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June 2016

Posted by AACONS on June 04, 2016 0 Comments
Juan Williams is a top political analyst for Fox News Channel, co-host of the daily news show “The Five,” and a columnist for The Hill. His written work includes such critically acclaimed bestselling books as Eyes on the Prize, Enough, and Thurgood Marshall. And his latest book is entitled We the People: The Modern-Day Figures Who Have Reshaped and Affirmed the Founding Fathers' Vision of America. Demetrius Minor is a former White House intern, and radio and television talk show personality, and the founder of demetriuspeaks.com. He is also a graduate of Georgia Military College and a member of the National Advisory Council of Project 21, a black leadership network. His first book is entitled, Preservation and Purpose: The Making of a Young Millennial.

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on June 03, 2016 8 Comments
Barely a month ago, I blogged about a nasty November surprise lurking in the electoral shadows -- monstrous Obamacare premium rate hikes. Huge losses and a supposedly high number of unexpected claims are being blamed for looming rate hikes in the Lone Star State. The average rate hike for Texan consumers? 35%. Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas requested a 58% rate hike for some 603,000 consumers and, "18% increase for 353,000 members who buy plans via the small group market that caters to businesses with fewer than 50 employees," according to Investors.com.

Posted by Mary Chastain on June 03, 2016 3 Comments
Police have connected a murder in Minnesota to the man who killed a UCLA professor and then himself. Mainak Sarkar, 38, left behind a kill list in his aparment, which included two UCLAS professors and Ashley Hasti, 31, his estranged wife. Police in Minnesota discovered Hasti's dead body on Thursday, the day after Sarkar killed Professor William S. Klug. Deputy Police Chief Mark Brutley said Sarkar killed her before he killed Klug:
Sarkar apparently believed Klug had stolen some of his work while he was a doctoral student at UCLA. Sarkar’s motive for Hasti’s slaying remains unclear. The two were married by a justice of peace in 2011, said Hasti’s grandmother, Jean Johnson. The couple split about a year later and Hasti moved back home to Brooklyn Park.

Posted by Mary Chastain on June 03, 2016 5 Comments
Devastating floods have forced officials to shut down the Louvre and evacuate priceless works of art. The Louvre houses the Mona Lisa, but workers assured people she will remain protected on her upper floor. But the most visited museum in Europe must shut down:
"Due to the level of the river Seine, the Musée du Louvre will be exceptionally closed to the public on June 3, 2016 to ensure the protection of the works located in flood zones. We apologize for any inconvenience caused," the museum said on its website.

Posted by Mary Chastain on June 03, 2016 9 Comments
President Obama press advisor Jen Psaki attacked Fox News after reporter James Rosen asked for clarification over her statement about deleted footage from a 2013 press briefing about secret Iran and U.S. talks. Rosen asked then-State spokeswoman Psaki about the meeting in 2013, a year after the department denied such talks existed. Psaki admitted they took place, but Rosen found someone deleted his questions from the old video:
The department acknowledged Wednesday that several minutes of video from the 2013 briefing – at which then-State Department spokeswoman Psaki appeared to acknowledge misleading the press over the Iran nuclear deal – had been intentionally cut. The order apparently came from an official in the public affairs office, but that individual has not been identified.
Fox News published their complete email exchange, where Psaki berates Rosen for politely asking for an explanation after Psaki referred to the transcript and not the video.

Posted by Mike LaChance on June 03, 2016 30 Comments
Social justice warriors at Yale are angry that the study of English involves reading the work of old white men. In a move that defies history and logic, they have launched a petition which makes specific demands on Yale's English Department to put an end to this travesty. Robby Soave writes at Reason:
Yale Students Tell English Profs to Stop Teaching English: Too Many White Male Poets Some Yale University students are demanding changes to the English Department curriculum: specifically, they don't think it should feature so many English poets who were straight, white, wealthy, and male.

Posted by Leslie Eastman on June 03, 2016 142 Comments
San Jose media appears to be following the same template used by San Diego's press last Friday: Make the focus of the Donald Trump rally reports the protests that occur after the event, instead of the thousands of enthusiastic supporters who attended. During the rally within an annex of the San Jose Convention Center, Trump addressed about 5,000 Californians. Interestingly, his remarks included sharp retorts to Hillary Clinton's supposed "national security" speech in San Diego that was mainly a tirade against the GOP's presumptive nominee:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on June 03, 2016 4 Comments
I'm leaving for Israel for almost two weeks. On June 9, I'll be speaking to the Israel Cornell Club. Hopefully I also can see some Legal Insurrection readers there -- it's open. BUT, you need to register (HERE) since seating is limited. It's being held in the David Ben-Gurion House in Tel Aviv, which is the house once occupied by .... (please, don't make me tell you). As with my travels in 2013 and 2015, I'll post when I can on interesting places and people I meet. As before, I expect to report on the human side -- the victims of the Arab terror campaigns past and present.

Posted by Leslie Eastman on June 02, 2016 14 Comments
My campaign field report series continues today with the Hillary Clinton speech in San Diego. The underlying reason for the event is that Clinton is barely clinging to a 2-point lead in California polling data, ahead of its June 7th primary. Based on my observations, the "national security address" at the Prado in Balboa Park was an utterly astonishing failure. Furthermore, the arrangements associated with her appearance show that if she does win, Clinton will extend the Obama imperial style of presidency. I will begin my analysis with crowd size comparisons:

Posted by Taryn O'Neill on June 02, 2016 46 Comments
Last week, Louisiana passed a resolution calling for a Convention of States as described in Article V of the U.S. Constitution. The resolution passed on May 25 with a vote of 62-36, making Louisiana the eighth state to call for a meeting of the states for the purpose of proposing constitutional amendments addressing abuses by the U.S. Federal Government. Other states that have called a Convention of States for the same purposes are Florida, Georgia, Alaska, Alabama, Tennessee, Indiana, and Oklahoma. Increased national interest in a Convention of States (COS) is due largely to the government's failure to operate as the Framers envisioned. Having accrued a national debt of over $19 trillion and a debt-to-GDP ratio of 105%, the government's size and scope has grown far beyond anything the Founders could have imagined. Meanwhile, the states, having created the Federal Government, find themselves acting at the mercy of Washington's limitless regulations and outstretched tentacles, lest they lose federal sacred funding.

Posted by Mary Chastain on June 02, 2016 32 Comments
Welp, it's official. Speaker Paul Ryan has endorsed Donald Trump. He made the formal announcement in an op-ed in the Janesville Gazette:
But the House policy agenda has been the main focus of our dialogue. We’ve talked about the common ground this agenda can represent. We’ve discussed how the House can be a driver of policy ideas. We’ve talked about how important these reforms are to saving our country. And we’ve talked about how, by focusing on issues that unite Republicans, we can work together to heal the fissures developed through the primary. Through these conversations, I feel confident he would help us turn the ideas in this agenda into laws to help improve people’s lives. That’s why I’ll be voting for him this fall.

Posted by Taryn O'Neill on June 02, 2016 17 Comments
The nation's payday and auto title lenders are now the latest target of the Obama administration in an effort to transform the relationship between private lending companies, their borrowers, and the government. For the very first time, high-interest lending companies will face regulations set forth by the federal government. Credit of this type typically involves an immediate, short-term loan of a few hundred dollars that comes with a high interest rates and lending fees. When costs are combined, the annual interest rate of these loans often calculate to around 300%. Until now, regulation of this $39 billion industry had been left up to the states. This week, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), an agency conceived by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, announced the beginnings of a regulatory framework intended to protect the roughly 12 million low-income households borrowing from these often described "predatory" lenders. Rules proposed by the CFPB will require lenders to assess the borrower's ability to pay back the loan before an exchange of money takes place. Payday lenders fear this step will make it more difficult to roll over loans, a frequent practice of high-interest lenders that usually results in the hiking of the lender's borrowing fees.

Posted by Mary Chastain on June 02, 2016 11 Comments
First Lady Michelle Obama asked Anthony Mendez to attend the 2015 State of the Union with her since he overcame a tough childhood to advance to college. However, he never told her or anyone else that he didn't even make a 1.0 GPA at the University of Hartford and faced expulsion. Mendez admitted in a Vox op-ed that he accepted the invitation despite knowing the university would not accept him back for the spring semester. Unfortunately, though, his op-ed sounds like he wants to place some of the blame on the White House and the media that hounded him after the White House announced the invitations.

Posted by Mary Chastain on June 02, 2016 16 Comments
Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes's worth went from $4.5 billion to zero in a year after officials found her company failed at blood testing. Holmes founded the company in 2003 "with plans of revolutionizing the diagnostic test market." President Barack Obama named her as an ambassador for global entrepreneurship while the Clinton family propped her up at their Clinton Global initiative meeting last year. But Forbes has found that her stake in the company equals absolutely nothing. The company has faced "allegations that its tests are inaccurate" and investigations from government agencies. Plus their annual revenues equal less than $100 million.

Posted by Vijeta Uniyal on June 02, 2016 18 Comments
According to UK Armed Forces Minister Penny Mordaunt, Britain must join a European Union Army under Brussels’s direct command if the country stays within the EU. The ominous revelation comes as British voters are heading towards a historic ‘in-out’ referendum on June 23. What could only be described as cynical manoeuvring, EU bosses intends to table the plan a day after the British referendum -- concealing the totalitarian nature of the ‘European Project’ from the British voters. Mordaunt made it clear that if her country were to stay in the EU as a result of a "remain vote", her government would be “powerless” to stop the formation of an EU Army. Furthermore, UK would be “bound to support” and bankroll such an Army under the provisions of existing Lisbon treaty. “As usual with the EU, the plan for this army would see Britain paying highest price and but getting a raw deal. They've done that with our budget, I'm not going to let that happen to our armed forces,” Minister Mordaunt told the UK voters. The preparations for new pan-European Army outside the framework of NATO are long under way. Germany and The Netherlands have reportedly merged their army and naval assets to form a core fighting force that would serve as the basis for a new EU Army. NATO officials had recently accused France of neglecting its commitment to NATO-alliance by diverting resources to build an EU Army.

Posted by Mike LaChance on June 02, 2016 8 Comments
It makes perfect sense that Bernie Sanders is the favored candidate of the Occupy Wall Street movement. His anti-capitalism rhetoric fits perfectly with the group's ideology. It's therefore hardly a surprise to learn that many of his supporters are planning to use Occupy style tactics to protest Hillary's nomination at the Democratic National Convention in July. Peter Hasson reports at the Daily Caller:
Twenty Thousand Committed To Anti-Hillary ‘Occupy DNC’ Protest More than twenty thousand people have committed to protest Hillary Clinton’s likely nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia — and that number is quickly growing.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on June 01, 2016 3 Comments
Dolphinarium. It's a word that brings chills to those who have lived through or studied the Second Intifada, the murderous suicide bombing campaign targeting Israeli civilians. Much like the Sbarro Pizza suicide bombing and the Park Hotel Passover suicide bombing, not to mention suicide bus bombings like Haifa Bus 38. Just a few of the more notorious attacks on a very long list of attacks on Israeli civilians starting in 2001. The carnage only ended after the security barrier was built and Israel launched an intensive military operation in Judea and Samaria (the "West Bank"). And after almost 1000 Israeli civilians died. You can't understand the current Israeli political outlook without understanding the Second Intifada. I've heard so many times it was the event that soured so many Israelis on the Oslo Peace process. After all, we now know that the Second Intifada was a planned assault launched by Yasser Arafat after he couldn't bring himself to say Yes to generous peace offers at Camp David an after. 15 years ago, on June 1, 2001, a Palestinian suicide bomber killed 21 young Israelis outside the Dolphinarium disco.
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