Schools are safer than they were in the 90s, and school shootings are not more common than they used to be, researchers say

The deadly school shooting this month in Parkland, Florida, has ignited national outrage and calls for action on gun reform. But while certain policies may help decrease gun violence in general, it’s unlikely that any of them will prevent mass school shootings, according to James Alan Fox, the Lipman Family Professor of Criminology, Law, and Public Policy at Northeastern.

READ MORE

HOGG WILD - Update

Why losing a dog can be harder than losing a relative or friend

Recently, my wife and I went through one of the more excruciating experiences of our lives – the euthanasia of our beloved dog, Murphy. I remember making eye contact with Murphy moments before she took her last breath – she flashed me a look that was an endearing blend of confusion and the reassurance that everyone was ok because we were both by her side.

When people who have never had a dog see their dog-owning friends mourn the loss of a pet, they probably think it’s all a bit of an overreaction; after all, it’s “just a dog.”

However, those who have loved a dog know the truth: Your own pet is never “just a dog.”

READ MORE

A GUIDE TO WEAPONS FOR THE UNINFORMED

The way the Left swings into action every time a nut commits mass murder with a firearm, you would think that school shootings are the leading cause of death in the U.S. Michael Ramirez reminds us that according to FBI homicide statistics, rifles are the country’s least popular murder weapon. If you really wanted to do something about violent crime, it would make more sense to crack down on knives. Or fists. Click to enlarge:

READ MORE

This Mashup Of Golden Age Movie Dance Scenes Set To 'Uptown Funk' Will Make Your Day

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzpBCr8P4WA

"Michael Binder is what you would call a “movie aficionado” through and through. He’s probably watched just about every single movie you’ve ever heard of, twice. In fact, Binder loves movies so much that he’s managed to make a career writing about them and talking about them for his hundreds of followers.

But when he saw the mega viral hit that featured a bunch of dance scenes from popular movies matched up to the incredibly popular song, “Uptown Funk,” he was instantly inspired to do a similar mashup, only he wanted to use dance scenes from movies that only came out of the Golden Age of cinema.

It took him a long while to find the perfect clips which properly conveyed the energy and passion, but after he scanned through hundreds and hundreds of movies from 1953 and earlier, he finally edited together an absolutely stunning video featuring some of our favorite dancers and singers.

It’s pretty amazing to watch legends like, Gene Kelly, Shirley Temple, Judy Garland, and Fred Astaire dance to one of the catchiest songs ever!

The amount of time it must have taken to edit this whole piece together is truly astounding. Not only did Binder have to be aware of the dance sequence in his head, but he had to time it properly with the music without speeding up or slowing down the original footage.

In the end he created a video that is really fun to watch. He really put a lot of thought into this whole project, and just about everyone loves the final result!

Please SHARE this fantastic video if you love the old classics and wish they made movies like they used to!"

Peggy Breckenridge1 year ago

1. Red-Headed Women (1932) 2. The Littlest Rebel (1935) 3. The Barkleys of Broadway (1949) 4. Sensations of 1945 5. Broadway Melody of 1940 6. Honolulu (1939) 7. Lady Be Good (1941) 8. Girl Crazy (1941) 9. You Were Never Lovelier (1942) 10. Take Me Out to the Ball Game (1949) 11. Colleen (1936) 12. Gilda (1946) 13. It Happened in Brooklyn (1947) 14. Animal Crackers (1930) 15. For Me and My Gal (1942) 16. Summer Stock (1950) 17. The Little Princess (1939) w/ Shirley Temple 18. Easter Parade (1948) 19. Second Chorus (1940) 20. Footlight Parade (1933) 21. Kiss Me Kate (1953) 22. The Pirate (1948) 23. Carefree (1938) 24. On The Town (1949) 25. Gold Diggers of Broadway (1929) 26. The Gay Divorcee (1934) 27. A Day at the Races (1937) 28. Go Into Your Dance (1935) 29. Stormy Weather (1943) 30. Babes on Broadway (1941) 31. Ship Ahoy (1942) 32. The Sky's the Limit (1943) 33. Small Town Girl (1953) 34. Anchors Aweigh (1945) 35. Show Boat (1936) 36. Top Hat (1935) 37. Broadway Melody of 1938 38. Roberta (1935) 39. Love 'em and Leave 'em (1926) 40. Singin' in the Rain (1952) 41. Babes in Arms (1939) 42. 42nd Street (1933) 43. Till The Clouds Roll By (1946) 44. The Band Wagon (1953) 45. Born To Dance (1936) 46. Broadway Melody of 1936 47. Rosalie (1937) 48. Swing Tim (1936) 49. Ziegfeld Follies (1945) 50. Follow The Fleet (1936) 51. Cover Girl (1944) 52. Thousands Cheer (1943) 53. Royal Wedding (1951) 54. Way Out West (1937) 55. The Red Shoes (1948) 56. Blue Skies (1946) 57. Boarding House Blues (1948) 58. Panama Hattie (1942) 59. The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939) 60. Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) 61. An American in Paris (1951) 62. Stormy Weather (1943) 63. Shall We Dance? (1937) 64. Easter Parade (1948) 65. On The Avenue (1937) 66. Hellzapoppin' (1941) 67. That's Entertainment, Part 2 (1976)

REPEAL THE 2ND AMENDMENT? YES, PLEASE TRY

POWERLINE:

Actually, the liberals have an easier plan to get rid of the 2nd Amendment. All they need is one more Supreme Court justice, and if Hillary Clinton had been elected, that need would, in all likelihood, have been filled. But that doesn’t deal with state constitutional protections, it doesn’t get confiscation legislation passed at the federal level, and it doesn’t begin to address the impossible task–as Cooke ably describes it–of actually carrying out the confiscation.

Do liberals have the stomach for any of this? It doesn’t seem so. They could have passed whatever “common sense” gun legislation they wanted during the time when they controlled the House, had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, and Barack Obama as president. But they didn’t touch gun issues with a stick. Which pretty much proves that their only interest in the subject is political.

READ MORE

WHERE ARE THE INDICTMENTS OF OBAMA’S FOREIGN COLLUDERS?

Daniel Greenfield, FRONTPAGE MAG:

The Clinton campaign employed a British foreign agent who used Russian intelligence sources to put together opposition research meant to interfere with the results of a United States election. Collusion between the Clinton campaign, Steele and the Russians doesn’t require an endless fishing expedition.

Foreigners interfering in United States elections are not a new phenomenon. Muslims in Gaza famously ran a phone bank for Obama. A Hamas political adviser had declared that he hoped Obama would win.

There was no investigation. Nor did anyone indict the Gazans running the phone bank.

READ MORE

Catholic Bishops Stumble on the Banana Peel of DACA Policy

Patrick O’Hannigan, THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR: February 16, 2018

Should they really be encouraging the faithful to email their congressmen?

The website for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) devotes an “Advocacy Center” page to political issues, and the cause du jour on that page is “support for our brothers and sisters who are migrants and refugees.” In bishop-speak, that’s a tip of the zucchetto to a campaign called “Share the Journey.” It’s also an endorsement of Barack Obama’s DACA program, and a plea for continuing DACA on moral grounds.

It makes sense for Catholic bishops to offer a moral argument for DACA rather than a legal or Constitutional one. They know which side of the street offers them firmer footing. Nevertheless, the bishops have let the rest of us down, whether we’re part of their flock or simply know someone who is. The boilerplate text that American Catholic faithful are encouraged to email to their legislators under the subject line “Please Support Dreamers” stinks of poor logic and prejudice-inducing rhetorical flourishes.

The most aggravating part of what the bishops want the Catholic faithful to say to their representatives sits up top, in the first three sentences of the letter that they’re soliciting signatures for:

READ MORE

Flashback 30 Years: Guns Were in Schools ... and Nothing Happened

PJ MEDIA:

The millennial generation might be surprised to learn that theirs is the first without guns in school. Just 30 years ago, high school kids rode the bus with rifles and shot their guns at high school rifle ranges.

After another school shooting, it's time to ask: what changed?

READ MORE

Constitutional, criminal, and civil rights attorney: "The indictment raises serious issues under the free speech clause of the First Amendment and due process rights under the Fifth Amendment."

Does Mueller Indictment Mean Clinton Campaign Can Be Indicted for Chris Steele?

by Robert Barnes | 8:02 am, February 17th, 2018

Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted foreign citizens for trying to influence the American public about an election because those citizens did not register as a foreign agent nor record their financial expenditures to the Federal Elections Commission. By that theory, when will Mueller indict Christopher Steele, FusionGPS, PerkinsCoie, the DNC and the Clinton Campaign? Mueller’s indictment against 13 Russian trolls claimed their social media political activity was criminal because: they were foreign citizens; they tried to influence an election; and they neither registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act nor reported their funding to the Federal Elections Commission.

READ MORE

FLASHBACK: Ted Kennedy Secretly Asked The Soviets To Intervene In The 1984 Elections & Help Defeat Reagan

TruePundit:

According to Soviet documents unearthed in the early 1990’s, Kennedy literally asked the Soviets, avowed enemies of the U.S., to intervene on behalf of the Democratic party in the 1984 elections. 

Kennedy’s communist communique was so secret that it was not discovered until 1991, eight years after Kennedy had initiated his Soviet gambit:

Picking his way through the Soviet archives that Boris Yeltsin had just thrown open, in 1991 Tim Sebastian, a reporter for the London Times, came across an arresting memorandum. Composed in 1983 by Victor Chebrikov, the top man at the KGB, the memorandum was addressed to Yuri Andropov, the top man in the entire USSR. The subject: Sen. Edward Kennedy.

“On 9-10 May of this year,” the May 14 memorandum explained, “Sen. Edward Kennedy’s close friend and trusted confidant [John] Tunney was in Moscow.” (Tunney was Kennedy’s law school roommate and a former Democratic senator from California.) “The senator charged Tunney to convey the following message, through confidential contacts, to the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Y. Andropov.” – READ MORE atThe Federalist.

THE FEDERALIST: "The press has played an active role in the Trump-Russia collusion story since its inception. It helped birth it."

• MEDIA

The Media Stopped Reporting The Russia Collusion Story Because They Helped Create It

The press has played an active role in the Trump-Russia collusion story since its inception. It helped birth it.

Excerpt:

I’ve argued over the last year that the phony collusion narrative is a symptom of the structural problems with the press. The rise of the Internet, then social media, and gross corporate mismanagement damaged traditional media institutions. As newspapers and magazines around the country went bankrupt when ownership couldn’t figure out how to make money off the new digital advertising model, an entire generation of journalistic experience, expertise, and ethics was lost. It was replaced, as one Obama White House official famously explained, by 27-year-olds who “literally know nothing.”

But the first vehicles of the Russiagate campaign were not bloggers or recent J-school grads lacking wisdom or guidance to wave off a piece of patent nonsense. They were journalists at the top of their profession—editors-in-chief, columnists, specialists in precisely the subjects that the dossier alleges to treat: foreign policy and national security. They didn’t get fooled. They volunteered their reputations to perpetrate a hoax on the American public.

That’s why, after a year of thousands of furious allegations, all of which concerning Trump are unsubstantiated, the press will not report the real scandal, in which it plays a leading role. When the reckoning comes, Russiagate is likely to be seen not as a symptom of the collapse of the American press, but as one of the causes for it.

Lee Smith is the media columnist at Tablet and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.

READ MORE

Nonie Darwish: Warning to the West

What the West does not understand is that Islam admits that government control is central to Islam and that Muslims must, sooner or later, demand to live under an Islamic government. The majority of the world does not understand that much of the American media is in a propaganda war against the Trump administration simply because he names Islamic jihad and would prefer to see a strong and prosperous America as a world leader rather than to see a dictatorship -- secular or theocratic -- as a world leader. Islam claims to be an Abrahamic religion, but in fact Islam came to the world 600 years after Christ, not to affirm the Bible but to discredit it; not to co-exist with "the people of the book" -- Jews and Christians -- but to replace them, after accusing them of intentionally falsifying the Bible. Islam was created as a rebellion against the Bible and its values, and it relies on government enforcement to do so. Political and legal (sharia) Islam is much more than a religion. Is the First Amendment a suicide pact?

Nonie Darwish, born and raised in Egypt, is the author of "Wholly Different; Why I chose Biblical Values over Islamic Values."

Andrew McCarthy: "We need a full-blown investigation of how the FISA court came to grant warrants to spy on Carter Page."

I spent many months assuring people that nothing like this could ever happen — that the FBI and Justice Department would not countenance the provision to the FISA court of uncorroborated allegations of heinous misconduct. When Trump enthusiasts accused them of rigging the process, I countered that they probably had not even used the Steele dossier. If the Justice Department had used it in writing a FISA warrant application, I insisted that the FBI would independently verify any important facts presented to the court, make any disclosures that ought in fairness be made so the judge could evaluate the credibility of the sources, and compellingly demonstrate probable cause before alleging that an American was a foreign agent.

I was wrong.

READ MORE

"What no one will say is that this is an ongoing plot to restore Barack Obama to the Presidency!"

This is a theory that I haven't seen before...from my husband, Gary Starr:

What no one will say, but I will, is that this is an ongoing plot to restore Barack Obama to the Presidency. 

Before heads explode let me explain.

As Mark Levin says, we are in the middle of a slow motion coup

https://amgreatness.com/…/29/conspiracy-theories-conspirac…/

https://amgreatness.com/…/01/26/lefts-end-game-scam-remains/

http://www.nationalreview.com/…/hillary-clinton-barack-obam…

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DUY5evHVQAMGtih.jpg

Joseph diGenova, former federal prosecutor, says the truth is starting to seep out about the Obama Administration’s “brazen plot to exonerate Hillary Clinton” and “frame an incoming president with a false Russian conspiracy,” according to an exclusive interview with The Daily Caller:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aa95jLxZfc4&feature=youtu.be

Dan Bongino, on Tucker Carlson's show, has called the operation a sting.

So here’s what we know from the Nunes memo [https://www.scribd.com/document/370599316/Nunes-Memo] and the Grassley/Graham memo [http://www.powerlineblog.com/…/…/enter-the-grassley-memo.php].

Hillary kept a secret server overflowing with national security info which, more than likely, was hacked. On a Phoenix tarmac Bill Clinton met with Attorney General Loretta Lynch to seal a deal that Hillary would not be prosecuted. On July 5 , 2016 James Comey pretty much exonerated Hillary when he said he would not Prosecute, after Barack Obama said there is no evidence that Hillary did anything wrong. Lynch also instructed Comey to call the Hillary scandal a “matter”

The Hillary campaign also paid Fusion GPS to gather dirt on Trump which became the dossier, compiled by Brit agent Christopher Steele, relying on Russian sources.. Steele and Fusion GPS gave the Dossier to the FBI and DOJ with the help of FBI employee Bruce Ohr's wife Nellie, who worked at Fusion GPS.

FBI guys James Comey and Andrew McCabe didn't bother to tell the FISA Judges under what circumstances the dossier was obtained and that it was unverified. In other words they lied to the FISA judge at least three times to get the warrants renewed, because the people who worked for them didn't want to see Trump elected.

Thus, the Department of Justice used the unverified dossier to obtain a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant against Carter Page, an alleged “foreign policy adviser” to Donald Trump and the last frayed thread of the Russian collusion story. The FISA court was not told who had paid Steele to create the “salacious and unverified” dossier — in the words of the showboating former FBI Director James Comey — much less about Steele’s personal hatred of Trump. And McCabe has testified that the Dossier was the basis of getting the FISA warrants. Two days later McCabe was fired.

And this now leads back to the Oval office. Texts between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page reveal Obama wanted to be briefed on EVERYTHING happening in the "Russia" investigation – after he 'guaranteed' he wouldn't get involved. Lisa Page wrote her lover Peter Strzok about the Clinton probe: Obama 'wants to know everything we're doing'

Obama had said he could 'guarantee' he wouldn't interfere and there would be 'no political influence' in the FBI investigation
The September 2, 2016 text message was among more 50,000 texts the pair sent during a two-year extramarital affair. Page was an FBI lawyer, and Strzok was a leading investigator on both the Clinton probe and the more recent Trump-Russia investigation. Strzok, though expected to be nonpartisan, also called Trump 'a f***ing idiot' and texted Page about a cryptic 'insurance policy' against a Trump presidency

Here’s where my theory kicks in:

Strozk's and Page's 'insurance policy' might well have been one of two things. If the faux legal mechanisms (the Mueller investigation and impeachment) failed the 'insurance policy' may just be an on-call hit squad to take Trump out. Pence would have been denied his right to take office as he would have been falsely implicated as well.

Hillary was always small potatoes, a placeholder as it were. Her health was always suspect. And do you think the plotters would have let a doofus like Tim Kaine take office in the event that Hillary became disabled?

The Democrats would be clamoring for a suspension of the 22nd Amendment and calling for Barack Obama, to "restore calm and order", to step back into his role for the "good of the country".

And then the door would slam shut. The FBI would basically become the State Police, so to speak, the DOJ a collection of corrupt prosecutors and the intelligence community the new KGB

Obama would declare himself president for life with Soros really running the show, as he did for the entire Obama presidency.

In his heart Obama is a small time, garden variety leftist Communist wannabe. During his eight years Obama just ran out of time and he was just too incompetent. Fortunately he was also constrained (barely) by the Constitution. He didn't have the guts to follow through. But he has the totalitarian impulse. After all, he went around saying he didn't have Constitutional authority to legalize the the illegals, and then he tried anyway. Fortunately the courts stopped him.

I know it's all speculation, but how much of what we suspected about the Obama Administration has already come to light.

And look at who has been removed from the picture in just the last year:

Obama...gone
Hillary defeated
Yates fired
Comey fired
McCabe fired
Strzok demoted to the HR department and disgraced
Page demoted and disgraced
Ohr demoted and disgraced
Ohr's wife no longer leaking info to the FBI
Steele no longer leaking info to the FBI
Glenn Simpson and Fusion GPS, soon to be out of business
Weissman fired

Not a bad start, and we've only just begun. We must expose the rest of this rat's nest:

Brennan
Clapper
Lynch
Jarret

Eve (of "Adam and Eve"): "MeToo"

Ben Shapiro:

On Thursday evening, The Forward unleashed the single most illiterate piece ever written on the Biblical story of Adam and Eve. The piece defies description; it has to be read to be believed. Its central thesis, however, is that God somehow sexually harassed Eve, and that Eve is “the first case of #MeToo.”

This is not a total surprise coming from the same publication that ran a piece this week suggesting that Orthodox Jews are the new white supremacists.

READ MORE

The Hill’s John Solomon reports the Uranium-One Informant, Douglas Campbell, broke his silence on a Russia plot to steer millions of dollars to the U.S. in an effort to benefit the Clinton Foundation.

An FBI informant connected to the Uranium One controversy told three congressional committees in written testimony that Moscow routed millions of dollars to America with the expectation it would be used to benefit Bill Clinton‘s charitable efforts while Secretary of State Hillary Clinton quarterbacked a “reset” in US-Russian relations.

The informant, Douglas Campbell, said in the testimony obtained by The Hill that he was told by Russian nuclear executives that Moscow had hired the American lobbying firm APCO Worldwide specifically because it was in position to influence the Obama administration, and more specifically Hillary Clinton. […]

Campbell said Russian nuclear officials “told me at various times that they expected APCO to apply a portion of the $3 million annual lobbying fee it was receiving from the Russians to provide in-kind support for the Clinton’s Global Initiative,” he added in the testimony.

“The contract called for four payments of $750,000 over twelve months. APCO was expected to give assistance free of charge to the Clinton Global Initiative as part of their effort to create a favorable environment to ensure the Obama administration made affirmative decisions on everything from Uranium One to the U.S.-Russia Civilian Nuclear Cooperation agreement.“

READ MORE

Walter Williams: "The true measure of government's impact on our lives is government spending, not government taxing."

Let's Limit Spending

Walter E. Williams

|

Posted: Feb 07, 2018 12:01 AM

Some people have called for a balanced budget amendment to our Constitution as a means of reining in a big-spending Congress. That's a misguided vision, for the simple reason that in any real economic sense, as opposed to an accounting sense, the federal budget is always balanced. . .

READ MORE

Take your pick: "The FBI got fooled by a source, or it knew its source was lying, or it didn’t bother to check, or it was too incompetent to see the obvious."

Excerpt:

The Grassley referral needs be fully declassified, just as the House memo was. The FBI needs to answer straightforward questions about Mr. Steele’s claims, and he needs to provide his version. The FBI got fooled by a source, or it knew its source was lying, or it didn’t bother to check, or it was too incompetent to see the obvious. Take your pick. None of the possibilities look good, especially if you’re a FISA judge.

[Ms. Strassel writes the Journal’s Potomac Watch column.]

READ MORE

TIMELINE: FBI and DOJ OFFICIALS BROKE THE LAW AND TRIED TO DECIDE THE ELECTION

Thomas Del Baccaro
FORBES

There can be no question, at this point, that certain higher ups in the FBI and the DOJ did not want Hillary to be indicted and did not want Donald Trump to become President. Those efforts were not entirely independent of each other.

Below is a timeline of events – abbreviated though it is – that makes it rather plain that the FBI and DOJ were not investigating potential crimes objectively.

Indeed, they were committing crimes during the process in aid of their preferred outcomes.

READ MORE

Robert Mueller's entire "Russia investigation" springs from this dossier: a huge sprawling multi-branch tree of a rotten poisonous fruit.

Un-Candid in Camera

by Mark Steyn
Steyn on America
February 3, 2018

Candor to the tribunal: Former Deputy Attorney-General Sally Yates and former FBI Director James Comey

Well, the memo was released. You can read it in full here, and I recommend you do so because, on the evidence of much of Friday's TV and radio coverage, most commentators only want to talk about it in the most shallow political terms. Whereas the questions it raises about state corruption in an age of round-the-clock technological surveillance are far more profound.

Let's start with something I wrote back in October:

It seems a reasonable inference, to put it as blandly as possible, that the [Christopher Steele] dossier was used to justify the opening of what the Feds call an "FI" (Full Investigation), which in turn was used to justify a FISA order permitting the FBI to put Trump's associates under surveillance. Indeed, it seems a reasonable inference that the dossier was created and supplied to friendly forces within the bureau in order to provide a pretext for an FI, without which surveillance of the Trump campaign would not be possible.

READ MORE

POWERLINE: "The Intelligence Committee memo is a major step forward, but we have not yet gotten to the bottom of what happened in the heavily-politicized Department of Justice and FBI."

John Hinderacker, POWERLINE:

The Intelligence Committee memo obviously outlines a major scandal that indicts principal figures in the FBI, including James Comey, Andrew McCabe, and Sally Yates and Rod Rosenstein, unless the latter two officials were unaware of the fraud that was being perpetrated on the federal court. Whether some of those involved should go to prison would require a careful examination of relevant federal statutes.

The memo leaves much unsaid. The timing is unclear, at least to me. It sounds as though the FBI continued to renew its FISA warrant long after it had terminated its relationship with Steele and knew, or should have known, that his information was bogus. Why? Did the FBI tell the FISA court in these renewal applications that it had terminated its relationship with Steele, or that it had been unable to corroborate his claims? Presumably not.

Also, we don’t know what was done with the information that was collected about Carter Page–and, of course, about anyone with whom he communicated. This is where the enormous number of “unmasking” requests by Obama officials like Susan Rice come in. Did the Obama administration use the ill-gotten FISA warrants to spy, not only on Carter Page, but on others who had some relationship with Trump, or even Trump himself? Did the Obama administration pass information obtained from improper surveillance on to the Clinton campaign, or leak it to the press after the election?

The Intelligence Committee memo is a major step forward, but we have not yet gotten to the bottom of what happened in the heavily-politicized Department of Justice and FBI.

READ MORE

Monkey Clones: Harbingers of Things to Come?

EVOLUTION NEWS & SCIENCE TODAY:

From all this it should be clear: while this may be a scientific breakthrough, it comes with a very high price tag, monetarily, and morally. And the scientific community has neither the will nor the means to regulate itself. As long as someone is willing to fund the research, someone will try.

Let us hope, fervently, that the scientific and regulatory communities act to prohibit the next step.

READ MORE

Here's what the Democrats refused to stand up for: