IRS Finally Reveals List of Tea Party Groups Targeted for Extra Scrutiny

/0 Comments/in , , /by

More than three years after it admitted to targeting tea party groups for intrusive scrutiny, the IRS has finally released a near-complete list of the organizations it snagged in a political dragnet.

The tax agency filed the list last month as part of a court case after a series of federal judges, fed up with what they said was the agency’s stonewalling, ordered it to get a move on. The case is a class-action lawsuit, so the list of names is critical to knowing the scope of those who would have a claim against the IRS.

But even as it answers some questions, the list raises others, including exactly when the targeting stopped, and how broadly the tax agency drew its net when it went after nonprofits for unusual scrutiny.

The government released names of 426 organizations. Another 40 were not released as part of the list because they had already opted out of being part of the class-action suit.

That total is much higher than the 298 groups the IRS‘ inspector general identified back in May 2013, when investigators first revealed the agency had been subjecting applications to long — potentially illegal — delays, and forcing them to answer intrusive questions about their activities. Tea party and conservative groups said they was the target of unusually heavy investigations and longer delays. (Read more from “IRS Finally Reveals List of Tea Party Groups Targeted for Extra Scrutiny” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

LEST WE FORGET: The Worst Scandal in U.S. Presidential History

/1 Comment/in , , /by

The “Chinagate” fundraising scandal plagued the 1996 Bill Clinton-Al Gore campaign and Hillary was very much involved. Chinagate aka Commercegate is the most serious scandal in U.S. history. It involves the transfer of America’s most sensitive technology, including but not limited to nuclear missile and satellite technology, apparently in exchange for millions of dollars in contributions to the 1996 Clinton-Gore re-election effort and the Democratic National Committee.

The Chinagate scandal of 1996 ended up in an award of $900,000 in attorney’s fees and costs to Judicial Watch ten years later.

The scandal was an apparent scheme by the Clinton administration to sell seats on taxpayer-funded trade missions in exchange for campaign contributions to the 1996 Clinton-Gore campaign.

Judicial Watch began an investigation and Clinton administration officials deliberately concealed and destroyed records regarding the trade mission and testimony was falsified.

Nolanda Hill, a business partner and confidante of the Clinton then-Commerce Secretary Ron Brown testified in a court hearing during the litigation that the Clinton White House told Brown to “delay the [Judicial Watch] case by withholding the production of documents prior to the 1996 elections and to devise a way not to comply with the court’s orders.”

She also testified that Brown, who died in a plane crash during a trade mission to Bosnia, told her that Hillary conceived of the scheme to sell trade mission seats. Brown complained of being “Hillary’s blankety-blank tour guide.”

The case was so serious and so damaging that the Commerce Department asked for a judgment against itself to avoid any further revelations. The court refused and insisted the Commerce Department conduct a new search for trade mission records and authorized discovery into the illegal concealment and destruction of government records.

Congressional investigations, FEC investigations, a criminal inquiry by the Justice Department and the FBI followed. The DOC changed its trade mission policy which abandoned all political contributions affecting mission seats.

Finally, in 2006, without any fanfare, an appellate court upheld an award of $900,000 to Judicial Watch.

While there was a lot of circumstantial evidence, there was never a smoking gun.

~ Clinton friend Yah Lin “Charlie” Trie pleaded guilty to charges of violating campaign finance rules in exchange for having pending indictments dropped against him in Washington and Arkansas.

~ According to news reports in 1997, Democratic donor Johnny Chung received a $150,000 transfer from the Bank of China three days before he handed then-First Lady Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff a $50,000 check.

~ Then-Vice President Al Gore received political donations from Buddhist nuns who had taken a vow of poverty.

~ President Clinton admitted in 1997 that he invited major campaign donors to spend the night in the White House. The Clintons hosted 404 overnight guests.

~ During the investigation by the Department of Justice, about 120 people connected to “Chinagate” either fled the country or pleaded the Fifth Amendment to prevent testifying.

Judicial Watch brought the case on behalf of shareholders of Loral Space & Communications Ltd. They transferred sensitive US missile technology to China in the 1990s. The CEO Bernard Schwartz gave $1.5 million to various Democratic Party entities including Bill Clinton’s 1996 reelection campaign.

At the same time Schwartz and Loral convinced the Clinton Administration to transfer technology export licensing authority from the State Department to the more politically-influenced Commerce Department. Schwartz and Loral then obtained licenses from the Commerce Department that were needed to launch Loral-manufactured communications satellites into orbit from China.

They ended up advancing China’s missile program which is a threat to US national security much as the Clinton-Russian uranium deal is..

Federal racketeering charges were never brought.

Then there was the contribution scandal involving fugitive Norman Hsu during Hillary’s last presidential run. She kept most of the money he contributed even after she knew he admitted guilt in illegal bundling of the contributions. He had raised more than $1 million for then-Senator Clinton’s presidential campaign.

There were questions, but no smoking gun.

In January 2001, immediately before Bill Clinton left office, he granted a presidential pardon to Marc Rich after his ex-wife and his friend donated a combined $1.45 million to the Clinton Presidential Library. Rich fled the country once he was convicted of tax evasion.

Even Hillary’s 2000 Senate campaign involved an illegal contribution from Hollywood mogul Peter Paul and the leveling of a $35,000 fine by the FEC. Hillary’s finance director was indicted and acquitted.

Recently, very large contributions to the Clinton Foundation and exorbitant speaking fees for Bill Clinton were proven to coincide with favors granted by the State Department and signed off by then-secretary Hillary Clinton. One extremely large donation was tied to the selling of our Uranium to the Russians.

The Benghazi scandal brings us once again to Hillary Clinton’s lack of transparency and suspected intrigue. She deleted 30,000 emails from a private server she was not allowed to use for government documents. She had no right to delete the emails and she did it when Congress announced they were going to subpoena them. (For more from the author of “LEST WE FORGET: The Worst Scandal in U.S. Presidential History” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Someone You’d Never Expect Warns America ‘to Be Prepared for a Disaster’

/0 Comments/in , , /by

When Barack Obama speaks to the public, it is very rare that he does so without a specific purpose in mind. So why is he urging Americans “to be prepared for a disaster” all of a sudden? On May 31, Obama took time out of his extremely busy schedule to deliver an address at the FEMA National Response Coordination Center in Washington. During his speech, he stressed that every American is responsible for preparing for disasters, and that includes “having an evacuation plan” and “having a fully stocked disaster supply kit”. These are basic steps that I have been encouraging people to do for years, but if they won’t listen to me, perhaps they will listen to the man currently residing in the White House. The following excerpt from Obama’s speech comes directly from the official White House website…

One of the things that we have learned over the course of the last seven and a half years is that government plays a vital role, but it is every citizen’s responsibility to be prepared for a disaster. And that means taking proactive steps, like having an evacuation plan, having a fully stocked disaster supply kit. If your local authorities ask you to evacuate, you have to do it. Don’t wait.

This speech was timed to coincide with the beginning of the hurricane season, although hurricanes have not posed much of a threat lately.

In fact, a major hurricane has not made landfall in the United States for 127 straight months.

But without a doubt, we all need to be preparing for disaster. Hurricanes can create a short-term emergency that can last for a few days, but there are other threats that could create a major emergency that could potentially last for an extended period of time. That list of potential threats includes a major volcanic eruption, a natural or engineered pandemic, a west coast earthquake, a New Madrid earthquake, a tsunami on either the east or west coasts, a meteor impact, Islamic terror, war, an EMP burst that takes down the power grid, cyberwarfare, economic collapse, and civil unrest resulting in the imposition of martial law.

Of course the items that I just mentioned are not mutually exclusive. In fact, in different scenarios we could actually see multiple events happen in rapid succession.

It is interesting to note that during his speech Barack Obama also noted that the American people seem to have become very complacent about getting prepared…

And what we’ve been seeing is some public complacency slipping in; a large portion of people not having preparedness kits, not having evacuation plans.

This is exactly what I have been noticing as well. There appears to be a tremendous amount of apathy out there, and relatively few people really seem to feel much urgency to get prepared these days.

My contacts in the emergency preparedness industry have been telling me that sales are way down right now. There was a big peak last fall, but since then it is like interest in prepping has just fallen off the map.

Ultimately, those companies are going to be okay because interest will pick back up shortly as global events begin to spiral completely out of control. However, of much greater concern is the fact that people have not been using this period of relative calm constructively.

Just like we have seen in Venezuela, time to prepare eventually runs out. And someday there will be millions of parents that are absolutely horrified when their children come to them crying out for food and they don’t have anything to give to them because they didn’t heed the warnings and they didn’t get prepared.

When that day arrives, many of those families may be forced to turn to whatever help the government is offering at the time.

One more thing that I found particularly noteworthy about Obama’s speech was that he said that there is now “a FEMA app” that can direct you to the nearest “FEMA shelter” in the event of a major emergency.

If you need information about how to put together an evacuation plan, how to put together a disaster preparedness kit, as Craig said, we’ve got an app for everything now. We have a FEMA app in English and in Spanish to help you prepare your family for a disaster. You can update the National Weather Service alerts. You can get safety tips for more than 20 kinds of hazards. It provides you directions to nearby shelters.

Could you envision yourself and your family having to take refuge in a “FEMA shelter” someday?

If not, you should do what you can to get prepared now. Over the next couple of days, my wife and I will be releasing a couple of new videos about preparation on our YouTube channel. In fact, I just checked and the first one is already up…

Unlike Venezuela, it looks like we may still have a little bit more time to prepare for what is ahead. Some people will relax and use this time to party, but those that are wise will work diligently and will do what they can to get ready for the exceedingly challenging times that are rapidly approaching.

Hopefully you are listening to the warnings and are heeding what the watchmen are saying.

If not, the consequences for what will happen to you and your family will ultimately be on your own hands. (For more from the author of “Someone You’d Never Expect Warns America ‘to Be Prepared for a Disaster'” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Watch: Obama ‘Trips Over His Tongue’ When He Goes off Teleprompter to Bash Trump

/0 Comments/in , , /by

President Obama, lauded as one of America’s premier orators when he was elevated to the White House back in 2008, had a stuttering moment Wednesday as he was trying to trash Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.

“If we turn against each other based on divisions of race or religion. If-if-if-if-if-if-if-if-if-if-if we, if we fall for, you know, a bunch of okie-doke, just because, you know it-it-uh. You know, it-it-it-it-it-it sounds funny or the tweets are provocative,” Obama said during an appearance in Elkhart, Indiana.

John S. Roberts, writing on Young Conservatives, noted that he was never impressed with Obama the orator in the first place.

“Barack Obama is usually known for being an eloquent speaker. I guess, right? That’s what people say,” Roberts wrote. “I mean, the man has used the word ‘uh’ more than anyone in recent memory.”

Roberts then called Obama’s inability to get through one sentence attacking Trump “tripping over his tongue.”

Jim Hoft wrote on Gateway Pundit, “Poor Barack. He wanted to sound more powerful. He really did! Unfortunately, it didn’t go as planned. He turned into a stuttering mess.”

Others noticed the rhetorical pothole as well.

“In the past I’ve pointed out when this guy stutters he is lying. Towards the end of his economic speech he was hinting to Trump and trying to slide in a cheap shot or two but that truthful Achilles heel kicked in!” wrote BMartin1776 on Saving the Republic. (For more from the author of “Watch: Obama ‘Trips Over His Tongue’ When He Goes off Teleprompter to Bash Trump” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Watch: Firefighters With American Flags on Their Trucks Compared to Terrorists in Rhode Island

/0 Comments/in , , /by

A city official in Rhode Island has angered the Coventry Fire Department by demanding that they remove the American flag from the back of their fire trucks.

Fox news reports that Fred Gralinski of the Central Coventry Fire District “bizarrely compared it to ISIS flying its black flag while riding around in Iraq or Syria.”

“They look like a bunch of yahoos,” Gralinski said at a board meeting. “Like in the paper, like ISIS in Syria going to take over a city. I don’t think they need that big flag on the back of the truck. That’s not America to me. Those are a bunch of terrorists. So, I’m going to ask you to take the flag off that truck.”

Gralinski reportedly apologized for his comments through a spokesman after facing backlash from members of the fire department. (For more from the author of “Firefighters With American Flags on Their Trucks Compared to Terrorists in Rhode Island” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

“DEVASTATING”: Inspector General Report Effectively Terminates Hillary Clinton’s Presidential Aspirations

/0 Comments/in , , /by

With a State Department Inspector General’s report concluding that Hillary Clinton was not, and would not have been, permitted to use a private email server during her tenure as secretary of state, the mainstream media have been forced to finally wake up and take notice of this persistent Clinton scandal. But instead of reporting that the revelations demonstrate how unfit Mrs. Clinton is for president, these news reports largely focus on the claim that it was merely record-keeping policies, or rules, which were broken.

“When two IT staffers raised concerns in 2010 that the system might not properly preserve records, the official said the system had been reviewed by attorneys and chided the staffers ‘never to speak of the Secretary’s personal email system again,’ the report says,” according to The Washington Post. “The IG’s office said it could not find evidence of such a legal review.”

In other words, the IT department was strong-armed into accepting Hillary’s dangerous email setup.

Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy, writing for National Review, points out that Mrs. Clinton’s transgressions were not merely violations against “policies” and “procedures,” as the IG report suggested, but “that these policies and procedures were expressly made pursuant to, and are expressly designed to enforce compliance with, federal law,” something the IG report at least acknowledged. And what were those “serious violations of federal law,” according to McCarthy?

“Mrs. Clinton’s withheld tens of thousands of government records (the e-mails) for nearly two years after she departed the State Department. She failed to return all government-related e-mails upon demand. She destroyed (or at least attempted to destroy) tens of thousands of e-mails without consultation with the State Department. And she did it all malevolently: for the manifest purpose of shielding her communications from the statutory file-keeping and disclosure requirements.”

Fortune magazine has listed a number of Mrs. Clinton’s misstatements, and shown how the IG report has exposed them as such. For example, Mrs. Clinton said: “What I did was allowed. It was allowed by the State Department. The State Department has confirmed that.”—AP interview, September. But what the report said was that there was “‘No evidence’ that Clinton asked for or received approval to conduct official government business on a personal email account run through a private server in her New York home. According to top State Department officials interviewed for the investigation, the departments that oversee security ‘did not — and would not—approve’ her use of a personal account because of security concerns.”

But an even bigger story here goes beyond Mrs. Clinton’s blatant attempts to subvert the Freedom of Information Act, and the fact that she did not archive her emails properly for record-keeping purposes. The bigger story is that this has been a national security scandal, placing classified sources and methods at risk. Mrs. Clinton wrote 104 emails that are considered classified, and sent or received at least 2,000 more emails containing material that was later classified. There were 22 emails that were considered “Top Secret” and too highly classified to be released to the public.

She and her apologists have claimed at various times that nothing was classified at the time she sent or received it and that nothing that passed through her server was marked classified. But it’s the material itself that matters, not the markings, and it was her responsibility to recognize material as classified.

Of course, Mrs. Clinton and her staffers declined to be interviewed for the Inspector General’s investigation, after previously stating that she would fully cooperate. “So what conceivable legal privilege do Clinton, Mills, Sullivan, and Abedin have that would allow them to refuse to answer investigators’ questions?” asks McCarthy in another article for National Review. “Only one: the Fifth Amendment privilege—i.e., the refusal to answer on the grounds that truthful responses might be incriminating.”

“The report is devastating,” writes McCarthy, adding that “although it transparently strains to soften the blow.”

“For example,” he writes, “it concludes that State’s ‘longstanding systemic weaknesses’ in recordkeeping ‘go well beyond the tenure of any one Secretary of State.’” However, Mrs. Clinton’s homebrew server was singular in its ability to breach national security.

Even CNN host Wolf Blitzer questioned why Mrs. Clinton did not cooperate with investigators. “But if she has done nothing wrong, if she’s done nothing wrong and she has nothing to hide, why not at least cooperate with the inspector general?” asked Blitzer on his CNN show, The Situation Room.

Pointing out that there was no Senate-confirmed inspector general during Mrs. Clinton’s four years as secretary of state, Howard Krongard, the State Department IG from 2005 to 2008 under President George W. Bush, told Fox News that “I would have been stunned had I been asked to send an email to her at a personal server, private address. I would have declined to do so on security grounds and if she had sent one to me, I probably would have started an investigation.”

Mrs. Clinton has uttered so many lies that she and her campaign are practically drowning in them, causing even The New York Times to take time to fact check her campaign rhetoric. Yet Mrs. Clinton continues to blame “Republicans and their allies” for damaging her presidential chances. “Thus far, this ‘vast right-wing conspiracy’ has entailed several left-leaning media outlets, the Obama-appointed intelligence community Inspector General, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” writes Guy Benson for Townhall.

That FBI investigation could derail Mrs. Clinton’s presidential run if FBI Director James Comey decides to refer the case to the Department of Justice. However, this State Department IG report is having an immediate effect. “This is a bad day for Clinton’s presidential campaign. Period,” wrote Chris Cillizza for the Post on May 25. “For a candidate already struggling to overcome a perception that she is neither honest nor trustworthy, the IG report makes that task significantly harder.”

Clinton’s biggest primary challenge comes not from the right, but from the left, with Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) refusing to concede to her. Sanders has said that he will challenge Mrs. Clinton all the way to the Democratic convention. Meanwhile, Democratic National Committee chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz may lose her position because she is perceived as “too divisive a figure to unify the party in 2016,” reports The Hill.

While the Democratic Party is divided, Mrs. Clinton remains the frontrunner and likely presidential nominee. However, it is becoming more and more clear that she has endangered government secrets.

“One of the more shocking parts of this report was the fact that after she thought she was being hacked, she complained to her staffers,” said CNN justice correspondent Evan Perez on Blitzer’s Situation Room on May 25. “In the report, it says their solution was simply to unplug the server.” Mrs. Clinton and her staff failed to report the incident to security officials, Perez said.

This damaging IG report demonstrates that Mrs. Clinton and her staff violated policy, lied about a legal review, and placed national security at risk. It is almost certain that her server was hacked by foreign governments. While mainstream media outlets would prefer to report this as a paperwork or records scandal, Mrs. Clinton’s email scandal remains a national security debacle, and a serious threat to end her dream of moving back into the White House. (For more from the author of “”DEVASTATING”: Inspector General Report Effectively Terminates Hillary Clinton’s Presidential Aspirations” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

WHAT DO THEY KNOW THAT WE DON’T? Feds Preparing for Massive Natural Disaster in Pacific Northwest

/0 Comments/in , , /by

Starting on June 7th, FEMA will be conducting a large scale drill that has been named “Cascadia Rising” that will simulate the effects of a magnitude 9.0 earthquake along the Cascadia Subduction Zone and an accompanying west coast tsunami dozens of feet tall. According to the official flyer for the event, more than “50 counties, plus major cities, tribal nations, state and federal agencies, private sector businesses, and non-governmental organizations across three states – Washington, Oregon, and Idaho – will be participating”. In addition to “Cascadia Rising”, U.S. Northern Command will be holding five other exercises simultaneously. According to the final draft of the Cascadia Rising drill plan, those five exercises are entitled “Ardent Sentry 2016″, “Vigilant Guard”, “Special Focus Exercise”, “Turbo Challenge” and “Joint Logistics Over-The-Shore”. The primary scenario that of all of these participants will be focusing on will be one that involves a magnitude 9.0 earthquake along the Cascadia Subduction Zone followed by a giant tsunami that could displace up to a million people from northern California to southern Canada.

We have never seen such a disaster before in all of U.S. history.

Do they know something that the rest of us do not?

It is funny that they are preparing to deal with the effects of a magnitude 9.0 earthquake along the Cascadia Subduction Zone, because that is precisely the size of earthquake that I warned about in an article back in March.

The San Andreas Fault in southern California gets more headlines, but the Cascadia Subduction Zone is a much larger threat by far. This fault zone is where the Juan de Fuca plate meets the North American plate, and it stretches approximately 700 miles from northern Vancouver Island all the way down to northern California.

If a magnitude 9.0 earthquake were to strike, the immense shaking and subsequent tsunami would cause damage on a scale that is hard to even imagine right now. Perhaps this is why FEMA feels such a need to get prepared for this type of disaster, because the experts assure us that it is most definitely coming someday. The following comes from the official website of the “Cascadia Rising” exercise…

A 9.0 magnitude earthquake along the Cascadia Subduction Zone (CSZ) and the resulting tsunami is the most complex disaster scenario that emergency management and public safety officials in the Pacific Northwest could face. Cascadia Rising is an exercise to address that disaster.

June 7-10, 2016 Emergency Operations and Coordination Centers (EOC/ECCs) at all levels of government and the private sector will activate to conduct a simulated field response operation within their jurisdictions and with neighboring communities, state EOCs, FEMA, and major military commands.

If you don’t think that the scenario that they are studying is realistic, perhaps you should consider the fact that the largest earthquake in the history of the continental United States stuck along the Cascadia Subduction Zone back in 1700. The following comes from CNN…

In fact, “the Cascadia” already has made history, causing the largest earthquake in the continental United States on January 26, 1700. That’s when the Cascadia unleashed one of the world’s biggest quakes, causing a tsunami so big that it rampaged across the Pacific and damaged coastal villages in Japan.

Yes, we all remember the big Hollywood blockbuster about the San Andreas fault. But if they wanted to be more realistic, they should have made the movie about the Cascadia Subduction Zone. According to a professor of geophysics at Oregon State University, the Cascadia Subduction Zone has the potential to create an earthquake “almost 30 times more energetic” than anything the San Andreas Fault can produce…

Everyone knows the Cascadia’s cousin in California: the San Andreas Fault. It gets all the scary glamor, with even a movie this year, “San Andreas,” dramatizing an apocalypse in the western U.S.

Truth is, the San Andreas is a lightweight compared with the Cascadia.

The Cascadia can deliver a quake that’s many times stronger — plus a tsunami.

“Cascadia can make an earthquake almost 30 times more energetic than the San Andreas to start with, and then it generates a tsunami at the same time, which the side-by-side motion of the San Andreas can’t do,” said Chris Goldfinger, a professor of geophysics at Oregon State University.

And the kind of tsunami that would be created by such a massive quake along the Cascadia Subduction Zone would absolutely dwarf the massive tsunami that struck Japan back in 2011. In fact, an article in the New Yorker quoted the head of the FEMA division that oversees Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Alaska as saying that “everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast”…

If the entire zone gives way at once, an event that seismologists call a full-margin rupture, the magnitude will be somewhere between 8.7 and 9.2. That’s the very big one.

…By the time the shaking has ceased and the tsunami has receded, the region will be unrecognizable. Kenneth Murphy, who directs FEMA’s Region X, the division responsible for Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska, says, “Our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast.”

In the Pacific Northwest, everything west of Interstate 5 covers some hundred and forty thousand square miles, including Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, Eugene, Salem (the capital city of Oregon), Olympia (the capital of Washington), and some seven million people.

We live at a time when the crust of our planet is becoming increasingly unstable. Based on my research, I have come to the conclusion that we will soon see major earth changes on a scale that most of us would never even dare to imagine.

All over the world the Ring of Fire is roaring to life, and the Cascadia Subduction Zone lies directly along the Ring of Fire. Just last week, I wrote about the alarming earthquake swarms that we have seen directly under Mt. Rainier, Mt. Hood and Mt. St. Helens, and now we have learned that FEMA is about to hold a major drill that is going to simulate a magnitude 9.0 earthquake along the Cascadia Subduction Zone and an accompanying west coast tsunami dozens of feet in height.

Of course most Americans aren’t concerned about this threat at all.

Most Americans just assume that life will continue to go on normally just as it always has.

But I happen to agree with the experts that are promising us that an absolutely massive earthquake along the Cascadia Subduction Zone will strike someday, and when that happens life in America will be permanently altered. (For more from the author of “WHAT DO THEY KNOW THAT WE DON’T? Feds Preparing for Massive Natural Disaster in Pacific Northwest” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

These Parents Pulled Their Kids out of School for a Week Over Obama’s Bathroom Directive

/0 Comments/in , , /by

A Michigan family pulled their three sons out of public school for a week after finding out from their 9-year-old son that he had to share a restroom with a biological girl.

On May 13, the departments of Education and Justice issued a directive to schools around the nation, threatening to take away federal school funding if districts do not equate gender identity as a student’s biological sex.

The dad who pulled his kids out of school, Matt Stewart, told The Daily Signal that his 9-year-old son, who attends Southwest Elementary School in Howell, Michigan, informed him on Friday, May 20, that a girl was using the same restroom as him, at the same time.

“On Monday we had a conversation with our son’s teacher and the principal,” Stewart said. The next day, on May 24, Matt and his wife Lindsay removed their three boys, all who attend Southwest Elementary, from Howell Public Schools.

Stewart says that Erin MacGregor, the school district superintendent, suggested that his son could be accommodated with a single-use or unisex bathroom if the 9-year-old was uncomfortable with the current bathroom situation.

“As parents, we decided we were not going to force our children to make the decision between confusion, humiliation, and embarrassment,” Stewart told Kim Russell with WXYZ 7 Action News, Detroit’s ABC TV station.

A spokesperson for Howell Public Schools told The Daily Signal in an email that the school district could not comment regarding if a biological girl had been allowed to use the boys restroom at Southwest Elementary School, as the issue is a matter of student privacy. “Single-use bathrooms are available to any student who wishes to use one,” the spokesperson noted in reference to the accommodations available for Stewart’s son.

Stewart says that MacGregor confirmed with him on May 24 that there was no district-wide policy in place on this issue and that the superintendent had made the final decision allowing students to use the restroom of their choice, without prior notification to parents. The school district spokesperson confirmed to The Daily Signal that this information is correct.

On May 25, parents were informed through email of the school district’s intent to comply with President Barack Obama’s administration’s transgender student directive.

Meanwhile, Stewart was “hopeful that the superintendent and school board would be open to creating a policy where every student felt comfortable.”

“We are hopeful as parents that that would be a discussion that would involve members of the community in an open and transparent manner,” he said.

During the week Stewart’s kids were not in Howell Public Schools, the dad says the school district took “a 180” on the issue after those in the community spoke up.

The school district “changed their position” on May 31, Stewart told The Daily Signal.

“At Howell Public Schools we work tirelessly to create an inclusive environment where all students feel welcome, safe, and secure,” a statement given to The Daily Signal by a spokesperson for the school district says. The school district has decided to press pause on the Obama administration’s transgender student directive while it gathers feedback on the issue. The school district’s statement says:

At this time, we do not currently have any students using a restroom other than that designated for their biological gender, or requesting to do so. In light of this, we are pausing on the federal guidance issued to all school districts across the nation in a joint letter on transgender students issued by the Department of Justice and Department of Education on May 13, 2016, while we work to provide opportunities in the coming weeks to gather feedback on this matter. This feedback will further inform the board of education as they engage in a thoughtful approach to shape policies, practices, and guidelines consistent with legal requirements. Like districts across the state and country, Howell Public Schools and its board of education are staying apprised of the changing federal, state, and local dynamics relating to this matter.

“We have never sought to deprive any other student of their rights only to protect the rights of our own children,” Stewart said. He added:

This is an example of how we can make a difference in our communities. An injustice was brought to our attention and Lindsay and I spoke out, made others aware and shined a spotlight on what we felt was a hasty decision which was not well thought out. We appreciate the district’s responsiveness and are hopeful that they will be more cautious and thoughtful in the future on decisions which affect so many.

According to Stewart, MacGregor, the district’s superintendent, confirmed with him that Howell Public Schools will “only provide access to restrooms designated for a student’s birth gender or to a single-user facility” while the school district works to finalize policies and guidelines.

“We also trust that as they seek wisdom on the correct course that they will give parents the opportunity to have a voice,” Stewart said. “And when that happens we will speak up. For now, we will be sending our kids back to school with their assurances.” (For more from the author of “These Parents Pulled Their Kids out of School for a Week Over Obama’s Bathroom Directive” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Newest Details Revealed in Clinton Aide Deposition Expose This About Hillary

/0 Comments/in , , /by

Video Transcript:

Hillary Clinton’s Chief of Staff, Cheryl Mills, finally had her deposition released and in it were some bombshells.

JUDGE NAPOLITANO: But what [Mills] did say is that Mrs. Clinton used exclusively her Blackberry. She didn’t have a laptop, she didn’t have a desktop, she didn’t have a tablet, she just used the Blackberry. Her Blackberry, not a government issued Blackberry. Because it was not government issue, it was blocked on the 7th floor of the State Department where her office is. What does that mean? That means that when she was in her office, she did not have the means to communicate electronically to her people all around the world for the entire time she was there. How did she do it? Take a security team, go from the 7th floor to the 6th floor where her Blackberry worked. Or she would have one of her aides come in and use a — you’ll like this cause you’re a historian — 19th Century technology, read the document to me. Read it aloud. So when people are saying she was incompetent as a Secretary of State, they’re absolutely correct and right on the mark because of this alone. She has ambassadors all around the world trying to communicate with her and she’s cut herself off.

Mills’ testimony revealed that one of Mrs. Clinton’s defenses was a lie.

NAPOLITANO: Mrs. Clinton in her press conferences, the few that she’s given, said “don’t worry about it because everything was stored and its searchable, all of my emails.” Cheryl Mills revealed in the deposition earlier this week, it was not searchable, that they couldn’t find this stuff because it had gone through Mrs. Clinton’s private server. What does this mean? All of this means that she frustrated the ordinary operations of the State Department, which she was in charge of because she was terrified of the president, the rest of the State Department, the media and the public knowing what she was doing. It is crystal clear that the motivation for all of this was her incredible desire to avoid the Freedom of Information Act, to keep from the president, the rest of the State Department and the public what she was doing as Secretary of State, which is a violation of the law.

(For more from the author of “Newest Details Revealed in Clinton Aide Deposition Expose This About Hillary” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Evidence of Global Warming Found on a Planet With No Humans

/0 Comments/in , , /by

New evidence, as reported by the Washington Times, suggests that global warming is happening on a planet not inhabited by a single human… Mars.

The red planet, which moved closer to the Earth on Monday than at any other time since 2005, has retreated from a glacial period that would have covered large areas in white before the thaw about 370,000 years ago, according to a study published Friday in the journal Science.

The research was conducted using an instrument on board the NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter that allowed an unprecedented examination of “the most recent Martian ice age recorded in the planet’s north polar ice cap,” according to a NASA press release.

Scientists attribute the shift in Mars’ climate to natural variations that occur over “thousands of years.” Changes in the planet’s orbit and tilt of the planet’s axis move Mars in and out of ice ages over time.

“As the warm polar period ends, polar ice begins accumulating again, while ice is lost from mid-latitudes. This retreat and regrowth of polar ice is exactly what Smith and colleagues see in the record revealed by the [Shallow Subsurface Radar] images,” said NASA.

One wonders if Earth’s climate is undergoing a similar natural shift. (For more from the author of “Evidence of Global Warming Found on a Planet With No Humans” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.