Showing posts with label political enemy lists. Show all posts
Showing posts with label political enemy lists. Show all posts

Saturday, August 29, 2020

Judge rules Sarah Palin's defamation suit against The New York Times can go to trial​

Sarah Palin's defamation lawsuit against The New York Times is moving forward and headed to trial after a federal judge ruled Friday that a jury will decide whether the newspaper acted with "actual malice" when it published a false editorial pointing to Palin as the motivation behind the 2011 assassination attempt on former Rep. Gabby Giffords (D-Ariz.).

What are the details?

Palin sued The Times in 2017 over a piece that linked materials distributed by the former Alaskan governor's political action committee and the Tucson, Arizona, mass murder at a Giffords event that left six people dead and Giffords injured.

An excerpt from the editorial — which was later corrected — read:

Was this attack evidence of how vicious American politics has become? Probably. In 2011, Jared Lee Loughner opened fire in a supermarket parking lot, grievously wounding Representative Gabby Giffords and killing six people, including a 9-year-old girl. At the time, we and others were sharply critical of the heated political rhetoric on the right. Before the shooting, Sarah Palin's political action committee circulated a map that showed the targeted electoral districts of Ms. Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized cross hairs.

The lawsuit has been tied up in the courts ever since, and on Friday, Manhattan Federal Judge Jed Rakoff denied The Times' request to bring the case to a close, which Law & Crime called "a major procedural win" for Palin.

"Gov. Palin brings this action to hold [former editor] James Bennett and The Times accountable for defaming her by falsely asserting what they knew to be false: that Gov. Palin was clearly and directly responsible for inciting a mass shooting at a political event in January 2011," the judge wrote. 

"Specifically," he continued, "on June 14, 2017, The Times published an editorial authored in the name of its Editorial Board (which represents the 'voice' of The Times) that falsely stated as a matter of fact to millions of people that Gov. Palin incited Jared Loughner's January 8, 2011, mass shooting at a political event in Tucson, Arizona."

Rakoff added, "Taken in the light most favorable to (Palin), the evidence shows Bennet came up with an angle for the editorial, ignored the articles brought to his attention that were inconsistent with his angle, disregarded the…research he commissioned, and ultimately made the point he set out to make in reckless disregard of the truth."

In reaction to the judge's decision, a spokeswoman for The Times said in a statement, "We're disappointed in the ruling but are confident we will prevail at trial when a jury hears the facts," the New York Daily Newsreported.


Posted by jerry at 7:09 AM 0 comments
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Friday, August 21, 2020

Four Years Later, Planned Parenthood Whistleblower Still Trapped In Kamala Harris’s Persecution

Four Years Later, Planned Parenthood Whistleblower Still Trapped In Kamala Harris’s Persecution

https://thefederalist.com/2020/08/20/four-years-later-planned-parenthood-whistleblower-still-trapped-in-kamala-harriss-persecution/


AUGUST 20, 2020 By 

Sen. Kamala Harris accepted the Democratic nomination for vice president Wednesday night, exactly three weeks after journalist and pro-life activist David Daleiden appeared in a San Francisco Superior Court, once again fighting the criminal charges Harris brought against him at the behest of her political donors four years prior. As Harris joins a campaign fighting for the “soul of our nation,” Daleiden continues a years-long battle for countless unborn souls and the First Amendment, both of which Harris has a record of fighting against.

In March 2016, as the California attorney general, Harris met with six Planned Parenthood officials in her Los Angeles office. Email recordsbetween Harris’s office and Planned Parenthood officials show the two were corresponding on orchestrating public responses, filing police reports, and even drafting legislation targeting Daleiden for his undercover videos exposing the abortion giant’s illegal practices.

Two of the six executives in that meeting went on to be used as witnesses in Harris’s criminal investigation. Harris has been a staunch abortion advocate and received tens of thousands of dollars in political contributions from Planned Parenthood-affiliated entities over the course of her political career.

Two weeks following that Los Angeles meeting, on April 5, 2016, Harris ordered state law enforcement agents to raid Daleiden’s home, tasking them with seizing his camera equipment, documents, and unreleased video footage. Daleiden’s attorneys argued Harris’s search warrant should have never been issued according to California’s shield law, which explicitly protects citizen journalists’ unpublished materials.

Instead, a judge ruled “there was sufficient probable cause in the warrant that Daleiden was engaged in criminal activity irrespective of his journalistic status and that the items seized were related to the criminal activity.” Nevermind that those items seized included evidence of Planned Parenthood’s own criminal activity, including the trafficking of fetal body parts, which Harris never bothered to prosecute or investigate.

How blatant was Harris’s targeting of Daleiden and her disregard for a journalist’s First Amendment rights? For starters, Daleiden is the first person to ever be prosecuted for undercover video reporting in California. Her own deputy prosecutor later admitted in court that Daleiden was targeted solely because of the content his videos.

Harris’s own personal double standard goes even further. In 2013, she protected an animal rights group, Mercy for Animals (MFA), that used hidden cameras to expose alleged abuse at a poultry farm. Rather than seeking charges against MFA, Harris threw her support behind them, filing a notice to appeal against a federal judge’s previous ruling.

“David had a reasonable belief that he could find evidence of a felony crime of violence against human beings, namely, infanticide, that is, the killing of babies born alive with beating hearts,” said Thomas Brejcha, one of Daleiden’s attorneys. “These children – whom fetal tissue traffickers refer to as ‘intact fetuses’ – are the source from whom ‘fresh’ organs were harvested and ‘donated.’ These ‘donations’ were acquired at premium prices in dollar amounts bearing no ascertainable relationship to actual costs incurred in their ‘production.’”

Harris’s record as an attorney general shows she did more to fight against the alleged abuse of chickens than she did against the trafficking of human fetuses for profit. Furthermore, it shows her willingness to only extend First Amendment protections to those she views as politically expedient.

As for Daleiden, the legal battle initiated by Harris four years ago continues. In a hearing on July 28, Daleiden’s lawyers asked Judge Suzanne Ramos Bolanos to drop the 10 criminal counts against him and his partner, Sandra Merritt. Bolanos dropped one charge as “duplicative,” but kept the rest, leaving Daleiden and Merritt’s legal to another appeals court. He could face up to 10 years in prison if convicted.

Just hours ahead of Harris’s DNC speech, Daleiden told The Federalist that the California senator’s targeting goes beyond his own legal fight. “Kamala Harris’ radical disrespect and contempt for the First Amendment is a threat to the civil liberties of all Americans,” he said.
Madeline Osburn is a staff editor at the Federalist and the producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Follow her on Twitter. 
Posted by jerry at 5:09 PM 0 comments
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Thursday, July 23, 2020

Victor Davis Hanson: Not your parents' revolution — how today's anarchists differ from 60s protesters

OPINION
Published

Victor Davis Hanson: Not your parents' revolution — how today's anarchists differ from 60s protesters

Today, if there is a silent mass of traditionalists and conservatives, they remain in hiding.

Victor Davis Hanson
 By Victor Davis Hanson | Tribune Media Services

NYPD clears out remaining Occupy City Hall protesters, cleanup efforts begin

The NYPD says occupiers were given 10 minutes to clear out before police moved in in riot gear; Aishah Hasnie reports.

In the 1960s and early ’70s, the U.S. was convulsed by massive protests calling for radical changes in the country’s attitudes on race, class, gender and sexual orientation. The Vietnam War and widespread college deferments were likely the fuel that ignited prior peaceful civil disobedience.

Sometimes the demonstrations became violent, as with the Watts riots of 1965 and the protests at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. Terrorists from the Weathermen (later called the Weather Underground) bombed dozens of government buildings.

The ’60s revolution introduced to the country everything from hippies, communes, free love, mass tattooing, commonplace profanity, rampant drug use, rock music and high divorce rates to the war on poverty, massive government growth, feminism, affirmative action and race/gender/ethnic college curricula.

DOZENS OF FEDERAL LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICERS IN PORTLAND DOXED AMID RIOTS, OFFICIALS SAY

The enemies of the ’60s counterculture were the “establishment” — politicians, corporations, the military and the “square” generation” in general. Leftists targeted their parents, who had grown up in the Great Depression. That generation had won World War II and returned to create a booming postwar economy. After growing up with economic and military hardship, they sought a return to comfortable conformity in the 1950s.

A half-century after the earlier revolution, today’s cultural revolution is vastly different — and far more dangerous.

Government and debt have grown. Social activism is already institutionalized in hundreds of newer federal programs. The “Great Society” inaugurated a multitrillion-dollar investment in the welfare state. Divorce rates soared. The nuclear family waned. Immigration, both legal and illegal, skyrocketed.

Thus, America is far less resilient, and a far more divided, indebted and vulnerable target than it was in 1965.

How should protest violence be handled in major US cities?Video

Today, radicals are not protesting against 1950s conservatism but rather against the radicals of the 1960s, who as old liberals now hold power. Now, many of the current enforcers — blue-state governors, mayors and police chiefs — are from the left. Unlike Democratic Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley in the ’60s, today’s progressive civic leaders often sympathize with the protesters.

The ’60s protests were for racial assimilation and integration to reify Martin Luther King Jr.’s agenda of making race incidental, not essential, to the American mindset. Not so with today’s cultural revolution. It seeks to ensure that racial difference is the foundation of American life, dividing the country between supposed non-white victims and purported white victimizers, past and present.

In the ’60s, radicals rebelled against their teachers and professors, who were often highly competent and the products of fact-based and inductive education. Not so in 2020. Today’s radicals were taught not by traditionalists but by less-educated older radicals.

Another chief difference is debt. Most public education in the 1960s was bare-bones and relatively inexpensive. Because there were no plush dorms, latte bars, rock-climbing walls, diversity coordinators and provosts of inclusion, college tuition in real dollars was far cheaper.


The result was that 1960s student radicals graduated without much debt and for all their hipness could enter a booming economy with marketable skills. Today’s angry graduates owe a collective $1.6 trillion in student loan debt — much of it borrowed for mediocre, therapeutic and politicized training that does not impress employers.

College debt impedes maturity, marriage, child-raising, home ownership and the saving of money.  In other words, today’s radical is far more desperate and angry that his college gambit never paid off.

Today’s divide is also geographical in the fashion of 1861, not just generational as in the 1960s. The two blue coasts seem to despise the vast red interior, and vice versa.


Yet the scariest trait of the current revolution is that many of its sympathizers haven’t changed much since the 1960s. They may be rich, powerful, influential and older, but they are just as reckless and see the current chaos as the final victory in their own long march from the ’60s.

Corporations are no longer seen as evil, but as woke contributors to the revolution. The military is no longer smeared as warmongering, but praised as a government employment service where race, class and gender agendas can be green-lighted without messy legislative debate. Unlike the 1960s, there are essentially no conservatives in Hollywood, on campuses or in government bureaucracies.

So the war no longer pits radicals against conservatives, but often socialists and anarchists against both liberals and conservatives.


In the ’60s, a huge “silent majority” finally had enough, elected Richard Nixon and slowed down the revolution by jailing its criminals, absorbing and moderating it. Today, if there is a silent mass of traditionalists and conservatives, they remain in hiding.

If they stay quiet in their veritable mental monasteries and deplore the violence in silence, the revolution will steamroll on. But as in the past, if they finally snap, decide enough is enough and reclaim their country, then even this cultural revolution will sputter out, too.


Posted by jerry at 10:02 AM 0 comments
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Sunday, June 7, 2020

The left has always felt entitled to violence and immediate gratification.

CRIME
Published

Massachusetts Trump supporter, 82, ‘violently assaulted’ by motorist, 27, police say

By Dom Calicchio | Fox News

Fox News Flash top headlines for June 6

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com.
Nobody should be attacked for their political views, Charlie Chase says.
But according to authorities, that’s exactly what happened last week to the 82-year-old U.S. military veteran and supporter of President Trump.
The Fall River, Mass., man says he was holding a Trump sign and wearing a Trump hat when suddenly a motorist allegedly got out of his car and charged toward him.
“Give me the (expletive) sign!” the suspect said, according to police.

Posted by jerry at 8:27 AM 0 comments
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