Category: Politics

Puerto Rico staged a referendum on whether the island protectorate should become a state, remain a territory, or become a sovereign nation. According to Reuters, 97% of voters voted to become the 51st state. But only 23% of voters bothered to cast their votes.

The main reason for the lopsided win is that Puerto Rico is sliding into bankruptcy. New conservative regulations are keeping their collective head above water, but it’s only staving off the inevitable. Puerto Ricans see statehood as a bailout – until the first April 15th rolls around and they have to start paying Federal taxes.

Puerto Rico’s former governor, Rafael Hernandez Colon, said in a statement: “A contrived plebiscite fabricated an artificial majority for statehood by disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of Commonwealth supporters.”

Rather than heading to the polls, some 500 Puerto Ricans marched on the streets of San Juan, waving Puerto Rico’s flag and burning the American flag while chanting in support of independence.

“This is a bogus plebiscite. Our future is independence. We need to be able to decide our own fate,” said Liliana Laboy, one of the organizers of the protest.

Boycotters were also angry about the costly referendum at a time when over 400 schools have closed and many Puerto Ricans are struggling to make ends meet. Schools where voting took place were in poor condition, with cracked paint and bare-bones playgrounds.

Yeah, that’s what we need another 3.5 million welfare recipients and 2 million Democrat voters.

The Army Times (I know, a bit out of my swim lane) reports that a group of US combat vets has formed a non-profit that addresses both poaching and PTSD. A former Marine, Ray Tate, founded Veterans Empowered to Protect African Wildlife (Vetpaw) with the goal of protecting rhinos and other game in the bush around their base in South Africa.

The vets have had extensive training and are salty enough “to resist the temptation” of the use of lethal force, and use “textbook COIN” techniques, according to Kevin, a former Green Beret who did not wish to be identified further.

“The organization seeks to employ combat veterans and giving them a similar level of brotherhood, intensity and purpose they knew during deployments. That also may help offset the PTSD that Tate told The Guardian “everyone gets” after returning from war.

“There are all these veterans with billions of dollars of training and the government doesn’t use them. I saw a need in two places and just put them together,” Tate said. ”

I hope part of the price of admission is a valid DD-214. If so, good on them.

 

 

CBS News is reporting Reality Leigh Winner, the 25-year-old NSA contractor accused of leaking classified documents, has been denied bail by U.S. Magistrate Judge Brian Epps.  She had pleaded not guilty to charges that she illegally retained and transmitted national defense information. The federal crime carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison upon conviction.

Prosecutors argued Winner had used a thumb drive to download classified documents while she was in the Air Force, CBS News’ David Begnaud reports. The thumb drive has not been found, and Epps said he was concerned that drive’s location is unknown.

Epps was also concerned that Winner seemed be fascinated with the Middle East and Islamic terrorism, Begnaud reports. “Whether that’s a jest or not, it still concerns me,” Epps said.

“Prosecutor Jennifer Solari says investigators seized a notebook from Winner’s house in Augusta, Georgia, and in it, Winner made references about traveling to the Middle East. At one point she wrote, “I want to burn the White House down … find somewhere in Kurdistan to live. Haha.”‘

Solari cautioned that prosecutors were not trying to link Winner to terrorism.”

Maybe one day she’ll get her wish about moving to Kurdistan, inshallah.

In all the Comey brouhaha beating on our senses is an organizational issue that none of the pundits seems to have picked up on: the simple fact that Donald Trump was really and truly James Comey’s boss. The media and the urban elites seem perfectly happy to grant James Comey and the federal attorney general the unlimited power of making a determination of prosecution for any suspected federal wrongdoing. If a high-profile case gets killed in Comey’s office or the attorney general’s office, there may be some blowback in the media and the general population, but no one ever challenges the legal authority of either the director of the FBI or the attorney general to make such prosecutorial decisions.

Think about that: the media are willing to grant these two presidentially appointed individuals this virtually unlimited power of prosecutorial discretion, yet when it comes to their boss, the man with hiring and firing powers over them, the liberal media contend that he has no such rights. According to them, even though he is the highest executive authority above these people who exercise such broad discretionary powers, he, our president, has none, zero, zip, nada. He can’t voice a single concern about how a particular case is proceeding or express discomfort that a loyal friend may be wrongly prosecuted. He, as the boss of these two government officials who exercise this virtually limitless discretionary power of prosecution, must remain haplessly mute. The liberal media and the Democrats say he has no legal means of intervention to suggest to his employees that he may possess information, or simply an understanding of the situation that they do not, that leads him as chief executive and chief legal officer, as their boss, to believe that further investigation is unwarranted.

The question begging to be asked here is, just when did a president lose his authority as the chief executive of this country to insert his input, his opinion, his direct orders, in fact, into a federal legal investigation? I would suggest that, in the eyes of the media, that long established power mysteriously disappeared the moment a Republican became president. I would further suggest that this whole Russia business is a concerted plan by the dirty-tricks Democrats to keep President Trump and his administration preoccupied and off-balance so that he is unable to enact the political changes he promised those who elected him. Their hope is to make him look like an ineffectual and failed president, vulnerable to losing the election for his party in 2018.

They should know it’s not working; nothing irritates this old voter more than seeing some smarmy California congressman get on a TV talk show and whine about how Trump’s travails are holding up the normal conduct of government when that snake knows full well that it is his party’s carefully planned program of political obstruction that is holding up legislation the country needs. It is my further belief that James Comey and his testimony are an integral part of that carefully organized program. Typically, the Democrats put their cards on faux heroes. Hoping for a high-ranking insider who could give Trump a shiner, they instead got their more typical Democrat whiner, a larger than normal guy whose drama-queen testimony left a large part of the nation shaking their heads in hopeless wonder that he was in charge of our national Federal Bureau of Investigation. Bet he went through the female course at Quantico.

Talk about the need for an inquiry…

Crossposted at American Thinker

Combined Joint Task Force-Inherent Resolve (CJTF-IR) reports a US aircraft shot down a Syrian armed Unmanned Air Vehicle (UAV) after it fired on Coalition forces in Southern Syria today. The UAV was similar to a US MQ-1 Predator, and it was downed after attacking personnel training and advising partner forces in the fight against ISIS.

This follows another successful attack where Coalition Forces destroyed two Syrian “Technical” vehicles, essentially trucks with heavy caliber crew served guns.

“The Coalition’s mission is to defeat ISIS in Iraq and Syria.  The Coalition does not seek to fight Syrian regime, Russian or pro-regime forces partnered with them. The demonstrated hostile intent and actions of pro-regime forces near Coalition and partner forces in southern Syria, however, continue to concern us and the Coalition will take appropriate measures to protect our forces.”

While not as satisfying as seeing SU-22 Fitter silhouettes painted on a F-14 Tomcat’s tail, this is the first air-to-air kill in about 20 years, and I’m sure the troops on the ground appreciated the effort.

 

In what is surely to be seen on the right as a victory over political correctness, ESPN, the ever more left leaning sports network, has announced that country boy, Hank Williams, Jr., and his rowdy, booming country rock anthem that welcomed viewers to Monday Night Football for more than two decades, will be returning this season. ESPN fired Williams six years ago for his sin of failing to worship at the altar of Obamanism. For a single on-air comparison of Obama to Hitler, an offense that would go largely unremarked in this time of vile, scatological profanities aimed at our president by even anchor personalities, Hank’s longtime association was ended with a terse announcement of termination. That may not have signaled the beginning of ESPN’s decline into political correctness but it surely marked a waypoint on the leftward course that has continued, losing them millions of subscribers year after year.

ESPN reverted back to their previous musical intro for MNF but it failed to welcome you into the game with the boisterous enthusiasm of good ol’ Bocephus and his driving anthem to you, everyman, who, blue or white collar, loved feeling for that short while, like one of his rowdy friends as you sat back and cracked open a cold one, waiting for that opening kickoff. That Williams off-air is a solid Republican and 2d Amendment supporter provided a small bit of additional comfort when you knew that some smarmy ESPN talking head might berate you with some leftist agitprop before the game ended.

So is this return to the country meme acknowledgment by ESPN suits that their preferred, chardonnay sipping, enlightened liberal audiences simply aren’t sufficient to pay the bills much less to generate a profit? Are they finally recognizing what all those departing subscribers have been telling them loudly by the tens of thousands, “Keep your damned politics outta my sports!” Could it be that some common sense has soaked through those skulls marinated in urban elite political correctness? The decision makers at ESPN, from executive suites and corporate board rooms down through every production facility would do themselves well to listen to Hank’s militant ode to conservative independence, “A Country Boy Can Survive” where Williams lays out a defiant code of self-reliance that, while most Americans can no longer live up to, they still firmly embrace the sentiment.

I live back in the woods, you see
My woman and the kids, and the dogs, and me
I got a shotgun, a rifle, and a 4-wheel drive
And a country boy can survive
Country folks can survive

I can plow a field all day long
I can catch catfish from dusk ’til dawn
We make our own whiskey and our own smoke, too
Ain’t too many things these old boys can’t do
We grow good old tomatoes and homemade wine
And a country boy can survive
Country folks can survive

It would appear to this ol’ small town boy that country boy, Hank Williams, Jr., most assuredly has.

Crossposted at American Thinker

Actually that’s not what the article says but we know instinctively that Ol’ Poe is right with his title. AL.com, an Alabama website, is reporting that when authorities reinstated work requirements for able-bodied persons to receive food stamps, the number of recipients fell dramatically. From AL.com:

During the economic downturn of 2011-2013, several states – including Alabama – waived the SNAP work requirements in response to high unemployment. It was reinstituted for 54 counties on Jan. 1, 2016 and for the remaining 13 on Jan. 1, 2017. As of April 2017, the highest jobless rate among the 13 previously excluded counties was in Wilcox County, which reported a state-high unemployment rate of 11.7 percent, down more than 11 percentage points from the county’s jobless rate for the same month of 2011.

Ending the exemption has dramatically cut the number of SNAP recipients in the counties.

As of Jan. 1, 2017, there were 13,663 able-bodied adults without dependents receiving food stamps statewide. That number dropped to 7,483 by May 1, 2017. Among the 13 counties, there were 5,538 adults ages 18-50 without dependents receiving food stamps as of Jan. 1, 2017. That number dropped to 831 – a decline of about 85 percent – by May 1, 2017.

Statewide, the number of able-bodied adults receiving food stamps has fallen by almost 35,000 people since Jan. 1, 2016. Each recipient receives about $126 a month in benefits.

Do the math: That’s almost $4.5 million a month statewide the taxpayers were paying to feed people who apparently didn’t want to eat badly enough to meet the minimal work requirements; yep, more than $50 million a year to keep all those Alabamans voting Democrat as Lyndon Johnson boasted fifty years earlier. He may not have known how to fight communists but he sure knew his Democrat constituents it seems.

Most of you have likely heard that the University of Missouri, whose administration completely caved in to demands from black student activists over largely disproved campus racism, has suffered declining enrollments as a consequence. What most of us don’t take into account are the real costs in human misery those lower freshmen enrollment numbers carry with them. UM had already shuttered several freshmen dorms last year, the first year after the protests, due to smaller incoming classes, but as the trend continues with another 14% freshman enrollment reduction expected this coming fall, the Missouri legislature has hit the university system budget with a 6.6% reduction in core funding, necessitating the elimination of close to 500 jobs with more than 300 of those at that notoriously “racist” flagship campus in Columbia.

Back when those first dorms closed, few of us likely even paused to consider the associated job losses. But large buildings require maintenance and with these being domiciles, likely numerous housekeeping jobs as well. Anyone care to hazard a guess as to how many of those jobs were held by blacks or other people of color? Since many of the incidents that caused all this grief were found to be hoaxes and the charges of widespread campus racism were found to be largely unfounded until the protests inspired them, this contrived incident drummed up by black Social Justice Warriors clearly has cost many blacks and other people of color their jobs. Once again, the unintended consequences of rampant liberalism has harmed the very folks these rabid liberals say they want to protect.

But now the damages go deeper since concerned parents, white and black, have decided to send their freshmen children to less racially troubled schools. The resultant declining enrollments and tuitions have caused the legislature to enact budget cuts to save $100 million, forcing the UM administration to axe almost 500 positions. Consider the fact that black organizations frequently complain that in layoffs blacks are the first to go. Even if that is not the case here, of 474 jobs on the chopping block, how many of those are likely to be blacks and other people of color, multiple dozens at the least? And what about all those other folks, whites, Asians, Jews, Muslims, who are going to lose their jobs? Were they all mean spirited and racist, deserving of the life crises they will now face?

It is a sad truth, an inconvenient truth, so to speak, that liberals have a tin ear for this sort of irony. One definition for inconvenient is “embarrassing” which certainly is applicable to those whose bad behaviors set in motion these sad events for their people. There’s just one problem with that: Liberals seem to live in a state beyond feeling normal human embarrassment for their screw-ups; they are so steeped in dishonesty and hypocrisy that even when shown the spoiled fruits of their folly they are utterly unfazed and unrepentant, but most importantly, blithely unaccountable.

Crossposted at American Thinker