Of Arms and the Law has more details. This one is for the people who fantasize that if only the government will confiscate all the guns, then only the government will have all the guns. Of course it's not that simple. It's never that simple.

Daily Mail

An Immigration and Customs Enforcement pilot of new rapid DNA testing at the border has found that nearly a third of those tested were not biologically related to the children in their custody.

ICE conducted the pilot for a few days earlier this month in El Paso and McAllen, Texas, finding about 30 per cent of those tested were not related to the children they claimed were their own, an official told the Washington Examiner.

The official said that these were not cases of step-fathers or adoptive parents.

'Those were not the case. In these cases, they are misrepresented as family members,' the official said.

Sounds like that's an easy way to dispose of a third of the asylum claims. Ask if they are related to the children they are with. Test them. If they lie, send them home -- and put them in the identity database so next time you don't even have to bother.

Free Beacon

Fires at Jewish centers in Massachusetts were deliberately set, authorities now believe. Two were an hour apart, and two struck one house the same week.

Police responded to reports of fires two Massachusetts cities Thursday night. One, at a Chabad rabbi's home in Arlington, burned for less than a minute before police responded to put out the flames.

The current Democratic party is showing a disturbing trend towards antisemitism. I don't want to say that this is the result, but the Overton window has certainly been shifted by it.

New York Magazine (from 2003)

“In college, I was left of center, and through a gradual process I found myself more comfortable with a lot of the ideas and approaches the Republicans were using.” He voted for Carter in 1980, but in ’84, “I voted for Reagan—I’d moved from Communist to whatever I am now. I’m not even sure how to characterize myself politically. Maybe at some point, I’ll have to figure it out.”

No, a literal Communist. His own words.

Here's the thing. He describes himself as a Commmunist. He admits voting for Carter. And then he switches to Reagan. But that doesn't make him a true believer; it makes him someone who realized being a Communist was bad for his career. Identifying as a Republican means he gets all the Deep State jobs where they need a Republican who is...reliable.

And remember, Obama's pick for CIA, Brennan, was... also a Communist. Voted for their candidate back in the day, before he went undercover. Just like Comey. It's not really a surprise that two "ex"-Communists would conspire to overthrow a legitimate President.

Conservative Review

The latest report from the U.S. Sentencing Commission demonstrates that the 800-pound gorilla in the room clogging up the federal criminal justice system is immigration, not “low-level” domestic offenders.

If we only solved our border problem and deported illegal aliens before they commit more crimes, not only would we be safer, but we’d save a ton of money on the federal criminal justice system – without irresponsibly releasing American criminals back into our communities, as proposed by jailbreak proponents.

According to the U.S. Sentencing Commission, in its recently published 2018 report on federal sentencing statistics, 54.3 percent of the 69,425 federal offenders last year were Hispanic, and 42.7 percent of offenders were non-citizens. The two biggest offense categories were immigration (34.4 percent) and drugs (28.1 percent).

This is somewhat circular but the point is still valid. The counterpoints: federal crimes don't include local or state crimes, which are the majority of criminal activity, especially violence, and of course, being in the country illegally is a crime and one of the few crimes that fall under federal jurisdiction and are commonly committed.

The core point does stand, though. Illegal aliens are a large burden on our justice system, and deporting them rather than allowing them to remain in the country tying up the court system with frivolous asylum claims and court dates they don't bother to show up for would save us a lot of trouble.

Washington Examiner

Nellie Ohr, the wife of Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, told her husband she was deleting emails sent from his government account.

The revelation comes as both Ohrs remain under intense scrutiny for their ties to Fusion GPS and British ex-spy Christopher Steele, the author of the anti-Trump dossier that was used to obtain warrants to wiretap a member of President Trump's 2016 campaign.

Sounds like a coverup, doesn't it?

It appears, from their press reports, that they helped the spying operation on Trump and are now being told to fall on their swords.

The Kavalec email describing flaws in Steele's dossier went directly to Strzok well before the FISA warrant application was submitted. That means Strzok knew Steele's story had massive holes -- the most obvious being the routing of payments through a nonexistent Russian consulate in Miami.

Daily Caller

The FBI has uncovered a homegrown, jihadist compound in Macon County, Alabama.

The FBI‘s search warrant described the property as a “makeshift military-style obstacle course” in a story first reported by Sinclair Broadcast Group. The land where the group gathered reportedly looked like an “abandoned dump,” and was led by Siraj Wahhaj, who allegedly trained children to commit school shootings in a similar terrorist breeding ground in New Mexico last year.

Make no mistake, these terror camps are intended to produce terrorists. If we've found two there are likely more.

For what it's worth, on the scary scale, the indoctrination factor of being isolated in a controlled environment is probably worse than any skills they could be teaching. Firearms instruction is perfectly legal and gas is cheap. The missing ingredient to manufacture a terrorist is the desire to kill infidels for the glory of their twisted god of murder.

Hot Air

Google provides a significant percentage of the incoming traffic which many news sites get, but the algorithms that determine which sites get that traffic are proprietary and not widely understood. Academics at Northwestern University decided to attempt to quantify how those algorithms work by looking closely at search results for news related queries for one specific month, November 2017. The researchers identified 200 search terms related to hard news events and then ran those terms once for each minute of each day. What they found after collecting all of this data is that Google’s top story search results are concentrated on a small handful of major outlets.

If you exclude the 26% that isn’t rated, the ratio of news that appears in Google search results leans left by more than 5:1. But CJR points out that this result may be skewed by the fact that there are more left-leaning sites than right-leaning ones overall. However, even if you account for this, it appears Google’s algorithm is still tilting the results to the left.

Of course it is. Algorithms are developed by people, trained by people, and given manual tuning input by people. And the people working at Google are so far to the left they don't even know how reproductive sex works. We'll be fine, if we can just survive the current idiots.

Details here. There are good technical arguments the data was leaked rather than hacked, even if you discount what Wikileaks says about how they got the data. Who exactly did the leaking is still an open question.

DOJ is of course saying they don;'t have to prove anything about the supposed "hack", they can just charge Stone with somehow being an accessory or conspiring to do something that they haven't proven was a crime.

The Conservative Treehouse

Recently release FOIA documents into the special counsel team of Robert Mueller reveal the remarkable trail of a 2017 entrapment scheme conducted by Prosecutor Andrew Weissmann to target George Papadopoulos.

Before digging into the details it is important to note this is a DOJ/FBI entrapment operation being conducted in 2017 by the special counsel; this is not prior to the 2016 election. The detail surrounds a series of events previously discussed {Go Deep} where George Papadopoulos was approached by a known CIA operative named Charles Tawil.

The entrapment operation against Papadopoulos has been known for some time now. It was obvious from the first accounts we heard from Papadopoulos that it was an entrapment operation. However, this is the first evidence we have seen that Mueller's team was the one definitively behind it and knew what was going on in advance. This is more than just a tip that Papadopoulos was flying into the US with an undeclared $10,000 cash from some guy in Israel who tried to recruit him -- it's evidence Weissman was preparing the groundwork before the events.

... since some judges in Kentucky pre-signed child seizure documents for nights and weekends.

And then, charge workers and judges with violation of civil rights under color of law.

Attorney General William P. Barr has assigned the top federal prosecutor in Connecticut to examine the origins of the Russia investigation, according to two people familiar with the matter, a move that President Trump has long called for but that could anger law enforcement officials who insist that scrutiny of the Trump campaign was lawful.

John H. Durham, the United States attorney in Connecticut, has a history of serving as a special prosecutor investigating potential wrongdoing among national security officials, including the F.B.I.’s ties to a crime boss in Boston and accusations of C.I.A. abuses of detainees.

Durham's history of prosecuting national security abuses seems promising. And that bit about FBI ties to a crime boss in Boston? Mueller kept 4 innocent people in jail to protect an FBI informant.

Alan Dershowitz on NewsMax

"He's the guy who kept four innocent people in prison for many years in order to protect the cover of Whitey Bulger as an FBI informer. Those of us in Boston don't have such a high regard for Mueller because we remember this story. The government had to pay out tens of millions of dollars because Whitey Bulger, a notorious mass murderer, became a government informer against the mafia . . .

"And that's regarded in Boston of one of the great scandals of modern judicial history. And Mueller was right at the center of it. So, he is not without criticism by people who know him in Boston."

So Mueller in particular may have reason to be especially worried.

Unanswered question: What happened to Huber? He was appointed under AG Sessions to look into basically the same thing.

Breitbart

Conservative YouTuber and second amendment activist Antonia Okafor reports that her entire channel was stripped of advertising revenue by the Google-owned video platform after she uploaded an interview about self-defense with a fellow conservative. YouTube restored advertising to Okafor’s account after this article published, claiming in a statement, “sometimes we make the wrong call on content.”

“YouTube went straight to just demonetizing my ENTIRE channel today” wrote Okafor. “Just uploaded an episode where Nina Prevot, a Creole libertarian and I interviewed Amy Robbins about teaching young women to defend themselves.”

Outdoor Life

During the April 12 “Holding Megabanks Accountable: A Review of Global Systemically Important Banks 10 years after the Financial Crisis” hearing, Citigroup CEO Michael Corbat basically said imposing the institution’s ant-gun policy is a higher priority than wisely managing investors’ money.
Corbat acknowledged Citigroup’s policy is to discriminate against firearms manufacturers and retailers who refuse to abide by their policy of instituting age-based gun bans, “deny a right to keep and bear arms by a legal adult,” Keane writes, and that the policy is not a Second Amendment threat but a “good practice.”

We're heading into a new civil rights era, complete with new Jim Crow laws -- except now instead of basing those laws on race, they are being based on holding conservative political opinions. Even if those political opinions are explicitly protected in the bill of rights.

Everyone has the right to free speech and gun ownership for self defense until they abuse it. Publicly owned corporations need to be obliged to respect that, even of the people who nominally represent the shareholders personally prefer not to.

Judicial Watch

Judicial Watch announced today that it obtained 44 pages of records from the State Department through court-ordered discovery revealing that the Obama White House was tracking a December 2012 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking records concerning then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of an unsecure, non-government email system. Months after the Obama White House involvement, the State Department responded to the requestor, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), falsely stating that no such records existed.

We've known for some time that Obama knew personally about Clinton's private email server; we know because they sent emails back and forth. Which means Obama's claims to have found out about it from the news are a transparent lie. But now, we have proof that the Obama White House knew about the FOIA requests for Clinton's emails and was watching those requests closely. That means any violations in the State Dept response to those FOIA requests implicate the White House.

That Obama is a liar is not news. That he may have participated in or even orchestrated the coverup puts members of his administration in legal jeopardy. Probably not at real risk of conviction, but it's definitely going to put some heat on any officials who put anything in writing about the coverup.

Epoch Times

The FBI lost notes from a 2015 meeting with people from the office of the Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG), according to newly released FBI records on the investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s alleged mishandling of classified information.

The ICIG-FBI meetings hold special significance because it was allegedly several of these meetings where the ICIG officials passed a lead to the FBI about anomalies in the metadata of the emails indicating that a copy of nearly every email was sent to an agent of a foreign power.

"Lost" is being generous. The person who took the notes claimed they were turned over to the person supposed to enter them into the system. And they would have exposed Hillary's email server as not just being a security risk but an actual security breach, sending literally all her private server email to a foreign power.

So they were not lost.

They were destroyed.

Or, as Hillary puts it, wiped with a cloth.

IJR

There may be 20 different Democrats entering the presidential race, but all the primary candidates are coming together on one issue: restricting the Second Amendment.

Gun control has always been a complicated issue in the United States, with lawmakers on both sides trying to strike the balance between keeping Americans safe and not trampling their right to bear arms and defend themselves from tyrants.

But if recent policies have any indication on Democrats’ intentions, the candidates have stopped their consideration for the rights of gun owners. Here are six ways — big and small — that 2020 Democrats plan to strip gun owners of their access to firearms.

Democrats have never had any consideration for the rights of gun owners; until the Supreme Court forced the issue they preferred to believe the 2nd Amendment was about a militia rather than a right of the people. But until recently, Democrats felt the need to pretend to care; they would create little astroturf "gun rights" groups to give endorsements to their candidates and wait until after the election (and an appropriate crisis appeared) to do their blood dancing and legislating. But it appears that is changing, and many of the current presidential candidates don't even feel the need to pretend.

That may lead them into electoral disaster, but if one of them wins, the disaster will be on us.

Houston Chronicle

President Donald Trump on Thursday called for an end to "surprise medical bills," the astonishingly high charges insured patients can face when a member of a medical team that treats them is not in their insurer's network.

"Not a pleasant surprise," Trump said of bills that arrive in the mail and run to tens of thousands of dollars. "A very unpleasant surprise."

What will this do to the health care industry? Force them to compete on price. As always, much depends on the details of the legislation, but the basic idea -- forcing health care providers to publish their prices in advance, and perhaps getting rid of hugely disproportionate out-of-network costs (especially in emergency situations) -- is very sound and will allow people to choose where they go based on the expected price rather than being at the mercy of a mystery bill they don't know ahead of time and usually can't negotiate.

I've also heard of cases where people go to small, local "urgent care" facilities that are very definitely not hospitals... but charge like you went to the emergency room at a hospital. That's an outright scam that is enabled only by the lack of price transparency.

Will this solve everything? Probably not. But it's a start at applying market forces to the health care market, something that market has long been insulated from.

To see how this might work, look at procedures like Lasik. Such procedures compete on price. And the price has been going down, not up, even while technologies and techniques improved.

... and not in much doubt following the Kavalec email, where the State Dept calls out Steele as a political hack doing opposition research and smear operations, points out that anyone at the State Dept engaging with him is in violation of the Hatch Act (prohibiting campaign activities by government officials with government resources), and notifying the FBI of those concerns before the first FISA was issued.

Note that the report from IG Horowitz has not yet been released; this is a characterization of its current conclusions from DiGenova.

Sara Carter

Former FBI Director James Comey admitted at a CNN town hall that the text messages between former FBI Agent Peter Strzok and former bureau attorney Lisa Page made the entire agency look bad. It damaged the institution and it tarnished the Russia investigation.

“I think, given the standards that we have,” said Comey, “there should have been, and was, severe discipline around their behavior.”

“Everyone has opinions,” said Comey. “You can’t bring them to work and have them affect your work, there have to be severe consequences.”

Funny how Comey never applied those consequences when he was in a position to do so. It's only now, when AG Barr looks to be seriously investigating the whole of SpyGate, that Comey starts trying to feel Strzok and Page to the lion hoping he will be eaten last. Comey is hoping that Strzok and Page will act as cutouts -- a term of art in espionage whereby the cutout is caught and exposed as a spy, but doesn't or can't reveal anyone else involved in their operations. Especially not anyone higher up the chain.

But the evidence suggests Comey is not the only one feeding people to the lion. Comey himself is being fed to the lion. His FBI investigation itself -- the FISA warrant, the obstruction of justice, the special counsel, all of it -- is merely smoke and mirrors to cover the spying performed by the Obama administration on political opponents by the CIA and NSA. Not just on Trump and his campaign, either.

This stuff goes all the way back to 2012, which, as you will recall, is roughly when the Tea Party IRS scandal was exposed, which also involved... spying on political opponents.

Epoch Times

Former vice president and current presidential candidate Joe Biden said during a campaign stop in California on May 8 that the United States has an “obligation” to give free health care to illegal aliens.

Biden made the comment while responding to a reporter who asked whether “law-abiding” illegals should be given federal benefits.

“I think that anyone who is in a situation where they’re in need of health care, regardless of whether they are documented or undocumented, we have an obligation to see that they are cared for,” Biden said in reply. “That’s why I think we need more clinics around the country.”

You cannot have a welfare state and open borders. The combination will inevitably self-destruct.

Daily Caller

Authorities apprehended a suspect late Wednesday after police discovered over 1,000 guns at a mansion in Los Angeles’s Holmby Hills neighborhood.

The Los Angeles Police Department took Girard Damien Saenz, 57, into custody Wednesday night after a group of local and federal agents seized a stash of more than 1,000 firearms of various sizes, makes and models from the home, according to NBC News.

Police are holding Saenz for suspected selling and lending of assault weapons as well as illegal transport of the weapons, according to a police spokesman, Lt. Chris Ramirez, NBC reported.

“We recovered over a thousand weapons of various makes, models and calibers — rifles, shotguns, pistols,” Ramirez said.

They keep talking about the number of guns they seized. What is the justification for seizing them? "Illegal transport", ie, moving them from place to place in a way the state doesn't like; and "selling and lending" in a way the state doesn't like because of silly and mostly non-functional cosmetic features.

You know what I don't hear? Anything related to violence. As far as I can tell, this man was arrested and had his firearm collection seized because he went shooting with his collection, lent friends firearms from his collection to try at the range, and occasionally sold one without asking the state for permission first.

Real Clear Investigations

Special Counsel Robert Mueller spent more than $732,000 on outside contractors, including private investigators and researchers, records show, but his office refuses to say who they were. While it’s not unusual for special government offices to outsource for services such as computer support, Mueller also hired contractors to compile “investigative reports” and other “information."

The arrangement has led congressional investigators, government watchdog groups and others to speculate that the private investigators and researchers who worked for the special counsel’s office might have included Christopher Steele and Fusion GPS, the private research firm that hired Steele to produce the Russia collusion dossier for the Clinton campaign.

That's a hell of a lot of money for an "unverified, salacious" dossier. Read the whole thing, and then more analysis at Conservative Treehouse.

Buzzfeed

Activists have successfully forced Mastercard to hold a vote by shareholders on a proposal which, if passed, could see the company monitoring payments to global far-right political leaders and white supremacist groups.

The proposal aims to see Mastercard establish an internal “human rights committee” that would stop designated white supremacist groups and anti-Islam activists, such as Tommy Robinson, from getting access to money sent from donors using the company’s card payment services.

It’s been conceived by US-based political activists SumOfUs, who want to escalate the battle against white supremacists and far-right groups from tech platforms like Facebook, Google, Twitter, Patreon, and PayPal to one of the biggest companies in world finance, in an attempt to choke off donations.

It's funny how these attempts at a financial death penalty are always aimed at the "far right" but never the "far left". Should we try to pressure financial services companies to deny service to Bernie Sanders, an admitted socialist? How about Antifa? How about openly communist political groups? How about the New Black Panther Party, who famously guarded polling stations in military uniforms with billy clubs when Obama was running for President?

The far-right but not far-left is an open admission of bias.

Putting it bluntly, people have the right to their opinions, and they have a right to participate in groups of people that agree with them, and they have a right to participate in the financial system so long as their activities are nonviolent and within the law. Yes, even if the left disagrees with them. Yes, even if the left REALLY REALLY STRONGLY disagrees.

These attempts at imposing a financial death penalty on people for having political views that the left disagrees with amounts to a financial civil war.