The Last Refuge: The thugs in Chicago don’t obey current gun laws, so the Police Chief’s moonbat solution is to give them more laws they can ignore. Brilliant !
CHICAGO – Ten people, including a seven-year-old boy, were killed in shootings in Chicago over the Fourth of July holiday weekend.
Police superintendent Garry McCarthy acknowledged that his department’s decision to increase the police presence in the city by 30% in anticipation of holiday violence had not prevented the killings – and called for more restrictive gun laws. Last year 14 people were killed in Chicago over the Fourth of July weekend.
“If you think that putting more cops on the street would make a difference, then take a look at the fact that we put a third more manpower on the street for this weekend,” McCarthy said.
“What’s the result? We’re getting more guns. Well, that’s great,” he said. “It’s not stopping the violence. And it’s not going to stop the violence until criminals are held accountable and something is done to stem the flow of these guns into our city.”
The youngest person killed this weekend was Amari Brown, seven, who was shot on Saturday night while watching fireworks with his father. McCarthy said that the gunfire was aimed at Brown’s father – who was described as a “ranking gang member” by police. A 26-year-old woman was also struck in the shooting. (read more)
Disclaimer: This article was not written by Lorra B.
We originally shared this story last weekend after law enforcement captured one of the culprits. Now police have released CCTV video:
MACON, Ga. — Authorities in central Georgia say up to 50 teenagers bent on destruction raced into a Wal-Mart in Macon, smashing merchandise and causing an estimated $2,000 in damage.
Bibb County sheriff’s officials say some of the young people snatched a man from a motorized shopping cart and dragged him to the floor during the rampage around 2 a.m. Sunday.
Sheriff’s officials said one of the teens later told a Wal-Mart employee the goal was to see how much damage they could cause. Sheriff’s officials say floors were coated with broken merchandise.
The Telegraph reports that the teens ran when deputies arrived, but a 17-year-old boy was arrested when he returned to the store to retrieve his cellphone. Bibb County Sheriff David Davis said investigators are using surveillance video to try and identify suspects. (link)
Another Report – […] Some in the crowd also snatched a man, apparently a shopper at the Zebulon Road store, from a motorized shopping cart and dragged him to the floor, Bibb County sheriff’s officials said Monday.
The vandals, said to number between 40 and 50, sprinted down the store’s main aisleabout 1:50 a.m. Sunday, “destroying merchandise displays and items,” a sheriff’s deputy’s report of the incident noted.
Floors in parts of the store were “coated with broken merchandise,” the report added. “The length of the store from front to rear was lined with items which had been shattered, destroyed, turned over and thrown about.”
When sheriff’s deputies got there, the crowd “began to flee into many different vehicles and leave the scene,” the report said.
The store, next to Lowe’s, is just east of Interstate 475 in one of the area’s most frequented shopping districts.
The teenager seen leading the rushing horde of young men and women told a Wal-Mart employee “that this was a planned event … to see how much damage they could cause,” the sheriff’s report said.
The teen, identified as 17-year-old Kharron Nathan Green, of Ashton Drive in northwest Bibb County, was arrested when he returned to the store to retrieve his cellphone.
Green was jailed and later released on bond after being charged with inciting a riot and second-degree damage to property.
Green, according to the sheriff’s report, first told cops that “he did not know anything about what had happened in the store and that he did not know anyone involved.”
But when his mother and father arrived and watched the surveillance footage with sheriff’s deputies, the report said “Green admitted to his parents that the male in the video was indeed him.”
He refused to name others in the crowd, but according to the report said they had all come from a party on the city’s south side.
“Hopefully we can identify the others,” Sheriff David Davis said Monday. “Hopefully it’s not a pattern of behavior.”
Davis wondered about the parental supervision of the young people involved. (Read more)
SCOTUS– Justice Kennedy begins his opinion for the Court with a paean to the institution of marriage: he describes it as “essential to our most profound hopes and aspirations,” “sacred to those who live by their religions” and offering “unique fulfillment to those who find meaning in the secular realm.”
But it is also, he continues, an institution that “has evolved over time” from an “arrangement by the couple’s parents” to a voluntary agreement between a man and a woman. Similarly, although being gay was once considered an “illness,” public attitudes have shifted significantly.
The Supreme Court, Kennedy’s opinion explains, has long recognized the right to marry as a fundamental right. And although until today it has always done so in the context of opposite-sex couples, he continues, all of the same principles on which the Court has relied in cases involving opposite-sex couples apply equally to same-sex marriage and the recognition of out-of-state same-sex marriages.
For example, being able to decide whether to get married is an important part of an individual’s autonomy regardless whether you are the same sex as your intended spouse. Along much the same lines, marriage is a unique way for two individuals – in both same- and opposite-sex partnerships – to demonstrate their commitment to one another.
The Court has also protected the right to marry, the opinion notes, because of its importance for children and families. Laws prohibiting same-sex couples from marrying, the opinion concludes, “harm and humiliate the children” of those couples by depriving them of both financial benefits and – even more importantly – “the recognition, stability, and predictability marriage offers.”
The Court takes pains, however, to make clear that a right to marry is fundamental even for couples who cannot or do not want to have children. And more broadly, the Court continues, marriage is “a building block of our national community” in so many ways, from the moral support given to married couples to the legal benefits and rights that they enjoy. “There is no difference between same- and opposite-sex couples with respect to this principle,” the Court emphasizes.
The Kennedy opinion then takes on the principal rationale on which the lower court relied in upholding the state bans on same-sex marriage – the idea that the political process, rather than unelected judges, should be allowed to play out and decide this question.
Kennedy begins by pushing back against the idea that it is, in essence, too soon to decide this question: there has already been, the opinion maintains, plenty of discussion of the same-sex marriage issue. The very reason that we have a Constitution, he stresses, is that some rights are too important to leave up to the democratic process. Moreover, same-sex couples should not have to wait to have their rights recognized: the husband of lead plaintiff Jim Obergefell, for example, has already died, and the children of same-sex couples are growing up without their parents being married.
The Kennedy opinion closes with an assurance that churches and other groups that oppose same-sex marriage on religious grounds can continue to express their views. But that pledge may not provide much legal protection for a florist who does not want to furnish flowers for a same-sex marriage ceremony, for example; we can expect the precise scope of this protection for religious beliefs to be the focus of lawsuits in the not-too-distant future.
Chief Justice John Roberts not only dissented from the Court’s ruling but also read a summary of his dissent from the bench. It was the first time that he has done so in his ten Terms on the Court, and it signaled how strongly he disagreed with the Court’s ruling.
Roberts forcefully criticized the majority for side-stepping the democratic process and declaring that same-sex couples have the right to marry when, in his view, such a right “has no basis in the Constitution.” The Court’s decision, he complained, “orders the transformation of a social institution that has formed the basis of human society for millennia, for the Kalahari Bushmen and the Han Chinese, the Carthaginians and the Aztecs.” “Just who,” Roberts laments, “do we think we are?”
The other three Justices echoed Roberts’s sentiments, sometimes in even more strident terms: Justice Antonin Scalia characterized the decision as a “judicial Putsch” and suggested that, before he signed on to an opinion like the majority’s, “I would hide my head in a bag.”
Today’s ruling means, without question, that same-sex couples now have the exact same right to marry as their opposite-sex counterparts, throughout the country. That right became effective shortly after ten o’clock this morning.
Same-sex marriages may not begin happening immediately all over the country, depending on long it takes for states to implement the ruling, but it’s nowthe law. –SCOTUS BLOG
The latest exploits of the Rebel Alliance (school capitalists/wolverines) finds them crouched behind the lockers selling restaurant style packets of salt, pepper and sugar to their classmates.
Secret handshakes and spy-like slight of hand exchanges in the hallways help the rebellious crew execute their scurrilous deeds while remaining undetected.
(Washington Examiner) School lunches are so bland that kids are selling salt and pepper to spice them up, a school official told lawmakers Wednesday.
This “contraband economy” is result of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act Of 2010, said John Payne, a school board president in Indiana.
The 2010 bill directed the U.S. Department of Agriculture to create national standards for food served and sold in schools, which included limits on what could be served and how much, as well as a maximum amount of calories that can be included in school meals.
Payne, president of the Blackford County School Board in Hartford City, Ind., told House lawmakers that students in his school district have been “caught bringing in — and even selling — salt, pepper and sugar in school to add taste to perceived bland and tasteless cafeteria food.”
Payne said the USDA standards are strangling school districts by making them provide food students won’t eat in addition to increasing the cost of lunch for school districts.[…]
Lynn Harvey, of North Carolina’s school nutrition services, testified that participation in school meals has dropped 5 percent in North Carolina under the new restrictions even as enrollment has increased.
Ninety percent of North Carolina school nutrition directors said a requirement that all grains must be whole grain is the main culprit, Harvey said.
For example, Harvey said that since breakfast biscuits were switched to whole grain, participation in breakfast has dropped in 60 percent of her state’s school districts.
“No amount of training or technical assistance for schools will change students’ distaste for foods that look and taste unappealing to them,” she said.
Another problem is that a provision in the 2010 bill requiring states to review school meals programs every three years is creating an unnecessary burden, South Dakota Secretary of Education Melody Schopp testified.
Schopp said the excess regulation is creating more paperwork and less benefit to needy, hungry children. (read more)
It is beyond rare for a situation to develop where the professionally black are in such a state of angst within the world of the professionally liberal.
The key part of this vote is to remove the possibility for trade defeats in the Senate. If Fast Track authority is passed/granted then a simple majority of 51 votes will be all that is required to approve President Obama’s trade deal.
Mitch McConnell has essentially granted President Obama new powers not enumerated in the constitution. John Boehner is about to do the same thing in the House of Representatives. Paul Ryan has cemented his cross-over to the dark side of Chamber of Commerce Republicans led by CoC head Tom Donohue…..
(Via Washington Examiner) The House will vote Friday on legislation to give President Obama “fast track” authority to secure trade deals.
Republican leaders announced plans for the vote in a closed-door meeting with their rank and file, who are divided over whether to support the legislation.
The vote is likely to be close. With just two days until the vote, GOP leaders continue to negotiate with members to win their approval for the bill.
“Actually we are doing really well,” House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., a chief negotiator, said as he emerged from the meeting. “I think we have addressed lots of concerns and I feel we really have an air-tight case to make. We’re in our closing arguments. We are comfortable. That’s why we are proceeding.”
Passage of the fast track bill, known formally as trade promotion authority or TPA, will depend mostly on Republicans, as fewer than 20 Democrats have said they will support the bill. (read more)
..”We are very close to full construction of the death star. We only need about 16 more months. The conservative rebel alliance must be defeated at all costs”. ~ Emperor Rove
(Via Vice) The Department of Justice has ordered libertarian website Reason.com to turn over the information of six commenters after they made threats against the federal judge who presided over the Silk Road trial.
Ken White of the blog Popehat obtained the grand jury subpoena issued by the Department of Justice last week, which demands “any and all identifying information” the website has pertaining to the threatening commenters. This includes email addresses, telephone numbers, IP addresses, and billing information associated with the accounts.
The subpoena targets users who commented on an article published on May 31st regarding a letter from Ross Ulbricht, the creator of online drug market Silk Road, pleading for leniency ahead of his sentencing for charges surrounding the site. The comments appearedafter Judge Katherine Forrest gave Ulbricht two life sentences for his crimes. (read more to see the threats)
Disclaimer: This article was not written by Lorra B.
Reverse the races and this would be leading CNN tonight, and tomorrow, and the weekend, and next week, and….
OHIO – A Pleasant Ridge man was arrested Wednesday afternoon, several weeks after police said he shoved a female jogger into oncoming traffic, brandished a knife and told her that “he hates white people,” according to court documents.
Rodney Arnold, 34, of Pleasant Ridge, was arrested and charged with ethnic intimidation, aggravated menacing, assault and carrying concealed weapons.
On May 11, a woman was jogging in the 5900 block of Montgomery Road when a man shoved her into the street and caused her to fall in front of oncoming traffic, according to an affidavit in Hamilton County court records.
The woman said that the attacker pulled out a knife, pointed it at her and stated that “he hates white people,” according to the affidavit.
The woman told police that she was able to flee the scene safely. (read more)
Disclaimer: This article was not written by Lorra B.
On Tuesday April 28th, just two days prior to announcing charges against the Baltimore Six police officers in the death of Freddie Gray, Marilyn Mosby gave a speech where she stated: “so we will pursue, justice by any and all means necessary” (video segment @1:40):
On Wednesday April 29th Baltimore Police Chief Batts was told by sources from the State Attorney office that Mosby was going to make an announcement by the end of the week. To the surprise of the investigative team Batts gave Mosby’s office the investigative report on Thursday April 30th, even before it was completed.
The same urgency message was relayed to the city Medical Examiner.
[…] homicide investigators who were briefed by the medical examiner’s office believed the examiner’s autopsy report would likely find the cause of death to fall short of homicide. (link)
However, on the morning of Friday May 1st, the Medical Examiner signed off on a copy of his report and included the cause of death as “homicide”. Oddly, labeling the death as “homicide” while simultaneously stating the “fatal injury occurred inside the transport van“.
It seemed the media did not want to ask how a medical examiner can claim the “fatal injury” occurred specifically inside the van? Nothing in the Mosby probable cause statement identifies how this “fatal injury” could have occurred in the van, let alone DIDoccur in the van.
Without further review of the investigative report, and without any review or questioning of the ME findings, within a few hours Marilyn Mosby was standing at a podium proudly announcing her direct action charges against the Baltimore Six officers…
A week later State Attorney and activist Marilyn Mosby stands on stage with the family of Freddie Gray as musician Prince delivers a “Justice for Freddie Gray” concert.
The Silent Soldier 