WHEN YOUR BOGUS CLAIM ABOUT MASS SHOOTINGS IS DISPUTED BY A MOTHER JONES EDITOR IN THE NEW YORK TIMES, IT’S REALLY BOGUS: How Many Mass Shootings Are There, Really?
Archive for 2015
December 5, 2015
OBAMA’S ALL ABOUT EXTRACTING MONEY FROM PEOPLE WHO DON’T SUPPORT HIM, AND FUNNELING IT TO PEOPLE WHO DO: The Justice Department’s Liberal Slush Fund.
Republicans talk often about using the “power of the purse” to rein in a lawless Obama administration. If they mean it, they ought to use their year-end spending bill to stop a textbook case of outrageous executive overreach.
This scandal comes courtesy of the Justice Department, which for 16 months has engaged in a scheme to undermine Congress’s spending authority by independently transferring dollars to President Obama’s political allies. The department is in the process of funneling more than half-a-billion dollars to liberal activist groups, at least some of which will actively support Democrats in the coming election.
It works likes this: The Justice Department prosecutes cases against supposed corporate bad actors. Those companies agree to settlements that include financial penalties. Then Justice mandates that at least some of that penalty money be paid in the form of “donations” to nonprofits that supposedly aid consumers and bolster neighborhoods.
The Justice Department maintains a list of government-approved nonprofit beneficiaries. And surprise, surprise: Many of them are liberal activist groups. The National Council of La Raza. The National Urban League. The National Community Reinvestment Coalition. NeighborWorks America (which awards grants to left-leaning community organization groups, and has been compared with Acorn).
This strategy kicked off with the $13 billion J.P. Morgan settlement in late 2013, though in that case the bank was simply offered credit for donations to nonprofits. That changed with the Citigroup and Bank of America settlements, which outright required $150 million in donations. The BofA agreement contains a provision that potentially tees up nonprofit groups for another $490 million. Several smaller settlements follow the same mold.
To further induce companies to go the donation route, Justice considers these handouts to be worth “double credit” against penalty obligations. So while direct forms of victim relief are still counted dollar-for-dollar, a $500,000 donation by BofA to La Raza takes at least $1 million off the company’s bill.
Political racketeering, pure and simple.
BLOOMBERG BUSINESS: Wal-Mart Sues Puerto Rico Over ‘Astonishing’ Tax Increases.
I started to ask, “is ‘astonishing’ the new “unexpectedly?”, and then realized the story was in Bloomberg Business, where bad economic news has been invariably appearing “unexpectedly” since oh, about January of 2009.
Unexpectedly.
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STEPHEN L. CARTER: Calling On Batman To Explain Our Dark World. “Whether facing acts of terror inspired abroad or mass murders concocted at home, we spend a lot of time flinging charges and wringing hands. The nation does not seem terribly confident just now. Our children must sense the uneasiness of the generation that’s running things — and be made uneasy by it in turn.”
Well, we’re led by crooks and idiots. That tends to produce a sense of uneasiness.
BEHIND EVERY RED-CARPET STAR: There’s a publicist with a giant handbag. An “Awards Season” Pinterest board inspired by chapter four of The Power of Glamour.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. No, Mr. President, the NRA is not to blame.
‘HUNTING GROUND’ FILMMAKERS CLAIM HARVARD LAW PROFS’ CRITICISM CREATES A ‘HOSTILE CLIMATE’: Last month, a group of Harvard Law School professors issued a press release denouncing the film The Hunting Ground as being misleading. Now the filmmakers are claiming that the professors’ criticism may constitute actionable sex discrimination in violation of Title IX. Check out what FIRE’s Samantha Harris has to say about this claim in her new article.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. The Attorney General of the United States Is Disgracing Herself. Also disgraced: The GOP members who voted for her confirmation.
In her response to what appears to be a deadly, ISIS-motivated domestic terror attack, Attorney General Loretta Lynch has offered an almost Onion-level self-parody of liberal pieties. Per Obama administration protocol, the attorney general was determined to never let a crisis go to waste. There is now a “wonderful opportunity and wonderful moment to really make significant change,” Lynch declared the day after 14 innocent Americans were murdered and 23 injured at the hands of a Muslim couple who’d reportedly pledged allegiance to ISIS. And what is this change? New gun-control measures, of course, including stripping the constitutional rights (without due process) of Americans often arbitrarily placed on the vastly over-inclusive terror watch list.
This is all just “stray voltage” meant to distract from Obama’s failure to protect America.
UPDATE: Somebody here at Bullets & Bourbon credited me with the “stray voltage” term, but that’s actually not a term that originated with me.
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TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 940.
JON GABRIEL RESPONDS TO THE NEW YORK TIMES: End The Islamist Epidemic In America. “It is a moral outrage and a national disgrace that Islamists can commit acts designed specifically to kill people with brutal speed and efficiency. These are acts of war, barely concealed and deliberately promoted as tools of religious intolerance and even insurrection. America’s elected leaders offer prayers for jihad’s victims and then, callously and without fear of consequence, reject the most basic restrictions on radical Islam, as they did on Thursday. They distract us with arguments about gun control. Let’s be clear: These spree killings are all, in their own ways, violent crime.”
YES, BUT THE POINT IS TO GIVE THE PRESS SOMETHING TO TALK ABOUT BESIDES OBAMA’S COLOSSAL FAILURES IN THE WAR ON TERROR: Why The Gun Control Push Is Futile.
Another mass shooting, another round of liberal venom hurled at people who oppose further gun control measures. In the wake of the slaughter in San Bernadino, the charges were particularly shrill. “Dear ‘thoughts and prayers’ people: Please shut up and slink away. You are part of the problem, and everybody knows it,” said one liberal Washington Post columnist, in a representative tweet.
Most gun control advocates know that the push for federal gun laws is futile. Public support for gun rights is near historical highs, the structure of the U.S. Senate favors pro-gun forces, and—as many observers pointed out at the time—if the tragedy at Sandy Hook couldn’t get gun legislation through the Congress, nothing can, at least for the foreseeable future. But liberal decision to make the San Bernadino massacre a story about gun control is more than futile—it is fundamentally disconnected from the role the Second Amendment has played in American political thought, and therefore might be even less effective than past efforts.
Remember, when we’re talking about gun control, we’re not talking about how Obama told us us that ISIS was the JV team, or how he’s importing lots of poorly “vetted” middle eastern Muslims, or how he has botched Syria and Libya, or how his hashtag campaign against Boko Haram failed, or how the domestic protections against terror are looking porous and ineffectual, or how . . . well, you get the idea. Plus, gun control is a tribal rallying cry for uninformed Obama supporters. Or, to be less redundant, Obama supporters.
IT WAS PROBABLY TRIGGERED BY POSTPARTUM DEPRESSION: Obama still won’t say Calif. shooting was terrorism.
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