Archive for the 'Politics' Category

Then there’s the knowledge of what they really intend.

An Illinois man who came to Minneapolis to riot over the weekend livestreamed himself handing out explosives, destroying property and appearing to set a Sprint store on fire, according to charges filed in the U.S. District Court of Minnesota on Monday afternoon.

Matthew Lee Rupert, 28, is charged with civil disorder, possession of unregistered explosives and participating in and organizing riots, making him the first to face federal prosecution for allegedly taking part in the fires, looting and other violence that engulfed the Twin Cities since the death of George Floyd in police custody.

Last Thursday night, Rupert, of Galesburg, Ill., posted on his public Facebook page an invitation for “goons” to join him in traveling to Minneapolis, where he said he was renting hotel rooms and planned to wreak havoc and “take hella good videos.”

The livestreamed videos, cited as evidence by FBI investigators in the complaint, show his role in the riots on Friday night and early Monday, including distributing explosives and then announcing, “He’s throwing my bombs … they’re going to bomb the police with them.”

“Good shot, my boy,” he shouted after one of the explosions, according to the complaint. “We came here to riot,” he declared later.

Later in the night, Rupert asked for lighter fluid and entered a Sprint store, according to the complaint. “I lit it on fire,” he said, before entering an Office Depot and stealing items from it.

Just so you know.

A real person.

Just so you know, via Instapundit.

News from Cleveland.

CLEVELAND (WJW) — What started as a peaceful demonstration in downtown Cleveland to protest the death of George Floyd turned violent on Saturday.

Those intent on turning the protest into a riot, systematically smashed out windows and looted stores, restaurants and bars. But when they got to Corbo’s Bakery on Euclid Avenue, they were met with resistance.

After protesters tried to force their way inside with bats and other weapons, owner Joe Corbo and his two sons armed themselves with guns and told the rioters that they would not allow them inside the bakery.

“We don’t want any trouble, we don’t want you guys in here damaging our property, we’re just protecting our business and truthfully, I would say maybe 80% of them understood, they left us alone and kept walking, and then there was that 20% that just were accusing us of some things and crazy things that just weren’t true. We weren’t there to hurt anybody or cause a problem, we were just protecting our business,” said Co-owner Selena Corbo.

The protesters apparently took note of the weapons and the determination of the Corbo family to protect their bakery and decided to move on to other businesses, but not before breaking out a large window at Corbo’s.

I’m glad it mostly turned out okay for the owners.  There’s video at the link.

I found it amusing that the first thing one of the thugs did when he tried to break in and saw guns was apologize for trespassing.

No, I’m just kidding.  He got on his knees and chanted, “hands up, don’t shoot.”  As if he had a right to steal from the store, and the owner was a cop, and bad man for stopping him thus infringing on his right to do whatever he wanted.

Gateway Pundit.

(WHAM) – Disturbing video recorded by a person in Rochester shows a group of people attacking a woman outside a business amid widespread looting and rioting in downtown Rochester Saturday evening.

In the video, a woman pleads with the people smashing the exterior of Rochester Fire Equipment Company on Marshall Street to stop. The woman yelled at the group of people, who were apparently trying to loot the jewelry store next door.

Several of the people then turn on the woman and begin attacking her, hitting and kicking her, and then used boards to hit her.

The woman’s husband runs in toward the end of the recording and tries to break up the attack while swinging a golf club. He was then attacked himself.

The woman is reportedly recovering on Sunday morning.

The woman and her husband are tenants who live above Rochester Fire Equipment. Joe Painter tells us he was out grocery shopping when he came upon the scene and started taking video on his cell phone.

Painter, who says he is a veteran of the War in Afghanistan, says it was one of the worst things he’s ever witnessed. He said he stopped recording abruptly because some of the people who attacked the woman in the video started running toward him.

There’s video at the link.

So I realize America has taught several generations of inner city youth that they have a right to steal whatever they want with impunity, destroy things and abuse other people like this, but it seems like this poor woman would have had rights too, yes?  Because she is made in God’s image?  Yes?

And I’m sorry to the Afghan war vet, but people running after him too isn’t an excuse to ignore the suffering of others.  Every man dies.  It matters how you live, and it matters how you die.

I have nothing detailed at the moment.  Lot’s of stuff in the pipeline, maybe.  Or maybe not.

So here’s my questions to the rioters.  Where were you, oh self righteous pricks, when open carry fishermen in Florida were body slammed by cops?

Where were you, oh self righteous rioters, when innocent former Marine Jose Guerena was raided and killed in his own home, having the trigger discipline never even to fire a shot in return?

Where were you this morning when the Supreme Tyrants declared that California, and thus any state, could prohibit Christians from worshiping?

Oh, I see.  Rights for some, but not for others.

Be careful folks.  Don’t align yourself with people who would take those very cops they hate so much and turn them on you to confiscate guns if they had the chance.  Don’t align yourself with people who would force Christians into hiding because of their own hatred for us.

BLM and Antifa couldn’t care less about your rights as a Christian or gun owner.

Here, and David Codrea also has video.

However, you’d better watch yourself.  The cops don’t like it one bit.  How do I know this?

Rieple’s arrest came after Libor Jany, a journalist for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, reported, via a police source, that Rieple had shot and killed a suspected looter at his business. Police confirmed in their first press conference on the shooting that they were investigating the theory that the owner of the Cadillac Pawn & Jewelry store shot a suspected looter, but they said they were also investigating other theories they wouldn’t describe. Police spokesman John Elder confirmed at midnight that one person was in custody and one person was dead but named neither.

Elder also said he believes Minnesota’s “duty to retreat” law means a businessowner doesn’t have a right to defend their property with lethal force because it’s not their home. You can read more about the duty to retreat law here.

Records obtained by Heavy show that John Richard Rieple, 59, of Galesville, Wisconsin, is being held in the Hennepin County jail.

In a state like that, if a thug comes in to steal your property, you have to retreat and let them do it.  In other words, you have to trust that stealing is all they really intend to do.

Make sure of the laws in your state, and be prepared to do – or not to do – whatever is necessary to do what it is you intend to do.

In other words, don’t back yourself into a legal corner you can’t get out of.

“You shall rise up before the grayheaded and honor the aged, and you shall revere your God; I am the LORD.” (Leviticus 19:32).

News from New York and the Northeast on how they have treated the elderly.

Health policy expert Avik Roy noted on Twitter Tuesday morning that if you remove New York from the national statistics, the percentage of COVID-19 deaths attributed to nursing homes jumps to 52%. Roy also reminds us that “only 1.8% of U.S. residents live in nursing homes or assisted living facilities, meaning that people in one of those facilities are 23 times more likely to die of COVID-19 than anyone else.

This isn’t without background.

Those deaths have occurred as Cuomo’s critics say he has taken a hands-off approach to regulating the healthcare industry interests that helped bankroll his election campaign. In March, Cuomo’s administration issued an order that allowed nursing homes to readmit sick patients without testing them for Covid-19. Amid allegations of undercounted casualties, the governor also pushed back against pressure to have state regulators more stringently record and report death rates in nursing homes.

And then came Cuomo’s annual budget – which included a little-noticed passage shielding corporate officials who run New York hospitals, nursing homes and other healthcare facilities from liability for Covid-related deaths and injuries.

GNYHA – a lobbying group for hospital systems, including some that own nursing homes – said it “drafted and aggressively advocated for” the immunity provision. The new law declares that top officials at hospital and nursing home companies “shall have immunity from any liability, civil or criminal, for any harm or damages alleged to have been sustained as a result of an act or omission in the course of arranging for or providing healthcare services” to address the Covid-19 outbreak.

Prior to the budget language, Cuomo had already temporarily granted limited legal immunity to doctors and nurses serving on the medical frontlines. But the carefully sculpted passage buried in the state’s annual spending bill expanded that by offering extensive immunity to any “healthcare facility administrator, executive, supervisor, board member, trustee or other person responsible for directing, supervising or managing a healthcare facility and its personnel or other individual in a comparable role”.

One of the most hideous things done in American history, second to abortion.

Politico.

The battle over the impact of coronavirus lockdown measures on Americans’ religious observances has reached the Supreme Court as a Southern California church and its pastor made an emergency appeal for relief from executive orders issued by Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Lawyers for the South Bay United Pentecostal Church and Bishop Arthur Hodges asked the justices to step in Sunday after a federal appeals court panel rejected a similar emergency application Friday.

The decision from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals came on the same day President Donald Trump publicly backed churches seeking to escape various stay-at-home orders in place across the country. Trump said he was ordering governors to exempt churches “right now” by declaring religious services to be essential, although he lacks any evident legal authority to impose his view on state officials.

Still, Trump’s pointed rhetoric added new fire to the simmering legal battles, including pledges by thousands of churches to defy local public-health restrictions by holding services on Pentecost, which falls next Sunday.

In the California-focused case that reached the high court Sunday night, a 9th Circuit panel split, 2-1, with the majority declining to disturb the state government’s action in light of the health dangers posed by the ongoing pandemic.

“We’re dealing here with a highly contagious and often fatal disease for which there presently is no known cure,’” Judges Barry Silverman and Jacqueline Nguyen wrote. “In the words of Justice Robert Jackson, if a ‘court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.’”

Silverman, a Clinton appointee, and Nguyen, an Obama appointee, were dismissive of the church’s arguments in the Friday order, devoting only two paragraphs to the substance of the dispute.

However, the third judge on the panel — Trump appointee Daniel Collins — weighed in with an 18-page dissent arguing that Newsom’s orders are impermissibly intruding on religious freedom protected by the First Amendment.

“I do not doubt the importance of the public health objectives that the State puts forth, but the State can accomplish those objectives without resorting to its current inflexible and over-broad ban on religious services,” Collins wrote.

Collins noted that the orders allow many workplaces to open, but ban religious gatherings even when they could meet the social distancing standards imposed on other activities that are now permitted.

“By explicitly and categorically assigning all in-person ‘religious services’ to a future Phase 3 — without any express regard to the number of attendees, the size of the space, or the safety protocols followed in such services8 — the State’s Reopening Plan undeniably ‘discriminate[s] on its face’ against ‘religious conduct,’” the judge said.

The legal dispute may turn on how much weight the justices choose to give to a 115-year-old Supreme Court precedent, Jacobson v. Massachusetts, which upheld a mandatory vaccination scheme for smallpox.

Who wants to lay bets with me?  I say the Supreme Court punts and refuses even to hear the case, leaving it to the cowards in the Ninth Circuit who didn’t even have the courage to hear the case En banc.