Month: August 2018

San Francisco Activists Demanded 100 Percent Affordable Housing From a Developer. Now They’re Getting None.

Even when housing developments win in San Francisco, they lose. Just look at a long-planned apartment building in the city’s Mission District, which is now being scuttled a few months after the developer won permission to finally start construction.

For the last three years, the company Axis has been trying to get permission to put up a 117-unit apartment complex off Folsom Street. Any new building in notoriously anti-development San Francisco is bound to attract controversy, and the Folsom project was no exception.

When Axis first unveiled its designs at a 2015 public meeting, attendees went ballistic, unimpressed by the developer’s offer to rent out 17 of the units at below-market rates. According to Curbed, activists with the city-recognized Calle 24 Latino Cultural District waved signs saying, “No more expensive Market Rate Housing! 100% Affordable Housing now!” Others shouted chants of “give Axis the axe” or banged on drums.

The objection from these activists—the same one raised against any market-rate development in the city—is that newer, more expensive housing stock would drive out the neighborhood’s lower-income, predominantly Hispanic population. “Axis development’s cultural impacts will negatively affect the character of adjacent Calle 24,” project opponents wrote in a 2017 open letter, warning that the market-rate apartment building would attract a flood of wealthy white people who would form a new “gentry class” that would force out lower-income residents.

This anti-development coalition, which included the San Francisco Tenants Union and an affordable housing group known as the Mission Economic Development Agency (MEDA) as well as Calle 24, demanded that the city conduct a more thorough environmental review of the Axis project, taking into account its cultural impact. As illustrated by the struggles of Robert Tillman, who has been trying to turn a nearby laundromat he owns into an apartment building for nearly five years over the objections of the same activists, these demands can gum up a project for years.

Eventually tiring of fighting activist demands and endless environmental appeals, Axis agreed in May 2018 to increase the number of below-market units from 17 to 31 (23 of them in the new apartment building on Folsom, the other eight elsewhere in the city), rent 5,200 square feet of what would have been commercial retail space to a community nonprofit for a $1 a year for 55 years (which represents a huge amount of forgone revenue), and use all union labor for construction. These concessions brought activists and local politicians around, and Axis got permission to build shortly afterward. But the conditions made the project uneconomical, and Axis found it was cheaper to just sell the land.

What will now happen with the site is up in the air. Mission Local reports that affordable housing developer Mission Housing is eyeing the land for a 100 percent below-market development. MEDA might also want to snatch up the Folsom site after having done its best to sabotage Axis’ plans for it.

Either group would need some mix of city funding, publicly subsidized bonds, and tax credits to finance such a project, which could take a long time to pull together. Other market-rate developers might be interested in the site, but given local hostility they are apt to be wary.

The end result of this years-long process is that nothing gets built and no one gets what he wants. Axis will have to take a haircut on its investment. Local residents will get none of the affordable housing or community space promised them. Potential Folsom tenants will go back to competing over existing housing units, further driving up prices in one of America’s most expensive cities.

I can’t help but think that everyone in this story would be better off if we just let property owners build what they want on their own damned land.

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“In Government, Scum Rises To The Top”

Authored by Walter Williams, op-ed via Townhall.com,

Some Ideas To Think About

Poverty is no mystery, and it’s easily avoidable. The poverty line that the Census Bureau used in 2016 for a single person was an income of $12,486 that year. For a two-person household, it was $16,072, and for a four-person household, it was $24,755. To beat those poverty thresholds is fairly simple. Here’s the road map: Complete high school; get a job, any kind of a job; get married before having children; and be a law-abiding citizen.

How about some numbers? A single person taking a minimum wage job would earn an annual income of $15,080. A married couple would earn $30,160. By the way, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, less than 4 percent of hourly workers in 2016 were paid the minimum wage. That means that over 96 percent of workers earned more than the minimum wage. Not surprising is the fact that among both black and white married couples, the poverty rate is in the single digits. Most poverty is in female-headed households.

Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign garnered considerable appeal from millennials. These young people see socialism as superior to free market capitalism. Capitalism doesn’t do well in popularity polls, despite the fact that it has eliminated many of mankind’s worst problems, such as pestilence and gross hunger and poverty. One of the reasons is that capitalism is always evaluated against the nonexistent, non-realizable utopias of socialism or communism. Any earthly system, when compared with a utopia, will not fare well. Indeed, socialism sounds good but, when practiced, leads to disaster. Those disasters have been experienced in countries such as the USSR, China, most African nations and, most recently, Venezuela. When these disasters are pointed out, the excuse is inadequacies of socialist leaders rather than socialism itself. For the ordinary person, free market capitalism, with all of its warts, is superior to any system yet devised to deal with our everyday needs and desires.

Here are a couple of questions: Does an act clearly immoral when done privately become moral when done collectively? Does legality or majority consensus establish morality? Before you answer, consider that slavery was legal; South African apartheid was legal; the horrendous Stalinist, Nazi and Maoist purges were legal. Clearly, the fact of legality or a majority consensus cannot establish morality.

You might ask, “If you’re so smart, Williams, what establishes morality?” That’s easy, and you tell me when I make the wrong step. My initial premise is that we own ourselves. You are your private property, and I am mine. Self-ownership reveals what’s moral and immoral. Rape is immoral because it violates private property. So is murder and any other initiation of violence. Most people probably agree with me that rape and murder are immoral, but what about theft? Some Americans would have a problem deciding whether theft is moral or immoral.

Let’s first define what theft is. A fairly good working definition of theft is the taking by force of one person’s property and the giving of it to another to whom it does not belong. Most Americans think that doing that is OK as long as it’s done by government. We think that it is OK for Congress to take the earnings of one American to give to another American in the form of agricultural subsidies, business bailouts, aid for higher education, food stamps, welfare and other such activities that make up at least two-thirds of the federal budget. If I took some of your earnings to give to a poor person, I’d go to jail. If a congressman did the same thing, he’d be praised.

People tend to love a powerful government. Quite naturally, a big, powerful government tends to draw into it people with bloated egos, people who think they know more than everyone else and have little hesitance in coercing their fellow man. Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek explained why corruption is rife in government: “In government, the scum rises to the top.”

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Entire Police Force Quits In This Massachusetts Town

The citizens of Blandford, Massachusetts, a small town in Hampden County, are in complete disarray after the entire police department resigned Monday night, citing faulty equipment and hazardous working conditions.

Interim Police Chief Roberta Sarnacki and three officers submitted resignations in a letter to Blandford officials on Monday, effective immediately.

“We refuse to put our lives on the line anymore for a town that seemingly cares so little about us,” read a statement signed by Sarnacki, the interim police chief, and the three officers. Immediately after resigning, the officers shut down the police station and said they were never coming back.

Around 8:53 pm on Sunday, the Blandford Police Department’ s Facebook page announced: “Attention Blandford residents: If you have a police, fire or medical emergency, please continue to call 911 as you normally would. Until further notice, please call the Russell State Police Barracks at 413-862-3312 if you need any other police services. The entire Blandford Police Department resigned this evening, effective immediately.”

According to The New York Times, Sarnacki alerted local officials on Sunday about how the job has become too dangerous for her and the town’s three part-time officers. The email cited failing brakes and inadequate air conditioning in the police cruisers, ill-fitting and expired bulletproof vests, and, of course, low wages that barely paid a living wage.

As many media outlets descended on the police station Tuesday, Ciara Speller, a morning reporter for WWLP-22 News, was one of those journalists who documented how the town of Blanford is now without a police department.

Speller captures a photo of the closed police station with one cruiser parked in front.

However, as news of the resignations disseminated through town, officials like Mr. Levakis told the NYT other forces had played a significant part. For example, town officials had been examining a possible merger of law enforcement services in Blandford with the neighboring town of Chester as a way to streamline costs.

The merger, Mr. Levakis said, had frightened and angered Blandford’s officers, who, he said, never before complained about their safety and or the police equipment.

“You’ve got to move with the future,” Mr. Levakis said. “We’re just trying to find better ways to use our money.”

Glancing at Blandford’s crime statistics for 2012, well, not much has happened in the town of 1,233 (at the 2010 census).

“Around the country, towns with shrinking tax bases and rising costs have been forced to make hard choices. In some cases, that has meant merging local police departments or cutting them altogether. Earlier this year, Brooksville, Fla., shuttered its 30-person police department and handed law enforcement duties over to the local sheriff. Other departments have disbanded after problems; Galesburg, Mich., for instance, closed its police department in January after firing the chief,” said the NYT.

“Small towns are having this discussion around maintaining the most basic functions of local government, police services being one of them,” said Josh Garcia, the acting town administrator for Blandford.

It seems as the NYT has discovered the next emerging trend: The Collapse of police departments in rural America.

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Another Court Rules Against Trump’s Threat to Cut Off Funding for Sanctuary Cities

|||Shawn Thew/Pool/CNP/MEGA / NewscomThe U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit yesterday dealt another blow to President Trump’s plan to punish sanctuary cities by withholding federal grant money. In a 2-to-1 decision, a 9th Circuit panel ruled that the threat against cities that do not help the feds enforce immigration law is unconstitutional.

Although the appeals court agreed with U.S. District Judge William Orrick’s legal analysis in a ruling he issued last April, it concluded that he went too far by imposing a nationwide injunction. Since the challenge was brought by San Francisco and Santa Clara counties, the 9th Circuit narrowed the injunction’s scope from the entire United States to just California.

Justice Department spokesperson Devin O’Malley said the ruling was a victory for “criminal aliens in California, who can continue to commit crimes knowing that the state’s leadership will protect them from federal immigration officers whose job it is to hold them accountable and remove them from the country.”

San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera had a different perspective. “When a president overreaches and tries to assert authority he doesn’t have under the Constitution,” Herrera said, “there needs to be a check on that power grab.”

In March 2017, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that the Justice Department would withhold $4.1 billion in federal grants from sanctuary cities. That September, a federal judge in Illinois granted a temporary injunction that halted the administration’s imposition of the penalties on Chicago.

As Reason‘s Scott Shackford reported, U.S. District Judge Harry D. Leinenweber concluded that Title 8, Section 1373 of the U.S. Code, the law on which the administration was relying, is unconstitutional. “In the end,” Leinenweber wrote, “Section 1373 requires local policymakers to stand aside and allow the federal government to conscript the time and cooperation of local employees. This robs the local executive of its autonomy and ties the hands of the local legislature. Such affronts to State sovereignty are not countenanced by the anticommandeering principle of the Constitution. Section 1373 is unconstitutional and cannot stand.”

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Syrian Military Claims It Shot Down Two Israeli Reconnaisance Drones Over Damascus

According to unconfirmed reports from Syrian sources, Damascus air defense systems shot down two Israeli reconnaissance drones to the west Syria’s capital. The Syrian Army’s (SAA) air defense systems reportedly engaged multiple targets, possibly hostile warplanes or projectiles. There has been no official confirmation from Israel officials so far.

According to Syrian activist Wael al-Russi, three missiles and one Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, or drone, were downed by Syria’s air defenses. Two of the missiles were apparently thwarted in the south of the city and another in the northwest. The drone was shot down in west of the city, according to the activist.

Syrian Journalist Kevork Almassian says his military sources are confirming an “enemy target” was intercepted to the west.

According to journalist Ilanit Chernick with the Israeli Jerusalem Post, Israel may have been targetting Iranian bases near Damascus.

Syrian state media outlet SANA has confirmed the downing of an “enemy” target in Western Damascus. They outlet has apparently posted footage of the country’s air defense systems at work.

With Iran said to be planning a massive military drill in the Persian Gulf,  reportedly to “demonstrate the country’s ability” to block the Persian Gulf, Israel may be eagerly awaiting even the smallest provocation to engage Iran “proxies” and promptly escalate to a broader confrontation, especially one which might benefit from the support of US forces.

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Superbugs Are Becoming Resistant To Alcohol Disinfectants

Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

Superbugs are now well on their way to becoming resistant to the most common alcohol disinfectants used to kill them.  Alcohol-based hand sanitizers are now no match for the more resistant infection-causing bacteria.

According to a report by Reuters, scientists said that in a study of what the researchers described as a “new wave of superbugs,” the team found specific genetic changes over 20 years in vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus, or VRE – and were able to track and show its growing resistance to alcohol-based hand sanitizers designed to combat them. Their findings were published on Wednesday in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

Tim Stinear, a microbiologist at Australia’s Doherty Institute who co-led the study, said that in Australia alone, use of the alcohol-based hand hygiene has increased tenfold over the past 20 years. “So we are using a lot and the environment is changing,” he said. Yet while rates of MRSA and other infections have stabilized due to heightened hygiene, Stinear said, VRE infection rates have not. This prompted his team to investigate the VRE bug for potential resistance to disinfectant alcohols.

Such disinfectants restrict transmission of pathogens, such as multidrug-resistant Staphylococcus aureus and Enterococcus faecium. Despite this success, health care infections caused by E. faecium are increasing. We tested alcohol tolerance of 139 hospital isolates of E. faecium obtained between 1997 and 2015 and found that E. faeciumisolates after 2010 were 10-fold more tolerant to killing by alcohol than were older isolates.

Using a mouse gut colonization model of E. faecium transmission, we showed that alcohol-tolerant E. faecium resisted standard 70% isopropanol surface disinfection, resulting in greater mouse gut colonization compared to alcohol-sensitive E. faecium. We next looked for bacterial genomic signatures of adaptation. Alcohol-tolerant E. faecium accumulated mutations in genes involved in carbohydrate uptake and metabolism. Mutagenesis confirmed the roles of these genes in the tolerance of E. faecium to isopropanol. 

These findings suggest that bacterial adaptation is complicating infection control recommendations, necessitating additional procedures to prevent E. faecium from spreading in hospital settings.

–Science Translation Medicine journal

Paul Johnson, a professor of infectious diseases at Austin Health in Australia who also co-led the study, said the findings should not prompt any dramatic change in the use of alcohol-based disinfectants but spark awareness of the fact that bacteria are becoming “superbugs.”

“Alcohol-based hand rubs are international pillars of hospital infection control and remain highly effective in reducing transmission of other hospital superbugs, particularly MRSA,” Johnson said.

Stinear said health officials should try higher-alcohol concentrate products and renew efforts to ensure hospitals are deep cleaned and patients found to be carrying VRE infections are isolated.

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Will TSA Eliminate Security Checkpoints at Small Airports? If Only.

TSA fondlingThe Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is considering a proposal to eliminate its security checkpoints at small airports. You’d think from some of the responses that the agency is planning to hire Islamic State terrorists as screeners.

According to documents that TSA officials provided to CNN, the plan would eliminate the agency’s screening services at 150 small airports across the United States. The people who fly through these airports would not necessarily be free from security-theater hassles. If they had connecting flights at a larger airport, they would have to go through that airport’s TSA-operated security. The change would affect an estimated 10,000 passengers daily, 0.5 percent of fliers.

The goal would be to “save” $115 million a year and redirect the money to security at larger airports. The proposal doesn’t really seem to be a money saver, and it’s not clear if it’s going to be much of a time saver for travelers. It’s also not clear whether the TSA is treating the idea seriously. A TSA spokesperson told CNN the agency frequently analyzes the impact of potential adjustments like this.

Under the Trump administration, the security theater at airports has been ramped upward, not downward. The administration seems intent on keeping Americans fearful that terrorists are out to get us.

Major news organizations are happy to help. Apparently CNN and The Washington Post could only find folks who think the TSA proposal is a terrifyingly bad idea with no potential benefit. Mary Schiavo, a former Transportation Department inspector general, offered the Post this overheated take:

Schiavo said people would be afraid to fly if TSA ended screenings at their local airports.

“Not only will this destroy any reasonable security over American skies, it will destroy small towns and cities across the country because they will virtually have no air service,” she said.

“You poor folks from, say, Toledo, Ohio, you only have three regional flights a day,” Schiavo said. “We’re not going to do any security for you. Would anyone fly from Toledo? Absolutely not. What does it do to Toledo, Ohio? Destroys it. You’ll have no air service. No one’s going to get on a plane without security. It’s not only terrorists, it’s nut cases.”

Schiavo bizarrely assumes that if small airports have no TSA screeners they won’t have any security, and people will be so terrified that the airports will have to shut down. Or maybe—stick with me here—maybe they’ll hire their own security? That’s a thing that happens. It was a thing that was happening prior to the September 11 attacks. While it’s true airports were much more accessible back then, there were still security checkpoints. If there’s a market for flights from these smaller airports, they will find a way to secure themselves without having to rely on the TSA.

In fact, several small (and not-so-small) airports have already replaced TSA staff with private screeners. They operate under the same security protocols as the TSA, so passengers might not even notice the difference. But such arrangements make it easier for airports to hold screeners accountable for their job performance, a welcome change in light of frequent complaints about the aggressive behavior and bad attitudes of some TSA employees.

Schiavo’s poor grasp of risk and how market pressures can provide safety solutions is nothing new. In a 1997 review of her book Flying Blind, Flying Safe, Robert Poole, director of transportation policy at the Reason Foundation (which publishes this website), took her to task for a naïve belief in more and more safety regulations, no matter their cost or effectiveness.

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Tropical Storm Hector Expected To Become Hurricane By Weekend, Could Threaten Hawaii

Just as we enter peak hurricane season — considered globally as occurring in the month of September — a tropical storm currently far of the eastern coast of Mexico in the Pacific is headed toward Hawaii, and is expected to become a hurricane by the weekend. 

The AP reports, citing new data from the US National Hurricane Center, Tropical Storm Hector is gaining strength as it moves deeper into the Pacific:

The U.S. National Hurricane Center said Hector would gradually strengthen and reach hurricane strength by late Friday or early Saturday, but it also said the storm would continue to move deeper into the Pacific and would not pose any threat to land.

Hector had maximum sustained winds of 60 mph (95 kph) Wednesday night. It was centered about 1,010 miles (1,630 kilometers) southwest of the southern tip of Mexico’s Baja California Peninsula and it was moving toward the west at 12 mph (19 kph).

Though currently still nearly 2,000 miles to the east-southeast of Hawaii, The Weather Channel forecasts a “strong tropical system” on a straight westward trajectory that would put it “several hundred miles south of the Hawaiian island chain” resulting it increasing swells; however, a number of factors could result in a significant impact on the southern part of Hawaii. 

Via The Weather Channel

According The Weather Channel’s analysis, a slight northward shift in Hector’s current trajectory would bring it closer to Hawaii’s path, though still too early to tell:

Two temporary dips in the jet stream might drop far enough south to bring Hector on a slightly more northward path. The first of these dips occurs late this week, but it will likely occur too far ahead of Hector to affect it greatly.

The second dip in the jet stream could be closer to Hector, and it arrives early next week. It is too early to know how strong that dip in the jet stream might be or how much northward pull it could have on Hector since that is nearly a week away, but it is something we will watch.

A few computer models are showing this early next week.

And while still to early to know the potential impact on Hawaii — whether merely increased swells or a more direct path to the south — the storm is expected to pass into the Central Pacific early next week. 

Via The Weather Channel: Computer models show Hector could take a more northerly path, potentially impacting Hawaii by early next week. 

Multiple reports say the tropical storm’s additional strengthening is forecast to occur over the next several days.

Tropical Storm Hector as of Thursday morning, via Honolulu KHON2

So far it’s been a quiet summer for hurricanes and tropical storms heading into the peak of the season, with two hurricanes in the Atlantic in early July, hurricanes Beryl and Chris, which formed around the same time, but which fizzled out in the West Atlantic and were considered weak and unremarkable. 

However, as Hector continues on its westward path in the direction of Hawaii, forecasters expect it to become a Category 2 hurricane by early next week, with maximum sustained winds of 105 mph.

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Hysteria Over 3D-Printed Guns – Misconceptions Vs. Reality

Authored by Duane Norman via Free Market Shooter blog,

In the wake of Defense Distributed winning the right to freely publish its blueprint for its “Liberator” 3D-printed gun, the gun control outrage machine went into overdrive:

The most egregious bit of hyperbole was courtesy of Sen. Chuck Schumer, who displayed his ignorance on “ghost guns” in just two sentences:

“I am sounding an alarm that come Aug. 1, America is going to get a lot less safe when it comes to the gut-wrenching epidemic of gun violence,” Schumer said. “Ghost guns are not only scary, they’re outright dangerous in the way they can mimic the look and the capacity of a hardened, fully semiautomatic weapon.”

In spite of the fact that Liberator plans have been available for years (and are still available in many places on the internet), Schumer thinks an arbitrary legal date will all of a sudden mean Chicago gangs will take to the streets armed with “ghost gun” Liberators that are as fully functional as regular firearms.  The truth is, Schumer blatantly ignores the truth not only on the Liberator, but what a “ghost gun” actually is.  

While Wikipedia’s “A ghost gun is a gun with no serial number” definition is enough to make Schumer look stupid, for the sake of argument, we will go with a more robust definition from Quora…

It is a firearm manufactured for personal use in compliance with 18 USC 922(r), Federal, State and local laws.  Such firearms are made for personal use and are more-or-less untraceable as they are not required to be registered or serialized.

Hence the made-up term “Ghost Gun”, a gun that is ephemeral, that doesn’t exist in any form that can be traced or observed unless its owner chooses to reveal its existence.

…which is especially relevant when the legality of a “ghost gun” is considered:

The key to such guns is ALL laws must be followed.  They cannot be manufactured for commercial sale as this requires an FFL07.  They must not violate the National Firearms Act of 1934 in general.  If the firearm is assembled using foreign made parts, it must comply with 18 USC 922(r) in order to be considered a “US Made” firearm.

So a prohibited person cannot legally own any firearm, “ghost” or otherwise…

An AR-15 lower receiver being “finished” (Youtube – Paradox Technology)

…but more importantly, the term has traditionally been applied to “unfinished” lower receivers and firearms into fully functioning ones, as the LA Times described in its fearmongering on the dangers of “untraceable” ghost guns:

“Criminals are making their own weapons because they cannot buy them legally … or they are paying other people to make those guns for them to get around the gun laws,” said Bill McMullan, special agent in charge of ATF’s L.A. Field Division. “This is a trend among Southern California gangs.”

An unfinished lower receiver, sometimes referred to as an “80% receiver,” can legally be purchased without a serial number from a seller who is not a federally licensed firearms dealer as long as it is missing the key components that would make it a firearm.

The lower receiver then can be completed easily by drilling a few remaining holesinto the unfinished metal shell. It is then ready for a barrel, trigger mechanism, stock and upper receiver to be attached.

Aside from the LA Times (falsely) believing that milling a fire control cavity and the other gunsmithing work required to finish a lower receiver can be “easily” done, the newspaper made sure to omit the recent California law which makes such activity illegal unless the finished receiver is registered:

In July 2016, California passed AB 857 which requires all completed firearms to have a serial number applied by Jan 1, 2019. An 80% lower is not a firearm, so a serial number would only be required once the 80% lower is completed. Unfinished 80% lower receivers do not need a serial number.

If you build an 80% lower into a 100% lower after July 1, 2018, you must FIRST apply to the California DOJ for a serial number, pay a fee, and they will then assign a serial number that you must apply to your firearm. If you built your firearm prior to July 2018 and already engraved a serial number of your choosing that is compliant with ATF regulations, the text of the law seems to indicate that this should be in compliance. However, we have heard that CA DOJ has made statements suggesting that people must engrave a new DOJ issued serial number on their lower even though the lower receiver already has a ATF compliant serial number engraved on it.

To quickly summarize the above, every activity pertaining to building, completing, or possessing “ghost guns” by prohibited persons is already illegal under federal law, and heavily regulated under many state laws.  

So, why is all of the “ghost gun” talk pertinent to 3D-printed guns?  That question is even more relevant when you take a closer look at the Liberator itself:

The Defense Distributed gun can be best described as a .380 caliber, single-shot, plastic piece of shit.  And before you say “cheap”, take a close look at what The Atlantic, a super-liberal mainstream media outlet, stated about the Liberator:

But 3D printing, still being a young technology, is slow. The two firms I spoke with each suggested that printing the various small parts would take hours — eight hours in one’s estimation.

Nor would it necessarily be cheap. The firm that ultimately offered to do the printing suggested that, given the number of objects and the fact that it was important to ensure that they were well-milled and that I wanted it quickly, the final price would be a bit above my budget: $1,500.

I wish the best of luck to anyone that attempts to build a Liberator for under $4,000 and safely fire it 10+ times.  But, even if it can be done for less than that, why would a criminal waste the money on the very limited Liberator, when the parts for a “ghost” AR-15 can be ordered online and “completed easily”, as the LA Times puts it?

The liberal hysteria surrounding “ghost guns” is nothing more than the latest round of liberal virtue signaling and inability to cope with the fact that President Trump is indeed… President.  In spite of the fact that all activity regarding home finishing of firearms is already widely-available yet illegal and off-limits to prohibited persons…

…this will not stop the big-money gun control machine from using the Liberator as its latest tool to make legal gun ownership as arduous, time consuming, and expensive as possible.  

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Maxine Waters Hit With FEC Complaint After Daughter Rakes In $750,000 From Campaign Funds

California Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters, 79, has been slapped with an FEC complaint after funneling $750,000 in campaign funds to her daughter since 2004 to manage a mailer program, as extensively detailed by the Free Beacon‘s Joe Schoffstall.  

The scheme managed by Karen Waters has raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars from California politicians who pay to be included in her “slate mailers” – sample ballots mailed out to around 200,000 Los Angeles voters which promote who Waters endorses. 

Since 2004, the campaign in turn reportedly has paid $750,000 to the congresswoman’s daughter, Karen Waters, or her public relations firm Progressive Connections for help producing them.

A government watchdog in July filed the first of two complaints with the Federal Election Commission asking for a full audit of the Citizens for Waters campaign. –Fox News

Waters, the California Democratic State Central Committee and Sen. Kamala Harris are all named in the first complaint. Of note, Harris is a likely 2020 Democratic presidential contender. 

Legally, the payments are considered “reimbursements” for the state mailer, rather than a campaign contribution – which is currently limited to $2,700 to a candidate’s committee and $5,000 to a PAC, so the mailer scheme is more or less a giant loophole. 

“This certainly violates the spirit of campaign finance laws, but the FEC doesn’t seem to think it violates the letter of the law,” said John Wonderlich, executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan watchdog group that first reported on the practice by the Waters campaign in 2010 and the connection with her daughter.

“In this case, is it a question of enrichment for a family member?” Wonderlich added. “How much of the money passes through to cover postage and printing? It may be unsavory but not corrupt. Much of it hinges on the extent to which the money passes through.”  

–Fox News

A second, broader complaint is currently being drafted by the conservative National Legal and Policy Center, which will focus on Waters’ sources of funding as well as the mechanism by which her daughter has been so handsomely paid for running the mailer program. 

‘Maxine Waters found an old provision and turned it into a cottage industry.’

– Tom Anderson, National Legal and Policy Center

Waters is well versed in fundraising through mailers, while California’s top Democrats and local office-seekers have funneled far in excess of legal contribution limits to her campaign in exchange for her endorsement, Fox reports. Waters’ campaign pays Karen and other firms as part of the program, which the FEC approved in 2004. 

Everything was going smoothly until the California Democratic Party paid $35,000 to the Waters campaign in 2016 for her endorsement of Kamala Harris’ Senate candidacy on the mailer. Third parties are not legally allowed to pay for mailers endorsing a candidate without a reimbursement under the 2004 FEC approval, reads the complaint. 

Another report shows that the Harris campaign paid $30,000 to Waters’ campaign in early 2016 for a primary slate mailer, however no subsequent payments were made. 

“The Democratic State Central Committee of California’s $35,000 contribution to Citizens for Waters violated campaign finance limits” -FEC complaint

So far in the 2018 election cycle, Fox reports that as of July 28, Democrat Gavin Newsom’s gubernatorial campaign has paid $27,000 to Waters’ re-election campaign in exchange for inclusion in her mailers. 

The state Democratic Party snubbed Sen. Dianne Feinstein this year, but she paid $27,000 and has the Waters endorsement. Candidates for state assembly, sheriff and judges paid between $2,000 and $12,000 to Citizens for Waters to be included on the mailers.

FEC data also shows as of July 28, Citizens for Waters paid Karen Waters $54,000 so far for the 2018 election cycle, mostly for slate mailers but also for other campaign work. The congressional campaign paid her $72,000 in the 2016 cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks money in politics.

In November, Waters is facing Republican Omar Navarro, 29, a small business owner. The 79-year-old incumbent beat Navarro in 2016 with 76 percent of the vote, and outpaced him again in the June “jungle primary” (in which both parties can run) with 72 percent of the vote.

“She is going to be re-elected no matter what,” Anderson said. “She comes knocking and other politicians in California to say, ‘do you want my endorsement,’ because she knows they don’t want her opposing them.”

“If you don’t pay to be on her slate, then maybe you’re one of Trump’s people,” Anderson said. “A local politician, like a judge, does not want to be on her bad side.”

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