Tag Archives: politics

Red Flag Laws

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Apart from their unconstitutionality—they ignore due process, equal protection, and privileges or immunities that are central tenets of our Constitution and of what it means to be an American—these laws don’t work on a petty practical level, either.

Illustrative of that are the mass shooting in Buffalo and especially the one on Independence Day in Highland Park.

In the latter case, police even entered the shooter’s home in 2019 and seized knives, only to return them later that same day.

According to Lake County officials, police had visited Crimo’s home twice in 2019 after he threatened to kill himself and his family. Police said they recovered knives from the home but no guns.
But, authorities pointed out, he responded no when asked if he felt like harming himself or others, and his father said the knives were his and were being stored in his son’s closet for safekeeping. Based on that information, the Highland Park police returned the knives to the father the same day.

Following that, at the end of 2019,

Crimo applied for a FOID [Firearms Owner Identification] card, according to the state police. Because he was under 21, the application had to be sponsored by a parent or guardian, according to state law.
“The application was sponsored by the subject’s father,” the agency said.
In January 2020, “There was insufficient basis to establish a clear and present danger to deny the FOID application” and Crimo was given a card, according to the state police.

Then,

Crimo passed four separate background checks to buy guns on June 9, 2020, July 18, 2020, July 31, 2020 and Sept. 20, 2021, the state police said.

Pushing for Red Flag laws is frivolous, nothing other than cynical virtue-signaling, and it’s a waste of taxpayer money for the Progressive-Democratic Party politicians and too many Republican Party politicians to push them in government legislatures.

A Simple Question

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And a simple answer.

In an article in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal about the West’s economic sanctions on Russia and their impact on Russian citizens, the authors, Ann Simmons and Yuliya Chernova, ask a simple question:

How effective are the sanctions against Russia proving to be?

The answer to that is blindingly obvious and is given by the answer to this question: How many battalions has Putin been forced by those sanctions to withdraw from Ukraine?

Meantime, in the face of namby-pamby sanctions and inadequate arms and ammunition shipments, Ukraine continues to lose ground, and Ukrainian civilian women, children, and old men continue to be butchered by the barbarian.

Regulatory Review and Streamline

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Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin (R) has a thought on this.

Youngkin signed Executive Order 19 to create the Office of Regulatory Management. This office will streamline the regulatory review process by subjecting agencies to its oversight. The executive order directs the new office to implement a 25% reduction in regulatory requirements.

And

The order states the office will review all regulations for their impact on local governments, the regulated community and private citizens. It will also streamline the regulatory process by requiring agencies to prepare a unified regulatory plan for every fiscal year.

It could work. It could, though, just turn into another layer of bureaucracy in getting regulations handled and new proposals enacted or rejected. As some of you might expect, I have a couple of thoughts of my own on this.

Although regulations must be reviewed every four years, the executive order states this is not uniformly achieved….

Regulations not reviewed on time or whose review isn’t finished on time should be deemed expired on the date of their review anniversary and no longer in existence as of that date. This requirement will require legislative action, though, rather than a Governor’s Executive Order.

And this thought, also deadline oriented:

According to the order, most regulatory proposals take two to three years to be adopted. The office will work to streamline this process to more quickly approve or reject proposed regulations.

Set hard deadlines—vis., 30 days, 90 days, as appropriate to the stage of proposal, 6 months to enactment—and if a stage of review is not complete by its deadline or the overall proposal not ready for enactment by its deadline, the proposal is deemed rejected and cannot be brought up again until after the next election cycle. This, too, will require legislative action rather than an EO.

Don’t allow stalling or dithering or indecision, or excuses for any of that. Push the pace, and specify the concrete, measurable response to stalling or dithering or indecision.

Biden to Oil Producers: Produce More

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Also Biden to oil producers: you can’t drill, though.

The Biden administration plans to block new offshore oil drilling in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans….

Produce more, but…. This is on top of the existing slow-walking and outright sitting on the myriad permits required to act on existing leases.

Oh, wait….

The proposal released by the Interior Department on Friday evening would allow as many as 11 oil lease sales for offshore drilling over the course of five years.

As many as 11 of them—a couple a year over those five years. Never mind that Biden’s administration cannot be trusted to grant the permits required for those leases to have a chance.

Never mind that it takes years, once the permits are granted, to drill a producing well, or that not all drilling will result in a producing well.

Never mind that the Biden administration cannot be trusted to not cancel those leases later in the name of its drive to the Liberal World Order.

Never mind that even if all five of those years are available to production, they’re not enough for the oil producers to recoup the costs of the exploration and subsequent drilling for effect.

That’s the duplicity of President Joe Biden (D) in his cynical pretense to be “doing everything he can” to reduce the cost of gasoline at the pump and of energy generally.

Accused Means Guilty?

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The Department of Veterans Affairs has failed again. Kenneth Harrelson, a US Army veteran, medically retired after a bit under five years in, and his family are getting their VA benefits cut off because they’ve been accused of a crime. Conviction be damned; the VA don’t need no stinkin’ conviction.

The federal government plans to suspends or terminate benefits to a military veteran and his family as a result of him being charged in connection with the January 6 Capitol riot.
The Department of Veterans Affairs informed the veteran, Kenneth Harrelson, and his wife in a June 13 correspondence that such actions are the result of the Justice Department telling the agency that Harrelson has been charged with “indicted and charged with Seditious Conspiracy….”

What he loses as a result of the VA’s action—which comes at the request of the Biden/Garland DoJ, to which the VA has no obligation to submit—even though the man is innocent, since no trial has been held and so no conviction is possible:

  • suspend payment of “gratuitous benefits” pending disposition of the criminal proceedings

Even though the VA knows he’s innocent [emphasis added]: If convicted, gratuitous benefits are forfeited…. Gratuitous benefits are things like burial in a national cemetery.

  • suspend “compensation benefit payments” starting Sept. 1, which is the first day of the month following a 60-day due process period

Regardless of whether that due process period includes even the start of his trial, much less its completion and conviction.

Guilty by accusation—off with his benefits. Congressman Louis Gohmert (R, TX) has the right of it on this:

This is what you have when vindictive leftists get in charge of major parts of the government[.]

Happy belated–suspended–Independence Day, guys.

 

Veteranos Administratio delende est.