Senate Democrats Proclaim Love Of 1st Amendment While Actually Threatening It

By William Teach April 12, 2018 – 8:13 am

So, just a little reminder of what’s going on

(Baltimore Sun) Facing a firestorm of criticism, Sinclair Broadcast Group spent last week defending a controversial on-air promotion in which its TV anchors across the country read identical scripts decrying “fake” news.

A video montage produced by website Deadspin, which shows anchors at local news stations warning of biased and false news on social media and in traditional outlets, went viral and sparked a backlash.

Critics say the TV station owner’s centralized message, required to be read on air, further reinforces the notion that right-leaning Sinclair wants to consolidate the local news industry and spread politicized “propaganda” through control and ownership of more stations than any other broadcaster.

Opponents of Sinclair’s proposed $3.9 billion takeover of Tribune Media, which would give it control of 233 television stations that reach 72 percent of U.S. households, see the anchor announcements as ominous signs of more to come from the company. They worry about conservative messaging being fed to local communities, especially when the latest echoes phrasing used by President Donald Trump when criticizing mainstream news organizations.

In a nutshell, this drove Leftists, especially those in the media, bat guano insane. How dare Sinclair have their own viewpoint which is different from the Leftist media viewpoint! That’s verboten, Comrades. So, of course, Senate Democrats have to get involved

And this is a lot closer to the letter of violating the 1st Amendment, whereby it says “Congress shall pass no law…” Usually, we’re just talking about violating the spirit of the 1st. Here, 12 Democratic Senators want the FCC to Do Something

So, they totally love the 1st so much that they want to use the power of the federal government to go after a TV network engaged in using their 1st Amendment Rights of Free Speech and Freedom of the Press. I don’t remember the 1st mentioning anything about any sort of “public interest test.” I do remember the Framers essentially saying Free Speech was about protecting speech that people, and government, do not like from Government, and the same with the press.

These 12 Democrat senators are Maria Cantwell, Tom Udall, Patty Murray, Elizabeth “Not Really And Indian” Warren, Ron Wyden, Edward Markey, Richard “Big Carbon Footprint” Blumenthal, Tina Smith, Bernard “lots of homes for a Socialist” Sanders, Jeffrey Merkley, Tammy Baldwin, and Cory Booker.

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NY Times Should Probably Ask Obama And Holder About Guns Going To Mexico

By William Teach April 12, 2018 – 7:55 am

Opinion writer Nicolas Ortega is rather upset about guns purchased in America ending up in Mexico, and he has a point. But, he very much forgot something

The Other Border Problem: American Guns Going To Mexico

On a sun-scorched prison patio in this sprawling border town, a 23-year-old inmate calmly explained to me how he trafficked hundreds of guns a year from the United States to Mexico. He never bothered paying American citizen straw buyers to purchase the weapons for him, he said. Instead, he would go to one of the many weekend gun shows around Dallas and take advantage of the so-called gun show loophole to buy firearms from private sellers without a background check or proof of citizenship.

He would drive back to Mexico with about a dozen guns hidden in refrigerators and stoves in the back of his truck, and sell the weapons in his hometown, a few hours south of the Rio Grande. His most requested weapon, he told me, was the AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, which he could buy for as little as $500 and sell for five times that. He became richer than he had dreamed, buying a house and new trucks and motorbikes.

“At the beginning I felt bad, but you get used to it,” he said. “It’s the way you can have a good time. You sell weapons, you earn money and you have fun.” He got caught only because his cousin informed on him after an argument, he said, and he is now serving a nine-year sentence.

Guns from America inundate Mexico, arming the brutal cartels that have drowned this country in blood, destroyed families and driven people from their homes. Over a six-year period, the Justice Department traced more than 74,500 firearms seized from criminals here to the United States, where they were either manufactured or sold on after being imported from other countries.

When I see something like this, I have to wonder if the person is manufactured out of thin air. Once again, an anonymous source, who just happens to perfectly encapsulate the gun grabbers talking points on the “gun show loophole”.

As President Trump rages about the dangers of drugs and criminals seeping north from Mexico, he should consider how America exports its own deadly products and the devastation they cause. He announced last week that he would send the military to the Mexican border, and states have begun deploying National Guard troops. If there is going to be a buildup of forces, more resources should be used to stop gun smuggling — operations against the firearms traffickers and searching of southbound vehicles.

In states such as Texas, an undocumented migrant is not allowed to get a driver’s license. But anyone — even a member of the MS-13 gang without papers — can potentially walk into a gun show and buy a semiautomatic rifle. Organized crime groups are taking advantage of this every day.

And, if that is happening, it is illegal. Regardless, Ortega does have a point that Trump should work to stop the trafficking going south with illegal firearms. Unintentionally, he makes that point that the National Guard should be used to stop these criminals coming across the border illegally in the first place, along with building a border wall.

Funny how that works, eh?

But, if you want to talk gun trafficking, you have to mention Barack Obama and Eric Holder, who allowed over 2,000 rifles to disappear into Mexico through Operation Fast and Furious. Guns which injured and killed hundreds of Mexicans (that we know about), including children, and killed two U.S. Border Patrol agents. Law enforcement stated that guns used in the Paris Islamist attack came from this gunwalking program.

Why are these two not mentioned?

The problems of gun violence, drug trafficking and immigration are international in our interconnected world — and we need to work across borders to solve them. Just as Mexico needs to fight the brutal cartels that drive people to flee north, the United States needs to slow the southward flow of this devastating iron river.

OK, let’s build the wall and have lots and lots of government agents on the border, who do not detain and release while awaiting a hearing. Let’s detain and immediately deport.

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Surprise: Now They Claim It Is A 99.94% Consensus

By William Teach April 11, 2018 – 4:30 pm

Having had the 97% consensus meme shown to be a 100% farce, Warmists refuse to give up on their anti-science drumbeat of consensus on the current warm period being mostly/solely caused by Mankind. And away we go

97% consensus on climate change? More like 99.94%, study finds

The general trend in the media seems to suggest that there’s a 97% agreement between scientists regarding the validity of climate change. However, that might not be accurate. Recent studies indicate an even stronger agreement. (snip)

There are thousands and thousands of studies documenting climate change and its effects and among scientists, there’s essentially a consensus regarding climate change. While the details and the exact specifics of how it is happening are still very much an area of active research, there’s not much denying that it is happening and that we are causing it.

To portray this, the media often uses the phrase “97% consensus” — likely originating from a 2014 study by Cook et al. entitled “Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature“. In the study, Cook analyzed 11,944 peer-reviewed papers published between 1991-2011. Out of them, about a third (4,013) expressed a position on man-made climate change, and 3,894 (or 97%) supported the position that humans are causing climate change. The authors also found that more recent papers were increasingly attributing climate change to mankind, indicating an increasing acceptance level.

But in 2017, James Powell published an even larger meta-analysis of 54,195 peer-reviewed papers, finding a 99.94% consensus about human-caused climate change. Again, more recent papers seem to back the idea up even more overwhelmingly.

Belief is not science. And, like the Cook et al “study”, this one will surely be found lacking, and that the vast majority of papers will portray the current warming period as not mostly/solely caused by Mankind. In fact, even Skeptical Science, a hardcore Warmist site, had issues with his previous paper proclaiming a 99.99% consensus.

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Posted in Collapsing Science, Global Warming, New Climate Deniers | 9 Comments | Trackback URL

If All You See…

By William Teach April 11, 2018 – 1:00 pm

…is a horrifying wood banner made from killing carbon pollution reducing trees, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is The First Street Journal, with a post on what to do when there are no good options.

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LA Is Painting Streets White To Combat Global Warming Or Something

By William Teach April 11, 2018 – 10:46 am

The City of Los Angeles, and CBS LA, unintentionally expose what a huge component of what the reality of global warming is: namely, that so much of the recorded temperatures are artificially inflated from the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect, as well as land use. Yes, these are anthropogenic, but, they are not causing future doom, and the reliance on blamestorming a tiny increase in the atmospheric carbon dioxide content is a bunch of mule fritters

(CBS LA) In the race to combat climate change, the city of Los Angeles is employing a surprising new tactic — covering its streets in a grayish-white coating known as CoolSeal.

It’s sprayed onto the roadway with trucks, then spread across the surface with squeegees. However, its impact extends far beyond the edge of the pavement.

Los Angeles, like so many other modern cities, is encased in thousands of miles of asphalt. And dark-colored asphalt absorbs between 80 and 95 percent of the sun’s rays, heating up not just the streets themselves but the entire surrounding area. So when temperatures in Southern California rise above 100 degrees Fahrenheit, surface temperatures on its asphalt roads can climb to 150. It exacerbates a phenomenon known as the “urban heat island effect,” which the EPA says can add up to 22 degrees Fahrenheit to the average air temperature in a city, compared to the surrounding area.

CoolSeal, which is made by a company called GuardTop, helps to reflect solar rays off asphalt so that less heat is actually absorbed. And according to the Bureau of Street Services, the L.A. streets that have been rendered lighter in color with CoolSeal are 10 to 15 degrees cooler on average than the L.A. streets that have not. That, in turn, keeps the neighborhood from heating up quite as much. Buildings in the area don’t need to use quite as much air conditioning, which can curb costs, benefiting residents’ wallets and the environment.

This is actually not a bad idea, despite the high cost of $40,000 per mile (a concern of read about previously is how long will it last with vehicular and pedestrian traffic constantly using it). There’s no doubt that urbanized areas, and even suburban, are artificially inflating the actual temperature. And this gets reflected (no pun intended) in the Warmist data, where they really do not adjust this out, because, hey, they need to keep the Cult of Climastrology going.

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Posted in Collapsing Science, Global Warming | 11 Comments | Trackback URL

Vox Notices That A Certain Type Of Shooting Happens Every Day In America

By William Teach April 11, 2018 – 8:04 am

I wonder if Leftists will run out and call Vox, and article writer German Lopez, racists?

This kind of shooting happens every day in America — and we usually ignore it

Kimson Green, 17, was a month away from being inducted into the National Honor Society. But on Sunday afternoon, he and three others were caught in a shooting in the Miami neighborhood of Liberty City. Green, a sophomore at Northwestern High School, and former student Rickey Dixon, 18, were killed. Two others were wounded, including a senior from Northwestern High.

Police still have not caught the shooter or shooters, and they have not publicly identified a motive, according to the Miami Herald. An investigation is underway.

Under some definitions (including the one used by the Gun Violence Archive and Vox), the event would actually qualify as a mass shooting — since four or more people were shot, even if they weren’t killed. But the event, despite tweets by survivors from the Parkland, Florida, school shooting, hasn’t gotten much attention — certainly not the kind of national media focus that Parkland drew.

That’s because this shooting appears to represent a more typical kind of gun violence in America. It wasn’t a lone shooter targeting a public space seemingly at random. It was yet another example of gun violence at Liberty Square, an apartment complex that the Miami Herald described as “crime-plagued.” Several other students at Northwestern High have also been killed in shootings over the past few years, according to the Herald.

What was this kind of shooting?

In 2016 (the latest year for which data is available), there were nearly 39,000 gun deaths. More than 14,000 of those were homicides, and almost 23,000 were suicides. Using Mother Jones’s definition of a mass shooting — which uses a narrow framework to try to identify the shootings people usually picture when they hear “mass shooting” — 71 deaths in 2016 were due to mass shootings. That represents less than 1 percent of all gun deaths that year.

Based on what we know so far, the Liberty City shooting represents the 99-plus percent.

The two teenagers who died in the Miami shooting were also black. This, too, is common: In 2016, for example, more than 52 percent of murder victims (73 percent of whom were killed by guns) were black, even though black people only make up about 13 percent of the general population.

So, what we see here is a crime that was a) not a mass shooting and b) involved African Americans in Democratic Party run cities, which never seem to want to do anything to deal with this criminal activity, and, on the few occasions they try, the Leftists will do all they can to shut the programs down as raaaaacist. Leftists prefer Blacks shooting each other rather than have some feelings hurt.

The racial breakdown may help explain the lack of national attention to more typical gun violence. We know that racial biases make white Americans more likely to perceive black people as less innocent and even as criminals, which may, in some people’s minds, make these victims more deserving of the gun violence in their communities.

So, that’s what Democrats think of Blacks? Who knew!

There are also some evidence-based policies that could help reduce everyday gun violence outside the realm of gun control, including more stringent regulations and taxes on alcohol, changes in policing, and behavioral intervention programs. These, too, rarely get national attention after a shooting like Liberty City’s.

Liberals. Good grief. Better yet, they could work to elevate the living standards of Blacks, instead of keeping them down on the Dem plantation.

Oh, and the handgun in the first excerpt? That’s the picture that accompanies the article. Anyone think that Dems are considering going after semi-automatic handguns?

Read: Vox Notices That A Certain Type Of Shooting Happens Every Day In America »

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Bummer: DOJ To Temporarily End Program Giving Illegal Aliens Taxpayer Funded Lawyers

By William Teach April 11, 2018 – 7:46 am

And the lawyers they had had worked super hard to keep all the illegals in this country in contradiction to the law

Justice Dept. to halt legal-advice program for immigrants in detention

The U.S. immigration courts will temporarily halt a program that offers legal assistance to detained foreign nationals facing deportation while it audits the program’s cost-effectiveness, a federal official said Tuesday.

Officials informed the Vera Institute of Justice that starting this month it will pause the nonprofit’s Legal Orientation Program, which last year held information sessions for 53,000 immigrants in more than a dozen states, including California and Texas.

The federal government will also evaluate Vera’s “help desk,” which offers tips to non-detained immigrants facing deportation proceedings in the Chicago, Miami, New York, Los Angeles and San Antonio courts.

Why, exactly, would the U.S. government be funding a program that does this? U.S. code is clear: these people are here illegally, and the primary penalty is to be removed from the U.S.

But advocates said the programs administered by Vera and a network of 18 other nonprofits are a legal lifeline for undocumented immigrants.

“This is a blatant attempt by the administration to strip detained immigrants of even the pretense of due-process rights,” said Mary Meg McCarthy, executive director of the National Immigrant Justice Center, one of the organizations that offers the legal services with Vera.

Well, great, these non-profits can pay for the legal services themselves.

Here’s an important part buried down the article, which Mary Meg forgot to mention when talking about due process

Immigration courts are separate from U.S. criminal courts, where defendants are entitled to a government-appointed lawyer if they cannot pay for their own legal counsel.

The Vera Institute said approximately 8 in 10 detainees in immigration court face a government prosecutor without a lawyer.

So, basically, illegal aliens are not entitled to a government appointed attorney if they cannot afford one. Why? Because illegal immigration is a civil penalty, in the vast majority of cases, which the illegal alien supporters love to point out. Even a lot of absconders, those who have been previously deported and came back illegally, which is a criminal offense, are treated as a civil offense. And, in civil cases, no lawyer is necessary. If you get a normal speeding ticket, you are not going to be offered a lawyer. You can get one if you like. But, government will not give you one. The 6th Amendment is about criminal cases.

A lot of the pro-illegal folks whine about this meaning little to no representation when someone is, say, an asylum seeker. Well, the illegal in question should have gone through legal channels to start with, rather than coming to the U.S. illegally or overstaying their visa. And, if these groups love illegals so much, they can certainly fundraise from all the rich leftists, right? Or, hey, work for free.

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College Campuses Full Of Warmists Need To Change Their Hypocritical Behavior

By William Teach April 10, 2018 – 3:20 pm

Who’s surprised that all these Concerned Kids, raised on a diet of Spreading Awareness from their Leftist teachers, are failing to live the Warmists life?

College campuses need change concerning climate change

Did you know that globally, humans buy a million plastic water bottles per minute, according to Ford?

College campuses can often be filled with people who either care about the environment and who are aware of climate change, and others who could not care less and liter on a daily basis.

How can you prevent damaging the Earth for our generation and the future?

The article actually does a good job in offering ideas that are about kids taking action in their own lives, which they should have been doing already. My big issue, as you’ve read before, is conflating real environmental concerns, such as plastic pollution, with Hotcoldwetdry. The former is real, the latter is a bunch of moonbat droppingd.

Read: College Campuses Full Of Warmists Need To Change Their Hypocritical Behavior »

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If All You See…

By William Teach April 10, 2018 – 1:00 pm

…is a field drying out from too much global warming atmosphere cancer, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is The People’s Cube, with a post noting that the Life Of Julia has ended.

Read: If All You See… »

Posted in If All You See | 8 Comments | Trackback URL

Bummer: Fossil Fuels Might Possibly Melt The Planet Or Something

By William Teach April 10, 2018 – 10:30 am

Insane Warmist alert

As Fossil Fuels Melt the Planet, Could Climate Change Cause a Nuclear Meltdown?

Nearly three dozen nuclear power plants are inadequately protected against major flooding guaranteed to occur after an upstream dam failure – flooding that could easily lead to an accident or meltdown on the scale of the 2011 nuclear power disaster in Fukushima, Japan.

Yet, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) – the federal agency responsible for protecting public health and safety from nuclear power mishaps – has been downplaying the risk and failing to ensure that the measures needed to avert disaster are implemented.

The article goes on to note a big problem with secrecy, most of which occurred under Obama, and this is real, and a real problem is happening (who would have thought govt would be secretive, especially under PBO? )

But, of course, the lunatics make it about their cult

What troubles CSPW – and should trouble us all – over the irresponsible and inappropriately secretive manner in which the NRC is mishandling the vulnerability of nuclear plants to flooding – is that the actual likelihood of a major nuclear incident caused by flooding is even greater than the probability determined by NRC’s risk analysis engineers. This is because their risk assessment calculations rely on past precipitation data that is not representative of the harsher weather and climate conditions we see today, such as severe storms and increased precipitation levels in certain regions of the US, caused by climate change. In fact, we see no evidence that the NRC is considering climate change impacts at all, as it evaluates overall risk of a nuclear power accident.

photo worf-startrek-facepalm_zps01f51f46.gif

Unsurprisingly, the screed goes on to mostly come out against nuclear power. Half of Warmists are ok with nuclear, the other half, who are extreme enviroweenies, are against it.

Read: Bummer: Fossil Fuels Might Possibly Melt The Planet Or Something »

Posted in AGW Idiocy, Enviroweenies, Global Warming, Uncategorized | 1 Comment | Trackback URL
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