Trial Of Mann v. Steyn, Part III: More On Damages; Simberg And Steyn's First Witness

February 02, 2024/ Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian

Readers seem to be enjoying my posts on the Mann v. Steyn trial, so I’m going to continue with one more today. Meanwhile, the court does not hold trials on Fridays, so the proceeding has recessed for the weekend, to resume Monday morning. It’s likely that the trial will get very interesting next week, as the defendants present the heart of their case and as things wrap up. In the interim, I’ll provide some comments on the events yesterday, which was the 11th day of the trial.

My previous post on Wednesday, January 31, was devoted mostly to the issue of plaintiff Mann’s claimed damages in the case. The post described what I found to be an extremely odd back and forth during Mann’s own testimony, where it emerged that Mann during the discovery process had provided three different, inconsistent and contradictory interrogatory answers on the topic of his main theory of damages, namely that he had lost grant funding due to the defamation. 

After initially being confronted on cross-examination with an interrogatory answer where he had refused to provide any list of allegedly lost grants and said the whole subject was “irrelevant,” Mann then on re-direct (highly unusual) attempted to use a second interrogatory answer as a basis for quantifying his damages from lost grants; only then to be confronted with a third interrogatory answer, which he had never mentioned under questioning by his own lawyer, where he had changed most of the numbers in the second answer, in the most notable case reducing the claimed loss from over $9 million to only about $100,000.

Well, it turns out that that oddity became the subject of extensive argument before the judge, in parts of the trial that were not broadcast to the public viewers. Yesterday, in connection with Mann resting his case, Steyn filed with the court something called a “Motion for Sanctions for Bad-Faith Trial Misconduct” against Mann, addressing many issues about the claimed damages and Mann’s proof of same. Steyn made a copy of that document available via a link on his website. The document gives much history of the subject of Mann’s damages claim in the case, including events that occurred at parts of the trial that have not been broadcast publicly. The document, only 11 pages long, makes for very entertaining reading if you have the time.

But first, some background. The law of defamation is one of the more complex subjects of American law. It arises under state rather than federal law (with D.C. defamation law arising out of D.C.’s role as a state/local governing entity, rather than out of federal law), and differs substantially from state to state. And then there is an overlay of Supreme Court case law interpreting the First Amendment to the federal Constitution, thus impacting the law in every state.

One of the truly odd quirks of defamation law is that some defamation cases require proof of what are called “special damages,” while others permit juries to make arbitrary awards of “general damages.” “Special damages,” are particular items of monetary harm that can be traced to the defendant’s defamation. These could include, for example, lost wages, or expenses of publicizing true statements to counter the libel, or maybe even the cost of mental health treatment or therapy. 

Mann’s lost grants, if he could prove that that occurred and resulted from the defamation, would be an example of “special damages.” “General damages,” sometimes also called “presumed damages” in the defamation context, are rather some number that a jury can pluck out of the air to compensate a plaintiff for alleged loss of the inchoate value of reputation. They are analogous to damages in a personal injury case, where a jury can select an arbitrary figure to compensate a plaintiff, for example, for loss of a limb, or even for just general “pain and suffering.” Of the $83 million that E. Jean Carroll just got awarded in her case against Trump, about $18 million was in the category of “general” or “presumed” damages, while the rest were punitive damages. Apparently, the court in the Carroll/Trump case determined that proof of “special” damages was not required. An appeals court may not agree with that.

I strongly suspect, without being sure, that Mann’s case against Steyn is within the category that requires a finding of at least some “special” damages. This is a subject that is difficult to research, and even if you research it you can’t necessarily get a definitive answer. There may well be quirks of D.C. defamation law that bear on this. 

In any event, it is likely that the court has made some ruling on this subject in the course of the 12 years that the case has been kicking around, because such a ruling would be important to guide the parties in what evidence to present at trial. If there is such a ruling, it may or may not stick on appeal. I have tried to find out if there is such a ruling, but unfortunately, even though I subscribe to the online document access system of the federal courts, the D.C. Superior Court for some reason apparently does not participate in that system. However, from the fact that Mann felt under an obligation to present evidence as to lost grants, I think it is highly likely that he has reason to believe — whether from D.C. case law or a prior ruling from this court or both — that he has an obligation to prove at least some “special” damages.

So here is the introduction to Steyn’s latest brief:

“Stunning.” That is the word this Court used to describe the conduct of Plaintiff Michael E. Mann’s counsel at trial on Monday, January 29, 2024. Trial Tr. (1/31/24 PM) 41. On that day, Plaintiff’s counsel presented to the jury evidence concerning Dr. Mann’s claimed loss of grant funding—evidence counsel knew was not true. Plaintiff’s counsel published to the jury an exhibit and elicited testimony from their client concerning Dr. Mann’s alleged grant loss. But, as Plaintiff’s counsel knew, most of the information on the exhibit was wrong, including information about the dollar amounts of the allegedly lost grants.

Plaintiff’s counsel knew that the evidence they offered to the jury was false because it was based on a 2020 discovery response concerning Dr. Mann’s grant-loss claim that counsel had been obliged to revise very dramatically just last year (2023). At trial on the 29th, Plaintiff’s counsel chose to present the wildly misleading and deceptive 2020 data, which counsel for Defendant Rand Simberg had to correct on cross-examination. The difference between the incorrect 2020 data and the corrected 2023 data was striking. This Court noted that “One entry was for nine million, and then it was significantly reduced to something a little over a hundred thousand.” Trial Tr. (1/31/24 PM) 45. On the tenth day of this jury trial, January 31, 2024, this Court asked the parties to address Plaintiff’s falsification of key damages testimony. . . .

As this Court stated, “clearly, the plaintiff was aware that the jury was being presented with an exhibit that contained incorrect information.” Trial Tr. (1/31/24 PM) 42. “And you wanted the jury to take that back to the jury room and deliberate on those figures.”

The portions of those excerpts that reflect the judge’s remarks had not been broadcast to the members of the public watching the trial online. In his submission, Steyn argues that the court should impose sanctions on Mann and his counsel for his bad faith submission of false evidence, with potential sanctions ranging up to and including complete dismissal of the claims and award of attorneys’ fees to Steyn:

What Dr. Mann and his counsel did amounts to bad-faith misconduct. . . . Rule 3.3 of the D.C. Rules of Professional Responsibility provides that “(a) A lawyer shall not knowingly ... (4) Offer evidence that the lawyer knows to be false ....” See Tibbs v. United States, 628 A.2d 638, 640 (D.C. 2010) (“In the District of Columbia, as in every other jurisdiction of which we are aware, an attorney has a duty not to present false testimony to a court.”). . . . Dr. Mann is also responsible for the admission of the false evidence. He knew the 2020 information was false but did not say so on the stand when his counsel questioned him. The truth came out only on cross-examination.

I have no idea what Mann’s or his counsel’s response to these matters may be. Experience teaches me that no matter how completely cornered your adversaries may appear to be, they always come up with something that at least sounds plausible. However, in this brief Steyn quotes Mann’s lawyers when confronted by the judge himself on this very issue (again, in a portion of the trial that was not broadcast to the public viewers):

[W]hen the Court confronted counsel with their presentation of false and misleading evidence to the jury, counsel was unrepentant. Instead of owning what they did, lead counsel John Williams doubled down and asserted that they did not present false evidence to the jury. See, e.g., Trial Tr. (1/31/24 PM) 43–44 (“Mr. Williams: No, Your Honor. Please. The numbers on the board were accurate. There had been earlier mistakes that were corrected, and that’s why we gave them the correct numbers.”). Counsel claimed that he was right and the Court was confused. See id. at 45 (Mr. Williams: “So I am sorry that there was confusion on your part, and we will certainly correct it.”) (emphasis added).

Meanwhile, in the part of the trial actually shown to the viewers at home, the main show on Thursday was the testimony of the defense expert witness Abraham Wyner, Professor of Statistics at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania — the same university where Mann teaches.

The key opinions offered by Wyner — that Mann had “manipulated” the data in creating his Hockey Stick graph, and that the graph was “misleading” — had already come out on Wednesday. The direct testimony on Thursday was devoted to going into the details of the basis for those opinions. There was much technical detail in the presentation; however, the gist was that the uncertainties inherent in the data were far greater than what Mann had presented. As a result, Wyner testified, the error range shown on Mann’s Hockey Stick graphs from several papers was much too narrow. And thus, contrary to Mann’s graph, it was not possible to say from the data that time periods hundreds of years ago definitively were cooler than the present.

One of the last questions put to Wyner on direct was whether any statistician on behalf of Mann had offered an opinion contrary to his. Wyner said he was not aware of that. (And indeed, Mann had not offered an expert witness on these statistical issues during his direct case.)

I found the cross of Wyner to be singularly ineffective, although perhaps the jury might find otherwise. The heart of the cross was to confront Wyner with criticisms of his Hockey Stick-related work expressed by other authors in published papers. It emerged that Wyner had published his criticism of Mann’s Hockey Stick papers in a journal article in 2011; and the editor of the journal had decided that this would be a good subject for an entire issue of the journal. So Wyner’s article became the first piece in this issue of the journal, followed by multiple pieces discussing or criticizing Wyner’s article, and followed finally by an article called the “Rejoinder,” where Wyner responded to all the criticisms. 

One by one, Mann’s lawyer confronted Wyner with the various criticisms from this journal. As to some, Wyner said that the criticism was wrong, and explained why. As to others, he said that the criticism did not go to the heart of his opinion as to why Mann’s work was misleading. And as to still others, Wyner said he did not recall that criticism. In each case, Mann’s lawyer simply read the criticism of Wyner from the article, took whatever Wyner said in response, and moved on to the next item. He never went deeply enough into any issue for an intelligent listener to form any view as to who might be right or wrong on this issue.

Expect more on this trial next week. Meanwhile, I’ll post on something else over this weekend.

Ukraine Finds Mass Theft of US Funding Support

Who’s minding the US taxpayer dollars flooding into Ukraine?

by Dave Patterson | Feb 2, 2024 @ Liberty Nation News Tags: Articles, Military Affairs, Opinion

Ukraine has found fraud in funding support provided by the United States. Shocking. Ammunition-starved Ukrainian troops struggle with Russian invaders on the front line, deprived of mortar and other artillery shells. At the same time, crooked Ukrainian officials are evidently stealing the desperately needed material. The Biden administration tried to establish solid funding controls, but Congress finally took the issue into its own hands, appointing a Special Inspector General for Ukraine Operation Atlantic Resolve.

Lax Controls and Crooked Bureaucrats in Ukraine

Liberty Nation explained in its report “Biden Wants Less Oversight on Ukraine Spending” that lax financial controls over military assistance to a foreign nation leads to a playground for unscrupulous actors. “This reluctance of the White House to have transparency on its Ukraine ‘as long as it takes’ assistance strategy raises the question of what is there to hide,” LN reported. Well, now we know.

On January 28, Reuters revealed:

“Ukraine’s SBU security service said on Saturday [January 27] it had uncovered a corruption scheme in the purchase of arms by the country’s military totaling the equivalent of about $40 million. The announcement of mass procurement fraud, confirmed by Ukraine’s Defense Ministry, will have a huge resonance in a country beleaguered by Russia’s nearly two-year-old invasion.”

The Kyiv government has felt pressure from the European Union and others to identify and eliminate corruption in the administration of massive amounts of foreign weapons and ammunition. Fighting against the Kremlin’s unprovoked attack has left the country’s forces in a defensive stance in much of the eastern region. Trading artillery barrages eats through stockpiles rapidly. Back at the Pentagon, the narrative remained consistent. Congress has to appropriate more money for increased military assistance to Ukraine. Defense Department public affairs spokesman US Air Force Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder lamented in a press briefing that the lack of funding “prevents us from meeting Ukraine’s most urgent battlefield needs to include things like artillery rounds, anti-tank weapons, air, [and] air defense interceptors.” But without proper accountability for what the United States sends, these resources are in jeopardy of theft by Ukrainian bureaucrats.

“Ukraine’s security service said members of the defense ministry conspired with members of a Ukrainian arms firm to embezzle the funds, which were meant to purchase 100,000 mortar shells,” according to Anders Hagstrom, writing for Fox News. Reports tell of Ukraine soldiers firing up to 7,000 artillery rounds per day; a portion of those were mortar. But 100,000 mortar shells are a substantial quantity. Just one incident of embezzlement prevented soldiers from using mortar tubes in the fight for a few more months. That’s a long time when facing daily contact with the Russian enemy.

Congress Authorized a Special Inspector General

Even though Congress authorized the current Department of Defense Inspector General to take over the responsibilities of the Special Inspector General for Ukraine Operation Atlantic Resolve, there is no information that he is in place in Kyiv and doing the job. In its report “Biden Team Failed to Track $1 Billion in Ukraine Aid,” Liberty Nation described the situation: “According to firsthand reports from inside Ukraine, no US inspector is resident in the country, a glaring shortfall.”

Americans should not expect intense oversight any time soon. The $40 million “mass fraud” and embezzlement the Ukraine government uncovered is a drop in the bucket compared to the billions that are exposed to corruption. The Biden administration desperately needs to be a better steward of  taxpayer dollars.

The views expressed are those of the author and not of any other affiliation.

 

Read More From Dave Patterson

 

The Washington Post Grades Biden’s Economy on a Curve

February 2, 2024 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty

I rarely comment about media bias, but sometimes there is an example that demands attention.

For today’s column, I want to examine a four-question quiz on the Biden economy put together by the Washington Post.

The first indication of bias is that every answer was the one that made Biden look good (or less bad).

Sort of like a quiz asking if communists killed 1 billion people, 500 million people, or 100 million. The fact that the right answer is that they “only” killed 100 million is hardly a ringing endorsement of Marx’s evil ideology.

But another problem is that some of the questions also were steroid-fueled examples of grading on a curve. For instance, based on Question #1, we’re supposed to be impressed that the United States has grown faster than Europe’s decrepit welfare states.

For what it’s worth, growing faster than France, Italy, and Greece is not exactly something to celebrate, as you might imagine.

Question #4 also is designed to make Biden look good by comparing job creation during his tenure to what happened under Trump and Obama.

Yet beating Obama is hardly a major achievement, and the Trump numbers are very distorted because Trump and Fauci shut down the economy during the pandemic.

Biden should have spectacular job numbers, if only because the pandemic meant there were still millions of missing jobs when he took office.

Yet his policies have contributed to relatively weak performance, particularly when looking at labor-force participation.

Suffice to say, Biden would not look good if his job numbers were compared were compared to market-friendly presidents like Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.

There were two other questions, which also were biased but not to the absurd level as the ones described above.

• Question #2 implies that Biden has done a good job because gas prices have only increased by 75 cents a gallon rather than going up by $1 or $2. Sort of like saying a diet is successful if you’re gaining two pounds a week rather than five pounds.
• Question #3 implies that Biden has done a good job because wages have almost risen as fast as inflation. Needless to say, the fact that there as been zero inflation-adjusted wage growth is actually a damning indictment of Bidenomics.

Here’s how the Post described the quiz.

The past few years have been tumultuous, with a deadly pandemic, a recession, an inflation spike and overseas wars. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Americans give President Biden low marks on the economy. How bad are things? This quiz will help you calibrate your level of concern, and it will show you how your knowledge of economic reality stacks up against other Americans we asked and other Post readers.

The Post obviously wants readers to conclude that Biden deserves good marks for the economy. The fact that the paper had to engage in contortions tells you what you really need to know.

Seems like these cartoons about media bias need to be updated.

Is America Already A Dead Country?

February 2, 2024 By Robin M. Itzler @ American Thinker

If you had made a list of all the actions a “president” could take to destroy the United States of America, it would include almost everything Joe Biden has done since moving into the White House. Biden’s “success” in wrecking this country is helped by a Republican party filled with too many RINOs (Republicans in Name Only) and not enough America First Patriots.

Our republic’s Founding Fathers, all men of strong Christian faith who believed in Judeo-Christian values and limited government, would be aghast to see what has become of our country.

Many political observers think 2024 is our last opportunity to save the republic. Bernie Marcus, Home Depot co-founder and a staunch Donald Trump supporter, said on Larry Kudlow’s Fox News Business program:

But the truth of the matter is that if we don’t change the government in this next ‘24 election, this country is dead. I’ve never said that before. I don’t see any way out.

Will Donald Trump stop the Democrat party from spreading its socialist tentacles, or is America already like Dr. Malcolm Crowe?

Image by Andrea Widburg using AI and public domain pictures.

In the 1999 film The Sixth Sense, child psychologist Malcolm Crowe, played by Bruce Willis, is seriously injured after he and his wife (Olivia Williams) arrive home late in the evening. Several hours earlier, he had proudly received a prestigious award, but an ex-patient lurked in the darkness of their upscale Philadelphia house, waiting to viciously attack and shoot his former doctor. [Spoiler alert for the rare souls who haven’t seen the movie.]

Following the assault, Malcolm goes back to his practice. He begins working closely with Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment), a young boy with mental health issues. Cole’s mother, Lynn (Toni Collette), is beside herself trying to help her young son and believes Malcolm is the boy’s only hope. However, the treatment requires much time, which means his homelife suffers.

Finally, the boy confides why he is so distressed. With that confession he starts to improve, and Malcolm knows he urgently must salvage his marriage.

But helping the child took a huge toll on Malcolm’s marriage. One night, he walks into his home to find his beloved wife asleep in the living room, where she had been watching their joyous wedding video. As the tape highlights the happy occasion, her hand slips open, and Malcolm’s wedding ring falls to the floor.

Puzzled, Malcolm looks at his hand. Why isn’t his wedding ring on his hand?

Suddenly, Dr. Malcolm Crowe realizes the answer...

He is already dead, but just didn’t know it!

That realization consistently led to a loud, collective gasp in theaters.

As it turned out, when Cole whispered to the doctor, “I see dead people,” he was also trying to help Malcolm even more than Malcolm was trying to help him.

Could the United States of America be Malcolm Crowe, murdered by a fraudulent 2020 election? Or will Donald Trump in November 2024 make it a “Normandy”-like election that saves our constitutional republic?

Pundits and historians share that the average lifespan of an empire is 250 years. America celebrated her 247th birthday in July.

In 1999, Alan Wolfe, currently a Boston University political scientist, authored “One Nation, After All”. After hundreds of interviews with Americans across the country, he concluded that the division at the turn of the last century was not strong enough to tear our nation apart.

However, today, Wolfe feels very differently. In July 2023, Wolfe said:

I really feel like we are becoming two different countries, if not that it has already happened. I don’t like it, but I don’t see what we have in common anymore. I really don’t.

The Democrat party’s open southern border has allowed millions of able-bodied, unvetted young men into the United States. Is a terrorist attack coming? The porous border was the number one issue for New Hampshire primary voters—and New Hampshire is quite a distance from the southern border. It was also top of mind for Iowa’s voters, another state far from Mexico.

Let’s assume 7 million unvetted illegal alien invaders have waltzed into our country since January 2021. If just one-quarter of 1 percent have malicious intent to do us harm, that would be 17,500 people, all of whom are scattered across the United States, with many receiving free housing, free medical, free education, free driver’s licenses, free iPhones and, in some cases, free ballots. It is estimated that the United States government has so far spent more than a whopping $450 billion on these illegal invaders.

Think what ONE person can do when they go on a murderous rampage at a school, shopping mall, or Las Vegas hotel, and then multiply that by the possibility of thousands of terrorists waiting to cause injury, death, and havoc from sea to shining sea.

Is everyone waiting for a terrorist attack? FBI Director Christopher Wray testified in Congress on November 15 that many on the terrorist watch list have not been tracked down:

The threats that come from the other side of the border are very much consuming all 56 of our field offices, not just in the border states.

Is the UniParty waiting for a terrorist attack?

Respected America First Patriot Dan Bongino keeps telling us with his frequent posts:

The enemy is already here.

— Dan Bongino (@dbongino) November 11, 2023

Currently, we are two distinct nations under one flag, highlighted by what is happening in Texas. Donald Trump is the President of the United Red States of America. Joe “Dementia” Biden is President of the United Blue States of America. Trump believes in capitalism, the free market, and the Constitution, while Biden and his puppeteers promote socialism and everything that flows from it.

This can’t continue indefinitely.

In November 2024, the party of Abraham Lincoln must take a strong majority in both Houses of Congress and gain the White House with Donald Trump. (Nikki Haley is just a stooge for the Uniparty). Otherwise, the republic that was fought for and won in 1776, 1812, and 1861 will not survive. As Gary Bauer of American Values wrote on November 1:

If progressives ever get a working majority in Congress along with the White House, we will lose our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech and virtually every right we have.

In ten months, Donald Trump gives us a final chance to save the United States of America from tyranny…unless the country is already like Dr. Malcolm Crowe.

Robin M. Itzler is a regular contributor to American Thinker. She can be reached at PatriotNeighbors@yahoo.com.

Further Notes On Mann v. Steyn: The Plaintiff Rests

January 31, 2024 Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian

The Mann v. Steyn trial in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia is now in the middle of its third week. For more background on the case, see my post from a few days ago here. I have been watching some substantial chunks of the trial on the court’s livestream, although unfortunately several other matters have prevented me from watching the entirety. Today at the lunch break, the plaintiff Michael Mann concluded the presentation of his case. The technical term is that the plaintiff “rested.” So I thought a short update would be timely.

Because I haven’t seen the whole thing, I’ll just cover some aspects that I find interesting.

In my prior post, I devoted some space to Mann’s claim for damages, which appears to be based principally on the theory that he had lost various government research grants as a result of the allegedly defamatory blog posts of Steyn and Simberg. Last week Simberg’s lawyer Victoria Weatherford had cross-examined Mann with an interrogatory answer he had given to a question asking him to substantiate his damages by providing a list of all grants he claimed he had lost for this reason. In his answer, signed under oath, Mann had not listed any grants, and instead had objected on the ground that the whole subject was “irrelevant.” My comment was “How Mann can claim damages from lost grants after giving this answer, I have no idea.”

Well, as tends to be the case, the story proved to be much more complicated than it first appeared. On re-direct examination, Mann’s lawyer came back with a supplemental interrogatory answer that Mann had served up in 2020, which did contain a list of allegedly lost grants. That seemed like a pretty good response.

But then Ms. Weatherford got another turn on what’s called “re-cross,” and she pulled out yet another supplemental answer provided by Mann to the same interrogatory. This one was dated in 2023. In 2023 the parties were finally in the run-up to the actual trial. In the 2023 answer, there was a list of allegedly lost grants that was either the same or very similar to the list from the 2020 answer, except that the amounts of money allegedly lost as to each grant had changed in many or even most cases. (It was difficult to determine exactly everything that had changed, because they never put the two lists of grants and amounts up on the screen simultaneously for the viewers at home to compare.). Some of the changed amounts were small, but some were dramatic. In the most notable case, the “lost” grant had at first been claimed to be associated with over $9 million of lost funding; but in the amended answer the number had been changed to only about $100,000. At least as to any numbers that ever appeared on the publicly-shown screen, that $9 million amount looked to be by itself far and away the majority of the claimed lost funding.

In his responses to the questioning on re-cross, Mann justified the final amended answer as just his honest attempt to get things right. At some point he realized, he said, that if that big grant had been won, most of the $9 million would have gone to institutions other than Penn State. OK, but he had signed the previous two answers under oath. Could he really have just been “mistaken” about the $9 million? Certainly the smell of this back-and-forth was that Mann had put a fake inflated $9 million figure into his claim in an effort to intimidate the defendants with a huge number, only to change it on the eve of trial when he realized that defendants probably had the information to prove him lying in front of judge and jury.

To someone like me with some experience in the trial game, this whole episode was exceedingly strange. If you are a plaintiff with the burden to prove your damages, and the defendant asks you in an interrogatory essentially “tell me what your damages are,” you want to produce an answer that corresponds very closely to what you are going to put on at trial. If you are initially unsure of how you will prove damages, perhaps you can delay answering until fairly close to trial, when your damages likely come more clearly into focus. But in any case, you want to give the defense nothing to use to cross-examine the plaintiff. Therefore you definitely don’t want to answer with something you are going to have to change dramatically, let alone in a way adverse to your claim. And if you do have to change something, then when you get to trial you had better cover that with the witness on direct, including an explanation of the reasons for any change, to avoid having the witness get crucified on cross. Clearly that was not the approach taken here by Mann. The only explanation for Mann’s approach that makes sense to me is that he expected he could use the large inflated claim to force a settlement, and the case would thus never go to trial, so he would never be put to his proof. Once again, his audacity astonishes.

In other matters related to damages, here are some more things that came out on the cross of Mann:

• When a grant is received, the grant moneys would go to the university, not to Mann personally.
• Mann’s salary went up in 2013 (the year after the allegedly defamatory blog posts in 2012), and remained above the 2012 level in every subsequent year that Mann remained at Penn State.
• Mann had no direct knowledge of any specific reasons why any particular grant was denied. He did not know who had reviewed any grants and recommended denial — those people act anonymously. He did not know whether any grant reviewer had read the blog posts.
• Both Ms. Weatherford in her cross, and Steyn in cross that he conducted himself, confronted Mann with numerous instances of others who had published material that Mann had publicly denounced as defamatory. The point was that it is not possible to isolate any damages to Mann’s reputation attributable to Steyn or Simberg amidst a sea of equally harsh criticism from others. Making that point gave the defense the opportunity to show the jury several materials, including a humorous video, extremely critical of Mann.

One other point of note on the cross of Mann: Ms. Weatherford confronted Mann with an email requesting deletion of emails relating to the temperature reconstructions, which email Mann had forwarded to another scientist. The background is that the “ClimateGate” matter had just broken, involving a large release of emails from the University of East Anglia in England. A group of scientists at UEA were collaborators with Mann on his temperature reconstructions (and on his efforts to suppress dissent in climate science). The head of the relevant UEA group was one Phil Jones. Upon the release of the ClimateGate emails, Jones had emailed Mann asking that Mann delete his emails on the subject, and also asked Mann to forward the request to others of their collaborators, including one Eugene Wahl. Ms. Weatherford confronted Mann with the email from Jones, and with his own email forwarding the Jones email to Wahl. Mann acknowledged that he had received the email from Jones, and forwarded the email to Wahl, but attempted to justify what he had done by saying that he was not himself asking Wahl to delete emails (he had forwarded Jones’s email without comment), but only forwarding the request to Wahl because he thought Wahl should know what Jones was requesting. Mann also asserted that although Jones had requested him to do so, he had not deleted any of his own emails.

Meanwhile, here’s what was missing from the Mann cross: there was very little to no cross of Mann on the issues of his Hockey Stick chart, or of the “science.” I did miss some of the cross on Monday morning, so there may have been some of this; but I did not miss much, so whatever there was on this subject must have been brief. I do not criticize the defense for this. It is rarely fruitful to try to cross-examine a technical witness on the subjects of his technical expertise. He can respond with a stream of technical verbiage that may be completely fake, but the jury can’t tell. Best to stick to matters going mostly to credibility, which is what the defense did here.

After Mann’s own testimony, his lawyers called Rand Simberg as an adverse witness for the plaintiff. Recall that Simberg is Steyn’s co-defendant, and the author of one of the blog posts challenged in the suit, this one published at CEI. (The Steyn blog post challenged in the suit was actually a response to and comment on the Simberg post at CEI.)

I think the main idea of Mann’s lawyers in calling Simberg was to try to establish the “actual malice” element that is required when a defamation claim is brought against a “public figure” like Mann. They asked Simberg, for example, about the Penn State and NSF investigations of Mann’s work, trying to get Simberg to acknowledge that Mann had been “exonerated.” This gave Ms. Weatherford the opportunity on her cross to ask Mr. Simberg about how those investigations had treated Mann’s forwarding to Wahl of the Jones email requesting deletion of documents. Simberg responded that the investigations (I don’t recall if it was one or both) had praised Mann for not deleting his own emails, but had failed to address his forwarding the email to Wahl — Wahl having then proceeded to delete his own emails. Simberg expressed scorn at the investigations for not criticizing Mann for this conduct.

At the end of the day today, the defendants called their first witness, a guy named Abraham Wyner. Wyner is a professor of statistics at the Wharton School — interestingly a part of the University of Pennsylvania, where Mann himself currently teaches. Wyner and a co-author had published a pair of statistical papers on temperature reconstructions back around 2011, which papers apparently addressed Mann’s work.

In the short amount of his testimony so far, Wyner has mostly covered his own background, and the question of what a statistician brings to climate science, and particularly to temperature reconstructions. However, just as the day was ending, Wyner was asked for the main opinions he had formed as to Mann’s temperature reconstructions. Wyner responded that in his opinion Mann’s techniques for using data were “manipulative” and that his result was “misleading.”

That’s where it ended. We will await Professor Wyner’s explanations tomorrow.

Its High Time to Stand Up to Climate Change Bullies

February 2, 2024 By Tom Harris

What do car manufacturers, farmers, ranchers, coal, oil and natural gas companies, electricity providers, cement companies, bird lovers, everyday consumers and pro-life activists have in common? They are all victims of the irrational and unscientific idea that humanity is causing dangerous climate change by our so-called greenhouse gas emissions. Yet virtually none of these groups contest the climate scare. Indeed, many support it, like hostages who identify with the goals of their captors in what has become known as the Stockholm syndrome.

For example, rather than explain that their products have negligible impact on climate, oil and gas companies and their associations acquiesce to the scare by spending hundreds of billions of dollars reducing their emissions to appease the climate bullies. They even waste untold sums of cash trying to capture and store benign carbon dioxide (CO2), the gas of life, underground in what they call Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS). For example, Pathways Alliance, a group of companies with major operations in Canada’s oil sands, boasts,

“Canada’s oil sands are on a path to reach net-zero emissions from operations…Pathways has outlined a planned $16.5 billion investment in the foundational CCS project and a further $7.6 billion on other emission-reduction projects.”

Coal companies are often frequently worse, meekly accept their designation as the bad boy of hydrocarbon fuels due to their CO2 emissions, ramping down production (at least in Canada and the US) and slowly dying: 

 

Coal company and association leaders would apparently rather see thousands of their workers laid off than dare contest one of the major causes of their companies’ decline: the climate scare. But then, unlike their workers, coal company presidents are frequency wealthy and so can quietly retire to their hacienda in Mexico when their companies go belly-up.

And how about electricity providers? In the United States, the Electric Power Supply Association (EPSA), the national trade association representing America’s power suppliers list their first three policy positions as follows on their website: 

 

Concerning the last item, their position on the Paris Agreement, EPSA state:

“The risks of climate change are real. EPSA member companies have and continue to play a significant role in reducing power sector greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions while ensuring reliable electric supply. EPSA members have invested billions of dollars to deploy new, low and zero carbon emitting solutions.

“EPSA supports the ambitions of the Paris Agreement to reduce GHG emissions, along with state and federal market-based policies, that seek to meaningfully, rapidly, and economically lower GHG emissions.”

Rate payers who foot the bill for these costly, woke policies have a right to be angry that power suppliers support an agreement that will ultimately result in price spikes and widespread blackouts.

Cement companies also bow to environmental political correctness, with the Cement Association of Canada even asserting:

“Our #ConcreteZero Action Plan shows that greater emissions reductions are possible. Relying on developed and proven technologies and processes, #ConcreteZero is about finding “true” net-zero emissions. It will require many actions, from changing the way we make cement, to imagining new ways of designing and constructing our infrastructure.”

The American Automotive Policy Council (AAPC), which Bing AI defines as “a trade association that represents the common public policy interests of three American automakers: Ford, GM, and Stellantis,” have apparently succumbed to the climate scare as well, for example asserting in their December 9, 2021 press release:

“Governor Matt Blunt, president of the American Automotive Policy Council, today issued the following statement on the Biden Administration’s executive order on lowering emissions and promoting electric vehicles for the federal fleet:

"We applaud the Biden administration for this announcement. American Automakers Ford, General Motors and Stellantis produce the vast majority of all government fleet vehicles, and they look forward to continuing to supply the vast majority of these vehicles as they do their part to reduce emissions and produce and sell more electric vehicles to help achieve these goals."

Considering the problems with EVs and how most consumers have rejected them, the last thing these companies should really want is to produce more EVs. But they are too frightened of political correctness to speak out against the climate scare. And, of course, there is money to be made producing vehicles for the government, no matter how useless.

Farmers and ranchers are somewhat better, at least protesting now and then about the imposition of unreasonable fertilizer and livestock reduction mandates in the name of “stopping climate change.” But look how the U.S. Farmers and Ranchers start the “Our Story” section of their website:

“Over the next ten years, we have the ability to collectively shift agriculture to be net-neutral for greenhouse gas emissions and ultimately a net positive sector, effectively erasing the footprint of how our food is grown while offsetting other industries.

“It will take collaboration and action across the entire food value chain.

“...Today farmers face the largest challenge of this generation – creating sustainable food systems and solving climate change. And they only have 30 harvests until 2050 to do it.”

Did Al Gore write the U.S. Farmers and Ranchers “Our Story” webpage?

You would assume that the last people to support the climate scare would be bird-lovers. After all, one of the main consequences of the climate scare is the mass proliferation of 60-story-high industrial wind turbines across the world. And, as Suzanne Albright, a founding member of the Great Lakes Wind Truth, my guest on the December 11, 2023 edition of The Other Side of the Story podcast, explained so well, wind turbines kill huge numbers of birds and bats. Yet, what is listed first on “Our Work” on the Audubon Society’s web site? Climate, of course: 

Clicking on “Climate” takes one to a webpage that highlights “The Audubon Guide to Climate Action” which then takes the reader to Your Climate Action Guide | Audubon headed by, get this, spinning industrial wind turbines, a screen capture of which appears as follows: 

All that is missing are dead birds splattered across the landscape.

Every day consumers are always complaining about high prices caused by the increasing cost of fuel and all the products that require fuel to manufacture and transport. Conservative politicians take full advantage of that sentiment by attacking impositions such as Canada’s “carbon tax.” But do political leaders or the public at large condemn the climate scare causing these price spikes? Aside from former president Donald Trump and a handful of others, none do.

About the only group that is a victim of the climate scare which have started to criticize the underlying science are the pro-life lobby, some of whom have recognized the nefarious connection between the climate movement and the abortion industry. For example, the Ottawa, Canada chapter of the Campaign Life Coalition, “a national (Canada) pro-life organization working at all levels of government to secure full legal protection for all human beings, from the time of conception to natural death,” brought me in for an evening of presentation and discussion in 2023. Similarly, LifeSiteNews.com, “a non-profit Internet news service dedicated to issues of life, family, and many related issues” recently published a four-part series I wrote advising pro-life activists how to fight back against the climate scare threatening their movement.

When I was in elementary school in Montreal, an aggressive boy who enjoyed hurting people, used to pick fights with me on the way home from school. At first, I was merely his victim, coming home with a black eye, bleeding lip and so on. So my father bought a punching bag and taught me how to fight effectively enough that I could defend myself. I eventually fought the bully to a draw and hurt him sufficiently that he instead eventually picked on boys who had not learned how to properly defend themselves. I am eternally in my father’s debt as a consequence.

But, before I learned how to fight, I discovered that other boys were also being picked on by the same delinquent and I tried to organize the victims to stand up to the bully as a group. Of course, we could have easily stopped the bully in his tracks if we had just stuck together, making it clear to him that an attack on one of us was an attack on all of us and then he would pay a serious price. But the victims were all too frightened and so continued to give him their hockey sticks, pucks, chocolate bars or whatever else he demanded and then run away after being punched in the head a few times.

The same thing is happening with the groups that are victims of the climate scare. Each of them, with, as I say, the recent exception of some in the pro-life lobby, are giving climate bullies exactly what they want—the power to control how they run their organizations, what priorities they establish and, ultimately, in the case of many of the companies, acceptance of their own guilt and eventual demise because they are too frightened to stand up and fight them uno a uno.

Imagine if all of them—coal, oil, gas, cement, automotive and electricity companies, ranchers and farmers, bird-lovers, pro-life advocates and ordinary citizens and the politicians who pretend to represent them—stood up to their shared enemy, climate activists and their supporters in government and the press, and announced,

“We are convening open hearings of scientists from diverging points of view on climate change so the public can finally hear what is really going on in the climate science community.”

If such hearings were held, the public would quickly learn that the science of climate change is anything but settled and is actually diverging away from the hypothesis that humanity is causing dangerous climate change. Politicians, fearing a violent backlash from their constituents, would drop the climate file like a hot potato and all of us would benefit immensely.

If these groups are too frightened to do this, an obvious alternative would be for them to help fund the next International Conference on Climate Change organized and run by The Heartland Institute, the most recent of which may be viewed at WATCH THE WHOLE CONFERENCE - 15th International Conference on Climate Change (heartland.org). Then entities funding the conference would use their considerable public and government relations departments to promote the conference in every way possible—press releases, newspaper articles, radio and TV interviews and advertisements, billboards, social media announcements, published transcripts and books, editorial board meetings with major media, meetings with government officials, and so on—to make sure millions of citizens would get the message loud and clear:

“There is no climate emergency. Efforts to solve this imaginary crisis will leave us bankrupt, hungry and freezing in the dark for no environmental benefit.”

And then the victims of the climate scare can finally say to the climate change bullies,

“We have had it with your aggressive behaviour and will no longer kowtow to your demands to prioritize actions to address a crisis that many scientists say does not exist.”

---

Tom Harris is Executive Director of the Ottawa, Canada-based International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC). Please share this article and support ICSC through its GiveSendGo crowdfunding webpage at GiveSendGo - THERE IS NO CLIMATE EMERGENCY!: The Leader in Freedom Fundraising.

Floundering Border Bill Finds Fresh Opposition: House Democrats

There’s just no pleasing everyone.  

James Fite | Feb 2, 2024 @ Liberty Nation News Tags: Articles, Illegal Immigration, Opinion

Who’s to blame for the failure of the border bill currently floundering in the Senate? Some say it’s the hard-liners in the GOP-controlled House. One Democrat, Representative Dan Goldman of New York, says former President Trump alone derailed the legislation. Certainly, neither helped the chances of passage. However, this border security/foreign war funding package seems to have simply fallen victim to a truth as old as society itself: There’s just no pleasing everyone. And nothing demonstrates that quite like the latest source of opposition to the bill – House Democrats.

Never Mind Ukraine – It Fails as a Border Bill

The Donald spoke out against it. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) declared it dead on arrival. Many Senate Republicans oppose it vehemently. Despite all this, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and his lead negotiator, Senator James Lankford (R-OK), aren’t quite ready to give up on the border bill tied to foreign aid for Ukraine’s fight against Russia. But now they, Senate Democrats, and President Biden face a new and potentially even more frustrating threat to their deal.

(Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Many Republicans feel the arrangement would go far too easy on illegals. After all, how else are border officials supposed to make sure all asylum applications are processed within six months – a process that often takes years – unless it’s to simply wave them on, paying little more than lip service to the actual review portion? But now some House Democrats argue that it is, in fact, far too tough on immigrants.

Mostly members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and the Progressive Caucus, these representatives are furious that the legislation presently being worked out doesn’t include a path to citizenship for undocumented people already in the country.

“Everything that I’ve heard that’s in this bill is going to set immigration reform – real comprehensive immigration reform – back 10 or 15 years,” complained Rep. Nanette Barragán (D-CA), the head of the Hispanic Caucus. “It was really a hostage-taking, and saying, ‘OK, what more do you want?’ And it was mostly concessions on things that there’s evidence is not going to fix the problem,” she continued. At least, on that last point, she and her allies seem to be in agreement with House Republicans!

Everything to Everyone and Nothing to Anyone

President Biden and the senators behind this deal seem desperately to want more money to send off to Ukraine. And while they finally admit there is a very serious problem at the border, they also know the only way they get a Ukraine funding package is to give Republicans a border bill. The problem is, this isn’t what conservatives want. Republicans want a return to Trump’s Remain in Mexico policy, more border wall construction, and for fewer people in general to be able to cross illegally. Certainly, Republicans want the folks who do make it over the border illegally to be sent packing right back home. But progressive Democrats would never approve of such a package. And, of course, most Republicans – especially those of Freedom Caucus fame – won’t sign off on granting citizenship to millions of illegals already in the US. With the Democrats holding such a slim majority in the Senate and the GOP doing the same in the House, there’s no passing a border bill that doesn’t at least appease both extremes, and with such polar opposite views on the matter, it seems no deal can please both.

Now throw in the $60 billion or more to be sent off to Ukraine, which is far too much money for anyone even remotely considered fiscally conservative, and it’s no wonder this package that was hoped to be everything for everyone has, so far, turned out to be nothing for anyone. Even if a bill takes form from these discussions and somehow clears the Senate, it would now have not one but both sides of the aisle fighting against it in the House.

Read More From James Fite

Vermont Resettled Somalis, Shootings Are Up 185%

By Daniel Greenfield  @ Sultan Knish Blog 

Shootings are up 185% in Vermont from 2021 to 2022.

“We are not used to this level of violence in Vermont,” Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger complained after the city racked up 5 murders. That may not sound like much, but it gives the normally sleepy city, where Bernie Sanders got his start, a higher murder rate than Philly.

When James Eaton, a mentally unstable leftist who had praised Hamas, shot and wounded three Arab Muslim men outside his home, the media eagerly diverted attention from the crime wave to the shooter, who was conveniently white, while falsely blaming it on ‘Islamophobia’.

The discredited hoax was not only trying to rally support for terrorists, but also to distract attention from the real perpetrators of the violence that has overtaken Bernie’s old city.

The shooters in Burlington, VT are much more likely to be Muslim male teens.

Another recent shooting out of Burlington made the national news when Hussein Mohamed, the underage son of Somali immigrants who don’t speak English, shot and killed Madden: a local 14-year-old boy. It was reported that “state police were able to make an arrest despite at least two eyewitnesses from the car providing multiple false statements about the crime.”

The murder wave in Burlington was touched off in 2022 when Abdiaziz Abdhikadir, 19, shot and killed Hussein Mubarak, 21.

Abdiaziz Abdhikadir had been part of a Somali Muslim refugee family profiled by the New York Times under the headline “U.S. a Place of Miracles for Somali Refugees.” Of that family, one son was convicted of assault with a firearm, another of “aggravated assault for shooting a man in November 2020” and Abdiaziz Abdhikadir was the grandson of that same family.

Abdhikadir had allegedly become a member of a Somali gang that stole cars while “wearing surgical gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints behind” and two of them had attacked a man in broad daylight while wearing ski masks.

Mubarak had been born in a refugee camp before being his family was resettled in America where his “older and younger siblings” spent time in jail, while he turned to selling drugs.

The reporting on the incident and other violent encounters in Burlington are littered with mentions of drug dealing, stolen cars and guns, shootings in garages and names like Abdirahman Mohamed, Ahmed Mohamed, Badal Khadka and Abukar Hilowle.

Abukar Hilowle was accused of a few shootings, including one in which he allegedly shot the driver of the car he was in, resulting in a car crash, and another in which he shot two middle-aged American men on the street, one of whom had told him to “chill”, but the Muslim perpetrator claimed that he was responding to “racial slurs” by his two victims.

In 2022 it was reported that, “by mid-summer, about half of the city’s gunfire incidents were connected to a small group of new American young men.” The inaccurate euphemism “new Americans“ was being used to refer to Somali and other often Muslim African immigrants.

The perps are usually repeat offenders who wander in and out of the justice system.

In 2020, Bonide Badibanga was arrested for aggravated assault during a fight over drugs. By 2022, when he was accused of trying to shoot his brother, he had racked up 47 police contacts and 11 arrests. Despite being briefly charged with attempted murder, his family refused to testify and he received a plea deal last year for time served.

Mayor Miro Weinberger however has claimed that the role of migrant settler teens in the wave of violence is not “particularly relevant”.

When the three Arab Muslim men were shot, State’s Attorney Sarah George rushed to claim, without a shred of evidence, that, “there is no question this was a hateful act.” But the Soros DA has been accused of giving violent drug gang members a pass for the sake of social justice.

Burlington’s crime level rose sharply after the City Council had voted to defund 30% of the police department during the peak of the BLM race riots.

Burlington City Councilor Ali Dieng, an African Muslim immigrant who has run for mayor, has attacked the police while introducing resolutions to boycott Israel and has urged funding for social services to explore the “root causes” of the violence by members of his community.

Tens of thousands of dollars were allocated to the Vermont New American Advisory Council (VNAAC), a group in which Ali serves as a secretary, which were used to pay for 15 hours of group therapy with “a therapist of African descent” along with “listening sessions” in which it was determined that the foreign population in Burlington had a “deep distrust” of the police.

“We all know in the 21st century, black people in this country continue to live in fear of losing their lives at the hands of law enforcement, or members of the white supremacy groups,” Ali Dieng had claimed after a resolution ordering the flying of the BLM flag at City Hall in 2020.

The reality is that black people in Burlington are being killed by other black people.

Ali Dieng has spent his political career alternating between falsely accusing America, the country that took him and his people in, of racism and accusing Israel of violence. The actual violence and racism are coming from the Muslim immigrants hiding behind those accusations.

When Hussein Mohamed killed Madden Gouveia, a 14-year-old local boy, local eyewitnesses attempted to lie to the police about what happened. The NAACP and other local leftist groups rallied for Mohamed who was portrayed as the victim. Meanwhile Gouveia’s family lost their son.

“Thankfully, through God’s work, (Madden) came to my house a week ago,” Ricky Worthen, his brother, wrote. “He walked to Battery Park with me and my daughter and spent two hours with us. I know now that was God’s way of showing me, I should cherish every moment and from this day forward I will”

While Madden’s family were thinking of God, Allah was on trial in Vermont.

Allah had been caught with fentanyl: the drug at the heart of the overdose epidemic and also of much of the local Muslim drug dealing and violence in the city. The police had busted Zahir Allah, a black convert to Islam, just outside Burlington, and he was tried and sentenced to less than three years in prison for trafficking in the deadly drug.

Muslim drug gangs are killing each other while fighting over territory in Burlington VT and across much of New England. And increasingly spreading their wave of terror across America.

While certainly not all shootings or murders in Burlington, VT involve Somalis, it is startling to see how many do, especially since the city has a relatively small Somali settler population.

Only a few hundred Somali Muslims were resettled in Burlington with horrifying consequences.

The question in Burlington, VT and across a nation under siege by hate, extremism, violence, crime and terror spread by first, second and third generation ‘refugees’ is how much more can we take, how many more lives can we lose and how long can we go on living this way?

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.

Texas Declares War – State Overreach or Self-Defense?

What the Constitution says about state action at the national border.

by Scott D. Cosenza, Esq. | Feb 1, 2024  @ Liberty Nation News  Tags: Articles, Law

(Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)

This week, Congress put the border skirmish between Texas and the Biden administration through the lens of our Constitution. While the House Homeland Security Committee moved Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ impeachment along, another committee hearing focused on Texas’ declaration of war. Is Governor Greg Abbott on sound legal ground for acting independently to secure the international border with Mexico? As the House Judiciary Committee heard, that may depend solely on the word invasion and what it means.

Don’t Mess with Texas

Abbott claims he was forced to act because “President Biden has instructed his agencies to ignore federal statutes that mandate the detention of illegal immigrants.” The governor said he declared an invasion, triggering Article 1, Section 10, Clause 3 of the US Constitution, invoking Texas’ right of self-defense. The Compact or Invasion Clause of the Constitution prohibits states from engaging in foreign policy or acting independently regarding foreign relations – but there’s a caveat:

“No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, lay any Duty of Tonnage, keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.”

Mark Brnovich, a Serbian immigrant and former Republican Attorney General of Arizona, was the first witness. He supports a reading of the Constitution that authorizes state action to secure the border. Brnovich said that the word invasion used in our founding charter includes the cartel capture of the Southern border. He draws his understanding from the Federalist Papers and arguments made by the father of the Constitution, James Madison. During a ratification debate, he proclaimed Virginia had the right to act against pirates and smuggles off her coast. Mr. Brnovich testified: “The courts have never said that states do not have the ability to protect themselves, that states do not have the ability to stop or repel an invasion.”

Subcommittee Chairman Chip Roy, a Republican from Texas, said, “The people of Texas have a right to defend themselves, just as I have a right to defend my home and my family if it is under attack.” The ranking minority member, Mary Gay Scanlon (D-PA), said the operative clause “refers to protection against armed hostility from a nation-state or organized political entity, not people fleeing danger in their home country and seeking protection under international and U.S. asylum laws….”

Never Let a Crisis Go to Waste

Democrats on the committee attacked the majority for milking the border crisis for political gain. “They want to grandstand in camo at the Rio Grande and impeach officials so they can campaign on bluster and boogeymen rather than doing the hard work of actually solving problems,” Ms. Scanlon said. The committee leadership also tossed out accusations of racism and that the fuss at the border was the stuff of Republicans’ racial animus. Meanwhile, Secretary Mayorkas is on his way to being impeached, and Democrats seem desperate to make a deal.

The legality of Governor Abbott’s actions is being litigated in the federal courts. The United States Supreme Court gave the Biden administration a win over Texas; however, the ruling was a short-term victory by a close 5-4 vote. It was decided on an emergency basis and only applies until the lower courts process the competing governments’ claims. Oral arguments in Department of Homeland Security v. Texas before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals (our country’s most conservative) are scheduled for February 7.

 

Read More From Scott D. Cosenza, Esq.

Democrats Want to Save the Rats

Los Angeles isn’t the city of angels: it’s the city of rats. 

By Daniel Greenfield  @ Sultan Knish Blog 

 Last year, LA shot up in the rankings of the “rattiest cities” from third to second place, and it’s closing in fast on Chicago. What is its secret? There is the fetid filth of the junkie vagrant camps where typhus, a medieval disease spread by rats, made a comeback almost as fast as crime once city officials legalized the ‘homeless’ trifecta of street living, drug use and shoplifting.

And like criminals and junkies, the rats have Democrats on their side.

In the fall of last year, Gov. Newsom signed into law a bill that banned more forms of rat poison after a previous rat poison ban in 2020. Newsom and other advocates for taking Los Angeles back to the rats pretended that the rat poison bans were about protecting mountain lions, but then two California Democrats put forward a bill that exposed the real ‘rats rights’ agenda.

Rep Ted Lieu of LA and Rep. Adam Schiff of Burbank introduced the Glue Trap Prohibition Act which bans glue traps because they’re cruel to rats. It’s understandable that Lieu and Schiff would feel for the suffering of their fellow rattus americanus and Lieu moans that glue traps are “among the cruelest ways to eliminate rodents”. (The least cruel is electing them to Congress.)

Rep. Lieu serves on the advisory council of Democrats for the Protection of Animals which campaigns against eating turkeys on Thanksgiving, pony rides for children and glue traps for rats. So expect a congressional bill on banning turkey sandwiches and pony rides up next.

Rep. Lieu agonizes that rats in glue traps “that do not escape die of blood loss, suffocation, or dehydration.” He didn’t bother listing the symptoms of hantavirus, for which there is no known cure, typhus or the bubonic plague: among the rat borne diseases making a comeback.

But while Rep. Lieu cares about the suffering of rats, he doesn’t care about human suffering.

It’s already illegal in California to remove rats from your property. If you trap a rat, you either have to “euthanize” it on the spot or let it go. And rats rights activists are campaigning to expand the ban on ‘trapping’ larger animals like coyotes to also apply to rats which, between the bans on effective varieties of rat poisons and glue traps, would make it impossible to stop the rats.

West Hollywood, an LA County “city” of 16 blocks at its tallest and 5 blocks at its shortest, where PETA has a great deal of influence, led the way in banning glue traps within the 5 supermarkets in its borders forcing residents to drive 3 minutes extra to the Ralphs on Sunset Boulevard, and what goes in West Hollywood must now also be imposed on all of America by Rep. Lieu.

Rather than kindness to animals, LA’s love of rats began killing man’s best friend. Ever since Los Angeles began cracking down on rat control measures, dogs began sickening. Leptospirosis, one of the diseases spread through the waste of Rep. Lieu’s best rat friends, caused an epidemic among dogs in the county.

“It’s the rats,” Dr. Alan Schulman, a veterinary surgeon, explained. “They urinate places, they defecate places, dogs get it from them.”

Given a choice between protecting rats and killing dogs, Democrats killed the dogs.

But in New York City, Democrats went one better, killing people to protect rats.

In 2021, former ACORN boss Bertha Lewis pushed through a ban on rat poison. Leptospirosis cases jumped from 57 in 14 years to 15 in just one year. Over a dozen New Yorkers contracted leptospirosis and suffered from liver and kidney failure. One of them died. The symptoms of include fever, aches, and jaundice. Even those who survive can end up with brain damage.

But at least New York City Democrats had banned cruelty to rats and killed people and dogs.

Rather than end the ban on rat poison, Mayor Eric Adams appointed a Department of Education bureaucrat “rat czar” at a salary of $155,000 a year.

“Rats are smart, they are resilient,” Mayor Adams argued. “Many of us live in communities where rats think they run the city.”

Since the rat poison ban remains in place, rats actually do run the city. When people suffer and die for the convenience of rats, it’s not a human government, it’s a government of rats.

The New York Post warned that, “rats as big as bunnies are roaming the streets in broad daylight, nesting in trees and chewing through car engine wires”

Mayor Bill de Blasio, his predecessor, had tried to demonstrate that there was no need for rat poison by dumping dry ice on rat nests, only to have a rat run right through his demonstration. $30 million was spent when thousands of dollars spent on rat poison would have done the job.

Without rat poison or traps, state and city governments dump the burden on property owners to practice what they call “prevention and exclusion” by sealing everything. But as everyone who has dealt with rats knows, they’re smart and, like leftists, can sneak in through the smallest crack and, also like leftists, once they get inside, it takes determined efforts to get rid of them.

Especially if, like leftists, you can’t put out a glue trap with a copy of Das Kapital, then release them in their natural habitat of Cuba or North Korea, and count the problem over and done with.

From New York City to Los Angeles to Vancouver to San Francisco, rat poison bans led to explosions in the rat population. And the Democrats pretended they had nothing to do with it.

Democrats have been running out of victim groups to protect, and they were bound to eventually turn to rats. Not only can’t you spell ‘Democrats’ without “rats’, but the rattiest cities in America are Democrat enclaves. Now the Democrats and the rats are finally teaming up.

So far no Democrat has figured out how to get them to vote, but give them time.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.