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April 2015

Posted by Mike LaChance on April 23, 2015 19 Comments
As the trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev entered the penalty phase yesterday, jurors were shown a photo of the Boston Marathon bomber giving the finger to a jail security camera after his arrest. The Boston Globe reported:
Jurors view footage of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev making obscene gesture Jurors in the death penalty trial of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on Wednesday were shown video of him making an obscene gesture as well as holding his fingers in the shape of “V” to a surveillance camera in a courthouse holding cell three months after he was arrested in the terror attack. A prosecutor had shown a picture of Tsarnaev making the obscene gesture to the jury in US District Court in Boston at the end of her opening statement in the penalty phase of the trial on Tuesday, underlining her argument that he was “unconcerned, unrepentant, and unchanged” after the attack. On Wednesday, video of the incident, which happened on July 10, 2013, was shown to jurors at the request of Tsarnaev’s defense team.
The gesture is blurred in this video but you'll get the idea:

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on April 22, 2015 7 Comments
According to The Hill, one of Hillary Clinton's longstanding supporters has defected to Governor Martin O'Malley. The Miami Herald explains, "as Miami mayor, Manny Diaz backed Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary. But now he's hosting a breakfast for former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, a potential Clinton rival in 2016." To say that Diaz is excited about a potential O'Malley run is probably an understatement. Diaz told the Miami Herald, "He's not running yet, but I'll tell you, if he does run, I will endorse him. He's an old friend, and I'm very loyal to old friends."
Diaz praised O'Malley's work as Baltimore mayor and noted he visited him when he first got elected in Miami. Diaz ended up using Baltimore's 311 call system as a model for his own city. "He's very data-driven, results-oriented, 'let's see how we're doing, let's measure ourselves,'" Diaz said. Plus, he has a soft spot in his heart for executives: In 2008, as head of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, Diaz said he met separately with Clinton and Barack Obama and urged them to run as "mayor of the United States." "When you look at what mayors do, and in this case what governor's do -- and he's been both, so he's actually run something," Diaz said. "He's run two governments."

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on April 22, 2015 16 Comments
Is the 2016 GOP field to RINO-y for you? Hillary too full of hogwash and O'Malley too boring? Are you looking for a candidate who graduated from the School of Hard Knocks? Then Waka Flocka Flame might just be the candidate you're looking for... or not. Juaquin James Malphurs or Waka Flocka, is a rapper from Atlanta. He also announced his presidential candidacy Monday (which was not so coincidentally 4/20). According to Rolling Stone:
Two years ago, Waka Flocka Flame made a promise. "I'm dead ass running for president in 2016," the Atlanta rapper tweeted. The date was November 6th, 2012. Today, he's keeping his word. In a high-level meeting with Rolling Stone today, on April 20th, 2015, Waka declared his candidacy for the next President of the United States, with DJ Whoo Kid as his running mate.

Posted by Amy Miller on April 22, 2015 10 Comments
Happy Earth Day, everyone! Hope you're all enjoying your...composting...and your...carbon offsets? I used aerosol hairspray today, so I'm not even going to pretend I observe this non-holiday. President Obama does, however. Today, he boarded his private jumbo jet and burned down to the Everglades to deliver a blistering take on his political opponents who aren't doing enough to stop people from flying their private jets everywhere. Also, something about protecting fragile ecosystems. In anticipation of Obama's Earth Day stump speech, the media started publishing annoying articles about Air Force One's carbon footprint. How inconvenient, right? When asked about the jet's effect on the environment, White House press secretary Josh Earnest crumbled under the weight of his boss's sanctimony. Watch the madness unfold:

Posted by Amy Miller on April 22, 2015 14 Comments
In 2015 America, government overreach isn't exactly headline news anymore. From the IRS to the VA to the EPA, it seems like every agency in the country is managing to find new and exciting ways to rob from the middle class to feed the bureaucracy; not only is the "system" growing, it's getting harder and harder for the average citizen to fight The Man and come out standing. Not headline news, and nothing new; many of the programs giving Americans hell were developed decades back. One program targeting raisin farmers, however, is currently under fire from business owners looking to protect their property rights. In the wake of World War II, the US government developed a series of programs aimed at stabilizing the agricultural industry. They wanted to drive up market prices, and decided the best way to do so was to confiscate a portion of each farmer's raisin crop without compensation. (Yes, really.) In 2001, farmers Marvin and Laura Horne decided they had had enough with regulations, and developed their own packaging and distribution system.

Posted by Amy Miller on April 22, 2015 27 Comments
I learned a lot during my time on the 2014 campaign trail. I learned how to "cut a walk book" for a block walk, and organize a phone bank, and juggle 15 reporters, 25 volunteers, and one candidate with one hand tied behind my back; but most importantly, I learned how to create a digital campaign that talks to people, as opposed to talking at them. People hate being talked at. It's condescending and boring and there's no hope of making a connection. You're wasting your time, money, and most importantly, your face time with a potential voter. That's why I was surprised and excited to see one of our already-declared presidential candidates taking a new approach to voter outreach. Yesterday, Team Rubio posted a different kind of video to their Facebook page. Watch it:

Posted by Amy Miller on April 22, 2015 29 Comments
Living in America, it's very easy to forget that just a plane ride away, people are persecuted on the basis of their religious beliefs. I say "persecuted" like that covers the atrocities that occur on a daily basis, but it really doesn't; feminists, gay rights activists, and race hustlers all claim "persecution," but if that's the word we're going to use to describe what happens to people like the Coptic Christians of Egypt, we may want to stop throwing it around when arguing about the wage gap. Recently, the world sat dumbfounded as news surfaced that a group of Muslims threw a dozen Christians overboard a migrant ship traveling from Libya to Italy. Outrage bubbled as Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi insisted during a joint press conference with the President that "the problem [was] not a problem of (a) clash of religions," and boiled over as Obama stood by and said nothing. Would he have spoken up if the victims had been Muslim? Kirsten Powers thinks so. In an op-ed for USA Today, Powers lashed out at Obama, and pointed out that his silence about the mass murder at sea isn't a one-off problem.

Posted by Leslie Eastman on April 22, 2015 2 Comments
We reported that an unexpected strain of the flu was hitting Americans hard this season. But our pets are becoming ill at alarmingly high rates with a new strain of a flu that impacts them.
An outbreak of canine influenza is reaching epidemic proportions, CBS Chicago reports. Veterinarians say the illness has sickened hundreds of dogs in the Chicago area, and the infection can be deadly. Veterinarian Natalie Marks of Blum Animal Hospital says in the last week alone, more than 70 dogs have been diagnosed with canine influenza, a much more serious illness than the common "kennel cough." And it's not just a Chicago problem. "It's everywhere," Marks says. "There have been a few fatalities."
More information about the illness is available in this eHow video:

Posted by Mike LaChance on April 22, 2015 25 Comments
David Brock of Media Matters appeared on MSNBC's Morning Joe program yesterday and attempted to defend Hillary Clinton from claims made in the new book Clinton Cash. Even the reliably liberal Mika Brzezinski wasn't buying Brock's hollow defense. Alyssa Canobbio of the Washington Free Beacon:
Mika Brzezinski Corrects the Record on David Brock’s Laughable Defense of Hillary Clinton Brock defended Clinton’s comments that when a person runs for president that they come under scrutiny and Brock asked people to look at Clinton’s record. Host Mika Brzezinski said no one could look at Clinton’s record because Clinton scrubbed the personal server she used during her time as secretary of state. Brock continued, arguing that the 55,000 pages of email that Clinton has turned over was enough to show her record. Brock said that the actions Clinton took after leaving the State Department all fell under regulations. “No, actually, David, you don’t have to give me a lesson on the regulations of the State Department,” Brzezinski said. “She scrubbed emails because she felt like it and that went against regulations.”
Watch the video:

Posted by Jay Caruso on April 22, 2015 13 Comments
When the Vice-President of a two term President seeks to reach the highest office in the land, they usually have a built-in advantage over all other contenders:
It's pretty much a truism in American political history: If the president is not running again and the vice president wants his party's nomination, it's his for the asking. That was the case in 1960, with President Eisenhower term-limited and Vice President Richard Nixon's path to the GOP nomination unimpeded. It was also true in 1968, when President Johnson decided not to run again and his vice president, Hubert Humphrey, won the Democratic nomination despite not having entered a single primary. The quests of Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy ended in assassination in Los Angeles and violence in Chicago, but considering the way things were back in '68, Humphrey may have had the nomination locked up from the beginning.

Posted by Miriam Elman on April 21, 2015 8 Comments
Memorial Day for the Fallen Soldiers of Israel and Victims of Terrorism (Yom Ha’zikaron) begins at sunset. It transitions on Wednesday evening to Israel Independence Day (Yom Ha’atzmaut). Due to the time difference, Israelis are already honoring the 23,320 fallen soldiers and victims of terrorism since the beginning of political Zionism, among them 553 fallen with graves unknown. Israel came to standstill Tuesday evening at 8 p.m. for a minute-long memorial siren. The siren was followed by the lighting of a memorial flame at the Western Wall (the Kotel), the site of the official state commemoration ceremony. On Wednesday, another official ceremony will be held at the Mount Herzl military ceremony in Jerusalem. It'll honor the 116 soldiers and former soldiers who died over the last year, 67 of them killed in this summer's Operation Protective Edge. They have left behind 131 bereaved parents, 187 siblings, 11 widows, and 26 children, two of whom were born after their fathers died.

Posted by Amy Miller on April 21, 2015 7 Comments
We've got some real staffer-on-senator, Republican-on-Democrat violence brewing up in Wisconsin---and it (mercifully) has nothing at all to do with the 2016 presidential cycle. Senator Tammy Baldwin's former Deputy State Director has officially filed an ethics complaint against the Wisconsin democrat, accusing the Senator of firing and demoting staffers in an effort to cover up mishandling of a whistleblower complaint about a Wisconsin VA hospital. Marquette Baylor is represented by Kansas City attorney Todd Graves, a former U.S. attorney and advocate for the conservative nonprofit Wisconsin Club for Growth. The trouble started when a complaint reached Baldwin's state-based caseworkers about alleged patient abuse at the Tomah VA hospital. According to the whistleblower, patients at Tomah were being prescribed dangerous amounts of prescription narcotics. A later Congressional investigation would show that the patients at Tomah were not only more likely to receive high doses of narcotics, but that three veterans died after receiving treatment there. The investigation also revealed a "culture of fear" that intimidated hospital employees and compromised patient care.

Posted by Amy Miller on April 21, 2015 10 Comments
Earlier today, I wrote about the importance of pointing out every time an official spokesperson gets testy with their press pool over fair-yet-tough questions. Marie Harf got herself in hot water yesterday when she hinted to the corps that the questions they were asking were far too complex to cover in a press briefing, then got caught lying about how much information she had about the Iranian nuclear deal. It was ugly, and told us a lot more about the State Department than Harf's policy bullet points. Today, Josh Earnest ran into a similar roadblock during the midday press briefing with the White House press corps. Earnest has a history of trying to run offense around tough questions, but it's only recently that the corps has responded with soundbite-worthy pushback. Today's little show involved a question about a comment Hillary Clinton made about small business growth under the Obama administration. She said that small business creation has "stalled out" in the United States, and ABC News correspondent Jon Karl wanted a response from the White House. Watch here, via Real Clear Politics:

Posted by Laurel Conrad on April 21, 2015 39 Comments
College campuses are meant to be a place where students engage in new perspectives and critical reasoning. Or so they say. But by labeling conservative points of view as “extremist,” “anti-feminist,” and “racist,” feminists are shutting down the dialogue on their college campuses before it even begins. To the leftist student activists, it seemingly doesn't matter whether or not these labels are deserved. They've realized that all they need to do is to stigmatize a talk by a conservative speaker is to condemn the speaker as an oppressing force. For instance, last Thursday, I facilitated a lecture at the Georgetown University on behalf of the conservative organization I work for, the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute, and the Georgetown CRs. As soon as the campus feminists caught wind of the event, they immediately began protesting and demanding trigger warnings in order to silence the talk.

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on April 21, 2015 28 Comments
Perhaps Mrs. Clinton should read the newspapers like the current White House occupant, then she might find her self a bit more informed about the goings on in the country she hopes to rule run. Speaking in Keene, New Hampshire yesterday, Hillary said: "From my perspective, I want to be sure that we get small businesses starting and growing in America again. We have stalled out. I was very surprised to see that when I began to dig into it. Because people were telling me this as I travelled around the country the last two years, but I didn't know what they were saying and it turns out, we're not producing as many small businesses as we used to, and a recent world study said that we are forty-sixth in the world in the difficulty to start a small business. And we'll get into some of those."

Posted by Amy Miller on April 21, 2015 7 Comments
It seems incomprehensible that in 2015, I would have to write a headline hinting at begrudging support on the part of Democrats for modern day slaves. And yet here I sit, after watching more than a month's debate over the Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act, finally able to report that the Democrats have finally relented in their all-out war against the JVTA, and we should see a vote soon. We finally have a deal. In a battle that mostly came down to optics, Democrats have finally agreed to a fee structure benefiting victims of trafficking that would flow through the appropriations process. This system will still invoke the Hyde Amendment's abortion funding prohibitions, but avoid the spectre of a Hyde "expansion" that Democrats used to block the bill's passage. This means that, once the JVTA is taken care of, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will allow a vote on the nomination of Loretta Lynch as the next attorney general. The bizarre and infuriating part about all this is that Reid recently played games with an idea very similar to the one currently on the table---a fact that JVTA sponsor John Cornyn highlighted in a speech pushing for final passage:

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on April 21, 2015 49 Comments
You've seen the maps delineating the largely regional usage of words like "y'all" versus "you guys." But what about the more subtle differences in English usage? Yale's Grammatical Diversity Project produced some rather fascinated results. The study "examines syntactic differences among local varieties spoken by considerably smaller numbers of people." Digging far deeper into the grammar usage among regions within the same state, the study documents, "minimal differences among varieties of English spoken in North America." According to one of the researchers, the goal was not to look for grammatical inaccuracies or judge language usage, but to catalogue regional variations. For example, in many parts of New England, people will say "so don't I" to mean "so do I," he explained. The study also explores generational differences in the usage of words like, "so." Among younger people, and particularly in New York and California, "so" is used to convey drama. For example, "I was so tired last night, I couldn't keep my eyes open."
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