Blog Posts

At Above the Law, a former clerk of Judge Edith Jones, Tamara Tabo, defends her.

Shouldn't the Utah Data Center, with its yottabyte of storage, have a transcript of Jones's speech by now?

Critics of the Heritage Foundation Report by Robert Rector and Jason Richwine are saying that it's "flawed" because its estimate that Amnesty will cost 6.3 TRILLION dollars is wrong. Unfortunately for them, the reason they advance is that illegals are going to cost us that anyway, under the no-enforcement status quo.

Here's part of Mickey Kaus's Handy U-Print-It Pocket Guide: Why S.744′s a Fraud

From the Washington Post:

The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets, according to a top-secret document obtained by The Washington Post. 

The program, code-named PRISM, has not been made public until now. It may be the first of its kind. The NSA prides itself on stealing secrets and breaking codes, and it is accustomed to corporate partnerships that help it divert data traffic or sidestep barriers. But there has never been a Google or Facebook before, and it is unlikely that there are richer troves of valuable intelligence than the ones in Silicon Valley.

If document requiring company to submit phone records for millions of Americans is authentic, it would be the broadest surveillance order known to date. 

Equally unusual is the way the NSA extracts what it wants, according to the document: “Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.”

As I've been admitting for over a decade, I used to laugh back in the 1990s when the president of France would complain about the "Anglo-Saxon powers" listening in to his phone calls via Echelon. Of course, as it turns out, the president of France is seldom an idiot and employs people in his intelligence services who are indeed intelligent.

The Anglo-Saxon wiretapping cabal goes back to the famous Ultra project of WWII. It's been a big deal

As an alumnus and  over interested-follower of Notre Dame sports and football in particular, I think you more or less get it right.  

I would highlight the fact Notre Dame is emulating the Duke basketball model on the football field.

You don't think they're capable of it?

Breitbart.com makes a very valid point today: Mainstream Media Fail to Break Even One of Four Obama Scandals

Well, if it is Thursday, there must be a new Obama scandal. But …whatever that scandal is, you can bet the American mainstream media will be playing catch up and not carrying the glory of breaking a story about a major White House scandal...

This is true enough and not surprising. But more important is Breitbart’s pointing out

…our pathetic, American, lapdog mainstream media is not responsible

H/T One Old Vet

The financial blog ZeroHedge flourishes by being more alert and less politically correct than the MSM – like The Drudge Report in better days.

From it I have become aware of the appalling impending student loan crisis as I discussed in Gang Bill Response To Record Student Loan Defaults And Youth Unemployment: Flood Their Market!

Yesterday ZeroHedge supplied what ought to be a lethal news item for the immigration acceleration aspect of the Gang Bill: Hourly Compensation Crashes Most Ever, Labor Costs Drops By Most In 4 Years, Manufacturing Compensation Plummets By 7% By Tyler Durden 06/05/2013

So much for the thesis of declining labor slack and rising labor leverage. Moments ag

Mexican diplomats meddle openly in U.S. immigration policy, while our own leaders do nothing to stop them.

So they continue to get away with it.

A new Mexican consul has arrived to his post in Dallas, and guess what he's talking about?

 

This week, the new top Mexican consul José Octavio Tripp arrived in Dallas, a region ranking among the top five for the Mexican government in a country where 11 percent of the population traces origins back to Mexico.

Judge Edith Jones: Blacks and Hispanics More Violent

Complaint filed over Jones's discriminatory and biased comments

BY JORDAN SMITH, 1:50PM, TUE. JUN. 4

A complaint filed today by several civil rights groups, including one funded entirely by the government of Mexico, alleges that federal Judge Edith Jones has violated her duty to be impartial and damaged the public's confidence in the judiciary, in statements she made in a public lecture – including that blacks and Hispanics are more violent.

Indeed, Jones also said that a death sentence provides a public service by allowing an inmate to "make peace with God."

Jones, who sits on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals – based in New Orleans, its jurisdiction includes Texas – made numerous offensive and biased comments during a February lecture at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law, according to the complaint filed pursuant to the federal Judicial Conduct and Disability Act. The complaint, filed by the Texas Civil Rights Project, Austin NAACP, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), and the Mexican Capital Legal Assistance Program (among others) alleges that during her talk – billed as "Federal Death Penalty Review with Judge Edith Jones (5th Cir.)" – Jones violated a number of canons of the code of conduct for federal judges.

The lecture was not recorded, but witnesses recalled a number of Jones' controversial statements. The views she expressed included not only that minorities are responsible for more violent crime than are whites, but also that claims by death row inmates that racism or arbitrariness infected their prosecutions, or that they are actually innocent or even mentally retarded, are merely "red herrings," according to those who attended the lecture. She told the law students and other attendees that she thought the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling outlawing the death penalty for the mentally retarded did intellectually disabled individuals a disservice, and that to create such an exemption from execution was a "slippery slope,"