Category: Corruption

Another one of the anti-american goobermint officials that George Soros donated millions to their election campaign. And the economic rule that you get more of what you subsidize – in this case violent crime – is going to kick New Yorkers in the seat of the pants, and I hope good and hard.

Manhattan DA to stop seeking prison sentences in slew of criminal cases

Who needs soft-on-crime judges when the district attorney doesn’t even want to lock up the bad guys?

Manhattan’s new DA has ordered his prosecutors to stop seeking prison sentences for hordes of criminals and to downgrade felony charges in cases including armed robberies and drug dealing, according to a set of progressive policies made public Tuesday.

In his first memo to staff on Monday, Alvin Bragg said his office “will not seek a carceral sentence” except with homicides and a handful of other cases, including domestic violence felonies, some sex crimes and public corruption.

Alvin Bragg.

 

 

 

 

 

“This rule may be excepted only in extraordinary circumstances based on a holistic analysis of the facts, criminal history, victim’s input (particularly in cases of violence or trauma), and any other information available,” the memo reads.

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Yet, the gun grabbers want to blame standard operational U.S. gun dealers

REPORT: Mexican Army Loses 30% of Weapons Purchased from U.S.

( ‘loses’? More likely sells to the cartels)

Mexico’s military is allegedly working to cover up its loss of weapons purchased from other countries.

Mexico’s Army (SEDENA) is losing approximately 30 percent of weapons purchased from the U.S., a report from Mexican journalist Carlos Loret De Mola revealed. The report comes as Mexico’s federal government litigates against firearm manufacturers in a U.S. court, blaming them for the raging cartel violence.

Those missing weapons are showing up in crime scenes. Mexico’s military has also allegedly misplaced weapons bought from Germany, Australia, Italy, Romania, Spain, and Belgium.

In Mexico, the Army is the only entity that can purchase weapons from other countries. Further, all weapons bought by federal, state, and local law enforcement, as well as private citizens, are sold by SEDENA. Loret De Mola reports that a national center called CENAPI within the Attorney General’s Office keeps track of weapons found in crime scenes or seized from criminal organizations — but because of the lawsuit, they are suppressing information about Mexican Army guns in the hands of cartels. The CENAPI even denied requests for information about those weapons as a way to protect the military as being partly responsible in Mexico’s illicit gun trade.

The new allegations come at a time when Mexico’s military is plagued by scandals.

Inconvenient studies get buried by the media

A couple of months back–or last year, if you care to look at it that way–Cam wrote about an interesting study that took a look at the impact of Massachusetts gun laws. Or, more precisely, the lack of any real impact. It’s one of the more interesting studies we’ve seen lately.

And then we don’t see it much of anywhere else.

Oh, it pops up here or there. I came across it at a site that basically just reports on studies.

While Congress has yet to pass nationwide gun control legislation measures, some state legislatures have enacted stricter gun control laws aimed at reducing violence in their communities. However, a recent study finds gun laws in at least one state aren’t doing that job. A team at American University analyzed the impact of one such measure in Massachusetts and found stricter background checks and licensing policies made little to no difference in curbing violent crimes.

In light of these results, study authors ponder if officials are doing enough to enforce these new policies.

“Gun violence remains at the forefront of the public policy debate when it comes to enacting new or strengthening existing gun legislation in the United States,” explains study author Janice Iwama, assistant professor of justice, law, and criminology at AU, in a media release. “Yet the political polarization and relatively limited scholarly research on guns and gun violence make it difficult for policymakers and practitioners to enact and implement legislation that addresses the public health and safety issues associated with gun violence.”

…

Using this approach, the research team was able to estimate, based on percentage of firearms licenses, that one to five percent of adult Massachusetts residents had a gun license. However, results also show the new gun control measures did not have a “consistent effect” on reducing four types of violent crimes — murder or manslaughter, aggravated assault, robbery, and rape.

Notably, a one-percent increase in denied firearm licenses and denied firearm licenses following statutory disqualifications increased robberies by 7.3 and 8.9 percent, respectively.

Now, this is an interesting study, and it’s something we should have had significant debate over. We should have run a dozen or so posts discussing it and responding to others who addressed this.

Instead, what we got was the digital version of crickets chirping.

It wasn’t absolute silence, but it was damn close. The Boston Herald reported it, but that’s probably the largest publication to do so. This wasn’t reported on CNN or MSNBC so far as I can tell. There wasn’t a New York Times or Chicago Sun story about it, either. I can’t say it just vanished because it’s still popping up in niche sites, but it just wasn’t really news.

Why?

Of course, we all know why. It runs counter to the media’s preferred narrative that gun control is a net benefit for society and we should enact more of it. In fact, it directly proves that’s not necessarily the case.

So, they simply pretend it didn’t happen.

Had the study found the opposite, I have little doubt it would have been heralded from the hills. We’d have been inundated with reports about what the study proved.

Instead, we get silence.

Meanwhile, this same media is absolutely baffled that trust in them is so low.

See, this is part of how media bias works. It’s not just how the stories are written/reported, but also what stories are reported. This one is, to steal from Al Gore, an inconvenient truth, so they’re hoping you’ll just forget about it.

Inconvenient studies get buried by the media

A couple of months back–or last year, if you care to look at it that way–Cam wrote about an interesting study that took a look at the impact of Massachusetts gun laws. Or, more precisely, the lack of any real impact. It’s one of the more interesting studies we’ve seen lately.

And then we don’t see it much of anywhere else.

Oh, it pops up here or there. I came across it at a site that basically just reports on studies.

While Congress has yet to pass nationwide gun control legislation measures, some state legislatures have enacted stricter gun control laws aimed at reducing violence in their communities. However, a recent study finds gun laws in at least one state aren’t doing that job. A team at American University analyzed the impact of one such measure in Massachusetts and found stricter background checks and licensing policies made little to no difference in curbing violent crimes.

In light of these results, study authors ponder if officials are doing enough to enforce these new policies.

“Gun violence remains at the forefront of the public policy debate when it comes to enacting new or strengthening existing gun legislation in the United States,” explains study author Janice Iwama, assistant professor of justice, law, and criminology at AU, in a media release. “Yet the political polarization and relatively limited scholarly research on guns and gun violence make it difficult for policymakers and practitioners to enact and implement legislation that addresses the public health and safety issues associated with gun violence.”

…

Using this approach, the research team was able to estimate, based on percentage of firearms licenses, that one to five percent of adult Massachusetts residents had a gun license. However, results also show the new gun control measures did not have a “consistent effect” on reducing four types of violent crimes — murder or manslaughter, aggravated assault, robbery, and rape.

Notably, a one-percent increase in denied firearm licenses and denied firearm licenses following statutory disqualifications increased robberies by 7.3 and 8.9 percent, respectively.

Now, this is an interesting study, and it’s something we should have had significant debate over. We should have run a dozen or so posts discussing it and responding to others who addressed this.

Instead, what we got was the digital version of crickets chirping.

It wasn’t absolute silence, but it was damn close. The Boston Herald reported it, but that’s probably the largest publication to do so. This wasn’t reported on CNN or MSNBC so far as I can tell. There wasn’t a New York Times or Chicago Sun story about it, either. I can’t say it just vanished because it’s still popping up in niche sites, but it just wasn’t really news.

Why?

Of course, we all know why. It runs counter to the media’s preferred narrative that gun control is a net benefit for society and we should enact more of it. In fact, it directly proves that’s not necessarily the case.

So, they simply pretend it didn’t happen.

Had the study found the opposite, I have little doubt it would have been heralded from the hills. We’d have been inundated with reports about what the study proved.

Instead, we get silence.

Meanwhile, this same media is absolutely baffled that trust in them is so low.

See, this is part of how media bias works. It’s not just how the stories are written/reported, but also what stories are reported. This one is, to steal from Al Gore, an inconvenient truth, so they’re hoping you’ll just forget about it.

BLUF:
They are fearful and angry not because democracy doesn’t work, but because it does, despite their own media and political efforts to warp it.

When a party is hijacked by radicals and uses almost any means necessary to gain and use power for agendas that few Americans support, then average voters express their disapproval.

That reality apparently terrifies an elite. It then claims any system that allows the people to vote against the left is not “people power” at all.

Why Is the Left Suddenly Worried About the End of Democracy?

What is behind recent pessimistic appraisals of democracy’s future, from Hillary Clinton, Adam Schiff, Brian Williams, and other elite intellectuals, media personalities, and politicians on the left? Some are warning about its possible erosion in 2024. Others predict democracy’s downturn as early 2022, with scary scenarios of “autocracy” and Trump “coups.”

To answer that question, understand first what isn’t behind these shrill forecasts.

They are not worried about 2 million foreign nationals crashing the border in a single year, without vaccinations during a pandemic. Yet it seems insurrectionary for a government simply to nullify its own immigration laws.

They are not worried that some 800,000 foreign nationals, some residing illegally, will now vote in New York City elections.

They are not worried that there are formal efforts underway to dismantle the U.S. Constitution by junking the 233-year-old Electoral College or the preeminence of the states in establishing ballot laws in national elections.

They are not worried that we are witnessing an unprecedented left-wing effort to scrap the 180-year-old filibuster, the 150-year-old nine-person Supreme Court, and the 60-year tradition of 50 states, for naked political advantage.

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Hypocrisy O’ The Day

If you hadn’t figured out Schiff has never been anything more than a bald-faced liar by now…….

Adam Schiff Uses Text Messages That Disprove Insurrection to Try to Shore Up Sagging Insurrection Narrative.

Liz Cheney on Monday revealed text messages from former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows’ phone. Despite the fact that they prove that there never was an insurrection, the Democrats and their media sycophants were working hard Tuesday to make the texts out to be the bombshell that will finally, once and for all, destroy Donald Trump. Foremost among them was, not surprisingly, Adam Schiff (D-OrangeManBad), whose only claim to fame as a congressman has been his relentless and evidence-free efforts to drive Trump first from the presidency, and now from public life altogether.

Schiff appeared Tuesday on MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Reports trying to shore up the Democrats’ sagging Jan. 6 insurrection narrative. No one has been charged with insurrection, no one was armed, the only person killed on the scene was a Trump supporter, and Trump himself called for a peaceful protest, but the facts have never mattered to a Left driven mad with hatred for the man whose continued popularity threatens their hold not just on the three branches of government, but on the popular culture as well.

According to Breitbart, Mitchell asked Schiff: “What is the impact do you think of Don Jr.? Publicly, he was saying one thing and denying the severity of the insurrection while privately, he was pleading with Mark Meadows. Does it, first of all, suggest that they all were aware that Donald Trump, alone, could have stopped the violence by asking him to do something about it?”

Mitchell was referring to texts from Donald Trump Jr. to Meadows in which the president’s son said: “He’s got to condemn this s**t ASAP. The Capitol Police tweet is not enough….We need an Oval Office address. He has to lead now. It has gone too far and gotten out of hand.”

To Schiff, this is the veritable smoking gun that will enable him at last to drive his harpoon into his white whale, Trump. “It says so much,” Schiff answered Mitchell excitedly. “The few text messages say so much. They tell us that these people understood the seriousness of this attack. They understood that the president was uniquely situated to try to stop it, and he wasn’t stopping it. It was going on for hours. But it also just calls out the blatant hypocrisy where they are now trying to downplay these events, but when you look at what they were saying in real-time, you see just how serious they understood this attack to be.”

Schiff added: “So the hypocrisy of it in particular just smacks you in the face to see what Don Jr. was saying now and to see what Don Jr. was saying then.”

Anyone who actually reads what Donald Trump Jr. wrote, however, will not see any of what Schiff claims to see in his texts. Donald Trump Jr. said that the president should speak out against people entering the Capitol and call on them to disperse, and Trump did so. But the fact that Trump Jr. wrote that “it has gone too far and gotten out of hand” makes it clear that there was no planned insurrection, no attempted coup, contrary to the Left’s incessant and hysterical propaganda for nearly a year now. This was a peaceful protest that did indeed get out of hand, and Trump duly spoke out.

That should have been the end of the matter, but Schiff and his colleagues instead opted to do everything they can to portray the events of Jan. 6 as far more serious than they actually were in a transparent attempt to destroy Trump’s political career altogether and stigmatize those who voted for him and still support him.

It is no surprise that Adam Schiff would be the one who is spearheading this initiative. This is, after all, the man who was still insisting as late as April 2019 that there was “ample evidence of collusion” between Trump and Russia “in plain sight,” and that “the obstruction of justice in particular in this case is far worse than anything that Richard Nixon did. I would say in every way this is more significant than Watergate.”

Yet despite the fact that Schiff and the Democratic Congressional leadership had their knives out for Trump from the moment he declared his candidacy, no such evidence of collusion or obstruction of justice has ever come to light. Nevertheless, Schiff has neither produced his “evidence of collusion” nor apologized for claiming to have it when he obviously did not.

The hypocrisy of Adam Schiff in particular just smacks you in the face.

The new Dark Ages
The woke assault on Western civilisation is taking us backwards.

If ignorance is bliss, the Western world should be ecstatic. Even as colleges churn out degrees and collect fees, and technology makes information instantly accessible, the basic level of literacy, as measured by such things as reading books and acquainting oneself with the past, is in a precipitous decline. Rather than building a vital world with our technological culture, we are repeating the memes of feudal times, driven by illiteracy, bias and a rejection of the West’s past.

Over half of American adults have a reading level below the equivalent of sixth-grade level (11- to 12-year-olds), and book reading outside of school or work among the young in particular has declined markedly. A survey conducted in 2014 found slightly over half of American children saying they liked to read books ‘for fun’, down from 60 per cent in 2010. This is not just an American trend. A landmark study by University College London tracked 11,000 children born in 2000 up to age 14 and found that only one in 10 ever did any reading in their spare time as teenagers. The Covid-related lockdowns, notes one recent UN study, raised the number of children experiencing reading difficulties from 460million to 584million.

Even before the pandemic, people’s cognitive skills were weakening. Many employers in the US report difficulty finding workers capable of having a serious conversation. Over 60 per cent of applicants are found to be lacking in basic social skills. Today’s teens’ experiences are increasingly limited to what they access on their phones and social media. Rather than opening minds, social media seem to be creating a generation with little ability to communicate in person.

Sites like Facebook and Instagram have been linked to reduced attention spans: research indicates that the average attention span has fallen 50 per cent since 2000, mainly due to social-media use. This loss of literacy comes at a time when much of our education and literary establishment has embraced censorship, while on the right there’s an increasingly Pavlovian embrace of book-banning. Even in defending the common culture, the right forgets the necessity of diverse opinions in a democracy.

Right now, the most influential advocates for banning classical literature from curricula, or removing books non-compliant on issues like gender, are not disgruntled conservatives. No, the assault on studying ‘great books’ and Western culture largely comes from progressive professors with PhDs, and the ever-expanding university bureaucracies and their recent graduates. The embrace of these cultural trends, as former Mother Jones writer Kevin Drum suggests, has emerged as Democrats have moved far more to the left than Republicans have gone further to the right. This is sometimes enforced with mandatory indoctrination sessions and even requirements to sign the woke version of McCarthy-era ‘loyalty oaths’.

In the new schema, the past is seen as racist, ugly and simply too complex for young minds. At many US colleges, books written before 1990 are considered ‘inaccessible’ to students. University policies increasingly marginalise Homer, Confucius, Shakespeare, Milton, Tocqueville or the Founding Fathers. Some books are scorned for having been written by dead white males, who as a group are linked to such horrors as slavery, the subjugation of women and mass poverty. America’s cultural arbiters, such as the National Archives, now consider it necessary to flag up the nation’s founding documents for ‘harmful language’. Ultimately, many of those things that drove Western ascendancy since 1500 – reason, work ethic, family and even science – are being cashiered to create some kind of woke brave new world. And our society seems all the poorer for the loss.

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El Salvador’s President Accuses Biden Administration of Corruption — and Drops Private Text Messages When Challenged

Apparently, the Biden administration’s relationship with El Salvador is on rocky ground. If you know anything about the history involved, those on the ideological left do not like Nayib Bukele, who is halfway through his first five-year term.

For example, here’s Amnesty International painting him as some kind of horrific dictator. Yet, when you drill down into their arguments, they appear to be that 1) he doesn’t support abortion, 2) he criticizes the press openly, and 3) that his party won a majority and has used that power to constitute their policies.

Since he took office, the right to express an opinion, to freedom of association or even for women to make decisions regarding their own bodies have been, at best, ignored and, at worst, purposefully pushed aside.

They list no actual examples of the right to express an opinion being violated on a legal level, only noting that Bukele has publicly criticized the press corps in the country.

First, Bukele effectively declared open season on independent journalists, lawyers, human rights activists, and anybody who dared criticise him or his administration’s policies. The campaign begun online, where he badmouthed and dismissed their work. He branded activists as “criminals”, “seeking the death of more people” during the toughest months of the COVID-19 pandemic and of being “front organizations” fof the “political opposition”.

How is that any different than Jen Psaki and Anthony Fauci insisting that Fox News is killing people? The answer is that it’s not, but there’s this weird thing the American government and its ideological allies do where they freak out on other countries for doing the same things they do.

Anyway, the point is not that Bukele is pure as the wind-driven snow. Rather, I’m just pointing out that context matters. He took over a country drenched in corruption, carrying the world’s highest homicide rate and a narco-dependent economy. If Bukele has stepped over the line compared to what we would accept in the United States, it’s still important to remember that not every country can operate exactly as we do and produce positive results for its people. Afghanistan’s collapse and the literal slave markets in Libya are stark reminders that naive idealism isn’t a governing strategy in certain parts of the world.

Regardless, now that I’ve given the teeth gnashers plenty of material, let’s talk about Bukele’s fight with the Biden administration this weekend. The El Salvadoran president had previously accused the US government of funding left-wing communists in the country.

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Trust The Science™

Nature: When scientists gave 1,000 vulnerable people hepatitis over 30 years
What sort of system nurtures a decades-long programme of deliberately infecting children and prisoners with a dangerous disease?

Dangerous Medicine: The Story Behind Human Experiments with Hepatitis Sydney A. Halpern Yale Univ. Press (2021)

In 1942, in the grip of the Second World War, the US military faced an existential threat from within. A hepatitis outbreak was suspected to have infected hundreds of thousands of personnel.

There were no animal or cell-culture models for studying the viral liver disease. Desperate to find the source of the outbreak and learn how to contain it, the military joined forces with biomedical researchers, including some from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, to launch human experiments that continued for decades after the war.

During the 30-year programme — meticulously chronicled in Dangerous Medicine — researchers infected more than 1,000 people, including over 150 children, with viruses that cause hepatitis. The people enrolled were prison inmates, disabled children, people with severe mental illnesses, and conscientious objectors performing community service in lieu of fighting, relates historical sociologist Sydney Halpern. Owing to biases in the US prison and psychiatric-hospital populations, a disproportionate number were Black. The long-term consequences will never be fully reckoned: although rarely fatal in the short term, hepatitis can lead to chronic liver disease and cancer years after the initial infection.

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Top Biden Staffer Led ‘All Expenses Paid’ China Trip Sponsored By Communist Influence Group.

Laurence Wilson – a senior aide to President Joe Biden’s Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra – accepted a trip to China sponsored by a leading Chinese Communist Party-linked propaganda group flagged by for its efforts to coerce American leaders to “take actions or adopt positions supportive of Beijing,” The National Pulse can reveal.

Wilson – who currently serves as the Scheduling & Advance Representative to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary – previously worked as the National Advance Lead on Biden’s presidential campaign.

Posts unearthed from Wilson’s social media accounts reveal the Biden official participated in a 2015 delegation to China sponsored by the China-United States Exchange Foundation (CUSEF) as an advisor to a cohort of college students.

CUSEF was founded by the Vice-Chairman of the “highest-ranking entity overseeing” China’s United Front, which the U.S.-China Security and Economic Review Commission notes the country weaponizes “to co-opt and neutralize sources of potential opposition to the policies and authority of its ruling Chinese Communist Party” and “influence foreign governments to take actions or adopt positions supportive of Beijing.”

CUSEF has deployed this tactic on American journalists and former Congressmen, offering free trips to the country in exchange for “favorable coverage,” according to Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) filings.

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Salvation Army Issues Sorry, Not Sorry Statement, Withdraws Racist Guide “For Appropriate Review”
This statement from the Salvation Army may have been intended to calm donors, but frankly, it is cause for even more alarm.

The Salvation Army has come under fire for its vile, un-American, and racist “antiracist” materials.  In response, the organization issued a confusing mix of a defiant non-apology coupled with acknowledgment that the criticism is warranted in that the most offensive material has been “withdrawn for appropriate review.”

The Salvation Army writes (archive link):

But although we remain committed to serving everyone in need—regardless of their beliefs, backgrounds, or lifestyle—some individuals and groups have recently attempted to mislabel our organization to serve their own agendas. They have claimed that we believe our donors should apologize for their skin color, that The Salvation Army believes America is an inherently racist society, and that we have abandoned our Christian faith for one ideology or another.

Those claims are simply false, and they distort the very goal of our work.

The truth is that The Salvation Army believes that racism is fundamentally incompatible with Christianity, and that we are called by God to work toward a world where all people are loved, accepted, and valued. Our positional statement on racism makes this clear. These beliefs and goals are critically important because we know that racism exists, and we are determined to do everything the Bible asks of us to overcome it.

The Salvation Army occasionally publishes internal study guides on various complex topics to help foster positive conversations and grace-filled reflection among Salvationists. By openly discussing these issues, we always hope to encourage the development of a more thoughtful organization that is better positioned to support those in need. But no one is being told how to think. Period.

In this case, the guide “Let’s Talk About Racism,” was issued as a voluntary resource, but it has since become a focus of controversy. We have done our best to provide accurate information, but unfortunately, some have chosen to ignore those efforts. At the same time, International Headquarters realized that certain aspects of the guide may need to be clarified.

Consequently, for both reasons, the International Social Justice Commission has now withdrawn the guide for appropriate review.

I’m not going to get into a religious debate about the Bible or God’s will here because that is not the point of the criticism directed at the Salvation Army. The point of Critical Race training, as with all Marxist ideologies, after all, is the replacement of God with government, but I don’t think the Salvation Army understands that what they are imbibing—and yes, telling their Salvationists to think—is rooted in racist cum Marxist ideology.

As I previously noted, the “ Salvation Army .pdf entitled ‘Let’s Talk About . . . Racism’ (archive link) is a 67-page screed railing against America; it’s a document that is riddled with vile anti-American lies, insulting racist stereotypes, and woke Marxist drivel.”  So it’s a good thing that the document has been withdrawn for . . . checks notes . . . ‘clarification.’

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The very company the administration touts and the Peter Pan look-a-like Secretary of Energy cashes in on a stock sale of. And it’s ‘legal’  because she is exempt by law.

Granholm’s Green Energy Millions

Biden energy secretary nets $1.6 million after offloading admin-backed electric bus company

Energy secretary Jennifer Granholm has finally sold hundreds of thousands of shares in a green energy company that has received the backing of the Biden administration.

On Wednesday, Granholm confirmed she earned a $1.6 million profit on her shares of Proterra amid a firestorm over her financial ties to an electric vehicle company repeatedly promoted by the Biden administration. In selling off her shares, Granholm was able to defer paying capital gains taxes on the $1.6 million sale because cabinet officials are not penalized with the tax on assets they are required to sell as a condition of joining the administration. The Biden administration is seeking to raise the capital gains tax on America’s wealthiest families.

On May 11, Granholm filed an Office of Government Ethics divestiture certificate. She confirmed the sale Wednesday. The former Michigan governor reported selling more than 240,000 shares in the electric bus manufacturer to an unnamed buyer. She valued the stake at up to $5 million in a January financial disclosure.

The Department of Energy did not return to requests for comment.

While Proterra is slated to go public within the next few weeks, Granholm’s sale of the shares of the yet-to-be publicly traded company likely occurred in an off-market private sale. The Washington Free Beacon reported that major Democratic donors are invested in the company taking Proterra public, including at least one member of the megadonor Pritzker family who stands to own up to 7 percent of the company when it finally becomes public.

The White House did not respond to requests for comment.

Granholm’s divestment comes weeks after President Joe Biden toured Proterra, prompting ethics concerns from federal lawmakers. Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) compared the Biden administration’s ongoing promotion of the company to the Obama administration’s pouring millions of taxpayer dollars into Solyndra, a failed solar panel company. Sen. John Barrasso (R., Wyo.) wrote to the Department of Energy’s inspector general demanding a review of Granholm’s stake in the company.

“Energy Secretary Granholm held millions of dollars of investments in an electric bus company. During her nomination hearing, she committed to the Senate that she would avoid the appearance of any conflicts of interest,” Barrasso told the Free Beacon. “Even though Secretary Granholm has now sold these stocks, her actions appear to be a significant conflict of interest.”

Rep. Ralph Norman (R., S.C.) wrote directly to Granholm requesting key documents about any Department of Energy promotion of Proterra. Rep. Jim Banks (R., Ind.) called for Granholm to offload her Proterra shares on May 5.

Granholm played a leading role in shaping the administration’s infrastructure package. Biden tasked her specifically with “identifying risks in the supply chain for high-capacity batteries, including electric-vehicle batteries, and policy recommendations to address these risks.” The legislation includes a $174 billion investment in the electric vehicle market and creates a Clean Buses for Kids program in order to “electrify” at least 20 percent of the nation’s school buses. Proterra opened a battery manufacturing plant in California just weeks after Biden’s election.

In addition to Biden’s virtual tour of Proterra’s South Carolina factory, the president in May hosted company CEO Jack Allen at the White House’s Leaders Summit on Climate. National climate adviser Gina McCarthy praised Proterra for its “amazing” work at the summit and asked Allen “what role” the federal government can play in “spurring the demand for zero emission electric vehicles, including school buses.”

Granholm and Allen spoke at the conference, with Allen thanking Biden for his “longstanding support of electric transit buses and zero emission transportation.” While Granholm has denied any involvement of planning Proterra-related events, the White House has yet to say who was involved in planning them.

Question O’ The Day:
If the prosecutors had no qualms about being *this* unethical on a case they knew was going to be broadcast live nationwide, just how far have they gone in cases that have never had this amount of publicity?
And that brings up a question about all prosecutors.

How Unethical Were the Prosecutors Trying to Put Kyle Rittenhouse in Prison? Let Us Count the Ways…

There is so much misinformation about what happened the night Kyle Rittenhouse fired his weapon at four — yes, four — attackers that it’s hard to know where to begin. But let’s start with the prosecutors who promulgated and, indeed, created some of the slanders against the then-17-year-old. In the end, prosecutors Thomas Binger and Jim Kraus could not back up their lies with evidence in a courtroom and a jury saw right through them, thank God.

To put it succinctly, Thomas Binger and Jim Kraus left a skid mark on the robes of justice. They put a Kraus-sized turd on Lady Justice’s scale. And they almost put an 18-year-old in prison because he fought for his life and took out three of their “heroes,” as Binger called them.

Americans, already disgusted by the FBI, manufactured Trump Russia scandals, and counterintelligence investigations into concerned parents like they’re members of Al Qaeda, closely watched this case and were repulsed by the chicanery used to prosecute Rittenhouse.

They’re supposed to be the justice guys, right?

It’s a wonder that Rittenhouse was found not guilty on all counts.

You can blame Leftist propagandists or your laziness if you believed that Rittenhouse’s assailants were black, or that his gun was illegal, or that he brought it “across state lines,” or that he was a “chaos tourist” and a “vigilante.”

But there’s a special Mike Nifong-sized ring of hell for prosecutors who introduce these slanders into a courtroom, knowing that their subterfuge might put a kid away for the rest of his life.

Thomas Binger and Jim Kraus did this in many ways, by invoking lies — that they knew were lies — into pre-trial bail hearings, motions, and then ultimately into the courtroom itself in the trial. All of these lies were dutifully transcribed by friendly journalists. Indeed, as I reported at PJ Media, prosecutors never went back to revise or revisit the plethora of charges brought against Rittenhouse to test against the truth. If the mob believed ’em, they stayed in the charging documents.

Well, Binger and Kraus, you two are to blame for nearly black-pilling the rest of America who still had hope in the justice system after the FBI and the DOJ scandals.

You had a chance to do a clean trial.      You chose poorly.

Let’s go over just a few of the things these weasels did to Kyle Rittenhouse.

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House Judiciary GOP: FBI Is Tracking Parent Protesters
“An FBI agent provided a copy of the internal email to several Republican lawmakers, citing concerns that it could open the door for the bureau to collect information on parents voicing their opposition to local school policies during meetings.”

We previously covered the disgusting politicization of the FBI and DOJ to put their criminal prosecution weight to silence the parent protest movement.

The House Judiciary GOP has obtained documents showing the the FBI is executing on the plan, specifically monitoring parents. The Wall Street Journal reports:

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has set up a process to track threats against school-board members and teachers, moving to implement a Justice Department directive that some law-enforcement officials and Republican lawmakers say could improperly target parents protesting local education policies.

The heads of the FBI’s criminal and counterterrorism divisions instructed agents in an Oct. 20 memo to flag all assessments and investigations into potentially criminal threats, harassment and intimidation of educators with a “threat tag,” which the officials said would allow them to evaluate the scope of the problem.

The internal email asks FBI agents to consider the motivation behind any criminal activity and whether it potentially violates federal law. Agents should tag such threats “EDUOFFICIALS” to better track them, according to the memo, which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

“The purpose of the threat tag is to help scope this threat on a national level, and provide an opportunity for comprehensive analysis of the threat picture for effective engagement with law enforcement partners at all levels,” says the email signed by Timothy Langan, the FBI’s assistant director for counterterrorism, and Calvin Shivers, the assistant director of the bureau’s criminal division, who retired this month.

An FBI agent provided a copy of the internal email to several Republican lawmakers, citing concerns that it could open the door for the bureau to collect information on parents voicing their opposition to local school policies during meetings.

WSJ further reports:

“The FBI has never been in the business of investigating parents who speak out or policing speech at school board meetings, and we are not going to start now,” the FBI said Tuesday in a statement. “We are fully committed to preserving and protecting First Amendment rights, including freedom of speech.”

The claim that they only track “threats” is complete BS, as we have seen time and again, parents raising their voices as school board meetings are called threats.

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Memo Confirms National School Board Group ‘Actively Engaged’ with White House While Drafting ‘Domestic Terrorists’ Letter.

Biden Administration, School Board Association Colluded To Direct FBI Scrutiny at Parents Who Were Critical of School Boards.

Arizona school board president kept secret dossier on parents opposed to CRT and mask mandates that was discovered after he accidentally sent a link to a mom: Private investigator ran background checks and filmed parents.

A school board president in Arizona has been accused of maintaining a secret online dossier containing personal details about parents who opposed mask mandates and Critical Race Theory.

Scottsdale Unified School District Governing Board President Jann-Michael Greenburg’s access to the Google Drive file was revealed after he accidentally displayed the link in a screenshot he sent to a parent in a heated email chain.

The drive contained files labeled ‘SUSD Wackos’ and ‘Anti Mask Lunatics’ among others in a sprawling database tracking the online activities of parents in the district.

The drive was set to public, allowing anyone with a link to view it, and the contents, including the Social Security numbers, financial information and divorce records of parents, quickly set off a firestorm of calls for Greenburg to resign, according to AZ Free News.

The district blames Greenburg’s father Mark, who shares a home and computer with his son, for creating the bizarre dossier, and the school board president has denied involvement, vowing an investigation by ‘forensic IT staff’.  [oh my foot, that’s a CYA smokescreen]

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This is what you get when corrupt politicians place other corrupt politicians in positions of power as federal bureaucraps. Politicized law enforcement, which is always a prelude to tyranny.

The FBI Raid of Project Veritas Turns Into a Massive Scandal After Privileged Communications Are Leaked.

As RedState reported, Project Veritas has found itself in the crosshairs of the FBI recently. That began with a raid on the homes of several of its journalists under the guise of looking for Ashley Biden’s diary. Apparently, a stolen diary is now in the purview of federal authorities. Will they be investigating bike thefts next?

But what was so disturbing, besides the raids happening in the first place, was how quickly The New York Times knew about them. While O’Keefe was asked by the FBI to keep quiet, the Times knew within hours, pointing to a leaker within the bureau.

But while the Department of Justice requested us to not disclose the existence of the subpoena, something very unusual happened. Within an hour of one of our reporters’ homes being secretly raided by the FBI, The New York Times, who we are currently suing for defamation, contacted the Project Veritas reporter for comment. We do not know how The New York Times was aware of the execution of a search warrant at our reporter’s home, or the subject matter of the search warrant, as a Grand Jury investigation is secret.

Days later, O’Keefe would have his home raided as well, and sure enough, the Times once again knew it about it before anyone else. Are you noticing a pattern? Because it’s about to become as obvious as a neon sign.

Two days ago, a court ordered the FBI to stop extracting data from O’Keefe’s phones, which had apparently been seized. Again, all of this is being done under the allegation that…a diary was stolen. But then last night, things boiled over into outright scandal. The Times suddenly started publishing privileged communications between Project Veritas and its legal team. Those messages apparently came from one of O’Keefe’s phones.

Yes, you read that right. Project Veritas had recently sued The New York Times over an unrelated matter, and now the Times has Project Veritas’ privileged communications that reveal their legal strategies. Given the circumstances, there could only be one logical source for that information — the FBI.

This is absolutely scandalous, though nothing is really surprising anymore when dealing with the FBI. It appears that a major newspaper has colluded with the federal government to target an investigative reporting outlet. Of course, there are still more dots to connect, but if there’s some other explanation, I’m not seeing it. The pretense of the original raid simply made no sense (really, a diary?), and the Times has been getting leaks from the bureau every step of the way in order to target Project Veritas.

If this isn’t a coordinated political hit job on a journalistic organization, then what is it? So many lines have now been crossed that it’s hard to keep up with them all. Worse, what can Project Veritas even do about it? The Biden-run DOJ is not going to investigate these leaks, and the damage has already been done. The Times now has possession of these privileged communications even as they are being sued by Project Veritas. Think about how absurd that is.

Let this serve as another example of why the FBI doesn’t need to just be reprimanded, but that it needs to be disbanded. The organization simply can not be trusted to uphold the rights of American citizens any longer, a reality that is borne out by its own politicized actions.

If a group, in this case the ‘free press‘, that has a certain protected status under the Constitution, uses that to work towards denying, infringing or abridging the rights of another group with similar status, I say they loose that protection as they’ve openly advocated for tyranny and are thus ‘Enemies Domestic’ of the Constitution. But that’s just me.

BLUF
But we as freedom-loving Americans must be equally vigilant to push back against this attack on the very right to preserve our lives and livelihoods. It is preferable for that to be done by the forces that take our taxes with the promise to do so. But the Founders foresaw that may not always be the case and provided us a right to do so ourselves in extremis.

Left’s Attacks On Kyle Rittenhouse Are Part Of A Bigger Plan To Disband The ‘Well-Regulated Militia’
The goal of the media provocateurs is to delegitimize the most basic right to protect our communities and ourselves in the absence of official security forces.

The corporate media is shifting narratives about the Kyle Rittenhouse case because his self-defense claim is bulletproof. They want to erase the long-understood obligation for all able-bodied citizens to come to the defense of their community when the normal authorities are unwilling or unable to do so.

The constitutionally sound principle that allows and expects this is the left’s most-abused part of the Second Amendment, the “well-regulated militia.” This is the false premise being pushed by many historically ignorant moral scolds.

“Do we want a society in which political conflict is settled on the streets between people with guns? One in which everyone is armed and can therefore view the other people armed as a plausible threat?” MSNBC’s Chris Hayes wrote on Twitter. “Is that the society we want?”

It’s tempting to answer with the online meme, “Your terms are acceptable.”

Except their claim deserves a solid beatdown for its shameless inaccuracy. The well-regulated militia is a real thing codified by the Second Amendment but in no way controlled by the government.

There is plenty of case law about this, but essentially it consists of able-bodied citizens who are available to help with the defense of the country. This can include actions against foreign enemies presenting a threat inside our borders, but it also includes cases of internal unrest or natural disaster.

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BLUF:
The reason that the licensing program was transferred to the Department of Agriculture years ago was to make sure that there would be an elected official who could be held responsible by the voters for abusing, misusing and failing to properly administer Florida’s first-of-its-kind shall-issue licensing program. Nikki Fried has just provided an important example of why that decision is still well-founded. She has mismanaged the program, infringed upon the people’s right to keep and bear arms, denied licenses without providing proof or evidence that people are disqualified, and now she uses secret information that is supposed to be confidential for her own political gains.

Florida Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried using confidential gun-owner data in campaign against Gov. Ron DeSantis

In a one-of-a-kind system unknown in other states, Florida’s wildly popular Concealed Weapon or Firearm Licensing program is overseen by the state’s Commissioner of Agriculture, in this case Nikki Fried.

Florida’s licensing division, which to date has issued more than 2.4 million CWFLs, is subordinate to Fried’s Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. State lawmakers once flirted with the idea of taking the CWFL program away from Fried and transferring responsibility for the concealed-carry licenses to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, but, ultimately, the changes were never made.

Fried is the only Democrat to hold statewide office in the Gunshine State, where last week Republican voters finally outnumbered registered Democrats. She is also the only state official known to possess both a CWFL and a Florida Medical Marijuana Card, regardless of the federal legal problems this creates when she purchases a firearm.

Now, Fried is using access to confidential gun-owner data that her position offers, in her campaign for governor against incumbent Gov. Ron DeSantis, and Fried has shrugged off scrutiny about her actions as well as attempts to gain clarity and accountability.

On July 27, at approximately 1:07 p.m., Fried tweeted: “I just suspended the concealed weapons permits of 22 people involved in the insurrection against the United States of America instigated by Donald Trump on January 6, 2021.”

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Woman Who Testified Against Trump Also Introduced Authors of Fake Russian ‘Dossier’ to Each Other. Gee, What Are the Odds … ?

The political Venn diagram with Vladimir Putin and the Democrats in the Trump Russia scandal just officially added another notorious name. In fact, it’s why Fiona Hill’s name is trending on Twitter and why the Left is trying to hard rehabilitate her image.

You remember Fiona.

She was the selfless hero who testified against the president in the notorious Trump-Ukraine “Phone Call.”

As Vox breathlessly reported at the time, Fiona Hill “met for over nine hours with congressional staff as part of the House Democrat-led impeachment inquiry, kicked off by allegations last month from a whistleblower who said Trump linked held-up military aid Ukraine wanted to start an investigation into Joe Biden’s family.” “This is a big deal,” the publication declared.

Hill, a leftover from the previous administration and a Brookings Institute expert, helped frame the Trump impeachment by selling the idea that the Phone Call was impeachment worthy. We can only guess she was ready, willing, and delighted to try to torpedo Trump’s presidency because her first try didn’t seem to be working.

Get a #2 Ticonderoga. It’s time to fill in your Venn diagram.

It turns out that Fiona introduced two major fake Trump/Russia scandal architects to each other.

Fiona’s friend and co-worker at the Brookings Institution think tank was none other than Igor Danchenko. Fiona also knew Christopher Steele. She introduced the two. And faster than you can say furious, Igor was working with Steele to make up stuff for that collection of notes and “memos” known as the Steele Dossier.

But Fiona’s friends Igor and Christopher did more than that. Igor got the “intelligence” for the “dossier” from a Hillary Clinton P.R. maven.

Just spitballing here, but I’m guessing old Fiona and her friends know the P.R. guy too.

You can read about it at PJ Media, but the short take is this: The Democrats made up the entire Trump Russia hoax with the help of their friends at the FBI, CIA, Obama White House, Hillary Clinton campaign and … Russia.