I got a little off track yesterday, and never got back to the rest of the political/election links that I'd saved. Let's see what I can do. Let's begin today by looking at the Freedom Convoy's taking shape in the US, and the Canadian crackdown that preceded, and prompted them.
The sun is out, it's 31 F, but the sun is melting the ice on the trees slowly,
and lot's of it is falling into the yard and lot behind us. Looks like it's
going to be a pretty tolerable day.
First, for no particular reason other than to get it out of the way, from
Politico, Rich Lowry warns The Donald,
What Trump Gets Wrong About McConnell "The former president has the devotion of the Republican rank and file,
but sooner or later they’ll have to win elections, where the Senate GOP leader
rules." But as a businessman Trump knows that no man, including himself is
irreplaceable. As Charlie DeGaul once may have noted
"The graveyards are full on indispensable men", Meanwhile from Sundance at CTH, Lara Trump Hints At President Trump 2024 Race. Should be be surprised?
i. Enable Congress to determine who can run for President, ii.Eliminate
the Electoral College without amending the Constitution, iii. Override
the states' constitutionally mandated authority to determine presidential
election rules, iv. Grant statehood to the District of Columbia by
statute, v. Rewrite the First Amendment to limit political speech,
and vi, Enable open border immigration through executive agreement
instead of Congressional action. Taken together, the program represents a
comprehensive challenge to representative democracy. It deserves to be
understood and debated front and center.
D'Souza points out something we've all noticed, which is that, on January 6,
many of the people peacefully walked and gawked through the Capitol after
having been
invited in
— and treated respectfully — by the relatively small number of Capitol police
officers on duty. If you've ever visited the Capitol in the past, you know
that's not how it ordinarily works.
Even stranger is the fact that
Capitol police officers, who expected to be pulling extra duty, given that
everyone knew that large numbers of Trump-supporters would be flooding D.C.,
were
instead sent home for the day. Additionally, D'Souza points out, when
Trump offered 10,000 National Guard troops
to help out because the rally was in town, both those in charge of the Capitol
and D.C. mayor Muriel Bowser rebuffed the offer. As speaker of the House, it's
inconceivable that Pelosi wasn't part of this decision.
In
addition, says D'Souza:
Steve Sund, the U.S. Capitol Police Chief, called for National Guard backup
two days before January 6. His offer was declined — and declined by whom?
Declined by the sergeant of arms [sic] working in cohorts, in consultation
with Nancy Pelosi's office.
The sergeant at arms later explained that they didn't want
the "optics" of troops
in town — but D'Souza states correctly that "this explanation to me makes
absolutely no sense." Since January 6, the Democrats have been rubbing
security in everyone's face, so those optics are fine with them.
Pelosi's
been moving people around like chess pieces since then:
Now, right after January 6 what does Nancy Pelosi do? She fires the sergeant
of arms [sic]. She fires the Capitol Police Chief Steve Sund and she
replaces him with another guy and, very interestingly, the police union, the
union that actually represents the Capitol Police, took a vote and 92% of
them have voted no confidence in this quote "new leadership." In other
words, in this guy Yogananda Pittman, Nancy Pelosi's man that she stuck in
there. The Capitol Police are basically saying we don't think this guy is
any good.
We also know
from the WaPo, of all places, that the FBI had advance warning that various radical groups
were planning to attack the Capitol. Yet no one did anything. It's
inconceivable that they kept this information to themselves.
Tucker: Pelosi's named a conspiracy theorist — who claimed the Capitol riot was an “inside job” and has said some Republicans “should be treated like terrorists” — to conduct an overview of Capitol Hill security pic.twitter.com/KO5RGlt5Zo
Congressman Tim Ryan (D-OH), chairman of the subcommittee on the legislative
branch, which has been investigating the police response to the riot,
previously told
reporters that one of the officers had been suspended for taking a selfie
with a rioter and the other had been suspended for wearing a MAGA hat and
giving trespassers directions. It’s not clear why the other officers were
suspended.
To be clear, the death rate being discussed here is new daily deaths. While Sweden now has the most daily deaths per million, that wasn’t always the case. In this version of the graph, you can see that the UK, France and Italy have all had much higher daily totals at the peak, before dropping. Meanwhile Sweden’s average (the red line) has remained relatively high since April.
The medical journal Lancet has now fully retracted their prior claimed “scientific study” against the use of Hodroxychloroquine. The Lancet study was quickly and purposefully used by all major media outlets to attack President Trump for his advocacy of the drug as an effective treatment for the COVID-19 virus.
It now appears the purpose of the fraudulent “scientific study”, conducted by a sketchy outfit called Surgisphere – who mysteriously appeared only after President Trump advocated for the treatment, was to weaponize medicine for political purposes.
After they were exposed for their role in pushing manipulated data, Lancet has now fully retracted their study in an attempt to retain credibility.
LANCET – Today, three of the authors of the paper, “Hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine with or without a macrolide for treatment of COVID-19: a multinational registry analysis”, have retracted their study.
They were unable to complete an independent audit of the data underpinning their analysis. As a result, they have concluded that they “can no longer vouch for the veracity of the primary data sources.” (continue reading)
Don’t expect the media to announce the Lancet retraction, or apologize for their role in pushing the political narrative around it. Journalism is dead as the entire profession has now been exposed as nothing more than narrative engineers.
“I encourage everyone who is protesting, if you are out demonstrating or out congregating at all, please wear a mask and please try to stay six feet away from others,” she said on Mojo In The Morning.
She marched along as the closely packed large group chanted, “Hands up, don’t shoot,” and “This is what democracy looks like.”
Whitmer, wearing a cloth mask, was standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Bishop Charles Ellis and Lt. Gov. Garland Gilchrist.
George Floyd’s funeral is expected to have hundreds or thousands of attendees, including high profile politicians like Biden. Meanwhile people have not been allowed to go to their own family members funerals because attendance was capped due to COVID.
A Maryland man who was shot and killed by a police officer was asleep in his bedroom when police opened fire from outside his house, an attorney for the 21-year-old man’s family said Friday. The man's girlfriend was also wounded.
The Montgomery County Police Department said in a news release Friday that Duncan Socrates Lemp “confronted” police and was shot by one of the officers early Thursday. Rene Sandler, an attorney for Lemp’s relatives, said an eyewitness gave a “completely contrary” account of the shooting. She said police could have “absolutely no justification” for shooting Lemp based on what she has heard about the circumstances.
“The facts as I understand them from eyewitnesses are incredibly concerning,” she told The Associated Press.
The warrant that police obtained to search the Potomac home Lemp shared with his parents and 19-year-old brother doesn’t mention any “imminent threat” to law enforcement or the public, Lemp’s relatives said in a statement released Friday by their lawyers. Nobody in the house that morning had a criminal record, the statement adds.
“Any attempt by the police to shift responsibility onto Duncan or his family, who were sleeping when the police fired shots into their home, is not supported by the facts,” the statement says.
A police department spokesman didn’t immediately respond to the statements by the family or their lawyer.
The department's news release on Friday says tactical unit members were serving a “high-risk” search warrant around 4:30 a.m. when one of the unit's officers fatally shot Lemp. Police detectives recovered three rifles and two handguns from the home. Lemp was prohibited from possessing firearms, police said.
“Detectives were following up on a complaint from the public that Lemp, though prohibited, was in possession of firearms,” the release says without elaborating.
Sandler said the family believes police fired gunshots, not a flashbang or other projectile, from outside the home, including through Lemp’s bedroom window, while he and his girlfriend were sleeping. Nobody in the home heard any warnings or commands before police opened fire, she said.
“There is no warrant or other justification that would ever allow for that unless there is an imminent threat, which there was not,” Sandler said.
The police department's news release says the “facts and circumstances of the encounter” are still under investigation. Prosecutors from neighboring Howard County will review the evidence at the conclusion of the investigation.
“An established agreement between the Montgomery County State’s Attorney’s Office and the Howard County State’s Attorney’s Office stipulates that when an officer-involved shooting involving injury or death occurs in one county, the other county’s State’s Attorney’s Office will review the event,” police said.
Regardless of what actually occurred in the incident, and the police do deserve the benefit of the doubt, the attempted confiscation, and resulting death would not have occurred without the red flag law. But it's OK, because Lemp was deplorable:
On social media accounts that friends said belonged to him, Lemp’s username was “YungQuant.” On an internet forum called “My Militia,” someone who identified himself as Duncan Lemp, of Potomac, and posted under the username “yungquant” said he was “an active III%'r and looking for local members & recruits.” That’s an apparent reference to the Three Percenters, a wing of the militia movement. The group’s logo, the Roman numeral “III,” has become popular with anti-government extremists, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
On his Instagram account, Lemp recently posted a photograph that depicts two people holding up rifles and included the term “boogaloo,” slang used by militia members and other extremists to describe a future civil war in the U.S.
The Department of Health and Human Services is asking Americans to celebrate the anniversary of our country’s independence from a tyrannical government by reciting government-approved talking points about the wisdom of the president’s healthcare policies. From the HHS website:
This Fourth of July, families across the nation will gather around hot dogs (or their favorite vegetarian alternative) and potato salad to spend some quality time together, watch fireworks and reflect on the holiday’s meaning. But as much as we love our families – and we do, seriously –we don’t always agree when it comes to current events, like last week’s Supreme Court decision upholding tax credits that help make insurance under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) more affordable for millions of people.
Misinformation about the ACA is everywhere, and there’s been a lot of money spent to spread that misinformation – as much as half a billion dollars in ads, according to one 2014 estimate. Not surprisingly, many Americans still don’t know how changes the law made to insurance and the health care system can help improve their lives.
You should be prepared when Aunt Janine says something like, “Obamacare hasn’t helped anyone!” So here are a few points to remember during this long holiday weekend. . .
Say "uncle"
Situation: Before reaching for another burger, your uncle mentions he’s been meaning to get a blood pressure screening he’s been putting off.
You say: Thanks to the ACA, most health plans must now cover recommended preventive services like annual checkups, flu shots and screenings at no out-of-pocket cost.
Back in May, the Washington Times reported that Cover Oregon (the Oregon Obamacare exchange) had flushed more than $300M in federal funding into their problematic system before then Governor John Kitzhaber scrapped the program, likely to avoid even more questions about his administration’s financial activities. Since we’ve heard no more about it in the intervening time I’d assumed that this was just more taxpayer money down yet another rathole. (Hardly newsworthy anymore, sadly.) But this week the Times is back with an update and somebody in Congress apparently noticed the Oregon money pit and would like a word with a few folks in in the Pacific Northwest.
A key House oversight panel is demanding that the Department of Health and Human Services turn over all documents related to the failed Cover Oregon health care information exchange, which was abandoned last year after the state spent an estimated $300 million of federal grant money to build it.
The June 15 letter from the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform seeks all communication between employees for the Center for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) about the Oregon site, all documents related to the site’s functioning, and a description of changes CMS made to its processes on grants and information technology related to federal and state Obamacare websites. The letter signed by Rep. Jason Chaffetz, Utah Republican and the panel chairman, notes that despite Cover Oregon having cost hundreds of millions only to be scrapped and have the state’s Obamacare customers turned over to the federal healthcare.gov site, CMS in February 2011 “identified Oregon as an ‘early innovator,’ one of only seven states granted large sums of federal dollars to design reusable IT systems in hopes of providing a state-based exchange model for other states to follow.”
The question is whether or not we get our money back if it was knowingly dumped to no purpose or to something corrupt. While it’s not all that common, there is precedent aplenty for states being forced to pay back inappropriately allocated funds. Fairly recently Wisconsin was facing paying back federal grant money for for an economic development scheme which was supposed to lure a new employer to the state. The deal never went through and Wisconsin was on the hook for it. There are other examples, including many in New York for similarly failed programs.
Of course the Obama administration will not hold Oregon accountable for blowing three hundred million dollars in attempting to implement a poorly drafted law.
The circumstances suggest that Gray's transportation may have involved a so-called "nickel ride," in which officers deliberately drive at high speeds and suddenly stop and start, a technique used to punish arrested suspects and which has been known to sometimes cause serious injury.
After lingering a week in the hospital, Freddie Gray died on April 19.
Clearly there are lessons to be learned here:
#1 The police are not your friends. Do nothing that can attract their attention.
#2 Never, never, ever, ever run from or resist the police. Nothing good can happen.
#3 Bad things can happen in police custody. Avoid if at all possible, consistent with #2.
With Ferguson and the Eric Garner incidents both close in the rear view mirror, it was almost inevitable that some strife and civil was going to come, and by all accounts, there may well be more justification in this case. It's difficult to conceive how a health man could be arrested, and wind up dead at the end of a car ride.
Democratic Congressman Elijah Cummings of Maryland spoke at the funeral: "To mother Gloria and to the entire family, I want you to know we stand with you during this difficult time."
Cummings said he "looked at the cameras" and reflected on the great amount of attention Gray was receiving in death: "Did anybody recognize Freddie Gray when he was alive?" he asked.
. . .
"There are those who will tell you don't cry. I'm not going to say that," Cummings said.
The White House sent Cabinet Secretary Broderick Johnson, chair of the Obama administration's My Brother's Keeper Task Force; Heather Foster, an adviser in the White House Office of Public Engagement; and Elias Alcantara from the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs.
Almost immediately after the funeral, the rioting began in earnest, with cars and buildings being torched, windows broken, and stores looted. Police who tried to restore order were attacked with thrown stones and bricks, resulting in several injuries. There is some suggestion that the mostly young rioters were inspired by the movie "The Purge."
The term appears to be a reference to 2013's "The Purge" and its sequel, last year's "The Purge: Anarchy," about a dystopian future America where on one day each year, all laws are suspended for a 12-hour period and all crimes, including murder, become temporarily legal.
In the movies, set in Los Angeles, people barricade themselves in their homes at night while gangs of violent "purgers" roam the streets. The government markets the sanctioned mayhem as a catharsis that reduces crime on the other 364 days of the year -- when in fact it's really a means of population control, mostly against people living in poor urban neighborhoods.
"I've made it very clear that I work with the police and instructed them to do everything they could to make sure that the protesters were able to exercise their right to free speech," Rawlings-Blake said Saturday as Baltimore roiled following the funeral of Freddie Gray, the black man who died in police custody April 19.
"It's a very delicate balancing act because while we try to make sure that they were protected from the cars and the other things that were going on, we also gave those who wished to destroy space to do that as well, and we work very hard to keep that balance and to put ourselves in the best position to de-escalate."
although she tried hard to deny that she gave any encouragement to the rioters:
"I did not instruct police to give space to protesters who were seeking to create violence or destruction of property," she wrote. "Taken in context, I explained that, in giving peaceful demonstrators room to share their message, unfortunately, those who were seeking to incite violence also had space to operate."
We declared state of emergency and I issued the executive order less than 30 seconds after requested by the city of Baltimore. So didn’t take us very long at all. I signed an executive order almost immediately as soon as we received the call and called the president. There was no delay whatsoever. We’ve had this emergency operation center activated since Saturday. We’ve had hundreds of state police on the ground. We’ve had every single state agency and local agency coordinated out of this operation already for the entire week.
I‘ve been in daily communication with the mayor and others in the city and our entire team has been involved from day one. Frankly, this was a Baltimore city situation. Baltimore city was in charge. When the mayor called me, which quite frankly we were glad that she finally did, instantly we signed the executive order. We already had our entire team prepared.
Curfews have been declared for the next week, and O's games cancelled for tonight.
Martin O'Malley, former Mayor of Baltimore, and former Governor of Maryland, and currently semi-serious candidate for the Democratic presidential candidacy immediately cut short his trip to Ireland, and cancelled paid speeches to return to the United States:
“I’m saddened that the City I love is in such pain this night,” O’Malley said in a statement before canceling his trip. “All of us share a profound feeling of grief for Freddie Gray and his family. We must come together as one City to transform this moment of loss and pain into a safer and more just future for all of Baltimore’s people.”
Civil rights advocates and some elected officials here trace the tensions to “zero-tolerance policing,” a crime-fighting strategy championed by Martin O’Malley, the former governor and a potential Democratic candidate for president, when he was the mayor of Baltimore from 1999 to 2007. Aides of Mr. O’Malley note that on his watch, the number of annual homicides dropped below 300 per year for the first time in more than a decade, and that violent crime in Baltimore dropped by 41 percent. Steve Kearney, a top aide to Mr. O’Malley when he was the mayor, described the policies as “appropriate for the time.”
But zero-tolerance policing led to mass arrests of people for small infractions, as well as intense “community frustration,” Ms. Kumar of the A.C.L.U. said. “Countless innocent people,” she added, “were getting caught up in this dragnet style of policing.”
"If we are serious about solving this problem, then we're going to need to not only help the police, we're to have to think about what we can do -- the rest of us," Obama said during a Rose Garden press conference with the Prime Minister of Japan.
"That's hard," he said. "That requires more than just the occasional news report or task force.
"If we really want to solve the problem, if our society really wanted to solve the problem, we could. It's just that it would require everyone saying, 'this is important, this is significant,'" Obama said.
"And we don't just pay attention when a CVS burns," he added. "That’s how I feel."
. . .
He argued that the riots, which grew particularly intense after Gray's funeral on Monday, had unnecessarily overshadowed more peaceful protests in previous days.
As of now, the riots are continuing.
And this is what happens in Baltimore when Mom finds out you've been rioting:
Two police officers were shot here early Thursday morning as gunfire rang out in front of the police station, throwing into panic what had been a spirited — and at times tense — but largely peaceful night of protests.
Demonstrators and police officers alike hit the ground when the gunshots echoed through the crisp air. Many people ran for cover. The police, clad in riot gear, dragged their wounded fellow officers to safety. Others crouched behind cars and walls, drawing their handguns or rifles as they rapidly swiveled their heads every which way to survey their surroundings.
One officer, from the St. Louis County Police Department, was shot in the shoulder, and the other, from the suburban Webster Groves department, was shot in the face. Both were in serious condition, but their injuries were not life threatening, said Sgt. Brian Schellman, a spokesman for the St. Louis County police.
The shots, which witnesses said they believed originated from the top of a hill about 220 yards directly across from the station, came just hours after the Ferguson police chief, Thomas Jackson, announced that he would resign, a move greeted with praise from protesters. Chief Jackson had been at the center of criticism that he ran a racially biased department ever since one of his white officers fatally shot Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager seven months ago.
Thanks, Mr. Holder, for helping to keep this situation in turmoil.
Indonesian Official Says Missing Plane Likely At Bottom Of The Sea: Countries from all over Asia sending ships and aircraft to aid in search for Air Asia jet - Another likely tragedy featuring an Asian airliner. They were dodging thunderstorms. On the bright side, it will keep CNN busy for weeks.
Jennifer Lawrence Is The Top-Grossing Actor Of 2014 - We watched Winter's Bone, and the first two Hunger Games. It seemed to me that they were all the same character. Hoping to see American Hustle soon. Enjoy the ride, and don't get cocky, kid.
Students at George Washington University (GWU) willingly signed a petition supporting the deportation of one American citizen in exchange for one illegal immigrant.
“Please sign our petition for President Obama to deport one American citizen, in exchange for one undocumented immigrant,” read the petition. “Everyone must be allowed a shot at the ‘American Dream.’ Americans should not be greedy. Let us right the wrongs of our past and make another’s dreams come true.”
“It makes sense,” one student told Campus Reform. “Like, I’ve noticed that there is a lot of like hatred against undocumented immigrants and it’s not necessarily their fault.”
It's shocking how quick lefties are to resort to force to implement their plans for society.
But I wouldn't be opposed to swapping them for random foreigners. It's not like it would make any difference as far as their voting patterns, and the foreigners would at least expect to work for a living, at least at first.
. . .But Clapper’s resignation has already been demanded by a person whose authority is beyond our poor powers to add or subtract: the president of the United States.
There is just no other way to parse President Obama’s comments on Sunday’s 60 Minutes.
“I think our head of the intelligence community Jim Clapper has acknowledged that they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria,” the president told Steve Croft. When Croft went on to note that Clapper had also mentioned the failure of the “intelligence community” (a catch-all term for the 17 intelligence agencies that are publicly known, including the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the intelligence services maintained by such varied departments as Defense, Energy, and Homeland Security) to get an accurate measure of the Iraqi army’s ability to fight, Obama responded “That’s true. That’s absolutely true.”
In my view, James Clapper should have been gone a long time ago, when he was first caught blatantly lying to Congress about the NSA surveillance being carried out on the public. Deliberate deception of Congressional oversight should be a capital crime as far as government careers are concerned. As Tom Lehrer said, in a slightly different context "If you can't communicate, the very least you can do is shut up."
But Obama stood by his man, and a Congress divided between democrats and republicans couldn't get exercised enough to get together about being deceived and force him out.
Now, my theory on Presidents and the collection, presentation, and consumption of intelligence, based on nothing but my intimate knowledge of governmental organizations:
The many intelligence services collect a whole lot of information, much of it vague and even contradictory, and no doubt, in many cases, just flat wrong, as other countries have a strong motive for deceiving the United States.
I have faith in bureaucrats, however, that the pertinent points are stated with sufficient equivocation (probabilities even), that President Jarrett Obama, has a number of options to focus on, probably arranged in some form of priority.
The President then, gets to pick among the options according to his own internal disposition. Now, President Bush, particularly after 9/11, was strongly inclined to assume to worst, and most warlike nuggets of intelligence, (and remember, before the Iraq war, even prominent democrats thought Saddam Hussein was up to no good). The President chose accordingly.
However, President Jarrett Obama ran as the quintessential anti-war President, choosing to vote "Present!", and take the least possible action in the face of deliberate provocations.
Finally, we get to the feed back loop. Whosoever's intelligence that reaches the Oval Office and is acted upon by the President gains power and authority within the intelligence community, and is more likely to be forwarded to the President, and ranked higher among the possibilities laid out for the President in the future. No bureaucrat wants to be be put in the position of giving the top guy a plate of vegetables, however nicely cooked.
So, I'm relatively sure the President was told of the dangers of ISILS, but it was not high on the menu, or prominently featured. It was there, and he chose to overlook it, in favor of the chili dog with fries, and a large coke of doing nothing.
The U.S. Forest Service has tightened restrictions on media coverage in vast swaths of the country's wild lands, requiring reporters to pay for a permit and get permission before shooting a photo or video in federally designated wilderness areas.
Under rules being finalized in November, a reporter who met a biologist, wildlife advocate or whistleblower alleging neglect in any of the nation's 100 million acres of wilderness would first need special approval to shoot photos or videos even on an iPhone.
So, if I were wandering around in the wilderness, and spot a rare, or even just a really cool butterfly, I'm supposed to have a $1,500 permit to take a picture? Or is it OK for a retired biologist blogger and illegal for a reporter? Does that draw a line between blogging and "reporting"? These days, anybody can be a reporter when they want to.
Permits cost up to $1,500, says Forest Service spokesman Larry Chambers, and reporters who don't get a permit could face fines up to $1,000.
At least it's still cheaper to ask forgiveness than permission. I'm sure they'll try to fix that
First Amendment advocates say the rules ignore press freedoms and are so vague they'd allow the Forest Service to grant permits only to favored reporters shooting videos for positive stories.
No government agency would bend the rules for favorable coverage, right?
"It's pretty clearly unconstitutional," said Gregg Leslie, legal defense director at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press in Alexandria, Va. "They would have to show an important need to justify these limits, and they just can't."
Liz Close, the Forest Service's acting wilderness director, says the restrictions have been in place on a temporary basis for four years and are meant to preserve the untamed character of the country's wilderness.
Why? Who wanted this?
Close didn't cite any real-life examples of why the policy is needed or what problems it's addressing. She didn't know whether any media outlets had applied for permits in the last four years.
She said the agency was implementing the Wilderness Act of 1964, which aims to protect wilderness areas from being exploited for commercial gain.
I suspect this was written with destructive exploitation in mind; mining, grazing, lumbering etc, and not from collecting and documenting photons. But you can't trust a government bureaucrat not to interpret a law in such a way as to restrict their power. It's simultaneously outrageous, and completely predictable.
. . . Apparently, I’m not the only one who had questions about the prevalence of conformity on both sides of the political spectrum:
The way I saw it, this slavish obedience to authority and tradition on the part of conservatives was the true source of the culture war between liberals and conservatives over foreign war, abortion, same-sex marriage, gun control, and racial inequality. They way I saw it, conservatives clung to old, near-sighted ways of thinking and fell in line with the dictates of the "man in charge." If only conservatives would think for themselves -- like liberals do -- the war would be over and we could get on with life, governance, and progress. Or so I thought.
Then, in 2012, I went on a cycling trip around Cuba.
Jeremy Frimer, the author of the piece, noticed that socialists seemed unable to tolerate even mild questioning of Che Guevara’s eminently questionable legacy. Frimer is a researcher at the University of Winnipeg, and he decided to investigate. What he found is that liberals are actually very comfortable with authority and obedience -- as long as the authorities are liberals (“should you obey an environmentalist?”). And that conservatives then became much less willing to go along with “the man in charge.”
Liberals are willing to argue about anything until they get a 50.01% consensus on it. After that, it's cast in stone, through the immutable "liberal ratchet", whereby governmental control once achieved can never be repealed.
A 23-year-old teacher at a Cambridge, Maryland, middle school has been placed on leave and—in the words of a local news report—"taken in for an emergency medical evaluation" for publishing, under a pseudonym, a novel about a school shooting. The novelist, Patrick McLaw, an eighth-grade language-arts teacher at the Mace's Lane Middle School, was placed on leave by the Dorchester County Board of Education, and is being investigated by the Dorchester County Sheriff's Office, according to news reports from Maryland's Eastern Shore. The novel, by the way, is set 900 years in the future.
Here is part of a breathless, law enforcement-friendly report from WBOC, which describes itself as "Delmarva's News Leader":
He's a man with many names, and the books he has written have raised the concerns of the Dorchester County Board of Education and the Dorchester County Sheriff's Office.
Early last week the school board was alerted that one of its eighth grade language arts teachers at Mace's Lane Middle School had several aliases. Police said that under those names, he wrote two fictional books about the largest school shooting in the country's history set in the future. Now, Patrick McLaw is placed on leave.
Dr. K.S. Voltaer is better known by some in Dorchester County as Patrick McLaw, or even Patrick Beale. Not only was he a teacher at Mace's Lane Middle School in Cambridge, but according to Dorchester Sheriff James Phillips, McLaw is also the author of two books: "The Insurrectionist" and its sequel, "Lillith's Heir."
Those books are what caught the attention of police and school board officials in Dorchester County. "The Insurrectionist" is about two school shootings set in the future, the largest in the country's history.
Phillips said McLaw was taken in for an emergency medical evaluation. The sheriff would not disclose where McLaw is now, but he did say that he is not on the Eastern Shore. The same day that McLaw was taken in for an evaluation, police swept Mace's Lane Middle School for bombs and guns, coming up empty.
Imagine that—a novelist who didn't store bombs and guns at the school at which he taught. How improbable! Especially considering that he uses an "alias," which is apparently the law-enforcement term for "nom de plume." (Here is the Amazon page for The Insurrectionist, by the way. Please note that the book was published in 2011, before McLaw was hired.)
According to an equally credulous and breathless report in the Star-Democrat, which is published in Easton, Maryland, the combined efforts of multiple law-enforcement agencies have made area children safe from fiction. Sheriff Phillips told the newspaper that, in addition to a K-9 sweep of the school (!), investigators also raided McLaw's home. "The residence of the teacher in Wicomico County was searched by personnel,” Phillips said, with no weapons found. “A further check of Maryland State Police databases also proved to be negative as to any weapons registered to him. McLaw was suspended by the Dorchester County Board of Education pending an investigation and is no longer in the area. He is currently at a location known to law enforcement and does not currently have the ability to travel anywhere.”
It's hard to even be cynical the stupidity of the anti-gun hysterics who are firmly in control of Maryland. I hope Mr. McLaw is writing a non-fiction book about his abuse at the hands of the police and educational "professionals." I fear his teaching career is over.
I hope he sues and wins a bundle, but, being Maryland, I have my doubts. If he can keep the suit on the Eastern Shore, though, there's some hope.
At $14.95, the Kindle Book seems over priced, but I just might buy it anyway out of solidarity to McLaw.
It's hard to get a really good sense of what's happening here. Clearly the cop has demanded that the emergency vehicles (fire truck and/or paramedics) move so that the cops can control the scene the way they prefer. It sounds like they both use their vehicles to protect the scene. Is the CHiP too lazy to walk to the scene from 25 yards further away, is he just on a power trip, or does he have a serious objection to how the firemen are doing their job?
According to officials, the officer told firefighters to move three fire engines from the fast lane, and two complied, but one firefighter refused that request and continued giving aid to the crash victims.
As presented, my sympathies lie with the fireman. It's more important to fight fires, and treat accident victims than to issue tickets and assign blame to the guilty party.
While fireman may have the cool tools, the cops have the guns.
Trouble, in fact, was the last thing on his mind a few weeks back as the Filippidises packed for Christmas and a family wedding in Woodridge, N.J., so he left the pistol locked in the safe. The state of Florida might have codified his Second Amendment rights, but he knew he’d be passing through states where recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions affirming the rights of individuals to keep and bear arms have been met by hostile legislatures and local officials.
“I know the laws and I know the rules,” Filippidis says. There are, after all, ways gun owners can travel legally with firearms through hostile states. “But I just think it’s a better idea to leave it home.”
It's likely they determined he had the CCW permit during the 10 minutes that the police car followed Filippidus before making the stop.
Asked where his gun was (note, not whether or not he had it), he said it was at home in his gun safe, which didn't sit well with the transit police, and they proceeded to badger his wife, who, not surprisingly, but incorrectly, gave the police the opening they needed by saying she didn't know, but it might be in the glove compartment (which would be illegal).
First Kally says, “I don’t know.” Retelling it later she says, “And that’s all I should have said.” Instead, attempting to be helpful, she added, “Maybe in the glove [box]. Maybe in the console. I’m scared of it. I don’t want to have anything to do with it. I might shoot right through my foot.”
The officer came back to John. “You’re a liar. You’re lying to me. Your family says you have it. Where is the gun? Tell me where it is and we can resolve this right now.”
The police tore the car apart, including the door panels, and detained the family for 2 hours, before finally issuing him a "traffic warning" ticket, essentially an admission that they had no basis for the stop.
“All that time, he’s humiliating me in front of my family, making me feel like a criminal,” John says. “I’ve never been to prison, never declared bankruptcy, I pay my taxes, support my 20 employees’ families; I’ve never been in any kind of trouble.”
Face red, eyes shining, John pounds his knees. “And he wants to put me in jail. He wants to put me in jail. For no reason. He wants to take my wife and children away and put me in jail. In America, how does such a thing happen? ... And after all that, he didn’t even write me a ticket.”
Now, despite having fielded apologies from the officer’s captain as well as from a Maryland Transportation Authority Police internal affairs captain, John is wondering if he shouldn’t just cancel his CCW license.
Now, this is on the far end of acceptable police conduct under any circumstances (unless there was a real probable cause to suspect that the gun was being deliberately concealed for use in Maryland the officer ought to be tarred and feathered fired), but what interested me about this, was how the police came to the awareness that this particular car, of all the thousands of cars passing through Maryland going north and south daily, might just contain a CCW that wasn't legal in the State of Maryland. It turns out, Maryland has this database thingy:
Maryland State has a network of technical security databases which access the databases of all other states who comply and coordinate with them. For states who do not willfully comply, or those who are not set up to align technically, Maryland mines data from various LEO systems.
The intelligence analysis hub has access to, and contains, Florida’s CCW list (among other identification systems) and mines the state’s database systems for vehicle plate numbers of the holders. These license plate numbers are then stored in a cross referencing database within the Maryland Coordination and Analysis Center.
So, if they wish, and apparently at least one officer does, they can just sit at the border, run out-of-state licence plates, and determine whether occupants of the car may have a CCW from another state, and just might be vulnerable to a search and seizure. A fun to spend a slow afternoon.
If I were a citizen of Florida, and this happened to me, I would be up in someone's face demanding that the state of Florida stop sharing its CCW list with other states, or at least Maryland.
Cops bloodied an 84-year-old man and put him in the hospital Sunday when he jaywalked at an Upper West Side intersection and didn’t appear to understand their orders to stop, witnesses said.
Kang Wong was strolling north on Broadway and crossing 96th Street at around 5 p.m., when an officer told him to halt because he had walked against the light. Police were targeting jaywalkers in the area following the third pedestrian fatality this month around West 96th Street.
Wong, who lives a block away, appeared to not understand the cop, the witnesses said.
“The guy didn’t seem to speak English. The cop walked him over to the Citibank” near the northeast corner of 96th and Broadway, said one witness, Ian King, a Fordham University law student.
“[The officer] stood him up against the wall and was trying to write him a ticket. The man didn’t seem to understand, and he started walking away. “The cop tried to pull him back, and that’s when he began to struggle with the cop,” said King, 24. “As soon as he pushed the cop, it was like cops started running in from everywhere.”
And the excuse the mayor proffered for beating the old guy up, and putting him in the hospital? Well, you could hurt jay walking:
The violence unfolded in front of several news reporters, who had been at the intersection documenting an accident that killed Upper West Side pedestrian Samantha Lee 12 hours earlier.
After Lee’s death, police resorted to the old-school tactic of writing up pedestrians for jaywalking at $250 a pop.
“Everyone does it. Heck, the cops do it,” said Emily Skeggs, 23, who was ticketed for illegally crossing the street.
Mayor de Blasio’s spokesman, Phil Walzak, said Sunday, “We won’t sit by while lives are lost and families are torn apart. These latest crashes underscore the urgent need to make our streets safer, which is why we are moving decisively to enact ‘Vision Zero’.”
'Vision Zero'? That seems apt somehow. I'm sure we'll see this played out again on "Blue Bloods" or "Law and Order."
It's pretty well known that when Elliot Spitzer was an ambitious Attorney General in New York, he liked to play rough with the people he was prosecuting, such as Richard Grasso, Chairman of the NYSE and cases involving prostitution:
Big Apple Oriental Tours was a Queens-based travel agency with an angle: it marketed vacations for men to destinations such as Angeles City, Philippines, a jurisdiction in which adult prostitution is nominally illegal but is condoned and regulated by the government because of the money it brings in.
...
In 2003, attorney general Spitzer, with one eye on the feminist vote and the other on the governor’s mansion, commenced a campaign of legal harassment against the tour company, obtaining a civil injunction prohibiting the company from advertising, which effectively put it out of business, according to owner Norman Barabash.
Ashley Dupree
Nice of Spitzer to attempt to enforce law in a foreign country, which appears to have no interest in its enforcement for his own political benefit.
Spitzer then brought criminal proceedings against Barabash and co-owner Douglas Allen that continue to this day. The first indictment was dismissed because prosecutors improperly relied upon a hearsay tape recording. The second indictment was dismissed because the facts alleged did not constitute a felony, leaving only a misdemeanor charge of promoting prostitution in the fourth degree, a crime so penny-ante it applies to doormen or bouncers. The third indictment was dismissed on jurisdictional grounds, according to Barabash, and is currently before the appellate court. After all that harassment, there's been no trial.
Eliot Spitzer lusted after violence, a former hooker says in a new tell-all book — revealing in graphic detail how the love gov pinned her to a bed inside a posh, Murray Hill apartment and then gripped her by the neck until she feared for her safety.
The violence was scripted by Spitzer, who wanted his hooker to follow a role-play dialogue in which she would pretend she had just taken a self-defense class.
The kinky politician would then pretend to test her skills by announcing, “Well, then, let’s see if you learned anything,” and attacking her.
“The more struggle there was, the more he was into it,” foxy blond escort Rebecca Woodard recalls of her sadistic tryst with Spitzer, whom she serviced for $1,500 at the behest of notorious hooker booker Kristin Davis.
Hooker - Rebecca Woodward
$1500! Not bad for 20 minutes of mildly sweaty work. But then, it could be considered hazard pay...
“When he grabbed my throat, that was too much,” Woodard says in her book, “Call Girl Confidential,” written for Simon & Schuster under the nom-de-plume of Rebecca Kade.
Woodard would go on to work for Hockey Mom Madam Anna Gristina — eventually allowing her phone calls to be recorded to help prosecutors take down Gristina’s far more upscale operation.
“He wasn’t squeezing,” she recalls of the governor’s hands at her neck. “He was pushing down. I was on my back. I don’t know if he was trying to really hurt me, but he was . . .
“I was nervous. I was worried. This is not OK, I thought . . .
“It got rough,” she writes. “And then he put his hands around my throat, strangling me.
“He wasn’t pretending to be a rapist. But he was like an attacker. I still had my lingerie on. He was naked. He was aroused,” she writes.
"And then he put his hands around my throat" is a perfect metaphor for the democrats.
