Libertarian Leanings

Expecting a Heated Debate in the Pennsylvania State House

Anthony Hennen, Just the News:  Pennsylvania considers welfare reform to keep food stamps from going to dead recipients

Proposed Pennsylvania legislation would require more state agency cooperation to ensure that welfare payments aren’t sent out after a recipient dies.

Awaiting approval in the House before it can go to Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf for a signature, Senate Bill 1124 would require the Department of Human Services to run a monthly check of death certificates with the Bureau of Vital Statistics to ensure Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits are not spent on deceased individuals.

“It's our hope that this legislation will help ensure that important public funds dedicated to helping those who need it the most reach as many Pennsylvanians as possible,” Sen. David Argall, R-Berks/Schuylkill, wrote in a legislative memo.

The impetus for the bill came from a 2016 state audit on DHS’s electronic benefits transfer (which the state uses to distribute SNAP funds) to detect fraud and monitoring weaknesses that needed to be addressed.

Is veto a possibility?

Read the rest here.

J6 Testimony is Behind Closed Doors for a Reason

...so the committee can lie about it.

Joel B. Pollack, Breitbart:  Ken Klukowski Accuses January 6 Committee of Withholding And Misrepresenting Critical Evidence, Challenges It to Release His Full Transcript

Klukowski was one of over 1,000 witnesses called to testify before the committee behind closed doors. He sat for several depositions, and for several hours at a time.

He told the committee he disagreed with the theory that Vice President Pence had sole discretion to unilaterally reject electors from contested states on January 6, 2021, based on his understanding of the Constitution and the electoral process.

However, in the fifth public hearing of the January 6 Committee last week, Reps. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and Liz Cheney (R-WY) suggested that he was part of a scheme to reverse the election results:

BENNIE THOMPSON: … A key focus of our hearing today will be a draft letter that our witnesses here today refused to sign. This letter was written by Mr. Jeff Clark with another Department of Justice lawyer, Ken Klukowski, and the letter was to be sent to the leadership of the Georgia state legislature. Other versions of the letter were intended for other states.

Neither Mr. Clark nor Mr. Klukowski had any evidence of widespread election fraud, but they were quite aware of what Mr. Trump wanted the department to do. Jeff Clark met privately with President Trump and others in the White House and agreed to assist the president without telling the senior leadership of the department who oversaw him.

[,,,]

In fact, Klukowski said in a statement Sunday, he supported exactly the opposite course of action. He accused the Committee of operating in bad faith, cherry-picking one snippet of his testimony that is contradicted by his deposition as a whole. And he challenged the committee to release the full transcript of his testimony:

Response of Ken Klukowski to January 6 Committee Hearing of June 23, 2022

The January 6 Committee falsely accused me on Thursday of being a go-between in a conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election. 

The January 6 Committee needs its false connection between Ken Klukowski and Jeff Clark to fabricate the conspiracy case.  It needs the fiction that there was no widespread election fraud to make the case that it was a conspiracy to stage a coup.

Read the rest here.

"Get This Thing Out of my Way"

I love this princess stood her ground, while Nancy showed her true colors. pic.twitter.com/17ArfkD3MG

— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) June 27, 2022

"Disciplined for Praying at the Wrong Time and at the Wrong Place"

Techno Fog, The Reactionary:  A Big Win for Religious Liberty at the Supreme Court

Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the majority, rejected the school district’s argument that the suspension of Coach Kennedy “was essential to avoid a violation of the Establishment Clause,” stating “an Establishment Clause violation does not automatically follow whenever a public school or other government entity fails to censor private religious speech.” He further noted that “where there is no evidence anyone sought to persuade or force students to participate, and there is no formal school program accommodating the religious activity at issue.” This means that all religious references are not inherently coercive or otherwise an Establishment Clause violation: “[T]his Court has instructed that the Establishment Clause must be interpreted by ‘reference to historical practices and understandings.’”

Liberal restrictions on free speech and the free exercise of religion so often rely on dishonesty.

The liberal Justices – Sotomayor, Breyer, and Kagan – dissented. The first sentence of Justice Sotomayor’s dissent started with an inaccurate description of Coach Kennedy’s actions: “This case is about whether a public school must permit a school official to kneel, bow his head, and say a prayer at the center of a school event.”

What Sotomayor gets wrong is that this case was never about praying “at the center of a school event.” Coach Kennedy prayed after the school event was over. Sloppy writing reveals sloppy thinking, and the dissent never recovers from this error.

Instead, Sotomayor only continues with the mistakes, alleging Coach Kennedy’s conduct caused “severe disruption to school events.” How can that be the case if the “school event” has concluded when the prayer takes place?

Read the rest here.

Think of the Left LESS as an Ideology and MORE as a Business — There's Money in It

Michael Walsh, The Pipeline:  Guns N' Roeses

It has long been a dictum of mine that, as far as the progressive Left is concerned, "they never stop, they never sleep, they never quit." After their twin defeats at the Supreme Court last week, regarding two of their most sensitive issues (both of which derive from their devotion to cultural suicide, which is their principal objective), don't expect them to give up easily. They subscribe to their version of Islamism or the Brezhnev Doctrine: once they've conquered moral or physical tparerritory[sp], it can never go back to the way it was. 

Read the rest here.

This War has been Lost a Long Time Ago

Mark Wauck, Meaning in History, Die Weltwoche Interviews Doug Macgregor

Retired United States Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor does not suffer fools. In the West’s efforts to assist the Ukrainians in repelling Russia’s invasion, he sees a motley crew. Once regarded a war hero, the Gulf War veteran is now denounced as a “Putin apologist” for his uncompromising criticism of what he regards as the West’s duplicity toward the old Cold War foe. 

The 69-year-old strategist tells Die Weltwoche, “At this point, the notion that the Russians would negotiate with anybody about events in Ukraine is simply unrealistic.” More ominously for the Ukrainians, Macgregor believes their fight for territorial integrity is already lost. He dismisses glowing reports of Ukrainian tactical victories as a politically concocted “fiction.”

Read the rest here.

"Dismissal of Lyme Disease was Adamant and Universal"

Mary Beth Pfeiffer, Rescue.Substack:  The Heroic Dr. Jones & the Gift of a Boy's Life

Dr. Charles Ray Jones was eighty-seven years old and in his waning days of doctoring when Troy Murphy became his patient in late 2016. Early that year, the boy, age ten, had turned in mere weeks from exuberant, active, and whip-smart in school to unable to eat or walk and consumed by pain. Within months he was living in a hospital bed in the family living room. He was fed through a tube. 

For his first appointment, this withered young boy was carried into Jones’ office, screaming and fearful of another doctor. In a three-hour examination he was reassured, and he came to trust. “You can be the same Troy you were before all this happened,” Jones, a giant of a man in a sweatsuit, told him. “You are fixable.” 

And so Troy was. Two years later, he returned to school in a wheelchair, first part-time, then, months later, full-time. The following year, he started to walk the halls on his own. Today, six years later, Troy is a high school junior who hopes to try out for varsity soccer. He smiles broadly in family photos. He hikes and banters with his four brothers like he used to. He is happy and whole.

Dr. Jones died on May 15, 2022, at the age of ninety-three, from cardiopulmonary edema. Troy may have been one of the last children saved from disability and even death by this remarkable pediatrician. But, among thousands Jones treated from an office in New Haven, Connecticut, Troy was surely not the only one.

Read the rest here.

Protesting Against “Woke Actions” at West Point

Enrico Trigoso, Epoch Times:  Concerned Graduates of West Point Challenge Leadership of Military Academy: Letter

The letter, titled “Declaration of Betrayal of West Point And the Long Gray Line,” asks for the following information:

1. An explanation for the irregularities in the enforcement of the Honor Code.
2. A justification for the mandatory vaccinations of cadets with the COVID Virus despite widespread adverse reactions to the inoculation, as well as provisions for exceptions for cadets with religious objections.
3. An explanation for teaching Critical Race Theory at the Academy that constitutes an attack upon the Constitution and our constitutional Republic. This is behavior that constitutes unconstitutional conduct, if not sedition.
4. An explanation of reported mismanagement of the cadet dining facility resulting in unsanitary conditions, inadequate food prepared for the meal, and food served that was reportedly unfit for consumption.
5. Political activism on the part of civilian faculty members constituting political activity violating the long-standing policy of the Academy and Army Regulations.
6. The practice of exclusive reliance upon radical progressive guest speakers to address the Corps of Cadets. This practice results in prejudiced political activism on the part of the Staff and Faculty in violation of Army Regulations.
7. An explanation for the failure of the Superintendent to respond to correspondence inquiring about problems identified at the Academy.

Read the rest here.

About that Pipe Bomb — Thread

Well ain’t this a coincidence! Here’s testimony by DC DHS director last year about how the agency used the FirstNet network to coordinate first responders on January 6.

What is FirstNet, you may ask? pic.twitter.com/MF5a3klFFH

— Julie Kelly 🇺🇸 (@julie_kelly2) June 26, 2022

Did the Alito Opinion Leak Change Roberts' Vote?

Interesting fact.
Roberts voted to sustain the Miss. law. That means he assigned the Opinion to Alito. He certainly knew what Alito was likely to write. And he ended up not joining the opinion, only the outcome.

I'm going to guess he wasn't originally with the majority.

— Shipwreckedcrew.substack.com (@shipwreckedcrew) June 26, 2022

Maybe the leak of Alito's draft opinion encouraged Roberts to join the conservative majority to put an exclamation point on the decision. After all, the Chief Justice did say, "To the extent this betrayal of the confidences of the Court was intended to undermine the integrity of our operations, it will not succeed. The work of the Court will not be affected in any way." 

And then, by assigning the opinion to Alito he straddled the fence, upholding the Mississippi law, while at the same time saying he wouldn't have struck down Roe v. Wade.