Underwear Bomber Gets Life Sentence

Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab, the Christmas Day 2009 underwear bomber, will spend the rest of his life behind bars after being sentenced by a federal judge in Detroit on Thursday:



 And on Friday, the FBI preempted an illegal alien from an alleged suicide bomb attack on Capitol Hill:

 

Study: Nearly Two Million Dead Voters Still on Rolls

Leftists (including seemingly corrupt U.S. Justice Department officials) who claim that vote fraud isn't a problem act like isolated soldiers who many years later still haven't heard that the conflict has been settled.

The Pew Center on the States found in a new report (titled "Inaccurate, Costly, and Inefficient,") that nearly two million dead people are still registered to vote, about 24 million registrations are either "invalid or inaccurate," and 2.75 million persons who are improperly registered to vote in more than one state.

Our lax voter registration procedures are obsolete. The report maintains that "Voter registration in the United States largely reflects its 19th-century origins and has not kept pace with advancing technology and a mobile society. States’ systems must be brought into the 21st century to be more accurate, cost-effective, and efficient."
 
How about as a start deploying similar technology to that implemented by MasterCard or Visa?

The study also provides more common sense justification for photo ID in all states, as Investor's Business Daily explains:

Yet Democrats are pummeling states trying to impose picture ID laws to protect against this kind of fraud. They vetoed such laws in Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire and North Carolina.

The Justice Department blocked South Carolina's new photo ID law...

Democrats make two bogus arguments. First, that ballot fraud isn't "widespread" enough to merit the new requirement, as though there's such a thing as a tolerable level of fraud. Second, that picture ID laws would suppress voter turnout among minorities.

In fact, states with picture ID laws go out of their way to make sure everyone who needs an ID can get one. Plus, turnout in Indiana and Georgia swelled after their laws went into effect, and  the Supreme Court already ruled that picture ID laws don't infringe on anyone's right to vote.

Given this, it's hard to escape the conclusion that Democrats count on exploiting an inept and tattered registration system to help them win close elections. If that isn't the case, they should prove it by backing a reform that would do much to protect the sanctity of the ballot box.

Addendum: In a column about the Pew study, National Review's Deroy Murdock writes:

 For its part, President Obama’s Justice Department exacerbates these problems.

As former federal prosecutor J. Christian Adams explains in his superb book Injustice, Section 8 of the Motor Voter Act “requires voter rolls to be kept free of dead and ineligible voters.” As Justice attorneys were poised to investigate eight states rife with non-living and otherwise unqualified voters, top Obama appointees balked.

Adams heard Deputy Assistant Attorney General Julie Fernandes tell headquarters staffers in November 2009: “We have no interest in enforcing this provision of the law. It has nothing to do with increasing turnout, and we are just not going to do it.”

The Real Unemployment Rate is...

                              photo credit: Lester Public Library via photopin cc

Three years later and billions spent on a failed stimulus, is it still Bush's fault?

To put it another way, does anyone with any connection to the real world accept the cooked Labor Department statistics that national unemployment is only 8%?

Even the supposedly non-partisan Congressional Budget Office indicates that joblessness is more like 15% in what it calls "the worst period of unemployment in the United States" since the Depression era of the 1930s.

In a report to Congress released on Thursday about "persistently high unemployment," the CBO summarizes its findings as follows:

The rate of unemployment in the United States has exceeded 8 percent since February 2009, making the past three years the longest stretch of high unemployment in this country since the Great Depression. Moreover, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that the unemployment rate will remain above 8 percent until 2014. The official unemployment rate excludes those individuals who would like to work but have not searched for a job in the past four weeks as well as those who are working part-time but would prefer full-time work; if those people were counted among the unemployed, the unemployment rate in January 2012 would have been about 15 percent. Compounding the problem of high unemployment, the share of unemployed people looking for work for more than six months—referred to as the long-term unemployed—topped 40 percent in December 2009 for the first time since 1948, when such data began to be collected; it has remained above that level ever since.

Read the full CBO report here.

 

TSA Scanning: A High-Tech Peep Show?

TSA agents are at it again:

Self-Described Manhattan Conservative vs. the Liberals

It's all Bush's fault--depending on what the definition of the word "it's" is...

Many urban Bush-bashing "sophisticates" like to consider themselves edgy, but is there anything more out there than navigating the ultra-liberal Manhattan enclave wearing a "Palin power" button?

That's what gutsy columnist and FNC talking head Jedediah Bila did during the 2008 presidential campaign, as she recounts in her short book/diary Outnumbered: Chronicles of a Manhattan Conservative. The engaging publication describes her various encounters with tolerant (is there any other kind?) leftists in the city, including in the private school where she used to teach.

Despite a non-adversarial, understated approach, Bila found herself on the outs with friends, colleagues, and students because her sincerely held views--on those occasions when she expressed them--differed from theirs. Politics should be irrelevant to relationships, but then again things have a way of working out, though; these same personal experiences compelled Bila to reinvent herself as a successful political commentator.

Birth Control Mandate is Just the Beginning

You could be a stone-cold atheist or a fervent pro-choice secularist with low opinion of organized religion and still be outraged about the Obama administration's latest effort to trample on religious liberty guaranteed by the First Amendment. Now comes reports that the administration may revamp its birth control mandate policy after the uproar.

In an excellent editorial Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal warns Americans to get used to such  ObamaCare dictates that will be imposed by U.S. Department of Health and Human Services bureaucrats:

The country is being exposed to the raw political control that is the core of the Obama health-care plan, and Americans are seeing clearly for the first time how this will violate pluralism and liberty....

Practicing this kind of compulsion is routine and noncontroversial within [HHS Secretary] Sebelius's ministry. That may explain why her staff didn't notice that the birth-control rule abridges the First Amendment's protections for religious freedom. Then again, maybe HHS thought the public had become inured to such edicts, which have arrived every few weeks since the Affordable Care Act passed...

HS tried to sell it as a compromise when it was announced, and in any case HHS would revive this coercion whenever it is politically convenient some time in Mr. Obama's second term. Religious liberty won't be protected from the entitlement state until ObamaCare is repealed.

 The Journal also notes that "The Catholic left was one of ObamaCare's great enablers."

Here is Next Media Animation's take on the controversy:



Regardless of your opinion of sometimes erratic Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann, the former GOP presidential candidate, she was right on target when she said that government control of healthcare is the crown jewel of socialism.

Added: Heritage Foundation video "Religious Liberty: Obamacare's First Casualty."

Help Wanted: The TSA is Looking for a Few Good Gropers

The spring/summer travel season is right around the corner, and the TSA--the U.S. Transportation Security Administration--has a new recruitment video for airport security officers.

Actually this video is satire by "Health Ranger" Mike Adams and naturalnews.com.



According to many passengers, TSA also stands for "thousands standing around" or "total sexual assault" among other nicknames.

Update--Grope tax: So-called passenger security fees will be doubled under the administration's budget proposal: "Obama’s budget plan as reported yesterday calls for hiking the ticket fees for passenger and bag security from $2.50 to $5 next year, while cutting federal subsidies to airports. By 2018, the fee would jump to $7.50, raising billions of dollars for the government."