Category: Politics

  • Van in Toronto injures pedestrians

    According to CBS News, a white van ran over eight to 10 pedestrians in Toronto today.

    “At this point it’s too early to tell what if any motive there was. We are also unable right now to tell the extent or the number of persons injured,” Toronto police spokeswoman Meaghan Gray said.

    Toronto paramedic spokeswoman Kim McKinnon said first responders were on scene treating multiple patients, but wouldn’t confirm the number or severity of injuries.

    Police shut down the Yonge and Finch intersection following the Monday afternoon incident and Toronto’s transit agency said it has suspended service on the subway line running through the area.

    The incident occurred as Cabinet ministers from the major industrial countries were gathered in Canada to discuss a range of international issues in the run-up to the G7 meeting near Quebec City in June.

    Fox News reports that police have the driver in custody;

    Alex Shaker, who witnessed the incident, said the van was speeding down the street before it mounted the curb and plowed into people.

    “He started going down on the sidewalk and crumbling down people one by one,” Shaker told CTV. “He just destroyed so many people’s lives. Every single thing that got in his way.”

    A worker at a gym in a building next to the site of the incident told Fox News that employees were told to stay inside as first responders tended to the scene.

    Global News journalist Jeremy Cohn said there were “bodies all over” the street and some people had been pronounced dead.

    Thanks to Mick for the tip.

  • Code inspector Melinda Power suspended

    Code inspector Melinda Power suspended

    Jacksonville, Florida city code inspector who made national news the other day was suspended from her job when she tried to cite Jaguar Power Sports for flags on their building and ended up treating poorly a customer who was a veteran according to News4Jax;

    The city of Jacksonville has suspended a code inspector who sparked controversy Monday after she issued a warning citation to a Westside business over military flags and then was caught on surveillance video in a confrontation with a customer who objected to the citation.

    The inspector’s supervisor, who was present during the incident, has also been suspended, Mayor Lenny Curry said Tuesday.

    Both employees will still be receiving pay during the investigation, the city confirmed.

    Mayor Curry released the following statement;

    “Employees of the city of Jacksonville are the servants of taxpayers who have a duty to enforce our laws and regulations. I expect every one of them to do that job in a manner that is respectful and reflects the privilege we all have to serve this great city. What I saw reported is 100 percent inconsistent with how I expect every city employee to interact with our citizens.

    “I have ordered a review of the actions of the employee and pending the completion of that review, the employee and her supervisor have been placed on leave. Today I will ask every manager of city departments to review our procedures with each city employee. Once a review of the actions in this matter is complete, appropriate corrective action will be enforced for any wrongdoing.

    “As the son and grandson of military veterans, and the mayor of a city with a proud history of commitment to our nation’s defense, I will not tolerate disparagement or disrespect of the men and women who serve or served. On behalf of the City of Jacksonville I apologize to veterans and service members who are rightly troubled by the events that have been reported.

    “While current ordinance does not address residents or businesses displaying military flags, I will not allow any citation of those who demonstrate their support for the Armed Forces. My team is working with the city’s Office of General Counsel to bring clarity to the relevant city laws.”

  • Chinese Space Station Expected to Crash to Earth on April 1st

    tiangong bus

    Can’t make this stuff up. Aerospace,org and Breitbart report the Tiangong-1 (“Celestial Palace”) is currently predicted to reenter the Earth’s atmosphere around April 1st, 2018 14:00 UTC ± 16 hours, somewhere. The estimated “target area” where debris could fall includes everywhere 43 degrees north and south of the equator, which narrows it down to anywhere in the United States, or southern Europe, Asia, Australia, or South America.

    If that sounds exceptionally vague, it is. Still, it is not the first time humanity has been rained on by its own space junk. At least one satellite a year makes the same fiery descent to Earth. While Tiangong-1 may be the size of a bus, NASA’s Skylab was more than seven times as large when it scattered its remnants across the ocean and Australia in 1979.

    Fear not; your chances of being struck by a part of the space station are roughly one in 300 trillion. That estimate comes courtesy of the European Space Agency, so it is almost certainly credible. Whatever could go wrong- anyone for Lottery tickets on Sunday?

  • Seattle man arrested for packages sent to DC

    Chief Tango sends us a link to the Washington Post which reports that a Seattle man was arrested for mailing the suspicious packages to military installations in the Washington, DC area;

    The FBI has arrested a man believed to be responsible for sending a series of suspicious packages to D.C. area government facilities Monday, a law enforcement official said.

    The man was arrested in the Seattle area and is expected to appear in federal court later Tuesday afternoon. Investigators do not believe the incident was one of terrorism, but they are still exploring the suspect’s motivations, the law enforcement official said.

    The man is believed to have sent more than half a dozen packages — targeting, among other places, Fort McNair, Fort Belvoir, and a military facility in Dahlgren, Va. He also sent packages that were intercepted at mail sorting facilities for the White House and CIA.

    The FBI declined to provide the man’s name.

    That didn’t take long – and he’ll be making appearances in court later today, all the way from across the country. He probably didn’t spend much time trying to hide his identity.

  • Miguel Perez, veteran deported

    Miguel Perez, veteran deported

    U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement reports that they handed US Army veteran Miguel Perez to Mexican authorities according to Tuscon News Now. They report that Perez completed two tours in Afghanistan while he served in the Army. Then he delivered two pounds of cocaine to a federal agent which caused ICE to reject his application for citizenship and prompted them to deport his ass because he did not show “good moral character”. So Senator Tammy Duckworth has taken up his cause;

    Perez, his family and supporters, who include Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-IL, had argued that his wartime service to the country had earned him the right to stay in the U.S. and to receive mental health treatment for the PTSD and substance abuse. She sent a letter to Homeland Security asking the Trump administration to review his case.

    “This case is a tragic example of what can happen when national immigration policies are based more in hate than on logic and ICE doesn’t feel accountable to anyone,” Duckworth said in a statement following reports of Perez’s deportation. “At the very least, Miguel should have been able to exhaust all of his legal options before being rushed out of the country under a shroud of secrecy.”

    I don’t think that Duckworth would have supported Perez if he’d been deported a few years ago. Dude was trafficking in cocaine, thousands of veterans who suffer from PTSD didn’t try to sell drugs to federal agents.

    According to the Houston Chronicle, it was two kilos of coke, not two pounds, 4.4 pounds. He was sentenced to 15 years and he’d served about half of that sentence when he was sent back to Mexico.

    I find it difficult to be supportive of a drug dealer, even a veteran who is a drug dealer, especially one who blames his drug deals on PTSD.

  • Read It and Weep, Gungrabbers

    I don’t know if it’s a good title or not, but maybe it will get the attention of the dumber people on the planet.

    The most recent attempts by the Leftred media to distort something into hysterics failed them again. I see the same idiocy being exposed at websites devoted to exposing the fraud in so-called climate science, which has deteriorated and declined into a pseudo-religion aimed at manipulating the minds of the uninformed into following false paths. There is a strange thing going on there, having to do with controlling what people “believe” in the most Medieval sense. The propaganda rhetoric wears thin when you can’t keep the home fires burning.

    In our most recent episode of Strange Violence in February, the quarreling and phony virtue signaling were rampant. The false narratives being pushed by major media networks and newspapers in what appeared to be an effort to create a theater of blood and gore was an over-the-top attempt to stir the fears and angst of the viewing public. But when there is no blood and gore, as in the more recent Maryland event, when the bad guy turned out to be a teen who stole his father’s gun to go after a girl who broke up with him, or when a serial bomber blows himself to bits before he gets caught, then they have nothing to turn into a bloody spectacle that suits their need to push a political agenda, i.e., take away what are rightfully and legally your possessions and civil rights with no due process.

    Would these same fearful people like it if they were muzzled by the same methods they seek to inflict on others? Perhaps we should give that a try. After all, the Reich in Hitler’s Germany controlled what the press was allowed to print, which is why news about the death camps never reached the average German.

    It was the same in the Soviet Union. Izvestia was the daily broadsheet newspaper in Russia. It was the newspaper of record in the Soviet Union from 1917 until the dissolution of the USSR in 1991. The word “izvestiya“in Russian means “delivered messages”. It also means “disambiguation”. It was the Soviets’ major propaganda rag, along with Pravda, the other official news rag of the Soviets, starting in 1912. Pravda (“Truth”) was a Russian broadsheet newspaper, formerly the official newspaper of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, when it was one of the most influential papers in the country with a circulation of 11 million. Since these were the only news resources available and were controlled by the Soviet government, only state-approved info was published in them. The counterpoint to all of that was Radio Free Europe, which broadcast news about the world outside the Iron Curtain to all those countries behind it, including East Germany.

    If you see a pattern of deceit in the stories presented by many media outlets, you are correct. Distort the real stories, make stuff up to scare the uninformed and naive, stifle civil rights, violate Constitutional laws, pretentiously parade children and/or victims of some terrible event in front of a camera to promote this obviously falsehood-laden objective, all to suit your own agenda – well, it’s all there, but it isn’t working quite so well these days.

    I have seldom been as disgusted with so-called reporters as I have been since mid-February, when the Leftred media’s hastily-concocted Theater of Blood fell apart within a 32-hour period as the verifiable facts came to light, more and more quickly. The result was that the Leftred media looked exactly like what they are: a bunch of amateurs barely out of junior high school pretending to be important.

    The Leftreds in news media have been counting on having control of it all for some time now. Unfortunately for them, it is not working quite as well as they had hoped. They have engaged in continuing efforts to act as master manipulators of the news and of opinions, and yet, for every exaggeration and false statement that they have concocted out of whole cloth, their opposition has filed a full story with all the facts available and shot down their tales of Jack the Fake Giant Killer and his Fake Exploding Beans. Every damned time!!

    Why are they failing? Their own vanity that sends them dashing to the internet and instant media outlets with angst-ridden horror stories of death and destruction has blinded them to the mere fact that the same media outlets are available to anyone who has more facts and better information and takes the time to present it correctly, without the speculation, the hysterics and the hyperbole, without the fabricated stories, and without the desperate need to be in control of the minds of public viewers.

    Yesterday (3/24/2018), a quickly-planned protest took place, addressing everything about gun violence except for the fact that many of the items howled about (e.g., universal background checks) are already in place, and the real problem is caused by people, not by inanimate objects.  800,000++ people, most of them reportedly under the age of 18, went to Washington, DC for this protest.. In Chicago, about 85,000 people (mostly under 18) held their own protest. (It did not look like that many, frankly. I’ve seen the crowds at Lollapalooza.)

    Per the news reports, other protests took place in other cities. There were protests held in Houston, NYC, Boston, etc., but 800++ cities around the world? Berlin, Paris, Hong Kong and London only count as four. Where’s the list? Some of those protest had 10 or 15 people attending. Wow. I’ve had more people at a spontaneous Friday PM dinner after work. And frankly, only one resource noted that a pro-gun protest took place in Salt Lake City.

    https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2018/03/24/aerial-images-around-world-shows-scope-march-our-lives/455891002/

    Sorry, but if these protests take place outside the USA borders, I don’t give a crap about them. They are not involved in either our legal processes or our laws, nor should they be. If the media cannot produce an accurate tally of people, even by square yard count, or a true list of those 800++ cities, then it’s just more of their idiot scare tactics, which are repeatedly failing. I can quickly get a list of the 10 largest cities in the world, and a count of cities worldwide (4,416) , so where’s that list of 800 cities with protests?

    I want to be clear on this issue.

    It is absolutely appropriate to protest the violence.

    That is the real issue, not some inanimate object that seems targeted by the brainwashed who believe that guns are somehow responsible for these things, but fail to acknowledge that it is people who abuse them. There is no doubt in my mind that there is a problem with people who misuse these inanimate objects. Need I remind anyone that in that hostage event at a French grocery store yesterday, the French policeman was stabbed, as well as shot? Why is no one blaming the knife used to stab the policeman? Must I add that in the Austin violence last week, homemade explosives were used to kill people, and the bomber was killed by his own instrument?

    The real message – that it is violence, not guns, which is the problem – is not being heard at all. Violence is caused by people who are out of control, with no one stopping them before it starts. They can and do use anything available to cause destruction.

    When does that sink in? WHEN????

    The people who are promoting the wrong attitude want this narrative of fear of an inanimate object to be the issue, first and foremost.

    We who know better and disagree with that narrative must ensure that this disinformation campaign to cloud the truth becomes weaker and weaker and finally, fizzles to nothing by speaking the truth: – that is it people who are the cause of violence.

    Accordingly, I’m providing links to three articles by different authors, in separate publications, including a 1994 article in The Atlantic when the Brady Bill was signed, providing various viewpoints on why gun control laws do not work.

    Brazilians are leaning toward increasing access to guns to combat increasing gun violence.  https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/03/28/472157969/brazil-has-nearly-60-000-murders-and-it-may-relax-gun-laws

    Brazil is the murder capital of the world, with 60,000 people dying per year, per Bloomberg News article 2018-3-20. Brazilians are now supporting access to guns for self-defense. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-20/in-world-s-murder-capital-brazilians-are-ready-to-buy-some-guns

    The false promise of gun control, from The Atlantic in 1994: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/03/the-false-promise-of-gun-control/306744/

    “Gun-control laws don’t work. What is worse, they act perversely. While legitimate users of firearms encounter intense regulation, scrutiny, and bureaucratic control, illicit markets easily adapt to whatever difficulties a free society throws in their way.” – article.

    It’s not the guns that are the problem, you incredible morons.

    It’s not the means of destruction that bear the blame, you despicable cretins.

    It’s the people using them.

    Now what are YOU going to do about that?

  • Governor Zell Miller passes

    Governor Zell Miller passes

    Mick sends us the sad news that former governor of Georgia (1975-1991), and US Senator (2000-2005) Zell Miller, 86, passed after battling Parkinson’s Disease yesterday;

    A lifelong Southern Democrat, Miller famously famously spoke at the 2004 GOP convention as a Democrat in support of former President George W. Bush’s re-election campaign.

    A decade earlier, Miller had been the keynote speaker at the 1992 Democratic National Convention, endorsing then Arkansas Democratic Gov. Bill Clinton for president.

    Wiki tells the story of his military career;

    Less than a month after the Korean War armistice, Miller wound up in a drunk tank in the mountains of North Georgia. Miller stated later that this incident was the lowest point of his life. Upon his release, Miller enlisted in the Marines. During his three years in the United States Marine Corps, Miller attained the rank of sergeant. He often refers to the value of his experience in the Marine Corps in his writing and stump speeches; in his book on the subject, entitled Corps Values: Everything You Need to Know I Learned in the Marines, he wrote:

    In the twelve weeks of hell and transformation that were Marine Corps boot camp, I learned the values of achieving a successful life that have guided and sustained me on the course which, although sometimes checkered and detoured, I have followed ever since.

  • Seven service members killed in helicopter crash

    CNN reports that seven members of the military were killed in a Pave Hawk helicopter crash in Iraq;

    Army Brig. Gen. Jonathan P. Braga, the director of operations for the combined task force leading the fight against ISIS in the region, said all personnel aboard the HH-60 Pave Hawk helicopter were killed.

    The military said the crash, which is under investigation, “does not appear to be a result of enemy activity.”

    The names of those aboard the helicopter were not immediately released pending the notification of next of kin.