Alan Caruba: Protesting Law and Order

Warning Signs

 

... "The protests that occurred in the wake of grand jury decisions not to indict a police officer who shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, or another group of police officers whose arrest of Eric Garner led to his death in Staten Island, New York are different only because they swiftly went from local to national. The initial Ferguson protests immediately descended into looting and arson. The Garner protests attracted large crowds that disrupted traffic and interfered with consumers in some shopping outlets. It seems to have gone unnoticed that large numbers of those in the latter protests were white." ...

 

theconservativetreehouse.com

 

Related:

2nd Night Of Berkeley Protest Turns Violent Again

Most Americans See Race Relations Worsening Since Obama's Election

Bloomberg Politics   "President Barack Obama had hoped his historic election would ease race relations, yet a majority of Americans, 53 percent, say the interactions between the white and black communities have deteriorated since he took office, according to a new Bloomberg Politics poll. Those divisions are laid bare in the split reactions to the decisions by two grand juries not to indict white police officers who killed unarmed black men in Ferguson, Mo., and Staten Island, N.Y.

"Both times, protesters responded with outrage and politicians called for federal investigations. Yet Americans don’t think of the cases as a matched set of injustices, the poll found. A majority agreed with the Ferguson decision, while most objected to the conclusion in the Staten Island death, which was captured on video...

... "In the six years since his election as the nation’s first black president, Obama has addressed race just a handful of times. ..."

"Obama has also weighed in on the deaths of both Brown and Garner. And the Justice Department is reviewing the two incidents, as well. Yet Obama has not gone to Missouri or New York. ... “He should have gone to Ferguson and very bluntly said, ‘I don’t want any violence here. Let’s show people that we can accept verdicts we don’t like,’” he said. “The destruction just makes people more prejudice[d] than they already are.”

 

Sharyl Attkisson: Why I’m Suing the Justice Dept.: Its Unlawful Freedom of Info. Response

Sharyl Attkisson  "On Nov. 19, I filed a Freedom of Information (FOI) lawsuit against the Department of Justice, which oversees the F.B.I.. For over a year, I had been pursuing public information that the F.B.I. holds—about me. Something any U.S. citizen has the right to do.

"The response I got was typical of the response federal agencies provide to FOI requests today.

"The F.B.I. first said it didn’t have any information that mentioned me.
I appealed, reiterating the information in my original request, which outlined a great deal of information that the F.B.I. is known to have regarding me (at the very least through my dealings with the F.B.I. as a reporter over more than 20 years)." ...

...

... "On his first day in office, President Obama said he was instructing federal agencies to err on the side of disclosure in answering Freedom of Information requests. The record under Clinton and Bush had been abysmal. Obama was promising unprecedented transparency. Only the most sensitive material, such as that which could directly harm national security, should be kept from the public that owns it.

"In reality, there is now a consensus among many journalists and open government groups that the Obama administration has been the least transparent in recent times, and the worst at properly responding to FOI requests."   Via IOTWReport

NYPD cops warned militant group Black Guerrilla Family ‘preparing to shoot on-duty police officers’

http://www.nj.com/hudson/voices/index.ssf/2009/10/editorial_cartoon_is_it_safe.html

NY Daily News  "A tattooed gang of militants declared open season on the NYPD in the wake of the Eric Garner grand jury decision, according to a threat a police union verified Saturday.

"Ten Black Guerrilla Family members are “preparing to shoot on duty police officers,” Sergeants Benevolent Association President Ed Mullins said.

"The gang, formed in the 1960s in the California prison system, recently surfaced on the East Coast and Maryland, where members are at the heart of a drug-trafficking and corruption probe within the Baltimore prison system.

"Members swear allegiance for life and sport “BGF” tattoos, as well as ink depicting a dragon surrounding a prison tower, according to gangs.org.

An Impassioned Defense of Law Enforcement Officers

Legal Insurrection   "San Bernardino DA Takes Jon Stewart and the Daily Show to task."
"San Bernardino County district attorney Mike Ramos was recently watching television when he noticed Jon Stewart of the Daily Show reporting incorrect information about an incident in his county.
"Ramos took to YouTube and created a video in which he scolds Stewart and offers a powerful defense of law enforcement officers everywhere.

"Carman Tse of the LAist reported:

Video: San Bernardino D.A. Calls Out ‘The Daily Show’, Show Apologizes For ‘Sloppy’ Mistake
Comedy Central’s news commentary show The Daily Show tweeted an apology to the San Bernardino district attorney after host Jon Stewart listed a Victorville man, who had previously died in an incident with a sheriff’s deputy, as another victim of police shootings in the United States.
On the Monday, December 1 episode of The Daily Show, Jon Stewart opened the show with a bit about the nationwide response to the events in Ferguson, Missouri. Stewart ran through a list of black men killed in police shootings across the country, listing Dante Parker, who was killed in a controversial incident with a San Bernardino Sheriff’s Deputy in Victorville in August. Unlike the other victims Stewart listed, including 12-year old Tamir
BrownRice of Cleveland, Parker was not shot by police but actually died after being Tased.

"Watch the video. Ramos singles out the Daily Show but his message applies to the media at large.


"For his part, Jon Stewart said in a tweet Friday that he will apologize on Monday.  

Last of Senate's Deep South Democrats defeated

AP   " 'This victory happened because people in Louisiana voted for a government that serves us, that does not tell us what to do," Cassidy said in Baton Rouge, the state capital.

thehayride.com

 

With Landrieu’s Loss, the End of an Epoch   "Now if only we could get rid of the myth, too."
 ... "A few obvious questions: If white Southerners were really so enraged about the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and if they switched to the Republican party to express their displeasure, then why did they wait 30 years before making that preference felt in House elections? Why did Dwight D. Eisenhower — a supporter of civil-rights legislation who insisted on the actual desegregation of the armed forces (as opposed to President Truman’s hypothetical desegregation) and federal agencies under his control — win a larger share of the Southern vote in 1956 than Barry Goldwater, the most important Republican critic of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, did two cycles later?"

 

 

Rick Moran: Cassidy crushes Landrieu in Louisiana Senate runoff  ... "An observation born of studying and writing about politics for 40 years: Democrats will be back. It may take them a while. They will resist the changes that have to make for them to become competitive again. But massive defeat for a political party is a big motivator. The deadwood has been cleared away by the GOP wave and new, younger Democrats will rise, and one day be successful - if they can adapt to the political realities that Democrats failed to understand these last few election cycles" ...

 NY Times: Demise of the Southern Democrat Is Now Nearly Complete  ..."It remains to be seen whether Republicans will continue to fare so well after Mr. Obama leaves the White House. Yet a Democratic rebound seems unlikely anytime soon. With Republicans now holding the advantage of incumbency, unless the region’s religiosity dims or the Democrats relent on their full-throated embrace of cultural liberalism, it may be theirs for a generation."

The Benghazi Report; An ongoing intelligence failure

Stephen F. Hayes and Thomas Joscelyn  ... "But Boehner’s visit was not a social call. He was there to see three CIA officers who had fought in Benghazi, Libya. Their identities were unknown to all but a small group of U.S. government officials with high-level security clearances, and the details of their harrowing stories were unknown to virtually everyone who was not a colleague or relative.

 

"And the fact that the meeting was taking place at all was unknown to the man who, under different circumstances, might have been expected to host it. Mike Rogers, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, was not invited.

 

Rogers was sick of Benghazi. Some of his Republican colleagues had spun themselves into a frenzy of conspiracy theorizing, publicly making wild claims that had no basis in fact or hinting at dark conspiracies that had the president of the United States willfully and eagerly arming its enemies. Representative Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, long the Republican face of Benghazi investigations, accused Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of giving a “stand-down” order to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. Representative Louie Gohmert claimed that Senator John McCain deserved some of the blame for Benghazi because McCain, like Barack Obama, had supported opposition forces in Libya. Normally responsible Republicans pretended that Hillary Clinton’s famous “what difference at this point does it make” line was not so much a tone-deaf question about how the attacks happened, which deserved the criticism it earned, but a declaration of indifference that the attacks happened, which was absurd. Rogers complained about these excesses regularly to his staff and colleagues.

 

"This frustration, however, wasn’t the reason Boehner and Nunes cut him out of the meeting with CIA officers. They shared his frustration, as it happened."   Full article here.

 

Chuck Schumer Bails on ObamaCare

Bokbluster

 

"Chuck Schumer, the third ranking Senate Democrat, gave a speech trashing ObamaCare. He said it was a mistake to ram through health care reform when the main concern of voters was the economy. The uninsured were a small percentage of the electorate and most of them didn’t vote. ObamaCare meant middle class working people had to pay more for their insurance to subsidize the non-voting beneficiaries of ObamaCare. Schemer said that was politically stupid. As a result Democrats are now getting shellacked at the polls.

"The speech came as a shock to Progressives and the press but it’s something Schumer must have given a lot of thought to. As Dan Henninger said in the WSJ, “Let us count the times Sen. Chuck Schumer has blown himself up politically.

"That was a short count, wasn’t it?”

Hillary Clinton’s History as First Lady: Powerful, but Not Always Deft

NY Times

 Bringing impeachment charges against President Richard Nixon
 in Washington in 1974.

  ... "She talks about championing women’s rights globally, supporting her husband during years of robust economic growth, and finding inspiration in Eleanor Roosevelt to stay resolute in the midst of personal attacks.

 

"What Mrs. Clinton leaves out about her time as first lady is her messy, sometimes explosive and often politically clumsy dealings with congressional Republicans and White House aides. Now, the release of roughly 6,000 pages of extraordinarily candid interviews with more than 60 veterans of the Clinton administration paints a more nuanced portrait of a first lady who was at once formidable and not always politically deft." ...

http://comicallyincorrect.com/2014/06/27/hillary-book-tour/

The End of Feminism

Bruce S. Thornton

 

"California recently passed a law requiring that sexual encounters between students in universities and colleges can proceed only on the basis of “affirmative, conscious and voluntary agreement.” Failure to resist or to ask the partner to stop the encounter can no longer be taken as consent.

...

"But the main problem with the California law is the corruption of feminism that it represents. When it comes to sex, the old feminist claim to equal treatment based on a woman’s equal capacity to control her sexual choices has been transformed into an old-fashioned Victorian notion of women as weak creatures who need to be protected from sexually feral males, and who lack agency and thus should not be held accountable for their choices.

...

"But as the years passed, many women began to discover that there are indeed differences between men and women and their experiences of sex. Liberation did not lead to the sexual utopia of carefree and cost-free pleasure, but to the guilt, regret, and humiliation that follow being used as an object for somebody else’s transient enjoyment.

"The response to these ill effects was to create rules and codes designed to eliminate the negative consequences of sexual freedom.
...
"The demand for personal freedom without accountability contradicts the foundational philosophy of our republic. The right to liberty is not the right be absolved from the consequences of one’s actions. Taking that responsibility is what makes one worthy of freedom and equal to others who likewise must be accountable for their actions."

GenderBen!

A Civil War In The Olive Garden Parking Lot

NPR: Daily Picture Show  "Think about where you are, this very moment — and imagine all that has happened there before now.

"When I was in college in Tennessee, for example, my neighborhood was nicknamed "The Fort," because that's exactly what it was during the Civil War. How weird to think that where soldiers once fired cannons, students today are doing keg stands. And actually, I wouldn't have been shocked to see Civil War soldiers milling around the neighborhood; re-enactments were — and are — huge in the area.

"That interests photographer Gregg Segal. "I travel a lot on assignment for magazines and had been increasingly disturbed by the growing sameness of America," he writes in an email. "Wherever I traveled, I'd see the same strip malls with the same Olive Gardens and Jamba Juices and Panera Breads, etc., and I wanted to say something about the erasure of the past and the homogenization of the landscape.' "
...
"Through Hodge, Segal met his cast of characters and, over the course of five trips to the South and Gettysburg, created this series of, for instance, soldiers camped out in front of Domino's."

Below: The Massaponax Baptist Church was used as Grant's HQ in 1864

Massaponax Church, Virginia "Council of War": General Ulysses S. Grant examining map held by General George

 G. Meade. LOC Summary: Photograph from the main eastern theater of war, Grant's Wilderness Campaign,

May-June 1864. Date Created/Published: 1864 May 21

 

Massaponax Baptist Church in 1864. Below: the church location today thanks to Google Earth
 

This may stress the importance of historic preservation.

Report: No ‘Global Warming’ For 215 Months, plus: Caruba on the climate change mafia

Freedom Outpost   "The numbers are in and the verdict is that there has been no global warming for 17 years and 11 months, according to satellite data.

"Satellite data prepared by Lord Christopher Monckton shows there has been no warming trend from October of 1996 to August of 2014 — 215 months. To put this in perspective, kids graduating from high school this year have not lived through any global warming in their lifetimes."...
...
 "But meteorologists have been predicting a weak el Niño this fall and winter, which would warm ocean waters and potentially put an end to the "pause" in global warming.

" 'The Great Pause may well come to an end by this winter," said Monckton. "An el Niño event is underway and would normally peak during the northern-hemisphere winter. There is too little information to say how much temporary warming it will cause, but a new wave of warm water has emerged in recent days, so one should not yet write off this el Niño as a non-event.' "...

The World's Climate Change Mafia Meet in Peru

 

... "The lies being inflicted on Americans include Obama’s “war on coal” that is shutting down coal-fired plants that affordably and efficiently produce the electricity the nation needs, along with the six-year delay of the Keystone XL pipeline. Add in the thousands of Environmental Protection Agency regulations affecting our manufacturing, business and agricultural sectors and the price we are paying is huge.

"At its heart, environmentalism hates capitalism." ...