U.S. immigration laws allow anyone who reaches U.S. soil to seek humanitarian protection if they have a well-founded fear of persecution in their home country. The emergency measures Biden announced June 4 suspend access to those protections on an emergency basis, arguing the U.S. immigration system is too overwhelmed by illegal crossings and insufficient resources.

Lower number of illegal crossings have allowed U.S. agents to better safeguard the border and increase patrols, the department said, "enhancing DHS efforts to interdict individuals who pose a threat to public safety."

The DHS statement echoed the administration's calls for lawmakers to boost funding for the U.S. immigration system, including a major expansion of detention and deportation operations.

DHS said the number of migrants who are allowed into the United States with a pending court date after crossing illegally - the practice derided as "catch and release" - has dropped 65 percent under Biden's measures. Deportations and returns to Mexico have doubled over the past three weeks, the department said.

The shift was evident Tuesday in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas, which has been one of the border's busiest migration corridors for the past decade. Along areas of the border where migrant families have crossed in large groups to surrender to U.S. authorities and seek protection, Border Patrol agents pursued a handful of adult men trying to evade capture. Agents' radios were mostly quiet.

The Tucson area in the Arizona desert saw a similar decline in unlawful crossings, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said during a news conference in that border city Wednesday.

"The president's actions are working because of their tough response to illegal crossings," Mayorkas said. "We are attacking the smuggling organizations that prey on the vulnerable even as the smugglers try to undermine our actions."

Biden administration officials hope the falling numbers of migrants can blunt Republican criticism of the president's border record. The president has criticized Republicans for opposing a bipartisan bill that would have increased enforcement, leaving him to act on his own.

Homeland Security officials cautioned the results of the crackdown were preliminary, and cast the measures as an attempt to balance tougher enforcement with more generous opportunities for migrants to reach the United States legally.

Regardless of where one falls, the facts remain that the Congressional GOP negotiated a border security deal that they said was better than anything before it, but they allowed Trump to force its defeat for the sake of his own campaign. Hopefully Biden will contrast himself as the President trying to fix the problem compared to Trump being the candidate trying to exploit the problem for his own benefit, the country's needs be damned.

That last paragraph you wrote Tony ... are you saying Black People too stupid to understand the basics of municipal governance?

Are YOU too stupid to understand that the white council controls local government and that typically includes the public schools who actually TEACH pupils the civic history that they learn? So exactly whose fault is it that the black residents didn't know or realize that they were having their constitutional rights usurped by this inbred confederate board for over 60 years?

You aren't very bright not to understand just how insidious this entire enterprise actually is. Whites not only denied blacks their rights to vote, they denied them the information for the entirety of their lives.

Are you too stupid not to understand that? This is no different than a slave owner controlling what his slaves learn under his ownership. And how just how racist are the whites to think that their arrangement would pass legal scrutiny in 2021 forward? Shouldn't they have known better themselves, or were they too stupid to know the law themselves? This is systemic racism and likely not the only continuing example of it still in existence among the old Confederacy states.

And precisely why the full VRA protections must be restored due to the fact whites continue to create electoral impediments for black voters throughout the South including the dilution of their political power through gerrymandering.

Clarence is just voting "F--- all y'all" at this point, regardless of the issue.

Pretty much nailed it.

"This is just one of many examples of the country's longstanding racist practices that deny Black folks the right to vote," said Leah Wong, a voting rights attorney with the Legal Defense Fund. "White folks in this town essentially handed down the positions of power to one another. Throughout the decades, there were never any municipal elections held for mayor or town council. Black folks weren't even told how to get on the town council."

Newbern is about an hour away from Selma, where civil rights activists were brutally attacked on the Edmund Pettus Bridge while marching for voting rights in 1965.

The settlement will reinstate Patrick Braxton as the mayor of Newbern, the first Black person to hold the position in the town's 170-year history. Braxton was the only candidate who filed qualifying paperwork with the county clerk in 2020, so he won the mayoral race by default. The incumbent, Haywood "Woody" Stokes III, hadn't even bothered to fill out the paperwork to run again. Haywood Stokes Jr., his father, had previously been mayor of the rural Black Belt town.

After Braxton assumed office, he discovered the locks to the town hall had been changed, and that the town council had held a secret special election in which they simply reelected themselves. They then reappointed Stokes III as mayor of Newbern in 2021. He has been acting as mayor ever since.

There were no public notices announcing the special election, so the majority of residents didn't know about it, as the Legal Defense Fund noted in its lawsuit.

Again, I'm seething. This Court has now decided it's above and beyond Congress and the President in knowing best how laws and regulations should be applied and function, forget what the President or elected representatives say. But there is no thing we can still count on - they will always say that the Constitution is on their side even as they parse and reverse engineer simple language to mean whatever serves their ends at the moment.

This incident is little more than a thru-line from the Confederacy straight to the 21st Century - white supremacy and black subjugation. But according to this Court's majority, the real problems today come from blacks being unfairly advantaged over whites in the never ending quest for an equal society. The Roberts Court said a decade ago - "All is equal already. It's unconstitutional to help any historically disadvantaged group over any other."

I guess Newbern's black residents have benefited from all the education and opportunity afforded them by the local city fathers to the point that they had no understanding of how their city's government was run or even realize that there should have been public elections for every elected office. Yeah, racism is gone and buried. Just like Newbern's civil rights.

Between 2021, when the ban went into effect, and 2022, the study found infant deaths in Texas jumped from 1,985 to 2,240 - a 12.9% increase. The rest of the country, meanwhile, only saw a 1.8% increase. Similar data was observed in neonatal babies in their first 28 days of life.

Many of those deaths were due to congenital abnormalities in the infants, one of the myriad reasons patients may choose to terminate a pregnancy, especially later into term. In 2022, the study found that infant deaths attributable to that cause saw a 22.9% increase, compared to 3.1% for the rest of the country.

"Although replication and further analyses are needed to understand the mechanisms behind these findings, the results suggest that restrictive abortion policies may have important unintended consequences in terms of trauma to families and medical cost as a result of increases in infant mortality," the study authors from Johns Hopkins and Michigan State University wrote.

Many of those deaths were due to congenital abnormalities in the infants, one of the ... reasons patients may choose to terminate a pregnancy, especially later into term.

But go ahead and say it was worse than Pearl Harbor, 911 and the Civil War combined ...

It was worse than the other events mentioned because the actions on that one afternoon could have led to an unelected President using constitutional dictates to illegally remain in office - which by definition is a coup d'etat made possible by co-conspirators that happened to be duly elected representatives inside the US Congress.

With each seminal event you mentioned, none of them threatened the constitutional functioning of our government from within our own Congress like the planned events of 1/6 were meant to had they proceeded to Trump's stated and desired conclusion. So by any logical metric, 1/6 came far closer to seeing an unelected person occupy the White House and helm our government than all the others combined.

That's right, some had flag polls.

Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the majority opinion in a 6-to-3 Bruen decision split along ideological lines. He applied the text, history and tradition test by walking through the very complex, often contradictory, history of American gun laws to determine whether New York's restrictions had analogies with the colonial period or the periods after ratification of the Second Amendment and the Fourteenth Amendment, which applied the Second Amendment to the states. Under a fair reading of Thomas's opinion, lower courts would be hard pressed to uphold any gun restriction unless they could point to an obvious historical match.

Judicial reliance on founding-era legislation suffers from (a fatal) conceptual flaw: State legislatures are hardly stuffed with constitutional scholars. Then and now, our state legislatures are prone to enact wildly unconstitutional legislation.

Our courts exist in part to check legislatures when they go astray. The courts do not rely on legislatures to establish constitutional doctrine. In our divided system of government, legislators are not tasked with interpreting constitutional law. Yes, they should take the Constitution into account when they draft laws, but the laws they draft aren't precedent. They do not and should not bind the courts.

Chief Justice John Roberts declared that "some courts have misunderstood the methodology of our recent Second Amendment cases." The court's precedents "were not meant to suggest a law trapped in amber." Or, as Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote in her concurrence, "Historical regulations reveal a principle, not a mold."

Barrett put her objections well. "Imposing a test that demands overly specific analogues has serious problems," she wrote. "It forces 21st-century regulations to follow late-18th-century policy choices, giving us a law trapped in amber.'

As a practical matter, this means, as Roberts wrote, that "when a challenged regulation does not precisely match its historical precursors, it still may be analogous enough to pass constitutional muster.'" Applying this more flexible framework, the court reached a holding that will echo beyond Rahimi's case: "An individual found by a court to pose a credible threat to the physical safety of another may be temporarily disarmed consistent with the Second Amendment."

That holding is relevant not just to domestic violence restraining orders; it's also relevant to so-called red-flag laws or extreme risk protective orders.

Then and now, our state legislatures are prone to enact wildly unconstitutional legislation ... In our divided system of government, legislators are not tasked with interpreting constitutional law. Our courts exist in part to check legislatures when they go astray. The courts do not rely on legislatures to establish constitutional doctrine.

As ACB wrote herself, "Historical regulations reveal a principle, not a mold." Somebody be sure and tell Clarence Thomas and Bellringer. Both of them appear to be confused with this simple inescapable Constitutional logic.

One colleague argued to Cannon that it would be better for a judge in Miami, rather than her satellite Fort Pierce courthouse, to deal with the case, in part because the Miami courthouse has a facility for sensitive documents, the paper reported. When Cannon demurred, the chief judge of the district called her and argued that her reversed decision earlier meant that her having this case would look bad. She again declined to hand it off.

Whether Cannon's colleagues were concerned about inexperience or bias is not clear from the reporting, but what is striking is that they seem to have reached the same conclusion that many outsiders did at the time and later: Cannon has no business presiding over the case.

The trial was once scheduled to begin in May; now no tentative date even exists. She's also ruled against prosecutors again and again. Even when Cannon has ultimately rejected defense claims, she has first held hearings on matters that few judges are willing to entertain.

The case is crawling forward at the same time that the Supreme Court has been dilatory in ruling on Trump's argument that he should be immune to prosecution for acts taken as president - a claim that could upend his federal indictment for subverting the 2020 election. And just as no mechanism exists to speed up the justices, prosecutors have little recourse with Cannon.

Statistically, Americans have a less than one percent chance of living to 100. And Carter faces particularly significant challenges in reaching the milestone. For the past 16 months, he's been in hospice, end-of-life care that focuses on comfort and foregoes medical intervention. Half of people in hospice die within 17 days, according to the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization.

According to friends and family, Carter continues to have a good appetite and eats meals made from the squash, peppers, corn and other vegetables grown on his boyhood farm, which is now a museum maintained by the National Park Service. They said he still recognizes people and smiles.

For several years he has not been able to walk, and the last time he went outside his home in Plains, Ga., was when he was wheeled into his backyard on Easter Sunday in March.

More recently, Carter has been sleeping or resting for much of the time, sometimes in a favorite recliner in the living room.

Since his improbable rise from peanut farmer to president in 1976, Carter has been an underdog. In 2015, he survived metastatic melanoma, which had spread to his liver and brain. He has long outlived all three siblings, who died of pancreatic cancer.

It's laughable how differently supposed evangelicals viewed this devoted man who openly lived his faith every single day of his life versus how they deify a philandering grifter who has never shown a moment of simple humanity - remorse, understanding or regret - as he daily breaks the very Commandments he claims to love.

Maybe Jimmy Carter was a living example of the abject hypocrisy that many people who espouse that religion guide and control our government and people obliviously represent. The Carter's lives were filled with continuous service to humanity and their own communities up until they were physically unable to do any more. What an American life - that isn't quite over yet.

#10

Let me be clear, basic rights and principles don't change over time; however, the practical application of those basic rights and principles relating to specific circumstances might change as society does.

It makes no sense - and defines illogic - to wed oneself to viewpoints based in the past when there is no direct analogue. Life nor society is the same as it was at the time of this nation's founding.

Originalism is the most illogical form of jurisprudence.

It's fully illogical to support beliefs and opinions based in the distant past when the breadth of relevant human knowledge and experiences were significantly lesser than they are in the present.

All the writings and wishes of the Founders were based on their bedrock understanding that the Constitution they codified then would obviously need changes and evolve as the nation matured. The last thing they wanted was for future Americans to feel that they were locked into how things were interpreted in their times. These thoughts are in writing throughout the letters and left us for posterity. There was never any ambivalence in understanding that even enumerated rights come with both practical limitations and group/personal responsibilities, for without them one person's liberty could turn into another person's tyranny.

Originalism is nothing but sophistry from those who actually want to see their religious views and morality codified into law by elevating their "belief" on how law should be interpreted sans any dispositive empirical findings or data. What they "know" to be true then is still true right now, - by God - even though no exact analogues from present to past exists. And then they claim that the same "belief" is indeed dispositive simply because they say so over any protestations by the other alleged co-equal branches of government.

And now this hits:

The divide became evident last week as the court ruled on what was expected to be an amusing but not terribly significant case over a trademark application for crude anti-Trump T-shirts. Despite the trivial subject matter, Barrett squared off with Thomas in such a confrontational manner that they seemed to be really fighting about something else.

Thomas wrote the majority opinion rejecting the trademark applicant's claim. Barrett (and all the other justices) agreed with that bottom-line result. The quarrel came down to methodology.

In a concurring opinion, Barrett used unusually blunt terms to skewer Thomas' history-based rationale for denying the trademark. She described his approach as "wrong twice over," and she made clear that her gripes went far beyond this case alone.

Barrett complained in her 15-page concurrence that her conservative colleagues have become so enamored of history that they're now employing it even when the record is ambiguous and the purpose of embracing a retrospective approach is unclear.

"The views of preceding generations can persuade, and, in the realm of stare decisis, even bind," Barrett wrote, using the Latin term for the principle that courts should adhere to past rulings. "But tradition is not an end in itself - and I fear that the Court uses it that way here."

"It presents tradition itself as the constitutional argument. ... Yet what is the theoretical justification for using tradition that way?" she wrote.

Barrett's next critique amounts to fighting words among legal conservatives: She compared Thomas' approach to the kind of amorphous, multi-pronged legal tests that conservatives frequently accuse liberal judges of concocting.

"Relying exclusively on history and tradition may seem like a way of avoiding judge-made tests. But a rule rendering tradition dispositive is itself a judge-made test," she asserted.

Last week's trademark case wasn't the first time Barrett has unfurled the yellow caution flag as the court turned to history to resolve a case. Almost a year ago, in a case involving the admissibility of confessions by co-conspirators, Barrett again accused Thomas of making too much of a very limited historical record.

"The Court overclaims. That is unfortunate," Barrett wrote in a solo concurrence, referring to Thomas' majority opinion. "While history is often important and sometimes dispositive, we should be discriminating in its use. Otherwise, we risk undermining the force of historical arguments when they matter most," she declared.

For those who follow the progression of legal interpretations, ACB is telling Thomas and Alito that not only are their references into history just another "rule" created from the bench, she also argues that the examples they use do not fully represent the totality of viewpoints or considerations of the issues at particular points in history.

"It does seem to me that Justice Barrett is trying to lay down a marker of at least some limitation or clarity in terms of where she and the others on the court see history and tradition' moving in the future," said Catholic University law professor Jennifer Mascott, who clerked for Thomas at the Supreme Court and Kavanaugh when he was an appeals court judge. "Justice Barrett is basically raising questions that could really shift and perhaps limit the impact of the way specific [historical] examples are used."

store closings due to rampant theft that goes un-prosecuted

Just another gullible mind wallowing in the ignorance spewed by the Trumpist right wing media:

Another view:

Don't assume the Biden's have clean hands.

No one has to assume anything about Joe Biden's income. For over 40 years, Joe Biden had one of the lowest - if not the lowest - net worth of all the members in Congress; it's documented. Barack Obama offered to loan Biden money after Beau's death because Joe was going to take out another loan on his property to pay for family expenses. These things are known in public.

Joe Biden only gained millionaire status AFTER he left the White House in 2017 due to book and speaking contracts along with his fellowship at UPenn. His tax returns are public record since he's continuously run for office for almost 50 years. If he's done something illegal or illicit it would have come out years ago.

This isn't saying that Biden is perfect because no one is. But we do know that he has no criminal acts or provable allegations in his past and there is no any evidence of questionable income in his financial records.

The Supreme Court has slow-walked Trump's criminal cases at every turn. In December 2023, the Court denied the Department of Justice's request to hear Trump's claim that he is absolutely immune from criminal prosecution, opting to instead let the question make its way up to the justices through the lower courts. After the D.C. Circuit heard Trump's argument and decided unanimously against him within 28 days, the Supreme Court waited 22 days before it announced it would indeed hear Trump's claim of presidential immunity, scheduling oral arguments for the last day of its term, 57 days later. The ultra-conservative Supreme Court has weaponized time to delay accountability for their friend Donald Trump and influence the November election.

It is increasingly obvious to Americans who are paying attention that the Supreme Court is no longer a neutral arbiter of the law, but a partisan outfit willing to protect its political allies and overturn long-established precedents like Roe v. Wade for ideological reasons.

Trump v. United States presents an obvious conflict of interest for Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. Ginni Thomas' efforts to overturn the 2020 election are well known. Rather than recuse himself and despite the Court's new sham of a code of conduct, Justice Thomas ignored calls from legal experts and Democratic lawmakers. After revelations that a Stop the Steal' flag flew at Samuel Alito's residence, Justice Alito joined Justice Thomas in disregarding calls to remove himself from the case, thumbing his nose at Congress and federal laws requiring justices to recuse themselves when their "impartiality might reasonably be questioned." We simply cannot trust the justices to rule without bias and uphold the integrity of our elections when they're so clearly aligned with Donald Trump.

Things are what they appear to be.

Who even watches WNBA OR NBA?

Enough people around the world to the tune of their 30 teams getting ready to be paid $76 Billion over a ten year deal for tv and streaming rights - and those aren't the only media rights contracts to be signed. Currently the NBA is looking at record revenues for the foreseeable future as an entire crop of new superstars are ascending as the old guard of LeBron, Steph, KD and others see the end of their playing days quickly approaching.

Yeah, the WNBA needs to update (a.k.a., renegotiate) their various contracts to reflect a new situation.

The W's CBA contract will be renegotiated after next season - right in time for players to take proven advantage of the Caitlin Clark effect currently setting tv viewership and in person attendance records, drawing more eyes to all the league's teams and marquee players which created the security necessity of accelerating team charter jet travel (mentioned above) previously to be implemented next season, not this one.

The league has also boosted the player prize pool for this year's in season Commissioner's Cup tournament where winning players will receive an additional $40,000 a piece.

This will likely be the first time in history the league will be able to completely support itself through its own revenues without any assistance from the NBA.

45-46

Stop posting other's works as your own without attribution. What's worse is that you're offering us nothing as it regards your own feelings and sentiments while getting others to respond to what someone else actually said, not you.

For those interested, every single word posted in the above threads was taken from an article written by Daniel Lacalle, a Spanish Economist and Fund Manager, who happens to be the same person that published these things in the recent past: