Category Archives: Current News

This is about stuff in the mass media that generally has a short interest life span. Speculation about an election outcome a few days before the election is an example.

Quote of the day—Brantley Starr

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The federal government forgot the Tenth Amendment and the structure of the Constitution itself.  It is concerning that the federal government believes it swallowed the states whole.  Assuming the federal government didn’t abolish the states to take their police power, the Court DENIES the motion to dismiss WITHOUT PREJUDICE.  The Court will allow the federal government to try again and explain which enumerated power justifies the federal regulation and whether it allows a taking without compensation.  The Court requests that the federal government also address any limits on that federal power and the Court’s proper role in examining the validity of the underlying rule when determining if there was a compensable taking.

Brantley Starr
United States District Judge
March 30, 2020
BRIAN P. LANE, Individually and on behalf of all others similarly situated, Plaintiff,  v. THE UNITED STATES
[Via Reason: Another Trump-Appointed Judge Benchslaps the Trump Administration for Rewriting Federal Gun Laws
[It’s a good start.

I know it’s too much to ask for, but I’d like to see those responsible for rewriting the definition of a machine gun without going through the proper legislative procedures being recommended for prosecution. If if they did go through the legislative process see the prosecution any legislators who voted for the illegal infringement of our rights as well as the criminals who advocated for such legislation.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Tim Pool @Timcast

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More and more polls show American’s approve of Trump and its hilarious watching the media go through the five stages of grief

Denial was yesterday and today it’s anger

I’m excited for the bargaining phase

Tim Pool @Timcast
Tweeted on March 25, 2020
[As funny as this is I can’t see the media ever bargaining.

I think they would rather go out of business and be homeless than admit President Trump might have done something right.—Joe]

Quote of the day—William Booth

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The Imperial College group reported that if nothing was done by governments and individuals and the pandemic remained uncontrolled, then 510,000 would die in Britain and 2.2 million in the United States over the course of the outbreak.

These kinds of numbers are deeply concerning for countries with top-drawer health-care systems. They are terrifying for less-developed countries, global health experts say.

If Britain and the United States pursued much more ambitious measures to mitigate the spread of coronavirus, to slow but not necessarily stop epidemic over the coming few months, they could reduce mortality by half, to 260,000 people in the United Kingdom and 1.1 million in the United States.

Finally, if the British government quickly went all-out to suppress viral spread — aiming to reverse epidemic growth and reduce the case load to a low level — then the number of dead in the country could drop to below 20,000. To do this, the researchers said, Britain would have to enforce social distancing for the entire population, isolate all cases, demand household quarantines of households where anyone is sick, and close all schools and universities — and do this not for weeks but for 12 to 18 months, until a vaccine is available.

William Booth
March 17, 2020
A chilling scientific paper helped upend U.S. and U.K. coronavirus strategies
[Welcome to the new normal.

This could permanently change all industrialized societies. High population densities, mass transit, and high density offices will be far less attractive to the population at large. The effect could last for a generation or more. How does this affect the political climate?

Live entertainment, restaurants, and the travel industry are going to take a tremendous hit which will ripple throughout society.

We live in interesting times.—Joe]

Mandatory “social distancing”?

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Hmmm…

Gov. Inslee says ‘mandatory measures’ under consideration to combat coronavirus in Washington

Since the novel coronavirus emerged as a threat in Washington, officials have sought to keep people here from infecting each other by offering advice, health care and other assistance. What they haven’t yet done to slow the spread of the virus is tell residents what they can and can’t do.

That could change at some point, however.

Officials are considering mandatory measures for social distancing as part of the state’s effort to combat the outbreak, Gov. Jay Inslee said Sunday.

Barb, my oldest daughter, her spouse, and I, all in Bellevue, have been doing our part for the last week. We have been working from home and minimizing contact outside our homes. We are also prepared for several more weeks as needed.

We live in interesting times.

COVID19 in Iran

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From a reliable source, we have some plausibly good data and some speculation:

A coworker is an Iranian immigrant. She says her siblings are in the medical field back home in Iran, and the situation there is vastly worse than is being officially reported. The leaders didn’t want to disrupt the anniversary of the revolution, so they pretended there was no problem, causing it to be spread rapidly across the nation during the mass gatherings and official celebrations, where close (face-proximity-to-face) greetings are common, and it spread like wildfire. Her sibling’s estimate is over a million are infected just in Iran. (Considering the viral video of the imam “blessing” water bottles by spitting in them, and other personal hygiene practices that are epidemic-friendly, it’s not an impossible number).

Assuming the fatality rate of~2% is correct, that’s 20k dead just in Iran…. so far. Considering it hits the elderly and infirm the hardest, it might be the “magic bullet” that takes out the entire leadership group so they can be replaced, which would likely be a good thing. But on a human tragedy scale of things, if it hits a nation with a failing healthcare system harder than two percent, it’s a major tragic event.

We live in interesting times.

King County conronavirus death confirmed

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Via KOMO News:

KING COUNTY, Wash. — A man in King County has died from the coronavirus, the Washington state Department of Health said Saturday in a media advisory.

No other details were given about the death as of Saturday morning.

Officials plan to hold a press conference at 1 p.m. with more details. KOMO will livestream the press conference.

Just as my source told me last night.

First Covid19 death tonight, in King County

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Via email:

I work in the fire department as a medic and our medical service officer just informed us of that info.

And that’s literally all we know.

Choose safe, be ready.

King County is the county surrounding Seattle and east to basically to the top of the Cascades.

I don’t recognize the email alias and have no basis upon which to judge the accuracy of the information.

Good news

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A couple days ago I urged Washington State residents to contact their representatives about HB 2240 which would restrict firearm magazine capacities.

That bill and a bill requiring concealed carry permit holders to have mandatory training, among other things, was defeated.

Whew!

Quote of the day—Scott Adams @ScottAdamsSays

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The best cringetainment of the day is watching Colbert in full TDS panic mode argue that Constitutional scholar @AlanDersh does not have a logical argument. On the next episode of The Late Show, Colbert will explain why Einstein was just a lucky guesser.

Scott Adams @ScottAdamsSays
Tweeted on January 30, 2020
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]

Mugme street news

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I’ve written about what Barb calls Mugme street many times.

Today, just before 5:00 PM, about the time I used to cross the street at this corner to get to my bus for the ride home:

One person is dead and seven people were taken to Harborview Medical Center after a shooting Wednesday evening in downtown Seattle.

The shooting happened shortly before 5 p.m. near Third Avenue and Pine Street by the Macy’s and McDonald’s. Investigators said the suspect fled and police are searching for him. They did not immediately release a description.

I’m so glad neither of us work downtown any more.

Quote of the day—Joseph G.S. Greenlee

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The necessity for this Court to clarify the role of history in defining the right is illuminated by so many outcomes depending on whether the reviewing court considers history. Disregarding history and merely interest-balancing Second Amendment rights has allowed the Second Amendment to be singled out for special—and specially unfavorable—treatment. Many courts have boldly admitted doing so, offering justifications that this Court has previously rejected. Until this Court reinforces its precedents, lower courts will continue to treat the right to bear arms as a second class right.

Joseph G.S. Greenlee
Counsel of Record
Firearms Policy Coalition
October 30, 2019
BRIEF OF AMICI CURIAE FIREARMS POLICY COALITION, FIREARMS POLICY FOUNDATION, CALIFORNIA GUN RIGHTS FOUNDATION, MADISON SOCIETY FOUNDATION, AND SECOND AMENDMENT FOUNDATION IN SUPPORT OF PETITIONERS
[This is an Amicus brief before SCOTUS in Brian Kirk Malpasso, et al., Petitioners v. William M. Pallozzi, Superintendent, Maryland Department of State Police

Things are moving in the courts. It’s a good sign that gun owners are choosing the cases to back.

I believe this is our best chance for making progress on the gun owner rights front. I and, through matching funds to 501(c)(3) corporations, my employer donate thousands of dollars every year to FPC and SAF.—Joe]

Quote of the day—AuricTech

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The traditional media use fact checks for the same reasons that hockey players use body checks: to disrupt their opponents and advance their own game plan.

AuricTech
October 15, 2019
Comment to Layers of fact checkers
[Great point!—Joe]

Layers of fact checkers

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When you catch them in lies (or even errors) this big the correct conclusion to draw is that nothing they say can be trusted:

ABC News ‘slaughter in Syria’ footage appears to come from a Kentucky gun range

ABC aired supposedly shocking footage Monday and Sunday purporting to be from the frontline battle between the Syrian Kurds and the invading Turks. The only problem is: The footage appears to come from a nighttime machine gun demonstration at the Knob Creek Gun Range in West Point, Kentucky.

As J.D. Rucker said:

If @ABC News made a mistake, then their incompetence is startling. If they did it on purpose (and with the edits to the video, that seems to be the case), then they’re an outright evil group of bald-faced liars pretending to report the news.

This reminds me of what WSBTV did with a video of daughter Kim shooting a Boomershoot fireball target a number of years back.

No bias here

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From CNN (of course):

Gordon Sondland, is expected to tell Congress this week that President Donald Trump relayed to him directly in a phone call the content of a text message that Sondland sent denying quid pro quo, The Washington Post reported Saturday, citing a person familiar with his testimony.

Sondland’s text message was sent to the top US diplomat in Ukraine, Bill Taylor, who raised concerns in a text to Sondland about the US withholding nearly $400 million of US military and security aid. This text message exchange has become a major focal point of the impeachment inquiry into the President.

Sondland is expected to testify to Congress that he has no knowledge of whether Trump was telling him the truth at the time, the Post reports. “It’s only true that the President said it, not that it was the truth,” the person familiar with Sondland’s planned testimony, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive diplomatic matters, told the Post.

So… The President of Ukraine says there was no quid pro quo. Sondland is quoted as saying there was no quid pro quo. CNN then tries to keep their impeachment hopes alive by claiming some unnamed source with, “It’s only true that the President said it, not that it was the truth.” Yeah. That really gives them a strong case.

I rolled my eyes at that and was about to stop reading when this caught my eye (emphasis added):

He also exchanged messages about whether foreign aid was being withheld while Trump and Giuliani pushed for Ukraine to open an investigation into business activity by the son of one of the President’s 2020 Democratic rivals, former Vice President Joe Biden.

There is no evidence of wrongdoing by the Bidens.

Oh, really!

No bias here.

Interesting times

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Judicial Watch Files Two New Lawsuits on Biden Scandal:

Our government doesn’t assume that every business investment opportunity is good for our country, and so there are checks in place, including something called the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). CFIUS is commissioned to review “transactions involving foreign investment in the U.S. to determine the effect of such transactions on the national security of the United States.”

What does CFIUS know about Hunter Biden’s questionable overseas ventures? The agency is playing its cards close to the vest. So we are suing the State and Treasury Departments for information on CFIUS’ handling of investments in the U.S. by two companies tied to Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden. The companies are Ukraine’s Burisma Holdings and China’s Bohai Harvest RST (BHR).

We sued in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia after the departments failed to respond to June 24, 2019, FOIA requests for CFIUS records related to investments by the Ukrainian company Burisma Holdings LTD or any of its affiliated entities and records related to investments by the Chinese company Bohai Harvest RST or any of its affiliated entities (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:19-cv-02960)), (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of the Treasury (No. 1:19-cv-02961).

Hunter Biden, son of former Vice President Joe Biden, is reported to be one of nine directors of BHR Partners, which was registered 12 days after the vice president’s son, in December 2013, flew to Beijing aboard Air Force Two, while his father made an official visit as vice president. Hunter Biden, then-chairman of the private equity firm Rosemont Seneca, reportedly signed a deal with the Chinese government-owned Bank of China to set up the BHR $1 billion joint venture investment fund.

From the same update:

Here’s an update on the Clinton email deposition.

A federal court will soon rule on whether Hillary Clinton and her top aide can be questioned under oath by our lawyers about her email and Benghazi controversies. The court has already granted us additional discovery and is now considering Clinton’s objections, filed on September 23, to being questioned. We filed our response to Clinton on October 3 (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:14-cv-01242)).

The court previously ordered discovery into three specific areas: whether Secretary Clinton’s use of a private email server was intended to stymie FOIA; whether the State Department’s intent to settle this case in late 2014 and early 2015 amounted to bad faith; and whether the State Department has adequately searched for records responsive to our request. The court specifically ordered Obama administration senior State Department officials, lawyers and Clinton aides to be deposed or answer written questions under oath. The court ruled that the Clinton email system was “one of the gravest modern offenses to government transparency.”

On August 22, 2019, the court then ruled that Clinton and Mills had 30 days to oppose being questioned in person under oath by us related to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. Additionally, we were granted seven new depositions, three interrogatories and four document requests.  In granting the additional discovery, U.S. District Court Judge Royce C. Lamberth commented: “I’ll tell you everything they’ve discovered in this period raises serious questions about what the hell the State Department’s doing here.”

One has to wonder if the the reason the Democrats have gone so completely bonkers is because they know there is a noose tightening around their necks.

We live in interesting times.

Mass stabbing

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Four Paris police officers killed in knife attack at headquarters:

One of the most popular tourist areas in Paris is sealed off after an attacker goes on a knife rampage and is shot dead.

…

The attacker had also recently converted to Islam, according to the French news channel BFM TV.

It has nothing to do with the person. This is obvious because it was someone who adheres to the religion of peace. What they need is common sense knife control.

Mugme Street news

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I used to work downtown Seattle in the Century Square building which has one side on 3rd Avenue between Pike and Pine streets. Barb calls this street “Mugme Street” because all your warning flags go up as soon as you poke your head out of the building along that one block length of 3rd. When I was working there I blogged about it fairly often.

Last night there was a “dispute” at 3rd and Pine which moved below the street to Westlake Tunnel (and bus station). The end result was three people shot and one dead:

Police are looking for a gunman who shot three people, killing one of the victims, near the Westlake light rail station in downtown Seattle Friday night.

Authorities said three people were struck by gunfire about 9:30 p.m. Two of the victims were found near Third Avenue and Pine Street. The third victim was at Fifth Avenue and Pine Street.

It is important to note that the locations were all underground at Westlake Station.

…

Police believe a dispute started above ground near the McDonald’s on Third Avenue and moved below to the Westlake Tunnel. They also believe there is only one suspect.

I used to take the bus into town and get off at Westlake Station.

That McDonald’s has to be one of the most dangerous to eat at in the country. I almost never got food there and it just really bothered me to even linger in the area.

I’m so glad neither Barb nor I work downtown now.

Update: A suspect has been arrested: 20-year-old Westlake Station shooting suspect held on $2M bail

Quote of the day—Larry Correia

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I am strangely okay with the city of San Francisco designating me a terrorist. If San Francisco liked me I would be wondering where I had gone wrong in life.

Larry Correia
September 4, 2019
Controversial Gun Politics Opinion Time
[There is more than a little truth for all of us in that statement.

In related news:

I would like to think that San Francisco inadvertently volunteered to bail the NRA out of its poor financial situation.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Kurt Schlichter

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We’ll get lots of the “Orange man bad, orange man not nominate a judge because he bad” babble from the libs and their gimp media. Maddow will cry, Don Lemon will pound an umbrella drink and Tater Stelter will sweat profusely as he reads off the teleprompter about how Trump is literally Hitler. The Fredocons will weigh in with their patented brand of sissy submission to their elite tops. We’ll be informed how taking back the Supreme Court like the geebos of Conservative, Inc., promised for three decades is actually not who we are and how we’re better than that and how oh well I never. Can you imagine Jeb! or Mitt in this situation? They would eagerly, whole-heartedly buy into the compromise unity candidate ploy to stick some moderate muggle on the bench in order to “repair the heart of our country” and “build bridges” of bipartisan love.

Trump builds victories, and he’s going to blow up that bridge.

Kurt Schlichter
August 26, 2019
Get Ready For Apocalypse Ruth
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]

The end of the climate change hoax?

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Via Thomas Lifson.

TL;DR version:

Michael Mann, the guy who claimed a graph of global temperature rise in the late 1990s resembled a hockey stick, sued a skeptic, Dr. Tim Ball, who publicly said Mann “belongs in the state pen, not Penn. State”. The libel lawsuit has now been dismissed because Mann refused to show the court the data and math by which he produced the graph. The lawsuit took six years, cost millions of (Canadian) dollars, and Mann has been told to pay the legal fees.

It is becoming more and more clear that a criminal conspiracy case against Mann and others regarding the climate change hoax is valid.

Read various quotes and get the links to the entire story below.

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