California Democrat Gun Controller Charged With Gun Trafficking

Pity it wasn't Diane Feinstein.

LA Times:

"State Sen. Leland Yee (D-San Francisco) was charged Wednesday with conspiring to commit wire fraud and traffic firearms...

In all, 26 people, including former school board president Keith Jackson, were indicted on charges related to an extensive crime ring...

The indictment alleges Yee and Jackson defrauded "citizens of honest services" and were involved in a scheme to traffic firearms in exchange for thousands in campaign donations to the senator.

...The gun charges go against Yee's stand as a gun control advocate.

In 2006, Yee was named to the Gun Violence Prevention Honor Roll by the Brady Campaign for his efforts that included co-authoring a first-in-the-nation bill to require new semiautomatic handguns be equipped with ballistics identification technology known as micro-stamping.

In 2013, he stood with law enforcement officials and then-Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to propose a bill that would regulate assault weapons."

Regulation increases the price they can charge.

UPDATE: More specifics here. Arming Muslim rebels in the Philippines? While trying to ban assault rifles in CA? That's a Democrat for you.

Law Professor Tyler Cowen Pepper Sprayed At George Mason University

A little bizarre. Cowen blogs at Volokh Conspiracy, which was recently picked up by the Washington Post. I wonder if this was random, or if he was targeted. It sounds like the latter, in which case my guess is that the assailant is somewhat left of center. In any case, I hope he gets more than a slap on the hands.

Intergalactic Fender Bender

Pretty neat. Here.

Rosy Fingered Aurora Does Her Thing

Here.

The Taliban, Pakistan, ISI, And Bin Laden

The New York Times has a longish story by Carlotta Gall, who covered Afghanistan and Pakistan from 2001 to 2013.

The Pakistani government, under President Pervez Musharraf and his intelligence chief, Lt. Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, was maintaining and protecting the Taliban, both to control the many groups of militants now lodged in the country and to use them as a proxy force to gain leverage over and eventually dominate Afghanistan. The dynamic has played out in ways that can be hard to grasp from the outside, but the strategy that has evolved in Pakistan has been to make a show of cooperation with the American fight against terrorism while covertly abetting and even coordinating Taliban, Kashmiri and foreign Qaeda-linked militants.

Our failure to understand what is going on has consequences.

America’s failure to fully understand and actively confront Pakistan on its support and export of terrorism is one of the primary reasons President Karzai has become so disillusioned with the United States. As American and NATO troops prepare to withdraw from Afghanistan by the end of this year, the Pakistani military and its Taliban proxy forces lie in wait, as much a threat as any that existed in 2001.

In January 2013, I visited the Haqqania madrasa to speak with senior clerics about the graduates they were dispatching to Afghanistan. They agreed to let me interview them and gave the usual patter about it being each person’s individual choice to wage jihad. But there was also continuing fanatical support for the Taliban...(T)he spokesman for the madrasa told me (they) were set on a military victory for the Taliban in Afghanistan. Moreover, he said, “it is a political fact that one day the Taliban will take power. The white flag of the Taliban will fly again over Kabul, inshallah.”

Pakistani security officials, political analysts, journalists and legislators warned of the same thing.

Not that any of this matters, of course.