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June 2015

Posted by Fuzzy Slippers on June 06, 2015 14 Comments
I saw this story earlier this week, and it's been nagging at the back of mind ever since.  Dennis Hastert allegedly engaged in serious sexual misconduct and then paid the victim millions to remain silent; that's not really defensible on a moral level, and the crimes with which he's been charged are not related to the sexual misconduct. Instead, he's "been indicted for two alleged felonies: 1) withdrawing cash from his bank accounts in amounts and patterns designed to hide the payments; and 2) lying to the FBI about the purpose of those withdrawals once they detected them and then inquired with him." As Conor Friedersdorf explains:
It isn’t illegal to withdraw money from the bank, nor to compensate someone in recognition of past harms, nor to be the victim of a blackmail scheme. So why should it be a crime to hide those actions from the U.S. government? The alarming aspect of this case is the fact that an American is ultimately being prosecuted for the crime of evading federal government surveillance. That has implications for all of us. By way of background, financial institutions are required to report all transactions of $10,000 or more to the federal government. This is meant to make it harder to commit racketeering, tax fraud, drug crimes, and other serious offenses. Hastert began paying off the person he allegedly wronged years before by withdrawing large amounts of cash. But once he realized that this was generating activity reports, he allegedly started making more withdrawals, each one less than $10,000, to avoid drawing attention to the fact that he was paying someone for his silence. Again, the payments weren’t illegal. But as it turns out, structuring financial transactions “to evade currency transaction reporting requirements” is a violation of federal law.
Although initially designed to identify criminal behavior such as drug cartel transactions, racketeering, and terrorist's money trails, the law is willfully abused by the IRS to confiscate the bank accounts of small business owners without any evidence of a crime.  The small business owner has the responsibility (and with now empty bank accounts) to prove that they are not engaged in any criminal activity.  According to Hot Air,  "the IRS used this tactic 639 in 2012 alone, with only 20% of those cases ever being prosecuted."

Posted by Fuzzy Slippers on June 06, 2015 9 Comments
From physical attacks, to vandalism, to verbal attacks on those walking while Jewish, Europe has seen a rise in anti-Semitism in recent years. So much so, that a resolution condemning the rising tide of anti-Semitism in Europe passed the Senate by unanimous vote on Thursday.
The resolution, authored by Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ) and co-sponsored by 60 other senators encouraged “greater cooperation with the European governments, in the European Union, and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe in preventing and responding to antisemitism.” “In light of the rise of antisemitism in Europe, this resolution calls on European governments to not only stand against antisemitism, but to work to end it,” said Sen. Menendez, applauding the unanimous passage of the bill.
In the UK, former Prime Minister Tony Blair has been appointed to head the European Council on Tolerance and Reconciliation: Nicholas Watt of The Guardian reports:
Tony Blair is to take on a new role tackling antisemitism by assuming the chairmanship of a pan-European body that campaigns for stronger laws against extremism across the continent. The British former prime minister has been appointed as chairman of the European Council on Tolerance and Reconciliation a week after he announced that he would stand down as the envoy of the quartet on the Middle East. In an article for the Times, in which he sets out his plans for his new role, Blair says that he will campaign against the abuse of religions which has become a “mask behind which those bent on death and destruction all too often hide”.

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on June 05, 2015 5 Comments
Last week, reporters with NBC's Atlanta affiliate station crashed the Spring Task Force Summit of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). ALEC, an organization that works with state legislators, think tanks, and policy experts to advocate for limited regulation and reduced taxation, is a favorite target of left-leaning media outlets and reporters. The report published by 11 Alive, Atlanta's NBC affiliate, paints ALEC as a group of nefarious money-mongers who buy their way through state legislatures to accumulate power. 11 Alive also suggests ALEC was involved in a "secret back room meeting"... a secret back room meeting to educate part-time legislators.
What is ALEC? "It's really a corporate bill mill," said Sen. Nan Orrock, an Atlanta Democrat who has served in both houses of the Georgia General Assembly for years. "They're cranking out legislation, putting it into the hands of legislators who go back and file it." Orrock would know. She was once a member of ALEC. "The corporations that are there have equal standing with the legislators," Sen. Orrock said. "You mean they can vote?" we asked. "They absolutely can vote, and truth be told, they write the bills," she answered, referring to the lobbyists. There really are back rooms where corporate lobbyists have direct access to lawmakers completely out of sight, with no transparency or public filings. They're also wined and dined after hours at these events with nothing recorded on ethics reports. We know because we saw one of these back rooms with our own eyes, and were kicked out with the aid of off-duty police officers on orders from ALEC staff.
Orrock won awards from the Progressive States Network. It's also not uncommon for think tanks and policy shops to have sample legislation posted on their websites for state house use. But facts and things.

Posted by Fuzzy Slippers on June 05, 2015 20 Comments
With the media busy normalizing socialism for Bernie Sanders, it's no wonder that few are reporting on his latest plan to spend $5.5 billion to employ a million young people. Bloomberg has the details:
The Employ Young Americans Now Act is the sort of legislation that would have struggled even in a Democratic Congress. In a Capitol controlled by Republicans, it might as well propose taxing churches to pay for sex reassignment surgeries on a moon base. The legislation, introduced by Michigan Representative John Conyers, would create a $5.5 billion fund, $4 billion earmarked for the employment of people between 16 and 24, $1.5 billion for job training grants. There are no pay-fors. It would ask a Congress that is dead-set against "big government" to employ people, with the help of big government.

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on June 05, 2015 42 Comments
Friday morning, the New York Times deemed Senator Rubio's driving record news that fit to print. Though it reads like something from the annals of The Onion, the New York Times was completely serious about Sen. Rubio's troubling speeding tickets from the 90s.
Senator Marco Rubio has been in a hurry to get to the top, rising from state legislator to United States senator in the span of a decade and now running for president at age 44. But politics is not the only area where Mr. Rubio, a Republican from Florida, has an affinity for the fast track. He and his wife, Jeanette, have also shown a tendency to be in a rush on the road. ...A review of records dating back to 1997 shows that the couple had a combined 17 citations: Mr. Rubio with four and his wife with 13. On four separate occasions they agreed to attend remedial driving school after a violation.
Sen. Rubio took defensive driving?! IMPEACH.
Mr. Rubio’s troubles behind the wheel predate his days in politics... A dozen years later, in 2009, he was ticketed for speeding on a highway in Duval County and found himself back in driver improvement school. Things got more complicated in 2011 when Mr. Rubio was alerted to the fact that his license was facing suspension after a traffic camera caught him failing to stop at a red light in his beige Buick. His lawyer, Alex Hanna, paid a $16 fee to delay the suspension and eventually it was dismissed.
What kind of elitist is Rubio that he paid a whopping $16 fee to avoid suspension of his driver's license?

Posted by Jay Caruso on June 05, 2015 10 Comments
Another left narrative bites the dust and this time, by the agency considered to be the equivalent of an environmental Pontiff, the Environmental Protection Agency. Hydraulic fracking is still a relatively new technology (as it relates to using it for shale gas deposits). Most people would not have heard of it 10 years earlier, but now it is common. Environmental groups aided by Democrat politicians have been successful in banning fracking in counties and municipalities across the country. New York banned it statewide based on hysterical nonsense about the lack of a good economic impact and it supposed harm to the environment. First on the economic front, The American Enterprise Institute says the economic impact has been very positive:
The direct benefit of increasing oil and gas production includes the value of increased production attributable to the technology. In 2011, the USA produced 8,500,983 million cubic feet of natural gas from shale gas wells. Taking an average price of $4.24 per thousand cubic feet, that’s a value of about $36 billion, due to shale gas alone. This increase in value produced can also increase the number of people employed directly in production and delivery activities. These numbers will often be pointed to in political debates. In an economy with full employment, such an increase would not be considered a ‘benefit’ per se, but a state such as New York with a high unemployment rate of 8.2 might wish to weigh the potential employment effects when evaluating the merits of a moratorium. At its peak in 1980, the oil and gas extraction sector supported 267,000 employees, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. As more easily tapped oil reserves grew scarcer and domestic oil production gradually declined over the following two decades, so did employment, with the number of employees in oil and gas extraction shrinking by over 50 percent to 118,400 in 2003. Since 2003, however, there has been a steady upward climb in employment, slowing only slightly during 2009 and reaching 198,400 by December 2012 – over a 67 percent increase. As other industries have sputtered in the a”ermath of the 2008 recession, oil and gas has been a remarkably bright spot in the US economy, with employment at the end of 2012 at its highest since 1987.

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on June 05, 2015 8 Comments
Speaking from a plane hanger in a Dallas suburb Thursday afternoon, Governor Perry officially launched his second bid for the White House. Flanked by Navy SEALs, Perry was introduced by his wife, Anita. Meet the former first lady of Texas, Anita Perry. Over the years, I've often heard Governor Perry refer to Anita as, "his rock" and it's easy to see why. Perry's Coaxer in Chief as CNN called her, addressed one of the most crucial issues of Perry's 2016 campaign -- his glasses. "He's got these new glasses that have gotten a lot of attention," observes CNN, "What do you think? Did he need a new image?" "No, he needed the glasses to see! I mean, this really just tickles me, it makes me laugh. He needed those glasses from a childhood injury when he was 16 or 17-years-old and the vision in one eye deteriorated such that he had to have the glasses. So I picked them out. Really, I like him without the glasses, but he had to have them to see."

Posted by Leslie Eastman on June 05, 2015 24 Comments
What is the line between political hyperbole and utter fantasy? Whatever it is, President Obama has completely crossed that particular Rubicon. I recently noted that his assertions that America has become more respected internationally under his watch were not quite based in reality. Now, it appears he has delusions regarding his faith:
Speaking to JPUpdates.com, top Obama confidant David Axelrod described a moment where the president expressed exasperation to him over being derided as anti-Israel by some. “You know, I think I am the closest thing to a Jew that has ever sat in this office,” the president claimed, according to Axelrod. “For people to say that I am anti-Israel, or, even worse, anti-Semitic, it hurts.”
Given President Obama's treatment of Bibi Netanyahu over the years, and the troubling deal with Iran that my colleague David Gerstman reviews, I must admit to being a bit perplexed.

Posted by Andrew Branca on June 05, 2015 38 Comments
We're all familiar with the proverb, rats flee a sinking ship. To see this in action on a human scale we need look no further than the offices of Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake. In a story that's gotten remarkably little news coverage, the Baltimore Sun Times reports that four of the Mayor's highest ranking staff have quit since six Baltimore police officers were charged in the death of Freddie Gray. Among those who have resigned:

LeVar Michael, Head of the mayor's Office of Nonviolent Programs, resigned on Wednesday, May 20.

Angela Johnese, Director of the Criminal Justice Office, resigned on Friday, May 22.

Heather Brantner, Coordinator of the Mayor's Sexual Assault Response Team, also resigned on Friday, May 22. (Coincidence?)

Perhaps most shocking however, was the next resignation the following week:

Shannon Cosgrove, the Mayor's own Deputy Director, resigned Tuesday, May 26 (the day after Memorial Day.)

For those without a calendar in front of them, that's four high-level departures in a period of four business days.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on June 05, 2015 4 Comments
On June 12, 2014, a terror cell affiliated with Hamas kidnapped Naftali Fraenkel (16), Gilad Shaer (16), and Eyal Yifrah (19) in the West Bank. After an intensive hunt and crackdown on Hamas throughout the West Bank, they were found dead. The murderers months later were located and killed by Israeli forces. Contrary to popular mythology, the kidnapping did not cause Israel to attack Gaza weeks later. Rather, the cause of the Gaza conflict was when Hamas started firing rockets from Gaza at Israel without stop. While driving on the way back from Hebron, I saw a sign (Featured Image), designating a forest in the memory of the three teens. It is at the Gush Etzion junction in an area of settlements near where the teens were abducted. The visit to Hebron was quite interesting. Hebron had the oldest continuous Jewish community in the world -- dating back several hundred years -- until Arab riots in 1929 killed 67 Hebron Jews and ethnically cleansed Jews from the city.

Posted by Amy Miller on June 04, 2015 14 Comments
US officials suspect hackers in China are responsible for a cyber attack on the Office of Personnel Management's (OPM) computer systems that left the personal information of almost four million current and former federal government employees exposed. The breach, which was detected back in April, is now being described as one of the largest thefts of government data ever seen. DHS concluded back in May that the information had indeed been compromised and stolen, but so far neither OPM of the FBI have indicated exactly whose records have been exposed. More from WaPo:
“Certainly, OPM is a high value target,” said OPM Chief Information Officer Donna Seymour, in an interview. “We have a lot of information about people, and that is something that our adversaries want.” With that understanding, she said, within the last year “OPM has undertaken an aggressive effort to update our cybersecurity posture, adding numerous tools and capabilities to our networks. As a result of adding these tools, we were able to detect this intrusion into our networks.” “Protecting our federal employee data from malicious cyber incidents is of the highest priority at OPM,” said the agency’s director, Katherine Archuleta, in a statement.

Posted by Andrew Branca on June 04, 2015 42 Comments
Last November Cleveland Officer Timothy Loehmann shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice in a city park.  The investigation by law enforcement has now been completed, and the case is being handed over to prosecutors and a Grand Jury, reports CNN and other sources. The Cleveland police officers had been dispatched to the scene by 911 because of calls received that someone--ultimately determined to be Tamir Rice--was walking around the park pointing a gun at people. At least one call to 911 reported "a guy with a pistol" walking around the park. The same caller purportedly also told 911 that the gun was "probably" fake, but according to dispatch recordings released by law enforcement this additional information was not communicated to the responding officers.  Even if it had, no police officer could reasonably be expected to risk his life on the firearm identification skills of an anonymous caller to 911. Indeed, the surveillance video (below the fold, and annotated by the author) clearly shows Rice openly handling an apparent pistol (seemingly spinning it on his finger cowboy-style at the 1:20 mark), placing and removing it from his waistband (e.g., at 2:00 mark), and even apparently pointing the gun-like object at passersby. There are at least 10 occasions captured by the grainy footage of the surveillance video in which Rice is openly displaying the apparent gun in some fashion.  To an actual observer at the scene, the handling of the gun would have been far more apparent.

Posted by Fuzzy Slippers on June 04, 2015 22 Comments
Earlier this year, Alabama became a focal point in the ongoing resistance in some states to legalizing gay "marriage" (read about it here and here).  Watch a PBSNewshour clip that summarizes the issue (and the professor interviewed try to downplay the unpopularity of gay "marriage" in Alabama): Much of the debate centered on the Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court who was and is adamantly opposed to federal government intervention in states' rights regarding gay "marriage," but Chief Justice Moore is not the only Alabamian who is taking actual steps to address their objections. The Alabama state legislature has drafted a bill that moves to replace marriage licenses with contracts. Hot Air reports:
Assuming a pending bill in Alabama makes it all the way into law, we’re about to see an unusual test case in the marriage wars. Rather than arguing over the definition of marriage for the purposes of issuing licenses, the Heart of Dixie is moving to do away with marriage licenses entirely and replace them with contracts.

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on June 04, 2015 8 Comments
After being maligned by the press for "inviting" violence by taking a stand for free speech at her Garland, Texas "Draw Mohammad" event, Pamela Gellar was target of a beheading plot. Usaamah Rahim, who was being investigated by the FBI, was shot and killed by Boston police Tuesday. Rahim and an alleged co-conspirator, planned to behead Pamela Gellar.
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