HERITAGE FOUNDATION: How to f--- with Harry Reid's illegal nuclear assault on the Senate filibuster

Well, to be fair, the Heritage Foundation didn't drop the F-bomb. But I read their intent, I tell you, I read their intent.

You may have heard that the Senate Majority Leader -- a freakish-looking man named Harry Reid -- will likely attempt to violate the rules of the Senate to destroy the filibuster rule. Reid, of course, was a huge fan of the filibuster when he served in the minority. But, as always with the Marxist Left, the ends justify the means.

So if Reid wants to go nuclear on the filibuster and illegally shred decades of Senate procedure, a response in the form of some serious scoundrelry is in order.

• A new two-thirds point of order against any infringement on the Second Amendment rights of all Americans. This would be subject to a simple majority vote under Reid’s theory. There is a pro-gun majority in the Senate today, and this might actually pass. It would be a great tool for conservatives to forever block reinstatement of the assault weapons ban in addition to any other gun-grabbing ideas.

• A new two-thirds point of order against any net tax increase on the American people as scored by the Congressional Budget Office. This would be subject to a simple majority vote and is part of the Senate version of the Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution supported by all members of the current Republican caucus.

• A new point of order preventing the Senate Majority Leader from blocking amendments by filling up all the areas of the amendment tree with pro-forma amendments. Reid has used this tactic to prevent members from offering amendments. A new point of order should be proposed to prevent that tactic for Reid or any future Majority Leader.

• A new point of order to make Senators sign a consent form before a bill is passed by “Unanimous Consent” or “UC.” Many times, the Senate operates by waiving the rules with the consent of all Senators. Many times the bills passed are opposed by members, but they fear getting blamed for obstructing bills by forcing the Senate to abide by all the rules to pass a bill or confirm a nomination. This would put all members explicitly on the record supporting legislation that sneaks through the Senate under the radar.

As Heritage notes, these are just a few of the ideas that could be floated. Off the top of my head, I can think of a few others:

• Preventing any bill related to education from infringing on charter schools and privatized education

• Capping any funding bill from exceeding 18 percent of GDP in toto

• Forcing any bill that funds Obamacare, the HHS or the EPA to face a six week public review period before a vote is permitted

You get the picture. Bring it on, Leftists.

KIRA DAVIS: Meme-crusher

Radio personality and conservative pundit Kira Davis saw this piece of fabricated nonsense (left) and responded using the online equivalent of a tactical nuclear weapon.

You can catch Kira's radio show at Conservative Daily News.

EXPOSED: The Real Tea Party Platform

Yes, the fabric of our society has unraveled to the point where the following principles are reviled as "extreme" and "right wing" by antique media and the punditry class:

Thousands of years of civilization have taught us the paramount importance and wisdom of individual sovereignty, private property, self-reliance and limited government. These are the precious gifts our country's founders bequeathed to us.

Now, in Washington, we have corrupt and craven politicians who stress the sovereignty of government, collectivism, reliance on handouts and the need for an unconstrained government.

But we Constitutional Conservatives are the extreme ones, right?


Hat tip: MOTUS.

CLICK: Hotel Keycard Attack Just Got Real in Texas

Ruh roh:

You may remember a vulnerability in four million keycard locks presented at the Black Hat conference in July. Hacker Cody Brocious showed he could insert a device he built for less than $50 into the port at the bottom of the common hotel lock, read a key out of its memory, and open it in seconds...

...Two months later, it turns out at least one burglar was already making use of that technique to rob a series of hotel rooms in Texas. The Hyatt House Galleria in Houston has revealed that in at least three September cases of theft from its rooms, the thief used that Onity vulnerability to effortlessly open rooms and steal valuables like laptops...

...at least two other hotels in Texas were hit with the attack. Onity has been criticized for its less-than-stellar response to a glaring vulnerability in its devices. The Hyatt says Onity didn't provide a fix until after its break-ins, forcing the hotel to plug its locks' ports with epoxy. And even now, Onity is asking its hotel customers to pay for the full fix, which involves replacing the locks' circuit boards.

Sebastian Anthony has a suitable and pithy response to Onity's, eh, carelessness:

The hack in its entirety is detailed on Brocious’s website, but in short: At the base of every Onity lock is a small barrel-type DC power socket (just like on your old-school Nokia phone). This socket is used to charge up the lock’s battery, and to program the lock with a the hotel’s “sitecode” — a 32-bit key that identifies the hotel. By plugging an Arduino microcontroller into the DC socket, Brocious found that he could simply read this 32-bit key out of the lock’s memory. No authentication is required — and the key is stored in the same memory location on every Onity lock... The best bit: By playing this 32-bit code back to the lock… it opens. According to Brocious, it takes just 200 milliseconds to read the sitecode and open the lock.

As for how Onity justifies such a stupendously disgusting lack of security, who knows. Generally, as far as managerial types go, securing a system seems like a frivolous expense — until someone hacks you. In non-high-tech circles, hacks like this are par for the course — usually, a company doesn’t hire a security specialist until after its first high-profile hack. For a company that is tasked with securing millions of humans every night, though, it would’ve been nice if Onity had shown slightly more foresight.

My advice: bar the hotel room door and secure it with a chair against the door jamb. Oh, and don't leave valuables in the room safe either. That's easily hacked too.

(Just wondering: isn't it about time security hardware companies started taking security more seriously?)

THE REAL CRASH: Surviving America's Bankruptcy

Author and business analyst Peter Shiff was one of the few pundits to predict the 2008 financial crisis. His latest book, "The Real Crash: America's Coming Bankruptcy---How to Save Yourself and Your Country", describes the nature of the crisis yet to come.

The main problem--and where most of the other problems begin--according to Schiff, is the Fed's manipulation of interest rates. By interfering with the free market value of money, and making it cheaper than the market would dictate, the Fed encourages financial bubbles that then necessarily pop. When a bubble pops, the market needs to correct itself; however, over the past 20 years, the Fed has not really allowed this correction to take place, as every time a bubble pops the Fed has lowered the interest rate even further, causing more money to enter the system and a new bubble to form. First it was dot-com stocks, then it was housing, and now it is government spending.

As a matter of fact, while government spending has reached new and mind-boggling heights in the recent past, it has actually been ballooning in this direction for years, spurred on largely by the low-interest rates that the Fed has provided. The government has used this borrowed money to maintain and extend social programs (such as Social Security and Medicare), and, more recently, bailout packages for failing businesses and entire industries. All the while, the government has been going deeper and deeper into debt. A big part of what has allowed the American government to borrow as much as it has (and to keep on borrowing now) is the fact that the American dollar is the world's reserve currency, which means it is always in demand, and hence people and organizations have been willing to act as creditors in order to get it. For Schiff, though, the sheer size of the debt, and the fact that it is running away faster and faster everyday (and has no realistic chance of ever being repaid) will sooner or later turn investors away from considering the American dollar a valuable reserve--at which point it will lose its status as the world's reserve, and investors will stop investing in it.

At this point, the American government will have but two options. It can either declare bankruptcy, or it can print the money it needs to pay its debt. In either case, an enormous crash will result, for in the first case, an astronomical sum of money that the economy had assumed existed will suddenly be wiped away, and in the latter case hyperinflation will set in, and the American dollar will be whittled down to worthless.

...the country will be forced to start over. For Schiff, this may not be such a bad thing, for, according to him, the nation has simply put itself in an unsustainable position, and the sooner it starts over the better. At that time, Schiff argues, America can finally get back to the small government and free-market forces that the country's founding fathers designed the nation around. While much of the book is focused on how the country can do this now, before the crash hits (in such areas as banking & finance, taxation, healthcare, education, the military, et. al.), Schiff very much believes that nothing can actually prevent the crash from coming, and that therefore, most of the rebuilding will have to be done after The Real Crash.

As Chris Cox and Bill Archer -- former members of President Clinton's Commission on Entitlement and Tax Reform -- explain in today's Wall Street Journal, the official national debt figure of $16 trillion is woefully understated.

The real figure is in excess of $87 trillion -- or roughly 550 percent of GDP.

And what do we hear from Democrats and Repubicans in Washington? Nonsense about taxing the top two percent, which wouldn't amount to one-tenth of one percent of the real debt.