More murders in Memphis

The New Neo Posted on by

Ezekiel Kelly is in custody after a shooting spree in Memphis in which several people appear to have been murdered:

Police said they received reports he was recording his actions on Facebook. In a Facebook Live video seen by a WREG staff member, Kelly was seen getting out of a car, walking into the AutoZone on Jackson Avenue, and firing shots. The video was later removed.

So, publicity hound as well as murderer.

There are parallels in his background to the history of the perp in the murder of Eliza Fletcher: same city, and an earlier record that included very violent crimes that didn’t result in the victim’s death but might have. Attempted murder was one of the earlier charges against Kelly, but he pled down to aggravated assault, got a three-year sentence, and was out in two. Because Kelly is still only 19, his earlier crime was apparently committed at 17, which may have been part of the reason for the light sentence. But the main reason is probably the usual one: an overburdened system in which prosecutors are happy to plea bargain for all but the most heinous (or politically rewarding to try) cases.

About Kelly’s crimes:

Chief Davis told reporters that suspect Kelly caused at least 8 crime scenes and he killed four people and injuring three more.

My guess also is that his timing was partly inspired by the Fletcher murder. He wanted some of the attention and had to up the ante.

Here are the previous charges against the perp:

Court records also showed more about the teen’s background: He faced four felony charges, including two counts of attempted murder, one count of reckless endangerment and one count of possession of a firearm in 2020 at the age of 17.

Sources told WREG he pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of aggravated assault in the case in 2021. He got three years in that case, but was already out of jail.

I don’t know Memphis; if I’ve ever been there it would have been about 50 years ago, when I went on a long trip through the South. But from what I’ve read recently, the city had gotten very dangerous even before these recent murders (see this). In addition, a month ago a soft-on-crime prosecutor named Steve Mulroy was elected there, but these two men were released prior to that so I doubt Mulroy had much if anything to do with decisions around their release.

Here’s an interview with the Republican whom Mulroy beat, the incumbent DA Amy Weirich. The interview took place shortly before that election a month ago. A few excerpts:

WEIRICH: The 40 juveniles that were transferred last year by the juvenile court system at the request of our office, committed murder in the first degree, murder in the second degree, rape, carjacking, aggravated robbery, criminal attempt murder. These are, the majority of them are 17 years old. And if we didn’t seek transfer at the age of 19, the jurisdiction of the juvenile court runs out and they would be released from custody with absolutely no supervision, no control, no regulations on their conduct. If we didn’t seek that remedy, I wish we didn’t have to. I wish we didn’t have so many juveniles committing the violent crime that we’re seeing in this community, but the answer is not just releasing them.

STARNES: And, you know, I’ve seen the debates and I’ve yet to hear a reporter ask Professor Mulroy the question, ‘Okay, out of the 40 people, which ones would you have charged as a juvenile? Which family doesn’t get justice?’

WEIRICH:Right. And that’s, you know, something I’ve said over and over again. I don’t think this community, because I go everywhere in this community, from North Memphis, to Westwood, to Cordova, to Chelsea, to Smokey City, to Southwind, it doesn’t matter. Everywhere I go in Shelby County, the citizens want the same thing. They want a district attorney who’s going to fight hard when the violent crime occurs. That doesn’t mean that we don’t also do a lot to help rehabilitate and a lot to help intervene…And if a juvenile or an adult offender continues to victimize, they leave us no choice as prosecutors.

Hmmm – Professor Mulroy. That prompted me to look up Mulroy’s background, and I found that he’s a law professor who has also served on the County Commission. I don’t see any criminal prosecutorial experience, although “from 1999-2000 he served as a Special Assistant United States Attorney (a federal prosecutor) in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Alexandria, Virginia.”

His actual field of expertise seems to be election law. See this for a sample of his views, which seem to boil down to “democracy, democracy, democracy requires all sorts of machinations to keep Democrats in power and assure real majority rule; here are my suggestions.” The word “republic” appears nowhere in the rather lengthy piece; the fact that we are a republic, or the reason the Founders created that structure, appears to be of zero interest to him.

NOTE: And here’s a “good guy with gun” story from July 4th that didn’t get much coverage at the time.

What does the GOP Old Guard think?

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter Barry Meislin writes

…”the older generation has had FLAT NOTHING to say about the abusive behavior of either Obama’s outfit or Biden’s….”

THIS is, in fact, the most chilling aspect of this vicious farce.
Dershowitz, whether one agrees with him or not, is unafraid when it comes to defending the Constitution and the rule of law, as he understands it.
The silence of the Old Guard of GOP leaders—and one might assume “decent” Democrats—is deafening, chilling and sinister…
(Or ought one say, “most disappointing”?…)

Many years ago, in my more naive days, I might have thought that most of our “elder statesmen” would be condemning the sort of behavior we’ve seen from the FBI and DOJ under Obama and Biden. I no longer expect such things.

But the comment made me wonder, who are these “Old Guard” of GOP leaders – apart from the Bush/Cheney crowd who hate Trump, because (among other things) he was quite vicious to them over Iraq? I recall Trump saying Bush should have been impeached and that he was evil. In fact, I wrote an article about it – you can find the article here. So one thing that is not a mystery is why the Bushes and Cheneys hate Trump. And many people who support or are allied with Bush/Cheney hate Trump for their own reasons, or on Bush/Cheney’s behalf.

Other Old Guard Republicans? It’s interesting to contemplate that, until Trump’s election, the most recent non-Bush Republican president was Richard Nixon [NOTE: Oops, I was in such a hurry I somehow left out Reagan].

The only non-Bush-allied elder statesman I can come up with is Gingrich, who has pretty consistently defended Trump and criticized Obama and Biden. Googling for a few others I see that John Ashcroft has defended Trump, Kay Baily Hutchison was his NATO ambassador, and Bob Dole endorsed and defended Trump from the start. The only thing Dole split with Trump on was he said he thought Trump lost the 2020 election (“I regret that he did,” Dole added). Dole certainly would be considered the Old Guard – he was 98 when he said that, and close to death.

Sarah Palin, who is a Trump defender, doesn’t really qualify as Old Guard. She’s rather young still, and relatively Trumpish herself.

That’s the Republicans. The silence (or even praise) of old-school Democrats for Obama and Biden’s machinations doesn’t surprise me in the least. Most people are not Dershowitz or Turley; most are not profiles in courage.

Gingrich, on the other hand, who is 79, has been very active on cable news defending Trump and criticizing Democrats and the left. A sample: this and this. Actually, take a look at just about anything Gingrich has said in the last few years and it’s very hard-hitting. Is he elderly enough to be Old Guard? I think so.

Also, for what it’s worth, erstwhile Democrat Joe Lieberman has been consistently critical of Obama’s and now Biden’s Iran Deal, and was pro Abraham Accords.

Modern-day censorship

The New Neo Posted on by

Learning how it’s done:

A U.S. district court judge issued a ruling on Tuesday that requires Chief Medical Adviser to the President Anthony Fauci, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, and other key public health officials to turn over all external communications with Big Tech companies. The ruling is based upon a lawsuit filed against top-ranking Biden administration officials by Missouri and Louisiana Attorneys General Eric Schmitt and Jeff Landry for “colluding with social media companies to censor free speech.”…

The issuance of the court order comes days after the release of bombshell emails showing that the Biden administration coordinated with senior officials at Facebook and Twitter to censor posts about Covid-19 they claimed contained false or misleading information. As reported by The Federalist, “In an email dated July 16, 2021, addressed to U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, a senior representative for Facebook discussed how the company and Biden administration officials met ‘to better understand the scope of what the White House expects from [Facebook] on misinformation going forward.’”

A separate email chain dated July 20, 2021, also shows Digital Director for the White House Covid-19 Response Team Clarke Humphrey asking Facebook if the tech giant could remove a parody Instagram account of Dr. Anthony Fauci, to which a company official replied, “Yep, on it!”

None of this should come as a surprise.

Murder in Memphis

The New Neo Posted on by

A woman named Eliza Fletcher was forcibly abducted while jogging in the early morning in Memphis, and her suspected killer has been apprehended, with a wealth of evidence to tie him to the violent crime, including video of the abduction itself.

One of the many disturbing things about this crime is his history:

Court records show Abston, 38, is a previously convicted kidnapper: He pleaded guilty to especially aggravated kidnapping and robbery in 2001. He was sentenced to 24 years and 11 years in prison, respectively, although it is unclear how long he remained incarcerated and if he served his sentences concurrently…

Abston previously pleaded guilty to kidnapping local attorney Kemper Durand around 2 a.m. May 25, 2000, walking up behind him with a gun and forcing him to get into the trunk of a car, local paper the Memphis Flyer reported at the time. Abston was a minor when he kidnapped Durand and brought him to an ATM to withdraw money.

And here’s an article written not long after Durand’s kidnapping – yesterday I was able to access it, but today for some reason I get an error message. However, I recall it mentioned that at the time of the Durand kidnapping Abston already had a long history of prior juvenile offenses, many of them violent.

Abston obviously has been a very dangerous person for most of his life and certainly was not rehabilitated in prison, and just as obviously although the criminal justice system managed to keep him off the streets for quite a few years, once his time was up within that system, he reverted to his old ways and upped the ante by killing his victim. However, even back in 2000, when he abducted Durand, it was only by chance that Durand was rescued and the court had reason to imagine that if that hadn’t occured, Durand would have been murdered. However, there was no way to prove it and Abson only was sentenced for the crime he actually had committed, not the one he may have intended.

I wonder if anything different might have been done to prevent the murder of Eliza Fletcher. I don’t think, given Abston’s actual crime, there was any way to have justified an even longer sentence, but obviously one might have been in order. The problem is whether the criminal justice system is able to distinguish incorrigible likely-repeat-offenders such as Abston from those who, after serving a long term, don’t go on to commit additional violent crimes.

We don’t know much about Abston’s behavior while in prison, but that could be a clue. Did he get time off for good behavior, or was he making trouble all the time? He obviously didn’t serve the entire 24 years, and he seems to have served the 11 additional years concurrently.

RIP Eliza Fletcher.

Margot Cleveland and new revelations about the MAL raid

The New Neo Posted on by

At The Federalist, Margot Cleveland has seven very interesting observations about Judge Cannon’s written decision ordering a Special Master to review the documents seized in the MAL raid. Here are three of them I want to highlight.

The first concerns a letter sent by the NARA archivist to Trump’s lawyer back in May, after Trump had claimed executive privilege for some documents and the acting archivist Debra Steidel Wall had consulted with the assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel, and then had decided not to honor Trump’s claim of privilege. Here’s what Cleveland writes:

Monday’s order highlighted a key sentence in that same letter and that went less noticed by the press: “NARA will provide the FBI access to the records in question, as requested by the incumbent President, beginning as early as Thursday, May 12, 2022” (emphasis added).

This language indicates that Biden did not merely defer to the NARA but asked the NARA to give the documents to the FBI. Of course, deferring to the NARA’s judgment equated to Biden authorizing the hand-off to the FBI, but this passage suggests a more direct connection between Biden and the investigation into Trump.

Biden has denied any connection or even any knowledge, of course.

This subsequent point of Cleveland’s is connected:

In opposing Trump’s request for a special master, the Biden administration argued that Trump lacked the right to assert “executive privilege” against the current executive branch. The court concluded that the Biden administration’s “position arguably overstates the law,” noting that the Supreme Court has not “rule[d] out the possibility of a former President overcoming an incumbent President on executive privilege matters.”

“Further, just this year,” Cannon continued, “the Supreme Court noted that, at least in connection with a congressional investigation, ‘[t]he questions whether and in what circumstances a former President may obtain a court order preventing disclosure of privileged records from his tenure in office, in the face of a determination by the incumbent President to waive the privilege, are unprecedented and raise serious and substantial concerns.’” To protect former President Trump’s ability to raise a question of executive privilege, then, a special master should review the documents and make an initial assessment, the court concluded.

And in my opinion that should have been done at the outset, either prior to the raid or immediately afterward. Apparently for some unknown reason, however, Trump’s lawyers didn’t file to do this immediately; perhaps it took them a while to research the law on it, or perhaps it was something else. And then the judge took a long time after that to issue the ruling.

To me the behavior of the DOJ is just another indication that the left doesn’t ever expect to lose power. It’s my impression (as far as I know, anyway) that one of the reasons this issue has not been adjudicated before – of a later president who is hostile to the previous president waiving privilege for the former president for matters involving that former president’s administration – is that no previous president has attempted to do so. And if that’s correct, it seems rather obvious to me that no president would want to set that precedent for fear that a subsequent president hostile to him would respond in kind. Each president would seem to want to preserve his own right to assert executive privilege for himself.

That’s why it seems to me that the Biden administration doesn’t ever expect to encounter such a scenario because they don’t ever expect a president from the other side to take office, and even if such a thing were to somehow happen, the DOJ would remain firmly in the left’s hands.

More from Cleveland:

Another revelation from Monday’s order concerned the amount of personal material the FBI seized. “The Government’s inventory reflects a seizure of approximately 11,000 documents and 1,800 other items from Plaintiff’s residence,” the court wrote. Of the material seized, the court said approximately 100 documents contained classification markings. But the FBI also seized some 500 pages of material potentially protected by attorney-client privilege, medical documents, correspondence related to taxes, and accounting information.

That the FBI seized Trump’s passports, articles of clothing, medical records, and accounting and tax documents during the raid of Mar-a-Lago highlights both the breadth (and lack of particularity) of the search warrant and the potential for the Biden administration to use the search as a fishing expedition.

Please read the whole thing.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Mac” expresses what I’ve been feeling too:

I have a sense that politically, culturally, socially, things are *not* going to be ok. Things are *not* going to work out. The America that we knew is not going to survive. The people who will populate the new America do not have the foundation of fundamentally American thinking that we had even when we rebelled against it. Part of the crisis for me is that many or most of my own family are among these new people.

There is no place for people like me in the new America. We will be marginalized and subjugated. I’m old, and I tell myself that I won’t be around, and my descendants will live in a different world and there’s nothing I can do about it. That’s not much help though.

Sometimes, though, I remind myself I’m not the best prognosticator, and that feelings are not facts. I don’t know what the future will bring. I don’t know whether this thing will somehow turn around.

It doesn’t feel that it will turn around, though. But isn’t this partly just what older people often feel? Is that part of this phenomenon? I do know that a lot of my liberal friends don’t seem like happy campers, either. They seem to have a sense of general foreboding, although it’s probably about different things. But it’s not always well-articulated, and I think some of it has to do with a gut feeling of not understanding the forces that have been set loose in the world today.

Here’s a compendium of statements to read, many of them from ancient times, in which old people carp about how society is degenerating and things were falling apart. Of course, sometimes they were correct.

NOTE: The title of this post comes from “The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats, a poem I’ve quoted several times before on this blog. Here it is again:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Special master appointed: Horses escape, judge shuts barn door

The New Neo Posted on by

In my opinion, this ruling comes way too late. The DOJ has had plenty of time to go through the documents and other seized items, if they had enough people working on it – and I am pretty sure they threw enormous numbers into the effort, because that’s how determined they are to get Trump for something:

Federal Judge Aileen M. Cannon has granted Donald Trump’s Motion for Judicial Oversight of the FBI/DOJ handling of records and other things seized during the Mar-a-Lago Raid.

The Order entered today provides, in relevant part (emphasis added):

“Pursuant to the Court’s equitable jurisdiction and inherent supervisory authority, and mindful of the need to ensure at least the appearance of fairness and integrity under the extraordinary circumstances presented, Plaintiff’s Motion [ECF No. 1] is GRANTED IN PART. The Court hereby authorizes the appointment of a special master to review the seized property for personal items and documents and potentially privileged material subject to claims of attorneyclient and/or executive privilege. Furthermore, in natural conjunction with that appointment, and consistent with the value and sequence of special master procedures, the Court also temporarily enjoins the Government from reviewing and using the seized materials for investigative purposes pending completion of the special master’s review or further Court order.”

Much more at the link.

I’m assuming the DOJ will appeal.

Those “election deniers”

The New Neo Posted on by

From Biden’s Thursday night speech:

Democracy cannot survive when one side believes there are only two outcomes to an election: either they win or they were cheated. And that’s where MAGA Republicans are today.

But there is no indication that so-called “MAGA-Republicans” believe that all elections they lose are the result of cheating. In the 2020 presidential election, however, there was reason to believe it based on the loosening of the rules for voting and the way some of the votes in key states came in. But underlying all of that was the unverifiable nature of mail-in voting, which became very common in 2020 with the excuse of COVID, and enabled possible fraud that would be undetectable, thus undermining general trust in elections.

Democrats will never admit that – unless it’s they who lose the election.

Actually, there’s plenty of reason to say that it has been the Democrats who – both in 2000 (which was a bona fide photo finish election) and in 2016 – cannot accept defeat and must charge cheating. To refresh your memory:

I had forgotten this resolution that was introduced in the Missouri House, if I ever even knew about it in the first place. It’s got some good reminders in it, as well:

WHEREAS, House Speaker NancyPelosi indicated that the 2016 election for President of the United States was illegitimate by stating, “Our election was hijacked. There is no question” in her Twitter comments to the nation;

WHEREAS, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has indicated on numerous occasions that President Donald J. Trump and members of his family likely colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 election; and

WHEREAS, in January 2017, Senator Tim Kaine appeared on MCNBC’s “Morning Joe” where he stated, “What we’ve got to do is fight in Congress, fight in the courts, fight in the streets, fight online, fight at the ballot box, and now there’s the momentum to be able to do this”;…

WHEREAS, on November 17, 2018, Senator Richard Blumenthal told MSNBC host Chris Hayes “the evidence is pretty clear that there was collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians”; and

WHEREAS, on January 14, 2020, Nancy Pelosi spread further debunked conspiracy theories and discord by tweeting: “American elections should be decided by the American people, not by the Russian Government. Retweet if you agree”; and…

WHEREAS, in August 2020, Representative Ayanna Pressley stated, on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that, “you know, there needs to be unrest in the streets for as long as there’s unrest in our lives”; and…

WHEREAS, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has referred to the Senate as a “kangaroo court” whose impeachment votes are illegitimate; and

WHEREAS, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has issued threats against individual justices of the Supreme Court of the United States in such a virulent manner…

WHEREAS, these actions are clear and convincing evidence of a long-term pattern of disrespect for the rule of law and disdain for the democratic process; and

WHEREAS, these statements by Democrats in Congress have been unchecked by Democrat leadership, allowing conspiracy theories of Russian interference, Russian collusion, and an “illegitimate” presidential election to grow, leading to a probe into these debunked theories that cost taxpayers millions of dollars…

Let’s focus on Biden himself:

During his first news conference since March, Biden refused to say the country’s upcoming elections would be free and fair or that the results would be legitimate, unless Democrats’ voting reforms were passed.

“I just wanted to clarify: A moment ago, you were asked whether or not you believed that we would have free and fair elections in 2022 if some of these state legislatures reformed their voting protocols,” a reporter said. “You said that it depends. Do you … think that they would in any way be illegitimate?”

I’m not saying it’s going to be legit,” Biden responded. “The increase in the prospect of being illegitimate is in direct proportion to us not being able to get these reforms passed.

He later denied that’s what he meant. Oh, and there was also this from Biden in May of 2019, shortly after he announced his candidacy for the 2020 race:

After a woman [during a visit by Biden to New Hampshire] claimed she had a “very severe case of what’s called Trump Derangement Syndrome,” and that Trump is an “illegitimate president in my mind,” Biden responded: “I absolutely agree.”

We also have this:

Vice President Kamala Harris’ newly appointed communications director Jamal Simmons insisted more than once that George W. Bush’s first presidential election victory was “illegitimate,” according to resurfaced statements and tweets.

While Simmons repeatedly noted that he behaved respectfully toward Bush, his insistence that the 2000 election was stolen pairs awkwardly with the Biden administration’s furious response to former President Donald Trump’s insistence that widespread voter fraud cost him a second term — a claim the White House and many top Democrats have labeled the “Big Lie.”

I could go on and on and on – but really, I could save myself the trouble, because this video provides a host of incontrovertible evidence:

Remember the “Resistance”? Not the people who during WWII opposed the Nazis, but the other – self-styled – “Resistance,” the enormous number of Democrats who declared loudly and often that Trump’s 2016 election was illegitimate, and many of whom went on to try to frame him with lies such as the Steele dossier. And yet Biden and other Democrats who denied and denied Trump’s 2016 election (some of them even denying Bush’s 2000 election) have the gall to accuse the “MAGA Republicans” of what they themselves have repeatedly done. And those same Democrats had even less evidence to go on – except, of course, for the evidence they themselves manufactured.