Month: December 2018

The Trump administration filed an amicus (or “friend of the court”) brief Wednesday urging the Supreme Court to protect a 93-year-old war memorial in Bladensburg, Maryland, that is shaped like a Latin cross.

The court will soon decide whether the cross-shaped World War I memorial violates the First Amendment’s ban on religious favoritism.

The justices agreed to take the case on Nov. 3.

The Trump administration’s brief emphasizes the need for the high court to clarify its jurisprudence concerning religious displays in the public square. Since 2005 the justices applied two different tests for assessing the constitutionality of sectarian symbols in public settings.

Confusion has followed in lower federal courts as to which test should govern the so-called public display cases. That uncertainty, the government says, “encourages challenges to longstanding displays like the Memorial Cross, which in turn fosters the very religion-based divisiveness that the establishment clause seeks to avoid.”

“Cases like these cannot help but divide those with sincerely held beliefs on both sides,” the brief reads. “This case presents an opportunity for the Court to adopt a standard for establishment clause challenges to passive displays that will reduce factious litigation, provide clarity to lower courts, and promote consistency across cases.”

The administration then offers a solution to that problem: It urges the justices to resolve public display cases with reference to the practices of the Founding Fathers. The brief favorably cites the high court’s approach to a 2014 case called Town of Greece v. Galloway. In that case, a five-justice majority said the town board of Greece, New York, did not violate the Constitution by opening monthly public meetings with a prayer.

The case arose when several Maryland residents represented by the American Humanist Association filed a lawsuit seeking the memorial’s renovation or removal in 2014. A three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found for the American Humanist Association in October 2017, concluding that the memorial was an unconstitutional government endorsement of Christianity.

“While the Latin cross may generally serve as a symbol of death and memorialization, it only holds value as a symbol of death and resurrection because of its affiliation with the crucifixion of Jesus Christ,” the decision reads.

The full 4th Circuit denied review on an eight to six vote, prompting several dissents, including one which warned that the panel decision imperils similar monuments in Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.

The American Legion erected the memorial, known locally as “Peace Cross,” to honor the World War I dead of Prince George’s County in 1925. A state commission has administered the site since 1961.

Oral arguments are scheduled at the Supreme Court for Feb. 27 and a decision is expected in June.

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Nancy has an agenda to follow.

Via Washington Times:

Former acting ICE Director Tom Homan on Wednesday blasted House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi for calling a border wall ineffective and accusing President Trump of “fear mongering” with the illegal immigration issue.

“Every place a wall or barrier has been built, it has resulted in decreased illegal immigration, decreased drug smuggling. One hundred percent of the time, it has proven effective,” Mr. Homan said on Fox News, where he is a contributor.

“Look at the rest of the data on the border, where arrests of MS-13 [gang] this year are up 118 percent, the seizures of guns — for God’s sake — are up almost 200 percent. There’s your data. Look at it. You can see why we need a wall,” he said.

Mr. Homan, a veteran of the Border Patrol agent and investigator for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said Mr. Trump was “doing the right thing” in shutting down the government in a fight with Democrats over funding a wall or barrier on the border with Mexico.

The partial shutdown began Saturday, affecting about 25 percent of the federal government, including the Department of Homeland Security.

Mrs. Pelosi told USA Today that Mr. Trump was using the wall to “fear monger.”

“He talked about terrorists coming in over that particular border, which wasn’t so. He talked about people bringing in diseases and all the rest of that, which wasn’t so,” said Mrs. Pelosi, who is poised to become speaker when Democrats take control of the House next week. “He’s using scare tactics that are not evidence-based, and it’s wrong.”

Keep reading…

Not only did President Donald Trump visit with troops abroad during “Christmastime,” despite media claims to the contrary, but the troops were happy to see him.

Some service members even had MAGA hats and asked the president to sign them.

Trump signing MAGA hats for the troops in Iraq pic.twitter.com/bDUIk94jpR

— Charlie Spiering (@charliespiering) December 26, 2018

That did not go over well with the left.

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Almost immediately, claims of troops being in violation of military rules were tossed around. They were wrong, but that didn’t seem to matter.

“But troops’ requests for the autographs could brush up against Department of Defense guidelines for political activities,” CNN admonished. “Those guidelines say that ‘active duty personnel may not engage in partisan political activities and all military personnel should avoid the inference that their political activities imply or appear to imply DoD sponsorship, approval, or endorsement of a political candidate, campaign, or cause.’”

Under the heading of “haters are gonna hate” is this insanity from @CNN – a blatant and near criminal misrepresentation of “The Hatch Act” – troops having and bringing out MAGA hats is completely legal (and kinda cool that they had them in Iraq BTW)https://t.co/mTnu7QPz9J

— Tony Shaffer (@T_S_P_O_O_K_Y) December 27, 2018

What CNN left out was the rest of the guidelines, which clearly state that “(a)ctive duty members may, however, express their personal opinions on political candidates and issues, make monetary contributions to a political campaign or organization, and attend political events as a spectator when not in uniform,” according to The Daily Wire.

Of course, CNN also made sure to throw some Trump-bashing in with their attack on the troops allegedly breaking the rules. The panel doing the smearing included White House correspondent Jim Acosta, who, perhaps surprisingly, somewhat came to Trump’s defense when it was implied that he might have provided the hats to the troops.

“(W)hat would the concern be if something like that is going on, do you think? Or is this just, you know, a soldier is there, he’s got a hat in his locker, and he runs over and says, ‘Hey, when am I going to have another chance for the president to sign one of these things?’” Acosta said, according to NewsBusters.

But the hate-fest was worse than just hate. It was hypocrisy, as well.

RELATED: The Real Story of How the 8-Year-Old Died in US Custody Doesn’t Fit the Media Narrative

HYPOCRISY 101: #CNN Attacks Trump for signing #MAGA hats for TROOPS; Media said NOTHING when Obama did the SAME thing…https://t.co/BOoPKqu6iK

— Chuck Callesto (@ChuckCallesto) December 27, 2018

As a candidate and throughout his presidency, President Barack Obama also signed items for troops, and there are photos to prove it.

pic.twitter.com/R5pm4Kc2wc

— Guerrilla 495 (@Guerrilla_495) December 27, 2018

But let’s not a little thing like facts get in the way of the media pushing their Trump Derangement Syndrome onto whatever viewers they have left to keep the hate and division going. So what if the “fake news” label continues to be applied to them. They’ll just attribute that to Trump, too.

Using the brave men and women who risk all for us back home to push a hate-filled narrative is pathetic. Attempting to smear the sitting president by smearing them is not journalism and it is not OK.

The troops, the president — and for that matter, the American people — deserve better than that.

We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.

The New York Times published an interesting story on Christmas Eve about continuing fallout from the economic decisions made by former Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa. Correa is a socialist who served two terms between 2007 and 2017. His time in office was highlighted by a rejection of  Ecuador’s debt (he defaulted) and American influence in the country. Instead, he invited China to come into the country and accepted $19 billion in loans for infrastructure projects in exchange for 90% of Ecuador’s oil production until the cost of the projects was paid off. The largest of the projects was the Coca Codo Sinclair dam. The dam was supposed to generate enough electricity to power a third or more of the country’s needs. But the reality has been something quite different.

When it finally opened in late 2016, China’s president, Xi Jinping, flew to Ecuador to celebrate.

Yet only two days before the visit, the dam was in chaos.

Engineers had tried to generate the project’s full 1500 megawatts, but neither the facility nor Ecuador’s electrical grid could handle it. The equipment shuddered dangerously, and blackouts spread across the country, officials said.

Ecuadoreans were never told about the failure, and a full power test has not been attempted since.

Today, the dam typically runs at half capacity. Experts say that given its design — and the cycle of wet and dry seasons in Ecuador — it would be able to generate the full amount of electricity for only a few hours a day, six months out of the year.

And that’s really the best case scenario. There’s a much worse case in which the entire dam could fall apart as a result of shoddy Chinese workmanship:

As early as 2014, technicians noticed cracks in the Chinese-made stainless steel equipment. That December, 13 workers were killed when a tunnel flooded and collapsed.

A senior engineer sent records to Mr. Correa, the president, asking to brief him on the problems, according to documents viewed by The Times. The engineer was fired days later, according to former officials…

Now, 7,648 cracks have developed in the dam’s machinery, according to the government, because of substandard steel and inadequate welding by Sinohydro. Sand and silt are also big concerns because they can damage vital equipment.

The reason a dam had not been built here wasn’t simply the scale of the project it was also the dam’s proximity to an active volcano:

When Fernando Santos, an energy minister in the 1980s, found out that the Coca Codo Sinclair dam was actually being built, he could hardly believe it.

During his time in government, officials had rejected a much smaller version of the project. The whole idea was doomed, he said, because of the volcano nearby. A major earthquake had decimated oil infrastructure in the area in 1987.

“The volcano has been erupting since the time the Spanish came to Ecuador in the 16th century,” Mr. Santos said, adding that investing so much money “in such a risky location was nonsense.”

One reason authorities may have been so willing to take a risk on the project is that they were receiving bribes. The anti-corruption official who was in charge of the project was caught on tape discussing the existence of bribes from China. Multiple officials involved are currently in prison for taking bribes from a rival engineering company which was the main rival to the Chinese.

Correa’s time in office also included other highlights including his promotion of the Chevron shakedown lawsuit. Correa created a PR campaign which brought sympathetic Hollywood leftists like Mia Farrow to visit Ecuador to bring favorable publicity to that case. Like fellow socialist Hugo Chavez, Correa was also known for cracking down on press freedom. He sued El Universo newspaper over an opinion piece and won:

A judge in Ecuador ruled Wednesday that the directors and former opinion editor of El Universo newspaper must each serve three years in prison for an opinion article about President Rafael Correa, state media reported.

The judge also ruled that the accused must pay $30 million, and the newspaper must pay $10 million, to Correa, the state-run El Ciudadano government information website reported.

The case drew international attention from press-freedom advocates, who say Correa aims to crack down on critics by restricting the media.

After his second term in office ended, Correa left for Belgium where his wife is a citizen. The belief at the time was that his chosen successor would take his place for a few years and then Correa would make a triumphant return in time for the next election. Instead, Correa’s successor turned on him and helped support an initiative which created a 2-term limit for presidents. He also began prosecuting government officials involved in bribery.

This summer Raphael Correa requested asylum in Belgium to avoid facing charges of kidnapping back home. Just last month, Ecuador’s top court ordered Correa to stand trial in that case:

Correa was charged in September by prosecutors of orchestrating Fernando Balda’s kidnapping in Bogota after he fled to Colombia’s capital to escape what he considered persecution by Correa.

A supreme court justice decided that the accusations against Correa, his top intelligence chief and two others merited a trial. Judge Daniel Camacho also formally declared Correa a “fugitive” after he flouted for months an order to appear before the court every 15 days as part of the ongoing probe. For his defiance, Ecuadorean authorities had previously requested Correa’s arrest and extradition from Belgium, where he has been living since leaving office last year…

Balda was abducted but quickly escaped harm after nearby taxi drivers alerted police, who stopped the vehicle in which he was being taken away. Colombian authorities later determined that three intelligence agents with Ecuador’s police had contracted the kidnappers to abduct Balda.

Correa faces up to 12 years in prison if convicted, but that’s not likely to happen as he can only be convicted if he returns to his home country.

As part of its continuing crackdown on Christians and other religious believers, the Communist government of China seized a reported 100 members of the Early Rain Covenant Church, an underground Protestant church, on Dec. 9, including its pastor,  Wang Yi and his wife. 

In addition, Communist authorities seized another 60 members of the church on Dec. 16 and placed a lock on the gate to the church. 

The Early Rain Covenant members’ cell phones and social media accounts were blocked before they were arrested, reported the South China Morning Post. In addition, the telephone line at the church in Chengdu, Sichuan was cut. 

Assistant Deacon Zhang Guoqing was arrested on Dec. 9 and then released on Dec. 10. He is being watched by “security personnel” in his home, according to the Morning Post. 

“The police said our church is an illegal organisation and we cannot attend any more gatherings from now on,” said Zhang. He also said that Pastor Wang’s house had been “ransacked” by Communist officials and “was a mess.”

Bob Fu, head of the non-profit Christian relief group ChinaAid, was reported by the Morning Post as saying there have been “more than 10,000 cases of detention of Christians this year,” in China, “compared with just over 3,000 cases for the whole of last year.”

“In September, Beijing police closed the Zion Church, one of the largest Protestant churches in China with more than 1,500 regular church-goers,” stated the Morning Post. 

Concerning the 60 Early Rain Covenant members who were arrested on Dec. 16, ChiaAid reported that “authorities took the Christians into custody for attending their weekly Sunday service. A baby is among the detained, as is Minister Cao Qingen, who was beaten.”

“Sichuan’s government has been targeting Early Rain Covenant Church consistently throughout the year, even persecuting them for remembering the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre and the victims of a deadly 2008 earthquake,” said ChinaAid. 

Regarding all 160 people arrested, authorities have released some of them but charged others with criminal offenses. As ChinaAid reported, “Pastor Wang Yi and his wife, Jiang Rong, have been detained on ‘inciting subversion of state power’ charges; Elder Qin Defu, Fu Lijun, Lü Jinheng, Li Xiaofeng, and Deacon Ge Yingfeng were charged with ‘illegal business operations’; and Huang Yaling, Wang Fei, Elder Li Yingqiang, and Elder Li Zhu were accused of ‘stirring up trouble.'”

“Officials have prevented all of them from meeting with their lawyers, a tactic that violates Chinese law but is often employed during procedures targeting prisoners incarcerated for political or religious reasons,” said ChinaAid. 

Christians and other religious believers have been persecuted in China since the Communist Party takeover in 1949-50. Under the Communist dictatorship in China, scholars estimate that at least 65 million people have been killed for political reasons.