Category: Goobermint

Record gun sales a ‘vote of no confidence in Democratic leadership’

Fox News contributor Leo Terrell blamed Democrats for a record surge in U.S. gun sales, Monday, telling “Fox & Friends” that the party’s lack of support for law enforcement has made Americans “afraid.”

LEO TERRELL: There is a vote of no confidence in Democratic leadership. Everyone in this country saw what happened last summer. Everyone is witnessing the rising crime in democratic cities. People are afraid. They cannot expect the Biden administration, Democratic leadership in Chicago, L.A., Washington, D.C. to protect them. And people, all Americans, are buying guns – blacks, browns, women – because they are afraid of the lack of support by the government regarding law enforcement. It’s very simple, a vote of no confidence….

I think the Democratic playbook is ‘take guns away.’ The Beto O’Rourke, Kamala Harris, the Joe Biden — take guns away; how can you take America’s right to protect himself when you see all this crime? And Ainsley, here’s the biggest concern. There’s an expectation of riots this summer. People are looking at what’s going on every day in these Democratic cities. And the government wants to take your guns away. People are afraid. People want to protect their family. And when they can’t call 911, as you articulate, they have no other choice but to protect themselves. And I applaud them because government is abandoning its number one obligation to protect citizens.

WATCH FULL INTERVIEW HERE:

AhhhhhhHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH

Atlanta councilman Antonio Brown, who voted to defund police, has car stolen

An Atlanta mayoral candidate who voted to defund millions of dollars from the local police department’s budget reportedly had his car stolen by a group of young thieves this week.

City Council Member Antonio Brown had just gotten out of his white Mercedes coupe to speak to fellow community leader Ben Norman in northwest Atlanta’s Dixie Hills community Wednesday when he spotted four or five kids — the youngest only 6 or 7, WAGA-TV reported.

The children were walking around a store — and within seconds were inside Brown’s car, he said.

“One kid was in the driver’s seat,” Brown told the outlet. “Ben attempted to open the door to get him out of the car. He fought with Ben. I then engaged and tried to get him out of the car. The three other kids were trying to figure out how to get in the car or stay out of the car. He started to hit on the gas. Ben let go.”

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Did they fail to send in social workers?

U.S. cities that defunded their police are continuing to experience historic crime waves.

WHO COULD HAVE SEEN THIS COMING??

Cities That Pushed For Defunding The Police Reckon With Record-High Crime Rates

Liberal cities are facing a dramatic rise in violence which has forced city leaders to reevaluate their stance on defunding the police, a Sunday report says.

Here’s what has happened in a few cities that voted to slash police budgets:

  • Homicide grew by 44% in New York, which had 1,531 shootings and 462 murders in 2020.
  • Homicides also increased 36% in L.A. to 350, leading the police chief to say “a decade of progress” has been erased.
  • Minneapolis, the center of the “Defund the Police” movement, saw a 46% increase in murders.
  • Oakland, California has seen a staggering 314% increase in homicides.
  • Portland, Oregon has seen murders triple.
  • Austin, Texas has had a 26% increase in aggravated assault reports.
  • Chicago saw a 65% increase in homicides from June 2020 to February 2021, despite arrests dropping 53%.
  • Philadelphia hit a 30-year-high with homicides in 2020, with 499 people murdered.
  • Even smaller cities like Louisville, Kentucky had a record high of 173 murders and is on track to surpass that this year.

The New York Times reported that many such cities are now expanding their police budgets to try to deal with these outcomes that absolutely no one could have seen coming.

Great job, America!

Joe Biden Is Actually a Mean, Old Man When the Cameras Go Off. He’s Sucking Right Now, So I Can See Why

Joe Biden is sleepy. He’s slow. He’s aloof. And he calls it a day early—very early at times. Yet, The New York Times did a lengthy piece about the inner workings of this White House to confirm what we already knew, along with insight into what foods he hates to be served in public events and his favorite drink, which is apparently orange Gatorade.

It’s the anti-Trump piece in the sense that it shows how Joe comes to a decision which is at a pace slower than a Galapagos tortoise. Yes, that part we knew. His decision-making process is as torturous as this presidency. And the publication notes how this process is at odds with a nation that craves urgency on the economy.

The man takes everyone on an esoteric journey where details upon details are demanded and where Sleepy Joe becomes Grumpy Joe at the flip of a switch. One thing that might make progressives upset are the four final folks he solicits for advice before finally making a move—some days later (via NYT):

Mr. Biden had already spent the first two months of his presidency debating how to respond to Mr. Putin, and despite his acknowledgment in March that he needed to act quickly, his deliberations were far from over. He convened another meeting in the Situation Room that stretched for two and a half hours, and called yet another session there a week later.

“He has a kind of mantra: ‘You can never give me too much detail,’” Mr. Sullivan said.

Quick decision-making is not Mr. Biden’s style. His reputation as a plain-speaking politician hides a more complicated truth. Before making up his mind, the president demands hours of detail-laden debate from scores of policy experts, taking everyone around him on what some in the West Wing refer to as his Socratic “journey” before arriving at a conclusion.

Those trips are often difficult for his advisers, who are peppered with sometimes obscure questions. Avoiding Mr. Biden’s ire during one of his decision-making seminars means not only going beyond the vague talking points that he will reject, but also steering clear of responses laced with acronyms or too much policy minutiae, which will prompt an outburst of frustration, often laced with profanity.

Let’s talk plain English here, he will often snap.

Interviews with more than two dozen current and former Biden associates provide an early look into how Mr. Biden operates as president — how he deliberates, whom he consults for advice and what drives his decisions as he settles into the office he has chased for more than three decades.

On policy issues, Mr. Biden, 78, takes days or weeks to make up his mind as he examines and second-guesses himself and others. It is a method of governing that can feel at odds with the urgency of a country still reeling from a pandemic and an economy struggling to recover. The president is also faced with a slim majority in Congress that could evaporate next year, giving him only months to enact a lasting legacy.

Those closest to him say Mr. Biden is unwilling, or unable, to skip the routine. As a longtime adviser put it: He needs time to process the material so that he feels comfortable selling it to the public. But the approach has its risks, as President Barack Obama found out when his own, sometimes lengthy policy debates led to infighting and extended lobbying, and made his White House feel process driven.

Well, this White House being Obama 2.0 is not shocking. We have Russia and China doing what they want, just like during the Obama years. We have anemic jobs growth, just like during the Obama years. We have the president pushing more gun control. Gas prices soaring. Inflation now rising. And Biden’s biggest domestic accomplishment was set forth by Trump regarding the COVID vaccine and the rate of vaccinations.

None of what Joe Biden has proposed has really done anything, but the Times spent a lot of words dissecting the action process here. In all, it’s a lot of sentences to show that this White House is a lot of talk and no real action. Second, yeah, Biden is cranky but that’s about it while they portrayed Trump as a madman for the better part of three years. He’s slow Joe—and this piece confirms that. Also, he reportedly refuses to have leafy greens served because they get stuck in his teeth. And the final four dudes he consults with are all white, Bruce Reed, Mike Donilon, Ron Klain, and Steve Ricchetti.

If it were, Europe would be a crime free paradise.

Lack Of Gun Control Is NOT Reason For Rise In Crime

Not enough gun control. That, according to the vaunted “experts” in the Biden basement dwelling White House, is the reason for the rise in crime we are seeing all over the United States.

Yes indeed, you heard it here first from good ole Jen ‘circle back’ Psaki.

Oh REALLY? Let’s review the past fourteen months shall we? What has happened during all that time? Well, yes. The idiotic lockdown, but that’s not what I’m talking about.

How about all those riots? How about all the looting and destruction in cities all over the United States that has caused billions in damage? How about the fact that many of those looting rioting THUGS walked out of jail scot-free thanks to Kamala and her ilk who ponied up millions for bail funds across the country.

What about Democrats and their asinine defund the police movement? Crime has skyrocketed because of that as well. Seattle is a cesspool. San Francisco is a pit of feces, discarded syringes, blatant daylight robberies, and homelessness run rampant. Chicago and St. Louis crime rates are out of control, while the mayors bloviate about how fewer police are needed. New York has de Blasio contributing to the crime rate with his grandiosely stupid ideas.

“When de Blasio and his police commissioner, Dermot Shea, dismantled the city’s hugely successful anti-gun street crime units, when the City Council embraced the defund rhetoric, and when Gov. Cuomo and the Legislature bought into the anti-cop zeitgeist and obnoxiously did away with most bail, the message to law-abiding New Yorkers became clear: You’re on your own, chumps.

What has happened since then? Crime is up, WAY up, and the anti-Semitism hate crimes have risen exponentially. 

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Well, when the left doesn’t have something they can use for propaganda, they make one up.

Team Biden keeps hyping a basically phony ‘domestic violent extremism’ threat.

With illegal migrants crossing the southern border by the hundreds of thousands and setting new records by the month, the Department of Homeland Security’s top priority — somehow — is “domestic violent extremism,” and it doesn’t even mean Antifa.

“President Joe Biden’s top appointees have called white supremacists the greatest security threat to the country and are pushing for bolstered intelligence gathering,” the Associated Press reported last week, noting that DHS “plans to ramp up social media tracking as part of an enhanced focus on domestic violent extremism,” for which the department has opened a new office in its intelligence branch.

Yes, the Jan. 6 Capitol riot was awful, but that collection of crackpots is no serious national-security threat or there’d have been some sign of more such trouble in the months since.

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Proggie Primary Rule:
Rules for thee, not for me.
Proggie Observation:
If they didn’t have double standards, they would have any standards at all.

She apologized? How many times does that make it that she has apologized for violating the travel and meeting rules she mandated for Michiganders?

It’s like ‘Climate Change!™’.
When the people who are telling us “It’s a crisis!” start acting like it’s a crisis, I’ll think about considering it to be a crisis.

Hypocrisy, thy name is Der Grëtchënführër

Whitmer apologizes for violating own order at restaurant gathering

On May 15, the state’s Department of Health and Human Services issued an order disallowing groups of more than six people to be seated together at a restaurant, and each party has to be separated by six feet. However, the governor was caught disregarding that rule on Saturday.

Whitmer was spotted at the Landshark Bar & Grill in East Lansing. A photograph of the group with Whitmer showing tables pushed tougher and no masks being worn was briefly posted on social media. Her chief operating officer, Tricia Foster, was also at the event.

“Throughout the pandemic, I’ve been committed to following public health protocols,” Whitmer said Sunday in a statement. “Yesterday, I went with friends to a local restaurant. As more people arrived, the tables were pushed together. Because we were all vaccinated, we didn’t stop to think about it.”

“In retrospect, I should have thought about it. I am human,” she added. “I made a mistake, and I apologize.”

Ted Goodman, spokesman for the Michigan Republican Party, said, “For Gov. Whitmer, it’s rules for thee but not for me,” according to the Detroit News.

Whitmer has faced strong criticism from conservatives for her handling of the pandemic and subsequent lockdowns, in part because this weekend’s violation wasn’t the first time she has been accused of not following her own policies.

On March 12, Whitmer traveled on a private plane to Florida to visit her ill father, returning to Michigan on March 15, despite guidance against traveling.

A number of other Democratic politicians, including California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, and Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser, have also been caught violating the coronavirus restrictions.

Last week, Whitmer announced outdoor capacity limits will be lifted June 1, when indoor capacity limits will also be raised to 50%. Indoor capacity limits and the state’s broad mask mandate will be fully lifted July 1 for those who received the vaccine.

Biden’s Exploitation of Religion
For him it’s only useful if turned into liberal propaganda.

The Declaration of Independence says “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” On the campaign trail in 2020, Joe Biden botched that line, saying, “All men and women created by — you know, you know, the thing.” His omission of God was telling. Unlike the Founding Fathers who spoke openly and often of God, Biden hesitates before mentioning him. In early May, he managed to issue an obligatory proclamation on the National Day of Prayer without referencing God once. He put a political spin on prayer, saying it had “powered moral movements — including essential fights against racial injustice, child labor, and infringement on the rights of disabled Americans.”

For Biden, religion is only useful insofar as it serves as a tribune of liberal propaganda. His secularism seeks to remove religion from politics while inserting politics into religion. Whether talking about prayer or pontiffs, Biden has politics, not religion, on his mind. He often gushes about Pope Francis, but his alliance with him rests not on Catholicism but political liberalism. In a grim irony, the party of John F. Kennedy, who promised never to take political cues from a pope, now slavishly follows one.

Taking religion out of religion and putting politics into it is one of the most corrupting projects of modern liberalism.

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No, Republicans Don’t Need To “Come To The Table” On Background Checks

Do Republicans in Congress really need to sit down and collaborate with their Democratic counterparts on a background check bill? I certainly don’t think so, and the vast majority of GOP congresscritters seem to be opposed to the idea as well, but former Fayetteville, North Carolina city councilman Bobby Hurst has penned an entire column fleshing out his extraordinarily bad idea, arguing that if Republicans don’t give in now, Democrats may pass something even worse.

While there is a lot we can disagree on regarding gun rights, we can make progress by focusing on what we do agree on, which is that we want to keep our families safe from people who should legally not be able to purchase firearms. The best way our elected officials can do this is to close any loopholes in current laws that allow felons to easily gain access to firearms.

This is where Congress comes in. A bipartisan group of Senators is looking at closing loopholes that allow strangers to sell guns to other strangers without a background check. Some might assume this is already law, but as it stands, only licensed dealers are required to conduct background checks.

While there is certainly a lot of room for error in any gun legislation, Sens. Thom Tillis and Richard Burr can fight to ensure that any agreement that is reached in the Senate closes loopholes without infringing on our Second Amendment rights. Thankfully, Sen. Pat Toomey, who is leading the negotiations on the Republican side, knows clearly that there are certain lines that cannot be crossed, such as requiring a background check when a father sells a gun to his son or daughter.

What is also clear is that if Republicans refuse to come to the table, Democrats will undoubtedly take any background check bill too far. With the filibuster under constant threat, and a Democratically controlled House, Senate and White House, it is more important than ever that Republicans stand up for our Second Amendment rights. The best way to do so is to support expanding background checks and by taking an active role in drafting any legislation on this issue.

That’s a really long way to say “I support the Second Amendment, but…”, isn’t it?

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Self-Spreading Insanity: The Age of Contagious Vaccines

With COVID vaccination “rollouts” ongoing, it would seem the angelic host of Big Pharma has swooped in to avert the end of the world, triumphing in the nick of time over a super-lethal, super-contagious, super-pandemic…with a whopping 0.15% infection fatality rate.

But if, for whatever reason, you still aren’t sold on the whole COVID Vaccination Magical Mystery Tour, don’t worry.  You may get another chance at serum-based salvation quite soon — whether you want it or not.

This is because COVID-19 may mark not the end, but the dawn of an age in which mankind will be constantly and inescapably peppered with custom-engineered viruses of all kinds.   A great many of these will go by the name “vaccine.”

We can now be all but certain, for instance, that COVID-19 itself originated in a Chinese bio-lab, as part of an ongoing (and U.S.-funded) project to create extra-contagious and extra-lethal humanized bat coronaviruses — so-called “gain of function” research.  (One famed virologist has even argued that COVID originated as a custom target for an experimental HIV vaccine.)

This aspect of COVID-19’s origin lends it the surreal distinction of being the world’s first wholly man-made pandemic.

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10 Things We Have Learned During the Covid Coup

One potential positive from the whole Covid-19 debacle is that we have learned an incredible amount about the society in which we live. This will be crucial if we manage to stave off a descent into a nightmare future of techno-fascist slavery.

We will have a new understanding of what our world has become and what we would like it to be in the decades and centuries to come. And “we” means we. While the majority have, apparently, learnt nothing at all from what has happened, they will eventually catch up.

There is no way that knowledge gained by a wide-awake 15% or 20% of the population will not end up being shared by almost everyone. Once the truth is out, it tends to stay out. As H.R. Haldeman so wisely put it, “you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube”.

Here are Ten Things We Have Learned During the Covid Coup.

1. Our political system is hopelessly corrupt. 
Virtually all politicians are hopelessly corrupt. No political party can be trusted. They all can be, and have been, bought.

2. Democracy is a sham.
It has been a sham for a very long time. There will never be any real democracy when money and power amount to the same thing.

3. The system will stop at nothing to hold on to its power
and, if possible, increase its levels of control and exploitation. It has no scruples. No lie is too outrageous, no hypocrisy too nauseating, no human sacrifice too great.

4. So-called radical movements are usually nothing of the sort.
From whatever direction they claim to attack the system, they are just pretending to do so, and serve to channel discontent in directions which are harmless to the power clique and even useful to its agendas.

5. Any “dissident” voice you have ever heard of through corporate media is probably a fake.
The system does not hand out free publicity to its actual enemies.

6. Most people in our society are cowards.
They will jettison all the fine values and principles which they have been loudly boasting about all their lives merely to avoid the slightest chance of public criticism, inconvenience or even minor financial loss.

7. The mainstream media is nothing but a propaganda machine for the system…
…and those journalists who work for it have sold their sorry souls, placing their (often minimal) writing skills entirely at the disposition of Power.

8. Police are not servants of the public…
…but servants of a powerful and extremely wealthy minority which seeks to control and exploit the public for its own narrow and greedy interests.

9. Scientists cannot be trusted.
They will use the hypnotic power of their white coats and authoritative status for the benefit of whoever funds their work and lifestyle. He who pays the piper calls the tune.

10. Progress is a misleading illusion.
The “progress” of increasing automation and industrialisation does not go hand in hand with a progress in the quality of human life, but in fact will “progressively” reduce it to the point of complete extinction.

Nothing new to be surprised about. It merely confirms that demoncraps are elitist hypocrites with double standards

Maxine Waters Accused of Abusing the Use of Air Marshals for Her Own Protection

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) has been a big backer of the anti-police, BLM movement.

Indeed, she visited Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, last month to tell protesters that they should get more “confrontational”, if they didn’t get what they wanted when it came to the verdict in the trial of Derek Chauvin. She also bashed the police while there, and later, in an interview with CNN’s Jim Acosta.

But this is a huge crock from her because while she bashes police, she seems to be very eager to have police protecting her.

As we previously reported, even as she traveled to Brooklyn Center, she allegedly had police protection on her way there.

Now, there may be a scandal breaking over her use of air marshals. And she’s not the only member of Congress involved.

Air marshals were put on flights in the wake of the 9/11 attack to protect flights, particularly high risk flights, from danger. But, according to the New York Post, after the riot at the Capitol, lawmakers began asking for extra protection when going back and forth on flights, even when going on vacation. So in response, the TSA began pulling the marshals from the high risk flights to protect the members of Congress instead.

While we reported Maxine Waters allegedly had police protection from the Capitol Police when she went to Brooklyn Center to agitate against the police, she actually may have had even more protection that we thought.

According to a complaint filed with the House Ethics Committee, she was accompanied by “two armed Capitol Police and two U.S. Secret Service agents.” On top of those people, Waters requested two air marshals to join her on the plane, plus two more to escort her through the airport when she got to Minneapolis. So, she was allegedly protected by at least eight people on her way to Brooklyn Center.

From Fox News:

“Air marshals can only be assigned to high-risk flights. That means flights that have been deemed through our vetted process that have a security risk,” said Sonya Hightower LoBasco, executive director of the Air Marshal National Council. “When these processes are violated and they’re taken advantage of and they are just tossed to the side now as if they don’t matter, we’re really looking into creating a major problem for ourselves in the aviation domain.” [….]

“Congresswoman Maxine Waters utilized numerous government resources inappropriately,” the complaint reads. “Federal Air Marshals were removed from a “High Risk” flight to cover Ms. Waters flight to Minnesota. The High Risk flight took off with no armed law enforcement on board leaving a gap in National Security.”

“Air marshals for Miss Waters trip were assigned high risk missions, they were removed from those missions and assigned to Miss Waters mission on top of her already armed security detail from the Capitol Police,” Hightower said. “That was not an official business trip. We still don’t have any justification as to why government resources were utilized to fly Miss Waters out to Minnesota.”

The Capitol Police and the U.S. Secret Service are denying that they provided Waters protection, but their denial conflicts with what the Air Marshal group is saying. Obviously Waters did get protection from air marshals, which raises the greater question of her denying those marshals from being able to protect high risk flights because of her request.

The president of the Air Marshal National Council, David Londo, objected to the greater point of using the marshals this way, calling it an “egregious misuse of government resources,” David Londo, president of the Air Marshal National Council, said in a complaint to the Department of Homeland Security Inspector General.

“The FAMs are now taking agents off of regularly scheduled “high risk” flights to put them on flights with members of Congress, that in most cases have their own armed federal security details onboard already. It has become akin to a type of extremely expensive concierge service for Congressional members.”

Members of Congress are supposed to be serving us, but with this, they’re taking away protection that’s actually needed elsewhere for Americans. The marshals aren’t supposed to be servants or security for Congress. This has the potential of putting national security at risk.

As noted in passing on a previous post and commented on by Paul;
The Hernando de Soto Bridge carrying Interstate 40 over the Mississippi River between Arkansas and Tennessee at Memphis has been closed indefinitely due to a crack in one of its main support beams.

⇑⇑THIS⇑⇑ is ‘infrastucture’.

Democrats refuse to prioritize REAL infrastructure — like Colonial Pipeline.

Child care is infrastructure, according to Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Health-care aides for seniors are infrastructure, say Democratic activists. “Anti-racism” is infrastructure, we’re told. But these things aren’t infrastructure; they’re just things Democrats want funded with taxpayer money.

You know what’s actually infrastructure? Bridges and pipelines. On that front, we’re not doing so well.

The shutdown of the Colonial Pipeline this week demonstrated that our actual infrastructure is vulnerable and that our lives can be disrupted quickly when it fails. Hackers, undeterred by the FBI and Homeland Security officials who are supposed to be protecting critical infrastructure, managed to lock down the pipeline controls with ransomware. Fuel deliveries stopped, gas lines formed (shades of the Jimmy Carter era), and prices went up, all within a couple of days.

Fresh from blocking construction of another major pipeline (the Keystone XL), the Biden administration flailed, while a nation that just a year or so ago became a net oil exporter found itself facing fuel shortages. That’s infrastructure.

Meanwhile, the Interstate 40 bridge across the Mississippi River also failed this week. The Hernando de Soto span connecting Memphis to Arkansas on one of America’s most important interstate highways is closed until further notice after dangerous cracks were found. Now all traffic is being routed onto the single alternative bridge while officials play catch-up on maintenance. That’s infrastructure.

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Biden’s Middle East Failure.
America’s enemies sense weakness, and they are capitalizing

Three recent events, two of them from the past week, haven’t gotten the news coverage they deserve as the Biden administration desperately pursues a rapprochement with Iran.

The first is the U.S. Navy’s seizure over the weekend of a significant weapons shipment. It contained “dozens of advanced Russian-made anti-tank guided missiles, thousands of Chinese Type 56 assault rifles, and hundreds of PKM machine guns, sniper rifles and rocket-propelled grenades launchers … [and] advanced optical sights,” the Fifth Fleet said in a statement.

The cache was destined for Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen, whom the Biden administration recently delisted as a terrorist organization. No serious person believes the arms didn’t originate in Iran, though for obviously political reasons the United States Navy prefers not to state the obvious.

In neighboring Iraq, a prominent Iraqi political activist and critic of Iranian influence in his country, particularly the arming and funding of pro-Tehran militias, was gunned down—the latest in a series of Iran critics to turn up dead. The early reporting suggests an Iranian militia is to blame.

Finally, there is the escalating security situation in the Persian Gulf. After several years of tranquility along one of the world’s most important shipping lanes, Iran has returned to harassing American ships. In early April, one IRGC Navy boat harassed U.S. Navy and Coast Guard boats; weeks later, three IRGC boats got so close that the United States fired warning shots for the first time in years. Thirteen IRGC armed speedboats harassed U.S. ships on Monday again forcing them to fire warning shots.

In response, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said yesterday that “harassment by the IRGC Navy is not a new phenomenon.” That depends on the definition of the word “new”: This round of antagonistic behavior began a few weeks ago, after several years of comparative Iranian good behavior in the Gulf.

These events make clear that Tehran feels no pressure to demonstrate goodwill to the Biden administration, preferring confrontation and violence. It cannot be a coincidence that these events are unfolding in the midst of the administration’s campaign to reenter the nuclear deal.

No matter how many times the pattern repeats itself, JCPOA supporters refuse to learn that Iran repays engagement with contempt, not good behavior, and that the Iranians know a dupe when they see one. Looking at you, Rob Malley.

Elsewhere in the region, the Hamas terrorist organization is demonstrating the same astute appreciation for weakness. A month after Team Biden announced its intention to restore U.S. aid programs to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and resume funding for UNRWA, Hamas rockets are raining down on Israel. Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas is glorifying the behavior and encouraging the attacks.

The Biden administration pledged to revive aid to the Palestinians—and to jump back into the nuclear deal—to advance peace.

In both cases, the administration has been repaid with violence and humiliation.

Texas Hits Snag On Constitutional Carry

In Texas, it really seemed like a done deal. Constitutional carry was going to pass. Enough lawmakers wanted it that there was no chance of it not passing the legislature. The governor is likely to sign such a bill, too.

However, passing legislation is tricky. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, either, because it helps stop all kinds of horrible laws from making it onto the books. The downside is that it can create hurdles that good legislation has to deal with as well.

It seems constitutional carry hit just such a hurdle.

The Texas House on Wednesday rejected changes the Senate made to a Republican-backed proposal to allow Texans to carry handguns without a license, sending the bill behind closed doors for further negotiations.

Before the permitless carry bill can head to Gov. Greg Abbott, who has said he would sign it into law, a conference committee made up of representatives and senators will have to reach a compromise that must get approval from both chambers.

House Bill 1927 would nix the requirement for Texas residents to obtain a license to carry handguns if they’re not prohibited by state or federal law from possessing a gun.

Among other changes, state senators last week approved an amendment barring permitless carry from people convicted in the past five years of making a terroristic threat, deadly conduct, assault that causes bodily injury or disorderly conduct with a firearm. The chamber also approved an amendment that enhances criminal penalties for illegal weapons carried by felons and those convicted of family violence offenses.

Bill author state Rep. Matt Schaefer, R-Tyler, drew cheers Wednesday when he announced he was rejecting the Senate changes. House Speaker Dade Phelan said the House conferees for the committee that will negotiate the bill are Republican Reps. Schaefer, James White and Dustin Burrows and Democratic Reps. Terry Canales and Ryan Guillen – two of the seven Democrats who voted for the bill.

Now, this isn’t good news, but it’s not awful news.

The bad news is compounded by there only being a short time remaining for the legislature to remain in session, which means any compromise has to be reached quickly.

The good news is that these lawmakers seems to want constitutional carry in the state, which means they’re starting from a decent enough place. My hope is that they’ll pass a law based on just the parts they agree with and then debate the other stuff next year. Get the law on the books, then modify it as needed.

If they don’t do that, they may well miss this golden opportunity for passing an important law.

I doubt the voters in Texas will be appreciative of such behavior, to say the least, nor should they be. They know what the people want, they just need to put aside the bickering and get it done.

Pass constitutional carry and do it now. Worry about the other stuff in later bills and let the people exercise their Second Amendment rights the way God and the Constitution intended.

Falling Down and Falling Apart

Last night, for the first time in a long time, I watched the 1993 movie Falling Down on YouTube, and was struck by the final line: “I’m the bad guy? How’d that happen? I did everything they told me to.”

William Foster is a guy who believed in the system. He followed the rules, and yet lost everything. His wife divorced him. He lost his job. His wife has a restraining order against him so he’s not even allowed to attend his daughter’s birthday party. The world has ceased to make sense.

Falling Down is a classic — some of the scenes are funny as hell, in a dark way — and what is the message? It’s about incentives.

Why should we play by the rules, if the rules don’t work? What is the incentive to be a good citizen — an honest, hard-working taxpayer — if the system does not reward you for compliance with the rules?

There are two kinds of incentives — the carrots of reward and the sticks of punishment. What has happened to William Foster in Falling Down is that he finds himself being punished (divorce, unemployment and a thousand other tiny humiliations) despite having followed the rules.

We have heard a lot of rhetoric about “social justice” lately, by which liberals mean a redistribution of rewards and punishments in the system, for the benefit of those allegedly suffering oppression. In reality, however, oppression is not neatly distributed according to the identity-politics formulae of the Left. Everybody has their own grievances, and attempts to explain human frustrations by such simplistic labels as “systemic racism” — or “patriarchy” — fail to capture this reality.

The lessons of Falling Down were on my mind as I watched Tucker Carlson’s opening monologue for his Tuesday program:

There are a lot of unprecedented things happening, but not all of them are shocking. For example, it probably shouldn’t surprise you that, once they got their hands on real power, the same lunatics who don’t believe in human biology immediately made a serious mess of our economy. It took them less than six months to do it.

First, they acted like the U.S. dollar had no value. They spent money like they’d just printed it for the occasion, which, needless to say, they had. Predictably, we wound up with frightening levels of inflation, which for the record they still deny exists. But inflation does exist, as you well know if you live here.
Corn prices, to name just one example of a staple commodity that’s now out of control, have risen by 50 percent just since January. But that wasn’t bad enough. The lunatics decided to make it worse.

They paid millions of Americans more than they make at work, to stay home and do nothing. To justify doing this, they used the word “COVID” quite a bit, but it had nothing to do with the pandemic. They just wanted to break the system. And so they did. And the rest of us immediately wound up with a bewildering combination of rising unemployment in the middle of a severe labor shortage.

So, at the very same time, we found ourselves with too many workers, and also too few workers. That doesn’t even make sense, but thanks to their policies, that’s now exactly what we have. And then, finally, in case 2021 didn’t remind you enough of a grimmer version of the 1970s, we now have serious gas shortages, in a country that just recently was energy independent. All along the east coast of the country today, people couldn’t fill up their cars. The footage looks like Venezuela.

And so forth. The real point — why it reminded me of Falling Down — is that ordinary citizens are powerless to fix this manmade disaster. The people in charge don’t give a damn about ordinary citizens, because if they did, they wouldn’t have done what they’ve done. We find ourselves in a broken system, where the incentives have gone haywire, and the world has stopped making sense. We’re all like William Foster, stuck in that L.A. traffic jam with a broken air conditioner. Everything seems to be falling apart, and we find ourselves helplessly falling down.

Things are likely to go from bad to worse, and the only question is just how much worse the situation will get. We cannot expect Joe Biden (or the people who are running the government in his name) to experience a sudden insight as to the cause of their failures. There will be no sudden reversal of their “progressive” agenda, and it is far more likely they will just double-down on the bad policies they’ve embraced.

Probably a lot of people aren’t going to be able to cope. We’re going to see more and more people going berserk — seemingly random massacres, “suicide by cop,” acts of domestic terrorism — because what do you expect people to do when the rules don’t work anymore?

“I’m the bad guy? How’d that happen? I did everything they told me to.”

“I’ll take No Enemies To The Left for $500, Alex”

Republicans push FBI over ‘suicide by cop’ outrage.

REPUBLICANS PUSH FBI OVER ‘SUICIDE BY COP’ OUTRAGE. Last month some House GOP lawmakers revealed the previously unknown fact that the FBI ruled the June 14, 2017 shooting attack on the House Republican baseball team to be an act of “suicide by cop.” It was stunning news. How could the FBI do such a thing? The shooter, James Hodgkinson, expressed bitter hatred for Republicans, brought guns when he moved to the Washington area, had a hit list of GOP lawmakers in his pocket when he approached the baseball practice, checked to make sure the men on the field were in fact Republicans, and then opened fire. He nearly killed House Republican Whip Steve Scalise, badly wounded a lobbyist, and hurt two others before being shot to death by Scalise’s security detail and Alexandria, Virginia police.

It was absolutely clearly, without any doubt, an act of domestic political terrorism. And yet in November, 2017, when the FBI briefed House lawmakers on the investigation, they announced that they had determined the attack was an episode of “suicide by cop” — that is, despite all the evidence to the contrary, Hodgkinson was trying to kill himself, not Republicans.

Now, GOP lawmakers are pushing FBI Director Christopher Wray to explain how the bureau came to that conclusion. Today, the House members who were present at the baseball field that day are sending a new letter demanding Wray not only re-investigate the shooting itself but also investigate how FBI investigators came to ignore the evidence and reach the “suicide by cop” verdict.