Tag Archives: responsibilities

Ellison Returned some Money

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Minnesota’s Attorney General Keith Ellison (D), who seems deeply connected with his State’s multi-billion dollar welfare fraud via his lack of action on when advised years prior to the current public exposure, returned some $2,500 in illegally donated money. When called on all the donations from welfare fraudsters, Ellison answered the call.

Ellison had already returned a $2,500 campaign contribution to a donor who was indicted in September 2022 for the food aid fraud. The donor, Liban Alishire, later pleaded guilty to wire fraud and money laundering and awaits sentencing, court records show.

Never mind that that’s not all the money that folks who had defrauded the State or are charged with defrauding the State but whose trials have not yet begun that Ellison has not yet given up. The larger question here concerns these $2,500, which were returned to the fraudster. Those dollars could easily have supported the fraudster’s benefit, his defense bills or his potential restitution bill, for instance.

There are alternatives for what could have been done with Ellison’s illegally funded donations; he still can use those alternatives for the rest of his…donations.

State Senator John Hoffman [D], who received eight questionable donations that totaled about $3,300, sent all of the money to the US Marshals Service because the donated money might have been obtained through fraud.
“It was the right thing to do,” he told The Center Square.

But not Ellison. He still put it to his own and his donor’s good use.

Lost in the Reporting

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Or, perhaps carefully ignored in the reporting. The Free Press has its collective panties in a wedgy over an FBI raid on Washington Post news writer Hannah Natanson. It seems that, pursuant to the FBI’s investigation into the leak by a defense contractor of classified information, the FBI executed a warrant on Natanson and seized two of her laptops, her phone, and a smartwatch.

Of course that raid, part of what should be a thorough investigation of the leak and the defense contractor’s role in it (if any), has the “fourth estate” in a tizzy. The Committee to Protect Journalists issued a statement:

Without assurances that journalists can protect their reporting materials, accountability journalism will suffer a major setback, eroding yet another mechanism for government accountability.

That’s true up to a point. However, “accountability journalism” doesn’t place those news writers outside our laws. Were that so, that self-appointed title would be laughably hypocritical. If news writers are going to traffic in stolen goods—as leaked classified information most assuredly is—than of course those news writers must be held accountable: they must be arrested, brought to trial, and if convicted, jailed.

Of course, the FBI has not said Natanson was directly involved (or involved at all) in the leak, but that is beside the point of press accountability—a point the press is busily ignoring at the top of its collective lungs.

Were they Tipped?

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The lede raises the question in my mind.

On New Year’s Day, an oil tanker partially filled with sanctioned crude slipped out of Venezuela’s main export terminal and sailed toward Iran. The next day, another tanker escaped with Venezuelan oil, scrambling its signals to hide its course. Satellite imagery later confirmed it was headed to China.

Just two days later, US forces and law enforcement personnel entered Venezuela and seized the nation’s dictator Nicolás Maduro and his wife, bringing them back to the US for trial.

That timing raises my question: did someone tip off the Venezuelans that we were coming, and that’s why at least one of them left while only partially loaded? Or was that all the oil Venezuela had available for shipping at the time?

Public Keeping and Bearing

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Our Constitution’s 2nd Amendment is brief and crystal clear:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

The Supreme Court has already ruled, several times, that a well regulated militia is an outcome facilitated by individuals keeping and bearing arms, it’s not the purpose of that. The Court has further clarified that to mean shall not be infringed is nearly all-encompassing, with only a few carefully enumerated locations that can bar individuals from bringing their firearms. That short list includes locations like polling places, post offices, public-accessible private facilities like places of business that post clear signs prohibiting them on the premises. New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc, et al. v Bruen is one example of this.

Hawaii wants to outlaw carrying firearms altogether, having devised and enacted a State law that bars carrying anywhere—private enterprises, even other folks’ homes—unless those places are explicitly posted permitting the carrying. As the Wall Street Journal‘s editors correctly note,

A shop could theoretically post a sign on the door—or the parking lot entrance?—saying it doesn’t object to concealed carry. But it’s easy to see why a proprietor might hesitate, since a “Pistols Welcome” banner might alienate other customers. Businesses have an incentive to accept whatever is the default.

Hence the effective ban on carrying firearms that the State is attempting. The State argues that

[a] default of no guns…fits Hawaii’s custom and “unique history,” dating to King Kamehameha III, who banned weapons in 1833.

Bruen, though, says otherwise.

[W]hen the Second Amendment’s plain text covers an individual’s conduct, the Constitution presumptively protects that conduct, and to justify a firearm regulation the government must demonstrate that the regulation is consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.

The Nation’s historical tradition, not any particular State’s personal choice. Bruen is as crystalline as is our basic right under the 2nd Amendment. Hawaii’s statute needs to be struck down completely.

He’s Right

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Robert Woodson, Woodson Center Founder and President, wrote in the lede of his Thursday Wall Street Journal op-ed this:

Black America must declare a one-year moratorium on whining about racism. Not because racism has disappeared, and not to soothe the sensitivities of white America—but because grievance has become a shield protecting predators within our own communities. Accusations of racism are routinely weaponized to silence accountability, excuse corruption, and reward moral cowardice.

That’s absolutely correct. One of the Critical Items in American culture, currently under direct assault by open borders and the detritus remaining from that, is that our republic can survive only with acceptance and action on personal responsibility. Government is a last resort in that, not the default solution.

Then Woodson expanded on that in a way that too few folks who should know better have the courage (or integrity, I add) to do.

Civil-rights leaders and politicians remain conspicuously silent, waiting instead for the next police shooting or racial controversy they can exploit for media attention and moral posturing. Call out this silence, and you will be accused of racism—bullied into retreat by those who profit from outrage while ignoring the suffering in their own backyard. This silence isn’t compassion. It is cowardice.

He’s especially right about that last. It’s also an especially cowardly form of cowardice. Bullies have only the power over their victims that their victims consciously, deliberately, choose to grant those bullies. These grown, adult, allegedly rational civil-rights “leaders” and politicians assuredly know that. Yet they still bow down and if not actively kiss the boots of their bullies, passively cower under their desks, hoping to go unnoticed.

These folks are unworthy of their civil-rights or political desks, and they should be disregarded by the rest of us.