Tag Archives: United States District Court

Common Sense Scores A Small Victory

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In many schools across the nation, teachers are told not to share information with parents if a child is identifying as a gender different from their birth sex. The child can change clothes in school and be addressed by their ‘new’ name. Teachers are specifically told not to share this information with parents. In California, two teachers were fired for telling parents.

On Thursday, Red State reported:

In December, our Jeff Charles brought you the story of how two teachers from the Escondido Union School District teachers were placed on administrative leave after they refused to hide the gender identities of students from their parents, citing their religious beliefs. The pair sued, and in September 2023, Roger Benitez, Senior Judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of California, issued a preliminary injunction against the district and barred it from enforcing such policies.

The “new policy appears to undermine their own constitutional rights while it conflicts with knowledgeable medical opinion,” he wrote. 

On Wednesday, Benitez weighed in on the matter again and told the school to get the teachers back in the classroom:

The order from Judge Roger Benitez says the teachers, who haven’t been allowed in their classrooms since last May, must be allowed to return by next Tuesday, Jan. 15. In September, Benitez blocked their employer, Escondido Union School District, from forcing them to comply with their policy to socially transition kids to different gender identities behind their parents’ backs.

“Both sides are expected to work in good faith going forward to resolve this matter,” Benitez wrote Wednesday. 

The article concludes:

The issue boils down to rights: whose should be primary, the parent’s or the student’s?

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the 14th Amendment of the Constitution gives a lot of deference to parents regarding their children’s upbringing, education and care. But under California’s Education Code, students have certain privacy rights.

“That is the crux of the issue — what is more superior, a child’s right to privacy or a parent’s right to know about their child’s life?” said Jillian Duggan-Herd, a family law attorney.

More and more parents around the country are sounding off and making themselves heard, declaring that the answer is simple: the parents should parent, not the government, not schools. In my view, official policies at schools or businesses or government agencies requiring employees to lie or misinform are quite simply unethical, regardless of what subject they’re instructed to be dishonest about. 

Families are one of the foundations of our society. To exclude parents from such an important issue in their child’s life is to undermine that foundation.

How Much Did This Cost The Taxpayers?

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The Daily Wire posted an article today about the final required filing on Friday by Robert Mueller on the Paul Manafort case.

The article reports:

Mueller and his team made their final required filing in Manafort’s case late Friday, submitting a “government sentencing memorandum” to the United States District Court in Washington, D.C., justifying their request for a harsh, 17-year prison sentence against Manafort.

In it, the government argues that Manafort “chose repeatedly and knowingly to violate the law— whether the laws proscribed garden-variety crimes such as tax fraud, money laundering, obstruction of justice, and bank fraud, or more esoteric laws that he nevertheless was intimately familiar with, such as the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA),” both before and after he was under scrutiny by the Special Counsel.

Manafort’s portfolio of crimes include incidents going back more than a decade to 2005, to when Manafort was a lobbying the federal government on issues involving Russia and Ukraine. They run all the way up to last year, when Manafort was discovered to have engaged in witness tampering, even after he was indicted on tax fraud charges.

But what the government sentencing document — and Manafort’s apparent list of transgressions — doesn’t include is evidence of actual collusion with Russia during the course of the Trump for President campaign, the actual focus of Mueller’s investigation. Instead, the filing simply says that Manafort committed some of his crimes while under the “spotlight” of the campaign.

The filing is 25 pages long and barely mentions President Trump’s campaign. Collusion between candidate Trump and the Russian government is never mentioned.

The article concludes:

One item does seem to be from the correct era — an instance of “false statements to the Department of Justice” in late 2016, just before the presidential election — but those statements appear, based on the filing, to relate to Mueller’s (and before him, the Justice Department’s) investigation of his work with Ukraine. Instead of lying about something new, it seems Manafort was still covering for actions he took years earlier.

Mueller’s report is expected in early March, but so far, it seems, may have little in the way of evidence that the Trump campaign is guilty of collusion, as a number of Democrats desire.

Keep in mind that eight years ago Paul Manafort was investigated (and cleared) of most of the charges currently against him. The prosecutor that led the exoneration was Rod Rosenstein. Paul Manafort may not be as pure as the driven snow, but I strongly suspect the charges against him have more to do with the “insurance policy” discussed by the FBI than any actual crimes.

Texas Wins

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Yesterday Breitbart posted an article about the ongoing battle to institute a voter identification law in Texas.

The article reports:

A United States District Court judge dismissed the lawsuit which challenged the Texas voter ID law, announced Attorney General Ken Paxton late Monday.

The 2017 Texas voter ID law (SB 5) cleared its final hurdle when the Fifth Circuit honored a request made last month by the opponents of the state’s voter ID law to dismiss any remaining claims since the matter was settled and there was nothing left to pursue in this case. This marked the end of seven years of litigation over the state’s attempts to enact a voter ID law.

“I’m proud of the successful fight my office waged to defend Texas’ voter ID law,” said Paxton in a prepared statement. “With this major legal victory, voter ID requirements remain in place going forward to prevent fraud and ensure that election results accurately reflect the will of Texas voters.”

The following is from a rightwinggranny article in 2010. It is the story of True the Vote and their investigation into voter fraud in Houston:

“”The first thing we started to do was look at houses with more than six voters in them” Engelbrecht (Catherine Engelbrecht, founder of True the Vote) said, because those houses were the most likely to have fraudulent registrations attached to them. “Most voting districts had 1,800 if they were Republican and 2,400 of these houses if they were Democratic . . .

“”But we came across one with 24,000, and that was where we started looking.”


“Vacant lots had several voters registered on them. An eight-bed halfway house had more than 40 voters registered at its address,” Engelbrecht said. “We then decided to look at who was registering the voters.”

“Their work paid off. Two weeks ago the Harris County voter registrar took their work and the findings of his own investigation and handed them over to both the Texas secretary of state’s office and the Harris County district attorney.

“Most of the findings focused on a group called Houston Votes, a voter registration group headed by Sean Caddle, who formerly worked for the Service Employees International Union. Among the findings were that only 1,793 of the 25,000 registrations the group submitted appeared to be valid. The other registrations included one of a woman who registered six times in the same day; registrations of non-citizens; so many applications from one Houston Voters collector in one day that it was deemed to be beyond human capability; and 1,597 registrations that named the same person multiple times, often with different signatures.”

It is obvious from the above numbers that Texas has had a voter fraud problem. I suspect many other states have had similar problems. It will be interesting to see how election results change as voter fraud is cleaned up. That may be the reason some organizations are fighting so hard against voter identification laws.

The article at Breitbart concludes:

The president of the pro-voter ID Public Interest Legal Foundation, J. Christian Adams, praised the State’s work in defending the law over the years and suggests it can help prevent attacks from “external influences.”

“While the Office of the Texas Attorney General ably handled this case to protect against classic fraud, it also helped harden defenses against external influences and threats to our elections,” Adams said in a release. He challenged “well-funded” opponents of the law to instead “expend [their] resources to actually help people cast ballots.”

Breitbart Texas has reported on the growing number of voter fraud claims statewide which Paxton’s office has prosecuted, including in-person, mail-in ballot, and noncitizen voting cases. Also, the AG increasingly has assisted district attorneys in Texas counties and/or opened voter fraud investigations.

Let’s work together to make our elections more honest.

Laws Were Broken, Consequences Were Non-Existent

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Yesterday The Hill posted an article about violations of the civil liberties of Americans under the Obama Administration. I will try to highlight the article here, but I strongly suggest following the link above to read the full article. It is chilling in the fact that it illustrates how people in high office can use their position to violate the rights of other Americans. It is a very unusual day when I am in agreement with the American Civil Liberties Union, but they are right in this case.

The article reports:

The National Security Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation violated specific civil liberty protections during the Obama years by improperly searching and disseminating raw intelligence on Americans or failing to promptly delete unauthorized intercepts, according to newly declassified memos that provide some of the richest detail to date on the spy agencies’ ability to obey their own rules.

The memos reviewed by The Hill were publicly released on July 11 through Freedom of Information Act litigation by the American Civil Liberties Union.

The article reminds us:

“Americans should be alarmed that the NSA is vacuuming up their emails and phone calls without a warrant,” said Patrick Toomey, an ACLU staff attorney in New York who helped pursue the FOIA litigation. “The NSA claims it has rules to protect our privacy, but it turns out those rules are weak, full of loopholes, and violated again and again.”

Section 702 empowers the NSA to spy on foreign powers and to retain and use certain intercepted data that was incidentally collected on Americans under strict privacy protections. Wrongly collected information is supposed to be immediately destroyed.

The Hill reviewed the new ACLU documents as well as compliance memos released by the NSA inspector general and identified more than 90 incidents where violations specifically cited an impact on Americans. Many incidents involved multiple persons, multiple violations or extended periods of time.

The NSA’s chief spokesman, Michael T. Halbig, stated, “Quite simply, a compliance program that never finds an incident is not a robust compliance program.” The NSA has also stated that the violations amount to a small percentage when compared to the hundreds of thousands of specific phone numbers and email addresses the agencies intercepted through the so-called Section 702 warrantless spying program created by Congress in late 2008. In my opinion that doesn’t help the NSA’s case–a violation is still a violation.

The article further states:

“CIA and FBI received unminimized data from many Section 702-tasked facilities and at times are thus required to conduct similar purges,” one report noted.

“NSA issued a report which included the name of a United States person whose identity was not foreign intelligence,” said one typical incident report from 2015, which said the NSA eventually discovered the error and “recalled” the information.

Likewise, the FBI disclosed three instances between December 2013 and February 2014 of “improper disseminations of U.S. persons identities.”

Some of our government officials need to be held accountable for this violation of the civil rights of Americans. The people in leadership in the NSA and the FBI during the time of these violations need to be removed from office if they are still there. Jail time would be appropriate. I would like to remind everyone that spying on American citizens is not an authorized government activity. Whether it was for political reasons or other purposes, there need to be consequences.

Protecting Our Young Women

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This article was posted in The Daily Caller last month. I missed it, but I am posting it now because I think it is important.

Wikipedia states:

In 1996 the Federal Prohibition of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) Act made it illegal to perform FGM on minors for non-medical reasons, and in 2013 the Transport for Female Genital Mutilation Act prohibited transporting a minor out of the country for the purpose of FGM. In addition, 24 states have legislation banning FGM. The American Academy of Pediatrics opposes all forms of the practice. The firstFGM conviction in the US was in 2006, when Khalid Adem, who had emigrated from Ethiopia, was sentenced to ten years after severing his two-year-old daughter’s clitoris with a pair of scissors.

Unfortunately, some of the Muslim residents of America choose to ignore the law. Last week I posted an article about some recent arrests for performing FGM. We need to remember that Muslims who believe in Sharia Law believe that it supersedes the U.S. Constitution. They do not feel bound by the federal ban on FGM.

The article in The Daily Caller reports:

The American Civil Liberties Union launched a vocal opposition this week against a Maine bill criminalizing female genital mutilation (FGM), Mainely Media reports.

Republican Rep. Heather Sirocki is sponsoring the bill, saying that it would classify performing FGM as a Class B crime in the state, punishable by up to 10 years in prison and a $20,000 fine. The bill would also punish the parent or guardian of the victim.

However, the Maine ACLU staunchly opposes the protection. ACLU spokesman Oamshri Amarasingham said that the risk of mutilation isn’t worth expanding Maine’s criminal code. The Maine Coalition Against Sexual Assault also supported the ACLU, arguing that FGM is not happening in Maine.

…The bill, LD745, only criminalizes the practice on those under 18. It does not apply to adults who choose to undergo mutilation, “though it probably should,” Sirocki said. If the bill passes, Maine would be the 25th state to protect its residents against FGM.

Sirocki said that the Committee of Criminal Justice and Public Safety was divided in its support of the bill, but eventually recommended the bill favorably with a 7-5 vote. The Maine House of Representatives will first review the bill, then it will go to the members of the state senate.

FGM is a brutal practice, often done without anesthesia, that can result in serious health problems for women later on. It does not belong in America. I don’t understand why the ACLU is not protecting young women from being subjected to this practice.

 

Closer To The Truth

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The Daily Caller posted an article today about the ongoing quest for Hillary Clinton’s emails.

The article reports:

A federal judge has ordered Hillary Clinton and two of her top aides at the State Department, Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills, to attest, under penalty of perjury, that they have turned over all official government records in their possession.

…In his ruling, Sullivan (U.S. District Court judge Emmett Sullivan) ordered the Staet Department to “identify any and all servers, accounts, hard drives, or other devices currently in the possession or control of the State Department or otherwise that may contain responsive information.”

The State Department must also request that Clinton, Abedin and Mills “confirm, under penalty of perjury, that they have produced all responsive information that was or is in their possession as a result of their employment at the State Department.”

“If all such information has not yet been produced, the Government shall request the above named individuals produce the information forthwith,” Sullivan ruled.

The State Department must also require the trio “describe, under penalty of perjury, the extent to which Ms. Abedin and Ms. Mills used Mrs. Clinton’s email server to conduct official government business.”

The use of a private email server was illegal. It also posed a security risk because the private server did not have the anti-hacking software that would have been on the government server. It would probably be easier to ask the Chinese to give us everything that was on Mrs. Clinton’s server. Chances are that they have it.

And The Next Step Is?????

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There is such a thing as a slippery slope. In terms of upending the concept of traditional marriage–a union between one man and one woman– that slope began with Lawrence v. Texas in 2003. This was the case that struck down sodomy laws in Texas and thirteen other states. While I question the idea of the government having any jurisdiction in what goes on between consenting adults in their own homes, this case opened a true Pandora’s Box. Those who support homosexual marriage say that there will be no further definition of marriage other than to allow homosexual couples to marry. However, that does not seem to be the case. Yesterday World Net Daily posted a story showing a situation that should give pause to all of us.

The story reports:

Norman MacArthur and Bill Novak, father and son, though not biologically, will soon be husband and … whatever, reports the Patch of Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

The pair, both in their 70s, have been together for 50 years and registered in New York City as domestic partners in 1994. But when they moved to Pennsylvania, they discovered their domestic partnership wasn’t recognized, and legalized same-sex marriage was nowhere on the horizon.

…When the United States District Court declared unconstitutional Pennsylvania’s marriage laws prohibiting same-sex marriage unconstitutional in 2014, Novak and MacArthur wanted to tie the knot in marriage, but their earlier legal gambit now became an obstacle. Pennsylvania law doesn’t permit marriage between parents and children.

…So, a week ago, the father and son’s Petition to Vacate Adoption Decree was approved, and the pair simply became two single men now allowed to marry.

So let’s look at this. They were not actually father and son, so they were able to dissolve that relationship in the courts. However, what would happen if a parent and child wanted to marry? Could the parent disown the child and proceed? Homosexual marriage redefines the traditional definition of marriage. To people who hold a Biblical view of homosexuality and of marriage, it is not acceptable. To people who simply believe in tradition, homosexual marriage in not acceptable. There are two possible answers here that might make things a little more palatable for both sides–one is to simply make marriage a civil matter and let the churches perform whatever marriages they choose (no penalty to churches who do not want to perform homosexual marriages) or to give civil unions the same legal rights and benefits as marriage. Neither is a perfect solution, but I believe both are fair to each side of the argument.

The gay community needs to understand that there are people in our society that simply do not condone what they are doing–just as they often do not condone the practice of Biblical Christianity. Equal under the law is not a concept that allows people to randomly sue other people who do not share their views. Unfortunately our society has forgotten that. We have had thousands of years where marriage was between a man and a woman. This has been an important building block of our civilization, and I believe we tamper with that building block at our own risk.

 

 

The Supreme Court Gets One Right

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The Attleboro Massachusetts Sun Chronicle is reporting today that the Supreme Court has rejected an appeal from Robert Kosilek to have the taxpayers pay for his sex-change operation. Robert (now being called Michelle) is serving a life sentence for killing spouse Cheryl Kosilek at their Mansfield condo in 1990. He then placed her body in her car and drove her to Emerald Square Mall in North Attleboro, and took a taxi home. He then reported her missing.

The article reports:

The inmate has waged a lengthy fight for the surgery she says is necessary to relieve the mental anguish caused by gender-identity disorder.   

Last year, a divided federal appeals court in Boston overturned a first-in-the-nation court order for the state to provide the sex-reassignment surgery. Courts around the country have found that prisons must evaluate transgender inmates to determine their health care needs, but most have ordered hormone treatments and psychotherapy, not surgery.

It does not concern me whether or not Robert has the operation he desires. What does concern me is that a murderer expects the taxpayers to fund optional surgery. It is obvious that Robert has some serious issues, whatever they may be, but I do not think it is up to the taxpayers to resolve them with extreme elective surgery. I am also not convinced that anything will resolve these issues. It is one thing to want a sex-change operation, it is quite another thing to murder your wife and try to get away with it. This is one case in which I wish Massachusetts had the death penalty. Mr. Kosilek needs to be shown the same amount of mercy that he showed his wife.

The Obama Administration Has Forgotten Its Responsibility To Enforce The Law

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Yesterday The Daily Caller posted an article about a lawsuit in Arizona. The lawsuit

The article reports:

A career attorney with top ratings at Immigration and Customs Enforcement says that she faced retaliation from superiors for refusing to drop cases pending against illegal aliens guilty of DUI, identity theft and other crimes.

Patricia Vroom, 59, made the claims in a lawsuit filed last week in U.S. District Court of Appeals in Arizona against Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson.

Many of the cases involved were identify theft and other low-level crimes. Ms. Vroom was “instructed to look favorably for prosecutorial discretion on immigration removal cases involving the lowest level of felony convictions for identity theft under Arizona law.”

Think about this for a minute. These are felony convictions. The idea here is to allow convicted felons to stay in America illegally. Don’t we have enough convicted felons that are here legally?

The article further reports:

Vroom also claims that on Nov. 5, 2013, Downer emailed her concerning the case of an individual who was found ineligible for relief under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which was started by President Obama, because of an ID theft conviction.

Unknown to Vroom at the time, top ICE and DHS officials had discussed that individual case on a conference call in August 2013.

An angry Downer emailed Vroom on Nov. 5, 2013, demanding to know why she had been unable to convince her field office director to cancel the “notice to appear” order for the alien.

Our immigration laws are currently not being enforced. They do need to be revised and brought up to date, but we do not need amnesty–we need common sense. I strongly suggest that rather than having an overactive President and a lame-duck Congress rewrite our immigration laws, we let the new Congress write them–after discussion and deliberation. Hopefully our new Congress will have some respect for the concept of making sure laws are enforced and will have some respect for the wishes of the American people.

It’s Easier To Rewrite History If You Delete The Actual Records

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I never thought I would agree with Patrick Leahy {Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont)}, but in this case he is absolutely right. Eastman’s Online Geneology Newsletter posted an article yesterday about Senator Leahy’s fight to preserve court records that have recently been erased by the government due to a computer update.

The article reports:

“Wholesale removal of thousands of cases from PACER, particularly from four of our federal courts of appeals, will severely limit access to information not only for legal practitioners, but also for legal scholars, historians, journalists, and private litigants for whom PACER has become the go-to source for most court filings,” Leahy wrote Friday to US District Judge John D. Bates, the director of the Administrative Office of the Courts (AO).

A spokesperson for the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts said the removals were due to technical differences between the archives maintained by local courts and a new electronic case file system being adopted by the judiciary. The documents are still available on paper but were deleted from online access “without any warning to the public, and without prior notification or consultation with Congress,” according to Senator Leahy.

This may be a totally innocent event, but it is an example of how history can easily be rewritten because so much of our records are digital. When information was in printed books, revising that information was more complicated than it is today. The downside of record books is that there was a period in American history when courthouses would catch fire, burn quickly because of all the records in them, and those records would be lost. Now, in the electronic age, we face the challenge of losing electronic records because the electronic platforms change. When was the last time you watched a videotape rather than a DVD?

Thank you, Senator Leahy, for trying to save the deleted records. I am sure there will be many lawyers and genealogists who will be grateful for your efforts.

A Small Step Forward For Religious Freedom In America

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No one has yet argued that Christians have the right to practice their faith in their churches, but ObamaCare has raised the question as to whether they are permitted to practice their faith outside their churches and even in the business world. Two of the major players in the legal fight to defend religious principles in regard to ObamaCare are Hobby Lobby and the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church has recently won a significant victory.

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air is reporting today that New York, US District Court Judge Brian Cogan ruled that the HHS mandate forces the Catholic Church and its associated organizations to curtail its religious expression, and enjoined HHS from enforcing it.

Ed Morrissey points out that the HHS mandate on birth control is not a legislative mandate and was never passed by Congress. This is a regulatory mandate.

The article reports the Judge’s statement:

Cogan ruled the plaintiffs “demonstrated that the mandate, despite accommodation, compels them to perform acts that are contrary to their religion. And there can be no doubt that the coercive pressure here is substantial.”

“They consider this to be an endorsement of such coverage; to them, the self-certification compels affirmation of a repugnant belief,” Cogan wrote. “It is not for this Court to say otherwise.”

The article looks at this decision in the light of the coming case regarding Hobby Lobby and how that will impact the implementation of ObamaCare on the whole. Please follow the link to read the article and see why this case matters.

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What’s Next?

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On Friday, The Salt Lake Tribune reported that Judge Clark Waddoups has ruled that key parts of Utah’s polygamy laws are unconstitutional. The judge’s ruling essentially decriminalizes polygamy.

The article reports:

Waddoups’ ruling attacks the parts of Utah’s law making cohabitation illegal. In the introduction, Waddoups says the phrase “or cohabits with another person” is a violation of both the First and 14th amendments. Waddoups later writes that while there is no “fundamental right” to practice polygamy, the issue really comes down to “religious cohabitation.” In the 1800s — when the mainstream LDS Churh still practiced polygamy — “religious cohabitation” in Utah could have actually resulted in “multiple purportedly legal marriages.” Today, however, simply living together doesn’t amount to being “married,” Waddoups writes.

“The court finds the cohabitation prong of the Statute unconstitutional on numerous grounds and strikes it,” Waddoups later writes.

This ruling is not good news for the American family. It is a step toward recognizing polygamy as legal marriage. It is also a step toward changing the definition of marriage and family. Since the family has been the foundation  of our society, what happens when you weaken that foundation? What will be the next group of people to have their relationships declared legal marriages?

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The Key To Racial Equality Is Equal Education For All Children

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One of the major keys to racial equality is to make sure that children of all races have access to a good education. Because of the makeup of most of our major cities, the only way to achieve that is through vouchers and school choice. Most Republicans have been encouraging these programs for years. Unfortunately, because of their relationship to the Teachers’ Unions, the Democrats have worked very hard to oppose both vouchers and school choice.

Yesterday John Hinderaker posted an article at Power Line detailing the latest battle on the school choice front. The source for the Power Line article is a Fox News story from yesterday.

One of the unexpected consequences of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans was the birth of a new school system. Many failing schools were replaced by Charter Schools and other schools that were not failing. Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal has worked very hard to provide children in New Orleans a good alternative to the failing city public schools. However, the Justice Department is blocking his efforts.

Fox News reports:

The Justice Department is trying to stop a school vouchers program in Louisiana that attempts to help families send their children to independent schools instead of under-performing public schools.

The agency wants to stop the program, led by Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal, in any school district that remains under a desegregation court order.

In papers filed in U.S. District Court in New Orleans, the agency said Louisiana distributed vouchers in 2012-13 to roughly 570 public school students in districts that are still under such orders and that “many of those vouchers impeded the desegregation process.”

The federal government argues that allowing students to attend independent schools under the voucher system could create a racial imbalance in public school systems protected by desegregation orders.

John Hinderaker at Power Line states:

This Louisiana case is typical: Holder wants to keep the archaic residue of the civil rights movement alive forever, as a club with which to beat the Southern states, and as a means of screwing African-Americans. After all, if blacks can’t escape from terrible schools, their employment prospects will be lousy. They likely will be welfare-dependent, and therefore reliable Democratic voters for decades to come. That is, as best one can infer it from the facts, the calculation that Obama and Holder have made.

Eric Holder’s Justice Department is a disgrace. They have become totally political. I would suggest that Eric Holder be replaced, except that I think President Obama would simply find someone equally bad.

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New Heights In Insanity

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Yesterday the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) posted an article about their filing an amicus brief to defend the World Trade Center cross. This is the story:

The legal argument is absurd. American Atheists, which has filed a lawsuit to remove a cross from the new museum at Ground Zero, is making some astonishing claims.

The atheists say they are suffering both physical and emotional damages from the existence of the cross. That’s the right. The mere existence of this memorial has brought on headaches, indigestion, even mental pain. They even make a bizarre suggestion about erecting a “17-foot-high A for Atheists” to promote their non-beliefs at the site.

These claims are ridiculous. And so is the lawsuit. In just a matter of days, we will be filing a critical amicus brief defending this Ground Zero cross, which consists of two intersecting steel beams that survived the Twin Towers collapse on 9-11. We have a unique opportunity to not only urge the court to reject this flawed lawsuit, but to send a powerful message to the court: that more than 100,000 Americans are standing with us in this brief – urging the court to keep this powerful memorial in place.

If you haven’t signed your name yet, there’s still time to do that. Add your name to our brief now. We want to top the 100,000 mark. And we need your help to do it. Add your name here.

The National September 11 Memorial & Museum already has filed papers with the court defending the cross.

According to the museum, the cross is an “important and essential artifact” that “comprises a key component of the retelling of the story of 9/11, in particular the role of faith in the events of the day and, particularly, during the recovery efforts.” As the museum correctly points out: the 9/11 Museum is “not in the business of providing equal time for faiths, we are in the business of telling the story of 9/11 and the victims of 9/11.”

Absolutely correct.

If you choose to get involved, here is what to do:

Add your name to our brief defending this Ground Zero cross now.

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The Latest Ruling On The New Black Panthers Voter Intimidation Case

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Today’s Washington Examiner is reporting that a federal court has determined that some of President Obama’s political appointees interfered with the Department of Justice prosecution of the New Black Panthers voter intimidation case. Judicial Watch had sued the Department of Justice to enforce a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for documents. The documents were eventually obtained. The current lawsuit involved reimbursement for attorneys fees.

The article cites the writing of United States District Court Judge Reggie Walton:

The documents reveal that political appointees within DOJ were conferring about the status and resolution of the New Black Panther Party case in the days preceding the DOJ’s dismissal of claims in that case, which would appear to contradict Assistant Attorney General Perez’s testimony that political leadership was not involved in that decision. Surely the public has an interest in documents that cast doubt on the accuracy of government officials’ representations regarding the possible politicization of agency decision-making.
…
In sum, the Court concludes that three of the four fee entitlement factors weigh in favor of awarding fees to Judicial Watch. Therefore, Judicial Watch is both eligible and entitled to fees and costs, and the Court must now consider the reasonableness of Judicial Watch’s requested award.

Wow.

The article concludes:

“The Court’s decision is another piece of evidence showing the Obama Justice Department is run by individuals who have a problem telling the truth,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said. “The decision shows that we can’t trust the Obama Justice Department to fairly administer our nation’s voting and election laws.”

Incidents like this need to be remembered when all of us vote in November.

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