The Friday Letter / #500 / July 8, 2022
True, the situation is mostly dire. Just yesterday the only non-establishment news network discovered that the China threat is real. Welcome to Realville, Fox News. The legacy media are too busy impeaching President Trump for the third time to bother.
We don't need to catalog all the nefarious schemes the Left is using to destroy the country. Most of these are well known to people who actually read reliable news reports and thoughtful (as in logically and fairly argued) commentary.
Let's talk instead of who's coming to the rescue: women. We're not talking about the hysterical purple-haired females who aren't even sure what sex they are who are screaming in the streets and threatening to kill anyone who disagrees with them.
We are talking about tough, principled, informed, prepared women who are fed up with the nonsense. Step aside Mitt Romney, Mitch McConnell, Susan Collins, John Cornyn, Lindsey Graham, Bill Cassidy, Lisa Murkowski, Shelly Moore Capito, Joni Ernst, Todd Young, Liz Cheney, Asa Hutchinson, Kristie Noem, Larry Hogan, and some others. The New Republican Party has arrived and will steamroll you if you don't get out of the way. Another party might appeal to you more, the Democrats.
Ironic, isn't it, that of the actual legitimate votes in 2020, Donald Trump is said to have lost because of suburban women, especially college-educated single women who look to Mother Government for safety and security, the anti-self protection, anti-self-reliance crowd.
Because activist-feminist women gravitate to other women as role models, these women look to Maxine Waters, Shelia Jackson Lee, Sandi Cortez, Ilhan Ohmar, Kamala Harris, “Doctor” Jill Biden, Michelle Obama, Pocahontas, and a host of ignorant ideologues in the Biden cabinet such as Jennifer Granholm as inspiration for the wonderful things this administration is doing to us. Pathetic.
Ladies, may I introduce Harriet Hageman. She's running in the Wyoming GOP primary against anti-Trump Liz Cheney, vowing to “fight back against big government bureaucrats who want to manage our lands, control our lives, and dictate what we are allowed to think and say.”
Can you imagine hearing words like this from wimpish Republicans like Mitt Romney or Mitch McConnell? Let her speak for herself in this 11-minute video: Hageman at Trump rally.
This introduces the new breed of constitutional conservative woman. There are others: Kelly Tshibaka, running to unseat liberal Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska (scores 33 out of 100 by Heritage Action for America), and Kari Lake, hoping to become Arizona's next governor. And of course Sarah Palin, the target of a failed attempt by Saturday Night Live and the national media to portray her as a clownish doofus, running for Alaska's lone House seat.
Lake, a Fox News affiliate reporter for 22 years, has all the bona-fides of a constitutional conservative: total opposition by the establishment press including most of Arizona's and the Fox News Channel. “Republicans, please don't nominate Kari Lake for Arizona governor,” a Washington Post headline reads.
These are the hard-chargers who will save the Republic and the Republican Party. They are incorruptible, and that, more than anything else, is what this country needs.
Houston, we have a problem
The search for causes of rising violent crime in the U.S. leads to two suspects: incompetence and leftist ideology. Their presence is prominent in our largest cities where murder is ingrained in the culture: Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, St. Louis, and Baltimore, every one of them ruled by Democrats, every one whose prosecuting attorneys were put in power with money from America-hating, Jew-hating Marxist Hungarian immigrant George Soros.
Just as it takes hydrogen and oxygen to make water, rising violent crime needs incompetent rulers with a deep hatred of our society and the unwillingness to enforce existing law.
To get a handle on this, we looked at Houston, whose 195 homicides as of June 3 just exceeded the 2021 tally of 192. We contrast this with the higher-profile crime capital of Chicago, whose 223 homicides through May 24 are down slightly from last year and 2020 but still higher than in 2019 and 2018.
We don't have current figures on Chicago's 2022 murder production, but the number doesn't include the seven shot dead at the Highland Park suburb's Independence Day parade by a 21-year-old deranged psychopath whose advertised intentions on social media were ignored, or the death toll from the City of Chicago's 71 holiday shootings, seven of them fatal.
Violence in Chicago is no surprise. Long ruled by the corrupt Democrat machine, Chicago is now under the thumb of a grossly incompetent mayor who has no concept of or experience in running a large organization., evidenced by her 90-officer security detail in a time where the undermanned Chicago Police Department has lost more than 1,100 officers grown weary of being shot in the last year.
(You may remember that Mayor Lori Lightfoot had her hair fixed during the CCP coronavirus lockdown when her subjects were ordered to shelter in place. She exempted herself because of the importance of looking good to her constituents.)
Astonishing as it seems, Chicago voters obviously make no connection between the politicians they put in office and what results on the streets. This is a common fault of voters in Democrat-controlled cities. To date, the city has 342 homicides, which, the website heyjackass.com notes, translates to a shooting every two hours and 34 minutes, with a fatality every 13 hours and six minutes.
Houston and Harris County lack Chicago's storied crime history, but they are making a run for it. A cause-effect relationship is hard to dispute: The timeline can roughly be traced to 2016, when Soros-backed Kim Ogg was elected Harris County Prosecuting Attorney. One of her early acts was to call for a loosening of bail requirements for most misdemeanors including most drug offenses.
Her easy-on-crime stance was supported by a federal lawsuit brought by a woman who had been stopped for driving with a suspended license but stayed in jail until her trial because she didn't have the $250 bail money. In 2017 U.S. District Judge Lee Rosenthal ordered that virtually everyone accused of a misdemeanor, including shoplifting and driving with an invalid license, be released without paying bond.
The parties reached a consent degree in 2019 under the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Except for six “carve-out” charges, misdemeanor defendants must be released on personal bond after their arrest. The reasoning was that bail discriminates against the poor, particularly blacks and Latinos, who often spend weeks or months in jail awaiting trial for no other reason than the inability to post bail.
Official reports claim the system is working, a ridiculous claim in that 40 percent have been no-shows since bail change was made. A March report at Houston Public Media says misdemeanor arrests declined from 62,000 in 2015 to 49,828 in 2021, “a drop of near 20%.”
These numbers can be misleading, however. What's not known is why arrests have declined. Is it that defendants have a better attitude now that they don't have to make punishing bail, or is it that Houston Police have grown tired of arresting people only to see them walk free within hours, many of them never to reappear for hearings – until they offend again?
We wanted to ask Prosecuting Attorney Kim Ogg that question but did not get a response. Houston news media have quoted her as pointing out that it's the judges who make the bail decisions, not she.
“Bond reform and the backlog with Harris County courts are two key reasons that are helping fuel the crisis that is concerning for law enforcement,” Click2Houston said in noting that Houston's 57 homicides in January trailed only Chicago's 61. The pace has slowed since then, but through March 16 the city had 103 homicides, up by 13 percent from 91 in the same period a year earlier.
Andy Kahan has an idea of what is behind Houston's violence. The director of victim services for Crime Stoppers of Houston, Kahan has been tracking the relationship between bail bonds and homicides since 2019. His research revealed a disturbing pattern of defendants being released on bond. In most cases, he said, Harris County murder suspects were defendants who had been released on multiple felony bonds, had a bond forfeiture reinstated, had a motion to revoke bond denied, or had been released on a personal recognizance or PR bond.
Predictably, Harris County's leaders blame guns for the murders, not the people who commit them. And following the May 24 massacre in Ulvalde, Democrat Robert O'Rourke became hysterical at Gov. Abbott's press conference, demanding that guns be outlawed despite the killer having advertised his intentions on social media.
“All of this crime started with the chief judge in the Southern District of Texas,” says a retired Harris County lawyer who spoke with The Friday Letter on the condition of anonymity. “It was all about bail bond reform, the concern that we discriminate against poor defendants – primarily black and Hispanic defendants – that we have a bail bond system that favors rich people over poor people and discriminates against minorities.” The plaintiffs were women who had been charged with misdemeanors, he said.
“We've had people who get arrested for killing a cop and they get a $2,000 bond and their buddies come around and bond them out and they are back out on the street,” says the longtime Houstonian. “Police arrest people, bring them to court, and either the judge dismisses it or the prosecutor dismisses it. Low bond, it's a revolving door. So we don't have a defund the police system. We don't need one. Instead, there's no support for the police activities from the administration or the media.”
Rising crime goes hand-in-hand with the left's massive campaign to turn Texas into a blue state, says Bob Shealor, a retired human resources executive who has lived in Houston since 1976. Harris County is now under Democrat control, and its leaders – typical of Democrat politicians – are not schooled or experienced in running large organizations. They are highly skilled at winning elections.
Lena Hidalgo is the elected county administrator with the title of judge.
“She's never been in charge of anything important in her whole life, but she does have an education,” says Shealor. “All of a sudden she is the county judge in charge of running a bureaucracy overseeing four or five million people. We have floods, freezes, traffic jams and road problems on and on and on, and she's in charge of fix and repair. It's been an absolute disaster.”
Earlier this year federal agents raided Hidalgo's office over voting irregularities in a recent local election in which the ballots still have not been properly accounted for. “Is it fraud or incompetence?” Shealor asked. “Probably both. I think they tried to commit fraud and they messed it up. They got it twisted up and couldn't present it to the public because they would have been caught and put in jail. So they tried to bury the problem.”
In 2020, a real estate research firm called Neighborhood Scout gave Houston a Crime Index rating of 3, explaining that Houston is “safer than 3 percent of U.S. Cities.” That means Houston is less safer than 97 percent of them. It reported 12.82 violent crimes per 100,000 residents, compared with 4.2 in Texas and a national median of 4. For the year, Houston had 205 crimes per square mile, against the national median of 26.9 and 27 throughout Texas.
That was the year Kim Ogg was re-elected Harris County District Attorney, after she had made good on her promise to eliminate bail for lower-level misdemeanors including marijuana violations. But under the broken windows concept, crime escalates upward. Two weeks into January, Houston had 26 murders, compared with 16 for the same period in 2021.
“We can attribute this back to the issue of letting people out of jail, not holding people accountable for their actions,” Doug Griffith, president of the Houston Police Officers’ Union., told Click2houston.
“This woke commissioner's court wants to treat offenders like they are the victims,” the retired county government attorney told The Friday Letter. “They want to give them vouchers to get a taxi to come to court, phone calls to remind them of their court date. When you look at the nightly news, you have a violent offense and no suspect in custody, they never mention the offender's race. The overwhelming number of violent offenses committed in Harris County are committed by blacks and Hispanics. And a lot of it is black on black.”
The lies of liberalism (continued)
Or, corrections that somehow never get made. “A woman's ability to obtain an abortion is no longer protected under the Constitution” reads an MSNBC subhead. Sorry, MSNBC, the right to an abortion was never in the Constitution. In fact, the right to an abortion was never federal law, law defined as legislation passed by a legislature. The right to an abortion was a ruling, not a law. Obama's House and Senate majorities in 2009 had the opportunity to federalize the right but passed.
A visit down Memory Lane to a story from the Jan. 11, 2021, Washington Post reveals this utterly false statement: “On Wednesday, Officer Brian D. Sisnick died of injuries sustained while fighting off the 'Stop the Steal' mob that had breached the Capitol while lawmakers were certifying the presidential vote.”
Sorry WaPo, Officer Sisnick died of a stroke the day after the incident, not from any injury. As far as we can tell, the Post never corrected this false statement, or claims in other stories that Sisnick was struck with a fire extinguisher. Made up, 100 percent.
Short takes on the news
Hidin' from Biden. Rep. Tim Ryan, running for the U.S. Senate from Ohio, has voted against Biden-supported legislation exactly zero times. In his busy-busy-busy campaign against Trump-endorsed conservative J.D. Vance, Tim examined his schedule for Wednesday and discovered that he just couldn't fit attending Biden's speech into it. Biden came to Cleveland trying to stop the bleeding of working-class voters from the Democrat Party.
Biden's legacy: Divide the nation
House Republicans dismiss the Biden State Department's appointment of a “woke czar” as another wedge to divide the nation – “a radical, progressive agenda the American consistently reject.”
Desirée Cormier Smith is the first “special representative” for the State Department’s “Equity Action Plan,” Just the News reports. In podcast interviews, Smith called white American diplomats racist and mocked President Reagan's 1989 “city upon a hill” speech, taken from Matthew 5:
“You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. . . Let your light shine before others so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.”
Recommended reading
“Oil from U.S. Reserves Sent Overseas as Gasoline Prices Stay High”
Reuters, reported at U.S. News & World Report
At some point one must ask what are actual, legitimate grounds for a president's impeachment. We have seen two (three if you count the current House show trial) cases of impeachment on purely partisan political grounds. What about a real threat to our national defense?
Arathy Somasekhar reports that Biden's handlers have sent more than 5 million barrels of crude oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to countries in Europe and Asia, including China. The reserves are now at their lowest point since 1986. Meanwhile, gasoline remains historically high in the U.S.
“Illinois Has All the Gun Laws Republican Senators Caved To Push States Into, and That Didn’t Stop the Highland Park Killer”
Jordan Boyd at The Federalist
Is this an act of braggadocio? A state's attorney assured the press that red flag laws are working well in Illinois, even though the country's toughest gun control laws failed to stop a 21-year-old psychopath well known to police from killing seven and injuring at least 30 others at the Independence Day parade in Highland Park. Eric Rinehart “praised his state’s gun laws and called for a national ban on certain types of firearms,” Boyd writes.
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