Scientists, Women, the Press Think Trump Is Coming for Them

/0 Comments/in , /by

A week or so before the election, there was a rumor bumping around the Internet which said Trump, if he were to become President, would immediately begin rounding up LGBT folk and placing them into camps. I replied to one of these exceptionally nervous people on Twitter, “It won’t be so bad. I hear Thursdays will be lasagna nights.” That earned me a blocking. (I have since deleted my account so that I don’t cause any more hurt feelings.)

Over this past weekend, a mob of angry females tromped through the streets of Washington DC. Boy, were they upset. Fuming. Nary a happy face. Trouble was, no one was able to discover why these citizens were displeased. Perhaps the nation is suffering a critical shortage of blue hair dye? Can somebody look that up?

One woman not reduced to incoherent ravings about her cat (that’s what I thought I heard), said Donald Trump was going to come after women and break them up like “puzzle pieces.” Jack the Ripper, look out! It’s Donald Trump, puzzle breaker.

The eminent New York Times writer Ross Douthat isn’t shivering over internment camps or feminist puzzle breaking, but he did wring his hands over the possibility that Donald Trump “will escalate from tweets to Erdoganian crackdowns, that truly independent journalism will be marginalized while the White House breeds a lap dog press.”

It doesn’t do to criticize Times writers, of course, but is it even theoretically possible for the press to more resemble a fluffy white pampered poodle, blind with devotion, madly licking its master, and barring its wee yellow teeth and yipping at intruders than it did during Mr Obama’s tenure?

Fear of an all-powerful Trumpenführer has not been confined to dyspeptics, dye-jobs, and diarists. The officially brightest among us — scientists themselves! — have convinced themselves Trump is going to confiscate their data. Headline at Forbes: “Fearing White House Purge Of Climate Science, Scientists Frantically Copying Data.” The author, James Conca, said:

It’s not like the new administration is going to start burning books or flushing files down the toilet, but website access will disappear, reports will be put in deep storage, and datasets will become more difficult to access, or will degrade in quality, as funding is cut from the agencies maintaining them.

Conca says this data is needed because the United States has been under attack from the Polar Vortex, a beast which he intimates was caused by global warming (which he mistakenly refer to as “climate change”).

Conca is calling these deletions, which have not happened, a “purging of science” which will result in the nation “sliding further into the abyss where truth and lies have equal weight and science is just another ideology to ignore when it’s inconvenient.”

Engadget asks whether the data panic is “irrational.” “Possibly”, they admit, but then they claim the new administration “has been picking climate change deniers for positions in relevant agencies, and has threatened to stop ‘politicized science.’” (Incidentally, no Trump hire has ever denied the climate has changed.)

How Trump will reach into the computers of all those scientists and vacuum up their precious bits hasn’t been specified. Maybe he will hire the Russians who hacked and stole the election from its rightful winner to do the job? Scientists will come in to their offices after a weekend to discover their hard drives have been purged of the proof the sky will soon fall and replaced with JPEGs of Rosie O’Donnell laughing.

Scary stuff! No wonder Harvard is sponsoring an “Archive-a-thon” to begin the backups before Trump comes after them. The announcement doesn’t say, but it’s a good guess the Archive-a-thon will take place in a Safe Space complete with puppies and coloring books to calm the nerves of these great brains. Don’t scoff. It’s got to the point where there is serious talk of scientists having a march on Washington.

Since there is so much angst out there, it is well to review its cause. Progressives assured us, in turn, that Ronald Reagan was Hitler, that George Bush père et fils were Hitler, that Barack Obama opponents John McCain and Mitt Romney were each Hitler, really that every Republican since Goldwater was Hitler, and so none of us would have been surprised to learn that Donald Trump was Hitler, too.

But it was worse! The Left insisted Trump was literally Hitler. Which brings to mind Mr Trump’s inauguration speech in which he spoke of “an education system flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge” — including, as we have just seen, knowledge of the word literally.

After decades of creating and telling themselves horror stories, it was inevitable that the Left would begin believing them. It is thus not surprising that Trump’s election resulted in a full-blown moral panic. We’re in for four (or eight?) years of having everything that goes wrong blamed on Donald Trump. Might as well enjoy it. (For more from the author of “Scientists, Women, the Press Think Trump Is Coming for Them” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

When Pro-Abortion Sentiments Trump Science and Common Sense

/0 Comments/in , /by

There is a reason why many women contemplating abortion decide not to abort when they see an ultrasound of their baby. There is no denying the humanity of this tiny creature, which is anything but a clump of cells.

As the baby grows in the womb and is seen by ultrasound imaging, it’s common to hear parents exclaim, “Look at those little hands! Look at that adorable nose (it looks like Grandpa’s nose, doesn’t it?)! And look — it’s a girl! (Or, It’s a boy!)”

How amazing it is to see the ultrasound of your baby, especially when it’s your first child. Not surprisingly, both of our daughters, now in their late 30s, had the identical reaction when they saw the ultrasounds of their first babies: How could anyone abort their child?

It is for good reason that pro-abortion legislators fight against laws that would require abortion clinics to show an ultrasound of the baby prior to the decision to abort. They know it would be bad for business (plus, they argue, it adds to the inconvenience of the mother wanting to dispose of the contents of her womb).

It is hard to deny the personhood of the fetus when you see an ultrasound, which is why, during last year’s Super Bowl, Dorito’s incurred the wrath of NARAL (the National Abortion Rights Action League) when it aired an innocent, light-hearted, commercial featuring a very pregnant woman, her husband, and an ultrasound of their baby. According to NARAL, Dorito’s had committed the cardinal sin of “humanizing fetuses.” Oh, the very thought of it!

But there is something even worse than that Dorito’s ad. According to a bizarre article in The Atlantic, pro-life groups are being devious and deceptive when they use ultrasounds to convince women that their babies are human. How low will these pro-lifers go?

The Atlantic’s Ultrasound Deniers

The article, written by Moira Weigel and posted on Tuesday, was originally titled “How the Ultrasound Pushed the Idea That a Fetus Is a Person” with the subtitle, “The technology has been used to create sped-up videos that falsely depict a response to stimulus.” (Its current title is, “How Ultrasound Became Political.” The subtitle remains the same.)

Weigel’s article, which was marred by embarrassing errors (as pointed out by Alexandra DeSanctis on the National Review), not to mention being marred by bizarre claims, denied the reality (and significance) of fetal heartbeats as early as five or six weeks old, downplayed the evidence of ultrasounds and claimed that — gasp! — the pro-life movement was yet another example of patriarchal overreach. Yes, the science of “ultrasound made it possible for the male doctor to evaluate the fetus without female interference.” Those dastardly, duplicitous males! They are at it once again.

For good reason Sean Davis of the Federalist wrote that, “Moira Weigel took a sledgehammer to basic science and then did her best to vacuum its brains out before anyone could figure out what just happened.” The title of his article was as accurate as it was snarky: “Abortion Science: Heartbeats Are Imaginary, Unborn Babies Aren’t Alive, And Ultrasounds Are Just Tools Of The Patriarchy.”

Further underscoring the absurdity of Weigel’s article was this tweet from Denise Russell, which Davis reproduced: “Before ultrasounds, a woman had to wait until delivery to find out if she was getting a puppy, a goat, or a human.” How did we forget that?

Responding to the Republican-led effort to pass the “Heartbeat Bill,” which would prohibit doctors from aborting a baby if a heartbeat was detected (in the words of its sponsor, Congressman Steve King, “If a heartbeat is detected, the baby is protected”), Weigel asks, “What is a fetal heartbeat? And why does it matter?”

Her answer to these questions can be summed up, respectively, in three words, “Nothing” and “It doesn’t.”

The Heartbeat of a Child

Forget the fact that doctors check the baby’s heartbeat during each pre-natal visit, since this is an indicator of health, or the fact that they carefully monitor the baby’s heartbeat during delivery to be sure the child is OK. And forget the fact that doctors look for a pulse to see if someone is still living or the fact that a person is declared dead when their heart stops beating for good.

No. When it comes to abortion, all those facts conveniently disappear, and the heartbeat of that tiny pre-born child is of no significance at all. Indeed, Weigel opines, “Doctors do not even call this rapidly dividing cell mass a ‘fetus’ until nine weeks into pregnancy.” (I must be getting old, but somehow, I don’t recall my wife, Nancy, saying to me decades ago, “Honey, I just got the test results back and I have a rapidly dividing cell mass inside of me!”)

But it is not just fetal heartbeats which have no meaning for Weigel. Ultrasounds also have no meaning for her since … well, since she’s doesn’t believe they should. (If you think I’m exaggerating, read her article.) She notes that posting pictures of ultrasounds on social media has “heightened the social reality of the unborn,” as if this was somehow a bad, misleading thing.

And she points to an American couple who “posted a video of their sonogram fast-forwarded so that their fetus appeared to be clapping in time as they sang, ‘When You’re Happy and You Know It Clap Your Hands.’” The implication is that because the video was sped up, giving the false impression that the baby was clapping to the beat, that the more basic impression was also false, namely that there was a little human being in that mother’s womb who was putting its two little hands together. Pretty good for a clump of cells and a mass of tissue!

Although Weigel cites those who claim that pregnant women who see their ultrasounds are less likely to abort, she disputes these claims, pointing to a “2014 study published by the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology, which drew on the medical records of nearly 16,000 women seeking abortions” and “found that viewing an ultrasound had a negligible impact on whether they decided to proceed.”

Other studies I have read have come to very different conclusions (see here, for examples), and a pro-life ministry that offers ultrasounds to women considering abortion has also seen tremendous results. But I doubt that all the studies in the world would convince Weigel right now, since her objections seem to be based on ideology more than science. As observed by Alexandra DeSanctis, “The reason that progressives such as Weigel denounce ultrasound technology is … because they want to continue denying the humanity of the unborn child, a humanity that is undeniable whether or not the mother wants the child.”

Yes, “Pro-life activists and parents who want to keep their unborn children will acknowledge this humanity. We all know it. Abortionists know it. Mothers aborting their babies know it. Planned Parenthood executives know it. Perhaps many are able to dull their consciences and convince themselves that it’s “just a clump of cells.” But deep down, they must know. We all do. And that’s why the Left has to work so hard to deny it.”

And the harder the Left works to deny the humanity of the unborn child, the more it exposes its moral and scientific bankruptcy. In that regard, Weigel’s article does a great service to the pro-life cause, and for that, we should be glad. Truth is sweeping away the lies. (For more from the author of “When Pro-Abortion Sentiments Trump Science and Common Sense” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

How President Trump Could Make the IRS Great Again

/0 Comments/in , /by

The president, Congress, and the American taxpayer are none of them fans of the Internal Revenue Service. Voters were justifiably angered by well-publicized mismanagement in recent years on the part of high-ranking IRS executives, many of whom are gone but are probably collecting sizeable government pensions. These missteps included:

Lois Lerner’s stone walling of Tea Party groups;

IRS employees subsequently pleading the 5th before Congress;

an extravagant Disneyland training conference;

a multi-million-dollar technology contract awarded to a military school drop out with a fictitious injury who is now doing hard time for killing his wife;

and IRS executives goofing off during the workday to practice line dancing (at least it wasn’t disco dancing) and making skits parodying Star Trek and Gilligan’s Island.

Despite all this, the IRS is not an agency out of control. The IRS answers to an alphabet soup of other government agencies which monitor its operations, such as the Government Accountability Office, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, and the IRS Oversight Board. The current IRS commissioner has clamped down on abuses and in many ways the pendulum has swung the other way. Now rank and file employees (the people who didn’t create the problems but have to clean up the mess) must complete a form and get high level approval to attend a free training conference across the street from their offices. Bathroom passes are probably next.

The bad news is that the IRS is now being starved of resources which it needs to keep the government running — the government which you the voters just elected and inaugurated. On Monday, President Trump signed an Executive Order freezing all federal hiring not directly related to the military, public safety, and public health. President Trump should have also exempted the IRS. Here’s why:

Why IRS Needs Funds Restored

The Federal Government’s fiscal condition is dire. The national debt hovers around $20 trillion ($20,000,000,000,000), with almost $9 trillion added during the Obama Administration. In 2016, the federal government ran about $1 trillion in the red. The voluntary compliance rate hovers only around 81%, and the Gross Tax Gap, the estimated amount of taxes that should be collected before enforcement efforts but is not, stands at $468 billion. This figure does not include the unpaid taxes from illegal activities such as pimping and drug dealing.

Despite the ballooning national debt and massive annual budget deficits, Congress has slashed the IRS budget 19% in constant dollars since 2010. This has resulted in the IRS hemorrhaging employees, from 95,000 in 2010 to 80,000 in 2015. This decline in personnel has resulted in fewer auditors, investigators, tax collectors, and people answering the phone. There are fewer people working at the IRS now than when Ronald Reagan took office.

In 1998, the IRS had about 3,300 highly trained special agents combating tax fraud, money laundering, and related financial crimes (I was one of them). Today there are fewer than 2,300. The same trend exists for revenue agents (the people who conduct field audits) and revenue officers (they do the actual collections). At this rate, getting caught cheating on your taxes is going to be about as likely as Publishers Clearing House knocking on your door.

The money invested in the IRS produces astronomical returns. The IRS uses the $5 billion Congress gives it for enforcement and reduces the Gross Tax Gap by $62 billion, resulting in an estimated annual Net Tax Gap of $406 billion. In other words, for every dollar you give the IRS for enforcement it returns $12 to the Treasury. MIT-trained economist Dr. Jeff Dubin wrote in a 2007 article that a $353 million additional investment would result in $16.8 billion, between in additional dollars collected and greater voluntary compliance. No business owner would forgo the opportunity to earn that kind of return on investment.

To tackle America’s fiscal nightmare, President Trump should exempt the IRS from the hiring freeze and press Congress to appropriate the funds necessary to close the Tax Gap. Start with an extra $2 billion. That would bring the IRS budget back to 2010 budget levels. Then hold the IRS accountable for every dime. Tell it to start with cracking down on the pimps and the dope dealers who never did an honest day’s work (I have a few names they can start with). Then go after the fraudulent tax preparers who add fake dependents and abuse the ITIN system to bilk the Treasury out of tens of billions of dollars in bogus refunds. Stop chasing the little guy, like my friend who is a semi-retired septuagenarian who filed his corporate return late (he was in the hospital) and is fighting a $1,700 fine.

President Trump has big plans to Make American Great Again. To do that, he needs to make the IRS Great Again. To my friends at the IRS I say this: Sharpen your pencils and double knot your wingtips. It’s time to get to work! (For more from the author of “How President Trump Could Make the IRS Great Again” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

CNN Responds to My Application for Its Fake News Position

/0 Comments/in , /by

The following is the CNN human resources department’s reply to Rachel’s application for their new position of fake news editor. You can find her application here.

Dear (not to imply a level of intimacy that would make you uncomfortable) Ms., Miss, Mrs. Alexander (not to imply a marriage status or non-fluid gender identity, not that there’s anything wrong with that, if that’s who you feel yourself to be, and not to exclude Mr.),

We have reviewed your request to join our team (not that it’s a competitive type of team, everyone is equal here) as a reporter on fake news.

You must have misunderstood what we are looking for. We don’t run fake news here. We consider ourselves a ministry of truth, as the most trusted cable news network. We are looking to expand the work that our fake news expert Brian Stelter is doing.

We are looking for someone with a Media Matters, Snopes or Politifact approach to fake news. This means calling out biased, fake news sources like Fox News, The Washington Times and the Drudge Report. Or The Stream, a right-wing Christian site based in Dallas.

For example, Politifact has a great article entitled, “Fake News Purveyors Cheer On, Echo Trump Team’s Lies About Inauguration Crowd Size.” Not only does the article call out several offensive sites, but it goes further and notes that the sites all make revenue from Google advertising, so they are violating the company’s terms of service by providing misleading content. Politifact went the extra mile and is trying to shut these sites down.

To be honest, Ms./Miss/Mrs./Mr. Alexander, we don’t think you could do this. We think you’d be too biased.

Further, we want our new reporter to reach even higher levels of accuracy and zealousness. A really good reporter would go beyond what the Politifact article did and break down the Trump team’s inauguration numbers, explaining why they were fake. Or better still, keep repeating that the numbers were fake with smug authority and furrowed brow until it becomes accepted common wisdom.

We don’t think you understand that readers can only trust reputable sources like CNN, the New York Times and Huffington Post. You can generally distinguish a reputable site from the riff-raff because we use the AP Stylebook (the Times has its own stylebook, but it’s very similar). This guarantees our objectivity. For example, AP style requires the neutral term “anti-abortion” instead of the biased term “pro-life.”

The fake news sites use prejudicial terms like “Islamic terrorism” and “illegal immigrant,” so they should be easy to spot. We were alarmed to notice when reviewing the writing you submitted that you used these terms. We do not hire bigots who think that Muslim freedom fighters are “terrorists” and that undocumented visitors to this country are “illegal immigrants.”

We’re afraid we also doubt your ability to recognize fake news. How good are you at parsing every word in order to find one that looks off? President Trump’s Twitter feed should be a gold mine for this position, but we suspect you do not agree.

Take this tweet, for example, where Trump brags about meeting with “automobile industry leaders.” That looks objective, right? But that’s the genius of rightwing fake news. Who are these men really? What would the objective journalist call them? They’re greedy, wealthy white men and polluters largely responsible for the massive increase in manmade global warming.

This position requires the ability to create effective sound bites, in order to make sure the fake news exposés go viral. The stronger phrase “fake fake news” should be reserved to describe the worst offenses, like any story about someone connected to the Clintons who died under mysterious circumstances. “Trump fake news machine” should be used anytime the president says anything incorrect, which seems to be every other tweet.

Although it looks like your skills and the needs of CNN do not mesh, feel free to reapply and submit some samples of your work exposing the “real fake news.” Getting published in Media Matters will improve your chances with us. We hired Stelter in part because he came from one of the world’s most honest publications, The New York Times.

In keeping with our tolerance and diversity policies, we write you in peace and solidarity with all the oppressed peoples of the earth, the whales and all endangered creatures, and especially with the Palestinians oppressed by Israel.

Right on, sister (or brother if you wish)!

Your comrades at CNN

(For more from the author of “CNN Responds to My Application for Its Fake News Position” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

The Showdown over Sanctuary Cities

/0 Comments/in , /by

In the 1940s, Jan Ting’s parents faced a difficult path to American citizenship following a U.S. immigration ban on Chinese workers that lasted 61 years.

Today, Ting is a law professor at Temple University—after serving as a top immigration official under President George H.W. Bush. Ting is also a strong opponent of sanctuary cities that shield illegal immigrants from deportation. That includes Philadelphia, where Temple University is located.

“I think that it is wrong, I think it endangers public safety, I think it endangers our law enforcement officers, and it’s just short-sighted,” he says.

This week on “Full Measure,” we examine the debate over sanctuary cities, which face a loss of federal funding following President Donald Trump’s directive Wednesday. Watch the story to learn more about what’s at stake. (For more from the author of “The Showdown over Sanctuary Cities” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Trump Already Making Good on Campaign Promises, Says Newt Gingrich

/0 Comments/in , /by

Less than a week into his presidency, Donald Trump has already acted on the promises he made to the American people, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said.

Speaking Wednesday at The Heritage Foundation for the fifth of a six-part series on understanding Trump and Trumpism, Gingrich said the president, thus far, has shown a commitment to upholding the will of the people.

According to Gingrich, Trump’s early days in the White House are just a taste of the results we can expect to see in the next four years.

“This inaugural rose directly out of a two-year campaign and has now led into the first week of activism,” he said. “What’s he focusing on—job creation, immigration, shrinking government—all the things he campaigned on. Guess what that probably means—he’s probably going to continue to do just this.”

Trump’s commitment—which helped him beat 16 Republican candidates, the elite news media, and a billion-dollar Hillary Clinton campaign—has left his critics appalled.

“Of course, it shocks all the liberals because it turns out he may actually have meant what he campaigned on, which people voted for,” Gingrich said. “That puts him so outside liberalism and outside the traditional establishment that it’s unthinkable. Therefore, it can’t be true.”

Gingrich noted the latest incident to enrage the left: Trump’s plan to launch an investigation of mass voter fraud.

“The elite media doesn’t want to cope with it, but the fact is Donald J. Trump has been saying consistently as a candidate and as a president, we have a problem with voter fraud in America,” Gingrich said.

Gingrich argued that the Democratic Party would be in “real trouble” if only legal citizens were allowed to vote.

“They can’t win in an election that only involves people who are legal citizens of the United States and alive, which I think are two reasonable criteria for being allowed to vote,” Gingrich said.

Gingrich’s remarks focused largely on the themes of Trump’s inaugural address. Gingrich said Trump’s speech was about the people, which is something Americans can continue to expect from Trump.

“What is the Trumpian revolution about?” Gingrich questioned. “It’s about the citizens joined in a great national effort, rebuilding the country and restoring its promise for all of our citizens.”

While Trump’s message was “America first,” Gingrich said Trump will “put America first within a world system.”

“If he negotiates with Mexico and when he meets with the Mexican president later on, guess what he expects the Mexican president to do,” Gingrich said. “He expects him to represent Mexico. He’s just asking for the right to represent America.”

Trump’s “moral obligation” to both God and the American people will allow him to deliver on his promises, Gingrich suggested.

“If we do what we promised to do, if we do what Trump promised in his inaugural, we would be in a fight consistently from now till either we win or they win,” he said. “That’s why this is so important.”

Gingrich will wrap up his six-part series on Trumpism at Heritage on Monday, Jan. 30. The speech will take place at 11 a.m. EST. (For more from the author of “Trump Already Making Good on Campaign Promises, Says Newt Gingrich” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Trump DOJ Likely to Find Many Offenses in Voter Fraud Probe, Experts Say

/0 Comments/in , /by

President Donald Trump’s Justice Department will likely find numerous offenses to warrant launching a broad investigation into voter fraud, legal experts and watchdog groups say.

Trump has said that more than 3 million to 5 million illegal votes were cast during the 2016 election, causing him to receive a lower popular vote total than his vanquished opponent, Hillary Clinton, whom he defeated in the Electoral College.

On Wednesday, Trump said:

One legal organization took action on preventing voter fraud this week. The Public Interest Legal Foundation, a voter integrity group, reached a consent decree with Noxubee County, Mississippi, which has had voter registration that exceeds the number of county residents since 2011, according to the group. A consent decree is a legal agreement between two parties without an acknowledgment of guilt.

The decree includes requiring the county to identify dead voters on the rolls, clear voter rolls of former county residents, and mail all registered voters who have been inactive since January 2011.

The Public Interest Legal Foundation this week is also seeking to pry the release of information about noncitizens registered to vote in Manassas, Virginia.

Logan Churchwell, spokesman for the Public Interest Legal Foundation, said it is good that the Justice Department won’t just leave it to the nonprofit groups to weed out fraud.

“We need to know how many noncitizens are voting and know the unknowns,” Churchwell told The Daily Signal. “Trump could just enforce the law. The giant research project he tweeted about, or had a series of tweets about, is worthwhile and only something the federal government could do.”

It’s likely that 800,000 noncitizens illegally voted in the last presidential election, according to Jesse Richman, an associate professor of political science at Old Dominion University, who extrapolated on a 2014 study that examined illegal voting in the 2008 and 2010 elections.

Before the 2016 election, there were several documented cases of voter fraud. These included an FBI probe that found 19 dead people were registered to vote in Harrisonburg, Virginia; a woman arrested in Des Moines, Iowa, for voting twice for Trump; and a CBS News investigation that found multiple cases of dead voters and double voting in Colorado.

8 Instances of Voter Fraud in 2016, and It’s Not Even Election Day Yet

Churchwell asserted Trump’s 3 million or more projection couldn’t be proven or disproven, but regardless of whether this is an overstatement, President Barack Obama’s Justice Department ignored Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act, better known as the “motor voter” law. This provision requires local governments to maintain and keep voter rolls current.

The Obama administration has not enforced this provision of the motor voter law, and in Florida, Wisconsin, and Ohio, even took action to prevent maintaining the voter registration rolls.

Still others, such as Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice, a liberal legal group at the New York University School of Law, insisted voter fraud is a myth and opposed an investigation.

“An expensive investigation of imaginary voter fraud is not needed. It could easily devolve into a witch hunt,” Waldman said in a public statement. “Worse, it could be used to justify sweeping voting restrictions. There is no need for another investigation that is not independent, rigorous, and fact-based.”

Waldman continued:

There is a great deal of evidence that our voting system locks out far too many eligible citizens from voting. The voter registration system needs an upgrade, and that is something that should unite all Americans. Errors on the voter rolls are emphatically not signs of fraud—they are signs that we need to improve the system.

An investigation into voter fraud would not be complicated, said Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, a government watchdog group.

“You can see the numbers we are talking about by looking at public voter registration lists and cross-checking that against a list of noncitizens,” Fitton told The Daily Signal. “The federal government could coordinate with state and local governments and determine who registered to vote illegally. It’s a simple process. That’s why the left is so upset. They know the jig is up.”

Enforcing the law is long overdue, said Hans von Spakovsky, manager of the Election Law Reform Initiative at The Heritage Foundation.

“We don’t need [to create] a commission. The Justice Department can enforce the law and work with the Department of Homeland Security, and its records for citizenship and change of status to get an idea of who is illegally registered to vote,” von Spakovsky told The Daily Signal.

Regardless of the investigation’s outcome, von Spakovsky expects critics will dismiss anything that falls short of Trump’s 3 to 5 million illegal voter estimate.

“They may try to dismiss this, but the American people don’t believe what the media say about voter fraud not being real,” von Spakovsky said. “Polling solidifies that.” (For more from the author of “Trump DOJ Likely to Find Many Offenses in Voter Fraud Probe, Experts Say” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

House Speaker Paul Ryan Slates Obamacare Repeal for Spring

/0 Comments/in , /by

House Speaker Paul Ryan told House and Senate Republicans that lawmakers likely won’t repeal and replace Obamacare until March or April.

Speaking in the first major session of GOP lawmakers’ joint retreat in the City of Brotherly Love, Ryan said Wednesday that the health care law wouldn’t be repealed and subsequently replaced until spring.

“What we heard today was Obamacare is front and center,” Rep. Chris Collins, R-N.Y., told reporters, referring to the first session of the retreat, which outlined President Donald Trump’s first 200 days in office, or the “200 Day Plan.”

“Repeal and replace,” Collins added. “The word was by the springtime.”

Trump apparently has come around to this timeframe, after suggesting he wanted to see Obamacare repealed and replaced much sooner. Trump is scheduled to address the group of about 290 lawmakers Thursday.

Republicans are using a budget tool called reconciliation to repeal Obamacare, and lawmakers took the first step toward getting rid of the law using the fast-track procedure earlier this month.

GOP lawmakers originally had set a Jan. 27 deadline to craft the repeal bill, but Republicans admitted they would miss that deadline.

Since at least 2010, Republicans have campaigned on getting rid of the Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare. Now that they have the chance—with control of the White House as well as both chambers of Congress—some Republicans consistently have called for its swift repeal.

One senior Republican aide told The Daily Signal that the health care law should be rolled back “as soon as possible” to “fulfill our promise to voters that enabled unified government.”

Republicans first plan to use budget reconciliation to repeal the health care law and implement parts of a replacement, Collins said.

The next step is to use administrative actions, spearheaded by Tom Price, Trump’s nominee as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, to continue to dismantle Obamacare.

Last, they’ll implement additional parts of a replacement through the House and Senate’s normal procedures, called regular order.

That third and final step in Republicans’ repeal-and-replace process would require Democrats’ support, however, since 60 votes are needed to override a filibuster to block action in the Senate. Republicans hold 52 seats in the 100-seat upper chamber.

Heading into the closed-doors joint retreat at Loews Philadelphia Hotel, House and Senate Republicans were expected to hash out the final details of their plan for repealing and replacing Obamacare.

Though lawmakers in both chambers agree on how they’ll repeal Obamacare, through the budget reconciliation process, they haven’t come to a consensus on which parts of the law they’ll dismantle.

Conservatives want to repeal as much of Obamacare as possible using the budget reconciliation tool, which requires only a simple majority of 51 votes to advance in the Senate.

But centrist and liberal Republicans such as Sens. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Susan Collins of Maine want to keep Obamacare’s taxes in places.

Although the GOP lawmakers haven’t coalesced around a replacement for the law, they were scheduled to discuss proposals to do so at a session Thursday morning. (For more from the author of “House Speaker Paul Ryan Slates Obamacare Repeal for Spring” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

AI System as Good as Experts at Recognising Skin Cancers, Say Researchers

/0 Comments/in , /by

Computers can classify skin cancers as successfully as human experts, according to the latest research attempting to apply artificial intelligence to health.

The US-based researchers say the new system, which is based on image recognition, could be developed for smartphones, increasing access to screening and providing a low-cost way to check whether skin lesions are cause for concern.

“We hope that this is a first step towards early detection,” said Andre Esteva, an electrical engineering PhD student from Stanford University and co-author of the research.

According to the World Health Organisation, skin cancer accounts for one in every three cancers diagnosed worldwide, with global incidence on the rise.

In the UK alone, 131,772 cases of non-melanoma skin cancer were recorded in 2014. In the same year there were 15,419 new cases of the deadliest skin cancer, melanoma, making it the fifth most common cancer, according to Cancer Research UK. (Read more from “AI System as Good as Experts at Recognising Skin Cancers, Say Researchers” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

‘Stephanie’ Crowder Punks Wendy Davis at the Women’s March and It’s Absolutely Brilliant!

/0 Comments/in , , /by

Steven Crowder has outdone himself. In what could be his most controversial and hilarious video yet, the Louder with Crowder host infiltrated the national Women’s March held over the weekend … dressed in drag.

That’s right, Crowder and his producer NotGayJared went undercover as transgendered men. Or is it transgendered-women? Trans-women-men? These pronouns are confusing. What’s not confusing is the far-Left, radical agenda Crowder filmed march attendees espousing.

What is “p*ssy economics”?

Watch to find out:

Crowder even punked feminist-icon, leader of the pink revolution Wendy Davis, and got an exclusive interview with her. As she explained her ideas, it turns out the liberal Democratic policies advocated by Davis are all built on negative female stereotypes.

Hypocrisy much? (For more from the author of “‘Stephanie’ Crowder Punks Wendy Davis at the Women’s March and It’s Absolutely Brilliant!” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.