ET Williams

The Doctor of Common Sense

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Angela Merkel Tanks In Popularity

END FOR MERKEL? Angela would be BEATEN by Martin Schulz if German election was held TODAY

Angela Merkel looks like Schultz if you ask me

Social Democrats (SPD) leader and Brexit opponent Mr Schulz, 61, who resigned from his EU presidency last month after earning more than £1million from the taxpayer in five years, is on target to win in the forthcoming elections, according to a new poll.

And 62-year-old Mrs Merkel’s Christian Democratic party (CDU), which has just ratified a law banning refugee families as well as a raft of immigration laws, will be more than decimated by the far-right.

Mr Schulz leads the SPD, which holds a minority share in Mrs Merkel’s ‘grand coalition’.

The SPD has been trailing the conservatives for years in opinion polls and last won an election under Gerhard Schroeder in 2002.

A poll commissioned by National newspaper Bild shows that Mrs Merkel is fast losing support after announcing her candidacy for the CDU in December.

The poll by INSA for Bild newspaper put the SPD on 31 per cent, and the conservatives on 30 per cent.

The populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) was projected third with 12 per cent, followed by the hard-left Die Linke on 10 per cent.

Mrs Merkel’s approval ratings have collapsed after The Federal Ministry of Finance revealed taxpayers will be spending £37billion (€43billion) for 2016 and 2017 migrant budget to “meet the challenges of the nation-state” last week.

Bundestag politicians have instigated an ‘Asylum Procedures Acceleration Act’ in a bid to speed up the process of deportation.

The German parliament has banned family reunion for two years, meaning battles to bring relatives, as currently happens in Britain, will no longer take place.

Now, despite swift action and even a call to ban the burka, Mrs Merkel is in a race against time to turn around public opinion.

Large scale sex attacks, terror sprees and horrific crimes, which have broken out all over Germany, have led to protests on the streets.

Another pollster Emnid’s also believes Mrs Merkel is on the way out.

The firm’s Torsten Schneider-Haase told Bild: “Martin Schulz is managing above all to win back former SPD voters and to appeal to them emotionally.

“Such a strong shift in party preferences within a week is a one-off.”

In October, Mrs Merkel’s own party called for her to form a new alliance with the surging AfD which was only founded in April 2013.

Politicians from the CDU fear they could lose their grip on control of the country and one prominent member has now called on an alliance between the parties.

During the regional elections, the AfD came second taking 24.3 per cent of the vote.

Currently the CDU is an alliance with the SPD and Greens.

At the time CDU MEP Hermann Winkler has called for a coalition between the AfD and his party.

Mr Winkler said if they joined forces at both national and the federal level there could be co-operation with the right-wing populists which would effectively secure Mrs Merkel’s control of the state.

He said: “If there is a conservative majority together with the AfD, we should form a coalition with them.”

http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/763832/Angela-Merkel-Germany-polls-Martin-Schulz-European-Migrant-Crisis

 

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Brazil Goes Right Wing Under Trump Tectonics

Brazil swings to the right, setting the stage for a Trump-like leader

The election heard ’round the world. Trump has changed the world.

 

BRASILIA — In a big, multiethnic country built by immigrants and slaves, a septuagenarian white male leader is riding a right-wing backlash after an era of leftist rule. His much-younger spouse is a former model. His five-letter last name starts with a “T” — but it’s Temer, not Trump.

Brazilian President Michel Temer took office five months ago after the impeachment and political humiliation of the country’s first female political leader, Dilma Rousseff, ousting her left-wing Workers’ Party after 14 years in power. Temer named an all-male cabinet and quickly embraced a right-leaning, regulation-slashing agenda.

Temer, 76, is not a Brazilian version of Trump. He does not have a populist touch or a showman’s flair. He is a career politician and government insider at a time when both things are deeply unpopular in Brazil.

And yet, like the United States, Brazil is a big country whose political center has swung abruptly to the right. The next presidential election is not until 2018, but in municipal-level contests held in October, Rousseff’s once-dominant Workers’ Party was trounced, losing 60 percent of the city government seats it controlled. Temer’s centrist Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB) and the more conservative Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB) swept the country’s most important districts.

The results were the clearest signal yet of a “shift in mentality” in the country, according to political analyst Lucas de Aragão of the Brasilia-based consulting firm Arko.

“It’s an anti-status-quo sentiment, just like Brexit and Trump,” Aragão said, “but I don’t think it’s about ideology as much as a lack of results.”

Rousseff was impeached on charges of violating budget-making rules, not for personal corruption. But she and the Workers’ Party have shouldered most of the blame for Brazil’s worst economic crisis since the 1930s and the biggest corruption scandal in the country’s history.

Temer, who is married to a 33-year-old former model, is a constitutional law expert who speaks carefully and sends out dull, dutiful tweets. His patrician bearing may be hurting him at a time when Brazilians are looking for someone who doesn’t talk like a professor. And with virtually Brazil’s entire political establishment under suspicion of shady dealings, Temer’s tight-lipped rectitude can seem like opacity.

Once in power, Temer embraced Brazil’s rightward turn, but it has not embraced him. His approval ratings hover around 14 percent, roughly on par with Rousseff’s before her impeachment.

More than half the country sees Temer as dishonest, according to a December survey by Datafolha, Brazil’s main polling firm. His low approval ratings are a sign that he has not benefited from Brazil’s shifting political winds, even as he tries to tries to tack with them.

“He gives the impression of a very traditional politician, who is rarely seen on the streets,” said Mauro Paulino, director of Datafolha.

Much of Brazil’s political and business elite, including Temer, is under the cloud of the sprawling corruption investigation known as “Car Wash” that has uncovered $2 billion in illegal bribes over the past three years. The former speaker of Brazil’s Congress has been imprisoned, along with some of the country’s most powerful business executives.

According to leaked plea bargain testimony, a jailed former construction executive has accused Temer of soliciting nearly $3 million in illegal campaign funds. Temer has not been charged, and he has repeatedly insisted that he supports the investigation and has nothing to hide. After the Supreme Court judge overseeing the Car Wash probe died in a plane crash last month, Temer said he would wait to nominate a replacement until the judge’s colleagues — not him — could decide who would take over the case.

It may be too late for Temer to recover his credibility. With less than two years left in his term, Brazil seems to be waiting for its Trump to come along. Populist outsiders such as the new mayor of Sao Paulo, a business tycoon who starred on the Brazilian version of “Celebrity Apprentice,” are often mentioned among the early favorites for 2018.

What many Brazilians and Brazilian lawmakers have embraced is Temer’s right-leaning austerity agenda. He has won approval in Congress for a 20-year freeze on social spending and his refusal to bail out state governments that have blown their budgets. He has eased restrictions on foreign oil companies looking to drill for lucrative offshore deposits, and he is expected to present new legislation to open up Brazilian agribusiness and the airline industry to full foreign ownership.

Although Temer has stopped the economic slide, the country’s jobless rate remains in the double digits, and 2017 growth is projected to be just 1 percent.

“People are not consuming, because they’re afraid of losing their jobs,” said Paulo Sotero, the director of the Brazil Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington.

“Temer’s job is to calm people down, take measures that are effective, and put Brazil back on a sustainable growth pattern,” Sotero said. “It’s probably too much for his government to accomplish by 2018, but he can start working on it, and he has.”

Unlike Trump, Temer is not overly concerned with his popularity, analysts say. He insists he will not be a candidate in 2018. He has his eye on his long-term legacy, and whether he will be remembered as a leader who restored stability and lifted Brazil out of the ditch.

“This is a country that changes opinion very quickly,” said Aragão, the political analyst. “Don’t forget Rousseff had the highest approval rating of any president in history” at the beginning of her first term.

Temer’s presidency has signaled a shift in priorities for Brazil, from the multiculturalism and inclusive social message of his leftist predecessors to a more singular focus on economic liberalization. Some of those changes have fueled large street protests, and “Fora Temer” (Temer out) graffiti is a frequent sight in major cities.

Temer came under fire days after his inauguration for not appointing a single woman or Afro-Brazilian to his 23-member cabinet. He eventually appointed women to head the attorney general’s office and the central bank, but the damage was done.

To cap it off, anger over the perceived slight to women was compounded by the fact that Temer got his job by replacing the country’s first female president, with his party driving the impeachment proceedings.

“The lack of sufficient female representation in his government feels like a huge step backwards,” said Rosiska Darcy, a feminist author and political critic. Rousseff had appointed 14 women to cabinet-level positions. “We are half of Brazil’s population,” Darcy said.

The global shift to the right poses a threat to the gains of Brazil’s feminist movement, she added, saying that Brazilians should draw inspiration from the U.S. women’s march that followed Trump’s inauguration.

“The Americans spoke of resistance,” said Darcy. “We have to fight this wave of conservatism.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/brazil-swings-to-the-right-setting-the-stage-for-a-trumplike-leader/2017/02/05/456d7a6a-e99b-11e6-acf5-4589ba203144_story.html?utm_term=.4f61a20c86c4

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Vizio TVs are Spying on You

Vizio smart TVs tracked viewers around the clock without consent

Manufacturer will pay $2.2 million and delete data to settle privacy-invasion charges.

Damn Perverts

Vizio, one of the world’s biggest makers of Smart TVs, is paying $2.2 million to settle charges that it collected viewing habits from 11 million devices without the knowledge or consent of the people watching them.

According to a complaint filed Monday by the US Federal Trade Commission, Internet-connected TVs from Vizio contained ACR—short for automated content recognition—software. Without asking for permission, the ACR code captured second-by-second information about the video the TVs displayed. The software collected other personal information and transmitted it, along with the viewing data, to servers controlled by the manufacturer. Vizio then sold the data to unnamed third-parties for purposes of audience measurement, analysis, and tracking.

“For all of these uses, Defendants provide highly specific, second-by-second information about television viewing,” FTC lawyers wrote in Monday’s complaint. “Each line of a report provides viewing information about a single television. In a securities filing, Vizio states that its data analytics program, for example, ‘provides highly specific viewing behavior data on a massive scale with great accuracy, which can be used to generate intelligent insights for advertisers and media content providers.'”

In an e-mailed statement, Vizio officials wrote: “The ACR program never paired viewing data with personally identifiable information such as name or contact information, and the Commission did not allege or contend otherwise. Instead, as the Complaint notes, the practices challenged by the government related only to the use of viewing data in the ‘aggregate’ to create summary reports measuring viewing audiences or behaviors.”

The tracking started in February 2014 on both new TVs and previously sold devices that didn’t originally ship with ACR software installed. The software periodically appended IP addresses to the collected data and also made it possible for more detailed personal information—including age, sex, income, marital status, household size, education level, home ownership, and home values—to be associated. The collection occurred under a setting that was described as a “Smart Interactivity” feature that “enables program offers and suggestions.” The menu never informed users that the feature also transmitted viewing habits or other personal information. The complaint offered these additional technical details:

Through the ACR software, Vizio’s televisions transmit information about what a consumer is watching on a second-by-second basis. Defendants’ ACR software captures information about a selection of pixels on the screen and sends that data to Vizio servers, where it is uniquely matched to a database of publicly available television, movie, and commercial content. Defendants collect viewing data from cable or broadband service providers, set-top boxes, external streaming devices, DVD players, and over-the-air broadcasts. Defendants have stated that the ACR software captures up to 100 billion data points each day from more than 10 million VIZIO televisions. Defendants store this data indefinitely.

Defendants’ ACR software also periodically collects other information about the television, including IP address, wired and wireless MAC addresses, WiFi signal strength, nearby WiFi access points, and other items.

Big Brother is watching

The allegations are only the latest to raise troubling privacy concerns about Internet-connected TVs and other so-called Internet-of-things devices. In late 2015, security researchers found that Vizio TVs failed to properly validate the HTTPS certificates of servers they connected to when transmitting viewing-habit data. That made it trivial for anyone who had the ability to monitor and control the Internet traffic passing between the TV and the Vizio servers to impersonate the servers and view or tamper with the transmitted data. Smart TVs manufactured by LG have also been caught collecting potentially sensitive data, including a list of shows being watched, the names of files contained on connected USB drives, and the names of files shared on home or office networks.

Under the terms of the settlement, Vizio will pay $1.5 million to the FTC and $700,000 to the New Jersey Division of Consumer affairs. The settlement also requires Vizio to delete all data collected before March 1, 2016. Additionally, Vizio has agreed to prominently disclose and obtain express consent for all future data collection. The FTC has more details about the case here and here.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/02/vizio-smart-tvs-tracked-viewers-around-the-clock-without-consent/

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Transgender (Born a Man) Removed from Female Prison After Having Sex with Other Inmates

Transgender murderer moved from women’s prison ‘after having sex with female inmates’

A transgender murderer has been moved from a women’s prison following claims she had sex with female inmates.

Paris Green, who was born a man, had been allowed to serve her sentence at HMP Edinburgh’s female wing.

But authorities sent the 23-year-old back to a male institute after it was alleged she had been intimate with other prisoners.

‘The women want sex and Paris is the only person who can give it to them,’ a source told Daily Star Sunday.

Green, who was previously known as Peter Laing, had been accused of ‘inappropriate behaviour’ with inmates before.

Following her murder conviction in 2013 she was moved out of Corton Vale women’s prison after the allegations.

Green and her friends Kevin McDonagh and Dean Smith, were found guilty of murdering Robert Shankland, 45.

They tortured him for hours before killing him. She was jailed for 18 years.

A Scottish Ministry of Justice spokesperson said it would not comment on individual cases.

Read more: http://metro.co.uk/2017/02/05/transgender-murderer-moved-from-womens-prison-after-having-sex-with-female-inmates-6429321/#ixzz4Xy5R1YjZ

Rediscovering his ding-a-ling in prison

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Soros Paid Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, John McCain, John Kasich, Lindsey Graham

Employees of a hedge fund founded by the king of the Institutional Left, billionaire and Democratic Party mega-donor George Soros, donated tens of thousands of dollars to top Republicans who fought against President Donald Trump in 2016, donation records compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics show.

That’s right, wear your pussy hat you sellout bastards

Soros Fund Management, a former hedge fund that serves now as an investment management firm, was founded by progressive billionaire George Soros in 1969. It has risen to become one of the most profitable hedge funds in the industry. Employees of the firm are heavily involved in backing political candidates giving millions upon millions to groups that were supporting failed 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton for the presidency.

But more importantly, perhaps, than the unsurprising giant lump sums of cash funneled into Democratic Party and Clinton coffers is the revelation thanks to the Center for Responsive Politics that employees of the Soros firm—now run by his son Robert Soros—pumped tens of thousands of dollars into the campaigns of top anti-Trump Republicans over the course of 2016.

In total, executives with the Soros-founded company pushed $36,800 into the coffers of these GOP candidates just this past cycle. That does not include Super PACs or campaign committees, which saw tens of thousands of dollars more. While these numbers for Republicans pale in comparison to the millions upon millions poured into Democratic groups, causes, and candidates, it is significant that Soros executives are making a play inside the GOP. Perhaps even more significant is the type of Republican they aim to prop up: pro-amnesty, pro-open borders on trade, and generally speaking anti-Trump. A pattern emerges when looking at the policies of the Republicans that these Soros Fund Management executives support financially.

The biggest recipient of Soros-connected cash in the GOP was none other than House Speaker Paul Ryan, who repeatedly attempted to undermine Trump over the course of the election. According to the records available online, the Soros firm’s workers gave $10,800 to Ryan. Included in that are two separate May 2, 2016, donations from David Rogers, a then-employee of Soros Fund Management who lives in New York City. Rogers left the Soros Fund Management firm right around that time.

Bloomberg reported in late April 2016, just before these two separate donations to Ryan;

David Rogers and Joshua Donfeld, two portfolio managers at billionaire George Soros’s family office, are leaving the firm over disagreements with its new chief investment officer about the direction of global markets, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Rogers, a protege of Soros’s former chief investment strategist Stan Druckenmiller, managed a portfolio of about $3 billion at the $28 billion Soros Fund Management, said the people, who asked not to be named because the matter is private. Rogers, 38, made his name as a commodities trader, while Donfeld, 40, focuses on stock investing, said the people, adding that both men are expected to leave the family office next month.

Another two separate donations to Ryan came from Donfeld, both on May 2, 2016 and totaling $2,700 each. In total, that adds up to $10,800—between both Rogers and Donfeld, who were working for Soros Fund Management at the time—that they gave to Paul Ryan.

Ryan’s chief spokesman, Brendan Buck, has not responded to a Breitbart News’s inquiry about the donations from the Soros firm’s employees. But Ryan’s support for open borders when it comes to immigration and trade, and his backing of so-called “criminal justice reform” legislation, is in line with Soros’ worldview—and he regularly bashed Trump over the course of the 2016 election.

But he was hardly the only anti-Trump Republican who received cash from Soros Fund Management employees over the course of 2016. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), a failed presidential candidate, received $3,500 from the firm’s employees, according to the Center for Responsive Politics data. That includes a $1,500 donation from Soros Fund Management executive Scott Bessent. Bessent has since left the firm to work at a different hedge fund, but “oversaw George Soros’s $30 billion fortune for the last four years” according to an early January 2016 article in Bloomberg. The other two donations to Graham from the firm’s employees—both worth $1,000, with one on March 17, 2015, and the other on July 29, 2015—came from Alexander Cohen, an executive with Soros Fund Management.

Fellow failed presidential candidate Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) raked in $2,700, while other failed GOP presidential candidates Ohio Gov. John Kasich and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush also received $2,700 apiece from employees of the Soros firm.

Rubio’s $2,700 donation came from the aforementioned Los Angeles-based Donfeld on Jan. 22, 2016, a few months before, as Bloomberg reported, he and Rogers left the firm. Kasich’s $2,700 donation came from Bessent on Oct. 24, 2015. Bush’s $2,700 donation came on July 24, 2015, from David Murphy of Soros Fund Management. Murphy, according to his LinkedIN page, is a current “portfolio manager” at the firm.

Kasich’s spokesman Chris Schrimpf did not respond to a request for comment, nor did Bush’s spokeswoman Kristy Campbell.

A spokesman for Rubio, Matt Wolking, vociferously defended the senator, calling this story in Breitbart News—without having read it because it wasn’t written until long after he responded to inquiries about this matter—a “fake” story since Rubio didn’t get donations directly from George Soros himself and since hedge funds as companies cannot make donations to federal candidates. Breitbart News never alleged that Rubio did get donations directly from George Soros himself, but was inquiring with Rubio’s staff if the senator had a comment on why he did take donations from an executive at George Soros’s hedge fund. That fact, that Rubio did take cash from a Soros Fund Management executive—and that that fund was founded by George Soros—is not something Wolking, on Rubio’s behalf, challenges. So what his team is doing is creating a straw man argument to falsely claim this story is “fake.”

“This story is a fake,” Wolking told Breitbart News. “Senator Rubio has never received any contribution from George Soros. And he has never received any contribution from the Soros company because, among other things, companies can’t donate to federal candidates.”

But more importantly, a Rubio spokesman did admit that the FEC filing is correct—that Rubio took a $2,700 donation from Donfeld. The Rubio spokesman argues that Donfeld donated “almost exclusively” to GOP candidates over the years—which is mostly true, as Donfeld has given to people like Ryan, Rubio, Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO), Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT), and 2012 GOP Ohio Senate nominee Josh Mandel, among others. But Donfeld, whom the Rubio spokesman points out and as Breitbart News mentioned earlier in this piece, left the Soros firm after making this donation to Rubio, has donated to Democrats like Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA), Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY), and a failed Democratic congressional candidate in Arizona’s 9th congressional district in 2012, Andrei Cherny.

Anti-Trump Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), a failed one-time GOP presidential nominee from 2008, got $2,500 from an executive at the Soros firm, while Boehner—who resigned amid a coup from conservatives—raked in $2,600 from an executive at the Soros firm.

McCain’s $2,500 this cycle came from Donfeld of Soros Fund Management on Sept. 23, 2015. In previous cycles, McCain has taken cash directly from George Soros himself—a $1,000 donation on June 2, 1999—and from others with the firm, including a $1,000 donation from Bessent on March 13, 2000, a $2,300 donation from Soros Fund Management’s Michael Au on Dec. 27, 2007, a $1,000 donation from Duncan Hennes of Soros Fund Management on March 13, 2000, and a $2,300 donation from Soros Fund Management’s Joshua Berkowitz on Jan. 15, 2008. McCain’s spokeswoman, Julie Tarallo, has not responded to multiple requests for comment from Breitbart News.

Boehner’s $2,600 donation this cycle came from Bessent of Soros Fund Management on Feb. 12, 2015. The media relations department at Reynolds American, the tobacco company of which Boehner joined the board after resigning from Congress in 2015, has not responded to a request for comment on his behalf.

Now former Rep. Joe Heck (R-NV), the 2016 Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in Nevada who lost his election after he withdrew his endorsement of Trump in the general election, also received $2,500 from an executive at Soros Fund Management, while Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-FL)—a “Never Trump” congressman who voted for a third-party candidate because he refused to support the GOP nominee for president—received $1,000 from an executive at the Soros family firm.

Heck’s $2,500 donation on Sept. 29, 2016, came from Soros Fund Management’s Sender Cohen. According to the Israel on Campus Coalition, another organization for which Sender Cohen serves as director, he is a “Portfolio Manager, the Director of Research and member of the Management Committee at Soros Fund Management.” Heck’s spokesman from the campaign has not responded to a request for comment on Monday.

Curbelo’s $1,000 donation came on June 5, 2015, from Paul Sohn, a former executive with Soros Fund Management. Sohn had already left the firm earlier in the year, as it was reported on CNBC in January 2015 that Sohn had left Soros Fund Management after his involvement in a controversial investment. That is months before he reported on this June 2015 Federal Election Commission (FEC) filing for this Curbelo donation that his employer was Soros Fund Management. A Curbelo spokeswoman has not responded to a request for comment.

Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), the House GOP conference chairwoman, got $1,000 from an official with Soros Fund Management. She is responsible for unleashing the independent and wildly unsuccessful general election candidate Evan McMullin—whom Trump has called “McMuffin” in jest after his failure—upon the world. McMullin, who turned out to fail fantastically on election day despite media fanfare about his candidacy, was previously a McMorris Rodgers staffer as chief policy director for nearly two years in the House GOP conference before his whimsical bid at the presidency that went nowhere and had essentially zero impact on the race. Rodgers’ $1,000 donation this cycle came from Alexander Cohen of Soros Fund Management on March 13, 2015. A spokesman for McMorris Rodgers has not responded to a request for comment on this matter.

The only few Republicans who received Soros Fund Management cash but did support Trump were Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), Rep. Dan Donovan (R-NY), and Rep. Ed Royce (R-CA). Royce received $2,500 from the firm, Johnson and Grassley each received $1,000, and Donovan received $300. Johnson’s $1,000 donation came on April 15, 2016, from Alexander Cohen of Soros Fund Management, as did Grassley’s, which came on Oct. 13, 2015. Donovan’s $300 donation came from Christopher Rich of Soros Fund Management on April 20, 2015. Royce’s $2,500 donation came from Sender Cohen of Soros Fund Management on March 31, 2016. Spokespersons for Johnson, Grassley, Donovan and Royce have not responded to Breitbart News’s requests for comment.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/02/06/records-soros-fund-execs-funded-paul-ryan-marco-rubio-jeb-bush-john-mccain-john-kasich-lindsey-graham-in-2016/

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Trump Threatens to Defund Left Coast California

Trump threatens to defund ‘out of control’ California

President Donald Trump is threatening to withhold federal funds from “out of control” California if the state declares itself a sanctuary state.

“If we have to, we’ll defund,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News host Bill O’Reilly before the Super Bowl. “We give tremendous amounts of money to California, California in many ways is out of control, as you know.”

Trump was responding to a question from O’Reilly about efforts by Democratic state legislators to make California a de-facto “sanctuary state” that would restrict state and local law enforcement, including school police and security departments, from using their resources to aid federal authorities in immigration enforcement.

“I think it’s ridiculous. Sanctuary cities, as you know, I’m very much opposed to sanctuary cities. They breed crime, there’s a lot of problems,” Trump said.

Sacramento, Los Angeles and San Francisco are sanctuary cities and have said they will will challenge in court any attempt by Trump to withhold federal funds from them. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said he doubted the 10th amendment to the Constitution, which reserves power to the states, would allow Trump to defund.

Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg has said he would “join, if not lead, any effort to fight (the sanctuary city threat) with litigation.”

Trump told O’Reilly that he didn’t want to defund a state or a city and would like to give them “the money they need to properly operate.”

But the president added that “if they’re going to have sanctuary cities, we may have to do that. Certainly that would be a weapon.”

Californa Gov. Jerry Brown pledged in his State of the State address last month to defend everybody who has come to the state “for a better life and has contributed to the well-being of our state.”

“I recognize that under the Constitution, federal law is supreme and that Washington determines immigration policy. But as a state we can and have had a role to play. California has enacted several protective measures for the undocumented: the Trust Act, lawful driver’s licenses, basic employment rights and non-discriminatory access to higher education,” Brown said in his State of the State. “We may be called upon to defend those laws and defend them we will.”

 

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/white-house/article130934804.html