The Collin County sheriff said his office is looking into “security concerns” related to state Rep. Jeff Leach, days after the Plano Republican announced he would not allow a controversial abortion bill to leave his committee for a vote of the full House.

“My office has been in touch with him regarding some security concerns that we were made aware of,” Collin County Sheriff Jim Skinner told The Texas Tribune. “We’re taking appropriate measures and outside of that, there’s no additional comment.”

Leach referred all comments on the matter to the Collin County Sheriff’s Department.

The concerns come after Leach released a statement on Twitter Wednesday saying House Bill 896 would not leave the House Committee on Judiciary and Civil Jurisprudence that he chairs. The bill from state Rep. Tony Tinderholt, R-Arlington, criminalizes abortion and opens up the possibility of prosecutors charging a woman who has an abortion with criminal homicide, which can be punishable by the death penalty under current Texas law.

...

Thomas Massie, however, thought it’d be a good idea to question Kerry’s credentials – or more specifically, his degree.

[Massie] began his line of questioning attempting to undermine Kerry’s authority on the issue by asking him about his “science degree” from Yale.

Kerry explained it was actually a bachelor of arts in political science.

“How do you get a bachelor of arts in a science?” Massie asked.

“Well, it’s liberal arts education …” Kerry replied.

“So, it’s not really science,” Massie said. “I think it’s somewhat appropriate that someone with a pseudoscience degree is here pushing pseudoscience in front of our committee today.”

It was at this point that Kerry interjected. “Are you serious?” he asked. “Is this really serious? This is really happening here?”

For the record, if we wanted to summarize our contemporary political lives in five words, we could do worse than “This is really happening here?”

Ilhan Omar Never Stood a Chance

Ilhan Omar has courted controversy ever since she transformed, in the public’s conception, from a telegenic symbol of American pluralism to an actual person with actual opinions. In the months after her swearing-in to Congress, the Minnesota representative has been strident in her criticism of Saudi Arabia and Israel. Both are American allies, but it’s her position on the latter country that has prompted members of her own party to turn against her. The past two months have seen her accused varyingly of anti-Semitism, disloyalty to the United States, and, most recently, of downplaying the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The first criticism can be attributed to her suggestion that American support for Israel is “all about the Benjamins” — a seeming nod to the bigoted trope that rich Jews control the world. The second and third are more flagrantly Islamophobic in origin.

The backlash came to a head this week after footage surfaced of Omar speaking about Islamophobia at a Council on American-Islamic Relations event last month. “Far too long we have lived with the discomfort of being a second-class citizen and frankly, I’m tired of it and every single Muslim in this country should be tired of it,” Omar said to an audience gathered in Los Angeles. “CAIR was founded after 9/11 because they recognized that some people did something,” she said, gesturing as if to separate herself from ‘some people’, “and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties.”

Conservatives seized on Omar’s characterization of 9/11 as “some people did something” to cast it as an effort to trivialize the attack. President Trump on Friday tweeted a video that intercut her repeatedly saying “some people did something” with footage of the 9/11 attacks, with the caption, “We will never forget!” Representative Dan Crenshaw, a Texas Republican, tweeted that her comments were “unbelievable.” Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel added that Omar is “anti-American,” while the New York Post on Thursday published a cover photo of airplanes colliding with the Twin Towers. “Rep. Ilhan Omar: 9/11 was ‘some people did something,’” the headline read. “Here’s your something: 2,977 dead by terrorism.” The photo echoed imagery from an Islamophobic poster displayed at the West Virginia statehouse last month, which pictured Omar in front of the collapsing World Trade Center. “‘Never forget,’ you said,” the caption reads. “I am the proof — you have forgotten.” Such an ungenerous interpretation of her remarks is only possible if one is inclined to believe that Omar sympathizes more with terrorists than her murdered countrymen. That she spoke them in the course of decrying Islamophobia makes it especially disconcerting that her political opponents would decontextualize them to fan the flames — she receives regular death threats on the basis of her faith, including from one New York man who threatened recently to “put a bullet in her fucking skull.”

continued: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/04/ilhan-omar-islamophobic-backlash.html

Russian aluminum giant Rusal spent most of last year under US sanctions. Now it's pumping $200 million into a new project in Kentucky.

Rusal, the largest producer of aluminum outside China, will help fund and supply a low-carbon aluminum rolling mill under construction in the eastern part of the state, parent company En+ Group said Sunday.
The Russian company will take a 40% stake in the project, which is led by US startup Braidy Industries. The 2.5 million-square-foot plant in Kentucky will churn out metal for the auto and aerospace sectors.

...

Calilasseia wrote:The attacks on AOC are because the Rethuglicons are fucking scared shitless of her. She's already opened Trump up to tax fraud investigation with a simple question, and they're shitting themselves at what she'd do given some serious meat to tuck into. I so want to be a fly on the wall when she does have something juicy to break out the cutlery for, especially if it involves Pence and rent boys.

Minnesota, which gave the country Democratic Vice Presidents Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale, has not given its 10 electoral votes to a Republican since Richard Nixon in 1972. Mr Trump came within 1.5 percentage points of carrying the state in 2016 thanks to his strength among rural voters.

The state’s Democrats saw a huge overall resurgence during the anti-Trump backlash of 2018, notably in traditionally Republican suburbs of Minneapolis and St Paul.

Giving the president hope is the memory that his popularity outside the Twin Cities area helped the GOP flip two Democratic US House seats last year.

“I’m glad he’s coming to Minnesota,” said state Senate Majority Leader Paul Gazelka, the top Republican in state government. “I think he realises Minnesota’s in play.”

Calilasseia wrote:The attacks on AOC are because the Rethuglicons are fucking scared shitless of her. She's already opened Trump up to tax fraud investigation with a simple question, and they're shitting themselves at what she'd do given some serious meat to tuck into. I so want to be a fly on the wall when she does have something juicy to break out the cutlery for, especially if it involves Pence and rent boys.

Willie71 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:The attacks on AOC are because the Rethuglicons are fucking scared shitless of her. She's already opened Trump up to tax fraud investigation with a simple question, and they're shitting themselves at what she'd do given some serious meat to tuck into. I so want to be a fly on the wall when she does have something juicy to break out the cutlery for, especially if it involves Pence and rent boys.

They keep dismissing her as a bartender, ignoring her degree in political science.

willhud9 wrote:

Willie71 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:The attacks on AOC are because the Rethuglicons are fucking scared shitless of her. She's already opened Trump up to tax fraud investigation with a simple question, and they're shitting themselves at what she'd do given some serious meat to tuck into. I so want to be a fly on the wall when she does have something juicy to break out the cutlery for, especially if it involves Pence and rent boys.

They keep dismissing her as a bartender, ignoring her degree in political science.

Even a political science degree is no good to the GOP as John Kerry would discover the other day:



These people seriously hold political power.

willhud9 wrote:

Willie71 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:The attacks on AOC are because the Rethuglicons are fucking scared shitless of her. She's already opened Trump up to tax fraud investigation with a simple question, and they're shitting themselves at what she'd do given some serious meat to tuck into. I so want to be a fly on the wall when she does have something juicy to break out the cutlery for, especially if it involves Pence and rent boys.

They keep dismissing her as a bartender, ignoring her degree in political science.

Even a political science degree is no good to the GOP as John Kerry would discover the other day:



These people seriously hold political power.

Delaware state Rep. Richard Collins (R) said this week that he was sponsoring an anti-abortion bill because women are not replenishing the U.S. population quickly enough.

While speaking to WGMD-FM on Tuesday, Collins explained that he was introducing a bill that would require women to listen to the fetal heartbeat before having an abortion. A second bill would outlaw abortion after 20 weeks.

“God is moving in strange and wonderful ways, folks,” the lawmaker insisted. “Gun bills that we’ve talked about will save essentially no lives because it will have no impact on criminals getting of keeping their guns. But every single year, we kill hundreds of people in abortions.”

“You know, we have a massive problem in this country,” he continued. “Our birthrate is way, way below replacement [levels]. You know, we are just not having enough babies.”

Seabass wrote:Male lawmaker says he’s trying to restrict abortion because women ‘are not having enough babies’
https://www.rawstory.com/2019/04/male-lawmaker-says-hes-trying-restrict-abortion-women-not-enough-babies/

Delaware state Rep. Richard Collins (R) said this week that he was sponsoring an anti-abortion bill because women are not replenishing the U.S. population quickly enough.

While speaking to WGMD-FM on Tuesday, Collins explained that he was introducing a bill that would require women to listen to the fetal heartbeat before having an abortion. A second bill would outlaw abortion after 20 weeks.

“God is moving in strange and wonderful ways, folks,” the lawmaker insisted. “Gun bills that we’ve talked about will save essentially no lives because it will have no impact on criminals getting of keeping their guns. But every single year, we kill hundreds of people in abortions.”

“You know, we have a massive problem in this country,” he continued. “Our birthrate is way, way below replacement [levels]. You know, we are just not having enough babies.”

The Republican correspondence to state officials, signed by Jim Jordan and several of colleagues, said federal lawmakers believed it would be “prudent” to inform them of the concerns.

“With a Democratic president, there was no allegation too small to investigate,” Elijah Cummings said this week, “but now that Donald Trump is in the White House, there is apparently no scandal too big to ignore.”

At issue are suspected voter-suppression tactics in Texas, Georgia, and Kansas, each of which generated national headlines during the 2018 election cycle.