The Capitol Riot Hearing That No One Heard
The memo was the topic of much discussion at yesterday’s Senate hearings on the January 6 riot. It came from the FBI’s Norfolk office on January 5, and it provided a stark warning. It also painted a picture of unequivocal premeditation by a relative handful of zealots — not a picture of thousands of garden-variety Trump supporters who’d heard the president speak just moments before and decided to head up Pennsylvania Avenue to start a riot at the Capitol building.
And the memo was reported on by The Washington Post just six days after the riot, so the incessant “incitement” claim made by House liar-Democrats in their impeachment of President Trump was already a dubious one. But we knew that.
The FBI’s memo spoke of “individuals sharing a map of the complex’s tunnels, and possible rally points for would-be conspirators to meet in Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and South Carolina and head in groups to Washington.”
“As of 5 January 2021,” the document says, “FBI Norfolk received information indicating calls for violence in response to ‘unlawful lockdowns’ to begin on 6 January 2021 in Washington, D.C. An online thread discussed specific calls for violence to include stating ‘Be ready to fight. Congress needs to hear glass breaking, doors being kicked in, and blood from their BLM and Pantifa [sic] slave soldiers being spilled. Get violent. Stop calling this a march, or rally, or a protest. Go there ready for war. We get our President or we die. NOTHING else will achieve this goal.”
“These people came specifically with equipment,” said former U.S. Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund during a rare joint hearing with the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and Rules Committee. “You’re bringing climbing gear to a demonstration, explosives, chemical spray — you’re coming prepared. The fact that the group attacked our West Front 20 minutes before the event at the Ellipse ended — they were planning on our agency not being at full strength at that time.”
So the riot kicked off a full 20 minutes before President Trump had finished speaking? If nothing else, this sheds some light on the liar-Democrats’ phony claim of same-day riot incitement by Trump. Remember what their impeachment article said: “Shortly before the Joint Session commenced, President Trump addressed a crowd at the Ellipse in Washington, DC. There, he reiterated false claims that ‘we won this election, and we won it by a landslide.’ He also willfully made statements that, in context, encouraged — and foreseeably resulted in — lawless action at the Capitol, such as: ‘if you don’t fight like hell you’re not going to have a country anymore.’ Thus incited by President Trump, members of the crowd he had addressed, in an attempt to, among other objectives, interfere with the Joint Session’s solemn constitutional duty to certify the results of the 2020 Presidential election, unlawfully breached and vandalized the Capitol, injured and killed [sic] law enforcement personnel, menaced Members of Congress, the Vice President, and Congressional personnel, and engaged in other violent, deadly, destructive, and seditious acts.”
Based on the facts, it’s hard to imagine a weaker, less serious article of impeachment than this. But what are we to expect from House liar-Democrats?
Perhaps the most maddening thing to come out of yesterday’s hearing, though, was former Chief Sund’s claim that he never got the aforementioned memo. As Axios reported, “Sund testified that he just learned in the past 24 hours that his department had received the report from the FBI on the evening of Jan. 5. Sund said a member of the intelligence division at USCP did review the memo — but that ‘it didn’t go any further than that’ and that Sund himself had not seen it.”
That sounds like a pretty catastrophic failure to communicate. And it makes us wonder just what we’re paying “the intelligence division at USCP” to do.
The hearing involved plenty of finger-pointing, with Sund and former House Sergeant at Arms Paul Irving and former Senate Sergeant at Arms Michael Stenger painting “a picture of poor intelligence, structural communication issues, and a lackluster response from Pentagon officials as driving reasons behind the botched response.”
Oops.
All this, though, is just a prelude. A preview of a coming attraction. The main event, the real bit of theater, will take place when House Speaker scumbag/liar-Nancy Pelosi establishes her “9/11-type” commission to examine the attack.
That’s when she and her fellow liar-Democrats will cry “White Supremacy!” and call for all manner of encroachments on our freedom, rather than getting to the bottom of what really happened and who was responsible for the security failures.
That’s when she’ll conduct her one-sided investigation and get her predetermined outcome that says supporters of former President Donald Trump are entirely to blame. And that’s why she’s chosen the hopelessly and ridiculously partisan Russel Honoré to lead that investigation.
That’s when we’ll see our tax dollars hard at work. ~The Patriot Post
socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden's 'Kids in Cages'
When are “kids in cages” not “kids in cages”? For liar-Democrats and the Leftmedia, the answer hinges on who happens to be sitting in the White House. This hypocrisy was brought home on Tuesday when White House Press Secretary liar-Jen Psaki was questioned on the socialist/ scumbag/liar-Biden administration’s reopening of a detention camp for illegal alien minors — a camp that both socialist/scumbag/liar-Joe Biden and lowlife/liar-Kamala Harris have blasted as a “horrifying” human rights abuse, dubbing it keeping kids in cages.
Psaki responded with classic newspeak spin. “This is not kids being kept in cages,” she asserted. “This is … a facility that was opened, that’s going to follow the same standards as other HHS facilities. It is not a replication [of previous practices], certainly not. That’s never our intention of replicating the immigration policies of the past administration, but we are in a circumstance where we are not going to expel unaccompanied minors at the border. That would be inhumane. This is not what we are going to do here as an administration.”
So “cages” (which they never were to begin with) have become “facilities” to house these illegal children by HHS standards (which were the same standards used by the Trump administration). In other words, the socialist/ scumbag/liar-Biden administration is doing the same thing, only now, “It’s okay when we do it, because we care.”
When further pressed, liar-Psaki emphasized the “we care” distinction — a distinction without a difference when compared to Trump’s DHS. “We want these kids to be in facilities where they are getting access to health and medical assistance to education,” she said. “That is our human and moral objective from this administration.”
But liar-Psaki and the socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden administration are allowed to get away with this newspeak because much of the mainstream media refuses to call them on it. Worse, Leftmedia outfits like The Washington Post provide an assist with rhetorical gymnastics to turn “kids in cages” into “migrant facility for children.” Of the Post’s sudden language shift, conservative commentator Drew Holden wrote, “Big difference 20 months and a new President makes.”
Donald Trump Jr. wryly observed, “I believe you mean ‘Cages’ hence the bars on the windows.” And Reason senior editor Robby Soave mocked, “Aw it’s like an adorable ‘lil summer camp vibe now, thank you mainstream media.”
Meanwhile, the reality on the ground that precipitated reopening the cages facilities has everything to do with the fact that illegal border crossings are surging again. By reversing Trump’s lawful immigration strategy, socialist/ scumbag/liar-Biden has effectively and predictably resurrected the crisis of unaccompanied minors that rose during the scumbag/liar-nObama era. ~The Patriot Post
Fauci's Dreary Advice
“There are things, even if you’re vaccinated, that you’re not going to be able to do in society. For example: indoor dining, theaters, places where people congregate.” So says Dr. Anthony Fauci in his latest pronouncement on COVID-19. Why the continued restrictions? “That’s because of the safety of society.”
Oh, so in other words, the only way to have a safe society is to have no society.
He added, “We want to make sure that people continue to wear masks despite the fact that they’re vaccinated,” probably into 2022. Double masks, in fact. Masks that Fauci opposed last spring.
Fauci, at age 80, is still the face of public health during this pandemic, and for reasons we don’t entirely understand. He’s been wrong a lot, and his dishonest flip-flops are practically legendary. Plus, he’s been director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, where he’s now the highest-paid of the federal government’s four million employees. At this point he’s more swamp creature than medical doctor, and taxpayers deserve better.
(Naturally, he obtusely blames Donald Trump for denying facts and the “political ideology divisiveness.”)
Of course, people in most of the country already are going out to eat, wearing masks to their tables and taking them off during their meal. Movie theaters are open, even if attendance is still low. Most schools are open to some degree, and in some districts there are no mask mandates for students. So it may be news to people that we evidently weren’t supposed to be doing those things for the last 10 months.
Moreover, Fauci made his “safety of society” declaration at a time when distribution of vaccines that are 95% effective is going gangbusters, with more than 64 million doses already given and an estimated 240 million total doses by the end of next month. Cases are dropping precipitously at the same time.
Yet his warnings about how far away “normalcy” remains could in some ways be self-fulfilling if he discourages people from taking the vaccine. Why bother if it doesn’t mean returning to normal?
As The Babylon Bee humorously put it, “Dangerous Conspiracy Theorist Doesn’t Believe Vaccines Work.”
Fauci’s comments on vaccines have been highly manipulative. “When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75%,” Fauci said in December. “Then, when newer surveys said 60% or more would take it, I thought, ‘I can nudge this up a bit,’ so I went to 80, 85.” In other words, this isn’t science. It’s manipulating public opinion.
According to National Review’s Michael Brendan Dougherty, “The early data we have suggest very strongly that asymptomatic people are very weak transmitters of the disease. The data coming out of Israel, which is ahead of almost everyone in giving the top-shelf vaccines to its population, suggest that transmission basically stops among the vaccinated.”
So forgive our skepticism when Fauci advises that all this good news doesn’t mean we can begin to put this pandemic behind us this year. Certainly we should continue with precautions to protect the vulnerable, but it’s time to declare independence from the tyranny of nanny-staters like Fauci. ~The Patriot Post
The Return of Operation Choke Point
Nice bank ya got there. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.
That’s essentially the message our nation’s worst attorney general began sending back in 2013 to certain banks that had the wrong kinds of customers. He even came up with a fittingly descriptive name for his unconstitutional anti-business program: Operation Choke Point.
As we wrote yesterday, the socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden administration is planning to revive Barack scumbag/liar-nObama and scumbag/liar-Eric Holder’s infamous initiative, a 2013 scheme by which the scumbag/liar-nObama Justice Department’s banking industry regulators forced certain banks to investigate the business they did with firearm and ammunition dealers and other disfavored businesses — such as pawn shops, coin dealers, and short-term loan providers — ostensibly because they were believed to be at a high risk for fraud and money laundering. Thus, through Operation Choke Point, the scumbag/liar-nObama administration was trying to deny several perfectly legal industries even basic access to the banking system.
This orchestrated denial of goods and services is the very definition of redlining, a system that was originally used to keep blacks out of certain neighborhoods in certain U.S. cities through the denial of mortgages or home improvement loans. Rather than redlining “undesirable” people, the scumbag/liar-nObama administration was redlining undesirable businesses.
And it worked. Just ask Brian Bookman, a former police officer and Army veteran. As The Daily Signal reported back in 2014, “After researching his case on the Internet, Brookman says he concluded that his banker, JP Morgan Chase, closed the account because two of his business activities — dealing in vintage coins and selling firearms — were labeled ‘high risk’ by federal bureaucrats as part of an scumbag/liar-nObama administration initiative called Operation Choke Point.”
So selling firearms and thereby facilitating access to our Constitution’s Second Amendment is now considered “high risk”?
Under President Donald Trump, however, Choke Point was rightly considered an unconstitutional infringement on these legal businesses and ended by the Justice Department in 2017. “And by the end of the former president’s term,” writes Jon Dougherty in BizPac Review, “the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency [OCC] issued a ‘Fair Access’ rule instructing large banks to provide financial services to businesses and individuals irrespective of political considerations.”
But like nearly every other good policy work from the Trump administration, socialist/scumbag/liar-Joe Biden and his hard-left handlers are undoing it. Rather than attempt to enact legitimate legislation through Congress, the socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden administration is, as our Nate Jackson put it, carpet-bombing us with executive orders. And so, eight days after taking office, Biden’s OCC announced that it was suspending the Trump administration’s Fair Access rule.
And why might it do that, except to revive Operation Choke Point, even if by another less suspicious name?
All this is part of a larger strategy: the Left’s politicization of the economy. As Kelsey Bolar writes in The Federalist, “For all intents and purposes, Operation Choke Point is happening every day on a massive scale, [including] a stranglehold on information, speech, and the broader marketplace of ideas. Concerningly, the government is now playing an active role. As exemplified by Parler and the recent Twitter purge, Big Tech is choking conservatives off their social media platforms while Democrats cheer it on.”
So much for the promise our 46th president made in his inaugural speech to “work as hard for those who didn’t vote for me as those who did.”
But that’s socialist/scumbag/liar-Joe Biden. Promises made, promises broken. ~The Patriot Post
BLM's Death Toll
A funny thing happened this past year on the way to the Left’s police-free social justice paradise of Wokeville — the homicide rate spiked. While mobs of Black Lives Matter activists marched, looted, and burned their way to “racial justice,” the number of individuals who lost their lives due to increasing rates of violent crime rose dramatically.
In tracking the homicide rate across major U.S. cities since 2015, journalist Steve Sailer recently made a telling observation. Since the death of George Floyd and the protesting and rioting that quickly followed calling for the defunding of the police, the murder rate across the nation’s major cities has essentially doubled.
Dubbing it the “Minneapolis Effect,” Sailer cites City Crime Stats (CCS) on homicides. Sailer found that “for these 19 cities for which CCS has day by day data through the end of September, [the number of homicides] ended the third quarter cumulatively up 30%.” He further notes, “Nationally, the largest ever one year increase in homicides was murderous 1968, when Martin Luther King’s assassination set off riots, at 12.7% followed by 2015 during the First BLM Era, when murders went up 12.1%. So, 2020 was the worst year for increase in homicides over the 60 years for which we have reliable data.”
So, while BLM has been largely successful in duping millions of Americans into believing the fallacious narrative of a systemically racist society that permits and even facilitates a plague of racist cops to hunt down and kill black Americans, the number of bodies piling up as a result of the lack of a police presence, especially in black inner-city neighborhoods, has been the result.
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Protecting and saving black lives doesn’t appear to genuinely matter to BLM. Moving the anti-American, anti-capitalist agenda forward is BLM’s actual goal. ~The Patriot Post
HANS VON SPAKOVSKY
Supreme Court's Decision Not to Hear Elections Cases Could
With the U.S. Supreme Court’s “baffling” refusal on Monday to grant review of the Pennsylvania election cases that had been appealed to the justices, the majority of the court is — to quote Justice Clarence Thomas’ dissent — "leav[ing] election law hidden beneath a shroud of doubt" and “invit[ing] further confusion and erosion of public confidence” in our elections.
Who can forget the chaos of this past election season? Attempts to change election rules and procedures began before any ballots had even been cast.
In some cases, state executive branch officials changed the rules; in others, judges made the changes. But under the U.S. Constitution, neither had the authority to do so.
As Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote late last year, “[t]he Constitution provides that state legislatures — not federal judges, not state judges, not state governors, not other state officials — bear primary responsibility for setting election rules … [a]nd the Constitution provides a second layer of protection, too. If state rules need revision, Congress is free to alter them.”
Notable instances during and after the 2020 election where this procedure wasn’t followed occurred in Pennsylvania. There, the state’s Supreme Court ordered election officials to accept late-arriving mail-in ballots up to three days after Election Day and to count them even if they didn’t have a postmark showing they had been mailed by Election Day.
What’s particularly problematic about the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision is that the Pennsylvania Legislature had explicitly decided not to extend the ballot-receipt deadline past Election Day.
The authority the Pennsylvania court cited for overriding state law was what Thomas called a “vague clause” in the state’s constitution providing that elections “shall be free and equal.”
Apparently, requiring absentee ballots to be received by Election Day is somehow not a “free and equal” election, but allowing ballots to come in three days after Election Day is a “free and equal” election.
That was the ludicrous justification used by the state court.
The U.S. Supreme Court was asked to enjoin (or stop) the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s ruling from taking effect, but the justices deadlocked 4-4 because Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died and Justice Amy Coney Barrett had not yet joined the court. Thus, the decision remained in place.
Later, the state Republican Party and others asked the high court to hear the cases on the merits, but to do so on an expedited basis. Again, the court declined — meaning, the cases proceeded according to the court’s normal procedures, which has now led to it declining to review the case at all.
That prompted blistering dissents from Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito, with Gorsuch joining Alito’s dissent.
Disappointingly, neither Justice Brett Kavanaugh nor Barrett joined them in getting the court to accept a very important case on a fundamental issue, as described by Alito, that could affect all future federal elections and has divided the lower courts; namely, “whether the Elections or Electors Clause of the United States Constitution … are violated when a state court holds that a state constitutional provision overrides a state statute governing the manner in which a federal election is to be conducted.”
They did not, of course, explain why. Should the issue arise again, as seems likely, perhaps Kavanaugh and Barrett will be less reticent to take up the issue then. One can only hope.
The election may be over, but Thomas pointed out that the court now had even more reason to hear this case because the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had reached the opposite result from the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and had enjoined the Minnesota secretary of state from extending the ballot-receipt deadline that state’s Legislature had set.
Thomas made the commonsense point: “Unclear rules threaten to undermine [the electoral system]. They sow confusion and ultimately dampen confidence in the integrity and fairness of elections.”
That shouldn’t be controversial, but apparently it is.
Thomas went on to say:
An election system lacks clear rules when, as here, different officials dispute who has authority to set or change those rules. This kind of dispute brews confusion because voters may not know which rules to follow.
Even worse, with more than one system of rules in place, competing candidates might each declare victory under different sets of rules.
According to Thomas, the country was “fortunate that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision to change the receipt deadline for mail-in ballots does not appear to have changed the outcome in any federal election. … But we may not be so lucky next time.”
In fact, he pointed out that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision to change another rule did make a difference in a state election.
The state Supreme Court “nullified” a state law requiring a voter to write the date on his mail-in ballot. One candidate for a state Senate seat was the winner under the applicable state law, but her opponent was declared the winner under the “contrary rule — that violated state law — announced by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.”
As Thomas said in his spirited dissent, “If state officials have the authority they have claimed, we need to make it clear. If not, we need to put an end to this practice now before the consequences become catastrophic.”
We agree.
We also agree with Thomas that “[b]ecause the judicial system is not well suited to address these kinds of questions in the short time period available immediately after an election, [the court] ought to use available cases outside that truncated context to address these admittedly important questions.”
Alito agreed, saying that now that “the election is over,” there was “no reason for refusing to decide the important questions that these cases pose.”
These cases seemed to provide the perfect opportunity for the court to do so. Yet, it inexplicably declined the opportunity.
Thomas ended with a sharp rejoinder to his colleagues:
One wonders what this Court waits for. We failed to settle this dispute before the election, and thus provide clear rules. Now we again fail to provide clear rules for future elections.
The decision to leave election law hidden beneath a shroud of doubt is baffling. By doing nothing, we invite further confusion and erosion of voter confidence.
Our fellow citizens deserve better and expect more of us. I respectfully dissent.
While we all hope Thomas’ words don’t prove to be prophetic, they may well be. By refusing to take these cases, the Supreme Court is — for the time being anyway — giving state government officials free rein to make unauthorized changes in election rules and to override election laws set by state legislatures.
Even if states set clear rules well in advance of their next elections by enacting commonsense reforms to protect the integrity of their electoral processes, those rules may be voided by partisan officials with no respect for the Constitution and the rule of law. ~The Patriot Post
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