Question Thy Masters Not

Indian Wells banker: Questions got him fired

An Indian Wells banker and executive, Haddon Libby was accustomed to asking questions and getting answers.

Trying to stay within a three-minute time limit, he began firing off financial questions at an Aug. 4 City Council meeting. He expected answers about council perks and compensation — specifically the city manager's pension.

But he wasn't prepared for what he got — phone calls and emails to his boss from the city's top leader. Then he was fired.

Indian Wells City Manager Greg Johnson attempted to silence the dissent after Libby followed up with a written public information request to the city, documents obtained by The Desert Sun show.

There were at least four email exchanges between Johnson and Libby's boss, Scott F. Kavanaugh, CEO of First Foundation Inc., on separate occasions between Aug. 9 and Sept. 7. The exchanges escalated, becoming increasingly aggressive.

That includes an initial email Aug. 9 from Johnson to Kavanaugh requesting a public apology from Libby, saying: “As a representative of First Foundation Bank, Mr. Libby will be held accountable for his comments now and into the future.”

On Sept. 8, Libby said he was fired from his job. He contends it was because Johnson dragged his employer into the fray.

“I've never done anything, but ask questions,” Libby, 49, and former senior vice president and director of the bank's desert region, said. “The bank made it clear that I was on thin ice.

“I think people should be afraid when you have people that operate like this. They work for us. We don't work for them.”

Kavanaugh declined to comment on Libby's dismissal, calling it a personnel matter. He referred questions to Lisa Carlson in the bank's human resources department. She did not return multiple phone calls Tuesday.

But Kavanuagh did say that in his more than 20 years in the banking industry, he has never been contacted by a city official regarding an employee's comments during a public meeting.

Johnson “did call me out of the blue and wanted to inform me of this, but short of that I don't have anything further to say,” Kavanaugh said Monday. He said he spoke to Johnson twice by phone.

[....]

Read the rest of Nicole C. Brambila's report at The Desert Sun.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was unavailable for comment.

Good News: Media Now Has a Word To Describe State's Rights Advocates

It looks like a new style sheet has come out which dictates that any conservative cause or issue can now be described by adding the suffix -er to the end of the issue name.

First it was birth-ers, then Tea Bagg-ers, and now it is tenth-ers.

What are tenthers? It is used to describe people who advocate for state's rights as outlined in the Tenth Amendment of the Constitution.

The movement is garnering attention and several states have passed resolutions expressing support of their rights, and not just from the south for all you that want to immediately scream racism.

Their message is loud and clear: Big government is out of control; states need to take back their constitutional rights.

A movement has been growing over the past two years of urging states to exert their rights under the 10th Amendment. The Amendment, part of the Bill of Rights, states: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

A number of states have passed resolutions that assert their rights. While the resolutions have no legal teeth, they're intended to carry a message: States' rights are being trampled on.

The CNN article spends a lot of time focusing on the matter in Georgia and uses a column written by an AJC columnist named Jay Bookman.

The basic thrust or tone is to paint a picture of how support of state's rights is a prelude to another civil war.

After the Georgia Senate's move in April 2009 for sovereignty, Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist Jay Bookman wrote that this push has a "particularly nasty legacy."

"It helped precipitate the Civil War, and in the 1950s and early '60s it was cited by Southern states claiming the right to ignore Supreme Court rulings ordering the end of segregation," he wrote.

Right, Jay. It was actually New Hampshire that got the ball rolling on this movement. To date 37 states have introduced or voted on their own resolutions affirming state's rights, with Alaska and Tennessee actually getting their governor's signatures on the legislation.

It is more then state's rights being trampled on, it is out and out blackmail. The federal government learned long ago that they could threaten states by withholding funds if states didn't agree certain federal laws. You know, like the 55 MPH speed limit. If your state didn't play ball then they got no money from the transportation budget.

The counter argument is that states can make the hard choice to refuse the money, which is true to a point. At what point can a state tell the federal government that since they are getting no return for the tax dollars that their citizens are sending in, they have directed their citizens to quit paying any federal tax, or better yet, just step in and intercept those funds and prevent them from going to Washington.

How long before the Treasury Department agents descend upon the state? A lot quicker then you would see Homeland Security coming in to do a sweep for illegal aliens, I bet.

How many parts of the Bill of Rights have the liberals now come out in opposition to?

We have the First Amendment they are trying to overturn in wake of the recent Supreme Court ruling regarding campaign finance.

They have always been against the Second Amendment.

Now the Tenth Amendment.

Dems Pushing Constitutional Amendment To Overturn The First Amendment

The progressives in the congress are in high dander over the recent Supreme Court ruling that struck down portions of the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Law. It really was a matter of free speech and not corporate financing like the progressives are trying to paint it. I knew when I saw the extension on the web address, i.e., the dot org rather then the traditional dot com, that this was a far left liberal site. That is one of the surest signs of a liberal site, just like the media not mentioning a party affiliation in the reporting of a scandal automatically triggers a intuitive guess that it involves a Democrat.

Well they have taken the next illogical step, mainly proposing a constitutional amendment to repeal the First Amendment. The amendment is being cosponsored by Donna Edwards (D-MD) and John Conyers (D-MI) among others.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

John Kerry, fearing for his Senate seat maybe, and making an appeal to the far left in his party went even a little further.

I think we need a constitutional amendment to make it clear once and for all that corporations do not have the same free speech rights as individuals.

So who is it that contributes to Ms Edwards Campaign? The usual suspects, unions and SEIU in particular.



As for John Conyers, well he doesn't seem to have a problem taking campaign donations from some of those evil corporations. Among the list of contributors to his campaign are Microsoft and Comcast.



Don't you just love the hypocrisy?

Open Secrets has modified their page which displays the biggest contributors to political campaigns. They removed the name of who it is that receives the most from the various industries.

Guess it is a good thing I got a screen shot, huh?

EPA Lawyers Challenging the White House 'Truth' Machine

Dare to oppose the party line? Prepare to have your life and liberties turned upside down. Dissent is to be crushed. I don't care if you are Fox News, a health insurance company, or simply private citizens who question the propaganda coming out of this administration.

Laurie Williams and husband Alan Zabel worked as lawyers for the Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, in its San Francisco office for more than 20 years, and they know more about climate change than most politicians. But when the couple released a video on the Internet expressing their concerns over the Obama administration’s plans to use cap-and-trade legislation to fight climate change, they were told to keep it to themselves.

Williams and Zabel oppose cap and trade -- a controversial government allowance program in which companies are issued emissions limits, or caps, which they can then trade -- as a means to fight climate change.

Here is the video that Williams and Zabel produced that is causing all the hand-wringing and the attempted denial of First Amendment rights of these two EPA lawyers.

An Arab lectures an American citizen on the First Amendment

Too good to pass up. This is from the Arab newspaper. it appears that a certain Ms Lin Hansen, wrote in a letter taking the columnist to task for one of his opinion pieces. In part she wrote:

while writing her article, “Fatin Bundagji conveniently forgot, as Arab writers usually do, that the US was attacked by Arab terrorists which led to retaliatory action in the Middle East and out of America. All those glorious outreach programs she was describing that America used to do would still be in effect and there would be no war waging at the moment if the radical Arabs kept their opinions and hatred of American policies in the academic or political arena... the majority of Americans are getting pretty fed up with handling out billions of dollars in aid, education, medical care, technological advancements, and religious tolerance and so on to a world of egocentric ingrates”.

To which I say Bravo!
Well Fatin Bundagji wasn't going to take that kneeling on a prayer rug, and decided to devote a column on lecturing Ms Hansen on the First Amendment. He cites a retired University of CA professor, yes you know where this going,

“All serious and intelligent journalists today know that the US government has massive media management brigades to carefully control what Americans see and, thus, what they are very likely to believe about things of which they have no direct experience, such as high-level politics, finance and foreign affairs. They also know that the government is extremely effective in secretly censoring the news by using devices such as ‘embedded reporting’ in nations like Afghanistan and Iraq which the US government invades, occupies, and governs.

Gee if the government has that much control why is the New York Times still in business after all of the classified information they have chosen to put on the front page and their blatant disdain for the current administration that they exhibit every day.
The main thrust of Fatin's commentary is that our news is controlled by the government in bed with the major news agencies. He (she) tells us to use Google a couple of times. Might I suggest she do the same thing and look up blogger and internet. Or just check out a local jail since many bloggers in that part of the world are there.