Gov Corruption

[GURPS]

Meme-Maker Sentenced to Seven Months in Prison for Attempting to Trick Voters


Back during Twitter 1.0, a whole lot of conservative meme-makers were banned (e.g., Carpe Donktum). Douglas Mackey made up a graphic suggesting that you could vote for Hillary Clinton via text. He was sentenced Wednesday to seven months in prison. Seven months isn't long, but the time it's taken for this case to move through the justice system certainly has. The Justice Department sent out a press release Wednesday announcing the sentencing:

He’s not out of the woods yet, but things were looking up a little yesterday for convicted “meme criminal” Douglass Mackey. The Post Millennial covered the story in an article headlined, “BREAKING: Federal appellate court sides with Douglass Mackey in meme case, drops prison sentence until after appeal.” (As of this morning, Corporate Media was silent as the grave, which means it was good news for the rest of us.)





In October, a federal judge sentenced Mackey to seven months in federal prison for a speech crime: in 2016, as a joke he tweeted a fake meme suggesting that Hillary supporters should vote by text. Judge Ann Donnelly didn’t get the joke. Instead she found it was an attempt to “impair the votes of black and latino Hillary supporters,” who apparently aren’t sophisticated enough to tell the difference between a joke meme and official voting instructions. And according to the judge, black and latino people are gullible, so they believe you can vote for president by text message.

In fairness, the meme was intended to look ‘official’:





Further complicating Douglass’s case were some text messages from a 4Chan message board where he’d workshopped his meme. Several still-unidentified users on that board encouraged Mackey and explicitly expressed hopes that “illegal Hillary voters” would fall for it and waste their votes.

(When these facts emerged this year, some observers wondered whether the users who encouraged Mackey to mislead voters might have been the same FBI agents who also coordinated the Gretchen Whitmer fednapping plot. But who knows.)

Back to Mackey’s sentencing. Sticking the old judicial knife in right up to the hilt, Judge Donnelly devilishly denied Mackey’s request to stay his sentence pending appeal, intentionally defeating the entire point of an appeal. In other words, by the time his appeal was decided, he’d have already served his seven-month sentence. So, take that.

Accordingly, Mackey’s lawyers rushed to appeal Judge Donnelly’s denial of the stay of his prison sentence, so that Mackey could have enough time to appeal his conviction.

Unfortunately for Mackey’s lawyers, an appeal of a stay is almost as much work as an appeal of the conviction itself. To grant a stay, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals must review enough of the case to conclude that Mackey has a “substantial likelihood of prevailing on the merits.” This is a high standard. The appellate judges must be convinced not only that Mackey’s appeal is likely to prevail, but also that it’s substantially likely to prevail.

But after reviewing the briefs from Mackey and the government, the Second Circuit granted Mackey’s stay. This was correct, in my view. The order did not comment on the merits apart from simply granting the stay and, in a compromise for the government’s position, “expedited” the appeal by shortening up the briefing deadlines.

As a litigator with decent appellate experience, I can assure you an expedited appeal is both a blessing and a curse. Under the expedited schedule, Mackey’s initial brief is now due on January 5th, meaning Mackey’s lawyers just canceled all their holiday travel plans.

Still, it could be worse. I once had a trial scheduled with jury selection set to start at 9am on January 2nd. Ugh.

☕️ GRIM VERMIN ☙ Tuesday, December 5, 2023 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Good news about free speech; great news about mask science; bad news for Ukraine (good for us); and the most terrifying pandemic we've ever faced, which media has been hiding from you.

www.coffeeandcovid.com

 

[Kyle]

They convicted him because Democrats are Stupid.

 

[Hijinx]

To be perfectly honest I would not be surprised if the Democrats tried to pass a bill so that they could vote by text.
They have done just about everything else to make it easy for them to cheat.

He’s not out of the woods yet, but things were looking up a little yesterday for convicted “meme criminal” Douglass Mackey. The Post Millennial covered the story in an article headlined, “BREAKING: Federal appellate court sides with Douglass Mackey in meme case, drops prison sentence until after appeal.” (As of this morning, Corporate Media was silent as the grave, which means it was good news for the rest of us.)



In October, a federal judge sentenced Mackey to seven months in federal prison for a speech crime: in 2016, as a joke he tweeted a fake meme suggesting that Hillary supporters should vote by text. Judge Ann Donnelly didn’t get the joke. Instead she found it was an attempt to “impair the votes of black and latino Hillary supporters,” who apparently aren’t sophisticated enough to tell the difference between a joke meme and official voting instructions. And according to the judge, black and latino people are gullible, so they believe you can vote for president by text message.

In fairness, the meme was intended to look ‘official’:



Further complicating Douglass’s case were some text messages from a 4Chan message board where he’d workshopped his meme. Several still-unidentified users on that board encouraged Mackey and explicitly expressed hopes that “illegal Hillary voters” would fall for it and waste their votes.

(When these facts emerged this year, some observers wondered whether the users who encouraged Mackey to mislead voters might have been the same FBI agents who also coordinated the Gretchen Whitmer fednapping plot. But who knows.)

Back to Mackey’s sentencing. Sticking the old judicial knife in right up to the hilt, Judge Donnelly devilishly denied Mackey’s request to stay his sentence pending appeal, intentionally defeating the entire point of an appeal. In other words, by the time his appeal was decided, he’d have already served his seven-month sentence. So, take that.

Accordingly, Mackey’s lawyers rushed to appeal Judge Donnelly’s denial of the stay of his prison sentence, so that Mackey could have enough time to appeal his conviction.

Unfortunately for Mackey’s lawyers, an appeal of a stay is almost as much work as an appeal of the conviction itself. To grant a stay, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals must review enough of the case to conclude that Mackey has a “substantial likelihood of prevailing on the merits.” This is a high standard. The appellate judges must be convinced not only that Mackey’s appeal is likely to prevail, but also that it’s substantially likely to prevail.

But after reviewing the briefs from Mackey and the government, the Second Circuit granted Mackey’s stay. This was correct, in my view. The order did not comment on the merits apart from simply granting the stay and, in a compromise for the government’s position, “expedited” the appeal by shortening up the briefing deadlines.

As a litigator with decent appellate experience, I can assure you an expedited appeal is both a blessing and a curse. Under the expedited schedule, Mackey’s initial brief is now due on January 5th, meaning Mackey’s lawyers just canceled all their holiday travel plans.

Still, it could be worse. I once had a trial scheduled with jury selection set to start at 9am on January 2nd. Ugh.

☕️ GRIM VERMIN ☙ Tuesday, December 5, 2023 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Good news about free speech; great news about mask science; bad news for Ukraine (good for us); and the most terrifying pandemic we've ever faced, which media has been hiding from you.

www.coffeeandcovid.com

Dirty deeds done by Democrat Judges is nothing new.

 

[GURPS]

A group of commercial fishermen have ended up before the Supreme Court​

For years, fishermen like Bill Bright and his colleague Wayne Reichle have been required to take federal observers on their boats when they set out into the North Atlantic in search of herring. Those observers are making sure fishermen are catching what they're legally allowed, most of it in efforts to prevent overfishing.

But back in 2020, federal regulators moved to require herring fishermen to directly pay observers salaries, a move that could potentially cost herring fishermen up to $700 per day.

By some estimates, that could top 20% of revenue from a fisherman's catch.

"From the beginning, the most important thing for us was the ability to continue fishing and continue operating the way we've operated for a number of years," Wayne Reichle said.

As a result, Reichle, Bright and a half dozen other fishermen sued the federal government.

 

[GURPS]

US Government BUSTED Tracking YOU On All Iphone & Android Devices Through SNEAKY Trick!​

 

[GURPS]

The Trojan Horse That Would Force Your Barista To Spy on You​

Even more outrageous is a problematic provision tucked away in this “reform” bill but not so much as mentioned in the committee’s report. Section 504 of the House Intelligence bill requires that those who have access to the “equipment that is being or may be used to transmit or store such communications” shall be treated as “electronic communication service providers” and thus subject to Section 702’s general requirement to (secretly) disclose our data to the government.

Let us unpack this: Under current law, electronic communication service providers include Internet service providers such as Google, Facebook/Meta, and Microsoft. It also includes telecom providers such as AT&T and Verizon. Under the law, these big companies are routinely compelled to hand over billions of foreign communications in addition to vast amounts of Americans’ communications that are “incidentally” caught up in this surveillance net.

But the House Intelligence bill’s expansion to include “equipment” would cover, for example, any small or medium-sized business that simply provides Wi-Fi or stores data. This means that your business landlord, Airbnb host, hotel manager, or coffee shop barista will have a legal obligation to give the government any of your emails, texts, or phone metadata that ran through their equipment. Larger entities, such as data centers, would also be enlisted in spying on Americans.

To call the expansion of government-mandated spying to baristas and landlords “reform” shows the contempt the intelligence community has for Congress and the very idea of oversight. It is nothing less than a Trojan horse buried in the House Intelligence bill.

 

[GURPS]

 

[GURPS]

FBI Official Who Helped Launch Trump-Russia Probe Sentenced to Four Years in Prison for Work with Russian Oligarch​

A former FBI counterintelligence chief who played a pivotal role in launching the Trump-Russia probe was sentenced to just over four years in prison for assisting a sanctioned Russian oligarch after leaving his post in 2019.

In August, Charles McGonigal, a 22-year veteran of the bureau’s field office in New York, was found guilty of a count of conspiracy for working with Oleg Deripaska, a Russian billionaire with close ties to President Vladimir Putin. During his stint with the bureau, McGonigal received classified information that Deripaska would be designated a Russian oligarch with close ties to the Kremlin, the indictment alleged. McGonigal was legally obligated to inform the FBI of his relationship with foreign officials, which he violated by continuing communication and establishing business ties with Deripaska.

Judge Jennifer Rearden argued that McGonigal “repeatedly flouted and manipulated the sanctions regimes vital” to American security interests. “The undeniable seriousness of this and the need to respect the law,” Rearden continued, “compels a meaningful custodial sentence.”

The FBI official admitted during the hearing that he has a “deep sense of remorse and sorrow for my actions.”

“I, more than anyone, know that I have committed a felony and as a former FBI special agent it causes me extreme mental, emotional and physical pain – not to mention the shame I feel in embarrassing myself and the FBI, the organization I love and respect,” McGonigal told Reardon. “I’m humbly asking for a second chance.”

 

[GURPS]

FBI shocker: Agent told boss Biden laptop could be Russian disinformation, but team knew otherwise​

The FBI agent who ran the bureau’s Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) during the 2020 election admitted in Congressional testimony that he advised his leadership that Hunter Biden’s laptop could be part of a Russian disinformation campaign, apparently unaware his team already knew that the FBI had obtained and corroborated the computer as “real,” according to interview transcripts reviewed by Just the News.

Retired FBI Special Agent Bradley Benavides' account to the House Judiciary Committee comes as congressional investigators gather mounting evidence that the government's early efforts to identify and block alleged misinformation in politics have been so haphazard as to inject inaccurate, speculative, or incomplete information themselves into the public domain.

Benavides served as the very first FBI section chief for the Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), a new entity created during the 2020 election to issue warnings to other bodies in government and the private sector about possible foreign misinformation or disinformation.

“I remember a question being posed broadly if there was a laptop purported to be attributed to Hunter Biden, is it possible that a foreign adversary, like the Russians, could be using that as a way to insert into the U.S. political system false information, bad information, corrupted information, all kinds of things that could be on the laptop? Is it possible, FITF, that the Russians are capable of doing this? And my response would have been yes,” Benavides told the House Judiciary Committee in a Sept. 28 transcribed interview reviewed by Just the News.

 

[GURPS]

Court Allows Gov't Warrantless Searches of Gun Club Property​

 

[GURPS]

Stunning Report Shows U.S. Intelligence Is Flying Blind When It Comes to China​

The new details of just how blind U.S. intelligence is flying when it comes to China were part of a stunning and in-depth report from the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday. If the details in the report are accurate (and there is no reason to believe they are not), then it shows that the U.S. is almost completely in the dark when it comes to the motivations of Chinese leader Xi Jinping and his party government.

According to the reporting from the WSJ, we've been flying blind since a number of spies were rounded up and killed by the Chinese government between 2010 and 2012. In all, it appears the U.S. lost about 30 assets in China as a result of this purge, and that had some severe ramifications for American intelligence interests. We're now doing the best we can in dealing with the growing Chinese threat, but we're doing so through limited monitoring and a lot of guesswork.

 

[GURPS]

Biden’s Ministry of Diversity Comes for the Internet​

Commissioner Brendan Carr—one of two Republicans on the five-member FCC—called the plan “an unlawful power grab that gives the government a roving mandate to micromanage nearly every aspect of how the internet functions.”

Former FCC adviser Adam Candeub added: “The FCC is dishonestly claiming that it is promoting equity and fairness. However, the FCC is just seizing control over business decisions, funneling resources to politically preferred constituencies.”

The timing is particularly suspect, given entrepreneur Elon Musk’s effort to provide uncensored internet access via Starlink to go with the uncensored speech he already has delivered on his social media site X (formerly Twitter).

The FCC adopted the package of regulations Nov. 15. The new rules would empower the commission to prosecute internet service providers for alleged discrimination based on race, ethnicity, and other protected classes, as well as income.

The rules empower the FCC to “crack down on digital inequities,” as The Associated Press put it. By which the commission might mean, for example, punishing companies for building infrastructure in neighborhoods where the agency expects people actually will buy it.

The newly Democrat-dominated FCC allegedly imposed the new rules to “eliminate discrimination” in access to internet services. By which the commission means the uneven rollout of 5G service, itself stymied by regulatory red tape.

Congress, in the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure bill, delegated to the FCC the task to “ensure that all people of the United States benefit from equal access to broadband internet access.”

In fact, the agency found no evidence of intentional discrimination, but the leftists on the FCC used Congress’ delegation as an excuse to force equity and diversity mandates ranging from controls over discounts, language options, and credit checks to marketing and advertising.

What’s the goal? Essentially to reinstate so-called “net neutrality” rules that dictate how internet service providers treat traffic and use those rules to ram through a federal takeover of Americans’ access to the internet.

 

[GURPS]

Another Massive Media Fever Dream Fell Apart Over Christmas. Hardly Anyone Noticed​

NBC News ran the headline: “Pentagon report warns of threat from white supremacists inside the military” in February of 2021, prior to the commission of the study. Weeks later Axios published a story entitled: “Pentagon report: Domestic extremists pose serious threat to the military.”

VICE News flat out claimed extremism existed in the ranks with their video piece: “American Terror: The Military’s Problem With Extremism in the Ranks.”

The Boston Globe published in July a piece : “‘The single biggest threat to the security of the country’: Extremism in the military is alarming experts.”

Of course these reports were bolstered, in part, by cries of 15 Democratic lawmakers who said in a letter to the Department of Defense that “White supremacists are joining the military and permeating the ranks.”

“The spread of white supremacist ideology is dangerous for the military and threatens to rupture civil-military safeguards that our democracy requires,” the letter read.

The amplification of claims such as these and the successful fear mongering by the left-wing media may have contributed to the Pentagon’s decision in December of 2021 to issue new rules prohibiting military members from engaging in so-called “extremist activities” which included simply “liking” something on social media that was considered an extremist view.

The regulations did not specify what was considered an extremist organization or message and instead left that up to commanders in charge. And despite the hoopla, less than 100 service members were actually accused of being involved in extremist activity in 2021.

But Austin didn’t seem to care about potential division within the military nor the politicization of something that could be very serious. Austin appointed Bishop Garrison to lead Countering Extremism Working Group (CEWG) in 2021 even though Garrison tweeted in 2019 any supporter of then-President Donald Trump was an unequivocal supporter of extremism and racism.

Of course we didn’t need to wait for the Pentagon to release the latest findings because anyone with an iota of a brain cell could have looked at all the other evidence available coupled with a general distrust in media narratives and determined something was amiss.

A survey conducted by the RAND Corporation in May of 2023 found veterans are less likely to support far-right or far-left extremist groups when compared to the general public despite the media’s fever dream. RAND found zero evidence to support the claim veterans are more likely to be part of an extremist group than average Americans.

 

[GURPS]

The Lloyd Austin AWOL story isn’t going away. Yesterday one tiny new fact emerged, prompting renewed widespread coverage. The Wall Street Journal’s headline said, “Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s Hospitalization Deepens Mystery of His Absence.” The sub-headline explained, “His No. 2 at the Pentagon didn’t learn of his hospital stay until days after he was admitted.”





The Pentagon is still hiding more about this story than it has disclosed. We already knew that, following an ‘elective procedure,’ Defense Secretary Austin went into Walter Reed’s ICU on Monday and was out of commission until Thursday, apparently telling no one but his doctors. His second-in-command Kathleen Hicks took over, but apparently didn’t know why she was taking over, which is why it never occurred to her to tell anyone about Austin’s condition. At the time, she was on vacation in Puerto Rico.

For four days, Ms. Hicks ran the entire U.S. military from her hotel room, in between spa appointments.

If you believe any of that.

Yesterday’s new information was that the Pentagon has deigned to give we the peasants a tiny new morsel of information, the fact Austin was in “severe pain” on New Year’s Eve before he went into the ICU. That’s it. We still have no idea what’s wrong with him, whether he’s still in the hospital, what’s his prognosis, how his severe pain is going, or anything useful. It seems the Pentagon is now operating as its own independent government. Civilian oversight? What’s that?

It might even be a whole separate country at this point.

You know who else is AWOL? Joe Biden. He has not publicly commented on Austin’s hospitalization, even to reassure the country that everything is under control. Biden’s comments on the story are from spokesmen claiming to be reporting Biden’s words. But Biden hasn’t said anything. Do we know for sure that Biden knows?

Yesterday, Biden was in South Carolina for campaign reasons but refused to answer any questions from reporters.





CLIP: Biden refused to answer reporter’s questions about Secretary Austin (0:21).

Even more bizarre, the statements issued on Biden’s behalf claim Biden is perfectly satisfied with Secretary Austin’s services and has no plans to take any action despite the number two man in the nuclear chain disappearing for a week after an ‘elective procedure.’

It’s almost like the Pentagon is running the country instead of the other way around.

☕️ CONFLICTS OF INTEREST ☙ Tuesday, January 9, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

More 2024 disclosures! Fani Willis caught with, uh, hand in the taxpayer cookie jar; new Lloyd Austin details; Portlander finds Alaska Air door plug; 9th Cir. re-stays Ca. gun law; and a good example.

www.coffeeandcovid.com

 

[GURPS]

Lawfare Against Trump Is Running Out of Gas​

Do we recall when leftist legal eagles claimed that of all the iffy Trump indictments, Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis had the best case against Trump?

The phone call, we were told, was proof of “election interference.” It was Willis who got the first Trump “mug shot.” It was Willis, we were assured, who got Trump with the goods on tape, begging election officials to “find” the requisite missing votes that would prove his victory (note that he did not say “invent” the votes but to look for a supposedly existing trove of them).

And now Willis’s signature case is in shambles.

We learn, allegedly, that 1) Willis hired her stealth boyfriend Nathan Wade as a special counsel, the day before he filed for divorce (whose records were then mysteriously sealed by the court); 2) that Wade so far has received over $650,000 as special counsel, reportedly including a miraculous ability to charge for 24 hours of continuous legal service in a single day; 3) that Willis and Wade allegedly have used her greenlighted windfall to him to go on a number of pricey junkets and cruises; 4) that to try an ex-president and the leading candidate in the 2024 presidential election, Willis picked Wade who had never tried a single felony case and was previously a “personal injury/accident” lawyer; 5) that the supposedly apolitical Willis had consulted with the January 6 partisan congressional special committee, while Wade had met for marathon meetings with the Biden White House legal counsel (and apparently billed Georgia taxpayers for receiving such federal tutorials).

The legal community’s initial dismissal of this sordid prosecutor’s office is reminiscent of the immediate efforts to downplay Claudine Gay’s plagiarism. But the charade will eventually end the same way, in this case with the resignation and likely indictment of the prosecutor, along with her boyfriend, who concocted quite a scheme at the expense of the taxpayers. Both have made a mockery of their indictment of an ex-president and, if the allegations are true, will be disbarred and prosecuted.

The other three indictments are even weaker. Alvin Bragg claims that Donald Trump’s efforts a near decade ago to enact nondisclosure agreements and payments to remain silent about embarrassing behavior constituted “campaign finance violations.”

If so, what then defines campaign violations when Ms. Clinton brazenly destroyed nearly 30,000 subpoenaed campaign-era emails, ordered subpoenaed communication devices smashed, illegally hired a foreign national to find dirt on a campaign rival, and used three paywalls to hide her hush payments to British subject Steele to concoct a smear dossier—with help from Russian sources—to destroy her 2016 rival?

Letitia James, apparently for the first time in New York history, believes a bank was somehow wronged when its seasoned auditors viewed Trump’s assets, approved a loan to him, profited from his timely payments of interest and principles, and lodged no complaints against Trump or his company.

James apparently believes that Donald Trump is the first and most egregious real estate baron in New York history who inflated the value of his holdings. Her indictments thus supposedly have nothing to do with a left-wing political activist who ran for attorney general on promises to get Trump.

As far as Jack Smith, he supposedly was to be focused on Trump’s removal of classified presidential files to an insecure location at his Mar-a-Lago home and Trump’s “insurrectionary” actions on January 6. But he seems way beyond that now and is trying to put a gag order on the presidential frontrunner and to ensure Trump is in court during the 2024 campaign—challenging the very administration that appointed Smith in the first place.

In truth, Trump was the first ex-president in history to be indicted for a dispute with archivists over the status and security of removed classified files. Such disagreements were historically adjudicated bureaucratically rather than criminally, and certainly not with performance-art FBI swat raids into an ex-presidential residence.

Moreover, true insurrectionists do not instruct protestors to assemble peacefully and patriotically. Insurrectionists themselves do not try to overthrow governments while unarmed and accompanied by bare-chested buffoons with cow horns and slow-moving septuagenarians draped in American flags. And during an “insurrection,” unarmed “rebels” are usually not invited into the government quarters by supposed government doormen, among them perhaps 150-200 FBI informants. They are usually not shot and killed for the crime of entering a broken window while unarmed. And governments need not lie about the violence of insurrectionaries if they are truly insurrectionists.

 

[GURPS]

In the you-can’t-make-it-up category, the New York Post ran a remarkable story yesterday headlined, “FAA’s diversity push includes focus on hiring people with ‘severe intellectual’ and ‘psychiatric’ disabilities.” It wasn’t exactly news, per se, but it added some pretty important context to the Boeing doorplug incident, where last week part of the side of the plane “departed the aircraft” going 600 mph at 16,000 feet, fortunately not killing anybody but stripping off one passenger’s shirt, sucking out a bunch of cell phones, and creating what sounds a lot more like a painful ordeal than a relaxing flight.



Anyway, diligent New York Post reporters did some digging and found that for most of the last year, the FAA has been focused on recruiting everyone except qualified candidates including — and I am not making this up — people with issues, euphemistically referred to as “severe intellectual and psychiatric disabilities.”

Um.

The FAA’s “Diversity and Inclusion” hiring plan claimed that “diversity is integral to achieving FAA’s mission of ensuring safe and efficient travel across our nation and beyond.” I think we can all agree that safety and efficiency are, in fact, what the FAA should be aiming for. But what’s not entirely clear is how it helps improve safety and efficiency to put people with “severe intellectual and psychiatric disabilities” in charge of the nation’s critical air industry.

When it comes to air travel, safety first, right? I mean, they even make us take our shoes off, for crying out loud. And don’t get me started on the ‘enhanced’ patdowns. It’s too soon. I’m not ready to talk about it yet.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s good to help disabled people get jobs. I’m all for laws banning discriminating against disabled people who can do the same job as a fully abled person, or however you say it. A person in a wheelchair should be able to get a job as a bookkeeper, with no problems. I’d even allow that the employer might be required to buy that employee a wider desk to accommodate the wheelchair, depending on how much it costs, of course.

But it’s not clear to me at all that employers should be discriminating against non-disabled people by preferring disabled people. That doesn’t seem fair. Beyond that, the FAA seems to have lost the plot a little. The idea is: it’s good to give a disabled person an equal shot if they can do the same job just as well.

Don’t cancel me. But I have serious doubts whether issue-plagued people with “severe intellectual and psychiatric disabilities” can do important airline safety jobs just as well as smart, sane people can. Never mind whether they’re severe, I’m not even sure if people with regular intellectual and psychiatric disabilities are a good fit for a high-stress, high-stakes job like controlling airplanes or anything adjacent to that.

☕️ ERUPTIONS ☙ Monday, January 15, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Racism made DA Willis hire her boy toy; Soros' DA strategy starts to look stinky; NBC's latest hilarious Trump conspiracy theory; CDC covered up early cardiac problems; FAA likes issue-people; more.

www.coffeeandcovid.com

 

[GURPS]

Costly Biden Rule Threatens To Put Louisiana Shrimpers Out Of Business, Lawsuit States​

“The bureaucrats who instituted this rule ignored the economic devastation it will cause to shrimpers,” Pelican Institute founder James Baehr said in a statement. “This unnecessary and unconstitutional rule is a direct attack on Louisiana livelihoods and culture.”

The new rule mandates an expensive new update to shrimpers boats, and one that is, by the data, unnecessary, the lawsuit argues.

“These [NMFS] bureaucrats ignored data showing 1) the devastating financial impact the rule would have on Louisiana shrimpers and 2) the complete lack of environmental threat facing inshore turtles – as only two documented interactions with sea turtles have occurred in 55 years and neither was harmed – and turtle nests are thriving,” said the lawsuit, a copy of which was obtained by The Daily Wire.

In addition, the LSA filing accused the Biden administration of violating the regulatory protocol when implementing the new rule.

“Defendants have violated the [Administrative Procedures Act (APA)] by (1) failing to show the need for a new rule without any evidence that sea turtles inhabit Louisiana’s inshore waters and thereby encounter skimmer trawls, (2) refusing to consider relevant data supporting an exclusion zone for inshore waters of Louisiana despite the State of Louisiana’s request for an exclusion zone, and (3) ignoring significant industry reliance interests by the shrimpers,” the lawsuit said.

 

[GURPS]

Government Paid Left-Wing Academics to Write ‘Counter-Propaganda’​

"Disinformation" is one of those words that has lost all meaning. Now, it generally refers to information that the elites would prefer the unwashed masses not to have, like the COVID lab leak or Hunter Biden's laptop.

Sen. Josh Hawley has uncovered that the government has paid $700,000 to a group to "write blog posts that criticized Donald Trump and other conservatives under the guise of 'media literacy.'" That's the hot new thing in education as well — teaching students how to recognize misinformation.

And who is writing these blog posts? Left-wing academics.

Hawley sent a letter to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas Wednesday. Hawley writes:

Your Department provided a grant to the University of Rhode Island’s Media Education Lab to create “counter-propaganda.” This grant was given through the Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention (TVTP) Grant Program, which “provides funding … to prevent targeted violence and terrorism.” In its application, the Lab wrote that it would address “propaganda and misinformation concerning topics including immigration, racial justice, the coronavirus, and vaccination” and “build on top of concerns about so-called ‘fake news’ and ‘cancel culture.’” The Lab planned to use funds to create “counter-propaganda.” Your Department gave them $700,000 to do so.

There appears to be a pattern of funneling taxpayer dollars through the TVTP program to disparage conservatives. Last year, reports indicated that your Department provided a grant to a University of Dayton program to fight “domestic violent extremism and hate movements.” The year prior to the grant award, the university’s Human Rights Center—which runs the program—hosted a seminar during which the Christian Broadcasting Network, the National Rifle Association, Fox News, and other mainstream conservative organizations were included in a “pyramid of far-right radicalization” with neo-Nazis and white supremacists. Your Department gave the University of Dayton program more than $350,000.

 

[GURPS]

 

[GURPS]