President Donald Trump welcomed Americans Kim Hak Song, Kim Dong Cul, and Kim Sang-Duk home to the United States at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland early Thursday after they were released by their North Korean captors.
The President and First Lady descended the steps of a medical aircraft with the three Americans at approximately 3 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time as a small crowd applauded.
The three were released by North Korea on Wednesday as a gesture of goodwill ahead of an upcoming summit between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, now planned for the island nation of Singapore.
“They are really three incredible people,” Trump told assembled reporters, describing the release as part of a diplomatic process leading up to the summit.
“Frankly, we didn’t think this was going to happen,” he said, adding that he wanted to pay his “warmest respects to the parents of Otto Warmbier,” an American prisoner who died shortly after being returned home last year due to injuries sustained in North Korean custody.
They were released during meetings between Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his North Korean counterparts. Fox News reported that the U.S. did not know with certainty that they were going to be released until they were physically aboard Pompeo’s plane.
Donald J. Trump
✔@realDonaldTrump
Secretary Pompeo and his “guests” will be landing at Andrews Air Force Base at 2:00 A.M. in the morning. I will be there to greet them. Very exciting!
The release of the prisoners in advance of formal talks between the U.S. and North Korea is a contrast to the approach used by the Obama administration in negotiating for the release of four American prisoners from Iran. That release came after the Iran nuclear deal was signed in 2015, and was accompanied by the secret transport of billions of dollars in cash from the U.S. to Iran.
Upon their release, the three freed Americans issued a statement:
We would like to express our deep appreciation to the United States government, President Trump, Secretary Pompeo, and the people of the United States for bringing us home. We thank God, and all our families and friends who prayed for us and for our return. God Bless America, the greatest nation in the world.
Warmbier’s family had earlier expressed their well wishes to the families of the freed Americans.
A large US flag is set up ahead of the arrival of US detainees Kim Hak-song, Tony Kim and Kim Dong-chul after they were freed by North Korea, at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland on May 10, 2018. – US President Donald Trump was expected to greet the three US citizens released by North Korea at the air base near Washington early on May 10, underscoring a much needed diplomatic win and a stepping stone to a historic summit with Kim Jong Un. (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP) (Photo credit should read SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)
The three were flown from North Korea to Japan, where they boarded a medical plane. After landing to refuel in Anchorage, Alaska, the plane continued onwards to Andrews.
President Trump arrived with the First Lady, Vice President Mike Pence, and Second Lady Karen Pence.
Zeke Miller
✔@ZekeJMiller
JOINT BASE ANDREWS, Md. (AP) — Military plane carrying 3 Americans freed from North Korea arrives at base outside Washington, Trump on hand to greet.
What Idiot Would Think That This Idiot Is Smart? Yes Feel The Bern You Morons.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is set to unveil a plan that would give American workers who want or need jobs guaranteed government jobs that pay at least $15 per hour and have health benefits.
The progressive Vermont senator’s guaranteed jobs plan would entitle any American a job or job training in U.S.-funded projects in infrastructure, the environment, caregiving, and education, but he did not provide a cost-estimate or plan to fund the proposal, the Washington Postreported.
A representative from Sanders’ office said no funding estimate was available for the project because staffers were still crafting the proposal.
Two other potential 2020 presidential candidates—Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Sen. Kristen Gillibrand (D-NY)—have expressed interest in crafting similar proposals.
If You Voted For Or Supported Bernie Sanders You Are A Jackass.
“The goal is to eliminate working poverty and involuntary unemployment altogether,” said Darrick Hamilton, an economist at The New School who expressed support for a guaranteed jobs program. “This is an opportunity for something transformative, beyond the tinkering we’ve been doing for the last 40 years, where all the productivity gains have gone to the elite of society.”
Critics of the plan have said guaranteed jobs proposals would not be sustainable or affordable, and would cause massive job losses in the private sector.
Studies have shown that states and cities which choose to enact a $15 per hour minimum wage trigger job losses. A December 2017 study found that once California’s minimum wage hike takes effect in 2022, the state would lose 400,000 jobs.
“It completely undercuts a lot of industries and companies,” Brian Riedl, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute who opposes the program, told the Post. “There will be pressure to introduce a higher wage or certain benefits that the private sector doesn’t offer.”
The proposal is unlikely to gain favor with Republicans in control of Congress, and even most Democrats have slammed similar plans as unrealistic.
“It would be extremely expensive, and I wonder if this is the best, most targeted use of the amount of money it would cost,” said Ernie Tedeschi, an economist who worked for the Treasury during the Obama administration.
The Vermont senator’s proposal comes days after he declared President Trump’s agenda “dead” if the Democratic Party wins the majority in the House or Senate.
Gentleman’s Quarterly has proposed refashioning contemporary culture by unmooring it from the past, a feat that can be accomplished — in part — by updating lists of required reading to fit the modern Zeitgeist.
In their essay titled “21 Books You Don’t Have to Read Before You Die,” the editors of GQrecommend rewriting canons of Great Books by swapping out works that are hard to read, dangerously backward, or politically incorrect with more contemporary works that conform to the values and sensibilities of the modern cultural elite.
So, out with Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, and of course, the Holy Bible, and in with chick-lit, inclusive language, edgy plots, and entertainment purged of traditional values or outdated suppositions about the human person, family, and society.
The Great Books are taken down in one fell swoop. “Some are racist and some are sexist, but most are just really, really boring,” we learn.
First among these “overrated books” is the Bible, for which the GQ editors reserve some particularly choice epithets. It is “repetitive, self-contradictory, sententious, foolish, and even at times ill-intentioned,” or, in a nutshell, “certainly not the finest thing that man has ever produced.”
As a substitute, why not read Agota Kristof’s The Notebook, the editors suggest, “a marvelous tale of two brothers who have to get along when things get rough.”
Their scorn extends well beyond the Good Book, however.
Pulling no punches, GQ says that the “cowboy mythos” of Lonesome Dove, for example, “with its rigid masculine emotional landscape, glorification of guns and destruction, and misogynistic gender roles, is a major factor in the degradation of America.”
Instead, we are told to read The Mountain Lion by Jean Stafford, which “acts in many ways as a strong rebuttal to all the old toxic western stereotypes we all need to explode.”
Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, on the other hand, “is without any literary merit whatsoever” and therefore should be replaced by Olivia, the Sapphic story of a British teenage girl who falls in love with her teacher Mademoiselle Julie.
Goodbye to All That, by Robert Graves, is definitely out, since it is “incredibly racist.” If one really must read about war, a more sanitized option is Dispatches by Michael Herr — we are told — which properly conveys “the cruelty and violence of modern warfare.”
And so, on and on.
One reads that Ernest Hemingway, with his “masculine bluster and clipped sentences” should give way to kinder, gentler writers. The Old Man and the Sea can be fruitfully substituted by The Summer Book, a “heartwarming” series of vignettes about a grandmother and granddaughter living on a remote Finnish island that “teaches us what it is to be in sync with the world.”
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn gets the axe, of course (“Mark Twain was a racist”), as do The Bible, Henry James’ The Ambassadors, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Try reading instead Mary Gaitskill’s Veronica, we are told, “in which emotions are so present and sensory they almost hold a physical weight.”
The exercise seems aimed primarily at avoiding contact with antiquated beliefs, racist language, and sexist assumptions.
In keeping with similar crusades on college campuses, it also seeks to bring in many more female writers, which GQ seems to think especially necessary for domesticating its predominantly male readership. Of its original list of 21 “required” works, not one is written by a woman. The new list, on the contrary, is dominated by women authors.
It is also noteworthy than its original list, GQ includes not a single volume from antiquity or even the Renaissance. Unlike the Great Books, here there is no Homer, no Plato, no Greek drama, no Virgil, no Dante, no Cervantes, and no Shakespeare.
Of course, different strokes for different folks. Everyone interested in literature has his own list of favorites that merit wider circulation as well as a similar list of “highly acclaimed” works that could just as well be forgotten. The core of the GQ proposal, however, is the surgical excision of books that serve to keep traditional values alive.
As simple as it is straightforward, GQ’s plan follows the tried-and-true political strategy of Antonio Gramsci, the Italian communist mastermind who explained in great detail how to overcome a “cultural hegemony” by replacing it with a new one (counter-hegemony).
According to Gramsci, society can only be changed by changing culture, and this can only be accomplished by developing a new cultural hegemony, which is necessarily rooted in folklore, popular culture, and religion.
The brave new world that the cultural left wishes to establish cannot come about as long as “folklore” (which includes art, literature, history, and other sources of national identity) remains rooted in the ideas and values of the Judeo-Christian West.
Only when a new set of values has been adopted and assimilated as a “commonsensical world view” to which any thinking person is expected to spontaneously adhere, can we say that the cultural hegemony has been successfully changed.
The original collection called The Great Books of the Western World, brainchild of Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler of the University of Chicago, was presented at a gala party in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City, on April 15, 1952.
In his speech, Robert Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago, spoke glowingly of the project, underscoring its utility for the preservation of the culture of the west.
“This is more than a set of books, and more than a liberal education,” he said. “Great Books of the Western World is an act of piety. Here are the sources of our being. Here is our heritage. This is the West. This is its meaning for mankind.”
GQ’s proposal can only be viewed in these terms. It is not about suggesting more “entertaining” literature. It is about changing the cultural hegemony for the generations to come.
An Oregon jury convicted a previously deported Mexican national of sexually assaulting a nine-year-old girl. The convicted child-rapist has a history of crimes in the U.S.
The little girl’s mother told law enforcement officials in Clackamas County last year that a man broke into their 9 and 5-year-old daughters’ bedroom. The man came through the window of their apartment at night on February 25 and sexually assaulted their daughter. Although he escaped through a window, law enforcement officials were able to find his fingerprints, KATU2 in Portland, Oregon reported.
Breitbart Texas reported that federal officers arrested 48-year-old Santiago Flores-Martinez when he was trying to cross back into Mexico in late April. The port’s Anti-Terrorism Contraband Enforcement Team (A-TCET) apprehended the Mexican national at the San Ysidro port of entry. San Ysidro is a district within the City of San Diego and is on the California-Mexico border near Tijuana.
Officials identified Flores-Martinez when they retrieved biometric information on him via the “Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System” (IAFIS).
Police began searching for the accused child rapist on April 25.
Fox 12 Oregon reported the jury found Flores-Martinez guilty on charges that include first-degree sex abuse, attempted rape, burglary, and coercion. His sentencing hearing is scheduled to begin on Monday.
The convicted child rapist has used the aliases “Felipe Coeto” and “Isidro Ramos Flores.”
The previously deported Mexican national has a criminal record in the U.S. that dates back to 1994. Immigration officers deported him in 2001 after serving two years in prison in Oregon.
Clackamas County is located just southeast of Portland, Oregon. The county is listed by the Center for Immigration Studies as being a sanctuary jurisdiction that has policies prohibiting local law enforcement officials from cooperating with federal immigration officers.
Obama, stands with his nominee to become Health and Human Services secretary, Budget Director Sylvia Mathews Burwell who is the President of the liberal college now.
American University rolled out a $121 million diversity and inclusion plan Tuesday, which includes the creation and implementation of a mandatory two-semester race and social identity course.
American has allocated $60 million for FY 2018, though it began spending the $121 million last spring, and intends to keep spending through next year.
The majority of the funds have been earmarked for scholarships to minority applicants, but $7 million has already gone toward the creation of the American University Experience course.
The first section of AUx, taken in the first semester of freshman year, is built as a psychological, social, cultural, and academic transition into college life. Topics covered include “exploring and expressing identities,” as well as “diversity, bias, and privilege,” in addition to mental health maintenance.
The sole focus of the second semester is “race and social identity.” Students will be instructed in identifying and countering the “coded, contentious, or uncomfortable ways” in which “ethnicity, gender and sexual expression, class, disability, and religion are often discussed.”
“AUx2 seeks to create a space for conversations and learning about these topics that pushes beyond the norm,” according to the course description.
The year-long class will be mandatory for freshman starting in fall 2018, as part of American’s overhauled core curriculum — which includes an additional, separate “Diverse Experiences” requirement.
AUx director Andrea Malkin Brennertold a campus news outlet, “The best critique of things that we could change for [the course] would be to expand the number of intersectional identities that we talked about.”
An effort to increase faculty diversity has also been promised in the new American diversity blueprint .
The school has said the initiative has been in the works for the last couple of years, but its character was impacted by incidents in recent semesters that some have labeled racist.
In May bananas marked with the acronym for the black women’s sorority were found hanging from noose-like ropes, while in September a Confederate flag was hung on campus. Last week, anti-immigration posters were found posted around the campus.
According to a 2016 campus survey, 33 percent of black students reported feeling included at American, compared to 71 percent of white students.
The University of Maryland-College Park announced last week that it had allotted nearly $4 million for diversity programming, including a $200,000 program to train student leaders on intercultural competency, following the murder of a black Bowie State University student by a white Maryland student in May.