The only unfortunate part of this is that the Inspector General did not immediately turn over the raw emails to Congress. There has been ample time for the IG to scrub anything pointing directly to Obama or the White House. If the email release includes such examples, we'll know it wasn't scrubbed despite the delay. If the email release instead paints a rosy picture of nothing to see here, we will always be left wondering what they left out.
Since there is a substantial chance that prominent Senators and House leadership members are implicated in at least encouraging the targeting, there is more than one potential source for a coverup effort.
This is very similar to the Washington Monument strategy that Obama has employed in the past: when threatened with budget cuts, make your cuts in the most annoying, most visible locations possible, and then complain loudly about how the budget cuts are making people suffer. Other people, of course. People not you. Because people might remember that they cut your budget so that you would suffer, the emphasis needs to be on the suffering of innocent third parties.
This particular case is in Baltimore, but I've seen other stories from all over the US. I have no particular problem with stingray use so long as the police obtain a warrant first and only extract information from the targeted phone. But that's not how the stingray devices work; they collect everything in the vicinity including individuals completely unrelated to the investigation.
Mind you, a competent encryption infrastructure would render all of this moot. Let's get one in place already.
NLRB soliciting union legal opinions on collecting dues from non-members
With, I note, no legislation change to justify the new power. Presumably this is a sue-and-settle scenario where Obama's friends will sue Obama, and Obama will order the government to settle on favorable terms that establish a legal precedent allowing the National Labor Relations Board to compel non-members to pay dues under some BS legal theory. And then that legal precedent will, in theory, be binding on future administrations, because it's a legal settlement rather than a regulatory change.
It's out and watchable. I enjoyed it, but I'm a Daredevil fan.
Good points: It's reasonably faithful to the comic origin. They hit the religious theme heavily, which the comics also did. The whole first season is basically an origin story, and in doing that, they use one of Daredevil's really early costumes from an iconic version of his origin story -- so I recognized that and it was nice. Jess the baby vamp from True Blood has the leading female role. Very good job. The actor playing Matt Murdock is not someone I recognize, but also does a good job in both the acting scenes and the fighting scenes. Fisk's actor came off well. His character development suffered due to script, There's a one-liner setup for Electra. There's a couple more one-liners for Iron Man and Thor. Stick shows up. The fights are brutal, and this is character-appropriate. There is one ninja.
Bad points: There is ONLY one ninja. Script was pretty clumsy, and worse as time went on... but did have some good moments. They blew a fair bit of their budget in the early episodes, which damaged their ability to break things and use fancy effects in the later episodes. The budget allowed for one stock criminal to get beat up for information regularly. Just one. The same one.
In some ways I thought the low-budget for sets and such was appropriate. Daredevil is not about exotic locales or fancy gadgets. It's about a few blocks in New York -- poor blocks, filled with people at the bottom of the social and financial ladder, and their struggle to stay afloat while those on top try to sink them.
If they can find a scriptwriter for Season 2 who can keep the right tone while remembering that lines on television do not need to fit into a speech bubble, they have a real hit on their hands.
I can't even work up proper outrage over this anymore. I suppose the governor might not sign it. Ya'll in the land of fruits and nuts might want to call him or something.
I'm surprised there hasn't been more outrage over this. Maybe it's an april fool's joke that I discovered late? It can't possibly pass 2nd Amendment muster, can it? If you can't ban a firearm in common use, surely you can't ban ammunition in common use for over a hundred years?
UPDATE: I was right to be skeptical, though I didn't find the time to check it out more thoroughly until later.
Clinton foundation to refile at least 5 years of tax returns
Of particular note: For three years, beginning in 2010, the foundation reported zero funds received from governments, both US and foreign. But it continued to receive tens of millions of dollars from foreign governments during that time. How will be explained as an honest mistake rather than an attempt to hide potential conflicts of interest? I'm sure they will come up with something.
Lott rounds up cases of concealed-carry preventing crimes
That case got a lot of publicity because it's in Chicago which until recently banned firearms entirely, never mind allowing concealed carry. But there are lots more. Read the whole thing.
Supreme Court rules that police may not delay a traffic stop to wait for a search
At first glance, this is a blow struck against police abusing traffic stops to pressure victims into consenting to a search instead of waiting hours for the police to bring a drug dog up to the car, where the handler will signal the dog to alert and the car will be torn apart on the shoulder of the road and left for the victim to put back together and drive away hours later. The facts in this case included a delay of less than 10 minutes and the police still lost. So, in theory, they aren't allowed to make you wait for a drug dog.
In practice, officers will claim they smelled marijuana while they were writing the ticket and business will continue as usual.
IRS to monitor political actiivity of churches without disclosing rules
In other words, churches will be expected to adhere to rules for political activity that they aren't allowed to know. After all, if we don't know what the rules are, we can't call the IRS out for their political bias in enforcing those rules, and churches can't take proactive steps to comply with the law. After all, you cannot rule an innocent man; instead, one makes so many rules for every possible kind of activity that no man can successfully follow them all. The power and pick and chose who to prosecute from a national of criminals becomes supreme.
SWAT raids for ordinary legal political activity in Wisconsin
Patterico describes the problem. I've seen reporting on this before, and it should be much bigger news than it currently is. But it seems most news organizations are content to wait to see if any actual charges surface before looking into whether the raids were justified.
If it was news organizations getting raided, I doubt they would be quite so patient.
Brady attorneys withdraw from case under ethical cloud
The scary part about this is that literally the only different between Wisconsin and Stalin's secret police is that the people were still at home after the midnight knock on the door, just a lot quieter, politically speaking. Wisconsin is apparently close enough to Siberia that no transportation was necessary.
We are just a few executive orders away from a police state as long as Obama remains in office. The police who participated in these raids need to take a long, hard look in the mirror and retire from law enforcement. Not only were the midnight raids by secret police on political opponents intended to intimidate and terrorize, the police carried them out without a peep of protest despite the clear and unambiguous violation of the first amendment to which they swore an oath to uphold.
Gun control effort to stop WalMart from selling guns fails
By investors, they mean an anti-gun group that bought a minimal investment specifically to try to force a vote, and which, if the tactic succeeded, they would presumably sell and move on to "invest" in another company for the same purpose. This decision basically restores business as usual.
I always appreciated Picard's "four lights" interrogation episode on its own merits, but having seen this quote and being thus reminded, I suspect the choice of four lights for reality and five lights for submission was a deliberate reference to this passage.
CBS has a study claiming that 1 in 10 Americans have "anger issues" and access to guns, implying that this is an argument for gun control. The problem is, if their thesis was true, this would show up in 1 in 10 Americans being charged with murder or attempted murder. And it doesn't; their model is falsified by existing reality. In actual reality, the odds of a particular gun owner committed a violent crime with their gun is literally millions to one, and the concealed-carry folks are generally even more peaceful people than the general population.
If you are a scientist, or have even a vague grasp of the scientific method, you look at this and say "The model doesn't predict the observed results, so the model is bunk and must be scrapped."
If you are a Democrat, apparently you call for another law to stop the murders that aren't happening.
They do the same thing on the next ice ageglobal warmingclimate change climate disruption. Their hysterical mental model is stronger than reality, for them.
We know he's tried to get a few things through under the radar already, the real question is going to be what he's already gotten through that we haven't noticed yet. Particularly that bit about "administratively tighten up how background checks are run". He probably means the VA preemptively disqualifying people who need a financial advisor or the like.
Notice how all the Republican primary candidates immediately, literally the day they announce, get nasty media shorthand attacks as their defining moment? Like it's almost coordinated? Remember journolist: it probably is coordinated. And while Hillary is not having an easy time in the media either, it's a) a far easier time than any of the Republicans, b) still pretty damn easy, given the sheer number and magnitude or her unforced errors, and c) coordinated by the President and his media team to knock Hillary out of the race early.