Month: March 2020

AOC Invokes Jesus, Compares Religious Freedom to White Supremacy, Slavery, Segregation

She’s a radical marxist whose relationship with God, I’ll just mention as:
“…by their fruits ye shall know them” As in, ‘what they do will tell you’.

On Thursday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-Grow Yucca in NYC) compared religious freedom advocates to Americans who twisted scripture to defend white supremacy, race-based slavery, and segregation. She suggested that Republicans would dismiss Jesus Christ as a radical and condemned the Trump administration for giving religion a bad name.

“It’s very difficult to sit here and listen to arguments in the long history of this country of using scripture and weaponizing and abusing scripture to justify bigotry. White supremacists have done it, those who justified slavery did it, those who fought against integration did it, and we’re seeing it today,” Ocasio-Cortez declared at a hearing entitled, “The Administration’s Religious Liberty Assault on LGBTQ Rights.”

She went on to suggest Republicans would condemn Jesus Christ Himself.

“And sometimes, especially in this body, I feel as though if Christ Himself walked through these doors, and said what He said thousands of years ago, that we should love our neighbor and our enemy, that we should welcome the stranger, fight for the least of us, that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into a kingdom of heaven, He would be maligned as a radical and rejected from these doors,” AOC declared.

She contrasted her faith with that of traditional Christians.

“And I know, and it is part of my faith, that all people are holy and all people are sacred, unconditionally. We love all people,” AOC insisted. “There is nothing holy about rejecting medical care of people, no matter who they are on the grounds of what their identity is. There is nothing holy about turning someone away from a hospital. There’s nothing holy about rejecting a child from a family. There’s nothing holy about writing discrimination into the law. And I am tired of communities of faith being weaponized and being mischaracterized because the only time religious freedom is invoked is in the name of bigotry and discrimination.”

She turned to Evan Minton — a female who identifies as a man and who is suing a Catholic hospital in California for not performing a hysterectomy. During the hearing, Minton accused the Trump administration of having “singled me out” by issuing a Health and Human Services (HHS) ruling protecting the consciences of medical professionals who refuse to perform abortions, hysterectomies on healthy women, or other controversial services.

“I’m tired of it. My faith commands me to treat Mr. Minton as holy because he is sacred, because his life is sacred,” AOC declared. Turning to Minton, she added, “Because you are not to be denied anything that I am entitled to. That we are equal in the eyes of the law and we are equal in my faith in the eyes of the world.”

“But what this administration is advancing is the idea that religion and faith is about exclusion,” she argued. “It is not up to us to deny medical care, it is up to us to feed the hungry, to clothe the poor, to protect children, and to love all people as ourselves.”

Ocasio-Cortez would have more credibility on these issues if she actually followed the tenets of the church to which she claims to belong, the Roman Catholic Church. If “there is nothing holy about rejecting medical care of people … turning someone away from a hospital [or] rejecting a child from a family,” then why does AOC staunchly support abortion, which denies unborn children medical care, hospital visits, and a family? If she believes that “all people are holy and all people are sacred,” why does she support the killing of any person in the womb?

Iran Supreme Leader’s top adviser dies from coronavirus: VP and health minister infected

They can be as suspicious as they want. I think the offer of aid was genuine and their refusal makes the bug even more their own problem to deal with.

A top adviser to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has died from the coronavirus pandemic amid a sweeping outbreak that has already infected Iran’s vice president and deputy health minister.

This weekend, Iran confirmed the death of Mohammad Mirmohammadi, a senior adviser to the Ayatollah. The news comes amid reports that Iran is trying to cover up the pervasive extent of the coronavirus epidemic in the nation.

The Iranian Health Ministry recorded 523 new cases of the coronavirus in the past 24 hours — bringing the total number of people infected in Iran to 1,501, Fox News reported.

The virus has killed at least 66 people in Iran so far. That’s the highest death toll from the coronavirus outside of China. Most of the 1,150 cases of coronavirus observed in the Middle East reportedly originated from Iran.

Last week, Iran rejected U.S. offers of help to contain the virus after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo expressed concern that Iran is trying to hide the mass outbreak in the nation.

In a statement, a spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry said Iran is “suspicious” of America’s offer of aid. He also accused the United States of trying to weaken Iran’s morale. The rep said: “We neither count on such help nor are we ready to accept verbal help.”

MARK STEYN: COVER STORY.

Before Sleepy Joe’s Super Tuesday and COVID-19’s super-spreaders and the super-virus’s increasing proximity to the super Supreme Leader and all the other stuff that will afflict us this coming week, a Monday miscellany of items that may not have caught your eye:

~From our Abbahu Akbar files, as Laura Rosen Cohen would say: For over a decade, I’ve been saying that we’ve been living through an extraordinary moment in human history – the conscious self-extinction of some of the oldest nations on the planet. Also for over a decade, I’ve been saying that if I had to pick a Continental country that would surrender to Sharia first, I’d plump for Sweden. As Laura noticed the other day, in a land that fifty years ago was almost entirely ethnically homogeneous, an increasing number of Swedish grade schools now have a student body whose first language is Arabic. Within thirty years, ethnic Swedes will be a minority in Sweden.

How do you manage such a transition? Obviously, you make it a hate crime even to raise the subject, you racist you. Still and all, people do tend to notice these things. So maybe it’s time to move to the next phase and make the total transformation of cultural mores a sexy lifestyle choice. The above magazine cover is from Swedish Elle, hailing Imane Asry’s stylish hijab as the “Look of the Year”.

There’s an utterly charming Irving Berlin song from a century ago:

The Girl I Love Is On The Magazine Cover

Now the girl I love is on the magazine covered. That’s not an improvement.

You’re not Muslim? Hey, relax; you don’t have to be – yet. It’s just the new chic. And, in certain of the livelier neighborhoods, it might lessen the risk of getting sexually assaulted when you’re walking home after work.

18-Year-Old SUV Driver Deliberately Runs Over Four Teens On Sidewalk.

Nah, there surely can’t be a islamic connection

Four teenagers were injured when an 18-year-old driver intentionally ran them over as they were walking on the sidewalk in Burlingame, California. Two of the victims suffered serious injuries and were taken to Stanford Hospital, while the other two teens were taken to a different hospital with less severe injuries.

The SUV driver, identified as Omeed Adibi, struck a fire hydrant after he mowed them down.

“The neighbor, the front room is where he watches TV, he was just house-sitting for his parents, and he heard a loud crash, and he was the first on the scene with the water going crazy,” local resident Joe Ram told KBCW-TV.

Abidi fled the scene but was taken into custody a few blocks away. Authorities said that he deliberately targeted the group, but did not provide a motive for the attack. He is facing charges of felony hit-and-run and attempted homicide.

Why did Amy Klobuchar drop out?
Party insiders would rather go to a meet-and-greet in Wuhan than see an avowed socialist at the top of the ticket

Down to 5, Bernie, SloJoe, Lieawatha, Gabbard….. and….BeetleBloom.

Minnesota Nice Wasn’t Enough. Neither were Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s center-left positions and bland presentations. And so, today, she left the race for president. Why?

The immediate reason is that her chances of winning anything on Super Tuesday were grim. The only exception was her home state, and it was far from certain. Klobuchar’s failures at the ballot box meant she had no plausible path forward. Her donors would stop giving and her backers would begin blaming her (and other also-rans) for blocking Joe Biden, who they now see as the only center-left candidate with a shot at the nomination. Biden’s huge victory in South Carolina and Bloomberg’s disastrous debates cemented that position.

Party insiders are desperate for an alternative to Bernie Sanders. They would rather go to a meet-and-greet in Wuhan than see an avowed socialist at the top of the ticket. Those pros have solid reasons for their fear. First, they think Sanders would devastate their down-ballot candidates, jeopardizing their chances to keep the House and retake the Senate. They could be wrong, just as Republican insiders were in 2016, but they are convinced Bernie would pose impossible obstacles for centrist Democrats across the country. Second, Bernie would assault the insiders hold on lucrative lobbying contracts and policy influence, just as Trump’s victory smacked down the K Street Republicans, the US Chamber of Commerce, and traditional Republican think tanks.

With Bernie poised to win the biggest Super Tuesday prizes, California and Texas and perhaps others, he is closing-in on the Golden Ring: an insurmountable lead going into the Democratic Convention in Milwaukee. But he hasn’t nailed it down yet. That’s why insiders will exert all their remaining leverage on low-ranking candidates, such as Klobuchar, to get out of the race — and do it now. They’ll also urge endorsements of Biden, while those can still help. Klobuchar’s announcement that she will back him makes her an obvious VP candidate on his ticket……..

Klobuchar’s exit and endorsement won’t shift many votes to Biden. She doesn’t have many to shift. But, together with Pete Buttigieg’s exit and Bloomberg’s failure at retail politics, it establishes Biden as the one candidate to stop Bernie. The question is whether Joe, with his gaffes, goofiness, and geologic age, has enough gas left in the tank to stop the Democratic party’s socialist surge.

How modern education has destroyed the next generation’s soul.
Students are taught self-esteem and sexual promiscuity more effectively than science and civics

Hardly a day goes by that you don’t hear the question: How did we get in this mess?
Where did this lunacy come from, and how did it all happen so quickly?
Well, let’s play a game. Let’s play “imagine.”
Imagine that we live in a day where we intentionally sever a man’s arm from his body and then expect him to win a fight.
Imagine that we live in a country where it’s common practice to remove a woman’s eyes from her head and then ask her to paint her portrait.
Imagine that ours is a time where we surgically alter a child’s frontal lobe and then demand he explain an algebraic formula.

Imagine that we live in such a world; a world where, as C.S. Lewis warned, the elite among us claim it makes sense to “remove the organ and demand the function;” a time and a place where we “geld the stallion and then “bid him be fruitful.”
Just imagine. As John Lennon said, “it’s easy if you try,”

How did we get in this mess?
One answer: As Richard Weaver said, “Ideas have consequences.” Education matters.

Why would we expect decades of teaching sexual promiscuity in our schools to result in sexual restraint in our students?
Why are we surprised at the selfishness of our culture when we have immersed several generations of our children in a curriculum that teaches self-esteem more effectively than it does science and civics?
How can we possibly think that teaching values clarification rather than moral absolutes will result in virtuous people?

Where is there any evidence in all of human history that the subordination of a child’s right to be born to an adult’s right to choose ever resulted in the protection of any individual’s unalienable right to life? And why would any culture ever think that after decades of diminishing the value of marital fidelity that the same culture would then be able to mount a vigorous defense for the meaning of marriage and morality, or anything else for that matter?

This list could go on and on. The evidence is clear. All you need to do is Google the daily news to see the proof. When you have schools that revel in separating fact from the faith, head from heart, belief from behavior and religion from reason, the result will never be liberty. It will always be licentiousness.

Severing things that should be united has a very predictable result.
“Removing the organ while demanding the function” gives us “men without chests,” an electorate of those who have nothing but a gaping cavity in the center of their being; a callousness of mind; an emptiness of conscience; vacuity where there should be virtue.
As the wisdom of Solomon tells, cutting babies in half always results in dead babies.

Ours is a day of delusion. We destroy ourselves by our dishonesty. We boast of freedom and yet live in bondage to deception. We champion human rights, yet we ignore the rights promised to us by reason, revelation and our own Constitution. We march for women while denying that women are even real.

We claim to stand for the dignity of children but remain silent while their dignity is mocked in the ivory tower’s grisly game of sexual nihilism. We are what M. Scott Peck called “people of the lie.” The road to hell is before us, and we enter its gates strutting with the confidence of an emperor with no clothes. And, when we are challenged, we belittle the “incredulous rubes” and the “deplorables” who dared shout out of our nakedness.

Santayana once said that those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Well, here is one irrefutable lesson of the past: Ideas always have consequences. Education matters. It will always lead somewhere. Our schools will either take us toward the liberty found in that which is right and just and true and real or toward the slavery made of our own dysfunction and lies.

Why are we in this mess? It is because of our local schools, colleges and universities. When you relentlessly work to remove the next generation’s soul, you should not expect your culture to stay out of hell.

“All your life long you are slowly turning … either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, and rage … Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other.” — C.S. Lewis “Mere Christianity”

Dow roars back from coronavirus sell-off with biggest gain since 2009, surges 5.1%.

Stocks rebounded sharply from their worst week since the financial crisis on Monday, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average posting its best day in more than a decade. Expectations that the Federal Reserve would cut rates drove the gains, which accelerated aggressively into the close.

The Dow closed 1,293.96 points higher, or 5.1%, at 26,703.32. The move on a percentage basis was the Dow’s biggest since March 2009. It was the largest-ever points gain for the 30-stock average.

The S&P 500 climbed 4.6% — its best one-day performance since Dec. 26, 2018 — to close at 3,090.23. The Nasdaq Composite also had its best day since 2018, surging 4.5% to 8,952.16.

Monday’s gains snapped a seven-day losing streak for the Dow.

Apple shares led the Dow higher with a 9.3% jump; Merck and Walmart gained 6.3% and 7.6%, respectively. Utilities, tech, consumer staples and real estate all rose more than 5% to lead the S&P 500 higher.

The major averages were coming off a massive decline from the week before as worries over the coronavirus spreading dented investor sentiment.

CH 20200302_dow_daily_points.xlsx

“The market has been conditioned to buy on any weakness,” said Keith Buchanan, portfolio manager at GLOBALT. “We’ve grown accustomed to bad days being followed by a few good days in a row.”

Study Proves Mass Shootings Are NOT Becoming More Common

The researchers also noted that more kids are killed each year in incidents involving pools and bicycles than in all the school shootings combined.

Of course, this study didn’t get a whole lot of attention in the mainstream media. That’s not surprising. After all, they seem to be personally invested in selling the idea that our kids aren’t likely to survive to graduate because of some maniac with an AR-15 is going to kill them all. Yet looking at the average over the last 25 years, it’s easy to see that more students are killed in car crashes than by mass shooters.

So why does everyone freak over these?

For one thing, it’s not about the total numbers. It’s about the number of people killed per incident. It’s not about how many have been killed in the last quarter of a century or what the annual average. If a dozen die in a single incident, that’s an even bigger tragedy but if you spread those deaths over an entire year, it’s a statistic.

That’s what’s fueling much of this nonsense.

Gun-Rights Activists Look to Supreme Court to Take Up AR-15 Bans, Confiscation Bills
High Court has yet to rule on ‘assault weapon’ bans

The latest denial of cert, even if it was simply for the preliminary injunction requiring the bump stocks be surrendered or destroyed, as I have just learned, still leaves me uneasy about the odds that the court will grant it for any of these cases, even though there’s disagreements across the appeals circuits.

Second Amendment advocates are pursuing multiple lawsuits against gun-control measures in an effort to trigger a Supreme Court challenge that could upend decades of legislation.

The Second Amendment Foundation has filed multiple gun-rights challenges in federal courts across the country. Founder Alan Gottlieb said the muddled nature of state laws, on issues ranging from open carry to the possession of certain weapons, calls out for judicial review from the nation’s highest court.

“Politicians making claims that the Second Amendment doesn’t apply to so-called assault weapons is exactly why the Supreme Court needs to take all of these cases and put this issue to rest,” Gottlieb told the Washington Free Beacon

The Supreme Court has never heard a legal challenge on either federal or state bans on “assault weapons” and has been largely silent on Second Amendment issues since its landmark rulings in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) and McDonald v. Chicago (2010)……..

If the Supreme Court is moved to rule on new gun-rights cases….it could change the landscape of gun laws in the United States. Any ruling expanding protections for what categories of guns Americans have a right to own, or where they have a right to take their guns, could strike down laws in heavily Democratic states such as California, New York, and Illinois.

In 2016, the Supreme Court used Heller to toss out a Massachusetts woman’s conviction for possessing a stun gun banned in the state—the ban was later struck down by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. That was the only major gun-rights case that the justices ruled on in the last decade. Gun-rights advocates say the reluctance of the High Court to act has led to a confusing web of lower court decisions that leave the extent of Second Amendment protections an open question……….

Second Amendment activists are confident that they would prevail if state or local gun bans reach the Supreme Court. The Court ruled in Heller that weapons “in common use” for lawful purposes are protected by the Second Amendment. The AR-15 and other semiautomatic rifles are some of the most popular guns in the country with more than 17.7 million owned by civilians in the United States, according to a recent industry estimate……..

Appellate courts have disagreed, but there has been no uniform legal reasoning between circuits affirming the constitutionality of gun bans.

The Seventh Circuit ruled AR-15s and similar firearms banned in Cook County, Illinois, do not have a “reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well-regulated militia.” The Fourth Circuit ruled the AR-15s banned by Maryland are “‘weapons that are most useful in military service’ — which the Heller Court singled out as being beyond the Second Amendment’s reach.” The D.C. Circuit ruled there was a “substantial relationship” between the city’s AR-15 ban “and the objectives of protecting police officers and controlling crime.” The First Circuit ruled Massachusetts “(at most) minimally burdens” Second Amendment rights with its AR-15 ban.

Mark Oliva, a spokesman for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, said the varied opinions make the issue ripe for the Supreme Court to take up.

“There are no grounds to say it’s settled law. You have circuit courts of appeal that are at disagreement as to why those bans are constitutional,” he told the Free Beacon. “When you have disagreement among the circuit courts that is a reason why the Supreme Court could be weighing in to come to an agreement on what that standard is.”………

There are at least six separate gun-rights challenges from Maryland, Illinois, Massachusetts, California, and New Jersey—as well as one challenging a federal ban on interstate handgun sales—waiting for review by the High Court. Not every gun-control advocate shares Levine’s optimism. Ladd Everitt, former director of the gun-control group One Pulse for America, said pro-gun control policymakers should not give the Supreme Court leeway to set new precedents overturning gun-control laws.

“The majority’s decision in Heller led to a torrent of litigation against gun-control laws nationwide,” Everitt said in a 2019 op-ed. “Thankfully, federal courts have rejected most of those challenges. It will become harder to do so in the future, however, if our increasingly pro-gun Supreme Court is allowed additional, unnecessary bites at the Second Amendment apple.”

The District of Columbia declined to appeal a 2017 decision striking down its restrictive gun-carry permit law because city officials feared a Supreme Court decision would strike down similar laws in other states. In 2019, New York City officials attempted to withdraw a bid to defend a law limiting the transportation of legally owned firearms after the Supreme Court agreed to review the case. Local gun-control groups even lobbied for a state law loosening the travel restrictions out of fear of what the Court might rule.

Several Supreme Court justices have publicly spoken out in favor of the Court taking more gun-rights cases. When the Court declined to hear a challenge to a California gun-carry law in 2017, Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch wrote a dissent, telling their colleagues not to “stand by idly while a State denies its citizens that right.”

“The Court’s decision to deny certiorari in this case reflects a distressing trend: the treatment of the Second Amendment as a disfavored right,” Thomas said. “The Court has not heard [an] argument in a Second Amendment case in over seven years—since March 2, 2010, in McDonald…. Since that time, we have heard argument[s] in, for example, roughly 35 cases where the question presented turned on the meaning of the First Amendment and 25 cases that turned on the meaning of the Fourth Amendment.”

The make-up of the Court has changed drastically since McDonald, following the additions of President Trump’s appointees, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch. Kavanaugh has previously weighed in on the constitutionality of gun bans, notably dissenting when the D.C. Circuit upheld the city’s assault-weapons ban in 2011.

“In my judgment, both D.C.’s ban on semiautomatic rifles and its gun registration requirement are unconstitutional under Heller,” he wrote. “There is no meaningful or persuasive constitutional distinction between semiautomatic handguns and semiautomatic rifles. Semiautomatic rifles, like semiautomatic handguns, have not traditionally been banned and are in common use by law-abiding citizens for self-defense in the home, hunting, and other lawful uses.”

Americans may soon get a preview of which direction the current Court will move on guns when it issues its decision in the New York City gun-transportation case. In December, justices heard oral arguments in the New York City case and will decide whether to allow authorities to drop the case or rule on the merits. No matter the outcome in that case, both sides of the gun-control debate say the Supreme Court has the potential to shake up the entire course of legislative debates moving forward.

Coronavirus in Washington state: 6 dead, 12 others infected

‘The elderly and ill’ were already on the list of those most susceptible to this bug. That it caused these deaths isn’t surprising. That it got loose as has is thought as it indicates someone was slacking off on precautions for a facility like this.

SEATTLE – Six people have now died from the coronavirus in the Puget Sound area and at least 12 others have been infected, health officials said Monday, as King County’s top executive issued an emergency declaration in response to the outbreak.

The newest victims in King County include:

– A man in his 70s, a resident of LifeCare who was hospitalized at EvergreenHealth. The man had underlying health conditions and died Sunday.

A woman in her 70s, a resident of LifeCare, was hospitalized at EvergreenHealth. She had underlying health conditions and died Sunday.

– A woman in her 80s, who was hospitalized at EvergreenHealth and was one of the earlier reported infected and died Sunday.

And a Snohomish County man in his 40s at EvergreenHealth has also died. He had been a previously-announced infection.

Overall, five deaths are King County residents and one death a Snohomish County resident. Of the 12 other reported, confirmed infections, 10 are King County residents and two are from Snohomish County.

Researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and the University of Washington on Sunday said they had evidence the virus may have been circulating in the state for up to six weeks undetected — a finding that, if true, could mean hundreds of undiagnosed cases in the area.

In Kirkland, city officials announced that now 27 of their firefighters and two of their police officers are in quarantine as they had been responding to the Kirkland LifeCare Center over the past week.

Law students storm out of ‘purely legalistic’ DACA discussion

Law students, LAW STUDENTS.  Students, supposedly in university to study LAW. What irony…and idiocy,  from those that have been propagandized until they totally lack self awareness.

Stanford University law students, upset about a “morally affronting” discussion of the arguments for and against the legality of DACA, staged a walkout of the event in protest.

On Feb. 10, Texas Solicitor General Kyle Hawkins spoke at Stanford Law School, sponsored by Stanford’s Federalist Society chapter. After Hawkins began his speech on the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, more than half of those in the room got up and left. The purpose of Hawkins’ speech was to discuss the issues of legalities of repealing DACA.

Hawkins stated that he would be covering and arguing both sides for and against DACA…………

The walk-out from Hawkins’ speech was arranged by the Stanford Latinx Law Students Association (SLLSA) along with various other student groups. SLLSA member Raquel Zepeda wrote in an email to law students that the lecture was an “intellectually cheap and morally affronting topic.” In protest, students held posters that read, “No human being is illegal”, and “Everyone is welcome here.”

While Hawkins spoke about both sides on DACA he mentioned that Trump’s motion to repeal “did not say that DACA was unworkable…it just says that DACA is unlawful.”

“DACA is unlawful for the same reason that DAPA was unlawful, according to the fifth circuit,” Hawkins added.

Hawkins also spoke about the Obama administration not having the authority to put DACA into place as it “confers on someone a status Congress would otherwise deny.”

In a statement, SLLSA  and other groups said that “purely legalistic discussions of DACA ignore the human element, which must be front and center… we can not agree to disregard the presence and importance of DREAMers in all places, including here at SLS,” being that those who walked out did not find legality to be of importance in this aspect.

U.S. Supreme Court rejects challenge to ban on gun ‘bump stocks’

This case was less ‘RKBA’ as it wasn’t based on a 2nd Amendment argument, than about ‘Chevron Deference’ where the courts defer to bureaucraps when they tie themselves into a logic pretzel to come up with a regulation. And as I have just learned, this was a ‘only’ denial of cert for the preliminary injunction on the demand by ATF that bump stocks have to be destroyed or surrendered since they are considered contraband machinegun conversion devices, but whatever.

This provides more confirmation that the conservative side of the court probably considers Roberts the new ‘squish’ as it only takes 4 Justices to grant ‘cert’.
And that means among Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, Alito & Thomas they figured Roberts would side against them. Kavanaugh, Gorsuch have case history against ‘deference’ and Thomas has recently changed his mind and come around against it.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday rebuffed a bid by gun rights advocates to overturn President Donald Trump’s ban on “bump stocks” – devices that enable semi-automatic weapons to fire rapidly like a machine gun – implemented after the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting.

The justices left in place a lower court’s decision that upheld the Trump administration’s action to define bump stocks as prohibited machine guns under U.S. law.

The ban, which went into effect in March 2019, was embraced by Trump following a massacre that killed 58 people at a music festival in Las Vegas in which the gunman used bump stocks. It represented a rare recent instance of gun control at the federal level in a country that has experienced a series of mass shootings.

Numerous gun control proposals have been thwarted in the U.S. Congress, largely because of opposition by Republican lawmakers and the influential National Rifle Association gun rights lobby.

The Firearms Policy Foundation, a gun rights group, and other plaintiffs sued in federal court to try to reverse Trump’s action. The Supreme Court last year refused to block the ban from going into effect while the legal challenges against it were considered in the courts. The justices also refused to temporarily exempt from the plaintiffs in the case from the ban.

USFDA’s COVID-19 Supply Chain Update: Is There a Shortage?

The USFDA has been monitoring the nation’s supply chain very closely with the expectation that the coronavirus outbreak would likely cause potential disruptions to supply or shortages of critical medical products in the nation.

The FDA has been contacting over 180 human drug manufacturers to notify them of any anticipated supply disruptions and to evaluate their entire supply chain. Some manufacturers have alerted the FDA about the shortage of a particular drug.

“A manufacturer just notified us that this shortage is related to a site affected by a coronavirus. The shortage is due to an issue with the manufacturing of an active pharmaceutical ingredient used in the drug,” FDA’s recent press release read. “It is important to note that there are other alternatives that can be used by patients. We are working with the manufacturer as well as other manufacturers to mitigate the shortage. We will do everything possible to mitigate the shortage.”

Here’s a gist of the supply chain update:

1. Human drugs

 About 20 drugs solely source their active pharmaceutical ingredients from China. The FDA has been in touch with all those manufacturers to assess whether they face any drug shortage risks due to the COVID-19 outbreak. None of them have reported any shortage so far.

A total of 63 manufacturers representing 72 different facilities in China that produce essential medical devices have also reported no shortages within the U.S. market. However, there are some supply challenges of personal protective equipment including gloves, gowns, masks, respirator protective devices and other products that are designed to protect the wearer from injury or the spread of infection or illnesses.

3. Biologics & Blood Supply

Currently, there are no reported shortages of biologics. But the FDA has no information pertaining to any cellular or gene therapies that are made in China for the U.S.

4. Food

The FDA isn’t aware of any reports suggesting COVID_19 transmission via food or food packaging. With more cases of COVID-19 appearing in the nation, supermarkets and other retailers are preparing for a surge in demand for supplies including staple foods and cleaning products.

5. Animal Drugs

Among 31 animal drug manufacturers that source ingredients from china, six of them have notified that they could soon face shortages.

An Obama Holdover in an Obscure Government Arm Helped Cause the Country’s Coronavirus Crisis
Who really decided to bring infected people to the United States?

Two months after the outbreak of the coronavirus, #TrumpVirus began trending on Twitter. Why? Because it’s the only chance that the Democrats have of winning back the White House in 2020.

Saddled with broken primaries whose nominee, after a possible brokered convention, will either be a Socialist who admires Communists, a senile lecher who admires young girls, or a billionaire who admires power, the coronavirus is a much more effective candidate than Sanders, Biden, or Bloomberg.

#TrumpVirus follows in the footsteps of #TrumpHurricane which attempted to blame a natural disaster and local corruption in Puerto Rico on President Trump. And that just dusted off the smears and slanders of Hurricane Katrina and substituted Puerto Ricans for black people and Trump for Bush.

Not to mention the CDC for FEMA.

The truth about disaster relief and pandemic management is that it hasn’t changed much between administrations. The Bush administration dealt with SARS in much the same way that the Obama administration addressed swine flu. And the Trump administration is doing most of the same things.

That’s because the actual decisions are being made by bureaucrats based on existing protocols.

The best example of this was the decision to fly back infected American passengers from the Diamond Princess. This fateful decision helped spread the virus inside the United States.

President Trump had been told that nobody with the coronavirus would be flown to America.

The State Department decided to do it anyway without telling him and only made the announcement shortly after the planes landed in the United States.

According to the Washington Post, as unfriendly an outlet to the administration as there is, “Trump has since had several calls with top White House officials to say he should have been told, that it should have been his decision and that he did not agree with the decision that was made.”

Who in the State Department actually made the decision? That’s a very good question.

According to a State Department briefing, the missions were carried out by the Directorate of Operational Medicine within the Bureau of Medical Services. You might think that sounds like it would be part of HHS or NIH, but the Bureau of Medical Services is actually an arm of the State Department.

The Directorate of Operational Medicine is a part of the Bureau assigned to deal with crisis response with a $250 million portfolio and a lot of employees that almost no one outside D.C. ever heard of. At least unless you remember an event at which Barack Obama honored Dr. William Walters, the head of the Directorate, for evacuating Ebola patients to the United States.

“Now, remember, the decision to move Kent back to the United States was controversial.  Some worried about bringing the disease to our shores.  But what folks like William knew was that we had to make the decisions based not on fear, but on science,” Obama said.

By “some”, Obama meant, among others, Trump, who had been a strong critic of the move.

Despite Obama’s end-zone dance, the State Department had badly botched the Ebola evacuations.

Under Bush, the CDC had prepped an evacuation aircraft for flying out contagious Americans. The Obama administration shelved the gear because of the cost, and then failed to make use of it. The evacuation process led to the same infighting between the State Department and the CDC as now.

Dr. William Walters is still on duty. In 2017, Walters was boasting of prepping more Ebola evacuations even over President Trump’s opposition to the practice. And he was once again at the wheel now.

“The question was simply this: Are these evacuees?” Walters explained the decision to evacuate coronavirus patients to the United States. “And do we follow our protocol? And the answer to that was yes on both accounts.”

Consulting President Trump was not part of the protocol even on a major national security issue.

In a Congressional briefing, Walters boasted that, “the Department executed the largest non-military evacuation of U.S. citizens in its history. The safe and efficient evacuation of 1,174 people from Wuhan, China and people onboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship in Japan is a testament to the agility, proficiency, and dedication of our workforce to accomplishing our core mission – advancing the interests of the American people.”

And the triumph of the administrative state and its bureaucratic protocols over the President.

At a State Department briefing, Walters stated that, “The chief of mission, right, through the U.S. embassy, is ultimately the head of all executive branch activities.”

That is the problem. Right there.

Walters got his job in 2011. He’s a relic of the Obama era. That doesn’t mean that his politics are those of his former boss. But this is not about him. It’s about the reality that the White House doesn’t make many of the most vital decisions and doesn’t even know that they’re being made until it’s too late.

And what that means, beyond the politics of the moment, is that the people don’t decide.

You can vote one way or another and the real decisions that matter will still be made by the head of a directorate that is a subsection of a bureau that you never heard of, but that has a budget in the hundreds of millions, a small army as its disposal, and will follow whatever the protocol is.

This is how the country is really run. And that’s the problem.

The underlying problem with our government is that it’s too big to control. Voting in an election or even sitting in the Oval Office doesn’t mean you’re in charge. The problem goes beyond the current obsession with the Deep State. The real issue has always been the Deep Industry or the administrative state.

If the coronavirus becomes a critical problem in this country, the blame will go back to an obscure arm of the State Department, but it will never be placed there. Whatever happens a year from now, no one outside a small professional class will have ever heard of the Directorate of Operational Medicine.

The media will spend all its time bashing President Trump, Pence, assorted cabinet members, and perhaps the CDC, without ever drilling down to the facts, even though it has them at hand. The media’s rule of thumb is that natural disasters and disease outbreaks are always successfully managed by Democrats and mismanaged by Republicans. Katrina and Maria were disasters, but Sandy was a success story. The coronavirus is a catastrophe, but the Ebola virus was brilliantly handed by smart people who are handling the coronavirus response. But it’s different because the guy in the White House is.

The truth is that all of these were mismanaged by the same agencies, many of the same people, and by a government infrastructure that excels at drawing up big budget proposals, but is inept at solving problems when they actually emerge, and just follow whatever protocols will cover its collective asses…….

Washington “Spring Blade” Knife Ban Repeal Passed by House Judiciary Committee

Knife Rights: Washington state “Spring Blade” (Switchblade) Knife Ban Repeal bill, SB 5782, was reported out the House Civil Rights & Judiciary Committee by a 12-3 vote with a  “do pass” recommendation.  The next step would be a vote by the full House. We will let you know when it is time to contact House members.

Thanks to the hundreds of Washingtonians who used the Knife Rights’ Legislative Action Center to email the committee members. It had a huge impact!.

Knife Rights would also like to thank Committee Chair Christine Kilduff for allowing the bill to come for a vote and Ranking Member Morgan Irwin for his support.

Knife Rights’ has helped enact 16 Switchblade Ban or Restriction Repeals since 2010: Alaska, Indiana, Kansas, Maine, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, Nevada, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin.

Second Amendment supporters attend militia muster call in Campbell County

CAMPBELL CO., Va. (WSET) — Campbell County joins the growing list of localities holding militia muster calls.

At least 300 people showed up to the militia muster call in Campbell County to protect their Second Amendment rights on Saturday.

The muster call was held on Leesville Road in Lynchburg.

Floyd County held the first militia muster in the area in January.

Bedford County followed suit two weeks ago.

Virginia Code 44-1 defines the four sections of Virginia’s militia which includes the unorganized militia.

Anyone ages 16 to 55 can join an unorganized militia, according to Virginia’s code.

Thomas Massie: If Voter ID Is a Tax on Voting Rights, Firearm Licensing Is a Tax on 2A Rights

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) used a Wednesday hearing to suggest that if Voter ID is a tax on voting rights, then firearm licensing is a tax on Second Amendment rights.

Massie made this point while cross-examining Voter ID opponents, contending that their arguments break down if they oppose issuance of ID’s for one constitutional right but look the other way when ID’s are required for the exercise of a a different right.

Fox News reported Timothy Jenkins, a witness in the hearing and board member of Teaching for Change, criticized Massie for bringing up licensing for gun rights during a discussion about licensing for voting rights.

Jenkins said:

Let me tell you this: that the whole business of being able to vote is not intermeshed with the business of bearing arms. You are taking the time that we’re trying to deal with a constitutional right to be a citizen and turning it into something else. Use another forum! We don’t have many opportunities to get a right to vote. We don’t have an opportunity to talk about the whole business of the way in which the Constitution has been distorted. And don’t take us off on some rabbit trail to talk about arms.

Jenkins also said, “Let the record show, that nobody has died because of their being deprived of bearing guns.”

Massie interjected:

What you’re saying, Mr. Jenkins, is absolutely incorrect. I had a staffer … who worked for me. She watched her husband be gunned down in front of her in a gun-free zone, because her firearm — she followed the law and left her firearm in the vehicle. So do not tell me, and do not tell her that nobody has ever died because they were deprived of their right to keep and bear arms.

In a separate but pertinent example, Breitbart News reported Carol Bowne applied for a license to possess a gun for self-defense in April 2015 and was stabbed to death on June 3, 2015, while waiting for the state of New Jersey to issue the license.

The Courier-Post reported Bowne sought state’s permission to have a gun so she could protect herself from a former boyfriend. It was he who was charged with stabbing Bowne to death as she waited for the state to grant her a license for gun ownership

 

Mike Bloomberg’s Campaign Has Fired Up At Least One Group: The NRA and Gun Owners.

Billionaire media mogul Michael Bloomberg’s presidential run helped gun-rights groups light a fire under owners of firearms who grew somewhat complacent in the era of President Trump.

Gun groups ranging from the National Rifle Association to Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership are whipping up their members with dire warnings about a potential President Bloomberg.

A former mayor of New York City who leapfrogged to the top-tier in the Democratic presidential race, Mr. Bloomberg has a long record of challenging the Second Amendment from his get-tough policies as mayor to bankrolling a massive gun control advocacy organization.

The National Association for Gun Rights alerted its members on social media to Mr. Bloomberg’s $300 million campaign to “DESTROY the Second Amendment,” calling on them to unite and stop “his anti-gun agenda.”

“Our members are motivated by Mike Bloomberg and have been for a while,” said Dudley Brown, president of the National Association for Gun Rights. “He is a billionaire and one of his main focuses has been spending his own personal money to destroy the Second Amendment. And he has been relatively successful. All of the groups on the left rely on his money.”

The NRA recently penned an editorial detailing the former mayor’s high-dollar push to limit soda consumption through taxes and shut down coal-fired power plants, arguing he will do the same to guns.

“Bloomberg has promised to spend ‘whatever it takes’ from his $55 billion personal fortune to control you from our nation’s capital,” the NRA article warned of his self-funded run for the Oval Office.

Amy Hunter, the NRA’s director of media relations, said Mr. Bloomberg is just like the other Democratic presidential candidates pushing for “registration, confiscation and bans,” but his deep pockets make him a top enemy for legal gun owners.

“His hypocritical desire to strip all Americans of their right to self-defense while he enjoys 24/7 armed security and his willingness to spend billions to destroy the Second Amendment make him a greater threat to those who cherish their constitutional rights,” said Ms. Hunter.

Alan Korwin, a consultant with Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, said the group is convinced Mr. Bloomberg’s goal is gun confiscation.

“He reflects everything that is wrong with the mainstream Jewish population in America. He doesn’t understand why guns are important and he takes a strictly anti-gun rights view. He wants to confiscate guns,” Mr. Korwin said.

Gun Control And Demographics: I

mmigrants Vote Against American Gun Rights

So Virginia gun owners just dodged a legislative bullet in the form of a proposed ban on so-called assault weapons. But a demographic bullet is still aimed right where it can do the most damage: the ballot box. The Great Replacement that Leftists celebrate—even as they call it a racist conspiracy theory—is the primary reason gun rights are in the crosshairs in Virginia and throughout the country. Immigration has consequences, meaning foreign-origin voters, and if the GOP doesn’t figure that out soon, gun rights will go the way of Confederate statues, along with other American rights currently undreamt of.

Consider the most recent near miss: Four moderate Democrats sided with Republicans in Virginia’s Senate to block a ban on semi-automatic sporting rifles such as the AR-15. Magazines of more than 12 rounds were targeted, too.

This provoked some eloquent opposition. “The people of Virginia are demanding that someone, anybody that is in power, please stand up and defend the Second Amendment,” said Sen. Amanda Chase, a gun-rights champion and GOP gubernatorial candidate. “If I am going to continue to do the law-abiding work of the people I am going to have to arm myself, so I went through all the training, got the licensing and all that and I will just tell you—I won’t miss” [‘We don’t need weapons of war’: Va. Gov. Northam reacts to failed assault weapons ban, by Tim Barber, WJLA.com, February 18, 2020].

Senator Chase was right: Real Virginians are indeed demanding that someone defend their rights, as the massive gun-rights rally on January 20 surely showed. But the last election results showed something else: Non-white Third World immigrants in Richmond and Northern Virginia who put the Democrats in power last election are doing their best to take those rights away.

“The 2020 legislative session kicked off shortly after noon with several history-making firsts as women and people of color assumed leadership roles previously held only by white men for the last 400 years,” gloated The Associated Press:

One of the House’s first acts was to elect Del. Eileen Filler-Corn as the new speaker, the first woman to serve in that role. She is also the first Jewish speaker.

Her top deputy, House Majority Leader Charniele Herring, is the first black woman to hold that role, and the House elected Suzette Denslow to be the first ever female clerk. Ghazala Hashmi, who unseated a Republican incumbent to help Democrats flip the Senate, became that chamber’s first Muslim female member.

[Newly empowered Virginia Democrats promise action, by Alan Suderman and Sarah Rankin, January 8, 2020]

The New York Times has published two separate articles that celebrate the immigrant-driven demographic displacement of white Virginians and what it means for those who still “cling to their guns or religion,” as the presidential scion of a Kenyan immigrant famously put it.

“Guns, that is the most pressing issue for me,” Indian engineer Vijay Katkuri told the Times of his vote for a Democrat. “There are lots of other issues, but you can only fix them if you are alive.” Enthused the NYT, “once the heart of the confederacy, Virginia is now the land of Indian grocery stores, Korean churches and Diwali festivals” [How Voters Turned Virginia From Deep Red to Solid Blue, by Sabrina Tavernise and Robert Gebeloff, November 9, 2019].

The paper gleefully noted that 10 percent of Virginian voters are foreign-born, up from 3.6 percent in 1990, and that the white population in Katkuris’ district has plummeted from 91 percent to 64 percent.

Such is the shift, the New York Times reported in its second tribute to The Great Replacement, that a Muslim woman born in India, Ghazal Hashmi, defeated an incumbent Republican in suburban Richmond:

At the root of this district’s—and Virginia’s—political transition is a slow-moving demographic change, a new kind of suburbanization that is sweeping through national politics. From Atlanta to Houston, this pattern is repeating itself—suburban housing developments gobbling up rural areas and farmland and lifting Democrats to power.

[What Made Virginia Change Its Mind on Guns? by Timothy Williams, January 30, 2020].

Of course, the GOP didn’t help its cause last year by leaving 33 General Assembly races uncontested—10 in House, 23 in the Senate—particularly given that Democrats control the House by a slim two votes and the Senate by 11. Nor can one ignore Michael Bloomberg’s 90-caliber shot at gun rights: $2.5 million that overwhelmed the National Rifle Association’s popgun [Mike Bloomberg’s gun-control group just vastly outspent the NRA to help Democrats win in Virginia, by Lauren Hirsch, CNBC, November 6, 2019].

But demographics are what mattered in the election and will matter long term, as MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough cheerily explained.

Tweeted the ex-conservative:

https://twitter.com/JoeNBC/status/1226906496170102795

Sex robots with ‘coding flaws’ prone to ‘sexually assaulting humans.’

Well, it is the time frame that the original Blade Runner was set in.

The computer science professor, therefore, warns robots that are not programmed correctly risk overstepping the boundaries of human consent.

Speaking at a Raspberry Dream Labs event, he told Daily Star Online: “It makes sense for us to debate what should be the boundaries for consent given by humans to robots.