Friday, April 3, 2015

Today's important political news and opinion

Update

I received notice today that my ethics complaint against Dane County Sheriff David Mahoney and Justice Ann Walsh Bradley for illegally using his uniform and patrol car in a political ad will be April 13. The election is April 7. Despite the complaint, I'm told the ad is still running and the photo below is still on her website. I assume they will tell him don't do it again, meaning they get clean away with breaking the ethics law for political purposes.

Dane County Ordinances: ARTICLE 6. Section 9.27 is amended to read as follows: 9.27 IMPERMISSIBLE USE OF PUBLIC OFFICE.
No county official or county employee shall use or attempt to use his or her public office or employment to influence or gain unlawful: benefits, advantages or privileges, personally or for others. The use of county equipment and property including, but not limited to, county owned vehicles, cameras, projectors, audio systems, copy machines, fax machines, telephones and uniforms is prohibited for use for both partisan and non-partisan political activity.

Supreme Court Administrative Rules (I understand they have the force of law): SCR 60.03 A judge shall avoid impropriety and the appearance of impropriety in all of the judge's activities.
(1) A judge shall respect and comply with the law and shall act at all times in a manner that promotes public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary.
Comment: Public confidence in the judiciary is eroded by irresponsible or improper conduct of judges. A judge must avoid all impropriety and appearance of impropriety. ... Actual improprieties under this standard include violations of law, court rules or other specific provisions of this chapter.


General News and Comment

RFRA: Not Like Jim Crow Laws at All. They forced tolerant black-friendly businesses to be intolerant. By Jonah Goldberg
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/416402/rfra-not-jim-crow-laws-all-jonah-goldberg
Excerpt: It’s the Jim Crow law of our time.” That exact quote, or one very much like it, has come from the mouths of reporters, editorialists, activists, corporate CEOs, and, of course, politicians, all because of Indiana’s Religious Freedom and Restoration Act. (RFRA) The other day I wrote a column arguing that it’s ridiculous to compare Indiana’s RFRA to Jim Crow laws. It was obvious, at least to me, that lots of people didn’t really understand what RFRA was. What I failed to appreciate is that perhaps even more people didn’t really know what Jim Crow laws were. After the Civil War, the victorious North, led by the fledgling Republican party, brought civil rights, including economic rights, to Southern blacks by a series of legislative “Reconstruction” acts — hence, the “Reconstruction era.”

Take Out Your Dictionaries. By Jonah Goldberg, The Goldberg File
Megalothymia is a term coined by Francis Fukuyama. It’s a common mistake to think Fukuyama simply took Plato’s concept of “thumos” or “thymos” and put a “mega” in front of it because we all know from the Transformers and Toho Productions that “mega” makes everything more cool. But that’s not the case. Megalothymia is a neologism of megalomania (an obsession with power and the ability to dominate others) and thymos, which Plato defined as the part of the soul concerned with spiritedness, passion, and a desire for recognition and respect. Fukuyama defined megalothymia as a compulsive need to feel superior to others. And boy howdy, do we have a problem with megalothymia in America today. Everywhere you look there are moral bullies utterly uninterested in conversation, introspection, or persuasion who are instead hell-bent on grinding down people they don’t like to make themselves feel good. If you took the megalothymia out of Twitter, millions of trolls would throw their smartphones into the ocean. Make no mistake: This is a problem across the ideological spectrum, because it is a problem of human nature in general and modernity in particular. But in this context, it’s a special malady of elite liberalism.

11 Teachers Found Guilty in Biggest Cheating Scandal in U.S. History
Excerpt: Here is your teacher Union legacy. This is what happens when you let government schools have control. Check it out: Atlanta cheating scandal teachers go to cells in hand-cuffs: Eleven educators face up to 20 years in prison for inflating their students’ test scores to get bonus money for their schools . . . and for themselves

I'm Shocked! The IRS has an ethics office? Ex-IRS ethics office lawyer disbarred for … ethics violations. By Stephen Dinan 
Excerpt: A lawyer who worked in the IRS ethics office was disbarred Thursday by the District of Columbia Court of Appeals, which concluded she misappropriated a client’s funds from a case she handled in private practice, broke a number of ethics rules and showed “reckless disregard for the truth” in misleading a disbarment panel looking into the matter.
The lawyer, Takisha Brown, reportedly had bragged that she would never be punished because her boss would protect her, but an IRS spokesman said Wednesday that she was no longer an employee at the agency.

This Culture War We're In. By Daniel Greenfield
Excerpt: How are wars won? To win a war you don't need to kill every soldier on the other side. What you need to do is destroy the other army as an organized force. You destroy the ability of the officers to command and the morale of the men. You destroy their perception of the worth of their side and of their own self-worth. All wars are culture wars. To win you must destroy the values of the other side. (That is one reason why we're losing to Islam no matter how many times we beat them on the battlefield.) You must destroy their sense of purpose and the values instilled in them to break them as an organization. That is what the left has been doing to us. (What a great, insightful essay this is. I guess I was aware of some of this, but never realized the full picture in the sharp focus that Greenfield has given it. Plenty to think about. --Del)

Judge orders California to pay for inmate's sex change
Excerpt: A federal judge on Thursday ordered California's corrections department to provide a transgender inmate with sex reassignment surgery, the first time such an operation has been ordered in the state. U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar in San Francisco ruled that denying the surgery to 51-year-old Michelle-Lael Norsworthy violates her constitutional rights. Her birth name is Jeffrey Bryan Norsworthy. (So now the taxpayers of CA will pay the serious expense of sex change operation and of course lifetime hormone therapy for this convicted killer, an operation and costs that this person could never have afforded on their own in private life. I do not understand at all the rationale for giving convicts elective medical procedures. Decent medical care, yes, that's a responsibility we have as civilized people. But expensive elective stuff just doesn't make any sense at all to me, and why the taxpayers, who are already paying plenty for keeping people in jail, with decent conditions, good nutrition, weight rooms, libraries, etc, should have to pay for stuff many of them could not pay for themselves, is impossible to rationalize, at least for me. Del)

Gun News

Gun Ownership and Concealed Carry Surging in Black Community. By Awr Hawkins
Excerpt: On April 2, NPR reported that concealed carry permits and gun ownership for self-defense is surging in the black community. This marks a seismic shift toward guns in the black community, as more and more individuals realize the safety of their lives and the lives of their families is literally in their own hands. According to NPR, this positive view of gun ownership in the black community has jumped almost 50 percent in two year’s time. They cite a PEW Research Poll showing “54 percent of blacks now see gun ownership as a good thing,” which is up from the “29 percent” who saw it that way two years ago. (They know that the vast majority of blacks who are murdered are killed by black thugs and want to protect themselves. I suppose that makes them racist. ~Bob)

Detroit home invasion ends in shoot-out
Excerpt: Police say that's when the homeowner and men got into a scuffle. We're told a woman also living at the residence came downstairs and fired several shots at the suspects. 

Obamacare/Government Healthcare News

Teachers Union Says Obamacare Hurts Women And Old People But Totally Supports It Anyway. By Eric Owens
Excerpt: The National Education Association, America’s largest teachers union, released a report on Thursday which is critical of an excise tax on high-cost health plans. The tax is required under the Affordable Care Act. The steep excise tax is intended to burden people who enjoy generous health plans. However, the NEA’s report asserts, the excise tax actually tends to burden women, older people and people who live in places where the cost of living is already high.

Undocumented Democrat News

Illegal Immigrant Thrown in Jail After His SICK Plan for 14-Year-Old Was Discovered
Excerpt: An illegal immigrant recently received a 10-year sentence in federal prison for attempting to transport a 14-year-old across state lines “with the intent to have sexual relations.” He was arrested at the Jacksonville, Fla., airport while waiting for the child to arrive from Las Vegas. When questioned, he admitted that he had arrived in the United States by way of a smuggler who helped him cross the border from Mexico into Texas in exchange for $700.

"You're Greener than Gore" News

Worth Reading: An Engineered Drought. Shortsighted coastal elites bear most of the blame for California’s water woes. By Victor Davis Hanson
Excerpt: We do know two things. First, Brown and other Democratic leaders will never concede that their own opposition in the 1970s (when California had about half its present population) to the completion of state and federal water projects, along with their more recent allowance of massive water diversions for fish and river enhancement, left error in a state now home to 40 million people. Second, the mandated restrictions will bring home another truth as lawns die, pools empty, and boutique gardens shrivel in the coastal corridor from La Jolla to Berkeley: the very idea of a 20-million-person corridor along the narrow, scenic Pacific Ocean and adjoining foothills is just as unnatural as “big” agriculture’s Westside farming. The weather, climate, lifestyle, views, and culture of coastal living may all be spectacular, but the arid Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay-area megalopolises must rely on massive water transfers from the Sierra Nevada, Northern California, or out-of-state sources to support their unnatural ecosystems. (Yep, 40,000,000 people now living in a state which is actually mostly a desert, but using water as if there is an infinite, readily available supply. Washing cars, watering lawns, doing laundry daily while using shower towels in quantity, watering all those golf courses, and so many other ways of pouring millions of gallons of water out every day. The major aquifer is down by hundreds of feet, the land itself is changing as a result, but the use of water just goes on for the moment like there is no tomorrow. But tomorrow is just about here, and things are going to get interesting in CA fairly soon. Will they kill off agriculture so people can still shower twice a day and wash their cars and water their lawns? That won't make any sense at all, since then the flow of money from taxes on the produce and the jobs in the fields will go away, in a state that isn't exactly flush with money and has lost too much industry and too many jobs already. Will they build nuclear power plants to supply the energy for monster desalinization plants on the coast to turn sea water into fresh? Probably not, that's another topic that PC says cannot be discussed. So what will happen? Damifino, but I bet it will get "interesting" and there will be a lot of unhappy people one way or another. Congratulations to those who back in those years when things might have been set up better, made sure it didn't happen. --Del)

Don't cross the Ministry of Truth: Global Warming Skeptics In Gov’t Stay Silent Under Obama. By Michael Bastasch
Excerpt: “There are skeptics in NASA and NOAA, a good number. But they are quiet. They know in this administration, they don’t speak out,” John Christy, a veteran climate scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsvilletold AL.com. “These guys in government are not unbiased and they have pressures from above,” echoed Roy Spencer, also a climate scientist at UAH. “Those organizations, NASA and NOAA, they are part of the executive branch. So the White House has some influence over what direction they go. The heads are political appointees so you have political influence from the top down on scientists. And that’s a problem.”

The Northeast's Natural Gas Supply and Demand Problem
Excerpt: The cost of residential heating and cooling in the Northeast is comparatively high. Fracking regulations and outright bans are pushing entire industries out of densely populated municipalities as well as entire states, such as New York, where the extraction technology has met strong opposition at every level of government. Even the importation of natural gas from other states, such as Pennsylvania — which remains very active in tapping Marcellus shale deposits — is becoming difficult, with neighborhood groups and city governments opposing pipelines and other forms of infrastructure to support burgeoning energy demand. ... Crowded regions pining for their power needs to be met are unwilling to make concessions for it, with $700 million projects such as the Constitution Pipeline between Pennsylvania and New York being put on hold. With less population density, Southern and Midwestern states do not suffer from the congestion, which limits gas transfer. Logically, New Englanders are overpaying for gas by $3.58 per thousand cubic feet. This amount may seem trivial, but for long-term residents and businesses, it represents a huge cost.

Obama Administration Report Overstates Wind Power's Potential, Understates Costs and Limitations. BY Julian Morris
Excerpt: Cost of wind power generation more likely to fall if wind is forced to compete in the market, far less so if it continues to receive subsidies

Religion of Peace News

Worth Reading: Is ISIS Islamic, and Other "Foolish" Debates. By Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi and Amarnath Amarasingam
Excerpt: "Do they think we are Jewish now? lol," responded one ISIS fighter in Syria when asked for his thoughts on the current public debate about whether the Islamic State is actually Islamic. He went on to make an argument, as many of these fighters often do when interviewed, that not only is the Islamic State Islamic but it is the purest and most pristine form of Islam, the kind most in line with what God and His Prophet had intended all along. Another ISIS fighter from South Africa, when asked how he knew that the Islamic State was legitimate, remarked that "I just used my brain." "The truth is never endorsed by the masses," he said. "It's always the smallest groups that are firm in truth. Migration becomes compulsory when a caliphate is established on the foundations of Sharia Law, and Muslims around the world have no valid excuse to remain amongst the infidels in enemy lands."

Geopolitics/ The Naked Truth About The Lausanne Agreement. By Josh Block
Excerpt: The same day the Lausanne agreement was signed, an Iranian general said that "Israel's destruction is non-negotiable." The P5+1 and Iran announced a framework of understanding that U.S. officials told the Associated Press "would open the path to a final phase of nuclear negotiations." This is not an "agreement" -- it's an affirmation that both sides will keep talking, and a catalog of our deeply alarming concessions that contradict every pledge the President made to ensure Iran would abide by five U.N. resolutions, and do a deal to "end their nuclear program." Let me be clear: An actual nuclear agreement based on the framework revealed today would endanger not only Israel and America, but the entire world. 

Obama’s Nuclear Deal With Iran Puts the World’s Safety at Risk. By Mark Dubowitz, Annie Fixler
http://defenddemocracy.org/media-hit/dubowitz-mark-obamas-nuclear-deal-with-iran-puts-the-worlds-safety-at-risk/
Excerpt: On April 2 officials announced they had agreed on “key parameters” for the long-anticipated nuclear deal between the United States, its allies, and the Islamic Republic of Iran. Coincidentally, just as the Obama administration’s Middle East policy is in complete meltdown, with Sunni and Iranian-backed Shiite extremists murdering their way through Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. Worried yet? The Obama administration isn’t.

What else is Iran hiding? By Ali Alfoneh, Reuel Marc Gerecht
http://defenddemocracy.org/media-hit/ali-alfoneh-what-else-is-iran-hiding/
Excerpt: We don’t know all that has transpired in the talks on Iran’s nuclear program being conducted in Switzerland, but we do know that the White House has shied away from a potentially paralyzing issue: the “possible military dimensions” — the PMDs — of the regime’s program. As Olli Heinonen, a former No. 2 at the International Atomic Energy Agency, has warned, outsiders really can have no idea where and how fast the mullahs could build a nuclear weapon unless they know what Iranian engineers have done in the past. Without “go anywhere, anytime” access for IAEA inspectors and a thorough accounting of Tehran’s weaponization research, we will be blind to the clerics’ nuclear capabilities. And one of the most important issues — probable North Korean nuclear cooperation with the Islamic Republic — deserves special scrutiny. This disturbing partnership casts serious doubt on the Obama administration’s hope that President Hassan Rouhani and his team have any intention of limiting Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Report: Islam To Become World’s Majority Religion By 2070. By Thomas D. Williams, PhD
Excerpt: On April 2, the Pew Research Center released its report on “The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections, 2010-2050,” which explores not only demographic trends, but also the underlying causes behind them. The study projects the number of Christians as a percentage of the global population remaining stable for the next several decades, while the number of Muslims—both in absolute figures and as a percentage of the population—increases steadily.

Oppressive View of Women Came with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's Islam Conversion. By John Nolte
Excerpt: The relationship abruptly changed when Lew asked her to start calling him Kareem. He had begun a conversion to what would become a lifelong commitment to Islam. Immediately, he demanded she stop working. “A conservative man at heart who was getting more so by the day,” Grier writes, “he didn’t want to see his girlfriend working.” At the time Grier was working as a dancer in a nightclub. The type of work she was doing wasn’t the only issue. He did not want her working at all, and he also wanted her to convert to Islam. His faith told Jabbar he could date a non-Muslim, but not marry one. Her heart set on an education, she didn’t want to move to Milwaukee. “If we get married, you don’t have to get an education,” was his reply, according to Grier. “I’ll take care of you.”

Doomsday: Stopping a Middle East Nuclear Arms Race. By David Andrew Weinberg
http://defenddemocracy.org/media-hit/david-weinberg-doomsday-stopping-a-middle-east-nuclear-arms-race/
Excerpt: Imagine the imposition of financial sanctions on the central bank of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia—the only Arab member of the G20 group of major economies. To this, add biting multinational trade sanctions to stop the majority of Saudi Arabia’s oil production from being sold on international markets. If these measures seem preposterous, it is because they are. Yet American counter-proliferation policy in the Middle East may be premised on implementing this bizarre, nightmarish scenario.

[VIDEO] Find Out What Happens When Muslim Bakeries Asked to Bake Gay Wedding

Iran Brags About Nuke Concessions. Sanctions to be terminated, no nuke sites closed, research and development to continue. By Adam Kredo
Excerpt: “None of those measures” that will move to scale back Iran’s program “include closing any of our facilities,” Zarif said. “We will continue enriching; we will continue research and development.” “Our heavy water reactor will be modernized and we will continue the Fordow facility,” Zarif said. “We will have centrifuges installed in Fordow, but not enriching.” The move to allow Iran to keep centrifuges at Fordow, a controversial onetime military site, has elicited concern that Tehran could ramp up its nuclear work with ease.

Iran Says the US is Lying About the Nuclear Deal. Hours after announcement, Zarif slams US 'spin' of saying sanctions to be phased out and not dropped at once.
Excerpt: Mere hours after the US triumphantly announced a framework deal with Iran over its nuclear program and subsequently released a fact sheet, the Islamic regime charged that America was lying about details of the agreement...Speaking on Thursday after the agreement, Zarif claimed that upon the signing of a final agreement by the end of June, "all US nuclear related secondary sanctions will be terminated...." He added that Iran will be allow to sell "enriched uranium" on the international market, "hopefully making some money" from the sales. (Bolding mine. --Barb)

*****
Robert A. Hall is a Marine Vietnam Veteran who served five terms in the Massachusetts State Senate. He is the author of The Coming Collapse of the American Republic. http://www.amazon.com/Coming-Collapse-American-Republic-prevent/dp/1461122538/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1304815980&sr=1-5 For a free PDF of Collapse, e-mail him at tartanmarine(at)gmail.com. Hall’s eleven books are listed here:

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