US Politics - Trump cancels summit having to do with North Korea

Britain inspired the US to have the Second Amendment. What a shame that they can't inspire us to be peaceful and gunless

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Looking at how its turned out, maybe the 13 colonies should have remained English.....just think, we would have universal health care, little or no guns, a better soccer team, prettier flag and anthem, lots of tea, 1 month paid vacation, the BBC instead of fox, better educated people............on and on........oh, The Beatles.

Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló says the federal government has denied the U.S. territory's request for its citizens to redeem food stamps for ready-to-eat hot meals, amid widespread food shortages and power outages in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria.

The nearly 1.3 million people on food stamps in Puerto Rico — almost 40 percent of its population— are unable to use the benefits of the federal program to buy fasts food or pre-prepared meals at supermarkets, according to The New York Times.

Food-stamp recipients are usually prohibited from buying hot foods and other items that can be eaten “in store” such as sandwiches, soup or pizza.

Puerto Rico requested the administration temporarily lift the restrictions on the program, formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

So far, the administration has refused, even after granting similar waivers in Texas after Hurricane Harvey and in Florida after Hurricane Irma.

The SNAP waivers for Texas and Florida expired Sept. 30.

Many of the island's supermarkets are still without electricity after the storm, disabling the computers needed to redeem the credits.

Rosselló said 95 percent of Puerto Rico still remains without power, more than one week after Maria slammed into the island.

Jared Kushner's personal email moved to Trump Organization computers amid public scrutiny

President Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner and daughter Ivanka Trump moved their personal email accounts to computers run by the Trump Organization as public scrutiny intensified over their use of private emails to conduct White House business, internet registration records show.

The move, made just days after Kushner’s use of a personal email account first became public, came shortly after special counsel Robert Mueller asked the White House to turn over records related to his investigation of Russia's interference in the 2016 election and possible collusion with Trump associates. It also more closely intertwines President Trump’s administration with his constellation of private businesses.

Memento Mori wrote:

Alvin Flummux wrote:The only thing the Trumps haven't yet done is hosted their private email server in their home.

It's only Tuesday.

According to internet registration records reviewed by USA TODAY and cybersecurity researchers, Kushner and his wife Ivanka Trump, who is also a senior adviser, switched the location of their email accounts to a server operated by the Trump Organization on either Sept. 26 or 27, as attention from the media and lawmakers intensified.

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The Supreme Court is hearing a case on whether partisan gerrymandering can be considered unconstitutional, and Kennedy is likely to be the deciding vote. ... Wisconsin is appealing a decision by a lower court, which ruled that the way Republicans crafted the state’s electoral maps in 2010 was illegal. The attorneys for the state, who are defending the maps, got plenty of questions from Kennedy, while the Wisconsin Democrats, who want the maps struck down, got none. Kennedy spoke 10 times during the state of Wisconsin’s arguments. He asked five questions and made five statements.

“If you get a lot of questions, you’re going to lose,” Adam Liptak, The New York Times’ Supreme Court reporter, told FiveThirtyEight in 2015.

Justices aren’t just asking questions to get information from the lawyers arguing their cases. In some ways, the questions aren’t meant for the lawyers at all. The justices ask questions to signal their positions to their fellow members of the court, and to potentially sway other justices to their side. If they’re skeptical of one side’s argument, they often pepper that side with queries. Chief Justice John Roberts has even described the lawyers as a “backboard” — the questions bounce off them and come right back to the bench.

A body of academic research has confirmed this conventional wisdom, showing empirically that questions from the justices are usually bad news for the party on the receiving end. The number of questions, their length, their linguistic content and even the tone of voice in which they’re asked are all statistically significant factors in predicting the court’s eventual decision.

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Kennedy didn’t speak during the Wisconsin Democrats’ arguments, but they were clearly speaking to him. Their attorney cited him twice during his arguments, and, as one of their attorneys in lower court, Nicholas Stephanopoulos, told FiveThirtyEight, “Our first Supreme Court brief … cites Anthony Kennedy all over the place and that’s not purely for tactical reasons, it’s actually because he’s said a lot of things that we think our test is consistent with.”

Of course, some of the other justices had plenty to say during the Wisconsin Democrats’ arguments. The most junior justice, Neil Gorsuch, dismissively compared their legal test to the hodgepodge of spices in his steak rub, and Chief Justice Roberts called it “sociological gobbledygook.” But Kennedy sat in silence, taking in a case that was tailor made for him.

Heskimo wrote:The Monopoly man doesn't have, and never has had, a monocle.

Cuttooth wrote:

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"I don't need to do this to survive, I'm a good boy."

Secret Service: No visitor logs for Mar-a-Lago

There are no visitor logs or other system of tracking those who visited President Donald Trump at his winter retreat known as Mar-a-Lago, a Secret Service official confirmed Wednesday.

Responding to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, Special Agent Kim Campbell said that her agency had a smattering of records regarding some foreign dignitaries and law enforcement officers who met Trump earlier this year during his stays at the Palm Beach resort he owns.

However, Campbell acknowledged the lack of a comprehensive or even a routine process for tracking such visitors, such as the one used for the White House.

"The...search and review of records confirmed that there is no system for keeping track of Presidential visitors at Mar-a-Lago, as there is at the White House Complex," wrote Campbell, head of the Secret Service's Liaison Divison. "Specifically, it was determined that there is no grouping, listing or set of records that would reflect Presidential visitors to Mar-a-Lago."

The Justice Department filed Campbell's declaration, signed under penalty of perjury, with a federal court in New York late Wednesday night in response to a FOIA lawsuit brought by three transparency-focused groups: the National Security Archive, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.

Those groups and others have been agitating for months for public disclosure of information on who met Trump at the Florida club or in other venues like the White House and Trump Tower. Many liberal activists contend that Mar-a-Lago offers an opportunity for wealthy club members and their guests to lobby the president on policy decisions, without any public disclosure or oversight.

U.S. District Court Judge Katherina Failla had imposed a September 15 deadline for the government to turn over information responsive to the FOIA lawsuit, to the extent it was not exempt from disclosure under various legal provisions, such as a protections for personal privacy or sensitive law enforcement methods.

At the deadline, the government turned over only a single document: a two-page list of Japanese officials who took part in Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's visit last February.

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