One little detail is missing from this self-congratulatory press release: The shooter himself was “a member of the LGBTQRSWTF community”

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Gays everywhere can rest easy and be at peace because the ATF, FBI and DOJ, all of whom are displaying their rainbow cloaks of wokeness here, have their back. “We will not rest”

… “Fueled by hate, the defendant targeted members of the LGBTQIA+ community at a place that represented belonging, safety, and acceptance – stealing five people from their loved ones, injuring 19 others, and striking fear across the country,” said Attorney General Merrick B. Garland. “Today’s sentencing makes clear that the Justice Department is committed to protecting the right of every person in this country to live free from the fear that they will be targeted by hate-fueled violence or discrimination based on who they are or who they love. I am grateful to every agent, prosecutor, and staff member across the Department – from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Colorado, to the Civil Rights Division, the ATF, and FBI – for their work on this case. The Justice Department will never stop working to defend the safety and civil rights of all people in our country.”

“The 2022 mass shooting at Club Q is one of the most violent crimes against the LGBTQIA+ community in history,” said FBI Director Christopher Wray. “The FBI and our partners have worked tirelessly towards this sentencing, but the true heroes are the patrons of the Club who selflessly acted to subdue the defendant. This Pride Month and every month, the FBI stands with the survivors, victims, and families of homophobic violence and hate.”

“ATF will not rest until perpetrators like this defendant are prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” said Director Steven Dettelbach of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). “I hope today’s life sentence brings at least some peace to the victims and survivors of this senseless, horrific tragedy. That this sentence should come during Pride month reinforces how far we have left to go before all communities, including all LGBTQIA+ communities, are safe here. It also shows how far ATF and all our partners will go to ensure hatred does not win.”

“The defendant’s mass shooting and heinous targeting of Club Q is one of the most devastating assaults on the LGBTQIA+ community in our nation’s history. This sentence cannot reclaim the lives lost or undo the harms inflicted. But we hope that it provides the survivors, the victims’ families, and their communities a small measure of justice,” said Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “Our message today should be loud and clear. No one should have to fear for their life or their safety because of their gender identity or sexual orientation. The Justice Department will vigorously investigate and prosecute those who perpetrate hate-fueled, bias-driven attacks.”

So what’s the problem? The shooter “identifies” as non-binary/gay, as even NBC once admitted (and referred to him as “they/their” in its coverage) back in November 2022. That aspect, rarely mentioned in media coverage of the massacre at the time, has now long since been buried.

Buried, but exhumed by The Maine Wire yesterday:

LGBT Mass Shooter Pleads Guilty to Hate Crimes Against LGBT People

Anderson Aldrich, who identifies as “non-binary,” pled guilty on Tuesday to 74 additional charges related to hate crimes and firearms. Aldrich is already serving a life sentence of a thousand years without the possibility of parole for a mass shooting at a gay bar in Colorado.

“Fueled by hate, the defendant targeted members of the LGBTQIA+ community at a place that represented belonging, safety, and acceptance – stealing five people from their loved ones, injuring 19 others, and striking fear across the country,” said U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, following the new sentencing.

In 2022, Aldrich murdered five people, and attempted to murder numerous others, at the Club Q.

Following the incident, headlines and prosecutors suggested that the crime was motivated by hatred of LGBT people.

It was later revealed, however, that Aldrich himself is a member of the LGBT community, and identifies as non-binary.

That revelation did not stop AG Garland from charging him with additional hate crime charges, to which Aldrich pled guilty.

The new charges will carry with them an additional 55 life sentences, although the additional conviction is merely symbolic, since Aldrich is already serving a lengthy sentence, which he has no chance of outliving.

Well, of course he did

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Manhattan DA drops charges against Columbia University students arrested at anti-Israel protests

The office of Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg claimed insufficient evidence of damage to property or injury to individuals as pretext for dropping charges

A trip down memory lane:

Violent pro-terror rioters shouting ‘Intifada!’ smash their way into Columbia University academic building in latest campus chaos

Biden's invitees are doing Trump's ads for free

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Illegal immigrant suspects in Texas girl’s murder were recently caught by Border Patrol, released into US

Johan Jose Rangel Martinez, Franklin Jose Pena Ramos charged with capital murder in death of Jocelyn Nungaray

The two men charged in the killing of a 12-year-old Houston girl who was found strangled to death in a creek this week are Venezuelan migrants who entered the United States illegally.

Johan Jose Rangel Martinez, 21, and Franklin Jose Pena Ramos, 26, were linked to the death of Jocelyn Nungaray and face capital murder charges, the Houston Police Department said Thursday. 

Pena Ramos illegally crossed into El Paso, Texas, in May, sources with the Department of Homeland Security confirmed to Fox News. He was caught by Border Patrol agents and was released into the U.S. with a Notice to Appear in court. 

Rangel Martinez also crossed illegally into El Paso in March and was caught by Border Patrol. He was released into the U.S. on an unknown basis. 

So while Trump’s got Biden’s boys out canvassing for votes; what are Joe’s handlers up to?

According to a report from Axios, the Biden campaign is launching an ad campaign in all the swing states, seeking to make Donald Trump's recent criminal conviction a central theme of the 2024 election.

The ad buy is part of a $50 million investment in June alone and will target key demographic groups, such as black, Hispanic, and Asian American voters, whom Biden is struggling to keep in his column this year.

Even professional Trump haters aren’t impressed

Joe Biden is in a position similar to that of other failed presidents. And that means he will try desperately to make his opponent the issue. Donald Trump is certainly a target-rich environment, but voters aren't concerned about Trump's foibles. They want to know what Biden will do to get us out of this mess.

But Biden decided to double down and go after Trump anyway. Matt Margolis reported that the Biden campaign was going to spend $50 million on ads solemnly informing the American voter that Donald Trump was convicted of a felony. 

It would be one thing if they were good ads. But the universal reaction to Biden's $50 million ad campaign tagging Trump as a convicted felon ranges from "Is this the best they can do?" to "You've got to be kidding."

 "It’s soulless," political strategist Steve Schmidt, a fierce Trump critic, recently said on his "The Warning" podcast. "It’s flat." 

"It’s like it was written by a committee of chat GPTS."

Eeesh.

"The ad sucks," Schmidt added. "It’s terrible. It doesn’t raise anybody’s pulse. It won’t do anything except burn money."

Follow the science

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You must remember this … the fundamental things apply, as time goes by

Matt Margolis, PJ Media:

“The fight over protecting women's sports will continue on, because too many Democrats don't seem to understand that there are differences between biological males and biological females. Well, Sen. John Kennedy explained things is simple terms that perhaps, even Democrats can understand.

"The differences between biological males and biological females explode during puberty," he began. "Girls, during puberty, develop 14% smaller hearts. Their lungs are 12% smaller... You cannot debate that. It's just a biological fact. That helps boys take in oxygen and pump blood more efficiently than girls can. That gives boys a clear edge in endurance sports like swimming, for example, cycling, rowing..."

“Kennedy still wasn't done explaining the differences between boys and girls.”

Girls develop a wider pelvis. That decreases the amount of force their legs exert when they're lifting, when they're kicking, when they're pedaling. That's another relative disadvantage, vis-à-vis boys or men, when you compare female athletes to their male counterparts. Now boys, in contrast, develop broader shoulders—a biological fact, folks—that allows them to make space for more upper body muscle mass and gives them a decided advantage when competing against a girl. It's hard to think—I can't think of a sport in which a higher muscle-to-fat ratio isn't helpful. The average boy will grow five inches taller than the average girl. It's just a fact. Even when men and women are the same height men have higher levels of bone density, which helps them move more forcefully and to escape more injuries.

Ned Lamont declined to be interviewed for this story

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was that wrong? should i not have done that?

Wealthy Maine couple accused of killing neighbor’s trees to secure ocean view, poisoning public beach in the process

Two Maine millionaires are bickering in court over accusations that one poisoned the other's trees to score the ultimate ocean view — and that in doing so, a lethal herbicide leached into their small community's only public beach.  

Lisa Gorman, wife of the late LL Bean president Leon Gorman, claims that her neighbor applied herbicide to her oak trees without consent in 2021, The Associated Press reported. 

Neighbor Amelia Bond, former CEO of St. Louis Foundation, then offered to split the cost to remove the dying trees from the front of the Camden home in 2022, according to legal documents reviewed by the AP. This gave Bond an unobstructed view of Penobscot Bay, an idyllic harbor filled with lobster boats, yachts and schooners. 

The destruction didn't stop at the Gorman property. Herbicide Tebuthiuron spread next door to the town's only public seaside beach, prompting a legal investigation. Residents were seen walking their dogs just 500 feet away from the soil where the herbicide, lethal to aquatic plants, was detected, according to the AP. 

Bond and her husband, Arthur Bond III, an architect whose aunt is former U.S. Sen. Kit Bond, have paid thousands to the state and $1.5 million to Gorman, the town's planning and development director told the AP. Most acknowledged that the fabulously wealthy part-time residents "from away" — the Mainer's expression for out-of-towners — have enough money to comfortably shoulder fines and get away with their actions. 

"They just pay the fine because they have plenty of money," Hodgson said. "That’s the town we live in."

Then again, there’s this:

The herbicide at the center of the skirmish, Tebuthiuron, was also used by an angry Alabama football fan to avenge his team's loss by killing oak trees at rival Auburn in 2010. 

That fan, Harvey Updyke, admitted to poisoning the trees and received jail time, the AP reported. 

[Three year sentence, minimum six months served, five years probation.]

"The cupboard is bare. There's (sic) no more cuts to make." Nancy Pelosi, 9/21/2013

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“and Loan forgiveness and citizenship, too – allahu akbar, baby”

But there’s been plenty of restocking of that cupboard since she made that preposterous claim. For instance …

Dem Sen. Patty Murray Seeks Millions for Anti-Semitic Mosque Whose Leader Called Jews 'Despicable Apes'

The Muslim Association of Puget Sound hosted speakers who praised Palestinian 'martyrs,' referred to Jews as 'filth'

The Democrats’ top Senate appropriator is seeking millions of dollars in taxpayer funds for an Islamic organization in Washington state that has preached anti-Semitism, cheered Hamas’s "victory" over Israel, and hosted Palestinian activists who urge resistance against Israel "by any means necessary."

Sen. Patty Murray (D., Wash.), the chairwoman of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, requested $2.5 million for the Muslim Association of Puget Sound last month for the construction of a clinic, a massive windfall for an organization that received $6.2 million in revenue in 2022. That’s on top of an $850,000 earmark that Murray landed for the organization earlier this year to provide tech training for "underrepresented communities."

>>>

The Biden administration has awarded millions of dollars in Department of Homeland Security grants to mosques whose leaders have called Jews "an arrogant breed of people" and called on Allah to "eradicate [Zionists] from existence," the Washington Free Beacon reported.

The Muslim Association of Puget Sound, the largest Islamic group in Washington, has provided a platform for similar rhetoric. Mohammad Joban, the mosque’s head imam, apologized [uh huh] in 2019 for preaching that Allah transformed Jews into "despicable apes" for disobeying him.

Joban and other speakers hosted by the Muslim association have praised Hamas and other "liberation" groups’ attacks on Israel

>>>>

The cleric, who referred to Israel as "the killers of the babies," declared the residents of Gaza the "winners" of the Israel-Hamas war. As evidence of Israel’s defeat, Joban said, "there’s no school, no university, no services" in some parts of Israel.

During a sermon on Nov. 3, Sheikh Hasib Noor called on Allah to "accept our martyrs" in Gaza and "destroy their enemy and your enemy," according to the Middle East Media Research Institute. Noor prayed to "destroy the occupying Zionists" and "cleanse the Al-Aqsa Mosque of their filth."

Then there is an event with Palestine Chronicle publisher Ramzy Baroud, whose outlet published the writings of Abdullah Aljamal, a Hamas affiliate who held three Israelis hostage in the wake of the October 7 attack.

Baroud declared at a talk hosted by the association on June 4, 2021, that Israel has "no right to self-defense" and Palestinians have a right to liberation "by any means necessary."

A failed inspection, or did the buyer discover that, even at $1.350 million, no one else wanted it, and rethought his bid ?

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3 Hickory Drive a 1901 Mediterranean in Stamford’s “prestigious” Southfield Point, was reported under contract on June 10th, but has now been returned to the active roster. It’s been asking $2.1 million lately, but that number has ranged lower over the past five years, dropping to just $1.350 in 2020.

Yes, it’s Stamford: high taxes, lousy schools, yadada, but, depending on this home’s condition, and how close you can get to that $1.350 price, I’m amazed by how much house you can get in our poorer neighbor to the east compared to, say, Chickahominy.

I'd thought Sam Goldbrick had converted his house on Glen Avon into homeless housing and left town, but apparently not; that's too bad.

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GOLDBRICK: Camillo’s Absence at Pride and Juneteenth Events Should Not Be a Surprise

Greenwich Republican first selectman Fred Camillo was a no-show at this month’s Pride celebration at Greenwich Town Hall.  And you won’t see him at Greenwich’s Juneteenth commemoration either.  Greenwich Free Press reported that Camillo has a prior engagement.  What exactly is keeping him from attending those events?  According to his executive assistant, Ken Borsuk, the first selectman won’t appear for Juneteenth because “he’s taking some personal days and is out of Town.”

>>>

[N]o one should be surprised that Camillo would no-show for these two important [sic] celebrations.  It was Camillo, after all, who just last fall attempted to implement a “flag law” that would have allowed him to ban the flying of the Pride and the Juneteenth flags at Town Hall.  …

During his decade in the Connecticut legislature, state representative Camillo voted repeatedly for racist “voter ID” laws that targeted Black and Hispanic voters with what a federal judge in North Carolina described as “almost surgical precision.” [And what a North Carolina judge was doing in Connecticut, we’ll never know]. Camillo and his fellow Republicans also voted repeatedly against amending the Connecticut constitution to permit early voting.  ….

Fred Camillo demonstrated his hostility to the LGBTQ community by voting against the nomination of Andrew McDonald in 2018 to serve as chief justice of the Connecticut Supreme Court.  McDonald was a tremendously well qualified candidate [so say the Democrats, so so say all] for chief justice, having been a partner in a leading Connecticut law firm, serving as a state senator, and as chief legal counsel to the governor of Connecticut, before being named as an associate justice of the state supreme court.  But when he was nominated to be chief justice, the GOP balked.  You see, Andrew McDonald is openly gay, and married to a man, and Republicans were determined to demonstrate their anti-LGBTQ bigotry by blocking his nomination.  Fred Camillo and every other Republican legislator except one voted against his nomination.

Given his history, no one should be surprised that Fred Camillo can’t be bothered to show up for Pride or Juneteenth celebrations.  But no one should consider his no-shows acceptable.

Well, anyone who scoffs at feel-good, meaningless parades, slogans and suburban lawn signs, and despises those hypocritical white liberals who participate in such empty activities probably finds Fred’s refusal to join in Goldbrick’s and his fellows’ pseudo-outrage entirely acceptable.

As an aside, I’m sick of frauds like Goldbrick feeling so free to call anyone who disagrees with him a racist homophobe. If these people didn’t believe that everything and everyone was racist, I’d be offended. As it is, I suggest the following for this fine fellow:

Victor Davis Hanson's family has lived in California for generations — he still does — and he has some observations

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in memoriam

How California’s Paradise Become our Purgatory

How and why did California end up as a warning to Western civilization of what might be in store for anyone who followed its nihilism?

By Victor Davis Hanson

June 20, 2024

California has become a test case of the suicide of the West. Never before has such a state, so rich in natural resources and endowed with such a bountiful human inheritance, self-destructed so rapidly.

How and why did California so utterly consume its unmatched natural and ancestral inheritance and end up as a warning to Western civilization of what might be in store for anyone who followed its nihilism?

The symptoms of the state’s suicide are indisputable.

Governor Gavin Newsom enjoyed a recent $98 billion budget surplus—gifted from multibillion-dollar federal COVID-19 subsidies, the highest income and gas taxes in the nation, and among the country’s steepest sales and property taxes.

Yet in a year, he turned it into a growing $45 billion budget deficit.

At a time of an over-regulated, overtaxed, and sputtering economy, Newsom spent lavishly on new entitlements, illegal immigrants, and untried and inefficient green projects.

Newsom was endowed with two of the wettest years in recent California history. Yet he and radical environmentalists squandered the water bounty—as snowmelts and runoff long designated for agricultural irrigation were drained from aqueducts and reservoirs to flow out to sea.

Newsom transferred millions of dollars designated by a voter referendum to build dams and aqueducts for water storage and instead blew up four historic dams on the Klamath River. For decades, these now-destroyed scenic lakes provided clean, green hydroelectric power, irrigation storage, flood control, and recreation.

California hosts one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients. Over a fifth of the population lives below the property line. Nearly half the nation’s homeless sleep on the streets of its major cities.

The state’s downtowns are dirty, dangerous, and increasingly abandoned by businesses—most recently Google—that cannot rely on a defunded and shackled police.

Newsom’s California has spent billions on homeless relief and subsidizing millions of new illegal migrant arrivals across the state’s porous southern border.

The result was predictably even more homeless and more illegal immigrants, all front-loaded onto the state’s already overtaxed and broken healthcare, housing, and welfare entitlements.

Newsome raised the minimum wage for fast-food workers to $22 an hour. The result was wage inflation rippling out to all service areas, unaffordable food for the poor, and massive shut-downs and bankruptcies of fast food outlets.

Twenty-seven percent of Californians were born outside of the United States. It is a minority-majority state. Yet California has long dropped unifying civic education, while the bankrupt state funds exploratory commissions to consider divisive racial reparations.

California’s universities are hotbeds of ethnic, religious, and racial chauvinism and infighting. State officials, however, did little as its campuses were plagued for months by rampant and violent anti-Semitism.

Almost nightly, the nation watches mass smash-and-grab attacks on California retail stores. Carjackers and thieves own the night. They are rarely caught, even more rarely arrested—and almost never convicted.

Currently, Newsom is fighting in the courts to stop the people’s constitutional right to place on the ballot initiatives to restore penalties for violent crime and theft.

Gas prices are the highest in the continental United States, given green mandate formulas and the nation’s highest, and still raising, gasoline taxes—and are scheduled to go well over $6 a gallon.

Yet its ossified roads and highways are among the nation’s most dangerous, as vast sums of transportation funding were siphoned off to the multibillion-dollar high-speed rail boondoggle.

The state imports almost all the costly vitals of modern life, mostly because it prohibits using California’s own vast petroleum, natural gas, timber, and mineral resources.

As California implodes, its embarrassed government turns to the irrelevant, if not ludicrous.

It now outlaws natural gas stoves in new homes. It is adding new income-based surcharges for those who dutifully pay their power bills—to help subsidize the 2.5 million Californians who simply default on their energy bill with impunity.

>>>>

Meanwhile, a tiny coastal elite, empowered by $9 trillion in Silicon Valley market capitalization, fiddled while their state burned.

California became a medieval society of plutocratic barons, subsidized peasants, and a shrinking and fleeing middle class. It is now home to a few rich estates, subsidized apartments, and unaffordable middle-class houses.

California suffers from poorly ranked public schools—but brags about its prestigious private academies. Its highways are lethal—but it hosts the most private jets in the nation.

The fantasies of a protected enclave of Gavin Newsom, Nancy Pelosi, and the masters of the Silicon Valley universe have become the abject nightmares of everyone else.

In sum, a privileged Bay Area elite inherited a California paradise and turned it into purgatory.

RELATED:

Los Angeles Opens Homeless Shelter That's Nicer Than Some Houses

xThe city of Los Angeles has a homeless problem.

Okay, a lot of California's big cities do (given who runs it), but what did Los Angeles do about it? Shuffle them off like they did for Xi Jinping when he visited San Francisco? Let churches and private entities do something about it?

Nope, they built a fancy high-rise apartment block, just for homeless people, right in the middle of downtown.

And believe me, it's nicer than some people's houses, boasting 228 studio apartments and 47 one-bedroom apartments, a gym, an art room, a library, and a music room.

All for the low, low cost of $600,000 per room to build on the taxpayers' dime!

As Fox 11 LA described, this is part of the 2016 Proposition HHH passed by voters to allocate $1.2 billion in bonds toward building homeless shelters.

And this is only opening just now?

Oh yeah, and there are going to be two more at some point, but given how it's been almost a decade to build the first one, don't hold your breath for the others.

People on X have rightly made fun of this genius plan to make being homeless preferable to actually earning a living in L.A., with many pointing out that it will either A) be used to shelter illegal immigrants instead of the regular homeless, or B) be utterly trashed in a very short amount of time.

California already has half the nation’s homeless: this will attract still more, but perhaps that’s the point, I don’t know.