Lee’s Summit homeowner shoots, injures intruder Saturday morning

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Police in Lee’s Summit say a homeowner opened fire after discovering an intruder inside their home Saturday morning.

Officers were called just after 7:30 a.m. to the 2800 block of NW Chipman Road after receiving a call about a burglary.

A Lee’s Summit police spokesperson said the homeowner told officers a male had entered their residence and refused to leave. The homeowner said they fired one shot toward the male, striking him with gunfire.

The male subject was able to escape the home and get into a nearby vehicle. Police later located the vehicle and took the driver and the injured male subject into custody.

The spokesperson said the male subject’s injuries were not life-threatening.

Detectives are continuing to investigate the incident, though at this time, they don’t believe the male subject and the homeowner knew each other. No other suspects are being sought.

Jackson County prosecutors issued a warrant for 32-year-old Trent Taylor on Saturday.

He is charged with first-degree burglary and two counts of harassment.

Police said Taylor’s bond is set at $45,000 or 10%.

September 2, 2024

1901 – Vice President Theodore Roosevelt utters the famous phrase, “Speak softly and carry a big stick” at the Minnesota State Fair.

1945 – 6 years and 1 day after it began, with over 80 million dead, World War II ends when The Japanese Instrument of Surrender is signed by Japan and the major Allied Powers aboard the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay.

Matt Whitlock

Cotton lays out all the important facts that have been completely misrepresented:

“[Trump] didn’t take campaign photos there. These families — Gold Star families — whose children died due to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s incompetence, invited him to the cemetery, and they asked him to take those photos…”

“You know who those families also invited? Joe Biden and Kamala Harris — where were they? Joe Biden was sitting at a beach. Kamala Harris was sitting at her mansion in Washington, DC. She was four miles away — ten minutes. She could’ve gone to the cemetery and honor the sacrifice of those young men and women, but she hasn’t. She never has spoken to them or taken a meeting with them. *It is because of her and Joe Biden’s incompetence that those 13 Americans were killed in Afghanistan.*”

And when the anchor pushes back that Harris attended that “they attended the dignified transfer,” Kamala Harris did NOT, just Joe who was seen and photographed repeatedly checking his watch.

Shooting Straight with John Lott

The mainstream media likes to use federal statistics as hooks for their one-sided gun-control narratives. The thing is, many of those statistics are suspect, even those from various federal agencies. The Crime Prevention Research Center’s (CPRC) work goes deep into how factual this “official data” is.

Indeed, when I reached out to John Lott, president and founder of the CPRC, he talked about his time working as a senior adviser for research and statistics at the Office of Justice Programs—a Department of Justice division that doles out about $5 billion in grants each year—during the Trump administration and about his research into crime and gun ownership. He has a lot to say about the statistics these agencies publish. As crime is an important topic in this upcoming election, we decided it was time to speak with Lott about how politically skewed these numbers from federal agencies can be.

Continue reading “”

September 1, 2024

1878 – Finding that the young men originally hired as telegraph messengers are providing unsatisfactory customer service as voice telephone operators, Emma Nutt becomes the first female telephone operator when she is recruited by Alexander Graham Bell to the Boston Telephone Dispatch Company. It is not until nearly 100 years later, in the early 1970s, under terms of the Equal Opportunity Act mandating opportunities for ‘non-traditional’ job placement, before men are again hired to be operators, yours truly being one of them.

1939 – Ground, Air and Naval forces of Nazi Germany begin an attack and invasion of Poland beginning what will be World War II.

 

Here’s How We Really Know Kamala’s CNN Interview Wasn’t Good for Her

There are plenty of reasons why Kamala Harris’s first interview since she took Joe Biden’s place at the top of the ticket was underwhelming at best — or a train wreck at worst — for her. I thought it was really bad. Kamala got a lot of softball questions that she couldn’t answer, and Tim Walz didn’t help much either.

But how do we know that the interview was a bust for Kamala? Let me explain.

As you know, Kamala has been under significant pressure to stop hiding behind scripted campaign events and speak to the media in interviews and press conferences. When her interview with CNN was announced, there was little reason to believe that it would satisfy her critics — between choosing a friendly network with an anchor who was gonna give her the softest of softball questions, the deck was going to be stacked in Kamala’s favor to come out looking pretty good after the interview.

She didn’t, and that’s not because I said so. Kamala’s performance Thursday evening didn’t exactly floor CNN pundits.

Former Obama advisor David Axelrod said he thought Kamala did well, but “It wasn’t a huge — I don’t think she moved the ball that much forward.”

Ashley Allison, a former Obama White House staffer, similarly tried to paint the interview in a positive light, by falsely claiming that Kamala “answered every question” but added, “Now, you might not like the way she answered them. But she answered them as a capable, qualified leader. And I do think she — I think she moved the ball forward a little bit. Maybe she didn’t score a touchdown, tonight. But she definitely moved down the field.”

One goal that Kamala wants to achieve in the campaign is putting distance between her and the Biden-Harris administration. CNN political analyst Astead Herndon clearly doesn’t think she succeeded.

“I don’t think there’s a policy separation that they’ve created with Biden. Obviously, she gave a kind of personal defense of him. But they’re also very clearly trying to position her as a change candidate,” he said.

Another devastating blow for Kamala is that even CNN’s fact-checker Daniel Dale admitted that she was being dishonest about her flip-flopping on fracking.

Remember, this is CNN. This network wants Harris to win, yet its attempts to put lipstick on the pig that was this so-called “interview” let enough truth come through to make it clear that nobody really thought she did that great of a job.

It’s nice we even have video for PID of an actual threat to the U.S.

Do We Need a ‘New Constitution’ to Protect Democracy™? Berkeley Professor Weighs in

Erwin Chemerinsky, Berkeley Law School dean and author of “No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States,” is not a fan of the United States Constitution, which obviously makes him an ideal academic to teach the next generation of lawyers how to practice law.

Via Los Angeles Times (emphasis added):

No matter the outcome of the November elections, it is urgent that there be a widespread recognition that American democracy is in danger and that reforms are essential. No form of government lasts forever, and it would be foolhardy to believe that the United States cannot fall prey to the forces that have ended democracies in many other countries.

Although the causes are complex, many of today’s problems can be traced back to choices made in drafting the Constitution, choices that are increasingly haunting us. After 200 years, it is time to begin thinking of drafting a new Constitution to create a more effective, more democratic government.

Signs abound that American democracy is in serious trouble. Confidence in the institutions of American government is at an all-time low. The Pew Research Center has been tracking public trust in government since 1958. It has gone from a high-water mark of 77% in 1964 to our contemporary 20%.* A poll in September 2023 indicated that only 4% of U.S. adults said the American political system worked “extremely or very well.” A recent Gallup poll had only 16% of Americans expressing approval for how Congress is performing its job.

Especially individuals in their 20s and 30s are losing faith in democracy. A Brookings Institution study found that 29% of “young Americans say that democracy is not always preferable to other political forms.”

*These people never ask fundamental questions like: why is trust in government at an all-time low? Nothing is different about this guy’s analysis; he simply chalks it up to some vague failings of “democracy” without legitimizing the mistrust, which isn’t fit to be printed in the self-anointed guardians of Democracy™ like the Los Angeles Times.

**Here I feel compelled to offer the obligatory but necessary caveat that we don’t actually have a pure democracy. In generic terms, “democracy” means rule by the people. In practice, pure democracy is merely mob rule, which is not and has never been a foundation of Western civilization excepts for brief stints of upheaval like the French Revolution — and we saw how that story ended.


Continuing:

There is an alternative to a spate of separate amendments: starting fresh by passing a new Constitution. It does not take much reflection to see the absurdity of using a document written for a small, poor and relatively inconsequential nation in the late 18th century to govern a large country of immense wealth in the technological world of the 21st century.

It may seem strange and frightening to suggest thinking of a new Constitution at a time of great partisan division. But that existed in 1787; in many of the states, the Constitution was just barely ratified.

What Could Go Wrong? It’s Possible US Navy Will Escort Philippine Ships in South China Sea

The Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy (yes, that’s really what they call it) has been acting aggressively towards Philippine shipping and fishing vessels in the South China Sea for some time now. Because of this, the United States Navy is now reportedly “open to consultations” about the possibility of using American ships to escort Philippine shipping through the contested area.

What could possibly go wrong with that?

The U.S. military is open to consultations about escorting Philippine ships in the disputed South China Sea, the head of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command said Tuesday amid a spike in hostilities between Beijing and Manila in the disputed waters.

Adm. Samuel Paparo’s remarks, which he made in response to a question during a news conference in Manila with Philippine Armed Forces chief Gen. Romeo Brawner Jr., provided a glimpse of the mindset of one of the highest American military commanders outside the U.S. mainland on a prospective operation that would risk putting U.S. Navy ships in direct collisions with those of China.

Granted the Philippines is a U.S. ally, at a time when we can use all the friendly faces in the west Pacific that we can find. We have important bases in the Philippines, which occupy a strategic location. But our ally is butting heads with China rather a lot lately:

China and the Philippines accused each other of causing a collision between their two vessels Saturday in the latest flareup of tensions over disputed waters and maritime features in the South China Sea.

In a statement posted on social media, Chinese coast guard spokesperson Liu Dejun was quoted as saying that a Philippine ship maneuvered and “deliberately collided” with a Chinese coast guard ship “in an unprofessional and dangerous manner.”

Philippine officials in Manila said it was their coast guard ship, the BRP Teresa Magbanua, that was rammed thrice by the Chinese coast guard without any provocation, causing damage to the Philippine vessel.

This is the kind of incident that we are going to be escorting Philippine shipping through. What happens when a Chinese Coast Guard captain “accidentally” bumps into a U.S. Navy frigate or destroyer?

These are the kinds of flashpoints that can start wars. And, candidly, we aren’t ready for a war in the West Pacific.

That’s not to say that we shouldn’t stand by an ally. We have treaty obligations to consider, namely the 1951 U.S.-Philippines Mutual Defense Treaty.

But there’s just a lot that can go wrong when things are this tense. China, by which we can only mean the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), has been showing increasing bellicosity in the West Pacific for quite a while. Under Chairman Xi, it is facing a host of problems; a moribund economy that they have been trying to conceal, a population that is about to walk off a demographic cliff, and a real-estate bubble in the process of bursting; this is a recipe for national leaders becoming increasingly irrational.

China is not showing aggression solely towards the Philippines, either. Japan has been the target of China’s bellicosity lately too.

Granted with many of these actions China is probably, as the saying goes, testing the waters. We do the same thing, calling it the exercise of the right of passage in international waters or airspace, as the case may be. Russia does it too; every seafaring nation does these things.

But for some reason, China is pushing harder on the Philippines, perhaps because that nation’s military is, unlike Japan, rather modest – but surely China knows that the United States has a mutual defense treaty with the Philippines, which makes one wonder what, at the end of the day, they are really trying to accomplish.

And, of course, there is the visible weakness and incompetence of American leadership to consider.

One wonders what General Douglas MacArthur might have said.

Man fatally shot by homeowner after allegedly breaking into house in Pettis County

One person is dead after allegedly breaking into a Pettis County home on August 30.

 

Sheriff Brad Anders

On August 30th, 2024, at about 1 AM, deputies were dispatched to the area of Anderson School Road and Shire Lane for a single-vehicle accident called in by a passerby.
At about 1:09 AM, while en-route to the accident scene, deputies were notified of a Burglary in Progress at a residence near the accident scene.
The homeowner reported someone had forced his way into the residence.
Upon arrival, deputies found a rear door of the residence forcibly entered and that the unknown intruder was down after having been shot by the homeowner.
Medics from Pettis County Ambulance District arrived on the scene and pronounced the male subject deceased.
Pettis County Coroner Robert Smith arrived on the scene and took possession of the body.
The names of the parties involved are being withheld at this time, pending the notification of the next of kin.
The investigation is ongoing at this time.

So, the options are, that the wound wasn’t bad enough to need the care of a doctor and the crim has been patched up, or he holed up somewhere, bled out, died and when the corpse is ripe enough will be found by the odor.

Homeowner Shoots Intruder, Suspect Flees Home and Has Not Been Located

Albuquerque –

Around 11:00AM,[August 27] the Albuquerque Police Department received a call from a homeowner stating that their spouse shot an intruder in their home located on the 1300 block of Katie St. NE.

When officers arrived on scene the homeowner exited the house and was questioned by officers. Police were able to locate a blood trail leading away from the house. Officers tried to locate a gunshot victim within the neighborhood but could not find anyone bleeding.

There was a heavy police presence near the Snow Heights Park as they looked for evidence and a suspect. Local hospitals were notified to keep a lookout for anyone coming in with a gunshot wound.

We will update this story if any information becomes available.