Category Archives: Law

George Floyd’s Cause Of Death: Clear. Chauvin’s Criminal Intention: Harder To Prove.

Crime, Criminal Injustice, Justice, Law, Race, Racism

“In the case of Mr. Derek Chauvin, a mindset of depraved indifference seems to jibe with the video of George Floyd’s expiration.” (From “Was The Cop’s Knee On George Floyd’s Neck ‘Racism’? No!“)

Judging from the known facts, …  the chilling video recording in which Floyd expired slowly as he pleaded for air… Floyd begged to breathe. But the knee on his neck—“subdual restraint and neck compression,” in medical terms—was sustained for fully eight minutes and 46 seconds, causing “cardiopulmonary arrest.”

There are laws against what transpired between former Officer Derek Chauvin and Mr. Floyd.

And the law’s ambit is not to decide whether the offending officer is a correct-thinking individual, but whether Mr. Chauvin had committed a crime.

About Officer Chauvin’s mindset, the most the law is supposed to divine is mens rea—criminal intention: Was the officer whose knee pressed on Floyd’s neck acting with a guilty mind or not?

For fact-finding is the essence of the law. The law is not an abstract ideal of imagined social justice, that exists to salve sensitive souls. …

Considerations to tease apart are in, “Was The Cop’s Knee On George Floyd’s Neck ‘Racism’? No!”

Comments from readers can be followed on this blog post: “UPDATED (8/22/): NEW COLUMN: Was The Cop’s Knee On George Floyd’s Neck ‘Racism’? No!”

Derek Chauvin’s trial is live, on USA Today.

Open Sesame: The Piss-Poor ‘Conservative,’ Immigration Positions That Admit You Into Polite Company

Argument, Conservatism, Democrats, IMMIGRATION, Law, Republicans

On the immigration front, the “Open Sesame” magical phrase that gets you into polite, conservative company is J. D Vance’s “True ‘Compassion’ Requires Secure Borders and Stopping Illegal Immigration.

Banal. Puke. Yawn.

True ‘Compassion’ Requires Secure Borders and Stopping Illegal Immigration” is the typically bankrupt, conciliatory, “conservative” argument we’ve come to expect from these quarters, regarding America’s promiscuously loose  immigration policy, under Republicans and Democrats alike.

First, the “moral” preening component: “All’s I’m saying, you folks, comes out of the goodness of my hillbilly heart.”

For the second point, allow me to excerpt from my “Immigration Scene,” written in 2006 (has anything changed? why vote?):

Everyone (and his dog) currently concurs that we have no problem with legal immigration, only with the illegal variety. It’s now mandatory to pair an objection to the invasion of the American Southwest with an embrace of all forms of legal immigration.

Vance opposes the rot of our immigration reality simply because he’s so kind, diverse and open, but still law-abiding.

Note the name-dropping from our hoedown Hillbilly, a member of the elite by any other name:

“… my friend (and my wife’s former boss) Brett Kavanaugh [of the] Supreme Court...”

Ooh. Impressive. While Vance forgot to brag directly about having married an Indian-American lady, who “Rid Him of His Hillbilly Ways“; he brought her up indirectly while touting his elite credentials.

Then there’s the shtick that is the constant mentioning of his “working-class background.” Once they’ve “arrived” in the power zone; conservatives like Vance are as good at lefty elitists at assuring us of their (manifestly fake) authenticity.

By the way, Appalachian folks, whom Vance depicted in his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, say justifiably that “Vance was not an authentic hillbilly or an example of the working class.”

Cassie Chambers Armstrong, an Appalachian and author of Hill Women: Finding Family and a Way Forward in the Appalachian Mountains, tells why her Aunt Ruth didn’t think much of JD Vance’s endeavor:

Hillbilly Elegy’s 

portrayal of Appalachia is designed to elevate Vance above the community from which he came. Remember that it seeks to tell his story in a way that aligns with a simplistic rags-to-riches narrative. Think critically about how that narrative influences the way we are taught to think about poverty, progress, and identity.

When all is said and done, J. D. Vance utters the code words at the door of the Establishment, Left and Right, when discussing immigration–and has been allowed in.

The right answer, the one J.D. Vance wouldn’t dare give, is this:

Vance and his phony conservative friends misplace compassion. Their job is not to flaunt their virtue to The World currently on its way to America.

True compassion demands that American politicians and policy makers stick strictly to their mandate—and that is looking out ONLY for their American constituents, and sending all the rest THE HELL HOME.  These politicians are hired hands: hired by the American electorate to do its bidding, alone.

Except for a tiny elite, Americans are struggling. But the political class, Dem & Republican, has developed crooked ways of virtue signaling about immigration, using these safe words: Humanitarian crisis! The Kids are in cages. Trafficking. Cartels. Sex.

See:

Do We Still Have A Country? Part I
“We Aren’t Americans; We ARE The World (Part II)”

UPDATE:

The GOP is RIP to me: Typically, Sen. John Kennedy, with his contrived Southern act (he’s Ivy League) and rehearsed, overwrought cracks, puts Trump’s party back decades, tells “Fox News Primetime” host Trey Gowdy that Americans love 1 million legal immigrants coming in annually, object ONLY to illegal, Biden-created chaos on border. (3/9/021)

* Image attribution

UPDATE II (1/15/021): Make No Mistake, It Is Trump Voters Who’re Being Impeached In The House, Set Up For Persecution

Constitution, Criminal Injustice, Democrats, Donald Trump, Justice, Law

Martyred twice—take the president’s second impeachment, passed impromptu in the House (Senate still to fold) with no due process of law afforded him whatsoever—as a badge of honor, a decoration of sorts ~ilana

 

And never forget, Deplorables, that it is you, in the person of Donald Trump, who are being impeached—it is you who are being set up for ouster and persecution. It is you who are being maligned as a “mob.”  It is you who’re being told you’re going to be “cleansed” from the body politic. President Trump is but a symbol, a catalyst.

MAGA men and women have been dubbed “Deplorables” (courtesy of Mrs. Clinton), “lizard brains” (via TV historian Jon Meacham), and, recently, “Jerks,” by Donny Deutsch, a lefty business-cum-media man, on MSNBC, who hollered that “there are 50 million jerks in this country.”

Correction: We are 74 million strong.

And we don’t forget.

FoxNews:

The House of Representatives Wednesday made history by voting to impeach President Trump for a second time for “incitement of insurrection” after a mob of his supporters besieged the Capitol on Jan. 6 in a failed attempt to stop the certification of President-elect Joe Biden’s electoral college win. The House voted 232-197 to impeach the president. Ten Republicans joined with Democrats.

 UPDATE I:
 

Dan Crenshaw: what a tool, calls Liz Cheney someone with “a lot more backbone than most and is a principled leader with a fierce intellect. She will continue to be a much needed leader in the conference, with my full support.”

screen pic of impeachment squad courtesy Photo/J. Scott Applewhite

UPDATE II (1/15/021): Revolver News: If you like the concepts generated on my sites, give me credit, please. 

On January 13, I wrote this blog post (above), “It Is Trump Voters Who’re Being Impeached In The House, Set Up For Persecution.” It’s an idea. It’s only decent to credit others’ ideas.

On January 14, Revolver News wrote their cloning post: “Republicans Aren’t Voting to Impeach Trump, They’re Voting to Impeach You.” Some of my China posts—unique in their angle—have similarly reverberated. Come on! Let our side at least act ethically and cordially toward each other.

TRUMP Erected ‘Bureaucratic Wall That Expels Every Unauthorised Immigrant On The Southern Border’

Donald Trump, IMMIGRATION, Justice, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Political Economy, Politics, Populism, Trade

Unlike the American media, the British lefties are honest reporters. This is why the Economist’s litany of President Trump’s achievements, framed as failures, is most credible. Take it to the bank; it’s what Biden will attempt to reverse.

In “President Trump has had real achievements and a baleful effect,” the magazine writes:

… What is perhaps less appreciated is the degree to which it has succeeded. The “Muslim ban” issued in the first days of his presidency ran afoul of the courts and had to be reworked; the border wall Mr Trump promised has not been built, let alone paid for by Mexico. But eligibility criteria for asylum have been tightened, and asylum-seekers at the border must now wait in Mexico while decisions are made. “It may not be the physical wall that Trump initially touted, but there is now a bureaucratic wall that expels every unauthorised immigrant on the southern border,” says Sarah Pierce, an analyst at the Migration Policy Institute. In its revised form the Muslim ban remains in place, with little dissent.

Apprehensions at the border with Mexico have risen to their highest level in 12 years (see chart 1), and in 2019 there were 360,000 deportations. That was not a record—there were 432,000 in 2013—but it was more than there were in 2016, and the share of the deported who had no criminal records, 14% in 2016, had risen to 36%. The administration also increased the bureaucratic hurdles faced by those trying to immigrate legally. Applications for temporary visas and permanent-residency permits have both declined by 17% since 2016. The annual ceiling of refugee admissions has been slashed. The White House recently proposed just 15,000 admissions for 2021, compared with 85,000 admitted in 2016.

… Growth never quite reached the lustrous annual rate of 4% he promised, but it did do better than many had forecast, and his tax cut in 2017 turned out to be a well-timed fiscal stimulus. At the end of last year unemployment was at its lowest level for half a century. The wages of the less well paid were rising swiftly.

What was more, he had made good on other parts of his agenda. Trade deals he disliked had been abandoned or rewritten, tariffs had been slapped on countries accused of stealing jobs and immigration had fallen dramatically. He had appointed two conservative justices to the Supreme Court, a number which he has now brought up to three. …

…But on many issues he stood out as unorthodox, extreme or both—and in so doing captured voters’ imaginations in a way that his rivals did not. He pledged to deport all 11m undocumented immigrants in the country and build a wall on the border with Mexico. He derided the party’s foreign-policy and free-trade orthodoxies as failures, and held that trade deficits were purely a sign of weakness and poor negotiating—which, as the master of the deal, he could set right. He bashed Wall Street and was against making Social Security and Medicare, the pension and health-insurance programmes for the elderly, less generous. He mocked and disparaged not just his opponents, but also revered Republicans such as the late Senator John McCain (a “loser”).

…Mr Trump’s judicial appointments, too, were those that any other Republican might have made, given the chance. That he got that chance was thanks to Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, who held up the confirmation of a number of Barack Obama’s judicial nominations—most notably that of Merrick Garland for the Supreme Court in March 2016. The resultant backlog allowed Mr Trump to follow the recommendations of the Federalist Society, a fraternity of conservative jurists, in appointing about 30% of the federal judiciary. Sandra Day O’Connor, Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy—the three justices whom it took Reagan two terms to put on the bench—shaped the court’s rulings for decades. It is likely that Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett will do so too. …

… On the signature issues which set the Trump campaign apart from the Republican establishment, the successes look more vulnerable to revocation. Take immigration. Xenophobia was the raison d’être for his campaign in 2016, which he launched with a speech warning that Mexico was sending rapists and drug-dealers across the border; later on, Mr Trump called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States”. His administration’s aggressive restriction of migration was therefore no surprise, even if the shock of seeing children alone in detention camps because of a policy of family separation caused an outcry

MORE: President Trump has had real achievements and a baleful effect.”