Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren proposed a universal child care plan that would limit American families’ expenses to 7 percent of income regardless of how many children they have in care — paid for by a tax on the ultra-wealthy.
The Massachusetts senator’s plan, unveiled Tuesday on Medium.com, would make child care free for families with incomes below 200 percent of the poverty level, or less than $51,500 for a family of four. Other families would pay up to 7 percent of income, depending on how much they earn.
The proposal marks the latest policy entry into a 2020 contest that features scores of progressive Democrats competing over how best to mitigate income inequality and expand the economic safety net for working families. Americans pay nearly as much for child care as they do for rent, with the average cost of child care in the U.S. approaching $1,400 a month, according to a 2018 HotPads analysis of a Care.com state and metro area pricing index.
Warren’s economic populist vision, paired with fierce attacks on corporations and wealthy Americans who she says are rigging the system for self-interest, is at the heart of her campaign, which has already drawn attacks from President Donald Trump.
Warren’s plan would cost taxpayers $70 billion per year, according to an analysis by Moody’s Analytics economists Mark Zandi and Sophia Koropeckyj. It would be paid for with some of the revenue from an annual wealth tax Warren has proposed on assets above $50 million, the person said.
The proposal would “substantially increase the number of children able to receive formal child care” from 6.8 million (or one-third of those under 5 years old) to 12 million (or 60 percent of children under 5), the economists said. It would cut formal care costs for families with young children by about 17 percent.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez raised eyebrows after comparing President Trump’s border wall plans to the Berlin Wall separating communist Germany from the free world.
The New York Democrat made her remarks during a livestream for supporters on Friday, where she spoke out about the scrutiny she received ever since she won the election last year and dethroned top Democrat Joe Crowley.
“No matter how you feel about the wall, I think it’s a moral abomination,” Ocasio-Cortez said on the issue of the border wall that Trump has been pushing for since getting into office.
“I think it’s like the Berlin Wall. I think it’s like any other wall designed to separate human beings and block out people who are running away from the humanitarian disasters. I just think it’s wrong,” she added.
MSNBC journalists and analysts on Monday lashed out at conservative complaints of reporters picking out an “amazing” coat for Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. MSNBC Live co-host Chris Jansing called the reaction “crazy” and guest Mark Thompson attacked it as racist.
MSNBC reporters at a campaign stop over the weekend gushed as they chose an “amazing,” multi-colored coat. CNN reporter Maeve Reston admitted “we kind of forced” Harris to put it on. Chris Jansing on Monday whined, “But people did go kind of crazy on this. They were saying, ‘Journalists shouldn’t be shopping with candidates’ or ‘They shouldn’t be doing these kinds of activities.’”
Jussie Smollett’s “Empire” screen time is getting slashed in the wake of a growing sentiment that he staged the so-called “attack.”
Production sources tell TMZ … Jussie was supposed to have 9 scenes and a big musical number in the second to the last episode — which is being shot now — but, 5 of his scenes have been cut, and his musical number has been 86’d.
As for the remaining 4 scenes … we’re told he’s no longer the focus. The scene features an ensemble, meaning he’s flanked by a number of cast members.
With his duties pared down, Jussie will be spending way less time on set.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg took the bench at the Supreme Court Tuesday, the first time she has heard arguments since her treatment for lung cancer in December 2018.
The justice’s presence at Tuesday’s arguments was expected — the high court’s public information office announced Friday that Ginsburg would participate in a private conference among the justices to discuss pending petitions.
At 85, Ginsburg sometimes appears frail, moving at a slow shuffle with her head slumped at the shoulders. But her entrance in the courtroom Tuesday was unusually vigorous. She darted quickly to her seat beside Chief Justice John Roberts with her head aloft, cheeks locked in a broad smile.
As is often the case, Ginsburg asked the first question at Tuesday’s argument, pressing attorneys just moments after the proceedings began. Though she is usually a subdued presence — and sometimes almost inaudible — Ginsburg advanced her question Tuesday with strength and clarity.
Leaks from the Chicago police over the weekend, however, indicate that Smollett likely paid two Nigerian-American brothers he knew to orchestrate the attack. Smollett denied any wrongdoing through a statement released to the media by his lawyers.
That the original story broke days just after the Covington narrative fell apart last month didn’t stop it from spreading quicker than a wildfire. Within hours of TMZ’s report, some of America’s most influential politicians and celebrities amplified the story — and the belief that America is a dangerous place for minorities — to millions across the world.
2020 Democratic presidential hopeful Senator Cory Booker described the attack as “an attempted modern-day lynching.” He used the incident to press for more hate-crime legislation. California senator Kamala Harris, who is leading the polls for the 2020 race, repeated Booker’s words. Speaker Nancy Pelosi described the attack as “an affront to our humanity.” Freshman congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez castigated media for describing the incident as a “possible” hate crime. Her colleague Rashida Tlaib wrote that “the right wing is killing and hurting our people.”
Jussie Smollett is the lead actor on the Fox drama Empire and has deep roots in Hollywood and the Democratic party. Celebrities, many of them friends with Smollett, pounced on the story. Pansexual pop star Janelle Monae shared a (now-deleted) photo of her and Smollett on social media, writing that “it is still a risk daily to be a black, out and proud human being.” Smollett’s co-star Grace Byers wrote that “hatred, inequality, racism and discrimination continue to course through our country’s veins.” Rapper T.I. condemned the attack on “OUR PEOPLE” and said “the hits won’t stop until we hit back!” He warned that a “revolution is imminent.”
Awwww, we love The Babylon Bee. They have truly mastered what it means to be a parody/satire account and truth be told, they are fairly equal opportunity with it comes to mocking people and politics in this country.
Their take on Jussie Smollett though … we’re not sure who this hurts more, Jussie or CNN.
CBS News' Lara Logan on US media: "Although the media has historically always been left-leaning, we’ve abandoned our pretense, or at least the effort, to be objective, today. … We’ve become political activists, and some could argue propagandists, and there’s some merit to that" pic.twitter.com/rkVstDuKBh
Famed 60 Minutes correspondent Lara Logan has broken ranks with mainstream media, claiming news outlets are now ‘mostly liberal’ and have become ‘propagandists’ while covering President Trump.
The South African-born foreign affairs journalist said that most of the American press is biased against Trump because journalists are overwhelmingly Democrats.
‘You say the media is mostly liberal,’ Logan told Mike Ritland on his Mike Drop podcast.
‘I agree with you. It’s true. Why can I say that with certainty?
‘Well first of all I’ve been part of this for all my life, I’m 47 now and I’ve been a journalist since I was 17 and the media everywhere is mostly liberal not just in the U.S, but in this country 85 percent of journalists are registered Democrats so that’s just a fact.’
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., announced on Tuesday he will make another bid for president by entering the already crowded 2020 race.
Sanders made the announcement in an interview with Vermont Public Radio. The full interview is set to be released later Tuesday morning.
“We began the political revolution in the 2016 campaign, and now it’s time to move that revolution forward,” he told the radio station.
Sanders also released a video announcing his intentions to run.
While blasting President Trump as a “pathological liar,” Sanders said he’s running to pursue policies like universal health care and a $15 minimum wage — items he championed in 2016 but have since been adopted by a number of other candidates in the field.
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein is expected to leave his role at the Justice Department by mid-March, a senior DOJ official told Fox News on Monday.
An official announcement of who has been selected to replace Rosenstein could come as early as this week. A Trump administration official added that Attorney General William Barr has picked Jeffrey Rosen, who currently serves as Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of Transportation, to take over for Rosenstein.
A graduate of Northwestern University and Harvard Law School, Rosen previously served as General Counsel and Senior Policy Advisor for the White House Office of Management and Budget (2006 to 2009) and as General Counsel at the Department of Transportation (2003 to 2006), according to his online biography.
The lawyer for Covington Catholic High School junior Nick Sandmann says he will begin filing defamation lawsuits this week, as the Kentucky school’s diocese released a private investigative report clearing students of instigating the Jan. 18 incident at the Lincoln Memorial.
“Nick Sandmann is 16 years old & has 2½+ years to identify accusers & sue them,” Atlanta attorney L. Lin Wood said Saturday on Twitter. “No member of mainstream & social media mob who attacked him should take comfort from not being sued in initial round of lawsuits which will commence next week. Time is Nick’s friend, not his enemy.”
In videos of the incident, Nick is the student wearing a “Make America Great Again” cap who smiles as American Indian activist Nathan Phillips approaches him, chanting and pounding a drum. Nick and his classmates, who gathered for the March for Life on the National Mall, had felt the sting of insults from a group called the Black Hebrew Israelites.
An initial burst of liberal Twitter feeds claimed the students provoked the incident, insulted Mr. Phillips and yelled “build the war.”
The tweets triggered mass condemnations from liberal activists, Democrats, Hollywood and noted mainstream media reporters.
On air, HBO’s “Real Time” host Bill Maher called Mr. Sandmann a “little pr—k.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Massachusetts Democrat, tweeted: “Omaha elder and Vietnam War veteran Nathan Phillips endured hateful taunts with dignity and strength, then urged us all to do better.”
One liberal tweeted that someone should burn down the school in Park Hills, Kentucky, with the students locked inside.
Authorities in California are struggling to enforce a state law that permits officials to seize firearms from people with previous criminal convictions or mental health issues – running into staffing and budgetary issues that have contributed to a massive backlog of guns marked for confiscation.
The law, which was passed in 2013 following the shooting at Connecticut’s Sandy Hook elementary school and set aside $24 million for seizure programs, had a goal of confiscating around 20,000 guns over three years. But six years later, according to a San Francisco Chronicle report, there are still roughly 9,000 of those guns out there, with more being added to the list yearly.
While the state’s new governor, Gavin Newsom, has made gun control a priority of his new administration and has proposed a multi-million-dollar increase to hire more agents, the program reportedly has been hit by retention issues and a lack of experience among new agents.[…]
Under California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, seven positions open over the last year have gone unfilled and last year agents were made to sign contracts guaranteeing they would stay on the force for at least two years.
“We get people straight out of college, with minimal law enforcement experience, and we have to train them for a year,” Alfredo Cardwood, president of the Justice Department agents union, told the Chronicle. “After we train them, they skip out and go work for the local D.A.s.”
New hires make between $50,844 and $66,852, and a recent report by the California Department of Human Resources found that state agents make around 19 percent less than their local counterparts.
The ecstatic sailor shown kissing a woman in Times Square celebrating the end of World War II died Sunday. George Mendonsa was 95.
Mendonsa fell and had a seizure at the assisted living facility in Middletown, R.I., where he lived with his wife of 70 years, his daughter, Sharon Molleur, told The Providence Journal.
Mendonsa was shown kissing Greta Zimmer Friedman, a dental assistant in a nurse’s uniform, on Aug. 14, 1945. Known as V-J Day, it was the day Japan surrendered to the U.S.. People spilled into the New York City streets to celebrate the news.
Mendonsa planted a kiss onto Friedman, whom he had never met.
The photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt was first published in Life magazine and became one of the most famous photographs of the 20th century. It’s called “V-J Day in Times Square,” but is known to most as “The Kiss.”
Several people later claimed to be the kissing couple. It was years before Mendonsa and Friedman were confirmed to be the couple.
Mendonsa served on a destroyer during the war and was on leave when the end of the war was announced. He has said Friedman reminded him of nurses on a hospital ship whom he saw caring for wounded sailors.
“I saw what those nurses did that day and now back in Times Square the war ends, a few drinks, so I grabbed the nurse,” Mendonsa said, WPRI-TV reported .
A Federal Way mom held a would-be intruder at gunpoint Thursday night until police could arrive.
Casandra Cooksey said she heard a car door slam outside her home just before midnight.
“Then I heard my screen door open, and I started panicking,” Cooksey said. “Grabbed our firearm and came peeking around the corner here. Saw a man right in this opening in the door.”
Cooksey said the unidentified man appeared to be intoxicated and wouldn’t leave.
“He did start getting agitated when told to go away,” said Cooksey.
She called her husband who was at work. Cooksey also called her neighbor, Daniel Wilson. He ran outside, also armed.
“I said you ain’t going nowhere bud, leave the house alone,” he said.
Wilson said he’s especially sensitive to the issue – his home was robbed in 2017.
“Gives you the chills for a little while,” he said.
A few minutes later police arrived and took the man away. According to the police report, they determined no crime occurred and eventually dropped the man off at home with his wife in Tacoma.
Liberal actor Jussie Smollett is accused of staging a racist and anti-gay attack on himself, which Smollett blamed on supporters of President Donald Trump.
Smollett’s alleged fake “hate crime” appears to be the latest instance of liberals manufacturing hate crimes for attention in the Trump era.
The Daily Caller News Foundation compiled below some of the most outrageous fake hate crimes since Trump was elected, in rough chronological order:
ANTI-MUSLIM HATE CRIME IN MICHIGAN TURNS OUT TO BE A HOAX (NOV. 2016)
A Muslim woman at the University of Michigan received national attention from national outlets like The Washington Post in November 2016 after she claimed a drunk 20-something man threatened to light her on fire if she didn’t remove her hijab. The university condemned the “hateful attack,” which turned out to be a hoax.
BISEXUAL STUDENT FAKES TRUMP-INSPIRED HATE CRIME (NOV. 2016)
Taylor Volk, an openly bisexual senior at North Park University claimed to be the target of hateful notes and emails following Trump’s election in November 2016. Volk told NBC News that “I just want them to stop.” But the “them” referenced by Volk turned out to be herself, as the whole thing was fabricated.
A student was arrested for disrupting the classroom on February 4th. To be clear, the student was NOT arrested for refusing to participate in the Pledge of Allegiance as some media outlets reported. https://t.co/hxtRB6uVok
Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan on Sunday praised Rep. Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) for her anti-Semitic language, saying she has “nothing to apologize for.”
Farrakhan, who has a long history of using anti-Semitic language, including comparing Jews to “termites” last October, delivered remarks at his movement’s Saviours’ Day conference in Chicago. During the two-hour speech, he talked about the need to break up Democracy before he went on to praise the 102 women in Congress, specifically Omar.
He began by referencing Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s (D., Mich.) “impeach the motherfucker” line about President Donald Trump, calling it “funny language” and went on to talk about widely-condemned tweets from Omar. The congresswoman was pressured to apologize last week after a tweet was widely condemned as anti-Semitic, receiving backlash from Democratic colleagues, Jewish organizations and even Chelsea Clinton.
“Ms. Omar from Somalia – she started talking about ‘the Benjamins’ and they are trying to make her apologize. Sweetheart, don’t do that. Pardon me for calling you sweetheart, but you do have a sweet heart. You sure are using it to shake the government up, but you have nothing to apologize for,” Farrakhan said. “Israel and AIPAC pays off senators and congressmen to do their bidding, so you’re not lying, so if you’re not lying. Stop laying down. You were sent there by the people to shake up that corrupt House.”
For nearly four years, Gavin Grimm has been suing his former school district after it banned him from using the boys bathrooms in high school.
Along the way, he’s became a national face for transgender rights. His case almost went to the U.S. Supreme Court. He graduated and moved to California but kept fighting.
The school board in Virginia may finally be giving in, although not in court. It will hold a public hearing Tuesday to discuss the possibility of allowing transgender students to use restrooms that correspond with their gender identity.
“I have fought this legal battle for the past four years because I want to make sure that other transgender students do not have to go through the same pain and humiliation that I did,” he said.
The Gloucester County School Board’s meeting comes just months before a trial is set to begin over its current bathroom rules.
Grimm said the proposed policy “is far from perfect, but would represent an important first step for Gloucester.” The policy “would also send the message to school districts across (Virginia) and the country that discrimination is unacceptable,” he said.
Grimm has also been expanding his case against the school board. A federal judge ruled Thursday that he can sue over its refusal to change the gender on his high school transcript, which still lists him as female.
Grimm said the unchanged transcript will stigmatize him every time he applies to a college or potential employer that asks for it.[…]
Since moving to California, Grimm has been studying at a community college and working as an activist and educator.
He’s been able to avoid submitting his transcript to anyone so far. But that will likely change soon. He’s looking for more traditional work and will eventually apply to four-year schools.
Dozens of demonstrators occupied and vandalized a privately owned U.S. Border Patrol museum near El Paso, Texas, over the weekend, according to the site’s top official.
Museum director David Ham told the Washington Examiner his staff and guests worried for their safety Saturday when a group of about 50 rowdy protesters entered the facility, defaced property, and refused to leave the grounds.
“Say it loud, say it clear, Border Patrol kills!” group members standing inside and outside the facility yelled.
Security cameras set up outside the private museum captured protesters pulling into the parking lot and putting on face masks before going inside around 2:15 p.m. local time.
“That was really intimidating to our staff, plus their kind of aggressive attitude,” said the museum official, a 31-year veteran of the Border Patrol. The museum is a nonprofit and apolitical.
Ham, who was not at the museum at the time of the incident, said he got a call from an “upset” staff member.
“We have cameras, and we saw them gathering in the parking lot. We saw them come in the museum, and she had called 911. I was able to watch the cameras on my cellphone. They came in after putting masks on,” Ham told the Examiner in a phone call Monday.
“They proceeded to set up a bunch of signs and just went all over the museum. They of course had an agenda, they were chanting and singing songs, and then a couple of them got on a bullhorn,” Ham said. “We had visitors in the museum. They started talking and kind of harassing them. Of course the staff was asking them to leave, and they wouldn’t leave.”
Ham said his staff led non-protesting visitors to the back of the gift shop, so they could hide until police arrived on the scene.
