Tag Archives: law

Misreading

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In his letter in The Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section, the Reverand Carmen Mele decried the deaths of more than 100 children at an Iranian school that occurred as a result of our country’s armed forces‘ bombing as a violation of just war principles.

This is a misreading of the situation. What the highly intelligent and learned man of the cloth chose to omit is that the school was adjacent to the military target, an adjacency that the Iranian regime deliberately chose in an effort to use those children as shields for its military, a common practice by terrorists.

The deaths of those children are deeply regrettable, but the responsibility for those deaths lies on the backs of those terrorists who so badly abused those children. This is well understood by any serious student of just war concepts.

The Editors’ Misapprehension

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In writing Wednesday about the (later that day) Wednesday Supreme Court oral arguments for Trump v Barbara, the Wall Street Journal‘s editors have badly misunderstood the situation. Leave aside that the editors completely ignored the matter of birth tourism in the US, wherein pregnant women enter the US, legally or illegally, to give birth and then to return to their home country, with their purpose for being present for birth being wholly and cynically confined to gaining US citizenship for their newborn. The editors’ argument only concerned the children of illegal aliens and the current automatic conferring of US citizenship to those newborn.

The editors correctly argued that the nub of the matter concerns the 14th Amendment’s reference to children born to parents in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, and they agreed with the plaintiff argument that

Under the longstanding definition, undocumented immigrants are domiciled in this country: they reside here, with “an intention to remain[.]”

This, though, is an incomplete definition of “jurisdiction.” The illegal aliens certainly do intend to remain, but by having entered our nation illegally and refusing to correct that illegal status, they continue to hold themselves apart from our laws, outside our legal strictures, and so outside our government’s jurisdiction—making themselves only subject to our government’s power. These people, in the words of the government’s argument, are incapable of and do not owe “direct and immediate allegiance” to the Nation, and so they both may not and cannot claim its protection.

The editors did acknowledge that

the place to fight [illegal immigration] is at the border, and Mr Trump has virtually halted migrant flows.

A place to fight illegal alien influx is at the border, but that’s not the place. Other necessary battlefields exist, too, battlefields that contain incentives for continued efforts at illegal entry, and these include the birth wards of hospitals and our courts. The present courtroom battlefield is an arena in which birthright citizenship for the children of illegal aliens (and of birth tourists) must be ended. That, in turn, will facilitate the successful outcome of the birth ward battlefield.

Not that New

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Iran is using oil as a new weapon of war?

Iran’s move to choke off the Strait of Hormuz and turn crude oil into a weapon of war marks a new phase in the 21st-century competition for global power—one that will be defined by the control of critical raw materials and energy.

Not really. Oil as a war weapon may be new to the 21st century, but it’s an old weapon. The US and our allies, in the runup of our entry into the shooting war with Japan, used oil as a weapon of economic war with our embargo of oil sales and shipments to Japan. OPEC used oil as an economic war weapon with its embargo of oil sales to us over our support of Israel.

Oil as weapon isn’t really new to this century, either. Hungary’s Orban is using Russia’s attack on an oil pipeline that transits Ukraine from Russia to Hungary to accuse Ukraine of waging oil war on Hungary, even as he uses that oil blockage as his own weapon against Ukraine. Russia is using oil and other energy sources as weapons in its war on Ukraine by making that disruptive attack, along with other attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure, in the first place. The US, and subsequently Europe, began using oil as a war weapon against Russia following that barbarian’s invasion of Ukraine with our and their refusal to buy Russian oil and subsequent sanctions against Russian oil more generally.

Iran’s blockage of the Strait isn’t new, it’s just taking advantage of a chokepoint for oil, and natural gas, shipping.

Voting is a Two Step Process

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Elections by ballot, whether by secret ballot, as in the US, or by candidate-coded ballots, often by color, as early on in the US and in sham-election nations, are a two step process: voters mark their ballots, indicating the candidates for whom they’re voting, and they then cast their ballots—put them into a ballot receptacle at a polling station approved by each State’s elections process agency—to be collected and counted.

Mail-in ballots complicate voting, and their arrival after Election Day while still being considered legitimately cast unnecessarily threaten our elections’ integrity. The question of whether mass-mailed late ballots should be counted has arrived on the Supreme Court docket.

Election Day is a nationally statutory date—a single day. Ballots arriving after that day are not cast on Election Day because they’ve not arrived to be cast. It’s bad enough that too many precincts on up to States, whether by dishonesty or incompetence, don’t (not can’t) finish counting the ballots cast by the end of the day, without allowing those not yet cast by Election Day to be counted.

Mississippi law says absentee ballots that are postmarked on time are valid even if officials don’t receive them from the mailman until a week later. Other states have similar rules. The question for the Justices: does accepting tardy mail votes violate the federal law that sets a uniform Election Day?

Mississippi’s argument:

Mississippi suggests that once the US Postal Service takes custody of any outstanding ballots, then the election’s winner is already determined, however long it takes the mail to arrive and the result to become clear. “An election occurs when the voters have cast their ballots,” the state says. “The voters have then chosen and their choice is conclusive: the election is over. An election thus does not depend on when ballots are received.”

That’s the fallacy of the State’s argument. The USPS has never taken custody of a voter’s ballot; it only accepts custody. The responsibility to actually cast that ballot remains the voter’s, and his ballot is not cast until it makes it into the ballot box. His election, therefore, has not occurred until after Election Day if the USPS fails its custody acceptance by delivering the ballot after Election Day has ended and the polls have closed.

It seems straightforward: if the ballots aren’t received until after Election Day, then they weren’t cast by Election Day, and so they cannot be valid. Even if a voter chooses not to cast his ballot himself, instead trusting to a third party, even one as nominally trustworthy as the US Postal Service, the failure to get those ballots into the ballot box remains that voter’s, not the delivering party—even the USPS.

As Joseph Stalin said, it is extremely important who will count the votes and how. It’s imperative for our elections’ integrity that the counting be strictly controlled, especially including limiting the counting to the period beginning after voting precincts close in the State and ending as soon as possible after that, ideally by midnight of Election Day.

Social Services Fraud

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Minnesota’s social services fraud has been going on for years. Faye Bernstein used to work in Minnesota’s Department of Human Services as a compliance officer, but when she started identifying the level of fraud and the lack of controls with which to prevent the fraud and to address it when it did occur in 2019, she started being cut out, slandered, and ultimately forced out.

Since the situation has started getting ovetly addressed, nearly 100 people have been charged…. Two-thirds have been convicted so far in multiple interconnected schemes.

Most of those, though are soldiers, with maybe a made man or two thrown in as scapegoat distractions. It’s really necessary to go after the social services syndicate’s capos along with the capo di tutti i capi, which likely include Minnesota’s Progressive-Democratic governor, Tim Walz, and his syndicate concierge, Minnesota’s Attorney General Keith Ellison. If those last two are, in fact, involved, and if they are brought down, two things would result: the Feds would know better how to identify and stop this sort of fraud and jail the perpetrators, and other States might start taking their social services responsibilities more seriously.