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Criminally Stupid Comes to the Border
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Criminally Stupid Comes to the Border
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[caption id="attachment_313191" align="aligncenter" width="512"]militia Members of the United Constitutional Patriots patrolling the border in Sunland Park, N.M., last month[/caption]

This is how a bad situation potentially gets completely out of control quickly, and authorities are right to jump all over it.

The F.B.I. on Saturday arrested the leader of a right-wing militia that was detaining migrant families at gunpoint near the border in southern New Mexico, as the group faced a torrent of criticism for its tactics.

Hector Balderas, New Mexico’s attorney general, said federal agents had arrested the leader, Larry Mitchell Hopkins, who had been operating under the alias Johnny Horton Jr. Mr. Balderas said in a statement that Mr. Hopkins was arrested on charges of firearms possession by a felon.

“This is a dangerous felon who should not have weapons around children and families,” Mr. Balderas said. “Today’s arrest by the F.B.I. indicates clearly that the rule of law should be in the hands of trained law enforcement officials, not armed vigilantes.”

The firearms charge against Mr. Hopkins is relatively minor. But it is likely the start of a deeper investigation into his activities and those of the militia, and opens the way for the authorities to bring more serious charges like kidnapping and impersonating a police officer or an employee of the United States.

Mr. Hopkins’s arrest comes as tensions rise over ultraconservative paramilitary groups operating along the southwestern border. Professed militias have a long history of targeting immigrants from Latin America, tracing back to the Ku Klux Klan’s creation of its own border patrol in the 1970s. Record numbers of Central American migrants apprehended by federal authorities in recent months have been accompanied by a new surge in militia activity on the border.

The organization led by Mr. Hopkins, the United Constitutional Patriots, recently uploaded videos of armed members detaining children and their parents in a stretch of the New Mexico desert near El Paso, before handing the migrants over to the Border Patrol.

This is so simple it defies common sense that it has to be explained, but here goes: unless you are sworn and duly recognized law enforcement, you have no business whatsoever acting like you are. Never, in the history of ever, has armed groups of vigilantes wearing masks accomplished something good, and most of the time it ends in something very, very bad happening. You cannot enforce laws by breaking them, and it doesn't matter what position you take on the border, immigration, or anything else -- if you arm yourself and start detaining people you are now the unlawful one. Authorities are correct to crack down on this, and swiftly.

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Elizabeth Warren Goes There
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Elizabeth Warren Goes There
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[caption id="attachment_183441" align="aligncenter" width="512"]Warren Elizabeth Warren speaks to protestors during the Kavanaugh Confirmation Hearings[/caption]

Those of you wondering which of the major 2020 presidential candidates would call for impeachment first, wonder no more. If you had Senator Elizabeth Warren, come collect your prize.

NBC News:

Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Friday became the first Democratic presidential candidate to call on the House to begin impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump.

Warren, of Massachusetts, said her announcement was based on the findings of special counsel Robert Mueller.

"The severity of this misconduct demands that elected officials in both parties set aside political considerations and do their constitutional duty," she tweeted. "That means the House should initiate impeachment proceedings against the President of the United States."

Before Warren's statement, another 2020 candidate, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, told reporters at a campaign stop in New Hampshire that the senators in the race seemed to be choosing their words carefully on the issue.

"I think you’ve seen all the senators are very cautious about talking about this because we would be the jury if there was any kind of an action brought over from the House," she said, adding that "the key thing" for her was to have special counsel Robert Mueller testify before the Judiciary Committee.

A spokeswoman for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif, responding to Warren's call, said, “As the speaker has said repeatedly, one step at a time."

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The Mueller Report, Presented by AG William Barr: Discussion Thread
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The Mueller Report, Presented by AG William Barr: Discussion Thread
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[caption id="attachment_312960" align="aligncenter" width="512"]mueller William Barr takes his oath of office AG[/caption]

UPDATE: link to report can be found here: Original post follows.

AG William Barr is giving a press conference before releasing the Mueller Report first to congress then to the public.

WaPo:

Attorney General William P. Barr on Thursday is expected to submit to Congress and make public a redacted version of the 400-page report written by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and his team that will reveal much about President Trump’s actions in office.

Barr plans to hold a 9:30 a.m. news conference to address “process questions” and provide an “overview of the report,” a senior Justice Department official said. The report will be delivered on discs to Capitol Hill between 11 a.m. and noon and posted on the special counsel’s website thereafter, the official said.

Until now, the only information about Mueller’s findings from his 22-month investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections had been provided by Barr in a four-page letter to Congress last month in which he described the special counsel’s “principal conclusions.”

This post will be updated as information comes out throughout the day.

UPDATE: Well, that didn't take long...

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An Icon Burns Along the Seine
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An Icon Burns Along the Seine
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We haven't done an architecture post in a while, and shame on us for that. Horrifying it has to be for a reason like this. Notre Dame in Paris is burning, and is very much in danger of complete destruction.

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Julian Assange Evicted, Arrested in London
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Julian Assange Evicted, Arrested in London
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Well then...Ecuador had finally had enough of Julian Assange.

NY Times:

Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder who released reams of secret documents that embarrassed the United States government, was taken into police custody on Thursday after being evicted from the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he has lived for almost seven years.

The Metropolitan Police said in a statement that Mr. Assange had been arrested by officers at the embassy on a warrant issued by Westminster Magistrates’ Court in 2012, for failing to surrender to the court.

The United States Justice Department has filed criminal charges against Mr. Assange, 47, related to the publication of classified documents, a fact that prosecutors accidentally made public in November. He also faces a charge in a British court of jumping bail.

Mr. Assange is also suspected of aiding Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election by releasing material stolen from the computers of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party. In July, the Justice Department charged 12 Russian intelligence officers with hacking those computers, and the indictment contends that at least one of them was in contact with WikiLeaks.

Assange first holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy to avoid an arrest warrant from Sweden on a rape charge back in 2012. That warrant was rescinded, but Assange has outstanding legal issues in both the US and UK, the later for jumping bail and in the States where his sealed federal indictment was accidentally revealed in court filings back in November. Meanwhile, Assange relationship with the Ecuadorian government had long since soured, with President Moreno especially looking to offload him since his election in 2017. They finally did. Now in UK custody, the legal and diplomatic wrangling on who gets their hands on Julian Assange first begins. Much more to come from this story.

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  • 2019-04-22 2:42 pm
    To CJColucci
    A Polish Joke
    Avatarpillsy

    One reason I went the route I did with my response is I didn't want to just bring facts into the discussion for a change. We spend an awful lot of time around here arguing about what the facts are, and not, IMO, enough discussing why our perceptions differ.

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