Category: Goobermint
Sordid Lessons from Uvalde School Shooting; Justice Department Cites “Cascading Failures.”
WHEN SECONDS COUNT, THE POLICE ARE MINUTES AWAY JUST NOT COMING
The U.S. Department of Justice released its findings yesterday on the May 2022 school shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, which left nineteen children and two teachers dead and another 17 wounded. The report, “Critical Incident Review Active Shooter at Robb Elementary School,” found what it called “cascading failures of leadership, decision-making, tactics, policy and training” also using terms such as “critical failure,” “breakdown,” demonstrations upon leadership “of no urgency,” policy “training deficiencies” and more on the part of mostly local law enforcement officials. The word “failure” appeared dozens of times throughout the report.
The report noted that law enforcement officers were on the scene within 3 minutes of the first 911 call, yet the threat was not eliminated until more than an hour later.
Officials received intense criticism in the aftermath of the attack, with more than 75 minutes passing after the initial police response and before action was taken against the shooter, during which multiple calls by students were made to 911.
Former Uvalde Acting Police Chief Mariano Pargas and Uvalde school district Police Chief Pete Arredondo, neither who are still on their jobs, is where much of the initial blame has been placed as they were both ultimately in charge. Indeed, many families of the victims and within the community of Uvalde want officials who were responsible for the botched response to face criminal charges, according to the Texas Tribune. According to the Associated Press, local officials are still “weighing whether to bring charges.”
What added more pain and disgust to the situation for many Americans at the time of the massacre was the scene of police officers, who we now know went from “active shooter” mode to dealing with what they simply were communicating as a “barricade situation,” keeping understandably panicked parents—some getting text messages and calls from their children inside the school—from entering to save their children.
To review the complete 610-page Justice Dept. report, click here.
It’s hard to think of a worse environmental scandal in recent years than Volkswagen ’s 2015 diesel-emissions cheating. The German automaker was rightly pursued by regulators, enforcement agencies and class-action lawyers.
The scandal ended up costing Volkswagen an estimated $33 billion in fines and financial settlements—and revealed that diesel-emissions cheating was endemic. In 2020 Daimler AG made a $1.5 billion settlement over emissions cheating in Mercedes-Benz diesel vehicles. (One of us helped secure that settlement.) Last year engine maker Cummins agreed to pay $1.7 billion to settle claims that it skirted diesel-emissions standards.
In all of these cases, regulators punished carmakers that had cut corners and misled the public. But when it comes to electric cars, the government has a cheating scandal of its own. That scandal, grabbing far fewer headlines, is buried deep in the Federal Register—on page 36,987 of volume 65.
When carmakers test gasoline-powered vehicles for compliance with the Transportation Department’s fuel-efficiency rules, they must use real values measured in a laboratory. By contrast, under an Energy Department rule, carmakers can arbitrarily multiply the efficiency of electric cars by 6.67. This means that although a 2022 Tesla Model Y tests at the equivalent of about 65 miles per gallon in a laboratory (roughly the same as a hybrid), it is counted as having an absurdly high compliance value of 430 mpg. That number has no basis in reality or law.
For exaggerating electric-car efficiency, the government rewards carmakers with compliance credits they can trade for cash. Economists estimate these credits could be worth billions: a vast cross-subsidy invented by bureaucrats and paid for by every person who buys a new gasoline-powered car.
Until recently, this subsidy was a Washington secret. Carmakers and regulators liked it that way. Regulators could announce what sounded like stringent targets, and carmakers would nod along, knowing they could comply by making electric cars with arbitrarily boosted compliance values. Consumers would unknowingly foot the bill.
The secret is out. After environmental groups pointed out the illegality of this charade, the Energy Department proposed eliminating the 6.67 multiplier for electric cars, recognizing that the number “lacks legal support” and has “no basis.”
Carmakers have panicked and asked the Biden administration to delay any return to legal or engineering reality. That is understandable. Without the multiplier, the Transportation Department’s proposed rules are completely unattainable. But workable rules don’t require government-created cheat codes. Carmakers should confront that problem head on.
Op-Ed: HB 114 – Destruction Of State Firearm Industry Act
This dangerous legislation, prefiled at the Roundhouse by Los Alamos State Representative Christine Chandler, targets the already heavily regulated firearm industry with potential litigation intended to make it impossible to remain in business in New Mexico.
This specific, aggressive targeting of the singular industry necessary for the citizens to exercise a constitutionally protected right weaponizes the civil justice system and will create a vacuum into which unlicensed and unregulated persons and entities will likely step.
Bad actors in ANY industry who engage in unconscionable, unfair, or deceptive trade practices are already held to account by the state’s existing Unfair Trade Practices Act. Federally licensed firearm manufacturers and retailers who violate gun laws commit federal felonies and face prison time, heavy fines, and revocation of their license by the ATF. So why is HB 114 being filed?
HB 114 creates new civil violations associated with “false advertising” and actions that “negatively impact public health, safety, or welfare” that apply only to the firearm industry. Activist attorneys general, district attorneys, and gun control organizations are explicitly authorized to litigate against members of the firearm industry and drive them out of business. HB 114 provides a template for destruction that can and will be used against any industry disfavored by certain elected officials and progressive interest groups.
In the interim joint legislative hearings leading up to the 2024 session, in which the bill author participated, lawmakers repeatedly stated that they wanted to target unlawful manufacturers and sellers of illegal firearms and firearm products. HB 114 sweeps up lawful and legitimate firearm industry members in a web of subjective, vague civil law that applies only to them and no other industry.
How it started: How it's going: pic.twitter.com/4EHZ6N3p39
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) January 16, 2024
The Likely Lab Leak and the Covid Cassandra.
I thought I was done with writing about Covid-19. But Covid-19 isn’t done with me—or with any of us.
I’m writing this precisely four years after Chinese health officials first announced the emergence of a mysterious new form of pneumonia in the city of Wuhan. “No obvious human-to-human transmission has been observed,” the officials added in that December 30, 2019, release. (Already, the Chinese were lying.) Today, Covid cases are ticking up for the umpteenth time. And documents keep coming to light that expose how American officials and scientists similarly suppressed unsettling facts about the pandemic’s origins.
While the death rate from each new wave of Covid keeps dropping, the disturbing revelations about our public health leaders keep getting worse. In December 2023, a new disclosure revealed how leading U.S. virus experts lobbied to conduct dangerous gain-of-function research at the substandard Wuhan Institute of Virology laboratory. The latest leak provides yet more evidence that the pandemic likely emerged from a lab experiment gone awry, and that U.S. scientists actively covered up their possible role in that world-historical catastrophe.
After both the 1986 Challenger explosion and the 9/11 attacks, bipartisan commissions were convened to investigate the disasters. Covid has killed more than a million Americans and has cost our economy at least $14 trillion. And yet we see no great urgency to investigate the pandemic’s murky origins or prevent a recurrence. Republicans in Congress continue to hold productive hearings. But, according to the New York Times, the Biden administration is “privately resisting” pressure to create a 9/11-style commission on the pandemic. The press has largely moved on. And the public health officials most deeply involved in the debacle—including Anthony Fauci and his National Institutes of Health (NIH) colleague Francis Collins—continue to tap-dance around the truth, even after leaving their posts.
There’s Proof Biden’s Border Crisis Was Intentional… And It’s Being Covered Up.
As soon as it became clear that Joe Biden was going to be inaugurated as president, illegal immigrants started flooding our nation’s southern border.
During Donald Trump’s time in office, the number of illegal border crossings dropped dramatically—an undeniable result of Trump’s zero-tolerance policy for illegal immigrants. The border wall also worked well in stopping people from crossing illegally. But when Biden became president, things changed. On his first day in office, he signed an executive order halting border wall construction. As anyone could have predicted, illegal immigration skyrocketed after Biden took office. Within months of Biden taking office, the number of illegal border crossings shot up to six times more than what the Obama administration deemed to be crisis level, and it’s only gotten worse.
The White House has repeatedly sought to blame Republicans for the crisis that they don’t official recognize as a crisis, but confidential documents obtained by the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI) have pulled the curtain back on the border crisis, revealing that the historic influx of illegal immigrants is entirely by design.
According to a lawsuit by IRLI against the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the agency ceased the 287(g) program under Joe Biden. The 287(g) program enables the removal of illegal migrants involved in serious criminal activities such as child rape, attempted murder, assault, carjacking, and other criminal offenses. The program gives local law enforcement the ability to work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to capture illegal immigrants who have committed crimes and bring them to federal custody for arrest and deportation.
Sure sounds like a sound program, doesn’t it? To most people, yes. But to the Biden administration, not so much. The program was canceled in January 2021, soon after Joe Biden took office. The agency never provided any explanation for the decision.
“It is ironic that the Biden administration insists it is ‘the most transparent in history’ when, in reality, it has repeatedly attempted to change immigration laws without congressional authorization and then tried to hide the evidence of its misdeeds from the American public,” IRLI Director of Investigations Matt O’Brien explained.
Our sister site Townhall has more:
Flash forward to September 2023, the IRLI filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to ICE, requesting to obtain internal documents regarding the agency’s suspension of the 287(g) program. However, the government did not comply with a rule that they must reply within 20 days. ICE authorities have yet to respond.[…]
Twenty-three agreements between local law enforcement and ICE were set to go into effect before Biden suspended the program. However, they were canceled after the president took office. Currently, ICE has 287(g) relationships with nearly 140 law enforcement organizations nationwide.
“Increased cooperation between ICE and local law enforcement is critical and makes our communities safer, so of course, this administration wants to limit that effort,” IRLI Executive Director Dale Wilcox said in a statement. “There is no benefit to this country or its legal residents by keeping criminal aliens in the country, yet it appears to be a priority of this White House. The American people own those emails, yet we are not allowed to see them because it might embarrass this administration and expose their extremist agenda.”
yeah, I want these kinds of people as Air Traffic Controllers
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is actively recruiting workers who suffer “severe intellectual” disabilities, psychiatric problems and other mental and physical conditions under a diversity and inclusion hiring initiative spelled out on the agency’s website.
“Targeted disabilities are those disabilities that the Federal government, as a matter of policy, has identified for special emphasis in recruitment and hiring,” the FAA’s website states. “They include hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability and dwarfism.”
The initiative is part of the FAA’s “Diversity and Inclusion” hiring plan, which says “diversity is integral to achieving FAA’s mission of ensuring safe and efficient travel across our nation and beyond.” The FAA’s website shows the agency’s guidelines on diversity hiring were last updated on March 23, 2022.
The FAA, which is overseen by Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s Department of Transportation, is a government agency charged with regulating civil aviation and employs roughly 45,000 people.
The Drunk-Driver Detection Tech That Could Soon Take Over Your Car.
Your car may soon be tasked with determining whether you’re sober enough to drive—but how? As we explained recently, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act signed into law on November 15, 2023 gave NHTSA a year to gin up a standard compelling new vehicles to either “passively monitor the performance of a driver” to detect if they are impaired, or “passively and accurately detect” whether the driver’s blood alcohol level is above the legal limit, and then “prevent or limit motor vehicle operation.” Said standard could go into effect as soon as 2026. At CES 2024—held within the 60-day public comment period for this standard—the Tier-I supplier community showed off some tech aimed at fulfilling the sensing aspect of this proposed drunk driver detection standard.
Blood alcohol level is the gold standard, but the “passively” requirement rules out blowing into a tube. Walking a straight line, reciting the alphabet backwards, and other road-side sobriety test methods are equally impractical. But the eye test checking for nystagmus seems reasonably practical, so several suppliers are focusing efforts on this approach. That’s where an officer asks the subject to follow their finger moving left to right without turning their heads and checks for jerking or bouncing eye movements shortly before the eyes reach a 45-degree angle. It’s still anybody’s guess how best to detect cannabis use/misuse.
NM governor unveils bills that ban assault weapons, raise age to possess a gun
Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham announced support for several bills that she said were aimed at gun violence — banning assault weapons, raising the age to possess a gun and extending the waiting period to take it home.
“We have a gun problem, ladies and gentleman, and we have a public safety problem,” she said Friday , surrounded by public safety officials, law enforcement and the bills’ sponsors. “We have a responsibility to our children, to families, communities to solve it, and I believe this package goes a long way to do just that.”
One bill would ban assault weapons statewide, another would raise the minimum age to buy a gun, from 18 to 21 years old, and extend the waiting period to take one home from three to 14 days.
The bills were just a few of dozens related to public safety that will come up in the legislative session, which begins Tuesday.
At least three of the gun initiatives Lujan Grisham highlighted Friday reflected failed legislation from the Legislature’s last session. House Bill 101, which would have prohibited people from possessing assault weapons; House Bill 100, which would have established a 14-day waiting period for guns; and Senate Bill 116, which would have made it illegal for anyone younger than 21 to purchase an automatic or semi-automatic firearm, all died in committee.
Can you say: “Replacement Migration“?
I thought you could
Biden Admin Has Allowed 5 Million Illegal Aliens Into the Nation — Outpacing Yearly U.S. Births
The immigration crisis has worsened as a result of President Joe Biden’s reckless open border policies and incompetence to do anything about it.
Under the Biden Administration, more than five million illegal migrants have crossed into the United States— outpacing the nation’s annual birth rate.
Rep. Mark Green (R-TN) is blaming Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for releasing at least 85 percent of illegal aliens into the U.S. without vetting them due to the administration’s Catch and Release program. Most of these immigrants will be given work permits— taking away vital work opportunities for American citizens.
“All told, DHS numbers indicate that well over three million inadmissible aliens have been released into our country on Secretary Mayorkas’s watch. Factor in the 1.8 million known gotaways, and that’s roughly the population of the state of South Carolina,” Green said, suggesting that Mayorkas has allowed more illegal migrants into the nation from 2021 through 2023 than the number of babies born annually in the U.S.— which is fewer than four million.
“In Fiscal Year 2013, according to [the] DHS’s own numbers, the Obama administration detained 82 percent of illegal aliens from the moment they were encountered until their case was decided, and another nine percent were held for at least some portion of that time,” Green continued. “In Secretary Mayorkas’ first year on the job, that 82 percent number dropped to just ten percent. Illegal aliens not detained at all jumped from nine percent in FY 2013 to 64 percent in FY 2021.”
Green’s comments come as billionaire Elon Musk issued a warning to New York City residents after students were forced to attend remote classes as their school was used to house illegal migrants.
In a tweet, Musk warned Americans that illegal aliens will soon come for American homes as schools, shelters, and hotel rooms become overwhelmed.
Well, I was-sorta-close. But I was right that complications arose.
Austin developed infection after prostate cancer treatment
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s Jan. 1 hospitalization was due to a urinary tract infection that developed after he underwent prostate cancer treatment on Dec. 22, doctors from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center said in a statement Tuesday.
The infection was cleared as of Tuesday and he is expected to make a full recovery, Dr. John Maddox, Walter Reed’s trauma medicine director, and Dr. Gregory Chesnut, head of prostate cancer research, wrote.
“Secretary Austin continues to recover well and remains in good spirits.” Air Force Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder, a Pentagon spokesman, said Tuesday during a briefing. “He’s in contact with his senior staff and has full access to required secure communications capabilities and continues to monitor the [department’s] day to day operations worldwide.”
Austin’s team did not inform the White House or Congress about his condition or hospitalization for several days last week following his New Year’s Day return to Walter Reed.
On Tuesday, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters that the White House was not informed that Austin had prostate cancer until earlier in the day and admitted that the lack of information from Austin was “not optimal.”
Illinois ‘Assault Weapons’ Registration Mandate Is Already in Shambles
It’s now been a week since the deadline passed for Illinois gun owners to register their now-banned “assault weapons”, and the big question at the moment is which agencies, if any, are actually enforcing the new law. We’ve seen plenty of sheriffs and some state’s attorneys publicly say that they won’t be arresting or charging anyone for non-compliance, and as my colleague Tom Knighton reported on Friday, the Illinois State Police has said much the same; they won’t be actively looking for those they know have guns but failed to register them, though if a state trooper finds someone in possession of an unregistered firearm they may still make an arrest.
The state police are also keeping the registration portal open just in case any gun owner feels like registering after the deadline has come and gone. Maxon Shooting Supplies owner Dan Eldridge says he’s not even sure if that’s allowed under the text of the Protect Illinois Communities Act, and wonders if registering after the deadline opens gun owners up to criminal liability.
It sounds like a terrible idea to us. It is not obvious from where the ISP derives the authority to modify the Act’s language, which was passed by the General Assembly and signed by the Governor.
The department says it won’t pursue criminal charges against late affadavits, but does this prevent an anti-gun Cook or Lake County state’s attorney from doing so?
Put these failures, sloppy work product, and mis-steps together, and it’s easy to see that nobody knows with complete certainty what and when registration affidavits must be filed. Even those tasked with enforcement don’t seem to understand the requirements of this act.
- The Office of the Lake County State’s Attorney posted a notice on its facebook page warning law-abiding citizens that they must register their assault weapons and high-capacity magazines by December 31.
- The Governor is on camera warning law-abiding citizens that they must register their automatic and semi-automatic rifles and magazines.
There is no requirement to register magazines, and the act does not mention full-auto. Yes, if a full auto is a selective fire device, the semi-auto capability would require registration, but it’s obvious that these politicians have no idea what they are talking about.
Even the Illinois State Police website warns that “individuals who possessed assault weapons, high-capacity magazines, and other devices listed in the Act before it took effect are required to submit an endorsement affidavit through their Firearm Owner’s Identification Card account by JANUARY 1, 2024,” though the statute only requires owners of those magazines to submit an affidavit if one has been transferred to them after the deadline had passed.
If the people who wrote the law and the agencies tasked with enforcing it don’t even know the details of the Protect Illinois Communities Act, how can the average Illinois gun owner possibly be expected to be aware of all of the intricacies in the legislation? That confusion may be one reason why compliance with the registration mandate has been so low (Maxon estimates about 4.2% of gun owners have submitted their affidavits to the state police), but Maxon believes there’s a large amount of civil disobedience taking place as well.
Nearly every county sheriff and most of the county State’s Attorneys have stated that they will not enforce this Act. Residents of those counties have little incentive to register.
The act is highly offensive to otherwise law-abiding Illinois gun owners. It is a mess of legislation put into law:
- by individuals who know little to nothing about firearms
- who are willfully ignorant of the difference between lawful ownership and criminal misuse of firearms
- and who abused (again) the proper process for introducing and debating bills, jamming this through in the middle of the night on the last day of the 102nd General Assembly.
The great Milton Friedman is said to have remarked:“The British follow all the laws, good and bad, the French ignore all the laws, and the Americans follow the good ones and ignore the bad ones”
Non-compliance with unjust laws: It’s as American as apple pie.
So long as Illinois gun stores like Maxon Shooter’s Supplies aren’t selling these now-banned arms, Gov. J.B. Pritzker and other anti-gunners in Illinois will still consider PICA a win even if the lack of compliance with the registration mandate makes a mockery of their latest anti-2A effort.
The legal battles to have the gun and magazine ban (along with the accompanying registration requirement) declared unconstitutional are continuing to play out in federal court, and there’s a strong likelihood that U.S. District Judge Stephen McGlynn, who denied a request for an injunction against the registration mandate shortly before it took effect, will revisit the issue before long and hopefully put the mandate on ice while the litigation runs its course.
Either way, I don’t see any signs that hundreds of thousands of Illinois gun owners will be registering their banned arms now that the deadline has passed, even if the Illinois State Police is encouraging them to do so.
Lipo? Nah, I figure he had a colonoscopy and the tech punctured his bowels.
One of my Uncles had that happen and spent a few days in ICU.
Why would Biden talk to anyone?
He isn’t in charge of his own bowel movements, much less anything that’s happening on the world stage.
Let’s think about this for a minute. Joe Biden, who is supposed to be the commander in chief, didn’t know for four days that his own defense secretary, a member of his cabinet, was in the hospital. Now, considering what’s going on in the world right now—the Israel-Hamas war, the Houthi attacks on container ships in the Red Sea, and many other things—how is it possible that Biden isn’t talking to his defense secretary daily? Sure, he has time to give speeches about how Donald Trump is a threat to democracy, but he didn’t even know his defense secretary was incapacitated for days?
Joe Biden can barely read from a teleprompter these days, and even when he CAN read from the teleprompter he can’t even enunciate the words that are being fed to him. Joe Biden is a drooling Chinese hand puppet, a senile dementia patient being led around by Obama’s staffers and told where to go and what to do. OF COURSE nobody told Biden about Lloyd “I fuck the troops over for lunch” Austin. Biden isn’t making any decisions, he’s being told what to do, just like Lloyd “I’m a political whore” Austin. They’re BOTH tools.
And I still want to know what the surgery was. I’m betting on lipo.
The Secretary of Defense – and ONLY him, not some underling – by law is in the direct chain of command of the U.S. military from POTUS to the Combatant Commanders. This was blatant dereliction of duty what with a senile delusional dotard sitting in the oval office.
BLUF
Austin’s Department of Defense is a barking shambles. It is incompetent in action and not trustworthy. It not only lies to the people and to Congress, but to the White House and itself…okay, maybe that isn’t all that unusual. As the old saying goes, a fish rots from the head down. If Biden lets this slide by, he’s a much bigger imbecile than even I had considered possible.
SecDef Austin Did Not Tell Biden’s National Security Adviser He Was in the ICU
The Department of Defense didn’t notify the White House that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was in the Walter Reed National Medical Center intensive care unit until Thursday. That’s it.
I’ve posted twice on the growing mystery of why the Defense Department failed to notify Congress that Secretary Austin was in the hospital. In the first episode, it was revealed in a Pentagon statement on Friday that Austin had been in the hospital since New Year’s Day due to “complications” from an “elective medical procedure.” This came as a shock to the Pentagon Press Corps and Congress.
BACKGROUND: Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin Has Been Hospitalized for a Week and Just Told Congress Today
The second act materialized earlier on Saturday with the report that Austin hadn’t just been in the hospital; he’d been in the intensive care unit from Monday to Friday evening. His deputy, Kathleen Hicks, was on vacation in Puerto Rico at the time. While he was incapacitated and she was sunning herself, the US ordered a drone strike on the leader of an Iranian militia; the US Navy was trying to make the Red Sea safe for commercial traffic without upsetting the Iranians or Houthis, a war raged between Israel and Hamas, and North Korea lobbed a couple of hundred artillery rounds into South Korean waters.
I ended that update with this note.
While we are focused on Congressional notification, no one has yet asked if the White House was told.
Now we have the answer to that question.
The Pentagon did not inform senior officials in the White House’s National Security Council of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s hospitalization until Thursday — three full days after he arrived at Walter Reed Medical Center, two U.S. officials said.
The news came as a shock to top staff, including national security adviser Jake Sullivan, as they were unaware the DOD chief was dealing with complications following an elective medical procedure, the officials said. NSC staffers were surprised it took the Pentagon so long to let them know of Austin’s condition. The Pentagon didn’t make the information public until Friday evening, notifying Congress about 15 minutes before releasing a public statement.
For three days, Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan, the National Security Council, and, it seems, a lot of senior Pentagon officials did not know where Austin was, nor did they miss him.
The Pentagon did not inform senior officials in the White House’s National Security Council of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s hospitalization until Thursday — three full days after he arrived at Walter Reed Medical Center, two U.S. officials said.
The news came as a shock to top staff, including national security adviser Jake Sullivan, as they were unaware the DOD chief was dealing with complications following an elective medical procedure, the officials said. NSC staffers were surprised it took the Pentagon so long to let them know of Austin’s condition. The Pentagon didn’t make the information public until Friday evening, notifying Congress about 15 minutes before releasing a public statement.
In what is probably a monument of understatement, one unidentified US official said, “This should not have happened this way.”
Ya think?
There is a Paul Harvey “Rest of the Story” angle that remains to be teased out. What possible elective surgery could Austin have had that he’d literally go AWOL for a week and put the Nation’s security at risk rather than discuss?
Still, there are apologists at work. Democrat apparatchik Brad Carson doesn’t see anything wrong.
There is no standard protocol for when to announce a defense secretary’s hospitalization or temporary inability to do the job, said Brad Carson, formerly under secretary and chief management officer of the Army, though he added it could depend on the severity of Austin’s condition. If Austin were incapacitated, Congress would surely want to know. But if he were still capable of making decisions, even under a doctor’s supervision, “I don’t think Congress has to be notified in such cases.”
This is bullsh**. It makes no sense to say Congress doesn’t need to know if the Secretary of Defense is in the ICU because that affects national security. It certainly makes no sense to imply the national security adviser doesn’t need to be told.
It’s childish and unprofessional to tell the leaders of both chambers of Congress to FOAD by not informing them you are incapacitated. It is dangerously disloyal not to let the Jake Sullivan, idiot that he is, know. It is a sure bet that if Sullivan didn’t know that Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines were also out of the loop.
Austin’s Department of Defense is a barking shambles. It is incompetent in action and not trustworthy. It not only lies to the people and to Congress, but to the White House and itself…okay, maybe that isn’t all that unusual. As the old saying goes, a fish rots from the head down. If Biden lets this slide by, he’s a much bigger imbecile than even I had considered possible.
For gun rights advocates, a ‘Bruen’ bonanza
Upholding weapons ban just one development
In a Dec. 22 press release, the Attorney General’s Office trumpeted the fact that it had successfully defended the state’s assault weapons ban in federal court.
But not only has the final chapter in that case, Capen and National Association for Gun Rights v. Campbell, not yet been written, there is no end in sight — here and across the country — to the battles spawned by the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen.
In Bruen, the Supreme Court refined the Second Amendment jurisprudence it had previously laid out in District of Columbia v. Heller and McDonald v. Chicago, clarifying that it believed that appellate courts had gone astray in interpreting Heller.
Since Heller, the appeals courts had developed a “two-step” framework for analyzing Second Amendment challenges, combining history with means-end scrutiny, which the Bruen court said was one step too many. The proper test should involve drawing analogies to the country’s history of firearm regulation alone, the Supreme Court ruled.
The court stressed that it was attempting to create “neither a regulatory straightjacket nor a regulatory blank check.” As courts were engaging in “analogical reasoning,” they need only find “a well-established and representative historical analogue, not a historical twin,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the six-member majority in Bruen.
Since that ruling, courts in Massachusetts and elsewhere have begun fleshing out the standard, often prompted by cases filed by emboldened gun rights advocates. Recent weeks have not only seen U.S. District Court Chief Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV’s denial of the plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction in Capen but a Superior Court judge similarly rejecting a post-Bruen challenge to Massachusetts’ ban on anyone under the age of 21 obtaining a license to carry a handgun outside their home.
Meanwhile, gun rights advocates are celebrating a Lowell District Court judge’s decision to dismiss a charge of carrying a firearm without a license that a New Hampshire man had been facing for bringing the weapon he was licensed to carry in his home state across state lines.
Bruen has also revived a challenge to the state’s “gun roster” in the federal case Granata, et al. v. Campbell, et al., and spawned a new lawsuit challenging gun license delays of six months or more in Boston in White, et al. v. Cox.
The Houthi terrorist group is an Iranian proxy that Iran has found increasingly useful. The Houthis have attacked American assets stationed in their vicinity at will and disrupted commercial shipping in the Red Sea. American forces sunk three Houthi boats attacking a commercial freighter this past Sunday.
The Biden administration has politely warned the Houthis to knock it off. Going a step further, the Biden administration has organized Operation Prosperity Guardian, “a multinational naval task force to protect commercial ships in both the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden,” according to the recent New York Times story.
And yet the Houthis persist. Yesterday the Houthis claimed responsibility for the latest attack on a merchant ship in the Red Sea, as the vessel’s operator sharply raised prices between Asia and Europe. The Times of Israel reports that story here (with credit to AFP).
It’s come to this: A Joint Statement from the Governments of the United States, Australia, Bahrain, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Singapore, and the United Kingdom. This is the statement in its entirety as posted by the White House:
Recognizing the broad consensus as expressed by 44 countries around the world on December 19, 2023, as well as the statement by the UN Security Council on December 1, 2023, condemning Houthi attacks against commercial vessels transiting the Red Sea, and in light of ongoing attacks, including a significant escalation over the past week targeting commercial vessels, with missiles, small boats, and attempted hijackings,
We hereby reiterate the following and warn the Houthis against further attacks:
Ongoing Houthi attacks in the Red Sea are illegal, unacceptable, and profoundly destabilizing. There is no lawful justification for intentionally targeting civilian shipping and naval vessels. Attacks on vessels, including commercial vessels, using unmanned aerial vehicles, small boats, and missiles, including the first use of anti-ship ballistic missiles against such vessels, are a direct threat to the freedom of navigation that serves as the bedrock of global trade in one of the world’s most critical waterways.
These attacks threaten innocent lives from all over the world and constitute a significant international problem that demands collective action. Nearly 15 percent of global seaborne trade passes through the Red Sea, including 8 percent of global grain trade, 12 percent of seaborne-traded oil and 8 percent of the world’s liquefied natural gas trade. International shipping companies continue to reroute their vessels around the Cape of Good Hope, adding significant cost and weeks of delay to the delivery of goods, and ultimately jeopardizing the movement of critical food, fuel, and humanitarian assistance throughout the world.
Let our message now be clear: we call for the immediate end of these illegal attacks and release of unlawfully detained vessels and crews. The Houthis will bear the responsibility of the consequences should they continue to threaten lives, the global economy, and free flow of commerce in the region’s critical waterways. We remain committed to the international rules-based order and are determined to hold malign actors accountable for unlawful seizures and attacks.
I wish Henry Kissinger were available for comment. I’m quite sure this is not how he did these things. Under the circumstances, it seems unlikely that a rhetorical escalation will produce the desired deterrent effect, but that is only a guess. We shall see.
Typically Tyrannical: Biden Admin Slips Out Slew Of ‘Regulations’ Over Holidays
As tyrants so often do, on December 29th the Biden Administration quietly slid out a “slow-news/Holiday-hidden” announcement of many more “regulations” it is imposing on your market choices of home appliances.
And to add insult to injury, it’s all for their religion-like claim to be preventing a Kali-esque demigod, “anthropogenic climate change” from destroying the world.
It’s a false religion, backed by fake claims of “science” and false claims of “savings” that they’re imposing on you.
Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year.
Indeed, as American families gathered for the Holidays, the Biden Department of Energy (DOE) under slick, smarmy, “enriched by stock options received from palsy corporations” DOE head Jennifer Granholm and her cult released the song of Kali.
Nick Pope reports on it, for DailyCaller:
“The Department of Energy (DOE) finalized or proposed a bevy of regulatory actions cracking down on numerous appliances on Friday.
The DOE proposed new rules designed to promote ‘energy efficient’ commercial fans and blowers, and also finalized energy efficiency standards for refrigerators and freezers, the agency announced Friday. The regulatory actions are the latest in a string of moves by the Biden administration intended to phase out a host of fossil fuel-powered appliances and replace them on the market with more energy efficient, and often electric, equivalents.”
I suspect that you, too, might be wondering where their vaunted US Constitution hides the so-called “authority” for the feds to create a DOE, let alone tell private makers of appliances what they can and cannot offer you to freely purchase or leave on the showroom floor. Perhaps, you, also, might be scratching your head over the easy way elitist bureaucrats and politicians claim to define for US what is “efficient.”
Well, you’d better extend the sentiment of “Silent Night” to your potential protestations about those matters, because, of course, the mandates are for YOUR OWN GOOD, to stop their magic monster of “anthropogenic climate change,” and if you should question either their mandates or their faulty claims of “science,” you are an apostate of the new religion.
Looks Like There’s Massive Non-Compliance With Illinois Gun Registration
The deadline for Illinois gun owners to register their banned “assault weapons” with the state police has come and gone, and contrary to the predictions of Gov. J.B. Pritzker it looks like there was no last-minute flood of registrations. According to the latest figures from the Illinois State Police, about 15,000 FOID holders had registered one or more firearm, “large capacity” magazine, or other device named in the Protect Illinois Communities Act as of late last week; about double the number that the ISP had previously reported, but still fewer than one percent of the nearly two million Firearm Owner ID card holders in the state.
Not everyone who possesses a valid FOID card ones one or more of the guns banned under the Protect Illinois Communities Act, but my guess is that the vast majority of them own either a firearm covered under PICA or a “large capacity” magazine that’s supposed to be registered with the state police. Compliance with the registration looks to be almost non-existent, which raises the question of how, exactly, the new ban will be enforced going forward.
In November, state police said it is up to prosecutors in the state’s 102 counties to enforce the law, but it’s unclear what penalties would be in store for those who fail to register their weapons. Penalties can vary for illegal weapons. Carrying or possessing unauthorized assault weapons could result in a misdemeanor, with one year in jail or a fine of up to $2,500. Manufacturing, selling, or purchasing an unauthorized weapon could constitute a felony and result in up to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $25,000.
Kane County Sheriff Ron Hain explained that his deputies won’t be going door to door to find residents who may have a FOID card and “asking to see all of their weapons.” He said the law works more during high-profile investigations.
“However, if we are investigating a criminal organization and we do come across firearms that are in violation of the assault weapons ban, we will certainly use this new law to enhance criminal charges against them,” Hain said.
While some sheriffs like Hain say they’ll enforce the law if there are more serious charges attached, other sheriffs and even some state’s attorneys have indicated they have no plans on enforcing the law at all, much to the chagrin of gun control advocates, anti-gun politicians, and their allies in the media.