In 1949, this definition of "terrorism" could be found on page 1346 of
Funk & Wagnall's Standard Dictionary of the English Language.

Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, 1970, page 911.

Federal judge rules illegal-immigrant minor has right to abortion.  Illegal-immigrant minors in the U.S. have an unfettered constitutional right to obtain an abortion, a federal judge ruled Wednesday [10/18/2017], ordering both the Trump administration and Texas officials to back off and allow a 17-year-old girl being held in a government-run shelter to be taken to a clinic.  District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, who was appointed by President Obama, said during a hearing she was "astounded" that the administration was trying to hinder the girl, identified in court papers only as "J.D."  "Despite the fact that she's in this country illegally, she still has constitutional rights," the judge said.

The Editor says...
Really?  Everybody who steps across the border inherits the protection of the U.S. Constitution?  I don't think so.  Moreover, what part of the Constitution legalizes abortion, makes it a right, and bestows that right on everybody who sneaks across the border?

Why is rebuilding after storms the federal government's responsibility?  The hurricane devastation is severe.  What should the federal government do?  Give us lots of money, say many in the wounded states.  Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) demanded "about $150 billion" — just for Texas.  So far, Congress has agreed to $15 billion in hurricane relief.  But more will come.  Few Americans will object.  The House vote for the first $7.9 billion was 419-3.  But let's take a breath.  Why is rebuilding the federal government's responsibility?

Nothing Makes Liberals Angrier Than Us Normals Insisting On Our Rights.  I don't agree with liberals often, because I'm not an idiot and because I love America, but when they once again say, "We must have a conversation about guns!" I still couldn't agree more. [...] But we really don't need to have a conversation about our rights to keep and bear arms.  They're rights.  There's nothing to talk about.  This goes for all our rights that the left hates, like the rights to speak and write freely, to practice our religion as we see fit, and to not be railroaded by liberal authority without due process.  Leftists hate our rights because they hate us, and when we assert our rights it gets in the way of their malicious schemes to dominate and control us.

Judicial Watch representing Clarice Feldman in her lawsuit against DC Government.  Federal law requires that DC's annual budget be approved by a majority or two-thirds vote of the DC Council and have affirmative appropriation passed by both Houses of Congress and presented to the president for signing.  In 2013, DC passed the Budget Autonomy Act of 2012, which "purportedly grants the District authority to incur obligations and expend local tax and fee revenue without an appropriation passed by both Houses of Congress and presented to the President for signing." In other words, DC has sought to remove appropriation authority from Congress and grant it to itself.  "This is quite simply a case of politicians gone wild.  The DC government acts as if it can violate federal law and ignore the U.S. Constitution without repercussions," said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.  "It is a federal crime to spend federal dollars without congressional authorization."

Mueller Scorches the Earth.  Robert Mueller's sprawling special-counsel investigation is playing hardball.  It was not enough to get a search warrant to ransack the Virginia home of Paul Manafort, even as the former Trump campaign chairman was cooperating with congressional investigators.  Mueller's [investigators] persuaded a judge to give them permission to pick the door lock.  That way, they could break into the premises in the wee hours, while Manafort and his wife were in bed sleeping.  They proceeded to secure the premises — of a man they are reportedly investigating for tax and financial crimes, not gang murders and Mafia hits — by drawing their guns on the stunned couple, apparently to check their pajamas for weapons.  Mueller's probe more resembles an empire, with 17 prosecutors retained on the public dime.  So ... what exactly is the crime of the century that requires five times the number of lawyers the Justice Department customarily assigns to crimes of the century?  No one can say.

With a Picked Lock and a Threatened Indictment, Mueller's Inquiry Sets a Tone.  Dispensing with the plodding pace typical of many white-collar investigations, Mr. Mueller's team has used what some describe as shock-and-awe tactics to intimidate witnesses and potential targets of the inquiry.  Mr. Mueller has obtained a flurry of subpoenas to compel witnesses to testify before a grand jury, lawyers and witnesses say, sometimes before his prosecutors have taken the customary first step of interviewing them.  One witness was called before the grand jury less than a month after his name surfaced in news accounts.  The special counsel even took the unusual step of obtaining a subpoena for one of Mr. Manafort's former lawyers, claiming an exception to the rule that shields attorney-client discussions from scrutiny.

Filibuster is Senate invention to aid and abet senators.  First of all, let's get it straight.  There is no such thing as filibuster in the United States Constitution.  The notion that this was an invention of the Founding Fathers is just wishful thinking by senators who want to give their shameless power grab the imprimatur of legitimacy.  Actually, the Constitution provides that a simple majority in both the House and Senate is sufficient to do business.  We know that was the plan because the authors of the Constitution spelled out only a handful of circumstances when a super-majority would be required such as ratifying treaties.

The Democrats' War on First Responder Services.  Government derives much of its moral authority to tax from its obligation to provide public safety, health and education.  Yet as public-sector pension plans create ever-greater demands upon local and state financial resources, The Democrats' machine funnels so much tax revenue into the corrupt bargain the party made with unions that states and municipalities must rob local public services of funds in order to give their constituents outrageous salary increases, bonuses, benefits and what is called "other pay."  There are two types of demands for this money: salary increases and pensions.  Even while revenues increase, the demand for public pensions and salaries has grown so fast that it has outrun the increases in tax revenue.  And rather than stabilize pensions or go to 401K type plans, municipalities and states have chosen to violate the Constitution and cut back on essential government public services.

Parents Catch FBI In Plot To Force Mentally Ill Son To Be A Right Wing Terrorist.  It's become a near-weekly occurrence.  Somewhere in some state, the FBI will announce that they've foiled yet another terrorist plot and saved lives.  However, as the data shows, the majority of these cases involve psychologically diminished patsies who've been entirely groomed, armed, and entrapped by FBI agents.  Simply put, the FBI manufactures terror threats and then takes credit for stopping them.  While many of these cases have garnered attention and been exposed in the alternative media, a recent case out of Oklahoma sets a new low for FBI and exposes how insidious these plots can be.

This Is Not The United States.  What is the technical moment when the Constitution failed?  Maybe that goes as far back as Theodore Roosevelt when he decided that it would be a good idea to occupy huge swaths of the Western states.  Make no mistake, these are not states in the same way another state might have 3-5% federally-owned land somewhere as an island in the mass of privately-owned land.  Western states are between 35-85% federally-owned lands.  That is an occupation and I often refer to the Western states as the Occupied States of America.

No Mass Casualty Incidents on U.S. Soil Since Trump Victory.  In late 2001, after 9/11, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld created the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Influence (OSI).  OSI activities include strategic influence, special plans, psychological operations (psy-ops), and perception management.  The DoD has identified the information domain as its new "asymmetric flank."  The level of use of perception management continues to grow throughout the military.  There are now specialists, known as psychological operations officers and civil affairs officers, whose sole purpose is to decide how to present information/propaganda to the media and to the people.  The NDAA makes it legal to broadcast propaganda within America.  The bill passed in Congress legalized covert infiltration of media organizations by government agents and created media outlets that operate as government fronts.  The National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 authorizes the dissemination of real fake news.

Prosecutors Look To Treat Illegal Alien Crimes Different From Actual Citizen Crimes.  [Scroll down]  In other words, there are games being played with the criminal justice system in order to protect illegal aliens who commit crimes above already being unlawfully present.  This is the point where the federal system should jump in and charge prosecutors and district attorneys with things like prosecutorial misconduct and violations of immigration law, such as 8 U.S. 1324, providing shelter to an illegal alien.

Gangster government revisited.  Michael Barone dubbed the Obama administration's casual attitude toward fundamental legal niceties "gangster government."  Based on recently unsealed documents in the shareholder litigation over the government's appropriation of the profits of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, New York Times business columnist Gretchen Morgenson provides one more striking case study: [...]

America's Long March toward a Secular Socialist Democracy.  Property rights are the bedrock of the American political system; without that foundation, there is no freedom.  The Founders held that property rights encompass not just physical property but also one's life, labor and livelihood, as individuals own their own lives; therefore, they must own the products of that life that can be traded in free exchange with others.  They further believed that the primary role of government is to guarantee and protect these property rights, and further, that these property rights are natural, or God given rights. [...] Nonetheless, since the 1930's the Progressives have been extraordinarily successful in gradually transforming the country into what the Founders feared:  a nation dominated by an all-powerful central government running roughshod over man's inalienable rights.

No, really — guns for we but not for thee.  Hey, remember two weeks ago when congressional bodies were hitting the ground, and some guy named Loudermilk rushed to a microphone and said congressvermin should pass a law giving them the privilege of going armed anywhere they wanted? [...] Introducing H.R. 2940, The Congressional Self-Defense Act, "To allow Members of Congress to carry a concealed firearm anywhere in the United States, with certain exceptions."

Code of Federal Regulations: 30 Miles of Paper.  The Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) contains 180,000 pages, Business Insider reported on June 26.  "On standard paper, these pages would be about sixty feet tall if stacked," Business Insider contributor Nathan Bryant writes.  "That is roughly equivalent to the height of a six-story building.  If those same pages were laid end-on-end, they would be over thirty miles long," he added.  That's not just a problem for printers, it's a problem for people trying to make a living in the United States.  The cost of compliance with these federal regulations is roughly $2 trillion a year, according to separate reports published by the National Association of Manufacturers and the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Robert Mueller Adopts Stalinist Tactics.  Yes, Virginia, this is a witch hunt.  Robert Mueller III was appointed special counsel after his friend, the vindictive James Comey, committed a federal crime by leaking a memo which was a government record to the press.  Mueller has picked staff and prosecutors as if he were stocking Hillary Clinton's Department of Justice.  He has picked a bevy of Clinton donors, an attorney who worked for the Clinton Foundation, a former Watergate assistant prosecutor, and even a senior adviser to Eric Holder.

Trump Russia probe gets special counsel but not Hillary, not IRS? Time to investigate the investigators.  The American people want justice to be blind.  They want equal justice and equal protection for everyone.  But Mr. Comey's actions continue to call his impartiality, and the impartiality of the Holder and Lynch Justice departments, into question. [...] Throughout 2015 and 2016 there were calls from Congress for a special counsel in the Clinton email scandal.  Again the Justice Department refused, even after it was revealed that Attorney General Loretta Lynch met privately with Bill Clinton less than a week before the FBI interviewed Hillary Clinton.  No special counsel was established, even after some unusual Justice Department immunity deals were revealed, including those designed to protect Secretary Clinton's chief of staff Cheryl Mills, and Bryan Pagliano, who set up the email server in the first place.  This is the type of unequal justice that Americans despise.  No special counsel in the IRS targeting investigation.  No special counsel for the Clinton email investigation.  But if it's about protecting Mr. Comey's reputation and hurting President Trump, then of course there has to be a special counsel.

A License to Mow Lawns?  Occupational Licensure and Liberty.  If teenagers in Gardendale, Alabama, want to earn money this summer mowing lawns, they'll need to comply with a city ordinance requiring them to get a lawn mowing license, permission that will cost $110. [...] How did we come to a place where the powers that be can demand people apply for permission to earn a living?  Is occupational licensure not a contemporary cousin to the Stamp Act that sparked a revolution?

Americans Learning to Live with Treason.  [Scroll down] 
  •   Benghazi — Obama and his administration to the American people that a video caused the horrific massacre.  President and allies openly engage in cover-up.
  •   FBI investigation on Hillary Clinton — Comey announces Hillary's guilty on all counts, then the judgment, and she walks.  A two-tier justice system; Hillary's above the law.
  •   CNN caught giving to Hillary Clinton.  Democrats rig debates.  Democrats cheat Bernie Sanders out of the nomination.  Democrats rig elections.
These are just a few of the unacceptable transgressions by our corrupt leaders.  Each time, outraged conservatives demand that the perpetrators be brought to justice.  Each time, the press gaslights the American people with a media blackout, acts as though the incident never happened.  Each time, the cabal rides out the news cycle until the story fades, and everyone's home free.

Alabama man jailed for a decade without trial awaits decision from judge.  An Alabama man who has been jailed on a murder charge for the last 10 years without a trial could soon learn his fate.  Houston County Circuit Judge Kevin Moulton heard arguments in a case involving Kharon Davis on Tuesday [6/6/2017] in Dothan.  Davis was arrested and charged for the murder of Pete Reaves in June 2007 at an apartment in Dothan, the Dothan Eagle reported.  Davis' attorney Thomas Goggans argued his case should be dismissed because he was previously represented by a lawyer with a possible conflict of interest in the case.  His previous attorney, Ben Meredith, had a son who was going to testify as a witness for the prosecution.

Obama's regulations in 2016 to drain economy by $2 trillion.  The Obama administration issued a record number of new regulations on its way out the door in 2016, leaving an administrative state that saps the economy of nearly $2 trillion a year, according to a new report being released Wednesday [5/31/2017].  The government itself spent $63 billion in 2016 to administer and enforce all of its own regulations, the Competitive Enterprise Institute said.

Vermont DMV Caught Using Illegal Facial Recognition Program.  The Vermont Department of Motor Vehicles has been caught using facial recognition software — despite a state law preventing it.  Documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union of Vermont describe such a program, which uses software to compare the DMV's database of names and driver's license photos with information with state and federal law enforcement.  Vermont state law, however, specifically states that "The Department of Motor Vehicles shall not implement any procedures or processes... that involve the use of biometric identifiers."

Republicans Go to Jail, Democrats Run Free.  Americans have lost faith in government because, frankly, had private citizens committed crimes remotely similar to those perpetrated by the Clintons, Abedin, Holder, Lerner, Rice, and the rest of these crooks, they would be making license plates.  Unfortunately, Republican ineptness has contributed to this excruciating disappointment.  This helps explain why so many Americans believe the elite operate with a rule book to which regular folks have zero access.

The News Is Propaganda.  Non-stop distractions are deliberately used by those in power as instruments of policy for the purpose of preventing people from paying attention to reality.  Propaganda is used by those in power to manipulate language, thought, and opinion in a way that causes the progression from thought to action artificially.  When the public is reduced to a state where people no longer care about the truth and are unaware of what that truth even is, propaganda takes hold and shows them what to do. [...] Under the conditions in which we find ourselves living crisis to crisis, there can be no thought as the steady stream of propaganda is fed to us in the form of "news" that never strays from a certain narrative.

Congress' secret police.  After the arrest and conviction of a woman for laughing during Attorney General Jeff Sessions confirmation hearing, one might be curious to see the incident report filed by the police.  Unfortunately, the arresting agency, the United States Capitol Police (USCP), is a "legislative branch entity," and therefore not subject to FOIA.

Widow can sue over NASA's sting operation on her.  A 75-year-old widow in tough financial straits reached out to NASA about selling a speck of moon rock her late husband had given her.  Joann Davis then became the target of a sting operation at a Denny's that a federal appeals court suggested Thursday was outrageous overkill.  The lead agent "organized a sting operation involving six armed officers to forcibly seize a Lucite paperweight containing a moon rock the size of a rice grain from an elderly grandmother," wrote Judge Sidney Thomas of the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals in the decision allowing Davis to sue, per the Los Angeles Times. [...] Agents also forcibly restrained her second husband, who had accompanied her to the supposed sale.  Davis' first husband, Robert, worked as an Apollo 11 engineer, and he saved a paperweight with moon material and another with a bit of the heat shield.

Man Fined $500 for Crime of Writing 'I Am An Engineer' in an Email to the Government.  An electronics engineer says he found a flaw in traffic lights.  The Oregon engineering board fined him for it.

When the feds won't give up information the public owns.  There's no better example of our broken system than the partial Freedom of Information (FOI) response I just got.  It's from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) regarding an Obamacare FOI request I made several years ago when I was at CBS News and investigating the failed launch and serious security risks surrounding the Affordable Care Act national website.  A couple of points:  In 2013, I asked for simple public information regarding the website, but the government improperly refused to provide it.  I filed a FOI request, which requires the government to process and provide the material within about 20 days.  The government didn't provide any of the material in the lawful time frame, which, unfortunately, is currently the typical response from federal agencies in response to FOI requests.  I eventually filed a FOI lawsuit with the help of Judicial Watch.  The government spent your tax dollars defending the lawsuit.

We're down to one branch of government.  How did we reach the place where nobody knows what the "law of the land" is until the Supreme Court rules?  How did the Supreme Court acquire so much blatantly unconstitutional and immoral power?  The answer is easy:  the Court stole it.

A Case of 21,587 Crimes.  In the 1990s, Dr. Ralph Erdmann, a highly paid pathologist working for Lubbock County, Texas, ran into a spot of trouble:  At one point he had misplaced a human head, and in one autopsy report he duly recorded the condition of the spleen of a man who did not have one.  He kept blood samples in his home refrigerator, next to the mustard.  He was eventually convicted of a raft of felonies involving evidence tampering and perjury.  Local lawyers insisted that he was cooperating with the district attorney and providing whatever evidence was needed to produce a conviction.  His tainted evidence helped produce convictions in at least 20 capital murder cases.  Dookhan received a sentence of three to five years and was shortly thereafter paroled.

White House sidewalk to be closed to public permanently.  The U.S. Secret Service said it would end public access to a sidewalk along the south fence of the White House beginning on Wednesday night [4/19/2017].

Congressman Says Corruption in Washington Is 'Worse Than You Think'.  Corruption on Capitol Hill is "worse than you think," Rep. Ken Buck, R-Colo., insists.  "When you first get here, you think that you are in some sort of fairy-tale novel," Buck said.  "They wine and dine you and they show you just exactly what it's like if you play the game.  It's a wonderful life."  Things quickly change, however, if "you don't play the game."  "If you don't play the game ... it becomes a much less conformable existence here," Buck said.

A Century of Political Surveillance and Repression.  Whether protesting the march to war, federal policy on AIDS research, civil rights violations, or simply enjoying the Nevada desert at a "Burning Man" gathering, the common theme that emerges is that simply publicly expressing strong political views that run counter to the prevailing government political paradigm is often enough to trigger federal government surveillance.

In New York, Big Brother Is Watching Your Free Speech.  When free speech threatens government power, government has a tendency to get curious about the identity and funding of dissenting speakers.  This was true in the civil-rights era, when the state of Alabama tried to force the NAACP to divulge its membership lists.  It was true during the Obama administration, when the IRS targeted the Tea Party for illegal scrutiny not merely by asking in some cases for donor lists but also by inquiring about the political activities of family members of tea-party leaders and the login information of tea-party websites.  And it was certainly true in the state of Wisconsin, when law enforcement used terrifying dawn and pre-dawn raids to gather information about First Amendment-protected issue advocacy about labor-union reform.  But why threaten to batter down a door when you can just pass a law that batters away at the Constitution?  That's the state of New York's approach, and it's now facing one of the more important First Amendment challenges that you've likely never heard of.

700 Attorneys Spied On in One Prison, Investigator Finds.  A court-appointed investigator has found that the United States Attorney's Office for Kansas is in possession of hundreds of phone and video recordings of communications between attorneys and their clients, inmates at a privately run prison facility in Leavenworth.  At least 700 attorneys are believed to have been recorded without their knowledge, the investigator's report submitted to a federal court said.  Last week Special Master David Cohen asked to expand his probe to determine whether prosecutors regularly listened to and compiled attorney-client conversations.  Already, 227 phone call recordings and at least 30 videos of attorney-client meetings have been discovered in the U.S. Attorney's Office in Kansas City.

Thanks to Trump, Pruitt, Gorsuch, and Goodlatte, the Constitution Is Back.  America has begun the process of reclaiming the Constitution.  This week, the Senate is taking up the confirmation Judge Neil Gorsuch, one of many Trump nominees known for his dedication to constitutional government.  This follows the Senate confirmation of Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt as head of the EPA — a federal agency he has sued not once, not twice, but fourteen times.  Pruitt's appointment could not come at a better time.  During the past eight years, the Obama administration has passed well over 25,000 regulations.  These regulations cost taxpayers a whopping $890 billion, or about $15,000 a household.  And of that $890 billion, the EPA is responsible for $344 billion — more than any other agency.  This kind of power goes directly against the framers' original intent.

Feds knew blizzard forecast was exaggerated — but didn't want to confuse us.  Fears of a massive blizzard led officials to close city public schools and for above-ground train service to be stopped — but in the end, only about 7 inches fell in Central Park.  After announcing that snow could reach record levels in the city, NWS meteorologists in New York and other Northeast cities held a conference call Monday afternoon [3/13/2017] about computer models that dramatically cut predicted totals.  But they decided to continue forecasting deep snow, claiming that they didn't change their forecast for fear people would mistakenly think the storm was no longer dangerous.

The Editor says...
The situation above demonstrates the state of the art in meteorology:  Snowfall cannot be accurately predicted a few days in advance, even with the fastest computers and best software in the world.  Tornados can't be forecast at all, and the prediction of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions is just as uncertain.  But these are the same people who are absolutely sure that by January 1, 2100, the average worldwide temperature will be two degrees higher than it is today.

Gorsuch Understands How Bureaucratic Bullies Harm First Amendment Rights.  One of the major threats to free speech today is not censorship.  It's harassment.  Here's how it works.  People join or give money to groups that support causes they believe in.  Those groups attract the ire of government officials when they criticize them or take a position they oppose.  Unable to ban the group from speaking, an angry bureaucrat does the next best thing:  launch an investigation into how the group operates and who supports it.  The best part for the government?  It doesn't matter how the investigation turns out or if no charges are ever pressed.  The investigation ties up the group's resources and scares away supporters.  The process is the punishment for speaking.

A Fair and Legal Replacement for DACA.  President Obama's DACA, issued in 2012 via memorandum, was a patently lawless use of executive power.  After Congress (again) decided not to pass the DREAM Act, granting legal status to illegal immigrants who came here as children, the president abused his "pen and phone" to impose the law's provisions unilaterally.  The administration risibly claimed that this was an exercise of "prosecutorial discretion," implying that the government would be evaluating applications for deferred status on a case-by-case basis.  Unsurprisingly, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officials have reported otherwise; in fact, anyone who appears to be under the maximum deferral age — that is, any illegal immigrant who appears younger than 35 years old — is simply presumed to be eligible for DACA.  Under the policy, about 750,000 illegal aliens have been granted not only renewable, two-year deportation stays, but also work permits, Social Security numbers, access to the EITC welfare program, and driver's licenses.  Functionally, more than 2 million have been shielded from deportation for nearly five years.

Judge: If Obama Wiretapped Trump, It Would 'Destroy Whatever Legacy' He Has.  Judge Andrew Napolitano said Barack Obama's alleged wiretapping of Trump Tower is technically legal but it would destroy whatever legacy the former president has if true.  The Fox News senior judicial analyst was a guest Tuesday [3/7/2017] on "Fox & Friends" discussing whether the former administration would face legal trouble if the wiretapping is confirmed.  The judge said Obama had the power to legally order a wiretap, saying it's directly in the FISA statute that "the president of the United States on his own may conduct surveillance or order surveillance of any person in the United States upon the filing of a certification with the attorney general."

U.S. Gives Soros Groups Millions to Destabilize Macedonia's Conservative Govt.  The U.S. government has quietly spent millions of taxpayer dollars to destabilize the democratically elected, center-right government in Macedonia by colluding with leftwing billionaire philanthropist George Soros, records obtained by Judicial Watch show.  Barack Obama's U.S. Ambassador to Macedonia, Jess L. Baily, has worked behind the scenes with Soros' Open Society Foundation to funnel large sums of American dollars for the cause, constituting an interference of the U.S. Ambassador in domestic political affairs in violation of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations.

Tired of Everything Being Politicized?  There's One Simple Solution.  The problem with Big Government is that, when you have a hammer, every problem begins to look like a nail.  Likewise, the answer to all issues of life in an over-governed society becomes one for public policy and, eventually, national debate to settle it out.  Pretty soon, the engines that make up our daily lives — the ones that ought to be filled by family and community institutions — become the purview of the state.

This Indiana Town Wants to Fine a Community Out of Existence on Behalf of Private Developers.  Members of a small, low-income community in Indiana are discovering that state-level protections that make it hard for cities to seize their property may not be enough.  When city leaders decide to get into bed with private developers, there are all sorts of ways for cronyism to threaten the property rights of owners.  When we imagine how a city or town seizes private property from citizens in order to hand it over to developers for special projects, we often think about eminent domain.  Governments can force citizens to sell them their property (often for much less than it's worth on the market). While eminent domain was supposed to be used solely for public works projects (roads, schools, et cetera), the infamous Kelo v.  City of New London Supreme Court decision set a legal precedent allowing governments to use it to hand over property to private developers for big projects.  Some states that objected to that decision passed new laws to restrict how eminent domain may be used within their borders.  Indiana was one of them.

The Ninth Circuit's Power Grab.  A federal judge in Seattle, James Robart, issued a temporary restraining order against the travel ban at the behest of two states, Washington and Minnesota, run by Democratic governors.  Now, the Ninth Circuit has upheld this single, unelected jurist's usurpation of the power to make American national-security policy.  According to the three-judge panel, even illegal aliens, to say nothing of aliens holding non-immigrant visas or permanent-resident status, have due-process rights against government actions to protect Americans from foreign threats.  Therefore, the president and Congress (i.e., the branches of government constitutionally responsible for national security) may not take such actions unless and until the judiciary (the branch with no such responsibility) has approved those actions.  That aliens are not citizens and have no constitutional right to come to the United States is apparently superseded by their newfangled "right" to be welcomed into the United States courts.  And even if they are not here already, even if they remain in the far reaches of the globe, this alien "right" may be asserted by state governments.

Troops Await Deployment Orders from Ninth Circuit.  Apart from the unremitting attacks on Republicans by paid mobs and Democratic congressmen desperate to help the base forget they lost big time and will continue to do so in 2018, the big news this week has to be the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals granting itself the right to dictate foreign policy despite the clear words of the Constitution and federal law granting the president the absolute right to preclude entry to any alien he thinks poses a threat to national security.  Following a nonsensical decision by federal court Judge James Robart in Washington state staying the suspension of entry from seven countries, the administration sought to overturn it — the most popular Trump executive order — in the Ninth Circuit, the largest and most frequently overturned federal Circuit Court.

Court ends constitutional government by blocking Trump.  The 228-year experiment with a Constitutional Republic took another step closer to ending today in a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals courtroom when a panel of three judges upheld a district court's decision that the president of the United States and Congress cannot control our borders.  So much for the idea that elections have consequences. [...] he judges involved in this should be impeached for exceeding their authority.  There is no way every single district judge in America has the power or authority to make a policy decision affecting the national security of 320 million Americans.  The Supreme Court should make that perfectly clear.

Short Circuit:  Bill Aims to Deep-Six 9th.  How big is the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals?  The San-Francisco-based circuit is so big that it represents nine states, including Nevada, 20 percent of the U.S. population and 40 percent of the nation's land mass.  It's so big that Congress has looked at bills to split the circuit since 1941, and it's so big that none of those measures have succeeded.

U.S. judge who stayed President Trump's immigration order abused his judicial power.  I just read the ruling of U.S. District Judge James Robart blocking a sitting American president's ability to impose temporary rules limiting the entry of migrants seeking access to the United States so that the existing programs are properly evaluated and modified, as necessary, for reasons of national security.  Can you spell "forum shopping" for a favorable judge?  Imagine the attorney general of the state of Washington being able to strategically pick a judge who allows his personal preferences to override his responsibility to respect the law and apply it properly rather than acting as an independent arbiter with the duty to respect and follow the law.

President Obama Declares Record 26th, 27th National Monuments.  Using authority granted the President under the 1906 Antiquities Act, Obama created the 1.35 million acre Bears Ears National Monument in Utah and the 300,000 acre Gold Butte National Monument in Northern Nevada.  This action brings the number of national monuments created or expanded by President Obama to 27, more than any other president in history.  A national monument designation prevents a variety of uses on the land including energy development, mining, and sometimes fishing and hunting.

Oath, Shmoath.  I've long argued that the only impeachable offense committed by George W. Bush was when he signed McCain-Feingold into law while admitting that he thought parts of it were unconstitutional.  The president takes an oath to protect the Constitution every bit as binding as the one the Supreme Court Justices take.  If you're president or a member of Congress it is a violation of your oath to green-light an unconstitutional act, whether or not you think the Supreme Court will fix it.

Judge Newman Turns Slager Trial into Kangaroo Court — Verdict Now Irrelevant.  The afternoon story began with the announcement the jury in the Officer Michael Slager trial was hopelessly deadlocked.  Previously the State of South Carolina presented two options for verdict consideration, Murder or Voluntary Manslaughter.  The voluntary manslaughter option (lesser charges) was added AFTER the trial phase was concluded and the defense presented, then rested, its case.  The reason for the lesser charge was transparent to all who knew and followed the case closely, there was virtually no way for a jury to convict on just the original charge of murder, hence the lesser included.  Adding the lesser charge option after trial testimony was yet again more evidence of a manipulative prosecution.

Obama sets new record for regulations, 527 pages in just one day.  President Obama has just set a new record for rules and regulations, his administration spitting out 527 pages worth in just one day, as he races to put his fingerprint on virtually every corner of American life and business.  According to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the administration has just shattered the old record for pages of regulations and rules published by the in-house journal, the Federal Register.  At 81,640 total pages for 2016, it ranks first and 235 pages more than all of those published in 2010, the previous record.

The Head of DOJ's Civil Rights Division Is Violating Federal Law and Her Actions May Be Void.  Vanita Gupta, the acting head of the U.S. Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, apparently has been working in violation of federal law for more than a year and a half.  That may render all of the official actions she has taken during that period — lawsuits, demand letters, hires, you name it — "void" and of no effect.  To deter presidents from trying to get around the Senate's constitutional "advise and consent" role in executive branch appointments, Congress passed the Federal Vacancies Reform Act in 1998.  A key section of the law sets restrictions and time limitations on how long someone can remain as the "acting" official in a position that must be confirmed by the Senate.

House Republicans to Obama officials:  Slip new regulations through and you could be punished.  Newly empowered House Republicans on Tuesday laid down the gauntlet to the outgoing Obama administration:  Don't finalize any pending rules and regulations you think you can slip through before you leave office.  In a letter to hundreds of Cabinet secretaries, commissioners and other heads of federal offices and agencies signed by 22 Republican leaders, the lawmakers noted that President Obama has been generous in his use of executive orders to set policy.  And they issued a threat:  Ignore us and we will give your agency extra scrutiny.

The Persecution of Hank Greenberg.  Earlier this month in New York City, a 91-year-old man who fought on Normandy beach during World War II and later fought in the Korean War was dragged into a courtroom and drilled with questions for five days by a team of government-paid prosecutors.  There are no witnesses to testify against him, and no claim of damages.  The government's ultimate objective is to bar the man from working in the securities industry, though it also hopes to force him to forfeit bonuses that he earned nearly two decades ago.  The case has been in the works for 11 years.  Initially nine charges were filed, but now only two remain.  The trial is expected to last into next year.  None of this seems to make any sense — until you learn that it is all Eliot Spitzer's doing.

Paying the Price for Calling Obama a Commie.  Call President Barack Obama a communist in Nebraska and you could pay a hefty price.  Just ask Robert Bennie Jr., a successful financial adviser and former leader of the tea party in the state capital of Lincoln.  Bennie and the employer that eventually fired him were hounded and harassed by the Nebraska Department of Banking and Finance for months, in large part due to Bennie's political views, according to his attorneys.  And while a U.S. appeals court agreed with a lower court that the regulators "targeted Bennie partly in retaliation for his constitutionally protected political speech," the agency's harassing activities did not rise to a First Amendment violation — to "deter someone of ordinary firmness from continuing to speak."

FBI Leaks Reveal Disgust With Politicization of Agency and DOJ.  CTH readers will remember how far we researched the transparent politicization of criminal cases as they related to the DOJ (Eric Holder and Tom Perez) in the Zimmerman trial.  Specifically how entities within the DOJ/FBI colluded with State Attorney Angela Corey about extracting then hiding Trayvon Martin's phone metadata.  That level of coordinated DOJ/FBI corruption only worsened with Darren Wilson (Ferguson) and beyond.  The same manipulative tentacles became more evident with the IRS targeting scandal and later the email investigation into Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.  In essence, the bottom line is:  the politicization and weaponization of government has been going on for more than just a few years.

Pastor Facing $100 a Day Fines for Helping Homeless Women and Children on His Own Church's Property.  Proving once again that the state has no interest in helping people, the state of Delaware is attacking a pastor who would dare attempt to help the homeless.  Pastor Aaron Appling of Victory Church West in Dover is being threatened with a $100 per day fine by county officials for allowing a 21-year-old homeless woman to live in an RV in the back of the church property.  Because Appling didn't go through the right channels of extortion and get his own property approved by the government to do with it what he wishes, officials are promising to extort him.

Obama: Country Can't Function With Only Eight Supreme Court Justices.  Article III of the Constitution lists nine classes of cases within the jurisdiction of the federal judiciary, including the Supreme Court.  Among those nine powers, one does not find "amending the Constitution," or "voiding the will of the people," or "forcing states to accept social attitudes inconsistent with their citizens," or anything even close to amending the Constitution via judicial decision.  Article V of the Constitution sets out the amendment procedure and "whatever the Supreme Court says" is not part of the constitutionally mandated process!  Thomas Jefferson had something to say in the matter.  In 1804, he wrote that giving the Supreme Court power to declare as unconstitutonal acts of the legislature or executive "would make the judiciary a despotic branch."  He noted that "nothing in the Constitution" gives the Supreme Court that right.

FBI Colluded with Democrats, Team Clinton on Email 'Prosecution'.  The clueless Republicans — like most Americans — simply cannot bring themselves to realize what sort of government we are now living under. [...] The Obama administration has corrupted and weaponized the major enforcement agencies of the federal government, including the IRS and the FBI, and now is reaching down to the local level in order to bring municipal police forces under Washington's control.

School orders 5-hour psych exam for student after he hands in anti-gun control presentation.  Manville High School senior Frank Harvey school officials are driving him out over an anti-gun control class presentation he received an "A" on last year.  Harvey was suspended Tuesday [9/27/2016] and ordered to undergo a five-hour psychological exam before he can return after he left a thumb drive in the school library that contained an anti-gun control presentation he gave as an assignment in April, NJ.com reports.  Someone found the thumb drive and turned it over to school officials, who then called police to interrogate the student.

Ex-O.C. court clerk accused of fixing hundreds of criminal and traffic cases for bribes.  A dozen men have been charged in a massive bribery scheme allegedly run by an Orange County court clerk accused of forging records in hundreds of cases to get drunk drivers and other violators off with little or no punishment. [...] At the center of the case is Jose Lopez Jr., a former clerk in Orange County Superior Court who is accused of resolving hundreds of cases by entering information into the court's computer system to make it appear as if defendants had served jail time, been convicted of less serious charges and paid fines when they had not.

Inmates say prison made them watch Hillary Clinton's speech, blacked out Donald Trump's.  Federal convicts told a judge they were forced to watch Hillary Clinton's convention speech at the federal prison where they're being held — but said the prison imposed a blackout on Donald Trump's speech, tuning the facility's televisions to other channels.  The felons are trying to join the federal case against President Obama's 2014 deportation amnesty, saying that Mr. Obama is discriminating against U.S. citizens caught breaking the law by punishing them, even as he attempts to grant work permits and taxpayer-funded benefits to illegal immigrants.

Patent Office Workers Defraud Inventors Of Millions of Dollars.  Reviewing and issuing patents is one of the few responsibilities of the federal government that is actually important — which makes the revelations contained in a new report from an inspector general all the more disturbing.  The Commerce Department's IG found that hundreds of patent examiners billed for close to 300,000 hours that they didn't work, over a span of 15 months.  That cost $18.3 million, the IG says, with the bill paid by inventors themselves who fund the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office through application fees.  Plus, had these employees actually worked those hours, they could have cut the USPTO's chronic backlog of patent reviews by 16,000.

This Is Not Your Government.  Those who reside within the borders of the United States live under a despotic rule of Supreme Court justices, regulators, random judges, presidential decree and Fed policy.  There is no politician in the land responsive to the people.  This is how Donald Trump gained the Republican nomination, because folks were fed up with calling their congressperson seeking redress only to be sold out as soon as the votes were counted.  US citizens are not constituents in the normal vernacular, they are simply voters, you know, those folks who come around every two to four years and validate all of the larceny that has taken place in the past two to four years.

Obama's Indian Policy Threatens All Americans, Both Tribal and Non-tribal Citizens.  Flying completely under the radar of the vast majority of Americans, federal Indian policies of the Obama administration are subverting our constitutional order and successfully transferring vast land holdings and natural resources to corrupt, federally controlled tribal governments.  This stealth agenda is replacing the authority and obligations of the various state governments to protect the lives, rights, property, and natural resources of their citizens by illegally and immorally transferring that authority to select tribal governments. [...] The horrendous consequences of this political path are alarming, to say the least, not only for Americans living in the 39 states directly affected, but for our entire country.  While farmers, ranchers, and other rural citizens and small towns are the frontline targets of this stealth agenda, it will dramatically impact all Americans.

Government Workers Now Outnumber Manufacturing Workers by 9,932,000.  Government employees in the United States outnumber manufacturing employees by 9,932,000, according to data released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  Federal, state and local government employed 22,213,000 people in August, while the manufacturing sector employed 12,281,000.  The BLS has published seasonally-adjusted month-by-month employment data for both government and manufacturing going back to 1939.  For half a century — from January 1939 through July 1989 — manufacturing employment always exceeded government employment in the United States, according to these numbers.

Dallas Judges Shred Constitution, Steal Millions.  Jeff Baron is a Dallas resident and U.S. citizen who was put into "virtual slavery" by U.S. District Court Judge Royal Furgeson after Baron settled an otherwise ordinary contract dispute in his court.  Although Baron was never accused of any crime and had just resolved the dispute in Furgeson's court, Furgeson seized the sum total of Baron's personal property and possessions, including his home and car, and suspended nearly all of his civil rights, including his right to be represented by counsel, right to own property, right to earn income, and right to travel.  Four years later, Baron was still in civil lockdown — even after the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the unlawful rulings and enjoined any further liquidation of Baron's property.

'Cajun Navy' Saves Thousands After LA Floods, Now Govt.  Wants to Introduce Legislation Around Citizen Heroes.  No good deed goes unpunished.  That's especially true when the government finds out about it.  The 'Cajun Navy' has rescued upwards of thousands of people after the floods ravaged Louisiana, but now Uncle Sam wants to introduce "legislation around future actions by citizen heroes."

A Louisiana Republican wants Good Samaritans to pay up before helping flood victims.  Louisiana State Representative Jonathan Perry has proposed a bill that could require training and a fee before volunteers can get past law enforcement cordons around dangerous areas, WWL-TV reports.  Perry argues that untrained volunteers pose a liability to the state.  But that almost immediately sparked resistance from the Cajun Navy.

The Editor says...
Liberals think you're too stupid to watch out for snakes and submerged hazards.  Statists abhor private-sector problem-solvers because they think the government should be in charge of (and take credit for) everything.  Self-important officials and politicians seem to believe that only those with badges and permits are capable of helping their neighbors.  This licensing of post-disaster volunteers has never been necessary before.  This is all about fees and licenses, which means it's all about control and taxes, not public safety.

Carbon Cost Ruling Favors Environment over Citizens.  On Monday [8/8/2016], the Chicago-based 7th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals unanimously rejected an industry-backed request to overturn a 2014 Department of Energy (DOE) regulation that set efficiency standards for refrigerators.  In doing so, the court decided that the DOE has the authority to use SCC as part of its overall cost-benefit analysis when considering environmental regulations.  This is the first time a court has weighed the legality of carbon accounting, which many congressional Republicans, manufacturers and fossil fuel interests oppose as inaccurate and unreliable.  But the court sided with the DOE and environmental groups that believe the social costs of carbon emissions can, and should, be assessed on an economic scale.

What's Wrong With the Government's Mandating of Energy Efficiency.  The Obama administration's Department of Energy has churned through a list of energy efficiency regulations before the next administration.  Just since June, the DOE has set or initiated standards for dehumidifiers, ceiling fans, battery chargers, and wine coolers. [...] Take a look around your kitchen.  Many of the appliances are also regulated by the federal government, from the oven and refrigerator, down to the standby light on the microwave.  Step outside to other rooms and even outdoors.  TVs, showers, air conditioners and heaters, washers and dryers, backyard swimming pools, toilets — these are just some of the other things regulated by the federal government.

Government Pulls Water Supply of Dakota Protestors Despite Sweltering Heat.  Growing in number and spirit, the Standing Rock Sioux protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline is swiftly gaining strength ahead of a federal hearing on the controversial project.  Support has spread across the country, and thousands have descended on the peaceful "prayer camps" in recent days, prompting state officials on Monday to remove the demonstrators' drinking water supply.  North Dakota homeland security director Greg Wilz ordered the removal of state-owned trailers and water tanks from the protest encampment, despite the sweltering heat, because of alleged disorderly conduct, according to the Bismarck Tribune, including reports of laser pointers aimed at surveillance aircraft.

Seattle Warrantless Garbage Searches Unconstitutional.  King County Judge Beth Andrus ruled Seattle's warrantless searches of garbage violate Washington State's constitution, banning Seattle sanitation workers from looking in residents' trash for possible violations of the city's composting law.  The ruling in Bonesteel, et al. v.  City of Seattle shows states are able to grant rights beyond those guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution.  It was handed down on April 27.  According to the Washington State Constitution, "No person shall be disturbed in his private affairs, or his home invaded, without authority of law."  "By authorizing garbage collectors to pry through people's garbage without a warrant, the city has promoted a policy of massive and persistent snooping," said Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF) attorney Ethan Blevins in a statement.  Blevins was one of the PLF lawyers who represented the eight plaintiffs.

With New Navajo Nation Lawsuit, EPA Faces More Pressure Over Gold King Mine Spill.  One year has passed since the Environmental Protection Agency caused a discharge of 3 million gallons of toxic water into the Animas River, and no one has been held accountable, although private parties have been criminally prosecuted under similar circumstances in the past.  Now, three entities' actions might change the resulting narrative that there are two sets of rules, one for people in the private sector, and another for employees of the federal government.

277,000: Fed Regulators Have More Than Quadrupled Since 1960.  Want to work in a field that has more than quadrupled in size since 1960?  Consider being a regulator for the federal government.  Even during the last recession, the regulatory agencies were hiring.  In 2015, the U.S. government employed more than 277,000 regulators.  To put that number in perspective, it's 50,000 more workers than General Motors Co. employs throughout the entire world.  We've all heard of the regulatory agencies that constitute the "fourth branch" of government.  It has cost our economy over $100 billion during the Obama administration.  But it wasn't always like this.  We haven't always lived in a world where unelected bureaucrats could fine a man $55,000 for taking photos of his friend's art project.

DOJ Bills JW $50k to Search for Nonexistent Records about Anti-Terrorism Coalition Launched by AG Loretta Lynch.  Specifically, Judicial Watch asked for legal opinions and analysis prepared by the DOJ relating to the U.S. involvement in the program, documents that form the foundation for the decision for the country to participate in SCN [Strong Cities Network], all international agreements and related records involving the commitment of U.S. resources or personnel to SCN and records of communication between officials in the Office of the Attorney General relating to the initiative.  The request reminds the agency that, under the OPEN Government Act, Judicial Watch is entitled to a complete waiver of search and duplication fees if records aren't produced within 20 business days.  On July 29, 2016, long after the deadline to produce the records, the DOJ sent Judicial Watch a $50,000 invoice for search fees, though not a single file was produced.

Was This Wartime Technology Really Deployed Against Journalists Inside the DNC?  Technology developed to jam cellphones during the Iraq War may be getting deployed against journalists reporting on protests against the political establishment in the United States.  While police and government surveillance of protests, including monitoring of cellphone use, is well-documented, efforts to block signals at protests remains an oft-repeated, but never proven, rumor.  It may be impossible to definitively prove that authorities are using cellphone "jamming" technology, but journalists working with both mainstream and independent media reported unusual difficulties accessing the internet during recent protests at the gates of the Democratic National Convention, consistent with the effects this very real technology could have.  During the protests outside the DNC, which I covered for MintPress News, I experienced this personally, with my internet connection behaving suspiciously near the convention's security fences and entrance gates, often abruptly blocking my tweets and other communication.  The same was true for every other journalist I spoke with who covered the protests.

Aristocracy In America.  An increasing number of Americans do not know history.  The result is the continued expansion of an elite class for whom the law does not apply.  We no longer recognize that there is a cycle from tyranny to revolution (or invasion), to liberty, to oligarchy and back again.  Our founders understood this and wrote the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights to counter it.  Yet knowledge of only 20th century history is enough to see the pattern clearly.  Since the writings of Karl Marx, aristocracy has flourished by camouflaging itself in the cloak of equality.  For example, an increasing number of Americans fail to recognize the inherent hypocrisy of politicians surrounded by taxpayer-funded, armed security while working diligently on removing the right of the citizenry to defend itself in the same way.

Donald Trump Is Right About One Thing:  Our Experts Know Nothing.  Americans are governed by politicians who see fit to reimagine entire sectors of our economy and, indeed, our lives despite having little, if any, experience in the areas of life they seek to reform wholesale.  This means Americans, seeing the failures of government from Obamacare to the Veterans Affairs, from the Environmental Protection Agency dumping toxic materials into a Colorado river to the Dodd-Frank regulations strangling local community banks, have had just about enough of their credentialed but utterly inexperienced supposed betters reordering their lives and livelihoods.  Think about it:  how many practicing physicians helped design and implement Obamacare?  How many doctors did the Obama administration consult in imposing its electronic medical records requirements on physicians?

Engineered Chaos And Fear The New Norm In America As Many Assume The "Reality" Of Staged Events.  There was a time when there was actually a sense of normality all around us and there was a sense of justice and accountability at the government level even if it was mostly the perception of it. [...] There was even a time when you could comfortably plan on traveling pretty much anywhere in the world, especially here in the United States for business or pleasure without having to deal with the prospect of "terrorism" or another psyop mass shooting, terror truck drivers, snipers or lockdowns.  You also didn't have to worry about a violent police state, checkpoints, surveillance cameras, killer robots, government spying and 24/7 fear, death and destruction being put out by the mainstream media news.  There was a sense of order, in other words, that many of us still remember and we remember exactly what it felt like.  Obviously you can't miss something or yearn for the days you've never experienced.  This disconnect that the younger generation has to what some may refer to the good old days is important in the grand scheme of things because this chaos is all they know and it is a grand example of learned helplessness.  For the first time in modern American history we have a generation that doesn't know what order, calmness and peace looks like.

Texas man made to pay child support in New Jersey for child that isn't his.  Abisai Moreno Iglesias is a 33-year-old man from Tyler, Texas, who for almost a decade has been embroiled in the one of the weirdest child support stories you'll ever hear.  He's had thousands of dollars garnished from his wages by the state of New Jersey — all to support a child that isn't his.  And he could have had even more money taken out of his paycheck as recently as the first week of July if it weren't for a little help from Chasing News.  Mr. Iglesias was accidentally attached to a child support case in Cumberland County, New Jersey because he has almost the same name as the father of a nine year-old girl.

You Need 4 Different Licenses to Shine Shoes in DC.  Most agree that jobs that deal directly with public health and safety should require some sort of license to do.  However, a 2015 study conducted by the White House Council of Economic Advisers found that the share of the U.S. workforce needing a license to work increased five-fold from 1950 to 2008.  In the District of Columbia, for example, someone looking to work as a shoe shiner must attain four different licenses and pay at least $337 to get those licenses.

The Bureaucracy — The Unaccountable Fourth Branch Of Government.  In arguing for the states to ratify the Constitution, James Madison wrote in Federalist 47, "The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many ... may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."  In our time, the regulatory state has become a form of tyranny led by bureaucrats who have wrested power from Congress and even influenced the Supreme Court to bow to their power.  This concentration of power in the regulatory state has led to outrage after outrage as unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats act as tyrannical kings, issuing edicts that harm small businesses, restrict freedom and cost our economy almost $2 trillion per year.  This fourth branch of government exists outside of and unrestrained by the constitutional system of checks and balances.  It represents one of the greatest threats to the liberties of American citizens.

'Tens of Thousands' Wrongly Convicted Based on Unreliable Drug Tests.  ProPublica reporters Ryan Gabrielson and Topher Sanders estimate that widely used but notoriously unreliable field tests for drugs have led to "tens of thousands" of wrongful convictions in the United States.  The tests are not admissible in court, but that does not matter much, since the vast majority of drug cases — 90 percent or more — are resolved by plea deals.  Gabrielson and Sanders' story, which was published in The New York Times Magazine over the weekend, illustrates that point with the case of a Louisiana woman, Amy Albritton, whose employment prospects were ruined by a felony conviction after Houston police pulled over her car in 2010 and found a white crumb they mistakenly identified as crack cocaine.  The test that was used to incriminate Albritton involves dropping a suspected drug sample into a vial of cobalt thiocyanate, which is supposed to turn blue in the presence of cocaine.  But as Gabrielson and Sanders note, "cobalt thiocyanate also turns blue when it is exposed to more than 80 other compounds, including methadone, certain acne medications and several common household cleaners."

Thug-ocracy.  [Scroll down]  The law is for the Dirt People and it will be enforced by the Cloud People, but, the Cloud People will do as they please.  There's another way to look at it.  That is, the ruling class has lost control of the reigns and they can no longer police themselves.  Hillary Clinton has no business being president.  It's absurd even without the massive corruption and criminality.  Hillary's crowning achievement was marrying Bill Clinton 50 years ago.  Even a deeply corrupt and incompetent ruling class should be able to filter out the likes of Hillary Clinton.  The fact that they cannot bring themselves to flush her from the system when they have an iron clad criminal case against her is ominous.  There's another angle here.  The whole "Arkanside" thing is a fun gag, but it does appear that the ruling class is playing much tougher with one another.  Judge Roberts was either blackmailed or threatened into reversing his opinion on ObamaCare.  That's incandescently obvious.  FBI Director Comey's erratic performance yesterday suggests there's more here than just a man suddenly changing his mind about law enforcement.  He has prosecuted many others for these exact same crimes.  A lesson of history is that when ruling elites become unstable, they become thuggish.

America's Actual Biggest Lawbreaker.  Through the frequent and growing use of "administrative subpoenas," which are warrants issued by federal, state and even local government officials without prior approval of judges or magistrates, the government trespasses on papers and effects.  Courts and legislatures have eliminated the "probable cause" and other Fourth Amendment standards for these judge-less warrants, giving great deference to government trespasses. [...] Administrative subpoenas have become institutionalized violations of the Fourth Amendment.  America's biggest lawbreaker loves administrative subpoenas.  Government violations of the Constitution happen every day across the country.

The McDonnell Case:  Another Study in Criminal Law as Democratic Partisan Warfare.  It's common for those unhappy with a decision to criticize the partisanship of the judges involved, but the weakness of the case, which was evident when it was argued in the Supreme Court (and during the trial itself), and the fact that it was reversed unanimously warrants a raised eyebrow.  It comes on the heels of the reversed prosecutions of then-Senator Ted Stevens, Governor Rick Perry, House Majority leader Tom DeLay, the IRS war on Obama's opponents in the tea party and other conservative groups, and the outrageous trampling the rights of those who worked for and supported Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.  This case and those matters lead to an inescapable conclusion:  With the endorsement of partisan juries and/or judges, the Democratic Party seeks to and will use the power of the prosecution to destroy Republican political leaders and anyone who supports them.

After Air Force One Ride, Hillary Uses Official Presidential Seal For Campaign Speech.  Just hours after walking free from felony and misdemeanor charges for handling top secret, classified information in an "extremely careless" manner, presumptive Democrat presidential nominee Hillary Clinton boarded Air Force One with President Barack Obama and jetted off to a campaign event in North Carolina.  The trip cost taxpayers $200,000 per hour.  During the event, President Obama spoke before Clinton and used the official Presidential Seal for his remarks.  When Clinton stepped up to the lectern it wasn't taken down, but instead used by Clinton for her remarks as well.

Is True American Liberty Gone?  It saddens me to see the dedication to liberty of the founders and those who sacrificed so much being flushed down the toilet by the people running the nation today who are only interested only in their own power and wealth.  There are only a few, barely a handful, who care about the well-being of the nation and its citizens.  Barak [sic] Obama is the most blatant of despotic wanna-be tyrants but far from the only one.  The entire political party system is corrupt and evil.

What's really behind the ongoing push for gun control?  All modern governments are organized crime legitimized by the police power of the state.  There is illegal crime and there is legal crime.  We tend to accept government crime because it has made itself politically legal and politically palatable with such propaganda myths as "democracy."  All economic power, political power and religious power are vested in the state.  The state manages the system backed by police power.  Police power is civil and military.  The German state under Adolf Hitler was organized crime protected by visible military power, whereas American so-called democracy is a police state without the jack boots and the swastika.  Police power in a modern "democracy" appears more benevolent because it is more subtle or more invisible.  But police power is ever present.  It normally isolates and prosecutes enemies of the state, radiating its presence through the controlled media for public obedience.  This type of police state is accurately described as benevolent totalitarianism.  Sometimes, however, it misfires and rears its despotic head in actions like Waco and Ruby Ridge.  All national states have one thing in common.  They want all uncontrolled arms of the people confiscated.

Federal Judge Strikes Down Security Buffer Zone for GOP Convention.  A federal judge found unconstitutional a heightened-security area proposed to surround the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio on Thursday [6/23/2016], saying the 3.5 square mile "event zone" unfairly restricted free speech.  U.S. District Judge James Gwin stated the event zone was "unduly large," siding with the American Civil Liberties Union, which brought the suit on behalf of protesters.

A Week in the Life of the American Police State.  The following incidents constitute a typical week in the life of the American police state.  [#1] Not content with merely spying on our emails and phone calls, the NSA wants to spy on thermostats, refrigerators, and pacemakers.  [#2] Reinforcing fears about how easily surveillance technology can be abused by government officials, local police in California are using money acquired through asset forfeiture to buy surveillance equipment that was then used to blackmail city council members.  [#3] Small-town police departments continue to militarize their forces, acquiring military equipment such as BearCat armored vehicles and SWAT teams at an alarming rate.  [#4] According to the Government Accountability Office, the majority of people in the government's criminal face-recognition database have never committed a crime. [...] [#7] The Second Circuit Court of Appeals recently ruled that as long as the government shows "good faith," it can search your digital files as much as it wants.  [#8] The FBI and other government agencies have been hiding cameras in city utility poles in order to carry out warrantless, covert surveillance on Americans.

The Licensing Disaster.  When people on the right say "job-killing regulations," they usually are referring to health or environmental or social welfare rules that may or may not be wise but which actually have — or are intended to have — some kind of positive benefit for society at large.  But a good chunk of America's occupational licensing system — exemplified by the [New York] Times story about the animal masseuse ordered by Arizona's veterinary board to stop practicing unless she paid a quarter million dollars for four years of veterinary school — falls into a different category entirely.  These are cartels, plain and simple, that use state power to minimize competition and maximize rents, without any plausible justification besides self-interest.

Obama wants to starve kids in Texas.  State officials there are opposed to Obama's edict to allow students to determine which restroom or locker room they use, based solely on how they feel about themselves.  Obama says any state that does not bow to his wishes faces a cutoff of education funding.  Texas gets almost $2 billion a year from the federal government for its school breakfast and lunch programs.  Thus, over an issue affecting less than 0.01 percent of students in Texas, Obama is threatening to take food out of the mouths and bellies of the poorest of the poor children.  And it's not just kids in Texas.  More than a dozen other states are refusing to go along with Obama's edict on bathroom and locker room for so-called "transgendereds."  We're talking about millions of kids not getting breakfast and lunch as a direct result of Obama's bullying.

This Lyft driver uses her congressman father's Honda.  Users of the ride-sharing app, Lyft, were treated to more than just a low-cost ride when they requested one specific car.  Maryland Rep.  Elijah Cummings confirmed Tuesday [5/31/2016] he gave his daughter, Adia, permission to use his Honda while she was a student at Howard University in Washington, D.C.  But in an effort to pay her school bills, Adia used her father's vehicle to enlist as a Lyft driver, according to a statement obtained by the Washington Examiner.

Rep apologizes after daughter found using congressional car tag.  [Maryland Rep.  Elijah Cummings] said Tuesday [5/31/2016] that a daughter who recently graduated from college has been using his Honda with a congressional plate while working part time for a ride-sharing company to make extra money for school expenses.

Daughter of Democrat Congressman Elijah Cummings uses his car with official plates to ferry Lyft passengers around Washington.  Thousands of drivers work part-time for Lyft to make a little bit of extra money on the side, but not many of them are congressmen earning a $174,000 salary.  So it's no wonder eyebrows were raised when Democrat Elijah Cummings' Honda — complete with Congressional plates — was spotted picking up cab fares around Washington, DC.  The black car carrying a sticker for the car service app was spotted by eagle-eyed Lyft user Dustin Andres, who asked:  'So, which member of Congress drives Lyft in DC?'

It's Boomtime For Regulators Under Obama, While Economy Flatlines.  The economy might be tepid under President Obama, but there is one part that has been thriving.  Since Obama took office, the federal regulatory economy has never been better, with solid growth in spending and employment.  That's according to a new report that tracks how much the government spends on federal regulatory activity.  That is, how many people work at regulatory agencies, and how much money those agencies spend.  The numbers are staggering.

Congressional Conservatives Trying to Save You From Laws They Never Passed.  The vast majority of federal lawmaking is no longer done by elected officials, and a handful of congressmen are working to change that.  Wednesday morning [5/25/2016], Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) and Reps.  Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) and Mark Walker (R-NC) introduced the Article I Regulatory Budget Act of 2016, which seeks to force Congress to exert more of its constitutional authority in countering regulations imposed by the executive branch.

This Is Not The America My Parents Immigrated To In 1957.  This country is ruled by force, not law.  Governmental assassinations of US citizens.  A highly militarized police with almost unlimited powers to harass, intimidate, and brutalize with impunity.  TSA groping whereby in any other setting would be considered sexual harassment.  Overseas detention, torture and assassinations carried out against anyone, including American citizens, without due process — and without recourse if later cleared.  Warrantless GPS tracking by the FBI. The IRS targeting religious groups.  Some people now actually be charged with pre-crimes.  Checkpoints up to one hundred miles inland from all our borders (including the two oceans and Gulf of Mexico) in an area stunningly known as a "Constitution Free Zone".  No Ride / No Fly lists which are extrajudicial, secret, and form a guilty-until-proven innocent framework that subverts freedom instead of protecting it.  A See Something/Say Something program which goes beyond the already high-tech surveillance apparatus of the NSA and turns each of us into an unpaid employee of the police state similar to what the East German Stasi did to their citizens.  Web cameras and surveillance proliferating like a wildfire, data mining, recording all your phone conversations, all your web searches, all your emails, and all without your consent.  An FDA, which has near-total food control and usually renders anything healthy as toxic, and all that is toxic as healthy, and does insane [things] like jailing folks who buy raw milk.  Literally tens of thousands of regulations which literally invade every facet of society, whereby it has been said that almost all of us commit three felonies per day, and every violation of these laws will be met with the full force and fury of the State which promises fines, penalties, forfeiture of properties, or imprisonment.  Does any of this even remotely resemble a representative democracy, or does it sound more like a dictatorship?

Did the Houston DA's Office Abuse Its Power to Get Daleiden Indictment?  Did the Houston District Attorney's Office abuse its grand-jury subpoena power in order to help Planned Parenthood not only escape an indictment, but also turn the tables on the two undercover videographers who brought to light the abortion giant's fetal-tissue practice?  According to attorneys representing Center for Medical Progress undercover-video investigators David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt, Houston Assistant District Attorney Sunni Mitchell engaged in prosecutorial misconduct by working closely with Josh Schaffer, legal counsel for Planned Parenthood of the Gulf Coast, which was the target of the grand-jury investigation that resulted instead in the indictments of the pro-life advocates.

Secret Service punishes 41 over leak of lawmaker's data.  Forty-one U.S. Secret Service employees have been disciplined over a media leak of the personal files of a congressman who had criticized the agency's security lapses, the Department of Homeland Security said on Thursday [5/26/2016].  Punishments ranged from a letter of reprimand to suspensions without pay for up to 45 days, Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson said in a statement.  One person found to have disclosed information on Republican congressman Jason Chaffetz to the Washington Post has resigned from the service, Johnson said, noting that privacy laws prevented disclosure of more details.

Any American who believes in the rule of law and fair play should be afraid, very afraid, of our government right now.  [Scroll down]  The problem of lawyers lying to judges is extremely serious.  Our system of litigation — lawyers present facts and argue about laws, and judges rely on the truthfulness of what the lawyers have told them — is built on trust.  Because lawyers know the facts in their cases more intimately than judges do, judges rely on lawyers to tell them the truth.  At first, these DOJ lawyers lied.  Then they lied about their lying.  Then they reluctantly acknowledged that they had momentary lapses in understanding, an argument that the court rejected because of the repeated nature of their lying.  The lawyers said the programs had not begun, when in fact they had — to a large degree.

A Monstrous Moral Leviathan.  Having grown up within a mile of the Beltway during the Cold War, the greatest fear dominating my childhood and adolescence was that I might one day look up and see a brilliant mushroom cloud rising over DC.  At the time, it never occurred to me that the biggest threat to our nation would come not from a foreign enemy, but from within the halls of power in our nation's capital.  Our government Leviathan is very real and has grown to previously unimaginable proportions.  Its ever-increasing reach seems to know no bounds.  And what was once perceived to be Leviathan's mostly fiscal threat to the health and well-being of our nation is now a monstrous moral threat.  Leviathan's vast bureaucracies are now its foot soldiers, who have busied themselves with weaponizing executive edicts, errant court rulings and out-of-control regulatory powers against all who disagree with our Ruling Elites never-ending social/moral engineering experimentation.

Killing the regulatory parasite.  The successful parasite does not kill its host.  But the federal regulatory parasite is in the process of killing the golden goose upon which it feeds.  Several studies from highly reputable institutions have been released in the last number of days, all with similar alarming conclusions — namely, the number and costs of federal regulations are growing much faster than the economy, and they are having a significant negative impact on economic growth and job creation.  From the new annual report, Ten Thousand Commandments 2016, prepared by Clyde Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, we learn that the costs of federal regulations — nearly $1.9 trillion — is now greater than the Internal Revenue Service collects from both personal income and corporate taxes.  "Federal regulation is a hidden tax that amounts to nearly $15,000 per U.S. household each year."

Obama Raided $500M for Zika to Finance UN's Green Climate Fund.  Last week, the Senate passed legislation to address and prevent the spread of the Zika virus.  However, the Senate failed to pay for it, and instead approved a $1.1 billion "emergency" spending supplemental bill that is not subject to the budgetary caps that were agreed to last year.  While congressional inattention to the budget crisis is inexcusable, it is even more disturbing that the Obama administration already has the authority to pay for a Zika response from existing agency budgets, but chose not to.

20,642 New Regulations Added in the Obama Presidency.  The tide of red tape that threatens to drown U.S. consumers and businesses surged yet again in 2015, according to a Heritage Foundation study we released on Monday [5/23/2016].  More than $22 billion per year in new regulatory costs were imposed on Americans last year, pushing the total burden for the Obama years to exceed $100 billion annually.  That's a dollar for every star in the galaxy, or one for every second in 32 years.

Obama Has 3,260 Rules In The Regulatory Pipeline.  The Obama administration's got more than 3,200 regulations at various stages of completion, including 2,239 active rules agencies are working to finish before President Barack Obama leaves office.  The White House's Office of Management and Budget released its spring 2016 "Unified Agenda of Federal Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions," which lists 3,260 regulations at various stages in the regulatory pipeline.  The vast majority of these regulations — 2,239 — are considered "active" rules, meaning regulators are still working on them.

Obama rushes out rules to guarantee legacy.  The Obama administration is shoveling out regulations nearly one-third faster in its final year than during the previous three — all to beat a May 23 deadline to prevent a President Donald Trump from overturning them.  A total of 195 regulations have been pushed through since Jan. 1 at an estimated cost of $69.5 billion to the nation's businesses, according to the conservative American Action Forum.  One of the most significant — a sweeping rule that will extend overtime pay to more than 4 million people without any input from Congress — was released Tuesday night [5/17/2016].

FTC Accused of Engaging in 'Partisan' Defense of Clintons.  The Federal Trade Commission is being accused of engaging in a partisan defense of Bill and Hillary Clinton and their business interests after the agency refused a congressional request to investigate the family's foundation.  The agency, which is charged with ensuring consumer protection, rejected a request to investigate the nonprofit Clinton Foundation despite "serious and well-documented" concerns from lawmakers, said Matthew Whitaker, a former U.S. attorney who serves as executive director for the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust (FACT), an ethics watchdog group.  The FTC penned a letter to Rep.  Marsha Blackburn (R., Tenn.) this week rejecting a request from she and 21 members of Congress that the FTC review the nonprofit status of the Clinton Foundation after reports raised questions about the charity's transparency and possible deception.

Resisting Obama's Transgender Directive:  A Hill to Die On.  [T]he left, without remorse, appoints results-oriented, activist judges, whom they view not as protectors of the Constitution and law but as vehicles to advance its political agenda by any means necessary, including twisting the meaning of constitutional and statutory provisions and often inventing rights out of whole cloth. It's why it doesn't even blink when one of its own usurps legislative authority and issues lawless executive orders in contravention of the people's will, even while knowing he has no constitutional authority to do so.  It's why it deliberately refuses to enforce immigration laws.  It's why it blackmails state governments, through the threat of withholding funds, into doing the will of the federal government.  It's why it privately applauds the use of the IRS to target its political opponents.  And it's why it stacks the Justice Department with radical leftists whose mission to effect changes in policy supersedes its duty of ensuring the fair and impartial administration of justice.

DOJ's Lawsuit Against North Carolina Is Abuse of Power.  North Carolina has sustained unrelenting and coordinated attacks from big business, the entertainment industry, the American Civil Liberties Union, and now the federal government over its commonsense bathroom policies.  Gov.  Pat McCrory and the North Carolina Legislature have had enough of this bullying and filed separate lawsuits against the Department of Justice Monday in the reasonable expectation that a federal judge will order the ideologues at the Department of Justice to back off.

The use of airport security as a weapon against political opponents:
Is the U.S. Government Now TRACKING 'Right-Wing Extremists'?  It started last summer.  I don't consider myself a "right-wing extremist" — but the far-Left Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) does, and the FBI uses the SPLC as a resource.  Since then, every time I fly — and I fly almost weekly — I can't check in online.  I am always directed to go to the airline counter.  There — as soon as I present my identification — the trouble starts.  It generally proceeds like this:  [1] The clerk types a great deal, frowns at the screen, types some more, asks me what my middle name is, types still more, looks at me quizzically, and gets on the phone.  [2] They're very secretive about these calls, sometimes even moving to a different desk to make them.  They refuse to tell me anything about them afterward, including who they called or why.  [3] The call usually takes around ten minutes.  The whole process takes fifteen or twenty minutes.  Then I am checked in and allowed to go to my gate.

Let's Don't Put On a Show.  The only thing I know about Kasim Reed is that he's the mayor of Atlanta and I hate him.  If you've had the experience of going through the Atlanta airport recently, you'll be familiar with the deeply grating voice of Mayor Reed, who greets travelers with self-aggrandizing North Korea-style loudspeaker announcements in which he extols the virtues of his boring, sweaty little city and labors mightily to associate himself with military men.  It's the 500-megawatt-amplifier version of those dumb signs in which Governor Andrew Cuomo welcomes Fairfield County commuters to New York every time they cross the line from Connecticut:  Using public infrastructure for purely self-promotional purposes, as though all of New York State were a gubernatorial fiefdom and all of Atlanta Kasim Reed's personal playground.

She Spoke Up About Cooked ISIS Intel.  They Booted Her — for Cursing.  She worked on and off for five years identifying targets for the U.S. military's Central Command.  And then, when, some believe, she spoke up about cherry-picked intelligence in the ISIS war, she was drummed out of her job — allegedly for cursing twice in the span of the year.  Those were just some of the surreal allegations thrown around last week in a Tampa law office conference room turned into a quasi-courtroom.  Had the case not involved the third-highest ranking person at the Defense Intelligence Agency, a two-star general, a military judge, and hours of testimony — all at a cost of thousands of dollars — it would have been hard to take seriously.  Even with those high-ranking officials, at times it was hard not to do a double-take about what was happening.

It Takes 300 Hours to Become a Shampooer in Tennessee.  In 1996, the Tennessee General Assembly passed a law requiring natural hair stylists to attain a cosmetologist's license through the state's Board of Cosmetology and Barber Examiners.  Natural hair braiders like [Tammy] Nutall had excelled in their craft for years, learning braiding from their mothers and grandmothers.  But now, the state was telling them they had to log more than 1,500 hours of education through an eight-week course with costs topping $12,000, Nutall recalled, and all for a skill she pioneered in Tennessee.

Federal Regulations Now Cost Almost $1.9 Trillion, Study Finds.  Just look at the balance between regulations and laws.  For every bill passed through Congress and signed by the president last year, regulators imposed 30 new regulations.  And at $1.885 trillion, the cost of regulations now exceeds the cost of federal individual and corporate income taxes, which raised about $1.82 trillion last year.  The CEI report shows that economic regulations (such as market entry restrictions, price supports and the like) impose the biggest costs at $399 billion.  That's followed by environmental regulations at $386 billion, and — incredibly — the cost of complying with the tax code, which is expected to be $316 billion this year.

Ten Thousand Commandments 2016.  Ten Thousand Commandments is the Competitive Enterprise Institute's annual survey of the size, scope and cost of federal regulations, and how they affect American consumers, businesses, and the U.S. economy. [...] The scope of federal government spending, deficits and the national debt is staggering, but so is the impact of federal regulations.  Unfortunately, regulations get too little attention in policy debates because, unlike taxes, they are unbudgeted.

Crony Capitalism and the Spigot of Government Subsidies.  Creating something that people want is how one gets wealthy in a market economy.  Sadly, there's another way to get rich.  It's called cronyism, and it can make billions for the lucky businesses that get government support — whether their products are profitable or not.  In the process, the taxpayers foot the bill.  Taxpayer insurance against unprofitability takes many forms, from loan guarantees to grants, which provide a no-lose scenario for beneficiaries.  If the business is profitable, then the corporation makes massive profits.  If the business goes bust, then the taxpayers take a hit.  Either way, the crony capitalist wins.

Obama's Civil Rights Divisions.  For the past seven years and counting the Obama administration has been engaged in a silent war on the rights of the American people at the hands of an organized network of fringe leftist lawyers working within the Civil Rights Divisions of the Department of Justice (DOJ) as well as the Department of Education (DOE).  These lawyers have been unleashed under the administration to push an ideological agenda that is far outside of the American mainstream all under the banner of protecting civil rights.  As noted by J. Christian Adams and Hans A. von Spakovsky of PJ Media, if a president wanted to "fundamentally transform" the nation, he would likely start with the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department because the tentacles of that Division reach into virtually every crevice of American life.  For example, Adams and Spakovsky write that "Federal statutes, under the banner of protecting civil rights, reach home lending, football stadium and theater seating, voting, elections, education, college admissions, apartment rentals, prisons, hiring practices, the use of English, special education programs, religious liberty, abortion clinic protests, arrests, law enforcement, voter rolls, insane asylums, state and local government hiring, swimming pool lift chairs, bathtub design, Spanish language ballots, school discipline, and even if boys can dress in drag in high school".  This list barely scratches the surface of the scope of the Civil Rights Division's powers.

The DOE is now in the High School Girl's Shower.  For more than two decades Americans have become desensitized to the arrogance, hubris and general incompetence of Washington insiders.  Each succeeding administration has seemingly tried to outdo the previous administration in outrageous conduct, whether it be in creative tax burdens or reasons for sending young Americans to other countries to fight and die.  Every day brings another revelation causing Americans to roll their eyes, shake their heads, and wonder what, if anything, can be done to a government that seems to pay no attention to its citizens whatsoever.

Pick one thing and fight.  The dismantling of America leaves one breathless as we face of an avalanche of horrors.  We've been dealing with a long roll out of evil with more to come.  It shocks the mind trying to absorb it all.  What can citizens do to stop the fundamental transformation of our nation?  How can we function effectively to save our country?  And how do we do so in a leadership vacuum?

Study: GDP Would Be 25% Bigger If Government Regulations Had Been Capped In 1980.  Under President Obama, annual GDP growth never once even hit 3%.  Under Bush before him, there were only two years when growth topped 3%.  But in the two decades before that, annual GDP growth was above 3% in all but six years.  Growth has been so anemic for so long, we're now being told that this is the "new normal."  As the Bureau of Labor Statistics put it, "annual U.S.  GDP growth exceeding 3% ... is not expected to be attainable over the coming decade."  It lists everything as a cause, except for one thing:  federal regulations.

An Amateur vs.  ISIS: A Car Salesman Investigates and Ends Up in Prison.  [Scroll down]  He was pulled into the murky world of Internet jihadists, sparring with them from his office at the car dealership and late into the night at home.  Before long, he was talking for hours on Skype with a man who claimed — falsely, as it would turn out — to be a top ISIS military commander, trying to negotiate the release of hostages.  Mr. Lopez contacted the F.B.I. and began a testy relationship with counterterrorism agents who came to believe he might pose a danger.  In the end, he landed in federal prison, where he was held for nearly 14 months without trial.

Is Eric Schneiderman colluding with other AGs in an illicit war on Exxon?  New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and other state AGs are probing ExxonMobil — but maybe they're the ones who should be investigated.  E-mails obtained by a free-market think tank (the Energy & Environment Legal Institute) show Schneiderman & Co. colluded with two activists last month just before the AGs rolled out their anti-Exxon campaign.  A top Schneiderman aide even tried to keep the press in the dark about the role of one activist, Matt Pawa.  Pawa was also in the loop for a January meeting by various groups — Greenpeace, the Working Families Party, the Rockefeller Family Fund — to plan how to "delegitimize [Exxon] as a political actor," smear it publicly as "corrupt" and steer away investors.

Democrat A.G.'s Colluded With Eco-Nazis to Punish Political Opponents.  Emails obtained by the Energy & Environment Legal Institute (E&E Legal) show that the offices of New York Democratic Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and those of other politically aligned AGs, secretly teamed up with anti-fossil fuel activists to launch investigations against groups whose political speech challenged the global warming policy agenda.  These emails, obtained under open records laws, shed light on what followed after a January meeting, reported by the Wall Street Journal on April 14, in which groups funded by anti-fossil fuel Rockefeller interests met to urge just this sort of investigation and litigation against political opponents.

AGs, activists accused of 'collusion' on Exxon probe amid new emails.  State Democratic officials are facing mounting accusations they secretly coordinated with climate activists to investigate whether ExxonMobil hid the truth about global warming, as new documents show the collaboration went deeper than previously thought.  Emails obtained and released by the Energy & Environment Legal Institute show a number of state attorneys general and their staff received advice and guidance from environmental activists at a March 29 meeting in New York, on the same day as a major press conference.

TX Judge resigns when caught texting instructions to prosecutors to help win convictions.  Texas district Judge Elizabeth E. Coker is stepping down from the bench after being caught engaging in a massive perversion of justice.  A whistleblower revealed that Corker was sending text messages to prosecutors with suggestions on questions to ask in court in order to secure a conviction.

The Cannons of Government.  The people cannot express their will through a government that seeks to impose its will upon them.  As President Obama withdraws American influence from the world, he extends a malicious imperial doctrine into the domestic private sector.  In exercising its vast regulatory powers, his administration has discovered the means by which it may exceed its lawful commission given by the people as expressed in their written Constitution.  Therefore, against the willful disregard of fundamental law by a few in the power of office, the people must hold dearly their own legitimate right and obligation to correct their government.

Panama Papers: The Elites' Shield From Laws Imposed On Us.  With the release of the Panama Papers Sunday [4/3/2016], it's increasingly clear that the global elites in politics, business and sports have two sets of rules — one for them, and one for the rest of us.

Report: Obama Admin's Effort to 'Eliminate Red Tape' Adds $16 Billion in Costs.  The Obama administration's effort to eliminate red tape added $16 billion in regulatory costs, according to a new report by the American Action Forum obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.  "President Obama signed executive orders (13,563 and 13,610) as part of an effort to 'eliminate red tape.'  Federal agencies were told to 'modify, streamline expand, or repeal' existing regulations," according to the report released by AAF, a center-right nonprofit led by Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former director of the Congressional Budget Office.  The American Action Forum has found the reviews consist mostly of recycled regulations by federal agencies that have actually increased regulatory costs.  "The recent 'retrospective reports' from the administration reveal that executive agencies have added more than $16 billion in regulatory costs, up from $14.7 billion in the previous update, and 6.5 million paperwork hours," the report said.

Obama regulations whack GOP states, go easy on liberal states.  Sweeping and expensive regulations pushed by President Obama have had a lopsided effect on states that voted for Obama's presidential foes, Mitt Romney and Sen.  John McCain, according to a new George Mason University study of the impact of rules and regulations.  The top 14 states crushed the hardest by financial and environmental regulations sought by Obama voted for Romney in the last election and generally trend Republican in other elections.  They include Louisiana, Texas, Indiana, Kentucky and Alabama.

Turning back the leviathan of the administrative state.  There are two stacks of papers in Utah Senator Mike Lee's office that should cause all Americans to pause.  One stack is 400 pages; the other is over 80,000 pages.  The short stack is all of the laws Congress passed in 2014.  The 11-foot tall tower is all federal regulations.  Senator Lee and other members of Congress see this disparity as indicative of not just a growing government, but an erosion of the separation of powers.  They are correct.  When James Madison authored Federalist 47, he gave voice to a sentiment shared widely by the Founders:  consolidating executive, legislative, and judicial power into one entity is "the very definition of tyranny."  To preserve self-government, the Constitution separated those powers into three branches.  As new laws may restrict liberty, separated power ensures that one faction of society cannot run roughshod over another.  Debate, compromise and consensus should ensure that any new regulations are enacted with wide public agreement.

Rule by bureaucrat.  [Scroll down]  Why do federal agencies have so much power to begin with?  In simplest terms, it's Congress' fault.  The lawmakers you elect to make law have gotten into the habit of passing remarkably vague legislation.  The law your senator or representative votes for to do Good Thing X is often full of blanks.  Somebody has to fill in those blanks — to specify all the details about how X will be accomplished.  Increasingly, that somebody is not a man or woman who's directly answerable to you, but someone you'll never meet.  Someone who can't be voted out of office for failing to look after your interests.

Yes, Mr. President: Capitalism Is Better.  [Scroll down]  One can see how Obama's "pragmatism" is both laughable and pathetic.  Listen to the dichotomous thinking that our dear president wants to discourage.  There is no significant difference between the sanctity of property ownership and a society where there is no ownership (thus no need for contracts).  There is no significant difference between a society where the government is the only employer and a society where competing companies hire people.  There is no significant difference between a society where there are infinite regulations that discourage entrepreneurship and a society where entrepreneurship is encouraged.  There is no significant difference between a country that has a vast network of private banking with access to funds competing for venture capital and a country where all the banks are owned and controlled by the government.

The Lunacy of One-Size-Fits-All Law & Regulation.  [Scroll down]  It's called The Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), which is a federal law that seeks to keep American Indian children with American Indian families.  Congress passed the ICWA in 1978 in response to the alarmingly high number of Indian children being removed from their homes by both public and private agencies.  The intent of Congress under the ICWA is to "protect the best interests of Indian children and to promote the stability and security of Indian tribes and families (25 U.S.C. § 1902).  ICWA sets federal requirements that apply to state child custody proceedings involving an Indian child who is a member of or eligible for membership in a federally recognized tribe."  So here is [...] yet another example of the government screwing things up and then passing a law or regulation to solve the problem that they caused.  First they pass a law to be able to remove the children — then must pass another to return them, never considering the individual children or families.  But of course the "experts" in the federal government always know what's best.

Obama holds his own... Umbrella.  In previous such outings in rain or storm with President Obama, his Secret Service detail were shamefully abused by being forced to hold umbrellas over the heads of Obama and whomever else he thought warranted the cover.  To outside observers, this may not seem a big deal, but to cognoscenti, the use of Secret Service agents for any purpose other than alert protection is unlawful.

The Left Is Embracing Orwellian Policies to Go After 'Climate Deniers'.  Just when we thought liberalism can't get any more authoritarian, the Obama administration reminds us that it can.  Attorney General Loretta Lynch recently confirmed that she had "referred" the "matter" of whether climate change "deniers" should be brought to court on racketeering charges to the FBI.  Yes, that's right.  If you happen to disagree with the administration's views of global warming, you could face a civil suit accusing you of fraud and corruption.  This represents a breathtaking corruption of the law.  Laws designed to catch mafia figures on corruption charges could be twisted to punish Americans whose only crime is to contest the Obama administration's view of climate change.

Rick Perry [is] A Victim Of Democrats' Politicization Of Courts.  A Texas appeals court wadded up and threw out the "abuse of power" indictment against Gov. Rick Perry this week, the latest in a line of such harassment suits against effective political officials.  It was the right move.  But given what it cost Perry, where's the "abuse of power" charge against his odious assailants?  It was a travesty.  The distinguished governor of Texas, just finishing 14 years in office characterized by a dazzling economic record and a wagon-train of newcomers to his state, was hit with a nuisance indictment claiming "abuse of power" and "intimidation of a public official" after he vetoed funding in 2013 for a portion of a state prosecutor's office called the "public integrity unit."  That followed after its top prosecutor, Rosemary Lehmberg, refused to resign after being picked up by the cops for driving drunk and then, in a spectacular video caught on YouTube, drunkenly attempting to intimidate the officers from filing charges.

Rick Perry Is Not Guilty, but Texas Is.  Puff Daddy, or whatever his name is now, has a friend in Rosemary Lehmberg.  The hip-hop impresario is an endorser of Cîroc vodka, and Lehmberg, who in her role at the Travis County prosecutor's office oversees political crimes statewide, went through about 25 gallons of the stuff — 74 bottles — in the course of a year.  She had one of those bottles in her car when she was pulled over on suspicion of drunk driving.  She was convicted of the crime and went to jail.  Texas being Texas, she is not the first prosecutor to have been carted off to the pokey in shackles; truth be told, the state hasn't imprisoned nearly as many of its prosecutors as it should. [...] Upon her arrest, Lehmberg immediately went into "Do You Know Who I Am?" mode and was so abusive that she had to be put in restraints.  She demanded special treatment and threatened law-enforcement personnel with legal retaliation for refusing to let her slide.  Specifically, she threatened to have them arrested.

Networks Hyped Perry Indictment in 2014; Silent on Dismissal.  Political scandals make for juicy journalism, but apparently a politician being cleared of wrongdoing isn't even worth a mention.  When the initial story of Rick Perry's indictment broke in August 2014, ABC, CBS and NBC eagerly devoted 25 minutes in just two days to topic, speculating that the controversy could "end any chance" for Perry in 2016.  But when Perry was cleared of any wrongdoing on Wednesday, all three networks were silent, on both the evening news shows that night and the morning news shows the following day, Thursday, February 25.  [However, with their similarly half-hour-long evening news broadcast, Univision's Noticiero Univision managed to give Perry's exoneration 20 seconds on Wednesday night.]  The indictment came after then-Governor Perry vetoed funding for a public integrity unit after the District Attorney in charge of the unit refused to resign after a drunk driving conviction.

Report: Department of Education views for-profit colleges 'too big to fail'.  For-profit colleges will keep wasting billions of taxpayer dollars if the U.S. Department of Education continues to treat them as if they are "too big to fail," a new report said.  Chris Hicks, who formerly led the Debt-Free Future campaign for the advocacy group Jobs With Justice, said the Education Department has refused to use its authority to regulate such colleges, setting up students and taxpayers for massive financial blunders.

End the Army coverup on the 'lost dogs of war'.  From Bernie Sanders to Ted Cruz, the presidential candidates talk up how much they care for America's veterans.  Well, Sunday's [New York] Post suggests a test:  Will any of them fight for the "lost dogs of war"?  Maureen Callahan's expose shows the Pentagon repeatedly breaking its promise to reunite bomb-sniffing dogs with their handlers on the pups' return from war.  Instead, private firm K2 Solutions routinely places the four-footed veterans in civilian hands.  Never mind that a federal law passed in 2000 mandates that soldiers who handled the animals in Iraq, Afghanistan and so on get the chance to adopt their dogs.  Callahan uncovered evidence that three Pentagon employees took dogs for themselves.

California district reported incorrect numbers while 'shaming' water wasters.  East Bay Municipal Utility District, which serves counties in the San Francisco Bay Area, recently released lists of more than 4,200 customers accused of violating the water usage limit imposed to combat the lingering drought.  That limit is roughly 1,000 gallons per household each day.  However, an investigation from the Contra Costa Times revealed that some figures were off by 1,000 or more.  One retired woman was listed as using more than 5,000 gallons per day when the real number was just over 1,000, the newspaper reports.

FDNY chief had Bravest shovel out his home while Queens froze.  Two FDNY crews were dispatched to Commissioner Daniel Nigro's Queens home in the aftermath of the blizzard — just to clear a patch of snow that was blocking his path to the street, The [New York] Post has learned.  At least eight firefighters made the run to Nigro's private Whitestone residence at 8:49 a.m. Sunday [1/24/2016] and when they got there, he instructed them to shovel a 3-foot wall of snow between his walkway and the street, sources said.

FBI ran website sharing thousands of child porn images.  For nearly two weeks last year, the FBI operated what it described as one of the Internet's largest child pornography websites, allowing users to download thousands of illicit images and videos from a government site in the Washington suburbs.  The operation — whose details remain largely secret — was at least the third time in recent years that FBI agents took control of a child pornography site but left it online in an attempt to catch users who officials said would otherwise remain hidden behind an encrypted and anonymous computer network.  In each case, the FBI infected the sites with software that punctured that security, allowing agents to identify hundreds of users.

More Government Abuse: 120 Years in Prison for Firing Two Shots in the Air.  An Army veteran has been charged with 12 criminal counts for firing two shots off in the air that hit no one.  He didn't hurt anyone.  This is a case of blatant prosecutorial abuse.

How America can be saved from stupid people.  During the last few decades, politicians learned they could "buy" their way into elected office by promising various constituencies free stuff, such as favorable treatment for "well-connected" companies and welfare for those who did not want to work.  Government bureaucracies grew large to administer all the free handouts, and, of course, the free stuff had to come from somewhere, so politicians either took it from people who worked hard or, increasingly, borrowed it.  Our national debt is an estimated $18 trillion, which is about the size of our economy.  We make the debt that recently brought down Greece look like a poorly-run Monopoly game.  When our debt comes due, it may resemble the Great Depression of the 1930s and bring down the entire world economy.  The politicians took care of their own, of course.  And by "their own" I mean the vast bureaucracies — federal and state employees' unions, teachers' unions, police forces, and prison systems — that grew up to support the politicians' goals of transferring the wealth of those who worked to those who kept them in office.

Racism, Power and Control.  The bureaucrats within a multitude of ever growing agencies that create regulation after regulation based upon their parties fanatical ideology; the tenured professors who restrict the usage of words they deem offensive while punishing those who dare challenge them by practicing their right to free speech; the scientists who go along in propagating an erroneous myth of "climate change"; the journalists who act as the praetorian guard media as they spew this administrations talking points from healthcare to the environment and everything in between; finally we have the professional politicians who abdicate their responsibilities once elected into office as they campaign on a platform of lies and deceit.  All of this adds to the growing environment of authoritarianism as those who are currently in power seek to facilitate deception and manipulation of thought upon our society.

Global Tyranny Just Getting Warmed Up.  The great revolution of political progressivism was its creation of an intermediary mechanism, the administrative state, to filter the relation between the oppressors and the oppressed.  The regulatory bureaucracy depersonalizes tyranny, diluting its real meaning with legalistic paperwork and soporific incrementalism.  The bureaucratic labyrinth, with its officious, abstract, uncommunicative language, is the perfect guardian for the craven greed and power lust that occupy the offices on the top floor but dare not show their true faces in a "democratic" society.  With obscure jargon and banal committee reports, the administrative state trivializes the property-obliteration of confiscatory taxes, the horror of government-normalized mass killing (from "abortion on demand" to "palliative care"), the moral outrage of state-controlled child-rearing ("public school"), and the freedom-slaying thousand cuts of state-micromanaged daily life, recasting them as mere annoyances, equivalent to household chores.  History will someday show that the great coup of progressive authoritarianism was its translation of despotic decrees into the language of white papers, statistical analyses, and policy proposals.

Obama pushing thousands of new regulations in Year 8.  Nearly 4,000 regulations are squirming their way through the federal bureaucracy in the last year of Barack Obama's presidency — many costing industry more than $100 million — in a mad dash by the White House to push through government actions affecting everything from furnaces to gun sales to Guantánamo.  That means a full court press at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to reduce exposure limits for silica, a chemical used widely in construction and fracking that can cause cancer when inhaled; at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, to require more small-scale gun sellers to perform background checks; and at the Food and Drug Administration, to make food manufacturers disclose on product labels how much sugar they add to cranberry juice.

The Spending and Tax Lollapalooza.  In the dead of night, House Republicans unveiled a massive tax and spending bill.  The bill comes with a price tag of more than $2 trillion — and your member of Congress will never read it.  At 2,009 pages, House members would have to read one page a minute over the next 48 hours without any bathroom breaks, sleeping, Christmas parties, lobbyist meetings, or taxpayer-funded steak dinners to interrupt them.  Of course, that wont happen.  Whether you are liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat, the fact that your elected representative will cast a consequential vote on your behalf, dear constituent, without fully comprehending what he or she is voting on, is nothing short of outrageous and a dereliction of responsibility.

Terrorists are a real threat. So is your government with a blank check.  What should we do about terrorism?  After the attacks on Paris, the French government passed a law that allows anyone suspected of being a security threat to be placed under house arrest and searches to be conducted without warrants. [...] France also decided that it now has a right to copy data from anyone government deems of interest.  By "anyone," though, the politicians didn't mean politicians.  They exempted themselves — and journalists, lawyers and diplomats.  Insiders protect their own.  Of course, this will inspire terrorists to pose as — or become — politicians, journalists, lawyers and diplomats.  France also claims the right to control TV, radio and theater content that might incite violence.

The Growing Threat Of "Dark Matter" Regulations.  In his seven years in office, President Obama has signed 895 bills into law.  Over the same period, federal regulators issued 24,478 rules.  If you want an example of how unaccountable the federal government has become, it doesn't get much better than that.  The regulatory state is so massive that the government doesn't even know how many regulatory agencies there are.  Counts range from a low of 60 to a high of 438.  But this is just the tip of the regulatory iceberg, according to a report from the Competitive Enterprise Institute titled "Mapping Washington's Lawlessness."

Little Sisters of the Poor vs. Government Almighty.  Whether it's President Obama ordering his HHS secretary to bring intransigent nuns to heel or the Emperor Trajan advising a provincial governor on the proper punishment of unrepentant Christians, it's all about worshipping the state gods.  During Trajan's reign, that meant forcing people to betray their faith by making them participate in the imperial cult.  This typically involved a public sacrifice to the "divine" Augustus.  Refusal to do so resulted in very unpleasant consequences.  In our era, it means forcing people to betray their faith by making them subsidize the sacraments of the secular state, like abortion on demand and "free" abortifacients.  Refusal to obey means financial destruction by means of ruinous federal fines.

Armed militias and concealed carry: It is Lexington and Concord time.  Thomas Paine wrote in the "Rights of Man" (1791):  "The fact, therefore, must be that the individuals, themselves, each, in his own personal and sovereign right, entered into a contract with each other to produce a government:  and this is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a right to exist."  That is, government is a construct of and accountable to its citizens and whenever the actions of government are contrary to their interests and well-being, citizens have the right to defy or dissolve the government.

Uncle Sam Owns This Much Of America.  Uncle Sam owns nearly one out of every three acres in the United States — 640 million acres of the entire country's 2.27 billion acres.  But "a picture is worth a thousand words," according to Texas Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert, chairman of the House Committee on Natural Resources' Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations.  So, his full committee created an interactive map revealing every acre the federal government owns in each congressional district, color-coded by agency.  Those 640 million acres aren't enough for the White House and federal bureaucrats, as they're constantly trying to grab more for environmental reasons, Gohmert says.

We'll Tell You Which Black Lives Matter.  [Scroll down]  Congress has delegated pretty much everything they are responsible for — other than fund raising, pandering to special interest groups and holding court for lobbyists — to either staff or administrative agencies.  Justice Thomas' very legitimate point is that we've reached the point where the hundreds of thousands of "rules" that are written to "implement" the laws passed by Congress dictate how we are allowed to go about living our lives.  This is not how the Founding Fathers envisioned America working.

The surprising reason behind Obama's aggressive drive to regulate you more.  Clearly, Americans are incapable of living their everyday lives without explicit written guidance from Washington bureaucrats.  Thankfully, a caring Barack Obama and his minions are working feverishly these days to guide us on their proper path by writing and imposing a record number of costly regulations before his reign ends in 416 days.

Obama Turns Thanksgiving Into Rulesgiving.  With little fanfare, the White House announced more than 2,000 new regulations — including 144 deemed "economically significant" — just before Thanksgiving.  The law requires doing this twice a year, and Obama has followed it faithfully — repeatedly releasing rafts of costly new rules just days before holidays, when people are most distracted and not paying attention.  Luckily, Heritage Foundation fellow James Gattuso is paying attention.  He notes that the 144 new economically significant rules is a record, breaking the previous high of 136 set just last spring.

Also posted under Friday night document dumps.

One-in-five Americans still trusts the federal government!  It's not really surprising that after seven years of an administration of serial liars, empty promises and failed plans, an overwhelming percentage of the public does not trust elected officials, their politics or the government they're supposed to be running.  What's really shocking is that 19% of Americans still do.  Nearly one-in-five say they can always or most always trust that Washington crowd.  Seriously?  Who are these people?

Punishing the Obama way.  Mr. Obama's minions have prosecuted an oil producer for inadvertently allowing a duck that landed in a waste pond to die while granting solar and wind power producers the right to kill thousands of ducks, geese, eagles and endangered birds that get in their way, and they argue for more and more criminal penalties to be imposed on men and women who have unwittingly violated regulations they don't even know exist.

Feds Send Man to Jail for Overfishing as 6,000 Drug Convicts are Freed.  These are embarrassing times for the nation's criminal justice system; as the Obama administration executes the nation's largest mass release of federal prisoners, it's sending a Long Island fisherman to jail for reeling in too many.

Whitesplain This: A Response to My Hypocritical Accusers, Black and White.  In our culture these days, the ability to take offense is a kind of power.  Liberals abuse this power like a drunk cop with a nightstick.  They abuse it so much, they have become addicted to it and become blind to the reality in front of them.

America's Soft Tyranny is Hardening.  American citizens outside of the protective bubble of the government are not only expendable, they are fodder for bureaucratic abuse.  The IRS, the EPA, the DOJ, the VA, and the FEC under Obama are free to target and abuse those of us without the financial or government resources to protect ourselves.  The countless good people who were targeted by the IRS were prevented from exercising the freedoms guaranteed to them by the Constitution.  The actions of Lerner and the IRS very likely changed the outcome of the 2012 election.  That was the plan and it worked.  Prevent, with malice aforethought, hundreds of conservative groups across the country from organizing and raising money for their cause and you have silenced millions of people.

Forced Silence.  Before dawn, Deborah Jordahl was awakened by the sound of cops banging on her front door.  She rushed downstairs before police used their battering ram to break the door down.  The officers then said her household was under criminal investigation.  They ordered Deborah and her son Adam to step aside while they took her family's computers, cellphones and files.  They also told her, don't talk to anyone about this investigation!  If you do, you may be jailed!  They wouldn't tell her why. [...] This forced silence lasted five years, until Wisconsin's Supreme Court finally ordered the Joe Doe investigations stopped, saying prosecutors used "theories of law that do not exist."

Ted Cruz Dismantles Liberal Plantation Politics At Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing.  Fifty-five years ago, there were 13 regulatory federal government agencies.  Today, there are over 70.  Fifty-five years ago, the Code of Federal Regulations contained 23,000 pages — a sizeable amount.  Today, the Code of Federal Regulations takes up an astounding 175,000 pages and 235 volumes — all in incredibly small print.  Somehow the American people are expected to comply with 175,000 pages of regulations that no one person can even begin to understand. [...] Although an inexact science, estimates of federal regulations are estimated to increase costs up to possibly $2 trillion a year.  Is it any wonder we have the economic stagnation, so many millions hurting, when the federal government is putting $2 trillion a year of costs on small businesses, on those trying to create jobs and opportunity?

Our Lawless Secret Service.  Let's not shy away from what the Secret Service actually was up to in the matter of its illegal spying on Representative Jason Chaffetz:  conspiracy to commit blackmail against a member of Congress.  Representative Chaffetz has been investigating the scandal-plagued protective agency — the habitual drunkenness and whoring of its agents, among other things — when Secret Service personnel improperly accessed his protected records in a hunt for dirt.  The aim of this was made clear by assistant director Ed Lowery, who wrote to assistant director Faron Paramore:  "Some information that he might find embarrassing needs to get out."

Watchdog: Top Secret Service official wanted information about congressman made public.  An assistant director of the Secret Service urged that unflattering information the agency had in its files about a congressman critical of the service should be made public, according to a government watchdog report released Wednesday [9/30/2015].  "Some information that he might find embarrassing needs to get out," Assistant Director Edward Lowery wrote in an e-mail to a fellow director on March 31, commenting on an internal file that was being widely circulated inside the service.  "Just to be fair."

Distracted from an Ever-Growing Police State.  Caught up in the spectacle of the forthcoming 2016 presidential elections, Americans (never very good when it comes to long-term memory) have not only largely forgotten last year's hullabaloo over militarized police, police shootings of unarmed citizens, asset forfeiture schemes, and government surveillance but are also generally foggy about everything that has happened since.  Then again, so much is happening on a daily basis that it's understandable if the average American has a hard time keeping up with and remembering all of the "events," manufactured or otherwise, which occur like clockwork and keep us distracted, deluded, amused, and insulated from reality while the government continues to amass more power and authority over the citizenry.  In fact, when we're being bombarded with wall-to-wall news coverage and news cycles that change every few days, it's difficult to stay focused on one thing — namely, holding the government accountable to abiding by the rule of law — and the powers-that-be understand this.

Government: Here to Help!  People once borrowed from private banks, which applied market discipline.  If they thought you wanted to borrow more than you would likely repay, banks wouldn't lend you the money.  But now government — Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Housing Administration — guarantee nearly every loan.  That helped create the last housing bubble.  After it burst, and taxpayers were charged nearly $2 billion to bail out the FHA, the politicians assured the public they would fix this to make sure it never happened again.  But they didn't.  Today, once again, more than 90 percent of home loans are backed by taxpayers, and after briefly raising down-payment requirements, the FHA will again make loans to people who make down payments of as little as 3 percent.  A sensible solution would be to get government out of the home loan business, but even Republicans claim government support for homebuilding is needed.  It isn't.  Canada has no Fannie, Freddie or FHA, and no housing bubble.  In Canada, lenders and homeowners risk their own money, yet just as many people are able to buy homes.

Noose on James Meredith statue gets former Mississippi student 6 months in prison.  A former University of Mississippi student who admitted helping place a noose on a statue of a civil rights activist is going to prison.

The Editor says...
One might easily imagine that if it had been a statue of George W. Bush, the student would be given some sort of award for artistic expression.

Forget Justice: Government Just Wants Money.  The justice system is supposed to be about, well, justice.  It's why district attorneys are ethically obliged to pursue convictions only against people they believe to have committed the crime.  They are not supposed to pursue convictions at all costs to bolster their careers.

A Military Coup in the U.S.? A Surprising Number of Americans Might Support One.  Imagine you're watching the evening news, kicking back after a long day in the cubicle.  Suddenly a breaking news alert flashes across the screen:  "Military Coup Overthrows the Government."  What would be your reaction?  While most Americans say they can't imagine supporting a takeover of the government by the armed forces, or least aren't sure about it, a substantial number of people say they can imagine supporting the military in such a scenario.

The FBI successfully thwarts its own Terrorist plot.  The FBI is obviously quite pleased with itself over its arrest of a 19-year-old Somali-American, Mohamed Osman Mohamud, who — with months of encouragement, support and money from the FBI's own undercover agents — allegedly attempted to detonate a bomb at a crowded Christmas event in Portland, Oregon.  Media accounts are almost uniformly trumpeting this event exactly as the FBI describes it.  Loyalists of both parties are doing the same, with Democratic Party commentators proclaiming that this proves how great and effective Democrats are at stopping The Evil Terrorists, while right-wing polemicists point to this arrest as yet more proof that those menacing Muslims sure are violent and dangerous.  What's missing from all of these celebrations is an iota of questioning or skepticism.

The USS Cole: Twelve years later, no justice or understanding.  One thing about kids is that overall they have much less history which can be challenged through examination of the evidence provided by experiences and relationships.  What we know about them comes from brief periods of their independence for which the official investigations provide all the information.  This ability to control the story could be why, since 9/11, we have seen the FBI caught in several attempts to entrap teenagers in terrorist plots manufactured by the FBI itself.

Six months earlier...
Agents' chatter in Osmakac sting skirts line between protection, entrapment.  Months after Sami Osmakac started serving a 40-year sentence for terrorism, debate continues over the FBI sting operation that landed him in prison.  Was Osmakac a mentally ill, penniless radical incapable of causing serious harm or a dangerous would-be terrorist stopped before he could strike?  Newly disclosed transcripts of private conversations among FBI investigators provide fuel for both scenarios while highlighting the dual challenge law enforcement faces in taking the time to build a legal case while protecting the public.

The Rule Of Law In America: An Autopsy.  The best indicator for the unbearable luxuriance of law is the legal library even the humblest practitioner is required to maintain.  Hundreds of thick volumes populate the shelves... but even perfect knowledge of their contents would not be a sufficient guide to the law, for today's lawyer is perforce a specialist.  He operates in a corner of the law, defined by subject matter and geographical application, and dares not venture beyond it without consulting another lawyer whose specialty would adequately supplement his.  If the heavily educated, licensed practitioners of law are so confined, what, then, could the common citizen know of it?

In Trashing Land, The EPA Has Nothing On The Forest Service.  Americans now comprehend fully the disdain the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has for truth-telling, the rights of others, and the environment. [...] Even so, the EPA has nothing on the U.S. Forest Service.  In documents filed days ago in a federal district court in Arkansas, the agency and its lawyers demand dismissal of a $5 million lawsuit against the United States for decades of tortious use and abuse of a Scot-Irish family's farmland settled one hundred years before the Ozark National Forest's creation made the Forest Service the family's neighbor.  Worse yet, Conner Eldridge, the United States Attorney for Arkansas, argues that, because the Forest Service trespassed upon Matthew McIlroy's farm for years, the government owns the land!  The assertion, which has no factual or legal support, is asinine, absurd, and in conflict with an admonition of the Supreme Court of the United States.

The Justice Department's 'Grotesque' Misconduct against New Orleans Cops.  As we've previously observed, the Obama jihad to fundamentally transform America's police, spearheaded by the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, proceeds from the premise that police departments are corrupt institutions, beset by a culture of racism and law-breaking.  This week, after a federal appeals court's exposé of a breathtaking prosecutorial conspiracy to deprive indicted cops of their civil rights, and then cover it up, it is again time to ask:  Which is the corrupt institution beset by a culture of racism and law-breaking — the nation's police, or the Justice Department, which presumes to tame them?

Well, At Least the DHS Finally Started Profiling: Problem is, they're only targeting conservatives.  James O'Keefe, an investigative reporter with Project Veritas, crossed the border in 2014 dressed as Osama Bin Laden.  Since the video showing his crossing was posted on YouTube, an apparently embarrassed DHS has targeted O'Keefe for interrogation at least a half-dozen times.

Conservative video-maker James O'Keefe: Homeland Security targeted me, asked intrusive questions.  Conservative journalist James O'Keefe, known for targeting liberal groups and Democratic politicians, says he is now the one being targeted — by the Department of Homeland Security.  It all started in August 2014 when O'Keefe donned green fatigues and an Osama bin Laden costume and sneaked across the U.S. border to Mexico and then back into Texas, a stunt cited by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) during congressional hearings.  His point, O'Keefe said in an interview Wednesday [8/12/2015], was to "show that our elected officials were lying to the American people" by saying the border is secure.

Obama's "Community Schools" Aim to Replace the Family.  Lawmakers and the Obama administration are plotting to unconstitutionally commandeer local schools and turn them into "full-service community schools" — government centers that will usurp vast new responsibilities over children that have traditionally been handled by parents and families.  Under the plan, adopted in the Senate last month as part of a massive "education bill" solidifying federal control over children and schools, federally funded so-called community schools will "target" families and children for "services" covering their "academic, physical, social, emotional, health, mental health, and other needs."  If Congress and the Obama administration get their way, these full-service parent-replacement centers will soon be coming to a community near you, along with the swarms of government workers in charge of "home visitation" and "parenting education" under the program.  In fact, even without legislation to authorize it, Obama's education bureaucracy has already started using tax funds to create the "community schools" nationwide.

America: Founded in Liberty, Descended into Tyranny.  What started as a small list of enumerated powers in the Constitution, has evolved to hundreds of thousands of pages of laws and regulations in the Federal Register, and a government that has debt greater than the entire gross domestic product of the nation.  Laws have become so obtrusive that in any given day, millions of our fellow citizens can unwittingly commit "crimes" against the state, as documented in the Alan Dershowitz and Harvey Silverglate book, "Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent."  We are so far removed from our foundation of individual liberty, that literally every action of every day that we engage in is regulated, taxed, or overseen by an omnipotent Master governing its peon subjects.  The tyrannical control of our lives far, far exceeds the relatively minor transgressions of King George against our founding colonists.

You Know You Live in a Conservative State When....  Over in Williamson County, Tennessee — just north of my home — prosecutors actually filed a motion asking the court to order a defense attorney to stop calling them "the government" in open court.  Yes, that's right — in my home state, it's apparently now a slur to call the government by its name.

FBI mined secrets from George McGovern's past.  On April 16, 1975, two FBI inspectors met with Sen. George McGovern in Washington.  A month earlier, McGovern had written a letter to FBI Director Clarence Kelley asking for a copy of any file that the FBI kept on him.  In fact, unbeknownst to McGovern, the FBI had accumulated a large file on the senator and 1972 Democratic presidential nominee, but FBI officials were reluctant to share the information.  The two FBI inspectors met with McGovern to negotiate a compromise.

Too Many Secrets.  One of the most persistent challenges of U.S. national security policy is balancing the short-term benefits of secrecy with the long-term benefits of openness.  Government agencies responsible for dealing with national security threats will often be more effective if they are allowed to keep certain details about their activities secret.  But openness is not just a cherished American value; it is a core element of American strength.  Government officials who ignore this fact and insist on secrecy whenever it seems convenient will serve their agencies and their country poorly.

Official City Of St Louis Vehicle Spotted Sporting Anti-RTW Propaganda.  In a democracy (in third grade, the concept of a Constitutional Republic was slightly beyond our grasp), city governments were elected to discern the will of the people and govern accordingly. [...] In theory, that means that no city official should promote a specific political agenda while on duty.  In theory, that means that no one should affix paraphernalia associated with a specific political agenda to an official vehicle.  Why the impromptu civics refresher?  Obviously, someone employed by the city of St Louis missed it back in the third grade.

Truth is an existential threat to the US government.  The United States is not a constitutional republic.  It is an oligarchy controlled by wealthy financiers who hire politicians to pass legislation beneficial to them and employ journalists to keep the citizens ignorant and compliant.  Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans believe in democracy.  It is simply an ideological contest between two different forms of totalitarianism based on big government, where they represent only themselves in their pursuit of personal power and profit.  Over the last hundred years, the Democrat Party has moved farther and farther to the left, evolving from populism to Marxism and developing an operational model resembling that of the mafia.  Its leaders are a gaggle of coffeehouse communists and unindicted felons, who seek the lifestyles of the rich and famous while practicing the politics of Joseph Stalin.  The Republicans are democratic only in the sense that they are willing to sell their votes to the highest bidder, where their political power and, ultimately, compensation from their rich donors increase proportionally with the expansion of government.

Wisconsin Supreme Court ends 'John Doe' investigations.  The Wisconsin state Supreme Court has ruled 4-2 that the "John Doe" investigations targeting Governor Walker and several conservative groups in the state should be ended, and that no violations of the campaign finance law occurred.  Thus ends one of the most bizarre and frightening chapters in the history of American law enforcement.  The investigation into whether the Walker campaign colluded with outside groups was marked by pre-dawn SWAT raids on ordinary people's homes, as the hyper-partisan prosecutor — whose wife was an official with a local teachers' union — sought to intimidate conservatives statewide.

Obamuments: There Are Now 260 Million Acres Of 'National Monuments'.  President Barack Obama has designated more than one million acres of land as "national monuments," meaning the president has restricted the use of 260 million acres of U.S. lands and waters.  Obama has designated Berryessa Snow Mountain in California, Waco Mammoth in Texas and the Basin and Range in Nevada as national monuments under the Antiquities Act.  Together, these national monuments make up more than one million acres.

The Coming Confrontation.  [Scroll down]  Even our Supreme Court has been assigned a role in the destruction of the American culture.  There are parameters that the Court must abide by that have been trampled into oblivion.  Ethics have been set aside for political purposes in both the Obamacare and same sex decision.  States are laboratories for managed societal change and state's rights have been circumvented for the benefit of the Federal government and those dependent on it.  The non-recusal of both Ginsburg and Kagan are just the start of a judicial system that is progressive in nature and no longer follows the principled law that this country is founded on.

New national monuments in California, Texas and Nevada provoke ire.  The White House plans to designate three new national monuments Friday [7/10/2015] in California, Texas and Nevada, placing more than a million acres under monument status despite some objections.  The move brings the number of national monuments to 19 created or expanded by President Barack Obama under the Antiquities Act of 1906, a move that's been criticized as sidestepping the congressional process.

Mark Levin: 'We've Had a Silent Coup in This Country'.  Nationally syndicated radio talk show host Mark Levin said that "we've had a silent coup in this country" with the Obama administration taking over healthcare, targeting the suburbs, and nationalizing the local police.  "His government doesn't have the authority to do any of these things, but he does it," Levin said on his July 8 broadcast.  "Well, if that's not martial law, what the hell is?  We've had a silent coup in this country."  [Audio clip.]

The squeeze of regulatory kudzu.  As with kudzu, the idea of the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection seemed like a good idea at the time, seeded and fertilized by good intentions.  Its sponsors may have little imagined the bureau's remarkable appetite for turf, little sated by the transfer of 14 federal statutes by the Dodd-Frank Act.  At a May conference on "big data," a senior bureau official reportedly observed that the failure of Congress to enact laws is not necessarily a significant impediment to bureau involvement.

America's only remaining choices — civil disobedience or collapse.  The United States no longer has, as the Constitution designed, a government composed of executive, legislative and judicial branches, separate, but equal in power.  The federal government is now an alliance of branches, devoted to the preservation of government itself, separate, not from each other, but from the American people and dedicated to tyranny.  The policies pursued by the Obama Administration and facilitated by cowardly politicians and a compliant media are not simply the intersection of radical ideology and incompetence, but a dangerous subversive element of an anti-American and anti-Western strategy.

Constitutional Remedies to a Lawless Supreme Court.  This week, we have twice seen Supreme Court justices violating their judicial oaths.  Yesterday, the justices rewrote Obamacare, yet again, in order to force this failed law on the American people.  Today, the Court doubled down with a 5-4 opinion that undermines not just the definition of marriage, but the very foundations of our representative form of government.  Both decisions were judicial activism, plain and simple.  Both were lawless.

America's post-Constitutional culture.  Conservatives seem stunned that the U.S. Supreme Court ignored the plain language of the ObamaCare statute and upheld the legality of the premium subsidies that will flow indefinitely as the nation's newest entitlement.  Their surprise is similar to the shock they express every time the GOP congressional leadership passes a pork-laden spending resolution that lasts through the end of the fiscal year, essentially denying budget hawks the opportunity to trim federal spending.  This march of federal spending is an entirely predictable outcome.  As foreseen by Tocqueville in 1835, America has developed a post-constitutional culture in which citizens are transformed from independent citizens into weak dependents, fully reliant upon the dispensations and "protections" of government.  The Supreme Court and the Congress are now largely infirm, fatally weakened by the growth of an Executive branch that provides ever-expanding dispensations and "protections."  The entitlement state has killed the separation of powers.

Where Waco Is Headed.  F. Clinton Broden, the Dallas lawyer who is representing Scimitars Motorcycle Club member Matthew Clendennen in a federal civil rights lawsuit against the City of Waco and McLennan County, served a subpoena today [6/25/2015] for the video taken by the Waco Twin Peaks restaurant on May 17, 2015.  Broden wants the video by nine o'clock tomorrow morning.  He is probably not going to get it. [...] The video Broden subpoenaed is probably the only one anybody will ever see.  The Waco police, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and other police forces meticulously seized every possible video source.  The video evidence that most directly contradicted the official police narrative was probably transferred to ATF custody the first week and sent someplace where it could be easily misplaced.  The remaining, less dangerous videos were transferred to the custody of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Customs Agents To James O'Keefe: You're Being Detained For Investigating The Federal Government.  U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agents who detained conservative filmmaker James O'Keefe at the airport specifically asked him about the work he's done investigating the "federal government."  O'Keefe was detained by U.S. customs agents Monday [6/22/2015] after arriving at the airport in Nassau, Bahamas en route to Miami.  Agents told O'Keefe that he was being detained for crossing back and forth across the U.S.-Mexico border while dressed as Osama bin Laden in a video that was published by The Daily Caller.  Agents marked his passport with an "X" and explained that he would be detained every time he enters U.S. territory henceforth.

Conservatives and Progressives Alike Despise Obamatrade; Only Beltway Insiders Love It.  Americans increasingly believe that their country isn't serving its own citizens. [...] The same routine plays out over and again.  We are told a massive bill must be passed, all the business lobbyists and leaders tell how grand it will be, but that it must be rushed through before the voters spoil the plan.  As with Obamacare and the Gang of Eight, the politicians meet with the consultants to craft the talking points — not based on what the bill actually does, but what they hope people will believe it does.  And when ordinary Americans who never asked for the plan, who don't want the plan, who want no part of the plan, resist, they are scorned, mocked, and heaped with condescension.

Illegal immigrant 'Dreamer' sees law license suspended.  The illegal immigrant "Dreamer" whose law license was approved by New York just two weeks ago, announced Thursday [6/18/2015] that his license has been delayed because he is on probation from charges stemming from his activism.  Cesar Vargas, a leader in the Dreamer movement, is still on probation after being charged with trespassing for interrupting Rep. Steve King's presidential forum earlier this year.  He said he's paid all fines, but a county prosecutor in Iowa has refused to clear him, and even argues he's a danger to society.

How Government Stifled Reason's Free Speech.  For the past two weeks, Reason, a magazine dedicated to "Free Minds and Free Markets," has been barred by an order from the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York from speaking publicly about a grand jury subpoena that court sent to Reason.com.  The subpoena demanded the records of six people who left hyperbolic comments at the website about the federal judge who oversaw the controversial conviction of Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht.  Shortly after the subpoena was issued, the government issued a gag order prohibiting Reason not only from discussing the matter but even acknowledging the existence of the subpoena or the gag order itself.  As a wide variety of media outlets have noted, such actions on the part of the government are not only fundamentally misguided and misdirected, they have a tangible chilling effect on free expression by commenters and publications alike.

Anti-Hillary Clinton Group Refuses to Change Name, Defying FEC Order.  An anti-Hillary Clinton group is refusing to change its name in an escalating dispute with the country's election watchdog agency.  The Federal Election Commission, which is tasked with enforcing campaign finance law, has ordered the Stop Hillary PAC to cease incorporating Mrs. Clinton's name in its own or face penalties.  At issue is a federal rule barring independent groups from incorporating or using the name of a candidate for federal office in their own names.  The rule is designed to protect voters from mistaking independent groups such as PACs and super PACs with official campaigns.

FEC Attempts to Strong-Arm Anti-Hillary Group.  Stop Hillary PAC on Tuesday [6/2/2015] responded to federal regulators' attempts to force the group to change its name with a simple declaration:  "No."  The Federal Election Commission told the group, a super PAC that opposes Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, that it had to choose a different name in order to make clear that it is not affiliated with Clinton's campaign.  Stop Hillary PAC said that the concern was laughable.  It responded with a sternly worded and at times humorous letter declaring that the FEC's interpretation of relevant regulations would "suppress citizens' First Amendment rights to engage in robust political speech."

'Stop Hillary' group pointedly refuses to change name after FEC request.  A group called the "Stop Hillary PAC" is pointedly refusing to change its name after the Federal Election Commission (FEC) said it could be running afoul of campaign finance laws by using former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's name without her authorization.  In an April 27 letter, the FEC wrote to Dan Backer, counsel for the group, pointing out that the name of the group included a name of a candidate but did not appear to be an authorized committee of the candidate.

The Editor says...
It is a sad day in America when certain words cannot be used in public without authorization.

Today's America is a landscape of legal abuses.  Every week there are new revelations of the decrepit and often barbarous state of the U.S. criminal-justice and prison systems.  The most egregious aspects of its dysfunction are not the absurdly severe sentences and world-record incarceration levels, or the North Korean conviction rates, or the frequent murders of prisoners by correctional officers in some of the state prisons, but the politically motivated antics of the prosecutors.

Obama Admin. Deems Part of Wyoming Tribal Land, Putting Hospital in Legal Battle.  Imagine learning the town you live in suddenly becomes part of an Indian reservation, subjecting you to tribal courts and laws rather than the U.S. Constitution.  That's exactly what is happening in Riverton, Wyoming.  President Obama's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has thrown a hospital in Riverton, Wyoming (population 11,000), into an expensive and exhausting battle to extricate itself from the oversight of an American Indian tribal court.  Riverton Memorial Hospital — a non-Indian entity organized under the laws of the state of Delaware — was recently sued by a member of the Northern Arapaho Tribe for medical malpractice in the Shoshone and Arapaho Tribal Court, the court for the Wind River Indian Reservation.

A Scare a Week Keeps the Populace Meek.  [Scroll down]  One after another, these scares appear, command prime time on TV, control the headlines, make everyone crazy, and then disappear into oblivion, without a trace.  Like Sandy Hook.  Like the anthrax scare.  And so on.  They all have the same characteristics:  It's something big and scary, something that will certainly wipe us out, or will destroy America as we know her, the individual citizen is helpless before it, but the government — and specifically the Federal government — can and must do something about it, even if it means more destruction of our liberties.  Destruction of liberties, of course, only as the necessary price for gaining more security.  The global warming scare was too general and its threat was too far ahead in the future.

The Civil Disobedience Charles Murray Wants Has Already Arrived.  While Charles Murray has been out promoting measured civil disobedience in an effort to restore individual liberty, thousands of parents and children have been acting upon the same concept.  This spring has seen an extraordinary nationwide defiance movement aimed against standardized tests, thanks to Common Core.  It could be, as Murray hopes for, yet another "thin edge of a wedge that can work to wonderful effect" in service of restoring self-government.

The Tip of the Regulatory Iceberg.  In 2014, the government issued 2,400 new regulations, including 27 major rules that may cost $80 billion or more annually. They range from forcing restaurants to list the number of calories in food — even though past experiments have revealed that such measures fail to change consumers' behavior — to reducing consumer choices and increasing energy prices by imposing tighter energy efficiency mandates on the plugs that we use to charge cellphones, laptops and even electric toothbrushes.

Where America, Big Government Collide.  The U.S. government has well more than 2,000 overlapping, under-performing, over-regulating, inefficient agencies, so removed from their original purposes that no one knows how many agencies, offices and government corporations exist.  These are run by federal employees who, for the most part, are decent people but who probably couldn't tell you if their job is duplicated seven times over by 20 agencies, or who exactly runs their department, or to whom they ultimately answer — which is, essentially, you.  Because of the bureaucracy's size and power, scandals and negligence are endemic.

'Unfettered Capitalism'? 175,000 Pages of Federal Regulations.  Whenever a liberal like Paul Krugman talks about the American system of "unfettered capitalism" I break out laughing.  There are currently about 175,000 pages of federal regulations governing anything and everything about American business.  In truth, many regulations have become necessary over the decades.  Worker safety has benefitted enormously and death and injury rates on the job have plummeted in the last 50 years.  Our air and water are cleaner, consumer products are safer, and predatory capitalists have largely been sidelined.  But it goes without saying that agencies like the EPA are out of control, that the IRS has become even more overbearing, and that the dizzying array of federal compliance rules make it possible to violate the law without even knowing it.

Oyster Farmer: 'We Are Terrified' Of The Gov't.  The National Park Service used falsified data to shut down an 80-year-old oyster company in Point Reyes, Calif, its owner claims.  Drakes Bay Oyster Company operated in Point Reyes for decades until National Park Service officials used falsified data to force Kevin Lunny's family-run oyster farm to shut down.  The experience has left its mark on Lunny:  "We Are Terrified," he told lawmakers during a hearing Thursday [4/23/2015].  "Let me be clear, we did not fail as a business," Lunny said in his prepared testimony.  "This was not bad luck.  Rather, the Park Service engaged in a taxpayer-funded enterprise of corruption to run our small business out of Point Reyes."

EPA Spends $84,000 to Study Churches That Preach Climate Change.  The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is spending $84,000 to study how churches can be used to combat climate change.  A taxpayer-funded graduate fellowship at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor is examining 17 faith-based institutions that have implemented "sustainability initiatives" in the hopes of developing workshops to teach pastors and other religious leaders how to change the behaviors of their congregants.

Our troubled FBI: What Americans need to know about today's Bureau.  [Scroll down]  It was surprising, however, when the FBI was forced to admit last week that in the 1980s and 1990s, its agents and lab technicians who examined hair samples testified falsely in 257 of 268 cases that resulted in convictions.  Of the convictions, 18 persons were sentenced to death, and of those, 12 have been executed.  Some of these cases were federal, but most were state prosecutions in which state and county prosecutors hired the FBI to perform lab tests and compare hair samples from a crime scene with a defendant's known hair sample.  The faulty lab work and erroneous testimony destroyed the freedom of hundreds and the lives of 12, squandered millions in tax dollars, and impaired the constitutional values we all embrace.  You probably did not hear about the FBI cable guys or the admitted 96-percent rate of false testimony in cases of conviction.  That's because the FBI skillfully diverted your attention.

Thirty years in jail for a single hair: the FBI's 'mass disaster' of false conviction.  In July 2013, the FBI admitted that the foundations of what it called "hair comparison evidence" — a technique that its agents had used in hundreds of criminal cases nationwide and spread through the training of state-based detectives potentially through tens of thousands of other cases — were scientifically invalid.

Gov. Walker Supporters Claim Police Raided Their Homes Over Politics.  Megyn Kelly shared new information tonight [4/23/2015] about a series of terrifying raids which were reportedly a form of political retribution against supporters of Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI).  She explained that a few of the people who were raided came forward and spoke to the National Review about what they experienced.  Kelly reported that Cindy Archer had a raid conducted on her home when she was sound asleep one night.  Archer claims that more than a dozen police officers were yelling and pounding on her door.  She said that police would not tell her why they were there as they ransacked her home, Kelly reported.

Wisconsin's dirty prosecutors pull a Putin.  When Vladimir Putin sends government thugs to raid opposition offices, the world clucks its tongue.  But, after all, Putin's a corrupt dictator, so what do you expect?  But in Wisconsin, Democratic prosecutors were raiding political opponents' homes and, in a worse-than-Putin twist, they were making sure the world didn't even find out, by requiring their targets to keep quiet.  As David French notes in National Review, "As if the home invasion, the appropriation of private property, and the verbal abuse weren't enough, next came ominous warnings.  Don't call your lawyer.  Don't tell anyone about this raid.  Not even your mother, your father, or your closest friends. ... This was the on-the-ground reality of the so-called John Doe investigations, expansive and secret criminal proceedings that directly targeted Wisconsin residents because of their relationship to Scott Walker, their support for Act 10, and their advocacy of conservative reform."

This is a Picture of Judge Barbara Kluka: Make Her Name a Household Word.  Judges are supposed to uphold the law, not rubberstamp the criminal suppression of political opponents.

Wisconsin's Shame: 'I Thought it Was a Home Invasion'.  Wisconsin, the cradle of the progressive movement and home of the "Wisconsin idea" — the marriage of state governments and state universities to govern through technocratic reform — was giving birth to a new progressive idea, the use of law enforcement as a political instrument, as a weapon to attempt to undo election results, shame opponents, and ruin lives.  Most Americans have never heard of these raids, or of the lengthy criminal investigations of Wisconsin conservatives.  For good reason.  Bound by comprehensive secrecy orders, conservatives were left to suffer in silence as leaks ruined their reputations, as neighbors, looking through windows and dismayed at the massive police presence, the lights shining down on targets' homes, wondered, no doubt, What on earth did that family do?

FBI overstated forensic hair matches in nearly all trials before 2000.  The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000.

Can We Apply Common Sense to the Police Shootings Debate?  First, when wary, angry, and/or frightened citizens interact with wary, angry, and/or frightened police — often at odd hours and in moments of maximum stress — there will inevitably be a certain number of both tragic mistakes and heinous crimes.  Thus, it stands to reason that we should endeavor to decrease — not increase — such interactions.  Yet our regulatory state keeps criminalizing more and more conduct.  In two of the worst recent incidents, Eric Garner's choking death and Walter's Scott's apparent execution, the victims were facing prosecution for violating petty or stupid criminal laws — selling loose cigarettes in Garner's case and failing to pay child support in Scott's case.  Regarding child support, it's idiotic policy to lock deadbeat dads in debtors' prisons.  According to one study of South Carolina jails, one out of every eight inmates was behind bars for falling behind on child support.  Yet inmates are notoriously poor earners, and stints in prison tend to exacerbate chronic unemployment.

Kick Open the Doorway to Liberty: What Are We Waiting For?  Everything this nation once stood for is being turned on its head.  Free speech, religious expression, privacy, due process, bodily integrity, the sanctity of human life, the sovereignty of the family, individuality, the right to self-defense, protection against police abuses, representative government, private property, human rights — the very ideals that once made this nation great — have become casualties of a politically correct, misguided, materialistic, amoral, militaristic culture.  Indeed, I'm having a hard time reconciling the America I know and love with the America being depicted in the daily news headlines, where corruption, cronyism and abuse have taken precedence over the rights of the citizenry and the rule of law.

When everything is a crime.  What began as a trickle has become a stream that could become a cleansing torrent.  Criticisms of the overcriminalization of American life might catalyze an appreciation of the toll the administrative state is taking on the criminal justice system, and liberty generally.  In 2007, professor Tim Wu of Columbia Law School recounted a game played by some prosecutors.  One would name a famous person — "say, Mother Teresa or John Lennon" — and other prosecutors would try to imagine "a plausible crime for which to indict him or her," usually a felony plucked from "the incredibly broad yet obscure crimes that populate the U.S. Code like a kind of jurisprudential minefield."

You are probably breaking the law right now.  Ignorance of the law, we are often told, is no excuse.  "Every man is presumed to know the law," says a long-established legal aphorism.  And if you are charged with a crime, you would be well advised to rely on some other defense than "I had no idea that was illegal."  But not everybody favors this state of affairs.  While a century or two ago nearly all crime was traditional common-law crime — rape, murder, theft and other things that pretty much everyone should know are bad — nowadays we face all sorts of "regulatory crimes" in which intuitions of right and wrong play no role, but for which the penalties are high.

Downsize the Federal Government.  Recent studies have found that economic growth rates decline when relative government spending exceeds 26% of GDP, and the United States government current spending is close to 40% of GDP.  The Republican Party claims the core principle of limited government, but has actively participated in this growth in both size and scope of the federal government. [...] Government monopolies are notoriously inefficient.  Revenues are collected not just to pay for government services, but now departments redistribute funds between people, between states, and even between countries.  The problem is that government execution gets worse the bigger it gets.  The federal budget deficits have caused the national debt to skyrocket over $18 trillion, with no end in sight.

Feds Invade Native American Gathering, Grab Property, Threaten Jail.  [Pastor Robert] Soto is an ordained religious leader of the Lipan Apache Tribe of Texas.  His tribe is recognized by historians, sociologists, and the State of Texas — but not by the federal government.  Members of federally recognized tribes can possess feathers.  But Soto cannot.  Ironically, the government issues permits to multiple institutions — including power companies — to kill eagles but it will not allow Soto, or his fellow tribe members, to pick up feathers that fall on the ground as the eagles molt naturally.

Time to Tame Prosecutors Gone Wild.  At CPAC next week, former majority leader of the House Tom Delay, John Fund, and I, among others, will be speaking on a panel dubbed "Prosecutors Gone Wild."  The topic alone is a sad commentary on the current state of our criminal-justice system.  As Ninth Circuit judge Alex Kozinski has said, "there is an epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct abroad in the land."  The epidemic is devastating the lives of innocent people and breaking families; it is devouring our tax dollars; and it has destroyed the public's faith in our justice system.

Politicians went overboard with Snowmageddon precautions.  When it comes to the Blizzard That Wasn't, don't blame the models.  Don't blame the meteorologists.  Don't blame the media.  Blame the politicians — you know, those officials we elect to hire and who actually work for us.  They showed their true authoritarian colors Monday [1/26/2015] as they garbed themselves in emergency clothing and tightened their jaws and announced they were going to shut us all down for our own good.  They shut down highways and public transportation not because they had to.  They did it because they wanted to, for various reasons.

Too Many Laws, Not Enough Sense.  From a country with no federal laws until the first Congress was seated, we are now swimming in a flood tide of legislation, as if Congress (and the states, and the cities and the local municipalities; what we are really swimming in is too much government, at every level) had nothing else to do but pass laws. [...] No wonder Harvey Silverglate, a crackerjack defender of freedom, called his book Three Felonies a Day.  That's how many crimes you personally have already committed today, before you got out of bed, and for which you could go to jail for a very long time.

Federal Judge Accuses DOJ Attorneys of Defrauding The Court, Threatening Witness in Case of ATF Whistleblower Jay Dobyns.  As a refresher, Dobyns is the first law enforcement agent to ever successfully infiltrate multiple layers of the notoriously dangerous and violent Hells Angels motorcycle gang through "Operation Black Biscuit."  After doing so and after his identity was exposed, he received death threats against himself and his family.  ATF did nothing to protect him.  When his house was burned to the ground at 3 a.m., ATF supervisors tried to frame him for the arson after Dobyns blew the whistle and exposed supervisors had done nothing to address serious and credible threats against his family.

'What's the Big Deal With Selling Cigarettes?'.  In the aftermath of the Eric Garner death in New York City, there has been ongoing analysis criticizing the NYPD's response.  As you might recall, Garner was being arrested for selling loose cigarettes on a city sidewalk at the time of his death.  Many have questioned the need for the NYPD to even enforce such a minor law violation.  Others have called a law of this nature just another example of an overexpansion of government into the lives of citizens.  Beliefs like these ignore that every city has ordinances that exist for the purpose of improving the quality of life for its citizens, business owners, and visitors.  Cities have panhandling laws that prevent people from being harassed by transient people who are begging for money.  NYC having an ordinance about selling loose cigarettes is just another example of a local law that was passed to protect legitimate businesses and to prevent local "street dealers" from harassing pedestrians. [...] Some people question whether the Broken Windows theory actually reduces crime.  But aggressive policing of minor crimes has a major impact on overall crime.

The Editor says...
Yes, I will concede and stipulate that cigarettes are nasty and cigarette smoke stinks, but nevertheless tobacco a legal product.  Informal offers to sell merchandise to passing pedestrians are fairly harmless, and are even expected in certain locales, for example, the sidewalks of New York City, or the State Fair of Texas.  The broken window theory (about minor laws being enforced to prevent more serious crimes) works under the presumption that all those minor laws are necessary and just.

Md. parents investigated for letting kids walk alone.  A couple being investigated for child neglect because they allow their children to roam freely in their neighborhood says their parenting style is unfairly under assault.  In many ways, the Meitiv family is very traditional.  They eat dinner together every night, their kids have fixed bedtimes, do chores and have limits on their sweets and screen time.  But the parents are under investigation because they let their kids walk around the neighborhood together, unaccompanied by an adult.  Danielle and Sasha Meitiv say the investigation is an invasion of their privacy and infringes on their rights as parents.

Federal prosecutors who railroaded Ted Stevens escape punishment.  Obamacare would not have passed if Senator Ted Stevens had been re-elected in 2008. But two Alaska federal prosecutors, assistant U.S. attorneys Joseph Bottini and James Goeke, charged him with accepting tens of thousands of dollars of illegal contributions, and obtained a felony conviction on October 27, 2008, just days before the election.  The only problem:  they had illegally withheld exculpatory evidence from the defense, and the conviction was overturned.  But the damage had been done, and the longest-serving Republican in the Senate at the time had neen turned out of office, replaced by Democrat Mark Begich, who provided the crucial 60th vote to pass Obamacare.  Yesterday [1/13/2015], it was revealed that the two prosecutors would escape punishment for their history-changing misconduct.

Lamenting Liberty Lost.  The Framers believed in the presumption of liberty, which declares that we are free to make personal choices, and the government cannot interfere with our liberties unless we violate the rights of others.  Stated differently, the federal government cannot interfere with our personal choices by writing any law it wants; it can only regulate behavior or spend money when the Constitution authorizes it to do so.  But for the past 100 years, the federal government has rejected the Madisonian concept that it is limited to the 16 discrete powers the Constitution delegates to it, and has claimed its powers are unlimited, subject only to the express prohibitions in the Constitution.

Congress' Sneaky Tactic to Grab More Land for the Government.  Congress has returned from the mid-term elections and members are hammering out the details of the National Defense Authorization Act.  NDAA, which has passed for more than 50 years consecutively, provides policy guidance for the U.S. defense budget.  The importance of the NDAA to the defense budgeting process and its traditional status as a "must-pass" piece of legislation makes it an inviting target for pet projects and wasteful spending.  Unfortunately, as this year's lame duck session winds down, some lawmakers are trying to end-run the normal legislative process in a rushed, closed-door approach.

Also posted under What's the rush?

The federal government can't stand to see an emerging technology fall into private hands without regulating or taxing it.
This government rule could cripple commercial drone flight.  One of America's most popular consumer drones, the DJI Phantom 2, is surprisingly cheap, lightweight and easy to fly, and lots of wedding photographers, farmers and real estate agents now depend on it for eyes in the sky.  But federal rules could soon require that, before flying their three-pound whirlybirds, they'll first need pilot licenses — certification that can cost $10,000 and demand many hours flying aircraft that control nothing like a little drone.  The proposed Federal Aviation Administration rules, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, could add a big new burden onto the first generation of small businesses using drones to cheaply shoot video, map land or monitor crops.

How Long Must A Long Train Of Abuses Be?  I say we have been disposed to suffer long enough.  The Founders rose up over less than we are experiencing now.  The Constitution has been overturned in a Stealth Coup that took slightly over a century to achieve.  The current Leftists in Power And Control are merely firing the final shots into it's critically wounded corpse.  How long is long?  You say a century is not long enough a train.  Many of us say it is too long, that it is so long we stand a very good chance of not being able to derail it.  I say the situation is insufferable, intolerable, that it is time to act.

Legislative tyranny in Illinois.  In 2011 the Democrats, led by House Speaker Michael Madigan and Senate President John Cullerton, created a monstrosity of a gerrymandered remap that shamed all but the most hyper-partisan Dems.  It paved the way for the Democrats to enjoy veto-proof majorities in both chambers after the 2012 election.  Two years later the Democrats still have veto-proof majorities thanks to that redistricting assault on the people of Illinois.  In the House, the Democrats did not lose a single seat.  On of the effects of the Madigan-Cullerton remap was that 70 of the 118 House races were uncontested — nearly 60 percent of them.

America's perpetual state of emergency.  The United States is in a perpetual state of national emergency.  Thirty separate emergencies, in fact. [...] Those emergencies, declared by the president by proclamation or executive order, give the president extraordinary powers — to seize property, call up the National Guard and hire and fire military officers at will.  "What the National Emergencies Act does is like a toggle switch, and when the president flips it, he gets new powers.  It's like a magic wand.  and there are very few constraints about how he turns it on," said Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor at Princeton University.

Secret Service watched this woman for months.  The Secret Service monitored Brenda Allen and her family for months.  The surveillance came after an altercation with her neighbor, who worked for former Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan.  [Video clip]

Incompetence Meets Mendacity in Obama Administration's Ebola Response.  The shocking competence gap and the cavernous honesty gap — brought to you by the "most transparent administration in history" — make our heads spin as we careen from debacle to government-induced debacle.  In the tumult, we can miss the main point:  Why do we have a federal government?  Its purpose is to safeguard the American people and pursue our interests in the world, not to solve the world's problems on our dime and, occasionally, by using us as laboratory mice.  As free people, we can try to save the planet.  The federal government, however, was not created to do it for us, much less to coerce us into implausible "humanitarian" schemes that always manage to line some crony's pocket.  National interest is our government's only reliable compass, yet it has been discarded.

Department of Injustice.  [Scroll down]  As 97 percent of the 99.5 percent found guilty are intimidated by the manipulation of the plea-bargain system into pleading guilty to spare the state the irritation of a trial, the defendants accept the abandonment of 147 of the 153 counts against them, plead guilty, and are rehearsed in a catechetical process by the prosecutors to accuse themselves of cowardice, hypocrisy, sociopathic turpitude, and often outright evil, and profess their gratitude for the sentence they are about to receive.  It smacks of nothing so much as the Stalin system of torturing the innocent until, to spare their families, they proclaimed their guilt, fulminated an allocution of coruscating self-loathing and self-righteously bellowed their demand to be executed immediately, and were led away by Stalin's obliging jurists, and often dispatched, mercifully in the circumstances, in the basement of the courthouse.

Government Set Up A Fake Facebook Page In This Woman's Name.  The Justice Department is claiming, in a little-noticed court filing, that a federal agent had the right to impersonate a young woman online by creating a Facebook page in her name without her knowledge.  Government lawyers also are defending the agent's right to scour the woman's seized cell phone and to post photographs — including racy pictures of her and even one of her young son and niece — to the phony social media account, which the agent was using to communicate with suspected criminals.

Dereliction of Duty on a Grand Scale.  [T]he people who run government are in control of gigantic, unstoppable machines.  Their actions have the force of law.  They are just humans — but with the whole power of the state behind them.  This is a good reason to be very careful who we have at the levers of power in government — and to try to keep the role of government as small as possible.  Power will be abused.  So let's make sure it is out of the hands of a few willful people — as in the people who started the recession or missed ISIS.  Government is a dangerous instrumentality.  Sometimes needed, but always dangerous.

Mandatory minimum sentencing: Injustice served?  "We had tried calling the cops," said Lee Wollard.  "We had tried doing everything.  Nothing worked.  Nothing."  After hearing 59-year-old Wollard's story, you may think he did what any family man would do.  Or, you may agree with a Florida jury and think he went too far.  But either way, you're likely to wonder:  Does Wollard's punishment really fit the crime?

Government Desperation Is Increasing.  Even under normal conditions government fudges numbers to support its actions and policies.  Government always benefits from making conditions look better than they are.  A true understanding of what government does, as opposed to what it pretends to do, would mean its end, at least in any form resembling its current size, configuration and responsibilities.  Allowing government to report its own performance is worse than allowing the fox in charge of the chicken coop to report on the number and health of the chickens.

In Maryland, a Soviet-Style Punishment for a Novelist.  From the Dept. of Insane and Dangerous Overreactions to Fictional Threats:  A 23-year-old teacher at a Cambridge, Md. middle school has been placed on leave and — in the words of a local news report — "taken in for an emergency medical evaluation" for publishing, under a pseudonym, a novel about a school shooting.  The novelist, Patrick McLaw, an eighth-grade language-arts teacher at the Mace's Lane Middle School, was placed on leave by the Dorchester County Board of Education, and is being investigated by the Dorchester County Sheriff's Office, according to news reports from Maryland's Eastern Shore.  The novel, by the way, is set 900 years in the future.

Maryland's thought police strike.  A teacher in Cambridge, Maryland has been suspended from teaching, banned from school property, had his home searched, and been taken in for emergency medical evaluation because of a novel he wrote under a pseudonym in 2011, three years before he was hired.

"We are in a dangerous place when prosecutors can identify the target first, and then try to find a crime."
Revealed: Wisconsin John Doe investigation was full-blown anti-conservative fishing expedition.  The short story is that two separate proceedings were commenced under the auspices of Democratic District Attorneys in order to try to take down Scott Walker. [...] The investigators conducted a widespread fishing expedition through the otherwise private records of numerous conservative activists, as described by M.D. Kittle of Wisconsin Reporter, who has followed the case more closely than anyone[.]

Criminalizing Conservatism.  Newly unsealed federal court documents show that a crew of local prosecutors — Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm, a Democrat, his assistants, Bruce Landgraf and David Robles, a figurehead special prosecutor named Francis Schmitz, and a contract investigator named Dean Nickel — have exploited state law to seize "more or less all" the records of the Wisconsin Club for Growth and every other conservative group in the state dating back to 2009 as part of a boundless investigation of their own wild hunches.  Despite their unhindered access to the complete inner workings of the conservative movement in Wisconsin, these prosecutors have come up with nothing.

Westerners fear monumental land grab by Obama administration.  Utah officials are scrambling to prevent the Obama administration from locking down thousands of acres of land in their backyard, as federal officials consider up to a dozen possible national monument designations — all in western states.  The Antiquities Act gives U.S. presidents the authority to unilaterally declare public lands as national monuments at the stroke of a pen, with no input from the public unless they choose to seek it.

The Rick Perry Indictment is Textbook Malicious Prosecution.  Yes, for the past 16 years, Texas voters have elected only Republicans to statewide office, and since 2002 the GOP has controlled both houses of the state legislature, but the partisan divide in the Lone Star State is sharp and highly polarized.  In 2012, Mitt Romney trounced President Obama by 16 points statewide, but over 40% of the Texas electorate is resolutely "Blue."  There are pockets of liberal Democrats throughout the state, mainly in the large cities of Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio, but Travis County (encompassing Austin) is the epicenter of the Liberal Political Establishment in Texas, which thrives on the flagship campus of the University of Texas, in the halls of the Legislature, and in the ultra-liberal media organs based there:  Texas Monthly, Texas Tribune, and the Austin American-Statesman.  Democrats control Travis County and the City of Austin, as thoroughly as the GOP dominates statewide offices.

Ferguson and the Changing Attitudes Towards Cops.  Much like the TSA being an agency of teaching sheeplike compliance (and guaranteed union jobs) — as opposed to the public mission of safety — these demonstrations of government force and tactics are the part of the same coercion.  There is an unsettling commonality among all of this, the IRS, the militarized police forces, the TSA, the BLM, ATF — and many conservatives are starting to connect the dots. [...] Boaters, who tend to be overwhelmingly conservative, get boarded and harassed by these multiple agencies on a routine basis.  Sometimes the LEOs cannot handle these pricey toys and up destroying private property.

Patrolmen Without Borders.  If I drive across a U.S. border, I expect to stop at a Border Patrol checkpoint.  But imagine driving to the grocery store, or Mom's house, well inside America, and being stopped by the Border Patrol.  Many Americans don't have to imagine it — it's how they live.  Even as the federal government fails to control the southern border, it sends the Border Patrol farther into the interior, where Americans complain that agents harass people who are already U.S. citizens.

Report: Feds Created 400 New Crimes Since 2008.  A 2008 analysis by the law scholar John S. Baker for the Heritage Foundation found that, between 2000 and 2007, the government added 452 crimes to the books, indicating the government has increased the rate at which it created new crimes.  The 2008 report identified "at least 4,450 federal crimes."  Adding in the CRS report tally, there are now 4,889 federal crimes on the books. [...] For example, it is now a federal crime to conduct "high seas navigation of an unflagged submersible or semi-submersible vessel."

$619 billion missed from federal transparency site.  That's a problem, said Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee.  "We live in a world in which information drives decisions," Carper said.  "And, given the budget constraints that our government faces, we need reliable information on how and where our money is being spent." [...] The report comes as the Obama administration begins to implement the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act, which Congress passed last year to expand the amount of federal spending data available to the public.

$619 billion missing from federal transparency site.  The irony is thick with this one.  A government audit has found that a website dedicated to making federal spending "more transparent" can't find $619 billion. [...] No, this doesn't mean that $619 billion has been "lost," although some of it may have, indeed, gone down a black hole.  What it means is that we have incompetents running federal departments.

How the Obama Administration Has Actually Broken the Law Hundreds of Times.  Nearly half of the Obama administration's 4,000 regulations since 2012 were illegally imposed by skipping the required congressional review, the Washington Post reported — and there's not much Congress or the courts can do about it.  Under the 1996 Congressional Review Act, most federal administrative rules are supposed to be reported to the House and Senate and to the Government Accountability Office.  The idea was to give Congress the opportunity to take action before the rule goes into effect.  That same law also barred such rules from judicial review.  Curtis Copeland, a retired Congressional Research Service staffer, examined how many rules issued since 2012 were not reported to Congress and the GAO.  He found that out of about 4,000 rules, more than 1,800 were not properly reported.

Obama remains confident in CIA head John Brennan despite Senate spying.  President Obama remains confident in CIA Director John Brennan's leadership despite an independent investigation that concluded that the agency had overreached its authority by spying on Senate staffers.  White House spokesman Josh Earnest said the findings had not diminished Brennan's standing in the administration.  When asked whether it damaged his authority or credibility in any way, Earnest said:  "Absolutely not."

CIA confesses: Yeah, we hacked the Senate's computers.  In March, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) revealed that CIA Director John Brennan told her that the intelligence agency he leads had improperly accessed Senate computers and secretly removed classified documents while the agency's War on Terror interrogation tactics were under investigation.  Feinstein alleged that Brennan told her the CIA took that action because the agency believed the Senate might have accessed documents that they were not authorized to see.  In a statement, Brennan said the Senate Intelligence Committee chairwoman had leveled "spurious allegations about CIA actions that were wholly unsupported by the facts."  While he confessed that the agency had made mistakes, the CIA director insisted that there was no merit to the charge that the agency had spied on members of Congress.

Despite Brennan's Lying and Usurpation of Law, President Obama Gives Strong Vote of Confidence In CIA Director John Brennan.  President Obama issued a strong defense of CIA Director John Brennan on Friday in the face of revelations that his agency spied on congressional staffers' computers.  "I have full confidence in John Brennan," Obama said in a White House press conference.

A Government Feared and Distrusted.  [Scroll down]  The proposed regulations are so onerous, they could literally make farming of some areas impossible.  But if you don't comply, the EPA could label you a "polluter" whose wages should be garnished.  Case example:  the agency has threatened fines of up to $75,000 per day on Wyoming homeowner Andy Johnson.  He built a pond on his rural property.  Think twice before you build that koi pond in your own backyard — or collect rain water on your property, like Gary Harrington, an Oregonian now serving a 30-day sentence for violating water regulations.  An encyclopedia would be required to list all the examples of executive and governmental agency overreach.  But note the theme:  the examples above are violations of Americans trust by non-elected governmental agencies.  You, Joe Average, have no say in what is decreed.  You are not represented when thousands of regulations are enacted.

13 Ways The American Police State Squanders Your Tax Dollars.  Call it what you will — taxes, penalties, fees, fines, regulations, tariffs, tickets, permits, surcharges, tolls, asset forfeitures, foreclosures, etc. — but the only word that truly describes the constant bilking of the American taxpayer by the government and its corporate partners is theft. We're operating in a topsy-turvy Sherwood Forest where, instead of Robin Hood and his merry band of thieves stealing from the rich to feed the poor, you've got the government and its merry band of corporate thieves stealing from the poor to fatten the wallets of the rich.  In this way, the poor get poorer and the rich get richer.  All the while, the American Dream of peace, prosperity, and liberty has turned into a nightmare of endless wars, debilitating debt, and outright tyranny.

Land of the Free?  [John M. Horne (1813-186?)] would be horrified, even more so should he find out the Agriculture Department has its own SWAT team.  John would probably wonder why we even need a Department of Agriculture.  Seeing a country where the president's wife can dictate what your child eats for lunch, and where local authorities can shut down your daughter's lemonade stand, John M. would not be surprised that a law was passed obscenely incompatible with the land of the free.  ObamaCare was claimed to be within the government's power to tax, and is to be enforced by — why, the IRS, of course.  Most Americans didn't want it and still don't.

16 Reasons Why the United States is Going to Hell in a Handbasket.  I don't think any one problem or event will cause the collapse of the American empire, but a number of separate but interlocking events and issues.  Another point to consider is that the U.S. government has the resources, and inside information that would allow them to foretell when a major disaster or complete collapse is coming and they have been prepping and building underground bunkers on a mass scale and despite the fact our tax dollars are being used to build those bunkers we are not invited.

IRS Gave FBI 1.1 Million Pages Of Taxpayer Data To Encourage Prosecution Of Conservatives.  The perversion of law enforcement agencies for political ends is starkly revealed by the fact that in 2010, as part of its effort to stem the Tea Party movement, the IRS gave the FBI disks containing more than 1.1 million pages of documents on Section 501 non-profits, so that the FBI could selectively prosecute conservative groups and donors.

Illinois warns parents: You are replaceable.  Deborah Teixeira is in danger of literally being fired by the state of Illinois from her job as Juliet's mother. [...] Her predicament comes from the fact that she takes care of an adult daughter with brain damage.  She provides Juliet with round-the-clock care at her home thanks to subsidies from Illinois' Home Services Program.  That's common: Most of HSP's estimated 20,000 "caregivers" are just people like Teixeira watching over severely disabled family members.  The program also comes with strings attached, including a new billing system that requires caregivers to call a phone number twice daily to literally clock in and clock out.  Forget to clock out and you are technically overbilling the state.

After Revelations DOJ Collaborated With IRS on Targeting, Oversight Reiterates Calls For Special Prosecutor.  Earlier we learned that in 2010, the IRS sent a massive data base full of confidential information belonging to [conservative] tax exempt groups to the FBI just before the 2010 midterm elections.  The information was sent after collaboration and agreement between former IRS head of tax exempt groups Lois Lerner and DOJ Election Crimes Branch official Richard Pilger that tax exempt groups needed to be investigated.  Fast forward to four years later and the Department of Justice has been tapped to "investigate" the IRS targeting of conservative groups, even though they were involved in the targeting themselves.

Privacy takes a beating in the FBI's kangaroo court.  Feds ran roughshod over Lavabit, forcing it to shut down and proving the government is fighting to win — and fighting dirty — in the privacy wars.

ATF Charged with Creating Fictitious Crimes.  We need more criminal law pushback like this, in more areas.  Law enforcement agencies, especially at the federal level, have gotten out of hand.

"We are witnessing a new federal government that is a sort of rogue organism that exists for its own enhancement and is willing to do anything necessary to help those who help it."

— Victor Davis Hanson            

America's Last Straw.  [In 1877,] President James Garfield issued this warning:  ["]Twenty years ago, the presence of the national government was not felt by one citizen in a hundred.  Except in paying his postage and receiving his mail, the citizen of the interior rarely came in contact with the national authority.  Now, he meets it in a thousand ways... [and] a vote in Congress may, any day, seriously derange the business affairs of every person.["]  Today, more than another hundred years later, Garfield would be appalled to see that not only is our postal system bankrupt, but that outside of our mailboxes and in both our business and personal affairs — we meet the serious derangement of national authority practically everywhere and in every way imaginable.

Government Will Control You Before It Controls Climate.  Ultimately, it will not matter if people in government cynically promote the theory that human activity is destroying the global climate as a means of taking control of your life, or if they take control of your life because they sincerely believe human activity is destroying the global climate.  Either way, government will control your life.  The National Climate Assessment the Obama administration released this week describes in Sisyphean terms the task government faces in limiting carbon dioxide emissions, which the assessment says make up 84 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions it holds guilty of artificially warming our planet.

The Editor says...
The global warming fad / hoax is all about accumulating centralized government power through the use of frightening forecasts and rash pronouncements of impending catastrophe "if we don't do something."  Remember, the bigger the rush, the greater the underlying deception.  The U.S. government will never be able to control carbon dioxide emissions in China, which shares the atmosphere with the rest of us, and even a unified one-world government will never be able to control carbon dioxide emissions from volcanos, termites and cows.

Who Owns One-Third of American Land — And How It's Holding Us Back.  Did you know that the federal government owns nearly one-third of U.S. land?  What are they doing with it, you might ask.  And the answer is certainly not making the most of it.  In fact, true to form, the federal government is getting in the way of domestic energy and American jobs.  "Inaccessibility and unnecessary regulations inhibit economic growth in various parts of the country," says Heritage expert Nicolas Loris, the Herbert and Joyce Morgan Fellow.  He points to a recent study showing that "opening up offshore areas for drilling in the Atlantic Outer Continental Shelf — just one region where offshore drilling is possible but not permitted — would create 280,000 jobs in that region alone."  While U.S. oil production has gone gangbusters in recent years, most of that production has been on privately owned land.

It is time to choose our side.  Today in America, there are an increasing number of men and women who see the ominous parallels between the pre-Revolutionary War days and the present day. [...] Only those buried deep in denial or their own normalcy bias refuse to see the increasing oppression against the citizens of America by their own government.  Only those who are completely clueless or complicit cannot see or vociferously deny that the clouds on the horizon are not storm clouds, but the dust clouds of an approaching enemy selected and elected to retake our freedoms.  Only those who have been effectively brainwashed believe that those currently in power reflect the true will of the people.

GOP rep wants to cut funds for armed federal agencies.  A Republican congressman wants to crack down on the proliferation of armed law enforcement units within the federal government, on the heels of the standoff last month between supporters of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and a federal land agency.  Both sides of that standoff — agents with the Bureau of Land Management, and states' rights protesters who streamed into Nevada — were armed, leading the BLM to back down for fear of violence.

Bunkerville, the New Bunker Hill: The Back Story.  [Scroll down]  I assembled this information because I, like many others, have had it with an over-reaching, lying government.  If nothing else, I wanted to show how the BLM has too much power and when you see them go against a fellow citizen poised to shoot other Americans with guns and body armor, it's time to take steps to back them out of the picture.  I don't completely agree with Cliven Bundy not paying his fees.  559 other Nevada ranchers paid their fees, but I do understand where he is coming from, he predates all land management agencies.  How is that one man who is developing 44,000 acres can use the system, and Harry Reid to get a 10,000 acre tortoise habitat disband from his property and another is locked out of grazing because of the tortoise.  The Tortoise is just a vehicle that the BLM can use at their "discretion" and interpretation of the BLM Regs.  Americans are done with this.

Hydra-headed federal bureaucracy threatens American liberty.  Because humans are inclined to believe their ends are virtuous enough to justify immoral means, America's founders designed a liberty-preserving system to thwart excessive government power.  Their revolutionary principles included limited government, popular consent and human equality, meaning no one — not a president, congressman, IRS official or Bureau of Land Management agent — can be the ruler over another because the government's power is citizen-derived.  If this sounds quaint and obsolete, it's because the federal executive branch bureaucracy has grown so huge and unaccountable.

The soft despotism of regulation imposes high costs on Americans.  Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute and Alexis de Tocqueville, author of the classic Democracy in America, were born in different times and places.  But the French aristocrat and American think tanker have the measure of the federal behemoth in the age of Obama.  Writing in 1835, Tocqueville eloquently predicted how it would function, while Crews today supplies in his annual compilation of federal rules and regulations, "10,000 Commandments," the hard numbers that describe the behemoths contemporary reach and costs.

True the Vote founder to Fox: Five separate agencies came down on me out of nowhere.  Conservative activist Catherine Engelbrecht was on "Fox and Friends" Wednesday [4/16/2014] and said she has no doubt that there was a "collaborative effort" by a number of federal agencies to try to silence her.  The founder of "True the Vote" made the assertion in the aftermath of last week's release of emails by U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, that suggest U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., may have worked with the IRS to target Engelbrecht after her organization applied for nonprofit status.

Regulator Without Peer.  Anyone wondering why the U.S. economy can't seem to grow at its usual pace should examine one product category where production is booming: federal regulation.  Washington set a new record in 2013 by issuing final rules consuming 26,417 pages in the Federal Register.  While plenty of government employees deserve credit for this milestone, leadership matters.  And by this measure President Obama has never been surpassed in the Oval Office.

What Does the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Need with 96 Armed Agents?  The proliferation of federal agencies with armed agents is one of the most worrisome aspects of the growth in government.  Just last summer the EPA carried out an armed raid on a mine in Alaska to enforce the Clean Water Act — a bit of government intimidation that residents say was totally unnecessary. [...] And who can forget the Gibson Guitar raid by armed agents of the US Fish and Wildlife Service.  The EPA, the USFWS ...the Department of Education?  It's getting ridiculous — and frightening.

Did someone mention Gibson Guitar?

The Progressive March to the Future is Destroying America.  The progressive march to the future is destroying America.  What the Democrats and the progressives are doing behind the scenes is a more frightening and unjustified power grab than Putin's on the Ukraine. [...] [I]n spite of the dysfunction of our House and Senate there is a more pervasive danger — and it is the people who are behind the scenes — people who in the dead of night write laws and bills that no one seems to know what [...] is in them.  Or decisions that give up America's sovereignty to an organization that has now changed what its initial purpose once was to an institution preparing for a one-world government, The United Nations.  So the freest, most stable nation in the world gives up the Internet to forces that could advance it being stifled?  Does this make sense?

ATF Director: 'Wish I Had Better Answers' About ATF Agents Probing a Tea Party Conservative.  B. Todd Jones, director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, couldn't tell Congress why his agents made two visits to a tea party conservative in a 13-month period — but only after she requested tax-exempt status for her conservative group, True the Vote.  Catherine Engelbrecht had a Federal Firearms License (FFL) for 12 years.  "And suddenly she applies for tax exempt status, and you're knocking on her door twice in 13 months," Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) told Jones at a hearing on Wednesday.  "Congressman, I wish I had better answers," Jones said.

Under attack: Depth of federal arms race should surprise, shock citizenry.  In late February, four federal agents carrying side arms with a drug-sniffing dog descended on the Taos Ski Valley in what was called a "saturation patrol."  Authorities were working on tips of possible drug selling and impaired driving in the ski resort's parking lot and surrounding area.  But the agents weren't from the FBI, ATF, or even the Drug Enforcement Administration.  Rather, the agents represented the U.S. Forest Service. [...] It may come as a surprise to many U.S. taxpayers, but a slew of federal agencies — some whose responsibilities seem to have little to do with combating crime — carry active law enforcement operations.

U.S. confirms warrantless searches of Americans.  The Obama administration has conducted warrantless searches of Americans' communications as part of the National Security Agency's surveillance operations that target foreigners located outside of the U.S., the administration's top intelligence official confirmed in a letter to Congress disclosed Tuesday [4/1/2014].

Hate-Crime Laws and the Expansion of Federal Power.  Forty-five states and the District of Columbia provide additional penalties for crimes that they classify as "hate crimes," over and above what would have been available if the same crime been committed with a different motivation.  In 2009, President Obama signed into law a federal hate-crimes statute that adds a third level of criminalization for violent crimes that occur "because of" the victim's "actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, disability, or sexual orientation."  Actual hatred is not required. It is enough that there is a causal connection between the crime and one of these grounds.

A glimpse inside the dysfunctional federal bureaucracy.  We are governed by an arrogant, dysfunctional, self-serving organization that couldn't care less about us.  The federal bureaucracy, which increasingly behaves as our overlords, regulating what we may or may not do, prosecuting (or declining to prosecute) alleged wrongdoers, and spending roughly one dollar of every four in our economy (up from one in five in just a few years) is out of control and dangerous.  And it is only "extremists" like tea partiers who propose to do anything about it.

If You Are on the Right, 1st and 4th Amendments Don't Apply.  In August, 2012 uniformed county police officers showed up at Brandon Raub's front door.  They introduced Raub to several unidentified agents of the Secret Service and FBI who spoke with him concerning his anti-government Facebook posts.  A few minutes later, according to the August, 2013 complaint, one of the federal agents telephoned a Chesterfield County licensed psychotherapist to discuss the situation.  The therapist, without observing, meeting or evaluating Raub, recommended that he be taken into custody.  Raub was subsequently handcuffed, arrested and medically cleared before being driven to a psych hospital over a hundred miles away from his home.

The Obama Administration's Unilateral Actions.  Abusive, unlawful, and even potentially unconstitutional unilateral action has been a hallmark of the Obama Administration.  When Congress refuses to accede to President Barack Obama's liberal policies, the Administration often ignores the restraints imposed upon the executive branch by the Constitution, and when the Administration disagrees with duly enacted laws or finds it politically expedient not to enforce them, it waives legal requirements.  Under the U.S. constitutional system, Congress is charged with enacting the law, and the Executive is charged with enforcing it.  The individual liberties of all Americans are at stake when one branch usurps the role of another.

The Ten Most Abusive Obama Executive Actions.  President Obama has made liberal use of "executive action" throughout his presidency, and pledged to make even more use of executive action in this year's State of the Union speech.  He seems to think that because Republicans don't want to implement his agenda, he can go around Congress.  The Heritage Foundation is out with a new report on President Obama's executive actions, titled "An Executive Unbound," finding that "abusive, unlawful, even potentially unconstitutional unilateral action has been a hallmark of the Obama Administration."

Obama's Trifecta.  In its violations of the First Amendment, the Obama administration has consistently relied upon self-serving definitions of press, religion, and political speech.  Holder justified violating Rosen's press freedom on the grounds that he somehow wasn't acting as a legitimate member of the press.  Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has arrogated to herself the right to determine what is and what is not a "religion."  She claims the HHS mandate doesn't violate religious freedom since groups that serve the public aren't religious according to her criteria.  She declared at the time of the mandate's release that only purely sectarian groups are deemed religious under Obamacare and thus worthy of an exemption.  The Federal Election Commission plays the same game on what constitutes political speech, defining the concept ever more narrowly to justify restrictions on ordinary participation.

Legal Kidnapping.  Are responsible and loving parents safe from having their children taken away from them by government agents?  The Joneses had always thought so, until recent events taught them otherwise.

Americans rising up against government.  [I]n response to widespread protests last week, the Department of Homeland Security canceled plans to build a nationwide license plate database.  Many local police departments already use license-plate readers that track every car as it passes traffic signals or pole-mounted cameras.  Specially equipped police cars even track cars parked on the street or even in driveways.  The DHS put out a bid request for a system that would have gone national, letting the federal government track millions of people's comings and goings just as it tracks data about every phone call we make.  But the proposal was suddenly withdrawn last week, with the unconvincing explanation that it was all a mistake.

Michigan Democrat Rep. Gary Peters threatens TV station licenses over Obamacare ad.  While Julie Boonstra of Dexter, Mich., struggles to survive leukemia, she now also has to cope with being called a liar by the Democrat who wants to be her next senator.  And the campaign of Rep. Gary Peters is also going after television stations airing ads in which her story is featured, threatening their licenses.  The ad by Americans for Prosperity features Boonstra talking about how her insurance was canceled under Obamacare and saying that Peters' decision to vote for the law "jeopardized my health."  The ads are airing in Michigan as Peters seeks the Democratic nomination to replace Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., who is not seeking re-election.

Mark Levin: Obama Admin Using The Law Against Us Is The Definition Of Tyranny.  The FCC, call it whatever you want, Barack Obama's henchman, Barack Obama's comrades, there, that's right, all over the federal government have hijacked the institutions of government and are now turning them on the people.  Whether it's the EPA, or the Department of Justice, the Interior Department, NOAA, this, that or the other, they're using the government, they are using a law against us.  Which is the definition of tyranny.

Is Our Commander, Covert Or Criminal?  On January 1 an agreement between the United States and our most hostile enemy went into effect.  This agreement was secretly negotiated at secret meetings by a secret Presidential trip, and a secretive Secretary of State.  This super secret agreement we were told would bring peace in our time. [...] The only problem however is that there is now no way for "We The People" to know if our employee, one Barack Hussein Obama, is telling the truth.  And in our representative republic there is no way for our representatives — even ones legally empowered to watch foreign affairs and national security specifically — to be able to know.  Why?  Because the President has the text of the agreement — an agreement we are told is unclassified — being squirrelled away — and is off limits.

Atlanta Mayor Defends Using Emergency Lane to Get to Interview.  Atlanta's mayor is defending his use of emergency lanes at the height of Tuesday's icy traffic jam so he could do an interview at The Weather Channel's studios.

Big government does too much, badly.  Around the country there have been calls to raise the minimum wage, to impose strict regulations on our businesses and to forcibly adopt a health care system that nationalizes one-sixth of our economy.  The intended role of the federal government established by our Founding Fathers was to protect the rights of all Americans.  Nowhere in our Constitution is there a clause that mandates government to act as an employer, a health care provider or a charity — nor should it.  However, over the years the role of government has shifted from protecting rights to selectively distributing them.  This, in turn, has spawned a host of redistributionist policies that have been thrust upon the public as commandments.  Many people are beginning to wonder why they are being forced to pay for their neighbors.

What would Patrick Henry do with the NSA?  We are constantly informed that business cannot be trusted to regulate their public behavior, so government is called upon to manage the FDA, EPA, ICC, USDA and dozens of other alphabet-soup agencies.  We are told that even those who have taken oaths for their business activities, doctors and nurses come to mind, are not to be trusted to play fair with the fees they charge for services, with the latest attempt to fight this alleged threat being Obamacare.  Heck, we are even told that the clergy and those who look to them for spiritual guidance are not to be entrusted with the care of the poor any longer, thus the growing need for our vainglorious "safety net."  Everywhere an American citizen looks, you will find government, taxing, regulating, micromanaging, threatening and in some instances killing.  All made legal and growing by what force?  The threat of penalties, fines, unaffordable legal defense and imprisonment.

Rein in HUD.  Under our Constitution, a government agency may not act beyond the authority given it by Congress.  Indeed, as the Supreme Court has said, "an agency literally has no power to act ... unless and until Congress confers power upon it."  The principle is basic, but in a significant matter the Department of Housing and Urban Development under President Obama has ignored it, to say no worse.  Fortunately, a lawsuit now moving forward in the nation's capital promises to compel the agency to quit its conspicuous overreaching.

Congress Must Curb The 'Soft Tyranny' Of Bureaucrats.  The late Sen. Eugene McCarthy, D-Minn., observed, "The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is inefficiency.  An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty."  He said this in 1979 when the Code of Federal Regulations contained about 30,000 rules.  Today, the federal government has more than 180,000 rules.

DOE Plugs Energy Rating For Homes Similar To MPG Rating For Cars.  The Energy Department on Tuesday [1/14/2014] is rolling out new, improved software to help Americans measure the energy efficiency of their homes.  DOE says its energy-scoring software — called the Home Energy Scoring Tool — is like a vehicle's mile-per-gallon rating because it allows homeowners to compare the energy performance of their homes to other homes nationwide.  It also provides homeowners with suggestions for improving their homes' efficiency.

The Editor says...
First of all, it's never a good idea to compare your house to someone else's house.  It only leads to pride and arrogance, or jealousy and envy.  All that aside, this is apparently the government's way of being "helpful" to home buyers that are too stupid to ask the right questions when shopping for a house.  It sounds harmless enough, but that's the way automobile gas mileage ratings got started, and now fuel efficiency standards are mandatory — and constantly tightening.

Mike Lee: Obama's 'Unelected Bureaucrats' Wrote 80,000 Pages of Rules in 2013.  Friday [1/10/2014], Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) published a photograph on his Facebook page of all the rules and regulations President Barack Obama's administration implemented throughout 2013.  The photo, a display of all the printed pages of the federal register, is 80,000 pages worth of regulations stacked in a filing cabinet.

Border Security as Oppressive as Ever.  A constant barrage of stories of abuse from U.S. Customs and Border Patrol have arisen in 2013.  These did not only occur at the physical borders, but at the numerous domestic checkpoints that appear all over U.S. roadways across the southwest.  Up to 100 miles into the country, permanent roadblocks exist where travelers are asked by federal agents to prove their citizenship and often subjected to searches and other harassment.

The Police State in Review, 2013.  The foundation of an American police state is already laid and making its existence known, while most of the country remains blissfully focused on sports, reality shows, establishment pseudo-news, and other distractions.  It would require an encyclopedia to cover all of the injustices, scandals, and brutality that took place in 2013.  This list is designed to illustrate certain trends and significant stories from the past year.  If Americans don't fix their apathy and disengagement toward causes that matter, we can expect these trends to continue toward their logical conclusions:  an increasingly repressive police state dominating the lives people inside these borders and beyond.

Happy New Year! Feds list 141 new regulations in only three days.  It's a new year and you know what that means — new regulations.  The Obama administration has wasted no time in writing them.  The website Regulations.gov lists 141 regulations that have been posted by federal agencies in the last three days alone.  Of these regulations, 119 are "rulemaking," meaning they establish a new rule.  Twenty-three are "non-rulemaking," meaning the regulations does not establish a new rule.  The largest group of regulations have to do with energy and environmental issues, many of them issued by the Environmental Protection Agency.

11 Nasty Trends That Will Test America's Resilience.  Last year was a challenging one for entrepreneurs and other productive Americans.  No fewer than 13 new taxes were put into place.  Big government now consumes one of every four dollars of our GDP and is getting bigger.  Entering 2014, we face problems, including taxes and spending, that neither the White House nor Congress is addressing.

Showing How Government Fails.  The hyper-regulation by the federal government of nearly every aspect of commerce and industry through an ever-growing leviathan of laws, regulations, judicial decisions, and executive actions has stunted and even crippled huge swaths of private enterprise in America.  Almost any small business can recount at least one horror story that cost our nation productive activity, reduced meaningful employment, and closed off areas of potential growth in our economy.  Many Americans, however, have generally been shown only the sunny side of the federal government.

Uncle Sam's New Year's Binge: Borrows $1,088 Per Household in 1 Day.  Uncle Sam — AKA the federal government — went on a New Year's Eve binge, adding a net of $125,202,709,546.99 to its total debt in just the one day of Dec. 31, 2013, according to the U.S. Treasury.  That equals approximately $1,088.60 for each of the 115,013,000 households the Census Bureau currently estimates there are in the United States.

40,000 new laws take effect in 2014.  In Illinois for example, teenagers will no longer get to use tanning beds without a doctor's note.  If you live in Delaware, visit the shark fin buffet while you can, a new law will make it illegal to own, sale, or distribute the controversial delicacy.  And in California, new laws take effect that will let students take part in school sports, or use bathrooms based on their gender identity, regardless of the gender noted in their birth certificates.

State Dept Whistleblower's Emailed Hacked, Deleted.  The personal e-mail account of a State Department whistle-blower was hacked, and four years worth of messages — some detailing alleged wrongdoing at the agency — were deleted, The [New York] Post has learned.  The computer attack targeted the Gmail account of Diplomatic Security Service criminal investigator Richard Higbie, his lawyer, Cary Schulman, confirmed.  "They took all of his e-mails and then they deleted them all," said Schulman.  He said that he could not prove who was responsible for the hack job, but said the attack was "sophisticated" and called the targeting of Higbie "alarming."

It's a Very Merry Christmas for Washington's Parasite Class.  Simply stated, government is a racket that benefits the DC political elite by taking money from average people in America[.]  I realize this is an unhappy topic to be discussing during the Christmas season, but the American people need to realize that they are being raped and pillaged by the corrupt insiders that control Washington and live fat and easy lives at our expense.

Illegal Immigration: History's Greatest Wage Suppression Tool.  The very notion that in today's day and age that borders cannot be secured is beyond contempt.  Meanwhile, your grandmother is getting cavity-searched by the TSA and yet another anchor baby is born in a U.S. hospital (which accounts for 8% of all births).  The average American knows this "look the other way" policy very well, with all of its repercussions, because he has been dealing with suppressed wages for decades.  This suppression has not only helped gut lower and middle-class Americans, it has also caused millions of Americans to rely on government subsidies, i.e. welfare checks, section 8 housing, and EBT cards.

The Fed Is Operating Without Rules.  Basically, the Fed has become a central-planning agency that does what it wants when it wants, and will not be subject to the discipline of rule making.  Over time this can come to no good.

'Massive Seizure of Power': Climate scientists, economists challenge EPA.  A group of climate scientists and economists are challenging the Environmental Protection Agency's authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and other stationary sources.  These critics see a "massive seizure of power" by the agency.  The scientists and economists, including the former chair of the EPA's Science Advisory Committee, filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court, arguing that the agency does not have the authority to permit greenhouse gases from stationary sources.  According to the group, such a permitting scheme is a "naked power grab of the most cynical sort."

Drowning In A Costly, Intrusive Federal Regulatory Flood.  The federal regulatory machine is coming not only for power plants, as the president promised while campaigning in 2008.  It also has its eye on controlling private property.  Earlier this week, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which has a long history of highlighting Washington's regulatory excess, said that during the first week of December, "95 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register," which followed "77 new final rules" published the previous week.  It's "the equivalent of a new regulation every one hour and 46 minutes."

Politically motivated traffic are probably more common than anyone knows.
Christie ally steps down in wake of George Washington Bridge scandal.  Gov. Chris Christie's top appointee to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey resigned Friday [12/13/2013] amid questions over whether he ordered a traffic jam at the world's busiest bridge as political payback.  The Republican governor accepted the resignation of Bill Baroni, the agency's deputy executive director, effective immediately, and praised the former state senator's four-year stint at the bi-state agency.

Annie Dookhan's Falsified Lab Data: Symptom of a Corrupted System.  Friday [12/6/2013], former Massachusetts chemist Annie Dookhan pleaded guilty to all 27 counts of falsifying nearly 40,000 criminal drug cases, effectively upending the Massachusetts criminal justice system.  Dookhan admitted to filing false test results, mixing drug samples together, and lying under oath about her job qualifications. [...] Dookhan's "dry labbing" is just one part of a structure that incentivizes people working in the criminal justice system to get convictions — not truth — and put as many people in prison as possible without regard to their actual guilt.

BART Defends Cell Phone Shutdown.  San Francisco's Bay Area Rapid Transit is defending its order last August to shut down commuters' cell phone service.  BART's actions attracted a considerable amount of negative attenion.  Digital rights groups have spoken out against government agencies assuming the authority to shut down wireless coverage.  "BART is a government agency, and the First Amendment prevents the government from censoring communications.  Also, federal law — the Communications Act — outlaws both the government and carriers from interfering with wireless service," said Rebecca Jeschke, spokesperson for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

EPA preparing to unleash a deluge of new regulations.  Happy holidays from the Obama administration.  Federal agencies are currently working on rolling out hundreds of environmental regulations, including major regulations that would limit emissions from power plants and expand the agency's authority to bodies of water on private property.  On Tuesday [11/26/2013], the White House released its regulatory agenda for the fall of 2013.  It lists hundreds of pending energy and environmental regulations being crafting by executive branch agencies, including 134 regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency alone.

The Drift toward Despotism.  [Scroll down]  But one notes that the Supreme Court has dramatically circumscribed Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure when it occurs at America's border, and post-9/11 the "border" has been redefined to mean anywhere within 100 miles of the actual frontier.  Many European countries are not 100 miles wide in their entirety.  A hundred-mile buffer zone from Belgium's northern border, for example, would be well south of the southern border and deep into France.

Father Fed Knows Best.  The government thinks you're stupid, or at least ignorant. [...] In Massachusetts, all kids in daycare are required by law to brush their teeth after lunch.  In Texas — Texas! — if you don't have an interior-design license, you can't call yourself an interior designer, lest some unsuspecting consumer trust your opinion on throw-pillow placement without the backing of the state.  Almost everywhere, Americans need a license to open a business — sometimes even a lemonade stand — but in Milwaukee, you even need a license to go out of business.

Horror: Police force man to undergo invasive anal operation.  When New Mexico police stopped a local driver for committing a minor moving violation, they decided to check whether he was carrying drugs in his anus.  So they procured a warrant, drove him to two different hospitals, forced him to endure eight medical procedures — including an invasive colonoscopy — and stuck him with the bill.  No drugs were found.

Schweizer Says DC 'Just Like the Mob, Except It's Legal'.  Peter Schweizer argued that Washington's political establishment creates threatening bills to scare wealthy interests into making big campaign donations and to hire favored lobbyists, similar to the mafia's tactic of requiring "protection money" on Friday [10/25/2013].

Ten Thousand Commandments 2013: An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State.  Total costs for Americans to comply with federal regulations reached $1.806 trillion in 2012.  For the first time, this amounts to more than half of total federal spending.  It is more than the GDPs of Canada or Mexico.  This is the 20th anniversary of Ten Thousand Commandments.  In the 20 years of publication, 81,883 final rules have been issued.  That's more than 3,500 per year or about nine per day.

When Frogs Jump.  [Scroll down]  How far would today's American ruling elite go to stamp out real and concerted resistance to their brazen violations of individual liberty?  What steps would they not take to force submission to, and compliance with, their socialized medicine, their compulsory schooling, their EPA violations of private property, and so on?  In short, is there a point of coercive incivility beyond which you are certain they would never step to enforce their anti-constitutional, anti-natural rights, anti-rational plans?

Mission Creep: EPA Agents Enter Drug War.  A large-scale narcotics investigation and sentencing in Montana has revealed that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has entered the enforcement of U.S. war on drugs.  The EPA has full federal law enforcement capabilities, and their charter allows them to participate in the investigation and prosecution of "criminal conduct that threatens people's health," according to the EPA's Criminal Investigation Division (EPA CID).

Gun Free Zones are Designed to Spread, Like Smallpox.  The ugly truth is that gun free zones are not about irrational dreams of safety.  They are about power and control.  The irrational spouting about safety is just a way to get emotional support from those who do not think about the issue.  Gun free zones are just another incremental way to move toward total control.

Documents: Congress Charges Secret Fee to Land Top Committee Spots.  Members of Congress must pay secret fees known as "party dues" to the Democratic and Republican parties to secure and maintain top committee chairmanships and assignments, newly uncovered internal documents reveal. [...] The so-called "party dues" lawmakers must contribute for committee assignments are separate and apart from the fundraising they conduct for their own campaigns.  If lawmakers fail to make their tribute payment to their party, they can lose their place on a powerful committee.

Feds try to eliminate housing for the deaf — at complex built for hearing-impaired.  A 2005 federal study found that the U.S. had virtually no affordable housing for the deaf.  So the federal government helped build Apache ASL Trails, a 75-unit apartment building in Tempe, Ariz., designed specifically for the deaf.  Ninety-percent of the units are currently occupied by deaf and deaf-blind seniors.  But now, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development says Apache ASL Trails violates civil rights law — because it shows a preference for the hearing-impaired.

Democrats and Media Do a Number on the American People.  No free people should tolerate the pervasiveness of federal government activity in our daily lives even if we benefit from it in some fashion.  It is a matter of human dignity and self-respect.  And it was House Republican insistence on this very point that resulted in the shutdown.

Illegal use of DoD Communications Systems by Obama Administration.  The American Spectator has been provided with the text of a political message sent on Saturday evening, using Department of Defense communications systems, on behalf of President Obama and Secretary of Defense Hagel.  It is addressed to "all US government employees" and further specified by the DoD sender to go to "all subordinate commands," in compliance with Hagel's call for "the widest possible distribution."

Retaining America's liberty requires an alarmed America.  National finances, domestic and foreign policies are all askew.  Government spends the earnings of our yet-unborn great-grandchildren buying political support with corporate and individual welfare programs.  The U.S. government stifles the entrepreneurial spirit that made us prosperous, with over-regulation.  It partners with terrorists abroad, yet calls any who oppose unconstitutional tactics domestic terrorists.  And everywhere you turn, our government makes more and more nitpicking rules regarding everyday behavior, with drastic legal consequences for any who offend.

'Moral decay' and the rot of paternalism.  What is liberty when you can be forced by your government to spend endless hours toiling in the Kafka-esque maze of compliance and kow-towing that is our federal government today?  As businesses and individuals scurry to curry favor with their masters in Washington, D.C., the nation's wealth is being absorbed into a bottomless drain of regulation and dictate.  And what's scary is that this is the accepted norm.  The Supreme Court has joined with Congress and the president to rewrite the very rules which were intended to protect the people.  Now the Constitution of the United States of America is an instrument of the government, not a solemn vow of the people.

Woman who got 20 years for warning shot gets new trial.  A Florida appeals court is ordering a new trial for a woman sentenced to 20 years to prison after she fired a warning shot in a wall during a dispute with her husband.  The 1st District Court of Appeal ruled that a judge did not properly instruct the jury handling the case of Marissa Alexander.  But the appeals court did also state that the judge was right to block Alexander from using the state's "Stand Your Ground" law as a way to defend her actions.

The Hypocrisy Of Congress's Gold-Plated Health Care.  As close observers of history and human nature, James Madison and the other Founders of the U.S. Constitution knew that the equal and unbiased application of the law to all people, especially elected officials, is essential to freedom and justice and one of the primary safeguards from authoritarianism and oppression by a ruling class.  And so, referring to the members of Congress, James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 57:  "[T]hey can make no law which will not have its full operation on themselves and their friends, as well as on the great mass of the society."  Today, elected officials need to be reminded of these truths.

E.P.A. is the New Gestapo.  Just recently, a task force including members of 10 state and federal law enforcement agencies descended on a gold mine in the tiny town of Chicken[,] Alaska[,] with a population of 17 last month, in what locals described as a raid.  "Imagine coming up to your diggings, only to see agents swarming over it like ants, wearing full body armor, with jackets that say "POLICE" emblazoned on them, and all packing side arms," gold miner C.R. Hammond told the Alaska Dispatch. [...] According to the EPA The investigation was into possible violations of the Clean Water Act.  The officers were part of the Alaska Environmental Crimes Task Force and visited the outpost near the Canadian border during the third week of August to investigate water discharges into rivers, streams, lakes and oceans.  This is how the EPA handles an investigation, with rifles, handguns and bullet proof vests?

It's the law: Washington state lawmakers don't get speeding tickets.  A spokesman for WSP says Washington lawmakers are constitutionally protected from receiving noncriminal traffic tickets during a legislative session, as well as 15 days before.

America: Not Shining but Burning.  America is now a nation ruled — and that is the correct word — by a self-appointed elite of ignorant snobs and power-mad degenerates to compete with the worst ruling castes of the civilized world.  The U.S. federal government has, through the deliberate deteriorations of a century, finally dispensed with all but the flimsiest pretense of the principles of limited government and the rule of law that virtually defined America's historic political achievement.

Where is the Rule of Law?  Maybe the new Rule of Law is now the plain clothes police everywhere, who no longer serve and protect since we don't know who they are to ask for help in an emergency, they just ticket us to death for speeding, or the drones hovering over quiet residential neighborhoods, or the EPA police surprising a few law-abiding miners in Alaska, or the fully geared and assault ready police in the metro, the TSA molesting and irradiating us at airports, or the IRS making sure that we pay all of our taxes, including the Affordable Care Act tax?

Stop privileges for government officials.  All over America, government officials enjoy privileges that ordinary citizens don't.  Sometimes it involves bearing arms, with special rules favoring police, politicians and even retired government employees.  Sometimes it involves freedom from traffic and parking tickets, like the special non-traceable license plates enjoyed by tens of thousands of California state employees or similar immunities for Colorado legislators.  Often it involves immunity from legal challenges, like the "qualified" immunity to lawsuits enjoyed by most government officials, or the even-better "absolute immunity" enjoyed by judges and prosecutors.

NSA Staffers Have Spied on Lovers.  National Security Agency officers on several occasions have channeled their agency's enormous eavesdropping power to spy on love interests, U.S. officials said.  The practice isn't frequent — one official estimated a handful of cases in the last decade — but it's common enough to garner its own spycraft label:  LOVEINT.

NSA employees spied on their lovers using eavesdropping programme.  The employees even had a code name for the practice — "Love-int" — meaning the gathering of intelligence on their partners.  Dianne Feinstein, a senator who chairs the Senate intelligence committee, said the NSA told her committee about a set of "isolated cases" that have occurred about once a year for the last 10 years.  The spying was not within the US, and was carried out when one of the lovers was abroad.  One employee was disciplined for using the NSA's resources to track a former spouse, the Associated Press said.

NSA analysts knowingly broke surveillance rules.  The National Security Agency acknowledged Friday that some of its analysts knowingly violated the agency's rules, after the incidents were included in an inspector general report.  "Over the past decade, very rare instances of willful violations of NSA's authorities have been found, but none under FISA or the Patriot Act," the NSA said in a statement.

Washington's Blooming Bureaucrats Make 1,000 Flowers Wither.  A guerrilla gardener planted 1,000 flowers at the ugliest subway stop in the capital.  Instead of saying thanks, D.C. Metro authorities ripped the plants out to show him — and the public — who's boss.

The Government our American Founders Warned Us About.  The framers of the U.S Constitution were well aware of the historic trend of government.  They knew that ruling entities that endured over time evolved towards greater power, gradually increasing control over their nation's citizens.  The Constitution was designed in part to remedy this.  The Founder's vision of a limited government was a remarkable innovation for its time that was meant to maintain the rights of the individual citizen, and preserve the power of the individual states.  Their concept had little to do with left versus right, or liberal versus conservative.  Rather, they were largely motivated by the creation of a republic that would not descend into a state of tyranny — a fate that history seemed to show was in the end, inevitable.

Obama announces extra $300 million in aid for Syrians, refugees.  The U.S. is to give more than $300 million in additional "life-saving humanitarian assistance" to Syrians caught up in the country's civil war, Barack Obama has announced, taking the total amount given since the conflict began to nearly $815 million.

The Editor asks...
Can Mr. Obama generate $300 million dollars just by announcing it, and then spend it on whatever he pleases?  What part of the Constitution authorizes such a thing?

Fearless Fosdick at work.  The Obama administration and its well-meaning defenders, including several Republican members of Congress, argue that just because the government can discover intimate details about everyone's life, beliefs, politics, sexual orientation, health, diseases and sexual infidelities doesn't mean it would, with the click of a computer mouse, ever identify and mark this person for personal attention.  (We trust the IRS, don't we?)  If the snoopery were as innocent as these defenders claim, the government wouldn't have gone to so much trouble — in "the least most untruthful manner" — to hide what it was doing.

It's better to take our chances with the Muslim terrorists than to forfeit our liberty.
Are you Willing to Die for your Freedom?  [Scroll down]  I'm willing to die for my freedom.  I'm certainly willing to take the slightly-increased risk of dying in a terrorist attack that ostensibly will result from the government not sifting my email and monitoring all my calls and banking activity and who knows what else.  At this point, I'm becoming convinced it's not worth it.  We're groping children and Korean War vets in airports as part of an expensive show of security.  We're teaching our kids to put up with government intrusion into our lives.  On my most recent flight, I saw a father help his 5-year-old son remove his shoes and show him where to put them, how to remove his belt, how to wait his turn, how to go through security and comply with routine government searches.  It's not worth the toll on our freedom and our veneration of freedom.

NSA's PRISM, the IRS scandal: The U.S. Government gone wild.  [Previous presidents] created massive government regulatory and administrative bureaucracies — in fact, intelligence agencies — which demand information from businesses of all sizes to use against them at will — EPA, OSHA, IRS, and a host of other alphabet agencies, great and small.  The used these agencies and the intelligence they gathered to torment, punish and destroy their enemies.  Remember, intelligence is nothing more than information.  Intelligence gathering is information gathering.  What better way to gather intelligence than through pervasive regulatory regimes?

The felonious fibbers.  Thousands of Americans are languishing in federal prisons for lying to federal officials.  Federal officials themselves often get a pass when they tell a whopper to Congress.  It's a double standard that must end.  The problem starts at the top with Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.

A flawed federal law enforcement agency?  The federal government maintains a bewildering number of armed law enforcement agencies, including the 295 armed Social Security special agents, for whom 174,000 .357 Sig 125 grain bonded jacketed hollow point bullets were recently put up for bid.  A much larger armed police force consists of about 2000 agents in the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security.  According to the New York Post, that police force is seriously compromised because numbers of people with hidden criminal backgrounds have been hired.  This makes them unable to participate in criminal prosecutions.

Government's Shocking Interference in Rancher's Life.  The 104-page opinion by U.S. District Court Judge Robert C. Jones on May 23 in Nevada tells a sordid and infuriating tale of a two-decades-long conspiracy among federal employees of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) of the Department of the Interior to deny the grazing rights of a Nevada ranching family, interfere with their water rights, and destroy their cattle business by scaring away their customers.

It's Not Government's Job To Require Paid Vacations.  Rep. Alan Grayson, a Florida Democrat, has introduced the Paid Vacation Act.  It would require employers with more than 100 employees to provide workers with a week of paid leave every year.  It's not the first time Grayson has cranked out crackpot legislation that requires the government to act dictatorially toward private businesses.  Four years ago he came up with the same idea, inspired, he said, by a trip to Disney World.

Brooklyn DA 'arrested' people and held them until they testified in 'private jail system'.  Brooklyn's District Attorney has been accused of using locked hotel rooms as 'private jails' to interrogate witnesses and pressure them into giving false testimony in court.  The office of Charles Hynes is said to have routinely held trial witnesses against their will, according to new court papers filed by a lawyer representing a man suing for $150million for a wrongful murder conviction.  In court papers, Joel Rudin said: 'Hynes's office was running a private jail system where witnesses were illegally interrogated and forcibly detained indefinitely.'

The VanderSlooting of America.  [Scroll down]  But what the massive abuse of the IRS illustrates is a tyranny of a different sort.  A bloodless yet still quite decided tyranny.  A tyranny of the American Left designed not just to chill free speech — although that is a primary goal.  What has evidenced itself in the Obama era is a tyranny designed not just to silence dissent, but to deliberately, willfully damage if not ruin outright the reputations and businesses of Americans across the land.

More about the use of the IRS as a weapon.

Barack Obama's America.  Barack Obama's America is one where fishermen aren't allowed to catch red snapper but where the government can kill tens of thousands of snapper by blowing up oil rigs that provide valuable habitat for Gulf sea life.

Why All of Us Should Mistrust the Government.  [Scroll down]  The government rejects the natural law because it is an obstacle to its control over us.  The natural law is divinely embedded in our souls.  It is manifested by the universal yearning for freedom and justice.  It consists of areas of human behavior — thought, expression, religion, self-defense, travel, acquisition and use of property, privacy, for example — in which our behavior is subject only to the exercise of our free will and not the permission of our neighbors or regulation by the government.  The natural law, properly understood, is a restraint on the government.

Judge asks enviros for ideas to punish gas company.  Apparently frustrated by a U.S. Supreme Court decision that struck down an $18 million penalty for a Texas natural gas firm, a federal judge is taking the unusual step of asking the environmental community for suggestions on how to sentence the company in a way that will have "the broadest possible impact."

Big Sis: Obama Admin Can Pick Which Laws to Enforce.  During her testimony on the "Gang of Eight" immigration bill before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday [4/23/2013], Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano declared that she, President Barack Obama and other political officials at the top of this administration have the authority to decide which laws to enforce, and which ones to ignore.

Napolitano: Obama Regime can decide which laws to enforce.  In a startling and candid admission, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano argued to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday [4/23/2013] that regardless of oaths to uphold the law, the President and the executive branch can choose what laws are to be enforced.  Tensions rose as the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee questioned Napolitano over the enforcement, or lack thereof, of current U.S. immigration policies.

Leave your vuvuzula in the car.
Liquids banned from Obama's Ohio State speech despite past heat-related medical emergencies.  President Barack Obama's speech at the Ohio State University graduation ceremony Sunday will be on tight security lockdown, with graduating students subject to "airport-like security screening" and a strict list of prohibited items for graduates and their relatives attending the event at Ohio Stadium (capacity: 102,329).  Attendees are prohibited from bringing liquids into the stadium, despite high temperatures.

Is this an excuse to get a sample of everyone's DNA?
Federal panel says everyone 15 to 65 should have HIV test.  Citing recent evidence that HIV infections are best managed when treated early, an influential panel of medical experts has finalized its recommendation that all people ages 15 to 65 be screened for the virus that causes AIDS.  The recommendation from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force seeks to address one of the key challenges in the fight against HIV/AIDS:  The window during which patients respond best to treatment is also the time when symptoms of the disease are least noticeable.

U.S. Spends $1.75 Trillion to Enforce Federal Regulations.  It's a crazy system in which a bloated government meddles in areas that it shouldn't.  This is done via federal regulations that, of course, require manpower and money to enforce.  This costs U.S. taxpayers an astounding $1.75 trillion, an amount larger than all but eight of the world's economies, according to a U.S. senator who is pushing for reform.  It gets better; this means that more than 10% of the nation's economy is spent on trying to satisfy rules issued by Washington bureaucrats [...]

A Property Rights Revolution for 2013.  Martha Boneta had a business license for her tiny farm store in scenic Paris, Virginia, yet she was threatened with fines of up to $5,000 per violation per day for selling organic tea and wool products crafted from her rescued animals, and for hosting a birthday party for eight 10-year-old girls.  Officials from Fauquier County using zoning ordinances to bully Mrs. Boneta never obtained a warrant nor set foot on her property to gather actual evidence.  Instead a county bureaucrat relied on unscrupulous, unlawful methods to make these charges against Mrs. Boneta.  Her store remains closed out of fear of further uncertain charges carrying even criminal penalties.

Could Martial Law Be Right Around The Corner For Americans?  Merely a week after military exercises featuring Blackhawk helicopters were flown over the Miami skyline, the Florida Highway Patrol has informed the public that it will set up "vehicle inspection checkpoints" on specific roadways in at least six Florida counties that will be established during daytime hours.  State troopers will be requesting drivers licenses and conducting a visual inspection of every third vehicle once the checkpoint has been established.

Americans to Washington: Don't tread on me.  Nearly two-fifths of Democrats (38 percent) say the government is a threat to them personally, as do 45 percent of non-gun owners.  Overall, the percentage of Americans who view the federal government as a threat has increased from 36 percent in May 1995 to 53 percent today.

Guns and the Government.  The Supreme Court has ruled consistently and countless times that the "police power," that is, the power to regulate for health, safety, welfare and morality, continues to be reposed in the states, and that there is no federal police power.

The Greyhound Station Gulag.  No formal criminal charges were filed against [Abdulrahman] Zeitoun.  When he protested the denial of his due process rights and rudimentary decencies of living, he was told by the guards that he was under the jurisdiction of FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) — which meant that he was somebody else's problem.  If it hadn't been for an encounter with a Christian missionary ministering to the prisoners — a man Zeitoun believes was sent in literal answer to prayer — it's likely that he and at least one of his friends, a fellow Syrian-American, would still be prisoners of the Department of Homeland Security.

Hillary Clinton and the Branch Davidian Holocaust.  [Vince] Foster had a special Waco file.  Deborah Gorham, his personal secretary, said that he had a cabinet reserved for his most sensitive files:  "There were two.  One was Sean Hadden [a White House staffer], and the other was Waco."  After his death, Foster's Waco file somehow vanished.  Secret Service Agent Henry O'Neil later testified before a Congressional committee that on the night of Foster's death he encountered Maggie Williams leaving Foster's office with two handfuls of folders.  Williams denied removing any files, and when called upon to explain her presence in Foster's office that night, claimed she had gone "in the irrational hope that she would find her colleague still alive there."

More about Vince Foster.

Hillary Clinton and the Chain of Command at Waco.  The 1993 Waco showdown began when federal authorities rushed the communal home of a religious group, killing six of them, and losing four agents in return.  The FBI then besieged the place with tanks and other armored vehicles, and ended up with the armored vehicles punching holes in the building, and injecting massive quantities of CS "tear gas." When that didn't work, the tanks began to demolish the building, eventually smashing about a quarter of it and damaging the remainder.  A fire broke out and 74 people died in the flames, including twenty-one children.  It was the deadliest law enforcement operation in American history.  After the tragic debacle, the Clinton administration claimed that Attorney General Janet Reno had been solely responsible for the final assault.  There had been no White House input during the siege, and at the end, President Clinton only acquiesced in a decision Reno had made.  Twenty-three years later, there are substantial reasons to doubt the truth of these claims.  The evidence is strong that the Clinton White House was calling the shots, and that Hillary played a prominent role.

Hillary's Waco Deception.  Before Benghazi, before the e-mail scandal, before the numerous allegations of impropriety involving the Clinton Foundation, there was Waco.  On April 19, 1993, a few short months into Bill Clinton's first presidential term, nearly 80 men, women, and children perished at Mt. Carmel, their religious community and home near Waco, Texas.  A Federal investigation into the tragedy in 2000 found that government agents were not responsible for the deaths of Davidian civilians — that the sect members who died there had committed mass suicide, similar to the Kool-Aid drinking by Jim Jones' aficionados, but more violent.  This verdict was significant, given the allegations by Davidian survivors and relatives that sect members had been shot as they tried to flee their burning buildings.  And while many laid blame for the outcome at the feet of then-Attorney General Janet Reno, there are claims that Hillary Clinton was actually the one in charge.

Hasn't Al Sharpton Heard of Waco?  Those like Sharpton who hope to nationalize the police might want to recall what our national police forces accomplished on the dusty plains outside of Waco, Texas, twenty-two years ago next Sunday.  For those of short memory, the FBI, trying to mop up for a botched earlier raid by the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), launched a tank attack on a Branch Davidian religious community called the Mount Carmel Center.  The ATF had gotten it into its head that the Branch Davidians were converting legally owned, semi-automatic AR-15s into illegal, fully automatic weapons.  The ATF had no proof of this beyond the report from one neighbor who thought he heard machine gun fire, a report that the local sheriff had already investigated and discounted.

Disastrous raid on the Branch Davidians compound near Waco quietly remembered 20 years later.  The 20th anniversary of the disastrous raid on the Branch Davidians compound near Waco passed quietly Thursday [2/28/2013], as colleagues of the four agents who died gathered in private and local officials made no plans to mark the day.

Waco's Assault on Religious Toleration.  Looking over the span of American history, we must be struck by what a radical departure the conflict marked in religious terms.  Rather than ask what could have led believers to follow such a bizarre movement, we should see the Davidians as part of a well-established tradition of religious movements in America.  It is the ferocity of the official response that still demands explanation.

The Editor says...
Once again, it wasn't Waco that did this.  The evidence points to Janet Reno and Bill Clinton.

Progressives, Guns, and the Assault on Truth.  It is very clear that the Obama anti-private gun ownership people are on the offensive right now.  The mass murder of little children by a private gun user has a way of doing that.  (There was no such outcry when Bill Clinton and Janet Reno ordered the massacre of more than 20 children at Waco in 1993.  After all, Branch Davidians were on the fringes of what "bien-pesant" journalists would call polite or acceptable society, or what my academic colleagues call "wackos," "gun nuts," and "whack jobs."  In other words, they were not like the rest of us, so the FBI and BATF gave them what they deserved.) [...] On top of that, we have seen exponential increases in SWAT-type raids in which innocent people are killed, young children terrorized, and people unnecessarily exposed to police brutality.

The 'Heroic' Louis Freeh and His Legacies.  [Scroll down]  No, I am writing in order to let readers know that this "heroic" Louis Freeh has some serious baggage of his own, baggage that includes covering up murders, whitewashing the most hideous domestic massacre since Wounded Knee, publicly making wrongful accusations, and further turning the Federal Bureau of Investigation into an entity that James Bovard accurately has called, "A Stasi for America."

When They Come for the Smaller Groups....  Everywhere, totalitarian governments do the same:  one group after another, singled out, marginalized, demonized, and then safely destroyed or brutalized.  And the rest of the population remains silent.  Why?  Because "I am not a Jew, or a Ukrainian, or a Menshevik, or a kulak, or a person with glasses."  The massacre in Waco of a few days ago bears all the marks of this tactics.  A group is picked so small and marginal that most people won't associate with them.  The group is then marginalized and demonized, and all kinds of false accusations are said about them — violence, illegal drugs, illegal weapons, etc.  Then, when the group is so marginalized that the majority of the population won't trust them, and won't take their word for anything, the government ambushes them and guns them down. [...] It was that same Waco that saw an earlier version of the same tactics, with the Branch Davidians.

Ruby Ridge and the Age of State Terrorism.  Sara Weaver has forgiven the people responsible for murdering her mother Vicki and younger brother Samuel twenty years ago.  Lon Horiuchi, the FBI sniper who shot Vicki in the head while she was holding a ten-month-old infant, is still being sheltered by the Regime that employed him.  If he were any part of a man, Horiuchi would make a pilgrimage to Sara's home in Montana to express remorse for the crimes he committed against her family.