Category: Politics

They were talking about impeaching him before he was even sworn in, which tells you a lot about the seriousness of this. Whoopdie-Doo

BLUF:
If Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell does not attempt to reconvene the Senate, it all but guarantees Trump won’t be tried in the Senate until after 1 p.m. on Jan. 20, an hour after he becomes an ex-president.

House impeaches Trump a second time, but conviction and removal are unlikely.

The House impeached President Trump for the second time Wednesday, charging him for behavior they believe caused the violent Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol that left five dead, dozens injured, and the historic building defaced and damaged.

Ten House Republicans joined all House Democrats to pass a single impeachment article accusing Trump of inciting an insurrection.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, must now decide when to send the article to the Senate, which is not scheduled to be in session until Jan. 19 and is unlikely to consider it until after Trump leaves office.

Trump’s term ends on Jan. 20 at 12 p.m.

Continue reading “”

A few days ago, I told the Shootists’ Vice-Chairman to mark my words that on 21 January, we’d start to see a miraculous national recovery begin from the bug, just to make SloJoe look good.

Will COVID Numbers Now Shift for Biden’s Benefit?

How much of the past year was about the actual coronavirus rather than a political weapon to damage President Trump and remove him from office? The answer is obvious. We have had viral pandemics before, including a seasonal influenza, without mask mandates, social distancing, business closures, travel restrictions, and hysterical media coverage.

Much of the hair-on-fire reporting is over cases and deaths. As I have previously written, a positive test is not the same as a case, and a death with COVID is different than death from COVID.

What if these definitions suddenly change in the upcoming weeks, once Joe Biden is in the White House, creating the impression that getting rid of the Orange Man caused the case and fatality numbers to suddenly plummet, not because of anything Biden did, but simply because he isn’t Trump?

Rewriting history is a popular pastime for the left. Just ask George Orwell or observe current events including the social media purge and cancel culture. How might this play out with COVID?

Start with testing — the PCR test which is overly sensitive. From that bastion of right-wing conspiracy, the New York Times,

The PCR test amplifies genetic matter from the virus in cycles; the fewer cycles required, the greater the amount of virus, or viral load, in the sample. The greater the viral load, the more likely the patient is to be contagious.

This number of amplification cycles needed to find the virus, called the cycle threshold, is never included in the results sent to doctors and coronavirus patients, although it could tell them how infectious the patients are.

In three sets of testing data that include cycle thresholds, compiled by officials in Massachusetts, New York and Nevada, up to 90 percent of people testing positive carried barely any virus, a review by The Times found.

In addition, a positive PCR test is not necessarily a case of COVID. There is a “case definition,” something the corporate media is willfully ignoring. According to the CDC, a case requires, “presumptive laboratory evidence AND either clinical criteria OR epidemiologic evidence.”  Notice the AND, meaning not simply a positive test.

The result is that case counts are wildly inflated and are being used to drive lockdowns, business and school closures, mask mandates, and other measures that may not be necessary or even helpful.

What if the definitions conveniently change in the upcoming weeks?

As reported by Zero Hedge last week, “The FDA today joined The WHO and Dr. [Anthony] Fauci in admitting there is a notable risk of false results from the standard PCR test used to define whether an individual is a COVID case or not.”

Did Dr. Fauci just realize this? After decades working in public health and infectious diseases, test sensitivity is something he understands only too well. If he knew, did he say or do anything?

Continue reading “”

Rashida Tlaib’s New Office Neighbor to Fly Israeli Flag.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s (D., Mich.) new neighbor in her congressional office building intends to fly an Israeli flag as a statement against Tlaib’s anti-Israel stance.

Freshman Rep. Kat Cammack (R., Fla.), who has been given the office next to Tlaib’s for the 117th Congress, says she hopes Israel’s flag will send a message to Tlaib, a frequent critic of Israel who has a history of anti-Semitic comments.

“[Tlaib] has some very strong opinions about Israel, and I have some very strong opinions about Israel, so I have made a pledge that I’m going to be planting the flag of Israel outside my door right next to the American flag,” Cammack told a Gainesville, Fla., ABC affiliate. “I think it’ll be very helpful as she walks past it every day.”

Tlaib did not respond to a request for comment before press time.

Gators for Israel, a Jewish student advocacy group, will provide the flag for display, Cammack said.

Cammack became the representative for Florida’s Third Congressional District following the retirement of her former boss, Rep. Ted Yoho (R., Fla.), for whom she served for six years as deputy chief of staff. Cammack’s support for Israel and Israeli sovereignty was a major plank of her campaign platform.

 

Welcome to Banana Republic, USA.

Out of all the crazy, strange, and unbelievable news items Insanity Wrap has brought you over the previous 119 editions of this column, “guns drawn in the Capitol” is the craziest, the strangest, and the most unbelievable — all in one item of just five words.

It’s difficult to be glib about the news after a day like yesterday, so today’s Insanity Wrap will be less of a wrap-up and more of a lament.

Four people are dead.

So many of us told you something like this was inevitable after Antifa/BLM was allowed for months to get away with their anarcho-communist brand of street thuggery.

Not that you, gentle reader, needed to be told.

Still, the timing and location came as a shock.

It remains to be seen whether yesterday’s deadly riot represents a one-off venting of political frustration or a sea-change in that the Right will from now on operate more like the Left does.

Continue reading “”

Republican and Conservative Leaders Condemn Capitol Hill Violence

Contrast with leftist justification for Antifa/BLM violence all summer.

One thing that stands out at this early stage about the violence on Capitol Hill is that the right—from Republican Congressmen to prominent media personalities—is calling with one voice for the violence to stop.

The contrast between the right’s immediate calls for an end to the violence and the months-long Democrat, media, and leftist sugar-coating (remember the antifa “summer of love”?), down-playing (mostly peaceful arson), and refusing to condemn antifa and BLM violence as it swept the nation’s cities in 2020 is stark.

President Trump issues a strong request that the violence stop. He reminds the rioters, if they turn out to be Trump supporters, that “WE are the Party of Law & Order.”

Woman Shot Climbing Through Doorway inside Capitol Dies From Gunshot Wound

A young woman was shot while climbing through a doorway window in Washington DC today. It appears from the video, a woman attempted to climb through a side-door window; she was shot from inside the hallway and fell back into a small group behind her.

In the image below she is wearing a red and white backpack, climbing through a broken window next to a doorway when a shot is heard. She falls directly backward as people, including two uniformed police officers, attempt to render aid.

There were two uniformed police officers directly behind her who seemed surprised at the gunfire. [Twitter Video Here] Reports are now surfacing that the young lady died in the hospital following a single gunshot to the neck.

There is a reason I refer to them as demoncraps

Why Working With Democrats On Guns Is Impossible

Right now, political division is extremely high. I don’t want to say it’s at an all-time high because, well, there was that little tiff back in the 1860s that suggests it might have been a tad worse back then. I mean, 620,000 American lives lost is a bit worse than the rioting we’ve seen in the last few years.

Yet, anyone with eyes can see that it’s still pretty bad.

Many are issuing calls for unity, for us coming together and working with one another. Of course, this comes after four years of #resistance and all that, but whatever.

The problem is, when you don’t really understand why some divisions exist, it’s easy to make light of the issues. Take this one, for example.

If your dog won’t stop chewing on the furniture and you work with it to chew its toys are you suddenly on the level of your dog for still allowing the chewing?? Of course not! This is literally how simple and idiotic the arguments that happen on Capitol Hill are. Let’s take gun rights for example:

Democrats don’t want to see people get killed. Republicans don’t want people’s rights infringed on. So suddenly, any Republican who supports any kind of gun legislation wants to take everyone’s guns and any Democrat who wants to compromise is a murder-permitting disgrace.

This also works the other way though too. This means that Democrats now must signal that they are okay with taking guns and that Republicans must signal that they don’t support gun laws. Which, of course, further contributes to the polarization because now each side has a reason to fear that extreme because it’s real now.

Not only that but, if anyone on our side is working with the other side, they must have switched viewpoints because there’s only two and they’re so different. Get the picture?

Sure, if you look at it through a microscope, it appears that way.

When you understand the subject in totality, though, not so much.

See, when we say that anti-gunners want to take away our gun rights, it’s not based on fearmongering or a misunderstanding of their position, but a firm understanding of history. Continue reading “”

The Left Redefines Resistance as ‘Sedition’
Remember when dissent was patriotic?

It was inevitable that the Democrats would overreact to legal challenges by President Trump and other Republicans to corrupt election practices in swing states, but some responses have been unhinged even by their standards. One recurring refrain is particularly disturbing — that lawyers, members of Congress, and state attorneys general who supported post-election litigation are guilty of sedition.

At least one Democratic congressman insists that attorneys representing the president in such challenges should be disbarred and that House members who supported Texas v. Pennsylvania in the Supreme Court shouldn’t be seated in Congress. One of the defendants in that ill-fated lawsuit described it as a “seditious abuse of the judicial process.”

This dangerous view of dissent has a long, sordid history among progressives. Democratic President Woodrow Wilson, for example, was the driving force behind the notorious Sedition Act of 1918, passed by his fellow Democrats at a time when they controlled both houses of Congress. This anti-democratic outrage made it a felony crime to criticize the government and, by extension, Wilson himself. A violation of the Sedition Act was punishable by a fine of as much as $10,000 and imprisonment for as long as 20 years. More than 2,000 American citizens were arrested and prosecuted pursuant to the Sedition Act. This crime against democracy was at length repealed by the Republicans after the GOP won majorities in both houses of Congress in the 1918 midterm elections. Continue reading “”

Trump Is Considering Giving an Order That Should Terrify Joe Biden

I could write this article in just two words: Do it.

A new report is out saying that President Trump is currently considering the appointment of a special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden. This comes after the revelation of at least four investigations involving the former VP’s son. Money laundering appears to be one of the chief concerns, though there are also other corruption issues at play. Joe Biden himself could also be fingered, given some of the past evidence we’ve seen that his knowledge of what went on is far deeper than he’s admitted (see: New Hunter Biden Email Further Implicates Joe Biden). Continue reading “”

Biden, Harris Use Sandy Hook to Call for ‘Gun Reforms,’ Meaning Control

Using the anniversary of the Sandy Hook Elementary tragedy, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris on Monday called for “gun reforms” to honor the victims of the 2012 shooting that left 20 youngsters and six adults dead.

It’s what Second Amendment activists call “camo speak” for more gun control. Anti-gun Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal chimed in, according to Fox News, declaring the Sandy Hook victims should be honored with “positive action” and he expects the incoming Biden administration will “redouble the efforts against gun violence.”

Biden’s legitimacy as the next president got a boost from Republican Senate Majority Mitch McConnell, who congratulated the former vice president by declaring the Electoral College “has spoken.” The Drudge Report blared this headline: “Season Finale: McConnell Finishes Trump.”

Biden and Harris insist they want “common sense” gun “reforms,” according to the Associated Press. It all translates to the same thing, according to grassroots gun rights activists: More restrictions on law-abiding citizens that will ultimately not prevent a single violent crime involving a firearm.

Sandy Hook was the work of a single mentally-deranged individual, Adam Lanza. Prior to the shooting, Lanza murdered his mother, took her guns from a safe and headed to the school in her car. While a Connecticut news organ, The Day, editorialized for additional gun controls, a reader who signed in as Keith J. Robbins reacted.

“The Day again gives lip service to the mental health issue, the actual reason for all the incidents mentioned was a failure by the liberal mental health system,” Robbins wrote. “Newtown happened because a parent enabled a child to commit murder, she paid the ultimate price for her failure. The child should have been institutionalized, as has been documented multiple times…The Day fails to address the continued carnage in Chicago, Baltimore, Philadelphia and we are beginning to see it in New York, those communities have extensive gun laws and continue to be run by democrats. As we see emboldened criminals, because of a lax if non-existence criminal justice system, the Second Amendment becomes more prevalent for law abiding citizens.”

The Day wants to extend the background check period from three to ten days. It wants so-called “universal background checks” for all gun transfers, except between family members—a mandate that would not have prevented Sandy Hook, since Lanza killed his mother and used her guns—and a ban on so-called “assault rifles” and original capacity magazines.

The Day editorial claims these are “some sensible reforms that are popular with the American public, including many gun owners.”

The only thing that could derail Biden’s gun control schemes would be a Republican victory in the two Senate races slated Jan. 5 in Georgia. If incumbent Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler retain their seats, the GOP will remain in control of the Senate and provide a barrier.

Eating Our Own: The Fine (Not So) Young Cannibals of the Gun Industry

Whether through articles or posts on social media the gun industry has an unfortunate tendency to readily and joyously eat its own. Toss a proverbial hot topic into the ring and suddenly it’s lions versus Christians with the lone Christian being represented by some poor guy who was “just saying.”

It’s a topic worth addressing even though it will cause more even kvetching and whining in the comment section (commonly-shared saying among writers: never read the comment section). Addressing this topic at all is likely to be called “whining”, “playing the victim card”, or – my personal favorite – “virtue signaling.”

There’s also the opposite end of the spectrum. There we have those who loudly proclaim we as an industry are being divided by the use of “divisive” speech. This often involves the originator of the discussion having asked a question or somehow challenged the status quo. You don’t dare rock the boat, because that makes you “part of the problem.”

What follows are my two cents. They’re sentiments I like to believe are shared by most of us here at TTAG. If my bluntness about this state of affairs offends you, sorry, but I’m not sorry. Continue reading “”

Attorney General William Barr Resigns.

WASHINGTON — Attorney General William Barr is resigning, confirming speculation that he would leave his top cabinet post amid mounting criticism of his performance from President Trump.

Trump announced the departure in a Monday evening tweet.

“Just had a very nice meeting with Attorney General Bill Barr at the White House. Our relationship has been a very good one, he has done an outstanding job! As per letter, Bill will be leaving just before Christmas to spend the holidays with his family,” Trump tweeted.

The president added: “Deputy Attorney General Jeff Rosen, an outstanding person, will become Acting Attorney General. Highly respected Richard Donoghue will be taking over the duties of Deputy Attorney General. Thank you to all!” Continue reading “”

I said it when Trump first took office; The Senate should take up the ‘agreement’ just like it was a Treaty for consideration and vote it down like the crap-for-brains idea it is.
This particular problem would have been solved.
But noooo, they had to play politics with it.
Well – now we have to deal with the possibility of control of the Senate changing hands to the demoncraps.

Channel Yosemite Sam: “Politicians is so stupid.”

UN Chief Calls On World Leaders to Declare ‘Climate Emergency’
Joe Biden: “The United States will rejoin the Paris Agreement on day one of my presidency.”

The United Nations Secretary-General has told world leaders to declare a climate emergency. “I call on all leaders worldwide to declare a State of Climate Emergency in their countries until carbon neutrality is reached,” UN chief Antonio Guterres said on Saturday at a summit marking the fifth anniversary of the 2015 Paris Agreement.

The UN chief’s call comes has many in the climate camp are encouraged by the hopes of a possible Democrat-led administration in the United States, media reports say. “Guterres made his call at a summit aimed at building on momentum behind the Paris deal, buoyed in recent months by … the prospect of U.S. President-elect Joe Biden bringing the United States back into the pact,” Reuters reported. Continue reading “”

‘Thought Experiment’ 

Thought experiment. There are five Democrat justices on the Supreme Court. There was a Democrat president who just ran for reelection. He supposedly lost, but virtually all Democrat voters believe that massive fraud in several Republican controlled states caused him to lose. Many Democrat attorneys general file a lawsuit in the US Supreme Court, essentially identical to the one that is pending now.

Does anyone believe for a second that those five Democrat justices wouldn’t do absolutely anything necessary to make sure the Democrat control of the presidency was maintained? Democrats care about power. Democrats do not care about process, or rules. Now we are being asked to be so meticulous about adhering to the rules, that we are to allow a laughably egregious fraud to succeed, and to permit our own throats to be cut by turning over the executive branch to the people who just committed the biggest political crime in history. I hope five US supreme court justices will show just a tiny bit of the creativity, to put it politely, which Democrat justices had when they, for example, found an imaginary abortion right in the US Constitution. We’ll see what happens..

I hope five US supreme court justices will show just a tiny bit of the creativity, to put it politely, which Democrat justices had when they, for example, found an imaginary abortion right in the US Constitution. We’ll see what happens.

Well, they didn’t, so wherever you came from, here you are.

 

Is Left Starting To Understand Where NRA Stances Come From?

The National Rifle Association is the boogieman for the anti-gun left in this country. During the recent campaigns, plenty of politicians talk about how they were going to stand up to the NRA, how they were going to put the NRA in their place.

This is the same NRA that’s embattled at every flank, of course, yet still apparently managed to pose enough opposition to prevent a $100 billion effort by Micahel Bloomberg and company from yielding any fruits. At least, that’s what happened if you believe the NRA is the only barrier to anti-gun Utopia.

However, it seems that some on the left are starting to brush up against the understanding that the NRA isn’t what they need to worry about. Continue reading “”

Democracy Has Been Destroying the 2nd Amendment
If the United States truly operated as a Republic, there would be no worries about any laws being passed to infringe on the right of the people to keep and bear arms.

“Save our Democracy!” editor and publisher of The New Criterion and the president and publisher of Encounter Books Roger Kimball writes in a commentary piece for The Tennessee Star. Kimball, like many of us, is anxious about the officially unresolved-at-this writing election results and believes he has a way to help President Donald Trump turn the tide in his favor.

“Donald Trump needs to mobilize the public with a series of high-profile ‘Save Our Democracy’ rallies,” Kimball declares. “I suspect that such Save Our Democracy rallies would attract tens of thousands of people, just as Trump’s campaign rallies did these past weeks.

“Save Our Democracy!” Kimball proclaims. “It has a ring to it. I hope team Trump will consider organizing a bunch of them now, today.”

It does have a ring to it, one that falls flat with those who pay attention to such matters. We are a republic, not a democracy. The “D”-word appears nowhere in the Declaration of Independence, and more importantly, nowhere in the Constitution, which instead proclaims “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government…”

Kimball’s not the only well-intentioned friend who seems to think the distinction is not worth raising. Continue reading “”

Barack Obama Smears Trump’s Latino Voters.

Confounding Democrats across America, President Trump made big gains in the Latino community on Election Day in states like Florida and Texas, vastly improving his 2016 performance with them.

The data doesn’t lie, as Politico explains:

Despite four years of being defined as a racist for his rhetoric and harsh immigration policies, Trump improved his margins in 78 of the nation’s 100 majority-Hispanic counties. And he did better with Latinos in exit polls of each of the top 10 battleground states, a POLITICO review of election data found.

Joe Biden still won Latino voters overall. But as post-election data trickles in, Democrats are growing concerned. Trump’s notable gains weren’t limited to Miami’s Cuban Americans or border-region Tejanos. Although Florida and Texas stood out for the notable shift, Puerto Ricans as far away as Philadelphia and Mexican Americans in Milwaukee drifted Trump-ward.

………..

There are many reasons for Trump’s improved standing with a voting bloc that has long been crucial to Democrat wins at the state and national levels. We’ll get into those in a minute, but first, let’s take a look at how former President Barack Obama tried to explain away Trump’s gains.

In an interview to promote his new book “A Promised Land,” Obama told the New York City-based “Breakfast Club” radio program Wednesday that Hispanic voters who went for Trump ignored his allegedly racist rhetoric and instead supported him because he was pro-life and against gay marriage:

“Those of us who live in DC or New York or LA,” Obama argued, sometimes lack “a good enough sense of how big this country is and how a lot of folks do not accept at all” policies that people living in larger metropolitan areas take for granted.

The former president turned to the topic of Hispanics who voted for Trump as an example.

“People were surprised about a lot of Hispanic folks who voted for Trump, but there’s a lot of evangelical Hispanics who, you know, the fact that Trump says racist things about Mexicans, or puts detainees, undocumented workers in cages. They think that’s less important than the fact that he supports their views on gay marriage or abortion,” he explained.

While Trump is indeed pro-life, gay marriage was never a focal point of his 2016 presidential campaign, nor did he make it an issue during his presidency.

So with that in mind, on what did Obama base his claims? He didn’t say, but it’s a safe bet to guess that the basis for his remarks came out of the same old Democratic playbook that almost always boils down Republican gains among key voting groups to some form of bigotry or ignorance, because minorities who vote for Republicans couldn’t possibly be rejecting the Democratic Party for legitimate reasons, right?

Contrary to what Obama told the Breakfast Club hosts, the Hispanic voters who pulled the lever for Trump and other Republicans in down-ballot races did so because they rejected the Democrat messaging on socialism, defunding the police, and job-killing initiatives like the Green New Deal:

Continue reading “”

The party of tolerance, diversity and inclusivity:

Morning Joe: We Have No Reason to Tolerate, Understand Anyone Who Supported Trump.

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough has a habit of picking on his own friends and family members who supported President Trump, but on Tuesday’s Morning Joe, he took it a step further and plainly admitted that his obsessions with the President are more important to him than the concerns of the American people.

Speaking to wife and co-host Mika Brzezinski, Scarborough griped: “[W]e can sit and try to figure out, Mika, why people feel the way they feel. I’m more concerned on why they’re as comfortable as they were with an autocrat —“.

Knowing where this diatribe was going, Brzezinski interrupted: “I am too.” Naturally, their own concerns that they whine about every morning overwhelm those of the American people.

Sounding just like a caricature of a closed-minded journalist, safely shielded from regular Americans in his liberal bubble, he arrogantly added: “I don’t — I don’t know that — that journalists that have been cloistered in New York City and Washington, D.C., uh should — should run around America trying to figure out why people feel the way they feel. I think people have told us through two elections.” Continue reading “”

Yeglesias is to paraphrase Paul( of Tarsus) ; ‘A Proggie of Proggies’
Maybe he’s also one of the ‘new gun owners’ and he bought an AR even?

BLUF:
Yglesias’ piece has been met with mostly positive comments from his audience, and several say that they’ve been persuaded by his argument, which is fantastic. Look, as much as I’d love to convert every one of these folks to Second Amendment stalwarts, I know that’s not going to happen. I tend to subscribe to Milton Friedman’s view of politics:

The important thing is to make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. If it is not politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right thing either.

I’ll accept the wrong people doing the right thing for purely political reasons if it leads to our Second Amendment rights becoming more secure. That doesn’t mean we don’t need to continue to evangelize on the issue of the importance of our Constitutional rights, but we also need to think about ways to make our case in language the Left can understand, and Yglesias’ argument is a good exercise in how to do so.

Vox Co-Founder: Democrats’ Embrace Of Gun Control “Misguided”

Gun owners and conservatives have been saying this all along, of course, but it’s rare these days to hear someone on the Left admit that gun control isn’t such a great idea politically speaking. Kudos to Matt Yglesias for stepping up to the plate. The pundit, who recently left Vox because even his progressive views were ticking off the young socialist staffers and he wanted the freedom to speak his mind without them pitching a fit over his columns, headed off to Substack, where he’s writing for a paid audience and enjoying complete editorial freedom.

In his latest piece, Yglesias admits he’s stirring the pot with his lefty audience by arguing that Democrats would be better off dropping gun control as a political issue, but this isn’t just an attempt to troll his audience. As Yglesias puts it, the “juice here just isn’t worth the squeeze.”

The entire piece by Yglesias is well worth a read and far too long to quote extensively here, but his basic point is simple: Americans may say they support a few individual gun control agenda items like universal background checks or red flag laws, but there’s no stomach or yearning for the kind of firearm-free society that gun control advocates embrace.

Yglesias is a lefty, and he’s not making an argument trying to convince his audience of the importance of the Second Amendment as an individual right. His point is that it’s not an issue that Democrats should run on. Continue reading “”

Don’t understand? Au contraire mon ami. They hold it in contempt.

Axios Founder: Most media publications don’t understand 50% of America.

The founder and CEO of Axios, Jim VandeHei, says that he’s concerned America will split in two over the lack of understanding of Trump supporters’ values.