Judges should probably be asking more questions about warrants they are being asked to sign, and checking the results afterwards to make sure the results match what they thought they were authorizing.
The internet isn't broken, but the FCC wants to fix it
The problem Obama is trying to fix is that the internet allows news to get out to the people around his censors and intimidation machine. The problem they are using as a stalking horse is entirely made up:
Note that the FCC regulation, not law, he was talking about was struck down by a court challenge last year. Notice that it took 4 years. Notice that Obama only has two years left in his term. The game plan is simple. Regulate the Internet. Reward your friends. Punish your enemies. Drag things out in the courts. By the time the courts have a final ruling that says you can't do what you spent the last four years doing, you will be out of office and it will be someone else's problem. If you did it right, some other Democrat's problem.
I don't know whether to be impressed that Joe Biden, the creepy uncle of a Democratic party filled with creeps, is out in front of Elizabeth Warren, the great anti-Hillary hope... or to be impressed that Warren is only 4% behind sitting-vice-president Joe Biden.
I don't usually have much to say about education, but I think this deserves pointing out. Our educational system and culture of helicopter parenting is doing a lot of damage, and we're not going to see the results for years to come. It's been quite a while since I was in school, and things seem to have only gotten worse since then; I remember struggling with similar issues myself and I can't imagine how much harder it must be now.
Solutions? None, really; other than making it economically feasible for schools to experiment and parents to choose which schools to send their children to. The state-supported near-monopoly on education must be broken.
Democrats may be ready to blink on FCC Internet rules
It doesn't appear that the suddenly-recalcitrant individual is asking for a large change, but it's a significant step back from being prepared to ram the existing proposal down the nation's throat.
UPDATE: They did not blink.
They have still not released the regulations publicly even after voting for them. And this is supposed to be a free country?
Criminal investigation of Lerner's missing emails underway
Looks like they found 744 backup tapes pretty much right away, and recently located another 424. And "there is potential criminal activity." On one level that's simple common sense, but when the person running the investigation says it, it usually means that potential is actually being looked into.
It's not just the case of the mysteriously missing hard drives, either. The IG was able to locate the backup tapes within two weeks of starting to look for them, despite Koskinen testifying that the tapes were destroyed. That could qualify as criminal based on perjury or based on refusing to provide them to Congress. Plus there is the canceled backup contract. That's a lot of coincidences all at once.
It's good that someone appears to be taking this seriously.
IPCC chairman resigns amid sex scandal, describes climate change as his religion
Religion and science do not mix. You would think this would be obvious to the Left, which often claims "scientific" support for their policies. The truth, however, is that for the left, their policies are not scientific at all but religious in nature. That is why no amount of evidence to the contrary will stop a liberal yelling about global warming climate change.
This sort of thing is absolutely corrosive to the rule of law. There's a lot more at the first link. It's casual, it's pervasive, and it's basically impossible to challenge in court.
At this point, the White House is just running out the clock; they are hoping that they can delay any actual discoveries of damaging evidence linking the White House to the IRS scandal until Obama is out of office and a new President has arrived. Unfortunately, it's been an effective strategy so far. There is important circumstantial evidence that the White House has used its power -- perhaps unwisely granted, but legal -- to access taxpayer records for political purposes. But even those requests have legal channels that must be followed:
If, in fact, there was nothing embarrassing to find in the White House correspondence with the IRS -- as suggested by the lack of any requested records in the reports -- then why not release them and say so? The refusal to cooperate with Congress, at all, on this matter suggests that the White House has something to hide.
Congratulations are in order for Emily Miller, who has received her approved application for a license to carry a concealed firearm in DC. It took a long time and a lot of public pressure from the courts and the public to get to this point. Emily has done a stellar job reporting on the process and drawing much needed attention to how horrible it was. It's still not great; the process is may-issue and the police require documented "special dangers" and a 90-day delay, plus excessive permit costs and 18 hours of training. But we probably wouldn't have gotten even this far without Emily or someone like her directing the sunlight to scatter the cockroaches.
As we have found, the popular and common-sense policies supported by Senator Obama are often strongly opposed by President Obama. Particularly when those policies involve government transparency and accountability. Gosh, I wonder what might have happened to change his opinion?
Each slice of reasonable gun control they ask you to accept is just a small part of the whole sausage, and you're not going to like where they want to put it.
This is why the Democrats push for illegal immigration so hard. It's about votes. Not American votes, but illegal foreign votes. And the Republicans aren't very enthusiastic about fighting it either.
The combination is deadly to a country that once had free and fair elections. As for why he did it, well, I suspect we can add Rick Scott to the list of politicians being blackmailed by Barack Obama's NSA surveillance program.
Nothing the government wants to do with the internet is likely to make it better. Instead, the government will issue rules: rules for what you can't do, rules for what you must ask permission to do, rules for what you must do.
To date, the internet has been successful mainly because the only real rules are the informal social rules that organically develop within communities. It's impossible to punch someone in the face over the internet, and the internet version of violent crime, cracking into someone else's server, is still illegal; as are financial crimes such as fraud. Everything else is basically free speech. Government control is both unnecessary and counterproductive.
FedEx refusing to ship Defense Distributed's CNC mill
This could be the result of pressure ala Operation Chokepoint, or a simple misunderstanding of the regulations related to shipping firearms. For all practical purposes, the Ghost Gunner is a legal product, nothing more than a packaged manufacturing tool. There should be no problems shipping it; it's certainly not a firearm itself.
I'm beginning to wonder if Obama's plan for his last two years in office is to implement gun control by stealth and regulation.
Security problems at healthcare.gov even worse than expected
Given the sensitivity of the medical and financial information dealt with on the website, any data-sharing agreements beyond those strictly necessary for the site to function are questionable. It might be understandable to share visitor data with a single site to provide anonymous visitor metrics as many websites do; but this goes well beyond that data, and there can be no legitimate purposes for sharing private data with so many different companies.
I can tell you this: it has nothing to do with improving the user's experience. One metrics agreement would be more than sufficient for that.
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