Tag: freedom

University of hate

2:08 pm

Shades of climategate: An activist has released to the public the correspondence from a Brandeis University listserv devoted to expressing hatred for conservatives, Jews, Christians, and anyone who doesn’t conform to modern leftwing dogmas.

More here. It seems that 92 professors, many from Brandeis but also including academics from other institutions, belong to this listserv and post there regularly. Many also signed the petition that protested Brandeis’s decision, later rescinded, to give Muslim dissident Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s an honorary degree.

Read the articles. The language used by these so-called intellectuals is childish, simple-minded, bigoted, and hateful. It reveals to the world who they are, and what they stand for, and should serve as a warning to anyone thinking of attending Brandeis or who is there now: It is time to find another place to go to college.

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House slashes budget of National Security Council

10:09 am

Pushback: The House has approved a one third cut to the budget of the National Security Council in response to its mandate that agencies withhold information from Congress.

As I said yesterday, when an agency of the federal government decides to defy Congress, elected by the people, than the best and most effective action for Congress to take is to use the power of the purse to reduce or eliminate that agency’s funding. Without money their power disappears, and Congress takes control.

It has been decades since Congress used its power in this way. The more it does this now, however, the more it is going to realize how powerful it really is.

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White House defies House subpoena

9:56 am

Claiming that White House officials have absolute immunity from testifying to Congress, the administration today ignored a subpoena issued by a House committee investigating violations of the Hatch act.

The White House warned Issa late Tuesday that David Simas, director of the White House Office of Political Strategy and Outreach, would not be appearing. White House Counsel Neil Eggleston wrote that Simas is “immune” from any effort by Congress to compel him to testify. “[T]he committee’s effort to compel Mr. Simas’s testimony threatens longstanding interests of the Executive Branch in preserving the president’s independence and autonomy, as well as his ability to obtain candid advice and counsel to aid him in the discharge of his constitutional duties,” Eggleston wrote. “In light of those principles… Mr. Simas is immune from congressional compulsion to testify on matters relating to his official duties and will not appear at the July 16, 2014 hearing.”

Issa said late Tuesday that he would hold the hearing in the hopes that Simas would appear, and when the hearing started Wednesday morning, Simas was not there. Issa started the hearing by saying he received Eggleston’s “deeply disturbing” letter late Tuesday night, and argued that this decision goes against court rulings that say White House officials are not immune from having to appear before Congress. “A federal judge wrote that senior advisers to the president of the United States are ‘not absolutely immune from congressional process,’ ” Issa said.

Why am I so strongly reminded of Richard Nixon and his claim of executive privilege to prevent his subordinates from being questioned by Congress? As Issa notes correctly, the courts ruled against Nixon, and we eventually found out that executive privilege was merely Nixon’s way of stonewalling the investigation. I suspect this is Obama’s sole reason now for stonewalling.

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Lawyer threatened with disbarment because of his political views

9:42 am

Fascists: A South Carolina lawyer has been threatened with disbarment by his state’s legal agencies because they want to prevent him from publishing his political opinions.

Todd [Kincannon] is now reporting that the South Carolina governmental authorities responsible for governing the professional conduct and ethics of attorneys have decided that Todd’s conservative political and religious advocacy on Twitter, and elsewhere, is too offensive to be permitted, and needs to be gagged.

Specifically, Todd has written that the South Carolina Commission on Lawyer Conduct and the South Carolina Office of Disciplinary Counsel have informed him that his political and religious commentary is “unethical” to a degree sufficient to warrant legal sanction to the point of disbarment. … More specifically, Todd writes that these governmental agencies have threatened him with disbarment should he proceed with his planned publication of a book advocating conservative political and religious beliefs.

He has been forced to delay the release of this book, as well as stop posting his opinions on line, while he files a lawsuit to prevent his disbarment.

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What others really think of America

10:43 pm

Travel tips for Russian, French, Chinese, and Japanese travelers to the United States.

Read them all. Not surprisingly, the French are the most bothered by American habits while the Russians struggle mightily with our general niceness. All told, however, these tips will each give you warm feelings for the wild, crazy, enthusiastic culture that is America, as seen objectively by outsiders, and best summed up by this Japanese advice:

In Japan, there is great fear of failure and mistakes in front of other people. It is better to do nothing and avoid being criticized than to taste the humiliation of failure. As a result, there are things we wanted to do, but did not, and often regret.

In America, you can make mistakes, fail, and it doesn’t matter. It is a fundamental feeling that to sometimes be incorrect is natural. In addition, rather than thinking about mistakes and failures, American’s have curiosity and say, “Let’s try anyway!”

As noted so wisely in the 1982 comedy Night Shift, “Is this a great country, or what?”

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Israel repairs Gaza power line

6:17 pm

Another Israeli war crime! Even as Hamas continued to hurl bombs at them, Israeli electric workers on Monday repaired a power line, destroyed by a Hamas rocket, that fed electricity to Gaza.

After a day without power, electricity was restored to some 70,000 Gazans when the Israeli government gave the Israel Electric Corp. the green light to repair a high-power line damaged by a rocket on Saturday. … The IEC employees dispatched to repair the damage were accompanied by Israel Defense Forces soldiers and outfitted with bulletproof vests. They wore special helmets as well to minimize the threat of shrapnel injuries.

Can you wrap you mind around this? Not only did the Israelis do the repair, ending a blackout in Gaza, the story makes it clear that this power is supplied to Gaza by Israel. And this is all taking place while Hamas tries to kill as many Israelis as possible, from Gaza.

So, just who is the hate-monger here?

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TSA don’t know nothing about geography

5:36 pm

Does this make you feel safer? A TSA agent did not recognize a District of Columbia drivers license and did not know it is part of the United States.

When Gray handed the man his driver’s license the agent demanded to see Gray’s passport. Grays told the agent he wasn’t carrying his passport and asked why he needed it. The agent said he didn’t recognize the license. Gray said he asked the agent if he knew what the District of Columbia is, and after a brief conversation Gray realized the man did not know.

What was unfortunate for this particular agent was that the individual he questioned also happened to be a television news reporter.

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The House slashes IRS budget

9:51 am

The Republican-controlled House has slashed the IRS’s tax enforcement budget by 25%.

The cuts reflect GOP outrage over the agency’s scrutiny of tea party groups seeking tax-exempt status and frustration over the agency’s failure to produce thousands of emails by Lois Lerner, the official formerly in charge of the IRS division that processes applications for tax-exempt status.

“The use of a government agency to harass, target, intimidate and threaten lawful, honest citizens was the worst form of authoritarianism,” said Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., author of an amendment to cut the IRS tax enforcement budget by $353 million. Rep. Bill Huizenga, R-Mich., followed up with an amendment to cut $788 million more.

The Democratic floor leader on the funding bill, Rep. Jose Serrano of New York, opposed the amendments but opted against demanding a roll call vote. [emphasis mine]

This is the right way to deal with the IRS abuse of power. Cut their funds. Use the power of the purse. I also highlight the Democratic position because it illustrates several things:
» Read more

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Falcon 9 launch

8:41 am

The competition heats up: SpaceX’s Falcon 9 has successfully launched six Orbcomm commercial satellites into orbit.

The six satellites still must be deployed. We will know if this is successful sometime in the next hour or so. Also, no news yet on SpaceX’s effort to recover the rocket’s first stage after a soft splashdown in the ocean.

Update: All 6 Orbcomm satellites have successfully deployed.

Update 2: From Elon Musk as to the first stage recovery: “Rocket booster reentry, landing burn & leg deploy were good, but lost hull integrity right after splashdown (aka kaboom).”

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A spaceport for Great Britain?

8:38 am

The competition heats up: The government of the United Kingdom today outlined its intention to build its first spaceport by 2018.

The announcement listed eight potential sites, six of which were in Scotland, which is presently threatening to break away from the United Kingdom. This announcement I suspect is less a call for British space exploration and instead a political effort to encourage Scotland to remain in the UK.

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Surprising support for Israel against Hamas

10:15 pm

If true this is very good news: In the present conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, Israel is getting either support or fair treatment from a number of very surprising sources both internationally and inside the Arab community.

These sources include important leaders in Egypt, France, Lebanon, the United Nations (!), and even the press. As the author notes,

In large part the coolness toward Hamas results from the belated realization that Islamists pose a greater threat than Zionists. But media sobriety suggests that, in part, it also follows from a weariness of Hamas’ vile tactics and revulsion against its hideous goal of destroying Israel. As Hamas’ goal in this war is political, this lesser support is of supreme importance to it.

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The New Nazis have arrived.

5:51 pm

The religion of peace: Muslim protesters in Paris today chanted “Death to the Jews” while attacking Jewish businesses and synagogues.

The firebomb went off Friday night at the entrance to the synagogue of Aulnay-sous-Bois, a northeastern suburb of the French capital. A Middle Eastern man assaulted a Jewish 17-year-old girl on a Paris street near the Gare du Nord train station by spraying pepper-spray on her face, shouting: “Dirty Jewess, inshallah you will die.”

In Belleville, an eastern suburb of Paris, a demonstration Saturday by a few dozen people against Israel’s attack on Hamas featured calls to “slaughter the Jews,” according to Alain Azria, a French Jewish photojournalist who covered the event. The crowd also chanted “death to the Jews,” he said.

These stories are only a sampling.

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A conservative town rallies to support their gay police chief.

9:15 am

They might be strongly against gay marriage, but they also don’t like bigotry.

When openly gay police chief Crystal Moore was fired by a mayor who condemned her lifestyle as “questionable,” she feared her two decade career in law enforcement in this town was over.

Then, this conservative, small town rebelled.

The people of Latta, who voted overwhelmingly for a state amendment banning gay marriage eight years ago, turned against the mayor, stripped him of his powers and the town council rehired Moore. They said her dedication to the town mattered more than her sexual orientation.

This story illustrates how shallow the debate over gay marriage has become. It is entirely possible to oppose gay marriage (which I do) without a hint of bigotry in your heart.

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“Imagine 80 percent of your citizens in bomb Shelters.”

9:05 am

Guess who said it? More:

“I just want your viewers to imagine the United States being bombarded, not in one city or two cities, but in every city between New York and Colorado.

“Maybe 20% of the United States would be exempt from this,” he said, “80% of your citizens would have to be in bomb shelters or ready to go into bomb shelters within a minute to a minute and a half max. No country can accept that, we can’t accept it, and we’ll take the necessary actions to stop it.”

But they should exercise restraint! They are only Jews after all. And we mustn’t offend any Muslims!

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TSA backs down

9:34 pm

The furor over TSA policy to allow illegal aliens to fly without identification has forced the agency to change its policy.

TSA employees at Laredo International Airport notified Border Patrol agents last night at 11 p.m. local time that a new policy was in place that would not allow illegal aliens to fly solely using an I-862, otherwise known as the Notice to Appear form. TSA employees stated they will allow illegal aliens who had been released on their own to travel with a foreign passport or ID in addition to an I-862.

The TSA continues to deny they ever had a policy in force that allowed illegals to fly without identification, but the fact that they have announced “a new policy” proves that denial is an outright lie. Moreover, so does the willingness of many Border Patrol agents to testify to the earlier policy, under oath, which also probably contributed to forcing the TSA to quickly change its policy.

From my perspective, this entire story proves once again how completely worthless the TSA is. We would be better off without it entirely. At least then we wouldn’t have to be subjected to sexual abuse whenever we boarded an airplane.

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TSA joins Obama adminstration in opening the borders

10:59 am

Does this make you feel safer? The TSA is allowing illegal aliens to fly on commercial airlines without valid identification.

“The aliens who are getting released on their own recognizance are being allowed to board and travel commercial airliners by simply showing their Notice to Appear forms,” NBPC’s Local 2455 Spokesman, Hector Garza, told Breitbart Texas. “This is not the CBP [Customs and Border Protection] or another federal agency renting or leasing an aircraft, these are the same planes that the American public uses for domestic travel,” said Garza. “This just adds insult to injury. Not only are we releasing unknown illegal aliens onto American streets, but we are allowing them to travel commercially using paperwork that could easily be reproduced or manipulated on any home computer. The Notice to Appear form has no photo, anyone can make one and manipulate one. They do not have any security features, no watermark, nothing. They are simply printed on standard copy paper based on the information the illegal alien says is the truth.”

Spokesman Garza continued, “We do not know who these people are, we often have to solely rely on who they say they are, where they say they came from, and the history they say they have. We know nothing about most of them, ICE releases them into the American public, and now they are boarding aircraft at will with a simple paper document that anyone can easily alter or reproduce themselves.”

I am really speechless. Even as the TSA continues to force Americans to jump through hoops to simply board an airplane, it is allowing illegals to pass through without documentation. How insane is this?

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Federal judge gives the IRS 30 days to come clean

4:37 pm

A federal judge has given the IRS 30 days to testify under oath how the Lois Lerner emails were lost.

This testimony will be far different than congressional hearings, in that it will be wide-ranging and will not have Democratic legislators present to provide cover. It will also not be under the time constraints that limit congressional hearings.

In related news, Congressman Steve Stockman (R-Texas) has filed a resolution calling for the arrest of Lois Lerner for contempt of Congress.

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A pro-choice supporter illustrates her hatred for freedom

10:30 am

Feel the love: Watch a pro-choice supporter get violent against pro-life demonstrators with whom she disagrees.

Video below the fold. Be warned that the pro-choice woman uses very graphic language.

She tells us a great deal about herself and the social community that she belongs to when she says, “No uterus, no right to talk about it. Understand?” From her perspective, she has the right to dictate who has freedom of speech and who doesn’t. Worse, she very clearly has had this totalitarian belief confirmed by the people she socializes with.

» Read more

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Seven unjustified school suspensions

6:51 pm

Seven school suspensions that were insane and completely unjustified.

I’ve posted about most of these stories previously, but it is important to read about them again to see how completely ridiculous and oppressive they were. Each one of these actions was a good reason for everyone to pull their kids from these public schools, especially when the school officials who perpetrated these obscenities were not fired.

The first and third were especially egregious, but the third illustrates how best to combat the schools when they act this way.

Fourteen year old Jared Marcum wore a NRA “Protect Your Rights” t-shirt to school with a hunting rifle on it. Despite the fact that the shirt didn’t violate the school’s dress code, a screaming teacher demanded that he turn the shirt inside out. Marcum was then removed from class, suspended, arrested, and faced a year in jail for “obstructing an officer” because he wouldn’t stop protesting his innocence while he was being hauled away. In this case, 100 kids wore the same shirts to school as part of a protest without being challenged and the family lawyered up and got the charges dropped. [emphasis mine]

If one student is suspended for making his pop tart look like a gun, every student in the school should do the same. If one student is suspended for innocently using the word “gun” in conversation, then every student in the school should use the word repeatedly in conversation. If students and parents inundate the school with more examples of the behavior the school was trying to ban, the schools stop this insanity very quickly.

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ISIS demands a Jewish genocide

12:09 pm

The religion of peace: ISIS supporters are now demanding a new Jewish holocaust.

Facts remain facts. The world of Islam is poor, ignorant, bigoted, violent, and oppressive. Where there is wealth, such as in the Middle East, it is fueled entirely by oil that was found by Western capitalist companies and pumped to the surface using Western-developed technology. Without that help, the oil would still be underground and these Islamic countries would still be poor.

The oppressive nature of Islam, however, remains obvious and widespread. If we are intellectually honest we must ask: Why is that? What is it about Islam that results in this consistent cultural and social failure? An open-minded look at the language of the Koran and the history of this religion will give you a straight-forward answer, and that answer is not a pleasant one.

That the American intellectual community and many American politicians from both parties seem unwilling to take this hard look at Islam says a great deal about their lack of intellectual honesty. It also tells us something about their own attitude towards oppression. Maybe they don’t dislike tyranny that so much.

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FIRE sues to end university speech codes

1:30 pm

Pushback: The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) today filed lawsuits against the speech codes at four universities.

Read the article. The specific examples are quite oppressive. For example:

At Citrus College in California, student Vincenzo Sinapi-Riddle is challenging three unconstitutional policies, including a free speech zone that the school already agreed to abolish after a 2003 lawsuit. Not only did Citrus College reinstitute its “Free Speech Area,” comprising a miniscule 1.37% of campus, but it also requires student organizations to undergo a two-week approval process for any expressive activity.

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Another lawsuit presses the IRS

3:10 pm

A third lawsuit against the IRS, this one by True the Vote, will demand answers at a hearing on July 11 about those lost emails.

This lawsuit is in addition to the Z-Street and the Judicial Watch suits. Thus, we now have three different judges in three different courts pushing back at the IRS coverup, with hearings scheduled for July 10 and July 11.

As I said, things should get very hot for the IRS and the Obama administration come mid-July.

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True the Vote sues Mississippi over voter fraud in Republican primary

3:00 pm

True the Vote, the organization harassed by the IRS and the Obama administration for investigating fraud at the polls, has sued the Mississippi Secretary of State over alleged voter fraud in last week’s Republican primary.

Though I found some of Cochran’s campaign efforts quite disgusting, I was not offended that blacks came out to vote for him. As long as their vote is legal, that is their right. However, the allegations of fraud that have been swirling around this election suggest that maybe a closer look is warranted.

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Free paid vacations for House lawmakers

10:02 am

Who says they’re conservatives? The House Ethics committee, run by Republicans, has quietly eliminated the requirement that elected officials list any privately sponsored travel they receive in their annual financial-disclosure forms.

The move, made behind closed doors and without a public announcement by the House Ethics Committee, reverses more than three decades of precedent. Gifts of free travel to lawmakers have appeared on the yearly financial form dating back its creation in the late 1970s, after the Watergate scandal. National Journal uncovered the deleted disclosure requirement when analyzing the most recent batch of yearly filings. “This is such an obvious effort to avoid accountability,” said Melanie Sloan, executive director of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “There’s no legitimate reason. There’s no good reason for it.”

Once again more evidence that we the voters must replace as many of these crooks, from both parties, as we can.

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Hobby Lobby wins

9:28 am

The Supreme Court today struck down the Obamacare contraceptive mandate imposed by the Obama administration on all businesses.

Despite the opinions of many on the left, some of whom have even threatened to burn Hobby Lobby to the ground for making this challenge, this is a victory for religious liberty. Since when in this country did the government get the right to force religious people of any religion into doing things that directly violate their religious beliefs? This rules clearly says the government does not yet have that right.

No one who supports freedom, however, should rest easy. The decision was 5-4, and with a Democratic Party today quite willing to put restrictions on free speech, we must be prepared for more assaults on freedom.

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Another legal case that could blow the IRS open

12:44 am

The lawsuit of a pro-Israeli organization, filed in August 2010, makes the IRS extremely vulnerable to deep legal investigation.

[Y]esterday saw the beginning of the discovery phase in the lawsuit by Z-Street a pro-Israel organization that was told its application for tax exempt status was being delayed because “…these cases are being sent to a special unit in the DC office to determine whether the organization’s activities contradict the Administration’s public policies.” …
Judge Jackson gave the IRS until June 26 to respond to Z-Street. That deadline has now passed, so the case enters discovery. This means that Z-Street can subpoena IRS officials, place them under oath, and ask them questions about how they acted, and cross examine them closely. They can also subpoena documents and require their production. This is much different than a House committee hearing in which members have only a few minutes to ask questions, and when friendly Democrats have their opportunity to apologize for the impertinence of daring to ask questions of our IRS masters. Depositions taken under oath can last many hours and involve detailed questions.

What makes the Z-Street case unique and potentially extremely damaging is that its lawsuit was filed in August 2010. That filing placed the IRS under legal obligation to preserve records.

As the article notes, as a legal proceeding it will be practically impossible for the IRS to stonewall, as it has done during Congressional hearings. Like the Judicial Watch case that will have a hearing on July 10, the IRS was required under the law to make sure evidence was not destroyed, and failed to do so. And like that case, the court will have the right to demand answers about that failure and get them.

I want to underline the basis of the Z-Street case: An IRS official admitted that this organization’s tax exempt status was being delayed merely because its “activities contradict the Administration’s public policies.” Think about that. The IRS believes it can decide your tax liability and status based on your political opinion.

Doesn’t that capture in a nutshell the entire scandal, in which the IRS was used as a weapon to harass opponents of the Democratic Party and specifically of Barack Obama.

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Things could get very interesting for the IRS on July 10.

11:46 pm

The judge with whom the IRS failed to notify about the lost emails and is holding a hearing on the matter on July 10 has in the past aggressively pursued corruption in the Department of Justice.

Judge Sullivan is the judge who held federal prosecutors in contempt, dismissed an unjust indictment against a United States Senator, and publicly excoriated the Department of Justice. He also had the moral conviction, courage and gumption to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the Justice Department and the individual prosecutors. …

In the [Senator Ted] Stevens case, Judge Sullivan publicly upbraided the government lawyers before an overflow courtroom, “In nearly 25 years on the bench, I’ve never seen anything approaching the mishandling and misconduct that I’ve seen in this case. . . . When the government does not meet its obligations to turn over evidence, the system falters.”

Judge Sullivan was taking the extraordinary step of appointing a special prosecutor. He chose highly respected DC attorney Henry Schuelke III to investigate the prosecutors for possible criminal charges. The judge ordered the department to preserve all of its files, electronic correspondence—everything—and cooperate fully in the investigation, including providing Schuelke access to investigative files and all witnesses.

It is very possible Sullivan will get as incensed on July 10. Stay tuned. Things could get very hot for the IRS and the Obama administration on that day.

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