A “Democratic Socialist” who berated Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen as she ate at a D.C. restaurant Tuesday night is actually an employee of the United States Department of Justice, the Washington Examiner reports.
Allison Hrabar is a “paralegal specialist” at the DOJ’s Washington D.C. offices, but isn’t worried about her job — even if she works for the very organization overseeing much of America’s immigration enforcement. She told the Examiner that it “feels really good” to confront those responsible for arresting illegal immigrants at the U.S.’s southern border.
She says her actions were all done off company time, and that her speech is protected by the First Amendment.
Among the chants Hrabar took part in, as shown in a video passed around social media on Tuesday night, is a call to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement, also a Justice Department branch. Hrabar did not deny taking part in the chants and was unapologetic in her interview.
“If you see these people in public, you should remind them that they shouldn’t have peace,” she told the Examiner. “We aren’t the only ones who can do this. Anyone who sees Kirstjen Nielsen at dinner, anyone who sees anyone who works at DHS and ICE at dinner can confront them like this, and that’s what we hope this will inspire people to do.”
The Justice Department declined to comment on the matter, both to the Washington Examiner and to the Daily Caller, which also followed up on the story.
After their “success” with Kirstjen Nielsen, Democratic Socialists of America say they will continue to harass and intimidate members of the Trump Administration whenever they see them in public. The DSA was, of course, not satisfied with merely ending family separations and believes in open borders, so the campaign of harassment is expected to continue for some time.
President Trump signing an executive order on Wednesday to stop the separation of illegal immigrant families at the border was greeted Thursday morning by broadcast networks and cable news channels hailing the latest cover of Time magazine, which savaged Trump by using an altered image to portray him as indifferent to a crying young child.
Continuing their obsessive coverage of the Trump administration’s immigration policy, the NBC, ABC, and CBS morning shows all touted the liberal news magazine’s hostile cover at the top of the 8:00 a.m. ET hour. “Also this morning, within the last few minutes, we have now got our first look at the newest edition of Time magazine, we’ll put that up on the screen, there it is, with the headline, ‘Welcome to America,’” correspondent Peter Alexander breathlessly declared on NBC’s Today show.
The reporter described the image for viewers: “You can see the president staring down at a young undocumented immigrant child.” He then hoped the commander-in-chief would take notice of the nasty hit piece: “President Trump who is very image oriented, it will be interesting to see how he responds today.”
On ABC’s Good Morning America, filling in for co-host George Stephanopoulos, World News Tonight anchor David Muir announced: “Take a look at – this is the new Time magazine cover out just moments ago. The president there, a little girl, and it says…“Welcome to America.’”
CBS This Morning co-host Norah O’Donnell was clearly impressed by the hostile cover as she hyped: “The new issue of Time magazine, look at this, shows the president towering over a young crying girl. The cover says, ‘Welcome to America.’” Fellow co-host John Dickerson gushed: “An iconic – a now-iconic photo taken last week captured that girl as her mother was detained.”
Joining the network morning shows, MSNBC’s Morning Joe and CNN’s New Day also predictably seized on the topic. Joe Scarborough eagerly recited the interior headline: “The cover story entitled, ‘American Values: Trump’s brutal gambit at the border reflects a president uncomfortable with ideas.’” He celebrated the “devastating cover” and asserted that it reflected “how America right now is seen by the rest of the world.”
On New Day, fill-in co-host Erica Hill exclaimed: “Also new this morning, Time magazine out with a stinging new cover. Take a look at this. The president being hit there for separating children from their parents at the border.” Like CBS’s Dickerson, she praised the Photoshop job: “It features the now-famous photo of that crying 2-year-old Honduran girl. The caption, ‘Welcome to America.’”
The pattern is all too familiar: A liberal magazine launches a nasty attack against a Republican president and the rest of the liberal media dutifully repeat the smear.
In a 5-4 ruling on Thursday, the Supreme Court decided that states could tax internet sales, even when the internet retailer was not based in that state.
This overturned two Supreme Court rulings: 1967’s National Bellas Hess, Inc. v. Department of Revenue of Illinois and 1991’s Quill Corporation v. North Dakota, which prevented states from collecting these taxes.
What does this case cover?
Before this ruling, online retailers had to have a physical presence in a state to be subjected to that state’s sales tax. This gave them an advantage over brick-and-mortar stores. Before this ruling, Amazon, for example, collected sales tax only from customers in Washington and Pennsylvania.
South Dakota specifically brought this lawsuit against Wayfair, Overstock.com, and Newegg. All three companies sold online merchandise in the state, but did not have a physical location or employees there, and were exempted from collecting sales tax from their South Dakota customers.
South Dakota Gov. Dennis Daugaard (R) estimated that his state alone would get an additional $50 million a year in new taxes from online purchases because of this ruling.
How did the justices rule?
For this case, South Dakota v Wayfair Inc., Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Anthony Kennedy, and Clarence Thomas to deliver the majority opinion. Chief Justice John Roberts joined Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan in the dissent.
Writing the majority opinion, Kennedy called the previous ruling in Quill “flawed” and “removed from economic reality.” He argued that Quill was “a judicially created tax shelter for businesses that limit their physical presence in a State but sell their goods and services to the State’s consumers, something that has become easier and more prevalent as technology has advanced. “
What else?
The Trump administration had encouraged the Supreme Court to overturn the previous rulings and allow South Dakota to collect the sales tax.
Kim Kardashian Breaks With Hollywood, Says She Wants Trump to Win — Because She Wants America to Win
by Cassandra Fairbanks June 21, 2018
Kim Kardashian is breaking with the general sentiments in Hollywood and has stated that she wants President Donald Trump to succeed, because she wants our country to succeed.
During an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, Kardashian discussed the controversy over her successful visit to the White House where she was able to convince the president to grant clemency to Alice Johnson.
“I try to see all sides, especially after this experience [referring to the controversy over her visit to the White House]. There’s obviously a lot that we don’t agree with, but I want him [President Trump] to win,” Kardashian stated. “I want him to succeed, because it’s our country. It’s so crazy that everyone doesn’t want that.”
Her husband, Kanye West, had faced backlash after coming out in support of President Trump, but it didn’t stop his new album from skyrocketing to the top of the charts.
Kardashian also showed class and nuance regarding the debate over children of illegal immigrants being separated from their families at the border.
“It is really complex. It’s heartbreaking. When you see those images, it breaks your heart and I hope that it all gets resolved. You don’t want to see these things,” Kardashian said.
Kardashian also said that she saw a lot of compassion in the White House and that her work to help those who she believes are unjustly imprisoned is just beginning.
“It’s a longer-term mission for me. I never started out thinking I was being political. I just thought I was helping people and I knew that I had the opportunity or the resources, so I used them and, you know, it worked out really well for Alice. I definitely saw a lot of compassion from the White House with her and I really do believe it’s just the beginning,” she explained.
The reality star and businesswoman was also asked if she will ever run for president, but she explained that she does not have political aspirations.
“You know, everyone’s been asking me that and I said in one interview, ‘Never say never.’ And then I was like, ‘Why did I say that?’ I don’t have political aspirations. I really don’t!” Kardashian told THR.
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President Donald Trump’s new executive order on border enforcement all but restores the failed “catch-and-release” approach.
Though he proclaimed that he was continuing his “zero tolerance” policy, the government still cannot detain families for longer than 20 days due to the Flores decree — a law the media pretended, until now, did not exist.
The courts and Congress are unlikely to shift, meaning that illegal aliens with children will simply be let go.
This was a defeat brought about, quite literally, by fake news.
A widely-circulated photograph depicted a child standing in a cage and crying. It was not actually a child in a detention center. It was a child in a mock cage at a left-wing protest in Dallas.
In a further irony, the photo was publicized by Jose Antonio Vargas, a journalist who is, himself, an illegal alien.
This is what happens when a government believes people are “illegal.”
— Jose Antonio Vargas (@joseiswriting) June 12, 2018
Once people saw that image, it could not be unseen. Others began to circulate as well. One showed kids sleeping on mats in a temporary holding cell. That turned out to be from 2014, when Barack Obama was president.
Border Patrol detention centers still look much the same today. They are not inhumane, but when the media circulated audio of children crying — an everyday occurrence — it was taken as proof of cruelty.
The Beltway punditocracy did its part, comparing law enforcement to Nazi concentration camps and the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.
In 2006, when then-Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele compared stem cell research to Nazi experimentation on humans, he was forced to apologize for exploiting the Holocaust. In 2018, when he called shelters for migrant children “concentration camps for kids,” the media nodded in approval.
What all of this demonstrates is that there is simply no way to enforce our immigration laws. Every president, including Obama, has promised to do it and each has failed.
It was once said Trump would never be able to deport the millions of illegal aliens already in the U.S. because Americans would not tolerate the sight of families being rounded up. It turns out we will not even tolerate the sight of families being detained when they are caught in the act of crossing illegally.
The Democrats’ preferred option is not to stop illegal aliens at all. A bill drafted by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), and co-sponsored by every Senate Democrat, went so far as to prevent federal law enforcement from arresting anyone who is with a child, almost anywhere in the U.S, even for crimes not related to immigration.
Clearly we cannot enforce our laws at the border itself, because a child might cry somewhere in America and people will be upset.
The only solution — if we are to prevent mass immigration and human trafficking by the cartels — is to reduce the human element in border enforcement.
In other words, the only solution is the wall that campaigned on, and which Congress has refused to fund. Use humans only where topography requires it.
With a wall, there are no crying kids. They stay on the other side of the border — out of sight, out of mind, so as not to torment the liberal conscience.
Trump has vowed to shut down the government this fall unless Congress funds the wall. That might seem an empty threat, now that he has caved on “catch-and-release.”
Yet he may have no other choice — and he may have to go further, demanding an end to the Senate filibuster rule Democrats have abused to choke every effort by Republicans to pass their agenda. There is literally no bill Republicans could propose today to which Democrats would agree.
Israel’s experience with its own “wall” — really, a high-tech fence that is a wall in a few urban areas — is instructive. When the idea was first proposed, no one liked it: the right did not like the idea of a de facto border cutting off parts of Judea and Samara; the left did not like the idea of restricting Palestinians’ movements.
But when Israeli soldiers tried pursuing the terrorists where they lived, the world cried foul, making up hoaxes about human rights abuses.
So Israel had no choice but to remove the human element almost entirely and to put up a barrier that is ugly, and hated, but does the job. Thousands of lives have been saved as a result.
So, too, on our southern border. Americans have shown that we will not tolerate the sight of children being separated from adults — even when those children are being trafficked by criminals. We cannot leave law enforcement up to the discretion of future presidents. This one has tried hard enough.
There is no choice, if we want a country. It’s wall, or nothing.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He was named to Forward’s 50 “most influential” Jews in 2017. He is the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
Over a month ago we learned that the nation of Hungary had effectively driven all of the NGOs operated by billionaire George Soros out of their country. The current government isn’t exactly composed of big fans of Soros’ efforts to liberalize the country, particularly in terms of its immigration policy. At the same time, Prime Minister Viktor Orban was working with the legislature to formalize the arrangement while running for reelection. That effort has now come to fruition with the passage of what they refer to as the STOP Soros law. (Thomson Reuters)
Hungary’s parliament on Wednesday approved a package of bills that criminalises some help given to illegal immigrants, defying the European Union and human rights groups and narrowing the scope for action by non-governmental organisations (NGOs).
Prime Minister Viktor Orban has been a vocal critic of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open-door migrant policy and has led eastern European opposition to EU quotas that aimed to distribute asylum seekers around the bloc.
Orban’s right-wing Fidesz party tightened its grip on parliament in an April election fought on a fiercely anti-immigration platform that demonised U.S. billionaire George Soros and liberal NGOs he backs. Orban accuses Soros of encouraging mass immigration to undermine Europe, a charge Soros denies.
Speaking as somebody who isn’t exactly a big fan of Soros, even I’ll admit that this package of laws is a bit on the draconian side. They’ve already placed significant restrictions on legal migration and taken steps to secure their borders against unlawful entry. But the STOP Soros bills are criminalizing any efforts by groups or individuals to provide physical or legal assistance to migrants seeking legal status, with penalities including prison terms.
Soros seems to have taken the hint, though, since he’s reportedly shifting his Open Society Foundation operations to Germany. But given how rapidly things have been evolving there, with the possibility that Angela Merkel may not even remain in power for much longer, it’s unclear if Soros will be getting as warm of a welcome as he might have in the past.
This is a policy which fits in with other international efforts among certain EU nations. Austria and Italy, joined by the Foreign Minister of Germany, recently announced the formation of an “Axis of the Willing” to combat illegal immigration in Europe. Hungary, along with the other V4 nations (Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia), have expressed an interest in teaming up. So no matter where Soros and his foundation wind up this year, it’s unlikely to be one of those nations.
Remember the international outcry when Hamas claimed that an 8-month old baby, Layla Ghandour, died as a result of tear gas inhalation when Israel’s IDF forces confronted Gaza border protesters on May 14?
Remember the baby’s mother saying, “The Israelis killed her,” and Hamas ministry spokesman, Dr. Ashraf Al-Oudra, posting a photo of the baby on Facebook and attesting she died from tear gas inhalation?
Remember how the story took a twist when an unidentified doctor in Gaza told an Associated Press health official that the baby had a preexisting medical condition which caused her death?
Now the story gets even more serpentine: On Thursday, a 20-year-old Palestinian, Mahmoud Omar, who was indicted on terror-related charges and is a cousin of the baby, told Israeli investigators that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar paid the baby’s parents, Miriam and Anwar Ghandour, roughly $2,200 to lie to the media and say the baby died of tear gas inhalation when in fact the baby had died of a blood disease, the same disease that killed the baby’s brother in 2017.
The indictment against Omar states that he was among the 40,000 Gazans at the May 14 protests when his mother called and told him his cousin, the baby Layla Ghandour, had died. When he returned home, he was told the baby had died of the blood disease.
As The Times Of Israel reports, Omar was arrested on May 28 after he and a fellow member of Fatah’s armed wing, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, tried to infiltrate Israel and torch an unmanned IDF post.
According to the indictment, Omar was promised financial aid for his family if he joined the Mujahideen, a branch of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. Israel and the U.S. have named the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades as a terror organization. The Times of Israel adds, “The suspect had allegedly been active in the Mujahideen throughout the course of 2017 and had carried out guard duty, during which he had been instructed to fire at IDF forces if they approached the border.”
While Layla Ghandour’s funeral was covered internationally with condemnation of Israel, an Israeli army spokesperson stated that “contrary to the unequivocal Palestinian announcement, we have evidence that undermines the credibility of the Palestinian Ministry of Health’s announcement regarding the death of the baby.”
Five Finger Death Punch, a popular heavy metal band, spoke out in support of the police and their families during an interview published on Tuesday by Loudwire.
During the interview, the band’s guitarist, Zoltan Bathory, lauded law enforcement officers and their supportive families for protecting the public selflessly and often at a cost of their own personal safety.
In addition to expressing support for police, Bathory also announced that a portion of ticket sales from their upcoming tour would go to an organization that works to help the families of fallen officers.
What did he say about police at large?
“I personally look at [cops] and think they are special people who deserve the respect and I don’t know that the general population understands what they go through,” Bathory told Loudwire’s Chad Childers. “I feel that they are not getting the respect that they deserve.”
Bathory noted that it’s important to conceive the idea that it’s just not realistic to believe that we live in a world “where everybody’s got flowers and smiling and are peaceful.”
“[F]or those who realize this is not reality, you have to accept that each city has a police force,” he said, “and they are really that thin blue line, that thin layer of ice on a deep ocean of f***ing chaos, and savagely things can happen to them.”
Bathory also went on to lament the idea that some people in society just don’t appreciate the actual sacrifices that often come with police work.
“There are certain people who will sign up and do this job,” he explained. “I don’t have to look at my girlfriend and you don’t have to look at your family and think, ‘This could be my day.’”
He added, “It could be a bad traffic stop or if you’re in the military, it could be a mission that goes sideways. We don’t think this way, but for these guys, they go to work and realize they might not come home. They sign up for that and that is respectable.”
What did he say about donations?
Bathory told Childers that he and his bandmates will be donating “a portion from every ticket sold” to an organization called C.O.P.S.
C.O.P.S. — or Concerns of Police Survivors — is an organization founded in 1984 that benefits the families of fallen police officers through counseling, scholarship opportunities, kids’ camps, and more.
“On this next tour, we are donating a portion from every ticket sold to an organization called C.O.P.S.,” Bathory said. “Basically, it’s for the families of fallen police officers.”
The band’s latest tour — “And Justice for None” — kicks off on July 16 in Auburn, Washington.
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