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Kevin Williamson says we got lucky at the jihadi shootout in Garland, Texas.
Of course he was a convict.
Elton Simpson was the first figure identified in the latest eruption from the Religion of Peace — an attempted massacre at an exhibition of anti-Islamist cartoons in suburban Garland, Texas, which ended in the shooting of Simpson and his coconspirator, because Texas is where terrorists go to get out-gunned at an art show. Simpson and his pal are as dead as a tuna casserole — in Texas, we shoot back.
We got lucky when luck wasn’t what we needed.
Simpson was, like the overwhelming majority of murderers and most of those who commit serious violent crimes, already known to the authorities. He had been investigated by the FBI on the suspicion that he was attempting to travel to Somalia to engage in jihad. He was convicted of lying to the FBI in that episode, and sentenced to . . . probation. The average sentence for a tax-related crime in these United States is 31 months in a federal penitentiary, but for attempting to join up with a gang of savages who are merrily beheading, torturing, enslaving, and raping their way around the world? Probation, and damned little subsequent oversight, apparently.
The federal government will always tell you what it really cares about, if you are paying attention. Trim a bureaucrat’s paycheck by 1 percent and you’ll see mighty Leviathan roused from his dreaming slumber. …
… For Pete’s sake, the guy seems to have been on Twitter talking up “#texasattack” before the . . . Texas attack. Where was the FBI? No doubt still on the hunt for those angry Christian right-wing militia extremists who keep not attacking anything other than unlucky squirrels in rural Idaho. …
… Federal authorities weren’t doing their job on 9/11. They weren’t doing their job before the attack in Garland, either. No, nobody can stop every crime or detect every criminal, much less every jihadist. But this one had a great big flashing neon sign over his head reading “terrorist.”
If nobody saw, nobody was looking.
Walter Jacobson of Legal Insurrection says another attack on Scott Walker boomerangs.
… It seems that attacks on Scott Walker seem to boomerang and simply add to his political persona of being a regular guy.
Did you hear the one about how Scott Walker never graduated college? #Fail.
The latest attack on Walker is that he has “up to” $50,000 in credit card debt to — wait for it — Sears.
We don’t know exactly how much because financial disclosures only are made in broad ranges, so it could be as little as $10,000.
Regardless, it’s SEARS! …
… I don’t see how any of this hurts Walker.
The Boston Globe article linked by The Daily Beast was titled, Baggage of Wealth Burdens Presidential Candidates.
Walker doesn’t have that baggage.
You know what the biggest surprise in Walker’s financial status is? SEARS still exists!
Paul Mirengoff calls Marilyn Mosby, Baltimore prosecutor a grandstanding hypocritical ideologue.
Alan Dershowitz, the famous defense lawyer, has called the case against the six Baltimore officers involved in the death of Freddie Gray “a show trial.” The actions of prosecutor Marilyn Mosby “had nothing to do with justice,” but instead amounted to “crowd control,” Dershowitz said in remarks reported by the Daily Caller.
With regard to the second-degree murder charges against Caesar Goodson, Dershowitz stated that “there’s no plausible, hypothetical, conceivable case for murder under the facts as we now know them.” At most, there may be a case for involuntary manslaughter.
Dershowitz believes that, having overplayed its hand, the prosecution is unlikely to obtain any convictions. And if even if it does, there’s a good possibility the convictions will be reversed on appeal.
Dershowitz compared the case of the Baltimore six with that of George Zimmerman. In that case, Dershowitz accused the prosecutor of overcharging Zimmerman and argued that she should be disbarred for unethical behavior. As we all remember, Zimmerman was acquitted.
Speaking of the Zimmerman case, Chuck Ross reports that after Zimmerman’s acquittal, Marilyn Mosby denounced the verdict during a protest rally at the federal courthouse in Baltimore. Her husband, city council member Nick Mosby, went even further, calling for a boycott of Florida businesses.
Either the Mosbys don’t understand the concept of self defense or they are demagogues. Maybe both. …
Jonathan Tobin comments on the indictments and claims it’s no way to fix America’s cities.
… It goes without saying that the plight of those trapped in inner cities with failing schools and dysfunctional economies are right to want change. But no matter how Freddie Gray was killed, nothing in this case changes the fact that cities like Baltimore have been governed by the political left and often by minority politicians for decades. Racism is part of the reality of American history. But the collapse of these cities is the fruit of a failed liberal government project. Liberals and Democrats point to the Baltimore riots as the justification for a renewal of the same big spending policies that have already repeatedly failed. Nor will an attempt to shoehorn isolated incidents of police misbehavior into a general narrative of racism that makes it hard for law enforcement to work bring peace to neighborhoods. That’s especially true of those that badly need police to defend the safety and property of citizens beset more by crime than a notional oppression that has little connection to their lives.
The danger here is not just that justice is always sacrificed when mobs exercise influence over politicians who fear to anger them (such as Baltimore’s mayor who called earlier this week for giving thugs “space to destroy). It’s that a productive dialogue about how to expand economic opportunity and improve education — the only factors that can heal broken cities — is being drowned in a sea of misleading rhetoric about race and police violence.
Editors of the Chicago Tribune have similar thoughts.
No one could accuse Baltimore state’s attorney Marilyn Mosby of dragging her feet on the decision to file charges over the death of Freddie Gray, who suffered a fatal spinal injury in police custody on April 12.
Mosby got the report from an internal police department investigation on Thursday and the results of an autopsy on Friday morning. Within hours, she was standing on the courthouse steps, announcing charges against six police officers. Four of the officers are charged with homicide counts, ranging from involuntary manslaughter to second-degree murder.
Mosby bypassed a grand jury, declaring unflinchingly that she had found probable cause to file the charges herself. She batted away a call for her to step aside and let a special prosecutor handle the case because her husband is a Baltimore city councilman. …
… In last year’s election, Mosby, 35, unseated the incumbent state’s attorney by promising to hold police accountable. She said unabashedly that her goal was to “reform the criminal justice system.”
Four months into the job, Mosby the prosecutor is under considerable pressure to deliver on the promise made by Mosby the politician.
The officers are innocent unless proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. It’s a very high bar. How will Baltimore — or America — react if prosecutors come up short? What if the officers are not guilty?
This case needs to be about what happened between Freddie Gray and the six police officers who interacted with him on April 12, not about righting the entire criminal justice system. The stakes are high enough already.
Victor Davis Hanson writes on CA’s preventable drought.
The present four-year California drought is not novel — even if President Barack Obama and California governor Jerry Brown have blamed it on man-made climate change.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, California droughts are both age-old and common. Predictable California dry spells — like those of 1929–34, 1976–77, and 1987–92 — are more likely result from poorly understood but temporary changes in atmospheric pressures and ocean temperatures.
What is new is that the state has never had 40 million residents during a drought — well over 10 million more than during the last dry spell in the early 1990s. Much of the growth is due to massive and recent immigration.
A record one in four current Californians was not born in the United States, according to the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California. Whatever one’s view on immigration, it is ironic to encourage millions of newcomers to settle in the state without first making commensurately liberal investments for them in water supplies and infrastructure.
Sharp rises in population still would not have mattered much had state authorities just followed their forbearers’ advice to continually increase water storage. …