Category: Grumpy’s hall of Shame
Taya Gray/USA TODAY NETWORK file
California lawmakers will send a state excise tax on guns and ammunition to Gov. Gavin Newsom after years of failed attempts by Democratic legislators.
The Senate voted 27-9 on Thursday to approve Assembly Bill 28, which would require manufacturers, vendors and dealers to pay an 11% tax on guns and ammunition to fund violence prevention efforts. The bill passed with exactly the two-thirds threshold needed for approval of a tax.
Gun and ammunition-sellers would pay the new state tax on top of the 10 to 11% federal excise tax they already pay to fund wildlife conservation efforts.
Assemblyman Jesse Gabriel, D-Woodland Hills, authored the bill after former Assemblyman Marc Levine, D-San Rafael, failed multiple times to get excise tax bills through the Legislature.
Prior to Levine’s attempts, at least three other lawmakers had pushed similar taxes on guns and ammunition since 2013. Gabriel’s bill was the first of its kind to pass out of the Assembly.
When the assemblyman first put the bill forward, there were questions about whether it was “in the realm of possibility,” he said after the Senate vote.
“I introduced this bill at the very beginning of session,” Gabriel said. “A few weeks later, we have mass shootings in Half Moon Bay and in Monterey Park and in all these places.”
“Frankly, I think part of the reason the bill passed is the public is demanding this of us,” he added. “They are demanding that we have more solutions that will do more to protect their kids, to protect their communities.”
Lawmakers debate tax effectiveness
Many senators on Thursday cited their children and grandchildren and school safety concerns in their arguments for backing the bill. Floor debate lasted for about an hour before lawmakers voted.
Sen. Angelique Ashby, D-Sacramento, urged her colleagues to support AB 28 as a “mechanism to address gun violence.” She made her plea in the name of her school-age daughter and California children, as well as Amber Clark, a Natomas librarian who was fatally shot in 2018.
“Like so many Americans, I do hug my little daughter each morning as I drop her off at school,” Ashby said. “And as I drive away, I push out of my mind the unthinkable. Otherwise, it would be impossible for me to face the tasks I’m responsible for every day.”
But Republicans, and a handful of Democrats, said the tax would do little to prevent gun violence, and retailers would pass on the added cost on to customers. In this way, it would penalize law-abiding firearm owners, hunters and students taking part in shooting sports, they said.
“When you add another 11% on, all it’s going do is decrease the number of hunters,” said Sen. Bill Dodd, D-Napa. “Sooner or later, this will be like the tobacco tax. And sooner or later, this money’s going to go down, down, down.”
Gun control groups cheered AB 28’s passage and urged Newsom to sign it.
“This bill is an innovative approach in tackling gun violence and a crucial step to improve the safety of all California families,” said Cassandra Whetstone, a volunteer with the California chapter of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, in a statement.
Gun rights advocates said they plan to sue the state over the legislation if the governor makes it law.
“The passage of this bill will be seen for what it is … an unconstitutional tax on an enumerated right,” said Rick Travis, legislative director for the California Rifle and Pistol Association, in an email.
The measure now heads to Newsom, who must sign or veto bills by Oct. 14.
(Yup, you read that right – California is going to tax one of our Constitutionally protected Rights.)
I want to apologise for being tardy on replying to your comments lately. The fates had decided that I needed to have my Gallbladder taken out. So as you can guess it has really taken a lot out of me. Hopefully soon I will be up to snuff and things will get back to normal.
Thanks Grumpy
This cluster f*ck still maked my Blood Pressure go up ! Grumpy
If you’ve wondered why homelessness in California seems so much worse than in other states, Siyamak Khorrami’s interview with El Dorado County District Attorney Vern Pierson for California Insider provides some answers:
Some takeaways:
- “According to the latest report, California alone has one third of the U.S homeless population today.”
- “What we have is you can be arrested or cited did over and over and over and over again, and there’s no consequences. And it’s just getting worse and worse.”
- The same transients sprawling unconscious on city streets in LA and San Francisco are now found in San Diego.
- “If you look at the people and look in their eyes, you see a lost [soul], almost like a post-apocalyptic look. It’s not somebody who’s lost their job or lost their housing, it’s someone who is addicted to drugs. In large part have fried their brains. They’re suffering from mental illness.”
- “Stanford recently looked at it last year, their school of economics looked at it, and they found were over the last 10 years, most of the United States homelessness dropped by roughly 9%. In the same period here in the state of California, it went up by 43%.”
- He says that other blue states aren’t having the same problem California is, but that’s slightly misleading. There are blue cities that are starting to see some of the same problems (Seattle, Portland, Austin) that are starting to have the same problems because they follow the same playbook. But they do touch on Seattle at the end of the interview.
- “The most notable, unique difference is our decriminalizing hardcore drug use, and decriminalizing large or low-level property crimes.”
- You can’t trust crime statistics, because people have just stopped reporting things. Auto thefts are still reported for insurance purposes. “Vehicle thefts here in the state of California have gone up significantly, so much so that on a per capita basis we are double the State of Florida.”
- One Target accurately reporting thefts for a month doubled San Francisco theft statistics.
- “Employees that don’t want to come to work and be exposed to that, because of being told don’t contact anyone.”
- “Shoppers stop coming to stores. You just had Nordstrom’s in San Francisco close after 35 years. They’re one of their hallmark stores. That is a huge store in San Francisco closed because theft.”
- “Every year more people leaving than are coming to the state because of poor public policy decisions.”
- “The single dividing line between us and everywhere else in that regard is the legalization of hardcore drug use, or the decriminalization of hardcore drug use.”
- “Harm reduction centers” just prevent people from dying on that particular day, and do nothing to keep drug users from gradually killing themselves over months and years. Those non-profits are “simply enabling them to continue to that that addiction and to use those drugs, knowing it will kill them.”
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Pierson: HUD, uh, in 2015, 2016 decided…”Hey, we’re a housing entity. Why are we spending 60%, 70% percent of our resources on rehab for people? And so let’s get out of that business and go and do this other one.” I think that happened at a time which was critical in for California, to where we were already going down this housing housing first, or type in harm reduction type philosophy.
Khorrami: Then you exacerbate it by giving the homeless housing, and then you give them, let them use the drugs, and then you’re not really thinking about dealing with their addiction, right?
Pierson: Yeah, it’s absurd.
- “We have based all of our policy on the slogan called ‘Housing First.’ What it says is, if you provide them housing and you provide this, provide some services to him, the person will stop using drugs.”
- New York (which I personally would not point to as a model, it’s simply less of an obvious failure) has a ratio of one social worker to eight homeless people. California has a ratio of one to thirty-two.
- “Compassion isn’t enough.”
- “Compassion isn’t letting someone die in a ditch somewhere. Compassion isn’t letting someone lay on the street with a needle in their arm. That’s not compassion.”
- “Enough is enough. You’ve tried this grand social experiment over the last eight or ten years. It didn’t work. We need a course correction, and we need to do something about it now.”
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Seattle is an extreme example of what’s happening here in California. Everybody, the businesses are fleeing. The people who are living there that can leave are leaving. And it is very similar to what we’re doing, where open rampant hardcore drug use, little or no consequence for property crimes, and they also have a horrendous problem with law enforcement staffing. They simply can’t hire law enforcement officers because, frankly, the way they’ve treated them. It is a handful of really bad policy decisions that created this problem.
- No one wants to work at Nordstrom’s because they know their car will be broken into while they work.
One flaw with the interview is that they did not discuss the role of the Homeless Industrial Complex in creating the situation. My working theory is that the appalling decisions we see being made on homelessness and crime are because the hard left is actively benefiting from the situation because it provides myriad ways to rake off graft and fraud. Ditto the lunacy of defunding the police.
The Navy lost a couple of chances to sink several of Japan’s Aircraft Carriers. Needless to say that when Adm Ernie King heard about this. A lot of brown sauce hit the fan. Grumpy
Navy SEAL training commander speaks out after scathing report on ‘shattering’ candidate death
WASHINGTON – Navy Capt. Brad Geary was on the path to becoming an admiral on Feb. 4, 2022, when he got “earth-shattering” news: one of his Navy SEAL candidates was found unresponsive hours after completing the training program’s “Hell Week.”
Seaman Kyle Mullen, 24, had just pushed himself through the most physically intense period in the SEALs’ famously arduous boot camp when fellow candidates discovered him in his room, blue in the face.
Medics would later pronounce him dead at a hospital.
“I’ll never be able to take that weight off my shoulders,” Geary said in an exclusive interview with The Post this week. “I’ve lost many teammates in my career, unfortunately. Too many. But this was the first one under my command.”
Three months before Mullen’s death, Geary had traveled to Washington, DC to accept the Navy’s top honor for “inspirational leadership,” the Vice Adm. James Bond Stockdale Award.
Now, in the wake of a highly critical Navy investigation into Mullen’s death, the SEAL officer faces scrutiny from the Navy, Congress and the press, and plans to retire from the service without adding a star to his uniform.
“You’re grieving the death of a dream every day,” said Geary, who is speaking out for the first time since Mullen’s tragic death. “I know by coming forward with the press on this one, I’m committing a cultural faux pas that will put me out of graces with my community, but I have to … I am laying down my career for my cadre of candidates to be their voice and defend them because no one else is.”
Tough enough
An autopsy report revealed Mullen died of a combination of pneumonia and swimming-induced pulmonary edema – a condition common in SEAL candidates, who experience fluid buildup in the lungs after prolonged exposure to frigid waters.
But Mullen had powered through in the middle of winter, enduring a five-and-a-half day stretch in which SEAL candidates are allowed just four hours of sleep each night, run a total of more than 200 miles, swim in the frigid ocean and complete other physical training for more than 20 hours per day.
Navy investigators swarmed Geary’s command following Mullen’s death.
The captain says he laid his concerns about a rising number of SEAL candidates dropping out of the training program he took over in 2020 and his efforts to conduct a study to identify the cause.
Consulting with experts and academics, Geary found a multitude of reasons for rising dropout rates – including the coronavirus pandemic and “generational shifts” – but he said his concerns were ignored when brought to Navy leadership.
“Nobody really wanted to hear our message until after Kyle Mullen died,” he told The Post. “We beat that drum incessantly and it really did not resonate.”
Geary also made a number of changes to the program to prevent attrition, such as mandating six hours of sleep before Hell Week and eliminating heavy rucksacks from runs in early training phases.
But when the report came out, Geary found himself depicted as a barbarian, out-of-touch leader whose cadre of trainers pushed SEAL candidates too hard.
“Capt. Geary maintained a view that the high attrition was caused, among other reasons, by the current generation having less mental resilience, or being less tough,” said the report, which was unsealed last week.
The career SEAL officer vehemently denied the allegation to The Post, stating on multiple occasions that he would never say such a thing and that such an opinion would be the antithesis of his personal leadership philosophy.
“One of the things that was misstated in that report was this notion that I somehow blamed the next generation for being mentally weak, which is what resulted in the attrition,” Geary said. “Those were not my words. I never said that. Those closest to me in my command would say I never said that.”
“That’s flippant and irresponsible and just not true.”
To the contrary, Geary said he knew the next generation of SEALs were tough, giving multiple anecdotes throughout his two-hour interview with The Post and criticizing those who say young people are weak.
“It’s very easy to say, ‘Well, damn the next generation’ and make fun of them … [but] I’ve reinforced this throughout my entire time as as commanding officer: It’s on us as leaders to adjust to the next generation,” Geary said. “It’s not enough to say ‘You have to be like us and we expect you to perform like we did.’
“No, no, we need to look for their strengths and look for their weaknesses. Be objectively critical of those and then help them develop what we need them to have for the SEAL teams and the missions that will ask them to do,” he added.
Ironically, it was Mullen’s fierce, never-quit mentality that contributed to his death.
He’d turned down offers of medical treatment as he coughed up blood and fluids that week, and even called himself “such a p—y” because he was struggling to breathe the day he died, the report said.
“[Mullen], intent on doing everything possible to complete the pipeline, was at increased risk of serious injury during Hell Week conditions of extreme fatigue and environmental exposure, with decreased ability to compensate and recover from such injuries,” the report said.
Fall from grace
But the investigation placed the heaviest blame on Geary and his staff, alleging the latter abused the Special Forces hopefuls while the captain looked the other way.
It also claimed that his leadership fostered an environment where seeking medical attention was discouraged, young SEAL trainers grew extreme in their practices and the voices of retired SEALs brought in as advisers were silenced.
Geary denied the allegations, saying he was “disappointed” with the results of the investigation, defending his team against accusations of wrongdoing.
“Our cadre deserved to be trusted and the American people deserve to know that they can trust the SEAL community, and it’s frustrating to me that [the report] unjustly undermines that trust,” he said.
His attorney, Jason Wareham, criticized the Navy investigation, alleging it was mishandled from the start and “perpetuates the Navy’s narrative to wrongfully discredit my client through twisted quotes, misconstructions and mishandling of evidence that has existed since the start.”
For example, the Army coroner failed to test Mullen for certain performance-enhancing drugs despite knowing some were discovered in his belongings after he died.
While Mullen tested negative for steroids, other PEDs, including human growth hormone and testosterone, were found with syringes in his car, according to the report.
Geary received an official letter of reprimand after the Navy investigation, but was allowed to continue his service in the military.
However, the letter is likely a career-killer, as his name has been sullied throughout the course of the investigation.
“I genuinely love everyone that is entrusted to my care as a leader, and as the commanding officer of [the SEAL training program,] I loved my candidates,” Geary told The Post. “I loved Kyle Mullen; I grieved his loss and still do. I will carry that weight with me forever.”
A mother’s pain
But Geary’s fate is just fine with the late sailor’s mother, Regina Mullen.
If anything, she told The Post she’d like to see Geary, who still serves in the Navy but no longer leads the training program, fired for what she claimed was his role in her son’s death.
“I said, ‘You are a murderer. You murdered him,’” she said of her conversation with Geary in the wake of her son’s death, she told The Post. “I think he feels bad, but everybody feels bad when you’re caught.”
Regina Mullen went on to suggest that no one should go through the elite special forces training course.
A registered nurse, she said her son would not have died if he had been given proper medical care when showing signs of respiratory distress.
“If you’re sick, you’re weak – that’s what they were like promoting and cultivating,” she said. “I don’t even know that you need the SEALs [in the military.]”
From the beginning, Regina wanted accountability for the command and worried the Navy would float the drugs found in Kyle’s car as the cause of his death.
She said this week that she told the service to write that there was no evidence that PEDs caused her son’s death in a press release, a request that was honored.
At the very least, Regina Mullen said, the command’s medics who conducted the mandatory post-Hell Week medical check on her son should have caught his debilitating condition and been ordered to monitor him.
“They should have never let that medical team go home,” she told The Post. “They saw my son swallowing, spitting up blood – it was visible by the eye … That’s disgusting. It was abuse of power.”
After her son’s death, Regina Mullen worked with Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), who wrote legislation aimed at improving medical care and oversight of high-stress military training programs.
“When I first met Regina, she made it clear that no other parent should ever have to endure her pain,” Smith said in a statement last week after he and Regina met with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.). “She has made incredible strides in her goal to ensure these young men are as healthy as possible and have access to a world-class medical monitoring capability.”
Independent investigation
The bereaved mother is now pushing Congress to direct the Pentagon’s internal watchdog to investigate the case after advocating for the command investigation that alleged Geary and his team were at fault in Kyle’s death.
She’s also spoken to media outlets calling for accountability for the officers.
“The safety of the men, that’s their primary responsibility,” she told The Post on Friday.
Geary’s attorney said he is confident that further investigation would clear his client of the scrutiny that has surrounded him since the initial report was completed last fall.
“If the Navy regrettably acts against my client, administratively or punitively, the resulting process will undoubtedly bring the needed antiseptic of sunshine to this issue,” Wareham said.
Former Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller told The Post those most deserving of accountability are likely Geary’s superiors, claiming the Pentagon’s bureaucracy regularly pushes blame and punishment onto those in charge of individual commands after tragedies.
“The services are extremely reluctant to ever investigate themselves, and when they have to because they realize there’s pressure, the initial investigation is always flawed [with] cursory bias,” he said Friday. “And in this one, clearly, the mother was not accepting the results of it.”
Kash Patel, Miller’s former chief of staff and longtime friend of Geary’s, agreed, saying he believes the Navy is cracking down on the captain to avoid taking responsibility for ignoring Geary’s early warnings about attrition.
“It was a tragic death, there needs to be a justification for it and someone needs to be punished,” Patel said. “And rather than punish the people who are actually responsible for it – the secretary of the Navy and the admirals – they reach down and create a scapegoat and unfortunately … we have a tragic way of attacking our actual heroes.”
The hope is that the new IG investigation will bring more clarity about what actually happened, make sense of conflicting narratives and offer suggestions about how it can be prevented in the future.
“I am extremely skeptical of any investigation conducted by the United States military,” Miller said. “That’s why you have Inspector Generals [who] are typically more unbiased based on their charter and more forthright and more revealing.
“But here’s the thing,” he added, “until Congress gets involved and forces an independent investigation, that’s the only way you get any anything meaningful out of the military.”
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