Energy Sec Granholm secretly consulted top CCP energy official before SPR releases
EXCLUSIVE: Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm engaged in multiple conversations with the Chinese government’s top energy official days before the Biden administration announced it would tap the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) to combat high gas prices in 2021.
Granholm’s previously-undisclosed talks with China National Energy Administration Chairman Zhang Jianhua — revealed in internal Energy Department calendars obtained by Americans for Public Trust (APT) and shared with Fox News Digital — reveal that the Biden administration likely discussed its plans to release oil from the SPR with China before its public announcement.
According to the calendars, Granholm spoke in one-on-one conversations with Jianhua, who is a longstanding senior member of the Chinese Communist Party, on Nov. 19, 2021, and two days later on Nov. 21, 2021. Then, on Nov. 23, 2021, the White House announced a release of 50 million barrels of oil from the SPR, the largest release of its kind in U.S. history at the time.
“Secretary Granholm’s multiple closed-door meetings with a CCP-connected energy official raise serious questions about the level of Chinese influence on the Biden administration’s energy agenda,” APT Executive Director Caitlin Sutherland told Fox News Digital.
“Instead of focusing on creating real energy independence for America, Granholm has been too busy parroting Chinese energy propaganda and insisting ‘we can all learn from what China is doing,’” Sutherland continued. “The public deserves to know the extent to which Chinese officials are attempting to infiltrate U.S. energy policy and security.”
In a statement, the DOE said the meeting was broadly part of the agency’s effort to combat climate change, but didn’t share what was discussed at the meeting.
August 5
135 – The besieged town of Betar, in Judea falls to Roman forces on Tisha bAv , ending the 3rd Jewish revolt led by Simon bar Kokhba
910 – Danish Vikings on the last major raid on England for nearly a century are defeated at Tettenhall, by the allied forces of King Edward of Wessex and Æthelred, Lord of Mercia.
939 – During the Reconquista, the forces of Ramiro II of León are defeated by forces of Abd ar Rahman III, emir of Córdoba at Zamora, Spain.
1278 – During the Reconquista, the forces of Alphonso X of Castile take the port city of Algeciras, held by the Emir of Granada, under siege for the first time.
1583 – Sir Humphrey Gilbert establishes the first English colony in North America, at St. John’s, Newfoundland.
1620 – The Mayflower departs from Southampton but is forced to dock in Dartmouth when its companion ship, Speedwell, springs a leak.
1763 – During the Pontiac War, British forces led by Henry Bouquet defeat Chief Pontiac’s Indians at Bushy Run.
1816 – The British Admiralty dismisses Francis Ronalds’ new invention of the first working electric telegraph as “wholly unnecessary”
1858 – The Atlantic Telegraph Company led by Cyrus West Field, completes the first transatlantic telegraph cable, which turns out to be barely functional and is accidentally destroyed 3 weeks later in an attempt to increase transmission speed
1861 – The United States levies the first income tax as part of the Revenue Act of 1861 to help pay for the War Between the States.
1862 – Along the Mississippi River near Baton Rouge, Confederate troops attempt to take the city, but are driven back by fire from Union gunboats.
1864 – Admiral David Farragut leads a Union flotilla through Confederate defenses and seals one of the last major Southern ports of Mobile.
1884 – The cornerstone for the Statue of Liberty is laid on Bedloe’s Island
1914 – The first electric traffic light is installed in Cleveland, Ohio. Legend has it that the first traffic ticket for running a red light was written the same day.
1916 – Allied forces, under Archibald Murray, defeat an attacking Ottoman army under Friedrich von Kressenstein, and secure the Suez Canal
1930 – Neil Armstrong is born in Wapakoneta, Ohio,
1944 – Polish insurgents liberate the Gęsiówka labor camp in Warsaw. Nazis begin to massacre civilians and prisoners of war in Wola, Poland.
1957 – American Bandstand debuts on the ABC television network
1962 – American actress Marilyn Monroe is found dead at her home from a drug overdose.
1963 – The United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union sign the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
1964 – Aircraft from carriers USS Ticonderoga and USS Constellation bomb North Vietnam in retaliation for strikes against U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin.
1974 – Congress places a $1 billion limit on military aid to South Vietnam.
1981 – President Reagan fires 11,359 striking air traffic controllers who ignored his order for them to return to work.
2012 – Wade Page enters a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, killing 6 people before committing suicide after being wounded by police.
2015 – Contractors and personnel of the Environmental Protection Agency damage a dam retaining the Gold King Mine waste water containment pool, releasing three million gallons of heavy metal toxin tailings and waste water into the Animas River in Colorado.
Biden and Obama: The two Democratic presidents of the country’s only credit downgrades
Former President Barack Obama once explained how he would have arranged for a third term as president. He jokingly explained how it essentially involved having a puppet as president in which there would be a “frontman or frontwoman” with Obama directing them what to do while in “his basement in his sweats.” Three years into the Biden administration and these comments make Obama look like a soothsayer.
“If I could make an arrangement where I had a stand-in, a frontman or frontwoman, and they had an earpiece in, and I was just in my basement in my sweats, looking through the stuff, then deliver the lines, but somebody else was doing all the talking — I’d be fine with that,” Obama said to Stephen Colbert in 2020.
After the news of the Fitch downgrade, Obama’s joke now seems like an accurate description of the Biden presidency, mainly since only two presidents have overseen the country suffer credit downgrades: Joe Biden and Barack Obama. Biden’s was this past week with Fitch; Obama’s was with Standard & Poor in April 2011. Both downgrades occurred during each president’s third year in office. And, naturally, both presidents sought to blame Republicans each time. Blaming the GOP was a hallmark of the Obama legacy.
Obama’s downgrade in 2011 was the first time the United States was given a credit rating below AAA. S&P decided to lower the country’s rating to AA+ because the federal government failed to provide a credible plan to confront the soaring national debt at the time, CNN Money reported. S&P also blamed political gridlock, squabbling, and “dysfunctional policymaking” for the decrease.
“The downgrade reflects our opinion that the … plan that Congress and the administration recently agreed to falls short of what, in our view, would be necessary to stabilize the government’s medium-term debt dynamics,” S&P declared at the time. “The political brinksmanship of recent months highlights what we see as America’s governance and policymaking becoming less stable, less effective, and less predictable than what we previously believed.”
Fast forward 12 years later, and Obama’s vice president in 2011, Joe Biden, is now in charge. Once again, a credit agency downgraded the nation’s rating to AA+ from AAA. Coincidence? I don’t think so. The Fitch decision was based on “a steady deterioration of governance over the last 20 years” — the majority of that time occurring during the Obama and Biden presidencies.
Additionally, Fitch explained other factors behind its decision, including “repeated debt limit standoffs and last minute resolutions” and a “high and growing general government debt burden.” Other reasons included the government lacking a “medium-term fiscal framework” and having a “complex budgeting process.”
One of the most essential factors in the Fitch decision was a scathing indictment of “Bidenomics.” For all the rampant celebratory propaganda Democrats have spread regarding the economy under the Biden administration, projections call for “weak 2024 GDP growth” and a mild recession at the end of this year and into the first quarter of 2024.
Fitch also predicted “GDP growth slowing to 1.2% this year” and an anticipated “growth of just 0.5% in 2024.” It’s “Bidenomics” at work. And it should be noted that Biden’s weak GDP growth prediction is similar to the underwhelming Obama economy in 2011, the time of the last credit downgrade, which resulted in a measly 1.5% GDP growth. This is why Democrats are trying to deflect from this reality and pin the blame on Donald Trump or things like January 6th. They want to hide the truth of the adverse outcomes they helped create.
It’s no coincidence that both credit downgrades happened under Democrats — especially Democrats who were part of the same presidential administration. Democratic policies have been hampering the country for quite some time. It’s as if their entire party is immune to accepting responsibility for their political actions, no matter how often they misled the public into believing the opposite. Democrats should look at themselves instead of blaming Republicans for their failures.
What if Trump Stops Playing Along?
By now, we’re used to getting the BREAKING news alerts. “Oh, Trump must have been indicted again,” we sigh, or “Huh, guess he pleaded ‘not guilty’ again.” We no longer even bother to click through. The tragic and demoralizing utterly partisan corruption of our once-great American justice system is complete, and we are in such uncharted territory that we have no clue what to do at this point.
For me, the no-longer-American justice system crossed the Rubicon when they raided a former president’s private home. That was unprecedented and tragic enough for me to lose my respect for the DOJ. And naturally, once our country tilted over the top of the waterfall, it has only picked up speed on its plunge to the disastrous chaos below.
It’s time for former — and possibly future — President Trump to grab that branch that’s sticking out halfway down and refuse to fall any further.
In Fulton County, Ga. — which was featured prominently in the film “2000 Mules” for likely illegal ballot harvesting — despicable and racialist Soros DA Fani Willis has been working on her own Get Trump! indictment. And as if the entire world doesn’t know who Donald Trump is, Fulton County Sheriff Pat Labat has promised to, at long last, secure that coveted mug shot.
“Unless somebody tells me differently, we are following our normal practices, and so it doesn’t matter your status, we’ll have a mugshot ready for you,” vowed Labat on Wednesday.
Folks, we’ve entered the part of the drama where the evil ghouls shave off Aslan’s majestic mane and mock him on the way to his slaughter. Trump is dutifully visiting the stations of the cross he bears. But Trump isn’t Jesus, and there’s no reason why he should take one more choreographed step in the Left’s disgusting dance. It’s not fair, so let’s stop pretending it is.
What if Trump simply says, “No”?
Remember, we’re cascading down the face of the cliff at this point. Every step of the way will become increasingly debasing and humiliating for the former President of the United States and front-running candidate for office in 2024 (who is, after all, the representative of the political will of half the country — you and me). What if Trump simply refuses to show up for Fani’s hate-indictment arraignment and Labat’s cuffs-and-mugshot routine?
I would pay good money to see the look of frustrated rage on the Leftists’ faces when they realize he’s not coming. Trump should force their hand. Make them send armed forces to arrest him like the thugs they are. Show the captivated world that yes, it’s true — America is gone, replaced by just another failing fascist state.
It’s not like the former president has anything to lose at this point. We all know where this is headed — Trump forcibly imprisoned. He could save himself the years of ratcheting-up humiliations and tens (hundreds?) of millions of dollars (donors’ dollars!) and just cut to the chase. Run his campaign from prison if need be against the now fully exposed fascists who put him there. The next president — even if it’s him — can pardon him and save us all the drama of this endless law-war. Shoot the moon, as they say in Crazy Eights.
Please, President Trump, do something. We remain ever grateful to you for what you did to stop the decline when you were in office. In your influence alone, you remain the most powerful leader America has today. Please lead again. Tell them you’re not going to be their gulag-bound victim, their Emmanuel Goldstein. Tell them you ain’t gonna dance no more. If they want to keep abusing their authority to attack you, don’t help them.
Don’t go to Georgia, Mr. President. Just say no.
How a “poison pill” in NYSRPA v. Bruen is being exploited by a lower court
The last year has seen some significant successes in the restoration of our Second Amendment rights. From coast to coast, unreasonable gun laws written for the express purpose of harassing law-abiding citizens and infringing on the rights of the body politic are being struck down. Before the Bruen text/history/tradition test, just about every infringement was rubber-stamped by biased anti-Rights judges who always put a thumb on the scale in favor of restrictions.
Unfortunately, there is a sort of “poison pill” in the Court’s Bruen decision that provides a small loophole that anti-Rights judges can drive a truck through. This is the “unprecedented Societal Concern or dramatic technological changes” caveat in the Supreme Court’s opinion:
While the historical analogies here and in Heller are relatively simple to draw, other cases implicating unprecedented societal concerns or dramatic technological changes may require a more nuanced approach.
The regulatory challenges posed by firearms today are not always the same as those that preoccupied the Founders in 1791 or the Reconstruction generation in 1868. Fortunately, the Founders created a Constitution—and a Second Amendment—“intended to endure for ages to come, and consequently, to be adapted to the various crises of human affairs.” McCulloch v. Maryland, 4 Wheat. 316, 415 (1819) (emphasis deleted).
Although its meaning is fixed according to the understandings of those who ratified it, the Constitution can, and must, apply to circumstances beyond those the Founders specifically anticipated. See, e.g., United States v. Jones, 565 U.S. 400, 404–405 (2012) (holding that installation of a tracking device was “a physical intrusion [that] would have been considered a ‘search’ within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment when it was adopted”).
To be fair, the Court’s opinion talks about the importance of the right to keep and bear arms and how it has a fixed meaning and leaves it up to judges to apply those basic principles to circumstances beyond what the Founders specifically anticipated. The context, however, is not the infringement of rights but consistent support for rights over time. To drive home the point, the Court provides an example from United States v. Jones, and talks about how the installation of a GPS tracker was a physical intrusion that would have been considered a search. The Founders lived during an era when there was no electricity, but the Fourth Amendment is still applicable to small GPS devices that use signals from orbiting satellites to determine someone’s location.
But judges with inherent bias will take advantage of even the smallest opening, and we saw that yesterday at the United States District Court for the District of Connecticut in National Association for Gun Rights v. Lamont, which deals with Connecticut’s “assault weapons” ban. The plaintiffs in this case sought to get a preliminary injunction to stop the enforcement of Connecticut’s “assault weapons” ban. The Court denied the injunction, saying that the plaintiffs have failed to show their likelihood of success on the merits.
75-year-old woman shoots at home intruders in Oakland
OAKLAND, Calif. – A 75-year-old woman opened fire on two intruders who broke into her Oakland home and came under fire herself, authorities said.
The home invasion robbery happened around 2 a.m. on July 26 at a residence near the Oakland Zoo in the hills on Ettrick Street in the Chabot Park neighborhood, according to the Oakland Police Department.
Officers said two armed men forced their way into a home and began searching. The elderly resident was the only one at the home when the intruders broke in.
Fearing for her safety, the 75-year-old woman pulled out her .357 Magnum and fired one round toward the suspects, police said. The suspects returned fire at the woman and fled the scene.
Fortunately, the woman was not injured during the shooting, and there were no reports of physical injuries, according to the police.
“It’s absolutely unbelievable what she was able to do,” the woman’s daughter told KTVU. “It’s amazing. She is a Superwoman. We’re all just lauding her and just amazed at her wherewithal.”
Calvin Walker, a neighbor said, “She had the presence of mind to reach into her nightstand and get a weapon. And she had it under her covers, and when she saw an opening, she fired a shot.”
The men fired back – about 17 to 20 shots – before leaving with valuables, including jewelry.
“We went over afterwards and we saw gunshots all in the walls,” Walker said.
Oakland City Councilmember Treva Reid represents the area and is family friend of the victim.
“It’s a miracle that she’s alive after the number of shots that were fired in her home,” Reid said.
Neighbors say the victim did the right thing. “This woman is a hero,” said neighbor Dave Lederer. “She kept her wits about her.”
Her daughter said this should serve as a warning “I believe that this is a message also for the criminals, that people in Oakland, we’re tired of the lawlessness. People are standing up. People are fighting back,” she said.
Neighbor Lynn Baranco agreed, saying, “They’re really – they’re playing with their lives because all these people out here are armed.”
Armed Staff Versus School Resource Officers- The Quality of Quantity to Defend Our Students
You must be present to win. That trite phrase might apply to the local bake sale. It certainly applies to protecting our students at school. It is too easy for school boards and school principals to say they did something when they certainly did not do enough. We can agree that protecting our students is inherently a difficult problem. We are trying to stop evil narcissists who want to become celebrities by killing our kids. Formulaic answers don’t work for long because these murderers learn and adapt. The actions that protected our children yesterday might not work tomorrow. There are better solutions today and we need to recognize them.
The threat is changing over time. Greg Ellifritz did an excellent job looking at armed attacks at schools after the Covid lockdown. Only 20-percent of the attacks are now in the classroom. That means we need to do more than lock the classroom doors. Half of the armed attacks on our schools occurred before or after school when students were out of the classroom and on school grounds or on their way to school. That number is increasing, and that means that a single School Resource Officer at school for a few hours a week isn’t enough. Murderers might be adapting to the security measures that schools have already put in place like locked doors, metal detectors, and revised policies when someone pulls a fire alarm or triggers a smoke detector. We have to adapt as well.
We are changing every day. Schools are embedded in our society. Every problem we have in our culture eventually comes to school. We’ve heard calls to defund the police. Some urban administrators removed police officer on campus since they neither wanted to report nor wanted to file a complaint against the students committing crimes at school. As you’d imagine, more innocent students are victimized by violent crime when crime is tolerated at school. The social justice movements that removed School Resource Officers left students vulnerable to both common criminals and to celebrity-seeking murderers who search for easy victims.
Administrators prefer visible solutions. It is hard for school administrators to get public credit for solutions that the public can’t see. The parents seldom notice the reinforced glass in the windows and doors. In contrast, the parents can’t miss seeing the uniformed police officer standing in the parking lot when children are dropped off.
Unfortunately, public visibility works both for us and it works against us as we try to protect our children. A visible deterrent like an SRO helps stop low-level threats. The drug dealers move across the street and out of the school parking lot. The visible School Resource Officer is equally easy for a murderer to locate. The attacker can wait until the SRO either drives his police car away from campus, or the murderer can shoot the SRO first. We’ve seen both happen when schools were attacked.
Any single defender has a fatal flaw. There is an obvious reason that one adult can’t supervise an entire campus. They can’t be everywhere at the same time. The School Resource Officer can’t be up on the ball field when they are down in the parking lot. They can’t be behind the gymnasium if they are in the central courtyard. A midsized school might have half-a-dozen hallways and an equal number of separate buildings. That means a single defender is probably minutes away from an attack. That delay leads to more dead children.
The solution is obvious, if invisible. The researchers who study school security told us what to do over a decade ago. Murderers stop killing our kids when they face an armed defender. The defender’s response time predicts the body count. The SRO can’t be on the bus before school and on the bus after school, but the bus driver can. The SRO isn’t at the choir practice before school, but the choir director is there. After school, the SRO can’t be at the ball field and in the music room at the same time, but the coaches and band director are certainly there.
Americans, for the most part, don’t like to be controlled. It is part of our collective DNA and has been from the time the first English settlers arrived in Jamestown, continuing on through the westward expansion, and through to today. That is why the gun prohibitionists have begun to couch their aims behind innocuous buzzwords.
First it was “gun safety”. I attribute that to Mayor Bloomberg and his PR flacks including the Demanding Mom herself Shannon Watts. They understood that if they couched their desire for control behind the concept of “safety” then there would be less objection. The mainstream media has bought into the terminology wholeheartedly.
Of course, if Bloomberg, Watts, the Biden Administration, and the rest of the gun control industry were truly serious about “gun safety”, they would be insisting upon classes like hunter safety and the NRA’s Eddie Eagle program be taught in every school in America. As it is the Biden Administration through the US Department of Education is withholding funding to schools for archery and hunter safety programs. They are using the so-called Bipartisan Safer Communities Act of 2022 as their excuse. So in their pursuit of “gun safety” and “safer communities” they will defund the exact types of programs that actually work for safety.
Now it appears that the successor word to “gun safety” will be “gun responsibility”. This comes from Hollywood actor Matthew McConaughey. He, of course, is using the tragedy in his hometown of Uvalde, Texas as the pretense to urge for “gun responsibility.”
There is a difference between control and responsibility. The first is a mandate that can infringe on our right; the second is a duty that will preserve it. There is no constitutional barrier to gun responsibility. Keeping firearms out of the hands of dangerous people is not only the responsible thing to do, it is the best way to protect the Second Amendment. We can do both.
That all sounds nice but it is sophistry. As Bishop Robert Barron noted in his commencement address at Hillsdale College:
Their concern is not being truthful or just but rather speaking in such a way that they appear truthful or just and hence become convincing to others. Such sophists were, obviously enough, enormously useful to prospective lawyers and politicians in ancient Greece, and it should be equally obvious that their intellectual descendants are rather thick on the ground today.
McConaughey enumerates four key points for “gun responsibility” in his op-ed.
- Universal background checks
- Age 21 to buy an “assault rifle” (sic) unless one is in the military. “Assault rifle” is undefined.
- “Red Flag Laws should be the law of the land.”
- National waiting period for the purchase of “assault rifles” (sic).
So in the end, what McConaughey calls “gun responsibility” is just a rehash of many prior “gun control” proposals. They are all, as the gun control industry has said for decades, a “good first step.” A good first step to even more onerous control upon an enumerated right.
The gun control industry and their fellow travelers have to rely upon sophistry and buzzwords. Otherwise they have nothing.
Fresno Lab: China’s Operation to Exterminate Americans
Prestige BioTech, a Nevada company fronting for parties in China, was caught operating an “unlicensed laboratory” in Reedley, California in March. State and Fresno County officers raided the facility, and the FBI and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have since been participating in the investigation.
The illegal operation housed white lab mice—773 live and more than 175 dead—that were genetically engineered to carry disease. Authorities also found medical waste and chemical, viral, and biological agents. There were on site at least 20 potentially infectious pathogens including those causing coronavirus, HIV, hepatitis, and herpes.
The lab is “mysterious,” as the California Globe news site proclaimed. We know enough, however, to be alarmed.
The lab was supposed to be producing COVID-19 and pregnancy tests, but the facility contained items inconsistent with that explanation. The seizures at the lab strongly suggest China’s regime is preparing to spread diseases in America, undoubtedly in the months before a war.
“This kamikaze lab—unsecured, poorly contained, makeshift, containing a couple dozen pathogens near a population center—cannot be a one-off,” Brandon Weichert, author of Biohacked: China’s Race to Control Life, told Gatestone. “It is, I believe, a part of a large Chinese military operation to spread disease throughout the American population.”
Iowa Leaps Into Controversial State Digital ID Scheme
The latest state to push the contentious technology.
Amidst rising concerns surrounding digital privacy, the state of Iowa has taken a controversial leap into the world of digital identification with its new Iowa Mobile ID app. The app, now available on both Google Play and the Apple App Store, provides a new platform for users to verify their age or identity, a move that critics argue risks personal data security.
While it purports to supplement the conventional physical ID card, the fact that users are advised to still carry physical cards has raised eyebrows. The question arises – is the convenience of the app worth the potential privacy risks, especially considering its digital nature doesn’t entirely replace the physical card?
The process of creating a digital ID, while simple on the surface, has elicited concerns. Users are asked to upload images of their driver’s license or state-issued ID, and also capture a moving selfie for facial recognition. Critics argue that this gathering and storing of biometric data may present significant privacy implications and potential security vulnerabilities. Even the use of a PIN password system, while enhancing security to an extent, isn’t foolproof against potential hacking attempts.
One contentious point is the creation of a scannable QR code, which carries the user’s information. Although businesses are not compelled to accept this mobile form of ID, any who do will have access to this encoded personal information. As it’s a new technology, there may also be a delay in widespread acceptance, presenting both practical and privacy issues.
The app, developed by French identity verification firm IDEMIA, states that it stores user data within the state’s record system and the user’s device. The company further insists businesses can only access user data with explicit consent. But the concerns remain. Critics wonder whether the current privacy measures are truly sufficient to protect the sensitive data of millions from potential misuse.
The launch of the Iowa Mobile ID comes after a decade-long journey, filled with delays due to compliance with digital ID management regulations. Interestingly, while intended to be among the early adopters of Apple’s mobile ID program, the initiative has only expanded to Maryland and Colorado so far. This slow adoption could suggest a broader hesitation in the face of potential privacy issues.
August 4
1463 – Patron of many great renaissance artists, Lorenzo de’ Medici is born in Florence, Italy
1693 – Benedictine monk Dom Perignon invents champagne
1704 – Gibraltar is captured from the Spanish by an English and Dutch fleet, commanded by Admiral Sir George Rooke.
1790 – The Revenue Cutter Service, the predecessor to the Coast Guard is created
1834 – English mathematician John Venn, inventor of the Venn Diagram, using circles to denote sets, is born in Yorkshire, England.
1873 – The 7th Cavalry, under Lieutenant Colonel Custer, has its first minor engagement with the Cheyenne and Lakota near the Tongue River in Montana, while protecting a railroad survey party
1889 – The Great Fire of Spokane, Washington destroys 32 blocks of the city, prompting a mass rebuilding project.
1892 – The father and stepmother of Lizzie Borden are found murdered in their Fall River, Massachusetts home
1914 – The Germans invade neutral Belgium. In response Belgium and the British Empire declare war on Germany. The United States declares its neutrality.
1944 – A Dutch informer leads the Gestapo to a sealed off area in an Amsterdam warehouse, where they find and arrest Anne Frank and her family
1964 – U.S. destroyers USS Maddox and USS Turner Joy report coming under attack in the Gulf of Tonkin.
1977 – President Carter signs legislation creating the United States Department of Energy.
1987 – The Federal Communications Commission rescinds the ‘Fairness Doctrine’ which required radio and television stations to present controversial issues “fairly”. (AKA ‘Equal Time’)
2007 – NASA’s Phoenix Mars probe spacecraft is launched.
2019 – Antifa supporter, 24 year old Connor Betts, kills 9 people and wounds another 26 before being engaged, 32 seconds after his first shot, and killed by Police in Dayton, Ohio.
2020 – At least 220 people are killed and over 5,000 are wounded when 2,700 tons of ammonium nitrate explodes in Beirut, Lebanon.
Last month, U.S. District Judge Janet Bond Arterton tossed out a lawsuit challenging Connecticut’s ban on concealed carry in state parks, ruling that the plaintiff in the litigation didn’t have standing to sue because there was no credible threat of him being arrested or prosecuted for violating the ban. That was an exceedingly odd decision, but it kept the ban in place (at least for now), which counts as a win as far as anti-gunners are concerned.
Now Arterton has followed up with another legal doozy, rejecting a preliminary injunction against the state’s newly-expanded ban on so-called assault weapons and large capacity magazines by declaring that the Supreme Court’s Second Amendment jurisprudence allows for bans on commonly-owned weapons, and that “only a ban on firearms that are so pervasively used for self-defense that to ban them would ‘infringe,’ or destroy, the right to self-defense” would violate our right to keep and bear arms.
Under Arterton’s interpretation of Heller, McDonald, Caetano, and Bruen everything from bolt-action hunting rifles to single-barreled shotguns could be banned without calling into question the right to keep and bear arms; presumably leaving only some (but likely not all) handguns protected by the Second Amendment’s language.
Unlike the broader category of handguns at issue in Heller and Bruen, the record developed here demonstrates that assault weapons and LCMs are suboptimal for self-defense.
A set of statutes that bans only a subset of each category of firearms that possess new and dangerous characteristics that make them susceptible to abuse by nonlaw abiding citizens wielding them for unlawful purposes imposes a comparable burden to the regulations on Bowie knives, percussion cap pistols, and other dangerous or concealed weapons, particularly when “there remain more than one thousand firearms that Connecticut residents can purchase for responsible and lawful uses like self-defense, home defense, and other lawful purposes such as hunting and sport shooting.”
Well hang on there. If, according to Arterton, only those arms that are “pervasively” used in self-defense cannot be banned, then firearms most commonly used for lawful purposes such as hunting and sport shooting have no protection whatsoever under the Second Amendment, regardless of whether or not the state of Connecticut still allows them to be sold.
You can read Arterton’s lengthy dissertation for yourself here, but I’ll caution you before you start that her opinion reminds me of the apocryphal quote attributed to W.C. Fields; if you can’t dazzle them with brilliance baffle them with bullsh**. Arterton definitely left me scratching my head on multiple occasions, such as her rejection of the use of FBI crime statistics that point to rifles of any kind being rarely used in homicide because the data supposedly “provides limited relevant insight” since they “these statistics do not track what types of firearms are used with enough precision to determine whether they are assault weapons.” Arterton, meanwhile, blithely took the state’s “expert” John Donohue of Stanford University at face value, though Donohue has maintained that the individual right to keep and bear arms was created by the Supreme Court in Heller and was not a pre-existing right protected by the Second Amendment in 1791.
BLUF
The predatory, political and contrived nature of the indictments against Trump, and the degree to which Jack Smith and his team had to strangle statutes and reality to arrive at a predetermined conclusion is not lost on Americans.
The straightforwardness of the Biden family’s influence peddling operation makes it easy for all but the most rabid Democrats to understand.
Unlike the Trump indictments, the case against Biden is straightforward.
Those of us who follow the news for a living understand the details of the three indictments to date against former President Donald Trump. The average American understands only that he’s been indicted three times and that a fourth is likely on the way in Georgia. Those who get their news from legacy media sites are told that Trump threatens the very fabric of our democracy. But from there, it gets nebulous.
On the other hand, the accusations against President Joe Biden and his knowledge of and involvement in his son’s overseas influence peddling business are far more straightforward. The average American understands bribery, greed, and lies, concepts that are as old as mankind.
Evidence is mounting that, during Biden’s tenure as vice president, his son was on a mission to exploit his ability to sway U.S. policy for the family’s financial gain. At the right price, Joe Biden’s influence was for sale.
Special Counsel Jack Smith’s case against Trump shows how wildly he had to wrestle with the truth to arrive at an indictment.
Smith may have jumped the shark with his latest indictment. Especially since it came the day after Hunter Biden’s former business partner and longtime friend Devon Archer reportedly confirmed that Hunter had put then-Vice President Joe Biden on speakerphone at least 20 times during meetings with his foreign business associates.
Paramount among Archer’s statements was that Hunter was “selling the brand,” meaning access to the second most powerful man in the U.S. government on a moment’s notice. Now that’s impressive.
“We’re going to cheat, and if they say we cheated, we’re going to arrest them.”
The new motto of the communist Democrat fascist regime.
— Catturd ™ (@catturd2) August 3, 2023