Even a Progressive-Democrat…

…is starting to figure it out.

A Chicago Democrat running for the Illinois House is calling out Mayor Brandon Johnson for allowing migrants to “invade” the Windy City.

Fox & Friends co-host Lawrence Jones did a walk-along with Smith, who showed Jones

two shuttered buildings now sheltering migrants—an academy for young women and a health center that once serviced patients struggling financially. Smith said both were closed due to lack of funds.
“You tell us that there’s no funding or the lack of funding. But then you bring migrants in and make them shelters. That’s not the American way,” Smith said.
“They have the funding. And every now and then they say, ‘Hey, we found more millions, we found more money.'”

That dishonesty and that favoring illegal aliens over American citizens and legally resident aliens in Chicago is all too typical of the Progressive-Democratic Party.

Smith is in the Illinois Progressive-Democratic Party primary for the Illinois House against incumbent Kimberly du Buclet. Unfortunately, Smith has no serious influence within Party; from Party’s perspective, he’s a rogue and not to be listened to. It’ll be instructive to see the level of support from Party rank and file that he gets over the course of his primary campaign.

Amorality of the Progressive-Democratic Party

Senior advisors of Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s reelection effort are worried.

Some of President Biden’s senior aides are becoming increasingly worried that his support for Israel’s war in Gaza risks damaging his re-election prospects amid cratering support from young voters.

Make no mistake about it: those senior aides are far more typical of the Progressive-Democratic Party than are others who support Biden’s nominal support for Israel.

Party putting its power ahead of pushing for what’s right regarding terrorism. That’s what’s campaigning for government positions at all levels of government in our nation.

Contemptibly Unsurprising

Israel has uncovered evidence that UNRWA operatives personnel participated in Hamas’ 7 October ’23 butchery inside Israel, and the nation has passed that evidence along to relevant authorities, including to the UN.

The commissioner-general of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East announced Friday that UNRWA was suspending the alleged participants and launching an investigation.

Suspended their employees—ooh—that’ll show them. UNRWA will conduct an investigation? Say, rather, UNRWA will whitewash itself.

This unsurprising behavior by the UNRWA is merely an extension of its long and active support of the terrorist gang that is Hamas and its Gaza Strip predecessor, the Palestinian Authority, reaching at least as far back as the terrorists’ 2014 attacks on Israel, when the UN agency served as weapons storage facilities for Hamas’s predecessor.

It’s long past time for our own government to stop its timid finger-wagging and take more serious action about the UNRWA’s terrorist support than temporarily paus[ing] all additional funding to the agency and the moderately firm words of welcome[ing] the decision to conduct such an investigation and Secretary General Guterres’ pledge to take decisive action to respond, should the allegations prove accurate.

That more serious action should begin, but not stop, with formally announcing that, aside from permanently halting funding to this UN terrorism-supporting agency, all further statements by the UNRWA will no longer be heard and no action in response to them will be taken, and more concretely on the one hand, getting out of the way of Israel and letting that nation prosecute its existential defense in the war Hamas is waging, and on the other hand, actively supporting the nation in its defense for its own survival.

A Department of Veterans Affairs Fail

Yet another in an appallingly long list of Veterans Affairs fails.

This time it’s the VA’s conscious decision to deprecate, if not outright ignore, our nation’s veterans and to give priority access to limited resources to illegal aliens instead. Yes, yes, they signed a contract with ICE to do this, but they were not forced to do so. Here’s Senator Marsha Blackburn (R, TN):

We checked this week; it is up to one million claims for healthcare and benefits. As we were doing some oversight work of the VA, we realized that what they were doing was using some of their resources and their money to allow veterans—to approve veterans for community care—and to process claims, or to approve community care, for illegal immigrants, not for veterans, and then also to process claims for illegal immigrants.

And

When you’ve got a backlog of a million veterans that are waiting to get healthcare, and are waiting to get benefit answers, and you find out that money that should be being used to solve their situations is being used for illegal immigrants…it is absolutely maddening[.]

Indeed.

Veteranos Administratio delende est.

A Death Penalty Revival

Former President Donald Trump (R) revived the use of the death penalty after a hiatus of some duration, and President Joe Biden (D) has moved to deprecate the death penalty anew, even if inconsistently so.

I confess to being conflicted regarding the death penalty. There are some crimes so heinous that they cry out for execution of the criminal. Rape, especially of children, and premeditated murder come to mind for me, along with mass and serial murder.

However, the error rate in getting convictions for these crimes is high enough to give me pause. Some errors are the result of police error in the investigation, police or prosecutorial misconduct in the runup to trial, prosecutorial or judicial error during trial, or prosecutorial misconduct during trial. These instances are very rare, but they happen. Another reason for my reluctance is improving technology. Increasing ability to analyze DNA data—even the basic ability to handle DNA as evidence at all—reveals what becomes erroneous trial and conviction today even when those convictions of yesterday were correctly obtained given the evidence then available.

Thus: it’s easy enough to execute a criminal tomorrow. But if he’s executed today, and tomorrow we learn that he was wrongly convicted, we can’t undo his execution.

It’s maddening, on the other hand, for the survivors of the criminal’s crime to suffer the delays defense attorneys and “liberal” Others throw up to obstruct and delay an execution, and those delays deny justice for those survivors.

One at least partial solution would be to streamline the death penalty appeals process. Require attorneys bringing a case for delay or sentence reduction to something less than execution to present all of their objections in a single case, to include consolidation of all of the several separate lawyer cases into a single, class-action if you will, case. Perhaps, allow a single additional appeal based on truly newly developed evidence.

That won’t address the errors later discerned with improving technology. However, we can’t allow heinous criminals to escape the death penalty on the basis of inherently speculative potential future technology advances.