Link here. I would add that we are a democracy, and we get the government we deserve.
Working for the Democratic Party: An aide to Attorney General Eric Holder, in trying to arrange a leak of new IRS information to the Democrats so they could spin the story, accidently called the office of the Republican committee chairman instead.
The aide, Brian Fallon, is a former senior aide to Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and a well-known personality on Capitol Hill. The letter [by Republican Darrell Issa to Eric Holder] describes Fallon as “audibly shaken” when he realizes his request to leak documents to help get ahead of news stories about them was mistakenly made to the very office he was seeking to undermine. Issa believes the call was intended to be made to Democratic Rep. Elijah Cumming’s staff, the ranking member on the oversight panel, the letter said.
This kind of proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Obama administration does not have an investigation into the IRS scandal, only an effort to coverup their illegal activities.
We’re here to help you: The Justice Department has decided to force Yuma, Arizona to abandon a working border control program and make them follow the same policies that aren’t working anywhere else.
According to the sheriff of Yuma County, Arizona, the Department of Justice is set to end a program called “Operation Streamline” which prosecutes first-time illegal border crossers, and U.S. Senators Jeff Flake and John McCain are wondering why. Sheriff Leon Wilmot brought the DOJ’s plan to Flake’s attention in a letter last month. In it, Wilmot noted the success of a program called Operation Streamline, which implemented a zero-tolerance policy against illegal immigration.
But the DOJ is ending the successful program and bringing Yuma County’s policies in line with other sectors that have had trouble keeping a lid on illegal immigration.
Read the article. It outlines in detail the success of the Yuma program.
Why some Republicans voted for the Democratic Constitutional amendment yesterday to repeal the first amendment and squelch free speech.
As I guessed, they did it to force a public debate on the amendment. Not only will this allow them to highlight the vile Democratic effort to shut down the free speech rights of their opponents, it will eat up the little time the Senate has to do anything else.
We’re here to help you: New FDA regulations will make the import of certain very well known European cheeses forbidden.
New FDA restrictions on the levels of harmless bacteria found in imported cheese have effectively banned a number of artisan French cheeses, including Roquefort, Morbier, and Tomme de Savoie. The restricted bacteria already exist in the human stomach, and the banned cheeses have not changed their recipes for years. [emphasis mine]
Why is the FDA wasting time banning French cheeses when the deadly bacteria can be found in the human stomach? Shouldn’t the FDA instead ban the human stomach?
Fascists: The Democrats in the Senate tonight voted in favor of a constitutional amendment to partially repeal the first amendment.
Tonight the Senate voted 78-18 to advance the Democrats’ proposal to amend the Constitution to give Congress the power to prohibit or restrict participation in political campaigns. A number of Republicans voted to advance the bill, but will oppose it in debate and will vote against it. Charles Grassley said, “We should have debate on this important amendment. The majority should be made to answer why they want to silence critics.”
I call them fascists without shame, as that’s what they are. Their only reason for pushing this amendment is to silence their critics and shut down freedom, which is what fascists do. Sadly, there appears to be about 40% of the American populace that agrees with them. I call them fascists as well.
NASA has released the first photo of the completed first Orion capsule, now finished and scheduled to do a test flight in December.
As interesting as that first test flight will be, launching the capsule to about 3,600 miles before it dives back into the atmosphere to test its heat shield, I can’t get that excited about it. I sincerely believe this program will go the way of Ares, the Orbital Space Plane, Constellation, and a host of other big NASA projects that were too expensive and took too long to build. It will get cancelled before it actually flies any humans anywhere.
Government spending on healthcare has skyrocketed in the past few decades, and due to Obamacare, will rise much higher in the coming decades.
Note that this spending is not on innovation or the actual care of patients, but on bureaucracy and regulatory bodies based in Washington and elsewhere. And isn’t that just what patients need, more bureaucracy?
Note also that one of the Democratic Party’s justifications for passing Obamacare was to reduce costs, but the data outlined in this article strongly suggests that it is exactly this kind of government interference since the Great Society in the 1960s that has caused healthcare costs to rise. Look especially at the graph at the link.
An excellent question. The answer? The IRS refuses to say.
Among the most pressing is the fact that a Blackberry belonging to Lois Lerner, a former official at the center of the scandal, was wiped clean shortly after investigators started asking questions about her alleged role in the targeting of conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
Despite the fact that this revelation first came to light in August, the IRS has yet explain why this was done.
Considering her former role as chief of the IRS’ tax exempt division, and its proximity to the targeting scandal, the decision to wipe her phone after investigators started asking questions is both suspicious and troubling.
I have to admit I missed this minor detail. In previous examples where the IRS destroyed a hard drive, it was because the hard drive had had problems. The destruction was still illegal, but in at least in that case there was a somewhat reasonable if unlikely reason to do it. With Lerner’s Blackberry they haven’t given us any reason, other than it was done shortly after the investigation had begun.
Want to know which American professors are demanding an academic boycott of Israel? Here is a list.
Even as Islamic radicals and nations commit genocide against Christians, Jews, and Muslims, these so-called intellectuals only have anger at Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East and the only place in the Middle East where Christians, Jews, and Muslims can freely practice their religion and be full citizens. As the article notes,
“How can professors who are so biased against the Jewish state accurately or fairly teach students about Israel or the Arab-Israel conflict?” asked Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, AMCHA Initiative co-founder and faculty at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “Students who wish to become better educated without subjecting themselves to anti-Israel bias, or possibly even antisemitic rhetoric, may want to check which faculty members from their university are signatories before registering.”
By signing their names to this boycott, they reveal themselves to either be willfully ignorant of the complexity of the situation, or outright anti-semites.
Our tolerant Islamic allies! Even as they are doing an interfaith outreach internationally, Saudi authorities arrested 27 Christians in their own country for holding services in someone’s home.
The link includes lots of photos of the raid.
Cover-up: The IRS claimed today that it has lost emails from five more employees that were involved in the agency’s harassment of conservatives.
The article also spends a lot of time talking about a partisan Democratic Senate report issued today that whitewashes the IRS harassment. As far as I can see, that Democratic report confirms only one thing: Senate Democrats are working hand-in-glove with IRS bureaucrats and the Department of Justice to stonewall the investigation and to justify the use of the IRS as a partisan weapon by Democratic politicians. Isn’t that nice?
Our government in action: An inspector general has found that the Army was unable to track the spending on a project designed to help the Army track spending.
As of this February, the Army had spent $725.7 million on the system, which is ultimately expected to cost about $4.3 billion. The problem, according to the IG, is that the Army has failed to comply with a variety of federal laws that require agencies to standardize reporting and prepare auditable financial statements. “This occurred because DOD and Army management did not have adequate controls, including procedures and annual reviews, in place to ensure GCSS-Army compliance with Treasury and DOD guidance,” the IG report concludes.
And some people wonder why I am always skeptical of giving the federal government any job you need done.
Fascism: A New York gun shop was raided by a SWAT team, without a warrant, and forced to turn over customer sales records.
This raid was supposedly legal under New York’s newest gun control law dubbed the SAFE act. However, under the Constitution no raid can be legal without a warrant. In addition, the store owner has repeatedly requested clarification of the law from officials in his attempt to be cooperative and legal and was still raided. He is suing.
Working for the Democratic Party: New IRS emails reveal that the agency’s demand for donar lists was unnecessary according to the law and took place almost entirely against conservatives.
Worse, the donor lists were then used by the IRS to compile a list of conservatives to be audited.
Then-IRS Commissioner Miller initially testified to Congress on May 17, 2013 that “instructions had been given to destroy any donor lists,” but donor lists were actually produced to the House Ways and Means Committee four months later. The House Ways and Means Committee also announced at May 7, 2014 hearing that, after scores of conservative groups provided donor information “to the IRS, nearly one in ten donors were subject to audit.” In 2011, as many as five donors to one conservative (c)(4) organization were audited, according to the Wall Street Journal. [emphasis mine]
Apparently, the only reason these people were audited by the IRS is because they were contributors to conservative causes. In other words, the IRS was working to squelch the free speech rights of Americans who opposed the Democratic Party.
Read the whole article. There’s a lot more, such as proof that the claim by Lois Lerner and Barack Obama that the harassment was instigated solely by low level IRS employees was an outright lie. They didn’t misspoke. They didn’t misunderstand. They didn’t make a mistake. They lied, knowingly, consciously, and with forethought.
Heh. Doug Messier has found exclusive footage of the arrival of Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin at the new Vostochny spaceport under construction in eastern Russia, just prior to Vladimir Putin’s visit on Tuesday.
This is intriguing: A secure cell phone maker has uncovered 17 cell towers designed to attack cell phones that have no known owner, all located close to military bases.
The highly self-monitored phone does more than protect itself; according to Popular Science, it found 17 different phony cell towers known as “interceptors,” detected by the CryptoPhone 500 around the United States during the month of July. Interceptors are described to look to a typical phone like an ordinary tower, but once a phone connects with the interceptor, a variety of over-the-air attacks become possible, such as eavesdropping on calls and texts to pushing spyware to the device.
ESD America CEO Less Goldsmith found it suspicious that a lot of these interceptors are right on top of U.S. military bases. “So we begin to wonder – are some of them U.S. government interceptors? Or are some of them Chinese interceptors?” Goldsmith told Popular Science. “Whose interceptor is it? Who are they, that’s listening to calls around military bases? Is it just the U.S. military, or are they foreign governments doing it? The point is: we don’t really know whose they are.”
In approving extensions of seven NASA planetary missions, a review panel concluded that the Curiosity rover wasn’t doing the best it could, and that the project scientist didn’t work hard enough to change their minds.
The Mars Science Laboratory’s Curiosity rover landed on the red planet in August 2012. Equipped with a drill to gather surface samples and spectroscopy equipment to analyze the samples, the rover has collected and analyzed five surface specimens so far and, according to the extended mission proposal just approved by NASA, would analyze another eight over the next two years. That is “a poor science return for such a large investment in a flagship mission,” a 15-person senior review panel chaired by Clive Neal, a geologist at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, wrote in a report published Sept. 3.
The report also chided John Grotzinger, the lead Curiosity project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, for neglecting to show up in person during a Mars-focused senior review panel meeting in May. “This left the panel with the impression that the [Curiosity] team felt they were too big to fail,” the senior review panel wrote.
This sounds like a pissing war between scientists. Grotzinger didn’t give them the required deference so they slammed him. No matter happened, however, we know they weren’t going to cancel Curiosity’s funds.
Does this make you feel safer? One of the Americans killed while fighting for ISIS had previously held a job cleaning airplanes in Minnesota.
Multiple sources tell Fox 9 News that, for a time, he worked at a job that gave him security clearance at the airport, access to the tarmac and unfettered access to planes. Two former employees confirmed working with Muhumed at Delta Global Services, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Delta Airlines.
But hey, the TSA has us covered, focusing like a laser on sexually abusing American citizens rather than wasting time checking the security background of people who actually work at the airports!
A new study has provided further proof that the main driving force behind the abandonment of obscure languages is the desire of people to gain economic wealth.
Of all the variables tested, economic growth was most strongly linked to language loss, Amano says. Two types of language loss hotspots emerged from the study, published online today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. One was in economically well developed regions such as northwestern North America and northern Australia; a second was in economically developing regions such as the tropics and the Himalayas. Certain aspects of geography seemed to act as a buffer or threat, Amano says. For example, recent declines appear to occur faster in temperate climates than in the tropics or mountainous regions—perhaps because it is easier to travel in and out of temperate regions, Amano says.
As is usual for most of today’s modern intellectuals, already prosperous and speaking English, the author of the article as well as the researchers themselves lament the loss of obscure languages.
Although the study is silent on the subject of interventions to help preserve endangered languages, there is a range of revitalization efforts that can serve as examples, such as the incorporation of the Hawaiian language into school curricula and daily government operations, she says.
In other words, ordinary people want to improve their lives by learning the dominant languages that provide a gateway to wealth, and these self-righteous prigs want to do whatever they can to interfere with that desire. How nice of them!
Anyone see a strategy yet? A dozen commercial airplanes are missing since Islamist militias took over the airport in Tripoli, Libya.
The state-owned Libyan Airlines fleet until this summer included 14 passenger and cargo jetliners, including seven Airbus 320s, one Airbus 330, two French ATR-42 turboprop aircraft, and four Bombardier CJR-900s. Libyan state-owned Afriqiyah Airways fleet is made up of 13 aircraft, including three Airbus 319s, seven Airbus 320s, two Airbus 330s, and one Airbus 340.
The aircraft were reportedly taken in late August following the takeover of Tripoli International Airport, located about 20 miles south of the capital, by Libyan Dawn. Al Jazeera television reported in late August that western intelligence reports had warned of terror threats to the region from 11 stolen commercial jets.
The situation in the Arab Middle East continues to deteriorate, and the only way to stabilize that I can see will involve major warfare involving many countries.
The religion of peace: ISIS has beheaded a second American journalist and is threatening to behead a third.
But don’t worry, the international community and the Obama administration is on the ball, working to prevent Israel from building homes.
Madness: An 11-year-old has been threatened with expulsion for bringing a virtual gun to a virtual school.
In listening to the audio of the talk radio report, the school demanded the boy change his avatar because it included an image of a pistol, and is now rushing to craft a policy that would outlaw gun images in the future. Not only is this insane, it would be a violation of the first amendment.
Does this make you feel safer? U.S. Immigrations no longer knows where more than 6,000 foreigners are who came to the U.S. on student visas and are considered a threat.
The issue here is not to keep foreigners from entering the U.S. but the complete inability of the federal government government to do its job. The government is very good at abusing legal American citizens in airports, but is a total failure at controlling access to the country by non-citizens,
Working for the Democratic Party: Newly released emails show that Lois Lerner once dismissed complaints that labor unions were not reporting to the IRS millions of dollars in political activities — almost all of which helped Democrats — that they did report to the Labor Department.
In 2006, the year leading up to Lerner’s email, the national headquarters for the AFL-CIO reported no direct or indirect political expenditures with the IRS on their 990 form, leaving the line 81a blank. That same year, the AFL-CIO reported $29,585,661 in political activities with the Department of Labor. Also in 2006 the Teamsters Union reported no political expenditures with the IRS while at the same time reporting $7,081,965 with the Labor Department. Again in 2006, Unite-Here reported no political activity with the IRS and $1,451,002 with the Labor Department. In 2005, the National Education Association also reported no political expenditures with the IRS while at the same time reporting $24,985,250 with the Labor Department.
The lack of reporting to the IRS was essentially illegal. Yet, when complaints were made to Lerner about this, she poo-pooed the issue and apparently squelched further investigations.
This story is one of several published the last few days that have described the retreat of ISIS from several Kurdish and Iraqi villages.
I hadn’t posted any of the previous stories because I was unsure of their reliability. The number, however, keeps increasing and the sources are becoming more trustworthy. If true, it is mostly good news, though one should always be hesitant about the leadership of any faction in the Islamic Middle East. They might start out sounding good, but too often they end up being either incompetent or as evil as can be imagined.
A Minnesota black man is tased and arrested by police because he was going to pick up his kids from school.
Don’t believe me? Watch the video below the fold. It is heart-breaking and infuriating. The man does nothing wrong, and the police could have easily calmed the situation down. Instead, they escalated it for no reason. The man quite reasonably concludes “The problem is I’m black.”
I think the problem here is less racism and more a police force that is in love with its power. As I and many others have documented extensively, modern American police are increasingly willing to abuse their position of trust in ways that are appalling. In this case, as in many similar cases, the police officers in this case got off free, without punishment. What should have happened is that the male officer should have been fired, and the female officer disciplined.
» Read more
There are few weapons as deadly as the Israeli house. When its brick and mortar are combined together, the house, whether it is one of those modest one story hilltop affairs or a five floor apartment building complete with hot and cold running water, becomes far more dangerous than anything green and glowing that comes out of the Iranian centrifuges.
Forget the cluster bomb and the mine, the poison gas shell and even tailored viruses. Iran can keep its nuclear bombs. They don’t impress anyone in Europe or in Washington. Genocide is a minor matter when in the presence of the fearsome weapon of terror that is an Israeli family of four moving into a new apartment.
Read it all. It will make you shiver in fear at the terror produced by Israeli contractors.
Fascists: New York has passed a law requiring anyone who spends money to air their opinions during an election campaign to register with the state.
If you fail to register you will be fined.
Check out this very detailed review of the legal and political background behind Israel’s most recent decision to take full legal control over about 1,000 acres in the West Bank.
To put it simply, Israel is acting as per the Oslo Accords and its own legal system, which includes giving Palestinians the right to challenge the decision.
