Amid a relentless influx of illegal immigrants that has exposed liberal NIMBY hypocrisy in the quote-unquote Sanctuary City that is New York, Bloomberg reports that officials are considering housing migrants in Manhattan’s Central Park and Brooklyn’s Prospect Park as part of a plan to find new sites for some of the more than 95,000 asylum seekers who have arrived in the past 15 months.
“Everything is on the table,” Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services Anne Williams-Isom said Wednesday at a press conference when asked about housing migrants in city parks. The sites are among 3,000 locations the city is reviewing, she said.
LIVE NOW: Deputy Mayor Anne Williams-Isom hosts an asylum seeker briefing at City Hall https://t.co/pHBpIWl4fK
Gothamist first reported that New York City is considering erecting tents in the two major parks and on Randall’s Island as possible sites for the asylum seekers, citing unidentified people familiar with the discussions.
According to Bloomberg, Williams-Isom declined to comment on how imminent the plan is, and didn’t answer a question about who the city is working with on potential plans to house people in city parks, although it is safe to assume that Blackrock is going to expand its role as America’s favorite (and biggest) landlord monopolist by branching out into tents (and collecting a generous multi-billion government handout in the process).
A memo obtained by CNN earlier this year listed a YMCA in Park Slope, Brooklyn; a recreation center in Staten Island; the campuses of York College and Medgar Evers College; and the parking lot at Citi Field in Queens as possible shelter sites.
Placing migrants in temporary structures inside either Central Park or Prospect Park would bring high visibility to a crisis that’s dogged Mayor Eric Adams’s administration for months, and cement the city’s transformation into a modern version of the 1970’s crime and drug ridden Manhattan. On Tuesday, scores of people were sleeping and waiting for help on the sidewalks outside the Roosevelt Hotel in midtown Manhattan.
Adams has repeatedly criticized the Biden administration for failing to provide significant logistical or financial aid to the city to help manage the crisis. The mayor and members of New York’s congressional delegation met last week with US Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas to discuss the issue.
On Wednesday, Williams-Isom denied the city is letting people sleep on the streets as a tactic to force the federal government to come to the city’s aid; it is however a tactic to ensure that many of the wealthiest New Yorkers depart the city for Florida, taking billions in income tax payments with them. No one in the Adams administration “would use any people to do a stunt,” Williams-Isom said, which is amusing because that’s precisely what people the Adams administration is doing.
The city’s shelter system housed 107,900 people as of July 30, a record high that has more than doubled since January 2022, when the total shelter census citywide stood at 45,000 people. Some 56,600 of the city’s current shelter residents are migrants.
On rare occasions in Central Park’s history, the iconic public space has been commandeered for housing in emergencies. During the Great Depression, homeless people set up “Hoovervilles” and in a few months, it will be as if a new Great Depression has arrived to what was once the world’s greatest city.
Vice President Kamala Harris claimed that middle school students in Florida will “be taught that enslaved people benefited from slavery.”
Ms. Harris was referring to one of almost 200 focal points of instruction that the Florida Board of Education has adopted for instructors teaching African American history.
“Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
Besides being demonstrably true, that sentence is hardly a blanket endorsement of what used to be called “the Peculiar Institution” in antebellum America.
It’s clear that Florida middle schoolers will be taught that slavery was and is cruel and morally reprehensible. In that context, they will also learn that some slaves learned new skills like farming, smithing, carpentry, etc. during their servitude.
Repeating that truth hardly removes even one speck of the stain on our national soul that’s tied to slavery in America.
Some news outlets called VP Harris out for misrepresenting Florida’s curriculum.
Among those, the hosts on Fox News’s “The Five” discussed the issue, which led to Fox personality Greg Gutfeld making the following comment:
“Did you ever read ‘Man’s Search for Meaning?’ Vic Frankl talks about how you have to survive in a concentration camp by having skills. You had to be useful. Utility. Utility kept you alive.”
A number of left-leaning news outlets and politicians were horrified, having decided that Gutfeld was defending the Nazi extermination camps for supposedly providing educational opportunities for prisoners. “Let’s get something straight that the American people understand full well and that is not complicated: there was nothing good about slavery; there was nothing good about the Holocaust,” White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said. “Full stop.”
There was much more of the same sort of outrage spread far and wide. Reading the vitriol directed at Gutfeld, who combines thoughtful and witty about as well as any pundit going since P.J. O’Rourke passed away, was a depressing exercise. Depressing because this incident is yet another example of how many Americans have gone deliberately tone-deaf, attributing the worst possible motivations to anyone considered an enemy. What is said isn’t nearly as important as who said it. One can attribute any meaning one wants to words they don’t understand.
Clearly, the point of Florida’s guidance isn’t to glorify the practice of slavery, it’s to pay homage to the human spirit that can find a way to survive even in the worst of conditions. Clearly, that was Frankl’s point, and in referencing him, Gutfeld’s as well. Heroes aren’t created in cesspools like slavery and genocide. Heroes are forged in the fires of adversity. Just as no Israelite wanted to be under Pharoah’s thumb, no African-American wished to feel the boot-heal of the slave master on his or her neck. When freedom finally came, each would find they not only survived, but—for some—they even grew.
Recall the moment in “The Shawshank Redemption” when Captain Hadley is holding Andy Dufresne precariously at the edge of the roof, perhaps a moment away from letting him fall to his death. Dufresne explains to Hadley how he can get out of paying taxes on a $35,000 inheritance. It’s a turning point in the movie, the moment Dufresne stops being perpetually abused meat and starts to become a useful, and therefore somewhat respected, human being of sorts. Shawshank will not become heaven, but at least it will no longer be hell.
I was present at the memorial service recognizing the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and Birkenau in 1995. The camps, located near my family’s ancestral home of Krakow, have always made a huge impression on me both for what they tell us about man’s cruelty and for what they tell us about man’s resiliency. I had the privilege to speak to some survivors, and the message I took away was this: In that horror, every prisoner had a choice: give up or try to find a way to keep going. I didn’t get a sense that anyone begrudged or belittled those who gave up. It was understandable, I suppose. But if you tried to keep going, there was little you wouldn’t try.
That was Frankl’s point. If you’re Andy Dufresne and you have great accounting skills, then you try to leverage those skills to make your life a little less hard. If you’re an inmate of an extermination camp and are an expert carpenter, you try to leverage those skills to get an extra ration, or a good blanket, or anything else that will keep you alive for another day. So no, in pointing this out, Greg Gutfeld wasn’t being outrageous. But the outraged? They’re being ridiculous.
Chinese Government Asks Brokers How To Boost Stock Prices
China’s markets regulator is asking securities firms how to boost stock prices, stoking concerns that Beijing is desperate to restore investor confidence, Bloomberg reports, citing people familiar with the matter.
Last week, the China Securities Regulatory Commission held a meeting with several brokerage houses to solicit feedback. Among the measures proposed by the brokers was a possible cut in the stamp duty on stocks trading, as well as a slowdown in IPO traffic to help boost liquidity, the people said.
The CSRC gave no indications of how they plan to boost the market, though the strategy session with brokers suggests that Chinese officials are highly motivated to carry out an earlier pledge by the Politburo to supercharge the nation’s $10 trillion stock market and boost investor confidence. Raising the prices of stocks, where quite a bit of household savings is tied up, would help Beijing shore up funding for the corporate sector.
Participating in last week’s consultation was a rare meet-up between the CSRC and global funds, where officials including Vice Chairman Fang Xinghai attempted to calm concerns among foreign investors over investing in China.
Chinese stocks have been weighed down by the nation’s slowing economy for much of this year, underperforming their emerging market peers at one point by the widest margin since at least 1999.
The CSI financials subgauge soared 4.6% on Friday, extending gains earlier this week amid market chatter of a stamp duty cut. Hithink Royalflush Information Network Co. surged 17% and China Galaxy Securities Co. jumped by the 10% daily limit.
The gains helped lift the CSI 300 Index by 2.3%. The benchmark gauge recorded the best weekly performance since November. Overseas investors net purchased 16 billion yuan ($2.3 billion) of mainland shares on Friday, taking the week’s inflows to the largest since January. -Bloomberg
“The speculation about cutting stamp duty has helped lift market sentiment today, as the move would be following the vows to boost financial markets mentioned during the Politburo” meeting, said Steven Leung, executive director at UOB-Kay Hian Hong Kong.
The Joe Biden administration released a report endorsing the renewal of a controversial law which enables US intelligence agencies to spy on foreign nationals and American citizens on Monday. This comes amid a heated debate in Congress regarding how such surveillance powers are weaponized against the American people, as well as a slew of scandals involving these capabilities being wielded by the FBI against protesters and lawmakers.
Published by the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board and Intelligence Oversight Board, the 42-page report states that a failure of Congress to renew Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act – before it expires at the end of the year – would constitute “one of the worst intelligence failures of our time.”
Section 702 authorizes a tool used by US spy agencies to conduct warrantless surveillance on foreign targets and any Americans with whom they may be interacting. This practice has long been criticized by domestic civil liberties groups because in the process also collected are US citizens’ electronic communications including phone calls, text messages, and emails.
Unless reauthorized in December, the law will expire. This will be complicated as growing animosity over the spy bureaucracies’ abuse of power continues to prompt stiff opposition and demands for extensive reforms from lawmakers across the aisle and particularly the GOP.
Most recently, a declassified court document revealed the FBI improperly searched a surveillance database created by Section 702 to search information about a US senator, a state senator, and a state judge.
A senior FBI official made clear to Politico that the unnamed FBI analyst who snooped on the US senator and the state senator was not authorized to conduct searches using “sensitive query terms,” including the names of people running for office or public officials. The improper searches did not even meet the threshold of being “reasonably likely to retrieve” evidence of a crime or foreign intelligence information.
Despite the claim that the analyst had evidence that these officials were being targeted by a foreign spy service, the aforementioned FBI official conceded to Politico that if the analyst had sought the required pre-approval from the deputy director for the queries, “they would not have been approved.”
In light of rampant misconduct, such as the targeting of January 6th and Black Lives Matter protesters during recent years, the White House’s report says “FBI personnel should receive additional training on what foreign intelligence entails.” The administration does acknowledge, however, that the bureau’s conduct “undermined public confidence in its ability to use Section 702 in the way it was intended.”
FAA Greenlights Largest Drone For Commercial Operations Across US
California-based startup Pyka has been cleared by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to fly the world’s largest electric cargo aircraft in controlled US air space.
Pelican Spray is a fully autonomous and 100% electric agricultural aircraft with zero emissions. The fixed-wing aircraft weighs 1,125 pounds and was just approved for commercial operations across the US, according to Bloomberg, citing comments from the operating officer and co-founder Chuma Ogunwole.
Pyka’s new technology eliminates the need for aviation fuel, thus reducing operating costs for farmers and providing substantial environmental benefits. The drone can provide round-the-clock spraying due to its automation capabilities. It has already proven a huge success for Costa Rica, Honduras, and Brazil farmers.
Pyka, founded in 2017, is already selling the spraying version of the drone. Other versions include Pelican Cargo, which can carry 400 lbs of payload up to 200 miles.
Getting FAA authorization for passenger aircrafts is a long and difficult process and a significant hurdle for the electric aviation industry.
The main challenge to electrifying commercial passenger aviation, though, is the limitations of battery technology that make it infeasible to fly any meaningful distance with multiple passengers onboard.
Former President Donald Trump is running for the White House while facing three indictments and one more criminal investigation. Never before has a former president been criminally charged—much less a frontrunner in another presidential race.
As the remaining investigation gets closer to possible charges and the indicted ones inch closer to trials, Mr. Trump has repeatedly pledged that he would continue his campaign even if convicted.
The most developed case so far involves Mr. Trump’s keeping of documents from his presidency. Special counsel Jack Smith charged Mr. Trump and two of his employees with 37 felony counts, including illegal retention of national defense information, obstruction of government, and lying to the government.
While the trial is set for May 2024, some legal observers expect further delays.
The case traces back to Mr. Trump’s January 2021 exit from the White House. His belongings and some of the documents from his time in office were packed in boxes and shipped to his home at the Mar-a-Lago resort in West Palm Beach, Florida.
The indictment argues that it was at this point that Mr. Trump committed 31 counts of illegally retaining national defense information because he “caused” the boxes to be moved. While this crime, under the Espionage Act, requires criminal intent, no evidence has emerged so far that Mr. Trump was aware the 31 documents in question were in the boxes.
It appears that Mr. Trump was under the impression that he could go through the boxes at his own pace and keep whatever he deemed personal. However, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) had a different view; it demanded the return of all presidential documents as soon as possible.
Under the Presidential Records Act, all official presidential records must be handed over to NARA, and former presidents are only allowed to take personal items such as journals and artifacts that weren’t intended for official government business. The problem is, the law doesn’t include an enforcement mechanism.
In 2012, when Judicial Watch tried to force former President Bill Clinton to turn over dozens of interview tapes from his presidency that he had kept, Mr. Clinton claimed that the tapes were personal, and the court sided with him. Judge Amy Berman Jackson, an appointee of President Barack Obama, argued that the court had no way to second-guess a president’s assertion of what is or isn’t personal.
“Since the President is completely entrusted with the management and even the disposal of Presidential records during his time in office, it would be difficult for this Court to conclude that Congress intended that he would have less authority to do what he pleases with what he considers to be his personal records,” Judge Jackson wrote.
Mr. Trump has repeatedly cited that case as justification for keeping whatever documents he wanted. However, he faces the charges in Florida, where the case isn’t a controlling precedent.
Mr. Trump sent 15 boxes of materials to NARA in January 2022. NARA then made a referral to the Department of Justice (DOJ) upon finding that some of the documents had classification markings. Shortly after, the DOJ began an investigation.
On May 11, 2022, the DOJ obtained a subpoena that compelled Mr. Trump to turn over all documents with classification markings, including electronic files, at Mar-a-Lago.
Some defense lawyers and former prosecutors have argued that Mr. Trump should have challenged the subpoena as overly broad. The subpoena didn’t specify whether it only covered originals or also copies and whether it covered obviously declassified documents. There are millions of declassified documents online that still have visible classification markings. Locating any such documents in Trump’s possession at Mar-a-Lago—all physical copies ever printed out and all such files on any computers and storage media he owns—would have been a monumental task.
Mr. Trump did no such all-encompassing search. He let his lawyer search some of the boxes brought from the White House.
Most of the obstruction charges focus on that point, alleging that Mr. Trump had his aide, Walt Nauta, move boxes out of a storage room at Mar-a-Lago so that they couldn’t be searched by the lawyer.
Smith added a few more charges on July 27, alleging that Mr. Trump asked his property manager at Mar-a-Lago, Carlos de Oliveira, to have security camera footage deleted after the DOJ subpoenaed some of the footage in June 2022. Smith alleges the footage showed Mr. Nauta moving boxes in and out of the storage room. The updated indictment doesn’t cite direct evidence that Mr. Trump made such a request—only de Oliviera’s alleged claim that he did.
Mr. Smith’s adding of new charges and an additional defendant at this point may displease the judge overseeing the case, Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee. Just a few weeks ago, Mr. Smith requested that the case go to trial in December—a rather short timeline if Mr. Smith knew at the time that additional charges may be forthcoming.
Mr. Trump could theoretically render the whole case moot if he wins the election and issues himself a pardon, although some legal scholars question whether presidents can do that.
Mr. Smith, former head of the DOJ Public Integrity Section, was appointed a special counsel by Attorney General Merrick Garland on Nov. 18, 2022, to investigate Mr. Trump’s documents retention as well as his involvement in the Jan. 6, 2021, protest and riot at the U.S. Capitol.
January 6 Case
On Aug. 1, Mr. Smith revealed his indictment of Mr. Trump in the January 6 investigation. He charged the former president with conspiracy to “impair, obstruct, and defeat” the collection and counting of electoral votes, conspiracy against Americans’ right to vote, obstruction of the electoral vote counting by Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, and conspiracy to obstruct the electoral vote counting.
Mr. Trump said he was informed on July 16 that he was a target of a grand jury investigation in relation to the January 6 incident.
The case centers on Mr. Trump’s claims of fraud and other illegalities in the 2020 election and how they played into the events at the Capitol, where a part of a massive protest over the election results boiled over into violence, with some people breaking into the building and fighting with police.
The indictment alleges that Trump knew his attacks on the election results were false, largely because some people, including state and federal officials, told him some of the claims were false and he kept repeating them.
The 45-page indictment also focuses on Trump’s repeated urging of Vice President Mike Pence to reject electoral votes from states where Trump had contested the results.
It further alleged that Trump incited the January 6 violence by telling the protesters that he hoped Pence would “send [the electoral votes] back to the states to recertify,” despite knowing that Pence repeatedly rejected the idea.
There’s extensive evidence of illegalities during the election, including illegal changes to election rules made with the excuse of the COVID-19 pandemic and some instances of fraud. None of the allegations, however, have been successfully litigated to overturn the election result in any state. Many of the cases have been dismissed for procedural reasons, rather than on the merits of the evidence.
Mr. Trump has argued that if indicted, the proceedings would give him an opportunity to expose information about improprieties in the election.
Georgia Election Case
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis began investigating Mr. Trump shortly after taking office in the largest Georgia county in January 2021.
On Jan. 24, 2022, Fulton County Superior Court granted Ms. Willis’s request for a special purpose grand jury that couldn’t bring charges, but can subpoena witnesses. That panel worked for about eight months, interviewing about 75 witnesses starting in May 2022, local media reported.
Ms. Willis recently said she’s “ready to go,” following up on her previous promises to bring charges by Sept. 1.
The core issue of the probe, according to local media, was a telephone call by Mr. Trump to the state’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, on Jan. 2, 2021.
The content of the call was selectively leaked to the media to create the narrative that Mr. Trump asked Mr. Raffensperger to “find” him enough votes to overturn the election.
When the transcript of the call was released, it turned out that Mr. Trump said he believed hundreds of thousands of ballots had been cast illegally in the state, particularly in Fulton County, which includes the Democrat bastion of Atlanta. He profusely criticized Mr. Raffensperger for failing to sufficiently investigate the fraud allegations.
“Why wouldn’t you want to find the right answer?” Mr. Trump asked.
Mr. Raffensperger and his team countered some of the allegations during the call, saying they were already investigated.
Several times during the conversation, Mr. Trump noted that he only needed to identify about 11,000 illegal votes because that was the margin by which he lost the state.
“If you check with Fulton County, you’ll have hundreds of thousands because they dumped ballots into Fulton County and the other county next to it,” Mr. Trump said.
“So what are we going to do here folks? I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break. You know, we have that in spades already.”
Another part of Ms. Willis’s investigation seems to focus on the alternative set of electors who convened at the state Capitol on Dec. 14, 2020, to cast their votes for Mr. Trump, despite the official vote count giving the victory to Mr. Trump’s opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden.
Ms. Willis informed the electors that they were targets of her investigation, and at least eight of the 16 were granted immunity in exchange for their testimony, The Washington Post reported in May.
The state’s Republican Party started a website on July 31 that criticizes the Willis investigation for targeting the electors. It says that the “contingent electors” cast their votes with the express acknowledgment that they would only be counted in case Mr. Trump’s lawsuit challenging the election results in the state succeeded.
The website points to a similar incident in 1960, when John F. Kennedy sued to overturn election results in Hawaii. A set of Democrat electors had cast their votes for Mr. Kennedy even though the state already certified its vote count, with Richard Nixon as the winner. The lawsuit succeeded and the alternative votes were counted.
In Mr. Trump’s case, the lawsuit wasn’t heard until Jan. 8, 2021, two days after the counting of the electoral votes. The suit was tossed on procedural grounds, never getting a hearing on its evidence.
Ms. Willis was barred by a judge from pursuing charges against one of the alternate electors, Georgia’s new lieutenant governor, Burt Jones, after Ms. Willis hosted a campaign fundraiser for Mr. Jones’s opponent in the 2022 race, Charlie Bailey.
Hush Money Case
The first criminal charges against Mr. Trump came in March from the office of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg in New York.
Mr. Bragg alleged that Mr. Trump committed 34 felonies because payments marked in his accounting books as legal expenses were in fact reimbursing his then-lawyer Michael Cohen for payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford.
Ms. Daniels communicated to Trump ahead of the 2016 election that she intended to sell to the press her story alleging she had an affair with Trump in 2006; she said she was willing to keep the story to herself if paid. Mr. Trump indeed had Mr. Cohen pay about $130,000 in exchange for a non-disclosure agreement, which Ms. Daniels ended up breaking. Mr. Trump’s company then reimbursed Mr. Cohen.
Mr. Bragg is treating the bookkeeping entries for payments to Mr. Cohen as violations of New York law against falsifying business records. Such violations would only be misdemeanors unless committed in the advancement of another crime. Mr. Bragg has argued that is indeed the case, although the indictment fails to specify what was the other crime supposed to be. There has been speculation in the media that the other crime was a campaign law violation. The argument would be that the hush money for Ms. Daniels was, in fact, an illegal campaign contribution.
Lebron James’ “I Promise” School Hasn’t Had A Single Student Pass The State’s Math Test
LeBron James is a G.O.A.T. (Greatest Of All Time) on the basketball court. But all that greatness has yet to trickle down in the LeBron James-supported I Promise School classrooms in Akron, Ohio.
A new Akron Beacon Journal (ABJ) report said, “This fall’s class of eighth graders at the I Promise School hasn’t had a single student pass the state’s math test since the group was in the third grade.”
The revelations were alarming to some Akron Board of Education members who asked for the data on the school’s progress that opened in 2018 as a part of the Akron Public Schools system and partially funded by the LeBron James Family Foundation.
During last week’s board meeting, Akron Public Schools board member Valerie McKitrick said, “Not one? In three years?”
“It is discouraging,” responded Keith Liechty-Clifford, the district’s director of school improvement.
ABJ said some board members are questioning whether I Promise is meeting its goals of helping students who are two or more years behind grade level.
Ohio school board officials are concerned I Promise School, which is 60% black and 28% of the 554 students have disabilities, is failing the youth:
“The state has also issued its first concern about the school: Two of I Promise’s biggest subgroups of students, Black students and those with disabilities, are now testing in the bottom 5% in the state, landing the school on the Ohio Department of Education’s list of those requiring targeted intervention,” ABJ reported.
Board President Derrick Hall voiced concern about the apparent lack of improvement for most I Promise School test scores, even though the students were given abundant resources during Covid.
“For me as a board member, I just think about all the resources that we’re providing.
“And I just, I’m just disappointed that I don’t think, it doesn’t appear like we’re seeing the kind of change that we would expect to see,” Hall said.
The school receives local, state, and federal funding as any other public school, as well as $1.4 million from LeBron’s foundation.
I Promise released a statement about the disappointing test results, deflecting the short-term problems by indicating, “When we started this work to wraparound students through education, we entered this partnership with Akron Public School for the long haul.”
While there was no official statement for the exact reason behind the terrible test scores, mounting evidence shows children suffered significant learning loss during Covid lockdowns.
Earlier this year, we reported on President Biden’s announcement that he’d be directing the Department of Justice to “move the United States as close as possible to universal background checks without additional legislation.”
The move to govern by executive fiat is loud and clear. The ATF & DOJ will publish this new rule in the second half of 2024, with a proposal released “soon,” according to a new report by the New York Times —which seems to have access to internal ATF policy.
2️⃣Anti-gunners are rebranding private firearm sales as “the gun seller loophole” to justify executive action—rather than the passage of a new law.🤯https://t.co/e0vXbfZu3V
Other details about the rule in the NYT report include:
Anyone who makes “a profit” from selling firearms, perhaps as little as $1, is to be prohibited from selling their privately owned firearms without a Federal Firearms License (FFL) or a background check.
According to the report, anti-gun organizations are pushing ATF to limit the number of firearms sales a private citizen may engage in without an FFL. Currently, anti-gunners want to limit collectors and sellers to 5 guns or fewer. An Obama-era regulation would have set the threshold at 1–2-gun sales per person.
Failing to register as an FFL holder will carry a penalty of up to 5 years in Federal prison and a $250,000 fine.
1️⃣@NYTimes (which leaked the info) stated that the proposal is “expected to be released soon” with a final rule to be published in the “second half of 2024.”
Universal Background Checks, especially when implemented by executive order, are a blatant infringement — with no basis in the text or history of the Second Amendment.
For Universal Background Checks to exist, there must be a registry to support a trace. Forms 4473—transformed by the Biden Administration into permanent gun registration forms — are the only enforcement mechanism for Universal Background Checks, as they would prove who obtained a firearm legally (and has a Form 4473 to prove it) and who did not complete the required registration form (and has therefore violated the law).
Registries of firearms always precede confiscation.
GOA has already announced plans to file a lawsuit to block this rule, but that does not absolve Congress of its responsibility to use every means necessary to defend the Second Amendment.
While Gun Owners of America fights for the Second Amendment in the courts, Congress must repeal the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act —the law that has allowed for ATF to now subvert Congress with this rulemaking. The act has been completely weaponized, gun owners have gained nothing, and America is no safer.
Congress must also participate in the rulemaking process and voice its opposition to backdoor universal background registration checks during the public notice and comment period alongside GOA members. After commenting during the proposed rule phase, Congress must also take up a joint resolution of disapproval pursuant to the Congressional Review Actand strike down this unconstitutional infringement.
* * *
We’ll hold the line for you in Washington. We are No Compromise. Join the Fight Now.
The term “San Fransicko,” coined by Michael Shellenberger, describes the deteriorating condition of downtown San Francisco, a consequence of the city’s Democrat leadership. It reflects how progressive policies have failed, creating an increasingly unsafe environment. Without law and order, the conditions to raise a family or even operate a business are impossible — and because of that, an exodus continues, creating a ghost town in the city’s downtown shopping district.
The 2024 presidential election cycle has already started. President Biden is touting ‘Bidenomics‘ while White House officials pointed to the revival of American factories despite the latest manufacturing data showing a contraction.
Democrats are making concerted efforts to distract the public’s attention from chaotic urban areas under their control. That’s because these crime-ridden metro areas are imploding. The lack of enforcing law and order from progressive city halls caused a mass exodus of businesses and people to relocate to safer places.
San Francisco has been the epicenter of what can go wrong for urban areas when progressives ram down disastrous social justice reforms — like emboldening criminals to steal from shops because anything valued under $950 is a misdemeanor shoplifting charge.
Youtuber METAL LEO’s latest video, “Every Store Is CLOSED On Market St San Francisco,” is a stunning 12 minutes of the city’s downtown shopping district transformed into a ghost town.
“Market Street is a major artery in San Francisco, California. It had all kinds of shops, malls, bars, restaurants, and stores that are now closed,” the Youtuber said in the video’s description.
He said the video “begins at The Embarcadero in front of the Ferry Building and runs southwest through downtown, passing the Civic Center and the Castro District, to the intersection with Portola Drive in the Twin Peaks Embarcadero.”
Mayor London Breed will never admit her policies have failed. However, it’s too late for her because a recent poll commissioned by Probolsky Research found 60% of voters in San Francisco “disapprove” of Breed’s performance, and only 22% believe she deserves re-election.
Democrats hate when the spotlight is turned on their imploding cities. They will never admit their progressive policies have failed.
Special counsel Jack Smith’s team made a startling admission in its case against former President Donald Trump, acknowledging in a new court filing that it failed to turn over all evidence to Mr. Trump’s legal team as required by law and falsely claimed that it had.
Mr. Smith’s team said in a July 31 court filing (pdf) in its classified documents case against the former president that it had incorrectly claimed during a July 18 court hearing that it had provided all Mar-a-Lago surveillance footage to Mr. Trump’s defense attorneys, as required by law.
“On July 27, as part of the preparation for the superseding indictment coming later that day and the discovery production for Defendant De Oliveira, the Government learned that this footage had not been processed and uploaded to the platform established for the defense to view the subpoenaed footage,” Mr. Smith’s team wrote in the July 31 filing.
“The Government’s representation at the July 18 hearing that all surveillance footage the Government had obtained pre-indictment had been produced was therefore incorrect.”
Under what is called the Brady rule, prosecutors in a criminal trial have a constitutional duty to disclose all evidence to a defendant’s legal team, including information that is favorable to the accused and could reduce a potential sentence.
Mr. Smith’s team accused Mr. Trump in a new “superseding indictment” (pdf) filed on July 27 of conspiring with his staff to delete some security footage so that the grand jury in the case would not see all the evidence.
The Department of Justice didn’t immediately return a request for comment from The Epoch Times.
In the superseding indictment, the special counsel charged Mr. Trump with willful retention of national defense information and two charges in connection to claims that he allegedly told a Mar-a-Lago worker to delete security tapes to prevent a grand jury from seeing them.
Mar-a-Lago staffer Carlos De Oliveira has been named as a third defendant in the superseding indictment, along with Trump aide Walt Nauta and the former commander-in-chief.
Mr. Trump took to his social media platform to deny the new charges, claiming that Mr. Smith’s new allegation is false and tantamount to election interference ahead of the 2024 contest.
“The security tapes being deleted was a made up lie by deranged Jack Smith! Election interference,” Mr. Trump wrote in all caps in a post on Truth Social on Aug. 1.
In the superseding indictment, prosecutors allege that Mr. De Oliveira told another Mar-a-Lago employee that “the boss” wanted a server “deleted” on June 27, 2022. That came about two months before FBI agents raided the Palm Beach resort owned by the former president, uncovering allegedly classified documents in a storage area.
Mr. Trump has said he used presidential authority to declassify all the relevant documents in the case against him and has denied that he hid any materials from the government.
In a statement following the July 27 announcement of a superseding indictment and new charges, Mr. Trump’s campaign said that the new allegations were part of a “continued desperate and flailing attempt” to harass the former president.
“Deranged Jack Smith knows that they have no case and is casting about for any way to salvage their illegal witch hunt and to get someone other than Donald Trump to run against Crooked Joe Biden,” the campaign team wrote.
An average of polling data compiled by RealClear Politics shows a very close matchup between President Joe Biden and Mr. Trump, with the former enjoying a lead of 0.9 percentage points.
Mr. Smith’s superseding indictment increases the total number of charges in the classified materials case to 40.
The former president, who is the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, is involved in a number of legal disputes.
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland is investigating Mr. Trump’s role in actions surrounding his challenges to the 2020 presidential election that culminated in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol breach. Mr. Trump said his attorneys met with U.S. Justice Department officials on July 27 a sign that charges could come soon.
Mr. Smith has accused Mr. Trump of unlawfully keeping classified national security documents when he left office in 2021 and of lying to officials who tried to recover them.
Mr. Trump, on June 13, pleaded not guilty to those charges, which include alleged violations of the Espionage Act, which criminalizes unauthorized possession of defense information.
A New York grand jury has indicted Mr. Trump for allegedly falsifying business records in connection with a payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels before the 2016 presidential election.
Also in New York, Mr. Trump faces a civil lawsuit brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James, alleging fraud.
