Denver officials say the revised sentencing guidelines are a response to the Trump administration’s more aggressive enforcement of immigration laws. Although federal authorities have focused on illegal immigrants with criminal backgrounds, Hancock says the changes are necessary to ensure that city offenses can’t be used as a “deportation tool” against immigrants legally present in the U.S., reports the Washington Post.
“Over the past four months, the White House has issued a series of executive orders that have exacerbated our broken immigration system and have had a real impact on our community,” Hancock said Monday in a statement. “I have heard from many who are rightfully concerned. Denver is committed to taking actions that will protect our people’s rights and keep our city safe, welcoming and open.”
Denver joins several other U.S. cities that have revised prosecution or sentencing rules in order to prevent immigrants from facing deportation as a result of their criminal convictions.
Democrats are turning Denver into a stealth sanctuary city, in this case at the expense of domestic abuse victims.
Free speech on campuses has come on hard times. By now, we are all too familiar with the litany: invited speakers disinvited, talks by honored guests disrupted by shouting protesters, vandalism and riots forcing the cancellation of events, campus security announcing it cannot guarantee public safety.
The disruptions and attacks come almost entirely from an emergent Spit-Viper Left (as I call it), drawn from a motley collection of campus grievance groups that are angry, uninformed, anti-intellectual and uniformly illiberal in their attitudes and beliefs. They may describe themselves as feminists, defenders of civil rights, or advocates for sexual minorities, but they are very different from the older, and more tolerant versions of such advocacy groups, and far removed from any manner of liberalism by their authoritarian ways and intemperate rage.
Whatever else may be among the concerns of this newly emergent Left, furthering its cause through rational discussion isn’t one of them. The 60s-era radical Todd Gitlin, distraught at this transformation of the campus Left, suggests it may subconsciously feel that reason and argument are no longer on its side. Free speech, a fruitful exchange of ideas, mutual intellectual enrichment — these are not its modus operandi. And those among the most illiberal segments of the Left on college campuses often attract to their protests even more radical and more illiberal supporters from beyond the university, who bring with them a love of violence, confrontation and disruption. Mayhem can be exhilarating for some people — especially young males — and outside anarchists and nihilists come to join in the fun.
It is important to realize just how far this newly emergent Left has strayed from the American Left of the immediate post-WWII decades. During the Cold War, it was often Social Democrats and other anti-Communist leftists who were leaders in the struggle to defend free speech, whether on college campuses or within the broader society.
In retrospect, it seems like that was really just a way of defending communists at universities, one that’s been discarded now that the communists are in charge.
A significant portion of the political left has a penchant for violence these days. From May Day protestors in Portland, Oregon, to Antifa rioters and arsonists at UC Berkeley, to melee-creating students at Middlebury College, for too many fists and Molotov cocktails are an appropriate response to opinions they don’t like.
Add to that list Eyup Yildirim, identified by beating victim Lucy Usoyan as one of the thugs who beat her up while she was protesting Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan last Tuesday (May 16) outside the Turkish embassy in Washington, D.C. At least 11 of the protesters were reportedly injured.
A check of Federal Election Commission records shows that Eyup Yildirim of Manchester, New Jersey, has donated to several Democratic Party candidates.
The FEC’s online database shows the following contributions in his name: $1,000 to Hillary Clinton for President; $1,000 to Rush Holt for Congress (Holt was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from New Jersey’s 12th district from 1999 to 2015); $5,000 to the Obama Victory Fund; $2,300 to Obama for America; and $2,700 to the Democratic National Committee.
Read the whole thing. Yildirim seems like an excellent prospect for swamp-draining.
Without much fanfare, Obama has dramatically reversed his Iraq policy — sending thousands of troops back in the country after he declared the war over, engaging in ground combat despite initially promising that his strategy “will not involve American combat troops fighting on foreign soil.” Well, they’re on foreign soil, and they’re fighting.
It would have been easier — and would have cost far fewer lives — if we had just stayed. But Obama had to have a campaign issue.
And I suppose I should repeat my Iraq War history lesson: Things were going so well as late as 2010 that the Obama Administration was bragging about Iraq as one of its big foreign policy successes.
In the interest of historical accuracy, I think I’ll repeat this post again:
[Y]ou certainly can make a persuasive argument it was a mistake. But there is a time that line going along that Bush and the other people lied about this. I spent 18 months looking at how Bush decided to invade Iraq. And lots of mistakes, but it was Bush telling George Tenet, the CIA director, don’t let anyone stretch the case on WMD. And he was the one who was skeptical. And if you try to summarize why we went into Iraq, it was momentum. The war plan kept getting better and easier, and finally at the end, people were saying, hey, look, it will only take a week or two. And early on it looked like it was going to take a year or 18 months. And so Bush pulled the trigger. A mistake certainly can be argued, and there is an abundance of evidence. But there was no lying in this that I could find.
Plus:
Woodward was also asked if it was a mistake to withdraw in 2011. Wallace points out that Obama has said that he tried to negotiate a status of forces agreement but did not succeed, but “A lot of people think he really didn’t want to keep any troops there.” Woodward agrees that Obama didn’t want to keep troops there and elaborates:
Look, Obama does not like war. But as you look back on this, the argument from the military was, let’s keep 10,000, 15,000 troops there as an insurance policy. And we all know insurance policies make sense. We have 30,000 troops or more in South Korea still 65 years or so after the war. When you are a superpower, you have to buy these insurance policies. And he didn’t in this case. I don’t think you can say everything is because of that decision, but clearly a factor.
We had some woeful laughs about the insurance policies metaphor. Everyone knows they make sense, but it’s still hard to get people to buy them. They want to think things might just work out, so why pay for the insurance? It’s the old “young invincibles” problem that underlies Obamcare.
Obama blew it in Iraq, which is in chaos, and in Syria, which is in chaos, and in Libya, which is in chaos. A little history:
As late as 2010, things were going so well in Iraq that Obama and Biden were bragging. Now, after Obama’s politically-motivated pullout and disengagement, the whole thing’s fallen apart. This is near-criminal neglect and incompetence, and an awful lot of people will pay a steep price for the Obama Administration’s fecklessness.
Yes, I keep repeating this stuff. Because it bears repeating. In Iraq, Obama took a war that we had won at a considerable expense in lives and treasure, and threw it away for the callowest of political reasons. In Syria and Libya, he involved us in wars of choice without Congressional authorization, and proceeded to hand victories to the Islamists. Obama’s policy here has been a debacle of the first order, and the press wants to talk about Bush as a way of protecting him. Whenever you see anyone in the media bringing up 2003, you will know that they are serving as palace guard, not as press.
President Trump has delivered on almost all of his promises to have an America First energy plan. He has directed the EPA to suspend, revise, and rescind certain actions related to the Clean Power Plan. He has removed regulatory roadblocks to American energy independence, including signing the resolution Congress sent him to repeal the Stream Buffer rule. He has also instructed agencies to review existing administrative policies harming domestic energy production.
But there’s one missing piece to being truly America First, something President Trump promised on the campaign trail. He promised he would cancel the Paris Agreement as president. Can we really have an America First energy plan if we are needing to seek the endorsement of the U.N. as we make determinations about our country’s environmental and energy policies? The federal government should be beholden to one authority and one authority alone—our Constitution—and not some U.N. bureaucrats.
Contrary to a lot of what we’ve been hearing, it’s not okay to punch (or body-slam) your political opponents just because of what they say.
* * * * * * * *
One might almost say that the political class is happy to wink at political violence, until it affects one of their own. One of the things I really don’t like about following news and politics on a daily (hourly?) basis for so long is how cynical I’ve become about this sort of thing. I’d rather not feel this way, but it’s pretty hard to escape, given the realities.
* * * * * * * *
It occurs to me that this mess is bad for both parties in a way. Dems have been desperate for a special-election win that will show a wave is building against Trump, but if they win here, they’ll have trouble portraying it as such given that they beat a guy who bodyslammed a reporter the day before the election. On the other hand, if the GOP wins, they’re stuck with this guy in Congress. Or they have to get him to resign, or refuse to seat him, which has problems of its own.
In the economically illiterate hope that raising prices would increase incomes and restore prosperity, the New Deal cartelized agriculture. Landowners raked in subsidies for taking land out of production and destroying crops and livestock, which threw huge numbers of agricultural laborers, tenant farmers, and sharecroppers out of work and made food and clothing more expensive. FDR himself, having created the opportunity, built his coalition by decrying “one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clothed, and ill-nourished.”
* * * * * * * * *
Of course, not all groups saw increased opportunity during World War II. The book’s shocker is buried on page 299, thanks to the perverse geographical organization: Hello to Manzanar—or at least, to Tule Lake. Every collectivist agricultural revolution needs its kulaks, and the administration at last found a population that was compelled to obey commands and (at least in the case of its businesses) be liquidated. Japanese Americans, subject to intense racial discrimination before the war, had created an entrepreneurial niche in truck gardening: fruits and vegetables for urban markets that we would today call “locally sourced.” After being forced to sell their businesses for pennies on the dollar, they were shipped off to internment camps.
You can’t make omelets without breaking eggs, and you can’t collectivize agriculture without creating food shortages: The Roosevelt administration disrupted the West Coast’s efficient fruit and vegetable agricultural sector just as the region’s population exploded with war workers. New Deal Photography offers a single color Russell Lee picture (1942), which the OWI presumably hoped would depict the internees as happy collective farmers among the furrows. They don’t look too happy—nor should readers be, because this appalling culmination of the FSA project has been addressed in depth in several previous books, as opposed to the cursory treatment here.
A California farmer is facing a $2.8 million fine for failing to get a permit to plow his own field.
John Duarte bought 450 acres of land near Modesto in 2012 and is now being sued by the federal government for plowing near areas the government considers to be “waters of the United States.”
The case will head to trial in August. The government claims that Duarte violated the Clean Water Act because he did not obtain a permit to work near the wetlands.
This week, the New York Times and other U.S. papers published the name and photograph of the Manchester suicide bomber, as well as detailed explanations of how he avoided security, and photographs of essential components of the bomb itself, and they did so before the bomber’s — yes, I’m consciously not naming the son of a bitch — before the bomber’s network had been rolled up.
Worst of all, it turns out that this information was leaked to the New York Times by a member of the U.S. intelligence community from information shared by the Brits.
Prime Minister Theresa May was quite blunt about it this morning: the U.S. can forget further intelligence sharing on this topic. I expect she was quite firm with President Trump when they met privately later.
This has got to stop.
There are people in positions of trust within the United States government who are leaking very sensitive secrets because they have decided the Trump presidency must be undermined By Any Means Necessary (as they say in Berkeley).
There are people in positions of trust within the United States government leaking sensitive information about the murderers of little children, making it harder to catch them, and to prevent other attacks on other little children.
They are doing it with motivations I simply do not understand.
I cannot conceive of someone who would interfere in the capture of child murderers simply to damage Trump.
Or maybe I can. “By any means necessary,” right? “Got to break a few eggs.”
It’s wrong. It’s evil. It has got to stop.
Because they think that Trump is unfit for the job the voters, their alleged employers, elected him to, they’re demonstrating that they are unfit for the job they currently occupy. These leaks are, remember, criminal, and they’re crimes engaged in for political purposes. It’s a disgrace, and if Trump decides to go scorched-earth on them he’d be well within his rights to do so. And hey, Obama was already spying on journalists and government employees, so it shouldn’t be hard to find the leaker.
InstaPundit is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a
means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.
