Apr 30
Ever wondered what sailing down the River Styx would be like? Taking a boat into a scary and unknown world, only to be greeted by a terrifying figure signaling your impending fate? Thanks, Disney!
Apr 30
On a typical, bipartisan Friday night in Ohio, Mark Zuckerberg did a totally normal human thing that anyone definitely not awkwardly going about testing the waters for a major political run would: he had dinner with a family, who didn’t know him or that he was coming, at their house.
Apr 30
Trump Has Flip-Flopped. But His Supporters Aren't Upset — Or Haven't Noticed.
Posted in: Today's ChiliPresident Donald Trump spent much of the first 100 days of his presidency reneging on the populist, isolationist policies he often espoused as a candidate. Trump, who pledged during his campaign to stand up to Wall Street and to put “America first” in foreign affairs has instead championed financial deregulation and conducted airstrikes in Syria.
But despite Trump’s flip-flops on economic and foreign policy issues, most of his supporters still feel they’re getting exactly the man they voted for, new HuffPost/YouGov polling shows.
The majority, 63 percent of voters who supported Trump in last year’s election* say his current policies are not very or not at all different from the ideas he espoused as a candidate. Only 30 percent of voters who supported Trump in last year’s election say his policy views are “somewhat different” since he took office — and just 4 percent say they are “very different.”
And although the sample size of Trump voters who say he’s changed is very small, the results suggest that those voters are more likely to prefer his new positions. At a rough estimate, just over a tenth of the voters who supported Trump believe he’s changed for the worse since taking office, with about 14 percent saying they prefer the policies he now holds.
Trump, whose early presidency remains historically unpopular among the public at large, can ill afford to bleed any of his supporters. His approval rating among the general public stands at an average of just above 42 percent, according to HuffPost Pollster’s aggregate, strikingly low for a time period that usually plays out as a presidential “honeymoon period.”
Other metrics also suggest that the intensity of some of Trump’s support has cooled.
In the first weeks of Trump’s presidency, according to the Economist/YouGov tracking poll, around 90 percent of his voters said they approved of his job performance, with two-thirds approving strongly. While his overall approval with that group has remained relatively stable, the percentage who strongly approve has drifted downward, reaching its lowest ebb ― 51 percent ― in late March, following the failed attempt to pass an Obamacare repeal bill. In the last three weeks, between 56 and 61 percent of Trump’s supporters have said they strongly approve of his handling of the presidency.
Trump’s detractors outnumber his supporters and appear stauncher in their opposition than his supporters are in their support. The percentage of Clinton voters who strongly disapprove of Trump hasn’t dipped below three-quarters since his first week in office in the Economist/YouGov tracker. While 69 percent of Clinton voters think Trump the president is notably different from Trump the candidate, just about 3 percent consider the change an improvement.
More broadly, 30 percent of Americans already say there’s almost nothing Trump can do to win their support, according to another recent HuffPost/YouGov poll, three times as many that say there’s nothing he could do to lose their backing.
But the latest survey’s results stand in contrast to the idea, propagated by some in the media almost since the day he was elected, that Trump’s backers are constantly on the verge of deserting him wholesale.
“Donald Trump’s true believers are losing the faith,” Politico reported last week, citing “a belief that Trump the candidate bears little resemblance to Trump the president.” That’s just not happening, according to the polling.
Regardless of his supporters’ views, Trump has notably reversed himself on several issues.
Trump voters don’t like some of his new policies. They prefer, by a 33-percentage point margin, his campaign statement that China is a currency manipulator over his more recent repudiation of it. By 8 points, they agree with his previous stance that the Export-Import bank is “unnecessary,” rather than “a very good thing;” by 11 points, they say that Janet Yellen, whom Trump blasted during the campaign but recently praised, is doing a bad job heading the Federal Reserve.
But while the president’s populist rhetoric during the campaign may have resonated strongly with some voters, few hold especially strong views on the specifics of, say, the efficacy of the Export-Import Bank.
Most Americans aren’t knowledgeable on every issue. Instead, they tend to follow partisan cues ― assuming, reasonably, that they’re likely to agree with the politicians they generally support on other issues. Even before Trump became the GOP’s official nominee, for instance, Republicans warmed to liberal policies when his name was attached.
When told that Trump himself has taken both views at varying times, his supporters are often left largely uncertain. Forty-five percent of Trump voters say they’re not sure how they feel about China’s status as a currency manipulator, and nearly 60 percent have no opinion on the other two questions.
On international relations, Trump voters are more likely to have an opinion ― and they largely favor his reversals. By 21 points, they favor his decision that NATO is now “no longer obsolete.” And they favor military action in Syria, which Trump opposed in 2013, by a whopping 54-point margin.
That few Trump voters see his reversals across all of these policies as comprising a of pronounced shift is perhaps unsurprising: for him to have truly abandoned his earlier ideology would have required him to hold firm political positions to begin with.
But if Trump’s presidency frequently stands in opposition to his candidacy, it’s no more inconsistent than his candidacy itself. During both the Republican primary and the general election, he continually contradicted himself, either presenting the shifts as evidence of his “flexibility” or flat-out denying that he’d ever changed his mind. His supporters shrugged it off.
Throughout 2016, Trump’s one constant refrain was a vague promise, rather than a policy ― to Make America Great Again ― but it rang true for Americans who overwhelmingly believed that “people like them” were seeing their future evaporate.
In another recent HuffPost/YouGov survey, 86 percent of Trump voters said they believed that, when the president makes decisions, he was working for the interests of the people like them ― a level of consideration that just 36 percent ascribed to Republicans in Congress, and fewer than a third to their own representatives. As long as Trump voters’ faith in his intentions remains, it may matter less to them what his decisions actually are.
Use the widget below to further explore the results of the HuffPost/YouGov survey, using the menu at the top to select survey questions and the buttons at the bottom to filter the data by subgroups:
The HuffPost/YouGov poll consisted of 1,000 completed interviews conducted April 13-14 among U.S. adults, using a sample selected from YouGov’s opt-in online panel to match the demographics and other characteristics of the adult U.S. population.
The Huffington Post has teamed up with YouGov to conduct daily opinion polls.You can learn more about this project and take part in YouGov’s nationally representative opinion polling. Data from all HuffPost/YouGov polls can be found here. More details on the polls’ methodology are available here.
Most surveys report a margin of error that represents some, but not all, potential survey errors. YouGov’s reports include a model-based margin of error, which rests on a specific set of statistical assumptions about the selected sample, rather than the standard methodology for random probability sampling. If these assumptions are wrong, the model-based margin of error may also be inaccurate. Click here for a more detailed explanation of the model-based margin of error.
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Apr 30
Chicago Was On The Verge Of Police Reform. Then Trump Picked Jeff Sessions To Run The DOJ.
Posted in: Today's ChiliCHICAGO ― In the final months of the Obama administration, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division scrambled to complete its biggest-ever investigation of a city police department: a 13-month probe of Chicago’s 12,000-strong police force that wrapped up just a week before President Donald Trump’s inauguration.
For more than a year, the division’s lawyers reviewed thousands of Chicago Police Department documents, visited all 22 police districts, went on 60 ride-alongs, reviewed 170 police shooting files, examined over 425 incidents of less-lethal force, interviewed 340 department members and talked to about 1,000 Chicago residents.
Their final report, issued Jan. 13, recognized the tough job officers had in Chicago as they dealt with spiking gun violence, and praised the “diligent efforts and brave actions of countless” officers. But a “breach in trust” eroded Chicago’s ability to prevent crime, because officers were able to escape accountability when they broke the law, the report found. Because “trust and effectiveness in combating violent crime are inextricably intertwined,” the report found “broad, fundamental reform” was needed in Chicago.
Without a formal legal agreement to reform — known as a consent decree — and independent monitoring, the report concluded, reform efforts in Chicago were “not likely to be successful.”
Jeff Sessions, Trump’s attorney general, disagrees. In recent weeks, Sessions has expressed deep skepticism about the role of the federal government in fixing broken police departments, leaving serious doubts about the ultimate outcome of the Justice Department’s work in Chicago.
Sessions wants the Justice Department to serve as the “leading advocate for law enforcement in America.” While admitting he hadn’t read the full Chicago report, he called it “anecdotal” and “not so scientifically based.” Earlier this month in Baltimore, a Justice Department lawyer said Sessions had “grave concerns” about an agreement previously reached between that city and the Obama administration. A federal judge signed off on the deal over Sessions’ objections.
In an interview with a conservative radio host this month, Sessions seemed to suggest that Justice Department investigations and consent decrees were resulting in “big crime increases.” In an op-ed for USA Today last week, Sessions wrote that consent decrees could amount to “harmful federal intrusion” that could “cost more lives by handcuffing the police instead of the criminals.” There’s too much focus on “a small number of police who are bad actors,” Sessions wrote, and “too many people believe the solution is to impose consent decrees that discourage the proactive policing that keeps our cities safe.”
Chicago has a serious violent crime problem. Last year was the deadliest in the city in two decades, with 762 homicides. But supporters of police reform like Jonathan Smith, a former official in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, said that Sessions was “simply wrong” to suggest that crime goes up as a result of reform (or, in Chicago’s case, an investigation). DOJ investigations can increase community confidence in police departments and make people safer, Smith argued.
“In communities like Baltimore and Chicago where certain neighborhoods are experiencing gun violence, the problems long predate Justice Department involvement,” said Smith. “The issues in those communities are linked to weakened gun laws that create easy access to firearms, lack of opportunity for jobs and housing and a history of police misconduct that creates mistrust between police and the communities they serve. Lack of police accountability is often a significant contributing factor in a spike in crime because of community mistrust.”
Lorie Fridell, a criminologist and police bias expert from whom the Chicago’s Police Accountability Task Force solicited information for its report released last year, said DOJ investigations not only help to usher in badly need reforms to the specific departments probed, but other departments also rely on the reports to determine if their own departments are meeting constitutional standards.
“I think it’s very unfortunate the DOJ is no longer going to prioritize police reform,” Fridell said. ”The future of police reform is therefore going to have to come from the ground up. It’s going to be important for concerned individuals to demand high-quality policing.”
The future of police reform is … going to have to come from the ground up.”
Criminologist Lorie Fridell
Ian Prior, a Justice Department spokesman, said it should be “eminently clear” that the Justice Department “will never negotiate or sign a consent decree that could reduce the lawful powers of the police department and result in a less safe city.” Sarah Isgur Flores, the top spokeswoman for the Justice Department, declined to point to any specific sections of consent decrees Sessions or the department took issue with, though she said there were “several areas of concern” with the Baltimore agreement, which she alleged was “thrown together in such a hurried fashion.” She said Trump’s administration “agrees with the need to rebuild public confidence in law enforcement” but had serious worries “where consent decrees may reduce the lawful powers of the police department.”
Sessions appears to believe civil rights and constitutional policing were somehow adversarial to effective crime fighting, said Vanita Gupta, who headed the Civil Rights Division in the final years of the Obama administration. But “there’s no evidence that backs up what he’s saying,” she argued. Gupta rejected the new administration’s suggestion that the Baltimore agreement was tossed together at the last minute, calling it “an insult to the city and to the Baltimore Police Department,” and suggested they need take a closer look at what DOJ investigators found in Chicago.
“If the attorney general and his staff actually read the report, they would see reflected in that report the perspective of hundreds of Chicago police officers themselves, who talked to us about the realities of policing in the Chicago Police Department,” said Gupta. “That report reflects in many ways a very significant set of voices from law enforcement itself.”
Sessions dismissing the Justice Department’s reports without reading them also frustrates Christy Lopez, a former top Civil Rights Division official. It’s “ignorant” to describe the reports as anecdotal, Lopez said. The Chicago investigation, for example, revealed that just 1.4 percent of all misconduct complaints were sustained, or upheld as valid, over a period of more than five years, and that white Chicagoans were much more likely to have their complaints sustained than black or Latino residents.
“That’s not anecdotal,” says Lopez. Lopez also said that dismissing the individual stories highlighted in the DOJ reports as anecdotal is “deliberately blind” to what investigators were trying to do.
“It devalues people when you minimize the importance of their stories,” Lopez said. “You can call them anecdotes, but, for example in the Ferguson case ― when we have an officer writing down in his own report that after he went out and arrested a woman who’d called in on a domestic violence call, and he arrested her for an occupancy permit violation, and she says ‘I’ll never call the police again, even if I’m being killed’ ― that many be an anecdote, but that’s an important story to tell.”
It devalues people when you minimize the importance of their stories.”
Christy Lopez
Chicago residents for years have demanded changes like a citizen-led review board for police misconduct cases or improved mental health and crisis training. Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson have both expressed willingness to enact reform, with or without oversight from the courts or the DOJ. Failure to get traction for reforms — even as they face an obstinate police union — could spell political trouble for both of them.
In the absence of federal action, advocates “are looking at every option ― including litigation, political pressure and legislation” to bring about reform, said Karen Sheley, director of the ACLU Illinois’ police practices project. The city has “hit a crisis point,” she added. “Everyone in Chicago should be asking their elected officials to support reform, including of the police union contracts, which are being negotiated now.”
A lack of police reform has already come at a high cost to Chicago taxpayers. Since 2004, the city has forked over about $662 million for police misconduct in the form of multimillion-dollar settlements, as well as legal fees and other penalties. Settlements totaling more than $100,000 require city council approval ― and they always get it. Police who break the rules and later cost the city money are rarely punished, allowing a core of officers especially prone to violating rules to propel the staggering payout costs.
In his op-ed last week criticizing police reform, Sessions pointed to violent crime spikes in Chicago and Baltimore as reasons not to implement reform, even though neither city has implemented consent decrees.
In an email to HuffPost, a Justice Department representative provided links to stories about crime spikes in New Orleans, Cleveland and Albuquerque, New Mexico, all cities that came under federal scrutiny. One story highlighted comments from Louisiana’s attorney general, who argued that the Justice Department consent decree has resulted in a spike in crime in New Orleans.
“It’s not fair to say that the city of New Orleans is less safe because of consent decrees,” New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, a Democrat, told HuffPost after a meeting with Sessions this week.
Nobody was surprised by the findings. The issues in Chicago are longstanding and deep-rooted.”
Vanita Gupta
Federal consent decrees on policing do have a mixed record, but there are plenty of success stories. The consent decree monitor in Seattle, for example, recently said the police department had made a dramatic turnaround, and the overall crime rate in Newark, New Jersey, is lower than it’s been in 50 years.
Peter Harvey, the consent decree monitor in Newark, said it’s simply not true that federal police reform efforts lead to violent crime spikes, and that the community is excited by the prospect of modern policing being implemented in Newark.
“Remember, it’s the community that helps you police. Very few cities have enough cops to patrol a city 24-7 effectively, 12 months a year. You need the community to help you,” said Harvey. “The community will help you if you ask the community to engage with you, but what the community will not do is watch you place community residents in chokeholds where they die, and then turn around and say, ‘Well, we want to be your friend.’ Those are inconsistent messages.”
Harvey said the overwhelming majority of cities he knew of found a consent decree to be a positive development, because it allowed them to bring about changes they may have wanted for years but could not implement.
“In virtually every city that has had a consent decree, shootings have gone down, killings have gone down, judgments against the city have been reduced, and morale in the police department has been raised and morale in the community has been raised,” Harvey said. “It’s not going to negatively impact the crime rate, because you’re not inviting the police not to patrol, you’re not inviting the police not to enforce the law, you’re inviting the police to follow constitutional mandates.”
There’s a fear, a tremendous fear I’ve heard from residents, who wonder, ‘Where do we turn?'”
Father Michael Pfleger of Chicago
The DOJ’s change of agenda is worrying, said Father Michael Pfleger, the outspoken pastor of Chicago’s St. Sabina Church on the South Side of Chicago.
“The Justice Department, sort of being the big brother watching, the enforcer, has been a good thing across the country,” said Pfleger, who has organized his congregation to regularly protest violence and police brutality. “Now Sessions has certainly sent a message that police have no one standing over them ensuring they’re acting justify and fairly. … That’s not what we need right now. Yes, we need strong police, but not an imposing force.”
“There’s a fear, a tremendous fear I’ve heard from residents, who wonder, ‘Where do we turn? If the police are wrong, then where do we turn?’” he said.
Leaving the systemic problems found in Chicago unfixed “would be a serious abdication of the Justice Department’s responsibility,” Gupta said, noting that investigating patterns and practices of unconstitutional policing was a mandate given to the Justice Department by Congress.
“Nobody was surprised by the findings,” Gupta added. “The issues in Chicago are longstanding and deep-rooted. To think that there could be a crime-fighting strategy that doesn’t address police legitimacy and the severe breakdown in police-resident trust in certain neighborhoods in Chicago to me actually seems quite dangerous.”
She finds it telling that Sessions and the DOJ have not identified any specific provisions of consent decrees that raise concerns.
“What is it specifically that is causing alarm?” she asked. “Is it really the program at large that this Justice Department is seeking to diminish?”
Ryan J. Reilly reported from Washington. Kim Bellware reported from Chicago.
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Apr 30
Califonia’s Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) will soon review the new set of proposed regulations that could change how testing works in the state. If the proposals are approved, we might see some truly unmanned autonomous vehicles with no steering…
Apr 30
Hackers Leak New Episodes of Orange Is the New Black and Claim More Leaks to Come
Posted in: Today's Chili
Netflix bingers received a weekend surprise when they woke up this morning to find the first ten episodes of the new season of Orange Is the New Black have allegedly been leaked to torrent networks. A hacker group has claimed responsibility and they say it only occurred because Netflix refused to pay a ransom. The…
Apr 30
Tuker Murray is rapidly becoming an internet legend for his cool under pressure.
The 24-year-old assistant manager at a Jimmy John’s restaurant in Kansas, City, Missouri, is the clear star of surveillance footage from Wednesday, when the place was robbed.
Video shows a man police later identified as Terry Rayford walking up to the counter and ordering food before pulling out a gun and demanding cash, going so far as to shove the gun in Murray’s face.
None of that really appeared to impress Murray, though. The video shows him coolly staring down Rayford while slowly pulling off his work gloves and casually opening the register, as if he’s more fed-up than scared.
In fact, he told Buzzfeed News that he wasn’t afraid at all, because he felt like the robber wasn’t actually going to shoot him.
“I was thinking, fuck this guy, dude,” Murray said. “Because he did it like a bitch.”
Fox 4KC reports that the suspect, Rayford, was was already on parole for a different armed robbery and allegedly admitted to committing other robberies to support a drug habit.
But Murray found the idea that Rayford was an experienced criminal hard to believe.
“I was actually surprised when the detective told me that he had done like 12 other robberies and been to jail for it before, ‘cause it was amateur hour,” Murray told TMZ.
— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
Apr 30
Turkey may have just stepped up its efforts to quash online free speech. The country has blocked Wikipedia for supposedly running a “smear campaign” by allowing articles claiming that the Turkish government was coordinating with militant groups. The…
Apr 30
The marketing for Sleight includes a quote calling the film “Chronicle meets Iron Man.” Watching it, that comparison kind of makes sense, but it also sets up an unrealistic expectation versus what Sleight actually is.
Apr 29
In NYC, Birthplace Of Climate March, A Reminder Of Who Suffers Most From Pollution
Posted in: Today's ChiliQUEENS, N.Y. ― Jerome Nathaniel, 27, looks small standing in front of Ravenswood Generating Station, its four smokestacks looming like colossal candy canes over the power plant’s gated bramble of pipes and machinery. But his protest chant, soundtracked by a big speaker blasting Public Enemy’s anthem “Fight The Power,” rings loud.
“This is what democracy looks like,” he shouted as protesters, marching in New York City’s only official climate march on Saturday afternoon, streamed past the power plant.
The People’s Climate March began in 2014 as a massive protest in Manhattan. But this year, with environmental regulations under assault from a new president who dismissed climate change as a hoax, organizers encouraged as many people as possible to join thousands for a mass march in Washington, D.C.
Knowing not everyone could make the trip, Nathaniel, a community organizer in Queens for nonprofit food pantry City Harvest, assembled a sister march through New York City’s biggest and most diverse borough. The march began outside a public housing development in Queens’ Woodside neighborhood and snaked through the borough’s otherwise quiet residential streets, stopping off at four different public housing projects.
“This is bigger than one block, two blocks, one NYCHA development or four NYCHA developments,” Nathaniel told HuffPost, using the acronym for the New York City Housing Authority.
The last stop, the Jacob A. Riis Neighborhood Settlement, served as a microcosmic example of the larger environmental problem about which Nathaniel hoped to raise awareness: that low-income people and communities of color often suffer the worst effects of the greenhouse gas pollution warming the planet and rapidly changing the climate. The housing project sits sandwiched between the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge, where a steady stream of vehicles spew exhaust all day, and the one of the dirtiest power plants in New York State.
Ravenswood produces about 2.3 million metric tons of emissions each year, according to figures the Queens Tribune cited. That’s equivalent to about 500,000 cars. Unlike many plants that run on cleaner-burning natural gas alone, the power station burns 3,264,000 gallons of fuel oil per year. Under a law passed in 2015, the plant has until 2020 to switch over to a cleaner fuel. But lawmakers have recently stepped up efforts to probe emissions from the plant, citing health problems for people who live nearby.
“For decades, power plants in our communities here in western Queens have strongly contributed to increased asthma rates and increases in hospitalizations and ER visits that exceed the average in Queens,” said Costa Constantinides, a Democrat who represents the area on the city council, in December. “Our city has made great progress on ending the use of dirty fuel oil in buildings. Now more than ever, these plants must become better neighbors and stop the practice.”
The march wasn’t locals only. Protesters came from around the city and surrounding suburbs. Tina Nannaroni, who lives in the Forest Hills area of Queens, said she got up at 5 a.m. to take a bus to Washington, D.C., only to learn her ride had been mysteriously canceled.
“In 1965, they sabotaged the anti-Vietnam marches by canceling the buses,” she said. “I don’t know if that’s what happened, or if it’s just incompetence.”
Evelyn Fenick and Stephen Judd took the train in from Connecticut to march with matching signs that read “Just Cuz The Climate Killed The T. Rex Doesn’t Mean Rex T. Gets To Kill The Climate,” a reference to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who previously served as chief executive of Exxon Mobil Corp.
“It blew up,” Nathaniel said. “This is urgent, it’s important for a lot of people, you can no longer work in silos. It’s all community, it’s all climate justice.”
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