politics

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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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News/Politics 6-12-15

What’s interesting in the news today?

Open Thread

1. Oh boy. This is way worse than they thought/admitted. 

From ABCNews  “The massive hack into federal systems announced last week was far deeper and potentially more problematic than publicly acknowledged, with hackers believed to be from China moving through government databases undetected for more than a year, sources briefed on the matter told ABC News.

“If [only] they knew the full extent of it,” one U.S. official said about those affected by the intrusion into the Office of Personnel Management’s information systems.

It all started with an initial intrusion into OPM’s systems more than a year ago, and after gaining that initial access the hackers were able to work their way through four different “segments” of OPM’s systems, according to sources.

Much of that data has been stored on OPM systems housed by the Department of the Interior in a Denver-area data center, sources said. And one of the four “segments” compromised held forms filled out by federal employees seeking security clearances.

As ABC News previously reported, the 127-page forms — known as SF-86’s and used for background investigations — ask applicants for personal information not only about themselves but also relatives, friends, and potentially even college roommates.”

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2. OK Mr. President, let’s start with your neighborhood, then we’ll do Biden’s and Clinton’s too. 

They did something similar in this area. They closed down a housing project in a nearby city, gave the former residents Section 8 and disbursed them into the surrounding neighborhoods and cities. Did it bring them up? No, it had the opposite effect. It brought the other areas down. 

From TheHill  “The Obama administration is moving forward with regulations designed to help diversify America’s wealthier neighborhoods, drawing fire from critics who decry the proposal as executive overreach in search of an “unrealistic utopia.”

A final Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) rule due out this month is aimed at ending decades of deep-rooted segregation around the country.

The regulations would use grant money as an incentive for communities to build affordable housing in more affluent areas while also taking steps to upgrade poorer areas with better schools, parks, libraries, grocery stores and transportation routes as part of a gentrification of those communities.

“HUD is working with communities across the country to fulfill the promise of equal opportunity for all,” a HUD spokeswoman said. “The proposed policy seeks to break down barriers to access to opportunity in communities supported by HUD funds.”

It’s a tough sell for some conservatives. Among them is Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), who argued that the administration “shouldn’t be holding hostage grant monies aimed at community improvement based on its unrealistic utopian ideas of what every community should resemble.”

“American citizens and communities should be free to choose where they would like to live and not be subject to federal neighborhood engineering at the behest of an overreaching federal government,” said Gosar, who is leading an effort in the House to block the regulations.

Civil rights advocates, meanwhile, are praising the plan, arguing that it is needed to break through decades-old barriers that keep poor and minority families trapped in hardscrabble neighborhoods.”

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3. How nice.

From TheObserver  “In a scene all too typical in present day Washington, the culmination of Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations, along with the push for passage of related legislation such as Trade Promotion Authority (or Fast Track) have set off a lobbying frenzy.

While liberal organizations and members of Congress deride the TPP as the biggest boondoggle since NAFTA and President Obama defends it as “the most progressive trade treaty ever,” the influence peddlers who populate K Street see opportunity.

Policy makers aren’t simply facing a lobbying barrage from the typical slate of domestic interest groups. Foreign governments are running sophisticated operations to influence Congress and gather intelligence in Washington as the negotiations proceed.

This is now “par for the course,” according to Lydia Dennett, an investigator at the Project on Government Oversight [POGO], a nonprofit watchdog. “If a certain country wants trade legislation that will be beneficial to them they can hire an American lobbyist to get them the access the need.”

Leading the way among TPP nations seeking to sway American policy makers is Japan, which signed up former Democratic Leader Tom Daschle’s firm as well as well-connected public relations firm DCI.”

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4. Careful what you wish for…..

From HotAir  “Why are arrests down so sharply? Some cops may fear that criminals have turned more aggressive and confrontational after a year of high-profile allegations of police brutality, from the protests in Ferguson to the assassination of two officers in New York to the riots over Freddie Gray in Baltimore. Jack Dunphy, a cop himself, noted in a piece for PJM last month that crime rates are up in multiple major cities nationwide. Can’t be a coincidence. For other officers, it’s not fear of perps that drives them but of the DA: Watch towards the end of the clip below and you’ll hear Brooke Baldwin say some cops told her they’re more afraid of being charged by Marilyn Mosby if an arrest goes bad than they are of being killed in the line of duty. Even Baltimore’s police commissioner acknowledges that concern:

Batts has several explanations for what’s happening. One is a flood of prescription drugs on the street, being used for recreational purposes, that were looted from pharmacies during the April rioting. “There’s enough narcotics on the streets of Baltimore to keep it intoxicated for a year,” Batts said Wednesday. “That amount of drugs has thrown off the balance on the streets of Baltimore.” (This is, City Paper notes, a bit exaggerated.) Batts also said that officers have been patrolling in pairs rather than the normal solo beats, which effectively halves the number of patrols.

The FOP offers a bleaker, though related, rationale for the decrease in arrests: Officers are afraid, its leader says. On the one hand, they’re beset by hostile citizens who carefully monitor every arrest, crowding around officers who are just trying to do their jobs and capturing the detentions on camera, lest they turn into another Freddie Gray situation. On the other hand, police are also afraid a prosecutor will haul them in front of a jury. After Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby charged six of their comrades with a range of offenses in Freddie Gray’s death, they say that they don’t know when they might be charged with a crime, just for doing their jobs.”

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by

News/Politics 6-11-15

What’s interesting in the news today?

Open Thread

1. This is the problem with these secretive deals, which most haven’t read (again). It’s the unknown details which come back to haunt you. Establishment Republicans probably like it because it provides them cover to do what they want to do anyway, which is to expand immigration. 

From Breitbart  “Discovered inside the huge tranche of secretive Obamatrade documents released by Wikileaks are key details on how technically any Republican voting for Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) that would fast-track trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal would technically also be voting to massively expand President Obama’s executive authority when it comes to immigration matters.

The mainstream media covered the Wikileaks document dump extensively, but did not mention the immigration chapter contained within it, so Breitbart News took the documents to immigration experts to get their take on it. Nobody has figured how big a deal the documents uncovered by Wikileaks are until now. (See below)

The president’s Trade in Services Act (TiSA) documents, which is one of the three different close-to-completely-negotiated deals that would be fast-tracked making up the president’s trade agreement, show Obamatrade in fact unilaterally alters current U.S. immigration law. TiSA, like TPP or the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (T-TIP) deals, are international trade agreements that President Obama is trying to force through to final approval. The way he can do so is by getting Congress to give him fast-track authority through TPA.

TiSA is even more secretive than TPP. Lawmakers on Capitol Hill can review the text of TPP in a secret, secured room inside the Capitol—and in some cases can bring staffers who have high enough security clearances—but with TiSA, no such draft text is available.

Voting for TPA, of course, would essentially ensure the final passage of each TPP, T-TIP, and TiSA by Congress, since in the history of fast-track any deal that’s ever started on fast-track has been approved. Roughly 10 pages of this TiSA agreement document leak are specifically about immigration.

“The existence of these ten pages on immigration in the Trade and Services Agreement make it absolutely clear in my mind that the administration is negotiating immigration – and for them to say they are not – they have a lot of explaining to do based on the actual text in this agreement,” Rosemary Jenks, the Director of Government Relations at Numbers USA, told Breitbart News following her review of these documents.”

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2. Anybody shocked?

From TheWallStJournal  “Last September the Obama administration produced an FBI report that said mass shooting attacks and deaths were up sharply — by an average annual rate of about 16% between 2000 and 2013. Moreover, the problem was worsening. “The findings establish an increasing frequency of incidents,” said the authors. “During the first 7 years included in the study, an average of 6.4 incidents occurred annually. In the last 7 years of the study, that average increased to 16.4 incidents annually.”

The White House could not possibly have been more pleased with the media reaction to these findings, which were prominently featured by the New York Times, USA Today, CNN, the Washington Post and other major outlets. The FBI report landed six weeks before the midterm elections, and the administration was hoping that the gun-control issue would help drive Democratic turnout.

But late last week, J. Pete Blair and M. Hunter Martaindale, two academics at Texas State University who co-authored the FBI report, acknowledged that “our data is imperfect.” They said that the news media “got it wrong” last year when they “mistakenly reported mass shootings were on the rise.”

Mind you, the authors did not issue this mea culpa in the major news outlets that supposedly misreported the original findings. Instead, the authors published it in ACJS Today, an academic journal published by the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences. “Because official data did not contain the information we needed, we had to develop our own,” wrote Messrs. Blair and Martaindale. “This required choices between various options with various strengths and weaknesses.” You don’t say.

John Lott of the Crime Prevention Research Center—who has studied FBI crime data for three decades—told me in an interview that the FBI report is better understood as a political document than as a work of serious social science. For example, the authors chose the year 2000 as their starting point “even though anyone who has studied these trends knows that 2000 and 2001 were unusually quiet and had few mass shootings.” Data going back to the mid-1970s is readily available but was ignored. How come? Over the past 40 years, there has been no statistically significant increase in mass shootings in the U.S.”

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3. Again, is anyone shocked? Nope.

From TheWashingtonExaminer  “State Department Inspector General officials edited out passages of a high-profile report in 2013 that could have embarrassed Hillary Clinton just days before she quit President Obama’s Cabinet.

The officials excised details of a cover up of misconduct by Clinton’s security team.

The edits raise concerns that investigators were subjected to “undue influence” from agency officials.

The Washington Examiner obtained earlier drafts of the report which differ markedly from the final version. References to specific cases in which high-level State officials intervened and descriptions of the extent and frequency of those interventions appear in several early drafts but were later eliminated.

The unexplained gaps in the final version, and the removal of passages that would have damaged the State Department, call into question the independence of Harold Geisel, who was State’s temporary inspector general throughout Clinton’s four years at the head of the department.

The drafts were provided to the Examiner by Richard Higbie, a senior criminal investigator at the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, after he said he disclosed the documents to several members of Congress and multiple congressional committees under federal whistleblower protections.

Higbie is presently suing the State Department for retaliation.”

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4. Hillary appears to have been providing favors for Clinton Foundation donors even back when she was a Senator.

From TheWashingtonTimes  “Hillary Rodham Clinton’s efforts to provide favors to major donors to her husband’s global charity or her own political career stretch back far earlier than her tenure as America’s top diplomat, dating to the time she served as a U.S. senator and had the power to earmark federal funds and influence legislation, records show.

For instance, Mrs. Clinton introduced a bill when she was New York’s junior senator that allowed a donor to the Clinton Foundation to use tax-exempt bonds to build a shopping center in Syracuse, New York, public records show.

She also went to bat for Freddie Mac, working to defeat legislation that would have subjected the mortgage giant to tougher regulations before the housing bubble burst and led to a major recession. That same year, Freddie Mac donated $50,000 to $100,000 to her husband’s charity, originally called the William J. Clinton Foundation records show.”

“Mrs. Clinton also used her leverage as a senator to help persuade the Chinese government to reduce tariffs on Corning Inc.’s fiber optic products. The central New York company’s employees and executives contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to her campaigns and political action committee.

Analysts on political money have said the pattern of Mrs. Clinton’s intervention on behalf of donors to her husband’s charity raise troubling ethical questions.”

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5. Apparently his hometown of Chicago is where Obama learned to use fuzzy math. It’s one of the few courses required. 🙄

From HotAir  “Have you heard the good news? (No.. not that Good News.) The high school graduation rate in Chicago has finally started going back up as of the last full year of available records. (2012-2013) It jumped up from 61% to 63%, which still isn’t really close to the national rate of 81%, but hey… at least it’s improving, right?

According to an investigation done by NPR (of all places) the news might not be quite as sunny and cheerful as the headlines would indicate. Graduating more students isn’t really a positive accomplishment if the graduates in question are making it out the door on a technicality and are not prepared for either college or a job. And in Chicago, that seems to be the case far too often.

First of all, the “percentage who graduate” isn’t accurate if you mislabel a lot of the dropouts.

Basically, we found that many high schools in the city were mislabeling students when they left. They were saying they were moving out of town or going to private schools when, in reality, they were enrolling at the district’s alternative schools or, in some cases, GED programs…

Well, it’s making it look better than it really is because mislabeling those students makes them disappear from the denominator.

But even the ones who stick around and graduate were frequently getting credit for work which was dubious to say the least. Many students achieved the required minimums through “credit recovery.” This process allowed students who failed required courses to “retake” the class at home and/or online with limited teacher supervision and far fewer questions to answer.

Plenty of cities are apparently using similar tactics to Chicago. Camden, New Jersey has an interesting optional program for kids who fail their finals. They get to try again with a substantially easier course.”

“In New Jersey, if you fail the first-round high school exit exam, there’s a second exam you can take — an easier one. It’s untimed, and it consists of just one single question per subject. In Camden, half the senior class failed not just the first test but the second one too…”

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