A three-judge panel on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the federal government has the authority to deport illegal immigrants even if local leaders try to impede the process. The case arose after King County Executive Dow Constantine issued an executive order in 2019 that instructed county officials to prohibit “fixed base operators” (FBO) on a county airfield from servicing flights chartered by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to deport illegal immigrants who are lawfully removable. FBO’s “lease space from the airport and provide flights with essential services, such as fueling and landing stairs,” according to the ruling.
The Trump administration sued because the order impeded ICE from enforcing the law and removing illegal immigrants. The administration argued that the order violated the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause and a World War II-era agreement that gave the federal government permission to use the King County airport.
The three-judge panel affirmed both contentions. The panel ruled that the executive order was a violation of the Supremacy Clause’s intergovernmental immunity doctrine because it “improperly regulates the way in which the federal government transports noncitizen detainees by preventing ICE from using private FBO contractors at Boeing Field.” The court also held that the executive order discriminated against the federal government by “regulat[ing] them unfavorably on some basis related to their governmental ‘status.’”
King County said it would not appeal the ruling, according to The Seattle Times.
The incoming Trump administration has vowed to solve the border crisis and deport illegal immigrants who are draining taxpayer resources, while hordes of so-called “sanctuary cities” nationwide oppose enforcement of federal immigration law and go so far as to refuse to comply with ICE authorities.
Tom Homan, dubbed the incoming “border czar,” has already warned sanctuary city officials not to resist or impede the federal government’s deportation activities.
“It is a felony to knowingly harbor or conceal an illegal immigrant from immigration authorities. Don’t test us,” Homan said.
One Democrat, Denver Mayor Mike Johnston, has already vowed to mobilize police and residents “stationed at the county line” to “keep” federal immigration authorities “out” of the city. Johnston likened the hypothetical to Tiananmen Square but later tried to walk back the comparison.
Homan responded to Johnston’s open defiance, saying he is “willing to put [Johnston] in jail.”
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2
Seattle residents have once again voted to raise the cost of housing to lower housing costs. If it sounds contradictory, you must be new to the Emerald City. Here, a liberal ethos prevails, with a penchant for endorsing any proposal cloaked in the mantle of progressivism.
Consider the Seattle Housing Levy as a case in point: a colossal program nearing $1 billion, earmarked for the construction of affordable housing. This levy did not simply extend a pre-existing tax from 2016; it more than tripled the tax rate from 14 cents to 45 cents per $1,000 of assessed property value.
Predictably, the levy passed with early voting results showing a commanding 66% support. The only firm number the levy commits to is a mere 3,200 new rental home constructions.
While it helps build some affordable housing, it also increases the cost of housing. Homeowners will see their property tax bills surge by roughly $400 annually. Tenants won’t be spared either, as these tax hikes are passed along via increased rents.
Andrea Suarez, executive director of We Heart Seattle, a non-profit that stages trash cleanups across the city, dismantles a tent as garbage lies piled at a homeless encampment in Seattle on March 13, 2022. The accumulation of garbage at such sites has become a major issue as the city tries to move the unhoused out of shared public spaces. (John Moore/Getty Images)
Adding insult to injury, the levy allocates $30 million for rental assistance to 4,500 tenants, yet the administrative costs to implement it are twice as much. This is in a city where the median house price has soared to $800,000, and where record-high fatal overdoses and a surge in homicides have marred the previous year’s statistics.
This trend mirrors the distressing trajectory of other Democrat-run cities, where residents pay a premium to live in areas that are deteriorating thanks to extreme leftist policies.
Despite the clear evidence that increased regulations and taxes have propelled the cost of living to exorbitant heights, the radical left remains steadfast in their dogma demanding higher taxes, conveniently sidestepping the fact that all of us are already contributing more than our “fair share.”
Landlords, often misperceived as affluent, are merely striving to earn a respectable living while providing affordable housing. Yet, they find themselves beleaguered by a system that disproportionately favors tenants, including those who are clearly gaming the system.
Seattle Grassroots Landlords is a local group of about 600 that connect on social media “to support each other and to prevent the ongoing degradation of rental housing options in Seattle.” Independent landlord Charlotte Thistle told me on my Seattle-based radio show that 17 new laws implemented citywide and statewide over the last three years have made the job nearly impossible. She highlighted the bureaucratic labyrinth that can result in a yearlong process and $20,000 in legal fees to remove a disruptive occupant.
Jason Roth, another landlord, learned this the hard way. After his tenant allegedly stopped paying rent, sublet the property on Airbnb and flaunted his exploits on social media, Roth found himself homeless, with his court case to evict postponed for months due to the tenant invoking the claim of being low-income. It triggered the system to offer him even more benefits.
Thistle and Roth’s experiences have prompted them, along with many others, to pull their properties from the market. This landlord exodus, in a state that penalizes property ownership, only serves to inflate rental costs further.
Seattle continues to battle homelessness and crime as liberal solutions to its problems fail. (John Moore/Getty Images)
Democrats’ response is to pour tax dollars into affordable housing, but there’s a problem with relying on the wealthy to “pay their fair share” (whatever that is). They leave.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos announced this month that he’s leaving the Seattle area for Miami, to be closer to his parents and partner. It’s hard to ignore a striking difference between Washington and Florida.
Washington Democrats passed a statewide capital gains tax, managing to convince an eager state Supreme Court to redefine income taxes, which are unconstitutional here, so that they could get more tax dollars from the wealthy.
They bizarrely claimed it’s an excise tax, before justifying their position by arguing their new definition is necessary because the state’s “upside-down tax system perpetuates systemic racism by placing a disproportionate tax burden on BIPOC residents.”
This trend mirrors the distressing trajectory of other Democrat-run cities, where residents pay a premium to live in areas that are deteriorating thanks to extreme leftist policies.
Before the tax took effect, Bezos sold more than 1.3 million Amazon shares, sparing him about $1.1 billion in taxes. He won’t have to worry about this in Florida. Moreover, Seattle wants to implement an additional capital gains tax and Democrats in the legislature are eyeing a wealth tax.
Democrats believe the homelessness crisis is due to the high costs of homes. But they also believe housing developers and landlords are wealthy, privileged and greedy. This perspective has led to punitive regulations and a reliance on government agencies to manage housing “the right way.” Yet, there is scant evidence to suggest that these measures are making the housing market more accessible. On the contrary, the situation continues to deteriorate.
Maybe if they stopped “helping” so much, let the market operate with fewer impediments, we’d have housing for everyone. But Seattle voters seem eager to keep getting in the way of progress with more taxes.
After the death of George Floyd, leaders in Democratic cities across the country, who were alternately scared and desperate to virtue signal, refused to take action while the ensuing riots and looting did billions of dollars in damage to city centers across the U.S. And amid many callous and inept responses to the crisis, Seattle is a leading contender for the locality that handled things the worst.
Today, the city agreed to settle a lawsuit in federal district court that alleged the city violated the civil rights of several business owners after it ordered police to withdraw from a section of its Capitol Hill neighborhood and let protesters set up their own lawless “autonomous zone.” The area became alternately known as either the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) or Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (CHOP). This left business owners in the areas completely abandoned as law and order broke down — without a police presence, there was rampant violence, drug markets, and literal armed warlords patrolling the streets.
The settlement comes after a federal judge levied major sanctions on the city for apparently deleting thousands of text messages involving, among others, the city’s former mayor and police chief relating to their handling of the autonomous zone. The notion that city officials had something to hide here is certainly at odds with the rhetoric during the month the city abandoned the business owners in the CHAZ.
Former Mayor Jenny Durkan went on CNN and said what was happening in the CHAZ was “a block party atmosphere.” “We could have the summer of love,” she said. When Trump lambasted the city for abandoning law and order, this resulted in a defensive Twitter spat between Durkan and the former president, and Gov. Jay Inslee told Trump to “stay out of Washington state’s business.”
Not that there was ever any doubt, but with Seattle settling this lawsuit it’s now impossible to argue that city officials weren’t encouraging violence and guilty of abdicating their most basic responsibility to keep citizens safe. Or is it? If you’re wondering who would be so desperate to cling to a political narrative they would insist letting anarchists take control of your city wasn’t so bad, well, here’s today’s Seattle Times write-up featuring an epic “challenge accepted” moment:
While CHOP was mostly peaceful, there were instances of vandalism and sporadic outbreaks of violence, including fights, an attempt to torch the abandoned police precinct and at least four shootings that claimed two lives of two teenagers, including a 16-year-old boy whose death led the city to end the protest.
That’s right, other than the fights, shootings, multiple homicides, and an attempt to burn a police station to the ground, it was “mostly peaceful,” says the local newspaper. Who among us wouldn’t mistake what was going on here for a “summer of love”?
The media’s suspicious coalescing around the phrase “mostly peaceful” to describe the Floyd protests in the summer of 2020 was always transparently dishonest. The CNN chyron declaring the protests in Kenosha “mostly peaceful” as the city was in flames in the background is now iconic.
However, it is truly astonishing that two years later a major newspaper is still clinging to this phrase like some talisman they hope will ward off holding their local leaders responsible for, among many other crimes, facilitating the deaths of two young black men.
Mark Hemingway is the Book Editor at The Federalist, and was formerly a senior writer at The Weekly Standard. Follow him on Twitter at @heminator
Jessica Berg Wilson’s obituary described the Seattle woman as “an exceptionally healthy and vibrant 37-year-old young mother with no underlying health conditions” who “died unexpectedly on Sep. 7 from COVID-19 Vaccine-Induced Thrombotic Thrombocytopenia (VITT).”
The obituary on Legacy.com continued: “Jessica fully embraced motherhood, sharing her passion for life with her daughters. Jessica’s motherly commitment was intense, with unwavering determination to nurture her children to be confident, humble, responsible, and to have concern and compassion for others with high morals built on Faith.”
“Jessica’s greatest passion was to be the best mother possible for Bridget and Clara. Nothing would stand in her way to be present in their lives,” it said. “During the last weeks of her life, however, the world turned dark with heavy-handed vaccine mandates. Local and state governments were determined to strip away her right to consult her wisdom and enjoy her freedom.
“She had been vehemently opposed to taking the vaccine, knowing she was in good health and of a young age and thus not at risk for serious illness. In her mind, the known and unknown risks of the unproven vaccine were more of a threat.
“But, slowly, day by day, her freedom to choose was stripped away. Her passion to be actively involved in her children’s education—which included being a Room Mom—was, once again, blocked by government mandate. Ultimately, those who closed doors and separated mothers from their children prevailed.
“It cost Jessica her life. It cost her children the loving embrace of their caring mother. And it cost her husband the sacred love of his devoted wife. It cost God’s Kingdom on earth a very special soul who was just making her love felt in the hearts of so many.”
This very sad story was made even worse by the Twitter Police.
When a Twitter user shared Wilson’s obituary on Friday, adding in the caption that she had not wanted to get vaccinated, the post was slapped with a warning label.
“This Tweet is misleading,” it said. “Find out why health officials consider COVID-19 vaccines safe for most people.”
It provided a link so users could “find out more,” adding, “This Tweet can’t be replied to, shared or liked.”
Here is a screenshot of the Twitter warning label, which apparently was removed after many users complained about it.
This is what popped up if you clicked on the retweet button.
Misleading? On the contrary, it’s very clear. A healthy young woman, who believed that the vaccine posed a greater risk to her health than contracting the virus itself, was forced to comply with the school’s vaccine requirement for visitors if she wanted to be involved in her children’s classrooms. She took the vaccine and then died of a vaccine-induced blood clot. She was one of the unlucky ones.
The author of the tweet was not misleading readers, either. She was simply mourning the loss of a young mother who would not have gotten the vaccine (and therefore likely would not have died) had she not been forced to. Nobody was trying to convince others not to take the vaccine or claiming that it will cause mass deaths.
I am not anti-vax. Vaccines are a potent tool in the fight against COVID. That said, these vaccines do pose a risk to some individuals. Some might have medical reasons for rejecting the vaccine, and others are highly skeptical about taking a vaccine that was developed so quickly. Not everyone needs to be vaccinated.
This is tyranny, and it’s hard to believe this is happening in America.
Elizabeth is a contract writer at The Western Journal. Her articles have appeared on many conservative websites including RedState, Newsmax, The Federalist, Bongino.com, HotAir, Australian National Review, Independent Journal Review, Instapundit, MSN and RealClearPolitics. Please follow Elizabeth on Twitter.@StaufferVaughn
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A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and has had his toons tweeted by President Trump.
While peaceful protests took place in Seattle, Washington on Sunday, there was also no shortage of looting and rioting in the Emerald City and surrounding suburbs. Gov. Jay Inslee activated the National Guard statewide late Sunday evening, but some residents in the Seattle suburb of Bellevue weren’t waiting for authorities to protect them. Video taken on Sunday afternoon shows several armed citizens standing guard over the entrance to their neighborhood.
Citizens in Bellevue (Seattle suburb) are protecting their neighborhoods from rioters & looters. https://t.co/s6UpMtdXfM
While there were reports of looting in Bellevue on Sunday evening, it looks like it was confined to downtown businesses.
Despite curfews in both Bellevue and Seattle, peaceful protesters moved through each city well into the night. However, just blocks over in Bellevue, looters broke into Lincoln Square, Bellevue Square, The Bravern, and into small shops.
Streets in downtown Bellevue were full of smoke and sidewalks littered with glass.
Late Sunday, Bellevue officials imposed a curfew in the downtown area, and the mayor declared a civil emergency for downtown, which included a ban on firearms in the effected area and punishments ranging from a fine of $250 to a 90 day jail sentence for those caught with any weapon, from guns to lumber to skateboards.
I wouldn’t be surprised if local business owners ignored that prohibition on firearms in order to protect their businesses, given the widespread destruction we’ve seen in cities across the country. They may also take the mayor to court, arguing that the city is failing to keep their businesses and property protected. The order also doesn’t apply to residential areas, so the armed homeowners protecting their neighbors aren’t subject to the mayor’s weapons ban.
Armed citizens weren’t just protecting Bellevue neighborhoods either. Local news reports from Seattle showed more armed citizens protecting businesses in nearby Snohomish, Washington as well.
Perhaps these armed citizens wouldn’t feel the need to protect businesses if they felt like police and the National Guard had a handle on things. Seattle talk show host Dori Monson, in a scathing column, says Seattle’s leaders like Mayor Jenny Durkan have failed residents during a time of crisis.
Having seen for days what was happening in city after city, how did our political leaders not know that was going to happen in Seattle Saturday? When the Seattle protests were announced, I said on my show Friday that they were inevitably going to lead to disaster for our city.
So, why did our political “leaders” allow this mayhem to happen? There are only two possible answers: That they truly did not see this coming, in which case they really are too ignorant for their jobs and should resign immediately; or that they did see this coming and decided to allow it to happen anyway.
Monson says Durkan declared that “weapons are not allowed”in downtown Seattle, but the rioters simply ignored the mayor’s impotent proclamation.
She said they were caught off guard by the riots. Again, they’re the only ones who didn’t see this coming
She said to the rioters, “you cannot use inappropriate activity to destroy businesses.”
Uh, Jenny? Were you watching the coverage? They can — and did — use “inappropriate activity.”Did you really think talking to rioters like a scolding kindergarten teacher was going to make a difference?
She ended her presser by saying if you are determined to cause chaos and destruction, “stay home.”
That scolding also didn’t seem to have any impact of the rioters.
Scolding won’t have any impact on rioters.Consequences will. Arrests need to be made. Order needs to be restored, or else the chaos will only continue. Residents and business owners have no choice but to protect themselves and their livelihoods while officials twiddle their thumbs and utter platitudes.
In a video that’s gone viral, a black woman left a white woman speechless as she explained why she’s not voting for presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden this fall.
What are the details?
“We’re black women, but we do not support Black Lives Matter because they’re hand-in-hand with Planned Parenthood that kills African-American babies,” Beatty added to Fox News. “They’re fraudulent hypocrites … and I believe all lives matter because God created them. There are thousands of George Floyds that die every day in their mother’s womb, and it’s just as [unjust] as when he died at the hands of that police officer.”
She also called it “ironic” that they were cited for “illegally protesting” and said de Blasio and Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo have an agenda and really don’t care about saving lives, the cable news network noted.
“Let me tell you something, Christians get it the worst,” Beatty said in a Facebook Live video moments before she was handcuffed, Fox News said. “I have not been so harassed by the police until I started doing this!”
The Seattle district known as CHOP — for “Capitol Hill Organized Protest” — and initially known as CHAZ, has been occupied by demonstrators for over a week. The protesters pushed the police out of their precinct station a week ago.
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Democrats around the country are pushing to defund police departments following the deaths of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta. At the same time the American left and their fake news media are promoting anti-police protests and the demonization of police.
On Monday night a business owner in CHAZ or CHOP told reporters he called the police to report a burglary in progress but no one came.
The owner of a business on the cusp of Seattle’s so-called “Capitol Hill Organized Protest” zone – or CHOP – says he called 911 to report a burglary in progress, but no one showed up.
“We’re just trying to run a small business, make a living, be good members of society. And try to be good neighbors to the neighborhood and I think we’ve really been let down by the mayor’s office, the Seattle Police Department and the fire department,” said John McDermott a co-owner of Car Tender on Capitol Hill.
McDermott says early Monday morning he was alerted that his repair shop was being broken into. McDermott and his son drove to the scene while on the phone with 911.
“There were no police officers on scene ever. And I was here all night long,” he said.
Jim Hoft is the founder of The Gateway Pundit, one of the top conservative news outlets in America. Jim was awarded the Reed Irvine Accuracy in Media Award in 2013 and is the proud recipient of the Breitbart Award for Excellence in Online Journalism from the Americans for Prosperity Foundation in May 2016.
Armed Guard at Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (Getty)
On Thursday CNN political reporter Oliver Darcy, who defended the anarchist Seattle Autonomous Zone, published a hit piece on conservative publishers.
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Oliver Darcy, whose primary purpose at the network is to silence conservative voices, published a hit piece on The Gateway Pundit, Breitbart, and others. Darcy insisted there were no armed Antifa members in CHAZ — the antifa automous zone in Seattle.
Oliver Darcy
✔@oliverdarcy
If you’ve been getting your news from right-wing media, you probably think armed militant Antifa activists have seized a section of Seattle.
Right-wing media says Antifa militants have seized part of Seattle. Local authorities say otherwise
Armed militant activists with the group Antifa have seized a sizable section of Seattle and are plotting to expand their territory — all as the local police surrender to them and evacuate a local…
In his report Darcy says the local officials said there was “no interaction” with armed individuals at the CHAZ encampment.
TGP reporter Cassandra Fairbanks immediately responded to Darcy’s hit piece with video of armed antifa-anarchist terrorists in the Capitol Hill Free Zone (CHAZ).
Jim Hoft is the founder of The Gateway Pundit, one of the top conservative news outlets in America. Jim was awarded the Reed Irvine Accuracy in Media Award in 2013 and is the proud recipient of the Breitbart Award for Excellence in Online Journalism from the Americans for Prosperity Foundation in May 2016.
The latest slogan from the left has got to be their craziest (so far): “defund the police.”
There already seems to be a split among pundits on the left, with some taking the slogan literally, and others claiming that it’s more to echo sentiment that major reforms need to be made. In both scenarios the slogan makes no sense. If someone legitimately believes that police are routinely committing abuses, how would paying them less money change anything? And if the purpose of the slogan is to call for reform, their slogan should be “reform the police.”
Do people think that when Republicans say something like “defund NPR’ they mean “reform NPR”? Of course not.
Perhaps we will see a rebranding soon, because while support for movements like “Black Lives Matter” has reached a record high, support for (literally) “defunding the police” remains a fringe position.
[Only] 27% of American Adults favor reducing the police budget in the community where they live. Despite the growing political movement to defund police departments and channel that money into more social services, 59% are opposed to cutting their local police budget, while 14% are undecided.
Republicans (16%) are more reluctant than Democrats (29%) and those not affiliated with either major party (32%) to cut local police funding.
Just 17% of all Americans believe there are too many police officers in America, although that’s up from 11% six years ago. Thirty-eight percent (38%) say there are not enough cops, down from a high of 51% in 2014. Thirty-five percent (35%) rate the number of police officers as about right.
Even among blacks, only 27% think there are too many cops, although that compares to 15% of whites and 17% of other minority Americans. Blacks (36%) are more enthusiastic than whites (25%) and other minorities (24%) about defunding the police and channeling that money into more social services.
So far Camden New Jersey has been exhibit-A for those claiming that “defunding/abolishing the police”works. As bizarre as it is to see Camden heralded as a model of anything except how not to run a story, it is true that despite still being among the most violent cities in the country, they have seen a two-thirds reduction in their homicide rate since 2012.
The “defund the police”crowd will correctly tell you that Camden abolished their police force in 2013 to replace it with a new force centered on community policing – but they bury the lede and neglect to mention that Camden doubled the size of their police force and have triple the police per capita than similarly sized cities.
ironically, the only supposed successful example of “defunding the police”is a case where there are a lot more police were hired.
Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant speaks at rally at Westlake Center on March 8, 2017 in Seattle, Washington. Karen Ducey/Getty Images
Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant said she would be introducing legislation on Monday that would “ban the use of all chemical weapons and crowd-control, so-called crowd-control weapons against protest movements and to ban chokeholds.”
Sawant, a self-proclaimed socialist,made her announcement on CNN Friday during an interview with host Brianna Keilar, reported CNS News. Sawant called the demonstrators who have taken over six square blocks of Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, now called the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) a “rebellion” that “is incredibly inspiring to the vast majority of American people.”
She then accused President Donald Trump of threatening those “who are courageously protesting against police violence, threatening them with further escalation and military targets. I think it is a — we have to absolutely reject this idea.”
Trump has actually denounced the violent riots that have sprung up alongside the protesters.
“And, in fact, in that spirit on Monday, I will be bringing in legislation to vote to ban the use of all chemical weapons and crowd-control, so-called crowd-control weapons against protest movements and to ban chokeholds,” Sawant continued.
“It’s extremely important that we take this historic moment to win a real victory against police violence, defund by at least 50 percent and fight for an independently elected oversight board over the police,”she added, according to CNS.
Sawant went onto claim that “every night,” the Seattle Police Department is “inflicting incredible brutality and violence, horrific against the peaceful protest movement led by black and brown people.” She claimed she was “tear-gassed and maced” the night before. Sawant called Trump a “coward” and then blamed Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan for the “violence against the peaceful protest movement.”
She went on to say:
This rebellion happened in the first place because police departments in city after city after city have been murdering black and brown people, exacting systematic violence against people with impunity. This has happened with impunity. Not a single police officer so far has been prosecuted under Mayor Durkan, for example, in Seattle.
Eight black and brown community members have been murdered at the hands of the police. Not one police officer has been prosecuted. We need to change the status quo.
That is why our movement is demanding that we defund the police by at least 50 percent and divert those funds for community programs, for restorative justice so we begin to address this systematic racism, what we need beyond that.
Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best said last week that the protests in CHAZ are anything but peaceful, saying that “rapes, robberies” and other violent crimes are occurring in the area but that her police officers are unable to respond due to the demonstrators hurling projectiles at them and barring their entrance.
Handcuffs and fingerprints/ Bill Oxford | Getty Images
Isn’t it time we “do something” about shootings in America? Well, last week there was a shooting at one of downtown Seattle’s busiest street corners, yet it was barely covered by the media. There were about 75 opportunities to “do something” to prevent the murder, as is the case with almost every major city shooting you don’t hear about in the media. This is yet another example of the need for criminal control as a more effective public safety tool than gun control.
Last Wednesday night, right around rush hour, gunfire erupted on a busy Seattle street near a bus stop with numerous commuters and pedestrians nearby. One person was killed and seven were wounded, including a 9-year-old boy. This wasn’t the typical gang fight that erupted deep in a bad neighborhood; it placed numerous commuters in the crossfire. Two Amazon workers were shot.
The suspects are Marquise Latrelle Tolbert, 24, William Ray Tolliver, 24, and Jamel Linonell Jackson, 21. Tolbert and Tolliver are on the run, while Jackson is in custody of local police.
William Ray Tolliver has at least 44 prior arrests and 20 convictions, for offenses including unlawful possession of a firearm, theft, malicious mischief, and assault.
Marquise Latrelle Tolbert has over 20 arrests, with 15 convictions, including for robbery, possession of a stolen vehicle, discharging a firearm in a public place, theft, and harassment.
Both men were arrested in 2018 for drive-by shooting and weapons violations but appear not to have served time in prison.Police believe they are both members of a local gang.
What about Jamel Jackson? According to KIRO, he had a prior robbery conviction and two prior convictions for unlawful handgun possession. Yes, it was 100 percent illegal for him to have a gun, but he was caught on camera with a gun at the scene of this crime.He has barely served time in prison, according to court records –just four months of “work release” in 2017 – and even after this incident he is only being held on $50,000 bond. In a 2017 case, police charged that he was a gang member and “likely to commit a violent offense.”
Here we have three suspects with a total of nearly 70 prior arrests, including for violent crimes and gun offenses. But Washington state is a notorious criminal justice “reform” state with an egregious record of releasing both violent domestic criminals and violent illegal aliens.
Washington is also one of the states that is weakening its “three strikes” law. Under the law, those convicted of three violent crimes are supposed to serve time for life, but Gov. Jay Inslee has been consistently granting clemency to the most violent criminals. As KIRO radio host Dori Monson reported last week, Inslee released one three-strike offender who was convicted of stealing 27 guns as his last offense. He violated the terms of his clemency twice and then disappeared. He is now a fugitive criminal in California and is wanted by police for several crimes.
This is the story of almost every shooting and violent crime in America. There have been943,591 homicides in America from 1966 through 2018. Almost all of them are committed by known criminals who are let back out on the streets, and very few of them are committed with AR rifles. If we only locked up the violent gun felons, most murders would be prevented. Instead, the very people who want gun control are the ones who think that a system that already fails to confine violent gun felons and gangsters is too punitive.
Author: Daniel Horowitz
Daniel Horowitz is a senior editor of Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @RMConservative.
By taking point in the liberal campaign to pander to fools by jacking up minimum wage, Seattle has provided a valuable lesson in moonbat economics:
Nora Gibson is the executive director of Full Life Care, a nonprofit that serves elderly people in various homes and nursing facilities. She is also on the board of the Seattle Housing Authority. Gibson told KIRO 7 she saw a sudden reaction from workers when Seattle’s phased minimum-wage ordinance took effect in April, bringing minimum wage to $11 an hour.
She said anecdotally, some people feared they would lose their subsidized units but still not be able to afford market-rate rents.
It doesn’t stop at $11/hour. The law puts it up to $15 starting January 1, 2017. [F]ive employees at one of her organization’s 24-hour care facilities for Alzheimer’s patients asked to reduce their hours in order to remain eligible for subsidies.
If it weren’t for perverse incentives, progressive economics would have no incentives at all. Remember free market capitalism? Under that system, the harder and smarter you worked, the higher your standard of living. But that was found to result in income inequality, so now we have a system where wealth is bestowed by bureaucrats, and working harder doesn’t always make sense.
Don’t give them ideas.
On a tip from The Only Other Conservative in Seattle
Last year, in a fit of Socialism, Seattle passed a $15 per hour minimum wage. The Socialist member of the City Council cheered the move. (She’s actually a full-fledged member of the Socialist Party.) Barack Obama cheered the move. Seattle’s hoity-toity rich folks cheered the move. Everybody was full of hope and dreaming dreams of the change that the $15 per hour “living wage” was going to bring. And then…
Well, quite unexpectedly, at least to Seattle’s Progressives, reality came home to roost, to paraphrase the good Rev. Jeremiah Wright. The $15 minimum takes effect in a couple of weeks.
Instead of planning for a big party to celebrate the great things that big raise was going to do for working-poor families, the mood is a little more like the Seattle weather: downcast and drizzly.
Last month—and particularly last week— Seattle foodies were downcast as the blows kept coming:
Queen Anne’s Grub closed February 15.
Pioneer Square’s Little Uncle shut down February 25. Shanik’s Meeru Dhalwala announced that it will close March 21.
Renée Erickson’s Boat Street Café will shutter May 30 after 17 years with her at the helm…
What the #*%&$* is going on? A variety of things, probably—and a good chance there is more change to come.
See, Progressives are good at cooking up change that sounds hopeful. Unfortunately, they don’t do “details” and they don’t do anything that remotely resembles “math.” (See “Common Core.”) Here’s what reality looks like for the guy paying the $15 minimum wage.
Current
$15
Food Cost
30%
30%
Operating Cost
30%
30%
Labor Cost
36%
42%
Profit Margin
4%
-2%
See, Progressives are a one-dimensional group of “people.” They are the one dimension. Everybody doesn’t exist, except to pay for their wishes and desires. And then comes the “oops.” In this case, $15 drives the labor cost up to the point where the business owners (known to Progressives as “The Rich”) actually loses 2 cents on every dollar they take in. That’s called, by everybody BUT Progressives, insolvency.
And, as the above closings note, that which can’t continue, won’t. Unfortunately they’ll never figure that one out.
About the Author; Michael Becker
Michael Becker is a long time activist and a businessman. He’s been involved in the pro-life movement since 1976 and has been counseling addicts and ministering to prison inmates since 1980. Becker is a Curmudgeon. He has decades of experience as an operations executive in turnaround situations and in mortgage banking. He blogs regularly at The Right Curmudgeon, The Minority Report, Wizbang, Unified Patriots and Joe for America. He lives in Phoenix and is almost always armed.
The school board in Seattle unanimously resolved on Wednesday to direct public schools across the city to celebrate “Indigenous Peoples’ Day”instead of Columbus Day on the second Monday of each October.
That Monday — Oct. 13 this year — has been the federal holiday of Columbus Day since 1970. Columbus Day has been a federal holiday in some form in the United States since 1937.
The resolution declares that the Seattle school board “recognizes the fact that Seattle is built upon the homelands and villages of the Indigenous Peoples of this region, without whom the building of the City would not have been possible,” as local Fox affiliate KCPQ notes.
Further, according to board members, Seattle’s taxpayer-funded schools have “a responsibility to oppose the systematic racism towards Indigenous people in the United States, which perpetuates high rates of poverty and income inequality, exacerbating disproportionate health, education and social crises.”
The resolution also promotes “the teaching of the history, culture and government of the indigenous peoples of our state.”
Supporters of “Indigenous Peoples’ Day” praised the school board’s action.
“We know Columbus Day is a federal holiday. We are not naive about that,”Matt Remle, an advocate of the alternative holiday, told KCPQ.
“But what we can do and what you have seen is a movement,”the thickly-ponytailed indigenous peoples champion added.
Aficionados of “Indigenous Peoples’ Day”call official celebration of Christopher Columbus’s achievements into question because, they say, he — and Europeans generally — treated Native Americans poorly.
Italian-Americans have defended Columbus Day.
“For most Italian Americans, Columbus Day is a symbol of pride in our heritage,”said Audrey Manzanares at a mid-September Seattle school board meeting.
Columbus, an explorer from Genoa, reached several Caribbean islands including Cuba as well as parts of Central America and South America on four westward voyages from Spain from 1492 to 1502. The first voyage had been an attempt to reach Asia.
Historians generally accept that the first Europeans arrived in the U.S. state of Washington in the 1770s, some 270 years after Columbus died. (Putting that duration in perspective, the United States has currently existed for 238 years.)
On Monday, the Seattle City Council will vote on a resolution encouraging Seattle public schools to incorporate “indigenous studies” into curricula for social studies and history courses (even though the school board passed its own resolution), notes Seattle Weekly.
Recent reports on rogue cell phone towers being used across the country to intercept mobile cell phone data is drawing a response from federal agents who claim the towers are not being used by law enforcement groups.
by Mikael Thalen | Infowars.com | September 4, 2014
“I doubt that they are installed by law enforcement as they require a warrant to intercept conversations or data and since the cell providers are ordered by the court to cooperate with the intercept, there really would be no need for this,”former FBI agent Ross Rice told CBS Chicago. “Most likely, they are installed and operated by hackers, trying to steal personal identification and passwords.”
Despite the CBS article’s attempt to claim that law enforcement does not have access to stationary cell phone interception devices, exclusive documents provided to Infowars last year by a source within the Seattle government revealed an expansive “mesh network”throughout the city capable of intercepting cell information in real-time.
The mesh network system, funded with a $2.6 million “Port of Seattle” grant from the Department of Homeland Security, allows several groups within Seattle to communicate outside of normal cellular channels via “mesh network nodes”attached to utility poles. Beyond the simple communication aspect, the system has also been shown to be capable of collecting vast amounts of information from the city’s many surveillance systems.
One page from the document clearly details law enforcement’s involvement with federal agencies such as the local Fusion Center, a DHS-run group consisting of FBI and police who collect data on Americans deemed “extremist.”
Page 65 of the document details the Network Mesh System’s (NMS) ability to collect identifying data on anyone “accessing the network.” A public user guide from the network’s designer, Aruba Software, openly admits that “a wealth of information about unassociated devices” can be retrieve as well.
“The NMS also collects information about every Wi‐Fi client accessing the network, including its MAC address, IP address, signal intensity, data rate and traffic status,”the document reads. “Additional NMS features include a fault management system for issuing alarms and logging events according to a set of customizable filtering rules, along with centralized and version‐controlled remote updating of the Aruba Mesh Operating System software.”
Cell phone users walking within the vicinity of a network node could not only have their IP address grabbed, but even have the last 1,000 GPS locations taken as well.
The document also reveals how the system controls several other surveillance technologies such as license plate readers, which gather and store information on millions of drivers per month.
A seperate page within the document cache entitled “Police Video Diagram”shows how police vehicles even receive and control live-video feeds from the city’s expansive collection of surveillance cameras – also tied into the mesh network system.
Although the city has claimed that its cameras do not have facial recognition capabilities, the Seattle government secretly participated in the 2012 TrapWire program which used sophisticated facial recognition software, ran through the city’s surveillance cameras, to gather intelligence for federal agencies. Only two years later, the Seattle Police Department announced its plan to purchase a facial recognition program with a DHS grant to allegedly scan and compare surveillance video to the city’s mugshot database.
Although the mesh network was deactivated “until further notice” following public outcry in 2013, a civil liberties advocate testing the police department’s promise found an active network node just last month. Police explained the “rogue” device away as a simple mistake.
While some hackers do abuse similar technologies, the vast majority of surveillance abuses are carried out by local governments armed to the teeth with federally provided spy tech.
Unfortunately, rogue cell towers are only one piece of the “smart” surveillance grid currently suffocating the country. Despite claims that police need warrants to intercept people’s cell information, the deployment of Stingrays, a suitcase-sized device that mimics a cell tower, proves otherwise.
A report in Wired Magazine from last March explained how the Tallahassee Police Department had used a Stingrayas many as 200 times since 2010 without ever acquiring a warrant. The department argued that a non-disclosure agreement signed with the device’s manufacturer prevented them from obtaining warrants beforehand.
Emails uncovered last June showed how the U.S. Marshals Service purposely taught police how to deceive judges when trying to acquire Stringrays. In fact, when a public records request threatened to further expose the illegal activity, U.S. Marshals stormed a Florida police department and seized all associated Stingray documents.
A report by the Tacoma News Tribune last month revealed that a Washington state police department similarly used a nondisclosure agreement with the FBIto keep their 2008 Stingray transaction private. Countless other technologies such as “Intellistreets” light fixtures, capable of recording audio and video of pedestrians passing by, have begun popping up as well in major cities such as Las Vegas.
Meanwhile, as the media focuses on malicious hackers stealing nude photographs from celebrities, the fact that police regularly use the same software remains almost completely overlooked.
Law enforcement’s fight to keep these systems in place could likely be rooted in one thing: parallel construction.
Used to conceal how a law enforcement investigation began, parallel construction allows police to create a criminal case while concealing how the evidence, often obtained illegally, was acquired.
Speaking exclusively with Infowars, NSA whistleblower Kirk Wiebe, who helped develop the data processing system ThinThread, broke down the danger of surveillance and parallel construction.
“Now we have NSA collaborating with FBI and DEA doing something called ‘Parallel Construction.’ In such a scenario, NSA sends information to a law enforcement agency, such as Drug Enforcement Agency and that agency uses the information secretly to investigate individuals, circumventing the law. No warrants,”Wiebe said.
“In fact, the agency actively covers up the source of the information to make it look like the information came out of classical law enforcement investigatory techniques. DEA has a special unit called the ‘SOD’ – Special Operations Division that does the cover up work. The legal consequence of doing this kind of surreptitious collaboration between intelligence and law enforcement is to deny an accused person their legal rights under the Constitution,” Wiebe added. “They are denied the opportunity to face their accuser because the source of the information is kept under wraps/hidden.”
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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