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Ruth King

‘A Political Prisoner of the Democratic Party’ There is one standard of justice for rioters and cops on the side of the Biden Regime, and another for everyone else. By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2022/02/17/a-political-prisoner-of-the-democratic-party/

Three months after Ashli Babbitt, an unarmed veteran and Trump supporter, was killed by a Capitol police officer on January 6, 2021, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights division closed its investigation into the fatal shooting.

Omitting the name of Lieutenant Michael Byrd—the media, law enforcement officials, and congressional leaders concealed his identity for months—the Justice Department concluded Byrd did not violate 18 U.S.C., section 242, a federal criminal civil rights statute, when he shot Babbitt at point-blank range without warning, barely missing her face, around 2:45 p.m. that day. “The investigation revealed no evidence to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that the officer willfully committed a violation of 18 U.S.C. § 242,” the Justice Department said in an April 2021 statement.

Reports later revealed that Byrd had refused to participate in any substantive probe of his conduct on January 6. Not only did Byrd escape criminal charges or any internal reprimand, he is still employed as head of security for the House of Representatives and heralded as a hero in many quarters, including the national news media. 

Byrd was cleared not because he was innocent but because he shot and killed a Trump supporter, someone considered a subhuman terrorist by the Biden regime.

At the same time the civil rights division exonerated Byrd of any wrongdoing, the office was investigating a Louisville police officer for allegedly violating the civil rights of a Black Lives Matter protester during riots in that city following the police-involved deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. Louisville, Taylor’s hometown, was rocked by nights of violent protests resulting in millions of dollars in damages. Seven people were shot on the evening of May 28, 2020; rioters vandalized government buildings and looted stores downtown while attacking officers attempting to restore order.

For the Biden Administration, National Security is ‘Mission Irrelevant’ USCIS Mission Statement underscores dangerous priorities. Michael Cutler

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/biden-administration-national-security-mission-michael-cutler

The term “Mission Statement” has been defined as: a formal summary of the aims and values of a company, organization, or individual.

In other words, the mission statement concisely establishes the goals and priorities of an organization for both the general the public and for the employees of that organization.

The organization we will consider in my commentary today article is United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). This agency operates under the aegis of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and is charged with adjudicating applications for various immigration benefits that include the permitting aliens to change immigration status in the United States to acquire political asylum, lawful immigrant status (signified by being issued a “Green Card”), and United States citizenship.

I have come to think of USCIS as “America’s locksmith” because aliens who has been granted lawful status may easily enter the United States through ports of entry and remain in the United States permanently.  For such aliens border walls are irrelevant.

Celebs Backed BLM Fund That Bailed Out a BLM Assassin The creator of “Hamilton,” rappers, actors, and TV stars all donated. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/celebs-backed-blm-fund-bailed-out-blm-assassin-daniel-greenfield/

Quintez Brown, a Black Lives Matter activist, walked into the campaign office of a Louisville political candidate and opened fire. Bullets grazed the clothing of Craig Greenberg, a local businessman running in the mayoral election, as people ran for cover from the shooter.

Brown’s bag carried extra magazines suggesting that he had come prepared for a massacre or an extended firefight. However the people in the office barricaded the door and the Black Lives Matter activist ran for it.

The police caught him anyway.

After years of campaigning against the police with BLM, the arrest came as poetic justice, but it was followed by BLM’s Louisville Community Bail Fund bailing out the assassin.

“It is nearly impossible to believe that someone can attempt murder on Monday and walk out of jail on Wednesday,” Mayoral candidate Craig Greenberg said.

Another Issue Dems Want to Sweep Under the Rug Until After the Midterms By Matt Margolis

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2022/02/17/look-another-issue-dems-want-to-sweep-under-the-rug-until-after-the-midterms-n1559967

With their party expected to take a huge beating at the ballot box in November, Democrats fighting tough battles to save their careers are distancing themselves from the unpopular Joe Biden as well as key issues in their party platform. House Democrats are actually being advised to deny supporting amnesty and open borders, critical race theory, or defunding the police in order to salvage their campaigns.

And yet, there’s still another issue Democrats won’t touch with a ten-foot pole, either … at least, not until after the midterms. You know, when it’s safer.

That issue is gun control.

Despite Joe Biden calling for more gun control legislation, members of his party have “little appetite” for pursuing it before November, reports The Hill. Two gun control measures passed the House in March of 2021, but have gathered dust in the Senate since.

And with good reason: it’s a political loser for them. Most adults want existing laws to be enforced, not new laws to be passed.

The Real Pandemic By David Solway

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2022/02/17/the-real-pandemic-n1560170

In a Nov. 19, 2021 address to Hillsdale College, its president Larry Arnn identified the three factors recognized by the Constitution as the natural rights of human beings: the right to earn a living, the right to raise our children, and the right to participate in government.

“These facts about nature,” he pointed out, “were well known during the American Revolution … It was the interference with the colonists’ natural rights by that former ruling class that led to the American Revolution.” Such interference, he argues, is occurring today on both a national and global scale.

Nationally, a bureaucratic colossus has taken control of regulative governance, as evidenced by the collective response to the COVID-19 virus: the isolation of the nation’s citizenry via lockdowns, a form of house arrest; the virtual destruction of the economy; and the collusion between Big Pharma, major corporations, government, medical agencies, mainstream media, and the education establishment. This vast and nefarious consortium has nullified what Arnn enumerated as the basis of life in a democratic polity— the three fundamental rights which the COVID mandarin class has stripped from its citizenry.

The right to make a living has been ruthlessly and severely compromised. As is well known, small business has been decimated and millions of people thrown out of work or driven into bankruptcy. Whether this was part of a deliberate plan or a poorly thought-through strategy for dealing with the pandemic is an open question—but suspicions ramify. The vaccine mandates have only exacerbated the disaster.
The right to raise their children as parents see fit has been overridden by government edict and/or agency control. Children, who are effectively immune to the virus, are forced to wear masks in order to attend school and are being injected with entirely unnecessary and potentially harmful vaccines. Witness, too, the imposition of Critical Race Theory on school curricula by school boards and government fiat across the nation. In my own country, Canada, Bill C-4 prohibits what is called conversion therapy, making parents’ concern about transgender indoctrination of their children and intervention in the process a criminal offense. In all such cases, the state insists on acting in loco parentis, reducing parents to the status of daycare operators.
The right to participate in government has been stifled by oppressive and unnavigable bureaucracies whose regulative incontinence has closed almost every avenue of individual involvement in the apparatus of governance. Political authority has become both unrepresentative and unaccountable. Indifference to citizen opposition regarding policy measures and legislative enactments is the official version of a barricaded street.

Hillary Campaign Is Now Panicking Over Durham Probe By Matt Margolis

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2022/02/17/hillary-campaign-is-now-panicking-over-durham-probe-n1560091

On Thursday, attorneys for Michael Sussmann, the lawyer from Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign who was charged last year with lying to federal agents, filed a motion to dismiss Special Counsel John Durham’s case against him, reports the New York Post. The lawyers called the matter “extraordinary prosecutorial overreach.”

Sussmann’s legal team insists that he didn’t make false statements to the FBI and that he’s being targeted on a technicality. Sussman voluntarily approached FBI agents in Sept. 2016 to “pass along information that raised national security concerns.” Instead, Sussman came to them with bogus information linking the Trump Organization and the Kremlin-linked Alfa-Bank.

“He met with the FBI, in other words, to provide a tip. There is no allegation in the indictment that the tip he provided was false. And there is no allegation that he believed that the tip he provided was false,” Sussman’s lawyer’s motion reads. “Rather, Mr. Sussmann has been charged with making a false statement about an entirely ancillary matter — about who his client may have been when he met with the FBI — which is a fact that even the special counsel’s own indictment fails to allege had any effect on the FBI’s decision to open an investigation. Allowing this case to go forward would risk criminalizing ordinary conduct, raise First Amendment concerns, dissuade honest citizens from coming forward with tips, and chill the advocacy of lawyers who interact with the government.”

A president so bad that even his base is disgusted with him By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/02/a_president_so_bad_that_even_his_base_is_disgusted_with_him.html

Drew Magary is a San Francisco columnist who comes at politics from a place far, far along the leftist spectrum. He is the radical base that drives the modern Democrat party. On the Venn diagram mapping out my political views and Magary’s, however, there is one point of intersection: We both think of Biden as a failed president. That’s good for my side of the aisle and very, very bad for Magary’s.

Margary’s essay is entitled “Joe Biden is a lousy president.” In it, you’ll find phrases such as this: “Joe Biden is out of excuses.” “In many ways, it feels as if Biden’s presidency is already over.” “All this begs the question: Does Joe Biden even know he’s president? Does he give a s—t?” “He’s uninterested….” “He’s shown no ambition….” “I am sick to death of this….” “It’s not merely that Biden has been a lousy president; it’s that I’ve seen nothing to suggest that he’ll STOP being lousy.” “I briefly had high hopes for Joe Biden, and that’s on me.”

I think we conservatives can agree with every one of those statements. Where the opinion piece starts having that funhouse mirror feel is learning that, aside from being as disgusted as conservatives about Biden’s Afghanistan pullout fiasco, every one of Magary’s complaints comes about because he feels that Biden has failed as a leftist.

The New Politics of School Choice By John J. Miller

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/03/07/the-new-politics-of-school-choice/#slide-1

It is surging in popularity as parents become more activist.

Jessica Bagos is the kind of mom who may be on the verge of transforming K–12 education. “I grew up in public schools, and I’ve always been a proponent of the public-school system,” she says. Then came the Covid-19 lockdowns. The public schools closed in Royal Oak, Mich., the Detroit suburb where she lives. When her twin sons were ready to enter kindergarten at the beginning of the last school year, the schools stayed closed. Her boys could connect with a teacher by video conference, but they couldn’t attend class in person. “You can’t put five-year-olds in front of monitors for hours and hours every day,” she says. Yet for months, her daily challenge was to stop them from wrestling with each other and instead keep them fixed to screens while she tried to hold down a full-time job from her home. “I used to cry in the mornings,” says Bagos. “Then I got mad.”

Last September, she and her husband sued Michigan’s government in federal court, joining several other parents who had suffered from their own frustrations. They seek to overturn an amendment to their state’s constitution that forbids them to pay for private education with money from a state-sponsored savings plan. For more than half a century, the amendment has blocked Michiganders from enjoying any form of school choice (apart from the kind paid for with personal funds) outside the public-school system. Meanwhile, other parent activists in Michigan have launched a petition drive that could create a $500 million program of educational savings accounts (ESAs), allowing families to pay for more kinds of education expenses for their kids, such as transportation costs, speech therapy, and tuition at Catholic schools and cosmetology colleges. Ben DeGrow, of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, the state’s free-market think tank, says that these combined efforts may lead to a watershed moment: “Everything about education in Michigan could change this year.”

It turns out that education already is changing in a lot of other states: Last year, 18 states enacted or expanded school-choice programs.

Hillary Clinton Responds to Durham Investigation, Laments ‘Conspiracy Theories’ By Caroline Downey

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/hillary-clinton-responds-to-durham-investigation-laments-conspiracy-theories/

Former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton again on Thursday repudiated as a phony scandal the recent revelation that operatives connected to her campaign allegedly spied on the Trump administration as part of an effort to cook up a Russia-collusion narrative.

During her keynote speech for the 2022 New York State Democratic Convention, Clinton said Durham’s findings are a “right-wing lie” meant to serve as a distraction from Trump’s own scandals.

“And we can’t get distracted. Whether it’s by the latest culture war nonsense or some new right-wing lie on Fox or Facebook. By the way, they’ve been coming after me again in case you might have noticed. It’s funny, the more trouble Trump gets into the wilder the charges and conspiracy theories about me seem to get,” she said.

“So now his accountants have fired him and investigations draw closer to him and right on cue the noise machine gets turned up…” she added. “Fox leads the charge against me, counting on their audience to fall for it again. They’re getting awfully close to actual malice in their attacks.”

Special counsel John Durham is currently trying to get to the bottom of the extensive Trump/Russia probe launched by the Obama administration that spanned into the Trump administration, consuming the press and public for two years.

Race Essentialism at WaPo By Michael Brendan Dougherty

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/race-essentialism-at-wapo/

The Washington Post has a feature story about the influence of longtime Democratic house member Jim Clyburn. Clyburn, you may recall, was consequential in saving Biden’s candidacy during the Democratic primaries in 2016. An endorsement from the South Carolinian congressman carried great weight in such a divided field and helped to solidify Biden as the choice of party moderates and the choice of African-American voters, many of whom are now the party’s moderate voters.

Clyburn has apparently been frustrated in his inability to influence personnel choices by the administration, though the article says his words still carry great weight. The subject turns to the Supreme Court, and Clyburn’s push for Biden to nominate U.S. district judge J. Michelle Childs, who Clyburn believes better represents the values of people in his state. Childs is the product of public universities, whereas the current favorite of progressive commentators is Ketanji Brown Jackson, with a background from Harvard.

If you know how to read between the lines, there’s a lot of interest in this story as it gets to the class conflict within the Democrat Party. Traditionalists like Clyburn really are more moderate and pragmatic and speak to a certain important segment of the party. But ascendant progressives, who reflect the party’s generational tilt toward the elite, want something else.