The below was sent to me by a HALC member.  He asked me, rhetorically in his comments, if the Harris County DA’s prosecutor/spokeswoman thinks the increase in officer-involved shootings are really caused by law-abiding citizens practicing their Second Amendment rights.

I’d also like to add my own thought.. the first paragraph of the story linked below is very telling:

“The head of a city police union thinks it’s the economy. A community activist blames permissive prosecutors. Prosecutors point to expanded gun rights.”  [Read, liberally-slanted mainstream media, "MSM."]

Hmmm….  well, I guess we should outlaw pencil erasers too, since every year approximately 20 people choke to death on erasers on the ends of pencils they’ve stuck in their mouths.  And we can’t have anyone doing that any more, can we? ===================================================

In a Houston Chronicle article about officer involved shootings in Harris County, one Donna Hawkins, prosecutor and spokesperson for DA Lykos, is cited:

Hawkins said there are several factors leading to the rise in shootings.

Read the rest of this entry »

Note from HALC: This article was originally printed in the September 2009 edition of Atlantic Magazine and is available freely online. In my personal opinion, this is one of the most thorough and well-thought analysis of the healthcare issue and deserves a read by everyone genuinely interested. Goldhill’s journey takes you to the conclusion you probably already know – that healthcare costs (true costs – not just what people pay) are obscured by government intervention and a return to market solutions is the only way to fix it.

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After the needless death of his father, the author, a business executive, began a personal exploration of a health-care industry that for years has delivered poor service and irregular quality at astonishingly high cost. It is a system, he argues, that is not worth preserving in anything like its current form. And the health-care reform now being contemplated will not fix it. Here’s a radical solution to an agonizing problem.

by David Goldhill

How American Health Care Killed My Father

Illustration by Mark Hooper

ALMOST TWO YEARS ago, my father was killed by a hospital-borne infection in the intensive-care unit of a well-regarded nonprofit hospital in New York City. Dad had just turned 83, and he had a variety of the ailments common to men of his age. But he was still working on the day he walked into the hospital with pneumonia. Within 36 hours, he had developed sepsis. Over the next five weeks in the ICU, a wave of secondary infections, also acquired in the hospital, overwhelmed his defenses. My dad became a statistic—merely one of the roughly 100,000 Americans whose deaths are caused or influenced by infections picked up in hospitals. One hundred thousand deaths: more than double the number of people killed in car crashes, five times the number killed in homicides, 20 times the total number of our armed forces killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Another victim in a building American tragedy.

About a week after my father’s death, The New Yorker ran an article by Atul Gawandeprofiling the efforts of Dr. Peter Pronovost to reduce the incidence of fatal hospital-borne infections. Pronovost’s solution? A simple checklist of ICU protocols governing physician hand-washing and other basic sterilization procedures. Hospitals implementing Pronovost’s checklist had enjoyed almost instantaneous success, reducing hospital-infection rates by two-thirds within the first three months of its adoption. But many physicians rejected the checklist as an unnecessary and belittling bureaucratic intrusion, and many hospital executives were reluctant to push it on them. The story chronicled Pronovost’s travels around the country as he struggled to persuade hospitals to embrace his reform. Read the rest of this entry »

http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/46640
[Links added by HALC.us staff.]

By Michelle Malkin
Listen to Commentary Podcasts

What and who exactly are President Obama’s homeland security officials afraid of these days? If you are a member of an active conservative group that opposes abortion, favors strict immigration enforcement, lobbies to protect Second Amendment rights, protests big government, advocates federalism or represents veterans who believe in any of the above, the answer is: You.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has turned her attention away from acts of Islamic jihad on American soil (which she now refers to as “man-caused disasters”). Instead, her department is sounding the alarm over an unquantified “resurgence” in “right-wing extremism activity.”

On Apr. 7, DHS sent a nine-page warning memo to law enforcement offices across the country entitled “Right-wing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment.”

Read the rest of this entry »

[Thanks to Srav from We the People of Texas Meetup.com group for bringing this post to my attention.]

“Shariah (Islamic law) Finance expert and Columbia MBA Joy Brighton describes the threat of financial institutions embracing Shariah Finance as a banking and investment product. It is a new form of cultural Jihad with terror supporting implications.

Two videos will help you understand what Shariah Finance really is…”

[Original story from http://news.lp.findlaw.com/ap/o/1110/09-25-2009/20090925053507_23.html.  Hypertext added by HALC.us staff, photos’ sources as noted.]

By KATIE NELSON Associated Press Writer

Photo by Isaac Reese, © Institute for Justice, 2004

There are a few signs of life: Feral cats glare at visitors from a miniature jungle of Queen Anne’s lace, thistle and goldenrod. Gulls swoop between the lot’s towering trees and the adjacent sewage treatment plant.

But what of the promised building boom that was supposed to come wrapped and ribboned with up to 3,169 new jobs and $1.2 million a year in tax revenues? They are noticeably missing.

Proponents of the ambitious plan blame the sour economy. Opponents call it a “poetic justice.”

“They are getting what they deserve. They are going to get nothing,” said Susette Kelo, the lead plaintiff in the landmark property rights case. “I don’t think this is what the United States Supreme Court justices had in mind when they made this decision.”

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2008753858_opina18ramsey.html

Read the rest of this entry »

Cleveland OH Detective Cole finds an already-vacant forclosed home and entered with his weapon drawn, guarding against squatters. World Press Photo judges chose this image as World Press Photo of the Year. (http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1738458_1585589,00.html.)

Everyone knows that California is broke.  This video takes you on the ground so you can see why. Florida and Nevada have similar scenes and this is where all the “growth” was in the first half of the 21st century that made investors so confident.

Every empty store, every empty house represents a loan that’s not going to get paid back which represents a lender who will have less money to lend.

How long will it take to digest the inventory “overhang” (the real estate equivalent of a hang over?)

I have no idea, but it sure won’t be a year or two. This is a financial apocalypse.

What the fires don’t get, the bankers will. Banks are actually tearing down brand new houses in California because they can’t sell them at any price and they can’t afford to pay the taxes and expenses to maintain them. Here’s what it looks like on the ground. Check out the top video on the page.

Here is Rep. Ron Paul’s speech (R-TX) to Congress that he used to introduce H.R. 1207 on February 26, 2009.

A full hearing by the Committee on Financial Services was held today (9/25/09) at 9:00 a.m. in Washington D.C. for H.R. 1207, the Federal Reserve Transparency Act of 2009.

Here is the audio of that hearing, with timelapse still photos.

Uh-oh…. That guy didn’t just call that our glorious, hope bearing, change bringing, savior a border-destroying, baby-murdering, mortgage reneging, conscious-less, Communist illegal alien, birth certificate-hiding, presidency-usurping abomination?  Oh no, he did-unt!!  I just can’t believe in that CHANGE for the worst.  I HOPE someone will call the ACLU, Rev. Jackson or Rev. Sharpton!  Call Oprah!

Video and story from YouTube.com, user “keyes2008.”

Dr. Alan Keyes was a featured speaker at a fundraiser for the Triple A Crisis Pregnancy Center in Hastings, Nebraska, on February 19, 2009, where a reporter from KHAS-TV interviewed him about his thoughts on Obama. With conviction, Alan firmly stated that Obama is a radical communist (which he is) and a usurper (which he has done since he hasn’t produced an original birth certificate). And that Obama supports infanticide–the killing of babies born alive after botched abortions. Read the rest of this entry »

A few months back, the Houston Area Liberty Campaign’s Micah Jackson wrote an article on the Audit the Fed rally in front of the Houston Federal Reserve Bank, for The Red Pub.  The Red Pub is a Houston-based Progressive leaning online publication.

A true fiscal conservative protects the taxpayers even when it will raise the ire of those around them. Comptroller Susan Combs inherited a structurally-flawed college program known as the Texas Tomorrow Fund.

In recent days she has taken difficult, but necessary, actions to protect the integrity of the fund. More importantly, she has protected the taxpayers who will ultimately bear any risks the fund’s structure might create.

The change in policy stops the payment of financial benefits to participants who cancel their contracts with the fund. In plain English: the Tomorrow Fund cannot be used as a taxpayer-backed, all-purpose savings plan. The fund was designed to let parents lock in tuition rates at Texas’ colleges with a structured savings plan.

From day-one it was about providing for college, not funding vacations or supplementing investment portfolios. Whether the Tomorrow Fund should have ever been created is a separate issue and beside the point, it exists. It is the comptroller’s responsibility to keep the fund solvent; otherwise, taxpayers are on the hook for making good on the contracts as the tuition bills come due.

When Comptroller Combs announced the policy change, she was criticized by some with varying motives. The plan should, and does, allow folks to take out their money if the child no longer needs the funds. At the same time, the contracts for those using this savings plan specifically allow the rules for withdrawing the money to be altered.

There are two important points for those currently in the fund:

1. If you use it for a child’s college education, despite stock market conditions the investment remains fully protected by the state constitution, and
2. It is probably an even better deal than originally intended when one considers the rising cost of tuition over the last decade.

But it should be such a deal only if used for the purpose intended: to save for college. Unfortunately, some have sought to use the Texas Tomorrow Fund as little more than a taxpayer-backed hedge fund. The old rules allowed people who canceled their contracts to not only get their money back, but also substantial interest from the taxpayers. That is unsustainable. Read the rest of this entry »