Protecting the judiciary from illegal influences is critical

When someone at the United States Supreme Court leaked a draft of an opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito regarding the possible overturning of Roe v. Wade, abortion supporters flew into a rage.

The Huffington Post reported, “Activists protesting against the Supreme Court’s expected ruling gutting Roe v. Wade gathered outside the homes of two conservative justices over the weekend and plan to do so again later this week. 

Close to 100 protesters chanted and waved signs Saturday evening outside the Maryland house of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, then marched to the nearby home of Chief Justice John Roberts.”

Some who support this disgraceful activity remind us that peaceful protests are a guaranteed right, and that is true, to a point. 

The obvious intent of these gatherings is to intimidate the justices into changing their position on the constitutional question before them, and allow Roe to stand.

According to an article on the American Enterprise Institute’s (AEI) website, “Protesters outside Brett M. Kavanaugh’s house warned the Supreme Court justice this weekend, ‘If you take away our choices, we will riot.’ They marched on Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s home chanting ‘Abort the court!’ and stood outside the home of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. (who apparently did not vote to overturn Roe v. Wade) yelling ‘The whole world is watching!’”

This outlandish behavior smacks of attempts at “vigilante justice,” or mob rule on what is a matter of constitutional law. And, more importantly, these “protests,” however peaceful they may or may not be, are against the law.

The AEI article continues: “This is not just noxious behavior; it is illegal. Federal law — Section 1507 of Title 18 of the U.S. Code — clearly states that it is unlawful to protest near a ‘residence occupied or used by [a] judge, juror, witness, or court officer’ with the intent of influencing ‘the discharge of his duty,’ adding that anyone who ‘uses any sound-truck or similar device or resorts to any other demonstration in or near any such building or residence, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.’”

If people want to protest on behalf of some cause on which the Court is going to rule, they may peacefully protest legally outside the Supreme Court building.

Protests in front of the homes of judges, justices, and others involved in legal decisions is expressly outlawed because of the need for these people to make their decisions absent intimidation. Further, this chaos is also a problem for neighbors, who are unfairly subjected to unwanted noise, and other negative aspects of these illegal gatherings.

So, while both federal law and some state laws forbid this behavior, why is it still going on? And more importantly, why has there been no law enforcement action to arrest these criminals? Why is the Department of Justice failing to respond to these illegal activities? 

After all, an attempted assassination of Justice Brett Kavanaugh was recently discovered and stopped. And, a former judge was recently killed in his home by a person he sent to prison years earlier. These illegal gatherings are threats to the safety of the justices and their families.

Yet, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland sits complacently in his office more worried about the non-whipping of people illegally crossing the southern border, and the actions of parents concerned about the education of their children in tax-supported schools at boards of education meetings.

And President Joe Biden has been strangely quiet about this development. Biden has said publicly that we need to “stop treating our opponents as our enemy.” And in his inaugural address, he vowed to “end this uncivil war,” and bring America together. And yet, he has said and done nothing about this disgraceful development.

This failure on the part of the Attorney General, the Department of Justice, and others with authority to act against this illegal behavior seems to be part of the recent epidemic of so-called “progressive” thought on justice and the law.

There has been a rash of district attorneys and prosecutors across the country who were elected or appointed to enforce laws and who somehow believe they have the authority to ignore whichever laws they so choose. In doing this, they place the rights and concerns of criminals above the rights and concerns of their victims, and of innocent Americans.

Criminals are not prosecuted to the fullest, or sometimes hardly at all, and they often commit additional crimes. Two Los Angeles police officers were recently ambushed and killed by a career criminal who was given light treatment by District Attorney George Gascon. The killer should have been in jail, and would have been if he had been treated appropriately by Gascon.

People are plainly breaking the law in protesting at justices’ homes, trying to intimidate them to rule a certain way, and no one is doing anything about it. That is not acceptable.

Are gas prices too high for you? Just get an electric vehicle!

June 14, 2022

As the national average for a gallon of regular unleaded gas crosses the $5.00 mark, drivers across the country are finding it more and more difficult to keep gas in their cars. Those with diesel vehicles are in even worse shape.

In somewhat of a “let them eat cake” moment, U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg said recently that people struggling with rising gas prices should just get an electric car. 

Forget buying gas, the price of which has more than doubled in the past year or so. You can just stick your nose in the air as you drive by the gas stations in your new EV.

However, as with every idea, there is a reality that accompanies it, and reality is most often more difficult. 

For example, Kelley Blue Book tells us the average price of an EV was $56,437 in November 2021, and the average price jumped 6.2 percent from the same month a year earlier. The average price of a new compact car, however, was $25,240, less than half the price of an EV.

For an inside look at actually owning and traveling in an EV, we have stories from two people, Wall Street Journal reporter Rachel Wolfe, who described a trip from New Orleans to Chicago, and Emily Dreibelbis, a graduate student at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, who took a road trip from Princeton, New Jersey, to Arlington, Virginia and back.

Wolfe said at the beginning that she “thought it would be fun,” and plotted “a meticulous route” using an app that showed public chargers along the 2,000-mile round-trip route she selected.

Most of the chargers on her route, it turned out, were only Level 2. Those take eight hours for a full charge. Fast chargers give an 80 percent charge in about a half-hour, she noted. “Longer than stopping for gas — but good for a bite or bathroom break,” she reported.

 “Over four days, we spent $175 on charging. We estimated the equivalent cost for gas in a Kia Forte would have been $275, based on the AAA average national gas price for May 19. That $100 savings cost us many hours in waiting time,” she wrote.

She also noted that the Kia EV6 she drove had lower range than advertised, that the charging stations had slower speeds than advertised, that many charging stations had problematic cords, and that lots of the country had almost no fast-charging stations at all.

For the entire trip, Wolfe wrote, she spent 16 hours sleeping during the trip and 18 hours waiting to charge the vehicle, spread over 14 charges.

Dreibelbis, an avowed EV supporter, made a trip from Princeton, New Jersey, to Arlington, Virginia, and back. Traveling in her parents’ 2019 Chevrolet Volt, she experienced problems along the way, too.

During her 200-mile adventure, she experienced broken and slow vehicle charging stations, and also found not nearly enough of them. In Maryland, she found three chargers that didn’t work, and one that had an out-of-order sign on it that did work.

Of those that worked, the Level 3 “fast” charger takes about an hour for a charge that gives only 100 miles of range. Other chargers were slower. A Level 1 charger for home use can take up to 10 hours, and a Level 2 charger, like many found in public parking lots, may take up to four hours.

Dreibelbis Googled locations in Arlington and found one site was not accessible, as it was in a private complex, and the next one cost an $11 entry fee just to get to it. She wrote, “Frustrated, I surrendered the money. They only had Level Two chargers, so it took two and a half hours of reading a book in the cold until the car had enough power.”

In the manic drive to do away with fossil fuels, by 2030 the U.S. hopes for 50 percent of new cars sales to be EVs. Last year, EVs were only 4.5 percent of new car sales. 

To meet this goal, things will have to improve quickly. Charging times are long, and charging stations are far too few to service the number of EVs that is desired. Traveling long distances will take hours longer, given the charging times, and the potential waiting in line behind one, two or perhaps three  vehicles to get to the charger. And the price of EVs is often double that of conventionally fueled vehicles.

And then there is the reality of where the electricity comes from to recharge EVs: Much of it comes from fossil fuels: coal and natural gas. So, while driving an EV produces less pollution, generating the electricity to charge them will be producing lots more of it. And the more EVs there are, the more pollution will be required to keep them charged.

Further, the critical elements for EV batteries are being purchased largely from China.

When the time is right for EVs, we will transition naturally to them. That time is not yet, nor anytime soon. The biggest problem with the goals of the left is that they never want to wait until the time is right, but instead cause problems by rushing the issue.

The enigma of making schools safe, doing so sensibly and surely

June 7, 2022

More mass shootings at schools, and other events. Obviously, everyone wants a solution to this problem, particularly the shootings in schools, where young children are targeted by thugs and the mentally ill, who want to kill innocent and unprotected people.

There are lots of ideas being offered to solve this problem. Most of them are spawned by emotion, which is somewhat understandable under these circumstances. But emotional solutions are usually the wrong ones.

The first emotional response is against guns. Let’s ban guns, or certain guns, like “assault weapons” and “weapons of war,” and “large-capacity clips.” But are guns really the main problem?

When I was in high school a “few” years ago, it was not uncommon to see a rifle on a gun rack in a student’s or teacher’s or staff member’s vehicle in the parking lot. Yet, there was never a problem. None of these gun-owning people brought the gun into the school, shot at people, or even threatened anyone. This occurred across the United States. Some schools actually taught marksmanship and had rifle teams. 

That is perhaps the most obvious clue to what the problem with school shootings is. It’s not guns. It’s the mental state or mind-set of the perpetrator. And that is what must be addressed.

The first step is to secure school buildings. Schools must have just one entrance, with a security system that checks and clears everyone before they are allowed to enter the school. 

But making schools safe from maniacs with guns, knives, explosives or whatever, also requires armed personnel who will protect the school.

Having armed personnel in schools who are screened, trained and prepared to address a situation where someone manages to get through the school security system makes sense. That could include retired or no longer active military personnel, former law enforcement officers, and even teachers or staff members that volunteer for that duty.

It isn’t just about the guns, knives, pipe bombs or whatever some murderer incorporates to do his/her evil, it’s about the motivation to do it. It’s about the failure of our culture to teach young people about good and evil, and how to live a good, productive life, and also those with mental problems. In many or most cases, the killers have given signals on social media or elsewhere about their evil plans. These clues must be acted on.

Other factors are the defund the police movement, and the idiocy of prosecutors/DAs who refuse to adequately prosecute criminals and release the guilty to commit more crimes. These things encourage criminal behavior.

And the right of Americans to keep and bear arms for self-defense is also quite sensible. One example of this occurred last month in Charleston, West Virginia. A woman with a pistol and a concealed carry permit took down a crazed man spraying bullets at a graduation party there, as reported by WCHS-TV. The man drove up and started firing on the party with an AR15 when the woman, instead of running away, shot him dead. A good gal with a gun stopped a bad guy with a gun!

The “progressive” left thinks banning guns is the answer. If all guns are banned, criminals will have guns, but the law-abiding citizen will be undefended. That’s how it works: criminals don’t obey laws; but their targets mostly do.

The left sometimes backs off a bit and wants to ban only certain guns. But even that runs up against Second Amendment protections.

The most sensible idea is to make it illegal for anyone under the age of 21 to purchase guns or ammunition, with the exception of those who have served in the military and been properly trained in weapons handling. Background checks offer some level of safety, and red flag laws may also. But the red flag process often denies due process rights to the person targeted until after their weapons have been confiscated. That is unconstitutional. And they are open to fraudulent claims. 

“Who needs an AR-15, or a 30-round clip to hunt?” the left asks. Well, that is totally irrelevant. This is America. We are guaranteed certain rights, freedom of speech and the right to keep and bear arms, among them. The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution does not say, “the right to keep and bear muskets.” It also doesn’t say “the right to bear arms for hunting.” And, by the way, AR does NOT stand for “Assault Rifle.”

Taking a different tack on that idea, who needs a Rolls Royce, or a Bentley? Nobody really needs one, but we can have one if we choose to and can afford one. That same privilege applies to guns, and is constitutionally protected. With the exception of fully automatic weapons, law-abiding citizens can have pretty much any gun they want and can afford. And that proved to be a good thing in Charleston last month.

Punishing law-abiding Americans with gun bans because some thugs or mentally ill people want to kill innocent people really makes no sense. And, more to the point, it won’t help solve the problem. But it will help to make it easier for the radical leftists to take over the country and turn it into Venezuela. 

Predictions from the past are coming true right before our eyes

In 1965, Paul Harvey delivered a commentary titled “If I Were the Devil” that predicted the future spiritual condition of the United States. In 2020, the Washington Examiner ran a commentary by Gary Bauer titled “How to destroy America from within” that also predicted the future of the country.

Both of them did a good job of describing the current disorder in the United States and its continued movement in that direction.

A recent TikTok video is going viral. In it an unidentified woman expresses her concerns about what is wrong with our country, and how it has changed from when she was younger.

Many may not agree with some things she says, or any of it. And it is certain to have been banned or earned a warning label on Twitter or Facebook for its “inappropriate” opinions. 

But the concept of free speech makes things like this important for distribution on social media platforms, despite its unpopularity with social media oligarchs. Having a broad array of ideas to consider is critical to our future.

“I never dreamed that I would have to face the prospect of not living in the United States of America,” she began. “At least not the one I’ve known all my life. I’ve never wished to live anywhere else. This is my home, and I was privileged to be born here. 

“But today I woke up and when I had my morning coffee I realized that everything is about to change. No matter how I vote, no matter what. Something evil has invaded our nation. Our lives are never going to be the same.”

She then began listing things that trouble her. The hostility of people, including family and friends, who now agree with opinions they never would have expressed as their own before.

The “insanity” of men pretending to be women and women pretending to be men, along with the requirement that everyone accept that.

Making 18 the legal voting age, but being 21 to buy alcohol. The idea that people who never went to college, or who managed to pay their acquired college loan debt, now having their tax dollars pay the huge debts of some college graduates who are not able, or don’t want to do it.

The crazy situation where people like doctors and engineers from other countries have to endure a long, arduous process to immigrate here. But literally anyone can walk or sneak across the southern border, and be welcomed with open arms, whether they be gang members, drug dealers, or infected with Covid, or other horrible diseases.

And yet, spending $5 billion dollars for border security is too expensive, but spending $1.5 trillion for free healthcare is good. And, as a few folks recently discovered, if you cheat to get your kid into college, you go to prison, but if you cheat to get into the country, you may go to college for free.

Suddenly, the rights of criminals are more important than those of law-abiding citizens. After being arrested for a crime, they must be released to commit more crimes. And if you complain about this, you are called a racist.

“People who say there is no such thing as gender are demanding a female president,” she said. “We see other countries going socialist and collapsing, but it seems like a great plan to us. Some people are held responsible for things that happened before they were born, and other people are not held responsible for what they are doing right now.”

“Nothing makes sense anymore. No values, no morals, and no civility, “she said, as she began her conclusion. “We’re clearly living in an upside-down world where right is wrong, and wrong is right. Where moral is immoral, and immoral is moral. Where good is evil and evil is good. Where killing murderers is evil, but killing unborn babies is A-OK.

“Wake up, America. The great unsinkable ship, Titanic America, has hit an iceberg, is taking on water, and is sinking fast. Speak up.”

So much of what our Founders created and enabled America to do so well for so long, is crumbling beneath our feet. Those who don’t know that, don’t understand how good they have it, or just dislike what America is, are working so hard to transform the country into one more failed socialist state.

Harvey said that the Devil’s plan was to attack and destroy religion in the country as the first step in taking the nation down. While we still have several religions, the results of the anti-religion movement can be seen in the moral decay of our culture. 

Weakening the education system, changing how and what children are taught, is the way Bauer’s column begins. And today, many teachers, schools and school systems have been caught red-handed doing just that.

Defunding the police and the military were mentioned, as well as a news media that is largely ideologically driven, rather than honorably doing its vital job of presenting all the news without political or ideological bias.

Younger generations have not been taught why maintaining the “old ways” is important, and now the great country we grew up in is in peril.