Month: February 2013

John Cusack Interviews Law Professor Jonathan Turley

TURLEY: That’s exactly right. In fact, President Obama has not only maintained the position of George W. Bush in the area of national securities and in civil liberties, he’s actually expanded on those positions. He is actually worse than George Bush in some areas.

CUSACK: Can you speak to which ones?

TURLEY: Well, a good example of it is that President Bush ordered the killing of an American citizen when he approved a drone strike on a car in Yemen that he knew contained an American citizen as a passenger. Many of us at the time said, “You just effectively ordered the death of an American citizen in order to kill someone else, and where exactly do you have that authority?” But they made an argument that because the citizen wasn’t the primary target, he was just collateral damage. And there are many that believe that that is a plausible argument.

CUSACK: By the way, we’re forgetting to kill even a foreign citizen is against the law. I hate to be so quaint…

TURLEY: Well, President Obama outdid President Bush. He ordered the killing of two US citizens as the primary targets and has then gone forward and put out a policy that allows him to kill any American citizen when he unilaterally determines them to be a terrorist threat. Where President Bush had a citizen killed as collateral damage, President Obama has actually a formal policy allowing him to kill any US citizen.

via Truth-Out.org.

We’re at the point where the far left is starting to realize that Obama is simply shredding the Constitution.  I don’t think I’ve EVER agreed with  John Cusack before but he is 100% correct here.

CUSACK: Oscar Wilde said most journalists would fall under the category of those who couldn’t tell the difference between a bicycle accident and the end of civilization. But why is it that all the journalists that you see mostly on MSNBC or most of the progressives, or so-called progressives, who believe that under Bush and Cheney and Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzalez these were great and grave constitutional crises, the wars were an ongoing moral fiasco — but now, since we have a friendly face in the White House, someone with kind of pleasing aesthetics and some new policies we like, now all of a sudden these aren’t crimes, there’s no crisis. Because he’s our guy? Go, team, go?

I’m not sure that he means by “Pleasing aesthetics”.  Bush was not aesthetically pleasing?  I mean, he was no George Clooney but no ogre either.  … Or is that Obama is black?  I dunno.  But not sure I care either.  Where are all the anti-war protesters nowadays?

Overall this is an amazing piece that should be required reading for everyone on the Left.  They should think about all the venom they spewed at Bush for years for acting exactly like Obama.  I’m not saying Bush had it right… far from.  But the hypocrisy on the left is unbearable.

 

Widespread Violence on the CTA

With almost 20,000 CTA bus trips a day, tempers sometimes flare on a few of them. Regular users of the CTA know what an obstacle course it can be.

On the CTA’s 1,200 rail cars, riders are often met with a variety of frightening encounters- from armed robbers and cell phone thieves to fist fights and shoving.

Sometimes, shots are fired and people end up wounded or dead.

via abc7chicago.com.

Safe to say Chuck Goudie is not going to be invited to Rahm’s next party.

Then again… come-on Chuck, tell us something we don’t already know.

A Black Man in a KKK Hood: Race & Crime in Philly

In 2013, no one expects to see a man dressed in a Ku Klux Clan robe mid-morning in Center City, Philadelphia.  …

The man, who stood on the corner of 13th and Filbert on Tuesday, is not out to lynch or kill black people. In fact, he is black.Thirty-five-year-old Sixx King says he’s using the offensive symbol to highlight a serious problem: black on black crime.

“We’re bringing awareness to the black hypocrisy, complacency and apathy in the African-American community,” said King.

According to the FBI, in 2011 more than 7,000 black people were killed. King’s sign reads that the KKK killed 3,446 blacks in 86 years, while black on black murders surpass that number every six months.  …

Phelps-Washington rallied with King. Her son, Christopher, was among the 324 murdered in Philadelphia in 2011. Police say 85% of those killed that year were black.via CBS Philly.

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about how in Chicago blacks are 32.9% of the population but represent 78.7% of gun homicide victims.

According to the census Philadelphia is 43.4% black.  Here we’re told that 85% of those murdered in Philly are black.  This is as I predicted two weeks ago.

It is unfair and unjust that this does not get major media attention.  Years of neglect and failing schools have crippled inner cities and made them extremely violent places.  We’ve failed the young people in these places.

Kudos to Mr. Sixx King for his bringing attention to the issue.  I hope he gets some results in Philly.

Quinn Spends Another $1.5 Billion We Don’t Have

Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn on Thursday signed into law an extra $1.5 billion in spending for road construction and child welfare investigations, even as Republicans decried the measure as including ill-timed, pork barrel money.

via Chicago Tribune.

What is wrong with this guy?  Really?

Quinn already stopped a bond auction because the rates for Illinois bonds are too high (and only going to go higher.)

Illinois already has $9 billion in unpaid bills.  There’s also the looming pension time-bomb that no one wants to talk about.

What does The Machine not understand?

STOP SPENDING MONEY!

 

Illinois Never Met a Tax it Didn’t Like: Sneakers? Really?

The cost of a new pair of basketball shoes could jump by 25 cents under a proposal floated this week by an Illinois lawmaker.

State Rep. Will Davis, D-Hazel Crest, wants to create a new tax that would generate an estimated $3 million annually for a youth job preparation program. He said the added cost would likely go unnoticed by most consumers, while helping finance a program for kids during tight budget times.

via St. Louis Today.

Embarrassing that we have these people represent us.

Bacteria Creates Microscopic Gold Nuggets

Among the more peculiar organisms that inhabit our Earth exists a bacterium that turns water-soluble gold into microscopic nuggets of solid gold, scientists said Sunday.  …

The answer, suggest researchers in Canada, lies in a molecule excreted by the microbe that both shields the organism and transforms the poisonous ions into particles.”This finding is the first demonstration that a secreted metabolite can protect against toxic gold and cause gold biomineralisation,” the process by which living organisms produce minerals, they wrote in the journal Nature Chemical Biology.

The molecule, delftibactin A, is capable of achieving this feat within seconds in pH-neutral conditions at room temperature.

Study co-author Nathan Magarvey of Ontario’s McMaster University told AFP the study was not designed to show whether it would be viable to use germs to grow gold from water in the lab.

But such processes seem “distinctly possible,” he said in an email exchange.

via Business Insider.

Nature Rocks!!