Wednesday, November 19, 2014

Barker's Newsbites: Wednesday, November 19, 2014


Again, folks...

(*PAUSE*)

(*SIGH*)

...it's very difficult for me to focus on newsbiting. I feel as if I'm simply going through the motions.

With each new report that Obama is preparing to declare "war" on our Constitution...

(*PAUSE*)

(*SHARP PAINS SHOOTING THROUGH MY STOMACH*)

...my will is sapped.

McConnell and Boehner are going to allow this.

The Republicans in Congress are going to allow this.

The Democrats in Congress are going to applaud Obama's blatantly unconstitutional assault upon our Republic's Rule of Law.

My America is lost...


10 comments:

William R. Barker said...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/police-in-st-louis-agree-to-rules-of-engagement-for-protests-after-grand-jury-decision/2014/11/18/75107438-6f5a-11e4-893f-86bd390a3340_story.html

Following weeks of intense negotiations, local police officials and Ferguson protesters have agreed to a dozen policies for how any future protests will be policed — but have yet to reach consensus over whether tear gas and riot gear will be used or whether the protesters will get advance notice of when the grand jury will announce its decision regarding Ferguson Officer Darren Wilson.

* FOLKS... WE'RE LIVING IN AN ALTERNATE REALITY...

The negotiations have centered on 19 “Rules of Engagement” proposed by a coalition of 50 community and civil rights groups in an effort to avoid the violent clashes that brought worldwide attention to Ferguson after the shooting of a black teenager in August.

* "50 COMMUNITY AND CIVIL RIGHTS GROUPS..." (ARE THESE PEOPLE KIDDING...?!?!) (WHAT IS WRONG WITH THE MEDIA...?!?!)

The list is largely a docket of best police practices, such as “the first priority shall be preservation of human life”...

* OF INNOCENT HUMAN LIFE!

...and “excessive force and other forms of police misconduct will not be tolerated.”

(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)

In general, protesters have agreed to peaceful demonstrations if police don’t interfere, while police have agreed to respect demonstrators’ right to assemble as long as there is no violence.

Negotiations on Tuesday continued to stall, however, over seven of the proposals, including the coalition’s request to give protesters 48 hours’ notice prior to the grand jury announcement.

The three police departments — called the “unified command” for police response to protests — have also not agreed to the coalition’s request that police be dressed in minimal gear and that tear gas, tactical vehicles and rubber bullets not be used, a coalition leader said.

* "COALITION LEADER...?!?!" (AGAIN, FOLKS... THE MEDIA...)

It is also unclear whether the unified command will agree not to employ mass arrests during peaceful protests, and not to escalate the response when dealing with minor criminal offenses such as a water bottle being thrown at an officer — which was the precipitating factor for tear gas being deployed on at least one night during the protests in August.

* "MINOR CRIMINAL OFFENSES..." UH-HUH.

* HOW'BOUT THIS... ATTACK A POLICE OFFICER AND THE POLICE OFFER IS GOING TO PROTECT HIMSELF AND ARREST YOU. THROWING SOMETHING AT A POLICE OFFICER IS AN ATTACK.

Highway Patrol Capt. Ron Johnson confirmed that the unified command has reached agreement on a dozen items but would not discuss points of disagreement, saying, “We agreed we wouldn’t discuss the finer points publicly.”

* SO... FUCK THE TAXPAYERS... FUCK THE LAW-ABIDING CITIZENS...

William R. Barker said...

http://www.krgv.com/news/brooks-county-illegal-immigrants-on-the-rise/

The flow of illegal immigrants appears to be on the rise again in Brooks County, Texas.

Rugged trails on ranches are littered with empty bottles, the remnants of the journey made by those who entered illegally and those who are making their way north. People in the area said foot traffic is once again on the rise.

Dr. Michael Vickers said he is seeing more of these water bottles left behind on Brooks County ranches.

Vickers said, "We had two groups, Sunday a week ago. Seven of them gave up to me. They were Hondurans and Salvadorans."

Vickers said he is seeing a stream of illegal immigrants. He and the Texas Border Volunteers are gearing up for another massive wave.

"My feeling is and the intel that I'm receiving from law enforcement is that we're going to see a new surge. A new surge of traffic coming through," said the doctor.

Brooks County had their hands full over the summer. They could have a busy holiday season if the flood of illegal crossers picks back up again.

Brooks County Chief Deputy Benny Martinez said his county has limited resources, and there is not much they can do to get ready.

He said, "The worry is always going to be there like it now. We're just going to have to deal with it. We're just as prepared as we can be."

* FOLKS... THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES IS FACILITATING THE INVASION OF THE UNITED STATES...

michellez said...

I'm with you. Have been FORCING myself through the news for a few days, hoping to latch on to something "easy" to interest folks. Dialogue has decreased since the election, which translates, to me, into waning interest.

Attention spans are short, at the very moment they need to stay sharp. Don't give up, William. Even if people aren't conversing, some are still paying attention.

William R. Barker said...

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/nov/18/keystone-xl-pipeline-senate-dems-filibuster/

Senate Democrats filibustered the Keystone XL pipeline on Tuesday...

"Environmentalists" drew lines and dared moderate and conservative Democrats to cross it.

In the end, most were unwilling to defy the ascendant movement...

Based on Tuesday’s vote and Senate balance next year, Republicans should have enough support to overcome a Democratic filibuster but not enough to override a presidential veto.

* BUT AT LEAST SENATE DEMOCRATS WILL BE PUT TO THE TEST!

“The majority of Democrats in the Senate and the White House just don’t get it, even though the recent election results surely should have sunk in by now. They have lost their way, their purpose and their base,” said Laborers’ International Union of North America President Terry O’Sullivan.

Keystone defenders predicted the oil would end up in the U.S. and be shipped to ports in states such as Florida. They also said the drills would go no matter what — the question is whether the oil is shipped to the U.S. or China, and if it comes to the U.S., whether it’s shipped by dangerous railway cars or by what they said was the most advanced pipeline ever built.

“The pipeline has taken a role in American politics that is way disproportional to what it is,” said Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, a North Dakota Democrat whose state has undergone an economic renaissance based on drilling. “It is a pipeline. There are over 2 million miles of pipelines in America today. This is going to be just another one of those, and it’s going to be state of the art.”

William R. Barker said...

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/under-obama-u.s.-personal-freedom-ranking-slips-below-france/article/2556322

Americans' assessments of their personal freedom have significantly declined under President Obama, according to a new study from the Legatum Institute in London, and the United States now ranks below 20 other countries on this measure.

(*TEARS*)

The research shows that citizens of countries including France, Uruguay, and Costa Rica now feel that they enjoy more personal freedom than Americans.

(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD IN SHAME AND DESPAIR*)

“This is not a good report for Obama,” Legatum Institute spokeswoman Cristina Odone told the Washington Examiner.

As the Washington Examiner reported this morning, representatives of the Legatum Institute are in the U.S. this week to promote the sixth edition of their Prosperity Index. ... In the 2010 report (which relied on data gathered in 2009), the U.S. was ranked ninth in personal freedom, but that ranking has since fallen to 21st, with several countries, including France, Germany and the United Kingdom passing the U.S.

The nation’s overall personal freedom score has declined by 17% since 2009, with a 22% drop in combined civil liberty and free choice contributing to that decline.

Of the eight categories in the index, personal freedom was America's second lowest performance relative to other countries. The U.S. had its lowest ranking when it came to safety and security (a broad measure of how threatened citizens feel in instances such as walking late at night, or expressing their opinions) — ranking 31st out of 142 countries.

The cross-country comparisons in the index should be taken with a grain of salt.

* FINE! NO DOUBT!

The perception of what freedom means in New Zealand, which has the highest personal freedom ranking, may vary from how Americans measure their own personal freedom.

* PERHAPS... BUT THIS WOULDN'T EXPLAIN THE CHANGING - DECLINING - U.S. RANKING.

Regardless of how the U.S. compares to other countries, there is no denying that Americans felt less free in 2013 after four more years of Obama’s presidency.

William R. Barker said...

http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2014/11/obama-gives-3-bil-u-n-climate-fund-run-communist-terrorist-nations/

President Obama has committed a mind-boggling $3 billion to a new United Nations Green Climate Fund run by officials from Communist nations, a country that appears on the State Department’s list of terrorism-sponsors and an Arab oil-industry chief.

* HAS CONGRESS APPROPRIATED THE MONEY?

As if it weren’t bad enough that our commander-in-chief is giving away money while the nation suffers through a colossal budget deficit, there are countless reasons why this is a lousy idea. First of all, the United Nations is a famously corrupt organization that is already largely funded by Uncle Sam to the tune of billions annually.

* I'D PULL US OUT. (HELL... WE HAVE A STATE DEPARTMENT... WHY DO WE NEED A U.N.?)

The exact figure is tough to nail down because the U.S. cash flows, not just directly to U.N. coffers from the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), but also from a number of other government agencies to the U.N. system.

The entire world body is well known as a pillar of fraud and mismanagement, but that hasn’t slowed the tide of American taxpayer dollars. Even the U.N.’s Human Rights Council, funded primarily by American taxpayers, is a huge joke. A few years ago Judicial Watch reported that the U.N. awarded a genocidal warlord indicted by an international court for crimes against humanity a seat on its laughable human rights council. His name is Omar Al-Bashir, a ruthless African dictator charged by the International Criminal Court of war crimes in Darfur for killing thousands of his own citizens.

* FOLKS... YA CAN'T MAKE THIS $HIT UP!

The last thing we need is another global U.N. initiative looking for cash.

The “urgency and seriousness of climate change” inspired the crooked world body to create the Green Climate Fund, which aims to help the international community combat global warming. Here’s the plan in a nutshell; the fund will promote the paradigm shift towards low-emission and climate-resilient development pathways by providing support to developing countries to limit or reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and to adapt to the impacts of climate change. This will be accomplished by following the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, an international environmental treaty that aims to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations.

* FOLKS... FROM WIKIPEDIA: The treaty itself set no binding limits on greenhouse gas emissions for individual countries and contains no enforcement mechanisms.

William R. Barker said...

* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)

http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/111914-727283-boehner-taps-turley-for-obamacare-lawsuit.htm?p=full

For those in and out of the administration who dismissed the House lawsuit against the president for unconstitutional and illegal action, the naming of Jonathan Turley as lead attorney means game on.

Coming as President Obama prepares to extend his lawlessness and war on the Constitution by granting de facto amnesty to millions of illegal aliens, the timing of George Washington University law professor and constitutional scholar Turley being named lead attorney in the House lawsuit against the president is exquisite.

Though he is a supporter of Obama and his policies, Turley is not a party hack as Jonathan Gruber is. He is a respected constitutional scholar and Democrat who is not willing to stand by as the Constitution, the document that gave birth and life to the world's oldest representative republic, is shredded as part of Obama's fundamental transformation of America. Unlike some of his contemporaries and most of the mainstream media, he took the House lawsuit seriously.

The president's handling of ObamaCare is only one of the extralegal excesses of this administration that Turley warned about when he testified before the House Judiciary Committee.

* TO BE CONTINUED...

William R. Barker said...

* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)

Turley has called Obama's vow to rule by executive order "one of the greatest challenges to our constitutional system in the history of this country" and one that "threatens a fundamental change in how our country is governed."

"The question represented by this lawsuit," Turley wrote Monday on his blog, "is whether we will live in a system of shared and equal powers, as required by our Constitution, or whether we will continue to see the rise of a dominant executive with sweeping unilateral powers. That is a question worthy of review and resolution in our federal courts."

* OK. FOLKS. NOT THAT I DON'T APPRECIATE THAT IN THIS INSTANCE TURLEY IS "ONE OF THE GOOD GUYS... (*SIGH*)... ALLOW ME TO POINT OUT A DISCONNECTS IN WHAT YOU JUST READ.

* FIRST... WHAT TURLEY POLITELY REFERS TO AS "ONE OF THE GREATEST CHALLENGES TO OUR CONSTITUTIONAL SYSTEM IN THE HISTORY OF THIS COUNTRY" I CALL... TREASON.

* WHAT OBAMA AND HIS ALLIES ARE ATTEMPTING TO PUSH THROUGH IS NOTHING LESS THAN A COUP AGAINST THE CONSTITUTION.

* SECOND... TURLEY INFERS THAT A RULING BY THE COURTS UPHOLDING OBAMA'S CLAIMED POWER TO UNILATERAL POWERS NOWHERE FOUND WITHIN THE TEXT OF THE CONSTITUTION AND INDEED SPECIFICALLY DENIED HIM BY THE TEXT OF THE CONSTITUTION. TURLEY IS WRONG! JUST AS OBAMA DOESN'T HAVE THE POWER TO "RULE" UNILATERALLY BY WHAT AMOUNTS TO DECREE, NO COURT - EVEN THE SUPREME COURT - HAS LEGITIMATE POWER TO SIMPLY "GIVE" OBAMA (OR ANY PRESIDENT) SUCH POWER. ONLY A CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT HAS SUCH POWER.

* FOLKS... I'M BEGGING YOU... RE-READ WHAT I JUST WROTE. WRAP YOUR HEAD AROUND IT.

Some suggested at its announcement that the lawsuit would be rejected out of hand, that Boehner and House Republicans lacked standing and could not demonstrate personal harm.

But when our founding document, which begins with the words "We the people," is violated, we all have standing in this legal challenge.

* FOLKS... (*SIGH*)... WHEN OUR CONSTITUTION IS BLATANTLY VIOLATED... ALL TRUE AMERICANS MUST STAND AND DEFEND THE REPUBLIC! THAT THE ENEMY IS FROM WITHIN DOESN'T CHANGE OUR OBLIGATIONS AS CITIZENS.

Ironically, Obama once said that he did not have the authority to legislate by fiat — "I'm not the emperor of the United States. My job is to execute the laws that are passed," he said at a news conference last year — but now he claims he does.

"We are now at a constitutional tipping point for our system," Turley has warned. "If balance is to be re-established, it must begin before this president leaves office. And that will require every possible means to reassert legislative authority."

And that includes Boehner's lawsuit.

Turley wants to take the president at last year's word and have the courts etch it in stone. Obama is the federal government's chief executive, but he has no legal cover or authority to determine what laws mean, or to pick and choose which ones he will enforce and which ones he won't.

William R. Barker said...

* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)

http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials-obama-care/111914-727282-media-cover-up-or-downplay-jonathan-gruber-scandal.htm?p=full

What does it take for reporters to pursue a scandal story these days?

* A REPUBLICAN AT THE HEART OF IT.

Apparently, more than video proof of lying and obfuscation by top officials to get a massive entitlement enacted... (But don't call them partisan!)

* THAT WAS SARCASM, BY THE WAY.

Few political scandals are as tailor-made for television as the one involving the recently unearthed videos of ObamaCare architect and Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Jonathan Gruber. First you have Gruber, a guy paid $400,000 to design ObamaCare, admitting on tape that lawmakers purposely misled the public to get the bill passed, and counted on the "stupidity" of the American people not to notice.

On the explosive revelations scale, this and subsequent other Gruber videos rank right up there with Mitt Romney's "47%" statement.

* WORSE IN MY VIEW.

The only difference is that while the broadcast news networks aired the Romney clip so often that even the least-informed voter in America had heard of it, these same outfits have imposed a virtual Gruber blackout.

* TO BE CONTINUED...

William R. Barker said...

* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)

Up until Tuesday night, when ABC ended its silence, CBS was the only network to mention Gruber on its nightly news program.

* THINK ABOUT THAT, FOLKS; JUST THINK ABOUT THAT.

As of this writing, NBC's Nightly News still hasn't broken its Gruber embargo, according to the Media Research Center.

(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)

(NBC did have time enough Tuesday night for a report on how the share of homes with two-car garages could drop by 2040.)

And while other mainstream outlets have covered the story, they've been perfunctory, or written in a way that casts Gruber's revelations purely in light of how they've helped the GOP's anti-ObamaCare crusade.

Not only have Gruber's comments been treated as if they never happened, the TV networks haven't shown any interest in the next round of Gruber stories — in which the White House and Democrats made bald-faced lies about their connections to Gruber. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., for one, claimed she had no idea who Gruber was, although she is on tape from five years before praising his expertise.

President Obama himself, in answer to the one question he's gotten on the matter — from a Fox News reporter — brushed Gruber off as "some adviser." That's despite the fact that Gruber had been to the White House nearly two dozen times during the ObamaCare debate. (And he was prominently featured in a 2012 Obama campaign ad — from the Obama-Biden "Truth Team" — saying how he'd helped the president craft ObamaCare.)

(And he is someone from whom Obama once said he stole many ideas.)

* FOLKS... OBAMA IS A PIECE OF SHIT.

Worse still, though, are reporters' amateurish attempts to explain the story away, or defend themselves against charges of glaring liberal favoritism.

Witness Politico's Paige Winfield Cunningham, who four months after declaring Gruber "one of ObamaCare's chief architects now dismisses him as just one of "the legion of policy and technical experts who played a role in the massive legislation."

* SO... MANY... SCUMBAGS...

Then there's "Meet the Press'" Chuck Todd, who actually claimed that the reason the networks aren't covering Gruber is ... well, you have to read it to believe it: "It's a political story," he told Newsmax. "Network news in general hasn't been covering the political back-and-forths of Washington a lot lately. I don't think it has to do with Gruber specifically. I would just caution people on that."

(*SNORT*)

Still, what can you expect from reporters who spent all of 2009 and early 2010 cheerleading for ObamaCare, and then spent the next four years covering up its many glaring problems? The Gruber comments reveal their dereliction of duty as much as it does the Obama administration's malfeasance.