Election Ushers in Batch of States Preparing for Right-To-Work Laws

/0 Comments/in , /by

Not only did the 2016 election bring the country a new president, but Nov. 8 also ushered in the right political environment for a batch of states to pass right-to-work bills.

Twenty-six states have right-to-work laws on the books, and labor experts are expecting lawmakers in at least three more—Kentucky, Missouri, and New Hampshire—to pass bills giving workers the power to choose whether they want to join a union or pay union dues.

“2016 was sort of the tipping-point year for right to work,” Ben Wilterdink, director of the commerce, insurance, and economic development task force at the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, told The Daily Signal.

“We just got 26 states signed on, and that was the tipping point, and we’ve crossed that threshold,” he continued. “2017 is now going to be the year of right to work.”

In Kentucky, Missouri, and New Hampshire, last month’s election resulted in a flip in party leadership in either governors’ mansions or state legislatures, which put previously defeated right-to-work legislation back on the table.

The issue pits the business community against labor unions, and has proved to be a contentious one for both parties.

Proponents of right-to-work laws argue that they force unions to become more accountable to their members and make states more attractive to companies looking to move.

But unions fiercely oppose right-to-work legislation and say that not only do such laws harm union membership, but they also lead to decreased wages and benefits.

Still, labor experts say they believe that the political landscapes in Kentucky, Missouri, and New Hampshire have created a prime opportunity for right-to-work laws to pass in each of those states.

“The world changed in November of 2016, and advocates of labor reform and for worker freedom are emboldened,” Vincent Vernuccio, director of labor policy at the Mackinac Center in Michigan, told The Daily Signal. “While you’ve seen the fire of worker freedom spreading brightly across the country, it’s now raging thanks to the November election.”

Kentucky

According to Dave Adkisson, president of the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce, right to work has been a priority of the business community in the Bluegrass State for at least 30 years.

Republicans in the state Senate have pursued right-to-work legislation in the past, but the bills died in the state House of Representatives, which was controlled by Democrats.

But last month, Kentucky voters gave Republicans control of the state House for the first time in more than 90 years.

Now, with a GOP trifecta in the state Senate, state House, and the governor’s mansion—Gov. Matt Bevin, a Republican, was elected to a four-year term in 2015—Adkisson said business leaders are “almost to the point of [being] giddy.”

“One of the key elements of the labor argument is that right to work doesn’t matter to business, that they choose locations for other reasons,” Adkisson told The Daily Signal. “I can assure you that business leaders consider right to work as a major signal about whether a state is pro-business or not.”

Adkisson said international firms will typically hire consultants to help determine where in the U.S. they should move, and many of those consultants will “start their search only considering right-to-work states.”

For Kentucky, that ultimately meant losing out on economic development opportunities.

“Companies are not going to relocate to a place where they don’t think they can get a workforce, but invariably in that top list of factors is right to work,” Adkisson said. “You want to at least make the long list to be considered.”

Until recently, business leaders, particularly those in Louisville, were more “fatalistic” about right to work not passing Kentucky’s state Legislature.

But when Indiana—Kentucky’s neighbor to the north—passed a right-to-work law in 2012, “that suddenly got the attention of Louisville,” Adkisson said, in part because Indiana appeared “more pro-business.”

“It’s just a general issue of competitiveness,” he said.

Kentucky state legislators will meet for a shortened session, just 30 days, in January, so they have a tight timeline to pass right-to-work legislation.

Bevin said in September he wanted to see the state Legislature tackle right to work next year, but in an interview with the Paducah Sun earlier this month, he said he would allow the Legislature to decide how to address a bevy of issues they’ll face next year.

“I know people want to see right to work addressed, they want prevailing wage addressed, they want school choice addressed, they want tort reform addressed, they want tax reform addressed, they want pension reform addressed,” he said.

Still, labor experts say they are hopeful.

“Kentucky has demonstrated that the state is ready,” Jonathan Williams, vice president of the Center for State Fiscal Reform at ALEC, told The Daily Signal. “I’d expect it within the first half of the year.”

Missouri

While the success of right to work in Kentucky hinged on the makeup of the state Legislature, it was the election of Republican gubernatorial candidate Eric Greitens in Missouri that bolstered Republicans’ attempts to pass right-to-work laws in the Show-Me State.

Greitens, who defeated Democratic nominee Chris Koster last month, has stressed his support for right-to-work laws.

“I support it because it would stop companies and union bosses from taking a cut of your paycheck to support their political organization,” Greitens said of right to work on his campaign website. “It’s just common sense. That money is your money—and you should decide how you want to spend it.”

Republicans have a supermajority in the state House of Representatives and the state Senate, and already, GOP state lawmakers in both chambers have prefiled right-to-work bills for the 2017 legislative session.

“It’s going to be a race to see who is state 27, 28, and 29,” Vernuccio said.

New Hampshire

Williams, of ALEC, said Kentucky and Missouri are the “low-hanging fruit” for right-to-work proponents.

Though he and other labor experts are hopeful New Hampshire will join their ranks next year, New Hampshire is “somewhat on the bubble,” he said.

Republicans will control the state Legislature and the governor’s mansion in the Granite State after voters elected Republican Chris Sununu governor in November.

Sununu supports right to work and said earlier this month he’s “fairly” confident state lawmakers will pass right-to-work legislation next year.

“I’ve talked to businesses outside of this state that have clearly brought it up to me, so there’s no doubt by passing right to work, it will open up new economic opportunities for the state of New Hampshire,” he said in an interview with the New Hampshire Union Leader.

Still, the governor-elect encouraged state lawmakers to “be good listeners on both sides of the aisle.”

State lawmakers in the New Hampshire House passed a right-to-work bill last year, but it didn’t make it out of the Senate.

Though Republicans control the state government, Williams said there has been resistance among the GOP’s ranks.

Additionally, Democratic state Sen. Lou D’Allesandro of Manchester told the Union Leader opponents of right to work “have a good chance to stop it.”

Also at issue in New Hampshire is the dearth of other right-to-work states in the New England region.

Kentucky and Missouri are surrounded by states with right-to-work laws on the books, so they compete with others for business opportunities.

For New Hampshire, which would be the first in the region to become right to work, that competition doesn’t exist.

“There’s less pressure on them to get this across the finish line,” Wilterdink said.

Still, Williams said success in New Hampshire would be a “symbolic victory for conservatives.”

“If you saw the first state in New England become a right-to-work state—it’s been a tough region for conservatives to crack,” he said. “It would embolden right-of-center officials to push harder.”

Growing Momentum

Labor experts are confident that by the end of 2017, the number of right-to-work states will hover around 30.

Though they’re certain Kentucky and Missouri, at a minimum, will pass right-to-work laws, Wilterdink said lawmakers in three more states—Delaware, Pennsylvania, and New Mexico—will at least consider bills to make right to work a reality.

“We’re seeing a lot of movement and a lot of pressure, especially as businesses look at other states, especially as more and more states become right to work,” Wilterdink said. “States and their citizens are realizing they’re missing out.”

Republicans in Pennsylvania introduced right-to-work bills in the past, without success.

Earlier this year, New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez committed to including right to work on her agenda for the 2016 legislative session.

Right-to-work bills have also been introduced in the Delaware General Assembly, but they were ultimately blocked by Democrats who control both chambers.

“This is a jobs bill in the states,” Williams said. “As more and more legislators are elected and looking for ways to make their states more competitive in growing jobs, we’ve continued to see businesses move from one state to another with better climates. This is one of the best things states can do.” (For more from the author of “Election Ushers in Batch of States Preparing for Right-To-Work Laws” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

The Founders Anticipated ‘Fake News.’ Here’s What They Did About It.

/0 Comments/in , /by

Following the presidential election, numerous stories surfaced about how “fake news” influenced the results. This prompted a reaction from the media and a concerted effort by the social media giant Facebook to crack down on the phenomenon—announcing that it would in part by using liberal fact-checkers to distinguish the “real” from the “fake” news.

The truth is that while the American media landscape has been in a constant state of change over two centuries, the spread of hyperpartisan, scurrilous, and even phony news stories has been more common than uncommon throughout the history of the republic.

Ultimately, despite the increasingly Wild West state of journalism, Americans have been better at finding the truth than less free societies.

The media response frames the fake news issue as nearly the single greatest threat to democracy in our time. But despite the worries that surround an uptick in fraudulent news, the phenomenon is nothing new, nor does it particularly portend dark times in America’s future.

The overreaction in response, potentially damaging both the right to free speech and a culture that supports it, may be more dangerous to a free society.

‘Dupes of Pretended Patriots’

The idea that the press could try to deceive rather than enlighten readers was not lost on the Founders. In the years before and after the American Revolution there was an explosion of printing presses throughout the Western world as improved printing technology was becoming widely available.

Journalists and pamphleteers were certainly vital to spreading the ideas of American rebellion against the English—names like Thomas Paine and Samuel Adams were nearly synonymous with the American Revolution, and they certainly weren’t alone. Though propaganda and distortion of the news were common as well.

After America gained independence, there were still huge numbers of scribblers writing about news and politics with varying levels of credibility and accuracy.

When the framers of the Constitution met to discuss the construction of the new government at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, freedom of the press and what it would mean for the future of the country was certainly on their minds.

Many Founders fretted about what the proliferation of false or destructive notions would mean for the idea of democracy and a society of mass political participation.

Massachusetts delegate Elbridge Gerry lamented how the people in his home state were being led astray by false stories from malcontents and manipulators.

“The people do not want [lack] virtue, but are the dupes of pretended patriots,” Gerry said. “In Massachusetts it had been fully confirmed by experience, that they are daily misled into the most baneful measures and opinions, by the false reports circulated by designing men, and which no one on the spot can refute.”

So what did the Founders do to stop this problem? They created a system of government that would allow room for democracy, yet checked its vices: through institutions like Congress, the constitutional amendment process, and division of power between branches of government as well as the states and federal government. Not to mention the Electoral College, which the modern left now decries as unfair and undemocratic.

Unfortunately, some of these checks have been eroded over time and continue to be undermined. For instance, the 17th Amendment forced states to elect senators through a popular vote rather than have the state legislature choose a representative, which has reduced the power of the states in the American system.

And in some states, like California, the requirement to pass a constitutional amendment is simply 50 percent of the vote plus one, yet again increasing the chance that a temporary excitement of the populace can lead to rapid, negative changes in governance.

The weakening of the structural checks on democracy has been the greater threat of fake news’ proliferation than nonsense peddlers themselves.

Tocqueville on the ‘Liberty of the Press’

It was not only the Founders who understood the trade-offs between a free press and misleading news. Alexis de Tocqueville, the famed French observer of American life, wrote about the freedom of the press in his 1835 book “Democracy in America.”

Tocqueville noted that when he arrived in the U.S., the very first newspaper article he read was an overheated piece accusing then-President Andrew Jackson of being a “heartless despot, solely occupied with the preservation of his own authority” and a “gamester” who ruled by corruption. This type of account was not unusual.

The years following the founding saw a booming and free-wheeling publishing industry, unimpeded by the licensing and restrictions common in other countries. Freedom allowed newspapers to proliferate throughout the United States in a highly decentralized way.

And in early American history, most newspapers were expressly partisan or outright controlled by individual politicians. They often aggressively attacked and made outrageous comments about political opponents.

Yet Tocqueville wrote that despite the general vehemence of the press, America was further from actual violence and political revolution than other societies that tightly controlled information.

While recognizing the occasional problems of an unimpeded fourth estate, Tocqueville wrote that “in order to enjoy the inestimable benefits that the liberty of the press ensures, it is necessary to submit to the inevitable evils that it creates.”

An attempt to submit “false” news and opinions through an official fact-checker would likely only elevate and perhaps justify a false opinion in the minds of the people, according to Tocqueville.

He continued to write that expecting to have the good of a free press without the bad has been “one of those illusions which commonly mislead nations in their times of sickness when, tired with faction and exhausted by effort, they attempt to make hostile opinions and contrary principles coexist upon the same soil.”

Americans were so used to being bombarded with opinions and information from a diverse media, Tocqueville wrote, that they were less likely to react to falsehoods and outrageous opinions.

Fake News existed in that time as well as ours, but it did little to outright convince people to change their views. This continues to be the case today.

Tocqueville concluded of a free press:

When the right of every citizen to a share in the government of society is acknowledged, everyone must be presumed to be able to choose between the various opinions of his contemporaries and to appreciate the different facts from which inferences may be drawn. The sovereignty of the people and the liberty of the press may therefore be regarded as correlative, just as the censorship of the press and universal suffrage are two things which are irreconcilably opposed and which cannot long be retained among the institutions of the same people.

The visiting Frenchman understood what Americans have almost always believed. Occasional false news stories cannot destroy a society fitted for liberty, but extreme efforts to contain them will.

The Search for Truth

The reality is, barriers to prevent modern Americans from receiving “fake news” are unlikely to succeed in a free society where a mass of information is readily available.

The internet, and a lack of trust in the legacy media, has allowed numerous new media publications to find success. It has again radically decentralized the way Americans get their information.

These legacy media organizations are attempting to reign in the chaos with new gimmicks like fact-checkers, but ultimately their influence and credibility are fading in the minds of Americans as fewer people trust or desire to read those sources.

This isn’t an anomaly in American life—it has been the norm. We must trust and maintain the mediating constitutional system the Founders created along the judgment of the American people.

The freedom of the press, enshrined in the First Amendment and tempered by institutions designed to slow governmental change and thwart temporary excitements of opinion, created a nation incredibly free, yet robust enough to withstand potential large-scale errors in judgment.

The Founders understood that the good would outweigh the bad with a free press, and no court could justly measure the rightness or wrongness of news and public opinion. They realized that without allowing the press to operate freely and leaving the people as its ultimate tribunal, America would never truly be a land of liberty.

Fake or biased news was the willingly paid price of an open society, and the winnowing process of the American system ultimately leads the country toward the truth. (For more from the author of “The Founders Anticipated ‘Fake News.’ Here’s What They Did About It.” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Conservative Groups Warn of Obama’s ‘Midnight Litigation’ Against US Business

/1 Comment/in , /by

Conservative and pro-business groups warn that the Obama administration may pursue legal action to enforce some of its thousands of new “job crushing” regulations before President-elect Donald Trump is sworn into office.

Regulations promulgated in “the waning days” of President Barack Obama’s lame-duck administration could constrain the new Trump administration, the coalition of groups warned Vice President-elect Mike Pence in a letter dated Dec. 28.

“Because of this concern, Congress enacted the Congressional Review Act, which provides Congress procedural tools to disapprove expeditiously these last-ditch midnight regulations,” the letter says.

The Congressional Review Act could address regulations put in place by the Obama administration since June 3. However, the law can’t prevent so-called “midnight litigation” launched by the executive branch to enforce those regulations.

The Obama administration issued 3,852 new federal regulations during 2016, according to a new analysis by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, first reported Friday by the Washington Examiner.

The letter from conservative activists and business leaders says:

It has come to our attention that a number of departments and independent agencies are working furiously behind closed doors to bring significant, legally tenuous litigation against American business interests before Jan. 20, 2017. Doing so will saddle the Trump administration with having to litigate cases based on job-crushing liberal legal theories.

Inauguration Day, when Trump is sworn in as president, is Jan. 20.

Signers of the letter include Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform; Ken Blackwell, chairman of Constitution Congress; and Clyde Wayne Crews, vice president for policy at Competitive Enterprise Institute.

The signatories represent 29 organizations, including Frontiers of Freedom, the Heartland Institute, and Liberty Counsel.

The letter warns Pence, a former congressman and governor of Indiana who is well-liked by conservatives, that the new administration should review any litigation to enforce the recent regulations.

“Should the Obama administration bring nonroutine, last minute, legally unorthodox midnight litigation, your administration should not hesitate to withdraw immediately from that litigation,” the letter to Pence states.

Such last-minute litigation could hurt job growth, the letter says.

John R. Smith, the chairman of BIZPAC, the Business Political Action Committee of Palm Beach County, wrote in an op-ed for BizPac Review:

The lame-duck Obama administration has launched a mad scramble to throw up as many hurdles, and to plant as many last-minute landmines as possible against the new American president. In his final days of office, Barack Obama has initiated a major flurry of new executive orders, directives and regulations, thousands of them, that he is piling into the federal books.

Frontiers of Freedom, a nonprofit educational organization dedicated to promoting traditional American values, circulated the letter.

“Everything should be suspect,” George Landrith, president of Frontiers of Freedom, told The Daily Caller News Foundation, referring to the Obama administration’s final gush of regulations. (For more from the author of “Conservative Groups Warn of Obama’s ‘Midnight Litigation’ Against US Business” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Clinton Foundation CEO Mysteriously Missing; Massive Conspiracy of Silence by Mainstream Media

/0 Comments/in , , /by

Eric Braverman, the Clinton Foundation CEO from 2013 until 2015, has apparently been missing since October. His absence has fueled speculations in the blogosphere but so far has been ignored by the media.

Some speculate, with good reason, that Braverman may have gone into hiding after an email mentioning his name was released by Wikileaks on October 22 of this year. In the March 2015 email exchange, Center for American Progress President Neera Tanden told Clinton campaign manager and confidant John Podesta there was a mole within the Clinton Foundation. Podesta in his reply told Tanden the mole was Braverman.

Braverman had abruptly resigned from the Clinton Foundation shortly before this email exchange took place. And then, after the email exchange was made public by Wikileaks, Braverman vanished from the public eye.

This seems like a story that someone might want to report.

The last evidence of Braverman’s public activity was October 12, when he posted his last tweet on Twitter. (Usually he tweets about once a month. His “husband,” Neil Brown, hasn’t tweeted since August, although he rarely tweets.) I left a voicemail on Braverman’s personal phone and sent him an email, but received no response. He is still listed as a lecturer at Yale University and, contrary to some reports, there is a record of his lectures going back several years. I contacted the press office and Braverman’s department at Yale and received no response.

Braverman, the Podesta Leaks and the Clinton Foundation

Craig Murray, a former British ambassador to Uzbekistan and a close associate of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, told The Daily Mail that Podesta’s emails were leaked to the organization by a disgruntled insider, not the Russians. Consequently, there are suspicions it may have been Braverman. (Though some of the Podesta emails are dated after Braverman’s tenure with the foundation, if he had Podesta’s password, he could still have accessed his email after leaving.)

Re: Tweet from @JoeNBC
From:[email protected]
To: [email protected]
Date: 2015-03-08 19:48
Subject: Re: Tweet from @JoeNBC

Holy Moses.
Sent from my iPhone> On Mar 8, 2015, at 5:23 PM, John Podesta wrote:
>
> Eric Braverman
>
> JP
> –Sent from my iPad–
> [email protected]
> For scheduling: [email protected]
>
>> On Mar 8, 2015, at 4:49 PM, Neera Tanden wrote:
>>
>> @JoeNBC: A source close to the Clintons tell @ron_fournier to “follow the money” and find the real HRC scandal. https://t.co/lPTQY0L0o4
>>
>> I’m hoping someone is keeping tabs on Doug Band. Quote in here is from someone who worked in Clinton Foundation.

Politico ran a long story about Braverman’s ouster in 2015. Based on email correspondence released by Wikileaks, Braverman was apparently hired by Chelsea Clinton to clean up the corruption in the foundation, but then forced out of the foundation by longtime Clinton loyalists; sources say Podesta made him a target.

In 2011, Podesta’s leaked emails show that Chelsea was aggressively calling for an internal investigation. For example, former President Bill Clinton had raised over $1 billion though the foundation to rebuild 100 villages in India, but only $53 million was spent on the project. Also, Braverman resigned at the time Hillary was arranging one of her notorious “pay to play” deals with foreign leaders: a $12 million contribution from the king of Morocco in exchange for giving a speech.

#Where’s Eric: Did Braverman Request Asylum From the Russians?

screen-shot-2016-12-23-at-2-08-48-pm-1024x760

So far Braverman’s apparent disappearance has only been discussed by bloggers and fringe websites, which often mix the fact that he has gone silent with other unconfirmed claims. For instance, the site WhatDoesItMean.com reported that Braverman requested asylum in Russia on October 23. The information apparently came from a Russian blogger, who reported it in a rambling blog post on LiveLeak.

That’s pretty thin evidence. Moreover, WhatDoesItMean.com is known for posting questionable news stories. The left-leaning, myth-debunking site Snopes labeled the news site’s account of Braverman as false, but based its judgment on the fact that website publishes false stories. Aside from this circular argument, Snopes provides no independent evidence for its judgment. I contacted the Russian embassy and received no response. So at the moment, the claim that Braverman requested asylum from the Russians is an unconfirmed rumor.

#Where’sEric: Could Braverman be in FBI Protective Custody?

There are also rumors that Braverman is in FBI protective custody, perhaps in exchange for testifying against the Clintons. Sources within the FBI have said it is likely there will be indictments handed down over the Clinton Foundation’s pay-to-play schemes. Senior FBI officials told CNN that the investigation into the Clinton Foundation had never ended and is still ongoing. According to The Daily Caller News Foundation, that probe now involves as many as five FBI bureaus across the country: New York, Little Rock, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles and Miami.

Would the FBI have hustled Braverman to safety once it was known Podesta had pegged him as a mole? This theory seems plausible, given what we know. But there is still no independent evidence of it.

All Questions, No Answers

If Braverman is in hiding to protect his life, is it because he leaked the Podesta emails to Wikileaks, and/or is he preparing to testify against the Clintons? The one thing we know is that Braverman has disappeared from the public eye, and that neither he, his “husband” Neil Brown, nor his family, nor his Yale employers, has made a single public statement to dispel the speculations. (For more from the author of “Clinton Foundation CEO Mysteriously Missing; Massive Conspiracy of Silence by Mainstream Media” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Obama’s Final, Most Shameful, Legacy Moment

/0 Comments/in , /by

The audience — overwhelmingly Jewish, passionately pro-Israel and supremely gullible — applauded wildly. Four years later — his last election behind him, with a month to go in office and with no need to fool Jew or gentile again — Obama took the measure of Israel’s back and slid a knife into it.

People don’t quite understand the damage done to Israel by the U.S. abstention that permitted passage of a Security Council resolution condemning Israel over settlements. The administration pretends this is nothing but a restatement of long-standing U.S. opposition to settlements.

Nonsense. For the last 35 years, every administration, including a re-election-seeking Obama himself in 2011, has protected Israel with the U.S. veto because such a Security Council resolution gives immense legal ammunition to every boycotter, anti-Semite and zealous European prosecutor to penalize and punish Israelis . . .

The peace parameters enunciated so ostentatiously by Secretary of State John Kerry on Wednesday are nearly identical to the Clinton parameters that Yasser Arafat was offered and rejected in 2000 and that Abbas was offered by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in 2008. Abbas, too, walked away . . .

The administration claims a kind of passive innocence on the text of the resolution, as if it had come upon it at the last moment. We are to believe that the ostensible sponsors — New Zealand, Senegal, Malaysia and a Venezuela that cannot provide its own people with toilet paper, let alone food — had for months been sweating the details of Jewish housing in East Jerusalem. (Read more from “Obama’s Final, Most Shameful, Legacy Moment” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Obama Celebrates His Newest Monuments by Tweeting out Pictures of the Wrong National Park

/0 Comments/in , /by

The White House took to Twitter Wednesday to promote President Barack Obama’s latest monument designations in the Western U.S., but its tweet had a picture of a completely different national park.

Obama created the Bears Ears and Gold Butte national monuments, but it’s Wednesday tweet included a picture of the Three Gossips at Arches National Park that was created in 1929.

Utah Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch’s staff noticed the mistake and unleashed a storm of tweets criticizing the Obama administration’s error. Hatch is not a fan of Obama’s unilateral creation of national monuments in Utah and Nevada.

Arches National Park was redesignated as a national park in 1971 and is about a two-and-a-half hour drive to the newly created Bears Ears National Monument, but the two federal parks have very distinct geological features.

Utah Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz joined in mocking the White House for using the wrong picture to announce the creation of Bears Ears National Monument.

(Read more from “Obama Celebrates His Newest Monuments by Tweeting out Pictures of the Wrong National Park” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Bundy Militants ‘Locked and Loaded’ After Obama Monument Push

/0 Comments/in , /by

Anti-government militants erupted with fury and calls for an armed uprising after President Obama designated a new national monument in Nevada that includes the site of the infamous Bundy Ranch standoff between right-wing agitators and federal agents.

Members of the self-styled militias that swarmed to the aid of Cliven Bundy outside of Las Vegas in 2014 — and who later joined the rancher’s sons to seize a federal wildlife refuge in rural Oregon — said they were readying for another showdown. Obama’s move on Wednesday to protect 300,000 acres of federal land around Gold Butte, close to the Bundy ranch, comes as two dozen people await trials for their roles in the Nevada and Oregon standoffs, which emboldened right-wing militants across America and became a powerful symbol of anti-government sentiment.

“Get your gear ready,” wrote Jon Ritzheimer, one of the men who used handguns and assault rifles to hole up in Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge for 41 days last year. “Obama just designated the Bundy Ranch a national monument.”

Others with ties to patriot groups and militia movements online responded with a bit more force. “Locked and loaded ready to go,” wrote Chris Border, a member of the Cliven Bundy’s Army! Facebook group, which boasts more than 2,000 members. “Tired of this crap and time to do something.”

Whether the tough talk turns into another armed confrontation remains to be seen. “So far it’s just been a lot of posturing,” JJ MacNab, an expert on anti-government extremism in the U.S. and author of the upcoming book “The Seditionists,” told Vocativ. “But members of these groups are looking for something to happen. They don’t really care what it is.” (Read more from “Bundy Militants ‘Locked and Loaded’ After Obama Monument Push” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

DMV Licensed 800,000 Illegal Aliens Under 2-Year-Old Law

/0 Comments/in , /by

On the day that California officials implemented a controversial law that allows undocumented residents to obtain driver’s licenses, DMV offices throughout the state were packed with immigrants looking to take advantage of the opportunity.

Two years after the implementation of AB 60 on Jan. 1, 2015, an estimated 806,000 undocumented residents have received driver’s licenses, according to Department of Motor Vehicles statistics this month. About 14,000 of these licenses were issued in November alone, the DMV said.

The law has allowed undocumented residents to come out of the shadows and drive safely in their neighborhoods, according to Maricela Gutierrez, executive director of the immigration advocacy organization, SIREN.

“Many of them have been able to drive their kids to school and to run errands, when many times they were taking buses that would take them up to three hours to get from point A to point B,” she said. “It opened up new opportunities.”

One San Jose resident who applied for a license just a few days after AB 60 went into effect received his license in the mail shortly after. (Read more from “DMV Licensed 800,000 Illegal Aliens Under 2-Year-Old Law” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Obama’s Historic Land Grab: 553 Million Acres for ‘Conservation’

/0 Comments/in , /by

President Barack Obama decreed two more national monuments from his vacation home in Hawaii on Wednesday, taking 1.65 million more acres of Western land for management by the federal government.

The new Bear Ears Buttes monument includes 1.35 million acres of Utah and the Gold Butte monument includes about 300,000 acres in Nevada.

That makes a total of 553 million acres of national lands and waters that Obama has repurposed for conservation and protection using the 1906 Antiquities act, more than any other president, according to the New York Times. More than 80 percent of Nevada and about 65 percent or Utah is owned by the federal government, according to National Public Radio.

Utah Republican leaders in Congress were furious after Obama decided to designate the controversial Bear Ears monument.

“This arrogant act by a lame duck president will not stand,” Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee responded in a statement. “I will work tirelessly with Congress and the incoming Trump administration to honor the will of the people of Utah and undo this designation.” (Read more from “Obama’s Historic Land Grab: 553 Million Acres for ‘Conservation'” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

President Selfie Is Actually Trying to Claim These 5 Absurd ‘Achievements’

/0 Comments/in , /by

With just weeks left in the White House, President Obama is trying especially hard to sell a favorable legacy. In a collection called “The Record,” WhiteHouse.gov outlines five briefs that President Obama can tout as “achievements” the past eight years. We’ve broken them down here — the most ridiculous, the most arrogant, and the downright false:

1. Ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

According to “The Record,” Obama responsibly “ended the U.S. combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, bringing home 90 percent of the nearly 180,000 American troops deployed in those countries when President Obama took office.”

U.S. armed forces are still very much in Iraq and Afghanistan, even if the fight there doesn’t look the same as it did in 2003. There’s no mention that President Obama signed a 10-year Bilateral Security Agreement with the president of Afghanistan to keep thousands of American troops in Afghanistan until at least 2024. President Obama also put boots on the ground to intervene in the Syrian civil war — despite repeatedly saying he would not put boots on the ground there.

2. Taking credit for legalizing gay marriage

President Obama is also touting an achievement for having ended “the government’s defense of the Defense of Marriage Act, leading to the Supreme Court’s landmark decisions holding the Act unconstitutional.”

Yes. You can thank President Obama — who once was against gay marriage and argued that “the term marriage itself has strong religious roots and a strong tradition that means something special to people in this country” — for the legalization of gay marriage, after he “evolved” on the issue in 2012. Just as Obama’s moral evolution on marriage was for the sake of political expediency, so is this last attempt to claim the legalization of gay marriage as an achievement of his administration.

3. Transgender military

According to “The Record,” Obama promoted “diversity and inclusion as an indispensable asset and strategic imperative in the United States’ national security workforce of more than three million dedicated military and civilian personnel.”

While Obama’s work on diversity and inclusion in the military may have impacted the non-gender conformative, it didn’t help people like Monifa Sterling, who was court-martialed as a Marine for putting up Bible verses at her work station.

4. Seizing millions of acres of land from the American people

Obama is credited for creating “the largest marine monument in the world, which is completely off-limits to commercial resource extraction” — but that’s not anything to be proud of. President Obama has unilaterally seized more land and sea for the federal government than any other president. Since taking office, Obama has claimed more than 548 million acres of land and water under the 1906 Antiquities Act. That’s 548 million acres of U.S. bountiful land and water that you, reader, will not be able to access or use in your own country.

5. Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)

Obama is proud to have “Concluded the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a high-standard trade agreement that, if passed by Congress, would boost Made-in-America exports and American jobs, while setting strong rules of the road on labor and the environment across the fast-growing Asia-Pacific region.”

But according to President-elect Trump, TPP will be one of the first things to go at the start of his administration. That would mean that one of Obama’s signature achievements, something he’s worked on for years, will be washed away like a footprint during high tide.

And America would be better off if many other Obama “achievements” washed away along with TPP. (For more from the author of “President Selfie Is Actually Trying to Claim These 5 Absurd ‘Achievements'” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.