Month: January 2020

In a forthcoming memoir called “Open Book,” pop star and clothing designer Jessica Simpson opens up about alleged sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of a girl whose parents were family friends with the Simpsons.

Simpson said she shared a bed with the girl when the two families would spend time together. The “Newlyweds” star says she was sexually abused by the girl, starting when she was just six years old.

“It would start with tickling my back and then go into things that were extremely uncomfortable,” Simpson said in the memoir, according to exclusive excerpts reported by PEOPLE magazine.

“I wanted to tell my parents,” she wrote. “I was the victim but somehow I felt in the wrong.”

Simpson said she finally told her parents about the alleged abuse during a car trip when she was 12 years old. Tina Simpson, the pop star’s mother, apparently had her suspicions confirmed.

“I told you something was happening,” Tina said as she slapped Joe’s arm, according to Simpson.

“Dad kept his eye on the road and said nothing,” she wrote. “We never stayed at my parents’ friends house again, but we also didn’t talk about what I had said.”

According to PEOPLE, the pain from the abuse, combined with career pressures, led Simpson to “self-medicate with alcohol and stimulants — a dependency that would later prompt her doctor to tell her her life was in danger.”

“I was killing myself with all the drinking and pills,” Simpson said in the memoir.

“In one of the book’s most moving scenes, she writes about hitting rock bottom after a Halloween party at their home in late 2017,” reported PEOPLE. “That’s when she told her closest friends: ‘I need to stop. Something’s got to stop. And if it’s the alcohol that’s doing this, and making things worse, then I quit.’”

“When I finally said I needed help, it was like I was that little girl that found her calling again in life,” Simpson said. “I found direction and that was to walk straight ahead with no fear.”

“Honesty is hard but it’s the most rewarding thing we have,” she added. “And getting to the other side of fear is beautiful.”

In November 2017, the singer finally got clean, with the help of supportive family, friends, and twice-weekly therapy sessions.

“Her friends gathered around her in a group hug and haven’t left her side since,” PEOPLE noted. “With the support of her parents and help from a team of doctors and twice weekly therapy, she’s been sober since that day and calls her newfound clarity ‘a continual gift.’”

“Giving up the alcohol was easy,” Simpson said. “I was mad at that bottle. At how it allowed me to stay complacent and numb.”

“With work, I allowed myself to feel the traumas I’d been through,” she said of her therapy work.

“It’s been a long, hard deep emotional journey, one that I’ve come through the other side with pure happiness and fulfillment and acceptance of myself,” Simpson reveled in the personal memoir. “I’ve used my pain and turned it into something that can be beautiful and hopefully inspiring to people.”

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Attorney General William Barr on Wednesday announced the formation of a presidential commission on criminal justice, revitalizing a body that in the 1960s fundamentally altered the American criminal justice system.

The new members of the Presidential Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice took their oath of office, administered by Barr, Wednesday morning, and immediately set to work on their agenda for the coming months. Barr’s remarks linked their work to the last such commission, which was organized by President Lyndon Johnson.

"President Trump is an unwavering supporter of our men and women in blue, and he recognized that this commission is much needed to support law enforcement," Barr said. "It is, to be sure, long overdue. The last time there was a national commission on law enforcement was in 1965."

Barr’s allusion to the Johnson crime commission sets the stage for a comprehensive reassessment of the criminal justice system. The new commission’s work will likely highlight how the challenges of criminal justice have changed radically over the past half century.

The new commission is a diverse group of law enforcement officers, litigators, and stakeholders from local, state, and federal jurisdictions. It will be chaired by Phil Keith, who currently serves as the director of the Community Oriented Policing Services office within the Justice Department. Other board members include local sheriffs and police chiefs, U.S. attorneys, the Florida attorney general, and the acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives.

This group, Barr said Wednesday, will discuss key issues facing law enforcement in the 21st century. These include the challenges of mental illness; improving officer recruitment, training, and retention; understanding the rise of mental health problems among police officers; the challenges of new technologies; the causes and effects of "diminished respect" toward police officers; and the better incorporation of social services organizations into the policing process.

The push to establish a new commission on crime has commanded bipartisan backing. Senators Gary Peters (D., Mich.), Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), and John Cornyn (R., Tex.) introduced legislation to establish a commission modeled on the one from 1965. President Donald Trump issued an executive order in October that formally established the commission Barr swore in Wednesday.

Cornyn cheered Wednesday’s news as a step in the right direction for American criminal justice.

"An objective review system is necessary to reform our outdated criminal justice system and strengthen law enforcement’s ties to our communities," he told the Washington Free Beacon. "I’m grateful to the Administration for taking this important step, and I look forward to working with them to build upon their efforts to reform our justice system and increase public safety."

Trump’s order articulates the commission’s function as the study of "issues related to law enforcement and the administration of justice." It is also instructed to, within a year, furnish Barr with a final report, presumably similar in scope to the Johnson commission’s own 350-page report.

That original 1967 report, The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society, is widely considered—even by critics—a landmark in the history of American criminal justice. During the 1964 presidential election, Johnson opponent Barry Goldwater slammed the incumbent for his lack of focus on America’s rising crime problem. After Johnson won, he placed greater emphasis on law and order.

The 1967 report is responsible for many of today’s standard law enforcement practices. The Challenge of Crime recommended technological improvements including separate radio bands for police, fingerprinting systems, and an emergency hotline number that later became 911. It was one of the first major documents to recommend combating "ordinary street crime" as a matter of policy, concretizing Johnson’s "war on crime." It also systematized the role of the federal government as a major funder of local and state law enforcement, with spending reaching $56 billion by 2016.

The Johnson Crime Commission followed on the 1929 National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, generally known as the Wickersham Commission, which conducted some of the first systematic observation of law enforcement in the United States.

Barr, in his remarks, noted that radical changes in technology make a new crime commission all the more urgent.

"The incredible pace of technological change has meant the rapid evolution of new ways to commit and conceal crimes," he said. "All of you, because you’re on the front lines, see this every day—from the proliferation of synthetic opioids to the use of warrant-proof encryption and the dark web to sexually exploit the most vulnerable members of society."

Important, too, is the trend of crime rates since the ’60s. In the years immediately following the Johnson commission, America experienced a precipitous increase in violent crime, with the per capita rate rising nearly 400 percent between 1960 and 1991. Then, crime began an almost equally precipitous decline—today, it stands at roughly the lowest rate in the past 30 years.

Since multiple factors contribute to the crime rate, there is no one explanation as to what caused crime to rise and then drop. The new commission is not tasked with offering such an explanation, but it will have to think hard about how to make sure a crime wave does not happen again.

The post Trump Admin Revives Influential Criminal Justice Commission appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

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WASHINGTON, D.C. – Liberty Counsel, Faith & Liberty, and Liberty Counsel Action are hosting the “Remembering the Preborn” event on Wednesday, January 22, in front of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Three thousand flowers will be placed on the sidewalk during this prayer vigil in front of the High Court at 2 p.m. to represent the American babies that are killed every day by abortion.

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The U.S. Supreme Court this morning heard oral argument in the crucial First Amendment religious liberty case of Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue. The legal issue, as framed by SCOTUSblog, is “[w]hether it violates the religion clauses or the equal protection clause of the United States Constitution to invalidate a generally available and religiously neutral student-aid program simply because the program affords students the choice of attending religious schools.”

Amy Howe of SCOTUSblog contextualizes the importance of Espinoza through the prism of the Court’s recent First Amendment religious liberty jurisprudence:

Two and a half years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that Missouri’s policy of excluding churches from a program to provide grants to resurface playgrounds violated the Constitution. In a footnote in their opinion in Trinity Lutheran Church v. Comer, the justices emphasized that their decision was limited to the facts before them and did “not address religious uses of funding or other forms of discrimination.” [In Espinoza], the justices will return to the question they left open in Trinity Lutheran, when they review a decision by the Montana Supreme Court invalidating a tax-credit program because the scholarships created by the program could be used at religious schools.

The Montana state constitutional provision challenged in Espinoza is a so-called “Blaine Amendment” — an unfortunate area of law that has its insidious origins in blatant anti-Catholic bigotry. First Liberty Institute‘s Jeremy Dys explained the sordid history yesterday in a Daily Wire op-ed calling for the Court to end “Blaine Amendments” once and for all:

In 1875, … [James] Blaine introduced a proposed amendment to the United States Constitution that would prevent any government aid to “sectarian schools,” targeting Catholic schools in particular.

His federal amendment failed, but various states borrowed his proposal and their own constitutions were amended instead. Today, almost 40 states have a constitutional provision that prevents government aid to religious institutions. These state constitutional amendments have empowered states to legally discriminate against religious organizations when they perform the same work secular institutions do.

For years, activists have used Blaine Amendments to successfully exclude religious individuals and organizations from benefitting from public benefits. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote of Blaine Amendments in the 2000 decision of Mitchell v. Helms, “This doctrine, born of bigotry, should be buried now.”

Ilya Shapiro, who filed a “friend of the court brief” on behalf of Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies, is optimistic that the Court will do precisely what Justice Thomas called for it to do in Mitchell. Speaking exclusively with The Daily Wire, Shapiro opined: “The Supreme Court has the opportunity here to remove the last legal barrier to school choice, and I think it’s poised to do so. Constitutional principles of free exercise and equal protection don’t allow Montana to exclude religious groups from public benefits solely because of their religious nature. Similarly, there’s no room in Supreme Court precedent to exclude religious schools from programs structured around private choice (as opposed to, say, direct taxpayer funding of devotional education).”

In an additional Daily Wire op-ed published this morning, Jewish Coalition for Religious Liberty (JCRL) General Counsel Howard Slugh also lambasted the bigotry of Blaine’s legacy. “Espinoza has a strong legal basis for her claims,” Slugh wrote. “The Supreme Court recently indicated [in Trinity Lutheran] that excluding a religious organization ‘from a public benefit for which it is otherwise qualified, solely’ because it is religious ‘is odious to our Constitution … and cannot stand.’ The Supreme Court should strike down Montana’s Blaine Amendment based on the same reasoning.”

Slugh, who filed a “friend of the court brief” on behalf of JCRL, was in attendance this morning at the Supreme Court oral argument. Speaking exclusively with The Daily Wire, Slugh described what he saw: “I was very pleased with how the oral argument went. It seemed that at least five justices understood that the key issue in this case is whether it was permissible for the Montana Supreme Court to act pursuant to a law that, on its face, requires discrimination against religious people without even considering whether such discrimination is permissible under the U.S. Constitution. The answer to that question is that it is not permissible, and at least five justices seemed to support that position.”

Proponents of religious liberty and school choice ought to hope that Slugh’s intuition proves prescient.

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WASHINGTON, D.C. –  Since January 22 marks the 47th year since the U.S. Supreme Court decisions of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton which legalized the killing of an unborn baby’s life for any reason and at any stage of development, President Donald Trump proclaims today as National Sanctity of Human Life Day.

Since 1973, approximately 62 million unborn U.S. children have been taken from what should be the safest place—the womb.

In 1984, President Ronald Reagan issued a proclamation designating January 22 as the National Sanctity of Human Life Day as the result of the influence of one woman, Dr. Mildred Jefferson, who worked tirelessly in support of personhood for every unborn child.

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A political argument in Florida turned deadly this week when a construction worker allegedly killed his pro-Donald Trump boss and then draped an American flag over his dead body.

“A construction worker in Florida has been accused of murdering his pro-Trump boss with a trowel after a political argument on the construction site where they both worked and then throwing an American flag on the man’s body,” reports ABC News.

The suspect, 28-year-old Mason Trever Toney, allegedly stabbed his boss, William Steven Knight, Monday morning at Florida Turnpike job site, according to an emergency phone call from Toney’s co-workers. Though the exact details of the conversation between Toney and his boss have not been disclosed, the argument was political in nature.

“The Orange County Sheriff’s Office says that the murder appears related to a political dispute between the men,” continued ABC News. “Knight was a big supporter of President Donald Trump while Toney was anti-government. … When deputies arrived they found Knight’s body lying next to an excavator on the job site with a brand new American flag thrown onto the side of the victim’s body that didn’t belong to anybody on the site, according to the arrest affidavit.”

Toney’s arrest affidavit noted he was “very outspoken about his beliefs that the government is bad and out to get him.”

Toney allegedly fled the scene of the murder in a white pick-up truck before being taken into custody after crashing the vehicle amidst a police pursuit.

Since the election of President Trump, attacks on Trump supporters, primarily those in MAGA hats, have occurred on several occasions. Newsweek provided an account of these incidences that have occurred since 2016:

Terry Price has told his children and his wife they are not allowed to wear their “Make America great again” hats in public without him by their side after a man held a gun to his head for wearing the red cap.

Price, from Bowling Green, Kentucky, previously told Newsweek that he and his wife were shopping at Sam’s Club in Bowling Green wearing the hats when James Phillips, 57, allegedly pointed a Glock .40 caliber gun at Price’s face. Phillips allegedly told Price “this is a good day for you to die.” He was arrested and charged with wanton endangerment.

Following the incident, Price said some of his friends changed their party affiliations from Democrats to Republicans because they could no longer “identify with a party that has so much hate.”

“It’s just gone too far,” Price recently told Newsweek. “Republicans, conservatives and Christians need to stand up and take action against this kind of hate.”

However, while such attacks indeed illustrate the intense hatred that some conservatives face, especially at protests, that doesn’t necessarily mean walking down the street in MAGA hat will automatically be met with violence, despite the fact that some members of the media have likened them to Klan hoods. In fact, writing for Los Angeles Magazine, Joel Stein wore a MAGA hat to one of the most left-wing restaurants in Los Angeles and was pleasantly surprised that nobody confronted him.

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