Hasta La Gadget!

Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign fired back Wednesday after a major Associated Press report raised serious ethical questions over ties between the State Department under Clinton and her family’s charitable organization, with Clinton’s team arguing that the AP data was woefully out of context.

The AP found that of the 154 meetings Clinton held with private officials (i.e., those not in the domestic or foreign governments), 85 of those were with people who “gave money — either personally or through companies or groups — to the Clinton Foundation.”

The finding set off a round of criticism aimed at Clinton for blurring ethical lines and granting access to friends and high bidders. But in the hours that followed, questions began to mount about the presentation of the AP story.

The AP got called out for a misleading (and widely shared) tweet accompanying the report that made it appear that half of all Clinton’s meetings ― not just those with private officials ― had taken place with foundation donors. Vox’s Matthew Yglesias challenged the broader thrust of the AP’s story even further, arguing that the AP framed its findings as more scandalous than they warranted. Though Yglesias acknowledged that potential links between Clinton’s State Department and the candidate deserved scrutiny, he argued that donors who apparently received preferential access actually deserved it and were pushing unobjectionable, noble causes.

The Clinton campaign quickly circulated the Vox article, in addition to noting that some of the relationships that the AP highlighted ― including one with Muhammad Yunus, a Nobel Prize-winning Bangladeshi economist ― existed before Clinton’s tenure at state.

Their frustrations with the AP story didn’t end there, however.

Aides to the Democratic nominee say that the AP has not given them the actual list of the 85 foundation donors who the outlet says got access to Clinton while she was at State, making it hard for them to rebut charges that she engaged in quid-pro-quos. But on Wednesday, they began filling in the holes.

“We have applied the AP’s criteria on our own, cross-referencing publicly available donor info with publicly available schedules of her meetings,” the campaign’s press secretary, Brian Fallon, told The Huffington Post.

Among the names of people they believe the AP is referencing are the late Nobel Prize winner and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, former NBA star Dikembe Mutombo and actor Ben Affleck. The latter two have parlayed their fame into global philanthropy campaigns and humanitarian efforts.

The Associated Press declined on Wednesday to disclose the list of 85 people who it reportedly identified as having donated as much as $156 million to the foundation.

“We are still reporting on them ― cross-referencing information and so on,” AP Director of Media Relations Paul Colford told HuffPost, adding that the news organization is “not done with the names yet.”

That is well within their rights, considering how hard the outlet worked to get the data. Along with publicly available information, the news wire based Tuesday’s report on new details about Clinton’s State Department schedule that it obtained after suing the department last year. So far, the AP has received Clinton’s more detailed schedules for half of her four-year tenure.

The AP broadly defended its work Wednesday in a statement published on its website. The news organization, Colford wrote, “has been transparent in how it has reported this story.”

Colford added that the AP hopes to obtain the remaining two years of Clinton’s detailed schedules at the State Department before Election Day.

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In Tokushima Prefecture (south of Japan), Police forces have confirmed that a road accident that killed a woman was Japan’s first Pokemon-Go related fatality. Another woman was hit during the incident and was badly injured. The two victims are 60 and 72-year-old and the suspect is a 39-year-old man who was playing the game while driving.

Japan Times which was the first to publish the story, pointed out that the Japanese government feared that something like this could happen, and had issued a warning over Twitter and LINE (a popular chat app) warning about the potential danger of being distracted while playing the game. In Canada, local authorities have shown a police video of a driver playing the game. Taiwan has also seen a spike in smartphone use traffic violations.

The game itself contains a warning to remind players not to use it when their full attention is required elsewhere, but not everyone takes common-sense actions, including not trespassing private properties.

While the popularity of the Pokemon Go game has started to decline, its massive usage has caught authorities worldwide off guard. In Thailand, the Police has set up a dedicated Pokemon Go squad, while in the Philippines, students have been warned of arrest if they venture out to play during weather emergencies (Typhoons).

The Pokemon Go game has an outdoor component, where players have to go to physical locations to virtually see and catch virtual monsters. Because of this, there is an enormous advertising potential for businesses. For example, the sales for this ice cream shop have been revived (temporarily?) and some shopping malls have created dedicated areas for Pokemon Go.

Road Accident Is First Pokemon-Go Related Death in Japan , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

This news has us on the floor. 

Jennifer Lopez and her boyfriend/choreographer/dancer, Casper Smart, have broken up again, according to People. TMZ also confirmed the news. 

“It wasn’t anything dramatic and they were on good terms — it just came to a natural end,” a source told People, adding that the couple have not been together for a few weeks.

The 47-year-old and 29-year-old were first linked together in 2011, only a short time after Lopez divorced Marc Anthony. Lopez and Smart split in 2014, only to reconcile in 2015. 

The split seems abrupt, as it was just a few days ago the couple posed with Anthony and his new wife at Lopez’s Las Vegas show.

Smart also posted a sweet photo on Instagram for the singer’s birthday in July, writing: “HAPPY BIRTHDAY to the light of my life. My supporter, rock, partner in crime and love.” 

Based on their history, we feel like these two are bound to get back together within the next few months. 

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It’s important that we’re giving back to communities in need. And my take is that it’s most important for people to put food on the table, and then a roof over that table. To help facilitate this, I supported the DC Central Kitchen. One way I did that was to help ’em get some new ovens that we’re just delivered.

Since the founding of DC Central Kitchen in 1989, they’ve prepared 27 million meals for their low-income and at-risk neighbors. That’s a lot of meals, and the real deal, but they don’t want you to mistake them for a soup kitchen. (Here’s stories from some of the folks who have gone through DC Central Kitchen’s programs…)

DC Central Kitchen (DCCK) was founded by a young nightclub manager, Robert Egger. Egger was frustrated with the programs that fed DC residents who were homeless, and wanted to rearrange DC’s existing resources in ways that would ultimately liberate hungry and homeless individuals from poverty.

Operations began with the leftover food from George H.W. Bush’s inauguration, a refrigerated van, and deliveries to area shelters. A few months later, DCCK secured its own kitchen space and launched a Culinary Job Training program for residents of those shelters. This is about giving resources and access to more opportunities for people who could use it.

The org continued to grow, and helped start more than 60 like-minded community kitchens nationwide through the 1990s. In 2001, Egger launched The Campus Kitchens Project, a project to replicate DCCK’s core activities at college and high schools across the country. In this last academic year alone, they’ve empowered 23,000 student volunteers to implement their model on 53 high school and college campuses across the country.

Every single day, despite not having any AC, DC Central Kitchen provides 5,000 meals, distributed at little or no cost to 82 nearby homeless shelters, transitional homes, and nonprofit organizations, saving them money and feeding the community.

Mentioned earlier, the Culinary Job Training program is still running, and is for unemployed folks who want to replace homelessness, addiction, and incarceration with new careers and a different way of life. These are the folks who are making sure that DCCK’s recipes are cooked and the ovens are filled with food.

DC Central Kitchen’s School Food Program serves 6,800 healthy, locally-sourced, scratch-cooked meals to 3,600 low-income DC schoolchildren every day, helping to ensure that school meals are nutritious, affordable, and sustainable. And their Healthy Corners program delivers fresh produce and healthy snacks to 67 corner stores in DC’s ‘food deserts,’ where access to nutritious food options is limited. Because of these initiatives, more than half of their income is through social enterprise, but they’ve still got a pretty big monthly budget…

This is a big deal, and if you’re able, please join me in giving back.

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The Washington Post — and much of the establishment — wants you to buy a lifetime subscription to the politics of fear.

Dana Milbank, a columnist for the paper, popped up at Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein’s news conference that focused on climate change. After Stein noted that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have gotten billions in free media, he chimed in: “Dana Milbank with the Washington Post segment of the corporate media. I have a conundrum I want to present to you. I could write about today and others could report here about what an important issue climate change is. And we would publish it or broadcast it. The fact is very few people will read it. They will go read or view stories about Trump’s staff machinations or Clinton’s e-mails. I’m not sure the issue is necessarily a corporate media but what people are demanding. Why is that? What is the way around that if there is one?”

Milbank is pretending to be so concerned about what it is people want. What came to mind for me was John Milton’s aphorism: “They who have put out the people’s eyes reproach them of their blindness.”

Stein was more diplomatic: “Right now so many people are tuned out [of] the election and out of the political system in general because they are accustomed to being ignored by that system. Was Bernie Sanders tuned out? I don’t think so. I think he had more attention from the American public than just about anyone at least from my point of view. It looks to me like he was the guy saying that the emperor had no clothes and everyone was agreeing with him. Even Trump supporters were agreeing with him. Polls showed that the majority of Trump supporters are not motivated by supporting Trump. They are motivated by not liking Hillary Clinton. Let’s give them another choice besides Donald Trump as an alternative to Hillary Clinton.”

Having been deftly rebuffed, Milbank didn’t note his own question in his column in the Post.

Rather, he used mine. I actually had some rather hard questions in mind for Stein. I confess: I refrained. I sensed Milbank — who was sitting next to me — would use them to try to lynch Stein. It’s hard to have an open conversation with a wolf at the door.

So I asked her relatively easy questions. He still used that to go after Stein.

The question I asked Stein was about her electoral hurdles, including the phony Commission on Presidential Debates and “isn’t part of the issue that some people who agree with you are effectively driving down your numbers? Noam Chomsky is basically telling people: Climate change — the very issue you talked about — Trump is a climate denier, you’ve got to vote for Clinton in so-called swing states. How do you get past that hurdle when people who presumably agree with you on the issues are effectively driving down your numbers?”

Milbank transformed my question into Chomsky “has said that the only ‘rational choice’ for swing-state voters is to support Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump. ‘How do you get past that hurdle?’ Sam Husseini from VotePact, a group that supports third parties, asked Stein from the audience.”

First off, I identified myself as with VotePact.org, but Milbank drops the .org because he doesn’t want people to check out the website. And of course he doesn’t link to it. I mean, in this day and age — how rude. After all, I did his work for him.

Second, VotePact.org does not “support third parties” per se. It can tersely be described as encouraging disenchanted Democrats and disenchanted Republicans to pair up and vote for the independent candidates the prefer. If people actually wanted Clinton or Trump, there would be nothing to the idea. But, as it is, that’s not an idea the esteemed Mr Milbank wants to instill in the minds of readers.

And this shows Milbank’s brazen hypocrisy since he was pretending with his question to be so concerned about giving the people what they want. I actually talked to him after the news conference, telling him that no poll is asking the U.S. public who they want to be president. The major polls all ask some variation of the same “if the election were held today, who would you vote for” question. But that question just replicates the bind the public faces in the voting booth, compelling people to vote for their “lesser evil”. They are not public opinion polls. But they are reported on endlessly as if they are, thereby molding public opinion to discount alternatives to Clinton and Trump and buy into the the politics of fear. I actually gave Milbank a copy of a news release making this case. He feigned concern about why it would be that no pollster was asking the public what they want.

I say feigned in part because Milbank would later tweet a pic of the news conference that purported to show a low level of interest in the news conference, ignoring the dozen or so cameras that were there and the people who filled up the room by the time Stein got to the event. In his own column he sites what appears to be the lowest lowball of averages he could find regarding Stein’s standing in the skewed polls. Some polls don’t even list Stein. And of course, he ignores the argument I made to him about the skewed question all these polls are depending upon.

Milbank is a hatchet man and did a couple of similar jobs on Bernie Sanders, writing a piece “Democrats would be insane to nominate Bernie Sanders” early this year. This sums up the logic of the establishment in how it eviscerates choice: You can’t vote for moderate change in the primary, because you’ll lose in the general and you can’t vote for change in the general because you’ll end up with worse.

Milbank ends his column with the words: “If opposing Trump is subscribing to the politics of fear, then put me down for a lifetime subscription.”

Indeed. That’s what the emissaries of the establishment want: Just a lifetime of servitude. How troublesome is that, really? It’s just your life and your political freedom. Why shouldn’t you fork that over without troubling your pretty little head about possible ways out?

All this is exactly what VotePact.org is designed to over come. It’s what Milbank — as well unfortunately as Chomsky and even Stein and Nader — have all ignored: Is there an actual solution to the “spoiler” problem?

I have in fact put forward two solutions, which are related. One relates to what pollsters should do, the other relates to what voters could do.

Pollsters should ask people who they want to be president, not “who would you vote for if the election were held today” — which is a tactical, false hypothetical question that simply replicates the constraints of the voting booth. This is especially insidious given how the polls are used to exclude candidates from the debate stage. See my “How Presidential “Non-Opinion” Polls Drive Down Third Party Numbers and Facilitate Debate Exclusion.”

The way that voters can overcome this problem is by pairing up. People who are mainly voting for Trump because they don’t want Clinton should pair up with people who are voting for Clinton because they don’t want Trump. They could instead vote their actual preferences, be that for Jill Stein of the Green Party, Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party or any other independent candidate. The unfortunate reality is that this possibility has not only been ignored by the major media and establishment pollsters, but also by alleged political renegades and by independent candidates ostensibly searching for a path to victory.

That’s the tough question for Stein I didn’t ask: What’s your strategy? Are you actually trying to win? Stein is almost there when she notes: “Polls showed that the majority of Trump supporters are not motivated by supporting Trump. They are motivated by not liking Hillary Clinton. Let’s give them another choice besides Donald Trump as an alternative to Hillary Clinton.” And she notes the the tens of millions of people who are heavily indebted could constitute an electoral majority. But that’s not a strategy. VotePact.org takes those observations and points to a strategy: Get endorsements in pairs, with a would-be Clinton voter and would-be Trump voter who know and trust each other teaming up, overcoming their fear and voting for the third parties of their choice.

It seems increasingly clear: If you don’t do this, you likely get exactly what Milbank unwittingly admits to: A lifetime subscription of the politics of fear.

And that is something anyone with a conscience should not buy — and what we all should be truly afraid of.

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