News/Politics

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News/Politics 6-24-15

What’s interesting in the news today?

Open Thread

1. That didn’t take long……

From TheWashingtonPost  “In the wake of the Charleston shooting, Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) are considering ways to renew their failed push to pass meaningful gun-control legislation.

In separate interviews Tuesday night, at a reception before a ceremony hosted by Sandy Hook families where Toomey was honored, the senators discussed their desire to find a new way forward.”

Yeah, because criminals intent on killing always follow gun laws…. 🙄

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2. Good, now throw the book at ’em. 

From Reuters/MSN  “The United States has arrested 1,140 people on charges of sexually preying on children as part of a nationwide sweep to protect children, the U.S. Justice Department said on Monday.

The arrests stemmed from a two-month operation in April and May tracking alleged offenders who use the Internet to lure youths and traffic them into commercial sexual exploitation, child pornography and traveling abroad to engage in child sex tourism, it said in a news release.

The arrests were part of Operation Broken Heart, which last year netted 275 arrests for child sexual predation.”

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3. What’s wrong with this picture?

From BloombergView  “The U.S. military and Iranian-backed Shiite militias are getting closer and closer in Iraq, even sharing a base, while Iran uses those militias to expand its influence in Iraq and fight alongside the Bashar al-Assad regime in neighboring Syria.

Two senior administration officials confirmed to us that U.S. soldiers and Shiite militia groups are both using the Taqqadum military base in Anbar, the same Iraqi base where President Obama is sending an additional 450 U.S. military personnel to help train the local forces fighting against the Islamic State. Some of the Iran-backed Shiite militias at the base have killed American soldiers in the past.

Some inside the Obama administration fear that sharing the base puts U.S. soldiers at risk. The U.S. intelligence community has reported back to Washington that representatives of some of the more extreme militias have been spying on U.S. operations at Taqqadum, one senior administration official told us. That could be calamitous if the fragile relationship between the U.S. military and the Shiite militias comes apart and Iran-backed forces decide to again target U.S. troops.

American critics of this growing cooperation between the U.S. military and the Iranian-backed militias call it a betrayal of the U.S. personnel who fought against the militias during the 10-year U.S. occupation of Iraq.

“It’s an insult to the families of the American soldiers that were wounded and killed in battles in which the Shia militias were the enemy,” Senate Armed Services Chairman John McCain told us. “Now, providing arms to them and supporting them, it’s very hard for those families to understand.””

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4. I guess if we’re going to fight alongside terrorists, we might as well negotiate with them too. 

From CNN  “The White House will release on Wednesday a presidential directive and an executive order that will allow the government to communicate and negotiate with terrorist groups holding Americans hostage, a source briefed on the matter told CNN.

While the government will maintain its policy of not making “substantive concessions” to captors or paying ransoms, the White House will announce that officials will no longer threaten with criminal prosecution the families of American hostages who do pay ransoms to their relatives’ captors, according to a senior administration official.

Family members of former hostages were meeting at the National Counterterrorism Center on Tuesday to learn of the administration’s decisions after a months-long review of U.S. policies in dealing with American citizens held captive. The families were set to meet with President Barack Obama on Wednesday.

The payment of ransoms to terror groups has long been tolerated in many instances, though it is technically illegal. The administration has looked the other way when families of Americans held overseas have paid ransoms.

But several families — including the family of James Foley — have said they were threatened with prosecution as they considered making ransom payments. A member of the National Security Council staff had threatened Foley’s family with prosecution during their ordeal.”

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5. Time to find a new browser. 

From TheGuardian  “Privacy campaigners and open source developers are up in arms over the secret installing of Google software which is capable of listening in on conversations held in front of a computer.

First spotted by open source developers, the Chromium browser – the open source basis for Google’s Chrome – began remotely installing audio-snooping code that was capable of listening to users.

It was designed to support Chrome’s new “OK, Google” hotword detection – which makes the computer respond when you talk to it – but was installed, and, some users have claimed, it is activated on computers without their permission.

“Without consent, Google’s code had downloaded a black box of code that – according to itself – had turned on the microphone and was actively listening to your room,” said Rick Falkvinge, the Pirate party founder, in a blog post. “Which means that your computer had been stealth configured to send what was being said in your room to somebody else, to a private company in another country, without your consent or knowledge, an audio transmission triggered by … an unknown and unverifiable set of conditions.”

The feature is installed by default as part of Google’s Chrome browser. But open source advocates are up in arms about it also being installed with the open source variant Chromium, because the listening code is considered to be “black box”, not part of the open source audit process.

“We don’t know and can’t know what this black box does,” said Falkvinge.”

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by

News/Politics 6-23-15

What’s interesting in the news today?

Open Thread

1. Repealing ObamaCare would help the deficit, but we already knew that. 

From TheDailySignal  “These new “dynamic” estimates aren’t perfect by any means. However, they will provide policymakers with a better assessment for how legislation will actually affect the federal fisc.

The new dynamic scoring rule was recently tested in response to a request from Senate Budget Committee Chairman Mike Enzi, R-Wyo., to estimate how the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, would affect the deficit and the economy.

For the first time, the CBO and JCT found that repealing Obamacare would increase the gross domestic product by 0.7 percent and that effect alone would reduce projected deficits by $216 billion over the 2016 to 2025 period.

This may sound trivial, but a 0.7 percent increase in GDP is equivalent to an additional $1,400 in the pocket of each household per year. CBO also found that repealing Obamacare would increase capital stocks and the number of people working over the next 10 years.

CBO and JCT also found that that repealing Obamacare would reduce the deficit over the next five years but would then steadily increase the unified budget deficits. However, that assumes Congress will allow both the 40 percent excise tax on high cost health care plans and an automatic reduction in Obamacare subsidies to kick in by 2018, both which seem increasingly unlikely to actually happen.”

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2. Today is the vote on ObamaTrade in the Senate. Let’s hope it loses, but with so many RINO’s, it’s looking unlikely. 

From CenterForImmigrationStudies  “Republican leaders, who seem curiously eager to facilitate this deal for the president, have bent over backwards to assure the many skeptical Republican members that neither Trade Promotion Authority (TPA, or “fast-track” authority) nor the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) pact, which would be the next trade agreement to be rushed through the approval process on an up or down vote without possibility of amendments, includes or allows changes to immigration or visa law.

Some might be willing to trust our leaders on that, but in fact the biggest danger is not that the TPA bill and the TPP treaty make direct changes to immigration law. The biggest danger lies in theother deals that the president’s team is working on. Provisions in these deals do change immigration laws, and also would preventCongress from adjusting immigration laws that are currently being abused. That is the very goal of all trade pacts — to lock in open access to markets under current or more favorable terms, so that it cannot be changed. (For more on the implications of trade agreements for immigration law, see here.)

If we were just talking about free trade in widgets, these treaties would not be particularly relevant to immigration law. But other countries are pushing hard for open access to U.S. job markets, too, euphemistically calling it “trade in services” and the “movement of natural persons”.

Our current visa rules allow foreign-owned labor contractors who “trade in services” to bring in hundreds of thousands of foreign guestworkers each year. These rules, which the president’s trade negotiators would like to freeze in place, have permitted employers to replace some of their U.S. workers with foreign guestworkers, not because the guestworkers have better skills, but because they are cheaper (see the testimony at a recent Senate Judiciary committee hearing). Those who think the current guestworker rules are adequate certainly will not be troubled by freezing them in place, but there is a growing bipartisan consensus that Congress should change the law to curb abuse.

One of the treaties being negotiated by President Obama’s team is known as the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA). The contents were secret until it was obtained by Wikileaks. The documents reveal that the administration hopes to greatly expand access for foreign workers in dozens of occupations including engineering, veterinary medicine, management consulting, construction, waste disposal, hotel and restaurant work, transportation, and recreation. This is not just about computer programmers and nurses; TiSA would facilitate the movement of unlimited numbers of skilled and unskilled workers from participating countries.”

This is what they’ve been trying to hide. 

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3. Sen. Sessions is pleading with Republicans to vote no on this immigration expanding, jobs killing piece of trash. 

From TheWashingtonExaminer  “Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., called on GOP lawmakers to block a “Fast Track” trade bill on Tuesday that President Obama hopes to finalize in order to secure a string of new trade pacts.

Sessions, one of the Senate’s staunchest opponents of the Trade Promotion Authority legislation, or TPA, said new trade deals threaten to cause further economic damage and job loss in the United States and could lead to a back-door deal with China later on.

Approval of TPA will give President Obama expedited power to secure new trade deals, including the Trans-Pacific Partnership with 11 Pacific Rim nations, or TPP. But Sessions said in his letter that Obama has not spelled out how the U.S. economy might change if the TPP were approved, and that Obama is looking to inject environmental issues into the agreement.

“All of this information gives us more than enough basis to slow down and not fast track anything until all of our questions are answered,” Sessions said in a letter sent to Republican Senate lawmakers on Monday. “We should be inherently skeptical of grand designs, too complex to oversee, whose creators can provide no specifics yet pledge utopian results.”

Sessions’ call to oppose the bill came just two hours after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell signaled he was optimistic lawmakers will approve a two-part trade package this week.

The plan calls for lawmakers to vote on TPA on Tuesday, and then vote on Wednesday to extend the Trade Adjustment Assistance Act, a retraining and aid program for workers displaced by trade deals.”

So they’re trying to bribe unions into supporting it. 

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4. First the IRS harasses conservative groups, now the DoJ is harassing conservative websites. 

From HotAir  “Two weeks ago, Ken White at Popehat reported that the Department of Justice had subpoenaed the records of Reason Magazine to identify anonymous commenters on its website.  Nick Gillespie had criticized the DoJ for its prosecution of the Silk Road case, and a few of its commenters had responded with the usual hyperbole. White found out about the subpoena, but Reason remained so quiet that it became a matter of open speculation as to whether the court had slapped a gag order on the libertarian magazine. Today, Gillespie confirms the gag order, which has since been vacated, and explains the circumstances in which the government of the United States prevented a publication from discussing the abuse of power directed at it:

At about 10:30 am ET on Thursday, June 4, our attorney Gayle Sproul (of Levine, Sullivan, Koch, & Schulz) called Velamoor to discuss the subpoena. The call did not go well. Sproul asked Velamoor to consider scaling back the scope of the subpoena by omitting the more benign commenters. Velamoor said simply, “No.” Then Sproul informed him that we would be notifying our commenters about the subpoena to give them the chance to defend their rights to remain anonymous, and that we would not comply with the subpoena as it related to any commenters who moved to quash the subpoena before our compliance deadline. Sproul explained to him that there is case law firmly establishing that these commenters have the right to speak anonymously, and that we would withhold the information of anyone fighting the subpoena. Velamoor disputed that any such free speech rights exist. He asked that we delay notifying the commenters so he could get a court order prohibiting us from disclosing the subpoena to them. We refused. Sproul pointed out that we were perfectly within our rights to share the subpoena given the law and the wording of his own letter. Velamoor then suggested that Reason was “coming close” to interfering with the grand jury investigation. The call ended abruptly. …

Later that day, at approximately 5:35 pm ET, Velamoor sent Reason a gag order he had later secured blocking us from discussing the subpoena or the order itself with anyone outside of Reason, other than our attorney. …

Having already suggested that Reason might have interfered with a grand jury investigation, Velamoor contacted Sproul on the afternoon of Friday, June 5, in response to a letter from her explaining the commenters’ constitutional rights and laying out the timeline of Reason’s notification to them. Velamoor told her that he now had “preliminary information” suggesting that Reason was in violation of the court order. Sproul said we were not and asked for further information. Velamoor refused to give any specifics, saying simply that he was “looking into it further.”

So as of this point in the saga, Reason had been subpoenaed, we had been vaguely—and falsely—accused by a United States Attorney’s office of actions verging on obstruction of justice and contempt of court, and we were now told that we were being investigated further.

Be sure to read it all. White is outraged over the intimidation from the DoJ, especially given the specious claim that any of these comments represented a “true threat” in a legal sense. He calls it “the everyday arrogance of unchecked power”

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5. These guys never seem to get the numbers right in anything. The Chinese hackers were supposed to have gotten the info on 4.2 million Americans. But as with all the math this administration does, the numbers don’t add up. 

From TheWashingtonExaminer  “Approximately 18 million Americans reportedly had their personal records compromised when hackers attacked the Office of Personnel Management’s databases last year.

That number is exponentially bigger than the 4.2 million OPM first acknowledged earlier this month, and far more than the “up to 14 million” figure that began circulating after OPM acknowledged a second attack reached the sensitive information of not just current and former federal employees, but also of some people who simply applied to work for the federal government.

According to CNN, the larger number reflects family members of government workers who may have had their information stolen.”

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by

News/Politics 6-22-15

What’s interesting in the news today?

Open Thread

1. How the media spun the horrific murders in S.C. into a fight over a flag. 

From TheWashingtonExaminer  “It took less than two days for the press to take a story about a white South Carolina man who shot and killed nine black churchgoers, and turn it into a story about the Confederate battle flag flying outside South Carolina’s state house.

For media, the flag as a supposedly influential symbol of racial oppression and hate represented an issue that required immediate attention and hours of coverage. By Friday, the press’ focus on the flag was intense.

“S.C. Confederate flag back in the spotlight after massacre,” CNN noted, tracking the public furor over the state’s choice to display the Civil War leftover.

The Huffington Post featured an op-ed titled simple “Take It Down.”

The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates echoed these sentiments in a separate article titled “Take Down the Confederate Flag—Now.”

“The flag that Dylann Roof embraced, which many South Carolinians embrace, endorses the violence he committed,” the article declared.

The alleged terrorist, Dylann Storm Roof, 21, claims he targeted nine parishioners who had gathered for a prayer meeting Wednesday evening at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church because they were black. Pictures of Roof quickly circulated that showed him standing next to a car with a Confederate flag plate. The image stuck, and controversy over the flag found its footing.”

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2. While the media is busy with their agenda, a much bigger angle to the story goes mostly unreported. 

From WND  “As WND has reported, Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof was a known drug user who was caught with the powerful mind-altering narcotic Suboxone when apprehended by police during an incident on Feb. 28.

Suboxone is used to treat addiction to opioid drugs such as heroin. It’s adverse effects include anxiety, irritability, depersonalization, confusion, suicidal thoughts and irrational, sometimes violent behavior.

Other drugs linked to mass killers have more often been geared toward treating mental illness. According to a data set of U.S. mass shootings from 1982-2012 prepared by Mother Jones magazine, of 62 mass shootings carried out by 64 shooters, the majority of the shooters (41) were noted to have signs of possible mental illness — the precise kinds of mental illnesses that psychotropic medications are prescribed for.

It is a well-documented fact that in the 1980s, a shift occurred in the direction of treating the mentally ill. Rather than institutionalize them, the preferred method was to “mainstream” them, encouraging them to function in society while being treated with a mind-numbing array of new anti-depressants being developed by the pharmaceutical industry.

WND has compiled a list of killings committed by persons who had used mind-altering drugs or recently come off of them at the time of their crimes:”

The list is long, and it just keeps growing. 

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3. The Obama admin and the VA continue to fail our soldiers. 

From TheNYTimes  “One year after outrage about long waiting lists for health care shook theDepartment of Veterans Affairs, the agency is facing a new crisis: The number of veterans on waiting lists of one month or more is now 50 percent higher than it was during the height of last year’s problems, department officials say. The department is also facing a nearly $3 billion budget shortfall, which could affect care for many veterans.

The agency is considering furloughs, hiring freezes and other significant moves to reduce the gap. A proposal to address a shortage of funds for one drug — a new, more effective but more costly hepatitis C treatment — by possibly rationing new treatments among veterans and excluding certain patients who have advanced terminal diseases or suffer from a “persistent vegetative state or advanced dementia” is stirring bitter debate inside the department.

Agency officials expect to petition Congress this week to allow them to shift money into programs running short of cash. But that may place them at odds with Republican lawmakers who object to removing funds from a new program intended to allow certain veterans on waiting lists and in rural areas to choose taxpayer-paid care from private doctors outside the department’s health system.

“Something has to give,” the department’s deputy secretary, Sloan D. Gibson, said in an interview. “We can’t leave this as the status quo. We are not meeting the needs of veterans, and veterans are signaling that to us by coming in for additional care, and we can’t deliver it as timely as we want to.”

Since the waiting-list scandal broke last year, the department has broadly expanded access to care. Its doctors and nurses have handled 2.7 million more appointments than in any previous year, while authorizing 900,000 additional patients to see outside physicians. In all, agency officials say, they have increased capacity by more than seven million patient visits per year — double what they originally thought they needed to fix shortcomings.

But what was not foreseen, department leaders say, was just how much physician workloads and demand from veterans would continue to soar — by one-fifth, in fact, at some major veterans hospitals over just the past year.”

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by

News/Politics 6-18-15

What’s interesting in the news today?

Open Thread

1. First here’s the official story from the Obama White House where Obama takes credit for the success of other groups……

From TheWashingtonTimes  “The White House claimed credit Tuesday for a victory by Kurdish fighters over the Islamic State in northern Syria, saying the battlefield success is a direct result of military decisions by President Obama late last year.

White House press secretary Josh Earnest said the triumph by Syrian Kurds in the town of Tal Abyad “is actually a direct consequence of an earlier military operation that President Obama ordered” to break the siege of the Syrian city of Kobani last fall.

“Because of the president’s decision to order the air drop of significant resources and equipments and reinforcements, and because we were able to work with Turkey to allow for additional forces to enter that city, we saw that coalition … backed by coalition airstrikes, of course … drive [the Islamic State] out of Khobani,” he said. “And over the last several months, those forces have steadily driven east across northern Syria.””

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2. And then there’s the real story, which is success in spite of Obama……

From FoxNews  “The Kurds are enjoying increasing success against ISIS, and not only are they doing it without the U.S. weapons they seek, they often find themselves going up against American-made equipment.

In Syria, Kurdish Peshmerga forces captured the key city of Tal Abyad from ISIS on Monday, the latest in a string of Kurdish victories over the black-clad jihadist army in Iraq and Syria. Leaders of the ethnic army told FoxNews.com recently that they could be even more effective if U.S. weapons went to them instead of the enemy, which has seized massive amounts of American weaponry from the Iraqi forces it has defeated in battle.

 “What America has given to Iraq in the past, what Iraq borrowed from Russia and U.S., ISIS has,” said Peshmerga commander Kemal Kerkuki. “They are using many, many, mines, C4, TNT, snipers, mortars; they have Humvees, they have tanks, they have different kinds of weapons.”

U.S. military aid is distributed through Baghdad, which has an arm’s length relationship with the semi-autonomous Kurds in the north. Without direct aid, the Kurds have largely made do with aging equipment and weapons they seize from ISIS.”

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3. Meanwhile in the US, right-wing extremism and violence is rampant, at least according to the left and the NY Times. 🙄

From JammieWearingFools  “Let’s just completely ignore the constant threat of Islamist terror and the leftwing street marauders rioting around the country. We’ve got the New York Times helpfully cherry-picking and twisting some statistics to help pretend there’s some right-wing plot to undermine America. Yes, nearly 14 years after 9/11, the “right” are still the greatest threat facing America.

The stupid, it hurts.

THIS month, the headlines were about a Muslim man in Boston who was accused of threatening police officers with a knife. Last month, two Muslims attacked an anti-Islamic conference in Garland, Tex. The month before, a Muslim man was charged with plotting to drive a truck bomb onto a military installation in Kansas. If you keep up with the news, you know that a small but steady stream of American Muslims, radicalized by overseas extremists, are engaging in violence here in the United States.

But headlines can mislead. The main terrorist threat in the United States is not from violent Muslim extremists, but from right-wing extremists. Just ask the police.

In a survey we conducted with the Police Executive Research Forum last year of 382 law enforcement agencies, 74 percent reported anti-government extremism as one of the top three terrorist threats in their jurisdiction; 39 percent listed extremism connected with Al Qaeda or like-minded terrorist organizations. And only 3 percent identified the threat from Muslim extremists as severe, compared with 7 percent for anti-government and other forms of extremism.”

Was it right-wingers burning Baltimore and Ferguson, trying to blow up a bridge in Cleveland, shooting up a draw the prophet gathering, bombing Boston, attacking Boston police with a knife, shooting 2 cops in NY, attacking an FBI agent yesterday, or any other episodes in recent memory? No, it wasn’t, those have all been left-wing agitators and muslims. 

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4. From bad to worse.

From KHQ.com  “The City of Spokane says an independent investigation into a whistleblower complaint filed against three members of the volunteer citizen Police Ombudsman Commission has found “behavioral misconduct during interactions with City employees.” City of Spokane Communications Director Brian Coddington said eight findings of misconduct in the report include chair Rachel Dolezal and commissioners Kevin Berkompas and Adrian Dominguez. The report has been forwarded to the City Council for review. 

Dolezal recently resigned as President of the Spokane NAACP amid allegations from her parents that she is in fact white, and not black as she has been portraying for years. 

“We are deeply disturbed by the facts contained in the report of findings from the independent investigator,” Spokane Mayor David Condon and Council President Ben Stuckart said in a joint statement. “The conduct is unacceptable and falls far short of the community’s expectations of volunteers who sit on City boards and commissions.”

The evidence and interviews conducted by the law firm Winston & Cashatt confirmed workplace harassment allegations, revealing a pattern of misconduct as well as specific incidents of harassment that might be viewed only as rude or unprofessional were it not for the ongoing pattern of harassment.

The report also states investigators uncovered additional abuses of authority, as well as violations of the Code of Ethics. The report states one or more of the Named Commissioners attempted to directly supervise the operation of the OPO, lied to investigators, failed to set aside biases toward police, engaged in unprofessional disrespectful conduct in public settings, and engaged in conduct that created a conflict of interest.At a press conference on Wednesday, Council President Ben Stuckart said after reading the findings in the report, the creation of a hostile work environment was “pretty horrific.””

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5. Hillary’s lies continue to be exposed. 

From FoxNews  “Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used her personal email account to handle high level negotiations in 2011 for a no-fly zone to help topple Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi, according to a series of emails obtained by Fox News, challenging her claim the private server did not hold classified information.

The emails, linked here, conflict with Clinton’s statement that she did not put national security at risk by using a personal account.

“I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified material,”  Clinton, now a candidate for president, told reporters in March. “I’m certainly well-aware of the classification requirements and did not send classified material.”

That claim was hard to test because emails released by the State Department are heavily blacked out. But an email chain from March 23, 2011 — with virtually no redactions — shows a message for senior administration staff including then Deputy National Security Adviser Denis McDonough, then-Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs William Burns, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Michele Flournoy among others.  It goes point by point, explaining what Turkey, France and Britain will likely accept in the deal.

“I think the information in the email is clearly classified. If I were engaged in the negotiation on that subject reporting back to Washington, my reporting cable would be classified,”  former UN Ambassador and Fox News contributor John Bolton said after reading the un-redacted emails.”

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by

News/Politics 6-17-16

What’s interesting in the news today?

Open Thread

1. So who is withholding documents from Congress? Was it Hillary or the State Dept.? Or both?

From TheNYTimes  “Emails that a longtime confidant to Hillary Rodham Clinton recently handed over to the House committee investigating the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, raise new questions about whether the State Department and Mrs. Clinton have complied with a series of requests from the panel.

The emails, provided by Sidney Blumenthal, a close adviser to Mrs. Clinton, include information about weapons that were circulating in Libya and about the security situation in Benghazi in the year and a half before the attacks. The committee has asked the State Department and Mrs. Clinton several times in the past year for emails from her and other department officials about “weapons located or found in” Libya and about the decision to open and maintain a diplomatic mission in Benghazi.

The emails from Mr. Blumenthal have widened a rift between the State Department and the committee. State Department officials said that they had complied only with requests and subpoenas related directly to the attacks because the committee’s demands were too broad. The department has “provided the committee with a subset of documents that matched its request and will continue to work with them going forward,” said a spokesman, Alec Gerlach.

But the panel has called that an excuse to protect Mrs. Clinton and to slow the investigation of the attacks, which occurred on Sept. 11, 2012, and resulted in the deaths of four Americans, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens.

It is not clear whether the State Department possesses the emails between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Blumenthal and did not hand them over. It is also possible that Mrs. Clinton never provided them to the department and deleted them off the server that housed the personal account she used exclusively when she was secretary of state.”

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2. The Pope has become the left’s new BFF. At least for now. 

From TheGuardian  “Pope Francis will this week call for changes in lifestyles and energy consumption to avert the “unprecedented destruction of the ecosystem” before the end of this century, according to a leaked draft of a papal encyclical. In a document released by an Italian magazine on Monday, the pontiff will warn that failure to act would have “grave consequences for all of us”.

Francis also called for a new global political authority tasked with “tackling … the reduction of pollution and the development of poor countries and regions”. His appeal echoed that of his predecessor, pope Benedict XVI, who in a 2009 encyclical proposed a kind of super-UN to deal with the world’s economic problems and injustices.

According to the lengthy draft, which was obtained and published by L’Espresso magazine, the Argentinean pope will align himself with the environmental movement and its objectives. While accepting that there may be some natural causes of global warming, the pope will also state that climate change is mostly a man-made problem.

“Humanity is called to take note of the need for changes in lifestyle and changes in methods of production and consumption to combat this warming, or at least the human causes that produce and accentuate it,” he wrote in the draft. “Numerous scientific studies indicate that the greater part of the global warming in recent decades is due to the great concentration of greenhouse gases … given off above all because of human activity.”

The pope will also single out those obstructing solutions. In an apparent reference to climate-change deniers, the draft states: “The attitudes that stand in the way of a solution, even among believers, range from negation of the problem, to indifference, to convenient resignation or blind faith in technical solutions.””

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3. This is the face of evil. 

From TheDailyMail  “Merciless ISIS fighters retreating from towns taken by their Kurdish enemies are planting mines in the bedrooms and bathrooms of homes to blow up returning families, it was claimed today.

The bombs, which have so far killed 12 People’s Protection Units (YPG) fighters, are being discovered in the Khabour region of Syria.

YPG and Syriac Military Council forces are working to liberate the villages, as well as find and defuse the explosive devices. They were planted by the terrorists after they seized the area in February and kidnapped 250 civilians.

The bombs are being hidden under beds, behind bedroom doors and even in bath tubs, as well as in crop fields in the north-eastern region of the country, which is predominantly Kurdish but also has populations of Arabs and predominantly Christian Assyrians and Armenians.

It is the terror group’s chilling new tactic aimed at wiping out minorities in Khabour.

‘Property of Islamic State’ and ‘Your land is ours now, go to hell’ are scrawled on the walls inside the homes of Assyrians who fled earlier this year.”

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4. The poor woman is just a black person trapped in a white person’s body. Welcome to the world of transracials. I know it sounds silly, but she already has enablers helping her thru this difficult process. 🙄

From NewsBusters  “Transgenderism is so yesterday. Now, it’s time to “discuss” transracial issues! That, of course, according to a guest on the June 15 edition of MSNBC’s NewsNation. Tamron Hall invited Earl Hutchinson – a radio host and prominent author on racial issues – to the program to chat about the still unfolding story surrounding Rachel Dolezal, the now former head of the Spokane NAACP who lied about being black.

Hall started the conversation by asking Hutchinson if Dolezal has “identified herself as transracial,” and he responded by suggesting that she’s never had the chance to fully explain herself other than stating that she considers herself black. He added: “You know, if you consider yourself from the moon, or a Martian, I mean, if that’s what you wanna be, that’s what you want to be.” 

The radio personality mentioned that – aside from the fact that Dolezal clearly lied about her race – it is important that people look at her record:

The critical question is, what did she do as president of that chapter? I took a look at it. I took a look at the record. I took a look at the minutes of some of the meetings that they had, and I got to tell you, Tamron, I was absolutely bowled over on all the key issues: education, health care, criminal justice reform, police misconduct and civil rights. I got to tell you, she was spot on and the chapter was spot on. 

Hall concluded her interview by wondering if we have reached a point where discussion over transracial issues may become necessary: 

[A]re we now looking at a space where I am Caitlyn, so that’s how she wants to identify herself – are we now at a transracial point?  Because when blacks passed for white it was in many cases because their life was in danger. Are we at a transracial point now where someone like a Rachel is now on the forefront of something we’ve probably never discussed before?”

Ummmmm…. No.

And there’s more enablers making up justification for her actions……….

From TheHuffingtonPost  “Rachel Dolezal is a fascinating case study in White racial identity development.* She is stuck in the immersion/emersion stage, in which White people, having learned extensively about the realities of racism, and the ugly history of White supremacy in the U.S., “immerse” themselves in trying to figure out how to be White in our society, and “emerge” with a new relationship to Whiteness. Only in the case of Dolezal, her way of dealing with the pain of the reality of racism, was to deny her own Whiteness and to become Black.

She is an extreme example of a common phenomenon. The “immersion” stage is typified by White people taking more responsibility for racism and privilege and often experiencing high levels of anger and embarrassment for racism and privilege, which they sometimes direct towards other Whites. They sometimes try to immerse themselves in communities of color, as Dolezal did. She’s not alone.

I definitely experienced this. There was a time in my 20s when everything I learned about the history of racism made me hate myself, my Whiteness, my ancestors… and my descendants. I remember deciding that I couldn’t have biological children because I didn’t want to propagate my privilege biologically.

If I was going to pass on my privilege, I wanted to pass it on to someone who doesn’t have racial privilege; so I planned to adopt. I disliked my Whiteness, but I disliked the Whiteness of other White people more. I felt like the way to really end racism was to feel guilty for it, and to make other White people feel guilty for it too. And then, like Dolezal, I wanted to take on Africanness. Living in South Africa during my junior year abroad, I lived with a Black family, wore my hair in head wraps, shaved my head. I didn’t want to be White, but if I had to be, I wanted to be White in a way that was different from other White people I knew. I wanted to be a special, different White person. The one and only. How very White of me…”

The stupid is strong in this one…. and so is the white guilt. 

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by

News/Politics 6-16-15

What’s interesting in the news today?

Open Thread

1. You know when Soros is involved, grassroots is really astroturf. 

How are these people not in prison? A real DoJ would be all over this. 

From TheGatewayPundit  “Professional race activists Deray McKesson and Johnetta Elzie (ShordeeDooWhop), pictured here in Baltimore, helped whip up the Ferguson mobs. This year Fortune Magazine named these two professional activists two of the world’s greatest leaders.

Many conservatives rightly smelled a rat in the supposed organic race-riot movement that sprang up so quickly in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014 after the shooting death of robber Michael Brown. After burning the Ferguson and Dellwood, Missouri business districts to the ground the radical left has relentlessly sought to recreate the same discord and disinformation in various locations around the U.S. Ferguson #BlackLivesMatter protest leaders have been flown to New York, South Carolina, Milwaukee, Selma, and more recently to McKinney, Texas and Hillary’s campaign relaunch in New York.

Thankfully, every day patriots and online conservative investigators still fight to shine truth, anywhere “the movement” tries to sow its twisted seeds to foment anger, feed bitterness, and breed division. Much has been printed about the paid protesters and Soros connections.

** Nearly half of the roughly 500 businesses operating in Ferguson and adjacent communities, such as Dellwood and Jennings, suffered property damage or lost revenue as a result of the coordinated Ferguson protests and riots.

In May black Ferguson activists staged a protest at the office of MORE (Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment) to complain that the group’s white leaders collected tens of thousands of dollars in donations off of the Black Lives Matter movement without paying the Black participants their fair share. It was during these protests that Ferguson activists admitted that fellow protesters were making MORE THAN $5,000 a month to disrupt cities, damage property and attack police!

In response to these protests MORE released a list of names and amounts paid out to protesters and protest groups who agitated and harassed police night-after-night in Ferguson last fall and winter.

The list of over 80 groups and individuals was posted on Twitter by an irate protester.”

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2. These people would still be alive if we enforced our borders and deported these criminal illegals. 

From TheDailySignal  “More than 100 convicted criminals who remained in the U.S. despite receiving deportation orders between 2010 and 2014 now face murder charges, according to the agency charged with carrying out such deportations of illegal immigrants.

U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement reports that 121 convicted criminals who were never removed from the country face murder charges today.

In response, Sens. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., of the Judiciary Committee submitted a letter on June 12 requesting a “multi-departmental response” from Attorney General Loretta Lynch, Secretary of State John Kerry and Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson.

In their letter, Grassley and Sessions cite Immigration and Customs Enforcement statistics that show 1,000 of the 36,007 criminally-convicted illegal immigrants released from custody in fiscal year 2013 have been reconvicted of additional crimes.”

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3. Here’s an update. Remember this one? 

From TheAP  “A blogger who pleaded guilty in a conspiracy to break into a nursing home and shoot unauthorized video of the ailing wife of a U.S. senator was sentenced Monday to serve more than two years in prison.

Clayton Kelly, 29, of Pearl, Mississippi, shot the video of Sen. Thad Cochran’s then-wife in 2014 during a tough Republican primary. After making the video of a bedridden Rose Cochran, who had dementia, Kelly felt remorse but ultimately wanted to make a name for himself as a journalist, according to testimony during the sentencing hearing.

Mississippi Circuit Judge William Chapman gave Kelly the full five-year maximum sentence but allocated 2.5 years to prison and the rest to probation. District Attorney Michael Guest said there’s no way to know now whether Kelly will become eligible for early release.

Images of Rose Cochran appeared online briefly during the primary that Cochran ultimately won over a tea party-backed state senator, Chris McDaniel. Kelly was one of four people who conspired to produce the video suggesting Thad Cochran was having an affair, investigators say.”

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4. So the mayor allows the protesters space to destroy and loot these businesses, and then leaves them out of the loop when it comes time to rebuild? It’s almost like they planned it this way.

From Reuters/MSN  “Dozens of Baltimore liquor stores damaged in rioting over the death of Freddie Gray are likely to be excluded from city recovery help, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said on Monday.

Long-standing concerns about zoning and community complaints about liquor stores in poor neighborhoods mean they could be barred from loans and other financial aid, she said.

Many of the stores do not meet zoning laws and Baltimore needs alternatives, such as grocery stores to improve impoverished neighborhoods, Rawlings-Blake said.

“I do not believe it is appropriate for the city to provide money for these non-conforming liquor stores to rebuild as liquor stores in these locations,” she told a news conference in the Park Heights neighborhood, which city officials say has the highest concentration of liquor stores in Maryland.

Nearly 400 businesses across Baltimore, about 40 of them liquor stores, were damaged or destroyed in rioting after the April 27 funeral of Gray, a 25-year-old black man. He died of spinal cord injuries allegedly suffered while in police custody.”

They use words like non-conforming yet the city zoning allowed them. And they still took their tax money too. 

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5. Do Christians need to stop playing the self-flagellation game?

From TheFederalist  “Leftists love the self-flagellation game, a fun little exercise where you gather in a circle with people of your tribe, say you’re going to punish yourself for causing some problem in the world, and then whip the tar out of the guy standing next to you. Technically, of course, this is not self-flagellation. But that’s the fun part. As long as you act like you’re tearing up your own flesh, you can give as many lashes as you want to the guy that you think is really guilty of the transgression.

Leftists are masters of this game. They’re quite skilled at wincing and saying, “I, a poor, miserable sinner, deserve pain for refusing to check my cisgender privilege,” while unleashing all nine tails o’ the cat on the real culprits, those awful conservatives who cause a transgender suicide every time they assume that a person with an Adam’s apple, a five o’clock shadow, and a Y chromosome is a male.

But when losses in the culture war frustrate conservatives, they can occasionally be persuaded to try their hand at a round of the game liberals invented. In March of 2014, Ross Douthat grabbed the whip and repented of the sins other Christians have committed against the LGBT community, essentially arguing “we made our bed of having to bake gay wedding cakes by treating our gay neighbors with intolerance instead of charity, now it’s time to lie in it.” Recently, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry joined the self-flagellation circle, arguing that Christians only have themselves to blame for the recent Irish referendum in support of gay marriage.

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by

News/Politics 6-15-15

What’s interesting in the news today?

Open Thread

1. Something to keep in mind as Hillary campaigns on equal pay and equal economic opportunities. 

From TheGuardian  “Experienced, adult political operatives who want to do grassroots work for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign currently have no choice but to work as unpaid, full-time interns, raising new questions about how the White House frontrunner runs her own labor force as she prepares to double down on young people’s role in the American economy.

The Clinton campaign is currently in the midst of what multiple Democratic sources described as a “hiring freeze” for paid organizing positions in the early campaign states where the former Secretary of State is laying the foundations of a massive national staff, with few if any paying jobs available for field operations.

Clinton’s camp has made headlines about its frugality and a hard sell on its fellowship program, which allows aspiring politicos between the ages of 18 and 24 to spend this summer as full-time campaign volunteers. The result, however, is the human-resources reality of a campaign – one scheduled to hold at least 26 fundraisers this month alone – that isn’t just taking on college students with political science degrees but expecting political veterans to gamble their careers on her without pay.

Clinton, according to her would-be employees, has left full-time organizers with little choice but to criss-cross the country and work as “free help”.”

So her campaign will spend a billion dollars on getting her elected, but it won’t be spent on the employees. How populist of her. 

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2. We’re not all equal when it comes to water. 

From TheWashingtonPost  “Drought or no drought, Steve Yuhas resents the idea that it is somehow shameful to be a water hog. If you can pay for it, he argues, you should get your water.

People “should not be forced to live on property with brown lawns, golf on brown courses or apologize for wanting their gardens to be beautiful,” Yuhas fumed recently on social media. “We pay significant property taxes based on where we live,” he added in an interview. “And, no, we’re not all equal when it comes to water.”

Yuhas lives in the ultra-wealthy enclave of Rancho Santa Fe, a bucolic Southern California hamlet of ranches, gated communities and country clubs that guzzles five times more water per capita than the statewide average. In April, after Gov. Jerry Brown (D) called for a 25 percent reduction in water use, consumption in Rancho Santa Fe went up by 9 percent.

But a moment of truth is at hand for Yuhas and his neighbors, and all of California will be watching: On July 1, for the first time in its 92-year history, Rancho Santa Fe will be subject to water rationing.

“It’s no longer a ‘You can only water on these days’ ” situation, said Jessica Parks, spokeswoman for the Santa Fe Irrigation District, which provides water service to Rancho Santa Fe and other parts of San Diego County. “It’s now more of a ‘This is the amount of water you get within this billing period. And if you go over that, there will be high penalties.’ ”

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3. Huh. And yet DHS is focused on right-wingers. 

From FoxNews  “Several Boston-area terror suspects, including the man killed by police earlier this month as he allegedly sought to behead cops and two alleged associates, have frequently attended sermons given by firebrand imam whose message to the faithful doesn’t match the conciliatory tone he struck when contacted by FoxNews.com.

Imam Abdullah Faaruuq, of the Mosque for the Praising of Allah in Roxbury, Mass., has been seen on videos of his fiery sermons exhorting worshipers to commit acts of violence in the name of Islam. In videos of Faaruuq preaching, the former Northeastern University chaplain appears to skirt the line between metaphor and incitement.

“You must grab onto the rope, grab onto the typewriter, grab onto the shovel, grab onto the gun and the sword,” he railed in one video reviewed by FoxNews.com. “Don’t be afraid to step out into this world and do your job.”

It is not known if convicted or suspected terrorists including the Boston Marathon bombers, Usaamah Rahim, who was brandishing a knife when police shot him on June 2 or two men who have since been charged in the same plot heard sermons like these, but all have attended prayers with Faaruuq. The imam has been on the radar of researchers at Americans for Peace & Tolerance (APT), a conservative group devoted to exposing Islamic extremism, since 2009. Ilya Feoktistov, director of research at the organization, says he first spotted Faaruuq at a rally in support of now-convicted terrorist, Tarek Mehanna, who was convicted for providing material support to Al Qaeda and conspiring to kill Americans.

“We knew he was a prominent Imam in the Boston Muslim community,” Feoktistov told FoxNews.com. “We were concerned as to what he might be teaching.”

 Usaama Rahim, 26, who reportedly was obsessed with killing anti-Islamist activist Pamela Geller, allegedly plotted with Nicholas Rovinski, 24, of Warwick, R.I., and David Wright, 25, of Everett, Mass., to help ISIS by killing U.S. citizens. Rovinski was arrested Thursday, and appeared in court Friday on charges of conspiring to provide material support to ISIS. Wright was arrested last week on a conspiracy charge and is due in court June 19.”

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4. What’s wrong with this picture?

From TheBostonGlobe  “For years, doctors warned federal immigration officials: Do not take your eyes off Santos Hernandez Carrera. He had raped a woman at knifepoint and spent roughly half his life in jail, where immigration officials hoped to keep him until they could send him home to Cuba. As far as the public knew, the strategy worked: Until last month, the public sex offender registry said Hernandez Carrera, who has been diagnosed with a mental illness, had been deported.

He never was. Instead, the Globe discovered that Hernandez Carrera is in Florida, one of hundreds of immigrants convicted of sex crimes who should have been deported but instead were released in the United States because their homelands refused to take them back.

They are convicted rapists, child molesters, and kidnappers — among “the worst of the worst,” as one law enforcement agency put it. Yet the Globe found that immigration officials have released them without making sure they register with local authorities as sex offenders.

And once US Immigration and Customs Enforcement frees them, agency officials often lose track of the criminals, despite outstanding deportation orders against them. The Globe determined that Hernandez Carrera and several other offenders had failed to register as sex offenders, a crime. By law, police are supposed to investigate if such offenders fail to update their address within days of their release. But local officials said they did not learn that ICE had released the offenders until after the Globe inquired about their cases.”

““It’s chilling,” said Thomas H. Dupree Jr., a former deputy assistant US attorney general who led a 2008 federal court battle to keep Hernandez Carrera locked up. “These are dangerous and predatory individuals who should not be prowling the streets. In fact, they should not be in the United States at all.””

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