business interests in Macau.
Wynn resigned as RNC finance chair in 2018 after multiple female employees came forward with accusations of sexual harassment. RNC chair Ronna McDaniel demanded “due process” for Wynn before returning his personal donations. She never did.
BREAKING: The DOJ is suing Steve Wynn to get him to register as a foreign agent, claiming that he lobbied Trump on behalf of China! https://t.co/QmUA3tjYBq
The feds are now looking into how Trump’s billionaire friend Tom Barrack successfully stripped mentions of 9/11 in the 2016 GOP platform to please the Saudis.
Jose Pagliery
Political Investigations Reporter
Michael Kovac/Getty
Listen to article6 minutes
The Justice Department has updated its indictment of former President Donald Trump’s billionaire buddy Thomas Barrack, documenting how he quietly tweaked the GOP platform at the 2016 Republican National Convention to avoid mentioning the Saudi royal family’s connection to the 9/11 hijackers.
On Monday, the DOJ replaced its original 46-page charging document with an expanded 55-page superseding indictment that more closely details how the financier allegedly exploited his proximity to Trump to make secret deals with the United Arab Emirates.
In the latest version of the indictment, federal prosecutors documented the role Barrack played at the run-up to the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio. As a congressional investigation has since uncovered, Barrack had already allowed the Saudis and Emiratis to edit a major Trump campaign speech about energy, in which he made a pledge to “work with our Gulf allies.” Then, as Barrack’s relationship to the Emiratis got tighter, the meddling increased.
Seven weeks before the Republican convention, according to the revised indictment, someone only referred to as “Person-1” emailed Barrack about developing the GOP talking points at the convention. (The news site Middle East Eye, which initially broke news about the existence of these emails has surmised that this person was criminal political strategist Paul Manafort.)
“We need to talk about language for me to put in [the national political party] platform at national convention. Can be much more expansive than what we did in speech,” this person wrote to Barrack, adding a notable caveat that the “platform language” would be “based on what you hear from your friends.”
But just a week before the start of the GOP convention, the draft platform was deemed too problematic by “Person-1.”
Trump had previously promised to release the infamous 28 pages missing from a House and Senate joint intelligence report documenting the plane hijackers’ connections to the Saudi government and royal family—classified details that victims, activists, and journalists had long sought to make public. But on July 13 that year, this person wrote to Barrack that Republicans would have to back down from mentioning that.
This person wrote to Barrack that any mention “that was anti the Saudi Royal Family was removed from the platform.”
According to federal investigators, who have acquired suspects’ communications, Barrack then turned around and forwarded that email to UAE businessman Rashid Al-Malik. (The DOJ has also indicted Al-Malik, who is accused of passing along information to UAE government spies.)
In his note to his UAE contact, Barrack allegedly wrote that the email was “very confidential but you can share with HH. Please do not circulate any further since it is very sensitive.”
According to the feds, Al-Malik then forwarded that email to an unnamed Emirati official. But Barrack is also accused of passing that information along to a yet another unnamed Emirati official whom other journalists have identified at UAE ambassador Yousef Al Otaiba. Barrack allegedly told him the information was “really confidential but important.”
Otaiba still retains that post in Washington, D.C. The Emirati embassy did not respond to requests for comment on Tuesday.
The long-awaited missing 28 pages were eventually released—albeit with redactions—by President Barack Obama that very summer. The New York Times called it a “frustrating time capsule” whose importance grew over the years, but which ultimately showed that the tenuous connections between the 9/11 terrorists and Saudi leadership did not prove to be the vast conspiracy many suspected.
Brian McGlinchey, an independent journalist in San Antonio, Texas, who played a pivotal role in aggressively pushing for their release, told The Daily Beast that he welcomes the DOJ’s new focus on Barrack’s alleged role in having the GOP avoid the subject.
“It underscores the hypocrisy of the Trump camp, because at that time, there was an active presidential campaign going on,” he said. “You’ve got the candidate out front raising deep suspicions about Saudi involvement, at the same time you have these back channel maneuvers at the Republican convention to help the Saudis avoid embarrassment.”
When reached for comment, the Republican National Committee told The Daily Beast it was unaware of what transpired.
“The DOJ has not reached out to the RNC on this subject, nor do we have knowledge of this issue. Additionally, current RNC leadership was not involved with the 2016 platform,” said Emma Vaughn, the group’s spokeswoman.
The DOJ on Monday also hit Barrack with two additional criminal charges of making “material false statements” for allegedly lying to the FBI during a June 20, 2019 interview. Although some of the allegations were lumped together in the original set of charges, the revised indictment is now charging him separately for allegedly lying about only having one phone when he actually had a dedicated line for secretly communicating with the Emiratis.
Barrack’s legal team declined to comment for this story, citing the ongoing case, which is currently set for trial in the late summer.
The superseding indictment adds two new charges of making false statements to investigators to Thomas Barrack's, a longtime friend of former President Donald Trump and chair of his 2017 inaugural committee, 2021 indictment. https://t.co/x66wOLyhnn
Trump friend Thomas Barrack sought hundreds of millions of dollars in investments from the UAE while lobbying the Trump admin for the UAE, say prosecutors. By @annaschecter + @anblanxhttps://t.co/bSQ1lYuIMf
— NBC Investigations (@NBCInvestigates) May 17, 2022
Photo: Shutterstock
EXCLUSIVE
Scottie's Playtime 