Monday, June 23, 2014

Barker's Newsbites: Monday, June 23, 2014


Sorry for no weekend newsbites, folks, but it was a busy weekend...

 DRESS SHOPPING for "The Mother of the Bride."

 (She ended up - at my insistence - purchasing not one... but two... beautiful gowns!)

 Anyway... on to today's newsbiting!

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7 comments:

William R. Barker said...

http://nypost.com/2014/06/17/clintons-use-loophole-to-avoid-estate-tax-they-helped-create/

Not bad for a couple of “dead broke” people.

Penny-pinching probable presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and her former leader-of-the-free-world husband, Bill Clinton, have apparently grown quite attached to their money.

Despite being self-described paupers on their way out of the White House, the Clintons managed to sock away so much that they now want to shield their wealth from the dreaded estate tax they enthusiastically supported before striking it rich.

“The estate tax has been historically part of our very fundamental belief that we should have a meritocracy,” Hillary Clinton said at a December 2007 appearance with billionaire investor Warren Buffett.

* MERITOCRACY...? IS SHE KIDDING...? SHE WAS BASICALLY "GIVEN" A SENATE SEAT BY HER HUSBAND THE PRESIDENT... HER DAUGHTER CHELSEA WAS GIVEN A JOB PAYING TENS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS PER HOUR BASED UPON WHO HER PARENTS WERE...

(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)

But according to Bloomberg News, the Clintons have employed a variety of financial strategies designed to help shield multimillionaires from the estate tax, a levy paid by a person who inherits money or property.

The tax can top out at 40% of assets.

Bill and Hillary Clinton have long supported an estate tax to prevent the U.S. from being dominated by inherited wealth.

As long as the tax is for other people, it appears.

* YEP... AS LONG AS THERE'RE LOOPHOLES! (DO WHAT I SAY, NOT WHAT I DO!)

According to federal financial disclosures and local property records, the Clintons created residence trusts in 2010 and shifted ownership of their Westchester house into them in 2011, a strategy popular among the nation’s 1%.

* GEEZUS...

The move could save the Clintons hundreds of thousands of dollars in estate taxes, financial experts say.

(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)

News of the money move comes as Hillary Clinton promotes her new book, “Hard Choices.”

Last week, in an interview with ABC, she told anchor Diane Sawyer that she and Bill were “dead broke” and in debt when they left the White House after 2000.

She backtracked a day later on “Good Morning America,” saying she understood the struggles of Americans.

At the end of 2012, the Clintons were worth from $5.2 million to $25.5 million, according to financial disclosures that Hillary Clinton filed in 2013 as she was leaving her position as secretary of state.

June 23, 2014 at 12:27 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/10916086/The-scandal-of-fiddled-global-warming-data.html

When future generations try to understand how the world got carried away around the end of the 20th century by the panic over global warming, few things will amaze them more than the part played in stoking up the scare by the fiddling of official temperature data.

There was already much evidence of this seven years ago, when I was writing my history of the scare, "The Real Global Warming Disaster."

But now another damning example has been uncovered by Steven Goddard’s U..S blog Real Science, showing how shamelessly manipulated has been one of the world’s most influential climate records, the graph of U.S. surface temperature records published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Goddard shows how, in recent years, NOAA’s U.S. Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) has been “adjusting” its record by replacing real temperatures with data “fabricated” by computer models.

(*SNORT*)

The effect of this has been to downgrade earlier temperatures and to exaggerate those from recent decades, to give the impression that the Earth has been warming up much more than is justified by the actual data.

In several posts headed “Data tampering at USHCN/GISS,” Goddard compares the currently published temperature graphs with those based only on temperatures measured at the time. These show that the U.S. has actually been cooling since the Thirties, the hottest decade on record; whereas the latest graph, nearly half of it based on “fabricated” data, shows it to have been warming at a rate equivalent to more than 3 degrees centigrade per century.

(*ANOTHER SNORT*)

When I first began examining the global-warming scare, I found nothing more puzzling than the way officially approved scientists kept on being shown to have finagled their data, as in that ludicrous “hockey stick” graph, pretending to prove that the world had suddenly become much hotter than at any time in 1,000 years. Any theory needing to rely so consistently on fudging the evidence, I concluded, must be looked on not as science at all, but as simply a rather alarming case study in the aberrations of group psychology.

June 23, 2014 at 12:47 PM
William R. Barker said...

* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)

http://nypost.com/2014/06/22/what-congress-can-do-about-obamas-rewriting-of-laws/

* BY GEORGE WILL

What philosopher Harvey Mansfield calls “taming the prince” — making executive power compatible with democracy’s abhorrence of arbitrary power — has been a perennial problem of modern politics.

It is now more urgent in America than at any time since the Founders, having rebelled against George III’s unfettered exercise of “royal prerogative,” stipulated that presidents “shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”

Serious as are the policy disagreements roiling Washington, none is as important as the structural distortion threatening constitutional equilibrium.

Institutional derangement driven by unchecked presidential aggrandizement did not begin with Barack Obama, but his offenses against the separation of powers have been egregious in quantity... and... qualitatively different.

* YEP! EXACTLY!

Regarding immigration, health care, welfare, education, drug policy and more, Obama has suspended, waived and rewritten laws, including the Affordable Care Act.

That law required the employer mandate to begin this year. But Obama wrote a new law, giving to certain-sized companies a delay until 2016, and stipulating that other employers must certify they will not drop employees to avoid the mandate. Doing so would trigger criminal perjury charges; so, he created a new crime, that of adopting a business practice he opposes.

Presidents must exercise some discretion in interpreting laws, must have some latitude in allocating finite resources to the enforcement of laws and must have some freedom to act in the absence of law. Obama, however, has perpetrated more than 40 suspensions of laws!

Were presidents the sole judges of the limits of their latitude, they would effectively have plenary power to vitiate the separation of powers, the Founders’ bulwark against despotism.

* AND THIS IS OBAMA'S VIEW OF HIS OWN POWERS! (AND UNFORTUNATELY NEITHER MOST MEMBERS OF CONGRESS NOR MOST MEMBERS OF THE U.S. SUPREME COURT CAN BE TRUSTED TO FIGHT BACK AGAINST OBAMA'S IMPULSE TOWARDS DICTATORSHIP.)

* TO BE CONTINUED...

June 23, 2014 at 1:05 PM
William R. Barker said...

* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)

Congress cannot reverse egregious executive aggressions such as Obama’s without robust judicial assistance.

* DEMS IN CONGRESS WILL MOSTLY SUPPORT OBAMA OUT OF PARTY LOYALTY. REPUBLICANS WILL DO LITTLE BECAUSE THEY'RE AFRAID THEY'LL LOSE THE POLITICAL BATTLE FOR HEARTS AND MINDS.

* THE SURPREME COURT...? (*SIGH*)

It is, however, difficult to satisfy the criteria that the Constitution and case law require for Congress to establish “standing” to seek judicial redress for executive usurpations injurious to the legislative institution.

Courts, understandably fearful of being inundated by lawsuits from small factions of disgruntled legislators, have been wary of granting legislative standing. However, David Rivkin, a Washington lawyer, and Elizabeth Price Foley of Florida International University have studied the case law and believe standing can be obtained conditional on four things:

1) That a majority of one congressional chamber explicitly authorize a lawsuit.

2) That the lawsuit concern the president’s “benevolent” suspension of an unambiguous provision of law that, by pleasing a private faction, precludes the appearance of a private plaintiff.

3) That Congress cannot administer political self-help by remedying the presidential action by simply repealing the law.

4) And that the injury amounts to nullification of Congress’ power.

Hence the significance of a House lawsuit, advocated by Rivkin and Foley, that would unify fractious Republicans while dramatizing Obama’s lawlessness. The House would bring a civil suit seeking a judicial declaration that Obama has violated the separation of powers by effectively nullifying a specific provision of a law, thereby diminishing Congress’ power. Authorization of this lawsuit by the House would give Congress “standing” to sue.

Congress’ authorization, which would affirm an institutional injury rather than some legislators’ personal grievances, satisfies the first criterion. Obama’s actions have fulfilled the rest by nullifying laws and thereby rendering the Constitution’s enumeration of Congress’ power meaningless.

The House has passed Rep. Trey Gowdy’s (R-SC) bill that would guarantee expedited consideration by federal courts of House resolutions initiating lawsuits to enforce presidents to “faithfully execute” laws. But as a bill, it is impotent unless and until Republicans control the Senate and a Republican holds the president’s signing pen.

June 23, 2014 at 1:05 PM
William R. Barker said...

* THREE-PARTER... (Part 1 of 3)

http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-Texas/2014/06/21/US-Media-Restricted-at-Border-Fed-Agent-Cites-Safety-Concerns

A remote section of the U.S.-Mexico border near the Anzalduas International Bridge is one of the few places where media can witness and record the mass crossings of minors coming from Central America.

The U.S. Border Patrol is now restricting journalists' access to the area citing safety concerns.

* FIRST AMENDMENT? WHAT FIRST AMENDMENT?

“You can’t be here," a Border Patrol agent said. After learning that he was speaking with Breitbart Texas, the agent repeated his assertion and stated, “It isn’t safe for you here.” The agent refused to give his name and then grabbed his phone, acting as though he had a phone call. He then raised his arm over his name badge. When a camera was put on him, he quickly sped off.

The National Border Patrol Council (NBPC), the union representing approximately 17,000 U.S. Border Patrol agents, also had a representative in the area accompanied by a journalist from another outlet. The union representative spoke with the Border Patrol agent who demanded that this reporter leave the area. Within minutes, the union representative received a call from a Border Patrol supervisor about his presence in the area. The NBPC Local 3307 union representative, Albert Spratte, told Breitbart Texas, “This area has always been the public road to Rincon Village, it is the only access to the houses there. All of the sudden, we are being told it is restricted and not open to the public or media. A lot of media have been there recently and this hasn’t been told to us before. It is something new.”

* O-BAM-A! O-BAM-A! O-BAM-A!

Spratte continued, “The agent who removed you spoke with me immediately after the incident. The phone call from Border Patrol management brought to my attention that they only wanted agents in that area now, which is strange because we’ve never been told that before from up top.”

* TO BE CONTINUED...

June 23, 2014 at 4:19 PM
William R. Barker said...

* CONTINUING... (Part 2 of 3)

The area of the Rio Grande River south of McAllen, Texas to Anzalduas Park has effectively become ground zero for the Texas border crisis. While some of the activity is occurring near the park and can be witnessed and documented by media, much of the crossing of minors occurs in areas with signs warning U.S. citizens not to enter.

* IF IT'S U.S. TERRITORY WHY CAN'T U.S. CITIZENS ENTER?

Some of the areas are "under the care of U.S. Fish and Wildlife..."

* ISN'T THE VERY PURPOSE OF THE U.S. FISH AND WILDLIFE AGENCY TO PROVIDE THE BEST POSSIBLE EXPERIENCE FOR AMERICANS SEEKING TO ENJOY AMERICA'S NATURAL BEAUTY? (THUS... P*A*R*K - ANZALDUAS P*A*R*K...?!)

...while other areas are private property.

* AND IF A PRIVATE PROPERTY OWNER WANTS SOMEONE OFF OF HIS PROPERTY IT'S UP TO THE PROPERTY OWNER TO CALL THE POLICE.

Much of the area is controlled by the International Water Boundary Commission (IWBC), and the area around the Anzalduas International Bridge has traditionally been open for media and for anyone going to Rincon Village.

Spratte said that the area is the only access to Rincon Village and that this is why the area is one of the few without posted restrictions to the public. “It is one of the few places that doesn’t have signs restricting access, and therefore one of the few places in this hotspot where media has the ability to see what is really occurring and relate that to the American public,” Spratte said. “For the past several months in that area, media has constantly come down and we have never had a problem with them being kicked out.”

He continued, "That agent said it wasn’t safe for you to be there, and it isn’t the safest place in the world, but it has historically not been restricted to journalists and it is one of the few places where media can actually see what we are dealing with in this crisis. It seems the agent was either intimidated by the threats from management to be fired or criminally charged for telling media what is actually going on, more than he actually thought your life was at risk to be there.”

Breitbart Texas recently reported on the efforts of Border Patrol management to restrict information leaking to the public by threatening possible criminal charges against agents who spoke to media.

Spratte told Breitbart Texas that the Border Patrol agents are being placed under immense pressure in the crisis and that they have to follow their orders from above. He said, “A supervisor in the Border Patrol can't just put out a policy, it has to come from above them in the chain, maybe even as high up as Washington.”

“I think the folks in Washington are embarrassed that we have so little control over what is crossing into our nation right now and they don’t want the American public to have pictures or video of this failure, and this ultimately hurts the public and limits the knowledge they have. The public has a right to know what is really going on here,” said Spratte.

* TO BE CONTINUED...

June 23, 2014 at 4:20 PM
William R. Barker said...

* CONCLUDING... (Part 3 of 3)

Another Border Patrol agent working in the area spoke with Breitbart Texas on the condition of anonymity. The agent said the public information officers are the only ones allowed to speak with media. “They get their talking points from Washington, D.C., from high level political appointees, and they have to strictly adhere to what they are told to say. This is why it is vital that journalists have access to these areas without the oversight of the federal government,” said the agent.

Breitbart Texas spoke on the matter with the NBPC Local 3307 vice president, Chris Cabrera. He said, “It seems the service at the station or sector level is trying to hide something. Management is sending out emails to agents and intimidating them and trying to restrict the information journalists can obtain."

* AMERIKA... 2014... THE CONTINUING AGE OF OBAMA...

"This is a testament to how unsecured the border actually is. Leadership in Washington has consistently told the public that the border is secure or secured enough. This crisis exposes the lack of the truth in those statements and journalists have played a vital role in informing the public,” Cabrera continued. “Had those photos not been leaked and published, we’d still be at square one and there would be no attention down here."

"Journalists being prohibited from accessing areas to take photos and video of the river border is detrimental. This leaves the public to make decisions based solely upon the official line from Washington.”

* NOT ONLY IS IT DETRIMENTAL... HOW DOES IT PASS CONSTITUTIONAL MUSTER...?!?! (RHETORICAL QUESTION...)

He added, “Not only do Americans as a whole deserve better, but Border Patrol agents themselves are dependent upon the public understanding what they are dealing with.”

Shawn Moran, the NBPC vice president from the national office, spoke to Breitbart Texas on the matter as well. He largely agreed with Cabrera and said, “The more that CBP [Customs and Border Protection] tries to restrict the media and public attention from this issue, the more it appears they have something to hide.”

June 23, 2014 at 4:21 PM

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