After a homeowner was sent to the hospital with severe burns when a natural gas explosion damaged his home, the city threatened him with fines for not mowing his lawn.
The post City Slaps Burn Victim with Violation for Not Mowing Lawn While He Was in the Hospital appeared first on The Free Thought Project.
A large group of well-armed good samaritans took to the streets this week to openly break a bad law to help the homeless and those less fortunate.
"Just if we saw Confederacy named in it, we then highlighted it" says a school board spokesperson while describing a list which contained Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, and Sam Houston.
The Dallas Independent School District is in damage control mode after an internal school board list was obtained by local press which shows schools under consideration for name changes due to possible "connections with slavery or the Confederacy." News of the list, obtained by the Dallas Morning News early this week, caused outrage for the fact that it includes Texas revolutionaries and founders such as Sam Houston, James Bowie and William Travis, as well as Dallas pioneers James Gaston and William Brown Miller. It further names other early American figures who very obviously lived long before the existence of the Confederacy such as U.S. presidents Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and, inexplicably, Ben Franklin.
Battle of the Alamo: Even the Texas revolutionary defenders of the iconic Alamo were on a list of "controversial" historical figures which Dallas ISD needed to "research" for review of whether school names could stay.
Of course, William Travis and Jim Bowie both died at the Alamo in 1836 while the Confederacy didn"t come into existence until 1861. Sam Houston too lived most of his entire life before the civil war and was perhaps the greatest Native American rights supporter of the time, and was adopted as an "honorary Cherokee" by the tribe, having also married a Cherokee woman. Ben Franklin, one of the American founding fathers named on the Dallas ISD list, was a vocal abolitionist. It is stunning and extremely worrisome that school board trustees would be both so historically illiterate and politically correct that they would put such names on the list in the first place.
Dallas school board member Dustin Marshall confirmed the list via social media. It"s amazing that even founding fathers like Ben Franklin - an early vocal abolitionist - or Declaration of Independence author Thomas Jefferson should have to be debated.
But Dallas ISD is currently attempting to backtrack and spin the narrative now that the leaked list is receiving so much push back from Texans. There"s likely some level of embarrassment which motivated the new stance as well. A subsequent Dallas Morning News update explained, "Instead of more research, the district is focusing on a narrow set of parameters to only rethink schools named after Confederate generals, said chief of school leadership Stephanie Elizalde." The board now claims that while the original list was merely for "research" purposes, it is only four schools that are being seriously considered to undergo a name change: Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, Albert Sidney Johnston and William L. Cabell elementary schools.
Disturbingly, it appears that "research" into Confederate links is being conducted by a mere one person staff, this according to language used by board spokesperson Stephanie Elizalde. She was quoted further in The Dallas Morning News:
The additional names were never part of any specific renaming plan. Instead, Elizalde said, the list was originally so broad because she wanted to do "due diligence" on the names of the district"s 226 campuses.
"The more I researched, the more I was going to find," she said.
The more detailed explanation of her methodology is strange considering many of the names that actually made the school board"s list:
This was just a very quick review of looking at the biographies of the individuals, and if there was any association with Confederacy — not making a judgment for or against — just if we saw Confederacy named in it, we then highlighted it. We are now in the process of doing a second [look].
Yet that doesn"t explain how authors of America"s founding documents and Texas revolutionary came to be "highlighted", unless the Dallas school board"s knowledge of history is really that appalling (a real possibility it seems).
Rod Dreher, writing for The American Conservative, summarized the sad state of Dallas ISD with the following:
Imagine the impoverishment of the minds who believe the most significant thing to know about Jefferson, Madison, and Franklin, is that they were in some way tainted by slavery. Imagine the ignorance of school leaders who are going to investigate whether William Travis and Jim Bowie — both of whom died in 1836 at the Alamo — could have been involved with the Confederacy, which came into existence in 1861...
It’s disgusting, this iconoclasm. In 2015, 40 percent of DISD’s schools received a failing grade from the state. To be fair, over 90 percent of DISD’s students come from low income homes, meaning that the school system has tremendous barriers to overcome in educating them. Still, the fact that the DISD trustees are even considering a cosmetic, p.c. gesture like this is a farce.
As we"ve asked many times before: who will the PC mob come for next? If there"s talk of purging history - even Texas history in Texas schools - then clearly it can and likely will happen anywhere. Will there perhaps be a future time when Texans themselves will no longer "Remember the Alamo!"...?
DMHinIrving/FlickrDALLAS, Tex. (INTELLIHUB) — The 14-foot tall statue of American Confederate soldier Robert E. Lee was removed from its pedestal on Friday after members of the City Council voted on September 6 to erase it from history.
Workers removed the statue on Friday under armed police escort as some onlookers and members of the press captured a glance.
ABC News reports: “The statue was lowered onto a flatbed trailer for transport to an abandoned naval air station owned by the city on its western outskirts. It’s expected to remain there until city officials decide the statue’s future.”
Ladies and gentlemen, this is how the communists erased history in the past and it is being done right here in America and few seem to care.
Will the Alt-Left succeed at erasing all Confederate monuments from American history?
Will the #AltLeft succeed at erasing all Confederate monuments from American history?
— Intellihub (@intellihubnews) September 15, 2017
Shepard Ambellas is an opinion journalist, analyst, and the founder and editor-in-chief of Intellihub News & Politics (Intellihub.com). Shepard is also known for producing Shade: The Motion Picture (2013) and appearing on Travel Channel’s America Declassified (2013). Shepard is a regular contributor to Infowars. Read more from Shep’s World. Follow Shep on Facebook and Twitter.We first introduced readers to the Dallas Police and Fire Pension (DPFP) crisis last summer in a post entitled "Dallas Cops" Pension Fund Nears Insolvency In Wake Of Shady Real Estate Deals, FBI Raid." For those who have managed to avoid this particular storyline for the past 15 months, here is a brief recap of how it all started from our original post on the topic:
The Dallas Police & Fire Pension (DPFP), which covers nearly 10,000 police and firefighters, is on the verge of collapse as its board and the City of Dallas struggle to pitch benefit cuts to save the plan from complete failure. According the the National Real Estate Investor, DPFP was once applauded for it"s "diverse investment portfolio" but turns out it may have all been a fraud as the pension"s former real estate investment manager, CDK Realy Advisors, was raided by the FBI in April 2016 and the fund was subsequently forced to mark down their entire real estate book by 32%. Guess it"s pretty easy to generate good returns if you manage a book of illiquid assets that can be marked at your "discretion".
To provide a little background, per the Dallas Morning News, Richard Tettamant served as the DPFP"s administrator for a couple of decades right up until he was forced out in June 2014. Starting in 2005, Tettamant oversaw a plan to "diversify" the pension into "hard assets" and away from the "risky" stock market...because there"s no risk if you don"t have to mark your book every day. By the time the "diversification" was complete, Tettamant had invested half of the DPFP"s assets in, effectively, the housing bubble. Investments included a $200mm luxury apartment building in Dallas, luxury Hawaiian homes, a tract of undeveloped land in the Arizona desert, Uruguayan timber, the American Idol production company and a resort in Napa.
Despite huge exposure to bubbly 2005/2006 vintage real estate investments, DPFP assets "performed" remarkably well throughout the "great recession." But as it turns out, Tettamant"s "performance" was only as good as the illiquidity of his investments. We guess returns are easier to come by when you invest your whole book in illiquid, private assets and have "discretion" over how they"re valued.
In 2015, after Tettamant"s ouster, $600mm of DPFP real estate assets were transferred to new managers away from the fund"s prior real estate manager, CDK Realty Advisors. Turns out the new managers were not "comfortable" with CDK"s asset valuations and the mark downs started. According to the Dallas Morning News, one such questionable real estate investment involved a piece of undeveloped land in the Arizona desert near Tucson which was purchased for $27mm in 2006 and subsequently sold in 2014 for $7.5mm.
Then the plot thickened when, in April 2016, according the Dallas Morning News, FBI raided the offices of the pension"s former investment manager, CDK Realty Advisors. There has been little disclosure on the reason for the FBI raid but one could speculate that it might have something to do with all the markdowns the pension was forced to take in 2015 on its real estate book. At it"s peak, CDK managed $750mm if assets for the DPFP.
The sudden implosion of the fund left active-duty Dallas police and firemen wondering whether that pension check they had been counting on to fund their retirement was about disappear for good. All of which sparked a mass exodus of Dallas police and firefighters eager to lock in their payout rates before they were slashed by the DPFP board (see: Dallas Police Resignations Soar As "Insolvent" Pension System Implodes).
Now, despite the passage of a plan designed to "save" the pension by the Texas legislature back in May, a record 72 officers decided to quit the force in July. Apparently they were not convinced that the legislature"s plan is going to work.
Meanwhile, the steady outflow of officers for over a year now is leading to what many in Dallas are calling a public safety crisis. Per the local Dallas CBS affiliate:
Dallas Police Association President Mike Mata and others sounded the alarm months ago: Now, by the end of this month, Mata says 72 Dallas Police officers will leave: 70 percent of them are retiring and the other 30 percent are going to make more money at other departments. “We’re losing some of our most experienced detectives: The investigator you want to come out and solve that homicide, that you need to come out and solve that sexual assault.”
Adam McGough, chairman of the Dallas city council’s public safety committee, is also expressing concern. “That’s the first of this number I heard of it. Anytime we have large numbers of officers leaving, it’s concerning.”
Mata says, “We’re at a critical state and we’re not solving the problems that are going to help correct this. That’s why I’m a little disappointed in the city manager’s budget.”
Apparently these officers can"t wrap their heads around how an incremental $40 million contribution from the City of Dallas will solve their pension"s $3 billion funding shortfall...they aren"t the only ones.
Monty Bennett’s quiet but intense demeanor, overflowing wallet, and stature as a head of a hotel investment company earn as many friends in high places as narrow-lidded grudges, but — love him or hate him — this Dallas businessman sits in the same precarious position as an untold number of ordinary property owners around the country.
Eminent domain.
Fighting the government to keep your private property is a battle arguably no one should be forced to endure, yet all around the United States, landowners like Bennett — whose ranch, The Lazy W, or officially, East Texas Ranch LP, has been in the family for generations — have been subjected to an unfortunately common tactic employed by an arrogant State run amok.
Bennett, however, has been fortunate enough in business dealings to afford a legal feud with the Tarrant Regional Water District — which seeks to usurp part of his ranch for an enormous water line — in an epic battle for control so revealing of the hubris of the State, everyone needs to take notice.
“It all started a few years back when the entity responsible for getting water to Fort Worth, the Tarrant Regional Water District, let it be known that it intended to take part of Bennett’s ranch and lay a pipe across it,” D Magazine reports. “The water district sued Bennett in an attempt to get the land. The case made its way to the Texas Supreme Court, where Bennett won on a procedural matter before being bounced back to a district court in Athens, where it now sits. In the meantime, his fight with the water district has grown from a pipeline right-of-way dispute into a battle over issues concerning accountability and openness in government.”
Since 2011, Bennett has made plain TRWD will not receive a green light to steamroll the issue, and he’s spent hundreds of thousands contesting eminent domain — one of the government’s most insidious legal holdovers whereby the thinnest of justifications for the usurpation of private property can be implemented to steal rights to your land — as long as that theft of property is conducive to infrastructure or some other public ‘need.’
Perhaps because Bennett’s skirmish with the State has dragged on for nearly seven years, the tidily-composed façade of public interest in which the City of Dallas has festooned its impetus for stealing part of the Lazy W went up in flames at a recent City Council meeting — thanks to voluminous hot air delivered from the lips of Councilwoman Sandy Greyson.
Greyson wasted no time clarifying the imperious nature of the city’s complaint against Bennett, asserting the wealthy businessman “cost Dallas taxpayers millions of dollars, and intends to cost us millions more — unless we settle with him by going around his property.”
Of course, Greyson, the rest of Dallas City Council, and TRWD have indeed ignored from the start the possibility this seven-foot water line could have been diverted through lands either not owned privately, or those privately held, but whose owner would have been amenable to the project.
Rather than even acknowledging such a possibility, Greyson instead vilified the legitimate land ownership — foisting Bennett’s concrete opposition as an ineluctable stance against the supposed greater good. She continued,
“Now, other, ordinary people — regular people like you and I, who can’t afford to fight the City of Dallas over an eminent domain case for years and years — I mean, we wind up getting our property taken.”
READ MORE: Murder-Suicide Shooter Who Killed Dallas Cop: "I killed him because he was going to hit me again"
That scofflaw of a defense for offensive actions — a loose logical fallacy in appeal to authority — would win no support from those who have lost the rights to property in their possession to a State so behind in infrastructure innovation as to make eminent domain still a viable means to writ large any project it chooses.
It isn’t as if Bennett recently purchased the Lazy W — eminent domain claim already pending — the property has been in his family since 1955. Understandably, he does not want construction and the water line to invade the tranquility of the property — or to upset the ecosystem maintained in a wildlife refuge there.
Bennett has gone so far as to install a cemetery on the land, because, under Texas law, that feature is exempt from “taxation, seizure by creditors and eminent domain.”
That matters little to an obdurate council intent on implementing a project to the letter of its original plans — rather than conceding a new route for the water line could be a tenable solution for all sides involved.
Calling the government’s theft-of-private-property plan “necessary,” because, Greyson sanctimoniously postures, “we need water lines. We need some of these public improvements.”
Nominally acknowledging the seizure of land through eminent domain might ruffle feathers on occasion, Greyson added, “it’s just infuriating, that if you are rich enough, you can hold the city hostage for years, and then get what you want. There’s something really wrong with that.”
Thus, all signs point to the embittered city councilwoman’s issues with the law — that is, when it works in favor of a people attempting to resist its oppressive clutches.
Let that sink in for a moment.
To Greyson and those aligning, a man fortunate enough to wage a viable defense against the government should be vilified as a nuisance and public enemy simply because he hopes to maintain the integrity of his land — tacitly implying anyone without a fortune in their defense is a better citizen, because they would have no choice but to succumb to the whims of the State.
In fact, continuing her baffling oratory — incidentally evincing why the State just might favor the poor over the rich in their lack of fiduciary competency to fight the taxpayer-funded government — Greyson makes no bones about her ire over private citizen land ownership.
Perhaps the biggest takeaway for anyone not able to obtain as lucrative a profession as Bennett is the unabashed joy the government finds in economic superiority which allows it to trample rights of ownership — as if having less in the bank somehow makes one’s land a commodity ripe for the plucking.
Worse, though, Greyson tacitly champions the stratification of wealth as an obstacle of the State — if you’re wealthy enough to afford it, government cannot possibly be as formidable a foe as would be the case for someone whose legal defense lacks monetary teeth.
But it isn’t differences in worth or income comprising the issue here.
Rather, that the State feels running roughshod over someone’s rights to property is perfectly defensible in any situation is a condemnation of government — its manipulation, its effects on procuring lucrative professions, and its ambitions writ large, regardless of the name typed on a piece of paper proving that land cannot be taken forcefully and without reasonable just cause.
Regardless of years of extenuating details surrounding the Lazy W and Bennett’s family property, that the State through the words of Greyson shamelessly flaunts its clout — and lack thereof, in the face of money — proves eminent domain the sham it always has been.
Whether or not the arguably most hated government stipulation in existence began as a means to ensure the public good matters not if its modern iteration amounts to theft at will — and particularly not so when the content of one’s wallet decides the route for projects like a water line.
Eminent domain exists because the right to own property threatens government at its most vulnerable point — control.
Without that, the State is little more than an entity fleshed out on paper wishing desperately you would just get out of its way.
For the past several months we"ve warned that the taxpayers of the City of Dallas, despite all of the tough talk coming out of their elected city council members, would ultimately be forced to bail out the failing Dallas Police and Fire Pension (DPFP) system. And just last night the DPFP board voted 9-0 to approve a plan that would do just that.
The plan to save the DPFP was proposed by Dan Flynn, chair of the pensions committee in the Texas House of Representatives, and calls for Dallas taxpayers to contribute 34.5% of police and firefighter salaries each year into the failing pension system, up from 27% in 2015, plus an incremental $11 million per year. In total, the adopted plan will cost Dallas taxpayers an extra $22 million per year.
That said, the plan also calls for pensioners to grant concessions, including the following:
- Increase in retirement age to 58 from 55
- Increase in employee contributions to 13.5% of payroll from 8.5%
- Elimination of COLAs in the near term
- Elimination of exorbitant interest payments made on employees DROP accounts
Of course, the $7 billion shortfall in the DPFP triggered downgrades to Dallas’s credit rating from Moody’s and S&P in recent months which has wreaked havoc on the city"s bond yields. (chart per Bloomberg).
Meanwhile, no amount of incremental taxpayer funding will ever be sufficient to stop angry pensioners from playing the victim card when the realities of their pension ponzi schemes are exposed for all to see. Per NBC 5:
There was a whirlwind of emotions at the meeting, from clapping, to tears and obvious tension, both from board members and from those whose futures hang in the balance.
"I think we"re being treated like animals to a certain degree, and I was hesitant to even come down here today," said Frank Varner, a retired Dallas firefighter.
"How do you fix broken promises? These people deserve better. The firefighters and officers working today deserve better," said Mike Mata, a Dallas police officer and president of the Dallas Police Association.
Don"t worry dear pensioners, there is no problem too large for taxpayers to bail out.
A summary of the plan adopted by the DPFP board can be viewed below:
The father of Dallas police officer Patrick Zamarripa — a Fort Worth native who was one of five officers killed in downtown Dallas in July — is suing Black Lives Matter, among other groups, alleging that its organizers incited a “War on Police” that led to his son’s death.
Enrique Zamarripa filed a 43-page lawsuit in U.S. District Court on Monday, seeking damages of up to $550 million.
“While Defendant Black Lives Matter claims to combat anti-black racism,” the lawsuit said, “the movement has in fact incited and committed further violence, severe bodily injury and death against police officers of all races and ethnicities, Jews, and Caucasians. Defendant Black Lives Matter is in fact a violent and revolutionary criminal gang.”
(image credit: AP/Charlie Neibergall)Over the past few weeks corporate news media have interpreted Donald Trump’s repeated claims of a “rigged” election as exaggerated. The Republican presidential candidate’s response in the third presidential debate of perhaps not accepting the election result was met with similar bluster by the major punditocracy.
The experience of voters in Texas and other states may be bearing out Trump’s warning as multiple reports are surfacing of electronic voting machines changing virtual ballots from Republican to Democratic presidential candidates. Because Texas law prohibits videos and photos in polling places many voters in that state explain the apparent polling shenanigans on social media.
As The Economic Collapse Blog observes,
[A] number of voters in Texas are reporting that the voting machines switched their votes from Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton. The odd thing is that none of the other choices were affected when these individuals attempted to vote for a straight Republican ticket. If Hillary Clinton is declared the winner of the state of Texas on election night, a full investigation of these voting machines should be conducted, because there is no way that Donald Trump should lose that state. I have said that it will be the greatest miracle in U.S. political history if Donald Trump wins this election, but without the state of Texas Donald Trump has exactly zero chance of winning. So those living down in Texas need to keep reporting anything unusual that they see or hear when they go to vote.
Here are several social media posts from the Dallas Morning News article at the I Am A Texan blog.
The Dallas Morning News similarly reports:
Early voters in Texas have claimed that voting machines in Dallas, Collin, Tarrant and other counties changed their presidential votes from Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton.
The allegations follow a similar pattern: Voters say they voted straight-ticket Republican, but when they reviewed their ballots, they reflected they had voted for Hillary Clinton for president, not Donald Trump.
Their votes for Republicans in down-ballot races were not affected, according to the complaints.
But elections officials say the allegations are more than likely false or instances of user error.
Garland City Council member Stephen Stanley said he went to an early voting station at Nicholson Memorial South Branch Library on Tuesday morning while campaigning for candidates on the ballot.
He said around noon a woman came out of the library and told him she had tried to vote straight ticket Republican but the machine said she had voted straight Democrat.
The woman told him a poll worker apologized that the machine wasn’t working and instructed her to use another one.
Stanley said he was worried about people who didn’t double-check their ballots.
“My question is how many other people didn’t know,” Stanley said.
Dallas County elections administrator Toni Pippins-Poole encouraged all voters to double-check their ballots before submitting them. She said she’s received second-hand reports of malfunctioning machines, but no one has logged an official complaint and she doesn’t have any names to go with the claims.
H/t Matrix Bob
