Former Vice President Joe Biden admitted that the “Second Amendment exists” but stressed during his speech in New Hampshire on Tuesday that it does not say everyone is “entitled” to own a gun.
Biden, who was taking questions at a small outdoor venue, then added, “By the way, if one of you left the keys in your car down the street, and a kid comes along and jumps in it and takes off, you could be held liable civilly for that. So if you own a gun, put a damn trigger lock on it. Put it in a case. You have an obligation.”
Biden also spoke about past gun bans he supported. He specifically referenced the 1994 “assault weapons” ban and noted that it also “limited the number of bullets in a clip.” Additionally, he spoke about being former President Barack Obama’s point man for gun control following the December 14, 2012, attack on Sandy Hook Elementary School.
He said, “There are so many other things we can do to make schools safer, other than arming teachers.” He did not specify, however, what those other things are. Rather, he pivoted to the next question.
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. Sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.
President Donald Trump reportedly will sign an executive order this week banning U.S. telecom companies from using equipment deemed risky to national security. The order will not specify individual companies or countries of origin, but it will clearly have the most profound impact on Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei, sources told Reuters Tuesday.
Reuters quoted three U.S. officials who said the Trump administration had worked to plan the executive order for over a year, delaying it several times and potentially delaying it again.
If he issues the order this week, President Trump would draw upon existing legal authority to bar American companies from purchasing equipment that could pose a significant security risk, as the U.S. government believes is the case with Huawei and some other Chinese firms:
The executive order would invoke the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which gives the president the authority to regulate commerce in response to a national emergency that threatens the United States. The order will direct the Commerce Department, working with other government agencies, to draw up a plan for enforcement, the sources said.
If signed, the executive order would come at a delicate time in relations between China and the United States as the world’s two largest economies ratchet up tariffs in a battle over what U.S. officials call China’s unfair trade practices.
Washington believes equipment made by Huawei Technologies Co Ltd, the world’s third-largest smartphone maker, could be used by the Chinese state to spy. Huawei, which has repeatedly denied the allegations, did not immediately comment.
The administration banned U.S. government agencies last summer from using equipment made by Huawei and ZTE, another large Chinese telecom firm. Huawei is suing the U.S. government to overturn the ban.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has acted to prevent China Mobile from providing telecom services in the United States and may block other Chinese companies from the American market on similar grounds.
The Trump administration stepped up its criticism of Chinese technology theft and security threats this week, possibly laying the groundwork for the coming executive order.
Department of Homeland Security cybersecurity director Chris Krebs warned the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday that Beijing could force Chinese telecom companies to push out updates with hidden back doors and deliberate security flaws, making it possible for Chinese agents to steal data from Western companies or even sabotage U.S. infrastructure. He also suggested Chinese intelligence agents could be planted in teams of technicians sent from China to install or service telecom equipment.
“This is a single-party government. Everything that flows from the central party is a manifestation of their philosophy,” said Krebs, citing the recent Chinese cybersecurity law that effectively gives the Communist Party unlimited authority to co-opt Chinese companies for intelligence work.
The Chinese government insists it has not compromised the security of Huawei equipment and charges to the contrary are merely an effort to “smear” Chinese companies as a tactic in the larger U.S. trade war with China. The Chinese have accused the Trump administration of unfairly protecting American and European companies from competition with Huawei, which generally sells products for cheaper.
Huawei representatives argue that the type of security audits that should be routinely performed on crucial technology from any vendor could mitigate any hypothetical risk their equipment poses. Huawei Chairman Liang Hua has expressed willingness to sign “no-spying” agreements with the United States and European governments, a measure critics deem insufficient because China’s cybersecurity law would override any agreement signed with foreign governments or corporations.
On Tuesday’s episode of “The Michael Knowles Show,” the host debunks Democratic Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib’s comments on the Holocaust and on Israel in the years following the Second World War. Partial transcript and video below.
The whole left wing is totally falling apart. Over in D.C. and over in Congress, Rashida Tlaib, a rising star of the Democrat Party, has now referred to the Holocaust as a “calming” event. She not only said that phrase which is so outrageous. She is rewriting the history of the Holocaust and the creation of the state of Israel. This has nothing to do with investigations of Russia or collusion or whatever. This is just purely the Democrat Party and the ideological Left collapsing in on itself and specifically on this issue of Israel.
Here you see two major leftist strategies at play. Rashida totally does them both at the same time. She does the performance of victimhood and she does the rewriting of history both at the same time, both central to the left-wing agenda. Here she is speaking out of both sides of her mouth about the Holocaust:
Rashida Tlaib: And there’s you know this a kind of a calming feeling I always tell folks when I think of the Holocaust and a tragedy of the Holocaust and the fact that it was my ancestors Palestinians who lost their land and some lost their lives, their livelihood, the human dignity, and their existence in many ways, have been wiped out. I mean, just all of it was in the name of trying to create a safe haven for Jews. Post the Holocaust post the tragedy in her thick persecution of Jews occurred across the world at that time. And I love the fact that it was my ancestors that provided that in many ways, but they did it in a way that took their human dignity away. And it was forced on them.
None of that is true. Nothing she just said is true. Either she is a profoundly stupid woman or she’s lying, and I don’t think she’s stupid, so I think she’s lying. None of what she just said is true.
First of all, this is just a note of rhetorical advice: When you are describing the Holocaust, it is best to avoid the word “calming.” There are many words in the English language, and “calming” is not the best one to describe the Holocaust. Eric Swalwell, the sort of presidential candidate, just did this the other day when he compared the Russian election interference to September 11th. Again, another piece of advice: It’s best not to compare things to September 11th. You now have two rules for rhetoric: don’t compare things to 9/11; don’t refer to the Holocaust as calming.
But then she rewrites history. Everything she said that the Arabs in British Mandatory Palestine, they welcome the Jews and they said Jews please come in, please establish the state of Israel, we’d like you so much we want you to be here. How happy was Rashida Tlaib, to tell you that her ancestors, the Arabs in Mandatory Palestine, and they welcomed — except none of that happened. That did not happen. Arabs in British Palestine did not want the Jews to come in.
What is my evidence of this? For one, they allied with Hitler. The leader of the Palestinian Arab nationalist movement, Haj Amin al-Husseini, allied with Hitler. He was living in Germany in Berlin from 1941 to 1945. He not only allied with Hitler, he called for the massacre of Jews in the Arab world. He did it on Nazi radio stations all throughout Berlin. He called specifically for an anti-Jewish jihad. He then aided the Nazis because he was friends with Hitler. He aided the Nazis in recruiting Muslims from the Balkans for the SS and for the Wehrmacht.
The Palestinian Arabs launched a revolt between 1936 and 1939 to deter European Jews from coming into the region of Palestine. When we use the word Palestine, we have to be clear we’re not referring to a country called Palestine. There has never been a nation state called Palestine. That nation state might as well exist between Narnia and Wakanda. It is completely imaginary, completely fictitious. There is a region that was named by the Romans, Palestine. So, when we refer it historically to Palestine we’re referring to a region named by the Romans, well after the nation of Israel inhabited that land. And then when the British took over the area there was the mandate of Palestine. It’s referred to British Palestine or Mandatory Palestine, so that’s a region, not a nation state.
The Arabs who were living in British Mandatory Palestine launched a revolt to stop Jews from coming into the area, and eventually they petitioned the British to stop the refugee Jews almost altogether from entering the region. Rashida Tlaib completely reinvents that history.
Trump was effusive about updates to the budget supporting the Special Olympics, and a return to space “in a BIG WAY.”
Today, I officially updated my budget to include $18 million for our GREAT @SpecialOlympics,” Trump tweeted, “whose athletes inspire us and make our Nation so PROUD!”
Today, I officially updated my budget to include $18 million for our GREAT @SpecialOlympics, whose athletes inspire us and make our Nation so PROUD!
“Under my Administration, we are restoring @NASA to greatness and we are going back to the Moon, then Mars,” the President also said. “I am updating my budget to include an additional $1.6 billion so that we can return to Space in a BIG WAY!”
Under my Administration, we are restoring @NASA to greatness and we are going back to the Moon, then Mars. I am updating my budget to include an additional $1.6 billion so that we can return to Space in a BIG WAY!
And despite an original proposal that cut the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative budget by 90%, the President included a half billion for environmental restoration projects: $300 million in funding for the aforementioned initiative, and another $200 million for the Army Corps Everglades restoration work.
We must protect our Great Lakes, keeping them clean and beautiful for future generations. That’s why I am fighting for $300 million in my updated budget for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative.
My Administration will be fighting for $200 million for the Army Corps Everglades restoration work this year. Congress needs to help us complete the world’s largest intergovernmental watershed restoration project ASAP! Good for Florida and good for the environment.
“We must protect our Great Lakes, keeping them clean and beautiful for future generations,” the President said in regard to the former. “Congress needs to help us complete the world’s largest intergovernmental watershed restoration project ASAP,” he added regarding the latter. “Good for Florida and good for the environment.”
Still, despite these updates, Trump’s budget looks to spend significantly more outside the United States than in it. “America is roaring back, and now is the time to invest in the future of America,” Trump said at the budget’s March release. Whether it will actually pass in the current divisive climate remains to be seen.
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton appeared on “Lou Dobbs Tonight” on the Fox Business Network to discuss the targeting of President Trump over Russia collusion by Rep. Adam Schiff and others in Congress.
I don’t know if this was inspired by the San Francisco poop map, but it offers a similar view of a major west coast city that desperately needs to clean up its act. Christopher Rufo, who created the map, is the same person who recently created a short film about a woman who was raped by a homeless man in Seattle. Here’s what Rufo told MyNorthwest about the map shows and how it was made:
“Obviously, anyone who drives through a neighborhood in Seattle can see trash and needles across the street,” Rufo told The Candy, Mike, and Todd Show on KIRO Radio. “I wanted to really figure out how much trash is there in the city of Seattle with a little more statistical precision. So I did a public records request for all the citizen complaints for trash, needles, feces, tents, biohazards for 2018. And I got back 19,000 citizen complaints. I geo-coded them, and I mapped them in an interactive map.”…
The map is interactive, but is not comparative. It only covers 2018 and does not provide context to gauge if trash is increasing, decreasing, or moving around the city, year by year. Rufo says the natural next step is to document the trash over time.
“The snapshot is really important because there’s this argument over homeless encampments, trash, and needles and it really shows that neighbors and people who are complaining are not just imagining it,” Rufo said. “Especially in places like Ballard, SoDo, the University District there is just a proliferation of trash. You can’t walk half a block without reported needles, or feces, or all sorts of other unpleasant deposits along our streets.”
Rufo’s map actually includes the text of complaints and he highlighted some of the worst excerpts from those complaints here:
There are needles, garbage, feces, and about 13 tents in the gravel area next to where cars lineup. In this same area two weeks ago I saw a man yielding a hatchet at another man. I reported that incident, tents were cleaned up, and now people are back again and with needles everywhere. This is a common area where commuters walk to and from work and ferries.
The man in the tent waved a knife at one woman I know and aggressively tried to grab the bike of another friend. Please get him indoors. Apparently he has one or more assaults on record. Please please please fulfill basic municipal duty toward public health and safety. Especially on our main street!…
Garbage everywhere, drug use, weapons, scary men hanging around, needles. Will not take daughter to this park and it’s a block from our house…
Five tents with occupants in little triangular park. Needles, drug deals, drinking, illegal camping. Scaring away customers to our businesses. We are losing customers as they are nervous to come to our shop…
There is an enormous encampment here that has contributed to grow since it arrived. It is within a block of, and in full view of, not one but two schools. It operates a bike chop shop on the sidewalk, and drugs are sold out of it at night. There are needle caps littered all over the place around it. There have been a lot of suspicious characters in the neighborhood in the last week and everybody considers this an emergency.
As the Seattle Times pointed out last week, the city is collecting far less trash than it did just a couple of years ago, despite the consensus that the problem is worse now than it was then. The result of more people leaving trash and fewer attempts to clean it up is this map of citizens calling the city to complain about the mess. Again, this is just a sample and all of this comes from 2018.
For the sake of fairness, it’s worth noting that the Seattle Times published an editorial today suggesting that Seattle’s Mayor and city’s fire and police departments deserve some credit for some improvements as of late:
Much more remains to be done, especially to address harm caused by a small subset of the city’s homeless population repeatedly victimizing people in certain neighborhoods with little consequence. City Hall’s belated response and high costs continue to need scrutiny. But efforts to improve responsiveness and try new solutions deserve support from the City Council and residents…
Simultaneously, Seattle is boosting police presence in seven neighborhoods this summer, under an emphasis program announced by Durkan and Police Chief Carmen Best. Neighborhoods include several that have seen sharp increases in crimes, drawing complaints from neighborhood and business associations. It also coincides with a season that tends to see increased criminal activity.
So maybe some positive changes are starting to happen but Seattle has a long way to go.
The map below itself is interactive but seems a bit slow to respond. Make sure you’ve got the correct map tool when you try to move the map around (the one with four arrows). You’ll have to wait a few seconds for it to reload but it does work. Also, you can roll over each item on the map to read it, you don’t need to click on it at all. A lot of this garbage seems like illegal dumping of furniture and items people don’t want to pay to discard. That suggests they might need to drop the prices for bringing items to the dump. But there are also stretches full of tents and needles and feces which clearly are connected to the homeless. If the map isn’t working, you can see some jpegs of different neighborhoods here.
Disgraced former Congressman Anthony Weiner is finally free after serving 21 months in prison and an additional several months in a halfway house in New York City for sending lewd photos to a minor across state lines, a federal crime.
Weiner walked out of his Manhattan halfway house early Tuesday morning, to a gaggle of reporters.
“It’s good to be out,” he said. “I hope to be able to live a life of integrity and service. I’m glad this chapter of my life is behind me.”
Weiner has been in jail since late 2017, after he pleaded guilty to “one charge of transferring obscene material to a minor,” according to CNN, stemming from a sexting incident — the third such incident for Weiner, who lost both his job in Congress and his campaign to become mayor of New York City because he was unable to resist the urge to court women using private messaging services.
Weiner resigned in disgrace from Congress in 2011, after he was discovered to have engaged in “inappropriate, extramarital relationships with several women he met online” — relationships which involved sending lewd photos of himself to the women using Twitter’s private direct messaging service. After making a mistake and posting one photo publicly, Weiner’s habit of conducting affairs using the social media platform was revealed.
In 2013, after hiding out for two years, Weiner tried to re-enter politics, this time running for mayor of New York City. His campaign was widely considered a “test balloon” for then-Senator Hillary Clinton’s potential 2016 presidential run. The effort allowed Weiner’s wife, close Clinton aide Huma Abedin, to get a sense of donor availability in NYC and compile a list of potential Clinton supporters.
But Weiner eventually ruined that effort, too, sending a series of racy texts to a Democratic aide in Indiana named Sydney Leathers, using the moniker “Carlos Danger.”
Although both incidents were clearly inappropriate and unethical, Weiner escaped criminal prosecution until 2017, when federal agents discovered he had again been texting with a female, but this time, she was a minor in Kentucky, and Weiner’s sexually aggressive texts — which included photos — ran afoul of federal laws against sending salacious material across state lines.
Weiner pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a term of around two years in federal prison. He served 21 months in a minimum-security federal facility in Massachusetts and was then transfered, for the final three months of his sentence, to a halfway house, where he was expected to abide by house rules, find a job, and work on re-entering public life.
Weiner has been mum on his future plans — it certainly wouldn’t be beyond belief for him to make a third run at a political career, even this late in the game — but the New York Post reported last month that Weiner has been shopping around a book proposal, likely a memoir of his life.
No one has bitten.
“Every Simon & Schuster imprint has passed,” a source told the Post. “The project is being repped by the hot downtown boutique agency Foundry Literary + Media — which was behind nonfiction best-sellers by ‘Daily Show’ host Trevor Noah, New Orleans Saints coach Sean Payton and ‘Jersey Shore’ star Vinny Guadagnino.”
Here is one more staggering number to put into perspective the all-encompassing crisis currently transpiring at our beleaguered southern border: According to Texas-based border agents, an astonishing 5,500 illegal aliens cross the border every day in South Texas alone.
New Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan toured the border in South Texas on Saturday with Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan.
“We’re not going to leave until the border is secure,” said Shanahan, who is trying to transfer $1.5 billion from numerous defense projects to secure the Southwest border.
In South Texas, border agents the last several days apprehended 229 migrants an hour, or 5,500 a day, forcing the agency to set up tents in parking lots and hiring jets at $16,000 a flight to send adults to nearby Del Rio just for processing.
Pictures released by the Rio Grande Valley sector show migrants piling up in makeshift tents in parking lots as agents struggle to handle the surge
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) numbers continue to show the inundated migrant influx affecting America’s 1,900-mile-long border with Mexico. The Daily Wire reported last week on CBP’s April border numbers:
Per CBP’s official data release, total border apprehensions between points of entry in April rose 6.62% over March’s already-record-shattering pace. Astoundingly, April’s apprehension total of 98,977 is a full 94.04% higher than the monthly total from the beginning of the federal government’s fiscal year, in October 2018. In other words, apprehensions between points of entry along the border have nearly doubled in just the first seven months of the current fiscal year. As Daniel Horowitz observes, the combined total for points of entry inadmissibles and apprehensions between points of entry is 109,144, which is the highest monthly total since the second term of the George W. Bush administration. Furthermore, as Horowitz states, “it is very likely the highest number of unique individuals of all time, given that many in the past were the same individuals deported multiple times within the same week, while almost all of these are first-timers.”
As The Daily Wire has also noted before, part of the reason for the influx is the dissemination in Central America’s “Northern Triangle” region of transparently false claims pertaining to America’s asylum statute. Our asylum statute, 8 U.S.C. § 1158(b)(1)(B)(i), is operative for those who are persecuted in their native countries for “race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.” For instance, ethnic Yazidis persecuted in Islamic State-overrun Iraq should qualify — but purely economically motivated migrants simply hoping to “seek a better life,” in the abstract, should not.
CBP has sounded the alarm on Twitter, tweeting last week: “#CBP is experiencing an unprecedented and unsustainable situation at the Southwest border. In April, CBP apprehended or deemed inadmissible 109,144 individuals along the SWB.”
One unanswered question is why the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has aborted its unilateral rewriting of the much-ballyhooed and highly flawed Flores consent decree, which the Trump administration cites as hamstringing much of its detention and enforcement efforts at the border.
Heartache. Via The Hill: A majority of Americans say socialism is incompatible with American values, and only 10 percent of voters in a new poll have a positive view of socialism. A Monmouth University Poll survey released Monday found that 57 percent of voters believe that socialism is incompatible with American values, compared to 29 percent who […]
