Another liberal reporter describes getting obscene and threatening emails from the White House.
A wonderful montage of people refusing to answer questions at Border Patrol checkpoints.
I’ve embedded the montage below the fold. I especially like the one near the end, where the man driving the motor home expressly tells the officer that he is not exiting his vehicle and that they are not getting inside without a warrant. The officer eventually has to back down because that is exactly right: without a warrant they have no right to search his vehicle.
The best however is the last.
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Transparency! Bob Woodward said today that a senior White House official threatened him for his critical reporting of Obama concerning sequestration.
A more detailed report can be found here, with this quote:
The Obama aide, Woodward told Politico, “yelled at me for about a half hour” as well. “I’ve tangled with lots of these people,” Woodward said. “But suppose there’s a young reporter who’s only had a couple of years – or 10 years’ – experience and the White House is sending him an email saying, ‘You’re going to regret this.’ You know, tremble, tremble, tremble. I don’t think it’s the way to operate.”
Update: The White Office has backed down, making public an email written by that senior official to Woodward, apologizing for the above-mentioned threats.
Update #2: Meanwhile, partisan Democrat Lanny Davis has said that he too has been threatened by a senior White House official for writing columns that are critical of Obama.
Incompetence: Even as Democratic lawmakers scream for more gun control laws, the enforcement of the current laws by the Obama administration has declined by 40 percent.
The Syracuse study found the number of federal weapons prosecutions fell from about 11,000 in 2004 to about 6,000 under the Obama administration in 2011 — and ticked up to 7,770 in 2012. The GOP letter also cited data from the National Criminal Justice Reference Service (NCJRS), which found in 2010, of 6 million Americans who applied to buy a gun, less than 2 percent — or 76,000 — were denied. Of those, the ATF referred 4,732 cases for prosecution. Of them, just 44 were prosecuted, and only 13 were punished for lying or buying a gun illegally.
Gee, if these idiots really care about “the children,” maybe the first thing they should do is handle the responsibilities they’ve already given themselves?
Don’t they have better things to do ? The House yesterday voted to rename the Dryden Flight Research Center after Neil Armstrong.
As I noted previously, I disagree strongly with this action. To honor Armstrong properly we should name something really important after him. But it is shameless and wrong to steal the honor from Hugh Dryden in doing so. Armstrong, a modest and honorable man, would have surely protested this action himself.
We’re here to help you: Homeland Security seizes a man’s boat because they made an error on his custom’s paperwork.
That he eventually got it back is completely beside the point.
The question is worth asking, based on the described series of attacks. Too bad it is considered racist to ask it.
Pushback: Beretta has threatened to leave Maryland over the state’s proposed new gun bans.
Note that this was not said by a conservative, but by a very liberal commentator with whom I generally disagree. He should know, however, as he was fired by a leftwing “big media institution” for not toeing the line.
Pushback: Public pressure is now being applied to gun manufacturers who are trying to weasel out of the boycott against gun-banning states.
In other words, Armalite is trying to play both ends against the middle. They want to say they are on-board with the boycott (sort of) to placate gun owners, but they aren’t; they’re still going to continue selling to individual police officers… just not to the departments. Armalite will sell to every individual officer in the department that wants an AR-15, but they won’t sell to the department’s official purchasing agent. Wink-wink, nudge-nudge.
Owens suggests spending your money with other companies and I agree. We are reaching the moment where you are either for freedom or against it. And if you act against it you are not my friend and will get none of my support.
Does this make you feel safer? “All you need to know to get on a plane these days is the color of your house.”
I realize that this is actually an example of the TSA trying to be helpful to a U.S. citizen, but it also illustrates the complete uselessness of all TSA airport security.
We are doomed: A new poll finds that the public opposes cuts to virtually all types of spending.
We can make believe we can keep spending as we have, but reality always wins.
Finding out what’s in it: Because of the cost of Obamacare, employers are dropping healthcare coverage for spouses.
By denying coverage to spouses, employers not only save the annual premiums, but also the new fees that went into effect as part of the Affordable Care Act. This year, companies have to pay $1 or $2 “per life” covered on their plans, a sum that jumps to $65 in 2014. And health law guidelines proposed recently mandate coverage of employees’ dependent children (up to age 26), but husbands and wives are optional.
Doesn’t this make you feel safer? The TSA detained a wheelchair-bound three-year-old girl, took away her stuffed doll, and refused to allow the parents to videotape the child’s pat down. Videotape at the link.
It is necessary for more people to challenge these thugs. (I don’t care that the agents in the video tried to be polite to the mother, they were still acting like brainless thugs.)
The microfilmed miniature bibles that flew to the moon during Apollo have become the center of a custody dispute between the state of Texas and the author who wrote their history.
Not fit to print: Two days ago the Congressional Budget Office increased its projection for the cost of Obamacare by 29 percent, while also saying that seven million workers will lose their health insurance due to the law, almost twice as many as previously estimated.
As noted at the link, not one news organization has seen fit to mention this juicy tidbit in their news reports. I wonder why?
Meanwhile, we will go bankrupt. This law, and the government that is imposing it on us, is unsustainable.
The fascists are out: A gun control bill introduced in the state of Washington includes a provision that allows the police to conduct yearly house searches, without a warrant, of any gun owner’s home.
Such searches would violate the fourth amendment of the Constitution, and in my case, any cop who showed up at my door would be politely told that I do not consent to any searches, without a warrant. They don’t get in my door.
Meanwhile, the Democrats who sponsored this bill, without reading it of course, are now tripping over themselves to disavow it, as if that would somehow make everyone forget that they introduced it.
The abandoned calibration targets used by surveillance satellites of the 1960s.
“There are dozens of aerial photo calibration targets across the USA,” the Center for Land Use Interpretation reports, “curious land-based two-dimensional optical artifacts used for the development of aerial photography and aircraft. They were made mostly in the 1950s and 1960s, though some apparently later than that, and many are still in use, though their history is obscure.”
An outline of the cuts NASA proposes if sequestration occurs on March 1 includes shutting down commercial crew while leaving the Space Launch System untouched.
I am in favor of sequestration, as it will only bring NASA’s budget back to the numbers the agency received in 2005, numbers that were then totally sufficient to build Constellation and fly the shuttle. Now that the cost of the shuttle is gone there should be sufficient cash today for everything NASA wants to do.
To favor the very expensive and not very useful SLS system over the new commercial crew contracts however is madness. I suspect this letter is meant as a lobbying sledge hammer to try to convince Congress to cancel sequestration. If it is serious, however, than say good-bye to any manned American spacecraft for at least another few years, as I expect the new private companies will not disappear, but their effort will be slowed significantly as they search for alternative funding.
If it’s the government it’s okay to steal your property.
Pushback: A boycott by firearms companies against states that pass gun control laws appears to be growing.
It is often claimed by those who oppose Israel that it is an apartheid state that imprisons its Arab population, both in Israel itself as well as in the West Bank and Gaza.
Like much that is said about Israel, however, this claim has little to do with reality, and in fact, as I said yesterday, turns reality on its head.
Inside Israel, Arabs have the option (though some have decided not to take it) of becoming full citizens. Thus, not only are Israeli Arabs among the most prosperous Arabs in the Middle East, they have more rights under the Israeli democratic government than most Arabs in every other Arab country. They can vote, and have even served as elected members of Parliament.
Compare that with the way Arabs treat their religious minorities. Jews are of course forbidden. Christians meanwhile are fleeing the Islamic Middle East because of its persecution of non-Muslims.
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The day of reckoning looms: North Korea successfully set off an underground nuclear explosion today.
But don’t worry. The U.N. is going to talk about it later today. So will Obama.
In my visit to Israel this past week, I spent almost all my time in the West Bank. In all, I have now either stayed in or visited a total of four West Bank settlements. In addition, while there I also did some sightseeing in Jerusalem and elsewhere. From this short experience I have gleaned some very fascinating facts, many of which are very surprising, though they shouldn’t be as they are facts that in many cases are fundamental to understanding the long-running and seemingly unsolvable Middle East conflict.
In the next few days I will post a series of short essays describing my experience and thoughts, with this essay being the first.
First and foremost, the assumption everyone makes about the West Bank and Israel is that it is a very dangerous place, especially for Jews. This assumption is entirely false. It is so false it is downright laughable.
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After a long flight beginning yesterday I am finally back in Tucson. I have a lot of clean up work to do, but I will be posting a series of short essays about what I saw and learned while visiting Israel, beginning either later tonight (if I can stay awake) or tomorrow.
I would have posted some of these essays during my visit, but my old laptop finally died on me early in the trip. Time to buy a new one.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, seven million people — twice the number previously predicted — will lose their health insurance under Obamacare.
Russia is now threatening to abandon its Baikonur launch site due to restrictions demanded by the Kazakhstan government.
The restrictions include a limitation in the number of Proton launches, which Russia claims will cost them half a million dollars in sales. The problem is that the new Russia launch site in Vostochny will not be ready until 2015. If Russia pulls out of Baikonur before then, there will be no way to launch humans to ISS for at least the next two years.
