Category: Bureaucraps

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not to mention the CDC for FEMA.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is the problem. Right there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The reproducibility crisis

Watts Up With That? does a good job covering the climate scam, the only flaw being that they post so much good data that one is apt to lose sight of the forest for the trees.

They have recently posted an excellent post on the reproducibility crisis. The short of it is that nineteen out twenty science papers seem to be making up their data.

I would say that this reflects incentives. If you actually make observations, you are bound to run into some land mine of an ever growing and ever holier orthodoxy enforced by peer review, while if you simply make stuff up, you will be fine. So any scientist who believes in actual observation eventually finds himself in some other career.

The influx of priestly types into science was bound to result in an exodus of scientist types, in the same way we are seeing an exodus of engineering types from open source, and it appears that this transformation is now complete. Science is now about one third global warming, one third the neglected role of women, and one third making stuff up in the style and subject matter of famous science papers from back in the day when scientists actually did science. Soon scientist will stop bothering with those postmodern pastiches on old fashioned science topics, and it will all be about the oppression of drag queens.

And, since I am covering WattsUpWithThat, here is the short on global warming science. So I am going to give you the view from twenty thousand feet, and suggest you spend a week reading Watts Up with That to get a glimpse of a small part of the trees.

For the full sordid tale, search their site for references to the Climategate files.

The climategate files, most of which I myself read, are the internal emails of the climate conspiracy. It is obvious from their internal emails that the official climate scientists do no know and do not care whether the world is warming or cooling, whether humans are causing it or not, and whether it would be bad or good.

Their objective is to indict humans in general, whites and western civilization in particular, and anglos specifically, for crimes against Gaia.

In the climategate files, one encounters a few low status scientists who are worried about actual facts. They did not doubt holy global warming, they just wanted the data proving the sins of mankind to be genuine data. They all swiftly ceased to have careers in science.

What is the motive for this conspiracy?

Lots of motives, but the motive we saw on display with South Australia’s Green Energy program was to shakedown the electricity grid for a few bucks in the course of destroying South Australia. Instead of turning wind and solar power into electric power, and electric power into money, they turned wind and solar into superior holiness, superior holiness into status, and status into money.

South Australia wound up with blackouts, brown outs, sky high electricity prices, and massive imports of electric power from coal mining states.

I think most of them are in it for the shakedown. Global Warming resembles the Aztec religion, in that human sacrifices are required to ensure that the sun rises tomorrow. And then the priesthood get something in return for their influence over who gets sacrificed.

Of course there are some, the Greta Thunberg Bernie Sanders crowd, who just like human sacrifice. If not global warming, they would find some other justification, as Trump told us at the Davos conference.

Josh Hawley: Legislation ‘Necessary’ to Address Chinese Monopoly of U.S. Drug, Medical Supplies

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) wrote a letter to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Monday, contending that it is “inexcusable” that America relies on China for its medical supply chain. Hawley called hearings and legislation to determine how to address America’s reliance on Chinese for producing vital medicine.

The Missouri conservative wrote a letter to U.S. FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn after reports revealed that the coronavirus has jeopardized the “domestic supply of some 150 prescription drugs, including antibiotics, generics, and branded drugs.”

Hawley said that the time is coming for Congress to have oversight and consider legislation to address the insecurity of America’s medical supply chain.

Hawley wrote to Hahn:

The degree to which some of our own manufacturers rely on China to produce life-saving and life-sustaining medications is inexcusable. It is becoming clear to me that both oversight hearings and additional legislation are necessary to determine the extent of our reliance on Chinese production and protect our medical product supply chain.

Reports have revealed the extent to which China produces and exports the overwhelming majority of pharmaceuticals to the United States. China exports 97 percent of all antibiotics and 80 percent of active ingredients used to make drugs in Americans.

Another report stated that America is losing its ability to make pharmaceuticals because of Chinese dumping of low-price products into the global market.

Team Trump just called a halt to the Obama-era war on American suburbs.

President Trump gets credit — and takes heat — for many things, but many folks don’t even know about one of his best accomplishments: blocking the federal government’s power grab for control of America’s suburbs.

During the Obama administration, the Department of Housing and Urban Development tried to install Washington bureaucrats as the decision makers for how communities across all 50 states should grow. Using an obscure rule called Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing, HUD sought to remake America’s cities, towns and villages by forcing any community that was getting federal funds to meet racial quotas.

To do this, HUD applied the notion of “disparate impact,” which unilaterally deems housing patterns to be discriminatory if minority representation is not evenly spread across the jurisdiction. Communities with high concentrations of minorities are automatically labeled segregated.

Westchester served as the petri dish for HUD’s “grand experiment.” On Jan. 1, 2010, the day I was inaugurated as county executive, a federal consent decree signed by my predecessor went into effect requiring Westchester to spend at least $56 million to build 750 units of affordable housing over the next seven years in 31 white communities — or face crippling financial penalties.

Westchester not only met the goal of 750 units on my watch, it exceeded it by 40. A happy ending for everyone . . . except HUD. The administration was intent on taking its AFFH-linked, disparate-impact visions national, and that required villains. The last thing HUD wanted was a suburban community working cooperatively and using its existing zoning framework to build affordable housing without the federal government’s racial micromanagement.

So a year into the settlement, HUD demanded that the county go “beyond the four corners” of the decree and declare its basic zoning rules on things like height, density and safe drinking water as racially “exclusionary.” Single-family homes on quarter-acre lots were deemed potentially “racist” — supposedly because minority members might not be able to afford them….

Now:

Gone is the federal mandate dictating the modeling of communities based on statistical formulas. Restored to local officials is the power that gives them the flexibility to weigh real-world factors in making housing decisions. Restored, too, is the prosecution of bad actors by the courts — not bureaucrats — under the Fair Housing Act.

And builders are now more likely to build affordable housing, since the attached strings have been removed.

The Democratic candidates for president didn’t get the memo. They continue to support radical, divisive and failed housing policies aimed at abolishing single-family residential zoning. And they’d use billions of our tax dollars to local communities — and the threat of lawsuits — to get their way.

The United States needs affordable housing. By replacing social engineering with common sense, guarded by strong nondiscrimination laws, the country is now better positioned to meet that need — and that’s a victory for everyone.

All Four Roger Stone Prosecutors Resign From Case After DOJ Backpedals on Sentencing Recommendation

I’d like to think there’s some deep thinking going on in the DOJ tonight about the words ‘prosecutorial misconduct’.

The entire team prosecuting Roger Stone abruptly resigned from the criminal case on Tuesday after the Justice Department said it planned to reduce the recommended sentence for Stone, a longtime Trump associate.

The Justice Department on Tuesday said it was pulling back on its request to sentence Stone to seven to nine years in prison after President Donald Trump blasted the sentencing proposal as “a miscarriage of justice.”

Victor Davis Hanson on Hubris, Nemesis in the Deep State

This interview with Dr. Hanson is just too long to post and even excerpts wouldn’t do it justice. Just ‘Read The Whole Thing™‘ at your convenience about the corruption, hypocrisy, mendacity and sheer idiocy that’s endemic in our current government, bureaucracy and higher ‘education’.

Wray says FBI conduct surrounding Carter Page FISA warrant ‘unacceptable’ and ‘cannot be repeated’

Until the FBI agents who did this are held accountable, and that means in a court of law facing charges, Directors Wray’s words are so much hot air.

FBI Director Christopher Wray testified Wednesday that the actions taken by the bureau to obtain a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant against former Trump campaign aide Carter Page were “unacceptable” and “cannot be repeated.”

During his first congressional appearance following the release of Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s FISA review last year, Wray vowed to reform the FISA system by implementing “specific procedures and safeguards.”

“The failures highlighted in the inspector general report are unacceptable, period. And they cannot be repeated,” Wray testified before the House Judiciary Committee.

“I have already ordered more than 40 corrective actions to our FISA policies and procedures,” Wray continued, adding that he has “gone above and beyond” in outlining what “should be changed” and “can be changed” and can provide “accountability,” “rigor” and “discipline.”

“I do not think anyone has carte blanche to bypass rules, and I intend to make it painfully clear that is unacceptable at the FBI today,” he added.

Meanwhile, Republicans on the committee used Wednesday’s hearing as an opportunity to further grill Wray and the FBI.

“I don’t trust your agency anymore,” Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Calif., told Wray, adding that the FBI has “lost the trust of an awful lot of Americans.”

And Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, suggested that Wray was not taking the misconduct outlined in the inspector general’s report “seriously.”

“I’m concerned you’re not taking this seriously enough,” Jordan said. “Are you taking this seriously enough, Director Wray?”

The FBI director underscored that activities surrounding FISA during the 2016 presidential election were unacceptable and “unrepresentative of who we are as an institution.”

“Political bias has no place in today’s FBI,” Wray said.

 

 

Baltimore County hasn’t recycled glass in 7 years. But officials say residents still shouldn’t throw it out.

When ritual becomes more important than what you started out to accomplish, you’ve become religious which is man’s attempt at doing something on his own to tie himself back to God.

Baltimore County officials revealed this week that the county has not recycled glass materials for about seven years, though they are strongly urging residents to continue placing the items in their recycling bins.

The revelation was first circulated Friday on the Facebook page The Towson Flyer, shocking some residents who demanded answers about why the county has continued to collect glass for recycling. Glass bottles and jars of all colors were listed as acceptable materials on the county website’s recycling collection page Saturday morning.

Steve Lafferty, county sustainability officer, said it’s true the county has not recycled the material since 2013, the year it also opened a $23 million single-stream recycling facility in Cockeysville. Lafferty was hired to the newly created sustainability position in September 2019.

This problem of recyclable glass being thrown out was “inherited” from a previous administration, according to Sean Naron, spokesman for County Executive Johnny Olszewski.

Over the years, the county’s Department of Public Works encountered technical and financial limitations that meant it could no longer recycle glass at county municipal facilities.

The economics of recycling are changing, meaning there are fewer private waste management companies in the marketplace willing to take glass.

“It has become harder and harder to find a market” for glass recycling, Lafferty said.

The county is in preliminary discussions with an independent vendor about recycling glass materials, Naron said.

In the meantime, county officials have been reluctant to tell residents not to recycle their glass for fear of derailing a good habit.

“It’s unfortunate that we can’t tell people we have a better solution right now,” Lafferty said. “We know it’s an important issue.”

We are at the end of the worst week of NASA history.
Every accident that took the lives of the crew and destroyed the vehicle took place in the space of one calendar week, of course separated by decades.

Monday, January 27th, was the 53rd anniversary of the 1967 fire in Apollo 1 that took the lives of Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee and Ed White, during a full test on the pad.

The next day, January 28th, is the anniversary of the 1986 Challenger disaster when the main fuel tank exploded 73 seconds after launch.

And today, February 1, is the anniversary of the 2003 Columbia disaster during reentry when undetected damage to a wing during launch allowed hot plasma enter into the wing, burning through the internal structure until the wing tore off the shuttle and tore the vehicle apart.

Spaceflight is inherently a very risky undertaking, but from the records and investigations of these events a pattern emerged that NASA’s higher levels of management failed in the task of proper risk mitigation and letting Quality Assurance and Quality Control standards slide. One would think that after the first time that failure would have been permanently rectified, but bureaucraps being what they are, it wasn’t.

I was pleased to have ended my career working at a place where the standard in every section was:
“If there is a question, then there is no question. Whatever it takes do it.“

Gun Control? After Mar-a-Lago attack, maybe it’s time to talk about Bernie-supporter control

So what does Homeland Security do instead ?
They come by and webcrawl this site. Hi Fellas!
Springfield   February 1, 2020 216.81.81.80
Springfield   January 30, 2020 216.81.81.80
Springfield   January 29, 2020 216.81.81.80
Washington January 29, 2020 216.81.94.70
Source: whois.arin.net
IP Address: 216.81.81.80
Name:ONENETHandle: NET-216-81-80-0-1
Registration Date: 5/7/08
Range: 216.81.80.0-216.81.95.255
Org: DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY
Handle: DHS-37
Address: Department of Homeland Security 300 7th St SW
City: Washington
State/Province: DCPostal Code: 20024
Country: United States

Well, then again, maybe they just have good taste.

Strike two. Another apparent Bernie Sanders supporter has struck again in an act of violence against a Republican. According to Heavy.com:

Hannah Roemhild, a Connecticut opera singer who posted negative things about President Donald Trump on Facebook, was named by authorities as the woman accused of breaching security checkpoints at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.

One post on her Facebook page contained a sign reading “not my president” in reference to Trump. In 2016, she indicated support for Bernie Sanders on social media. She’s a registered Democrat, according to Connecticut records.

Roemhild drove a black SUV through two security checkpoints at Mar-a-Lago, leading to shots being fired by authorities protecting Trump’s Palm Beach property, according to the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Department.

That’s the story emerging as news comes out that the scary car-assault attack on Mar-a-Lago, President Trump’s Florida home, from a driver in an SUV who ran two checkpoints and barreled toward the president’s estate, using an automobile as a weapon.

It’s scarier still that the Secret Service did not manage to shoot the attacker dead in what had all the earmarks of an attempted assassination. Instead, they saw the assailant get away and even stop in traffic to pick up another person, until street-camera license plate readers enabled lawmen to catch up with the driver’s bullet-ridden SUV parked out front at an old motel and arrest her. Shooting sounds harsh, but note that all sorts of violent characters — Iranian terrorists, Antifa, etc. — are watching how this violent act went down and are taking notes.

Roemhild’s act represented some kind of derangement at work, possibly drug derangement, but also Trump derangement. Her still-open Facebook page is loaded with pictures of pink pussy hats, “not my president” drivel, anti-Trump caricatures, and the pro-Bernie posts.

Which rather sounds like another assassination-minded Bernie supporter out there, James Hodgkinson, the attempted assassin of House GOP leader Steve Scalise in 2017.

Sanders disavowed any association with Hodginson, and most people gave him a pass.

But then at least one other report came out, just two weeks ago, from investigative reporter James O’Keefe, who exposed the words of a Sanders insider who’s still on the payroll.

I wrote about him here:

…James O’Keefe released an undercover video of a top-line paid Iowa staffer, Kyle Jurek, praising gulags, re-education camps, burning cities, beaten cops, and killing anyone who resists the “revolution” as the plan all along.  Worse still, he said the Bernie campaign was loaded with such people, and Bernie’s moderate claims were a mask.

And at least some Bernie supporters were involved in some of these acts I described here in a blog post about Democrat doxxing outrages, 2018:

The near murder of Rep. Steve Scalise shot on a baseball field by a crazed Bernie Sanders supporter with a gun.

The heinous assault on Paul himself by a crazed leftist neighbor, leaving him with injured lungs and at least five broken ribs, along with the astonishingly light sentence this violent brute got.

The open plotting of violence and assassinations against Republicans by leftist communist thugs, in the wake of a long series of antifa vandalisms at universities over conservative speakers.

The restaurant mob chaseout of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, led by a Department of Justice employee acting in consort with her Democratic Socialists of America cohorts.

The restaurant chaseout of White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders by a crazed leftwing restaurant owner who apparently followed her party to the next restaurant to keep protesting.

The restaurant chaseout of Sen. Ted Cruz by a leftist mob over his support for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

The stalking and harassing of Rep. Devin Nunes by an apparently leftist weirdo still unknown.

At the time of the Scalise schooting, the New York Times called the Scalise attack “a test” for Bernie:

WASHINGTON — The most ardent supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders have long been outspoken about their anger toward Republicans — and in some cases toward Democrats. Their idol, the senator from Vermont, has called President Trump a “demagogue” and said recently that he was “perhaps the worst and most dangerous president in the history of our country.”

Now, in Mr. Sanders’s world, his fans have something concrete to grapple with: James T. Hodgkinson, a former volunteer for Mr. Sanders’s presidential campaign, is suspected of opening fire on Republican lawmakers practicing baseball in Alexandria, Va.

That shooting on Wednesday, which wounded four people, may prove to be an unexpected test for a movement born out of Mr. Sanders’s left-wing, populist politics and a moment for liberals to figure out how to balance anger at Mr. Trump with inciting violence.

But it wasn’t a test at all, because Bernie did nothing. Most people gave Bernie a pass for Hodgkinson, dismissing him as an anomaly. Sanders also did nothing about the O’Keefe revelations, not even firing the staffer. The only response was to send a staffer to Twitter to dismiss the video as “political gossip.” And now this Mar-a-Lago attack shows an increasingly pattern of violence.

There’s a lot of talk of gun control out there to prevent mass shootings, but the problem always comes down to an issue of culture. There’s some kind of cultural problem going wrong inside the Bernie camp. Bernie Sanders should be speaking out loudly about the propensity of violence coming from his supporters and taking steps to “re-educate” them, same way Starbucks sought to re-educate its employees after an incident around a non-paying customer taking up table space was deemed racist. He’s not even admitting a problem. Instead of gun control, maybe it’s time to talk about Bernie supporter control.

INJUNCTION GRANTED AGAINST PENNSYLVANIA STATE POLICE’S POLICY RELATING TO “PARTIALLY-MANUFACTURED FRAMES AND RECEIVERS”

Today, Chief Counsel Joshua Prince of the Firearms Industry Consulting Group and Attorney Adam Kraut, Director of Legal Strategy at Firearms Policy Coalition, were successful in the case of Landmark Firearms, LLC, et al. v. Evanchick, 694 M.D. 2019, in obtaining an injunction against the Pennsylvania State Police’s implementation and enforcement of its “policy” regarding what it refers to both as “partially-manufactured frames and receivers” and “80% receivers.”

In a 17 page decision, Commonwealth Court Judge Kevin Brobson found that the Pennsylvania State Police, in implementing and enforcing its policy, violated the due process rights of Pennsylvania residents and businesses, as well as, businesses from other states. Specifically, the Court declared

With respect to Petitioners’ due process claim in Count III and their claim in Count IV that the PSP Letter is void on the ground of vagueness, however, the Court concludes Petitioners have demonstrated a substantial legal question.

The Court continued on to specifically declare

The Court agrees with Petitioners that there is a substantial legal question as to whether PSP’s new policy regarding partially manufactured receivers is impermissibly vague.

As the Court explained

The term frame or receiver is not defined in the UFA, PSP has not promulgated any regulations to define what constitutes a frame or receiver, and PSP is no longer following the ATF’s lead regarding what constitutes the frame or receiver of a weapon. Rather than clarify, the new PSP policy adds confusion by introducing a new term” partially manufactured receiver”-and a new form-Form SP 4-121-into the mix of gun regulations without an explanatory bridge tying them back to the UFA.
Guidance to the firearms industry and the public on this change in policy is critical. The only document that currently sets forth PSP’s change in interpretation is the PSP Letter. That letter merely sets forth the blanket statement that partially manufactured receivers are considered firearms with respect to certain sections of the UFA, without providing a definition of the term partially manufactured receiver; a description or examples of the products that PSP believes, under its new interpretation, fall within the sweep of the statutory definition of firearm; or any guidance as to how this new term will be interpreted and applied by PSP going forward. The mere mention of the AG Opinion is not enough to provide fair notice or warning to the public as to how sellers or purchasers of this undefined class of unfinished receivers may comply with the UFA and avoid criminal prosecution. Due process demands more.

…

All of this-(1) PSP’s failure to explain how its new policy on partially manufactured frames or receivers differs from its prior policy and that of the ATF, such that those subject to the UFA have fair notice of PSP’s change in policy; (2) PSP’s failure to tether its new policy to the text of the UFA, particularly the term “frame or receiver” in the relevant definition of firearm; (3) the introduction of a new term, partially manufactured receiver, as opposed to simply defining what a “frame or receiver” is under the UFA as including what PSP now seeks to capture; and ( 4) the deployment of a new form to be used with respect only to sales/transfers of a subclass of firearms, which lacks any level of specificity, where PSP regulations provide for a specific form to be used in all firearms transactions under the UFA sows confusion within the industry and the public.

Thereafter, the Court acknowledged that the PSP’s “Policy” constitutes per se irreparable harm, that an injunction returns the parties to the status quo, and that the “public policy of this Commonwealth does not favor such vague laws.”

As such, the Court issued the following Order:

AND NOW, this 31st day of January, 2020, Petitioners’ Application for Relief in the Nature of a Preliminary Injunction is GRANTED. Colonel Robert Evanchick, Commissioner of the Pennsylvania State Police (PSP), and his agents, servants and officers, are enjoined from implementing or enforcing PSP’s new policy addressed to partially manufactured receivers, as currently set forth in PSP’s Letter of January 9, 2020, until final disposition of the Petition for Review, including appeals.

As specified in the Order, the preliminary injunction will not issue until we pay a $100.00 cost bond, which will be paid on Monday.

Feds Back Off Jailing Michael Flynn After Stunning New Evidence That Gov’t ‘Lied’ And ‘Framed’ Him

gubbermint bureaucraps lied about a purported crime?!

The government lied, “framed,” hid favorable evidence, and showed “contempt for the law at every turn” in their treatment of Michael Flynn, the retired three-star Army general and former Trump White House national security adviser.

Those charges were contained in a new filing in the government’s case against Flynn. And his attorney, Sidney Powell, was just getting started.

In the 27-page-filing, an add-on to her previous motions, Powell demanded charges be dropped against Flynn based on previously withheld exculpatory documents by the government and the IG report on FISA abuse.

Presidents have been working around the foreign affairs bureaucracy forever, simply because the foreign affairs bureaucraps suck.

Austin Comes Up With Inane ‘Gun Surrender’ Program. Gun Dealers Have Thoughts.

How dumb is liberal Austin — the city of empowered homeless citywide campouts (except at city hall)?

This dumb.

Looking to give up your guns? The  Austin Police Department has you covered.

On Jan. 28, 2020, the APD is holding a no-questions-asked gun surrender service where citizens can turn over their unwanted firearms and ammunition.

They’re serious. Give ’em your guns for free that you paid for with real money… because reasons.

There are only a couple of reasons someone would actually do this. One, the gun doesn’t work and can’t be repaired. Two, the individual committed a crime with the gun and wants to get rid of it so they can get away with the crime.

Now, you might be thinking that in the first case they could still get a little more money for it than the zero Austin is offering, and you’d be right. And removing it from wherever it was doesn’t stop any crimes. In the second case, the individual could toss the gun into Town Lake or pretty much any other body of water or bury it in a hole or a come up with a few thousand other ideas and be done with it, and you’d be right again. Criminals being criminals, even tossing the gun doesn’t stop any crimes. It probably begets more — the criminal is still on the streets.

And if Austin helps a criminal dispose of evidence of a crime, does that make the city an accessory to the crime?
>¯\_(ツ)_/¯

APD knows this is a dumb idea. The Austin Police Association hasn’t posted a word about it on social media. They are instead focusing on the recent story by The Texan, which reports that homeless criminals are getting out of jail and causing more mayhem thanks to another asinine city/liberal judge policy. Remember the Freebirds murder, which was Austin’s first murder of the new year? The Texan story is relevant to that. APD does not like the homeless lawlessness policy, and surely does not like this policy either.

The local CBS station posted about the “gun surrender” story on Facebook. It went about as well for Austin as you’d expect in the comments, with local gun dealers offering cash. And competing for business.

Austin gun dealers offer cash

They’re both more reputable than the city of Austin.

It’s Official: FISA Court Says Warrants Issued Against Carter Page Were Not Valid

This is what you get when you have a real corrupt person (Obammy) and his corrupt Chicago politics sitting in the Oval Office. A corrupted, politicized – and weaponized against your political opponents – federal bureaucracy. The federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies will take generations of their agents changing before anyone will ever trust them again, if they ever should be trusted in the first place to be anything but political operatives.

The FISA court officially acknowledged Thursday that the FBI submitted false information when obtaining warrants to surveil Trump campaign aide Carter Page. Therefore, the FISA warrants that were issued are invalid.

“Thanks in large part to the work of the Office of the Inspector General, U.S. Department of Justice, the Court has received notice of material misstatements and omissions in the applications filed by the government in the above-captioned dockets. See Docket No. Misc. 19-02, Order (Dec. 17, 2019; DOJ PIG, Review of Four FISA Applications and Other Aspects of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane Investigation (Dec. 2019),” the court released in an order. “DOJ assesses that with respect to the applications in Docket Numbers 17-375 and 170679, ‘if not earlier, there was insufficient predication to establish probable cause to believe that [Carter] Page was acting as an agent of a foreign power.'”

In other words:

During the time the FBI was illegally surveilling Carter Page with illegitimate and illegally obtained FISA warrants, Page was working for the CIA on behalf of the United States. He was not working for the Russias as the FBI and their friends in the media repeatedly stated…………..

Due to the seriousness and extent of the FISA abuse uncovered by Horowitz, a number of Senators have considered shutting the court down.

New Zealand .

California’s AB5 Leaves Women Business Owners Reeling

Sometimes I wonder if I should have a ‘?’ after Unintended Consequences, because my cynical side makes me think that this is not a bug, but a feature.

Aimee Benavides has built a thriving career as a translator and interpreter while homeschooling her nine-year-old daughter, who has autism, and 11-year-old son, who is heavily involved in STEM enrichment classes. What makes it all possible is the home-based business she started in 2010, after leaving a full-time job in the court system.

It isn’t easy to juggle it all. Sometimes she starts work at 5:30 am to get her work done—or brings her son to the school board meetings where she takes on evening projects. “The times I don’t take my son with me, they ask, ‘How is your son?’” she says.

Still, Benavides would not trade the flexibility of self-employment for a traditional job. Benavides’ business allows her and her husband, an IT professional, to afford the cost of living in Fresno, Calif., while still permitting them to manage their family responsibilities.

Benavides is one of a number of self-employed women in California who are speaking out in opposition to AB5, a union-backed law aimed at preventing misclassification of gig workers that took effect on January 1. The law presumes that every worker in the state—except those on a list of exempted industries, such as physicians, accountants, architects and engineers—is an employee.

Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez (D-San Diego), the bill’s sponsor, tweeted yesterday that under the law “if you are a true independent proprietor, you can still operate as one.”

She pointed to a test that allows sole proprietors, partnerships, LLCs, LLPs and corporations to operate legally in California if they meet 12 criteria—such as being free from the direction and control of the client, providing services directly to the client and not the client’s customers and being customarily engaged in the same type of work they are doing for the client—and pass another multi-point test, known as Borello.

However, many independent workers in California say AB5’s complexity has scared away their clients, who are afraid of getting hit with fines by the state if they misinterpret it. Governor Gavin Newsom’s proposed 2020 budget includes about $20 million for enforcement.

BREAKING: James Comey Under Investigation for Allegedly Leaking Classified Info, Lynch/Clinton Evidence That Made Comey Take Over Is Revealed

The New York Times is breaking, and can we say, desperately spinning, the reports that former FBI Director James Comey is under investigation for leaking classified information.

How’s that for an attempt to spin the investigation? This is the news timeline, not opinion. But yes, let’s pretend they’re objective. And maybe the reason it wasn’t investigated when it should have been is that there were still Comey cronies controlling everything? Of course, just a thought.

But on to what they’re trying to spin.

Comey had previously violated FBI policy in leaking the information to the times through his friend, Daniel Richman and the matter was referred to federal prosecutors in New York.

Now this new investigation involves leaks relating to two articles including one in the Washington Post and another in the NY Times (now we see why the spinning) about a Russian intelligence document, which the Times says was highly classified.

Now this part is fascinating:

The document played a key role in Mr. Comey’s decision to sideline the Justice Department and announce in July 2016 that the F.B.I. would not recommend that Hillary Clinton face charges in her use of a private email server to conduct government business while secretary of state.

Wait, what? What would a Russian intelligence document have to do with Comey stepping in and taking the power away from the DOJ, which he could not properly do anyway? At the time, Comey implied in his reasoning that there was classified information with regard to Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

The document is mentioned in a book published last fall, “Deep State: Trump, the F.B.I., and the Rule of Law” by James B. Stewart, a Times reporter.

Here’s the money paragraph, hidden down in the story.

The latest investigation involves material that Dutch intelligence operatives siphoned off Russian computers and provided to the United States government. The information included a Russian analysis of what appeared to be an email exchange during the 2016 presidential campaign between Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Democrat of Florida who was also the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee at the time, and Leonard Benardo, an official with the Open Society Foundations, a democracy-promoting organization whose founder, George Soros, has long been a target of the far right.

In the email, Ms. Wasserman Schultz suggested that then-Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch would make sure that Mrs. Clinton would not be prosecuted in the email case. Both Ms. Wasserman Schultz and Mr. Benardo have denied being in contact, suggesting the document was meant to be Russian disinformation.

That document was one of the key factors that drove Mr. Comey to hold a news conference in July 2016 announcing that investigators would recommend no charges against Mrs. Clinton. Typically, senior Justice Department officials would decide how to proceed in such a high-profile case, but Mr. Comey was concerned that if Ms. Lynch played a central role in deciding whether to charge Mrs. Clinton, Russia could leak the email.

Whoa, so strip everything away and what the document says is that Debbie Wasserman Schultz was guaranteeing that Lynch would get Hillary Clinton off.