Category: You Can’t Make This Up

Louisiana Man Arrested for Making a Joke About COVID-19 and Zombies Wins Appeal
5th Circuit overrules grant of qualified immunity for officers who made warrantless arrest

NEW ORLEANS—During the COVID-19 pandemic Waylon Bailey made a joke about the virus, zombies, and his local sheriff’s department on Facebook. Today, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed that Waylon’s joke was protected by the First Amendment and that deputies violated his free-speech rights and his Fourth Amendment rights when they arrested him. Waylon teamed up with the Institute for Justice (IJ) to appeal a lower court decision that granted qualified immunity to the detective and sheriff responsible for his arrest.

“I’m relieved that the court recognized that the deputies were wrong to arrest me for making a joke on Facebook,” said Waylon. “I’m glad that I will be able to hold the detective and sheriff accountable, and hopefully my case will stand as a strong statement to officers about what the First Amendment protects.”

Judge Dana M. Douglas, writing for the unanimous panel, said that: “The First Amendment’s protections apply to jokes, parodies, satire, and the like, whether clever or in poor taste.”

“The court’s opinion makes clear that the First Amendment applies with full force to online speech,” said IJ Attorney Ben Field. “Government officials can’t get away with stretching criminal laws to go after people who make jokes at their expense. This is a victory for free speech and common sense and against the pernicious doctrine of qualified immunity.”

Waylon Bailey’s March 2020 Facebook post used over-the-top language, emoji, and a hashtag referencing the Brad Pitt movie World War Z in facetiously warning that the local sheriff’s office had been ordered to shoot the “infected.” Despite the obvious indications that it was a joke, sheriff’s deputies decided to arrest Waylon, without a warrant, under an anti-terrorism law and sent a SWAT team with guns drawn to his garage.

Waylon was taken to jail and booked, though the absurd charge was dropped when a prosecutor reviewed the case. But when Waylon brought a civil-rights lawsuit, the deputy responsible for the arrest was granted qualified immunity by the district court. To add insult to injury, the court also said that Waylon didn’t have any free speech rights to make a joke in the first place. The 5th Circuit reversed and remanded to the district court, which will now fully consider Waylon’s civil-rights lawsuit.

“Any reasonable officer would have known that Waylon’s zombie joke was clearly protected by the First Amendment, and certainly wasn’t ‘terrorizing,’” said IJ Attorney Caroline Grace Brothers. “By denying qualified immunity to the detective who arrested Waylon, this decision confirms that government officials should not escape accountability when it should have been obvious that their actions were unconstitutional.”

Growing Concern Vaccine Heart Damage in Adolescents May be Permanent.
Hong Kong study finds 58 percent of COVID-19 vaccine myocarditis confirmed by MRI not resolved at one year

Almost every day the news brings another story of a young person dying of cardiac arrest. It is a sickening realization that COVID-19 vaccine-induced myocarditis could leave a zone of scar in the heart, risking the chance of ventricular tachycardia, ventricular fibrillation, and cardiac arrest at any time. Recently Hulscher, et al. have conclusively shown by autopsy that COVID-19 vaccine-induced myocarditis can be fatal.

Now a Hong Kong study by Yu and colleagues have found that of young persons who had heart damage confirmed by MRI [magnetic resonance imaging] and who underwent a second scan one year later, 58 percent had residual abnormalities suggesting a scar could be forming in the heart muscle.

Forty adolescents, mean age of 15, mostly boys, were evaluated. It was notable that 73 percent had no cardiac symptoms, so without an evaluation, the parents would have had no idea their child was suffering heart damage from the COVID-19 vaccine. Approximately 18 percent of cases initially had reduced left ventricular ejection fraction indicating they were at risk for the development of heart failure.

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Biden Administration Argues Texas and Florida Anti-Censorship Laws Are a First Amendment Violation

Presented as an effort to safeguard speech rights, the Biden administration has called on the Supreme Court to dismantle controversial segments of the anti-censorship social media laws ratified in Florida and Texas.

We obtained a copy of the filing for you here.

(President Biden is also using the argument that banning his administration from asking platforms to remove speech is a First Amendment violation.)

The laws in question restrict the autonomy of leading social media platforms by preventing them from censoring citizens speech and discriminating on the basis of political viewpoint.

Both Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Texas Governor Greg Abbott staunchly support these laws as a means of protecting voices from being suppressed. Governor DeSantis, at the law signing in May 2021, criticized Big Tech’s bias for Silicon Valley ideology and emphasized the need for accountability.

The Texas law, featuring a provision prohibiting discrimination based on viewpoints, incorporates several exceptions, permitting platforms to ban content promoting violence, criminal behavior, child exploitation, and harassment of sexual-abuse survivors and more. The law presses social media platforms to adopt user complaint procedures, disclose content and data management practices, and publish a comprehensive biannual transparency report.

The legislation only applies to platforms attracting over 50 million monthly users.

The Florida law has a similar scope and, in addition, mandates a detailed justification for each content moderation. The legislation also forbids the banning of political contenders or “journalistic enterprises.”

US Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar perceives this as an encroachment on First Amendment rights. She contended in a recent court filing that such laws infringe the liberty of tech giants in selecting, editing, and arranging user-generated content. Essentially, she claimed these actions are all protected under the First Amendment.

Endorsing two industry trade groups that have formally contested the laws, she implored the Supreme Court to scrutinize both measures.

Federal appeals courts, however, are divided over the issue. The 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta has primarily blocked Florida’s legislation, deeming it potentially unconstitutional. Conversely, the New Orleans-based 5th Circuit backed the Texas law but held it back to permit an appeal to reach the Supreme Court.

Certainly, both states, as well as the trade groups, are petitioning the Supreme Court to adjudicate on a range of issues concerning the two cases. An announcement of the court’s decision is expected as early as September.

While Prelogar largely aligns with the social media companies, she refrained from endorsing their protest against the “general-disclosure provisions” that require the publishing of content-management policies and production of transparency reports. These issues, she argued, are not the main subject of the lawsuits and high court review would be premature.

Biden Promises Maui Fire Survivors $700 Per Household — Less Than What is Spent on Ukraine

President Joe Biden announced Monday that survivors of the Maui fires would receive “a one-time $700 payment per household,” after he faced criticism for telling a reporter he had “no comment” on the rising death toll.

His account posted: “We’re laser-focused on getting aid to survivors, including Critical Needs Assistance: a one-time $700 payment per household offering relief during an unimaginably difficult time.”

The one-time payment of $700 per household is less than the estimated cost to each American household for the Ukraine War, according to a budget expert at the Heritage Foundation.

Richard Stern, director of The Heritage Foundation’s Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget, calculated that the congressionally-approved aid to Ukraine of $113 billion amounts to roughly $900 per American household.

“The formal aid packages alone amount to a staggering $113 billion — roughly $900 per American household and almost 12 times the spending cuts promised by House leadership in the annual spending bills,” Stern said in an email to The Daily Signal, Heritage’s news outlet.

Furthermore, he said the $113 billion would cost more than $300 in interest costs per household over the decade.

On Thursday, as the Maui fires continued burning, Biden asked Congress for an additional $20 billion more in aid for Ukraine.

“As the war in Ukraine becomes a prolonged conflict, Americans are rightly growing skeptical of sending more taxpayer dollars and equipment from our depleted armory,” Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts told The Daily Signal.

“Washington has failed to address their concerns, explain our nation’s strategy in the war, or enact basic oversight for our aid,” Roberts said. “If Congress can’t fix those fundamental issues, they have no business sending more money into the fog of war.”

So a guy pushing the Trump Russian collusion story was actually colluding with the Russians. You literally can’t make this up.

Former F.B.I. Spy Hunter Pleads Guilty to Aiding Russian Oligarch

The plea by the former agent, Charles F. McGonigal, represented a remarkable turn for a man who once occupied one of the most sensitive and trusted positions in the American intelligence community, placing him among the highest-ranking F.B.I. officials ever to be convicted of a crime.

Appearing before Judge Jennifer H. Rearden of Federal District Court on Tuesday, an emotional Mr. McGonigal stood up and said that he had broken the law after his retirement in 2018 from the bureau, where he had been an expert in Russian counterintelligence, by aiding an effort by Oleg V. Deripaska, a Russian billionaire under U.S. sanctions, to investigate a rival.

“I have understood what my actions have resulted in, and I’m deeply remorseful,” Mr. McGonigal said, his voice breaking. “My actions were never intended to hurt the United States, the F.B.I. and my family and friends.”

The conspiracy charge he pleaded guilty to was newly filed by prosecutors on Tuesday, replacing the original indictment handed up by a grand jury in January that had included more serious charges of violating U.S. sanctions and laundering money. Under the plea deal, the maximum prison term Mr. McGonigal could serve is five years, instead of the sentence of up to 20 years he might otherwise have faced.

In court, Mr. McGonigal, 55, told the judge that he had known he could not legally perform services for Mr. Deripaska, who was placed on a U.S. sanctions list in 2018. He said he had understood that his work in the second half of 2021 to collect “open source” negative information on Vladimir Potanin, an oligarch who was a business competitor of Mr. Deripaska, was likely to be used in an effort to get Mr. Potanin placed on the sanctions list as well.

He admitted knowingly arranging for payments to be routed from a Russian bank through a company in Cyprus, and then to a corporation in New Jersey, to conceal that the source of the money was Mr. Deripaska.

Judge Rearden scheduled Mr. McGonigal’s sentencing for Dec. 4.

In the initial charging document, prosecutors from the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York said that Mr. McGonigal and an associate had received payments totaling more than $200,000 for their work investigating Mr. Potanin under a contract with an aide to Mr. Deripaska. They also hired subcontractors for the investigation, the indictment said.

But on Tuesday, Mr. McGonigal told the judge that in the end he had netted only $17,500, and he agreed to forfeit that amount.

The plea brings the prosecution of Mr. McGonigal in New York to a relatively speedy conclusion after fewer than seven months. He had been arrested by F.B.I. agents in January at John F. Kennedy Airport upon his return from an overseas business trip.

Mr. McGonigal still faces a second indictment brought by federal prosecutors in Washington on charges that accuse him of concealing his acceptance of $225,000 from a businessman and of hiding dealings in Eastern Europe while working for the bureau. Mr. McGonigal has pleaded not guilty to those charges but is in talks to resolve them; his lawyer, Seth D. DuCharme, told the judge overseeing the Washington case that he expected to provide an update on the talks after Labor Day.

Although Mr. McGonigal was privy to highly classified information, a three-year investigation found no evidence that he had passed secrets to foreign adversaries, according to people with knowledge of the case who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the ongoing matter. The F.B.I. concluded that Mr. McGonigal’s misconduct was limited to corruption, the people said.

Mr. Deripaska, who has been called “Putin’s oligarch” because of his close relationship with the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, is among the best known of the businessmen who became rich as Russian state resources were doled out to friends of the Kremlin after the fall of the Soviet Union. Mr. Deripaska and others were also accused last year by federal prosecutors in New York of violating U.S. sanctions through real-estate deals and other actions, including trying to arrange for the oligarch’s girlfriend to give birth to their two children in the United States. Mr. Deripaska, a Russian citizen, is unlikely to be extradited to face the charges in the near future.

The prosecutors in Mr. McGonigal’s New York case have said that before the U.S. government expanded sanctions in 2018, following Russia’s interference in the 2016 American presidential election, Mr. McGonigal had reviewed a preliminary sanctions list with Mr. Deripaska’s name on it. Around the same time, they suggested, Mr. McGonigal was seeking a connection with Mr. Deripaska by arranging a New York Police Department internship for the daughter of one of the oligarch’s aides. (A senior police official has said it was actually a “V.I.P.-type tour.”)

After Mr. McGonigal retired, he and his co-defendant in the New York case, a court interpreter and former Russian diplomat named Sergey Shestakov, referred the same Deripaska aide to a law firm for help getting sanctions removed, according to the original charges in New York.

While negotiating the law firm agreement, Mr. McGonigal met with Mr. Deripaska in Vienna and London, referring to him in electronic communications as “the Vienna client,” prosecutors have said. Mr. Deripaska paid the law firm $175,000 a month; the firm passed $25,000 on to Mr. McGonigal as a consultant and investigator, the prosecutors said.

Mr. Shestakov has pleaded not guilty to violating U.S. sanctions, money laundering, conspiracy and making false statements to the F.B.I. His lawyer, Rita M. Glavin, did not respond to a request for comment.

The deal to investigate Mr. Potanin was made with an aide to Mr. Deripaska in the spring of 2021, prosecutors said.

In November of that year, Mr. McGonigal and Mr. Shestakov were trying to obtain “dark web” files, purportedly about $500 million in hidden assets held by Mr. Potanin, in exchange for a payment of up to $3 million, Rebecca Talia Dell, an assistant U.S. attorney, said in court Tuesday. Before that transaction could be completed, F.B.I. agents seized Mr. McGonigal and Mr. Shestakov’s electronic devices, bringing their work for Mr. Deripaska to an end, prosecutors have said.

Chicago Group Asks Gang Members Not to Shoot People Between 9:00 a.m. and 9:00 p.m.

Native Sons, a group from Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood, is asking that gang members pledge to cease fire from 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. daily so no one lives in fear of being shot while going about their day-to-day activities.

The push for the cease-fire is being called “The People’s Ordinance,” CWBChicago reported.

Native Sons’ co-founder, Tatiana Atkins, said:

Under this ordinance, we ask that people stop associating with and glorifying ‘shooters,’ stop glorifying ‘switches,’ and stop wearing those ski masks everywhere which perpetuates you as some ‘opp.’ When those who live a certain lifestyle try to hang with ‘regular’ class citizens, they put everyone at risk.…

At the end of the day, five-year-olds are being killed by gun violence, 14-year-olds are being killed by gun violence, 78-year-olds are being killed by gun violence, pregnant women are being killed by gun violence, young boys with bright futures are being killed by gun violence, fathers are being killed by gun violence, and this shouldn’t be happening.

Atkins hopes that gang members will adopt the cease-fire and that parents will react by making sure they have their children home and inside as 9:00 p.m. approaches.

Breitbart News reported at least 23 people were shot over the weekend in Chicago, three of them fatally.

Over 370 people have been killed in Chicago thus far in 2023.

Former senator told Biden he’d ‘kick the sh-t out of’ the then-VP for getting handsy with his wife.

Former Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown threatened President Joe Biden with bodily harm when the then-veep allegedly got fresh with Brown’s wife more than a decade ago, he recalled this week.

“I told him I’d kick the sh-t out of – beat the – I told him to stop,” Brown told host Tom Shattuck on the “Burn Barrel” podcast Wednesday.

“He didn’t act the way I thought he should,” Brown added. “And, you know, we called him on it, and that’s it.”

The incident occurred in 2010, when Biden, in his role as president of the Senate, posed for photos with Brown and his wife, Gail Huff Brown, at the Republican’s swearing-in ceremony in the US Capitol.

Photographers captured Huff Brown’s frozen grin as Biden’s right hand remained awkwardly behind her back – apparently near her posterior – as the portrait session ended.

Brown who won his senate seat in a 2010 special election after the death of Sen. Teddy Kennedy and served just three years in office, refused to elaborate on the episode.

“No, no. It’s old news, it’s old news,” he insisted when Shattuck pressed him for further details.

Instead, Brown blamed Biden’s inappropriate handsiness on incipient dementia — which, he suggested, has worsened during his presidency.

“I spent quite a bit of time with him. I enjoyed his company,” Brown recalled. “But we all know people who have dementia and have the beginning of Alzheimer’s, and he’s got it,” he said. “I mean, it’s the walk. It’s the way he’s mumbling, his anger outbursts. And it’s a shame that we can’t do better in this great country.”

For years, Biden has been notorious for his touchy-feely behavior with women and young girls — with a particular fondness for groping female family members of new senators and cabinet members taking the oath of office.

In June, actress Eva Longoria had to physically guide the 80-year-old president’s hands away from her breasts as he embraced her at a White House film screening.

Another in the ‘You Can’t Make This Up’ category.
I advise a different sort of ‘loud noise maker’, something along the lines of that lady’s .357.

Police in Democrat-Run Oakland Urge Residents to Use Airhorns if Targeted by Criminals

Police in Democrat-run Oakland, California, are urging residents to use airhorns as a way of sounding an alarm when criminals strike amid a surge in crime.

Crime has risen to a point where police are not only advising the purchase of airhorns but also the placement of “security bars to…doors and windows,” CNN noted.

Burglaries in the city are up 41 percent “and robberies by more than 20 percent.”

Mayor-elect Sheng Thao speaks during a press conference at City Hall in downtown Oakland, California, on November 23, 2022. (Jane Tyska/Digital First Media/East Bay Times via Getty Images)

Oakland resident Toni Bird indicated that she followed the advice of police and now has three airhorns.

Bird said, “The types of crime that we’re seeing feel much more violent and the consequences feel much more severe. And it feels like the people that are being targeted are people who are vulnerable.”

On Sunday, July 30, 2023, a 75-year-old Oakland woman was home alone and armed with more than an airhorn when two alleged armed intruders entered her home.

The woman had a .357 Magnum revolver, which she used to fire one shot at the alleged intruders, KTVU reported. The alleged intruders fired multiple shots then fled the scene.

The woman was not injured and her daughter described her as “Superwoman.”

Energy Sec Granholm secretly consulted top CCP energy official before SPR releases

EXCLUSIVE: Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm engaged in multiple conversations with the Chinese government’s top energy official days before the Biden administration announced it would tap the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) to combat high gas prices in 2021.

Granholm’s previously-undisclosed talks with China National Energy Administration Chairman Zhang Jianhua — revealed in internal Energy Department calendars obtained by Americans for Public Trust (APT) and shared with Fox News Digital — reveal that the Biden administration likely discussed its plans to release oil from the SPR with China before its public announcement.

According to the calendars, Granholm spoke in one-on-one conversations with Jianhua, who is a longstanding senior member of the Chinese Communist Party, on Nov. 19, 2021, and two days later on Nov. 21, 2021. Then, on Nov. 23, 2021, the White House announced a release of 50 million barrels of oil from the SPR, the largest release of its kind in U.S. history at the time.

“Secretary Granholm’s multiple closed-door meetings with a CCP-connected energy official raise serious questions about the level of Chinese influence on the Biden administration’s energy agenda,” APT Executive Director Caitlin Sutherland told Fox News Digital.

“Instead of focusing on creating real energy independence for America, Granholm has been too busy parroting Chinese energy propaganda and insisting ‘we can all learn from what China is doing,’” Sutherland continued. “The public deserves to know the extent to which Chinese officials are attempting to infiltrate U.S. energy policy and security.”

In a statement, the DOE said the meeting was broadly part of the agency’s effort to combat climate change, but didn’t share what was discussed at the meeting.

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Federal judge bizarrely contends that most firearms can be banned without violating the Second Amendment

Last month, U.S. District Judge Janet Bond Arterton tossed out a lawsuit challenging Connecticut’s ban on concealed carry in state parks, ruling that the plaintiff in the litigation didn’t have standing to sue because there was no credible threat of him being arrested or prosecuted for violating the ban. That was an exceedingly odd decision, but it kept the ban in place (at least for now), which counts as a win as far as anti-gunners are concerned.

Now Arterton has followed up with another legal doozy, rejecting a preliminary injunction against the state’s newly-expanded ban on so-called assault weapons and large capacity magazines by declaring that the Supreme Court’s Second Amendment jurisprudence allows for bans on commonly-owned weapons, and that “only a ban on firearms that are so pervasively used for self-defense that to ban them would ‘infringe,’ or destroy, the right to self-defense” would violate our right to keep and bear arms.

Under Arterton’s interpretation of Heller, McDonald, Caetano, and Bruen everything from bolt-action hunting rifles to single-barreled shotguns could be banned without calling into question the right to keep and bear arms; presumably leaving only some (but likely not all) handguns protected by the Second Amendment’s language.

Unlike the broader category of handguns at issue in Heller and Bruen, the record developed here demonstrates that assault weapons and LCMs are suboptimal for self-defense.

A set of statutes that bans only a subset of each category of firearms that possess new and dangerous characteristics that make them susceptible to abuse by nonlaw abiding citizens wielding them for unlawful purposes imposes a comparable burden to the regulations on Bowie knives, percussion cap pistols, and other dangerous or concealed weapons, particularly when “there remain more than one thousand firearms that Connecticut residents can purchase for responsible and lawful uses like self-defense, home defense, and other lawful purposes such as hunting and sport shooting.”

Well hang on there. If, according to Arterton, only those arms that are “pervasively” used in self-defense cannot be banned, then firearms most commonly used for lawful purposes such as hunting and sport shooting have no protection whatsoever under the Second Amendment, regardless of whether or not the state of Connecticut still allows them to be sold.

You can read Arterton’s lengthy dissertation for yourself here, but I’ll caution you before you start that her opinion reminds me of the apocryphal quote attributed to W.C. Fields; if you can’t dazzle them with brilliance baffle them with bullsh**. Arterton definitely left me scratching my head on multiple occasions, such as her rejection of the use of FBI crime statistics that point to rifles of any kind being rarely used in homicide because the data supposedly “provides limited relevant insight” since they “these statistics do not track what types of firearms are used with enough precision to determine whether they are assault weapons.” Arterton, meanwhile, blithely took the state’s “expert” John Donohue of Stanford University at face value, though Donohue has maintained that the individual right to keep and bear arms was created by the Supreme Court in Heller and was not a pre-existing right protected by the Second Amendment in 1791.

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“Nothing shady is going on with Hunter Biden and his overseas business.”

“Hunter’s laptop is Russian disinformation.”

“Okay, the laptop is real but it doesn’t prove anything.”

“There is no proof who ‘the Big Guy’ is.”

“Okay, the Big Guy is Joe Biden but he still didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Joe Biden never got paid for Hunter’s overseas business dealings.”

“Okay, Hunter Biden said Joe got paid but there is no proof.”

“Joe Biden had no knowledge of his son’s business dealings.”

“Okay, Joe knew about the dealings but he didn’t partake in them.”

“Okay, Joe took business calls with Hunter but they were just talking about the weather!”

You are here  👆

Illinois Gov. Pritzker Allows Non-US Citizens to Become Police Officers With New Law: ‘Fundamentally Bad Idea’

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, D., signed a bill into law that allows non-U.S. citizens to become police officers in the state, angering critics who slammed the idea of foreigners arresting American citizens as “a fundamentally bad idea.”

Illinois House Bill 3751 will no longer require U.S. citizenship as a qualification to become a police officer in the state. The bill was signed by the Democrat governor on Friday and will go into effect on January 1, 2024, despite facing heavy opposition from GOP lawmakers and prominent police groups.

The bill “provides that an individual who is not a citizen but is legally authorized to work in the United States under federal law is authorized to apply for the position of police officer, subject to all requirements and limitations, other than citizenship, to which other applicants are subject,” HB3751 reads, adding that non-U.S. citizens must be able to obtain, carry, purchase, or otherwise possess a firearm under federal law to apply for the job.

Immigrants who remain in the country under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) Act, are also entitled to apply for a position to join law enforcement, the bill states.

Illinois Rep. Mary Miller, a Republican, voiced her outrage over the new law on Twitter over the weekend, writing that “no sane state would allow foreign nationals to arrest their citizens.”

“At 5 p.m. yesterday, when no one was paying attention, Pritzker signed a bill to allow illegal immigrants to become police officers, giving non-citizens the power to arrest citizens in our state,” she tweeted. “No sane state would allow foreign nationals to arrest their citizens, this is madness!”

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To Win Our Nation’s Wars”?
Lions Led by Donkeys.

The 248-year-old institution that this country depends upon to fight and win our wars has lost its focus, which is, “to win our nation’s wars.”  Preparing to do that is one of the most complex tasks on earth.  There is no profession more complex, more dangerous, or more crucial to the country’s survival than the United States Army. But its focus on “woke” social solutions has diluted the necessary focus on that duty.

The Army has thousands of magnificent and highly skilled officers and enlisted men and women who perform continuously at the highest levels.  Yet, as German General Erwin Rommel said of the British after he captured Tobruk, they are “lions commanded by donkeys.”  Today’s donkeys are officers and civilians in the highest levels of the current administration, up to and including the Commander in Chief, Joseph R. Biden and a Secretary of the Army who wants to reduce recruiting from families with a tradition of service because she fears a “warrior caste.”  Donkeys indeed. And they set the tone for all their subordinates in the Army.

The latest display of the donkeys’ madness is an article on the Army’s official website, lauding another man who claims to be a woman.

U.S. Army photo by Sarah Patterson 

The first sentence of the article accompanying the photo pronounces that “Coming out as a transgender female saved Maj. Rachel Jones’ life.” It goes on to describe how an in-the-closet Jones “lived every day deeply depressed and suicidal.”  After President Joe Biden lifted the prior ban on transgenders in the military, “Jones was finally able to come out publicly as transgender.”  The Army’s article does not state that Jones had any type of so-called “gender affirming surgery,” so presumably “coming out” merely means that he announced that he now prefers to be known as “she.”  This allows “her” to “live her truth” and be “so much more comfortable with myself.”

The article claims that any thoughts of suicide are now a thing of the past.  It does not explain how an obviously unstable Jones managed to remain in the Army and get promoted to major.  Nor does it mention the suicide rate among transgenders who have “come out” or had the life-altering surgery, such as the 30+ year study that concluded that “Ten to 15 years after surgical reassignment, the suicide rate of those who had undergone sex-reassignment surgery rose to 20 times that of comparable peers.”

Now, this author’s quarrel is not with MAJ Jones, who obviously is a person in need of help.  No responsible person wishes him or any other human being to suffer depression to the point of potential suicide.  No, the proper quarrel is with the donkeys leading the Army who create the command climate that tells subordinates that, in the words of West Point’s Battalion Orders in 1820, Jones is a soldier to be “venerated and emulated.”

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Judge vacates Bowe Bergdahl’s desertion conviction

FALLS CHURCH, Va. — A federal judge on Tuesday vacated the military conviction of Bowe Bergdahl, a former U.S. Army soldier who pleaded guilty to desertion after he left his post and was captured in Afghanistan and tortured by the Taliban.

The ruling from U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton in Washington says that military judge Jeffrey Nance, who presided over the court-martial, failed to disclose that he had applied to the executive branch for a job as an immigration judge, creating a potential conflict of interest.

Walton noted that former President Donald Trump had strongly criticized Bergdahl during the 2016 presidential campaign. Bergdahl’s lawyers argued that Trump’s comments placed undue command influence on Nance.

Walton rejected the specific argument surrounding undue command influence, but he said a reasonable person could question the judge’s impartiality under the circumstances.

Bergdahl was charged with desertion and misbehavior before the enemy after the then-23-year-old from Hailey, Idaho, left his post in Afghanistan in 2009. He said he was trying to get outside his post so he could report what he saw as poor leadership within his unit, but he was abducted by the Taliban and held captive for nearly five years.

During that time, Bergdahl was repeatedly tortured and beaten with copper wires, rubber hoses and rifle butts. After several escape attempts, he was imprisoned in a small cage for four years, according to court documents.

Several U.S. service members were wounded searching for Bergdahl. In 2014, he was returned to the U.S. in a prisoner swap for five Taliban leaders who were being held at Guantanamo Bay.

The swap faced criticism from Trump, then-Sen. John McCain and others. Both Trump and McCain called for Bergdahl to face severe punishment.

In 2017, he pleaded guilty to both charges. Prosecutors at his court-martial sought 14 years in prison, but he was given no time after he submitted evidence of the torture he suffered while in Taliban custody. He was dishonorably discharged and ordered to forfeit $10,000 in pay.

His conviction and sentence had been narrowly upheld by military appeals courts before his lawyers took the case to U.S. District Court, resulting in Tuesday’s ruling.

The Justice Department declined comment on the ruling Tuesday.

Eugene Fidell, one of Bergdahl’s lawyers, said he was gratified by the ruling and said Walton’s 63-page opinion shows how meticulous he was in rendering the ruling.

Calls and emails to the immigration court in Charlotte, North Carolina, where Nance now serves as an immigration judge, were not returned Tuesday evening.