…Progressive-Democrat style. Here’s Congresswoman Frederica Wilson (D, FL):
people who are “making fun of members of Congress” online “should be prosecuted”
Because, she went on, making fun of Congress intimidates Congressmen. In fact, she went on in that vein for more than 40 seconds, just in the recording.
Wow.
And the People’s Republic of China threatens. Hong Kong citizens have been protesting a PRC-endorsed law proposal that would allow Hong Kongese and others resident in or visiting Hong Kong to be extradited to the mainland for trial in the PRC’s government-run court system.
[The PRC’s] government signaled its fraying patience with protesters in Hong Kong after they stormed the city’s legislature, calling the violent turn a direct challenge to Beijing’s authority and suggesting it would have to be answered.
Public statements from Beijing marked a shift in Chinese leaders’ attitude toward the crisis in the semiautonomous territory, indicating they may be forced to step in….
Consistent with that, the PLA’s Hong Kong garrison has begun “emergency handling” exercises.
And this:
The [PRC] government’s Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office called the protests a “blatant challenge to the bottom line of ‘one country, two systems’….”
Hardly. The PRC’s proposed extradition law for Hong Kong is a deliberate threat to the two systems part. Yet, here’s Zhang Jian, Associate Research Fellow at the Shanghai Institute of International Studies:
The suspension of the bill is tantamount to a withdrawal. There is no more room for backing down, no more ground for retreating.
This, of course, is nonsense. Suspension is not withdrawal, it’s a deliberate attempt to keep the extradition bill alive for later, quieter reconsideration and for enactment out of site of the peasantry. There’s plenty of room for continued action: the actual withdrawal of the bill.
Beijing has often appeared tolerant in the face of mass protests in mainland China and Hong Kong—and when passions and attention fade, authorities detain, attack, or otherwise punish ringleaders to prevent a recurrence.
To be sure, that’s a faux patience, and the tanks may well roll across the bridges, just as they rolled into Tiananmen Square not so very long ago when another bunch of uppity peasants demanded freedom.
This one regards the rescue of those escaping from northern Africa and their disposition on arrival on European shores. The particular case concerns Italy’s arrest of a German national who is the captain of an NGO ship that had rescued a number of refugees whose ship was in danger in international waters in the middle of the Mediterranean. Carola Rakete, captain of the Sea-Watch 3, was arrested after she docked her ship at Italy’s Lampedusa, an island in the southern Med—and closer to Tunisia than to any land of Italy’s.
UK [and UN Secretary General Antonio Gutteres] spokeswoman Stephane Dujarric said in a daily press briefing that “no vessel or ship master should be at risk of being fined for coming to the aid of boats in distress, where loss of life is imminent.”
“Sea rescue is a longstanding humanitarian imperative. It’s also an obligation under international law.”
Dujarric went on:
the UN was “concerned by the recent decree from the government regarding NGO vessels.”
She was referring to Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini’s successful implementation of legislation to fine ships that flout orders to stay out of Italian waters.
Dujarric is mischaracterizing the situation, and a part of the incident that matters has been omitted by Deutsche Welle in its piece at the link. Italy has not criminalized rescue on the high seas. Italy has only responded to the illegal entry into Italian waters, compounded by the illegal entry into an Italian port, by a captain and her vessel that not only had no permission to enter either, she had been explicitly denied that permission.
Furthermore, that denial had been enforced by an Italian police vessel that Rakete rammed and forced her way past as she docked at Lampedusa. That was elided by the DW article.
Foreign Minister Heiko Maas is upset over the arrest of the German national for her criminal act.
Haggling over refugee distribution is undignified and must stop. We urgently need a European solution—one that is also in line with our European values.
Indeed, the haggling must stop. The EU must respect the European value of territorial integrity of its member nations.
In the end, regardless of what we might think of Italian actions in the present incident, such…confusion…reduces the credibility of those favoring the transfer of rescuees from the rescuing ships to a nation’s shore regardless of that nation’s expressed wishes and of that nation’s laws. And of that nation’s sovereignty.
Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis (R) signed a bill that returns the ability to vote to felons when certain conditions are met. However, in his piece at the link, Arian Campo-Flores wrote
Under the bill, the state doesn’t automatically restore rights to felons who completed their sentences but have outstanding fines, fees, or restitution—common for many released from prison.
That’s a misunderstanding of the law and of the Florida Constitutional Amendment that prompted it. Either the felon has completed his sentence, or he has not. If he still has outstanding fines, fees, or restitution, he hasn’t completed his sentence.
Being released from prison is an important milestone, but it in no way signifies completion of anything. Here is Florida’s Voting Restoration Amendment as it appeared on the ballot:
Constitutional Amendment Article VI, Section 4. Voting Restoration Amendment This amendment restores the voting rights of Floridians with felony convictions after they complete all terms of their sentence including parole or probation. The amendment would not apply to those convicted of murder or sexual offenses, who would continue to be permanently barred from voting unless the Governor and Cabinet vote to restore their voting rights on a case by case basis.
The Amendment passed, and this is how it appears in the Florida Constitution [non-italicized emphasis added]
Article VI, Section 4. Disqualifications.—
(a) No person convicted of a felony, or adjudicated in this or any other state to be mentally incompetent, shall be qualified to vote or hold office until restoration of civil rights or removal of disability. Except as provided in subsection (b) of this section, any disqualification from voting arising from a felony conviction shall terminate and voting rights shall be restored upon completion of all terms of sentence including parole or probation.
(b) No person convicted of murder or a felony sexual offense shall be qualified to vote until restoration of civil rights.
All terms of their sentence means all terms, not some of them.
Kate Cronin-Furman, Assistant Professor of Human Rights at University College London—that’s London, Great Britain, mind you, not London, KY—thinks our Border Patrol agents should be doxed and then shamed for doing their jobs in trying to keep our borders secure and detaining illegal aliens.
Of course, she denies that her demand is doxing.
The identities of the individual Customs and Border Protection agents who are physically separating children from their families and staffing the detention centers are not undiscoverable. Immigration lawyers have agent names; journalists reporting at the border have names, photos and even videos.
Yet here she is, demanding they be doxed. With her doxing demand, too, she’s demanding that immigration lawyers violate client-lawyer privilege.
She went on to insist that the agents and others associated with detaining illegal aliens should not be allowed to have lawyers to defend them.
…the American Bar Association should signal that anyone who defends the border patrol’s mistreatment of children will not be considered a member in good standing of the legal profession.
Her definition of mistreatment, mind you, not a jury’s. Never mind the causes of the border situation. Never mind that all defendants, no matter how despicable-seeming, are entitled to legal representation, are presumed innocent until proven otherwise in a jury trial—even in Great Britain. Or, maybe it’s that she Knows Better than us ignorant colonials; our juries are not to be trusted.
Atrocity-doers, she calls them, saying the conditions in the detention centers amount to torture chambers.
Deplorable those conditions certainly are, but that’s not the agents’ fault. What Cronin-Furman carefully elides (deliberately, I say; she is a professor at a prestigious British school, so she knows better) are the reasons for those conditions.
Reasons like the wholly unprecedented flood of illegal aliens across our border.
Reasons like their claiming asylum falsely, having already rejected the asylum—and work opportunities—that Mexico offered them on their way up from the Caravan Triangle.
Reasons like Congress’ Progressive-Democrats blocking all efforts to reform our immigration laws to make it harder to enter illegally and much easier to enter legally while at the same time refusing to correct our asylum laws so that the combination of immigration and asylum law could remove incentives to try to enter our nation illegally.
Reasons like Congress’ Progressive-Democrats blocking all efforts actually to secure our southern border with increased and improved security measures, including walls in key sections of our border. Indeed, many of the Progressive-Democratic Party’s current Presidential candidates have openly called for open borders, decriminalizing illegal entry.
Immediately proximate reasons like Progressive-Democrats in the House of Representatives refusing—for far too long; it took an overwhelmingly bipartisan vote in the Senate to force the question to the House floor—to fund DHS so that Department could expand the detention facilities to meet the “demand” created by that flood of illegal aliens.
Immediately proximate reasons like Progressive-Democrats in the House of Representatives refusing—until that Senate vote—even to allow money to be appropriated for beds and hygiene supplies for those children unless they also could get existing detention facilities disbanded. “Let those children suffer,” the Progressive-Democrats demanded, “until we get our way.”
If there are atrocities going on on our southern border, they’re in those House Progressive-Democrats’ cynical, despicable dehumanizing of those children, using them as machinations for imposing Progressive-Democrat policies regarding our borders and immigration. Those children are not human beings in the eyes of those Progressive-Democrats; those children are seen merely as tools to be used for a purpose.
The august personage of Cronin-Furman hasn’t been to our border; she just phoned her piece in (emailed it?) from the safety and comfort of her London school’s office.
Her behavior would be shameful were it not so foolish, or had this professor the grace to know shame.