Read it.

Congress enacted the ethanol mandate about a decade ago because it feared the United States was too dependent on foreign oil. The lawmakers hoped ethanol, which is mostly made from corn, and other homegrown biofuels, would replace some of the imported oil. But they did not anticipate that drilling companies would solve the problem of extracting oil from shale rock, making the United States the world’s largest oil and natural gas producer.

Now the U.S. is awash in domestic oil and stuck with an ethanol mandate that forces consumers to pour ethanol into their tanks. Not only is the ethanol mandate wasting corn that should be consumed as food, but also it is wasting the money consumers use to purchase fuel.

Ethanol reduces mileage. E10, the common form of gasoline available today, contains up to 10 percent ethanol. But a gallon of ethanol contains only two-thirds of the energy in a gallon of gasoline. In fact, it takes 1.52 gallons of ethanol to replace the energy content of a gallon of gasoline. This means drivers who use E10 must fill up more often.

Read it.

The bullet that Hillary dodged may be coming back around.

The Utah Republican then asked if the FBI had investigated whether Clinton perjured herself when addressing the server while testifying to Congress.

“Not to my knowledge. I don’t think there’s been a referral from Congress,” Comey responded.

“Do you need a referral from Congress to investigate her statements under oath?” Chaffetz asked.

“We sure do,” Comey shot back.

“You’ll have one,” Chaffetz said with a laugh. “You’ll have one in the next few hours.”

…

The FBI does not take it upon itself to investigate matters before Congress, Comey told lawmakers later in the hearing. Instead, it waits for a formal offer to open an inquiry before examining whether a crime may have occurred.

…

If Clinton is found to have lied under oath while discussing the server — such as during an 11-hour hearing with the House Select Committee on Benghazi last year — she could be subject to felony charges of perjury, Comey hinted.

Comey’s situation appears to be that relying on such an old and untested statute can’t guarantee a conviction. Perhaps he’s fishing for authority to use something more fresh and potent. We shall see.

Read it.

“Last Saturday afternoon (June 4) I’m standing on the west side of Main Street directly across from the Hunt Avenue intersection chatting with friends. Of course, traffic was heavy in both directions,” Smith wrote.

“A large perfectly polished and gleaming black SUV is attempting a left turn from Hunt onto southbound Main (not easy). Suddenly blue/red lights are flashing from the windshield area of the SUV (like you would see in an official fire/police vehicle),” he continued. “I said to my friends, I’ve never seen that before on a ‘regular’ vehicle and I’d think that’s illegal and dangerous. They agreed.”

That’s when the large black SUV jolted across two lanes of traffic, lights flashing, to park in front of a fire hydrant at the high end shoe boutique Footcandy.

“A St. Helena police car happens to be going northbound and pulls into the center lane and the officer starts shaking his arm and hollering at the driver of the SUV. While this goes on a man exits the SUV assisting a woman from the vehicle. She dashes off to Footcandy while he waits by the SUV in the red zone,” Smith explained.

The police officer then drove off without confronting the driver, he wrote.

Victor Davis Hanson thinks not.

There was more of the same old, same old California news recently. Some 62 percent of state roads have been rated poor or mediocre. There were more predictions of huge cost overruns and yearly losses on high-speed rail — before the first mile of track has been laid. One-third of Bay Area residents were polled as hoping to leave the area soon.

Such pessimism is daily fare, and for good reason.

Read it.

The Obama administration has been illegally funding Obamacare “Cost Sharing Reduction” (CSR) payments for years over the objections of IRS officials, according to a report released today by the House Ways and Means Committee and the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Since Congress launched its investigation, multiple agencies have refused to provide information, selectively applied the law, and even pressured one witness not to testify.

Read it.

Countless foreign-born US veterans were deported after the federal government failed to assist in their naturalisation process, a new report by the American Civil Liberties Union said.

According to the report, many of the soldiers, whose service dated back to the Vietnam War, were deported after facing charges for minor misdemeanors – which can be deportable offences – and courts were not allowed to consider military service.

I’m curious as to why the ACLU is interested in this. Surely they don’t think that somehow ‘civil rights’ have been violated here?

If one is not a citizen, and one commits a crime, then it seems fairly obvious that deportation is a rational response for a government committed to preserving public order and the safety of its citizens.

Read it.

CIAShortly after Khaleed al Masri arrived at a CIA prison in Afghanistan, officials figured out they had the wrong man. In fact, al Masri, a German citizen who had been kidnapped for the CIA by Macedonian police, didn’t appear to have any connections to terrorism. But agents continued to hold him and continued to question him for months. A recently released report said the CIA refused to release him because it couldn’t figure out a way to do so without admitting its mistake.

Sometimes I wonder which is the greater threat: Muslims or government employees.

Government lies re food

For many years, starting in the late 1950s, a British nutritionist named John Yudkin waged a lonely war against the prevailing scientific consensus. Dietary fat was not the bogeyman it was portrayed to be, he argued. The real problem, he said, was sugar. In 1972 he published a book on the topic: Pure, White and Deadly.

And for going against the scientific grain, Yudkin was thoroughly savaged by the peers in his field. Among them was Ancel Keys, who believed fat was the culprit behind heart disease and other ailments. He made lacerating attacks on Yudkin and his research, and was joined in them by entrenched interests such as the British Sugar Bureau.

…

Eventually, however, the data suggesting problems with the fat-is-bad hypothesis—such as the fact that the French eat a lot of saturated fat but have very low rates of heart disease—piled up so high that it caused nutritionists to pause and rethink, albeit slowly and with considerable resistance. But by then, Leslie writes, “Yudkin’s scientific reputation had been all but sunk. He found himself uninvited from international conferences on nutrition. Research journals refused his papers. He was talked about by fellow scientists as an eccentric, a lone obsessive. Eventually, he became a scare story.”

Guess he was a ‘denier’, wasn’t he?

Of course, just because the nutritional consensus about fat was wrong does not mean the consensus about global warming is wrong. There’s an overwhelming scientific consensus about evolution and gravity, too. And evidence in favor of those theories continues to accumulate while evidence that could falsify them remains scarce as unicorns. Besides, prudence counsels restraint. Science might one day revise its view of gravity, but that doesn’t make it safe to jump off bridges.

Gravity and evolution have been demonstrated experimentally. Climate change — not so much.

Nevertheless, the story of John Yudkin should serve as a cautionary tale about the danger of groupthink and the folly of demonizing people who dare to ask hard questions. It’s crucially important that we get the facts about salt, climate change, and other possible hazards right. To that end, it’s also crucially important to recognize the possibility that we might be wrong.

Yea verily yea.

Read it.

Fourteen teen girls from the Bronx—all young women of color, ages 12 through 19—have gone missing since July 2014, according to New York City Councilman Andy King. He worries that their disappearances indicate the presence of a prolific youth sex-trafficking ring operating in the area. “Every other week our young girls are just vanishing off our streets,” said King at a June 29 press conference, explaining with creepy gusto that the missing Bronx teens had all been “attractive girls.”

There’s just one problem with the councilman’s lurid speculation: The vast majority of those 14 missing girls have already been reunited with their families.

Guess: Republican or Democrat?

Read it.

The chairman of the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday said FBI Director James Comey plans to testify before Congress Thursday to explain his recommendation not to press criminal charges against presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton for her use of a private email server while secretary of state.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who has faced heavy scrutiny over a recent conversation with Mrs. Clinton’s husband, former President Bill Clinton, was invited by a separate committee to testify at a hearing next week.

Oversight! What a concept.

Read it.

Not every potential federal defendant gets the benefit of such distinctions. Consider the retired racecar driver on a snowmobile outing in Colorado who got lost in a blizzard and unwittingly crossed into a National Forest Wilderness Area, the Native Alaskan trapper who sold 10 sea otters to a buyer he mistakenly believed was also a Native Alaskan, and the 11-year-old Virginia girl who rescued a baby woodpecker from her cat.

The first two of these incidents resulted in misdemeanor and felony convictions, respectively, while the third led to a fine (later rescinded) and threats of prosecution. All three qualify as federal crimes, even though the perpetrators had no idea they were breaking the law—a kind of injustice that would be addressed by reforms that opponents falsely portray as a special favor to corporate polluters and other felonious fat cats.

The federal code contains something like 5,000 criminal statutes and describes an estimated 30,000 regulatory violations that can be treated as crimes. The fact that no one knows the precise numbers is itself a scandal, compounded by the fact that many of these provisions include minimal or no mens rea requirements, which specify the mental state required for conviction.

Watch it.

Interstitial video between Hillary’s lies and Comey’s evaluations.

Read it.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

And don’t get me started on what government bureaucrats devoted to fighting poverty make a year.

Read it.

The U.S. Army is one of the most lethal fighting forces in the modern world. In 1991, it demolished the Iraqi Army in 100 hours. In Operation Iraqi Freedom, the U.S. Army marched to Baghdad in 18 days. The ratio of enemy combat vehicles destroyed to losses suffered by U.S. and coalition forces in both Iraqi wars was stunningly lopsided.  Both in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. Army has shown a remarkable capacity to dominate across a large part of the conflict spectrum. Even the much-feared improvised explosive device (IED) threat was reduced to a manageable level through the amazing efforts of Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization (now Joint Improvised-threat Defeat Agency) and a host of government laboratories and, most important, private contractors.

Unfortunately, the Army has shown itself to be equally lethal when it comes to starting and then killing major acquisition programs.  Over the past thirty years, the U.S. Army has cancelled some 20 major acquisition programs including armored fighting vehicles, helicopters, artillery pieces, communications systems, infantry weapons and munitions. If you count designs that never got out of the research and development (R&D) process that number more than doubles.

…

According to a 2011 review of Army Acquisition, between 1998 and 2011, the Army spent more than $1 billion dollars annually on programs that were ultimately cancelled. The Army’s Big Five mistakes – the Future Combat System, Comanche Helicopter, Crusader cannon, Brilliant anti-armor munition and the Ground Combat Vehicle — cost the Army a total of $33 billion for nothing. The Army has a reputation for funding lots of R&D projects ever year. Yet, during this same period the Army spent between 22 percent and 34 percent of its annual Developmental Test and Evaluation budget on programs that were cancelled. The total loss of R&D resources on cancelled programs between 1985 and 2014 is estimated to be some $38.5 billion.

Read it.

How did a big-money Clinton donor get on an expert panel next to nuclear scientists?

Theory: Money may have changed hands. Just sayin’.

Read it.

Over the last decade the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) has found it increasingly difficult to keep its head above water financially, often posting annual losses in the billions. A steep decline of mail volume due to the rise of online communications has reduced USPS’s role in the market place. As the Postal Service’s fiscal instability has grown, so have calls for USPS reform. Potential reforms range from shifting to centralized delivery, changes in governance, and full privatization.

Read it.

I hope that all of the pro-marijuana ‘Let’s legalize it! Then we can tax it!’ people are paying attention.

I still think some Puritanism is at work—it bothers activists that smokers find vaping enjoyable, as opposed to arm patches, nasal sprays and ten-step programs. But some readers reminded me of an even bigger and more cynical reason for the state’s approach: officials are addicted to their cut of tobacco-related revenues. Smoking rates are declining. As smokers give up their bad habit, anti-smoking programs lose tax dollars.

Taking dollars from government agencies and government-addicted nonprofits makes them as grumpy as taking the last pack of cigarettes from a habitual smoker. Even though the state passed several new laws—raising the smoking age to 21 and regulating e-cigarettes like tobacco, for instance—anti-tobacco activists have qualified an initiative for the November ballot that would go even further. The “California Healthcare, Research and Prevention Tobacco Tax Act of 2016” is, as its name suggests, all about hiking tax rates.

Read it.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

“She’s an honorable person. We know that,” Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), expected to be the next Senate Democratic leader, told reporters on Thursday. “She has said nothing was discussed related to the investigation so you have two choices: To say this didn’t matter or she’s lying. I think it didn’t matter. I don’t think she’s lying.”

I don’t consider Chuckie Schumer to be an adequate character witness.

“All I can say is Loretta Lynch is one of the most outstanding human beings I’ve ever known,” Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said.

Considering with whom Harry Reid tends to associate, that’s not even a low bar, it’s barely a line painted on the ground.

“There was no discussion on any matter pending before the Department or any matter pending with any other body, there was no discussion of Benghazi, no discussion of State Department emails,” she told reporters.

And if you believe that one, she’ll tell you another one. What’s next? Asking us to believe Bill Clinton?

Read it.

Of course they are.

Insurers helped cheerlead the creation of Obamacare, with plenty of encouragement – and pressure – from Democrats and the Obama administration. As long as the Affordable Care Act included an individual mandate that forced Americans to buy its product, insurers offered political cover for the government takeover of the individual-plan marketplaces. With the prospect of tens of millions of new customers forced into the market for comprehensive health-insurance plans, whether they needed that coverage or not, underwriters saw potential for a massive windfall of profits.

Six years later, those dreams have failed to materialize. Now some insurers want taxpayers to provide them the profits to which they feel entitled — not through superior products and services, but through lawsuits.

Read it.

“Nothing is ever as expensive as something our government provides for ‘free’ said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform.

Clinton has outlined several onerous tax increases she wants to impose on the American people. The tax increase proposals up to at least $1 trillion.

‘Tax and spend’ has worked for the Democrats so long that it’s second nature. They don’t even realize when they’re doing it.

Read it.

Yesterday, I linked to the additional views that Reps. Jim Jordan and Mike Pompeo presented in connection with the report of the House Select Committee on Benghazi. I’m told that a major reason for submitting additional views was the unwillingness of Trey Gowdy, chairman of the committee, to present any conclusions in his report.

Gowdy and the chief investigator decided just to present the facts — no conclusions. If they thought this odd decision would win approval from the mainstream media, they were mistaken. Most outlets referred to the report as a Republican report, rather than the report of the committee. I don’t recall the MSM calling Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s controversial and sulky hit piece on the CIA (the so-called torture report) a Democratic report. It was cited as the report of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

If you haven’t read the additional views of Reps. Jordan and Pompeo, I again urge you to do so. I want to comment on a portion of their statement that I don’t think has received enough attention.

Read it.

Flash back three years ago, and remember when the secretary of Homeland Security declared “the border has never been stronger.” Well, if what is going on at America’s border with Mexico is a success, Americans should shudder to think what failure looks like.

Unaccompanied children crossing the border is up over 70 percent this year. Other categories and overall numbers are on the rise as well, reflecting significant increases since 2014. And it is not just the numbers that are troubling to Americans. They are worried about national security threats on the Southern border.

Read it.

Just when you thought the Star Wars prequels couldn’t get any worse. You knew something like this was out there (“out there” in both senses of the term) in the journal Communication, Culture, and Critique:

Darth Vader Made Me Do It! Anakin Skywalker’s Avoidance of Responsibility and the Gray Areas of Hegemonic Masculinity in the Star Wars Universe

Joshua Atkinson (Bowling Green State University) and Bernadette Calafell (University of Denver)

You can’t make this shit up.

Read it.

It still took them a day to try (and fail) to find some way to blame it on Republicans, Trump, or the NRA.

Read it.

Who says police departments always move swiftly to protect their own? Sometimes it takes them almost nine years to find a fellow officer not guilty. Such is the case with Manuel Avila, a Paterson, New Jersey, cop who was accused of sexual assault in 2007. A local woman claimed that Avila had forced her to perform oral sex on him while she was in police custody.

A few days before the alleged assault, a city psychiatrist had ruled Avila unfit to carry a weapon and recommended that he retire. Instead, police officials decided to reassign him for six months to a duty that didn’t involve carrying a weapon, at which point he would reach 20 years of service—a pension milestone. Avila was assigned to monitor municipal holding cells.

Avila was acquitted of criminal charges related to the alleged assault in 2010. The city settled a civil lawsuit with his accuser in 2011, agreeing to pay her $710,000. But somehow, the police department’s internal investigation persisted through early 2016.

Throughout this time, Avila was on paid leave from the Paterson Police Department. By the end of his nine years on suspension, Avila had collected about $900,000 in income for doing nothing. With Avila’s pay, the settlement with his accuser, and legal fees, the city has spent about $1.9 million on this case.

As Jerry Pournelle likes to say, ‘The purpose of government is to hire and pay government workers.’

Read it.

A super-PAC backing Hillary Clinton has accepted $200,000 in donations from a company holding multiple contracts with the federal government — despite a ban on such contributions.

According to a review of contributions by The Hill, Boston-based Suffolk Construction made two contributions of $100,000 to Priorities USA, which is backing the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.

At the time it made the contributions, Suffolk held multiple contracts worth $976,560 with the Department of Defense for maintenance and construction projects at a Naval base in Newport, R.I., and the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, N.Y., according to the government website USASpending.gov.

Read it.

Chris Stevens, Sean Smith, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods were heroes who gave their lives in service to our country. Their bravery and the courageous actions of so many others on the ground that night should be honored.

When the Select Committee was formed, I promised to conduct this investigation in a manner worthy of the American people’s respect, and worthy of the memory of those who died. That is exactly what my colleagues and I have done.

Now, I simply ask the American people to read this report for themselves, look at the evidence we have collected, and reach their own conclusions. You can read this report in less time than our fellow citizens were taking fire and fighting for their lives on the rooftops and in the streets of Benghazi.

Contrary to what the Drive-By Media are reporting, it shows Clinton’s malfeasance in detail.

Read it.

Yet another corrupt Democrat.

Not really news, but a useful reminder.

Read it.

Why did some Democrats skip this week’s sit-in on the chamber floor? The reasons run the gamut.

While the Democrats were overwhelmingly united in their remarkable 25-hour protest of congressional inaction on gun reform, not everyone participated. And the no-shows were absent for a range of reasons, only a handful of which were related to either the protest itself or the legislation it was designed to move. They included illness, family tragedy, travel and legal trouble.

This ability to act in unison is why Democrats keep winning and Republicans keep losing, no matter what the voting strength each might have.

Read it.

A slip-up made by a technician fitting an electronic tracking bracelet on a man with a long-standing criminal record has ended in tragedy.

The GPS device was mistakenly applied to the ankle of Washington DC man Quincy Green’s fake leg in April, while he was on house arrest for a gun charge.

Mr Green, 34, then removed his prosthetic leg with the electronic tracker attached, before allegedly shooting and killing Dana Hamilton, 44, in the American capital in the early hours of 19 May.

If there is some way to screw something up, a government employee will find it.

And they want to put such people in charge of our health care….

Read it.

AP has identified at least 75 meetings that Hillary Clinton had with longtime political donors, Clinton Foundation contributors, and corporate and other outside interests that were not recorded (or not properly recorded) on her State Department calendar. AP identified the meetings by comparing her calendar with separate planning schedules supplied to Clinton by aides in advance of each day’s events.

In many cases, Clinton’s State Department calendar simply excluded the meeting altogether. On other occasions, the names of those with whom she met were omitted.

Read it.

Two professors at the University of Northern Colorado were investigated after students complained that they were forced to hear opposing viewpoints.

The complaints were made to Northern Colorado’s “Bias Response Team,” an Orwellian office on campus that asks students to report their peers and professors for anything that upsets or offends them. When the news outlet Heat Street made an open records request for some of the complaints, it discovered that two students had become so upset about having to hear an opinion they disagreed with they filed reports with school administrators.

And rather than telling the students to buck up because they might hear those opinions outside of college or on the news or in the media, the schools told the professors to stop teaching that there’s an alternate viewpoint.

Read it.

For 17 years, Tom Carroll and Hermine Ricketts grew a vegetable garden in the front yard of their Miami Shores, Florida home, and no one ever complained. Then, the City Council passed a law requiring front lawns be covered with only with grass, sod or “living ground cover,” and city officials threatened them with a $50 a day fine if they planted that garden again. The couple are now in court fighting for their right to plant their garden.

What business is it of a City Council what sort of plants people grow in their own yards? This is iniquitous.

Read it.

Professors registered as Democrats outnumber those registered as Republicans by a ratio of roughly 12 to one at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill – and in 15 departments zero registered Republican professors can be found – according to educators’ registered party affiliations.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Asked by The College Fix to comment on the results, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill spokesman Jim Gregory said via email that the university “does not hire faculty based upon their political affiliation, but instead upon academic merit.”

And if you believe that one, he’ll tell you another one.

Rich Lowry draws some parallels.

The FBI has now reversed course, but this is how its absurd redacting might have rendered enormities of the 20th century:

“The kamikaze pilot launched his attack on the U.S. aircraft carrier after proclaiming his loyalty to the Great Empire of [omitted] and its Emperor [omitted].”

“The S.S. division was utterly committed to [omitted] Germany and its leader [in German], the author of My Struggle [in German].”

“The cadres rampaged through China during the Cultural Revolution at the best of the Chairman of the [omitted], who urged them to [omitted], one of the sayings collected in his Little [omitted] Book.”

Read it.

President Obama is inflicting lingchi on the Constitution’s restraints on the executive branch. Here, however, he is acting consistent with a tradition that, while it doesn’t date back to 900, dates back to around 1900 and the onset of the Progressive Era in American politics.

He is also inflicting death by a thousand euphemisms. George Orwell wrote the book on it, so to speak, but here Obama is plowing new ground in American politics.

Read it.

And fascism creeps in on little cat feet….

California state lawmakers are poised to advance legislation they say will promote greater equity at the state’s colleges and universities, but religious freedom advocates say it’s just another attempt to advance the LGBT agenda by removing the ability of schools to determine their own criteria for selecting students and personnel and establishing codes of conduct.

The legislation is known as SB 1146, which amends the California Equity in Higher Education Act, or EHEA. As it currently stands, the statute forbids discrimination based on religion, sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression. But it also contains a significant exemption for religious colleges and universities. SB 1146 would change that.

“That state of affairs is unsatisfactory to the LGBT lobby in California. They want to dramatically restrict the scope of that exemption so that a liberal arts religious institution can no longer maintain, enforce and apply faith-based conduct standards for their students and employees,” said Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel Gregory Baylor, who also directs the group’s Religious Schools Team.

…

“This bill is a solution in search of a problem. There is no problem, except in the eyes of these legislators that these schools hold ‘the wrong views’ on these controversial issues. So it doesn’t really accomplish anything but it does punish these schools for having these religious views,” said Baylor.

It is not enough to conform. It is not enough to surrender. You must come to love Big Brother.

Read it.

The Pulse night club massacre was the latest in a series of Islamic terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, quite a few of which have succeeded, while others have been foiled. These attacks have used a variety of weapons: box cutters, knives, pistols, pressure cookers and rifles. There is a sharp partisan divide with respect to how such terrorist attacks should be viewed.

Republicans say that we should try harder to keep potential terrorists out of the country. Since we have no practical way to vet immigrants, and, in any event, Islamic extremists tend to be second generation Muslims like Omar Mateen, the only realistic way to do this is by reducing, or suspending altogether, immigration from Muslim-dominated countries. This is Donald Trump’s proposal.

That would be a radical departure from present practice. Senator Jeff Sessions’ Senate subcommittee has released this chart, which shows that the Obama administration will soon have issued one million green cards to immigrants from Islamic countries.

Read it.

Indeed, to make the comparison to Adam Lanza of Newtown and James Holmes of Aurora all but explicit, Obama described Mateen not as a jihadist but as a “single deranged person.”

The president did so because he doesn’t want us to view Mateen as a volunteer in a war against the United States in which he served as a combatant against a cleverly chosen soft target. He wants us to view Mateen as another psychotic American with improper access to dangerous weaponry.

It’s all about the narrative, Larry.

‘Never let a crisis go to waste.’ — Rahm Emmanuel

Read it.

The number of non-Defense Department federal officers authorized to make arrests and carry firearms (200,000) now exceeds the number of U.S. Marines (182,000). In its escalating arms and ammo stockpiling, this federal arms race is unlike anything in history. Over the last 20 years, the number of these federal officers with arrest-and-firearm authority has nearly tripled to over 200,000 today, from 74,500 in 1996.

What exactly is the Obama administration up to?

Read it.

Fearing a civil liberties backlash and “bad public relations” for the Obama administration, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson refused in early 2014 to end the secret U.S. policy that prohibited immigration officials from reviewing the social media messages of all foreign citizens applying for U.S. visas, according to a former senior department official.

“During that time period immigration officials were not allowed to use or review social media as part of the screening process,” John Cohen, a former acting under-secretary at DHS for intelligence and analysis. Cohen is now a national security consultant for ABC News.

One current and one former senior counter-terrorism official confirmed Cohen’s account about the refusal of DHS to change its policy about the public social media posts of all foreign applicants.

No wonder they aren’t catching the terrorists.

Read it.

New York City politician Adriano Espaillat has proposed that the federal government create “anti-gentrification” zones “where vulnerable tenants could form cooperatives to purchase their apartment buildings away from predatory landlords [and a] ruthless market.” As a rule of thumb, any time a politician proposes a new government program to save people from the “ruthless market,” it is worth looking to see what other government programs are really causing the problem.

First of all, gentrification is a local problem, so why should the federal government get involved? Espaillat’s answer is “the federal level . . . is really where the money is.” The real answer is that Espaillat is running for Congress, so he has to propose a federal solution to get people to vote for him. Considering that the federal government is nearly $20 trillion in debt, the Antiplanner suggests that people should be skeptical of politicians who think the federal government is made of money.

Good lick with that.

Read it.

Harvey Silverglate, a renowned civil rights attorney and former president of the American Civil Liberties Union in Massachusetts, called investigations of global warming skeptics by state attorneys general “pure harassment.”

No shit.

Read it.

If you think that all members of Congress have to comply with all of the laws that we common citizens have to obey, think again. Over the years, Congress has passed thousands of bills and statutes that dictate how we should or shouldn’t live our lives, but its members often fail to comply with these rules. In many instances, they actually exempt themselves from those burdensome constraints.

Read it.

The young people who have moved to Portlandia like to eat out a lot, and as a result the Portland has more restaurants per capita than all but five other metropolitan areas in the country. However, the cost of eating out is rising because inexpensive restaurants are getting pushed out by more expensive ones that can afford to pay the rising rents required to stay in Portland.

Cooking for yourself is just so last century.

This is just one more symptom of Portland’s growing affordability problem. In May, median home sale prices in the Portland area exceeded $350,000 for the first time. This is 4.8 times median family incomes, the worst Portland has yet seen. While sale prices might not perfectly reflect the entire housing market, they are probably pretty close, as Zillow estimates that the median value of Portland-area homes in April was facing eviction as the owner wants to sell the land to a developer who will no doubt build dense, but much-more expensive, housing on the site. The residents are trying to raise $2 million to buy the park themselves, but this seems unlikely. At least four other mobile-home parks are also facing sale and redevelopment.

Mother Jones must be part of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy.

In 2011, the State Department cleared an enormous arms deal: Led by Boeing, a consortium of American defense contractors would deliver $29 billion worth of advanced fighter jets to Saudi Arabia, despite concerns over the kingdom’s troublesome human rights record. In the years before Hillary Clinton became secretary of state, Saudi Arabia had contributed $10 million to the Clinton Foundation, and just two months before the jet deal was finalized, Boeing donated $900,000 to the Clinton Foundation, according to an International Business Times investigation released Tuesday.

They have a pair of nice charts laying it all out.

Read it.

According to a report released by Oklahoma Watch last Tuesday, The Oklahoma Department of Public Safety purchased “Electronic Recovery and Access to Data” (ERAD) machines to assist law enforcement with seizing funds in asset forfeiture cases. Oklahoma has been struggling with frequent civil asset forfeiture abuses and it seems like state law enforcement are trying to step up the use of forfeiture rather than reforming it.

The devices allow officers to seize funds on debit cards from people that are suspected of drug trafficking but do not have cash present with them at the time.

…

If the process of civil asset forfeiture wasn’t already controversial enough, law enforcement decided to purchase these machines in order to seize a person’s funds out of his or her own private bank accounts without any additional due process. Officials claim that these devices are essential to hinder drug trafficking in the state.

Stay out of Oklahoma until this gets fixed.

Read it.

In the wake of this past weekend’s massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) announced in a press release today that he intends to introduce new legislation which “would prohibit the purchase, possession or shipment of a firearm by anyone convicted of a misdemeanor hate crime or who received a hate crime sentence enhancement.”

This is, of course, unconstitutional. But that never stops Democrats.

Read it.

An investigation by the Electronic Frontier Foundation has shed new light on an experimental tattoo recognition program run by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and raised serious questions about the privacy safeguards in place.

I don’t see how marks on your body come under the category ‘privacy’. ‘Advertising’ perhaps.

The tattoo project has two potential uses. A simple recognition system can use individual tattoos to identify specific suspects over time, supplementing fingerprints and simple facial photos. But more sophisticated systems will also be able to identify tattoo patterns that may suggest particular criminal affiliations. Law enforcement agencies already catalog specific tattoos associated with Russian mafia and white supremacist groups, and the FBI believes an automated system might help uncover previously unrecorded associations. “Tattoos provide valuable information on an individual’s affiliations or beliefs and can support identity verification of an individual,” one researcher wrote in a NIST whitepaper.

And, indeed, having a tattoo at all reflects a degree of narcissism that constitutes, in my view, a character flaw at least as significant as anything one might post on ‘social media’.

It’s that second use case that EFF finds most concerning, potentially standing as a threat to free expression. “Tattoos are free speech that we wear on our skin,” the group writes. “Our tattoos express who we were, who we are, and who we hope to be. But when law enforcement looks at our tattoos, they see unique biometric identifiers and a shortcut to learning our personal beliefs and our social connections.”

Well, if tattoos express ‘who we are’, I don’t see any legitimacy to objecting to it being used to ‘learning our personal beliefs and our social connections’. We have a right to free speech, but it you use your free speech to shout ‘I hate Jews!’ I’m going to presume that it reflects a personal belief and feel perfectly justified in not hiring or doing business with you. You can’t have it both ways, although there’s a lot of that going around these days.

Read it.

Later this week, the U.S. House of Representatives is expected to vote on H.R. 5053, the “Preventing IRS Abuse and Protecting Free Speech Act,” introduced by Congressman Peter Roskam (R-Ill.). This important legislation prevents the IRS from targeting non-profits by prohibiting the agency from collecting the identity of donors who contribute to these organizations. Members of Congress should vote yes on H.R. 5053.

Currently, the IRS requires non-profits to submit a schedule B form, listing the names and addresses of their donors. However, this form is not used by the IRS for any purpose. Given the increasing politicization within the agency, the existence of these forms is an “accident” waiting to happen.

I would seriously love to see the Schedule B for the Clinton Foundation.