Under the tag line of, “You’ve got to be kidding me!” comes this tidbit from Politico. Given their continuing failures in reporting news, CNN is in discussion with changing Anderson Cooper’s 360 program to a game show. We all know that CNN has not been a news channel since the first Gulf War when their lead anchor, Bernard Shaw, had hysterics in Bagdad at the start of the Gulf War I air war. I suppose it’s only reasonable that CNN comes out of the closet and admits it hasn’t been a news channel and moves on.
CNN developing political game show
By DYLAN BYERS, 1/21/15 2:42 PM EST
CNN is producing a new political game show hosted by Anderson Cooper, TVNewser reports.
The show, which is set to air on Presidents’ Day, will be a quiz-style program focused on presidential politics. If the show is a success, CNN is likely to produce future episodes.
We’ve reached out to CNN for more details and will update here if and when we hear back.
CNN, like MSNBC, has drifted so far from reality that nothing they do now surprises me.
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The Jubilee has come! Eric Holder actually changes DoJ policy in favor of the states. The FedGov will no longer usurp state and local asset forfeiture cases. In many of those cases, the state and local law was more restrictive than federal law. The DoJ would takeover cases then give local PDs a cut-of-the-action. Theft by government order. I’ve never liked asset forfeiture until the accused has actually been convicted and sentenced. Even then the laws are too broad; seizing accounts and assets unrelated to the actual crime(s).
Holder Has Made It Harder for Federal Government to Legally Seize Your Property
Jason Snead / @jasonwsnead / Andrew Kloster / @ARKloster /
In a stunning announcement last week, Attorney General Eric Holder announced the Department of Justice would immediately stop “adopting” state civil asset forfeiture cases. Attorney General Eric Holder’s announcement came exactly one week after leaders on Capitol Hill called on him to halt the controversial program as a step toward broader reform of the nation’s civil forfeiture system.
Before today’s announcement, federal agencies could take over, or “adopt,” forfeiture cases from local or state law enforcement agencies. In other words, state or local law enforcement personnel would seize property and then turn it over to the federal government to process.
Pursuant to agreements with the federal government, once the property was successfully forfeited in federal court, the originating state or local agency got a portion of the proceeds, potentially as high as 80 percent. That money had to be used for law enforcement operations, placing it beyond the control of local governments and state legislators.
The program became the subject of controversy for effectively allowing local agencies to circumvent restrictive state laws in favor of the potentially more lucrative federal route, raising serious federalism and good government concerns. Even where states had strong procedural safeguards for property owners or limitations on the use of forfeiture funds, law enforcement could partner with the federal government and use federal rules to seize property and make use of the profits.
Sens. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Mike Lee, R-Utah, and Reps. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wisc., and John Conyers, D-Mich., wrote that “these seizures might circumvent state forfeiture law restrictions, create improper incentives on the part of state and local law enforcement, and unnecessarily burden our federal authorities.”
Apparently responding to these concerns, the attorney general’s new policy bars federal authorities from adopting local or state seizures of “vehicles, valuables, cash and other monetary instruments.” The AG was able to make this change unilaterally because the statutes underlying federal civil forfeiture made the equitable sharing payments optional. The Department of Justice has the authority to craft, and to change, the rules of the program. The Treasury Department, which operates its own forfeiture fund, announced its forfeiture operations will conform to the same guidelines as those laid out by Holder.
The article continues with an explanation of exceptions under Holder’s new directive. All-in-all, it’s a step in the right direction.
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Ya just gotta love Dave Clark. Who’s he? He’s the black, conservative, Milwaukee County Sheriff who won his last election despite the efforts of liberals who hate black conservatives. He does not hesitate to make his opinions known. This time the subject was Al Sharpton.
David Clarke, Wisconsin sheriff: ‘Al Sharpton ought to go back into the gutter he came from’
– The Washington Times – Thursday, January 22, 2015
Milwaukee’s tough-talking black sheriff, David Clarke, argued this week that white Americans have “made great strides” in healing race relations, and that sooner or later they’re going to grow tired of having their noses “rubbed in the past sins of slavery.”
Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke didn’t pull any punches in his assessment of the Rev. Al Sharpton — who vowed to keep fighting for justice for slain Ferguson teen Michael Brown, despite the feds’ decision to drop a civil rights investigation — and characterized him on national television as less than intelligent and unworthy of respect.
“The grand jury in Ferguson, Missouri, got it right,” Sheriff Clarke said, during an appearance on “Fox & Friends.” “Officer [Darren] Wilson has been exonerated. The thing I want to know is how does he get his reputation back?”
Sheriff Clarke then directed anger at Mr. Sharpton, who spoke sharply in the wake of Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision not to prosecute Mr. Wilson, a former police officer, on civil rights charges.
Sic’em Dave!
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Former Speaker of the House, Tom Delay.
Tom Delay may be out of Congress, but the libs failed to defeat him. The Texas Supreme Court ended the Travis County (Austin, TX) democrat prosecutor’s vendetta against Delay. He’s back now with a review of Obama’s SOTU speech earlier this week.
In Obama’s speech, a conservative call to arms
– – Thursday, January 22, 2015
I found President Obama’s State of the Union address this week infuriating — and exhilarating.
It was infuriating for all the usual reasons. For all the talk that this time things would be different, in the first State of the Union speech since the American people repudiated his entire agenda we got the same old Mr. Obama, arrogant, disdainful, defiant of the new Republican majorities and of the voters who sent them to Washington. Had there been a referee on the premises, he would have thrown a flag for taunting.
It was perhaps the most in-your-face speech of this kind that I have ever heard, and I felt for the Republican lawmakers who had to sit through it, knowing that the television cameras were ready to pick up any scowl, eye roll or failure to join a “spontaneous” standing ovation. (It must have been especially tough for House Speaker John Boehner, who had to preserve his dignity and remain polite while Joe Biden was bouncing up and down like a manic jack-in-the box behind the president.)
The president either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that his party badly lost the elections. He’s not listening to the American people, as was evident in the very first minutes of his speech when he laid out the same old tired agenda that dragged down the Democrats in the first place. When President Clinton got a similar repudiation in the 1990s, at least he had the smarts to cooperate — sometimes kicking and screaming — with our new Republican majorities to get items like welfare reform passed. Things worked out so well that now Mr. Clinton brags about the things we forced him to accept.
That’s clearly not Mr. Obama’s way. What we got instead was one of the most misguided, frankly unconstitutional speeches ever given by an American president. The president called for universal child care, gender pay equity, guaranteed paid sick leave for workers, a higher minimum wage, free community college and new rules to make labor unions stronger — not one of which is the responsibility of the federal government under the Constitution. Then he laid out all the things he’s ready to veto if he doesn’t get his way — not exactly the bipartisan outreach that his advisers said was coming.
Even more infuriating — if possible — was Mr. Obama’s boasting about how far we have allegedly come under his watch. He bragged of bringing down the federal deficit in recent years when it was his uncontrolled — and unconstitutional — spending and taxing that ran up the deficit and debt in the first place. The official unemployment rate is down, but only because 90 million Americans have grown so discouraged that they’ve dropped out of the labor market altogether.
The president says he wants to turn his attention to stagnant wages and income inequality, apparently oblivious to the fact that wages aren’t going up precisely because there is a vast army of nonworkers out there saturating the job market. And income inequality will never be “fixed” by taxing the job producers more and giving the money to people who aren’t working. That approach has failed everywhere it has been tried.
The president’s victory lap was even more incredible when you consider the full plate of crises beyond our borders, from Russia and Iran to Yemen, Nigeria and Syria — the easily foreseen consequences of an administration that brags of “leading from behind.” The president claims the “shadow of crisis” has passed, but that’s not true to anyone who has been paying attention.
So why the exhilaration, you ask?
The more I listened to the speech, the more I was convinced that the president is handing the Republicans an incredible opportunity. He’s not backing down from his disastrous progressive agenda, and that means conservatives cannot afford to back down from theirs.
New Sen. Joni Ernst struck a nice, hopeful tone in her official rebuttal speech, but building the Keystone pipeline and getting more help to vets is not a full agenda. The joint House-Senate Republican retreat last week was another missed opportunity to pre-empt the president’s liberal agenda, to put a true constitutional conservative program on the table and force this president to react.
But Mr. Obama’s speech made it crystal clear that Republicans have no alternative to confrontation, a clash that should last through the 2016 election. Facing a delusional and defiant president, this is no time for conservatives to play small-ball. We need a bold agenda that presents an alternative to the left. We need real, pro-growth tax reform. We need to repeal Obamacare — now. We need to slash spending. We need to defund the president’s illegal executive actions, starting with his amnesty for illegal immigrants. We have to show we respect life and traditional values.
There can be no debate about it any more. Barack Obama has made it unmistakably clear he wants a fight.
We should give him one.
Well said, Tom. Well said.
