Suspected intruder shot, killed while trying to crawl through home window,
A 29-year-old man was killed when police say he was shot while trying to break into a west Birmingham [Alabama] home.
The burglary call went out at 12:45 a.m. Tuesday at a house on Avenue O.
The homeowner told police the intruder was trying to crawl through the window of her house. She grabbed her gun and fired a couple of shots, striking the burglary suspect once in the chest.
It wasn’t immediately clear whether the homeowner knew the man.
Authorities said the wounded man then ran a block to the Chevron on Bessemer Road where he collapsed at the front door of the store. A store worker called Birmingham 911 at 12:46 p.m.
West Precinct officers arrived at the store and provided aid to the man until paramedics arrived. He was then transported to UAB Hospital where he was pronounced dead at 2:11 a.m.
The Jefferson County Coroner’s Office said the man’s name is being withheld pending notification of his family. The investigation is ongoing.
The man is Birmingham’s 126th homicide this year. Of those, seven have been ruled justifiable and therefore aren’t deemed criminal.
In all of Jefferson County, there have been 170 homicides, including the 126 in Birmingham.
Comment O’ The Day
People know the system is total baloney. Yet the GOP does little or nothing to fix it, even to help itself! At some point, we have to assume this level of loserdom is deliberate.
Robert Shibley
“I’m Sick of Losing, I Hope You Are Too.”
While votes are still being counted, and there could be a few, rare bright spots left for Republicans, one thing is clear: The red wave didn’t materialize in 2022.
Ironically, some accused me of being too conservative when I predicted the GOP only getting to 235 seats in the House. Now, the Republican Party might end up with a majority far less than that. The Senate is pretty much a wasteland as well, with Mehmet Oz, despite a strong push down the stretch, not being able to overcome his unfavorables in Pennsylvania. Don Bolduc got trounced in New Hampshire, Georgia is headed to a runoff, and Masters is an underdog as counting continues in Arizona.
Far from the optimism of suggesting that 54 senate seats were on the table, my “low” prediction of winning 51 seats would actually be a minor miracle for Republicans now. I whiffed, not because I was too conservative, but because I was too bullish. That’s an outcome that seemed improbable just a day ago.
What happened on Tuesday can’t be left to lie. There has to be a reckoning, and it’s going to be uncomfortable and challenge some deeply-held priors. Republicans can’t keep running the same play over and over, hoping that the next time things will be different. No one should escape accountability.
On the congressional side, Kevin McCarthy did not earn the mandate necessary to be handed the role of Speaker of the House. There should be a real battle for the position. In the Senate, Mitch McConnell, even though he should be lauded for raising and spending a ton of money this cycle to help elect Republicans, is 80 years old and is deeply unpopular with most Americans. For Republicans to escape their current malaise, new leadership is needed.
The recriminations don’t stop with elected officials, though. Donald Trump is the de facto leader of the Republican Party. He is the face, he does the rallies, he makes himself the center of attention, and he is the kingmaker. He has now failed in that role for three straight elections. Frustratingly, he refuses to take any responsibility for his failures, pointing to no possibility of change on his part as the standard-bearer.
For example, after Don Bolduc lost in New Hampshire, Trump trashed him despite the fact that he was one of the former president’s endorsed candidates. He also bashed Mehmet Oz after that race was called. Worse, in the midst of Republican struggles becoming clear late on election night, Trump took to Truth Social to celebrate the loss of Joe O’Dea in Colorado’s senate race. Later, he bragged about his supposed endorsement record, calling the disappointing night a “great victory.” That’s not leadership. It’s self-serving buck-passing, and it’s especially off-putting given Trump was attempting to take credit for the red wave right up until the moment that it ceased to be.
This excerpt from Spencer Brown’s post-election write-up over at Townhall is correct.
It’s also impossible to separate the national GOP political apparatus from former President Donald Trump, who, before the election, circulated a memo hyping up the number of rallies, candidate endorsements, fundraising numbers, and primary wins for which he claimed responsibility.
For Trump, his biggest win on Election Day was arguably J.D. Vance’s victory in Ohio. But losses for his candidates, including Oz, Walker, Bolduc, and numerous others, call into question his role in picking candidates and getting them across the primary finish line — something he’s bragged about endlessly.
After all, the rest of the GOP machinery ended up pouring money and time into the races where Trump-endorsed primary candidates advanced to the general, but that’s all downstream from Trump (and in some cases, Democrats who backed the same candidates in a now proven theory that those candidates would be easier to beat).
Meanwhile, in Florida, Ron DeSantis turned a state he won by 30,000 votes four years ago into a 20-point blowout. It was the most shocking shift in a single state in decades, with Republicans actually winning Hispanic voters outright. In a sea of terrible, what happened in Florida showed a better way. It showed what issues voters care about. It showed that being likable and effective as a leader matters. I don’t know if DeSantis runs in 2024, but Republicans would be foolish to pass over him for a nearly 80-year-old man with extremely high unfavorable ratings.
I realize saying that definitively is going to ruffle some feathers, but I assure you that’s not my goal. None of what I’m saying means that 2016 wasn’t special. It doesn’t mean that the big rallies weren’t fun when they actually meant something and weren’t just irrelevant spectacles. It doesn’t mean Trump didn’t accomplish a lot in the White House.
What it does mean is that times change, appeals diminish, and not adapting going forward would only guarantee another gut-wrenching loss in the next election. Republicans need a course correction just as they needed one after the George W. Bush era (which ended with Mitt Romney). It’s not about establishment vs. Trump because, to be frank, both sides have shown themselves incapable of winning at this point.
It’s going to take a combination of inspirational fight and extreme competence that hasn’t been shown by the party’s national leadership, from McConnell to Trump, to turn this ship around. And while I may personally think that’s DeSantis, I’m not trying to browbeat anyone into that position. I encourage people to support whoever they feel convicted to support, and if we end up agreeing on 99 percent of everything else but disagreeing on that one issue, there should be no hard feelings. All I ask is that people step back, look at the whole picture, and think critically about how we got to where we are. Changes have to be made because I’m tired of losing, and I hope you are too.
One Year Later: The sky did not fall after the Supreme Court exited the abortion debate.
Exactly one year ago, the Federalist Society held its National Lawyers Convention. And exactly one year ago, the Supreme Court was enmeshed in the abortion debate on two fronts. First, Jonathan Mitchell, also known as “The Genius,” foisted the impermeable fetal heartbeat law on the judiciary. Second, Mississippi’s fifteen-week abortion ban was slated for oral argument. At the time, we were warned about the parade of horribles that would fall if the Supreme Court allowed either of these laws to go into effect.
One year later the story looks very different–especially after election day. In Kansas, voters rejected a ballot measure that would have reversed a state supreme court decision that protected abortion. And all the justices who joined that opinion, as well as several other justices appointed by the Democratic governor, were retained. Voters in several states also rejected efforts to scale back abortion rights. In Kentucky, 53% of voters rejected a referendum that would have stated there was no right to abortion under the state constitution. In Montana, 53% of voters rejected a “born alive” amendment to the state constitution. In Michigan, 56% of voters approved a referendum that protects a right to abortion, and wipes out a 1931 law that banned the procedure.
Justice Scalia’s clarion call in Casey rings true three decades later:
Quite to the contrary, by foreclosing all democratic outlet for the deep passions this issue arouses, by banishing the issue from the political forum that gives all participants, even the losers, the satisfaction of a fair hearing and an honest fight, by continuing the imposition of a rigid national rule instead of allowing for regional differences, the Court merely prolongs and intensifies the anguish. We should get out of this area, where we have no right to be, and where we do neither ourselves nor the country any good by remaining.
Justice Breyer should be proud that Dobbs is making democracy work.
As a general matter, I no longer pay attention to predictions that the sky will fall after a conservative Supreme Court victory. The sky did not fall after Heller. The sky did not fall after Citizens United. The sky did not fall after Shelby County. The sky did not fall after Hobby Lobby. The sky did not fall after Rucho. And so on. The sky will not fall after Dobbs.
RAND releases road map for gun control activists
In the wake of the midterms, Democrats might not have as many opportunities to impose legislative limits on our Second Amendment rights, but the RAND Corporation is still providing anti-gun activists with a guide to gun control laws they believe might be permissible, even after the Supreme Court’s decision in NYSRPA v. Bruen.
You’ll probably recognize many of the names associated with the RAND report, given the fact that they’re regularly quoted by legacy media outlets in support of new and existing gun control measures. Harvard’s David Hemenway, Saul Cornell of Fordham, and UCLA law professor Adam Winkler were all a part of the confab that laid out a road map for gun control groups to follow in the wake of Bruen. The group concedes that the decision is going to make it tougher to enact and uphold restrictions on the right to bear arms, but they also point to “ambiguities” in the decision that they say opens the door to keeping (and putting) gun control laws on the books. For example:
The Court’s determination that New York state’s concealed carry law was unconstitutional was narrowly focused on the use of subjective discretionary standards in issuing permits and seems to explicitly allow for states to use objective suitability and perhaps even good moral character standards that could serve similar risk management objectives as the former discretionary standards.
Does it really? U.S. District Judge Glenn Suddaby doesn’t think so. In his decision granting an injunction against many aspects of New York’s Concealed Carry Improvement Act, Suddaby declared that New York replacing one subjective standard (a “justifiable need” to carry) with another (whether someone has the “good moral character” to carry) is untenable.
The “good moral character” requirement is just a dressed-up version of the State’s improper “special need for self-protection” requirement.
… In sum, this Court has certainly found historical support for a modern law providing that a license shall be issued or renewed except for applicants who have been found, based on their past conduct, to be likely to use the weapon in a manner that would injure themselves or others (other than in self-defense). This standard is objective, easily applied, and finds support in numerous analogues that deny the right to carry to citizens based on their past conduct (including crimes, demonstrations of mental illnesses, and dangerous behavior). Unfortunately, this is not the law that the New York State Legislature passed.
Objective standards may be found to be constitutional, but Suddaby says that subjective standards are a no-no, unlike the academics who put together RAND’s report.
There was one conclusion that these analysts reached that I agree with; bans on semi-automatic firearms and “large capacity” magazines aren’t likely to stand up to court scrutiny.
… the Court has found that a weapon in common use cannot be considered dangerous and unusual. This reasoning creates a potential regulatory challenge: Unless a new dangerous technology is quickly determined to be dangerous and unusual, and regulated as such, it will no longer be subject to such regulation once it becomes popular and therefore in common use. States concerned with restricting access to new, more-dangerous weapon technologies would need to design mechanisms for quickly preventing their distribution and adoption by large numbers.
Even though they admit that a ban on so-called assault weapons would likely be ruled unconstitutional under Bruen, the authors of the RAND report suggest that there may still be a way to prohibit at least some law-abiding Americans from possessing them; a “graduating permit system” that “might resemble driver’s license classifications or graduated driver’s licenses, which require increasingly demanding standards and training depending on the type of vehicle (e.g., a person with a license to drive a car cannot legally drive a public bus or large truck) or driving conditions (e.g., some states dictate that adolescent drivers cannot drive at night or with other adolescents).”
Some states and the federal government already have something like a graduated permitting system for firearms. Beginning in July 2019, for instance, residents of Washington state who wish to purchase a “semiautomatic assault rifle” must undergo an enhanced background check and complete special training requirements, requirements distinct from those for purchasers of other types of firearms (Revised Code of Washington § 9.41).
Similarly, in accordance with the National Firearms Act of 1934 and subsequent amendments to it, the federal government regulates all automatic firearms, short-barreled shotguns, silencers, and certain other “destructive devices” differently from most other firearms, requiring, for instance, enhanced background checks and registration of the weapon with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Although the Court would likely consider semiautomatic rifles and high-capacity magazines as in common use and thus covered under Second Amendment protections, regulations that impose higher standards of control over the acquisition, use, and carrying of specific types of weapons may be constitutional under Bruen.
The Supreme Court rejected the idea of tiered scrutiny when it came to determining the constitutionality of gun control laws, so I don’t know what would give these folks the idea that the courts would be any more amenable to imposing a similar test on commonly-owned firearms. It seems far more likely to me that SCOTUS would strike down Washington State’s law rather than allow it to stand, though I suppose we’ll have to wait and see what, if any, action the Court takes when that particular legal challenge arrives at its doorstep.
The RAND report seems like it’s designed to reassure gun control advocates in the wake of the Bruen decision, but given that at least one of its major findings has already been overruled by a federal judge I don’t think it’s that convincing of a document. And honestly, given that the gun control lobby and their political allies have never been overly concerned with infringing on anyone’s rights before now, I don’t think they really care about the likelihood of their gun laws standing up in court. Oh sure, they’d love to see it happen, but they’re not going to go out of their way to write their post-Bruen gun laws with an eye towards respecting the right to keep and bear arms. They’ll keep pushing for their gun bans, limitations on the right to bear arms, and onerous burdens to become a gun owner even if they know that SCOTUS is going to smack them down. The fight to secure our Second Amendment rights is far from over, and even if gun owners have a great Election Day we’ll still need to be just as involved and engaged tomorrow as we are today.
Do what?
Chinese government operates police stations on US soil.
I’m the son of a cop.
My father was a police officer throughout my entire childhood, only retiring when I was in adulthood. He then went on to serve a time as a police chief in a small, neighboring town.
One thing he never did, though, was serve as part of a law-enforcement effort overseas.
That happens, of course. The FBI, for example, conducts investigations all over the world, as do postal inspectors. Yet there are rules that must be followed when that happens.
China, however, appears to have opened what amount to police stations all over the world, including in the United States.
The U.S. government must immediately investigate and shutter the recently discovered overseas Chinese government police station in New York City for potential violation of U.S. laws, several experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
In 2022, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) established secret police stations in over 100 cities around the world to conduct intimidation and harassment operations against overseas Chinese, human rights organization Safeguard Defenders revealed in a September report.
While other countries have announced probes into the alleged police stations, the location within American Changle Association — a Chinatown community organization in New York City — continues to operate outside legal boundaries and should be shut down, experts told the DCNF.
“This is a disgrace. How in God’s name could they openly have these communist police stations in our country?” Beau Dietl, a retired NYPD detective and current head of Beau Dietl & Associates private investigation firm, told the DCNF.
But what do these police stations actually do?
After all, some possibilities are benign and others aren’t. Unsurprisingly, the official explanation isn’t all that terrifying.
The police stations, designated as “110 Overseas” — in reference to China’s emergency telephone number — bill themselves as purportedly helping overseas Chinese obtain driver’s licenses, manage dispute resolution and resolve vaguely defined “difficult problems,” according to Chinese media.
Oh, well, that’s not so bad, right?
It’s the next paragraph of the report that bothers me.
However, they also conduct “foreign strike operations” against individuals who run afoul of the CCP through intimidation, blackmail and forcible arrest, according to Safeguard Defenders. The Chinese government claims these operations aim to crack down on drug smuggling and telecommunications fraud.
The problem is, they’re doing a whole lot more than that.
The truth of the matter is that if this were about drug smuggling or fraud, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies would likely be thrilled to help. After all, a lot of nasty stuff comes into the US from China, so helping put a stop to that would benefit American law enforcement a great deal. Reciprocating just makes sense.
But that’s not really what these 110 Overseas stations are really doing.
We know that the Chinese government does a lot of awful things. That includes threatening the families of Chinese nationals currently in the United States, to say nothing of having literal concentration camps.
This is not a government we can trust.
Yet it seems that despite a letter from at least 10 members of Congress asking Attorney General Merrick Garland to do something about these stations, nothing has come of it.
Other nations have started investigations, but not the Biden administration.
Look, I have no issue with there being someone to help Chinese immigrants navigate American bureaucracy. Even if it’s not as bad as Chinese bureaucracy—and while I can’t say for certain, nothing about China’s history suggests we’re worse—it’s still different. Someone helping work through that is a good thing.
But why would Chinese law enforcement be involved, anyway? That’s something for their version of a state department, not the cops. Not on foreign soil, at least.
Which is how you know what you’re seeing is absolute BS.
And yet, our government does nothing. They sit there and allow this kind of thing to happen. If there weren’t enough reasons to criticize the Biden administration, this would be enough all on its own.
Imagine a president letting the USSR do this kind of stuff during the Cold War. You probably can’t, because even left-leaning Democrats knew better. Yet we have fallen from those heights as a nation. We’re allowing a brutal and tyrannical government to exert its power on our soil and doing nothing about it.
Frankly, if we lose our status as a superpower, we deserve to see it happen at this point.
So today isn't the existential threat to democracy that was repeated every day for the last 2-3 months?
The issue here is that if every election is 'the end of democracy' then it becomes boy who cried wolf when there's minimal changes.
— Saltpork (@saltpork545) November 8, 2022
Gun laws, abortion, taxes: Why Eastern Oregon is voting to join Idaho
Republican voters in Eastern and Central Oregon are so fed up with liberal lawmakers that they want to break rank — and state lines — and become part of Idaho.
On Tuesday, two Oregon counties, Morrow and Wheeler, are set to vote on a ballot measure about whether to explore leaving the state. Since 2020, nine counties in Eastern Oregon have already voted to join the Greater Idaho movement.
“People in Eastern Oregon are just different and have different views on crime, the Second Amendment, abortion, taxes and minimum wage [from the western portion of the state],” Matt McCaw, spokesman for Greater Idaho, told The Post. “The polarization with the western part of the state is real. When I meet with people and host meetings, there are a lot of complaints about the lack of representation. Eastern Oregon is just very conservative and has its own culture.”
So he and a group of fellow disgruntled Oregonians in the small city of La Pine began to hash out a plan to secede because they no longer felt represented by the liberal lawmakers in the state capital, Salem. The solution: Join Idaho, where the Republican Party is firmly in control.
“Eastern Oregon, where we all live, could get state-level government from Idaho that matches their values,” McCaw said.
It’s a radical proposition that would see nearly two-thirds of Oregon’s 63 million acres (98,000 square miles), but less than 10% of its population, blend into neighboring Idaho.
McCaw, 46, said the movement’s leaders are hoping to attract 15 of the state’s 36 counties and two partial ones to join Idaho.
“We asked the simple question, ‘Would you like your elected leaders to change the border?’ and we’ve won our last six elections with more than 60% of the vote,” McCaw told The Post.
For McCaw, who owns a small math-curriculum company with his wife, and his supporters, the largely rural and conservative residents of Eastern Oregon have very little in common with their progressive urban neighbors in western cities like Portland, Eugene and Bend.
In the 2020 election, former President Donald Trump dominated Eastern Oregon, receiving nearly 80% of the vote in some counties, but President Biden ultimately won 56.5% of Oregon votes thanks to liberal cities.
Oregon’s current governor, Democrat Kate Brown, has a 56% disapproval rating, the worst in the US. Brown, whose term expires next year, has been criticized for doing little to stem rising crime and homelessness in the state’s urban centers since she became governor in 2015.
Some Oregonians are so fed up with spiraling crime, easy access to drugs and homelessness that — for the first time in 40 years — Oregon may see a Republican become governor.
Christine Drazan, 50, a former Oregon House minority leader, has a slight lead over her closest opponent, former Oregon House Speaker Tina Kotek, a Democrat. Independent Betsy Johnson is also in the race, and some predict she might split the blue vote.
But even the prospect of a Republican governor would not help the situation for those in the eastern part of the state, said Sandie Gilson, who lives in Grant County, one of the first Oregon counties to vote in 2020 to explore joining Idaho.
“Even if we have a Republican governor, the Democrats still have a supermajority in the legislature,” said Gilson, 56, a fifth-generation Oregonian whose gold-miner great-great-grandfather arrived in the state in the 1800s. “It will change nothing.”
Gilson and her husband are small-business owners who say they want to be self-sufficient in a rural region where making an emergency call to police could result in a two-hour wait for help. The couple, who own firearms, say they are not able to defend themselves if faced with an emergency, because of government mandates. Last year, the state enacted a safe storage law that requires the owners of firearms to keep them locked up.
“It would take us more than five minutes to unlock our guns, and in that time a lot could happen,” Gilson told The Post. “The legislature does things that just don’t make sense for us.”
Gilson also said she doesn’t feel safe after Oregon decriminalized personal portions of all drugs in 2020 and, earlier this year, instituted bail reform laws that allows defendants charged with misdemeanors and some felonies to be released without posting bail.
“How does that make me safe in my home?” Gilson said, adding that residents in Eastern Oregon, which has a fraction of the population of the western part of the state, generally get outvoted.
Like Gilson, Mike McCarter, 75, said residents in Eastern Oregon are almost always getting outvoted by the much more populous western region. McCarter, who lives in La Pine and is one of the founders of Greater Idaho, told The Post that eastern residents voted two to one against recreational drug use, but “Western Oregon wanted it, and they carried the vote.”
Still, McCarter insists that the movement for a Greater Idaho is not a political one. “We try to keep the movement away from politics,” he said. “Our movement is a traditional-values type movement of faith — of people who value freedom, independence and self-sufficiency.”
In 2020, Gov. Brad Little of Idaho said he welcomed the move, adding, “They’re looking at Idaho fondly because of our regulatory atmosphere, our values. What they’re interested [in] is they would like to have a little more autonomy, a little more control, a little more freedom and I can understand that.”
Although states have had their borders reconfigured in the past — Maine seceded from Massachusetts in 1820 — there is no historical precedent for large land masses to leave one state and join another.
“This is not the kind of thing that is done unilaterally by people in counties,” Griffiths said. “They have to get the state of Oregon on board and the state of Idaho, and that’s a very high bar.”
What’s left standing after judge guts NY carry laws?
As my colleague Tom Knighton reported this morning, U.S. District Judge Glenn Suddaby has halted enforcement of many aspects of New York’s Concealed Carry Improvement Act, from the “good moral character” requirement to the state’s designation of a host of publicly-accessible places as “sensitive” locations off-limits to concealed carry holders.
The 184 page order is mostly great news for gun owners, but Suddaby is still allowing several components of the CCIA to remain in place, like the requirement that concealed carry applicants provide a list of four character references, take part in an in-person meeting with law enforcement, and provide proof of 18 hours of training (16 hours of classroom training and 2 hours of range time) before concealed carry licenses “shall” be granted.
In upholding those provisions of the CCIA, Suddaby pointed to several statutes in place near the time of the ratification of the Second Amendment in 1791 and the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868. For the character references, Suddaby noted that at least five colonies “had gun laws based on a reputation-based perception of an individual (Pennsylvania, Maryland, North Carolina, Virginia and New York).” Suddaby also found “three historical statutes (one from a state and two from cities) requiring an applicant to provide character references to be permitted to carry a gun,” and determined that “together, these eight laws (five of which came from states in 1777, including Virginia) were sufficiently established and representative to constitute a historical tradition of firearm regulation based on reputation (for example, by a reasonable number of character references).” Though the judge did note in an aside that “it seems overreactive (and a bit offensive) to literally analogize the need to regulate concealed-carry applicants to the need to regulate ‘groups deemed dangerous’, that’s pretty much what he ended up doing.
In upholding the state’s expansive training standards, Suddaby said the financial burden on applicants is “troubling,” but ruled that the provisions can remain in place for now because of “the analogousness of a historical requirement that those persons without familiarity of firearms must become familiar with them if those persons are to exercise their right use firearms to defend themselves in public,” adding that [i”]n addition, as the Court stated in its Decision and Temporary Restraining Order of October 6, 2022, it has been persuaded by Defendants that historically Americans’ familiarity with firearms was far more common than it is today.” The problem with that line of reasoning is that most of the statutes that Suddaby points to in upholding the training mandate are directly related to militia service; something that is not required in order to exercise your right to keep and bear arms.
Moreover, it’s incredibly difficult for would-be carry holders in some parts of the state to find access to the state-mandated training. There are few ranges located in and around New York City, for example, and applicants are forced to travel for some distance, perhaps even staying in another location overnight and incurring additional costs, in order to meet the state’s requirement.
Interestingly, Suddaby suggested that he’d be amenable to halting enforcement of the in-person meeting requirement for concealed carry applicants, and even laid out a better argument than the one used by plaintiffs.
Granted, again, it seems a stretch to analogize the modern need to regulate concealed carry applicants to the historical need regulate “groups deemed dangerous.” And the need to personally see that the members of one’s military are competent to handle firearms during a time of war seems greater than the need to look all concealed carry applicants in the eye (and maybe exchanged a few words with them) after they have provided four character references and completed 18 hours of firearms training. However, Plaintiff Sloane has not yet adduced evidence of the inconvenience he would incur as a result of such an in-person meeting. (See generally Dkt. No. 1, Attach. 4 [Sloane Decl.].)
Conceivable examples of such evidence might include (1) the need to take time away from work or family to appear before a licensing officer, or (2) any delay experienced in having an appointment scheduled due to the CCIA’s imposition of this requirement on every applicant. Instead, Plaintiff Sloane has relied only on a possible infringement of his Fifth Amendment right to remain silent. (Id. at ¶ ¶ 5, 17-19.)
The problem with this sole reliance is that, even setting aside the argument that an applicant is not “in custody” during such an in-person meeting, Plaintiff Sloane’s Fifth Amendment injury stemming from an “interrogation” appears too speculative at this point in the litigation. Simply stated, without more evidence, the Court must find that the burdensomeness of this modern regulation appears proportionate to the burdensomeness of its historical analogues.
In this regard, based on better briefing by the State Defendants (and in the absence of testimony at the Preliminary Injunction Hearing), the Court reconsiders its prior ruling on this issue (in its Decision and Temporary Restraining Order of October 6, 2022), and denies Plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction with regard to this regulation.
Suddaby’s decision also allows the prohibition on concealed carry in playgrounds (but not parks), daycare centers, libraries and nursery schools; finding that those places are close enough to historical prohibitions on carrying firearms on school grounds to withstand constitutional scrutiny.
While the judge’s decision isn’t perfectly in line with what plaintiffs were asking for, it’s still a big win for Second Amendment advocates. Now the question is what will the Second Circuit do with Suddaby’s opinion? The state’s appeal will likely come quickly, and then the appeals court will have to decide whether to let the injunction stand as it is or reverse some or all of the district court decision. In the meantime, life will be a little easier for those who already possess a permit to carry in New York, but those hoping to exercise their right to bear arms for the first time are still going to deal with some unreasonable (and I’d argue unconstitutional) demands.
Latest New York Gun-Carry Law Ruled Unconstitutional Too
A federal judge has found the bulk of the gun-carry law New York instituted in response to the Supreme Court striking down its previous law also violates the Second Amendment.
On Monday, Judge Glenn Suddaby of the Northern District of New York issued a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of the law’s most controversial provisions. He also refused to issue a stay on his decision to enjoin what he described as a “patently unconstitutional” law, which means the state will not be able to enforce the impacted rules unless and until a higher court intervenes.
“[A]lthough the Court in no way suggests that America lacks a historical tradition of firearm-licensing schemes, it finds (based on the current briefing of the parties) that America lacks a historical tradition of firearm-licensing schemes conferring open-ended discretion on licensing officers,” Judge Suddaby wrote.
The ruling found the state could not force gun-carry permit applicants to turn over information on their family members or their social media accounts. It stops the state from subjectively denying applicants based on whether officials believe they have a “good moral character.” And it prevents them from banning anyone, including those with permits, from carrying a gun at restaurants that serve alcohol, theaters, protests, places of worship, banquet halls or conference centers, parks, areas at airports or clinics before security checkpoints, and public buses. Suddaby also ruled the state’s attempt to prohibit gun carry on all private property unless explicitly allowed by the owner, including private businesses open to the public, by default was unconstitutional.
The decision brings New York’s gun-carry restrictions closer in line with the rest of the country. It also represents the latest setback for New York’s new gun law and Governor Kathy Hochul (D.), who backed it as a rebuke to the Supreme Court’s decision in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association (NYSRPA) v. Bruen. A second federal judge has already blocked the law’s church-carry prohibition in the Western District, and a group of armed Jewish worshipers is challenging it in the Southern District. The law’s constitutionality took center stage in the recent debate between Hochul and challenger Lee Zeldin (R.) as polls show a much tighter-than-expected contest.
Gun Owners of America, one of the plaintiffs in the case, celebrated the decision as a rebuke of Hochul and the law.
“Just like we warned politicians after the Bruen decision, fall in line, or we will force you to,” Erich Pratt, the group’s senior vice president, said in a statement. “We are excited to see Kathy Hochul finally served a plate of humble pie, and we are fully prepared to continue the fight should she again attempt to disarm the citizens of her state at a time when her party’s policies are only escalating the danger that everyday citizens face.”
The news from the decision wasn’t all bad for Hochul, though. Judge Suddaby removed her as a defendant in the case and allowed the subway ban to remain in effect because he found plaintiffs didn’t have standing to sue her or the train ban. He also allowed the state’s strict training requirements to remain in place despite expressing concern about the potential cost of complying with it.
A spokesperson for the office of Attorney General Letitia James (D.), which is representing the state in the case, said “we are reviewing and considering our options.” The state previously appealed the judge’s decision to issue a temporary restraining order against the law that shared many of the same conclusions in his preliminary injunction.
Judge Suddaby’s lengthy ruling, clocking in at 184 pages, examines the historical evidence offered for each of New York’s regulations at length. Suddaby even describes how he performed his own research for potential historical matches for some of the provisions when the state failed to offer them. For instance, the judge said the state offered no comparison for its social media reporting requirement, and what his research found did not help their case.
“Rather, the Court has mostly found only instances in which this demand was (properly) made of convicted sex offenders while registering for a Sex Offender Registry,” he wrote. “Suffice it to say, the need to regulate convicted sex offenders has not been shown to be analogous to the need to regulate applicants for a concealed-carry license.”
Suddaby is also often unsubtle in his critique of the attempts to identify historical analogues the state did make.
“For the sake of brevity, the Court will not expound on why it finds that barring some people from openly carrying rifles on other people’s farms and lands in 19th century America is hardly analogous to barring all license holders from carrying concealed handguns in virtually every commercial building now,” he wrote. “Even if the way the historical and modern regulations burdened one’s Second Amendment right were the same, the State Defendants’ attempt to analogize these six laws to Section 5 of the CCIA would stumble over the second of the Supreme Court’s two ‘central’ metrics: ‘why the regulations burden a law-abiding citizen’s right to armed self defense.’”
He further argued the state’s attempt to ban is a “thinly disguised version of the sort of impermissible ‘sensitive location’ regulation that the Supreme Court considered and rejected in NYSRPA.” He said the state’s provision banning licensed individuals from carrying at any public protest was doubly unconstitutional, creating a “paradox” implicating both the First and Second Amendments.
“[T]he Court finds itself in a paradox created by a regulation that prevents a license holder from possessing a handgun while gathering with individuals to collectively express their right to protest the regulation by possessing handguns,” he wrote. “Levity aside, the Court does not understand how barring Plaintiff Terrille from carrying concealed at a gun show at a Polish Community Center would further this regulation’s purpose of avoiding the ‘destr[uction] [of] the exercise of [someone else’s] constitutionally-protected rights.’ The Court could be wrong but it will hazard a guess that the Center probably does not lease space to opposing expressive groups at the same time.”
Ultimately, Suddaby ruled many of the provisions in New York’s law are “unreasonably disproportionate to the burdensomeness of [their] historical analogues” and is filed with “unprecedented constitutional violations.”
BLUF
It all makes perfect sense if you just assume that Biden is prepared to say whatever he thinks the current audience wants to hear, no matter how contradictory to his previous statements and how factually inaccurate, with complete confidence that the mainstream media will cover for him.
Understanding Biden Administration Energy Policy.
Politicians have long been known for having a loose relationship with the truth. Generally, that takes the form of exaggeration or hyperbole. But the latest craze among Democrats is just making flatly contradictory statements.
In this category, it’s hard to top the performance of Pennsylvania Senate candidate John Fetterman on Saturday night, when he uttered this immortal quote: I run on Roe v Wade. I celebrate the demise of Roe v. Wade. That’s the choice that we have between us, in front of us.”
Video at the link if you don’t believe it. Clearly, Fetterman is not all there mentally.
But how different is that, really, from Joe Biden on energy policy? The main difference that I can find is that there does not appear to be an example where Biden has so clearly contradicted himself in consecutive sentences uttered to the same audience on the same night. But his various statements on energy policy are at least as contradictory as Fetterman’s on abortion. Consider a few from Category A and Category B.
Category A.
- Biden at a February 2020 rally: “We are going to get rid of fossil fuels. . . . That’s okay. These guys are okay. They want to do the same thing I want to do. They want to phase out fossil fuels, and we’re going to phase out fossil fuels.”
- Biden at a March 15, 2020 CNN debate with Bernie Sanders: “No more drilling on federal lands. No more drilling including offshore. No ability for the oil industry to continue to drill, period. [It] ends.”
- Biden Executive Order, January 27, 2021: “The United States and the world face a profound climate crisis. We have a narrow moment to pursue action at home and abroad in order to avoid the most catastrophic impacts of that crisis and to seize the opportunity that tackling climate change presents.”
- White House press release, April 22, 2021: “Today, President Biden will announce a new target for the United States to achieve a 50-52 percent reduction from 2005 levels in economy-wide net greenhouse gas pollution in 2030. . . . On Day One, President Biden fulfilled his promise to rejoin the Paris Agreement and set a course for the United States to tackle the climate crisis at home and abroad, reaching net zero emissions economy-wide by no later than 2050. As part of re-entering the Paris Agreement, he also launched a whole-of-government process, organized through his National Climate Task Force, to establish this new 2030 emissions target.”<
- List of section headings from Report at RealClearEnergy by Joseph Toomey dated September 2022, listing major Biden Administration energy initiatives: “Canceling the Keystone XL Pipeline; Halting Lease Sales in Alaska’s ANWR; Placing a Moratorium on Drilling on Federal Lands; Rejoining the Paris Climate Accord; Proposing Energy-Inhibiting Budgets; Canceling Oil and Gas Drilling Leases; Initiating Punitive Government Investigations; Restricting Permian Basin Drilling Using Ozone Rules; Imposing Stricter Methane Emissions Rules.”
Category B.
- Biden remarks at White House, October 19, 2022: “[W]e need to responsibly increase American oil production without delaying or deferring our transition to clean energy. [Ed – very Fettermanesque there] Let me — let’s debunk some myths here. My administration has not stopped or slowed U.S. oil production; quite the opposite.
- Biden remarks in upstate New York, October 27, 2022: “Today . . . we’re in a much better place [than when I took office]. . . . [G]as prices are declining. We’re down $1.25 since the peak this summer, and they’ve been falling for the last three weeks at well — as well. That’s adding up to real savings for families. Today, the most common price of gas in America is $3.39 — down from over $5 when I took office.”
CNN, of all places, called out that last line in a big fact check of recent Biden whoppers (of which there are many):
Biden’s claim that the most common gas price when he took office was more than $5 is not even close to accurate. The most common price for a gallon of regular gas on the day he was inaugurated, January 20, 2021, was $2.39, according to data provided to CNN by Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy. In other words, Biden made it sound like gas prices had fallen significantly during his presidency when they had actually increased significantly.
Op-Ed blows it on Second Amendment history
The Deep South is, for the most part, a safe haven for the Second Amendment. It’s not unique to here, mind you, but it’s definitely a big part of the culture down here and has been for ages.
And yet, for many, that’s indicative of…something. In particular, guns are about racism, and gun owners are, in essence, racist.
Yeah, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, either, but an op-ed in the LA Times is the latest to try and make that connection.
There are a lot of guns in America — this nation has collectively more civilian-owned guns than we have citizens. Unlike the rest of the developed world, firearms ownership in America is broadly held, with an estimated 40% of American households owning at least one gun; and unlike the rest of the world, gun-owning Americans tend to think of their weapons not as something dangerous, but as something that keeps them and their families safe.
Two-thirds of American gun owners say that they own their gun at least in part for protection — this despite data showing having a gun in the house doubles the likelihood that someone in the household will die by homicide, triples the likelihood that someone in the household will die by suicide, and provides little or no defense against assault or property loss.
Where does this unique set of beliefs about the protective power of a gun come from?
I don’t know. Facts, maybe?
Let’s remember that the data he links to has serious problems. For example, the study saying having a gun in the house doubles your chance of dying by homicide has been widely and repeatedly debunked. The other link uses information from the National Crime Victimization Survey, which also has problems that have been widely discussed.
But don’t worry. The author knows where our beliefs really come from.
Americans have not always felt this way: Historians suggest that for a large portion of this country’s existence, firearms were more often thought of as tools for hunting and pest control, with a purpose that was not primarily to keep a household safe. Guns, when advertised, were often displayed in the same pages as household goods such as farm implements, with similar language promoting both.
It is only relatively recently that Americans came to widely believe that guns keep a person safe and secure. My research with Jessica Mazen suggests that the crystallization and propagation of these beliefs happened largely in the former slave states in the aftermath of the Civil War.
There we go. The whole “racist” thing, right?
Well, not necessarily. I might be a bit worked up over this one.
Now, the author does go into the fact that those former states of the Confederacy were pretty lawless during Reconstruction and there was a widely held perception that the government in place had no interest in protecting former Rebel soldiers, thus precipitating people feeling the need to protect themselves.
However, even there, he’s missing a key aspect of gun ownership that predated the Civil War.
In particular, that guns had long been a part of self-defense measures, even if they weren’t necessarily marketed as such.
From the time of Jamestown and St. Augustine, the North American continent was a pretty rough place. Wild animals were an issue, but so were the Native American tribes that called this land home for eons prior. While many were friendly with the settlers and were willing to trade, others saw the Europeans as invaders.
This became even clearer after the settlements grew.
Indian attacks were a thing.
In fact, the earliest school shooting on American soil, if not in the world, took place in 1764, more than a century before Reconstruction. Four Lenape warriors slaughtered 11 people and wounded one other in the Enoch Brown school massacre, part of Pontiac’s Rebellion.
Such attacks were at least semi-common, particularly for those who lived outside of the protection of the town. Those who lived and farmed in these areas knew that their guns were key to their survival, not just for getting game during lean years, but also to fight back from these attacks.
The Founding Fathers were well aware of such attacks when they penned the Second Amendment.
“But advertisements…”
Honestly, I don’t want to hear a thing about advertisements. Advertisements are about what they think will sell a product but don’t represent the totality of how people view the product.
Even looking at the Founding Fathers’ words, it’s difficult to imagine that no one viewed guns as mere hunting tools rather than an item essential to self-defense and the defense of this nation.
Plus, if guns were for hunting, then why do we have flintlock pistols for private sale? Surely no one was using a pistol to hunt bears back in the day.
In fact, look at the wording of the Second Amendment itself for a moment. It begins with the controversial clause, “A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state” before anything else. There’s no “hunting being important for putting food on the table” or anything of the sort. The militia clause clearly articulates that this is about defending our nation and, by extension, ourselves.
No amount of pretending otherwise is going to change it.
Does Gun Control Save Lives or Cost Lives?
The world is violent. Lots of people think that we should pass more laws to make the world safer and less violent. It sounds obvious that we could reduce the number of criminals who use weapons by passing more gun-control laws. We’re not the first ones to think of that. We have thousands of gun-control regulations on the books already. I’ve been looking at the subject of gun-control and personal safety for a decade. I think gun-control laws put us at risk. The reasons are complex and not necessarily obvious.
Let’s be clear what is not under discussion here. We’re not talking about rights. Some people say they have a right to “be safe”. Some people say they have a right to “self-defense”. What you have a right to do may not have anything to do with how laws actually work in practice. Let’s look at what we already know.
We know that criminals commit violent crimes with a firearm about 510 times a day. That data is from 2019. That is the last year where the FBI has data from all 50 states.
Isn’t it obvious that we need more laws to stop those criminals? Shouldn’t we pass another law even if it only stopped a single crime? Isn’t that the least we should do?
I like that you obey the law and you think other people obey the law too. The problem of violent crime is more complex. There is more violent crime, much more than I’ve mentioned so far. There are also lots of gun-control laws. Last, and certainly not least, honest citizens stop a lot of violent crimes because the intended victim had a gun of their own. Each of those factors has a vital influence on what gun-control laws can actually accomplish.
While it is true that criminals use guns to commit crimes, criminals also commit crimes without using a gun. In fact, that’s closer to the rule than the exception. Only one-out-of six violent criminals used a firearm (15 percent). That means that taking guns from every criminal would still leave us with a lot of non-gun crime. The remaining five-out-of-six violent criminals would still commit their acts of violence. And that assumes the currently-armed criminal will suddenly become peaceful if we took away his gun. That isn’t very realistic. Taking the gun away from a violent criminal doesn’t turn him into a nice person who obeys the law.
But we have to do something. We can’t just let armed criminals hurt people. Why shouldn’t we pass more laws?
Those are good questions, but what makes you think we haven’t “done something” already? We have over 23-thousand firearms regulations on the books today. And anti-gun politicians pass more gun-control laws every week. We should certainly be safe by now if ink-on-paper was all it took to stop crime. We’ve tried that approach tens-of-thousands of times.
OK, maybe those gun-control laws didn’t work. We just need to write ones that will.
Let’s think this through a little more before we propose more laws. Life is more complex than what we see on the news. Bad guys are not the only ones who use guns. Good guys use guns too, a lot. Honest citizens legally use their firearms between 1.6 and 2.5-million times a year to stop violent crime or to prevent great bodily injury. That is over 4,500-times-a-day that honest citizens use a gun to save lives in the United States. Four-out-of-ten households have a gun today. One-out-of-a-dozen citizens are legally carrying a concealed firearm in public every day.
That is hard to believe. Why don’t I know that? How do I know you’re telling me the truth if the news didn’t show those stories?
Those are good questions. Those are brilliant questions. The answer will take more than a minute.
Study: 27 of the 30 Cities with Highest Murder Rate Are Democrat Run
A study published by the Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Judicial and Legal Studies shows that 27 of the 30 cities with the highest murder rates are controlled by Democrats.
FOX News noted that the study indicates “27….[of the 30 cities] have Democratic mayors. Within those cities, there are at least 14 “rogue prosecutors” either backed or inspired by billionaire Democrat supporter George Soros.”
The Daily Signal reported that the authors of the study–Charles Stimson, Zack Smith, and Kevin D. Dayaratna–noted, “Those on the Left know that their soft-on-crime policies have wreaked havoc in the cities where they have implemented those policies.”
Stimson, Smith, and Dayaratna added:
It is not hard to understand why ‘reforms’ such as ending cash bail, defunding the police, refusing to prosecute entire categories of crimes, letting thousands of convicted felons out of prison early, significantly cutting the prison population, and other ‘progressive’ ideas have led to massive spikes in crime—particularly violent crime, including murder—in the communities where those on the Left have implemented them.
The study undercuts Hillary Clinton’s claim that Republicans’ emphasis on crime and violence in Democrat-run cities was not valid.
On November 3, 2022, CNN quoted Clinton suggesting Republicans were “just trying to gin up all kinds of fear and anxiety in people.”
She added, “[The Republicans] are not dealing with it. They are not trying to tackle it. So I view it as an effort to scare voters.”
We’re Not Going Back. You can’t make us.
Let me introduce you to a concept called “singularity.”
It was the hot thing in my field in the 90s. We were accelerating in tech so fast that eventually we were going to hit a point called the singularity. After that point, everything that came before would be non-understandable to the average human. And everything that comes after would not be understandable to us now.
This went along with augmented humans, where were were all going to have hardware ports in our brains and be plugging in thumb drives for extra knowledge. And stuff.
For the record, I was always agnostic on this. (Kind of like on aliens, yes.)
I’ve written one trans-humanist story, and it was because I was invited to a trans-humanist anthology. It’s kind of the price of admission. You get a call that says “Hey do you want to be in x y z anthology?” What they are actually saying is “Do you want six hundred bucks?” (More or less.) And if you’re trying to make a living with words (which is a remarkably precarious existence) you go “Sure, I can do that.” And when the prompt is something like “psychedelic drugs of the seventies” or “Alien strip clubs” you build in a morning to go down the weirdest internet rabbit holes, and become an expert (over time) in the strangest subjects.
What you don’t do is say “Your notion is silly. What even.” Because, you know, you want six hundred bucks, which are the difference between buying groceries and… uh…. not.
But I never truly bought it. Look, yes, a lot of people are nuts. My husband, for instance, wanted us fully hooked on to Alexa, and it took me months of carefully disconnecting the thing whenever I caught it connected before he gave up.
I can see — just not near, because tech is not there — augmented thought and reality devices in a headband, or perhaps a hood, or even glasses, or a neat clip that goes around your ear. Kind of like based bluetooth headsets. Heck, people get me one I can reliably dictate to with my thoughts, so I can write every minute I’m not actually asleep and I’ll buy it and never take it off.
But actual hardware installed in the head? Or inserted in my body not to treat a permanent problem, but just because? Yeah. No. No with bells on and a little mandolin.
Look, I came of age in the time of reel-to-reel home movies. Now? Now my DVDs are gathering dust, because everything is streamed. I’m not doing that with things that require major surgery.
And as for singularity? Like the last trump, it happens every day, little by little and man by man. If you’d brought me forward from 1990 even to day, I’d have a week of extreme confusion trying to understand how we live now. And hard adaptation. Me from the sixties… well, I’d probably eventually happen (Humans are more pliable than most people think) but it would take a long, long time.
But sometimes, sometimes, there singularities of experience and understanding. And once you go there, you can never ever go back. You just can’t.
And we went through one of those in the last six years. And how. Things we thought we knew turned out not to be so. Experts have proven themselves either craven, stupid, or bizarrely twisted. And if they believed half the things they told us too, they’re experts ONLY in make believe.
The masks came down. The whole beautifully painted picture of a reality that we all accepted because …. well, because pretty much everyone did. Even those of us who thought that they were out of their minds on certain things accepted some vast parts of it.
Because you had to believe some parts of it, and well… We believed things like that our politicians, no matter how idiotic, weren’t deliberately malicious and trying to kill us. We believed things like that our medical establishment was actually trying to keep people healthy. We believed– well, a lot of things that just weren’t so.
But the last few years have proven we were wrong. However stupid we thought our politicians were they’re dumber than that, but also they will say and do anything, even if it kills you, to avoid losing power or to gain more power. Our doctors might be fine — I know there are several here as regulars — but the establishment is horrendous.
And we’re not going back. What’s been seen can’t be unseen.
It’s apparent now that he’s considered expendable.
Observation O’ The Day
The media bail on Biden:
All polling points to Biden’s majorities in the House and Senate being wiped out come the November midterm elections. When that happens, and I mean the very next day, these innuendos and grumblings for Biden to step aside will become full-bore primal screams, and he won’t be able to survive them.
-Stephen L. Miller
CNN Crushes President Joe Biden With Fact Check.
It may not be something that CNN watchers are used to seeing, but President Joe Biden got hammered by a fact check from the network.
“Gas prices weren’t over $5 when Biden took office. The Social Security hike isn’t a Biden achievement. The Trump tax cut didn’t ‘only’ go to the top 1%. Biden didn’t cut the debt in half. Biden didn’t get Congress to pass a law to forgive student debt,” CNN fact checker Daniel Dale said.
“The unemployment rate. Biden said at the Florida rally on Tuesday: ‘Unemployment is down from 6.5 to 3.5%, the lowest in 50 years.’ He said at the New Mexico rally on Thursday: ‘Unemployment rate is 3.5% – the lowest it’s been in 50 years.
“But Biden didn’t acknowledge that September’s 3.5% unemployment rate was actually a tie for the lowest in 50 years – a tie, specifically, with three months of Trump’s administration, in late 2019 and early 2020,” the fact checker said.
“Since Biden uses these campaign speeches to favorably compare his own record to Trump’s record, that omission is significant.
“The unemployment rate rose to 3.7% in October; that number was revealed on Friday, after these Biden comments. The rate was 6.4% in January 2021, the month Biden took office,” he said.
Biden’s student debt policy
“During an on-camera discussion conducted by progressive organization NowThis News and published online in late October, Biden told young activists that they ‘probably are aware, I just signed a law’ on student debt forgiveness that is being challenged by Republicans.
“He added: ‘It’s passed. I got it passed by a vote or two, and it’s in effect.’
“Biden’s claims are false,” he said.
“He created his student debt forgiveness initiative through executive action, not through legislation, so he didn’t sign a law and didn’t get it passed by any margin.
“Since Republicans opposed to the initiative, including those challenging the initiative in court, have called it unlawful precisely because it wasn’t passed by Congress, the distinction between a law and an executive action is a highly pertinent fact here,” the fact checker said.
“A White House official told CNN that Biden was referring to the Inflation Reduction Act, the law narrowly passed by the Senate in August; the official said the Inflation Reduction Act created “room for other crucial programs” by bringing down the deficit. But Biden certainly did not make it clear that he was talking about anything other than the student debt initiative” he said.
Gas prices
“Biden correctly noted on various occasions in October that gas prices have declined substantially since their June 2022 peak – though, as always, it’s important to note that presidents have a limited impact on gas prices.
“But in an economic speech in New York last week, Biden said, ‘Today, the most common price of gas in America is $3.39 – down from over $5 when I took office.’
“Biden’s claim that the most common gas price when he took office was more than $5 is not even close to accurate,” the fact checker said.
“The most common price for a gallon of regular gas on the day he was inaugurated, January 20, 2021, was $2.39, according to data provided to CNN by Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy.
“In other words, Biden made it sound like gas prices had fallen significantly during his presidency when they had actually increased significantly,” he said.
“In other recent remarks, Biden has discussed the state of gas prices in relation to the summer peak of more than $5 per gallon, not in relation to when he took office.
“Regardless, the comment last week was the second this fall in which Biden inaccurately described the price of gas – both times in a way that made it sound more impressive,” he said.
But the president may be getting desperate as on Saturday, polling analysis publication FiveThirtyEight changed its Senate forecast from a “toss-up” to leaning Republican, Newsmax reported.
At president, the analyst firm lists Republican chances of winning the Senate at 55 in 100 versus Democrats retaining control at 45 in 100.
The new predictions come after the outlet reported on Monday: “Herschel Walker’s scandals may hurt his chances against Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock. Meanwhile, Democrats are hoping to pick up a seat in Pennsylvania, but that race has gotten a lot tighter recently.”
“Other Senate races are competitive but have identifiable favorites. For instance, strong Democratic incumbents currently have an edge in Arizona and New Hampshire. And the Senate races in North Carolina, Ohio, and Wisconsin are also close but will likely result in Republican winners,” the outlet also added.