US Politics Thread 2021-24

[Rockstar]

BLM teeters on the brink of insolvency after an $8.5 million loss in 2022

"It looks like she's still keeping it all in the family."

https://thepostmillennial.com/blm-te...campaign=64470

Financial disclosures reveal that the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation (BLMGNF), the global parent for all BLM, ran an $8.5 million deficit while they continued to give out seven-figure salaries and contracts to relatives of the founder Patrisse Cullors.

According to the organization's 2022 tax returns, one of those family members was Paul Cullors, Patrisse's brother, who was paid a $126,000 salary as the head of security. The bodyguard with no previous experience made a total of $1.6M between him and his two security companies.

BLMGNF only raised $9.3 million in 2022, down from $77 million in 2021, and $90 million in 2020.

Patrisse Cullor resigned as the executive director in May 2021, after the public learned she spent $3.2 million for four separate homes on top of other lavish expenses. Prior to her resignation, she was accused of funneling $238,000 to a company that belonged to the father of her child.

Paul Kamenar, an attorney for the National Legal and Policy Center watchdog group, said: "While Patrisse Cullors was forced to resign due to charges of using BLM's funds for her personal use, it looks like she's still keeping it all in the family."

According to the Free Beacon, a friend of Cullors and BLMGNF board member Shalomyah Howard earned $1.7 million for management and consulting services. He is accused of “diverting these donations to his own coffers and intentionally took calculated steps to prevent those same resources from being used by BLM for on-the-ground movement work,” according to a lawsuit by Black Lives Matter Grassroots.

The lawsuit, announced in September, accused Howard of stealing $10 million from the group and using the donations as a “personal piggy bank.”

BLMGNF was founded in 2013 after the death of Trayvon Martin and was thrust into the spotlight after the 2020 death of George Floyd when they organized protests, which ultimately turned into riots across the country.

[em2nought]

Originally Posted by Rockstar

The Department of Justice's failure to charge Rollins raises questions about a two-tiered system of justice.

Questions? There's no question about it.

[Buddahaid]

Originally Posted by em2nought

Questions? There's no question about it.

Bullcrap, unless you mean one level supports holding people accountable using reliable evidence while the other imagines laws don't apply to them and then whine about how unfair it is. In any case, it all comes down to presenting actual evidence instead of making loud noises and calling that evidence.

[Rockstar]

The typical New York Times article, nameless experts and the usual suspects crying about the 9-0 SCOTUS Decision limiting EPA authority. Thank God there are still people with a brain in this country’

Meanwhile… according to Democrats

This MAGA Supreme Court is continuing to erode our country’s environmental laws.

Make no mistake—this ruling will mean more polluted water, and more destruction of wetlands.

We’ll keep fighting to protect our waters. - Chuck Schumer DEMOCRAT

I’m sure the Democrat party kool-aid drinking cult will back Schumer too, how sad.

—————-

Supreme Court Limits E.P.A.’s Power to Address Water Pollution

Experts said the decision would sharply undercut the agency’s authority to protect millions of acres of wetlands under the Clean Water Act, leaving them subject to pollution without penalty.

Adam Liptak
By Adam Liptak
Reporting from Washington

May 25, 2023
Updated 4:48 p.m. ET
The Supreme Court on Thursday curtailed the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to police millions of acres of wetlands, delivering another setback to the agency’s ability to combat pollution.

Writing for five justices, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said that the Clean Water Act does not allow the agency to regulate discharges into wetlands near bodies of water unless they have “a continuous surface connection” to those waters.

The decision was a second major blow to the E.P.A.’s authority and to the power of administrative agencies generally. Last year, the court limited the E.P.A.’s power to address climate change under the Clean Air Act.

Experts in environmental law said the decision would leave many wetlands subject to pollution without penalty, sharply undercutting the E.P.A.’s authority to protect them under the Clean Water Act.
“This is a really disastrous outcome for wetlands, which have become absolutely vital for biodiversity preservation and flood control,” said Patrick Parenteau, a professor at Vermont Law School.

Kevin Minoli, who worked as a senior E.P.A. lawyer from the Clinton through the Trump administrations, overseeing the enforcement of Clean Water Act regulations, said the decision would have enormous practical consequences and estimated that it would affect more than half the nation’s wetlands.

“If you’re in an area with a lot of wetlands, but those wetlands are not directly connected to a continuously flowing water body, then those wetlands are no longer protected by the Clean Water Act,” he said.

The decision was nominally unanimous, with all the justices agreeing that the homeowners who brought the case should not have been subject to the agency’s oversight because the wetlands on their property were not subject to regulation in any event. But there was sharp disagreement about a new test the majority established to determine which wetlands are covered by the law.

Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, joined by the three liberal justices in a concurring opinion, said the decision would harm the federal government’s ability to address pollution and flooding.

“By narrowing the act’s coverage of wetlands to only adjoining wetlands,” he wrote, “the court’s new test will leave some long-regulated adjacent wetlands no longer covered by the Clean Water Act, with significant repercussions for water quality and flood control throughout the United States.”

In a second concurring opinion, Justice Elena Kagan, referring to the court’s decision in June to curtail the E.P.A.’s ability to restrict power plant emissions, criticized the majority’s interpretation of the law.

“There,” she wrote, “the majority’s non-textualism barred the E.P.A. from addressing climate change by curbing power plant emissions in the most effective way. Here, that method prevents the E.P.A. from keeping our country’s waters clean by regulating adjacent wetlands. The vice in both instances is the same: the court’s appointment of itself as the national decision maker on environmental policy.”

The ruling was also another example of the court’s skepticism of the authority of administrative agencies, said Jonathan H. Adler, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University. “The current court,” he said, “is clearly unwilling to defer to an agency about the scope of that agency’s own power.”

Damien Schiff, a lawyer with the Pacific Legal Foundation, which represents the homeowners in the case, praised the Supreme Court’s decision. “Courts now have a clear measuring stick for fairness and consistency by federal regulators,” he said in a statement. “Today’s ruling is a profound win for property rights and the constitutional separation of powers.”

President Biden expressed dismay with the ruling and said his administration would consider next steps. “It puts our nation’s wetlands — and the rivers, streams, lakes and ponds connected to them — at risk of pollution and destruction, jeopardizing the sources of clean water that millions of American families, farmers and businesses rely on,” he said in a statement.

The case, Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency, No. 21-454, concerned an Idaho couple, Michael and Chantell Sackett, who sought to build a house on what an appeals court called “a soggy residential lot” near Priest Lake, in the state’s panhandle.

After the couple started preparing the property for construction in 2007 by adding sand gravel and fill, the agency ordered them to stop and return the property to its original state, threatening them with substantial fines. The couple instead sued the agency, and a dispute about whether that lawsuit was premature reached the Supreme Court in an earlier appeal. In 2012, the justices ruled that the suit could proceed.

In a concurring opinion at the time, Justice Alito said the law gave the agency too much power.

“The reach of the Clean Water Act is notoriously unclear,” he wrote. “Any piece of land that is wet at least part of the year is in danger of being classified by E.P.A. employees as wetlands covered by the act, and according to the federal government, if property owners begin to construct a home on a lot that the agency thinks possesses the requisite wetness, the property owners are at the agency’s mercy.”

On Thursday, all nine justices agreed that the agency had gone too far in seeking to regulate the Sacketts’ property.

“I agree with the court’s bottom-line judgment,” Justice Kavanaugh wrote, “that the wetlands on the Sacketts’ property are not covered by the act and are therefore not subject to permitting requirements.”

That suggested that the court could have issued a far more limited ruling, Professor Parenteau said.

“They could have rendered a narrow decision based on the facts of the Sackett case and said, in this case, where a wetland is this small and is not connected to the lake, it should not be subject to federal control.”

Instead, he said, the majority “fashioned a policy for the entire United States based on this one particular set of facts of this property in northern Idaho.”

The two sides on Thursday differed principally on the Clean Water Act’s coverage of wetlands that are “adjacent” to what the law calls “waters of the United States.”

That second term, Justice Alito wrote, “was decidedly not a well-known term of art” and a “frustrating drafting choice.” He said it included “streams, oceans, rivers and lakes.”

But what does it mean for wetlands to be “adjacent” to such bodies of water? Justice Alito wrote the term can mean “contiguous” or “near.” For purposes of the Clean Water Act, he wrote, “wetlands that are separate from traditional navigable waters cannot be considered part of those waters, even if they are located nearby.”

The four justices in the minority took a different view.

“‘Adjacent’ and ‘adjoining’ have distinct meaning,” Justice Kavanaugh wrote, adding that he would have included wetlands that are “separated from a covered water only by a man-made dike or barrier, natural river berm, beach dune, or the like.”

He added: “There is a good reason why Congress covered not only adjoining wetlands but also adjacent wetlands. Because of the movement of water between adjacent wetlands and other waters, pollutants in wetlands often end up in adjacent rivers, lakes and other waters.”

Justice Kagan gave an example of the difference between adjoining and adjacent.

"In ordinary language,” she wrote, “one thing is adjacent to another not only when it is touching, but also when it is nearby. So, for example, one house is adjacent to another even when a stretch of grass and a picket fence separate the two.”

Justice Alito responded, quoting from an earlier decision, that Congress must use “exceedingly clear language if it wishes to significantly alter the balance between federal and state power and the power of the government over private property.”

Justice Kagan wrote that last year’s climate-change decision used similar reasoning, invoking “another clear-statement rule (the so-called major questions doctrine) to diminish another plainly expansive term.”

She added: “Today’s pop-up clear-statement rule is explicable only as a reflexive response to Congress’s enactment of an ambitious scheme of environmental regulation. It is an effort to cabin the anti-pollution actions Congress thought appropriate.”

Lower courts ruled that the Sacketts’ property was a wetland that the agency could regulate, concluding that it qualified under a 2006 Supreme Court decision, Rapanos v. United States, which featured competing tests for deciding that question.

Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in 2016, wrote for four justices in the Rapanos decision that only wetlands with “a continuous surface connection” to “relatively permanent, standing or flowing bodies of water” qualify.
Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who retired in 2018, said in a concurring opinion that the law required only a “significant nexus” between the wetlands at issue and bodies of waters.

The decision on Thursday rejected that view. “It’s striking,” Professor Adler said, “that no justice sought to preserve the ‘significant nexus’ test Justice Kennedy had articulated in Rapanos.”

Coral Davenport contributed reporting.

[Rockstar]

Originally Posted by em2nought

Questions? There's no question about it.

No doubt, unless you’re in the club you’re screwed.. Rachel Rollins is in the club, she used her position to interfere in an election and lied under oath. Biden’s DOJ refused to prosecute. The report is factual, yet some people try to convince themselves otherwise.

https://www.oversight.gov/sites/defa...DOJ/23-071.pdf

[Rockstar]

Stormy Daniels Admits She Regrets Accusing Trump Of Affair: 'It Was Just For Nothing'

by: Reed Cooper 05.26.2023 Source: DC Enquirer

https://dcenquirer.com/stormy-daniel...m_source=89385

Adult film 'star' Stormy Daniels admitted on 'Good Morning Britain' on Wednesday she regrets accusing leading 2024 presidential candidate and 45th President Donald Trump of an affair, claiming it was "just for nothing."

"It was just for nothing," she whined.

"I just feel like if people don’t want to face facts and see the truth … then you know what, I’d rather have had the time back with my family,” she added.

“I almost feel like humans aren’t really worth saving at this point. Truth doesn’t seem to matter," she continued.

Daniels claims "Trump supporters" climbed her fence and "attacked" her horse, Redemption, a couple of weeks ago.

“Because I’m the one that gets the messages from his supporters. I was one whose horse was attacked a couple of weeks ago,” she claimed.

“They’ve gone after friends and family. Just literally said that they’re gonna come to my house with slit my throat," Daniels said.

“I’m frightened of his sycophants and his followers, and it’s the tone that has changed," she added.

"I was called a slut and a gold digger and, and all of these horrible things that I probably can’t say on TV,” she continued.

Daniels was ordered to pay Trump $300,000 after losing a defamation case against him. However, a Manhattan grand jury voted to indict President Trump over a $130,000 payment to Daniels made by his former lawyer and now-convicted liar, Michael Cohen.

In a Manhattan state court before Judge Merchan on Tuesday, Trump was remotely present from Florida alongside lawyer Todd Blanche in front of U.S. flags.

The judge reminded Trump of a gag order he placed on Trump preventing him from "making public evidence and other material related to a pending criminal case against him in New York," according to reporting from CNBC.

Under New York law, the fine for breaking a gag order holds a penalty of either 30 days in jail or a $1,000 fine.

Far-left Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who has been exposed as being funded by a group supported by far-left billionaire George Soros, was able to get a Manhattan grand jury to vote to indict Trump.

This makes Trump the first American president to ever face criminal charges.

The Color of Change PAC, the “nation’s largest online racial justice organization", which was given $1 million in May 2021 from Soros, gave $1 million to Bragg but later pulled back half of their donation.

[Gorpet]

Originally Posted by em2nought

In furtherance of the left's false narrative: Travel advisory issued for visitors to Florida.

https://naacp.org/articles/naacp-iss...visory-florida

"Florida is openly hostile toward African Americans, people of color and LGBTQ+ individuals. Before traveling to Florida, please understand that the state of Florida devalues and marginalizes the contributions of, and the challenges faced by African Americans and other communities of color."

Guess that's why the head of the NAACP lives in Tampa.

If you have a problem with Florida, Just don't fly in,buss in or drive in.If you don't like the atmosphere.Stay at home or stay away What is the problem? Let's use some common sense why are you going to Florida, Ya see this ass doesn't even live here , Do ya ? em2nought

[Rockstar]

The debt limit agreement includes a debt limit suspension until January 1st, 2025.

Can’t wait to find a credit card company that will let keep me borrowing and postpone payments.

[em2nought]

Originally Posted by Gorpet

Ya see this ass doesn't even live here , Do ya ? em2nought

...only until I sell, then I'm off to Thailand. Not sure why it's your business?

[Rockstar]

Look at that racist white anti-immigrant supremacist in the picture causing another insurrection during a meeting with AOC. Oh wait he’s an immigrant from Cuba.


AOC called 'piece of sh*t' by constituent fed up with illegal immigrant infiltration of NYC

https://thepostmillennial.com/aoc-ca...campaign=64470

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) was heckled at a town hall meeting in Queens, New York Friday, with one protester calling her a "piece of sh*t." Protestors took issue with her stances on the border crisis, sending billions to Ukraine, Drag Queen story hour, and the debt ceiling.

The Congresswoman was speaking to her constituents in the Corona Neighborhood as the scene descended into chaos. At some points, members of the audience were chanting "America First," and one man in a Cuba shirt yelled, "American citizens before migrants."

The video, posted by FreedomNews TV, shows the man asking, "Where are you on the migrant issue?" and calling her a "piece of sh*t" while being escorted away.

One man stood up to defend the congresswoman, proclaiming, "We all, for the most part, came through Ellis Island," before others interrupted with, "Legally!"

When speaking on the debt ceiling, Ocasio-Cortez said that she doesn't believe the US should have a debt limit. A man pointed out that money was spent in the form of "$100 billion to Ukraine, which you voted for." AOC voted in favor of sending $40 Billion to Ukraine last year.

On the topic of Ukraine, one woman shouted, "Stop Funding this war, there's a lot of communities that need help and need that money. I'm from that community." She was subsequently removed from the building.

"We are at war with Russia," another woman said. "We're on the verge of nuclear war. Are you going to stop this war?"

One woman held up a sign that read "AOC: An obvious Criminal." while others had signs that read "Stop funding Ukraine," "America first," and "AOC: Stop pushing drag queen story hour,' among others reported by the New York Post.

Last year, numerous town halls in which Ocasio-Cortez appeared delved into chaos. In October, she danced on stage as protestors shouted, "AOC has got to go." At an event in the Bronx that same month, a man stated, "You ran as an outsider yet you voted to start this war in Ukraine. You're voting to start a nuclear war with Russia and China."

[MaDef]

Originally Posted by Rockstar

The debt limit agreement includes a debt limit suspension until January 1st, 2025.

Can’t wait to find a credit card company that will let keep me borrowing and postpone payments.

That would be Japan and China, Japan owns over a trillion of the debt & china owns 850 billion. If it continues on the current course, China won't need to invade, they'll just wait for the U.S. to default, then take possession in lieu of payment or sell off the newly acquired assets.

[Rockstar]

[Rockstar]

The Democrat’s version of paradise, total idiots who still think it’s just the thought that counts... Then when the State of Texas holds up traffic to search for fentanyl at the border. Idiot Democrats tell them to stop it and stay out of the way.

[Rockstar]

[mapuc]

Now now you know it ain't the truth- The Dems are the only party who can save US soul.

(Have a couple of American friends who is incarnated Dem-supporters and according to them Rep is evil itself.)

Has on occasion said that there's good and bad thing on both parties.

Markus