In School, Adults Styme Children Play. No Wonder When They Get Older They Act Out Their Aggression! For How Many Years Have Kids Been Playing Cops and Robbers, Cowboys and Indians And Similiar Games Without Any Damage To Society. Now That We Remove This Play From Schools, We Find The Killings Are Increasing. Is There A Cause And Effect Here?:

Zero Tolerance: Kid Suspended For Pantomiming Bow And Arrow Shot With His Hands

December 9, 2013 by Ben Bullard

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Is your child a Katniss Everdeen fan? Better warn him not to play "Catching Fire" at school.

In October, a Pennsylvania boy was suspended from school for playing make-believe with a classmate. The silly tale involves no props or weapons — just hands, imagination and the ruinous intervention of adults to quash what should be free, unremarkable and productive child’s play: the unencumbered, improvised activity kids crave as they learn to share the world with others kids.

Instead, the lesson 10-year-old Johnny Jones is learning is that he has to share the world with idiots — adult ones. The Rutherford Institute, a Virginia-based civil liberties nonprofit, learned of his suspension and decided to take on the South Eastern School District in Fawn Grove, Penn., for its overzealous enforcement of the system’s zero-tolerance weapons policy.

Here’s the Rutherford Institute’s synopsis of what transpired:

The incident took place the week of October 14th, when fifth grader Johnny Jones asked his teacher for a pencil during class. Jones walked to the front of the classroom to retrieve the pencil, and during his walk back to his seat, a classmate and friend of Johnny’s held his folder like an imaginary gun and “shot” at Johnny. Johnny playfully used his hands to draw the bowstrings on a completely imaginary “bow” and “shot” an arrow back. Seeing this, another girl in the class reported to the teacher that the boys were shooting at each other. The teacher took both Johnny and the other boy into the hall and lectured them about disruption. The teacher then contacted Johnny’s mother, Beverly Jones, alerting her to the “seriousness” of the violation because the children were using “firearms” in their horseplay, and informing her that the matter had been referred to the Principal. Principal John Horton contacted Ms. Jones soon thereafter in order to inform her that Johnny’s behavior was a serious offense that could result in expulsion under the school’s weapons policy. Horton characterized Johnny’s transgression as “making a threat” to another student using a “replica or representation of a firearm” through the use of an imaginary bow and arrow.

Attorneys from the Rutherford Institute are asking that South Eastern School District Superintendent Rona Kaufmann rescind Johnny’s suspension and remove all references to the incident from his permanent record, giving the district until Dec. 13 to respond before considering possible legal action.

The school district’s code of conduct prohibits the possession of weapons, as well as “replicas” or “look-alikes” on school grounds. In Johnny’s case, the school’s faculty and administration allegedly construed the pantomiming action of drawing an imaginary bow as an act that, in some transubstantial fashion, replicated the real weapon. Even more absurdly, they regarded the exchange between the two boys as adversarial, threatening and indicative of imminent violence.

“No reasonable argument can be made that the imaginings of a 10-year-old boy, completely lacking any actual, tangible device, represented a ‘replica’ or a ‘look-alike’ of an actual gun,” attorney Douglas R. McKusick wrote in a letter to the superintendent. “… This atrocious misapplication of rules originally intended to protect students while on school grounds is foolish and actually damages the future of the children meant to be protected… There is no reason that Johnny should be stigmatized and branded a miscreant due to the school’s unreasonable application of its zero tolerance policy against him.”

Once Again The Fear Mongers Get It Wrong--Voter ID Laws Work

Texas Voter Participation Skyrockets Under New ID Law

November 15, 2013 by Ben Bullard

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Opponents of voter identification laws reliably say it’s racist, exclusive and oppressive to require registered voters to show photo identification when they exercise their right to vote. Voter ID, the story goes, denies some people their Constitutional rights by locking out eligible citizens who, for whatever reason, don’t possess qualifying ID.

But a recent amendment ballot in Texas could be an early indication that those kinds of fears are unfounded. Texas voters went to the polls on Nov. 5 to approve nine amendments to the State constitution (all nine measures passed), and voter turnout — even among Hispanics — trounced that of a similar series of measures that came before voters in 2011.

According to The Daily Caller, turnout in predominantly Hispanic Hidalgo County was roughly four times the turnout in the 2011 ballot measure, even though the Nov. 5 election marked the State’s first referendum in which a new voter ID law was enforced.

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, who’s widely believed to have the inside track in the 2014 Governor’s race, said last week’s turnout and relatively problem-free polling should silence progressives who’ve facetiously decried voter ID laws as a return to Jim Crow-era voter segregation.

“I haven’t ever seen anything that was overhyped as much as some partisan efforts to overhype concerns about this, when in reality, there has been no problems whatsoever,” Abbott told the Houston Chronicle.

Abbott, who himself had to sign an affidavit confirming his identity at the polls, said there was nothing onerous or disenfranchising about the process

Fascinating Chart But Does It Mean Anything? We Don't Think So. Obama Ain't Your Normal Politician And The US Is A Different Country. We Fear A Total Democrat Congress After 2014.

Graph: Barack Obama’s Pre-Midterm Slide In Popularity Rivals George W. Bush’s

November 13, 2013 by Ben Bullard 

The Washington Post ran a timeline graph today superimposing the approval rating trends of Presidents Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush through their second terms. The graph, supplied to the paper by Robert Blizzard, a Republican pollster at Public Opinion Strategies, also includes Barack Obama’s approval rating through the first ten months of his second term.

What’s interesting is how closely Obama’s approval rating through his second term mirrors that of George W. Bush – a potentially dire sign for Congressional Democrats and State governors seeking office in the 2014 midterm election cycle.

“[I]f you believe that at least some portion of a president’s legacy is built on — or broken by — the state he leaves his party in when he departs office than Obama’s poll standing matters a whole heck of a lot as we get closer and closer to 2014,” writes the Post’s Chris Cillizza.

“The loss of the Senate majority and a smaller minority in the House after November 2014 would make any attempt to rack up second term accomplishments before he left office extremely difficult for Obama. Combine that with the reality that Obama’s second term has not exactly been larded with major wins to date and you understand why Obama and his legacy are on the ballot in 2014 — even if his name is not. And that means his poll numbers matter. A lot.”

Cillizza points out that every midterm election from WWII to 1986 saw the President’s party lose an average of 48 House seats and seven Senate seats during midterm elections, and that the trend has dipped only slightly since then. Add in an unpopular President who appears to be doubling down on an equally unpopular agenda, and the potential for turnover in 2014 is ripe.

New Film: ObamaCrapCare--The Federal Program Which Couldn't

News That’s Too Bad To Spin: Obamacare Has Enrolled 3 Percent Of Its Target Customer Base

November 13, 2013 by Ben Bullard 

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If you started a company with a fully subsidized startup cost and were granted free publicity months ahead of your product launch that got your product in front of every eligible buyer in the United States, would you be disappointed when your product achieved a 3 percent market share in its first month?

What if the court system had cleared a path for your ambitions to reach monopolistic proportions by giving you permission to dictate to your competitors what they could or couldn’t sell? What if the government set the wind at your back with buyer mandates and a guaranteed market presence in all 50 States?

Even assuming all your startup costs had been paid by a mysterious benefactor and you had no financial skin in the game until the day your widgets hit the market, would you even want to stay in business after you mustered a 3 percent market share? Or would you cut your losses before you incurred any and try your hand at something else?

Government doesn’t have to play by any of the rules that force free markets to be profitable, so it can cruise along indefinitely — or until its financiers grow restless enough to revolt against its policies — by pumping money into a sinking ship.

And according to a Reuters report Monday, that’s the shape of things in the early going for Obamacare, which has managed to enroll only 3 percent of the number of people the Department of Health and Human Services predicted it would. The kicker is that 3 percent is an optimistic figure, one that derived from Obamacare enrollment statistics in the 12 States where online health insurance exchanges are “mostly working smoothly,” according to the report.

HHS expected the State-managed exchanges to enroll 1.4 million people for 2014. They’ve enrolled 49,100 instead. Of course, the enrollment period is ongoing through March 31 of next year. But there’s no universe in which the sign-up rate will accelerate rapidly enough to come anywhere near the 1.4 million target by the time the enrollment period ends.

“Supporters of Obamacare and health insurers fear that scant participation in the private insurance exchanges will prevent them from becoming a sustainable new individual market, including the right mix of young and healthy members to offset coverage for older, sick people,” Reuters observes.

And those are the “supporters.” Far down in the same article, another revealing nugget demonstrates just how doomed the as-implemented configuration of the Affordable Care Act truly is: Part of the paltry 49,100 tally of new Obamacare enrollees includes people who’ve signed up for Medicaid.

And when the Obama Administration finally divulges some numbers on how many people have signed up in all States, as is expected later this week, those numbers – however meager they will appear – will nonetheless be inflated by the White House’s inclusion of anyone who’s put insurance in his or her online shopping cart at Healthcare.gov.

“Health insurance plans only count subscribers as enrolled in a health plan once they’ve submitted [sic] a payment,” The Washington Post reported Monday. “That is when the carrier sends out a member card and begins paying doctor bills.

“When the Obama administration releases health law enrollment figures later this week, though, it will use a more expansive definition. It will count people who have purchased a plan as well as those who have a plan sitting in their online shopping cart but have not yet paid.”

Lest you need some evidence that the Administration is doing everything it can to spit-shine the Obamacare disaster with unsustainably deceitful tactics, check out the latest “glitch” in the online marketplace: About 8,000 would-be shoppers at the Washington State Obamacare website were informed they would qualify for a healthcare subsidy on their tax returns.

But after following through with their Obamacare purchase, those same customers were informed the prices they’d been quoted were too low and that they don’t, in fact, qualify for the generous subsidies and low prices on which they made the decision to buy the coverage in the first place.

“That led many enrollees in the Washington exchange to select generous insurance plans they likely won’t be able to afford once their subsidies are reduced,” reports The Hill. “Those 8,000 individuals likely will need to go through the entire application process again to see what plans at what prices they qualify for under the correct tax subsidy.”

ObamaCrapCare Has Failure Written All Over It

Oregon Promotes Obamacare, Enrolls No One

November 6, 2013 by Ben Bullard 

Oregon, a State that spent $3.2 million on ads like this one to ensure its State-run Obamacare exchange would take off with willing customers, has yet to enroll a single living soul in any of its new coverage plans.

Cover Oregon, the State healthcare exchange, is blaming the stillborn launch on computer glitches — a problem that supposedly was confined to the Federal healthcare.gov website for non-participating States.

But Cover Oregon spokesperson Amy Fauver told NPR the disastrous rollout is forcing the program to beg would-be customers to line up in an email waiting queue:

We have on our website right now a place where people who just want to wait, who just want to do it electronically, can give us their e-mail address, and we will e-mail them when the system is fully functional.

Sure enough, the Cover Oregon website doesn’t even offer an option for online enrollment. The site invites residents to fill out a paper application and promises online enrollment is “coming soon.”

Like healthcare.gov, Cover Oregon is anticipating the enrollment glitches should be ironed out by the end of this month. That’s when the real fun begins, because the approximately 7,300 people who’ve attempted to apply for coverage will finally discover whether they’re eligible for the plans they want, as well as how much more they’ll have to pay.

Portland-based KATU News reported last week that residents whose existing plans were dropped because they don’t measure up to the new Obamacare policy mandates (like across-the-board maternity care) are facing extraordinary premiums for new, qualifying policies. One viewer said his new policy would cost him an additional $300 a month.

Another Oregon station, KVAL, reports premium costs will more than double for those who are still able to afford the coverage:

Independent insurance brokers like Skylar Jones of Eugene are waiting to hear from you.

He’s just set up a new venture called Oregon Covered.

“What we’re doing is we’re helping individuals,” Jones said. “We’re setting up enrollment meetings. We analyze their situation from start to finish.”

…He just hopes the promised [Obamacare] subsidies are enough to help his clients.

“In some of my individual clients we’re seeing 100 to 200 percent cost increases, and that causes some huge concerns for our individuals,” he said.

Oregon, of course, offers just one instance of an Obamacare nightmare scenario that’s beginning to play out in several States. All of this news comes at a time when President Barack Obama is walking back his unequivocal promises on how the Affordable Care Act will only help Americans who need insurance and not affect those who already have it.

Obama told a gaggle of Organizing for Action supporters Monday that he never promised everyone they could keep the insurance they were already happy with. According to Obama, what he really said was that “you could keep it if it hasn’t changed since the law was passed.”

ObamaCrapCare Scares Most Americans!

More Than Half Believe Obamacare Will Make American Health Care System Worse

October 28, 2013 by Ben Bullard 

A Rasmussen poll released today shows more than half of American voters sampled believe the implementation of the Affordable Care Act will ultimately damage the quality of health care offered in the United States.

The poll, which surveyed 1,000 likely voters by phone over the weekend, found that people are largely happy with the quality of the health care they have been receiving – although 52 percent don’t expect that to last under Obamacare:

“[M]ost voters (52%) still believe the system will get worse under the new law, while six percent (6%) expect it to stay about the same. Twelve percent (12%) are undecided,” the report states.

In addition, people are beginning to see the financial consequences of the way Obamacare affects the health care marketplace, with one-fourth reporting the law has forced their insurer to modify their health coverage – even though only two percent said they’d successfully signed up for an Obamacare plan through an online marketplace:

One-out-of-four voters (25%) say their health insurance coverage has changed as a result of the health care law. Two percent (2%) have signed up successfully for health insurance through the health exchange websites created by the new law, but given the problems those websites are having, 51% favor delaying the requirement that every American have health insurance by January 1.

Don't Go Near ObamaCrapCare Says Consumer Reports

Consumer Reports On Obamacare: ‘Stay Away’

October 21, 2013 by Ben Bullard 

Consumer Reports has bailed on Obamacare, at least for now.

The consumer advocate magazine is cautioning would-be volunteers who wish to enroll in overpriced government-managed health coverage to “stay away” from the bug-ridden rabbit hole at www.healthcare.gov.

“If all this is too much for you to absorb, follow our previous advice: Stay away from Healthcare.gov for at least another month if you can. Hopefully that will be long enough for its software vendors to clean up the mess they’ve made,” advises Consumer Reports’ Nancy Metcalf, whose tolerance for the Federal health care marketplace has steadily eroded over the course of its bad rollout, now three weeks in the (un)making.

Her assessment comes after repeated attempts at walking through the enrollment process, and doesn’t even begin to consider the cost and coverage merits (or lack of them) of the Affordable Care Act itself.

Working with Phoenix-based software tester Ben Simo, who’s been tracking the many problems that plague the Federal health care website, the magazine ran through all the many hang-up points in the online sign-up process, concluding that completing an Obamacare application is equal parts faith and gritty determination. Metcalf’s enrollment walkthrough is fraught with advice like this:

If you are truly successful, you should receive an “account activation” e-mail within a few hours to verify that the email address you gave was legit. Answer it promptly, because if you don’t, Healthcare.gov will time you out. If the e-mail never comes, you’ll have to go back to square one.

The magazine continues to hold out hope that the technical problems will eventually all be solved, but its bottom-line advice even for people who’ve bought in to the big-government corporatism of Obamacare – at least for now – remains unequivocal: don’t be an early adopter.

More Truth About The Misnamed Obamacare--It Is Really Becoming ObamaCrapCare

Obama’s Hometown Paper Takes Down President Over Obamacare: ‘Stop Blaming Republicans’

October 17, 2013 by Ben Bullard 

President Barack Obama’s hometown paper, the Chicago Tribune, endorsed the Illinois Senator in both his Presidential election campaigns.

But the Tribune has had enough of Obama’s accomplishment numero uno – Obamacare.

The paper ripped into Obama this week with a blistering editorial takedown of the socialized medicine mess, saying the time has come “…for the Obama administration to level with Americans about what’s happening here. It’s time to stop blaming Republicans and start talking about what needs to change.”

Last spring, President Barack Obama said “there will still be, you know, glitches and bumps” in the rollout of the new system. But what we’re seeing now is no glitch or bump. There is a growing mountain of evidence that Obamacare has fundamental problems in design and implementation.

…The Department of Health and Human Services under chief Obamacare cheerleader Kathleen Sebelius has had three years to develop this system. It has busted deadline after deadline, all the while promising that the system would be ready on Oct. 1. It has overpromised and underdelivered. The excuse? Demand was unexpectedly high, crashing servers. Unexpected? Americans have been bombarded with marketing campaigns and news stories and outreach efforts on behalf of Obamacare.

The piece takes down Obamacare’s chief conceptual pillar – that mass enrollment will buttress the government subsidies program for those who can’t afford the full cost of health care – by pointing out the disincentive of skyrocketing costs for those would-be buyers who are just starting to realize how unaffordable the Affordable Care Act really is.

Those who have managed to browse the marketplace have often been hit by sticker shock. Take Adam Weldzius, a nurse practitioner and single father from Carpentersville. He sought the same level of coverage on the exchange as he and his 7-year-old daughter have now, with the same insurer and the same network of doctors and hospitals. At best, Weldzius found, his monthly premium of $233 would more than double. If he chose a plan priced at the same level, the annual deductible would be $12,700, more than three times his current $3,500 deductible.

The editors reiterate their call for the President to grant the same one-year delay that’s been afforded businesses and “special pleaders,” but even they acknowledge the stubborn Administration simply isn’t going to budge just to help out regular folks.

Read the entire piece at the Chicago Tribune’s website.

Who Owns The US Debt? Revealing Graph Tells The Story

This Graph Illustrates Who Holds America’s $17 Trillion Debt – Including The One-Third Held By Foreign Countries

October 15, 2013 by Ben Bullard 

NPR may have had its reasons for putting together this grid explaining how the Nation’s $16.8 trillion is divvied up – it’s featured in a story that begins “If Congress doesn’t raise the debt ceiling soon, the U.S. government won’t be able to pay its debts” – but anyone who approaches the infographic with an open mind can come away with their own conclusions.

In some ways, the image reads like a history lesson in how the U.S. government grew to the bloated monstrosity that future generations will inherit. The Federal government (for NPR’s purposes, the Federal Reserve is included here) owns nearly half of U.S. debt, including $2.6 trillion in Social Security obligations. More than $1 trillion is tied up in Federal and military retirement funds and the Fed itself holds $2.1 trillion.

Many of these obligations stem from the decisions of previous Presidential Administrations and Congressional acts that instituted or expanded government programs – the Clinton-era manipulation of Social Security to keep the Federal budget balanced, not to mention the original creation of the Social Security program itself, are two of many examples.

Foreign banks and governments hold about $5.5 trillion in U.S. debt, amounting to nearly one-third of the $16.8 trillion total. As everyone knows, China holds the most financial sway with $1.3 trillion, followed closely by Japan with $1.1 trillion.

For some numeric perspective, the Federal debt increased an astronomical $4.89 trillionunder President George W. Bush, and has increased $6.1 trillion more in the nearly five years that President Barack Obama has been in office. The Federal debt stood at $10.6 trillion when Bush left office.

As Obama continues to drive a hard bargain on insisting that Congressional Democrats get their way in raising the Federal debt limit, here’s Senator Barack Obama in 2006 condemning President Barack Obama’s present rhetoric on raising the debt ceiling:

The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. government can’t pay its own bills. … I therefore intend to oppose the effort to increase America’s debt limit.

Can Anyone Really Not Understand Why Our Students Are So Poorly Educated? Look At One Example And You Will See

Mistake Or Malfeasance? Doesn’t Matter; This Textbook Gets The 2nd Amendment Dead Wrong

September 18, 2013 by Ben Bullard 

It could be the innocent product of overzealous editing, or it could be intentional. Either way, a high school textbook supplement has a lot of parents upset for what it’s telling students about the meaning of the 2^nd Amendment.

The Denton, Texas, Unified School District adopted the book, United States History: Preparing for the Advanced Placement Examination, as a supplement to a larger course of study for students aiming to ace the AP U.S. History test to jump-start their college careers.

School officials in Texas say it’s meant to serve as a supplemental guide to assist more thorough study of the Constitution, but the book has drawn anger from some parents who believe it’s a subversive effort to rewrite what the Constitutional framers originally wrote.

The Constitution:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.

And now the book:

Second Amendment: The people have a right to keep and bear arms in a state militia.

The paperback version sells for about $37 on Amazon. Until word of the Bill of Rights butchering began circulating among conservative Internet sites this week, it had received almost universal praise from student reviewers throughout the country who’d used it to anticipate the questions they’d face on the AP U.S. History exam.

But the book’s user rating, which appears to have hovered around four stars (out of five), has taken a dive down to two stars just in the past week, after all the publicity began driving angry Constitutionalists to the site.

For some perspective, though, here’s the (hastily written?) opinion of one review from back in 2010, offered by a customer who identifies as an AP teacher (“DBQ” stands for “Document-Based Question”):

The book leaves out a subtantial maount of essential information, and is downright deceptively bias in many areas of national politics. (note the background and inclination of the authors on the inside flap). As the book is highly slanted politically throughout and SELECTIVELY avoids facts that are essential to FULLY answering the DBQs, I would not at all recommend this book to any student who is preparing dilligently for the exam. The political cartoons in this book were especially repulsive in their political slant as well as deceptions for the student. Unless most of the AP readers are teachers/profs. from Boulder Colorado, or Santa Cruz California, the student will fail to be able to provide a well rounded and informed answer on his DBQs which will result in a lowered overall score. This brief readers digest (TIME/NEWSWEEK) version of history should only be used along with another tome that covers both partisan sides of the American political and social spectrum over the past 300 years. Caveat emptor with this one folks!

Youth-slant political website PolicyMic makes the case — perhaps inadvertently — for the argument that the book simply isn’t written by people who understand any portion of the Bill of Rights. PolicyMic’s Saad Asad writes:

Students are taught the complete version in classes, and the supplemental textbook is only used as a quick guide to prepare before the AP exam. As someone who once took these classes, I can attest to the inaccuracy of many of these supplemental textbooks, which are only meant to be review guides.

Although the Second Amendment summary is receiving a lot of criticism, the authors also erroneously summarized the Third Amendment by stating: “The people cannot be required to quarter (house) soldiers during peacetime.” This skims over the clause that explicitly forbids quartering during times of war. In fact, the history of the Third Amendment is explicitly rooted in protesting the British quartering of soldiers in wartime. It would be silly to assume there is some ideological bias behind this summary of quartering.

Whether intentional or just dumb, it’s time for this mangled reimagining of the 2^ndAmendment, along with the rest of the Bill of Rights, to end. There’s already enough agenda-driven misinformation being foisted on young people, as ever-zealous progressives carry on their tireless campaign to obscure the plain language of our Constitution

UnConstitiutional Gun Control Legislation Explodes In California

California Legislature Moves Forward With UnConstitutional Bills Regulating Guns And Ammo

August 13, 2013 by Ben Bullard 

PHOTOS.COM

The California Legislature is pressing forward on a number of bills in both the Senate and the State Assembly that, taken together, would give the State the dubious distinction of having the most unConstitutional gun laws in the U.S.

Described in the San Jose Mercury News as “a fusillade of gun-control bills that could move California far beyond what any other state has enacted,” the laws are designed to restrict citizens’ access to both firearms and ammunition.

A bill before the State Senate Monday aims to establish a Statewide database that tracks all point-of-sale ammunition purchases, as well as make it a crime to have a gun that isn’t “locked up” when it’s not being carried.

The State Assembly is also expected today to take up legislation that, if passed, would ban outright all semiautomatic firearms with detachable magazines and force owners of high-capacity magazines to dispose of them. The Assembly bills also include their own language criminalizing the presence of a firearm in the home that isn’t kept under lock and key when the owners are away.

Larry Keane of the National Shooting Sports Foundation told the newspaper Saturday that it’s folly for the anti-gun lobby to pin its hopes of shaping National gun control legislation on big Blue States like California.

“While they may try to reignite their lost momentum, I don’t think anything California does is going to affect what Washington does,” said Keane. “We constantly see a barrage of anti-gun, anti-industry legislation being introduced in California, far more than in any other state.”

California Governor Jerry Brown has given no assurances that he would sign any of the legislation into law, if it passes. But Brown does have an oddly mixed record on 2^ndAmendment issues. He also signed an open carry ban on both handguns and “long guns” in 2011. But as State Attorney General in 2009, Brown also sided with the National Rifle Association in filing an amicus curiae brief opposing Chicago’s ban on handguns.

Review the bevy of gun control proposals at the San Jose Mercury News website.

Cops Break In and Citizens Pay The Price

Why don't we  hold police responsible for mistakes like the one in the following post. If they make an error, why should the citizen pay the price of the repairs and other damages?  We should expect more from our government officials. Don't you agree?

Conservative Tom

Buffalo Police To Army Vet: Oops, Wrong Apartment… Sorry We Killed Your Dog (Not)

June 12, 2013 by Ben Bullard 

An Army veteran who’d been living at the same Buffalo, N.Y., address for three years got home Monday afternoon to discover that someone had torn down the door, shot up the apartment, ransacked the place and killed his dog, Cindy, who was leashed in the kitchen.

Breaking and entering in broad daylight. Animal cruelty. Adam Arroyo appeared to have been the victim of big-city crime.

But wait — whoever it was had left a piece of paper behind, a note. Not a note, a warrant. It wasn’t robbers after all; this was all police work.

Army vet says police killed his dog

The guy the cops were looking for evidently lived around the building’s corner. He was being sought on suspicion of dealing crack cocaine. The two apartments are completely separate and have separate entrances. All the cops had to do before indulging their trigger fingers was double-check the clearly marked mailbox.

According to WKBW in Buffalo, Arroyo is an Iraq combat veteran who plans to become a member of the National Guard. He told the ABC affiliate he isn’t a drug user or a drug pusher.

“Never. Never. I don’t do drugs. I’m a United States veteran. I work every day. I’m just trying to live my life… For police to wrongfully come into my house and murder my dog… It wasn’t that they felt threatened. No. They murdered my dog. That was my dog, man. That was my dog. They didn’t have to do that, you know. They didn’t have to do that.”

Arroyo now has to pay to have his pet cremated. The door repair will come out of his own pocket. He’s also had to miss work.

The Buffalo P.D. suit who talks to the media trotted out the same stale, self-justifying nonsense you always seem to hear whenever police unload on dogs that aren’t a threat.

Spokesperson Michael DeGeorge said the police “don’t believe the dog was chained or leashed” at the time they burst through the door — even though that’s how Arroyo left his pet in the morning, and how he found her when he got home.

DeGeorge also said the department’s Internal Affairs division will investigate, but that the police (somehow) believe they got the address right.

Arroyo said he plans to press charges against the city.

Shoot First And Ask Questions Later

Are DUI checkpoints being overused? Do they work? Or is it a way to check motorists without a warrant? Should cops be punished when violence breaks out at one of these stoops?  All are good questions, however, when actions occur such as in the following post, one has to wonder about the advisability of having this tool in the policeman's arsenal.

Conservative Tom

Eyewitness: ‘Super Trigger Happy’ Cops Endanger Motorists Waiting At DUI Roadblock

June 18, 2013 by Ben Bullard 

A young North Carolina couple returning from a Father’s Day outing with their infant daughter slowed down for a DUI checkpoint in Brunswick County, N.C., Sunday evening.

That’s when the driver of an SUV nearer the front of the line made an alleged attempt to escape, and seven cops allegedly started shooting.

The couple, Jared and Rose Cleerdin, along with their daughter Chloe were too close for safety (to say nothing of comfort); but at least they came away with an incredible account of how little regard the police evidently showed for the safety of all the motorists and passengers they’d been flagging down.

“Every cop turned around and started unloading like super trigger happy as if their training was coming into full effect and they were being able to utilize it,” said Cleerdin. “Everybody was just blasting this car to pieces. It was absolutely terrifying.”

Cleerdin said he estimated about 40 rounds were fired, with the bullets “ricocheting off the road” in the direction of oncoming traffic, with the officers allegedly demonstrating no regard for public safety — despite the DUI checkpoint’s stated purpose of accomplishing just that.

The SUV’s occupants, Jerry Melvin and Antoine Graham, both survived but were hospitalized. Brunswick County Sheriff John Ingram stood behind the officers’ actions at a press conference the following day, saying the SUV looked as though it were going to run over deputies manning the checkpoint.

“Realizing their lives were in danger of being run over by this vehicle, [officers] proceeded to shoot at the vehicle in attempts to stop the vehicle from traveling any further,” he said.

“Another question that always arises is, were officers acting recklessly and without regard for the public safety and I can assure you they were acting with extreme care for the safety of the public and the safety of everyone involved in that checkpoint.”

Not according to the Cleerdin family.

“It was way beyond reckless,” said Jared. “I couldn’t believe it. These are professional people; professional officers, and they’re training, they’re highly trained and they’re not supposed to do stuff like that. I could understand why they wouldn’t come out with an explanation as to what happened after seeing what we saw. It looked like every officer there did not follow protocol in any way, shape, or form.”

Seven deputies from both Brunswick and New Hanover Counties in North Carolina were involved in the shooting, and they’ve been moved to administrative duty while the State Bureau of Investigation reviews their conduct during the shooting.shoot Fi

FISA Court-A Joke

Nearly 99% of the time the FISA Court gives the government permission to take the actions it desires.  Is that judicial oversight or rubber stamp? We believe it is the latter.

We doubt that there is a court in the land (well, maybe in Chicago) that the prosecutor wins 99% of the time. Those are impossible odds and only can be accomplished when the "fix is in." 

FISA is fixed and anyone who stands on the argument that the "court has approved" is naive or worse.

Conservative Tom

The FISA Court Exists To Give The Government What It Wants

June 13, 2013 by Ben Bullard 

PHOTOS.COM

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA) was born from Watergate. It was designed to place the government’s targeted surveillance of any “U.S. person” suspected of involvement with international terror organizations under Congressional and judicial oversight.

Under FISA, there were limits on how government could deploy surveillance against suspects inside the United States. Warrantless surveillance of a suspected terrorist in the U.S. who’s not an American citizen could go on for a year before the Department of Justice (DOJ) and related watchdog agencies like the National Security Administration (NSA) and FBI were forced to obtain judicial authorization. If the suspect was an American citizen, the DOJ had to get a court order within three days after the government began spying on him.

In 1978, the court that began giving out those permission slips was consolidated into a single, purpose-made entity: the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). Ever since, in order for the DOJ to obtain a FISA warrant, it has to submit a request to a FISC judge. Except when a third party files an amicus curiae brief objecting to, or supporting, the DOJ’s request, the Federal government is the only party before the judge. There are 11 FISC judges, but only one presides over each individual DOJ surveillance request. The public doesn’t see what goes on in the FISC deliberations. It’s a secret court. By law, its records and opinions can be kept secret.

FISA has become a rubber stamp for secret government surveillance of regular Americans, and the FISC has become a permission-slip clearinghouse. Since Sept. 11, 2001, “judicial oversight” has really meant “judicial blessing.”

The Administration of President George W. Bush had some rocky encounters with the FISC, largely because of media reports that outed the extent of then-Attorney General John Ashcroft’s surveillance ambitions. But Bush’s expansion of FISA powers with the Patriot Act, which amended the FISA Act to break down the standing distinction between “terrorist” and “criminal,” as well as the Republican-backed Protect America Act of 2007, which opened overseas communications to FISA’s spy scrutiny, gave the Federal government everything it needed to get away with indiscriminate, secret surveillance of just about everyone living in the United States.

The door was standing ajar, and Bush threw it wide open. Now, his successor, President Barack Obama, has blasted through it like the Kool-Aid man smashing through a brick wall.

Oh, yeah.

Ever since FISA was passed, the Feds have made 33,900 surveillance requests. They’ve walked away with nothing 11 times. They’ve succeeded 99.97 percent of the time in getting what they wanted. Said differently, the DOJ had all its ducks in a row 33,889 times in making a case for spying on someone — or on millions of people (what’s the difference anymore?) — before it approached FISC with a surveillance plan. That represents a sterling commitment to due diligence and development of probable cause on the part of the DOJ before submitting to the keen blade of judicial oversight. Right?

So said a former security lawyer under the Bush Administration, who told The Wall Street Journal that the DOJ rigorously vets its applications (like the one that created the PRISM program and secretly plugged into nearly every major online service provider in the country) before approaching FISC, hat in hand.

“We’ve got Congressional oversight and judicial oversight,” Obama said last week. “And if people can’t trust not only the executive branch but also don’t trust Congress and don’t trust federal judges to make sure that we’re abiding by the Constitution, due process and rule of law, then we’re going to have some problems here.”

If you believe that the Obama Administration — or that of his predecessor — has consistently been making sound Constitutional arguments that, on the merits, have persuaded one FISC judge after another to authorize PRISM, or the mass mining of cellphone metadata, or the DOJ surveillance of people before it even has a suspect (or a crime), well… you’ve been drinking the Kool-Aid.