Archive for the 'Politics' Category

Reason.

Amid popular calls for policing reform, a handful of senators are resurrecting a bill to make it harder for police to take people’s property without first convicting them of crimes.

Sens. Rand Paul (R–Ky.), Mike Lee (R–Utah), Mike Crapo (R–Idaho), and Angus King (I–Maine) reintroduced the Fifth Amendment Integrity Restoration (FAIR) Act this week to significantly restrain the federal use of civil asset forfeiture, a practice that lets police and prosecutors seize and keep property they claim are associated with criminal activity.

Because the process is “civil,” it often allows police to do this without ever proving the property owner has committed a crime, or even charging them with criminal action. Those facing the forfeiture process often have to pay for their own lawyers (if they can afford lawyers, what with their assets being seized) and face a complex bureaucratic process stacked against them. This was sold as a way to fight drug cartels, but over the past several decades it has become clear that cops are abusing the process to pad their budgets and payrolls. Instead of drug kingpins, the targets are frequently poorer people, often minorities or immigrants, who lacked the financial resources to fight back when police took their property. Law enforcement agencies have raked in more than $35 billion in this way over the last two decades.

Several states have tried to curtail abuses by imposing their own restrictions on forfeitures, but the federal Department of Justice’s programs can be used to bypass state-level restraints. The Justice Department’s Equitable Sharing program allows local law enforcement agencies to team up with the FBI or Drug Enforcement Administration to do a raid, then launder the assets they seize through the feds and keep much of it.

The FAIR Act would eliminate such “equitable” sharing, forcing law enforcement agencies to comply with state-level restrictions on forfeiture. It also increases the evidentiary threshold for forfeiture, requiring “clear and convincing evidence” that the property to be seized is connected to a crime, compared to the current, much looser standard or a “preponderance of the evidence.” It’s still not the same “beyond a reasonable doubt” threshold to get a conviction, but it’s nevertheless an improvement.

[ … ]

This time Paul says he’ll be attempting to attach the FAIR Act as an amendment to any police reform bill the Senate might consider. Unfortunately, it’s not clear that the Senate will actually be considering any of them.

Because it’s the right thing to do, this doesn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of passing.  So the next time you hear anything about police reform, consider that it’s just window dressing until this bill has passed.

BLM has made their intentions clear.

A Black Lives Matter leader told Fox News on Wednesday evening that if they are not given what they want then they will “burn down” the system.

Hawk Newsome, head of Black Lives Matter for Greater New York, part of the neo-Marxist Black Lives Matter movement, made the remarks in a combative interview with Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum.

[ … ]

“If this country doesn’t give us what we want then we will burn down the system and replace it,” Newsome responded. “All right. And I could be speaking figuratively, I could be speaking literally. It’s a matter of interpretation. Like let’s be very real and observe the history of the 1960s. When black people were rioting we have their highest growth and wealth and property ownership.”

People have begun to look to the future and what it may look like.

America faces three scenarios.

• One: Trump is re-elected on a wave of anger over the looting and anarchy unleashed by the “I-Can’t-Breathe” narrative. Trump sends Javanka packing, dispatches the troops to restore order, extends the immigration moratorium, finally builds the wall, and begins mass deportations as the White House protects the dissident Right from deplatforming by the Tech Totalitarians.

That scenario is most likely a fantasy.

[ … ]

• Two: Trump loses, and the Blob and its allies triumph. But because this is a country now and not a nation, with no shared sense of common identity and agreed-upon history, culture, beliefs, or language, only a full-blown police state can hold it together.

Even that might not ensure order in a chaotic post-America, and the diminishing number of whites will surely not enjoy the protection of the state. At some point, white Americans might well be living like white South Africans, ever in fear for their lives.

[ … ]

• Three: The country breaks apart, and the Historic American people establish enclaves for themselves and others who love and fondly remember the old America.

Those scenarios are possible, except for #1.  Actually, #2 could only ever be temporary, as I don’t even believe that a full blown police state could hold it together.  Neither do others, I suspect, as witness the massive gun and ammunition buying spree Americans are currently on.

But burning the system down isn’t something that will happen in the future- it’s already happened.  The fruits of Horace Mann (1796 – 1859) and John Dewey took a long time to ferment, but they did, and their children now self flagellate over “wokeness” and whiteness and imaginary infractions and sins, all the while ignoring the maker of the universe, the only sovereign, and the only potentate who can legitimately demand loyalty and obedience.

The real root of the problem lies not in the current disembowelment, but rather, that it is a replacement religion for the vacuum left by the utter and complete failure of classic Christianity in the West.  True religion, Christianity, was under attack for centuries by German higher criticism and modern philosophy, but actually held fairly strong in America until about the early 20 century.

By that time, the influence of John Darby (1800 – 1882) had begun to be felt, and his acolyte Scofield (1843 – 1921) popularized his ideas.  Mann’s ideas would have had little traction had it not been for a weakened, decimated Christianity that believes that the world is getting worse and worse and worse and Jesus is coming soon, and rather than “take every thought captive” to the claims of Christ, as the Calvinist would say, the job of the Christian is to make converts, cloister and expect the soon release from the hell that the church themselves created by turning their backs on the world.

Rather than be salt and light as commanded, the church turned over science to Darwin, the arts to the pagans in Hollywood, and politics and law to the demons in Washington and their “expert” linguists in the schools of law to teach them how to twist every word ever spoken.  The racists want reparations, or more redistribution of wealth (a colloquial term for theft), the woke mob is even now targeting STEM, and the Marxists want to tear down now just statues, but every vestige of Western history and culture, most especially the church.

America is not going to rupture, it has already ruptured.  The framework had begun to be hatcheted some century or more ago.  The American church is to blame.  “Go forth and make disciples” became “Go forth and snatch brands from the fire before we all get a free ride out of here, and maybe there will be football, beer and brats in heaven.”  The church got one half of it right, but therefore all of it wrong because it missed the “disciples” part of it.

Dispensational, premillennial rapturism neutered American Christians and rendered them pathetic; it is the greatest lie and hoax ever perpetrated on the Christian church.  If you’re looking for a root cause of all of the pain and suffering we are soon to endure, look no further than ourselves.

World Net Daily.

Speaking to Wired in an interview published Thursday, Biden said that no amendment is “absolute,” thus suggesting that even something as precious as the freedoms guaranteed under the Bill of Rights are not set in stone.

Responding to a public curiosity about his gun control platform, Biden explained not only what he felt about the Second Amendment, but all of the similarly vital constitutional amendments as well.

“From the very beginning you weren’t allowed to have certain weapons,” Biden said. “You weren’t allowed to own a cannon during the Revolutionary War as an individual.”

“Anybody think you should be able to go out and have a machine gun these days?” Biden asked.

“The answer is no, we have a rational policy. No amendment to the Constitution is absolute.”

Letters of Marque would of course demonstrate Biden to be an ignorant stooge, but we knew that about him anyway.

But I would argue, and have argued, that the right to weapons ownership is indeed written in stone – the stone tablets of the ten commandments.  The right and duty to self preservation and preservation of life of those who depend upon you is located squarely in the sixth commandment.

So he is also a pagan, but we knew that about him already.  The useful part of this is that you get yet another glimpse into what a Biden presidency would look like, especially if the American public hands him the senate.

From the land of Ralph “Kill the babies give me all your guns” Northam, news from hell.

The Virginia Department of Health under Gov. Ralph Northam (D-Va.) is encouraging Virginians to file an anonymous report to snitch on various establishments for violating the governor’s restrictions to fight the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic that came from China. State Sen. Mark Obenshain (R) pondered whether Northam is trying to turn Virginia into a “society of … snitches.”

[ … ]

The “society of snitches” form, entitled “Online Complaint Report for Violations of Executive Order 63 (Face Coverings) and Executive Order 65 (Phase Two Easing of Certain Temporary Restrictions)” and first reported by the Washington Free Beacon, indeed includes a drop-down menu listing eight different types of establishments, including “Indoor Gun Range” and “Religious Service” as options.

A note to readers in Virginia.  Listen to me.  I see that a number of pastors have signed a letter pleading with him to change his mind.  Don’t appeal to this communist.  Ignore him.  Don’t fear the anonymous snitches, and don’t fear illegitimate rulers.  Only fear God.  A note to LEOs in Virginia.  Refuse to enforce this abomination.  As I’ve said before, the desire to control others is the signal pathology of the wicked.  Don’t be a part of his wickedness.  God will judge you for it.

A quick note to kill babies Northam.  Blow it out your ass, communist.

One day ago I said this.

Most people have left CHAZ. Only a hard core remain. Meanwhile, drones have video in preparation for the hundreds of arrest warrants to be issued for: looting, vandalism, murder, rape, kidnapping, brandishing weapons, carrying weapons to the “terror of the public,” interfering with the police in the performance of their duties, assault, assault with a deadly weapon, defacement of public property, and anything else crafty lawyers at the DoJ can come up with. It won’t go down as a muzzle flash in the night at CHAZ. It’ll happen when the people go home, with the help of facial recognition, signals intelligence, news reports, and deep plant witnesses. Look for it over the next few months. Raz-a-daz will be in prison soon. Raz was even so stupid to livestream him trafficking in weapons, handing out rifles to people he didn’t even know. Not even the best lawyer can turn that video into “gifting” a firearm to a loved one. Thus, even the ATF will be involved in this affair.

You can go ahead and pile on top of this: arson, littering, illegal threats, battery, illegal possession of firearms (how many of these folks filled out form 4473?), and crossing state lines with criminal intent. This is a short list.

And don’t you know that the FedGov is fisking Raz’s business dealings at the moment, wondering how all of that money from Dubai got into his bank account.

That’s why only a handful were there to protest his actions to dismantle the mess.

Today, Barr said this.

Attorney General William Barr said the Justice Department had “scores of indictments” filed against people who committed violence during a wave of protests across the country.

During Thursday’s episode of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s podcast, Verdict, which is co-hosted by conservative commentator Michael Knowles, Barr said his agency was using 35 joint terrorist task forces across the country to investigate criminal activity, which has taken place since the Memorial Day death of George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man.

“When the real violence started around May 25, 26, and so forth, we started using our joint terrorist task forces around the country. And there are 35 of them around the country,” Barr said.

“And now they are starting to go full bore, cranking out investigations, indictments against the people who are involved in this violence. So we’ve had scores of indictments already for such things as arson, destruction of federal property, things like that. And we have, right now, about 500 investigations underway,” he added.

The taxpayers and ratepayers will also bear some of the burden.  Or actually, all of it.

Just as I said.  These are the repercussions of that kind of behavior.  Most of these are children whose parents never spanked them and who never had a chance to grow up and become responsible.

PJM.

Woke mobs are coming for you if you are an elected official with conservative values. In cities and towns all across America, organized and well-funded protest groups have begun attacking city councilors, mayors, county commissioners, and members of school boards. It’s not just the big cities. Increasingly, small towns have faced similar harassment. The woke mob has targeted local elected officials for the sin of not being sufficiently woke. Its goal appears to be to intimidate conservatives from getting involved at any level of government. It also appears that the mob efforts are expanding faster than anyone realizes.

Here in Oregon, the small, rural, conservative-leaning towns of Estacada and Mollala have recently seen elected officials threatened with recall. In Oregon City, a medium-sized city south of Portland, a protest group has organized a recall against the mayor. The suburb of Gresham saw resignations from its mayor, city manager, and chief of police. And in Salem, the state’s capital, several school board members have been targeted for destruction.

This trend is growing and expanding and it appears to be the work of well-funded progressive groups on the local level with ties to large national non-profits pushing a radical agenda.

In Estacada, Mayor Sean Drinkwine was forced to apologize after he posted in a Facebook group, “I would not and have not condoned these BLM Vigils in our community. All city staff and I are working tirelessly to shut these Vigils down … Our number one concern is to keep our city safe and free from conflict.”

Disagreeing with the Marxist goals of BLM and opposing looting and violence will get you in trouble no matter how small your town is.

How ridiculous.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  No one “forced” the mayor to apologize.  He decided to do that all by himself.

For heaven’s sake, people.  Grow a spine.  Stand up to these people.  Thus far this is easy.  If you don’t think so, wait until the shooting starts, they take all of your possessions, and they make it clear they want to load you and your family on the train to the “reeducation center.”

Stand up now or suffer later.  It’s your choice.

News about the den of demons.

Former Vice President Joe Biden appears to have “personally raised the idea” of investigating Michael Flynn for potentially having violated the obscure Logan Act during his phone calls with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, according to newly filed court papers Wednesday.

The previously sealed document also says that former President Barack Obama told top members of his administration that “the right people” should investigate Flynn.

But then-FBI Director James Comey acknowledged during the meeting — which also involved Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates and possibly national security adviser Susan Rice — that Flynn’s conversations with Kislyak “appear legit,” according to the Washington, DC, federal court filing by Flynn’s defense lawyers.

The revelations are contained in handwritten notes prepared by disgraced ex-FBI Agent Peter Strzok that Flynn’s lawyers called “stunning and exculpatory evidence” in the government’s since-abandoned case against President Trump’s former national security adviser.

A partially blacked-out copy of Strzok’s notes is attached to the filing and includes a mention that appears to say: “VP: ‘Logan Act.’”

“According to Strzok’s notes, it appears that Vice President Biden personally raised the idea of the Logan Act,” defense lawyers Jesse Binnall and Sidney Powell wrote.

”That became an admitted pretext to investigate General Flynn.”

The revelation contradicts Biden’s claim of total ignorance regarding the Flynn probe when he was vice president, which he was asked about during a May 12 interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.

“I know nothing about those moves to investigate Michael Flynn,” he said at the time.

But then, a conspiracy to subvert the constitution is nothing new with the Obama administration.  Virtually everything they did subverted the constitution.

And violated God’s laws.

The Atlantic.

As I have watched Confederate monuments being removed by state and local governments, and sometimes by the forceful will of the American people, the fact that 10 U.S. Army installations are named for Confederate officers has weighed on me. That number includes the Army’s largest base, one very special to many in uniform: Fort Bragg, in North Carolina. The highway sign for Bragg proclaims it home of the airborne and special operations forces. I had three assignments there during my career. Soldiers stationed at Bragg are rightly proud to serve in its elite units. Some call it “the Center of the Military Universe,” “the Mother Ship,” or even “Hallowed Ground.” But Braxton Bragg—the general for whom the base was named—served in the Confederate States Army.

The United States is now wrestling with repeated instances of abusive policing caught on camera, the legacies of systemic racism, the challenges of protecting freedoms enshrined in the Constitution and Bill of Rights while thwarting criminals who seek to exploit lawful protests, and debates over symbols glorifying those who fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War. The way we resolve these issues will define our national identity for this century and beyond. Yesterday afternoon, an Army spokesperson said that Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy is now “open to a bipartisan discussion” on renaming the bases. That’s the right call. Once the names of these bases are stripped of the obscuring power of tradition and folklore, renaming the installations becomes an easy, even obvious, decision.

I wonder if this has weighed on him as much as his decision to become an adulterer and be unfaithful to his wife, violating her trust, his own vows, and God’s laws?

I wonder if this has weighed on him as much as putting into place a set of rules of engagement in Afghanistan and Iraq that killed and maimed American boys?

I wonder if this has weighed on him as much as his involvement in creating the completely bogus talking points about Benghazi, or leaving those American fighters there to perish without help?

I wonder if this has weighed on him as much as the violation of his oath to the constitution by advocating gun control?

I wonder if this has weighed on him as much as divulging classified information to Paula Broadwell?

Pardon me if I don’t give a rat’s ass what Petraeus wants to do concerning the names of military installations.

Via David Codrea, news from Kentucky.

Kentucky Republican Rep. Thomas Massie, a libertarian-minded maverick who often clashes with GOP leaders, was renominated for a sixth House term. Trump savaged Massie in March as a “disaster for America” who should be ejected from the party after he forced lawmakers to return to Washington during a pandemic to vote on a huge economic relief package.

Here’s more.

Liz Cheney woke up with a lot of egg on her face this morning.

The Wyoming Republican and GOP establishment figure has long railed against Rep. Thomas Massie, and initially even backed his primary challenger, Todd McMurtry. However, Republican primary voters from Kentucky’s 4th Congressional District rebuked Cheney and reelected their libertarian-leaning congressman by an overwhelming margin in Tuesday’s primary. He secured a whopping 88% of the vote to McMurtry’s paltry 12%.

Massie, understandably, feels vindicated. “Tonight’s victory sends a strong message that Republican voters in the 4th District of Kentucky want someone to represent them in Washington who will consistently stand up on principle, defend life, and support the Constitution,” the congressman said.

In light of such an overwhelming electoral landslide in favor of a pro-liberty Republican and constitutional conservative, it’s worth rehashing the establishment’s campaign against Massie — if only to show how out of touch the swamp can be with the grassroots.

As an anti-interventionist stalwart and principled limited-government conservative, Massie has always been willing to vote against the establishment line. For example, Massie broke ranks with most Republicans to vote for a War Powers Resolution that reasserted Congress’s war powers and would have restricted the executive branch’s ability to launch unilateral military interventions. He voted against Paul Ryan for speaker of the House and has voted against so many establishment-backed spending packages and bills that he’s been dubbed “Mr. No” by the media.

The GOP establishment can’t stand legislators who aren’t afraid to buck the party line. They remind the GOP base of what it would look like if party leaders actually followed the principles they campaign on.

In particular, Massie angered Cheney, President Trump, and other Republicans when he demanded that Congress actually show up to vote on the $2.2 trillion coronavirus relief bill. (You know, just like how they were asking all essential workers to show up to work). For this apparently egregious insistence that Congress actually does its job as the Constitution mandates, the establishment denounced Massie.

Even Trump blasted Massie, calling him a “third-rate grandstander” and tweeting a call to “Throw Massie out of Republican Party!”

Good.  Anything that throws egg in the face of the establishment is alright with me.  I’ve long supported Massie and called him one of the very few good men in Washington.

Bill Buppert.

Absent cops, no politician can rob a single human of their liberty. Full stop. Until humankind owns that notion, every pursuit of liberty and freedom will be a forlorn hope. Now we’re even hearing the usual suspects in the deep state media talking about reducing or eliminating police departments (there are currently 19,000 of these Loyalist army units in America from the Federal to the local level). The Bluecoats today are the analog of the Redcoats riding roughshod over British colonials before the divorce proceeding from London started in earnest. The cops are the standing army the Anti-Federalists warned us about.

While I am encouraged by such sober thinking, the government supremacist on the left have failed to grasp that their fetid Sovietopian dreams need cops to be realized. No communist state can exist without two important ingredients: a robust police state and a very large segment of the subject population who are either unpaid or paid informants for the state. These two elements are intimately married to each other and no leviathan can exist absent these things.

The latter notion of an informant society is the glue that terraforms the building of homo Sovieticus. And make no mistake, the iron dream of every [national] socialist and communist is complete control of the physical and mental landscape of the serf populations.

If fear and obedience are the brick and mortar of the state, the informant and casual compliance with state codes may be the foundation of the steel house of the government plantation.

I have no need to choose between the dying liberal order and the Mango Emperor, as I have no need to choose between Lucifer and Baphomet. Both major parties in the US are mere complements of one another. One, the Democrats is nothing more than an asylum structure to house the Bolsheviks while the scolding and invertebrate Mensheviks of the Grand Old Politburo are embarrassed that the gibbering of the Democrats says out loud what they are thinking.

Both parties want nothing more than your chained obedience.

It’s supreme irony that the government supremacists in Antifa, BLM and their Democrat party sugar daddies are calling for defunding the police. The very entity that makes all government shitholes enforceable under their inhuman rule.

Ah, but as I’ve pointed out before, most of the sons and daughters of hippies became communists within a single generation.  Those who didn’t will pass into the night like the brownshirts in the equivalent of the Röhm Purge.

As for the true believers, they have a different end in mind.  While there are some very bad cops, and some bad cops who will cover for the very bad cops, there are still too many who won’t enforce gun confiscation orders, too many who won’t load men onto trains to be spirited off to camps.

To the believers, these cops have to go.  They don’t really want to rid themselves of cops, they want to be the cops just as Raz Simone and his band of thug bois want to rule six blocks of inner city Seattle.  This means forcing out the remaining non-compliant police, and replacing them with true believers.  For them, in order to change the cops, become a cop.

Defunding the existing infrastructure is just the first step in driving out the existing employees so they can be replaced.