Mediaboss Marketing

(CNN) - Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill said Tuesday that police officers across the country should be required to wear body cameras in order for their departments to qualify for federal funds.

McCaskill believes that the ubiquity of cameras gives way to incidents in which only part of the story is recorded, seen or understood. So, a body camera on every officer will not only protect citizens against police misconduct, but also protect officers from wrongful accusations.

"Everywhere I go people now have cameras," said McCaskill, a Democrat. "And police officers are now at a disadvantage, because someone can tape the last part of an encounter and not tape the first part of the encounter. And it gives the impression that the police officer has overreacted when they haven't."

McCaskill made the comments at an event in Springfield, Missouri, where she answered questions about the shooting of Michael Brown by Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson, CNN affiliate KOLR reported.

In the wake of the shooting and community outrage to the response from Ferguson police, McCaskill has called for congressional hearings to examine a Defense Department program that allows local police departments to acquire military weaponry.

Already, President Barack Obama has called for a review of programs that allow for the transfer of military weapons to the police.

Section 1208 in the National Defense Authorization Act has allowed the Defense Department to grant military hardware to local law enforcement since 1990. A law enforcement support program, the military's Defense Logistics Agency, was established in 1999 to facilitate law enforcement militarization.

McCaskill said Thursday she hopes the Senate will embrace her body camera proposal and that it will eventually become law.

"I would like to see us say, 'If you want federal funding in your community, you've got to have body cams on your officers,'" she said. "And I think that would go a long way towards solving some of these problems, and it would be a great legacy over this tragedy that's occurred in Ferguson, regardless of what the facts say at the end as to whether or not anyone is criminally culpable."

View original post here:
President Obama CNN Political Ticker - CNN.com Blogs

The former president (well, actually his office) continues to respond to wedding invitations -- even though he's left the White House. Apparently mail forwarding is one government function that has avoided the DC gridlock.

Yes, it's only a form letter. But these recipients aren't going to let that dim their excitement.

Earlier this week, Brooke Allen tweeted a photo of a response her mother, Liz Whitlow, just received from the Office of Barack and Michelle Obama to say congratulations on her wedding.

Soon, others started sharing photos of similar responses they received. It turns out Obama's office responded to wedding invitations throughout his eight years in office.

Chelsea Roden and her wife, Lisa, sent then-President Obama a handwritten invitation to their wedding in 2016.

"I was really grateful for the work his administration did," Roden told CNN. "When we first started dating in 2011, same-sex marriage wasn't even on the table."

She completely forgot about the invitation she mailed to the White House until she got a response back one month before her wedding.

It read: "Congratulations on your wedding day. May this special time be blessed with love, laughter, and happiness. We wish you all the best as you embark on your journey together, and we hope your bond grows stronger with each passing year."

When Carmen Alvarez-Mendoza got married in 2014, she invited the Obamas as well as Oprah and Ellen DeGeneres. She told CNN she was pleasantly surprised when POTUS and FLOTUS actually responded.

And for all the single ladies out there, it's not just wedding invitations that get an Obama response.

Aubree Spath mailed her high school graduation announcement to the White House and got a lengthy reply.

"It's somewhat magical reading the letter and thinking Obama's proud of you," Spath told CNN. "It really did put the cherry on top of my senior year."

New mom Rachel Newsom sent the Obamas a birth announcement for her daughter, Harlem, in October and got a response welcoming the baby to the world.

Newsom said she wanted to send the announcement before Obama left office. "I was nervous that I might not get a response from the Obama administration," she said. "I wondered if I had waited too late."

It seems that Obama plans to keep up the tradition even though he no longer has the White House letterhead.

Today the former President turns 56.

Go ahead and send him a birthday card and see if he responds.

Read the rest here:
Even in retirement, Obama still responds to strangers' wedding invitations - CNN

The U.S. Justice Department has significantly ramped up its number of leak investigations, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced Friday, more than tripling themcompared with the past three years numbers combined.

Thestatement likely came much to the glee of President Donald Trump. But it was his predecessor, Barack Obama, who charted a course for Trump when it came to leak crackdowns.

Perhaps answering his bosss cries for investigations, Sessions said that at least four people, three of whose cases had not been reported on as of Friday, have already been charged with unlawfully disclosing classified material or with concealing contacts with foreign intelligence officers. He also said the Justice Departmenthad seen a boom in criminal referrals for probes into intelligence agency leaks.

Daily Emails and Alerts - Get the best of Newsweek delivered to your inbox

Referrals for investigations of classified leaks to the Department of Justice from our intelligence agencies have exploded, Sessions said. In the first six months of this administration, DOJ has already received nearly as many criminal referrals involving unauthorized disclosures of classified information as we received in the last three years combined.

To date, only Reality Winner, a 25-year-old federal government contractor accused ofleaking classified information to The Intercept, is known to be facing prosecution. Her trial is set to begin in October.

Sessionss DOJ still has to play catch-up to reach the number of leak investigations from Obamas time.

DOJ prosecutors under the Obama administration pursued nine leak cases, and in May 2013 it was disclosed that federal investigators had surreptitiously seized two months worth of phones records from Associated Press reporters and editors, including home phones and cellphones, The New York Times reported.

Later in 2013, a scathing report from the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ)said the Obama administrations war on leaks had been the worst of its kind since the days of Richard Nixon, who engaged in a cover-up that eventually led to his resignation in 1974.

At the time of the CPJs report, Obamas team had used the Espionage Act, passed in 1917, to kick-start eight prosecutions involving allegations of leakedclassified information, including those against Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden. Manning was later granted clemency by Obama, before he left office earlier this year, while Snowden remains in exile in Russia.

Though CPJs report did show that the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington set off a major expansion of information deemed to be classifiedstarting with the administration of President George W. BushObamas eight prosecutions far outranked the three Espionage Act prosecutions under every other president before him.

In May 2016, Obama said that many of the cases prosecuted during his time in office actually were holdovers, but according to Politico that proved to be untrue.

Many of the cases that are often lumped into, you know, my ledger, essentially were cases that were brought before we came into office, Obama said to a college newspaper. Some of them are serious, where you had purposeful leaks of information that could harm or threaten operations or individuals who were in the field involved with really sensitive national security issues.

Politico found that of the eight cases, three were from the Bush administration that preceded Obama.

One of those cases involved New York Times reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, who in 2005 revealed the National Security Agencys domestic and clandestine surveillance program. Risen also wrote about a CIA operation to disrupt Irans nuclear program in a book published in 2006. Under Obama, the DOJ and Attorney General Eric Holder attempted to force Risen to testify and reveal his source of the classified information.

In December, Risen penned an op-ed forthe Times,and its closing paragraph now seems almost prophetic: Press freedom advocates already fear that under Senator Jeff Sessions, Mr. Trumps choice to be attorney general, the Justice Department will pursue journalists and their sources at least as aggressively as Mr. Obama did.

See the original post:
Obama's 'War on Leakers' Was More Aggressive Than Trump's So Far - Newsweek

With the hourly deluge that is the Trump news cycle, it can be easy to forget that Barack Obama was our president just eight months ago. For some of us, it has felt too long since weve seen that familiarand downright presidentialgrin. In hopes of reproducing it, and to commemorate his birthday, weve got five factoids you probably didnt know about the 44th President, from the time he was rejected as a model to a young Obamas dreams of being an architect.

Happy Birthday, President Obama! We promise we wont ask you for proof.

While at Harvard, he once attempted to model for a calendar (and he was promptly rejected by the judging committee) When Obama was at Harvard, a classmate decided to create a calendar featuring 12 of the schools most promising African-American male law students (as a response to damning portrayals of black men in mainstream media). According to a New York Times article from 1991, the student, Troy Chapman, hoped the project featuring Harvards brightest would paint a different picture. With 90 or so black male law students that year, the competition was apparently so fierce that Chapman employed the help of many of the schools 110 African-American female students to decide who would ultimately make the cut. Obama was a student, and while one might think hed be a shoe-in, the judges thought otherwisethe fact that he was the first black president of the Harvard Law Review apparently didnt help him, either .

He is baby-crazy Obama has been known to love children, and told CBSs Gayle King last year that kids were some of his more memorable visitors over the years at the White House. I love getting on the ground with babies in the Oval Office, he said. And theyre unrestrained so they will run around. They will take out all the apples out of the bowl and set them in various places and then put them back. Theyre out of control, he noted, laughing. His chief official White House photographer would often capture the former president playing with toddlers in the West Wing, and images reveal that he had no qualms about joining them in their crawling adventures on the floor, as he did most notably with Ella Harper Rhodes, the daughter of former Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes.

He carried lucky charms in his pocket during his presidency For President Obama, personal stories have always been central to not only his campaign, but his belief system of what unites us as people. In January of 2016, he revealed to YouTube vlogger Ingrid Nilsen that he always carried a few pieces of memorabilia or lucky charms given to him over the years to remind him of this. Ever since I started running for office, people started handing me things when I'd speak to a crowdlittle lucky charms or keepsakes, or things that meant something to them. And so now I have a habit of I always carry around . . . a few things that I just stick in my pocket to remind me of all the people Ive met along the way and the stories they told me. Among the items Obama procured from his pocket during the interview were rosary beads from Pope Francis, a small Buddha statuette, and a poker chip from a biker guy with a big handlebar mustache and a bunch of tats. Though he admits hes not very superstitious, he looked to them as symbols of the faith of his constituents. If I feel tired or I feel discouraged sometimes, I can reach into my pocket, and I say, Yeah, thats something I can overcome because somebody gave me this privilege to work on these issues that are going to affect them. I better get back to work.

Speaking of stories, he is a writer of short ones In an interview with then New York Times chief book critic Michiko Kakutani about the importance of reading fictionbeloved by Obama from the time he was a child for allowing him a sense of escapism after having grown up in several countries and feeling, at times, culturally displacedhe shared that, while he was in college, he wrote short stories. At that time, writing was the way I sorted through a lot of crosscurrents in my liferace, class, family, he explained. And I genuinely believe that it was part of the way in which I was able to integrate all these pieces of myself into something relatively whole. A believer that fiction can bridge the gaps between even the most different of people, Obama famously quoted To Kill A Mockingbird s Atticus Finch in his farewell address : You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view . . . until you climb into his skin and walk around in it. It received, as one can imagine, roaring applause from the crowd. Fiction was useful as a reminder of the truths under the surface of what we argue about every day and was a way of seeing and hearing the voices, the multitudes of this country, he told Kakutani.

He wanted to be an architect, but didnt have the creative chops for it In 2011, while at a dinner for Eduardo Souto de Moura, the recipient of that years Pritzker Architecture Prize, Obama admitted that he had early dreams of being an architect. He went into politics when he reportedly discovered that he wasnt as creative as he hoped to be. In his speech, he said that, to him, architecture was all about creating buildings and spaces that inspire us, that help us do our jobs, that bring us together, and that become, at their best, works of art that we can move through and live in. Revealing that he believed architecture is the most democratic of art forms, his switch to politics seemed a natural choice.

Original post:
5 Things You Didn't Know About Barack Obama - Vogue.com

The bill makes Aug. 4 an honorary holiday for former President Barack Obama.

Gov. Bruce Rauner today signed into law a bill declaring Aug. 4 Barack Obama Day, effective in 2018.

Senate Bill 55 passed through both chambers of the General Assembly without a single dissenting vote. The bill would only make Aug. 4 an honorary holiday and not a legal holiday, unlike an earlier proposal.

The first attempt to create Obama Day in the state failed in March by six votes in the House. That plan, which would have made the day a legal holiday, was estimated to cost Illinois taxpayers nearly $20 million in lost productivity and state employee personnel costs given that state employees would have had the day off. Under that bill, had Obama Day fallen on a Sunday, state workers wouldve been given the following Monday off, as well.

Aug. 4, 2018, will mark the first Barack Obama Day in Illinois.

See original here:
The bill makes Aug. 4 an honorary holiday for former President Barack Obama. - Illinois Policy