Citizens Dedicated To Preserving Our Constitutional Republic

Bullheaded Texan's "Open Thread"

Information

A place for anything that does not properly fit anywhere else

Members: 3
Latest Activity: Dec 19, 2018

0 members like this

Discussion Forum

This group does not have any discussions yet.

Comment Wall

Comment

You need to be a member of Bullheaded Texan's "Open Thread" to add comments!

Comment by Bullheaded Texan on May 4, 2018 at 10:22pm: President Trump To World Series Winners: ‘You were Houston strong’!

3/13/18

In the same year that Houston battled the challenges of rebuilding from a destructive hurricane, the Houston Astros earned the city’s first baseball World Series Championship.

The Astros visited the White House yesterday, where President Trump congratulated the team on a hard-fought series win.

“It’s a really befitting tribute—what was really a show of world spirit and Houston Strong,” President Trump said. “You were Houston Strong.”

The President explained that the Astros were true champions both on and off the field. “When Hurricane Maria ravaged Puerto Rico weeks later, the Houston Astros redoubled their assistance, and many of them went there and helped,” he said.

“It really exemplifies what greatness is all about !!

Comment by Bullheaded Texan on May 4, 2018 at 10:07pm: The Texas support and spirit can drive the rest of the country in support of the 1st and 2nd amendment and in support of winning the continued Republican Majority in Congress.
We must have more new Republicans elected!
The Term Limit bill has not been passed or even on the table simply because of who is in charge of doing the job.

WE, taxpaying citizens Have a responsibility to execute the Term limits at the voting booths and replace incumbents who are not doing the job.

We need to demand swamp dwellers just be gone.
” Don’t Mess With Texas”

Comment by Bullheaded Texan on May 4, 2018 at 9:59pm

May 4, 2018

WATCH: President Fires Up NRA Convention In Dallas!

Highlights, from CNN:

On the Second Amendment: “Your Second Amendment rights are under siege, but they will never, ever be under siege as long as I’m your President.”
On arming teachers: “They love their students. And they’re not going to let anybody hurt their students. But you have to give them a chance.”
On the Parkland school shooter: “”There has never been a case where more red flags have been shown.”
On North Korea: “We’re really doing well with North Korea. We’re really doing well, OK.”
On the midterm elections: “Don’t be complacent. Don’t be complacent.”
On current immigration laws: “We have laws written by people that truly could not love our country.”
On the special counsel investigation: “It’s a witch hunt.”
On Kayne: “By the way, Kanye West must have some power, because you probably saw I doubled my black poll numbers. We went from 11 to 22 in one week, thank you Kanye.”

Comment by Bullheaded Texan on May 4, 2018 at 9:07pm: Chicago Mayor Pushes for Police Drone Surveillance of Public Gatherings.

May/4/18 1:00 pm Scott Shackford

Rahm Emanuel wants to do the thing that critics of drone surveillance fear most.

Illinois passed a law three years ago requiring police to get warrants before use drones for most surveillance purposes. But a bill being pushed by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his allies in the state legislature would blow a massive hole in these restrictions by allowing the government to use drones to monitor protests and large gatherings.

The American Civil Liberties Union is raising hell, noting that the change in the law would allow Chicago police (who have a history of secret surveillance against political activists) to take pictures, record video, and even use facial recognition tools against protesters. The Chicago Sun-Times reports:

"If this bill is passed, as drafted, during the next large scale political rally, drones could identify and list people protesting the Trump administration," added Karen Sheley, director of the ACLU's Police Practices Project.

"The sight of drones overhead, collecting information, may deter people from protesting in a time when so many want to exercise their First Amendment rights....This is too much unchecked power to give to the police—in Chicago or anywhere."

Representatives for the mayor's office say this is all about "ensuring the safety" of people attending large events. The bill requires regular reporting of when police use drones and says any data collected must be deleted after 30 days unless it's connected to a "criminal matter."

It also forbids arming the drones with any sort of weapon, but only for this particular addition to the surveillance rules. Sheley (aclu) worries that this new bill therefore creates a loophole that would allow police to arm drones for use in other circumstances.

Drones can be useful tools for emergency responders in crisis and rescue situations when it's dangerous to send in human beings. So the value of drones in the hands of police shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. But the one thing critics of drone surveillance are most opposed to using them for—snooping on public political activism—is the exact thing this bill is attempting to authorize.

Meanwhile, Mexifornia lawmakers are considering a very different police surveillance bill. SB 1186 would require that local law enforcement agencies each to submit a surveillance tech use policy to its city or county governing body, which would then vote on them. They'd have to make these policies available online, and they would be forbidden from sharing or selling data collected from surveillance with anybody other than permitted law enforcement agencies including the Department of Justice.

Comment by Bullheaded Texan on May 4, 2018 at 9:05pm: 2)

This is not a bill that permits or forbids types of tech surveillance. It requires counties and cities to be open with citizens about what sort of tools they use, and it puts city and county elected officials in an oversight position. They can decide which surveillance tech to permit and which to forbid. SB 1186 is currently in the state Senate's appropriations committee and is scheduled for a hearing next week. The ACLU supports the legislation, and is encouraging citizens to contact their lawmakers, noting

Comment by Bullheaded Texan on May 4, 2018 at 9:04pm: 3)

Local surveillance rarely stays local. It starts with local law enforcement agencies purchasing high powered technologies like drones, license plate readers, or facial recognition software, or conducting social media surveillance.

Increasingly, this secret surveillance creeps into of our lives, leaving the door open to monitoring and detention not just by local police, but also by the federal government.

Whether it is the monitoring of blackLivesMatterSplatter protestors and leaders, or the tracking of alien and muslim community members, this secret surveillance must stop.

It's not clear if this bill is going to get them what they want, given that there are cities in Mexifornia resisting the state's "sanctuary" law that attempts to restrict how local police share information about people's immigration status with the feds.

A number of communities could very well give this "secret surveillance" their full stamp of approval and encourage its use to track the very people the ACLU wants to protect.

Nevertheless, transparency and oversight are certainly preferable to letting police operate however they choose. It at least gives the community the chance to hold elected officials responsible if they expand surveillance in ways that violate civil liberties.

Comment by M on May 4, 2018 at 10:05am: Landel;

See; Govt. Acronyms for Bureaus and Personnel in the War on Terror It's more than the title suggests

M

Comment by Bullheaded Texan on May 4, 2018 at 6:10am: Trump won’t apologize for harsh rhetoric aimed at muslims.
Apr/30/18 By Bob Fredericks
President Trump on Monday declined to apologize for his incendiary comments about muslims and calls for a muslim immigration ban, arguing that it wouldn’t make any difference as a lawsuit against his policy is argued before the Supreme Court.
“I don’t think it would, number one. And there’s no reason to apologize. Our immigration laws in this country are a total disaster. They’re laughed at all over the world, they’re laughed at for their stupidity and we have to have strong immigration laws,” Trump said during a joint news conference with the Nigerian president in the Rose Garden.
“I think if I apologize, it wouldn’t make 10 cents worth of difference to them. We have to have strong immigration laws to protect our country.”
The travel ban made its way to the Supreme Court last week, and a lawyer representing those fighting the ban, obuma administration attorney Neal Katyal, had said if Trump would take back some his statements, the case would likely end in his favor.
On the campaign trail in December 2015, Trump called for a “total and complete shutdown” of muslims entering the US “until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on,” adding that muslims have “a great hatred” for Americans.

“Without looking at the various polling data, it is obvious to anybody the hatred is beyond comprehension,” Trump added in a statement.
“Where this hatred comes from and why we will have to determine. Until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in Jihad, and have no sense of reason or respect for human life.”

Comment by Bullheaded Texan on May 4, 2018 at 5:55am: Judges who join the Resistance are trouble for our legal system.
Apr/26/18 By Rich Lowry Updated
Rod Rosenstein has let Mueller go far too far.
Why has the Republican Congress given up on doing anything?
'Righteous' james comey is cashing in...
There’s a lawlessness rampant in the land, but it isn’t emanating from the Trump administration.
The source is federal judges who are making a mockery of their profession by twisting the law to block the Trump administration’s immigration priorities.

If the judges get their way, there will, in effect, be two sets of law in America — one for President Trump and one for everyone else.
In this dispensation, other presidents, especially Democratic presidents, get a pen and a phone. Trump gets a judicial veto — even when he is simply trying to undo the unilateral moves of his predecessor.
This is the clear implication of the latest decision against Trump’s rollback of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
US Judge John Bates in the District of Columbia held that Trump’s decision was “arbitrary and capricious.”
If nothing else, the judge is an expert on arbitrariness. He’d force the administration to begin granting new DACA permits if it doesn’t explain to his satisfaction the decision to end the program.
This would make some sense if Trump were stretching to defy a legal regime duly passed by Congress. He is not. That is what resident barry obuma did.
Because Congress declined to pass the DREAM Act, obuma implemented a version on his own. He justified DACA as prosecutorial discretion and to this day denies that he rewrote the laws.
But if that is true — and it’s the only legal defense of DACA — there is nothing to stop Trump from reversing it via his own pen and phone!
Prosecutorial discretion must work both ways, or the law is a ratchet always working against immigration enforcement.
Especially given how obuma’s defense of DACA as prosecutorial discretion was a transparent rationalization. It wasn’t as though immigration authorities were coming across so-called Dreamers during traffic stops and deciding that pursuing removal would be a poor use of time and resources.

Comment by Bullheaded Texan on May 4, 2018 at 5:40am: 2)
No, DACA set up a shadow immigration system outside of and in defiance of congressional enactments. This is why DACA’s sister program, DAPA, which would have applied to a wider population of illegal immigrants, was rightly blocked in the courts.

All the same arguments that sank DAPA should apply to DACA, but once Trump is part of the equation, all the rules change. Bates wants to hear a more extensive argument from the administration on why DACA is illegal. More to the point is the fact that there isn’t any remotely plausible case that it is unlawful to apply the law to illegal immigrants.

Obama himself long maintained that he lacked the authority to issue a unilateral amnesty for Dreamers. We’ve gone from everyone assuming that the president can’t act in defiance of the immigration laws to judges insisting that a president must act in defiance of the immigration laws.

Books have been written about the coming descent of the US into fascism, but evidently no one who promotes or buys these tomes cares about the black letter of the law, at least not when it doesn’t suit their political interests.

The complaints on the right, meanwhile, about an unelected deep state trying to destroy the president are overdone. Yet here is an unelected branch of government overstepping its constitutional bounds to frustrate a core priority of a president who ran and won on the issue of immigration. This is corrosive of faith in our system, counter to the rule of law and sophomoric on the part of men and women who are supposed to be neutral arbiters of justice.

The saving grace of the judiciary is that the Supreme Court, as of now, takes its responsibility more seriously. The oral arguments suggest that the court will, despite absurd rulings below, uphold Trump’s travel ban.

This is something, but it doesn’t remove the shame of those judges who, when it comes to Trump, substitute the logic of #resistance for common sense and the law.