With current control in Congress and the White House, Democrats are considering attempting to add Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico as states. The additions will likely give Democrats more power, which may explain why Democrats support Puerto Rico statehood more than Puerto Ricans.

A recent Economist/YouGov poll of 1,500 U.S. adults taken from April 25-27 found that a plurality of Americans (43%) support statehood for Puerto Rico, while 31% were opposed and about a quarter were undecided.

However, the approval for Puerto Rican statehood increased by 20 points among Democrats.

The poll found 63% of Democrats approved of statehood for Puerto Rico. Just 13% of Democrats were opposed, although another 24% remained undecided. Even if all undecided Democrats surveyed ended up opposing Puerto Rico statehood, support for Puerto Rico statehood would still be higher among U.S. Democrats than native Puerto Ricans.

In 2014, Kevin Lamarque for Reuters reported:

| President Barack Obama came into office in 2009 promising a new era of unprecedented transparency in his administration. But when he leaves office, reporters may remember him for an effort that has largely turned out to be the opposite — and for being what one affected reporter has called the “greatest enemy to press freedom in a generation.”

At a time when journalists’ roles in covering different, critical conflict zones have been under the microscope, renewed attention has come to the case involving James Risen. He is the New York Times journalist who has been fighting efforts by two different Departments of Justice — under Presidents Obama and George W. Bush — to compel him to identify sources from a 2006 book that reveals a secret CIA plan to sabotage Iran’s budding nuclear program.

For the past five years, he has battled the Obama administration’s Justice Department, which in 2009 took a rather unprecedented step of renewing a subpoena scheduled to expire that year. From his case and others the Obama administration has pursued, Risen told The Times’ Maureen Dowd recently that Obama represented a fundamental obstacle for press freedom.

“It’s hypocritical,” Risen said. “A lot of people still think this is some kind of game or signal or spin. They don’t want to believe that Obama wants to crack down on the press and whistleblowers. But he does. He’s the greatest enemy to press freedom in a generation.” |

For the full text -> Why The Obama Administration Wants This Journalist In Jail 

Reuters exclusively reported how deployments of facial recognition from Israeli start-up Any Vision show how the surveillance software has gained adoption across the United States even as regulatory and ethical debates about it rage. The technology finds certain faces in photos or videos, with banks representing one sector that has taken interest in systems from Any Vision or its many competitors to improve security and service. Organizations in other industries are chasing similar goals. The Los Angeles hospital Cedars-Sinai and oil giant BP Plc are among several previously unreported users of Any Vision.

The federal government has long been covering up the existence of UFOs because of religious objections, concerns over tarnishing its own reputation and fears of inciting public panic, according to the former Pentagon official who says he ran the program investigating “unidentified aerial phenomena” or UAP.

This longtime suppression of research data has resulted in a serious threat to US national security, controversial whistleblower Luis “Lue” Elizondo told The Post.

With a bombshell government report on UFOs set to be released any time between now and the end of June, Elizondo has revealed the shocking things he alleges to have learned — and the chilling reason why some in the Pentagon don’t want this information made public.

As part of his job, Elizondo says he had access to the Pentagon’s UFO data and interviewed military eyewitnesses who encountered UAP on an almost “daily basis.” Meanwhile, Navy pilots have testified about engaging 50-foot Tic-Tac shaped vessels only to see them disappear in the blink of an eye. Other pilots said their fighter jets had a “near collision” with a strange “sphere encasing a cube.” Elizondo scrutinized all this evidence, including radar and electro-optical data, that showed unknown aircraft zipping 60 miles in five seconds and descending at speeds of 14 miles per second.

“Do the math,” Elizondo, also a former intelligence officer for the US Department of Defense, told The Post. “You’ll see that it’s very fast.” (BTW: We did the math — and 60 miles in five seconds is 216,000 miles-per-hour.)

Despite those mind-blowing discoveries, Elizondo — who says he came into the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program in 2008, and headed it up from 2010 until 2017 — was always swimming upstream. He tried to share frightening evidence with close-minded non-believers who shunned his research, which he has now compared to an “intelligence failure on the level of 9/11.”

The left had a lot of fun this week mocking a false claim in some conservative circles that President Joe Biden was planning on limiting hamburger consumption. There are a few lessons in all of this. The first is obvious and has been driven home in the corporate media: Conservatives need to be more careful on the facts. By taking liberties on the potential costs of Biden’s climate goals, conservatives walked into a hailstorm of criticism that could easily have been avoided.

The second and more important lesson is that the hamburger misinformation pales in comparison to the corporate media’s misinformation on Biden’s climate targets. Biden has proposed cutting U.S. emissions by 50% below 2005 levels by 2030. This is double the hugely ambitious target set by former President Barack Obama in 2015.

Meeting Biden’s emissions targets would require major lifestyle changes that Americans may not want to make. But the media has done a great job of obscuring this fact, so people aren’t aware of the radical sacrifices that could be demanded of them. Talk about misinformation. Hiding the impact of Biden’s climate goals on the American people is misinformation of the highest order.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) traded barbs through the media on Thursday as the longtime political rivals face off over issues including the reopening of businesses in the state.

The feud was reignited at a vaccination event in Buffalo, N.Y., where reporters asked the governor about de Blasio’s announcement that New York City was hoping to loosen most if not all of its COVID-19 restrictions by July 1.

“First, the mayor of New York, I don’t know what he’s indicative of. And I say that as a former New York City boy,” Cuomo said, according to Business Insider. “Ask the people in New York City what they think of the mayor of New York City, and I would second their opinion.”

De Blasio’s spokesman, Bill Neidhardt, fired back in a statement to the New York Post by referencing how Cuomo is facing multiple allegations of unwanted sexual contact

“Serial sexual assaulter says what?” Neidhart said in response to Cuomo’s comments about de Blasio.

When asked about Cuomo’s attacks on the Mayor today, City Hall press secretary Bill Neidhardt responds: “Serial sexual assaulter says what?”

— City Nolan (wears a , so should you) (@ndhapple) April 29, 2021

Cuomo’s spokesman, Rich Azzopardi, later sent reporters a link to a tweet depicting Val Kilmer’s character from “Top Gun” making a taunting face at Tom Cruise’s character.

Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers (D) signed legislation into law on Tuesday making it mandatory for schools to include lessons about the Holocaust and other genocides in social studies education for students.

“This bill will affect generations of kids in our state and bring increased awareness, and recognition in our schools to the tragedies of the Holocaust, the pervasiveness of anti-Semitism to this day, and hopefully cultivate a generation that is more compassionate, more empathetic, and more inclusive,” Evers said in a statement.

“States across our country require or encourage education about the Holocaust for students, I am glad that today, Wisconsin will be joining them,” he added.

Under the measure, school districts, independent charter schools and private schools that participate in a choice program will be required to teach about the Holocaust and other genocide “at least once in grades five through eight, and again at least once in grades nine through twelve,” an announcement from Evers’s office detailing the measure states.

The State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Carolyn Stanford, will also be required to include the Holocaust and other genocides into model academic standards for social studies and develop model curriculum “in consultation with a state agency in another state that has developed such standards,” his office states.