Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) turned down an offer to tour a Housing and Urban Development (HUD) facility in Baltimore with HUD Secretary Ben Carson on Wednesday.
The agency extended an invitation on Tuesday but Cummings turned down the request.
When reporters asked Carson about why Cummings was not present at a press conference, he responded Cummings may have been absent due to a scheduling conflict but did not elaborate on why he skipped the tour.
Carson visited the Baltimore facility soon after a series of weekend tweets from President Donald Trump criticized Cummings for being a “brutal bully,”alleging his district was in disrepair because of his lack of oversight.
Cummings fired back, reportedly blaming racism and Trump for Baltimore’s problems.
While critics have called Trump’s remarks “racist,” not many people have been able to counter Trump’s claims about Baltimore’s corruption, high-murder rate, and rat problems.
President Trump: "Baltimore's been very badly mishandled for many years…Baltimore is an example of what corrupt government leads to…If they ask me, we will get involved."
“The government has been pumping billions of dollars to no avail. Baltimore is an example of what corrupt government leads to. … I feel so sorry for the people of Baltimore, if they ask me we will get involved,” Trump told a crowd of reporters Tuesday.
The PRIDE Act will give new handouts to homosexual couples.
By Shane Trejo
Last week, Democrats in the U.S. Houseapprovedthe PRIDE (Promoting Respect for Individuals’ Dignity and Equality) Act by a voice vote, unanimously rubber-stamping what is tantamount to reparations for homosexual couples.
The PRIDE Actamends the federal tax code to remove gender-specific language such as “husband” and “wife” that may be offensive to those practicing the LGBT lifestyle. It also allows LGBT members to claim tax benefits that they were denied before the Defense of Marriage Actwas unilaterally struck down by the robed lawyers on the Supreme Court in 2013.
The Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that this new LGBT give-away could cost the taxpayers as much as $67 million. The Democrats are patting themselves on the back for pushing another handout.
“In passing the PRIDE Act, Democrats are honoring our diversity and providing long-overdue justice to countless same-sex couples across the country who have been denied critical tax refunds because of who they are and who they love,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said.
Sen. Elizabeth ‘Pocahontas’ Warren (D-MA) is the lead sponsor for the Senate’s version of the PRIDE Act. This could be seen as an attempt on her part to buy votes as she campaigns for the Democratic Party’s nomination for the presidency in 2020.
“The federal government forced legally married same-sex couples in Massachusetts to file as individuals and pay more in taxes for almost a decade,” Warren said in a public statement. “We need to call out that discrimination and to make it right — Congress should pass the Refund Equality Act immediately.”
Fox News contributor Tammy Bruce noted in a column that the PRIDE Act opens the door to create more welfare schemes for the LGBT community. She called out Pocahontas in particular for her shameless pandering.
“What Ms. Warren doesn’t mention to people is the IRS already allows everyone to amend the last three years of returns,” wrote Bruce, who is a gay conservative herself.
“Instead, she wants couples to be able to amend their tax returns for the entire time they were married in one of the 10 states allowing gay marriage prior to federal recognition,” Bruce added.
Bruce gave an example of how the policy could be expanded in the future by Democrats who are always inventing new schemes to paper over their victim-group constituencies.
“But why stop there? What about all the gays and lesbians who never had a chance to marry at all because of the Clinton administration’s Defense of Marriage Act?” Bruce asked.
“That has to be asked because this has nothing to do with tax fairness and everything to do with reinforcing the politics of resentment and victimhood,” Bruce argued.
“For the Democratic Party machine, however, there can never be success, there always has to be a new appended wrong or violation, some new campaign to convince you that victimhood will never end, and you must always resent, well, everyone,” she added.
It is unlikely that the PRIDE Act will be passed, or even considered, by the Republican-led Senate.
A North Carolina gun shop is facing liberal backlash for using a promotional billboard to mock the four freshmen congresswomen known as “The Squad.”
The advertisement for Cherokee Guns shows Democrat Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (Mich.), and Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), with the message “The Four Horsemen Cometh (are Idiots).
“Signed, the Deplorables,” it says.
The display was criticized Monday by far-left group Coalition to Stop Gun Violence (CSGV), who called it “disgusting anti-government violent rhetoric.”
“Threats against members of Congress, particularly minority members are (rising) and it is driven by the president’s racial rhetoric,” said the coalition in a Facebook post.
Pressley – the “Ringo” of the Squad – also took to Twitter to condemn the humorous billboard, calling on Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) to take action against the gun shop.
“#Racist rhetoric from the occupant of the @WhiteHouse has made hate our new normal. We are still vulnerable. @RepMarkMeadows – Cherokee Guns is in your district & you and I serve on a committee together. Here’s your chance to finally do the right thing,” Pressley tweeted Tuesday.
Pressley’s criticism is rich given Antifa firebombed an ICE facility two weeks after she stood outside a similar facility warning the left “will bring the fire.”
However, Cherokee Guns doubled down in the face of the liberal outrage, announcing they would start giving away bumper sticker versions of the 4 Horsemen ad.
“Alright my fellow Infidels for Trump…due to OVERWHELMING demand…you may come by the shop (next week) and get your very own FOUR HORSEMEN COMETH STICKER…simple…eat a piece of bacon…tell us you’re voting for Trump in 2020…then get your limited edition bumper sticker!! (While supplies last!) Snowflakes and Liberals are not eligible…sorry…”the gun shop said on Facebook.
When contacted by a reporter, a Cherokee Guns employee explained how to deal with “threatening liberals” should they decide to get confrontational.
“Show them the door, or your gun, and tell them they can buy their own billboard and pay for it like I did,” the staff member reportedly said.
“The ‘Squad’ is a very Racist group of troublemakers who are young, inexperienced, and not very smart,”Trump tweeted last week.
“They are pulling the once great Democrat Party far left, and were against humanitarian aid at the Border…And are now against ICE and Homeland Security. So bad for our Country!”
The first night of the second 2019 Democratic debate on CNN had some wild moments.
We’re not going to bother with the moments the candidates or the CNN audience liked.
We want to point out some of the crazier moments that will probably be overlooked by the media.
Here are five examples.
5. Marianne Williamson
While talking about Democrats taking corporate donations, Williamson invoked a joke from Seinfeld and suggested that voters are going to “yadda, yadda, yadda, right over them. Watch:
Marianne Williamson: "For politicians… who themselves have taken tens of thousands & in some cases, hundreds of thousands of dollars from these same corporate donors… I don't think the Democratic Party should be surprised that so many Americans believe yada, yada, yada." pic.twitter.com/50qlTYVB1j
When the subject of the minimum wage came up, Pete Buttigieg, who frequently implies that he is more Christian than anyone else, suggested that you are not a decent Christian if you don’t support raising the minimum wage. Watch:
CNNhost Don Lemon was included as a moderator in this debate for some reason. He is not a journalist, he is an opinion guy and he absolutely hates Trump. He made that crystal clear with this question. Note the wording:
This is a real question CNN "journalist" Don Lemon asked tonight at the #DemDebate:
"What do you say to those Trump voters who prioritize the economy over the president's bigotry?"
John King, another CNN host, said something factual in his post-debate analysis. He suggested that this field of candidates is further left than any Democrat who has ever won the presidency, including Obama. Watch:
John King of @CNN calls Democrats in the 2020 race "way to the left of the last Democrat who won, Barack Obama, way way to the left of Bill Clinton" and says they’re further left than Democrats running for President have been in our lifetime. #DemDebatepic.twitter.com/99ee2rms74
When asked a direct question about whether her healthcare plans would raise taxes on the middle class, Warren refused to give a straight answer. What a surprise. Watch:
Elizabeth Warren refuses to answer whether she backs middle class tax hikes for government health care takeover. #DemDebatepic.twitter.com/WvrV4L9aYB
President Trump has been labeled a racist for using the word “infested” to describe Baltimore’s rat problem, but Elijah Cummings used the exact same word to describe the city back in 1999.
As the video below highlights, CNNslammed Trump for using the word “infested” to describe Baltimore, suggesting that the president was dehumanizing black people.
However, during 1999 testimony, Elijah Cummings referred to his own district as a “drug infested area.
I guess Elijah Cummings is racist too.
As we previously highlighted, Bernie Sanders also claimed Trump was “attacking” an American city by calling Baltimore rat infested yet Sanders himself repeatedly said the place resembled a “third world country” back in 2015.
Meanwhile, Benny Johnson visited residents in Rep. Cummings district to find out what life is really like there.
Common themes; Rats, trash, crime, corrupt politicians.
We are in a political firestorm over the condition of Baltimore. So what is life really like there? I spoke with residents in Rep. Cummings district. Here's what they had to say: Rats. Trash. Crime. Abandoned by politicians. Begging for change. Want the truth? Please WATCH @TPUSApic.twitter.com/rkHwwHc1kf
The expansion of home tech products to make life increasingly convenient requires consumer privacy sacrifices, the full extent of which won’t be revealed for years to come, but have been hinted at through a slew of missteps.
This past week Amazon hit headlines after its virtual assistant Alexa was caught passively recording couples arguing, having intimate family discussions and even having sex (apparently sex noises can trigger Alexa-activated Echo speakers).
Data is the new dominant commodity of the 21st century and the trade-off of convenience for privacy and security has been highlighted in a plethora of cases involving consumer ‘smart products’ in recent years.
Amazon Echo as murder witness?
Take the November 2015 case of James Bates, who was suspected of the murder of his friend Victor Collins at a house party in his home. Police issued multiple search warrants to Amazon in the landmark case, in an attempt to gain access to the records of Bates’ Echo device.
“I have a problem that a Christmas gift that is supposed to better your life can be used against you,”Bates’s attorney, Kimberly Weber, said at the time. Eventually, Bates himself decided to turn over the data, foregoing his right to privacy in the interest of proving his innocence and clearing his name.
Much like Amazon, Apple has been found surreptitiously recording users’ sexual encounters, drug deals and medical appointments, though more worryingly, these audio recordings were sent to human ‘graders’ for evaluation, according to recent, explosive revelations from a whistleblower.
Apple’s virtual assistant Siri stores users’ identifiable utterances for up to six months, before removing the unique user ID information and storing the clips elsewhere for up to two years – in the interest of improved customer experience, of course.
Google Mini & passive spying
Google’s domestic virtual assistant Google Mini has also been caught passively spying on consumers in their own homes. Worryingly, however, Google employs hundreds of so-called “language experts” to parse snippets of audio, some of which contain embarrassing or sensitive information, to better understand the nuances of human language.
In 2017, writer Artem Russakovskii went to the product’s unveiling at the SFJazz Center in San Francisco. After a couple of days he checked his voice activity log to find thousands of inadvertent entries that should never have been logged; the device had been spying on him 24/7 due to an apparent ‘hardware flaw’, as the company claimed at the time.
Hacking tech teddies
The idea for a teddy bear that allowed parents and children to share affection when long distances apart was good in theory, but ultimately proved terrifying in practice.
Through Cloudpets (and various other interpretations of the idea), children could record short messages for loved ones far away that would be transmitted via bluetooth to a nearby smartphone and beamed across the country or, indeed, the world.
Alas, it didn’t take long before data belonging to some 800,000 customers, totalling roughly two million messages between children and adults, which were stored in an online database, was hacked and held for ransom.
There was no encryption or authentication between the bluetooth devices in the stuffed animals and the smartphone app, meaning unscrupulous actors could invade people’s most heartfelt moments with their children.
Backdoor Barbie
Mattel’s ‘Hello Barbie’ was billed as the world’s first “interactive doll”complete with a microphone that records children and sends the messages to third parties for processing before a response is generated.
However, security researchers quickly discovered that the wifi-connected doll was vulnerable to hacking, and those with the relevant knowhow could access the doll’s system information, account information, stored data including audio files, and the doll’s built-in microphone.
Researcher Matt Jakubowski claimed that it was “just a matter of time until we are able to replace their servers with ours and have her say anything we want.”
But the ghoulish details didn’t stop there; hackers could theoretically take over a home’s wifi network via the doll and gain access to other connected devices such as laptops and phones, allowing them to pilfer a wealth of personal and financial information.
High-tech takeover
White hat hacking work by a team of researchers at China’s Zhejiang University showed how inaudible “commands” could be used to remotely trigger a potential victim’s smart device. The team used various clever strategies, including playing frequencies above 20kHz as the victim was recording, rendering the inaudible frequency as a trigger to access the device.
The researchers managed to hack the voice interfaces of Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft and Samsung devices and command them to, for example, visit specific malicious websites or even send emails and text messages all while dimming the screen and lowering the device volume to conceal the attack, leaving the victim completely unaware.
The team even managed to remotely place phone and video calls to listen in and observe the victim’s surroundings. They infamously also managed to hack the navigation system of an Audi SUV.
A rare brain-infecting virus has been detected in Orange County, Florida, and residents have been advised to avoid mosquitoes, which carry the deadly disease.
The Florida Department of Health in Orange County released a public advisory warning that the mosquito-borne, brain-infecting Eastern equine encephalitis virus (EEEV) infection has been found in the area.
The risk of transmission to humans has increased after several sentinel chickens, which local governments use to monitor and track infectious diseases, tested positive for the killer virus. Residents have been told to avoid mosquitoes, as a bite from an infected mosquito can lead to fatal swelling of the brain.
EEEV infection can cause dangerous brain swelling which triggers headaches, convulsions, and even death, and just two days after symptoms start. Survivors of the brain swelling can be left with neurological impairments. Not everyone who contracts EEEV develops swelling of the brain, however; the majority develop flu-like symptoms or no symptoms at all.
There is no specific treatment or vaccine for EEEV available. There are an average of seven cases detected in the US each year, the Centers for Disease Control and Preventionreports.
Members of the public have been advised to cover their bodies, use mosquito repellent, to drain off any stagnant water and to use screens on doors and windows to keep mosquitoes from getting indoors.
The far-left “fact check” outlet Snopes is using fake news to blacklist the Christian satire site the Babylon Bee.
Although the Babylon Bee’s own name points to the fact it’s a satire site, although the Babylon Bee is widely known and recognized as a satire site, although the Babylon Bee clearly advertises itself as a satire and “fake news” site, Snopes has launched a fake news jihad to deplatform the Babylon Bee and put it out of business.
Everyone was laughing at Snopes when it started fact-checking the Babylon Bee’s satire pieces; we all howled as the self-serious Snopes labeled obvious satire as “false.” But now we know Snopes actually has an agenda here — and that is to abuse its power as a Facebook-recognized fact checker to blacklist the Babylon Bee, to get the openly Christian satire site algorithmically hidden and demonetized, which will effectively put it out of business.
The Babylon Bee is concerned enough — and rightfully so — that it has retained an attorney.
In a statement released Tuesday, the satire site writes:
Last week, Snopes fact-checked us again. We’re pretty used to that. But this time, instead of merely rating the article as “false,” they questioned whether our work qualifies as satire, and even went so far as to suggest that we were deliberately deceiving our readers. Basically, they treated us as a source of intentionally misleading fake news, rather than as the legitimate, well-known satire publication that we are. This is a big deal.
Yes, this is a big deal, because as we all now know, once the fascist left smears ideas and opinion they do not approve of as “fake news,” people and web sites start to disappear forever.
Although Snopes has been “fact-checking” the Babylon Bee since July of 2016, everyone took notice back in March when Snopes published a disingenuous fact check that resulted in Facebook threatening the Babylon Bee with “limitations and demonetization.”
Facebook eventually backed off, but it is likely no accident that the Snopes’ attack and Facebook’s subsequent blacklisting threat occurred just after CNN’s Brian Stelter — a rabid left-winger and conspiracy theorist — published a tweet accusing the Bee of being a “fake news site” disguising itself as satire. He eventually deleted it.
In April, Snopes again “fact-checked” another blatantly obvious piece of satire, this one aimed at Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY).
“Did U.S. Rep. Ocasio-Cortez Repeatedly Guess ‘Free’ on TV Show ‘The Price is Right?’” asked Snopes in its stupid “fact-checking” article.
Obviously, she didn’t. That’s the joke.
Things got a whole lot more serious last week, though, when Snopes openly accused the Babylon Bee of engaging in the spreading of fake news.
Snopes “fact checked” a July 22 Babylon Bee piece satirizing State Rep. Erica Thomas (D-GA), the lawmaker who was caught lying earlier this month about being told by a white man in a Publix grocery store to “go back where she came from.”
In the end, Thomas was forced to admit she lied. The man in question is not only Cuban, he’s a Democrat who probably voted for her. What’s more, witnesses claim she was the one screaming “go back,” not him.
Anyway, the Babylon Bee satire piece was titled: “Georgia Lawmaker Claims Chick-Fil-A Employee Told Her To Go Back To Her Country, Later Clarifies He Actually Said ‘My Pleasure.’”
But for its pedantic “fact check,” Snopes accused the Babylon Bee of deliberately misleading people.
“We’re not sure if fanning the flames of controversy and muddying the details of a news story classify an article as ‘satire,’” Snopes wrote as its sub-headline, adding:
The Babylon Bee has managed to fool readers with its brand of satire in the past. This particular story was especially confusing for some readers, however, as it closely mirrored the events of a genuine news story, with the exception of the website’s changing the location from “Publix” to the more controversial Chick-Fil-A.
Babylon Bee founder Adam Ford exposes Snopes in this must-read Twitter thread.
Over the past couple years, Snopes has “fact-checked” the Babylon Bee some 20 times! But if you look at the most recent “fact-checks,”the nine since June of last year, they are all in defense of leftists: Bernie Sanders. Ilhan Omar, CNN, Bill Clinton, California legislators, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, etc.
Although the Babylon Bee regularly satirizes President Trump, Republicans, and even Christians, it is quite telling that Snopes — which falsely identifies itself as non-partisan — never rushes in to save right-leaning targets from the Babylon Bee’s effort to mislead people.
Obviously, what we have here is CNN and Snopes manufacturing a “fake news”controversy as a means to blacklist a satire site — not because the satire site is effective at spreading fake news, but because it is effective at mocking the media, Democrat politicians, and their inane ideas; effective at using comedy to illuminate a truth the far-leftists at Snopes do not want illuminated.
Thankfully, the Babylon Bee sees this “latest smear from Snopes [as] both dishonest and disconcerting.”
“Snopes appears to be actively engaged in an effort to discredit and deplatform us. While we wish it wasn’t necessary, we have retained a law firm to retain us in this matter,” the statement reads.
Tom's Blog 