It’s Monday, February 19th, 2018…but before we begin, we loved this line from last Friday’s edition of the Morning Jolt:

“Trump may objectify women, but there is apparently no shortage of women who are happy to be objectified if the man is rich, famous, or powerful enough.“

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, as Guy Benson notes at Townhall.com, given the latest admission by the FBI…

…as well as three similar law enforcement failures in the recent past, one thing is undeniably evident:

The Existing System is Broken: How Government Failures Helped Enable Four Recent Mass Shootings

Wrong Wray

Actually, counting the Aurora, CO theater killings, our government’s failed us at least five times; and that doesn’t include the San Bernardino terror attack, Major Hassan’s Ft. Hood killing spree or the innumerable homicides committed by illegal immigrants politicians continue to welcome into the country.

Yet Progressives and their MSM shills continue to blame inanimate objects…

…owned by tens of millions of law-abiding citizens.

And while we understand the pain and frustration of those like Sarah…

…two facts remain true: first, Sarah’s unreasoned, uninformed response notwithstanding…

Second, we for one are not willing to sacrifice either our personal safety or, far more importantly, the safety of our family and loved ones because Sarah and her ilk are off on emotional benders.

In the meantime, we’re with Florida governor Rick Scott in demanding Chris Wray and whoever mishandled this at the national or local level immediately resign.

Turning to a related item, NRO‘s Jim Geraghty correctly suggests…

We Need an Accurate National Conversation About Guns

Thank you, Washington Post, for stepping up to the plate and correcting a widely cited and shared piece of misinformation in the aftermath of the Florida shooting. There have not been 18 school shootings in the United States so far this year.

The figure originated with Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit group, co-founded by Michael Bloomberg, that works to prevent gun violence and is most famous for its running tally of school shootings…

It is a horrifying statistic. And it is wrong.

Everytown has long inflated its total by including incidents of gunfire that are not really school shootings. Take, for example, what it counted as the year’s first: On the afternoon of Jan. 3, a 31-year-old man who had parked outside a Michigan elementary school called police to say he was armed and suicidal. Several hours later, he killed himself. The school, however, had been closed for seven months. There were no teachers. There were no students.

Also listed on the organization’s site is an incident from Jan. 20, when at 1 a.m. a man was shot at a sorority event on the campus of Wake Forest University. A week later, as a basketball game was being played at a Michigan high school, someone fired several rounds from a gun in the parking lot. No one was injured, and it was past 8 p.m., well after classes had ended for the day, but Everytown still labeled it a school shooting.

We keep hearing, “we need to have a national conversation about guns,” and then we keep hearing statements from those same voices that are simply not true. If we’re going to have that national conversation, I want the other side to do its homework first.

I don’t want to hear CNN lamenting that Florida doesn’t require a concealed carry permit for an AR-15 or shotgun. (They are too large to conceal.) I don’t want to hear people referring to the AR-15 as an “automatic assault weapon” and I want them to learn the difference between automatic and semiautomatic, and which kind is already illegal. I don’t want to hear about “the gun show loophole” unless the shooter purchased his gun at a gun show. (To the best of my knowledge, not a single mass-shooter has done so.) I want former presidents to stop asserting that it’s easier for a teenager to buy a Glock than buy a computer or a book.

If someone wants to ban AR-15s, I want them to say so. I also want to know what they want to do about the 5 million to 10 million AR-15s already in private hands. I want them to realize that if they don’t grandfather in the already-owned ones, they will instantly turn millions of law-abiding Americans, who have never fired a shot in anger, into criminals. If a gun control advocate proposes a buyback program like Australia’s, I want that person to recognize that the compliance rate down under was about 20 percent and it created a violent black market for guns. If a gun control advocate calls for law enforcement to confiscate AR-15s from private homes, I want that person to realize that they’re calling for violent chaos. And I want them to know that as long as groups advocate ideas like this, the line “no one wants to take away your guns” is a disingenuous lie.

Lying: it’s what Liberals do; 24/7…365 days a year…as evidenced by the following two videos from Tucker Carlson, the latter of which is featured as our Video of the Day, accessible via link #2 at the top of the page:

Then there’s this clip of Michal Bloomberg, a man who, if his wealth depended upon his knowledge of the issue at hand, would be a pauper:

Bloomberg’s adamant opposition to firearms is particularly hypocritical given, as this next snippet from Tucker Carlson details…

…Mike’s surrounded by heavily armed security every single minute of every single day.  We found Carlson’s idiotic guest’s willingness to not “begrudge” billionaires like Bloomberg “having bodyguards” particularly rich.

Such deliberate duplicity demonstrates why we wouldn’t depend upon a Progressive to give us the correct time of day…let alone interpret the Founders’ intention in drafting the 2nd Amendment.

And since we’re on the subject of prevaricating Progressives, in today’s installment of the “Oh, What Tangled Webs We Weave“ segment, Jim Freeman details the difficulties Fauxcahontas recently experienced keeping the ever-changing story of her supposed ethnic heritage straight:

Elizabeth Warren’s Rough Week

The Massachusetts senator gives the Native American claim another try.

Are there Native Americans who don’t belong to any tribe? Sen. Elizabeth Warren argues that there is at least one, and on Wednesday the Massachusetts Democrat made her case to the National Congress of American Indians.

Recently the Boston Globe explained why Ms. Warren needs to address the issue:

There’s a ghost haunting Elizabeth Warren as she ramps up for a possible 2020 presidential bid and a reelection campaign in Massachusetts this year: her enduring and undocumented claims of Native American ancestry….

As Warren is mentioned as a serious presidential contender in 2020, even some who should be her natural allies say Warren has displayed a stubborn unwillingness to address the gap between the story she was told of Native Americans in the family tree and a dearth of hard evidence to back it up.

And of course people who are not natural allies have been rather less charitable. President Donald Trump has taken to calling her “Pocahontas” and other critics have called her a “fake Indian.”

The website MassLive has published a copy of Sen. Warren’s prepared remarks for the Wednesday speech:

I get why some people think there’s hay to be made here. You won’t find my family members on any rolls, and I’m not enrolled in a tribe.

And I want to make something clear. I respect that distinction. I understand that tribal membership is determined by tribes — and only by tribes. I never used my family tree to get a break or get ahead. I never used it to advance my career.

Hmm. She seems to be acknowledging that no one in her family is a member of any tribe, and also claiming that she never used her “family tree” to get ahead.

But did she get ahead by pretending to be part of someone else’s family tree? According to the Globe:

In 1984, she contributed five recipes to a Native American cookbook entitled “Pow Wow Chow: A Collection of Recipes From Families of the Five Civilized Tribes: Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole.” In the book, which was edited by her cousin and unearthed during her 2012 campaign by the Boston Herald, her name is listed as “Elizabeth Warren, Cherokee.”

Warren also listed herself as a minority in a legal directory published by the Association of American Law Schools from 1986 to 1995. She’s never provided a clear answer on why she stopped self-identifying.

She was also listed as a Native American in federal forms filed by the law schools at Harvard University and University of Pennsylvania where she worked.

And in 1996, as Harvard Law School was being criticized for lacking diversity, a spokesman for the law school told the Harvard Crimson that Warren was Native American.

Warren has not formally claimed to be Native American during her time in the Senate, where the chamber’s historian lists three former senators as having American Indian heritage. Senators self-report their ethnicity to the historian’s office. Her office has declined to comment on why.

But as of this week’s address it seems she is once again claiming Native American heritage. According to the prepared remarks:

…my mother’s family was part Native American. And my daddy’s parents were bitterly opposed to their relationship. So, in 1932, when Mother was 19 and Daddy had just turned 20, they eloped.

As far as this column can tell, Sen. Warren has still not presented evidence to back up the claim that her family is part Native American, nor for the insinuation that her paternal grandparents were racists. Even if they were as hard-hearted as Ms. Warren suggests, if a Native American ancestor was so distant on her mother’s side that the senator cannot even come up with a name, how would her father’s family have even known?

Later in her Wednesday remarks, Sen. Warren creates still more confusion. Having just renewed her claim of Native American ancestry, she then appears to cast doubt on it by addressing Native Americans in the second person, instead of the first-person plural. She speaks of “your story” and “your history” and “your people.” Doesn’t she mean to say, “our people”?

While the senator mulls over her identity, it seems that few voters in the early primary state next door are identifying themselves as Warren supporters. This week the University of New Hampshire’s Granite State Poll reports that former Vice President Joe Biden is the favorite for 2020 with the support of 35% of Democratic primary voters. Meanwhile 2016 primary winner Sen. Bernie Sanders is running second with 24% and Sen. Warren polls third at 15%…”

Perhaps Fauxcahontas polls so poorly because so many Granite State voters have already concluded…

Moving on, this next item from The Daily Caller indicates the CIA may be just as infested with deep-state obstructionists as the DOJ and FBI:

CIA Argues The Public Can’t See Classified Information It Has Already Given To Favored Reporters

“Intelligence officials can selectively release classified information to trusted journalists while withholding the same information from other citizens who request it through open records laws, CIA lawyers argued Wednesday.

In a motion filed in New York federal court, the CIA claimed that limited disclosures to reporters do not waive national security exemptions to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. Intelligence and law enforcement agencies frequently deny records requests on the basis of protecting sensitive national security information, one of nine exemptions written into the federal FOIA law.

The case stems from lawsuit against the CIA by New York-based independent journalist Adam Johnson, who had used FOIA to obtain emails between the agency’s public information office and selected reporters from the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and The New York Times. The emails the CIA provided to Johnson were redacted, leading him to question why he was not allowed to see the same information that had been given to uncleared reporters.

Johnson challenged the redaction in court, arguing that the CIA, once it has selectively disclosed information to uncleared reporters, cannot claim the same information is protected by a FOIA exemption…”

In all seriousness, you can’t make this sh*t up!!!

Which brings us, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side:

Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with News of the Bizarre, and this just in courtesy of George Lawlor and The New York Post:

Farty passenger forces flight to make emergency landing

“A pilot made an emergency landing after a fight broke out over a passenger who allegedly refused to stop passing gas.

Two Dutchmen sitting next to the flatulent passenger reportedly asked the man to stop, but he refused and continued to break wind aboard the Transavia Airlines flight from Dubai to Amsterdam Schiphol.

The budget airline crew allegedly did not help the passengers after their complaints, Metro reports, leading to a fight between the men. Despite a warning from the pilot, the altercation continued and forced the airplane to be diverted to Vienna Airport, where it made an emergency landing…”

We’d have thought the descendants of those who birthed the term “dutch oven”…

…would have been more tolerant of the flatulent-impaired!

Magoo