Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

Some quick takes:

(1) Pay no attention to that election fraud that’s now not even behind the curtain.

(2) Have you noticed how little we hear about Afghanistan these days? That’s what the Biden administration was counting on. But, contrary to their expectations, people haven’t forgotten. It appears to have been the beginning of public opinion turning against the administration – although subsequently, of course, some closer-to-home issues have been driving the polls further down. But I think there’s still a far amount of shock and horror over the bold awfulness of the administration’s Afghanistan pullout and the shameless nature of the lies the administration told in the process.

(3) You might want to read Matt Taibbi’s long article on Russiagate.

(4) The Smiths are suing Loudoun County:

The furious parents of a 15-year-old high schooler are suing Loudon County in Virginia after their daughter was allegedly raped by a ‘skirt-wearing male student’ in a ‘gender fluid’ school bathroom.

Jess and Scott Smith allege that the district attempted to cover up the alleged assault. They claim that Superintendent Scott Ziegler alleged there was no record of the May 28 incident at Stonebridge High School in Leesburg, Virginia, despite Loudoun County Sheriff’s office conducting a two-month long investigation into the allegations.

(5) Jen Psaki wants you to embrace the joys of inflation.

Jonathan Turley on Hunter and Joe Biden

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: I was just about to publish this post this afternoon when the power went out.]

Jonathan Turley is taking seriously the information that Hunter Biden and his dad Joe had some combined bank accounts:

However, the tranche of emails raises a new and disturbing element: the possible mixing of accounts and funds between Hunter and his father. If true, President Biden could be directly implicated in ongoing investigations into his son’s money transfers and dealings.

Most notable are the new emails from Eric Schwerin, his business partner at the Rosemont Seneca consultancy, referencing the payment of household bills for both Joe Biden and Hunter Biden. He also notes that he was transferring money from Joe Biden. If true, the communications indicate that some of President Biden’s personal expenses were paid out of shared accounts with Hunter, including accounts that may have been used to pay for prostitutes. Rosemont Seneca is directly involved in the alleged influence peddling schemes and questionable money transfers from Chinese and Russian sources.

Schwerin also was involved in President Biden’s taxes and discussions of a book deal for the then-vice president…

No wonder the press and the Democrats and social media worked overtime a year ago to make sure to discredit all the Hunter laptop information. The suppression worked temporarily – and perhaps permanently for a lot of people – and that temporary success helped mightily to give us the Biden presidency.

More from Turley:

There is already a federal criminal investigation into these matters involving Hunter Biden, and the latest emails now link President Biden receiving money and benefits from related accounts as well as key players. Even if one questions a direct conflict of interest, it is hard to deny the towering appearance of a conflict in the ongoing investigation.

“The Big Guy” is now president and his administration is handling an investigation that could have political as well as legal implications for him and his family. It may be time for a special counsel.

Long past time, I’d say. But I will go out on a limb with a prediction: it won’t happen.

Also, if things actually do heat up and the MSM et al can’t squelch the commotion sufficiently, Joe will be dumped for “health reasons” by the Democrat powers-that-actually-be and Kamala will be declared our new – first female – president. After all, one stupid, unlikable socialist puppet is just as good as another, and Kamala has the added benefit of being young and checking various favored-identity-group boxes.

Wouldn’t it be interesting if vaccine mandates in companies led to a general strike?

The New Neo Posted on by

The US hasn’t been big on general strikes, although they’re a bit more popular in Europe. And in the past they’ve tended to be launched by the left.

The forced vaccine mandates the Biden administration has tried to foist on businesses that have any government contracts, and even on private businesses, is neither a strictly left nor strictly right issue. The subject matter is liberty, and these days it’s the right that tends to champion that, but with COVID vaccine mandates there are people on both right and left as well as in-between who oppose them. That even includes those who – like me – are already vaccinated.

Already there’s been resistance – or at least alleged resistance, for example among Southwest Airlines employees – and this resistance might spread. The economy is already hurting, and some sort of nationwide strike would further damage it, so theoretically this should give the strikers power and leverage.

However, one drawback is that the Biden administration may not care. In fact, there’s reason to believe they are trying to sabotage the economy, and federal vaccine mandates for businesses are just one arrow in that quiver. It seems counterintuitive to believe that an administration would ever want to do such a thing, but this particular administration has shown such a remarkable propensity for economy-damaging decisions that such a theory cannot be discarded.

And if there’s a general strike, the DOJ may declare war on all the participants as “domestic terrorists.”

In the Loudoun school system, it’s the crime and the coverup

The New Neo Posted on by

The plot thickens.

Loudoun County is an affluent suburb of Washington DC:

Loudoun County is part of the Washington–Arlington–Alexandria, DC–VA–MD–WV Metropolitan Statistical Area. As of 2018, Loudoun County had a median household income of $136,268. Since 2008, the county has been ranked first in the U.S. in median household income among jurisdictions with a population of 65,000 or more.

One would think they’d have a great school system. And for all I know, it’s great in many ways (although at this point I tend to doubt it) – but certainly not in the realm of responsiveness to sexual assaults that might occur in its schools. We now learn that Loudoun school system has apparently been failing to report incidences of sexual assault in its schools for years, despite a state law that mandates such reporting:

Well, I suppose that’s one way to get a clean record.

The only reason we know any of this, even now, is the result of one of those ironic situations in which a series of events designed to protect these people has backfired, at least in the sense of revealing what this NY Post article calls “the rot.”

And the rot is not confined to the Loudon school system, either. As we already know, the Biden administration DOJ decided it would be a mighty fine idea to threaten to classify as “domestic terrorists” parents who object too strenuously to CRT in public schools, or to allowing trans students in the bathrooms of their choice. There already are rules on the books if someone actually commits a crime, but the idea was that the DOJ would cite some sort of increased amount of danger to school board members at the hands of these parents, and they used a Loudoun man named Scott Smith (although they didn’t name him) to this end:

Smith, 48, became the poster boy for the new “domestic terrorism” the Biden administration has concocted to destroy anyone who gets in the way of its agenda.

The left-wing activist group National School Boards Association wrote a letter to President Biden citing Smith’s case, without naming him, and urged the administration to use the Patriot Act to crack down on parents who demand a say in their children’s schools. It didn’t seem to occur to Biden that targeting disgruntled parents with legislation designed for foreign suicide bombers might be over the top.

What had Smith done? The way we first heard the story, he spoke out at a school board meeting against school policy on these issues, and started some sort of scuffle which culminated in him being tackled by police and dragged off (in fairly humiliating fashion, in which his pants somehow came down) and arrested:

The Soros-funded left-wing prosecutor, Buta Biberaj, reportedly a decarceration proponent, tried to get Smith jailed for his disruptive behavior.

You can read a fuller account of these events in the NY Post article.

That’s all we learned until recently, when a Daily Wire reporter decided to get Smiths’s side of the story – and what a story it was. Astoundingly, the little detail of what Smith had been trying to say at the meeting had been left out of reports, and it was no general expression of concern about school policies. It was something very specific, an allegation that his 9th grade daughter had been raped and sodomized in the school bathroom by a biologically male student who gained access by wearing a skirt, claiming to be trans. And then a leftist activist said his daughter was lying, which is what sparked the fight (I have yet to learn if it was just an angry exchange of words or if more was involved, but the Post story indicates it was just words).

Here’s one of the many things that happened at that meeting:

There was no compassion, either, from superintendent Scott Ziegler, who claimed bafflingly at the meeting that there had been no assault in a school restroom anywhere in Loudoun County and airily dismissed parents’ concerns about the risks of transgender bathrooms. Then he gave a little woke homily to show those powerless parents in the room who really was in charge.

“Time magazine in 2016 called that a red herring … we’ve heard it several times tonight from our public speakers but the predator transgender student or person simply does not exist,” he said.

Whether the student doing the assaulting was actually trans or merely claiming to be is not the issue, and I don’t know which is the case because we’re not allowed to know much if anything about that student, who is protected by the juvenile justice system.

So, to recap:

The DOJ has decided to intimidate parents objecting to leftist policies in schools by threatening to label them domestic terrorists and treat them as such. Smith was used as an example of this. But in fact, he turns out to be something quite different and far more sympathetic, and in the course of learning about his case we’ve also learned to what extent some school districts (and now the DOJ) will go to demonize the right, protect themselves, protect student predators, and protect the left.

Good to know.

Oh, and one more thing: the MSM is barely reporting these new developments. The MSM is an important part of the coverup:

Mainstream broadcast networks failed to cover a Tuesday night report that alleged a Virginia school board covered up a rape allegation against a boy who wore a skirt in the girls’ bathroom, according to a media analysis.

The Loudoun County School Board kept the rape allegations quiet as it successfully pushed to adopt a policy that allows students to choose which bathroom to use based on their preferred gender, according to the Daily Wire. The alleged rapist was reportedly transferred to another school where he was later charged with sexual battery and abduction of another student. Neither ABC, CBS, nor NBC dedicated primetime coverage to the report, according to the Media Research Center….

“How can one call itself a news organization when it blacks out coverage of a story like this, which has such broad impact on the safety of our children and education?” Brent Bozell, president of the Media Research Center, tweeted.

The more local rag the WaPo apparently has published some coverage, although limited in scope to the fact that there were two assaults in the Loudoun schools.

That means that most Democrats will never learn anything about any of this except for hearing that some angry and aggressive right-wing parents have become domestic terrorists against noble progressive school boards.

[ADDENDUM: A summary here, plus the fact that parents are petitioning to get the school superintendent fired.]

The Bee Gees talk about taxes

The New Neo Posted on by

And a few other things.

The segment I’ve cued up is only six minutes long, but if you want to hear just the tax part it’s from 7:02 to 9:14. This interview took place in 1978, when Barry was 31 or 32 and Robin was 28 (Maurice had the flu that day and didn’t appear). Note the cigarette, perfectly normal back then but anathema now.:

In the interview Robin predicted that the Brits would soon turn on Labour and vote them out of office for the next twenty years. That turned out to be pretty much the case.

Norway: the slings and arrows of outrageous mass murder

The New Neo Posted on by

A bow and arrow attack in Norway has left five people dead, and there is reason to believe it may be some form of Islamic terrorism although the main weapon is unusual:

The suspect, a 37-year-old Danish citizen named Espen Andersen Brathen, had converted to Islam and there were fears he had been radicalised.

However a motive has not yet been determined.

Police in Norway don’t carry guns – something I first learned while researching the Breivik shootings in Norway. I wrote an article for PJ about it – an article I described and commented on in this post from ten years ago. But PJ has removed the piece that appeared there and so I can’t give a working link to that one, although I preserved all my PJ articles on my own computer because I thought they might disappear some day.

To refresh your memory, the gist of it is that because the police don’t carry weapons there, a SWAT team was summoned to the island, wasting precious time. In addition, there was no helicopter available to transport them (see this for the rather shocking facts – including that the police helicopters there were only for “observation” rather than transportation).

The Norwegian police policies were woefully inadequate to deal with that sort of violence, and it appears that little has changed during the ensuing years. For example:

The attack was first reported at 18:13 (16:13 GMT) on Wednesday. Police confronted the man six minutes later, but he shot several arrows at them and escaped. He was eventually caught about 30 minutes later.

It was during this time, between being first approached and then arrested, that the victims were killed, the police chief said.

A woman was also stabbed at a nearby intersection, witnesses told local media.

Police fired warning shots when he was eventually arrested, but it is not clear if officers were armed when they first came across the suspect. Norwegian police do not usually carry guns on them – weapons are stored at police stations or in their patrol cars.

The article then goes on to mention that this was the deadliest in Norway since Breivik’s attack in 2011.

And this is interesting: “After the attack, police officers nationwide were ordered to carry firearms as an extra precaution.” I’m going to assume this is a temporary directive.

If you want to follow the Kyle Rittenhouse trial…

The New Neo Posted on by

…Andrew Branca is writing about it at Legal Insurrection.

Branca has been writing for LI for years and has covered many trials in great detail, in particular trials that involve the law of self-defense which is his specialty. The Rittenhouse trial certainly falls under that heading.

The Rittenhouse trial hasn’t yet begun – the opening date is November 1 – but Branca is writing about some pre-trial legal activity of interest. You can read his latest here and here.

I think the legal stuff is interesting. But in recent years the politics has often overridden everything else in these trials, especially in the case of Derek Chauvin. The Rittenhouse case involves a more sympathetic defendant in some ways, because he is a teenager and because there is so much evidence of self-defense. But the actions for which Rittenhouse is on trial occurred during the period of enormous turmoil post-Floyd (although the Kenosha riots were actually sparked by the shooting of Jacob Blake by police). Plus, Rittenhouse has been the victim of a remarkable amount of bad press. So I fear a jury pool will be highly tainted and I have great concern that the verdict will be political however strong Rittenhouse’s self-defense claim might be.

Katie Couric covered up what she thought were damaging statements from RBG

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s the story:

Katie Couric has admitted to ‘protecting’ Ruth Bader Ginsburg from public backlash by cutting out negative comments she made about people who kneel during the national anthem.

The former Today show host reveals in her new book that she let her personal political views influence her editing decisions after her interview with the late Supreme Court justice in 2016.

In new memoir, Going There, Couric writes that she edited out a part where Ginsburg said that those who kneel during the national anthem are showing ‘contempt for a government that has made it possible for their parents and grandparents to live a decent life.’

The published story, which Couric wrote for Yahoo! News in 2016, did include quotes from Ginsburg saying refusing to stand for the anthem was ‘dumb and disrespectful’, but omitted more problematic remarks.

What’s interesting about this? The first thing is that RBG said it in the first place. It reminds me of what liberals used to be like when I was younger – they were willing to praise America as a land of opportunity, and they weren’t against patriotism.

The second thing is that Couric and the MSM judged that simple statement of Ginsburg’s, which would have been non-controversial not so many years ago, to be “problematic” even back in 2016.

The third thing is that Couric – who always seemed to me to be mediocre at best, and that’s being kind – has reported this herself. I think she believes that what she did was quite okay.

Which brings us to the fourth thing: this is done by the MSM all the time. The news in general and interviews in particular are constantly edited to make the left look good and the right bad. The members of the MSM are the gatekeepers and they believe their judgment should be the thing that shapes events and the perceptions of those events for the proles who watch them.

I wonder why Couric has decided to tell this story now, about five years later. The simple answer is that she wrote a memoir and she thinks this sort of thing will sell. And perhaps the simple answer is best in this case.