Republicans have painted Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch as a man whose character and legal scholarship are unimpeachable, but on Tuesday night he became the latest Trump pick to be accused of plagiarism.

Politico and BuzzFeed reported that in several sections of Gorsuch’s 2006 book The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia, and in an article on the same subject published in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy in 2000, he repeats the facts, words, and structures of other sources without citing them.

The most egregious example is a summary in Gorsuch’s book of a 1982 case involving a baby with Down syndrome. Gorsuch repeats about 11 sentences from an Indiana Law Journal article by Abigail Lawlis Kuzma, omitting and altering only a few words and sentences. Rather than giving Kuzma attribution, Gorsuch cites the same sources that she relied on.



[blockquote style="border:1px solid #000000;"] Christina Wilkie ✔ @christinawilkie
Politico reports on documents showing that SCOTUS nominee Neil Gorsuch plagiarized the work of others. Behold: http://politi.co/2o7z2tU
11:41 PM - 4 Apr 2017



In another example, Gorsuch appears to lift his description of euthanasia activist Derek Humphry from the 2003 book A Merciful End: The Euthanasia Movement in Modern America by Ian Dowbiggin. Here’s Gorsuch:

In 1989 Humphry left his second wife, Ann Wickett, soon after she had undergone surgery for breast cancer. During the divorce, Wicket alleged that when Humphry purported to help her mother commit suicide, the resulting death was not fully consensual.

And here’s Dowbiggin:

In 1989 he left his second wife, Ann Wickett, shortly after she had undergone surgery for breast cancer. Their subsequent divorce was made messier by Wickett’s allegations that her mother had not died willingly when Humphry had participated in the suicides of her own parent.

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Some of the latest hooey uttered by White House press secretary Sean Spicer — the man from whom a seemingly bottomless wellspring of hooey flows — was his pronouncement the other day that having so many fabulously wealthy men and women working in the White House is a good and wondrous thing.

“The president has brought a lot of people into this administration, and this White House in particular, who have been very blessed and very successful by this country, and have given up a lot to come into government by setting aside a lot of assets,” Spicer said.

“… People are often told they have to sell an asset or get rid of something to come serve in the government. And there’s a lot of people that have done a lot to come into this administration to give back, that have been inspired by the president’s victory and the president’s agenda to move the country forward.”

You bet, Sean. In a world of haughty ideals and self-professed high purpose, some would call this notion noblesse oblige — that with wealth and power comes social responsibility; to whom much is given, much is expected, etc. And so it should be. But in Donald Trump’s world, snagging a White House job doubtless will be a solid gold vehicle for using wealth and power to generate more wealth and power for yourself and others, taking optimal advantage of an opportunity handed you by the rich guy who, thanks to the deficiencies of the Electoral College, has landed in the most lucrative pot of jam ever.
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Sexual predator Trump defends accused predator O’Reilly: “I don’t think Bill did anything wrong”
By Tommy Christopher |
APRIL 5, 2017
On the heels of a New York Times report on the millions of dollars that have been paid to sexual harassment accusers on behalf of Bill O'Reilly, Sexual-Predator-in-Chief Donald Trump is defending O'Reilly, and potentially harming all survivors of sexual crimes.


Fox News host Bill O’Reilly is in a heap of trouble, after years of sexual harassment accusations finally caught up to him in the form of a New York Times exposé detailing the $13 million that has been paid out to his accusers over the years.

That story has resulted in a mass exodus of advertisers that now stands at twenty, and in an unusual twist, these companies are explicitly citing O’Reilly’s misconduct allegations in their statements.

O’Reilly does have at least one friend left, though, and he is a powerful one: Donald Trump, himself a self-professed sexual assailant and violator of intimate privacy, defended O’Reilly in a New York Times interview that took place in the Oval Office:

“I think he’s a person I know well — he is a good person,” said Mr. Trump, who during the interview was surrounded at his desk by a half-dozen of his highest-ranking aides, including the economic adviser Gary Cohn and the chief of staff, Reince Priebus, along with Vice President Mike Pence.

“I think he shouldn’t have settled; personally I think he shouldn’t have settled,” said Mr. Trump. “Because you should have taken it all the way. I don’t think Bill did anything wrong.”

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In more than a dozen messages on Twitter in 2013 and 2014, Mr. Trump repeated his advice, emphatically stating that “Syria is NOT our problem,” appealing directly to Mr. Obama to “not attack Syria” as “there is no upside and tremendous downside” and telling him to “stay out of Syria.”

[font size="3"]Mr. Trump had a noninterventionist stance during the 2016 election.[/font]

Mr. Trump shrugged at calls to use force against Mr. Assad’s government and endorsed Russia’s support of the Syrian leader.

“You have Russia that’s now there. Russia’s on the side of Assad, and Russia wants to get rid of ISIS as much as we do, if not more, because they don’t want them coming into Russia,” Mr. Trump said in a September 2015 interview with CNN. “Let Syria and ISIS fight. Why do we care?”

In a May 2016 interview on MSNBC, Mr. Trump said the United States had “bigger problems than Assad.” He added, “I would have stayed out of Syria and wouldn’t have fought so much for Assad, against Assad.”
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Donald Trump has claimed repeatedly that he has had no contact with Russian officials as a presidential candidate.

He was lying.

Trump personally met with the Russian ambassador on April 27, 2016, prior to a major foreign policy speech. The Wall Street Journal, in a report that was little-noticed at the time but was recently picked up by AMERICABlog News, reported the meeting last year.

A few minutes before he made those remarks, Mr. Trump met at a VIP reception with Russia’s ambassador to the U.S., Sergey Ivanovich Kislyak. Mr. Trump warmly greeted Mr. Kislyak and three other foreign ambassadors who came to the reception.

Kislyak, according to multiple contemporaneous news reports, was seated in the front row. It was an invitation-only event.
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By Adam Entous, Greg Miller, Kevin Sieff and Karen DeYoung

video

The United Arab Emirates arranged a secret meeting in January between Blackwater founder Erik Prince and a Russian close to President Vladi­mir Putin as part of an apparent effort to establish a back-channel line of communication between Moscow and President-elect Donald Trump, according to U.S., European and Arab officials.

The meeting took place around Jan. 11 — nine days before Trump’s inauguration — in the Seychelles islands in the Indian Ocean, officials said. Though the full agenda remains unclear, the UAE agreed to broker the meeting in part to explore whether Russia could be persuaded to curtail its relationship with Iran, including in Syria, a Trump administration objective that would be likely to require major concessions to Moscow on U.S. sanctions.

Though Prince had no formal role with the Trump campaign or transition team, he presented himself as an unofficial envoy for Trump to high-ranking Emiratis involved in setting up his meeting with the Putin confidant, according to the officials, who did not identify the Russian.

Prince was an avid supporter of Trump. After the Republican convention, he contributed $250,000 to Trump’s campaign, the national party and a pro-Trump super PAC led by GOP mega-donor Rebekah Mercer, records show. He has ties to people in Trump’s circle, including Stephen K. Bannon, now serving as the president’s chief strategist and senior counselor. Prince’s sister Betsy DeVos serves as education secretary in the Trump administration. And Prince was seen in the Trump transition offices in New York in December.

U.S. officials said the FBI has been scrutinizing the Seychelles meeting as part of a broader probe of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election and alleged contacts between associates of Putin and Trump. The FBI declined to comment.
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Senator Bob Casey (D-PA)

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The Senators want to see Trump’s secret plan to destroy health care, “According to reports, the Administration presented a letter to a privileged group of Congressional Republicans on March 23 outlining a plan to dismantle and repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) through regulatory action. As such actions could negatively affect tens of millions of Americans, we ask that you share this letter with all Members of Congress no later than April 6, 2017.”

The letter, provided to PoliticusUSA by Sen. Casey’s office, from the Senators also urged the Trump administration to stop working to destroy health care for tens of millions, “Rather than continuing down this path, we request that you heed Democrats’ calls to stop working to repeal the ACA and stop taking actions that would undermine our health care system. In order to provide much needed oversight and transparency regarding the Administration’s path forward on the ACA, please provide the document that was presented to Congressional Republicans on March 23, 2017, which outlined ACA regulations the Administration could repeal on its own. We hope you will set aside your plans to unravel these regulations so that we can move forward to improve our health care system, but until you make the commitment, we will continue our efforts to hold you accountable. Given the limited scope of the request, and since there is no reasonable basis to withhold this record, please provide a copy of this letter no later than April 6, 2017.”

The American Health Care Act had a 17% approval rating at the time of its death in the House. It is clear that the vast majority of Americans want nothing to do with Trumpcare/Ryancare/a House Freedom Caucus plan that will take health care away from ten of millions while raising premiums on everyone and changing the US health care system back to the insurance company profit driven scheme that it once was.

Trump and the Freedom Caucus have been caught. Democratic Senators are not going to sit on their hands and let Trump undermine the health care system to sell people a worse plan.
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Operatives for Russia appear to have strategically timed the computer commands, known as “bots,” to blitz social media with links to the pro-Trump stories at times when the billionaire businessman was on the defensive in his race against Democrat Hillary Clinton, these sources said.

The bots’ end products were largely millions of Twitter and Facebook posts carrying links to stories on conservative internet sites such as Breitbart News and InfoWars, as well as on the Kremlin-backed RT News and Sputnik News, the sources said. Some of the stories were false or mixed fact and fiction, said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the bot attacks are part of an FBI-led investigation into a multifaceted Russian operation to influence last year’s elections.

Investigators examining the bot attacks are exploring whether the far-right news operations took any actions to assist Russia’s operatives. Their participation, however, wasn’t necessary for the bots to amplify their news through Twitter and Facebook.

The investigation of the bot-engineered traffic, which appears to be in its early stages, is being driven by the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division, whose inquiries rarely result in criminal charges and whose main task has been to reconstruct the nature of the Kremlin’s cyber attack and determine ways to prevent another.

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Starbird argues in a new paper, set to be presented at a computational social-science conference in May, that these “strange clusters” of wild conspiracy talk, when mapped, point to an emerging alternative media ecosystem on the web of surprising power and reach.

It features sites such as Infowars.com, hosted by informal President Donald Trump adviser Alex Jones, which has pushed a range of conspiracies, including that the Sandy Hook school shooting was a staged fake.

There are dozens of other conspiracy-propagating websites such as beforeitsnews.com, nodisinfo.com and veteranstoday.com. Starbird cataloged 81 of them, linked through a huge community of interest connected by shared followers on Twitter, with many of the tweets replicated by automated bots.

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“Your brain tells you ‘Hey, I got this from three different sources,’?” she says. “But you don’t realize it all traces back to the same place, and might have even reached you via bots posing as real people. If we think of this as a virus, I wouldn’t know how to vaccinate for it.”

Starbird says she’s concluded, provocatively, that we may be headed toward “the menace of unreality — which is that nobody believes anything anymore.” Alex Jones, she says, is “a kind of prophet. There really is an information war for your mind. And we’re losing it.”
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