Tag: florida school shootings

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The Biggest Problem with Sheriff Israel is that he is So Common

The Evening Campaign Update

(Because The Campaign Never Ends)

The trouble with Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel is that he is so damn common in our society today:  Arrogant, utterly incompetent and judged in his job based on “metrics” that have little to do with actually getting his job done.

In a really fine piece in Sunday’s Orange County Register, Carl Cannon condemns the Sheriff’s pathetic excuse-making in the wake of the shooting:

The Broward Sheriff’s Office resorted to its own bureaucratic gobbledygook, telling reporters that none of his behavior “appeared arrestable under Florida law.” This is false. It’s not legal in Florida to hold a gun to your mother’s head, or menace the family that took you in, or threaten to shoot up a school. Authorities could also have pursued an involuntary commitment to a mental facility under Florida’s “Baker Act,” which might have given him the psychological treatment he needed and seems to crave. It also might have made him ineligible to legally purchase firearms.

Of course, Israel actively avoided arresting the Parkland shooter despite having his officers called to the kid’s home an amazing 39 times in the 3 years leading up to the mass shooting, precisely because of the metrics used to judge his performance.  Those metrics required the crime rate among high school aged teenagers fall each year in order to maximize the federal money coming into the county’s schools and sheriff’s department, as part of an agreement they’d entered into with the Obama Administration’s Justice Department.  Israel’s department had accomplished that goal by simply refusing to enforce the law:  thus, his job performance was judged by those metrics to be outstanding.

The truly sad thing about Israel is that he really meant it last week when he told CNN’s Jake Tapper that he had provided “amazing leadership” in his job as Sheriff.  Hey, his job performance had been judged to be outstanding as all that federal money came pouring in – what else would he believe?

The hapless, witless Sheriff is hardly alone.  Our society is filled with glorified bureaucrats like Israel posing as law enforcement officers while responding to the perverse incentives set up by the idiotic edicts coming down from Washington, DC.  Our public and higher education systems are also filled with similar perverse incentives, with teachers and administrators forced to spend more and more of their time fulfilling tasks designed to maximize state and federal money rather than actually educating our children.  Common Core and standardized testing are just two of hundreds of examples that have led to the steady diminution of the quality of education in our society.

This is no surprise:  This is in fact the classic outcome of command-and-control socialism.  The more nationalized the school curriculum and law enforcement objectives become, the less accountable the people implementing them will become to the local public.  It is in fact inevitable that hapless men and women like Sheriff Israel will increasingly become the familiar faces of our nation’s sheriff’s departments.

Sheriff Israel is not the cause of what took place three weeks ago in Parkland, Florida – the FBI was every bit as hapless and every bit as much to blame as they respond to their own perverse incentives – he is just one of the effects of the nationalization of the goals and objectives of local law enforcement.

The biggest problem with Mr. Israel is that he is just as common as a day’s laundry in America today.

That is all.

Follow me on Twitter at @GDBlackmon

Today’s news moves at a faster pace than ever. Whatfinger.com is my go-to source for keeping up with all the latest events in real time.

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If Dissembling Were an Olympics Event, Adam Schiff and Scott Israel Would be Co-Gold Medal Winners

Today’s Campaign Update

(Because The Campaign Never Ends)

Tired of all this Winning yet? – The 2018 U.S. Winter Olympics team was a colossal flop, winning just 23 medals overall, the lowest U.S. total since 1998.  This comes despite the fact that the Games have been loaded up with junk sports over the last 20 years specifically in order to give the U.S. a shot at winning more medals, in hopes of boosting TV ratings.  Not surprisingly, the poor U.S. performance also led directly to these Olympic games setting new lows in terms of television audience.

But all is not lost, sports fans!   As The Simpsons eerily predicted 8 years ago, the U.S. men’s curling team was able to raise their brooms over their heads as they were awarded the gold medal for the first time ever!  It’s like they always say, if your nation’s main core competency in athletics is sliding a gigantic rock across 50 feet of ice while a guy clears its way with a broom, you are becoming Norway, which, as President Trump recently assured us, is definitely not a shithole country.  So we got that going for us.  #Winning!

While my website was down on Saturday, bug-eyed California Congressman Adam Schiff released his long-awaited “counter-memo” on FISA abuse to a public that is now obsessed with other matters.  The fact that Schiff took 2 weeks to edit a few sentences and remove some footnotes from his tome and then released it quietly on a Saturday – ensuring a minimum amount of news coverage – tells you all you really need to know about the thing.

The Democrats with press passes in the fake news media predictably hailed the Schiff memo as the word of god.  But basically, once you get past all the irrelevant fluff and attacks on President Donald Trump scattered throughout the thing, the Schiff memo simply confirms what Devin Nunes and Trey Gowdy had already told us three weeks ago:  That the Obama Administration used the Fake Trump Dossier as its main basis for obtaining a FISA warrant to spy on the Trump Campaign, and later on the Trump Transition team; that the FBI and DOJ did not inform the court that the Dossier was paid for by the DNC and the Clinton Campaign;  that the information in the Dossier was unverified and was obtained by a British agent and sourced mainly from Russian agents; and that this process was repeated 4 times over a period of 9 months.

Schiff’s latest distraction not only does not dispute those key facts of wrongdoing by the Obama FBI and DOJ, it actively confirms them.  In response to Schiff’s laughable dud, Nunes issued a point-by-point dissection of thing, which everyone at CNN and MSNBC studiously ignored.  You can bet the balance of your 401(k) that Schiff, having created the misdirection he was shooting for, will now clam up like a mid-level mob operative and hope this particular aspect of the House Intelligence Committee’s work fades away.

Meanwhile, in Florida, Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel, barely hours removed from hilariously bragging to fake CNN host Jake Tapper that he had provided “amazing leadership” in his duties as Sheriff, told a local NBC affiliate’s reporter that he’s just not responsible at all for the actions of his deputies.  I swear I don’t make this stuff up:  “As I said, I’m the Sheriff, my name’s on the door,” Israel said. “The people responsible are the ones who took the calls and didn’t follow up on them, as it was with the FBI, as it was with any person.  Leaders are responsible for the agency, but leaders are not responsible for a person.  I gave him a gun. I gave him a badge. I gave him the training. If he didn’t have the heart to go in, that’s not my responsibility.”

As of early Monday morning, this aspiring circus clown still has his job, but one wonders whether the people of Florida have enough self-respect to allow that situation to last into Monday afternoon.  If Speaker of the Florida House Richard Corcoran has his way, it won’t.  Corcoran and 73 of his Republican colleagues sent a letter to Florida Gov. Rick Scott on Sunday that demands he immediately suspend Israel for “dereliction of duty and incompetence.”  Although sheriffs in Florida are elected to their office, the state’s law does give the state’s governor the right to take such action.

Given that, to borrow one of Israel’s favorite words, it’s rather “amazing” that Governor Scott has waited this long to get this embarrassment to his state’s dissembling face off of America’s television sets.  No time like the present, Governor.  What are you waiting for?

Just another day in Winning Curling is still Winning America.

That is all.

Follow me on Twitter at @GDBlackmon

Today’s news moves at a faster pace than ever. Whatfinger.com is my go-to source for keeping up with all the latest events in real time.

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What’s the Over/Under Line on How Many Days Scott Israel Has Left in Office?

The Evening Campaign Update

(Because The Campaign Never Ends)

You keep saying that word.  I don’t think it means what you think it does. – Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel told CNN’s Jake Tapper that he has given “amazing leadership” to the County during his time as Sheriff.  In other news, the folks at Taco Bell bragged that they have given “amazing fine dining” to the American public, Harvey Weinstein bragged that he has given “amazing respect” to every woman he has ever met, and Hillary Clinton said that she exhibited “amazing stewardship” over her illegal email server while she was Secretary of State.  Holy cow.

Tapper is being widely praised for his fairly tough treatment of the dissembling Sheriff in Sunday morning’s interview, but let’s don’t go overboard here.  Tapper, after all, is the very same fake host who stood silently by during Wednesday evening’s disgraceful townhall and allowed NRA Spokesperson Dana Loesch be called a baby killer and repeatedly accosted with death threats from the audience, and allowed one kid to accuse Senator Marco Rubio to the killer himself without comment.  So Jake has an awful lot of making up to do for that huge fiasco.

But this is CNN, after all, and as if to make up for Tapper’s sudden attack of momentary objectivity, the dimwitted Brian Stelter did his best to satisfy his Democrat masters by allowing student David Hogg – who has obviously been co-opted by the Democrats and is being fed talking points – to say of Ms. Loesch “She owns these congressmen. She can get them to do things. It’s just she doesn’t care about these children’s lives.”  Neither Stelter nor the all-time fake news king Dan Rather, who was sitting next to the kid, said anything to correct the blatant libel coming from Mr. Hogg’s always-running mouth.

 

While Israel has denied that his department responded to an astonishing 39 calls to the Parkland school shooter’s home in recent years – claiming the number was “just” 23, as if that makes it all better – Buzzfeed now reports that its research indicates the correct number is an even more mind-numbing 45 calls, about which the Broward County Sheriff’s department did nothing.  Zip.  Nada.  That’s pretty “amazing” all right, Sheriff.

In that same interview, Tapper asked the Sheriff when it was that he found out that several of his deputies were on the scene while the killings were taking place, and did nothing to intervene.  Israel’s answer?  “Days” later.  When asked how many days later, Israel said he wasn’t sure.  Yep, that’s pretty “amazing” leadership right there.

In all seriousness, how much worse does this have to get before the people of Broward County storm the the county offices and demand Sheriff Israel’s resignation?  While they’re at it, they might want to start up a recall petition for every member of the school board as well, since, as I pointed out in yesterday’s Campaign Update, the utter and complete failure of local law enforcement in this case is not due to incompetence, but rather due to a conscious policy decision to stop enforcing the laws where school students are concerned in order to improve statistics that determine the level of federal and state funding.

Such a sad situation all around, made infinitely worse by the dishonest ghouls at CNN.

That is all.

Follow me on Twitter at @GDBlackmon

Today’s news moves at a faster pace than ever. Whatfinger.com is my go-to source for keeping up with all the latest events in real time.

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How an Insane Liberal Money Grab Led to the Parkland School Shootings

Today’s Campaign Update

(Because The Campaign Never Ends)

And she’ll keep saying that so she can continue to use her gig on 60 Minutes as a campaign platform – Oprah Winfrey says she’s “definitely not” running for president.

Better headline: Crazy Person Says Everyone Who Disagrees With Her is Crazy. – Rose McGowan says Trump voters are victims of “Cult brainwashing.”

Now that they’ve gotten their virtue signaling on sexual assault out of the way by wearing black to the Golden Globes Awards show and grown tired of using that #MeToo hashtag with all their Tweets, all the depraved mental midgets in Hollywood have decided to move on signaling their virtue on the gun control frenzy. Boy, that’s surprising, huh?

But of course, in this ongoing media-created national nervous breakdown over the school shootings in Parkland, Florida, guns become quickly of little relevance to those who are actually looking for the truth behind what led to the tragedy. The gun control aspect of it mainly serves to give liberals something to scream about in order to divert attention away from the real root cause, which in such situations pretty much always turns out to be policies that they foist upon our society.

Parkland is just the latest manifestation of this reality. It took more than a week, but we finally discovered several facts on Friday that clarify how a kid with such a long history of violence and mental illness was able to walk into a local high school from which he had been expelled and kill 17 people.

USA Today has a report out detailing the fact that the Broward County Sheriff’s department received at least 18 calls from individuals who know the shooter and were worried that he had access to weapons and would ultimately use them to commit murder. 18 times, and that is in addition to the 39 times local law enforcement was called out to the guy’s home to stop him from harming his relatives.

Did he ever go to jail? No. Was he ever prosectuted? No. Was he ever even charged with a crime? No. Hell, it took the better part of a decade before his repeated violent offenses even got him expelled from school. Many are labeling this a “failure” of local law enforcement and the Broward County School system. Which would be bad enough if only that were true.

But this story only gets worse: It turns out that this was not at all a “failure” of law enforcement and the school system, but rather the result of actual compliance with an idiotic liberal policy that had taken effect in 2009. In that year, Broward County schools and law enforcement entered into a conscious agreement to stop enforcing the law on school campuses in order to “improve” statistics related to student behavior. By improving those statistics – by artificially reducing the number of reported instances of criminal behavior and student arrests – the school district and local law enforcement would gain access to more state and federal funding.

In other words, it was all a money grab, and now 17 people are dead as a result.

But it gets even worse than that. A friend on Facebook points out that in 2016, the Barack Hussein Obama Administration’s Department of Education actually used this Broward County agreement to stop enforcing the law on school campuses (and this really what it is despite all the evasive liberal labeling of it) as a model for new guidelines that were rolled out nationally. Given that compliance with these guidelines will play a role in determining the level of federal school and law enforcement funding, you can bet that they have now been implemented broadly across the country.

So think about it: How many more ticking time bomb kids do we have out there right now, who have exhibited years of mental illness and violent behavior, have access to weapons, are well-known to school administrators and local law enforcement, are legends among their peers, but are still walking around free to harm others because this insane liberal system for grabbing federal dollars discourages the local police and sheriff’s department from doing anything about them?

Much has been made in the last 24 hours about the revelation that no fewer than 4 Broward County Sheriff’s deputies were on the scene while the killings were taking place, and did nothing to stop them. But hell, they’d been doing nothing about criminal behavior on school property for almost a decade – so is it any wonder that they just continued in that mode in this situation?

You want to know why liberals invariably knee-jerk to screaming about guns when tragedies like this take place? Because an honest search for the root cause always leads right back to their own insane doorstep.

Just another day in Gun Derangement Syndrome America.

That is all.

Follow me on Twitter at @GDBlackmon

Today’s news moves at a faster pace than ever. Whatfinger.com is my go-to source for keeping up with all the latest events in real time.

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