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Semi-retired Trial Lawyer

George Floyd’s Death Was A Tragedy, Because All Lives Matter. It Was Not A Homicide.

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By Jim George

Jim George

| 

None of it had to happen. Capt. Dorn did not have to have his execution live-streamed on Facebook in the name of “justice” for George Floyd. Minneapolis did not have to be burned, with businesses which took a lifetime to build gone in a flash of flame. Statues of some of our country’s greatest heroes of human rights, men like Frederick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses Grant and so many others did not have to be torn down by packs of ignoramuses who had no idea who they were or what they stood for — all in the name of “avenging” the “murder” of George Floyd.

Much of this–admittedly not all–could have been avoided had the thoroughly corrupt Attorney General of the State of Minnesota, Keith Ellison, waited just a few days before “jumping the gun” and filing murder and related charges against the Minneapolis Police Officers who arrested George Floyd on May 25, 2020, before all toxicology and autopsy reports were completed. Now, as a growing number of observers and analysts are bringing to light, these officers’ lives and liberty are at peril due to the inexcusable and detestable politicization of the criminal justice system and the prosecutors –and the Court–are saddled with a very likely unwinnable case in view of the real conflicts in the evidence making “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” difficult, if not impossible.

In this discussion, I will attempt to illustrate just how glaring those inconsistencies are but in doing so, I start with one important caveat. That has to do with the popular misconception created by the combination of the premature charges with the usual ubiquitous iPhone video of “the knee on the neck” scene layered on top of the countless riots, looting, shootings, injuries, deaths, candlelight vigils, etc., all of which have rendered almost impossible any fair and reasoned evaluation of the evidence. Any doubt about the power of that deeply-entrenched narrative should be dispelled by the briefest consideration of the fact that mobs are still shouting “hands up, don’t shoot” years after that entire scenario was proven to be sheer fiction.

There have been several comprehensive analyses of the evidence weighing against guilty verdicts in these cases, with two of the best written by our colleague, @arizonapatriot, and this discussion will not plow those furrows again, except to refer to some of their findings. My thesis will be to summarize, as succinctly and dispassionately as I know how to, the various strong arguments in favor of these defendants– legal arguments, not emotional, social justice “arguments” — to illustrate the life-or-death danger of prejudgment of any case, the George Floyd case, the Jacob Blake case in Kenosha, the Michael Brown case in Ferguson. It will also be my goal to try to illustrate the dominant role played in many of these cases by he corruption of public officers who we entrust to help assure we live in an ordered society–the very antithesis of what we are seeing today in many of our cities.

The arrest occurred on May 25, 2020; Floyd expired later that day, perhaps in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, although a viewing of the video of that scene is not clear as to whether he survived that long. A full autopsy was performed the next day, but the toxicology report, the findings of which have assumed heightened importance recently, was based on a study of “Hospital Blood” drawn upon his admission to the hospital soon after the arrest.

On May 29, 2020, charges of Third Degree Murder were filed against Officer Derek Chauvin. The Attorney General of the State of Minnesota, Keith Ellison, increased that charge to Second Degree Murder later, on June 3, 2020, in a move likely designed to appease the howling mobs then busily destroying everything in sight in downtown Minneapolis in the interest of “Justice” for Mr. Floyd. The mob, like mobs since the memory of man runneth not to the contrary, continued howling and burning and looting and, as surely as night follows day, killing.

In this interim of several days , however, a development was taking place which may well mean there is no rational argument that the State of Minnesota can prove these officers guilty of these crimes “beyond a reasonable doubt.”

The autopsy report, analyzed meticulously and brilliantly by @arizonapatriot in his post of July 6, 2020, was discussed with two representatives of the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office on May 26, which meeting was memorialized in the following memo, making it crystal clear that as of the night of the arrest incident, there was no physical evidence suggesting that Mr. Floyd died of asphyxiation:

On May 26, 2020, Patrick Lofton and Amy Sweasy met with Hennepin County Medical Examiner Dr. Andrew Baker (AB) over Microsoft Teams. Also present in the MS Teams meeting were SAIC Scott Mueller and SA Mike Phill from the BCA and FBI Agents Hoffstetter, Rainer, Kane, and Melcher.
AB explained his findings from the autopsy of George Floyd. He stated that his final report
is not complete and that he must review more evidence, including video evidence, and toxicology
results before releasing a final opinion.
The autopsy revealed no physical evidence suggesting that Mr. Floyd died of asphyxiation. Mr. Floyd did not exhibit signs of petechiae, damage to his airways or thyroid, brain bleeding, bone
injuries, or internal bruising. Mr. Floyd had several external injuries, including laceration to his lip and bruising on his left shoulder and face. He also had abrasions on his fingers and knuckles as well as wrist injuries
likely associated with being handcuffed. Mr. Floyd had preexisting health conditions including heavy heart and some coronary artery disease, including at least one artery that was approximately 75% blocked.
AB sent Mr. Floyd’s blood samples to NMS Labs, who will provide full toxicology report.
AB opined that he does not have full context for Mr. Floyd’s death without reviewing more of
the evidence. He specifically avoided watching any videos associated with the case to avoid
bias during the autopsy.

As observed in an article written by a 30 year veteran of the LAPD, Jack Dunphy (his nom de cyber according to his bio) about a week after the arrest incident, another curious piece of the puzzle was revealed:

On May 28, three days after Floyd’s death, there emerged the first hint that the narrative may have been too hastily constructed and that its foundation was less than solid. The Hennepin County medical examiner issued a press release citing preliminary results from George Floyd’s autopsy. “The cause and manner of death,” it read, “is currently pending further testing and investigation.”

As the author of that article then noted, “[t]his should have given a dispassionate observer pause”, but there was to be no “pause” with these prosecutors who charged ahead in the face of what many lawyers would have regarded as bright, large red flags and filed the first charges on May 29, in an action which appears to this hopefully objective observer to be, at best, ethically and professionally questionable.

Two days after the charges were filed, the prosecutors held an evening “virtual meeting” with the Hennepin County Medical Examiner, Dr. Andrew Baker which was memorialized in the memo below:

It is important to note that this memo was only made public a few days ago (August 27, 2020) and then only in response to a Motion to Compel Disclosure in the case against one of the officers.

In other words, not voluntarily or with great fanfare, like the very public action of the execrable State AG in increasing the severity of the charge against Officer Chauvin.

The prosecutors and the State AG had to be ordered by a Court to produce information almost 3 months after the burning and looting and rioting in Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, Chicago, St. Louis, Washington, Kenosha and the injuring and maiming and killing of scores of American citizens, including a baby boy in his stroller in Chicago.

George Parry is former federal and state prosecutor. He has had extensive experience with a section of the Philadelphia DA’s Office investigating and prosecuting the use of deadly force by police. He has written a 3-part series in The American Spectator (here, here and here) about the George Floyd case and in the third part of that series gives a rather vivid imagining of the scene as the prosecutors heard this information and considered what it had done to their case:

So there they were, staring at the just-received and damning toxicology report that blew to smithereens the whole prosecution theory that the police had killed Floyd. To their undoubted dismay, Dr. Baker, the chief medical examiner, had to concede that at 11 ng/mL, Floyd had “a fatal level of fentanyl under normal circumstances.” He also conceded that the fentanyl overdose “can cause pulmonary edema,” a frothy fluid build-up in the lungs that was evidenced by the finding at autopsy that Floyd’s lungs weighed two to three times normal weight.

This is consistent with Officer Kueng’s observation at the scene that Floyd was foaming at the mouth and, as found at autopsy, that his lungs were “diffusely congested and edematous.”

In other words, like a drowned man, Floyd’s lungs were filled with fluid. And that was the obvious and inescapable reason why Floyd kept shouting over and over again that he couldn’t breathe even when he was upright and mobile.

The memorandum ends with Dr. Baker’s devastating conclusion that “if Floyd had been found dead in his home (or anywhere else) and there were no other contributing factors he [Dr. Baker] would conclude that it was an overdose death.”

Translation: this toxicology report drives a stake through the heart of our murder case. How do we justify criminally charging these police officers and explain away our colossal screw-up?

While that should be legally sufficient to end this tragically wrongful prosecution, as the TV salesmen might say, “wait, wait, there’s more!” in the nature of a coup-de-grace, as if one would be needed. There is also a handwritten note, described and discussed by @arizonapatriot as follows:

The final evidence is a single page of handwritten notes dated June 1, 2020 (here). It does not identify the person who wrote the notes but appears to be written either by Dr. Baker or by someone recording a discussion with Dr. Baker. Here is the full text (again, my emphasis added):

6/1/20 p.2

Fentanyl at 11 ng/ml – this is higher than chronic pain patient. If he were found dead at home alone + no other apparent causes, this could be acceptable to call an OD. Deaths have been certified w/ level of 3.

Baker: I am not saying this killed him.

4Fentanyl: metabolite

4ANPP – thinks this is non-commercial

Meth 19 ng/ml – this is relatively low, but meth is bad for your heart.

From videos I have seen, it appears like his knee is on the side of his neck, not where the structures are.

This last line is relevant to the asphyxia argument, and specifically the media narrative that Ofc. Chauvin was choking Floyd by kneeling on his neck. As noted in my June 6 post and in the first memo quoted above, the autopsy found no physical evidence of choking or other asphyxiation — specific relevant details is the lack of damage to Floyd’s trachea and hyoid bone. This is common sense. In the video, Floyd’s head is turned to the side — his right side — and Chauvin’s knee is on the right side of Floyd’s neck, presumably pressing down (with an unknown amount of force, except that it was insufficient to cause any bruising or other tissue trauma, according to the autopsy). You can’t choke someone with pressure on the side of their neck.

@arizonapatriot, with admirable and circumspect professionalism, observes that the officers in this case are “engaging in deliberate obfuscation, and I find this very troubling.”

While this evidence should —legally– finish this prosecution and free these wrongfully persecuted officers (I write the word “persecuted” advisedly on the day a Federal Court of Appeals has disgracefully extended the persecution of Gen. Flynn apparently indefinitely), there is more powerful evidence in their favor. This evidence is discussed in the second of George Parry’s series, entitled “Chauvin, Lane, Kueng, and Thao: The George Floyd Fall Guys”, and shows that every step they took in the arrest and subduing of George Floyd was in complete compliance with the Minneapolis Police Department officer training materials on how to safely properly subdue a suspect.

As I promised I would (attempt to) keep this as succinct as possible, and considering that I believe, in the utmost of good faith, that there is no way for the prosecution to overcome the challenges presented by the evidence of their own Medical Examiner, I will not cover that additional evidence in detail here. However, for those who wish to delve further into this additional source of “reasonable doubt”, it is set forth in the article cited above and also in the Memorandum Supporting Motion to Dismiss in behalf of Officer Thomas Kiernan Lane and especially the exhibits listed in the appendix.

The result of the callous and sickening corruption of the officials involved in this prosecution is best described by George Parry, a lawyer, as noted above, with a lifetime of professional experience in this field:

So where are these well-intentioned, well-trained, and dutiful public servants today? They are in jail awaiting trial on murder and aiding and abetting charges after having been universally condemned in the news media and used by neo-Marxists and opportunistic criminals across the country as a pretext to riot, loot, and burn. And, while they sit in their cells, not one Minneapolis official, from Mayor Jacob Frey to Police Chief Medaria Arradondo or any member of City Council, has come forward to acknowledge that, in subduing Floyd, these law officers were acting in meticulous accordance with the MPD training and directives designed to reduce the risk of harm to persons suffering excited delirium.

In fact, after Chauvin, Lane, Kueng, and Thao were summarily fired by the MPD, Chief Arradondo apologized to Floyd’s family and acknowledged his department’s purported role in creating “the deficit of hope” that he claims existed in Minneapolis even prior to Floyd’s death.

“I am absolutely sorry for the pain, the devastation and trauma that Mr. Floyd’s death has left on his family, his loved ones, our community in Minneapolis and certainly across the country and the world,” Chief Arradondo announced in a news conference.

For its part, the Minneapolis City Council has acted to defund and dismantle the police department.

All of this, mind you, from the very officials who are ultimately responsible for the training and directives that the defendant officers followed to the letter in their attempt to safely subdue Floyd, who was under the influence of a massively lethal overdose of fentanyl and exhibiting the unmistakable signs of the deadly excited delirium.

By their hypocrisy and cowardice, these blame-shifting public officials, desperate to preserve their political careers and places at the public trough, have tossed these police officers to the howling mob.

In this discussion, I have repeatedly emphasized the word “legally” in weighing what should be the outcome of these unjust prosecutions to distinguish from what we all suspect will be the tragic actual outcome. Here is a passage from one of the very early articles by an author who saw “the handwriting on the wall” months ago”:

Think about this for a minute. What becomes of a society in which facts do not matter? The US media, Democrat Party, white liberals, and the sorry excuse for a leftwing are so primed for “white racism” that they jumped to their desired conclusion and egged on riots and looting that resulted in massive property damage in multiple cities, some deaths, many injuries, and much damage to racial relations. Democrat mayors and governors stood down. Police and National Guard attempting to contain the violence were not supported. Even the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Trump’s Secretary of Defense accommodated the rioting and looting by undermining President Trump’s stand against it. Many people’s businesses were wiped out, and in most cases insurance does not cover damage from riots. The politicians and the media are responsible for the billions of dollars the “peaceful protests” cost. Those who suffered the damage should bring class action suits.

When the Minnesota police, who have been falsely charged with George Floyd’s murder, are tried, the jurors will be afraid not to convict. The story is set in stone, and too many powerful interests are committed to it. The police have already been tried and convicted in the media, and the jurors will fear going against public opinion that the media and white liberals have orchestrated. The effect on police morale and commitment will be devastating. Already police are standing down when faced with crimes committed by “people of color.” Blacks are learning that they have immunity from their violent behavior. For the criminal element, protests are profit opportunities. Expect more “peaceful protests.”

If the name O.J. Simpson comes to mind now and then it is for good reason. “Jury nullification” is a real and most pernicious reality in our legal system, and its ghost haunts the future of these horribly mistreated Officers of the Law.

I pray I’m wrong.

Respectfully submitted, Jim.

Call your Congressman! Call your Senator! (Good luck with that!)

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By Jim George
| August 23, 2020

I recently read an article entitled “Queen Kamala’s Imperial Aspirations” and, given my opinion of “Kah-mahla”, which can only be accurately described in a way which would instantaneously get me disciplined or impeached, or whatever happens when one violates the C of C around here, the title grabbed me. I can definitely recommend reading the whole thing, although it appears in National Review and is, therefore, just a tad more Never Trumper for my taste, but nonetheless is a good discussion of how the Presidency seems to more and more attract those of an Imperial bent, like the execrable “Queen” herself, and why we need a much stronger legislative branch than we’ve had for many years.

The part of the piece which really got my attention, as it relates to experiences of my own in trying to communicate with “our betters” in the august Halls of Congress, was the following:

So whatever your political persuasion, the best thing you can possibly do this year is to phone up your senators and your representative, preferably at least once a week, and instruct them that no matter which party holds the White House, they must grow a backbone and stop acting like a craven lickspittle of the executive branch. This country is only going to function properly if we start to care a little bit less about the parties and a lot more about the branches of government. The only sure way to avoid handing executive power to megalomaniacs such as Kamala Harris in the future is to shrink the presidency so drastically that holding it no longer appeals to them.

Here is my question: is it just me, in my naivete (the use of that word for someone of my age is laughable) thinking we still have a “representative Republic” and still believing that our representatives in the National Legislature should respond to our requests for communication as part of their job description, or is that really a totally lost cause? I would be most interested in learning what kind of experience others have had in their attempts to get their Congressperson’s or Senator’s attention long enough to get an actual answer out of them, and not just a bowl of Pablum- filled form letter which was generated by a young staffer hitting what I imagine is a well worn key on the office computer.

I have been embarrassingly unsuccessful in getting my Congressman to send anything but the aforementioned form letters — as if to rub salt in the wound, the precise same form letter in all 3 instances over the last month or two, including the last request which covered about 3-4 different areas and in which I expressly requested, in what I thought was pretty clear language, that he not respond with a form letter!

At one point, I decided I would really go bold and call my Senator’s office and ask to speak with him personally. I posed the request to the apparently-very-young staffer (I know I’m “of a certain age”–truth be known, way beyond that level, but is it just my imagination, or do they all seem to very young?) and there was a measurable pause as if he might be thinking something like “I’ve never had that request before — someone actually wants The Senator–himself!– to get on the phone with this constituent! What next? Of course, after he recovered sufficiently, I was told how very, very, very busy my representative to one of the bodies of the National Legislature was at that moment but could he/she (who knows anymore?) have the ” fill in blank of some faceless aide” call me. I declined and asked when I could expect to talk with The Senator. The answer to that question was equally unsatisfactory, to be as polite as possible.

Is it just that what I thought was my former formidable charm may be finally wearing off or could it be that many others have had similar experiences in trying to voice their concerns and opinions to their duly elected representatives in the National Legislature? If this is no longer possible, at least for some in those exalted positions in Congress, can we still, with a straight face, continue to call ourselves a Representative Republic?

Who’s kidding whom?

Justice Gorsuch, The Peace Cross and the “Offended Observers”

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As one who has spent most of a (long!) life as an attorney , I am painfully aware that reading most Court opinions is not viewed as the typical “easy reading” we see in novels and The Classics and biographies or other types of reading we do purely for enjoyment. I use the term “painfully aware” as I was required, in the pursuit of our practice, and in the interest of our clients due to my obligation to be as well prepared as possible, to read many opinions and some of them were, quite frankly, sheer, dreadful, boredom. Once in a while, as most notably in the case of the masterful writing of a Justice Scalia, one is treated to a lovely and pleasurable exception The Justice is sorely missed not only for his genius of the law, but for his unusual combination of humor and conviviality of the kind which engendered a close friendship with the Justice he probably most markedly disagreed with, Justice Ginsburg, and their shared love of Opera and great food and wines. Also, as one most interested in the High Court’s erratic treatment of issues relating to the Constitution and federalism, I savor every word of Justice Thomas’ opinions, but readily concede that they might not be everyone’s cup of tea, as they are often heavier in the fields of Constitutional history and jurisprudential development of those issues than most readers would readily be drawn to.

However, I would like to bring to your attention one of those rare opinions which is not only a lawyer’s dream, assuming that lawyer was at least slightly, or more, to the right of center, but should be one to give an unusual level of pure reading enjoyment to anyone with its blend of plain speaking, irreverent, tongue-in-cheek, slicing remarks about some of the abuses many of us believe the Courts have not only allowed, but, in some cases, even encouraged, such as the centerpiece of his concurring opinion in the Peace Cross case, The American Legion v. American Humanist Association.

It is laced with wittily incisive discussions of where the law has wound up in the area of The Establishment Clause by allowing, it is important to note, in some cases but not in all cases, a person who is offended by seeing something, as in this case, a 94 year old memorial to that area’s dead from World War I, to be permitted to claim “standing” to sue in a Federal Court for relief. Here is the way he opened his treatment of this “doctrine”, leaving little or no doubt of how foolish he thought the whole idea was:

“The American Humanist Association wants a federal
court to order the destruction of a 94 year-old war memorial because its members are offended. Today, the Court
explains that the plaintiffs are not entitled to demand the
destruction of longstanding monuments, and I find much
of its opinion compelling.”
***
“The Association claims that its members “regularly”
come into “unwelcome direct contact” with a World War I
memorial cross in Bladensburg, Maryland “while driving
in the area.” …… And this, the
Association suggests, is enough to allow it to insist on a
federal judicial decree ordering the memorial’s removal.
Maybe, the Association concedes, others who are less
offended lack standing to sue. Maybe others still who are
equally affected but who come into contact with the memorial too infrequently lack standing as well. …But, the Association assures us, its
members are offended enough—and with sufficient frequency—that they may sue.
This “offended observer” theory of standing has no basis
in law”

After a brilliant and sometimes comic “parade of horribles” he paints a vivid picture of the lunacy which has upset and concerned so many who see these decisions as crazy patchwork with little or no uniformity or predictability, he sums up a few of the most illogical results with some of the examples coming from the Court’s own building and those nearby on Capitol Hill:

“Courts ….. have upheld
Ten Commandment displays and demanded their removal;
they have allowed memorial crosses and insisted that they
be razed; they have permitted Christmas displays and
pulled the plug on them; and they have pondered seemingly
endlessly the inclusion of “In God We Trust” on currency
or similar language in our Pledge of Allegiance. No one
can predict the rulings—but one thing is certain: Between
the challenged practices and the judicial decisions, just
about everyone will wind up offended.
Nor have we yet come close to exhausting the potential
sources of offense and federal litigation Lemon invited, for
what about the display of the Ten Commandments on the frieze in our own courtroom or on the doors leading into it?
Or the statues of Moses and the Apostle Paul next door in
the Library of Congress? Or the depictions of the Ten
Commandments found in the Justice Department and the
National Archives? Or the crosses that can be found in
the U. S. Capitol building? And all that just takes us mere
steps from where we sit.”

Many of us have viewed the current phenomenon of the “perpetually aggrieved” , represented most graphically on today’s political scene by The Hon. (?) Maxine Waters of Los Angeles, whose most visible characteristic is an unrelenting, day in and day out, anger at everything about the United States, with a blend of some humor and a lot of concern for where all that vitriol can lead. In his closing lines, Justice Gorsuch gives voice to those concerns, with language which indicates to me that major changes in thinking may be taking place at the High Court, to be made even more permanent if the President gets an opportunity to make just one more nomination to that Bench:

“In a large and diverse country, offense can be easily
found. Really, most every governmental action probably
offends somebody. No doubt, too, that offense can be
sincere, sometimes well taken, even wise. But recourse for
disagreement and offense does not lie in federal litigation.
Instead, in a society that holds among its most cherished
ambitions mutual respect, tolerance, self-rule, and democratic responsibility, an “offended viewer” may “avert his
eyes,” …or pursue a political solution. Today’s decision represents
a welcome step toward restoring this Court’s recognition of
these truths, and I respectfully concur in the judgment.”

A welcome step, indeed.

Thank you, Justice Gorsuch.

President Trump has a primary challenger. Wm. Weld. Seriously?

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Jim George

| 

The Curious Candidacy of William Weld is the title of a piece in this morning’s Spectator USA in which the author asks what to me, at least, is most worthy of consideration at this time when the Democrats are filling up their Clown Cars with, well, clowns running for their nomination: “The former Massachusetts governor is entirely a figure of the past. Why is he running?”

I preface the following observations with the painfully obvious reality that if there is one thing we all should have learned in the last decade or two, it is that anything, absolutely anything, could happen and has happened in the recent past. And, I am reliably given to understand that there are actually citizens out there who have, as is their right, sent real, actual American dollars to Mr. Weld’s campaign and quite possibly those of other potential challengers to the President.

That said, I highly recommend to your reading and consideration the delightfully tongue-in-cheek article cited above, which examines Mr. Weld’s, shall we say, interesting history of changing parties and beliefs (I think the most commonly used euphemism is “evolving beliefs” ) as indicated by the temper of the times.

I also recommend a piece in the Washington Examiner, a more straightforward discussion of his history. It can be found here.

In my more and more humble opinion, I am at one with the conclusion of the Spectator article:

“This is the bottom-line problem for NeverTrump — whether Trump serves another four years after next November or not, the GOP base is not looking to return to nominees like John McCain and Mitt Romney or either of the two Bushes. The Republican party is the Flight 93 party, as far as its voters are concerned, and the NeverTrump crew are not the men to rush the cockpit.”

In honor of those incredibly brave Americans aboard that doomed flight straight into that Pennsylvania field, I close with their charge: Let’s roll!

Sincerely, Jim

Out-Foxxed in MAGA Country (Making Arrests Go Away)*–Where’s the Justice for “the nobody people”?

Corruption in law and politics, Uncategorized

By Jim George
April 4, 2019

While it may raise howls of derision from the apparently millions of Americans who think that lawyers are a blight upon the Republic, it is my firm belief that approximately 99% of all lawyers in America strive to conduct their practices in an honest, civil and, most importantly, ethical manner. I cannot speak for every single one of that cohort, but I can definitely speak for two of them, my law and life partner, Judi, and myself when I say that the antics — and there’s no better way to describe her conduct — of State’s Attorney of Crook, er, Cook County in regard to the Jessie Smollett case in Chicago are blatantly and sickeningly unethical. It was disgusting to read the first accounts of her apparently newly created method of “alternative dispositions”, about which more later, as it appeared, in the early stages, she might just get away with her brand of “in-your-face” lawlessness. Almost as gag-inducing was the sanctimonious speech Smollett gave, telling the world he had been “exonerated” and that he “wouldn’t be my Mother’s son if I had done the things reported.” What unmitigated rot! Pure fiction, although there are several much more, shall we say, colorful words I could have — and have– used to describe this entire kabuki dance.

One of the several reasons I decided to research this entire dismal episode what that I saw writings in what was once called the Mainstream Media, at a time when that title was accorded with respect, now composed of thoroughly discredited propaganda organs of the Democrat Party, buying hook, line and sinker Smollett’s Courthouse steps speech proclaiming his complete and total innocence of 16 felony charges handed down by a Grand Jury. One such column, also as cringe-worthy as Smollett’s speech, if not more so, appeared in the New York Times over the weekend. There, in that publication referred to by Klavan as “a former newspaper”, the always reliable propagandist for the far-left and a bona fide Trump hater,Charles Blow, put together a series of statements which were, for the most part, divorced from reality, and from the actual facts which have been in the public domain since about mid_February.

The author referred to the incident as a “trivial crime and entertainment story” and “an “interesting Hollywood drama, but meaningless in the grand scheme of things” and concluded with this lovely piece of — dare I say it?– hateful commentary:

“Folks, what you are seeing is a media being bullied into bending over backward to placate the people who endlessly accuse them of bias. I believe you are also seeing an expression of subconscious race bias in the media itself that truly registers sensation at the thought of this black man’s deception.

“Smollett’s greatest offense in this regard was not lying, if indeed he did, but lying about white people who support a racist in the White House.”

Now that we have, in the interest of balance, heard from “the other side of the moon”, we should consider the real world, many views from Chicago writers and authorities of Bar Associations opining on the ethical issues Ms Foxx has stumbled (?) into.

We start that look at the real world of Chicago politics, which one might hear from time to time is the very pinnacle of corruption in our country. I’m also aware that such a word as pinnacle, denoting lofty altitudes, is the wrong word to describe such a universally known level of corruption. Our look at that real world, one Ms. Foxx occupies and has sullied by her actions, should start with the Illinois Prosecutors Bar Association, which issued a statement sharply critical of her actions in this matter. I urge reading it in full for a solid grounding in the serious ethical issues involved in her handling of this case:

“The manner in which this case was dismissed was abnormal and unfamiliar to those who practice law in criminal courthouses across the State. Prosecutors, defense attorneys, and judges alike do not recognize the arrangement Mr. Smollett received. Even more problematic, the State’s Attorney and her representatives have fundamentally misled the public on the law and circumstances surrounding the dismissal.

“The public has the right to know the truth, and we set out to do that here.

“When an elected State’s Attorney recuses herself from a prosecution, Illinois law provides that the court shall appoint a special prosecutor. See 55 ILCS 5/3-9008(a-15). Typically, the special prosecutor is a neighboring State’s Attorney, the Attorney General, or the State Appellate Prosecutor. Here, the State’s Attorney kept the case within her office and thus never actually recused herself as a matter of law.

“Additionally, the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office falsely informed the public that the uncontested sealing of the criminal court case was “mandatory” under Illinois law. This statement is not accurate. To the extent the case was even eligible for an immediate seal, that action was discretionary, not mandatory, and only upon the proper filing of a petition to seal. See 20 ILCS 2630/5.2(g)(2). For seals not subject to Section 5.2(g)(2), the process employed in this case by the State’s Attorney effectively denied law enforcement agencies of legally required Notice (See 20 ILCS 2630/5.2(d)(4)) and the legal opportunity to object to the sealing of the file (See 20 ILCS 2630/5.2(d)(5)). The State’s Attorney not only declined to fight the sealing of this case in court, but then provided false information to the public regarding it.

“The appearance of impropriety here is compounded by the fact that this case was not on the regularly scheduled court call, the public had no reasonable notice or opportunity to view these proceedings, and the dismissal was done abruptly at what has been called an “emergency” hearing. To date, the nature of the purported emergency has not been publicly disclosed. The sealing of a court case immediately following a hearing where there was no reasonable notice or opportunity for the public to attend is a matter of grave public concern and undermines the very foundation of our public court system.”

The Bar Association’s statement also puts the lie to Ms. Foxx’s assurances to the public that this procedure, which she termed a diversionary program “available to all defendants.:

“Lastly, the State’s Attorney has claimed this arrangement is “available to all defendants” and “not a new or unusual practice.” There has even been an implication it was done in accordance with a statutory diversion program. These statements are plainly misleading and inaccurate. This action was highly unusual, not a statutory diversion program, and not in accordance with well accepted practices of State’s Attorney initiated diversionary programs. The IPBA supports diversion programs, and recognizes the many benefits they provide to the community, the defendant and to the prosecuting agency. Central to any diversion program, however, is that the defendant must accept responsibility. To be clear here, this simply was not a deferred prosecution.”

Their reprimand concluded by describing her conduct as the polar opposite of “trivial”, as tut-tutted by the New York Times:

” ‘This irregular arrangement was an affront to prosecutors across the State, the Chicago Police Department, victims of hate crimes, and the people of the City of Chicago and Cook County. We strongly encourage our members and the public to review the National District Attorneys Associations statement on prosecutorial best practices in high profile cases.’ “

Before turning to the opinions and analysis of some of the better writers in that real world–Chicago–it should be noted that the Chicago Tribune has published an excellent comprehensive timeline of all events in this case up to March 29, 2019, and it is a very helpful resource in trying to sort out all the twists and turns in this sad display of pure corruption.

Now to take up events “on the ground”, consider first the columnist I consider to be the “best of the best”, John Kass of the Chicago Tribune. He has been reporting on Chicago politics for over 30 years, and starts his discussion in his usual pithy and direct manner:

““I think it (the Smollett case) has opened an opportunity for us to have conversations around what does justice look like,” Foxx told WBEZ.

“Oh, really? What justice looks like? In Cook County? Kim Foxx, that’s so precious. Are you serious?

“Since I was born in Chicago, with the smell of the Union Stockyards in my nose, I can’t really tell you what justice looks like with Kim Foxx leading the parade.

“But I can tell you what desperate politics looks like. And I’m going to tell you some of it today, including a story about the desperate emails sent to Foxx’s employees, asking them to come up with examples to support her foolishness with Smollett.

“And about Foxx’s so-called “recusal” from the case, which wasn’t a true recusal. It was a story, the kind Chicago politicians tell to children and journalists.

“Foxx’s troubles began when she inexplicably compromised herself ethically through inappropriate contacts with Obama Celebrity Friends who wanted her help with the Smollett case.

“And then she dropped charges against Smollett — charges approved by a Cook County grand jury — alleging that the Hollywood star of the TV show “Empire” faked his own hate crime and blamed it on supporters of President Donald Trump.”

He then got to the meat of the whole ethics imbroglio in which Foxx’s office sent out a request to other prosecutors to help her out of the ethical dilemma she had gotten herself into”

“And then came that panicky email Foxx’s office sent out, asking prosecutors for “examples of cases, felony preferable, where we, in exercising our discretion, have entered into verbal agreements with defense attorneys to dismiss charges against an offender if certain conditions were met, such as the payment of restitution, completion of community service, etc. but the defendant was not placed in a formal diversion program.”

“In other words: Please help me. I’ve screwed up, and I need examples to show people that what I did is really not all that unusual.

“I asked a Cook County judge about this.

““How stupid is it to put in writing that you’re advertising for excuses after the fact?” said the judge.

” “No further questions, Your Honor.” “

Another writer with the Tribune, Eric Zorn, noted a few other “tone-deaf” statements by Foxx in trying to extricate hersself from the pit she had dug for herself, entitled “Kim Foxx will and should lose her job over the Jussie Smollett case”:

“Her tone-deaf statements included equating Smollett to the raft of no-name, low-level, nonviolent offenders who have received the “go and sin no more” treatment, and patronizing those who are outraged by the outcome as “people who don’t understand the intricacies of the justice system.”

“Here’s what we understand: High-profile criminal cases are the lens through which the public sees and evaluates the administration of justice as a whole.”

***

“It was a fairly basic task. They failed spectacularly.

“The process that brought a surprise end to the case was anything but transparent. Prosecutors didn’t even alert reporters to the “emergency” hearing where they dropped, without explanation, all 16 felony disorderly conduct charges, and where they didn’t object to the sealing of the court file.

“And although prosecutors got Smollett to forfeit his bond of $10,000 — not much of a dent in the budget of an actor who reportedly makes more than 10 times that amount per episode of “Empire” — they did not even ask for a confession or apology.

“That allowed Smollett to repair immediately to the courthouse lobby and preen for the cameras about his innocence.

“His lawyers have since repeatedly echoed this claim, for example responding Thursday to the city’s demand that Smollett pay the cost of the investigation, later estimated at $130,000, with a statement saying, “It is the mayor and the police chief who owe Jussie — owe him an apology — for dragging an innocent man’s character through the mud. Jussie has paid enough.”

“Such galling pieties have infuriated all of us who wanted to see the accused selfish charlatan humbled and fined for allegedly perpetrating such an ugly hoax.”

Other good discussions can be found here, here, here and here.

Interestingly, the last piece looks into whether Smollett got a sweetheart deal by “ratting out” his celebrity lawyer, Mark Geragos, who was implicated in the embezzlement charges against “Porn Lawyer” Avenatti, those charges being filed one day before Smollett got “the deal of a lifetime”:

“Smollett’s celebrity attorney Geragos is officially the co-conspirator in Avenatti’s criminal case in two different states for trying to extort $25 million from Nike. Avenatti claims he has proof that Nike was paying college and high school basketball players and that the sportswear company’s practices were illegal. He is also facing charges of defrauding a bank for a loan for over $4 million as well as lying to clients about their settlements in order to use their monies to fund his own enterprises, including a chain of coffee houses.”

To be “fair and balanced”, a ;phrase which seems to drive some of he far-left batty (perhaps better said: more batty), I should note that Foxx wrote an Op-Ed in the Chicago Tribune defending her actions, replete with many of the buzzwords our progressive colleagues like to bandy about such as “have a conversation”, “transparency”, “smart justice”, “rethink the justice system”, etc., etc. It was also replete with what the reprimand of the Bar Association, quoted above, called “repeated deceptive and misleading statements”:

“So, why isn’t Smollett in prison or at least on trial? There are two different answers to this, both equally important.

“First, the law. There were specific aspects of the evidence and testimony presented to the office that would have made securing a conviction against Smollett uncertain. In determining whether or not to pursue charges, prosecutors are required to balance the severity of the crime against the likelihood of securing a conviction. For a variety of reasons, including public statements made about the evidence in this case, my office believed the likelihood of securing a conviction was not certain.

“In the interest of full transparency, I would prefer these records be made public. However, in this case, Illinois law allows defendants in certain circumstances to request that public records remain sealed. Smollett chose to pursue that avenue, and so my office is barred from releasing those records without his approval.”

***

“I was elected on a promise to rethink the justice system, to keep people out of prison who do not pose a danger to the community. I promised to spend my office’s finite resources on the most serious crimes in order to create communities that are both safer and fairer.

“Our community is safer in every sense of the word when murderers and rapists are locked away. But we can’t allow fearmongers to devalue the tremendous progress we’ve made in the last year. Since taking office, I’ve sought to employ alternative prosecutions, diversions, alternate outcomes and other forms of smart justice, and it has been working — violent crime in Chicago is down overall.”

Notwithstanding her defenses, in the real world:

“Foxx could be in trouble. According to FOIA documents released several weeks ago, she communicated with both a former aide to President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, and a member of the Smollett family, believed to be Smollett’s sister. Because of those communications, Foxx supposedly “recused” herself from the Smollett case, but last week her office revealed that Foxx had used the term only “colloquially” and had never officially stepped away from the case.”

Finally, I used the phrase “nobody people” in my title. It caught my eye as a fitting description of those who really do suffer from this unequal justice under law, and it appeared in one of several analyses in the past few days about people who are not named Smollett or Clinton, but who have names like Watts and Bohanon-Silmon. This article related the tragic account of Ms Silmon’s 21 year old son, Andre D. Bohanon, who was robbed and killed in 2005. His murder is still unsolved. She expressed her frustration in these words:

” “I’m insulted and quite frankly heartbroken that all of this time, attention, detective work, manpower and hours upon hours were spent on this Jessie [sic] Smollett case, yet hundreds of murders go unsolved every year!” Deneen Bohanon-Silmon complained in an email.”

Adowa Watts’ daughter was fatally shot in 2016 while riding in a vehicle with an ex-boyfriend, Darrell Junious. The evidence was strong that he had shot her, according to this account:

“He admitted firing shots, but allegedly told police he threw the gun away, according to Watts.

” “She had a gunshot wound on the left side of her head that blew off the back part of her head,” the mother told me.

“Watts said Junious “drove around for a few hours, passing up hospitals” before taking Ali to West Suburban Hospital where she was DOA.

” “When I got to the hospital, he did not have any blood on him nowhere which means he changed his clothes, because there was a splatter of blood all over his [car] seat,” she told me.

“Watts is outraged that Junious was charged only with unlawful use of a weapon.

” “Police came right out and said he was guilty of murder but they couldn’t prove it,” she said.”

She said that she and a group of Mothers who have lost chidren to gun violence met with prosecutors for an outreach and counselling session attended by Foxx:

” “We never got an answer to our questions about why the shooters weren’t charged. She kept saying that we are backed up and it’s not that they are not trying to get to the case,” Watts recalled.

” “If this had happened politicians and police officers or doctors or someone like that, they would have done something already. We are nobody people.” “

Those words embody the potential dangers which many see as troublesome fault lines in our society caused by well-founded concerns that certain classes “get away with murder” and “skate” because of their celebrity, money, political clout or all of the above.

I am definitely of that view and, for that reason, among others, this article is most respectfully dedicated to “the nobody people” everywhere.

*I am grateful to the incisive wit of John Kass for the new words for MAGA.

Lawsuits are terrible for the country–except when they’re not

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Jim George By Jim George
March 2, 2019

Too little, too late, proclaims a title of a piece this morning about the pathetic attempt by the Washington Post to ameliorate its enormous exposure to potentially crippling damages stemming from the –gasp! — lawsuit filed by Nick Sandmann and his family over its disgraceful, dishonest, despicable fabrication of an article about the so-called “Lincoln Memorial confrontation” between Nick and his friends with the poor, beleaguered “Indian chief” and “Vietnam War veteran” who turned out to be as fraudulent as the Post.

Here is the Post’s “apology” in full:

“Editor’s note related to Lincoln Memorial incident
By Washington Post Staff March 1 at 5:17 PM
A Washington Post article first posted online on Jan. 19 reported on a Jan. 18 incident at the Lincoln Memorial. Subsequent reporting, a student’s statement and additional video allow for a more complete assessment of what occurred, either contradicting or failing to confirm accounts provided in that story — including that Native American activist Nathan Phillips was prevented by one student from moving on, that his group had been taunted by the students in the lead-up to the encounter, and that the students were trying to instigate a conflict. The high school student facing Phillips issued a statement contradicting his account; the bishop in Covington, Ky., apologized for the statement condemning the students; and an investigation conducted for the Diocese of Covington and Covington Catholic High School found the students’ accounts consistent with videos. Subsequent Post coverage, including video, reported these developments: “Viral standoff between a tribal elder and a high schooler is more complicated than it first seemed”; “Kentucky bishop apologizes to Covington Catholic students, says he expects their exoneration”; “Investigation finds no evidence of ‘racist or offensive statements’ in Mall incident.”

A Jan. 22 correction to the original story reads: Earlier versions of this story incorrectly said that Native American activist Nathan Phillips fought in the Vietnam War. Phillips said he served in the U.S. Marines but was never deployed to Vietnam.”

See any actual apology? Neither do I.

Here’s a common sense report on the “apology” from the piece in the Washington Examiner, linked above:

“The teens abused no one. They mistreated no one. Yet, they were treated like monsters all the same, and all because newsrooms couldn’t be bothered to double-check whether there was a longer, uncut version of the viral footage that had sparked this especially grotesque news cycle. The Covington boys were pilloried, publicly condemned by even their own bishop, and threatened with violence. One student in particular, Nick Sandmann, received the brunt of the hate because he is the most visible of the students captured in footage of the incident.

Unedited tapes of the confrontation between Phillips and the Covington students show the teens were accosted first by Black Hebrew Israelites, a loathsome fringe hate group. The footage also show that it was Phillips who approached the students, not the other way around.

Sandmann filed a defamation lawsuit against the Post in early February, seeking $250 million in damages — the same amount the Post’s owner, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, paid for the newspaper in 2013.”

The journalism “profession” has beclowned itself (admittedly a poor choice of words as there is nothing funny about setting out to deliberately ruin young men’s lives) so thoroughly it is difficult, for me at least, to see a return to the august position it once held as a beacon of truth, integrity and honest reporting any time in the foreseeable future.

The title I chose for this post was prompted by a lifetime of filing and pursuing lawsuits on behalf of (mostly!) deserving clients in various courts, State and Federal, and hearing, time after time, lawsuits being called various forms of the scourge of the Earth.
Note to anyone who believes the Washington Compost would have ever published even that sad imitation of an apology without that lawsuit: I’ve got some beachfront property in Montana I’ll let you have cheap.

Sincerely, Jim

Eight Days In May–Rosenstein Did Wear A Wire and Discuss Using the 25th Amendment to remove the President of the United States

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Edit

 By Jim George

 February 14, 2019

I had written a slightly sarcastic post about how it was our civic duty as American citizens to rush out and read the latest book by a member of the Swamp, and how their families could probably use the money in the future when all appeal delays have expired after criminal proceedings have been wrapped up, and then I read Byron York’s piece of this morning, and Powerline’s comment on the same, and saw the book in a whole new light.

I strenuously urge a reading of York’s discussion of the number of suspicions and speculations some of McCabe’s book confirms, such as:

“If it’s all true, that is, if revelations in an upcoming book by former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe are accurate. The bottom line on that is that, at least from what we know now, McCabe’s story seems consistent with information congressional investigators have been able to glean elsewhere.”

“It’s just like we thought all along,” said one House Republican upon hearing the news. “If McCabe’s account is true, it confirms what we thought, that Rod Rosenstein was serious when he talked about wearing a wire and invoking the 25th Amendment. Rosenstein should be under oath answering our questions. We need to know who was in the room and what was said.””

There is a lot more in York’s piece, especially about Rosenstein who is, in my opinion, one of the most dangerous people in government today.

As John Hinderaker concluded on Powerline, “Someone should be doing hard time.”

Indeed.

Sincerely, Jim

“Something Wicked This Way Comes”: Barbaric, Depraved Paganism

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After the President’s soaringly optimistic paean to all that’s best about an America he obviously loves deeply, as do so many of us who voted him into office, it is jarring, to put it mildly, to return to the darkness which is steadily creeping over our Beloved Nation. But as we have learned time after time, year after year, the magic potion of trying to wish problems away has never worked and will never work, and some of our black holes carry such grave potential as to represent truly dangerous chasms which bode ill for our very existence as a Nation.

Some of them are serious, on varying levels of gravity, and need attention right away.

One of them, represented by the New York law on late term abortion and the attempt at an even more radical law in Virginia, is truly wicked–are evil, barbaric, paganistic, depraved and murderous. These laws, and and the bland, ho-hum attitude some have expressed toward them, cause one to question the basic humanity of some of our fellow citizens. The standing ovation given the “Catholic” Governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, was surely one of the most sickening displays of ghoulish cruelty seen since the days of butchers like Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. One must ask: how is this different, in principle, from Auschwitz and Berkenau?

I was driven to write this by an ever-strengthening feeling that I needed, on a personal level, to try to get some even partial understanding of how humans can be so driven by — ideology? cruelty? self-absorption? — as to not only approve infanticide, as the act described by Dr. Northam of Virginia can only be called, but to give it a standing ovation, as in the New York legislature. I, quite simply, could not understand this kind of inhumanity and, now, after delving into it much more deeply, more than ever am convinced that there is a kind of rot and sickness growing inside our body politic which clearly has the power to destroy us if not checked, and soon.

It has been said that only  13% of those polled actually favor partial birth abortion, euphemistically all gussied up with the term “late term abortion”, a figure often used to illustrate how unmoored from real Americans many politicians are who pass these laws. My question is: who are these people, apparently fellow Americans, who believe it is just fine to kill a living, breathing, fellow citizen? I’m not good at math, but can there really be 40 Million Americans who are that inhumanly cruel and callous? It seems there must be and, at the risk of not being at all nuanced about it, they are the core of the rapidly spreading growth threatening our country.

It will be, I hope, helpful to take a tour of the writings of some of our most thoughtful essayists on these developments, not all, by the way, of the right or center right.

For example, the “conservative” columnist for the Washington Post– “conservative” in the same sense as the New York Times’ David Brooks— referred recently to “The Banality of Evil, 2019 Version”. She wisely turned to C.S. Lewis for guidance in commenting on the “weird, wicked world we live in”:

“C.S. Lewis was only partly right when he wrote: The greatest evil … is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice.

Lewis, perhaps, couldn’t have envisioned the day when a law allowing abortion up to the moment of birth would receive a standing ovation, as occurred last month with New York’s passage of the “Reproductive Health Act.”

Upon signing the bill, which also permits some health care professionals who are not doctors to perform the abortions, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo ordered that One World Trade Center be illuminated in pink, hijacking the color associated with saving breast-cancer victims — and the birth of a baby girl.

What a weird, wicked world we live in.”

She went on to discuss the –thankfully!–defeated bill in Virginia, about which more later, and similar bills being considered in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont and other states and she made this cogent observation, which perfectly sums up my revulsion at the strangely uncaring attitudes we see all around us:

“More concerning than a possible increase in late-term abortions (now at fewer than 2 percent of all pregnancy terminations) is the clinical way we view and discuss human life. When we use language to disguise reality, we move ever-closer to the dehumanization of us all.”

Several excellent pieces have highlighted the similarity of much of this thinking to that of the eugenicist Margaret Sanger, who, it may be appropriate to note, was one of Hillary Clinton’s icons, who formed two organizations that later merged to become Planned Parenthood. One of the best was an analysis by Ben Domenech, publisher of The Federalist, with a title carrying more than a kernel of truth: “The Thing We Don’t Talk About.” Quoting Gov. Northam’s remarks–sickening to read, even worse to hear the words being uttered by an M.D. (who specializes in Pediatric Neurology!) he showed how this attitude is indistinguishable from that of eugenicism:

“Northam said: “When we talk about third-trimester abortions, these are done with the consent of the mother, with the consent of physicians, more than one physician by the way, and it’s done in cases where there may be severe deformities, there may be a fetus which is non-viable. So in this particular example, if the mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen, the infant would be delivered, the infant would be kept comfortable, the infant would be resuscitated if this is what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physician and the mother.”

The full Northam interview is here, and fuller context do not make his comments any less disgusting – in fact, they make them even more eugenicist. This is not deceptive editing: it is literally a governor of a major state across the river from our capital endorsing infanticide. Northam has dismissed the situation as a frame job, but the video and text speaks for itself. His state isn’t so blue that he can do what Andrew Cuomo did, and brush off all criticism of his abortion regime as mere religious nagging.”

He then illustrated how Margaret Sanger would be proud of her followers:

“But should we be surprised? Are we so sure that the modern left is actually against infanticide? In looking back at the entirety of human history, the vast majority of it has been filled with blood, slavery, and child sacrifice, and the subjugation or disposal of the weaker members of the human race. It is only in the past few centuries, the blink of an eye historically, that we have become more civilized. The forces of eugenics have had to cloak their aims in a scientific-sounding melange, even as they seek what Margaret Sanger colorfully referred to in The New York Times as “the release and cultivation of the better racial elements in our society, and the gradual suppression, elimination and eventual extirpation of defective stocks — those human weeds which threaten the blooming of the finest flowers of American civilization.”

The idea that for the sake of the fittest, the weakest among us must be destroyed is not a new idea. It is old as humanity, and it is the law of the jungle. The idea that Northam endorsed – a crying baby, “kept comfortable” as doctors consult with the mother about whether it ought to be revived, is as disgusting a concept as can be vocalized. But it is the reality of the regime we live under, and the regime the left wants us to live under. They will not limit their extremism to New York. They will deliberately spread it across the country, fueled by the elites who still hold Sanger’s views, the murderers who profit from it, and the media who cringes in disgust and turns away from local crime stories.”

Human weeds! This is the modern (?) Democrat Party speaking through the voice, among others, of Sanger, who another article termed:

” … The radical eugenicist — a scientific term for codified racism — founded the organization precisely to provide as many abortions as possible and to push for anti-family policies. She wanted to use abortion to “exterminate” black Americans. That is the term she actually used: Exterminate.

Another word for that is “genocide.” “

Charles Hurt, in one of his typically incisive slices right to the core of the issue, observed, in a piece appropriately entitled “Outrage over blackface, silence over killing babies” :

“For years, we have been chided for talking openly about fearing the Obamacare “Death Panels” that would reign after the government takes over every last corner of our health care system.

Turns out that not only are the Death Panels real, they’re not just for old people and expensive sick people. Democrat politicians want them for newborns, too.

“The infant would be kept comfortable,” the Grand Wizard of Death Squads, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, tells us in chillingly antiseptic tones.”

“Listening to Dr. Death Northam discuss the final solution for troublesome, colicky or, perhaps, wrong-gendered babies is a little like listening to Hannibal Lecter make tender pillow talk before he rapes a woman, skins her and eats her medulla oblongata.

Or Buffalo Bill give skin moisturizer tips.

“It rubs the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again!”

Perhaps Dr. Death should get himself one of those hoods that executioners have always been so fond of throughout the darkest of ages. It could even be pointy. I bet it comes in white, with convenient, yet fashionable, little eye holes.

Virginia House Del. Kathy Tran introduced the legislation that, she admitted, would legalize “abortion” during actual labor. Among the rest of civilization, this is called “infanticide.” Or, more plainly, “murder.”

But, hey, according to Death Squad Grand Wizard Ralph Northam, the baby will be kept “comfortable” while waiting for his or her death row conviction. You know, toss “it” onto a table underneath one of those french fry lamps.

If that is not Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness, then what is?”

John Kass of the Chicago Tribune hit the target in explaining the real reason for why the Democrats have been feverishly fanning the flames of the dumpster fire over the –gasp!–fact that their Governor and Attorney General dabbed a bit of shoe polish on their faces thirty plus years ago:

“The talk of Democrats wearing blackface has all but covered up something else that Northam, a pediatrician, said about aborting a child who had been delivered.

“When we talk about third-trimester abortions, these are done with the consent of — obviously — the mother, with the consent of the physicians — more than one physician, by the way. … If a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen. The infant would be delivered.

“The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and mother.”

A discussion. You mean the discussion that America isn’t having about the value of human life.”

Several recent events have pointed ujp the sheer madness sof where the far-left has gone on this topic. For example, Sen. Ben Sasse, R-NB, announced he will ask the Senate to consider his legislation, the Born Alive Survivors Protection Act and attempted to use the Rule 14 process to expedite consideration of the bill. That rule requires unanimous consent. It was blocked by Sen. Patty Murray, D-Left Coast).

Also pointing up the bizarre consequences of this left drift into depravity is this story out of New York. A woman, apparently very accomplished and the mother of a 12-year old boy, was stabbed to death by her boyfriend. He was charged with her murder, but could not be charged with “homicide” of the baby in view of new York’s new abortion law, because:

“Even though Irigoyen wanted her baby, it was not considered a life under the new law. A spokesperson for the District Attorney told the Post the abortion charge “was repealed by the Legislature, and this is the law as it exists today.”

As The Daily Wire’s Amanda Prestigiacomo previously reported, the law, called the Reproductive Health Act (RHA), repealed abortion from the state’s criminal code and removed the law limiting abortions beyond 24 weeks. The abortion can be performed by a licensed practitioner in “good faith” up to the minute a baby is born “to protect the patient’s life or health,” yet “health” is not defined in the legislation.

“Ostensibly billed as a “women’s healthcare” law, the RHA states that “”every individual who becomes pregnant has the fundamental right to choose to carry the pregnancy to term, to give birth to a child, or to have an abortion.” Irigoyen didn’t get to make those choices, yet the man who did won’t be charged for ending a pregnancy she wanted.”

There are a number of very good discussions of this moral conundrum and, for convenience of those who may wish to consult the ones I considered the best, they can be found here, here, here and here.

However, one study stands out for me and I strongly recommend that it be read in its entirety as it represents the deepest dive I have seen of the history of infanticide, and, most troubling for our purposes, where it can lead. The author is Georgi Boorman and she entitled her essay “Infanticide is the Historical Hallmark of a Pagan Culture.” To use one of our times’ most hackneyed phrases, “trigger warning”: it is a history which is at times gruesome and painfully explicit. No brief listing of quotes would suffice to convey the chilling, to put it euphemistically, history she outlines–only a full reading will accomplish that. Perhaps her concluding paragraphs will offer a small glimpse of the horror which went before:

“What we are seeing now is a return to a world that does not know God and does not want to know God. This is the consequence of our detachment from Christianity and its moral system. The truth is that you do not attain a culture where human life (albeit born life) is almost universally cherished without the knowledge of the one true God.”

“As the Apostle Paul reiterated from Old Testament writers: “None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God…Their feet are swift to shed blood; in their paths are ruin and misery, and the way of peace they have not known. There is no fear of God before their eyes.”

“The fact that we are surrounded by a wealth of resources and still 13 percent of all pregnancies in America and 28 percent in the state of New York end in murder should tell you something. This is not a matter of inequality of rights between the sexes or inequality of resources. It is a matter of the heart, and a heart without God is “desperately wicked.” The god of Progress has led its worshipers to embrace death as easily as the Canaanite gods that surrounded the people of Israel.”

I conclude by stating just one of the many seemingly unanswerable questions I have been asking in the days these scenes from Hell have been unfolding: How can we possibly square what is being done to the most helpless among us–our babies — with the fact that our Founding Fathers set out to assure they would have the inalienable right to “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness”? How do we explain to those coming after us, our children and grandchildren, nieces and nephews, that a large number of their fellow citizens are setting out to “alienate”, in the most horrible and terrifying way, all of those precious rights? I do not pretend to have an answer. Do you?

Sen. Whitehouse: “Indictment and Charges of the President” Coming

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The Senator of Rhode Island, more recently seen beclowning himself by asking oh-so-serious and deeply grave questions of now-Justice Kavanaugh about some of the fart jokes teen-aged boys were sharing, has told Chris Cuomo (of course) that “if there are crimes that he [President Trump] has committed, he should be indicted.” Here is a partial transcript of his remarks, followed by a little thought experiment using the Senator’s own language to illustrate the blatant, in-your-face hypocrisy of what has become the far left Democrat Party:

“A partial transcript is as follows:
“SEN. SHELDON WHITEHOUSE: I think that if there are crimes that he [President Trump] has committed, he should be indicted. I do not at all subscribe to the OLC theory that a president can’t be indicted. I think that the Office of Legal Counsel and Department of Justice bends over backward to take the most executive branch-friendly position that it possibly can. I think a court taking a look at this would say “no, no, no, no, no,” and if you look at the Nixon precedents and others, they don’t align with a president not being answerable to the public in this way. And it would create a terrible situation. You have a president, who the public knows is the subject of a criminal investigation, may very well be involved in criminal activity, and you don’t get a resolution of that question? You don’t get pressure on him to answer questions and get out? That doesn’t seem like an appropriate way to deal with it.

“CHRISTOPHER CUOMO: Based on what you know right now, do you think you could bring a case against the president?

“SEN. WHITEHOUSE: I would want to know a lot more. I’m at the stage, based on what I know, that I would be sitting down with the agents and say “okay, we need to run down this, we need to run down that, we need to pin down some things before we go.” We are certainly in a mode, I believe, of moving toward an indictment and charges of the president, but I do not believe, based on what I know — Mueller may know more — that we’re at the stage of actually being able to make the charge.”

Fully acknowledging that I am engaging in full-blown “what about ism”, it is most interesting to adapt the good Seantor’s own language to the matter of another well-known public official about whom there is little or no question about being involved in criminal activity, with the hope, however illusory, that some day, somehow, we might see this kind of fairness in all of our “representatives” to the National Legislature:

”I think that if there are crimes that she (Former First “Lady” (?), former US Senator, Former Secretary of State, former Presidential candidate) has committed, she should be indicted. …. And it would create a terrible situation. You have a (see above list for all the things she has been, in addition to presently being a “has been”) , who the public knows is the subject of a criminal investigation, may well be involved in criminal activity (about 30,000 counts of Federal felony counts, at last count, at that’s only the e-mail criminality) and you don’t get a resolution of that (those) questions? You don’t get pressure on her to answer questions and get out? That doesn’t seem like an appropriate way to deal with it.”

Just as I got to that point, I woke up, put on the coffee, and returned to the real world where members of that August Club known as the United States Senate, spend their time, on our dime, asking questions of candidates for the highest Court in the land questions about teen aged boys’ bad behavior as if they had any actual substance.

Sincerely, Jim

The President’s Press Conference this morning

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By Jim George
| November 7, 2018
5 COMMENTS 9UNFOLLOW

This will be a very personal post as it will reflect my very personal impressions after watching every single minute of the President’s press conference after the Mid Term Elections and I was so struck by several impressions, feelings, revulsion, off-putting feelings that I thought I would share them with you, this incredibly well-informed group which I have been so honored to be a part of (no, I’m not running for Mayor of Ricochet-ville, but if I were I know there would be some votes I could definitely not count on, and a handful that maybe I could count on.) and ask if you were moved as I was and, if not, why not?

But, first of all, I would, with the utmost of respect, ask that you watch every single minute of the press conference, as there is really no way to deal with these questions if you have not seen it all. I, like so many of us in this short attention span society of ours, am so accustomed to reading a short blurb somewhere about some subject which interests us, and forming immediate impressions based on those fleeting, momentary, “bites” ( bytes?) of information. I have long been troubled by this shortcoming of mine and have tried to dig more deeply, into “the weeds”, as the phrase is used these days, to understand more fully, whatever issue I am considering at the time.

Have you ever watched one of the President’s Press Conferences? I don’t mean the “chyrons” running across the bottom of your screen telling you what some first year intern has written and is to be taken as an actual substantive summary of what was actually said? I do not ask that question in anything approaching a pejorative manner, as I personally must answer my own question in the affirmative.

But, tonight, I decided, once and for all, I had the duty, before I formed any impressions, opinions, attitudes, conclusions, about all the things I had heard about some of the incivilities I had heard went on at this press conference, to watch every single minute, beginning to end, of this, quite frankly, amazing performance by the President and the disgraceful demonstration of disrespect and lack of civility by members of the media for myself.

I strongly recommend, for those of us who really want to be informed, that you spend the one and a half hours necessary, and then consider the following questions:

With all the media talk (narrative) about the President’s “rudeness” and ill mannered behavior, tell me who was more rude or uncivil, this President or the members of the “esteemed” (by themselves) Capitol Press Corps?

Can you imagine a person, with the weight of the Presidency of the United States of America, being any more patient, nice, forbearing, polite, etc. than this President was, under those circumstances?

Do you understand better, after watching this display of rudeness, childish behavior, disrespect, lack of civility, how this president may be entirely within all our understanding when he calls these people (formerly known as “the Profession of Journalism”) the enemy of the people?

Can you imagine yourself, or anyone you know, who would have been more patient, considerate, nice, courteous, etc. under those circumstances?

What we have is an amazing political genius as President, who has pulled off an astonishing success for the mid terms.

Watch this press conference, and then tell me whether you agree. If not, I’d love to hear your reasons, as I, like the President Trump you will actually hear on this video ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXcJYf2SkI8) would rather be bipartisan than fighting all the time about everything.

Adam Schiff, call your office; there’s a new dawning coming, and it’s not interested in one hundred new senseless investigations of something which never happened.

Your views?

Sincerely, Jim