Category: Judicial Watch
Supreme Court punts on revisiting landmark gay marriage decision
The Supreme Court has rejected an appeal that was thought to be the only case that had standing to challenge the landmark 2015 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges that legalized so-called same-sex marriage.
On Monday, Supreme Court justices denied a petition for a writ of certiorari for the case Kim Davis v. David Ermold, et al., according to court documents.
‘If ever a case deserved review, the first individual who was thrown in jail post-Obergefell for seeking accommodation for her religious beliefs should be it.’
There were no notable dissents in the order, and no justices recused themselves.
Photo by Ty Wright/Getty Images
The appeal was brought by Kim Davis, a former Kentucky county clerk who was briefly jailed after refusing to issue marriage licenses for a homosexual couple who are party to the suit.
Davis was also ordered to pay $100,000 in damages plus another $260,000 in legal fees, according to her attorneys.
Her refusal to issue the marriage license was on religious grounds, raising serious First Amendment questions.
Davis’ appeal opens: “If ever a case deserved review, the first individual who was thrown in jail post-Obergefell for seeking accommodation for her religious beliefs should be it.”
Of the three questions presented in the petition, the last reads: “Whether Obergefell v. Hodges … and the legal fiction of substantive due process, should be overturned.”
Although Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas have previously indicated a willingness to reconsider Obergefell, Davis’ case was always considered to be an uphill battle since four justices would need to assent to hearing it.
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79-year-old landlord opens fire on naked intruder who body-slammed him to ground, breaking his legs
A 79-year-old landlord opened fire on a naked male intruder who body-slammed him to the ground Friday morning, breaking his legs, authorities said.
The incident occurred around 7:15 a.m. in the 4500 block of Tujunga Avenue at a Studio City apartment in Los Angeles, authorities told KABC-TV.
‘Why is he out here naked?’
Surveillance video captured the intruder walking naked around the neighborhood, the station said, adding that video also shows him at the front door of a home and grabbing a sign and then continuing to walk.
The suspect soon entered an apartment, after which two women who were home at the time confronted him, a Los Angeles Police Department spokesperson told KABC.
More from the station:
The women yelled at the trespasser to get out, prompting the landlord to rush to their aid, the LAPD said.
The intruder body-slammed the landlord, breaking both of the victim’s legs, police said.
The 79-year-old man “at this time, in self-defense, shoots the suspect three times,” said Capt. Warner Castillo of the Los Angeles Police Department.
Castillo added to KTTV-TV that the victim gave the naked man every opportunity to stop what he was doing before shots were fired.
“The 79-year-old man tells the suspect to leave, tells him I have a gun, and I will shoot you. The suspect grabs the 79-year-old man, lifts him, throws him on the ground, and that’s where the 79-year-old man suffered two broken legs,” Castillo noted to KTTV.
What’s more, Castillo added to KTTV that “the suspect got shot one time, and the suspect still approached the 79-year-old [who] shot the suspect again, killing him.”
KTTV noted that the victim, identified only as George, was taken to a hospital and underwent surgery. A neighbor added to KTTV the 79-year-old man is a Vietnam veteran.
The name of the suspect has not been released, KTTV noted. No injuries to the women were reported, KABC said.
“I heard commotion, like a lady yelling,” a woman who witnessed the incident and declined to be identified by name told KABC. “Then I looked over, and it was a naked guy. At first I thought it was just like, maybe it’s a house fire. Like, why is he out here naked?”
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‘It was me and God every night’: Hunter was lost in the wilderness for nearly 3 weeks — until God told him ‘let’s go walking’
If you’ve ever been lost in the wilderness, even for a few moments, the sudden realization that you have no idea where you are — or how to get back on track — can be terrifying.
Ron Dailey had to endure that awful feeling for nearly three weeks.
‘Nobody really knew where I was.’
Dailey, 65, had packed for a half-day solo hunting trip on Oct. 13 in the Sierra National Forest, KCBS-TV reported, adding that the area is a dense wilderness in central California near Fresno.
However, a wrong turn would extend his trip by quite a bit.
“I went down this hill. I’m going, ‘Oh, God, this ain’t good,'” Dailey recalled to the station in regard to the moment he knew he was lost. “So I turned around and tried to get out. I couldn’t get out.”
A storm hit that evening and left two feet of snow on top of his broken-down truck and all around him, Dailey recalled to KCBS, adding that he thought, “Oh, man, I’m in trouble.”
His family contacted the Fresno County Sheriff’s Office when he didn’t return as planned, and a massive search was under way from the air and on land, the station said.
KCBS said the rescue effort eventually stretched across multiple counties and required responders to look for Dailey in rugged terrain.
Soon Dailey’s survival instincts kicked in, the station said, adding that he had 14 bottles of water and about 900 calories’ worth of food, all of which he tried to ration for as long as possible.
But eventually his food and water ran out, and Dailey recalled to KCBS that he “didn’t know if rescue was gonna come” because “nobody really knew where I was.”
Well, he did have a most important companion, it turns out.
“It was me and God every night,” Dailey told the station in regard to how prayer and his Christian faith helped him when things looked bleakest.
He shared with KCBS that soon “God woke me up at 6:45 Saturday morning. He goes, ‘Ron, get your boots on. Let’s go walking.'”
With that, Dailey abandoned his truck and estimated that he walked about 10 to 12 miles through the wilderness, the station said, stopping and sitting down often due to the altitude. He reportedly fell several times and lost his phone.
KCBS said finally three rescuers appeared.
“The Christian community just pulled together and kept praying and praying and praying,” Dailey recounted to the station. “They wouldn’t let me die. Neither would God.”
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McCloskey’s Latest Spy Thriller Turns a New Page
In just five years, David McCloskey has gone from being a complete unknown to his current status as one of our leading writers of spy fiction, a remarkably rapid ascent. While his first three novels—Damascus Station (2021), Moscow X (2023), and The Seventh Floor (2024)—were set in the same fictional universe, centered around the CIA (where McCloskey himself spent seven or eight years as an analyst, mostly in the Middle East), The Persian marks a new departure.
The post McCloskey’s Latest Spy Thriller Turns a New Page appeared first on .
The Spectator P.M. Ep. 166: Glamour Selects Men as the Women of the Year
Nine men who identify as women were awarded “Women of the Year” by Glamour UK. The men, many of whom…
The Socialist Order … It’s Not Pretty
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European Trump derangement syndrome on full display in ‘deviant’ crucifixion spectacle
Liberals have made no secret of their desire to see harm come to President Donald Trump.
A survey conducted by the Network Contagion Research Institute and Rutgers University’s Social Perception Lab revealed in April that 55% of respondents who identified as left of center said that assassinating Trump would be at least somewhat justified.
When asked by pollsters about the September 2024 attempt on the president’s life at his golf course in Florida, 28% of Democrats said it would have been better for Trump to have been slaughtered on the green.
This murderous loathing for the president leached into popular culture long before Democrats rushed to mock Trump’s brush with death last year in Butler, Pennsylvania. For instance, a theater production simulated his assassination in New York City and an aspiring D-list comedian posed with a fake decapitated head made to look like the president.
A masked London-born agitpropist who calls himself Mason Storm recently contributed to this unhinged anti-Trump genre with a hyper-realistic, life-size sculpture of the president dressed in an orange prison jumpsuit and set on a cross-shaped gurney in a cruciform pose. The sculpture, which is titled “The Saint or the Sinner,” depicts Trump as incapacitated with the implication — made explicit elsewhere — that he is dead as the result of a lethal injection.
According to a statement shared online by Storm, “In a world increasingly driven by polarized narratives, this work offers a moment of reflection, urging us to take responsibility — and to realize that every decision tells a story.”
RELATED: Evil unchecked always spreads — and Democrats are proof
Photo by SEBASTIEN BOZON/AFP via Getty Images
While the title of the sculpture and the corresponding statement from Storm suggest there’s an ambiguity about the work’s meaning, Storm made clear online his antipathy toward Trump, writing, for instance, “He’s not the messiah he’s a very naughty boy!”
‘Simply deviant.’
The sculpture, which was shown earlier this year in Vienna, was also going to be shown at the central train station in Basel, Switzerland; however, Gleis 4, the gallery responsible for the planned pop-up, called it off, citing “expected large crowds and feared disturbances.”
On Saturday, Gleis 4 reportedly installed the sculpture in a showcase window on Kunstmeile, an indoor pedestrian walkway in downtown Basel.
According to France24, the sculpture has been purchased by an “internationally renowned figure living in Europe” whose identity will remain confidential.
Bishop Hermann Glettler of the Diocese of Innsbruck has called the sculpture “simply deviant.”
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BBC execs step down after network accused of deceptive edit of Trump’s January 6 speech
An internal memo has rocked the leadership at the British Broadcasting Corporation.
Last week, another outlet in the United Kingdom revealed that the memo had accused the BBC of deceptively editing footage of President Donald Trump’s speech on January 6, 2021.
‘We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not gonna have a country any more.’
The Telegraph reported that Michael Prescott, a former independent external adviser to the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee, wrote a dossier on the BBC’s alleged bias before leaving his position in June.
The report accused the BBC of splicing together Trump’s comments on Jan. 6 to appear as if they were made in the same breath, even though the remarks were about 54 minutes apart.
As Blaze News previously reported, the edit in question appeared on the BBC’s one-hour Panorama special, titled “Trump: A Second Chance?”
The documentary featured a clip purporting to show Trump saying, “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell.”
In reality, Trump’s actual statement was:
“We’re gonna walk down, and I’ll be there with you. We’re gonna walk down. We’re gonna walk down, any one you want, but I think right here, we’re gonna walk down to the Capitol, and we’re gonna cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women. And we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them, because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong. We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated. Lawfully slated. I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
The edited clip also featured Trump’s words from about 54 minutes later, when he was discussing election integrity.
“Most people would stand there at 9 o’clock in the evening and say, ‘I wanna thank you very much,’ and they go off to some other life, but I said something’s wrong here, something’s really wrong, can’t have happened, and we fight.”
“We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not gonna have a country any more,” Trump added.
Now, BBC Director-General Tim Davie and CEO of BBC News Deborah Turness have both handed in their resignations.
RELATED: BBC allegedly deceptively edited Trump’s Jan. 6 speech into riot lie
Tim DAvie. Photo by Dominic Lipinski/Getty Images
Davie issued a memo to his staff on Saturday and claimed that it was completely his decision to step down.
“I wanted to let you know that I have decided to leave the BBC after 20 years. This is entirely my decision,” Davie wrote, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
The director said he had been reflecting on the “very intense personal and professional demands” that come with his role and claimed that “in these increasingly polarized times, the BBC is of unique value and speaks to the very best of us.”
Without directly mentioning the video editing controversy, Davie called the BBC a “critical ingredient of a healthy society.”
‘As the CEO of BBC News and Current Affairs, the buck stops with me.’
Turness, however, was openly self-deprecating in her decision to resign.
“The ongoing controversy around the Panorama on President Trump has reached a stage where it is causing damage to the BBC — an institution that I love,” she wrote in a memo. “As the CEO of BBC News and Current Affairs, the buck stops with me — and I took the decision to offer my resignation to the Director-General last night.”
She added that “in public life, leaders” must be “fully accountable, and that is why I am stepping down.”
Still, Turness said despite the mistakes, any “allegations that BBC News is institutionally biased are wrong.”
RELATED: The UK wants to enforce its censorship laws in the US. The First Amendment begs to differ.
CEO of BBC News Deborah Turness, October 13, 2022 in London, England. Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images
As the BBC is a government-run institution, the ruling Labour Party chimed in on the controversy.
“I want to thank Tim Davie for his service to public service broadcasting over many years. He has led the BBC through a period of significant change and helped the organization to grip the challenges it has faced in recent years,” said U.K. Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy.
Nandy said the BBC charter, which defines “Object, Mission and Public Purposes” for the organization, will be reviewed to help the BBC “adapt to this new era” and secure its role at the “heart of national life” for the future.
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The nukes are fine — the advice is not
Despite his well-known aversion to using the “other N-word” and discussing the issues connected to nuclear deterrence and nuclear saber-rattling by America’s adversaries, the president, during his recent trip to Asia, dropped a bombshell of his own.
On October 29, President Trump posted a brief statement on Truth Social about nuclear weapons testing, which contained the following key points:
- The United States has more nuclear weapons “than any other country.”
- During Trump’s first term in office, the U.S. accomplished a “complete update and renovation” of existing U.S. nuclear weapons.
- Because of other countries’ testing programs, the president has “instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis.”
- The process of testing our nuclear weapons “will begin immediately.”
Sadly, whoever provided the president with the background information for each of his statements is manifestly unaware of the easily ascertainable facts. The president is being extremely poorly served by his own staff.
The president appears to have been informed that the Department of War is responsible for nuclear weapons testing. It is not.
First, the Russian Federation has more nuclear weapons than any other nation. Its stockpile of nuclear weapons available to the Russian military is about 5,200, while its overall stockpile is about 5,600. The numbers for the U.S. are about 3,700 and 4,400, respectively. This information is readily available in public sources such as the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute Yearbook or the annual assessments published by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Second, during the president’s first term, progress was made on the Strategic Modernization Program initiated in 2010. Still, no new platforms (submarine-launched ballistic missiles, bombers, or land-based missiles) were deployed between 2017 and 2021. Instead, we rely today on aging systems that are decades old.
Importantly, a small number of modified, low-yield submarine-launched warheads were produced and placed in service, and development of new Air Force nuclear warheads began, but none were deployed.
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Photo by NASA/Getty Images
Third, the president’s staff has a profound misunderstanding about the difference between the test of a nuclear system’s delivery vehicle (i.e., a ballistic or cruise missile) and the test of a nuclear warhead. In the days before the president’s post, Russia conducted a test of a new cruise missile and a new trans-oceanic torpedo (both of which, incidentally, are not constrained by the new START treaty). Tests of missile systems are commonly conducted by all the nuclear powers, including the United States.
Today, with the sole exception of North Korea in 2017, neither Russia nor China nor any other nuclear power has conducted a nuclear warhead test in this century. To be clear, the U.S. intelligence community has raised concerns that both Russia and China may be covertly carrying out extremely low-yield tests of experimental nuclear designs, but those do not appear to be the “tests” to which the president’s Truth Social post was referring.
Finally, the president appears to have been informed that the Department of War is responsible for nuclear weapons testing. It is not. That responsibility belongs to the Department of Energy. Based on over 30 years of neglect, that department would be unable today to conduct a nuclear weapon test in the near future. Based on estimates provided by the Department of Energy to Congress, it would take 24-36 months to do so, at a cost of several billion dollars — dollars that have not been authorized or appropriated by Congress.
When asked, on his return flight from Asia, why he had delivered this signal of U.S. strategic nuclear weapons muscle-flexing, the president said he believed that if others were testing, then we should too. Depending on the state of our own nuclear weapons (currently assessed by the military as being reliable), and if he had been properly informed on the facts that others had resumed testing of nuclear weapons, there would be something to this argument. But as things stand, the president owes it to himself and to America’s national security to improve the quality of advice he is being provided on the vital issue of nuclear deterrence and our ability to sustain it — and soon.
Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearDefense and made available via RealClearWire.
Trump pardons MLB legend and ‘Celebrity Apprentice’ cast member for 30-year-old tax fraud charges
President Trump has granted a pardon to a cast member from his hit show “Celebrity Apprentice” for the second time this term.
In February, Trump pardoned former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D) after commuting the politician’s 14-year prison sentence in 2020.
The new pardon again extinguishes charges laid against a member of the Season 3 cast of Trump’s hit reality show, this time for a legendary baseball player.
‘Mr. Strawberry found faith in Christianity and has been sober for over a decade.’
“President Trump has approved a pardon for Darryl Strawberry, three-time World Series champion and eight-time MLB All-Star,” a White House official told the New York Post.
Strawberry had an iconic 17-year career in the majors, spending 13 seasons with teams in New York. He came into the league with the New York Mets and finished his career with the New York Yankees.
Back in 1995, Strawberry pleaded guilty to a single count of tax evasion over a failure to report nearly $500,000 in income from baseball card shows and autograph signings between 1986 and 1990.
As UPI reported at the time, Strawberry was sentenced to three years of probation in April 1995, along with six months of home confinement and $350,000 in restitution for tax evasion
At just 32 years old, Strawberry was also battling substance problems that cost him some opportunities in MLB.
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Photo by James Devaney/WireImage/Getty Images
Strawberry was beloved as a member of the Mets and was hilariously immortalized in the iconic episode of “The Simpsons” titled “Homer at the Bat.”
However, the trouble started after he moved back to his home state of California to play for the Los Angeles Dodgers. Following an All-Star campaign in 1991, the outfielder never played a full season again.
Just three days prior to appearing in front of a federal judge for the tax evasion charges in 1995, Strawberry was suspended by MLB and released from his new team, the San Francisco Giants, over his continued use of cocaine.
Months later, Strawberry signed with the Yankees and played well, but only appeared in 32 games. He retired from baseball after the 1999 season.
Photo by Mitchell Layton/Getty Images
“Mr. Strawberry served time and paid back taxes after pleading guilty to one count of tax evasion,” the recent White House comment added.
“Following his career, Mr. Strawberry found faith in Christianity and has been sober for over a decade — he has become active in ministry and started a recovery center, which still operates today.”
Strawberry has been praised in recent years for overcoming his drug-abuse problems and turning to God, and he now preaches alongside his wife.
“There’s nothing too hard, there’s nothing too big for God,” Strawberry was recorded telling a group of prisoners in 2024.
“There’s nothing too hard, there’s nothing too big for God to fix in your life right here, right now,” he preached, as the men rejoiced. “God has not forgot about you. You’re not a mistake to God. We’ve all made mistakes. We have all fallen short. The Bible didn’t say some of us. The Bible says all of us have fallen short.”
Strawberry concluded, “So you gentlemen need to know that today I stand up here; there’s nothing great about me. I was a liar. I was a cheater. I was a womanizer. I was an alcoholic. I was a drug addict, and I was a sinner, saved by grace.”
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