90 Miles From Tyranny

Friday, September 7, 2018

Sex, Lies And Muslim Honor Killings In Texas....

A five-week capital murder trial came to a swift ending Thursday when a Harris County jury took more than a half-hour of deliberations to convict a Jordanian immigrant of killing his son-in-law and orchestrating the slaying of his daughter’s close friend in what prosecutors said were “honor killings.”

Ali Mahwood-Awad Irsan, 60, was found guilty of masterminding two homicides as part of broader plot to kill five people, including his daughter, after she ran away from the family compound in rural Montgomery County, converted to Christianity and married a Christian man.

Family members of the victims said the quick verdict indicates the jury was certain that Irsan was guilty, and that “honor killings” are not acceptable.

“Honor killings have no place in American society,” said Michael Creed, the older brother of Coty Beavers, one of the victims. “These are not infrequent events that happen in some random part of the world. They’re happening in America and they’re on the rise.”

A lengthy punishment hearing will begin on Friday, and the jury will determine if Irsan should be sentenced to death or life without parole for the double homicide of 28-year-old Beavers in November 2012 and Gelareh Bagherzadeh, an Iranian activist who was a close friend of Irsan’s daughter, 11 months earlier.

As state District Judge Jan Krocker read the verdict, Irsan shook his head slightly and looked down at the counsel table where he was sitting in a black suit.

After the courtroom had been cleared, members of the Beavers and Bagherzadeh families, all with tears in their eyes, hugged the prosecutors who also cried.

“It’s been hard for all of us, but it’s a good day,” said Kathy Soltani, a family friend of the Bagherzadehs. “Two wonderful lives cut short. It’s senseless. It’s a hard day, even though it’s a happy day.”

The two seemingly unrelated murders shocked Houston residents in 2012, and for a time there was speculation that Bagherzadeh’s murder was the work of Iranian elements unhappy with her criticism of that country’s government. But an even darker motive was given in 2015, when Irsan, his wife, and son were charged with planning the killings to restore family honor.

In closing arguments, a team of special prosecutors insisted that the elder Irsan, the father of 12 children by two wives, was...

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Nike Has Been Very Good For Memes...

Just Do It For Twenty Three Cents An Hour....

Hollywood Director Caught Knowingly Employing REGISTERED CHILD SEX OFFENDER

Actress Olivia Munn raised the alarm with studio executives after learning of Streigel's sex offender status.

20th Century Fox has purged one scene from its upcoming ‘Predator’ movie after it was discovered that one of the actors is a registered child sex offender. The director apologized when it emerged he knew about the conviction.

The scene was cut after executives were made aware that actor Steven Wilder Striegel is a registered sex offender. Striegel played a minor role in the film, featuring in only one scene.

“When the studio learned the details, his one scene in the film was removed within 24 hours,” Fox said in a statement as cited by Variety. “We were not aware of his background during the casting process due to legal limitations that impede studios from running background checks on actors.”

Actress and ‘Predator’ star Olivia Munn, who acted in the scene with Striegel, learned of the actor’s conviction as a child sex offender and alerted the studio on August 15.

According to The Los Angeles Times, Predator director James Black was aware of Striegel’s status as a sex offender at the time he hired him. Striegel has previously appeared in several films directed by Black, including ‘Iron Man 3’ and ‘The Nice Guys.’

“Having read this morning’s news reports, it has sadly become clear to me that I was misled by a friend I really wanted to believe was telling me the truth when he described the circumstances of his conviction,”Black said. ”I believe strongly in giving people second chances – but sometimes you discover that chance is not as warranted as you may have hoped.”

“After learning more about the affidavit, transcripts and additional details surrounding Steve Striegel’s sentence, I am deeply disappointed in myself. I apologise to all of those, past and present, I’ve let down by having Steve around them without giving them a voice in the decision,” Black added.

Striegel pleaded guilty to two felony counts of ‘risk of injury to a child’ and ‘enticing a minor by computer,’for his internet relationship with a 14-year-old Connecticut girl in 2009. Messages between the two were found by the girl’s father who alerted authorities. Striegel was later convicted of...

Especially A Camera Hogg!

Coup against Trump gains traction after John McCain’s funeral

While Trump is accused of being “anti-democratic”, the anonymous writer touts membership of an “unelected cabal that covertly imposes their own ideology with zero democratic accountability, mandate or transparency” on American voters.

On Thursday, two more anonymous “senior White House officials” boasted about “dozens and dozens” of other White House appointed bureaucrats that are carrying out “a resistance from the inside” against the Trump administration, Axios reported.

This sadly also confirms everything Trump has been saying about the deep state conspiring against him. On Thursday morning, Trump tweeted that he was going to start declassifying evidence of the deep state’s many crimes.

The anonymous op-ed ghost chose the aftermath of John McCain’s funeral to launch the attack on Trump.

The problem however is everyone on the right and left hates John McCain. The level of hatred on social media and in comment sections across the internet after McCain’s death was clearly bipartisan.

Left-wing journalist Caitlin Johnstone was temporarily banned from Twitter over her tweet that had gone viral.

Fox News had to shut down their entire comment section because of negative rants and insults after McCain’s death, both on YouTube and on FoxNews.com.

Contrary to the media’s propaganda, McCain was hardly a unifying figure. If the NYT op-ed writer had contact with people outside of the swamp, they would have known this.

The Vietnam Veterans Against John McCain, a 527 Political Action Committee, was formed in 1997. During his time as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, McCain was a “Manchurian candidate” the group said.

They believe that McCain was an agent of the Vietnamese, and in 2008, a flier claimed that McCain was a “Hanoi Hilton songbird” who collaborated with...

After a marathon 13 hours of questioning on Wednesday, Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings continued Thursday with more questions from the senators.

Protesters continued to punctuate the senators’ questions throughout the day, and a dozen or so of the girls Kavanaugh has coached on basketball teams showed up in the afternoon to support “Coach K.”

Here are the key takeaways from Kavanaugh’s final day before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

1. Booker’s ‘disclosed’ documents were a nothing burger—and a publicity stunt.

The morning began with the dramatic announcement by Sen. Cory Booker, D.-N.J., that “I am going to release [an e-mail from Kavanaugh’s record] about racial profiling, and I understand that the penalty comes with potential ousting from the Senate.” That decision earned Booker a stern rebuke from some Republican senators.

It turns out, however, that the documents Booker had discussed in the hearing and “released” had already been cleared for public release the night before. He wasn’t defying anyone.

So far, more than 350,000 pages of material from or about Kavanaugh’s professional work have been made available to the public. That’s more than for the past five Supreme Court nominees combined.

This week’s discussion about documents, however, has failed to clarify that different federal statutes set rules for handling different categories of material.

The Federal Records Act, for example, governs documents from Kavanaugh’s work as an associate independent counsel, while the Presidential Records Act governs the documents from his work as an associate White House counsel.

Most documents can be made publicly available right away, while others require more review but are still made available to the committee members and staff. That’s what the label “committee confidential” means.

Booker, apparently objecting to any documents being designated “committee confidential,” took matters into his own hands and released emails from Kavanaugh’s time serving in the White House counsel’s office. Booker gave the impression that this was a dramatic, defiant, and perhaps even dangerous step, saying: “This is about the closest I’ll probably ever have in my life to an ‘I am Spartacus’ moment … [and] I’m knowingly violating the rules.”

Later in the day, Booker released more confidential documents. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, has repeatedly invited senators simply to request public release of particular documents and proven that he’s willing to do so. Given that, Booker simply could have made a request rather than make this look more like a publicity stunt.

In the emails, Kavanaugh discussed racial profiling in airport security screening following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. He wrote that he “generally favor[ed] effective security measures that are race-neutral.”

Booker made it sound like the emails might somehow expose Kavanaugh as a proponent of racial profiling. It turns out the opposite was true.

In another email chain, leaked to The New York Times, Kavanaugh had reviewed a draft op-ed supporting one of President George W. Bush’s judicial nominees that stated “legal scholars across the board” agree that Roe v. Wade is “the settled law of the land.” Kavanaugh also wrote: “I am not sure that all legal scholars refer to Roe as the settled law of the land at the Supreme Court level.”

At the hearing Thursday, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., asked what he meant by that, and Kavanaugh explained that he suggested deleting a line from the draft op-ed since there are plenty of scholars who do not believe that Roe v. Wade is settled.

Far from being revelatory bombshells, these emails show Kavanaugh providing straightforward advice as an attorney working for the president. Addressing those issues in that role is not at all the same as a judge addressing those issues in the context of actual cases with real parties and specific facts.

2. Feinstein earned four Pinocchios.

Two of Feinstein’s exchanges with Kavanaugh from Day Two of the hearing included some obvious factual errors. First, she claimed that between 200,000 and 1.2 million women died from illegal abortions in the 1950s-60s, pointing to a report by the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute.

But those numbers actually refer to the estimated number of illegal abortions during those years, not the number of women who died from them. The death statistic was around 200-300 per year. That’s a pretty big discrepancy.

Second, in questioning Kavanaugh about the Second Amendment, Feinstein stated that there have been “hundreds of school shootings using assault weapons.” Once again, Feinstein got her numbers wrong. As Jacob Sullum at Reason explained (citing a Mother Jones database of mass shootings), only six attacks at schools involved “assault weapons.” That’s far short of the “hundreds” Feinstein claimed.

3. Senate approved other nominees over lunch.

When the committee broke for lunch Thursday, senators made a quick detour to the Senate floor to confirm eight nominees to the U.S. District Court. Only two required a formal recorded vote (the tallies were 60-35 and 79-12).

This brings President Donald Trump’s total number of confirmations to 68 judges (including Justice Neil Gorsuch). Yet during the same time, the...