Man who stood before Robert E. Lee statue with a Confederate flag was also heavily armed
Will autonomous cars make roads safer for pedestrians?
A substitute teacher at my middle school showed us a Dick Gregory tape in detention and it blew my mind
Dean Obeidallah is suing the neo-Nazi website "The Daily Stormer" for defamation
Donald Trump is completely unfit to be president of the United States. Though he’s given us a plethora of evidence in the last seven months to corroborate this fact, the past week alone has served to remove any doubt. In a country which has a history of serious injustice and racial division and with race relations worsening by the day, Trump solidified his fate as Divider-In-Chief when he announced his support for the “very fine” white supremacists who rallied in Charlottesville. At this point, all rational-thinking minorities, people of color and human beings in general should want nothing to do with him. Which is why it’s both bizarre and astoundingly tone deaf that the administration thinks that now is the time to have a White House sponsored conference for Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). But that’s exactly what they are doing. A White House official said that a Trump administration-backed conference for historically black colleges and universities will go ahead as planned next month. In recent days, a Democratic lawmaker and prominent nonprofit donor to the schools recommended to the White House that the National Historically Black Colleges and Universities Week Conference be postponed because of concerns “related to recent national events.” [...] Johnny C. Taylor and Rep. Alma Adams, a North Carolina Democrat, were among the voices who tried to get the White House to halt the planning. Taylor, the outgoing president and CEO of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, wrote a letter to [Omarosa Manigault-Newman, assistant to the president and director of communications for the Office of Public Liaison] dated Aug. 18, saying that there was a “pretty strong consensus” in the HBCU leadership community that the White House should hold off until good faith measures — such as appointing an executive director and advisory board — showed that the White House had a “commitment to advancing the HBCU agenda.” It’s pretty ridiculous to insist on holding a conference for a group of people that you’ve not only done absolutely nothing for, despite promises to the contrary, but whose livelihood and well-being you actively work against. Nevertheless, the administration persists.
Tillerson to the Taliban: "You will not win a battlefield victory. We may not win one, but neither will you"
Breaking the sound barrier took years of diligent engineering and cost the lives of skilled pilots. But Donald Trump has sailed through the 1,000 documented lies barrier with the ease of … Donald Trump lying, actually. There is nothing easier or more dependable. The Washington Post’s list of Trump’s false and misleading statements now stands at 1,057. That’s an impressive number by any standard. In fact, we are a little late with this update because we have simply been overwhelmed keeping track of the deluge of claims made by the president in the later part of July. Things slowed down during the president’s “working vacation,” so we have finally been able to catch up. Yes, while on his vacation, Trump concentrated his efforts on equating Nazis with people who fight Nazis, giving those tasked with counting his ordinary lies a chance to breathe. While Trump lies about … everything, there are some topics that get special attention. Trump’s most repeated claim, uttered 50 times, was some variation of the statement that the Affordable Care Act is dying and “essentially dead.” The Congressional Budget Office has said that the Obamacare exchanges, despite well-documented issues, are not imploding and are expected to remain stable for the foreseeable future. The next biggest category of Trump lie? Claims that he secured new business investments or job increases that either didn’t happen or were planned before the election.
Republican Missouri Governor Eric Greitens was pressured to grant a stay of execution for Marcellus Williams
Jerhonda Pace is breaking her nondisclosure agreement to share her story in hopes that she can help other women
Joel ditches his usual apolitical stance for a anti-Nazi protests
Members whose voting records are more solidly left-wing or right-wing tended to have more supporters on Facebook
In a podcast interview with Seth Meyers, Sen. Al Franken discusses his new book and his fellow colleagues
A Trump immigration deal could be very bad, indeed
For the first time, white players have joined their black teammates in taking a knee during the national anthem
For the first time, white players have joined their black teammates in taking a knee during the national anthem
While already picked up for a third season, the hit Netflix show may end after a fourth
Police say Andrew Cecil Schneck wanted to destroy a memorial to Confederate hero Richard Dowling with explosives
The leader of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, has told reporters he will definitely participate in the 2018 presidential race, also urging changes to the current law that allows presidents to serve two consecutive terms. Read Full Article at RT.com
With Steve Bannon back at his far-right publication, Breitbart needles Trump for departing from "America first"
Here we go … again. Republicans are hyper-obsessed with women’s bodies and our reproductive choices and they don’t hesitate to let the whole world know it through asinine statements and backward legislation. Unfortunately, they’ve been somewhat successful at limiting our reproductive rights at local levels. In Texas, with their latest law which bans insurance coverage for abortions with no exceptions, they’ve managed to raise their hatred of women to an art form. Now it looks like the GOP is continuing its assault on family planning with an upcoming rule that would eliminate free birth control through insurance providers. The Trump administration is preparing to roll back the Obama-era free birth control mandate, a move legal groups say would be unconstitutional and subject to a court challenge. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that the rule will be very similar to a draft version leaked in May, which would vastly expand the number and types of businesses eligible for an exemption from Obamacare’s rule requiring all employers to provide insurance coverage of all contraceptive methods without co-pays. If enacted as drafted, it would allow not only religious groups but thousands of non-profits and for-profit businesses to leave birth control out of their employees’ insurance altogether. Why employers are interested in the sex lives and procreation of their employees in the first place is beyond comprehension. If anything, you’d think they welcome covering this kind of medication. If women are not forced to manage unwanted pregnancies, they are happier, healthier, and more productive. This rule is discriminatory against women. And it doesn’t just impact them but also their entire families because it means dealing with lack of access to contraception and also because, under this rule, family members lose their access to contraception, too.
The Trump-McCain proxy war in Arizona heats up
Assange bravely ignores science, choses eclipse trutherism
Trump read a vague speech from a teleprompter that promised continued war in Afghanistan, pleasing media members
Donald Trump, fresh off the golf course, gave a rare speech to the nation on Monday night to reveal his new plan for Afghanistan. In a half hour teleprompter plod, through text Trump gave every sign of never seeing before, he revealed no troop numbers, no dates, no goals, no … anything. He did say that the troops would be fighting “to win,” because Trump apparently believes that previous administrations told the troops that losing would be peachy. He also spent quite a bit of time saying, without really saying, that he was backing out of all the promises he made previously about pulling troops from the area. “My original instinct was to pull out, and historically I like to follow my instincts.” … “I heard that decisions are much different when you sit behind the desk of the Oval Office.” What the person who nicely wrote this up for Trump really means is that everything he said before was BS without a hint of reason behind it. Oops sorry, America. The entire “strategy” offered up by Trump was that he would stop “nation building” and get down to “terrorist fighting.” Though beyond throwing out these terms he provided not a single detail of what this would mean. Earlier, Trump had said he would leave Afghanistan to the generals, but the plan that they returned to him was clearly not something he liked. President Trump was frustrated and fuming. Again and again, in the windowless Situation Room at the White House, he lashed out at his national security team over the Afghanistan war, and the paucity of appealing options gnawed at him. Trump considered options, including firing the leadership and installing Erik Princes’ mercenary army solution. But in the end, Trump came around to … doing as he was told.
