FMJRA 2.0: The Mountain Road

There is an ammunition shortage in America. Gun sales soared to record levels in 2020, and the demand for ammunition is insatiable, a problem the NRA’s Mark Keefe illustrates with anecdotes:

Just two weeks ago, I received a call that probably should not have surprised me.
“Do you have any .30-30?” This was not a question I was expecting. I mean, after all, there might be some parachute-cord-wrapped lever-actions somewhere if they haven’t been snarfed up, but .30-30 ammo? Really?
It seems the friend of a friend was heading out on a hog hunt and left it too late to buy ammunition. Nowhere in northern Virginia could you find a box of .30-30 on the shelf. He was headed for a wild boar trip and had exactly four rounds. I dug into my personal stash to make sure his hunt wasn’t ruined, but this is a symptom of a much larger issue today.
Back in April, one of our field editors received a call from a pretty prominent gun shop asking, “How much 9 mm do you have?” He answered and was told that he would be paid twice what he paid for it, and a truck would be there tomorrow. . . .
With the COVID-19 pandemic, protests, riots and then the most rabid anti-gun platform ever introduced being pushed by the Democratic party, it’s no wonder that people have increased their demand for guns and ammunition. When a candidate for national office — even a poorly performing one — utters, “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15,” what did you think was going to happen? . . .
I personally watched a fellow who entered the gun shop wanting a Glock and left with a Uberti single-action revolver in .45 Colt simply because it was the only handgun in the store. Once that was gone, the shelves were bare.

Americans are the most heavily armed nation on the planet. There are more guns in America than there are adult citizens. Despite this, the perceived threat to gun ownership from the Democratic Party — and the crimes perpetrated by the kind of people who elect Democrats — is sufficient to incite fear among some gun owners that they don’t have enough guns yet. President Obama was the greatest gun salesman in American history, but it appears that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will out-do even Obama. Do you have enough ammunition? Well, you’ll never know the answer to that question until you run out.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.)

Category: Crime

A Grim Anniversary in Kansas

Posted on | December 20, 2020 | Comments Off on A Grim Anniversary in Kansas

Twenty years ago this week, the people of Wichita, Kansas, awakened to startling news: Four people had been murdered — shot to death, execution-style — after an ordeal of sadistic torture. The only surviving witness, a 25-year-old school teacher, had been shot in the back of the head and left for dead with her four friends. Somehow, she not only survived being shot, but walked a mile through the snow, naked and barefoot, to summon help. She was able to give police a description of the two men who had perpetrated what became known as “The Wichita Massacre,” and everyone who learned about the crime was horrified.

The thing is that most people never heard of this atrocity. The national media ignored The Wichita Massacre because the perpetrators were black and the victims were white. So it was never reported on CNN or NBC, CBS, ABC, NPR — none of the media that have devoted endless hours to promoting the Black Lives Matter movement ever gave a minute of time to the murders committed by Reginald and Jonathan Carr:

The Carr brothers were from Dodge City. Both 22-year-old Reginald and 20-year-old Jonathan had lengthy criminal records.
On December 8, 2000, having recently arrived in Wichita, they robbed and wounded 23-year-old Andrew Schreiber, an assistant baseball coach. Three days later, on December 11, they shot and mortally wounded 55-year-old cellist and librarian Ann Walenta as she tried to escape from them in her car. She died three days later in hospital from her wounds.
On December 14, the brothers broke into a house at 12727 E Birchwood Drive in Wichita.

What the Carr brothers did inside that house is so grotesque I won’t even bother summarizing it, except to say they were convicted of nearly 100 felony counts, including kidnapping and rape, in addition to multiple counts of murder. While there was no evidence that what happened was a “hate crime” — robbery appears to have been the motive — several commentators at the time noticed that the Carr brothers had targeted only white victims, which at least suggested that these two criminal predators had a distinct preference in terms of their chosen prey.

In 2014, there was outrage when the Kansas State Supreme Court overturned the death sentences against the Carr brothers. Two years later, the U.S. Supreme Court voted 8-1 to restore those death sentences. During oral arguments, Justice Samuel Alito said the Carr brothers had commited “some of the most horrendous murders that I have seen in my 10 years here, and we see practically every death penalty case that comes up anywhere in the country. These have to rank as among the worst.” In his majority opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote: “These defendants tortured their victims, acts of almost inconceivable cruelty and depravity described firsthand for the jury by the lone survivor.”

The point that cannot be overlooked in this case is that these murders never would have happened if Jonathan and Reginald Carr hadn’t been turned loose on the streets after their previous crimes. Anyone who pays attention to news about crime and justice recognizes the pattern — career criminals, set free on probation or parole, tend to escalate the severity of their crimes. Over and over, you see that murders are perpetrated by criminals who already had a lengthy record of “minor” crimes.

Yet we find that “progressives” believe that we are locking up too many criminals. Just pray that none of the monsters turned loose by Soros-sponsored district attorneys like L.A.’s George Gascon ever show up in your community. The national media will ignore your death.

Category: Crime, Kansas, Media Bias

The Lewinsky Scandal and Media Bias

Posted on | December 19, 2020 | 1 Comment

My American Spectator colleague Melissa Mackenzie provides a walk down memory lane exposing the media’s partisan double standard:

For a damaging story about a Democrat to be true, DNA must be found on a blue dress. There must be Blue Dress Proof™. It’s not enough to have a witness and a victim. It’s not enough to have a computer, a cache of validated emails, thousands of affadavits signed under the threat of perjury. There must be actual DNA, videotaped evidence. If the bad guy is a Democrat, there must be Blue Dress Proof.
For a damaging story about a Republican to be true, nothing has to be true at all. Third-hand hearsay about hookers and pee, a smile on a face, or a sarcastic tweet or phrase taken out of context can make even the most absurd conclusion be portrayed as fact and conveyed as truth in perpetuity. If the bad guy is a Republican, no proof is needed. . . .

Read the whole thing. The Lewinsky scandal erupted two months after I arrived in D.C. as an assistant editor at The Washington Times, and I have vivid memories of how that went down. What happened was that Clinton’s first finger-wagging denial — “I did not have sex with that woman” — was a tactic used to buy time while his spin doctors went to work devising a message that could enable him to survive the scandal when, inevitably, it was revealed that Clinton was guilty as hell.

A basic element of the Team Clinton strategy was to confuse the issue, to persuade middle-of-the-road voters that the scandal was “just about sex,” to distract from the obstruction-of-justice claim related to the Paula Jones civil-rights lawsuit. Whatever your opinion about Paula Jones, or the wisdom of the Supreme Court decision allowing her lawsuit against Clinton to go forward, once Clinton decided to litigate the case (rather than to pay Jones a settlement), the plaintiff had a right to truthful testimony in the case. Lawyers for Jones, tipped off by Linda Tripp about Clinton’s affair with Lewinsky, subpoenaed Lewinsky’s testimony. Team Clinton then (a) arranged through one of Clinton’s donors for Lewinsky to get hired at the New York offices of Revlon, and (b) dispatched Clinton’s lawyer Vernon Jordan to have Lewinsky sign a false affidavit, denying any sexual activity with the president and saying she couldn’t attend a deposition because she had moved to New York.

This was straight-up obstruction of justice and suborning perjury and, among other things, Bill Clinton was disbarred as a result. But because of Team Clinton’s media spin — “It’s just about sex! Everybody lies about sex!” — most Americans never understood the real issue.

A series of court decisions had determined that plaintiffs in sexual harassment cases could use evidence that a “hostile work environment” existed because of a pattern of harassing behavior. Paula Jones, as an employee of the state of Arkansas, had been subjected to sexual advances from Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton and suffered retaliation when she refused those advances. The reason Monica Lewinsky mattered was that the Jones lawyers were seeking to demonstrate that Bill Clinton made a routine practice of engaging in sexual affairs with female employees or with women he met as a result of his political position.

Personally, I take a dim view of the whole field of “sexual harassment” law. My essentially libertarian position is that employment is a matter of mutual agreement, and if an employee does not like workplace conditions — for whatever reason — the thing to do is to quit. Tell the boss “take this job and shove it,” and walk out the door. If you are a woman and your boss is a creepy womanizer (like Bill Clinton), there are many ways to deal with that problem without filing a lawsuit. Democrats, however, have embraced a theory of “employment rights” that turns practically every workplace grievance into a potential lawsuit, and “sexual harassment” cases like Jones v. Clinton have proliferated as a result.

Bill Clinton was elected with the avid support of feminists who had weaponized “sexual harassment” accusations in the 1991 Tailhook scandal, which wrecked the careers of several Navy officers, and certainly the Commander-in-Chief could not be exempted from this standard. The reason why Republicans repeatedly invoked “the rule of law” in the Lewinsky scandal was that Clinton was claiming that his obstruction of justice in the Paula Jones case — a crime which would have subjected any other citizen to imprisonment — did not “rise to the level of impeachment,” in the phrase popularized by Clinton’s surrogates.

Many of the same Democrats who supported impeaching President Trump over a phone call to the newly elected president of Ukraine claimed that Clinton was above the law when it came to obstruction of justice in the Paula Jones case. Why? Because “everybody lies about sex.”

Had it not been for the media furiously spinning in Clinton’s defense in 1998, he would have been forced to resign, because responsible journalists would have made clear what was at stake in this case. Professor Glenn Reynolds comments about the Lewinsky scandal:

“I think the Clinton/Lewinsky affair was a real turning point with the press. When it first broke, I remember Sam Donaldson saying that if it was true, obviously Clinton would have to resign. But within a few days the Democrats, very much including the press, had circled the wagons around Clinton and were willing to recycle any pro-Clinton talking point, and scoff at anything that hurt Clinton, in a way that was, at the time, unprecedentedly brazen.”

Indeed. And we are still paying the price.

Category: Bill Clinton, Scandal

British Court Rules It’s OK to Call ‘Stephanie Hayden’ a ‘Pig in a Wig’

Posted on | December 19, 2020 | 1 Comment

Not a woman: Anthony Halliday (left) as ‘Stephanie Hayden’ (right).

Last year I described this menace to society:

Anthony Halliday changed his name to “Stephanie Hayden” and became a transgender activist in England who “regularly threatens gender identity disbelievers with civil or criminal lawsuits, or attempts to have them ousted from their careers.”

Now a British appeals court has ruled against Halliday/“Hayden”:

Judges have insisted that freedom of speech includes the ‘right to offend’ in a landmark ruling which could help to turn the tide on ‘woke’ intolerance after a feminist who called a transgender woman a ‘pig in a wig’ and a ‘man’ was cleared.
Presiding over a case in the Court of Appeal, Lord Justice Bean and Mr Justice Warby said: ‘Freedom only to speak inoffensively is not worth having.’
They added that ‘free speech encompasses the right to offend, and indeed to abuse another’. The judgment from two senior members of the judiciary will set a precedent for future cases involving freedom of speech.
The ruling has emerged only now, but came in the successful appeal decided last week in favour of mother-of-two Kate Scottow, from Hitchin in Hertfordshire, after she had been found guilty under the 2003 Communications Act earlier in the year.
Miss Scottow told The Daily Telegraph: ‘It was necessary to enshrine one of the most fundamental rights of every living being in a democratic society – the right to freedom of speech that is now routinely attacked…’ But Miss Hayden said: ‘This is… a kick in the teeth to the entire LGBT community.’

(You know what, “Miss Hayden”? Maybe “a kick in the teeth” was long overdue to stop transgender bullies like you.)

Miss Scottow was arrested in 2018 and taken from her children and into custody after referring to trans woman Stefanie Hayden as a man, a ‘racist’ and a ‘pig in the wig’. Miss Hayden, 47, reported the online remarks to police.
[Scottow] had been arrested by three police officers in 2019 at her home in Pirton near Hitchin, Hertfordshire, in front of her daughter, 10, and son, 20 months. Boris Johnson later called it an abuse of power.
In February this year radical feminist Miss Scottow, 40, was handed a two-year conditional discharge, and ordered to pay £1,000 compensation, with district judge Margaret Dodds telling her: ‘Your comments contributed nothing to a debate. We teach children to be kind to each other and not to call each other names in the playground.’
But, overturning the decision, Mr Justice Warby explained that the relevant parts of the Communications Act ‘were not intended by Parliament to criminalise forms of expression, the content of which is no worse than annoying or inconvenient in nature’.
Mr Justice Warby also suggested that the prosecution had been an ‘unjustified state interference with free speech’.

Well, a small victory for free speech, but I’d still be happier if “Stephanie Hayden” got a kick in the teeth, literally. In America, we can say that.

Category: Great Britain, The Transgender Cult

Celebrate the Joyous Occasion of the Return of the Big Yellow Button

Posted on | December 18, 2020 | 1 Comment

Occasionally, when the need arises to rattle the tip jar, I supersize the PayPal contribution button, and today is such an occasion.

My family and I will be traveling today to a Midwestern state where our youngest son will be marrying his beloved Jasmine.

Having a wedding in the middle of a pandemic requires careful planning which, thankfully, has been attended to by the bride’s family. We may hope that one day our son will be telling our grandchildren how we managed appropriate social distancing on this happy occasion.

We can happily imagine the grandkids wondering about what grandpa did in “the old days” of 2020. “Dad, what’s a ‘blogger’?” And that’s when my son will explain to them how their grandfather reminded readers of the Five Most Important Words in the English Language:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!

Category: Family, Shoe Leather Fund

In The Mailbox: 12.17.20

Posted on | December 18, 2020 | 2 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Silicon Valley delenda est.

Words to the wise.

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Stalker Ex-Boyfriend Killed In Self-Defense
Red Pilled Jew: Wednesday Whittle
EBL: Awesome Way To Enjoy The Driving Range
Twitchy: To Some, Despite Her Disabilities, Helen Keller Was Just Another Privileged White Person
Louder With Crowder: Trump Cuts California Health Funds Over Abortion
Vox Popoli: Unrestricted War In Action, also, The Narrative Shifts

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Conservative: The Conviction & Heroism Of William Barr
American Greatness: Data Scientists Claim Arizona Certified Fraudulent Votes, also, Peter Navarro’s Report Detailing Election Irregularities In Six States Suggests Coordinated Strategy To Steal Election
American Power: Hunter Biden Asked The Chicoms For $10 Million To Help “The Biden Family”
American Thinker: Oblivious Biden, also, What The American Aristocracy Has Wrought
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Urban Flight News
Babalu Blog: Cuba’s Communist Regime To Jack Up Electricity Prices 500% In 2021
BattleSwarm: Everybody In California Is Moving To Texas
Cafe Hayek: COVID-19 Is Indeed Relatively Harmless For Younger Adults
CDR Salamander: Diversity Thursday
Da Tech Guy: Iran Redux, also, McConnell Tells GA Voters To Stay Home And Other Weirdness Under The Fedora
Don Surber: U.S. Intelligence Says Trump Won In A Landslide, also, Pardon Obama
First Street Journal: Some Good News From SCOTUS On Freedom Of Religion, also, Well, Wahhh!
The Geller Report: Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg Being Sued For Enabling Election Fraud In Key States, also, DNI Ratcliffe – There Was Red Chinese Interference In The 2020 Election
Hogewash: Part Of The New Normal, also, Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day
Hollywood In Toto: MessingGate Reveals Not One, But Two Hypocrisies, also, I’m Your Woman Packs Thrills, Not Lectures
JustOneMinute: FDA Panel Approves Moderna Vaccine
The Lid: Liberal Democrats Want Colleagues Disarmed On Capitol Hill
Legal Insurrection: Calls Begin For Kamala Harris To Have A More Important Job Than Just Vice President, also, U. Oregon Students Want College Republicans Removed From Campus For Attending “Stop The Steal” Rally
Nebraska Energy Observer: Tis The Season
Power Line: Are Shutdowns Leading To Youth Suicide? also, 9th Circuit Tells Nevada It Can’t Treat Churches Worse Than Casinos
Shark Tank: House Democrat Wants Gov. DeSantis Investigated Over COVID Death Rate Reporting
Shot In The Dark: Orwell Overestimated Minneapolis DFLers
The Political Hat: Critical Election Theory, also, Anti-Racism Infects The AMA
This Ain’t Hell: Seattle Politician Who Defunded Police Calls 911 For Crime She Wants To Legalize, also, Pushing The Envelope
Victory Girls: Rocky Road Ahead – Biden Detours Off Easy Street
Volokh Conspiracy: Chief Justice Roberts Has Fallen Into A “Truly Bottomless Pit From Which There Is Simply No Extracting [Himself]”
Weasel Zippers: Dominion Whistleblower Says CEO Lied During Testimony, also, UMC Nevada Shows Video Of Doctor Getting COVID Vaccine – But The Syringe Was Empty
The Federalist: Rand Paul Calls For President Trump To Pardon Edward Snowden, also, New Texts Show FBI Spied On Fox News
Mark Steyn: When Sieges End, also, Links & Latkes

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Category: Linkagery

Can Mere Words Describe How Bad ‘Doctor’ Jill Biden’s Dissertation Really Is?

Posted on | December 17, 2020 | Comments Off on Can Mere Words Describe How Bad ‘Doctor’ Jill Biden’s Dissertation Really Is?

Having endeavored to read the dissertation for which the wife of the alleged President-elect received a Doctorate of Education, Kyle Smith tries to explain how awful it is: “To call Jill Biden’s dissertation thin gruel is an insult to gruel. . . . The dissertation, Student Retention at the Community College: Meeting Students’ Needs, shimmers with the wan, term-papery feel of middle school, although in defense of today’s middle schoolers, they at least know how to use spell-checking software, unlike Mrs. Biden.” The dissertation, Smith tells us, includes “meaningless prattle,” “awkwardly phrased banalities . . . and childlike repetition”:

Biden’s style is atrocious, her research is comical, her reasoning is muddled, and as one finishes the final vacuous line of this student-newspaper-style exercise (“A student retention plan requires diligence and effort — but most of all, leadership”), it is impossible not to be reminded that the University of Delaware, which granted Mrs. Biden an Ed.D. in 2007, is deeply connected to her husband. A more exacting, or even minimally self-respecting, university would have directed Mrs. Biden’s paper to the nearest trash receptacle. Jill Biden looks like yet another member of the Biden family who successfully leveraged the family name to obtain things of value that otherwise would have lain far beyond the reach of someone of such meager talents.

A typical member of the Democratic Party “elite,” in other words.

Tucker Carlson ripped it to shreds Wednesday night:

Category: Democrats, Education

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The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

FMJRA 2.0: The Mountain Road

Do You Have Enough Ammunition?

A Grim Anniversary in Kansas

The Lewinsky Scandal and Media Bias

British Court Rules It’s OK to Call ‘Stephanie Hayden’ a ‘Pig in a Wig’

Celebrate the Joyous Occasion of the Return of the Big Yellow Button

In The Mailbox: 12.17.20

Can Mere Words Describe How Bad ‘Doctor’ Jill Biden’s Dissertation Really Is?

THE FULL METAL JACKET REACH-AROUND AWARD

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!

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