Tuesday, February 04, 2020

After Epic 'Nightmare' in Iowa, Democratic App Built by Secretive Firm Shadow Inc. Comes Under Scrutiny"
"This outfit is inexcusably secretive."
Published on Tuesday, February 04, 2020 by Common Dream
At Shadow, https://shadowinc.io our mission is to build political power for the progressive movement by developing affordable and easy-to-use tools for teams and budgets of any ...

Web results

SEE AGENT 99 I TOLD YOU IT WAS KAOS
Image result for GET SMART KAOS"
https://getsmart.fandom.com/wiki/Siegfried 

by 

Officials from the 68th caucus precinct overlook the results of the first referendum count during a caucus event on February 3, 2020 at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. (Photo: Tom Brenner/Getty Images)

ARE THEY USING TEXAS INSTRUMENT SCIENTIFIC CALCULATORS, THEY ARE THEY ARE USING TEXAS INSTRUMENTS CALCULATORS, THE HARDEST CALCULATOR TO PROGRAMME WITH! SO NO WONDER THEY HAD PROBLEMS FROM THE GIT GO. PLUS THEIR AGE .....OF THE INSTRUMENTS WHAT DID YOU THINK I WAS REFERRING TO. 

Amid all the finger-pointing and anger that followed the nightmarish Iowa Democratic presidential caucuses Monday night, many journalists and progressive observers honed in on the smartphone app the state Democratic Party used—with disastrous consequences—to record and report the results of the highly anticipated contest.
"The DNC and the Iowa Democratic Party have engineered a nightmare. People are going to lose their minds over the result, whatever it is. Epic, raw incompetence."
—Zach Carter, HuffPost
The app, according to several news reports, was developed by the secretive for-profit tech firm Shadow Inc., which has ties to and receives funding from ACRONYM, a Democratic digital non-profit organization. Shadow's CEO is Gerard Niemira, who worked on Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign.

"State campaign finance records indicate the Iowa Democratic Party paid Shadow... more than $60,000 for 'website development' over two installments in November and December of last year," HuffPost reported late Monday. "A Democratic source with knowledge of the process said those payments were for the app that caucus site leaders were supposed to use to upload the results at their locales."

Shadow has also been paid for services by the Nevada Democratic Party and the presidential campaigns of former Vice President Joe Biden and former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg, according to Federal Election Commission filings.
Democratic Party officials kept the details of the app as well as Shadow's involvement hidden from the public ahead of the Iowa caucus. But as Monday night wore on and frustration with the delayed reporting of the caucus results boiled over, journalists began scrutinizing the new technology and its developer more closely.
The New York Times, citing anonymous people who were briefed on the app by Iowa Democratic Party officials, reported that the app was hastily constructed in just two months and "not properly tested at a statewide scale."

"The party decided to use the app only after another proposal for reporting votes—which entailed having caucus participants call in their votes over the phone—was abandoned, on the advice of Democratic National Committee officials," the Times reported.

"The secrecy around the app this year came from the Iowa Democratic Party, which asked that even its name be withheld from the public," according to the Times. "There were concerns that the app would malfunction in areas with poor connectivity, or because of high bandwidth use, such as when many people tried to use it at the same time."
Mandy McClure, communications director of the Iowa Democratic Party, said in a statement that the new app was not responsible for the delayed results.
"This is simply a reporting issue," said McClure. "The app did not go down and this is not a hack or an intrusion. The underlying data and paper trail is sound and will simply take time to further report the results."

Results of the caucuses are expected Tuesday, but no specific time has been given. The presidential campaigns of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Buttigieg released portions of their internal caucus data suggesting they emerged victorious from the bungled process.

In a statement released in the early hours of Tuesday morning, ACRONYM spokesperson Kyle Tharpe attempted to distance his group from Shadow's technology.

"ACRONYM is an investor in several for-profit companies across the progressive media and technology sectors," said Tharpe. "One of those independent, for-profit companies is Shadow Inc., which also has other private investors. We are reading confirmed reports of Shadow's work with the Iowa Democratic Party on Twitter, and we, like everyone else, are eagerly awaiting more information from the Iowa Democratic Party with respect to what happened."




A voting app by Shadow Inc. takes center stage at chaotic Iowa caucuses

Brian Heater@bheater 
Image Credits: Tim Hynds/Sioux City Journal / Getty Images
American democracy can be confusing and messy. There is, perhaps, no better example than last night’s Iowa caucuses. The votes that kick off presidential primary season are, at once, a wonderful celebration of citizen participation in representative democracy and a rather complex system that remains a mystery to many of those outside the nation’s 31st most populous state.
It is, however, an extremely important one for presidential candidates who spend the months leading up to the event doing photo ops while awkwardly attempting to eat food from a stick. It’s the source of much momentum that can propel a candidate into the general. As such, the chaos and uncertainty following last night’s voting are all the more troubling. The day after the long-awaited and much ballyhooed caucuses, no victor has been declared (though some appear to have already declared themselves).
At the center of the confusion is an app reportedly built by a for-profit company called “Shadow Inc.” According to reporting by The New York Times, the app used by the Iowa Democratic Party was “quickly put together in just the past two months” and not subjected to the kind of scrutiny one might traditionally reserve for software used in such an important statewide contest. The app is said to be a replacement for a system wherein caucus participants called in their election. The party reportedly paid Shadow around $63,000 in two installments to build one of its “affordable and easy-to-use tools.”
We reported on the crashed app and delay late last night. “We found inconsistencies in the reporting of three sets of results,” Iowa Democratic Party spokesperson Mandy McClure said in a statement. “The underlying data and paper trail is sound and will simply take time to further report the results.”
McClure was quick to point out that no evidence of a hack or other intrusion was found — an important point after the fallout from the 2016 election.
Shadow’s background is, fittingly, shrouded in some mystery. Digital nonprofit firm ACRONYM, which has been tied to Shadow, issued a statement late last night claiming to merely be an investor that didn’t provide any technology to the Iowa Democratic Party. “We, like everyone els,e are eagerly awaiting more information from the Iowa Democratic Party,” spokesperson Kyle Tharp said in a statement.
A followup statement from the Iowa Democratic Party Chair Troy Price chalks the error up to a “coding issue.”
As part of our investigation, we determined with certainty that the underlying data collected via the app was sound. While the app was recording data accurately, it was reporting out only partial data. We have determined that this was due to a coding issue in the reporting system. This issue was identified and fixed. The application’s reporting issue did not impact the ability of precinct chairs to report data accurately.
Because of the required paper documentation, we have been able to verify that the data recorded in the app and used to calculate State Delegate Equivalents is valid and accurate. Precinct level results are still being reported to the IDP. While our plan is to release results as soon as possible today, our ultimate goal is to ensure that the integrity and accuracy of the process continues to be upheld.
Price also echoes the early statement regarding hacking and insists that, in spite of reports of insignificant testing, the system was vetted by security experts.
“We have every indication that our systems were secure and there was not a cybersecurity intrusion,” he writes. “In preparation for the caucuses, our systems were tested by independent cybersecurity consultants.”
The LA Times notes that Shadow began life as Groundbase, which was founded by former Clinton 2016 digital campaign staffers, Gerard Niemira and Krista Davis.
The unclear and uncertain nature of the situation has gone way toward fueling doubt among voters in a time when many are understandably already skeptical of the system.

WHY IOWA SHOULD NOT BE FIRST NOR A CAUCUS BASED PRIMARY
Iowa Caucus Night Is an Utter Disaster
FUBAR
Image result for the shadow"
SEE 

NEW DETAILS SHOW HOW DEEPLY IOWA CAUCUS APP DEVELOPER WAS EMBEDDED IN DEMOCRATIC ESTABLISHMENT

Top Hollywood celebrities and Silicon Valley investors are linked to the app that failed in Iowa
https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2020/02/top-hollywood-celebrities-and-silicon.html 

The App That Disrupted the Iowa Caucuses
https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-app-that-disrupted-iowa-caucuses.html

Iowa Caucus Night Is an Utter Disaster
https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2020/02/why-iowa-should-not-be-first-nor-caucus.html
---30--
Posted by at No comments:
CULTURE

Jesse Mockrin Paints Billie Eilish in the Style of Caravaggio for Vogue


BY DODIE KAZANJIAN February 3, 2020
 
Portrait by Jesse Mockrin


Just before Thanksgiving, when I asked the Los Angeles–based artist Jesse Mockrin if she was interested in doing a portrait of Billie Eilish for Vogue, she said yes without missing a beat. By the next morning, she sent an email containing five sketches of Eilish. Each one was based on a different historical painting (including Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, but Eilish's earring was a sword, not a pearl).

Mockrin was a natural for this project. She once told me that she wanted her paintings to blur or break down gender barriers, so that “the figure is a figure.” Her work has always been about connecting the contemporary with historical painting—bringing the past into the present, building on similarities between the now and the then: A series of paintings in her early work combines K-pop stars with historical images of androgynous boys. In Jesse’s portrait for Vogue, Billie Eilish meets Caravaggio.


When did Billie Eilish first catch your eye? Are you a fan? If so, what was it that you liked about her?

I first read about her in the New York Times in March of 2019, when she was about to release her first album. She already had a huge following by then. She seemed preternaturally mature and I liked her genderless style. I am interested in gender as a construct, both contemporary and historical. I’m also interested in parts of our culture that expand and challenge our notions of gender—in music, fashion, etc. I liked that she was giving teenage girls a model that was based on creativity and self-expression rather than traditional sex appeal. I was once a teenage girl—I came of age in the Britney Spears era. I would have appreciated Billie Eilish and I am glad to see her shifting the culture.

 
Courtesy of Jesse Mockrin
Courtesy of Jesse Mockrin

Your paintings often reimagine details from Renaissance work—an arm or a leg or a face that’s often turned away from the viewer. How did it feel to zero in on the face of a contemporary idol—a real person in real time?


I was nervous I wouldn’t be able to capture the likeness required for this kind of portrait. I don’t use projected images in my painting because I want my hand to come through in the work, so it was a challenge to make sure her features came through. In many ways her face is reminiscent of other faces in my work—the deep-set eyes, small nose, and full lips. And it was fun to paint Billie because of her striking contemporariness—the hair, the nails, the jacket.

You based your portrait on Caravaggio’s 1593 Boy With a Basket of Fruit. Why that particular painting—did you feel there was something of Billie in that 16th-century boy? She’s as contemporary as anyone on the planet. How did she fit into that character for you—in other words, why did you cast her in that role?

I did a series of paintings early on combining images of K-pop stars with historical paintings of androgynous boys, so it felt natural to look for a connection to Billie in the past. In the Caravaggio painting that inspired me, his model was sixteen years old. The basket of fruit represents abundance, youth, vitality...all things Billie has in spades. I chose to insert the insects, which come from the tradition of Dutch Golden Age still-life painting, but also from the ways Billie herself has used insects in her imagery. In the way Billie represents herself, beauty and darkness are inextricably intertwined, just as they are in the gorgeous Dutch paintings of flowers and fruit, peppered with snails and insects. There is a kind of danger lurking within all the success and fame she has achieved at such a young age. Youth and beauty will rot and wither just like fruit. What I like about Billie in this painting is that she knows it, and she embraces it.

Caravaggio's painting Boy with a Basket of Fruit (1593).
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. Boy with a Basket of Fruit, 1593 / Alamy

You asked for Billie to be photographed at a certain angle in a certain light, and then worked from that photo, not from life. If you could have it either way, which do you prefer?

I actually prefer working from photographs. My work is so much about the image—the image of the icon, the images of the paintings that are reproduced in books or on the internet. It is also about the loss of information and the power of the surface. I feel like the surface of things paradoxically contains a deep well of possible meanings.
Billie Eilish at the 62nd Annual Grammy Awards in January.Photo: Getty Images

Did you listen to Billie’s music while you were painting?

I did, a few times! I listened to her album a lot in the studio when it first came out.

A photograph of Billie that’s been going viral since the Grammy Awards shows her holding all five of her new Grammys in both arms. It made me think of your portrait of her—both arms brimming with an abundant basket of fruit and insects. The similarity of the pose is uncanny. Did you have a premonition of her sweeping five Grammys?


JM: I didn’t—but the basket of fruit is a metaphor for abundance, which in the context of the Grammys turned out to be very apt. Even before the Grammys, it felt clear that Billie was riding high.
Posted by at No comments:
Biden vs Sanders: How One Latino Family In Iowa Is Thinking About Tonight’s Democratic Caucus

In Marshalltown, Iowa — a town that went for Trump in 2016 — one large and politically engaged family is motivated by one thing: beating Donald Trump.



Nidhi PrakashBuzzFeed News Reporter February 3, 2020

Nidhi Prakash / BuzzFeed News

The Lopez family discusses politics over lunch at Ramona Lopez's home in Marshalltown, Iowa.

MARSHALLTOWN, Iowa — Three days before the caucuses, Ramona Lopez gathered much of her extended family — she has 7 children, 17 grandchildren, as well as sons- and daughters-in-law — at her warm yellow house in Marshalltown, Iowa, to have a spirited discussion about whom they each plan to support on Monday night.

Lopez, 61, was always determined her children would be “good people with a sense of responsibility to the community.” On Saturday, she watched the lively back-and-forth between her children with pride while devouring homemade guacamole, salsas, rice and beans, and two types of carne asada, making sure no one's plate was empty for long.

“It’s one’s responsibility to be able to talk about these things,” she said with her family gathered around her kitchen table. “We need to be assertive people. We need to be strong, mentally and physically.”

“I want [Sanders] to win,” said Raymond Correa, 31, who attended both Sanders and Biden events in Marshalltown with his mother the previous weekend, adding that he had his doubts about whether Sanders could win and actually get anything done.

“That’s what they said about Trump!” his sister Jacqueline Correa, 27, shot back. “You donated to [Sanders]! You’ve literally put your money where your mouth is!”

The family is deciding between Sanders and Biden, the two candidates who have been neck and neck in recent polls, and who most members of the family believe seem most likely to defeat Donald Trump.

Nidhi Prakash / BuzzFeed News

Latino voters in places like Marshalltown are keenly aware of what’s at stake in a presidential election that will almost certainly include vitriol around immigration and racist rhetoric.

Iowa’s Latino population has grown to 6.2%, more than double what it was 20 years ago. Groups like the League of United Latin American Citizens have been working on turnout ahead of the caucuses — the group says it has registered 10,000 new Latino voters this year.

The Lopez family is one of the oldest Latino families in Marshalltown, where Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton by seven points in 2016. Ramona moved here in the late ’80s from Jalisco, Mexico, and started working at the meatpacking factory in town. In the late ’80s and ’90s, she protested the factory's working conditions and led protests against police brutality that targeted Latinos. Ramona and her family say they’re thinking this decision through not just for themselves but for the good of their community and all the people who come to Ramona as a community leader for her guidance.

“This is what I know for sure: Bernie is a socialist. Joe Biden is middle-class and represents the richer people. We’re not those people,” Ramona said.

“I love Joe Biden because I have a lot of friends in richer positions, people in power, and I like his presentation. He’s calmer and everything — exactly what represents the middle class, not the lower class,” she said. “I think the candidate for us is Bernie Sanders. He’s more of a dreamer, like me.”

Ultimately, she said, both candidates and all Democratic voters have this in common: They all want to defeat Donald Trump. And while she thinks Biden may have a slight edge in that area, she’s decided on Sanders as a candidate who has detailed, clear plans for climate change, immigration, labor, and education, among other issues.

The family has been visited by canvassers for almost every candidate. They’ve welcomed them all in to sit at the kitchen table and talk, and shared with them whatever’s on the stove. On Saturday, a canvasser for the Biden campaign came by. Soon after, Texas Rep. Filemon Vela stopped in to visit the family on behalf of the Biden campaign. (The family said no other campaign has actually sent a high-profile supporter to visit.) The following day, a Sanders canvasser dropped by. Above the kitchen table, there are two “Bernie” signs — and on a door in the living room, a “Todos con Biden” door hanger.

“We’ve received everyone from the campaigns. I tell them: 'I’m 60 years old. I have 30 years’ involvement in politics. I make my own decisions,'” Ramona said.

She said she spoke to Sanders when he was in Iowa in 2016 and pressed him to do more on immigration.

“Last time he was here, I talked to him and I told him he needs to come up with answers, with plans for immigration. ‘I know it’s hard. You’re not going to win, you or anyone else, if you don’t have an answer for this,’” she said she told Sanders. After seeing him with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez last Saturday, she said, she was more confident that he had a solid plan around immigration.

The following day, Ramona went to see Biden with her son Raymond, who was impressed with the former vice president's plan to invest resources in Central American countries and his emphasis on foreign policy.

“I think Bernie is stronger,” Ramona whispered right after meeting and taking a photo with Biden last Sunday.



Nidhi Prakash / BuzzFeed News

Ramona Lopez and her son Raymond Correa meet former vice president Joe Biden after an event in Marshalltown.

Some of her children, as well as her 17-year-old granddaughter, Itzary Mundo, who’s caucusing for the first time on Monday, are convinced that Sanders is their candidate.

Others, like Raymond, like what they hear from Sanders but aren’t sure they believe he’ll actually deliver on his promises. Despite that, Raymond said, he’d donated $50 to the Sanders campaign recently.

“What I did like about Joe Biden, when we saw him, was that he said ‘I’m not actually here to promise you a bunch of stuff,’” he said, adding that the remark made the candidate seem realistic.

And then there’s ICE. For Latino families in Marshalltown, the uptick in ICE raids is more than a distant concern — the town’s meatpacking factory was one of those targeted in a massive operation in 2006, which resulted in at least 100 workers being arrested and separated from their families.

Gladys Mundo, Ramona’s 40-year-old daughter, worked as a child development specialist during those raids. She saw the impact of that up close, and the way politicians talk about immigration is something she watches closely.

Gladys and her sister Jacqueline said neither of them think any of the candidates have really spoken to the fears and uncertainties immigrants in the US deal with, though they’ve heard more than they have in the past on immigration.

“They talk about kids in cages. That’s just one part of the whole thing. You can’t talk about these isolated things,” said Jacqueline.

“Candidates come and visit towns like this on the campaign trail. Where are they after that?” said Gladys. “There’s a loss of faith in the system.”

While everyone who falls between Ramona, 61, and Itzary, 17, in the family were still undecided between Sanders and Biden, they were all certain they would be turning out on caucus night.

“We all need to caucus. We’ve been here in the US a really long time,” said Jacqueline, adding that the conversation around immigration has become more in-depth and more unavoidable for Democrats because “now we can vote. And there’s a lot of us.”

Nidhi Prakash is a reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in Washington, DC.
Contact Nidhi Prakash at nidhi.prakash@buzzfeed.com

 SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2020/02/in-deep-white-iowa-first-latino.html
Posted by at No comments:

Did Solomon's Temple have competition?
ARCHAEOLOGY: Iron Age Temple Complex Discovered Near Jerusalem Calls Into Question Biblical Depiction of Centralized Cult. Tel Moẓa site proves there were other sanctioned temples besides the official temple in Jerusalem, TAU and IAA researchers say (Tel Aviv University press release).

In 2012, a monumental Iron Age temple complex dating to the late 10th and early ninth centuries BCE was discovered at Tel Moẓa near Jerusalem by archaeologists of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA). The site, identified as the biblical city of Moẓa, within the boundary of the tribe of Benjamin (Joshua 18:26), served as an administrative center for the storage and redistribution of grain.

In the spring of 2019, the first academic excavation of the site set out to fully unearth and study two cult buildings discovered one on top of the other at Tel Moẓa: The monumental temple complex built in the late 10th to early ninth centuries BCE, and a structure beneath it that has only partially been uncovered, tentatively dated to the 10th century BCE.


Posted by at No comments:
Trump World Is Crashing The Iowa Caucus And Can't Stop Talking About Bernie Sanders

“If you pick one candidate right now, the passion of Bernie followers is concerning,” a Republican member of Congress said in Iowa.

Miriam Elder BuzzFeed News Reporting From Des Moines, Iowa Posted on February 3, 2020

Jim Watson / Getty Images



DES MOINES — While the eyes of the country are on the Democratic caucus in Iowa tonight, the Trump campaign is holed up in a Sheraton in West Des Moines with dozens of famous supporters and officials in tow to flex their muscle and grab some of the spotlight.

Their message is unified: They’re here to show Iowans that the president’s reelection campaign hasn’t forgotten them, that Trump is eager for November, and that he can take on whichever nominee Democrats eventually choose.

But scratch the surface and you find growing concern over the unmistakable rise of Sen. Bernie Sanders. It would be easy to think of the concern as disingenuous. What better competitor could Trump face than an avowed socialist, the epitome of the demonic “far left” that he’s been screaming about — at rallies, on Twitter, in interviews — for months? And don’t Trump and his people lie all the time anyway? Maybe they’re just saying that because he’s the competitor they actually want.

“If you pick one candidate right now, the passion of Bernie followers is concerning,” Rep. Mark Meadows said here before listing the attributes of other candidates who could pose a challenge for the Trump campaign — Joe Biden’s “moderate policy,” Mike Bloomberg’s money, Pete Buttigieg’s “more direct policy conversations.”

“Bernie Sanders’ followers are more of a concern to me than anybody else,” he said. “They have a passion and, in a way, they tap into what Donald Trump tapped into, but they do it on the left. It’s an antiestablishment, 'we want to mix things up' kind of environment. That’s why Sanders will continue to be a factor, and it’s why a lot of people see him not just as a legitimate contender but the contender to beat. So if I had to pick one person I’m most concerned about, it would be Bernie Sanders.”

Meadows was one of dozens of surrogates flown into Iowa by the Trump campaign to fan across the state and rally caucusgoers in a race that is totally meaningless (apologies to Joe Walsh and Bill Weld). Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross sat, quiet and alone, in the shadow of the Sheraton’s vast indoor waterfall, apparently willing himself to stay awake. Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s first campaign manager in 2016, has rejoined the reelection effort and was inseparable from David Bossie, another once-fired aide who has also rejoined. Firebrand pastor Paula White, who last week publicly prayed for women to miscarry if they were carrying “Satanic babies,” milled around, as did pastor Jerry Falwell Jr., Trump’s acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, and former Energy secretary Rick Perry. Mike Lindell, better known as the My Pillow guy, said the Trump campaign had called him last week to join the effort. The campaign only announced the push — not a thing reelection campaigns normally do — last Monday, a week before the caucus.

Before they fanned out across the state, the guests of honor took the three front rows in what was billed as a press conference at the hotel by campaign manager Brad Parscale, the president's sons Eric and Don Jr., and their partners, Lara Trump and Kimberly Guilfoyle.

The event felt better suited to a Trump rally. There was an introductory soundtrack — Adele, Guns n' Roses, Britney Spears, Aerosmith. When the five took the stage and arranged behind a lectern that read “Keep Iowa Great,” the surrogates leaped to their feet and broke into applause.

Parscale said the Trump campaign had built the “largest grassroots army we’ve ever seen” and that it was time to “kick the training wheels off and see how it’s going.”

“We’ve built a well-oiled machine,” he said, “and tonight will be the first test of that machine.”

Lara said they “don’t take a single vote for granted. ... We’re here in Iowa to show the people that we take the election seriously.” Guilfoyle went into attack mode, saying “the liberals, the Democrats, the socialists, the communists — that’s the other side, that’s the juxtaposition — have lost their minds but we have not lost our way. And with the help of God, we will get this done.” Eric lauded the campaign’s huge coffers — nearly $200 million cash on hand — and Don Jr. did his thing, making sure to promote his book, Triggered, several times, including when he was interrupted by a protester accusing the president and his family of spreading anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and prompting the rise in anti-Semitic attacks around the country.

Asked whom Trump was eager to fight against in the general, both Parscale and Don Jr. launched into conspiracy mode, hinting that the Democratic machine was mobilizing to “rig the primary” to make sure that Sanders didn’t get the nomination.

“I think Bernie will do well,” Parscale went on to say before being quietly tapped by Don Jr. and moving on. “The president is a fighter. I’ve never sat with him, one time, and he goes 'That’s the guy I want—’ or woman. He can take all of them on.”

Don Jr. took the mic to shift the focus to Biden — a candidate the campaign has long been concerned about, to the degree that impeachment is unfolding the same time as the Iowa caucus.

“I think one thing that should be pointed out — while obviously it seems like there’s a good surge in Bernie and obviously a lot of support, I mean — Joe Biden had Iowa to himself for what, three weeks? Because of the impeachment sham,” he said, saying it was an example of “Nancy Pelosi actively trying to keep Bernie off the trail,” while failing to mention that Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar were also confined to DC while the Senate deliberated whether to remove Trump. Biden wasn’t exactly alone either, with Buttigieg and Andrew Yang storming Iowa at the same time. Don Jr. continued: “If Biden doesn’t win big, I mean, he’s probably in a lot of trouble, right?”

“It’s one thing to hide him in a field of 17, it’s another to try to hide Joe when he’s running alone against Trump for six months," he said, "and that’s a fight I would pay a lot of money to see.”

He ended by saying: “It’ll be a lot of fun and I promise you one thing: Over the next 10 months, Donald Trump will make this very entertaining for you all.” Maybe it depends on your definition of "entertaining."

MORE ON THE IOWA CAUCUS

WTF Is The Iowa Caucus?Otillia Steadman · Feb. 3, 2020
Ruby Cramer · Feb. 2, 2020

Miriam Elder is a political reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in New York. Her secure PGP fingerprint is 5B5F EC17 C20B C11F 226D 3EBE 6205 F92F AC14 DCB1
Contact Miriam Elder at miriam.elder@buzzfeed.com.


Posted by at No comments:

Islamic State claims purported attack on Egypt-Israel gas pipeline in Sinai

Though sources said attacked pipe was a domestic one, jihadist group insists it ‘targeted… the natural gas line linking the Jews and the apostate Egyptian government’

HOLY NECROMANCY! A SPECTRE IS HAUNTING THE MIDDLE EAST THE GHOST OF ISIS DEFEATED BY MAGA TRUMP RISES FROM THE GRAVE



By AFP 3 February 2020
Illustrative: Flames rise from a gas pipeline explosion in el-Arish, Egypt in July, 2012. (AP/File)
CAIRO — The Islamic State extremist group said on Monday that it blew up a gas pipeline in Egypt’s restive Sinai Peninsula, claiming it was connected to Israel.
Security sources earlier said the pipeline hit was a domestic one that connects to a power station in el-Arish, powering homes and factories in central Sinai. No casualties were reported.
Masked gunmen drove a four-wheel drive before detonating explosives in the attack, carried out around 80 kilometers west of the provincial capital El-Arish, the sources told AFP.
Some media reports in Egypt and Israel said, however, that the section of pipeline hit was part of Israel’s Leviathan offshore field that connects the two countries — claims denied to AFP by the Leviathan consortium.
But in a statement posted on its Telegram chat groups, IS said “caliphate soldiers targeted… the natural gas line linking the Jews and the apostate Egyptian government.”
It claimed that the section of the pipeline hit was in the Sinai village of Al Teloul and that several explosive devices were used to blow it up, causing “material damage.”
Last week, the jihadist group encouraged its fighters to launch attacks against Israel as part of a “new phase” of its operations.
Illustrative: An image taken from a video clip released by the Sinai affiliate of the Islamic State group on August 1, 2016. (MEMRI)
Israel began pumping natural gas to Egypt for the first time earlier this month under a $15 billion, 15-year landmark deal to liquefy it and re-export it to Europe.
Egypt’s petroleum ministry did not react to a request for comment on Monday after IS claimed responsibility.
One of the two offshore fields managed by Israeli and American firms in the deal, Leviathan is estimated to hold 535 billion cubic meters (18.9 trillion cubic feet) of natural gas, along with 34.1 million barrels of condensate.
View of the Israeli Leviathan gas field gas processing rig near the city of Caesarea, on January 31, 2019. (Marc Israel Sellem/Pool)
Egypt has previously exported gas to Israel but land sections of the export pipeline were targeted multiple times by Sinai militants in 2011 and 2012.
It hopes the recently inked deal will position it to become a regional gas hub.
The country has for years been fighting a hardened insurgency in North Sinai that escalated after the military’s 2013 ouster of Islamist president Mohamed Morsi following mass protests.
In February 2018, the army and police launched a nationwide operation against militants focused on North Sinai.
Posted by at No comments:

ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW FULL ALBUM

Posted by at No comments:

Pete Buttigieg wants Jefferson-Jackson dinners renamed 

May 18, 2019

LET'S DO THE TIME WARP AGAIN.....

Iowa Democrats rebrand fundraiser as Liberty & Justice Celebration

 BY 

The Iowa Democratic Party’s annual fall fundraiser has a new name.
The event will be held November 1, 2019. It will attract international attention, as it has in the past, due to all the Democratic presidential candidates who’ll speak. It’s been re-branded as the Liberty and Justice Celebration.
For decades, the annual event was named for Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, who are considered the founders of the Democratic Party. A few years ago Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinners in Iowa and other states were renamed after critics pointed out Jackson’s policies towards Native Americans and that Jefferson owned slaves.
The Iowa Democratic Party renamed its annual J-J Dinner “The Fall Gala” in 2015.
The Iowa Democratic Party has rented Wells Fargo Arena — the largest venue in Des Moines — for their 2019 Liberty and Justice Celebration. The party’s chairman says it will give Democrats a chance to highlight the party’s strength heading into the 2020 election.
Jefferson-Jackson Dinner Will Be Renamed

Aug. 8, 2015

An Iowa Democratic Party panel voted on Saturday to change the name of the popular Jefferson-Jackson dinner, joining several state parties in distancing itself from the legacies of the two former slave-owning presidents for whom the dinner is named.

Andy McGuire, the party chairwoman, said the State Central Committee voted Saturday to begin the process of changing the name. A single-sentence resolution was approved overwhelmingly by a voice vote, said Sam Lau, a state party spokesman. The change will take effect after this year’s event in late October.

The annual dinner, which draws big crowds and presidential hopefuls looking for an early advantage in Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucuses, is named for Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. Both owned slaves, and President Jackson carried out a bloody campaign to remove Native Americans from the South to make way for white settlers.

“The vote to change the name of the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner comes after much debate and discussion among our activists and grass-roots leaders around the state,” Dr. McGuire said. “This was not a decision that was made lightly. The vote today confirms that our party believes it is important to change the name of the dinner to align with the values of our modern-day Democratic Party: inclusiveness, diversity and equality.”

Jefferson-Jackson dinners have been a Democratic tradition dating back decades, helping to raise money for state and local parties. Nowhere is it more celebrated than in Iowa, where more than 9,000 Democrats turned out in 2007 to hear speeches from a field led by Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton in their quest for the party’s presidential nomination.

State party committees in Georgia, Connecticut and Missouri also recently dropped the names of Jefferson and Jackson from the annual fund-raising dinners, and similar moves are being considered in New Hampshire, South Carolina, Arkansas, Maine and Tennessee, President Jackson’s home state.

Efforts to drop names and symbols linked to slavery and the Civil War have gained traction since nine black churchgoers were killed by a white gunman in Charleston, S.C., in June. That attack prompted state leaders to remove the Confederate battle flag from the South Carolina State House grounds.

 By Ashley Southall
A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 9, 2015, Section A, Page 14 of the New York edition with the headline: Jefferson-Jackson Dinner Will Be Renamed.
Posted by at No comments:

BROKEN ENGLISH MARIANNE FAITHFUL LIVE

because of the trumpet solo I post this version of MF singing BrokEN engliSH 
and of course because she can belt it out like Lottie Leta and its a great live video

Posted by at No comments:

IOWA CAUCUS WINNER (S)

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/rubycramer/iowa-caucus-results-delay

Posted by at No comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)