Timothy Birdnow

A cyber attack against election computers in Knoxville Tennessee was perpetrated by a IP based in the Ukraine,  according to a story in the Associated Press (Ass PR)

A private security firm - Sword & Shield Enterprise Security - was hired by the Knox County Board of Elections to determine what happened. The "denial of service" was the result of "a suspiciously large number of foreign countries" accessing the system. Strangely enough, the Board never requested help from the FBI. more...

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Timothy Birdnow

On April 26 the Aviary reported that the Chinese University of Science and Technology detected the collapse of North Korea's nuclear test site. The next day Rush Limbaugh reported the same, leading me to conclude that Limbaugh read it here at The Aviary (that has happened on several occasions; things reported here have wound up on the Rush Limbaugh show.)

At any rate, the story is now filtering through the general media. Gateway Pundit is reporting on it and suggesting that Trump had something to do with it more...

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Timothy Birdnow

The politically-motivated case against Missouri Governor Eric Greitesn has been dropped after the prosecution was forced to admit they had no evidence. The cnrterpiece of the case was an alleged photograph taken by the embattled Governor of his illicit lover in the buff, and allegedly used to blackmail her into silence. But the witness admitted she may have dreamed the whole thing, and without a photograph to prove it happened there was no case.

The prosecutor dropped the charges after the presiding judge permitted the Greitens camp to call her as a witness, opening her to perjury and other charges.
more...

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Timothy Birdnow

The U.S. Navy is blocking a California scheme to put floating wind farms in the Pacific Ocean.

According to the LA Times:

At the request of Gov. Jerry Brown, the federal government's Bureau of Ocean Energy Management established an intergovernmental task force to look into opportunities for offshore wind in California. more...

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Jack Kemp forwards this:

NRA president Oliver North outlines strategy against gun control activists’ ‘civil terrorism’


Gun control activists are committing "civil terrorism” akin to practices in the "days of Jim Crow,” newly-named NRA president Oliver North said this week.

North made the statement during an interview with the Washington Times.
Gun control activists have stepped up their efforts following the February mass killing in Parkland, Florida, that left 17 dead.

North cited the growing anti-gun rhetoric and a recent suggestion by former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens recently that the Second Amendment should be repealed.
He made the comments shortly after activists showed up at NRA executive’s home and splashed fake blood on it, the Times reported.

They call them activists. That’s what they’re calling themselves. They’re not activists — this is civil terrorism. This is the kind of thing that’s never been seen against a civil rights organization in America,” North told the Times.

/read the rest at The Blaze.

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Paul Driessen

This past week, Congress and the White House struck a deal on ethanol blends in gasoline. Unfortunately, the noisiest and best-connected warring factions again got what they wanted, while environmental, budgetary and other pressing concerns were mostly ignored.

Refiners will save hundreds of millions of dollars a year, by not having to buy ethanol (or paper biofuel credits) that they don’t need to blend into the smaller quantities of gasoline they are refining. Corn farmers and ethanol producers will rake in hundreds of millions more every year, selling 15% ethanol gasoline all year long. That’s helps those industries, their workers and investors, and the politicians who receive campaign contributions from them.

Forgotten once again in the discussions were environmental and pocketbook concerns raised by a strange-bedfellows alliance of manufacturing, consumer, environmental and other organizations – and the most basic issue of all: The climate change and imminent oil depletion claims that launched the corn ethanol and biofuels program were dubious two decades ago; they certainly don’t stand up to scrutiny today.

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Jack Kemp

Happy Mothers' Day...


Mothers: the Last Best Hope for America

When Matthew Vasser founded Vasser Women’s College he said it was because he realized that the "Mothers of a nation mold its citizens, determine its institutions, and shape its destiny.”
What better place to invest in the future of America then the mothers who are shaping her future?
We spend so much time looking to the federal government to solve our problems that we have

completely overlooked where our real power lies – with us. America wasn’t founded by a government. It was founded by families uniting together in communities, who then formed a government, organized into states and united those states into a union. But it all started with families. Families founded America and it is families that will save her. Home is the center of the society and mothers are the center of the home.

Read it all at Townhall!

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Jack Kemp

I don't know what happened in "the good old days" because people were ashamed to talk about such topics then, even in the 1950s. I recall my mother commenting about a wayward relative and jokingly saying that the story could be made into a movie. She then joked that it could be a Woody Allen movie but then dismissed that idea as something too low-life for Woody to be involved in. If my mother had lived a few more years, she would not have said that Woody was too "upstanding" to direct such a low-life themed movie plot.

But being a major sinner and hiding behind a formal religious position is not limited to any one Judeo-Christian faith. In a bitter irony, this Hassid's organization is a police auxillary group called the "Shomrim" in Hebrew which means "Guardians."

Shomrim leader accused of raping teen caught on recorded call with victim: DA


Jacob "Yanky” Daskal, 59, who helped found the neighborhood Boro Park Shomrim patrol group some 30 years ago, knew his victim prior to the alleged attacks, prosecutors said.

The major campaign donor pleaded not guilty at his Friday arraignment in Brooklyn Supreme Court and quickly posted $75,000 bond.

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Timothy Birdnow

Just a quick thought on the U.S. pullout from the Iranian deal, and Trump's meeting with Kim Jong-Un in Singapore; does anybody think these are related events? I do. more...

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Timothy Birdnow

Welcome American Thinker readers!

In my article on Missouri Governor Greitens I had to leave a number of things out that really should have been in the piece, but the article was getting too long and in the interest of brevity I stuck to the critical details. For instance, the judge in the case refused to allow a change in venue, despite the fact that the City of St. Louis has perhaps ten Republicans counting myself and my wife, and neither of us were called to jury duty for this case. Greitens cannot get a fair trial here, and he knew it. But the judge simply refused to entertain moving it. Also, Greitens lawyers wisely asked that he be allowed to waive a jury and instead have a bench trial, so the law would be the determining factor and not the R behind Greiten's name. The judge would have none of it, and Greitens is being forced to face a hostile jury, one that is probably going to be predominantly black and in sympathy with the BLM prosecutor. Greitens did succeed at getting the trial moved from November (just before the elections) to May, but he had asked for April so as to get this out of the way. The judge refused to allow that, too. And the judge, knowing what a travesty of justice this is, with suppression of evidence and evidence and witness tampering, has on several occasions refused to throw the case out, as any reasonable magistrate would do.

In any other case the prosecutor herself would be cited for contempt of court. And Tisaby, the investigator, would be in jail. In court Gardner was asked directly if Tisaby was off the case as she claimed then who was the investigator and Gardner, the lead prosecutor, simply ignored the question.  Three times the judge asked her and she simply refused to respond at all, staring at the floor and ignoring the question. Anybody else would be in jail. Not so here, with the black political power structure entirely behind Gardner and the state Democrats (and many of the Republicans as well) backing this whole thing.

Meanwhile demands have been fierce from both sides for Greitens to resign, and articles of impeachment are being drawn up, despite the fact that the Governor has not even had his day in court yet.

This would make a great movie or stage play. Sort of All the King's Men and The Bonfire of the Vanities meets a reverse To Kill a Mockingbird meets Fifty Shades of Gray...'

Greitens approached politics in much the same way as Trump, calling out and offending established politicians. Unlike Trump, though, who tried to mend fences to a degree (and had enough power that the political class had to at least try to work with him) Greitens isolated himself, and now he's facing the music.

For the record, I did not support Greitens in the primary, as he was a Democrat. He also struck me as a self-promoter, a guy who padded his resume' considerably. He did have an impressive resume', too; Special Forces, Oxford, ran a charity, etc. But right is right, and what is being done to Greitens is shameful. Oh, and he's been a pretty good governor since taking office. But he's supported Right to Work, which has the labor unions enraged (I support him on that) and the unions are still powerful in Missouri. And as I mentioned in the article, he is cutting lots of money out of the cookie jar for special interests, and they don't like it at all. Unfortunately for Greitens, he hasn't had enough time for his program to bear fruit, and the media in Missouri is all left wing so he will get no credit.

His situation is very similar to Scott Walker's in Wisconsin shortly after he took over. The same forces that were arrayed against Walker are arrayed against Greitens. It's doubtful, though, that Greitens will survive this, in my opinion, because the GOP will impeach him if and when he loses his trial - which I strongly suspect he will. He'll win on appeal, but the damage will be done. That is the whole point of this. Gardner doesn't care if Greitens spends six minutes in jail; she wants to destroy his political career. So do a lot of other people.

Every conservative in America should care about this.

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Jack Kemp

This coin is from a private company and not an official Israeli Government coin or medalion. But its creation is still significant.


Donald Trump's face will feature on Israeli coin marking 70th anniversary of Israel independence, following decision to move US embassy to Jerusalem

* Celebratory coin has President Trump's face side by side with head of King Cyrus
* The biblical character allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem 2,500 years ago
* Makers of coin Mikdash Educational Center liken Trump to saviour from bible


Donald Trump's face will feature on an Israeli coin marking the 70th anniversary of the country's independence.

It depicts the US President alongside the biblical King Cyrus, who allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem 2,500 years ago.

The coin, which cannot be used as currency, is also a token of gratitude for Mr Trump's decision to move the US embassy from to Jerusalem, KOBI reported.

Read the rest at the Daily Mail.

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Jack Kemp

Today I read an important detail about the White House official who joked about John McCain's impending death from cancer.

First, a quick summary of the event.

more...

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Timothy Birdnow

Looks like our old buddy, the mad Hungarian George Soros, is at it again. This time he's pumping big bucks into the District Attorney race in San Diego. Matthew Vadum has the story at Canda Free Press:

"So far Soros has pumped $1.5 million into the San Diego County, Calif., prosecutor’s race to support the candidacy of radical left-winger Geneviéve Jones-Wright, the Democrat candidate and deputy public defender in the county, according to the Washington Free Beacon’s Joe Schoffstall.

On May 3 Soros’s money was deposited into the California Justice & Public Safety PAC, a political action committee created as a vehicle for his assault on law and order in the county that borders Tijuana, Mexico. Some of the members of the so-called caravan of Central Americans led by Pueblos Sin Fronteras (People Without Borders, in English) have sought asylum at the busy San Ysidro Point of Entry in the county.

The PAC is administered by Whitney Tymas, a longtime treasurer of Soros PACs. From 2011 to 2014, she was director of the Prosecution and Racial Justice Program at the pro-criminal Vera Institute of Justice. Vera has received close to $6.7 million from OSF. The PAC has so far spent $194,884 on TV ads, $100,000 on digital ads, and $107,575.60 on campaign literature and mailings in recent days, according to Schoffstall.

Local elections for district attorney are relatively low-key, small-scale affairs that rarely see the kind of money Soros has been throwing around. By pouring millions of dollars into the campaigns of various extreme-left district attorney candidates across America, Soros has provided his preferred candidates huge financial advantages over their rivals."

more...

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Timothy Birdnow

Anyone else notice how quickly bread gets stale these days? You can barely get it home before it becomes dry and falls apart. I would blame my dear wife for it, but it happens to me as much as to the saintly Mrs. Birdnow, and long ago I was a bread truck driver and know how to pick a fresh loaf from the shelves. This problem started during the Obama era, I might add, so I know it stems from some sort of regulation imposed by the Obama FDA. I decided to find out what it is. more...

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Paul Driessen

Plastics are vital for modern health, technology and civilization – for food packaging, furniture, cars, shoes, heart valves, water pipes, toys, protective helmets, smart phones and countless other products that we rely on every day. And yet, demonstrating once again how totally out of touch with reality they are, radical environmentalist groups are now demanding an end to plastic.

Anti-plastics campaigns are huge and growing – driven forward by Earth Day organizers and the UN’s upcoming, taxpayer-fundedWorld Environment Day, which has chosen "Beat Plastic Pollution” as its theme this year. Most want all plastics eliminated, but some say it will be OK to continue making and using plastics – if they are manufactured from manmade biofuels. Of course that would mean growing more specialty plants on billions of acres of land that today is food crop land or wildlife habitat. Sadly, this insanity is what we have come to expect from activists who oppose drilling for, producing and using Mother Nature’s own biofuels: the oil and natural gas that natural geologic processes have put right under our feet.

Citing expert opinion from Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore and other environmental experts (including yours truly), Tom Harris’s informative article sets the record straight on some of the absurd claims against these truly miracle materials.

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This from Americans for Limited Government:

Robert Romano

On May 8, the National Fair Housing Alliance filed suit in the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia against the Department of Housing and Urban Development for delaying the 2015 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing regulation until 2020 or later.

This regulation allowed HUD to force more than 1,200 cities and counties that took $3 billion of annual community development block grants to rezone neighborhoods along income and racial criteria.

The lawsuit argues that HUD Secretary Ben Carson lacked authority to delay implementation of the rule when it was announced in Jan. 2018.

There’s only one problem. Even if that were true, since the announced delay, Congress has acted via the recent omnibus spending bill, which preempts everything HUD was doing on this regulation, especially in implementing it. more...

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Daren Jonescu

I was raised Catholic, and therefore learned to regard capital punishment as immoral, on the Church’s "life is sacred” and "no human has the moral authority to take a life” grounds.

Later, when I started thinking things through for myself — as opposed to rationalizing what I had been raised to believe — I became a fairly strong supporter of the death penalty, in principle if not always in practice. By that I mean that I favored the arguments in support of the idea that the worst kind of criminal deserves the "ultimate” punishment, and that part of the legitimate function of government is to carry out the rectification of injustices, with punishment being proportionate to the crime; but that since I was simultaneously arriving at the conclusion that in order to have the moral authority to carry out any of the duties of a state, a government must itself be morally legitimate, and that few if any of today’s actual governments are morally legitimate (i.e., just), it follows that the practical enforcement of the death penalty may be unjust in most real nations of our time.

Today, I ride the fence on the issue, or rather I find myself inclined to see the advantages of whichever side I am not defending at the moment. Still, I probably situate myself on the "pro” side of the fence more often than on the "anti” side, notwithstanding my permanent reservations about the practical implementation of such an ultimate punishment by states, such as our modern progressive authoritarian states, which have forfeited their moral authority as enforcers of anything, let alone anything so irreversible as the death penalty. more...

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Timothy Birdnow

The NAACP is promoting the Orwellian idea of "implicit Bias Testing" for public employees.

Hot Air has the story:

"NAACP President Derrick Johnson wrote a piece for USAToday yesterday announcing that his organization was calling for mandatory implicit bias testing for all public officials. Implicit bias testing is a method which claims to be able to detect subconscious bias within individuals’ thought processes (more on that in a moment). While Johnson didn’t call for mandatory testing of everyone, he thinks testing everyone is a good idea.

Everyone should get tested for implicit bias, and if you’re a public official or receiving public dollars — it should be mandatory. It’s just a matter of time before another black person is abused, arrested, or shot dead for flying, golfing, driving, walking or drinking coffee "while black.”… more...

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Jack Kemp

Go to the webpage to see photo images of women's outfits mocking Christianity.

Piers Morgan: ‘If the Met Gala was Islam or Jewish-themed, all hell would break loose’

"In a scathing new column, Piers Morgan excoriated Hollywood liberals for appropriating Christianity at this year’s Met Gala.

The theme, entitled "Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Logical Deduction of the Nature of Reality,” featured celebrities to the likes of Sarah Jessica Parker, Donatella Versace, Rihanna, Gigi Hadid, Kim Kardashian, and bigtime liberal George Clooney.

Each celebrity graced the red carpet in liberal smugness decked out in bejeweled suits and gowns affixed with sacrilegious crucifixes.

Piers argued Islam is always off limits for the left yet "it’s absolutely fine to have a ‘Catholic’ theme, as we saw at last night’s Met Gala.”

Read the whole article at The Blaze.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5703953/PIERS-MORGAN-Met-Islam-Jewish-themed-hell-break-loose-disrespect-religion.html




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Timothy Birdnow

Global Warming has been one of the hot topics of the last thirty years, and the Aviary has been on the cutting edge of this science. I'm always on the lookout for arcane and unusual stories that might tie in with warming theory, and this one certainly does not disappoint.

From the article: more...

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