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Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) said Wednesday he has serious concerns about presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump and won’t vote for him without assurances “that he’s not somebody who’s going to abuse” the Constitution.
Lee, during an interview on Newsmax TV, told host Steve Malzberg why he hasn’t endorsed Trump’s campaign against Democratic presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton. Lee pointed to Trump’s plummeting popularity and his unfounded accusations that the father of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) — Lee’s good friend — helped President John F. Kennedy’s assassin.
“We can get into that if you want,” Lee said. “We can get into the fact that he accused my best friend’s father of conspiring to kill JFK. We can go through the fact that he’s made some statements that some have identified correctly as religiously intolerant. We can get into the fact that he’s wildly unpopular in my state.
“Don’t sit here and tell me, Steve, that I have no reason to be concerned about Donald Trump,” Lee added.
Lee explained there was “no possibility” he’d vote for Clinton, and Trump could certainly still win his vote. But first, Lee said he’d need to believe the businessman would be “a vigorous defender for the U.S. Constitution.”
“I would like some assurances … that he’s not going to be an autocrat, that he’s not going to be an authoritarian, that he’s not somebody who’s going to abuse a document that I have sworn to uphold and defend and protect,” Lee said.
“I’m sorry, Sir, but that is not an unreasonable demand.”
Some other GOP senators also have failed to fall into line behind the party’s standard-bearer. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has criticized Trump’s lack of preparedness, but said this week Trump was “getting closer” to being a credible candidate. Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) withdrew his endorsement of Trump this month after the candidate attacked the Mexican heritage of a judge presiding over lawsuits against Trump University. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who has not endorsed Trump, urged other Republicans to follow Kirk.
Watch Lee’s entire exchange on Newsmax TV above.
Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S.
H/T BuzzFeed
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JOE’S PUB, NEW YORK – On June 27th, Joyce Carol Oates, Ben Arthur and Ted Leo hit the stage for the one-night-only engagement, “Joyce Carol Oates: Answer Songs featuring Ben Arthur & Ted Leo.”
“Right now the mother is about to confront the daughter about the bruises that she’s been told about by the school psychologist…”
The evening began with Joyce Carol Oates reading out loud for the first time a piece from her catalogue. Upon completion, Ben Arthur and Ted Leo, in that order, played the new songs they have written in response.
It’s songwriter Ben Arthur’s contention that all art answers other art. The excerpts below are from “Why Is Your Writing So Violent?” by Joyce Carol Oates. I was inspired to read the piece after the eclectic Tuesday evening at Joe’s Pub. I encourage you to do the same via The New York Times. This was not the piece read at Joe’s Pub.
Check out the recent conversation, “Ted Leo and Ben Arthur discuss Carly Simon, Joyce Carl Oates, and the touring grind.”
Art in reaction to other art, my drawing of @MyHeart playing a personal song inspired by @JoyceCarolOates @JoesPub pic.twitter.com/GflO47DanE
— michael arthur (@inklines) June 28, 2016
My drawing of @tedleo last night @JoesPub . #sketchbook #nyc pic.twitter.com/aH0838eCdD
— michael arthur (@inklines) June 28, 2016
Really enjoyed this conversation on songwriting and the touring grind between @tedleo and @MyHeart for @believermag https://t.co/fumyglK1lL
— Chris McGuire (@84_til_infinity) June 28, 2016
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All futurists, the professionals that forecast, analyze trends and attempt to predict what’s coming owe a colossal debt to Alvin Toffler who died at 87 yesterday. I know I do. He was the father of futurists everywhere. His forecasts from space to technology and business opened up a new thinking about our world that was fresh and unique. He was the interpreter of the future yet to be.
Al was an original thinker that inspired me and everyone he met. His passion and sheer force of intellect was impossible to ignore. He navigated how power, globalization and technology were creating a new world. He sought to interpret that new world. And he did.
His book Future Shock disrupted business, society and popular culture by first forecasting the convergence of knowledge, technology, change and social order. His next book the Third Wave took the world by storm as well. It went deeper into the waves of change that would explain the present and our future. He created a typology of change so we could understand change. Al’s insights influenced the leaders of the day. He was a wellspring; he inspired us all by predicting the impact of technology on our world and enabling us to think about the future in a unique and courageous way.
Toffler was my first mentor. I had the honor to work with him NY City in the 1970’s. As a young social scientist still going to graduate school, I was amazed by the intellectual depth of Al Toffler. He inspired me to pursue being a futurist and my career has been shaped by his contribution to the world found in his books and projects.
He started the Anticipatory Democracy Network which was developed to advise the US Congress on how to build foresight into the democratic process of government. No easy thing. Al’s vision was that “Anticipatory Democracy” is the public and their representatives natural right and process of engagement in shaping their social and political future. The AD Network was a bold and amazing experience that Toffler invited me to work with him on which I did. It was the seminal futures project that altered the direction of my life. I decided then that being a futurist, like Al Toffler was my career objective.
Looking back at Toffler’s public greatness was secondary to his personal graciousness. Though decades older then me at the time when he invited me to work with him, he never made me feel small. Quite the opposite. Al made me feel big. I felt I was part of his forecasting wave that swept over us all. He invited me to a seat at the table. Actually we worked at times out of his apartment. But he made me feel apart of the juggernaut of forecasting that was a course change for business, society and civilization.
Al’s graciousness was second only to his curiosity and common man experience. He had been a welder, labor journalist, magazine editor and finally a world renown author. Though I never heard him refer to himself as a futurist, he was undeniably the first who was. The entire concept, the very paradigm of being a futurist, one who forecasted the future was a unique emerging profession that defied definition.
I being a kid of the sixties, seventies and the various gut wrenching social movements that changed the social and political landscape of the day–from Watergate to the Pentagon Papers to Vietnam, saw Toffler as an interpreter of civilization’s tsunami’s of complex change. But most of all Toffler invited me and others, neophytes into the conversation with open arms. All ideas were welcome.
Though I have had the immense good fortune of working with many thought leaders, business gurus and authors, there is no one that has had more of an impact on my professional world then Al Toffler. He was a visionary whose ideas are relevant even today. His large net that he threw to grapple with change was second to none. He was curious and infected me with this trait.
He was the first to embrace and understand that technology was a social transformative force. That change was cultural. That we as humans were caught between the worlds of an industrial and post-industrial era and that “information overload” was not normal. We were in a state of complex change that Al’s books like Future Shock explained with clarity, honesty and even courage.
Though we lost touch over the years, we would find ourselves on a CNN special together on the future around 2008 where we reconnected. He was warm and engaging when we talked. The show went well and we talked afterward.
I never forgot how grateful I was for knowing Al Toffler. I say when asked that Al Toffler inspired my career direction. His mentorship was appreciated. He will be missed.
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Antivirus programs are designed to protect the user from malware and all kinds of nasty software that they might not be familiar with. However it seems that sometimes these softwares could also be the source of the problem, which is why Google security researcher Tavis Ormandy has recently slammed several Norton and Symantec products in a post on Google’s Project Zero blog.
According to Ormandy, “These vulnerabilities are as bad as it gets. They don’t require any user interaction, they affect the default configuration, and the software runs at the highest privilege levels possible. In certain cases on Windows, vulnerable code is even loaded into the kernel, resulting in remote kernel memory corruption.”
However it should be pointed out that Symantec has since fixed the vulnerabilities pointed out by Google, but Ormandy’s post basically points out that this is something that should not have happened in the first place, especially for a company that supposedly sells users products meant to protect them.
He has also noted that while some of the updates are done automatically, in some cases it doesn’t where it might require an IT administrator’s permission first, which is something that he urges administrators to quickly do. In the meantime for those with some technical knowledge, Ormandy has listed down the various vulnerabilities that were discovered on the Project Zero blog.
Google Security Researcher Slams Antivirus Software For Its Vulnerabilities , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.
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Writing in The New York Times, Kate Zernike documents a charter school disaster being perpetuated on Detroit children and families. It is a story of phony “choice,” not better schools. It is a warning of what can happen to education in the United States if the charter school movement is allowed to grow unchecked and unregulated.
Zernike’s opens with a focus on the experience of one family. Damian and Omar Rivera attended a series of Detroit charter schools as their mother tried to offer them a brighter future. Damian, the older son, initially was enrolled at a charter school across the street from their home. He earned top grades and dreamed of becoming an engineer, until he was accepted into a special program at the University of Michigan where he discovered he knew far less about almost everything than similar students from Detroit public schools. Ana Rivera pulled her son out of the charter and sent him to a Catholic school, where charter school A’s suddenly turned into Catholic School D’s. Damian is now a discouraged learner.
According to Zernike, so many national for-profit charter school chains entered the Detroit “market” that in some poorer communities “it easier to find a charter school than to buy a carton of milk.” Detroit has a bigger percentage of students enrolled in charter schools than any U.S. city except New Orleans, whose public school system collapsed and was abandoned after Hurricane Katrina. The Detroit charter companies compete to attract students and government pay-outs by offering “cash bonuses, laptops, raffle tickets for iPads and bicycles,” but the promise of a better education is illusory.
There are many villains in the Detroit education debacle, but the main ones are a former Michigan governor, the state legislature, and of course, the for-profit charter school companies. The force behind the 1993 state charter school law was Republican Governor John “Free Markets” Engler, who not coincidently was an opponent of teachers’ unions. Engler wanted schools that were publicly financed but independently run. In theory, choice would lead to innovation; at least that was his theory.
Michigan decided to let virtually anybody set up charter school and actually paid school districts a bonus to promote the program. For-profit companies saw the law as their chance to cash in and they rapidly moved into the Michigan school market. Currently for-profit chains operate 80% of the state’s charter schools, a much higher percentage than in any other state. The companies also became major political lobbyists in Michigan with support from some of the state’s most powerful Republican Party donors.
Market dogma produced all kinds of absurdities. In 2011, the state legislature ended caps on the number of charter schools. Michigan currently has over 200,000 fewer students than it did in 2003, but more than 100 new charter schools. Twenty-four of those new charter schools are in Detroit and 18 charter companies with existing schools that were performing poorly were allowed to expand or open new schools.
Because of pressure from lobbyists it became impossible to agree on a system for evaluating charter schools so the legislature decided to come up with a quality control system after the cap was lifted. The law actually eliminated the requirement that the State Department of Education issue annual reports that monitor charter school performance. It also granted for-profit charter companies special tax right-offs.
Zernike quotes Scott Romney, a lawyer and board member of the civic group New Detroit. According to Romney, when Detroit went charter, “The point was to raise all schools. Instead, we’ve had a total and complete collapse of education in this city.”
Let’s make sure Michigan and Detroit are not the future of education in the United States and that these policies can be reversed before more children are deprived of an education.
From July 8-10, educators, parents, and activists will rally in Washington, DC for three days of action in defense of public education. Featured speakers include author Jonathan Kozol, Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis, and Diane Ravitch. On July 8 there will be a People’s March for Public Education and Social Justice. Save Our Schools is organizing a conference for July 9 to be followed by a July 10 Coalition Summit and organizing session. The program for the rally and meetings includes full, equitable funding for all public schools; safe, racially just schools and communities; community leadership in public school policies; professional, diverse educators for all students; child-centered, culturally appropriate curriculum for all, and no high-stakes standardized testing.
Follow Alan Singer on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ReecesPieces8
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