Note: You may reprint this cartoon provided you link back to this source. To see more Legal Insurrection Branco cartoons, click here. Branco’s page is Cartoonist A.F.Branco...
Prof. Jacobson, I know you usually show bumper stickers, but there is a Halloween display in a neighborhood in Euless, TX, that I drive through all the time. The tombstones have some interesting observations. I am wondering if our freedom will in this lot next year. Gee, who...
ANDERSON COOPER, HOST: Now more breaking news, evidence that the Obama administration is leaning on insurance companies to keep a lid on problems with the healthcare law rollout. Now Drew Griffin on CNN’s investigations did the reporting. So Drew, What’s going on here, what have you learned? DREW GRIFFIN: Anderson, what’s going on is behind the scenes attempt by the White House to at least keep insurers from publicly criticizing what is happening on this Affordable Care Act rollout. Basically, if you speak out, if you are quoted, you’re going to get a call from the White House, pressure to be quiet. Several sources tell me and my colleague Chris Frates that insurance executives are being told to keep quiet....https://twitter.com/whpresscorps/status/395410470653661184 Why would the insurance industry be worried? Maybe because like all Obama critics, they are only one speech away from being demonized.
So we drafted a petition last Thursday and as of today [October 29, 2013] there are over 500 signatures. We delivered it to the Taubman Center [at Brown] and they didn't respond to our demand to cancel the lecture, so today we cancelled it for them.It probably will not surprise you that Li is a fellow at the People for the American Way Foundation, the liberal activist group that runs the Right Wing Watch blog among other activities. Author Mychal Denzel Smith writing at The Nation plays into every stereotype of liberal intolerance in supporting the shout down, and terming it "glorious", Brown University Booed Ray Kelly and Racism (emphasis added):
NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly of stop-and-frisk fame was scheduled to speak at Brown University yesterday and deliver the school's annual Noah Krieger '93 Memorial Lecture. The title of his speech, and I'm not making this up, was "Proactive Policing in America's Biggest City." What happened instead was glorious.
An internal government memo obtained by CNN and written just days before the start of open enrollment for Obamacare warned of a "high" security risk because of a lack of testing of the HealthCare.gov website. "Due to system readiness issues, the SCA (security control assessment) was only partly completed," said the internal memo from the U.S. Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services. "This constitutes a risk that must be accepted and mitigated to support the Marketplace Day 1 operations." The memo goes on to explain that the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services would create a "dedicated security team" to monitor the risk, conduct weekly scans and, within 60 to 90 days after the website went live, "conduct a full-scale SCA test." The memo did not detail the security concerns. It was written by IT officials at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and was sent to and signed by the agency's director, Marilyn Tavenner, who testified on Capitol Hill on Tuesday that she thought the website was ready to go when it began its crash-riddled rollout on October 1.And in an earlier article at CNN Money titled Security hole found in Obamacare website, it was also reported that a cybersecurity expert discovered a security flaw that went unaddressed for more than three weeks after healthcare.gov’s launch.
The Florida city where neighborhood watch leader George Zimmerman shot and killed unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin is changing the rules on how civilian patrols can operate to help prevent a recurrence and revive the program's reputation. The new rules, to be released at a community meeting on November 5 in Sanford, Florida, will state explicitly that residents acting under the authority of neighborhood watch may not carry a firearm or pursue someone they deem suspicious.The Reuters piece, published in the Chicago Tribune, notes that the "prosecution accused [Zimmerman] of racially profiling Martin, a high school student visiting from Miami, and then pursuing, confronting and shooting him." Nowhere in the article -- seriously, nowhere -- do they mention the vicious, life-threatening beating that Martin launched against Zimmerman without any just cause (even Martin's girlfriend, who was on the phone with him at the moment of the attack, testified that it was Martin who initiated the physical conflict). Local News 13 further reports:
Sanford's new police chief, Cecil Smith, said the neighborhood watch program as it was operated while Zimmerman was part of it was dysfunctional and had no accountability. "In this program, it is clearly stated that you will not pursue an individual," Smith explained. "In this new program, it clearly indicates that you will not carry a firearm when performing your duties as a neighborhood watch captain or participant."I expect Sanford FL will encounter one, or both, of the following two realities in short order:
If only it were that benign. What probably will be the most viral moment from the Sebelius hearing this morning: And The Only Obamacare/Sebelius GIF You’ll Ever Need, from our friend Steve Gutkowski: ...
Each Saturday morning in July and August, Susan E. Rice, President Obama’s new national security adviser, gathered half a dozen aides in her corner office in the White House to plot America’s future in the Middle East. The policy review, a kind of midcourse correction, has set the United States on a new heading in the world’s most turbulent region. At the United Nations last month, Mr. Obama laid out the priorities he has adopted as a result of the review. The United States, he declared, would focus on negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran, brokering peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians and mitigating the strife in Syria. Everything else would take a back seat.The article goes on to point out that even Egypt was no longer a priority. In a jab at President Obama's predecessor we learn:
The protestors were a mix of Providence community members and Brown students. There is a moment in the video where people are asked to raise their hands if they want to hear Kelly speak. About half the room raised their hands.The woman in the image below (since removed) related how she was called a White Supremacist for wanting to attend the lecture (at 9:30):
I got called a White Supremacist when I tried to go inside, cause I told a man near the front door that I wanted to hear what Kelly had to say. And I think that's pretty ridiculous. I think the idea that suppressing another person's right to free speech equals exercising your free speech is completely wrong.In a press release, the BPR described what went on inside the auditorium:
Kelly had time only to thank the event organizers, before a group of students and community members in the audience rose simultaneously to read prepared remarks. “Asking tough questions is not enough!” they read together, fists raised in unison.
Jimenez unearthed a story that few people wanted to hear. And it calls into question everything you think you know about the life and death of one of the leading icons of our age.
1) We demand that the lecture be cancelled. 2) We demand that the honorarium set aside for the lecture be donated to organizations working to end racial profiling and police brutality in Providence and in New York City. 3) We demand transparency in the Taubman Center for Public Policy's decision-making process for inviting speakers to campus.According to the Brown Daily Herald, protesters against the NYC stop and frisk policy disrupted and caused the talk to end after just 30 minutes. The feature image above was posted to Facebook and shows protesters outside the building where the speech was to be held. Protesters were encouraged by protest organizers to "Bring Drums." Inside the auditorium there was loud shouting until the event was closed. https://twitter.com/BlogDailyHerald/status/395282152700391424
US Senate hearing: "Stand Your Ground: Civil rights and Public Safety Implications of the Expanded Use of Deadly Force"[/caption]
My first general observation is that the anti-SYG folks were, as experience would suggest, big on emotion and small on actual facts, law, or data.
One of the anti-SYG witnesses, Professor Sullivan from Harvard Law School, did raise some actual data--but when these were utterly destroyed by the later testimony of Dr. John Lott and Elliot Shapiro of CATA, Professor Sullivan was swift to discount the use of data (which he himself had introduced into the testimony) and instead focus on the "real people" behind the data. In sharp contrast, the testimony of the pro-SYG speakers was focused and direct.
Second, the anti-SYG folks persistently conflated the legal concept of Stand Your Ground with utterly discrete legal concepts, such as presumptions of reasonableness and civil/criminal immunity.
Here's Steny Hoyer on Obama's oft-repeated promise that if you like your health insurance plan you could keep it: “We knew that there would be some policies that would not qualify and therefore people would be required to get more extensive coverage,” Hoyer said in response...
Democratic Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois has removed the controversial Facebook post that sparked a firestorm last week after he accused a then unnamed Republican of having said ‘I cannot even stand to look at you’ to the President during a shutdown negotiation meeting. That...
A tweet from our very own Aleister earns Tweet of the Day honors. His tweet was in response to this tweet of mine regarding Obama's voracious reading habits. I just tweeted the word that came quickest to mind. https://twitter.com/LegInsurrection/status/395032821628035072...
