Latest posts

FBI Pushed Junk Science on Mass Shooting Trends : by Bob Allen

We were assured mass shooting occurrences were increasing. We were fed junk science.

As you read this short article, think: Climate Change science. From the Patriot Post:  http://patriotpost.us/posts/35728

Last fall, we noted that the FBI used bogus stats in its pre-election mass shooting report. Researchers counted some mass shootings that weren't "mass" at all, and entirely omitted actual mass shootings that occurred early in the carefully selected timeframe. All of it was an effort to show an increasing trend of "gun violence" since 2000, we suspect in concert with Democrat campaign talking points about the necessity of gun control. The Wall Street Journal's Jason Riley picked up on a quiet announcement that, indeed, the researchers pretty much made it up.  http://patriotpost.us/posts/29961  http://www.wsj.com/articles/obamas-gun-control-misfire-1433892493

I can't count how many times I've had people protest my "climate change denier" status by pointing to the "scientific consensus." Many are absolutely aghast that I would question whether the individuals putting out the data might be... gasp... biased and lying in their conclusions.

Many of the same people are quick to point to the "nefarious and evil" Koch brothers—who are supposedly funding everything dark and wicked—but they refuse to even momentarily ponder that government money (stolen from taxpayers, rather than earned in free commerce) might be used to "encourage" results in line with the wishes of those handing over the checks.

This brief look into FBI data from 2014 illustrates the point that government numbers are often totally cooked to portray something that simply isn't true. It's a bit hollow to see the Academics trying to salvage their reputations years later—well after the checks have been cashed, and the damage done. There are so many who are willing to prostitute themselves for a bit of notoriety and fortune.

The recent NOAA report arose from the same abyss of deceit as the FBI statistical report on "mass shooting" violence. Face it: Everyone has a bias, and is liable to being influenced by the Siren Song of mammon.    http://politicaloutcast.com/2015/06/mark-steyn-on-climate-change-scamology/

The same people who hide trade negotiations, abuse taxpayers, lie about economic and unemployment numbers, molest young boys and girls, take measureless bribes under the table, and completely sell their souls for fleeting earthly power and money are simply not to be believed when they say "trust me."

 http://politicaloutcast.com/2015/06/fbi-pushed-junk-science-on-mass-shooting-trends/#sZoercCx758L43RJ.99

Re: What are you listening to right now?

King Crimson - Red.

Re: Are you having fun or going crazy....

LOL, and the thumbs up, thumbs down feature.

Re: Are you having fun or going crazy....

This one so far is the closest I've seen, just needs a bit of fine tuning and getting used to.

Re: Today in History

"Tear down this wall!" was the challenge issued by United States President Ronald Reagan to Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev to destroy the Berlin Wall, in a speech at the Brandenburg Gate near the Berlin Wall on this day in history June 12, 1987

Re: Are you having fun or going crazy....

It is pretty crazy with the multiple sites that are popping up or that already existed.  I am sure that one or two of the new sites will rise to the top in time.  It takes a bit to get used to new formatting, and with multiple sites that have different formats - all of which are new to me...well, that's where it gets frustrating.  Plus, I have encountered glitches on some.  The main problem, imho, is the inability to respond directly to another user's comment and actually have a discussion/debate.  If we could do that, and recieve notifications of replies on site, rather than via email (as I have encounteted elsewhere), it would be fanfuckingtastic!

Rachel Dolezal, Spokane NAACP Head, Accused of Pretending to Be Black : By Nick Sanchez

Rachel Dolezal, president of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP in Washington state, has been accused of pretending to be black, and now the city is investigating.

The Coeur d'Alene Press reported Thursday that Dolezal, who in childhood photos appears as Caucasian with blonde hair, identified herself as African-American on her application to serve on the citizen police ombudsman commission — a commission she now chairs. Additionally, she claimed on her Facebook page in December that Albert Wilkerson, a black man posing with her in a picture, was her father. Public birth records indicate otherwise.

"It is very disturbing that she has become so dishonest," said Ruthanne Dolezal, Rachel's mother, in a phone interview from Montana. "Rachel is very good at using her artistic skills to transform herself."

Ruthanne and Larry Dolezal, who just celebrated their 41st wedding anniversary, are listed as Rachel's parents on her Montana birth certificate, filed in Lincoln County in 1977.

They told The Spokesman-Review that they are both white, having Czech, Swedish, and German roots with "faint traces" of Native American ancestry. Between 1993 and 1995, the couple adopted four black infants, Ezra, Izaiah, Zachariah, and Esther, but clarified that Rachel was their biological daughter.

When reporters confronted Dolezal about her possible masquerading this week, she gave confusing and unclear answers.

"That question is not as easy as it seems," she said from Eastern Washington University, where she's a part-time professor in the Africana Studies Program. "There's a lot of complexities . . . and I don't know that everyone would understand that . . . We're all from the African continent."

http://www.newsmax.com/TheWire/rachel-dolezal-naacp-woman-black/2015/06/12/id/650197/

GOP Critical of New Obama Rules To Create 'Utopian' Neighborhoods : By Courtney Coren

Housing regulations aimed at diversifying wealthy neighborhoods, which some are calling executive overreach for the purpose of establishing a utopia, are expected to be released by the Obama administration this month.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) will release the rules with the aim of ending segregation in neighborhoods around the country, The Hill is reporting.

HUD plans to offer grant money to communities willing to build affordable housing within affluent neighborhoods. On the flip side, the federal agency will also give money to poorer neighborhoods to improve those communities through better schools, parks, libraries and grocery stores.

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

The regulations are a continuation of a rule made by the Obama administration in 2013, in which HUD started gathering data about diversity in neighborhoods around the country for the purpose of making such policy changes.

The new regulation has its share of critics, especially among conservatives.

Arizona Republican Rep. Paul Gosar, who is working to block the rule, said that the Obama 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," Gosar told The Hill.

The Heritage Foundation's Hans von Spakovsky said the rule is "too race conscious."

"It's a sign that this administration seems to take race into account on everything," Spakovsky told The Hill.

The plan has plenty of advocates among civil rights groups, who say it will help break down barriers that make upward mobility difficult for those in poor, rundown neighborhoods.

"We have a history of putting affordable housing in poor communities," Debby Goldberg, vice president of the National Fair Housing Alliance, told The Hill.

http://www.newsmax.com/US/hud-neighborhoods-wealths-poor/2015/06/11/id/650022/        {I WOMDER IF  BIDEN AND HILLIERY ARE GOING TO LIKE THIS. OR IF THEY ARE SAYING "THERE GOES THE NEIGHBORHOOD " ?}

Obama Facing Humiliating Defeat if Trade Bill Fails : Jonathan Ernst

A landmark trade bill that tops President Barack Obama's second-term agenda faces a showdown vote in the House as Democrats mount a last-ditch effort to kill it.

The outcome was uncertain and the drama intense heading into Friday's votes. In frantic 11th-hour maneuvering, liberals in the House defied their own president and turned against a favored program of their own that retrains workers displaced by trade. Killing the program would kill the companion trade bill, and many Democrats and labor leaders advocated just that.

The move caught the GOP off-guard. House Republicans, already in the awkward position of allying themselves with Obama, found themselves being asked by their leaders to vote for a worker retraining program that most have long opposed as wasteful. Many were reluctant to do so, leaving the fate of the entire package up in the air, and Obama facing the prospect of a humiliating defeat at the hands of his own party members — unless he can eke out what all predict would be the narrowest of wins.

"If we have to pass something that's a Democratic ideal with all Republicans to get the whole thing to go," said Rep. Tom Rooney, R-Fla., "we could be in trouble."

The main trade bill at issue would give Obama so-called "fast track" authority to negotiate trade deals that Congress could approve or reject, but not amend. He hopes to use the authority, already agreed to by the Senate, to complete a sweeping pact with 11 other Pacific Rim nations which would constitute the economic centerpiece of his second term. Obama says such a pact with Japan, Mexico, Singapore and other nations constituting 40 percent of the global economy would open up critical new markets for American products.

Business groups like the Chamber of Commerce crave the deal; labor unions are ardently opposed, pointing to job and wage losses from earlier trade pacts opponents say never lived up to the hype from previous administrations.

Those colliding interests have produced unusual alliances on Capitol Hill, with House Republicans working to help a president they oppose on nearly every other issue, and most Democrats working against him.

Yet in a convoluted series of events Thursday, the fast-track bill, long the main event, seemed to fade in importance even as Republicans began sounding confident it would command enough votes to pass. Instead, Democrats began eyeing the possibility of taking down the related Trade Adjustment Assistance bill — a maneuver that would be made possible only because of how House leaders decided to link the two of them in rules governing how they would come to a vote.

Republicans said that the sequencing was determined at the behest of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. Pelosi, trying to maintain leverage, has remained noncommittal on the whole issue to the end, even as she worked behind the scenes with House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, this week to solve a last-minute hang-up involving Democratic concerns about cutting Medicare funds to pay for worker retraining.

The intricate solution to the Medicare issue lay in finding another revenue source —various tax penalties — and also lining up the votes in a certain order that made passage of the fast-track bill contingent on passage of the trade adjustment bill. That created the opening for Democratic fast-track opponents to take aim at the trade adjustment measure.

"The TAA is the handmaiden to facilitate the whole deal," said Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore. "We have the potential to stop this whole train."

 http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/US-Congress-Trade/2015/06/12/id/650194/#ixzz3crW2AzkJ
Urgent: Rate Obama on His Job Performance. Vote Here Now!

Hillary’s Unlawful Plan to Overrule Voter-ID Laws

A good read.


Declaring that Republican-controlled states have "systematically and deliberately" tried to "disempower and disenfranchise" voters, Hillary Clinton has called for a sweeping expansion of federal involvement in elections. In a speech last week in Houston, laying out what promises to be a major campaign theme, Mrs. Clinton called for automatic voter registration at age 18, a 20-day early-voting period and a maximum 30-minute wait period to vote.

She has also endorsed the idea of a federal law permitting convicted felons to vote and allowing individuals, such as students, who reside in one state to vote in another. All of these federal mandates would augment and make more onerous an unconstitutional election-regulating federal statute known as the "Motor Voter" law enacted during her husband's White House tenure.

A federal takeover of election laws—and rolling back state voter-ID laws intended to discourage election fraud—is a high priority for progressives. The billionaire financier George Soros reportedly has pledged $5 million to bankroll legal challenges to laws like those that Mrs. Clinton decries. Part of the effort is intended simply to galvanize the Democratic base by stoking a sense of grievance, but the strategy should be taken seriously—and rebutted as unconstitutional.

The Constitution gives Congress the power to regulate federal elections, not state ones. It also distinguishes between the regulation of presidential versus congressional elections. Specifically, under Article I, Section 4—the Elections Clause—while the states have primary responsibility for regulating congressional elections, Congress can pre-empt their rules by regulating "times, places and manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives," except that Congress cannot regulate the "places of chusing [sic] Senators."

For presidential elections, the Constitution restricts Congress's power and grants states an even more robust role—which is why the president is elected by the votes of the state-driven Electoral College, rather than directly by the people. Accordingly, Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution permits congressional regulation only of "the time of chusing the Electors, and the Day on which they shall give their Votes."

With this constitutional backdrop, Mrs. Clinton's proposals as applied to presidential elections would be entirely unconstitutional. They go well beyond regulating the time of choosing the electors for the Electoral College and the date for voting.

As applied to congressional elections, Mrs. Clinton's proposals fare no better. Her goal of extending voter qualification to felons and transient individuals such as college students is patently unconstitutional. The Constitution establishes some categorical voting entitlements, primarily relating to gender (the 19th Amendment), age (the 26th Amendment) and race (the 15th Amendment). The Constitution doesn't grant Congress the authority to determine voter qualifications. As the Supreme Court said in Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona (2013), "the Elections Clause empowers Congress to regulate how federal elections are held, but not who may vote in them."

Mrs. Clinton's proposals regarding voter registration, 20-day early voting periods and maximum 30-minute wait times are also constitutionally wanting. Congress's Election Clause authority to regulate the "time, place and manner" of congressional elections was meant to allow regulation of how those elections are carried out. But it was not intended to give Congress carte blanche to regulate all aspects of voting. The clause, particularly given its capacious word "manner," must—like all other constitutional provisions—have a meaningful limiting principle.

That principle is in the Supreme Court's federalism-protecting anti-commandeering and anti-coercion doctrines. In New York v. U.S. (1992) the court declared that Congress cannot "commandeer" state legislatures "to enact or administer a federal regulatory program." In Printz v. U.S. (1997) the court expanded the principle to state executive officials, invalidating federal gun laws requiring state and local law enforcement officers to run criminal-background checks.

Congress can use its Elections Clause power to pre-empt state laws, but its pre-emptive authority should be restrained by the anti-commandeering principle. Congress cannot conscript state officials to execute federal congressional-election reforms, but instead must use federal officials to do so.

One year after New York v. U.S., Congress enacted the 1993 the Motor Voter law, imposing numerous obligations on states, including requiring that voter registration be allowed upon applying for a driver's license and by mail, and designating state welfare agencies as voter-registration locations. Illinois, California and Michigan challenged the law, asserting that it violated New York's anti-commandeering principle. All three states lost in the lower courts, but none of the decisions was reviewed by the Supreme Court.

The lower courts concluded that, under the Elections Clause, Congress may "make or alter" state laws for holding elections and thus, inevitably, may commandeer states when exercising this power. But the scope of the Supreme Court's incipient anti-commandeering doctrine was not fully developed. It wasn't until Printz in 1997 that the anti-commandeering doctrine's centrality to federalism became clear.

That federalism limits federal power generally was confirmed by NFIB v. Sebelius (2012), when the court invalidated ObamaCare's Medicaid expansion because it coerced states. NFIB confirmed that while Congress can incentivize states' adoption of election laws such as those Mrs. Clinton proposes, it cannot constitutionally withhold large amounts of funds from states to coerce the laws' adoption.

Democrats are seeking to overturn voting laws in the presidential battleground states of North Carolina, Ohio and Wisconsin. The Associated Press reported on June 4 that one of the lawyers involved in the effort is Marc Elias, who is also general counsel for Mrs. Clinton's campaign.

Republicans have been muted in their response to Mrs. Clinton and the attempt to expand federal power over elections and undermine states' anti-fraud election laws. Such reticence is a mistake. They would have the Constitution and legal precedent on their side in rebutting her proposals—as they would if they launched a fresh legal challenge to the Motor Voter law.

Mr. Rivkin, a constitutional litigator, served in the Justice Department and the White House Counsel's Office in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations. Ms. Foley is a constitutional law professor at Florida International University College of Law.

 http://www.wsj.com/articles/hillarys-unlawful-plan-to-overrule-voter-id-laws-1434063299