From:
david.j.worrell@gmail.com
Anyone who claims I'm biased or 'extreme' need only look at this chart.
http://tinyurl.com/ybjyyqsy
(Published by MarketWatch
http://tinyurl.com/yajgcjng )
Most of the news-sources I quote here are squarely in the GREEN box
reflecting 'minimal partisan bias', yet most 'skew slightly liberal'.
Which is exactly what I've always said my political position is. :)
Also notice that all 3 of the original major American TV networks:
ABC, CBS, and NBC news are seen as reflecting 'minimal partisan bias'.
I most often use news sources: NY Times, Washington Post, ABC, CBS,
NBC, BBC, NPR, PBS, Politico and The Hill. All of those have been
judged to be relatively unbiased news sources.
***
But yeah, there is something important to talk about now.
Which is the partisan bias of the Supreme Court of the US.
Since justice Kennedy is now retiring, Trump can put another extreme right-winger on the Supreme Court, pretty much effectively biasing
the Supreme court conservatively for some time to come.
First, the conservatives totally cheated the American people by
obstinately refusing to even vote on Obama's last rightful Supreme
Court nominee, in effect *stealing* one seat on the Supreme Court,
which Trump could then fill with a conservative, when it rightfully
should have been Obama's last Supreme Court pick.
In its latest ruling, that now conservative court has ruled to protect
the generic presidential power to make determinations about immigration,
(which has a somewhat shady and disgraceful past of its own).
In the process, they totally overlooked the obvious evidence that
THIS PARTICULAR president has had a clear bias all along in his
intent for using that power.
But after being forced to create THREE versions of his biased
'Travel Ban', Trump finally came up with a version that could
squeak by in his ill-gotten conservatively biased Supreme Court.
The only hope for any real justice in the US now lies with the
American voters themselves. We will soon see, in the midterms.
But does Trump's Travel Ban keep us safe? It doesn't do shit.
America just shot itself in the foot again, and this time
our own Supreme Court did it. Read this...
***
How, Exactly, Does This Travel Ban Keep Us Safe, Mr. President?
By Bret Stephens
June 27, 2018
Congratulations, Mr. President: The Supreme Court has ruled that your third attempt at a travel ban is within the scope of your constitutional prerogatives. To nobody’s surprise, you trumpeted the court’s decision as “a moment of profound
vindication following months of hysterical commentary from the media and Democratic politicians who refuse to do what it takes to secure our border and our country.”
All right, then: The ostensible purpose of your ban is to keep Americans safe from terrorists by barring visitors, refugees and immigrants from Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela and Yemen. So let’s consider, nonhysterically, what such
a ban might have accomplished had it come into force in recent years.
It would not have barred Ramzi Yousef, the Kuwait-born Pakistani who helped mastermind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
It would have been irrelevant in the case of Terry Nichols and Timothy McVeigh,
the American perpetrators of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing in which 168 people
were murdered.
It would have been irrelevant in the case of Eric Rudolph, the Christian terrorist who killed one person at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and later bombed abortion clinics and a gay bar.
It would not have barred Mohamed Atta, ringleader of the 9/11 hijackers. Atta was an Egyptian citizen who arrived in the U.S. on a visa issued by the American Embassy in Berlin in May 2000.
It would not have barred Atta’s accomplices, all in the United States on legal visas. Fifteen of them were from Saudi Arabia, two from the United Arab Emirates and another from Lebanon.
It would have been irrelevant in the case of the 2001 anthrax attacks, in which
five people were killed. The attacks are widely believed (without conclusive proof) to have been the work of the late Bruce Ivins, an American microbiologist.
It would not have barred Richard Reid, who tried to blow up a Miami-bound airliner in 2001 with explosives hidden in his shoes. Reid was a London-born Briton who converted to Islam as an adult.
It would have been irrelevant in the case of Nidal Malik Hasan, the Virginia-born Army officer of Palestinian descent who killed 13 soldiers and civilians (including a pregnant woman) at Fort Hood, Tex., in November 2009.
It would not have barred Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian man who tried to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day, 2009, with explosives hidden in his underwear.
It would have been irrelevant in the case of the 2010 Times Square car bombing attempt. The perpetrator, Pakistan-born Faisal Shahzad, was a U.S. citizen at the time of the attack.
It would have been irrelevant in the case of Wade Michael Page, the white supremacist who murdered six people at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin in 2012.
It would not have barred Boston Marathon bombers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, both of Chechen background, who arrived in the United States as children.
It would not have barred Tashfeen Malik, the Pakistani woman who arrived in the
United States on a so-called “fiancée visa” after extensive screening from
American consular officials. Malik and her Chicago-born husband murdered 14 people in San
Bernardino in 2015.
It would have been irrelevant in the case of American-born Omar Mateen, who murdered 49 patrons of Orlando’s Pulse nightclub in June 2016.
It would not have barred Sayfullo Saipov, the legal immigrant from Uzbekistan who murdered eight people when he drove a pickup down a New York City bike path.
I have just listed the 14 most significant terrorist attacks (or attempts) in the U.S. in the last quarter-century. Your travel ban would have done nothing to prevent any of them.
Nor would it do anything to prevent future attacks, even if it were widely expanded. A blanket prohibition on Muslim immigrants of the sort you proposed during the campaign might be more effective, but it surely would be ruled unconstitutional. A blanket
prohibition on immigrants from every majority-Muslim country might conceivably pass constitutional muster, but it would be feckless: Not all terrorism is Islamist, and not all Islamists come from Muslim-majority states.
In other words, the policy you celebrate offers, at most, the illusion of security, purchased at an exorbitant cost to America’s moral reputation. In a
different era, your travel ban would have kept out everyone from supermodel Iman to Steve Jobs’s
biological father to the great scholar Vartan Gregorian.
We can only guess who (or whose child) is being excluded now, but we know what is being excluded: the idea of America as a refuge to the persecuted; an inspiration to the oppressed; a rebuke to the fearful and intolerant. As was written 228 years ago:
“The citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for giving to Mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It
is now no more that mere toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no
sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection, should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.”
The author, the first of your predecessors and your opposite in every other respect, must be turning in his grave.
***
Bigoted and Feckless, the Travel Ban Is Pure Trump
By The Editorial Board of the New York Times
June 26, 2018
On Tuesday morning the five conservative justices of the Supreme Court — including the one who got the job only because Senate Republicans stole a seat and held it open for him — voted to uphold President Trump’s travel ban, which indefinitely bars
most people from five majority-Muslim countries, and certain citizens from two other countries, from entering the United States.
The conservatives said the ban, Mr. Trump’s third version after the first two
were struck down by lower federal courts, was a lawful exercise of presidential
authority. They reached this conclusion despite Mr. Trump’s best efforts to convince them,
and the country, that its real purpose was to discriminate on the basis of religion.
Remember his call for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States”? That came in December 2015, when he was still a candidate. But the sentiments didn’t stop when he became president. In June 2017, he called the second
version of the ban a “watered-down, politically correct version” of the first one, previously saying he would prefer to “go all the way” with the original, which referred to “violent ideologies” and gave priority to Christian refugees from
Muslim-majority countries. In September, he said the ban “should be far larger, tougher and more specific — but stupidly, that would not be politically correct!” Two months later he retweeted misleading anti-Muslim videos from a far-right British
nationalist group. (And don’t forget that the language about a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” remained on his campaign website until months after he took office.)
All this looks a lot like a government official acting on religious animus, which is barred by the First Amendment and which, one would think, would especially offend the conservative justices. It was just a few weeks ago that the same justices ruled in
favor of a Christian baker who had refused to bake a cake for a gay couple’s wedding, on the ground that a state civil-rights commissioner had violated the baker’s First Amendment rights by expressing animus toward his religious beliefs.
The conservative justices surely believed then that, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor
wrote in her dissent from the travel ban decision, “Our Constitution demands,
and our country deserves, a Judiciary willing to hold the coordinate branches to account when
they defy our most sacred legal commitments.” But the principle failed to carry over into Tuesday’s ruling, even though the government actor was not a state commissioner but the president, and the target of his remarks was not a single shopkeeper but
millions of Muslims around the world.
Instead, the justices in the majority upheld the travel ban because, they said,
presidents have ample legal authority to make national security judgments in the area of immigration. That’s true, but the ban does nothing to make America safer than do
the aggressive laws Congress has already passed to manage threats to the nation’s security. Those laws help explain why no one from any of the countries included in the ban — Iran, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Venezuela
and North Korea — has been
involved in a fatal terrorist attack in the United States in the past two decades. The travel ban may have the effect of making the country less safe, according to many national security experts.
The conservative majority’s endorsement of nearly unchecked presidential power in this context is all the more disturbing given this administration’s policies at America’s southern border, which include separating children from
their parents and
prosecuting those trying to come here from brutally violent countries in Central America.
It’s no small paradox that the justices chose Tuesday’s ruling to formally overturn, at long last, one of the greatest abominations in the court’s history, Korematsu v. United States, the 1944 decision that upheld President Franklin Roosevelt’s
order to lock up thousands of Japanese-Americans for years based on nothing but
their ancestry — and based on a fabricated claim that our national security demanded it. The Korematsu ruling was “morally repugnant,” the court said, and was “
gravely wrong the day it was decided.” That’s surely correct. It’s also easy to say from a distance of 74 years, protected by the warm embrace of history’s consensus. It’s much more important to say it in the moment — as Justice Robert
Jackson did in his dissent from the Korematsu decision, which he warned was “a far more subtle blow to liberty than the promulgation of the order itself.”
So what can be said in this moment? Perhaps this — that Mr. Trump’s travel ban is of a piece with the man himself. We may not be able to look into the president’s soul, but we can look at his words and actions over the last half
century:
Mr. Trump and his father settled a lawsuit brought against them by the Justice Department for refusing to rent apartments to black people in the 1970s.
He bought a full-page ad in this newspaper and others calling for the death penalty for five young black and Latino men who were convicted of raping a white woman in Central Park in 1989, and refused to admit error even after the men were proved innocent
and set free years later.
He demanded the nation’s first black president provide documentary proof he was born in the United States.
He gleefully repeated on the campaign trail, and at rallies after becoming president, a fake story about an American military general slaughtering Muslims
with bullets dipped in pigs’ blood.
He defended a march in Charlottesville, Va., led by neo-Nazis and white supremacists in support of a statue of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee, saying that the march also included “very fine people.”
White racial fear has always been at the core of Mr. Trump’s worldview. What’s so dangerous about Tuesday’s ruling is that the Supreme Court has now implicitly blessed his use of this strategy as a political organizing tool and as a governing
philosophy.
On Jan. 27, 2017, as Mr. Trump signed the first version of the travel ban, he read out its official title, “Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States,” then looked up and said, “We all know what that means.”
Indeed we do, even if five Supreme Court justices refuse to admit it.
***
While the above is the opinion of an editorial board, I think it
is a 100% accurate telling of just exactly what has happened.
[continued in next message]
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* Origin: www.darkrealms.ca (1:229/2)