When officials at the State Department began mulling the notion of creating a special LGBT envoy, there was some trepidation.
A few worried that designating an envoy expressly for the purpose of promoting the rights of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people around the world — an official goal of U.S. diplomacy since 2011 — would stovepipe the issue and lead others at State to neglect it. Others, according to a State employee involved in the process, wondered if including “LGBT” in the title would hurt the envoy’s ability to get meetings with senior officials in countries such as Uganda and Russia, where gays have increasingly come under legal attack.
In February, veteran U.S. diplomat Randy Berry was named to the carefully titled position of America’s “special envoy for the human rights of LGBT persons,” and it’s clear he has no intention of being isolated either at State or by any state.
In an interview with POLITICO, the 50-year-old, openly gay diplomat sketched out an ambitious agenda, one he hopes will mean forging ties with activists, companies and governments everywhere, including in places hostile to people such as himself.
Of the thousands of positive messages he’s received so far — he can’t think of a negative one — Berry points out that a big chunk came from the Islamic Republic of Iran, whose former president insisted the country had no gays. Surely, he argues, even the most ardent opponents of gays wouldn’t object to having a discussion on whether people in the LGBT community deserve basic human rights. (Read more from “Obama Appoints First LGBT Envoy in Effort to Convert the World Over to the Gay Agenda” HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2015-04-28 01:42:312015-04-28 01:42:31Obama Appoints First LGBT Envoy in Effort to Convert the World Over to the Gay Agenda
Did you know that law enforcement can track your cellphone with a fake cell tower? It’s true — and devices that do this, known as stingrays, are at the center of a growing scandal.
The FBI has done everything it could to keep the existence and use of stingrays a secret. Local law enforcement agencies are forced to sign nondisclosure agreements before they can use the devices. The FBI claims that revealing details about how the gadgets work would tip off criminals and terrorists, rendering them less effective.
But in recent months, civil liberties groups have steadily chipped away at the secrecy of these devices. We’ve learned that they’re used by dozens — and probably hundreds — of law enforcement agencies across the country, and that at least one agency has used them thousands of times.
Critics say the way these devices have been used violates the US Constitution, by tracking people’s locations without judicial oversight. And the secrecy surrounding the devices also appears to be hampering efforts to prosecute violent criminals, as prosecutors have dropped key evidence rather than discuss how it was obtained.
The extreme secrecy surrounding these devices is out of step with the American tradition of open and accountable government. Americans have a right to know that law enforcement spying has proper judicial oversight. And this kind of oversight is impossible if even basic information about the technology is kept under wraps. (Read more from “The Police Are Using False Cell Phone Towers to Spy on Us” HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2015-04-28 01:42:202015-04-28 01:42:20Law Enforcement Using False Cell Phone Towers to Spy on Us, Destroying American Tradition of Open, Accountable Government [+video]
Ian Reisner, one of the two gay hoteliers facing boycott calls for hosting an event for Senator Ted Cruz, who is adamantly opposed to same-sex marriage, apologized to the gay community for showing “poor judgment.”
Mr. Reisner put the apology on Facebook, where a page calling for a boycott of his properties, the gay-friendly Out NYC hotel and his Fire Island Pines holdings, had gotten more than 8,200 “likes” by Sunday evening.
“I am shaken to my bones by the emails, texts, postings and phone calls of the past few days. I made a terrible mistake,” wrote Mr. Reisner.
The New York Times first reported on the event, a dinner and on April 20, at the duplex Mr. Reisner and his business partner Mati Weiderpass co-own on Central Park South in Manhattan. The event was a “fireside chat” for about a dozen people, but was not a fund-raiser.
The two men are prominent figures in the gay rights community, and Mr. Reisner has been especially vocal about same-sex marriage. He’s also a staunch supporter of Israel, as is Mr. Cruz. (Read more from “Homosexual Businessman Who Hosted Ted Cruz Event Apologizes” HERE)
If it looks like a bubble, smells like a bubble and walks like a bubble, it is a bubble.
What we have in the certain stocks today is a bubble every bit as epic as the one that took the NASDAQ Composite Index (INDEX:.IXIC) to its previous record of 5048 back in 2000.
There are few certainties in this world, but one of them is that bubbles pop.
And like all previous bubbles, this bubble will pop too.
One of the key signs of a bubble is when investors and the analysts that cheer them over the cliff refuse to acknowledge facts that contradict their bullishness.
The Evidence Is Irrefutable
Exhibit “A” is Tesla Motors, Inc. (NASDAQ: TSLA). At the beginning of the year, analysts were forecasting that the company would earn $2.78 per share and had an average price target on the company’s stock of $269 per share – $49 per share higher than where it was trading at the time. Since then, a series of setbacks have led analysts to radically lower their earnings estimates to a mere $0.53 per share – a reduction of 80%.
But instead of lowering their price target on the stock by a commensurate amount, analysts have only lowered it by $19 per share to $251 – a reduction of a mere 7.1%.
That is bubble thinking. The psychological term for that is denial. The Wall Street term for that is careerism.
Exhibit “B” is Amazon.com Inc. . . (Read more from “Desperate “Bubble Thinking” Takes Hold on Wall Street” HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2015-04-27 03:50:032015-04-27 03:50:03Desperate “Bubble Thinking” Takes Hold on Wall Street
The United States is moving toward “criminalization of Christianity” as a result of legalizing same-sex marriage, Mike Huckabee told a group of conservative pastors in a conference call organized by the Family Research Council.
“I think it’s fair to say that Christian convictions are under attack as never before,” Huckabee said Thursday, according to audio of the call obtained by Right Wing Watch, a project of the progressive advocacy group People for the American Way. “Not just in our lifetime, but ever before in the history of this great nation. We are moving rapidly toward the criminalization of Christianity.”
The former governor of Arkansas, who is expected to announce his presidential bid on May 5, said it is his “biblical duty” to pray for the members of the Supreme Court as they prepare to rule on same-sex marriage this summer.
In an apparent defense of gay conversion therapy, Huckabee also said that the government is telling chaplains that they cannot help people “seek assistance” for a “homosexual lifestyle” and to “put their Bibles away, no longer pray in Jesus’ name.”
Huckabee said that he cringes whenever he hears people call a court decision “the law of the land.” (Read more from “Mike Huckabee: U.S. Moving Toward ‘Criminalization of Christianity'” HERE)
The Left doesn’t care about gay rights, any more than they care about civil rights, welfare rights, minority rights, animal rights or any other “rights.” According to the Left, “the issue is never the issue; the issue is always the revolution.” The various “rights” the Left has aggressively promoted over the years are merely vehicles to advance the Left’s power.
Consider: the welfare “rights” movement, founded by the notorious socialists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, was not established to guarantee welfare to the poor. As they said, their purpose was to pack the welfare rolls with so many beneficiaries that the government would collapse of its own weight. In the ensuing riots, they hoped policy makers would be driven to accept their socialist solution. In short, they sought anarchy, using a militant poor as their foot soldiers. They could care less what happened to the poor in prosecuting this agenda, and they said so. Doubt me? Just look at the status of the poor today. There are more people on welfare than at any time in history. And the crime and degeneracy that accompany it are epidemic.
Look at our country today. With manufactured crisis Strategist-in-Chief Obama, we are almost there, and Cloward and Piven’s intellectual descendants were out in force in Ferguson. The communist agitators seeking “social justice” for Michael Brown burned down the entire neighborhood. Do black lives matter to them? Apparently not. And they have even said so. The issue is not the issue.
Occupy Wall Street’s black anarchist organizer Nelini Stamp’s new group, Dream Defenders, popularized the slogan “Hands Up Don’t Shoot!” But prior to Ferguson there was Trayvon Martin. Working with Eric Holder’s DOJ, Stamp’s group was responsible for getting Sanford, Florida police chief Bill Lee fired. This despite the fact the FBI agreed with Lee’s assessment that there was no case against Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman. Did Stamp care about “Justice for Trayvon?” Not according to Stamp. “We are actually trying to change the capitalist system we have today, because it’s not working for any of us,” she said.
The Left uses “rights” agendas to wrap itself in the mantle of righteousness and seize the moral high ground, tactically putting us on the defense in the process. But they could care less about the actual issue except in its ability to facilitate their path to power.
The agenda is never the agenda for the Left. And this is especially true for gay marriage. Homosexual marriage is a Trojan horse tactic. The true agenda is to establish the primacy of homosexual rights over the First Amendment’s guarantee of the free exercise of religion. Our nation was founded on this principle, and the gay marriage movement seeks to destroy it.
Consider that Annise Parker, the lesbian mayor of Houston, Texas, demanded to review pastor’s church sermons before public outrage forced her to back off. We have already seen how small businesses have been singled out and attacked for refusing to provide certain services to gays.
What is less known is that these gay couples are frequently part of the movement. They deliberately seek out businesses known for their Christian owners. They deliberately demand a service they know in advance will be refused. When the inevitable happens they use it as pretext to destroy the business and savage its owners. Doesn’t it amaze you how quickly legal groups immediately materialize to assist in the attack? The fact that they got unexpected push back through a spontaneous crowd sourcing campaign to support one pizza shop will not dissuade them from future efforts. If gay marriage is adopted, their current Nazi behavior will look like child’s play compared to what’s coming.
This is a highly organized, nationwide campaign of vilification against Christians. But even Christians are not the ultimate target. If the First Amendment can be challenged this way; if a certain group’s “rights” can trump the U.S. Constitution, and if the Supreme Court can actually issue an edict making it so, then the entire Constitution has become meaningless. This is the Left’s true agenda and it always has been. This is the Cultural Marxists’ endgame. The issue is not the issue. The issue for them has always been destroying our country to impose socialism—with them in charge, of course. In order to do that they have to strip America of its culture, its traditions, and most importantly, the most important law of the land, the U.S. Constitution.
We are almost there. Well-meaning liberals and even some conservatives who support the gay marriage agenda are unknowingly committing an act of betrayal against their own country. If the gay marriage agenda wins, those other rights guaranteed by the Constitution will immediately be at risk. Obama’s “fundamental transformation” of America will be complete. Everyone in our country, including gays, will find all our rights summarily stripped. And if the gay lobby wants to see what that looks like for them, they should turn to Cuba, Russia or North Korea for their inspiration. It will not go well for them. The Left does not care about your rights. They care about one thing and one thing only: their power. (See “Gay Marriage: A Trojan Horse Movement Aimed at the Heart of Our Constitution”, originally posted HERE)
[Editor’s note: Here is a very interesting Restoring Liberty interview with the author several weeks ago, on a different subject:]
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2015-04-27 03:43:562015-04-27 03:43:56Gay Marriage: A Trojan Horse Movement Aimed at the Heart of Our Constitution [+videos]
Last month, we are told, the world enjoyed “its hottest March since records began in 1880”. This year, according to “US government scientists”, already bids to outrank 2014 as “the hottest ever”. The figures from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) were based, like all the other three official surface temperature records on which the world’s scientists and politicians rely, on data compiled from a network of weather stations by NOAA’s Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN).
But here there is a puzzle. These temperature records are not the only ones with official status. The other two, Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) and the University of Alabama (UAH), are based on a quite different method of measuring temperature data, by satellites. And these, as they have increasingly done in recent years, give a strikingly different picture. Neither shows last month as anything like the hottest March on record, any more than they showed 2014 as “the hottest year ever”.
Back in January and February, two items in this column attracted more than 42,000 comments to the Telegraph website from all over the world. The provocative headings given to them were “Climategate the sequel: how we are still being tricked by flawed data on global warming” and “The fiddling with temperature data is the biggest scientific scandal”.
My cue for those pieces was the evidence multiplying from across the world that something very odd has been going on with those official surface temperature records, all of which ultimately rely on data compiled by NOAA’s GHCN. Careful analysts have come up with hundreds of examples of how the original data recorded by 3,000-odd weather stations has been “adjusted”, to exaggerate the degree to which the Earth has actually been warming. Figures from earlier decades have repeatedly been adjusted downwards and more recent data adjusted upwards, to show the Earth having warmed much more dramatically than the original data justified.
So strong is the evidence that all this calls for proper investigation that my articles have now brought a heavyweight response. The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) has enlisted an international team of five distinguished scientists to carry out a full inquiry into just how far these manipulations of the data may have distorted our picture of what is really happening to global temperatures. (Read more from “Due to Widespread Global Warming Fraud, Scientists Launch Comprehensive Review” HERE)
The Department of Justice is “monitoring” Gun Cave Indoor Firing Range owner Jan Morgan in Hot Springs, Arkansas, for banning Muslims from shooting in the facility.
At that time, Fox News reported that Morgan decided to ban Muslims after “two customers she deemed suspicious” showed up in September. Since that time, she has excluded those “she believes to be Muslim based upon their names.” She said, “We are dealing in lethal firearms. I am not going to let a Nazi shoot in here, or a Ku Klux Klan member in here, either.”
Breitbart News reported that the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) wrote a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder asking him to intervene. In the letter, CAIR said, “Given the recent spike in anti-Muslim rhetoric, including Islamophobic statements by government officials, community leaders and media outlets, death threats, and other bias incidents targeting Muslims, I urge you to investigate this matter soon” . . .
And now, the DOJ says it is “monitoring the situation”. . .
CAIR’s Jennifer Wicks said, “We welcome this positive development and hope it leads to a thorough investigation of clear violations of the civil rights of American Muslims and those perceived to be Muslim by the gun range owner.” (Read more from “Department of Justice Monitoring Gun Range Owner Who Banned Muslims” HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2015-04-27 03:43:322015-04-27 03:43:32Department of Justice Now Monitoring Gun Range Owner Who Banned Muslims
As he began his first re-election run in early 2013, tea party Rep. Thomas Massie had no trouble raising money from business interests . . .
The Kentucky Republican voted against returning John Boehner, R-Ohio, to the speaker’s job and opposed an effort by GOP leaders to avoid a standoff with President Barack Obama over immigration that threatened to shut down the Department of Homeland Security.
In the first three months of 2013, Massie reported $46,000 rolling in from tobacco, trucking, health care and other industries. During the first quarter of 2015, Massie has collected just $1,000 from political action committees, which funnel contributions to candidates from business, labor or ideological interests. That money came from the conservative Eagle Forum.
Massie and some other conservatives say the reason their business contributions have fallen is simple: GOP leaders are retaliating for their defiance . . .
Conservatives point out that leadership has targeted them before, and they cite Boehner’s removal of some rebels from coveted committee assignments. In March, an outside group allied with GOP leaders ran radio and Internet ads accusing some House Republicans who opposed efforts to end the Homeland Security impasse of being “willing to put our security at risk.” (Read more from “As Contributions Fall, House GOP Rebels Blame Party Leaders” HERE)
Two gay businessmen [gay night club owners Mati Weiderpass and Ian Reisner] who held a reception for Sen. Ted Cruz, continued to face blowback Friday as a nonprofit canceled an event at one of their nightclubs. . .
Weiderpass and Reisner hosted Cruz, the Texas senator and presidential candidate — and vocal opponent of same-sex marriage — at their duplex apartment earlier this [past] week for a “fireside chat” and dinner. . .
Cruz, a tea party favorite, has long called for a constitutional amendment that would disallow the federal government and courts from reversing state marriage laws. Most recently, he introduced another piece of legislation to prohibit the federal courts from deciding on same-sex marriage until such an amendment is put in place. In the past, the senator has called himself a supporter of traditional marriage, harshly criticized the Supreme Court for effectively allowing same-sex marriage to move forward in five states and said in a 2011 email that “engaging in homosexual conduct is a choice.”
Most recently, he dodged a question about whether he would attend a gay wedding.
Cruz spoke mostly about national security at Monday’s event at Weiderpass and Reisner’s apartment, The New York Times reported, saying only that he believes the states should decide their own marriage policies and that he wouldn’t love his daughters differently if they were gay. (Read more from “Homosexual Businessmen Hold Fundraiser with Ted Cruz, Now Face Blowback” HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2015-04-27 03:41:152015-04-27 03:41:15Homosexual Businessmen Hold Fundraiser with Ted Cruz, Now Face Blowback
When officials at the State Department began mulling the notion of creating a special LGBT envoy, there was some trepidation.
