"I have never seen so many older white people packed into a room"...
North Carolina Speaker of the House wins GOP Senate nod...
Suit against Wisconsin “John Doe” star chamber investigators can move forward
The John Doe investigation into conservatives is dead. In a monumental victory for targeted conservatives, Judge Rudolph Randa on Tuesday granted a preliminary injunction to stop the politically charged probe, ruling in favor of conservative activist Eric O’Keefe and his Wisconsin Club for growth. ’Keefe and the club in February filed a civil rights lawsuit against Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm, two of his assistant DAs, John Doe Special Prosecutor Francis Schmitz, and a shadowy investigator contracted by the Government Accountability Board. “The Defendants must cease all activities related to the investigation, return all property seized in the investigation from any individual or organization, and permanently destroy all copies of information and other materials obtained through the investigation,” wrote Randa, federal judge for the U.S. District Court Eastern District of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. Randa further ordered that the plaintiffs in the civil rights case “and others” are “hereby relieved of any and every duty under Wisconsin law to cooperate further with Defendants‘ investigation.” “Any attempt to obtain compliance by any Defendant or John Doe Judge Gregory Peterson is grounds for a contempt finding by this Court,” he ordered in the 26-page ruling.An interesting aspect of the ruling was the reliance on the Supreme Court's McCutcheon case, in holding that the investigation was an attempt to interfere with the targets first amendment rights:
The select committee that will probe the attacks in Benghazi will have seven Republicans and five Democrats, according to sources familiar with the GOP leadership’s plans. A resolution to create the committee will come to the floor Thursday and is expected to pass by a wide margin. Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) tapped South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy to chair the panel.And it's pretty obvious that Hillary will be a primary focus:
On May 7, 2013 during one of the many House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearings on Benghazi, Rep. Trey Gowdy, his voice slightly shaken with emotion, had the following ringing words to say – and for their sake, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama better have been listening: “so if anyone wants to know what difference does it make, if anyone wants to ask what difference does it make (in reference to the now infamous Hillary Clinton quote) – it always matters whether you can trust your government – and to the families of the victims – we are going to find out what happened in Benghazi and I dont give a damn who’s career is impacted – we are going to find out what happened.” Rep. Gowdy will now be able to completely fulfill that promise, and in the process, could destroy the political careers of one or both of the most powerful Democrats in America.Rand Paul is encouraging the focus on Hillary:
To hold that invocations must be nonsectarian would force the legislatures that sponsor prayers and the court that are asked to decide these cases to act as supervisors and censors of religious speech, a rule that would involve government in religious matters to a far greater degree than is the case under the town’s current practice of neither editing or approving prayers in advance nor criticizing their content after the fact... Government may not mandate a civic religion that stifles any but the most generic reference to the sacred any more than it may prescribe a religious orthodoxy.Because the plaintiffs in this case only wanted the Christian-specific aspect of the prayer removed from the town council, the above line of reasoning was invoked to buoy the more basic "tradition" argument also employed by the majority. But what about a constitutional challenge seeking a ban of prayer altogether? That would alleviate the need to inquire into the content of the prayer, thus freeing courts and governments from entangling themselves in the process of picking and choosing deities and faiths to pray to.
Marshall Coulter, shot while attempting to burglarize Merritt Landry, has been accused of another burglary after the shooting, and now also for a home invasion committed in 2012 when he was 13 years old...
After 10 years of virtual silence (“So silent, in fact,” she writes, “that the buzz in some circles has been that the Clintons must have paid me off; why else would I have refrained from speaking out? I can assure you that nothing could be further from the truth”), Lewinsky, 40, says it is time to stop “tiptoeing around my past—and other people’s futures. I am determined to have a different ending to my story. I’ve decided, finally, to stick my head above the parapet so that I can take back my narrative and give a purpose to my past. (What this will cost me, I will soon find out.)” ..., “Sure, my boss took advantage of me, but I will always remain firm on this point: it was a consensual relationship. Any ‘abuse’ came in the aftermath, when I was made a scapegoat in order to protect his powerful position. . . . The Clinton administration, the special prosecutor’s minions, the political operatives on both sides of the aisle, and the media were able to brand me. And that brand stuck, in part because it was imbued with power.”Which brings to mind this Branco cartoon:
My speech for Israel and against the academic boycott was well-attended....
Massachusetts will stop trying to fix its deeply flawed health insurance website and instead buy new software to help its residents enroll in coverage, officials there said Monday. But the state will also prepare to join the federal insurance marketplace by the next enrollment period, which starts in November, in case the new system is not working in time.It must be a difficult pill to swallow for the state, given that it had a functioning system prior to revamping its site to comply with the new federal law. And that’s spurred some sharp criticism.The decision follows months of problems with enrollment through the state website, which Massachusetts set up in 2006 under its landmark health insurance law. The site worked well until it was revamped last year to comply with the Affordable Care Act, President Obama’s health care law. The state had put CGI, the company that also helped design the initially problem-plagued federal exchange, in charge of the overhaul.
Massachusetts announced in March that it was dropping CGI, but it is still negotiating the terms of ending its $69 million contract, of which the state has paid $17 million. The state received $174 million from the federal government to overhaul its health insurance website and has spent about $57 million so far, including the amount paid to CGI, according to Glen Shor, the state’s secretary of administration and finance.Sarah Iselin, a health insurance executive whom Gov. Deval Patrick appointed to oversee fixes to the website, said the new “dual-track” plan would cost a little more than $100 million through 2015. But she said it was too soon to know whether the state would seek more federal money; that will depend partly on whether the state ends up owing CGI more money.
This should have been big news from the moment the girls were kidnapped: Fears for the fate of more than 200 Nigerian girls [kidnapped from school on April 14, almost 3 weeks ago] turned even more nightmarish Monday when the leader of the Islamist militant [sic:...
Conservative dynamo Tammy Bruce recently took a look at the how the federal government is masking the realities of our very questionable economic "recovery," disguising the fact that 20 percent of American families do not have a single person in the household who is employed. That...
SB116 spent almost nine months dying a slow death in the state Senate, receiving not even a single vote in any committee...
Hide your Big Gulps, again, New York. Mayor Bill de Blasio announced this week his administration will pick up where former mayor Michael Bloomberg left off and will continue the battle to ban sodas larger than 16 ounces. The city will appeal a state court ruling that axed the ban last year. City lawyers will argue the case at the Court of Appeals on June 4, the New York Daily News reported this week. Former Mayor Michael Bloomberg got lots of headlines in 2012 when he declared war on Big Gulps and other large sugary drinks.Bloomberg's administration was excitedly awaiting implementation of his ban on large sodas to take place last March. A state judge intervened a day prior however, and "permanently restrained" the city "from implementing or enforcing the new regulations."
Decision this morning from the U.S. Supreme Court: From Reuters: The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday upheld the right of government entities across the United States to allow sectarian prayers prior to public meetings. The court said on a 5-4 vote that the town of Greece in New...
