90 Miles From Tyranny

Friday, June 29, 2018

Government Employee Who Beat Unions at Supreme Court Sees End to Their ‘Free Ride’

Labor unions no longer get a free ride on the backs of government employees who are forced to pay for political activism they disagree with, the man who successfully challenged the practice at the Supreme Court told The Daily Signal in an interview.

For decades, Illinois state government worker Mark Janus said, union leaders had argued that nonunion employees should pay “fair share” fees so that those workers wouldn’t be “free riders” who enjoyed the benefits of collective bargaining on their behalf without cost.

In 1977, the Supreme Court accepted that argument in its unanimous ruling in a case known as Abood v. Detroit Board of Education.

But on Wednesday, in a 5-4 ruling, the high court reversed that decision in Janus v. AFSCME Council 31, finding that its Abood opinion was “poorly reasoned” and that mandatory union fees violate the First Amendment rights of government employees.

Janus, a child support specialist at the Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services who became the lead plaintiff in the case, turned the tables on the unions’ “free rider” argument in a phone interview with The Daily Signal a few hours after the high court released its decision.

“There are two arguments on this point of free riders that need to be made,” Janus said. “No. 1, it was the unions that asked for and received the ability to collectively bargain for everyone, both union and nonunion members.”

“No. 2,” he said, “the way I look at this is it is the unions that have been free-riding on me and 5 million public-sector workers across the country. They have been getting our money in order to...

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Perhaps you can gently convince her that Genocide is not cool.

It's probably not a good idea to let your kids watch this hate channel.

2018 Has Been Very Good to Trump...And America...

In his final day of campaigning ahead of the 2016 primary in the state of South Carolina, then-Republican nominee Donald Trump held three different rallies. Feeding off the energy of the crowd, he delivered a classic Trump line.

“We’re going to win so much,” he told thousands of supporters in attendance. “You're going to get tired of winning. You’re going to say, ‘Please Mr. President, I have a headache. Please, don't win so much. This is getting terrible.’ And I'm going to say, ‘No, we have to make America great again.’”

It would become one of many classic Trump quotes from the 2016 campaigning season -- one that supporters would repeat with big smiles, and one that detractors would laugh about in dismissal as they mocked the real-estate tycoon’s chances of becoming president.

The notion of winning so much that people would get tired was obviously delivered tongue in cheek, but here we stand, just over two years removed from that rally, and supporters are beginning to enjoy a glimpse of what the now-president predicted back then.

“So Much Winning” in 2018

Everyone can agree that Trump had a unique strategy as a politician -- and now as president. Whereas most political figures use the same safe, cookie-cutter strategies, he goes against the grain.

He uses provocative tweets and tangential tales to send the media into a frenzy. Then, have gotten the media to yammer about issues that don’t really matter, he gathers his team and goes to work, unimpeded by reporters and commentators who are busy booking segments on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News.

While Trump’s strategy is genius, it has had at least one interesting side effect: when the Trump administration accomplishes something of substance, it often goes unnoticed. That’s because it seems far less sensational than the TMZ-like stories the media goes after in the moment.

The reality is that the Trump administration has strung together an impressive series of victories in 2018 -- many of which are surprisingly bipartisan. If most American liberals could slow down enough to push aside their personal hatred for the president, they would find that -- in the words of Trump himself -- there’s “so much winning” going on right now.

Since the media would rather talk about porn stars, conspiracy theories, and celebrity opinions on political matters, you won’t have a ton of opportunities to hear about these wins on cable news or in the major newspapers and magazines.

Dig around some, however, and you’ll find plenty of victories. Here are just a few of the accomplishments that have taken place in 2018 thus far.

1. Unemployment Reaching Historical Lows

When he was running for president, one of Trump’s big promises was...

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“How Can This Be?” Dems & Media Cry As Trump Approval Among Hispanic Voters Jumps 10% In Just One Month

They’ve spent thousands of hours and millions of dollars attempting to spin President Trump as a racist. That attempt is falling on a whole lot of deaf ears and it now has political and media leftists in a rage as a new poll shows Donald Trump’s popularity among Hispanic voters (as well as ALL Democrats!) surging in the last month to historic highs.

Via the Daily Wire:

A new Harvard CAPS/Harris poll released exclusively to The Hill revealed something astonishing: not that President Trump’s approval continued to climb, resting at 47%, but that his approval rating among Hispanics soared a staggering 10 points in the last month.

Trump’s approval rating also climbed six points among Republicans and even four points among Democrats from where it stood last month.

The majority of respondents approved of Trump’s efforts to stimulate jobs, handle the economy, and fight terrorism.

As The Hill noted of Trump, “He has a higher approval rating among Republican voters at this stage of his presidency than any GOP president in the modern era except for President George W. Bush, according to Gallup data.” (Bush’s approval rating was very high following the 9-11 attacks and then plummetted two years later.)

The far left in America is losing its grip as President Trump appears to be...

In our nation’s worst governmental scandal, Watergate, the Federal Bureau of Investigation heroically kept widespread White House corruption from being concealed, eventually reviving important prosecutions. Sadly, in today’s increasingly convoluted moral universe, senior FBI officials, it now appears, have tried to artificially create serious “Russiagate” crimes, thereby becoming implicated in a scandal promising to be nastier than Watergate. Congress presently awaits DOJ documents which may or may not confirm what presently seem reasonable inferences of such FBI wrongdoing.

In Watergate, the White House and senior DOJ officials attempted to limit the investigation to the seven arrested members of the burglary team caught penetrating the DNC Headquarters in the Watergate Office Building. Deputy Associate FBI Director Mark Felt, to prevent the FBI from becoming complicit in a politicized investigation, met with the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward to avoid this corruption through public exposure. The FBI deserves its honor as the unsung hero of Watergate, refusing to become politicized.

However, one perverse lesson of Watergate is that Felt would have received great perks and personal laurels if he had gone along with the corrupt political program. Heeding a lesson not intended by Felt, FBI Director James Comey engaged in acrobatic contortions during the 2016 election to help presumed President-Elect Hillary Clinton to escape serious criminal charges in the email and related obstruction probes. But this blatant politicization pales in comparison to emerging evidence that Comey’s team, working with John Brennan’s partisan CIA, and partnering with British intelligence agency GCHQ, had attempted to fabricate serious Trump-Russia electoral interference crimes akin to treason.

The ”Russian collusion” inquiry began in December 2015 (not, as claimed, on July 31, 2016), with a tip from GCHQ to Brennan that Putin wished to financially support a Donald Trump presidential candidacy. Nothing has yet emerged, in subsequent FISA warrant applications or elsewhere in leaks, to suggest that the tip was anything but phony. But on December 28, 2015, after Brennan had hurriedly formed a special “inter-agency” group, one of Comey’s top aides Peter Strzok was attempting to get approval for “LUREs,” Fedspeak for spies, inferentially to penetrate the Trump campaign. All of this would have been well and good if there had been a solid basis to suspect criminal activity by the Trump campaign. But, it now appears, rather than dismiss the inaccurate tip as disinformation, the FBI tried to manufacture evidence where none had existed, hoping real wrongdoing would eventually be found. Thus started an investigation without a crime, long a Comey specialty.

Soon a seeming British plant (associated with UK’s Claire Smith) with Russian connections, Joseph Mifsud, became greatly interested in London-based George Papadopoulos after he was named a Trump advisor on Russian issues in March 2016. Mifsud, whom we should now view as wearing an FBI uniform through his sponsor GCHQ, told Papadopoulos days later of Russian-hacked Clinton emails, and introduced him ostentatiously to a number of Russians. Because Mifsud could be sold to the public as a Russian agent, given his wide array of Russian connections, when Papadopoulos was later indicted for misstating the timing of his Mifsud conversations, American citizens, understandably, could smell Russian collusion. But it was, it seems now, really interaction with a disguised...

Army robotics officials at Fort Benning, Georgia are trying to give individual soldiers the capability to control swarms of air and ground robotic systems for missions that often require large numbers of troops to accomplish.

U.S. ground forces have used small ground robots and unmanned aerial systems for years, but only on a small scale, said Don Sando, director Capabilities Development and Integration Directorate at Benning.

"To really get a large benefit from robotic systems, we have to break the one-soldier, one-robot link, because right now, you generally need one operator for one robotic system and that is effective and interesting, but when I can have dozens of robotic systems controlled by one soldier, now I have a significant advantage," Sando told a group of defense reporters today on a conference call.

A single soldier could conduct reconnaissance over "large areas with fewer soldiers and many dozens of robotic systems," Sando said.

"That starts to matter especially in conditions such as dense urban environment," Sando said. "The problem with urban environments is they consume soldiers ... limited lines of sight, tunnels, buildings -- all the things that just take manpower to overcome and control.

"If we can expand that with robotic systems, both air and ground, then that has significant impact."

The concept could be developed to enhance communications battlefields when networks are hampered by enemy activity as well as natural obstacles.

"If our communications infrastructure is going to be contested, as we know it will, then how can I regenerate quickly and effectively in a given area with robotic systems, both air and ground, to create that network?" Sando said.

CDID officials are developing a common controller that can control air and...