His campaign to unseat President Trump kicked off in Philadelphia. One person showed up. And Bill Quinn is a registered Democratic who has no intention of voting for Sanford. By contrast, some 30,000 people packed the American Airlines Center in Dallas, Texas yesterday for a Trump event.
Sanford does have one claim to fame:
The former South Carolina governor resigned in disgrace in 2009 after he disappeared for 10 days without explanation to visit his mistress in Argentina. Sanford called the girlfriend, Maria Belen Chapur, his “soulmate” and the affair ended his marriage.
All in all, the Sanford campaign is off to an amusing start.
Leftist congresswoman Ilhan Omar and her husband – the father of her three children – have split and are heading for their second divorce, DailyMail.com has learned exclusively. Omar has now dumped her current husband Ahmed Hirsi - who she first married in a religious ceremony in 2002 and divorced in 2008 - and moved into a penthouse apartment in one of Minneapolis's trendiest neighborhoods.
But wait - the Republican candidate for Omar's office is no prize, either:
A Minnesota congressional candidate hoping to unseat Ilhan Omar with promises of being tough on crime faces felony shoplifting charges, according to a report.
Danielle Stella, a 31-year-old supporter of President Trump, was arrested twice this year in the thefts of 279 items worth more than $2,300 from a Target and $40 worth of goods from a grocery store, The Guardian reported.
The Guardian story has many more details. Minnesota must have something tainting their water.
88 year-old Rep. John Conyers is in a hospital today, as stress brought about by revelations of his malfeasance has reportedly become too much to bear. Nanny Pelosi, who recently referred to Conyers as "an icon", has now called for him to resign. So did Paul Ryan. How about that? Members of the two parties can come to agreement when necessary.
And Al Franken now has an accuser for each finger of his grope-hand, as a fifth woman has stepped up to join the parade.
It seems to be the turn of Democratics; it was in the late 1980s when Oregon Republican Senator Bob Packwood resigned over similar behavior. Wonder what Bob's doing, these days....
It is September 30, 2017. That's the last day of the current fiscal year for the federal government. After this, if a program hasn't received its official funding, it can't keep operating.
CHIP, the Children's Health Insurance Program, hasn't received funding reauthorization, a first since the program was started in 1997. It has received reauthorization a number of times and currently helps bring healthcare to millions of children. A recent bipartisan bill for reauthorization has been left hanging.
Also going away after today are a number of programs for hospitals that treat primarily poor people. The problem there is that since Obamacare was passed into law by Democratics, you have to buy health "insurance". So poor people do that, but almost always go for the "bronze plans", which carry the highest deductibles. When something serious happens and they end up in a hospital, the tab can run into the thousands.
Since the patients are poor, they can't pay. One way or the other, hospitals have to absorb the cost. The programs that are going away after tonight were designed to cushion the impact on hospitals.
Congress couldn't manage to come up with a health care plan to replace Obamacare, and they're doing nothing to address these problems.
After diagnosis of glioblastoma, average remaining lifespan is 14.5 months, though some few hang on for as much as five years. That's what did in the former Lyin' of the Senate, "Swimmer" Ted Kennedy. McCain should have retired years ago, but it looks as though this will be another forced removal from orifice.
Nature doesn't need Trump to find ways to drain the swamp.
I don't dislike McCain, unlike my view of Swimmer, but I've never seen him as part of the solution in D.C. - more like part of the problem.
Why not, asks the long-suffering taxpayer. Congress, in addition to being a bunch of rich lawyers, is also exempt from Obamacare requirements:
Congress was granted, and still enjoys, an illegal exemption from Obamacare.
Obama instructed the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) in 2013 to permit Congress to be classified as a small business — a designation that requires an enterprise to attest that it employs fewer than 50 employees. The House and the Senate obviously employ thousands of people.
One of the very few who refused to avail themselves and the staff of this exemption is, unsurprisingly, Senator Ted Cruz.
On the other hand, Obamacare is not sustainable, and so it will eventually implode.
President Trump has an opportunity to unilaterally halt an unconstitutional corporate welfare scheme, deal Obamacare a mortal blow, and save the taxpayers more than $100 billion. U.S. District Judge Rosemary Collyer ruled last year that the Obama administration had unconstitutionally dispensed subsidies to insurers, holding that it had flouted the Appropriations Clause by doling out “cost sharing reduction” (CSR) payments that hadn’t been authorized by Congress.
It's especially irksome to people like me, as we pay the full costs of mandatory health "insurance" ourselves. It's also galling to have that "buy this product or else!" gun at your head. Next thing you know, the government will demand that you purchase a car - and it must be purchased from GM.
I don't presently have to buy home insurance, although it would be pretty stupid not to do so. But there's no government mandate; it's my call. I don't have to buy auto insurance (unless I want to drive a vehicle and do so on a public road). So why do Democratics get to mandate that we buy health "insurance" - or else?
Congress just gave you another reason to use The Onion Router (TOR) or a virtual private network (VPN), as they yesterday passed legislation that allows your ISP to engage in "snoopertizing" - tracking your every move on the internet and selling the data to advertisers. Of course, some companies like Google and Amazon have been doing that for ages by tracking your search requests, purchase history, and "wish-list" data. But you go into those by consent. Yesterday's action tells your ISP it doesn't need your consent. The Republicans claim that just "levels the playing field". That's idiotic.
It's also a good reason to deploy https everywhere if you haven't already done so; it's probably the easiest way to achieve a measure of safety from a prying ISP. It's an extension for Firefox, Chrome, or Opera browsers that encrypts your communications with many (though not all) websites.
You can check here to see how your Representatives voted; "Yea" votes favored the ISP goal. This may well come back to bite a number of congress-critters in the next election.
Starting today, the U.S. government agencies such as FBI and NSA are free to engage in mass hacking of computers, phones, and other devices because Congress failed to act to prevent the new authorizing rule from taking effect.
A last-ditch effort in the Senate to block or delay rule changes that would expand the U.S. government's hacking powers failed Wednesday, despite concerns the changes would jeopardize the privacy rights of innocent Americans and risk possible abuse by the incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump.
Democratic Senator Ron Wyden attempted three times to delay the changes, which will take effect on Thursday and allow U.S. judges will be able to issue search warrants that give the FBI the authority to remotely access computers in any jurisdiction, potentially even overseas. His efforts were blocked by Senator John Cornyn of Texas, the Senate's second-ranking Republican.
The changes will allow judges to issue warrants in cases when a suspect uses anonymizing technology to conceal the location of his or her computer or for an investigation into a network of hacked or infected computers, such as a botnet.
DoJ claims that the rule change is necessary to combat the increasingly widespread use of bot-nets by criminal hackers, a situation that has largely arisen as a result of adoption of the so-called Internet of Things - "smart" devices that allow users to remotely control home temperatures, lighting, "security" cameras, and more; nowadays you can even check the contents of your fridge while you're at the store. "Smart" televisions are becoming ubiquitous, and streaming video options are changing the way addicts get their TV fix.
The problem is that all of these devices are connected in various ways to the Internet, and virtually none of them do so securely. It may be a source of amusement to some to log into a website and pick up a feed from somebody's "baby-cam" (possible because the user didn't secure the playpen monitor's connection settings), but these things also afford criminal hackers additional tools that they can - and do - use to launch distributed denial of service attacks against the servers of a targeted site.
Obviously, Congress screwed up here, and it's particularly disturbing that Senator Cornyn shot down a fellow Republican who opposed allowing the rule change to take effect without further consideration of possible effects. Republicans claim to favor limited government, but establishment Republicans such as Cornyn put the lie to that claim. Wyden was hardly alone in opposition, and in this instance, the opposition was correct.
What is needed is not another expansion of governmental intrusion; rather, manufacturers and service providers could be - and should be - required to harden their offerings to minimize the likelihood of harnessing IoT devices by hackers.
