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Fast and Furious assault weapons seized from drug cartel enforcer’s home

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From the L.A. Times.

Excerpt:

High-powered assault weapons illegally purchased under the ATF’s Fast and Furious program in Phoenix ended up in a home belonging to the purported top Sinaloa cartel enforcer in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, whose organization was terrorizing that city with the worst violence in the Mexican drug wars.

In all, 100 assault weapons acquired under Fast and Furious were transported 350 miles from Phoenix to El Paso, making that West Texas city a central hub for gun traffickers. Forty of the weapons made it across the border and into the arsenal of Jose Antonio Torres Marrufo, a feared cartel leader in Ciudad Juarez, according to federal court records and trace documents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

The smugglers’ tactics — quickly moving the weapons far from ATF agents in southern Arizona, where it had been assumed they would circulate — vividly demonstrate that what had been viewed as a local problem was much larger. Six other Fast and Furious guns destined for El Paso were recovered in Columbus, N.M.

“These Fast and Furious guns were going to Sinaloans, and they are killing everyone down there,” said one knowledgeable U.S. government source, who asked for anonymity because of the ongoing investigations. “But that’s only how many we know came through Texas. Hundreds more had to get through.”

Torres Marrufo, also known as “the Jaguar,” has been identified by U.S. authorities as the enforcer for Sinaloa cartel chieftain Joaquin “Chapo” Guzman. The Fast and Furious weapons were found at one of Torres Marrufo’s homes.

I want to see how the media tries to help the Obama administration out of this mess. Be sure and share these stories on Facebook, especially the ones from CBS News, the L.A. Times, etc.

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What’s behind the explosion of sexual activity among college students?

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Consider this article about the problem first, from the Wall Street Journal.

Excerpt:

The two most serious ethical challenges college students face are binge drinking and the culture of hooking up.

Alcohol-related accidents are the leading cause of death for young adults aged 17-24. Students who engage in binge drinking (about two in five) are 25 times more likely to do things like miss class, fall behind in school work, engage in unplanned sexual activity, and get in trouble with the law. They also cause trouble for other students, who are subjected to physical and sexual assault, suffer property damage and interrupted sleep, and end up babysitting problem drinkers.

Hooking up is getting to be as common as drinking. Sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox, who heads the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, says that in various studies, 40%-64% of college students report doing it.

The effects are not all fun. Rates of depression reach 20% for young women who have had two or more sexual partners in the last year, almost double the rate for women who have had none. Sexually active young men do more poorly than abstainers in their academic work. And as we have always admonished our own children, sex on these terms is destructive of love and marriage.

Here is one simple step colleges can take to reduce both binge drinking and hooking up: Go back to single-sex residences.

I know it’s countercultural. More than 90% of college housing is now co-ed. But Christopher Kaczor at Loyola Marymount points to a surprising number of studies showing that students in co-ed dorms (41.5%) report weekly binge drinking more than twice as often as students in single-sex housing (17.6%). Similarly, students in co-ed housing are more likely (55.7%) than students in single-sex dorms (36.8%) to have had a sexual partner in the last year—and more than twice as likely to have had three or more.

Now this is where things get interesting. The religious conservative people don’t like students drinking, hooking up, and getting depressed. Who could possibly be in favor of hurting women?

Well, consider this article in the College Fix.

Excerpt:

Now John Banzhaf, a law professor at George Washington University, is suing CUA for discrimination.

Banzhaf filed a complaint with the Washington D.C. Human Rights Office alleging that the university had violated D.C.’s Human Rights Act. CUA lawyers met with Banzhaf at the Human Rights Office on September 15 to defend the university’s decision.

Banzhaf, who has a history of using lawsuits to fight against what he sees as discrimination, compared the university’s decision to separate students by sex to separating them by religion or race.  He specifically linked the single-sex dorm policy to the “separate but equal” racial policy in place in the U.S. before civil rights movement.

He also told CUA’s student newspaper, The Tower, that the decision is “the same as saying that since Muslims and Jews don’t get along we should force them to live apart.”

What’s behind the push to make women drink and hook-up with men? Feminism.

What feminism says, in practice, is that men have no special duties when compared to women. To say that men have anything special that they are responsible for is to be “sexist”. Therefore, men and women have to be lumped together from kindergarten to college graduation so that they can be identical in every way. Anything less would be “discrimination”.

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House passes bill to protect cement industry from job-killing EPA regulations

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The EPA is considering regulations that would kill American jobs by the bushel.

Excerpt:

According to [Sen. James] Inhofe, the administration’s proposed CO2/greenhouse gas-emission regulations—due out in November—could chop $300 billion to $400 billion alone off the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) each year.  Estimates from the Senate Energy and Public Works Committee’s Republican staff estimates this regulation could cost in excess of the 2 million jobs that would have been lost as a result of Waxman-Markey Climate Change Bill.

Other estimates suggest that the EPA’s Utility MACT and Transport Rule could cost $184 billion and 1.4 million jobs.  Statistics Inhofe provided suggest the rule could shutter hundreds of coal-fired power plants around the country—equaling as much as 20% of the nation’s total energy output.

[…]“We are relying on coal for as much as 45% of our nation’s energy,” Inhofe said.  “He’s intentionally passed a rule that will shut down coal in America, and there are lots of jobs that either directly or indirectly rely on coal.  It’s going to make it a lot much more expensive.”

These increased costs are underscored by a  Bernstein Research report that found:  “We expect the loss of this generation to translate into higher wholesale energy and capacity prices.  … We estimate that this will raise the price of electricity during on-peak hours by $3 to $5 per MWh.”

The rule’s impact hit closer to home for 120 workers at a Cincinnati-area coal-fired power plant when Duke Energy announced it would be closing the plant if the rule is approved in November.

“The anticipated retirement date is contingent on potential changes to the implementation [of the] EPA’s MACT rule and other environmental regulations,” Duke Energy said in a statement released in July.

And Texas-based Luminant followed suit last week, announcing it would be laying off 500 workers in anticipation of the implementation of the EPA’s cross-state air pollution rule, set to take effect on Jan. 1, 2012.

[…]The National Associations of Manufacturers estimates the Utility MACT and cross-state air pollution rules will cost its members $18 billion annually, and drive its members’ electricity costs up by 11.5%.  It also shares Inhofe’s analysis that these regulations could cost 1.4 million jobs annually.

But there is some good news from the Energy and Commerce Committee.

Excerpt:

The U.S. House of Representatives declared another victory today in its ongoing battle against destructive regulation with passage of H.R. 2681, the Cement Sector Regulatory Relief Act. The measure passed the full House with strong bipartisan support by a vote of 262 to 161.

H.R. 2681, authored by Reps. John Sullivan (R-OK) and Mike Ross (D-AR), will protect the domestic cement manufacturing industry from costly new rules issued by the EPA, which currently threaten widespread plant closures and thousands of American jobs. This legislation provides a remedy to EPA’s flawed cement MACT rules with a directive to EPA to propose achievable standards and timelines. This legislation will ensure public health and the environment is protected without sacrificing jobs.

“President Obama likes to talk about the need to invest in our nation’s infrastructure and this bipartisan legislation will remove regulatory barriers to growth in the construction and cement manufacturing industries,” said Sullivan. “The bottom line is that if EPA’s Cement MACT rules are not revised, thousands of jobs will be lost due to cement plant closures and higher construction costs. These rules threaten to shut down up to 20 percent of the nation’s cement manufacturing plants in the next two years, sending thousands of jobs permanently overseas and driving up cement and construction costs across the country.  Additionally, the Portland Cement Association estimates it will cost $3.4 billion – half of the industry’s annual revenues – just to comply with EPA’s current Cement MACT rule.”

I was surprised that a Democrat supported this bill, but it’s really important to protect American jobs.