Far-Left Politics and the Obama Justice Department

At WSJ, "Notable & Quotable: Justice and the Obama Justice Department."

It's from Michael Mukasey, at the September issue of Hillsdale College's Imprimis magazine, "Justice and the Obama Justice Department."

Water Rationing in the Central California Town of Okieville

Yeah, rationing in the Central Valley, something you won't see in Beverly Hills and Malibu.

At CBS News 5 San Francisco:



And at the Los Angeles Times, "#drylandsCA: The drought’s hard lesson: ‘When water is life’."

LAPD Officers Feared Ambush Because of Rappers' Video

At the Los Angeles Times, "LAPD shooting: Officers feared ambush after seeing video, attorney says":

For days, a 15-second video circulated on social media that alarmed Los Angeles police.

Taken from a vehicle parked behind a black-and-white police cruiser in downtown L.A., the clip opened with a view of the patrol car then flashed down to show someone holding a revolver. The person showed the gun off for the camera, then cut back to the patrol car as an officer got out and walked away.

Worried the video was a threat against its officers, LAPD officials briefed the rank-and-file about the recording, warning officers in roll call meetings to be on alert.

On Tuesday, police said that the department’s robbery-homicide detectives — tasked with investigating the LAPD’s more complex and high-profile cases — now believe the video wasn’t a threat against officers but a promotional video filmed by an early 1990s rap group trying to earn street cred and make a comeback.

The clip, however, has already had serious consequences. Investigators have arrested one person who they say was in the car at the time and have a warrant for the man they believe was holding the gun.

Meanwhile, an attorney representing two officers who fatally shot a man Saturday night said the pair had seen the video and thought they were under attack when the man threw what turned out to be a beer bottle through their patrol car’s back window.

Attorney Gary Fullerton said the video was discussed in at least two roll call meetings that the officers attended, including one the same day as the shooting. The officers were also warned that they might be ambushed from behind, he said.

“Both officers were very focused on that,” Fullerton said. “When the window got blown out, they looked at each other and said, 'We're being shot at.'“

Fullerton said that after the shooting, the officers told investigators they thought they were being attacked because of the video they had seen.

The lawyer said that even if the video wasn't a threat, there are others who do want to harm police officers. He defended the officers' actions, saying it was reasonable for them to think they were being fired upon.

“Officers feel very, very vulnerable out there right now. They feel that at any moment somebody could attack them,” he said. “The officers feel terrible because they were 100% convinced that the guy was shooting at them.”

As of Tuesday evening, the man's name had not been released by coroner's officials, who are still trying to locate his family. He was the 18th person shot and killed by LAPD officers this year.

LAPD officials said the man walked up behind the police cruiser, which was stopped at a red light in Van Nuys, and threw a 40-ounce beer bottle, shattering the car's back window. The two officers bailed out of the car and opened fire, killing the man.

When investigators searched his body and the nearby scene, police said, they did not find a weapon...

Keep reading.

U.S. Concludes Russia Targeting CIA-Backed Rebels in Syria (VIDEO)

Holly Williams has the report at the CBS News clip below.

And at the Wall Street Journal, "U.S. Sees Russian Drive Against CIA-Backed Rebels in Syria":

Russia has targeted Syrian rebel groups backed by the Central Intelligence Agency in a string of airstrikes running for days, leading the U.S. to conclude that it is an intentional effort by Moscow, American officials said.

The assessment, which is shared by commanders on the ground, has deepened U.S. anger at Moscow and sparked a debate within the administration over how the U.S. can come to the aid of its proxy forces without getting sucked deeper into a proxy war that President Barack Obama says he doesn’t want. The White House has so far been noncommittal about coming to the aid of CIA-backed rebels, wary of taking steps that could trigger a broader conflict.

U.S. officials said Russia’s targeting of its allies on the ground was a direct challenge to Mr. Obama’s Syria policy. Underlining the distrust, the Pentagon decided against sharing any information with Moscow about the areas where U.S. allies were located because it suspected Russia would use that information to target them more directly or provide the information to President Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

“On day one, you can say it was a one-time mistake,” a senior U.S. official said of Russia’s strike on one of the allied rebel group’s headquarters. “But on day three and day four, there’s no question it’s intentional. They know what they’re hitting.”

U.S. officials say they now believe the Russians have been directly targeting CIA-backed rebel groups that pose the most direct threat to Mr. Assad since the campaign began on Wednesday, both to firm up regime positions and to send a message to Mr. Obama’s administration.

Russian officials said last week that they had launched the air campaign in Syria to fight the extremist group Islamic State and other terrorists—adopting the language that the Syrian regime uses to refer to all its opponents. U.S. intelligence officials said the primary mission of the operation appeared to be shoring up the Assad regime and preventing rebels gaining any additional ground on government-controlled areas, rather than fighting Islamic State.

A spokesman for Russia’s Embassy in Washington said: “Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has made it clear on multiple occasions that the airstrikes are targeted at ISIL [Islamic State], Nusra, and other terrorist groups.”

Top Russian officials, including President Vladimir Putin, have described the current campaign as limited to airstrikes. But Adm. Vladimir Komoyedov, the head of the defense committee of Russia’s lower house of parliament, said he couldn’t rule out that Russian “volunteers” might surface in Syria, much as they did in Ukraine on the side of separatists, according to state news agency Interfax...

Russian "volunteers," like the "little green men" in Crimea back in early 2014. Funny how the "volunteers" just show up so conveniently in all the hot spots.

But keep reading.

Josephine Skriver Wicked Hot in Revealing Lingerie

She's a Victoria's Secret gal.

At Egotastic, "Jospehine Skriver just jumped several rungs on the sextastic ladder, both for Danish and international climbers, with her new revealing lingerie pimping particulars for Victoria's Secret."

And on Twitter.

'Whatever Gets You thru the Night...'

From the Sound L.A., during yesterday afternoon's drive time.

At Wikipedia:

This was Lennon's only solo number 1 single in the United States during his lifetime, and Lennon was the last member of The Beatles to achieve his first American number one solo hit. The recording featured Elton John on harmony vocals and piano. While in the studio, Elton bet Lennon that the song would top the charts, and such was Lennon's scepticism that Elton secured from him a promise to appear on stage at one of his performances should the record indeed hit number one. When the record did achieve that feat, Lennon appeared at Elton John's Thanksgiving performance at Madison Square Garden on 28 November 1974. It was his last major concert appearance.

Light My Fire
The Doors
3:33 PMCLICK TO EXPAND

Hot Blooded
Foreigner
3:22 PM

Back On the Chain Gang
Pretenders
3:18 PM

Old Time Rock & Roll
Bob Seger
3:15 PM

Straight On
Heart
3:11 PM

Hurts So Good
John Mellencamp
3:07 PM

Born to Be Wild
Steppenwolf
3:04 PM

Second Hand News
Fleetwood Mac
3:01 PM

London Calling
The Clash
2:52 PM

Whatever Gets You Thru the Night
Elton John & John Lennon
2:49 PM

Somebody to Love
Queen
2:44 PM

Welcome to the Jungle
Guns N' Roses
2:39 PM

Time
Pink Floyd
2:33 PM

Don't Stop Believin'
Journey
2:22 PM

Don't Do Me Like That
Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers
2:19 PM

Summer In the City
The Lovin' Spoonful
2:17 PM

Just What I Needed
The Cars
2:13 PM

Dana Loesch's Hands Off My Gun Out in Paperback!

Don't miss Dana's book in paperback, Hands Off My Gun: Defeating the Plot to Disarm America.

How About a Debate Over Common-Sense Mental-Health Laws?

At WSJ, "A Shooting in Oregon":

As we went to press Friday, federal, state and local authorities in Oregon were trying to piece together the inevitable puzzle of motive that led to the slaughter of at least nine students at a community college in the small town of Roseburg.

Sheriff John Hanlin of Douglas County, like law officers elsewhere recently, has ordered his staff not to use the name of the alleged killer, lest it merely glorify what he did. This is an understandable, if ultimately quixotic, gesture in the modern media age. The whole world soon will be saturated with the name of Chris Harper-Mercer and every possible detail—some of it true, some of it barely verified—of his life and the tragedy at Umpqua Community College.

One certainty in the wake of the massacre is that gun control will be discussed avidly for the next few weeks, as after past incidents. This debate emerged after a crazed gunman killed 12 individuals at the Navy Yard in Washington in 2013. And after a classroom in Newtown, the movie theater in Aurora and after Virginia Tech.

President Obama called for gun legislation: “This is a political choice that we make, to allow this to happen every few months in America.” But Americans did not choose to set a madman loose with a gun. Mr. Obama also called for “common-sense gun-safety laws.” The American people, we suspect, would like more evidence of which “common-sense” policies will work and which won’t before they consent to abrogating the Second Amendment.

Our own view remains that what deserves equal if not greater political attention are common-sense mental-health laws. It is now established that Harper-Mercer attended the Switzer Learner Center, in Torrance, Calif., which treats teenagers with emotional disabilities and mental-health problems. He ended up in Roseburg.

The element of untreated mental or emotional disturbance is present in most of the individuals who commit horrific mass killings in the U.S. If it is preordained that talking heads must argue for days now about guns in America, at least let some specialists enter the debate to discuss how identifying and treating disturbed brains might contribute to forestalling the madness of murdering innocent strangers...

More.

Leftists don't want a debate on mental health. They want to abolish the Second Amendment.

Just Out from Steven Lee Myers, The New Tsar

Well, Putin certainly seems more impressive by the day. This last week's maneuvering in Syria, with Russia bombing U.S.-backed rebels, was quite the move --- and with no repercussions from the Obama White House!

See Steven Lee Myers, The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin.

Disneyland Raises Annual Pass Prices (VIDEO)

When he was in high school, we bought our oldest son annual passes a couple of years in a row. They were about $400.00. Now the top-level pass is going for $1,000.00.

At the O.C. Register, "Disneyland raises annual pass prices, introduces $1,000 pass, and discontinues Premium pass."

Angels Still Feel Sense of Achievement After Season-Ending Loss

Well, I was saying so much the other day.

At LAT, "After season-ending loss, Angels still feel a sense of achievement":

The adrenaline rush from three weeks of playoff-intensity baseball and the euphoria of several heart-stopping victories gave way to the emptiness of a long, cold winter for the Angels on Sunday.

Postseason longshots after a 10-19 August, the Angels kept their playoff hopes alive right up to the final day of the season, going 20-10 in September and October, winning 12 of 13 one-run games since Sept. 9 and staging a remarkable comeback with a five-run ninth inning Saturday.

But those visions of a momentum-fueled run through October were dashed amid a flurry of walks, fielding miscues and hits during a 37-minute seventh inning in which the Texas Rangers scored six runs against five Angels relievers en route to a 9-2 victory in Globe Life Park.

Left-hander Cole Hamels, acquired from Philadelphia in a July 31 trade, gave up two runs, three hits and struck out eight batters in a complete-game effort to help the Rangers clinch their sixth American League West title and knock the Angels out of playoff contention.

Adding salt to the Angels' wounds: Houston lost to Arizona on Sunday. Had the Angels defeated Texas, they would have forced a one-game tiebreaker against the Astros on Monday to determine the second AL wild-card team. Instead, Houston will play the New York Yankees in Tuesday night's wild-card game...

More.

Plus, "Angels' rallying cry next year: Remember Game No. 161."

Gerod Roth Fired from Polaris Marketing Group for Racist Facebook Post

At the Atlanta Blackstar, via Memeorandum, "Multiple Firings After Racially Charged Facebook Remarks Mocking a Black Child Go Viral."

Also at London's Daily Mail, "White marketing employee fired after posting a selfie and hateful racist comments with the son of a black colleague calling the little boy a 'slave'."

Just one more reminder that social media often brings out the worst in people, and also that people are way to casual about the kind of stuff they post to their feeds, thinking that their indiscretions won't be seen by the wider world out there. Times have changed folks. While personally I've seen much worse online, clearly, especially given how adorable that kid is, some people need to dig down deep in search of some moral well of decency.

Claire Danes Discusses 'Homeland'

Season five's first episode was great. I especially liked agent Peter Quinn's debriefing on his two years spent in Syria, in a meeting to top CIA honchos (he says the U.S. needs 200,000 boots on the ground, if we're serious, and that Islamic State has a strategy, plans for a caliphate, while the U.S. has bupkes).

See Variety, "‘Homeland’ Recap: Meet the New Carrie Mathison in ‘Separation Anxiety’." And at WSJ, "‘Homeland’ Season Five Premiere: An Intelligence Expert Weighs In."

Obama Not Welcome in Roseburg, Says Local Newspaper Publisher (VIDEO)

You gotta love it.

From Lee Stranahan, at Big Government:

David Jaques, the publisher of the conservative newspaper the Roseburg Beacon, says he believes that President Obama would not be welcome to the town after making remarks politicizing the shooting that left nine dead and nine injured at Umpqua Community College on October 1. Jaques told Breitbart News that he believes officials of Douglas County would also not welcome the President using the tragedy to score political points for a gun control agenda.

Any visit by President would be “a campaign stop for agenda to take away American citizen’s right to own firearms” said Jaques in an exclusive interview...

Plus, watch here, "Roseburg Beacon publisher David Jaques says a problem Obama is not welcome after his comments politicizing the shooting death of nine people at Umpaqua Community College."

Discrimination Against Asian-Americans in College Admissions

It's not a new problem, but as we get even more diverse, especially with Chinese immigrants emerging as the fastest growing immigrant group, expect to see more controversy over race-based affirmative action policies.

See Robert Stacy McCain for the write-up, "Anti-Asian Discrimination: The Hidden Secret of Elite Educational ‘Diversity’."

And see if you can get to this piece, which I can still recall from back in the day, at WSJ, "Is Admissions Bar Higher for Asians at Elite Schools?"

Also, on Facebook, Asian Americans Against Affirmative Action.

U.S. Freighter El Faro Sunk by Hurricane Joaquin (VIDEO)

Jeez, this is freakin' rad.

At the New York Times, "US-Based Cargo Ship With Crew of 33 Sank in Storm."

The Breakdown of the Black Family

From Kay Hymowitz, at the Atlantic, "Mass Incarceration and the Uncomfortable Realities of Black Family Life":

With the publication of “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration” Ta-Nehisi Coates has added an elegant and forceful voice to the growing frustration with the inefficacy and injustice of America’s criminal-justice system. Mandatory-sentencing laws, the War on Drugs, juvenile-justice sentences that seem to do more to create than deter criminals, racial arrest and sentencing disparities: All are ready for a tough national cross-examination.

But even in the unlikely event that Washington and state legislatures successfully adapt the nation’s crime policies to a safer, more racially sensitive era, the nation will still look around to find more black men in prison than it might expect or want. There’s a simple reason for that, one that Coates himself notes: Relative to other groups, blacks commit more crimes. To understand why is to tackle some very hard-to-talk-about realities of black family life.  And on that issue—and despite his announced interest in the topic—Coates has been the opposite of lucid.

Coates puts forward two interconnected, but flawed, theories about mass incarceration. First, he argues that there is no relationship between crime and incarceration rates, pointing his readers to a chart showing two apparently disparate trend lines. The first line shows crime levels rising dramatically after 1960; the second shows the rise in incarceration rates coming some 15 years later. Because of the 15-year gap, Coates concludes something other than a crime wave must have led Americans to lock up so many black men after 1975. “Imprisonment rates actually fell from the 1960s through the early ’70s,” he writes “even as violent crime increased … The incarceration rate rose independent of crime—but not of criminal-justice policy.”

That conclusion ignores something American history teaches over and over: The democratic process is groaningly, and often tragically, slow. Policy lags the most pressing social problems: Today’s exhibit A is immigration. “Thought leaders were slow to catch up,” after crime rates began falling and incarceration rates rising in the early 1990s, Coates observes. So too were they slow to catch up in the 1960s as crime was on the rise while incarceration rates moved not at all. It takes time to distinguish trends from blips, national changes from local upticks; witness the current debate over the significance of murder rates that are rising in Baltimore, St. Louis, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., while remaining relatively flat in New York and Los Angeles. Contemporary surveys of public opinion show precisely the expected reaction to rising crime. “Popular support for liberal policies on crime and rehabilitation grew steadily” from the 1930s until the mid 1960s,” according to Thomas and Mary Edsall. “At that juncture public opinion shifted decisively in a rightward direction as crime rates rose sharply.”

Courts and legislatures dawdled, as they often tend to do. Today’s agonizing pictures from Europe, though, illustrate how people, particularly parents, living under the threat of violence will vote with their feet if they possibly can. In the 1960s, whites still living in increasingly crime-ridden urban areas, and more than a few blacks, simply left for safer suburbs. (An excellent chronicle of how this played out in the South Bronx can be found here.) Those blacks who remained, often because of the discriminatory housing policies Coates describes, joined local community and church groups to demand more aggressive policing and harsher penalties for crimes, including for drug offenses.


Black alarm about crime raises doubts about Coates’s second theory, that “the carceral state” was a new “system of control,” of black people. According to this line of thinking, the reason Americans started putting more people in jail circa 1975—“mass incarceration” wasn’t “mass” for years after it started—was that they wanted to perpetuate a racial caste system, or as Coates puts it, to keep blacks “unfree.”

Keep reading.

Hymowitz is the author of, Marriage and Caste in America: Separate and Unequal Families in a Post-Marital Age.

Hillary Clinton Exploits Oregon Massacre to Push for More Gun Control

At Bloomberg, "Clinton Proposes New Gun Measures, Staking Claim vs. Sanders."



Also at Memeorandum.

Image Credit: Ms. EBL.

Delta Force Secretly Killed Iranian Agents in Iraq — with IEDs

From Sean Naylor, at the New York Post:

The Iraq war was, in part, a proxy battle between the US and Iran. But fighting it had “political restrictions,” author Sean Naylor writes. In his new book, “Relentless Strike: The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command,” Naylor reveals that US special operations forces came up with a solution, one that would let them conduct secret assassinations without anyone — even our own FBI — finding out.

By early 2007, some US intelligence estimates held that as many as 150 Iranian operatives were in Iraq. Many were member of the Quds Force, the covert arm of Iran’s Shi’ite theocracy. Their mission was to coordinate the violent campaign being waged against US forces by Iraq’s Shi’ite militias.

“It was 100 percent, ‘Are you willing to kill Americans and are you willing to coordinate attacks?’ ” said an officer who studied the Quds Force’s approach closely. “ ‘If the answer is “yes,” here’s arms, here’s money.’ ”
The Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) set up a new task force, named Task Force 17.

Its mandate was simple: go after “anything that Iran is doing to aid in the destabilization of Iraq,” said a Task Force 17 officer...

Keep reading.

I blogged Naylor's book last night, "Sean Naylor's New Book, Relentless Strike: The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command."

Putin's Aggression in Syria Taking Advantage of Obama's Inaction, New Regional Architecture

A great piece, from Caroline Glick, at Town Hall, "Israel's Risk Aversion Problem":

On Wednesday the Obama administration was caught off guard by Russia’s rapid rise in Syria. As the Russians began bombing a US-supported militia along the Damascus-Homs highway, Secretary of State John Kerry was meeting with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, at the UN. Just hours before their meeting Kerry was insisting that Russia’s presence in Syria would likely be a positive development.

Reacting to the administration’s humiliation, Republican Sen. John McCain said, “This administration has confused our friends, encouraged our enemies, mistaken an excess of caution for prudence and replaced the risks of action with the perils of inaction.”

McCain added that Russian President Vladimir Putin had stepped “into the wreckage of this administration’s Middle East policy.”

While directed at the administration, McCain’s general point is universally applicable. Today is no time for an overabundance of caution.

The system of centralized regimes that held sway in the Arab world since the breakup of the Ottoman Empire nearly a century ago has unraveled. The shape of the new order has yet to be determined.

The war in Syria and the chaos and instability engulfing the region are part and parcel of the birth pangs of a new regional governing architecture now taking form. Actions taken by regional and global actors today will likely will influence power relations for generations.

Putin understands the opportunity of the moment.

He views the decomposition of Syria as an opportunity to rebuild Russia’s power and influence in the Middle East – at America’s expense.

Russia isn’t the only strategic player seeking to exploit the war in Syria and the regional chaos. Turkey and Iran are also working assiduously to take advantage of the current absence of order to advance their long term interests.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is exploiting the rise of Islamic State in Syria and Iraq to fight the Kurds in both countries. Erdogan’s goal is twofold: to prevent the establishment of an independent Kurdistan and to disenfranchise the Kurds in Turkey.

As for Iran, Syria is Iran’s bulwark against Sunni power in the Arab world and the logistical base for Tehran’s Shi’ite foreign legion Hezbollah. Iranian dictator Ali Khamenei is willing to fight to the bitter end to hold as much of Syrian territory as possible.

Broadly speaking, Iran views the breakup of the Arab state system as both a threat and an opportunity...

Keep reading.