Hard to know quite what to say about this, but the voice of the narrator is annoying enough that you might want to mute it:
Biden makes a speech and gives a press conference
I didn’t have the stomach to watch either. You can read about both from Ace, here and here, and also at Legal Insurrection.
There were quite a few extraordinary things Biden said, and I don’t mean that in a good way. But perhaps the most ironic was this (words in brackets mine):
Democrats are expecting to lose bigly in the 2022 elections, so of course, Biden preemptively is suggesting the 2022 elections may not be legitimate. That’s just how Biden framed it at his press conference today:
“Oh, yeah, I think [the 2022 election] could easily be illegitimate … The increase in the prospect of being illegitimate is in proportion to not being able to get these reforms [HR1] passed.”
…Asked if he still believes the next election’s results will be legit if voting rights bill isn’t passed, Biden says this: …”It all depends on whether or not we’re able to make the case…that some of this is being set up to try to alter the outcome of the election.”
So, whether or not the election is “illegitimate” depends on the success of the messaging?
The irony comes, of course, from the fact that the Democrats spent Trump’s entire presidency questioning the legitimacy of his presidency as well as manufacturing fake evidence such as the Steele dossier in order to supposedly prove it and remove him from office, and then had the cojones to call the right traitors and lying conspiracy theorists for questioning whether fraud had been committed in the 2020 election subsequent to widespread relaxation of voting security rules and reports of suspicious election night goings-on.
Now Biden – and I think we can safely assume it’s with the acquiescence of whatever group advises him these days – is preemptively alleging fraud if the Democrats’ pet legislation isn’t passed. This informs us once again – not that we need any reminders – of the intensity of the Democrats’ desire for the “reforms” in HR1. They think that bill or its equivalent would provide the keys not only to victory in 2022 despite the fact that the American people have turned on them, but they also believe it would enable them to continue in power indefinitely through a number of other “reforms” such as packing SCOTUS and creating several new states that are reliably Democrat.
An implication of Biden’s argument is that, since the voting measures that would be enacted in HR1 are not the way America has voted for its entire history (except for some blue states in very recent years and some new supposedly COVID-based measures in 2020), every previous election except the one that elected Joe Biden was illegitimate.
Biden said a bunch of other awful stuff, but some of it is described in those posts I linked from Ace. Here’s a discussion of some of Biden’s message on Ukraine, which seemed to give Putin the go-ahead for action there short of a full-scale invasion.
Virginia’s new AG has an idea for dealing with those Soros DAs
In a statement given to the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Victoria LaCivita, a spokesperson for [AG] Miyares, defended the move, saying, “During the campaign, it was made clear that now-Attorney General-elect Miyares and Attorney General Herring have very different visions for the office.”
“We are restructuring the office, as every incoming AG has done in the past,” Civita added.
As a candidate, Miyares had stated that “George Soros-backed Commonwealth’s attorneys are not doing their jobs,” and he promised to prosecute crimes that progressive attorneys had ignored…
As Attorney General-elect, Miyares also announced that he would be pursuing legislation under Governor Glen Youngkin (R) that “would essentially say, if the chief law enforcement officer in a jurisdiction – either the chief of police or the sheriff – makes a request because a commonwealth’s attorney is not doing their job, then I’m going to do their job for them.”
“I’m thinking specifically, some of the so-called ‘social justice’ commonwealth’s attorneys that have been elected particularly in Northern Virginia. We’re obviously aware of some pretty horrific cases,” he added.
So both Miyares – described as “the first statewide elected Latino in Virginia’s history” – and Youngkin are not messing around when it comes to their campaign promises. This seems to be a potentially viable way to deal with Soros DAs who decide to allow criminals to flourish. There are issues of jurisdiction, I suppose – can the state AG override the decisions of the locally elected DAs? My guess is that the answer is “yes,” as long as legislation empowers them to do so and the head of police in that jurisdiction makes such a request. It’s a creative solution.
Roundup
(1) Kudos to Professor William Jacobson of Legal Insurrection for being the named plaintiff in a class action suit against the state of New York for its racially-based discriminatory COVID treatment guidelines. Read all about it here.
(2) RIP to blogger “Oregon Muse,” who had a regular gig at Ace’s writing the Morning Rant and the weekly chess column and book thread. I don’t know any personal details about Oregon Muse (such as, for example, his age), but I regularly read his Morning Rant and the news of his death is shocking and sad. Here’s the article at Ace’s. Oregon Muse apparently died of COVID. Condolences to his family and to the Ace of Spades community.
(3) RIP to actress Yvette Mimieux. She was 80 years old, and in her heyday a truly lovely actress with a delicate beauty. By sheer chance and some convoluted circumstances involving the weather, about 45 years ago (!) I spent a day with Mimieux and her then-husband Stanley Donen in a Malibu beach house owned by a friend of my brother-in-law. I doubt that either Donen or Mimieux could have been too happy about spending a rainy day in a beach house with four strangers (me, my then-husband, my brother-in-law, and his wife). Donen was rather taciturn, but Mimieux was as friendly and gracious as could be, making the best of the situation. That seems memorable to me.
(4) Face mask mandates and other COVID restrictions end in Britain. The timing is interesting.
(5) Justices Sotomayor and Gorsuch issue a joint statement saying NPR’s Nina Totenberg is a liar, or at the very least mistaken. I had suspected as much when I first read the report that Gorsuch was a meanie to Sotomayor (you can read the details at the link), and I wondered whether NPR or Totenberg – who’s made a career out of reporting supposedly inside info on the Supreme Court – had checked with the justices themselves or whether they were relying on some third or fourth party. Seems like probably the latter.
Many rank-and-file Democrats are just fine with governmental COVID tyranny
Insane survey of Democratic voters in a recently poll:
-55% support fines against unvaxxed
-59% support house arrest
-48% support prison for questioning vax efficacy on social media
-45% support internment camps
-47% support surveillance
-29% support the state taking their kids pic.twitter.com/w2bK9zW5a0— Alex Rubinstein (@RealAlexRubi) January 17, 2022
If you read the fine print there, you’ll notice that it isn’t just Republicans who oppose these things, but Independents have a profile very similar to Republicans on this issue.
If that very same poll had been taken prior to COVID, using a hypothetical virus with similar lethality, I wonder whether the answers from Democrats would have been at all similar to what they are now. It’s not a stretch to think that more Democrats than Republicans would have been in favor of the restrictive measures even in such a pre-COVID hypothetical poll. But my guess is that their numbers would have been much lower. Nearly two years of COVID restrictions and justifying propaganda have normed the idea of draconian responses to individual resistance. The public frog has become used to the boiling water of tyranny (and yes, I know that tale isn’t really true of frogs).
Open thread 1/19/22
Why was Martial Simon free to kill Michelle Go?
More on the killing of Michelle Go, who was pushed to her death this past Saturday in front of an oncoming New York subway train, can be found here:
[New York’s Asian[] Community leaders said that even if Saturday’s fatal attack was not motivated by racial hatred, it added to a sense of palpable fear among Asian-Americans.
“This is horrifying. It’s a horrible attack on yet another one of our citizens,” said Wai Wah Chin, charter president of the Chinese-American Citizen’s Alliance of Greater New York. “This has to stop.
Prevention is worth a pound of cure. There were police officers in the Times Square station where the killing occurred, but I doubt they’re allowed to arrest someone for being a public nuisance – which was what Simon had previously been until the fatal moment that happened in an instant. Simon (previously referred to as “Martial” because earlier news reports had his first and last names reversed) had a lengthy history of mental illness and criminality, and it’s not as though the state hadn’t tried to intervene previously:
“He’s been on medication for over 20 years and in and out of mental hospitals in New York,” a woman who identified herself as Martial’s sister, Josette, told The Post.
But there are limits to how long someone can be kept in a mental hospital for merely being crazy, and it’s also very expensive. Treatment with drugs often helps when the person is in the hospital, so authorities can’t justify keeping the person much longer. But on release he or she often stops taking the drugs.
This is just plain tragic, for everyone involved (in particular for Michelle Go, but not just for her):
Josette Simon wept as she recalled she once even begged a hospital to keep her troubled brother locked up after his life was derailed by mental illness.
“He was a hardworking man, he was a giving man,” Simon, 65, said through tears of her younger brother, Martial Simon, 61.
“Somehow, in his 30s, something happened and he lost it,” she said. “He kept seeing and hearing people after him. One of my sisters took him in. He stayed, and then he said, ‘I have to go back to New York.’ “…
Josette Simon, who lives outside Atlanta, Ga., said her brother was diagnosed with schizophrenia, with his conditioning worsening after their mother died 23 years ago.
“She was taking care of him,” Simon said. “She had to call the police on him a couple of times, but after that, he went downhill. He’s been in and out of mental hospitals at least 20 years.”
And here it is, just as I suspected emphasis mine]:
“I remember begging one of the hospitals, ‘Let him stay,’ because once he’s out, he didn’t want to take medication, and it was the medication that kept him going,” his sister told The Post.
Schizophrenia is generally incurable. These situations are rather common. You can’t keep everyone locked up forever against their will, and fortunately most people with schizophrenia will never become violent. But they are somewhat more likely to become violent than people without the illness, although it can be hard to predict who will be the ones to harm others:
Although the majority of patients with schizophrenia are not actually violent, an increased tendency toward violent behaviors is known to be associated with schizophrenia. There are several factors to consider when identifying the subgroup of patients with schizophrenia who may commit violent or aggressive acts. Comorbidity with substance abuse is the most important clinical indicator of increased aggressive behaviors and crime rates in patients with schizophrenia. Genetic studies have proposed that polymorphisms in the promoter region of the serotonin transporter gene and in the catechol-O-methyltransferase gene are related to aggression…Management of comorbid substance use disorder may help prevent violent events and overall aggression. Currently, clozapine may be the only effective antipsychotic medication to repress aggressive behavior.
Good luck with any of that once the person is outside the hospital.
Simon also had a criminal record, although it doesn’t appear to have involved actual violence (it may have involved a threat of a gun that didn’t exist, however). Reports on the exact charges differ, but here’s one:
Martial has a criminal record with at least three arrests going back to 1998, when he was busted for robbery, with the latest coming in October 2019 for criminal possession of a controlled substance. He served two years in state prison for attempted robbery and was released in August 2021, state records show.
That last robbery was unsuccessful (in another account, I read that the person ran away). But here we have “controlled substance,” so Simon probably was abusing some sort of substance, which would have increased his risk for criminality.
What to do with someone like that? Even before Bragg became the DA, Simon’s crimes don’t appear to have warranted very lengthy sentences. And although he was insane, it was probably only when he didn’t take his meds. A dilemma, indeed, because you can’t lock up everyone who fits that description on the off chance that the person will go on to commit a heinous crime.
DA Bragg gave what he considered reassurance to frightened New Yorkers:
When asked if New Yorkers had to be worried about the suspect being released immediately from jail, he said no.
It probably takes a crime of this magnitude, however, for Bragg to keep someone in jail pending trial. There is little doubt in my mind that, according to Bragg’s guidelines for charging criminals, Simon would not have gone to prison in the first place for his earlier offenses.
Curtis Sliwa – the man who founded the Guardian Angels in New York, and who recently ran for mayor as the Republican nominee and lost to Eric Adams – had some remarks, too:
Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa said he’s seen the suspect “many times” ranting in the subway.
“He will have a conversation and then all of a sudden he will have a psychotic disorder,” Sliwa said. “Again, an Asian gets pushed in front of a train.
So Simon was a fixture in that station and perhaps in others. There are many such people, more than there were when Giuliani and Bloomberg were the mayors. They created an atmosphere that it wouldn’t be tolerated. How was this done? Was it the “broken windows” policy? Here’s one opinion (from 2015):
“Giuliani is right. De Blasio is in denial,” said Floyd Parks, 60, a vagrant who was hanging around a recently broken-up homeless encampment in Harlem.
Writing in Sunday’s Post, Giuliani blasted de Blasio’s “so-called ‘progressive’ view” of homelessness, saying the city should be pushing addicts and the mentally ill into treatment, and everyone else into shelters.
Longtime vagrant Mohamed Rasul, 60, said that under deBlasio, the homeless decide their own fates.
“I’ve seen mayors come and go, and I’ve never been as comfortable as under de Blasio,” he said.
“I have choice under de Blasio, and I choose to be homeless.”
…Rasul said that under Giuliani, cops would wake him by smacking something “with a baton, shine a flashlight in my eyes and cart me off to a shelter.”
“These days, if I don’t want to cooperate, I don’t have to,” he said.
Indeed. And Martial Simon didn’t have to, until now.
Kamala’s nightmare
I tend to avoid watching either Biden or Harris speak, but sometimes they’re nearly impossible to avoid. The other day I heard part of an interview with Harris, and I was appalled.
I expected very little, but it was worse than I expected. She was nearly incoherent, every bit as bad as Biden, and worse because what’s her excuse? I’d seen her talk before she became VP and in the early days of the Biden administration, and although she wasn’t great at expressing herself nor was she “likeable,” her thoughts weren’t especially difficult to follow. They are now, at least when I’ve seen her.
Here an article that references the interview I saw:
Last Thursday’s interview with Craig Melvin of Democrat-friendly NBC sealed her fate. The Zen koan-like statement, “It is time for us to do what we have been doing. And that time is every day,” closes the case, a brilliantly meaningless platitude that seems to demand meditation, as if there must be some enlightenment lurking in the vast mental emptiness…
In the wake of the Melvin interview, the Washington Free Beacon has put together a video resembling the old Saturday Night Live segments of “deep thoughts” with genuine Kamala quotes of notable vacuity…
Here it is, although I don’t think it really captures what I mean:
Thomas Lifson, the author of the article I linked, thinks Harris is stupid. I disagree, although I acknowledge that she’s not the brightest bulb. What I think she is, is scared. Really really scared.
Based on watching her facial expressions, speech patterns, and body language, my gut feeling is that Harris is under so much pressure that she’s cracking somewhat. I don’t mean it’s nervous breakdown time; I just mean major jitters. I think Kamala senses how badly things are going. She knows she has to defend the indefensible and lacks the nimble snarkiness of Jen Psaki, the ability to lie without showing a “tell.”
I believe that Harris suspects – or fears – that, having fulfilled her ambitions and become VP, it’s an example of the Peter Principle and she’s unqualified or at least unready. Her day-to-day existence has become a bit like the actor’s dream or the student anxiety dream come to life, in which everyone is watching you and you’ve forgotten your lines or forgotten to study the subject.
For Harris, it may be some of both. I think it generally takes an extraordinary person to prepare for the job of president or vice-president. Some people are quick studies and have nerves of steel, or they’ve been major politicos for so long that they’re functioning more or less on automatic. I don’t see that with Harris, who looks and sounds frightened to me.
She remains personally ambitious, power-hungry, dedicated to whatever leftist beliefs animate her. But she’s winging it and she knows it. And it’s not turning out anything like she expected.
I know the rumors are that Harris doesn’t even try to read the position papers and briefings her aides give her. Maybe so. But anyone who passed the bar exam has to at least have the ability to study really hard. Has that skill deserted her? Perhaps. But I think part of the problem is that when a person is cramming for an exam, even if a lot is riding on the result in the individual sense, that person isn’t constantly on stage at the same time being scrutinized by the entire world and dealing with huge consequences that affect millions of people. But that’s Kamala’s situation right now, and I believe that she fears she’s flunking the test (cognitive and real-life) and will flunk it even if she crams for it.
And her supposed tutor and mentor and experienced example, Joe Biden? Completely and utterly unhelpful, except as an example of what not to do.
Open thread 1/18/22
Here’s a companion piece to the video in yesterday’s open thread:
Hey, why not sneak in a Bee Gees tune, who with 1000+ songs have one for everything? Originally released in 1975, this is a slightly later live version (and yes, I know it should be “just my dog and me):
Those Texas synagogue hostages apparently freed themselves
The initial articles’ descriptions of the end of the Texas synagogue standoff were so murky that I wondered what really happened. Had law enforcement been instrumental in freeing the hostages, or not? Had they been let go? Had they escaped? It seems to be the latter:
Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker told BBC partner CBS News the group had been praying when he heard a click that turned out to be the hostage-taker’s gun, and he and three others were held captive.
“We were threatened the entire time but fortunately none of us were physically injured,” he said.
One hostage was released after six hours, while the other three escaped several hours later.
“When I saw an opportunity, when he wasn’t in a good position, I made sure the gentlemen were still with me, they were ready to go,” Rabbi Cytron-Walker recalled. “The exit wasn’t too far away, I told them to go.”
He then threw a chair at the gunman and headed for the door.
“It was terrifying. It was overwhelming and we’re still processing. It’s been a lot,” Rabbi Cytron-Walker said.
How did the hostage-taker die? I’ve read several articles, and although it’s somewhat unclear, it appears that after the hostages had escaped, the authorities entered and killed him (although I continue to wonder if perhaps he killed himself, as sometimes happens).
Akram was a British citizen, the FBI said. He arrived in the U.S. two weeks prior to his death via New York City’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, a federal law enforcement source told CBS News.
A British citizen of Pakistani descent. Where did he get the money to travel? How did he obtain the weapon? He apparently wasn’t on any terror watch lists, and yet this was his history:
Akram had been the subject of an exclusion order in 2001 banning him from Blackburn magistrates court after he made remarks about the September 11, 2001 attacks on the US, saying he wished a court usher had been on the planes flown into buildings to commit mass murder…
A community source in Blackburn said Akram was known to behave unusually, including in and around mosques in the Lancashire town.
Not enough to stop him from getting a passport and coming here. There are probably thousands of British subjects with a similar profile – vaguely problematic and suggestive of sympathy with Islamic terrorism but nothing so very unusual.
The stated goal of his hostage-taking was to free a U.S.-trained Pakistani neuroscientist who is held prisoner in the US, having been convicted of terrorist activity. This explains why the gunman chose this particular Texas location:
Siddiqui was convicted in 2010. Now 49, she is currently being held a short drive from the Colleyville synagogue at FMC Carswell prison in Fort Worth, Texas, according to a database of federal inmates.
Dubbed “Lady al-Qaida” in the media, Siddiqui’s release has also been sought by groups including ISIS and the Taliban. When she was convicted, protests erupted across Pakistan by those who believe Siddiqui was innocent.
So this has been a big cause in Pakistan.
The rabbi mentioned something the FBI and various other organizations actually got right:
“Over the years, my congregation and I have participated in multiple security courses from the Colleyville Police Department, the FBI, the Anti-Defamation League, and Secure Community Network,” Cytron-Walker said in a statement late Sunday.
“We are alive today because of that education. I encourage all Jewish congregations, religious groups, schools, and others to participate in active-shooter and security courses,” he said.
“In the last hour of our hostage crisis, the gunman became increasingly belligerent and threatening,” Cytron-Walker added. “Without the instruction we received, we would not have been prepared to act and flee when the situation presented itself.”
Indeed.
Murder in a New York subway station
A 40-year-old woman named Michelle Go was killed Saturday morning by a 61-year-old vagrant who pushed her onto the tracks in the path of an oncoming train. The woman was Asian, the man black.
That NY Post writer asks a good question:
The point is this: Why are the subways so full of babbling lunatics in the first place — them and nodding-out addicts and in-your-face panhandlers and cold-weather campers who easily could find space in New York’s billion-dollar-plus shelter system, but who prefer not to?
They are there because de Blasio aggressively rejected the tough-love approach to public-space management initiated by Rudy Giuliani and maintained by Mike Bloomberg. They kept the city’s subways and terminals and parks mostly clean and safe for two decades.
The question made me think of my own experiences when I used to ride the subways as a child starting in the late 50s and going through the mid-60s. That’s a long time before de Blasio or even Bloomberg or Giuliani. Most of the time I rode the subways I was on my way to ballet class, which meant destinations that were some of the rougher parts of New York at the time (Times Square and a bit north on Broadway or 8th Avenue). I often was returning home in the early evenings.
It was a frightening experience – at least, I was frightened – because the subway seemed to me to be “full of babbling lunatics.” How full? I don’t know, but over the course of a few years I encountered quite a few on the fairly empty trains I often rode after transferring from express to local for the last leg of my subway journey.
My most vivid memory along these lines was once when the train was halted between stations for quite a while, which used to happen regularly back then on that line. A guy sitting across from me took the opportunity of the relative silence to begin a long rambling rant in which he blamed us for his various ills and disappointments, and threatened us with death. He sounded very angry, although he didn’t actually do anything but talk. There were only a few other people on the train, and no one did or said anything. I didn’t want to move away and draw his attention, so I just averted my eyes. After what seemed like a really long time, the train started up again.
I knew such people were drunk or insane or on drugs (or all three), because it was obvious. But that didn’t make them any less frightening. That’s why I was so delighted when New York was cleaned up during the Giuliani years. I’d visit my family and felt safe riding the trains, even at night – for the first time in my life, I’ll add. That feeling of safety and relief continued for decades.
I wouldn’t feel safe anymore.
There’s a heartbreaking photo of the murdered woman at that first link. I notice that the crime occurred in the Times Square station, my old stomping grounds. At first I thought that “Saturday morning” might mean the wee hours of the morning, but apparently it was 9:40 AM. Here are more details:
Before [the killing], police allege [the perpetrator] was also taunting another woman, who was able to escape unharmed. Police say that woman is not Asian.
“He approaches her. He gets in her space. She gets very raised up, very alarmed. She tries to move away from him, and he gets close to her and she feels that he was about to physically push them onto the train. As she’s walking away, she witnesses the crime where he pushes our other victim in front of the train,” NYPD Detective Bureau Assistant Chief Jason Wilcox said.
Transit police say there were six officers assigned to the Times Square station, and two of those officers were on the platform when the incident happened.
So, police were already present, and it still happened. Police probably can’t stop something that occurs that quickly, especially it they’re not allowed to do anything proactive about vagrants or public nuisances.
The problem, as you might imagine, has this background:
When former Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. announced he would no longer prosecute farebeating, he symbolically surrendered the subways to the lawless.
That is, if the DA doesn’t give a damn, why should criminals, to say nothing of people like Simon Martial? And now Vance’s successor, Alvin Bragg, has ratified the policy — and, indeed, has extended it far beyond simple turnstile jumping.
Sources tell CBS2 [that] Martial has a previous record of three emotionally disturbed incidents. They add he has four prior arrests, including several for robbery.
Police say there was a current warrant out for his arrest for allegedly violating his parole conditions.
Was there any attempt to find him? I doubt it. There are probably thousands of people like that in New York City. He probably wasn’t all that easy to find, since he was a vagrant, although maybe he was a fixture in that particular Time Square station and would have been easy to find.
The article mentions that “the train operator has ‘incredible trauma’ after witnessing the incident.” Of course, and the people on the platform who witnessed it probably will have trouble shaking it as well.
Officials say they’re not sure if race was an issue in the targeting. I had originally thought of course it was, but from the more detailed description of the perpetrator’s actions that day – first targeting another woman who wasn’t Asian – it sounds like his selection of the victim may have been random and opportunistic.
I haven’t been to New York since COVID began, but I know that a few years ago I started standing far away from the edge of the platform while waiting for a train – near the wall if there’s a wall, but if there’s just a middle platform between two tracks, then equidistant between the tracks. Was that during de Blasio’s tenure? I don’t know, but my guess would be that it was.
Roundup time
(1) Neither the FBI nor the MSM cover themselves with glory over their story of the hostage-taking at the Texas synagogue. Nor does Joe Biden.
(2) Those ballot dropboxes in Wisconsin in the 2020 election? A judge declares them illegal. A fat lot of good that does us now, especially since some higher-up court might reverse and say they were legal. Who knows what SCOTUS would say if it ever came to that? But if you read the article, you’ll see how the dropboxes could rather easily have enabled significant fraud, although we’ll never know whether they actually did – which is part of the problem: faulty or nonexistent chain of custody.
(3) Governor Youngkin of Virginia hits the ground running.
(4) Today is Martin Luther King Day, and one question I’ve had is the one posed in this NY Post editorial: what would he think of America today?
(5) Maine temporarily suspends the license of and orders a psych evaluation for a physician who went against COVID medical orthodoxy. The doctor also lied to a pharmacy about a patient’s diagnosis in order to obtain hydroxychloroquine, saying the patient had Lyme disease when the diagnosis was actually COVID, but this doesn’t appear to be the reason for the suspension and psych evaluation.