Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
Trump’s Appeal of His New York Convictions Highlights the Absurdity of Alvin Bragg’s Convoluted Case
https://reason.com/2025/10/28/trumps-appeal-of-his-new-york-convictions-highlights-the-absurdity-of-alvin-braggs-convoluted-case/
““In Portland, protests have endured for months, and the [Portland police have] been either unwilling or unable to respond to the disturbances,” the appeals judges wrote.
Nelson and Bade said Immergut relied too heavily on Trump’s social media commentary — calling Portland “war ravaged” — to conclude that his deployment was “untethered” from reality, noting that the unrest had required a surge of law enforcement from the Federal Protective Service to contain.
The 9th Circuit panel majority repeatedly cited a similar decision issued by three colleagues permitting Trump’s deployment of Guard troops to Los Angeles earlier this year. In the ruling, the judges said Trump is owed great deference in determining whether civil unrest reaches a point in which the military may be called in for support.
The majority said Immergut used a faulty definition of rebellion in her decision, but the appeals judges did not address whether Trump had a valid claim that such unrest was underway when he sent in the Guard. (They did say they were not endorsing Trump’s description of Portland as a “war zone.”)
The appeals panel’s dissenting judge, Clinton appointee Susan Graber, called the majority’s decision ”absurd,” pleaded with her 9th Circuit colleagues to quickly reverse it and urged the public to “retain faith in our judicial system for just a little longer.”
“We have come to expect a dose of political theater in the political branches, drama designed to rally the base or to rile or intimidate political opponents. We also may expect there a measure of bending—sometimes breaking—the truth,” Graber wrote. “By design of the Founders, the judicial branch stands apart. We rule on facts, not on supposition or conjecture, and certainly not on fabrication or propaganda.”
Graber emphasized that even though there had been unruly protests in Portland in June, they had largely subsided and by September routinely featured 30 or fewer demonstrators and virtually no violence or requests for local police assistance.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/20/national-guard-deployment-oregon-ruling-00615660
““All of this is unprecedented,” John Sandweg, a former acting ICE director, tells POLITICO Magazine. “I don’t think we’ve ever seen a nationwide immigration enforcement effort like this.”
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he noted the Trump administration has revved up the agency’s raid strategy, leading to broad and indiscriminate sweeps to maximize arrests — regardless of people’s criminal record.
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What we have seen is that immigration enforcement has become probably the central priority for all U.S. law enforcement, the Department of Justice, the Department of Defense. This executive order has elevated this to the highest priority. I’ve never seen a whole government effort focused like this, even in the State Department. As a result of that, we’ve never seen an immigration enforcement effort like this. And that manifests itself in a lot of different ways, really quickly.
When you’re at ICE, of course you can run down to a Home Depot parking lot. Any administration could have done this: round the Home Depot parking lot, stop a bunch of day laborers and ID them. In car washes, in places where low-wage workers work, places like that. The reason that historically hasn’t been done, is you just don’t find criminals there. Once in a blue moon you find someone, and we see that the administration highlights when they get someone who has some criminal history. But by and large, your really serious criminal threats don’t do shifts at the local car wash for minimum wage. They’re out making their money, making a living as a criminal.
And so ICE has always focused our operations on getting those individuals — that takes more time, though. You’re taking lists of people who are criminally convicted and you’re identifying them, and then once you identify them, you’re doing research on addresses, and then you’re building a dossier and sending a team out to get them. The Obama administration deported a large number of people, but generally, a very high percentage of them were people who either just crossed the border or people with a serious criminal history.
This administration, though, is taking a different tack. This administration has repurposed the way they’ve operationalized ICE — to go out and get as many people as possible, and that’s why we’re seeing these raids on the car washes and on the Home Depot parking lots. They know they can make a large number of arrests there, and they don’t seem to care whether or not those people pose a threat to public safety. They just say, “If you’re undocumented, you’re a fair target.”
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This administration is going to want to get as many of these new agents out in the field as quickly as possible. Normally, to hire this many people, it would take the agency three, four years.
The problem is that the agency only has the capacity to do so many background checks at once, to interview so many people at once. The training academy can only train so many people at once. It would take years to fully deploy these agents. This administration clearly doesn’t want to wait.
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I spent five years at DHS working on ICE issues. It just wasn’t an issue. None of the officers felt the need to wear masks. I think it’s an unfortunate byproduct of the administration’s policies. This is a very contentious area of law, this idea that we’re not going to discern the difference between migrants who might be committing serious crimes and those who might have real long-term presence in the United States, young children and family members and things of that nature.
I hate that the agents are wearing the masks. I think it is hurting the reputation of the agency, and feeding a lot of these narratives about the agency. But I’m also sympathetic to the agents themselves, who need to protect themselves and their families. Like we just talked about, there are these upticks, these massive upticks in assaults on the agents. These threats against the agents are real, and there’s, unfortunately, a lot of people out there who can’t discern the difference between the administration and the policymakers and the agents themselves. And as a result of that, these agents feel compelled to take steps to protect themselves and their family, and I’m sympathetic to it.
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What’s different is who they’re targeting. Under Obama, under Biden and even to a certain extent, under the first Trump administration, there were priorities. The agents were told, “Focus first on the worst. Worst first. Get the worst bad guys off the street first, we’ll deal with everything else later.” Those rules are gone.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/10/14/former-ice-director-q-a-00603916
“Five years after the city’s fiery 2020 protests, Portland is mostly calm. That hasn’t stopped Trump from reviving old battles, fueled by false memories and made-for-TV outrage.
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there have been rocks and sticks thrown at ICE agents and the shining of lasers into officers’ eyes. According to recent reporting in The Oregonian, there have been 29 arrests during ICE protests this year, 18 of them in June. Still, most nights see a few dozen protesters at most. Comparing this to the 2,000-plus nightly protesters in 2020 is not just apples to oranges; it’s apples to an apple-flavored sugar crystal on an Apple Jack.
This clearly doesn’t matter to Trump, who has shown little to no interest in what’s actually happening, instead relying on historical memory of the city’s fiery days to animate the proposition that “war-ravaged” Portland must be made to heel.”
https://reason.com/2025/10/06/trumps-troops-return-to-a-city-that-moved-on-dispatch-from-portland/?nab=1
The Venezuelan military is involved in drug trafficking at the highest echelons.
Crime and corruption has consumed Venezuela. It is partly run and controlled by gangs and militias.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYlsn6vLVm4
“Using military personnel for domestic law enforcement is dangerous and fraught, and any political leader who does it should be held strictly accountable for the consequences. Given the absence of any real need for militarized law enforcement in Chicago, it would be a grave abuse of power for the president to send any troops there on a law-enforcement pretext — as it was when he mobilized the National Guard for law enforcement in Washington, D.C. But for more than one reason, that mobilization in D.C. is easier to defend constitutionally than sending the Texas National Guard to Chicago would be. Justifiably or not, constitutional law treats all of D.C. as an exception to the McCulloch principle: The people of D.C. are, as a general matter, subject to a lawmaking authority — Congress — that they play no part in electing. (That’s why some D.C. license plates bear the protest slogan, “Taxation Without Representation.”) But regardless of whether that exception is justified in D.C., it has absolutely no application in Illinois. Like Nebraskans and Pennsylvanians and Kansans, Illinoisians are constitutionally entitled to be constituents of whatever body governs them.
Any military force is likely to behave with less restraint toward a population to which its leaders are not responsible than toward a population to which its leaders must answer democratically. If the Texas National Guard behaves poorly in Chicago, the locals have no electoral mechanism for holding Texas authorities to account. The governor of Texas never appears on any ballot in Illinois. He has nothing to fear, politically, from the people his National Guard will police. Surely a militarization at the hands of a non-responsible power is no less tyrannical, and no more constitutional, than a tax imposed by one.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/09/09/chicago-protest-trump-national-guard-dangerous-00552873
The Kirk shooter so far seems to have no connections to anti-facist groups. “right wing” violence kills far more people than “left wing”. Of course, most left wing people and most right wing people have nothing to do with any of this violence.
Designating drug gangs and then domestic organizations as “terrorist” organizations could lead to persecuting political opponents not because they are somehow funding, or a part of, a terrorist organization, but because they are political opponents.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuftWWI3uM4
‘No evidence’ found yet of ties between Charlie Kirk’s shooting and left-wing groups, officials say
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/no-evidence-found-yet-ties-090000648.html
Criminals can steal your car’s key fob’s signal and use that to steal your car. This is causing insurance rates to go up. Some kids do this because Tik Tok teaches them how to do it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sTqw0Vfg-A
““We do need protection here,” said Mable Carter, 82. “I have to come down on the bus. It’s horrifying.”
There might be military units patrolling Union Station and public spaces where tourists often come, she said, but “none of them over here. They are armed — on the Mall. Ain’t nobody doing nothing on the Mall. It’s for show.”
Carter wants to see more police in this area — the city’s own police, under the direction of Chief Pamela Smith. “I’d rather see them give her a chance. She has the structure in place.”
The Pentagon, when asked if there were plans to deploy the National Guard to higher crime areas like Anacostia and who determines that, sent a list of stations where the military units were present as of late last month. None of those deployments included stations east of the Anacostia River.
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Like Carter, people would like more law enforcement resources, but they distrust the motives behind the surge and how it has usurped the authority of the mayor and local officers. And while they acknowledge crime is more serious here than most other areas of the district, it is nowhere near the levels of three decades ago, when the D.C. National Guard worked with the Metropolitan Police to address the violence.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/07/in-1-dc-neighborhood-after-federal-intervention-a-mixed-view-of-more-authority-00549954?fbclid=IwY2xjawMr9qNleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHvutC7qWw3ceE-Mrqu6bQr52yIHLg5tHooS703ENgGqh0ftBwRBxJ7jy-Rvp_aem_6QxikMxK9stiAymZ7HQvgQ