The Left's Temporary Obsession With a Killer's Race
When we had nothing more to go on than the video footage of the suspect being led away shirtless and in handcuffs, Democrat Representative worthless-Ilhan Omar and her race-obsessed ilk were quick to pounce on the color of his skin.
“The shooter’s race or ethnicity seems front and center when they aren’t white,” she complained. “Otherwise, it’s just a mentally ill young man having a bad day.”
When it was later revealed, however, that the killer was 21-year-old Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, a Trump-hating Syrian-born Muslim, worthless-Omar’s “white supremacist” narrative went up in smoke — at least temporarily. At that point, she probably wished she’d simply said something less incendiary and less accusatory. Perhaps something like she said about the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks: “Some people did something.”
Or perhaps something like the latter of these remarkable before and after tweets from a more anonymous race-baiter.
Translation: The killer is white! Oh, wait, he’s Muslim? [Cue crickets.]
To be clear, this wasn’t a mere slip of the tongue for worthless-Omar. She’d said much the same thing a week earlier in the wake of the Atlanta spa murders, which were perpetrated by a man who happens to be white: “It isn’t hard,” she tweeted, “to understand why it’s so normalized for law enforcement to protect the humanity of white mass murderers and their willingness to continually make excuses [sic] them.”
As for the Boulder killer, it’s already clear that he’s a very sick young man, just as the Atlanta killer is. As the Associated Press reports, “A law enforcement official briefed on the shooting said the suspect’s family told investigators they believed Alissa was suffering some type of mental illness, including delusions. Relatives described times when Alissa told them people were following or chasing him, which they said may have contributed to the violence.”
A former high school wrestling teammate said Alissa would act strangely sometimes, turning around suddenly or glancing over his shoulder. “He would say, ‘Did you see that? Did you see that?’ We wouldn’t see anything. We always thought he was messing with us.”
Deeply disturbed or not, there seems to be a clear double standard on the Left when it comes to covering these mass killers. “If the shooter is a white supremacist,” tweeted columnist David Harsanyi yesterday, “the event is an indictment of all white people and America. If the shooter is an Islamist, it is a completely individual act that has nothing to do with ideology.”
Conservative author Dinesh D'Souza put it this way: “If six out of eight Asian American victims in Atlanta automatically made that murder spree a hate crime, what can we conclude now that we know all 10 of the Boulder shooter’s victims were white?”
Here’s a thought for those on the Left: Mass killers of innocent people are by definition profoundly and deeply disturbed. Unless there’s clear-cut evidence that race played a role in the killer’s motives — as it did with, say, Dylann Roof — let’s just mourn the dead and stick to the relevant facts. ~The Patriot Post
socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden and Democrats Target Second Amendment
Not that long ago, politicians on both sides of the aisle and members of the media would castigate those who dared politicize an atrocity such as what happened in Boulder, Colorado, on Monday. Unfortunately, those days are long gone, and we must now endure the immediate politicization of nearly every murderous attack. Democrats from socialist/scumbag/liar-Joe Biden on down blame the Second Amendment, disgracefully scapegoating a fundamental constitutional right that the vast majority of law-abiding American citizens legally engage in and depend upon.
“I don’t need to wait another minute, let alone an hour, to take common sense steps that will save lives in the future and to urge my colleagues in the House and Senate to act,” socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden obtusely asserted Tuesday. “We can ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines in this country once again.”
By “once again,” socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden was referencing scumbag/liar-Bill Clinton’s failed 1994 Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act, which banned rifles with certain cosmetic features (mislabeled “assault weapons”) and did nothing to end or even curb “gun violence,” another bogus leftist term. The truth is that semiautomatic rifles were only ever used in the tiniest fraction of crimes, and that remains true to this day. In fact, following the expiration of scumbag/liar-Clinton’s gun ban, the number of crimes committed with so-called “assault weapons” actually decreased.
Like so many anti-Second Amendment activists, socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden peddles a myth when he suggests that a return to the Clinton-era “assault weapons ban” is a “commonsense” step that will “save lives.” If anything, it will likely lead to an increase in “gun violence.”
But socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden isn’t content to wait on Congress. “We are considering a range of levers,” explained White House Press Secretary liar-Jen Psaki, “including executive actions to address, obviously, not just gun safety measures but violence in communities.” We’ll be waiting to see how badly he infringes on the Second Amendment.
One of those ways looks to be what liar-Psaki last week framed as “repealing gun manufacturers’ liability shields.” That would be basic liability protections that all other industries are currently afforded. By falsely implying that firearms manufacturers bear some special liability, socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden is in fact singling out and intentionally vilifying the firearms industry, as if these companies have escaped justifiable legal culpability. Nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden and the anti-gun lobby are looking for ways to eradicate the firearms industry by removing protections from frivolous and meritless lawsuits.
Meanwhile, some Democrats are calling for exploiting the recent murderous attacks in Atlanta and Boulder to push for the elimination of the Senate filibuster. Senator dinky/liar-Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) blatantly stated, “Things won’t get better until Democrats get rid of the filibuster and finally pass gun safety legislation that a huge majority of Americans support. What are we waiting for — another tragedy?”
Finally, the socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden administration is using the Boulder attack to distract from a calamity of socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden’s own creation — the border crisis. On the one hand, socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden is attacking Americans’ fundamental right to bear arms, while on the other hand he refuses to defend and protect the nation’s borders from those seeking to illegally infiltrate and exploit our economy and citizenry. It’s almost as if socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden holds Americans in contempt for wanting to protect and hold on to our Liberty. ~The Patriot Post
Dems Attempt Election Overthrow in Iowa
One can’t help but wonder: If we had an honest, accurate, and unbiased media, would Democrats be less brazen and more embarrassed at their endless hypocrisy and lies?
After claiming President Donald Trump was a danger to the very fabric of the American republic because he highlighted and demanded accountability for election fraud and/or malfeasance, Democrats are brazenly attempting to steal another election — Iowa’s 2nd Congressional District seat.
In that race, Republican Mariannette Miller-Meeks led Democrat Rita Hart by 282 votes on election night, a lead that shrunk to 47 votes after all mail-in ballots were counted (Iowa law allows ballots postmarked by Election Day). When the recount was completed and all things accounted for, Miller-Meeks had won by a mere six votes.
Hart could have gone to court to contest the Republican victory by providing evidence of fraud or counting errors, but instead she waited two months until the Democrat-controlled House had been seated. She has now petitioned House Democrats to overrule Iowa’s recount, evict Republican Miller-Meeks, and seat her instead.
Hart’s justification is that she objects to the fact that different Iowa counties used different recount standards, yet Hart herself pushed machine recounts in Republican-run counties while calling for hand recounts in Democrat-run counties (not at all suspicious).
The Democrat hypocrisy is so glaring that even a few Democrats are grumbling about it.
Democrats ridiculed every effort by President Trump to ensure election integrity. They called his accusations of fraud a danger to American democracy and condemned the dozens of lawsuits filed by Trump and the Republican Party to contest the legality of votes cast where Democrat governors, secretaries of state, and unelected judges unilaterally rewrote election law under the guise of accommodating COVID restrictions.
And though far too late to make a difference, courts are now ruling that Democrats did indeed violate the law and the limits of their constitutional authority.
Apparently, claims of fraud, election rigging conspiracy theories, questioning the legitimacy of elections, and working to overturn election results are only bad when done by Republicans.
Unfortunately, as National Review’s Dan McLaughlin points out, “If misbehaving Republican politicians often embarrass the party’s intellectuals, misbehaving Democrats have their side’s scholars and pundits whispering in their ears like Iago, urging them to ever-more-radical steps.”
He’s referencing in particular a recent California Law Review article by Harvard Law School professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos calling on Democrats to take insanely radical steps to permanently rig elections in their favor. In support, he pulls from the recent writings of former Stanford Law School professor Pamela Karlan, who now serves as the deputy attorney general for the Civil Rights Division of socialist/scumbag/liar-Joe Biden’s (Social) Justice Department.
Stephanopoulos calls for Democrats to do what they have already threatened to do — end the Senate filibuster, stack the Supreme Court, grant statehood to DC and Puerto Rico, enact the National Popular Vote scheme, etc.
What makes Stephanopoulos’s rantings so dangerous is that he calls on Democrats to give their naked power grab the patina of legitimacy by using constitutional authority in ways never considered or authorized before.
For example, Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution grants Congress the power to “be the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members.” Stephanopoulos wants the Democrat-controlled House and Senate to evict Republican members who win under Republican-written state election laws.
Additionally, Article IV, Section 4 grants the president emergency powers under the Guarantee Clause, which ensures every state has “a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion…”
Stephanopoulous calls on socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden to use this power to dictate the terms of state election laws by executive order, invalidating any elections not conforming to his demands. And not just to federal elections, but elections and policies down to the local level.
He openly acknowledges his attempt to short-circuit constitutional checks and balances, contemptuously arguing, “Desperate times call for desperate measures.”
And what has brought about these “desperate times”? According to Stephanopoulous, “American democracy is in real peril thanks to the malapportioned Senate, the obsolete Electoral College, voter suppression, gerrymandering, and so on…” The first two are written into the Constitution, and his definition of voter suppression includes requiring photo ID.
And why these specific recommendations? Because they have the advantage of bypassing constitutional checks and balances, giving Democrats “tools that can be blunted by neither a Senate filibuster nor a hostile Court.”
When discussing his proposed weaponization of the Guarantee Clause, Stephanopoulos says, “The President [as] head of the executive branch … could take whatever steps she thinks are necessary to prevent states from lapsing into nonrepublicanism or to remedy antirepublican abuses. The only limits on the President’s discretion are that exigent circumstances must exist and that Congress must be unwilling or unable to act.”
Congress’s refusal to act, to be a rubber stamp for a dictatorial president, is the exact same justification Barack scumbag/liar-nObama used when he unilaterally and unconstitutionally used his “pen and phone” to create law.
Make no mistake: The Democrats’ endeavor in Iowa is not just part of a power grab. It is one skirmish in an all-out assault on America’s republican, federalist form of government. It is an effort to destroy checks and balances on power and usher in a permanent Democrat rule. It is an assault on the very concept of Liberty and self-government.
It must be stopped. ~The Patriot Post
HR 1 Is Rotten Through and Through
When someone serves you a plate of rotten meat, you refuse to eat it because it’s rotten — not because you don’t like the plate on which it was served.
Yet the latter is essentially what the deep-thinking Jessica Huseman at the progressive Daily Beast has done in an article titled “How This Voting Rights Bill Could Turn the Next Election Into a [Charlie Foxtrot].” Indeed, Huseman undressed HR 1, the Democrats’ ridiculously named “For the People Act,” not because it’s a power-grabbing abomination but rather because she thinks it’s technically unworkable.
“The For the People Act is, truthfully, the best piece of legislation proposed to standardize and ensure voting rights for all,” she cluelessly begins. “But the bar is low for voting bills, and this one barely clears it. While the tenets of the bill are laudable [no, they’re not] … it comes packed with deadlines and requirements election administrators cannot possibly meet without throwing their systems into chaos.”
Let’s set aside, for a moment, that fundamentally correct conclusion to remember that HR 1 is, in the words of our Louis DeBroux, “a massive power grab by Democrats that takes the worst aspects of the 2020 elections and puts them into federal law.”
Thus, if you liked the buttery-smooth means by which the 2020 election was conducted — the lawsuits, the recounts, the audits, the allegations of rampant fraud in Democrat-controlled big cities — you’ll love HR 1. As DeBroux continues, “Democrats aim to dictate from Capitol Hill election law for every single state, county, and city. HR 1 intentionally weakens election security, creating the very lawlessness and discord that made the last election such a nightmare and guaranteeing that it’s the norm for all future elections.”
So, what’s not to like?
To listen to the Daily Beaster, HR 1’s flaws are mostly in the means of execution. “Many of the changes the bill demands of election administrators are literally impossible to implement,” Huseman writes. “Others would significantly raise the cost of elections but provide no assured long-term funding. It empowers an agency — the U.S. Elections Assistance Commission — that was criticized less than a year ago for mismanagement and fecklessness by the same Democrats promoting this bill. And, perversely to its purpose, the bill would make elections less secure by forcing states to rush gargantuan changes on deeply unrealistic time frames.”
Again, she’s missing the trees for the forest. HR 1 takes a very bad situation — voters’ lack of confidence in our current electoral system — and proposes to make it much worse.
“There is a reason,” writes veteran political analyst John Fund, “ scumbag/liar-Nancy Pelosi has called her 791-page bill, stuffed as it is with her favorite election-related changes, House of Representatives Bill Number 1 or HR 1. It’s that important to her. She has convinced or pressured every single House Democrat to co-sponsor. … Should the power grab masquerading as HR 1 become law it will represent only the latest distortion of democracy. It will undermine confidence in the system far more than anything Donald Trump attempted.”
For the last word, though, let’s leave it to the folks who’ll be responsible for implementing HR 1: “Listen, I’ll do this — if the law passes, I’ll follow it,” said one state-level Democrat election director in the Southeast who declined to be named. “But I can’t guarantee it’s not going to be a total clusterf—k the first election.”
“I don’t know what they were thinking, honestly,” said the head of an elections nonprofit. “It’s a bad bill. The goals might be admirable, but it’s a f—ing bad bill.”
It’s hard to disagree with this assessment, vulgar though it is. Except for the part about HR 1’s goals being admirable. They’re not. This bill is a naked and undemocratic power grab, and an ill-conceived one at that. And if ever there were a reason to retain the Senate’s filibuster, HR 1 is it. ~The Patriot Post
Honoring the Boulder Victims
We deliberately waited to comment on the mass murder in Boulder, Colorado, Monday because such things are often initially misreported and then the political narratives take off. Our Douglas Andrews offers thoughts on the killer, while Thomas Gallatin takes on the grotesque Democrat political agenda that they trot out with nearly every mass shooting. The focus here is on the victims and what we’ve all lost because they’re gone.
Rikki Olds was just 25, but she was a manager at King Soopers, the store where the murders took place. She was a student at Front Range Community College, where she was working toward a career in nursing.
Denny Stong, also a King Soopers employee, was even younger at age 20. His social media profile contained the phrase “I can’t stay home. I am a Grocery Store Worker.” He was training to be a pilot, and he encouraged friends to honor his recent birthday by donating to the National Foundation for Gun Rights.
Teri Leiker was a third employee who lost her life. Age 51, she had been working at the store for 30 years and was dating a coworker.
Neven Stanisic was a 23-year-old refugee from Bosnia and a parishioner at St. John the Baptist Serbian Orthodox Church in Lakewood. According to his pastor, he was “a very good, shy, hardworking boy,” and he was at the store to fix a Starbucks coffee machine.
Lynn Murray, 62, was at the store working to fill an Instacart order, but she had previously worked for Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, and Glamour magazines.
Kevin Mahoney, 61, had not long ago walked his daughter down the aisle in her wedding. “I am now pregnant,” she said. “I know he wants me to be strong for his granddaughter.”
Suzanne Fountain was a 59-year-old local actress in shows around town, as well as the manager of a music venue.
Tralona Bartkowiak owned Umba Love, a small clothing shop. She was 49, and a friend described her as “the kindest and sweetest lady you ever did know.”
Jody Waters, 65, was a beloved family woman who worked at a leather goods store called Embrazio.
Eric Talley is particularly noteworthy as a law enforcement officer who responded to shots fired. The 51-year-old married and homeschooling father of seven gave his life in service to his fellow citizens. But Talley wasn’t your average cop. He left a six-figure post in IT a decade ago to join the Boulder Police Department because he felt a higher calling after a friend’s DUI death. As his father, Homer, put it, “Above all else he loved his family and his Lord Jesus Christ.”
These regular Americans are the ones who deserve the attention this week. Their families are suffering immense grief, and they should receive genuine compassion from all of us. ~The Patriot Post
HANS VON SPAKOVSKY
Georgia Legislators Addressing Election Vulnerabilities
With the recent passage by the Georgia House of Representatives of House Bill 531, the state has made a good start on amending its election rules to reform the system and fix the many security vulnerabilities that currently exist — vulnerabilities that fueled the controversy over election results in Georgia in 2020.
Legislators have proposed several amendments to the state’s election code relating to primaries and elections. Among them: revisions to how absentee ballots and early voting are handled. Considering some of the problematic voting procedures utilized in Georgia during the 2020 presidential election, this bill is certainly a step in the right direction.
One of the most-needed reforms in House Bill 531 is adding an identification requirement to absentee ballots. Georgia has had a model voter ID statute for more than a decade that requires a government-issued photo ID to vote in person — and the state provides a free ID to anyone who lacks one.
The current ID law applies only to in-person voting and not absentee ballots, as the voter ID law in Alabama does. It is important to understand that signature comparison is a very insecure way of ensuring it is actually the registered voter who completed and returned an absentee ballot.
Handwriting analysis is more of an art than a science, and the average election worker lacks the training necessary to do it, particularly in the very brief time they have to review thousands of absentee ballots. Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist Victor Joecks illustrated this last year when he mailed nine absentee ballots with forged signatures to election officials. Only one was caught; the others sailed through without detection.
The House bill would require voters applying for an absentee ballot to provide either a photocopy of the same IDs acceptable for in-person voting or the serial number of their Georgia driver’s license or non-driver’s photo identification card. The state will still conduct signature comparison, but an ID requirement is an added — and necessary — layer of security to protect voters.
The bill also amends state law to protect voters using absentee ballots from predatory voter traffickers — political operatives, campaign staffers, party activists and other third parties with a stake in the outcome of the election. It would prohibit anyone other than a relative or a person assisting an illiterate or physically disabled voter from requesting absentee ballot applications or handling or delivering the completed absentee ballots.
This can prevent the altering or changing of a voter’s absentee ballot, as well as protect that voter from coercion and pressure by a political operative in a voter’s home, where — unlike in polling places — there are no election officials to prevent such misbehavior. Anyone who doubts this happens should look at the 9th Congressional District race in North Carolina in 2018, which was overturned due to this type of criminal behavior.
The Georgia House also showed its concern over the risks posed by unsecured, unguarded drop boxes for absentee ballots. The bill places limits on the number of drop boxes that can be established by a county and requires that they be located at the office of the county board of registrars or inside locations where early voting is conducted. The drop boxes have to be under constant surveillance by an election official, law enforcement official or licensed security guard.
Another important provision is one banning private funding of election officials and election officers, something that happened in the 2020 election. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg contributed $350 million to an organization that distributed those funds to local boards of elections nationwide, including in Georgia. These were supposedly “nonpartisan” grants, but an analysis by the Capital Research Center showed that the grants were targeted “to known Democratic districts to turn out its base in battleground states.”
There are many other changes to Georgia law in the House bill on other issues such as early voting and poll watchers, which are intended to directly address challenges seen across the country in the 2020 presidential election. The bill is a big first step in the right direction to protect both access and security, which should be the key objectives of any state’s election process. ~The Patriot Post
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