Tuesday, April 14, 2015

Barker's Newsbites: Tuesday, April 14, 2015


Well, folks, finally some new newsbites.

Work has slowed down, but I still spend a fair amount of time at the gym. Also, I admit it... I've been getting more and more caught up in FBing.

FB isn't the best forum for chatting... but... at least I can find some interaction there!

All I seem to get here is spam...

(*SIGH*)

Well... as I always say... ultimately I do this for me.


10 comments:

William R. Barker said...

http://denver.cbslocal.com/2015/04/13/cbs4-investigation-tsa-screeners-at-dia-manipulated-system-to-grope-mens-genitals/

A CBS4 investigation has learned that two Transportation Security Administration screeners at Denver International Airport have been fired after they were discovered manipulating passenger screening systems to allow a male TSA employee to fondle the genital areas of attractive male passengers.

It happened roughly a dozen times, according to information gathered by CBS4.

According to law enforcement reports obtained during the CBS4 investigation, a male TSA screener told a female colleague in 2014 that he “gropes” male passengers who come through the screening area at DIA.

“He related that when a male he finds attractive comes to be screened by the scanning machine he will alert another TSA screener to indicate to the scanning computer that the party being screened is a female. When the screener does this, the scanning machine will indicate an anomaly in the genital area and this allows (the male TSA screener) to conduct a pat-down search of that area.”

Although the TSA learned of the accusation on Nov. 18, 2014 via an anonymous tip from one of the agency’s own employees, reports show that it would be nearly three months before anything was done.

* NEARLY... THREE... MONTHS...

The agency has not released the names of the two fired employees and refused a CBS4 request for an interview.

* OH... WAIT... IT GETS "BETTER"...

Earlier this month a prosecutor from the Denver District Attorney’s Office was asked to review the case but she declined to press charges because there was no reasonable likelihood of conviction and no victim had been identified.

* BULLSHIT! (ESPECIALLY IN THE FOLLOWING CONTEXT... KEEP READING!)

It’s not the first time TSA screeners at DIA have been accused of inappropriate touching of passengers. Jamelyn Steenhoek filed a complaint against TSA screeners at the airport saying the frisking she received in December 2013 amounted to a sexual assault. She said a female TSA agent searched her at an airport checkpoint after an alarm went off.

“There are just areas of my body I’m not comfortable being touched in. On the outside of my pants she cupped my crotch,” said Steenhoek, who called the frisking “invasive.”

She said “the part of the search that bothered most was the breast search. You could tell it shouldn’t take that much groping. I felt uncomfortable, I felt violated.”

In 2014 the Denver District Attorney’s Office announced it would not be filing criminal charges in the Steenhoek case.

(*SMIRK*)

Across the country other passengers have raised concerns over the years about TSA pat downs. But the recent case uncovered by CBS4 is more problematic for TSA since its own employee blew the whistle on the practice, a supervisor observed it happening, the agency fired the employees, and the female screener who was fired admitted to the fondling conspiracy.

* THUS... HOW COULD A CONVICTION NOT BE POSSIBLE...?!?!

michelle said...

Maybe I shouldn't say this, but...it sure seems that, under the current administration, a whole lot of perversity is being revealed WITHIN government...

William R. Barker said...

http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2015/04/isis-camp-a-few-miles-from-texas-mexican-authorities-confirm/

ISIS is operating a camp just a few miles from El Paso, Texas, according to Judicial Watch sources that include a Mexican Army field grade officer and a Mexican Federal Police Inspector.

* HAS ANYONE TOLD ERIC HOLDER NOT TO SHIP THEM ANY GUNS...?

The exact location where the terrorist group has established its base is around eight miles from the U.S. border in an area known as “Anapra” situated just west of Ciudad Juárez in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. Another ISIS cell to the west of Ciudad Juárez, in Puerto Palomas, targets the New Mexico towns of Columbus and Deming for easy access to the United States, the same knowledgeable sources confirm.

During the course of a joint operation last week, Mexican Army and federal law enforcement officials discovered documents in Arabic and Urdu, as well as “plans” of Fort Bliss – the sprawling military installation that houses the US Army’s 1st Armored Division. Muslim prayer rugs were recovered with the documents during the operation.

Law enforcement and intelligence sources report the area around Anapra is dominated by the Vicente Carrillo Fuentes Cartel (“Juárez Cartel”), La Línea (the enforcement arm of the cartel) and the Barrio Azteca (a gang originally formed in the jails of El Paso). Cartel control of the Anapra area make it an extremely dangerous and hostile operating environment for Mexican Army and Federal Police operations.

* WHO WANTS TO RESEARCH HOW MUCH MONEY, TRAINING AND EQUIPMENT WE GIVE TO MEXICO EACH YEAR...?

According to these same sources, “coyotes” engaged in human smuggling – and working for Juárez Cartel – help move ISIS terrorists through the desert and across the border between Santa Teresa and Sunland Park, New Mexico. To the east of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, cartel-backed “coyotes” are also smuggling ISIS terrorists through the porous border between Acala and Fort Hancock, Texas. These specific areas were targeted for exploitation by ISIS because of their understaffed municipal and county police forces, and the relative safe-havens the areas provide for the unchecked large-scale drug smuggling that was already ongoing.

* AND WE HAVEN'T TAKEN THE CAMPS OUT... WHY...???

Mexican intelligence sources report that ISIS intends to exploit the railways and airport facilities in the vicinity of Santa Teresa, NM (a U.S. port-of-entry). The sources also say that ISIS has “spotters” located in the East Potrillo Mountains of New Mexico (largely managed by the Bureau of Land Management) to assist with terrorist border crossing operations. ISIS is conducting reconnaissance of regional universities; the White Sands Missile Range; government facilities in Alamogordo, NM; Ft. Bliss; and the electrical power facilities near Anapra and Chaparral, NM.

* SOUNDS FAR-FETCHED... BUT...

(*SHRUG*)

William R. Barker said...

http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015/04/14/the-student-loan-problem-is-even-worse-than-official-figures-indicate/?mod=blog_flyover

Student loans are proving to be a much bigger burden on households than previously thought.

* NOT THAN PREVIOUSLY THOUGHT BY ME!

Nearly one in three Americans who are now having to pay down their student debt – or a staggering 31.5% – are at least a month behind on their payments, new research from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis suggests.

* BRING BACK DEBTORS PRISONS!

That figure is far higher than official delinquency measures reported by the Education Department and the New York Fed. And it’s also likely the most accurate. Here’s why:

The official measures reflect delinquencies as a share of all Americans with student debt, but millions of borrowers aren’t even required to make payments yet. Many are currently in college or grad school and thus don’t have to make payments until six months after they leave. Others are out of school and past that grace period but have received permission by their lender — the federal government in most cases — to suspend payments for a range of reasons, such as being unemployed. Including these borrowers in the broader pool of student-loan debt makes official delinquency rates artificially low.

A more precise way of measuring delinquencies is to just look at borrowers who are required to make payments.

In their new paper, St. Louis Fed researchers Juan M. Sánchez and Lijun Zhu determined that, as of Jan. 1, more than half of student-loan debt – 55% – was held by borrowers who were in repayment. The remaining 45% weren’t in repayment.

* GEEZUS...

The researchers point to a kernel of good news: Delinquencies are no longer rising. But they’re not going down, either. Delinquencies spiked after the recession and then again in 2012 before falling and leveling off in the past few years.

William R. Barker said...

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/apr/14/feds-releasing-illegal-immigrant-rapists-murderers/

The Obama administration is deporting fewer criminal aliens than it did last year, according to new statistics released Tuesday that undercut President Obama’s justification for his new amnesty, which he said was intended to free agents to focus on the most dangerous of criminals by focusing on “felons not families.”

(*SILENCE*)

Instead, both arrests and deportations of criminal aliens are down about 30% through the first six months of fiscal year 2015, signaling that agents, who have been told to stop focusing on rank-and-file illegal immigrants, have not been able to refocus on criminal illegal immigrants instead.

* "...NOT BEEN ABLE..." UH-HUH...

(*SNICKER*)

The data, released by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Robert W. Goodlatte at the beginning of a hearing with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Sarah Saldana, also showed that the 30,558 criminal aliens ICE knowingly released back into the community in 2014 had amassed nearly 80,000 convictions, including 250 homicides, 186 kidnappings and 373 sexual assaults.

(*SILENCE*)

According to the statistics, the aliens released by ICE had amassed 13,636 convictions for driving under the influence, 1,589 weapons offenses, 994 aggravated assaults, 56 arsons and 31 smuggling offenses.

The Obama administration has claimed that many of those releases are required by court order stemming from a years-old Supreme Court ruling, Zadvydas v. Davis, that says immigrants can’t be held indefinitely and if their home countries won’t take them back, they must eventually be released.

* NONSENSE. THEY'RE DELIBERATELY DISTORTING THE COURT RULING. BUT BEYOND THAT... (KEEP READING...)

But the new numbers suggest those released are a small fraction. Of the nearly more than 30,000 criminal aliens released, only 2,457 were cut loose because of considerations stemming from the Zadvydas ruling, the House committee said. And for the serious crimes, only about half the homicide convictions and a third of the kidnapping convictions were Zadvydas-related releases.

William R. Barker said...

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

http://www.wsj.com/articles/hillary-and-the-liberal-way-of-lying-1428968021

Sometime in the 1990s I began to understand the Clinton way of lying, and why it was so successful.

To you and me, the Clinton lies were statements demonstrably at variance with the truth, and therefore wrong and shameful. But to the initiated they were an invitation to an intoxicating secret knowledge.

What was this knowledge?

That the lying was for the greater good, usually to fend off some form of Republican malevolence.

What was so intoxicating? That the initiated were smart enough to see through it all. Why be scandalized when they could be amused? Why moralize when they could collude?

It always works. We are hardly a month past Hillary Clinton’s Server-gate press conference, in which she served up whoppers faster than a Burger King burger flipper — lies large and small, venial and potentially criminal, and all of them quickly found out. Emails to Bill, who never emails? The convenience of one device, despite having more than one device?

It doesn’t matter.

* REPEAT...

It doesn't matter...

(*SHRUG*)

What the Clintons pioneered — the brazen lie, coyly delivered and knowingly accepted — has become something more than the M.O. of one power couple. It has become the liberal way of lying.

William R. Barker said...

* CONTINUING... (Part 2 of 3)

Consider this column’s favorite subject: the Iran deal. An honest president might sell the current deal roughly as follows:

“My fellow Americans, the deal we have negotiated will not, I am afraid, prevent Iran from getting a bomb, should its leaders decide to build one. And eventually they will. Fatwa or no fatwa, everything we know about their nuclear program tells us it is geared toward building a bomb. And frankly, if you lived in a neighborhood like theirs — 70 million Shiites surrounded by hundreds of millions of Sunnis — you’d want a bomb, too.

Yes, we could, in theory, stop Iran from getting the bomb. Sanctions won’t do it. Extreme privation didn’t stop Maoist China or Bhutto’s Pakistan or Kim’s North Korea from building a bomb. It won’t stop Iran, either.

Airstrikes? They would set Iran back by a few years. But even in a best-case scenario, the Iranians would be back at it before long, and they’d keep trying until they got a bomb or we got regime change.

Fellow Americans, how many of you want to raise your hands for more Mideast regime change?

So here’s the deal with my deal: It never was about cutting off Iran’s pathways to a bomb. Let’s just say that was an aspiration. It’s about managing, and maybe slowing, the process by which they get one.

I know that’s not what you thought I’ve been saying these past few years — all that stuff about all options being on the table and me not bluffing and no deal being better than a bad deal. I said this for political expedience, or as a way of palliating restive Saudis and Israelis. You feed the dogs their bone.

But if you’d been listening attentively, you would have heard the qualifier ‘on my watch’ added to my promises that Iran would not get the bomb. And what happens after I leave office? Hopefully, the Supreme Leader will be replaced by a new leader cut from better cloth. Hopefully, too, this marathon diplomacy will open new patterns of U.S.-Iranian cooperation. But if neither thing happens we’d be no worse off than we are today.

That’s why getting a deal, any deal, is more important than the deal’s particulars when it comes to sanctions relief, inspections protocols and so on. The details only matter insofar as they make the political medicine go down. What counts is that we’re sitting at the table together, speaking.”

* TO BE CONTINUED...

William R. Barker said...

* CONCLUDING... (Part 3 of 3)

A speech along these lines would have the virtues of intellectual integrity and political honesty. It would improve the quality, and perhaps the tenor, of our foreign-policy discussions. The argument might well lose — the U.S. tool kit of coercion is not so bare, the benefit of diplomacy isn’t so great, the threat of a nuclear Iran isn’t so manageable and Americans aren’t that eager to roll over for the ayatollah. But at least we would have a worthwhile debate.

Question for Mrs. Clinton: Does she think the U.S. should gently midwife Iran’s nuclear birth or violently abort it? If she wants to be president, our former top diplomat could honor us with a detailed answer.

In the meantime, let’s simply note what the liberal way of lying has achieved.

We are on the cusp of reaching the most consequential foreign-policy decision of our generation. We have a deal whose basic terms neither side can agree on. We have a president whose goals aren’t what he said they were, and whose motives he has kept veiled from the public.

Maybe the ayatollah will give him his deal, and those with the secret knowledge will cheer. As for the rest of us: Haven’t we learned that we’re too stupid to know what’s for our own good?

William R. Barker said...

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

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/416884/dont-let-science-be-settled-political-intimidation-thomas-sowell

How long will this country remain free?

* TOO LATE! (WE'RE NOT FREE NOW!)

Probably only as long as the American people value their freedom enough to defend it.

* WE DON'T. (THEY DON'T. THEY WON'T.)

But how many people today can stop looking at their electronic devices long enough to even think about such things?

* VERY FEW.

Meanwhile, attempts to shut down people whose free speech interferes with other people’s political agendas go on, with remarkably little notice, much less outrage.

The Internal Revenue Service’s targeting the tax-exempt status of conservative groups is just one of these attempts to fight political battles by shutting up the opposition, rather than answering them.

Another insidious attempt to silence voices that dissent from current politically correct crusades is targeting scientists who do not agree with the “global warming” scenario. Congressman Raul Grijalva has been writing universities, demanding financial records showing who is financing the research of dissenting scientists, and demanding their internal communications as well. Mr. Grijalva says that financial disclosure needs to be part of the public’s “right to know” who is financing those who express different views.

(He is not the only politician pushing the idea that scientists who do not march in lockstep with what is called the “consensus” on man-made global warming could be just hired guns for businesses resisting government regulations. Senator Edward Markey has been sending letters to fossil-fuel companies, asking them to hand over details of their financial ties to critics of the “consensus.”)

The head of the National Academy of Sciences has chimed in, saying: “Scientists must disclose their sources of financial support to continue to enjoy societal trust and the respect of fellow scientists.” This is too clever by half. It sounds as if this government bureaucrat is trying to help the dissenting scientists enjoy trust and respect — as if these scientists cannot decide for themselves whether they consider such a practice necessary or desirable. The idea that you can tell whether a scientist — or anybody else — is “objective” by who is financing that scientist’s research is nonsense. There is money available on many sides of many issues, so no matter what the researcher concludes, there will usually be somebody to financially support those conclusions.

* TO BE CONTINUED...

William R. Barker said...

* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)

Some of us are old enough to remember when this kind of game was played by Southern segregationist politicians trying to hamstring civil-rights organizations like the NAACP by pressuring them to reveal who was contributing money to them. Such revelations would of course then subject NAACP supporters to all sorts of retaliations, and dry up contributions.

The public’s “right to know” has often been invoked in attempts to intimidate potential supporters of ideas that the inquisitors want to silence. But have you heard of any groundswell of public demand to know who is financing what research? Science is not about “consensus” but facts. Not only were some physicists not initially convinced by Einstein’s theory of relativity, Einstein himself said that it should not be accepted until empirical evidence could test it. That test came during an eclipse, when light behaved as Einstein said it would, rather than the way it should have behaved if the existing “consensus” was correct. That is how scientific questions should be settled, not by political intimidation.

There is already plenty of political weight on the scales, on the side of those pushing the “global warming” scenario.

The fact that “global warming” models are not doing a very good job of predicting actual temperatures has led to a shift in rhetoric, with “climate change” now being substituted.

This is an issue that needs to be contested by scientists using science, not political muscle.

Too many universities are too willing to be stampeded by pressure groups. Have we forgotten Duke University’s caving in to a lynch-mob mentality during the “gang rape” hoax in 2006? Or the University of Virginia doing the same thing more recently? Politicians determined to get their own way by whatever means necessary may have no grand design to destroy freedom, but what they are doing can amount to totalitarianism on the installment plan.