Senator Fail: Doug Jones’ task force couldn’t find serial bomber Eric Rudolph for FIVE YEARS.

From early 1998 through early 2003, Eric Rudolph’s elusiveness was a running joke. It was a lot like Saturday Night Live (when SNL was still funny and relevant) and the Weekend Update report that Spanish strongman Generalissimo Francisco Franco was ‘still dead.’

What Rudolph did was not funny. He planted bombs in Atlanta and Birmingham, targeting abortion clinics gay bars and the 1996 Olympics. But the federal task force set up to capture him was a Keystone Kops affair that failed miserably in its efforts to bring him in.

That task force of local, state and federal law enforcement was headed up by none other than the junior Senator from the state of Alabama.

President Bill Clinton appointed Jones as the US Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama in August 1997. He became point man for the task force in 1998.

For the next five years, Rudolph successfully evaded capture. He wasn’t caught until May 2003 when a rookie cop in a small town in North Carolina saw a bum rummaging through garbage for breakfast. Five years. Millions of federal dollars. And it took the sharp eye of a 21-year old Barney Fife to bring him in.

When Jones ran in the 2017 special election to fill the seat left by former Senator and eventual Attorney General Jeff Sessions, President Donald Trump correctly labeled him as ‘soft on crime.’ Local and national media raced to his defense and gave him all the bandwidth and column inches he needed to talk about his ‘record as a prosecutor.’

But no one asked about his miserable role in the task force that couldn’t find just one man. One man who had no outside help, no money, no job, no nothing. That one man was atop the FBI’s Most Wanted List for five years and had a $1 million bounty on his head.

Ask him today why a former federal prosecutor sits on exactly zero Senate committees with responsibility for law enforcement. Ask him why he has sponsored exactly zero Senate bills on the issues of crime and law enforcement.

He won’t answer because the one opportunity he had as a federal prosecutor came up empty. For five years.

Congratulations to Justice Kavanaugh. And shame on Senator Doug Jones

Congratulations to Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Doug Jones should be ashamed.

On Saturday, October 6, 2018, Judge Kavanaugh was confirmed by the United States Senate to the Supreme Court. He becomes the 114th Associate Justice in the history of the highest Court in the country. He replaces retiring Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy.

Kavanaugh was appointed by President Donald Trump on July 9 and toiled through a bitterly partisan vetting process and confirmation hearings. He was accused of vile sexual assaults by people that he didn’t even know and probably never met. They trotted out bare allegations with no supporting evidence, no witnesses, no nuttin’.  It was a confirmation process that shouldn’t have happened.

Jones didn’t agree to meet with then Judge Kavanaugh until he was hounded by the media and Alabama voters, inventing an excuse that he wanted to see his performance in “the hearings” first. That was bullshit—Jones was never going to be a Yes vote for confirmation and had no reason to meet with a man that he was never going to support.

Jones also repeated a lie he propagated throughout 2017’s special election campaign—that he was an independent voice and would not toe a party line. Jones isn’t an independent. He’s the Senator with the lowest seniority rank in a minority Senate conference run by Chuck Schumer. What Schumer says, Jones does. He’s a buck private in Schumer’s army of thugs.

Doug Jones did nothing to stop his “colleagues” or warn them that such partisan character assassinations are beneath the United States Senate—the world’s most deliberative and collegial legislative body. Their tactics were totally out of bounds in the advice and consent role Jones was elected to fulfill.

The Democrats made it clear that they would stop Brett Kavanaugh’s ascension to the Nation’s highest court.  On the very same day that President Trump announced Judge Kavanaugh as his Supreme Court nominee, Schumer promised to “oppose Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination with everything I have.”  When he said everything, he meant letting his fellow Democrats assault the character and reputation of an accomplished jurist who has done more to advance the role of women in the judiciary than any other Judge on his Court. It also meant making sure that little man Jones stayed in his place and kept his mouth shut as a national disgrace played out before us.

As an Alabamian, I was horrified.

Jones may object, pleading that there was nothing he could do.  That is another bare faced lie.

Jones could have put a quick end to the whole embarrassing and divisive confirmation by saying, “I have listened to my constituents and I have evaluated the Judge’s qualifications. I will vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh.”

Jones turned his back on Alabama. He turned a deaf ear to the people of this state, and their representatives in Montgomery and Washington, DC.  By a nearly two-to-one ratio, Alabamians supported Kavanaugh’s confirmation. Every elected leader from the state supported his confirmation. Senator Richard Shelby—who met with Kavanaugh very early in the confirmation process—strongly supported the nomination and proudly voted for it.

Jones voted against it, along with all but one honorable Democrat—Joe Manchin of West Virginia. Jones also stayed silent as his fellow Democrat henchmen tried to make Judge Kavanaugh out to be a serial sexual predator. Despite his fellow thugs’ best effort, Kavanaugh was confirmed by a 50-48 vote.

The Court will survive this mess, just as it has survived the 1991 “high tech lynching” of Justice Clarence Thomas.

Jones should be absolutely ashamed of himself.

Tennessee is not Wisconsin: Union thugs dragged out and arrested

In a scene that looked like it would morph into the debacle that occurred late last month and earlier this month in Wisconsin, public employee union thugs descended on the State Capitol in Nashville, Tennessee to protest a bill that would strip teachers’ unions of their collective bargaining rights.

But the Tennessee State Patrol was having none of it.

When seven protesters stood up and interrupted a hearing on the bill:

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Troopers pulled the holdouts out of the room one by one, while lawmakers, lobbyists and other observers looked on. Several fellow protesters shouted: "Shame!"

The protesters, some of whom were dragged to a nearby conference room, were arrested and faced charges of resisting arrest and disorderly conduct.

Republican Senate Speaker Ron Ramsey of Blountville in a statement said he supports the right to protest and assemble peacefully in Tennessee. But he said the protesters went too far.

"This General Assembly will not be intimidated by nomadic bands of professional agitators on spring break bent on disruption," he said. "We talk through our differences here. Tennessee is not Wisconsin."

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As in Wisconsin, the state of Tennessee faces a severe budget situation, and has to make difficult choices about where limited state revenues will be allocated. And, as always, the public employees’ pensions, healthcare programs and other benefits are on the cutting room table, just like everything else.

But the only way to sharply curtail the skyrocketing costs of these programs is to eliminate the public employees’ unions ability to negotiate the steady average annual increases they’ve enjoyed for decades and the taxpayers’ expense.

It has to stop, but the union thugs are not giving up without a fight. I suspect that before the day or the week is out, additional confrontations will take place in Nashville, as SEIU and AEA thugs mobilize and descend on the Music City.

Fortunately, Speaker Ron Ramsey and the Tennessee State Troopers are committed to maintaining order, and allowing the legislature to do the work the voters of Tennessee elected them to do.

Exit Question: Seeing the success that Wisconsin and soon to be Tennessee will have in slashing these bloated programs, when do other states realize their opportunity to get their fiscal heads back above water, and declaw these thuggish community organizers?

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