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.
Now this is a trend I like: The current Congress has passed the fewest laws in history.
The divided House and Senate have managed to pass just 163 laws that garnered President Obama’s signature since the two-year term began in January 2013. At this rate, Congress will have no problem beating the previous record set during the 2011-2013 session in which 284 laws were passed. That was down from 385 laws passed in the 2009-2011 session.
The less the better. And the legal areas that desperately need addressing are those areas, like Obamacare, that are best handled by repeal, not new laws.
The right kind of gun control: An Ohio woman with a concealed carry license scared off two bat-wielding attackers when she pointed her gun on them.
This is not that unusual a story but I wanted to highlight it because of this quote:
The men took off and so far have eluded police. Dinah posted about the incident on Facebook to alert friends and neighbors, to criticism by some. “Most of the males’ opinion was, ‘Why didn’t you shoot them?'” [emphasis mine]
The highlighted quote above, nonchalantly advocating that she should have fired the gun, is incredibly stupid. Life is not a modern Hollywood movie, where idiots shoot their weapons indiscriminately without thought. This woman made exactly the right decision. She used her weapon to stop the attack, and then proceeded on her way. Had she fired she would made things very messy for herself, for no reason.
Guns in the hands of good people are without question the best defense against bad people. However, if you use that gun unwisely or without cause you make yourself a bad person. Stay good and stay safe. Arm yourself, but don’t use your weapon unless you really really really have to.
The Indiana professor who is going to build a database for the federal government to “detect political smears, astroturfing, misinformation, and other social pollution” turns out to have numerous links to and is a strong supporter of left wing causes.
“‘Truthy’ claims to be non-partisan. However, the project’s lead investigator Filippo Menczer proclaims his support for numerous progressive advocacy groups, including President Barack Obama’s Organizing for Action, Moveon.org, Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, Amnesty International, and True Majority. Menczer, a professor of informatics and computer science at Indiana University, links to each of the organizations on his personal page from his bio at the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research.”
Menczer of course has denied his database will have any partisan tinge. He is as pure as the wind-driven snow!
Link here. I especially like Buckley’s comment to Gore Vidal.
Finding out what’s in it: A new analysis of Obamacare predicts that in the next ten years the number of uninsured Americans will increase by 10 percent while premiums will continue to rise.
We estimate that average annual costs for the cheapest individual plans—the “bronze” plans—may increase by 96 percent, from roughly $2,100 to nearly $4,200. Bronze family plans prices, meanwhile, may increase by nearly 50 percent. The average plan in this category could come close to $13,000 a year in total premiums. Almost every plan will see a price increase of some kind.
Consumers will learn these unpleasant truths in the fall of 2016 when they attempt to extend their policies.
No matter where you live, the effects will ripple across the entire industry. The dramatically higher prices will almost surely drive some consumers out of the exchanges. But they won’t have many places to turn. Many—perhaps most—won’t be eligible for Medicaid, while others won’t have jobs that offer replacement health insurance. People in this position will thus choose between health insurance they can’t afford and becoming uninsured. Not even the IRS penalty will convince everyone to bite the bullet.
Prior to 2016 the law allows insurance companies to use tax dollars, subsidizes from the federal government, to artificially depress premiums. After 2016 that option disappears, and the real cost of Obamacare gets passed to the consumer, most of whom will not be able to afford it.
Update: Sources in the federal government say that an Islamic terror attack coming from Mexico is imminent.
Original post:
While Obama has admitted he has no strategy to deal with ISIS, the British government today raised its terror threat level to “severe.”
[Home Secretary Theresa] May said the threat level was raised because of the risk from the deteriorating situation in Iraq and Syria, where extremist militants from the group calling itself the Islamic State (also ISIS or ISIL). May said, however, that there was no specific threat to Britain that caused the raise in the terror level. This is the first time Britain’s terror threat level has been at “severe” since 2011. “The increase in the threat level is related to developments in Syria and Iraq where terrorist groups are planning attacks against the West. Some of these plots are likely to involve foreign fighters who have traveled there from the UK and Europe to take part in those conflicts,” May said in a statement.
Add to this the fact that U.S. intelligence has noted a “significant increase” in chatter among terrorist organizations as September 11 approaches.
Islamic terrorists have celebrated September 11 several times previously with terrorist attacks. We shouldn’t be surprised if they do it again, especially as they now have a resurgent base of operations with many resources in the territory now controlled by ISIS.
Barack Obama meanwhile will probably find out about the next terrorist attack from a newspaper he reads, after he finishes his next very important round of golf.
Heh: “Semi-retired president to address something he saw on the news today about Ukraine at 4 p.m.”
In truth, I really shouldn’t see any humor in this headline, as it appears to be 100% true. During the briefing President Obama, when asked about his plans to deal with ISIS, actually said, “We don’t have a strategy yet.”
In a ruling today a court has ruled that the police have the right to curtail the free speech of Christians on a public street if Muslims threaten them with violence.
Let me describe what happened again that so there is no confusion. There was a Muslim festival open to the general public on the streets of Dearborn, Michigan. Some Christians wanted to walk through that festival holding signs and preaching the gospel. They were attacked by a mob. The police, instead of arresting the attackers, threatened the Christians with arrest if they didn’t shut up and leave.
If you doubt me, watch the video of that event, which I posted when it happened under the title The Stoning of Christians — in Michigan.
In essence, the court has sanctioned the heckler’s veto. If you don’t like what someone is saying, threaten them with violence and the police will shut them up for you so that you don’t behave badly.
What could go wrong? The federal government is spending almost a million dollars to make it possible to track “misinformation” and hate speech on Twitter.
The National Science Foundation is financing the creation of a web service that will monitor “suspicious memes” and what it considers “false and misleading ideas,” with a major focus on political activity online. The “Truthy” database, created by researchers at Indiana University, is designed to “detect political smears, astroturfing, misinformation, and other social pollution.” The university has received $919,917 so far for the project.
Anyone want to make a bet that the only ones who will be labeled with “political smears, astroturfing, misinformation, and other social pollution” will be conservatives?
What could go wrong? The DOT has proposed that all new cars be required to broadcast their location and speed.
They claim that this data could be used to provide drivers with a warning if their vehicle might be getting too close to another vehicle. It will also be necessary to make driverless cars more reliable.
I wonder what other uses this information could have.
Guess who that “familiar villain” happens to be. It shouldn’t surprise you, though it horrifies me that this is happening again, in the west, in civilized society, and among the so-called intellectual elites of the U.S. and Europe.
If you are really serious about understanding what has been going on in the Middle East these past few months, make sure you read the entire article, carefully, and slowly. The conclusion will tell you a great deal about what is going to happen in the coming years. The fact that most intellectuals in the West will be caught with their pants down when it does happen can best be summed up by how that conclusion begins:
Because a gap has opened here between the way things are and the way they are described, opinions are wrong and policies are wrong, and observers are regularly blindsided by events. Such things have happened before. In the years leading to the breakdown of Soviet Communism in 1991, as the Russia expert Leon Aron wrote in a 2011 essay for Foreign Policy, “virtually no Western expert, scholar, official, or politician foresaw the impending collapse of the Soviet Union.” The empire had been rotting for years and the signs were there, but the people who were supposed to be seeing and reporting them failed and when the superpower imploded everyone was surprised.
Depressing: According to a new poll, 68% of all Americans believe it should be illegal for kids to play unsupervised
Worse, almost half the population thinks these regulations should even apply to twelve-year-olds.
Last night Diane and I watched the classic 1945 Hollywood film, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, about a young girl growing up in early 20th century Brooklyn. They live in Williamsburg in a neighbor packed with tenement apartments. The kids are outside all the time, on their own. No one questions it all. They in fact encourage it. The result: the kids quickly become self-reliant, smart, independent, and mature.
Since the 1980s American kids have increasingly been supervised every moment of their lives. The result today is a generation that fears freedom and wants it squelched wherever it exists.
An investigation has found at least seventeen examples of voters voting multiple times in both Virginia and Maryland.
In both cases the investigators sent their reports to state attorneys for further investigation and prosecution. In both cases, the state attorneys, both Democrats, have done nothing. I wonder why.
Cover-up: The IRS destroyed Lois Lerner’s Blackberry after her computer crashed and after the Congressional investigation into the harassment of conservatives had begun.
In two elusive and nebulous sworn declarations, we can glean that Ms. Lerner had two Blackberries. One was issued to her on November 12, 2009. According to a sworn declaration, this is the Blackberry that contained all the emails (both sent and received) that would have been in her “Outlook” and drafts that never were sent from her Blackberry during the relevant time.
With incredible disregard for the law and the Congressional inquiry, the IRS admits that this Blackberry “was removed or wiped clean of any sensitive or proprietary information and removed as scrap for disposal in June 2012.” This is a year after her hard drive “crash” and months after the Congressional inquiry began.
The IRS did not even attempt to retrieve that data. It cavalierly recites: “There is no record of any attempt by any IRS IT employee to recover data from any Blackberry device assigned to Lois Lerner in response to the Congressional investigations or this investigation,” according to Stephen Manning, Deputy Chief Information Officer for Strategy & Modernization.
I am once again reminded of the Watergate coverup, where Nixon’s effort to block the investigation did nothing but slow the release of evidence, turning it into a steady trickle that kept coming, again and again and again, with each revelation acting like another nail in the coffin. We are seeing this same process unfold again here.
Working for the Democratic Party: The attorney in the Justice Department representing the IRS directly participated in the harassment of conservatives when he worked under Lois Lerner at the IRS from 2008 to 2010.
The article calls this a conflict of interest. I instead see it as a continuing and unified effort by the Obama administration and all levels of the federal bureaucracy to use the power of the federal government to squelch any opposition to the Democratic Party.
Egypt and the United Arab Emirates have admitted they launched combined air strikes in Libya this past week.
There are two aspects of this story that are significant. First:
Egyptian officials explicitly denied the operation to American diplomats, the officials said. It is almost as if the theme of ignoring and/or mocking US superpower status exhibited most recently by both China and Russia, is gradually spreading to even the more “banana” republics around the world. Because, while one can debate the pros and cons of any previous administration, it is very much improbable that any regime, especially ones as close to the US as the UAE, and to a lesser extent Egypt, would have conducted such military missions without preclearing with the Pentagon first.
Desperate to stop radical Islamists from taking over Libya, Egypt and UAE made the decision to act without U.S. involvement, on their own. They no longer felt obliged to get our advice, or even tell us what they intended to do.
Second, the air strikes illustrate how the Middle East is becoming increasingly destabilized. The U.S. is seen as weak and unwilling to act. Thus, the radicals move to grab power, and the status quo elites feel compelled to respond.
As long as Barack Obama is in power, expect this unstable situation to become even more unstable. When we occupied Iraq we brought stability and the promise of civilized rule of law. Until recently that stability was held together by either our presence or the belief that we would return if things got out of hand. Now everyone in the Middle East knows the U.S. will do nothing, no matter what happens. They are on their own. And the crazies are moving to take advantage of our absence to bring chaos to the region.
Cover-up: A Justice Department official has admitted that Lois Lerner’s emails can be retrieved from a back up system, but the Obama administration simply doesn’t want to retrieve them.
In other words, everything the IRS and Obama administration has said previously about the destruction of these emails was a lie, including lying under oath while testifying to Congress.
Finding out what’s in it: Two new surveys find that Obamacare continues to be a drag on employment as well as manufacturing.
Thank you Democrats! Let’s reward them for this gift by voting for them again in November!
Surprise, surprise! Since Illinois began issuing concealed carry permits last year, the crime numbers in Chicago have plunged steeply.
Since Illinois started granting concealed carry permits this year, the number of robberies that have led to arrests in Chicago has declined 20 percent from last year, according to police department statistics. Reports of burglary and motor vehicle theft are down 20 percent and 26 percent, respectively. In the first quarter, the city’s homicide rate was at a 56-year low. …
As of July 29 the state had 83,183 applications for concealed carry and had issued 68,549 licenses. By the end of the year, Mr. Pearson estimates, 100,000 Illinois citizens will be packing. When Illinois began processing requests in January, gun training and shooting classes — which are required for the application — were filling up before the rifle association was able to schedule them.
Actually, this shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. In every single case, when the number of gun-toting law-abiding citizens was allowed to increase because of an easing in gun restrictions, the number of crimes has dropped.
