HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Was Your State’s Election System Hacked by the Russians? DHS Notifies 21 States By Tyler O’Neil

Posted By on September 23rd, 2017

On Friday, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) notified the election officials of 21 states that hackers targeted their systems last year. DHS had previously told The Associated Press (AP) that more than 20 states were targeted by hackers believed to be Russian agents before the 2016 elections. Many of the states did not know until Friday that their systems were targeted.

“It is completely unacceptable that it has taken DHS over a year to inform our office of Russian scanning of our systems, despite our repeated requests for information,” California Secretary of State Alex Padilla (D) said in a statement. “The practice of withholding critical information from elections officials is a detriment to the security of our elections and our democracy.”

State election offices in Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Maryland, Minnesota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin verified to the AP that they were among those targeted. Among these, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin are considered swing states.

The DHS did not specify the identity of the hackers, but in most cases, the states were told their systems were not breached. In most of the states, the targeting involved preparatory activity, like scanning computer systems. Targets included voter registration systems but not vote tallying software.

Only Illinois reported that hackers had succeeded in breaching its voter systems. Other states reported that their cybersecurity efforts turned back efforts to get to crucial information.

Election officials in three states did tie the attacks to Russia.

The Wisconsin Election Commission said the state’s systems were targeted by “Russian government cyber actors.” Alaska Elections Division Director Josie Bahnke alleged that computers in Russia were scanning election systems.

“There are constant attempts by bad actors to hack our systems,” Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate (R), said in a statement. “But we continue to deflect those attempts.”

A spokesman for the Colorado secretary of state was hesitant to label the cyber attack attempts. “It’s not an attack. I wouldn’t call it a probe. It’s not a breach, it’s not a penetration,” Trevor Timmons said. “It’s really reconnaissance by a bad guy to try and figure out how we would break into your computer.”

DHS admitted that state and local officials should be informed about cybersecurity risks to election systems. “We are working with them to refine our processes for sharing this information while protecting the integrity of investigations and the confidentiality of system owners,” the agency said.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Professor Wants to Destroy ‘Whitestream Intellectual Habits’ By Tom Knighton

Posted By on September 23rd, 2017

By now, we get it. Race-baiting professors are convinced the entire system is rigged against minorities and will use any and all opportunities to argue such. If possible, they’ll publish these arguments in journals so they can pretend their racially charged screeds are somehow legitimate.

The latest example comes from a professor at the University of Texas. James Jupp is a professor of critical white studies who thinks that too much of K-12 education is racist or something.

From Campus Reform:

Such knowledge, Jupp explains, “refers to Whitestream subject area content and related whitened intellectual habits that form the basis of much mainstream learning and teaching in U.S. schools.”

Jupp then cites K-12 history lessons as an example, noting that many K-12 students are taught through the lens of “white privilege,” which creates problems among the future educators in Jupp’s classes, whom he teaches to “resist critical race and whiteness pedagogies.”

In an effort to fight this, Jupp, a proponent of “decolonizing education,” calls upon his fellow professors to commit to “the creative destruction of cherished curriculum knowledge” and replace it with “actionable, teachable, antiracist knowledge for race-visible teaching.”

“Racialized curriculum recoding is important because it begins to outline the ways in which critical race or whiteness pedagogies must actually recode and replace existing cherished knowledge in process-oriented ways,” Jupp argues, saying such a tactic is important because historically aspiring “white teachers [have] denied, evaded, or diminished the salience of race in teaching and learning.”

In other words, math, science, English, and actual history are all racist and stuff.

Look, we have issues in education, but Jupp is out of his mind if he thinks “whiteness” is somehow an infection that has spread throughout the K-12 curriculum in this country. He’s absolutely insane.

Instead, this is race-baiting nonsense that only really impacts him because he teaches courses in this nonsense and students who enter his class see it as such. They see it, resist it, and Jupp doesn’t like that. So he wants them primed for his class by ignoring centuries of scholarship in all the various disciplines just so he can have an easier time.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Princeton Newspaper Disbands Editorial Board after Right-Leaning Articles Appear By Tom Knighton

Posted By on September 23rd, 2017

The Princeton campus newspaper has a unique editorial structure. While most newspapers — not just student-run ones — have an editorial board that is made up of senior editors, Princeton’s Princetonian has an editorial board that is completely separate from the senior student staff. Instead, it has what has been reported as a fairly broad cross-section of students on the Ivy League campus.

But then the board put forth several right-leaning opinion pieces in a row, which was intolerable for the tolerant leftists in charge at the Princetonian.

From The College Fix:

Earlier this month, however, that independent board was dissolved by the Princetonian’s top editors, who reverted to the more common model of having senior editors pen unsigned editorials.

The decision upset members of the disbanded board, who have gone rogue, launching their own website to continue to publish opinions and combat what they call the Princetonian’s“anti-pluralism.”

In their debut editorial Sept. 14, they also called current leaders of the Princetonian out for bias, noting the “catalyst for the change in the Editorial Board’s structure was a series of editorials that did not align with the personal political convictions of the Editor-in-Chief and other senior editors.”

Sarah Sakha, who is now editor-in-chief of the campus paper and was also a contributor to the Princeton Progressive, defended the action.

Sakha, in an email to The College Fix, defended the decision to disband the group, noting it was made by the Managing Board, which she heads, after consulting with other members of the Princetonian and its Board of Trustees.

“We decided to revise the structure of our Editorial Board, in a return to a more traditional model of an editorial board, for a college newspaper,” Sakha said. “We welcome a diversity of opinion, which is why we have invited all current members of the board to apply to the new board. Alternatively, they can become bylined columnists, without having to apply. We expect their voices will not be lost, but rather amplified, on our Opinion pages by having a byline.”

I’m sorry, but that’s equine excrement.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Dershowitz: Plame Story Is ‘Much, Much Worse than the Media Has Presented It’ By Debra Heine

Posted By on September 23rd, 2017

Harvard University law professor Alan Dershowitz slammed the media this morning for playing down the Valerie Plame anti-Semitic tweet story after her disingenuous apology.

The former CIA operative came under intense fire yesterday on Twitter after she tweeted an anti-Semitic article that blames “America’s Jews” for all of our wars. After the backlash, it was said that she had only skimmed the Unz Review article and somehow had missed the blatant anti-Semitism.

During an appearance on Fox and Friends Friday, the professor said that this story is “much, much worse than the media has presented it.” He added that the author of the article, Philip Giraldi, is a “well-known anti-Semite.”

“In this article, he says that Jews like me or Bill Kristol, when we appear on television, should have on the bottom of the screen identification saying we’re Jews,” Dershowitz pointed out. “And he says it’s ‘like a warning label on a bottle of rat poison. Ingest at your own peril.'”

“All you have to do is read the first couple of paragraphs: Jews control the media, Jews control politics,” he exclaimed. “This is just like what was written in Nazi Germany!” He added, “she can’t now say, ‘I didn’t know what was in it.'”

Dershowitz noted that in 2014, Plame tweeted another article by Giraldi and he argued that her retweets expose “her real set of beliefs.”

“The interesting thing about Twitter, is you do it so quickly, it often reflects your real, genuine beliefs. Then you realize what you’ve said and you say, ‘Uh, oh. I’m sorry,'” he explained. “This guy, Giraldi’s articles are constantly put on neo-Nazi websites!”

“Who would imagine that a former CIA operative would retweet that and, I believe, endorse it?” Dershowitz said incredulously.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Hillary Clinton criticizes first lady Melania Trump – here’s what she said by Carlos Garcia

Posted By on September 23rd, 2017

“Is this a fair criticism?While cyber-bullying has not been stamped out in our time, it is a little unfair of the former first lady to criticize the current first lady when it’s just a few months into the first term of President Trump. Some might also point out that Clinton herself is accused of “bullying” attacks on the alleged sexual harassment victims of her husband, former President Bill Clinton.”

Hillary Clinton said that first lady Melania Trump was doing not enough to stop cyber-bullying, and that if she “were serious” about the issue, there’s plenty of allies she could enlist in the struggle.

What did she say exactly?

When asked if the first lady was doing enough to combat cyber-bullying, she responded, “No, no and, look, I don’t think anybody is doing enough on cyberbullying, because it’s real and it has a particularly damaging effect on young people, who are so influenced by and personally affected by what is said about them or is said to them.”

Hillary made her comments to progressive news site MIC, who published her comments on Tuesday.

“I really worry about it as a major issue,” she said, “y’know, as something that I talked about in the campaign and I wanted to do more. I think they’d be a lot of people who would be willing to help her, if she were serious about actually following through.”

“Because we’ve got to try the best we can to make the internet,” she explained, “particularly social media, understand the impact that it can have particularly on vulnerable people, particularly on susceptible young people, and we need more voices that are not just firing nasty shots back, but saying, time out, no. This is not the way you talk about anybody, this is not how you conduct yourself.”

“You would never do it in person. I think it’s a really important issue, and if she were serious and able to follow through on it,” she concluded, “I bet there’d be so many people who’d be willing to try to help her on that.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Obamacare insurance rates in IL expected to rise an average of 35% By Rick Moran

Posted By on September 23rd, 2017

The insurance commissioner for the state of Illinois announced that health insurance customers in the state will see premium increases average 35% in 2018.

Washington Free Beacon:

The four insurers serving the individual market in Illinois are Celtic Insurance Company, CIGNA HealthCare of Illinois, Health Alliance Medical Plans (HAMP), and Health Care Service Corporation (HCSC). Humana has announced earlier this year it was leaving the Illinois exchange.

For Obamacare’s lowest silver-plan, the four insurers are requesting a range of 15 to 43 percent in premium hikes, coming to an average of 35 percent.

A 21-year-old nonsmoker on the lowest cost silver-plan with Celtic Insurance can expect to see premiums of $315.33. For those with Cigna coverage, an individual in this category could expect to see a range of premiums of $448.97 to $344.23. Individuals with HAMP coverage can expect their premiums to go up from a range of $423.96 to $446.71. Those covered by HCSC can expect premiums to increase from a range of $358.46 to $520.94.

For those purchasing the second-lowest silver plan, the commissioner says many counties will see increases of more than 40 percent.

In October of last year, the Obama administration announced that premiums for 2017 would rise by double-digits. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, rate increases are a result of the increasing number of insurers experiencing losses on the exchanges.

“Years before the Trump administration came to office, Obamacare’s double-digit rate increases and onerous mandates have been squeezing the pocket books of the American people,” a spokesperson at the Department of Health and Human Services said.

“Americans are once again facing skyrocketing costs and plummeting choices because of Obamacare’s fundamental failures,” the spokesperson said. “Congress should bring relief to American families and end the Obamacare nightmare once and for all.”

Are these rate increases going to be typical nationwide? Those states with more insurance companies selling policies will see smaller increases, while those states where consumers have fewer options will probably see increases higher than an average of 35%. The key, as in any market, is competition. It’s not rocket science.

The Republican bill that Congress may vote on next week does not address the lack of competition in many states. And as the DHS spokesman points out, whatever uncertainty there is among insurance companies because Obamacare reform is up in the air pales in comparison to the fundamental and continuing flaws of Obamacare from the day it was implemented. The reason Obamacare continues to fail is that insurance companies can’t make money selling Obamacare policies.

Until that issue is addressed, we will continue to see skyrocketing premium increases driving more and more people out of the market.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

What Did the Founders Think about Freedom of Speech? By Mike Sabo

Posted By on September 23rd, 2017

The natural right of an individual to speak freely has been under assault by the Left for decades. With the election of Donald Trump, the pace and ferocity of the Left’s attacks on the freedom of speech have only accelerated.https://amgreatness.com/2017/09/22/what-did-the-founders-think-about-freedom-of-speech/

The urge among progressives to codify into law “hate speech” exceptions to the First Amendment—and even to repeal the freedom of speech altogether—is no longer the stuff of hushed fantasy on the Left. It is open and proudly spoken in the salons of D.C. and Berkeley. Members of the Orwellian-named Antifa movement attack anyone—from neo-Nazis to your run-of-the mill harmless conservative—who disagrees with the Left’s destructive ideology of identity politics.

Yet some speech is still considered more equal than others. Consider the media’s self-serving elevation of their right to speak over and against all other Americans. This has become hard to miss. Pompous news anchors with furrowed brows tell us in tones fraught with “concern” that President Trump’s refusal to be the media’s punching bag is something akin to third world authoritarianism. It is the stuff of a tyrant who wants to crush the press under his heel.

The typical conservative response to these attacks has been less than helpful. In some cases, they even abet the Left.

William J. Haun, a lawyer based in Washington, D.C., has penned an important essay at the Library of Law and Liberty blog that delves into these details. In the piece, he traces the feckless conservative response to the progressive rejection of free speech and attempts to shed light on the American founders’ understanding of free speech.

Haun notes that instead of arguing from a basis steeped in the American political tradition, conservatives have adopted an “absolutist” view of the freedom of speech that is fearful of “drawing principled distinctions.” “The Right…seems to find it an alluring posture given dominant cultural forces’ militant hostility to conservative views,” Haun argues.

Afraid of voicing any fundamental concerns regarding the consensus morality of the ruling class, conservatives resign themselves to make dubious utilitarian arguments that cannot possibly meet the challenge the Left has put forward. Nearly every contributor at National Review who writes on free speech, for example, regularly conflates speech that is obscene or vile with speech that is not harmful to the rights of others.

Underlying this “absolutist” rhetoric is the notion that “dissent from the dominant political and cultural orthodoxies (read: conservative views) would be protected” if “drawing content-based restrictions” was prohibited. But this is a fool’s errand. Lines will be drawn always. The real question is where such restrictions are—not if there should be any restrictions in the first place.

As Haun contends, the conservative “absolutist” position can easily descend into a deep moral relativism:

The absolutist position is akin to a compass without a magnet: Without any extrinsic source of objective value—right reason and objective truth—to allow political communities to assign worth to any speech, speech’s worth is determined only by individual perceptions, and these perceptions are informed by one’s passions. When those passions are aggregated, as has happened with Progressive dominance on college campuses, the ‘marketplace of ideas’ lacks any strength to stop a mob silencing views that do not accord with those of the dominant consumers.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Clinton Pollster Explains Clinton Loss Another Democrat admits the failure of identity politics. James Freeman

Posted By on September 23rd, 2017

What happened in 2016? Longtime Clinton family adviser Stanley Greenberg has a very different answer than Hillary Clinton. While the former secretary of State is on a book tour blaming a long list of people outside her campaign, this week Mr. Greenberg is explaining what went wrong on the inside. And it has a lot to do with ignoring the concerns of Middle America.

Mr. Greenberg was Bill Clinton’s pollster during his winning election campaign in 1992, has worked for other Democratic presidential candidates in the years since, and seems to have offered plenty of advice to Mrs. Clinton and her campaign team in 2016. By and large, they ignored it.

In the magazine American Prospect this week, Mr. Greenberg writes:

The Trump presidency concentrates the mind on the malpractice that helped put him in office. For me, the most glaring examples include the Clinton campaign’s over-dependence on technical analytics; its failure to run campaigns to win the battleground states; the decision to focus on the rainbow base and identity politics at the expense of the working class; and the failure to address the candidate’s growing ‘trust problem,’ to learn from events and reposition.

Mr. Greenberg’s postmortem details the campaign’s blind faith in its computer models, even though they had often failed in the primaries to accurately measure the strength of rival Bernie Sanders. According to the author:

Astonishingly, the 2016 Clinton campaign conducted no state polls in the final three weeks of the general election and relied primarily on data analytics to project turnout and the state vote. They paid little attention to qualitative focus groups or feedback from the field, and their brief daily analytics poll didn’t measure which candidate was defining the election or getting people engaged.

Beyond the reliance on flawed analytics was a flawed strategy, says Mr. Greenberg:

Clinton and the campaign acted as if “demographics is destiny” and that a “rainbow coalition” was bound to govern. Yes, there is a growing “Rising American Electorate,” but Page Gardner and I wrote at the outset of this election, you must give people a compelling reason to vote and I have demonstrated for my entire career that a candidate must target white working-class voters too.

Not surprisingly, Clinton took her biggest hit in Michigan, where she failed to campaign in Macomb County, the archetypal white working-class county. That was the opposite of her husband’s approach. Bill Clinton visibly campaigned in Macomb, the black community in Detroit, and elsewhere.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Iran Tests Ballistic Missile Amid U.S. Tensions Test comes days after U.S. President Donald Trump sharply criticized Iran in U.N. address By Aresu Eqbali

Posted By on September 23rd, 2017

TEHRAN—Iran said it had tested a new medium-range ballistic missile, the day after unveiling it in defiance of U.S. criticism over its disputed nuclear program.

State television flashed images of the Khoramshahr missile’s disengaging warhead, calling it the country’s third such missile capable of traveling some 2,000 kilometers (1,240 miles). The announcement came after it and other missiles, tanks and a submarine were displayed in a military parade on Tehran’s outskirts marking the anniversary of the 1980s Iran-Iraq war.

President Hassan Rouhani on Friday vowed that his country would continue to bolster its ballistic-missile program, amid rising tensions with the U.S.

“Whether you like it or not, we will strengthen our defense and military capabilities as deemed necessary for deterrence. Not just our missiles but also our land, air and maritime capabilities,” he said in a speech. “We won’t ask anybody’s permission to defend our people.”

Mr. Rouhani also addressed a key source of tension with the U.S. and its regional allies, saying Iran would continue to defend “the wronged people of Yemen, Syria and Palestine,” indicating it wouldn’t scale back its involvement in Middle East conflicts.

The missile test comes days after U.S. President Donald Trump sharply criticized Iran in his address to the United Nations General Assembly, denouncing the landmark 2015 nuclear deal reached between Tehran and six world powers including the U.S.

U.S. sanctions introduced this year included legislation targeting the missile program. Iran regards those new sanctions as a violation of the deal, which suspended most international sanctions on Tehran in return for curbs to its nuclear program. It doesn’t mention ballistic missiles.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

ObamaCare’s Tax on the Poor The mandate penalty hits low-income Americans the hardest.

Posted By on September 23rd, 2017

Democrats claim to have a monopoly on caring for the poor and suffering, and this week the left is portraying a GOP health-care bill as an attack on society’s vulnerable. So check out the data on how ObamaCare is a tax on some low-income families.

IRS data offers insight into who paid the law’s individual mandate penalty in 2015 for not buying health insurance, the latest year for which figures are available. Spoiler alert: The payers aren’t Warren Buffett or any of the other wealthy folks Democrats say they want to tax. More than one in three of taxed households earned less than $25,000, which is roughly the federal poverty line for a family of four.

More than 75% of penalized households made less than $50,000 and nine in 10 earned less than $75,000. Fewer families paid the tax in 2015 than in 2014, yet government revenues increased to more than $3 billion from about $1.7 billion, as the financial punishment for lacking coverage increased.

These Americans are paying a fine to avoid purchasing a product they don’t want or can’t afford but government compels them to buy. Such individuals don’t suddenly have access to less expensive or higher quality medical care, but they do have less money for household expenses, which can consume a high share of income for this class of families.

The unfortunate irony is that ObamaCare destroyed the private market that offered options that in some cases made sense for these people. For example: High-deductible, limited coverage for unexpected events.

Then again, the point of this coercion was to substitute the government’s political preferences for individual judgment, while forcing the young and healthy to pay more to finance the mandated benefits that Democrats think everyone must have. This is the status quo that Senators John McCain and Rand Paul are supporting with their opposition to reform.