My Army son, now a sergeant first class, recently transferred to Alaska, where he’s part of the new 11th Airborne Division. Besides leading a platoon in the “Arctic Angels,” my son’s also enjoying the Alaska wildlife, catching gigantic salmon at Willow Creek. While his new assignment has been pleasant so far, he called last night to talk to my wife about what happened this week at his previous assignment, Camp Merrill near Dahlonega, Georgia. That’s where he served as a training sergeant for Mountain Phase of Army Ranger School. Two trainees, 2nd Lt. Evan Fitzgibbon and Staff Sgt. George Taber, were killed when a tree fell on a group of five soldiers in a “weather-related incident” Tuesday.
2nd Lt. Evan Fitzgibbon; Staff Sgt. George Taber
This was such a freak accident — a tree blown down during a sudden storm up on Yonah Mountain — that it’s probably unprecedented, and yet there are two soldiers dead, and another seriously injured, as a result. Training-related deaths are not an insignificant risk in a hazardous occupation. Last year, the Army lost 20 troops in training accidents, down from 24 in 2020. The two soldiers killed in Tuesday’s incident were obviously excellent troops, or they wouldn’t have been in Ranger School. Both of them were from Florida. Taber was a five-year veteran from Glen St. Mary who served as a Special Forces medic, while Fitzgibbon was a West Point alumnus from Winter Garden. And while of course their deaths are mourned most deeply by their family and friends, the entire nation has suffered a loss. In case you weren’t aware, the military has been suffering a recruiting crisis the past year, and the Army could ill afford to lose two top-quality men like this. For our family, of course, such a loss hit rather too close to home, and makes us conscious of what risks attend our son’s service. Pray for our troops.
My brother Kirby has a keen sense of probability. We were sitting outside our local convenience store having coffee on Sunday, when he started ranting about a story out of New Mexico to which I hadn’t paid attention. Four Muslim men had been murdered in the span of a few days, and President Biden (or, at least, whatever White House staffer is running his Twitter account) issued a statement condemning the “hateful attacks.” Kirby expressed doubt that this was some kind anti-Muslim hate crime. Why? All four victims were from the same mosque, Kirby pointed out, and it seemed to him that this was significant. Well, I said, we’ll wait and see. The killer couldn’t possibly get away with this, I said, because of ubiquitous video surveillance, so it probably wouldn’t be long until they announced an arrest. Oh, did you notice how Biden said he “stands strongly with the Muslim community”? Someone should ask him whether he stands with the Shi’ite Muslims or the Sunni Muslims, because Albuquerque police arrested a suspect Tuesday and — call it a hunch — but I don’t think Syed Muhammad is a MAGA-hat wearing Trump voter:
Police said Tuesday that they were investigating whether a string of murders that have shaken Albuquerque was motivated by a Sunni Muslim father’s anger over his daughter marrying a Shiite Muslim.
Muhammad Syed, 51, has been charged with the murders of two Muslim men in New Mexico’s largest city, and faces possible charges for the murders of two other Muslim men killed in the last nine months.
Authorities said in a press release that “the offender knew the victims to some extent, and an interpersonal conflict may have led to the shootings.”
Ahmad Assed, president of the city’s largest mosque, told TheNew York Times that authorities informed him the shooter is a Sunni Muslim who may have targeted the victims because he was angry over his daughter marrying a Shiite Muslim.
At a press conference Tuesday afternoon, Albuquerque’s deputy chief, Kyle Hartsock, said police are still investigating the motive behind the slayings, but acknowledged the theory that Syed targeted victims because he was angry over his daughter’s marriage. “We’re not sure if that’s the only motivation,” Hartsock said, adding that they’re “still investigating it.”
The men killed have been identified as Mohammad Ahmadi, 62, Muhammad Afzaal Hussain, 27, Aftab Hussein, 41, and Naeem Hussain, 25.
Syed faces murder charges for the deaths of Aftab Hussein and Muhammad Afzaal Hussain, police said Tuesday, and remains the prime suspect in the other two homicides. A gun traced back to two of the homicide scenes was found during a search of Syed’s home, authorities said. . . .
Syed is the only suspect being investigated as of Tuesday, Hartsock said. Authorities are not labeling him a “serial killer” and said that, at this point, they still do not believe the murders were a hate crime.
Syed is a native of Afghanistan who has lived in New Mexico the “last several years,” Hartsock said. He’s been arrested on domestic violence charges three times in recent years, but all the charges were eventually dropped. . . .
As police connected the four murders to a single shooter, authorities released a photo of a silver sedan they believed was driven by the suspect. On Tuesday, Albuquerque Police Chief Harold Medina posted to Twitter just before 1 p.m. local time that the car had been found.
“We tracked down the vehicle believed to be involved in a recent murder of a Muslim man in Albuquerque,” Medina wrote. “The driver was detained and he is our primary suspect for the murders.”
Sherry Shafiq, a friend of Afzaal Hussain, told The Daily Beast he was relieved that the alleged killer was caught. Over the past few days, he said, his community was living in fear while a suspect was on the loose. Some Muslim residents stayed home or kept hyper-vigilant of their surroundings. “It’s heartbreaking news,” Shafiq said. “It’s one of the community members. It was a possibility that had crossed our minds, but never in my wildest dreams would I imagine someone in the community would do such a heinous crime.”
He “can’t imagine” a Muslim committing “such a heinous crime” because vengeance and honor killings are unheard of in the Islamic community.
Somebody should tell Joe Biden he was wrong. Of course, he’s been so wrong about so many things, this isn’t really surprising.
Former President Donald Trump’s Florida home, Mar-A-Lago, was raided by FBI agents, Trump announced in a statement on Monday.
“These are dark times for our Nation, as my beautiful home, Mar- A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, is currently under siege, raided, and occupied by a large group of FBI agents,” Trump said. “Nothing like this has ever happened to a President of the United States before.”
Trump noted his previous cooperation with law enforcement and called the FBI raid of his home “prosecutorial misconduct.” Trump also said it is an example of “the weaponization of the Justice System who desperately don’t want me to run for President in 2024.” . . .
Eric Trump said on FNC’s Hannity Show tonight, “That’s what this is about today. To have 30 FBI agents, actually, more than that descend on Mar-a-Lago, give absolutely, you know, no notice, go through the gates, start ransacking an office, ransacking a closet. You know, they broke into a safe. He didn’t even have anything in the safe. I mean, give me a break. And this is coming from, what, the national archives? Yet Hunter Biden, he’s did firearms crimes, illegal drugs, you know, shady deals with everybody around the world. By the way, it’s all on his laptop for the whole world to see, in his own writing, in his own words. Where are these FBI agents? Where is everybody? Why is it that the arrows only fly at Donald Trump and his family? Why is it that the political persecution only goes one way in this country?”
"Mar-A-Lago 'under siege, raided, occupied' by FBI agents, Trump says"
Americans live in a banana republic run by people who are sick and evil https://t.co/Wg6cePuOA4
So if the Biden White House is now claiming that they had no idea this historic raid on the home of a past President was happening… that means that they're admitting there are people in FBI/DOJ that are more powerful than the White House or even the President himself.
DeSANTIS: "The raid of [Mar-a-Lago] is another escalation in the weaponization of federal agencies against the Regime’s political opponents, while people like Hunter Biden get treated with kid gloves." https://t.co/NUFML2NxjFpic.twitter.com/aUChePZwo8
Professor William Jacobson is almost certainly correct: “This is a provocation. They are trying to get a reaction that allows a further crackdown. Don’t take the bait.” Democrats desperately want to turn the November midterms into a referendum on Trump, and this raid is part of that political strategy. Joy Pullman observes: “We’re watching federal agencies use their powers not to catch criminals but to criminalize peaceful political views and actions. We’re witnessing a growing campaign to lock people up for their opposition to the ruling political party, which is not only profoundly un-American but profoundly dangerous societally.” And in the name of “deficit reduction,” Democrats just passed a bill that gives the Internal Revenue Service $80 billion to hire 87,000 new IRS agents. Because nothing reduces inflation like hiring tens of thousands of new government agents to harass taxpayers.
Silicon Valley delenda est. IRS headquarters in Mordor-on-the-Potomac
This weekend the Senate passed, and Slow Joe signed, the so-called “Inflation Reduction Act”, and today the right side of the blogosphere was full of folks screaming about the part where the IRS will get funding for 87,000 new agents, which certainly seems to fit the complaint memorably issued by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence:
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
I first caught sight of this on Dana Loesch’s Instagram, and left the comment that as far as I was concerned this was no big deal. The IRS’ staffing problems are of long standing, and much of the problem boils down to the fact that very few accountants want to work for one of the most hated agencies of the Federal government when they can earn a lot more money and a lot less enmity signing up with Deloitte, KPMG, or some smaller accounting shop. The IRS was desperate enough to make me an offer this spring (almost a year after I filed an application with them while I was on unemployment last year) and I don’t even have an accounting degree. I do have fifteen years of seasonal experience preparing taxes, especially small business Schedule Cs, and I think that was what led them to make me an offer. Unfortunately for the IRS, the offer was for a position in Ogden, Utah, which is a long way from my current burrow in rural Nevada, and the pay for a GS-5 Step 1 is not much more than I’m earning from disability and my tax season work with H&R Block, so I turned them down. But think on it – they are so desperate for bodies they were seriously considering hiring a 62-year-old semi-retired tax professional who hadn’t held a full-time job sine 2009. Would they be doing that if they could find freshly-minted accounting majors from…anywhere?
Coming at this from a slightly different angle, there was no shortage of people in the comments to Dana’s post harrumphing “Well, they don’t need accountants, they just need activists to harass Republicans!” Yeah, sure, they’ll be issuing the brown shirts and Democrat Party brassards right after these people fill out their Standard Form 86. People need to tighten their tinfoil hats and consider that 1) nothing gets done quickly by the Feds, especially in the hiring process, and 2) the IRS can’t just hire unqualified schmucks to stand around and menace the taxpayers. I would be extremely surprised if the IRS managed to get the job requirements for the new meat done before the end of the calendar year/beginning of tax season, much less hire more than a few hundred agents. By then, assuming everyone on the Right has been out doing the necessary field work, the Red Tsunami should have swept a lot of Democrats out of Congress, and even if McCarthy & O’Connell can’t manage to outright repeal this shameful bill, they should be able to slice here, trim there, and tie up the IRS personnel bureaucrats long enough to keep anywhere near 87,000 agents from getting hired.
Finally, there’s no guarantee the IRS is going to use those agents the way the Democrats want them used. Right now the staffing crunch is so bad that a lot of paper returns filed in 2021 haven’t even been looked at, much less processed, and if they haven’t finished 2021, what do you think their stack of 2022 returns looks like? The IRS very badly wants those returns finished, because every one that doesn’t get done in a timely fashion means that either the IRS owes interest on the refunds or they aren’t collecting the debts owed by people with balances due. I suspect a lot of the 87,000 new chums are going to be handed a desk, a banker’s box full of returns, and told “I don’t want to see your face until these are done. You have until Friday – and don’t forget you’re on six-month probation, rookie.”
So be of good cheer. Maybe some of the crazies on the left want to use these new T-men to be goon squads in the service of the Great Reset, but I don’t think it’s going to work out that way.
NINETY MILES FROM TYRANNY: