Sunday, July 26, 2015

Church disciplines wife for wanting to divorce husband who admitted paedophile leanings
A Dallas megachurch is facing accusations that it has failed to deal with one of its members who viewed images of child abuse and instead made his wife a subject of church discipline.

The 10,000-member Village Church, whose lead pastor is Matt Chandler, supported two of its members, Jordan and Karen Root, in their work with the SIM USA mission organisation in East Asia. Jordan Root was found to have been viewing child pornography and his appointment with SIM was terminated following an investigation and his admission of guilt.

Jordan Root entered what the church called a "process of walking in repentance" and the church was told: "1 John 1:7 reminds us that he is washed clean of all unrighteousness, met with forgiveness, and granted fellowship with the body. Even with egregious sin, we are now called to reaffirm our love for him." He was removed from ministry and reported to the authorities. He was allowed to attend worship at the church if he was accompanied by a member, and also forbidden to enter the church's children's ministry building.

Karen Root – now Karen Hinkley – took steps to have her marriage annulled and resigned her membership of the church. However, The Village Church has a strict 'covenant' membership policy which includes the commitment: "I will seek to preserve the gift of marriage and agree to walk through the steps of marriage reconciliation at The Village Church before pursuing divorce from my spouse."...
Obama’s awesome new race database even more awesome than you imagined
...Unbeknown to most Americans, Obama’s racial bean counters are furiously mining data on their health, home loans, credit cards, places of work, neighborhoods, even how their kids are disciplined in school — all to document “inequalities” between minorities and whites.

This Orwellian-style stockpile of statistics includes a vast and permanent network of discrimination databases, which Obama already is using to make “disparate impact” cases against: banks that don’t make enough prime loans to minorities; schools that suspend too many blacks; cities that don’t offer enough Section 8 and other low-income housing for minorities; and employers who turn down African-Americans for jobs due to criminal backgrounds....

Obama Orders Cities And Towns To Racially Integrate
...Communities nationwide will be given a series of questions designed to help them figure out whether racial bias is causing segregated neighborhoods, racial or ethnically concentrated areas of poverty, unequal access to opportunity or disproportionate housing needs in their jurisdiction. They will be required to set goals related to that data and publicly report on their progress every three to five years.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development rule is intended to prod communities to meet fair housing standards established in the Fair Housing Act of 1986, by making previously unavailable or unreliable data accessible to the public, which could then use the data as an impetus for change.

The Fair Housing Act requires the government to not only eliminate racial discrimination in housing, but also to encourage racially integrated neighborhoods...

Planned Parenthood Paid Disgraced Official More Than $200,000 On The Side

Backlash RIPS Lib Journo After She Blames Planned Parenthood Videos On ‘Patriarchy,’ ‘White Supremacy’
Satellites: Earth Is Nearly In Its 21st Year Without Global Warming
...Since September 1994, University of Alabama in Huntsville’s satellite temperature data has shown no statistically significant global warming trend. For over 20 years there’s been no warming trend apparent in the satellite records and will soon be entering into year 22 with no warming trend apparent in satellite data — which examines the lowest few miles of the Earth’s atmosphere.

Satellite data from the Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) group also shows a prolonged “hiatus” in global warming. After November of this year, RSS data will be in its 22nd year without warming. Ironically, the so-called “hiatus” in warming started when then vice President Al Gore and environmental groups touted RSS satellite data as evidence a slight warming trend since 1979....

Contemplating Catastrophe, Environmentalists Embrace Existentialism
Giving up on climate change means giving up on being human.

...Walking away, Kingsnorth says, is not giving in to despair. Far from it: though he denies he’s a nihilist, he has a nihilist’s glee at the collapse of the phony world, the illusion that we can keep our technological society and our cars and computers and our cheap food grown half a world away, just by building more stuff and being smarter. The world, if not modern techno-civilization, will persist. We might destroy ourselves, but nature will outlive us. That’s all that really matters...

SETTLED SCIENCE, OR SELECTIVE IGNORANCE?
...Then there is a fact that, in my opinion, doesn’t get enough emphasis in these debates: in the course of preparing its most recent report, AR5, the IPCC slashed its estimate of future global warming by almost 50 percent. And this was at the end of 2013! How can the science be settled, when it isn’t even settled within the IPCC, a political body that was established by the U.N. to promote global warming alarmism?

It is obvious to any disinterested observer (i.e., anyone not funded by a government) that the alarmists are in disarray. Their models–the sole basis for their predictions of catastrophic warming–have been shown to have no ability to forecast the future. And, in fact, they don’t even hindcast very well. It is easy to create a model that matches the past better than the alarmists’ models, but to do that, you have to downgrade the importance of CO2–which is, in truth, a minor factor in the Earth’s climate....

Rice revolution? New rice could help feed world, fight climate change.

Sunday, July 12, 2015

The Whitest Privilege
...The Left occasionally indulges in bouts of romantic exoticism — its pin-ups have included Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, Patrice Lumumba, Mao Zedong; we might even count Benito Mussolini, “that admirable Italian gentleman” who would not have been counted sufficiently white to join Franklin Roosevelt’s country club — but the welfare states that progressives dream about are the whitest ones: Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, etc. The significance of this never quite seems to occur to progressives. When it is suggested that the central-planning, welfare-statist policies that they favor are bound to produce results familiar to the unhappy residents of, e.g., Cuba, Venezuela, or Bolivia — privation, chaos, repression, political violence — American progressives reliably reply: “No, no, we don’t want that kind of socialism. We want socialism like they have it in Finland."

Translation: “We want white socialism, not brown socialism!”...

The Stupidity of Sophisticates
...Claudine and I were talking about Germany in the Thirties - before the concentration camps and the Final Solution, before millions of dead bodies piled up in the gas chambers. So you need to have an imaginative capacity. It's not clear from your email that you do, but give it a go: Imagine being a middle-class German in 1933. No one's talking about exterminating millions of people - I mean, that would be just "lunatic" stuff, wouldn't it? And you belong to a people that regards itself as the most civilized on the planet - with unsurpassed achievements in literature and music and science. You might, if you were so minded, call it Teutonic Exceptionalism. And you're "progressive", too: you pioneered the welfare state under Bismarck, and prototype hate-speech laws under the Weimar republic. And yes, some of the beer-hall crowd are a bit rough, but German Jews are the most assimilated on the planet. The idea that such a society would commit genocide is not just "lunatic", it's literally unimaginable.

So don't even bother trying to imagine that. Instead try to imagine it's early 1933. The National Socialist German Workers Party is the largest party in parliament and thus President von Hindenburg has appointed its leader, Herr Hitler, as Chancellor - not der Führer, just Chancellor, the same position Frau Merkel holds today. And the National Socialist German Workers Party starts enacting its legislative programme, and so a few weeks later the Civil Service Restoration Law is introduced. Under this law, Jews would no longer be allowed to serve as civil servants, teachers or lawyers, the last two being professions in which Jews are very well represented.

But that wily old fox Hindenburg knows a thing or two. So as president he refuses to sign the bill into law unless certain exemptions are made - for those who've been in the civil service since August 1st 1914 (ie, the start of the Great War), and for those who served during the Great War, or had a father or son who died in action. And the practical effect of these amendments is that hardly any Jew in the public service has to lose his job.

And so in April 1933 it would be easy to say, if you were a middle-class German seeking nothing other than a quiet life, that, yes, these National Socialist chappies are a bit uncouth, but the checks and balances are still just about working. What's the worst they can do?

Paul von Hindenburg died the following year, and his amendments were scrapped....
Professor’s Manifesto: Vegans Must Illegally Overthrow Society to Save the World
...We endorse a form of abolition that (1) defends the use of high-pressure direct action tactics, along with illegal raids, rescues, and sabotage attacks; (2) views capitalism as an inherently irrational, exploitative, and destructive system, and sees the state as a corrupt tool whose function is to advance the economic and military interests of the corporate domination system and to repress opposition to its agenda; (3) has a broad, critical understanding of how different forms of oppression are interrelated, seeing human animal, nonhuman animal, and earth liberation as inseparable projects; and, thus, (4) promotes an anti-capitalist alliance politics with other rights, justice, and liberation movements who share the common goal of dismantling all systems of hierarchical domination and rebuilding societies through decentralization and democratization processes....

...We must link the liberation of other animals to human and Earth liberation, and build a revolutionary movement strong enough to vanquish capitalist hegemony and to remake society without the crushing loadstones of anthropocentrism, speciesism, patriarchy, racism, classism, statism, heterosexism, ableism, and every other pernicious form of hierarchical domination.

Humanity may not succeed in this endeavor, but it is one that we must undertake. It is no longer the classical choice between ‘revolution or barbarism,’ but now that of revolution or ecological collapse and mass extinction....

Academic: Constitution Is ‘Confederate Symbol,’ Censor It
...Bain isn’t calling for the creation of a new Constitution, but rather says the current one should simply be edited to remove parts he considers immoral and outdated....

...Modern copies of the Constitution (such as that at Archive.gov) typically show the text as it originally was, while also including a note that such clauses have been superseded by later amendments. That may seem reasonable, but Bain says that kind of approach is the reason nine people found themselves brutally gunned down in Charleston.

“One might justify this presentation of our national charter by saying that it commemorates an earlier time or instructs students on the nation’s political history,” says Bain. “That kind of thinking has prevailed for a long time in Charleston, only recently yielding in the face of an atrocity.”...

Movement To Rename Schools Honoring Confederate Leaders Widens To Reach Progressive Woodrow Wilson
...How much of a racist was Wilson? He was such a racist that AlterNet, the activist-progressive news outlet, labeled him as America’s most racist modern president....
Study Resurrects The Global Warming ‘Hiatus’
...“[T]he main story here is not the new findings… but that Science magazine is publishing a paper describing physical mechanisms behind the hiatus that was accepted in its final form on June 24th, three weeks after Science’s paper announcing the hiatus to be a non-event,” wrote Pat Michaels and Chip Knappenberger, climate scientists with the libertarian Cato Institute.

“The new paper contains a lot of science while the earlier paper rehashed some old findings (published elsewhere) and then spun them to make it seem as if the hiatus didn’t exist,” the libertarian scientists added.

Georgia Tech climatologist Judith Curry argued the study presents a better picture of vertical and horizontal heat distribution in the oceans. Curry also added the study shows there’s no observational evidence that the “missing heat” from global warming is being trapped in the deep oceans....

Law Prof.: Obama’s Climate Agenda Is About Changing The Constitution
...Late last year, Obama committed the U.S. to cut CO2 emissions 26 to 28 percent by 2025. Obama made the pledge in conjunction with China’s government, which promised to merely peak its CO2 emissions by 2030. Republicans immediately came out against Obama’s pledge, saying it was unworkable and they wouldn’t ratify it....

...Obama wants to make signing a global climate deal part of his presidential legacy, but knows such an agreement would never be ratified by a Republican-controlled Senate. Therefore, the administration is doing everything it can to argue a UN deal would not need lawmakers’ approval....

Saturday, July 11, 2015

Federal Judge orders Obama administration to court to explain why it has ignored his immigration injunction
...The Court was first apprised by the Government of the violations of its injunction on May 7, 2015. It admitted that it violated this Court’s injunction on at least 2,000 occasions—violations which have not yet been fixed. This Court has expressed its willingness to believe that these actions were accidental and not done purposefully to violate this Court’s order. Nevertheless, it is shocked and surprised at the cavalier attitude the Government has taken with regard to its “efforts” to rectify this situation.The Government promised this Court on May 7, 2015, that “immediate steps” were being taken to remedy the violations of the injunction. Yet, as of June 23, 2015—some six weeks after making that representation—the situation had not been rectified. With that in mind, the Court hereby sets a hearing for August 19, 2015, at 10:00 a.m. Each individual Defendant must attend and be prepared to show why he or she should not be held in contempt of Court. In addition to the individual Defendants, the Government shall bring all relevant witnesses on this topic as theCourt will not continue this matter to a later date. The Government has conceded that it has directlyviolated this Court’s Order in its May 7, 2015 Advisory, yet, as of today, two months have passed since the Advisory and it has not remediated its own violative behavior. That is unacceptable and,as far as the Government’s attorneys are concerned, completely unprofessional. To be clear, thisCourt expects the Government to be in full compliance with this Court’s injunction. Complianceas to just those aliens living in the Plaintiff States is not full compliance....

AP source: Fed's gun used in San Francisco pier slaying
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The gun used in the seemingly random slaying of a woman on a San Francisco pier belonged to a federal agent, a law enforcement official briefed on the matter said Tuesday.

The official, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the case and spoke on condition of anonymity, said a police check of the weapon's serial number shows it belonged to a federal agent. The official declined to elaborate further....

Chris Matthews On Illegal Aliens: ‘Democrats Want Votes’ [VIDEO]
...“I know, they don’t believe in it,” Matthews said. “They want cheap labor, cheap labor. And Democrats want votes, let’s face it.”

Illegal deported five times who shot woman: I came back to San Francisco because it was a sanctuary city
A horrifying lesson in incentives for which there’s plenty of blame to go around. Blame for San Francisco, of course, because it’s a sanctuary city where local PD won’t ask residents about their immigration status. Blame for ICE, who handed Sanchez over to San Francisco police to face a drug charge knowing full well the city wouldn’t hand him back later because of its “sanctuary” status. And blame, of course, for our fearless ruling class, whose fecklessness on border security presented ICE with a choice of either sending Sanchez to San Francisco and knowing he’d soon be back on America’s streets or returning him to Mexico … knowing he’d soon be back on America’s streets....

All Four Democratic Presidential Candidates Support ‘Sanctuary Cities’ [VIDEO]
All four of the Democratic candidates for president have expressed support for sanctuary cities, a controversial policy that is being blamed for the recent release of a five times-deported illegal alien who allegedly murdered a woman in broad daylight in San Francisco.

...Sanctuary city policies, which are on the books in about 140 cities, are coming under scrutiny following Wednesday’s shooting death of 32-year-old San Francisco resident Kate Steinle.

Steinle was walking on Pier 14 with her father and a friend when 45-year-old Francisco Sanchez allegedly shot her. The Mexican national, who was last deported in 2009 and had a rap sheet that included seven felonies, was in ICE custody as recently as March following an arrest for felony re-entry...
Wisconsin’s Shame: ‘He Could Have Been Shot. Over Politics’
...The officers sat him down, read him the entire search warrant, and ordered him not to tell anyone about the raid — not even school officials. He asked if he could call his parents. They said no. He asked if he could call a lawyer. They said no.

Then, they proceeded to turn his house “upside down.”

This story should sound familiar. In April, National Review shared the accounts of three women — Cindy Archer and two others, “Anne” and “Rachel” — who related their own terrifying experiences with dawn or pre-dawn police raids. The police brought a battering ram to Archer’s house, literally watched her dress, and then ran into the bathroom as her partner showered. “Anne” thought for a moment she was facing a home invasion as investigators poured through her front door and screamed taunts in her face. Police followed “Rachel” into the bedrooms where her children slept, where they woke to the sight of armed officers looming over them.

The pretense for the October raids was suspected “coordination” between various conservative organizations and Wisconsin governor Scott Walker’s campaign — activity that a trial court has held constituted nothing more than entirely legal “issue advocacy,” if it even occurred. Because they’d had the temerity to engage in this issue advocacy — constitutionally protected free speech — multiple conservative citizens were subjected to so-called John Doe proceedings by Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm, a Democrat....

Judicial Watch: Lois Lerner, DOJ Officials, and FBI Met to Plan Criminal Charges for Obama Opponents
Newly obtained documents from the conservative educational foundation Judicial Watch detail an official memo from October 2010 of a meeting between Lois Lerner and officials at the Department of Justice and the FBI to plan for the prosecution of targeted nonprofit organizations.

A lawsuit filed under the Freedom of Information Act produced the documents which included the memo as well as revelations that the Justice Department wanted IRS employees to turn over sensitive documents before giving them to Congress, Judicial Watch said in a press release Tuesday.

In a letter from then-House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R., Calif.) to IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, Issa said “this revelation likely means that the IRS—including possibly Lois Lerner—violated federal tax law by transmitting this information to the Justice Department.”...

WSJ: Lerner-John Doe link shows “common cause” for progressive squelching of speech
...Former IRS tax-exempt director Lois Lerner ran the agency’s policy on conservative groups. Kevin Kennedy runs the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board (GAB) that helped prosecutors with their secret John Doe investigation of conservative groups after the 2011 and 2012 recall elections of Governor Scott Walker and state senators.

Emails we’ve seen show that between 2011 and 2013 the two were in contact on multiple occasions, sharing articles on topics including greater donor disclosure and Wisconsin’s recall elections. The emails indicate the two were also personal friends who met for dinner and kept in professional touch. “Are you available for the 25th?” Ms. Lerner wrote in January 2012. “If so, perhaps we could work two nights in a row.”

This timing is significant because those were the years when the IRS increased its harassment of conservative groups and Wisconsin prosecutors gathered information that would lead to the John Doe probe that officially opened in September 2012. Ms. Lerner’s lawyer declined comment. Mr. Kennedy said via email that “Ms. Lerner is a professional friend who I have known for more than 20 years” but declined further comment....

...These interconnections matter because they reveal that the use of tax and campaign laws to limit political speech was part of a larger and systematic Democratic campaign. …

Conservative nonprofits like the Wisconsin Club for Growth and Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce were later subpoenaed and bound by secrecy orders as their fundraising all but ceased. Liberals worked together to turn the IRS and the GAB into partisan political weapons....
Health Insurance Companies Seek Big Rate Increases for 2016
Health insurance companies around the country are seeking rate increases of 20 percent to 40 percent or more, saying their new customers under the Affordable Care Act turned out to be sicker than expected. Federal officials say they are determined to see that the requests are scaled back.

Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans — market leaders in many states — are seeking rate increases that average 23 percent in Illinois, 25 percent in North Carolina, 31 percent in Oklahoma, 36 percent in Tennessee and 54 percent in Minnesota, according to documents posted online by the federal government and state insurance commissioners and interviews with insurance executives....

Saturday, July 04, 2015

Did The Department of Justice Get A Gag Order Silencing Reason About The Grand Jury Subpoena?
...Since my June 8 post, I've become convinced that it is likely that there is an under-seal gag order, probably obtained on Thursday, June 4, 2015, purporting to prohibit Reason.com from disclosing the existence of the grand jury subpoena. The U.S. Attorney's Office would have gotten such an order by making an under-seal application to a United States Magistrate Judge under authority discussed below, and obtaining an under-seal order in return. It's impossible to obtain such filings from the courts until the matter is unsealed....

...Third, Reason has now gone ten days without commenting on the story. This story — the federal government using grand jury subpoenas to uncover anonymous commenters — is squarely in Reason's wheelhouse, and would normally provoke justifiable outrage from them. A slight delay in commenting was consistent with them waiting until their lawyers figured out what was going on; this prolonged silence strongly suggests compulsion....

How Government Stifled Reason's Free Speech
For the past two weeks, Reason, a magazine dedicated to "Free Minds and Free Markets," has been barred by an order from the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York from speaking publicly about a grand jury subpoena that court sent to Reason.com.

The subpoena demanded the records of six people who left hyperbolic comments at the website about the federal judge who oversaw the controversial conviction of Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht. Shortly after the subpoena was issued, the government issued a gag order prohibiting Reason not only from discussing the matter but even acknowledging the existence of the subpoena or the gag order itself. As a wide variety of media outlets have noted, such actions on the part of the government are not only fundamentally misguided and misdirected, they have a tangible chilling effect on free expression by commenters and publications alike....
D.C. Officials Stole $110K From Children's Program to Fund Obama Inaugural Ball
Neil S. Rodgers, a former D.C. government official, was sentenced Tuesday for his role in the misappropriation of $110,000 earmarked for D.C.'s Children at Risk and Drug Prevention Fund to cover a deficit for the 51st State Inaugural Ball for President Obama's inauguration in 2009. Rodgers, found guilty of fraud in March, was sentenced to 36 days (served on weekends) plus two years of probation. Rodgers must also repay the entire $110,000 as restitution for his crime....

White House defends private Prince party
The White House on Monday defended a private concert over the weekend featuring Prince and Stevie Wonder, saying the Obamas paid for it themselves....
Testimony: Gov’t Labor Officials Coordinated With Union To Intimidate, Silence Workers On Key Vote
Recently uncovered legal testimony out of California details a long list of alleged abuses from state labor agents who, the testimony alleges, secretly coordinated with union officials to intimidate, silence and disenfranchise thousands of Latino farm workers.

“They call me ignorant,” Silvia Lopez, one of the farm workers, told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “They said they’d call immigration to take me out of the country.”...

Illegal Alien With 7 Felonies And 5 Deportations Fatally Shot San Francisco Woman In Broad Daylight
An illegal alien who shot a woman in broad daylight in San Francisco on Wednesday had been deported five times but was released back onto the streets anyway, federal immigration officials are saying.

The alleged killer, 45-year-old Francisco Sanchez, shot 32-year-old Kate Steinle as she was walking with her father and a friend on San Francisco’s famous Pier 14.

Authorities say Sanchez fired a bullet that struck Steinle in the chest. She died two hours later. Police do not yet know the motive for the shooting.

Sanchez was recently in police custody but was allowed to go free rather than face his sixth deportation because San Francisco is a so-called “sanctuary city.” That means that city institutions do not enforce federal immigration laws....

Police withheld bombshell report revealing how gangs of Muslim men were grooming more than 100 schoolgirls as young as 13 in case it inflamed racial tensions ahead of General Election
Britain's second largest police force withheld a report about gangs of Muslim men grooming children in case it inflamed racial tensions ahead of a General Election, it was revealed today.

West Midlands Police were warned more than 100 predominantly white children - some as young as 13 - were at serious risk of child exploitation five years ago.

A document entitled 'Problem Profile, Operation Protection' from March 2010 reveals Asian gangs targeted schools and children's homes across the force area.

The report, written for senior officers, also reveals how white girls were used to recruit other vulnerable victims on behalf of the gangs.

But there were fears over a row ahead of the May 2010 General Election and an English Defence League rally in April leading to a 'backlash against law abiding citizens from Asian/Pakistani communities'....
Obama Administration Seeks To Diversify Wealthier Communities Through HUD Provision
...Some believe though that through the threat of withholding important funds, local communities will be stripped of their zoning powers....

...In the past, monies for affordable housing have been concentrated in poorer areas, though this rule seeks to shift affordable housing into, “communities that have lots of other good attributes; good schools, good jobs, good transportation, but don’t have any affordable housing or very limited affordable housing,” Goldberg said.

Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow with the Heritage Foundation, sees this less as a political problem and more of an abuse of federal power, in which Obama’s ideological views on what communities should look like are forced on local jurisdictions....

Texas Dep't of Housing and Community Affairs v. The Inclusive Communities Project
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled today on a case involving what constitutes housing discrimination, deciding in Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. The Inclusive Communities Project that federal law impacts not only intentional discrimination but also practices that have a discriminatory effect - even without an actual intent to discriminate....
Most Preclinical Life Science Research Is Irreproducible Bunk
...The scientific journal Nature published a disturbing commentary claiming that in the area of preclinical research—which involves experiments done on rodents or cells in petri dishes with the goal of identifying possible targets for new treatments in people—independent researchers doing the same experiment cannot get the same result as reported in the scientific literature.

The commentary was written by former vice president for oncology research at the pharmaceutical company Amgen Glenn Begley and M.D. Anderson Cancer Center researcher Lee Ellis. They explain that researchers at Amgen tried to confirm academic research findings from published scientific studies in search of new targets for cancer therapeutics. Over 10 years, Amgen researchers could reproduce the results from only six out of 53 landmark papers. Begley and Ellis call this a “shocking result." It is....
Professor: Reason Itself Is A White Male Construct
A philosophy and religion professor at Syracuse University gave an interview to The New York Times Thursday in which he critiqued the notion of pure reason as simply being a “white male Euro-Christian construction.”...

SO IF CAMPUS RAPE IS SUCH A BIG PROBLEM, HOW COME ALL THE FAMOUS EXAMPLES TURN OUT TO BE LIES?
...Like most journalists and critics, I first wrote about The Hunting Ground on Feb. 27 of this year, the day the film made its theatrical debut, and did so unaware that, the same week, the unnamed man Willingham calls a rapist was standing trial in Middlesex County on the charges stemming from her criminal complaint. I learned of Winston’s trial when a juror contacted me after it concluded to express dismay that Winston had been forced to stand trial—and had faced potential jail time—for what she saw as a drunken hook-up....

...Yoffe wrote that Winston “was hardly a perfect gentleman” on the night in question, and perhaps that’s true. But only if one assumes that all men, by nature of their physiology (or perhaps because of rape culture), are always the instigators in sexual encounters, and that women have no sexual agency whatsoever, could it be said that he was a rapist....
When the police are against the people
...The nature of policing should be obvious from the name. The police are the polis. They are the people. But since the 1970s, larger political agendas have driven a wedge between the police and the people. The cop with the girl under his knees does not see her as himself, which she is. Absurd as it sounds—and frightening as it looks—she is a foe....

The OPM Hack Is the Clearest Symbol of the Obama Era
...We are governed by progressives who have an infinite faith in the federal government’s ability to manage enormously complicated tasks and almost no interest in ensuring the government actually does those tasks well.

Federal Employees Describe “Collective Panic” After Massive Hack
SAN FRANCISCO — Millions of current and former U.S. Federal employees received an email Friday urging them to take exhaustive security precautions in the wake of the largest hack on the U.S. government in history.

The email, which includes tips such as “be suspicious of unsolicited phone calls, visits, or email messages from individuals asking about you, your employees, your colleagues or any other internal information,” urges all federal employees to run a credit check to make sure their bank accounts or credit cards have not already been compromised.

Several current and former Federal employees who spoke to BuzzFeed News about the breach described a state of panic and confusion within their offices. The breach on the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), first disclosed last week, is already the largest breach in U.S. government history. The OPM said it was currently working with the FBI, as well as with other relevant bodies, to determine the extent of the breach, which could affect many more employees than originally disclosed....

Why I’m Filing a Civil-Rights Lawsuit: Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm and his agents ransacked my house and ruined my career.
...Nothing could have prepared me for waking up to the shouts of men with battering rams announcing that they were about to break down my door on that morning in 2011. It was so unexpected and frightening that I ran down from my bedroom without clothes on. Panicked by the threatened show of force, I was then humiliated as officers outside the window yelled at me to get dressed and open up. I quickly retrieved clothing and dressed as I unlocked the door.

Agents with weapons drawn swarmed through every part of the house. They barged into the bathroom where my partner was showering. I was told to shut up and sit down. The officers rummaged through drawers, cabinets and closets. Their aggressive assault on my home seemed more appropriate for a dangerous criminal, not a longtime public servant with no criminal history....

‘Did they get me?’: Docs reveal long-time John Doe spying operation
MADISON, Wis. – Democrat Milwaukee County prosecutors tapped the email and text communications of conservative activists as part of a five-year probe aimed at bringing down Republican Gov. Scott Walker, affidavits reviewed by Wisconsin Watchdog reveal.

One target of the spying operation told Wisconsin Watchdog the methods used to keep tabs on Wisconsin residents were like those of the National Security Agency’s domestic spying program.

“It was actually worse because (Milwaukee County prosecutors) were taking the body of emails and looking at actual data,” said the source, who asked not to be identified for fear of retribution from the prosecutors....

Why the TSA posted a photo of a passenger’s cash-filled luggage on Twitter
...The photo, from the Richmond airport, shows a passenger's luggage containing $75,000 in cash. Farbstein asks, "Is this how you'd transport it?" Most people would not, but there is nothing illegal about simply checking a bag containing $75,000, or carrying it with you on the plane. Passengers aren't under any obligation to report large sums of cash unless they're traveling internationally, though the TSA recommends that passengers consider asking for a private screening....

...In this case, the cash was seized by a federal agency, most likely the Drug Enforcement Administration, according to Richmond airport spokesman Troy Bell. "I don't believe the person was issued a summons or a citation," he said. "The traveler was allowed to continue on his way."...

FWIW – Kagan 2009: “There is no federal constitutional right to same-sex marriage”
1. As Solicitor General, you would be charged with defending the Defense of Marriage Act. That law, as you may know, was enacted by overwhelming majorities of both houses of Congress (85-14 in the Senate and 342-67 in the House) in 1996 and signed into law by President Clinton.

a. Given your rhetoric about the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy—you called it “a profound wrong—a moral injustice of the first order”—let me ask this basic question: Do you believe that there is a federal constitutional right to samesex marriage?

Answer: There is no federal constitutional right to same-sex marriage.
Emails Reveal Jonathan Gruber’s Obamacare Work Was Of ‘Key Political Importance’
A top Obama administration health official considered putting MIT economist Jonathan Gruber to work on Obamacare to be an initiative of such “key political importance” that it was expedited because of “political push” from the Obama administration, emails released by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) reveal.

The agency released 750 pages of heavily-redacted records on Monday to The Daily Caller and other news outlets in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.

In one telling exchange after Gruber’s Obamacare work was first reported in 2010, one HHS analyst told another that having Democrats in charge “across the board” would “stop some scrutiny” into the arrangement. Gruber’s work attracted scrutiny because the Obama administration failed to disclose the academic’s support for the health-care law without disclosing that he was paid $392,000 to help craft it....

Failing Obamacare Co-Ops Offer Lavish Executive Pay — And May Violate the Law
...Eighteen of the 23 co-ops paid their top executives prodigious salaries ranging from $263,000 to $587,000, according to 2013 IRS tax filings.

The high take-home pay for the “nonprofit” executives appears to violate both federal law and Obamacare rules prohibiting “excessive executive compensation.”...

Obamacare’s Oligopoly Wave
...The five largest commercial health insurers in the U.S. have contracted merger fever, or maybe typhoid. UnitedHealth is chasing Cigna and even Aetna; Humana has put itself on the block; and Anthem is trying to pair off with Cigna, which is thinking about buying Humana. If the logic of ObamaCare prevails, this exercise will conclude with all five fusing into one monster conglomerate. . . .

[T]he economics of ObamaCare reward scale over competition. Benefits are standardized and premiums are de facto price-controlled. With margins compressed to commodity levels, buying more consumers via mergers is simpler than appealing to them with better products, to the extent the latter is still legal. Synergies across insurer combinations to reduce administrative overhead and other expenses also look better for shareholders.

The mergers reflect the reality that government—Medicaid managed care, Medicare Advantage and the ObamaCare exchanges—is now the artery of insurance profits, not the private economy. The feds “happen to be, for most of us now, our largest customer,” Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini said this month at a Goldman Sachs conference. . . .

A healthier market would have many new competitive entrants given the transformative pace of technological and biomedical discovery. Health-care finance and delivery ought to be evolving along with these innovations, but the only disruptive force under ObamaCare is government. So five years into the glories of “health-care reform,” the same antiquated incumbents dominate as they did before, only with less accountability to patients. Cartels don’t care about quality, safety or costs to consumers....

Thanks, Obama. Health insurance rates jumping up… again
...Health insurance companies around the country are seeking rate increases of 20 percent to 40 percent or more, saying their new customers under the Affordable Care Act turned out to be sicker than expected. Federal officials say they are determined to see that the requests are scaled back.

Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans — market leaders in many states — are seeking rate increases that average 23 percent in Illinois, 25 percent in North Carolina, 31 percent in Oklahoma, 36 percent in Tennessee and 54 percent in Minnesota, according to documents posted online by the federal government and state insurance commissioners and interviews with insurance executives.

The Oregon insurance commissioner, Laura N. Cali, has just approved 2016 rate increases for companies that cover more than 220,000 people. Moda Health Plan, which has the largest enrollment in the state, received a 25 percent increase, and the second-largest plan, LifeWise, received a 33 percent increase...
'How dare you put such a complex issue to common folk?'
...I was told in no uncertain terms that this is a very strange and even inappropriate course of action that we’ve taken. And the argument that was given to me by a colleague in the Eurogroup, whose name will remain unsaid, while everybody was more or less nodding, was 'how dare you put such a complex issue to common folk?' And I was just looking at them astounded, thinking 'you have just negated the whole principle of democracy, which is that the common folk determine government; they determine very complex questions during elections.'...

US Prosecutor Now Sending Criminal DNA Testing In DC To Lab Run By His Girlfriend
The U.S. attorney who handles DNA and forensics litigation in the District of Columbia stopped sending cases to the city’s independent forensics lab in January, in favor of a private lab run by his girlfriend....
Leland Yee, the Gun-Hating Calif. Pol. Accused of Helping Smuggle Guns, Agrees to Plea Deal
It was the craziest political scandal to hit California in a while. In March 2014, State Sen. Leland Yee, in the midst of a campaign for secretary of state, was arrested in part of a massive raid in the FBI area, accused of political corruption and helping arrange illegal firearm deals on behalf of violent group in the Philippines.

That scandal was crazy enough, but adding fuel to the fire was the fact that Yee, a Democrat, was also an open supporter of tougher gun control laws and was a proponent of legislation in California to ban the sales of violent video games to children, a law that the Supreme Court subsequently struck down as unconstitutional. Yee was a critic of games like Grand Theft Auto, even though he apparently behaved in real life like one of its characters. He took political hypocrisy to brand new heights....

The Government Wants You to Get Its Permission Before Discussing Gunmaking Information on the Internet (or Anywhere)
...Your action is urgently needed to ensure that online blogs, videos, and web forums devoted to the technical aspects of firearms and ammunition do not become subject to prior review by State Department bureaucrats before they can be published...

....the Administration has been pursuing a large-scale overhaul of the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), which implement the federal Arms Export Control Act (AECA)...

Also regulated under ITAR are so-called "technical data" about defense articles. These include, among other things, "detailed design, development, production or manufacturing information" about firearms or ammunition. Specific examples of technical data are blueprints, drawings, photographs, plans, instructions or documentation...

Some State Department officials now insist that anything published online in a generally-accessible location has essentially been "exported," as it would be accessible to foreign nationals both in the U.S. and overseas.

With the new proposal published on June 3, the State Department claims to be "clarifying" the rules concerning "technical data" posted online or otherwise "released" into the "public domain." To the contrary, however, the proposal would institute a massive new prior restraint on free speech. This is because all such releases would require the "authorization" of the government before they occurred. The cumbersome and time-consuming process of obtaining such authorizations, moreover, would make online communication about certain technical aspects of firearms and ammunition essentially impossible.

Penalties for violations are severe and for each violation could include up to 20 years in prison and a fine of up to $1 million. Civil penalties can also be assessed. Each unauthorized "export," including to subsequent countries or foreign nationals, is also treated as a separate violation....

Obama’s Gun-Control Misfire: Before the 2014 election, the FBI claimed that mass shootings were up. False.
...Last September the Obama administration produced an FBI report that said mass shooting attacks and deaths were up sharply—by an average annual rate of about 16% between 2000 and 2013. Moreover, the problem was worsening. “The findings establish an increasing frequency of incidents,” said the authors. “During the first 7 years included in the study, an average of 6.4 incidents occurred annually. In the last 7 years of the study, that average increased to 16.4 incidents annually.”

The White House could not possibly have been more pleased with the media reaction to these findings, which were prominently featured by the New York Times, USA Today, CNN, the Washington Post and other major outlets. The FBI report landed six weeks before the midterm elections, and the administration was hoping that the gun-control issue would help drive Democratic turnout.

But late last week, J. Pete Blair and M. Hunter Martaindale, two academics at Texas State University who co-authored the FBI report, acknowledged that “our data is imperfect.” They said that the news media “got it wrong” last year when they “mistakenly reported mass shootings were on the rise.”

Mind you, the authors did not issue this mea culpa in the major news outlets that supposedly misreported the original findings. Instead, the authors published it in ACJS Today, an academic journal published by the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences. “Because official data did not contain the information we needed, we had to develop our own,” wrote Messrs. Blair and Martaindale. “This required choices between various options with various strengths and weaknesses.” You don’t say....