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The Southern Poverty Law Center has been sued by an immigration watchdog group after the left-leaning arbiter of social justice labeled it a “hate group,” reports the Washington Times. 

The Center for Immigration Studies says the SPLC’s accusations that it is racist and anti-immigrant are wrong and have cost the nonprofit support and financial backing by scaring people away from doing business with the center.

The center brought its challenge to U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia by filing a civil complaint under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act against SPLC President Richard Cohen and Heidi Beirich, who runs the group’s Hatewatch blog. –Washington Times

Center for Immigration Studies Executive Director Mark Krikorian asserts that his organization doesn’t meet the SPLC’s definitaion of a hate group, and their decision to continue labeling it as such is evidence of the racket. 

“SPLC and its leaders have every right to oppose our work on immigration, but they do not have the right to label us a hate group and suggest we are racists,” said Krikorian. “The Center for Immigration Studies is fighting back against the SPLC smear campaign and its attempt to stifle debate through intimidation and name-calling.”

The SPLC defines hate groups as organizations whose official statements or activities “attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics.”

Krikorian says that doesn’t apply to the Center for Immigration Studies – whose motto is “pro immigrant, low immigration,” and which makes the case for “fewer immigrants but a warmer welcome for those admitted.” He adds that the Supreme Court holds that simply being an immigrant is not an immutable characteristic, so maligning them doesn’t qualify as hate either way. 

Last June the SPLC settled for $3.375 million and issued a public apology after including former Islamic radical named Maajid Nawaz in the group’s “Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists.” 

Since abandoning Islamic radicalism, he has advised three British prime ministers and created the Quilliam Foundation, to fight extremism. He is not anti-Muslim. He is a Muslim and has argued that “Islam is a religion of peace.”

So how did he end up in the SPLC’s pseudo-guide to anti-Muslim bigots? His crime, apparently, is that he has become a leading critic of the radical Islamist ideology he once embraced. Thanks to his courage, the SPLC has been forced to pay a multimillion-dollar penalty and acknowledge in a statement that it was “wrong” and that Nawaz has “made valuable and important contributions to public discourse, including by promoting pluralism and condemning both anti-Muslim bigotry and Islamist extremism.” –Washington Post

In June, PJ Media reported that no fewer than 60 organizations and 47 nonprofit leaders are considering lawsuits against the SPLC for similar smears by the radical left-wing organization. 

“We, the undersigned, are among the organizations, groups and individuals that the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has maligned, defamed and otherwise harmed by falsely describing as ‘haters,’ ‘bigots,’ ‘Islamophobes’ and/or other groundless epithets,” the signatories declared. “We are gratified that the SPLC has today formally acknowledged that it has engaged in such misrepresentations.”

“Journalists who uncritically parrot or cite the SPLC’s unfounded characterizations of those it reviles do a profound disservice to their audiences,” the signatories added.

Meanwhile, as the Daily Caller noted last year, the SPLC is widely relied upon by Silicon Valley social media platforms to police “hate speech.” 

Four of the world’s biggest tech platforms have working partnerships with a left-wing nonprofit that has a track record of inaccuracies and routinely labels conservative organizations as “hate groups.”

Facebook, Amazon, Google and Twitter all work with or consult the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) in policing their platforms for “hate speech” or “hate groups,” a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation found.

The SPLC is on a list of “external experts and organizations” that Facebook works with “to inform our hate speech policies,” Facebook spokeswoman Ruchika Budhraja told TheDCNF in an interview.

…

Of the four companies, Amazon gives the SPLC the most direct authority over its platform, TheDCNF found.

While Facebook emphasizes its independence from the SPLC, Amazon does the opposite: Jeff Bezos’ company grants the SPLC broad policing power over the Amazon Smile charitable program, while claiming to remain unbiased.

“We remove organizations that the SPLC deems as ineligible,” an Amazon spokeswoman told TheDCNF.

Amazon grants the SPLC that power “because we don’t want to be biased whatsoever,” said the spokeswoman, who could not say whether Amazon considers the SPLC to be unbiased. –Daily Caller

In fact, Apple pledged $1 million to the organization, while J.P. Morgan has given the group $500,000. “Companies like Lyft and MGM Resorts have partnered with the group, while Pfizer, Bank of America, and Newman’s Own have each contributed over $8,900 to the SPLC in recent years,” according to the PJ Media report. 

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Authored by James Bovard via The Mises Institute,

Franklin Roosevelt did more than any other modern president to corrupt Americans’ understanding of freedom. Last week was the 75th anniversary of his 1944 speech calling for a second Bill of Rights to guarantee economic freedom to Americans. Nation magazine whooped up the anniversary, proclaiming that Democrats now have a “unique—and likely fleeting—opportunity to deliver where FDR fell short” with vast new government programs.

The 1944 speech, given as the tide in World War Two was finally turning, was a followup of his 1941 “Four Freedoms” speech which exploited Americans’ rising apprehensions to see far more power for the government. Roosevelt promised citizens freedom of speech and freedom of worship and then, as if he was merely enumerating other self-evident rights, declared:

“The third [freedom] is freedom from want . . . everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear . . . anywhere in the world.”

Proclaiming a goal of freedom from fear meant that government should fill the role in daily life previously filled by God and religion. Politicians are the biggest fearmongers, and “freedom from fear” would justify seizing new power in response to every bogus federal alarm.

FDR’s list was clearly intended as a “replacement set” of freedoms, since otherwise there would have been no reason to mention freedom of speech and worship, already guaranteed by the First Amendment. The “four freedoms” offered citizens no security from the State, since it completely ignored the rights guaranteed in the original Bill of Rights that restricted government power, including the Second Amendment (to keep and bear firearms), the Fourth Amendment (freedom from unreasonable search and seizure), the Fifth Amendment (due process, property rights, the right against self-incrimination), the Sixth Amendment (the right to a speedy and public trial by an impartial jury), and the Eighth Amendment (protection against excessive bail, excessive fines, and cruel and unusual punishments).

And, while Roosevelt pretended to magnanimously recognize a right to freedom of speech, that did not include freedom to dissent:

“A free nation has the right to expect full cooperation from all groups…. The best way of dealing with the few slackers or trouble makers in our midst is, first, to shame them by patriotic example, and, if that fails, to use the sovereignty of government to save government.”

Roosevelt sounded like James Madison had simply forgotten the asterisk to the First Amendment about using “the sovereignty of government to save government.” FDR’s “new freedom” would justify suppressing anyone who balked at the political ruling class’s latest goals.

Regardless of its authoritarian overtones, FDR’s Four Freedoms doctrine quickly became enshrined, by Norman Rockwell and others, in American political mythology. President George H.W. Bush, speaking on the fiftieth anniversary of the Four Freedoms speech, called FDR “our greatest American political pragmatist” and praised him for having “brilliantly enunciated the 20th-century vision of our Founding Fathers’ commitment to individual liberty.” President Bill Clinton declared in October 1996, “In Franklin Roosevelt’s view, government should be the perfect public system for fostering and protecting the ‘Four Freedoms’ . . . Roosevelt . . . enumerated these freedoms not as abstract ideals but as goals toward which Americans—and caring people everywhere— could direct their most strenuous public efforts.” President George W. Bush invoked Roosevelt’s Four Freedom proclamation in Bush’s most fraudulent speech — his “Mission Accomplished” huff-and-strut aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln in May 2003.

Three years later, in his 1944 State of the Union address , Roosevelt revealed that the original Bill of Rights had “proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.” Roosevelt called for a “Second Bill of Rights,” and asserted that: “True individual freedom can’t exist without economic security.” And security, according to FDR, included “the right to a useful and remunerative job,” “decent home,” “good health,” and “good education.” Thus, if a government school failed to teach all fifth graders to read, the nonreaders would be considered oppressed (lawsuits over public school failures in Michigan and elsewhere against local and state governments have relied on similar claptrap). Similarly, if someone was in bad health, then that person would be considered as having been deprived of his freedom, and somehow it would be the government’s fault. Freedom thus required boundless control over health care.

Roosevelt also declared that liberty requires “the right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living.” In other words, government should inflate food prices high enough to keep the nation’s least efficient farmer behind his mule and plow. But FDR-style freedom also required unlimited federal control over every farmer. At that point, USDA was dictating to every wheat farmer exactly how many acres of the grain they could grow. An Indiana farmer exceeded his quota to grow wheat to feed to his hogs. The Roosevelt administration hounded him all the way to the Supreme Court, claiming it needed a free hand to “suppress … a public evil.” And what was the “public evil”? Wheat surpluses and uppity farmers who failed to kowtow to every USDA bureaucrat.

FDR also proclaimed “the right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition.” Here was another new freedom that could be secured only by giving bureaucrats unlimited control of the private sector. Two years earlier, Congress enacted the Emergency Price Control Act, which created an Office of Price Administration with sweeping power to set or strike down prices in practically any industry. The act contained no substantive guidelines for the administrator’s decisions but merely required prices that “in his judgment will be generally fair and equitable.” When the Supreme Court upheld the law in 1944, Justice Owen Roberts bitterly dissented that “it is plain that this Act creates personal government by a petty tyrant instead of government by law.” Roberts scoffed at the court’s rubber-stamping of the law as a “solemn farce” because the law was written so that “the courts are unable to say that the Administrator has exceeded the discretion vested in him.”

Pundits and progressives who are whooping up Roosevelt’s Second Bill of Rights almost always ignore perhaps the biggest surprise in that speech. While Roosevelt spoke gaudily of new rights, he scooped George Orwell’s 1984 by revealing that slavery was freedom – or at least “close enough for government work.” FDR urged Congress to enact a “national service law— which for the duration of the war . . . will make available for war production or for any other essential services every able-bodied adult in this Nation.” FDR invoked the “eternally just principle of ‘fair for one, fair for all’” to justify destroying the freedom of every worker in the nation. He promised that this proposal, described in his official papers as a Universal Conscription Act, would be a “unifying moral force” and “a means by which every man and woman can find that inner satisfaction which comes from making the fullest possible contribution to victory.” Presumably, the less freedom people had, the more satisfied they’d become. And anyone who did not feel liberated by federal commands was a bastard who deserved all the misery officialdom heaped upon them.

H.L. Mencken wisely observed, “One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms.” Americans are still suffering because Franklin Roosevelt’s freedom bunkum was not immediately laughed off the national stage. Any politician who seeks more power today to bestow more freedom in the distant future deserves all the ridicule Americans can heave his way.

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Winter Storm Harper will become a major snowstorm from the Great Plains to the Midwest and Northeast Friday into the weekend, according to The Weather Channel.

A blast of Arctic air will return to the nation’s northern tier starting Thursday.

The storm system entered the West Coast Wednesday will collide into that frigid air once it reaches central and eastern states Friday through the weekend, delivering the possibility of Snowmageddon for parts of the Northeast.

Weather models are not sure on the exact trajectory of the system as it currently pivots through the central and eastern states.

On Thursday, Harper is set to bring snow into the Rockies, Sierras and Cascades, then push into the Northern Plains by evening. On Friday, snow will continue in the Rockies and Plains — leaving the possibility for blizzard conditions.

Late Friday, the lower Great Lakes, Kansas, parts of Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle are expected to experience some form of wintery precipitation. Sleet and freezing rain are expected for northern Missouri and southern Illinois.

On Saturday, the big snow event is expected to start in the Northeast. Heavy snow will also continue in some regions of the Plains and Midwest, said The Weather Channel.

By Saturday evening, snow will blanket parts of New England, while a mix of wintery perception is expected in parts of the Ohio Valley, the mid-Atlantic, the lower Hudson Valley, and southern New England.

On Sunday, that is when Snowmageddon could strike New York State. The Weather Channel indicates that people should prepare for heavy snow in parts of northern Pennsylvania, New York state, and northern New England. 

Already, the National Weather Service has issued a winter storm watch for western and north-central New York well before Harper’s arrival this weekend.

As of Thursday morning, it is too early to know the exact trajectory of the storm and snowfall totals, due to the unknown track of the low-pressure system and the rain/snow line. However, it certainly looks like a major snow event this weekend is an immient threat to the Northeast. 

 

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Authored by Adam Taggart via PeakProsperity.com,

Estimates of recoverable oil are proving wildly wrong…

Art Berman, geological consultant with over 37 years experience in petroleum exploration and production, returns to the podcast this week to debunk much of the hopium currently surrounding America’s shale oil output.

Because the US is pinning huge hopes on its shale oil “revolution”, so much depends on that story being right. Here’s the narrative right now:

• The US, is the new Saudi Arabia

• It’s the swing producer when it comes to influencing the price of oil

• The US will be able to increase oil production for decades to come

• New technology is unlocking more oil shale supply all the time

But what if there’s evidence that runs counter to all of that?

We’re going to be taking a little victory lap on this week’s podcast because The Wall Street Journal has finally admitted that shale oil wells are not producing as much as the companies operating them touted they would produce — which is what we’ve been saying for years here at PeakProsperity.com, largely because we closely follow Art’s work:

The Wall Street Journal did some research and they got the general point that the wells are not as good as advertised.

But what they missed is just how much farther off many of these reserves are than even the discounted reserves that they’ve reported.

Bottom line: if the understatement is only 10%, that’s a rounding error and it’s not that much of an issue to the average person. But I’ve been trying for a decade to get the number that I independently develop to get anywhere close to the published numbers. In most cases, I can only get near 60% or 70% of them. So, the gap, I think is much more substantial.

The reason that The Wall Street Journal didn’t get it more right is because they don’t do any independent research and of course they didn’t talk to me, they didn’t talk to Dave Hughes, they didn’t talk to people who actually do the work, and so they’re getting one side of the story. 

Click the play button below to listen to Chris’ interview with Art Berman (52m:56s).

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For Crispin Odey, revenge is a dish best served at 2 and 20 degrees.

The hedge fund manager, who suffered years of underperformance with many, including occasionally this site, predicting his demise when year after year Odey dared to “fight the Fed” and go all in on his bet for a “violent unwind” of the QE bubble, finally enjoyed a triumphant return in 2018 when, as we reported in December, his performance in 2018 was absolutely stellar, topping the HSBC hedge fund league table and generating nearly double the return of his next closest peer with a 52% YTD return for his European fund.

Now, still fresh from his victory tour, the billionaire hedge fund investor has once again turned to a topic that is near and dear to his heart, namely Brexit – which he backed and which has been the source of much of his profits last year – and in an interview with Financial News, Odey warned of a “revolution” if politicians fail to ensure the UK leaves the European Union.

While the high-profile investor, who donated generously to the Vote Leave campaign in 2016, prompted some confusion last was weekend when he quoted as saying Brexit “ain’t gonna happen” because “I just can’t see how it happens with that configuration of parliament”, speaking to Financial News, Odey elaborated saying his comment referred only to the short-term political outlook, and that he believes that Brexit can – and must – happen in the long run.

“All I was saying, which maybe was misquoted, was that it was very obvious, given the constitution of parliament, that we weren’t going to get a Brexit,” he said. “It doesn’t mean that they [politicians] are not going to get scared about what they are going to do when they have to face constituents, having promised that they would deliver Brexit.”

Odey then warned ominously that “in the long-term, usually what the people want, the people get. Otherwise there’s a revolution.”

His latest predictions come in a week of turmoil for UK politics, with parliament delivering a crushing defeat to Prime Minister Theresa May’s EU withdrawal agreement on January 15 and the PM surviving a vote of no confidence in her government just one day later. May will now work with MPs across all parties to try and find a way of moving Brexit forward, with the UK’s official exit date of March 29 fast approaching.

To be sure, Odey is anything if unconflicted: he donated £873,323 to the Vote Leave campaign. Along with Paul Marshall, co-founder of Marshall Wace, and Savvas Savouri, chief economist of Toscafund Asset Management, Odey is one of the City’s most high-profile Brexit backers according to FN.

He also restated his belief that the pound would now strengthen, having bet against the UK currency in the recent past. “Sterling has been oversold,” Odey said. “If sterling is likely to be rising, why be short on it?”

This is another trade where he has been spot on because after flash crashing early in January, on Thursday the pound rose to the highest since Nov. 15, squeezing numerous shorts, after U.K. opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn said that a second referendum remains an option in the Brexit saga.

And in totally separate news, Orlando Montagu, a partner at Odey Asset Management, announced he is leaving the company in March to focus on his family’s famous: the sandwich. Montagu is a direct descendant of the 4th Earl of Sandwich, who was credited with inventing the snack in the 18th century. He will leave Odey Asset Management at the end of March after more than 16 years at the firm. He’ll work at his family’s mostly U.S.-based business, also known as Earl of Sandwich, which has plans to open in London.

Speaking to Bloomberg, Montagu, who is deputy chairman and part of the executive committee which runs the hedge-fund firm., said “the timing feels right. Crispin is performing well, clients are making money and the Odey team is upbeat.”

 

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President Trump on Thursday scrapped a scheduled delegation to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, citing the partial government shutdown. 

Several cabinet officials were slated to attend the trip headed up by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Deputy Chiief of Staff Chris Liddell. 

“Out of consideration for the 800,000 great American workers not receiving pay and to ensure his team can assist as needed, President Trump has canceled his delegation’s trip to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement.

Earlier Thursday, President Trump nixed Nancy Pelosi’s planned overseas trip to Afghanistan and other countries by refusing to provide military transportation for her delegation. The move came after the Democratic Speaker of the House “disinvited” Trump from giving the State of the Union address later this month.

The Davos cancellation follows an initial scaling back of the US delegation to the gathering of political elites which will run from Jan. 22-25. 

Earlier Thursday, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) questioned why the Speaker’s trip was canceled while the Davos trip was still on the schedule. 

“The president’s concern about [a trip] into a war zone apparently doesn’t apply to a delegation from the administration going to Davis the following week. Because we got confirmation that is still planned,” said Schiff, who added that President Trump is acting “like he’s in the 5th grade.” 

Of course, Pelosi “disinviting” Trump from giving the State of the Union speech wasn’t exactly mature either.

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Authored by Gary Galles via The Mises Institute,

Why is politics so negative compared to marketing — its analog in the private sector — even though virtually every candidate echoes the desire to “just get along”? The explanation revolves around two important ways political competition differs from market competition: higher payoffs to negative attacks, and rationally ignorant “customers.”

Selling your product in the private sector requires a customer to cast an affirmative vote to buy it. Just convincing a potential customer that a rival product should not be purchased does not mean a sale for you.

This is because a sales prospect can choose from among several sellers, or he can choose to not buy at all. But those options are unavailable in an election with only two major parties, where customers are effectively forced to “buy” from one of them.

In an essentially two-party election, convincing an uncommitted voter to vote against the “other guy” by tearing the opponent’s position down is as valuable to a candidate as convincing that voter of positive reasons to vote for him; either brings him a vote closer to a majority. That is not true in the private sector, as only votes for you — purchases — help you.

Similarly, talking a voter committed to a rival to switch to your side is worth two votes, since it adds one to your vote column and subtracts one from your rival’s. But you would only benefit from the single additional purchase/vote for you in the private sector. Further, in an election, finding a way to get someone who would have voted for your rival to not vote at all is as valuable as getting one more voter to vote for you.

This is why negative campaigns that turn voters off from political participation altogether are acceptable in politics, as long as a candidate thinks he will keep more of his competitor’s voters away from the polls than he will his own. In the private sector, such an approach would not be taken, as it would reduce, rather than increase, sales.

So despite ongoing pleas to “change the tone” in politics, political competition is far more negative than market competition, primarily because negative attacks have a greater payoff in politics (witness the growth of opposition research). But that incentive is intensified by the fact that voters are far less informed about what they are being sold than private-sector customers.

People acquire information to make decisions only so long as they expect the added benefits they receive from a better choice to exceed the added costs of obtaining the information necessary to make it. This benefit is substantial in market decisions, since your vote changes your result.

Why It Makes Sense to be Ignorant about Candidates and Policies

In the political arena, however, your vote is but one among many, giving you only a minute chance of influencing the outcome, and yielding you virtually no benefits from casting a better vote. Further, the cost of acquiring the information necessary for public-sector decisions tends to be much higher, because a great deal more information is required than simply knowing how a choice will directly affect you.

The higher costs and lower benefits to becoming informed lead most voters to have less information about political decisions than about their market decisions, particularly crucial swing voters, who are often among the least informed in the electorate. That further raises the payoff to negative campaigning, especially the use of misleading part-truths. They are simple, but reality is complex and therefore is much harder to “sell” to voters paying limited attention.

Any public policy has many effects, some of which will be adverse, and those can be easily separated out and packaged to inflame rationally ignorant voters. Politics also involves compromises, and, taken out of context, any compromise can provide fodder for attacks that a candidate has abandoned principle. The result, according to Barbara O’Connor, director of Cal State Sacramento’s Institute for the Study of Politics and Media, is the widespread use of “facts taken out of context or misleading facts where you know that including the truth would negate the point you’re making.”

As electoral competition heats up this year, we will see politicians decrying opponents’ negative attacks at the same time they are launching their own negative attacks.  That inconsistency will madden many of us.

But negativity is built into the incentive structure of modern politics. So despite continuing pleas for honesty and civility, it will only get worse as long as the government continues to expand its control over Americans’ lives, increasing the payoff from controlling the political process.

In fact, the only real solution to negative attack politics is to reduce the power and scope of government over our lives, returning that control to the voluntary arrangements we make for ourselves.  However, that solution is unlikely to come from those so busily abusing the truth to become or remain a part of government.

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Freshman Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-MN) awkwardly struggled to explain her accusation that Sen. Lindsey Graham is “compromised” in her response to a tweet implying that the South Carolina senator is being blackmailed to support President Trump. 

They got to him, he is compromised! https://t.co/m8sB3EmElg

— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) January 16, 2019

When pressed on her tweet by CNN, Omar said “I am pretty sure that there is something happening with him – whether it is something that has to do with his funding when it comes to running for office. Whether it has to do with the polling that they might have in his district. Or whether it has to do with some sort of leadership within the Senate,” adding “He is somehow compromised“

Jim Sciutto: That’s quite a charge to make, you say you’re pretty sure – based on what evidence? What facts? That’s a remarkable comment to make about a sitting US Senator. 

Omar: The, the, the, the evidence really is present to us – it’s being presented to us by the way he is behaving.

Poppy Harlow: But that’s not evidence, that’s your opinion. 

Omar: My tweet was just an opinion based on what I believe to be visible to me, and I’m pretty sure there are lots of Americans who agree on this. 

Watch: 

As noted by Grabien, accusations of Graham being blackmailed are part of a longstanding “whisper campaign” over the South Carolina Senator’s sexuality – such as this Sunday tweet from the chair of a Democratic super PAC, John Cooper, who said that Graham was being “probably” being blackmailed over “some pretty serious sexual kink.” 

A Republican just told me that he doubts @LindseyGrahamSC is kowtowing to Trump (and indirectly Putin) because he’s being blackmailed over his sexual orientation (an open secret) or even financial corruption. Rather, he thinks it probably involves some pretty serious sexual kink.

— Jon Cooper (@joncoopertweets) January 13, 2019

This started when a coordinator for Dem Coalition specifically stated “pretty serious sexual kink”. Two days later, it made it’s way to MSNBC where Stephanie Ruhle said “Trump or somebody knows something pretty extreme about Lindsey Graham” And now a sitting member of congress https://t.co/hnkYDgrxas

— Stephen Miller (@redsteeze) January 17, 2019

Holy, fuck fuck. I just the video of trumps bipartisan “meeting” yesterday. Hey, @LindseyGrahamSC what kind of dick sucking video do they have on you for you 2 be acting like this? Wouldn’t coming out be more honorable?

— Chelsea Handler (@chelseahandler) January 11, 2018

Meanwhile, on MSNBC, anchor Stephanie Ruhle made the same claim. During a panel on the same day as Rashid’s tweet, Graham’s 2015 “bigot” comment was brought up. Former Republican David Jolly said Graham apparently has a “change of heart.”

Or, Ruhle said, “Donald Trump or somebody knows something pretty extreme about Lindsey Graham.”

“Pretty extreme”? The idea, of course, was to let viewers’ imaginations take over from there. Ruhle is not the only MSNBC host to traffic in anti-gay rumor-mongering about Graham. On a now-defunct blog, her colleague Joy Ann Reid repeatedly referred to Graham as “Miss Lindsey.” (She also accused Karl Rove, then-Republican Charlie Crist, and the son of Chief Justice Roberts of being gay.) –Grabien

Graham has previously denied being gay, telling the New York Times in 2010: “I ain’t gay.” 

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Authored by Andrew Moran via Liberty Nation,

If the left had its way, government teachers would be a protected class, afforded all the privileges the nation has to offer. Rather than bargaining and compromising, a blank check would be handed to these education professionals. Despite indoctrination overtaking the three Rs, putrid test results, and students ill-equipped to handle the real world, unions expect more from taxpayers, even if they cannot afford their exorbitant demands.

LA Teachers Protest

An estimated 30,000 Los Angeles teachers recently took to the streets for the first time in 30 years. What was the reason for this strike that crippled the second-largest school district in the country, affecting half-a-million students? Unsurprisingly: money. Marching down the streets of L.A. and sporting the color red, thousands of teachers and activists wanted four things:

• A 6.5% pay raise right away.

• A reduction in class sizes (meaning less work).

• An order to “fully staff” schools with librarians, nurses, counselors, and other support personnel.

• A guarantee that public school funding will not be impacted by privatization.

Suffice it to say, if teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) were given an exorbitant pay raise, they’d likely forego the other demands.

Alex Caputo-Pearl, president of UTLA, told the crowd:

“Here we are on a rainy day in the richest country in the world, in the richest state in the country, in a state that’s blue as it can be – and in a city rife with millionaires – where teachers have to go on strike to get the basics for our students.”

Their plight garnered the support of the usual suspects: Black Lives Matter, Democrats, and Hollywood.

Void Of Facts

Won’t somebody please think of the children?

Whenever instructors walk off the job in the name of their pupils, the mainstream media’s reportage, especially at the national level, is typically one-sided. The broadcasts usually lay the blame on Republicans, privatization, and other conservative conspiracies to bleed public schools dry. This isn’t shocking, considering the political nature of the press.

Unfortunately for those who seek the truth, the coverage is void of facts.

For instance, what is often absent in the discussion is the political representation. L.A. has a Democratic mayor, California has a Democratic governor, Democrats have a supermajority in the state legislature, and the courts are left-leaning. The right cannot be blamed for this one.

So, it’s really the left that is engaging in a war on teachers? Not exactly.

Let’s begin with the makeup of the school district: It boasts a $7.52 billion budget and more than 60,000 employees, including about 26,000 teachers, with the average annual salary being $73,000. While employment has gone up 16% since 2004, enrollment has dropped 10% in the same period.

According to the latest available data, California school funding surged by nearly 10% from 2015 to 2016. If you examine a five-year period (2011 to 2016), school funding in the state is up a whopping 26%. Governor Gavin Newsom (D-CA) has further proposed the “largest ever investment” in the LAUSD.

Plus, the district already offered LAUSD educators a pay raise of 3% this year and another 3% in 2020. It was rejected.

But the school district can’t afford another pay hike. Next year, LAUSD will have a $422 million budget deficit, mainly because employee pension and health care costs represent a great portion of the budget – they will account for more than half within 10 years. Overall, it has $5.1 billion more in liabilities than in assets and another $15 billion in unfunded health care benefit liabilities for retirees and current workers.

Officials conceded in a 2018 report that its shortfall “threatens its long-term viability and its ability to deliver basic education programs.” So, if raises were handed out, then future liabilities would swell, which would create long-term headaches that can only be remedied by a cocktail of cutbacks and higher taxes.

Failing Report Card

Children are falling behind in mathematics, drag queen story times are infiltrating public schools, and social justice is paramount to reading comprehension.

After spending 13 years in government indoctrination camps, studies have found that many Americans cannot answer basic questions relating to history, science, geography, or even money. One can only imagine the left’s reaction if the private sector delivered such results. So, why should teachers and administrators be compensated more than they already are? If you continually failed at your job, your boss would not allow you to keep your position, let alone present you with a raise.

Today, teachers earn more than average Americans, receive a myriad of opulent benefits, and will have quite the winter years thanks to overgenerous retirement packages provided by politicians. Yet, these civil servants are always wanting more and use the children as pawns to get their way. When will elected officials stand up for the taxpayers and not the powerful teachers’ unions?

via RSS http://bit.ly/2SVBArS Tyler Durden

Thursday’s presidential visit to the Pentagon for the long awaited Missile Defense Review — the first such congressionally mandated assessment of the state of the nation’s defense systems since 2010 — gave Trump yet another chance to chastise NATO allies on his as yet unmet demand that they “step up” defense spending. He also hinted that he plans to stick by his recent deeply controversial decision to pull out of the Reagan-era Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty with Russia.

“We are committed to establishing a missile defense program that can shield every city in the United States and we will never negotiate away our right to do this,” President Trump said.

“We will insist on fair burden-sharing with our allies,” he said. “We’re protecting all of these wealthy countries, which I’m very honored to do, but many of them are so wealthy they can easily pay us the cost of this protection. So you’ll see big changes taking place.”

Foremost among the “big changes” Trump outlined during his formal remarks unveiling the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Review are plans to implement a system of 20 ground-based missile interceptors to be placed in Alaska which could “shield every city” in the continental United States. The goal would be to “terminate any missile launches from hostile powers, or even from powers that make a mistake,” he said. 

This is part of broader plans to be studied and developed that aim to “ensure that we can detect and destroy any missile launched against the United States anywhere, anytime, anyplace.” Toward this end he outlined six major changes to Washington’s missile defense policy, including investment into “new technologies” such as space-based launch detection sensors, laser defenses, as well defending against hypersonic missiles, among other changes. 

“The US will now adjust its posture to also defend against any missile strikes, including cruise and hypersonic missiles. And we are by the way very advanced also on hypersonic technology and missiles,” the president said. 

And as expected, the most attention grabbing part of his speech, echoed in plans for research laid out in the Pentagon review, which will inform the White House’s Pentagon funding request for the upcoming fiscal year 2020 budget, involved comments on last year’s announced Space Force and integrating missile defense with space. He said the US must “recognize that space is a new warfighting domain, with the Space Force leading the way.” He further promised it will be a “very, very big part” of America’s future defense:

My upcoming budget will invest in a space-based missile defense layer. It’s new technology. It’s ultimately going to be a very, very big part of our defense and obviously of our offence.

We will ensure that enemy missiles find no sanctuary on Earth or in the skies above. This is the direction that I’m heading.

Potential plans and areas of further research laid out in the Pentagon review include “early warning systems” in space that could track missiles as they are being prepared for launch, perhaps ever more crucial given current reports of Russian and Chinese rapid development of hypersonic threats. 

Pres. Trump says upcoming budget will “invest in a space-based missile defense layer.”

“We will recognize that space is a new war fighting domain, with the Space Force leading the way.” https://t.co/gSCiI7nuGk pic.twitter.com/HE3vIigfnP

— ABC News (@ABC) January 17, 2019

This will involve exploration of “a space-based interceptor that could fire rockets into space, directed at an incoming missile,” according to senior officials. This will also include study of the use of what an official described as “directed energy” against incoming missiles, possibly through laser technology.

On these and other technologies that sound straight out of Star Trek the concluding section to the now published Missile Defense Review itself reads as follows:

As rogue state missile arsenals develop, space will play a particularly important role in support of missile defense.

Russia and China are developing advanced cruise missiles and hypersonic missile capabilities that can travel at exceptional speeds with unpredictable flight paths that challenge existing defensive systems.

The exploitation of space provides a missile defense posture that is more effective, resilient and adaptable to known and unanticipated threats… DoD will undertake a new and near-term examination of the concepts and technology for space-based defenses to assess the technological and operational potential of space-basing in the evolving security environment.

Specifically the Missile Defense Review focuses in part on the capabilities and strategic intentions of rising threats like China and Iran, as well as North Korea and Russia. Trump’s remarks singled out Iran by name, also following similar words by Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan, while noting “foreign adversaries, competitors and rogue regimes are steadily enhancing their missile arsenals.”.

During this part of the speech he invoked Iran’s failed missile launch test on Tuesday which Iran had long said is part of a peaceful, UN-allowed space program to put satellites into orbit. 

Trump continued of the proposed Alaska-based expanded defense shield, which would eventually be tied into space-based sensors, “It’s ultimately going to be a very, very big part of our defense and obviously of our offense,” and detailed, “The system will be monitored and we will terminate any missile launches from hostile powers or even powers that make a mistake. It won’t happen, regardless of the missile type or geographic origins of the attack.”

The president also boasted of American capabilities and his willingness to invest anything it takes to keep the homeland safe, saying, “We have some very bad players out there and we’re a good player, but we can be far worse than anybody if need be.”

But such advanced and futuristic sounding systems could still be a long way off before they’re realized, as the review lays out plans to study the possibilities of what’s tantamount to “weaponizing space” that will be years if not decades in research and development. 

And no doubt, foreign nations and their defense sectors paid very close attention to Trump’s remarks and will be carefully studying the Missile Defense Review, especially competitors in Beijing, Moscow, and Pyongyang. 

via RSS http://bit.ly/2Fx5ks3 Tyler Durden