Tag: democrats

MI House Democrats seek to imprison kids for having BB guns

Michigan may have a hunting and gun culture, but legislative Democrats are doing everything in their power to change that.

The latest example comes as House Democrats have proposed HB 4184, a bill to ban those 18 and under from “using or possessing certain BB guns outside of their property,” according to the summary.

State Rep. Julie Rogers, a Democrat from crime-riddled Kalamazoo, filed the bill earlier this session.

The bill is to “regulate the possession or use of pneumatic guns,” that is, those that are designed to use air pressure to propel the projectile. The bill bans kids from having guns “that will expel a BB or pellet by spring, gas, or air.”

“An individual less than 18 years of age shall not use or possess a pneumatic gun outside the curtilage of the individual’s dwelling unless the individual is accompanied by another individual over 18 years of age,” it states.

A child who breaks the proposed law “is guilty of a misdemeanor punishable by imprisonment for not more than 90 days or a fine of not more than $500.00, or both.”

“Please get your kids outside this summer to make some epic memories before the leftists who have never engaged in such fun ban it,” state Rep. Angela Rigas (R) said in response.

“Allowing kids to use BB guns unsupervised can have life-threatening consequences,” Rogers claimed. “All too often, these guns are treated as toys, without regard to the dangers they pose. As with all types of guns, adult supervision for children to ensure they are following safety precautions is necessary for everyone’s well-being.”

During Rogers’s first term in office (2021), Kalamazoo was one of the most dangerous cities in the state.

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Democrats in Congress Demand More Aggressive Ukraine Policy

Several members of the Democrat Party in Congress are urging the White House to provide Kiev with significantly more military support. One representative wants the Joe Biden administration to place “non-combatant observers” on the ground in Ukraine. 

Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO) called for long-term investment in modernizing Ukraine’s military. He believes the upgraded weapons will turn the country into a “porcupine that can’t be swallowed.” 

One suggestion Crow made was sending non-combatant observers to the battlefield to learn “through direct observation and communication with Ukrainian forces.” Crow did not specify if the personnel would come from the CIA, Pentagon or another agency. However, deploying any Americans on the battlefield risks them being killed by Russian soldiers. 

Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI), chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, along with Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CN), are backing a plan that would send ATACM missiles to Ukraine. The rockets have a range of nearly 200 miles. 

The White House has rejected several requests from Kiev to send long-range munitions to Ukraine. The Department of Defense went as far as modifying the HIMAR launchers it donated to Kiev to prevent the system from being able to fire the ATACM missiles. Recently, the Biden administration suggested it may be budging on the issue as Washington backed London sending long-range air-launched missiles to Kiev. 

Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA), ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, called for the White House to authorize sending cluster bombs to Ukraine. Groups of Republican Representatives have sent letters to Biden demanding he fulfills Kiev’s request to send the controversial weapons. 

Both Russia and Ukraine are reported to have used cluster bombs in Ukraine. Typically intended for use against personnel and light vehicles, cluster bombs carry smaller explosive submunitions which are released in flight and scattered across a target area. However, the bomblets often fail to detonate and remain on the ground as ‘duds,’ causing countless civilian deaths in former warzones, sometimes even decades into the future.

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Both Parties Always Serve the Military-Industrial Complex

In 2023, despite skyrocketing inflation, debt, as well as rising sociopolitical divisions, leadership among both the Republicans and Democrats will always agree that substantially more US taxpayer money, never less, should be poured into the military industrial complex, according to an analysis by Judd Legum.

Case in point, the debt ceiling agreement established between the Joe Biden administration and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy caps military spending at a record $886 billion, exactly matching Biden’s mammoth budget request.

The GOP was seeking large increases in military spending and would only entertain cuts in non-military expenditures. The agreed upon war budget represents a 3.3% increase over the current year. The tentative deal still needs to make its way through Congress, where hawks will fiercely oppose any and all military spending caps.

Half of this money will go to defense contractors with Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics receiving the lion’s share. Some of these arms industry giants are currently ensnared in a massive “price gouging” scandal, with a bipartisan group of Senators demanding an investigation be opened at the Pentagon’s highest levels.

Legum highlights the lack of any “peace dividend.” after the disastrous 20 year war and occupation in Afghanistan. “This military spending increase has occurred even as Biden ended the war in Afghanistan, the military’s longest-running and most costly foreign intervention… Each year, the costs go up dramatically,” Legum writes.

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New Democrat Bill Calls For A Federal Agency To Create “Behavioral Codes,” Introduce “Disinformation Experts”

On May 18, two US senators introduced the Digital Platform Commission Act of 2023, a bill that seeks to give powers to a new federal agency that will set up a council to regulate AI, in the context of social platforms.

More precisely, the new body – the Federal Digital Platform Commission – would “rule” on what’s termed as enforceable “behavioral codes,” and among those staffing it will be “disinformation experts.”

The move by the two Democratic senators – Michael Bennet and Peter Welch – seems to have come in concert with congressional testimony delivered by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, since the bill was presented shortly afterwards, and backs Altman’s idea to form a new federal agency of the kind.

Altman had more thoughts on how all this should work – the new agency, according to him, might be given the power to restrict AI development via licenses or credentialing.

The speed with which the two senators picked up on this to announce their bill may owe to the fact Bennet “only” had to go back and update one he already introduced in 2022. This time around, the proposed legislation has been changed in a number of ways, most notably by redefining what a digital platform is.

The bill wants this definition to also cover those companies that provide content “primarily” generated by algorithmic processes. This is done by proposing that the future Commission be given the authority over how personal information is used in decision-making or content generation, which is thought to specifically refer to tech like ChatGPT.

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Busted: These 6 members of Congress violated a federal conflicts-of-interest law

At least six more members of Congress have violated the STOCK Act by failing to disclose transactions — up to $376,280 collectively — within a 45-day federal deadline, according to Raw Story analysis of congressional financial documents.

The majority of the late disclosure dollars came from Rep. Jonathan Jackson (D-IL) who was late in disclosing up to $300,000 in stock transactions from a joint trust.

He is joined by five other lawmakers who were late in disclosing transactions in the $1,000-to-$15,000 range: Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-MI), Rep. Russ Fulcher (R-ID), Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-OH), Rep. Deborah Ross (D-NC) and Rep. John Sarbanes (D-MD).

The lawmakers aren’t alone in violating the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act this week.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), who last year led Democratic House leadership’s self-aborted effort to ban congressional stock trading, violated the STOCK Act with up to $265,000 in late financial disclosures, Raw Story reported on Wednesday.

Raw Story also broke the news last week that Rep. Dan Bishop (R-NC) was late in disclosing up to $5 million in U.S. Treasury note purchases.

The ongoing violations come at a time when a bipartisan group of lawmakers have introduced several similar bills aimed at banning congressional stock trading.

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Deja blue: Printer’s flub makes every Nassau County voter a Democrat

An upstate printer has once again screwed up downstate election materials, this time by mailing registration cards to Nassau County’s nearly 1 million voters — identifying them all as Democrats.

“It’s a terrible error. People are upset. People are angry. There is a lot of confusion,” GOP County Executive Bruce Blakeman seethed at a Tuesday press conference.

Democrats make up about 40 percent of the county’s 972,000 voters, according to state Board of Election records from February.

Blakeman ruled out partisanship as a likely cause of the mistake but said the county is investigating what did happen.

This week’s flub by the Rochester-based Phoenix Graphics comes two years after the company messed up absentee ballots for 100,000 Brooklynites shortly before the 2020 election, prompting outrage from voters concerned about whether their votes would count. The mistake extended into Nassau County as well, where nearly 800 people also received botched ballots.

Phoenix will now pay the roughly $300,000 needed to resend a correct registration card to every Nassau voter, Democratic County Election Commissioner Jim Scheuerman told The Post.

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Clintons in the crosshairs…again! Republicans demand new probe into Bill and Hillary after report reveals FBI top brass shut down FOUR criminal investigations into millions of dollars in foreign donations and speaker fees

The FBI had at least four criminal investigations into Hillary and Bill Clinton that were ultimately shut down months before the presidential election in 2016, a new Justice Department report reveals – and Republicans want to reopen those probes.

A long-awaited report by Special Counsel John Durham released on Monday shows the FBI began investigating claims in late 2014 from a ‘well-placed’ confidential source that two foreign governments were trying to make illegal donations to buy influence with Hillary during her presidential campaign. 

Investigators were even offered documents of one alleged $2,700 illegal contribution that led to a ‘substantial’ further donation.

The bombshell report also reveals three different FBI field offices, in Washington, D.C., Little Rock, Arkansas, and New York, launched investigations into the Clinton Foundation in early 2016 for ‘possible criminal activity.’ 

One of the investigations was partly based on statements made in journalist Peter Schweizer’s 2015 book, Clinton Cash, claiming the Clintons’ charity was taking millions in donations from foreign governments trying to change US foreign policy while Hillary was Secretary of State. 

But despite making progress, all four criminal investigations were shut down by senior officials, Durham found. 

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We Asked Every California Congressional Democrat If They Support Their State’s Reparation Plan. Here’s What They Said

The Daily Caller News Foundation asked every Democratic member of Congress from California if they supported their state’s ambitious reparations plan, finding that just two would go on the record regarding the proposal.

California’s Reparations Task Force voted Saturday to send a plan to the legislature that would, if approved, pay out $800 billion in reparations to black citizens. Despite numerous attempts to contact members, only one Democrat in California’s Congressional delegation, which numbers 42 members, responded to inquiries.

The office of Democratic Rep. Mark DeSaulnier deferred to Democratic Rep. Barbara Lee’s opinions when contacted by the DCNF.

“We think checking in with our neighbor Rep. Lee would be best given her work on this issue,” Mairead Glowacki, a spokesperson for DeSaulnier, who represents California’s 10th Congressional District, covering Concord and San Ramon, told the DCNF.

Lee, who represents Oakland in the San Francisco Bay Area and is a former Congressional Black Caucus chair, has expressed support for the plan, which would see eligible black Californians receive up to $1.2 million in payments, on average. These include a housing discrimination payment of $148,099, a mass incarceration payment of $115,260 and an annual yearly payment of $13,619 for health care disparities, assuming an average lifespan of 71 years, according to the recommendations.

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Woke Tennessee Rep. Justin Jones accused of covering up sexual assaults by homeless man

Infamous Democratic Tennessee House Rep. Justin Jones allegedly covered up two sexual assaults committed by a homeless man, according to a 2020 Facebook post made by fellow activist Jeneisha Harris and recently unearthed by journalist Matt Murphy.

In the post, Harris said Jones witnessed two women get assaulted during a protest, then told the victims not to report the incident to police out of fears it would shift the “narrative” of the event, which he was supporting.

“For almost a week now, there has been a group of protestors demonstrating outside the Capitol to advocate for the removal of Nathan Bedford’s bust,” Harris wrote. “Last night, a homeless man sexually assaulted two women who were protesting. Two different incidents. Same man.”

She explained that Jones, “Nashville’s favorite activist,” witnessed the attack, but when the group suggested that it should be reported, he said the women had to stay silent “because it would change the narrative of why they’re actually protesting,” and that, “the incident would overpower the advocacy.”

Harris went on slam Jones for embodying the “egotistical, prideful, and patriarchal activism” in Nashville, and said that even she, someone who never trusted the police, wanted the women to report the homeless man to achieve some level of protection.

“F*ck you to Justin, his fake activism and anyone who defends what he did,” she stated, unapologetically.

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These Senators Want the Federal Government To Verify Your Age Online

Despite their many disagreements, Republicans and Democrats have developed a common affinity for social media regulation, largely relying on the disputed assumption that platforms like Instagram and TikTok severely degrade children’s mental health. The latest regulatory proposal in Congress is the Protecting Kids on Social Media Act, sponsored by a bipartisan group of four senators: Sens. Brian Schatz (D–Hawaii), Tom Cotton (R–Ark.), Chris Murphy (D–Conn.), and Katie Britt (R–Ala.).

The bill features several flawed policies, drawing from recent state and federal social media proposals. It would require social media platforms to verify the age of every would-be user. Platforms could allow the unverified to view content, but not to interact with it or with other users. After providing age verification to register an account, underage teens would need proof of parental consent. Those under 13 years old would be completely barred from registering accounts.

The bill does propose one novel—and potentially dangerous—innovation. It would establish a “pilot program” for a federally run verification system. This system would ascertain social media users’ age and, for teen users, confirm parental consent.

Age verification mandates, which invariably entail intrusive data gathering, threaten user data privacy and security. They also violate the individual’s right to speak freely and anonymously online. Although the bill’s authors sought to mitigate the risks their implementation would pose to users, they largely failed. Such risks are inextricable from the process of age verification itself. The bill proposes a legal safe harbor for social media platforms that choose to use the pilot program. To avoid even the appearance of noncompliance, many platforms will do just that.

The proposed pilot program would require would-be social media users to submit documentation to the Department of Commerce in order to verify their age. In return, the pilot program would provide a “credential” to be submitted to social media platforms. Users would verify parental consent by the same process. To administer the program, the government would necessarily obtain and store troves of personal data on American social media users—to prove regulatory compliance, if nothing else.

To protect user privacy, the bill directs Commerce to “keep no records of the social media platforms where users have verified their identity.” It would also forbid the agency from sharing user data with platforms or law enforcement without user consent, a court order, or a program-specific fraud or oversight investigation.

Nonetheless, the bill would require users to register personal information with state authorities simply to speak online. Government agencies, under a legal pretext, could retrieve from social media platforms the records necessary to identify user accounts. Democrats have long been skeptical of the federal government’s data abuses, but both parties—including newly skeptical Republicans—ought to understand these risks.

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