More lawsuits are pouring in against the Biden administration’s recent decision to redefine firearms with pistol braces as short-barrelled rifles (SBR) under the National Firearms Act (NFA), with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Gun Owners of America (GOA) filing a joint lawsuit seeking to block the rule.
The lawsuit, State of Texas v. ATF, was filed in the Federal Southern District Court of Texas on Thursday, joining two other lawsuits filed in federal district courts in Texas. Those include a challenge filed by attorneys with the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty in the Northern District, and a challenge filed in the Eastern District by the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF).
GOA called their lawsuit “the most comprehensive” among those filed, writing, “Our complaint makes clear that the agency’s rule violates the Second Amendment ‘text, history and tradition’ standard set forth by the Supreme Court in its recent Bruen case.” GOA also said their case argues the rule violates several other constitutional provisions, including being an “invalid” exercise of taxing authority.
Paxton also released a statement on the lawsuit, saying he is hopeful they prevail in blocking the rule.
“This is yet another attempt by the Biden Administration to create a workaround to the U.S. Constitution and expand gun registration in America,” Paxton said in the release. “There is absolutely no legal basis for ATF’s haphazard decision to try to change the long-standing classification for stabilizing braces, force registration on Americans, and then throw them in jail for ten years if they don’t quickly comply. This rule is dangerous and unconstitutional, and I’m hopeful that this lawsuit will ensure that it is never allowed to take effect.”
Today, Gun Owners of America (GOA) and the Gun Owners Foundation (GOF) jointly filed a lawsuit challenging the Biden Pistol Brace Ban with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. The suit was filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas.
This new rule, which took effect on January 31st of this year, will force Americans to register or destroy their approximately 40 million lawfully owned brace firearms within 120 days, or face possible felony charges.
Erich Pratt, GOA’s Senior Vice President, issued the following statement:
“Millions of Americans are facing a very tight deadline to destroy or register their lawfully owned property under this draconian new rule. We hope the court will hear the pleas of gun owners across the country who will be irrevocably harmed by this rule, and GOA stands ready to fight it at every turn.”
Sam Paredes, on behalf of the board for GOF, added:
“This rule will have some of the most wide-reaching impacts nationwide in the tyrannical history of gun control. We the People will not tolerate this abuse.”
Having a state Attorney General join your lawsuit tends to do wonders to establish standing to sue the federal government. Like bump stocks, ATF has decided to retroactively make an entire class of widely-owned firearms accessory illegal, along with turning millions of lawful gun owners into felons for continuing to possess the same accessories they had already lawfully purchased. The composition of the Supreme Court has changed since Gundy v. United States was decided, and the current court may be much more inclined to reign-in delegation of congressional powers to regulatory agencies.
One-Party Democratic California is so desperate for cash they want to tax people for leaving.
Desperate to stem the stampede of cash cows — affluent residents — out of their state, they are trying to pass an exit tax for households with assets of $50 million or more. Current residents would have to keep paying for years after they have decamped to less hostile states.
Heaven forbid that these legislators should instead come to terms with the reasons so many productive residents flee or what they could do to make their state a more attractive destination for people and businesses. They aren’t much concerned with that, merely with stopping the flight of all that revenue. If they cared about the livelihoods of the people leaving, they probably would have governed in a way that didn’t prompt people to head for the exits.
This is probably unconstitutional nine ways to Sunday. Wealth tax, Ex-Post Facto law, taxation without representation, etc. It’s also likely to be counterproductive, as rich people are not only likely to leave the state preemptively to avoid being subject to it, but are exactly the people that can hire top-notch lawyers to get it overturned.
Louis Rossmann, who recently fled New York City to Austin, has additional thoughts:
“They are showing and demonstrating here they have no confidence in their ability to govern better, or in their ability to actually give the customers of that state what they want, because they’re telling you ‘We’re not going to make things better. Rather, if you leave we are going to figure out a way to fine you.'”
“It demonstrates a sick ideology that’s both just authoritarian and disgusting in nature.”
“It’s not like [the tax rates in California and New York] just spiked up insanely over the past one or two years, they’ve been higher than the tax rate in Texas and Florida for as long as I’ve been alive, by a fairly large margin. This is not news. It’s something else in addition to that, and they don’t even appear to be interested in trying to figure out what that is.”
“Florida and Texas…have not had income tax for a very long time.”
“Maybe it would make sense to actually ask people what changed over the past two or three or five years that caused you to decide that you want to move your business and get the fuck out.”
“I could tell you from experience that losing half of your employees, putting all your stuff in a truck, carting it across the country. and spending months putting it all back together is insanely stressful, and not something that I’m going to do so I could save six or eight percent of my income tax.”
“Why are you then going to bake more taxes, and then have a fine for leaving that is then going to discourage anybody else that has the same concern from ever coming to your state thereby ensuring that the population of people that are productive and create value diminishes.”
“The idea of being taxed based on what you are worth at a particular time without actually cashing it out is insane to me.”
Long, correct discussion of why long-term capital gains are taxed at a lower rate snipped. (I doubt many of my readers don’t already understand, or disagree.) Ditto the discussion of how investment creates jobs.
“People deciding to defer their gratification, to decide ‘I will wait for the large payoff 10 to 20 years from now rather than make a decision that results in me getting more money right now,’ and I think that that it should be discussed more often because if it’s not, then we are going to end up with stuff like this.”
He discusses the slippery slope argument: The bill already states the tax will start at billionaires, but then in two years hit people with a net worth of $50 million or more. “Once it gets low enough like once this makes its way off to 10 million or a million, because again this is going to slip.”
And just wait until it hits the net worth not only of individuals, but of businesses.
Fallout from the House speaker’s race, Biden busted for mishandling classified files, more blue state teachers raping their students, Cadillac’s EV breaks into double digit sales, and the Imelda Marcos disco musical! It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Kevin McCarthy finally wins Speaker of the House race on 15th vote after offering concessions to the House Freedom Caucus.
How is McCarthy doing? Early signs are encouraging. “The House of Representatives passed a new rules package Monday that overhauls the way it functions by putting up more barriers to congressional spending and creating a more deliberate process for passing legislation, which were key demands of the more conservative members of the Republican Party.” (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) used Thursday morning’s press briefing to criticize the Department of Justice’s handling of the issue.
“They knew this happened to President Biden before the election, but they kept it secret from the American public,” McCarthy told a scrum of reporters on Capitol Hill.
Chicago Board of Education Inspector General Will Fletcher reported 470 sexual complaints against Chicago Public School employees from students in 2022.
“The report details students being abused, groped, groomed, assaulted and threatened by school officials.
“One investigation found a former Junior ROTC staff member had sex with a 16-year-old high school student for a year. When he learned there was an investigation, the staff member threatened to kill the girl and her family if she cooperated with investigators.”
The teachers’ union in Chicago, Randi Weingarten’s American Federation of Teachers, so praised by Joe Biden, has done nothing and said nothing about it so far as I can tell, and I did look, focusing instead on promoting critical race theory into the school system. Left unsaid is that the union ensures that firing any of these teachers involved in this activity is virtually impossible. Chicago’s public schools’s firing rate of bad teachers owing to their union membership, as of a few years ago, is 0.1%.
What’s vivid here amid all this widespread predatory behavior from the teaching classes, which like Harvey Weinstein, are prolific campaign donors to Democrats, is that the low outrage factor stands in sharp contrast to the sexual abuse scandals of the Catholic Church, which was ordered by courts to pay billions in reparations to the victims, has seen its leaders publicly apologize for the abuses, and has many programs now to prevent child abuse by perverts in authority. This activity was evil and inexcusable and rightly punished.
As for the more widescale abuse now seen in Chicago’s public schools, along with comparable scandals in the Los Angeles public school system, and other bad cases in New York and other blue cities, well, crickets. The perversion has gotten out of control in Chicago and the story barely makes the national news.
How Biden’s inflation is destroying family budgets:
The reality of the inflation report for American families – year-over-year real wages have been negative for 21 straight months. pic.twitter.com/1Bh4DNqZBF
A federal appeals court on Friday struck down the Trump-era ban on bump stocks, a firearm accessory that enables a semi-automatic gun to shoot at an increased rate of fire.
In a 13-3 decision, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans held that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), acting under “tremendous” public pressure, short-circuited the legislative process by approving a rule to define bump stocks as “machineguns,” which are illegal to possess. The court said ATF did not have the authority from Congress to do so.
This is what a real pro-natalist policy looks like: “Hungary addresses falling birthrates by exempting moms under 30 from income tax for life.” More:
Hungary has taken several measures in recent years to encourage its citizens to have more children, including three years of paid parental leave and state-funded daycare.
The country previously suspended income tax for moms with four or more children, but this new policy specifically encourages women to have children sooner, which in the long run means a higher likelihood of having more children overall.
Israel hit Syria again, and I heard just about nothing about it. Ukraine has really pushed Syria out of the headlines.
Speaking of Ukraine, Russia has largely captured the salt mining town of Soledar, though at a high cost in man. And good luck checking those hundreds of miles of salt tunnels for partisans…
“Tesla plans Houston-area expansion with large new industrial site in Brookshire…Little is known about Tesla’s plans, but the Fortune 500 company signed a lease late last year for about 1.03 million square feet at 111 Empire West, part of the 300-acre Empire West Business Park in Brookshire.” A bold move, considering how radically car sales have dived this year.
Other EVs update: “GM delivers record Cadillac Lyriq deliveries in Q4 – 12 per month.”
“David Byrne, Fatboy Slim Disco Musical ‘Here Lies Love’ Sets Broadway Debut. The musical, which has had a long journey to Broadway, centers on the life of Imelda Marcos, the former first lady of the Philippines.” They say the mirror ball shine bright on Broadway… (Hat tip: Dwight.)
This is an interesting video on the conflict between some poor boatniks known as “Anchor-Outs” for anchoring in Richardson Bay, just off Sausalito, California, and a government entity known as the “Richardson Bay Regional Agency.”
What’s the conflict? RBRA wants them gone, because they pay neither rent nor taxes, and their ramshackle boat view spoil the views of limousine liberals.
So they just seize and destroy people’s boats.
Some quotes:
“The RBRA. It’s the Richardson Bay Regional Agency. I call it the ‘Rich Boy Reach Around’.”
“They want to get rid of us all and gentrify the whole waterfront, eliminate the historical waterfront atmosphere, and put mooring balls for yachts.
They just want millionaire yachts.”
“Richardson Bay is in one of the wealthiest counties in the U.S. and is a scenic vista for million dollar homes. Basically, this is the most desirable place to live in all California. And ironically, it’s run by limousine liberals, you know? Rich people don’t want to look at poor people. A lot of them are people that were born here that have been out here a long time, and they just kind of got priced out.”
“There aren’t many housing options for someone on a fixed income of $1,200 a month.” Funny how Democratic Party-run locales always seem to price the poor out of the market.
“For the past few years the RBRA has taken the extreme step of confiscating and crushing boats in their effort to clear out the anchorage. Leaving many boat owners homeless. ‘It’s to push out the poor. They want to get rid of the junkier boats. They literally would like to get rid of all the boats.'”
A detailed discussion of various local ordinances follows, some of which appear to be at odds with national maritime law.
“This is a federal anchorage so they don’t have authority to actually come out here and police us. People telling you laws, regulations, 72 hour anchoring, harbormaster. All that is just lies. It’s smoke and mirrors.”
Are there parallels between the Anchor-Outs and the homeless plaguing Austin? A few. But there doesn’t appear to be a large crime problem, the people in the boats don’t appear to be dealing drugs, and if they’re on boats, they’re not panhandling or breaking into people’s houses, so the parallels to Adlers seem minimal. Also, if they haul their own garbage (as the video states), they’re not leaving the needles on public streets (or floating in the bay), so there also seems to be little parallel with Seattle’s dystopian RV drug culture.
Sausalito’s limousine liberals do truly seem to have become The Man, using their power to oppress the little guy.
Life expectancy in the United States last year dropped to its lowest point in a quarter century, and it’s not all because of Covid.
Last year saw a 5% decline in life expectancy for Americans, dropping to under 77 years of age.
And while some experts want to try to tie the drop to Covid-19, the numbers reveal that there’s much more at work here than people being killed by the China Virus. There’s another epidemic that is killing Americans at an alarming rate: The Opioid Epidemic.
From the Wall Street Journal:
Covid-19 was the third-leading cause of death for a second consecutive year in 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday, and a rising number of drug-overdose deaths also dragged down life expectancy. Overdose deaths have risen fivefold over the past two decades.
The death rate for the U.S. population increased by 5%, cutting life expectancy at birth to 76.4 years in 2021 from 77 years in 2020. The CDC in August released preliminary estimates demonstrating a similar decline. Before the pandemic, in 2019, life expectancy at birth in the U.S. was 78.8 years. The decline in 2020 was the largest since World War II.
While the drop coincides with the Covid pandemic, the increased numbers aren’t caused by the disease alone.
The leading cause of death in the US is still heart disease and cancer.
Then there’s the opioid epidemic.
The country during the pandemic has recorded more than 1.2 million excess deaths, which is a measure of all deaths beyond prior-year averages and can represent both undercounted Covid-19 deaths and collateral damage from other causes, including more overdoses. The CDC put the final count for 2021 overdose deaths at about 106,700, a record that is 16% higher than the prior year. The final count differs from a preliminary count for last year that topped 108,000 because the CDC in its final counts doesn’t include overdose deaths that occurred among non-U. S. residents.
Opioid deaths increased because of lockdowns.
People locked in their homes are more likely to have heart disease.
Thousands and thousands and thousands of people missed cancer screenings and got lesser treatment thanks to lockdowns.
As we covered here at NTB recently, the excess deaths we are seeing aren’t because of Covid, but the lockdowns.
n August of this year, I reported that Moderna is suing Pfizer and BioNTech for infringing patents that are key to Moderna’s mRNA technology platform that was used to develop the covid vaccine.
In response, Pfizer has now countersued Moderna.
The ongoing legal battle now sees Pfizer and its partner BioNTech reject its rival’s claims it copied the shot.
Pfizer has accused Moderna of rewriting history, and dubbed its lawsuit ‘revisionist history’.
Manhattan-based Pfizer requested from a federal court in Boston that Moderna’s lawsuit be dismissed.
Pfizer and its German partner, BioNTech, fired back at Moderna on Monday in a patent lawsuit over their rival Covid-19 vaccines.
They are seeking dismissal of the lawsuit in Boston federal court and an order that Moderna’s patents are invalid and not infringed.
We need effective biotech companies that are not infected by politics or social justice. Unfortunately, those don’t appear to be the companies we have.
Pfizer asserts their vaccine technology was arrived at through independent research.
Everything you need to know about the motives and methods of the 21st-century Left can be learned from studying 20th-century Communism. What Mises said about Marx and Engels, and the ad hominem quality of their rhetoric — slander and insults, rather than actual arguments — was even more true of Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, et al. Having once seized power, the Bolsheviks immediately proceeded to suppress all potential rivals. Within a month, they established the Cheka (predecessor of the NKVD and, later, the KGB) and appointed Felix Dzerzhinsky as its leader. Eight months later, the Red Terror began in earnest, and within a matter of weeks, the Bolsheviks had summarily executed more victims than were sentenced to death in the entire preceding century by the Tzarist regime
Snip.
The other day I wrote a piece about how the Left can’t argue anymore. My thesis was pretty simple: because they have owned the cultural means of production so long they have lost the need for or ability to argue things logically.
I still believe that. Having rarely been exposed to a conservative argument that [they] haven’t been able to dismiss merely through repeated ridicule the Left pretty much only engages in ad hominem attacks. Even very smart prominent Lefties . . . seem incapable of doing much more than insulting their opponents any more. It all boils down to Bad Orange Man or MAGA simps. . . .
But I ran into a slightly different perspective on the matter while cruising Twitter, and I think it deserves consideration: sometimes, at least, the person throwing out an absurd take isn’t actually hoping to convince you of anything. They are, rather, trying to discredit the source and do nothing more. The ad hominem attack is the only point — to destroy the credibility of their opponent, without actually convincing you of any particular argument.
Thus the need to label anything that refutes The Narrative as “disinformation.”
State Rep. Brian Harrison (R-Midlothian) filed proposed legislation to prohibit state tax dollars from being used to pay for gender modification procedures.
House Bill 1029 states, “No funds authorized or appropriated by State law shall be expended for any gender reassignment.”
“Just as the Hyde Amendment, which has enjoyed bipartisan support for almost 50 years, bans tax dollars from funding abortions, I’m proud to file a bill which protects Texans from being forced to pay for their neighbor’s sex change,” Harrison said in a statement. “Irrespective of how anyone views these procedures, it should be uncontroversial that tax money should not fund them.”
Harrison added that the bill was filed in response to a statement made by President Biden’s Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra that public money should be used to provide these procedures to those who want them.
On the same theme: “Kristi Noem’s Health Department Fires Transgender Group Ahead of ‘Gender Summit.'”
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, a Republican, directed her state Department of Health to terminate a contract with The Transformation Project, a transgender activist group that is hosting a “Gender Identity Summit” next month, after The Daily Signal drew the governor’s attention to the summit and the group.
“Gov. Kristi Noem is reviewing all Department of Health contracts and immediately terminated a contract with The Transformation Project,” Ian Fury, Noem’s chief of communications, told The Daily Signal on Friday. “The contract was signed without Gov. Noem’s prior knowledge or approval.”
Fury sent The Daily Signal a copy of the document dissolving the state contract.
“South Dakota does not support this organization’s efforts, and state government should not be participating in them,” Noem told The Daily Signal in a statement provided by Fury. “We should not be dividing our youth with radical ideologies. We should treat every single individual equally as a human being.”
Fury said that The Transformation Project had not complied with its state contract. The organization had failed “to submit required quarterly reports for two consecutive quarters,” among other violations.
All funding to any radical social justice group should be cut, and the people responsible for funding them fired for cause.
The very progressive and liberal nation of Sweden is showing that they still have at least a little bit of common sense in health leadership.
Sweden has decided to cut ties with WPATH, the World Professional Association of Transgender Health because they’re a bunch of activists.
Swedish health authorities have officially broken ranks with the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) with the announcement that gender clinics will no longer be attempting to perform experimental sex changes on under-18s but will instead offer “psychological support to help youth live with the healthy body they were born with.”
According to an article published in the Swedish medical journal Läkartidningen, new guidelines will be published before the end of the year advising against puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgery for under 18s. This is in direct contrast with the WPATH Standards of Care 8 (SOC8) released earlier this year which advises affirmation and medical intervention as the first line of treatment for gender-confused minors.
Sweden is rejecting these recommendations because it’s clearly an extreme measure to do sex change operations on minors.
However, the Biden admin has told us that they’re totally on board with the radical recommendations.
I’m shocked, shocked to discover that two-time loser Democrat Stacey Abrams is bad with money.
Despite surpassing her 2018 fundraising record, Stacey Abrams’s 2022 Georgia gubernatorial campaign fell into deep debt due to reckless expenditures, according to staffers and operatives who worked on the failed campaign.
The campaign still owes more than $1 million to vendors, Abrams campaign manager Lauren Groh-Wargo confirmed to Axios.
Some of the campaign’s lavish expenditures included the rental of a home near Piedmont Park in Atlanta, which Abrams envisioned as a “hype house” for TikTok videos but which was ultimately underutilized, staffers told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Some aides occupied the empty large house as a work space. It can now be rented for $12,500 a month, the publication noted.
The campaign’s youth outreach strategy also proved pricey. Against the better judgement of many staffers, who found the idea irresponsible, Abrams launched a pop-up shop and “swag truck” to hand out merchandise, such as T-shirts and hoodies.
Abrams burned through cash on polls that ended up being inconsequential and consultants whose contributions were unclear, staffers also said.
Many employees in the campaign were given generous salaries compared to other candidates’ teams. For example, the campaign advertised paid canvasser jobs at $15 an hour, higher than the typical rate, according to a Georgia Tech blog discovered by the Journal-Constitution.
Benefitting from glossy, identity-focused coverage, Abrams brought in nearly $98 million as of early November. Yet, her campaign nearly ran out of money in the final stretch. Most of the 180 full-time staffers who worked for her were told they’d receive their last paycheck just a week after Election Day, according to Axios.
YouTube has banned the official Pornhub account, which boasted more than 900,000 followers, after repeated violations.
The platform’s move comes in the wake of other Big Tech companies, like Meta/Instagram and TikTok, removing such accounts. Other corporations, like Visa, Mastercard, Roku, Comcast, Unilever, Kraft-Heinz, and PayPal, have also cut ties with Pornhub.
“Upon review, we terminated the channel Pornhub Official following multiple violations of our Community Guidelines,” YouTube spokesperson Jack Malon said, according to Variety. “We enforce our policies equally for everyone, and channels that repeatedly violate or are dedicated to violative content are terminated.”
MindGeek, Pornhub’s parent company, has been hit with multiple lawsuits from survivors of child sex trafficking who claim videos of their abuse were platformed on the pornographic site.
A ban on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) offices within institutions of higher education has been filed in the Texas House.
State Representative-elect Carl Tepper (R-Lubbock) filed House Bill (HB) 1006 that requires higher education institutions in Texas to “foster a diversity of viewpoints [and] maintain political, social, and cultural neutrality.”
The teeth of the bill command these universities to “demonstrate a commitment to intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity” by eliminating DEI offices or anything like them “beyond what is necessary to uphold the equal protection of the laws under the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.”
It also allows anyone to bring forth civil action against an entity for violation of the prohibition, something Tepper confirmed was modeled after a similar mechanism within the Texas Heartbeat Act.
Additionally, the definition of “expressive activities” protected under state law is expanded to include “published or unpublished faculty research, lectures, writings, and commentary.”
Tepper told The Texan, “These offices have been out of control for a while now and people are getting really frustrated with them.”
The Biden Administration, in its never-ending quest to punish the oil and gas industry for supplying cheap, reliable energy, tried to block the export of liquefied natural gas to Asia. Then Ted Cruz stepped in.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced the approval of permits to export liquefied natural gas to Asia after Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) held four agency nominees hostage.
Two Sempra Energy facilities on the West Coast will now be able to ship Texas-produced liquefied natural gas (LNG) to Asia, increasing the supply that competes with Russia to fuel the rest of the continent. They will also allow the transport of LNG supplies by pipeline to Mexico.
The approvals come after the Biden administration’s reticence and Cruz’s corresponding holds placed on four nominees to positions in the DOE. Those nominees are David Crane, to work under DOE Secretary Jennifer Granholm; Jeffrey Matthew Marootian and Gene Rodrigues, both nominated to serve as assistant secretaries; and Evelyn Wang, up for director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy.
A Senate procedural tool, the hold is “an informal practice by which a senator informs Senate leadership that he or she does not wish a particular measure or nomination to reach the floor for consideration.”
Cruz used a similar maneuver back in May to force permit approvals, including one for a Port Arthur facility.
“This decision is a long overdue win for Texas and America,” Cruz spokesman Dave Vasquez said in a statement provided to The Texan.
“These permits will enable West Coast liquefied natural gas export facilities to send U.S. natural gas from Texas and other Western states by pipeline to Mexico, and from there export the LNG to Asia. As a result, American allies and partners in Asia will have access to newer and cleaner alternatives to the coercive energy blackmail pushed by Russia and China.”
The permits will enable the cheaper sale of Texas LNG supply to Asia; it also enables shippers to avoid the congested Panama Canal, thus expediting the supply. In total, the two permits will allow the exchange of 2.33 trillion cubic feet per year of LNG.
In 2021, Texas producers generated 10.3 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.
It’s good to have a senator on your side that knows how to play the game…
Abortion (especially taxpayer-funded abortion) is one of the most sacred sacraments of the modern Democratic Party, and it thus wants to force everyone in medicine (especially Christians) to bow to its Holy of Hollies. And every time Democrats control the executive branch, they try to force their ideology down other people’s throats, so the Biden Administration has decided to use the Veterans Administration to promote its absolutist abortion position.
A Texas nurse practitioner has filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in Waco against the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) for its rule requiring its medical facilities to provide abortions and abortion counseling.
Stephanie Carter, who has worked as a nurse practitioner at the Olin E. Teague Veterans’ Center in Temple for 23 years, sought a religious accommodation from participating in abortions.
According to the complaint filed by religious freedom legal defense group First Liberty, Carter was told no process for such an accommodation existed.
“The VA officials explained on October 11 that Ms. Carter would have to prescribe medications to end certain first trimester pregnancies if she did not have an approved religious accommodation,” the complaint asserts.
Carter claims that the VA is substantially burdening her freedom to exercise her religious beliefs in violation of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA).
Good for Carter. Also, I want to note that, 50 years ago, the phrase “VA Hospital-provided abortions” would have been inexplicable to men serving in the military…
Remember the post on how Alex Jones horribly misrepresented a video on Tyler “Hoovie” Hoover’s trouble with a Ford F-150 Lightning EV pickup truck? Well, there’s a follow-up:
It turns out that it isn’t just towing that drains the F-150 Lightning EV’s battery at an alarming rate. In mild winter weather (37°F), he found the Lightning using up 120 miles of estimated range in a mere 60 or so miles. “Towing nothing! It’s just cold outside! What!?!”
Teslas can suffer from the same problem, but even by that standard, the Lightning loss of range seems pretty extreme.
This is yet another example of why our urban elites decreeing that everyone should drive EVs to phase out gasoline-powered cars is foolhardy. EVs may be adequate for an urban commuting environment for people who have garages in which they can recharge them overnight, but is deeply unrealistic for people who need to do lots of driving in a single day, or need to haul around a lot of equipment or a trailer, or just any country driving in general.
And the F-150 Lightning EV seems unsuitable for, well, just about any real pickup truck tasks. Unless you live in Hawaii, southern Florida or the Rio Grande Valley, and even then there are better options.
Sidenote: At the end of the video, Hoover replaces the Lightning with…a Hummer EV! I thought the Hummer brand had been sold to China a decade ago, but evidently that deal fell through, and GM has evidently kept the brand dormant until recently.
It’s more than a little ironic that a 9,000 pound behemoth (the battery alone weighs more than a Honda Civic) with a nameplate treehuggers used to treat as synonymous with evil now counts as “green.”
In my previous post on crime statistics, several commenters (here and over on Instapundit) noted that Louis Rossmann had also put up a video covering the final straw that caused him to decide to leave New York: an audit he was subjected to after making a video discussing how incompetent New York taxing authorities were. I had seen it, but it was a bit long and I already had the crime statistics video cued up. Here it is by way of prologue for the next video.
The upshot is that, after having millions in fines and the possible destruction of his business dangling over his head for over a year thanks to New York authorities, the audit found that Rossman’s reporting had a 0.11% error rate.
If you thought that was the end of it, you underestimate the penny-ante fury of petty bureaucrats against those who would dare to criticize them. New York has launched a spite audit of Rossmann on his way out of the state:
Yet another excellent reason for business owners to leave New York as soon as possible…
Dr. Peter McCullough, a respected and highly-published cardiologist from Dallas, was informed in a recent letter from the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) that they recommend revoking his certifications in internal medicine and cardiovascular disease.
The letter, dated October 18 and obtained by The Epoch Times, stated that the decision was based upon McCullough’s “public statements … about the purported dangers of, or lack of justification for, the COVID-19 vaccines.”
“They’re trying to make an example out of me,” McCullough said in an interview with Emerald Robinson.
“This idea that a board can create a dispute over the ‘science’ … and then professionally damage me represents a legal infringement. This infringement ought to be carefully viewed as a dangerous step toward censorship,” he added.
McCullough was among the first to publish an early outpatient treatment protocol for COVID-19, and has raised concerns about the safety and efficacy of the emergency-authorized vaccines. He has been published in various medical journals over 1,000 times.
The ABIM’s Credentials and Certification Committee notified McCullough that the revocation process was being considered in May before the group met in July to consider the matter.
They cited his testimony before the Texas Senate Committee on Health and Human Services in March 2021. The ABIM committee took issue with McCullough saying there is “no scientific rationale” for healthy people under 50 to receive a COVID-19 vaccine.
In June, McCullough sent a letter asking for the matter to be dismissed, or for the right to be present and participate or have legal counsel present. He was not granted that right.
The committee said in its deliberation that it focused on McCullough’s claim about negligible mortality risks for those under the age of 50 or 60, countering with CDC reports that more than 71,000 Americans under 50 died of the disease.
They also stated that his assertion that tens of thousands have died from vaccines, based on Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) data, was “not supported by VAERS data or any other reliable source.”
“For these reasons, the [Credentials and Certification Committee] found that you have provided false or inaccurate medical information to the public,” the committee chair wrote, adding that McCullough’s statements questioning the vaccine “pose serious concerns for patient safety.”
The letter further explained that McCullough has the right to appeal the revocation of his credentials by November 18 or it becomes final.
Dr. McCullough’s real sin, of course, is to question The Holy Narrative over Flu Manchu, so much of which has turned out to be counterproductive or just plain wrong.
For that, the Democratic Medical Establishment will never forgive him.