(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Freshly fired Peter Strzok, once the FBI’s deputy chief of counterintelligence, took his case to the public sphere Monday in hopes of garnering both moral and financial support.
Echoing the scorched-earth separations of his one-time bosses, James Comey and Andrew McCabe, by taking a defiant tone against the White House, Strzok’s first post on his newly-minted Twitter account was a statement from Washington, D.C. litigation firm Zuckerman Spaeder, blaming “political pressure” for the firing and hinting at a fight to come.
It closed by saying, “The FBI and the American people deserve better.”
Strzok had been reassigned within the agency after his anti-Trump text-messages with mistress Lisa Page became part an investigation by the Justice Department’s Instructor General.
Prior to that, he had lead roles in both the Hillary Clinton email investigation and the Trump Russia investigation.
While testifying before the House Oversight Committee in July, he refused to answer many questions, citing the advice of FBI counsel.
In addition to his Twitter, Strzok established a GoFundMe account “dedicated to covering [his] hefty—and growing—legal costs and his lost income.”
At press time on Tuesday, it had raised nearly $330,000 of its stated goal of $350,000 with roughly 8,500 contributors.
However, a sizable chunk of the money was likely to be returned according to the page itself, which noted that “[d]ue to federal ethics regulations … any donation whose source cannot be determined … may be returned.”
It said additional SEC guidelines regulated any possible conflicts of interest or donations from prohibited sources and that any aggregate donation greater than $390 must be publicly disclosed.
At least 20 of the donations exceeding that amount came from anonymous donors.
‘It’s really an important part of our democracy to have an excellent, world-class news organization like CNN is…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Two notorious Trump-bashers teamed up Monday night to blur the lines of fact, fiction and fantasy under the guise of comedy.
CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer, who has repeatedly led the charge in bringing up questions on impeachment against President Donald Trump, visited “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” to despair over the push-back that left-wing media outlets have faced under the current administration.
“It’s been a very slow news cycle lately—I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” Blitzer began glibly.
It was hard to tell from there, however, when the erstwhile White House correspondent’s tongue left his cheek as he proceeded to wax philosophical about the lofty mission of the mainstream news media.
“We want people to watch, obviously, CNN. We want people to know what’s going on. Our job as journalists, as reporters, is to report the news as fairly, as responsibly, as accurately as we possibly can.”
Throwing a charitable bone to critics, Blitzer conceded that CNN has had a sometimes rocky relationship with the truth, perhaps alluding to the resignation of three CNN employees last year over a false story asserting ties between Trump officials and a Russian investment fund.
CNN itself drew criticism for collusion during the 2016 election when it was discovered by Wikileaks that contributor Donna Brazile had given questions to the Hillary Clinton campaign prior to a debate sponsored by the network.
“We know we’re the first draft of history, meaning that occasionally we make a mistake,” Blitzer said, “and if we do, we correct it as soon as possible, but that’s our responsibility.”
Blitzer and others in the media have particularly harped on Trump’s rhetoric in referring to members of the press as an “enemy of the people” due to their slanted coverage.
“It’s really an important part of our democracy to have an excellent, world-class news organization like CNN is…. It’s very concerning, very worrisome, that the president of the United States goes after us the way he does,” Blitzer said.
Encouraged by Kimmel—who acknowledged industry bias in his own field when he said in February that talk show hosts were liberal because it required ‘intelligence’—Blitzer then went on record denying Trump’s charge while preaching to the choir:
“Not just me, but all of us serious news organizations, we are not the enemy of the American people. We report the news. It’s part of our democracy. What worries me so much is that when the president says what he says, it gives encouragement to dictators out there around the world to go after a free press, and they say, ‘Look, fake news, disgusting people, we gotta get rid of them.’”
Kimmel chimed in that it was not only journalists at risk.
“Camera guys, audio guys on the scene at a rally in Florida and he’s getting people stirred up, he doesn’t know who’s in that crowd. He doesn’t know what someone might do. It’s truly irresponsible,” Kimmel said, before again blurring the lines between comedy and wish-fulfillment: “We’ve gotta get rid of him, right?”
Blitzer took his cue to play the straight man to Kimmel’s madcap foil: “We have to convince him to stop talking, cause it’s really, really a dangerous situation. It’s an awful situation, and I hope he stops doing it.”
Despite the speculation of what might happen to journalists at a Trump rally, networks were decidedly mute over the aggressive treatment from Antifa and left-wing protestors during a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, over the weekend, as documented by an NBC camera crew.
Correspondent Cal Perry tweeted footage of the protestors cursing and shoving both media and law enforcement during an Aug. 12 demonstration. The march ostensibly commemorated the year anniversary of the “Unite the Right” event, during which one counter-protestor was hit by a car.
‘Nobody should hang their hat on starting Second Amendment litigation these days. It’s a losing proposition…’
Jeff Sessions/Photo by Gage Skidmore (CC)
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) The recent settlement of a case involving the distribution of materials for at-home gun-making has opened the floodgates to questions about the Trump administration’s positions on gun-rights.
The Justice Department reached an agreement last week with the Second Amendment Foundation and Defense Distributed, which filed suit against the State Department in 2015 to challenge government claims that the instructions they provided for creating a plastic gun using a 3-D printer violated federal law.
In 2013, the John Kerry-led State Department sent a letter to Defense Distributed owner Cody Wilson that said the company’s online materials violated the International Traffic in Arms Regulations and threatened legal action.
In a release on its website, Wilson’s co-plaintiff, the Second Amendment Foundation, described ITAR as “a Cold War-era law intended to control exports of military articles.”
Wilson told Liberty Headlines that the settlement was a major victory for both First- and Second-Amendment rights.
“This is a significant thing for the history of the Second Amendment and for the present of American gun culture,” he said. “It affects free and clear access [to online information about firearms]. That’s going to be an essential thing as we go forward.”
SAF also said in its release that the settlement was an important step in having the government recognize that many non-automatic or semi-automatic firearms are not “inherently military.”
“Not only is this a First Amendment victory for free speech, it also is a devastating blow to the gun prohibition lobby,” wrote Alan Gottlieb, SAF founder and executive vice president.
Under its terms, the technical information provided by the plaintiffs will now be regulated by the Commerce Department, which does not impose prior restraint on public speech, Gottlieb said.
After five years, Wilson said, the files for its 3-D models are back online and available to the public for download at defcad.com.
As part of the settlement, the government also will pay back $39,000 in legal and administrative fees, including about $10,000 in State Department registration fees.
Wilson said it covers only a small fraction of the nearly half a million dollars he spent in his defense (about a quarter of which was paid by SAF).
“It’s rare enough just to get dollar 1 from the feds in an action like this, so I can’t really complain,” he said.
Despite the pyrrhic victory for Wilson, Second Amendment advocates continue to puzzle over mixed signals from Jeff Sessions’s Justice Department.
Although Wilson said he hoped the Trump administration might signal a more sympathetic position on gun-rights, he saw no change in how the federal government litigated the case.
The settlement, he said, had more to do with administrative issues than philosophical ones.
“It’s going to become a convenient way to read what happened here—Trump becomes president and we won,” Wilson said. “… That’s all technically true, but I don’t think it’s related.”
Sessions has chosen to press forward on several other appeals in cases initiated by his Obama-era predecessors, Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch.
Among these are decisions involving the rights of citizens with previous nonviolent felony convictions to have their gun-ownership rights restored.
Larry Hatfield, Rickey Kanter and Jorge Medina all face cases where, despite having long ago paid for crimes such as making false statements on a bank loan and mail-order fraud, they continue to be denied gun rights, even for self-defense and hunting.
Other cases being litigated include one involving the sale of a handgun by a licensed Texas dealer to an out-of-state resident and another to determine whether a gun stored in the glove compartment of a locked vehicle violated Massachusetts law.
The cases have met with mixed success in the lower courts, but each could prove an early test of the Supreme Court’s conservative leanings in its next session, following the retirement of “swing” Justice Anthony Kennedy.
The court averted one recent test case by declining to review the decision in Sessions v. Binderup, which ruled that serious misdemeanor crimes in Pennsylvania were not grounds for depriving gun rights.
Despite a few major victories the Obama era—including 2008’s District of Columbia v. Heller, which challenged a D.C. law banning the possession of firearms, and 2010’s McDonald v. Chicago, determining that the Heller decision applied also to states—few see a definitive resolution to gun-rights issues coming in the pipeline anytime soon.
Wilson said part of him had hoped to see his case make it to the Supreme Court (they ruled against him on one injunction), and he was cautiously optimistic about the changes that Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment (if approved by the Senate) might bring.
However, he added, “Nobody should hang their hat on starting Second Amendment litigation these days. It’s a losing proposition.”
RAND PAUL: ‘I’m worried about his opinion on the Fourth Amendment…’
Brett Kavanaugh/IMAGE: YouTube
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) As President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh begins the vetting process leading up to his confirmation hearings, not all of his opposition comes from the Left.
Conservative analysts have questioned some of his unorthodox decisions and raised the concern that Kavanaugh—like his Supreme Court predecessor, Anthony Kennedy—could flip on key decisions.
Several have pointed to his dissenting opinion on the Affordable Care Act in Seven-Sky v. Holder.
Kavanaugh asserted that the case lacked standing since the Obamacare individual mandate was, effectively, a tax.
That argument inadvertently provided the framework that Chief Justice John Roberts used to uphold Obamacare in 2012.
Meanwhile, privacy advocates point to a larger concern: Kavanaugh’s record of supporting government data-collection as being consistent with the Fourth Amendment.
Libertarians like the Ron Paul-affiliated Campaign for Liberty have said these decisions show a “need to keep a close eye on the confirmation hearings.”
In 2015, in the wake of whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance, Kavanaugh joined Chief Judge Merrick Garland and others to deny an emergency petition filed by Judicial Watch founder Larry Klayman over the NSA’s collection of phone-record metadata.
Among the reasons Kavanaugh cited were that the collection of phone records from telecommunications service providers did not constitute a search and that the Fourth Amendment did not prohibit all searches, only unreasonable ones.
Citing a litany of precedents, Kavanaugh stated that “The Fourth Amendment allows governmental searches and seizures without individualized suspicion when the Government demonstrates a sufficient ‘special need’ … that outweighs the intrusion on individual liberty.”
He offered as examples the drug testing of students, roadblocks to detect drunk drivers, border checkpoints and security screening at airports.
“To be sure, sincere and passionate concerns have been raised about the Government’s program,” he added. “Those policy arguments may be addressed by Congress and the Executive. Those institutions possess authority to scale back or put more checks on this program, as they have done to some extent by enacting the USA Freedom Act.”
But last month the Supreme Court ruled that police need a warrant before obtaining cell phone location data about a suspect from telecom companies.
As Politico noted, it was not the first time Kavanaugh gave a wide berth to surveillance efforts.
In 2010’s USA v. Lawrence Maynard, he supported the warrantless use of a GPS tracking device, saying there was no expectation of privacy—though Kavanaugh conceded that tampering with the vehicle may have violated property rights.
The Supreme Court later ruled that such tracking required a warrant, with Justice Antonin Scalia citing Kavanaugh’s latter statement.
In a message to supporters, Norm Singleton, the Campaign for Liberty president, said, “[W]e will pore through more of Judge Kavanaugh’s opinions to help make sure we don’t get another wolf in sheep’s clothing.”
Despite the concerns, however, Singleton supported the idea that Kavanaugh’s role was simply to interpret the Fourth Amendment and apply judicial precedent, not to legislate from the bench.
“At the end of the day, we want and need a justice who will adhere to a strict constructionist view of the Constitution,” he wrote.
Still, Kavanaugh must convince a majority of Senators to endorse his nomination.
Republican Rand Paul of Kentucky, perhaps the strongest advocate for citizens’ privacy rights in the Senate, has expressed concern about Kavanaugh while at the same time claiming to have “an open mind.”
“I’m worried about his opinion on the Fourth Amendment,” Paul said in Louisville on Monday, the Courier-Journal reported. “Kavanaugh ruled that national security trumps privacy … that worries me.”
‘The full extent of noncitizen registration and voting throughout the Commonwealth remains a mystery mostly due to the obstructionist tactics…’
Photo by byzantiumbooks (CC)
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) In most presidential election years, Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes make it a pivotal part in any victory strategy.
If President Donald Trump’s narrow victory in Pennsylvania (by approximately 0.7 percent and under 50,000 votes) is any indication, it is a state in which every vote matters.
A new report by the Public Interest Legal Foundation suggests that it is also a state in which an election could be easily stolen.
The report, titled “Steeling the Vote” identified 139 ineligible non-citizen voters in Allegheny County (which encompasses the city of Pittsburgh), who acknowledged being registered to vote since 2006 due to “flaws” in the screening process while applying for a driver’s license.
“According to officials, any person seeking a driver’s license—regardless of his or her immigration documents on the table during the transaction—was erroneously screened for interest in registering to vote,” the report said.
The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation first implemented its expedited voter registration process through the DMV following the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, also known as the “Motor Voter” law.
Of the 139 noncitizen voters identified in Allegheny County, 87 (62 percent) used the PennDOT system to register, and 13 (9 percent) did so through voting drives.
The report said that 27 percent had voted at least once prior to removal from the voter rolls.
It found that 74 (54 percent) of them registered as Democrats, 38 (27 percent) as non-declared and 23 (16 percent) as Republican.
While the foundation looked only at one region, the true scope of the impact on Pennsylvania’s voting integrity could be much greater.
“According to one Philadelphia City Commissioner, the number of noncitizens who entered the voter registration system during the last two decades exceeded 100,000,” the report said, citing Al Schmidt, one of the three-member panel that oversees the city’s elections.
Among the reasons given by noncitizens, some said the questions used to screen citizenship status were confusingly sequenced or given in a language they didn’t fully understand.
Others said they were pressured by PennDOT employees to register, even after expressing their confusion.
Still, others should have raised red flags, the report said.
“Days after the 2008 election, the Allegheny County Election Division received a concerned citizen’s complaint from a person who overheard a coworker ‘bragging’ about his noncitizen wife’s vote for President of the United States.”
Despite assurances from Pennsylvania officials that the glitch had been resolved, the report faulted an ongoing lack of transparency.
“The full extent of noncitizen registration and voting throughout the Commonwealth remains a mystery mostly due to the obstructionist tactics of the Department of State, which refuses to turn over records that might show just how many noncitizens are presently registered to vote,” it said.
Although the sample of the Allegheny County incidents may seem insignificant when considering the impact on a national election, Pennsylvania’s glitches mirror concerns throughout the nation that voter eligibility may not be fully enforced during registration or in the actual polling stations.
Following the 2016 election, Trump publicly questioned the validity of Hillary Clinton’s 2.8 million popular vote margin, citing research of the 2012 election from the journal Electoral Studies that non-citizen voting may have impacted U.S. elections.
‘Whatever the reason, non-work is becoming the norm among teenagers as more and more of them sit idle each summer…’
Photo by Samantha Jade Royds (CC)
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Although Labor Department figures have brought good news on the unemployment front, a recent study says teens’ summer jobs continue to lag.
However, a report from the Center for Immigration Studies, using data from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Surveys, projected that the number of U.S.-born teens in the workforce would rise by only about 1 percent over 2017.
It expected only about 42 percent of teens to be in the workforce this summer, down about 20 percent from two decades ago.
CIS said increasing immigration numbers play a large role as adult workers compete with adolescents or unskilled and temporary labor.
“Perhaps it is due to a willingness by immigrants to work for less or put up with more unpleasant working conditions” the report said. “It may also be due to immigrants’ more effective social networks for finding employment. Whatever the reason, non-work is becoming the norm among teenagers as more and more of them sit idle each summer.”
It noted similar declines across the board for black, white and Hispanic teens, as well as in comparisons of immigrant and U.S.-born teens.
However, it also found an inverse correlation between states’ immigration rates and teen employment, suggesting that the two were connected.
The report from CIS also spoke extensively on the importance of work experience during teen years as it related to future employment experiences and wages.
“The impact of high school work experience on future economic attainment is significant eight years after terminating schooling,” it said. “Teens employed in high school earn more than teens who did not work in the first year after graduation, with wage differences tending to increase over time.”
‘I spend most of time thinking about how to combat income inequality through the guaranteed income…’
Chris Hughes/IMAGE: CNBC via YouTube
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) A consortium of Silicon Valley progressives, led by Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, is piloting a program to give free money to residents of Stockton, California.
The Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration will team with the city, 80 miles east of San Francisco, to distribute $500 a month for 18 months to 100 residents with no strings attached.
Organizers of said they hoped to provide “an unprecedented opportunity to radically reimagine our social safety net and reinvent the 21st century Social Contract.”
Originally announced in October by Stockton’s 27-year-old mayor, Michael Tubbs, the experiment has garnered increasing attention through recent stories from national outlets like CNN and The New York Times, which likened it to Sir Thomas More’s 16th-century work Utopia.
Despite its proximity to the wealthy Bay Area, where property values are among the most inflated in the world, Stockton faced hard economic times when the housing bubble burst, resulting in a foreclosure crisis that (along with poor fiscal management and unrestrained spending) led the city to declare bankruptcy in 2012.
According to the SEED website, “Stockton is in many ways a microcosm of the United States. [M]ajor shifts in the economy such as persistent wage stagnation and rising inequality have made it increasingly difficult for hardworking people to make ends meet.”
The SEED initiative is slated to begin in 2019 and will be evaluated by researchers from the University of Tennessee and the University of Pennsylvania.
Among its co-chairs is Hughes, a former Harvard roommate of Mark Zuckerberg and one of Facebook’s five original co-founders.
Hughes’s past progressive projects include helping direct digital initiatives for the Obama campaign and a four-year stint as publisher/editor of The New Republic, which he helped steward into insolvency before selling it off in February 2016.
In a profile on the site Medium.com, Hughes said, “I spend most of time thinking about how to combat income inequality through the guaranteed income.”
With broad support from tech industry tycoons such as Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, California Democrats added the Universal Basic Income to their official party platform in March.
But while private funding could help get it off the ground, Hughes acknowledged in an interview with UBI advocate Irv Garfinkel that the true aim may be to establish the ultimate government entitlement.
“[T]he real utility of the concept is to set a very aggressive goal like Social Security for all,” he said. “The big goal is useful because it makes other policies seem modest in comparison—Food stamps, SSI, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and so on.”
‘I believe you should get rid of it, start over, re-imagine it and build something that actually works…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) As Democratic hopefuls eye the 2020 field, New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand revealed a sharp left turn in her immigration positions on CNN Thursday, calling for the abolishment of the 15-year-old Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.
“I believe that it has become a deportation force, and I think you should separate the criminal justice from the immigration issues,” she said of ICE, which was created after 9/11 as part of the Department of Homeland Security.
CNN anchor Chris Cuomo set up Gillibrand with the softball pitch to unveil her new about-face, characterizing her stance as “even to the left of Bernie Sanders.”
“We believe that we should protect families that need our help, and that is not what ICE is doing today,” Gillibrand said. “And that’s why I believe you should get rid of it, start over, re-imagine it and build something that actually works.”
New York’s junior senator, who was appointed to replace Hillary Clinton after the 2008 election, is the most recent to hop on the bandwagon supporting the latest liberal talking point to abolish ICE.
Political novice Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez caught the attention of many blue-state Democrats with her surprise upset over veteran congressman Joe Crowley in Tuesday’s primary.
Although President Donald Trump gleefully celebrated the ouster of the “slovenly” Crowley during a rally in North Dakota, Ocasio-Cortez’s socialist-tinged platform – which included opposition to ICE – was a bellwether for others on how Democrats may try to recalibrate their pro-immigration tactic.
Former “Sex and the City” star Cynthia Nixon (who faces Chris Cuomo’s brother, current New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, during the Empire State’s Democratic gubernatorial primary in September) also joined the anti-ICE chorus, calling it a “terrorist organization.”
While the political newcomers had no prior record to compare with, however, Gillibrand’s long history of supporting immigration policy during the Obama years raised some eyebrows.
Schumer calls Janus decision a “gut punch” and a “despicable decision” based “on a flimsy, almost made-up First Amendment justification…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) In the wake of two game-changing announcements from the U.S. Supreme Court that will directly impact the political sphere, Democrats scrambled to respond on Thursday.
The Janus decision, delivered Wednesday by Justice Samuel Alito, found that unions’ collecting compulsory ‘fair share’ dues from public-sector employees was a violation of the workers’ fundamental free-speech rights.
It struck down the precedent set in 1977’s Abood vs. Detroit Board of Education, through which unions could collect up to 80 percent in “agency fees” from government workers, even if they declined to join for political or other reasons.
“[W]e recognize the importance of following precedent unless there are strong reasons for not doing so. But there are very strong reasons in this case,” Wednesday’s opinion said, citing abuses in the monopolistic collective-bargaining process.
At the Democrats’ press conference, Schumer fired back by calling the decision a “gut punch” and a “despicable decision” that was based “on a flimsy, almost made-up First Amendment justification.”
With no trace of irony, even though the Janusruling overturned an existing court decision, Schumer decried what he saw as judicial activism from the bench’s originalist wing.
“The golden age of America was when America was unionized … but now the hard right wants to take it away,” Schumer said. “They know they could never pass this stuff, even in a conservative House and Senate, and so they use the one elected body—the one non-elected body—the Supreme Court.”
The press conference was intended to announce the introduction of a new bill, Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act, sponsored by Hawaii Sen. Mazie Hirono and Pennsylvania Rep. Matt Cartwright.
Joining the bill’s sponsors and supporters were labor representatives including AFSCME President Lee Saunders and AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka.
Chuck Schumer/Photo by Lion Multimedia Production U.S.A. (CC)
A release from Schumer’s office stated that the bill aimed “to ensure that public sector employees across the country are able to form and join a union and enter into a written contract with employers. The bill also reaffirms that it is policy of the United States to encourage collective bargaining.”
It remained unclear what the legislation would do to directly address the Janusruling, which dealt only with the rights of non-union public servants to opt out of such an arrangement.
But that decision likely will require some of the most steadfast Democratic lobbying institutions to scale back their operations.
A New York Times article estimated that teachers’ unions could stand to lose up to a third of their memberships and funding in states that have no pre-existing right-to-work laws.
The National Education Association, the largest of the teachers’ unions, expected to lose up to 200,000 members and $28 million from its $366 million annual budget, the article said.
However, it added that NEA president Lily Eskelsen García did not plan to curb political activities, such as voter mobilization.
Maxine Waters (screen shot: cavalierseul/Youtube)
In a week in which her California House of Representatives colleague, Maxine Waters, received an ethics complaint for telling followers to “push back” aggressively against Trump cabinet members, erstwhile House Speaker Pelosi seemed in her remarks on Thursday to paint an equivalency between the left’s recent rhetoric and the Supreme Court decision.
“Yesterday, [the court] did violence to our democracy by trying to diminish the voices of working people,” she said.
Several of those at the podium, including Washington Sen. Patty Murray, framed their remarks by weighing in on the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy.
Kennedy, the longest-serving jurist on the court and last remaining Reagan appointee, was considered the swing vote on issues such as abortion and gay marriage.
“Right now, there are people who across this country who are deeply and rightly worried about how Justice Kennedy’s retirement affects their day-to-day lives,” Murray said. “They’re gonna have questions for this Trump administration and every Republican who decides the people don’t need a voice now that President Trump is in charge after blocking President Obama’s qualified nominee.”
Murray and others hoped to forestall the next appointment until after the midterm elections, referencing Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s previous refusal to vote in an election year on Merrick Garland to replace the late Antonin Scalia.
Justice Kennedy himself was appointed in an election year, 1988, after a contentious, partisan confirmation battle led by Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy (no relation) successfully blocked Reagan’s first nominee, Robert Bork.
A second choice, Douglas Ginsburg, withdrew due to past marijuana use.
Despite Schumer’s promises to “fight it all the way,” a vote prior to the November elections would almost assuredly succeed due to the precedent established during the confirmation of Trump’s first Supreme Court appointment, Justice Neil Gorsuch.
After Democrats attempted to block Gorsuch, McConnell forced a rules change that required only a simple majority.
The move followed in the footsteps of his predecessor, Nevada Sen. Harry Reid, who initiated the so-called nuclear option to override filibusters of Obama appointees.
‘Research designed to sway individuals of a various group…to a politically contentious viewpoint is not science…is propagandizing…’
Rand Paul/IMAGE: YouTube
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul joined Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, and Oklahoma senators James Lankford and Jim Inhofe on Monday to call for an investigation of the National Science Foundation, saying it violated federal law by using the grant process to influence political and social debate over global warming and other topics.
“Research designed to sway individuals of a various group, be they meteorologists or engineers, to a politically contentious viewpoint is not science—it is propagandizing,” the letter co-signed by the four senators said. “Such efforts certainly fail to meet the standard of scientific research to which the NSF should be devoting federal taxpayer dollars.”
The senators specifically raised questions over two grants, totaling nearly $4 million, to promote “climate education” among local news meteorologists.
Much of the funding benefited Climate Central, a group with the objective to “inspire people to support action to stabilize the climate,” according to a 2012 Washington Post article.
“Climate Central has since changed the manner in which it characterizes itself, perhaps due to the attention it received from the Washington Post, but the organization’s receipt of federal dollars for advocacy efforts raises significant concerns,” the senators’ said in their letter.
The senators asked NSF Inspector General Allison Lerner to investigate whether the grants were a violation of the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal agencies from engaging in partisan activities.
They provided seven questions about the nature of the NSF policies on research grants.
Among the Climate Central’s three founding board members is Wendy Schmidt, wife of former Google chair Eric Schmidt, an outspoken advocate for progressive causes.
Another founder, Janet Lubchenco, was appointed by President Barack Obama to lead the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Other members of the Climate Central leadership, including board chair Stephen Pacala and President/CEO Ben Strauss, have contributed to Democratic campaigns, according to FEC filings.
Photo by ItzaFineDay (CC)
The Climate Central website denies it is an “advocacy group” because it does not endorse any specific policy positions.
However, the stated aim of its Climate Matters program is to influence public perception by providing graphics and other resources to TV weather people because “research shows that meteorologists are trusted messengers on climate change.”
The senators noted in their complaint to the NSF that when the initial funding for the program proved ineffective at swaying meteorologists, Climate Central doubled down by applying for a second grant.
“Having learned that meteorologists in general remained inconclusive regarding climate change, this coalition then returned to the NSF and secured an additional $2,998,178 to expand ‘the reach’ of a political advocacy group by recruiting 200 additional weathercasters.”
Since then, Climate Central’s efforts to infiltrate the media seem to be working.
A Wednesday story by NBC News boasted that, due to the organization’s work, “The number of stories on global warming by television weather people has increased 15-fold over five years.”
The hypocrisy of some climate change warriors and the ironic refusal of the weather to cooperate with their agenda have also created a public perception problem.
However, one data point that can’t be denied is the money involved.
As the Washington Times reported in 2015, the climate change industry was a $1.5 trillion global business, driven largely by policymaking.
With both reputation and financial livelihood at stake, climatologists have a vested interest not only in proving the veracity of their hypotheses, but also the urgency to take action.
In addition to the Climate Central grants, Sen. Paul et al. called on the NSF to investigate several other grants for “projects that appear to have little value beyond pushing for increased political activism,” amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars, including a study on the role of social justice in engineering, which received $369,480.
They noted that the research sought to strengthen the role of social justice by mapping its evolution in the field of engineering and then sharing the findings with student groups and professional organizations that might use it for advocacy purposes.
The letter to the NSF also took to task two other studies on the “mechanisms for disengagement from contentious political action” and “identifying persuasion effects and selection in media exposures.”
“This is a stark departure from the purpose of the NSF, which includes ‘promot[ing] the progress of science,’” the senators wrote.
