Jump to content

Usa Thread


TroyinEwa/Perv
 Share

Recommended Posts

By Hannah Sparks

Boston.com Staff

 

November 28, 2014 4:56 PM

 

Jeffrey Moreno, 28, of Revere, allegedly fired three shots into the air during a dispute with two people who had parked near his home on Fenno Street to attend a neighborhood holiday party. Moreno apparently wasn’t in the holiday spirit.

 

Just after 1 a.m., the two partygoers were getting into their car when Moreno, who “alit from his Cadillac Escalade,†reportedly confronted them, yelling at them in both English and Spanish to move their car, according to the Suffolk County DA.

At that point Moreno allegedly returned to his car, retrieved a gun, and fired three shots into the air. After yelling at the victims one more time, Moreno then backed into his driveway and went inside his house.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

How Obama pushed out Hagel after reducing the Pentagon's power

 

 

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama pushed Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel out of his job Monday after less than 21 months, with White House officials citing disagreements over Iraq and Syria policy.

 

http://www.stripes.c...-power-1.316206

 

The "Righties" want to cut the annual deficit , cut the $17 trillion dollar debt, but good god - not the military.

Cut all of those 47 percenters instead.

 

As Eisenhower stated: watch out for the military industrial complex.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

A UN report has condemned the United States for violating the terms of an international anti-torture treaty. The panel took Washington to task for police brutality, military interrogations, and capital punishment protocols.

Released by the UN Committee Against Torture, the report took issue with the excessive use of force by law enforcement and accused the US police force of racial profiling. The report was released on Friday, just days after the contentious decision of a Missouri grand jury not to indict a white officer accused of shooting Michael Brown, an unarmed black teen. The decision triggered a wave of protests nationwide.

The UN watchdog expressed “deep concern at the frequent and recurrent police shootings or fatal pursuits of unarmed black individuals.†Though the report did not specifically mention the events in Ferguson, Mike Brown’s parents met with the committee to discuss their son’s case in Geneva earlier this month.

 

The 10-person panel, which periodically reviews the records of the 156 countries which ratified the Convention Against Torture – a non-binding international human rights treaty – cited mounting concerns over “racial profiling by police and immigration offices and growing militarization of policing activities.â€

“We recommend that all instances of police brutality and excessive use of force by law enforcement officers are investigated promptly, effectively and impartially by an independent mechanism,†said panel member Alessio Bruni at a news conference in Geneva.

US activists welcomed the findings as a call to action for the federal government.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

For Obama and the Pentagon, it has been an uneasy relationship

 

 

WASHINGTON — On a trip to Afghanistan during President Obama's first term, Defense Secretary Robert Gates was stunned to find a telephone line at the military's special operations headquarters that linked directly back to a top White House national security official.

 

"I had them tear it out while I was standing there," Gates said earlier this month as he recounted his discovery. "I told the commanders, 'If you get a call from the White House, you tell them to go to hell and call me.'"

 

To Gates, the phone in Kabul came to symbolize Obama's efforts to micromanage the Pentagon and centralize decision-making in the White House. That criticism later would be echoed publicly and pointedly by Gates' successor, Leon Panetta.

 

The president's third Pentagon chief, Chuck Hagel, was picked partly because he was thought to be more deferential to Obama's close circle of White House advisers. But over time, Hagel also grew frustrated with what he saw as the West Wing's insularity.

 

There have been similar gripes from other Cabinet officials, but the friction between the White House and the Pentagon has been particularly pronounced during Obama's six years in office. That dynamic already appears to be affecting the president's ability to find a replacement for Hagel, who resigned Monday under pressure from Obama.

 

Within hours, former Pentagon official Michele Flournoy called Obama to take herself out of consideration, even though she was widely seen as his top choice and would have been the first woman to hold the post.

 

Flournoy officially cited family concerns, but people close to her say she also had reservations about being restrained like Hagel and would perhaps wait to see if she could get the job if another Democrat — namely Hillary Rodham Clinton — won the presidency in 2016.

 

Obama's eventual nominee will join a national security team that is under intense criticism for its response to the rise of the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq. The president has authorized airstrikes in both countries and sent about 3,000 U.S. troops to train and assist Iraqi security forces.

 

He has resisted sending American troops into ground combat and has insisted the military campaign is not designed to oust Syrian President Bashar Assad, whose 3½ year assault on civilians helped create the chaos that allowed the Islamic State to thrive.

 

The foreign policy landscape looks far different from what Obama envisioned when he ran for the White House and pledged to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

 

Obama has been seen in the Pentagon as being overly suspicious of the military and its inclination to use force to address problems. To some in the Pentagon, the president's approach to the military seems particularly cool and detached when compared with that of his predecessor, Republican George W. Bush, who was more eager to embrace the military and accept its judgments.

 

Stephen Biddle, an occasional adviser to U.S. combat commanders, said the White House has fallen victim to "group think" and is distrustful of advice or perspectives that challenge its own.

 

"That's a bad policy development design," said Biddle, a political science professor at George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs.

 

Several White House, defense and other administration officials discussed the relationship between the president and the Pentagon on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to do so publicly.

 

On foreign policy decision-making, Obama relies in particular on national security adviser Susan Rice and chief of staff Denis McDonough. Secretary of State John Kerry has managed to carve out some areas of influence, particularly on Iranian nuclear negotiations. Some Pentagon officials say they have seen an increasingly close relationship between Obama and Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

 

But at the Pentagon, senior officials say there is growing frustration with a lack of policy direction and clarity from the White House that has hampered the military's ability to quickly respond to fast-moving events around the world. Policy recommendations from the Pentagon are often discussed exhaustively in White House meetings that can bog down, delaying decisions and sometimes resulting in conclusions that remain vague.

 

Over the past year, officials said the Pentagon leadership was particularly baffled by the White House's slow deliberations on Russia's moves against Ukraine and the rise of Islamic State militants.

 

Earlier this fall, officials said, Hagel sent Rice a memo on Syria reflecting the views of military commanders who feel Obama's strategy lacks cohesion and has included too many one-off decisions, such as resupplying Kurdish forces fighting the militants in the Syrian town of Kobani. Hagel and military commanders were particularly concerned about a lack of clarity over Obama's position toward Assad.

 

On Ukraine, officials say Hagel pressed the White House to speed up the protracted debate over providing even nonlethal assistance to Ukrainian forces and to look for new options when the support the administration did provide proved ineffective in stopping Russian-backed rebels.

 

Obama's advisers deny Hagel was ousted because he challenged the president. They cast the former Republican senator as the wrong fit for a job in which he never appeared comfortable. The aides also defended the White House's lengthy internal deliberations, saying Obama's decision-making process reflects the complexity of the problems.

 

Hagel's ouster has spurred a flurry of suggestions from foreign policy experts for how Obama can repair his relationship with the Pentagon, from ousting his West Wing aides to revamping the White House's National Security Council, which has ballooned from a few dozen staffers in the 1970s to more than 400.

 

But Gates, the former Pentagon chief who voiced his frustrations during a forum this month at the Ronald Reagan presidential library in California, suggested the real issue rested with the president himself.

 

"When a president wants highly centralized control in the White House at the degree of micromanagement that I'm describing, that's not bureaucratic, that's political," he said.

 

 

http://www.militaryt...hip/19659755/?s

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Russian Gays Seeking Asylum in US

 

 

NEW YORK (AP) -- Had he stayed in Russia, Andrew Mironov would be settling in to a stable job with an oil company, likely with a newly awarded doctoral degree in electrical engineering.

 

Instead, he faces an uncertain future in New York City as one of scores of Russian gays seeking asylum in the United States because of hostility and harassment in their homeland.

 

"In Russia, I would have gotten my Ph.D. this fall, had a job and health insurance," said Mironov, 25. "Now, here, I'm nobody."

 

Yet the sacrifices have been worth it, Mironov says, given the fears that lingered after he was severely beaten by several assailants in the lobby of a gay bar in his home city of Samara.

 

"Which is more important, happiness or success?" he asked over coffee in midtown Manhattan. "I would say happiness. I feel no fear here."

 

There are no firm statistics on the number of gay Russian asylum seekers; U.S. government agencies that handle applications do not report such details. However, the Department of Homeland Security's latest figures show that overall applications for asylum by Russians totaled 969 in the 2014 fiscal year, up 34 percent from 2012.

 

The increase is due in part to the worsening anti-gay climate in Russia, according to Immigration Equality, a New York-based organization which provides legal services for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender immigrants.

 

...

 

 

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_RUSSIAN_GAYS_ASYLUM?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2014-11-29-12-34-01

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Romney proposed a 1 trillion dollar increase in the defense budget even though all the top brass were against, some vehmentally? Why would they? Its like that old movie Brewster's Millions. They can't spend it. You can only buy so many, tanks, planes and guns but it has to be somewhere, people are needed for its maintinence,etc. It was unfeasible, because they knew they woul have to spend it and they couldn't. Anyway, the itneresting thing about the article was that McCain and Graham fought hard to deny Hagel the position..lol. Even calling him anti-semite more or less. Troops on the ground aren't going to stop whats going on and ISIS or ISIL can not project power to USA shores.Its media whipping up frenzy to get us to okay another mideast war.

 

As for Ferguson, the pro Wilson narrative has the major media. Frankly it insulting that some teenager, heading to a local college, unarmed, called to a police car is going to arbitrarily and without provocation other than being suppposedly nicely to get on the sidewalk will beat him, go for his gun, and verbally goad him to shoot him. Really? He did not steal the cig thingies. http://aattp.org/ferguson-cops-busted-new-video-seems-to-show-brown-paying-for-cigarillos-video/ The store did NOT call 911, Wilson did NOT know about the alleged robbery. Brown's friend said the cop told them to get the fuck out of the middle of the street. Wilson's prior PD had abuse issues with black residents of which he was a part of. http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/darren-wilsons-first-job-was-on-a-troubled-police-force-disbanded-by-authorities/2014/08/23/1ac796f0-2a45-11e4-8593-da634b334390_story.html even the white witnesses say it was murder http://edition.cnn.com/2014/09/10/us/ferguson-michael-brown-shooting-witnesses/ this lie about him beaten badly after is nullified on video http://www.kctv5.com/story/27403383/video-released-of-darren-wilson-at-police-station-after-shooting The prosecutor threw the case obviously, its not even done well. grand juries are rubber stamps. this specific prosecutor whose father was a cop killed by a black man and has yet to indict a cop in 5 cases, has a bias and showed his bias.

 

occams razor.

Wilson had a history of treating black folks badly since his prior job. Some of the members of the police department were outted by Anonymous of havign KKK ties. So, we know the environment. Wilson talked shit to Brown. Ordered him to the car and said something that scared the shit out of Brown, which resulted in the scuffle. Bown fled and Wilson executed him. the reason it took 4 hours to remove the body and the long wait was for the PD to get their stories and narrative straight. The release of the name coincided with the attempt to impune Brown. There is a video of the media catching white masked undercover cops throwing bricks amongst the protesters to get the police to hurt the protesters. Its all bullshit and the reaosn why I reacting seemingly emotionally is because its what I and every black male i know has been through. I have been verbally abused by philly cops, LA cops. a few times coming back from work in a suit and tie. The itnerntional press isn't fooled (the guardian in the UK, al jazeera usa, etc.

 

 

 

As far as the anti gay sentiment in Russia, its all part of Putn's number one fear. Negative birthrate. The population has been dropping quickly since the fall. now 143 mllion, at the present rate will drop below 100 mi by mid century. They are paying 4k to have kids there http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/11/world/europe/11russia.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 Gay lifestyle is seen as speeding up the process so that's why they are so anti gay. Ameica's brithrate is dropping as well but only caucasion birthrate. latino have a high birthrate, blacks have a postive birthrate as do asians. Hence America will be majority non white in 20 years and why Red states (usually white) like Virginia and N. Carolina, New Mexico, Colorado are all now toss ups that have voted for Obama except NC. California was a firmly red state until the early 1990s. Latinos turned it blue starting with the Clinton election.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hi Steve...good to know that the North Koreans have finally released you after completion of your "re-education". :neener: Too bad that for the last few years you've only been allowed to see MSNBC news. Otherwise you wouldn't be promoting things like " As for Ferguson, the pro Wilson narrative has the major media." I don't know where you get that. From the start, major media has been overwhelmingly supportive of the deceased and even argumentative over the grand jury's appropriate determination. The deceased was no angel. Did you not see the video of him committing strong armed robbery that ultimately led to his demise. Did you not know that he was probably high on dope that morning? Did you not know he was not "college bound", but his classes at some vocational school had started a week prior to the incident? Here's some interesting background on your college-bound kid. (Be thankful he wasn't at Auburn. LOL)

http://beforeitsnews.com/obama/2014/12/the-truth-michael-browns-family-of-gangstas-the-rest-of-the-story-video-2468794.html

Link to comment
Share on other sites

:dunno:HH-

That link is every bit as biased as YOU THINK THE OTHER SIDE IS

The caption under the top photo-

 

"this is how these blacks behave"

 

That's not a balanced view-to put it mildly.. :rotl:

 

The above being said-It hard to know what really happened.

If he did try and grab the cops gun- Well that's stupid and set things into a very bad direction .

 

 

Did he deserve to die?

 

I don't think so.

 

What happened to

taking someone down with a non lethal shot?

 

The police are out of control in the USA.

 

But on the other hand I also think his step-fathers screaming on top of that car

"to burn the bitch down" was a huge mistake- :nono:

And on it goes..

 

As practicing Buddhist I see all of this as Karma-US style

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Meet the woman spearheading the federal probe of Ferguson

 

 

Vanita Gupta was only weeks out of law school in 2001 when she began looking into a strange series of drug busts in a tiny West Texas ranch town named Tulia.

 

In 1999, a third of the town’s black population had been ensnared in the biggest drug bust the Texas Panhandle had ever seen. Forty-six people, almost all of them poor African-Americans who had prior run-ins with the law, were convicted on charges of cocaine dealing and sentenced to years in prison based solely on the testimony of a former rodeo clown turned undercover cop who had little experience investigating narcotics.

 

Gupta, then 26, had just joined the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, and she began assembling a team of attorneys and civil rights groups to look into the drug arrests, which didn’t smell right to her. It was her first case as an attorney. Two years later, a Texas judge overturned many of the convictions, calling the cop’s testimony not credible. After the officer was found guilty of perjury, Gov. Rick Perry pardoned most of the defendants whose convictions had not been previously overturned.

 

It was one of the highest-profile cases of racial injustice in recent memory, and it branded Gupta, so young she still resembled a college student, a rising star in the legal world. “Don’t be surprised if she ends up on the Supreme Court someday,†the Houston Chronicle mused in 2003. And Hollywood took notice too, optioning a book about the Tulia case. Tentatively cast as Gupta: Halle Berry.

 

In the decade since, Gupta has gone on to become one of the best-known civil rights attorneys in the country — leading the charge on prison reform, immigration law, police overreach and other issues.

 

Now the 39-year-old lawyer, praised as a trailblazer on civil rights issues, is set to play a major role in how the Justice Department proceeds in its ongoing federal investigation into the events surrounding the shooting of an unnamed black teenager in Ferguson, Mo., last August.

 

Last month, Attorney General Eric Holder named Gupta as the acting head of the Civil Rights Division at the Justice Department, with the expectation that she will soon be nominated for the job permanently. The job puts her at the center of other politically sensitive issues, including the department’s lawsuits against Texas and North Carolina for controversial voter ID laws that Justice officials contend are in violation of the Voting Rights Act.

 

But it's how DOJ proceeds in the Ferguson investigation that is sure to be an early test for Gupta. A local grand jury declined Monday to indict Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown. But the Justice Department is still looking into whether Wilson, who is white, should face civil rights charges in the case. At the same time, DOJ officials are continuing a broader inquiry into the widely criticized practices of the police department in Ferguson, a mostly black suburb of St. Louis that has had tensions for years with police and community officials who are largely white.

 

Gupta is already well acquainted with the issues in Ferguson. Before joining the Obama administration, she was the deputy legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union, where she spearheaded the group’s efforts on Ferguson. She was a co-author of a study, launched months earlier, looking into the militarization of local police departments — an issue that garnered new attention after violent protests erupted between the Ferguson Police Department and people angry over the death of Brown.

 

“What Ferguson has laid bare is something that communities of color, kind of at the target of the war on drugs, have known for the last several decades, that policing in their communities is often highly militarized,†Gupta said in an interview with New York's WNYC radio in August. “The question will be that once the cameras leave Ferguson, once the Ferguson hashtag is no longer trending on Twitter, is there going to be the political will and resolve to actually address what has been a very alarming situation in local and state police departments around the country? Because there’s no question that this has really gone out of control.â€

 

Gupta brings an interesting personal perspective to her new job. Born in Philadelphia, she is the daughter of Indian immigrants and spent much of her early childhood in England and France, where her father worked as a business manager for a multinational chemical company.

 

While she has told reporters that she’s not sure when she developed an interest in social justice issues, she’s also recounted vivid memories of a childhood in which she experienced discrimination firsthand.

 

In one incident in a London restaurant, she and her family, including a grandmother who was visiting from India, were the targets of slurs by skinheads who called them “Pakis†and threw french fries at them until they left. “It was just a very vivid demonstration of what it’s like to grow up as a person of color in a very troubled time,†Gupta told the New York Times in a 2003 profile.

 

She later attended Yale, studying history and women’s studies, prompting her family to tease her about what she was going to do with her life. But that soon became clear to her parents when, in 1996, Gupta, dressed in her graduation gown, skipped her commencement ceremony to demonstrate with Yale employees fighting for fair wages. She later graduated from New York University’s School of Law.

 

In Gupta, the Obama administration sees someone who has not only the smarts and legal experience for the job but also the pragmatism to work across aisles. She is expected to be able to find common ground with conservatives on criminal-justice reform, one of the few policy areas where Democrats and Republicans have been able to work together. She’s won praise from staunch conservatives including Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform and former National Rifle Association head David Keene, who told the Washington Post that she “listens to and works with people from all perspectives to accomplish real good.â€

 

While Gupta’s name has not been formally put before Capitol Hill lawmakers, her confirmation proces would presumably be easier than Obama’s last nominee. In August, the Senate rejected another NAACP veteran, Debo Adegbile, who was strongly opposed by Republicans and some Democrats because of his involvement in the defense of Mumia Abu-Jamal, a controversial prisoner who was convicted of killing a Philadelphia police officer in 1981. The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has been without a permanent leader since June 2013, when its former head, Tom Perez, became Obama’s labor secretary.

 

On Oct. 31, just days into her new job, Gupta made her first public appearance on behalf of the administration, appearing in Albuquerque, N.M., to announce a “landmark settlement†between the Justice Department and the city’s police department after an investigation found that officers had been using excessive force against civilians. Under the agreement, the city accepted an independent monitor to oversee reforms for the next two years and agreed to adopt new policies aimed at easing conflict with the community.

 

The investigation offered hints of how the Justice Department might pursue a civil rights case against the Ferguson Police Department, which has faced similar claims from the community.

 

“Constitutional policing is key to building trust between police departments and the communities they serve, and trust is, of course, key to ensuring public and officer safety,†Gupta said in announcing the agreement.

 

It was a long way from Tulia, the case that launched her career. In an interview with the Dallas Morning News in 2005, Gupta spoke of that controversial episode not as an isolated problem but as something that was happening in cities all over the country. And it was pursuing that issue, she said, that made her feel alive.

 

“Civil rights work is what gets me up in the morning and makes me feel like I can live a meaningful life,†she said.

 

 

http://news.yahoo.com/ferguson-justice-department-vanita-gupta-153750781.html

Link to comment
Share on other sites

To be honest reading all these stories I am surprised the USA's second civil war has not started yet. No one seems to get along with eachother. Everyone seems polarised. Blacks, Whites, Hispanics, Republicans, Democrats. Everyone hates the other camp and refuses to listen to what they have to say.

 

It seems a sad state of affairs :(

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
 Share

×
×
  • Create New...