At Mike Huckabee’s presidential campaign headquarters just outside downtown Little Rock, Ark., the political team is stacked with veterans of his previous campaigns. His fundraising operation, however, is staffed with almost all new faces who are tasked with avoiding a repeat of Huckabee’s 2008 campaign, which went broke just as he was capturing the GOP’s imagination.
A staff roster, obtained by TIME, shows that of the headquarter’s 19 senior political aides, 12 are veterans of his Huckabee’s earlier efforts, including daughter-turned-campaign manager Sarah Huckabee Sanders. In the finance department, however, five of the six top officials are newcomers to Huckabee’s orbit.
Their resumes include stints working for the presidential campaigns of George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, John McCain, Rick Santorum, Michele Bachmann, Jon Huntsman and Tim Pawlenty.
Huckabee on Tuesday launched his campaign with a speech in his hometown of Hope, Ark., and signaled he would run a more-polished campaign than his 2008’s effort. An upstart eight years ago, Huckabee now is a known candidate whom voters will expect to run a more professional operation . . .
Huckabee Sanders is her father’s top aide but hardly a nepotistic hire. In 2014, she managed John Boozman’s successful Senate campaign in Arkansas and was a top adviser to Tom Cotton’s winning campaign in North Carolina. She previously was an adviser to Pawlenty’s failed 2012 bid for the GOP nomination and guided her father’s 2008 campaign in Iowa to a win as his national political director. (Read more from “Huckabee Staff Picks Underline New Focus on Fundraising” HERE)
Former Gov. Rick Perry said Texans — including new Gov. Greg Abbott — don’t have any cause for worry about an upcoming military training exercise in Texas.
Abbott last week directed the Texas State Guard to monitor Operation Jade Helm 15, an eight-week federal training exercise that will bring about 1,200 troops to Texas this summer to simulate special operations, because he’s worried the training could infringe on Texans’ rights.
“I think it’s OK to question your government,” Perry, a potential 2016 presidential candidate, said Tuesday before speaking to a World Affairs Council of Dallas/Fort Worth luncheon at the Tower Club in Dallas. “I do it on a pretty regular basis” . . .
In a Tuesday statement, Gohmert said his office has been inundated with calls referring to the Jade Helm 15 military exercise scheduled to take place between July 15 and September 15. His statement said the military practice has some concerned that the U.S. Army is preparing for modern-day martial law. He went on to say that he understands these concerns. (Read more from “Military Training Exercise Causing Worry in Texas” HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2015-05-09 00:17:442015-05-09 00:17:44Military Training Exercise Causing More Worry in Texas, but Gov. Perry Says Chill
Last week, as you may or may not have heard, a guy named Jack Ely passed away at the age of 71. The name may not be that familiar, but the voice almost certainly is. Jack Ely was — fairly briefly — the lead singer of the Kingsmen, and happened to do a cover song in a single take under poor conditions, that created one of the most memorable songs in rock and roll history, also known as Louie Louie:
You know the song. You also know the lyrics are completely indecipherable. However, with Ely’s death, there’s been renewed attention to the fact that the FBI spent nearly two years investigating the song. It is just as ridiculous as it sounds, but the FBI has released the file on its investigation and it’s a rather hilarious read. It turns out it wasn’t just the FBI, but involved the FCC and the Post Office:
Apparently, the government was being inundated with claims from people (some of which you can see in the file) insisting that they had heard the indecipherable lyrics were actually “obscene.” If you want to see the supposedly “obscene” interpretation of the lyrics, there’s one set on page 14 [pdf] of the document, though I warn you, even the falsely heard “obscene” lyrics are not particularly obscene by today’s standards (and I’m at a loss as to how they’re that obscene by the standards of 1963, frankly). On page 22, there’s another, mostly different set of falsely heard “obscene” lyrics that at least includes the word “f***.” On page 35, yet another version with both “f***” and “b****.”
Photo Credit: Tech Dirt
(Read more from “FBI Spent Years ‘Researching’ the Lyrics to ‘Louie, Louie’ Before Realizing the Copyright Office Must Have Them” HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2015-05-09 00:17:222015-05-09 00:17:22Flashback on Stupid: FBI Spent Years ‘Researching’ the Lyrics to ‘Louie, Louie’ Before Realizing the Copyright Office Must Have Them [+video]
A mother is launching a legal battle for possession of her dead daughter’s frozen eggs so that she can become pregnant with her own grandchild.
In what may be the first case of its kind, the 59-year-old woman and her husband, 58, are challenging an independent regulator’s refusal to allow them to take the eggs to a US fertility treatment clinic.
The couple say it was the dying wish of their daughter, an only child who died of bowel cancer in her late twenties, that her eggs be fertilised by donor sperm and implanted into her own mother’s womb.
The daughter initially had her eggs frozen after being diagnosed with cancer in the hope that she herself could have children in the future. Her parents want to export the eggs to New York, where a clinic has indicated it is willing to provide treatment at an estimated cost of up to $92,500.
Dr Mohamed Taranissi, who runs the ARGC fertility clinic in London, said: “I have never heard of a surrogacy case involving a mother and her dead daughter’s eggs. It’s fair to say that this may be a world first.” (Read more from “Woman Launches Legal Challenge to Give Birth to Her Dead Daughter’s Baby” HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2015-05-09 00:17:072015-05-09 00:17:07Woman Launches Legal Challenge to Give Birth to Her Dead Daughter’s Baby
At a mock airport in an underground laboratory here at Northeastern University, students pretending to be passengers head through a security exit in the right direction, while a young man enters going the wrong way. On a nearby computer screen, a newly developed video surveillance software program flags the wayward person and sounds an alarm.
In a lab across the street, researchers are developing a new way to detect explosives using radar.
Just down the hall, a professor and a team of students are working on a scanning system that they hope will speed up security lines. The system uses machines installed in walls or other places to scan passengers as they walk past instead of having them walk individually into a conventional scanning machine.
“The goal is to have a system that provides better scanning of individuals going through security, while at the same time making it more convenient,” said Jose Martinez Lorenzo, a professor of mechanical and industrial engineering, who is directing the project.
But the ambitious research in the name of passenger safety and easing air travel delays is colliding with pressure to protect privacy and to reduce federal spending. (Read more from “Airport Security Advances Clash With Privacy Issues” HERE)
More Americans living outside the U.S. gave up their citizenship in the first quarter of 2015 than ever before, according to data released Thursday by the IRS.
The 1,335 expatriations topped the previous record by 18 percent, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Those Americans are driven to turn in their passports in part because of laws that have expanded bank reporting and tax compliance requirements for expatriates . . .
An estimated 6 million U.S. citizens are living abroad, and the U.S. is the only country within the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that taxes citizens wherever they reside.
In many cases, those choosing to give up their citizenship have limited connections to the U.S. and have lived outside of the country for most of their lives. Anyone born in the U.S. automatically receives citizenship, and people born abroad to U.S. parents are typically citizens as well.
“The cost of compliance with the complex tax treatment of non-resident U.S. citizens and the potential penalties I face for incorrect filings and for holding non-U.S. securities forces me to consider whether it would be more advantageous to give up my U.S. citizenship,” Stephanos Orestis, a U.S. citizen living in Oslo, wrote in a March 23 letter to the Senate Finance Committee. “The thought of doing so is highly distressing for me since I am a born and bred American with a love for my country.” (Read more from “Americans Living Abroad Set Record for Giving up Citizenship” HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2015-05-08 00:36:562015-05-08 00:36:56Americans Living Abroad Set Another Record for Giving up Citizenship
The number one goal of all governments is to control and dominate their own citizens. The more deceptively it can be done, the more complete and long-lasting the tyranny.
I have been telling you for many years that the face of modern tyranny is benevolent totalitarianism. Police state totalitarianism went out with World War II. The “Gestapo” knock at the door in the middle of the night and barbed-wire detainment camps are history, though there are steps in place to recreate them here via FEMA resettlement camps. Benevolent totalitarianism is an advanced stage of people control through mind control and mass psycho-political manipulation.
The individual (individualist) is an enemy of the state. Therefore individuality must be removed. So the individual and the nuclear family, which is an individual and sovereign unit, are under attack. . .
Government is attacking the individual and family unit in a myriad of ways: through social programs, class warfare and altruism, which is selfless self-denial to the point of literal self-sacrifice for a myth called society, and propaganda.
Social welfare programs are destructive to the individual and the family unit because they absolve the parents of their parental responsibilities and promote dependency on government. There are now “families” that for two or three generations have been wards of the state. Many if not most of them are without a male head of household. They depend upon the state to provide their sustenance, their housing, their transportation, their healthcare and their entertainment. They know nothing of individuality or personal responsibility. Their provider is the state, and the state is their god. It is 21st Century Baal worship. (Read more from “The Government’s War on Christianity” HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2015-05-08 00:36:342015-05-08 00:36:34The Government’s War on Christianity
In a pandering speech this week, Michelle Obama addressed an unavoidable issue in today’s cultural climate: racism. Rather than use the forum to enumerate the myriad ways – an obvious example being her husband’s two terms as the nation’s chief executive – blacks have progressed in America, she chose to further stoke racial tension by declaring “museums and concert halls” unaccommodating to minorities.
“You see,” she told an audience at New York City’s Whitney Museum, “there are so many kids in this country who look at places like museums and concert halls and other cultural centers and think to themselves, ‘Well, that’s not a place for me, for somebody who looks like me, for somebody who comes from my neighborhood.’”
She went on to “guarantee” that, within a mile of the location, there is a population of children “who would never in a million years dream that they would be welcome in this museum.”
Without mentioning exactly how she came to the conclusion, Obama instead opted to appeal to the audience’s emotion by sharing a chapter from her own past.
“So I know that feeling of not belonging in a place like this,” she said. “And today, as first lady, I know that feeling limits the horizons of far too many of our young people.” (Read more from “Michelle Obama Says Minorities Are Not Welcome in These Places” HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2015-05-08 00:36:242015-05-08 00:36:24Michelle Obama Says Minorities Are Not Welcome in These Places
American freedom came under attack on May 3rd by soldiers of international jihad. I’m speaking of the attempt by Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi to commit mass murder at an exhibit of depictions of Muhammad in Garland, Texas. These two men arrived at the site clad in body armor with rifles, with the clear intent of murdering unarmed Americans for “blaspheming” their religion.
The organizers of “Draw Muhammad” were trying to demonstrate that Islam is only at home in a position of unchallenged power, with laws backing up its scripture’s incessant threats of hellfire with the sword of the state. These two Muslims went a long way toward proving the point.
Here’s the cold reality: millions of Muslims worldwide believe, with the backing of their own religious authorities, that they have the duty to go anywhere in the world and impose Islamic penalties, including death on non-Muslims who oppose them. That includes missionaries, cartoonists, journalists, politicians, and now American citizens just outside Dallas. I know someone who attended “Drawing Muhammad.” If it weren’t for the courage and competence of local police, he’d be dead today.
Islamists have clear religious reasons for thinking as they do. Expert in Islamic jurisprudence Daniel Akbari, author of Honor Killing and New Jihadists and Islam, cites the authorities used by Islamists to justify such attacks: the Q’uran, and the Hadith, Islam’s tradition of “sayings” about Muhammad, which scholars use to interpret that often-puzzling document. The Q’uran’s “surah 9:61 states, ‘those who hurt Allah’s Messenger (Muhammad SAW) will have a painful torment,’” Akbari notes. “Surah 9:63 says, “Know they not that whoever opposes and shows hostility to Allah and His Messenger (SAW), certainly for him will be the Fire of Hell to abide therein. That is extreme disgrace.’”
Okay, but that’s just a threat for the next world, right? Well, no. Akbari explains: “Under ijma, the consensus of Islamic scholars that forms the basis for sharia, any act that will send one to hell in the afterlife warrants the punishment of death in this life.” In the absence of an Islamic government to carry out such punishment — as Saudi Arabia and the Islamic State currently do — some individual Muslims feel empowered to enact God’s justice in places like Garland, Texas. Imagine how we would live if Christians believed that they could punish sin with death, on their own authority.
There’s a special penalty for those who go further than opposing Islam, and criticize its founder. Akbari explains, “Islamic scholars also find authority for putting to death those who insult Muhammad from Surah 33:57 of Koran. This verse states, ‘Verily, those who annoy Allah and His Messenger (SAW) Allah has cursed them in this world, and in the Hereafter, and has prepared for them a humiliating torment.’ The phrase ‘humiliating torment’ means they will go to hell in the next life and they therefore deserve death.”
Blasphemers deserve it, and individual Muslims feel empowered to enforce it: the death penalty, for dissent.
Multiculturalism: The Suicide Pill of the West
It is staggering to learn that some Western liberals — for instance, one journalist at CNN — are practically blaming the would-be victims of the May 3 attacks, suggesting that the show presenting cartoons of Muhammad was needlessly provocative. The attack’s targets, and by extension the journalists of Charlie Hebdo, it’s suggested, were tempting Muslims to slaughter them.
If some Muslims around the world really feel empowered by their sacred scriptures to kill anyone who “opposes and shows hostility” toward Islam, then, such liberals surmise, the only way to safely avoid terror attacks would be for the rest of us to defer to it and grant it pride of place in our societies. That is, in fact, what Islamists want to accomplish. Why liberals are eager to help them almost boggles the mind — except that for the secular left, the enemy is invariably orthodox Christianity, while every other religion deserves respect in the name of “diversity.” That is the central tenet of multiculturalism, which has nothing to do with racial harmony and tolerance. The core of this ideology is the rejection of any part of the Western tradition that has its roots in Christianity.
With that ideology in mind, we can make sense of the decision by President Obama’s State Department to accept more than 100 Iraqi refugees from ISIS last week — admitting every non-Christian who applied for a travel visa to speak out about the Islamic State’s reign of terror (including Shi’ite Muslims), and rejecting the sole Christian applicant, Sister Diana Momeka, from the scholarly Dominican Sisters of St. Catherine. As Sister Diana’s spokeswoman, Juliana Tamaroozy of the Philos Project, commented, “That’s like putting salt on our wounds and a slap in all Christian faces.”
As Dinesh D’Souza documented, President Obama was trained since his youth, and up through his college years trained himself, in anti-colonial, anti-Western multiculturalism. He was only able to join a Christian church when he found the quasi-Marxist Black Liberation sect of Rev. Jeremiah “God D*** America” Wright. Obama has taken every opportunity — for instance, at prayer breakfasts — to downplay recent proofs of Islamic intolerance, and highlight long-past crimes of individual Christians. The reason isn’t that he’s secretly a Muslim, but that he’s openly a multiculturalist.
Our president applies a rigorous double standard to Christian and non-Christian sinners. The Christians are acting as servants of a long-engrained power structure, which serves to repress and demean a long list of groups, from gays to abortion doctors. Non-Christians, however bigoted, are the heirs of this world’s victims, the people who were held down by Western imperialism and impoverished by capitalism. So the non-Christians (including Muslims) deserve a lower level of scrutiny, even when they are overwhelmingly more violent and intolerant.
And that is why the next time you hear Barack Obama discuss religious intolerance, he won’t mention Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi. He is more likely to be talking about your pastor. (See “Jihad Attacks in Texas, While Obama Keeps U.S. Safe From Iraqi Nuns”, originally posted HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2015-05-08 00:35:512015-05-08 00:35:51Jihad Attacks in Texas, While Obama Keeps U.S. Safe From Iraqi Nuns
Hillary Rodham Clinton’s fighting words on immigration this week, designed in part to provoke Republicans into a reactionary counterattack, instead drew an unusual early response from several top-tier GOP presidential candidates: silence.
Two days after Clinton vowed to expand on President Obama’s executive actions to shield up to 5 million undocumented immigrants from deportation, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker was one of the only leading Republican 2016 contenders to strike back, calling it a “full embrace of amnesty” that is “unfair to hard-working Americans.”
By contrast, former Florida governor Jeb Bush, Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.), Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.) and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie did not weigh in publicly on the remarks Clinton made Tuesday at a campaign stop in Las Vegas. Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.), one of Obama’s most vocal critics on immigration, waited until Wednesday evening to respond on Facebook, writing that Clinton wants to “continue and expand President Obama’s illegal amnesty” and “continue the lawlessness that is dividing our country.”
Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee told MSNBC on Wednesday that Clinton was wrong, saying the country needs to focus on border security first.
The relatively subdued GOP reaction illustrated a dilemma for a Republican Party still wrestling with the hot-button issue of immigration three years after Obama routed Mitt Romney behind overwhelming support from Latinos and Asian Americans. (Read more from “Why Clinton’s Immigration Speech Left Many Republican Rivals Speechless” HERE)
