Category Archives: Education

BOSTON OFFICIALS PUSHING LAW REQUIRING DOCTORS TO ASK PATIENTS ABOUT THEIR FIREARMS

Boston city officials plan on pushing legislation requiring doctors to ask patients whether or not they possess firearms in their homes.

Mayor Martin J. Walsh’s administration said Wednesday that the step would be taken to help health care providers statewide “play a larger role in addressing gun violence” by identifying red flags or patients at risk of suicide or domestic violence.

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THINGS DEMOCRATS HAVE FUNDED THAT COST MORE THAN THE BORDER WALL

After President Trump requested $5.7 billion to fund the border wall he campaigned on in 2016, Democrats have dug in, refusing to appropriate the funds that the administration says are needed to better manage the flow of immigration across the southern border.

Democrats are not traditionally known for their fiscal rectitude but are being particularly parsimonious over what ultimately amounts to a very small percentage of the federal budget. (In 2018, the feds spent $4.173 trillion overall, meaning the border wall would amount to just 1/10th of 1 percent of current annual federal spending.)

Indeed, these lawmakers have happily funded various projects over the years that cost far more than the border wall — many of which had very questionable value. Below are some examples of wasteful federal spending projects that individually cost more than the proposed border wall (some data courtesy of Citizens Against Government Waste):

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“Rural Utility Service.” This program costs taxpayers $8.2 billion/year and has no actual purpose after its original intent — bringing electricity to rural communities — was long ago achieved. It’s now being used to bring broadband access to small communities (usually with populations of less than 20,000). However there’s no indication the “beneficiaries” of this expensive government agency actually appreciate the program and the majority of its projects are not completed on time or within budget.
Sugar Subsidies. America, as Democrats frequently intone, faces a health crisis. What they don’t tell us is that it’s largely of their own making, as Congress subsidizes the production of unhealthy foods like sugar and high-fructose corn syrup. Eliminating sugar subsidies alone would save $6 billion, enough to fund the border wall; it would also have the added benefit of helping curb the nation’s obesity epidemic.

The feds spent $613,634 to boost “intimacy and trust” of transgender women and their male partners (The Washington Free Beason)

The feds spent $5 million paying hipsters to stop smoking and then blog about it (as well as use cool anti-smoking swag — like beer koozies). (Readers Digest)

Northwestern University has received more than $3 million in National Institutes of Health to watch hamster fights. “Some of those experiments involved injecting hamsters with steroids, then putting another hamster in the cage to see if the drugged rodents were more aggressive when protecting their territory. This program has since been halted following protests from animal rights activists,” Readers Digest reports.

The feds spend $1,009,762 training “social justice” math teachers (The Washington Free Beacon)

“The government spent at least $518,000 in federal grants to study how cocaine affects the sexual behavior of Japanese quails,” Readers Digest reports.

The Federal Register is legally required to be printed daily and distributed to Congressional offices despite most never being read and all of the information being available online. Stopping this unnecessary printing would save $1 million a year.

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Journalist Who Broke Story Of Mueller Deleting Text Messages Dies Mysteriously

Bre Payton was a Christian writer for the conservative online news magazine The Federalist and a guest commentator on the Fox News Channel. And she was a rising star…

She seemed unafraid to take on things that mattered, including breaking the hard-hitting piece DOJ Destroyed Missing Strzok/Page Text Messages Before The IG Could Review Them on December 13th, where, unlike the mainstream media who later focused on the idea that there was ‘no evidence’ that these text messages were deliberately destroyed, Payton leaned towards the conclusion that there was criminal intent in these deletions, a notion supported by Donald Trump.

And then she died suddenly on Friday in San Diego. She was 26…

I don’t have any definitive ‘proof’ for the notion that Payton was killed because she was going to disclose some type of sensitive information against the Deep State; however, it must be said that the cause and circumstances of her death are befuddling enough for one to consider such an idea. My only intention is to explain the facts and allow you to draw your own conclusions.

Timeline
Wednesday, December 26th: Bre Payton, who lives in Washington, was in San Diego to be a guest host on a show on the One America News Network. Her last tweet was announcing to followers that they could see the show broadcast ‘right now’ and responding to one follower who was watching it. So as of Wednesday night, all was well with Bre Payton.

Thursday, December 27th: Bre was staying with good friend Morgan Murtaugh while in San Diego. Morgan found Payton unconscious in her bed around 8:30 am, as disclosed in this tweet:

24 hours ago I found my friend unconscious and called 911. She’s been in a coma since and really needs a miracle right now. Please, if you’re religious at all, send prayers this way. We really need them. https://www.caringbridge.org/visit/brepayton

Friday, December 28th: By Friday morning, Bre had passed away…

I don’t know enough to say it’s impossible that Bre Payton died so suddenly from a virus she had contracted naturally without any prior symptoms, but it just doesn’t feel right. You would expect that she would have some pretty significant symptoms in the days prior. Add that to the fact that we have covered many stories of people who have died mysterious deaths who all happened to be courageous, outspoken people who were willing to challenge the establishment, and might have had some information that was damaging to the Deep State and were willing to reveal it, as she showed in breaking the Mueller story, you can begin to understand the suspicions.

REAL NEWS

Judge Blocks New York City Law Aimed at Curbing Airbnb Rentals

A federal judge on Thursday blocked a recent New York City law intended to crack down on Airbnb and other online home-sharing sites that city officials say have essentially turned residential apartments into illegal hotels and have aggravated the city’s housing shortage.

The law, which was enacted last summer and was to go into effect next month, would have required the home-sharing services to disclose monthly to the city detailed information about tens of thousands of listings, and the identities and addresses of their hosts.

Airbnb and another firm, HomeAway, sued in August, contending the law was unconstitutional.

On Thursday, the judge, Paul A. Engelmayer of United States District Court in Manhattan, granted Airbnb and HomeAway’s request for a preliminary injunction, stopping the law from going into effect. He wrote that the ordinance violated the guarantee against illegal searches and seizures in the Fourth Amendment, and that the companies were likely to prevail on their claim.

“The city has not cited any decision suggesting that the governmental appropriation of private business records on such a scale, unsupported by individualized suspicion or any tailored justification, qualifies as a reasonable search and seizure,” the judge wrote.
Airbnb called the decision “a huge win for Airbnb and its users,” including “thousands of New Yorkers at risk of illegal surveillance.”

The decision could aid home-sharing services in their fight with other cities that have sought to regulate them, putting a limit on how much information local governments can demand.

The ruling also dealt a major blow to New York City’s political leaders, Mayor Bill de Blasio and the City Council speaker, Corey Johnson, who had championed the law as a way of combating rising rents. Mr. de Blasio signed the law in August after it passed the Council unanimously. It was seen as a major victory for Mr. Johnson just months into his tenure as speaker.

Speaking at a news conference, Mr. de Blasio defended the law on Thursday and predicted that the city would “ultimately prevail” in court.

“We have a huge city with a lot of Airbnb activity and a lot of concern in our neighborhoods and, unfortunately, a lot of examples of abuse,” he said. “To put a strong data regimen in place made all the sense in the world.”

Jacob Tugendrajch, a spokesman for Mr. Johnson, called the law a “vital protection against illegal hotels” and said the Council would continue “the fight for this common sense, data-driven law.”

Mr. de Blasio has contrasted home-sharing services with the hotel industry, which is subject to inspections and regulations that allow the city to hold owners accountable. He has argued that Airbnb should also be required to turn over information that helps the city protect the public interest.

An influential union for hotel workers, the Hotel Trades Council, strongly backed the law.

In a 52-page ruling, Judge Engelmayer did not rule on the merits of Airbnb and HomeAway’s claims, but said the injunction would block the law from taking effect pending resolution of the litigation, which he said would proceed expeditiously.

The law would require online rental services to disclose the addresses of its listings and the identities of its hosts to the city’s Office of Special Enforcement on a monthly basis. Hosts would also be required to list whether the dwelling is their primary residence and whether the entire unit or a portion is available for short-term rentals. Companies that failed to share the data would be subject to fines of $1,500 for each listing they did not disclose.

New York City is Airbnb’s largest domestic market, with more than 50,000 apartment rental listings. But under state law, it is illegal in most buildings for an apartment to be rented out for less than 30 days unless the permanent tenant is residing in the apartment at the same time.

City officials hoped the new disclosure requirements would make it much easier for the city to enforce the state law and would lead to thousands of units rented through Airbnb in the city coming off the market.

Airbnb and other home-rental services have been battling regulation nationally and abroad, as cities including Seattle, San Francisco and London have required such companies to share some data through a registration system for listings.
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San Francisco, for example, enacted a law in 2016 that fined home-sharing companies if a host rented an apartment through their platforms without registering it first with the city. Airbnb sued and reached a settlement with the city in 2017, under which the company agreed to register hosts automatically and to turn over a monthly accounting of its listings. Listings on Airbnb plunged by half after the rules went into effect.

But the measure New York City passed went further. Rather than set up a registration system, the law instead required Airbnb and similar companies to turn over the information its users had shared with them, including personal information about the hosts.

Roberta A. Kaplan, a lawyer for Airbnb, said, “I’m not aware of any city that has tried anything of this scope.” The opinion, she added, “sends a strong message to other cities that the New York approach is not the way to go about doing this.”

Judge Engelmayer, in his opinion, said that in the era before electronic data storage, an attempt by a municipality “to compel an entire industry monthly to copy and produce its records as to all local customers would have been unthinkable under the Fourth Amendment.”

The judge said that upholding the ordinance would invite other cities to make “similar demands on e-commerce companies” to routinely turn over broad-ranging customer records to investigative agencies.

That, he added, could allow regulators “to troll these records for potential violations of law” even when there had been no basis to suspect a violation.
Correction: January 3, 2019
An earlier version of this article misstated the fines levied under a new law requiring home-sharing sites to turn over data to New York City about their users. The fine is $1,500 for each listing a company fails to disclose, not $25,000.

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