Boots & Sabers

The blogging will continue until morale improves...

Month: September 2016

Wisconsin to Finish Year With Surplus

Good news!

The state will end the biennium with an $87 million surplus if it collects as much in taxes in the 2017 fiscal year as expected, according to fiscal bureau director Bob Lang. The surplus amount reflects a $101 million deferral of debt payment and legislation adopted this past session. It doesn’t include any adjustments in spending.

Free Magazine Offered on 1st Day of School

That’s how I interpret this story from the Washington County Insider.

The West Bend School District sent a note home to parents after a teacher discovered a loaded pistol magazine near McLane Elementary School.

West Bend Police said they received a call from a teacher at the school at 1:30 p.m.  Police conducted an extensive search and no firearms were located on school grounds.

It was determined that no students were in danger.

Milwaukee Police Chief Blames Soft Justice System for Violence

He’s mostly right.

“We’ve had a slight increase in domestic violence homicides this year but the biggest driver of our homicides is arguments and fights and retaliation among people with criminal records,” Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn said Thursday.

“Some of our challenge is simply consistently being able to deter armed offending through the criminal justice system,” he added. “The penalties are too weak.”

The penalties are fine. What’s weak are the prosecutors and judges who too often fail to implement them.

Iran Takes More Hostages After Obama Ransom

From their perspective, it never hurts to have a few Americans to bargain with when they want something from us.

At least half a dozen other dual-national Iranians, including at least three other Iranian-Americans, have been arrested on similar charges in the past year.

News of the latest arrest came on the same day that the Iranian parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy committee met members of the intelligence wing of the Revolutionary Guards.

Kaepernick Wears Pig Socks

What a jerk.

After the head of a national police organization blasted Colin Kaepernick on Thursday for wearing socks with cartoon pigs in police hats, the San Francisco 49ers quarterback said he didn’t want the apparel to distract from his protest of racial inequalities in America.

On Instagram, Kaepernick said he wore the socks in practice to make a statement — but he did so before he took a public stance by refusing to stand for the national anthem at preseason games.

Sleazy Clintons Caught Being Sleazy Again

Even though the Clintons are making millions of dollars a year, they still think that the middle class taxpayer should pay for their stuff.

Bill Clinton’s staff used a decades-old federal government program, originally created to keep former presidents out of the poorhouse, to subsidize his family’s foundation and an associated business, and to support his wife’s private email server, a POLITICO investigation has found.

Taxpayer cash was used to buy IT equipment — including servers — housed at the Clinton Foundation, and also to supplement the pay and benefits of several aides now at the center of the email and cash-for-access scandals dogging Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

This investigation, which is based on records obtained from the General Services Administration through the Freedom of Information Act, does not reveal anything illegal. But it does offer fresh evidence of how the Clintons blurred the line between their nonprofit foundation, Hillary Clinton’s State Department, and the business dealings of Bill Clinton and the couple’s aides.

The thousands of pages of newly uncovered records reveal sometimes granular detail about how Bill Clinton’s representatives directed the spending of taxpayer cash allocated by the GSA under the Former President’s Act.
The Act authorizes the GSA to fund the pensions, correspondence, support staff and travel of ex-presidents. It was passed in 1958 to “maintain the dignity” of the presidency by helping former commanders in chief avoid hard times like those that befell Harry S. Truman. He complained that, without help from Uncle Sam, he would be forced to “go ahead with some contracts to keep ahead of the hounds.”

Iran Granted Exemptions In Nuclear Deal

This deal was bad even before we knew of all of the secret provisos. The more we learn about it, the worse it gets.

The report says “most of the conditions” laid out in the agreement “were met by Iran” but it also claims Iran would have not been in compliance by January 16, 2016, the deal’s so-called Implementation Day, without the exemptions to the requirement that Iran limit its stockpile of low enriched uranium to under 300-kilograms. The exemptions supposedly pertained to uranium in “waste form,” according to the report, but the authors noted that that waste was potentially recoverable.
The report’s authors, David Albright and Andrea Stricker, went on to blast President Barack Obama’s administration for keeping these exemptions secret.
“Any rationale for keeping these exemptions secret appears unjustified,” the report said.
Albright told CNN that the additional low enriched uranium could reduce the amount of time needed for Iran to develop a nuclear bomb if it decided to break the accord.
The report said another exemption allowed Iran to operate 19 “hot cells” larger than specified in the accords, larger hot cells could be used to produce plutonium, which can also be used to produce a nuclear weapon.
Obama was so intent on getting this deal done to build his legacy that he has put the U.S. and the world in more danger.

Polls Narrow in Wisconsin

The latest Marquette Law School Poll is out. The race appears to be narrowing in Wisconsin.

Among likely voters, i.e., those who say they are certain they will vote in November, Clinton is supported by 45 percent and Trump by 42 percent in the new poll, with 10 percent saying they will support neither candidate. In the early August poll, 52 percent of likely voters supported Clinton, while Trump was backed by 37 percent and 10 percent said they had no preference. In July, likely voters gave Clinton 45 percent support and Trump 41 percent, while 14 percent said they lacked a preference.

[…]

In a head-to-head matchup for Wisconsin’s U.S. Senate race among registered voters, Russ Feingold receives 46 percent to Ron Johnson’s 42 percent, with 9 percent lacking a preference. In early August, Feingold had 49 percent and Johnson had 43 percent. In July, Feingold had 48 percent support and Johnson 41 percent.

With such bad candidates on the presidential ticket, I think that a lot of the occasional voters will stay home, thus making this race all about turning out the base. If that’s the case, then the GOP has the tougher slog since a sizable portion of people who used to be the GOP base won’t vote for Trump.

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