Karine, Kamala and the Killers From Nashville to San Bernardino, ignoring victims and excusing terrorists. by Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/karine-kamala-and-the-killers/

“Our hearts go out to the trans community as they are under attack right now.”

That was Biden White House press secretary Karine Saint-Pierre, several days after Audrey Hale murdered Evelyn Dieckhaus, 9, Mike Hill, 61, William Kinney, 9, Katherine Koonce, 60, Cynthia Peak, 61, and Hallie Scruggs, nine years old and the daughter of Covenant Presbyterian pastor Chad Scruggs. By any standard, this mass murder, committed in the run-up to “Trans Vengeance Day,” was an act of terrorism.

Biden press secretary Karine Saint-Pierre did not name or condemn Audrey Hale, a woman who thought she was a man. The White House mouthpiece also failed to name a single victim, including Mike Hill, who was black. No word from Saint-Pierre whether Hale could have been motivated by racism.

The Nashville mourners might be hard pressed to find a similar demonstration of indulgence for  terrorism and callousness toward their victims. Something similar took place on December 2, 2015, in San Bernardino, California.

That day, employees of the Inland Regional Center gathered for holiday party. A National Police Foundation report explains what happened.

“Suddenly, a door swung open and a person clad in all black, with a mask shielding his or her face, stepped inside, wielding what appeared to be an automatic rifle. Without saying a word, the person, now believed to be [Syed] Farook, opened fire.” Then Tashfeen Malik followed.

“She also wore all black and entered the room shooting. Together, the shooters fired more than 100 rounds.”  The shooters then “hastily departed, heading out to a black SUV they had parked just outside, leaving behind a chaotic scene of noise, fear, and pain.” And death.

American-born Syed Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik, a green-card holder born in Pakistan, murdered Robert Adams, Isaac Amianos, Bennetta Betbadal, Harry Bowman, Sierra Clayborn, Juan Espinoza, Aurora Godoy, Shannon Johnson, Larry Daniel Kaufman, Damien Meins, Tin Ngyen, Nicholas Thalasinos, Yvette Velasco, and Michael Wetzel.

Isaac Amanios, 60, immigrated from Eritrea to California in 2000 to escape violence and repression. Bennetta Betbadal, 46, fled to America with her family to “escape Islamic extremism and the persecution of Christians that followed the Iranian Revolution.”

‘We should not live by lies’: Heather Mac Donald warns America to wake up VIDEO

https://www.thecollegefix.com/we-should-not-live-by-lies-heather-mac-donald-warns-america-to-wake-up/

The constant mantra that racism defines America and is deeply embedded in all of the nation’s institutions is leading to policies and practices that are slowly destroying the country from within, writes Heather Mac Donald in her new book “When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives.”

Mac Donald recently joined College Fix editor Jennifer Kabbany to discuss how America is committing civilizational suicide and what can be done to reverse the trend.

One big step that must take place across American society: “We should not live by lies,” Mac Donald said.

Watch the full interview here:

Michael Mukasey at the NRI Ideas Summit

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/05/michael-mukasey-at-the-nri-ideas-summit/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=second

” My job was to do law, and to have enough faith in the law to know that if I did it right, the result would be justice. Law can be a strength if it can be used to keep a society open to the opinions of all, and if, but only if, its administration can be placed in the hands of those for whom the law itself is the only agenda.”

When Abbé Sieyès, the 18th-century French clergyman and political theorist, was asked what he did during the Reign of Terror that accompanied the French Revolution, his answer was brief and to the point: “I survived.” Which is to say, he kept a low profile until the terror blew over, and so he didn’t wind up under the guillotine, as did several of his colleagues.

I don’t think we can afford to follow that passive example today, as we live through our own reign of terror, due in large measure to the advance of what is known as the woke agenda in which people can have their careers decapitated if they compliment a co-worker on her appearance or can be made to vanish from social networks for endorsing the wrong idea. Unlike the 18th-century Reign of Terror, this one seems unlikely to blow over on its own.

The proponents of this agenda are advancing their cause using control of what University of Texas scholar Michael Lind called three separate gateways: college education, professional accreditation, and commercial services, in particular media platforms. He did not mention government as a separate category, but I would suggest that it should be added to the list.

The theme of this conference, of course, is the sources of American strength, and one of those sources undeniably is the rule of law. But that presents us as conservatives with a particularly acute problem because several of those gateways are largely in the control of the private sector, which in turn poses the dilemma of whether the power of government can be brought to bear here in a way consistent with the Constitution’s limits on the reach of government, or not, and consistent with the economic freedom that has helped make this country great, or not. And the solution to that dilemma is by no means clear.

Shock: The New York Times Admits Biden’s Border Policies Encourage Illegal Immigration

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/05/10/shock-the-new-york-times-admits-bidens-border-policies-encourage-illegal-immigration/

After two years spent either ignoring the crisis at the southern border or refusing to blame President Joe Biden, the New York Times tepidly confessed this week that his border policies have, indeed, contributed to the surge in illegal immigration. Why now?

In an email to subscribers, the Times senior writer David Leonhart writes:

When the U.S. makes it difficult for people to enter the country illegally, fewer people make the journey north to try. When the U.S. sends signals that people will be able to cross the border even without permission, and potentially remain here for years, more people attempt to do so.

(Before you know it, the Times will be telling readers that water is wet.)

But Leonhart isn’t done.

The pattern is clear. Donald Trump was the most anti-immigration president in decade. … Joe Biden ran for president in 2020 promising a more welcoming approach, and after he won the election, the number of people trying to enter the country without permission spiked.

He even includes a chart (similar to the one below) showing Customs and Border Protection data on annual “encounters” with illegal border crossers.

The Deep State Is All Too Real Congress and the courts have shirked their duty, letting bureaucrats make and interpret the laws. By David Bernhardt

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-deep-state-is-all-too-real-congress-chevron-delegation-civics-hunter-biden-985ed65e?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

There are two competing conceptions of American governance: the version students are taught in the classroom, and the one that exists in the real world. Grade-school civics teaches that Washington is designed to operate under a system of checks and balances, constrained by the Constitution and empowered by the consent of the governed. In practice, however, power has become concentrated in the executive branch and largely wielded by unaccountable career bureaucrats. The notion of a “deep state” isn’t a conspiratorial talking point but a manifest political reality.

The separation of powers is an animating principle of our nation’s founding documents. As the Constitution outlines, the U.S. has three distinct and coequal branches of government: a legislature that passes laws, an executive branch that implements them, and a judiciary that interprets them. This built-in division is meant to restrain government overreach and prevent abuses of power. The president and members of Congress regularly stand for election to ensure the government is accountable to the governed, and the judiciary serves in good behavior to ensure that justice is dispensed impartially.

While this sounds nice in theory, the federal government typically doesn’t honor it in practice. Congress has delegated much of its lawmaking authority to the executive branch since the 1930s. Federal agencies now issue regulations that have the force and effect of the law. “Administrative judges”—executive-branch employees—routinely preside over trial-like proceedings without juries, letting agencies act as both prosecutor and judge.

Under the Supreme Court’s Chevron doctrine, courts generally defer to the executive branch’s interpretation of the law—both in regulatory and enforcement proceedings. Many of the Constitution’s checks and balances, from the separation of powers to the right to jury trial, have fallen by the wayside.

DEI Brings Kafka to My Law School Ohio Northern University is trying to banish me for lack of ‘collegiality’ but won’t say what I’ve done. By Scott Gerber

https://www.wsj.com/articles/dei-brings-kafka-to-my-law-school-ohio-tenure-collegiality-viewpoint-discipline-102d62b8?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

Franz Kafka’s “The Trial” tells the story of Josef K., a man arrested, prosecuted and killed by an inaccessible authority, with the nature of his crime revealed neither to him nor to the reader. I’m Josef K.

Around 1 p.m. on Friday, April 14, Ohio Northern University campus security officers entered my classroom with my students present and escorted me to the dean’s office. Armed town police followed me down the hall. My students appeared shocked and frightened. I know I was. I was immediately barred from teaching, banished from campus, and told that if I didn’t sign a separation agreement and release of claims by April 21, ONU would commence dismissal proceedings against me. The grounds: “Collegiality.” The specifics: None.

Josef K. never learns what he’s alleged to have done wrong. The offenses I’ve allegedly committed haven’t been revealed to me, either. But I have an educated guess.

Net Zero grid batteries alone would bankrupt America By Craig Rucker

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/05/net_zero_grid_batteries_alone_would_bankrupt_america_.html

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) cites “the climate crisis” at almost every opportunity. President Biden calls it a greater threat than nuclear war. They and their allies champion “carbon-free” electricity generation by 2035 and nearly fossil-fuel-free energy by 2050.

Achieving “net zero” carbon dioxide emissions will be painless, they assure us. Costs will be so low you’ll need a magnifying glass to see them. Governments merely have to enact mandates, provide subsidies, and the transformation to “clean” energy will just happen. Almost like in a fairy tale.

Here in the real world, however, we would need literally millions of weather-dependent wind turbines, billions of equally unreliable solar panels, millions of half-ton battery modules for vehicles, billions more modules to back up intermittent electricity generation, millions of transformers, and tens of thousands of miles of new transmission lines.

All these technologies must be manufactured from metals, minerals, and petroleum extracted from the Earth, via mining on scales unprecedented in human history.

The dollar costs alone — just for a U.S. transformation — are almost incomprehensible.

Science and policy analyst David Wojick calculated that just the batteries needed to back up wind and solar electricity generation in a “net zero” USA would cost $23-trillion — America’s entire 2021 gross domestic product (GDP) — and probably many times that.

Energy and technology consultant Thomas Tanton found that battery backup to replace current U.S. fossil fuel electricity — and convert vehicles, furnaces, water heaters, and stoves to electricity — would cost at least $29 trillion in initial outlays.

Trillions more would be needed to cover financing, repairs, maintenance, replacements, burying broken and worn-out non-recyclable equipment, and building systems strong enough to survive hurricanes.

Professional engineer Ken Gregory determined that grid-backup battery costs could reach $290 trillion (12.6 times the USA’s 2021 GDP), based on actual 2019 and 2020 hourly intermittent electricity-generation data, rather than annual average data utilized in the other studies.

None of these estimates includes the costs of turbines, panels, transmission lines or transformers.

A ‘Much Better and More Trusted’ CDC? Americans need more answers about those “dark days of the pandemic.” By Lloyd Billingsley

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/08/a-much-better-and-more-trusted-cdc/

“The end of the COVID-19 public health emergency marks a tremendous transition for our country, for public health, and in my tenure as CDC Director,” proclaimed Dr. Rochelle Walensky last week. The CDC boss is stepping down from the job, which she took “with the goal of leaving behind the dark days of the pandemic and moving CDC—and public health—forward into a much better and more trusted place.”

Before they place more trust in an allegedly better CDC, embattled Americans might review events that took place on Walensky’s watch, including the sudden departure of a key CDC figure. 

In April 2021, the CDC reassigned Dr. Nancy Messonnier, longtime director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases (NCIRD). In a May 7, 2021, White House briefing, Walensky suddenly announced that Messonnier would be stepping down. 

“Dr. Messonnier has been a true hero,” Walensky told reporters. “And through her career, in terms of public health, she’s been a steward of public health for the nation. Over this pandemic and through a many-decade career, she’s made significant contributions, and she leaves behind a strong, strong force of leadership and courage in all that she’s done.”

Walensky did not explain why, exactly, Messonnier was leaving the CDC and did not detail any of the “significant contributions” the NCIRD director had made. That invites a review of what the “true hero” Messonnier managed to accomplish in those “dark days of the pandemic.”

In November 2020, Biden’s COVID-19 advisory board called for Messonnier to take a central role in briefings on the pandemic as a way to elevate science and restore public trust in the Centers for Disease Control. The chosen messenger got right to it. 

In a CDC telebriefing on January 17, 2020, Messonnier mentioned “the outbreak of pneumonia in Wuhan City, China, which has been identified as being caused by a novel coronavirus.” It was “a serious situation,” and the CDC official cautioned about travel to and from Wuhan. 

In a January 24 briefing, Messonnier said “we expect to find more cases of novel coronavirus in the United States associated with the ongoing and expanding outbreak in Wuhan, China.”  Sarah Owermohle of Politico wanted to know “what kind of dialogue are you guys are having with Chinese health authorities, and “if there is any inkling” of the origin of the novel virus.

J6 Jackals Circle Trump The verdicts and rhetoric surrounding J6 trials are leading to one goal: the arrest and prosecution of Donald Trump. By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/08/j6-jackals-circle-trump/

In 2002, David Frum, chief speechwriter for President George W. Bush, coined the phrase “axis of evil” to describe the despotic regimes of North Korea, Iran, and Iraq during the nascent stages of the global war on terror.

Today, Frum is warning the country about a different axis of evil that he believes similarly threatens the security of America and perhaps even the world: Donald Trump, the Oath Keepers, and the Proud Boys.

“One after another, the foot soldiers of the January 6 attack on Congress are sentenced to prison terms, which for many will mean the lifelong loss of political rights,” Frum tweeted on May 8 in faux concern for the railroaded defendants. “Yet the commanders who plotted and ordered the attack are escaping with impunity—even running for high office.”

Frum, who hasn’t lost his touch as he’s transitioned over the past two decades from a neoconservative to a full-blown Marxist, was referring to the recent convictions of members of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys. Last Thursday, a Washington, D.C., jury found four Proud Boys guilty of seditious conspiracy, a post-Civil War statute nearly synonymous with treason; six Oath Keepers also have been convicted of the same charge for their participation in the events of January 6. Individuals tied to the groups have pleaded guilty to that count or been convicted of other conspiracy and obstruction felonies.

Now, none of these so-called “foot soldiers” possessed nuclear material or starved millions of their countrymen or harbored foreign terror cells bent on the annihilation of the United States. To the contrary, several defendants associated with both groups fought in the very same wars orchestrated by Frum and his former boss. For example, Joseph Biggs, a Proud Boy convicted last week of seditious conspiracy and other offenses, is a Purple Heart recipient who was deployed to both Iraq and Afghanistan in the early 2000s.

But in Frum’s tiny, vindictive mind, men like Biggs—who brought no weapons to the Capitol and did not assault police on January 6—are comparable to, perhaps worse than, al-Qaeda and ISIS. 

After all, Osama bin Laden never expressed loyalty to the Bad Orange Man!

John Kerry ‘finds’ his Vietnam War medals, pops them onto his suit at the U.K. coronation By Monica Showalter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/05/john_kerry_finds_his_vietnam_war_medals_pops_them_onto_his_suit_at_the_uk_coronation.html

Lurch makes a fool of himself in the pageantry of Britain.

In today’s ridiculous news, I present this picture:

Kerry is famous for tossing his Vietnam war medals over a fence, or at least, saying he did, before he later said it was just his ribbons, and then later still saying it some other guy’s medals. 

Here’s the New York Post report from 2004:

Presumed Democratic Presidential nominee John Kerry said in an interview more than 30 years ago that he threw away some of his Vietnam combat medals – contradicting statements he has made as a candidate, it was reported yesterday.

“I gave back, I can’t remember, six, seven, eight, nine medals,” Kerry said in an interview with WRC-TV, a Washington, D.C., station on Nov. 6, 1971, ABC News reported. Kerry previously had told the network that stories about him tossing medals were a “myth.”

In the 1971 interview, for a program called “Viewpoints,” Kerry – who had not yet been elected to the Senate – said that war veterans who threw away their medals “decided to give them back to their country.”

When asked if he disposed of his Bronze Star, Silver Star and three Purple Hearts received as a Navy lieutenant in Vietnam, he replied, “Well, and above that. [I] gave back the others.”

Earlier this year, Kerry was asked by syndicated columnist Robert Novak, if he regretted throwing his medals away, and responded, “There was no regret,” but he added, “I threw away my ribbons, not my medals.”

…and this…

But in 1984, he told the Globe he still had his own medals but had tossed away another soldiers’ medal.