South Korea halted anti-North Korea propaganda broadcasts across their tense border on Monday as officials from the two Koreas met again to work out details of their leaders’ upcoming talks, expected to focus on the North’s nuclear program.
In the latest episode of alleged “fake news” in high places, the Boston Globe’sKevin Cullen was placed on leave after hosts on WEEI claimed the columnist—part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for breaking news during the Boston Marathon bombings—falsely inserted himself at the scene of the terror attack.
Cullen wrote in April 2013: “After the initial explosion, runners instinctively craned their necks toward the blast site. Then, 12 seconds later, a second explosion, further up Boylston. It was pandemonium. I saw an older runner wearing high rise pink socks, about to cross the finish line.”
This month, he “reflected” on the fifth anniversary of the tragedy: “I can smell Patriots Day, 2013. I can hear it. God, can I hear it, whenever multiple fire engines or ambulances are racing to a scene. I can taste it, when I’m around a campfire and embers create a certain sensation. I can see it, when I bump into survivors, which happens with more regularity than I could ever have imagined. And I can touch it, when I grab those survivors’ hands or their shoulders.”
However, WEEI’s Kirk Minihane reported that Cullen had confirmed he had that day off and arrived at the scene hours later. Cullen is also accused of fabricating details related to the father of Martin Richard, an eight-year-old killed in the attack. Cullen also allegedly falsely claimed a firefighter named “Sean” saved Martin’s sister, rather than off-duty firefighter Matt Patterson, to whom Cullen never spoke.
Should the allegations prove true, it will not be the first time the Globe has been wounded by a columnist’s fabulism. The paper forced columnist Mike Barnicle to resign after his editors could not confirm the details of a tear-jearker he wrote about two cancer-stricken boys of different races in 1995. Similar allegations had dogged Barnicle for years.
Barnicle might have survived had the Globe not also forced out columnist Patricia Smith, who was caught fabricating socially downtrodden people and their quotations in four of her columns in 1998. The perception that Barnicle was treated differently than a female African-American writer helped end his run at the paper.
Of course, most people tend to remember only the highest-profile cases of journalistic fabulism. NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams was suspended for six months after admitting he told a false story about coming under fire while covering the 2003 invasion of Iraq. That incident raised questions about his reports on a variety of stories. He is now mostly relegated to MSNBC.
The Williams scandal was not NBC’s first, either. “Dateline NBC” infamously aired a story showing a GM truck bursting into flame following a collision, but had used tiny rockets strapped to the bottom to ensure it would ignite.
The Globe and NBC are hardly alone. The New York Times suffered a huge embarrassment when it was discovered that reporter Jayson Blair fabricated comments and falsely created the impression he had been places or witnessed people in dozens of stories. As the NYT admitted: “[H]e used these techniques to write falsely about emotionally charged moments in recent history, from the deadly sniper attacks in suburban Washington to the anguish of families grieving for loved ones killed in Iraq.”
The Washington Post has not been immune either. The paper returned a Pulitzer Prize awarded to Janet Cooke after discovering that “Jimmy’s World,” a front-page saga about an eight-year-old heroin addict, had been fabricated. The fraud was uncovered only after other journalists alerted the Post to Cooke’s inflation of her Pulitzer résumé.
Other media fabulism scandals are known mostly to those who follow politics. The premier example may be Stephen Glass, who fabricated all or parts of 27 articles he wrote for The New Republic over the course of two and one-half years, including the lurid but fictional exploits of young men at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 1997.
TNR was stung again by Scott Thomas Beauchamp, who wrote a number of inflammatory pieces about the U.S. military as the magazine’s “Baghdad Diarist.” After an extensive re-reporting effort, the magazine concluded it “cannot be confident that the events in his pieces occurred in exactly the manner that he described them.” (That Beauchamp was married to TNR fact-checker Elspeth Reeve—a seemingly blatant conflict of interest—did not instill confidence either.)
Even less well-known, but more bizarre, was Nik Cohn’s 1997 confession that the story that made his career and was adapted as the movie “Saturday Night Fever” was almost entirely fiction, very loosely based on people he knew from London, not Brooklyn.
Consider further the case of Jack Kelley, a star reporter for USA Today who was found to have fabricated substantial portions of at least eight major stories that spanned the globe, including a Pulitzer finalist. In 2002, the Associated Press cashiered DC bureau reporter Christopher Newton upon concluding he made up sources for at least 40 of his stories. In 2004, Fox News apologized to Sen. John Kerry after publishing a supposed “joke” article by Carl Cameron, one of Fox’s more respected reporters, that Kerry had received a manicure before a presidential debate, complete with fabricated quotes.
Setting aside the occasional goofy incident, such as Jay Forman inventing the sport of “monkeyfishing,” media fabulism tends to fall broadly into two major categories. The first are those stories that did not receive proper editorial scrutiny because they confirmed their editors’ political biases. The second are those that mash the reader’s emotional hot buttons in ways which are sometimes political, sometimes not (the Cooke scandal, for example, arguably falls into both categories). The emotional content of such stories also likely accounts for why fake news spreads faster than real news.
If the Boston Globe concludes the accusations against Cullen are true, his career may well be at an end. Those judged to be fabulists generally do not recover professionally, although Beauchamp has since written for The Atlantic, a once-prestigious magazine.
Cullen could take some comfort in the fact that the cases that did not involve ideological or political biases seem to have had less harsh results, as in the cases of Williams and Barnicle. Or it could be that Williams and Barnicle survived because they were already media fixtures beyond print. Fabulism, like so many other things, may be less damaging to the rich and TV-famous.
After the mysterious assassination of a well-known Palestinian engineer and academic in Malaysia over the weekend, Israel's defense minister issued a statement denying accusations that the Israeli spy agency Mossad was behind the killing.
Dr Fadi Mohammed al-Batash, 35, had been living with his family in Malaysia for the past ten years and was a university professor in the field of electrical engineering. Batash was further recently employed by the Energy Authority in the Gaza Strip and had long held a position as lecturer at the British-Malaysian Institute at the University of Kuala Lumpur, according to Israel's YNet news. Israeli officials have recently accused him of being a rocket expert and downplayed his advisory work connected to Gaza's civilian infrastructure.
Multiple international reports indicate that as Batash made his way from his home in Kuala Lumpur to a nearby neighborhood mosque for dawn prayers sometime around 6am, a motorcycle drove by and two unidentified men unleashed a volley of ten shots, at least four of which hit Batash in the head and body, killing him on the spot.
Witnesses say the killers had European features.
Dr Fadi Mohammed al-Batash, 35, is shown in a poster displayed during a Hamas rally. Image source: AP via Times of Israel.
Importantly, Malaysian authorities immediately classified the crime as a "targeted assassination"as others had been present at the scene but only Batash was killed. Security cameras had reportedly captured footage of the killing, and police say they have evidence that the killers had followed the Palestinian scientist for up to twenty minutes beforehand.
Hamas immediately claimed the victim as one of their own, calling him a "martyr" but stopping short of directly pointing blame at Israeli intelligence. However, Hamas affiliated media groups did make the accusation along with Batash's own family, who issued a statement saying, "We accuse the Mossad of being behind the assassination."
According to Malaysian media reports, the assassins, who were described by witnesses as "white men" with "European features," were driving a powerful BMW 1100cc motorbike. Security camera footage showed they waited for Albatsh for 20 minutes until he arrived at the scene.
"Preliminary investigations found four gunshot wounds on the victim's body. Two bullet slugs were found at the scene of the incident," Kuala Lumpur police chief Mazlan Lazim said in a statement.
The police said it believes "this was a targeted killed and not a terror attack, because there were other people at the scene but the assassins focused only on (al-Batash)."
Israeli officials were quick to point to Palestinian factional infighting as the likely reason for the killing.
And Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman emphasized Batash's role in engineering Hamas rockets, telling Haaretz: "He wasn't involved with improving the electricity grid or infrastructure and water. We have heard the announcements by the heads of the Hamas taking responsibility for the man, explaining he was involved with the production of rockets, with improving the rockets' accuracy."
Lieberman added further, "A settling of scores among terrorist organizations, among terrorists, among various factions, is something that we see from time to time. I assume that's also what occurred in this case."
Yahoo News: Malaysian forensic police cordon off the area where a Palestinian scientist and Hamas member, Fadi Mohammad al-Batsch, was assassinated in Kuala Lumpur on April 21, 2018. Image source: AFP
Meanwhile, Palestinian activists have pointed to a long history of Israeli assassinations of Palestinian, Iranian, and Syrian scientists, engineers, and notable figures living abroad.
Another notable headline grabbing operation, reportedly by Mossad agents, occurred in 2010 and resulted in the assassination of a top Hamas commander who had checked into a high end Dubai hotel after flying from Syria.
An eleven man Israeli hit squad had entered the hotel while dressed in tennis gear and carrying tennis rackets, and were later reported to be traveling on fake Irish and French passports. After conducting surveillance the Mossad agents got Hamas' Mahmoud al-Mabhouh to open his hotel room door and quickly suffocated him without arousing suspicion from other hotel guests. By the time the body was discovered, the assassins had flown out of Dubai to various locations around the world and were never seen again.
And in 2015 a secret document revealed by The Intercept as part of the Edward Snowden leaked NSA archives confirmed that Israeli agents had assassinated a top Syrian general and personal aide to President Assad in 2008 while the general dined at his family home near Tartus, along the Syrian coast.
The daring operation involved Israeli naval commandos and snipers targeting Gen. Muhammad Suleiman's house from the waters of the Mediterranean and shooting him in the head and neck. Israel considered him responsible for coordinating weapons and supplies between Iran and Lebanese Hezbollah, as well as overseeing an alleged nascent nuclear development program at Syria’s Al Kibar facility which had previously been bombed by Israeli jets.
And six months prior to Syrian General Suleiman's murder, a top Hezbollah officer was killed by a joint CIA-Mossad operation in the heart of Damascus. According to former intelligence officials who confirmed the assassination plot to the Washington Post, a car bomb planted near a Damascus downtown restaurant instantly killed Imad Mughniyah - Hezbollah's international operations chief who was believed to have masterminded several terror attacks targeting Americans.
So in spite of Israeli officials' current vehement denials, recent history suggests that Malaysian-based Fadi al-Batash's targeted killing was very likely yet another Mossad or other allied intelligence service hit.
President Trump is eager to go head-to-head with the DNC which filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit on Friday against several parties, including the Russian government, the Trump campaign and the WikiLeaks organization - alleging a "far-reaching conspiracy to disrupt the 2016 campaign and tilt the election to Donald Trump."
Hours after the Washington Post broke the news of the lawsuit, Trump tweeted "Just heard the Campaign was sued by the Obstructionist Democrats. This can be good news in that we will now counter for the DNC server that they refused to give to the FBI," referring to the DNC email breach. Trump also mentioned "the Debbie Wasserman Schultz Servers and Documents held by the Pakistani mystery man and Clinton Emails."
Just heard the Campaign was sued by the Obstructionist Democrats. This can be good news in that we will now counter for the DNC Server that they refused to give to the FBI, the Debbie Wasserman Schultz Servers and Documents held by the Pakistani mystery man and Clinton Emails.
The "Pakistani mystery man" is a clear reference to former DNC CHair Debbie Wasserman Schultz's longtime IT employee and personal friend, Imran Awan - whose father, claims a Daily Caller source, transferred a USB drive to the former head of a Pakistani intelligence agency - Rehman Malik. Malik denies the charge.
Of note, the DNC would not allow the FBI to inspect their servers which were supposedly hacked by the Russians - instead relying on private security firm Crowdstrike.
Meanwhile, the "Wasserman Schultz Servers" Trump mentions is likely in reference to the stolen House Democratic Caucus server - which Imran Awan had been funneling information onto when it disappeared shortly after the House Inspector General concluded that the server may have been "used for nefarious purposes."
The server may have been “used for nefarious purposes and elevated the risk that individuals could be reading and/or removing information,” an IG presentation said. The Awans logged into it 27 times a day, far more than any other computer they administered.
Imran’s most forceful advocate and longtime employer is Florida Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who led the DNC until she resigned following a hack that exposed committee emails. Wikileaks published those emails, and they show that DNC staff summoned Imran when they needed her password. -DCNF
Imran Awan, his wife Hina Alvi and several other associates ran IT operations for at least 60 Congressional Democrats over the past decade, along with the House Democratic Caucus - giving them access to emails and computer data from around 800 lawmakers and staffers - including the highly classified materials reviewed by the House Intelligence Committee.
Napolitano: He was arrested for some financial crime – that’s the tip of the iceberg. The real allegation against him is that he had access to the emails of every member of congress and he sold what he found in there. What did he sell, and to whom did he sell it? That’s what the FBI wants to know. This may be a very, very serious national security situation.
Last July, Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer claimed to Laura Ingraham that the Awan IT staffers were sending sensitive information with the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Awans notably worked for rep Andre Carson (D-IN) - the first Muslim on the House Intel Committee, who has several ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.
Among those with whom Rep. Carson has been involved as a guest speaker, panelist, fundraiser, recipient of funds, etc., are: the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and a number of its chapters across the country; the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA); the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA); the Muslim American Society (MAS); and the Brotherhood’s new proto-political party, the U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO). -Center for Security Policy
The DNC lawsuit, filed on Friday, asserts that the Russian hacking campaign - combined with Trump associates’ contacts with Russia and the campaign’s public cheerleading of the hacks - amounted to an illegal conspiracy to interfere in the election that caused serious damage to the Democratic Party.
DNC Chairman Tom Perez said in a statement...
“During the 2016 presidential campaign, Russia launched an all-out assault on our democracy, and it found a willing and active partner in Donald Trump’s campaign,”
“This constituted an act of unprecedented treachery: the campaign of a nominee for President of the United States in league with a hostile foreign power to bolster its own chance to win the presidency,”
Unfortunately for the DNC, which has now exposed itself to an aggressive discovery phase, their case holds no water according to Law And Crime;
Here’s the problem: several pages of quotes and factual allegations in the beginning of the document are wholly uncited, at least in that section of the document.
Another section of the document, “general allegations,” does cite information through footnotes — some 107 of them. However, the records cited are almost exclusively news reports from sources such as the New Republic, the New York Times, ABC, CNN, Politico, the Washington Post, Fox News, Business Insider, Slate, and other media outlets. Ferretting out exactly what was reported by those outlets is not difficult.
The DNC’s lawsuit shoves what ultimately is fourth-hand information to a federal judge to be taken as fact in support of this conclusion:
Through these communications, the Trump Campaign, Trump’s closest advisors, and Russian agents formed an agreement to promote Donald Trump’s candidacy through illegal means.
Has the DNC just created all the rope it needs to hang itself?
Former FBI Director James Comey includes accounts of people saying nice things about him in almost every single memo he wrote about his private interactions with President Trump, to the point where they take on the feel of a teenage girl’s diary.
Dispersed among his accounts of top secret conversations with the president on national security, salacious allegations and Russian influence, and illegal leaks are detailed accounts of various people complimenting his work and defending his honor.
“After others left the room, we sat at the table,” he writes in a memo recounting his first private conversation with Trump inside Trump Tower in January, 2017. “He began by telling me that I had had one heck of a year but that I had conducted myself honorably and had a great reputation. He said I was repeatedly put in impossible positions.”
He continued: “He said you saved her [Hillary Clinton] and then they hated you for what you did later, but what choice did you have? He said he thought very highly of me and looked forward to working with me, saying he hoped I planned to say on. I assured him I intended to stay. He said good.”
Comey then went on to tell Trump the intelligence community had learned of a dossier containing allegations that Russia had a tape involving him and prostitutes, noting that he executed the conversation “exactly” as he “had planned.” Before concluding the memo, Comey adds: “He said he was grateful for the conversation, said more nice things about me and how he looks forward to working with me and we departed the room.”
In a second entry dated Jan. 28, Comey gives a multi-layered account of a dinner he had with Trump, including what they both said, and what he thought about what they said, and how that made him feel. He also is sure to note more compliments.
The President spoke an overwhelming majority of the time. He never asked me an open-ended question or left it to me to choose a topic of conversation. there were almost no periods of silence during the 1 hour and 20 minutes, except once or twice when the President paused as the servers entered. I felt comfortable throughout, although never relaxed, given the focus conversation required.
… He touched on my future at various points. The first time he asked ‘so what do you want to do,’ explaining that lots of people wanted my job (“about 20 people”), that he thought very highly of me and had heard great things, that the people of the FBI really like me, but he would understand if I wanted to walk away given all I had been through …
Before wrapping up his account, Comey again notes how loyal he is and how he was told Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis had complimented him.
The President then spoke again about being glad I wanted to stay. He said Mattis said great things about me, as did Sessions. He explained he had asked a lot of people about me and heard great things. He then returned to loyalty, saying ‘I need loyalty,’ I replied that he would always get honesty from me. He paused and said that’s what the wants, ‘honest loyalty.’ I replied ‘you will get that from me.’ (It is possible we understood the phrase differently, but I chose to understand it as consistent with what I had said throughout the conversation …
In another memo recounting a conversation with then-Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, Comey recounts in dramatic language how the two of them reflected on his handling of the Clinton email investigation and concluded he had done a good job and was being unfairly maligned by Clinton and her allies. Both agreed, apparently pensively, that it wasn’t his fault.
During the conversation, Reince also touched the email investigation, offering his view that the Clinton team had misplayed my final announcement and should have pushed it harder as good news. He also said, reflectively, that it wasn’t the Russians’ fault that she failed to campaign in Michigan, and it wasn’t my fault that she set up her email the way she did. He then pressed me on why it wasn’t chargeable ‘gross negligence,’ and I took him through the facts and the law. At some point I added that it also wasn’t my fault that Huma Abedin forwarded emails to Anthony Weiner.
Before wrapping up his final memo, Comey notes once more that Trump told him he was doing “great.”
“He asked me to follow up and make sure that we were working well with the Jordanians and helping them quickly bring the killer to justice,” he writes. “I told him I would. He then said that I was doing a great job and wished me well. The call ended.”
The Office of the Inspector General at the Justice Department has opened an investigation into James Comey to determine if he shared classified information when he leaked contents of his memos outlining his conversations with President Trump.
When testifying before Congress last year, Comey admitted that he leaked some of the memos to a friend with instructions to leak them to the media in an effort to force a special prosecutor be appointed to investigate Trump. Comey said that he removed some of the information that he knew to be classified at the time before sending them along to his friend, but the IG has said two of these memos contained classified information at the time that he leaked it, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday. The IG is now reviewing the classification of the memos.
In a meeting with President Trump last year, Comey quipped that people who leak government secrets should have their heads put on a pike in order to deter others from taking similar actions.
Facebook has made moves to shrink their legal responsibilities under new EU data laws by storing as much international user data as possible in the United State instead of Ireland
The Democratic Party is looking to include reparations in their 2022 platform, along with Medicare for all United States residents, and free higher education that is fully paid for by American taxpayers.
On four separate occasions, ex-FBI Director James Comey vouched to President Trump for the alleged integrity and professionalism of former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, according to Comey’s newly-released personal memos.
It's a long article but the summary is brief: corrupt politicos promised the moon to public employees, and now the fiscal chickens of insolvency are coming home to roost.
Public pension obligations are rising so fast that even repeated tax increases can't keep up.
This is setting up a second front in the war between entitled Baby Boomers and younger taxpayers who pay most of the federal and local taxes. Public pensioners are a subset of the entitled Baby Boomers, but their pensions can't be paid with borrowed money like Social Security and Medicare; public pension obligations come out of local and state taxes, and as those obligations soar then public services must be slashed and taxes jacked up by annual double-digit increases.
So there is a war brewing between public pensioners and the Tax Donkeys: the Unprotected who pay local property taxes on their homes, state and local taxes on their incomes, sales taxes on their purchases, junk fees on local government services, and so on.
Corrupt politicos created the war by over-promising benefits to public employees and ignoring fiscal realities. By the time the bill comes due, the politicos who rubber-stamped the unaffordable promises are themselves gorging at the public-pension retiree trough.
Not every public employee is receiving gold-plated pensions and benefits, of course, but that doesn't negate the reality that nationally, public pensions are increasing faster than government revenues and the returns earned by the pension programs.
If the stock and bond markets suffer multi-year declines, even modest declines, the pension war will move from skirmishes to open political combat. The 2008-09 Global Financial Meltdown was a taste of the reality facing public pension programs: once annual returns slip from +7% annually to -7% annually, the pension plans are soon insolvent.
Like virtually all wars, there are asymmetries between the two combatants: in the war between public pensioners and the Tax Donkeys, the pensioners can't switch pension programs, but the Tax Donkeys can move to lower-tax states.
Allow me to summarize for those who aren't too squeamish: a lot of cities and counties are going to go broke, slashing services and jacking up taxes, all to no avail. The promises made by corrupt politicos cannot possibly be kept, despite constant assurances to the contrary, and those expecting services and taxes to remain untouched will be shocked by the massive cuts in services and the equally massive tax increases that will be imposed in a misguided effort to "save" politically powerful constituencies and fiefdoms.
These dynamics will power a Great Migration of the Tax Donkeys from failing cities, counties and states to more frugal, well-managed and small business-friendly locales. I've sketched out the migration in this graphic: the move by those who can from incompetently managed and/or corrupt cities/counties/states to more innovative, open, frugal and better managed locales.
Unlike Communist regimes which strictly control who has permission to transfer residency, Americans are still free to move about the nation. This creates a very Darwinian competition between sclerotic, corrupt, overpriced one-party-dictatorship states whose hubris-soaked political class is convinced the insane housing prices, tech unicorns, abundant services, and a high-brow culture ruled by an artsy elite are irresistible to everyone, and locales that are low-cost, responsive to the Tax Donkey class, welcoming to new small businesses, employers and talent, unbeholden to a politically-correct dictatorship and conservatively managed, i.e. not headed for insolvency, are no match for their elitist fiefdoms.
Not everyone can move. Many people find it essentially impossible to move due to family roots and obligations, kids in school, and numerous other compelling reasons.
Many people who are able to move are the Tax Donkeys who are paying the most taxes: self-employed entrepreneurs, mobile creatives, those with scarce skills and those who earn substantial incomes from royalties, patents and other forms of capital.
These Tax Donkeys can live pretty much anywhere they please. They don't need to stay in NYC, Boston, L.A., San Francisco or Chicago.
This is the model for many half-farmer, half-X refugees: people who are moving to homesteads or small towns with the networks and skills needed to earn a part-time living in the digital economy. In a lower cost area, they only need to earn a third or even a fourth of their former income to live a much more fulfilling and rewarding life.
Not that hubris-soaked politicos and elites have noticed, but only the top few percent of households can afford to own a home in their bubble economies. Paying $4,000 a month in rent for a one-bedroom cubbyhole in San Francisco may strike the elites living in mansions as a splendid deal, but to the people who have surrendered all hope of ever owning anything of their own to call home--not so much.
Though this chart is based on national data, there are many regional variations. When it takes a year just to obtain a permit to open an ice cream shop (in San Francisco), how much will the insolvent "owner" have to charge per ice cream cone to make up a year in hyper-costly rent paid for nothing but the privilege of being a scorned peon in a city ruled by privilege and protected fiefdoms?
Not that hubris-soaked politicos and elites have noticed, but the Tax Donkeys are getting fed up: their local schools have been stripped of enrichment programs, the cash-strapped local governments are demanding taxpayers pass $100 million bonds to fill potholes and repair schools' leaking roofs, parking tickets now cost more than a restaurant meal for the entire family, and the increases in fees and taxes are coming fast and furious.
If the real estate and stock/bond bubbles pop, the pension bubble pops, too. Once property taxes start declining even as rates are jacked up, the public pensioners will lose the war. Once the stock and bond portfolios of the pension programs are shrinking rather than growing, the the public pensioners will lose the war. Which American Cities Will File Bankruptcy Next?
There is a feedback loop to raising taxes to pay for skyrocketing public pension obligations: the higher taxes rise, the more Tax Donkeys will migrate away from high-tax states and cities. As those paying the majority of the taxes leave, the high-tax states and municipalities have no choice but to raise taxes even more aggressively, which only accelerates the migration of high-income, entrepreneurial Tax Donkeys that are the engines of growth.
The migration is only beginning, but that's only half the story: those who can't leave for whatever reason can opt out: close their businesses, quit their high-stress, high-paying job, move back to the family home, retire and start living as close to the ground as possible.
Those who opt out are in effect moving from those contributing the most to those contributing the least.
Right now, hubris-soaked politicos and elites can entertain the fantasy that NYC, Boston, LA, San Francisco, Chicago, etc., are irresistible: they're not. They're great for those feeding at the trough but not so great for those filling the trough. As astonishing as it will be to hubris-soaked politicos and elites, the straws that will break the back of the Tax Donkeys' will to put up with the ever-increasing burdens are many.
(Washington Times) The New Jersey Supreme Court unanimously ruled Wednesday that it’s a violation of the state constitution to award historic preservation grants to houses of worship.
The 7-0 decision reversed a lower court ruling that said church involvement in the program was permissible because the government used “neutral criteria” to determine grant recipients.
Diana Verm, an attorney for the nonprofit Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which filed an amicus brief in the case, said Wednesday’s ruling goes against last year’s Trinity Lutheran v. Comer decision, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states can’t bar religious institutions from participating in government aid programs.
Sky News has broadcast a package on Enoch Powell’s infamous Birmingham Speech, including a clip of a young girl of ethnic minority background misquoting the speech by adding the word “white” in. The clip which aired on the 50th anniversary of the speech sees leading left wingers, wet Tories, and ethnic minorities lamenting Powell’s warnings over mass migration. But in the opening scenes, three children — all of ethnic minority backgrounds — were asked to read from parts of the speech. The first recites: “In 15 or 20 years, on present trends, there will be in this country 3.5 Commonwealth immigrants and their descendants”. This quote is accurate, and in fact cites figures given by the Labour Party’s Parliamentary Secretary for Health, Julian Snow MP. The next quote however, includes an errant “white” where Powell never spoke it. “As I look ahead, I am fitted [sic] with much foreboding,” says one girl, adding: “Like the Roman I seem to see the white River Tiber foaming with much blood”. Powell actually said: “As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood.” He gave the original quote here,
The last living suspect in the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks received a 20-year sentence Monday for his involvement in a gunfight with Belgian police.
