LA Times: Yes, People On Terrorist Watch Lists Should Be Able To Buy Guns

Townhall.com:

Well, well the LA Times’ published this interesting editorial today, where they wrote about the ongoing debate about barring people on the terrorist watch list from buying firearms. Democrats want it; Republicans don’t; yet both parties share blame that this grossly unconstitutional anti-terror program has continued under the Bush and Obama presidencies. Unlike the paper’s rather inflammatory editorial the day of the San Bernardino shooting, which said that our “infatuation with guns” bordered on suicidal impulses, they were somewhat more measured in their response to this Democratic gun control initiative: yes, people on the watch lists should be able to buy guns. 

One problem is that the people on the no-fly list (as well as the broader terror watch list from which it is drawn) have not been convicted of doing anything wrong. They are merely suspected of having terror connections. And the United States doesn't generally punish or penalize people unless and until they have been charged and convicted of a crime. In this case, the government would be infringing on a right guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution — and yes, like it or not, the right to buy a gun is a constitutional right according to the U.S. Supreme Court.

How certain is it that the people on the two lists are dangerous? Well, we don't really know, because the no-fly-list and the broader watch list are government secrets. People are not notified when they are put on, nor why, and they usually don't discover they have been branded suspected terrorists until they try to travel somewhere.

But serious flaws in the list have been identified. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, which is suing the government over the no-fly list, the two lists include thousands of names that have been added in error, as well as the names of family members of suspected terrorists. 

What's more, it's not clear how much impact Feinstein's law would have. The broader watch list, which is actually a database maintained by the FBI's Terrorist Screening Center, apparently had about 480,000 names on it in 2011, according to the FBI, and it has since swelled to about 1.1 million names, according to the ACLU. Of those, the vast majority are noncitizens living overseas; the number of American citizens on the list is believed to be fewer than 10,000 people.

That's important because federal law already bars gun sales to most people who are not U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents or holders of valid visas, which means the vast majority of the people on the suspected terror list would already be barred from buying a firearm in the U.S. even without Feinstein's law. That leaves us with about 10,000 American citizens (and some legal residents) who, under the proposed law, would be barred from exercising a constitutional right. That gives us pause.

They also note that this wouldn’t have stopped Syed Farook or Tashfeen Malik since they weren’t on the list.

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Donald Trump: It’s Time For a “Total and Complete Shutdown” of Muslims Entering The U.S

HotAir.com:

He’s not just talking about immigrants and refugees, campaign manager Corey Lewandowski emphasized. He’s talking about tourism too. No more Muslims until we “figure out what is going on,” whatever that means.

It’s a perfect Trumpian play, though. It’s highly politically incorrect; the media will go positively batsh*t over it; the rest of the GOP field, especially his new rival Ted Cruz, will squirm about how to respond; and the more heat Trump takes from all sides, the more his fans will love him for it. This is why so many Trump critics, me included, thought that Trump was agreeing with that reporter a few weeks ago when the reporter started asking him about a database of Muslim citizens. That proposal would accomplish most of the same things politically for him that this one does. Maybe he’s saving it for when Cruz crosses 35 percent in Iowa.

Cruz, by the way, also wants to restrict Muslim immigration — but only a particular type, namely refugees, and only from Muslim countries like Iraq and Syria that contain “territory substantially controlled by a foreign terrorist organization.” Tourists and immigrants would presumably still be welcome. Trump’s strategy here, I take it, is to show blue-collar Republicans that Cruz is, to borrow the phrase of the day, a “total pussy” for not being as hard-ass against Muslims as he is. What it’s going to end up doing in practice is making a lot of center-right Republicans more comfortable with the idea of nominating Cruz as a less demagogic alternative to Trump if it turns out that Cruz is the only guy in the race who can realistically stop him. In fact, a Twitter buddy tweeted at me after Trump put this statement out that Trump is a stalking horse for Cruz, a guy whose role in the race is really just to advance Cruz’s political interests. I don’t buy that — they’re too different ideologically — but I’m less skeptical of the idea than I used to be. Give Trump another month of high polling and you’ll have Jeb Bush donors quietly sending money to Cruz Super PACs to take him down.

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Who was Tashfeen Malik?

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Barack Obama Forces Illinois High School To Allow Teenage Boy Dressed As Girl To Use Girl's Bathrooms and Showers

YahooNews.com:

A suburban Chicago school district said on Thursday it reached a deal with the U.S. government over locker room access for a transgender student, but the civil rights group representing the student said the agreement fell short of its hopes.

Township High School District 211 in Palatine, Illinois, said it will provide changing areas in the girls' locker room for the student, who has not been named, and for other students, within 30 days.

The seven-member school board held a special meeting on Wednesday evening, heard public comments and then voted 5-2 early on Thursday to approve the deal reached with the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights (OCR).

The OCR last month found the school district discriminated against the student and gave it a month to provide full locker room access. At stake were millions of dollars in annual federal funds for the district of five high schools west of Chicago.

The case stemmed from a complaint filed in 2013 by the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois on behalf of the student, who was born male and identifies as female.

After investigating the complaint, the government said a separate changing place just for the student was discriminatory. The language of the agreement reached on Thursday with the OCR says the school district will provide multiple changing areas with privacy curtains, for the student and any others who want privacy.

"Consistent with our stated position throughout this matter, if the transgender student seeks access to the locker room, the student will not be granted unrestricted access and will utilize a private changing station whenever changing clothes or showering," District 211 Superintendent Daniel Cates said in a statement.

John Knight of the Illinois ACLU said that the district's statement that the student must use the private changing area contradicts the language in the agreement itself.

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Male San Bernardino, CA Shooter Syed Farook Apparently Radicalized

Mediaite.com:

CNN is reporting that Syed Farook, the suspect involved with yesterday’s deadly shooting of 14 people in San Bernardino, CA, held radicalized ideologies of fundamental jihadism.

Vaughn Sterling, the Senior Producer of The Situation Room, took to Twitter to report the following from CNN reporter Evan Perez:

No specific information has been released regarding possible connections between Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik to terror groups abroad. According to CNN, officials have announced that Farook visited Saudi Arabia in 2013, though no specific relationship with those groups have been announced.

Perez spoke with CNN host Chris Cuomo moments ago about the new developments. “We also know they’re looking at overseas communications,” reported Perez. He continued, “Now we don’t know whether that indicates that anybody was ordering what happened yesterday to occur — again, there’s no indication of that yet.”

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New Hampshire Voter Asks Hillary Clinton Whether Bill Clinton’s Alleged Victims Should Be Believed

FreeBeacon.com:

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was asked Thursday in New Hampshire whether the alleged sexual abuse or harassment victims of her husband should be believed, given her recent twet on the matter.

“You recently came out to say that all rape victims should be believed? But would you say that about Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey, and Paula Jones? Should we believe them as well?” the audience member asked.

“Well, I would say that everybody should be believed at first until they are disbelieved based on evidence,” Clinton said, drawing applause.

Sometimes it takes the common people to do the media's job. Unfortunately, it looks like Hillary's team prepped her well on how to deal with that trap she set up for herself.

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Rahm Emanuel’s Nixon Moment: The Laquan McDonald Coverup Will Be His Legacy

Salon.com:

When Rahm Emanuel was a congressman, he was nicknamed “the Jewish LBJ,” not only for his ambition, but for his reputation as an amoral political animal focused only on power. Now that he’s facing his biggest crisis as mayor of Chicago – the coverup of a video showing a police officer shooting a black teenager 16 times – he’s looking much more like Richard Nixon.

On Tuesday morning, Emanuel began attempting to excise this cancer on his mayoralty by firing Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy, a move reminiscent of Nixon’s dismissals of H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman. Then he held an “I Am Not Corrupt” press conference, which one veteran City Hall reporter called “the most unusual in his four-and-a-half years as mayor,” because he showed up on time and answered questions. When Rahm Emanuel starts treating people with respect, you know he’s in trouble. He also appointed his very own special prosecutors, announcing the formation of a Police Accountability Task Force, to be advised by former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, a Chicago native.

Emanuel was asked whether he had sat on the video – which was released 400 days after the incident, as the result of a lawsuit by a freelance journalist – to protect his reelection bid.
“The family came forward on February 27 contacting the city,” the mayor explained. “In a short time, we reached a conclusion. As it relates to the video, that on the completion of the investigation, the video would be made public, which is what happened. It is a common practice that you don’t release material essential to an investigation.”

Feb. 27 was three days after the mayoral election. Emanuel received 46 percent of the vote, forcing him into a runoff with Cook County Commissioner Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, in which the support of the city’s black voters would be decisive. The “conclusion” was a $5 million settlement with the family of Laquan McDonald, the 17-year-old gunned down by Officer Jason Van Dyke. The shooting occurred on Oct. 20, 2014. The video was finally released last month. A Cook County judge ordered it made public in response to a suit by journalist Brandon Smith. (The police department had previously turned down 14 Freedom of Information Act requests from news agencies.) Almost simultaneously, Emanuel condemned the officer for violating the public trust “at every level,” and Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez charged him with first-degree murder.

There’s even a missing tape in this Nixonian saga. After McDonald was shot, police spent hours viewing security camera footage at a Burger King across the street from the scene. When officials from the Independent Police Review Board asked to view the footage, 86 minutes were missing, from 9:13 p.m. to 10:39 p.m. McDonald was shot at 9:57. The store’s manager believes police erased the tape, but the FBI says it found no evidence of tampering.

Police shoot civilians all the time in Chicago, which has led the nation in homicides for every full year of Emanuel’s term. In 2014, they killed 17 and wounded 28. As the Chicago Tribune noted in a headline last year, “In Chicago, police shootings rarely protested.” But this shooting was different, because the video contradicted the official story that McDonald had lunged at officers with a knife, and because it ended with the sight of smoke trails from bullets passing through his inert body. On the day after Thanksgiving, protesters formed a human wall outside the tony shops on Michigan Avenue, causing one would-be Apple Store patron to wail, “I’m an American. I just want to shop!” On Monday, the University of Chicago campus was closed after an anonymous threat to shoot 16 white males in retaliation for McDonald’s death.

If liberals are serious about justice for Laquan McDonald, they'd start a petition now to get Barack Obama's longtime buddy and former counsel Rahm Emanuel to resign as mayor of Chicago for his part in this major coverup.

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Another Mass Shooting In America, This Time Claims 14 Lives In California

While innocent people continue to die from these horrific mass shootings, which are almost always committed by white men with serious mental issues, liberals bash conservatives while pushing for more gun control (which doesn't work). And at the same time conservatives bash liberals, argue for more guns and defend the NRA (which is a non-starter). Frankly, Americans as a whole need to put aside idiot partisanship and start offering real solutions to this madness that's literally occurring like everyday now. Enough is enough already.

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