Samantha Bee slams anti-Girl Scout archbishop who wasn’t ‘sure’ child molestation was a crime

RAW STORY

Samantha Bee put her money where her Thin Mints were on Monday as she offered support to the Girl Scouts of Eastern Missouri against St. Louis Archbishop Robert Carlson.
“You have underestimated our love of girl power — and our love of cookies,” Bee said to Carlson before revealing that the program bought a “sh*t-ton” of Girl Scout cookies to give to her audience. She also directed viewers to her website, which is encouraging them to “ruin an awful archbishop’s day” by either buying cookies or donating to the Girl Scouts directly.
Carlson drew Bee’s ire after he contacted local parishes and urged them to cut ties with the Scouts, saying they were “becoming increasingly incompatible with our Catholic values.”
Among the behaviors troubling Carlson, Bee noted, was the fact that the Scouts were working with Amnesty International.
“I guess trying to stop the beheading of political prisoners doesn’t count as ‘pro-life’ enough for him,” she quipped.
However, she also highlighted Carlson’s testimony in May 2014 concerning the sexual assault committed by former Father Thomas Adamson. Adamson met with Carlson in 1980 while both men worked under the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis. At the time, Carlson handled sexual abuse cases for the archdiocese, but Adamson’s crime was never reported.
“You knew it was a crime for an adult to engage in sex with a kid,” a prosecutor can be heard saying in footage of Carlson’s testimony.
“I’m not sure whether I knew it was a crime or not,” Carlson responds.
Yet at the same time, Bee said, Carlson found the Girl Scouts’ support for contraception to be part of “a troubling pattern of behavior.”
“If you don’t want girls getting knocked up and you won’t let them have contraception, you’d better teach the Boy Scouts to use some of those fancy knots on their d*cks,” she said.

CNN contributor insists David Duke is a ‘hardcore leftist’ and the KKK is ‘military arm of the Democratic Party’

RAW STORY

A CNN contributor who doesn’t seem to understand how politics have evolved since the Civil War repeatedly insisted the Ku Klux Klan was a liberal organization.
Jeffrey Lord, a former associate political director in the Reagan administration who frequently calls on modern Democratic Party to apologize for sins committed by historical Democrats, appeared Monday to discuss a former Ku Klux Klan leader’s backing of Donald Trump, reported Media Matters.
David Duke, the one-time Grand Wizard of the KKK and a one-term Louisiana state representative, threw his support behind Trump, who has disavowed the endorsement but also said he would need to research white supremacist groups before commenting on them.
“Donald Trump isn’t playing the game, although he certainly denounced him,” Lord said. “I mean, David Duke is a hardcore leftist. He’s an anti-Semite.”
Duke served in the Louisiana legislator as a Republican from 1989 to 1992, but he has run long-shot presidential and legislative campaigns as both a Democrat and Republican.
Lord then argued that the KKK, which was founded by angry former Confederate soldiers during the Reconstruction era and terrorized blacks throughout the first half of the 20th Century, was associated with the Democratic Party.
“The Ku Klux Klan is a function of the left,” Lord said. “It was the military arm of the Democratic Party. Hello? Donald Trump’s daughter and son-in-law are Jewish. David Duke is an anti-Semite, for heaven’s sakes. This is ridiculous.”
Many members of the historical KKK were Democrats, but most historians and political scientists agree that the Democratic Party of the late 19th and early 20th centuries bear little resemblance to today’s Democratic Party.
The long-standing link between the Democratic Party and white supremacists in the south began unraveling during the 1960s as the national party became increasingly aligned with the black civil rights struggle and white southerners began to vote for Republican candidates.
CNN host Margaret Hoover did not correct her guest’s claims, but she dismissed the KKK as a hate group that was no longer affiliated with any traditional political party — but Lord wouldn’t hear it.
“It is a racist hate group from the left, and that counts,” Lord said. “That is important to understand. It is not conservative. It has nothing to do with conservatism. All of these Klan members who have been elected to Congress and U.S. Senate and governorships over the years, supporting Franklin Roosevelt because they like Social Security. Let’s get our history straight.”
In fact, a recent study showed how the KKK played an active and enduring role in steering southern white voters away from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party.
By 1992, when Duke sought the GOP presidential nomination over party leaders’ objections, a poll found that even decades after the KKK’s decline, Republican voting was strongest in southern counties where the Klan was active in the 1960s.
“The Klan played an active role in encouraging white southerners to prioritize white supremacy over party loyalty,” the study’s authors found.
Lord, however, said the controversy would only strengthen Trump’s appeal with some voters.
“This is why — this is exactly the kind of thing why people are voting for Donald Trump,” Lord said. “Because they think the media is making something out of nothing. Nothing. This is crazy.”

FULL FIGHT VIDEO: The KKK Gets Beat Up in Anaheim

Conservative nonprofit attacks Trump University in new ads

By Jenna Johnson


OKLAHOMA CITY -- A retiree says he was "duped by the Donald" and lost $35,000 to Trump University, a short-lived and controversial Donald Trump business venture. A single mom says she "made a huge mistake trusting him" and lost just as much money, maybe more. A man identified only as "Kevin" says Trump University ruined his credit; he called Trump "a fraud, a misrepresentation, a B.S. artist."
The American Future Fund -- a conservative nonprofit based in Iowa that advocates for conservative and free-market issues -- released three ads Friday that use these former Trump University students to attack Trump, the Republican presidential nomination front-runner. Each student, identified only by first name, urges voters not to trust Trump.
"I was scammed because I believed in Donald Trump -- he can make people believe practically anything," the retiree says in one of the ads. In another, Kevin says: "America, don't make the same mistake I made with Donald Trump."


Trump has repeatedly defended Trump University, which was never licensed as an institution of higher education, and has said that a majority of students were satisfied with the real estate training program. Trump University started in 2004, and about 80,000 people attended free introductory seminars held in hotel ballrooms across the country. About 9,200 of those participants then paid $1,495 for three-day real estate seminars, and nearly 800 paid up to $35,000 for all-inclusive packages that included one-on-one mentoring.

 

[Was Donald Trump's education venture a scam?]

Trump University changed its name to the Trump Entrepreneur Initiative in May 2010 -- the New York State Education Department had deemed the "university" part of the name misleading -- and, soon after, stopped operating. The venture is still caught up in three pending lawsuits, including a $40 million suit brought by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman (D).
Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) both mentioned Trump University during the GOP debate on Thursday night, forcing Trump to explain and defend himself. Trump has repeatedly said he did nothing wrong. A spokeswoman for Trump's campaign did not respond to a request for comment on the new attack ads.

[One punch that Marco Rubio landed on the frontrunner: Trump University]

The ads were posted on the nonprofit group's website on Friday, but a representative of the group did not respond to a request for comment. The New York Times reported the group plans to spend millions of dollars airing the ads, which are reminiscent of attack ads Democrats used against Mitt Romney in 2012 that featured people who said they were victimized by Bain Capital, the private equity firm where Romney was a partner.

It’s official: ‘Idiocracy’ writer says his satire about a dumber America has become a reality

RAW STORY


The co-writer of the cult sci-fi comedy Idiocracy confirmed what many of the film’s fans probably felt about the current political climate, The Hill reported.
“I never expected Idiocracy to become a documentary,” Etan Cohen posted on Twitter on Wednesday. The 2006 film centered around two people who awaken from a cryogenic sleep to learn that the country is awash in anti-intellectualism.
“I thought the worst thing that would come true was everyone wearing Crocs,” Cohen added.
The movie, which Cohen co-wrote with director Mike Judge, garnered critical praise and a cult following despite being under-promoted by 20th Century Fox during its US theatrical release.
“People will email and post stuff on my Twitter that’s like, ‘Hey, you predicted it right!’ So that’s always nice. But it’s not always nice because you want the world to become a better place,” Judge told The Verge in 2014, adding, “Yep, we’re doomed. Might as well make jokes about it.”
Terry Crews, who played President Camacho in the film, reprised the character on his own Twitter account last month, telling fans, “ALL Y’ALL NEED TO STOP TRIPPIN. CHILL THE F OUT, ‘MERICA.”

Triumph the Insult Comic Dog Sends Fake Fox News Girls to Trump Rally • Triumph on Hulu

Argentinian fossil dating back 12,000 years belonged to mammal built like ‘a small car’

RAW STORY

DNA coaxed out of a 12,000-year-old fossil from Argentina is providing unique insight into one of the strangest Ice Age giants: a tank-like mammal the size of a small car with a bulbous bony shell and a spiky, club-shaped tail.
Scientists said on Monday their genetic research confirmed that the creature, named Doedicurus, was part of an extinct lineage of gigantic armadillos. Doedicurus was a plant-eater that weighed about a ton and roamed the pampas and savannas of South America, vanishing about 10,000 years ago along with many other large Ice Age animals.
“With a length of more than three meters (10 feet) from head to tail, it certainly looks like a small car, like a Mini or Fiat 500,” evolutionary biologist Frederic Delsuc of France’s Université de Montpellier, one of the researchers, said.
It was a member of a group called glyptodonts that shared the landscape with giant ground sloths, sabre-toothed cats and towering, flightless, carnivorous “terror birds.” Some glyptodonts made it as far north as southern portions of the United States, from what is now Arizona through the Carolinas.
The researchers were able to place Doedicurus and the other glyptodonts into the armadillo family tree after studying small fragments of DNA extracted from bits of the creature’s carapace. They used a sophisticated technique to fish mitochondrial DNA out from a soup of environmental contaminants that had leached into the fossil over the eons.
They determined the glyptodont lineage originated about 35 million years ago. The oldest armadillo fossil, from Brazil, was around 58 million years old.
Asked what someone might think upon encountering Doedicurus, another of the researchers, evolutionary biologist Hendrik Poinar of McMaster University in Canada said, “That’s the biggest armadillo-looking creature I’ve ever seen, and it has a tail like an Ankylosaurus. Yikes!”
Doedicurus resembles the dinosaur Ankylosaurus, which also was heavily armored and wielded a club-like tail.
The researchers said the resemblance was an example of “convergent evolution” in which disparate organisms independently evolve similar features to adapt to similar environments or ecological niches.
Scientists have debated whether humans contributed to the extinction of the glyptodonts. Poinar said he believed that humans played a role, saying most of the large mammals of that time were under pressure not only from climate change as Ice Age waned but also from human hunting.
The research was published in the journal Current Biology.

Bombshell: Iran Reveals Republicans Tried To Delay Release Of US Prisoners Until After Election

By Colin Taylor


Shocking new revelations appear to show that the Republicans in Congress are insisting in pursuing their treasonous efforts to go around the President’s back and derail his foreign policy agenda. Last year, led by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), forty-seven Republican traitors sent a letter to the Iranian government in an attempt to scare them out of the President’s historic nuclear peace accord. Republicans in Congress were then caught taking bribes from foreign governments in exchange for their efforts against the White House.
But this time, they have gone too far. The Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council (SNSC), Ali Shamkhani, alleges that Congressional Republicans attempted to parlay with the Iranian government in an attempt to postpone the recent prisoner exchange until after the election.

“In the course of the talks for exchanging prisoners, the Republican rivals of the current US administration who claim to be humanitarians and advocates of human rights sent a message telling us not to release these people (American prisoners) and continue this process (of talks) until the eve of US presidential elections. However, we acted upon our independent resolve and moved the process forward.”

These false patriots and treasonous dogs wrap themselves in the flag while secretly negotiating behind closed doors to condemn five Americans to languish in an Iranian prison just so they can use their captivity as a political weapon with which to bludgeon the President and the Democratic candidates. Their hypocrisy is incredible – the GOP has been obsessed with finding out the “truth” of the tragic deaths of four Americans in Benghazi, and then turn their coats and work to keep five Americans in the hands of the people they themselves call an enemy? American lives are nothing but political pawns for these self-serving cowards and fools.
It is a shocking and depressing day to see our legislators behaving with such disrespect for the office of the Presidency and his agenda and for the well-being of American citizens abroad. They have threatened our national security by exposing our partisan divide to a nation that they themselves insist wants to destroy us and previously worked to prevent President Obama from neutralizing that same nation’s nuclear program. They have disgraced our nation and the office they serve, and they must be made to pay for it next election.

Yep, The Oregon Standoff Is Still Going -- And If Anything It's Getting Weirder

TPM

More than a month since a group of anti-government extremists took over a federal wildlife refuge in rural Oregon and nearly nearly two weeks since the authorities arrested most of the group's leaders in a dramatic confrontation that left one of the occupier's dead, the standoff drags on with no end in sight.
Hopes that arrests of the ringleaders would lead to a quick and peaceful resolution to the ongoing takeover have diminished as the holdouts still at the refuge dig in and the occupier who was killed, LaVoy Finicum, has been elevated as a martyr in extremist circles. The remaining diehards at the Malheur National Wildlife Center have re-dubbed it "Camp Finicum."
National attention on the standoff has waned since Finicum's death, but things have continued to get weirder. Franklin Graham, the minister, has gotten involved at some level to try to bring an end to the standoff. Ammon Bundy, the main leader who is now jailed in Portland, reportedly in solitary confinement, has been making regular statements to the public via recorded messages released by his lawyers, and police have tightened the cordon around the refuge even as the handful of militants holed up inside ​have sounded the call for their supporters on the outside to "stand up" in their defense.
Here's what has happened since Ammon Bundy and brigade were arrested last month:

Ammon Bundy amps up his rhetoric against the authorities

Since immediately after his arrest, Ammon Bundy has shifted his tone in the messages he has been delivering through his lawyers. At first, his attorneys read statements in which he urged the remaining occupiers to leave the refuge. But more recently, his lawyers have posted audio messages apparently recorded of Bundy in jail in which Bundy directs his scorn at authorities. "Go home Oregon State Police. You have already killed enough," he said in one message last week. "Go home FBI. It is time to end this."
In another that was posted Monday, Bundy urged elected officials to stand up for the occupiers now facing federal charges.
“It is your duty to hold federal agencies at bay, protecting the people in your state," he said.
Bundy, along with more than a dozen others involved in the takeover, were in indicted by a grand jury on a single count of conspiracy to impede officers of the United States. Eight occupiers, including Bundy, were arrested Jan. 28, and three more were arrested the next day, though some of them have been released from custody on bail.

Those who remain at ‘Camp Finicum’ start posting videos again

David Fry -- a self-described gamer, the tech guru for the occupiers, and one of the four people believed to be still at the refuge -- posted a series of videos to YouTube Sunday. He called the transmission a “miracle” after the occupiers told Oregon Public Radio last week they believed the FBI had shut off their lines of communication.
In one message, Fry called those who reportedly disrupted a make-shift memorial site for Finicum “trash” and said, “It’s time that the good people stand up, bear arms and tell all these evil trash people to piss off.”
He also signaled the need for more support for those within the refuge, as “supplies aren’t unlimited.”
“How much longer are the American people going to sit here and wait and let the FBI snuff people like us out?” Fry said. “We are out here making a stand.”
In another video -- titled “Shove your charges where the sun dont [sic] shine!” -- Fry shows off the federal property his group has hijacked, and takes a vehicle owned by the government for a “joy ride.”
“We are going to use every resource we have here. And I think we have every right to do that,” he said.
Another video features Sean and Sandy Anderson, a husband-wife duo who remain at the refuge and claim they are being “held hostage” because they now face criminal charges.
“The rest of them have felonies, that’s not going to make us want to go home any sooner," Sean said.
Franklin Graham has also been called upon by the occupiers to act as an intermediary between authorities and those still at the refuge. Graham’s spokesman confirmed last week he had been in contact with both sides of the dispute, and in a YouTube video posted Sunday, Fry recounted the phone conversation he had with the evangelist. “I never talked to him before this. i never actually followed him much before this. But speaking to him on the phone he seems like a pretty good guy,” Fry said. “We asked for prayers. We asked that people in America know to give us prayers so we can make it through this.”
Fry also referenced a message Graham posted on his Facebook page Saturday in which Graham said he was "praying" for a peaceful resolution for the "complicated" dispute.

Authorities shut off access

The authorities, meanwhile, do not appear eager to further escalate the situation, but have shut off access to and from the refuge, limiting the occupiers’ lines of communication and supplies. According to Oregon Public Radio, over the weekend law enforcement erected signs to further discourage any attempts to reach the refuge -- be it by a member of the media or a militia man wishing to join the occupation. The lighted sign flashes the messages, “Road Closed, “No Unlawful Entry” and “Subject To Arrest."
The occupiers have been calling upon local sheriffs to join them in their fight against federal officials, an idea the Oregon State Sheriffs' Association rejected in a statement released Friday that said the group does “not agree with or support any citizen or elected official who would advocate for change in a manner that includes illegal action, threats of violence, or violence against any citizen of the United States.”
The question of who will ultimately pay for the occupation has also come up. U.S. Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) introduced a bill last week that would shift the $100,000 per week he estimated the occupation cost local and state authorities to the federal government, which in turn could recoup the costs from the occupiers via a Department of Justice civil suit.

The LaVoy Finicum martyrdom movement grows

The funeral held for Finicum in Kanab, Utah, Friday prompted demonstrations across Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and at the funeral site itself, where more than a thousand people showed up. At the various "vigils" across the Pacific northwest, protestors carried signs that said “Rural Lives Matter” and “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot.” Cliven Bundy was in attendance at the funeral, seated on horseback behind the Finicum family, according to Oregon Public Radio. The elder Bundy did not participate in the Oregon takeover but knew Finicum from the 2014 stand-off at the Bundy ranch.
“He was basically crucified,” Cliven Bundy said.

Another arrested occupier claims he is a journalist, but a judge refuses his release

Pete Santilli, a talk radio host who has a YouTube show, was among those arrested for his involvement in the occupation, but was unsuccessful in his attempts to convince a judge to release him on bail. The Huffington Post reported that he was often seen with his domestic partner Deborah Jordan -- who also traveled to Burns, Oregon after the takeover -- carrying gear and standing with the press. His lawyers also produced receipts from a local motel to prove he wasn't participating in the takeover.
Nevertheless, prosecutors pointed to videos posted to his YouTube account supportive of the occupiers and even calling for others to join them. Ultimately, U.S. District Judge Michael W. Mosman denied his request to be released from custody on bail, citing claims Santilli made on his YouTube show well before the occupation that he had a cache of unregistered guns.