URLs du Jour

2021-12-24

[Amazon Link]
(paid link)

  • Add university administrators, government bureaucrats, and I'm in. George F. Will is hopeful, because The Supreme Court has a fresh chance to rein in police lawlessness.

    When Hamdi Mohamud was a child, she was whisked away from Somalia’s violence and corruption to Minnesota. There, however, she endured prolonged incarceration because of corrupt behavior by Heather Weyker, a St. Paul police officer who had been deputized by a federal task force.

    In 2011, Mohamud, then 16, was a bystander at a fight involving a knife-wielding girl who was a witness in Weyker’s “investigation” of a nonexistent Somali immigrant crime ring. Judicial proceedings have found that Weyker “exaggerated or fabricated” and “misstated facts,” to have been caught “lying to the grand jury” and lying “during a detention hearing.” Also, when providing compensation for a witness. And when “endorsing the validity” of a forged document.

    Weyker got Mohamud arrested on suspicion of witness tampering, then filed a criminal complaint that included fabricated facts and excluded exculpatory evidence. Mohamud spent almost 25 months in federal custody. When Mohamud sued for violations of her constitutional rights, the district court denied Weyker’s claim of qualified immunity. But last year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit ruled that because Weyker acted as a federal officer, she could not be sued at all.

    GFW provides another egregious example, and the judicial history, at the link. The Institute for Justice's page page on Hamdi Mohamud is here.


  • Coulda put a period after 'Remember'. Jim Geraghty notes a specific example of a general problem: Biden Can’t Remember What He Promised on Covid-19 Testin.

    As he did during the Afghanistan-withdrawal debacle, President Biden has turned to ABC News for a formal sit-down interview to do damage control. And while the president did not indignantly bark, “That was four or five days ago, man!” he didn’t exactly put on a command performance, either:

    “Three days before Christmas, if you look out across the country, you see it everywhere, these long lines, people waiting for hours outside in the cold, just to get tested, to be reassured before they spend time with their family,” Muir said. “If you go to the pharmacy, we hear this over and over again, empty shelves, no test kits. Is that a failure?”

    “I don’t think it’s a failure,” Biden replied. “I think it’s — you could argue that we should have known a year ago, six months ago, two months ago, a month ago.”

    “I wish I had thought about ordering” 500 million at-home tests “two months ago,” he told Muir.

    That statement isn’t just the usual presidential excuse-making; it’s another sign that Biden does not remember what he said, promised, pledged, or announced earlier. Recall that Biden’s vaccine mandate gave companies the option of testing employees once a week — which was going to dramatically increase the need for Covid-19 tests. Back in his big announcement of a vaccine mandate for employers in September, Biden pledged that Americans would find Covid-19 tests plentiful and cheap, if not free[.]

    Geraghty, indispensable as always, provides quotes and links to the empty promises Biden made on September 9 and December 2. The ABC news doofus, David Muir, apparently didn't bring up those inconvenient facts.


  • Another way he's killing Americans. OK, so Albert Einstein probably didn't say the "definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result." But the quote's bogosity doesn't make it untrue. Jacob Sullum reports that Biden Doubles Down on a Lethal Anti-Drug Strategy.

    For more than a century, the U.S. government has failed to prevent Americans from consuming politically disfavored intoxicants. Worse, it has systematically made drug use more dangerous by forcing consumers to rely on black-market products of unknown composition and by pushing traffickers toward increasingly potent substances that are easier to smuggle.

    The ongoing "opioid crisis," which has driven drug-related deaths to record levels, illustrates both of those phenomena. But instead of recognizing the lethal effects of prohibition, President Joe Biden is doubling down on a strategy that has never worked as intended.

    Last week, Biden signed two executive orders aimed at combating the "transnational criminal organizations" that "contribute directly to tens of thousands of drug-overdose deaths in the United States each year." One order replaces the federal government's Threat Mitigation Working Group with a brand-new U.S. Council on Transnational Organized Crime; the other authorizes sanctions against "foreign persons involved in the global illicit drug trade."

    As with his Covid promises, Biden's main goal is to be seen as "doing something". And hope that nobody checks on whether "something" accomplishes anything worthwhile.


  • He's OK when he's not accusing Chris Sununu of being a Chinese Communist sympathizer. Don Bulduc has a remarkably sane take at NH Journal: Hassan Is No Joe Manchin, And That's Bad for NH.

    All the hullaballoo over West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin’s steadfast opposition to the Democrats’ so-called “Build Back Better” spending bill distracted from a broader point with more far-reaching implications: it never had to get this far.

    Because the U.S. Senate is evenly divided 50-50, any one of the Democratic senators in Washington could have put the brakes on this disastrous spending boondoggle at any point in time, including New Hampshire’s own Maggie Hassan.

    Make no mistake, this is all political. Maggie Hassan doesn’t have the will to stand up to the left-wing progressives in her party like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Granite Staters will be left holding the bag, again.

    Bolduc goes on to note (as we've done here) that Senator Maggie votes 100% of the time in line with Biden's position. She's a rubber stamp.

    That “Chinese Communist sympathizer” thing here.


Last Modified 2024-01-19 5:47 PM EDT