Author Archive: Stephen Green

INSURRECTION, STRAIGHT UP:

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Gun buyer licensing law giving some Colorado sheriffs heartburn.

Not enforcing it, [Weld County Sheriff Steve Reams] said, makes it harder on his constituents, not easier.

“If I ignore this and don’t issue these permits, I’m creating a bigger barrier for them to exercise their constitutional right to buy a gun,” Reams said. “I’m just trying to get out of the way. It is unconstitutional. But until someone sues, I can at least not be a roadblock. Sheriffs are squarely in the middle of a gun conflict that we didn’t ask to be in.”

Reams was referring to the steps added to purchase semi-automatic guns that accept detachable magazines, which amounts to a huge number of commonly owned handguns and rifles.

Hopeful buyers must first get fingerprinted to prove eligibility to own a gun, then taking that proof to the local sheriff, who then gives them a card that approves them to take a special class by a certified instructor (the details of which are not yet in place). Once the applicant passes that test, they will be put into a statewide database for five years, which gun dealers will then need to access to confirm the person is legally able to purchase the firearm.

However, the added workload and costs to sheriff’s offices across the state are what are of concern for many – but not all – sheriffs. Reams said at this point he’s planning to request two more full time employees to manage the increase. But those numbers are not guaranteed. He said it could be more.

“Weld County has 27,000 concealed-carry permit holders,” Reams said. “That keeps my front office staff busy enough as it is. My guess is there will be four to five times as many people who will want to exercise their right to take that class to go buy a gun.”

I imagine that underfunding/understaffing the required two-day class might prove to be another one of Denver’s infringements.

SCHLICHTER: Which Democrat Will Merge Into the 2028 Sane Lane?

What does the Sane Lane look like? Well, it looks a lot like the way we ended up with Bill Clinton. For those of you who weren’t around when Bill Clinton came out of nowhere in 1992 – he had been the governor of a southern state and was known primarily for giving the longest and most boring Democrat convention speech in history. He did it despite having a libido limited only by the angle of his Peyronie’s disease. He did it because he had some charisma, and he took the radical position that crime is bad and people should work instead of getting welfare.

Yes, at the time, most Democrats were saying the same kind of thing that the Democrats now are saying about crime and people working instead of being on welfare. They were for crime and against people working instead of being on welfare. But Bill Clinton understood that normal Americans did not see things that way.

Like Clinton in 1990, if there’s a “sane lane” Democrat for 2028, they might not be on many people’s radar yet.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Democrats Want to Kill You If You Pray. “I’m now going to be carrying a gun to Mass every Sunday. It’s insane that we’ve gotten to this point, but the Democrats are, in fact, insane. People of faith have to protect ourselves from the Trump Derangement Syndrome psychosis that plagues the Democrats. As long as they are telling the faithful that violence is a valid response, every conservative is at risk.”

UPDATE (FROM GLENN):

THE ATLANTIC AND PACIFIC AREN’T THE MOATS THEY USED TO BE:

COMMUNIST DICTATORSHIPS ARE LIKE THAT: Life Has Gotten Surreal in China.

This past November, in the town of Zhuhai, in southern China, a man named Fan Weiqiu got into his car and plowed into a crowd at a sports center, killing 35 people and injuring 43. Apparently distraught over a divorce settlement, the 62-year-old Fan was found inside the car with severe self-inflicted knife wounds to his neck.

The incident immediately became a political problem. Such a tragedy should never have happened in the happy, harmonious society that Xi claims to have created, free of the violence and divisions that plague other, inferior countries. China’s vast security state quickly got to work making sure it hadn’t: Censors scrubbed videos, articles, and comments about the incident from social-media platforms. Workers at the sports center cleared away the bouquets of flowers that mourning residents had laid there. Police chased off curious visitors. Fan was executed two months later.

Disappearing inconvenient truths has always been a feature of Communist rule in China. In an episode of The Simpsons, Homer and the family visit Beijing, and as they pass through Tiananmen Square, they find a plaque that reads On this site, in 1989, nothing happened. But Xi has lately taken his efforts to convince people that they live in a socialist utopia to a new extreme.

The Chinese people are content, the state’s propaganda organs insist, as they feed the public good news and suppress discussion of the country’s many economic and social problems. The result is a surreal environment, where public discourse is ever more detached from everyday life, and the government is ever less responsive to the concerns and difficulties of its people.

At the same time, the state intrudes more and more into daily life. My wife and I have experienced this directly. Over the past year, teams of police have made regular visits to our Beijing apartment—four of them just this month. Officers check our passports and visas while recording the interaction with small video cameras. We have already provided this information to the police, as required by local regulations; these repetitive visits are likely meant simply to intimidate.

The resulting atmosphere is a throwback to an earlier era of Chinese Communist rule, before the economic-modernization program of Deng Xiaoping.

Read the whole thing.

GOOD QUESTION:

HMM:

Exit quote: “Bolton spent his career demanding severe punishment for anyone who mishandles classified docs. He was all over CNN, which reveres him, condemning Trump for it.”

NO MATTER HOW MUCH YOU DESPISE THE MEDIA…:

DEAF EARS: Cracker Barrel’s CEO dismissed warnings from a top investor who called the rebranding ‘obvious folly.’

Masino and her board of directors dismissed at least four warnings by a top investor, Sardar Biglari, that the rebranding was “obvious folly,” filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission reveal.

“Cracker Barrel is not a broken brand but it has a broken board,” he wrote, in a scathing seven-page letter to shareholders.

He laid out his criticisms in a 120-page slide-deck presentation with the title, “CRACKER BARREL IS IN CRISIS,” next to the company’s longtime logo of an old man in overalls leaning on a barrel – a logo that Masino would wipe out, unbeknownst to Biglari at the time.

But of course they ignored Biglari — BlackRock owns an even bigger stake.

FASTER, PLEASE: South Korean Shipbuilder to Invest $5B in Philadelphia Shipyard.

“Hanwha is also reviewing the build-out of a new block assembly facility. Through this expansion, Hanwha aims to increase Philly Shipyard’s annual production volume from less than two vessels to up to 20,” the release continues. “As a global leader in [liquefied natural gas] vessels, Hanwha aims to produce LNG carriers, naval modules and blocks, and, in the long-term, naval vessels out of its U.S. shipyard.”

During the Monday meeting with South Korean President Lee Jae Myung at the White House, Trump acknowledged the length of time needed to ramp up shipbuilding.

“We really gave up the shipbuilding industry foolishly, many years ago,” Trump said. “But we’re going to start it up again.”

Seriously — much faster, please.

INDULGING DELUSIONS WITH HORMONES AND SURGERY HAS NOT WORKED OUT AS PROMISED:

And on cue:

It’s never the actor, it’s always the object.

KRUISER: Starve the Leftist Trolls of Oxygen and Leave Them Gasping for Relevance. “It’s easy to believe the worst of the loudmouth social media lefties. What we don’t need to be doing is giving these cretins a bigger audience, yet that’s what conservatives have been doing with the most vile leftist trolls for years.”

NICE WORK, EVERYBODY:

THE NEW SPACE RACE: Russian space official: “We need to stop lying to ourselves” about health of industry.

In his message to the corporation’s thousands of employees, Maltsev said Energia is having difficulty paying wages and delivering the spacecraft and other products it is contracted to build.

“We need to stop lying to ourselves and others about the state of affairs, convincing ourselves and others that everything is fine with us,” he wrote. “The time demands decisive action from us—not to sit, but to fight for the enterprise. I suggest that everyone answer the question honestly: are you ready to work for the result and make a real contribution?”

Maltsev, who was appointed director general of Energia just three months ago, closed his dark missive by suggesting it will take a miracle to save the historic space corporation.

This is an extraordinary statement coming from a senior leader within Russia’s space industry. Although it is widely understood that Russia’s space program is in decline, the most common tactic among Russian officials is to bluster about past greatness and talk about all the new programs that are under development.

What a sad state of affairs for the country that put the first satellite and the first man into space.

More: “In reality, the Russian space program is chronically underfunded, and the war against Ukraine has only accelerated the depletion of talent and resources. Russia cannot afford new spacecraft and rockets when it needs munitions and men for the front lines.”

Putin can have a space program, or he can keep throwing away hundreds of thousands of lives for minimal gains in Ukraine.

He seems to prefer the latter, so that’s what he’ll get.