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Friday, November 1, 2024

Newly Obtained Transcript Implicates Local Snipers In Butler Security Failures

There were two snipers posted inside the second floor of the AGR building used by alleged gunman Thomas Crooks to shoot at Donald Trump. Both failed to spot Crooks before his assassination attempt.

Ever since then, excuses have been made for the failure of the local snipers, Greg Nicol and Mike Murcko. Local officials have insisted that the snipers didn’t have a vantage of Crooks, and would have had to lean out of their windows to see him on the rooftop. Meanwhile, some media members have reported rumors that Nicol locked himself out of the building while searching for Crooks—and that the shooting happened right when Murcko went downstairs to let him back inside.

However, a time-stamped transcript of encrypted radio communications from July 13 tells a different story—showing that both Murcko and Nicol received warnings about an armed man on the rooftop at least seven seconds before he opened fire, and that Murcko radioed that Crooks was down after the shooting. The transcript further reveals other new details about the July 13 Butler rally, raising still more questions in the process.

The transcript was obtained by Headline USA via a Right to Know Law request. The Washington Post and Congress have both obtained and cited the same transcript—but they omitted key details, and they haven’t published the actual document.

This article marks the first publication of the full transcript. However, reader beware: The document includes a disclaimer that it’s “not a legal transcript of the radio transmissions,” and was only compiled to assist in making a rough timeline of events—a fact that neither the Post nor Congress has disclosed.

But while it’s incomplete, the transcript does appear to be damning for the local snipers. Indeed, it shows that Butler ESU Commander Ed Lenz was told there was a gunman on the AGR roof by 6:08 p.m., nearly three minutes before the shooting. Lenz responded to that information by telling local sheriffs that the man on the roof wasn’t one of his officers. For some reason, Lenz didn’t immediately relay that same info to Nicol and Murcko, who were on another channel, according to the transcript.

Still, the transcript shows that Lenz did tell Nicol and Murcko that there was “a male on the roof with a long gun” at 6:11:25 p.m., which was about seven seconds before Crooks opened fire. Lenz was in the middle of his transmission when shooting began.

Seven seconds may not have been enough time for Murcko to respond before Crooks began firing, but another 15 seconds ticked off before a Secret Service sniper finally put the kill shot in him—meaning that Murcko and Nicol knew Crooks was on the rooftop for more than 20 seconds, but did nothing. Then, at 6:12:11 p.m., Murcko radioed that “shooter is down, 10Sierra3, shooter is down”—undermining the excuse that he couldn’t see Crooks from his post.

The transcript does appear to corroborate Nicol’s claim that he left his post to search for Crooks. About a minute after the shooting, Murcko says over the radio that he’s not sure where Nicol is—suggesting that he indeed left his post. Another minute later, a dashboard police camera shows Nicol leaving the first-floor exit of the AGR building.

Along with new details of the actual shooting, the transcript includes other previously unreported revelations about the leadup to the assassination attempt, including that officers apparently had someone detained around 6:03 p.m. Who they detained and why is still unclear, as part of the transcript is redacted. Butler County officials told Headline USA that the redaction was made to protect the identity of a minor who was reported missing at that time, but the redaction is about three lines long. This publication is appealing to remove the redaction.

Lenz didn’t respond to an email with details question about the transcript, including questions about why certain communications weren’t included in the document.

Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/jd_cashless.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/newly-obtained-transcript-implicates-local-snipers-butler-security-failures

'Reducing Abortions'

A progressive pastor named Zach Lambert claims that “you should vote for Kamala Harris” to “reduce abortions,” because “abortions have increased nationwide since Trump-appointed judges helped overturn Roe v. Wade” and “abortion rates go down through” Democrat policies like “comprehensive sex education” and welfare programs.

IN FACT, nothing that Lambert says about Harris reducing abortions is true. Here are the actual facts:

The pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute — which is the only source that Lambert uses to support his claims — explicitly states that abortions increased after Roe was overturned because of “monumental efforts on the part of clinics, abortion funds and logistical support organizations” to provide “financial and practical support” for abortions.

All of those abortion-increasing actions are supported by Harris, who campaigned at an abortion clinic, which has never been done before by a vice president or president.

A Guttmacher study found that “public funding of abortion for poor women,” another Harris policy, causes “significant” increases in abortions.

A chart from Guttmacher, which Lambert uses to support his argument, shows that abortions skyrocketed in the wake of the Roe Wade ruling (1973).

A 2024 systematic review of “sex education interventions continue to present mixed findings of the effectiveness concerning sexual health behaviours, with some reporting positive effects, and other reporting negative effects.”

In brief, this pastor argues that abortions can be reduced by universally legalizing them, funding them with taxpayer money, and teaching children how to get them.

IN FACT, nothing that Lambert says about Harris reducing abortions is true. Here are the actual facts:

The pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute — which is the only source that Lambert uses to support his claims — explicitly states that abortions increased after Roe was overturned because of “monumental efforts on the part of clinics, abortion funds and logistical support organizations” to provide “financial and practical support” for abortions.

All of those abortion-increasing actions are supported by Harris, who campaigned at an abortion clinic, which has never been done before by a vice president or president.

A Guttmacher study found that “public funding of abortion for poor women,” another Harris policy, causes “significant” increases in abortions.

A chart from Guttmacher, which Lambert uses to support his argument, shows that abortions skyrocketed in the wake of the Roe Wade ruling (1973).

A 2024 systematic review of “sex education interventions continue to present mixed findings of the effectiveness concerning sexual health behaviours, with some reporting positive effects, and other reporting negative effects.”

In brief, this pastor argues that abortions can be reduced by universally legalizing them, funding them with taxpayer money, and teaching children how to get them

https://www.justfactsdaily.com/in-fact/n0000357

Inflation Reduction Act sent seniors' health care costs surging

Medicare premiums and senior citizens' prescription drug costs have surged since passage of the $891 billion Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, according to data compiled by an advocate for seniors on the federal health care program.

The legislation promised financial relief for millions of people with Medicare by expanding benefits, lowering drug costs, and strengthening Medicare for future seniors. Medicare Is for Seniors' "Misery Index," as the report is known, says prescription drug costs instead have risen nationally by 31%, leaving seniors with new expenses and fewer options. Those costs will rise again under the new Plan B premiums.

With less than a week until the 2024 presidential election, these higher Medicare monthly drug premiums will be in 45 of 50 states, including those considered battleground states. More than 67 million Americans rely on Medicare for their health care.

As previously reported by The Center Square, the new average plan bid for a standard Part D coverage will increase by 179% for 2025, partly due to an underestimation of federal attributions to the Part D changes.

The Biden administration's Medicare prescription drug premiums could cost taxpayers more than $21 billion over three years.

The national monthly average cost rose from $47.69 in 2022 to $62.34 in 2025, a 31% increase that will cost seniors an additional $176 annually per individual, according to Mark Merritt, the founder of Medicare Is for Seniors' "Misery Index."

Merritt told The Center Square that seniors end up paying the tab with higher monthly Medicare premiums. He said that the Inflation Reduction Act makes Medicare Drug Plans offer costly new benefits and siphons funds from Medicare into the federal treasury for its funding, most notably its electric car and green energy subsidies.

In an op-ed for the Atlanta Journal Consitution, Merritt wrote that "rates for Medicare Prescription Drug Plans have risen four times more than the national rate of inflation since the IRA was enacted. In some battlegrounds, it's risen eight or nine times higher."

Georgia seniors will have a monthly premium increase of 59% in 2025, totaling $73.42 compared to $46.05 in 2022. North Carolina seniors will have a 39% increase in monthly premiums, rising from $46.67 in 2022 to $65 in 2025, while Pennsylvania seniors get a 35% monthly increase to $71.53 a month in 2025 from $52.86 in 2022, according to the index.

Merritt reiterated that Medicare and prescription drug savings are used to finance other parts of the legislation that have nothing to do with Medicare.

The Inflation Reduction Act added red tape and government mandates to Medicare Part D, which increased seniors' drug costs, he said.

"Before the IRA overhauled Part D, costs for Medicare drug benefits had stayed flat for the previous 18 years," Merritt said.

"So there's an IRA double whammy; it's that the law's spending contributed to higher general inflation of 7% since 2022," said Merritt, but caused "Medicare inflation" to spike 31% during those same two years.

According to KFF, an independent source for health policy research, polling, and news, insurers are increasing premiums for their stand-alone drug plan offerings, but not "across the board." They also are reducing standalone prescription drug plan offerings, from 709 plans in 2024 to 524 plans nationwide in 2025.

Wisconsin is one of the few states with a decline in monthly premium costs, according to the misery index, when rates decrease 5%, $50.10 in 2022 to $47.83 in 2025.

New York seniors will have the highest increase in Medicare PDP plans with a rate of $52.46 in 2022, increasing to $97.13 in 2025.

California will increase 69%, with the coverage increasing from $55.82 monthly in 2022 to $94.31 in 2025, making it the second-largest increase on Merrit's Misery Index.

Nevada seniors will have the third-highest increase in prescription drug costs, when premiums increase from $44.24 in 2022 to $72.52 in 2025.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services website says the legislation offers provisions of financial relief for those with Medicare by lowering some drug costs, keeping prescription drug premiums stable, and improving the strength of the Medicare program.

The benefits include a cap of $35 for a month supply of insulin, access to recommended adult vaccines without cost-sharing, a yearly cap of $2,000 in 2025 on out-of-pocket prescription drug costs, and the expansion of the low-income subsidy program.

https://www.thecentersquare.com/national/article_b0b100ea-957c-11ef-ad2c-eba8b2be1119.html

Harris Would Expand the IRA’s Price Control Misery

Recently in New Hampshire, President Biden praised his administration’s policy to start imposing price controls on what Medicare pays for prescription prices, a policy enthusiastically endorsed by Democrat presidential candidate Kamala Harris. They’re starting with ten particular drugs, and they want to rapidly extend the price controls to all of them.

They try to disguise their scheme by saying all they want to do is give Medicare the power to negotiate prices. But given Medicare’s overwhelming buying power, this is price controls under another name.

Already, the results are beginning to have a calamitous effect of slowing down investments by pharmaceutical companies in new medicines and medical devices essential to Americans enjoying a healthier and longer life.

Bringing a new drug to market is a horrifically expensive proposition, costing over $2 billion and years of testing before getting approval by the FDA.

The actual physical manufacturing cost of a drug is the least of it. Creating or improving a medication or device through the extensive, expensive research and development process is where the real costs come in.

Say the way words “price controls” and most people immediately grasp that this is a losing, harmful proposition. Hence, the Biden-Harris approach of trying to disguise what they’re actually up to.

Vice President Harris got a hard lesson in the need to hide one’s true intentions. Earlier in her campaign, she laid out a plan to address the economic mess she and Joe Biden did so much to create. She painted a picture of “greedy” supermarkets and grocery stores, accusing them—despite paper-thin margins of less than two cents on the dollar—of price-gouging. Her solution: price controls.

Commentators—including many left-of-center— ridiculed her nostrums as economically illiterate.

Chastened, she reverted to the obfuscation used concerning drug price controls. Her tie-breaking vote on the obscenely misnamed Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) set up that Medicare drug price scheme that had long been a goal for Democrats.

But the legislation’s malevolence didn’t stop there. In addition to imposing price controls on select drugs, the IRA restructured the Part D prescription drug coverage for seniors. Democrats sought to reduce costs for seniors by capping them and shifting the risk to the insurance companies that service Part D. At the same time, the legislation forced insurers to limit premium increases to 6% annually. Feeling the squeeze, some insurers are leaving Part D altogether. The number of plans seniors can choose from plummeted by 11% in one year alone.

Most remaining plans are responding by raising the price of their coverage. The price of a Part D plan shot up almost 60% this year and will more than triple in in 2025. Despite the premium cap—which only applies to base coverage—premiums that seniors have to pay are going up by as much as 179%. The Biden-Harris administration realized this would not sit well with older voters in an election year, and so Democrats cobbled together a three-year “demonstration project” to subsidize Part D and disguise the increase. That project will cost taxpayers between $5-10 billion.

Yet despite all the evidence of how the IRA is driving up costs, the Harris campaign continues to brazenly peddle the fiction that “American taxpayers are expected to save $6 billion on prescription drug costs.” That’s a phony figure; the alleged “savings” are based on the full list price. In fact, the Price Benefit Managers (PBMs) claim to have beaten the government of six of the ten prices recently unveiled.

Then there’s the question of whether savings for the government are savings in any real sense.

Let’s not forget that the IRA created the drug price fixing scheme, at least in part, so that it could divert the expected $260 billion in Medicare “savings” to cover EV subsidies and other green new deal spending projects. Those “investments” have aided—not seniors—but younger, wealthier Americans who’ve exploited generous tax breaks on expensive EVs and solar panels. But they haven’t spurred the green revolution Democrats had hoped for, as pathetic sales of electric cars have shown.

Drug research is also cooling in the wake of the IRA. Charles River, a drug-development services provider in Boston, has reported that business is souring because drugmaker clients are slashing budgets. For the industry, that means fewer projects and the downsizing of their workforces. Some companies, foreseeing how the IRA would disincentivize the development of new medicines, were cancelling programs as the bill was being passed. More have followed. Others in the industry have made clear they may have to take different approaches to maximize the return on their research investments. For some, that may lead to holding off on bringing drugs to market until they can be proven to work for larger populations.

The net result will be that fewer new, life-saving drugs will be developed. For those that make it, the time it takes them to come on the market will be slower.

None of this has cooled Democrats’ desire to expand this misbegotten program. Originally, the IRA laid out a plan to ultimately target the top 50 drugs. But now Harris wants to hit 500 prescription drugs. What she and her fellow travelers are proposing is nothing short of a virtual government takeover of the American pharmaceutical industry.

Having gotten the camel’s nose under the tent with the IRA, Democrats are poised to expand government controls across the economy. Not just pharmaceuticals but housing, agriculture, energy—everything—will be in the crosshairs of these radicals.

And make no mistake: there will be huge hidden costs and fake savings of the kind we’re seeing with the IRA. Americans would then experience what billions of people throughout history have endured under socialism—immense misery.

Steve Forbes is Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of Forbes Media.

https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2024/11/01/harris_would_expand_the_iras_price_control_misery_1069281.html

In the Grip of Madness

Conservatives give Kamala Harris and her allies too much credit when they say she is gaslighting Americans by insisting that Donald Trump is the second coming of Adolf Hitler and that his tens of millions of supporters are budding brown-shirts.

Gaslighting suggests calculated deception, a knowing attempt to spread useful lies. Democrats and their “Never Trump” GOP confederates see themselves as truth tellers – they honestly believe their angry delusions are reality. Like most sufferers in the grip of derangement, they insist that visions which exist only in their minds are obvious facts. Hence, their closing argument is not so much a political ploy as a symptom of psychological distress.

This is not unusual. All human beings – even you and I – are constantly toggling between the rational and the irrational. Our minds are blenders of fact and fiction, of clear-eyed observations filtered through the lens of hope and fear. No one lives in the just-right Goldilocks zone. Day to day, even moment to moment, one side of our brain or the other can be ascendant. Healthy people, by and large, balance these forces. But it doesn’t take much, especially when we are under stress, to fall down the well of emotion. This is especially true when we act as members of groups, which often demand loyalty to, and thereby validate, unmoored ideas. The madness of crowds is real.

This is, in fact, the argument Democrats are making about Trump and his supporters. They say he has transformed the Republican Party a la Adolf Hitler, circa 1933, into a cult of personality. Like most wild ideas, this one has some faint grounding in reality. For good and ill, Trump has radically transformed the GOP from the party of Ronald Reagan to one more in his own populist image. Alas, he is no Reagan.

He is also no Hitler. Making such a comparison is a grave injustice to the memory of those who suffered at the hands of that genocidal monster. It suggests a profound ignorance of the German leader’s evil, and it may even encourage antisemitism – if Trump is Hitler, then Hitler was just Trump. It dangerously distorts the past, which is the only guidepost we have to navigate the future. Trump’s opponents are not just saying this, they believe it.

One can certainly argue that Trump should not be president of the United States. But, in a healthy democracy, such assertions must be based on evidence, not deranged claims. If he truly is beyond the pale, it should be easy to make the case without recourse to hateful fabrications. If the truth is on your side, why advance conspiracy theories that he colluded with Vladimir Putin to steal the 2016 election and that Jan. 6 was an insurrection just like the Civil War? If he really is a racist, why repeatedly lie about his “fine people on both sides” comments following the Charlottesville violence? If he bungled the response to COVID, why repeat the canard that he told Americans to inject bleach?

From a psychological standpoint, the telling point about these and so many other falsehoods Democrats and Never Trumpers put forth is that they continue to repeat them long after they have been debunked. It is the insistence of troubled souls that their unmoored perceptions are reality. The depth of their problem is underscored by reports that their apocalyptic warnings are not resonating with swing voters. They persist in this self-defeating behavior because they can’t help themselves.

Yes, Trump and his followers not only spread, but believe, their share of lies. A key difference, however, is the sheer ferocity of the Democrats’ attacks and their unquestioned embrace within their crowd. I know many conservatives who will vote for Trump despite their many misgivings. It is hard to find a Democrat who will admit that Harris is a deeply flawed candidate fomenting division. For proof, scan the headlines of the New York Times, Washington Post, the Associated Press, CNN, NPR, The Atlantic, etc.

Although one can argue that Trump has tipped his opponents into madness, the form it is taking has deep historical roots. The leopard cannot change its spots and neither can the Democratic Party.

A political institution apparently doesn’t master the art of fear and division during the nation’s first century and a half when it was the voice of slavery and Jim Crow – and then drop that skill set. Instead, it has merely been reapplied to one’s new enemies. The “negro menace” has been replaced by white “Christian nationalists.” Their racist depictions of blacks as a violent threat have been repurposed into grave warnings about working-class whites. So, too, have their previous claims about the intellectual inferiority of blacks simply been refashioned like some kind of toxic boomerang aimed at the people Hillary Clinton described as “deplorables.”

From Clinton’s dismissal of many Trump voters as “irredeemable” to President Biden’s recent description of them as “garbage,” Democrats have made their contempt for millions of Americans clear. But, if one truly believes those voters are supporting Hitler, you can see where they get this kind of language.

Both Democrats and Republicans have worked to demonize their opponents. But we are kidding ourselves if we don’t recognize that the bile from the left – which still controls the media and so many other levers of power – is more extreme and more dangerous. They have tipped into mad hatred that will not be cured by the results of a single election. If Harris wins, Democrats will continue their tireless effort to delegitimize their opponents.

If Trump wins, I fear to imagine where their madness will lead.

J. Peder Zane is an editor for RealClearInvestigations and a columnist for RealClearPolitics.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2024/11/01/in_the_grip_of_madness_151875.html