Perhaps the NYT's audience will understand why a bit better after reading these facts.The charge itself was a gift from the Obama-era DOD. It should have been treason, with a side order of responsibility for recklessly endangering hundreds of lives -- an untold number of which may have been lost.
When Ms. Manning transmitted 750,000 secret military records and State Department cables to WikiLeaks in 2010, she not only jeopardized continuing missions and disrupted American diplomacy. She also put an untold number of innocent people’s lives in danger.
According to The New Yorker, when the United States tried to locate “hundreds” of Afghans named in the documents and move them to safety, “many could not be found, or were in environments too dangerous to reach.” When pressed by a journalist about the possibility of redacting the names of Afghans who cooperated with the United States military, Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, reportedly replied: “Well, they’re informants. So, if they get killed, they’ve got it coming to them. They deserve it.”
Meantime, Mr. Assange gave a Russian Holocaust denier 90,000 of the cables. That man, who goes by the pen name Israel Shamir, delivered a trove to the Belarussian dictatorship, which then utilized the material to detain opposition activists. In Zimbabwe, President Robert Mugabe used a leaked cable detailing a United States Embassy meeting with opposition figures as pretext for an investigation into “treasonous collusion.”
Yet from the moment United States military prosecutors charged Ms. Manning with violating the Espionage Act in 2010, progressives have hailed her as a folk hero.
The states created the federal government. They gave it a sphere of jurisdiction, over which it is supreme. That jurisdiction, however, is limited to the specific, enumerated powers contained in the text of the Constitution. All other powers—every single power not expressly delegated to the national government—remain vested in the states, or the people....His kind words for the 14th Amendment, though doubtless unavoidable given the rhetorical project, strike me as at odds with the idea of restraining an overweening Federal government. The 14th's delegation of power to the Federal courts is one of the things most in need of restraint by any new amendments. The idea that the Federal courts would prevent states from violating basic rights was nice, and probably even needed at the time the amendment was proposed, but it became the vehicle for forcing state submission to every Federal whim in every single kind of case. Outright repeal of the 14th might not be appropriate or necessary, but some sort of adjustment certainly is necessary if Coburn's vision is going to be realized.
Don’t fall for the lie that the Convention of States Project is some conservative plot to impose their policies on the American people. The real agenda is exactly the opposite: to restore the power of the American people to decide public policies for themselves.
An analysis by the Pew Research Center that looked at every piece of legislation that received final approval from Congress found this Congress tied for fifth most productive in the past 30 years.Doing what, you ask?
...overturning Obama-era rules, using a little-known law call the Congressional Review Act.That's under-selling it. The regulations are an undisputed bright-spot in the Trump administration: for every new regulation they have proposed, they've killed sixteen existing ones. They have focused especially on Obama-era regulations intended to 'fundamentally transform America.' The economic benefits are real.
The 1996 law gives this Congress a shortcut to overturn any rules submitted after mid-June of 2016. Before now, the Act had only been used once.... This Republican-led Congress, however, has shown no qualms about using the act to chip away at Barack Obama’s legacy. While Congress hasn’t been able to repeal and replace Obamacare, which Republicans have been promising for the seven years since it was passed, they have gotten rid of regulations around mountaintop removal for coal mining, a rule that kept internet service providers from using selling customers data to advertisers without their permission, and a Securities and Exchange Commission regulation that requires corporations to disclose payments to foreign governments.... President Trump promised repeatedly during his campaign to slash regulations, and Congress has delivered: While congressional “productivity” is high, regulatory activity is at an all-time low.
In a statement, OMB Director Mick Mulvaney boasted about how much the administration has been able to cut down on regulatory red tape and improve American prosperity.Smaller-government efforts like this would never have been considered under the second Clinton administration. That's a fact worth keeping in mind as a partial counterweight to the criticisms, though many of those are valid.
“Government is using muscles it hasn’t used in a really long time, exposing and removing redundant and unnecessary regulation,” he said.
“In the first five months of this administration alone the net cost of our regulatory agenda has been less than zero dollars. Contrast that with the last five months of Fiscal Year 2016 when the Obama administration imposed almost $7 billion in costs on our economy through regulation."
The classic example of a moral panic involves a society losing its mind over witchcraft, as when more than twenty innocent people, mostly women, were hanged or otherwise killed following the Salem witch trials of 1692. In general, a moral panic concerns something that would be bad, perhaps horrific, if real, but whose reality is imagined or exaggerated to the point of social hysteria, and the popular reaction to which leads individuals and institutions to abandon reason, evidence, and common sense....Lord is a TV personality, and I don't watch television. I don't know that Gorka is an "odious" person, though; I've never met the guy, but I know a guy who knows him and who tells me that Gorka's been badly mistreated. The press hates Trump so much that they're looking to hate anyone associated with Trump, and if there are things they can misrepresent in a way that makes that guy look even worse than Trump, well, then that guy becomes a weapon against Trump.
It should be obvious from history that uninformed or illiterate attacks on odious people like Gorka or Lord lead inevitably to uninformed or illiterate attacks on good people. Perhaps CNN dismissed Lord on a pretext, or perhaps it finally just no longer thought he was worth the trouble. And the Vitézi Rend is an obscure bit of knowledge, easy for dilettantes to posture over because so few others are equipped to challenge their “expertise.” The okay sign is a different matter. It is familiar, common, mundane. What does it say that so many repeat the myth of the “white power” sign? One possibility is that people have no confidence in their own understanding of the sign; another is that they acknowledge that it used to mean “okay,” but are willing to surrender such a common expression to extremists instantly when challenged. Both possibilities are disturbing, because they suggest that we lack the mental tools and strength to respond to this phenomenon. When pressed, we will sacrifice our culture and our way of life. Charlottesville demonstrated, at least for the moment, that we are not willing to cede control of our streets to white nationalism. But if we cede control of our rhetoric, of our intellectual spaces, and even of our ordinary language, the real battle will be lost.
The true meaning of the tablet has eluded experts until now but new research by the University of New South Wales, Australia, has shown it is the world’s oldest and most accurate trigonometric table, which was probably used by ancient architects to construct temples, palaces and canals.The ancients in general were better at math than we understand them to have been. We have forms of math they didn't have, but they had forms we have lost or abandoned, and sometimes they end up enabling pretty sophisticated mental work. In this case, it looks like the ancient Babylonians invented a form that was actually better than anything that has replaced it.
However unlike today’s trigonometry, Babylonian mathematics used a base 60, or sexagesimal system, rather than the 10 which is used today. Because 60 is far easier to divide by three, experts studying the tablet, found that the calculations are far more accurate.
“Our research reveals that Plimpton 322 describes the shapes of right-angle triangles using a novel kind of trigonometry based on ratios, not angles and circles,” said Dr Daniel Mansfield of the School of Mathematics and Statistics in the UNSW Faculty of Science.
“It is a fascinating mathematical work that demonstrates undoubted genius. The tablet not only contains the world’s oldest trigonometric table; it is also the only completely accurate trigonometric table, because of the very different Babylonian approach to arithmetic and geometry.
Senator William Mahone was one of the most maligned political leaders in post-Civil War America. He was also one of the most capable. Compared to the Roman traitor Cataline (by Virginia Democrats), to Moses (by African American congressman John Mercer Langston), and to Napoleon (by himself), Mahone organized and led the most successful interracial political alliance in the post-emancipation South. Mahone’s Readjuster Party, an independent coalition of black and white Republicans and white Democrats that was named for its policy of downwardly “readjusting” Virginia’s state debt, governed the state from 1879 to 1883.Like the United Irishmen's union of Protestant and Catholic in 1798, it's one of history's tragic missed opportunities.
During this period, a Readjuster governor occupied the statehouse, two Readjusters represented Virginia in the United States Senate, and Readjusters represented six of Virginia’s ten congressional districts. Under Mahone’s leadership, his coalition controlled the state legislature and the courts, and held and distributed the state’s many coveted federal offices. A black-majority party, the Readjusters legitimated and promoted African American citizenship and political power by supporting black suffrage, office-holding, and jury service. To a degree previously unseen in Virginia, and unmatched anywhere else in the nineteenth-century South, the Readjusters became an institutional force for the protection and advancement of black rights and interests....
The Readjusters lost power in 1883 through a Democratic campaign of violence, electoral fraud, and appeals to white solidarity. While Democrats suppressed progressive politics in the state, other groups of elite white Virginians worked fast to eradicate the memory of Virginia’s experiment in interracial democracy.
They got rocking chairs on big porches. They got the friedest food you ever tasted. They got cheap cigarettes. They got cute nicknames like Scooter, June Bug, Colonel Poopy Conner,” she said. “They got big fat guys in tiny little ties, and got drive-though liquor stores.Be sure to conform to these
Firefighters in Wiltshire, England rescued 18 piglets and two sows from a barn that was going up in flames in February, according to the BBC. The fire ended up consuming 60 tons of hay. Six months later, the farm gave the firefighters sausage made from the pigs to thank them.I imagine it was. There's a great butcher shop not far from here where we get fresh sausage on a regular basis. It never disappoints.
“I’m sure vegetarians will hate this,” said Rachel Rivers, the manager of the farm where the pigs were saved.
Rivers and farm owner Canon Gerald Osbourne defended the gift, saying raising and slaughtering livestock is their livelihood.
“I gave those animals the best quality of life I could ever give until the time they go to slaughter and they go into the food chain,” Rivers said, adding that “you do feel sad at the end of it.”
The firefighters, who barbequed the sausage, didn’t seem to mind. They called the meat “fantastic.”
"I can not be a traitor, for I owe him no allegiance. He is not my Sovereign; he never received my homage; and whilst life is in this persecuted body, he never shall receive it. To the other points whereof I am accused, I freely confess them all. As Governor of my country I have been an enemy to its enemies; I have slain the English; I have mortally opposed the English King; I have stormed and taken the towns and castles which he unjustly claimed as his own. If I or my soldiers have plundered or done injury to the houses or ministers of religion, I repent me of my sin; but it is not of Edward of England I shall ask pardon."Requiescat in pace Sir William Wallace.
Ghana has said it will remove a statue of Mahatma Gandhi from a university campus in the nation’s capital where it had sparked protests over the leader’s allegedly racist attitudes....It's ironic to see a Hindu guru from India roped up for using a slur that originates from Muslim criticisms of those who reject Islam. But of course there are plenty of reasons to criticize Gandhi; it's just that he's a kind of secular saint (who wasn't, himself, at all secular) to the very sort of American who wants to pull down other monuments.
The petition, which had more than 1,700 supporters on Thursday, cited letters Gandhi wrote during his time in South Africa as evidence that he advocated for the superiority of Indians over black Africans. It also took issue with his use of the derogatory term kaffir to refer to native Africans and criticized the lack of statues of African heroes and heroines on campus.
