It is basically what we thought, but seeing it laid out is still shocking… and scary.
The FISA process is set up to allow our government to secretly spy on American citizens if they are suspected of foreign espionage. The process is set up so that the government agency must get a FISA court’s permission based on probable cause and renew that permission every 90 days. It is supposed to protect the 4th Amendment rights of Americans.
In this case, the FBI presented the Steele Dossier as probable cause to spy on American citizens working on a political campaign. The FBI did so without disclosing to the court that the dossier was paid for by an opposing political campaign or that Steele had repeatedly voiced his passionate opposition to Trump.
Is that how easy it is for our government to spy on us? The FBI can just use a trumped up report from a political campaign to spy on Americans? That’s scary.
After the abuses we saw with the John Doe and now the FBI, it is past time for citizens to yank back the chain on our rogue government agencies.
The jobs report beat expectations, but the most encouraging numbers are in the wages and participation rates.
Lagging pay has been a persistent economic mystery. But many economists expect wage growth to accelerate in 2018, especially if the unemployment rate continues to fall, forcing companies to compete to attract scarce workers.
Economists warned about reading too much into January’s strong wage numbers — several times during the recovery, wage growth has appeared to accelerate, only to fall back to earth. But they said there was little doubt that the latest numbers were an encouraging sign.
“People have been wondering when the wages are going to start to rise in response to this tightness,” said Catherine Barrera, chief economist of the online job site ZipRecruiter. “I think that over the first six months of this year, we’re really going to start to see the wages rise.”
[…]
“People who are marginally employable suddenly become highly employable in a period like this,” said Joseph Brusuelas, chief economist of RSM, a financial consulting firm.
The strong labor market is pulling workers off the economy’s sidelines. The labor-force participation rate — the share of adults either working or actively looking for work — has edged up recently, although it was flat in January. Diane Swonk, chief economist for the investment firm Grant Thornton, said she expected to see companies start trying to draw people into the labor force by letting them work from home or offering flexible schedules.
“We plan to hire thousands of people across the U.S. this year,” said Pichai. “Last year in the US we grew faster outside the Bay Area than in the Bay Area. To support this growth, we will be making significant investments in offices across nine states, including Colorado and Michigan.”
Typically considered a Silicon Valley company, the plans are consistent with Google’s U.S. hiring in recent years. The company currently has an office or a data center in 21 states.
The Alphabet-owned company will also open or build five new data centers in the United States in 2018. The company currently has six open data centers in states including Oklahoma, Iowa and North Carolina.
I’ll go ahead and predict now that their strike will be an utter failure. A few dozen stores across the nation will have a few employees walk out and the media will cover it like it’s a big deal.
The Fight for $15, the movement that has galvanized city campaigns to raise the pay of low-wage workers, is teaming up with the civil rights leader William Barber for a day of action in support of racial justice and voting rights.
The organization is calling on fast-food workers in two dozen southern cities to go on strike on 12 February, to mark the 50th anniversary of the famed Memphis sanitation workers’ strike, which began shortly before the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King Jr.
And then there’s this:
The collaboration also shows that Fight for $15’s goals have expanded beyond higher wages at fast-food franchises toward fighting for racial justice and voting rights. Two ministers, Barber and Liz Theoharis, are heading the new effort, officially called “the Poor People’s Campaign: a National Call for Moral Revival”. They are seizing on the 50th anniversary of King’s campaign to relaunch the effort, and trying to make poverty the center of the national conversation.
I think a lot of charity and non-profit groups make the mistake of diluting their mission. Agree with it or not, “Fight for $15” is a very clear mission with a tangible goal. It’s something that people can get behind. There are hundreds of organizations that are “fighting for racial justice and voting rights” – however they define those. What does Fight for $15 bring to the table that all of those other groups don’t?
GOP U.S. Senate candidate Kevin Nicholson Tuesday brushed off reports he was paid by the Democratic Party for campaign work as late as 2002, despite previously claiming he was “absolutely sure” he was not a Dem after speaking at the party’s 2000 national convention.
Federal Election Commission filings show the GOP U.S. Senate candidate was paid a total of $7,315 in 2002 by the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party for administrative and voter drive work.
Nicholson questioned the significance of him being paid by the party in 2002 given previous reporting showing he was a registered Democrat in 2004. Records show he registered as a Dem when he moved to North Carolina in 2005.
“Whatever campaign work I did in 2002 predates 2004, so why we’re even talking about this I don’t know,” Nicholson told reporters after a WisPolitics.com luncheon at the Madison Club. “I wasn’t happy with the Democratic Party. I didn’t think they had common sense, but I wasn’t ready to give up on a label at that point in my life. But I got there in a relatively short amount of time.”
We’re talking about it, Mr. Nicholson, because you were not just a Democrat… you were an activist, paid Democrat functionary… until you weren’t. But there isn’t any evidence of you putting that much effort into being a Republican… ever. And now you want my vote to be elected to one of the highest political offices in the state.
