“Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker on Monday signed into law a measure that prohibits requiring a worker to pay union dues, striking another blow against organized labor four years after the state effectively ended collective bargaining for public-sector employees.”
National unions poured tens of millions into Wisconsin trying to defeat Walker, and only succeeded in making him stronger and losing worse than they would have otherwise.
“As many as 373 children may have been targeted for sex by gangs of men in Oxfordshire in the last 16 years, a serious case review found.”
All the men were from “Muslim backgrounds”.
It’s infuriating that political correctness and fears of offending Muslim sensitivities have caused so many officials to repeatedly look the other way and fail to investigate child rape cases in the UK. As in Rotherham, the officials that let this happen should end up in prison.
Rotherham was disturbing enough. To find out that there was another Muslim child rape ring operating in the UK (albeit one with only one-third the victims) rather staggers the moral imagination. It also begs the question: How many more Muslim child rape gangs in the UK remain to be uncovered?
So Boko Haram (or Group of the People of Sunnah for Preaching and Jihad, if you prefer the full name) has now pledged allegiance to the Islamic State. It’s like the Voltron of Radical Islamic Lunatics.
Significance? Maybe very little, unless every other Sunni Islamist group starts pledging fealty to the Islamic State as well, in which case future historians may pinpoint the declaration as the official start of World War III.
In either case, it’s yet another foreign policy triumph for the Obama/Clinton/Kerry team. Expect them to issue a denouncement in the form of a strongly worded hashtag any time now..
Here’s something that falls into the category of “undernews,” i.e. potential significant events occurring below the detectable threshold of the mainstream media.
Hacking group Anonymous (or a certain fraction thereof; things are always murky in the cyberunderground) have decided to purge Twitter of ISIS supporters in Operation #TangoDown.
This follows ISIS threatening to kill Twitter employees over blocking ISIS-related accounts.
Within seconds of Anonymous-related accounts @CtrlSec, @CtrlSec0, @CtrlSec1 or @CtrlSec2 designating a Twitter account as an ISIS-supporting account, those accounts are getting suspended.
This follows previous pro-Islamic website hacking attacks, and resulting Anonymous counterattacks, following the Charlie Hebdo attack.
One need not approve of all Anonymous’ actions (they’ve targeted Israel over Gaza) to see the elimination of the accounts of several thousand (my estimate) supporters of a designated terrorist irganization as a good thing.
If members of the Islamic State really want to live in the 7th century, they should just step away from Twitter (and computers, and cell phones, and indoor plumbing) entirely…
(Hat tip: @ColorMeRed’s Twitter Feed.)
So it was foretold, and so it has come to pass.
Wisconsin lawmakers voted Friday to make their state the 25th to enact right-to-work legislation, pushing a fast-tracked bill through the Assembly after an overnight debate and sending it on to Gov. Scott Walker for his promised signature.
The Republican governor, a likely 2016 presidential candidate who rose to national prominence by taking on public-sector unions four years ago, plans to sign it Monday. Walker planned to be in Iowa for an agriculture summit on Saturday that’s attracting other likely Republican presidential candidates.
The Assembly passed the bill 62-35 after a marathon session that included about 20 hours of debate. It was a straight party-line vote, with no Democrats backing the measure.
You come at the king, you best not miss…
Welcome to Friday! With so much being written about Hillary Clinton’s secret email server (well, secret to mere peasants like you and me, if not foreign governments…) and the King v. Burwell ObamaCare hearings, I didn’t include anything on them in this LinkSwarm. Maybe later…
The Washington Post reported last week that the tax-exempt foundation run by Bill and Hillary Clinton accepted money from seven foreign governments while Hillary served as U.S. Secretary of State (it’s unclear how much foreign money the organization accepted while Hillary was a U.S. Senator). Super shady, right? It’s worse than that, though, because Article I, Section 9 of the U.S. Constitution actually bans foreign payola for U.S. officials.
The constitutional ban on foreign cash payments to U.S. officials is known as the Emoluments Clause and originated from Article VI of the Articles of Confederation. The purpose of the clause was to prevent foreign governments from buying influence in the U.S. by paying off U.S. government officials. Here’s the text of the clause:
No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.
Does any sane person look at #ISIS burning people alive and go "Oh, they'd never dare use nuclear weapons"? @jihadwatchRS
— BattleSwarm (@BattleSwarmBlog) March 3, 2015
If you hadn’t heard, House Republicans caved in to fund Obama’s unconstitutional illegal alien amnesty.
Even more infuriating: Four Texas Republican congressmen were among the 75 Republicans who caved:
Will Hurd at least has the excuse that he represents a majority Hispanic swing district representing San Antonio and several border counties, so it’s possible that he’s following the wishes of his constituents.
Carter, Granger and McCaul do not.
So Hillary Clinton dropped a late night tweet to address the private email server controversy, which inspired the #HillaryAfterDark tag.
Which, in turn, inspired me to go way, way off the reservation:
"I thirst for the agony of the innocent. The tears of you puny mortals are like ambrosia unto me!" #HillaryAfterHours
— BattleSwarm (@BattleSwarmBlog) March 5, 2015
"The blood of my enemies shall grease the wheels of my Chariot of Pain for my triumphal procession through Dis!" #HillaryAfterHours
— BattleSwarm (@BattleSwarmBlog) March 5, 2015
"There, finally ensconsed upon the Throne of Night, I may finally begin my great work, and sing the Song of Ending." #HillaryAfterHours
— BattleSwarm (@BattleSwarmBlog) March 5, 2015
I blame this Penny Arcade cartoon and Llamas With Hats…
Over on Ace of Spades HQ, DrewM is pessimistic that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech accomplished anything. While his central premise is correct (the deal won’t prevent the Obama Administration from making a criminally stupid deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran that will actually make it easier for them to obtain nuclear weapons), the speech actually did accomplish several positive things:
Most of the news of the last 24 hours is by turns annoying and depressing, so let’s start with a bit of good news.
Ft. Hood shooter Nidal Hasan has finally been given the death penalty for his act of jihad. It should not have taken over five years (longer than it took America to win World War II) until the obvious conclusion, but at least it’s done. Now it’s a matter of winding through the military appeals process, which could take years.
Workplace violence, my ass…