Posts Tagged → attorney general
Will Pam Bondi cut it as AG?
Earlier today, former congressman Matt Gaetz stepped down as nominee for US Attorney General. The ridiculous scandal created around him drove him out. Within about six hours, President Trump announced that former Florida AG Pam Bondi was the next up nominee. And I do not have a good feeling about this selection.
Here is why: If you are trying to re-enter enemy territory and bring law and order to the Biden DOJ chaos, you are best served by having someone who is aggrieved. Someone like Kash Patel, who served in the Pentagon and as Rep. Devin Nunes’ chief of staff and investigator into the DOJ’s fake Russia Hoax scandal aimed at Trump. You are best served by someone who knows where the skeletons are buried and where the bad guys are hiding, and who is personally invested in fixing it.
Pam Bondi could easily be another Amy Coney Barrett, a moderate sheep sold in conservative clothing, who promised to act like a sheriff, but who ended up being a spineless liberal do-nothing on the Supreme Court. Justice Brett Kavanaugh also turned out to be a cute soccer mom, more interested in DC elbow rubbing than in implementing constitutionally sound legal decisions. America cannot survive with more of this kind of weak personality in leadership positions. The rot is too deep and too broad, and only the very meanest, toughest crime fighters will succeed in righting the listing ship.
My fear is that Pam Bondi will not want to rock the boat by making aggressive moves on big name crime figures, like Alejandro Mayorkas and Merrick Garland. Rather, she is likely to go after the second tier personalities, and only a few at that. People like Andrew McCabe and Rod Rosenstein, maybe Jim Comey or Chris Wray. My fear is that she she will have a few big dog and pony circus show cases, and puff out her chest and strut around like she has done something. Letting all the myriad bad guys off the hook.
What DC and America need is a Batman, a caped crusader, someone so personally angry and hurt by the last eight years of cruel, lawless injustice, that he will stop at nothing to bring everyone to justice. That means the Merrick Garlands and the junior DOJ prosecutors too, everyone who all engaged in criminal prosecutorial misconduct. And whomever is responsible for the professional murder of Jeffrey Epstein inside a jail cell. And whoever left the fake bombs outside the DNC and RNC on January 6th. And and and….
Doors have to be kicked in at 4AM, tons of bad guys have to be trotted out cuffed in their underwear, and as much prosecution as can be dreamt up must be dumped on every. single. one. of these bad people who have wrecked America over the past eight years.
Pam Bondi. Someone this pretty probably isn’t going to be as tough as America needs. Photo credit CNN
Maybe I will be pleasantly surprised, but I doubt it. If nothing else, one hopes that President Trump has explained to Pam Bondi what his exact expectations are, and what the short timeline looks like for her implementation. We cannot have another Jeff Sessions or Bill Barr situation, where people who are entrusted with everything do absolutely nothing. And we also cannot have another situation where the AG does something, but not everything that must be done.
Batman, where are you?
America needs a caped crusader US Attorney General to bring tough justice to Washington DC criminals. Credit DC Comics (ironically)
“The Elites Have Revolted and Are In a State of World War Against Us”
Today we host Tom Shepstone as a guest here. His essay below is a well written aggregation of some of the different things I myself have written here over the years, and also things which other much better known commenters than either Tom or I have said and written. If I recall right, it was radio show host Mark Levin who first pointed out that the elites are in full revolt against the people. What Tom has done is pull a bunch of these related threads together for a coherent appeal to moderate American voters: If you like your civilization, and you want to keep your civilization, you must vote for the one person who will protect your civilization.
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The Elites Have Revolted and Are In a State of World War Against Us
By Thomas J. Shepstone
Every day there’s further evidence global elites are at war with the people. Western Civilization has periodically been the exception to the rule that the people ordinarily live as serfs in totalitarianism nations dominated by the elites. Those times when the people have actually had a role in governing themselves have been relatively few, in fact, over the centuries. The signing of the Magna Carta by King John giving up some of his rights to lesser nobles was such a moment. The American Revolution was another. Sooner or later, though, the elites claw back their power as the people are conned into giving them a bit of it back only to see the inch given turn into miles and miles.
This process of decay has reached to the very core of Western Civilization at our present point. Free speech is evaporating like a dragster taking off for the hay bales at the end of the strip. Rumble has been banned in France and X chased out of Brazil. The developer and CEO of Telegram has been arrested for not cooperating with government. The UK is jailing people for Facebook posts challenging the government narrative and has threatened to extradite Elon Musk for allowing the same thing. The Biden-Harris administration bullied Twitter into downplaying the significance of the Hunter Biden hard drive during a political campaign.
The mainstream media has allied itself with totally corrupt CIA and FBI agencies. Politicians lie with abandon and tell ever bigger lies with straight faces. The heads of other Federal agencies such as Homeland Security and the Department of Justice make flat out false assertions with no embarrassment whatsoever. The Attorney General [Merrick Garland] refuses to pursue perpetrators of violence against pro-life centers but is willing to put grandmothers in jail for praying outside abortion mills. The main bodies of both political parties have joined forces as a uni-party focused on special privileges for themselves as they bankrupt the country. The President and a Vice-Presidential nominee both appear to be all but Chinese Communist Party agents.
The rot simply cannot be denied. Oh, it’s always been there. Woodrow Wilson was a vicious racist who reduced free speech to whispers and even Lincoln arbitrarily took away many basic rights but those were war-time situations and temporary. There was also corruption with the Teapot Dome scandal, Alger Hiss and so many other cases, but it’s never been as deep and widespread as today. France’s Macron refuses to leave office despite being massively defeated in the recent election. The UK’s new leader replaced one never elected and the new one is more aligned with the World Economic Forum than his own country.
The elites are in full revolt — world war, if you will — against us. They are stealing elections now but hope to end them soon. They are pushing self-appointed world government on every front with phony campaigns against ‘malinformation’ (their invented word for accurate information opposed to the government narrative), proposals for digital currencies, 15-minute cities, health care dictatorships and so much more. It’s all in the name of control, control and more control and it’s mushrooming like crazy.
What can we do about it, short of another dangerous and counterproductive French Revolution like the one two centuries ago that ended up consuming the advocates of revolution? Well, the first thing it seems to me, despite my gloomy observations above, is not to despair. There are reasons to hope after all. It is clear, for example, there is worldwide revulsion of the elites who are currently running our institutions not only of government, but everything else that matters as well. There is also a realignment of some nature taking place.
The new divisions are ever less of a left vs. right nature and more a matter of the elite establishment vs. versus anti-establishment commoners, insane folks who wish to destroy the family vs. normal people who recognize it as the building block for any civilization, and wannabe masters of the universe vs. freedom lovers. Each of these divisions is important because they clarify what the problem is and what must be remedied, which can only happen if we talk to each other and abide our differences. Reforming or abandoning corrupt institutions so as to realign on principles are the only ways that can happen.
That’s how I see what’s happening in the political realm these days. The RFK, Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard endorsements of Trump are indicative of what I’m talking about. I strongly disagree with both on certain matters, especially on abortion and, in Kennedy’s case also on climate and energy matters. Yet, look what’s happened. Bobby, Jr. unforgivably helped killed fracking in New York. He once stated, too, that he wanted to jail ‘climate deniers.”
But, in recent speeches and interviews, Kennedy has attacked the billionaire green grifter class sucking up all our money on wasteful green boondoggles. How can we possibly disagree? He also went after Anthony Fauci in a way no else was capable of doing. And, he has defended free speech like a lion. He came to Trump because he had no other principled choice, and so it must be with us. We need to unite with one-time enemies where we can and destroy the old divisions on the way to restoring Western Civilization.
Notwithstanding all this, elections, while mattering greatly, won’t save us by themselves. No one individual can do it and events always intervene, making it extraordinarily difficult in the situation we face, which is a world war of entrenched special interests against those of us who would ask questions. Yet, individuals of principle do make a difference, so it falls on all of us to live by our principles. Chief among them are life, liberty and truth-telling, all of which rest on a foundation of free speech and the elite troops arrayed against are making simultaneous major assaults on this principle on every front.
Free speech is the prerequisite of any truly functioning democratic republic, despite the disingenuous wails of the left suggesting that democracy is threatened by it. They want to separate good speech from bad, but don’t tell us they plan to be the arbiters of what is good and bad. And, what they mean by democracy is anything but the vote of the people. No, what they mean by democracy is no more than the institutions they now control, whether they be government agencies or electoral bodies. They aim to kill true democracy, as in “the will of the people,” to save their captured form of it.
Their so-named democracy lives by lies and, therefore, can tolerate no truth telling. The only way they know to stop others from speaking truth to power is smother it by throwing a wet blanket over all speech on the excuse that some of it’s bad. Free speech, though, has no such distinctions. It is mixture of good and bad and it’s only by comparing the two that free people get to make up their minds. The antidote to bad speech in the eyes of the beholders is always more speech. Even if ends in both sides calling each other liars, those observing the debate get to decide where the truth really lies. That is true democracy. All speech must be protected or there is no speech for any of us.
We will not turn back the elite troops attacking us without free speech. If we do not insist upon it, we are doomed. We will be forced to live in city colonies and give up our right to travel. We’ll be forced to subsidize the lives of elites by paying for unreliable and pricey energy systems that make no sense but fatten the wallets of grifters. We’ll lose the right to farm, to possess our own homes, to vote and to live in a nation of our own making. We will revert to a feudal society.
Let’s all remember this when we vote. Let’s vote like our very lives depend upon it, because they do, but more than that we all owe it to ourselves and each other to speak up and challenge each other. That means getting on social media, becoming activists and talking with others, especially with whom we disagree. There can be no running away from argument.
That doesn’t mean making everything political or acting hostile. No, it simply means engaging others in a civil way. We must cross the divides and ask questions…lots of questions so those aligned against us might understand us better and vice versa with a view toward identifying areas of agreement. We will not win the war against the elites without making friends of some of our enemies. And, we will not wrestle the beast we have created to the ground alone.
#Elites #FreeSpeech #WesternCiviization #Democracy
Central PA candidates on the ballot
Because I am a “politico” actively involved in politics, friends, family, and strangers ask my opinion on candidates running for political office.
Here are the people I am voting for on next week’s Republican primary election ballot:
President: Donald J. Trump, of course. President Trump is all that stands between We, The People and chaos and the forced failure of America as the representative constitutional republic we have enjoyed since 1789.
Attorney General: Dave Sunday. He has a strong 2A background and is endorsed by Gun Owners of America, whereas his opponent has a very poor 2A record.
Congress: Scott Perry. Scott continues to reliably do what an elected official is supposed to do. He has gotten a lot quieter since the lawless Democrat Party thugs known as “FBI agents” stopped his car and stole his cell phone from him at gunpoint last year. Nonetheless, Scott continues to vote for We, The People, like voting against the FISA renewal. FISA has been used by the FBI to conduct lawless, warrantless domestic spying against everyday American citizens.
US Senator: Mickey Mouse. I literally wrote in Mickey Mouse because the GOPe endorsed and orchestrated puppet strings candidate whose name appears on the ballot spent time and money to knock off the ballot several other candidates who would have competed with him in this primary race. What a scumbag.
Auditor General: Tim DeFoor. Tim is a solid citizen and one of the very few now career politicians I can support. I have watched him work his way through the political process, and though he is not ideological, he comes to his traditional views honestly, from the way he grew up, which I can respect.
State Senator: Nick DiFrancesco. This is a newer version of the state senate district seat I ran for in 2012 and 2015, and I have a lot of familiarity with its voters. Nick is an all-around politico who has been a Dauphin County commissioner and has held other publicly visible positions of trust. Nick is presently Dauphin County treasurer, and I believe he represents the only chance normal taxpaying citizens in our region have to stop far-left radical Patty Kim from inheriting this seat in a heavily gerrymandered district made just for her. The other candidate is Ken Stambaugh, who I have had the pleasure of speaking with at length and staying in touch with. Heck of a nice man, good intentions, and not a political animal. My opinion is Ken would stand zero chance against Patty Kim. I yearn for the days when America would naturally and easily elect good people like Ken to office, but unfortunately spring 2024 is as far away from those old days as America can get. We need political warriors.
State Treasurer: Stacy Garrity. Wish we had a primary opponent just for voter choice.
Representative in General Assembly (State House 103rd district): Cindi Ward. Wish we had a primary opponent just for voter choice.
Representative in General Assembly (State House 100th district): Dave Nissley. Failed incumbent and career political hack Bryan Cutler has been a disaster for central Pennsylvania voters who care about good policy and clean politics. Cutler got into elected politics at a very young age, and he just learned bad habit after bad habit along the way. Dave Nissley is by far the better man and the better candidate, and he has been endorsed by Gun Owners of America.
Delegate to the Republican National Convention: Jeff Haste, Sue Helm, George Margetas, and Charlie Gerow. Both Jeff and Sue are well known central PA pro 2A advocates. George Margetas is a local attorney who like so many of us went along with the covid tyranny mask nonsense in 2020, but who then bucked it publicly afterwards when it was clearly evident that covid was about political control and not about public health. I like a strong man who stands up for freedom. Last but not least is well known local politico and lobbyist Charlie Gerow, who I have known for many years and who is one of the few lobbyists I actually like.
The other RNC candidates have either zero about them available online, which tells us they are hiding, fakes, RINOs, or Democrats, or they have something about being “a fiscal conservative,” which is always a red flag for social conservatives looking for strong candidates who will represent traditional values and meritocracy. So-called “fiscal conservatives” rarely are, and they are always social liberals. No thanks.
Your political action in 2024, like voting and volunteering for candidates, is as important as 1776
Celebrate Independence Day with A Month of Defiant Acts
Today is July 4th, America’s Independence Day, founded immediately upon the heels of the United States’ successful civil war with Great Britain, from 1775 to 1781. What we call the Revolutionary War was actually a civil war between American colonists loyal to the British monarch, King George III, and his Redcoat soldiers on the one hand, and American colonists loyal to a new idea of democracy and representative self-government, on the other hand.
As we celebrated today, individual freedom, individual liberty, and individual choice won out against and over King George’s tyranny. As a result, America has enjoyed roughly 245 years of unparalleled prosperity and opportunity for even the poorest and least educated human beings from around the planet.
In 1818, then-past-President John Adams wrote that the actual revolution had already occurred among the American citizens and frontier colonists, years before the actual fighting began in 1775. The people’s then-revolutionary views on power sharing among humans, governmental legitimacy through consent of the governed, government transparency and accountability, and a kind of loose and very broadly defined Christian brotherhood united by loyalty to ideas and shared values had already taken hold on the frontier, united more than enough individuals to stand up against what was then the greatest military power in the world.
Today there is without question a formal tyranny afoot in North America. Both Canada (Trudeau) and America (Biden) are presently run by people who are openly and aggressively at odds with the fundamental rights and freedoms the peoples here have lived by for a very long time. It is an effort to consolidate official power over The People that knows no bounds, and official malfeasance and abuse of official positions against innocent but uppity citizens are now daily occurrences in both Canada and America.
Here in America the Department of Justice and the FBI have set land speed records for false accusations and the corrupt detonation of individual due process rights, whereby the criminal prosecutorial process is in and of itself the punishment. Even if an innocent individual is eventually cleared of wrongdoing, the government will have bankrupted them, destroyed their good name, and perhaps destroyed their family, their career, and taken their home, too.
These public employees and agents are pretty much double dog daring everyone to try to hold them accountable within the realm of America’s legal system. And they have access to just enough corrupt and politically partisan activist judges to get the Crackerjack Box search and seizure warrants they need to spread fear and political retaliation under color of official law. But we citizens have a duty to resist this tyranny.
In the spirit of Independence Day, let us all engage in a month of defiant acts against this political corruption and destruction of our rights. You know, live up to those 1970s bumper stickers that said “Question Authority,” which at that time were aimed at the many traditional institutions the Left had not yet captured, corrupted, or destroyed. Of course, if we begin to question the authority of our Usurper in Chief and his minions, they will immediately recoil in horror: “No, don’t question THAT authority! OUR authority you must unquestionably obey!”
If the Left did not have double standards, they would have no standards at all.
Some acts of defiance and questioning authority that you should do:
- Write a letter to your county sheriff, and ask him or her to begin assembling a significant number of armed deputies, to be able to resist illegal invasions or lawless acts in the county by federal troops or agents.
- Write a letter to your county sheriff, and ask him or her to formally communicate with the Department of Justice and the FBI that their partisan corruption is now so great, they are no longer welcome in the county, and their agents encountered in the county will be arrested and held without bail.
- Write a letter to your state Attorney General, and ask him or her to formally communicate with the Department of Justice and the FBI that their partisan corruption is now so great, they are no longer welcome in the state, and their agents encountered in the state will be arrested and held without bail.
- Write a letter to your governor, asking about the possibility of re-assembling the state’s Home Guard, or some similar armed civilian force, that is capable of quickly reacting to and resisting federal troops and agents.
- Write a letter to your state Attorney General, and ask him or her to issue and execute arrest warrants against individual federal agents who have clearly broken state (and federal) laws against illegal searches and seizures, illegal search warrants obtained under false statements by said agents, etc. Most state constitutions have similar limits on government action and safeguards of individual liberties as the US Constitution, so this is not just a federal issue.
- Buy a pint of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream and then return it to the store for a refund, because it tasted “off.” Or you can remove the pint of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream from its freezer at the store, and then kindly leave it in the chips and pretzels aisle. Yes, it will melt and be lost there. But that’s not your problem. What is your problem is a Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream that is actively working overtime with its corporate influence to deprive you of your individual liberties and rights. Show them you don’t care for their anti-democracy meddling.
- Write a letter to your local school board and demand they issue a clear statement that you and other concerned taxpaying parents of school children are not domestic terrorists.
- Etc. Just stand up and be heard for the next thirty days, in the spirit of July 4th Independence Day. Be a naturally defiant American who is naturally suspicious about official authority, who sees himself or herself as part of a citizen brotherhood united against corrupt power, and resist Biden’s tyranny, even in small ways.
Happy Independence From Government Tyranny Day!
Democrat Party violence and Armed Citizen response = Save the NRA
Democrat Party militia have been engaged in violent destruction, looting, and personal assaults across America for months now. In Portland, Chicago, Minneapolis, New York City, and now Kenosha, as well as others.
Every one of these places is run by the Democrat Party, and in every one of these places the political leaders have stopped their own police forces from doing what police have always been hired to do: Bring general law and order to the public square. Liberals have unleashed their BLM, ANTIFA, and “peaceful protest” militias to bring chaos and disorder to public life, with the hope of scaring the public into giving them political power that they cannot otherwise persuade voters to convey to them at the ballot box.
I have never been a partisan person, never. I used to be a Democrat, a long time ago, until the Democrat Party abandoned almost everything I believed in, like a free America.
All my adult life I have voted for candidates and worked on political campaigns that seemed to me to offer the best choice for the citizenry. This includes Independents, Republicans, and Democrats. Living in Harrisburg, long ago abandoned by the GOP, I am often given a choice between batshit crazy leftist Democrats and normal, taxpaying, working Democrats who are liberal but also reasonable. Guess whose political campaigns I volunteer for? If you guessed the normal people who I merely disagree with on many policy issues, but who I do not feel physically threatened by, then you would be correct. Because the chickenshit GOP has abandoned Harrisburg, there are no GOP campaigns to volunteer for.
But this is in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where things may be violent in certain neighborhoods, but overall we presently enjoy some general tranquility. In most other Democrat-run locales, the citizenry has been abandoned by the political leaders and their police; left to fend for themselves. Left to defend themselves with whatever weapons they can get.
But Kenosha and Portland could easily come to Harrisburg, because mayor Eric Papenfuse and governor Tom Wolf already sent the public message that they support violence when they marched in solidarity with Black Lives Matter and ANTIFA militias earlier this year.
And so what happens in the burning streets of Kenosha, Wisconsin, is a symbol of things about to come to your neighborhood. And so when 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse lawfully defends himself in those burning Kenosha streets against violent, murderous assault by a convicted violent pedophile, a convicted felon not-to-have-firearms who is pointing a handgun in his face, and another guy beating on him with a deadly weapon, is a symbol of what you and I may well end up doing. If we care to save our own lives.
And so we ask, why is the New York State Attorney General, a partisan Democrat, using her public office to attempt to destroy the National Rifle Association, on the most obvious of political and ideological grounds?
Is she attacking the NRA because she wants to bring harmony to the world? Or is she trying to undermine the Second Amendment rights of law abiding citizens, while simultaneously not enforcing the law against criminal use of firearms?
If you believe the NY AG is using her lawsuit against the NRA to hurt law-abiding citizens, and to leave them at the mercy of the exact kind of murderous Democrat Party militia guys who just attacked innocent Kyle Rittenhouse, then you would be correct. And this is why protecting the NRA is so important.
Without the NRA’s constant defense of our Second Amendment rights, we would have no self-defense rights at all, and we will then all be subject to the murderous attacks of liberal street militias, who are protected by their political leaders. The same Democrat leaders who will use the law to attack anyone who stands up to their liberal street militias.
The takeaway is this: Vote to support the NRA, because your very life depends upon it.
Kenosha, Wisconsin, car dealership attacked by Democrat Militia, despite the pro-BLM sign
Kenosha, Wisconsin, streets on fire with Democrat Militia. Is this really how you want America to be?
My letter to US Attorney General Jeff Sessions
April 12, 2018
Honorable Jeff Sessions, Attorney General
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20530-0001
Dear Attorney General Sessions,
When you recused yourself from a potential 2016 Russia collusion investigation, you did so out of a sense of respect for the American justice system. It was an honorable thing to do. Good for you.
Now, however, the American people see that the entire premise of the Russia collusion investigation is false. It is based on lies and deceit, law breaking and deep corruption at the highest levels of the US Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. This investigation has become an open-ended fishing expedition, a political witch hunt, a farce. Nothing about it is justified. In fact, the actual criminals are walking free, and apparently their known crimes are not being investigated. America hangs on a precipice.
That an illegal warrant to wiretap a political candidate and then president-elect was obtained through the fake “dossier,” which was created by the Hillary Clinton campaign in collusion with Obama administration appointees at DOJ and FBI, is unthinkable. It is an enormous crime. It is the biggest political corruption scandal in America’s history.
Text messages show that FBI Agent Peter Strzrok is a corrupt public servant. Why is he still employed at the FBI? Why isn’t he being investigated for his obvious corruption?
The FBI will not cooperate with Congress. FBI staff will not release documents to Congress that the FBI Inspector General already has. A huge cover-up is under way, right in front of us, the American people. Why is FBI Director Wray allowed to remain in his position and behave this way, in complete defiance of everything that America stands for – transparency, the rule of law, and official accountability?
Knowing all this, why are you still recused? You are needed in this fight.
This is not the same “investigation” that you thought it was in early 2017. It is clearly wrong, unjust, un-American. Mr. Mueller is a rogue and illegal force, covering up evidence of crimes from the previous administration and attacking people who are trying to shed light on those crimes. His work is purely political retribution, disconnected from any legal justification. If anything, Mr. Mueller must be investigated for his role.
I am asking you to un-recuse yourself and get directly involved in this situation. America needs your strong and aggressive leadership, your firm hand, passionately seeking actual justice based on facts. Every day that this blatant injustice is allowed to continue America gets weaker. If you cannot get back in the fight for America’s life, then I beg of you to resign and allow someone with strength and courage to take your place. I feel like you are dithering away our nation’s most precious moments, our last breaths as a free republic.
Thank you for considering my request,
Josh First
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
PA AG Kane: The Breck Girl
Pennsylvania’s attorney general is Kathleen Kane.
Pennsylvania citizens deserve much better than Kane. We deserve more than what she brings to her public job.
Kane acts like the silky models who showed off their long hair with pirouettes and head tosses for Breck Shampoo. One is reminded of the song “I’m Too Sexy.”
Based on her carefully groomed public appearances that coincide with an honest-to-goodness inability to grasp or articulate the issues of her office and the public, she is henceforth dubbed “The Breck Girl.”
Kane’s flippant, vacuous approach to serious public policy and legal issues, emphasized by a physical appearance crutch, complete with slow-motion hair tosses and giraffe-like Cheshire Cat radioactive radiant grins, have earned her this nickname.
Breck Girl, you are not up to the job. You are incompetent. If Pennsylvania had a recall provision in our constitution, you’d be recalled by now.
Hopefully, you will be impeached soon. If Pennsylvania must have a Democrat as AG, I personally know several men and women attorneys in that party who would qualify much better than you, Breck Girl.
AG Kane exonerates Corbett with backhanded, ironic report
PA Attorney General Kathleen Kane “exonerated” Governor Tom Corbett with the most back-handed investigative report seen in a long time.
While acknowledging that Corbett, previously as AG himself, investigating Jerry Sandusky, did not politicize the Sandusky investigation, Kane still called Corbett’s choices in that investigation “inexcusable” and “inexplicable.”
Without question Penn Staters like me, who have followed the Sandusky debacle from beginning to end, we tend to feel like Penn State’s reputation never was considered by anyone involved. Well, it was the paramount consideration by former PSU president Graham Spanier, at a time when the school’s reputation should not have mattered at all, and the kid victims’s interests should have been advanced immediately and at any cost.
So, too little, too late for Penn State by everyone, including a majority of the PSU trustees, Louis Freeh, and state officials everywhere. If Corbett was guilty of failing to jump to Penn State’s defense, he was in damned good company. Pissed at Corbett? OK, then be pissed at many of the sitting trustees.
But what irks me is to see the most politicized AG in Pennsylvania’s history use the words “inexcusable” and “inexplicable.”
Kane’s behavior in the AG office has been both of those words and much much more.
My favorite misdeed is how she refused to pursue the unethical PA Liquor Control Board members, whose financial misdeeds have been widely reported.
What has not been reported is how her family, Kane Trucking, holds PLCB contracts worth millions of dollars. Kane’s failure to apply the law here could be due to a large financial incentive for her to not rock the PLCB gravy boat. Is anyone investigating THAT?
No. In fact, the establishment media has circled the wagons around Kane, with not one word yet mentioned in print about this ethical lapse of hers. In fact, a fawning, fluffy, cheerful, supportive interview with Kane was posted by the Patriot News two weeks ago, and worse yet, by reporter Charles Thompson, a writer I have long considered one of the last real investigative reporters in Harrisburg. Thompson made no mention of any of Kane’s lapses, or of her pending impeachment, in that unpaid advertising piece run by the Patriot News. She was even photographed laughing away, her head held high, her artificially white teeth flashing for the camera.
While people are still asking if Kane’s report on Corbett’s role as AG has any salience for the governor’s race, what informed citizens want to know, is: Why does it appear that Kathleen Kane is protecting Kane Trucking’s PLCB contracts? Now that is a real public policy question worth asking.
Is it time to recall PA AG Kane?
In 2012, Pennsylvania’s Attorney General Kathleen Kane campaigned on being fresh, new, unconnected to party politics. She challenged the ultimate Republican insider, and crushed him by a good 15%. Kane became Pennsylvania’s first Democrat AG only because so many Republican voters defected from the GOP and voted for Kane.
Within six months into her four-year tenure, signs were evident that she was not this politically dispassionate, politically disconnected professional and fair-minded arbiter she represented herself to be.
Rather, it became clear that she was politically correct (dogmatically liberal) and willing to use the AG office to score partisan political points, going so far as to choose not to enforce or defend state laws with which she personally disagrees. That right there is pretty much the end of democratic government, when elected officials stop enforcing laws they personally disagree with. Democracy only works if everyone agrees that whatever the law is, it is, and it is the law of the land until it is changed.
Kane’s icing on the cake was to cold-stop an investigation of four Democrat elected officials in the Philadelphia area. Kane does not deny that the four had been caught on tape or video taking bribes. One of the officials can be heard saying “Well, happy birthday to [me]!” as he pockets a wad of illegal cash.
In what stinks of political favoritism, Kane simply made up a lame excuse and stopped the ongoing investigation of obvious official corruption.
When Kane was called out about it by the Philadelphia Inquirer, a newspaper unused to criticizing Democrats, she showed up to a meeting with the paper’s board with her libel lawyer in tow. A subsequent show of legal force and more open threats of a lawsuit against her critics, by Kane, has only made things worse for her. But she is not backing down. Mind you, the Inquirer merely reported the facts; the paper did not ascribe motive or allege that Kane herself was part of the cash scandal. So it is hard to see what kind of libel suit this elected official thought she was going to actually win. Intimidation was her first and last approach, however, which tells you all you need to know about her very low quality as an elected official.
Additionally, Philadelphia City DA Seth Williams, a Democrat, has criticized Kane for ending the investigation. Seth and I were close friends while students at Penn State, and yes, he is an active Democrat, and he is also a straight shooter.
Now, Kane says she supports another newspaper’s open records effort to get the documents about the terminated investigation. Well, actually, after opposing it, Kane only now supports releasing “certain” documents; you know, the documents that support her position. The investigation’s documents that will cast her political activism in a bad light, well, they should remain sealed, she says.
Governor Tom Corbett may well be a one-term governor, which presently it appears is his sad destiny, if the polling data is even close to accurate. Well, folks, let’s make this Kathleen Kane a half-term AG. She is incompetent, she is politicizing Pennsylvania’s established laws, and she is using blunt force legal intimidation to blunt honest criticism of her official job performance. Let’s start a recall of AG Kane, and get someone in that office who is a plain vanilla enforcer of The Law, as that role is supposed to be.
In an ideal world, party affiliation should not matter in the AG office. I myself am partial to the potential AG candidacy of Ed Marsico, Dauphin County’s present District Attorney. Marsico is an honest guy, a hard working guy, and has shown few partisan inclinations in his day to day work of making Dauphin County a safe place to live and work. Marsico would be a big enough improvement over Kane to warrant a recall effort against her. Surely there are other professional-grade DAs out there, too, who also would qualify to fill out the remainder Kane’s term.
Let’s get that recall effort started and Pennsylvania’s law enforcement back on track.
UPDATE: How on earth could I forget? Kane is having some difficulty investigating the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board, where cash gifts and other toxic ethics violations have occurred recently. Now….why would Kane have such a tough time bringing to bear her full weight on such obviously corrupt violations of Pennsylvania laws? Why, it would not perhaps happen to be the presence of KANE TRUCKING contracts with the PLCB, right? The KANE TRUCKING contracts with the PLCB are worth millions of dollars to Kathleen Kane, personally. Got it. Fox guarding the henhouse here. Good old fashioned corruption, at least on the face of it. Time to end this sick experiment, and send Mrs. Moneybags Kane home.
Pennsylvania Attorney General Kane actually drops investigation against her political buddies
An overwhelming number and percentage of Pennsylvanians voted for a new PA Attorney General in 2012, to the point where a record spread was achieved.
Democrat Kane beat Republican Freed by 15%, an unheard of, unimaginable number.
The primary reason that so many Republican voters voted for Kane was that she was seen as clean, fresh, a new antidote to the deeply insider Freed and the same-old-gang of Good Ol’ Boy Republicans who had controlled that office since its creation in the early 1980s. The Penn State – Sandusky scandal really hurt the Republicans in so many ways, and Kane was seen as the snake oil potion that would solve all of the problems, aches, worries, unfairness, baldness, and gout that was then plaguing Pennsylvania and Penn State.
Enter Kane the politician. Wow. If you had any questions about her political abilities and inclinations, wonder no more. She has proven herself to be as adaptable as a chameleon, and as trusty as a rake left tines-up in the grass.
Last Friday (never a strong day for media, so always a strong day for government news releases seeking minimal coverage of their actions), Kane officially terminated a three-year-long investigation of a bunch of obviously corrupt elected officials in Philadelphia. Caught on tape and camera taking bribes, these officials set the gold standard for how to make a great city fall to pieces.
But only days after she announced an indictment against a black state senator from the Philly area, Kane determined that there are “too many African Americans” involved in this sting, and that it is therefore racially biased. No kidding. Obviously, any future mob take-downs will be thrown out because too many white guys are involved, right? This is both an embarrassing example of the bad government caused by Political Corrrectness, and an embarrassing example of the corruption of AG Kane.
Look, lady, either someone behaves legally, or not. Either someone breaks the law, or not. Skin color has zero to do with it. And if skin color becomes the new standard for applying laws, then the country is going down the tubes, quick, because there’s a lot more Caucasian people overall, and more crime committed by Caucasians, than anyone else. Allowing all that crime to move forward because we want to apply some vague, bizarre notion of “fairness” will allow crime to take over. What is good for the goose is good for the gander.
Kane has proven herself to be just as political, just as capable of bad decisions as anyone else could have been in the AG seat. That honeymoon was short.