The lame-duck session is the most dangerous period in the nation’s capital that you’ve never heard of.
There are nearly two months in between Election Day in November and the swearing-in of the newly elected Congress in January. This period is known as the lame-duck session, because many of the voting members won’t be returning due to defeat or retirement (hence, they’re “lame ducks”).
Why is it dangerous? Because those lame ducks have no oversight or accountability, and the members who are returning have just won re-election—and won’t have to face the voters for two or six more years.
It wasn’t always this way. Lame-duck sessions used to be a quirk of history, only employed to address pressing issues or unexpected emergencies. However, they are now routinely used by both parties to schedule difficult or controversial votes after the election.
In the minds of congressional and party leadership, this delay tactic accomplishes two valuable things. First, it pushes meaningful votes until after the time when voters can hold the members accountable. This allows party leadership to protect their vulnerable members at the ballot box. Are you a voter who wants to know where your member of Congress stands on critical issues? Too bad! You have to vote them into office to find out what they really think.
Second, it means that all votes become “must-pass,” because the end of the year is suddenly approaching. Deliberation on major legislation—the sort that could have been (and should have been) considered earlier in the year—is now crammed into a few short days because Congress is up against a cliff of its own making.
The existence of the modern lame-duck session is troubling for several obvious reasons. During a lame-duck session, the accountability normally assigned to weighty legislative matters goes out the window. The “representative” part of “representative democracy” matters little to departing members who will vote on new laws and confirm judges for lifetime appointments—all before the door hits them on the way out.
But the damage doesn’t stop there. For returning members, the lame duck acts as a shield against behaviors that would seem unconscionable during the rest of the year. The opaqueness of a lame duck helps accomplish this. Votes are jammed into a short time frame with little clarity on who is voting on what, leaving voters with limited information. Not to mention that these members have just been re-elected, and the length of time before they stand for re-election renders any action they take now basically moot, since voters will likely not recall it with ease.
Instead of recognizing the dangerously twisted incentives provided in a lame duck, House and Senate leadership take full advantage of them. Rather than dealing with the hard issues up front, congressional leadership waits for a lame duck to handle controversial measures. Lame ducks are coming to be known as the period when the real work is done.
2016 has been a perfect example of this calculating behavior. This year, Congress could potentially set up a lame-duck session that will consider major policies, all of which carry more weight than any other measure the members will have considered before the election.
Consider just a few policies that may be voted on during the lame duck: funding authorization for the Defense Department, a new internet tax, and a $5.6 billion bailout of coal miner pensions, just to name a few. Together, these policies represent the most significant—and controversial—work that Congress will have done all year. And it’ll be doing so in the period of very little accountability to the voters.
The ability to clearly assign responsibility to elected officials is central to representative democracy, and a fundamental tenet on which the American government was founded. To deliberately push the consideration of major policy issues until after an election is as much an intentional deception as it is a blow to the health of our representative government.
Voters should demand that Congress complete its must-pass work before the November elections, and leave more controversial issues to the next president, and the new Congress. (For more from the author of “The Most Dangerous Period in Washington Could Be About to Happen” please click HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/Capitol_hill.jpg7681024Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2016-09-11 22:12:482016-09-11 22:12:48The Most Dangerous Period in Washington Could Be About to Happen
Some are puzzled by the dishonesty, lack of character, and sheer stupidity of many people in the media. But seeing as most of them are college graduates, they don’t bear the full blame. They are taught by dishonest and irresponsible academics. Let’s look at it.
“A Clash of Police Policies,” a column written by Thomas Sowell, presents some readily available statistics:
Homicide rates among black males went down by 18 percent in the 1940s and by 22 percent in the 1950s. It was in the 1960s, when the ideas of Chief Justice [Earl] Warren and others triumphed, that this long decline in homicide rates among black males reversed and skyrocketed by 89 percent, wiping out all the progress of the previous 20 years.
Academics and the media blame poverty and discrimination for today’s crime. No one bothers to ask why crime was falling in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, when blacks faced far greater poverty and discrimination.
The 1960s riots were blamed on poverty and discrimination. Poverty and discrimination were worse in the South than in the rest of the country, but riots were not nearly so common there. Detroit’s deadliest riot occurred at a time when the median income of black families in Detroit was 95 percent of their white counterparts, plus the black unemployment rate was 3.4 percent and black homeownership was higher than in other major cities.
Academics teach that the breakdown of the black family is the legacy of slavery and discrimination. They ignore the following facts.
In 1950, 72 percent of black men and 81 percent of black women had been married. Also, only 17 percent of black children lived in single-parent households; today it’s close to 70 percent. Every census from 1890 to 1950 showed that black labor force participation rates exceeded those of whites. During the late 1940s, the unemployment rate for black 16- and 17-year-olds was less than that for white teens.
According to the 1938 Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, that year 11 percent of black children and 3 percent of white children were born to unwed mothers. Before 1960, the number of teenage pregnancies had been decreasing; both poverty and dependency were declining; and black income was rising in both absolute and relative terms to white income. As late as 1965, 75 percent of black children were born to married women. Today, over 73 percent of black babies are born to unwed mothers. Again, so much for the “legacy of slavery” argument.
Academics teach that school integration is a necessary condition for black academic excellence. Blacks, their logic implies, cannot achieve academic excellence unless they go out and capture a white kid to sit next to their kids. Public charter schools such as those in the Knowledge Is Power Program, or KIPP, and Success Academy Charter Schools are having some successes without race mixing.
Sowell points out that only 39 percent of students in New York state schools who were tested recently scored at the “proficient” level in math, but 100 percent of the students at the Crown Heights Success Academy scored at that level in math. Blacks and Hispanics are 90 percent of the students in the Crown Heights Success Academy.
More than 43,000 families are on waiting lists to get their children into charter schools. Teachers unions are opposed to any alternative to public education and contribute to politicians who place obstacles and restrictions on the expansion of charter schools. The NAACP, at its 2016 national convention in Cincinnati, voted to support “a moratorium on the proliferation of privately managed charter schools.”
It’s easy to understand why the NAACP is against any alternative to public schools. Many of its members work in public education. However, many of those people do want alternatives for themselves.
In Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, 25 percent of public school teachers send their children to private schools. In Philadelphia, 44 percent of teachers send their children to private schools. The percentages are similar in several other cities: Cincinnati, 41 percent; Chicago, 39 percent; and Rochester, New York, 38 percent. This demonstrates the dishonesty, hypocrisy, and arrogance of the elite. They effectively say, “One thing for thee and another for me.” (For more from the author of “What the Media, Academics Get Wrong When They Blame Crime Rate on Poverty, Discrimination” please click HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/drunk-1045137_960_720.jpg539960Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2016-09-11 22:06:032016-09-11 22:06:03What the Media, Academics Get Wrong When They Blame Crime Rate on Poverty, Discrimination
This is not an article about Hillary Clinton’s health, so get that right out of your head. This article is about how the candidate, or more specifically her handlers, have reacted to questions about her health, and how that reaction bodes for a potential Clinton presidency.
The relationship between the press and the White House is an important one. In a representative democracy, the people have a right to know what their government is up to; it’s the only way they can make informed decisions about how to vote in subsequent elections. It is therefore in the interest of both the public and the country as a whole that reporters be granted a certain latitude in covering the presidency, even (especially) if that coverage is not always favorable to the commander in chief.
Yet, press freedom in this area has not been ideal in recent years. President Obama has a notoriously frosty relationship with any news organization willing to criticize him, to the point of actually trying to exclude whole networks (Fox) from press conferences and other official events. While he is happy to grant plenty of time to fawning talk show hosts and comedy shows, Obama’s unwillingness to be scrutinized by more serious media has made his promise to run “the most transparent administration in history” a pathetic joke.
One would hope that the next administration would be a little less hostile towards journalists, but if Clinton manages to defeat Donald Trump in November, don’t count on it. She has already earned the ire of many press outlets by refusing to grant access. In fact, she is so walled off from reporters, that members of the press literally rolled an orange with a question written on it down the aisle of her plane — just to get a question to her! Likewise, she has been suspiciously reclusive, when most candidates would want to spend as much time as possible getting face time with the public. It is this reclusiveness, in part, that has contributed to persistent rumors about Clinton’s health; rumors to which she has not reacted well.
As The Hill reports, several members of Clinton campaign team are pushing back aggressively against reporters who dare to question her physical fitness for the job, particularly a story by an NBC reporter, Andrew Rafferty, who wrote about the candidate’s recent coughing fit.
As Jay Caruso points out, questions about the health of presidential candidates, who are frequently in their late sixties or earlier seventies, are not unique to Clinton. Bob Dole and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. (F, 34%) received a similar treatment during their campaigns, so journalists holding Clinton to the same standard can hardly be described as sexist or in any way out of bounds.
I don’t want to seem like I’m giving Trump a pass here; anyone who has expressed a desire to strengthen libel laws clearly has no great respect for freedom of expression. But Hillary’s lack of press accessibility and hostility towards reporters who question her is especially concerning. The last thing this country needs is another president who refuses to brook criticism from the press. While the media has been unhesitating critical of Trump, most news outlets are basically in the tank for Hillary, with some even admitting as much. The fact that she is unable to tolerate a few dissenting voices from coverage that is otherwise nearly uniformly positive points to a presidency defined by secrecy, deception, and even strongman tactics to silence dissent.
Then again, Hillary doesn’t know what the word “classified” means, so maybe she will end up being transparent after all. Just not for the right reasons. (For more from the author of “Reporters Beware: A Hillary Presidency May Require a LOT of Rolling Oranges” please click HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/white-house-754766_960_720-5.jpg592960Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2016-09-11 21:57:552016-09-11 21:57:55Reporters Beware: A Hillary Presidency May Require a LOT of Rolling Oranges
My father recalls watching the North Tower burning from the 100th floor up and thinking to himself, “How would they put this out?’”
I grew up in Rockland County, New York, and dad used to work in the city, styling himself as an “architectural carpenter.” What that means is that he worked with his hands — and on his knees —installing cabinetry, wood flooring, and the heavy, polished oak doors that decorate the high-end offices of Manhattan with his union brothers in NYC District Council of Carpenters Union Local 157. It was hard work and it took its toll on my father, who is now retired and living comfortably in Pennsylvania.
Fifteen years ago today, on September 11, 2001, at 8:46 a.m, American Airlines Flight 11 flew south over Manhattan and crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
On that particular day, Peter Pandolfo (my dad) was working on the 20th floor of the Ritz Carlton, staring in shock toward the World Trade Center three blocks away.
“We had a clear view of the debris and smoke coming out the North Tower. Then a terrifying vibration with a loud screaming engine-noise was directly over our building and startled us.”
It was the second plane. United Airlines Flight 175 crashed into the South Tower at 9:03 a.m.
“Terrorism was my immediate thought.” As my father tells the story, he immediately went into “survival mode” and began to rifle through his tool belt, emptying some tools to lighten his load and keeping others on his person in case he needed them. He and his coworkers then evacuated the building.
“The whole crew ran 20 floors down the stairs to the street. It was mayhem. All the people who had evacuated the towers — the tourists and their babies, the workers, and everybody else — were on the street in shock, crying and afraid.”
Dad remembers that they couldn’t call for help, or tell their loved ones what was happening.
“All cell phone activity seemed to be dead. We couldn’t call home, and I thought, at least we were out of the building.”
On that day, I was sitting at my desk in Mrs. Brown’s third-grade classroom at George W. Miller Elementary School in Nanuet, N.Y. I remember our teacher calling us over to gather on the rug where we would have story time. Crestfallen, with tears in her eyes and a voice on the verge of breaking, Mrs. Brown told our class that “something terrible has happened.”
We children were sent home early that day. My father didn’t come home that night.
On the street in Manhattan, people were talking in hushed and anxious voices. Why did two planes just crash into the World Trade Center buildings? Did the air traffic controllers make a mistake? Were the planes hijacked? Were more planes going to descend on New York City? Were more people — my father and those by-standers — in danger?
As my dad and the other bystanders watched the towers burn, to their horror, they began to notice “large objects” falling from the buildings. There were people leaping from the towers, falling to their deaths, to escape the incinerating heat of the flames. You can find videos on YouTube, if you have the stomach for it.
“I saw two people hold hands and jump together. That made me sick,” my dad remembered.
As the crowd watched in horror, my father remembers, they would moan each time another person jumped. Each time, someone would scream. USA Today estimated that at least 200 people jumped that day.
Powerless, is how my father describes feeling back then. Unable to do anything to help those people. The crowd unsure of what they should do standing there, on the street.
Stunned disbelief turned to desperate panic.
“The South Tower began to fall straight down on itself, pancaking and exploding from the compression of each floor slamming on the next. A cloud of concrete ash, and who knows what else, billowed around the buildings and was headed straight for us. There was no way of escaping it. This cloud surrounded us and blocked out the sun.”
Providentially, perhaps, my father’s carpenter crew had dust masks on their person, necessary for breathing through sawdust and chemical fumes on the job. They gave those masks to the people with babies and young children.
To have a chance at breathing, my dad ripped off his t-shirt and dipped it in a building’s outside koi pond he found on that street, wrapping it around his face. New Yorkers made an attempt to flee as the debris, smoke, and ash descended, enveloping them in darkness and fire.
“I felt the hot, smoky, dust through my wet shirt, and it began to burn my lungs.” There was a moment Peter Pandolfo thought he could duck into some bushes; maybe they would help filter some of the dust. He had other thoughts, too.
“I thought at that moment, I was going to die. I began to pray.”
It was two coworkers — union brothers — who came to my dad’s rescue. They grabbed hold of my father, pulling him away. One of them lived on Long Island, you see, and they had decided to make for the Brooklyn Bridge hoping to get out of the city and rest there. They “zigzagged” northerly through the streets of Manhattan, smoke and dust clouds obstructing their view such that they could only see about 50 feet in front of them. Eventually, the sun broke through and they could see again.
Thousands of people made for the Brooklyn Bridge that day, carrying the same hope that they could cross on foot and leave the dust, and death and destruction, behind them. Noise filled the air as much as smoke. Noise of people running, of sirens wailing. Shouts. Mourning. There were those who were eerily silent, too.
First responders ran in the opposite direction of the crowds, toward the death and destruction. 411 emergency workers in New York City died in response to the terrorist attacks on September 11. 343 New York firefighters, 37 Port Authority police officers, 23 NYPD officers, and eight emergency medical technicians. They died heroes, saving many lives through their sacrifice.
My father and his coworkers could not get to the bridge without heading to the ramp, which was behind them, toward the towers. They kept going on foot, passing more bridges and eventually the United Nations building. They hurried past, thinking “a plane was definitely going to crash into it.”
Tired and scared, the carpenters decided to cross over at the next bridge, unsure if that too would become a target for the terrorists. They climbed a construction scaffold on the side of the Williamsburg Bridge. It turned out, my dad’s tool belt came in handy after all.
“It was abandoned, and workers left everything, dropped it where they were to get out of there thinking the bridge would be a target. We thought that as well and hurried across. At the end of the bridge there were hoses spraying water over wet concrete to cure it, and blocked us. So I had my tool belt still on with tools I thought would be useful, like my utility knife. I used the knife to cut through the netting that kept the occupied side separate from the construction side, and we got off the bridge onto Metropolitan Ave. in Brooklyn.”
Hours and miles later, dad spent an anxious night at his coworker’s house in Long Island. The Twin Towers were gone. 2,996 people died and more than 6,000 people were injured in the attacks that knocked them down.
I share this story with you because my father made it home to my mother and their three boys (and, later, girl) the next day. Other kids weren’t so fortunate. Too many fathers’ and mothers’ lives were claimed by evil men doing evil deeds in service of an evil ideology. An ideology that, as President George W. Bush rightly said on that day, targeted America and her countrymen “because we’re the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world.”
September 11, “is a day when all Americans from every walk of life unite in our resolve for justice and peace. America has stood down enemies before, and we will do so this time. None of us will ever forget this day, yet we go forward to defend freedom and all that is good and just in our world.”
None of us have forgotten the terrible things that happened on that terrible day 15 years ago. But at times, in the midst of this heated and divisive election season, I do wonder if some of us Americans have forgotten the things that came under attack from evil that day.
I shared my father’s story with you because regardless of who wins the presidency, who controls the Senate or the House or the judiciary — whatever political party or individual is put in control of the government — it is imperative, it is essential, it is good and it is right that we as Americans never cease to fight for and defend freedom and justice for all.
There is a specter of fear, of distrust and outrage that is dividing us today. Discourse over ideas has devolved into bickering, name-calling, trolling, and contests of insult and ego. Each side of every argument seems less interested in showing how their ideas defend freedom and justice and more invested in forcing those who disagree into submission.
I am guilty of this as much as anyone. And when I engage in that behavior, I am wrong.
What is good and decent in America is under assault today from forces that hate us and seek to destroy us every bit as much as the people who hijacked those planes did. We do a disservice to the people who died on September 11, 2001, whether as victims or as heroes, and to our living countrymen and ourselves when we forget that defending the freedom of every American, and ensuring that justice prevails for every American — even those that disagree with us — makes this country good and decent.
The purpose of American conservatism is to conserve freedom and justice for the good and happiness of all of us. Its purpose is to defend liberty from hatred and evil that seeks to destroy. That is what we must remember on September 11, and on every day. We must never forget that.
My father won’t. (For more from the author of “200 People Jumped From the Twin Towers on 9/11. This Is What It Felt Like to Watch It From the Street Below” please click HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/7835970386_9ae11a9338_b.jpg7681024Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2016-09-11 21:51:252016-09-11 21:51:25200 People Jumped From the Twin Towers on 9/11. This Is What It Felt Like to Watch It From the Street Below
Hillary Clinton is world-renowned as a “habitual and serial liar”. She’s also an exteremely arrogant woman who will continue Barack Obama’s divisive and hateful behavior, only she won’t be as charming about it. She appears nasty and aloof because that is who she is. And this latest video confirms it.
The sad thing is half the country is just fine with this. Hillary could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and it wouldn’t matter.
Her arrogance is why she had a personal server and continues to lie about it. The American people are beneath her.
At a New York fundraiser, she demonized “half” of Trump’s supporters as “baskets of deplorables” who are “racists, sexists, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, you name it”. The rest are just “baskets” of pathetic people who think “the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them.”
She called Trump followers “irredeemable”.
How dare she characterize people that way — half are haters and the other half are childlike idiots That is so insulting and condescending, words hardly can describe it. She has given it new meaning.
The only thing that is deplorable is her arrogance. It’s breathtaking.
We no longer have immigration, we have a welcomed invasion of illegal immigrants and unvetted asylum seekers but if we complain, we’re xenophobes and racists. If we want a private bathroom, we’re homophobes, and if we say a thing about a woman, we’re sexists. Expect to hear a lot of that last accusation if she wins the presidency.
She tried to walk it back today, saying she was “grossly generalistic”. You simply can’t take something like that back.
Look at this next brief clip. The first is Hillary behaving incredibly arrogant towards a congressman. She failed to properly supervise her embassies, particularly a most endangered one and she’s arrogant about it. In the next, she throws her support behind Soros’s anti-police, deceitful and violent hate group, Black Lives Matter – calls them “dignified”.
This is “deplorable” for traditional Americans who are being disposed and replaced. (For more from the author of “HILLARY’S ROMNEY MOMENT: More Than 47% of Trump Supporters Are Scum, According to Your Abuela” please click HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/Hillary_Clinton_24525869652.jpg37445616Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2016-09-11 21:31:462016-09-11 21:31:46HILLARY’S ROMNEY MOMENT: More Than 47% of Trump Supporters Are Scum, According to Your Abuela
Joe Miller Files to Challenge Murkowski for US Senate Seat
Anchorage, Alaska, September 6, 2016 – At the urging of disenfranchised voters across the state of Alaska, 2010 Republican Nominee Joe Miller today filed his paperwork to run for United States Senate.
“Alaskans deserve a real choice,” said Miller. “The choice between a Democrat, a Democrat-backed independent, and a Republican-In-Name-Only – who has been one of Barack Obama’s chief enablers – is no choice at all.”
With a near-historic low of 15.4 percent turnout and only 7.7 percent of Alaska’s registered voters casting a vote for our incumbent senator in the primary, it is obvious that Alaskan voters wanted another choice.
Due to Libertarian candidate Cean Stevens’ withdrawal from the race and a unanimous vote of the Alaska Libertarian Party’s board of directors, Joe Miller will appear on the November ballot as the Alaska Libertarian Party Nominee. Miller seeks to be the first third-party nominee to win a federal seat in decades.
Murkowski is the most liberal “Republican” up for re-election having voted with Pres. Obama 72 percent of the time during the last session of Congress, second only to Sen. Susan Collins of Maine.
“The Conservative Voice for Alaska,” as Murkowski dubbed herself during this year’s primary election, ranks near the bottom of the American Conservative Union scorecard for GOP senators; was given an “F” grade by the Conservative Review for her voting record, and scores just 36 percent with the Heritage Action Committee ratings this session of Congress (34 percent lifetime), well below the 58 percent average for Republicans.
By way of comparison, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who won the Alaskan presidential primary in the spring, scored 97 percent for his senate votes with Heritage Action, while Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, earned a 100 percent score.
Alaska deserves representation that will confront the corruption of Washington and reverse the disastrous, big government policies of the Obama era, not facilitate them. From encroaching federal tyranny and the surveillance state, to illegal immigration and economically devastating trade deals; from confirming activists judges and pushing globalist treaties, to using our military as an experiment in social engineering and undermining religious liberty; from systematically trampling on the Constitutional rights of the weakest and most vulnerable among us, to burdening our children and grandchildren with intergenerational debt; Lisa Murkowski has failed Alaska and America. It’s time for a change.
If elected, Miller pledges to caucus with the Republican Party, but be a voice for reform on Capitol Hill and within the Last Frontier.
Miller stated, “I am grateful to Cean Stevens and the Alaska Libertarian Party for their vote of confidence. It is humbling. They could not have been more gracious and helpful. This is an historic opportunity for liberty-loving Alaskans to lead this nation to a post-partisan future of limited constitutional government. I’m calling on all Alaskans of good will to join us in this effort. Together we can make history!”
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Joe Miller is a limited government constitutionalist who believes government exists to protect our liberties, not to take them away. He supports free people, free markets, federalism, the right to life, religious liberty, American sovereignty, and a strong national defense.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/Update-The-rematch-6-yrs-in-the-making-is-on.-Go-Joe-Miller-11.jpg500650Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2016-09-10 14:55:392016-09-11 03:14:52Joe Miller Announces Run Against Lisa Murkowski, Will Be on Alaska Ballot
In a far-reaching response to the U.S. Supreme Court striking down natural marriage laws last summer in Obergefell v. Hodges, the IRS and Department of the Treasury have changed the meanings of the words “spouse,” “marriage,” “husband” and “wife.” This change was also a response to the Court’s 2013 decision in United States v. Windsor, which ruled that the words “spouse” and “marriage” could not be limited to heterosexual marriages.
“Husband” and “wife” now refers to “two individuals lawfully married to each other,” regardless of sex. The new definitions will give same-sex marriage couples job-protected leave to take care of their spouse’s family members under the Family and Medical Leave Act, and applies to the marital status of taxpayers for purposes of the income, estate, gift, excise and payroll taxes.
Of course, same-sex couples will now also face the “marriage penalty” for filing their taxes jointly. The “penalty” is the higher tax rate some married couples must pay if they are a middle to upper class couple with roughly similar incomes.
The proposed rule changes were announced in October, left open for comment, and finalized on Friday, with barely any fanfare or objections. One submitted comment to the proposed rule — to replace the words “husband” and “wife” with “spouse” — might have made more sense. Congress could still make that change in the future.
Another commenter suggested the IRS include the words “same-sex marriage” to better explain the changes, but the IRS dismissed the concern. According to The Washington Examiner, “Treasury and the IRS believe that the definitions in the proposed regulations apply equally to same-sex couples and opposite-sex couples, and that no clarification is needed. Amending the regulations to specifically address a marriage of two individuals of the same sex would undermine the goal of these regulations to eliminate distinctions in federal tax law based on gender.”
The changes do not apply to domestic partnerships or civil unions, in order to allow couples to choose alternative tax treatment that might benefit them more than being married. (For more from the author of “IRS Redefines ‘Husband’ and ‘Wife’ to Eliminate Sex” please click HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/holding-hands-1149411_960_720-1.jpg640960Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2016-09-10 01:22:332016-09-11 03:23:45IRS Redefines ‘Husband’ and ‘Wife’ to Eliminate Sex
For all the attention on battleground polls giving Hillary Clinton the edge, Donald Trump enjoys at least one electoral advantage in his uphill climb to the White House: Republicans are outpacing Democrats in registering new voters in key states.
A review of registration figures shows that in the swing states that sign up voters by party, Republicans are seeing a significantly bigger boost since 2012. In states like Florida and Pennsylvania, the party has added tens of thousands of voters to the rolls at a time when Democrats have seen their base shrink.
“The numbers [in those states] … are a huge shift from what we’ve seen in 2012,” Republican National Committee spokeswoman Lindsay Walters said.
The surge doesn’t change the fact that Clinton leads, if only by a thin margin, in most battleground state polls, which presumably reflect the current voter make-up.
Fox News ratings show Clinton maintains the advantage in the Electoral College, while a Washington Post survey this week of registered voters in all 50 states reflects a similar dynamic. And in big swing states ranging from Florida to North Carolina to Pennsylvania, there are still more registered Democrats than Republicans. (Read more from “Trump Card? Republican Voter Registration a Bright Spot for Campaign” HERE)
George Soros’s Open Society Foundations is seeking to expand the use of electronic and online voting systems nationwide, according to a leaked Foundations document reviewed by Breitbart News.
While the directive was issued two years ago, the issue of electronic voting has become a hot button topic in this year’s presidential election amid fears digital voting systems can be compromised.
The online voting plan was contained in a 67-page hacked file detailing the September 29-30, 2014 Open Society U.S. Programs board meeting in New York.
A significant portion of the board meeting was dedicated to methods the Foundation’s U.S. Programs (USP) could use to further the use of President Obama’s executive action authority to bypass Congress during Obama’s final two years in office.
The Open Society, together with partner grantees, assembled a general list of potential presidential executive actions on numerous issues. Significantly, the Soros-backed group zeroed in on the expansion of online voting. (Read more from “George Soros Trying to Convince More States to Adopt Vote-Fraud-Plagued Electronic Platforms” HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/13307602303_5bc17185ce_b-1.jpg6821024Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2016-09-10 01:06:032016-09-10 01:06:03George Soros Trying to Convince More States to Adopt Vote-Fraud-Plagued Electronic Platforms
This is a portion of remarks Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, delivered on the Senate floor on Thursday.
The Obama administration’s proposal to give away control of the internet poses a significant threat to our freedom, and it’s one that many Americans don’t know about. It is scheduled to go into effect on Sept. 30, 2016. Twenty-two days away. Just over three weeks.
Now what does it mean to give away control of the internet?
From the very first days of the internet, when it was developed here in America, the United States government has maintained its core functions to ensure equal access for everyone with no censorship. The government role isn’t to monitor what we say, it isn’t to censor what we say, it is simply to ensure that it works — that when you type in a website, it actually goes to that website and not somewhere else. And yet, that can change.
The Obama administration is instead pushing through a radical proposal to take control of internet domain names and instead give it to an international organization, ICANN [Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers], that includes 162 foreign countries. And if that proposal goes through, it will empower countries like Russia, like China, like Iran to be able to censor speech on the internet, your speech. Countries like China, Russia, and Iran are not our friends, and their interests are not our interests.
Imagine searching the internet and instead of seeing your standard search results, you see a disclaimer that the information you were searching for is censored. It is not consistent with the standards of this new international body, it does not meet their approval.
Now, if you’re in China, that situation could well come with the threat of arrest for daring to merely search for such a thing that didn’t meet the approval of the censors. Thankfully, that doesn’t happen in America, but giving control of the internet to an international body with Russia, and China, and Iran having power over it could lead to precisely that threat, and it’s going to take Congress acting affirmatively to stop it.
You look at the influence of foreign governments within ICANN, it should give us greater and greater concern.
For example, ICANN’s former CEO Fadi Chehadé left ICANN to lead a high-level working group for China’s World Internet Conference. Mr. Chehadé’s decision to use his insider knowledge of how ICANN operates to help the Chinese government and their conference is more than a little concerning.
This is the person who was leading ICANN, the body that we are being told to trust with our freedoms. Yet this man has since gone to work for the Chinese Internet Conference, which has rightly been criticized for banning members of the press such as The New York Times and The Washington Post.
But you know what, even reporters you may fundamentally disagree with have a right to report and say what they believe. And yet, the World Internet Conference banned them — said “we do not want these reporters here, presumably, because we don’t like what they’re saying.” — which led Reporters Without Borders to demand an international boycott of the conference, calling China the “enemy of the internet.”
Mr. President, if China is the enemy of the internet, do we want the enemy of the internet having power over what you’re allowed to say, what you’re allowed to search for, what you’re allowed to read online? Do we want China, and Russia, and Iran having the power to determine if a website is unacceptable, it’s taken down?
I would note that once this transition happens, there are serious indications that ICANN intends to seek to flee U.S. jurisdiction and flee U.S. laws. Indeed, earlier this summer, ICANN held a global conference in Finland in which jurisdiction shopping was part of their agenda, trying to figure out what jurisdiction should we base control of the internet out of across the globe.
A representative of Iran is already on record stating, “we should not take it [for] granted that jurisdiction is already agreed to be totally based on U.S. law.” Our enemies are not hiding what they intend to do.
Not only is there a concern of censorship and foreign jurisdictions stripping U.S. law from authority over the internet, there are also real national security concerns. Congress has received no assurances from the Obama administration that the U.S. government will continue to have exclusive ownership and control of the .gov and .mil top-level domains in perpetuity, which are vital to our national security. The Department of Defense, the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Marines all use the .mil top-level domain. The White House, the CIA, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security all use .gov.
The only assurance ICANN has provided the federal government regarding .gov and .mil is that ICANN will notify the government in the future if it decides to give .gov and .mil to another entity. So if someone is going to the IRS, or what you think is the IRS, and you’re comforted that it’s on a .gov website so that you know it must be safe, you may instead find yourself victims of a foreign scam, a phishing scam, some other means of fraud with no basic protections.
Congress should not sit by and let this happen. Congress must not sit by and let censorship happen.
Now, some defenders of the Obama proposal say “this is not about censorship. It’s about handing control to a multi-stakeholder unit. They would never dream of censoring content on the internet.”
Well recently, leading technology companies in the United States — Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Microsoft — reached an agreement with the European Union, to remove “hate speech” from their online platforms within 24 hours. Giant U.S. corporations signing on with the government to say, “we are going to help you censor speech that is deemed unacceptable.”
And by the way, the definition of “hate speech” we have seen can be very, very malleable depending upon what norms are trying to be enforced. For example, the Human Rights Campaign, which is active within ICANN, has featured the Family Research Institute, the National Organization for Marriage, the American Center for Law and Justice, and other conservative and religious groups in a report entitled “The Export of Hate.”
We are facing the real possibility of an international body having the ability to censor political speech if it is contrary to the norms they intend to enforce. In their view, it is hate to express a view different from whatever the prevailing orthodoxy is being enforced.
Now it is one thing dealing with government organizations that try to stifle speech that is profoundly inconsistent with who we are as Americans. But to hand over control of the internet, to potentially muzzle everybody on the internet, is to ensure that what you say is only consistent with whatever is approved by the powers that be, and that ought to frighten everybody. And there is something we can do about it.
Along with Congressman Sean Duffy [R-Wis.] in the House, I have introduced the Protecting Internet Freedom Act, which if enacted will stop the internet transition, and it will also ensure that the United States government keeps exclusive ownership and control of the .gov and .mil top-level domains. Our legislation is supported by 17 key groups across the country, advocacy groups, consumer groups, and it also has the formal endorsement of the House Freedom Caucus.
This should be an issue that brings us all together — Republicans, Democrats, all of us coming together. There are partisan issues that divide us, there always will be. We can have Republicans and Democrats argue till the cows come home about the top marginal tax rate, and that is a good and healthy debate to have. But when it comes to the internet, when it comes to basic principles of freedom, letting people speak online without being censored, that ought to bring every one of us together.
As members of the legislative branch, Congress should stand united to rein in this president, to protect the constitutional authority expressly given to Congress to control disposition of property of the United States. To put the matter very simply: The Obama administration does not have the authorization of Congress, and yet, they are endeavoring to give away this valuable, critical property, to give it away with no authorization in law. I would note the government employees doing so are doing so in violation of federal law, and they risk personal liability in going forward contrary to law. That ought to trouble all of us.
And if the Obama administration jams this through, hands control of the internet over to this international organization, this United Nations-like, unaccountable group, and they take it overseas — it’s not like the next president can magically snap his or her fingers and bring it back. Unscrambling those eggs may well not be possible. I suspect that’s why the Obama administration is trying to jam it through on Sept. 30, to get it done in a way that the next president can’t undo it, that the internet is lost for generations to come. To stop the giveaway of our internet freedom, Congress should act by continuing and by strengthening the appropriations rider in the continuing resolution that we will be considering this month, by preventing the Obama administration from giving away control of the internet.
Next week, I will be chairing a hearing on the harms to our freedom that come from the Obama administration’s proposal to give away the internet.
As President Ronald Reagan stated, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States when men were free.”
I don’t want you and I to have to tell our children and our children’s children what it was once like when the internet wasn’t censored, wasn’t in the control of the foreign governments.
And I urge my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to come together, to stand together and ensure that we protect freedom of the internet for generations to come. It is not too late to act, and I am encouraged by the leadership of members of both houses of Congress to stand up and protect freedom of the internet going forward. (For more from the author of “Obama’s Radical Internet Proposal Could Result in Censorship Online” please click HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/16018574316_c450277836_b-1.jpg5761024Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2016-09-10 00:42:572016-09-10 00:42:57Obama’s Radical Internet Proposal Could Result in Censorship Online
