In the Maryland case, lower courts disagreed on whether the 40-foot cross, erected in 1925 by the American Legion to honor 49 Marylanders killed during World War I, represents an “establishment” of religion. In 2015, a federal judge in Maryland rejected a suit by the American Humanist Association, saying, “The predominant and nearly exclusive use of the Monument has been for annual commemorative events held on Memorial Day and Veterans Day.” However, the Fourth Circuit Court later ruled the cross unconstitutional, asserting that any reasonable observer would conclude the cross’s “inherent religious meaning” means the government “either places Christianity above other faiths, views being American and Christian as one in the same, or both.”

Jurisprudence in similar cases has been inconsistent — as Justice Clarence Thomas put it last year, the Court’s “establishment clause jurisprudence is in disarray” — so the justices have a chance to clear up a larger issue if Chief Justice John Roberts doesn’t insist on another narrow ruling. As the American Legion said in its brief, “If a century-old war memorial that is only in government hands because of traffic safety considerations arising 40 years after it was built is unconstitutional, it is difficult to conceive of any cross-shaped monument that will survive.”

There are hopeful signs for a right outcome, whether narrow or broad. While the women on the Court’s left wing seemed hostile to the cross, the other justices appeared amenable to keeping it. And it’s worth remembering however the justices rule that when Thomas Jefferson wrote of a “wall of separation between Church and State,” it was in a private letter, not constitutional language. Jefferson clearly didn’t intend for the metaphor to become legal doctrine as modern courts have made it. The leftist interpretation is a myth.  ~The Patriot Post

Artificial Intelligence Creating Fake News

by Political Editors:   Who needs Russians to run a disinformation campaign when there are American leftists creating “deepfake” news? After the 2018 midterms, a wealthy Democrat became embroiled in controversy when it was reported that he had heavily bankrolled a false-flag operation in Alabama. Back in December, Internet billionaire Reid Hoffman apologized for his part in funding a high-tech disinformation campaign that sought to undermine support for Republican Roy Moore and boost Democrat Doug Jones.

Just after Christmas, The Washington Post reported, “Hoffman invested $750,000 in one group, American Engagement Technologies, or AET, according to a person close to the matter but not authorized to discuss Hoffman’s spending. Hoffman’s statement Wednesday referred to AET, which has been linked to a campaign to spread disinformation targeting Moore.” The Post further reported, “Hoffman’s public apology follows news reports on the effort, known as Project Birmingham, which involved the creation of misleading Facebook pages to persuade Alabama conservatives to vote for somebody other than Moore.”

While the promulgation of fake news is disgusting in and of itself, there is a more sinister aspect to this story that has many on both sides of the political aisle ringing alarm bells. As reported by The Guardian, “The creators of a revolutionary AI [artificial intelligence] system that can write news stories and works of fiction — dubbed ‘deepfakes for text’ — have taken the unusual step of not releasing their research publicly, for fear of potential misuse.”

The nonprofit research company known as OpenAI, founded in 2015 by Hoffman, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk (who left the company last year over his disagreements with the direction the team wanted to go), finds itself at the center of controversy. The Daily Caller notes that “lawmakers sounded alarms in January about so-called deepfake videos that look remarkably real, with some experts warning they will be the next phase in disinformation campaigns. They worry that this new type of AI can make it difficult for readers and social media users to distinguish fact from fiction.”

Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner (D-VA) last month lamented, “It is almost too late to sound the alarm before this technology is released — it has been unleashed … and now we are playing a bit of defense.”

This is indeed a problem, and it will only get worse as nefarious individuals and organizations work to weaponize AI technology in order to manipulate the masses with disinformation. It also provides some justification for the creation of “crediting houses” such as NewsGuard, which aims to provide a service designed to inform individuals on the credibility of various news sites. Although it’s far from perfect or free from bias, the recognition of the problem is real, and the need for conservatives to be involved in the process of “balancing” the vetting of news is imperative.  

~The Patriot Post

The United States Air Force had been using some of its F-22 Raptors to attack the drug labs. Now, let’s get one thing straight: Bombing the Taliban is good. Making drug labs go away is also good. Making Taliban drug labs go away via bombs is, therefore, very good.

That said, the F-22 Raptor is not the plane for the job. We have previously discussed the short-handed Raptor force. When you have such a highly advanced plane in such low numbers, it needs to be saved for the most important missions — and bombing Taliban drug labs is overkill.

There is plenty of argument over whether we should just get out of Afghanistan. But consider this: The Taliban were instrumental to 9/11. Yes, it’s been more than 17 years, and we will soon see children graduate from high school who were not even alive on the day al-Qaida carried out its unprovoked and dastardly attack. But the message needs to be sent that perpetrating something like 9/11 is a fatal mistake, and while al-Qaida is a shadow of what it once was, there’s still that score with the Taliban.

After all, we didn’t stop fighting Japan after Tom Lanphier shot down Isoroku Yamamoto’s plane in 1943. That wasn’t even at the halfway mark of World War II in the Pacific. So, when the previous U.S. administration wanted quit the fight after killing Osama bin Laden, someone needed to remind him that the Taliban were accessories to 9/11.

With that out of the way, it’s time to point out that since there really is a need to be involved in Afghanistan and to keep taking out the Taliban, then it is obvious the bombing should continue until the Taliban get the hint. But bombing with which plane?

The answer is a force more equipped to deal with the Taliban. F-22s are overkill and needed elsewhere. But there was a plane that the Air Force has dismissed that could sting the Taliban very well — the Textron Scorpion. This relatively simple, multi-role plane could carry the types of weapons needed to blast Taliban drug labs to bits, like Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAM) or laser-guided bombs. Scorpions can even haul regular old dumb bombs.

If the Scorpion isn’t an option, then the Air Force could always decide to buy the FA-50, a version of the T-50 that recently lost out in the T-X competition. Maybe the United States should also look into re-opening production of the OV-10 Bronco, a far more capable plane than the two planes in the competition: The AT-29 Super Tucano and AT-6B Wolverine.

This could be done as part of building up the United States Air Force. Yes, the USAF is talking about adding 74 more squadrons, but that’s not nearly enough. The fact is, a larger Air Force should also take into account the need to put bombs on al-Qaida, the Taliban, ISIS, al-Shabaab, and other terrorist groups. After all, just because Russia and China are major threats doesn’t mean we should ignore the radical Islamic terrorists.

When the Taliban decide to hand over any al-Qaida personnel they are harboring, then America can begin talks to stop the bombing. Until then, keep bombing their dope labs — and anything else we can find.  

~The Patriot Post

Such is the simple lesson Democrats want us to learn when they trot out teens and elementary children to parrot leftist propaganda about the issue du jour. Last year, it was the Parkland pawns marching for leftist gun control after the horrific mass murder at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. This week, it’s kids showing up to protest at various Senate offices to hawk the $90 trillion boondoggle known as the Green New Deal.

The Sunrise Movement specifically uses kids to advocate ecofascist policies because (A) as one kid put it, “you’re looking at the faces of the people who are going to be living with the consequences,” and (B) it’s always difficult to oppose what kids are saying without looking like an uncaring ogre. Sen. Dianne Fein-stein (D-CA) certainly came off as a condescendingly arrogant and grouchy old lady in pushing back against the rehearsed lines and phony anger thrust at her by a group of kids. See the video:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cd3H1boPIIE

But haven’t we all learned by now to beware selectively edited videos? Clearly, we’re no fans of Fein-stein, but the full video shows this to be a pretty amicable meeting of likeminded folks. 

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell certainly is aware of these tactics. He refused to meet with protesters, and some of them ended up getting arrested.

Finally, speaking of children with childish dreams, commie-Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the most prolific proponent of the Green New Deal, spent her first day on Capitol Hill back in November protesting with the Sunrise Movement outside Nancy Pulosi’s office. Pulosi later famously called the GND “the green dream or whatever they call it.” And that’s the same commie-Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who said of the climate-change threat, “I think young people … have a legitimate question. Ya know, should — is it okay to still have children?”

Maybe it’s not a great idea to put national policy in the hands of people banging on highchairs — or the hands of children used as pawns by those people, either.   ~The Patriot Post

“This should be frankly the easiest vote we ever cast in this body,” Sasse declared.

Just three Democrats voted for it. Three. Thus, it failed to reach  the 60-vote threshold.

One wouldn’t think that we need a federal law on the books that explicitly compels doctors to do their jobs (i.e., to “do no harm”), yet recent state laws have significantly rolled back infant protections. New York’s law claims to expand women’s rights, but it really just allows abortion as an option right up to labor and effectively negates born-alive protections.

Sasse first tried to pass his bill by unanimous consent, in large part to prove that there was no such consensus for the country’s newborns. Sen. scumbag-Patty Murray (D-WA) became the Dems’ lightning rod and opposed the move, claiming it was redundant because there are already laws against infanticide. Well, there are also plenty of laws on the books regulating gun purchases and ownership, yet scumbag-Murray and her Democrat cohorts are still heaping retread proposals onto that pile every time a useful murder hits the news.

There is no federal law to protect newborns in the context of abortion, and state protections can be shoved aside, as New York and seven other states have proven.

Seeing that the redundancy argument didn’t work, Democrats switched tactics and smeared the bill as restricting women’s access to abortion. (See how quickly they turned this from meaningless and redundant to a mortal threat to women’s rights?) Sasse’s bill does nothing to restrict access to abortion. Instead, it makes doctors culpable for allowing born infants to die from lack of medical care and grants women who receive abortions protection from prosecution. As noted in National Review, this bill will also force Democrats to “choose between rejecting infanticide and arbitrary beliefs about who gets to live.”

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is affirming life by ending one federal handout Planned Parenthood has been receiving for years. A new rule issued Friday by the White House prohibits federal family-planning money under Title X from being provided to institutions that make abortion referrals or perform abortions at the same facilities that provide other family-planning services such as birth control or medical checkups.

Planned Parenthood will survive without that particular $50-60 million every year because congressional Republicans continuously fail to stop shoveling another $500 million to the abortion mill every year. Moreover, much of its government funding comes from state Medicaid programs. However, it’s very easy for a gift to become a handout and soon to become expected. Planned Parenthood, having received so many taxpayer dollars over the years, insists it’s entitled to that money. It has promised to sue to block the order. If that fails, then the organization has vowed to drop out of Title X altogether rather than give up providing abortions.

In sum, the macabre Democrat Party of today fights tooth and nail against any move to restrict abortion any more than China or North Korea do, while demanding that American taxpayers foot the bill. “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” indeed…  ~The Patriot Post

Those hopes were utterly naive at best — or thoroughly calculated at worst. They are also one of the main reasons  Donald Trump is president today. While American voters who put Trump over the top may not be able to fully articulate why they went for a political novice whose mouth is both his biggest asset and his biggest liability, they instinctively knew he was an American Patriot who put his own country first. And they knew that loyalty stood in the sharpest of contrasts with a self-aggrandizing, bicoastal elitist class and their Washington, DC, water-carriers.

These elitists view borders and the nation state per se as anachronistic impediments standing in the way of their efforts to gain historically unprecedented riches and unassailable power.

Rubio later doubled down. “The Chinese effort to supplant America is first deeply rooted in their view of history, that it is their rightful place to be the most powerful nation on earth, and that the last hundred years are an aberration, and so they’re going to set things right,” he stated. “Second, it’s based on frankly suckering the West and America into believing that they are a poor and developing country who just wants to be like us. We’ve made policy decisions for two decades or longer based on that assumption that’s now come back to bite us.”

To further illuminate the seriousness of the threat, Rubio has released an 80-page report, “Made in China 2025: And the Future of American Industry,” which details the efforts of the Communist superpower’s plans to supplant America on the world stage.

How serious? “It’s the most comprehensive effort ever undertaken by any nation ever in every realm,” Rubio stated. “It’s in the fields of commerce, trade, technology. They use our immigration system against us. Academia. They influence media. They have learned how to use the American multinational corporate class to lobby policymakers towards pro-China decisions.”

Use? In the Post, Rubio speaks to the “meaningful structural changes” outlined by Trump that included addressing “forced technology transfers, intellectual-property theft, non-tariff barriers and cybersecurity.” Nonetheless, a CNBC article refers to the forced transfers as “alleged.” The Peterson Institute for International Economics refers to forced transfers and China’s penchant for property theft as an “increasingly accepted narrative in the West, especially in the United States.” Bloomberg News  bemoans the possibility that the S&P 500 could have been 11 percent higher “if President Donald Trump hadn’t adopted a protectionist stance on global commerce.” And an article entitled “Beltway Warriors Target China as the Next Global Threat”  asserts that “both economic nationalists and security hawks seem to be looking forward to the evolving cold war with China,” even though “China does not seek global domination and has no plans to establish a military presence in America’s sphere of influence in Central and Latin America.”

Really? As far back as 2008, a bipartisan congressional panel issued a report in which they unanimously agreed that China was regularly targeting databases used by the United States government and American defense contractors. In 2013, a 60-page report released by American computer security firm Mandiant revealed that ongoing cyber attacks were being perpetrated against a number of American corporations and government agencies “and that the Chinese Government is aware of them.” Last September, Bloomberg News revealed that China extended Venezuela a $5 billion line of credit. And last week, The Washington Times revealed that “the Beijing-based Chaoji Da Benying, revealed photos of China’s J-20 stealth jet fighter showing what appear to be knockoffs of two American jet fighter technologies.”

The foremost reality check? In 2017, America’s trade deficit with China was $375 billion, something global elitists view with no concern. Yet China’s entire 2018 military budget was $175 billion — meaning one could argue America financed all of it, with $200 billion to spare.

“For a long time, the assumption was that China was the place where cheap stuff would be made, but all the valuable stuff would be developed in America,” Rubio adds. “But they’ve developed the Made in China 2025 plan, which is designed to actually supplant us as the place that makes all of the valuable and higher-end things. So it’s just — not only is it comprehensive, it’s overwhelming all of government, and I think we’ve been late to wake up to it. Frankly, we’re running out of time to address it.”

Does anyone in government remember who they’re dealing with? Last year, more than 3.59 million Chinese enterprises were added to the Communist government’s “trustworthiness blacklist” — as in an all-encompassing social credit system that “assigns both positive and negative scores for individual or corporate behaviour in an attempt to pressure citizens into behaving,” as columnist He Huifeng explains. And an MSNBC article’s headline spells out the currently contemptible dynamic in no uncertain terms. “China Uses DNA to Track Its People, With the Help of American Expertise,” refers to the efforts coordinated between Chinese police and Thermo Fisher, a Massachusetts company.

Thermo Fisher’s response to the exposé? Last Wednesday, the company announced it would no longer sell equipment — solely in the Chinese province where the abuse was taking place.

Thermo Fisher is only one of many Communist China accommodators. Bing provides China with a censored search engine. Google is working on another. Hollywood has long  “tailored” its movies to comport with Beijing’s sensibilities. And as a report from the director of National Intelligence states, “China’s intelligence services will exploit the openness of American society, especially academia and the scientific community…”

Why is this allowed to happen? As Rubio explains, many multinational corporations are run by people “just trying to get five years of access to that huge market so they can retire with very valuable stockholdings. Just because they’re headquartered in America doesn’t mean they are American companies acting in the best interest of our nation.”

That’s an egregious understatement. The “citizen of the world” elitists and their useful idiot collaborators in media, academia, Hollywood, and Washington, DC, have made “nationalist” and “patriotism” dirty words in their contemptible effort to obscure the reality that they represent an existential threat to America.

Which is why you either agree with them or you’re a racist, xenophobic “deplorable.”

The effort to divide America by party, race, religion, sex, gender, and class — even if it requires a plethora of hoaxes to do so — is no accident. The highly orchestrated distractions are designed to fatally undermine anything resembling the national cohesion utterly inimical to the globalist agenda. Trump once noted that a “nation without borders is no nation at all.”

So is a nation without Patriots.  ~The Patriot Post

Reacting to the violence, interim President Juan Guaido, who has been recognized by the U.S. and at least 50 other democratic nations as Venezuela’s legitimate leader, stated, “Today’s events force me to make a decision: to formally propose to the international community that we must have all options open to secure the freedom of our country that is fighting and will continue to fight. Hope was born not to die, Venezuela!”

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo expressed his disgust with Maduro’s actions and reiterated America’s commitment to stand with the people of Venezuela: “We denounce Maduro’s refusal to let humanitarian assistance reach Venezuela. What kind of a sick tyrant stops food from getting to hungry people? The images of burning trucks filled with aid are sickening.” He added, “While Guaido leads the effort to get the aid to the people, Maduro sends armed gangs to attack innocent civilians.”

Vice President Mike Pence is scheduled to meet today with Guiado and the regional Lima Group of nations to offer further support and help decide what actions should be taken to increase the pressure on Maduro to step down. President Donald Trump has not ruled out military intervention, although it appears that the immediate response will be increased sanctions.

What is truly interesting — and almost comical if the situation weren’t so dire — is the attempt of leftists such as Vermont Sen. commie-Bernie Sanders to distance themselves and their socialist ideology from the socialist-created disaster that is Venezuela. On Saturday, commie-Sanders, who has long praised the socialist takeover of Venezuela, stated, “The people of Venezuela are enduring a serious humanitarian crisis. The Maduro government must put the needs of its people first, allow humanitarian aid into the country, and refrain from violence against protesters.” There would have been no need for the once-wealthy Venezuela to need humanitarian aid today had it not embraced the economy- and freedom-destroying ideology of socialism, but commie-Sanders can’t admit that fact.

For the sake of the Venezuelan people, we hope for an end to the Maduro dictatorship and the socialism that precipitated his rise to power in the first place.  ~The Patriot Post

At question in the case of Timbs v. Indiana: How far is too far when it comes to asset forfeiture by authorities? As the Ginsburg opinion queried: “Is the Eighth Amendment’s Excessive Fines Clause an ‘incorporated’ protection applicable to the States under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause? Like the Eighth Amendment’s proscriptions of ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ and ‘[e]xcessive bail,’ the protection against excessive fines guards against abuses of government’s punitive or criminal law-enforcement authority.”

The case stemmed from the 2015 arrest of Indiana resident Tyson Timbs, who eventually pleaded guilty to selling heroin to an undercover police officer. While Timbs was sentenced to house arrest and five years’ probation, the state also seized a 2012 Land Rover Timbs had purchased with proceeds from his late grandfather’s life insurance policy. The car, valued at $42,000, was worth over quadruple what the maximum fine for the offense would have been, and that disparity was ruled by two lower Indiana state courts to be excessive.

However, the state appealed to the Indiana Supreme Court, and it overruled the lower courts on their belief that the prohibition on excessive fines found in the Constitution only applied to the federal government — thus, the state of Indiana was within its rights under forfeiture law to seize Timbs’ asset despite it not having been purchased with illegally obtained funds. They argued that, since Timbs had transported the heroin with the car, it was fair game for seizure.

But the state’s case before the Supreme Court was weak from the start, leaving the solicitor general to defend a hypothetical seizure of a luxury car for the offense of driving five miles an hour over the speed limit. Thus, a 9-0 whitewash wasn’t really a surprise.

While both Gorsuch and Thomas agreed with the final decision, Gorsuch added a one-page concurrence that considered whether the case should have been decided based on the Privileges or Immunities Clause rather than by the Due Process clause. Thomas took the point further, writing his own separate opinion that harshly criticized the “due process” logic:

Because the oxymoronic “substantive” “due process” doctrine has no basis in the Constitution, it is unsurprising that the Court has been unable to adhere to any “guiding principle to distinguish ‘fundamental’ rights that warrant protection from nonfundamental rights that do not.” … And because the Court’s substantive due process precedents allow the Court to fashion fundamental rights without any textual constraints, it is equally unsurprising that among these precedents are some of the Court’s most notoriously incorrect decisions … [including] Roe v. Wade[and] Dred Scott v. Sandford.

Thomas’s concurrence, which provides much of the second half of the 26-page opinion, provides a good history lesson on the evolution of law against excessive fines.

Not only was Justice Thomas’s concern regarding proper precedent not answered completely, but as the Wall Street  Journal editorial board pointed out, the Timbs decision also left as a mystery just how outrageous a fine had to be to merit consideration as “excessive.” Surely — and unfortunately — this question will be left to play out in the legal system over the coming years.

The battle over excessive fines, though, is only a small part in the tug-of-war that has pitted law-and-order prosecutors who believe asset forfeiture is a deterrent to crime against civil libertarians who believe it’s a “gigantic law-enforcement scam,” with seizures of significant assets possible under the most circumstantial of evidence.

As our own Arnold Ahlert wrote in 2017, it’s “a process whereby government can seize property and cash they suspect is related to the commission of a crime” [emphasis added]. Note the word “suspect,” which is far different than the word “prove.” Unfortunately, the burden of proof in forfeiture cases is placed on the accused, who have to fight the unlimited resources of the government in order to reclaim what is legally theirs.

Tyson Timbs certainly doesn’t fit the profile of a hero, but he dared to make a stand against government overreach and scored a rare victory. Let’s hope it brings new awareness to the frequent abuses of a system that was supposed to ensure crime didn’t pay but instead became a cash cow for local and state governments.  ~The Patriot Post