Mark and Patricia McCloskey Plead Guilty to Charges, Will Surrender Guns

 

The St. Louis couple who were seen holding firearms as Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists approached their home pleaded guilty to several misdemeanor charges and surrendered their guns.

Mark McCloskey, a lawyer, pleaded guilty to a Class C misdemeanor of fourth-degree assault, while his wife, Patricia McCloskey, pleaded guilty to a Class A misdemeanor of second-degree harassment. They will pay the maximum fines of $2,000 and $750, and they won’t serve any jail time.

More notably, however, the two will be forced to forfeit the weapons they were holding when they confronted BLM protesters who were marching near their home last summer.

Mark McCloskey is running for the US Senate. 

Tucker: Biden admin using force of law to crush political dissent

Justice Is Coming: Carter Page Takes Comey, McCabe, Strzok to Court in $75M Obamagate Lawsuit

 

 The lawsuit names a host of defendants, including the federal government of the United States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Department of Justice (DOJ), former FBI Director James Comey, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, former FBI agent Peter Strzok, former FBI lawyer Lisa Page, FBI agent Joe Pientka III, and more. These individuals and others have confessed to compiling and approving four FISA warrants to spy on Page despite numerous errors and omissions — warrants Comey and others said they would not have signed, knowing what they know now.

Read the whole thing. 

Attorney General Says BLM Uses Black Americans As ‘Props,’ Calls Out DOJ’s ‘Permanent Bureaucracy’

 U.S. Attorney General William Barr said the “law has broken down” in the hands of prosecutors and that DOJ heads, checked by the American people, should oversee these unelected prosecutors to uphold law and order in the nation.

The executive branch has virtually unchecked power in bringing charges, Barr noted. “That means discretion is vested in the executive to determine when to exercise prosecution power,” Barr said to a “legal-sized” crowd at Hillsdale College’s Constitution Day Celebration on Wednesday evening,

The only question is: When should the branch use its prosecutorial power? The answer is left in the hands of prosecutors who, according to Barr, prioritize cases that they “can get,” meaning win, instead of the most important ones to prosecute.

“Federal prosecutors possess tremendous power,” Barr said. “Power that is necessary to enforce our laws and punish wrongdoing…but power that carries inherent potential for abuse.”

Such abuse is commonplace and usually takes shape in politically targeted prosecutions, he said.

“I’d like to be able to say that we don’t see headhunting in the Department of Justice,” he said. “That would not be truthful. I see it every day.”

Read the whole thing.

Lawyers Giving Effective Legal Advice?

Will lawyers going forward now advise their clients:

After you have been terminated … on your last day at work … before you are replaced (by the new employee) ... send an e-mail to yourself stating: “I did everything by the book.”
That is sure to work. 100%!

Also, do not mark the e-mail—“drafted on the advice of counsel”—even though you drafted it on the advice of counsel, and even though everyone knows I gave you this advice.

That is sure to work. 100%!

Fix the Flynn Frame-Up in the Courts

Mark Steyn:

I heard Kellyanne Conway being asked this morning about whether Trump should now pardon Flynn. No. It is for the court, as an act of judicial hygiene, to accept Flynn's withdrawal of his enforced guilty plea (made under threats by the feds to destroy the lives of various family members, too), quash the conviction as a miscarriage of justice, and invite the defense to lay before His Honor a wrongful prosecution suit.

If it requires a presidential pardon to bring garbage like this to an end, then we are all in trouble. Because if the Deep Staters can do it to Flynn, they can do it to anyone. It behooves Judge Emmett Sullivan to rule upon what has been a fraud upon the court from day one - and a fraud upon his court specifically: the documents made public this week were ordered to be handed over to Flynn's lawyers two years ago (February 2018) but were in fact only coughed up now because Jeff Jensen, a federal prosecutor in St Louis appointed by Attorney-General Bill Barr to look into the DoJ's conduct of the Flynn case, recently stumbled across them. A system in which prosecutorial misconduct requires a presidential pardon to undo it is not merely absurd but wicked: justice requires that Judge Sullivan extinguish the state's assault upon his own courthouse.

Oh, but the Comey-Mueller crowd will protest, Flynn confessed to the crime!

Well, sorta: He was prevailed upon to (in the sleazy euphemism) "settle". I hate settling - because, in the civil courts, it incentivizes the use of litigation as a form of blackmail; and, in the criminal courts, it leads to what happened in the Flynn case: a man confessing to a crime he does not honestly believe he has committed.

So why did he do it? Well, his then lawyers told him to. Why would they do that? Because the dirty rotten stinking corrupt federal justice system wins 99 per cent of its cases, 97 per cent without going to court. Kim Jong-Un's Attorney-General (assuming he has or needs one) can only marvel. A culture of judicial "settling" is by definition corrupt. ...

"Settling" is a very unsettling concept in the criminal context - in part because it destroys equality before the law: Someone who's got twenty bucks in his savings account can be forced to "settle" long before someone with twenty mil. In the case of this particular investigation, there was certainly foreign collusion in the 2016 election: Mrs Clinton colluded with an MI6 spook who colluded with his contacts in the Kremlin. But Hillary doesn't have to "settle" because she's never had anything to fear from the Strzoks and Comeys. For those less able to withstand the onslaught, the preponderance of American media see no injustice in the Flynn fit-up. For example, former federal prosecutor and CNN "legal analyst" Renato Mariotti:

This isn't unusual at all.

Michael Flynn was treated like thousands of other subjects who were interviewed by FBI agents.

If you don't like how Flynn was treated, change the rules for everyone. Because this is how it works.

...

Misremembering to the FBI should not be a crime - especially not on the basis of a politically motivated policeman's supposedly contemporaneous "notes", rather than an audio or video recording. Instead of a presidential pardon, why not repeal this vile pseudo-crime that mocks due process? I take it that, the GOP having lost the House, Congress will not enact a new Strzok Act, restoring the citizen's right to misremember to a corrupt police agency's goons, but why cannot Bill Barr suspend this "crime" pending an investigation into its misuse by prosecutors over recent years?

... There's a popular American vernacular expression to the effect that, if you're not on offense, you're on defense. After three years of seeing innocent persons traduced and ruined by a corrupt bureaucracy working to subvert the results of free and fair elections, is it too much to expect the enervated Republican Party and its flabby cheerleaders in Conservative Inc actually to rouse themselves and try a little offense?

For Whom the New Rules?

So egregious have been the ruling class’s attacks on Donald Trump, so shameless has been the sanctimony with which men such as William Webster have defended their biased governing rules, that the rest of us are well nigh compelled to give it a double dose of its own medicine.

Let's examine the 2020 Democratic field

Consider: To what extent do South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s father’s extensive Communist contacts continue to influence his son? Mayor Pete grew up among ideas and persons hostile to America. These need to be identified, and questions need to be examined about whether and to what extent any continue to influence this presidential candidate.

Mayor Pete also has a history of illegal drug use. Who have his suppliers been? Tied to which cartels? What sort of leverage might they have on him? People need to be identified and examined under oath. Discrepancies in testimony need to be prosecuted. So do whatever crimes they may have committed. The anti-Trump investigations turned related persons’ “process crimes” into indictments of Trump. Democratic candidates should experience no less.

And then, of course, there's the Biden family corruption

On their face, the Biden family’s financial profiting from the several offices Joe Biden has held involves the violation of numerous ordinary laws. Detailing the manner and extent to which the family’s enrichment have paralleled its access to power seems to be part of federal law enforcement’s core duties.

Judge Ellis Wants to See Mueller's Hunting License Read more: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/05/judge_ellis_wants_to_see_muellers_hunting_license.html#ixzz5EocfxmfO Follow us: @AmericanThinker on Twitter | AmericanThinker on Facebook

"I don't see what relationship this indictment has with anything the special counsel is authorized to investigate," U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III in the Eastern District of Virginia said.

At a tense hearing at the federal courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia, the judge said Mueller should not have "unfettered power" in his Russia probe and that the charges against Manafort did not arise from the investigation into Moscow's alleged meddling in the 2016 U.S. election.

"It's unlikely you're going to persuade me the special counsel has unfettered power to do whatever he wants[.]" ... "Our investigative scope does cover the activity in the indictment," Dreeben [the Department's deputy solicitor general] told the judge.

"Cover bank fraud in 2005 and 2007? Tell me how!" Ellis retorted. ...

Read the whole thing.

The Rape Culture of Politics by Investigation

Former Trump campaign advisor Michael Caputo condemned the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday following his closed-door testimony. His words, no doubt, resonated with every Trump aide, associate, and family member ensnared in the bogus Trump-Russia election collusion scam.

“God damn you to Hell,” Caputo told the committee—an impassioned conclusion to an emotional statement explaining the personal and financial strain the investigations have caused his family.

Caputo called out a former staffer to Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who is orchestrating the ongoing smear campaign against anyone in Trump’s orbit thanks to deep-pocketed Democratic activists in New York and California. And he implored the committee to “investigate the investigators.”

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team interviewed Caputo the following day, nearly one year after Mueller got his marching orders from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. So, why has Caputo now been interviewed by the House Intelligence Committee, the Senate Intelligence Committee and the special counsel? What makes this longtime GOP consultant who worked on the Trump campaign for less than a year (and not in any central role) possibly complicit in, or a witness to, the yet-unproven crime that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government to influence the 2016 presidential election?

Caputo made the egregious error of having once worked for the Russians. In the 1990s. He told New York magazine in an interview this week that he “studied Russia in college and became a big admirer of Russian literature and ballet. I worked hard in the Cold War to defeat Russia, and after the Wall fell I grew curious about the Russian people. I wanted to see the results.” Of course, this all sounds very fishy now. It’s obvious that Caputo developed an interest in Russia in the 1980s so he could earn the coveted post of Donald Trump’s New York primary election coordinator in 2015 and then work with the Rooskies to strip Hillary Clinton of enough votes in Pennsylvania and Michigan to cost her the election in November 2016 (even though he left the campaign in June 2016.)

Coincidence? I don’t think so.

While it’s tempting to joke about the ridiculousness of federal investigators and lawmakers continuing to sniff out a crime that did not happen, it’s no laughing matter. Caputo said he has incurred about $125,000 in legal fees and he’s not done yet. Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) brought up Caputo’s Ukrainian-born wife during a House hearing with former FBI Director James Comey last year. Caputo claims he and his family have been the target of death threats, all due to a “fishing expedition” into his alleged role in Trump-Russia election collusion. “If you drink vodka, you have Russian dressing in your refrigerator, you’re game for these people,” he told Fox News’ Tucker Carlson....

“This is a punishment strategy. I think they want to destroy the president, they want to destroy his family, they want to destroy his businesses, they want to destroy his friends,” Caputo told Tucker Carlson on Wednesday night. “Clearly these lawsuits after the fact are the new Democratic strategy. When you lose, you still win. I don’t think anyone should work on a Republican campaign again unless you’re legally indemnified. If you do, you’re crazy.”

The process is the punishment. (Mark Steyn)

An addendum to my recent post here: this deserves more everyone's attention.

In 2009, my wife and I moved to my hometown of East Aurora, New York to have a family. Making far less money back home, we had a far better quality of life. That is, until the Trump-Russia narrative took off. Today, I can't possibly pay the attendant legal costs and live near my aging father, raising my kids where I grew up.

Your investigation and others into the allegations of Trump campaign collusion with Russia are costing my family a great deal of money – more than $125,000 – and making a visceral impact on my children.

How many of you know Daniel Jones, former Senate Intelligence staffer for Senator Dianne Feinstein? Great guy, right? Most of you worked with him. One of you probably just talked to him this morning.

Of course, very few of us in flyover country knew Daniel until recently. Now we know that he quit his job with your Senate committee not long ago to raise $50 million from ten rich Democrats to finance more work on the FusionGPS Russian dossier. The one the FBI used to get a FISA warrant and intimidate President Donald Trump, without anyone admitting — until months after it was deployed — that it was paid for by Hillary Clinton.

In fact, good old Dan has been raising and spending millions to confirm the unconfirmable – and, of course, to keep all his old intel colleagues up-to-speed on what FusionGPS and British and Russian spies have found...

We know from the news that he's been briefing Senator Mark Warner, vice chairman of this committee. Which one of you works for Senator Warner? Please give Danny my best.

I saw some of his handiwork just last month. Remember this lede paragraph, from McClatchy on April 13?

'The Justice Department special counsel has evidence that Donald Trump's personal lawyer and confidant, Michael Cohen, secretly made a late-summer trip to Prague during the 2016 presidential campaign, according to two sources familiar with the matter.'

That's your pal Dan, isn't it?

I mean, you're all in this together. You're the swamp.

What America needs is an investigation of the investigators. I want to know who is paying for the spies' work and coordinating this attack on President Donald Trump? I want to know who Dan Jones is talking to across the investigations – from the FBI, to the Southern District of New York, to the OSC, to the Department of Justice, to Congress.

Forget about all the death threats against my family. I want to know who cost us so much money, who crushed our kids, who forced us out of our home, all because you lost an election.

I want to know because God damn you to Hell.

STEYN:

To reprise my old line: The process is the punishment. That's particularly true at the federal level, where as a matter of policy they first wipe you out - drain your savings, empty your retirement account, nuke the kids' college fund ...and then dangle a deal in front of you in exchange for you pleading guilty "only" to a process crime, like lying to the lyin' liars who run the FBI. It is an awesome thing to behold - particularly by comparison with, say, military justice, where the US has been holding 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed for almost four times as long as the First World War and still can't manage to bring him to trial....

Thus American justice in the 21st century: It can ruin a no-name Trump campaign volunteer in nothing flat. But it can't try a guy who murdered three thousand innocents in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, another two hundred in the Bali nightclub bombing, plus Daniel Pearl in Pakistan ...and has confessed to all this and more.

It's all a joke: civilian, military; federal, state; criminal, civil; family, probate. As my old boss Conrad Black likes to point out, the United States has as many lawyers as the rest of the world combined. One entirely inevitable consequence of that malign distortion in the labor market is that far more aspects of life are litigated, and, when they are, the natural tendency of the system is for everything to take far longer than it would anywhere else. So what counts is not plaintiff or defendant, but which party is in the position to inflict the most pain on the other ...

And yet despite this being the most litigious society on earth huge numbers of Americans remain oblivious to the vast amount of human wreckage piled up: Every day on cable news, I hear some Democrat telling the host that, if these former minor Trump aides have nothing to hide, then they have nothing to fear from investigation-without-end: We need to let the law do its job, and let the process play itself out.

I heard the same thing six years ago, when Michael Mann, the hockey-stick huckster and climate mullah, sued me for defamation: "Well, if Steyn's innocent, he'll get his day in court and the process will play itself out." That was 2012, and my day in court is no nearer than it was, and a First Amendment that protects my right to a 270-word blog post only after a decade of my life and an eight-figure sum isn't, as a practical matter, in terribly good health, is it?

When the process plays itself out as lethargically and ruinously as this, the process itself is the problem - as Michael Caputo has discovered.

I wish him well, and I wish those toying with him as they've toyed with Carter Page and others are indeed damned to Hell.

'God damn you to hell!': Former Trump campaign consultant explodes at Democratic Senate aides after he loses his house to legal fees in 'witch hunt' congressional Russia probe

The Real Criminals

A former campaign communications adviser to Donald Trump blew up at Democratic U.S. Senate aides on Tuesday at the end of a behind-the-scenes grilling connected to their wide-ranging Russia investigation.

New York-based political consultant Michael Caputo said he has spent $125,000 on attorneys to help him navigate the committee's demands for documents and testimony, ruining his children's economic future and forcing him to sell his family home.

Calling the probe a 'witch hunt,' Caputo demanded to know who is funding a secretive effort to continue digging into unsubstantiated allegations that Trump has ties with the Kremlin.

'What America needs is an investigation of the investigators,' he said. 'I want to know: Who is paying for the spies’ work and coordinating this attack on President Donald Trump?'

'I want to know who cost us so much money, who crushed our kids, who forced us out of our home, all because you lost an election. I want to know because God Damn you to Hell.'

Worth a read. In today's American judicial system thye process is the punishment.

Paul Manafort Sues Robert Mueller and Rod Rosenstein, Claiming the Special Counsel's Charter Is Overbroad and He's Gone Beyond Even Those Limits

It's about time that someone struck back with lawfare instead of bitching.

THE MUELLER TEST AND THE PAPER CIVIL WAR ON TRUMP

Daniel Greenfield on A last ditch effort by the establishment to wrest control from the president.

The original civil war was fought by farmhands and factory workers, freed slaves and young boys turned soldiers; the new civil war is being fought by lawyers in blue or gray suits not with bullets, but with bullet points.

From the Mueller investigation to Federal judges declaring that President Trump doesn’t have the right to control immigration policy or command the military, from political sabotage at the DOJ by Obama appointees like Sally Yates to Patagonia’s lawsuit over national monuments, the cold civil war set off by the left’s rejection of the 2016 election results has been a paper war largely waged by lawyers.

“The biggest threat to New Yorkers right now is the federal government,” Attorney General Eric Schneiderman of New York recently declared. The radical leftist pol who had once vowed to do everything possible to elect Hillary Clinton was explaining his hundred lawsuits against the government on everything from net neutrality to the travel ban meant to keep out the Islamic terrorists running over tourists near Ground Zero and bombing commuters in the tunnels off Times Square.

Islamic terrorists have killed thousands of people in New York City in the last two decades. Net neutrality’s current death toll hovers around zero. The Federal government is far less of a threat to New Yorkers than their own government which insists that Islamic terrorists should be able to kill them. But it is a great threat to a class of political lawyers whose ranks include AG Schneiderman, Hawaii’s Judge Derrick Watson, Mueller’s team, Sally Yates, the ACLU and countless other #resistance combatants.

And ...

Will the American people govern themselves? Or will Mueller, Schneiderman, Watson, Yates and ten thousand other elites with law degrees be allowed to turn elections into a meaningless farce?

Federal judges have seized previously unimaginable amounts of power by not only blocking orders that had always been considered an essential part of presidential authority on flimsy premises that when dissected amount to a critique of President Trump’s character (not to mention the sovereign entitlement of the University of Hawaii to set national immigration policy for the entire country based on its urgent need for Syrian grad students), but by demanding that agencies under the control of the President of the United States enact their orders, such as accepting transgender military recruits.

The absurd outcomes of these rulings, that the University of Hawaii can set national immigration policy, but not the President of the United States, and that fitness to serve in the military can be determined by a Federal judge, but not by the military or the commander in chief, are only an irrational side effect of a conflict between the elected branches of government and an unelected class of political lawyers.

The Mueller investigation has to be seen in the context of a battle between the democratic powers of the people to choose their own representatives and the lawyers who actually run the government. Elections are being replaced by investigations and litigation as the engines of government. You don’t need to win an election to investigate elected officials. You don’t need public support to sue either.

Read the whole thing.

Worried about sexual harassment? Don't force nuns to buy other people's birth control

Mansplain it.

That is what Xavier Becerra and Josh Shapiro, attorneys general for California and Pennsylvania will do until they are blue in the face when they drag the Little Sisters of the Poor back into court and wax on about why the beliefs of these women are invalid.

In what these men no doubt fancied some sort of bold move that would rev up a sagging base, Becerra and Shapiro filed lawsuits in their states (with other male attorneys general from the states of New York, Maryland, Virginia and Delaware signing on) to take away the conscience protections granted to the Sisters by the department of Health and Human Services. Those protections prevent the nuns from being fined millions of dollars if they didn’t provide employees with things like the morning after pill in their healthcare plans. The nuns’ attorneys had to file a motion to intervene.

Becerra and Shapiro, both men who no doubt think of themselves as rising superstars in the Democratic party, have horrible timing. Their lawsuit comes at a time when accusations of male sexual harassment of women in all forms, in both parties, seems to be reaching a fever pitch. There have been so many women coming forward post-Weinstein accusing powerful men of harassment that The New York Times actually published a chart of the men, the accusations leveled against them, and the fallout for those men to date. It's a lot to keep track of.

Coming out in the midst of this, the Becerra-Shapiro suit to rope nuns into contraception has the same icky feel of men pushing women around. Or as Princeton professor Robert P. George put it: “Can someone tell me why taking a group of elderly nuns to court to force them to implicate themselves in providing contraception is not a form a sexual harassment?”

It most certainly is abuse of power. The same kind of grotesque abuse of power we are seeing exposed on an almost daily basis.

Becerra and Shapiro are powerful men with political ambition and a track record for bullying the little guy. For Becerra, for example, picking on nuns wasn’t enough to prove his liberal bonafides — he had to bully crisis pregnancy centers as well. Becerra has been busy defending a California law that requires pregnancy centers to advertise for abortion and the case will be heard at the Supreme Court this term. Becerra also unsuccessfully tried to lock up David Daleiden, the young man behind the Planned Parenthood sting videos that captured potentially criminal behavior at various centers around the country, now under investigation by the FBI. Even Becerra’s own home state paper, The Los Angeles Times, editorialized that his actions against Daleiden were a “disturbing overreach."

Robert Mueller Stocks Staff with Democrat Donors

Time to impeach Robert Mueller.

Trump's Complaint Against Comey Likely to Fail, But Be Effective

Good. It's about time our side use lawfare.

If Comey and Mueller are friends there is an obvious conflict of interest.  I have been wondering why Mueller and Comey were allowed to collude before Comey's testimony.

The complaint which President Trump's lawyer has threatened to file against former FBI director James Comey, for admittedly leaking memos about his conversations with the president, is almost certain to fail in a legal sense, but it could be very successful in many other ways, says public interest law professor John Banzhaf....

However, notes Banzhaf, even a complaint which fails legally, and does not trigger any prosecution or other adverse action against the respondent, can be very beneficial to Trump and his team.

First, the actual filing of the complaint is bound to generate considerable publicity, thereby providing an additional opportunity for his lawyers to try to explain in great detail to the public why they think Comey's conduct was wrongful and even illegal.

Second, the filing and resulting investigation would undercut Comey's credibility as a witness in any criminal proceeding, in the ongoing credibility battle between himself and Trump, and generally in the eyes of the public, suggests Banzhaf.

Third, it could create an apparent conflict of interest in the eyes of many since the same agency which would supposedly be conducting an impartial investigation of Comey is at the very same time working with him to obtain documents and testimony for Mueller's investigation.

Moreover, since Comey's own testimony strongly suggested that he and Mueller are friends, Trump can claim that Mueller will try to persuade those investigating the complaint against Comey to go easy on him - a bizarre parallel to what Comey claims Trump asked him to do regarding Michael Flynn.

TV Client Sues Celebrity Attorney Gloria Allred for Fraud, Legal Malpractice

The legal action comes on the heels of recent reports that Allred is under investigation by the State Bar of California. Allred, a renowned civil rights attorney, is known for getting involved in controversial celebrity cases, especially those involving allegations of sexual assault and discrimination. Most recently, she announced a defamation lawsuit against President Donald Trump on behalf of Summer Zervos, a former Apprentice contestant who claims Trump groped her. She is also representing several women who have accused comedian Bill Cosby of sexual assault. According to a letter from the State Bar of California viewed by LawNewz.com, her case has been forwarded to the State Bar’s Enforcement Unit for further investigation and possible prosecution.

Heroic Judge Peter Jaklevic Defends Justice System From Anarchy of Jurors Maybe Not Convicting Everybody

Here's the picture of the latter-day Caesar:

Mecosta County District Court Judge Peter Jaklevic is a former career prosecutor, like all righteous judges, and knows the purpose of jurors: to convict like they're told.

So when Keith Wood — a wild-eyed former pastor and current lawless anarchist — began distributing seditious incitement to destroy the judicial system, Judge Peter Jaklevic knew just what to do: arrest him.

A 39-year-old former pastor was arrested and jailed in Mecosta County after he handed out fliers informing people about jury nullification in front of the county courthouse.

Keith Wood said he was handing out pamphlets from the Fully Informed Jury Association on Nov. 24 while standing on the sidewalks along Elm Street.

The Fully Informed Jury Association, and idea-terrorists of its ilk, promote the dangerous notion that Americans selected for jurors have a right — even an obligation — not just to follow the orders of judges, but to exercise their conscience and judgment in evaluating the state's exercise of power over individuals. Such incendiary nonsense threatens the very premise of our justice system, which is that jurors will act as obedient foot soldiers in the government's glorious and righteous efforts like the Great War on Drugs.

Read the whole thing.

Wisconsin's Neo Nazis

Bud Norman mentioned this Battering Rams in Wisconsin about the Nazi-syle reign of terror in Wisconsin against those who sided with Scott Walker.

This is America, where a citizen is free to express opinions and participate in politics without fear of retribution. That’s the way it’s supposed to be, but the ideal seems to be slipping away. The diminution of fresh speech is not just a matter of the increasingly confined parameters of polite opinion, enforced by boycotts and restricted career opportunities and the howling of mobs, or even the usual heavy hand of government, such as the harassment of conservative groups by the Internal Revenue Service or the politicized prosecutions by the Department of Justice or the extra regulatory scrutiny applied to those businesses donating to the wrong candidates. It has now come to the point that armed agents of the government have been invading homes, seizing property, and bullying ordinary citizens into silence for no reason other than their political beliefs.

If this sounds like the most far-fetched sort of paranoid right-wing fantasy, we’d urge you to read David French’s chilling article, headlined “Wisconsin’s Shame: ‘I Thought it Was a Home Invasion,'” at The National Review. Although there had already been scattered reports about the outrageous “John Doe Investigation” that a renegade prosecutor and a rubber-stamping judge had launched against various groups that supported Gov. Scott Walker’s efforts to reform the state’s collective bargaining laws regarding public sector unions, a fishing expedition which was eventually halted by a higher court that rightly considered it a clear attempt to intimidate the prosecutor’s political opponents into silence, only now are those targeted in the investigation coming forward with stories about doors being broken down with battering rams, computers being confiscated, children being terrified, neighbors being scandalized, and dozens of heavily armed police officers shouting warnings that no lawyers were to be contacted and no was to be told. The descriptions evoke Nazi-era Germany or the Soviet bloc, but it happened in Wisconsin, the birthplace of the “progressive movement.”

Norman notes that even though there has been some coverage of these outrages against innocent citizens exercising their free speech rights, the media - never a supporter of conservatives - is either spiking this story or continues to spread the smears of wrongdoing against Walker and his supporters.  That's why the rogue prosecutors and judges in Wisconsin went ahead with this, the media had their backs.

The NR article itself is more detailed: