Police to Begin Patrolling Arkansas Streets with M-16 Style Assault Weapons

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In response to a recent increase in crime, Paragould Mayor Mike Gaskill and Police Chief Todd Stovall offered residents at a town hall meeting Thursday night at West View Baptist Church what could be considered an extreme solution — armed officers patrolling the streets on foot.

Stovall told the group of almost 40 residents that beginning in 2013, the department would deploy a new street crimes unit to high crime areas on foot to take back the streets.

“[Police are] going to be in SWAT gear and have AR-15s around their neck,” Stovall said. “If you’re out walking, we’re going to stop you, ask why you’re out walking, check for your ID.”

Stovall said while some people may be offended by the actions of his department, they should not be. “We’re going to do it to everybody,” he said. “Criminals don’t like being talked to.”

Gaskill backed Stovall’s proposed actions during Thursday’s town hall. “They may not be doing anything but walking their dog,” he said. “But they’re going to have to prove it.”

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South Carolina Bill: Implement Obamacare, Go To Jail For Five Years

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Pursuing an archaic legal theory that punctuated pre-Civil War disputes between the federal government and states, South Carolina state Rep. Bill Chumley last week pre-filed a bill for the upcoming legislative session that would criminalize implementation of President Barack Obama’s 2010 healthcare reform law.

If his bill becomes law, any state official caught enforcing the healthcare law would be guilty of a misdemeanor and “must be fined not more than one thousand dollars or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.”

Federal officials caught enforcing the law, however, would be given stiffer punishment under the proposal.

Any federal employee or contractor enforcing the law “is guilty of a felony and, upon conviction, must be fined not more than five thousand dollars, or imprisoned not more than five years, or both,” the bill proposes.

“I think we’re within our rights to do this,” Chumley explained to U.S. News. “It’s an obligation, I swore an oath to uphold the Constitution and protect the people.”

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Likely Obama Defense Pick Pushed U.N. Scheme

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Former Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., President Obama’s likely nominee to head the Department of Defense, has a long history of introducing legislation aimed at massive U.S. funding for the Third World, even pushing a de facto global tax.

With Obama, Hagel co-sponsored the Global Poverty Act, which would have imposed a new “tax” on the U.S. requiring the country to add 0.7 percent of the gross national product to its overall spending on humanitarian aid.

For fiscal 2009, for example, the bill would have translated into up to $98 billion in required new aid.

The bill passed reading in the Foreign Affairs Committee in July 2008 but was never scheduled for a vote on the Senate floor.

A key section of the bill would have required the U.S. president to develop and implement a comprehensive strategy to achieve the United Nations Millennium Development Goal. The U.N. project purportedly aims to reduce by one-half the proportion of people worldwide who live on less than $1 per day.

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Panetta: Troop Pay May Be On Table in Future Budget Cuts

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At a packed National Press Club lunch event Tuesday afternoon, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta gave a talk full, as always, of ire at the unresolved specter of sequestration, but also spent time talking about how to implement further cuts to the Defense Department.

Under the 2011 Budget Control Act, Panetta and the military service chiefs carved out $487 billion from planned spending over the next fiscal decade. But if members of Congress can’t reach a budget deal that finds equivalent savings, the sequestration mechanism will kick in and lop an additional half-trillion dollars off the Defense Department’s bottom line.

“Because of political gridlock, this department still faces the possibility of another round of across-the-board cuts,” Panetta said. “Wherever I visit our troops, they make clear their concerns about those cuts. What does it mean for them and what does it mean for their families. We’re down to the wire now.”

But even while Panetta urged Congress Tuesday to put a halt to sequestration, he joined the new trend of defense hard-liners talking in earnest about additional Pentagon cuts.

“We obviously continue to look at areas where we can achieve efficiencies at the DoD. There’s no question there is duplication, there is overhead in a bureaucracy of three million people,” he said.

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Gov. Haley Picks Tim Scott to Replace DeMint

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photo credit: North Charleston

Rep. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) will be appointed the first African-American senator from South Carolina next year, Gov. Nikki Haley (R) announced Monday.

Haley’s selection of Scott, a Tea Party favorite, delighted conservative groups that had sought a strong conservative replacement for Sen. Jim DeMint (R), who is resigning in January to lead the Heritage Foundation.

“It is with great pleasure that I am announcing that I am appointing our next U.S. senator-to-be, Congressman Tim Scott,” Haley said at a press conference in Columbia, S.C.

Scott has enjoyed a meteoric rise in the GOP since being elected to the House in 2010, and was DeMint’s preferred choice to fill his seat, according to sources in South Carolina.

“I can walk away from the Senate knowing that someone is in this seat that is better than I am, that will carry that voice-of-opportunity conservatism to the whole country in a way that I couldn’t do,” DeMint said at the press conference.

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More Global Warming Hysteria: Environmentalists Push For Nuclear Option in US Senate

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photo credit: bhamrecycled

More green groups are putting their weight behind an effort to change the Senate’s filibuster rules.

Friends of the Earth, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the League of Conservation Voters, Clean Water Action and Greenpeace signed onto a Monday letter to Democratic leaders calling for changes to the upper chamber’s rules, joining the Sierra Club, unions and social justice groups as members of the “Fix the Senate Now” campaign.

Green groups hope changes to Senate rules could make it easier to push clean energy and climate change-related bills through the chamber.

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Democrats to Introduce Gun Control Bill

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Two days after the shooting deaths of 26 people at a Newtown, Conn., elementary school, Sen. Dianne Feinstein pledged Sunday that she would introduce new gun-control legislation at the beginning of next year’s congressional session.

“It [the bill] will ban the sale, the transfer, the transportation and the possession,” the California senator said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “Not retroactively, but prospectively. And it will ban the same for big clips, drums or strips of more than 10 bullets.”

Feinstein said the purpose of her proposal, a version of the assault-weapons ban that expired in 2004, is to get “weapons of war off the streets of our cities.”

Officials have said that most of those killed in Friday’s massacre — a toll that included 20 children — were shot with a semiautomatic assault-style rifle.

Feinstein has been at the forefront of gun-control efforts nationally. The assault weapons ban that she pushed followed mass killings in a Stockton schoolyard and in a San Francisco office tower. Feinstein was also at San Francisco City Hall in 1978 when Supervisor Dan White killed Mayor George Moscone and fellow Supervisor Harvey Milk. Feinstein saw White flee their offices and found Milk, memorably saying afterward that when she felt for a pulse, her finger slipped into a bullet hole. Feinstein, then the head of the Board of Supervisors, became mayor upon Moscone’s death.

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Oklahoma’s New Open Carry Law Goes into Effect This Week

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Bryan Hull will soon strap his Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum revolver to his hip and meet his armed friends at Beverly’s Pancake House here. They have no interest in the cash register. They just want a late-night breakfast.

A new law takes effect on Thursday in Oklahoma — anyone licensed to carry a concealed firearm can choose to carry a weapon out in the open, in a belt or shoulder holster, loaded or unloaded. Five minutes after midnight Thursday, Mr. Hull and his friends — supporters of the Oklahoma Open Carry Association, a gun rights group — will mark the occasion by wearing their unconcealed handguns while dining at Beverly’s, a 24-hour restaurant.

“It’s just a peaceful assembly,” said Mr. Hull, 44, the association’s co-director. “We’re all licensed by the state to carry. We’ve all been trained and vetted. Why wouldn’t somebody want to have that kind of a group do business with them in their establishment?”

In a state with 142,000 men and women licensed to carry concealed weapons, the scene at Beverly’s will most likely become commonplace as Oklahomans take advantage of the law by displaying their handguns while they shop for groceries, eat at restaurants and walk into banks.

Advocates for gun rights said the ability to “open carry” would deter crime and eliminate the risks of a wardrobe mishap, such as when someone carrying a concealed weapon breaks the law by accidentally exposing the firearm. But the new law is a symbolic as well as practical victory. Supporters said there was no better advertisement for the Second Amendment than to have thousands of responsible adults openly carrying their weapons in a highly visible fashion.

Sen. John Kerry Expected to be Named Next Secretary of State

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President Barack Obama has decided to nominate senator John Kerry as the next secretary of state, to replace Hillary Clinton, according to two major news outlets. An announcement is possible before Christmas.

Kerry, a senior ranking Democrat who ran for the White House in 2004, emerged as favourite after the US ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, withdrew from contention on Thursday. That speculation hardened over the weekend, with both ABC and CNN reporting that Obama had opted for Kerry.

His appointment would require Kerry to resign from the senate, with a special election having to be held by the summer. His replacement as Democratic candidate would almost certainly face a strong challenge from the former Republican senator Scott Brown, who lost the other Massachusetts seat to Elizabeth Warren in November.

Kerry, who is currently chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee, is in the classic diplomatic mould, with decades of experience in foreign policy and a desire to be engaged in the big issues of the day, from Syria to Iran. While Clinton also wanted to be involved in the major issues of the day, she also pursued single, universal issues such as championing women’s rights.

Conventional thinking in Washington has it that Clinton has never been close to Obama and has tended to be excluded from decision-making on major issues such as Iran and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, though she played an important part in shaping policy on Libya. Likewise, Kerry is not thought to be part of Obama’s inner circle, but he will harbour hopes that he will not be left on the sidelines, having been used by the president as an envoy to resolve awkward issues in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Unlike Rice, Kerry, as a senator, can expect a smooth nomination process.

Due to Alleged Concussion, Hillary Clinton Will Not Testify at Benghazi Hearings 5 Days from Now

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Photo Credit: Foreign and Commonwealth Office Creative Commons

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sustained a concussion last week after becoming extremely dehydrated and fainting while suffering from a stomach virus, the State Department said.

The 65-year-old Clinton is recovering at home and has been advised by her doctors to continue to rest and avoid strenuous activity and cancel all work events for the next week. She had been scheduled to testify before a pair of congressional panels looking into the Sept. 11 attack against a diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya.

Dr. Lisa Bardack of the Mt. Kisco Medical Group and Dr. Gigi El-Bayoumi of George Washington University said Saturday that Clinton was suffering from a stomach virus and fainted after becoming extremely dehydrated.

Clinton was diagnosed with a concussion Thursday after fainting at home earlier this week, according to a State Department official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss Clinton’s injury publicly. The doctors did not determine it to be a “severe” concussion, the official said.

Clinton, who is expected to leave her job soon, skipped an overseas trip this past week because of the stomach virus, the State Department said Saturday.

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