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October 2014

Posted by Andrew Branca on October 09, 2014 59 Comments
[UPDATE: An image purporting to be a police report of this shooting event was linked in the comments. I have embedded that image below--thanks Ras.  I can not personally attest to its provenance, but it appears to be of a form I would expect of an actual police report for such an incident.] It's deja vu all over again. A St. Louis police officer working off duty for a private security company shot and killed a black man yesterday.  Protestors gathered quickly, raising concerns of more rioting, looting, and arson threats similar to those that erupted following the shooting of Mike Brown in Ferguson, MO. (h/t @nadraenzi) Fox news reports that while working private security the officer approached three men, who ran away. The officer chased one of them, and a physical struggle ensued.  Police officials report that the chased man then presented a pistol and fired three rounds at the officer before his handgun failed.  There are no reports that any of the shots struck the officer. The officer's handgun was made of more reliable stuff, and he fired 17 rounds at his attacker, mortally wounding him. The Fox article goes on to report:
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that people claiming to be relatives of the victim identified him as 18-year-old Vonderrit Myers, Jr. The teenager's mother, Syreeta Myers, told The Associated Press by phone Thursday that her son was holding a sandwich when the officer killed him Wednesday night. [ . . . ] Hours after the shooting, a crowd gathered at the scene. Some people shouted "Hands up, don't shoot" in reference to the fatal shooting in August of an unarmed black man, Michael Brown, by a white police officer. That shooting in Ferguson led to weeks of sometimes violent unrest in the St. Louis suburb. Officer Darren Wilson has not been charged in the shooting. Dotson said some in the crowd late Wednesday shouted obscenities toward officers and damaged police cars. Officers, however, "showed great restraint," he said.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 09, 2014 14 Comments
After the Oklahoma workplace beheading, I asked if the threat level had shifted From Going Postal to Going ISIS. Regardless of whether we see more actual beheadings in the U.S., it appears that threats of beheadings may be the latest iteration of threatening hoaxes based on news events. As ISIS beheadings are in the news, as well as the Oklahoma workplace beheading, someone who hopefully will be caught made a beheading threat directed at elementary schools in three towns in my formerly home State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. (h/t Infidel Bloggers Alliance) NBC News 10 reports:
Police had a very visible presence Wednesday at schools in Cranston, Johnston and Warwick. Officers will be present all day after a letter threatening beheadings at the elementary schools in the three communities was received by the Johnston Police Department on Tuesday. Police said the handwritten letter was one page, and it is being analyzed at the state crime lab at the University of Rhode Island. Police departments said they would cover every school in the three communities. "When these threats come in, we take them very serious. But at the same time, we don't want these threats to disrupt our daily life, including important work that they do here educating students," Cranston Police Col. Michael Winquist said. The police presence calmed the fears of some parents.

Posted by Mike LaChance on October 09, 2014 15 Comments
Plenty of conservatives have faulted President Obama for his handling of ISIS but now even President Jimmy Carter is jumping on board. Jonathan Topaz of Politico reported:
Jimmy Carter: President Obama blew it on ISIL Former President Jimmy Carter is criticizing President Barack Obama’s Middle East policy, saying he has shifting policies and waited too long to take action against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. In an interviewed published Tuesday in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the 39th president said the Obama administration, by not acting sooner, allowed ISIL to build up its strength. “[W]e waited too long. We let the Islamic State build up its money, capability and strength and weapons while it was still in Syria,” he said, using an alternate name for the terrorist group. “Then when [ISIL] moved into Iraq, the Sunni Muslims didn’t object to their being there and about a third of the territory in Iraq was abandoned.”
Politico is referencing this article by Jim Jones:
Carter unhappy with Obama’s policies in Middle East Former President Jimmy Carter put down his hammer at a Meadowbrook Habitat for Humanity project Tuesday for a wide-ranging interview that touched on subjects such as the Obama administration’s use of drones, women’s rights and faith.

Posted by Amy Miller on October 09, 2014 16 Comments
Today's "Worst Administration Ever" story is a throwback to the Great Secret Service Sex Scandal of 2012, in which almost two dozen Secret Service personnel were fired after allegations surfaced that several agents had engaged in misconduct involving Colombian prostitutes. Now, reports have surfaced refuting White House claims that no staff members had been involved in any wrongdoing. The Washington Post reports:
As nearly two dozen Secret Service agents and members of the military were punished or fired following a 2012 prostitution scandal in Colombia, Obama administration officials repeatedly denied that anyone from the White House was involved. But new details drawn from government documents and interviews show that senior White House aides were given information at the time suggesting that a prostitute was an overnight guest in the hotel room of a presidential advance-team member — yet that information was never thoroughly investigated or publicly acknowledged.... The Secret Service shared its findings twice in the weeks after the scandal with top White House officials, including then-White House Counsel Kathryn Ruemmler. Each time, she and other presidential aides conducted an interview with the advance-team member and concluded that he had done nothing wrong. Meanwhile, the new details also show that a separate set of investigators in the inspector general’s office of the Department of Homeland Security — tasked by a Senate committee with digging more deeply into misconduct on the trip — found additional evidence from records and eyewitnesses who had accompanied the team member in Colombia.
According to WaPo, the team member in question was Jonathan Dach, who now is a full time employee with the State Department's Office on Global Women’s Issues. Through a family attorney, Dach denies any "inappropriate conduct":

Posted by Casey Breznick on October 08, 2014 8 Comments
The openly gay “New Generation” Republican Carl DeMaio is now polling three points above incumbent Democrat Scott Peters in California’s evenly split 52nd district. A UT San Diego poll released Monday shows DeMaio polling at 48% and Peters at 45%. Since the difference falls within the poll’s margin of error, the race stands at a virtual tie. This is an improvement from September, when DeMaio dropped below Peters for the first time since polling began in June. [caption id="attachment_102134" align="alignnone" width="427"]From UT San Diego. From UT San Diego.[/caption] It has been a whirlwind campaign for Peters and especially for DeMaio, who launched his maverick campaign after losing the 2012 mayoral race in San Diego. While Peters has consistently struggled to even appeal to his liberal base—being ranked by liberal bloggers as one of the worst freshman Democrats—DeMaio’s vows to push forward his “Fix Congress First” legislation and his efforts to reach out to traditionally non-Republican are impressing San Diegans and Republicans across the country. You can read my past coverage of the CA52 race for further details: #CA52: Flip opportunity against 1st term Dem in evenly split district and #CA52 still looking like Republican flip opportunity. UT San Diego breaks down the polling data by specific categories. Here’s a quick summary:

Posted by Amy Miller on October 08, 2014 2 Comments
The Patriot Act expanded the government's ability to keep an eye on American citizens---and their data. Through special permissions granted by the FBI through "national security letters," U.S. spy agencies are able to access user data owned by tech companies, while at the same time barring those companies from disclosing to users and shareholders what data has been requested. Fortunately, appeals judges across the country are siding with tech companies against the FBI in a series of lawsuits challenging the gag orders. Via Bloomberg Law:
“More and more service providers are issuing transparency reports,” said Kurt Opsahl, an attorney with Electronic Frontier Foundation, whose clients are seeking an end to the letters. “Many would like to say what national security” demands they’re getting. The gag provision violates free-speech rights, U.S. District Judge Susan Illston in San Francisco ruled in March 2013 in a lawsuit brought by a phone-service provider that received such a letter. She put her ruling on hold while the government appeals it. Because recipients of the letters are forbidden from discussing them openly, the identity of the phone company isn’t public.
The Justice Department's argument centers on the idea that national security concerns trump the general First Amendment rights of tech companies; they say that if companies are allowed to disclose which agency is looking at what data, terrorists will be able to gain inside information into national security investigations, and thus, that the government has a compelling interest in keeping this information classified. Tech companies' main concerns center on the indefinite nature of the gag order, which is also leaving judges questioning the heart of the Justice Department's argument:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 08, 2014 20 Comments
Elizabeth Warren says she "is not running" for President. (You know where I'm going with this, don't you?) Progressives will not take "is not running" for an answer. Ready for Warren is up and running, and now so are other progressive groups in Iowa and New Hampshire, as reported by The Hill, Liberal grass roots gather to find a challenger for Hillary Clinton:
Liberal groups are building a grassroots army in Iowa and New Hampshire in hopes of stopping a Hillary Clinton coronation in 2016. While the progressive groups don’t have a candidate, they are hiring organizers and opening offices as if one will emerge. At a minimum, the groups hope their efforts will push Clinton to the left. And if the political winds blow just right, the activists hope Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) will take the plunge — and turn their organizing work into the foundation for her candidacy.
Bill Maher just kissed the ring (featured image). Watch Warren's reaction when Maher says “You're going to make a terrific presidential candidate and an even better President of the United States!” :

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 08, 2014 5 Comments
Two of the targets of the John Doe investigation against Scott Walker and conservative activists have filed a Petition for en banc rehearing by the full 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, after a 3-judge panel dismissed their lawsuit against the John Doe prosecutors on the grounds that the federal courts should not intervene in a state investigation. The Petition for Rehearing, With Suggestion for En Banc Review, is embedded at the bottom of this post. The legal history is detailed in these prior posts: The short version is that the targets initially succeeded at the federal trial court level in obtaining an injunction shutting down the investigation (which already was on hold because of a state court judge's ruling), and allowing the civil damages lawsuit against the prosecutors/investigators to go forward in federal court. The Court of Appeals reversed, finding that there was no ground for the federal courts to intervene in a state investigation, particularly where a state judge already had effectively shut it down (which is on appeal in the state court system). Here are the grounds stated in the Petition to have the entire 7th Circuit rehear the case:

Posted by Mike LaChance on October 08, 2014 66 Comments
(Reader Poll at bottom of post) Jason Mattera of the Daily Surge recently filmed an unannounced confrontation with former IRS employee Lois Lerner in her own neighborhood. Lerner fled his camera and tried (unsuccessfully) to seek refuge in a neighbor's home:
VIDEO: Lois Lerner Tries Barging Into Neighbor’s Home To Evade Questions Lois Lerner attempted to bust into a neighbor’s home uninvited, in a desperate attempt to avoid answering questions about her involvement in the targeting of conservative groups. Jason Mattera, author of the explosive new book CRAPITALISM: Liberals Who Make Millions Swiping Your Tax Dollars, recently caught up with the disgraced former IRS official in her ritzy neighborhood outside Washington, D.C. Mattera, who publishes the Daily Surge, asked Lerner if she had any regrets for her role in the ongoing IRS corruption case, and if she wanted to take the opportunity to give a genuine apology to conservatives for using the force of government to harass and single them out. But, similar to her testimony before Congress where she pleaded the fifth, Lerner didn’t show any remorse, and, on a more latent level, showed her disregard for people’s privacy rights in general. In the video above, you can see Lerner fleeing from Mattera as she rushes through what appears to be a random person’s front yard.
Here's the video: This may seem invasive and inappropriate, but as Jason Mattera asks her in so many words, is it any more inappropriate than the way Lerner used her position at the IRS to target average Americans? In fact, this is a tactic the left has been using for quite a while.

Posted by New Neo on October 08, 2014 18 Comments
Spain's Ebola patient zero is a nurse's assistant. No one can say she kept mum about the fact that she'd been near an Ebola patient recently. Authorities were well aware of her exposure, because she was on the team that cared for a Spanish missionary and a Spanish priest, both of whom were shipped back to Spain after they contracted Ebola in Africa. Both of them have died. But although health workers in Dallas did not originally know that America's patient zero, Thomas Duncan, had been recently exposed to Ebola, there is a similarity between the unnamed nurse's disease trajectory and that of Duncan. As with him, there also was a delay in her hospitalization and diagnosis. She is said to have reported her first symptom, a fever, on September 30, and yet she was only hospitalized this week. Since authorities knew in advance that she'd been exposed, why the delay, which put many more people at risk? Should they not have erred on the side of caution? There are various possibilities. Perhaps the authorities had such faith in their isolation and protection techniques that they thought it impossible that a health worker could contract Ebola while working under state-of-the-art conditions in a Western hospital, as opposed to in Africa. Or perhaps (as I'm beginning to suspect) the diagnostic criteria for Ebola aren't rigorous enough. One of the first symptoms of Ebola is a fever, defined as above 101.5. But see this [emphasis mine]:

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on October 08, 2014 26 Comments
Rock the Vote released a new ad today with a song by Lil Jon featuring Lena Dunham, Whoopi Goldberg, Natasha Lyonne, Fred Armisen, E.J. Johnson, Darren Criss, Sophia Bush, Ireland Baldwin, Devendra Banhart, Ioanna Gika, and Gabriel Valenciano. Geared towards young people, Rock the Vote has long been successful at utilizing pop culture to engage younger demographics in the political process. Started in 1990 by a Virgin Record exec, Rock the Vote is supposed to be a non-profit, partisan organization. Whether or not you agree with their politics (which tend leftward), they're good at making voting and even politics look rad. Check out their latest ad:

Posted by Amy Miller on October 08, 2014 19 Comments
Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta's new book, Worthy Fights: A Memoir of Leadership in War and Peace, was released yesterday, and what it reveals has the media gaping---Democrats scrambling for a distraction. Panetta's memoir focuses on several aspects of Obama's foreign policy, but the section that's causing the most chatter highlights the complete lack of leadership shown after the attack on our embassy in Benghazi:
On the deadly 2012 siege of the U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya, Panetta said the administration had no indication of an attack coinciding with the Sept. 11 anniversary. U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were killed in the violence. Panetta, who also served as director of the CIA, said he questioned "from the beginning" the CIA's initial assessment that the attack was the work of a mob of protesters rather than an organized assault. "It seemed to me that most spontaneous demonstrators don't arrive for a protest carrying rocket-propelled grenade launchers," he said. But Panetta defended the intelligence agency, saying such work is difficult and often contradictory. "It was not clear at the time that there were two separate incidents, separated by distance and by several hours," he said.
"I didn't have any specific information, but the fact was, when you bring grenade launchers to a demonstration, there's something else going and. And I just---from the very beginning sensed that this was an attack...that this was a terrorist attack on our compound."

Posted by David Gerstman on October 08, 2014 21 Comments
The Houthis, Iranian backed rebels have taken control of Yemen's capital, Sanaa. The Washington Post reports:
The capital of Yemen, the Arab world’s poorest and perhaps most chronically unstable nation, has new masters. Shiite rebels man checkpoints and roam the streets in pickups mounted with anti­aircraft guns. The fighters control almost all state buildings, from the airport and the central bank to the Defense Ministry. Only a few police officers and soldiers are left on the streets. Rebel fighters have plastered the city with fliers proclaiming their slogan — “Death to America, death to Israel, a curse on the Jews and victory to Islam” — a variation of a popular Iranian slogan often chanted by Shiite militants in Iraq and supporters of Lebanon’s Hezbollah.
The comparison to Hezbollah is apt as Reuters is reporting that the Houthi are blocking the appointment of Yemen's president.
Abdel-Malek al-Ejri said Hadi had suggested five names at a meeting of his advisors, who represent various political parties in Yemen. When the aides failed to agree on a candidate Hadi suggested his presidential office director, Ahmed Awad bin Mubarak, as a compromise. "But we did not agree, and the matter is still under consultation," Ejri told Reuters.
Similarly, Hezbollah has kept Lebanon's politics unsettled preventing the appointment of a President. So what's Iran's interest in Yemen? It was spelled out by Michael Segall of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs two and a half years ago. A couple of Segall's observations are sobering:

Posted by Amy Miller on October 07, 2014 8 Comments
Today officials announced that four Veterans Affairs officials have been recommended for termination after investigations into their facilities revealed long wait times, unsafe water systems, and general "neglect of duty." VA headquarters revealed in a statement today that the heads of hospitals in Pittsburgh, central Alabama, and Dublin, Georgia, should expect to receive their pink slips, along with the VA’s deputy chief procurement director in Washington.
“VA will actively and aggressively pursue disciplinary action on those who violate our values. There should be no doubt that when we discover evidence of wrongdoing, we will hold employees accountable,” VA Deputy Secretary Sloan Gibson said. The firings are a direct result of wrongdoing found by the VA’s Office of Inspector General and the Office of Accountability Review, including significant delays and wait times of veterans, manipulation of appointment data, “neglect of duty,” inappropriate handling of VA contracts and misconduct at VA facilities. The firings also follow a yearlong investigation by CNN that found numerous instances of delays in care and, at times, deaths of U.S. veterans at VA facilities across the country. The reports sparked a national outrage, which led to the resignation of VA Secretary Eric Shinseki and prompted numerous House and Senate hearings. That resulted in a new law revising the VA health care system designed to help veterans get faster care. The new law, which was passed this summer and signed by President Obama, also gives VA Secretary Robert McDonald more authority to quickly fire top executives.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 07, 2014 2 Comments
We previously mentioned that a pro-Academic Freedom Petition was circulating among faculty and researchers, specifically objecting to the academic boycott of Israel passed by a small number of groups, such as the American Studies Association. The Petition has now passed 1200 signatures, mostly from faculty at universities in the United States, but including some international faculty, researchers and scholars. This is an important development, as some anti-Israel activist groups misleadingly attempt to portray academia as stifling speech hostile to Israel. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, there is a pervasive campus climate of hostility to Israel led by pro-boycott faculty, concentrated in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The anti-Israel academic boycott covers  Israeli institutions of higher education, and demands termination of exchange programs, terms abroad programs in Israel,  academic cooperation, and any attempt at normalization of relations among scholars.  The comprehensive boycott of these institutions by its nature includes a boycott of the faculty and staff at such institutions. In practice, the boycott such as that of the ASA, includes refusing attendance at conferences by the individuals representing such institutions or who carry administrative titles.  It is a boycott of individuals. The faculty supporting the academic boycott of Israel disregard calls by over 250 university presidents, numerous university associations, and the American Association of University Professors, that such systematic academic boycotts threaten the academic freedom of all of us. The anti-Israel boycotters have taken over some professional organizations, where a relatively small number of activists can manipulate key committees and national councils. But the academic boycotters do not represent the majority. This Petition is just a first step in the silent majority in the academic community speaking up -- not to take sides in the Middle East dispute, but to speak out against those who bring the war into the classrooms and hallways regardless of the consequences.  Enough already. The Petition remains open, and more signatures are anticipated as the word spreads. [caption id="attachment_100289" align="alignnone" width="600"]http://facultyforacademicfreedom.org/ (Click on Image to go to Petition page)[/caption] You don’t have to be “pro-Israel” to sign — only pro-academic freedom, pro-fairness, pro-intellectual honesty, pro-education and pro-peace. Here’s an excerpt from the Petition:
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