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News/Politics 10-17-14

What’s interesting in the news today?

1. More US victims from F and F. What else are they hiding?

From JudicialWatch  ” Judicial Watch today announced that, based on information uncovered through a Judicial Watch public records lawsuit against the City of Phoenix, the U.S. Congress has confirmed that an AK 47 rifle used in a July 29, 2013, gang-style assault on an apartment building that left two people wounded was part of the Obama Department of Justice (DOJ) Operation Fast and Furious gunrunning program.

An October 16 letter sent from Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) and Rep. Darryl Issa (R-CA) to Deputy Attorney General James Cole discloses that “we have learned of another crime gun connected to Fast and Furious.  The [Justice] Department did not provide any notice to the Congress or the public about this gun.”  Grassley (Ranking Member on the Senate Judiciary Committee) and Issa (Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee) detail:

Based on the serial number [1977DX1654] from the police report obtained by Judicial Watch and documents obtained during our Fast and Furious investigation, we can confirm that the assault rifle recovered in the vehicle on July 30, 2013, was purchased by Sean Christopher Stewart. Stewart pled guilty to firearms trafficking charges resulting from his involvement with Operation Fast and Furious … Stewart purchased this particular firearm on December 8, 2009, one of 40 that he purchased that day while under ATF surveillance” (emphasis in original document).

The Phoenix Police reports, which the letter from Congress references, were obtained by Judicial Watch thanks to a lawsuit filed against the City of Phoenix, AZ, seeking the Police Department’s records about the gang assault (Judicial Watch v. City of Phoenix (No. CV2014- 012018)). The lawsuit was filed on October 2 after the City of Phoenix ignored an August 5, 2014, Arizona Public Records Law request for information about the crime and the guns.  Judicial Watch believed the reports detailed that a weapon or weapons used in the assault are connected to the federal government’s Fast and Furious gunrunning operation.  Today’s letter from Grassley and Issa is official confirmation of Judicial Watch’s understanding from other sources.”

“According to the Phoenix Police Department report, ATF traced the firearm on July 31, 2013, the day after Phoenix police officers recovered it. Yet, over a full year has passed, and the Department has failed to notify the Committees … This lack of transparency about the consequences of Fast and Furious undermines public confidence in law enforcement and gives the impression that the Department is seeking to suppress information and limit its exposure to public scrutiny.”

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2. Catch and release.

From Breitbart  “Deportations from the interior of the United States declined 34 percent this year from last, according to a new report from the Center for Immigration Studies, derived largely from an internal Department of Homeland Security document. 

The CIS report released Wednesday and authored by the group’s director of policy studies, Jessica Vaughan, details the decline in immigration enforcement and reveals that there remain nearly 167,000 convicted criminal immigrants with final orders of removal still in the United States and “currently at large.”

“Prosecutorial discretion as practiced by the Obama administration has transformed immigration enforcement into a massive catch-and-release program that makes a joke of the law, fails to deter illegal settlement, and allows even illegal aliens who commit crimes to remain here,” Vaughan said Wednesday.

“These policies inflict real harm on Americans and legal immigrants,” she continued, “in the form of lost jobs, depressed wages, additional social services, and even lost lives. In addition, with the rise of ISIS and other terrorist groups around the world, our lax policies represent an unnecessary national security risk.”

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3. The CDC director says a travel ban would hurt African economies. Yet that’s exactly what many African nations are doing.

From TheAP  “Health officials battling the Ebola outbreak that has killed more than 4,500 people in West Africa have managed to limit its spread on the continent to five countries – and two of them appear to have snuffed out the disease.

The developments constitute a modest success in an otherwise bleak situation.

Officials credit tighter border controls, good patient-tracking and other medical practices, and just plain luck with keeping Ebola confined mostly to Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea since the outbreak was first identified nearly seven months ago.

Senegal did so well in finding and isolating a man with Ebola who had slipped across the border from Guinea in August that the World Health Organization on Friday will declare the end of the disease in Senegal if no new cases surface.”

Sealing the borders won’t happen under Obama, and if it does, it won’t be done until it’s too late.

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4. The Centers for Anything But Disease Control.

From TheNYPost  “At $7 billion, the Centers for Disease Control 2014 budget is nearly 200 percent bigger now than it was in 2000. Those evil, stingy Republicans actually approved CDC funding increases in January larger than what President Obama requested.

What are we getting for this ever-increasing amount of money? Answer: A power-hungry busybody brigade of politicized blame-mongers.

Money, money, it’s always the money. Yet, while Ebola and enterovirus D68 wreak havoc on our health system, the CDC has been busying itself with an ever-widening array of non-disease-control campaigns, like these recent crusades:

Mandatory motorcycle-helmet laws

Video games and TV violence

“Social norming” in the schools”

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5. Neo-Victorianism on Campus.

From TheWeeklyStandard  “Sexual liberation is having a nervous breakdown on college campuses. Conservatives should be cheering on its collapse; instead they sometimes sound as if they want to administer the victim smelling salts. 

It is impossible to overstate the growing weirdness of the college sex scene. Campus feminists are reimporting selective portions of a traditional sexual code that they have long scorned, in the name of ending what they preposterously call an epidemic of campus rape. They are once again making males the guardians of female safety and are portraying females as fainting, helpless victims of the untrammeled male libido. They are demanding that college administrators write highly technical rules for sex and aggressively enforce them, 50 years after the proponents of sexual liberation insisted that college adults stop policing student sexual behavior. While the campus feminists are not yet calling for an assistant dean to be present at their drunken couplings, they have created the next best thing: the opportunity to replay every grope and caress before a tribunal of voyeuristic administrators.

The ultimate result of the feminists’ crusade may be the same as if they were explicitly calling for a return to sexual modesty: a sharp decrease in casual, drunken sex. There is no downside to this development. “

Or if you prefer an alternate title, The Vindication of Christian Sexual Ethics.

From NationalReview  “It won’t work. Sure, there will be a chill that settles across some campuses (depending on enforcement), and there will be cases where the burden-shifting “works” (at least in the way that feminists want it to work) by ruining a man’s life in highly ambiguous circumstances. But the end result won’t be a net increase in healthy relationships but instead an increase in fear, confusion, and recriminations as neo-Victorianism butts up against the crazed ”sex week” culture that still infects campuses from the top to the bottom of the academic food chain. It’s decadence versus contractual morality that utterly defies human nature, and neither model is viable.

This is exactly the time when Christians should step forward with a different ideal, the holistic, healthy, and proven model of sobriety always, chastity before marriage, and fidelity afterwards — all because marriage is sacred, our bodies are a temple to God, and we love our spouses more than we love our own lives. 

Yet, sadly, many Christians have treated Christian sexual morality as something to be embarrassed about — to be shoved at the end of the conversation or minimized by reference to “other” good works. As if the formation of lifelong, loving relationships is somehow secondary to good deeds in soup kitchens or medical mission trips.”

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News/Politics 10-16-14

What’s interesting in the news today?

1. facepalm-double

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2. And if that video didn’t bring their incompetent response to all this into focus, this should.

From CNSNews  “Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said during a telephone press briefing Wednesday that you cannot get Ebola by sitting next to someone on a bus, but that infected or exposed persons should not ride public transportation because they could transmit the disease to someone else.”

“Frieden’s statement came in response to CNSNews.com’s question regarding a video message from President Barack Obama last week addressing Ebola-stricken countries in West Africa, in which the president told residents they “cannot get [Ebola] through casual contact like sitting next to someone on a bus.””

“My first question is, did the CDC vet this video message before it was released and posted on U.S. embassy websites, and is it true that a person runs absolutely no risk of contracting Ebola on public transportation, such as a bus?”

“Yes, CDC vetted the message, and, yes, we believe it’s accurate,” Frieden responded. “I think there are two different parts of that equation,” he continued. “The first is, if you’re a member of the traveling public and are healthy, should you be worried that you might have gotten it by sitting next to someone? And the answer is no.”

“Second, if you are sick and you may have Ebola, should you get on a bus? And the answer to that is also no. You might become ill, you might have a problem that exposes someone around you,” he said.”

Take a moment to absorb the stupidity of these statements……

How is it that you can’t catch it on a bus, but you can infect others on the bus if you have it. What?

And these are the experts handling this? We are so …….

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3. More bad news.

From TheJournalOfEmergencyMedicalServices  ” International aid organization Doctors Without Borders said that 16 of its staff members have been infected with Ebola and nine of them have died.

 Speaking at a press conference in Johannesburg Tuesday, the head of Doctors Without Borders in South Africa Sharon Ekambaram said medical workers have received inadequate assistance from the international community.

“Where is WHO Africa? Where is the African Union?” said Ekambaram who worked in Sierra Leone from August to September. “We’ve all heard their promises in the media but have seen very little on the ground.””

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4. Nope. No WMD’s here.

From TheNYTimes  “In all, American troops secretly reported finding roughly 5,000 chemical warheads, shells or aviation bombs, according to interviews with dozens of participants, Iraqi and American officials, and heavily redacted intelligence documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.”

“The New York Times found 17 American service members and seven Iraqi police officers who were exposed to nerve or mustard agents after 2003. American officials said that the actual tally of exposed troops was slightly higher, but that the government’s official count was classified.

The secrecy fit a pattern. Since the outset of the war, the scale of the United States’ encounters with chemical weapons in Iraq was neither publicly shared nor widely circulated within the military. These encounters carry worrisome implications now that the Islamic State, a Qaeda splinter group, controls much of the territory where the weapons were found.

The American government withheld word about its discoveries even from troops it sent into harm’s way and from military doctors. The government’s secrecy, victims and participants said, prevented troops in some of the war’s most dangerous jobs from receiving proper medical care and official recognition of their wounds.”

“Jarrod L. Taylor, a former Army sergeant on hand for the destruction of mustard shells that burned two soldiers in his infantry company, joked of “wounds that never happened” from “that stuff that didn’t exist.” The public, he said, was misled for a decade. “I love it when I hear, ‘Oh there weren’t any chemical weapons in Iraq,’ ” he said. “There were plenty.””

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5. Harvard educated lawyers are speaking out about the school’s new sexual misconduct policies.

From TheBostonGlobe  “Twenty-eight current and retired Harvard Law School professors are asking the university to abandon its new sexual misconduct policy and craft different guidelines for investigating allegations, asserting that the new rules violate the due process rights of the accused.

“This is an issue of political correctness run amok,” said Alan M. Dershowitz, an emeritus Harvard Law professor who was among the faculty members signing an article, sent to the Globe’s Opinion page, that is critical of the new procedures.”

“In a statement Tuesday night, Harvard said the new policy was enacted after a two-year review of its practices and its guidelines “create an expert, neutral, fair, and objective mechanism for investigating sexual misconduct cases involving students.”

The misconduct policy, which Harvard announced in July and which took effect this fall, includes a provision to adopt a “preponderance of evidence” standard when determining whether sexual assault or harassment occurred.”

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News/Politics 10-6-14

What’s interesting in the news today?

1. How Ebola spread out of control.

From TheWashingtonPost  “Frieden, the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), knew it was no simple matter to properly carry away a body loaded with Ebola virus. It takes four people wearing protective suits, one at each corner of the body bag. On that grim day near the end of August, in a makeshift Ebola ward in Monrovia, Liberia, burial teams already had lugged 60 victims to a truck for the trip to the crematorium.

Frieden had seen plenty of death over the years, but this was far worse than he expected, a plague on a medieval scale. “A scene out of Dante,” he called it.

Shaken, he flew back to the United States on Aug. 31 and immediately briefed President Obama by phone. The window to act was closing, he told the president in the 15-minute call.

That conversation, nearly six months after the World Health Organization (WHO) learned of an Ebola outbreak in West Africa, was part of a mounting realization among world leaders that the battle against the virus was being lost. As of early September, with more than 1,800 confirmed Ebola deaths in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, there was still no coordinated global response. Alarmed U.S. officials realized they would need to call in the military.

 Obama eventually ordered 3,000 military personnel to West Africa; about 200 had arrived by the beginning of this month. They will be joined by health workers from countries such as Britain, China and Cuba. Canada and Japan are sending protective gear and mobile laboratories. Nonprofit organizations such as the Gates Foundation also are contributing. But it’s not at all clear that this belated muscular response will be enough to quell the epidemic before it takes tens of thousands of lives.”

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2. The Dallas hospital is blaming a flaw in the new electronic medical records for errors involving patient zero.

From CNSNews  “When a sick Liberian man walked into Texas Presbyterian Hospital last month, “Protocols were followed by both the physician and the nurses,” the hospital said in a statement released Thursday night.

The man told a nurse he had come from West Africa, where an Ebola epidemic is raging.

“However, we have identified a flaw in the way the physician and nursing portions of our electronic health records (EHR) interacted in this specific case.”

The hospital said its electronic health records include “separate physician and nursing workflows.” The hospital said the Liberian man’s travel history was located in the nurses’ portion of the EHR, but — “As designed, the travel history would not automatically appear in the physician’s standard workflow.”

“As result of this discovery, Texas Health Dallas has relocated the travel history documentation to a portion of the EHR that is part of both workflows. It also has been modified to specifically reference Ebola-endemic regions in Africa.”

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3. Yes please!

From TheWashingtonTimes  “Attorney General Eric Holder should be held in contempt of court for refusing to release “Fast and Furious” documents in line with a judge’s order — and even given jail time if necessary, lawmakers said.

Members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee requested U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson to fine Mr. Holder if he doesn’t comply with her own order issued back in August — the one where she said he couldn’t claim executive privilege to keep private certain documents related to the federal gun-running program, “Operation Fast and Furious,” Politico reported.

Mr. Holder was supposed to turn over the documents by Oct. 1. The attorney general has not — but instead, announced his resignation from office.

Lawyers for the lawmakers say the time has come when the judge should consider imposing fines on Mr. Holder, or even throwing him in jail.

“Should the Court determine that the Attorney General has violated that Order, the Court should impose on the Attorney General an appropriate penalty to coerce his compliance with the August 20 Order, including an escalating daily monetary fine against Eric H. Holder Jr., to be paid by Mr. Holder out of his personal assets, converting to incarceration if the payment of daily monetary fines does not produce compliance within a reasonable period of time,” House Counsel Kerry Kircher and other lawyers wrote in the filing, Politico reported.”

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4. Kick ineligible illegal immigrants off the exchange, get sued for violating their supposed rights. Don’t worry, I’m sure the DoJ has a settlement plan already in the pipeline.

From TheDailyCaller  “Two immigration groups have filed legal complaints against the Obama administration for kicking over one hundred thousand Obamacare customers off their insurance plans without sending notices in their native language, Modern Healthcare reports.

The Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR) and Philadelphia’s Southeast Asian Mutual Assistance Associations Coalition (SEAMACC) have both filed complaints with Health and Human Services’ Office of Civil Rights. The groups believe the Obama administration’s move to end the health plans of customers who failed to prove their legal immigration or citizenship status violate customers’ rights as immigrants.

The Obama administration terminated 115,000 customers’ Obamacare exchange health insurance on September 30, after customers failed to submit required documentation to prove their legal status in the U.S. 

The administration said it first reached out to each customer between eight and ten times through mail, phone and e-mail in an attempt to get them to update their documents on HealthCare.gov before finally kicking them off their plans.”

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5. The real war on women.

From CNSNews  “A record 55,553,000 women 16 years and older did not participate in the labor force in September, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). This means that 55,553,000 women in the United States did not have a job and did not actively seek one in the past four weeks.

The number of women not in the labor force increased from 55,345,000 in August to 55,553,000 in September, an increase of 208,000.

The participation rate for women also dipped in September to 56.7 percent; it has not been this low since September of 1988 when it was 56.6 percent. This means that only 56.7 percent of women participated in the labor force by either having a job during the month or actively seeking one.”

But thanks to the Obama admin’s fuzzy math, the unemployment rate for women dropped anyway.

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6. Some good news.

From MSN  “Nearly two-thirds of the abortion clinics remaining in Texas must close immediately after a federal appeals court ruled Thursday that the state may enforce a law that requires those facilities to be built to the same standards as hospitals.

That law — part of an omnibus bill with several measures that chip away at women’s access to abortion — was struck down in late August as unconstitutional by an Austin federal judge, who put it on hold while the state appeals.

But on Thursday, a three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans tossed out U.S. District Court Judge Lee Yeakel’s August injunction, which allowed the estimated 20 abortion clinics in Texas to continue operating during the appeals process. Without that injunction, only seven clinics will be left.

In its ruling, the 5th Circuit said the “central” question it considered was “whether the state has shown a likelihood of success” in fighting Yeakel’s ruling “regarding whether the ambulatory surgical center provision is unconstitutional. We conclude that it has.”

The Center for Reproductive Rights, which sued the state on behalf of a coalition of abortion clinics, said that Thursday’s decision will force nearly 1 million Texas women of reproductive age to drive a minimum of 300 miles round trip “to access their constitutional right to an abortion.”

Oh, the horror…. 🙄

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