Category: Politics

Not surprisingly, it’s a demoncrap that supports this relic from the Jim Crow era.

Repeal of NC pistol permit law heads to governor’s desk

RALEIGH, N.C. — State senators voted Wednesday to repeal the state’s pistol purchase permit requirement.

Current state law requires people who want to buy a handgun to get a permit from their county sheriff’s office. The sheriff performs a background check on the applicant.

Gun rights supporters have advocated for the repeal for years, saying it’s duplicative because there’s now a national background check system, NICS.

Sen. Chuck Edwards , R-Henderson, said the additional permit requirement infringes on gun owners’ rights.

“It’s been brought to my attention that purchase permits are used to obstruct gun purchases by sheriffs who just simply do not want to allow citizens their Second Amendment rights,” said Edwards. “This, it’s become obvious to me, is tired law that’s ready to go away.”

However, NICS is required only for federally licensed gun dealers. Many people buy guns online, from individuals or at a gun show, purchases that don’t require a federal background check.

Sen. Natasha Marcus , D-Mecklenburg, said the pistol permit is “the only background check” in those cases, and eliminating it would create a huge and dangerous loophole.

“It would suddenly become completely legal for anyone to purchase a handgun, without any background check required, so long as they buy it from an individual or at a gun show, or via the Internet with an in-person handoff,” Marcus said. “Instead of creating these dangerous loopholes, we should be strengthening gun safety.”

Marcus also pointed out that the federal system includes only criminal convictions. It doesn’t include recent arrests, pending charges or charges that were dropped. The local check, she said, catches all those.

In the past fiscal year, she said, over 2,300 permit applicants in Mecklenburg County alone passed their NICS check but failed the local background check.

“It is irresponsible, in my opinion, to allow someone who’s awaiting a hearing on a domestic abuse charge, for example, to purchase a handgun. The permit was in place to stop that, and we should not repeal it,” Marcus said.

She noted that several sheriffs don’t support the repeal. But Sen. Ralph Hise , R-Mitchell, countered that the North Carolina Sheriffs’ Association does.

“This has only been a process that is effective for making sure that sheriffs in large urban areas are able to slow down the process,” Hise said.

The bill passed the Senate 27-20, with no Democratic support. The measure passed the House earlier this year. It now goes to the desk of Gov. Roy Cooper, who has so far vetoed any attempts to relax state gun laws.

Susan Rice is the secret puppet-master behind Biden’s war on guns

Joe Biden got lost in the bushes outside the White House Wednesday, after returning from a long weekend at his home in Wilmington, Delaware. Biden walked right past a Secret Service agent who was pointing the right way and stumbled into the bushes until he saw a side door, which he had to open himself. The President of the United States does not open his own doors at the White House.

Biden’s declining cognitive skills have become blatantly obvious – fodder for tweets and late-night comics. He cannot complete a simple sentence unless he’s reading from a teleprompter. His handlers have tried to offer the excuse that Biden suffers from a stutter, but what’s wrong with Joe is far more serious than a speech impediment. Biden drifts off mid-sentence and appears to lose touch with reality. It’s happening far too often for comfort.
The President of the United States has become a puppet, who has to be led – sometimes by the hand – to waiting news cameras, where he stumbles through speeches that someone else has obviously written. So, who is pulling Biden’s strings?

In my humble opinion, in the Biden-Harris Administration’s war against our guns, former Obama national security advisor and UN Ambassador, Susan Rice, who now serves as Biden’s domestic policy advisor, is clearly calling the shots. Rice has a staunch anti-gun pedigree, coupled with direct access to Biden – and Obama – and the means, ability and desire to orchestrate the war against our God-given, constitutional rights.

The evidence is everywhere.

The anti-gun forces love this woman. They were overjoyed when Biden appointed her as one of his closest advisors.

“Ambassador Susan Rice recognizes that gun violence is one of the most urgent threats facing our country, and through this appointment, President-elect Biden is continuing to build the strongest gun safety administration in history,” John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Safety, said in a statement heralding her appointment. “As Ambassador Rice said in our Demanding Women conversation this summer, ‘the American people want common-sense gun laws’ — and we’re excited to work with her to make that happen.”

“Ambassador Rice is committed to ending our gun violence epidemic, and she understands that COVID-19 has dramatically exacerbated our gun violence crisis,” Shannon Watts, leader of Moms Demand Action, said in the same statement. “Her appointment is proof positive that this administration is wasting no time in addressing the gun violence that takes 100 lives every day and wounds hundreds more. I know Ambassador Rice will be instrumental in helping tackle these dual public health crises.”

Susan Rice

Extremist views

Rice’s anti-gun history is well documented.
In 2018, according to Everytown, then-Ambassador Rice signed a letter calling “gun violence” a national security threat. The letter called on officials to “ban assault weapons, mandate background checks and waiting periods, and raise the minimum age to purchase guns.”

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CONSTITUTIONAL CARRY BILL INTRODUCED IN SENATE

A group of Republican lawmakers in the Buckeye State recently filed a permitless carry bill in the Ohio state Senate.

The proposal SB 215 was filed by Dr. Terry Johnson, state senator for Ohio’s 14th Senate District, and has eight co-sponsors. The measure joins HB 227, filed earlier this year in the Ohio House, which has 22 co-sponsors.

The move is a priority for state Second Amendment advocates.

“Ohioans have proven themselves to be overwhelmingly law-abiding over the past 17 years since concealed carry became law,” said Dean Rieck, the Buckeye Firearms Association’s executive director. “And Ohio is ready to join the 21 other states that now permit concealed carry without a license.”

The legislation proposed would not change Ohio’s lethal force laws or the locations where guns can already be legally carried in the state. Likewise, it would not do away with the state’s popular shall-issue concealed carry licensing program. Roughly 700,000 Ohioans held active licenses in 2020, according to a report from the Ohio attorney general. What the measure would do is codify that such licenses are not needed to carry a legal firearm in the state.

Republicans hold a commanding control of the Ohio General Assembly, counting 25 of the 33 seats in the Senate and 64 of 99 in the House. Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, has already this year signed a stand your ground bill into law, and DeWine spokesman Dan Tierney previously told the Ohio Capital-Journal that the governor has not yet taken a position on the proposed constitutional carry legislation.

The move, if successful, would make Ohio the 22nd state to recognize such permitless carry laws. So far this year, five states – Iowa, Tennessee, Montana, Utah, and Texas – have adopted similar protections.

State Opportunities to Repeal Bans on Gun Mufflers

The same person who invented the muffler for the automobile invented them for guns.  Hiram Maxim, the inventor, called them “Silencers”.  An obvious reason they were not invented earlier is the inside of a gun muffler is more complex than a gun barrel. Early silencer designs were made of mild steel, making them subject to corrosion. A silencer for a gun using black powder would require a significant effort to clean after each use.

Smokeless/non-corrosive gunpowder did not become common until about 1900. At that point, gun mufflers became more practical. Increasing prosperity in society, brought about by technical innovation and the use of fossil fuels, made target shooting more economical for more people.

Hiram Maxim invented the gun muffler in 1902. It was moderately popular. President Theodore Roosevelt owned several and found them useful for target shooting and pest control.

The Progressive regime of Franklin Delano Roosevelt was able to make the interstate transportation and marketing of silencers prohibitively expensive in 1934.   There was no clear reason to do so in the legislative record. Placing prohibitive taxes on machine guns, silencers, and short-barreled rifles and shotguns was the booby prize in 1934. The main aim of the proponents of the law had been to require registration and licensing of all pistols.

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When you don’t have enough people that will vote the way you want, will do what you want, will allow themselves to be controlled the way you want, well, replacing them is an option.

The Democrats Finally Did It on Immigration…And It’s the End of Us If They Succeed

Why wouldn’t Democrats do this? They need to address their base’s lust for left-wing activism. They want to get as much done as possible before the 2022 midterms likely wash them off the Hill. When it comes to illegal immigration, amnesty is a top item. For weeks, Democrats floated that they might incorporate some form of amnesty into this $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill that’s just a progressive goodie bag of wasteful spending. And, of course, you knew they were going to make the argument that legalizing these people impacts the budget in some fashion.

Now, with the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill looking to pass the Senate, the reconciliation bill is next, though House Democrats want this package done first and will block the former until that’s done. It’s all talk, no action. It’s pure theater. It’s meant to press this up against the September 30 government funding deadline. Regardless, if Democrats succeed in this effort, we’re done.

The $3.5 trillion package that the left-wing of the Democratic Party wants has a framework that allocates some $107 billion to get this amnesty push going. And only through the reconciliation process can this be done (via Breitbart):

The cost of the amnesty to taxpayers is just slightly lower than Senate Budget Committee chairman Bernie Sanders’ (I-VT) amnesty plan, which was projected to cost $150 billion.

Any amnesty plan crafted by Democrats is expected to give green cards, which lead to naturalized American citizenship, millions of illegal aliens eligible for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), those with Temporary Protected Status (TPS), those working on U.S. farms, and those considered “essential” workers.

Democrats’ amnesty via the reconciliation plan hit a serious roadblock last month when Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) announced she will oppose their $3.5 trillion budget. With Sinema’s opposition, Senate Democrats do not have the 50 votes necessary to pass the budget via reconciliation with Vice President Kamala Harris breaking a tie with Republican opposition.

Most recently, Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) told donors amnesty would only be possible if Senate Democrats shove it through the reconciliation process.

“If we don’t have reconciliation, I’m not sure that there’s a pathway forward,” Menendez said.

How many will be legalized? What’s the exact number? We don’t know. It doesn’t say. But given the fact that Democrats are hanging onto their majorities by a thread ahead of a key midterm election with Biden’s numbers rapidly sinking, you can bet the mortgage that the “millions” figure is correct. I’m not saying anything new—Democrats need to get as many on the fast track as possible. And they know there will be zero Republican support to do get this done.

This has all the makings of a doomsday situation. The House Democrats are purposefully delaying until all this nonsense is pressed against the deadline to keep the government open. Oh, and on top of trillions in new spending, an estimated $256 billion will be added to the deficit over the next eight years, and a soft amnesty push—the reconciliation package has no mechanism to increase the debt ceiling. The deadline for that was August 2. The Treasury is now in “extraordinary measures” mode. It only has enough reserves to fund government obligations for no more than three months.

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Bill Aims To Add ALL Semi-Automatic Rifles With Detachable Magazines To NFA

Back when candidate Joe Biden was running for president, he had laid out several different things he wanted to do in the way of curbing so-called “gun violence”. Multiple times on episodes of Cam and Company, Cam stated we should be taking Biden at his word on what he wishes to do. From his wish list:

Regulate possession of existing assault weapons under the National Firearms Act. Currently, the National Firearms Act requires individuals possessing machine-guns, silencers, and short-barreled rifles to undergo a background check and register those weapons with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). Due to these requirements, such weapons are rarely used in crimes. As president, Biden will pursue legislation to regulate possession of existing assault weapons under the National Firearms Act.

Let’s first note the laziness and candor in Biden’s plan by linking to a fact sheet on Giffords Law Center’s webpage. Biden is clearly in bed with this group, why else would his website link to them? I don’t think it would have been too hard for the team to come up with a similar document to link to or come up with their own ideas on the subject, but I digress.

Then there is the progressive golden boy, former ATF agent, David Chipman, who’s falling from grace, but still an entity to deal with, and his views. As reported on The Hill:

David Chipman, a retired Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) agent, on Monday said AR-15 rifles should be regulated like machine guns.

“What I support is treating them just like machine guns,” Chipman, who is now a senior policy adviser at Giffords: Courage to Fight Gun Violence, told Hill.TV’s Buck Sexton and Krystal Ball on “Rising.”

“To me, if you want to have a weapon of war, the same gun that was issued to me as a member of [the] ATF SWAT team, it makes sense that you would have to pass a background check, the gun would have to be in your name, and there would be a picture and fingerprints on file,” he continued.

Anyone paying attention? Just to connect the dots, we all know about Chipman’s involvement with Giffords. Biden linking to Giffords? Chipman working for Giffords? Swampy.

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Gun Control Activists Blame Biden As Chipman Nomination Nears Collapse

On Wednesday, advocates for David Chipman told POLITICO that they were pushing for a full vote to confirm the gun control activist as ATF director before the Senate starts its August recess. By Thursday afternoon, however, Chipman’s biggest supporters appeared resigned to the idea that senators will most likely skip town without holding a vote and had started pointing their fingers at the White House and Joe Biden himself over the crumbling prospects of installing one of their own as the head of the agency overseeing the nation’s gun laws, regulations, and the firearms industry.

Frustrations became evident during a Zoom call on Thursday afternoon with Cedric Richmond, senior adviser to the president and director of the White House Office of Public Engagement — the latest in months of meetings in which advocates have brought up Chipman’s nomination.

According to two people familiar with the call, a small group of survivors and those pushing firearms restrictions urged the White House to be more aggressive on the nomination. They also encouraged the administration to support ending the filibuster to allow firearms legislation to more easily pass the evenly-divided Senate, the people said.

If Biden can’t move senators like Joe Manchin to publicly support Chipman’s nomination, how exactly is Sleepy Joe supposed to convince red state Democrats to nuke the filibuster? The White House isn’t the hang up here, it’s a number of Senate Democrats themselves who are the biggest roadblock in that regard. But with Chipman’s nomination in serious trouble, gun control activists have to place blame somewhere, and they’re certainly not going to blame themselves for pushing Chipman as a candidate in the first place.

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Well, maybe they ought to careful about that. And ‘hoping’ for a backlash? What does the author think would happen? Any major form of crackdown and there’s quite a few that have made it plain that things can go kinetic.

BLUF:
Paul’s letter to the Ephesians was written at a time when fathers were kings of their homes and wielded total, unquestionable authority. It’s Paul’s biblical warning to fathers not to behave as tyrants lest they produce restless or rebellious children who ultimately resent them.

That same warning should be heeded by public officials who forget we’re a republic and “consent of the governed” is still the order of things.  Ignoring that fact will produce a “restless and rebellious” electorate, too.

And that’s just what the provocateurs in charge are hoping. 

They’re Provoking Us, You Know

If you grew up with siblings, you know what it’s like to feel provoked.  If you watch sports you’ll often see visiting players show-boat to provoke the home team and their fans after they make a great play.  Provocation is such a powerful psychological tool the Bible expressly forbids it when bringing up children. Ephesians 6:4 says “Fathers do not provoke your children to anger…”

We’re living in a time of great provocation directed at the American people from those in elected office.  Virtually all levels of government are barely hiding the disdain and contempt they have for the people they’re supposed to serve.

The pandemic has given county commissioners, school boards, health directors, mayors, governors and federal officials an emperor complex, lording over our daily lives deciding which privilege they will or won’t allow based on their whims.

They justify it by calling it science.  It’s not.  It’s provocation and it’s working for the left on many fronts in very effective ways.

Take for example the foiled plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Whitmer last year.  Originally reported as a group of pro-Trump insurrectionists bent on punishing Whitmer for her aggressive lockdowns of 2020, only a year later do we learn the truth.  The men involved may well have agreed with the plot, but were set up and goaded into it by embedded federal informants.

Left-leaning BuzzFeed reported, “Working in secret, they (FBI informants) did more than just passively observe and report on the actions of the suspects. Instead, they had a hand in nearly every aspect of the alleged plot, starting with its inception. The extent of their involvement raises questions as to whether there would have even been a conspiracy without them.”

Similarly, the events at the US Capitol on January 6th have led many eyewitnesses, journalists, and at least one United States senator to ask who was involved in that day and what planning went into it.  Given what BuzzFeed reported on the Whitmer plot, is it difficult to imagine the same for January 6th?

As Revolver News summarized, “If it turns out the federal government did in fact have undercover agents or confidential informants embedded within the so-called militia groups indicted for conspiring to obstruct the Senate certification on 1/6, the implications would be nothing short of seismic. Especially if such agents or informants enjoyed extremely senior-level positions within such groups.”

These events are still sold by media and Democrats as organic uprisings of unhinged opposition posing a constant, present danger to our very republic.  They have been used throughout the last eight months of Biden’s presidency to paint any opposition to any authority, order, or edict as potential “insurrection” and wing-nuttery.

Any questions raised about the election, the virus, the lockdowns, the vaccine, the border and the insinuation is, “What are you, one of THOSE people?”

They’re provoking you.

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BLUF:
The odd election of 2020 does not sit well with a great many Americans. They are not in the mood to engage in the equivalent theatrics of Ben Cohen’s mockery of Bush or the pussyhat feminists’ sneers against Trump.

President Biden is, in their view, a hollow figure not even worth mention. Their complaint lies far deeper as they see the purposeful destruction of American values by an elite that bullies and derides them.

What will come of this? How might revolt manifest itself? I hope it will be a successful recapture of key institutions, perhaps beginning with the schools. But the political elite that prefers to scorn the common people for wanting a say in their government is playing an awfully risky game. Despair breeds wrath and that fire, once ignited, will engulf us all.

OLD GLORY, NEW ANGER

America is no longer just angry. We have become a nation of wrath. It is a risky emotional condition, recognizable by our desire to obliterate our opponents. Wrath doesn’t seek reconciliation. It wants revenge. Nor does wrath want to accommodate what it can’t control. It wants to rub the slate clean.

There is a wrathfulness of the political left, stemming from visceral hatred of Trump and his supporters. But as the left is ascendant in the seats of power, it can pursue its effort to extinguish its opposition via the instruments of state. The wrathfulness on the political right is another story. Wrath reaches its zenith when people feel not just abused but hopeless in the pursuit of any redress. American wrath right now is the white-hot anger of the millions of people who have concluded the country is being destroyed and they have no legal redress.

I have been writing about anger in America for close to 20 years. That is a period that encompasses the ‘I hate George W. Bush’ manifestos; Revd Wright’s ‘God damn America’ sermons; Obama’s ‘They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them’; Hillary’s ‘basket of deplorables’ characterized by ‘racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic’ views; Trump Derangement Syndrome; the 2020 George Floyd ‘peaceful protests’; and the QAnon Shaman at the January 6 Capitol riot.

All of these are instances of American rage, specifically from its political branch. But the quality of the anger differs from one instance to another. Anger against George W. Bush, first ignited by his disputed 2000 victory over Al Gore, was vehement but theatrical. Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream, for example, mounted a national ‘Pants on Fire’ tour in 2004, exhibiting a 12-foot effigy of Bush with fake flames shooting out of his trousers.

The pussyhatted protesters at Trump’s inaugural in 2017 had some similar goal of deflating a man they saw as pompous and overbearing, but the tone of the protest shifted from exaggerated disrespect to something approaching bitter enmity.

Both are instances of what I call ‘new anger’, a self-congratulatory, look-at-me styling of the old emotion. New anger is a post-World War Two phenomenon that followed from the breakdown of an older ethic. For centuries American culture had upheld an ideal of self-control, in which easy resort to anger was stigmatized as a weakness and a personal fault. The arrival on these shores of Freudian analysis, emphasizing that repressed anger causes neurosis, and the simultaneous importation of the existentialist idea that unleashing anger is the path toward finding your authentic self, opened the door to this emotional rewiring of the American temperament.

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The Mythological White Supremacist

Washington — We at The American Spectator call it “Kultursmog,” and it is the only kind of smog of which our friends on the left approve. Actually, they not only approve of Kultursmog, but they contribute to it. Kultursmog is that aspect of American culture that is utterly politicized, and it is politicized by the politics of the left. Its leading centers of pollution are Hollywood, California; New York City; Washington, D.C., and, increasingly, Silicon Valley. I had hoped that Silicon Valley, with its brave claims to libertarianism, might have escaped the pollutants of Kultursmog, but I was wrong. The lure of virtue flaunting proved too strong for the tycoons of Silicon Valley. Now they are taking it to outer space. Did you see that Jeff Bezos had hardly gotten his feet back on terra firma when he donated $100 million not to the Red Cross, not to the Little Sisters of the Poor, but to Van Jones, who is himself a leading smokestack of Kultursmog over at CNN.

Kultursmog is everywhere. It is in the books we read, the movies we attend, the songs we sing. It does not permeate our history, which is why the woke folk are so intent on tearing down our history, including statues of Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and even Frederick Douglass. Can Martin Luther King Jr. be next?

I have made a career of sounding the alarm against the propaganda of the left, and just the other day, I caught the left extruding their propaganda into the public arena. They were using the obituary pages of The New York Times to spread their malign message. Is there no place they will not defile with politics?

One of the left’s favorite myths is that America is abundant with white supremacists and practitioners of something called the alt-right. I know. I, too, once thought the alt-right was a roadside direction or an indication a detour was ahead, but apparently it has something to do with the politics of a distinctly extremist variety. Advocates of the alt-right apparently tend to congregate at rural gas stations, usually in the dark of night. That is about all I know about it, but the writers at The New York Times claim to be highly agitated over it.

A couple of weeks back, William Regnery II, a man who supposedly “bankrolled” what the Times called “some of the leading organizations and figures behind the rise of the alt-right and championed efforts to win adherents to a modernized notion of white supremacy,” bit the dust. And do you know how the hysterics at the Times handled his passing? They devoted an entire half-page to him, complete with a picture of him standing with some young adjunct who looked understandably uneasy. The young man was wearing an ill-fitting suit, and he might have been more comfortable was he armed, but he was not. The recently deceased Regnery and I might have met years ago at some Republican function, for he was active in the Barry Goldwater campaign of 1964. Or possibly, it was at a stamp collectors’ conference. I used to be an avid collector. At any rate, he is dead, and from the Times’s own information gathered for Regnery’s obit, it is clear that he never succeeded in any political endeavor, from his earliest Republican days to his days of aimless wanderings with fanatics.

Senator Sinema Just Nuked Dems’ $3.5 Trillion Budget Reconciliation Plan

Senator Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) delivered a blow to Senate Democrats’ proposed $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill that the caucus hoped to pass after the bipartisan infrastructure package is advanced. Sinema made it clear that she will not support a bill with a $3.5 trillion price tag, but is open to “beginning the process.”

“I have also made clear that while I will support beginning this process, I do not support a bill that costs $3.5 trillion — and in the coming months, I will work in good faith to develop this legislation with my colleagues and the administration to strengthen Arizona’s economy and help Arizona’s everyday families get ahead,” Sinema told The Arizona Republic.

Democrats would need all 50 members of the caucus and Vice President Kamala Harris’ tie-breaking vote to pass the budget via reconciliation. Meanwhile, the Senate may advance the bipartisan infrastructure package, with a $1.2 trillion price tag, on Wednesday night.

Democrats condemn Trump’s ‘Big Lie’ but keep telling ones even worse ones themselves

Did you know that black people are not going to be allowed to vote in America anymore? At least in states controlled by Republicans? Sounds a bit unlikely, but that’s a conclusion you might have come to if you took seriously what President Joe Biden said in Philadelphia Tuesday.

Biden decried Republicans’ proposed changes to election laws as “the 21st-century Jim Crow assault” that tries “to suppress and subvert the right to vote in fair and free elections, an assault on democracy.”

This is, to be polite, unhinged nonsense.

Biden is old enough to remember what real Jim Crow voter suppression was like. It meant zero black people voting in places like Mississippi. It meant threats and violence against black people who tried to register to vote. It meant unfair application of literacy tests and poll taxes.

Requiring voters to present photo ID is nothing like this: Large majorities think it’s reasonable.

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McCarthy Pulls His Five Republicans From Riot Commission After Pelosi Rejects Conservative Reps

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi rejected two of Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s five choices to sit on the select committee that will investigate the riot at the Capitol on January 6.

Pelosi said that Ranking Judiciary Committee Member Jim Jordan — a close ally of Donald Trump — and Republican Study Committee Chairman Jim Banks cannot be on the committee because they might jeopardize “the integrity of the investigation.”

She said it with a straight face so I guess she thinks it’s true.

For his part, McCarthy threatened to pull all the GOP members from the Committee unless Pelosi changed her mind.

“With respect for the integrity of the investigation, with an insistence on the truth and with concern about statements made and actions taken by these Members, I must reject the recommendations of Representatives Banks and Jordan to the Select Committee,” Pelosi said in a statement. “The unprecedented nature of January 6th demands this unprecedented decision.”

The appointment of Trump supporters would ruin everything. No one is supposed to defend Trump or the Republicans. The GOP members will be present in order to give a patina of “bipartisanship” to the proceedings.

As CNN points out, because there is one Republican who has agreed to be on the committee — Liz Cheney — it will still be “bipartisan.” McCarthy won’t be able to pull her off the committee.

The committee will still have Republican representation from one member: Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, an outspoken critic of former President Donald Trump who was one of Pelosi’s eight choices to serve on the committee. Cheney’s participation keeps the committee bipartisan even without anyone appointed by McCarthy.

It’s still bipartisan even though no real Republicans will be there because CNN says so.

So there.

McCarthy issued his own statement, taking the high ground and saying, “We will not participate.”

“Denying the voices of members who have served in the military and law enforcement, as well as leaders of standing committees, has made it undeniable that this panel has lost all legitimacy and credibility,” he said. “Unless Speaker Pelosi reverses course and seats all five Republican nominees, Republicans will not be party to their sham process and will instead pursue our own investigation of the facts.”

Washington Post:

A senior Democratic aide familiar with caucus deliberations said many Democratic members were concerned about Banks and Jordan sitting on the committee, based on their past actions and statements. Particularly, members expressed outrage with Banks’s statement in which he blamed “the Left’s authoritarian agenda” for politicizing the committee’s scope. Reports that Jordan had aided then-President Donald Trump in strategizing about how to overturn the election, and the possibility of him testifying before the committee because he spoke to Trump on Jan. 6, made him an unreliable panelist, according to the aide.

Like CNN, the media will claim the proceedings are still “bipartisan” because Cheney — who was appointed to the committee by Pelosi, not McCarthy — will continue to serve. It’s one thing to stand up for your beliefs but quite another to actively seek to undermine your own political party.

This is not about impeachment. It’s about the integrity of Congress, which is threatened by this partisan attempt to destroy Trump and the Republican Party. That Cheney can’t or won’t see that should result in her being kicked out of the Republican caucus.

Below The Radar: The PISTOL Act

A while back, we discussed the difference between the ideal and the achievable. It is a conundrum that many Second Amendment supporters have, whether it is legislation or candidates. Our enemies often have the same problem, so we can take some small comfort.

Just as Dianne Feinstein has introduced a fallback measure to the semiauto ban she really wants, the same approach is being taken with regards to the Biden-Harris regime’s attack on AR-15-type pistols (among others). We have discussed the Home Defense and Competitive Shooting Act on multiple occasions, and it is the ideal solution to address that attack.

However, as Second Amendment supporters have often learned, the ideal solution isn’t always possible.

In this case, removing short-barreled rifles from the purview of the National Firearms Act may not be possible at the present time. In fact, to be very blunt, seeing the Home Defense and Competitive Shooting Act become law in this Congress is a pipe dream, given who controls the committees and subcommittees.

This is not to say it’s a bad idea – introducing legislation and tracking the cosponsors is a good way to gauge what sort of support there is for efforts to restore our rights. That makes having a fall-back option a good idea. Enter HR 3823, the PISTOL Act.

What this bill, introduced by Representative Bob Good (R-VA), does is to maintain the status quo by stating that firearms like the AR-15 pistols with a stabilizing brace may not be placed under the National Firearms Act. This would end the present threat for the short term – provided that anti-Second Amendment extremists don’t increase their numbers in Congress.

This doesn’t come without trade-offs.

On the one hand, if the PISTOL Act were to be passed into law (say as an amendment to the appropriate appropriations bill), it may make it more difficult to pass the Home Defense and Competitive Shooting Act in the future. But given the realities that surround passing legislation, even taking a majority in the future won’t make passing the Home Defense and Competitive Shooting Act a given.

For one thing, the same filibuster that currently is preventing anti-Second Amendment extremists from packing the court and ramming through extreme legislation will be wielded by the likes of Chuck Schumer, Chris Murphy, Dianne Feinstein, and other anti-Second Amendment extremists to block pro-Second Amendment legislation. It cuts both ways, and before Second Amendment supporters contemplate nuking the filibuster to pass such improvements, remember that Harry Reid’s use of the “nuclear option” for nominations backfired to the tune of Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett on SCOTUS.

The fact is, the PISTOL Act may be a suitable incremental measure in lieu of passing the Home Defense and Competitive Shooting Act, and Second Amendment supporters should contact their Senators and Representative and polite urge them to support this legislation. However, it is no substitute for defeating anti-Second Amendment extremists at the ballot box at the federal, state, and local levels.

Curtis Sliwa Blasts Biden Anti-Gun Gathering

The New York mayor’s race is heating up. Former police officer Eric Adams is already projected to win, and in New York City, that’s not overly surprising. However, his Republican opponent, Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa isn’t exactly rolling over and handing him the keys to the mayor’s office.

Instead, he’s fighting back. In doing so, he’s not afraid to aim at the White House and a recent gathering that included Adams.

As crime in New York City regresses toward the crisis level seen in the 1970s, Republican mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa argues his decades of experience leading the unarmed patrol group the Guardian Angels has prepared him far better than Democratic opponent Eric Adams to tackle worsening violence across the Big Apple a year after the onset of the “defund police” movement.

President Biden included Adams, a retired NYPD captain and current Brooklyn borough president, in a roundtable discussion on gun violence at the White House this week – even though Adams barely won his Democratic primary and there is still a general election in November, Sliwa told Fox News.

“To me, his invitation was purely political,” Sliwa said. “It’s almost as if they decided we don’t want to hear from the Republican, even though in this arena Curtis Sliwa has more credentials than anyone who attended that White House conference, especially Eric Adams.”

Sliwa, unlike other attendees at the roundtable, has a unique perspective as he is personally a victim of gun violence. He was shot five times in June 1992 on the orders of John Gotti Sr. to John Gotti Jr. and the Gambino crime family, and therefore went through four federal trials.

“I understand the problems of gun violence having experienced it,” Sliwa, who was once shot with a .38 Special handgun, said. “You say ‘gun control, gun control’ because that’s always what comes out of these sessions. That would have done nothing to have stopped the gunman.”

Sliwa has always taken a more proactive role in combating violent crime in New York City than most so-called gun violence activists. Rather than blaming the weapon, he’s always recognized the problem isn’t the tool, it’s the tool using it.

While many decried the Guardian Angels’ existence, let’s be honest, at least they were doing something tangible rather than holding rallies and hoping that would somehow stop the violence. They weren’t armed and weren’t trying to be polite, but they weren’t playing around, either.

Whether it worked or not is a topic for another time.

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Shocking Poll Finds Many American Now Want to Secede From the United States

Support for secession is growing among every partisan group in the months following the Jan. 6 riots at the Capitol but particularly among southern Republicans, a new poll found.

Bright Line Watch, in conjunction with YouGov, found that citizen support for their state or region to secede from the U.S. is greatest in the South “where support was already highest (and has the greatest historical precedent).” Overall, 37 percent of respondents indicated a “willingness to secede.”

Support among southern Republicans grew from polling conducted in January, which showed 50 percent were in favor of secession. But the number leapt to 66 percent in June.

“By this summer, we anticipated, political tempers may have cooled — not necessarily as a result of any great reconciliation but perhaps from sheer exhaustion after the relentless drama of Trump,” the group wrote in an analysis of the survey’s findings.

Respondents were asked: “Would you support or oppose [your state] seceding from the United States to join a new union with [list of states in new union]?”

Bright Line Watch constructed five distinct regions that a particular respondent’s state would join and added the relevant states to the question.

Brightline Watch warns that the numbers might be skewed given the complexities of the matter and because the group believes it is an issue that respondents were “very unlikely to have considered carefully.”

The group reiterated that the respondents on either side of the political aisle indicated some support for the idea and that it rose within both partisan groups.

“Republicans are most secessionist in the South and Mountain regions whereas it is Democrats on the West Coast and in the Northeast,” the group writes. “In the narrowly divided Heartland region, it is partisan independents who find the idea most attractive.”

YouGov collected the responses of 2,750 Americans in a public survey from June 16–26, 2021.

BLUF:
While anti-gun Democrats like Carolyn Maloney will use this GAO report to push for more gun control laws, what the study tells me is that a) we’ve got much bigger issues that are driving up healthcare costs and b) banning or tightly regulating items doesn’t solve the problem. Even if the right to keep and bear arms wasn’t protected by the Constitution, gun control wouldn’t be the best answer to bring down the rate of violent crime and firearm-related injuries, but the Second Amendment makes the idea a non-starter. Want to reduce gun-related injuries? Reduce the number of violent criminals, and leave the 100-million responsible gun owners alone.

The Fuzzy Math Behind The GAO’s New Report On The Cost Of “Gun Violence”

Democrats have a new talking point in their continued push for new federal gun control laws – restricting the rights of Americans doesn’t just save lives, but money too. A new report from the Government Accountability Office claims that that the United States spends $1-billion per year on hospital costs related to “gun violence,” and anti-gun politicians are already pointing to the new report as a reason to pass more anti-gun legislation.

The nonpartisan GAO found gun violence accounts for about 30,000 hospital stays and about 50,000 emergency room visits annually. More than 15 percent of firearm injury survivors are also readmitted at least once after initial treatment, costing an additional $8,000 to $11,000 per patient. Because the majority of victims are poor, the burden largely falls on safety-net programs like Medicaid, including covering some of the care for the uninsured.

The report, the first of its kind from the watchdog agency, is based available data on caring for people who suffer non-fatal gun injuries each year. It’s expected to fuel Democrats’ calls for expanded background checks amid a stalemate on gun control legislation.

“Congress must do whatever it takes — including abolishing the filibuster if necessary—to address this public health crisis,” said New York Rep. Carolyn Maloney, chair of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, who led the coalition requesting the GAO study.

Do you get the feeling that Maloney was going to use this report to call for an end to the filibuster no matter what it said? This report is a means to an end, and the end result that Maloney and her fellow Democrats are aiming for is the end of the filibuster and the establishment of one-party rule; from enacting sweeping gun bans with 51 votes to packing the Supreme Court full of anti-gun justices that will uphold every new infringement on the Second Amendment approved by Congress.

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“…outrage over the hypocrisy of allowing border crossers by land but not those who are seeking asylum for real reasons by sea.” ?

This is easy to understand. Mexicans in California tend to vote Demoncrap while Cubans in south Florida tend to vote Republican.

‘Outrageous:’ Mayorkas Blasted for Vowing to Reject Asylum-seeking Haitians, Cubans.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas vowed the United States will reject any Haitian or Cuban attempting to enter the country by boat, even if they have demonstrated a credible fear of being persecuted in their home countries.

“Allow me to be clear: if you take to the sea, you will not come to the United States,” Mayorkas said.

The warning comes as Cuban authorities are cracking down on demonstrators after massive protests erupted in the country over the weekend. At least 100 people are missing or have been arrested so far. In Haiti, the nation has been rocked by turmoil after President Jovenel Moise was assassinated last week.

Mayorkas fled Cuba with his parents in 1960 after Fidel Castro’s communist takeover of the country, a point he spoke about when President Biden nominated him to lead DHS.

“When I was very young, the United States provided my family and me a place of refuge,” Mayorkas tweeted. “Now, I have been nominated to be the DHS Secretary and oversee the protection of all Americans and those who flee persecution in search of a better life for themselves and their loved ones.”

But on Tuesday, Mayorkas said those attempting to make it to the U.S. by sea will be stopped by the Coast Guard and returned to their countries.

“If individuals make, establish a well-founded fear of persecution or torture, they are referred to third countries for resettlement,” Mayorkas said, reports CBS News. “They will not enter the United States.”

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