I’m saving Fauxcahontas and the Virginia Chapter of the Al Jolsen Reenactment Society for the weekend. And for some reason, there’s a lot of jet fighter news in this roundup. [Shrugs]
President Donald Trump: Here is everything I’ve accomplished for the black community. MSM: Yes, but are you sensitive?
Leftwing it girl Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (or, as one Twitter user put it, Alexandria Occasional Cortex) offered up a proposal for a “Green New Deal” that’s equal messaures complete government takeover (and tanking) of the economy and absolute fantasyland. Oh, and it gets rid of every gasoline powered car by 2030, has jobs and free health care for all, and eliminates cow farts. I just hope the line isn’t too long to get my free pony…
“The 10 Most Insane Requirements Of The Green New Deal.” Including free money for people “unwilling to work.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
France conducts a nuclear strike exercise in the wake of the U.S’s INF treaty withdrawal. Message: “Manger de la merde, les Russes.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
The F-15X is an updated version of the F-15E, and six active duty pilots I have interviewed who have flown both that jet and the F-35 state the former could never survive in a modern day, high-threat environment, and that it would be soundly defeated by an F-35 in almost any type of air-to-air engagement. That strongly suggests buying the F-15X in lieu of the F-35 would be a very poor choice.
This bizarre, unspoken assumption that someone can’t change and grow up in a third of a century – especially when the evidence is that he or she changed and grew up in a third of a century – is profoundly destructive. It’s designed to allow the SJWs unlimited power to ex post facto decree someone unfit for society at their whim. They will scour a target’s past, decide something regrettable is unforgivable, and demand his or her head. And you just know that the GOP establishment Fredocons are willing to give it up without a fight.
Bill Weld changes his party registration to primary Donald Trump in 2020. (Glances at needle.) Nope, not even a twitch.
“A famous opera singer and his husband have been arrested on suspicion of raping a young singer who claims he was left bleeding from the rectum after blacking out at an after-show party with the pair in Texas, in 2010.” They’re being extradited from Michigan to Texas.
They’re adding two toll lanes and one non-toll lane each way on 183 between Mopac and State Highway 45. Because politicians just hate adding non-toll lanes these days…
Since everyone and their dog are talking about President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address, I’m counter-programming by offering up Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s State of the State address.
The Texas economy is doing gangbusters. “Texas leads the nation in new job creation. And we have the fastest growing economy in America. A by-product of this success is a prosperity that touches all corners of our state. Texas recorded its lowest unemployment rate ever. And wages are rising.”
Education needs improvement.
Tax reform is a priority.
Still recovering from Harvey, and we need to upgrade infrastructure.
We need to do more to address gang violence, including on the border.
Sometimes you link piece because you read it and go “What the hell?” Such is the case with this piece on the Houston Independent School District School Board:
Three days after the stunning ouster of Houston ISD Interim Superintendent Grenita Lathan in mid-October, an unexpected move that further divided the already-fractured school board, district leaders gathered for training on how to govern.
Instead, HISD leaders spent four straight hours lobbing blistering accusations of disingenuous, duplicitous and dismissive behavior by their colleagues. Through raised voices and tears, they bemoaned the disintegration of trust and productivity on the board, with one trustee describing his service as “a step below hell” and another likening her experience to “an abusive relationship.”
The intervention-style airing of grievances, captured on video and reported here for the first time, culminated with Trustee Wanda Adams standing up and yelling at Trustee Elizabeth Santos, angry that board members did not defend her after she received threats while serving as board president in 2017.
Well, there’s one problem. You’re supposed to hold off of the Festivus Airing of Grievances until December 23.
“Did y’all come to my defense? Hell no,” Adams shouted as she slowly walked toward Santos, prompting a top Texas Education Agency official in the room to position himself between the two trustees. “So, you want to know how I felt last year? I was quiet the whole year. So, don’t come up here crying ‘woe is me’ when people came to my house, attacked me.”
Houston ISD Trustee Wanda Adams shouted at fellow board member Elizabeth Santos for about 90 seconds during a mid-October board meeting, slowly walking toward her until Texas Education Agency Deputy Commissioner of Governance AJ Crabill stepped between them. The exchange marked the highest point of tension during a heated meeting in the aftermath of Interim Superintendent Grenita Lathan’s unexpected ouster, which was later reversed.
The remarkably candid meeting laid bare the dysfunction that critics say has weakened the Houston school board’s ability to serve the district’s 213,000 children and prompted calls for major state intervention over the past several months. The turmoil has stalled efforts to tackle some of the biggest issues facing the district, including poor academic performance among many low-income students, inequities in funding between campuses and unstable administrative leadership. Houston ISD leaders also suspect the board’s disharmony has contributed to the district’s largest enrollment decline in 12 years.
“I have felt like this year (in 2018), there’s been no productive work done by the board,” Trustee Anne Sung said during the October meeting.
Details of the seven-hour mid-October meeting have not been publicly disclosed until now, largely because it was not attended by local media and HISD officials did not post video of the meeting online. The Houston Chronicle obtained a copy of the video through a public records request.
The video depicts a beaten-down board compromised by grudges, clashing personalities and heightened suspicions. Some trustees have said they were unaware they were being recorded during the meeting, resulting in an unfiltered look at the fragmented board.
Houston ISD Trustee Anne Sung explained to colleagues the frustration she felt in 2018 while serving on the school board, as well as part of her rationale for voting to replace Interim Superintendent Grenita Lathan.
“There’s so much back-biting and back-stabbing and all of these little freaking agendas,” then-Board President Rhonda Skillern-Jones said during the meeting. “Every single freaking person here contributed to that. And until we take responsibility for that, it’s not going to change. And the public sees that. They see right through us.”
The articles portrays a school board at each other’s throats, with the biggest battles about personal respect rather than what’s best for students. It’s like an episode of one of those reality talk shows where poor people scream at each other for an hour. Except these people oversee the eighth largest school district in the country.
The relative inaction does not bode well for HISD’s prospects of maintaining local control over the district. Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath has had legal authority to replace the district’s school board since September 2017, the result of HISD’s inability to prove strong governance practices and improve academics at long-struggling schools. Morath has not exercised that option, but Gov. Greg Abbott’s blistering comments about the district’s leadership last month — a “disaster,” he tweeted — and a fresh state investigation into potential Open Meetings Act violations by several trustees raises the stakes for HISD.
Even if Morath resists pulling the takeover trigger, chronically low performance at four campuses could prompt a legally required state takeover of the board later this year.
Snip.
The school board has been riddled with distrust and in-fighting for years, often cutting across the class, ethnic and racial lines that cleave the diverse district. The interpersonal grievances frequently are well known in local education circles but less visible to the public.
The mid-October meeting, however, illustrates how the current iteration of the board — three new members were seated to begin 2018 — became Houston’s most maligned governing group.
One by one, trustees voiced frustration with fellow board members or the district administration, accusing colleagues of undermining them, distorting the truth or offering inadequate support.
Skillern-Jones, for example, spent several minutes criticizing nearly all of the trustees for failing to defend her leadership in 2018, noting that she reluctantly assumed the presidency after Trustee Jolanda Jones scuttled Sung’s candidacy. Skillern-Jones drew flak in April when she ordered HISD police to clear the audience from the room during a raucous board meeting, which precipitated the arrests of two women.
Me me me me me.
I believe in subsidiarity, the idea that power should devolve to the lowest level of government possible, but it may very well be time for the state to take over HISD.
Trump has, however, suggested that he may well go the emergency route if Pelosi and Schumer remain intransigent: “We can call a national emergency. I haven’t done it. I may do it.… It’s another way of doing it.” The standard line trotted out by the Democrats and the media when the President alludes to an emergency declaration is that a phalanx of pettifoggers will contrive to tie it up in the courts indefinitely. This has even been repeated by conservative pundits. According to Professor Turley, however, “Courts generally have deferred to the judgments of presidents on the basis for such national emergencies, and dozens of such declarations have been made without serious judicial review.”
All of which means that there is no practical way for the Democrats to stop Trump from getting his wall. He will make a sound, statesmanlike case for it to the nation during the State of the Union address — just 10 days before the deadline to avoid another shutdown. Nancy Pelosi will be scowling behind him, still smarting from the beating she received in the polls from the last shutdown and the hectoring to which she has no doubt been subjected from vulnerable members whose constituents are tired of, “NO.” Then, failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams will deliver the Dem SOTU response and characterize Trump’s wall using the usual tired clichés about racism.
In other words, Trump will have been presidential. He will have delivered all manner of good news about the economy, deregulation, health care, foreign policy, and will have laid out a plan for the wall. The Democrats will have offered identity politics, obstruction, investigations, and magical thinking on policy. Pelosi will at length decide it’s smarter to ignore the crazies in her caucus, give Trump something that he can call a “win” on the wall, and move on to something else… anything else. And all the TDS victims and Never Trumpers will demand to know what happened to their bête noire.
Old and Busted: “Neither snow nor rain, nor gloom of night, shall stay these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” The New Coldness: Mail delivery in Minnesota cancelled due to cold.
In fact, with all of this year after year of the HOTTEST YEAR EVER, no state has set a highest temperature record is more than 20 years. In fact, most (39 out of 50) state highest temperature records were set quite long ago – over 50 years ago, sometimes as long ago as 1888 (!).
Stop and think about that – if the science were as settled as people say, wouldn’t there be at least one state that set an all time high record recently? What a strange warming that raises average temperatures but not record high temperatures.
“A shocking report from the Texas Secretary of State last week revealed 95,000 individuals identified in the Texas Department of Public Safety database as non-U.S. citizens have registered to vote in Texas — and 58,000 of those have voted in one or more Texas election since 1996.”
Texans may enjoy real property tax reform soon. It’s amazing what can be accomplished when you have a speaker working for conservative goals, rather than against them…
In April 2013, it was reported that BuzzFeed’s investment was $46 million, which means they’ve attracted about $450 million in new capital over the past six years — despite having never shown a profit!
BuzzFeed has been burning through cash at a rate of $75 million a year and you might think that at some point their investors would become impatient waiting for this operation to show some prospect of making a return on their investment.
“The Navy’s costliest warship, the $13 billion Gerald R. Ford, had 20 failures of its aircraft launch-and-landing systems during operations at sea, according to the Pentagon’s testing office.” There’s a reason they have shakedown cruises, and I think there’s a good chance they’ll work out the bugs and get the electromagnetic catapult systems working properly. But at $13 billion, the cost-benefit analysis of additional aircraft carriers starts to get very tricky vs. say, four cheaper ships capable of launching 1,000 semi-autonomous drones each. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Now, Tom Wolfe was a genuine intellectual — he had a Ph.D. from Princeton, for crying out loud — but he was also a Southerner, a native of Virginia, and unlike so many other journalists who have written about the South, he had sympathy for the people he wrote about. He wasn’t out to write an exposé or to do what is nowadays called “investigative journalism,” but sought to explain the folkways of small-town Appalachia to the urban sophisticates who read Esquire, to make the reader see how wholesome and quintessentially American these people really were.
If you want to know why nobody gives a damn about magazines like Esquire anymore, it’s because the progressive politics of the 21st century forbid any sympathy for the kind of people who like NASCAR. Everything in big-league journalism now is about left-wing politics, more or less, and because North Carolina rednecks probably aren’t too excited about the Left’s agenda of open borders and transgender rights and all that, there is zero possibility a latter-day Tom Wolfe could get any New York-based magazine to publish an article like “The Last American Hero.”
The whole thing is basically a celebration of toxic masculinity, as the Gender Studies majors would say. Junior Johnson was not one of these “sensitive” modern guys, but a big muscular fellow who thrived on ferocious competition in one of the most masculine of sports.
He also quotes part of my favorite passage from Wolfe’s celebrated essay, about courage being one of Appalachia’s exportable commodities:
In the Korean War, not a very heroic performance by American soldiers generally, there were seventy-eight Medal of Honor winners. Thirty-nine of them were from the South, and practically all of the thirty-nine were from small towns in or near the Appalachians. The New York metropolitan area, which has more people than all these towns put together, had three Medal of Honor winners, and one of them had just moved to New York from the Appalachian region of West Virginia. Three of the Medal of Honor winners came from within fifty miles of Junior Johnson’s side porch.
How much of the vicious, fact-free attacks on the Covington kids were just baseline floating animus against Christians and Trump supporters on the part of the media, and how much are battlespace preparation over a possible nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to replace Ruth Bader Ginsberg?
The northeastern part of Columbus, Ohio used to be an unpretentious, unremarkable part of America. You could go there if you wanted to. It is now an unofficial colony of Somalia. The business signs, grimy and grey for decades, are now in Arabic. Somali women, grown fat on an American diet doled out by the public’s confiscated largesse, waddle along the street in their abysmal burkas. Somali men are something other than Americans with funny accents. Something has gone badly wrong.
While I can still drive through this part of Columbus, I notice the Americans who used to live there, white and black, are fewer and farther between. I notice when I hear on the local news that a “refugee” has run his car into a group of students at Ohio State, then chased others down the street with a knife while shouting “Allahu Akbar!” I notice when another “migrant,” a Muslim from Ghana, enters a restaurant owned by an Israeli and proceeds to hack at the customers with a machete. America’s earlier minorities didn’t do these things. This is something new. I may be in Ohio, my dear Toto, but something tells me I’m not in my own country anymore. I’m in the middle of a pre-industrial, semi-literate, dystopian Islamic theme park.
Unlike Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, I cannot simply tap my heels together and get back to the imperfect but largely harmless familiarity of home. One more part of America has been allocated to another alien population – squatters who have been brought here to feed on us and to drive us out. But where do we have left to go? This isn’t progress – though it is progressive.
This situation did not occur by accident. It is the product of a premeditated and deliberate social policy. When immigration is talked about on what sneeringly masquerades as news, it is always painted in fatalistic phrases that make it sound like an unstoppable force of nature – as though the people surging into America were a swarm of Mexican butterflies or a herd of East African wildebeests that had somehow overwhelmed the TSA.
Snip.
They did not aspire to be Americans in any remotely meaningful sense of the word. We have seen them, and we are not that stupid. The African populations seeded in Columbus, Minneapolis, and many other places did not come here to learn our culture or our values. They were not blown here in some unavoidable freak storm, nor did they wander here in search of missing livestock. They were certainly not brought here centuries ago as hapless and unwilling slaves. People from Washington, Boston, San Francisco and New York have sponsored this invasion – people who staff committees and think tanks, people who show the residents of the heartland the same loving concern that the Jackson administration showed the Cherokee.
It seemed way out of character for [Nick] Frankovich to author an angry post about the Covington Catholic High School incident just as the details were emerging. His article—”The Covington Students Might As Well Have Just Spit on the Cross”—went online in the middle of the night on National Review’s portal for short posts by contributors. Frankovich harshly condemned the students, referred to their actions as evil and sadistic, and questioned their Christianity.
“They mock a serious, frail-looking older man and gloat in their momentary role as Roman soldiers to his Christ. Bullying is a worn-out word and doesn’t convey the full extent of the evil on display here,” the deputy online editor wrote. He included accusations that had not yet been confirmed.
On Sunday afternoon, as the media’s narrative fell apart and the reality of the situation came into view, National Review quietly removed Frankovich’s article from its website. Rich Lowry, the outlet’s editor, explained in a very brief post that he and Frankovich had been duped by a “hoax” and that Frankovich’s “strongly worded post” had been taken down. Lowry also deleted a few of his own tweets that inaccurately portrayed the incident.
That was it. Rather than acknowledge that the editor and deputy editor for a once reliable and thoughtful conservative magazine were complicit in mob-shaming teenage boys attending a pro-life rally, they quickly excused their behavior as nothing more than gullibility. There was no apology, save for this quasi mea culpa. There was no “calling out” other conservatives who also had participated in the viral assault on innocent young boys.
Two NRO articles addressed the the media’s malfeasance in the matter. In particular, “Nathan Phillips Lied, The Media Bought It,” wrote Kyle Smith.
But the fact that editors for National Review also bought into the various lies escaped mention. This also included senior editor Jay Nordlinger, who deleted a January 19 tweet that read, “the images of those red-hat kids surrounding and mocking that old Indian are unbearable. Absolutely unbearable. An American disgrace.” Jonah Goldberg hand-waved away Frankovich’s vicious post as just “different people reaching different conclusions or having different opinions.”
Snip.
When confronted with evidence, there is no real apology or soul-searching. The public and the maligned families are just supposed to accept their vague, “oops, my bad” tweets and move on.
Further, the same crowd of call-out conservatives, the nags who constantly are telling us which Republican lawmaker or presidential aide or Fox News anchor must be reprimanded for one imagined offense or another, have been silent on calling out their own tribe for joining the Covington High School outrage mob. Where is David French “calling out” his pal, Bill Kristol, for his two (deleted) tweets about the kids, including calling them “MAGA brats”? Where are the Referees of the Right demanding that Ana Navarro or Ben Howe or Jennifer Rubin apologize for vilifying innocent kids? Where are the conspiracy trackers like Jim Swift condemning Jim Swift for peddling this fiction? And why isn’t one conservative demanding that S.E. Cupp be fired from CNN for slandering these kids on her program? (She unconvincingly apologized on Twitter on Monday.)
Buzzfeed, Huffington Post, and other media outlets announced layoffs. Maybe those outlets should consider, oh, I don’t know, not treating half their potential audience with naked contempt?
As Mollie Hemingway has said several times, Twitter did improve transparency, and that transparency in turn reduced trust in media.
You showed yourselves for what you really are. We noticed. We adjusted our estimates of you according to the new information.
The thing is, what twitter exposed was not that you were leftwing. We already knew that.
What Twitter exposed was that you were also dumb, easily duped, eager to believe self-justifying conspiracy theories, thin-skinned, arrogant, incompetent, disgracefully lazy, psychologically (and almost certainly physically) inadequate, dunderheadedly unimaginative and unwilling to consider any idea not within the braindead leftwing Incela Corridor Conventional Wisdom Bubble, prone to the most cowardly go-along-to-get-along sort of groupthink, and weak.
Before Twitter, you were removed from us. Anyone who’s removed seems exalted. We knew you were leftwing political operators, but, and I hate to admit this, your remoteness made you seem like you were… elite.
Now we’ve seen what you really are. You’re C- minus students and fat-assed pencil pushers with a nose for sniffing out the right dicks to suck.
Stop holding back and tell us what you really think!
David Kopel has more on the case: “Since the Sullivan Act in 1911, New Yorkers must obtain a license to own a handgun. As will be detailed below, the New York Police Department’s enforcement of the Sullivan Act was abusive from the very start, and has generally remained so ever since.” (Hat tip: Say Uncle.)
The world is filled with dumbasses, and some of them even come from Texas. But it takes a special kind of dumbassery to join the Islamic State:
An American English teacher who joined ISIS says that witnessing people being beheaded never bothered him because ‘they like to execute people in the US too.’
Warren Christopher Clark, 34, who joined the group in spring 2015 before being captured by Kurds earlier this month, spoke out about life in the so-called Islamic State from a prison in northern Syria.
Clark told NBC that during his time in Iraq and Syria ‘I saw some people being executed publicly, I saw some crucifixions… that’s just normal life there.’
Watching your first judicial crucifixion, a man of even average intelligence and/or a functioning moral compass might have said to himself “Huh, maybe I’ve made a mistake.”
Asked how he felt about it, he replied: ‘I’m from the United States, from Texas. They like to execute people, too. So I really don’t see any difference.
‘[Texas] might do it off camera, but it’s the same.’
Clark also admits that he had seen the execution videos before leaving to join the group, and hadn’t been put off.
‘That’s just normal life there,’ he said. ‘This is an Islamic society, an Islamic country, things like this happen.
‘I guess [it didn’t bother me] because I knew what I was coming to see.’
Yeah, not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Or even the sharpest spoon.
Asked why he decided to join the group, which was being bombed by the US at the time, he said: ‘I wanted to go see exactly what the group was about and what they were doing.’
Clark made contact with the group by applying to be an English teacher at the University of Mosul, Iraq, having been a substitute teacher in Sugar Land, Texas.
He even sent a resume with a cover letter to the course director, under the alias of Abu Mohammed al-Ameriki.
Most people researching radical terrorist organizations don’t feel the need to join them.
By the way, my parents lived in Sugar Land for many years. For those unfamiliar with Texas, it’s a suburban city southwest of Houston where I-69 and Highway 6 meet. A hotbed of Islamic radicalism it’s not.
He was accepted, and in June 2015 Clark said he traveled to Turkey before crossing into Syria and making his way to Iraq.
Two weeks ago he was captured in eastern Syria, near the Euphrates river, as Kurdish forces attempt to flush out the last remaining pocket of ISIS resistance.
He was captured alongside two men from Pakistan, another from Ireland, and a fifth from Trinidad and Tobago.
Only five other American ISIS fighter are known to have been captured alive.
Clark claims he only ever worked as a teacher and refused to fight for ISIS, spending several terms in jail for refusing to pick up a weapon.
When interviewed by NBC he was walking on two crutches, but insisted he was injured in a ‘personal fight’.
Yeah, right.
“US officials have yet to reveal what they will do with Clark and another US citizen purportedly arrested by Kurdish-led forces, Zaid Abed al-Hamid.”
Here’s hoping Mr. Clark gets the precise degree of justice he deserves…
“Trump Gains 19 Points with Latino Voters During Border Wall Shutdown.” Via that well-known alt right cabal of NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist. Also: Trump popularity rating among Latinos at 50%. Gee, evidently Latinos like jobs and the rule of law too! Who knew? (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
“The Democratic National Committee is the latest organization to silently drop its partnership with the Women’s March. The DNC offered no explanation or condemnation of several march leaders’ well-documented history of anti-Semitism, yet the committee’s name is no longer listed as a “sponsor” on the Women’s March partner list.”
At least five Saudi citizens in Oregon facing serious charges (“two accused rapists, a pair of suspected hit-and-run drivers and one man with child porn on his computer”) disappeared after posting large bail and/or surrendering their passports.
Stupid news: “CNN analyst Areva Martin accused Sirius XM radio and Fox Nation host David Webb of benefiting from ‘white privilege‘ because of his views on race Tuesday morning.” There’s just one tiny problem…
Let’s not forget one of the stupidest pieces of stupid news this week: that Gillette “toxic masculinity” ad. Here’s everything wrong with it.
Not only should you stop buying Gillette razors, you should consider stop buying everything parent company Proctor & Gamble makes until they clean house:
Nick Clegg takes a job with .@facebook and a few weeks later one of the fastest growing Brexit groups .@Leavers_Britain gets shut down. Coincidence? Keep up the great work @Lugey6 solidarity from your comrades in @labourleave
“In a change designed to make their mission more transparent to Colorado citizens, the state’s Civil Rights Commission updated its mission statement Thursday to read simply “DESTROY JACK PHILLIPS.”
Remember that lawsuit against the city of Austin over barring a legally armed citizen from City Hall in violation of state law I mentioned two days ago? Well, State District Judge Lora Livingston just ruled against the city:
A Travis County judge has ruled that the city of Austin violated state open carry gun laws for blocking a licensed firearms holder from entering City Hall on multiple days in 2016.
State District Judge Lora Livingston fined the city $9,000. Her ruling came down Thursday, a week after the judge presided over a two-day trial centered on a lawsuit from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office.
The suit stated security guards at City Hall blocked local gun activist Michael Cargill, who has a concealed gun permit, from entering the building on multiple occasions. The building had a sign etched in glass prohibiting the presence of guns even though, according to the suit, City Hall was not exempt under the law the same way that a courthouse would be.
Cargill told the American-Statesman on Thursday that he complained to the city in July 2016 after he was denied entry to the building. When he returned to the building days later and was again told to leave, he alerted Paxton’s office.
“This means that every city and county, municipality and property, needs to follow the law,” Cargill said Thursday. “This means we absolutely were correct since we won in Travis County — a blue dot in a sea of red.”
Also this:
The AG’s office had asked the judge to make Austin comply with the law that states only certain government buildings, like courthouses and those that have school functions, are gun-free. The judge denied that request, saying that there’s no reason to believe Austin will not abide by the law going forward.
The new rule represents the most sweeping federal gun control effort since the so-called assault weapons ban, which was passed in 1994 and expired in 2003. Even the Obama administration, which was overtly hostile to Second Amendment rights, rejected the logic of Trump’s bump stock ban.
As a matter of both law and physics, the Trump administration’s gun control rule banning bump stocks is an abomination. The Department of Justice (DOJ), which formally issued the rule, not only ignores underlying federal statutes that precisely define what constitutes a fully automatic “machine gun,” it also ignores the mechanics of how guns are fired and how bump stocks increase the rate of fire. Even worse, the faulty logic of the new gun control rule could eventually be used as a basis for a presidential administration unilaterally banning and confiscating all semi-automatic weapons.
Another concern about the bump stock ban: It doesn’t just ban them, it make those already legally purchased before the ban illegal to own:
“A current possessor may destroy the device or abandon it at the nearest ATF office, but no compensation will be provided for the device. Any method of destruction must render the device incapable of being readily restored to its intended function.”
Get caught in violation and prepare to have your life destroyed through arrest, prosecution, incarceration and a lifetime ban on owning guns. All brought to you by a “pro-gun” president taking his lead from NRA’s plea to regulate instead of legislate.
This is, to my mind, an unconstitutional taking under the Fifth Amendment, and if allowed to stand, would pave the way for future gun confiscations via regulatory mandate.
Borepatch makes his position clear: “Gun control is unconstitutional. All of it. ALL OF IT.” Further: “I would roll it all back past the 1934 Gun Control Act. No lists. No watchdogs. No limits on design or rate of fire.”
Speaking of unconstitutional, “red flag laws” are bullshit.”
City of Austin: Don’t think you can bring your foolish “gun rights” here. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton: Here, have a lawsuit:
Austin could face punishment for infringing on the citizen’s rights: state law allows for a $1,500 daily fine for blocking licensed citizens from entering city hall with their permitted handguns. According to Paxton’s press release, the city has been barring the resident for more than 500 days, and the attorney general’s team asked the court to impose a total fine of over $750,000.
Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! At least those of you not among the millions dead from the shutdown, assuming you already survived the tax cut and the end of Net Neutrality…
In December, the United States reached a staggering level of oil production, pumping some 11.6 million barrels per day. For the first time since 1973, America is now the world’s largest oil producer
Since Trump took office, the United States has increased its oil production by nearly 3 million barrels per day, largely as the result of fewer regulations, more federal leasing, and the continuing brilliance of American frackers and horizontal drillers.
It appears that there is still far more oil beneath U.S. soil than has ever been taken out. American production could even soar higher in the months ahead.
In addition, the United States remains the largest producer of natural gas and the second-greatest producer of coal. The scary old energy-related phraseology of the last half-century—”energy crisis,” “peak oil,” “oil embargo”—no longer exists.
Near-total energy self-sufficiency means the United States is no longer strategically leveraged by the Middle East, forced to pay exorbitant political prices to guarantee access to imported oil, or threatened by gasoline prices of $4 to $5 a gallon.
The American economy grew by 4.2 percent in the second quarter of 2018, and by 3.4 percent in the third quarter. American GDP is nearly $1.7 trillion larger than in January 2017, and nearly $8 trillion larger than the GDP of China. For all the talk of the Chinese juggernaut, three Chinese workers produce about 60 percent of the goods and services produced by one American worker.
In 2018, unemployment fell to a near-record peacetime low of 3.7 percent. That’s the lowest U.S. unemployment rate since 1969. Black unemployment hit an all-time low in 2018. For the first time in memory, employers are seeking out entry-level workers rather than vice versa.
The poverty rate is also near a historic low, and household income increased. There are about 8 million fewer Americans living below the poverty line than there were eight years ago. Since January 2017, more than 3 million Americans have gone off so-called food stamps.
Abroad, lots of bad things that were supposed to happen simply did not.
After withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord, the United States exceeded the annual percentage of carbon reductions of most countries that are part of the agreement.
North Korea and the United States did not go to war. Instead, North Korea has stopped its provocative nuclear testing and its launching of ballistic missiles over the territory of its neighbors.
Despite all the Trump bluster, NATO and NAFTA did not quite implode. Rather, allies and partners agreed to renegotiate past commitments and agreements on terms more favorable to the U.S.
The United States—and increasingly most of the world—is at last addressing the systematic commercial cheating, technological appropriation, overt espionage, intellectual-property theft, cyber intrusions, and mercantilism of the Chinese government.
“There is one thing that Palestine obsessives never seem obsessed with: the opinions of Palestinians. There’s no mystery here—asking what Palestinians believe exposes a fundamental problem with the liberal approach to the peace process, which is based on the belief that Palestinians are willing to live peacefully beside Israel.”
House Democrats are up and running, and their first bill is instructive. Couched as an anti-corruption and good-government measure, it is really an attempt to silence or obstruct political opponents.
A central part of H.R. 1 is “campaign-finance reform,” no surprise given the progressive fixation with money in politics, which oddly turns to mist when Tom Steyer or Mike Bloomberg are spending. The House bill requires some advocacy groups to publicly disclose the names of donors who give more than $10,000, even if the groups aren’t running ads that endorse candidates but merely inform voters about the issues.
The goal is to identify donors who don’t genuflect to progressive views, then bully or harass them to stop giving. Recall how the Mozilla CEO was driven out after he donated to California’s referendum opposing same-sex marriage.
“Hey officer, I have a dead body in my apartment, along with a bunch of illegal drugs.” “It’s cool. No worries.”
How long would it take for police to arrest me if they found 24 syringes, meth, cocaine, other ILLEGAL drugs and paraphernalia AND a dead body in my home?
How long b4 prominent politicians like @HillaryClinton to distance themselves?
Laws are for the little people: “He’s been a staunch supporter of gun control measures for decades, but in a surprising twist, federal prosecutors revealed Thursday that nearly two dozen firearms were discovered in Ald. Ed Burke’s offices during their raids in November.” (Hat tip: Snowflakes in Hell.)
Jair Bolsonaro is “far right” and the media means that as a pejorative.
Turns out he favors the private sector and wants to get rid of government owned industry.
He favors expansive gun rights as a way to combat crime and let people protect themselves. This has led to massive media backlash in the United States.
He favors conservative social policy including a rollback of the LGBT agenda in Brazil. Again, this has led to massive media backlash in the United States.
Most damning in the eyes of many in western media, he favors abandoning restrictions on private property that could threaten Amazonian forest growth, i.e. he’s bad for climate change.
The media has focused a lot on Bolsonaro talking favorably about Brazil’s American backed military dictatorship that ruthlessly exterminated communists and other dissident groups from the 1960’s into the early 1980’s. They suggest Bolsonaro might bring it back.
So far, the only thing Bolsonaro seems to be doing is keeping his campaign promises to fight corruption, roll back progressive social policies his socialist predecessor supported, and expand gun rights. But the American commentariat can do nothing but see everything through the lens of Trump and if you hate Trump, you must hate Bolsonaro apparently.
Dan Crenshaw seems to be settling into his new job nicely:
HOW ELSE AM I SUPPOSED TO CUT STRAWBERRY SLICES FOR MY CEREAL BENNY??
But seriously, we are presented with a K-Bar knife at SEAL training graduation, engraved with the name of a fallen SEAL. Never Forget. https://t.co/ZEfI4M0dw3
