RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/chris-queen/2022/07/05/u-s-oil-gas-association-savagely-burns-biden-for-his-bring-down-gas-prices-tweet-n1610448

The official presidential Twitter account for the Biden administration sent out a strongly worded tweet on Saturday urging oil and gas companies to lower the price that Americans are paying for gasoline — as if it’s as simple as changing the numbers on the sign at gas stations.

Joe Biden and his team of incompetents want the oil and gas industry to decrease prices to “reflect the cost [they’re] paying for the product” — in other words, to not make any money — in order to save the Democrats from a bloodbath in November.

People on Twitter with smarter economic minds clapped back at Biden with some brutality. My PJM colleague Rick Moran pointed out some of the most prominent examples of pushback on Sunday, including a notable tweet from Jeff Bezos.

Rick also gave the White House a reality slap of his own when he wrote, “Biden apparently doesn’t know that gas station owners are mostly independent small businesses whose razor-thin profit margins make it impossible to willy-nilly lower prices at the pump just because the president orders them to.”

But when an entire industry issues a brutal, clever response to an ignorant tweet from the president, it’s a pretty rough burn.

https://www.city-journal.org/the-exoneration-hustle

The headline is becoming more common: “Innocent Man Freed After Decades in Jail for Murder!” As a matter of statistical probabilities, it must be true that some innocent defendants are convicted. But experienced law enforcement officials are growing concerned that progressive prosecutors are freeing guilty murderers in their rush to enforce their own politics of decarceration and equity. A close look at how this exoneration hustle works is worth reviewing because the pattern becomes clear.

The homicide facts usually look something like the following. Two drug crews in Big City, USA are having a territorial dispute about who controls a certain street corner. Sam “Bam” Suber sees rival drug crew member Mark “Shark” Trowbridge dealing drugs on the disputed corner. Bam drives up in a car and shoots Shark, killing him. The murder is witnessed by a drug addict, a sex worker, and another member of Shark’s crew. Bam borrowed the car from his cousin and has been seen with a 9 mm handgun by multiple other individuals on the criminal fringe. Because Bam simply drove up, shot Shark, and drove off, police have not recovered the gun, and they don’t have DNA or fingerprints. At trial, the drug addict and sex worker identify Bam as the shooter, with both of them facing unrelated criminal charges for drug possession and prostitution. Shark’s buddy, facing a ten-year mandatory sentence in an unrelated drug case, also identifies Bam as the shooter. Various witnesses link Bam to the car and the gun. Bam is convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. This scenario describes a typical drug-related murder conviction in the United States.

Flash forward 20 years. Bam loses every direct appeal of his conviction. He is now into collateral appeals in federal court, the endless habeas proceedings of a convicted murderer serving life. But suddenly, a progressive prosecutor is elected in Bam’s hometown. This prosecutor is a former criminal-defense lawyer who believes that no one should do more than ten years in prison and that all eye-witness identifications are flawed. How does this progressive prosecutor go about exonerating Bam, burnishing her progressive credentials?