I was very sad to hear the news about Paul Howard being involved in a financial scandal. I was shocked. I can’t say I knew him, but I knew his door was always open to crime victims for the twenty years I worked in victim advocacy and lobbying in Atlanta.
Nobody in politics has a perfect record, but more than a few times, I heard from victims of horrific crimes that Howard himself comforted them and sustained them through very difficult circumstances. ...
“He was a model officer. If you had the ability to clone police officers, you would’ve wanted your officer to be Joe Burson.”
That’s what Holly Springs Police Chief Tommy Keheley said of Burson, 25, who was murdered by Ansy Dolce, 29, during a traffic stop which ended with Dolce dragging the young officer to his death late Wednesday, using his car as a murder weapon. ...
This was Bill Smith. He was a former Deputy Chief of Operations for the DeKalb County, Georgia Fire Department and went on to become an Alabama Sheriff’s Deputy. Smith died last Sunday while successfully rescuing three drowning swimmers off Fort Morgan Peninsula in Alabama. He was only 57.
Deputy Bill Smith. He died doing what he did in life: save lives. ...
Elinor Burkett
Elinor Burkett is one of the oddest, rarest, yet most overlooked species in the journalism zoo. She is practically a holotype. Burkett started out as a history professor, a good one too, I imagine, before switching to journalism and teaming up with the now-New York Times op-ed contributor Frank Bruni. Together, they wrote a very quirky book about consumers’ rights called Consumer Terrorism and a very serious book about the Catholic Church scandal. But as Bruni swung left, Burkett swung — well, it’s hard to describe. She swung to an extreme commitment to open-mindedness which led her past ideology and conventional thinking to new insights into subjects such as the politicization of AIDS, the post-Columbine hysteria over American teens, a (relatively fair) revaluation of conservative women in politics, a biography of Golda Meir, and an utterly delightful book about her decision to travel, as an American, Jewish, woman, to the most dangerous places in the world for Americans, Jews, and women. In So Many Enemies, So Little Time: An American Woman in all the Wrong Places, Burkett visits Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Mongolia, Uzbekistan, China, and Vietnam in the wake of 9/11. She doesn’t do this, or much of anything else, to make friends, which is what makes her work so honest and refreshing. ...
To say the least, I’m not a tech person. My husband had to coax me to use my first *ordinary* computer because, in 1988, my dear IBM dad gave me a Kremlin-suitcase-sized “portable” that displayed three blurry blue lines of text. The device eventually overheated, blew its plug, melted the wall socket, and almost took down my house.
Some time after that and a much-needed rewiring (the computer, I like to think, was actually trying to save me), my husband literally had to design a screen that looked like a typewritten page just to pull the Penguin edition George Eliot from my whitened fists and teach me about the existence of the inter-web. I’m not humble bragging: I was honestly terrified of those internet machines, for good reasons as it turns out, reasons physical and professional and socially. ...
How much is Steve Bannon actually betraying the cause of working Americans while saying the opposite?
Perhaps as much as it benefits his bank account. Freedomworks, a Koch entity, openly supports open borders. What is he doing with them? Is he taking money from the Kochs now? ...
Robert Aaron Long, Killer ...
Last night, 21-year old Robert Aaron Long was captured after murdering eight people in so-called “massage parlors” in Metro Atlanta. Long is white. Six of his victims have been identified as Asian women. It is likely the six murdered women were Korean. In Atlanta, Korean mobs run the massage parlors; strip clubs are either all-black or predominantly white (Chocolate City, The Gold Club); so-called “lingerie modeling” enterprises are a glory of employment desegregation, as it were, and flat-up prostitution involves Hispanic or black or white women and girls — lots of girls — depending on where you are in the city.
The other two human beings Long murdered in the massage parlors were white — one male and one female. But who cares about them? Believe me, all around Atlanta, legislators and activists and journalists are waking up this morning desperately wishing he hadn’t killed those two white people — not because the murder of two humans is terrible, but because the existence of two murdered white bodies represent an inconvenient speed-bump in their excited jostling to get to the nearest microphone to grandstand the loudest about anti-Asian hate crime. ...
As I’ve often said, I’m a Luddite.
Look it up. It’s good for you. Not that I believe literally in smashing printing presses: I just don’t trust technology. See, for example, how technological advancements in pneumatic tube delivery of consumer goods drives the proto-Marxist world revolution in Edward Bellamy’s seminal 1888 worldwide best-selling novel, Looking Backward. ...
Isn’t she cute?
Amy Coney Bryant: Butter Wouldn’t Melt ...
You can watch it here, at America’s Survival: One-Party Rule: Republicans Now Taking Orders From Democrats
Analyst Tina Trent joins Cliff Kincaid to discuss the phenomenon known as “Kevin McCarthyism,” a name given to the Republican movement that keeps anti-Trumper Liz Cheney as the number three in the House GOP leadership while ostracizing conservative wife, mother, and small businesswoman Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green. House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy is the same official who removed strong conservative Steve King from the Congress in response to Democratic Party demands. ...
I’m positive I’ve “met” Marjorie Taylor Greene a couple of times. I put that in quotes because I don’t think I ever spoke to her, but our paths have crossed. I’m terrible with names, and I meet a lot of people, but I do recognize her.
Marjorie Taylor Greene: Truther Loon ...
Today, a few days before Christmas, Maureen Faulkner has received more terrible news. On Dec. 9, 1981, she received the worst news of all: her husband of two years, Danny, has been gunned-down, assassination style, begging for his life at the hands of then-street-thug/future NPR commentator Mumia Abu Jamal. The fine and brilliant Matthew Vadum has the story here. Note it has been removed from search functions: Pennsylvania Supreme Court Refuses to Remove DA in Cop-Killer’s Case.
Here’s a handy list of all the times I’ve written about Mumia: it makes me sick to recount them. I can’t imagine what it takes to live them. Now a Soros-funded District Attorney has taken up the case for freeing Abu Jamal from within the justice system that was supposed to represent Danny Faulkner, not drag his body from the grave and lynch his bones, again, from the nearest flagpole. This what you voted for, Democrats. None of you are welcome near my house again. The lines are drawn. ...
On Saturday, various activist groups descended on the Georgia Capitol to assert that Trump won, that Governor Kemp be deposed, and to shrilly instruct Georgia Republicans and conservatives to stay home and refuse to vote in the upcoming Senate runoffs because the Deep State is plottin’ to use the election to invade their privacy in some inexplicable way, so we should teach the Georgia GOP a firm lesson by tying up our two Senate seats in a pink bow and handing them to Stacey Abrams.
Alex Jones, Pre-Bathroom Floor ...
Cliff Kincaid at America’s Survival (or USA Survival) has several fascinating YouTube interviews about the existential rolling elections mess that is the Peach State, including an informative talk with Garland Favorito, founder of VOTER GA. Mr. Favorito, a retired computer tech expert, is also gifted in pedagogy, for in this relatively brief interview he was able to make the problems with the Georgia recount clear even to me, hopelessly unreconstructed luddite that I am.
If you can explain the virtually mystical workings of the Dominion voter machine bar-code-plus-fifty-four-pound-paper-ballot system to someone who still pines for her flip phone and IBM Selectric, you’re good at ‘splainin. Do check out the VOTER GA website. ...
Everything has some silver lining.
Covid-19 finally carried out the death sentence with which British authorities were too busy to bother: notorious Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe died today from the disease. Rather than link to the encomiums for Sutcliffe himself by “civil rights” attorney activists and depraved lovesick women — very often one and the same — here is an article paying proper tribute to Sutcliffe’s victims. How is it that the only real journalists now work at The Sun? ...
I know we’re all waiting to see what Trump does. Anticipation for triangulation, right? Trump is an astrophysicist of nine-dimensional triangulation.
Amy Coney Barrett is a great choice. Of course. ...
Craig Jones, lawyer for the family of murder victim Eddie Nelson Jr., made a pretty extraordinary statement today. Here is the video from the Columbus, GA news station WLTZ, along with a transcript of his remarks. It’s well worth watching the whole thing. This is the sort of reporting you’re not getting in Atlanta:
New details are emerging about what happened inside the Muscogee County Jail early Saturday morning when Eddie Nelson was allegedly beaten to death by his cellmate Jayvon Hatchett. Nelson was picked up for a probation violation on September 1st and then housed with the hate crime suspect. [snip] ...
There’s absolutely nothing hate crimes activists hate more than having the wrong type of hate committed by the wrong type of hater take the wind out of their ideological sails. This is why the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has reported exactly nothing about Jayvon Hatchett until they were grudgingly forced to do so a few hours ago, and then only by re-running an AP story after Hatchett apparently did a re-run on his openly stated intention to kill white men by killing his white cellmate.
Four days ago. ...
There’s no need to make this up.
In cities across America, ANTIFA and Black Lives Matter are violating all standards of human decency to carry out increasingly-violent putchs as idiot leftists like pretty much everyone I’ve ever known in college (New College of USF), Atlanta, grad school (Emory) et.al., outside police, manual labor, and fast food jobs, remain studiedly silent in the hope of maintaining their superior class status during the next wave of violence. ...
Let’s take a little breather from talking about how Georgia Speaker David Ralston misused his legislative privilege to free child rapists while saying that WE have no souls if we don’t elect Jussie Smollet to the Supreme Court. Let’s set aside the fact that the NAACP isn’t being kicked off twitter for saying ALL police are racist sub-humans who “murder black fathers,” while people who merely re-tweet the NAACP tweet to show how bat-crazy it is are having their accounts shut down.
Let’s save for tomorrow that speech someone needs to give soon-to-be former Governor Kemp when he signs that despicable hate crimes bill that will make his daughter a lesser victim in the eyes of the law if, say, she and her gay girlfriend both get gang raped by the same gang rapists because his daughter is just a heterosexual rape victim, not someone important like a gay rape victim. ...
104 people were shot in Chicago over Father’s Day Weekend. 14 died. Among the dead were four children: 3-year-old Mehki James, 13-year-old Amaria Jones, 16-year old Charles Riley, and 17-year old Sean Francis. All the dead children were black. All the dead and likely all or almost all the injured were black too. All or nearly all the shooters were black.
None of the shootings are being counted as hate crimes, of course. Blowing the brains of 3-year old Mehki James all over the seats of a car is not hate, because, as legislators in other states and now in Georgia have decided, “hate” only counts for crimes that can be blamed on police or white people, crimes that drop cash into the pockets of the NAACP and the ADL and the HRC and the Chamber of Commerce and, of course, the legislators who sidle up to them, pockets open. ...
The Republican-led Senate Rules Committee in Georgia just screwed police all over Georgia at the behest of a mob that celebrates cop-killers. From the discussions they had, they clearly don’t even know how these laws work. Ignorance AND submission aren’t a good look. Jeff Mullis is head of Georgia Senate Rules. Flood his damn phones: (404) 656-0057. If that doesn’t work, call his home district: (706) 375-1776.
Jeff Mullis, apologist for cop-killers, or ignorant misguided guy? ...
This is Richard Smith. He’s one of Speaker Ralston’s henchmen, which means that he lies about Ralston using his legislative power to deny justice to child rape victims in order to advance his own political career. Morally, I don’t know how you live with yourself, doing that. Optically, it looks sort of like this:
House Rules Chairman Richard Smith, a Columbus Republican, abruptly adjourned Tuesday’s rules committee without putting any bills before the full House to consider, saying it “is becoming an embarrassment to the state” that a Senate committee has yet to consider House Bill 426, a hate crimes penalty bill that the House passed in March 2019. ...
Well, we know why. But let’s pretend we don’t.
Contrary to what you might read in the newspapers, watch on tv, hear on the radio, or absorb directly into your brain through freebasing the Google-censored internet, a large number of people think hate crime laws are not only unnecessary but divisive and unjust and have no place in a society where many people fought for decades to ensure that all people are equal in the eyes of the law regardless of their identity. ...
For reasons I detail throughout this blog, and in editorials including this one published in the Atlanta Journal Constitution in 2000 and this one in Insider Advantage in 2019, I have been fighting against the passage of hate crime laws since the late 1990s. I’ve lost a lot professionally by taking on this fight, yet I have every intention of opposing the legislation again this time.
But looking at the crowds outside the Georgia General Assembly’s Gold Dome yesterday, I don’t think I will be physically safe if I come down the Capitol to testify against HB 426. I think most reasonable people would agree that anyone publicly identified as an opponent of hate crime laws would not get safely through that crowd of raucous protestors who circled the Capitol demanding hate crimes laws or else. ...
Do Georgians really want hate crime laws? Because, they’re the real mob violence.
You have probably heard of Stephanie Rapkin, the Milwaukee attorney who for no reason whatsoever but her racist, putrid heart expectorated on a black teenager at an entirely law-abiding, peaceful, high-school-musical-like protest in Milwaukee. ...
Certain politicians and pundits in Atlanta — Double-Dipping Mayor I’ll take two paychecks for that one job thank you very much Keisha Lance Bottoms, disgraced GOP House Speaker David Ralston, job-threatening public-radio-triple-dipper Bill Nigut, and every single Democrat and virtue-signaling Republican want to pass a hate crime law in Georgia. Because Brunswick. Because George Floyd. Because “racism.” Purportedly against all black men. Purportedly by all police.
As of this writing, such rhetoric and the riots they birthed have resulted in serious injuries to more than 400 police and several murders of police, along with hundreds of millions of dollars in property damage and looting. ...
Un-prosecuted Weather Underground terrorist Mark Rudd has an op-ed confessing to felony murder in the leftist-terrorist paper of record, The New York Times today.
Rudd must be excited: his stock is going up. The last time the Times gave over their editorial page to a Weather terrorist, it was to his rival-in-love-tenure-and-attention, Billy Ayers. It was also the morning of 9/11, and Ayers’ wispy-bearded mug smirking from the pages of the Times as he bragged about how much fun he had bombing the Pentagon was likely the last thing many people saw before they suffocated and burned to death in the Twin Towers. And, the Pentagon. ...
