Conservative Blogger
Sunday, January 14, 2018
Hawaii false alarm prompts plans for FCC investigation
Saturday's errant ballistic-missile alert to
cellphones, televisions and radio stations in Hawaii has officials in
Washington planning to find out what went wrong.
Federal Communication Commission Chairman Ajit Pai announced plans for a probe via Twitter.
“The @FCC is launching a full investigation into the
false emergency alert that was sent to residents of Hawaii,” Pai tweeted
later Saturday.U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, praised Pai's decision to address an error that sent many Hawaii residents into a panic for about 40 minutes.
"This system failed miserably and we need to start over," Schatz tweeted.
Local officials and the U.S. Pacific Command quickly recognized that the alert was a false alarm, but the system took about 40 minutes to send a corrective message to Hawaii residents, the Washington Examiner reported.
The FCC has regulated the nation's wireless emergency alert system since 2012. But critics have pointed out a number of perceived flaws, such as messages being delivered to too wide a swath rather than the people most affected by an emergency, Reuters reported.
In December, officials from Harris County, Texas, told members of the FCC about problems they experienced in directing alerts to people most affected by Hurricane Harvey, the New York Times reported.
In October, U.S. Sens. Kamala Harris and Dianne Feinstein, both D-Calif., wrote to Pai, saying that inefficient location-targeting had deprived some residents of receiving alerts, as wildfires raged across Northern California, the Times reported.
“These emergency services are caught in a bind between notifying individuals in imminent danger and risking mass panic,” the senators wrote.
Just last week Pai proposed that service providers “deliver these alerts to match the geographic area specified by the officials sending the alert with no more overshoot than one-tenth of a mile.”
The FCC plans to vote this month on a plan to improve the emergency alert system so it better targets the people most affected by a given situation.
Under such a proposed sytem, Pai said, Americans will “take more seriously the alerts they receive on their mobile devices.”
Who is Sean Penn to lecture Trump about compassion?
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| Piece of S**t Actor Sean Penn. |
It is utterly astounding that Time magazine published an op-ed
by clueless actor Sean Penn, lecturing President Trump on compassion
and justice in Latin America and the Caribbean. Who is Sean Penn to
lecture anyone about compassion?
After all, it is Sean Penn who enabled and befriended
the repressive and ruthless Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, using his
Hollywood clout to lend credibility to Chavez and to spread lies about
the “successes” of Chavez’s disastrous socialist revolution.
Of course, Penn was not alone.
Actor Danny Glover and filmmaker Michael Moore also lavished Chavez and
his successor, Nicholas Maduro, with praise and support as Venezuela
spiraled into chaos and poverty.So did Democratic Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Sanders’ website once stated that the American Dream was dead and more likely to be found in Venezuela than the U.S. He has since quietly removed this passage from the site.
Under Chavez and Maduro, Venezuela went from being the economic envy of Latin America – rich in oil and with a vibrant economy – to being one of its poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere.What has Sean Penn said about the horrible indignities and abuses suffered by the Venezuelan people? Nothing. Where is his “compassionate” op-ed to show concern for the victims of Venezuelan socialism and repression?
Today, thanks to the nationalization of oil production and government-imposed price controls, Venezuela is a country of hunger, deprivation, food shortages and humiliations that proud Venezuelans never thought they would be forced to endure. As a result of terrible food shortages, 75 percent of Venezuelans lost an average of 19 pounds last year.
The Miami Herald, in one of the saddest articles I have ever read, chronicled the plight of Venezuelan mothers with degrees in medicine and engineering prostituting themselves in neighboring Columbia to afford groceries for their families. Others are eating their pets or have to give away children they can no longer feed.
The political repression in Venezuela is equally alarming. Hundreds of dissidents have been imprisoned, including Maduro’s most threatening competitor – the handsome, young and courageous former mayor of Caracas, Leopoldo Lopez. Lopez was sentenced to 14 years in prison on trumped up charges, though he is currently under house arrest due to health concerns.
On top of all this, Venezuela’s brave citizens risk being attacked or killed by their own government when they protest against elections and institutions rigged by the regime.
So what has Sean Penn said about these horrible indignities and abuses suffered by the Venezuelan people? Nothing. Where is his “compassionate” op-ed to show concern for the victims of Venezuelan socialism and repression? Silence.
Meanwhile, President Trump – whom Penn calls “an enemy of compassion” over his reported use of vulgar language to describe some parts of the world in a closed-door Oval Office meeting – has been unequivocal in voicing his support for the Venezuelan people.
President Trump has condemned Venezuela’s socialist oppressors and made the quest of the Venezuelan people for freedom and prosperity one of his top three international concerns, behind North Korea and Iran.
I do agree with Penn on one thing. Immigrants and refugees who have escaped the corrupt, dysfunctional, crime-ridden, socialist and communist regimes of Latin America are precisely the kind of hard-working and grateful people we should be welcoming to the U.S. They truly appreciate the blessings that Penn takes for granted.
Unlike Penn, these immigrants understand that it is democracy and American free-enterprise that have made our country the best and most prosperous in the history of the world. They know that nothing has lifted more people out of poverty than entrepreneurial capitalism. And they resent the ignorant complicity of members of the Hollywood elite, like Sean Penn, in the destruction of their country and the misery and poverty it has wrought.
A few months ago I attended the graduation ceremony of a group of Latin Americans who had attended an English language course sponsored by the LIBRE Initiative, a nonprofit that educates Hispanics about how to achieve the American Dream.
A Venezuelan man stood up. He told us he was one of the lucky ones who was able to leave that nation. He expressed deep gratitude to America and to the LIBRE Initiative, which was empowering him with language skills to succeed in his new home.
Holding a small American flag in one hand and a Venezuelan flag in the other, he addressed this small group of immigrants gathered inside of a cramped Honduran restaurant. He didn’t mince words.
“We need to educate our children to be wary of those who promise us ‘free’ things,” the man said. “I don’t care if it’s a bag of rice or a washing machine. Nothing is worth your freedom. It’s priceless.”
This new immigrant knows more about America, freedom, and the fruits of free enterprise than Sean Penn and socialist Hollywood pals will ever know.
Rachel Campos-Duffy is a FOX News Contributor and a mother of eight. Her debut children’s book – inspired by real life events - is a story about a little girl’s adventure inside the US Capitol where she learns lessons about patriotism, courage and her immigrant father’s journey to citizenship. It will be released by Regnery Kids in Spring 2018.
What's really behind the furious efforts by Democrats' to spin the Trump dossier
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| kimberley strassel wall street journal |
There’s no such thing as a coincidence in Washington, so why the sudden, furious effort by Democrats and the media to give cover to the Steele dossier? As in, the sudden, furious effort that happens to coincide with congressional investigators’ finally being given access to FBI records about the Trump-Russia probe.
This scandal’s pivotal day was Jan. 3. That’s the deadline House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes gave the Federal Bureau of Investigation to turn over documents it had been holding for months. Speaker Paul Ryan backed Mr. Nunes’s threat to cite officials for contempt of Congress. Everyone who played a part in encouraging the FBI’s colonoscopy of the Trump campaign—congressional Democrats, FBI and Justice Department senior career staff, the Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama political mobs, dossier commissioner Fusion GPS, the press corps—knew about the deadline and clearly had been tipped to the likelihood that the FBI would have to comply. Thus the dossier rehabilitation campaign.
Weeks before, the same crew had taken a desperate shot at running away from the dossier, with a New York Times special that attempted to play down its significance in the FBI probe. You can see why. In the year since BuzzFeed published the salacious dossier, we’ve discovered it was a work product of the Clinton campaign, commissioned by an oppo-research firm (Fusion), compiled by a British ex-spook on the basis of anonymous sources, and rolled out to the media in the runup to the election. Oh, and it appears to continue to be almost entirely false. When the best you’ve got is that a campaign orbiter made a public trip to Russia, you haven’t got much.
But with Congress about to obtain documents that show the dossier did matter, it was time for a new line. And so the day before the Nunes deadline, Fusion co-founders Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch broke their public silence to explain in a New York Times op-ed that what really matters was their noble intention—to highlight Donald Trump’s misdeeds. The duo took credit for alerting the “national security community” to a Russian “attack.”
Keep reading Kimberley Strassel's column in the Wall Street Journal.
Kimberley Strassel writes the Potomac Watch column for the Wall Street Journal where she is a member of the editorial board. Her latest book is "The Intimidation Game: How the Left Is Silencing Free Speech" (Twelve, 2016). Follow her on Twitter @KimStrassel.
Nancy Pelosi's elitist Democrats -- America, this is the party of the rich, sneering at the poor
There was a time when the Democrats were the party
of working Americans. They seemed to understand and fight for the
interests of the working class and people living in poverty.
Republicans, by contrast, struggled for decades with the perception that
they were “for the rich.”
Well, how things have turned around. Just look at the latest economic pronouncements of leading establishment Democrats.
Here in my home state of California, in response to
President Trump signing the GOP tax reform bill into law, state Senate
Democratic leader Kevin de Leon has taken up a new cause: fighting for
the right of the richest Californians to evade their taxes.It’s almost unbelievable – but true. De Leon (who is also the leading challenger to Sen. Dianne Feinstein in her primary battle as she seeks re-election this year) has proposed setting up a new so-called charity that would enable the Silicon Valley and Hollywood elite to claw back their losses from the Trump administration’s new tax reform law.
That tax reform law, let’s remind ourselves, actually means that some of the richest people in the richest parts of America will pay more in taxes, thanks to drastic cuts in deductions for state and local taxes they pay.If you’re a member of a working family struggling to make ends meet (as pretty much half of American families are after the economic disaster of the Bush and Obama years), then $1,000 makes a real difference.
To fight off President Trump’s vicious attack on their rich friends (read: donors), California Democrats want to set up a “California Excellence Fund.” Donations to the fund would be matched dollar-for-dollar by tax credits, which can then be subtracted from tax bills as “charity.” It’s a classic liberal version of charity, mind you: all the money would go straight into the coffers of the state government’s general fund.
Who would benefit from this bit of creative accounting? Californians earning over $1 million a year, mainly.
“‘Kevin de Leon: the last best hope for California millionaires.” Not sure he wants that as the bumper sticker for his campaign against Feinstein, but as they say: when someone tells you who they are, believe them.
Another prominent California Democrat also revealed her true colors this past week over taxes: our old friend, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. She dismissed $1,000 worker bonuses given in response to the GOP tax cuts as “crumbs.”
Well yes, that’s what $1,000 may mean to you if you’re married to a wealthy real estate tycoon and live in splendor in San Francisco. But if you’re a member of a working family struggling to make ends meet (as pretty much half of American families are after the economic disaster of the Bush and Obama years), then $1,000 makes a real difference.
You can see the new left elitism in their attitude to immigration too. Their total rejection of any effort to clamp down on the out-of-control low-wage immigration that harms American workers shows that establishment Democrats’ sympathies now lie with big business, not working people.
That’s not true of the Democrats’ populist wing, of course. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont quite rightly points out that it’s corporate America that wants mass immigration.
In a 2105 interview Sanders said: “Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don't believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country, I think we have to do everything we can to create millions of jobs. You know what youth unemployment is in the United States of America today? If you're a white high school graduate, it's 33 percent, Hispanic 36 percent, African American 51 percent. You think we should open the borders and bring in a lot of low-wage workers, or do you think maybe we should try to get jobs for those kids?”
That’s Donald Trump’s position too: and rightly so. But establishment Democrats like Nancy Pelosi and Kevin de Leon and all the rest who are busy attacking the president’s pro-worker economic agenda have totally lost touch with the needs and aspirations of working Americans. They demean and dismiss them, preferring the company – and the interests – of their wealthy friends and donors.
That’s today’s elitist Democrats: they’ve become the party of the rich, sneering at the poor.
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