Ryan Saavedra of the Daily Wire highlights the absurd things he said about skeptics of the global warming hypothesis:
"Climate change, we're going to have to come up with some new technologies to solve the problem as much as we need to," Obama said. "Although even on something like that, right now I could take off the shelf existing technologies, we could reduce carbon emissions by let's say 30 percent, without any, you know it's not like we would have to go back to caves and you know live off, you know, fire."
I am sorry but this sounds like a stoner.
"We could have electricity and smartphones and all that stuff which would buy us probably another 20, 30 years for that technological breakthrough that's necessary," Obama continued. "The reason we don't do it is because we are still confused, blind, shrouded with hate, anger, racism, mommy issues."
A federal judge ruled recently that an inmate serving a life sentence for murder in California must receive sex-reassignment surgery at taxpayer expense.
The inmate was Rodney James Quine, 57, twice married and the father of two daughters. I write “was” because while in prison he changed his name to Shiloh Heavenly Quine. Quine began living as a woman in 2008, when prison officials authorized hormone treatments at taxpayer expense. Quine then began pushing for a sex change operation, to be paid for by California taxpayers like everything else in prison.
Enter Barack Obama. In 2013 Obama appointed Jon Tigar to the federal bench. Tigar, who evidently shares Obama’s fascination with the world of the transgendered, assigned himself to Quine’s case and appointed a team of San Francisco lawyers and the Transgender Law Center to represent Quine. The result of Tigar’s ruling in Quine’s favor is that the state of California must now provide sex reassignment surgery for prison inmates.
Tigar claimed to discover this requirement hidden deep within the Eighth Amendment, which forbids “cruel and unusual punishment.”
Of course, this was a lawless ruling by a rogue actor in judicial garb and an assault on the rule of law in America.
This same judge is now back in the news, this time with a ruling that encourages people to break the law. The New York Times put it like this:
Judge Jon S. Tigar of the United State District Court in San Francisco issued a temporary restraining order that blocks the government from carrying out a new rule that denies protections to people who enter the country illegally.
“A rule that denies protections to people” is Timespeak for not allowing people who have entered the country illegally to apply for asylum. The president of the National Border Patrol Council, Brandon Judd, said on Fox News Tuesday that the judge “just encouraged migrants to break the law.”
Getting around America’s border protections has been easy. Simply cross our borders illegally, apply for asylum, never show up for your asylum hearing, and join the ranks of the millions of illegal aliens already living in America. The administration’s new rule was aimed at putting a stop to this absurdity.inRead invented by Teads
We already know from Tigar’s Shiloh Heavenly Quine ruling that the judge is not dedicated to upholding the Constitution. It is clear that he has a political agenda instead. When Barack Obama was in office, he pushed beyond common sense and the plain meaning of the Constitution to advance the cause of “fundamentally transforming America.” With Donald Trump in the Oval Office, he has become part of #TheResistance.
Tigar’s efforts parallel perfectly with what is going on in the news media. The advent of Obama unhinged the reporters and the pundits. They abandoned any remaining pretense of even-handedness, of fairness. Professional standards went out the window. Bernie Goldberg, brilliantly, termed it a “slobbering love affair” with everything Obama.
Now that Trump has replaced Obama, the people in the news and opinions business are still completely unhinged, and in solidarity in their opposition to the president. They are as carried away with their loathing for Trump as they were carried away by their adoration of Obama.
House Democrat leader Nancy Pelosi crushed an intra-Democrat revolt against her bid to retake the Speaker’s gavel next year led by Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-OH) after a 2015 letter from Fudge backing a disgraced former Cleveland judge who was convicted of brutally beating his wife resurfaced in the wake of the man’s alleged murder of her.
Fudge, who had floated potentially running against Pelosi for Speaker and was pushed by anti-Pelosi rebel Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA), had attacked Pelosi as an “elitist” and “very wealthy person” out of touch with ordinary Democrats in the wake of the midterm election where Democrats retook the majority in the House.
She had also signed a letter along with more than a dozen other Democrats pledging to vote against Pelosi on the floor of the House of Representatives in January.
But then, as Breitbart News reported earlier on Tuesday, a letter from 2015 surfaced where Fudge backed former Judge Lance Mason who was convicted of a 2014 assault on his wife. He was convicted of hitting his wife 20 times, and then smashing her head into the dashboard of their car while their children watched from the backseat. Fudge’s letter backing his character, sent to the prosecutor in Cuyahoga County, said Mason’s behavior toward his wife Aisha Fraser during that assault “is out of character and totally contrary to everything I know about him.” Fudge went on to write that Mason “accepts full responsibility for his actions and has assured me that something like this will never happen again.”
That statement was written a bit too soon, perhaps. After a nine-month stint in prison for his conviction on this, he got out and got a job working for the mayor’s office in Cleveland. Then, this weekend, his wife Fraser was stabbed to death–brutally murdered–and while police have not yet charged him, they have taken Mason into custody in the murder of Fraser.
In the wake of this development–and with Pelosi throwing her a plum subcommittee chairmanship next year–Fudge has dropped all opposition to Pelosi and endorsed Pelosi’s bid for the Speakership of the House, effectively ending the rebellion against her.
“Last week I announced that I was strongly considering a run for Speaker of the House,” Fudge said in a statement released Tuesday evening. “My consideration was due in large part to the lack of sustained efforts that ensure diversity, equity and inclusion at all levels of the House. Further, despite the great success we experienced on November 6, voter protection and voter integrity are still at risk. The erosion of voting rights and civil rights was on full display in Georgia, Florida, North Dakota, Ohio and Texas. Our party should reflect the diversity of our changing nation and guarantee all our citizens the unfettered right to vote and to have every vote count. Leader Pelosi has granted me the opportunity to create the record necessary to satisfy the 2013 Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder, so that the protections of the Voting Rights Act will be reinstated and improved. She has also assured me that the most loyal voting bloc in the Democratic party, Black women, will have a seat at the decision-making table. I am now confident that we will move forward together and that the 116th Congress will be a Congress of which we can all be proud. I now join my colleagues in support of the leadership team of Pelosi, Hoyer and Clyburn.”
Meanwhile, Fudge’s own credibility wanes in the wake of her complete cave on Pelosi:
And it’s not just Fudge’s opposition to Pelosi that’s hurting. Moulton, one of the other leaders of the rebellion, is hurting now too:
While there are some similarities between the rebellion against former Speaker John Boehner from the Tea Party that led to his 2015 downfall and the current anti-Pelosi Democrat rebels, there are key differences too:
It remains to be seen what happens next. But if you’re going to take a shot at the king–or in this case, the queen–you best not miss. And these anti-Pelosi rebels seem to have missed, at least for now.
Popular microblogging platform Tumblr, popular with teenagers and college-aged youth, has been kicked off of the Apple App Store, allegedly over issues with “child sexual exploitation” being posted on the social network.
According to the Verge, the app, which has been on the store for several years, was removed on November 16 and has remained off the store since.
On Monday evening, it was confirmed that the reason was due to alleged problems with “child sexual exploitation and abuse” on the platform, which managed to slip through Tumblr’s filters.
“We continue to work to restore our app to the iOS App Store,” declared Tumblr in a statement. “We’re committed to helping build a safe online environment for all users, and we have a zero tolerance policy when it comes to media featuring child sexual exploitation and abuse. As this is an industry-wide problem, we work collaboratively with our industry peers and partners like NCMEC to actively monitor content uploaded to the platform.”
“Every image uploaded to Tumblr is scanned against an industry database of known child sexual abuse material, and images that are detected never reach the platform. A routine audit discovered content on our platform that had not yet been included in the industry database,” the company continued. “We immediately removed this content. Content safeguards are a challenging aspect of operating scaled platforms. We’re continuously assessing further steps we can take to improve and there is no higher priority for our team.”
The app is still available for Android on Google’s Play Store.
In 2017, a study revealed that nearly half of Tumblr users see porn while browsing, while in the same year, a lawyer accused the company of ignoring revenge porn posted to the platform after it allegedly took three weeks to get revenge porn featuring his 17-year-old client removed.
Lukas Dhont's feature directorial debut, Girl — about a transgender girl (played by breakout Victor Polster) training to become a ballerina — wowed Cannes when it premiered in May, picking up a distribution deal with Netflix and four awards including the Fipresci Prize in the Un Certain Regard section.
Now the film, Belgium's official entry in the foreign-language Oscar race, is the subject of controversy following Dhont's comments in a European newspaper that the streamer had plans to edit out a scene with full frontal nudity of its star, then 15.
Since then, it seems Dhont has come to a rapprochement, according to a statement from the director via Netflix to THR: "Regarding reports made this week in the Belgian media, we as filmmakers had some internal conversations with Netflix in which we discussed how some of the material in Girl could possibly be received outside of Europe. We were given the option to be able to edit the film, and it always was a dialogue in which the filmmakers had the strongest say. The version of Girl that will be shown on Netflix will be the same version that premiered in Cannes, and in theaters in Belgium and other parts of the world."
In a major blow to the federal government, a judge in Detroit has declared America's female genital mutilation law unconstitutional, thereby dismissing the key charges against two Michigan doctors and six others accused of subjecting at least nine minor girls to the cutting procedure in the nation's first FGM case.
The historic case involves minor girls from Michigan, Illinois and Minnesota, including some who cried, screamed and bled during the procedure and one who was given Valium ground in liquid Tylenol to keep her calm, court records show.
The judge's ruling also dismissed charges against three mothers, including two Minnesota women whom prosecutors said tricked their 7 -year-old daughters into thinking they were coming to metro Detroit for a girls' weekend, but instead had their genitals cut at a Livonia clinic as part of a religious procedure.
U.S. District Judge Bernard Friedman concluded that "as despicable as this practice may be," Congress did not have the authority to pass the 22-year-old federal law that criminalizes female genital mutilation, and that FGM is for the states to regulate. FGM is banned worldwide and has been outlawed in more than 30 countries, though the U.S. statute had never been tested before this case.
"As laudable as the prohibition of a particular type of abuse of girls may be ... federalism concerns deprive Congress of the power to enact this statute," Friedman wrote in his 28-page opinion, noting: "Congress overstepped its bounds by legislating to prohibit FGM ... FGM is a 'local criminal activity' which, in keeping with long-standing tradition and our federal system of government, is for the states to regulate, not Congress."
Currently, 27 states have laws that criminalize female genital mutilation, including Michigan, whose FGM law is stiffer than the federal statute, punishable by up to 15 years in prison, compared with five under federal law. Michigan's FGM law was passed last year in the wake of the historic case and applies to both doctors who conduct the procedure, and parents who transport a child to have it done. The defendants in this case can't be retroactively charged under the new law.
Gina Balaya, spokesperson for the U.S. Attorneys Office, said the government is reviewing the judge’s opinion and will make a determination whether or not to appeal at some point in the future.
Friedman's ruling stems from a request by Dr. Jumana Nagarwala and her codefendants to dismiss the genital mutilation charges, claiming the law they are being prosecuted under is unconstitutional.
A victory for the defendants
The defendants are all members of a small Indian Muslim sect known as the Dawoodi Bohra, which has a mosque in Farmington Hills. The sect practices female circumcision and believes it is a religious rite of passage that involves only a minor "nick."
The defendants have argued that “Congress lacked authority to enact" the genital mutilation statute, "thus the female genital mutilation charges must be dismissed.” They also argue that they didn't actually practice FGM, but rather performed a benign procedure involving no cutting.
"Oh my God, we won!," declared Shannon Smith, Nagarwala's lawyer, who expects the government to appeal. "But we are confident we will win even if appealed."
Smith has maintained all along that her client did not engage in FGM.
"Dr. Nagarwala is just a wonderful human being. She was always known as a doctor with an excellent reputation," Smith said. "The whole community was shocked when this happened. She's always been known to be a stellar doctor, mother, person."
For FGM survivor and social activist Mariya Taher, who heads a campaign out of Cambridge, Massachusetts, to ban FGM worldwide, Friedman's ruling was a punch to the gut.
"Oh my God, this is crazy," said Taher, stressing she fears the ruling will put more young women in harm's way. "Unfortunately, this is going to embolden those who believe that this must be continued ... they’ll feel that this is permission, that it’s OK to do this."
Taher, who, at 7, was subjected to the same type of religious cutting procedure that's at issue in the Michigan case, said she doesn't expect laws alone to end FGM. But they are needed, she stressed.
"This is a violation of one person’s human rights. It's a form of gender violence. … This is cultural violence," 35-year-old Taher said.
Yasmeen Hassan, executive global director for Equality Now, an international women's rights organization, agreed, saying the ruling sends a disturbing message to women and girls.
"It says you are not important," Hassan said, calling the ruling a "federal blessing" for FGM.
"In this day and age, for FGM to still occur — and a federal government can’t regulate this with a human rights violation — is very bizarre," she said. "This is not what I expected. It's so not what I expected."
Hassan added: "I don't think it's possible for the federal government not to appeal this case. My feeling is that it will go all the way to the Supreme Court."
Friedman's ruling also drew the ire of Sen. Rick Jones, R-Grand Ledge.
“I’m angry that the federal judge dismissed this horrific case that affected upwards of a hundred girls who were brutally victimized and attacked against their will," Jones said in a statement, noting 23 states don't have FGM laws.
“This is why it was so important for Michigan to act. We set a precedent that female genital mutilation will not be tolerated here, and we did so by passing a state law that comes with a 15-year felony punishment," Jones said. "I hope other states will follow suit.”
The federal statute at issue states: "Whoever knowingly circumcises, excises or infibulates the whole or any part of the labia majora or labia minora or clitoris of another person" under the age of 18 shall be fined or imprisoned for up to five years, or both.
Prosecutors argue Nagarwala, the lead defendant, did exactly that when she cut the genitals of two 7-year-old Minnesota girls who were tricked into the procedure in 2017 by their mothers.
They said Nagarwala did this with the help of Dr. Fakhuruddin Attar, who is accused of letting Nagarwala use his Livonia clinic after hours to carry out the procedures; and his wife, Farida Attar, who is accused of assisting Nagarwala in the examination room during the procedures and holding the girls' hands.
Prosecutors allege that Nagarwala may have subjected up to 100 girls to the procedure over a 12-year period, though they have cited nine victims in the case: two 7-year-old girls from Minnesota; four Michigan girls ages 8-12, and three Illinois girls.
Law deemed unconstitutional
Nagarwala has long maintained that she committed no crime and that she was charged under a law that slid through Congress without proper vetting.
“The law was never debated on the floor of either chamber of Congress nor was there ever any legislative hearing addressing the justification or need for the federal law. Instead, all that exists is the criminal statute itself,” defense lawyers have argued in court documents, claiming the driving force behind the legislation was one lawmaker's belief that the prohibited conduct was 'repulsive and cruel.' "
But the Constitution demands more than that, the defense has argued, claiming Congress could not have passed a female genital mutilation ban under the Commerce clause because "notably, here, the activity being regulated has absolutely no effect on interstate commerce."
The judge agreed.
"There is nothing commercial or economic about FGM," Friedman writes. "As despicable as this practice may be, it is essentially a criminal assault. ... FGM is not part of a larger market and it has no demonstrated effect on interstate commerce. The commerce clause does not permit Congress to regulate a crime of this nature."
The prosecution disagrees, arguing genital mutilation is an illegal, secretive and dangerous health care service that involves interstate commerce on a number of fronts: text messages are used to arrange the procedure; parents drive their children across state lines to get the procedure; and the doctor uses medical tools in state-licensed clinics to perform the surgeries.
In defending the statute, prosecutors also have noted that FGM is condemned worldwide -- it's illegal in more than 30 countries. And they've cited the legislative history of the law, along with U.S. Sen. Harry Reid's comments in pushing for a genital mutilation ban.
“I want everyone within the sound of my voice to understand that what I am going to talk about here today does not deal with religion and it does not deal with sex. It deals with violation of a person’s human rights. It deals with degradation of women and young girls. It deals with the most inhumane thing a person can imagine,” Reid stated in 1994.
On September 30, 1996, the female genital mutilation law was signed, with Reid stressing: “There is no medical reason for this procedure. ... It is used as a method to keep girls chaste and to ensure their virginity until marriage, and to ensure that after marriage they do not engage in extramarital sex.”
Nagarwala, meanwhile, is still facing a conspiracy charge and an obstruction count that could send her to prison for 20 years, along with the Attars. If convicted of conspiracy, Nagarwala faces up to 30 years in prison.
The case is set to go to trial in April 2019.
Contact Tresa Baldas: tbaldas@freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter @Tbaldas
Keep these in mind as you contemplate the direction of the American government over the past 50 years and especially since the Obama election.
The Goals of Communism
(as read into the congressional record January 10, 1963, from "The Naked Communist" by Cleon Skousen)
1. U.S. acceptance of coexistence as the only alternative to atomic war.
2. U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engaging in atomic war.
3. Develop the illusion that total disarmament of the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength.
4. Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war.
5. Extension of long-term loans to Russia and Soviet satellites.
6. Provide American aid to all nations regardless of Communist domination.
7. Grant recognition of Red China. Admission of Red China to the U.N.
8. Set up East and West Germany as separate states in spite of Khrushchev's promise in 1955 to settle the German question by free elections under supervision of the U.N.
9. Prolong the conferences to ban atomic tests because the United States has agreed to suspend tests as long as negotiations are in progress.
10. Allow all Soviet satellites individual representation in the U.N.
11. Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces. (Some Communist leaders believe the world can be taken over as easily by the U.N. as by Moscow. Sometimes these two centers compete with each other as they are now doing in the Congo.)
12. Resist any attempt to outlaw the Communist Party.
13. Do away with all loyalty oaths.
14. Continue giving Russia access to the U.S. Patent Office.
15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.
16. Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.
17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers' associations. Put the party line in textbooks.
18. Gain control of all student newspapers.
19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack.
20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policymaking positions.
21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.
22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to "eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms."
23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. "Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art."
24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them "censorship" and a violation of free speech and free press.
25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.
26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as "normal, natural, healthy."
27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with "social" religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a "religious crutch."
28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of "separation of church and state."
29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.
30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the "common man."
31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the "big picture." Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communists took over.
32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture--education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.
33. Eliminate all laws or procedures which interfere with the operation of the Communist apparatus.
34. Eliminate the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
35. Discredit and eventually dismantle the FBI.
36. Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.
37. Infiltrate and gain control of big business.
38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand.
39. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.
40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.
41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.
42. Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use united force to solve economic, political or social problems.
43. Overthrow all colonial governments before native populations are ready for self-government.
44. Internationalize the Panama Canal.
45. Repeal the Connally reservation so the United States cannot prevent the World Court from seizing jurisdiction over nations and individuals alike.
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