President Zuma, is the current leader of South Africa. He has purchased the most expensive aircraft
in the world for his own personal use and those of his hirelings and underlings.
BOEING 747-8 for President Jacob Zuma
Welcome aboard the custom-built plane that makes Air Force One look like The Wright Brothers’ first effort.
These extraordinary images show an enormous jumbo jet that has been converted into a luxury home for ZUMA
Complete with bedrooms, multiple lounges and an on board restaurant.
The custom-built Boeing 747 is believed to have cost South African taxpayers $400million.
Making it one of the most expensive purchases of all time.
The jumbo jet would normally carry up to 600 passengers – but this version was built for just one insane man,
although he will be able to fit dozens of guests.
The level of luxury is out of this world.
The plane wouldn’t look out of place on Cribs.
Of course cable television and Internet are among the perks.
No need to fight for sofa space either, just the 14 TVs dotted about the vessel.
More sleeping space is provided in the “aeroloft” on the top deck of the vessel, with eight double beds
for passengers who prefer to get some shut-eye on flights.
You know it’s good when your plane has a stateroom.
Look out for this baby flying above you.
Does the United States of America provide aid to South Africa?
Yup – over $571,000,000.
Just enough to pay for this toy, with a little change left over. Isn’t it heartwarming to see how our “Foreign Aid” is benefiting the underprivileged of other countries, while our own Veterans and Senior Citizens can’t get decent medical treatment or health care!
This originally appeared on LawFlog, on September 6, 2016 and is republished with permission.
I changed my mind. After lamenting two weeks ago that bar complaints against Hillary Clinton’s lawyers probably would be swept under the rug, I decided to file the grievances anyway. I also filed grievances against Mrs. Clinton herself.
State and federal bar rules uniformly prohibit perjury and destruction of evidence, and there is compelling evidence that Mrs. Clinton is guilty of both. We’ve known for months that Mrs. Clinton’s cronies deleted emails from her secret, home-brew email server. More recently, the chairmen of the Judiciary Committee and Government Oversight Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives referred Mrs. Clinton to the Justice Department for prosecution of perjury based on false testimony that she gave during the Benghazi investigation.
Mrs. Clinton’s friends in the Obama administration control the Justice Department, which means they can and will block any attempt to prosecute Mrs. Clinton for perjury (or anything else). The same goes for her lawyers. But maybe — just maybe — her tentacles don’t reach into every state and federal bar.
In Mrs. Clinton’s case, I filed grievances with the Arkansas State Bar, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas and theU.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. Mrs. Clinton is suspended from the Arkansas State Bar and the U.S. District Court for failure to comply with continuing legal education requirements, but she could reactivate her license at any time by taking the required credit hours. In the Eighth Circuit, however, she is still an active member of the bar, as is one of her attorneys, David “The Deleter” Kendall. I also filed grievances against Mr. Kendall and Mrs. Clinton’s other two lawyers, Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson, with the D.C. Bar and the Maryland Bar as well as the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. You can read the grievances by clicking the links above, and I’ve elaborated on the grievances below.
At first glance it doesn’t make much difference whether Mrs. Clinton faces disciplinary charges. You don’t need a law license to be president, and the Clintons have already made a fortune by raking inbribes obscene speaking fees from Goldman Sachs and financiers tied to the Russian Government, so it’s not like she needs her law license to make money. The problem, however, lies in the timing. Congress cannot make the Justice Department respond to its perjury referral against Mrs. Clinton, but any of the three bars could potentially order Mrs. Clinton to respond to my grievance (the same is true for Mr. Kendall, Ms. Mills and Ms. Samuelson), and that’s where things could get complicated for the Clinton crime syndicate.
If Mrs. Clinton or her minions are ordered to respond to the grievances before election day, they’ll have to decide whether to assert their Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination, knowing that any such assertion is bound to make headlines. Furthermore, they won’t yet know whether Mrs. Clinton will be the next president, and that means they won’t yet know whether she will be in a position to shut down any federal investigations or prosecutions. If the response deadline is extended until after the election, I suspect Mrs. Clinton will just resign from the bar rather than respond, even though resignation in lieu of discipline is the equivalent of disbarment in most jurisdictions.
David “The Deleter” Kendall
The question is more complicated for her attorneys, particularly David Kendall. Whereas Ms. Mills and Ms. Samuelson are primarily political hacks, Mr. Kendall practices law full time and presumably needs his law license more than his co-conspirators colleagues. Assertion of the Fifth Amendment privilege in a civil case is a two-edged sword: the person asserting the privilege does not have to answer questions, but the judge or jury may use the refusal to answer as evidence of culpability in the civil case. The Supreme Court has labeled disbarment proceedings as “quasi-criminal,” but they are ultimately civil, therefore assertion of the Fifth Amendment privilege can be used as evidence in support of disbarment.
Of course, that assumes that one of the bars or grievance committees will actually initiate an investigation, and that’s a big assumption indeed. The executive director of the Professional Conduct Committee of the Arkansas Supreme Court is, for example, a former Democratic state trial judge from Bradley County, Arkansas named Stark Ligon. I’ve dealt with Mr. Ligon before, and I have very little confidence in him (more on that below). Unfortunately, politicization of disciplinary committees is the norm, not the exception. Time and again on this blog, I’ve documented how politically-connected lawyers get special protections from state bar officials, e.g., the Texas Bar’s refusal to investigate Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton even after he was indicted and the California Bar’s refusal to investigate two of its own prosecutors who were caught withholding evidence in a disciplinary case.
One can only hope that there are a few honest souls in the various bars where Mrs. Clinton and her minions are admitted. After all, I only need to find one grievance committee that is willing to do the right thing. Although I am not given to quoting terrorists, I am nonetheless reminded of a statement released by the Irish Republican Army after it unsuccessfully tried to bomb Margaret Thatcher’s government in 1984: “Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.” Sooner or later, justice will catch up with Mrs. Clinton and her minions.
Full disclosure
I have a bone to pick with Mr. Kendall. As I explained in my August 23, 2016, post, Mr. Kendall signed charges seeking my disbarment in his capacity as chairman of the grievance committee for the U.S. District Court for D.C. Mr. Kendall oversaw the deletion of emails from Mrs. Clinton’s server even as his committee was investigating me, so forgive me if I’m unwilling to take professional criticism from a man who destroyed evidence, obstructed justice and then hid behind attorney-client privilege. I also have a very practical reason for filing the grievances against Mr. Kendall, namely because I am building my selective prosecution defense (more on that later). Besides, my critics in Texas have accused me of picking on too many Republicans, like Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and U.S. District Judge Walter S. Smith, Jr., so I might as well direct my muckraking at a few Democrats.
The devil in the details
The bar grievances against Mrs. Clinton, et al. speak for themselves, so I won’t reprint them here, but there are a few items worthy of special mention. The bar rules vary somewhat among jurisdictions, and sometimes those variations are significant. All three of Mrs. Clinton’s lawyers are admitted in Maryland, for example, and that state prohibits lawyers from “fail[ing] to disclose a material fact to a tribunal when disclosure is necessary to avoid assisting a criminal or fraudulent act by the client.” Md. Rule 19-303.3(a)(2), as incorporated by Rule 19-303.9 (which applies 19-303.3(a)(2) to legislative hearings).
Cheryl Mills
According to photographs of Mrs. Clinton’s October 22, 2015, testimony before the House Select Committee on Benghazi, Mr. Kendall, Ms. Mills and Ms. Samuelson were seated behind her during her testimony. Mrs. Clinton falsely testified that they had reviewed each and every email on her private server before any emails were deleted. In reality, her attorneys used only search terms and headers, further limiting the search to emails ending in “.gov” and “.mil,” thus no emails ending in “.com” were included. Obviously, Mrs. Clinton’s lawyers would have known that her testimony about “each and every” email was false, yet neither they nor Mrs. Clinton corrected her false testimony. That looks like a plain violation of Maryland Rule 19-303.3(a)(2).
D.C. Rule 3.3(d) is somewhat similar, but D.C.’s prohibitions against evidence tampering are considerably broader than Maryland’s:
A lawyer shall not “[o]bstruct another party’s access to evidence or alter, destroy, or conceal evidence, or counsel or assist another person to do so, if the lawyer reasonably should know that the evidence is or may be the subject of discovery or subpoena in any pending or imminent proceeding. Unless prohibited by law, a lawyer may receive physical evidence of any kind from the client or from another person. If the evidence received by the lawyer belongs to anyone other than the client, the lawyer shall make a good-faith effort to preserve it and to return it to the owner, subject to Rule 1.6.”
D.C. Rule of Professional Conduct 3.4(a). Mrs. Clinton’s lawyers violated Rule 3.4(a) in at least two ways: (1) they failed to turn over evidence that belonged to the State Department, and (2) they destroyed the evidence being sought by a Congressional committee (among others). Furthermore, the rule prohibits destruction of evidence “if the lawyer reasonably should know that the evidence is or may be the subject of discovery or subpoena in any pending or imminent proceeding.”
Not surprisingly, the FBI, the State Department and the Office of the Inspector General for the Intelligence Community began investigating Ms. Clinton’s email arrangement shortly after it was revealed. Thus any lawyer in the position of Mrs. Clinton’s attorneys should have known that the emails would be evidence in the “imminent proceeding[s]” that followed. In his July 5, 2016, statement to the press, FBI Director James Comey said, “we believe our investigation has been sufficient to give us reasonable confidence there was no intentional misconduct in connection with [the email sorting and deleting] effort” (emphasis added). I find that statement dubious, but even if it is true, it will not help Mrs. Clinton or her cronies for purposes of professional discipline.
Heather Samuelson
In D.C., for example, the level of intent required to prove most disciplinary charges is mere recklessness. See, e.g., In re Wilkins, 649 A.2d 557 (D.C. 1994) and Matter of Shorter, 570 A.2d 760, 768 (D.C. 1990). And there’s plenty of that to go around. For starters, Mr. Kendall is a senior attorney at Williams & Connolly, LLP, and Ms. Mills formerly worked as a litigator at Hogan & Hartson, now Hogan Lovells, LLP. Both are large national law firms that routinely handle document productions totaling hundreds of thousands and even millions of pages. Any first-year associate at such a firm knows that each document must be reviewed individually. And no self-respecting trial judge would accept the excuse that attorneys destroyed evidence because they didn’t read the evidence before destroying it.
Furthermore, we now have documentary evidence that the search was not conducted in good faith. On August 30, 2016, the State Department revealed that 30 of the deleted emails related to Benghazi. This begs a question: did the purported email search include terms like “Benghazi,” and do the recovered emails include obvious words like “Benghazi”? The chairman of the Select Committee on Benghazi had requested all such emails in a December 2, 2015, letter to Mr. Kendall, shortly before Mr. Kendall and his colleagues deleted the emails. It is also worth noting that Mrs. Clinton’s attorneys used a special software program designed to insure that forensic investigators could not recover the emails. If the deleted emails were only personal communications about yoga and wedding plans, as Mrs. Clinton claimed, then her attorneys would not have gone to such extraordinary lengths to prevent them from being recovered.
In each of my letters to the grievance committees, I pointed out that communications among Mrs. Clinton and her lawyers would not be protected by attorney-client privilege because of the crime-fraud exception. In a nutshell, the exception states that if someone colludes with his or her lawyer for the purpose of committing a crime or a fraud, then the attorney-client privilege is waived. Accordingly, Mrs. Clinton and her lawyers could be forced to answer some really inconvenient questions about the deleted emails and her false testimony to Congress (if anybody actually cared about upholding the law where she’s concerned).
After filing the grievances, however, I learned over the weekend that the Department of Justice had allowed Ms. Mills to represent Mrs. Clinton in violation of D.C. Rule 1.11(a), which prohibits a lawyer from accepting “other employment in connection with a matter which is the same as, or substantially related to, a matter in which the lawyer participated personally and substantially as a public officer or employee.” Ms. Mills was centrally involved with Mrs. Clinton’s illicit email system while she worked for the State Department, therefore she should have been disqualified from representing Mrs. Clinton concerning that email system. Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy has, as usual, thoroughly dissected the issue on the National Review website, and Shannen Coffin at Weekly Standard and Paul Sperry at the New York Post also provide some great insights.
Notwithstanding the obvious conflict, DOJ not only allowed Ms. Mills to represent Mrs. Clinton without objection, it allowed her to assert attorney-client privilege (again, without objection) for communications that clearly were not privileged. As a result, Ms. Mills and Mrs. Clinton did not have to answer any questions about their joint illegal activities. Maybe that’s what Bill Clinton and Attorney General Loretta Lynch were talking about on the tarmac.
Incidentally, I plan to update my grievances to reflect the latest developments. If you have additional suggestions, send me an email at tyclevenger@yahoo.com, or you can file your own grievances (you don’t need to be a lawyer).
A little inside baseball
Stark Ligon
My dealings with Stark Ligon, the man charged with investigating my complaint against Mrs. Clinton, go back more than ten years. After graduating from Stanford Law School in 2001, I moved to Little Rock, Arkansas to clerk for Judge Morris S. Arnold of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. During that time, a lawsuit was pending in state court between the Arkansas Department of Human Services and activists represented by the ACLU who were trying to overturn a state policy that prevented homosexuals from serving as foster parents. Pulaski County Circuit Judge Timothy Fox presided over the case.
I knew one of the state’s expert witnesses from my days at Stanford, and he told me that Kathy Hall, the attorney representing the state, seemed to be trying to sabotage the state’s case. He also informed me of a conflict of interest that she had not disclosed to her client or the court, namely that she was currently working with the ACLU on a pro-gay rights case even as she was ostensibly working against the ACLU in the case pending before Judge Fox.
I don’t care what your views are on gay rights (or any other issue), lawyers are never supposed to sabotage their clients’ cases. Never. So I sent a letter to Mr. Ligon and Judge Fox outlining my concerns and requesting an investigation. I don’t have the original, but you can read an undated copy by clicking here. Rather than investigate Ms. Hall’s potential fraud on the court, Judge Fox filed a grievance against me with Mr. Ligon, alleging that I had communicated ex parte with the court.
There were two problems with his grievance: (1) I was not and never have been a member of the Arkansas Bar; and (2) I was not a party and did not represent a party, therefore my communication could not have been ex parte. Even though Mr. Ligon knew I was not a member of the Arkansas Bar, he charged me anyway because, he said, the grievance had been filed by a judge and he was obligated to act on it. In reality, the rules said no such thing. Regardless, it’s preposterous to try to suspend or disbar someone who is not a member of your bar. I filed a motion to dismiss Mr. Ligon’s ridiculous case, and chairman of the hearing panel granted it immediately.
Mr. Ligon subsequently dismissed my grievance against Ms. Hall without an investigation, and you can read the details by clicking here. It is worth noting that both Mr. Ligon and Judge Fox are leftists and partisan Democrats. Their cover-up for the ACLU and Ms. Hall has always been a sore spot with me. Again, I don’t care what your political opinions are or how right you think you are, no attorney has the right to obstruct justice. But Mr. Ligon seems to disagree, so I doubt he’ll be filing any charges against Mrs. Clinton.
Update
The grievance committee of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, formerly chaired by David Kendall, postponed my August 30, 2016, disbarment trial, i.e., the one where they were only going to give me 30 minutes to present my entire case. The new trial date is October 14, 2016, and I’ll have more to say about it later. — Ty Clevenger
LawFlog is the blog of Ty Clevenger, a Texas attorney who lives in Manhattan. Posts are irregular at best (and Dulcolax doesn’t seem to help). You can reach Ty at tyclevenger@gmail.com, you can follow Lawflog on Facebook or Twitter (@Ty_Clevenger) or you can leave a voice message at 979-985-5289.
The Tea Party sweep that changed the face of U.S. politics in 2010 set American liberals on a mission to change the rules of free speech to regain the upper hand.
That’s according to Federal Election Commission Republican Lee E. Goodman, who suggested during an interview this week that the left has become one of the nation’s biggest threats to freedom of speech.
“It has triggered a very aggressive movement by people to amend the First Amendment, left intellectuals have placed it on the table,” Goodman said told Boston-based radio host Howie Carr.
“The general tenor of the Left in American politics today has certainly spoken out against First Amendment rights. It has been a reversal over the last 50 years,” he went on.
He said that the FEC frequently deals with complaints from the left that are obvious efforts to silence conservatives.
“I have been concerned about bias both in how complaints are brought to the commission just like in the way, the lobbying campaign for Lois Lerner. It was all one sided. But generally I try to make my First Amendment case by pointing out that we have to impact liberal and conservative speech in the same way. But I have been concerned from time to time about every time a conservative group comes up, somehow, some way, exceptions and distinctions are made and this is the problem giving government the power to regulate speech in the first instance because ultimately human beings have to make that decision,” he said.
“It’s now the left attacking conservative speakers, like free market speech because they are concerned that the big corporations might convince somebody, they might speak about free market economics,” he said, adding that liberals want to “chase them out of the democracy.”
Urgent Request for Help This Coming Monday Evening! from Laurie Higgins Illinois Family Institute
Many people are familiar with the controversy that has exploded in School District U-46 in the Elgin area over CEO Tony Sanders’ refusal to tell parents that the administration is allowing a gender-dysphoric student to use the locker room designated for the opposite sex.
On Monday, September 12, there is going to be a school board meeting at which Sanders’ decision will be discussed. If meetings in other school districts are any indication, this meeting will be intense, unpleasant, and likely dominated by “progressives,” including “progressive” students.
IFI is asking you to come alongside School District U-46 school board member Jeanette Ward who is paying a heavy price for standing boldly for truth in her district about the new locker room practice and Sanders’ refusal to notify parents. She has endured withering personal attacks at board meetings and vicious personal attacks on multiple Facebook pages for doing what all conservatives should be doing in their local schools but don’t. And while she endures personal attacks from many, very few people come alongside her to defend her and to defend the truths she courageously articulates.
IFI is pleading to seriously consider attending this meeting—even if you don’t have children in U-46 schools and even if you don’t live in the district. I have learned that “progressives” recruit support for their controversial school agendas from all over the state. When East Aurora High School was considering a similar policy several years ago, representatives from two homosexual/“transgender” activist organizations in Chicago and multiple cross-dressing men from other communities attended school board meetings, spoke at them, and even served on a school district committee. We must start doing likewise. There are few things scarier than entering a lion’s den alone. It’s unconscionable to allow Jeanette Ward to do it.
I know from personal experience how difficult it is to stand publicly for truth. When I worked at Deerfield High School and began speaking out in opposition to curricular imbalance and egregiously obscene material, I had English Department colleagues who had been my friends, turn against me. There were people who thanked me for what I was doing and prayed for me—all of which I appreciated—but I also desperately longed for people to come alongside me. There were a few courageous souls who did, and for them I remain to this day deeply thankful. Please be that kind of friend to Jeanette Ward. Don’t allow her to continue to do this almost unbearably hard work in the service of children and truth alone.
I often wonder why we so rarely see priests, pastors, elders, and deacons at these controversial board meetings. Why don’t these faith leaders, whose sanctuaries are filled with children who enter schools where deviance is promoted, do more to protect their children, defend truth, and oppose injustice? Perhaps co-ed locker rooms and restrooms will be the offense that will finally motivate them.
Theologian John Piper writes, “If a Christian brother or sister is weighed down or menaced by some burden or threat, be alert to that and quickly do something to help. Don’t let them be crushed. Don’t let them be destroyed.” I am asking men and women of all ages to come alongside Ms. Ward at this meeting. If possible introduce yourself to her. Consider making a statement or asking board members a question about the reality of sexual differentiation and the importance of modesty, which derives from sexual differentiation. (Comments are limited to 3 minutes, and you must fill out a “request to speak” card upon arrival.) Take ACTION: The school board meeting begins at 7:00 p.m., but it is likely to be very crowded, so please consider arriving early—at least by 6:00 p.m. The address is 355 East Chicago Street, Elgin, IL 60120.
I cover the “daily greed” of national, state, and local politics
The mission of the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) is to provide lending to “Mom and Pop” businesses on Main Street. The recipients are supposed to be entrepreneurs with great ideas who just can’t find financing in the private marketplace. The public image is one of apple pie, baseball and the American Dream.
But the reality is that the SBA is economically costly for taxpayers, and it creates a painful human cost for the workers it dislocates.
In 2014, we documented at Forbes, SBA lending to the wealthy lifestyle: Lamborghini auto dealerships, Rolex jewelers, world-class golf courses, private country clubs and even $142 million lent to businesses in ZIP code 90210, Beverly Hills, CA.
Now, we’ve published our OpenTheBooks Snapshot Oversight Report – Truth in Lending: The U.S. Small Business Administration’s $24.2 Billion Bad Loan Portfolio. Analyzing the SBA portfolio since 2000, we discovered 160,000 failed loans were charged-off to the tune of $17.5 billion. In other words, taxpayers absorbed those costs. Meanwhile, 1.4 million workers were dislocated when they lost their jobs within these failed companies. A few highlights:
• In some years, such as 2007, one of every three SBA loans was “charged-off” against taxpayers.
• We found that the Big Six Wheel ‘house odds’ at a Las Vegas casino are a better bet than large tranches of the SBA loan portfolio.
So who “gamed the most” from this taxpayer-backed boondoggle at the SBA?Nothing should rankle taxpayers more than $160 million lent to the nations country clubs and golf courses by the SBA since 2007. Many now-defunct clubs and courses received $61.4 million in SBA lending since 2000 and $44.6 million was charged-off against taxpayers.
Wealthy free-loaders that charged-off their loans include Canterbury Woods Country Club ($1.2 million), ranked as the #3 public golf course in New Hampshire; and Wildhorse Golf Course ($1.4 million), ranked as the best golf course in Yolo County, California and specially designed by course architect, Jeff Brauer.
Large corporations gamed the system by subdividing their businesses into “small business” franchises to qualify for the low interest, government guaranteed loans. Taxpayers – through the SBA – underwrote the national rollout and distribution plans of these companies. Many of these loans defaulted.
Here are some examples:
• Four national hotel chains defaulted on more than $350 million: Choice Hotels ($95.3 million), Holiday Inn ($88.4 million), Comfort Inn ($88.7 million), and Days Inn ($81.9 million).
• In the convenience store/gas station industry, more than $562 million was squandered in failed lending. Familiar names appearing throughout the list include Phillips, Conoco, Shell, Marathon, Citgo, Texaco, Chevron, Hess, and BP. Since when did a small business loan become a give-away to big oil? http://www.openthebooks.com/map/?Map=2&MapType=Pin
Scandalous Actions by Faux-Female in Co-Ed MN High School Locker Room Written By Laurie Higgins (Caution: Not for younger readers.)
According to a lawsuit filed yesterday by the Alliance Defending Freedom, a high school boy in the city of Virginia, Minnesota (near Duluth) who is pretending to be a girl and whom school administrators allow to invade the privacy of girls has been accused of engaging in vulgar sexual gestures in a girls’ locker room.
A group of girls uncomfortable changing with this boy present had sought from the administration the privacy to which they are entitled. Rather than require the biological-sex-rejecting boy to move to a single-occupancy restroom to change, the school suggested the girls move to an unused boys’ basketball locker room in an elementary school basement—which they did. The biological-sex-rejecting boy soon followed them, and on one occasion lifted up his dress and “twerked” in front of girls who were wearing only their underwear. Todd Starnesreports that the suit alleges the following:
Student X commented on girls’ bodies while in the girls’ locker room, including asking Girl Plaintiff F about her bra size and asking her to “trade body parts” with him;
Student X danced to loud music with sexually explicit lyrics while twerking, grinding and lifting up his skirt to reveal his underwear;
Student X would dance in a sexually explicit manner “dancing like he was on a stripper pole” to songs with suggestive lyrics….
The lawsuit also alleges that “Student X walked into the…locker room while Girl Plaintiff A was in her underwear and removed his pants while he was near her and other girls who were also changing.”
So, while a troubled boy is allowed to use restrooms and locker rooms with only girls and designated for girls, actual girls are denied the right to use restrooms and locker rooms with only girls and designated for girls despite complaints from both the girls and their parents.
The lawsuit names as defendants “Attorney General Loretta Lynch, Independent School District Number 706 (the Virginia School District) and Secretary of Education John King, Jr.”
Psychiatrist Dr.Boris Vatel writing for Salvo Magazine makes clear some inconvenient truths about the “transgender” phenomenon of which school administrators seem ignorant:
The NYC Commission on Human Rights maintains that gender identity is “one’s internal deeply held sense of one’s gender, which may be the same or different from one’s sex assigned at birth.” This statement intentionally uses language to distort reality. Except in cases of rare medical conditions resulting in ambiguous genitalia, no one’s sex is “assigned” at birth any more than the fact of belonging to the human species is assigned at birth.
More significantly, this statement erroneously implies that a person’s beliefs about himself carry more legitimacy than the physical facts that contradict such beliefs. Using the Commission’s reasoning, can we declare an alternate “age identity” to be legitimately different from one’s true age? What about “race identity” or even “species identity”? If one accepts as legitimate the logic by which men may identify themselves as women and insist on being considered as such by others, there is no reason to reject as invalid any number of other idiosyncratic identities that have no basis in reality.
…To suggest that there is no such thing as objective reality, or that reality is less important than what one wishes it were, renders the entire concept of psychiatric disorder invalid. In fact, the only way to accept the transgender phenomenon as psychiatrically normal is to say that, as a measure of reality, physical evidence is subordinate to what a person believes about or wishes for himself. And on that logic, we have no basis for calling anyone delusional….
Reading through the APA’s position on the transgender phenomenon, one gets the impression that the only suffering and disability experienced by “gender nonconforming” individuals stem from prejudice and discrimination on the part of those who disapprove of them. In reality—that is, any reality apart from the current attempt to reframe this phenomenon as a civil rights issue—these individuals do experience a great deal of disability associated with being unable to function adequately in society, as do other patients whose delusions influence their appearance and behavior.
Although the public’s reaction to the appearance and behaviors of people who consider themselves transgender may, indeed, be negative, to say that the disability of transgender individuals consists of being the recipients of a negative public reaction means confusing the cause with the effect. The fact is that the disability originates in the abnormal mental experience of “transgender” individuals and not in having been born in the “wrong” body or of living in the “wrong” society. However, according to the inverted logic of those who support the LGBT agenda, when an external reality contradicts the internal experience, the solution lies in altering reality in such a way that it conforms to the internal experience. Hence, the advocated approach to addressing an idiosyncratic internal experience is to give the person a new external reality by means of a surgically altered body and a re-educated society.
Identifying the problem as ultimately external naturally leads to the kind of solutions proposed by the New York Commission on Human Rights: fines and sanctions against individuals and institutions that refuse to recognize the legitimacy of being transgender. Ironically, the fact that the Commission would force others to conform to the beliefs of transgender individuals speaks to just how much functional impairment the latter experience in their everyday lives as a result of their beliefs.
The response of organized medicine, and psychiatry in particular, to the transgender phenomenon has been intellectually dishonest and dangerous to the mental and physical health of affected individuals. The acceptance of transgender beliefs as psychiatrically normal has in many cases led to harmful medical interventions in which individuals undergo so-called “sex-reassignment” surgery. These operations cannot “reassign” sex; they can only disfigure normal anatomy.
And now schools are facilitating an intellectually dishonest and dangerous response to a psychiatric disorder—a response that harms both those students who suffer from gender dysphoria and all others.
Here’s an idea: How about parents of students in this district and all other Virginia, Minnesota community members organize a sit-in to protest this science-denying nonsense and moral outrage. They should sit in the superintendent’s office until the administration restores school policies and practices that prohibit students from accessing opposite-sex restrooms and locker rooms, thereby fulfilling their obligation to protect the modesty and privacy of girls and boys.
Oh, and maybe someone should send this story to School District U-46 CEO Tony Sanders.
Famous Pic of Refugees Exposed as Massive Fraud… Look What They Cut Out
One of the images that has become an icon of the pro-refugee movement from the predominantly Muslim countries has been proven to be cropped.
Oddly enough, the image, shown below, has been peen portrayed all over the media as indicative of the plight that these Middle Eastern refugees endure every day. That could absolutely be done without cropping a picture, and yet here the media took another opportunity to lie to the American people.
In the commonly published image, it appeared the refugees were helplessly floating in the water, fighting for their lives as best as they possibly can.
Below is the cropped image:
They look pretty desperate, don’t they?
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There’s just one catch with that: They’re floating in about three feet of water.
The full image, provided by Bare Naked Islam, showed a group of young man standing about seven feet from the crisis.
Of course, it raises an important question: Why on earth would liberal media outlets take up the cause of this one picture, spread it everywhere, and hide the fact that it was cropped?
There are refugees in crisis. The majority of refugees are good people who just want a better, safer life.
Heck, there are refugees in crisis in deep water. And yet, the media went with the one picture that is a blatant lie.
Granted, it’s more than likely one outlet cropped it, then other outlets went with the picture — but that’s just bad journalism.
Could it be that they just don’t care what the truth is, as long as what they publish furthers their agenda?
H/T Mad World News
Why do you suppose the media pushed this false image?
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Recorder of Deeds Stukel Squanders Taxpayer Money
Unless you’re in the real estate industry, maybe you don’t think that much about the Recorder of Deeds, but maybe you should. Because Karen Stukel, the current Will County Recorder of Deeds, has a penchant for unethical and expensive no-bid contracts for software.
Typically a bidding process is used for any purchase over a certain dollar amount in units of government and also in private sector companies. The bidding process allows a company or unit of government to test the market and encourages competitive pricing. It also prevents decision-makers from getting too cozy with vendors.
But no-bid contracts are business-as-usual in the Recorder of Deeds office. Since Stukel was first elected Recorder of Deeds in 2008, she has executed two no-bid contracts for software systems and service, one in 2010 and another in 2014.
Did the software designed especially for the Recorder’s office back in 2008 really need to be replaced? No, the employees didn’t think so, nor did the users.
Stukel’s way of running the office of Recorder of Deeds is unscrupulous and unsustainable, and she has been doing it for almost 8 years. Now she wants a third term as Recorder. Good government is not run this way. This is just one reason we should fire Karen Stukel in November.
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Contact: Kristin Cross for Recorder of Deeds Campaign crossforrecorder@gmail.com
815-409-1961
Gulmurod Khalimov, the new ISIS military commander whom the U.S. just days agoannounced a $3 million bounty for, was trained by the State Department in an anti-terror program as recently as 2014 while serving in the security service of Tajikistan. He replaces former ISIS commander Tarkhan Batirashvili, aka Umar al-Shishani, who was also trained by the United States as part of the Georgian army and who ISIS claimed was killed fighting in Iraq this past July.
The State Department confirmed Khalimov’s U.S.-provided training to CNN in May 2015:
“From 2003-2014 Colonel Khalimov participated in five counterterrorism training courses in the United States and in Tajikistan, through the Department of State’s Diplomatic Security/Anti-Terrorism Assistance program,” said spokeswoman Pooja Jhunjhunwala.The program is intended to train candidates from participating countries in the latest counterterrorism tactics, so they can fight the very kind of militants that Khalimov has now joined.
A State Department official said Khalimov was trained in crisis response, tactical management of special events, tactical leadership training and related issues.
Unironically, the State Department spokeswoman said that Khalimov had been appropriately vetted:
“All appropriate Leahy vetting was undertaken in advance of this training,” said spokeswoman Jhunjhunwala.
“Listen, you American pigs: I’ve been to America three times. I saw how you train soldiers to kill Muslims,” he says.Then, he threatens, “we will find your towns, we will come to your homes, and we will kill you.”
Khalimov and Batirashvili are hardly the first terrorist leaders operating in Syria to have been trained by the United States.
Have you gotten mailers from your Democrat State Representatives saying they voted to freeze your property taxes, yet? If you haven’t, you will. And the mailers don’t lie. They voted for a property tax freeze. In fact, they voted for it up to seventeen times. Do you think, maybe … I don’t know… property tax rates should be frozen, then?
As a state legislator, I can assure you that no bill gets seventeen votes. It is extremely rare that a bill gets a second vote. So what’s going on here?
It’s a game that’s being played. House Democrats, led by Speaker Mike Madigan, know that they are going to have to answer for the fact that your property taxes are sky-rocketing. They need to have a vote or two to point at on a campaign mailer. So, they bring a bill to the floor with no intention of seeing into law, and vote on it. The process is a scam that’s being perpetrated on Illinois homeowners.
On these bills, Republicans vote ‘Present,’ because we refuse to participate in Mike Madigan’s political theater. Then, Democrats in “safe districts” are strategically let off the vote to ensure that it doesn’t pass. On the one occasion that Republicans decided to vote ‘Yes’ on one of these bills (HB 696), it passed out of the House. So, what happened? It was never sent to the Senate for a vote. It was never meant to be a law. It was only meant to be a campaign talking point. House Democrats let it die.
This was Madigan’s play and suburban Democrats backed it time after time after time.
Worse still, everyone is in on it. Lobbyists, unions, administrators and other political insiders dependent on Madigan’s Democrat legislators encourage such votes to protect their kept-politicians. So, instead of working to pass a balanced budget, we take sham votes on bills that won’t do anything to lower property taxes. All so that Democrat legislators can fill your mailbox with glossy mailers touting the great things they are doing for your community.
It is a game that only works for Illinois’ political elites. It doesn’t work for homeowners and businesses. Illinoisans pay the highest property taxes in the nation despite all the politicians who claim they are for lower taxes. We don’t have a balanced budget despite all the politicians who claim they want to compromise on the budget.
Families are being taxed out of their homes. Our state is broke. We have the highest unemployment rate in the nation. Do they think you will be so blinded by those glossy mailers that you won’t notice that? Yes, and what’s worse: they count on it. It is the impetus for this whole charade.
I have never been surprised that Speaker Madigan and his Democrats play political games. They are surely not the only political elites to do so. I’m just surprised that he chooses to make the games so obvious.
Seventeen votes on a bill that never passes? Who do they think they’re fooling?
In Illinois, elections speak louder than words. On November 8, will you tell the ruling class that games and lies so transparent render campaign mailers and rhetoric not just useless, but ridiculous?
Forward this to your mailing list so everyone understands the game..uhh, I mean scam.
This originally appeared on 
The Tea Party sweep that changed the face of U.S. politics in 2010 set American liberals on a mission to change the rules of free speech to regain the upper hand.
