Stealth unionization. “Many day care providers didn’t even know they were in the union until notified after the vote had concluded.”
The future of Obamacare: bureaucracy and pulling strings.
Does this seem as crazy to you as it does to me? At the same time the Obama administration is fighting to prevent any new drilling for oil, it is also now considering tapping our strategic oil reserve to get more oil into the market.
A Jewish student has sued the University of California Berkeley for not protecting her against harassment and violence. Key quote:
The complaint alleges that the Students for Justice in Palestine and the Muslim Student Association, another pro-Palestinian group on campus, harass and attack Jewish students, and that the university knows about it and has not taken sufficient steps to protect its Jewish students. The complaint further charges that university officials have tolerated “the growing cancer of a dangerous anti-Semitic climate on its campuses” that violates the rights of Jewish and other students “to enjoy a peaceful campus environment free from threats and intimidation.”
Maybe the airlines should consider this option: The Amtrak police chief has barred the TSA from the railroad’s security operations.
[Police chief] O’Connor said the TSA VIPR teams have no right to do more than what Amtrak police do occasionally, which has produced few if any protests and which O’Connor said is clearly within the law and the Constitution. More than a thousand times, Amtrak teams (sometimes including VIPR) have performed security screenings at Amtrak stations. These screenings are only occasional and random, and inspect the bags of only about one in 10 passengers. There is no wanding of passengers and no sterile area. O’Connor said the TSA violated every one of these rules.
O joy. The federal government posted its biggest monthly deficit ever in February 2011.
The new civility: Sarah Palin’s parents describe the numerous death threats the family has received.
Want to run against an entrenched liberal Democrat? Then expect him and his allies to try to destroy your children.
Does this make you feel safer? The TSA spent millions developing the ability to do secret body scans of pedestrians as they entered train stations, bus depots or major events. Key quote:
EPIC lawyer Ginger McCall says the project is disturbing nonetheless because it shows the department “obviously believed that this level of surveillance is acceptable when in fact it is not at all acceptable.”
Go Texas! Legislators there have proposed making it a felony for TSA agents to perform full-body patdowns without cause. They have also introduced legislation that would make the body scan equipment illegal.
Freedom of speech alert: Democrat state lawmakers in Illinois want to ban photography at accident sites.
House Republicans attempt to impose a national ID card.
Read the entire article. For more reasons than one can count (with the most important of all being that the public doesn’t want it), this is a bad idea at a bad time.
FOIA documents show that the TSA has plans to expand its jurisdiction to searching random people on city streets. More here.
Faced with pressure from Congress and the courts, Interior Secretary Salazar finally stopped stalling and issued late Monday the first Gulf of Mexico drilling permit since the BP oil spill.
The civility of a mainstream Democrat lawmaker: “You Are F***king Dead!”
Freedom of speech alert! A man who would stand on the steps of a courthouse and hand out pamphlets advocating jury nullification has been indicted for doing so. Key quote:
Since 2009, Mr. Heicklen has stood there and at courthouse entrances elsewhere and handed out pamphlets encouraging jurors to ignore the law if they disagree with it, and to render verdicts based on conscience. That concept, called jury nullification, is highly controversial, and courts are hostile to it. But federal prosecutors have now taken the unusual step of having Mr. Heicklen indicted on a charge that his distributing of such pamphlets at the courthouse entrance violates the law against jury tampering. He was arraigned on Friday in a somewhat contentious hearing before Judge Kimba M. Wood, who entered a not guilty plea on his behalf when he refused to say how he would plead. During the proceeding, he railed at the judge and the government, and called the indictment “a tissue of lies.”
Mr. Heicklen insists that he never tries to influence specific jurors or cases, and instead gives his brochures to passers-by, hoping that jurors are among them.
More civility on the left: Five-foot, one-inch female assaulted by union protester because she was videotaping him. Video at the link. Key quote:
“It’s one thing to be called a violent teabagger. It’s another to be called a violent teabagger while you’re being assaulted.”
O joy. The EPA today issued revised, scaled back regulations for commercial-grade boilers and incinerators.
The right response to violent rhetoric: The Indiana attorney general has fired his deputy for suggesting that the police use “live ammunition” on the Wisconsin union protesters.
A Clinton-appointed DC judge, in ruling that Obamacare is constitutional, also declared that the commerce clause allows the federal government to regulate “mental activity”.
The Christians whom Dearborn officials and police had falsely arrested for preaching to Muslims have now sued. You can see the video of the arrests here.
Madness: Police arrest an 11-year-old over an “inappropriate” stick figure drawing.
And the TSA exists for what reason again? In a test, a TSA agent with a handgun slipped past TSA security at Dallas-Fort Worth airport, despite being scanned by the enhanced-image body scanner.
The civil tone of the left: A wheelchair-bound, wounded veteran was jeered, heckled, and laughed at by Columbia University students. Key quote:
“Racist!” some students yelled at Anthony Maschek, a Columbia freshman and former Army staff sergeant awarded the Purple Heart after being shot 11 times in a firefight in northern Iraq in February 2008. Others hissed and booed the veteran.
Maschek, 28, had bravely stepped up to the mike Tuesday at the meeting to issue an impassioned challenge to fellow students on their perceptions of the military. “It doesn’t matter how you feel about the war. It doesn’t matter how you feel about fighting,” said Maschek. “There are bad men out there plotting to kill you.”
The memoir of a substitute teacher during a teachers strike. Key quote:
After the first week the phone calls in the evening began. After the first call, I had to not allow my children to answer the phone, as when the first call came, my seven year old answered and she heard an earful of cursing and threats that put her into tears. From that point on, we did not answer the phone in the evening unless I designated my husband to the task.
Hotair has this nice summary of today’s madness in Wisconsin. Key quote:
Speaker Jeff Fitzgerald said he decided to adjourn the Assembly this evening because Gov. Scott Walker called minutes before lawmakers took the floor to tell him to get his caucus members and staff out of the building because their safety could no longer be assured.
This is freedom of speech and religion according to ACLU: You can be Christian as long as you don’t follow your beliefs.
