Good morning, kids. Obviously the big story this morning continues to be the fallout from SCOTUS 9-0 evisceration of Colorado's attempt at unilaterally and illegally removing Donald Trump from the ballot.
But before getting to that, there always seems to be at least one link that gets lost in the sauce of the big stories of the day as well as act as a kind of barometer for where we are as a society. Yet again, and as befitting of a place that often is a trendsetter for the rest of the country, this one comes out of the Democratic People's Republic of California:
Michael Hart of San Diego was arrested under the American Innovation and Manufacturing Act of 2020, which prohibits the importation of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) without proper permits from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
HFCs are potent greenhouse gases commonly found in refrigerators and air conditioners, building insulation, fire extinguishing systems, and aerosols. They can be hundreds to thousands of times more potent than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere, exacerbating the climate crisis.
Stop the presses. Although this link is to Breitbart, evidently whoever the editor is over there just decided to cut and paste this bilge directly from AFP, Agence France Press. There is no "climate crisis" (certainly not one caused by man) and the physics of our planet's atmosphere is such that there is no way there will ever be a so-called "runaway greenhouse effect" that turns us into Venus in the next billion years or so, let alone the next 50. Now that you can see the shameless propaganda in the way the "journalist" is phrasing the story, we return to the action.
According to the Department of Justice, Hart purchased refrigerants in Mexico and smuggled them into the United States in his vehicle, hidden under a tarp and tools.
He then posted the items for sale on OfferUp, Facebook Marketplace and other sites, selling them on for a profit.
For profit? Oh the humanity! Making a profit is the equivalent of genocide!
“The illegal smuggling of hydrofluorocarbons … undermines international efforts to combat climate change under the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol,” said David Uhlmann of the EPA, referring to an agreement the United States, along with most countries, has signed. It calls to phase out the super pollutants by 80-85 percent by 2047.
The indictment also alleges Hart imported HCFC 22, an ozone-depleting substance regulated under the Clean Air Act. Mexico as a developing country has a longer timetable for phasing out such pollutants than the United States as a developed country.
So, some poor schlub gets nailed for smuggling freon into the US while millions of illiterate peasants, a not insignificant number of them being murderers, rapists, human traffickers, drug traffickers, possible terrorists, saboteurs from our worst enemies, or just flat out welfare sponges and disease-carriers get the red carpet and a ticker tape parade from the Biden junta.
I don't give a shit what the so-called "experts" tell us about freon, insofar as it causes a hole in the ozone layer. These are the same "experts" who in 1975 said Manhattan would be buried under a 500-foot deep glacier by the year 2000. The same "experts" who then told us in 2000 that Manhattan and the entire US coast would be submerged under 200 feet of water by the year 2015. The same "experts" who claimed COVID was a natural mutation and could only be stopped by lockdowns, masks and repeated doses of a vaccine that, combined with the banning of things like ivermectin and HCQ, has actually killed more people by orders of magnitude than the virus itself – which we now know was created in a Chi-Com lab with the active participation and funding of Dr. Anthony Fauci. Speaking of mini-Mengele . . .
Breaking news from 2020: "It’s Official: We Can Pretty Much Treat Covid Like the Flu Now." What do you mean "now," white man? From the Wall Street Journal:
A case of Covid no longer means isolating for five days, according to the latest guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released Friday. It’s the latest sign of the virus’s normalization four years after it upended our lives. You should now follow the same precautions with Covid as you take with the flu, according to new guidelines from the CDC. That means staying home until you’ve gone a day with no fever and symptoms start to improve. Take other precautions for the next five days, including wearing a mask and limiting close contact with others. Those are the same steps the CDC recommends for other respiratory viruses.
At what point have we had enough from these people? As evident practically from the start, the malignant Covid hoax -- part of a series of scarifying hoaxes perpetrated by the Left and its pet media starting in early 2016 as part of the "resistance" against the election of Donald Trump -- was (as we say in Ireland) a load of bollocks. . .
. . . The Malevolent Midget is gone now, pulling down his handsome pension for his "service," but the evil that he did lives on after him. Should Trump actually overcome the forces arrayed against him and actually pull a Grover Cleveland and get re-elected to the office from which a "fortified" election forcibly ejected him in 2020, a just universe would allow him to deal out some well-deserved payback for the forces behind the Russia Hoax, the Climate-Change Hoax, and the Covid Hoax, not to mention the abrogation of American sovereignty at the southern (and northern) borders, the collapse of the American military into a sob-sisterhood of feminist resentment and gay and "transsexual" triumphalism, and all the other ills currently attendant upon these United States. . .
. . . Hoaxes like these will never end until you do something about it. They will continue to pile on "catastrophe" after "catastrophe," demanding that we do something about it right now, including changing some of our most fundamental laws and principles in order to combat a non-existent "threat." The only thing these people understand is power. Not logic, argument, evidence, moral suasion. And the only way to respond to them is with greater power.
Even if freon really isn't good for the ozone layer, given all of the outright lies our government and more alarmingly, science which is fully now in service to government have tried and in some cases succeeded in selling us (for our own good, of course!), the only thing that's been destroyed is trust in the institutions we thought were there to protect our safety, security and freedom.
Yeah, color me skeptical.
Friend and friend of the blog Michael Walsh nails it above. Should Trump by some miracle actually defeat all the forces of tyranny still arrayed against him, the supposed "retribution" and "revenge" he would or should visit upon those who stomped all over our freedoms, rigged an election and chucked scores of people in prison over a faked "insurrection" would be more than justified. A terrible swift sword of justice is indeed needed now more than ever. The problem is, the system is so utterly corrupted that that outcome is seriously in doubt.
And that brings us conveniently back to yesterday's 9-0 SCOTUS decision. While for sure it's a huge win, certainly for Trump but more crucially the scintilla of the rule of law in what's left of our nation, the question is, given the ideological divide (and the moral vacuity/turpitude of at least one member in particular of that body) is this a one-off?
The things to note in all of this is the fact that a) Trump was never convicted of let alone indicted and tried for fomenting an insurrection and b) the alleged "insurrection" that happened on 1/6/21 was anything but. Not one person who entered the Capitol was armed and in fact they were allowed into the building and even escorted all over by Capitol PD. The worst thing anyone did was put their feet up on Malig-Nancy Pelosi's desk and leave her a rude Post-It note on her in box.
On the other hand, the calls for violence were from FBI/DOJ plants like Ray Epps and BLM cadre in a MAGA hat William Sullivan, while Ashli Babbit was murdered by Capitol Cop Michael Byrd and Roseanne Boyland beaten to death by some of his colleagues. And even before that happened, Donald Trump was about a mile away calling for people to peacefully leave the area and go home.
Some insurrection. And as I said, there are still dozens of people still languishing in the Garland Archipelago for doing nothing more than being at a rally and exercising their right of free speech. A right that evidently they didn't know no longer existed at that time. But that said, there are things brewing that, on top of the SCOTUS decision, have an even larger salutary effect, both on Trump and the body politic.
On Friday, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit (i.e. the “D.C. Circuit”
reversed a federal trial-level judge’s determination that January 6 Defendant Larry Brock had “substantially interfered with administration of justice.” That trial-level determination had significantly enhanced Brock’s prison sentence for felony obstruction of an official proceeding (i.e. Congress’ January 6, 2021 certification of the 2020 Presidential election) under 18 U.S. Code Section 1512(c)(2). The D.C. Circuit ordered resentencing. Brock, a 1989 graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy, A-10 Warthog pilot, and retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel with 29 years of Air Force service, had been sentenced to 24 months’ imprisonment in a federal penitentiary. . .
. . . The effect of the D.C. Circuit’s decision is to force the trail judge, in this case most likely still Judge Bates, to resentence Brock without the 3-level sentencing enhancement (“we vacate Brock’s sentence for his Section 1512(c)(2) conviction and remand to the district court for resentencing without the application of Section 2J1.2(b)(2)’s sentencing enhancement”, making his new offense level 14, not 17. Crossing offense level 14 with Criminal History Category I in the 2021 U.S.S.G. Sentencing Table, you find a Guideline Sentencing Range of 15-21 months, which Brock’s resentencing judge will almost certainly stick to. This will result in a sentence reduction of 3-9 months’ imprisonment for Brock, and since Brock has a federal prison release date of December 3, 2024, he could be released as soon as his resentencing judge conducts the resentencing!
The D.C. Circuit’s decision could also, as the Daily Caller suggested (without explanation as to why), lead to sentence reductions for other J6 defendants as well. That is because the D.C. Circuit’s Order is now binding on all D.C. federal trial courts, and any J6 defendant who has been sentenced with the 3-level offense level sentencing enhancement for “substantial interference with the administration of justice,” which there are several of, can move for a sentence reduction, which the sentencing court is bound to honor. And, any J6 defendants not yet sentenced cannot have the 3-level enhancement applied to their sentencing. In all cases, the sentencing reduction will not necessary be 3-9 months, as it was for Brock, because other defendants might have other crimes of conviction or serious criminal histories; it all depends on where on the Sentencing Table those defendants fall. But they will be significant in each case, as they are here.
I'm no F. Lee Bailey but if the sentencing reductions are significant, does that also not carry with it perhaps a reclassification of the charges/crimes from insurrection down to perhaps mere trespassing? And given the fact that we know from witness testimony and over 44,000 hours of videotape from the scene that at no point was anyone acting in a violent or out of control manner (the killers of Babbitt and Boyland notwithstanding) will we finally be able to completely trash the definition of what happened that day as an insurrection, and even a riot in the first place?
Center for Renewing America Senior Fellow and former Trump official Jeff Clark celebrated the ruling in exclusive comments to PJ Media. As PJ Media’s Matt Margolis reported, the Supreme Court voted unanimously on Monday to permit GOP presidential frontrunner Donald Trump to remain on the Colorado state ballot. This decision reversed a ruling from a lower court. Leftists had a royal meltdown at this SCOTUS refusal to rig the 2024 election, mourning that allowing a democratic election is an attack on democracy (that’s Democrat logic for you). But others see the ruling as a historic achievement for our Republic as the Founders established it.
Jeff Clark is one such person. “President Trump scored one for the history books today — a victory not just to keep himself on state ballots, but also a win for our system of federalism, better marking out the lines between federal and state authority,” he said. Trump isn’t the only target; all citizens who want to have the power to choose their own leaders should be concerned. . .
. . . Furthermore, Clark addressed Rep. Jamie Raskin’s (D-MD) announcement the Democrats are working on federal legislation to kick Trump off ballots. “That didn’t take long,” Clark commented. “At some level, you have to admire that Marxists like Raskin never give up. The Republican Party ranks are very thin on members this persistent.” If only Republican congressmen were as persistent in achieving justice and enforcing laws as the Democrats are in violating the Constitution to achieve their nefarious goals.
For now, in a GOP House, the bill is mostly virtue signaling, but tellingly Raskin is not so much trying to define insurrection as trying to define J6 as an insurrection. It’s the typical end run around the process of defining the thing because otherwise Democrat BLMers might fall afoul of it.
The Raskin bill conveniently defines J6 as an insurrection and carefully defines the term so as to specifically apply it to Trump. It does not however define what an insurrection is making the whole exercise into a bill that specifically exists to block a particular candidate from being able to take office on grounds that would be unlikely to apply to his own party. Does that raise some major banana republic issues? Obviously.
Still, has Raskin considered what kind of can of worms he’s opening here?
“An individual described in this subsection is an individual who has engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or has given aid or comfort to the enemies of the United States.”
Forget BLM for a moment. Giving aid or comfort to America’s enemies would block nearly every Democrat from taking or holding office. Pass a resolution declaring that funding Iran or any other terror group was an example of providing aid or comfort to America’s enemies and the party can get started.
Evil never rests. And the fact that our side is at best dodgy and at worst collaborationist, we're not out of the woods yet. Not by a long shot. Still, miracles do happen.
NOTE: The opinions expressed in the links may or may not reflect my own. I include them because of their relevance to the discussion of a particular issue.
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