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Middleboro Review 2

NEW CONTENT MOVED TO MIDDLEBORO REVIEW 2

Toyota

Since the Dilly, Dally, Delay & Stall Law Firms are adding their billable hours, the Toyota U.S.A. and Route 44 Toyota posts have been separated here:

Route 44 Toyota Sold Me A Lemon



Sunday, October 4, 2015

RSN: Wellhead and Tailpipe: Reflections on Eco-Orwellianism, The Sheriff Investigating the Oregon Shooting Believes Some Seriously Fringe Things About Guns




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Andy Borowitz | Pope Met With People Who Refuse to Do Jobs
Pope Francis. (photo: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)
Andy Borowitz, New Yorker
Borowitz writes: "The Vatican has confirmed that while Pope Francis was in Washington, he had meetings with people who refuse to do their jobs."
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Oregon Shooting: Eight Ideas to Help Stop Gun Violence
Alan Yuhas, Guardian UK
Yuhas writes: "he gunman who murdered nine people at an Oregon campus this week had 13 firearms, all of which were purchased legally by shooter Chris Harper Mercer or a member of his family in the last three years."
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Polls Show Jeb Bush Just Sunk to His Lowest Point Ever. And It's All Because of Donald Trump
Jim Newell, Slate
Newell writes: "It was just Wednesday when Jeb Bush began needling his prized mentee and current rival, Sen. Marco Rubio, as an inexperienced and untested wild card in the vein of Barack Obama. Bush argued that he, by contrast, was a 'proven leader' given his record as governor of Florida."
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The Sheriff Investigating the Oregon Shooting Believes Some Seriously Fringe Things About Guns
Ian Millhiser, ThinkProgress
Millhiser writes: "Two years ago, when Vice President Joe Biden was spearheading the Obama administration's response to the Sandy Hook school shooting, Douglas County Sheriff John Hanlin wrote Biden threatening open defiance of federal efforts to enforce gun laws. The letter is also riddled with language commonly used by the 'Oath Keepers,' a right-wing veterans and law enforcement group that is closely associated with armed, anti-government militias."
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ouglas County Sheriff John Hanlin, who is overseeing much of the law enforcement response to Thursday’s tragic shooting at Umpqua Community College, believes some highly unusual things about gun rights and the Constitution. Two years ago, when Vice President Joe Biden was spearheading the Obama administration’s response to the Sandy Hook school shooting, Hanlin wrote Biden threatening open defiance of federal efforts to enforce gun laws. The letter is also riddled with language commonly used by the “Oath Keepers,” a right-wing veterans and law enforcement group that is closely associated with armed, anti-government militias.
Sheriff John Hanlin letter to Vice President Joe Biden. (photo: ThinkProgress.org)
Sheriff John Hanlin letter to Vice President Joe Biden. (photo: ThinkProgress.org)
Several aspects of this letter are worth noting, but the most revealing part of the letter may be the unusual way that Hanlin introduces his pledge to oppose federal officials. “The United States Supreme Court has ruled that when a Sheriff chooses to enforce an unconstitutional directive, he is violating his Constitutional Oath. I will NOT violate my Constitutional Oath.”
This rhetoric, which focuses on an oath to follow the Constitution and a refusal to violate that oath, ispeculiar to the Oath Keepers. The Oath Keepers describe themselves as an “association of current and formerly serving military, police, and first responders, who pledge to fulfill the oath all military and police take to ‘defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.'” Oath Keeepers played a major role in the armed standoff between federal agents and supporters of the racist Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy in 2014. Their website prominently touts their offer to provide a “security detail” to anti-gay Kentucky clerk Kim Davis in order to “protect her against unlawful arrest” (Davis’s attorneys declined this offer).
Though the Oath Keepers align themselves with the Constitution, they are also partial to paranoid rhetoric about government officials “disarm[ing] the American people,” “confiscat[ing] the property of the American people, including food and other essential supplies,” and “blockad[ing] American cities, thus turning them into giant concentration camps.” Their founder once warned that America could be ruled by a “dominatrix-in-chief” named “Hitlery” who would impose a police state and shoot resisters.
Sheriff Hanlin, it should be noted, is far from alone in his willingness to stand against federal officials. The Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, a group led by Oath Keeper board member Richard Mack, claims that 485 sheriffs have signed onto statements similar to Hanlin’s.
Hanlin’s letter also contains a number of statements suggesting that he holds views about the Constitution that place him well to the right of even the most conservative members of the Supreme Court. Hanlin’s letter implies, for example, that the Obama administration was considering proposals that would violate the Second Amendment at the time of this letter, but this implication is not true.
The administration offered three proposals in the wake of Sandy Hook — universal background checks, an assault rifle ban and a ban on high capacity magazines. All of these are constitutional gun regulations. As Justice Antonin Scalia explained in the Supreme Court’s DC v. Heller decision, “nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill,” and background checks are an essential element of such prohibitions. Similarly, assault rifle and high capacity magazine bans fit within Heller‘s statement that the government may still ban “dangerous and unusual weapons.”
Hanlin’s letter also blurs the line between a matter that is lawfully within state officials’ discretion and something much more akin to insurrection. Under the Supreme Court’s “anti-commandeering doctrine,” states may refuse to enforce federal laws that they do not wish to devote their resources to enforcing. For this reason, provided that state law gives him the discretion to do so, Hanlin is permitted to deny his department’s resources to federal officials seeking to enforce federal gun laws.
What Hanlin may not do, however, is unilaterally assign himself the power to decide what is or is not constitutional and then refuse to “permit the enforcement” of federal laws by “federal officers within the borders of Douglas County Oregon.” This rule stretches back at least as far as the late nineteenth century, when California charged a United States Marshal with murder after the marshal shot and killed a man who threatened the life of a sitting supreme court justice. In ordering the charges dropped, the Supreme Court explained that a federal official who “is held in custody in violation of the Constitution or a law of the United States, or for an act done or omitted in pursuance of a law of the United States. . . must be discharged.”
If Hanlin believes that the federal government is acting unconstitutionally, he can file a lawsuit challenging the federal government’s action. But local sheriffs are not permitted to use the powers of their office to thwart federal officials trying to carry out their own duties.
The reason why local sheriffs do not have this power should be obvious. If local law enforcement did have the power to decide on their own what the Constitution says, and then to enforce their idiosyncratic notions about our founding document against federal officials, then this would be a recipe for armed conflicts between federal and local officials.


TPP Trade Negotiations Extended Yet Again
teleSUR
Excerpt: "Ministers from the 12 countries negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, have been extended to Saturday in an effort to reach a final agreement aimed at creating the world's largest free-trade zone."
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Disaster Capitalism Is Everywhere
Antony Loewenstein, Al Jazeera America
Loewenstein writes: "It's hard to find a better characterization of disaster capitalism than this - companies making money off catastrophe from the privileged few while ignoring the desperate pleas of the majority."
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Wellhead and Tailpipe: Reflections on Eco-Orwellianism
Paul Street, teleSUR
Street writes: "Three years ago, Hillary Clinton visited Norway to negotiate increased U.S. access to the Arctic's vast oil reserves. She sailed on a research vessel to see in person the melting of the Arctic under the pressure of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) - an experience she called 'sobering.' Back on land, she went straight into a meeting to strategize for increased Arctic oil production with an Exxon Mobil executive and the CEO of Norway Statoil."
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