Friday, January 10, 2014

How The Supreme Court Could Blow Up President Obama’s Last Two Years In Office

How The Supreme Court Could Blow Up President Obama’s Last Two Years In Office

By Ian Millhiser on January 10, 2014 at 12:42 pm
"How The Supreme Court Could Blow Up President Obama’s Last Two Years In Office"
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Samuel Alito, John Roberts, Timothy Geithner, Anthony Kennedy
CREDIT: AP Photo/Charles Dharapak
Barring another big Democratic wave in November, 2014 is likely to be a bad election year for Democrats. That’s because they are stuck defending the big Senate victories Democrats made in the 2008 wave election, as well as several seats in states that have trended red in recent years. Any year when Senate Democrats need to defend seats in Alaska, Arkansas, Louisiana, Montana, South Dakota and West Virginia is likely to be a difficult time for Team Blue, regardless of how they perform at the polls.
In the fairly likely event that Republicans regain control of the Senate next year, they will suddenly enjoy a power they haven’t held since Senate Democrats invoked the so-called nuclear opinion last November — the power to block every single one of President Obama’s nominees to any Senate-confirmed job. That is, at least, if the Supreme Court gives them this power. On Monday, the justices will hear a case that could effectively shut down the president’s power to make recess appointments, potentially cutting off the primary avenue a president has to push back against a Senate that refuses to confirm anyone to key government jobs.
When the justices announced that they would hear National Labor Relations Board v. Noel Canning, it had the potential to nuke literally three generations worth of protections for workers and unions. The NLRB is the only agency empowered to enforce many of the rights to organize and collectively bargain that workers enjoy in the workplace, and Senate Republicans attempted to effectively shut down this agency by refusing to confirm anyone to it. Thus, if President Obama’s recess appointees to the NLRB were invalidated, the specific question at issue in Noel Canning, America would suddenly find itself without a body of labor law that’s existed since the Roosevelt Administration.
That immediate crisis has passed. In July, Senate Republicans agreed to a confirm a full slate of NLRB nominees in a failed effort to ward of a change to the Senate rules. The larger question of whether President Obama still has a recess appointments power, however, remains a live issue in Noel Canning.
The vibrancy of the recess appointments power had not been an issue until fairly recently. As Attorney General Harry Daugherty wrote in 1921, the question of whether the Senate is in recess — and thus whether the president can make a recess appointment — hinged upon “whether in a practical sense the Senate is in session so that its advice and consent can be obtained.” Daugherty warned about reading hypertechnical requirements into the recess appointments power — “To give the word ‘recess’ a technical and not a practical construction, is to disregard substance for form.”
Until a handful of Republican judges got their hands on the Noel Canning case, the primary argument against Daugherty’s view was that the Senate could effectively defeat the recess appointments power by holding very brief “pro forma” sessions every three days. These pretend sessions, the theory goes, thwart a recess because three days away from business are not enough to constitute a “recess,” and even a very brief, sham session is enough to constitute an act of Senate business.
The problem with this theory, however, is that runs headlong into case law. Even assuming that a sham Senate session convened for the sole purpose of thwarting recess appointments constitutes the Senate doing business in any real sense, the highest judicial authority to consider the question prior to the Obama presidency flatly rejected the notion that a recess is not a recess when it is only a few days long. As the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit explained in Evans v. Stephens, “[t]he Constitution, on its face, does not establish a minimum time that an authorized break in the Senate must last to give legal force to the President’s appointment power under the Recess Appointments Clause. And we do not set the limit today.”
Faced with this legal precedent, a very conservative panel of the D.C. Circuit offered an entirely different reason to cut of President Obama’s recess appointment power. Under the D.C. Circuit’s opinion in Noel Canning, the only period that counts as a “recess” for purposes of the president’s recess power is the very brief period in between Senate sessions that often lasts for just several minutes every January. If the D.C. Circuit’s rationale is adopted by the Supreme Court, the recess power will effectively cease to exist.
It’s worth noting that the Supreme Court specifically added the question of “whether the President’s recess-appointment power may be exercised when the Senate is convening every three days in pro forma sessions” to the list of issues it would consider in this case, so it is somewhat unlikely that the Court will embrace the sweeping rationale that animated the D.C. Circuit. Even so, it may not matter that much how the Supreme Court rules against President Obama so long as they rule against President Obama in this case, since a GOP-controlled Senate will be fully capable of holding pro forma sessions.
While the severely conservative judges who handled the case in the D.C. Circuit claim that their decision is rooted in the “original understanding” of the Constitution, it is hard to read their opinion as anything other than an indictment of the idea that judges should look only to that original understanding without considering anything that has happened since the Constitution was drafted. There have been at least 652 recess appointments since 1981 alone that would be invalidated by the D.C. Circuit’s reasoning — potentially invalidating everything those appointees did in the process. Literally centuries of federal government practice cuts against the D.C. Circuit’s understanding of the Constitution. And yet the thrust of the D.C. Circuit’s opinion is that all of our nation’s historic practice must bow because three unelected judges happen to disagree with everyone who has come before them.
The framers themselves were not so arrogant. Although James Madison led an unsuccessful fight to declare the First Bank of the United States unconstitutional in 1791, he signed into law an act creating the Second Bank after he was elected president. Madison explained that Congress, the President, the Supreme Court, and (most important, by failing to use their amending power) the American people had for two decades accepted” the First Bank, and he viewed this acceptance as “a construction put on the Constitution by the nation, which, having made it, had the supreme right to declare its meaning.”
Nevertheless, if you are expecting the Supreme Court to side with President Obama in this case, don’t. To date, every single Republican judge to consider Obama’s recess appointments has ruled them unconstitutional, while every single Democrat has held them valid — and there are more Republicans on the Supreme Court than Democrats.

Video Analysis: Fukushima “Death Cloud” Kills hundreds on US Warship


via YouTube / January 3, 2014 /
Recently it has been widely covered in the media that ~70 members of the US 7th fleet are suing TEPCO (the company responsible for the Fukushima for THREE BILLION DOLLARS.
On paper they claim all sorts of cancer, however I can find no interview of anyone with cancer. Further the lawsuit doesnt say what the claims are for. What I do find is interview after interview of people describing non-quantifiable symptoms that are wholly inconsistent with radiation poisoning.
The thing that bugs me the most here is radiation is being sold as the ‘invisible boogey man’ that causes all the ills that you cannot otherwise explain.
Sure radiation can cause some serious problems, but then again so can asbestos. But this does not mean you can blame any unaccounted for maladies on asbestos or radiation!
In Africa when anything goes wrong (crop failures etc), there are those only too happy to blame witches. The only thing different here is the boogey man is radiation.
Video describing effects of radiation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oj6v8MtuVdU

YOU ALL VOTED FOR HIM NOT ME

Neil deGrasse Tyson on Our Grim Future: ‘We’re in a One-Way Trip to Oblivion’

video
Science. It can be fascinating and illuminating, but also kind of depressing. Especially when it comes to the future of the cosmos. Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson talked about just that with Bill Moyers this week, and talked about the acceleration of the universe towards… well, nothing much, and how there’s no scientific knowledge man possesses that can reverse it.
Moyers broke the seriousness by joking, “You mean the House of Representatives cannot pass an act that will stop this? As they would like to?”
But he moved on to ask what exactly happens to the universe billions and billions of years down the road. Dyson’s answer was blunt and to the point.
There’s no evidence to say that we will ever recycle ourselves. All evidence points to we’re in a one-way trip to oblivion. So the universe expands, the temperature of the universe drops, all stars eventually will run out of fuel. So the stars, one by one, in the night sky will turn off. And in the extremely distant future, a quadrillion years into the future, there’ll be no light coming to us in the day or night sky.
Enjoy the weekend, everyone!
Watch the video below, via WNET:

State Department names groups behind Benghazi strike

State Department names groups behind Benghazi strike why aint obama and hillarys names on here they planned it

The State Department on Friday for the first time blamed specific groups and militants for the 2012 Benghazi attack, designating them as terrorists -- a move that further undermines initial claims the attack was spontaneous.
The department announced that it was labeling Ansar al-Sharia in Benghazi and Ansar al-Sharia in Darnah as terror organizations, in part over their role in the Benghazi attack. It applied the same label to Ansar al-Sharia in Tunisia, over a separate attack on Americans in Tunis.
The State Department also labeled as terrorists Sufian bin Qumu, head of the Darnah branch and a former Guantanamo Bay detainee, and Ahmed Abu Khattalah, head of the Benghazi branch.
Fox News previously reported that the two were suspected of playing a role in the attack. And despite State Department claims that Al Qaeda leadership was not involved and a recent news report echoing that assessment, Fox News has learned that bin Qumu has Al Qaeda ties.
According to his Guantanamo file, he has historic ties to the Al Qaeda network, including training at one point at "Usama bin Laden's Torkham camp."
The State Department, in its announcement Friday, specifically discussed allegations against the Ansar al-Sharia branches.
"Ansar al-Shari'a in Benghazi and Ansar al-Shari'a in Darnah have been involved in terrorist attacks against civilian targets, frequent assassinations, and attempted assassinations of security officials and political actors in eastern Libya, and the September 11, 2012 attacks against the U.S. Special Mission and Annex in Benghazi, Libya," the department said. "Members of both organizations continue to pose a threat to U.S. interests in Libya."
Shortly after the attack, administration officials indicated it was related to protests over an anti-Islam film that were raging elsewhere in Africa and the Middle East, describing it as spontaneous. They have since backed off that explanation, though have not ruled out the film as having played some role. Many lawmakers, though, have claimed the film was not a factor and the attack was planned by terrorists.
The department on Friday cited Khattalah and bin Qumu over their leadership roles in the al-Sharia organizations. Khattalah, though, told Fox News in October 2012 that while he was at the U.S. consulate that night, he was not responsible for the attack. He claimed he was helping Libyan security workers defending the compound.
The new terror designation bars anyone from providing or trying to provide "material support or resources" to those organizations and individuals, and freezes any assets they have in the U.S. The State Department announced that it has also updated its Rewards for Justice website to include a reward of up to $10 million for information leading to the arrest or conviction of anyone involved in the Benghazi attack.
The department had faced criticism for not including that reward on the website, though officials claimed reward offers had nevertheless been made.
Four Americans died in the 2012 attack, and so far nobody has been brought to justice in connection with the killings.
"The U.S. government is committed to taking all appropriate actions against the organizations and individuals responsible for the attacks against the U.S. diplomatic facilities in Libya and Tunisia," the State Department said, also referring to a 2012 attack on the U.S. Embassy in Tunis.
Fox News' Catherine Herridge and Greg Palkot contributed to this report. 

Alan Keyes: Obama Working with Terrorists to Introduce Martial Law

Footage Surfaces Of Plane Crash Where Official Who Verified Obama’s Birth Certificate Died

Footage Surfaces Of Plane Crash Where Official Who Verified Obama’s Birth Certificate Died

Robert Rich

Earlier this month we reported that the official that verified Obama’s birth certificate had mysteriously died in a plane crash.  A new video has been released showing the moment of impact and the events that ensued after the plane crash that claimed the woman’s life.
Read more: Official Who Verified Obama’s Birth Certificate Dies In Plane Crash
The video starts out as a passenger began recording the incident at the moment of impact.  The footage begins and immediately, the camera pulls forward and down as the plane hits the water and its momentum is slowed.  As everyone equalizes after the moment of impact the camera raises to show that the plane is in Hawaii waters.
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Apparently everyone on the plane remained calm as one of the passengers, C. Phillip Hollstein, recalled, “There wasn’t panic or anything. It was very orderly. It wasn’t like any of the movies or the TV shows.”  Everyone was quick to remove their seatbelts but it wasn’t until the cabin began to fill with water that people proceeded to exit the aircraft.  The footage reveals the calm nature of the passenger’s exodus into the water.
Once everyone was in the water is when the trouble began for the official that verified Obama’s birth certificate, Loretta Fuddy. Accounts of the incident reveal that once out of the plane, Fuddy’s Deputy Director, Keith Yamamoto, held hands with the woman and tried to calm her down.  Simultaneously, he was able to get the woman’s inflatable life vest on and deploy it.
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Hollstein noted that, “She was doing fine out of the airplane,” and that, “her assistant was really watching her. He was taking care of her.”  He then decided to make the hour and half swim to shore. Sadly, shortly after arriving back to land, he heard the troubling news.
(See also: Obama Whines: ‘Do They Resent That I Never Served in the Military?’)
As Hollstein swam away, the group was reported to be floating in the water, hand in hand, waiting for help to arrive when, “she let go and there was no response from her.” In an extremely bizarre set of circumstances, even rescue swimmer Mark Peer stated that after he swam to Fuddy, he quickly noticed that she had no pulse and later stated, “It was not a good feeling.”
The plane crash all started shortly after takeoff when passengers recalled, “We probably weren’t a minute out. It wasn’t real loud or anything. Just a muffled bang. Then we were a glider.”  The plane lost power and naturally began to descend toward the water.  The pilot was able to make a successful emergency landing where no injuries were reported.
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Fuddy and her Deputy Director were on the flight returning from their annual visit to Kalaupapa.  Every year she visits a colony, only accessible by plane or mule, where the state had exiled leprosy patients back in 1969 and where only a  few still reside.
(See also: Obama’s Anti-Poverty Crusade Turns Out To Be Another Way For Democrats To Buy Votes)
Gov. Neil Abercrombie, as well as about 100 other Health Department employees showed up to pay their respects to Fuddy’s family in a memorial for the woman.  Abercrombie conveyed that Fuddy was as much loved as she was respected and told the mourners, “Her knowledge was vast, her counsel and advice always given from her heart as much as from her storehouse of experience.”
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Do these circumstances sound strange to you, or is this just the way it goes sometimes? Let us know in a comment below!

How The Supreme Court Could Blow Up President Obama’s Last Two Years In Office

How The Supreme Court Could Blow Up President Obama’s Last Two Years In Office

By Ian Millhiser on January 10, 2014 at 12:42 pm
"How The Supreme Court Could Blow Up President Obama’s Last Two Years In Office"
Share:
google plus icon
Samuel Alito, John Roberts, Timothy Geithner, Anthony Kennedy
CREDIT: AP Photo/Charles Dharapak
Barring another big Democratic wave in November, 2014 is likely to be a bad election year for Democrats. That’s because they are stuck defending the big Senate victories Democrats made in the 2008 wave election, as well as several seats in states that have trended red in recent years. Any year when Senate Democrats need to defend seats in Alaska, Arkansas, Louisiana, Montana, South Dakota and West Virginia is likely to be a difficult time for Team Blue, regardless of how they perform at the polls.
In the fairly likely event that Republicans regain control of the Senate next year, they will suddenly enjoy a power they haven’t held since Senate Democrats invoked the so-called nuclear opinion last November — the power to block every single one of President Obama’s nominees to any Senate-confirmed job. That is, at least, if the Supreme Court gives them this power. On Monday, the justices will hear a case that could effectively shut down the president’s power to make recess appointments, potentially cutting off the primary avenue a president has to push back against a Senate that refuses to confirm anyone to key government jobs.
When the justices announced that they would hear National Labor Relations Board v. Noel Canning, it had the potential to nuke literally three generations worth of protections for workers and unions. The NLRB is the only agency empowered to enforce many of the rights to organize and collectively bargain that workers enjoy in the workplace, and Senate Republicans attempted to effectively shut down this agency by refusing to confirm anyone to it. Thus, if President Obama’s recess appointees to the NLRB were invalidated, the specific question at issue in Noel Canning, America would suddenly find itself without a body of labor law that’s existed since the Roosevelt Administration.
That immediate crisis has passed. In July, Senate Republicans agreed to a confirm a full slate of NLRB nominees in a failed effort to ward of a change to the Senate rules. The larger question of whether President Obama still has a recess appointments power, however, remains a live issue in Noel Canning.
The vibrancy of the recess appointments power had not been an issue until fairly recently. As Attorney General Harry Daugherty wrote in 1921, the question of whether the Senate is in recess — and thus whether the president can make a recess appointment — hinged upon “whether in a practical sense the Senate is in session so that its advice and consent can be obtained.” Daugherty warned about reading hypertechnical requirements into the recess appointments power — “To give the word ‘recess’ a technical and not a practical construction, is to disregard substance for form.”
Until a handful of Republican judges got their hands on the Noel Canning case, the primary argument against Daugherty’s view was that the Senate could effectively defeat the recess appointments power by holding very brief “pro forma” sessions every three days. These pretend sessions, the theory goes, thwart a recess because three days away from business are not enough to constitute a “recess,” and even a very brief, sham session is enough to constitute an act of Senate business.
The problem with this theory, however, is that runs headlong into case law. Even assuming that a sham Senate session convened for the sole purpose of thwarting recess appointments constitutes the Senate doing business in any real sense, the highest judicial authority to consider the question prior to the Obama presidency flatly rejected the notion that a recess is not a recess when it is only a few days long. As the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit explained in Evans v. Stephens, “[t]he Constitution, on its face, does not establish a minimum time that an authorized break in the Senate must last to give legal force to the President’s appointment power under the Recess Appointments Clause. And we do not set the limit today.”
Faced with this legal precedent, a very conservative panel of the D.C. Circuit offered an entirely different reason to cut of President Obama’s recess appointment power. Under the D.C. Circuit’s opinion in Noel Canning, the only period that counts as a “recess” for purposes of the president’s recess power is the very brief period in between Senate sessions that often lasts for just several minutes every January. If the D.C. Circuit’s rationale is adopted by the Supreme Court, the recess power will effectively cease to exist.
It’s worth noting that the Supreme Court specifically added the question of “whether the President’s recess-appointment power may be exercised when the Senate is convening every three days in pro forma sessions” to the list of issues it would consider in this case, so it is somewhat unlikely that the Court will embrace the sweeping rationale that animated the D.C. Circuit. Even so, it may not matter that much how the Supreme Court rules against President Obama so long as they rule against President Obama in this case, since a GOP-controlled Senate will be fully capable of holding pro forma sessions.
While the severely conservative judges who handled the case in the D.C. Circuit claim that their decision is rooted in the “original understanding” of the Constitution, it is hard to read their opinion as anything other than an indictment of the idea that judges should look only to that original understanding without considering anything that has happened since the Constitution was drafted. There have been at least 652 recess appointments since 1981 alone that would be invalidated by the D.C. Circuit’s reasoning — potentially invalidating everything those appointees did in the process. Literally centuries of federal government practice cuts against the D.C. Circuit’s understanding of the Constitution. And yet the thrust of the D.C. Circuit’s opinion is that all of our nation’s historic practice must bow because three unelected judges happen to disagree with everyone who has come before them.
The framers themselves were not so arrogant. Although James Madison led an unsuccessful fight to declare the First Bank of the United States unconstitutional in 1791, he signed into law an act creating the Second Bank after he was elected president. Madison explained that Congress, the President, the Supreme Court, and (most important, by failing to use their amending power) the American people had for two decades accepted” the First Bank, and he viewed this acceptance as “a construction put on the Constitution by the nation, which, having made it, had the supreme right to declare its meaning.”
Nevertheless, if you are expecting the Supreme Court to side with President Obama in this case, don’t. To date, every single Republican judge to consider Obama’s recess appointments has ruled them unconstitutional, while every single Democrat has held them valid — and there are more Republicans on the Supreme Court than Democrats.