[The Intercept] A FEDERAL JUDGE in Tucson, Arizona, reversed the conviction of four humanitarian aid volunteers on religious freedom grounds Monday, ruling that the government had embraced a "gruesome logic" that criminalizes "interfering with a border enforcement strategy of deterrence by death."
The reversal, written by U.S. District Judge Rosemary Márquez,
...child of Mexican immigrants, non-Ivy League, Obama appointee...
marked the latest rebuke of the Trump administration’s crackdown on humanitarian aid providers in southern Arizona, and the second time in matter of months that a religious freedom defense has prevailed in a federal case involving the provision of aid to migrants in the borderlands.
The defendants in the case ‐ Natalie Hoffman, Oona Holcomb, Madeline Huse, and Zaachila Orozco-McCormick ‐ were fined and given probation in March of last year for entering the Cabeza Prieta Wildlife Refuge in the summer of 2017 without a permit, driving on a restricted access road and leaving food, water, and other humanitarian aid supplies for migrants passing through in the summer heat. They were the first among a group of volunteers with the faith-based humanitarian group, No More Deaths, to go to trial for their aid work in 2019.
The remains of roughly 3,000 migrants have been recovered in Pima County alone since 2000. Experts are confident that the true death toll is much higher. Situated at the heart of the Sonoran Desert, the Cabeza Prieta refuge is one of the deadliest spaces in the region. As Márquez made clear in her decision, the No More Deaths volunteers admitted to the factual claims in the case: that they left aid supplies in "an area of desert wilderness where people frequently die of dehydration and exposure." But in appealing their convictions, Márquez went on to write, the defendants had successfully argued that their actions ‐ imbued "with the avowed goal of mitigating death and suffering" ‐ were protected under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, or RFRA.
The defendants established that they were exercising their "sincere religious beliefs," Márquez wrote, while the government failed to demonstrate that its application of the refuge rules was carried out in the "least restrictive" manner available.
Gotcha. Now on to the appeals court, to be followed, if necessary, by the Supreme Court. It’ll be fun!
Katherine Franke, a law professor at Columbia, where she is faculty director of the Law, Rights, and Religion Project, called the reversal "fantastic." Last year, Franke and her colleagues published a report illustrating how the federal government has routinely sided with right-wing or conservative causes in religious freedom cases. The law professor has followed the No More Deaths cases closely, filing motions in support of RFRA defenses. "The lower court’s opinion was so horrible just as a matter of legal reasoning, that it was really nice to see the judge apply a thorough and careful analysis of the religious liberty claim," Franke told The Intercept. While she anticipates a government appeal, Franke said Monday’s reversal provides a solid foundation for applying RFRA in similar legal contexts.
Aid and Comfort
To render assistance or counsel. Any act that deliberately strengthens or tends to strengthen enemies of the United States, or that weakens or tends to weaken the power of the United States to resist and attack such enemies is characterized as aid and comfort.
Article 3, section 3, clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution specifies that the giving of aid and comfort to the enemy is an element in the crime of Treason. Aid and comfort may consist of substantial assistance or the mere attempt to provide some support; actual help or the success of the enterprise is not relevant.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
02/05/2020 12:52 Comments ||
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#4
They weren't charged with aid and comfort, btw. They were charged with infractions such as: entering closed areas, traveling off established roads, leaving items in a national park, etc. All valid and all guilty
Posted by: Frank G ||
02/05/2020 12:59 Comments ||
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[Red State] With the recent release of the IG report and confirmation that the FBI had illegally obtained warrants against Carter Page to spy on Trump’s campaign, one of the next steps was to see just how seriously the bureau would take the revelations. Director Wray’s initial, ridiculous response didn’t leave much hope that real reforms would come.
That looks to have been a pretty solid indicator because the FBI responded to the FISC recommendations on what to change and it’s exactly what you’d expect. Never mind all the issues with the FISA court itself and the team they chose, the FBI can’t even be bothered to do much of anything differently.
Oh, there will be more "training" and "modules." Well, that will surely fix everything because what happened with Page was just a training lapse or something.
This is ludicrous. It was political bias run wild and FBI leadership actively choosing to abuse their power that led to the warrants against Page being fabricated. Wray’s response should be to fire people, demote others, and show publicly that he’s willing to do what it takes to fix his agency. Instead, he’s going to simply stick to the current internal processes, throw out a few useless seminars, and call the job done.
What the FBI really needs is a good house cleaning and the bright light of external oversight shined into its recesses. That’s obviously not going to happen as long as Wray is in charge, but the President can’t afford the political firestorm firing him would produce right now. In the meantime, the country is stuck with this corrupt, dumpster fire of an agency essentially doing what it has always done. Wray couldn’t even be bothered to accept the recommendation to bar certain officials from being part of the FISA process.
Given all this, there’s only one direction left to go. Wray needs to be fired and the FISA court needs to be disbanded. Both have shown themselves woefully incapable of policing themselves. I hope Republicans in Congress take this up and push the issue over the next year. That’s the only way trust can ever restored.
#6
People tell me with a straight face that if Trump was so concerned about Biden in Ukraine, he should have asked the FBI to investigate.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
02/05/2020 12:55 Comments ||
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#7
People need to be held accountable. So far, one might think Wray to be a part of the cover-up. He does not instill the confidence that some have expressed for him.
#8
People need to be held accountable.
Exactly. Show me people going to jail. Show me people getting fired and having their pensions given a "haircut" to GS-8 levels... Then I'll start believing in (quote) Consequences (un-quote).
Takes a while to get to the point, but it's a fun ride
[AspenBeat] The figure of 2% doesn’t sound like much, but it’s about as much of the genetic makeup that I have from a direct ancestor of five generations ago, or about 200 years ago. Stated another way, I have about as much Neandertal in me as if my great, great, great grandfather had been 100% pureblood Neandertal. In fact, I’m way more Neandertal than Liz Warren is Cherokee.
#1
Mercutio dear, at that website if you click on the headline of the piece, it will give you the dedicated URL. Paste that into the Source box, and Rantburg will stop announcing it’s a duplicate.
[Hollywood Reporter] This following bit from National Review:
I find it amusing that after ripping America as an idiocratic nightmare every Sunday night for the last six years on HBO, John Oliver chose to become a citizen of this country above all others. Oliver hinted that he worried his paperwork might mysteriously get tied up due to his nonstop lambasting of the leadership of the executive branch ‐ "I do talk s***," he tells The Hollywood Reporter. But everything apparently turned out fine, and he took the oath of citizenship together with 159 other freshly minted Americans at the federal building in downtown Manhattan. He was given a tiny American flag as Lee Greenwood’s "Proud to be an American" played, with a photo of Donald Trump overlooking the proceedings. The long-promised exodus of American celebrities due to fears of Trump has yet to transpire, but here’s one coming the other way.
Why take the oath under Old Glory? Oliver notes, correctly that presidents come and go but America endures. "Everyone in this room is making a commitment that long outlasts the current president. You’re vehemently endorsing the idea of America because the idea is still perfect. That’s what was so moving about the ceremony."
Oh, and Oliver predicts Trump is going to be reelected. "It would be insane not to assume that," he says, with a sigh. Season seven of his show starts February 16. National Review link found here.
[BBC] Lawyer and diversity campaigner Funke Abimbola MBE says she suffered "bias" when she tried to get into the profession.
About a third of FTSE 100 companies have no ethnic minority representation on their boards, a report has revealed.
The Parker Review Committee found 31 of the 83 firms which provided relevant information fell into this category.
Ms Abimbola said: "I found a number of barriers to entering the profession because I had an African name and am a black woman, without any doubt."
She told the BBC: "I had to make over 100 phone calls to get a foot in the door.
"I have experienced bias and situations where, being a black woman, I was judged more harshly over other colleagues. You are more likely to be noticed and are far more likely to have negative judgements made about you if you are part of an ethnic minority."
The Parker report also found even lower representation at board level across FTSE 250 companies, where 119 out of 173 (69%) had no ethnic diversity.
MBE - The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is a British order of chivalry, rewarding contributions to the arts and sciences, work with charitable and welfare organisations, and public service outside the civil service.[2] It was established on 4 June 1917 by King George V and comprises five classes across both civil and military divisions, the most senior two of which make the recipient either a knight if male or dame if female.[3] There is also the related British Empire Medal, whose recipients are affiliated with, but not members of the order.
#11
"I have experienced bias and situations where, being a black womanold white man, I was judged more harshly over other colleagues. You are more likely to be noticed and are far more likely to have negative judgements made about you if you are part of an ethnic elder minority."
#12
Good chance it wasn't her name so much as the Lawyer and Diversity campaigner part that got her filed in the bin. I know that would be my reaction. Hire her and you will get sued and get a ton of bad publicity, it's just a matter of time.
[Free Beacon] As Georgia teeters on the brink of a backslide into authoritarianism, two senators are warning that a campaign of repression against pro-Western protesters opens the door "for increased Russian meddling in the country" and jeopardizes the historically close relationship between the United States and Georgia.
Sens. Jim Risch (R., Idaho) and Jeanne Shaheen (D., N.H.), two leading foreign policy voices in Congress, issued a letter urging Georgian prime minister Giorgi Gakharia to stop repressing pro-U.S. voices and ensure that upcoming Georgian elections are not marred by corruption. Risch and Shaheen both served in 2012 as election observers in Georgia.
The letter is the latest in a series of petitions from U.S. observers of Georgia, including House Georgia Caucus leaders and top officials on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. The bipartisan group of lawmakers has sent increasingly critical letters to Georgian leaders in recent weeks, warning that the anti-U.S. backslide imperils the country's democratic progress.
In addition to violently repressing protesters, the ruling Georgian Dream Party‐led by Bidzina Ivanishvili, the country's wealthiest citizen‐has targeted pro-U.S. opposition leaders to delegitimize their movement. U.S. officials are now worried that Georgia will fall back into authoritarianism nearly 30 years after it broke free of the Soviet Union.
"These events give us pause and raise questions about Georgia's commitment to our shared values," Risch and Shaheen wrote. "Further, we fear that a lack of progress on reforms and increased tensions within Georgia will only open the door for increased Russian meddling in the country and throughout the region. The longer these actions continue, the more Georgia's security will be jeopardized, and we may be forced to reevaluate our partnership."
The country's failure to enact electoral reforms and subsequent suppression of protesters are chief concerns for Risch and Shaheen.
#4
Uh, these are just crazy people who want to start military adventures in the Caucasus with Georgia as a convenient springboard.
Remember when they invaded South Ossetia and Russia handed them their asses in a bag?
The same people wanted to join Georgia to NATO. Yes, that's right, NATO. The one that specifically is oriented to the North Atlantic region, it says so in its charter. But if Georgia is in NATO then we're justified in using Georgia as an outpost to make even more endless war.
Posted by: Herb McCoy ||
02/05/2020 2:27 Comments ||
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#5
Why should we care? Not even close to our sphere of influence or strategic goals.
[PJ] - Terry Jones of Monty Python passed on last month, but his spirit was present at the Iowa caucuses last night as "none of the above" emerged as the apparent winner. The combined efforts of the comedy writers of Tinseltown couldn't have produced a sillier outcome. A technical glitch delayed the delegate count, but the contingent, in this case, reveals the necessary: The Democrats don't have a clue whom they want as a presidential candidate, because the Democratic Party has become a suppurating stew of contending resentments. Do they want a recycled Communist to soak the successful and distribute the spoils to self-defined losers in the form of student-loan forgiveness or subsidized health care or a job-killing minimum wage? Do they want an eco-gender icon who flatters the faddish predilections of young urban professionals? Do they want a feminist standard-bearer with an aggressive redistributionist agenda? Do they want an African-American candidate to embody the rejection of "white privilege" and correct the supposed original sin of slavery? Or do they want an aged, empty vessel whose only qualification is a past association with a Democratic Party that once upon a time won elections?
...Thus pops the bubble of intersectionality, the calculus of resentment that was supposed to align the interests of all the oppressed of the world. Feminists ignore the vulgar exploitation of the Super Bowl halftime show because Shakira and JLo are Hispanics, and therefore oppressed people who are entitled to use their sexuality as an expression of power (they also ignore the misogyny of rap and endemic violence against women in the Muslim world for the same reason). Urban metrosexuals ignore the fact that the tax burdens of failing municipalities erode their prospects, because they don't want to seem insensitive to the needs of the homeless or the problems of minorities.
...The Democrats can't unite because they have nothing around which to unite. Resentment is not a unifying platform, because the resenters resent each other as much as they do the opposition. The whole premise of left-wing politics has been daffy from day one, and the slapstick at the Iowa Caucuses is just life imitating art.
#1
Resentment is not a unifying platform, because the resenters resent each other as much as they do the opposition.
This. This stems from the liberal embrace of a weak and shallow culture whose only really attractive value is racial and religious tolerance.
Such tolerance is a good thing -- except when it's not true tolerance but resentment masquerading as same. Which is bound to happen if tolerance is not anchored in a spiritual belief.
Ultimately, tolerance is just a negative virtue, the absence of an evil. But you can't build anything valuable and strong and enduring on top of it. For that, a culture and a people need a positive belief in something greater than themselves.
The Dems don't really believe in anything substantial.
They aren't actually followers of Marx: he urged class solidarity, and that destroys their narrative of 1619 and its Church of "I just feel like racism is everything."
They aren't actually feminists: if they were they would shut down this BS nonsense about "gender dysphoria" and end the grotesque charade of chicks with dicks competing in and running the table in girls' and women's athletic events.
They don't really care about the environment -- if they did, they be off protesting the ChiComs and Indians, not the US where emissions are falling.
They don't give a shit about inequality. If they did they would not take millions from dozens of oligarchs -- let alone allow an oligarch to enter their race for the nomination and spend literally half a BILLION to stack the odds in his swinish favor.
#3
Some clear advice for the Dems. Give up on the impeachment issue, give up on election 2020. Focus on your base and both hoses of congress. Build a new platform more centric with the people all across America, not just NYC and San Fran, and not just FREE SHIT. Pick a center based dem from the new senate and put everything behind him/her. Pick your VP from the rest of the field. Stop pandering to the crybabies in the far left, like the right did with the far right. We need a two party system and a parent vs crybaby is not two party's.
Posted by: 49 Pan ||
02/05/2020 13:14 Comments ||
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#4
Nadler just said they will continue to investigate Trump
Posted by: Frank G ||
02/05/2020 13:17 Comments ||
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#5
Party out of power typically belly-flops and ensures a second term. GOP puts up "it's my turn" candidates with no charisma. Democrat puts up their socialists and nutbags to humiliate them so that the corrupt wing can take over again.
#6
Somebody needs to put a "You must be this tall to enter" sign at Nadler's door.
Posted by: 49 Pan ||
02/05/2020 14:26 Comments ||
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#7
Nadler just said they will continue to investigate Trump
Minutes after the impeachment vote was gaveled, Senator Mitch McConnell put the first batch of federal judges up for a vote. Presumably, they passed. So the Senate will get important things done while the House pleasures itself with another pointless impeachment effort.
Though if the pattern of this presidency continues, the House will pause to pass key budget bills with very little fussing about President Trump’s terms. Except for the shouting and tweeting, it’s practically an ideal situation.
[Babylon Bee] WASHINGTON, D.C.‐Washington has a long history of using empty chairs to make political statements, from "empty-chairing" politicians who don't show up to hearings to leaving chairs empty to protest gun violence.
The practice continued at tonight's State of the Union address, as Democrats left a lone chair empty in the audience to honor their fallen hero General Qasem Soleimani.
"We wanted to call attention to the violence Trump has wrought against innocent freedom fighters," Nancy Pelosi said. "This is just one way we continue to call out his callous oppression of America's enemies. Any enemy of America is an enemy of me, I always say, and Trump needs to understand that principle."
In a controversial part of the speech, Trump said, "Terrorism is bad," drawing boos from the Democrats' side. "Read the room!" shouted one congressman. "Too soon!"
"I mean, we're usually against terrorism," said Senator Chuck Schumer, "but if Trump is against it, it must be the best thing ever."
Also, it's hard to joke after the speech Trump gave.
It was magnificent, inspiring in so many ways -- short on rhetorical BS of the sort we've come to expect from the Globalists and long on direct, powerful, pointed facts -- and a welcome reprieve from the usual idiocy and triviality of the SS and Deep State.
#3
The truly fun part is going to be trolling socialists all day with the utterly bogus claim, because I have absolute confidence they will defend it completely.
[Features] When Vice Adm. Joseph Aucoin was elevated to lead the vaunted 7th Fleet in 2015, he expected it to be the pinnacle of his nearly four-decade Navy career. The fleet was the largest and most powerful in the world, and its role as one of America’s great protectors had new urgency. China was expanding into disputed waters. And Kim Jong-un was testing ballistic missiles in North Korea.
Aucoin was bred on such challenges. As a Navy aviator, he’d led the "Black Aces," a squadron of F-14 Tomcats that in the late 1990s bombed targets in Kosovo.
But what he found with the 7th Fleet alarmed and angered him.
The fleet was short of sailors, and those it had were often poorly trained and worked to exhaustion. Its warships were falling apart, and a bruising, ceaseless pace of operations meant there was little chance to get necessary repairs done. The very top of the Navy was consumed with buying new, more sophisticated ships, even as its sailors struggled to master and hold together those they had. The Pentagon, half a world away, was signing off on requests for ships to carry out more and more missions.
The risks were obvious, and Aucoin repeatedly warned his superiors about them. During video conferences, he detailed his fleet’s pressing needs and the hazards of not addressing them. He compiled data showing that the unrelenting demands on his ships and sailors were unsustainable. He pleaded with his bosses to acknowledge the vulnerability of the 7th Fleet.
#1
In the early 2000s, the Navy embarked on a quest for so-called efficiencies. Vern Clark, the Navy’s top military officer during much of the Bush era, brought an MBA to the job and pitched his cuts to the force using the jargon of corporate downsizing. Smaller crews were “optimal” crews. Relying on new technologies to do the work sailors once did was described as “capital-for-labor substitutions.”
Promising a “workforce for the 21st century,” Clark’s team tried out new training and staffing ideas, including a decision that officers no longer needed to attend months of classroom training to learn the intricacies of operating billion-dollar warships. Instead, aspiring Surface Warfare Officers, charged with everything from driving ships to launching missiles, could learn mostly at sea with the help of packets of CDs. The program was widely derided by sailors as “SWOS in a Box.”
The efficiencies even included eliminating a requirement for ship captains to post lookouts on both sides of ships, a cut that would later prove crucial when the Fitzgerald’s crew failed to see a fast-closing cargo ship until it was too late.
Posted by: Frank G ||
02/05/2020 10:32 Comments ||
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#2
Warships are often "overmanned" because they expect to take casualties. Some of the equipment is "redundant" because they expect to take battle damage.
You might be able to eliminate some of the "excess" and redundancies IF you expect that you will never go into combat.
On the other hand, eliminating lookouts is just effing stupid. Yes, 99.99& of the time, the lookout will see nothing. However, the 0.01% can literally be the difference between life and death.
Posted by: Rambler in Virginia ||
02/05/2020 10:50 Comments ||
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#3
Let's hope JIT Kaizen etc for .Mil isnt here...
[Town Hall] - It’s a tribute to the great Rush Limbaugh that the reaction to his cancer diagnosis by the tens of millions of people he inspired was not to be devastated but to focus and to resolutely offer their thoughts and prayers in his fight. And he will fight ‐ he’ll fight this like he has fought everything and everyone else that tried to take him out over the last third of a century. He is the archetypal conservative brawler, a no-apologies, no-excuses conservative who never submitted, never allowed himself to be domesticated and neutered by the elite. At the same time, he is gracious and a charity juggernaut. We love him for his strength and wit, and the left ‐ to judge by its vicious, hateful glee over the news ‐ has never forgiven him for either.
But then, the glory of Rush is that he doesn’t ask to be forgiven.
Here’s how I learned about Rush. I was back from the Gulf War in mid-1991, out of the Army and staying with my parents for a few weeks before I went to LA to start law school. One day, a guy I grew up with who lived across the street told me, "You gotta hear this Rush guy!"
...That’s when this all began for me. Sure, I was conservative already, but I was kind of on my own. Lots of us were ‐ millions of us thought we were the only ones who thought like we did. Back then, being a conservative meant you waited for the National Review and maybe the American Spectator to show up in your mailbox. That was it. That was the whole conservative media. You social media cons are spoiled. We were the conservative diaspora.
And conservatism was still nice. Nice worked for Ronald Reagan, but he had a spine of steel. Nice did not work for George H.W. Bush. He would dive bomb a Japanese destroyer and send me and half a million others off to war, but get into an undignified political brawl? Oh well, I never! He got pummeled.
But Rush was not interested in submission. He was interested in conservatism, raw and undiluted. And he gathered us together and demonstrated that we were not alone.
[American Thinker] - I don’t know about you, but I’d say that Speaker Lucy’s got some ’splainin’ to do. Hey, Lucy -- Nancy, that is -- what exactly is the point of staging an impeachment when the other party actually has a majority in the Senate? Hello? Anybody there?
Actually, I think the rot started way back on the night of November 8, 2016, when Hillary Clinton didn’t concede the election.
See, if I were the dark Sorotic force behind the Democratic Party I would have gotten the leaders together in a room on November 9 and then called up Hillary Clinton to tell her to get her nose out of the Chardonnay and concede the election right now -- or we take another look at the emails, know-what-I-mean.
That’s because I believe that the one thing "our democracy" needs to do is have proper alternation of the parties in power. That means that the losing presidential candidate gets up on election night and concedes the election and says we are all Americans and wait until next time.
...We Americans need a New Narrative, and right now I am pushing Curtis Yarvin’s notion that America is three social layers: Gentry, Commoners, and Clients.
The thing about Gentry is that they expect us to maintain their dignity in high-status careers. In Jane Austen novels the Gentry maintained their dignity with their income from land and the Funds. And as rectors and vicars in the state church. Today the Gentry is educated and expects professorships, lifetime gigs in the State Department and the "intelligence community," and, for recreation, ordering the Commoners around.
Whatabout Commoners? In Charles Dickens novels they abounded. In David Copperfield they included the Peggottys, Mr. Micawber, Uriah Heep, getting by as best they can. Today, of course, Commoners are Trump voters, bossed around by the modern Gentry and reviled as deplorables and racist-sexist-homophobes and fed up with it.
Clients used to be serfs and then landless laborers and then the workers. Today they are the Little Darlings of the ruling class and the Gentry.
The world is changing. It used to be the old three-class system of landowners and capitalists, the middle class, and the workers. Now it’s educated Gentry, Commoners, and Clients. Gentry used to be the middle class; Commoners used to be the workers.
...On this Narrative, the Commoners are just starting to achieve strategic concentration, and so, all of a sudden, politicians like Donald Trump in the US and Nigel Farage in the UK have emerged to give the Commoners a voice.
And the Gentry don’t like it.
Guess what. If the Gentry had conceded the election in 2016 then Trump would just have been an ordinary president doing a bit of deregulation and tariff manipulation. But because they fought him for three years he has now won what the strategerists call a "decisive victory" that will echo down the years.
Hey Nance and Hillary! Nice going, ladies! We couldn’t have done it without you!
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[The Intercept] A FEDERAL JUDGE in Tucson, Arizona, reversed the conviction of four humanitarian aid volunteers on religious freedom grounds Monday, ruling that the government had embraced a "gruesome logic" that criminalizes "interfering with a border enforcement strategy of deterrence by death."
[Red State] With the recent release of the IG report and confirmation that the FBI had illegally obtained warrants against Carter Page to spy on Trump’s campaign, one of the next steps was to see just how seriously the bureau would take the revelations. Director Wray’s initial, ridiculous response didn’t leave much hope that real reforms would come.
[Hollywood Reporter] 
[BBC] Lawyer and diversity campaigner Funke Abimbola MBE says she suffered "bias" when she tried to get into the profession.
[Babylon Bee] WASHINGTON, D.C.‐Washington has a long history of using empty chairs to make political statements, from "empty-chairing" politicians who don't show up to hearings to leaving chairs empty to protest gun violence.
