Here is the first frame:
It’s actually a fairly long read, 20 minutes or so, but it explains just how the free trade argument ignores basic economics (Hint, free flow of capital eviscerates most of the potential benefits for so-called free trade)
Go read.
See the rest at Economix Comix.
Remember the now debunked story about Senator Bob Menendez and a Dominican Prostitute from Tucker Carlson’s so-called news site Daily Caller?
Well, it turns out that they were not making it all up. The Daily Caller was used as a stooge for an intelligence operation carried out by Cuba:
Sen. Robert Menendez is asking the Justice Department to pursue evidence obtained by U.S. investigators that the Cuban government concocted an elaborate plot to smear him with allegations that he cavorted with underage prostitutes, according to people familiar with the discussions.
In a letter sent to Justice Department officials, the senator’s attorney asserts that the plot was timed to derail the political rise of Menendez (D-N.J.), one of Washington’s most ardent critics of the Castro regime. At the time, Menendez was running for reelection and was preparing to assume the powerful chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
According to a former U.S. official with firsthand knowledge of government intelligence, the CIA had obtained credible evidence, including Internet protocol addresses, linking Cuban agents to the prostitution claims and to efforts to plant the story in U.S. and Latin American media.
The alleged Cuba connection was laid out in an intelligence report provided last year to U.S. government officials and sent by secure cable to the FBI’s counterintelligence division, according to the former official and a second person with close ties to Menendez who had been briefed on the matter.
The intelligence information indicated that operatives from Cuba’s Directorate of Intelligence helped create a fake tipster using the name “Pete Williams,” according to the former official. The tipster told FBI agents and others he had information about Menendez participating in poolside sex parties with underage prostitutes while vacationing at the Dominican Republic home of Salomon Melgen, a wealthy eye doctor, donor and friend of the senator.
A spokesman for the Cuban Interests Section in Washington, which functions as the island’s U.S. diplomatic outpost, did not respond to requests for comment.
The allegations against Menendez erupted in public in November 2012, when the Daily Caller, a conservative Web site, quoted two Dominican women claiming Menendez had paid them for sex.
The FBI investigated the prostitution claims but was unable to corroborate them. Last year, three Dominican women who had initially claimed to reporters that they had been paid to have sex with Menendez recanted their story.
BTW, the inestimable Charlie Pierce notes some additional irony here.
You noticed the name of the source that misled Tucker Carlson and His Evil Minions™?
Well, the name Pete Williams has a history:
And, it appears that the Cuban spooks may well have a more finely honed sense of humor than we previously have noticed. Once upon a time, a long time ago, there was a senator from New Jersey named Harrison Williams.Senator Williams was a Democrat of decent instincts,but he also was something of a grab-it-all and, one day, a phony Arab sheikh in the employ of the FBI dropped in on him with some money the sheikh said he’d like to share in exchange for Williams’s help in buying the output of a defunct titanium mine. This bit of American Hustle landed forced Williams to resign from the Senate and landed him in the federal sneezer for three years.
As it happens, because his given name was Harrison Arlington Williams, Jr., his friends all called the senator, “Pete.”
“Pete Williams.”
Well-played, Cuban spies. Very well-played indeed.
I think that I can authoritatively state that the schadenfreude drought is officially over.
I love that line about the “Nixon Court,” and the fact that they literally have the Supreme Court in a bedroom.
Major Major’s father was a sober God-fearing man whose idea of a good joke was to lie about his age. He was a longlimbed farmer, a God-fearing, freedom-loving, law-abiding rugged individualist who held that federal aid to anyone but farmers was creeping socialism. He advocated thrift and hard work and disapproved of loose women who turned him down. His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn’t earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce. Major Major’s father worked without rest at not growing alfalfa. On long winter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend harness, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that the chores would not be done. He invested in land wisely and soon was not growing more alfalfa than any other man in the county. Neighbors sought him out for advice on all subjects, for he had made much money and was therefore wise. “As ye sow, so shall ye reap,” he counseled one and all, and everyone said, “Amen.”
Major Major’s father was an outspoken champion of economy in government, provided it did not interfere with the sacred duty of government to pay farmers as much as they could get for all the alfalfa they produced that no one else wanted or for not producing any alfalfa at all. He was a proud and independent man who was opposed to unemployment insurance and never hesitated to whine, whimper, wheedle and extort for as much as he could get from whomever he could.—Joseph Heller
H/t Atrios.
He was the chief pursuer of Bill Clinton’s penis, and an early big money supporter of what Hillary Clinton called the, “Vast right wing conspiracy.”
These days, he seems benign compared to the Brothers Koch, but then again, a rabid Pit Bull seems benign compared to the Brothers Koch.
Paul Wolfowitz is boosting Ahmed Chalabi as the next Prime Minister of Iraq:
Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi who helped spur the U.S. invasion of his country, would be viable as its next prime minister though close ties he established with Iran pose an impediment, said Paul Wolfowitz, a top American national security official when the war launched.
“The man is a survivor,” Wolfowitz said in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capitol with Al Hunt,” airing this weekend. “That’s impressive. I think he wants to succeed in what he does, he’s smart; maybe he’ll figure out a way to do it.”
Chalabi, 69, currently serves in Iraq’s Parliament as government forces battle insurgents who have destabilized the country and prompted calls for Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s resignation.
Chalabi’s political group, the Iraqi National Congress, supplied Wolfowitz and others in President George W. Bush’s administration with information that tied then-Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda and alleged he was developing weapons of mass destruction — the justification for the U.S. invasion in March 2003.
The information was later discredited and in May 2004, U.S. soldiers raided Chalabi’s house and offices in Iraq to investigate allegations of fraud and grand theft against him.
Why are we listening to these people after all that they have screwed up to completely?
The fact that Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Pearle, Paul Wolfowitz, Elliot Abrams, etc. are viewed as anything but a punchline is a complete indictment of our media.
* The full quote, ascribed to Karl Marx, is “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.”
An agent at the BND, the German intelligence service, has been arrested on suspicion of spying for the US:
German detectives have arrested a man suspected of spying for the United States in what could prove the ‘biggest scandal involving a German-American double agent since the Second World War’.
The 31-year-old German citizen was being questioned today on suspicion of snooping on Germany’s parliamentary inquiry into the NSA affair.
According to one German newspaper, he was first arrested amid suspicions he tried to make contact with Russian intelligence, only to confess he was in fact spying for the Americans.………
The man has admitted passing to an American contact details about a special German parliamentary committee set up to investigate the spying revelations made by former U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, two politicians, who asked to remain anonymous, said.
Both lawmakers are members of the nine-person parliamentary control committee, whose meetings are confidential, and which is in charge of monitoring German intelligence.
The parliamentary committee investigating the NSA affair also holds some confidential meetings.
(emphasis mine)
First, let me state the obvious: Allies spy on each other. It’s a fact of life.
In a properly run intelligence service, this tends to be low key, and it’s confined to items of direct security interests, things like divining the relationship with other states, basic positions in negotiations, potentially military technology, etc.
This is not this. This is the CIA/NSA/etc. spying on an official parliamentary inquiry because they are worried that the revelations might embarrass them personally.
This is stupid, and, as I have noted many times before, it is indicative of an intelligence apparatus that is completely out of control of either our defense and diplomatic establishment, to say nothing of the the President.
This is insane.
And finally, Glenn Greenwald comes very close to saying that the origins of this story has nothing to do with Edward Snowden, so there is necessarily a 2nd leaker as its source:
Glenn Greenwald, one of the journalists who has worked closely with exiled whistleblower Edward Snowden to reveal the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance programs, says there may be a second leaker providing the NSA’s secrets to the press.
Two German media reports co-authored by former WikiLeaks volunteer and current Tor Project employee Jacob Appelbaum are the cause of his suspicion.
The first report was published in December by Der Spiegel and describes a 50-page catalog of NSA surveillance tools. The second came last week from the German broadcasters Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR) and Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), detailing NSA surveillance of people who use Tor and other online privacy services.
Both articles “notably fail to mention anything about the sourcing for the documents,” Greenwald tells U.S. News. “That’s particularly notable given that virtually every other article using Snowden documents – including Der Spiegel – specifically identified him as the source.”
Bruce Schneier, a technology security expert who worked with Greenwald to evaluate the cache of documents Snowden leaked, offered similar speculation on his blog Thursday.
“I do not believe that this [information about Tor surveillance] came from the Snowden documents,” Schneier wrote. “I also don’t believe the TAO catalog came from the Snowden documents. I think there’s a second leaker out there.”
Seriously, this is a bureaucracy to run amok, and the fact that we have to rely on the kindness of leakers to provide any oversight scares the hell out of me.
There was an open carry demonstration in Richmond, VA, and only two people showed up:
More than 300 people were invited on Facebook to walk down Cary Street on July Fourth with handguns, rifles and other so-called “long guns” proudly displayed.
Two showed up — and they were the organizers of the midday event in the family-oriented Carytown shopping district.
“I don’t know why,” said organizer Jason Spitzer, 29, when asked to explain the low turnout for what he described as an Independence Day demonstration to “spread Constitutional awareness” of Americans’ Second Amendment right to bear arms.
“But even if nobody came I’d still walk,” the Chesterfield County steel mill worker said, holding a large American flag in his hands, with a rifle slung over his shoulder and a holstered handgun on his hip. “It’s the Fourth of July and I love my country.”
But with turnout so low, the shoppers and diners along Cary Street weren’t quite sure what to make of the two-man march, which might very well have gone unnoticed were it not outnumbered by two television crews and a photographer in tow.
BTW, I’m with the Institute for Philosophy in Public Life on the appropriate response if some of the open carry terrorists show up to your school/restaurant/laundromat, leave the area immediately without making an effort to pay:
The questions that concerns me now is how we bystanders should react when people come into a store with guns. There really is no legitimate way of determining intent. Even if the people with guns are carrying a sign claiming to be activists (which they do not do), they could be lying, just setting us all up for slaughter. And since there is no way to know what is on their minds, all we have are our instincts, but as we all should know, our instincts are often racist, classist, and frequently mistaken. So, what should we do?
My proposal is as follows: we should all leave. Immediately. Leave the food on the table in the restaurant. Leave the groceries in the cart, in the aisle. Stop talking or engaging in the exchange. Just leave, unceremoniously, and fast.
But here is the key part: don’t pay. Stopping to pay in the presence of a person with a gun means risking your and your loved ones’ lives; money shouldn’t trump this. It doesn’t matter if you ate the meal. It doesn’t matter if you’ve just received food from the deli counter that can’t be resold. It doesn’t matter if you just got a haircut. Leave. If the business loses money, so be it. They can make the activists pay.Following this procedure has several advantages. First, it protects people. Second, it forces the businesses to really choose where their loyalties are. If the second amendment is as important as people claim, then people should be willing to pay for it. God knows, free speech is tremendously expensive. If it weren’t, I’d be reading this on ESPN during prime time, not posting this on Blogger.
Third, this proposal has the added advantage of taking the activists seriously. Most gun-rights activists describe a world of tremendous dangers. Guns, they repeatedly tell us, are the only thing between home invasion, rape, murder, and government intrusion. Okay, well if that’s true, then we bystanders should be equally afraid, and react instantaneously to keep away the chaos and the violence. We learned to be afraid from the gun-rights supporters. They have gotten everything they wanted.
This is an unbelievably appropriate response.
Jeffrey Scudder had his career destroyed by the CIA because he filed Freedom of Information Act Requests to declassify historical documents:
His CIA career included assignments in Africa, Afghanistan and Iraq, but the most perilous posting for Jeffrey Scudder turned out to be a two-year stint in a sleepy office that looks after the agency’s historical files.
It was there that Scudder discovered a stack of articles, hundreds of histories of long-dormant conflicts and operations that he concluded were still being stored in secret years after they should have been shared with the public.
To get them released, Scudder submitted a request under the Freedom of Information Act — a step that any citizen can take, but one that is highly unusual for a CIA employee. Four years later, the CIA has released some of those articles and withheld others. It also has forced Scudder out.
His request set in motion a harrowing sequence. He was confronted by supervisors and accused of mishandling classified information while assembling his FOIA request. His house was raided by the FBI and his family’s computers seized. Stripped of his job and his security clearance, Scudder said he agreed to retire last year after being told that if he refused, he risked losing much of his pension.
What were these documents?
The documents sought by Scudder amount to a catalog of a bygone era of espionage. Among them are articles with the titles “Intelligence Lessons from Pearl Harbor” and “Soviet Television — a New Asset for Kremlin Watchers.”
Scudder said he discovered them after he took an assignment in 2007 as a project manager for the CIA’s Historical Collections Division, an office set up to comb the agency’s archives for materials — often decades old — that can be released without posing any security risk.
(emphasis mine)
BTW, the CIA has since closed the Historical Collections Division, claiming “budget concerns.”
This is how the US state security apparatus addresses an attempt to hasten the declassification anodyne historical documents.
What do you think would have happened if Edward Snowden had gone further with his complaints?
He would still have had to flee the country for his own safety.
We have worries on both sides about more abductions of children and teens, and Hamas and the IDF exchanging love notes full of explosives:
Jewish and Muslim parents here kept their children indoors Monday, as anxious residents formed neighborhood watch groups and monitored social media, alert for revenge attacks following the recent abductions and killings of three Israelis and a Palestinian, all teenagers.
“It is the time of the ambush,” said Ahlam Kawasmi, 36, a mother of five who cares for the elderly. She was walking on the nearly deserted streets in the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan, just outside Jerusalem’s Old City.
“I tell my kids, ‘I don’t know if you leave if you will come back,’ ” she said. The family is avoiding public parks and outdoor evening celebrations during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
Among Jewish residents of Jerusalem, warnings circulated on text-messaging services such as WhatsApp asking citizens to report suspicious cars, strangers and activities.
“Pay attention,” a typical message began. “We have received information from the police that there are Arabs in Jerusalem who are opening doors and pretending they are police. . . . Send this message to as many people as possible.”
The Israeli police issued a statement saying that none of the messages were official. Residents said the atmosphere in the city was beginning to remind them of the tension and distrust that marked the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising, which began in 2000.
In Israel’s south, meanwhile, residents were dealing not with rumors but with sirens warning them hourly to seek shelter.
Since the abduction of three Israeli students last month, mortar rounds and rocket shells have been fired at Israel almost daily from the Gaza Strip. Almost 100 were fired Monday, and sirens sounded in 10 towns, the military said, adding that Israel’s U.S.-supported Iron Dome missile-defense system shot down a dozen rockets. The security cabinet had warned earlier that Israeli forces would retaliate with a major sustained salvo in the event of such a barrage.
This is depressing.
At the end of this, nothing will have changed, and some more people will have died on both sides.
My son called me, “Pretentious,” today.
He was jerking my chain, as is his wont,* and he got the word completely wrong, and I got to say, well, you know.
I got to go all Inigo Montoya on him.
It’s almost as much fun as going Dr. McCoy, and it is a nice change-up.
*Both my kids are smart asses. They get it from my mom.
The latest numbers are pretty good, but it says very little about the quality of those jobs.
It must be noted that there has been an explosion in the number of involuntary part-time workers, and many of the new full time jobs can be described by the technical term, “crappy.”
We just finished watching the Catonsville fireworks show, and before that, we did a cookout at Patapsco State Park.
The weather was glorious, clear and with a high in the 70s.
It actually got a bit nippy while we were watching the fireworks.
It’s the coolest Independence Day I can remember since moving to Maryland.
Posted via mobile.
Robert Peston, Economics Editor at the BBC, was notified by Google that it was removing one of his blog posts from its European search index in accordance with the European Court of Justice’s recent ruling giving people “The Tight to be Forgotten”:
This morning the BBC received the following notification from Google:
Notice of removal from Google Search: we regret to inform you that we are no longer able to show the following pages from your website in response to certain searches on European versions of Google:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/legacy/thereporters/ robertpeston/2007/10/merrills_mess.html
What it means is that a blog I wrote in 2007 will no longer be findable when searching on Google in Europe.
Which means that to all intents and purposes the article has been removed from the public record, given that Google is the route to information and stories for most people.
So why has Google killed this example of my journalism?
Well it has responded to someone exercising his or her new “right to be forgotten”, following a ruling in May by the European Court of Justice that Google must delete “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant” data from its results when a member of the public requests it.
(emphasis original)
The only person mentioned in this article was the disgraced former head of Merrill Lynch, Stan O’Neill, but the Ex-Merrill CEO has denied any knowledge of this request, though this is a kind of non-denial denial, where he might have hired a law form, or someone like Reputation.com to monitor his online presence, and they sent the request at his request.
You will notice that O’Neill did not deny that he had taken action to improve his reputation on the web, only that he lacked specific knowledge of this request.
In an update, Mr. Peston suggests that the request might have come from someone who commented on his post, since a search for Mr. O’Neill still pulls up the post, but I did a search of Google.co.uk for all of the commenter’s who left a proper name, and they all came up as well.
The Guardian revealed that they had been notified that 3 sets of articles, about a lying soccer ref, French Post-It® art, and a lawyer on trial for fraud.
This is, of course, a complete clusterf%$#, as was predicted when this ruling came down.
Not it appears that vaccine prices are the latest case of looting by corporate medicine:
There is little that Dr. Lindsay Irvin has not done for the children’s vaccines in her office refrigerator: She remortgaged her home to afford their rising prices. She packed them in ice chests and moved them when her office flooded this year. She pays a company to monitor the fridge in case the temperature rises.
“The security company can call me any time of the day or night so I can go save my vaccines,” said Dr. Irvin, a pediatrician. Those in the refrigerator recently cost $70,000, she said — “more than I paid for four years of medical school.”
Vaccination prices have gone from single digits to sometimes triple digits in the last two decades, creating dilemmas for doctors and their patients as well as straining public health budgets. Here in San Antonio and elsewhere, some doctors have stopped offering immunizations because they say they cannot afford to buy these potentially lifesaving preventive treatments that insurers often reimburse poorly, sometimes even at a loss.
Childhood immunizations are so vital to public health that the Affordable Care Act mandates their coverage at no out-of-pocket cost and they are generally required for school entry. Once a loss leader for manufacturers, because they are often more expensive to produce than conventional drugs, vaccines now can be very profitable.
Old vaccines have been reformulated with higher costs. New ones have entered the market at once-unthinkable prices. Together, since 1986, they have pushed up the average cost to fully vaccinate a child with private insurance to the age of 18 to $2,192 from $100, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Even with deep discounts, the costs for the federal government, which buys half of all vaccines for the nation’s children, have increased 15-fold during that period. The most expensive shot for young children in Dr. Irvin’s refrigerator is Prevnar 13, which prevents diseases caused by pneumococcal bacteria, from ear infections to pneumonia.
And Prevnar started expensive, and the cost has gone up from there, and it had to nothing to do with the cost of the product:
The value of that “school mandate” is also apparent in the pricing. When Singapore’s national vaccine advisory group evaluated Prevnar 7 for mandated use, its price was about $80, said Karen Tyo, a researcher from Brandeis University, who was advising the government. After the government included it in the required national schedule, “the price jumped immediately” to about $120, she said. “Nothing had changed,” she noted. “It didn’t make any sense.”
………
The Swiss Agency for Therapeutic Products pays $101, a price that has not changed over time. In Britain, the small private health care market sells prefilled syringes of Prevnar 13 for an average of $82 at pharmacies; the National Health Service pays even less, experts say. Prefilled syringes cost an average of $136 in the United States, and even the C.D.C. — which buys vaccines for the Medicaid program at a discount — pays $112.84.
If the US government grants a monopoly in the form of patents, perhaps compulsory licensing, something allowed for in all of international IP agreements.
It might be a good for the US government to take advantage of this.
Simply paying for price gouging is not working.
Francis has defrocked the formal Papal ambassador to the Dominican Republic, the former Archbishop Josef Wesolowski for sexually abusing boys.
You saw a bit of damage control under Benedict, but this is strong statement against JP II’s willful blindness on this matter:
The Vatican has defrocked Archbishop Josef Wesolowski, the former Vatican ambassador to the Dominican Republic following an investigation into his sexual abuse of boys. He is the highest-yet ranking official of the Church to be so punished.
The former Archbishop, now just Josef Wesolowski, has two months to appeal his dismissal and laicization. He is no longer a priest of the Church.
Following his period of appeal, during which he may or may not choose to fight the decision, he will face a criminal trial under the Vatican City State tribunal. If convicted, he will face a jail term. The Vatican has recently updated its laws to punish with criminal penalties those who sexually abuse children and says it will take measures to ensure that Wesolowski does not flee justice.
Pope Francis has instituted a zero-tolerance crackdown on clergy who abuse children, saying they would not have any special privileges and that even high-ranking offenders would be severely and swiftly punished.
Pope Francis is the first Pope to take such drastic measures to deal with the problem of child sexual abuse in the Church although both Pope John Paul II and Benedict XVI also took steps to protect children. The measures now instituted by Pope Francis are the most significant in history, ensuring that offenders cannot use the Church as cover and will face certain prison time if found guilty.
This guy really is a breath of fresh air.
Parents worried about getting young children vaccinated against infectious diseases have fresh cause for reassurance, researchers say.
A new review of existing scientific evidence has concluded that childhood vaccines are safe and don’t cause serious health problems such as autism or leukemia.
“Our findings support that vaccines are very safe for children, and add to a substantial body of evidence that the benefits of vaccination outweigh the very low risks,” said senior author Dr. Courtney Gidengil, an associate physician scientist at RAND Corporation and an instructor at Harvard Medical School. “Hopefully, this will engage hesitant parents in discussions with their health care providers.”
The review found strong evidence that the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine is not associated with autism, which is consistent with previous reviews of this rumored link.
Some parents have chosen not to have their children vaccinated because of a now-debunked and retracted study published in 1998 that suggested that the MMR vaccine might cause autism. It was later reported that the study’s author, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, had altered some of the study’s results.
The researchers behind the new study also found no link between childhood leukemia and vaccines for MMR, DTaP (diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis), tetanus, influenza and hepatitis B.
Overall, vaccines given to children 6 or younger are safe, causing few side effects, the review concluded. The findings are published in the July 1 online edition and the August print issue of the journal Pediatrics.
The fact that Andrew Wakefield is still a free man, when the death toll of his fraud numbers in the thousands, dishonors both the justice system and the scientific community.
Microsoft filed a lawsuit to seize domains from No-IP.com. Their reason?
In a blog post, Richard Domingues, assistant general counsel for the Microsoft digital crimes unit, said Microsoft pursued the seizure for No-IP’s role “in creating, controlling, and assisting in infecting millions of computers with malicious software—harming Microsoft, its customers and the public at large.” He added: “We’re taking No-IP to task as the owner of infrastructure frequently exploited by cybercriminals to infect innocent victims with the Bladeabindi (NJrat) and Jenxcus (NJw0rm) family of malware.”
(emphasis mine)
To quote the great Anna Russell, “I’m Not Making This Up, You Know.”
Seriously, “Zero Day” Microsoft, the creater of of Windows™, is complaining about someone being the “Owner of infrastructure frequently exploited by cybercriminals to infect innocent victims?”
Really?
The irony here is stunning.
While I make jokes about the small penis brigade who carry long arms (Rifles and Shotguns) in public, in Georgia, we now see Georgia’s open carry laws which have created a crop of people who have pistols on their hips, and fantasies of killing someone in thier heads:
On the first day of the new Georgia Safe Carry Protection Act, a misunderstanding between two armed men in a convenience store Tuesday led to a drawn firearm and a man’s arrest.
“Essentially, it involved one customer with a gun on his hip when a second customer entered with a gun on his hip,” said Valdosta Police Chief Brian Childress.
At approximately 3 p.m. Tuesday, police responded to a call regarding a customer dispute at the Enmark on the corner of Park Avenue and North Lee Street.
A man carrying a holstered firearm entered the store to make a purchase. Another customer, also with a holstered firearm, approached him and demanded to see his identification and firearms license, according to the Valdosta Police Department report.
The customer making demands for ID pulled his firearm from its holster but never pointed it at the other customer, who said he was not obligated to show any permits or identification.
He demanded the man’s ID again. Undeterred by the drawn gun, the man paid for his items, left the store and called for police.
Gee, hoocoodanode that this would have happened?
Hoodcoodanode that this would happen from day one?
I dunno, pretty much EVERYONE coodanode?
We now have the usual group of rat-f%$#s, including Rick “Invited by Obama to giva a benediction at his first inaugeration” Warren, are demanding the right to discriminate against LGBT employees:
This week, in the Hobby Lobby case, the Supreme Court ruled that a religious employer could not be required to provide employees with certain types of contraception. That decision is beginning to reverberate: A group of faith leaders is urging the Obama administration to include a religious exemption in a forthcoming LGBT anti-discrimination action.
Their call, in a letter sent to the White House Tuesday, attempts to capitalize on the Supreme Court case by arguing that it shows the administration must show more deference to the prerogatives of religion.
“We are asking that an extension of protection for one group not come at the expense of faith communities whose religious identity and beliefs motivate them to serve those in need,” the letter states.
I am so ready for Antonin Scalia to choke to death on his own bile and be replaced by a justice who is not an unethical hack.
Letter follows: