Why the Ashli Babbitt Saga Isn't Going Away Anytime Soon
An unarmed 5'2" lady was no threat to anyone
The family of Ashli Babbitt, the only person who was killed on January 6, is filing a $30 million wrongful death suit against the government, according to CBS News. Babbitt was one of the individuals who entered the Capitol during the January 6 riot and was shot and killed by [black] Capitol Police Lt. Michael Byrd:
Ashli Babbitt was shot and killed Jan. 6, 2021, while she tried to climb through a broken door into the Speaker's Lobby outside the House Chamber, as a mob of dozens of supporters of then-President Donald Trump stormed the Capitol while lawmakers were preparing to certify the results of the 2020 election. The shooting was captured on cell phone video. Babbitt later died at a hospital.
In the lawsuit, which was filed Friday in federal court in Southern California, Babbitt's family claimed that she was unarmed and had her hands in the air when she was shot once by Capitol Police Lt. Michael Byrd.
"Ashli posed no threat to the safety of anyone," the lawsuit states, going on to claim that she was "ambushed" by the officer.
The lawsuit also argued that Byrd was "not in uniform," "did not identify himself as a police officer" and did not issue a warning before opening fire.
It’s the one officer-involved shooting the liberal media doesn’t want you to read a lot about since there are some peculiar circumstances concerning her death. The officer who shot and killed her was cleared reportedly without an interview, though Capitol Police maintain that Lt. Byrd acted following department policy on the use of deadly force. Her family even alleged that police ambushed her while adding that she was killed for “no good reason.” If this lawsuit gets dismissed, that’s one thing, but for now, this story isn’t going away as the family tries to find closure by placing this case on the federal docket.
Babbitt's shooting is part of the overreaction to this little riot. The Left views it as some turning point in American history, where extremist MAGA Republicans tried to overthrow the government in a moment that was worse than Pearl Harbor or the 9/11 Attacks. It wasn’t, and everyone who wasn’t mentally ill returned to their daily lives. It never caught on the way liberals thought, being viewed as more of a sideshow annoyance than some existential threat to our country. Meanwhile, as the 2024 election cycle gets going, Democrats are trying to remove Donald Trump from ballots nationwide despite not being charged with insurrection. So, who’s the real threat to the country?
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2024/01/08/the-ashli-babbit-saga-isnt-going-away-n2633309
**************************************************Speaker Johnson Is Right, Free Market Should Set Drug Prices, Not Government
A Reuters report released just days ago uncovered that America’s leading drugmakers are raising prices yet again. Due to industry greed, the American people can expect to see more than 140 brands of drugs increase in cost over the next month.
Prior to the increase, on average, pharmaceutical costs were higher in the United States than in any other country in the world. According to Bloomberg, Americans spend about $1,300 per year on pharmaceuticals. For a year’s supply of a newly launched drug, the costs have risen to $220,000 per year, an increase of more than 20% from 2021.
The most infuriating of the announced price hikes came from Pfizer. The $167 billion company routinely receives government-guaranteed business, including $2 billion from Operation Warp Speed. It has so much money that its CEO receives an average of $17.4 million in annual bonuses. Yet, it still has the audacity to raise the prices of its products.
It is one thing when drugmakers decide to raise prices independently; however, it is quite another when they seek to use government force to help them do so. Unfortunately, that is exactly what is happening now.
In 2022, the Pharmaceutical Research Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), the trade association that represents all the major drugmakers, contributed $52 million to “political campaigns and nonprofits, patient groups, universities and other organizations.” In the first nine months of 2023, PhRMA spent $21 million on just federal lobbying, ranking as the fourth highest in the nation.
The group recently hired more lobbying firepower, YC Consulting, in an effort to convince Congress to pass regulations on pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), entities that health plan sponsors hire to negotiate against drugmakers to keep the cost of prescriptions down.
Fortunately for consumers, PBMs are amazingly effective in keeping the cost of prescriptions as low as possible. The data shows they save each consumer an average of $1,040 annually.
Because of this successful track record, Seema Verma, the Trump Administration CMS Administrator, said she is very thankful that the federal government uses PBMs to lower prescription drug costs. Unfortunately, pharmaceutical companies are not very enthused by the successful record of PBMs. This is why they are desperately trying to neutralize the effectiveness of PBMs through regulation.
Hopefully, this situation is tailor-made for the new Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson (R-LA). Throughout his career in Congress, Johnson has been opposed to such special interest power plays. Johnson has lined up squarely against Big Pharma’s special interest legislative agenda. The reason is simple: he believes the free market should determine drug prices, not government bureaucrats that conspire with crony capitalist corporations and their affiliated trade associations. Imagine that!
PhRMA is hoping they can influence Speaker Johnson because the lobbyist they just signed used to work for him when he served as the chairman of the Republican Study Committee. However, this is not how the new Speaker of the House operates. The main characteristic of his career in Congress is that he is grounded in conservative principles and is not pressured by powerful interests.
In November, Speaker Johnson hired Drew Keyes, another former staffer from the Republican Study Committee, as his top healthcare policy adviser. He made this selection because of his confidence in Keyes as someone he can trust.
In fact, this summer, Keyes, then a think tank staffer, wrote an opinion piece titled “Congress Should Not Do the Bidding of a Dying Trade Association.” The trade association he referenced was, of course, PhRMA.
As Keyes noted, the PBM Transparency Act is a crony giveaway to drugmakers who “desperately [point] the finger away from themselves and towards PBMs” when it comes to discussing the reason for high drug costs in America. He wrote, “When three pharmaceutical company executives sat with their PBM rivals at a recent Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) committee hearing chaired by Senator Bernie Sanders, their biggest critic, they desperately pointed the finger away from themselves and toward PBMs. The next day, Sanders’ committee marked up a bill to significantly increase federal regulation of PBMs.”
Keyes correctly identified the problem, writing, “Falling for Big Pharma’s blame game by targeting PBMs won’t help everyday Americans get the care they need. That’s what Congress needs to understand.”
It would have been easy for Keyes to take “donation” money from this fourth-largest lobbying entity in the country and peddle PhRMA’s misleading talking points about PBMs, but he chose to advance the truth instead. This is exactly why Speaker Johnson hired him to a key position on his staff. More members of Congress need to follow his lead and not be afraid to show lobbyists the door.
PhRMA is not accustomed to members of Congress in leadership positions rejecting its advances. With House Speaker Mike Johnson, it would behoove them to accept this new reality.
Thank goodness House Republicans have a new Speaker who is a principled conservative. For PhRMA, it is time to put the checkbooks away and engage in serious policy discussions about the best course of action for the American people.
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Biden Admin Reverses Decision to Tear Down William Penn Statue
The Biden administration has backed off and decided not to demolish a statue of William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania.
In case you haven’t been following the latest in the war on history, the National Park Service announced over the weekend that it would be removing the famous Quaker’s statue from in front of his historic home in Philadelphia as part of a supposed “rehabilitation” of the site.
It was trying to pull this off even as Vice President Kamala Harris was posting on X, apparently with no sense of irony, about how “extremists” are trying to “erase” history.
Clearly, the only “history” this administration won’t erase is one warped by ideology to fit the narrative of how America has been such a bad, awful place.
After the move to topple Penn was announced, there was a firestorm of anger on X. The National Park Service account got blasted. After a few days of anger, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, announced that the Biden administration would halt the demolition project.
It’s good news, I guess, but I won’t exactly celebrate this decision. That’s like celebrating a thief who, when he discovers a homeowner is armed, decides not to burglarize the house.
It’s shameful that removing Penn’s statue was even considered. The National Park Service didn’t even really give a specific reason. The only justification was that it was done for the purpose of making a more “inclusive experience for visitors.”
The Park Service said, according to Fox News, that it would be working with representatives from “the Haudenosaunee, the Delaware Nation, the Delaware Tribe of Indians, the Shawnee Tribe and the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma” to make changes.
This is a clear demonstration of how the ideology of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” is often the opposite of the literal definition of those three words. “Inclusion,” according to DEI, actually means removing what Hillary Clinton would call “deplorables”—whether living or dead—from society, so that the “oppressed” no longer have to think of their existence.
It’s why Christ Church in Alexandria, Virginia, removed plaques for Robert E. Lee and George Washington in 2017 in the name of “inclusion.”
Inclusion means exclusion.
What’s interesting about Penn is that in addition to founding Pennsylvania as a colony, he was responsible for a treaty among Pennsylvania colonists and local tribes intended to establish just and amicable relations between the peoples.
That treaty created the so-called long peace in Pennsylvania that lasted for more than half a century. That’s a considerable accomplishment, given the complicated nature of relations between people of vastly different cultures and forms of government.
Don’t think this fact will prevent Penn from ultimately being erased, however. As we’ve seen with countless other figures, pretty much any historical figure alive more than two weeks ago can be canceled for not upholding the ever-changing standards of the modern Left.
They certainly didn’t seem to care about that fact when they first decided to tear Penn down. It didn’t matter. This was an exercise of raw power.
What really saved the statue from oblivion wasn’t the good sense of left-wing bureaucrats. It was the power of social media and politics.
If it weren’t for the story going viral and likely embarrassing Democrats in a swing state during an election year, the woke bureaucratic scrubbing of America’s past would have continued apace.
It certainly wouldn’t be surprising, if President Joe Biden were to win the 2024 election, for the statue to come down anyway. Or, alternatively, to have a plaque installed next to it shaming Penn for all his purported sins against modernity.
The war on history has moved on from the activist street phase of 2020. The Left no longer needs literal mobs to pull down statues. Instead, they can rely on the vast federal apparatus to erase and rewrite the past to conform to the ideology of DEI. Whether that’s done through the National Archives, the Smithsonian, the National Park Service, or any other agency, the game plan is the same.
And they won’t stop until they are met by the soft power of X (thanks to Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter) and the hard power of electoral politics.
Arguments and reason don’t matter to these revolutionaries. They will take down every statue if they can—Confederate, Unionist, Founding Father, Quaker colonist, whatever. It’s all part of the same history of what they see as a shameful nation, built on nothing but oppression and systemic racism.
If you still think this is just about Confederates or if you are wasting your time arguing about the Civil War, then I’ve got a bridge being blockaded by pro-Palestinian activists to sell you in Brooklyn.
The Biden administration’s reversal is a good sign. It means that the Jacobins who have marched forth from our elite universities to transform every American institution are still in some way accountable to the American people.
But this victory is like Dunkirk. We’ve only managed to save one statue, one shred of our history. That doesn’t mean we are winning the war, nor does it mean the Biden administration will halt its efforts at cultural transformation.
Remember, just a few weeks ago they tore down a memorial to the Confederate dead in Arlington National Cemetery meant to recognize reconciliation between Americans. It’s emblematic of what they would like to do to anyone who questions “our democracy”—meaning the left-wing values they insist we all adopt, or else.
This war will be won when the iconoclasts won’t touch a single statue, and when every attempt to take one down is opposed, ridiculed, and rejected.
It will be won when, instead of even thinking about tearing down our history, we put up new statues to the Founding Fathers and the countless great Americans who, whatever their human faults, transformed a sparsely populated set of colonies at the edge of the world into the most powerful and prosperous country on the planet.
The only reasonable response to fanatics—and that’s really what they are—is to be unreasonable. Don’t give an inch. We still have the tools to fight back. All we need to do is to be willing to fight.
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Black Democrat Tells a Big Lie to Pin White Supremacy on Trump
During an interview with CNN this week, top Biden surrogate and Democratic Congressman James Clyburn said it was "fair" to tie President Donald Trump to the June 2015 Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church massacre in Charleston, South Carolina.
Clyburn made this claim despite Trump not being the president at the time. President Obama was still in the White House, but Clyburn shamelessly left that detail out. He also refused to note that the FBI failed to prevent the perpetrator from purchasing a firearm despite being ineligible to do so.
"A judge in South Carolina this week excoriated the Federal Bureau of Investigation, describing in a court order a parade of errors and a series of 'abysmally poor policy choices' that allowed Dylann S. Roof to unlawfully buy the gun that he used to kill nine African-American people in a Charleston church in 2015," the New York Times reported. "The court order described what F.B.I. officials had acknowledged less than a month after the shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church: Mr. Roof, who was 21 at the time, had been allowed to buy the .45-caliber handgun he used in the killings in April 2015 despite having previously admitted to drug possession, which should have disqualified him from making the purchase."
Meanwhile, President Joe Biden is back on the campaign trail and fear mongering about race.
During a visit to the church this week, Biden made a political speech and a number of false claims about his "work" in the civil rights movement. As a reminder, Biden proudly attended the funeral of KKK leader and Democratic Senator Robert Byrd in 2010.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
<> http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See
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