Thursday, February 20, 2020
In the US, leftist local prosecutors make inroads
But on the local level, a small group of progressive state prosecutors have been elected, and they have big ideas about criminal justice reform.
Parisa Dehghani-Tafti — who is now the top prosecutor in northern Virginia’s Arlington county in the Washington suburbs — knows she is not the “typical” candidate for the job.
“I am an immigrant. I grew up very poor. I have done some (public) defender work,” says the 46-year-old, who was born in Iran, and is a mother to two black children.
“The federal judiciary is changing, it’s becoming very conservative. It’s even more important that folks who are reform-informed people are running and engaged in the local system,” she told AFP.
“We are now the frontline.”
Since he won the White House, Trump has named nearly 200 judges to the federal bench. In that time, about 40 unorthodox prosecutors — one is even a tattooed biker — have taken office.
For Miriam Krinsky — a former federal prosecutor and the executive director of Fair and Just Prosecution (FJP), which is supporting these local attorneys — the progressives represent a “drop in the ocean.”
But many of them have emerged in major cities such as Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, and Orlando: “jurisdictions that impact large numbers in terms of prison population.”
– ‘Justice League’ –
The United States has the largest number of prison detainees in the world at more than 2.2 million, according to the World Prison Brief database.
But only 10 percent of those prisoners have been convicted in federal courts. The others are the domain of state and local jurisdictions.
In the past, local prosecutors were known to favor tough sentences for even minor offenses, often as a way of ensuring re-election.
But the new guard is advocating a different approach.
“We need more people joining the Justice League of progressive prosecutors,” says Rachael Rollins, the district attorney in Suffolk County in Massachusetts, which includes Boston.
“We are looking at our profession and crafts differently than many of our predecessors have … They would almost exclusively say that the right solution to...
Trump: Democrats, ‘Dirty Cops’ And ‘Dishonest Scum’ Have ‘POISONED Democracy’
“The ones at the top, they were absolute scum”
Wowing a crowd of thousands in Phoenix Wednesday night, President Trump tore into his Democratic opponents, declaring that it doesn’t matter who he goes up against because “We’re going to win”.
The President referred to Elizabeth Warren as “phony,” called Bernie Sanders “crazy,” and used his favourite nickname for Bloomberg, “Mini Mike.”
Trump accused the Democrats of attempting to “poison” democracy, noting that he has been subjected to “very unfair witch hunts and partisan … crusades” against his Presidency.
“And guess what? They failed,” he proclaimed to a raucous ovation. “And our polls numbers today are higher than they’ve ever been before.”
“I actually think we’re going to win by a lot – just like we did last time,” Trump urged.
“The ones at the top they were absolute scum,” Trump declared, suggesting that if ‘dirty cop’ FBI officials had targeted Democrats in the same way, “They’d be in jail for 50 years.”
Focusing on the current Democratic frontrunner, Sanders, Trump mocked the notion that Americans would vote for a socialist at a time when the economy is booming and the country is experiencing record...
China’s Government Is Like Something Out of ‘1984’
By Victor Davis Hanson
The Chinese communist government increasingly poses an existential threat not just to its own 1.4 billion citizens but to the world at large.
China is currently in a dangerously chaotic state. And why not, when a premodern authoritarian society leaps wildly into the brave new world of high-tech science in a single generation?
The Chinese technological revolution is overseen by an Orwellian dictatorship. Predictably, the Chinese Communist Party has not developed the social, political, or cultural infrastructure to ensure that its sophisticated industrial and biological research does not go rogue and become destructive to itself and to the billions of people who are on the importing end of Chinese products and protocols.
Central party officials run the government, military, media, and universities collectively in a manner reminiscent of the science-fiction Borg organism of “Star Trek,” which was a horde of robot-like entities all under the control of a central mind.
Thirty years ago, American pundits began gushing over China’s sudden leap from horse-drawn power to solar, wind, and nuclear energy. The Chinese communist government wowed Westerners. It created from nothing high-speed rail, solar farms, shiny new airports, and gleaming new high-density apartment buildings.
Western-trained Chinese scientists soon were conducting sophisticated medical and scientific research. And they often did so rapidly, without the prying regulators, nosy elected officials, and bothersome citizen lawsuits that often burden American and European scientists.
To make China instantly rich and modern, the communist hierarchy—the same government that once caused the deaths of some 60 million innocents under Mao Zedong—ignored property rights. It crushed individual freedom. It embraced secrecy and bulldozed over any who stood in its way.
In much the same manner that silly American pundits once praised Benito Mussolini’s fascist efforts to modernize Depression-era Italy, many naifs in the West praised China only because they wished that their own countries could recalibrate so quickly and efficiently—especially in service to green agendas.
But the world is learning that China does not just move mountains for new dams or bulldoze ancient neighborhoods that stand in the path of high-speed rail. It also hid the outbreak and the mysterious origins of the deadly coronavirus from its own people and the rest of the planet as well—a more dangerous replay of its earlier effort to mask the spread of the SARS virus.
The result was that thousands of unknowing carriers spread the viral plague while the government covered up its epidemic proportions.
China, of course, does not wish to have either its products or citizens quarantined from other countries. But the Chinese government will not allow foreign scientists to enter its country to collaborate on containing the coronavirus and developing a vaccine.
No wonder internet conspiracies speculate that the virus was either a rogue product of the Chinese military’s bioengineering weapons lab or originated from bats, snakes, or pangolins and the open-air markets where they are sold as food.
It is hard to believe that in 2020, the world’s largest and second-wealthiest county, which boasts of high-tech consumer products and gleaming cities, has imprisoned in “re-education camps” more than 1 million Uighur Muslims in the manner that Hitler, Stalin, and Mao once relocated “undesirable” populations.
China seems confident that it will soon rule the world, given its huge population, massive trade surpluses, vast cash reserves, and industries that produce so many of the world’s electronic devices, pharmaceuticals, and consumer goods.
For a year, the Chinese government has battled massive street demonstrations for democracy in Hong Kong. Beijing cynically assumes that Western nations don’t care. They are expected to drop their characteristic human rights advocacy because of how profitable their investments inside China have proven.
Beijing was right. Few Western companies complain that Chinese society is surveilled, regulated, and controlled in a nightmarish fashion that...
New Lawsuit from Covington Catholic Students Levels Defamation Case Against Hoax Hatemongers
Nine students are suing a list of media liberals.
Weeks after their classmate Nicholas Sandmann achieved victory in a lawsuit against CNN for the network’s role in broadcasting a defamatory narrative against him, a group of Covington Catholic students are launching new lawsuits against a list of media liberals who dishonestly attacked the students over the infamous incident at the Lincoln Memorial in 2019.
Twelve students of the Kentucky school are filing a collective lawsuit against a list of prominent media liberals who jumped on a bandwagon to defame them in January 2019. Some well-known blue checkmark media personalities are being sued, such as:
-Shaun King
-Reza Aslan(who despicably threatened Sandmann with violence after the incident)
-Maggie Haberman
-Ana Navarro
-Matthew Dowd
Judging from Sandmann’s handsome settlement with CNN, the group of Covington Catholic students may have a good chance of securing a favorable judgement in their lawsuit. The case was filed in the Kenton County Circuit Court on Tuesday.
In the court filing, the students state they were subjected to “public denunciations, calls for public harassment and public demands of school expulsion.” It appears as if at least some of the students were accompanying Sandmann when he engaged in an infamous confrontation with Nathan Philips, who approached the group and loudly utilized a drum as Sandmann stood cooly and...
Paul Harvey So God Made A Farmer
And on the 8th day, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, "I need a caretaker." So God made a farmer.
God said, "I need somebody willing to get up before dawn, milk cows, work all day in the fields, milk cows again, eat supper and then go to town and stay past midnight at a meeting of the school board." So God made a farmer.
"I need somebody with arms strong enough to rustle a calf and yet gentle enough to deliver his own grandchild. Somebody to call hogs, tame cantankerous machinery, come home hungry, have to wait lunch until his wife's done feeding visiting ladies and tell the ladies to be sure and come back real soon -- and mean it." So God made a farmer.
God said, "I need somebody willing to sit up all night with a newborn colt. And watch it die. Then dry his eyes and say, 'Maybe next year.' I need somebody who can shape an ax handle from a persimmon sprout, shoe a horse with a hunk of car tire, who can make harness out of haywire, feed sacks and shoe scraps. And who, planting time and harvest season, will finish his forty-hour week by Tuesday noon, then, pain'n from 'tractor back,' put in another seventy-two hours." So God made a farmer.
God had to have somebody willing to ride the ruts at double speed to get the hay in ahead of the rain clouds and yet stop in mid-field and race to help when he sees the first smoke from a neighbor's place. So God made a farmer.
God said, "I need somebody strong enough to clear trees and heave bails, yet gentle enough to tame lambs and wean pigs and tend the pink-combed pullets, who will stop his mower for an hour to splint the broken leg of a meadow lark. It had to be somebody who'd plow deep and straight and not cut corners. Somebody to seed, weed, feed, breed and rake and disc and plow and plant and tie the fleece and strain the milk and replenish the self-feeder and finish a hard week's work with a five-mile drive to church.
"Somebody who'd bale a family together with the soft strong bonds of sharing, who would laugh and then sigh, and then reply, with smiling eyes, when his son says he wants to spend his life 'doing what dad does.'" So God made a farmer.
-Paul Harvey
If I were the devil | remastered audio | Paul Harvey
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