Muslim American Society Investigating ‘Oversight’ After Video Published of Kids Singing About Beheading

The Muslim American Society will investigate an event at a Philadelphia Islamic Center last month at which children sang violent songs which the organization says were not "properly vetted." The group called the incident "an unintended mistake and an oversight," the Philadelphia Inquirer reports.

A video of the event published by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) shows children singing violent lyrics. One girl says "we will chop off their heads" to "liberate the sorrowful and exalted Al-Aqsa Mosque" in Jerusalem. "We will defend the land of divine guidance with our bodies, and we will sacrifice our souls without hesitation. We will lead the army of Allah fulfilling his promise, and we will subject them to eternal torture," a girl reads. Children also sang about the "blood of martyrs" and "Rebels, rebels, rebels." "While we celebrate the coming together of different cultures and languages, not all songs were properly vetted," the Muslim American Society said in a statement on Friday. "This was an unintended mistake and an oversight in which the center and the students are remorseful. MAS will conduct an internal investigation to ensure this does not occur again."

The person in charge of the event was dismissed. The Anti-Defamation League condemned the songs sung by the children. "Children should not be indoctrinated to hate. These young people should never have been asked to make speeches and dance and lip-sync to songs that glorify violence against Jews and the State of Israel. The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is deeply complex and painful on all sides, and the only chance for a peaceful future is to teach our children to pursue peace," the ADL said in a statement.

https://freebeacon.com/politics/muslim-american-society-investigating-oversight-after-video-published-of-kids-singing-violent-lyrics/

NYT Editorial Board: ‘Trump Is Right’ About Border Crisis, Congress Should Approve Funds

The New York Times editorial board urged Congress to give the Donald Trump administration requested emergency funds, writing that the president was right about a crisis on the border. "Congress, Give Trump His Border Money," read the headline on the Sunday editorial, which argued that Democrats should approve the $4.5 billion in funds that were requested in a letter from Acting Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought. "We are continuing to experience a humanitarian and security crisis at the southern border of the United States," Vought wrote. "Apprehensions are expected to surpass one million by the end of the year, more than doubling those compared to last year. The number of large-scale groups of family units and unaccompanied alien children (UAC), primarily from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, seeking to enter the country and claim asylum has increased dramatically."

"President Trump is right: There is a crisis at the southern border. Just not the one he rants about," the editors wrote. They argue that while Trump is wrong to demand a wall and to present the border as a natural security issue, there is a very real humanitarian crisis at the border due to the surge in asylum claims and wall funding is not included in the request. "As resources are strained and the system buckles, the misery grows," they write. "Something needs to be done. Soon. Unfortunately, political gamesmanship once again threatens to hold up desperately needed resources." The editorial board urged Democrats to approve the funding, but cautioned that Trump needed to grant some concessions as well. "If the White House is serious about needing the money, it should be prepared to agree to a few conditions — and convey the need for flexibility to Senate Republicans…" they wrote. "Both sides need to dial back the fighting words, resist the temptation to finger-point and find a creative way through this minefield." The admission about a crisis on the border comes after former Obama DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson said during an April Fox News appearance that the influx of migrants represented "a crisis by any measure." By contrast, 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Julian Castro has called the notion of a border crisis "B.S."

>>6431941

Agreed, nothing more than optics at this point. They would have to move the bar quite a bit further for it to be believable imho.

>>6432027

Yup nothing to see here.

>>6432077

They just got woke, only not the way they expected! They will be spending a long time pondering where they went wrong in their planning..Only difference this time is they will not have a snowballs inch of a chance at a re-do.

Tech giants rethink the businesses that made them big

Google, Facebook Inc. and other tech giants have long tinkered with ways to grow outside the core businesses they dominate. Now those efforts are becoming urgent. Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, beset by public anger over abuses on the social network, spent the company’s annual developer conference last week talking up his vision for a Facebook more focused on private messaging and small groups than on the advertising-driven social-media hub that gained it nearly 2.4 billion monthly users. Messaging is one of several areas Facebook has been eyeing for new opportunities. Another got the spotlight last week when The Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook is recruiting financial firms and online merchants to help launch a cryptocurrency-based payments system.

Apple Inc., meanwhile, said last week its sales-and-profit slump extended into a second straight quarter—the first time that has happened in more than two years—thanks to falling sales of the iPhone, the product that turned it into a colossus. Its response has been to try to morph itself into a services company fueled by app and entertainment sales as much as hardware. Google parent Alphabet Inc. has been Big Tech’s most eclectic big-idea factory. It has worked on self-driving cars for a decade and has arms devoted to everything from balloon-tethered internet access to extending human life. But it has had little success turning those efforts into moneymaking businesses. Advertising is still 85% of its revenue, and operating losses at its “other bets” segment ballooned by 52% in the last quarter to $868 million, Alphabet said last week. The perils of its ad dependence were laid bare when an unexpected drop in quarterly sales sent Alphabet shares down 7.5% on Tuesday, their biggest one-day drop since 2012.

A confluence of forces is behind Big Tech’s business-model ferment. Blowback over privacy abuses and misinformation threatens ad-driven strategies at Facebook and Google built on harvesting people’s information and maximizing the time they spend glued to the internet. The smartphone, which underpinned so much of the tech industry’s boom over the past decade, is maturing, with incremental innovation and flagging sales. And the law of large numbers, combined with the tech industry’s history of upstarts leapfrogging incumbents on innovation, compels executives to seek out new places to disrupt, lest they themselves be disrupted.

“Their perspective is: We have to keep the growth,” says Tim Kendall, a former senior executive at Facebook and Pinterest Inc. who now runs Moment, an app to help manage smartphone use. Mr. Kendall says the need to diversify is all the greater because regulatory concerns make it risky for giants to bet on growing their share of the markets they already dominate. “The current regulatory climate is such that all of them are saying, ‘We can’t acquire growth into our core business because the [Federal Trade Commission] will block it.’”

Mr. Zuckerberg in an interview with the Journal last week emphasized the significance of Facebook’s changes, calling his plan to build out less-public communication networks “the beginning of a new chapter” and attributing some of the recent executive departures to the magnitude of the switch.

https://www.foxnews.com/tech/tech-giants-rethink-the-businesses-that-made-them-big

Big Tech Trying to Have it Both Ways as Platform and Publisher

Google, Facebook and Twitter are private companies, so the constitutional guarantees of free speech generally do not apply to people using their platforms. But it’s not that simple. The tech giants have been playing fast and loose with labeling themselves platforms v. publishers, trying to claim protections from both of them. As publishers, the companies can restrict speech on their platforms as they see fit. Their editorial decisions (not those of their customers) are protected by the First Amendment. However, they are open to lawsuits over the content. As a platform, or provider of a computer service, a company cannot be liable for content users post on their sites. This is from Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. When Facebook was sued by the app startup Six4Three, the tech giant’s lawyers claimed it was a publisher. Six4Three accused Facebook of maliciously removing app developers’ access to friends’ data, forcing it out of business. Facebook claimed it was acting as a publisher and was allowed discretion of what to permit. But in that same case, Facebook asserted that it was a platform and not liable for users’ content.

The big tech giants act as publishers when they weed out offensive content, much like a news publication would. A true platform does not engage in these kinds of restraints. For example, a PC is a platform. You can do whatever you want on your PC and no one is going to censor you. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted to Congress that the company is “responsible for the content” on its platform. “We didn’t take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake,” he said. “It was my mistake, and I’m sorry. I started Facebook, I run it, and I’m responsible for what happens here.” Facebook is proactive about removing content. For example, instead of waiting for someone to complain, it reviews urls the first time they are posted on the site. It even reviews urls sent over its Messenger chat program.

The government actually could jump in and regulate free speech within the big tech companies. In Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. v. Federal Communications Commission, the Supreme Court held that the First Amendment “does not disable the government from taking steps to ensure that private interests not restrict . . . the free flow of information and ideas.” But this would be a dangerous erosion of the First Amendment. The courts have already found a limited forum on the pages Facebook allows for government officials, departments and agencies. A federal district court judge ruled that President Trump blocking people on Twitter violates free speech (the case is on appeal).

If they are a platform protected by Section 230, tech companies are allowed a limited amount of moderation to ban “offensive” speech. However, this is not the same as regulating political speech, which goes too far. Big tech regularly engages in censorship, especially of conservative viewpoints. Banning Infowars, Laura Loomer and Milo Yiannopoulos is banning political speech. It may not be likable speech, but it is nevertheless political speech, not the offensive type of speech Section 230 had in mind. Once those people are banned, it becomes easier to ban regular conservatives. On April 19, Twitter suspended actor James Woods from accessing his account. Woods is a regular conservative who happens to have a large following and is very witty. The tweet that got him suspended was in response to the Mueller report exonerating the Trump campaign from Russian collusion, "If you try to kill the King, you better not miss. #HangThemAll." How is this any different from the revered free speech of Patrick Henry, “Give me liberty or give me death!” And unlike Woods, Henry meant his statement literally.

By engaging in censorship, big tech is behaving more like publishers than platforms. Lydia Laurenson came up with an easy test for companies to determine which category they fall into: “Does your company want to change the world by making the tool everyone uses — or would you prefer to change the world by being the voice that everyone trusts?” Big tech is trying to be a new type of hybrid media platform. But they can’t have it both ways and use the benefits of both to mistreat conservatives. It doesn’t follow the law. Law professor Adam Candeub recommends that either Congress or the courts step in and clarify the matter. As the companies continue to engage in censorship of conservatives, it is clear they are acting as publishers.

https://townhall.com/columnists/rachelalexander/2019/05/06/big-tech-trying-to-have-it-both-ways-as-platform-and-publisher-n2545882

Treasury rejects demand for Trump tax returns, setting up court battle with congressional Democrats

The Treasury on Monday declined a demand from House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal, D-Mass., to review President Trump’s tax returns, likely setting up a high-profile court battle over Congress' power to obtain the president’s financial records. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin had set Monday as the department’s own deadline to decide whether to cooperate with the request, which was made under a nearly 100-year-old law that grants chairmen of congressional tax-writing committees the ability to confidentially review tax returns.

In a brief letter to Neal, Mnuchin reiterated the argument he and Trump’s personal attorneys have made that the request lacks a legitimate legislative purpose and is therefore unconstitutional. Mnuchin says he arrived at the conclusion after consulting with the Justice Department. He added that department will provide a written opinion on the matter "as soon as practicable."

In his initial request for the information, Neal asserts several legislative purposes. Those include oversight of how the IRS reviews presidential tax payments and whether the tax collection agency audits businesses owned and controlled by a sitting president. According to IRS guidance, presidents and vice presidents are automatically placed under audit, following a major tax underpayment by former President Richard Nixon. Despite his opposition to the congressional request for Trump's tax information, Mnuchin offered to "provide information concerning the Committee's stated interest in how the IRS conducts mandatory examinations of Presidents, as provided by the Internal Revenue Manual." The stalemate sets the stage for a major court fight over Congress' power to obtain information.

In a brief statement, Neal said: "Today, Secretary Mnuchin notified me that the IRS will not provide the documents I requested under Section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code. I will consult with counsel and determine the appropriate response.” The law Neal cites was passed in 1924 in reaction to a bribery scandal involving President Warren Harding's Cabinet, known as the Teapot Dome Scandal. Trump's returns and financial information have been the source of scrutiny since Trump became the first major presidential candidate in decades to refuse to release his tax returns to the public and the first president in decades to decline to divest himself from his business interests while in office.

The House of Representatives may now sue Mnuchin for failure to comply with the law or subpoena the returns. It is unclear how quickly a court battle over either would play out. Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney has said the administration will fight the request to the Supreme Court. Treasury's refusal to grant the tax returns request is the latest in a series of showdowns between House Democrats and Trump over the president's finances. Trump has sued to prevent his banks and accountants from disclosing his financial information to congressional investigators.

In a tweet reacting to the Treasury's letter, senior Ways and Means Committee member Rep. Bill Pascrell, D-N.J., called the Treasury's actions "unprecedented." "What’s unprecedented is refusing to comply with our lawful request," tweeted the New Jersey Democrat. "What’s unprecedented is a [Department of Justice] being bodyguard to the executive. What’s unprecedented is an entire [government] shielding a corrupt [President] from accountability."

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/economy/treasury-rejects-demand-for-trump-tax-returns-setting-up-court-battle-with-congressional-democrats