"The Michigan Economic Development Corporation administers the state’s corporate welfare programs. The MEDC approves the spending of taxpayer dollars for select private businesses. Here’s the list of euphemisms the agency uses to describe giving out taxpayer dollars in its various reports it produces:
Philippines church bombings: 20 killed and dozens wounded - CNN (CNN)Two bombs tore through a Roman Catholic cathedral in southern Philippines on Sunday, killing at least 20 people and leaving dozens wounded, authorities said.
Two suspected improvised explosive devices detonated at intervals at the Jolo Catholic cathedral in the Mindanao region, according to the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao.
At least 81 people have been wounded, authorities said, including 14 soldiers of the Armed Forces of the Philippines and two Philippine National Police officers.
...ISIS (Islamic State) on Sunday claimed responsibility for the bombings via its Amaq News Agency..." Read on.
Immigration will get sorted out not in congressional debate but at the ballot box. The 2020 national elections may well deliver a mandate to one side or the other. Conservatives could win that mandate if they rally round a consensus reform agenda.
To forge an appealing common path, conservatives will have to rethink how they handle the border issue. President Donald Trump has roused his base with a call to “build the wall.” Some think that’s all that’s needed and are willing to trade away almost anything to fund the wall. That would be a huge mistake.
Complete failure at Oroville Dam "The $1.1 billion spent to repair Oroville Dam is failing as water is seeping through the rebuilt spillway threatens new mass evacuations over the risk of the dam collapsing.
According to national dam expertScott Cahillof Watershed Services of Ohio, Oroville Dam is on the same failure track as in 2017, with visible water seepage trickling from the foot of the dam and dozens of points along the dam’s principal spillway.
...As America’s tallest earthen dam with a 770-foot face and901-foot top of the spillway, the lake behind Oroville Dam can hold 3.5 million-acre feet of water.
...(2017)...Facing the risk of a 30-foot wall of water racing toward metropolitan Sacramento, the Butte County Sheriff issued a mandatory evacuation of 188,000 residents.
The rains ebbed and the dam survived, but the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s after-action 537-page Independent Forensic Team Report found:
“The Oroville Dam spillway incident was caused by a long-term systemic failure of the California Department of Water Resources (DWR), regulatory, and general industry practices to recognize and address inherent spillway design and construction weaknesses, poor bedrock quality, and deteriorated service spillway chute conditions.”
California’s potential liability for the 2017 Oroville Dam crisis was reinforced on March 14 when Sacramento Superior Court Judge James McFetridgeordered discovery to beginin a lawsuit against the state for hundreds of millions in damages by the City of Oroville, dozens of farmers, businesses, and others during the two-month crisis.
The plaintiffs’ motion included wide-ranging allegations of dam employees suffering from sexual and racial harassment, extensive theft of equipment by dam officials, filing fraudulent financial reports, shoddy maintenance records, and a pattern of actively destroying evidence to conceal liability and criminal actions.
President Trump has blamed California for systematically failing to fund known state infrastructure and safety needs, then billing the Federal Emergency Management Agency under its 75 percent reimbursement for national disaster relief claims.
Based on the reports of incompetence, FEMAdenied $306 million of California’s first $639 million national disaster reimbursement requests for the 2017 Oroville Dam crisis."
History for March 21 - On-This-Day.com Johann Sebastian Bach 1685 - Composer, Albert Khan 1869 - Architect, Julio Gallo 1910 Timothy Dalton 1944 - Actor, Gary Oldman 1958 - Actor, Matthew Broderick 1962 - Actor ("Ferris Bueller's Day Off") 1980 - U.S. President Jimmy Carter announced to the U.S. Olympic Team that they would not participate in the 1980 Summer Games in Moscow as a boycott against Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. 2002 - In Pakistan, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh was charged with murder for his role in the kidnapping of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Three other Islamic militants that were in custody were also charged along with seven more accomplices that were still at large.
He went on to state his faith that Common Core — at that point unwritten — would “not only make America’s entire education system the envy of the world, but we will launch a Race to the Top that will prepare every child, everywhere in America, for the challenges of the 21st century.” Race to the Top was a $4 billion money pot inside the 2009 stimulus that helped bribe states into Common Core.
So here we are, nine years later. Common Core has been officially rolled out into U.S. public and even many private schools for at least three to five years now. Are American children increasingly prepared for the “the challenges of the 21st century”? We’re actually seeing the opposite. They’re increasingly less prepared. And there’s mounting evidence that Common Core deserves some of the blame.
Student Achievement Largely Down or Flat.
Colorado joins effort to elect presidents by popular vote, go around Electoral College
"Colorado has become the latest state — and the first swing state — to join a group pledging to elect presidents based on who wins the national popular vote. Eleven other states and the District of Columbia have signed onto the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, an agreement that requires those states to select their presidential electors based on who wins the most individual votes nationwide, regardless of which candidate wins in the state.
...The compact only goes into effect once states with at least 270 electoral votes — the number needed to win a presidential election — have signed on.
While the addition of Colorado brings the electoral count of states in the compact to 181, reaching the 270 point before the 2020 election appears unlikely..." Read all!
Designating certain crimes as "hate crimes" was a bad enough idea, but expanding on the idea to target lawful actions that can be subjectively described as hateful goes too far. Is crossing someone off your Christmas card list a hate incident? or instigating a social media mob to destroy your high school frenemy? If a woman turns down a date with a guy because he supports Trump, is that a bias incident?
The problem with words like "hate" and "bias" is that they're far too easy to misuse. That's especially the case with people (biased people) who reflexively describe others who don't think like them as being motivated by "hate." Leading the charge in this practice is the Southern Poverty Law Center, which "label[s] virtually anyone who does not fall in line with its left-wing ideology an 'extremist' or 'hate group.'" Now Nessell and Arbulu are using SPLC's "hate map" as a guide for targets to spy on. "Hate cannot continue to flourish in our state," declares Nessel. Or at least hate as defined by Nessel, the ACLU, and the SPLC.
The financial collapse of the Democratic mayors "Recently, non-government organization Truth in Accounting published a reportabout the financial condition of the 75 largest cities of America. As it turns out, 63 out of 75 cities in America were not able to pay bills at the end of the fiscal year of 2017.
The final result of this study was the calculation of the burden borne by taxpayers in these American cities. The formula is simple: the financial balance of the city (positive or negative) is divided by the number of inhabitants. The result is a good assessment of how effectively the city authorities work, depending on the positive or negative financial balance of the city per capita.
Let us start with the most financially strong cities.
...In other words, for many years, at the helm of these cities with a brilliant financial future were fiscal conservatives, who (occasionally) could be found among representatives of the Democratic Party and representatives of the Republican Party.
Moreover, those who earned a pension by working for the city have nothing to worry about, either — the pension funds of these cities are in good shape. If we turn to the cities at the bottom of the list, the picture is quite different.
First, it is easy to see that the negative balance of cities at the bottom of a financial abyss exceeds the positive balance of those cities at the top of financial well-being by an order of magnitude.
Secondly, the political preferences of the inhabitants of these cities are quite unambiguous: they prefer almost exclusively Democrats..."
New Jones Act Ship No Cause for Celebration | Cato @ Liberty
"Earlier this month a new Jones Act-eligible ship, Kaimana Hila, was officially christened when Rep. Tulsi Gabbard broke a ceremonial champagne bottle against the ship’s super-structure.
On the surface, the new vessel is a triumph.
At 850 feet in length and featuring a cargo capacity of 3,600 TEUs Kaimana Hila is—along with sister ship Daniel K. Inouye—the largest containership in the Jones Act fleet.
But this is no shining example of U.S. seagoing prowess.
In fact, the ship is in many ways symptomatic of the damage and dysfunction wrought by the Jones Act upon the U.S. maritime industry.
Such dysfunction begins with the vessel’s $209 million price tag (Kaimana Hila and Daniel K. Inouye were purchased for a combined price of $418 million). In comparison, one of the largest containerships in the world, OOCL Hong Kong, features a cargo capacity of 21,413 TEUs but a purchase price of just $158 million (six of these G-class ships were built by Samsung Heavy Industries for $950 million).
That’s $51 million less for a ship capable of transporting six times more containers.
But the rot goes deeper.
...the Philly Shipyard has received government largesse ranging from tax deferrals to funding for employee training to a $438 million taxpayer-funded rebuilding of the shipyard in 1997 (nearly $700 million in 2019 dollars).
The shipyard itself is leased from the city government for a mere $1 per year..." Read all, it gets worse!
Locher reported later that the aircraft went into a kind of right slice.
He noted that the right engine's RPM was at zero and the left was decreasing towards idle.
It looked to him that the right engine had exploded. Lodge and his WSO discussed their options.
They saw that the hydraulic pressure was low and falling.
When Lodge tried the autopilot, it didn't respond.
The rear of the jet was on fire, and as the plane yawed the slipstream pushed the flames up over Locher's canopy.
Locher later recalled, "We immediately went out of control, flopping from side to side.
Then fire started coming in the back of the cockpit.
It seared my canopy with bubbles and I couldn't see out any more.
The airplane slowed down and was approaching a flat spin."
Passing through 8000 MSL, Locher told Lodge that it was getting too hot and he'd better get out. Lodge looked over his right shoulder at Locher and said, "Well, why don't you eject then?"[14] Lodge had about three weeks previously told fellow squadron members, as he had done several times before, that he would not allow himself to be captured because of his extensive knowledge of classified and sensitive information.[15] Locher successfully ejected at about 8,000 feet (2,400 m) but because the remaining planes were busy with the other MiGs, and due to smoke, no one saw his parachute canopy.[4]
Two Mig 19s (quite likely the ones that had just shot them down) buzzed Locher as he descended, so he knew the enemy was aware he had survived.[14]
He estimated it took about 30 seconds for the jet to impact the ground, but never saw Lodge's chute[14]..."
Win For Trump: Supreme Court Rules Against Immigrants With Criminal Records | Daily Wire:
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court ruled against immigrants who argued that even if they had committed crimes that made them deportable, the Department of Homeland Security could take them into immigration custody to decide what to do with them after they’ve finished their sentences after more than roughly one day has gone by since their release.
President Trump Saves Thousands of Lives | Power Line "On December 6, the New York Times headlined: “U.S. Murder Rate for 2018 Is on Track for a Big Drop.” The story was based on homicide statistics from 66 large cities. (The official FBI numbers for 2018 won’t come out until September 2019.)
The murder rate in the United States in 2018 is on track for the largest one-year drop in five years. *** Murder rose 23 percent nationally between 2014 and 2016 before leveling off in 2017.
The Times can’t think what might have caused the homicide rate to rise rather dramatically during the last years of the Obama administration.
It does provide this useful chart, with the homicide rate for 2018 based on 66-city data:
Note that the Y-axis starts at zero, which means that the U.S. has seen a wide variation in our murder rate over the past 50 years. In the 1960s, the murder rate (expressed in homicides per 100,000 population) rose rapidly.
By the early 1970s it was around twice the previous level.
The homicide rate dipped during the 1980s but remained high until the mid-1990s, and then began to decline sharply.
That decline had something to do with the crackdown on crack cocaine.
Maybe other factors were at work as well.
I think the more widespread ownership of handguns and issuance of carry permits played a positive role. The decline that began in the mid-1990s continued to the point that by 2014, the homicide rate was back where it had been before the social upheaval of the 1960s. But then something happened. In 2015, the homicide rate suddenly reversed its downward trend and spiked upward. In 2016 it jumped upward again. In those two years–2015 and 2016–there were 4,968 more murders than would have been the case if the 2014 rate had remained steady. (The delta is actually more than that, since population increased after 2014.) It should be noted that other violent crimes increased during the last two years of the Obama administration, as well. The incidence of forcible rape, like homicide, has been in long-term decline–down from a high of 42.8 per 100,000 in 1992 to 25.9 in 2013. It rose slowly for a couple of years, then took off like a shot in 2016, jumping suddenly from 28.4 per 100,000 to 40.9. Aggravated assault similarly spiked in 2015 and 2016, while property crimes in general continued their historic decline. So what happened in 2015 and 2016 to cause the violent crime rate, including the homicide rate, to rise after decades of decline? I can’t think of any explanation other than the Black Lives Matter movement and the relentless attacks on law enforcement that it engendered, which were supported by the Obama administration. But what happened when Donald Trump took over in the White House? The homicide and violent crime rates began to fall again. If the New York Times’s projection is correct, the second year of the Trump administration saw a steeper decline in the homicide rate. Again, what could possibly have caused this change? I can’t think of a plausible theory other than the Trump administration’s renewed support for law enforcement and the waning of the anti-police Black Lives Matter movement. Something happened beginning in 2017 that has saved thousands of lives. If it wasn’t the new administration in Washington, what was it?"
Multnomah County GOP Chairman Sues Portland Public Schools Over Gun Control Protests - Willamette Week
"The lawsuit alleges Portland Public Schools violated parents' and students' First Amendment rights to advance the district officials' political agenda. ...The suit relies heavily on documents released by PPS following a public records request filed by a plaintiff in late March 2018.
The lawsuit argues those records revealed a coordinated effort by Superintendent Guadalupe Guerrero, the Board, teachers and local anti-gun groups to advocate for stricter gun control with public protests, walkouts and classroom "indoctrination."
In a statement, Buchal said his lawsuit "demonstrates the extraordinary degree to which PPS officials have misused scarce educational resources for narrowly partisan and political objectives."... Read all.
Ocasio-Cortez's claim that centrists legitimize bigotry when they side with the Republican Party over the Democratic Party is laughable considering the bigotry scandals the Democratic Party has faced this year.
Michigan Capitol Confidential - Posts
· Capital committed and called for investment
