Monthly Archives: July 2016

The Law of the Sea Treaty in Action

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In June 12, I posted a letter from a group of retired senior military leaders stating their reasons for opposing The Law of the Sea Treaty.  The letter lists in detail their reasons for opposing the treaty. The treaty was not ratified. Recent events illustrate the wisdom of not ratifying the treaty.

Today The Center for Security Policy posted a small article about the actual usefulness of the treaty.

This is the article:

The International Arbitration Tribunal of the Law of the Sea Treaty has just ruled that one of LOST’s member states, Communist China, has violated the rights of another, the Philippines. Beijing was found to have no valid claim to the South China Sea, despite its manufacturing and arming of islands throughout the region.

The Chinese have imperiously rejected the ruling and are now in a position forcibly to resist any effort to enforce it.

As I and other critics of the Law of the Sea Treaty have long argued, its restrictions only apply to law-abiding nations. Were the U.S. to join, it would impose real burdens on us. But it cannot on countries like China that routinely breach their treaty obligations.

The stage is being inexorably set for conflict in the Western Pacific. China is preparing for it. And so must we.

We have been warned. Are we paying attention?

There Are Always Unintended Consequences

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There are always unintended consequences. Sometimes those consequences continue for a generation. Recent events illustrate that.

On Sunday, The Wall Street Journal posted an article about the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). President Lyndon Johnson signed the act on July 4, 1966. President Johnson referred to FOIA as “the damned thing” when he signed it.

The article reports:

Bill Moyers, LBJ’s press secretary at the time, recalled in a 2003 broadcast how FOIA nearly didn’t become law: The president “hated the very idea of a Freedom of Information Act, hated the idea of journalists rummaging in government closets, hated them challenging the official view of reality.”

I am sure Hillary Clinton would have agreed with him.

The article reports:

Mrs. Clinton stonewalled FOIA requests for years with her keep-no-records, produce-no-records strategy. In a deposition last month in a civil lawsuit challenging her personal email server, the State Department said its staffers in charge of records didn’t realize until 2014 that its former boss had used private email.

Appropriately enough, Mrs. Clinton’s explanation that she used a private email server to keep her records secret only became public in a lawsuit challenging the State Department’s insistence that it couldn’t respond to FOIA requests because it couldn’t locate her emails on its .gov server.

The State Department’s inspector general in May ruled that Mrs. Clinton broke record-keeping laws such as those requiring compliance with FOIA requests, never got permission for her home server and ignored numerous security warnings.

…the judges (federal appeals court judges in Washington, DC) said evading government servers is no defense against a FOIA request:

“If a department head can deprive the citizens of their right to know what his department is up to by the simple expedient of maintaining his departmental emails on an account in another domain, that purpose is hardly served,” the judges wrote. “It would make as much sense to say that the department head could deprive requestors of hard-copy documents by leaving them in a file at his daughter’s house and then claiming that they are under her control.”

The article also reminds us that there are indications that Russian agents hacked the servers of the Clinton Foundation and the Democratic National Committee. That means that Vladimir Putin has all sorts of information he can either release in October or hold over Mrs. Clinton’s head if she becomes President. Her desire to hide information from the public has potentially damaged American national security.

A representative republic (which America is) relies on informed voters to maintain freedom. When people work against informing the voters, it hurts us all. The fact that Washington, DC, has become a city where wealthy elite politicians govern for their own good may explain why Donald Trump has done so well in this campaign cycle. Because Donald Trump may well go into Washington and clean house, he is opposed by the Washington elites. This opposition will become more obvious at the Republican National Convention and in the press coverage he receives between now and the November election. It is up to Americans to decide whether they want more Washington secrecy and elitist government or whether they want someone to clean house.

I Don’t Think We Are All On The Same Page Here

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For whatever reason, we seem to have returned to the racial tensions of the late 1960’s. I don’t quite understand how, when we have positive models of success in the black community, race relations have deteriorated, rather than improved. I suspect the following interview, posted at Breitbart.com might give us a clue.

The article states:

Babu Omowale, the so-called national minister of defense for the People’s New Black Panther Party, says his group and allied organizations have their sights set on establishing “our own government in a nation within a nation.”

…Omowale used the interview (“Aaron Klein Investigative Radio,” broadcast on New York’s AM 970 The Answer and News Talk 990 AM in Philadelphia) to claim five states as belonging to the “Black Nation”: Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Alabama, and Georgia.

 The revolutionary stated: “We just need to start migrating back to those states and taking control of the economics in those states. If black people move in, most definitely white people will move out. So it’s not a hard process for us to have our own country within a country.”

Omowale is also co-founder of the Huey P. Newton Gun Club, a black militant gun group named after Black Panther Party founder Huey P. Newton. According to reports, Dallas shooter Micah X. Johnson “liked” the Huey P. Newton Gun Club and Omawale has said that he recognized Johnson from black community events in Dallas.

…There is no way that we can totally separate ourselves in the United States of America and we are aware of that. We know that we are owed land, we are owed monies, we are owed restitutions and we are owed reparations. That’s going to be a continuing process. What we are saying right now is we want to control the economics in our community. We want to control the black dollars. The money that goes in, the money that goes out.

We want to control the politics in our community. If a politician is not bringing anything to the table for the betterment of that community, we are not going to vote for these particular people. And we most definitely want to control the education. What our people are learning in what we call the public fool system, not school system, where they are teaching and misrepresenting the true history of the black man here in the United States.

That does not sound like a leader who is interested in peaceful coexistence–that sounds like someone who feels entitled to what other people have earned. I have no problem with building the black economic community by helping black people start and run businesses within their communities. Recently I heard a black businessman state that in many cases, people in the black community do not frequent businesses run by black businessmen in their communities because somehow they have gotten the idea that the products or services offered by those business are somehow inferior (although generally they are not). Frankly, there is a local black businessman who runs some of the best car washes in our city.

There are a few things that need to be constantly restated. There is no American alive today that owned slaves. Many of the Americans in the country today are descendants of people who arrived after the Civil War. No one is entitled to anything another person has worked for unless personal responsibility for some harmful act has been legally established. Part of our current race problem was predicted by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (my favorite Democrat ever). Senator Moynihan felt that the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) Program passed by Congress encouraged women to kick their husbands out of the house. He predicted that this would destroy the black family. It did.

It is time for everyone to get out of the boat and start rowing in the same direction. There will always be inequality of outcome, but we need to do all we can to create equality of opportunity.

 

It’s Hard To Draw The Right Conclusion Without The Facts

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I have stated before that I believe that the current racial tension in America is being ginned up by the media and by certain others who profit by creating racial tension rather than helping ease it. One source of racial tension right now is the idea that the black community is being targeted by white policemen. I offer the theory that this is a lie told with the purpose of creating racial unrest. Who gains from racial unrest? Racial unrest justifies the existence of those whose profession is supposed to be creating equality (who instead have focused only on creating more division). Racial unrest is seen as something that will bring out the black voters to support Hillary Clinton. At this particular time, racial unrest diverts our interest from the careless handling of national security secrets by Hillary Clinton. Those are just a few examples of how racial tension can be used to create a desired outcome totally unrelated to what is actually happening. We are being manipulated to believe that the black community is being unfairly treated by the police. The statistics tell a very different story.

On April 27 The Washington Post posted an article showing the results of a study into the role of race in police shootings. The results are surprising considering recent events.

The article reports:

The conventional thinking about police-involved shootings, and some scientific research, has been that black suspects are more likely to be shot than white suspects because of an implicit racial bias among police officers. But now a new study has found exactly the opposite: even with white officers who do have racial biases, officers are three times less likely to shoot unarmed black suspects than unarmed white suspects.

The results come from a laboratory project at Washington State University using highly realistic police simulators, in which actors in various scenarios approach and respond to officers on large, high-definition video screens in an attempt to recreate critical situations on the street. The officers are equipped with real guns, modified to fire infrared beams rather than bullets, and the scenarios can branch into conflict or cooperation, depending on the officers’ words and actions.

…A 1978 report found that 60 percent of black suspects shot by the police carried handguns, compared with 35 percent of white suspects. In 2001, a statistical study showed that black people comprised 12 percent of the population but committed 43 percent of the killings of officers.

The article includes a research article entitled, “The Reverse Racism Effect.” Please follow the link above to the article to read that report. It is becoming very obvious that we are being lied to.

The article concludes:

James (Lois James, a researcher at Washington State) cited one of Klinger’s interviews from 2004, where an officer said that, “The press always plays up the racial angle on shootings around here, and that used to affect my thinking about things.” The officer recounted a time where a black suspect was menacing others with a rifle, and the officer repeatedly warned the man to put down his gun or he would shoot the man in the back. “The whole time I was telling him I was going to shoot him, I was thinking, ‘They’ll crucify me on the news tomorrow if I shoot this black guy in the back.’”

James noted that her three studies have now tested a total of 116 police and 66 non-police participants, with the same results each time. She acknowledged that a video simulator is not the same as a live encounter, and that she had “limited diversity” from the Spokane police. But given that all three tests were performed before Ferguson, “this could represent a significant contribution to the literature on the impact of suspect race on actual deadly encounters,” the report concludes.

It’s time to tell the truth. There are bad police, but there are also police who try very hard to do what is right when they have a split second to make a life or death decision. The black community needs to examine its own relationship with law and order before pointing a finger at the police. It’s time to reintroduce the concept of intact families with fathers in the house into the black community. Having visited a few black churches in my community, I can tell you that some of the black churches in my city are stressing personal responsibility, achievement, honesty, forgiveness, and the avoidance of victim mentality. That will be the ultimate answer to the racial divide. We all need to start acting like grown-ups instead of spoiled children throwing a temper tantrum.

Sleight Of Hand To Move An Agenda Forward

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The one thing that the Obama Administration has been really good at is directing the attention of the American people away from an actual problem and creating a crisis that creates the appearance of a need for more government power. The current supposed problem with the police is aimed at getting more federal control of local police forces. That is totally unconstitutional, but the Obama Administration has little use for the Constitution. There are very few people talking about the impact that the destruction of the black family unit (caused in part by America’s social welfare programs) has on our society. We need to look at some of the roots of the myth that white police target black Americans. It is a myth if you actually look at the statistics, but the media is not overly inclined to mention that fact.

The Washington Free Beacon posted a story yesterday which illustrates how President Obama is creating racial unrest rather than helping solve the problem. Someone in the administration seems to think that racial unrest will bring out the black vote in November and elect Hillary Clinton. As Rahm Emanual stated, “Never let a serious crisis go to waste.” The Obama Administration would do well to remember that the violence during the 1968 election did not elect Democrats.

The article reports:

On November 24, 2014, President Obama betrayed the nation. Even as he went on national television to respond to the grand jury’s decision not to indict Officer Darren Wilson for fatally shooting 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, the looting and arson that had followed Brown’s shooting in August were being reprised, destroying businesses and livelihoods over the next several hours. Obama had one job and one job only in his address that day: to defend the workings of the criminal-justice system and the rule of law. Instead, he turned his talk into a primer on police racism and criminal-justice bias. In so doing, he perverted his role as the leader of all Americans and as the country’s most visible symbol of the primacy of the law.

Obama gestured wanly toward the need to respect the grand jury’s decision and to protest peacefully. “We are a nation built on the rule of law. And so we need to accept that this decision was the grand jury’s to make,” he said. But his tone of voice and body language unmistakably conveyed his disagreement, if not disgust, with that decision. “There are Americans who are deeply disappointed, even angry. It’s an understandable reaction,” he said.

Understandable, so long as one ignores the evidence presented to the grand jury. The testimony of a half-dozen black observers at the scene had demolished the early incendiary reports that Wilson attacked Brown in cold blood and shot Brown in the back when his hands were up. Those early witnesses who had claimed gratuitous brutality on Wilson’s part contradicted themselves and were, in turn, contradicted by the physical evidence and by other witnesses, who corroborated Wilson’s testimony that Brown had attacked him and had tried to grab his gun. (Minutes before, the hefty Brown had thuggishly robbed a diminutive shopkeeper of a box of cigarillos. Wilson had received a report of that robbery and a description of Brown before stopping him.)

The President, in making the statement at that time, undermined law and order in America, cast doubt on the ability and fairness of the police, and sowed the seeds for the destruction and loss of life we are seeing now. The Obama Administration’s disrespect for law and order was evident at the beginning of his term when his Justice Department refused to charge the New Black Panthers for their actions during the election. In case you have forgotten, here is the video:

 

There was also the incident with the Cambridge police when, without a shred of evidence, he condemned the policeman who was simply doing his job. The chaos we are seeing now is the result of actions by the Obama Administration. It is a planned strategy. It will stop when people ignore the media and look at the facts. Unfortunately, that may not happen. It is truly sad that America’s first black president, who grew up in elite schools with no relationship to the civil rights struggle, has chosen to advance his agenda instead of helping other black people achieve the success he has known.

The Risk Of Taking In Refugees From Another Culture

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Yesterday The Lowell Sun (Lowell, Massachusetts) posted an article about an incident in a community swimming pool.

The article reports:

A 22-year-old Syrian refugee is behind bars after only two months in the United States after he was accused Thursday night of inappropriately touching a 13-year-old girl at a state-run swimming pool in Lowell.

In Lowell District Court on Friday, Emad Hasso, of Lowell, was ordered held on $25,000 cash bail after pleading not guilty via an interpreter to one count of indecent assault and battery on someone under 16.

Judge Stacy Fortes set the bail over the defense attorney’s objections, because Hasso’s only ties to this country are his family members with whom he lives.

We need to remember that pedophilia is an acceptable practice in Islam. Men in their 40’s marry 11-year-old girls, and young boys are frequently kept as sex slaves in the Islamic culture. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini provides a lot of insight as to this aspect of Islamic society.

The article further reports:

Police said the incident may have been captured on video security cameras at the pool.When questioned by the Massachusetts Environmental Police, who oversee state pools operated by the state Department of Conservation and Recreation, Hasso indicated he had been in the U.S. for about two months.

Defense attorney William Kittredge said Hasso, who speaks little English, receives assistance from the International Institute of New England, a nonprofit group with an office in Lowell that offers information and resources to refugees and immigrants.

Kittredge said Hasso told him that while he was swimming in the pool he may have “accidentally bumped” the girl, but he denies inappropriately touching the teen or speaking to her.

I hope that the security cameras at the pool clearly show what actually happened. If the girl is telling the truth, the man needs to be deported and sent back to Syria. Europe has seen a dramatic rise in the number of assaults on women because of the influx of Islamic refugees. We do not need that problem here. We need to carefully screen those desiring to come to America, focusing on allowing women and children who are truly refugees to come here rather than military-aged men.

Some Details The Mainstream Media Somehow Forgot

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Hillary Clinton loves to criticize Donald Trump’s management of his Atlantic City casinos. However, The Wall Street Journal posted an article on Wednesday that gives a more complete picture of exactly what happened there. Evidently Democratic policies in Atlantic City and New Jersey played a major role in the events there.

The article reports:

In 1976 New Jersey voters approved a referendum that legalized gambling in Atlantic City. The constitutional amendment required casino revenues to fund programs for senior citizens and disabled residents, but politicians have instead funneled the cash to favored projects and businesses under the guise of promoting development.

…A 1984 law required casinos to pay 2.5% of gaming revenues to the state or “reinvest” 1.25% in tax-exempt bonds issued by the state Casino Reinvestment Development Authority for state and community “projects that would not attract capital in normal market conditions.” Investment recipients have included Best of Bass Pro shop, Margaritaville and Healthplex.

A decade later, state lawmakers imposed a $1.50 fee (which has since doubled) on casino parking spots to fund Atlantic City transportation, casino construction and a convention center. In 2004 lawmakers added a $3 surcharge for casino hotel stays to finance new hotel rooms and retail establishments, which had the effect of promoting unsustainable commercial and casino development.

As the cost of operating the casinos rose (thanks to the policies of the state–run by the Democrats), other states legalized gambling–Connecticut in 1992 and Pennsylvania in 2004. Atlantic City not only lost its monopoly–but the cost of running the casinos increased significantly.

The article further reports:

Irony alert: Mr. Trump in 1997 sued to block the state’s redistribution of casino income when a competing developer stood to benefit from its investments. However, New Jersey’s liberal Supreme Court ruled that voters should have known that the referendum was actually intended to revitalize Atlantic City tourism, not help seniors.

The article concludes:

Employment in Atlantic City has declined by about 10% over the last decade. Since 2010 the city’s property tax base has shrunk by two thirds. Local politicians raised property taxes by 50% between 2013 and 2014 to compensate for the dwindling tax base, but this has merely deterred new business investment and propelled flight.

Meantime, local politicians have continued to spend like they work for Google. Between 2010 and 2014, expenditures increased by 10% while government debt doubled. The city government spends about $6,600 a year per resident—more than any other city in the state including Newark ($2,344). Its budget exceeds that of nearly half of New Jersey’s counties. Labor costs constitute about 70% of the budget.

Earlier this year, the city emergency manager projected a $393 million cumulative deficit over the next five years absent reforms. More than 100 workers have recently been laid off. In May Democratic legislators and Governor Chris Christie passed a bailout that allows the city to squeeze an additional $120 million out of casinos in revenues annually to compensate for lower property-tax revenue.

To sum up: New Jersey Democrats plundered Atlantic City casinos, redistributed the spoils and loaded up the city with unaffordable levels of debt. The gambling mecca is a five-star example of failed liberal policies.

This sounds like Detroit. This is what we are in for if we put Hillary Clinton in the White House and allow Democratic policies to control our economy. I need to mention that in both Atlantic City and Detroit, had the free market been allowed to operate without union and government interference, the industries involved might have been flexible enough to deal with the competition. Because of government interference (and in the case of Detroit, greedy union bosses), the cities went from prosperous and flourishing to poor and decaying.

Parts Of The Story You May Not Have Read In The Media

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It is unfortunate that the police shot Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge. However, there is some history to the story that you may have missed. My sources on this are CNN and a website called Clash Daily. The police were called to the scene by a homeless man who claimed that Sterling threatened him with a gun. Sterling was a felon with a rather long rap sheet who could not have legally purchased a firearm. He was also a registered pedophile. There were also warrants out for Sterling because of his involvement in gun running.

I am sorry that the man was killed and that this incident is being used by some to gin up racial discord. However, there is obviously considerable more to the story than is being reported. We are being manipulated.

The History Behind The Decision Not To Charge Hillary Clinton With Mishandling Classified Information

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We are at a critical point in America–we have lost the concept of equal justice under the law. However, we did not get here overnight, and the characters involved are simply acting in ways they have acted in the past. It is time to clean house in Washington and see if we can replace the current elites with people who love America more than they love their own personal advancement.

World Net Daily posted an article yesterday that gives an amazing amount of insight into how Washington works and the characters involved in the latest Clinton scandal. I would strongly suggest that you follow the link and read the entire article, but I will try to summarize the article below.

The article reports:

In 2004, Comey (James Comey, FBI Director), then serving as a deputy attorney general in the Justice Department, apparently limited the scope of the criminal investigation of Sandy Berger, which left out former Clinton administration officials who may have coordinated with Berger in his removal and destruction of classified records from the National Archives. The documents were relevant to accusations that the Clinton administration was negligent in the build-up to the 9/11 terrorist attack.
…Curiously, Berger, Lynch and Cheryl Mills all worked as partners in the Washington law firm Hogan & Hartson, which prepared tax returns for the Clintons and did patent work for a software firm that played a role in the private email server Hillary Clinton used when she was secretary of state.

…After Attorney General John Aschroft recused himself in the Valerie Plame affair in 2004, Comey appointed as special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald, who ended up convicting “Scooter” Libby, a top aide to then Vice President Dick Cheney, of perjury and obstruction of justice. The charge was based on the accusations of Plame and her former ambassador husband, Joe Wilson – both partisan supporters of Bill and Hillary Clinton – that Libby outed her as a CIA agent.

New York Times reporter Judith Miller’s 2015 memoir strongly suggests Fitzgerald improperly manipulated testimony and withheld crucial evidence in obtaining a conviction against Libby in his 2007 trial.

…When Dukakis was defeated, Berger returned to Hogan & Hartson until he became foreign policy adviser for Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign in 1992.

On March 28, WND reported Lynch was a litigation partner for eight years at Hogan & Hartson, from March 2002 through April 2010.

Mills also worked at Hogan & Hartson, for two years, starting in 1990, before she joined then President-elect Bill Clinton’s transition team, on her way to securing a position as White House deputy counsel in the Clinton administration.

According to documents Hillary Clinton’s first presidential campaign made public in 2008, Hogan & Hartson’s New York-based partner Howard Topaz was the tax lawyer who filed income tax returns for Bill and Hillary Clinton beginning in 2004.

In addition, Hogan & Hartson in Virginia filed a patent trademark request on May 19, 2004, for Denver-based MX Logic Inc., the computer software firm that developed the email encryption system used to manage Clinton’s private email server beginning in July 2013. A tech expert has observed that employees of MX Logic could have had access to all the emails that went through her account.

In 1999, President Bill Clinton nominated Lynch for the first of her two terms as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, a position she held until she joined Hogan & Hartson in March 2002 to become a partner in the firm’s Litigation Practice Group.

I’m sure you get the picture. Washington needs a major housecleaning. Our justice system is seriously compromised and needs to be cleaned up and staffed with people who believe in equal justice under the law. I suspect our Founding Fathers are spinning in their graves.

 

 

The Filters In The Media

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Regardless of whether or not it is admitted, we are engaged in a war with radical Islam. The enemy is inside our gates and influencing our media, government policy, and national security apparatus. (see rightwinggranny.com) We have reached the point that as consumers of news we need to be aware of the political leanings of all sources and the political connections of all reporters. Major news outlets are not telling us the truth–they are omitting and twisting information according to their own political aspirations.

For example, yesterday The Clarion Project posted an article yesterday about a recent story (and map) posted by CNN.

The article reports:

A CNN map detailing terror attacks around the world perpetrated during Ramadan has omitted Israel, Nigeria, Niger, Pakistan Somalia, Malaysia, Cameroon and Kenya.

During Ramadan there were also terrorist attacks as yet unattributed to specific groups in Madagascar, Bahrain, Mali and Indonesia, where evidence indicates possible Islamist motives.

Ramadan began on Monday June 6 and culminated on Wednesday July 6.  

On Wednesday, June 8, four people were murdered when gunmen linked to the Islamic State opened fire at a restaurant in Tel Aviv. Hamas praised the attack saying, “This is the first surprise in store for the Zionist enemy during Ramadan.”

CNN apologized for the omission of Israel and released an updated map that included the Jewish state. However, they did not update the map to include attacks on several African and Asian countries.

During Ramadan, many Muslims are encouraged by their mosques to engage in terrorist attacks (jihad) as part of their celebration of the holiday. Because the Obama Administration does not allow the monitoring of what is preached in American mosques, we have no idea which American mosques are specifically preaching jihad. Any amateur sleuth could easily figure this out by looking at the funding of the mosque, but the government does not seem to be capable of figuring that out. Any mosque funded by the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA, an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation Trial, and a group linked to the Muslim Brotherhood) probably bears a certain amount of watching.

At any rate, if you depend on CNN as your primary news source, I would strongly recommend that you find an additional source to use for frequent fact checking.

Some People In Congress Have Forgotten Who They Work For

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The Washington Examiner is reporting today that Democrats on the House Select Committee on Benghazi voted against releasing the findings of the committee.

The article reports:

Sections of witness testimony and internal documents remain classified, although committee Chairman Trey Gowdy has pushed the White House to clear as much information as possible for release.

“We urge the Obama administration to clear for public release all of the supporting evidence and documents referenced in the more than 2,100 footnotes in the report, including all of the transcripts of the committee’s witness interviews and all of the video footage from the drones operating over Benghazi during the attacks,” the committee’s Republican members said in a statement. “The administration should do this as fast as possible so the American people can see all of the evidence for themselves.”

As Americans, we are entitled to see the results of this investigation without any filters. We should be smart enough to read it and draw our own conclusions. It’s time to end secrecy in Washington.

An Interesting Endorsement

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This story is from March, but I had not seen it until today. The Clarion-Ledger reported on March 7 that Charles Evers has endorsed Donald Trump for President. Charles Evers is the borther of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers, who was assassinated in front of his Jackson home in 1963.

The article lists Mr. Evers reasons for the endorsement:

According to Evers, the hiring practices of Trump’s properties are reflective of him being “fair.” Before launching his campaign, Trump was accused of discrimination. In 1973, the real estate mogul and his father were sued by the Department of Justice under the Fair Housing Act for allegedly implementing a system to block black applicants from renting Trump Management’s Brooklyn; Queens; and Norfolk, Virginia, properties.

…Evers said he doesn’t feel the U.S. should be obligated to provide support for undocumented immigrants.

Evers added that he also respects Trump for his faith and that he plans to attend Monday’s rally in Madison. Evers said that if he has the chance to speak with Trump he wants to pitch bringing a catfish processing plant to Mississippi.

“Our catfish is shipped to China and brought back for us to buy. Put a catfish farm here.”  A website for The Catfish Institute, based in Jackson, lists more than half a dozen U.S.-certified catfish processors in the state.

Mitch Tyner chairman of the Mississippi Donald Trump Committee in a news release Friday named Evers as a member of the candidate’s state campaign team along with Madison Mayor Mary Hawkins Butler.

Mr. Evers is 93 years old. I have not seen this story in the media until I stumbled on it today. Mr. Evers is obviously a realist who has made a very practical choice.

They Are Already Here

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Yesterday Townhall.com posted an article about  Mohamed Jalloh (26) of Sterling, Virginia, who formerly served in the National Guard. He has been charged with plotting to help ISIS.

The article reports:

Jalloh attempted to purchase an assault rifle in Chantilly but was not so successful.

According to the Washington Post, he had previously tried to purchase a weapon at the Blue Ridge Arsenal gun store on Friday but was denied for a lack of identification forms. After turning him away, the FBI was in compliance with the store, making sure any gun sold to Jalloh in the future would be inoperable. 

Jalloh returned to the gun store on Saturday to buy an assault weapon for $1,200. He was then taken into custody on Sunday.

In federal court in Alexandria this Tuesday court documents revealed a three-month sting and Jalloh’s past interactions with ISIS. Authorities say the sting operation began after Jalloh made contact on his own with ISIS members in Africa earlier this year.

The ex-soldier was planning an attack like the one in Fort Henry in which 13 people were killed by a gunman in 2009.

Jalloh served in the National Guard from 2009 to 2015. He was honorably discharged.

We need to seal our borders, but we also need to realize that there are terrorists already here.

 

 

The Wind Doesn’t Cut It

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Hot Air posted an article today about changes in Germany’s energy policy. Germany has often been cited as an example of effective use of green energy. Well, evidently green energy is not all it’s cracked up to be.

The article reports:

Germany plans to stop building new offshore wind turbines to lower the costs of electricity and prop up its ailing power grid, according to a revision to a new energy law.

The revision of the law will come into force at the start of 2017, and will sharply limit the construction of new offshore wind farms, reports Reuters. The motivation behind the law is that Germany’ over-reliance on wind power “has pushed up electricity costs in Europe’s biggest economy and placed a strain on its grids,” the article reads.

“Germany now has electric rates for consumers that are among the highest in the world. Energy poverty has become a reality for millions of German families,” Myron Ebell, director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the free market Competitive Enterprise Institute, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

The article goes on to explain that Germany has made good use of wind energy, but that there are two problems with wind energy. First of all, despite the fact that the government has subsidized wind energy, the consumer prices of electricity generated by wind are much higher than the price of electricity generated by fossil fuel.  Second of all, wind power is neither stable or predictable–in order to supply electricity 24 hours a day (expected in most western countries), wind power needs a fossil-fuel powered back-up.

The article concludes:

Keep that in mind here in America where we have a vastly larger and more complex grid. We can’t operate this huge system without a predictable energy supply which can be regulated to match fluctuations in demand. Wind can be a great booster to the energy supply in the areas where it can be produced, but the technology remains too expensive in most cases to stand on its own feet and the wind still has an unpleasant tendency to stop blowing sometimes.

 

What Happened To Equal Justice Under The Law?

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Yesterday The Navy Times reposted a story from last July.

Here are the highlights of the story:

A federal attorney announced Wednesday that Bryan Nishimura of Folsom, California, pleaded guilty to the unauthorized removal and retention of classified materials.

Nishimura, deployed in Afghanistan in 2007 and 2008 as a regional engineer, admitted to downloading classified briefings and digital records onto his personal electronic devices. He carried the materials off base and brought them back to the U.S. when his deployment ended.

An FBI search of Nishimura’s home turned up classified materials, but did not reveal evidence he intended to distribute them.

He was sentenced to two years of probation and a $7,500 fine, and was ordered to surrender his security clearance. He is barred from seeking a future security clearance.

Note that he is barred from seeking a future security clearance because of the way he handled classified materials. If the law were enforced equally, would a President Hillary Clinton be allowed to have a security clearance? Should candidate Hillary Clinton be allowed to handle classified information based on the statements by FBI Director James Comey? Does the law apply to everyone?

When The Image And The Truth Totally Disagree

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This story is based on a story from November 2015, but it is particularly relevant now. As I have said before, I am not a strong supporter of Donald Trump, but I am dismayed at the charges routinely leveled against him that have no basis in fact. One day I am going to read in the news that Donald Trump conferred with aliens on Mars before deciding to run for President (and what is worse–there will be people who believe that).

On November 13, 2015, The American Spectator posted as article about some activities of Donald Trump during the 1990’s. These activities totally negate the most recent charge that Donald Trump is a racist.

This is the story:

…The culture clash began to approach a climax last fall, when Mr. Trump’s lawyer sent members of the town council a copy of the film “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” a film that deals with upper-class racism. Mr. Trump then approached the town council about lifting the restrictions that had been placed on the club. He also asked some council members not to vote on the request because their membership in other clubs created a conflict of interest.

Last December, after the council refused to lift the restrictions, Mr. Trump filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Palm Beach, alleging that the town was discriminating against Mar-a-Lago, in part because it is open to Jews and African-Americans. The suit seeks $100 million in damages.

… Mr. Foxman seems pleased that Mr. Trump has elevated the issue of discriminatory policies at social clubs. “He put the light on Palm Beach,” Mr. Foxman says. “Not on the beauty and the glitter, but on its seamier side of discrimination. It has an impact.”

In recent weeks, Mr. Foxman says, the league has received calls from Jewish residents telling of how Palm Beach clubs are changing. Locals concur that in the past year, organizations such as the Bath and Tennis Club have begun to admit Jewish patrons. The Palm Beach Civic Association, which for many years was believed to engage in discriminatory behavior, this month named a Jewish resident as its chief officer.

In other words? In other words, long before he was running for president, there was Donald Trump battling racism and anti-Semitism in Palm Beach society. Using every tool at his disposal.

This was almost twenty years before Donald Trump announced his run for the Presidency. These are not the actions of a racist.

A + B Equals Whatever You Want It to

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The following quotes (from ABC News) are taken from James Comey‘s statement concerning the Hillary Clinton investigation:

After a tremendous amount of work over the last year, the FBI is completing its investigation and referring the case to the Department of Justice for a prosecutive decision. What I would like to do today is tell you three things: what we did; what we found; and what we are recommending to the Department of Justice.

…I have so far used the singular term, “e-mail server,” in describing the referral that began our investigation. It turns out to have been more complicated than that. Secretary Clinton used several different servers and administrators of those servers during her four years at the State Department, and used numerous mobile devices to view and send e-mail on that personal domain. As new servers and equipment were employed, older servers were taken out of service, stored, and decommissioned in various ways. Piecing all of that back together—to gain as full an understanding as possible of the ways in which personal e-mail was used for government work—has been a painstaking undertaking, requiring thousands of hours of effort.

…From the group of 30,000 e-mails returned to the State Department, 110 e-mails in 52 e-mail chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received. Eight of those chains contained information that was Top Secret at the time they were sent; 36 chains contained Secret information at the time; and eight contained Confidential information, which is the lowest level of classification. Separate from those, about 2,000 additional e-mails were “up-classified” to make them Confidential; the information in those had not been classified at the time the e-mails were sent.

…The FBI also discovered several thousand work-related e-mails that were not in the group of 30,000 that were returned by Secretary Clinton to State in 2014. We found those additional e-mails in a variety of ways. Some had been deleted over the years and we found traces of them on devices that supported or were connected to the private e-mail domain. Others we found by reviewing the archived government e-mail accounts of people who had been government employees at the same time as Secretary Clinton, including high-ranking officials at other agencies, people with whom a Secretary of State might naturally correspond.

…Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case. Prosecutors necessarily weigh a number of factors before bringing charges. There are obvious considerations, like the strength of the evidence, especially regarding intent. Responsible decisions also consider the context of a person’s actions, and how similar situations have been handled in the past.

So what do we know?

  1. The exclusive use of a private server was against the rules. Permission was never given for that use. It is also interesting that Mrs. Clinton never made it clear that there was more than one server.
  2. Hillary Clinton did not release all of her emails (and lied–saying she did).
  3. FBI Comey said today that there were times when Hillary’s private server could have been hacked.
  4. The investigators reported that 110 emails in 52 email chains were determined to contain some form of classified information at the time they were sent, contrary to statements made by Hillary Clinton.

Mrs. Clinton has avoided an indictment, despite the fact that she obviously broke the law. This is a really sad day for American justice.

Doesn’t This Make You Feel Safe?

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The Washington Examiner is reporting today that Brazil is looking for a former Guantanamo detainee who entered Brazil and then dropped from sight.

The article reports:

Abu Wa’el Dhiab, who was released in Uruguay in December 2014 after twelve years spent in detention, has vanished after purportedly entering Brazil. Uruguayan authorities claim he was authorized to visit the country as a refugee, but Brazil has no record of his arrival.

According to a report by the Argentinian publication “Infobae,” Avianca Airlines issued an internal alert notifying its employees that the 44-year-old Syrian may be using a passport under a fake name. The airline has refused to provide further comment.

Dhiab was arrested by Pakistani police in 2002 before being sent to Gitmo, but never charged with a crime. He spent seven years protesting his detention with a hunger strike, suffering health problems as a result. He was finally cleared for release in 2009, a move that received great fanfare from civil liberty advocates.

My first thought upon reading this was concern for the Summer Olympics in August, but the article cites another concern:

His disappearance is of particular concern this week, as terrorist attacks around the globe ramp up as the month of Ramadan winds down. It is anticipated that adherents of the Islamic State will view July 6 as perhaps the most valued day of the year for perpetrating acts of terror.

This is an example of why Guantanamo prison needs to stay open and the terrorists there need to stay there. Rehabilitating a terrorist is nearly impossible. Their indoctrination begins at birth and asking them to disavow everything they have ever been taught is not realistic. The book The Blood of Lambs by Kamal Saleem provides a lot of insight as to how a terrorist is taught and trained. I strongly recommend reading it. Meanwhile, we need to keep terrorists in Guantanamo.

Sometimes The Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction

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After the airport meeting between former President Bill Clinton and Attorney General Loretta Lynch, a lot of Americans have concluded that Hillary Clinton now has a ‘get out of jail free card.’ That may or may not have been the intention of the meeting, but at any rate, a wrench has been thrown into the works.

The Hill is reporting today that WikiLeaks has published more than 1,000 emails from Hillary Clinton during her tenure as Secretary of State. These emails relate to the war in Iraq.

The Hill reports:

The website tweeted a link to 1,258 emails that Clinton, now the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee sent and received. They stem from a trove of emails released by State Department in February.

WikiLeaks combed through the emails to find all the messages that reference the Iraq War.

The development comes after WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said last month the website had gathered “enough evidence” for the FBI to indict Clinton.

“We could proceed to an indictment, but if Loretta Lynch is the head of the [Department of Justice] in the United States, she’s not going to indict Hillary Clinton,” Assange told London-based ITV. “That’s not possible that could happen.”

First of all, the article does not make this clear, but according to another source, these emails were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request–the server was not hacked to obtain them. The server may have been hacked, but we don’t know that for sure. Second of all, the emails I would be looking at if I were going to build a criminal case would be the emails regarding the Clinton Foundation. There were many foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation during Mrs. Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State. These are the emails the government says they will not release until two and a half years. Much of the money was funneled through a charity in Canada so that the money would not be directly traceable. Recently, Charles Krauthammer explained this on Bill O’Reilly’s show:

1. You create a separate foreign “charity.” In this case, the Clintons set it up in Canada.

2. Foreign oligarchs and governments, then donate to this Canadian charity. In this case, over 1,000 did – contributing mega millions. I’m sure they did this out of the goodness of their hearts, and expected nothing in return. (Imagine Putin’s buddies waking up one morning and just deciding to send untold millions to a Canadian charity)

3. The Canadian charity then bundles these separate donations and makes a massive donation to the Clinton Foundation.

4. The Clinton Foundation and the cooperating Canadian charity claim Canadian law prohibits the identification of individual donors.

5. The Clinton Foundation then “spends” some of this money for legitimate good works programs. Unfortunately, experts believe this is on the order of 10%. Much of the balance goes to enrich the Clintons , pay salaries to untold numbers of hangers on, and fund lavish travel, etc. Again, virtually tax free, which means you and I are subsidizing it.

6. The Clinton Foundation, with access to the world’s best accountants, somehow fails to report much of this on their tax filings. They discover these “clerical errors” and begin the process of re-filing 5 years of tax returns.

7. Net result – foreign money goes into the Clinton’s pockets tax free and untraceable back to the original donor. This is the textbook definition of money laundering. Oh, by the way, the Canadian “charity” includes as a principal one Frank Giustra. Google him. He is the guy who was central to the formation of Uranium One, the Canadian company that somehow acquired massive U.S. Uranium interests and then sold them to an organization controlled by Russia . This transaction required U.S. State Department approval, and guess who was Secretary of State when the
approval was granted.

Get out the popcorn, the show has begun.

The Money In The 2012 Election

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Below is a list of donors to Barack Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign. The list is from Open Secrets which tracks all donations made to candidates.

The article at Open Secrets reminds us:

This table lists the top donors to this candidate in the 2012 election cycle. The organizations themselves did not donate , rather the money came from the organizations’ PACs, their individual members or employees or owners, and those individuals’ immediate families. Organization totals include subsidiaries and affiliates.

Here is the list:

2012DonorsThis is Mitt Romney’s list of donors:

2012MittRomneyI don’t really love either list, but I would rather see a candidate get money from the private sector than government employees. Another aspect of these lists is that they probably reflect the experience of the candidates and the friends gained along the way–Mitt Romney is a businessman who moves in business circles; Barack Obama worked in government and at the University of Chicago and moved in political and academic circles. Growth in the private sector is good for the economy–growth in government takes money out of the private sector and out of the private economy. At any rate, these two lists illustrate a very basic difference between the two parties.