Sopranos Creator David Chase on James Gandolfini's sudden death pic.twitter.com/tEWeBQ8Yxw
— BuzzFeed News (@BuzzFeedNews) June 20, 2013
Cause of death is not yet known, but suspected heart attack.
Daily Beast has assembled some of his best performances here.
Here is James speaking on his documentary project, “Alive Day Memories”, on behalf of the Wounded Warrior Project:
Hmm, who do you suppose would make such a threat?
BELTON, Texas (AP) — Someone threatened to bomb a county courthouse near Fort Hood unless officials met the “demands” of the Army psychiatrist charged in the 2009 shooting rampage on the Texas Army post, a sheriff said Wednesday.
After the Wednesday morning call that mentioned Maj. Nidal Hasan, law officers evacuated the historic courthouse and Bell County Justice Center, but found nothing after searching extensively with bomb-sniffing dogs, Bell County Sheriff Eddy Lange said. The jail was put on lockdown.
Employees were allowed back inside the buildings a few hours later. The time that the caller said the bomb would explode at the courthouse had long expired, said city of Belton spokesman Paul Romer.
Bell County has a contract with nearby Fort Hood to house all of its defendants, including Hasan, because the Army post does not have holding facilities.
HT: Jihadwatch
The insanity of the ever increasing dependence on government. Cut 3% of a doubled increase, and you hate babies and grandmas.
Via Breitbart:
The House voted on Wednesday to cut food stamps by $2 billion a year as part of a wide-ranging farm bill.
The chamber rejected 234-188 a Democratic amendment to the five-year, half-trillion-dollar farm legislation that would have maintained current spending on food stamps, now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. The overall bill cuts the $80 billion-a-year program by about 3 percent and makes it harder for some people to qualify.
The food stamp cuts have complicated passage of the bill and its farm-state supporters were working to secure votes Wednesday. Many conservatives have said the food stamp cuts do not go far enough since the program has doubled in cost in the last five years and now feeds 1 in 7 Americans. Liberals have argued against any reductions, contending the House plan could take as many as 2 million needy recipients off the rolls. The White House has threatened a veto over the food stamp cuts.
Audit this, IRS!
Via Breitbart:
When Barack Obama gave a speech in Berlin in 2008, he drew a crowd of 200,000. Wednesday’s speech at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate was a little less popular. White House pool reporter Elmar Jakobs estimated the crowd at only 4,500.
Obama’s Berlin crowd may also have been smaller than the crowd of several thousand who turned out for the Tea Party Patriots’ ‘Audit the IRS’ rally and for a rally against the immigration bill held at the Capitol on Wednesday. One unofficial estimate put the crowd size at 7,000 to 10,000 at its peak. Both rallies lasted several hours.
Love it! De-Luxe-r “F-U” to Morsi appointee.
Via WSJ:
Residents of Luxor, a key tourist destination in Upper Egypt, are mobilizing against their newly appointed governor who hails from the same ultra-conservative religious group responsible for a terror attack that took the lives of of 62 people in the same city some 16 years ago.
On Sunday Egypt’s president Mohammed Morsi appointed 17 new governors across Egypt, including eight Islamists, seven of whom belong to the president’s Muslim Brotherhood party. But the most controversial appointment was the naming of Adel al-Khayat, as governor of Luxor. Mr. Al-Khayat is a member of the Building and Development party, the political arm of Gamaa Islamiya, the group responsible for a 1997 attack at Luxor’s Hatshepsut Temple, where 58 foreign tourists and four Egyptians were gunned down by six members of the movement.
On Wednesday, hundreds of Luxor residents, took to the streets vowing to bar the new governor from entering his office. The Luxor area, which contains the historic temple of Karnak and the pharaonic tombs of the Valley of the Kings, depends heavily on tourism revenues.
“We’ve been protesting for three days now in front of the governorate’s building. We’ve bolted the doors shut and many of us are currently blocking the city’s main road in order to keep the new governor from entering his office,” said Abu Bakr Fadel, a protest organizer, speaking from Luxor by telephone. Mr. Fadel said he wasn’t swayed by Gamaa Islamiya’s 2003 decision to renounce violence.
“We reject this governor completely because of his backward past. They have renounced violence since then, but what happened in 1997 is unforgettable,” Mr. Fadel said.
Just a little unwell…
HOUSTON (AP) — A Houston man is accused of threatening to kidnap, murder and burn U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and his father and also to “blow up” the sun if he wasn’t paid $3 million.
Nick Gates was being held Tuesday in the Harris County jail on a $10,000 bond. He’s charged with making a terroristic threat.
Investigators allege threatening phone calls made June 5 to Cruz’s offices in Austin and San Antonio were traced back to Gates.
Court documents show the 37-year-old admitted to FBI agents he made the calls and that Cruz was told he had a choice: give Gates the money or “lose the sun.”
Gates told agents he had previously been hospitalized at the Harris County Mental Health Center.
Court records didn’t list an attorney for Gates.
Once you start down the slippery slope, you go down still further…
Via Telegraph:
Of all the social/moral questions facing us, euthanasia is one of the toughest to draw a conclusion on. On the one hand, nobody likes to think of a patient being left to suffer. As individuals we have a right to control our own way of living and, by that logic, our own way of dying. On the other hand, there’s a worry that legalising euthanasia encourages a culture of death. Sadly, the news coming out of Belgium and the Netherlands confirms the critics’ worst fears.
Belgium adopted euthanasia in 2002, one year after the Netherlands, and its laws were designed to help adults riddled with “unbearable physical or mental suffering”. Today, roughly one per cent of all deaths in Belgium are due to euthanasia – and the grounds on which it is carried out are becoming looser and looser. As the Telegraph recently reported, two deaf brothers opted to die after they started to go blind. They were young and their condition wasn’t terminal. They couldn’t bear the thought of living alone and in darkness, which is entirely understandable – but the case bends the spirit of the original law.
Now Belgium is weighing up some changes. One would allow patients diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and other diseases leading to dementia to sign an agreement permitting a doctor to allow them to die when the condition enters an advanced stage – even if they appear perfectly happy and physically stable. Another reform is to allow Belgians under 18 to choose euthanasia, too. This means that children who can’t drive, marry, vote or drink alcohol will be regarded as competent enough to decide whether or not they can die.
Via Fox News:
ALBANY, N.Y. – Federal authorities have accused two upstate New York men of assembling a portable X-ray weapon they intended to use against opponents of Israel.
Prosecutors say 49-year-old Glendon Scott Crawford, of Galway, and 54-year-old Eric J. Feight, of Hudson, have been charged with conspiracy to provide support to terrorists following a yearlong undercover investigation.
Investigators say Crawford approached local Jewish organizations looking for people to help him with technology that could be used to secretly deliver damaging and even lethal doses of radiation against those he considered enemies of Israel.
Authorities say they assembled the mobile device, but it was inoperable and nobody was hurt.
Both are scheduled to appear in federal court Wednesday in Albany.
Even after all the scandal, they still flout this in our faces…
WASHINGTON (AP) — Already reeling from a pair of scandals, the Internal Revenue Service is drawing new criticism over plans to hand out millions of dollars in employee bonuses.
The Obama administration has ordered agencies to cancel discretionary bonuses because of automatic spending cuts, but the IRS says it’s merely following legal obligations under a union contract.
The agency is about to pay $70 million in employee bonuses, said Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, a senior Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, which has jurisdiction over the IRS.
Grassley says his office has learned that the IRS was to execute an agreement with the employees’ union Wednesday to pay the bonuses. Grassley says the bonuses should be canceled under an April directive from the White House budget office.
The MSM would be going ballistic over this if we had a Republican in the White House.
Via BuzzFeed:
The CEO of the Associated Press told an audience Wednesday that the Department of Justice has succeeded in muzzling government employees from talking to AP reporters in the weeks since the seizure of AP phone records was revealed.
“What I learned from our journalists should alarm everyone in this room and I think should alarm everyone in this country. The actions of the DOJ against AP are already having an impact beyond the specifics of this particular case,” AP CEO Gary Pruitt told an audience at the National Press Club. “Some of our longtime trusted sources have become nervous and anxious about talking to us, even about stories that aren’t about national security. In some cases, government employees that we once checked in with regularly will no longer speak to us by phone, and some are reluctant to meet in person.”
After it was made public that the Justice Department took AP Washington bureau phone records as part of the Obama administration’s aggressive anti-leak operation, Pruitt said the fear among potential sources has spread to reporters from other outlets.
“I can tell you that this chilling effect is not just at AP, it’s happening at other news organizations as well,” he said. “Journalists from other news organizations have personally told me it has intimidated sources from speaking to them.”
Via NRO:
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has released its analysis of the economic impact of the Gang of Eight’s immigration-reform proposal. Proponents are likely to emphasize the report’s findings that the bill would reduce the federal deficit by $197 billion over the next decade (although Republicans will likely be asked to explain why this estimate is any more reliable than the CBO’s predictionsregarding Obamacare).
However, the bill’s supporters are certain to downplay other aspects of the CBO report, particularly the section on “Future Unauthorized Residents.” The CBO predicts that some of the bill’s enforcement measures, such as the establishment of an employment-verification system, are likely to reduce the future flow of illegal immigrants, but they’re less optimistic about the bill’s ability to stop individuals from overstaying their temporary work visas, a problem that accounts for at least 40 percent of the existing population of illegal immigrants.
“Other aspects of the bill would probably increase the number of unauthorized residents — in particular, people overstaying their visas issued under the new programs for temporary workers,” CBO writes. And as a result, “the net annual flow of unauthorized residents would decrease by about 25 percent relative to what would occur under current law.”
Shockingly, she’s also a big Barack Obama supporter.
Via INN:
American writer Alice Walker, who has long made clear her antipathy toward the state of Israel, “has taken her extreme and hostile views to a shocking new level” in her latest book of meditations on life and her personal activism, according to a review of the book by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).
Walker’s “The Cushion in the Road” devotes 80 pages to fervently anti-Jewish ideas, explicit comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany.
The 12 essays of the section, titled “On Palestine,” which make up a quarter of the book, are rife with comparisons of Israelis to Nazis, denigrations of Judaism and Jews, and statements suggesting that Israel should cease to exist as a Jewish state. Walker’s book also attempts to justify terrorism against Israeli civilians, claiming that the “oppressed” Palestinians should not be blamed for carrying out suicide bombings.
“Alice Walker has sunk to new lows with essays that remove the gloss of her anti-Israel activism to reveal someone who is unabashedly infected with anti-Semitism,” said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director.
“She has taken her extreme and hostile views to a shocking new level, revealing the depth of her hatred of Jews and Israel to a degree that we have not witnessed before. Her descriptions of the conflict are so grossly inaccurate and biased that it seems Walker wants the uninformed reader to come away sharing her hate-filled conclusions that Israel is committing the greatest atrocity in the history of the world.”
Walker, a Pulitzer Prize-winning African-American writer, essayist and poet, has a long history of biased statements against the Jewish state. In June 2012 she refused to allow an Israeli company to publish a Hebrew edition of her classic novel, “The Color Purple,” in protest of what she described as Israel’s “apartheid” policies and “persecution of the Palestinian people.” Most recently, Walker wrote a letter calling on the singer-songwriter Alicia Keys to cancel her upcoming July 4th concert appearance in Tel Aviv in protest of Israel’s policies.
The ADL highlights that in “The Cushion in the Road,” Walker describes Israel’s actions vis-à-vis the Arab population as “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” “crimes against humanity,” and “cruelty and diabolical torture”.
Even though the IRS admitted it.
Via Mediaite:
Filling in for Alex Wagner, The Grio editor Joy-Ann Reid engaged in a heated exchange with her panel guests on Wednesday after she insisted that the Internal Revenue Service as an institution should not be implicated in the scandal surrounding the targeting of conservatives. Her panel guests objected to that assertion and said that it was clear that some malfeasance had occurred. They added that, without a completed investigation, no group or person should be exonerated yet. [...]
Reid asserted that low-level staffers were simply confused over how to navigate the new rules relating to tax-exempt groups. “We don’t know,” insisted Fournier who added that an investigation has not yet been completed.
Via The Hill:
President Obama’s visit to the Group of Eight summit has created a political row in Ireland after an outspoken liberal lawmaker on Wednesday denounced the U.S. president as a “war criminal” for his drone use and his decision to arm the Syrian rebels.
Parliamentarian Clare Daly said her country’s government had showcased the country “as a nation of pimps, prostituting ourselves in return for a pat on the head,” The Irish Times reports.The “unprecedented slobbering” during Obama’s two-day visit to Northern Ireland, she said, had even led to speculation that “you were going to deck the Cabinet out in leprechaun hats decorated with a bit of stars and stripes to really mark abject humiliation.”
“This is the man who is in essence stalling the Geneva peace talks [scheduled for next month] by trying to broker enhanced leverage for the Syrian opposition by giving them arms — and to hell with the thousands more who’ll lose their lives, or the tens of thousands who will be displaced,” Daly said.
“This is the man who has facilitated a 200 percent increase in the use of drones which have killed thousands of people, including hundreds of children.”
HT: JWF
Of course he didn’t use the word “jihadists,” but that is exactly what we are engaged in, and no, they won’t stop just because he says so.
Via Washington Examiner:
During his speech in Berlin today, President Obama declared once again that the “decade of war” against terrorism was coming to an end.
“The Iraq war is now over, the Afghan war is coming to an end Osama bin Laden is no more. Our efforts against al Qaeda are evolving.”
Obama reminded the crowd that it was time to move beyond the mindset of perpetual war.
And yet there has been no global warming over the last 15 years.
Via RTCC:
Speaking on Tuesday in Brussels during a during a CBI/EU Corporate Leaders Group event, Davey warned the consequences of inaction in the face of record emission levels were severe, calling on the European Union to adopt a 50% carbon reduction target by 2030.
“There will always be those with a vested interest in the status quo. Who seek to create doubt where there is certainty,” he said. “And you will always get crackpots and conspiracy theorists who will deny they have a nose on their face if it suits them.
HT: Junk Science
Does he ever stop pandering?
(CNSNews.com) – President Barack Obama made references to gay rights and immigration reform during the speech in Berlin, Germany Wednesday that was intended to focus on nuclear weapons reductions. He further demanded respect for religion at the same time his administration is being sued at home for violating religious liberty.
“When we respect the faiths practiced in our churches and synagogues, our mosques and our temples, we’re more secure,” Obama said. “When we welcome the immigrant, with his talents or her dreams, we are renewed. When we stand up for our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters and treat their love and their rights equally under the law, we defend our own liberty as well. We are more free when all people can pursue their own happiness.”
What are they going to do, start rounding up global warming skeptics and put them into re-education camps?
Via E2 Wire:
President Obama’s top climate adviser on Wednesday vowed that “meaningful” action on global warming was coming soon.
Heather Zichal, the deputy assistant to the president on energy and climate change, said she didn’t want to get “in front of the big man” and unveil specific plans during an event in Washington, D.C., hosted by The New Republic.
She spoke broadly, however, of bolstering energy efficiency, expanding clean energy on public lands and using various “tools” — including the Clean Air Act — to address climate.
Zichal’s comments come as speculation grows that the administration is preparing sweeping climate change proposals. Bloomberg reported that Obama has told donors he will take action next month.
Capitol Hill has been left guessing what the White House is cooking up on climate, though Zichal’s comments shed some light on the plan.
Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), the top Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, told The Hill on Tuesday that he understands Obama will reveal his actions “soon.”
The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee also skirted the climate debate in its Water Resources Development Act legislation. Lawmakers steered conversation toward the impact extreme weather events have on coastal infrastructure.
While such congressional activity does not address the reasons climate change is occurring, Zichal said it shows GOP lawmakers acknowledge there is a problem.
“The era of delay and denial is over,” she said.
The war on the unborn has never stopped.
Via NRO:
The “National Organization for Women” — I assume Marsha Blackburn and I don’t fall under their “women” umbrella – “deplores” House passage of the Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act.
NOW is “appalled” by the vote.
Words like these could be put to better use calling attention to the deplorable, appalling acts we tolerate in the name of women’s rights and health, of course.
“Anyone who thinks the Republican leadership’s war on women is moderating, let alone over, is mistaken,” NOW insists in their statement.
How can anyone not see through this? Wake up, America. We must wake up America. We pretend 20-week-olds aren’t unborn children; their value is infused by a mother’s “choice” – to be empowered or beheaded. And we are all to be content ignoring that many of these mothers don’t see how they can make any choice other than abortion. As a mother pleads for the abortion, and all the friends belittle any other choice, and the boyfriend will drive …. as we’ve seen.
Ever notice how the left has no problem using the word “jihad” to describe the right but would never in a million years use it to describe anything related to Islam?
Via Newsbusters:
On Tuesday’s All In show, MSNBC host Chris Hayes complained about an “anti-food stamp jihad” by House Republicans, and attacked the GOP for putting on a “shameful spectacle” in trying to cut the food stamp program.
With the words “War on the Poor” and an image of House Speaker John Boehner displayed on screen behind him, Hayes railed:
And no one in Washington, particularly on the Republican side, seems to be at all concerned about the continued economic misery of millions of our fellow citizens. So it seems to me that the very least, the absolute least, a decent wealthy society can do amidst an unprecedented period of economic stagnation and vastly unequal prospects for our people, is to just make sure our fellow citizens don’t go hungry. What a shameful spectacle to watch Republicans prove their ideological bonafides at these people’s expense. [...]
“Food stamp President” is nonsense, of course, as even the right-wing Wall Street Journal editorial page pointed out: “The food stamp boom began with the George W. Bush Republicans who expanded benefits in the appalling 2002 farm bill.” But with Barack Obama in the White House, the House Republicans are now on an anti-food stamp jihad.
So dumb it defies logic.
Via NY Post:
Cops might as well wear blindfolds if the City Council passes a bill that would let them use little more than the color of a suspect’s clothing in descriptions — or risk being sued for profiling, according to this provocative new ad (pictured) from the NYPD captains union.
The ad asks, “How effective is a police officer with a blindfold on?”
And the answer is not very, says the NYPD Captains Endowment Association, which is fighting the measure, claiming it would handcuff cops and send crime rates soaring.
Union President Roy Richter — who is seen in the ad wearing a blindfold in Times Square — told The Post the bill is dangerous because “it will ban cops from identifying a suspect’s age, gender, color or disability.
“When we have wanted suspects and patterns of crimes, those are very important descriptive terms to let officers know who to look for.”
The ad warns that if cops transmit a description of a suspect that goes beyond the color of his or her clothing, they could be sued for racial profiling if the proposal becomes law.
The ad will appear in tomorrow’s Post, in addition to the union’s Web site, Twitter and Facebook — and provides links to contacts for City Council members to sway their vote on the measure.
The bill’s sponsor, Jumaane Williams (D-Brooklyn), and Speaker Christine Quinn are going to bypass normal committee process and bring the measure directly to a vote.
Update to this story.
CONCORD – The office of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Wednesday apologized for including Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev among a list of shooting victims’ names that were read during a demonstration in Concord on Tuesday.
The apology came after several groups, including the New Hampshire Republican Party, blasted the Mayors Against Illegal Guns campaign for included his name.
Alex Katz, deputy communications director for the Mayors Against Illegal Guns campaign, said rally organizers relied on a list compiled by Slate.com of people killed by guns since the Dec. 14 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., “and his name was on the list.”
Tsarnaev was killed April 19 during a gunfight with police in Watertown, Mass., while trying to evade capture following the April 15 bombing.
“Tamerlan Tsarnaev was a murderous terrorist and a cold-blooded killer,” NHGOP Chairman Jennifer Horn said in a statement released about two hours before the Bloomberg Office apology. “It is outrageous that Mayor Bloomberg’s gun control group is so radical and out of touch with New Hampshire values that it believes this monster should be labeled as some kind of victim.”
The official song of the Federal Reserve:
Via CNBC:
The Federal Reserve will keep its version of the monetary printing press running a while longer, and provided few hints Wednesday that the days of extreme easing are coming to a close.
In a decision watched with a surgeon’s precision on Wall Street, the central bank’s Open Markets Committee tiptoed around the vaunted “tapering” question, saying it will continue watching the economy for more gains.
The Fed more or less met market expectations for this meeting, though some traders thought it would lay out a groundwork that could lead to at least a modest tightening of its $85 billion a month bond-buying program by September.
The release of the FOMC statement precedes a 2:30 pm news conference from Chairman Ben Bernanke.
Markets have been intent on finding signs for when the Fed will end its quantitative easing program, which has driven the central bank balance sheet to $3.45 trillion and sparked worries about asset bubbles in risk assets.
The Fed credits itself with funds that it uses to buy Treasurys and mortgage-backed securities.
This is a lengthy report from Reuters, definitely worth reading the whole thing.
(Reuters) – As the Syrian civil war got under way, a former electrician who calls himself Sheikh Omar built up a brigade of rebel fighters. In two years of struggle against President Bashar al-Assad, they came to number 2,000 men, he said, here in the northern city of Aleppo. Then, virtually overnight, they collapsed.
Omar’s group, Ghurabaa al-Sham, wasn’t defeated by the government. It was dismantled by a rival band of revolutionaries – hardline Islamists.
The Islamists moved against them at the beginning of May. After three days of sporadic clashes Omar’s more moderate fighters, accused by the Islamists of looting, caved in and dispersed, according to local residents. Omar said the end came swiftly.
The Islamists confiscated the brigade’s weapons, ammunition and cars, Omar said. “They considered this war loot. Maybe they think we are competitors,” he said. “We have no idea about their goals. What we have built in two years disappeared in a single day.”
The group was effectively marginalized in the struggle to overthrow Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad. Around 100 fighters are all that remain of his force, Omar said.
It’s a pattern repeated elsewhere in the country. During a 10-day journey through rebel-held territory in Syria, Reuters journalists found that radical Islamist units are sidelining more moderate groups that do not share the Islamists’ goal of establishing a supreme religious leadership in the country.
The moderates, often underfunded, fragmented and chaotic, appear no match for Islamist units, which include fighters from organizations designated “terrorist” by the United States.
The Islamist ascendancy has amplified the sectarian nature of the war between Sunni Muslim rebels and the Shi’ite supporters of Assad. It also presents a barrier to the original democratic aims of the revolt and calls into question whether the United States, which announced practical support for the rebels last week, can ensure supplies of weapons go only to groups friendly to the West.
The Islamists are more energetic and better organized. The main two hardline groups to emerge in Syria are Ahrar al-Sham and Jabhat al-Nusra, an al Qaeda offshoot that has claimed responsibility for dozens of suicide bombings, including several in Damascus in which civilians were killed.
But Islamist fighters, dressed in black cotton with long Sunni-style beards, have developed a reputation for being principled. Dozens of residents living in areas of rebel-held territory across northern Syria told Reuters the same thing, whether they agreed with the politics of Jabhat al-Nusra or not: the Islamists do not steal.
Proving once again Obama is a raging buffoon.
(CNSNews.com) – Likening religious schools to segregation–a racist system that forced blacks to attend different schools and use different facilities than whites in the American South–President Barack Obama told a town hall meeting for youth in Belfast, Northern Ireland on Monday that there should not be Catholic and Protestant schools because such schools cause division.
“Because issues like segregated schools and housing, lack of jobs and opportunity–symbols of history that are a source of pride for some and pain for others–these are not tangential to peace; they’re essential to it,” said Obama. “If towns remain divided–if Catholics have their schools and buildings, and Protestants have theirs–if we can’t see ourselves in one another, if fear or resentment are allowed to harden, that encourages division. It discourages cooperation.
“And I know, because America, we, too, have had to work hard over the decades, slowly, gradually, sometimes painfully, in fits and starts, to keep perfecting our union,” said Obama. “A hundred and fifty years ago, we were torn open by a terrible conflict. Our Civil War was far shorter than The Troubles, but it killed hundreds of thousands of our people. And, of course, the legacy of slavery endured for generations.
