Thursday, June 18, 2015

Head of Clinton Foundation: The Clintons are paranoid loonies


Clinton Foundation head Donna Shalala** privately expressed concerns about Bill and Hillary Clinton’s mental state in the mid-1990s, saying they had become “paranoid” and fixated on “right-wing conspiracies,” according to previously unpublished audio recordings obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
In 1994, four years before Hillary Clinton said a “vast right-wing conspiracy” was trying to take down her husband’s presidency, top aide Shalala said this theory was already embraced by the Clintons.
“They’ve become paranoid. Paranoia. Thinking people are out to get them, this right-wing conspiracy stuff,” said Shalala, who was the head of Health and Human Services during the August 1994 interview.
This isn’t new to anyone who has watched the Clintons. In addition to being grifters with no sense of propriety, they are clinically diagnosable as paranoids under DSM-5. What makes this newsworthy is that everyone knows this, even their cronies, but no one in the press has reported on it until now.
“[The Clintons are] feeling sorry for themselves. They talk about [conspiracies] all the time,” said Shalala. “That there really is a conspiracy out there to get us. That we don’t have a chance, people don’t understand how much good we’ve done. Our message isn’t getting across because these people are beating us up.”
Shalala said documents about supposed right-wing conspiracies were also being distributed to White House staffers.
“There is a feeling in the White House, and I don’t know whether it’s [James] Carville or [Paul] Begala or who’s giving them the materials,” said Shalala. “But sitting on the desks of their staff there’s these materials on this right-wing conspiracy.”
Rather than abating since they made their Clampett-esque exit from the White House, literally taking the furniture with them, the feelings of persecution seem to have metastasized– at least in regards to Hillary. Bill was confident enough to party with a pedophile. Her use of a private email server and having a handler follow a reporter into the bathroom are great examples of the ongoing paranoia. It also explains Hillary avoiding press questions and unscripted encounters with voters.
**Full disclosure. I have seen Donna Shalala in a tennis skirt (Montrose Park tennis courts, Washington, DC) and survived with only 20% of my body turned to stone, minor loss of sight in my left eye, and a permanent gag reflex at the sight of small curd cottage cheese.
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Hidden Costs of Health Benefit Mandates

The upcoming King v. Burwell ruling, with its ramifications for the Affordable Care Act, has health-insurance costs back in the spotlight. Health-care mandates in particular have been an ongoing source of controversy. But states have been quietly passing their own health-insurance benefit mandates —requirements that insurers cover specific treatments and conditions — for decades, and there's much we can learn from them.
The number of state-level health-insurance mandates has steadily grown since the 1960s, with the average state imposing nearly 40. This growth surged recently due to the ACA's "Essential Health Benefits." The scope of the services targeted by these mandates varies widely, from cancer screening and prenatal care to acupuncture and chiropractic services.
Some mandated services seem essential to an adequate health-insurance plan, while others are of questionable benefit. What they all have in common is that they increase the cost of insurance by raising premiums for the people and employers who buy it. And higher premiums lead to other hidden costs as well.
In new research for the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, we find evidence that new state health-insurance mandates distort state economies by leading to the existence of more large firms and fewer small firms.
The key to understanding how state mandates affect firm size lies in the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) of 1974. Under ERISA, employers who self-insure (that is, directly bear the cost of paying their employees'benefit claims instead of buying coverage from an insurance company) are exempt from state health-insurance mandates. While technically a firm of any size is able to self-insure its health plan, in practice it is only the largest employers who opt for this form of coverage. This is because any form of insurance is more cost-effective when risk is pooled over a larger population.
A large employer can easily absorb the cost of one employee's expensive cancer treatment, because the costs are relatively insignificant when spread out among its many more fortunate workers. However, if a small business had to pay the entire cost of the same cancer treatment, it could go bankrupt.
These incentives are clearly illustrated by breaking down the self-insurance rate by firm size. Approximately 84 percent of employees at large firms (employers with at least 1,000 workers) are covered via self-insurance plans, compared with only 13 percent of employees at small firms (fewer than 50 employees).
Because it is easier and cheaper for large firms to self-insure, and thus escape state health-benefit mandates, they face less of a burden than small firms. This grants them a competitive advantage in the form of lower labor costs. The result is surprising: We find that each state health-benefit mandate leads to about 3,000 fewer small firms (with, for instance, 15 workers each), but about 20 more large firms with 1,000 or more workers. The overall level of employment is essentially unchanged.
If there is no change in overall employment, just a shift in the size of the firm employing the average worker, why should we care? While it may seem harmless, the shift could actually have serious implications for the overall productivity of our economy. Take job growth, for example. A recent study found that new, small firms (as opposed to larger, more established firms) were the primary creators of new jobs. Given these results, we should be wary of any policy which places heavy burdens on small employers.
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Congress could vote on Trade Promotion Authority as a stand alone bill as soon as Thursday

Congress could vote on Trade Promotion Authority as a stand alone bill as soon as Thursday, congressional sources tell the Associated Press.

The new plan under consideration would have the House vote on TPA — which would grant President Obama fast-track authority to negotiate trade deals — separately from the Trade Adjustment Assistance provision rejected last week.
The decision to split up the bills comes as House Republican leaders and the White House attempt to figure out a way to pass “fast-track” in the face of diverse opposition. As the APreports:
Now Obama and his allies are considering something they had desperately hoped to avoid: revisiting trade legislation in the Senate, possibly after the House votes on a simplified fast track bill. It would give Senate opponents another chance to strangle the legislation with costly delays and other tactics.
According to The Hill, White House spokesman Josh Earnest did not express opposition to the move, merely stating that both TPA and TAA should be passed.
“The only legislative strategy the president can support is one that will result in both pieces of legislation arriving at his desk,” The Hill quoted Earnest.
The Hill noted that Earnest also did not offer an opinion on whether the bills should arrive at Obama’s desk as a package or stand alone bills.
“There is also this fundamental question … about whether or not they need to arrive at the same time, on the same day, as part of the same legislative vehicle or separately — that’s exactly what’s being discussed on Capitol Hill right now,” The Hill quoted Earnest.
The push for fast-track authority comes as the Obama administration hopes to advance 
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First Mary Jo Kopechne, Then America

First Mary Jo Kopechne, Then America
Sen. Ted Kennedy’s 1965 immigration act allowed the Democrats to start winning elections the same way they win recounts: by enlarging the pool of voters.
Liberals couldn’t convince Americans to agree with them, but they happened to notice that the people of most other countries in the world already agreed with them. So Sen. Ted Kennedy’s immigration act brought in millions of poverty-stricken foreigners to live off the American taxpayer and bloc-vote for the Democrats.
The American people aren’t changing their minds. Americans are becoming a minority to other, new people.
Deft politicians used to know how to convince the 15 percent on the fence. But even Reagan would look at today’s electorate and say: Who are you guys? We live in a different country, and I don’t remember moving.
At the precise moment in history when the United States abandoned any attempt to transmit American values to its own citizens, never mind immigrants, the 1965 immigration act began dumping the poorest of the poor from around the world on our country.
When the Republican Congress passed welfare reform in 1996, one of the provisions prohibited immigrants from going on welfare for the first five years they were here — a mere five years! It turned out to be the single biggest savings of the entire welfare bill.
The New York Times immediately denounced the provision, demanding that at “the very least,” immigrants get food stamps if they become “disabled” after arriving — i.e., the biggest scam in the welfare apparatus — and also that they be eligible for health care under Medicaid. Previewing the line that would soon be adopted by the Democrats’ plaything, Sen. Marco Rubio, the Times proclaimed: “After all, legal immigrants pay taxes like everyone else.”
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Every breath she takes

Screen Shot 2015-06-16 at 8.43.44 PMFifteen years ago this week, my beautiful daughter Veronica entered the world. She didn’t make a sound. As I stretched out my arms to hold her in the delivery room, furrow-browed doctors and nurses instead whisked her away. I shouted after them in panic:
“Is she all right? Is she going to be OK?!”
Slightly underweight and jaundiced, she remained in the hospital for several days before we got the all-clear. My husband and I counted our blessings. But it wouldn’t be the last time we felt the pangs of parental helplessness when it came to her health.
Here’s the good news: In the blink of an eye, our shy, clingy little girl blossomed into a wry, wisecracking and independent young lady. She loves to go fishing, hates shallow people, solves a Rubik’s Cube in 35 seconds, prefers true-crime novels to “Twilight” schlock and recently developed a thing for ice hockey players. Veronica’s a wicked Photoshopper, a talented drawer, a makeup artist and (unlike mom) a math whiz. Until six weeks ago, her main obsessions were “Grey’s Anatomy,” the Stanley Cup, Instagram, her new cartilage piercing, an actor named Evan Peters and the hope of getting a learner’s permit.
Just before Mother’s Day weekend, however, she started having what appeared to be respiratory trouble. She “couldn’t get a good breath” and began gently gasping and sighing for air every few minutes. Two trips to the ER later, she had been administered ibuprofen for “costochondritis” and then albuterol to open up her airways.
The problem is that all the various tests and exams indicate she’s getting plenty of oxygen. Her lungs, heart and vocal cords are all “normal,” and yet she describes a chronic feeling that she’s “drowning.” Every day begins with gasping beyond her control, multiple times a minute, nonstop, every hour of every day, until she reaches a point of exhaustion at 1 or 2 in the morning.
After a brief respite while sleeping, the day-mare starts all over again.
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End Civil Service 'Merit' Protection

Scott Walker’s proposal to end tenure in Wisconsin state universities is a great idea.  Here is another great idea that Governor Walker or some other brave Republican governor and legislature ought to implement: end the merit protection for state government employees.  Once that is demonstrated to work, propose the same reform at the federal level.

The Merit System was one of those odious “progressive reforms.”  It was intended to prevent politicians from placing their cronies in government jobs as a reward for support during campaigns and to prevent politicians in power from forcing government employees to support them in campaigns.


Has this reform “worked”?  It has worked about as well as all those other progressive reforms, which is to say that the Merit System has been a ghastly failure.  Witness the string of news stories following the VA scandal, the IRS scandal, the Secret Service scandal, and so on, all of which end with a variation of the phrase “so far, not a single employee has been fired.”  The Merit System makes it almost impossible to ever terminate a government worker.

One consequence of this fact is that supervisors never give government workers bad employee evaluations – that would be inviting even worse behavior – and when real horror stories break, the culpable employee has a sterling record of good evaluations, regular promotions, bonuses, and so on.  It also means that many more government workers are needed to do a job than would be needed in the private sector, because there are so many government workers doing little, if any, work.

Via: American Thinker



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Wednesday, June 17, 2015

Fed holds off on interest rate hike, downgrades economic forecast


The Federal Reserve downgraded its view of the U.S. labor market and economy on Wednesday in a policy statement that suggested the central bank may have to wait until at least the third quarter to begin raising interest rates.
The Fed's statement put in place a meeting-by-meeting approach on the timing of its first rate hike since June 2006, making such a decision solely dependent on incoming economic data.

The data, however, have been getting worse. Just hours before the Fed's statement, the U.S. government reported that first-quarter gross domestic product came in much weaker than expected.
The central bank acknowledged that growth had slowed in the winter months, a dimmer assessment of the economy than its view in March. And while it said the poor performance was in part due to transitory factors, it pointed to soft patches across the economy, in a sign it may have to hold off hiking rates until at least September.
"The committee anticipates that it will be appropriate to raise the target range for the federal funds rate when it has seen further improvement in the labor market and is reasonably confident that inflation will move back to its 2 percent objective over the medium term," the Fed said in its statement, following a two-day meeting of its policy-setting committee.
U.S. Treasury yields added to earlier gains and short-term interest-rate futures contracts dropped slightly after the Fed statement before paring the losses. Futures traders continue to bet the Fed will wait until December to raise rates, and give an October rate rise just a 46 percent chance, according to CME FedWatch.
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Pelosi-Obama Cold Front Moving Into California

On Friday, one of the Democratic Party’s most generous supporters may view up close what “climate change” looks like. That's when President Obama and Nancy Pelosi will be among those gathered at his home near San Francisco in support of House Democrats.
By anyone’s definition, putting Obama and Pelosi together under one roof to sing House Democrats’ praises a week after a messy intraparty rift over trade policy should be interesting.
Tom Steyer, a billionaire former hedge fund founder whose passion is combating climate change, is scheduled along with wife Kat Taylor to host a top-dollar fundraiser for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee at their home, where the president and the minority leader have replenished Democratic coffers many times before. 
But on Tuesday, it was unclear whether the president and the liberal congresswoman from San Francisco were on speaking terms. 
Scrambling to rescue his administration’s Asia-focused trade agenda, which Pelosi’s opposition helped torpedo on June 12, Obama spoke by phone several times with House Speaker John Boehner on Monday, but by Tuesday he had not touched base with Pelosi, according to White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest.  
“President Obama and Leader Pelosi have demonstrated that they have a strong enough personal and professional relationship to withstand a difference even on an important issue like this,” Earnest said.
Pelosi, in an interview with CNBC Tuesday, declined to describe her conversation with Obama before the climactic House votes tangled the trade trajectory. She spoke like a San Francisco congresswoman more than as a House Democratic leader when she said she wanted to “slow down” fast-track legislation that would have granted U.S. negotiators leverage to get a massive trans-Pacific trade pact completed. 
“What you saw on the floor on Friday was an expression of concern of the American people. We are representatives. That is our title, and that is our job description. These are our constituents,” she told CNBC’s John Harwood.
“I'll take you with me to my district, we'll go to church, we'll go to a parade, any place, the dry cleaners. And you will be very surprised at how everyday people who are not connected to any organized organizations, who come up and say, ‘Don't vote for that.’”
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White House Has No Backup Plan If Supreme Court Rules Against Obamacare

Millions of Americans could lose their insurance if the U.S. Supreme Court rules against President Barack Obama on his health-care law. And with the decision due in the next two weeks, the government has no backup plan.

 The court will say whether tax subsidies under Obamacare that make insurance more affordable for 6.4 million people in 34 states are legal. If it decides they aren’t, that would trigger a high-stakes debate between the administration and Congress over how to respond. Most of the states have no answer either.

 A ruling against the subsidies in the health-care law -- Obama’s biggest domestic achievement -- would triple or quadruple insurance premiums, on average, forcing many people to drop out and sending costs soaring for others.

 “Chaos would ensue quite quickly,” said Larry Levitt, a senior vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit group that studies health-care policy issues.

 There are steps the government could take: States affected by the ruling could set up their own health-insurance marketplaces, called exchanges. The federal government could make it easier for them by sharing the technology behind its healthcare.gov system.
The distinction between state and federal marketplaces matters because the case hinges on the meaning of four words in the law that appear to reserve tax subsidies to people buying insurance on exchanges “established by a state.”

 Opponents of the law sued, arguing that the subsidies shouldn’t be available in the three-dozen states that haven’t established their own exchanges and use the healthcare.gov system instead. Democrats who wrote the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act say that was never their intent.

 To The Brink

 Many states say that setting up their own exchanges would be too expensive -- or their governments are run by Republicans who refuse to do that. The Republican-controlled U.S. Congress is more interested in repealing the health-care law than in revising it.

 “There’s a significant constituency within the Republican Party which is ‘repeal or nothing,’” said Margaret Foster Riley, a law professor at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. “The concern is we’re going to play chicken right up to the brink.”

 The first unknown is exactly when that brink would come. It’s possible that a ruling against the administration would end subsidies within a month. But Justice Samuel Alito suggested during oral arguments in March that the high court could stay its decision “until the end of this tax year” to allow Congress time to address the “very disruptive consequences.”

Via: Newsmax

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Judicial Watch: IRS Finds New Lois Lerner Emails

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton made the following statement in response to the IRS’ court filing Friday about 6,400 newly discovered emails from Lois Lerner’s account:
“Late Friday afternoon, the Obama IRS finally complied with Judge Emmet Sullivan’s June 4 order requiring the IRS to provide answers by June 12 on the status of the Lois Lerner emails the IRS had previously declared lost. Judicial Watch raised questions about the IRS’ handling of the missing emails issue in a court filing on June 2, 2015, demanding answers about Lois Lerner’s emails, which had been recovered from backup tapes.
“Our review of the seven-page filing shows that the IRS remains intent on stonewalling Judicial Watch and Judge Sullivan. Indeed, contrary to false representations to the court and Congress that the emails were lost and unrecoverable, the IRS finally admits that it has as many as 6,400 new Lois Lerner emails but won’t promise to turn them over to Judicial Watch. Even though the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration already identified and removed emails that are duplicates, the IRS is in ‘the process of conducting further manual deduplication of the 6,400’ emails, rather than reviewing them in response to Judicial Watch’s Freedom of Information Act requests that are more than two years old now. Our legal team will continue pursuing all necessary and available legal options to hold the IRS accountable for its flagrant abuse of power.”
The “lost” Lois Lerner emails are at issue in Judicial Watch’s October 2013 lawsuit seeking documents about the Obama IRS Tea Party targeting scandal. Judicial Watch’s litigation forced the IRS first to admit that Lerner’s emails were supposedly missing and, then, that the emails were on IRS back-up systems.  Lois Lerner is the former head of the Exempt Organizations branch of the IRS, and was one of the top officials responsible for the IRS targeting of President Obama’s political opponents.

In November 2014, the IRS told the court it had failed to search any of the IRS standard computer systems for the “missing” emails of Lois Lerner and other IRS officials.

On February 26, 2015, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) officials testified to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that it had received 744 backup tapes containing emails sent and received by Lerner.  This testimony showed that the IRS had falsely represented to both Congress, Judge Sullivan, and Judicial Watch that Lerner’s emails were irretrievably lost.


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Greece can't pay IMF without bailout deal, says negotiator

Greece’s top negotiator has confirmed the country does not have the cash to make the €1.6bn payment due to the International Monetary Fund at the end of the month without a new deal.
And any deal looks as far away as ever, given the opposing positions held by the country and its creditors.
In an interview with Reuters, Euclid Tsakalotos said there was no money to pay the IMF at the moment and echoed prime minister Alexis Tsipras by saying the government was willing to make concessions but pension cuts could not be on the agenda:
“At the moment we haven’t got the money,” he said, adding that Athens was already “squeezing every last bit of drop of liquidity” to service debt so far.
“There is no financing, we haven’t got access to the markets, we haven’t got money that hasn’t been paid since the summer of 2014 so obviously we won’t be able to have the money to pay that [the €1.6bn to the IMF].”
Keeping up Athens’ rhetoric against what it calls unreasonable demands by lenders, he attacked European and IMF lenders for failing to give ground and seeking the bulk of concessions from Athens.
“(Negotiations are) a give and take process, not a convergence on the other side’s initial position,” Tsakalotos said. “They’ve moved a bit on fiscal targets but in most areas, you would be hard pressed to put an A4 paper between what they said in February and what they now say in June. So that seems a bit odd.”
In particular, he ruled out any further cuts to pensions, a stance repeatedly stressed by Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, whose radical leftist party stormed to power this year on a pledge to end austerity and raise living standards in Greece.
“Pension reform is not a red line for us,” said Tsakalotos. “It seems to us utterly reasonable that pension cuts should not be on the agenda; pension reform should be on the agenda.”
Euclid Tsakalotos.
 Euclid Tsakalotos. Photograph: Simela Pantzartzi/EPA
He added that any concessions had to be “economically viable”:
Athens could accept a deal only if it was sustainable and addressed debt, financing and investment issues, said Tsakalotos.
“If you have that, then the Greek government will sign the deal,” Tsakalotos said. “If it doesn’t have that kind of deal there is no point in signing onto something that you know is going to fail.”
The comments by Tsakalotos - who took a prominent role in the talks with European and IMF lenders in April after finance minister Yanis Varoufakis was sidelined - come amid growing fears that cash-strapped Greece is on track to a default at the end of the month that paves the way for a euro exit.
Via: The Guardian

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Conservative Laments to Fox: I’m Actually Black, Why Won’t NAACP Support Me?


When Fox & Friends hosts a quick debate about Rachel Dolezal, race, and the NAACP, you know you’re in for a treat.
On one end, Democratic strategist Brian Benjamin utterly confounded host Steve Doocy with the academic theory that race, unlike ethnicity, is a social construct and that he won’t outright tell the former Spokane NAACP leader she cannot identify as a particular race.
And on the other, conservative activist Deneen Borelli mostly railed against the NAACP for initially supporting Dolezal in the wake of her public dressing-down (she eventually resigned). Why? Because Borelli herself is black, but does not receive any such support from the civil rights organization.
“You look at me, someone who’s a black conservative,” she said. “I’m criticized, called all types of names. I’m told I act and talk white, should die my hair blonde. I don’t get support from NAACP, Al Sharpton, or Jesse Jackson. She’s been given a pass.”


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Poll: Hillary Clinton's Numbers Take Another Hit in Swing States Over Trustworthiness

As Hillary Clinton continues her campaign with little interaction with the press, Americans are becoming more wary about whether the former Secretary of State is trustworthy and honest on important issues.
A new Quinnipiac University poll shows Clinton's numbers have taken a particular hit in swing and Republicans are gaining right behind her with voters. In Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio a majority of voters view Clinton as untrustworthy, which is a major problem considering trustworthiness is at the top of the priority list for swing state voters. 
Clinton's favorability ratings are 47 - 45 percent in Florida, negative 44 - 48 percent in Ohio and 46 - 48 percent in Pennsylvania.

She is not honest and trustworthy, Florida voters say 51 - 43 percent, Ohio voters say 53 - 40 percent and Pennsylvania voters say 54 - 40 percent.

"It's a long way until Election Day, but in the critical swing states of Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania, U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida has a tiny edge over the GOP field, "said Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac Poll.

"Most of the eight GOP hopefuls are within striking distance of Secretary Hillary Clinton in at least one of the three states. In Ohio, Gov. Kasich leads."

"But perhaps more troubling for her than the continuing slide is how she is perceived by voters who continue to say she is not honest and trustworthy."

"But potentially more disturbing for her are low marks for caring about voter needs and problems. This is where Democrats almost always fare better than Republicans. Yet in this survey many Republican candidates do as well or better than does she," Brown added.
Via: Red State

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CALIFORNIA: Special Tax Sessions Announced by Gov. Brown

In announcing the budget deal with the Legislature, Governor Jerry Brown announced two special sessions to deal with transportation and Medi-Cal funding. Call them the Special Tax Sessions.
In the press release announcing the sessions, the governor stated that the sessions were to “find more adequate funding for our roads and health care programs.”
The governor asked for “permanent and sustainable funding to maintain and repair the state’s transportation and critical infrastructure.” He also wants “permanent and sustainable funding to provide at least $1.1 billion annually to stabilize the state’s General Fund costs for Medi-Cal,” some of which would be used to meet the demands of programs Democratic legislators sought funds for in the current budget such as In-Home Supportive Services.
At the governor’s press conference announcing the budget deal, reporters asked Brown about his first term (third term?) campaign pledge to only seek tax increases with approval of voters. Brown brushed aside the old pledge indicating the pledge only applied to his first term.
Add it all up and there will be a push for tax or fee increases to support the governor’s call for “permanent and sustainable funding.” Discussions will revolve around gas taxes and a higher car tax or maybe a mileage fee for transportation; perhaps an increased cigarette tax and other healthcare taxes for Medi-Cal.
Brown might hope for support from the business community for the transportation and infrastructure fix. Those issues have been of on-going concern to business.
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Oregon School District Spends $100,000 EACH YEAR On White Privilege Conference

Taxpayers in the Gresham-Barlow school district in the tranquil suburbs of Portland, Ore. spend approximately $100,000 annually on a white privilege conference, according to EAGnews.org.
The week-long “Coaching for Educational Equity” conference occurs in the small town of Cottage Grove, Ore. — some 140 miles away. The conference is mandatory for all school officials. It is optional for teachers.
The “Coaching for Educational Equity” conference is grounded firmly in “white privilege,” which is the bizarre, radically leftist political theory that every white person is deeply racist, even if the racism is subconscious. The organizers also believe that white racism pervades America’s public schools and, in fact, every nook and cranny of American society.
The spreaders of the white privilege gospel believe that black culture is socialist by nature. Thus, they argue, hard work for personal gain and notions of private property are unfamiliar to young American black children who have never spent a day outside the United States.
“If you tell a black kid that if you work hard you can achieve anything you set your mind to, that’s racist, because you are perpetuating a myth of meritocracy,” Dan Chriestenson, a Gresham-Barlow school board member who opposes “white privilege” theory, told EAGnews.
“They are segregating students,” Chriestenson added. “They are spreading anger among students of color and guilt among white students.”
After considerable finagling, Chriestenson was able to obtain a copy of the manual used by attendees of the “Coaching for Educational Equity” white privilege conference.
The document declares: “White Culture…there is one.” It also lists “Characteristics of White Consciousness” including individualism.
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Obama Admin Excluded Iran from Threat Assessment

Leading U.S. officials are expressing concern about newly disclosed efforts by the Obama administration to play down the terrorism threat posed by Iran in an official report issued this year.
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper admitted in a recent letter to top senators that the administration wrongly excluded references to the global terrorism threat posed by Iran and its terror affiliate Hezbollah in the 2015 World Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community.
“A specific reference to the terrorist threat from Iran and Hizballah—which was not included in any of the drafts of the testimony [offered before lawmakers]—would have been appropriate for the 2015 Assessment, but the lack of its inclusion is in no way a change in the [intelligence community’s] assessment,” Clapper wrote in a June 3 letter to top senators.
Clapper’s letter came in response to an earlier letter from a delegation of senators who were seeking to discover why the Obama administration excluded references to Iran’s global terrorist operations.
“Despite ongoing nuclear negotiations and the administration’s evolving policy towards the Iranian regime, we are perplexed that your annual assessment contains no meaningful reference to the chaos that Iran manufactures through its support for terrorist groups and proxy organizations, which raises serious questions about the credibility of this annual exercise,” Sens. Dan Coats (Ind.), Tom Cotton (Ark.), Susan Collins (Maine), James Risch (Idaho), and James Lankford (Okla.) wrote in an April 28 letter to Clapper.
Some critics accuse the Obama administration of downplaying the terrorist threat posed by Iran and its proxies in order to appease the Islamic Republic and preserve the ongoing talks aimed at inking a wide-ranging nuclear deal.
Coats said that the Obama administration cannot overlook Iran’s longstanding financial support for terrorist groups across the region.
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Breaking: Report Finds #RachelDolezal Misconduct On Spokane Police Ombudsman Commission

Whistleblower Report Finds Commissioner Misconduct

Report Says Three Ombudsman Commissioners Acted Inappropriately
Contact: Brian Coddington, Communications Director, 509.625.6740
Wednesday, June 17, 2015 at Noon
An independent investigation into a whistleblower complaint filed against three members of the volunteer citizen Police Ombudsman Commission has found behavioral misconduct during interactions with City employees.
The eight findings in the report admonish the conduct of chair Rachel Dolezal and commissioners Kevin Berkompas and Adrian Dominguez. It has been forwarded to the City Council for review and determination of any action.
“We are deeply disturbed by the facts contained in the report of findings from the independent investigator,” Spokane Mayor David Condon and Council President Ben Stuckart said in a joint statement. “The conduct is unacceptable and falls far short of the community's expectations of volunteers who sit on City boards and commissions.”
The investigation began on May 4. The full report is available below.
Separately, a selection committee has been interviewing applicants for the vacant ombudsman position. The committee is prepared to recommend three finalists after a nationwide search.
“We remain firmly committed to a Police Ombudsman Commission that delivers independent citizen oversight of the police department, and will keep the process of hiring a new ombudsman moving forward,” Condon and Stuckart said.
Attachments:
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