Mon Med/AM ~TheFrontPageCover

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~ Featuring ~  
One of the most outrageous 
Supreme Court decisions in decades
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by Stephen Carter  
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Monday Top Headline Summary
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by Media Editors:  Eighteen million views. That’s what the Washington Examiner says has been accrued by “a video of actress Ellen Page blaming President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence for the alleged assault on ‘Empire’ actor Jussie Smollett.” There’s just one huge problem: “The number takes on new significance … as new reports says two brothers told authorities that Smollett allegedly paid them to stage the attack.” But despite the media’s cursory and knee-jerk reporting, don’t expect any major concessions. Even House Speaker Nancy Pulosi deleted a sympathetic tweet without so much as an acknowledgment or apology.
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Tone deaf: “Speaking on German soil 75 years after the U.S. and its allies prepared for D-Day, loose lips-Joe Biden described America as ‘an embarrassment’ and its trade policies ‘self-defeating.’ … The former vice president was speaking exactly three-quarters of a century after American troops were fighting against Germans at the Battle of Anzio and Allied military staffs were deep into planning for the D-Day invasion of Normandy less than 4 months later.” (Washington Examiner)
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Democrats were expeditious in instigating border-barrier lawsuits. According to USA Today, “At least two lawsuits have been filed in response to President Donald Trump on Friday declaring a national emergency to secure funding for a wall along the southern border with Mexico. The filings are expected to be part of a flurry of legal challenges to the constitutionality of Trump’s decision.” Legal challenges are also anticipated to come from citizens themselves. As Bloomberg reports, “Some landowners along the U.S.-Mexico line say they see a government land grab in their future.” But Trump senior adviser Stephen Miller this weekend pointed out, “This is a threat in our country, not overseas. And if the president can’t defend this country, then he cannot fulfill his constitutional oath of office.”
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“President Trump’s pick to be the next United Nations ambassador withdrew from consideration Saturday, the State Department said. The department’s spokeswoman, Heather Nauert, had been tapped to succeed Nikki Haley at the United Nations, but her name was never formally sent to the Senate for confirmation. … The withdrawal is related to the employment of a nanny who was in the country illegally. … But according to a person familiar with Nauert’s situation, the nanny was in the country legally. She was a Jamaican national employed by Nauert and her husband 10 years ago.” (The Washington Post)
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According to Fox News, “More men and boys from a Somali American community in Minneapolis have joined — or attempted to join — a foreign terrorist organization over the last 12 years than any other jurisdiction in the country. … So what has made the area such a hotbed for such activity? And what has been Rep. Ilhan Omar’s record in addressing the issue — either before she was elected, or since? The answers matter because federal authorities say they remain ‘highly concerned’ about the terrorist connection with the Minneapolis Somalis.” Omar’s anti-Semitism could be emblematic of an even bigger problem.
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Too long coming: “Disgraced ex-cardinal Theodore McCarrick has been expelled from the Roman Catholic priesthood after an investigation found sex abuse allegations against him were credible, the Vatican said Saturday. The church is penalizing McCarrick, the former Archbishop of Washington, D.C., and Newark, New Jersey, with ‘dismissal from the clerical state,’ it said in a statement. He will not be able to appeal the decision.” (NBC News)
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A majority of Californians are inclined to put down roots elsewhere, new polling reveals. The catalyst is cost of living, which is particularly pronounced in San Fransisco. Perhaps voters should revisit partitioning the state.
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Civics testing in the U.S. is less than mediocre. According to the Washington Examiner, “A majority in every state except Vermont has failed the U.S. Citizenship test, the latest sign that Americans aren’t very good history students. … More than half of those in every other state failed, and in Washington, D.C., 58 percent failed, said the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, which does the survey. Only one-in-four nationally passed the 20-questions.” This shouldn’t surprise us, though. Schools are more interested in “diversifying” restrooms and locker rooms than they are in fostering education.
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A tragic mass shooting occurred Friday in Aurora, Illinois, where five innocent lives were taken and police officers were injured. But like many mass shootings, it could have been prevented via existing laws. Townhall reports that the shooter “purchased a Smith and Wesson .40 caliber handgun in 2014 but was later discovered to have been convicted of an aggravated assault charge back in 1995 when he tried to apply for a concealed carry permit. As a result, he should have turned his firearm over to authorities. He didn’t.”
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Having your cake and eating it too: “The NFL and lawyers for players Colin Kaepernick and Eric Reid jointly announced Friday that they had settled a complaint of collusion by the players, who claimed football team owners blackballed them,” CNBC reports. According to The Daily Wire, “All parties are prevented from revealing details of the settlement, by the settlement’s terms, but various news reports put the settlement between $60 million and $80 million split between the two players.” Furthermore, “Kaepernick’s attorney … told ESPN that he predicts Kaepernick will now be welcomed into the league with open arms.” On the contrary, why would any team want such a toxic charlatan?
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Humor: In pushing Amazon out of New York, commie-Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez declares victory over the modern-day equivalent of slavery: jobs. (The Babylon Bee)
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Policy: Read why “Amazon’s NYC Pullout Shows Economy Is Rigged, Just Not the Way Most People Think” at the Foundation for Economic Education.
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Policy: “Outsiders should regard purported hate crimes that sound like crafted narratives with skepticism until they’re proven true,” Kyle Smith suggests in National Review. “No matter what the era or who is in charge, disaster always looms, and any weird anecdote that supports the larger doom narrative is eagerly, even devoutly, believed.”  
 
~The Patriot Post
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7 Big Takeaways From 
Andrew McCabe’s Planned Coup  
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{thefederalist.com} ~ If Washington, D.C. were a better place, former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe would be swiftly run out of town. He was fired last year for lying to the FBI’s inspector general at least four times... regarding serious questions about multiple abuses that occurred while McCabe sat in a powerful and unelected office. These abuses included working with former FBI director scumbag-James Comey to set up former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus for obstruction charges, slow-walking and sabotaging the investigation of yet unseen scumbag/liar-Hillary Clinton  emails found on Anthony Weiner’s computer just before the 2016 election, and failing to report a clear conflict of interest where his wife received a political donation from a close scumbag/liar-Hillary Clinton ally while he was tasked with investigating scumbag/liar-Hillary Clinton. Among other things, McCabe also took part in spying on the Trump campaign through a secret warrant granted by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) court. This spying allowed obedient anti-Trump media figures to report, right before the 2016 election, that the FBI was investigating President Trump—which legitimized the scumbag/liar-Hillary Clinton campaign’s talking points about Trump and Russia. Thankfully, although the establishment media cheers McCabe, he may yet face legal trouble as a result of his actions. So to save his skin, and sell his new book to help pay the lawyers—titled “The Threat: How the F.B.I. Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump”—McCabe is on the media circuit...
Sweden Prosecuting Pensioners,
Welcoming ISIS
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{gatestoneinstitute.org} ~ "Violence-promoting Islamist extremism currently constitutes the biggest threat to Sweden," according to a January 15 press release from the Swedish Security Service (Säpo)... "The level of the terror threat remains elevated, a three on a five-point scale. This means that a terrorist act is likely to occur," said  Klas Friberg, head of Säpo. "In order to meet the threat from terrorism, the Security Service will in future work even more strategically to limit the growth of extremist environments. It may be about dealing with omhänderta persons who constitute a security threat or, in cooperation with other authorities, working harder to ensure that these individuals are prosecuted for other crimes - or have their opportunities cut." While Säpo  is assuring the Swedish public that it will do "even more" to limit the growth of terrorist environments in Sweden, the Swedish government is exacerbating the problem by welcoming returning ISIS fighters back into the country. Approximately 300 people left Sweden to fight for ISIS and it is estimated that approximately 150 Swedish ISIS fighters have returned to Sweden. Approximately 50 of those who didn't return were killed. The head of Säpo, in January, had  described returning ISIS fighters as "broken people who have been traumatized by their experiences" and said that Swedish society has to "play a big role in re-integrating them"...
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Florida Supreme Court: Don't be 
scammed by fake letters seeking money  
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by orlandosentinel.com:  The Florida Supreme Court is warning about email scams by fraudsters who use fake court letterhead to bilk people out of money. The scams involve fake inheritances or the paying off legal “debts”... of someone who purports to be interested in an online romance, according to a news release issued Wednesday by court spokesman Craig Waters. The ploys are the latest in a string of court-related online or telephone scams. Other deceptions include targeting Spanish-speaking people with threats of deportation, professionals over licensing issues or members of the public for allegedly missing jury duty, according to Waters. Similar scams, which Waters said “have become a significant problem” in recent years, often mention locations in Northwest Florida, such as Shalimar and Gulf Breeze. Many of the potential victims live outside the U.S. and aren’t familiar with Florida law, according to Waters. But Florida courts “never send out real legal notices by email,” Waters cautioned. “If you get an email asking for money because of some court document or saying you violated a court order or other legal obligation, you should check further before taking any action,” he said. People seeking more information about potential scams can forward copies of the emails and attachments to supremecourt@flcourts.org...
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Spending Bill Congress Just Passed Contains Restrictions Making It Almost Impossible 
For Trump To Build Wall
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by thewashingtonstandard.com:  On Wednesday, the House and the Senate both passed a massive 1,159 page spending bill that they were given less than 24 hours to read.  There was a concerted effort by the leadership of both parties to rush this bill through before the American people could be mobilized to oppose it... We are being told that this spending package represents a compromise, but as you will see below, the wording of the bill is so restrictive that it is going to make it just about impossible for President Trump to get anything built on the border. At this point, I think that Trump is counting on declaring a national emergency in order to get his wall built, but the moment he does that the Democrats plan to tie him up in court indefinitely. Before we get to the details of this bill, let’s talk about how ridiculous this legislative process has been. During her first term as speaker of the House, Nancy Pulosi often rushed through enormous pieces of legislation without giving anyone time to actually read what was in them, and now she is doing it again. This 1,159 page spending bill had an average of approximately 200 words per page, and as Breitbart has pointed out, a “fast reader” could get through such a document in about 40 hours. But members of Congress were not given 40 hours. Instead, they had the bill for about 18 hours before they were expected to vote on it. Needless to say, nobody that voted on this bill read the entire thing...
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commie-Ocasio-Cortez Caught Adding Her 
Boyfriend To Her Staff After Denying It
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by Carmine Sabia  
{thefederalistpapers.org} ~ Conservatives were outraged on Friday when they found that New York Rep. commie-Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s boyfriend has an official government email address... Political consultant Luke Thompson was the first to discover the email and shared it on Twitter. “While you were having a nice Valentine’s Day, @AOC decided to put her boyfriend on staff – drawing a salary on the taxpayer’s dime. Nice to see her adapting to the swamp so quickly,” he said.“Actually this cal designation is a permission so he can have access to my Google Cal. Congressional spouses get Gcal access all the time. “Next time check your facts before you tweet nonsense,” she said. As The Daily Mail reported, her staff argued that this was common practice... It’s totally naive and inappropriate   https://https://thefederalistpapers.org/opinion/ocasio-cortez-caught-adding-boyfriend-staff-denying/opinion/ocasio-cortez-caught-adding-boyfriend-staff-denying
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One of the most outrageous 
Supreme Court decisions in decades
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by Stephen Carter

{jewishworldreview.com} ~ In my 30 years of writing about religious freedom, I can't recall a case as outrageous as the one decided last week by the U.S. Supreme Court. A Muslim inmate on death row had asked to spend his last moments in the comforting presence of an imam.

The Alabama prison offered only a Christian chaplain, and the justices, by a vote of 5 to 4, refused to order the state to do any more.

In its two-paragraph order, the majority quoted an earlier decision encouraging courts to take into account " the last-minute nature of an application" in deciding whether to put an execution on hold. Well, yes. The court should indeed consider whether a death-row inmate's petition might be no more than a frivolous effort to postpone the inevitable.

This isn't that. There can be, and is, a lot of debate about the right standards for judging a claim of religious freedom. But this should have been an easy decision.

Domineque Ray committed a horrible crime, raping and murdering a 15-year-old girl. If the death penalty is ever appropriate, this would seem to be a clear case. But the question before the court wasn't whether Ray should be put to death. It was whether he should be denied the same right that a Christian inmate would have to be accompanied in the death chamber by a cleric of his own faith.

In recent decades, the justices have turned out to be most receptive to First Amendment claims that can be framed as examples of discrimination. Consider, for example, the court's 1993 decision in Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah. The suit was brought by a Santeria congregation whose practices included animal sacrifice. In response to the concerns of residents, local officials outlawed the killing of animals within the city limits. The trouble was that the ordinance included so many exceptions that it wound up prohibiting little besides the practices of the plaintiff.

The Supreme Court had no trouble striking down the law, saying it violated " the principle that the First Amendment forbids an official purpose to disapprove of a particular religion or of religion in general." The ordinance, the justices concluded, violated the constitutional rule " that laws burdening religious practice must be of general applicability." 

This is the problem with Alabama's death chamber practices: a lack of general applicability. As Justice Elena Kagan notes in her dissent, joined by justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor, the discrimination in the state's policies is obvious: " A Christian prisoner may have a minister of his own faith accompany him into the execution chamber to say his last rites. But if an inmate practices a different religion — whether Islam, Judaism, or any other — he may not die with a minister of his own faith by his side." 

This favoring of one religion over another is permissible only in the very narrowest of circumstances, writes Kagan. Here, the state argued that the presence of a cleric other than the Christian chaplain, a prison employee who understood the execution process, would pose a security risk. That's not a strong enough claim to get around the patent discrimination.

But even were there no discrimination at all, the denial of the presence of the imam would by itself present a strong case for judicial intervention in defense of religious liberty. Imagine a state rule that no clergy from any faith could enter the death chamber. I would argue that such a ban would itself be unconstitutional, for we are speaking here not of a prisoner's access to the holy books of his faith — the denial of which the courts have struck down even in cases where prison authorities concluded that the books were not religious at all — but of spiritual comfort at the moment of death.

No one who is now alive, it almost goes without saying, can truly know what death is like. What will we find on the other side? Many insist there will be only oblivion. Others are confident that they will step into paradise. Still others fear eternal punishment. Whatever may lie beyond the threshold, however, we surely commit a great wrong when, having the chance to do otherwise, we force a person who knows he is about to die to face that great opaqueness alone.

To deny that person his chosen spiritual counselor at such a moment is the ultimate cruel triumph of our current wave of secularization. The authorities are in effect saying, " What difference does it make who's with you at the end? You'll be dead soon, and none of this will matter to you." No matter how outrageous the crime, Alabama should not be taking sides in the greatest metaphysical question before us.

What can the court's majority say in response? That the security of the death chamber is inviolate? That the petition was filed too late? Such propositions as these cannot be taken seriously when the state is about to impose the technology of death. No matter how heinous the crime — and Ray's was despicable — a civilized culture must provide those last moments of comfort for the troubled soul.

The short of the matter is that the justices handed down a terrible decision, and, I suspect, miscalculated the reaction. There's nothing to be done now, because Ray has been put to death. But the issue is bound to come up again. Next time, for all of our sakes, let us pray that the court will get it right.
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