Photo Credit: Reuters As President Obama last month launched a sweeping new national program to combat “climate change,” including tens of billions of dollars in likely new subsidies for solar and wind power and bio-energy, a separate, groundbreaking study by the National Research Council has warned that those kinds of subsidies are virtually useless at quelling greenhouse gases.
The study, which looks at the subsidies and other incentives embedded in U.S. federal tax law after the past several years of climate change initiatives, concludes that they have done little or nothing so far to cut U.S. contributions to global carbon emissions, and are unlikely to do much more before 2035, the project’s research horizon.
The two-year, $2 million probe was the first of its kind undertaken to examine the relationship between U.S. tax provisions, a key tool of U.S. climate change policy, and the actual reduction of greenhouse gases.
The pioneering nature of the study itself speaks volumes about the murkiness of official knowledge concerning how well government can tweak the global thermostat by trying to radically reorient energy production and consumption in the U.S. economy.
It was carried out by a 12-member National Academy of Sciences panel of economists, energy experts, environmentalists, tax specialists and climate scientists backed by consultants wielding powerful computerized economic models and a sizeable handful of National Academy of Sciences staff.
Photo Credit: WNDAn Arizona college is being sued for labeling a student a “bigot” and punishing her with a long-term suspension after she requested that English be used in her nursing studies class so she could learn the subject.
The action was filed against Pima Community College on behalf of student Terri Bennett, who alleged that school officials created a “learning environment [that] was hostile to her as an English-language speaker.”
The complaint alleges that Bennett repeatedly was thwarted in her work listening to lectures, finishing group studies and participating in skills labs, clinicals and other learning activities by fellow students who spoke Spanish, which she did not understand. Study groups and labs in which she participated, an essential part of her nursing training, were being conducted in Spanish.
In response, she asked the college – which operates, ironically, under Arizona’s English-only legal requirement – to help enforce the use of English in her class so she could continue to pursue her educational goals. However, according to the complaint, Bennett was targeted by the school with ridicule, attacks, threats and, eventually, a nine-month suspension.
The group ProEnglish is helping Bennett with legal support.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-07-19 04:00:592016-04-11 11:18:57Student Booted from U.S. College for Favoring English!
Photo Credit: APNSA warned to rein in surveillance as agency reveals even greater scope
By Spencer Ackerman. The National Security Agency revealed to an angry congressional panel on Wednesday that its analysis of phone records and online behavior goes exponentially beyond what it had previously disclosed.
John C Inglis, the deputy director of the surveillance agency, told a member of the House judiciary committee that NSA analysts can perform “a second or third hop query” through its collections of telephone data and internet records in order to find connections to terrorist organizations.
“Hops” refers to a technical term indicating connections between people. A three-hop query means that the NSA can look at data not only from a suspected terrorist, but from everyone that suspect communicated with, and then from everyone those people communicated with, and then from everyone all of those people communicated with.
Inglis did not elaborate, nor did the members of the House panel – many of whom expressed concern and even anger at the NSA – explore the legal and privacy implications of the breadth of “three-hop” analysis.
But Inglis and other intelligence and law enforcement officials testifying before the committee said that the NSA’s ability to query the data follows rules set by the secret Fisa court, although about two dozen NSA officials determine for themselves when those criteria are satisified. Read more from this story HERE.
Photo Credit: APObama loses support for renewal of surveillance; NSA phone program will expire next year
By Stephen Dinan. The lawmaker who wrote the USA Patriot Act said Wednesday that, as it stands, the House will never renew the provisions that the Obama administration uses to collect Americans’ phone records, meaning the government’s surveillance program will be cut off some time next year.
Both Democrats and Republicans told top administration officials that they reject President Obama’s claim that the law allows the intelligence community to collect the phone numbers, time, date and duration of calls made by Americans, and they said Mr. Obama needs to change the way he is running the program if he wants to keep it intact.
Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., the Wisconsin Republican who was chief author of the Patriot Act in 2001, said Congress specifically tried to limit the law’s uses when it renewed the provisions under Section 215 of the act that allow the government to collect data from businesses without obtaining a warrant.
In that renewal Congress added in the word “relevant” to try to limit what the government was pursuing. But Mr. Sensenbrenner said the intelligence community has expanded, not limited, its data-gathering efforts after Congress tried to reel them in.
“Section 215 expires at the end of 2015 and unless you realize you’ve got a problem, that is not going to be renewed. There are not the votes in the House to renew Section 215,” he said. “It’s got to be changed and you have to change how you operate Section 215. Otherwise, in a year or a year and a half, you’re not going to have it anymore.” Read more from this story HERE.
By Brian Hughes. Russian President Vladimir Putin insisted on Wednesday that an already frosty relationship between his government and the United States would not be damaged if Russia granted asylum to National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden.
“Bilateral relations, in my opinion, are much more important than the squabbles around the activities of the security services,” Putin told reporters in eastern Siberia.
“We warned Mr. Snowden that any of his activities that cause damage to U.S.-Russian relations are unacceptable to us.”
Snowden, the former government contractor who disclosed details about U.S. phone and Internet surveillance programs, applied for temporary asylum in Russia on Tuesday. A lawyer representing Snowden told Russia’s Interfax news agency on Wednesday that the ex-CIA official could leave Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport in the next few days.
The Obama administration has repeatedly warned the Putin regime not to give Snowden refuge since he faces a trio of espionage charges back on U.S. soil. If his application were approved, Snowden could stay in Russia for up to a year. Read more from this story HERE.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-07-18 03:06:112016-04-11 11:18:58NSA’s Surveillance Goes “Exponentially Beyond what it had Previously Disclosed”
Photo Credit: CNNBy Michael Martinez. Police around the United States are recording the license plates of passing drivers and storing the information for years with little privacy protection, the American Civil Liberties Union said Wednesday.
The information potentially allows authorities to track the movements of everyone who drives a car.
The ACLU documented the police surveillance after reviewing 26,000 pages of material gathered through public records requests to almost 600 local and state police departments in 38 states and the District of Columbia.
Police are gathering the vehicle information with surveillance technology called automatic license plate readers, and it’s being stored — sometimes indefinitely — with few or no privacy protections, the ACLU said.
“The documents paint a startling picture of a technology deployed with too few rules that is becoming a tool for mass routine location tracking and surveillance,” the ACLU said in a written statement.
Photo Credit: APHow the government is keeping track of EVERYWHERE you’re driving thanks to license plates and police scanners
By James Nye. Chances are, your local or state police departments have photographs of your car in their files, noting where you were driving on a particular day, even if you never did anything wrong.
Using automated scanners, law enforcement agencies across the country have amassed millions of digital records on the location and movement of every vehicle with a license plate, according to a study published Wednesday by the American Civil Liberties Union.
Affixed to police cars, bridges or buildings, the scanners capture images of passing or parked vehicles and note their location, uploading that information into police databases. Departments keep the records for weeks or years, sometimes indefinitely.
As the technology becomes cheaper and more ubiquitous, and federal grants focus on aiding local terrorist detection, even small police agencies are able to deploy more sophisticated surveillance systems.
While the Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that a judge’s approval is needed to track a car with GPS, networks of plate scanners allow police effectively to track a driver’s location, sometimes several times every day, with few legal restrictions. Read more from this story HERE.
Photo Credit: Robert Landau/CorbisAlarming number of databases across US are storing details of Americans’ locations – not just government agencies
By Ed Pilkington. Millions of Americans are having their movements tracked through automated scanning of their car license plates, with the records held often indefinitely in vast government and private databases.
A new report from the American Civil Liberties Union has found an alarming proliferation of databases across the US storing details of Americans’ locations. The technology is not confined to government agencies – private companies are also getting in on the act, with one firm National Vehicle Location Service holding more than 800m records of scanned license plates.
“License plate readers are the most pervasive method of location tracking that nobody has heard of,” said Catherine Crump, ACLU lawyer and lead author of the report. “They collect data on millions of Americans, the overwhelming number of whom are entirely innocent of any wrongdoing.”
Crump said that the creeping growth of license plate scanners echoed the debate over the National Security Agency. “It raises the same question as the NSA controversy: do we want to live in a world where the government makes a record of everything we do – because that’s what’s being created by the growth of databases linked to license plate readers.”
ACLU based their research on the results of freedom of information requests to 300 police departments and other agencies nationwide that generated 26,000 pages of documents. The mountain of training materials, internal memos and policy statements retrieved by the group has opened a door on a previously little understood world. Read more from this story HERE.
Photo Credit: Reuters ACLU: We’re Increasingly Living in a Dragnet Society
“There’s just a fundamental question of whether we’re going to live in a society where these dragnet surveillance systems become routine,” said Catherine Crump, a staff attorney with the ACLU, which wants police departments to immediately delete records of cars not linked to a crime…
The ACLU study, based on 26,000 pages of responses from 293 police departments and state agencies across the country, also found that license plate scanners produced a small fraction of “hits,” or alerts to police that a suspicious vehicle has been found.
In Maryland, for example, the state reported reading about 29 million plates between January and May of last year. Of that amount, about 60,000 — or roughly 1 in every 500 license plates — were suspicious. The No. 1 crime? A suspended or revoked registration, or a violation of the state’s emissions inspection program accounted for 97 percent of all alerts. Read more from this story HERE.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-07-18 03:05:242016-04-11 11:18:58Moving Closer to Police State: Agencies Tracking Innocent Drivers by License Plate Scanners Everywhere (+video)
Photo Credit: WNDTalk radio icon Rush Limbaugh warned his listeners Wednesday that while many expected the election of a half-black president would ease racial strife in American, it is worse than ever under Barack Obama.
Limbaugh was reflecting on the newest strategy by Attorney General Eric Holder – to attack laws that allow self-defense, such as the famed “Stand Your Ground” law in Florida that was cited by neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman.
He was acquitted last week of charges of second-degree murder after a jury decided he had been in fear for his life when teen Trayvon Martin was beating his head on a concrete sidewalk. Zimmerman pulled his firearm and shot.
On Wednesday’s show Limbaugh said, “Eric Holder is moving on the stand-your-ground law. I tell you, folks, these people… It is really sad. I think it was the British historian Alistair Cooke (I think it was him) in his Letters to America who said that America would never overcome its ‘black problem.’ It was never going to happen. I’m struck here. We elected the first black president, and that was supposed to fix all of this, wasn’t it, or at least make a huge dent in the race problem in this country?”
He continued, “The theory was that if America, with a vast majority white population and 12 to 14 percent black population, elected a black man president, ‘Why, that would speak volumes about how progressive and advanced America had become. It would go a long way toward healing the wounds that apparently remain from slavery and discrimination and all the other things.’ But seems it’s got worse, to me. It seems that with the election of Barack Obama, racial strife in this country’s worse than it’s ever been since the Civil War. Or as bad, at least.”
Photo Credit: Gage SkidmoreDemocrats doggedly pursuing a far-reaching immigration bill are counting on help from Republican Rep. Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney’s running mate last year and an unlikely candidate for delivering the centerpiece of President Barack Obama’s second-term agenda.
Ryan, the House Budget Committee chairman who is frequently mentioned in the GOP lineup of possible 2016 presidential candidates, stands apart from many fellow House Republicans in favoring a way out of the shadows for the 11 million immigrants living in the U.S. in violation of the law.
He casts sweeping overhaul as a necessity to ensure both economic and national security — a fitting argument for an acolyte of Jack Kemp, the late Republican congressman and 1996 vice presidential candidate who backed an ill-fated effort in 2006 to overhaul the immigration system.
‘‘Paul Ryan says we cannot have a permanent underclass of Americans, that there needs to be a pathway to citizenship,’’ says Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., who has been working relentlessly on immigration legislation. ‘‘He is my guiding light. I know I get him in trouble every time I say it.’’
Senior White House aides often mention the Wisconsin Republican as crucial to the prospects for legislation this year, hoping the Republican with impeccable conservative credentials will sway recalcitrant House members. Ryan also is a reminder of two other powerful forces backing an overhaul of immigration laws — the Catholic Church and business.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-07-18 03:00:202016-04-11 11:19:00Democrats Pin Their Hopes for Obama’s Amnesty Bill on Rep. Paul Ryan
The causes of America’s current economic malaise are many, and some are harder to address than others. The misguided fiscal, monetary, and regulatory policies of our profligate and dysfunctional government head the list. Those can be turned around.
But a problem much more difficult to turn back is the rotting of our moral fabric—the decay of the Protestant work ethic—engendered by decades of New Deals, Great Societies and one attempt after another to Spread the Wealth Around. In its stead, we now have a culture of entitlement and dependency that threatens to accelerate our slide into permanent decline.
The alarming statistics can be seen in the accompanying graph. The first is the breadwinner index—the percent of the U.S. male population that is gainfully employed. Only a few points of this decline can be ascribed to the aging of the population. The graph for males 18 to 52 has much the same slope.
The second shows the number of out-of-wedlock births, the rate of which surpassed 40 percent of all births as of 2008. Add to this the new-normal 50 percent divorce rate and we have a country in which the majority of our children are being raised outside of the economic unit once known as the nuclear family.
The third shows per capita inflation-adjusted total government spending, including federal, state, and municipal government expenditures as best as they can be estimated. The extent to which the huge spike in government spending per person over the past 60 years is the cause or the effect of the first two trends is open to debate. But the relationship is clear. When traditional family breadwinners stop carrying their load, the burden falls upon the remaining workers, an increasing number of whom are single mothers struggling to make ends meet.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-07-18 02:52:002016-04-11 11:19:01Root Cause of America’s Economic Decline: The Loss of the Protestant Work Ethic
Photo Credit: APThere are famously no atheists in foxholes, but some conservatives say that the American military is not giving a fair shake to soldiers, sailors and Marines who want to practice their faith and express their beliefs more openly.
The Family Research Council and more than a dozen other conservative and pro-family groups this month announced a renewed push in Congress for stronger legislative protection for religious military personnel to combat what they say is a threat to religious liberty in the nation’s armed forces. A report from the Family Research Council documented a range of events in the military — such as one in which an Air Force officer was told to remove a Bible from his desk — that the group said exposed a “growing hostility to religion.”
Critics say the charges are overblown and are part of a covert move to promote evangelical Christianity within the ranks, but the coalition says it has collected a number of examples of violations of religious liberty and expression inside the military.
“There is a growing list of cases and incidents that point to the fact that religious liberty in our nation’s military is under attack,” said Family Research Council President Tony Perkins.
One event detailed in the report described a soldier who was reprimanded for serving fare from Chick-fil-A — known for its owners’ strong Christian beliefs — and for making statements related to the federal law on same-sex marriage at his promotion party. Religious leaders have had invitations to speak at military events abruptly withdrawn, and military personnel have been ordered to remove religious signs and symbols.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-07-18 02:49:152016-04-11 11:19:01Proponents of Religion Push for More Freedom of Expression in the Military
The National Rifle Association (NRA) on Wednesday accused Attorney General Eric Holder of exploiting the death of Trayvon Martin to push the Obama administration’s gun control agenda.
NRA Executive Director Chris Cox blasted Holder’s calls for states to review “stand your ground” laws, which allow the use of deadly force for self-defense. Those statutes received scrutiny during the Florida trial of George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watch captain who was acquitted Saturday on charges of murder and manslaughter in the shooting of Martin, an unarmed black teenager.
“The attorney general fails to understand that self-defense is not a concept, it’s a fundamental human right,” Cox said in a statement. “To send a message that legitimate self-defense is to blame is unconscionable and demonstrates once again that this administration will exploit tragedies to push their political agenda.”
In a speech Tuesday, Holder said “stand your ground” laws in states like Florida encouraged “violent situations to escalate.”
“Separate and apart from the case that has drawn the nation’s attention, it’s time to question laws that senselessly expand the concept of self-defense and sow dangerous conflict in our neighborhoods,” Holder said.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-07-18 02:46:562016-04-11 11:19:02NRA: Holder Exploiting Trayvon Martin Death to Push Gun Control Agenda
Photo Credit: APBy Tarini Parti. Sen. Marco Rubio will face several of his supporters-turned-critics in a closed door meeting of the Tea Party Caucus next Tuesday.
The Florida Republican has been criticized by tea party and conservative groups for his work with the Gang of Eight, and will be one of the senators, House members and tea party-affiliated groups attending the meeting.
The meeting will be co-chaired by Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) — two of the most vocal conservatives in the upper chamber.
Sen. Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.), who is now facing a primary challenge from Liz Cheney, is also expected to attend the caucus meeting, which could serve as an opportunity for him to solidify support among conservatives.
The meeting is organized by the TheTeaParty.Net, but several other conservative groups including Americans for Tax Reform, Tea Party Express, 60 Plus, Republican Jewish Coalition and National Tax Payers Union are expected to have a presence at the caucus meeting. Read more from this story HERE.
Photo Credit: APRand Paul to Mike Enzi: ‘I’ll do anything I can’
By Hadas Gold. Rand Paul is formally endorsing Sen. Mike Enzi as he faces Liz Cheney in a Wyoming GOP primary next year, Paul told POLITICO in an interview Wednesday.
“I’ve told him I’ll do anything I can to help him,” the Kentucky GOP senator said. “In fact, somebody asked me today if they could use my name, and I said I’d be happy to sign on and do a fundraiser for him.”
Paul said he isn’t sure why Cheney decided to challenge Enzi, but said she might end up picking up some grudges for doing so.
“I don’t think it probably will be helpful in the long run. I’m pretty sure Senator Enzi will be able to hold off against any primary challenge,” Paul said. “In doing so there will be some people that won’t be so happy with the primary challenge, that might bear grudges.”
Cheney, 46, is the daughter of former vice president Dick Cheney and launched her campaign Tuesday with a video calling for a “new generation of leaders to step up to the plate.” Read more from this story HERE.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-07-18 02:45:402016-04-11 11:19:02Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Mike Enzi Slated for Tea Party Meeting
