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Boo Hoo – Boo Hoo

Gun control advocates express disappointment with Biden

Gun violence prevention advocates were hopeful a year ago that the Biden presidency would make progress on gun control. Instead, as his first year in office draws to an end, they are feeling disappointed.

Advocates say Biden’s response to the recent school shooting in Michigan, when a sophomore opened fire at school and killed four students, fell short, and they are disheartened that the administration’s nominee to lead the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) withdrew.

Like his predecessors, Biden has issued executive orders on gun violence prevention while legislation to expand background checks has failed in the Senate.

“I think the biggest thing to highlight here is that the president has been a friend to the gun violence prevention (GVP) movement this year and we’re thankful, but frankly, he hasn’t really been a leader,” said Zeenat Yahya, deputy policy director at March for Our Lives.

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Observation O’ The Day
The difference between them and us is that we want Law to be the guardian of Justice for the People. They want Law to be the guardian of their Absolute Power.

This is the proggie notion that exercising the natural right of self defense and the right to keep and bear arms is wrong because the state has the purported ‘monopoly of violence’.
In other words: Self Defense Killing Bad – Government Killing Good.

Oh, and when you read crap like this, make notes.

Kyle Rittenhouse’s Defense Was Strong. It’s Also a Threat to the Rule of Law. 

 

In August 2020, Kyle Rittenhouse brought an AR-15 to downtown Kenosha, Wisconsin, in the name of law and order. As protests and riots raged in the wake of the police shooting of Jacob Blake, the 17-year-old Blue Lives Matter enthusiast felt called to serve as an amateur armed guard for a Kenosha car dealership. He ended up shooting two unarmed protesters dead and blowing off another’s right bicep — without committing a crime.

Or so a Wisconsin jury found on Friday. After three and half days of deliberation, the jurors found that Rittenhouse was not guilty of reckless homicide, intentional homicide, or recklessly endangering public safety. This verdict was legally defensible. Yet it also exposed the anarchy latent in America’s peculiar combination of lax gun regulations, expansive self-defense rights, and mass gun ownership.

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It must have really really hurt to write this and acknowledge he was a dupe that believed lies merely because they fit his politics.

The Federal Bureau of Dirty Tricks

[New York Times] Opinion Columnist
This month’s bombshell indictment of Igor Danchenko, the Russian national who is charged with lying to the F.B.I. and whose work turns out to have been the main source for Christopher Steele’s notorious dossier, is being treated as a major embarrassment for much of the news media — and, if the charges stick, that’s exactly what it is.
Put media criticism aside for a bit. What this indictment further exposes is that James Comey’s F.B.I. became a Bureau of Dirty Tricks, mitigated only by its own incompetence — like a mash-up of Inspector Javert and Inspector Clouseau. Donald Trump’s best move as president (about which I was dead wrong at the time) may have been to fire him.
If you haven’t followed the drip-drip-drip of revelations, late in 2019 Michael E. Horowitz, the Justice Department’s inspector general, published a damning report detailing “many basic and fundamental errors” by the F.B.I. in seeking Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court warrants to surveil Carter Page, the American businessman fingered in the dossier as a potential link between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.
Shortly afterward, Rosemary Collyer, the court’s presiding judge, issued her own stinging rebuke of the bureau: “The frequency with which representations made by F.B.I. personnel turned out to be unsupported or contradicted by information in their possession, and with which they withheld information detrimental to their case, calls into question whether information contained in other F.B.I. applications is reliable,” she wrote.
Here a question emerged: Were the F.B.I.’s errors a matter of general incompetence or of bias? There appears to be a broad pattern of F.B.I. agents overstating evidence that corroborates their suspicions. That led to travesties such as the bureau hounding the wrong man in the 2001 anthrax attacks.
But it turns out the bureau can be both incompetent and biased. When the F.B.I. applied for warrants to continue wiretapping Page, it already knew Page was helping the C.I.A., not the Russians. We know this because in August 2020 a former F.B.I. lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, pleaded guilty to rewriting an email to hide Page’s C.I.A. ties.
And why would Clinesmith do that? It certainly helped the bureau renew its wiretap warrants on Page, and, as Clinesmith once put it in a text message to a colleague, “viva la resistance.” When the purpose of government service is to stop “the crazies” (one of Clinesmith’s descriptions of the elected administration) then the ends soon find a way of justifying the means.
Which brings us to the grand jury indictment of Danchenko in the investigation being conducted by the special counsel John Durham. Danchenko was Steele’s main source for the most attention-grabbing claims in the dossier, including the existence of a likely mythical “pee tape.” Steele, in turn, wrote his report for Fusion GPS, an opposition-research outfit that had been hired by a Washington law firm close to the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
Translation: The Steele dossier was Democratic Party-funded opposition research that had been sub-sub-sub-sub contracted to Danchenko, who now stands accused of repeatedly lying to the F.B.I. about his own sources while also having been investigated a decade ago for possible ties to Russian intelligence. Danchenko has pleaded not guilty and adamantly denies Russian intelligence ties, and he deserves his day in court. He describes the raw intelligence he collected for Steele as little more than a collection of rumors and innuendo and alleges that Steele dressed them up for Fusion GPS.
Of such dross was spun years of high-level federal investigations, ponderous congressional hearings, pompous Adam Schiff soliloquies, and nonstop public furor. But none of that would likely have happened if the F.B.I. had treated the dossier as the garbage that it was, while stressing the ways in which Russia had sought to influence the election on Trump’s behalf, or the ways in which the Trump campaign (particularly through its onetime manager, Paul Manafort) was vulnerable to Russian blackmail.
Instead, Comey used it as a political weapon by privately briefing President-elect Trump about it, despite ample warnings about the dossier’s credibility. In doing so, Comey made the existence of the “salacious and unverified” dossier news in its own right. And, as the University of Chicago’s Charles Lipson astutely notes, Comey’s briefing “could be seen as a kind of blackmail threat, the kind that marked J. Edgar Hoover’s tenure.”
If you are a certain kind of reader — probably conservative — who has closely followed the Durham investigation, none of the above will come as news. But I’m writing this column for those who haven’t followed it closely, or who may have taken a keener interest in tales about Trump being Russia’s puppet than in evidence that, for all of his many and grave sins, he was the victim of a gigantic slander abetted by the F.B.I.
Democrats who don’t want the vast power wielded by the bureau ever used against one of their own — as, after all, it was against Hillary Clinton — ought to use the Durham investigation as an opportunity to clean up, or clean out, the F.B.I. once and for all.

Comment O’ The Day
Can’t decide if the best part is Cheryl schooling this reporter or the VA results scrolling underneath

Watch This Based Mom School A Reporter On Why Good Guys Should Have Guns

It’s no secret that corporate reporters aren’t the most poised or articulate about handling or talking about guns, but a recent interaction between ABC News reporter Devin Dwyer and a mother of five in New York might take the cake.

ABC News aired a segment on Tuesday night previewing the laws and background of New York State Rifle and Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen, which the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments for on Wednesday. The coverage is part of the corporate outlet’s larger “Rethinking Gun Violence” series, which is often used to amplify anti-gun activists’ war on firearms.

In the interview, Dwyer asks Cheryl Apple, a small business owner and recent first-time gun owner, to justify why she felt the need to apply for an unrestricted license to carry her 9 mm pistol. Her response to Dwyer is perfect.

“Do we really want a whole bunch of Cheryls running around with pistols in the grocery store?” Dwyer asked.

“Yeah, we probably do because Cheryl is trained,” Apple replied indignantly. “I feel proficient with my weapon, I feel secure with my weapon, and I feel confident with my weapon. I don’t think the Cheryls are the one[s] out there that are hurting people and committing the crimes and being unsafe with their guns.”

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Scathing review of Everytown For Gun Safety left by “former employee”

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Biden Prepares to Scapegoat Americans He Abandoned in Afghanistan

“Any American who wants to come home, we will get you home.” – President Joe Biden, August 20, 2021

That’s been the talking point from a number of Biden administration officials over the past week as the situation in Afghanistan continued to deteriorate. If you’re an American who wants to leave Afghanistan, Biden will ensure your departure. This is a lie.

A close look at the language, combined with the official policy that the United States will be leaving the country on August 31 even as the airport in Kabul is blocked off by miles of Taliban checkpoints, gives away Biden’s strategy.

Americans can’t safely get to the airport and the administration knows it. They’ve had their passports confiscated and destroyed by the Taliban. They’ve been beaten in their attempt to follow instructions from the U.S. government.

When the mission to get Americans out of the country fails, Biden will blame the Americans for “not wanting to leave” or for not properly getting in touch with the State Department to file their paperwork. Keep in mind the Taliban has seized cell towers and shut off electricity in a number of areas, making it impossible to receive updated instructions from the U.S. government about how to proceed.

For days, the State Department has told Americans to go to the airport, not to go to the airport, to go to the airport, and yet, they are already being blamed for their demise.

“People chose not to leave. That’s their business,” Acting U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Ross Wilson told CBS News in an interview this week.

Wilson of course ignores Biden’s own statements in July that a Taliban takeover of the country was unlikely.

“The likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely,” Biden said during a press conference on July 8.

This was a lie and Biden told it anyway while Americans stood in harm’s way.

In just a few short days, pointing fingers at stranded Americans will continue to be the cynical, despicable excuse for the administration’s decision to leave our fellow countrymen behind. It will be invoked after President Biden allowed the Taliban to overtake the country in record time, abandoning Americans behind enemy lines.

“We will continue to evacuate as many people as we can until the end of the mission,” Pentagon Spokesman John Kirby said, indicating the mission is to leave on August 31, not to get Americans out.

As of August 26, the drawdown has started and 600 U.S. troops have already left the country. With dual suicide bombings outside of the airport Thursday, the exit is quickly escalating.

“Military continues to retrograde and depart airport. Almost a certainty that Americans will be left behind.  They will have to be extracted after-the-fact through either Taliban negotiation or unconventional means,” Fox News reports.

By August 31, Americans who can’t make it to the airport due to suicide bombings, Taliban checkpoints and Biden’s incompetence, will be abandoned. Without U.S. troops in the country to get them out, they are all but doomed.

For a long time friend

San Jose Mayor: Yes, the Constitution Even Applies to Your “Kingdom”

The mayor of San Jose must have the same ailment as Governor Newsom because he, too, thinks his position grants him authority far beyond his legal scope.  While Newsom has bestowed upon himself kingly emergency “COVID” powers, Mayor Sam Liccardo thinks he can singlehandedly circumvent the Constitution.  How clever of him to require all gun owners in his city to carry liability insurance!  How very progressive.

He may think he’s first at bat in trying to force this policy, but he’s not.  The idea’s been around a while and it’s not been successful for the simple reason that it’s dumb as a box of rocks.  Not only is it an unworkable scheme (impossible to underwrite) – but it’s unconstitutional as well.

Requiring someone to carry liability insurance for participating in a Constitutionally guaranteed right such as the 2nd Amendment is no different than steamrolling the 1st Amendment by mandating the media carry such insurance.  At times, does not the written word result in extraordinary damages? Hasn’t the media fanned the flame of violence, leading to loss of livelihoods, property and yes, even lives?  Yet, to require the media to carry liability insurance is patently absurd – just as it would be for requiring the same of the ordinary American citizen who owns a gun or two.  Even though much of what the media turns out these days is nothing short of garbage, they are justly covered by our Constitution. This is one of the key reasons America is America and what differentiates us from the rest of the world – we have enumerated rights that are protected – fake news or otherwise.

In an op ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, David B. Rivkin Jr. And Andrew M. Grossman get right to the heart of this particular matter:

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All of those new Virginia gun control laws didn’t stop homicides from hitting highest level in decades. Should be some kind of clue there.

Homicides in Virginia hit highest levels in two decades

Virginia’s murder rate climbed to its highest level since the late 1990s last year, according to crime statistics released by the Virginia State Police this week.

Police reported 537 homicides in 2020, up from 455 in 2019, bringing the rate per 100,000 residents to just over six — a number last seen in 1998 as the crime wave that peaked earlier in the decade began to taper off, according to FBI reports.

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[Wyoming Legislature] Committee revives controversial gun bill in surprise vote

The Joint Agriculture Committee Tuesday revived a controversial gun rights bill on a split-second, unannounced vote moments before the committee adjourned in a move lambasted by critics for its lack of transparency.

The bill, last session’s Senate File 81 – Second Amendment Preservation Act, would prevent agents of the state from enforcing any federal law or regulation that restricts a citizen’s right to carry firearms. A heavily amended version of the legislation passed the Senate by an overwhelming margin in March, but died without a hearing in the House when it failed to meet a key procedural deadline.

Tuesday’s measure passed on a 7-4 vote.

Freshman Rep. Robert Wharff (R-Evanston) told committee members Tuesday he believed if the bill had been assigned to the Agriculture Committee during the session, it would have advanced to the floor, where he said he believed it had the votes to pass. The Joint Agriculture Committee is considered by many the Legislature’s most conservative committee, and has colloquially been known over the years as the “Guns and Ag” committee, according to committee member and former gun rights lobbyist Sen. Anthony Bouchard (R-Cheyenne).

Nullification bills like the Second Amendment Preservation Act have become popular with many Republican-led state legislatures in recent months as they prepare for anticipated federal gun restrictions. Despite previous court rulings that have found similar laws in states like Kansas to be unconstitutional, more than a dozen state legislatures have considered some form of nullification legislation, with Missouri passing a version in its most recent legislative session.

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A Federal Judge Denied NRA’s Bid For Bankruptcy. What Happens Next?

The NRA’s attempt to file bankruptcy and reorganize in the state of Texas has been denied by a federal judge in the Lone Star State, who issued a ruling on Tuesday afternoon that the Second Amendment organization’s move was not “filed in good faith both because it was filed to gain an unfair litigation advantage and because it was filed to avoid a state regulatory scheme.”

The judge’s decision means that New York Attorney General Letitia James’ attempt to dissolve the organization can continue in New York, where the National Rifle Association has been chartered since 1871.

The NRA was quick to release a statement following the judge’s decision, in which the organization vowed to “continue to fight on all fronts in the interests of its mission and its members.” Here’s the text of the full statement.

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Yes, Biden Is Swindling Americans: White House Staffer Lets the Cat Out of the Bag

The myth of the “moderate” Joe Biden stubbornly refuses to die — partially because the Democrats and the legacy media are working overtime to keep it breathing. From day one, Biden has aimed to erase his predecessor’s legacy, rejected Republican efforts to pass clean bills on COVID-19 and infrastructure, and inflamed the culture war on abortion, transgenderism, and race. He even called Georgia’s new election integrity bill “Jim Crow on steroids.”

Yet, somehow, Democrats and the legacy media continue to twist the limits of deception by branding this firebrand a “moderate.” This weekend, a White House staffer confessed that this is a key part of Biden’s strategy.

“[A]t his hundred-day mark, Biden is the most liberal president we’ve had — and the public thinks he’s a moderate,” an unnamed White House staffer told New York Magazine. “That’s a winning strategy to me. They’re willing to accept that you’re gonna write this piece as long as they know that swing voters in Colorado aren’t gonna read it.”

This gobsmacking admission comes nine paragraphs into Olivia Nuzzi’s article about “How the White House Polices Language in Washington.” Nuzzi’s piece focuses on how the Biden White House responded to the president’s recent gaffe in which he admitted there was a “crisis” on the southern border in contradiction to his administration’s messaging that there was no “crisis” on the border.

Nuzzi noted that the word “crisis” “suggests spiraling, breakdowns in the system, and the people who work for the new president happen to love systems.”

This is the return to normalcy: The professionals are back in the building — hyper-sensitive and type A — and Washington sure feels tense. “We are just not going to get pulled down in the muck of right-wing-driven arguments about word choice,” Psaki said. Semantics debates, she added, keeping with the swamp imagery, are a form of “crocodile wrestling.”

Yet the Biden administration does focus on word choice, intently. Conservatives have merely raised complaints about the White House’s intentional strategies.

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 Defounding America.

************

But, though the traders and Tea Partiers didn’t quite understand it, the federal government long ago had turned from the shield of individual liberty into a vast engine of redistribution. That transformation could occur because the Framers’ Constitution was body-snatched by the doctrine of the “living constitution,” which—as Woodrow Wilson first formulated it—saw the Supreme Court sitting as a permanent Constitutional Convention, making up laws as it went along, heedless of the 1787 scheme’s checks. Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal used Wilson’s doctrine as a license to remake America’s economy and society. Once the Supreme Court buckled to FDR’s threat to pack it and started voting his way, the justices allowed an utterly foreign governmental structure to devour the Framers’ republic from within, until it broke out of the shell as something altogether different.

Not that FDR was entirely frank about his transformative enterprise. Where Wilson had dismissed the Framers as obsolete relics in a Darwinian age, Roosevelt claimed to extend their great work even as he undid it. In his second inaugural address of 1937, he hailed the 150th anniversary of the Constitutional Convention, which had “created a strong government with powers of united action sufficient then and now to solve problems utterly beyond individual or local solution”—a wildly false characterization. Chastened by America’s near-loss in the Revolution, the Framers sought to create a government strong enough to protect national and individual independence but not so strong that, given mankind’s inherent power-hunger, it could become what they called an “elective despotism.” So they limited that power to such clearly enumerated tasks as raising an army, a navy, and taxes; coining and borrowing money; and regulating foreign and interstate commerce. All other matters they emphatically left to “individual or local solution.”

They certainly didn’t mean to put the whole U.S. economy under federal regulation. But as FDR later admitted, when he took the oath to defend the Constitution just before delivering the 1937 address, he had wanted to shout, “Yes, but it’s the Constitution as I understand it.” The New Deal’s main thrust, after all, was precisely to take total control of the economy, under the ruse of federal power to regulate interstate……

BLUF:
Share of Americans who favor stricter gun laws has declined since 2019

Amid a Series of Mass Shootings in the U.S., Gun Policy Remains Deeply Divisive
Declining support among Republicans for ban on assault-style weapons, national gun registry

Link to PDF

In an era marked by deep divisions between Republicans and Democrats, few issues are as politically polarizing as gun policy. While a few specific policy proposals continue to garner bipartisan support, the partisan divisions on other proposals – and even on whether gun violence is a serious national problem – have grown wider over the last few years.

Today, just over half of Americans (53%) say gun laws should be stricter than they currently are, a view held by 81% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents but just 20% of Republicans and Republican leaners. Similarly, while nearly three-quarters of Democrats (73%) say making it harder to legally obtain guns would lead to fewer mass shootings, only 20% of Republicans say this, with most (65%) saying this would have no effect.

The new national survey by Pew Research Center, conducted from April 5-11, 2021 among 5,109 adults, finds that 73% of Democrats consider gun violence to be a very big problem for the country today, compared with just 18% of Republicans who say the same. The current partisan gap on this question is 11-percentage-points wider than in 2018 and 19 points wider than in 2016.

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