Category: Crap For Brains

Markey, Ocasio-Cortez ask Biden to create Civilian Climate Corps by executive order

Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), two of Congress’ most vocal proponents for aggressive climate action, on Monday called for President Biden to establish a Civilian Climate Corps.

The CCC had been a key element in early versions of the Build Back Better Act, the sweeping environmental and infrastructure bill. It was not ultimately included in the slimmed down Inflation Reduction Act, which was nonetheless the largest climate bill in U.S. history.

Biden was a vocal backer of the Climate Corps early in his presidency, comparing it to the Civilian Conservation Corps introduced during the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The original legislation called for $10 billion to launch the new program.

In the letter, timed to the 30th anniversary of the bill that created Americorps, Ocasio-Cortez and Markey cited polling indicating the idea has more than 60 percent support. The two have also reintroduced a bill to establish a corps legislatively, although the measure will almost certainly not be given a vote in the Republican-majority House.

“A central coordinating body, overseen by the White House, will be essential to create a successful and cohesive Civilian Climate Corps,” they wrote. “Through interagency collaboration, as well as coordination with state climate corps, other state entities, and local non-profit organizations, your Administration can realize the vision of a Civilian Climate Corps that establishes a unified front in the face of climate change — one that looks like America, serves America, and puts good-paying union jobs within reach for more young adults.”

The letter is also signed by members of Democratic congressional leadership like Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Democratic Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.).

Also on Monday, a coalition of more than 50 progressive and environmentalist groups sent a separate letter calling on Biden to establish the CCC, citing its popularity among younger voters in particular.

“While previous Executive Orders and legislation under your administration demonstrate tremendous progress toward meeting our Paris climate goals and your campaign promises, this summer has made clear that we must be as ambitious as possible in tackling the great crisis of our time,” they wrote.

“We encourage your administration to create a Civilian Climate Corps through existing authorities, with existing climate funding, that can coordinate across relevant federal agencies.”

Vanderbilt professor: Climate change stories ‘cater to the white consciousness.’

A professor of English at Vanderbilt University recently gave a talk about how the genre of climate fiction, or “cli-fi,” has a problem with “its intersection [of] race and genre.”

Teresa Goddu  whose advocacy led to the creation of Vanderbilt’s Environmental and Sustainability Studies minor, told an audience at the Novel Seminar Series that climate fiction in the United States “depicts the climate crisis as a whiteness crisis,” The Hustler reports.

Such stories “often represent white, mostly privileged characters in communities becoming destabilized if not undone by climate catastrophe,” Goddu said. “Climate punctures the bubble of safety and security that cocoons the white psyche.”

Goddu added that she is “tired” of the focus on whiteness in climate stories, or “texts that actually just reify whiteness.” As a result, she’s working on “encompassing slave and neo-slave narratives” into such tales to “expand the canon.”

“I really think a lot of climate fiction is being written, but not recognized as such, especially African American literature,” Goddu said. “I want to expand […] what is considered climate fiction and [redefine] what we are actually reading and paying attention to.”

Looking ahead, Goddu said she hopes her work will expand the genre and leverage optimism, satire and new tropes to innovate the body of work and reimagine a better, more sustainable future.

“I am more interested in reading stories that reimagine possible futures or teach me about the structures, historically and currently, that I live within,” Goddu said. “I don’t like literature as policy statements. I don’t like literature to be so instrumental.”

According to her faculty bio, Goddu’s research deals with “slavery and antislavery, race and American culture [and] genre studies.” In a 2021 interview, Goddu said she began “noticing how the antislavery movement was being invoked by climate activists as a model.”

“This led me to consider what social change my own moment demanded of me and how I might bring my gifts—as administrator, teacher, and writer—to bear on the issue,” she said. “It made sense to connect my long-standing concern with racial justice to the issue of climate justice and my interest in how literature can affect social change to the climate crisis.”

Seven years ago another Vanderbilt academic, Ed Rubin, offered a pair of courses on cli-fi: “Visions of the Future in Cli-Fi” and “Climate Change Literature: A New Fictional Genre about a Real Problem.” Many of the titles on his reading list (“Earth Abides,” “The Postman,” “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”) are Euro/white-centric.

Navy Puts The Kibosh On Digital Recruiting Program After Discovering Enlistees Aren’t Into Drag Queens

The U.S. Navy confirmed on Tuesday it has discontinued an online recruiting initiative featuring an enlisted drag queen that was aimed at bringing new sailors into the service.

In May, The Daily Caller revealed that the Navy brought on Yeoman 2nd Class Joshua Kelley — an active-duty drag queen who goes by the stage name Harpy Daniels and identifies as non-binary — to be a “Navy Digital Ambassador.” The Digital Ambassador Pilot Program, which ran from October 2022 to March 2023, was reportedly “designed to explore the digital environment to reach a wide range of potential candidates” for military recruitment.

In a letter sent to Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., on Tuesday, Erik Raven, the under secretary of the Navy, confirmed that the branch’s Digital Ambassador Pilot Program “will not be continued.”

“The Navy learned lessons from the pilot program that will inform our digital engagement and outreach going forward,” Raven wrote. “Our digital outreach efforts will maintain the important distinction between Sailors’ official activities and their personal lives.”

Tuberville — who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee — previously sent a letter to Admiral Michael M. Gilday, the chief of Naval Operations, in May, demanding to know the identities of the officers tasked with funding and promoting drag queen shows aboard naval vessels. The letter was sent the same day the Alabama senator and his Republican colleagues submitted a separate communique to Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro on the branch’s embrace of Daniels and whether Navy leadership is encouraging its “digital ambassadors” and public affairs personnel to use TikTok — which the Pentagon banned its members from using on government-issued devices — “on their personal devices” in order to skirt the agency’s prohibition.

In his Tuesday letter to Tuberville, Raven claimed the Navy followed existing guidelines restricting the use of TikTok and that while some sailors partaking in the digital ambassador program “had [a] personal social media presence on TikTok,” the branch did not issue government devices for purposes of participating in the venture. Raven further contended the branch will “continue to communicate” to its members the “national security risks associated with their use of TikTok on personal devices.”

The Navy’s embrace of Daniels — which generated backlash among many military veterans — comes amid the branch’s failure to meet existing recruiting targets. On Thursday, acting Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti confirmed that the Navy is expected to miss its fiscal year 2023 recruiting goals by roughly 7,000 sailors. The revelation came days after the Air Force announced it would miss its “active-duty recruiting goals for the first time since 1999.”

The U.S. Army and Coast Guard are also expected to miss their respective fiscal year 2023 recruiting targets.

Grisham responds to backlash, ruling blocking her order

New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham had to know that she’d get pushback with her declaration of a “public health emergency” regarding violent crime in Albuquerque and the subsequent order banning the lawful carry of firearms there.

I mean, it’s a gun order. There’s literally no way that she could be oblivious to the fact that a lot of people weren’t going to like it.

However, Grisham got a lot more than she likely bargained for.

I mean, members of her own party pushed back. Then, on top of everything, a court issued a restraining order stopping enforcement of the rule.

But Grisham isn’t taking her lumps and learning from them. No, she’s trying to push back.

The governor told “GMA3” earlier Wednesday she has the “courage” to take a stand against gun violence in response to backlash over her emergency public health order.

“Everyone is terrified of the backlash for all of these political reactions,” Lujan Grisham told Eva Pilgrim on “GMA3” Wednesday. “None of those individuals or groups focused on the actual injuries or deaths of the public.”

“They aren’t dealing with this as the crisis that it is,” she continued.…

“How would you feel in a city or a community if people had handguns in their belts, on parks, near schools, on public trails, at the grocery store?” Lujan Grisham told “GMA3.” “It’s outrageous and it must stop. And I will keep doing everything that’s based in science and fact and public safety efforts to clean up our cities to make this the safest state in America. And I will not stop until that’s done.”

The thing is, it’s not the bad guys walking around openly carrying. Criminals never open carry so far as I’ve seen.

If this is what Grisham is pushing then it’s about theater, not safety. It’s about giving the illusion of making things better. What’s more, she knows it.

Of course, much of this is about responding to the pushback to her order.

She also had this to say following the restraining order being issued.

“As governor, I see the pain of families who lost their loved ones to gun violence every single day, and I will never stop fighting to prevent other families from enduring these tragedies,” Lujan Grisham said in the written statement.

“Over the past four days, I’ve seen more attention on resolving the crisis of gun violence than I have in the past four years,” she said.

No, she hasn’t.

What she’s seen is her entire party–at least those who spoke out–calling her out for this blatantly unconstitutional action. Everyone has been telling her that she can’t do what she’s tried to do and now a federal court has done the same.

Grisham’s problem is that she can’t see beyond her own partisan blinders. She can’t comprehend that there might possibly be ways to address violent crime in cities like Albuquerque that don’t involve restricting people’s rights.

Which is funny, because this whole “public health crisis” isn’t just about restricting guns. Among other things, it calls for state police to go to Albuquerque to help crack down on violent crime in the city. It actually does do a few things that might well help all on its own, and they’re far less controversial than trying to unilaterally restrict someone’s basic, constitutionally protected rights.

Then again, so many anti-gun Democrats can’t think beyond gun control for solutions to such issues.

And that’s a problem since gun control doesn’t really solve those issues.

Does Grisham have an end game with her gun ban order?

The Albuquerque police chief says he won’t enforce it. The Bernalillo County sheriff says the same thing. Even the District Attorney in Albuquerque says he won’t enforce Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s order suspending open and concealed carry in the city for 30 days, calling it “clearly unconstitutional“. With gun owners rallying in Old Town Albuquerque over the weekend, many of them openly carrying firearms in defiance of Grisham’s order, gun control activists divided over her announcement, and the governor herself unclear about what enforcement might look like, I can’t help but wonder if she has an actual end game in mind or if she’s just making it up as she goes along.

Armed American Radio’s Mark Walters joins me on today’s Bearing Arms’ Cam & Co to kick around Grisham’s order suspending the right to carry in Albuquerque for the next 30 days, and we’re both in agreement that gun owners in Albuquerque should be disregarding the governor’s edict. I won’t even call continuing to carry an act of civil disobedience, because Grisham has no lawful authority to suspend the exercise of the right to keep and bear arms simply by declaring a public safety emergency. Gun owners who continue to carry, either openly or concealed, are simply continuing to exercise their Second Amendment rights as they always have, and the multiple legal challenges that have been filed in response to Grisham’s declaration should soon make that abundantly clear to the governor and any state official willing to try to enforce it.

The biggest question isn’t whether or not Grisham’s order will stand up to legal scrutiny, but why she made the ill-fated decision to unilaterally suspend the Second Amendment right to bear arms inside Albuquerque city limits in the first place. Grisham’s move doesn’t appear to have been coordinated with any major gun control organizations, and it appeared to blindside local Democrats and public officials, including Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller and police chief Harold Medina, as well as Bernalillo County Sheriff John Allen.

Political consultant Joe Monahan says the governor’s “grand but ultimately feckless gesture” is a sign that New Mexico Democrats are at odds with each other when it comes to addressing the high violent crime rate in the state’s largest city.

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Firearms Policy Coalition @gunpolicy

The First Circuit heard oral arguments today in a lawsuit challenging Rhode Island’s magazine ban. You can listen to it here: ca1.uscourts.gov/sites/ca1/file…
“‘I struggle with the notion’ that magazines aren’t arms, said U.S. Circuit Judge Bruce Selya, a Reagan appointee. ‘The firearm isn’t operable otherwise. So I don’t understand why a magazine isn’t an essential component of a firearm and thus a firearm.'” courthousenews.com/can-states-ban…
The first federal appeals court to tackle this issue after the Supreme Court’s landmark gun-control ruling last year seemed uncertain how to proceed.
“[Judge] Kayatta was skeptical. ‘How did there get to be millions and millions of these in people’s hands if there’s a long tradition of outlawing them?’ he asked.”
wut?
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Staff Pulls Plug on Presser as Biden Goes Over Edge in Vietnam With Confusion, Dog-Faced Pony Soldiers

Joe Biden was in Hanoi on Sunday, meeting with Vietnam’s Communist Party leader, General Secretary Nguyễn Phú Trọng.

After the meeting, he made some remarks and took a few questions from the press. We probably don’t even have to say anymore that it didn’t go well, you can just assume that there are going to be big embarrassing issues.

Biden started in confusion about whether it was evening there (it was).

I think he was trying to make a joke about “Good Morning, Vietnam,” which was a famous Robin Williams movie, not a “famous song.” And maybe that’s not the best movie to bring up when you’re in Vietnam. As my colleague Andrew Malcolm observed in his post about Joe Biden’s visit, Biden said his Afghanistan withdrawal would not be as bad as the Saigon panic, but then it was.

But that was the good part. It was all downhill from there once the presser started. Although to be fair, it’s not much of a presser when he limits it to five preselected reporters that “they gave me here.”

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MEET THE NEW PRINCIPAL OF JOHN GLENN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL

Shantel Mandlay Facebook drag queen principal

Fox News reports that the Western Heights School District in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, has installed a drag queen as principal of the John Glenn Elementary School. Fox has confirmed that the new hire, Shane Murnan, is “a drag queen who goes by the name of Shantel Mandalay.” Although Mandalay’s Facebook account has since been deleted, the article provides screenshots of him in his full drag glory.

According to Fox, Murnan was employed as a drag queen at a venue called “The Boom.”

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Gun Violence Declared a Public Health Emergency.

Gun violence has been declared a public health emergency in New Mexico following the death of an 11-year-old boy.

New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham made the announcement following the death of a young boy in a shooting on a highway. Albuquerque Police Chief Harold Medina confirmed in a press briefing that a boy was killed and a second woman was taken to hospital in critical condition. They were attacked while traveling westbound on Avenida Cesar Chavez near University Boulevard. Neither of the victims have been named.

Declaring a public health emergency, Lujan Grisham shared a statement lamenting the death of the boy and the earlier unrelated killing of a five-year-old girl in the area. “Today, I join the family of an 11-year-old boy in mourning his violent death yesterday. And I mourn the loss of a 5-year-old girl murdered in her bed last month,” the statement read.

“These are disgusting acts of violence that have no place in our communities. As a mother and grandmother, I cannot fathom the depth of these losses, and their effects will be felt by families, friends and communities forever.”

She said new measures need to be brought in to end gun violence in the state and called for a meeting to determine what steps can be taken to reduce harm caused by guns. Lujan Grisham continued: “The time for standard measures has passed. Today I am declaring gun violence a public health emergency in New Mexico.”

The executive order signed by Lujan Grisham stated the “rate of gun deaths in New Mexico” had increased by 43 percent from 2009 to 2018, compared to an 18 percent increase nationwide. It also said guns are the leading cause of death for children and teenagers in the state.

In her comments, the governor urged New Mexicans to take action against gun violence, saying: “To my fellow citizens: get loud. Step up. Demand change: from your neighbors, from your friends, from your communities, from your elected leaders. Enough is enough.”

Lujan Grisham’s actions were met with derision from New Mexico House Republican Minority Leader Ryan Lane, who accused her of politicizing the death to “push her anti-gun agenda.” Lane said in a statement: “The Democrat’s policies have created and exacerbated the crime crisis that is literally killing New Mexicans daily. It is unacceptable that it has taken this long to notice the number of everyday New Mexicans that are being affected by criminal violence.”

Newsweek has contacted Gov. Lujan Grisham via an email form on her website for comment.

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You know, concealed means concealed, but as I don’t live in NM……

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New Mexico governor issues order to suspend open and concealed carry of guns in Albuquerque

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham on Friday issued an emergency public health order that suspends the open and permitted concealed carry of firearms in Albuquerque for 30 days in the midst of a spate of gun violence.

The Democratic governor said she is expecting legal challenges but felt compelled to act in response to gun deaths, including the fatal shooting of an 11-year-old boy outside a minor league baseball stadium this week.

The firearms suspension is tied to a threshold for violent crime rates that only the Albuquerque area currently meets. Police are exempt from the temporary ban on carrying firearms.

Lujan Grisham said the restrictions “are going to pose incredible challenges for me as a governor and as a state.”

“I welcome the debate and fight about how to make New Mexicans safer,” she said at a news conference, flanked by leading law enforcement officials, including the district attorney for the Albuquerque area.

Federal Judge Issues 42-Page Ruling on Floating Border Barriers

A federal judge on Wednesday ordered the state of Texas to remove barriers from the Rio Grande, which Gov. Greg Abbott had put in place to deter migrants from entering his state illegally.

The Biden administration filed a lawsuit against Abbott in July, arguing that he had failed to obtain the federal government’s permission to place the buoys on the border between the U.S. and Mexico, CBS News reported.

In his 42-page preliminary injunction order, Judge David Ezra, a Ronald Reagan appointee, directed the state to remove the barriers from the river by Sept. 15.

Ezra wrote that Abbott needed permission to place the floating barriers in the Rio Grande because they obstructed a U.S. navigable waterway in violation of federal law.

The judge also pointed out that the water barrier raised international relations issues with Mexico, which are in the purview of the federal government.

“Mexico vigorously denounces the presence of the barrier, expressing its hope for expeditious removal of the barrier as the first topic at the August 10, 2023, meeting between Foreign Secretary Alicia Barcena and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken,” Ezra said.

I Can’t Stop Laughing: Biden Thinks He’s Treated Like a Toddler.

Joe Biden is a man who likes his ice cream and routinely needs the White House to clean up his messes. He could be in diapers at this point, too. Who knows? If he is, I’m sure the White House is doing everything possible to keep that under wraps.

But I digress. According to a new book by Franklin Foer, staff writer at The Atlantic and former editor of the New Republic, Joe Biden feels like his White House staff is babying him, and he’s not particularly happy about it.

The book recalls the incident where Biden riffed after the conclusion of a speech about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, making a statement that appeared to call for Putin to be overthrown. “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,” Biden said. According to Foer’s account, the White House was walking back the statement by the time Biden had reached his motorcade.

“Suddenly, the press wasn’t marveling at his rhetoric or his diplomatic triumphs; it was back to describing him as a blowhard lacking in self-control,” Foer writes in his book, and Biden was deeply upset over the media coverage of the gaffe and “left for home, ending his triumphalist tour, feeling sorry for himself.” The president “resented his aides for creating the impression that they had cleaned up his mess.”

“Rather than owning his failure, he fumed to his friends about how he was treated like a toddler,” Foer writes.

Naturally, the White House disputed this story when Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy asked about it.

“President Biden is the oldest president in U.S. history. Why does White House staff treat him like a baby?” Doocy asked.

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre might have needed a diaper of her own when she got that question, as she was none too pleased by it.

Doocy then quoted the book and asked, “Was John [F.] Kennedy ever babied like that?”

“So, look, I’ll say this,” she began. “There’s going to be a range — always — a range of books that are — about every administration, as you know — that’s going to have a variety of claims. That is not unusual. That happens all the time. And we’re not going to litigate those here. That’s something that we’re not going to speak to.”

Cute story. I wonder if Jean-Pierre would dismiss all the outlandish claims made about Trump in various books the same way.

Frequently Debunked Crackpots Claim the AR-15 is Worthless for Self-Defense

When the young paste-eaters at Michael Bloomberg’s anti-gun propaganda factory, known as the Trace, team up with the stodgy window-lickers at the Gun Violence Archive to produce a story about the utility of the AR-15 platform as a modern self-defense tool, it’s hard not to get too excited.

It’s like watching two freight trains headed toward each other on the same track. You know the results are going to be cataclysmic. None of these halfwits have ever heard a shot fired, much less one fired in anger, or especially one fired to good effect. They know less about what makes a reliable home defense weapon than I do about man-buns, skinny jeans, or avocado toast.

We have debunked the Trace and the Gun Violence Archive so often it’s getting old. The kids at the Trace masquerade as legitimate journalists when, in fact, they’re nothing more than highly paid anti-gun activists. The GVA purports to track gun crimes and maintain a list of mass shootings, but their data is collected from media, and even social media sources, and their stats are so inflated they’d have you believe a mass shooting occurs nearly every time someone draws from a holster. When the two anti-gun nonprofits combine for a story, it’s bound to be something as bereft of facts as it is poorly written, and to that standard their most recent collaboration does not disappoint.

A story published Tuesday asks: “How Often Are AR-Style Rifles Used for Self-Defense? Supporters of AR-15s, often used in mass shootings and racist attacks, say they’re important for self-defense. Our analysis of Gun Violence Archive data suggests otherwise.”

The story was written by one of the Trace’s senior fabulists, Jennifer Mascia, who is “currently the lead writer of the Ask The Trace series and tracks news developments on the gun beat.” Mascia has also led the Trace’s hilarious we’re journalists, not activists, propaganda campaign on social media.

Mascia reportedly searched the GVA’s data for “assault weapon,” which she said the GVA defines as “AR-15, AK-47, and all variants defined by law enforcement.” Of course, there’s no mention of whether the weapons were capable of select-fire and, therefore, actual assault weapons. She started with 190 incidents, which she whittled down for various reasons. The results: “That left 51 incidents over a nine-and-a-half-year span in which legal gun owners brandished or used an AR-style rifle to defend life or property. That averages out to around five per year.”

To be clear, I trust Mascia’s findings about as much as I trust the GVA data that produced the results. The whole story is GIGO – garbage in, garbage out.

It is noteworthy that the firearms “expert” whom Mascia found to further beclown herself – who wrote in a CNN story that the AR is the last gun he’d recommend for self-defense – is none other than former Washington D.C. police officer Michael Fanone. He’s the officer who cried a lot before the January 6 Commission – the one with the beard who cried a lot, if that helps jog your memory.

The network must have liked the cut of his jib. Fanone is now a CNN contributor and hawking a new book: “Hold the Line: The Insurrection and One Cop’s Battle for America’s Soul.” (Nancy Pelosi highly recommended it.)

Since he’s so afraid of the AR platform, I can’t help but wonder what weapon Fanone, or for that matter, Mascia, would recommend for home defense. If I had to guess, it probably has two barrels, a wooden stock and exposed hammers.

I’m somewhat familiar with the AR myself, which is why I trust it to defend my hearth and home. It’s light, accurate, and deadly, which is exactly the point, and something we should stop making allowances for.

Despite the exhortations of Bloomberg’s activists or crybaby ex-cops, an AR-15 is exactly what I want when The Bad Man comes a-calling.

This judge has it backwards and I’d say purposefully. The goobermint has to submit evidence that the weapons are not in common use for self defense, (impossible by the way, so that’s why the judge pretzeled it)  not the plaintiffs

Federal judge upholds Conn.’s assault weapons ban for 2nd time in a month

For the second time in less than a month, a federal judge has upheld Connecticut’s assault weapons ban by denying an injunction seeking a temporary halt to the enforcement of the ban as part of a lawsuit challenging the state’s gun laws.

In a 14-page ruling issued earlier this week, U.S. District Judge Janet Bond Arterton said the assault weapons banned by the state are not “commonly” used for self-defense, which would classify the firearms as protected under the Second Amendment.

“Plaintiffs are correct that the Second Amendment provides them with the freedom to choose a firearm . . . ‘that is not dangerous and unusual’ and that is normally used for self-defense,” Arterton said. “However, until they submit evidence that supports a finding that the assault weapons in the challenged statutes meet those requirements, they cannot show a likelihood of success on the merits of their Second Amendment claim.”

She had denied a similar injunction requested by the National Association for Gun Rights, which is also suing state officials to revoke the ban, on Aug. 3. Her ruling this week marks the third time since June that Arterton has upheld the state’s assault weapons ban.

Attorney Cameron Atkinson, one of three lawyers representing the plaintiffs, three people including two former state correction officers and two gun rights advocacy groups, said they will appeal the most recent ruling.

“The District Court did exactly what the Supreme Court told it not to do (in other rulings),” Atkinson said Wednesday. “We’re very confident that the ruling will be reversed on appeal.”

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