Firearm Confiscation Checked by Supreme Court
The U.S. Supreme Court just issued a unanimous decision on a case that could have a reverberating impact on the Fourth and Second Amendments. On Monday, all nine justices agreed to overturn a First Circuit Court of Appeals ruling against Rhode Island resident Edward Caniglia, who contended that his Fourth Amendment rights were violated when law enforcement officers who were administering a welfare check elected to search his home and confiscate his firearms without a warrant.
In 2015, Caniglia had an hours-long argument with his wife of 22 years, during which he put his unloaded handgun on a table and asked, “Why don’t you just shoot me and get me out of my misery?” His wife then left the house and stayed in a motel overnight. The next morning she called police and requested a welfare check, saying she feared her husband was suicidal. When police arrived at the house, they spoke with Caniglia, who eventually agreed to go to the hospital for a mental health evaluation on the condition that the police would not seize his firearms. The officers agreed, but after Caniglia left for the hospital they entered his home and confiscated his two firearms anyway. They did so without obtaining a warrant, arguing that he represented a threat to himself and others.
Upon Caniglia’s return from the hospital that same day, after he was cleared of any mental health concerns, he discovered that his firearms had been seized. He contacted the police requesting their return. The police refused, citing a “community caretaking exception” as justification for both entering and searching his house and seizing his firearms. Caniglia subsequently sued, claiming a violation of his Fourth Amendment rights against unlawful search and seizure.
In their ruling, the justices homed in on the “community caretaking” exemption to the Fourth Amendment, an exemption based upon the 1973 Cady v. Dombrowski ruling in which the Supreme Court said law enforcement can legally search a vehicle without a warrant for reasonable cause. Justice Clarence Thomas observed a significant difference: “What is reasonable for vehicles is different from what is reasonable for homes.” Yet Thomas further asserted, “The First Circuit’s ‘community caretaking’ rule, however, goes beyond anything this Court has recognized.”
Justice Brett Kavanaugh disputed the notion that the Court’s ruling in support of Fourth Amendment protections would jeopardize the ability of police to legally enter a home. “If someone is at risk of serious harm and it is reasonable for officers to intervene now, that is enough for the officers to enter,” Kavanaugh stated.
Also of significance from this decision are the unanswered questions surrounding the constitutionality of so-called “red flag” laws meant for gun confiscation. Clearly, Justice Samuel Alito sees this as an issue that the Court needs to address. “We have addressed the standards required by due process for involuntary commitment to a mental treatment facility but we have not addressed Fourth Amendment restrictions on seizures like the one that we must assume occurred here, i.e., a short-term seizure conducted for the purpose of ascertaining whether a person presents an imminent risk of suicide,” he wrote. “This case also implicates another body of law that petitioner glossed over: the so-called ‘red flag’ laws that some States are now enacting. … Provisions of red flag laws may be challenged under the Fourth Amendment, and those cases may come before us. Our decision today does not address those issues.”
SCOTUS’s decision was a win for upholding Americans’ Fourth Amendment and Second Amendment rights. While the issue of how best to prevent mentally unstable individuals from accessing firearms remains a significant challenge, yesterday’s ruling was a firm reminder that the definition of the term “mentally unstable” is debatable. That’s why lawmakers cannot run roughshod over constitutional rights in the name of protecting the community. Due process must be respected and maintained. ~The Patriot Post
scumbag/liar-Cuomo Cashed in While New Yorkers Died
If ever there were a book that needed burning, scumbag/liar-Andrew Cuomo’s American Crisis: Leadership Lessons From the COVID-19 Pandemic is that book.
It’d be one thing if scumbag/liar-Cuomo merely took Rahm Emanuel’s advice and didn’t let a good crisis go to waste. Instead, though, he actually manufactured a crisis with his deadly mismanagement of New York’s elderly population, and then profited from it in real time.
People died because of him. Lots of people. And he profited from it. Handsomely.
scumbag/liar-Cuomo’s malfeasance — his disastrous decision to return COVID-positive patients to nursing homes and long-term care facilities, thereby allowing the virus to spread like wildfire among its most vulnerable population — likely cost more than 1,000 New Yorkers their lives. (More than 15,000 New Yorkers died of COVID in nursing homes, the worst number in the country.) And his desire to make a buck in the process cost Crown Publishing $5.12 million, which, according to tax returns scumbag/liar-Cuomo made public on Monday, is how much the publishing house paid for the rights to his book on “leadership.”
Even New York City Mayor scumbag-Bill de Blasio got it right this time. “I can tell you what I think it was. I think it was state-sponsored literature,” scumbag-de Blasio said on NY1. “This guy clearly depended upon public employees to do a lot of the work. And that’s not acceptable.”
As for the book, it’s hard to know who’s more gullible: the publisher, or the folks who actually shelled out good money to buy it. A total of 48,000 books have been purchased, but it’s not clear how many of those were bought by immediate family or fawning underlings. As the New York Post reports, “Based on that figure, Crown Publishing paid scumbag/liar-Cuomo around $107 per copy sold of the hardcover book, which has a suggested retail price of $29.99. New copies were available on the Amazon website at a cut-rate price of $13.54 each, and an auction for a new copy on eBay had just one bid, for a measly $1.99, plus shipping.”
Even at $1.99, though, the market appears to have failed — unless the book is being marketed as kindling. The author, after all, is at once a liar, a narcissist, and a serial sexual harasser of women.
And an unrepentant one at that. Yesterday, as the Post reports, “[He] deflected, joked, and laughed before denying Monday that he’d ever had an intimate relationship with a subordinate. ‘Intimate has a number of manifestations,’ scumbag/liar-Cuomo said when asked the question by The Post. The governor then turned to Health Commissioner Howard Zucker during a news conference at Manhattan’s Radio City Music Hall. ‘I think we have an intimate relationship, don’t you think? Yeah, not a sexual relationship,’ he said, laughing.”
We’re not sure what’s so funny. Maybe it was a nervous laugh — the kind people sometimes force out when the walls are closing in.
Another op-ed, from another scumbag/liar-Cuomo victim, appeared just yesterday in the New York Daily News. It was written by his former press secretary while he served as HUD secretary in the scumbag/liar-Clinton administration.
“ scumbag/liar-Cuomo … initially apologized for acting ‘in a way that made people feel uncomfortable,’” she writes, “but then reversed course, calling his accusers liars. He dug himself another hole last week when he told a female reporter, ‘If I just made you feel uncomfortable, that is not harassment. That’s you feeling uncomfortable.’ So are his 10 accusers liars, uncomfortable women or uncomfortable liars?”
That’s a question for the investigators, of course. But we already know the answer. ~The Patriot Post
MLB’s Hypocritical Foul Ball
We’re beginning to think that maybe Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred wasn’t really acting on deeply held principles when he moved the All-Star Game from Atlanta to Denver.
The supposed reason for the punishment was MLB’s objection over Georgia’s election integrity law, which, among other things, solidifies ID requirements for voting but also makes voting easier than at any point before 2020. Instead of remaining a nonpartisan for-profit business, MLB grossly politicized America’s pastime by regurgitating the Democrat BIG Lie that Georgia’s law amounts to voter suppression and was “Jim Crow on steroids.” Democrats, of course, want to continue their bulk-mail balloting fraud.
As for MLB’s moving only one out of at least 82 baseball games played in Atlanta this year, forget about the fact that Atlanta has a black population of more than 50% while Denver’s is less than 10%. Forget that voting in Georgia is in many ways easier than in Colorado. Forget the damage done to minority-owned businesses in Atlanta, losing out on $100 million in economic activity surrounding the game. Forget about the hypocrisy of the perpetually aggrieved scumbag/worthless-Stacey Abrams, who was for the boycott before she was against it.
MLB has been busted for its own gross hypocrisy.
Want to volunteer during MLB’s All-Star Week? After creating a profile in MLB’s “volunteer management system,” you’ll need to pass a background check, sign a release of liability, and you might even need to present a — wait for it — driver’s license “as proof of age.”
In other words, it’s easier to vote in Georgia than it is to volunteer at events surrounding a baseball game.
James Freeman of the Wall Street Journal sums it up: “MLB’s current position is that rigorous verification procedures should be reserved — not for elections to choose the people who will govern us — but for other societal activities, such as serving as an unpaid volunteer at baseball’s all-star game.”
Furthermore, he adds, “It’s possible that Mr. Manfred thinks that the democratic process at the heart of our constitutional republic really is less important than recruiting unpaid staff for his entertainment events. But who can believe that?” ~The Patriot Post
The Left Targets Conservative Media
The recent destruction of a building housing the offices of media outlets during Israel’s latest conflict with Hamas led to the usual suspects calling for the protection of journalists to be a higher priority. The only problem is they ignored two attacks that took place in the United States — only those targeted in America were the “wrong” kind of journalists.
The Intercept, which once smeared SEAL Team Six, has targeted a number of journalists from Townhall and the Daily Caller for their coverage of the riots in the summer of 2020. In essence, the Intercept’s “reporter” has painted targets on the back of other reporters over their politics, giving antifa thugs an idea of who to target. Think this is overhyping a threat? Recall what happened to Andy Ngo in 2019, an assault that was glossed over by the left-wing Media Matters and others.
Incidentally, as we noted with Tim Scott, the Left’s venom is pretty toxic, mostly because three of the four journalists targeted by the Intercept don’t fit the stereotype the Left likes to pin on conservatives. As bad as that is, it got worse in Baltimore.
In that violence-ridden city, the top prosecutor, Marilyn Mosby, has filed an FCC complaint against WBFF, a Fox broadcasting affiliate owned by Sinclair Broadcasting. (Contrary to some previous reports, it is not affiliated with Fox News, another target of the Left’s censorship campaign.) Sinclair has been targeted by the Left before, often for award-winning reporting that reveals the truth about hacks like Mosby.
In addition, the Left wants the FCC to halt an ownership change that would create a Spanish-language conservative talk-radio outlet.
Many “mainstream” outlets have sought to silence their conservative-leaning competition, often because they have lost the trust of many Americans. CNN, in particular, has been bad, between the efforts of Oliver Darcy and Mr. Potato Head’s jerky cousin, Brian Stelter.
Part of this is the fact that too many Big Lies have gone essentially unchecked by the press. If anything, “mainstream” outlets helped spread those lies over the years, contrary to their calls for civility.
To believe many media outlets whose “reporters” were acting as political operatives for the Left, the 2020 election was about throwing out an illegitimately elected Russian puppet who thought white supremacists were “very fine people” and whose followers hunted black youth, tossed Hispanic kids in cages, and drove LGBT teens to suicide while permanently poisoning the planet out of the White House. Dennis Prager raises some very valid questions about how that phony narrative prompted the “fortification” of the 2020 election, but also what the years of lies may have provoked.
These lies have gone on for over a quarter-century, ranging from school lunch standards to claims that the murderous attack in Tucson was incited by Sarah Palin to literal accusations that reforming welfare was proof of being a Nazi.
After such a long-term bombardment of hateful propaganda, wouldn’t you be okay with stealing an election to save the world?
The fact of the matter is, outlets like Sinclair Broadcasting, the Daily Caller, and Townhall didn’t come about because people were happy with the choices they had at the time. We didn’t launch The Patriot Post way back in 1996 because there was a real choice outside the mainstream media. We and these other outlets rose because the mainstream media had and has failed America. Censorship won’t fix the trust gap; it will only make it worse. ~The Patriot Post
Ethanol Boondoggle Raises Gas Prices
Following the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, ethanol was mandated to be blended in gasoline as a source of “renewable” fuel, under the guise of combating pollution and ostensibly to secure energy independence. In practice, ethanol has done little to rein in pollution and nothing to bring about energy independence. Instead, that has been achieved thanks to technological developments in the fossil fuel industry, such as fracking. Ethanol, meanwhile, is arguably the nation’s biggest boondoggle.
Besides serving as a plague on older gasoline engines (especially lawn equipment), ethanol has resulted in increasing the cost of food as well as raising prices at the pump.
As the nation recovers from the recent cyberattack on the Colonial Pipeline, Americans’ attention quickly focused on the price of gas, which jumped to its highest levels in six years. Now, it’s easy to blame the pipeline attack for the price hike, and there’s no question the ensuing run on gas that resulted in stations with no fuel played a role. But it was also a limited event that has been resolved with little lasting impact. In other words, the gas price increases can’t legitimately be blamed solely on that event.
The answer for the rising fuel prices — prices that were already on an upward trajectory prior to last week’s pipeline attack — can be blamed on other factors, one of which is ethanol.
Going back to Congress’s Energy Independence and Security Act, the Environmental Protection Agency assigned oil refineries annual ethanol quotas. Refiners would receive tradable renewable identification numbers (RINs) per gallon of renewable fuel produced. Companies that failed to meet the EPA’s ethanol quotas could purchase RINs from other companies in order to meet compliance, or they could apply for a waiver.
The Wall Street Journal notes, “Congress’s ethanol requirements were never realistic, though its real goal was to boost corn farmers in the Midwest and the nascent ‘advanced’ biofuels, which are still nascent. The blending mandates have become increasingly unattainable as fuel economy has improved, which is harming smaller refiners and pushing up gas prices.”
In a nutshell, as the price of corn has spiked 125% in the past year, it has served to directly raise the price at the pump by an estimated 30 cents per gallon. That’s an additional 30 cents that Americans would not be paying if not for the ethanol boondoggle. ~The Patriot Post
Cops & BLM: A Grotesque Double Standard
Welp, that didn’t last long. Freshman “pro-choice” Democrat Representative Cori Bush, whom we acknowledged on Mother’s Day weekend for her deeply moving and powerful testimony in support of both motherhood and life, has since reverted to form.
Bush, the St. Louis pastor and political activist who masquerades as a member of Congress, took to the floor last Thursday to heap praise upon a fellow Black Lives Matter agitator and cop hater — a Palestinian who prayed aloud outside the Ferguson Police Department for the death of its police officers in 2014 and tweeted the vile BLM chant “Pigs in a blanket, fry ‘em like bacon.”
“St. Louis and I rise today in solidarity with the Palestinian people,” Bush began, “and in memory of our brother, Bassem Masri, a Ferguson activist who was with us on the front lines of our uprising for justice following the police murder of Michael Brown Jr. … As a Palestinian, he was ready to resist, to rebel, to rise up with us as our St. Louis community mourned [Brown’s] state sanctioned murder, and as we demanded an end to the militarized police occupation of our communities.”
Bush kept using the word “murder” to describe what happened to the thuggish Mike Brown — he of the “hands up, don’t shoot” lie that suckered so many biased journalists, professional football players, and Democrat presidential candidates. But “murder”? We don’t think that word means what Bush thinks it means. And neither does the St. Louis grand jury that refused to indict officer Darren Wilson, nor the scumbag/liar-nObama Justice Department, which thoroughly investigated the shooting of Brown and refused to charge Wilson with any federal civil rights charges because the shooting was justified.
It was an odd and strained tribute — one that compared the Ferguson, Missouri, riots of 2014 with the deadly Palestinian terrorism of today. “Palestinians know what state violence, militarized policing, and occupation of their communities look like,” Bush said, “and they live that reality of having to go through checkpoints while trying to live their lives.”
Clearly, it’s acceptable for a member of Congress to laud a cop-hating “St. Louis Palestinian,” but what if a cop criticizes the Marxist movement known as Black Lives Matter and the nationwide riots it led last year?
As James Varney of the Washington Times reports, “In recent weeks, two policewomen in New Jersey were fired or demoted for calling BLM protesters 'terrorists,’ and a police officer in Virginia was canned for criticizing political leaders who side with racial justice rioters. Sara Erwin was a police officer in Hopewell Township, New Jersey, when she sounded off on Facebook last year. … In the post, she denounced the tactics of Black Lives Matter and asked people supporting the movement to un-friend her. ‘Just to let you know — they are terrorists,’ she wrote in June 2020. ‘They hate me. They hate my uniform. They don’t care if I die.’”
It’s hard to argue with Erwin’s sentiment. When a group chants, “Pigs in a blanket, fry ‘em like bacon,” it’s reasonable to assume that, yes, it hates you.
It’s true that cities and municipalities would prefer that their cops refrain from sounding off about hot-button, heat-of-the-moment issues that fall within their jurisdiction. “But if an officer is punished for doing so,” writes Power Line’s Paul Mirengoff, “it should be pursuant to a policy that was communicated to that officer before he or she made the comment deemed objectionable.”
Indeed, only one viewpoint is being punished in such instances. As the Times notes, “In the most recent examples, all of the officers took what might be dubbed a conservative or pro-police viewpoint and were harshly disciplined.”
It’ll be interesting to see how these cases play out legally. Because these days we seem to be administering justice according to four separate tiers: one rich, one poor, one liberal, one conservative. ~The Patriot Post
DHS: Violent Extremists May Exploit Easing COVID Restrictions
Just one day after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lifted most mask mandates for those who are fully vaccinated, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a national advisory warning, “Violent extremists may seek to exploit the easing of COVID-19-related restrictions across the United States to conduct attacks against a broader range of targets after previous public capacity limits reduced opportunities for lethal attacks.”
DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced the bulletin in a tweet Friday afternoon.
“Today I issued a new National Terrorism Advisory System #NTAS Bulletin after consulting with Intelligence Community and law enforcement partners,” Mayorkas wrote.
The bulletin said “violent extremists” may “exploit the easing of COVID-19-related restrictions,” and they could use social media to sow discord.
“Ideologically-motivated violent extremists fueled by perceived grievances, false narratives, and conspiracy theories continue to share information online with the intent to incite violence,” the DHS warned. “Online narratives across sites known to be frequented by individuals who hold violent extremist ideologies have called for violence against elected officials, political representatives, government facilities, law enforcement, religious or commercial facilities, and perceived ideologically-opposed individuals.”
The agency warned government facilities and personnel have been common targets for domestic violent extremists in 2020 and 2021, noting that “opportunistic violent criminals are likely to exploit Constitutionally-protected freedom of speech activity linked to racial justice grievances and police use of force concerns, potentially targeting protestors perceived to be ideological opponents.”
According to the advisory, DHS and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) are working to provide guidance to state, local, tribal, and territorial partners regarding the “current threat environment.”
“DHS is collaborating with industry partners to identify and respond to those individuals encouraging violence and attempting to radicalize others through spreading disinformation, conspiracy theories, and false narratives on social media and other online platforms,” it states.
Given that Attorney General Merrick Garland said last week he is prioritizing prosecutions of individuals involved in the Capitol breach over those tied to last summer’s riots because the events of January 6 were “the most dangerous threat to our democracy,” it is a good bet Biden’s Department of Justice (DOJ) believes this new domestic terrorist threat is coming from conservatives.
It is just this mindset that appears to be fueling a rise in DOJ civil rights abuses against Trump supporters.
We are seeing emboldened, weaponized Departments of Justice and Homeland Security based on the false narrative the left is pushing about what happened at the Capitol on January 6. They have created what appears to be a national drag net that seeks to ensnare Trump supporters, both high-profile ones and every-day American citizens.
This abuse of government power that cannot be tolerated. ~The Patriot Post
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