Germany to quash historic convictions of gay men, pay compensation: minister

A reveller waves the rainbow flag during the Christopher Street Day parade in Berlin, June 23, 2012. REUTERS/Thomas Peter

BERLIN (Reuters) - Germany plans to annul the historic convictions of tens of thousands of men charged under a law that criminalized homosexuality and to grant them financial compensation, the justice minister said on Wednesday.

The law originated in the 19th century, was toughened up by Hitler's Nazis and retained for decades in postwar West Germany, which used it to convict and jail some 50,000 men until 1969, when it finally decriminalized homosexuality.

German homosexuals who suffered under the law have had to live until now with the stigma of a criminal conviction.

"We will never be able to remove these outrages committed by this country but we want to rehabilitate the victims," Justice Minister Heiko Maas said in a statement.

"The convicted homosexual men should no longer have to live with the black mark of a criminal conviction," said Maas, a member of the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), junior partner in conservative Chancellor Angela Merkel's ruling coalition.

The move follows recommendations from Germany's Anti-Discrimination Agency which had commissioned a report.

A ministry spokeswoman said it was unclear when a draft law would be completed. It was also unclear how much financial compensation those men affected might receive or how much support Maas's plan might receive from Merkel's conservatives.

The Lesbian and Gay Association urged the government to act quickly to bring in legislation.

"Time is pressing for victims of homosexual persecution to get their unfair convictions lifted and see their dignity restored," Der Spiegel Online quoted the association as saying

Source : https://www.yahoo.com/news/germany-quash-historic-convictions-gay-men-pay-compensation-150234420.html?nhp=1

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Top Congo court says Kabila stays in power if election not held

KINSHASA (Reuters) - Democratic Republic of Congo's highest court ruled on Wednesday that President Joseph Kabila would stay in power beyond the end of his mandate if his government failed to hold an election due in November.

The ruling is a blow to the opposition, which had argued that an interim president should serve after the end of Kabila's mandate if the election was delayed.

Kabila took power in 2001 when his father, who was president, was assassinated, but is required by the constitution to step down in December after two five-year terms in office.

In Congo's second city of Lubumbashi, police fired tear gas on Wednesday at thousands of supporters of Moise Katumbi, a leading opposition candidate to succeed Kabila and who faced a second day of questioning over government allegations of hiring mercenaries.

The government has said the election to choose Kabila's successor is likely to be delayed due to budgetary and logistical obstacles.

"Article 70, clause two, (of the constitution) permits the president of the republic ... to remain in office until the installation of the new elected president," constitutional court president Benoit Lwamba Bindu said from the bench on Wednesday.

Opposition leaders say Kabila is trying to delay the election in order to hold on to power. He has declined to comment publicly on his intentions and called instead for a national dialogue to allow elections to take place.

(Reporting By Amedee Mwarabu Kiboko; Writing by Aaron Ross; Editing by Matthew Mpoke Bigg and John Stonestreet)

Source : https://www.yahoo.com/news/congo-high-court-says-kabila-stays-power-polls-141619799.html?nhp=1

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European rights watchdog complains about Greek migrant camps conditions

People queue for free food at a makeshift camp for migrants and refugees at the Greek-Macedonian border near the village of Idomeni, Greece, May 11, 2016. REUTERS/Marko Djurica

STRASBOURG (Reuters) - Urgent measures are need to address overcrowding and poor living conditions in refugee and migrant camps in Greece, Europe's top rights watchdog warned on Wednesday.

The Council of Europe, which brings together 47 countries, said some facilities were "sub-standard" and able to provide no more than the most basic needs such as food, hygiene products and blankets.

The report echoes warnings by other rights groups and aid agencies who say Greece has been unable to care properly for the more than 800,000 people reaching its shores in the last year, fleeing wars or poverty in the Middle East and Africa.

The Council described dire living conditions in several sites visited on a March 7-11 trip, just before the European Union and Turkey reached a deal that reduced arrivals but increased the number of people held in detention awaiting asylum decisions or deportation.

It said in its report that people who reached Greece were locked away in violation of international human rights standards and lacked legal access.

At Greece's Nea Kavala temporary transit camp, people were left burning trash to keep warm and sleeping in mud-soaked tents, according to the report.

The Council called for the closure of a makeshift camp in Idomeni, where some 10,000 people have been stranded en route to northern Europe due to the closure of Macedonia's border.

Germany has taken in most of the 1.3 million refugees and migrants who reached Europe across the Mediterranean in the past year, triggering bitter disputes among the 28 EU member states on how to handle the influx.

Europe's deal with Turkey last month gave its leaders some breathing space but has come under pressure since Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, one of the sponsors of the accord, stepped down.

The morality and legality of the deal has been challenged by human rights groups, however, and a provision to grant Turkish citizens visa-free travel to Europe in exchange for Ankara's help remains politically contentious.

In a separate report, a trio of European Parliamentarians on Tuesday described the poor conditions faced by people who have been returned to Turkey under the deal.

"We have seen how the migration policies imposed by the European Union have terrible consequences on the lives of thousands of people," said Cornelia Ernst, a German member of the European Parliament and a co-author of that report.

"Turkey has been hired as a deportation agency, putting into practice the migration policies designed in Brussels."

The left-wing deputies said on their May 2-4 visit to Turkey they had met people who complained of not being able to claim asylum in Europe, which would run counter to international humanitarian law.

They also described poor detention conditions, confiscation of private property and widespread difficulties in getting access to legal help or information, among other issues

Source : https://www.yahoo.com/news/european-rights-watchdog-complains-greek-migrant-camps-conditions-150528902.html?nhp=1

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Political Deadlock Leaves Lebanon to Unravel

BEIRUT—On the surface, Lebanon appears to be weathering the mayhem that has engulfed the Middle East surprisingly well. Despite dire predictions of sectarian strife spreading from next-door Syria, there has been relatively little violence. Fancy restaurants on Beirut’s seafront remain packed with diners, the streets clogged with traffic.

But it is also increasingly a country adrift, hostage to the regional conflict between Saudi Arabia, long a supporter of Lebanon’s Sunni political bloc, and Iran, sponsor of the Shiite bloc dominated by the Hezbollah militia. This zero-sum confrontation has translated into political deadlock—and the steady unraveling of the Lebanese state.

“It isn’t a failing state, it is a fading state. There is nothing left of it, just a shell,” said Ibrahim Shamseddine, a former Lebanese cabinet minister and a prominent Shiite politician independent of Hezbollah.

It has been almost two years that Lebanon has been without a president. The parliament has been unable to elect one because Hezbollah and its allies have boycotted the legislature’s sessions. The latest—38th—such attempt to hold the vote failed in April because of the lack of a quorum.
The parliament’s own term expired all the way back in 2013, and no national elections are in sight even though municipal polls are slated for this month. A Lebanese government, which unites all the main political forces, still exists. But the ministers have been unable to do much actual governing because important decisions require the elusive consensus.

“There is a desire to run away from reality.…It is kind of going into a suicidal process, which is unacceptable in a country that is a rare democracy in the Middle East,” said Ibrahim Kanaan, a prominent lawmaker from the Free Patriotic Movement of Michel Aoun, one of two main contenders for the presidency.

While the political crisis hasn’t led to bloodshed—no major political force in Lebanon wants to replay the horrors of the 1970s and 1980s civil war—it already is suffocating economic activity.

Lebanon’s economy stagnated last year. It isn’t expected to do better in 2016, in part because of tensions with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, which have advised their citizens to vacation elsewhere to protest Iran’s rising influence in the country. This in turn is undermining the critical tourism and property industries.

National debt and the government deficit, meanwhile, have ballooned—a trend economists expect will continue as long as the political paralysis persists.

For a while, this deadlock was acceptable to many Lebanese political forces. Everyone was waiting to see how the war in Syria, the big neighbor that traditionally dominated Lebanese politics, would play out and how the outcome would affect the balance of power within Lebanon.
While it is far from over, Russia’s intervention to shore up President Bashar al-Assad’s regime has been a vindication for Hezbollah, which has lost hundreds of fighters on the Syrian battlefields.

Hezbollah’s decision to get involved in Syria also earned it a degree of admiration from many Lebanese Christians, terrified by the prospect of Sunni Islamist radicals coming to power in Damascus, and even from some Sunnis.

“If Hezbollah had not gone to Syria, the war would have come to Lebanon, and we would have seen [Islamic State] all over our cities and towns,” said Kamel Wazne, a political analyst and director of the American Strategic Studies center in Beirut.

But it is far from certain that success in Syria, at the end of the day, would bring meaningful political gains for Hezbollah at home. For one, the Lebanese system, based on guaranteed shares of power for its 18 religious sects, is built to limit such ambitions.

“In the Lebanese formula of power-sharing nobody can get more than what they were getting originally. No one side can be able to be the dominant power,” said Yassine Jaber, a parliament member from the Shiite Amal party, a Hezbollah ally, and a former minister of economy.

But, in the absence of a functioning state, Hezbollah—the only Lebanese political force with a significant military muscle—is able to exercise de facto control over issues that matter to it and to its Iranian patrons.

Ghattas Khoury, a former lawmaker and an adviser to Saad Hariri, the country’s leading Sunni politician, pointed out that Hezbollah continues to impede a presidential election even though both leading candidates, who must be Christian, are from political forces aligned with it.

“The status of chaos that the Lebanese institutions are living in isn’t against Hezbollah and Iran, but against all the other Lebanese,” Mr. Khoury said. “At the present time, Hezbollah and Iran don't want a president at all. They enjoy the vacuum of leadership and power.”

Source : http://www.wsj.com/articles/political-deadlock-leaves-lebanon-to-unravel-1462440603

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Difficult Political Decisions Ahead For Clinton, Trump

As a veteran political operative involved in campaigns going back to 1976 I can say that each one is different but has similar characteristics. I also feel safe in saying that this year is probably more dissimilar from any campaign I have ever been associated with or witnessed over the past four decades. Like most other observers and pundits, I have written several times of Mr. Trump’s imminent demise only to be abruptly slapped in the face by the reality of the contemporary

exasperation, frustration and anger of an electorate that is as anti-establishment as any since the turmoil of the 1960’s.

The anger and frustration is legitimate and is not relegated only to the Tea Party faction of the Republican Party but significantly enough to the millennials who have flocked to the surprisingly strong candidacy of Bernie Sanders. What lies ahead at this juncture, assuming that both Trump and Clinton will succeed in wrestling their Party’s respective nominations away from the establishment in the former case and insurgents in the latter, is the extent to which either can cobble together a coalition of the disaffected and independents to put together a winning campaign in the Fall.

It is axiomatic in the last half century that candidates play to their bases during the primaries and pivot to the center for the general election. But will the bases that have proven so powerful in this environment allow either candidate to do so without exacting a price of nonsupport or even more troubling a vote for the other candidate? That seems to be the essential question as we prepare for the next phase of the 2016 Presidential election.

Trump is already having to deal with defections on behalf of prominent Republicans worried about down-ballot consequences which could put into play at the least control of the U.S. Senate and a possibility of the House of Representatives as well. There is discussion of the possibility of a vibrant Republicans for Hillary campaign and the unnaturally strong calls for Republican unity are a bellwether of the concerns facing the party.

Clinton is facing a rebellion by Bernie supporters who are so invested in their candidate that they may either sit out altogether or in an astounding development may even turn to Trump. How could that be?
Millennials who are actively involved in a Presidential campaign or an electoral campaign of any kind for the first time could be energized by the notion that change for change sake is in order. This, of course, is somewhat irrational given that change can be either positive or negative and the relative distance between Trump and Sanders on the ideological spectrum is as different as night and day. However, there is a danger that millennials are not so much driven by ideological fervor as by a revolutionary zeal that puts far more importance on replacing the status quo than upon the substantive policies represented by either candidate.

This could pose a devilishly difficult and prickly political dilemma for the Clinton campaign as it attempts to mobilize the diverse components of a coalition that is definitely tilted in their favor. If the election were determined on strictly ideological or policy positions it would appear to be a slam dunk for the Clintonites due to their historical strengths with both minorities and women. But the new dynamic of a frustrated populace thoroughly confounded by the performance and direction of both the major political parties could upset the proverbial apple cart here.

Trump truly has his finger on the pulse of anger and fears of the populace. Whether or not he can build off of that edge is as unknown as it is dangerous. He certainly has outperformed any and all expectations up to this point. Hillary needs to assuage the passions of youths that have gravitated towards a Democratic Socialist and/or attempt to sway what is left of moderate Republicans largely in suburban populations in the Northeast and Southwest. It is a daunting proposition to think that one could do both so there may come a point where she needs Bernie to rally his troops to her side or cast her lot with what four years ago would have been the loyal opposition.

The election as best as I can tell will be Hillary’s to lose, but once again Trump has been underestimated throughout the entire election experience to date. But it may be that what has truly been underestimated is the strength of disdain Americans feel towards their elected officials and governmental institutions at this point in time. Either way the strategic hallmark of this campaign will be how to deal with these seemingly contradictory conditions and if a decision is made to throw one under the bus, which one will it be?

Souce : http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lance-simmens/difficult-political-decis_b_9860484.html

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Understanding terrorism: Attacks have a political logic, although they are usually ineffective, scholar says

The site of explosions in the suburb of Beir Hassan, Beirut, Lebanon, Feb. 19, 2014, where two suicide attackers from an al-Qaida-linked group blew themselves up. (Credit: AP/Hussein Malla)

Terrorism is clearly reprehensible. Yet media reports and politicians often present terrorist attacks as if they are less calculated than they really are.

Scientific research shows that this view is mistaken. Terrorism scholars have found that, leaving aside the question of immorality, there is an internal political logic to terrorist attacks — although they are frequently ineffective.

A lot of what people think they know about terrorist attacks is wrong. For starters, no one publicly claims responsibility for the vast majority of terrorist attacks.

This has long been an unsolved “puzzle in terrorism studies,” explained Max Abrahms, an assistant professor of political science at Northeastern University, in an interview with Salon.

Scholars, Abrahms said, have traditionally conceived of terrorism as “a political communication strategy, that groups use violence to amplify their grievances, and the costs to the target countries of ignoring them.”

This interpretation flies in the face of a crucial fact: only roughly one in seven terrorist attacks is ever claimed. No group takes responsibility for approximately 86 percent of terrorism attacks.

Abrahms says his research hints why this is the case: Terrorist groups “are essentially rational political actors, especially at the top,” and usually only claim responsibility when they can politically gain from it.

For a long time, “terrorism researchers worked under the assumption that terrorist groups are unitary actors,” Abrahms said.

This idea, that terrorist groups are essentially homogeneous with all members motivated by the same goals, is flawed. Abrahms criticized this “very simplistic” approach, stressing “it’s more complicated than that.”

“Terrorist groups are actually diverse social units and are internally heterogeneous,” the scholar explained. There are many differences between those at the top of the organization and those at the bottom.

Leaders of terrorist groups are frequently “rational political actors,” Abrahms said, and in many ways operate like the heads of more conventional military units. Members of terrorist groups, however, “tend to be motivated by all sorts of complex motives.”

Rationality does not assume that people are engaging in moral activities, he emphasized, “all it assumes is that people learn based upon the predictable consequences of their behavior.”

Taking credit
Abrahms published some of this research in “The Strategic Logic of Credit Claiming: A New Theory for Anonymous Terrorist Attacks,” an article in the academic journal Security Studies.

The report was co-written with Justin Conrad, an associate professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Abrahms’ and Conrad’s study turns a lot of terrorism research on its head. “‘Anonymous’ attacks are actually the norm,” they note, and much of the scholarly “literature simply dismisses the fact that the lion’s share of terrorist incidents worldwide goes unclaimed.”

They cite fellow scholar Bruce Hoffman, who has argued that a serious study of the majority of terrorist attacks would “require re-thinking our most basic and longstanding assumptions about terrorism.”

Some scholars grapple with this by disposing of the notion that terrorist attacks are sometimes politically logical. Abrahms and Conrad insist otherwise, arguing instead that, “far from breaching the dominant scholarly view of terrorist groups as rational political actors, their patterns of credit claiming bolster it.”

“In practice, credit claims are typically issued by the leadership or at least with its consent,” they write. “When operatives strike a target, their leaders claim credit only if the expected political return is positive. When the anticipated political fallout is negative, leaders of the group are understandably reluctant to attribute the violence to their organization.”

Their research shows that “terrorist group leaders are significantly less likely to take responsibility for an attack when their operatives have struck civilians.”

“Attacks on military targets are not only more likely to be claimed by the leadership, but to evoke competing claims of responsibility from multiple groups,” the scholars add.

Abrahms has studied terrorism for more than a decade, and, through collecting data, he has found again and again that not all attacks are equally beneficial for militant groups.

Specifically, indiscriminate violence against civilian targets is almost always more harmful to the militant group than selective violence against military targets.

“Not all types of violence pay equally,” Abrahms told Salon. “Civilian targeting is genuinely counterproductive.”

Governments are less likely to grant political concessions to groups when they indiscriminately target civilians in terrorist attacks than they are to groups that selectively attack military targets.

Moreover, militant groups are, unsurprisingly, more likely to lose support among the civilian population when they attack civilians than when they attack military targets.

“In this sense, civilian targeting is counterproductive,” Abrahms said.

Over time then, the scholar noted, terrorist groups often move away from civilian attacks and toward military ones, “because leadership understands that their operatives are actually jeopardizing their political goal by striking politically sub-optimal targets.”

“ISIS is very anomalous in all sorts of ways,” Abrahms said, but al-Qaeda — the terrorist group off of which ISIS broke in early 2014 for not being extreme enough — is actually a more typical reflection of terrorist groups overall.

Abrahms details how his research provides insight into ISIS and al-Qaeda in another Salon article.

“Dying to Win”
In some ways, Abrahms’ and Conrad’s research is consonant with that of Robert Pape, a prominent terrorism studies scholar who revolutionized the field.

In his book “Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism,” Pape, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, famously showed that terrorism is fundamentally political in nature, not religious.

Pape documented all known 315 suicide terrorism attacks around the world from 1980 to 2003 and carefully analyzed them. He found “little connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism, or any one of the world’s religions.”

“Rather, what nearly all suicide terrorist attacks have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland,” Pape explained in the book.

The group that carried out the most suicide attacks, he found, was not even religious; it was a secular nationalist group, the Tamil Tigers.

Abrahms says he agrees with Pape on some of his findings, but disagrees with him on numerous issues, and has criticized him for years.

“I respect his work greatly,” Abrahms added. “My empirical research is very much a response to” Pape’s, he added. Yet Abrahms says his work uses much more data, whereas Pape’s is less quantitative.

“I have measured very systematically whether terrorism facilitates government concession,” and the data demonstrates that terrorist attacks are frequently ineffective, Abrahms maintained.

Both scholars agree that terrorism is a fundamentally political action with a kind of internal logic, yet Abrahms says the data shows that, overall, terrorism does not pay as an instrument of coercion, while Pape argues the opposite.

“Pape can’t explain which terrorist leaders don’t take credit for all their attacks, whereas my research can explain the variation in credit claiming,” Abrahms said.

“Takes seriously the empirics raises real questions about core theories within terrorism studies,” he stressed.

This article was written by Ben Norton from Salon and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.

Source : http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/understanding-terrorism-attacks-have-a-political-logic-although-they-are-usually-ineffective-scholar-says/ar-BBsOfp6

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Unconventional #10: This year’s conventions won’t be ‘contested.’ Here’s why they could still be crazy

1. Why this year’s conventions could still be crazy — even if they aren’t ‘contested’

May 3, 2016, will go down in history as the day that every political journalist’s most feverish fantasy — the fantasy of a contested GOP convention in Cleveland — finally slipped out of reach.

With his commanding win in Indiana over Texas Sen. Ted Cruz — and with Cruz’s and John Kasich’s subsequent decisions to suspend their campaigns — tinsel-haired mogul Donald Trump cemented his status Tuesday night as the Republican Party’s likely nominee.

Cruz’s supporters were shocked. As he delivered the news, cries of “No! No!” filled the Grand Hall Ballroom of Indianapolis’ Crowne Plaza Hotel. But in retrospect it appears that Cruz didn’t have much of a choice.

It’s not just that Trump clobbered Cruz 53 percent to 37 percent at the ballot box, surpassing his pre-primary polling average by 10 percentage points and securing at least 51 of the Hoosier State’s 57 prized delegates.

It’s that Trump’s poll numbers, which skyrocketed in the days before Indiana, had also been shooting up nationally (by 6 points in the past week alone, to 56 percent, according to the latest NBC News tracking poll) and in delegate-rich California (where Trump now leads by a staggering 26.4 points, on average).

This is what it looks like when a party coalesces around its nominee, and it put Trump on a glide path to hitting the magic 1,237-delegate mark by the end of the primaries, which in turn would ensure him a first-ballot nomination in Cleveland. All the Donald had to do was win the remaining states where he was favored (New Jersey, West Virginia), pick up some spare change in the less favorable states (New Mexico, Washington, Oregon), and not choke in California.

Cruz, on the other hand, needed to suspend the laws of gravity. He needed to reverse the tide. He needed to tear a hole in the fabric of space and time.

He accepted reality instead.

So what does Cruz’s exit mean for political journalists like us — and for political junkies like you? Does it mean that we have to abandon our dreams of convention drama, either in Cleveland or in Philadelphia?

Not a chance.

So far, the media has obsessed over the idea of a contested convention — the delegate bribing, the floor fight, the endless rounds of balloting. It makes for a romantic vision (and, not incidentally, great TV).

But actual contested conventions are extremely rare in contemporary American politics. In fact, every convention in the modern primary era has been decided on the first ballot — even the ones, like the 1976 GOP confab, that we tend to remember as “contested.” The last time it took Democrats or Republicans multiple ballots to settle on a nominee was in 1952, long before statewide primaries were the most decisive part of the process.

Far more common is what we might call the “conflicted convention.” These are conventions at which the nominee is basically known ahead of time, yet conflict ensues anyway. It could be because a rival with little chance of winning remains in the race in order to influence the party platform (as Gary Hart did in 1984); it could be because a distant runner-up is trying to change the rules and get pledged delegates released from their voting commitments (as Ted Kennedy did in 1980). Whatever the reason, conflicted conventions are anything but boring.

And the least boring — the most dramatic and combustible — of conflicted conventions is the kind likely to consume both Cleveland and Philadelphia this summer: conventions defined by deep divisions over the ideological direction of the party and passionate opposition to the presumptive nominee.

Both Republicans and Democrats have endured this kind of conflicted (if not contested) convention in the not-too-distant past.
Vice President Hubert Humphrey and his running mate, Maine Sen. Edmund S. Muskie, at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, Aug. 29, 1968. (Photo: AP)

In 1968, the Democratic Party seemed destined for a contested convention in Chicago. As antiwar candidates Eugene McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy gathered steam, incumbent President Lyndon B. Johnson withdrew from the race, anointing his loyal vice president, Hubert Humphrey, to run in his stead. Kennedy competed in the primaries; the pro-war Humphrey chose to amass delegates through other means. Then, the night he won the pivotal California primary, Kennedy was assassinated.

The dream of a contested convention died with Kennedy. With the progressive vote divided between McCarthy and George McGovern, Humphrey arrived in Chicago as the prohibitive favorite for the nomination, and he wound up winning by more than 1,000 votes on the first ballot. But the convention was hardly drama-free: Inside the hall, Humphrey faced a major credentials fight, with delegations from 15 states attempting to unseat his delegates and install anti-Vietnam delegates instead. Hostile debates between pro-war and “peace” delegates broke out on national television. City policemen allied with the local political machine roughed up liberal delegates and journalists in plain view of news cameras. Behind the scenes, insiders maneuvered to get Ted Kennedy to run. And on the streets of Chicago, antiwar progressives staged massive demonstrations that soon escalated into riots. While the protesters chanted, “The whole world is watching,” police bombed them with tear gas and beat them with billy clubs, leaving many bloody and dazed.

Four years earlier, Republicans had endured their own conflicted convention — less traumatic, perhaps, but still tension-filled — in San Francisco. Described by historian Rick Perlstein as the “ugliest of Republican conventions since 1912,” the 1964 GOP confab saw entrenched moderates facing off against conservative insurgents in a fight that would eventually redefine the party. In the primaries, archconservative Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater vanquished his main rival, moderate New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, along with several lesser competitors. But moderate forces didn’t give up when the primaries ended. On June 6, they launched a movement to draft Pennsylvania Gov. William Scranton. A week later, he announced his bid.

“Today the nation — and indeed the world — waits to see if another proud political banner will falter, grow limp and collapse in the dust,” Scranton said in his speech. “Lincoln would cry out in pain if we sold out our principles.”

“The hour is late,” lamented Rockefeller, “but if all leaders in the moderate mainstream of the Republican Party will unite upon a platform and upon Gov. Scranton, the moderate cause can be won.”

Scranton spent the next month holding massive rallies and trying to sway GOP delegates, with some success. According to a Harris Poll taken late that June, 62 percent of rank-and-file Republicans preferred Scranton to Goldwater.

The GOP delegates, however, did not agree. In San Francisco’s Cow Palace, they openly clashed with “Stop Goldwater” Republicans; a fistfight nearly broke out when a Goldwater supporter mocked Italian Americans. Meanwhile, “Goldwater devotees grew increasingly vicious as the days wore on,” as historian Josh Zeitz has recounted:

It “wasn’t just the galleries,” recalled one moderate attendee. “It was the floor, it was the hall. The venom of the booing and the hatred in people’s eyes was really quite stunning.”
A leader of the New York Young Republicans recalled the event as “horrible. I felt like I was in Nazi Germany.” No less a party stalwart than former President Dwight Eisenhower called the gathering “unpardonable. … I was deeply ashamed.”
In the end, however, the delegates awarded Goldwater an easy victory on the first ballot.

Sen. Barry Goldwater accepts the Republican presidential nomination in San Francisco, July 16, 1964, with a blast at the Democrats and a promise that “together we will win” in the November election. (Photo/AP)

It’s too early to say whether Cleveland or Philadelphia will look anything like 1964 or 1968. But many of the conditions this year are the same: the serious ideological rifts, the widespread antipathy toward the likely nominees, the sense that America is at a turning point.

Will Bernie Sanders — who upset Hillary Clinton last night in Indiana and is likely to win additional contests in the weeks ahead — threaten to withhold his support for Clinton unless the party’s platform and primary process are reformed? Will some daring Republican mount a William Scranton-like challenge to Trump in Cleveland? Will a third-party candidate emerge and scramble the entire equation?

Whatever happens, we’ll be covering it all right here in Unconventional.


2. What’s next for Ted Cruz and the #NeverTrump movement

With his wife Heidi by his side, Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz suspends his bid for the Republican presidential nomination, May 3, 2016, in Indianapolis. (Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images)

By Jon Ward

National conservative leaders and activists who have held private meetings over the past month to determine if a third-party candidacy is viable know that their window of opportunity is effectively closed. In Texas, a third-party candidate would have to submit roughly 80,000 signatures of Texas voters who had not voted in either primary by next Monday. And that is not going to happen.

(Read the full version of this story here.)

Erick Erickson, a conservative radio talk show host and publisher who has been one of Trump’s most vocal critics, said Tuesday that there is growing resignation among some members of the group who have been meeting to discuss a third-party bid.

Erickson said that when the group convenes a conference call Wednesday, “my guess is the consensus is going to be, we can’t mobilize a third party to do much good.”

“A lot of people are thinking, let’s let this shake out and let there be a reckoning,” Erickson said.

But another person involved in the third-party talks was adamant that such work will continue to move forward.

“Conservatives against Trump will remain conservatives against Trump even if he gets the nomination,” the Trump opponent said. “We will be looking for every alternative to Donald Trump.”

The anti-Trump group is looking at how to provide a reason for NeverTrump voters to come out to the polls, to keep their votes for House and Senate candidates from going uncast. This could be a national write-in campaign, or a state-by-state patchwork effort.

But even an anti-Trump super-PAC, Our Principles PAC, signaled that if Trump is the nominee, they will not continue to oppose him. “We will continue to educate voters about Trump until he, or another candidate, wins the support of a majority of delegates to the convention,” said Katie Packer, the group’s chair.

And many influential Republican operatives behind the scenes gave up the cause of stopping Trump days ago, resigning themselves to his nomination.

“He appears to me to be an amoral, arrogant, divisive man. However, I think he has tapped into the desperate frustration of many Americans and just maybe could grow as a candidate and politician.” one Republican insider said.

In Cruz’s concession speech, he positioned himself for a future presidential run by referring to Ronald Reagan’s speech in 1976 after narrowly losing a contested convention to incumbent President Gerald Ford.

Cruz cast himself as a Reaganesque figure who he said looked past “the close horizons” that preoccupied those thinking only of “their own fortunes” and peered far ahead into the future, concerned for coming generations of Americans.

But the mention of Reagan and 1976 also raised questions about why Cruz will not continue his candidacy on to the GOP convention this year in Cleveland.

One adviser noted that dropping out was an attempt to be a team player for the Republican Party. However, a Cruz endorsement of Trump seems unlikely. The Cruz adviser, asked about the chances of such an endorsement, just rolled his eyes.

In the closing days before this primary vote, Cruz spoke in increasingly bitter terms about Trump.

He implied that Trump is “evil,” said that “we are staring at the abyss” and “it is only Indiana that can pull us back.” Cruz also called Trump a “serial philanderer,” a “pathological liar” and “amoral,” and said that voters should choose him over Trump because “we are not a petty, bigoted, angry people.”

Cruz still has 546 delegates bound to him on the first ballot at the Republican convention in Cleveland this July. He could use them to negotiate for input on the party platform, as many past presidential candidates in competitive primaries have done.

But his campaign is just now beginning to reckon with what to do next. Former Virginia Gov. Ken Cuccinelli, tasked with overseeing Cruz’s delegate operation, didn’t have an answer for what will happen to those 546 delegates.

“We’re not ready to talk about that,” Cuccinelli said.

3. Inside Sanders’ new campaign to transform the Democratic primary process

Bernie Sanders speaks at his “A Future to Believe In” rally in April, at the Big Sandy Superstore Arena in Huntington, W.Va. (Photo: Sholten Singer/The Herald-Dispatch via AP)

By Liz Goodwin

At July’s convention, which he insists will be “contested,” Bernie Sanders plans to get his key policy goals, such as a $15 minimum wage and a ban on fracking, into the party platform. His even more ambitious goal is to transform the way the party picks its presidential nominee, to make it easier for a Sanders-like candidate to win in the future.

(Read the full version of this story here.)

First on the agenda is changing the primary system in each state so that independents and even Republicans can vote to pick the Democratic nominee. Sanders has done much better in these so-called open primaries than in closed ones.

“I think clearly the convention and the Democratic National Committee can change the rules and can create a scenario that makes it clear that we want open primaries in 50 states in this country,” Sanders told the Washington Post last week. He also said it’s time for the party to “rethink” its superdelegate system.

But can Sanders, who did not identify as a Democrat until this past year, convince Democrats to so dramatically change their own rules at their convention? The Clinton campaign clearly does not think Sanders has as much leverage as the thinks he does.

The former secretary of state laughed when NBC’s Andrea Mitchell asked her Tuesday about Sanders claims that the convention will be “contested” in July.

Meanwhile, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, chair of the DNC, said on MSNBC Monday that if anything, she would prefer to change all 50 primaries to be closed, not open.

“I believe that the party’s nominee should be chosen — this is Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s opinion — that the party’s nominee should be chosen by members of the party,” she said.

Another problem for Sanders: The convention is usually not the place where major primary rules changes happen. “Reforming the rules for the next primary season four years from now will probably not happen in a major way at the convention,” said former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, a superdelegate who backs Clinton. “The Democrats generally make their rules two years ahead with a rules committee put together largely by the president’s people, if there is a Democratic president.”

Dean added that changing the primaries to be fairer is difficult because states can be stubborn about their processes. “Caucuses are even more undemocratic than closed primaries because they discriminate against Americans stationed overseas, the infirm and disabled, those in nursing homes, etc. Try getting caucus states to give up their status,” Dean said.

The former governor said it’s far more likely that the Democrats would rethink the role of the party’s superdelegates. Superdelegates, who are party officials and politicians, were created to act as a check against nominating a candidate too liberal to win general elections. But they’ve never functioned that way, instead just backing the candidate who won the most pledged delegates in each election. A move to officially change the rules so that superdelegates function the same as pledged delegates may gain traction. Delegates could appoint a committee to look into those changes at the convention, or pass a non-binding resolution to change that process.

Sanders has not made it explicit whether he will push for a floor fight on the rules at the convention or if he’ll just demand his fair share of delegates on the platform writing committee and other committees. Sanders’ top strategist Tad Devine did not respond to a request to comment about the team’s strategy.

Source : https://www.yahoo.com/news/unconventional-10-this-year-s-conventions-1421697039564854.html

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Clinton has the map on her side, but history working against her

Hillary Clinton makes a stop at the Lincoln Square pancake house in Indianapolis on May 1. (Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

If you want to experience the full-on contempt of the leftist intelligentsia right now, go on social media and suggest, as I did this week, that Donald Trump isn’t certain to get crushed in November. (Trump, in case you hadn’t noticed, brings out pretty much the worst in everybody.)

The way a lot of partisan Democrats see it, Hillary Clinton — despite a loss to Bernie Sanders in Indiana Tuesday — will soon lock down her party’s nomination, and the only way she finds herself even threatened by Trump is if the media decides to legitimize him so we all have something to talk about. The word I keep hearing from liberals is “layup.”

Clinton does, in fact, enter the general election season with some serious structural advantages. Having analyzed trends from the past six elections and factored in demographic shifts, Third Way, the leading centrist Democratic group, concluded that Clinton starts the campaign virtually assured of 237 electoral votes — 46 more than Trump and just 33 short of a majority.

And as you’ve probably heard, no candidate has ever overcome — or even tried to overcome — the kind of ugly impressions Trump has made on women and minority voters to this point. Next to him, Clinton polls like Santa Claus.

But if history is any guide, Clinton comes to the campaign with a structural disadvantage, too, and one that shouldn’t be overlooked. It may explain why she can’t seem to put Bernie Sanders away — and why the outcome in November is hardly assured.

I’ve gone through this history once or twice before, but it bears repeating: In 1947, Congress passed the 22nd Amendment, which said no one could be elected to the presidency more than twice.

In the 65 years since the last state ratified that amendment — comprising 16 elections, and six elections following an eight-year presidency — only one nominee has managed to win a third consecutive term for his party. That was George H.W. Bush, who overcame a double-digit deficit late in the campaign, thanks in part to one of the most ineffectual Democratic campaigns in history.

(And before you start with me, I know, Al Gore actually won, and in an alternate universe somewhere they are building his monument on the Tidal Basin in a climate that is, on average, four degrees cooler than the one we inhabit, but for purposes of this discussion, let’s just live in the here and now.)

The important question is why it’s proved so difficult for either side to win third terms. The most common explanation has to do with voter fatigue. Essentially, we’re told that voters get sick of having one party in office for eight years, and so the pendulum swings back.

I don’t find this theory especially persuasive. I’ve met an awful lot of voters over the years, and rarely have I heard anyone make the case that it was time for the other party to get a turn. It seems to me voters focus a lot more on the candidates themselves than on the parties they represent.

And this may get to the truer cause of the third-term conundrum. If you look back at elections over the past half century, what you find is that the parties of two-term incumbents almost always nominate the candidate who is nominally next in line. Of the six candidates who have sought third terms since 1960, five had previously served as either president or vice president. (The president was Gerald Ford, who ran for election in 1976 after having held the job for two-plus years.)

The outlier was John McCain, who, like Clinton, had been the runner-up in the last open election, and who ran in a year when the incumbent vice president was sitting it out.

It’s not hard to see how this happens. A two-term president has both the time and the muscle to set up someone who will carry on his legacy — while effectively boxing out challengers.

And because presidents almost always lose congressional seats and governorships in off-year elections, an eight-year presidency tends to decimate the ranks of worthy, younger successors from outside the establishment, anyway.

In other words, by the time a president gets done slogging his way through the peaks and troughs of eight years on the job, there aren’t a lot of new, exciting alternatives to whichever former rival or loyal No. 2 has been patiently waiting on the edge of the stage.

The problem is that the next-in-line — Gore, McCain, Hubert Humphrey, Richard Nixon in 1960 — is almost never as politically gifted as the president he (or she) has served. If he were, he wouldn’t have ended up next-in-line to begin with.

And that inferiority is only magnified by a dilemma that even the best politicians would find damn near impossible to navigate. The next-in-line has to be loyal without being small, embody the future while representing the past. He has to somehow embrace continuity while at the same time putting distance between himself and the inevitable disappointment a president leaves behind.

The next-in-line always has more trouble than he should unifying the party, because the fissures that were suppressed through eight years of a presidency — in the cause of staving off the opposition — rise to the surface. The end of every eight-year presidency is something like the fall of Tito, with disparate factions and pent-up emotions finally unleashed.

Clinton — runner-up in 2008, loyal soldier thereafter — is the prototypical next-in-line. Thanks to a couple of dreadful midterm election cycles, she’s had to contend only with a 74-year-old protest candidate who just recently joined the party, and even then she hasn’t been able to excite enough of her own party’s base to lock down the nomination by May.


She’s had to lash herself tightly to the president while at the same time trying to co-opt the ideological fury among the party’s dissatisfied factions. She will emerge from this process with her agenda opaque, her convictions hedged.

Maybe Gore and McCain, having gone through the exact same thing, have some sort of support group she can visit.

Unlike both of those guys, of course, Clinton seems to have gotten astoundingly lucky in her opposition. It’s true: Trump’s appalling rhetoric will make for some whopping TV ads. And yes, if his numbers hold, especially among women, Trump’s next reality-show gig might be called “The Biggest Loser of All Time.”

But here’s the thing about Trump: He’s run the flat-out most offensive, least substantive and crassest campaign in memory, and national polls show him trailing Clinton by 10 points, with six months yet to go.

Think about that. In presidential politics, 10 points can fall away faster than Carly Fiorina on a riser.

And while voters’ impressions at this point in a campaign are normally hard to change, what we don’t know about Trump — the big question, to my mind — is whether the larger electorate will ultimately judge him by the standards of a politician or, like primary voters, as a celebrity.

Politicians aren’t allowed to simply shrug off their records and respawn entirely. The voters, finely attuned to any sign of inauthenticity, won’t have it.

But entertainers reinvent and redeem themselves all the time; it’s what gossipy magazines exist for. And Trump is closer to inhabiting this realm than any candidate we’ve ever seen.

Don’t expect the Trump who takes the stage in Cleveland to be remotely like the Trump who bragged about his genitalia in a debate. And don’t assume, just because his bigotry and base antics are a matter of record, that the rules of traditional politics will apply.

Next-in-lines have been known (at least once) to win, and assuming she can nail down the nomination, Clinton is as clear a favorite as we’ve seen in a while. But Clinton shouldn’t delude herself into thinking she’s headed for a layup, and neither should anyone else.


Source : https://www.yahoo.com/news/clinton-has-the-map-on-1421857612800054.html

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Palin on being Trump’s VP nominee: ‘I wouldn’t want to be a burden on the ticket

Sarah Palin says she’d be open to being Donald Trump’s vice presidential running mate but doesn’t want to hurt his chances the way many believe she did for John McCain in 2008.

“I want to help and not hurt” the former Alaska governor said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. “And I am such a realist that I realize there are a whole lot of people out there who would say, ‘Anybody but Palin.’ I wouldn’t want to be a burden on the ticket, and I realize in many, many eyes, I would be that burden.”

“I just want the guy to win. I want America to win,” Palin, who endorsed Trump in January, continued. “And I don’t know if I would be the person that would be able to help him win.”

But Palin, who burst onto the American political and pop culture scene as McCain’s running mate, said if Trump did put her on his shortlist for VP, she wouldn’t need much vetting.

“I think I’m pretty much as vetted as anybody in the country,“ she said. “I think there are so many other great people out there in America who can serve in this position. I think if someone wanted to choose me, they already know who I am, what I stand for. They wouldn’t be in for any surprises.”

Palin endorses Trump during a rally in Ames, Iowa. (Photo: Mary Altaffer/AP)

Palin also lashed out at House Speaker Paul Ryan, who said last week he’s not yet ready to support Trump.

In response, Palin said she will do everything she can to help fell Ryan in the Wisconsin primary.

“His political career is over,” Palin said of the 2012 vice presidential nominee. “He has so disrespected the will of the people, and as the leader of the GOP, the convention, certainly he is to remain neutral, and for him to already come out and say who he will not support is not a wise decision of his.”

Palin told CNN she will campaign for Paul Nehlen, Ryan’s GOP opponent in the Badger State.

“Paul Ryan and his ilk, their problem is they have become so disconnected from the people they were elected to represent,” she said. “Their problem is they feel so threatened at this point that their power, their prestige, their purse will be adversely affected by this change that is coming with Trump.”

Palin also thinks Ryan has an ulterior motive for not backing Trump.

“If the GOP were to win now, that wouldn’t bode well for his chances in 2020,” she said. “And that’s what he’s shooting for.”

In a separate interview that aired on “State of the Union,” McCain warned Ryan and other GOP leaders not to ignore the will of the voters who’ve all but cemented Trump as the party’s nominee.

“You have to listen to people that have chosen the nominee of our Republican Party,” the Arizona senator said. “I think it would be foolish to ignore them.”

McCain acknowledged there’s a “disconnect” that exists within the GOP when it comes to Trump.

“You have to draw the conclusion that there is some distance, if not a disconnect, between party leaders and members of Congress and the many voters who have selected Donald Trump to be the nominee of the party.”

But McCain, a war veteran who was mocked by Trump earlier in the campaign for being “captured,” said he’s not about to stump for Trump, either.

“A lot of things would have to happen,” McCain said. “I think it’s important for Donald Trump to express his appreciation for veterans, not John McCain, but veterans who were incarcerated as prisoners of war.”
McCain introduces Palin as his vice presidential running mate in Dayton, Ohio,  Aug. 29, 2008. (Photo: Kiichiro Sato/AP/File)

McCain also defended his choice of Palin for vice president.

“I don’t often make a comment like this,” he said. "But she was treated terribly by what we know as the mainstream media, and that’s the only thing I will ever resent about my presidential campaign is her treatment by the media. It was disgraceful.”

As for whom Trump should choose, McCain said it should be “somebody who unites the party,” like Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst or even Ryan, “though I’m not sure he’d want to do that again.”


Source : https://www.yahoo.com/news/sarah-palin-trump-mccain-paul-ryan-vp-145235725.html

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A failed pact tells you why Trump is winning

Like Stalin and Churchill huddled over a map of Europe in 1944, Ted Cruz and John Kasich began a very odd week by announcing — publicly, for reasons known only to them — that they were divvying up the remaining primary states in order to maintain individual spheres of influence. Cruz would get Indiana (which is next to Ohio), while Kasich would get New Mexico (which shares a border with Texas). Super-logical.

Of course, primary voters — unlike, say, Polish peasants — tend to do whatever they want, so all this plotting didn’t exactly make Cruz and Kasich grandmasters of global domination. More like a couple of guys playing Risk in somebody’s basement. Ural attacks Irkutsk! Coming for you next, Kamchatka!

And like most games of Risk, the whole thing fell apart within a few hours, as both campaigns backtracked and said they weren’t telling voters in any state not to vote for their chosen candidates, exactly. They just weren’t telling voters they should vote for their chosen candidates, either.

“I’m not telling anybody anything in Indiana, because I’m not competing there,” Kasich told the baffled hosts of NBC’s “Today” show. He accused the media of obsessing over process, which seemed odd, since it was his and Cruz’s campaigns that had apparently spent days, if not weeks, dividing up media markets according to the latest polls.

When Matt Lauer finally asked him point blank whom Republican voters in Indiana should vote for, Kasich replied: “I’m not getting into that, Matt. Things are not so plain and simple.”

No offense to Lauer or Savannah Guthrie here, but when you manage to make a morning show interview look like a scene from “Frost/Nixon,” it’s probably an indication that you should step back and think through what you’re doing.

In the end, the short-lived pact between Cruz and Kasich — followed closely by Cruz’s equally odd announcement that he was taking on a running mate, but more about that in a minute — served only to make a couple of things even clearer than they were before.

The first is that you should never, ever take strategic advice from Mitt Romney, unless it has to do with buying up companies and shedding overhead.

And the second is that there is a substantive vacuum at the heart of this year’s non-Trump campaigns — a vacuum that has, as much as anything else, enabled Trump to emerge, especially after Tuesday’s romp through the Eastern Seaboard, as a near-certain nominee.

It’s not just that the Cruz and Kasich campaigns managed, in the space of a few hours, to validate all of Trump’s conspiracy theories about the dark soul of the Republican establishment — although they did that pretty well.


For weeks, after all, Trump has been going around saying that corrupt Republicans are rigging the system against him, even though, as I’ve written before, the nominating rules of the party have always been the same.

But whatever high ground Trump’s opponents may have commanded was pretty much squandered when Cruz and Kasich announced that they were, in fact, going to game the system in an effort to subvert Trump at the convention. Now, when Trump says the party elites are trying to rig the process and undermine the voters, you’d have to admit he’s not crazy.

What’s more illuminating about the nonaggression pact, though, is that it even seemed plausible to both sides in the first place. In a world where Cruz and Kasich, Trump’s only remaining obstacles, were offering any galvanizing arguments of their own, there couldn’t possibly be any discussion of one side ceding voters to the other.

They represent, after all, two sharply opposed views of the party’s future. Cruz is a divider and a moral crusader, a peddler of nostalgia, a party crasher who essentially disdains government and those who serve in it.

Kasich is a bridge builder and a futurist, a successful insider who embraces the power of governance. Where Cruz sees a Republican Party that has destroyed itself by cravenly compromising its principles, Kasich sees a party that has grown too inflexible, too narrow and too often mean.

But neither camp has advanced much by way of a substantive vision. Cruz’s campaign is a bland rhetorical exercise, lacking any signature proposals. Kasich goes on about the Ohio record, but I defy anyone to synthesize his plan for replicating that success as president.

So why should a bunch of principles get in the way of tactics?

Source : https://www.yahoo.com/news/a-failed-pact-tells-you-1416851981025334.html

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Kerry expresses reservations about all-volunteer U.S. military

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry delivers remarks on trade at an event with the Pacific Council on International Policy in Los Angeles, April 12, 2016. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

By Jon Herskovitz

AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Wednesday he feels all Americans should find a way to serve their country, suggesting the need for a renewal in public service that could also affect the military.

"I have deep reservations about just an all-volunteer military," Kerry said at a forum on the Vietnam War at the University of Texas in Austin.

"There should be shared responsibility among all Americans," he said. "I think that is one of the best ways you don’t have wars."

Kerry also said numerous deployments overseas under the current system placed enormous burdens on military families.

"Every American ought to find a way to serve, somehow. It doesn’t have to be in the military. I like the idea that everybody ought to give back something," he said.

Kerry, a former Navy officer, earned silver and bronze combat stars and three Purple Heart medals for his service in the Vietnam War. He become a prominent figure in the anti-war movement when he returned to the United States.

He said that, among the lessons from Vietnam, was that Americans must always treat returning veterans with dignity and respect regardless of whether a war was popular or unpopular.

Kerry, who was instrumental as a Senator in helping restore diplomatic ties with Vietnam, will accompany President Barack Obama on a trip there next month.


Source : https://www.yahoo.com/news/kerry-expresses-reservations-volunteer-u-military-023627806.html?nhp=1

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Tennessee law to allow counselors to deny service based on beliefs

Tennessee Republican Governor Bill Haslam listens during the National Governors Association Winter Meeting in Washington, in this February 22, 2014, file photo. REUTERS/Mike Theiler/Files

By Alex Dobuzinskis

(Reuters) - Tennessee's Republican governor on Wednesday signed a law allowing mental health counselors to refuse service to patients on "sincerely held principles," the latest in a string of U.S. state measures criticized as discriminatory against the gay community.

Governor Bill Haslam signed the bill into law three weeks after it was approved by the legislature. It goes into effect immediately.

"The substance of this bill doesn't address a group, issue or belief system," Haslam said in a statement.

"Rather, it allows counselors – just as we allow other professionals like doctors and lawyers – to refer a client to another counselor when the goals or behaviors would violate a sincerely held principle."

An earlier version of the bill had allowed counselors to refuse service to patients on religious grounds, but it was amended to remove any direct reference to religion.

The law protects therapists and counselors from legal action when they cite their personal principles in refusing service, despite a provision in the American Counseling Association's code of ethics barring members from such denials of service.

"This measure is rooted in the dangerous misconception that religion can be used as a free pass to discriminate," Hedy Weinberg, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee, said in a statement.

Weinberg called the bill one in a series of "attacks" on the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community following last year's ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court striking down state bans on gay marriage.

Haslam had previously told Nashville Public Radio he was considering the effect the legislation may have on Tennessee and its citizens, as laws criticized as discriminatory against the LGBT community has drawn increased scrutiny in several states.

In North Carolina, a number of companies including PayPal Holdings and Deutsche Bank have canceled plans to add jobs in the state after it passed a law requiring people to use bathrooms or locker rooms in schools and other public facilities that match the gender on their birth certificate rather than their gender identity.

Haslam said he decided to sign the counseling bill in part because it forbids denial of service to patients in danger of harming themselves or others.

Earlier this month, Haslam disappointed some Christians in the state when he vetoed legislation that would have made the Bible Tennessee's official book. The governor said that violated the U.S. Constitution.


Source : https://www.yahoo.com/news/tennessee-law-allow-counselors-deny-based-beliefs-130359460.html?nhp=1

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U.S. seeks three more years in prison for mobster Bulger's girlfriend

Catherine Greig, longtime girlfriend of former mob boss and fugitive James "Whitey" Bulger, is seen in a booking mug photo released to Reuters August 1, 2011. REUTERS/U.S. Marshals Service/U.S. Department of Justice/Handout

By Scott Malone

BOSTON (Reuters) - Federal prosecutors on Thursday are set to ask a judge to order former Boston mob boss James "Whitey" Bulger's girlfriend to spend three more years in prison for refusing to say if anyone helped the couple during their 16 years on the run.

But lawyers for Catherine Greig, 64, said that punishment was too severe for a woman they described as an animal lover and model prison inmate who was never accused of joining Bulger's murder and mayhem.

Greig was arrested alongside Bulger in 2011 when federal agents caught up with the pair in a seaside condo in Santa Monica, California, where they were living with a cache of weapons and cash. Bulger fled Boston in 1995 after a tip from a corrupt FBI agent that arrest was imminent.

He was on the FBI's "Ten Most Wanted" list for most of his time on the run and his story inspired multiple films, including 2015's "Black Mass."

Bulger, now 86, was convicted in 2013 of murdering or ordering the killings of 11 people, following a months-long racketeering trial that exposed his corrupt relationship with the Boston office of the FBI, which turned a blind eye to Bulger's Irish-American gang as it focused its energy on the Italian-American Mafia. He is currently serving two consecutive life sentences.

Greig was sentenced to eight years in 2012 after pleading guilty to identity fraud and harboring a fugitive. Her sentence on contempt of court charges for refusing to testify would be added onto that time.

"She did not plead guilty to aiding and abetting a man who by the government's account was a mastermind of criminal activity and a killing machine," her attorneys wrote as they recommended a six-month sentence. "For 16 years she kept him docile, happy and avoiding any violence."

They also noted that Greig's initial sentence was longer than the five years Bulger associate Kevin Weeks served for his role as an accessory to five murders.

Federal prosecutors argued that Greig was inflicting further injury on the survivors of Bulger's victims by refusing to testify.

The pair have held to the underworld's code of silence in their court appearances. Bulger's attorneys began his trial by calling him an "organized criminal" and spent much of their energy denying prosecutors' claims that he had been an FBI informant.

Bulger claims to have paid agents for tips but provided no information in return.

Source : https://www.yahoo.com/news/u-seeks-three-more-years-prison-mobster-bulgers-113540750.html?nhp=1

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Warrants served in California linked to San Bernardino case: FBI

A memorial still remains outside as workers return to work for the first time at the Inland Regional Center (IRC) in San Bernardino, California, January 4, 2016. REUTERS/Mike Blake

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - FBI agents served warrants in Corona and Ontario, California, on Thursday morning in the investigation of the December mass shooting by a radicalized Muslim couple in San Bernardino, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation told Reuters.

The Riverside-based Press-Enterprise newspaper reported the Corona warrant was served at the home of Syed Raheel Farook, the brother of Syed Rizwan Farook, who along with his wife, Tashfeen Malik, opened fire at a Dec. 2 holiday party and killed 14 people. The couple died the same day in a shootout with police.

After confirming the warrants, Laura Eimiller, spokeswoman for the FBI's Los Angeles field office, said the U.S. Attorney's office would provide more details on Thursday.

A representative for the U.S. Attorney did not immediately return a call or email seeking comment.

The FBI searched the home of Syed Raheel Farook in February, a law enforcement source close to the investigation confirmed to Reuters at the time.

Los Angeles television station KABC reported on Thursday that three indictments were returned on Wednesday in connection with the San Bernardino shooting.

Reuters could not immediately confirm the KABC report.

Source : https://www.yahoo.com/news/warrants-served-california-related-san-bernardino-case-fbi-161353327.html?nhp=1

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Trump’s ‘America First’ neo-isolationism

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump delivers a foreign policy speech at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., April 27, 2016. (Photo: Jim Bourg/Reuters)

After rolling over its opponents in all five Eastern seaboard primaries, the Trump juggernaut entered Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, where the victorious candidate gave a speech intended to add gravitas to his scattershot positions on foreign policy and national security. As he edges closer to becoming the Republican nominee for president, Donald Trump field-tested a new bumper sticker to describe his unique brand of economic populism and trade protectionism, anti-immigrant nativism and a neo-isolationism that eschews foreign entanglements: “America First!”

“The direction I’m outlining will return us to a timeless principle — always putting the interests of the American people and American security above all else. It has to be first,” Trump said. “That will be the foundation of every single decision that I make. ‘America First’ will be the major and overriding theme of my administration.”

Putting America first hardly seems a controversial idea for a U.S. president, but the phrase has a long lineage in Republican politics dating back to the isolationist, noninterventionist wing of the party in the 1930s and 1940s. The America First Committee of the 1930s was established to keep the United States out of the approaching Second World War, and its noninterventionist agenda was embraced by Republican Sen. Robert Taft, who ran for his party’s presidential nomination in 1948 and 1952. Many Republican foreign policy experts in particular worry that, coupled with Trump’s strongman persona and what many see as his strong-arm instincts, the America First agenda would amount to a rejection of the United States’ outsize role in protecting the liberal international order put in place after World War II.

Under his America First conceit, Trump recited a familiar litany of foreign policy positions and criticisms of the Obama administration and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. He once again suggested a moratorium on Muslim immigration and opposed the Obama administration’s “senseless” immigration policies that “import extremism.” He threatened to punish U.S. companies that move jobs overseas and to quickly reverse the country’s lopsided trade imbalance with China by using economic coercion. He promised to rebuild depleted U.S. military power but also to use it sparingly, eschewing nation-building or democracy promotion overseas. In the early days of his administration, a President Trump would hold summits with European and Asian allies and demand that they pay America more for its security umbrella, or else he would be willing to close it and walk away from those alliances.

Going further than just bashing the free-trade agenda, Trump denigrated multilateral agreements and international institutions that undergird a rules-based international order and the dynamic of globalization that has been a driving force in spreading liberal economic and political values for decades.

“No country has ever prospered that failed to put its own interests first. Our friends and enemies put their interests above ours, and we must start doing the same,” Trump said. Insisting that nation-states remain the foundation of “happiness and harmony,” he voiced skepticism of “international unions that tie us up, and bring America down. Under my administration we will never enter America into any agreement that reduces our ability to control our own affairs. … No longer will I surrender our people to the false song of globalization.”

Arguably not since Patrick Buchanan in 1996, and possibly not since Taft in 1952, has a serious Republican presidential hopeful embraced such an isolationist platform or called into question an international order based on free markets and international institutions, and both of those previous Republican candidates ultimately lost the nomination.

In Trump’s telling, his agenda is not isolationist, but rather a sign of strong leadership. Allies and adversaries alike will respect America’s newfound strength and determination, in his view, and respond to border walls, trade tariffs and demands for more burden-sharing by quickly getting into line. What worries many Republican foreign policy experts is that that expectation doesn’t comport with reality as they understand it.

Souce : https://www.yahoo.com/news/trumps-america-first-neo-isolationism-113331890.html

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Shakespeare's school to open to visitors to celebrate 400th anniversary

The school room in Stratford-upon-Avon where Shakespeare learned “small Latin and less Greek” – as affectionately mocked by his friend Ben Jonson – will open its doors, scarred by centuries of rowdy schoolboys, as part of the town’s commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the death of its most famous son.

“We’re not opening a museum,” said Bennet Carr, head of the King Edward VI school, which will continue to use the building, “we’re welcoming visitors into our world.”

The children and teachers are well used to the tourists pressing their noses and camera lenses beseechingly against the diamond paned windows. From this weekend, after a £1.8m restoration mainly funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, the tourists will be welcomed in and offered the chance to sit though a Tudor grammar school lesson – but only after 11am on school days. The early mornings will still be reserved for school assemblies and classes, though the pupils will now sit on new benches made of oak from a Warwickshire woods once owned by Shakespeare’s family.

The historian Michael Wood has called it a treasure, “one of the most atmospheric, magical and important buildings in the whole of Britain”.

“Even though the evidence suggests he was yanked out of school without finishing the curriculum, due to his father’s dire business troubles, what he learned here stayed with him for life,” Wood said. “Right through to his last plays he was still drawing on stories he knew and phrases he had translated and learned by rote so many years earlier.”

 Performance guide Sam Lesser gives a tutorial in Latin to pupils of King Edward VI School
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 Performance guide Sam Lesser gives a tutorial in Latin to pupils of King Edward VI School Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
The project manager Lincoln Clarke said the school’s importance for Shakespeare was incalculable. “The birthplace is obviously key, because that’s where he happened to be born, but this is the building that made him Shakespeare, where he learned so much, witnessed so much, that inspired him for the rest of his life. It is of worldwide significance.”

The school was venerable even in Shakespeare’s day, and the building much older: dendrochronology work during the restoration has dated the earliest timbers to 1420. “We bear his name but we don’t regard Edward VI as our founder,” Carr said. “He stole the school when he abolished its true founder, the Guild of the Holy Cross – but at least he had the sense not to abolish the school.”


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Fundraising continues, partly as a result of the dramatic reappearance of John the Baptist. It was known that the building had ancient wall paintings, including the earliest Tudor roses in England, which the town – which had sided with the Yorkists – clearly thought it politic to add when the regime changed.

A whole painted wall emerged in the conservation work, including faint but still recognisable images of the Virgin Mary and the Trinity, probably deliberately defaced and covered over in the Reformation, possibly by Shakespeare’s own father during his term as mayor.

Then a few months ago, after an image reconstructing the original appearance of the original painting had been completed, an unexpected and startlingly well-preserved painting of the John the Baptist emerged on a beam, holding a lamb, still with traces of gilding on his staff.

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“His face and his blazing eyes were uncovered first - it was a transfixing moment,” Carr recalled.

Among the genuine treasures the visitors will see, one outrageous fake has been kept: a little pane of glass into which somebody – almost certainly a schoolboy – has scored “William Shakespeare 1575”. Of the six known genuine signatures of Shakespeare, all are different and not one spells his name in the way now regarded as correct.

“We’re expecting around 100,000 visitors a year,” said Carr, who lives a few yards from the schoolroom, on the other side of an absurdly picturesque courtyard. “So that could be 100,000 pairs of eyes peering in at me eating my cornflakes. I’m OK with that, it comes with the job, but I’m not sure the scale of it has entirely dawned on my wife yet.”

Electricians, carpenters and painters are still working flat out this week. The admission on Saturday will be free. “It’s our gift to the town,” Clarke said, “and also our get-out-of-jail-free card in case we’re not absolutely completely 100% finished.”

• Shakespeare’s Schoolroom and Guildha

Source by : http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2016/apr/20/shakespeares-school-to-open-to-visitors-to-celebrate-400th-anniversary

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A Modest Proposal: Reforming Supreme Court Justice Selection

I don’t have much interest in adding my voice to the thousands spilling ink on Senate Republicans’ tactics regarding the Supreme Court vacancy. All I’ll say is that I disapprove, but for anyone who believes that Democrats wouldn’t be doing the exact same thing were the situation reversed, well, there’s a bridge I’d like to sell you.

I’m much more interested in taking the long view and talking about how to avoid this kind of gridlock in the future, and also how to avoid the opportunities for such transformational and society-altering appointments to begin with. Here is the proposal:

1) Expand the Supreme Court to eleven justices instead of nine.

2) Each justice serves a twenty-two year term, staggered such that one retires and is replaced by a new justice every two years.

3) Retired justices can fill in to hear and decide cases when one or more of the sitting justices is recused. This way, the Bench is always full (assuming enough retired justices would be willing to do this).

Similar ideas have been floated in the legal academy. Most prominently, Jack Balkin at Yale Law School has suggested maintaining nine justices and granting each an eighteen-year term with the same two-year staggered retirement system. The beauty of such an idea is obvious. As life expectancy has increased and the Supreme Court has thrust itself into more and more issues at the forefront of American political life, the absurdity of life tenure has grown clearer. The power that a justice can exert over a lifetime career is greater than democracy can withstand, particularly from an office-holder who was never elected. This may not have been the case at the nation’s founding, when the Supreme Court had less importance and people lived shorter lives, but it is surely the case now.

Moreover, under this proposal, each president gets to appoint two justices in one presidential term and four justices over two terms. There is no more randomness of a justice dying or retiring suddenly—nine of the last ten justices to leave the Court served at least eighteen years, so very few would leave the Court unexpectedly before the expiration of their term. Justices would also no longer strategically time their retirements to coincide with the election of an ideologically similar president. Of particular relevance to current goings-on, it becomes impossible for one party to reasonably claim that a sitting president should not fill one of the seats that this proposal explicitly entitles the president to fill.

The drawback of the Balkin idea is that it gives one president the power to change the Constitution. Most presidents these days serve two terms. Replacing four out of nine justices is almost a majority of the entire Court, essentially letting one president and one party change the Constitution just for winning two consecutive presidential elections—something most incumbents have pulled off for three generations. A modified version of the Balkin idea is a twenty-seven year term with retirements staggered every three years so that in order to appoint four out of nine justices on the Court and “change the Constitution,” a party must win three consecutive presidential elections, a much more rare feat in modern times.

I accept the criticism levied against the Balkin proposal but think that the modification also misses the mark. A twenty-seven year term is excessive. Less than one-fifth of justices ever have even served that long. Admittedly, the ones who have disproportionately date to recent times, but not so disproportionately that there’s evidence for a twenty-seven year term as the new norm. Only five of the last ten justices to leave the Court served more than twenty-seven years. More importantly, the modification ruins the once-every-two-years balance of power that guaranteed each president would have the same power to reshape the Court. Most presidents would get only one appointment to the Court in a four-year term. A few would get two.

Instead, by expanding the Court’s membership to eleven justices, I maintain the balance among presidents and still require a party to win three consecutive presidential elections in order to appoint a majority or near-majority of the justices. A twenty-two year term is still long, although eight of the last ten justices to leave the Court served at least that long, as have three of the eight sitting justices, with a fourth to hit the mark in August. Still, as far as I know, it is a longer term than constitutional court judges have in any other constitutional democracy (no other constitutional democracy has life-tenured constitutional court judges). Nevertheless, it is hard to see an alternative that maintains equity in shaping the Court among presidents, does not let one president unduly influence the Court, and respects the vaunted importance that Americans have traditionally attached to an independent federal judiciary.

The proposal’s numerous advantages over the current system can be summed up as vastly reducing the effect of random events on the Court’s composition, instituting reasonable term limits, creating equity among presidents in their selection of justices, allowing a full Court to hear every case, and moderating the Senate confirmation process because there is no randomness to which party gets to fill vacancies. Parties fill vacancies when they win presidential elections.

The substantial benefits come with some caveats, however. First, while it would not happen often, if a justice were to die or retire before the expiration of the twenty-two year term, how would that be handled? There are a few options here. The president could unilaterally appoint someone to serve until the end of the two-year cycle, and then appoint a justice to a twenty-two year term with the Senate’s advice and consent. This means that, unless the retired or deceased justice was within the last two years of his term, every other justice would serve an extra two years in addition to the twenty-two year term in order to let the departed justice’s seat be filled promptly. This method is used when a sitting senator resigns or dies. The governor of the senator’s state appoints a temporary replacement until the people elect someone else.

Alternatively, to avoid giving other justices an extra two years on the bench, the president could simply appoint someone to serve out the rest of the twenty-two year term, either unilaterally or with the Senate’s advice and consent, and then keep every other justice on the same appointment and retirement schedule. While preferable because of that last feature, this gives the president an extra appointment beyond the two per term and so it does not alleviate the possibility of a situation like the current one, when a justice dies and leaves the president with an unexpected opportunity to transform the Court that no one could have foreseen. The prospect of such a vacancy arising after the president has already made two appointments in his term is a further complicating factor, although perhaps the appointments could be placed such that one is near the end of the term in order to reduce the likelihood of this situation.

A third solution would be to allow the least senior retired justice to serve out the term, either until the end of the twenty-two year term or until the end of the two-year cycle (probably the latter makes more sense). Then, the president would appoint a new justice to a twenty-two year term.

A second difficulty lies in structuring the term’s beginning and end dates. It would be easy enough to say that terms will begin on October 1, 2018; October 1, 2020; October 1, 2022, etc. But this formulation would incentivize continued partisan fighting over confirmation because the opposition party would have an incentive to wait as long as possible before confirming a nominee so some of the twenty-two year term elapses before the new justice is even seated. It is possible to give justices a fixed twenty-two year term, with the twenty-two years beginning on their confirmation date, but if the Senate takes a while to confirm a nominee, or rejects one or more of the president’s nominees before confirming one, the beginning of the twenty-two year terms would slide later and later. This raises the prospect that eventually, there would be only one vacancy in a presidential term, for the other twenty-two year term set to expire during that president’s term would not actually expire until after the presidential term did.

For this reason, I would probably favor a fixed date to the justice’s term’s start, such as October 1, and then perhaps allow the appointment process to begin several months before the seat on the Supreme Court technically becomes vacant. That method allows time for a full and exhaustive nomination process, including the rejection of a nominee or two, without the process bleeding into the justice’s term. While it would be a bit strange for the Senate to confirm someone to a vacancy that technically had not yet arisen, there’s no legal reason that this could not happen. Of course, if the Senate confirms a justice before the term’s start date, the justice would not begin service until the term’s start date.

Third, allowing retired justices to sit when there have been recusals leads to the bizarre result that the Supreme Court’s composition is unfixed and can differ from case to case. Recusals are infrequent, but they certainly happen, occasionally in important cases. For example, Justice Kagan is recused from the pending affirmative action case concerning college admissions at the University of Texas. It may seem too strange to potentially change the outcome of a case by allowing another justice to sit, a justice who would be selected from retired justices either randomly or based on which retired justice has the least seniority. If this part of the proposal is unacceptable, it can still be adopted with just its first two components, which are its major thrust and do not depend in any way on the third component. But I did want to highlight that for the first time ever, there would be retired justices who still want to participate in cases: in the present system, justices retire only when they no longer want to continue serving, while under this proposal, some justices who want to continue serving would have to retire because their term expired. It may be useful to find a way to benefit from justices willing to continue their service.

Reasonable people could prefer many different solutions to the aforementioned problems. Other than the original three-point proposal, I do not attempt to offer a one-size-fits-all theory for how to make changes to the Court. There is room for compromise, and none of the potential solutions is as important as the skeleton of the proposal laid out in the first place.

The more pressing issue is that, unfortunately, the Constitution guarantees federal judges life tenure. While the size of the Court could be changed to eleven by mere congressional statute, a justice’s term could be limited to twenty-two years only by amending the Constitution, which is nearly impossible to do. This proposal suggests sensible term limits in a careful way that does not give one president too much power. The resulting Supreme Court would be more democratic and balanced, with justices seated after a less politicized confirmation process. All of these features indicate that this “modest proposal” is indeed modest. Alas, because of the system that the Framers froze in place at the ratification of the Constitution, enacting this proposal would require a political movement that is not modest at all, one with sufficient force to amend the Constitution. I hope that at some point, the public becomes concerned enough with the generally un-sexy issue of the Supreme Court that such an amendment could come to pass.

Source by : http://thepolitic.org/a-modest-proposal-reforming-supreme-court-justice-selection/

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