Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue –
1. Insurrection
2. Peters
3. NYC
4. Permian
5. Black Codes
1. Insurrection. The government-sponsored anti-ICE insurrection continued to percolate last week, with the neo-Confederates nicely upping the ante of violence in hopes to trigger a media-ready body count of protesters in the streets (Kent State II). The only oddity was outside local temperatures during the week, in the low minus teens F. Gotta be really motivated to get outside and riot with thousands of your closest friends when it is that cold.
- Worst action was storming of a Baptist church during services. The mob showed up, disrupted the services, terrorized women, children and elderly, blocking their escape, all while claiming their First Amendment right to protest peacefully (sic). Menacing people isn’t peaceful. Obstructing their escape isn’t peaceful either. It is hostage taking. Note that protests are allowed at public places. A church is a private place and worship services are protected by at least two federal laws, the FACE Act which was infamously used by the Biden regime to hunt anti-abortion activists praying outside Aborto-clinics, and the 1871 KKK Act. It is beyond irony that the whole thing was planned and orchestrated by the local BLM leadership. Leaders included the local BLM leader who runs an NGO that doesn’t much do anything other than pay her for doing nothing other than figuring out new taxpayer grift. Quite the business model, that. Wannabee journalist Don Lemon also participated in the planning, as did MN Attorney General Keith Ellison, who defended the invasion. As of this writing, at least three have been arrested on federal charges with at least five more awaiting judicial approval fro their arrest warrants. A MN federal magistrate married to a woman who works in Ellison’s office is dragging his feet on approving the warrants. Lemon desperately wants to be arrested and charged with something, anything as a vehicle to resurrect his self-immolated media career. The protest was planned to confront one of the pastors rumored to be a local ICE Commander. He wasn’t present, but that didn’t stop the protesters who had themselves a grand old time terrorizing people who were not able to either escape or defend themselves. I expect there will be civil suits out of this after the feds get finished with their prosecutions.
- I said this entire mess is government caused by democrats at the state and local levels. At the state level, we have Tampon Tim Walz, MN governor, doing his level best to stir up the crowds and heighten tensions. At the local level, we have Mayor Frey doing the same thing. Worse, he instructed the local cops to not work with ICE and not defend them from the mob. State Attorney General Ellison is generally doing the same thing as Walz, doing his best to stir up the mob. Ellison takes it one step farther, orchestrating the mayhem. There is at least one member of the MN legislature moderating / leading SIGNAL chats used to coordinate the mobs. The LtGov is doing the same thing. Walz eventually called out the MN National Guard whose first job seems to be handing out milk and cookies to the rioters. Incumbent US Senator Amy Klobuchar filed papers to run for governor last week as Walz isn’t running for reelection. That the democrat machine in MN is burning an incumbent, all but bulletproof US Senate seat should tell us a lot about the risk they see to their funding stream should the MN governor no longer be a democrat. Klobuchar may end up running against Michelle Tafoya who also announced a run for governor. Someone has to defend the fraud, and that someone appears to be Amy.
- What is the democrat end game on this? Better yet, what is the democrat reason for triggering the current mayhem? Most would suggest, it is simply a distraction, the current shiny presented to the general public to distract from the $10 – 20 billion stolen from taxpayers by the combined Somali – democrat industrial fraud complex. Timing works out about right for that conclusion. At a higher level, other than mayhem, some would suggest that it is little more than destruction of civil society like they managed to do in Seattle during the 2020 Summer of Love in their CHAZ / CHOP lawless zones. The same sort of zones are being set up in Minneapolis. And they look just like they did in Seattle complete with resident warlords and barring local residents access to their homes. The question is who backs down first – Trump or the rioters? One writer this morning in American Thinker published a depressing piece suggesting that the left already won. I tend to disagree, but we must consider the possibility. There is a lot of armchair quarterbacking on what needs to be done next. Suggestions range from immediate use of the Insurrection Act to pulling ICE out completely. One respected correspondent suggested a variation of this pulling ICE out and showing up in a series of lightning quick, targeted ops, a technique that might work nicely.
- Over the weekend, I ran across a piece that suggests Trump has three goals driving his currently proportionate response. First, is to keep things from getting out of hand by minimizing the body count. Second is to win the 2026 midterms. Finally, elect JD Vance (or Marco Rubio) president in 2028. The current mayhem is not particularly popular with the general public. Yet, if he comes down upon the rioters like a ton of bricks, he hands them the 2026 election like the Summer of Love is thought to have handed 2020 to Biden and the democrats. The longer this goes, the more the coordination and funding networks will be penetrated, identifying all players and funding streams for terrorism charges.
- Democrats in the senate are waking up. starting to publicly threaten a new government shutdown unless ICE funding is stripped from the budget legislation. The brown floater hits the punch bowl on that Friday. Stay tuned. Should be fun to see how well this little gambit plays outside of the Beltway.
- Final related observation is another reason for the massive flood of illegals over the last four years. Most rationale is tied to diddling the census numbers, election fraud, and replacing the men who no longer vote for democrats. One writer over the weekend suggested a more obvious reason. What if the massive import is simply to operate the democrat fraud machine? What if it is all about fraud with elections being a secondary goal? Not a bad suggestion.
2. Peters. Former Mesa County CO Clerk Tina Peters is one of the more famous political prisoners falling out of the 2020 election in Colorado. While clerk, she found suspicious activity in the election database. After notifying her superiors at the state, democrats who weren’t interested, she made copies and sent the databases to outside analysts. Those analysts found that the database had been replaced and overwritten twice during the election, results that she reported up her Secretary of State food chain. As all messengers will be shot on sight, especially Republican election officials in a blue state, she was arrested, charged, tried, convicted, and eventually jailed for 9 years on charges of attempting to influence a public servant, one count of conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation, first degree official misconduct, violation of duty and failure to comply with an order or requirement from the (democrat) Secretary of State. In short, Colorado democrats threw the book at her and won a smashing conviction. The hearing before the Colorado Appeals Court a week or two ago was her appeal of the 2024 conviction. It did not go well for the State of Colorado, with the appeals panel ripping into both the prosecution and the trial judge. Essentially, Peters was convicted of a crime she was never charged with and the jury was never instructed on whether their verdict was a misdemeanor or a felony (they convicted on a felony), all orchestrated by the presiding judge and prosecution. One charge was written as a misdemeanor but misrepresented to the jury as a felony, which should lead to a mistrial of the entire mess. Shades of that charlatan Jack Smith. The presiding judge ripped into Peters during sentencing, calling her every name in the book, pretty impressive for a 70-year-old with no prior charges. This was the same presiding judge who refused to allow Peters to present evidence of election fraud. On one hand, the judge refused to allow Peters to present the evidence but at sentencing, refered to that evidence. You can do one or the other, but never both.
3. NYC. The title of this is: How Mamdani and Cea Weaver Plan to End Private Housing. Cea Weaver comes out of the community organizer world and is a most dangerous woman. While Greg Gutfeld had a grand old time making fun of her looks, she is smart, sneaky, and dangerous as an enraged wildebeest. Her expertise is organizing renters to go after their landlords. How would one use that tool in Mamdani’s Brave New World of no private property? It is a three-step process:
- First, freeze rents (which he has done)
- Second, increase regulations (which he is about to to)
- Third, organize renters over claims that the owners are not complying with the new regs, fine them for failure to comply, and force them to sell, which they will have to do
As a Good Communist, Mamdani would rather wave his regal hand and simply seize the property, but economically crushing the owners will work just as well, though take a while longer. It is a devastatingly effective approach, allowing NYC to acquire buildings as a non-profit market actor. Over time, the government incrementally replaces private property ownership. Note that a 2019 NY state rent control law keeps owners from increasing rents to the point where they can bring those apartments up to municipal code. This has worked so well that over 50,000 rent-controlled apartments are now vacant, off the market because the cost of bringing them up to code is greater than the rent owners can collect. Mamdani and his tenant organizer chickee babe plan on adding another 200,000 rooms at public expense, paying for them up to $100 billion in new capital spending. History has shown that governments are really bad property owners, mostly because they lack the profit motive. When you destroy private property, you ensure destruction of apartments in NYC. But at least Mamdani’s peeps will get paid.
4. Permian. A Jan 2026 USGS assessment released last week found significant undiscovered oil and natural gas in the Permian Basin deep Woodford and Barnett shales. The finds are deep, up to 20,000’, but recoverable with new technology. Up to 1.6 billion barrels of oil and 28.3 trillion cubic feet of natural gas are possible. These estimated tend ot be low as technology is not a static variable but improves over time. The longer we go, the more oil and natural gas will be recovered.
5. Black Codes. From the land of “that’s not something you hear every day” comes SCOTUS Justice Ketanji Brown – Jackson’s questions during the hearing on Hawaii’s “vampire rule” which restricts carrying guns on privately owned spaces without consent. Brown – Jackson, agreeing with Hawaii’s legal team pointed to the so-called Black Codes, restrictive laws passed after the end of the Civil War to control labor and activity of the newly freed slaves, essentially forcing them back into a situation similar to that of slavery, as legal justification for Hawaii’s law. Over time, the Black Codes morphed into the Jim Crow laws of the 20th Century, also passed by democrats. Hawaii attempted to defend their limits on concealed and open carry on royal edicts in place during the latter days of Hawaii’s monarchy before the islands were acquired by the US. This prompted one of the Justices to observe that Hawaii as a state is covered by the same constitution as all the other states. The defense, enthusiastically supported by Brown – Jackson attempted to set up a neat little circular argument, all based on racism, that the Black Codes disarmed blacks precisely to prevent them from doing what the Second Amendment is designed to protect Hawaii from keeping them from doing. Worse, the argument by Hawaii and its democrat defenders, including SCOTUS Justice Brown – Jackson echoes that of happily departed SCOTUS racist Roger Taney in Dred Scott (1857) that blacks were not, and never could be citizens of the US because they had no rights at the founding of the US. If you started out without rights because you were black, you can never have rights for the same reason, logic (in his mind) all protected by the Constitution. The amazing part of this is the devolution of democrats back into their founding documents and ideology.
More later –
- AG