polecat news and views: January 2025

Friday, January 31, 2025

On his way out of the White House, Joe Biden pardoned or commuted the sentences of around 2,500 “non-violent drug offenders.” But drug users don’t get incarcerated; the drug offenders in federal prisons are dealers. And anyone who thinks drug dealers who are worth a federal prosecution are “non-violent” is deluded.

But it came out a few days ago that one of the “non-violent drug offenders” whose sentence Biden commuted was Adrian Peeler, of Connecticut. Adrian Peeler’s brother was being prosecuted for murder, and two of the witnesses on the prosecution’s list were Karen Clarke and Leroy Brown. This is what Adrian Peeler was convicted of:

According to court documents, Adrian Peeler ambushed Clarke and Brown as they returned to their Bridgeport apartment. Brown was found face-down, shot dead at the top of the stairs. Clarke was found dead in a nearby bedroom, shot while apparently trying to call for help.

The “Brown” who was found face-down, shot by Adrian Peeler, was Leroy Brown, age 8. Karen Clarke was his mother.

Congratulations, Adrian, you’re a free man, courtesy of Joe Biden.

Peeler’s commutation has gotten a lot of publicity, especially in Connecticut. Far-left Senator Richard Blumenthal is unhappy about it:

There is much that one could say about this, starting with the fact that the ACLU–a worthless left-wing organization–gave the Biden White House a list of 2,500 “non-violent drug offenders” for Biden (or whoever) to pardon.

This is pretty revealing–a left-wing White House outsourcing the president’s constitutional pardon power to a left-wing policy organization. Sure, Joe Biden is senile. But was there ever any serious possibility that–forget about Joe–his staff would take the trouble to look into the ACLU’s list and verify that the people on it met the Left’s low bar for clemency? No. The ACLU provided the list, and Joe, probably not knowing where he was or what day it was, signed the document.

One wonders, too, about the role of the ACLU. Did the ACLU know about Peeler’s history as a killer? They may have. Peeler was sentenced to 25 years for the murders–not nearly long enough–but it was OK, since he was also sentenced to 35 years on the federal drug dealing charges, which would follow after the state incarceration. So the ACLU may well have thought that, as to the current sentence that would have kept the murderer in prison for another 35 years, Peeler was a “non-violent drug offender.”

This is the corrupt world, not just of the Biden administration, but of liberalism in general.

There is only one positive aspect of this story. Despite Adrian’s murdering two of the prosecution’s witnesses, his brother Russell was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. His sentence was reduced to life imprisonment when Connecticut abolished the death penalty. Too bad.

Oh, yeah, one more positive outcome: presumably we will never hear anything more from liberals about Donald Trump pardoning the January 6 protesters.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2025/01/biden-commuted-sentence-of-child-murderer.php

Raw Power

Raw Power

Scott Morefield

AP Photo/Evan Vucci

To say President Donald Trump has exceeded expectations in his first week is putting things mildly. In truth, his barrage of executive orders, pardons of innocents, and open defiance of the global order on everything from DEI to World Health Organization membership to gender ideology to the climate hoax nonsense and seemingly every other issue that matters has gone far above beyond what any of us dreamed would happen in his first 100 days, much less seven. It has truly been a glorious, multi-fronted, all-out assault on the left that would make the D-Day warriors proud, and I couldn’t be happier (OK, the ‘no tax on tips’ thing is a dud, but nobody’s perfect!).

Though the bipartisan and much needed Laken Riley Act will be the first, the entirety of this barrage on the communist agenda has been done without any legislation actually passed by the Congress and signed by the president. It was also entirely necessary to begin to reverse the incomprehensible destruction former President Joe Biden did to the country with nothing more than a stroke of the Executive pen.

Should it have been necessary though? Absolutely not, and there’s the rub. In truth, the fact that Biden had done so much damage, most of it with a mere signature, largely made the 2024 election the most important election in American history. And you know what? Unless things drastically change, every subsequent election from now until the end of the Republic will also be the ‘most important election in history.’

That’s a LOT of stress to endure every four years, stress that doesn’t bode well for easing the tensions between the political spectrums, or my blood pressure. I know I say this after every election (and every close Tennessee game), but I don’t know how many more of these I can take without having a heart attack!

So where did we go wrong? How did the balance of power get so out of whack? When the founders established the Constitution, they did so with three ‘separate but equal’ branches of government. It was meant to be a check on unlimited power being in the hands of too few. Instead of a king, we got a president who must stand for election every four years, could be removed from office via the impeachment process, and was at the mercy of the ‘people’ (i.e. Congress) for financing and enacting laws. It was a nice try.

Sadly, as the isolationism advised by George Washington waned, as executive agencies to administer laws rose, as the country endured wars, crises, and cataclysmic events like 9/11, and as the human nature to seek power took its inevitable course, the presidency, and indeed the entire government, grew increasingly more powerful. Where in the old days the chief executive was responsible for little that actually affected the lives of most ordinary people, today it’s hard to imagine an aspect of our lives that ISN’T affected by the decisions the leader of the free world makes.

It shouldn’t be this much of a relief to win a presidential election. The potential of losing shouldn’t stoke so much fear. Election results shouldn’t be the difference in whether or not millions will be able to comfortably feed their families. Whoever occupies the Oval Office shouldn’t have this much power over our lives and our success as a country. But they do, and so defeating the other side means a bullet dodged that would have made our lives worse in infinite ways.

Yes, government in general should shrink massively. But before that, the power the executive branch wields should be curbed to some semblance of what it once was. If anything, Congress should be the most powerful branch by a long shot instead of the afterthought it is right now. Then the presidency, then the judiciary only to make sure things are constitutional.

You probably will have a knee-jerk reaction to this one, but hear me out. One way to make Congress relevant again would be to revise the Senate filibuster to the old days where causing delays meant actually having to stand and speak, or even eliminate it entirely. When Congress can never pass anything meaningful, power is left to the president to act unilaterally, which is what we’ve increasingly seen over the past couple of decades.

As to making the federal government less powerful, that ability already resides with the states in the form of the 10th Amendment. It’s past time for them to start exercising that power.

The status quo is unsustainable long-term. Unless things change, every election will get more and more consequential, until the other side finds itself literally in a Gulag.

https://townhall.com/columnists/scottmorefield/2025/01/27/raw-power-n2651171?utm_source=thdailyvip&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl

The DOJ's J6 Unit Had a Total Meltdown Over Trump's Pardons

The DOJ's J6 Unit Had a Total Meltdown Over Trump's Pardons

Matt Vespa

These paragraphs might be the most satisfying to read for a long time in an NBC News story: President Donald Trump's pardons gutted the prosecutorial unit at the Department of Justice responsible for the January 6 cases. Some described it as being part of the worst days of their careers. We don’t care. Others have already left the DOJ since last summer, joining the Kamala Harris campaign with the explicit hope that their work could help prevent Trump from killing the January 6 cases (via NBC News):

Federal prosecutors in the now-disbanded Capitol Siege Section of the D.C. U.S. attorney's office spent much of the last four years prosecuting cases against Jan. 6 rioters. Suddenly, a single signature erased the end results — though not the public record — of that work.
Three prosecutors who worked in the section described the week to NBC News, with one calling it the worst of their professional lives. It started with President Donald Trump’s signing of the pardons. Soon, prosecutors were dismissing the active cases that remained and putting aside evidence they hoped would have led to more charges.
[…]
Ashley Akers, who worked on Jan. 6 cases and left the Justice Department on Friday, called the pardons “shocking” and said she had a “guttural” reaction to having to file motions to dismiss cases when she felt she had evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that showed assaults against law enforcement. Many in the office had developed close relationships with the police officers who were injured on Jan. 6, 2021, which had kept them dedicated to the work.
“It really undermines not only the sacrifices that all these officers made, but the experiences that they went through,” said Akers, who spoke to NBC News after she turned in her computers and left the department. “The public record — which is very clear and borne out in hundreds of trials — has shown that these officers are victims.”
The prosecutors acknowledged that while the Constitution gives the president extraordinary pardon power, they still found it extremely difficult to file the motions, under orders from new bosses, dismissing cases they had brought.
“It goes against every instinct that I have,” one federal prosecutor previously assigned to the Capitol Siege Section told NBC News. This person is still working for the Justice Department and spoke anonymously because their employment would be in jeopardy if they spoke on the record.
[…]
Some prosecutors decided to leave even before Trump was elected. Jason Manning, a former federal prosecutor who worked on Jan. 6 cases, left the Justice Department over the summer, joining Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign. He said he hadn’t previously been a really political person, but he heard Trump’s pledges to pardon Jan. 6 offenders on the campaign trail and he knew the Justice Department’s work against rioters would “grind to a halt” if Trump was elected.

I’m here to tell these people one thing: no one cares. They haven’t cared for years. It’s why January 6 was never a top issue among voters, except the far left and the Trump deranged. The House Select Committee was viewed with derision, as it was a political circus. And the true figure showing the Democrats’ messaging failure is that more voters began to view Joe Biden, not Donald Trump, as ‘a threat to our democracy.’

All your shoddy, politically motivated work got burned to ash. Meanwhile, you throw a tantrum over these pardons but not the ones issued by Joe Biden, where he pardoned his son Hunter and his entire crime family before he got wheeled out of Washington? Because of that, Trump can and should pardon whomever he wants.

Meanwhile, if the violent and rowdier J6 defendants got charged, this whole thing would’ve had a different ending. The Blaze’s Steve Baker, who got wrapped up in a legal nightmare over his footage, said that the DOJ’s overreach played a significant role in shifting the tide on J6:

Former Jan. 6 defendant Steve Baker — a libertarian writer who entered the Capitol during the attack, licensed his footage to media outlets, and then became a reporter for Glenn Beck’s outlet, The Blaze — told NBC News that he believed that federal prosecutors’ cases against misdemeanor defendants, and what he sees as overreach against other nonviolent participants, gave the right leverage in the battle over the story of Jan. 6.
“I can guarantee you this, I would bet a year’s salary on this,” Baker said. “Had the DOJ focused on the violent offenders only, we would have never heard the word ‘pardon’ in a campaign promise from President Trump.”

Anyways, the January 6 theater is over by order of President Donald J. Trump.

Thursday, January 30, 2025

Death to DEI: This Is the Real Reason White Lefties Are Panicking Stephen Green | 9:19 AM on January 27, 2025 Quinn Dombrowski from Berkeley, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons What if I told you that the primary beneficiaries of DEI were white progressive women, and the loss of their cushy, bossy, "bullst" jobs is the real reason for all the panic? You're already nodding in agreement, aren't you? The selling point for DEI — near as I can tell since lefties would rather accuse critics of racism than defend or sell their policies — is that DEI corrects historical racism, combats systemic racism, and gives businesses a competitive edge. Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins made that last point a few days ago, claiming that "You cannot argue with the fact that a diverse workforce is better. There’s too much business value [in diversity]." It would be cruel of me to point out that over the last five years, shares in Cisco have underperformed the S&P, with an overall return of 42%. The S&P 500 grew 82% in that same period. Some value, eh? True diversity of background, thought, priorities, etc., is essential for keeping a business innovative. But DEI is about enforcing progressive groupthink (secondarily) and an all-new category of iron rice bowls (primarily). So it's fair to conclude that the beneficiaries of DEI aren't the poor downtrodden masses but the HR-on-steroids scolds who run it. And look who they are: According to BLS, the average U.S. salary in 2024 was just under $60,000, mostly paid to people who have to get things done to earn it. The average DEI CDO salary is 50% higher and goes overwhelmingly to white people, mostly women, who accomplish little but cause headaches for everyone else. It's all about the money, honey — just like always. There are dicey legal issues, too. When everybody was busy establishing DEI programs during the BLM madness of 2020, they were apparently too convinced of their political invulnerability to care that DEI is inherently discriminatory — and illegal. "Everyone understood that [illegal discimination] was going on, in private business as well as universities," Megan McArdle posted on X. "Acquaintances would just outright say 'We're looking to hire a woman of color/queer person/etc for this position.' I never figured out how to politely ask why they were confessing a crime to someone they barely knew." Times change, and they changed bigly on Jan. 20. The CYA efforts will be a joy to watch, assuming schadenfreude is your thing. Then again, it would be unfair of me to deny the True Believers™ who are deeply committed to the rot that is DEI. They're in the Air Force, they're in Silicon Valley, they're in your local school district. SecDef Pete Hegseth is currently dropping MOABs on Air Force officers engaged in "malicious compliance" to undo President Donald Trump's anti-DEI orders to the military. And as for the "bullst jobs" I referenced above, you need to read Ryan Zickgraf's exposé of the "diversity hacks" in DEI whose jobs are much more corrosive than old-school make-work positions. "There was something bitterly ironic about being a straight white guy whose job was to design woke social-media posts — for Pfizer, among others — about the importance of celebrating Juneteenth," Zickgraff wrote about the freelance work he used to do. "But that job was the kind of grift that helps disguise the fact that the whole DEI world is smoke and mirrors." But it's smoke and mirrors covering up a lucrative field whose practitioners don't have to produce anything anyone can measure. Now that our long national DEI nightmare is finally ending, that sound you hear is the lamentations of their women (and beta men) — and it is glorious.

Death to DEI: This Is the Real Reason White Lefties Are Panicking

Stephen Green

*Quinn Dombrowski from Berkeley, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons*

What if I told you that the primary beneficiaries of DEI were white progressive women, and the loss of their cushy, bossy, "bulls**t" jobs is the real reason for all the panic?

You're already nodding in agreement, aren't you?

The selling point for DEI — near as I can tell since lefties would rather accuse critics of racism than defend or sell their policies — is that DEI corrects historical racism, combats systemic racism, and gives businesses a competitive edge.

Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins made that last point a few days ago, claiming that "You cannot argue with the fact that a diverse workforce is better. There’s too much business value [in diversity]." It would be cruel of me to point out that over the last five years, shares in Cisco have underperformed the S&P, with an overall return of 42%. The S&P 500 grew 82% in that same period. Some value, eh?

True diversity of background, thought, priorities, etc., is essential for keeping a business innovative. But DEI is about enforcing progressive groupthink (secondarily) and an all-new category of iron rice bowls (primarily).

So it's fair to conclude that the beneficiaries of DEI aren't the poor downtrodden masses but the HR-on-steroids scolds who run it. And look who they are:

According to BLS, the average U.S. salary in 2024 was just under $60,000, mostly paid to people who have to get things done to earn it. The average DEI CDO salary is 50% higher and goes overwhelmingly to white people, mostly women, who accomplish little but cause headaches for everyone else.

It's all about the money, honey — just like always.

There are dicey legal issues, too. When everybody was busy establishing DEI programs during the BLM madness of 2020, they were apparently too convinced of their political invulnerability to care that DEI is inherently discriminatory — and illegal.

"Everyone understood that [illegal discimination] was going on, in private business as well as universities," Megan McArdle posted on X. "Acquaintances would just outright say 'We're looking to hire a woman of color/queer person/etc for this position.' I never figured out how to politely ask why they were confessing a crime to someone they barely knew."

Times change, and they changed bigly on Jan. 20. The CYA efforts will be a joy to watch, assuming schadenfreude is your thing.

Then again, it would be unfair of me to deny the True Believers™ who are deeply committed to the rot that is DEI. They're in the Air Force, they're in Silicon Valley, they're in your local school district.

SecDef Pete Hegseth is currently dropping MOABs on Air Force officers engaged in "malicious compliance" to undo President Donald Trump's anti-DEI orders to the military. And as for the "bulls**t jobs" I referenced above, you need to read Ryan Zickgraf's exposé of the "diversity hacks" in DEI whose jobs are much more corrosive than old-school make-work positions.

"There was something bitterly ironic about being a straight white guy whose job was to design woke social-media posts — for Pfizer, among others — about the importance of celebrating Juneteenth," Zickgraff wrote about the freelance work he used to do. "But that job was the kind of grift that helps disguise the fact that the whole DEI world is smoke and mirrors."

But it's smoke and mirrors covering up a lucrative field whose practitioners don't have to produce anything anyone can measure.

Now that our long national DEI nightmare is finally ending, that sound you hear is the lamentations of their women (and beta men) — and it is glorious.

https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2025/01/27/death-to-dei-this-is-the-real-reason-white-lefties-are-panicking-n4936392?utm_source=rsafternoonbriefingvip&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl

NY Times Erases Biden’s Wokeification of the Military in Article Bashing Trump

NY Times Erases Biden’s Wokeification of the Military in Article Bashing Trump

“Milley politicizing DoD isn’t political, but taking down his portrait is. Hiring an ineffective & pro-DEI service chief isn’t, but firing her is. Open borders aren’t, but securing them is. Firing troops over the vaccine isn’t, but rehiring them is.”

Posted by Stacey Matthews

In any article on the political and cultural wars taking place within the United States military, one would expect former President Joe Biden’s name to be featured prominently.

The reason for that, of course, is because of the degradation of our fighting forces under Biden’s watch due in part to a dangerous obsession with implementing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in the name of woke, emphasizing them over actual merit, readiness, and fitness to lead.

Legal Insurrection extensively documented this during Biden’s four years in office. Examples:

During his 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly vowed to undo the damage Biden had done by, among other things, setting up a task force that would be charged with dismantling DEI in the military.

It’s something he followed through with after the election in part by nominating Iraq/Afghanistan wars veteran and DEI critic Pete Hegseth for Defense Secretary and by nominating former Space Force Lieutenant Colonel squadron commander Matt Lohmeier to be the Under Secretary of the Air Force.

Lohmeier, as Legal Insurrection has reported, was — under Joe Biden’s leadership —”fired, forced to resign without a pension just before his retirement date and subjected to an Inspector General investigation within the Pentagon after” publishing a best-selling book that shined an unflattering spotlight on the wokeification within the military.

With all of that in mind, we turn to an article from the New York Times which took the gaslighting to the extremes by accusing Trump of, I kid you not, pulling “the military back into the political and culture wars” over actions he’s taken to expressly remove them from it:

From the piece:

In his early-days blitz, President Trump fired the first woman to ever lead a military service branch, signed an order to send active-duty U.S. troops to the border and said he was reinstating, with back pay, former service members who had refused to take Covid vaccinations, a breach of military health rules.

And a portrait of his former senior military adviser, whom Mr. Trump has accused of disloyalty, was swiftly taken down at the Pentagon.
Mr. Trump’s nominee for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, said at his confirmation hearing last week that the president wanted a military “laser-focused on lethality, meritocracy, warfighting, accountability and readiness.”
It is not starting off that way.
Instead, the military is back where it has historically not wanted to be: in the middle of political and culture wars that could erode bipartisan support and, eventually, the public’s support for a military that is supposed to be apolitical.

Are you kidding me?

To be sure, there is always some degree of politicizing and culture warring in the military no matter who the Commander in Chief is. However, the media treating Trump as though he’s the main offender in this scenario when he’s not even close to that —while not even giving Joe Biden one single mention despite the absolute havoc he wreaked on our armed forces — is just flat-out nuts.

https://legalinsurrection.com/2025/01/ny-times-erases-bidens-wokeification-of-the-military-in-article-bashing-trump/

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