Zachary Rehl following his release from a wholly unjustified sentence, via Wikipedia Commons.
On January 20, 2025, President Trump pardoned the vast majority of the Capitol kerfufflers, but there were 14 for whom he only commuted their sentences, and did not pardon their convictions. Now four remaining injustices have been corrected: Continue reading
On this last day of ‘Pride month,’ the United States Supreme Court voted that common sense and normal behavior were inshrined in our laws and Constitution. Naturally, the left are aghast. From NBC News:
Supreme Court upholds bans on transgender athletes in girls’ and women’s sports
In the latest of a string of losses for LGBTQ rights, the high court allowed states to bar transgender athletes from girls’ and women’s sports.
by Lawrence Hurley | Tuesday, June 30, 2026 | 10:04 AM EDT | Updated: 10:08 AM EDT
WASHINGTON — Delivering another major blow to LGBTQ rights, the Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld state laws that ban transgender athletes from participating in girls’ and women’s sports.
How can an agency in the Executive Branch be “independent” from the president?
Justices Overturn 1935 Precedent, Backing President’s Power to Remove Agency Heads
The Supreme Court on Monday handed President Trump a sweeping victory over the administrative state, ruling that Congress cannot shield the heads of independent regulatory agencies from presidential removal, and overturning a landmark 1935 precedent that had underpinned the modern regulatory framework for nearly a century.
The 6-3 decision in Trump v. Slaughter arose from the President’s firing of two Democratic-appointed Federal Trade Commission commissioners, Rebecca Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya, at the start of his second term. Trump cited his constitutional authority under Article II rather than any cause recognized by the FTC’s governing statute, which permits removal only for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”
Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts concluded that the FTC’s for-cause removal protection is incompatible with the Constitution’s vesting of executive power in a single President. Officers who exercise executive power, the Court held, must remain accountable to the President — and accountability requires the ability to remove them at will.
The ruling explicitly overturned Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, which had carved out an exception to presidential removal authority for agencies exercising so-called quasi-legislative and quasi-judicial functions. The Court found that characterization had never made sense and had become increasingly untenable as the FTC’s powers expanded to cover virtually every corner of the American economy.
The decision’s reach extends well beyond the FTC, potentially exposing the leadership of dozens of independent agencies — including the SEC, CFTC, and NLRB — to at-will presidential removal.
If the POTUS doesn’t have control of an agency that what is the POTUS? The only way to shield these people is to pass a law out of the Legislative Branch and have a POTUS sign said law. Or refuse to sign but not veto, allowing it to become law with no action. The above article does briefly mention that SCOTUS held that the president has less power to fire a member of the Federal Reserve in a companion ruling, but, mostly because Lisa Cook was not given time to respond. More on that here.
And another big ruling that Trump lost
SCOTUS Rules 5-4 to Permit Counting of Mail-In Ballots that Arrive After Election Day
The Supreme Court (SCOTUS) ruled that state laws allowing for the counting of mail-in ballots after election day are not in violation of federal law, a blow to the Republican National Committee and President Donald Trump’s administration.
On Monday, SCOTUS issued a 5-4 ruling that permits states to count mail-in ballots — sent on or before election day — that are received by state election officials after election day.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote the majority’s opinion, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts as well as Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
“Two principles are important here. First, post-election-day receipt, considered on its own, does not conflict with the election-day statutes,” the Court writes:
Well, I kind of agree. If they were postmarked, and there really must be a clear, real postmark, then they should be counted per state law, since the Constitution gives states this power to set laws. I also understand this point by Alito
But if that is all that the election-day statutes require, there is no sense in which the electorate as a whole can be seen as making its choice on election day. Rather, the electorate’s choice would be made piecemeal over an extended period prior to election day, and that prospect is blatantly contrary to what the election-day statutes demand. [Emphasis added]
Election day is a specified date, not a span of multiple days. The election-day statutes require that federal elections occur on that date. Under the challenged Mississippi law, however, the collection of ballots continues for five more days, and therefore the “election” is not held until the end of that period. Because federal law requires that the election occur on election day, it preempts Mississippi’s statute. [Emphasis added]
But, unless the Court wants to rule to kill vote by mail and early voting, the laws, federal Constitution, and state Constitutions allow mail in. This will allow for challenges over postmarkes.
It seems as though I wrote too soon. Yes, the previous article, Larry Krasner gets bitch-slapped by the state Supreme Court, remains accurate and valid, but just this morning, only a few hours after the previous post was published here and on the American Free News Network, readers of The Philadelphia Inquirer are learning that the District Attorney’s Office has gotten yet another slap across the mouth, from another court.
A former supervisor in DA Larry Krasner’s office has been suspended in federal court
The development comes just one day after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court sharply curtailed Krasner’s office’s ability to seek to overturn old convictions and accused its lawyers of misleading judges.
We have frequently criticized Philadelphia’s George Soros-sponsored, criminal-loving and police-hating District Attorney, Larry Krasner, a former criminal defense attorney, but hey, this is just an evil, reich-wing source, so our criticisms can be simply written off as just more evil, conservative hate, right?
But what if some of that criticism comes from the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which is controlled by Democrats?
Pa. Supreme Court blasts DA Larry Krasner’s office, saying it misled judges in seeking to vacate old murder convictions
In a forceful and scolding opinion, the state’s high court said Krasner’s office “violated its duty of candor” and ruled the state attorney general’s office must now review cases it seeks to overturn.
To the surprise of absolutely no one, it seems that there were warning signs known to the police about Caleb Vazquez, one of the killers in the San Diego mosque shooting. From London’s left-wing The Guardian:
One of shooters in deadly attack at San Diego mosque was previously flagged by FBI
Officials seized guns from Caleb Vazquez’s father last year amid alarm over teen’s views on mass shooters and Nazism
by José Olivares | Friday, May 22, 2026 | 12:45 PM EDT
One of the two white supremacist shooters who attacked a mosque in California on Monday and killed three people had already been on law enforcement officials’ radar, according to US media reports.
Local officials were so alarmed by Caleb Vazquez’s idolization of mass shooters and Nazism that they seized his father’s guns a year before the shooting, the New York Times reports. Similarly, Bloomberg reports that Vazquez had already been flagged by the FBI as a “potential threat” last year.
Eighteen-year-old Vazquez and his friend, Cain Clark, 17, attacked the Islamic Center of San Diego earlier this week and killed three men, including a security guard who exchanged gunfire with the attackers and prevented them from reaching 140 schoolchildren. The two shooters then died from self-inflicted gunshot wounds in their getaway car.
Further down:
Vazquez was already on law enforcement’s radar, after someone flagged to officials troubling social media posts. In a protective order last year, a police officer wrote that Vazquez was involved in “suspicious behavior” that idolized Nazis and mass shooters, prompting officials to seize Vazquez’s father’s guns. Vazquez had also been placed in an involuntary psychiatric hold, the Times reported.
Vazquez’s father and his wife had 26 guns, including pistols, rifles and shotguns in their home. The father wrote in an affidavit that he had voluntarily put the weapons in a storage facility because of concerns about his son. The court ordered him to voluntarily turn over his guns to officials.
So, law enforcement knew about young Mr Vasquez at least, though there are still no reports that I have seen indicating either of the two shooters had previous criminal records. The New York Post reported that Mr Vazquez had:
walked away from a mental health facility the day before carrying out Monday’s deadly attack, sources said.
Caleb Vazquez, 18, left the Park Mental Health Treatment Center the morning before killing three people at an Islamic center with 17-year-old Cain Clark, law enforcement sources told The Post.
So, the police knew about Mr Vazquez, and the family’s firearms were taken away, and he had been receiving some apparently-not-very-effective mental health treatment, yet he still went on a killing spree. Why, it’s almost as though the policies that the left advocate didn’t work in this case.
Mr Vazquez was reported to be somewhere on the autism spectrum, though that term is so over-diagnosed and overused as to make it practically meaningless.
Messrs Clark and Vazquez had apparently been interested in radical videos, so watch for our good friends on the left want to censor our freedom of speech and of the press because a few nutbags might be radicalized. After all, they tried it before, during Joe Biden’s four unfortunate years! The New Republic blamed Kamala Harris Emhoff’s election loss on freedom of speech, and we have reported many times on now thankfully former President Biden’s attempt to create a Ministry of Truth under the Department of Fatherland Security, called the “Disinformation Governance Board”, and how we were fortunate that it failed. The left were aghast when Elon Musk was trying to buy Twitter, because they were afraid that conservatives might use Twitter more successfully, and the very lovely Taylor Lorenz, who wants to force us all to wear face masks forever, blamed the failure of that Board on “right-wing attacks.” My good friend — we’re such good friends that she has blocked me on Bluesky — Amanda Marcotte, who exercises her own freedom of speech and of the press on Salon, wanted the government to take over Twitter while The Philadelphia Inquirer’s far-left columnist Will Bunch suggested it “should exist more as a semi-public utility than as an entity that a man with a spare $44 billion can just light on fire.”
So, I’m waiting on yet another attack by the left to censor things that don’t like. To have a free society is to assume greater risks for that freedom. People could, after all, be far safer from crime, from revolutionaries, from all sorts of things in places like China or North Korea.
There’s some silliness in Earl Ofari Hutchinson’s concluding statement about the San Diego mosque killings:
(Cain) Clark and (Caleb) Vazquez’s hideous rampage almost certainly would have been treated as a murder, charges if they had lived. But in the hands of the Trump DOJ they may well not have been slapped with federal hate crime charges. This glaring laxity is just enough space for the Cains and Vazquez’s of America to run loose.
Uhhh, the killers are stone-cold graveyard dead; there’s not a lot more we could do to them at this point.
Why the San Diego Mosque’s Shooters Continue to Run Loose
Many police departments see hate crime data as a politically loaded minefield, leaving the FBI blind to the true scale of civil rights violence.
by Earl Ofari Hutchinson | Wednesday, May 20, 2026
At a news conference within hours after the shooting rampage at the San Diego Mosque, the San Diego Police Chief said the obvious: “The shooting would be investigated as a hate crime until it’s not.” His add-on, “it’s not,” gave with one hand and took back with the other on the issue of whether the rampage was a hate crime.
The FBI was only marginally less equivocal about whether the shooting was a hate crime. A top official promised to leave no stone unturned and said, “There was definitely hate rhetoric that was involved.” But he also gave with one hand and took back with the other. He quickly added that he did not see the murderous attack as “a specific threat to the mosque.”
The police are usually circumspect in issuing statements like this; is it any surprise that they were so this time?
The irony is that the alleged shooters, Clark Cain and Caleb Vazquez, left little doubt as to why they shot up the mosque. In what’s usual in these kinds of mass killings, the shooters leave a disjointed journal filled with scribblings that spew hate against Blacks, Jews, and Muslims. The pair did the same. If ever there was a smoking gun on a hate motive for the killing, they provided it with their diatribes against Blacks, Jews, and Muslims.
But why should that surprise? Surveys have repeatedly shown that hate crimes, violence, harassment, and threats against Muslims have been almost the norm in many circles. Dozens of neo-Nazis, anti-government, white supremacist groups, and tens of thousands of individuals spew hate with aplomb. The site’s writers lambaste blacks, Jews, gays, and are unabashed in praise of Hitler. They perennially exhort their readers and followers to arm themselves to the teeth against the imagined assault by the federal government on white people’s rights. It was virtually a given that the murders would fire the horde of racists up and ignite a frenzy of debate, speculation, denial, and even veiled acquiescence to the murders.
In reading those two paragraphs, I see no evidence or even allegations of a crime prior to the killings. Their speech was certainly offensive, but offensive speech is part of our freedom of speech. If people’s “scribblings . . . spew hate against Blacks, Jews, and Muslims,” are there not other people spewing hatred of whites and Christians and really normal people in general? Does Mr Hutchinson want the Geheime Staatspolizei to search every computer posting, or perhaps search people’s homes for written journals looking for hate speech? We have reported many times on the FBI under the Biden Administration and Attorney General Merrick Garland surveilling “radical traditionalist Catholics” looking for “domestic violent extremists”, before the program was made public and embarrassment made the FBI shut it down, and even then FBI Director Christopher Wray lied through his scummy teeth about the extent of it.
However, even when the Cains and Vazquezes are known, tracked, monitored, and surveilled, and worse commit hate acts, they often evade full punishment. This has nothing to do with the First Amendment, but rather muddled, confused, and outright lax enforcement and prosecution of hate acts. Even when the FBI and local law enforcement agencies ID them for their propensity for violence, their hands are still tied.
The author keeps mistakenly referring to Cain Clark as Clark Cain.
It’s still early in the investigations, but if Messrs Clark and Vasquez committed any previous crimes, I haven’t yet seen such reported, and I have searched. If either committed offenses as juveniles, those records would have been sealed. News flash: neither the local police nor the FBI can do anything about people who have not yet committed actual crimes.
Another point: while Mr Vasquez was 18, Mr Clark was a minor at 17. Had they survived and been tried for murder, Mr Clark could be sentenced to nothing more than life without the possibility of parole. Mr Vasquez could be sentenced to death, but the Pyrite State has not actually executed anyone for the last twenty years. A ‘hate crime’ rider could do nothing more to them.
ABC Channel 7 reported:
A Sonnenrad patch, depicting a neo-Nazi symbol, and what analysts assess is likely a patch for a militant accelerationist group, are both visible on the plate carrier being worn by the person believed to be Clark, according to sources. Additionally, writings are visible on a gun, including drawings of SS bolts and neo-Nazi insignias, sources said.
According to our good friends on the left, Nazi symbols and signs are not at all disqualifying, at least not when it comes to a Democratic candidate for the United States Senate, but just youthful mistakes.
But it shows you the depth of the problem about which Mr Hutchinson complained. The same Democrats who are willing to forgive Graham Platner’s ‘youthful mistake’ were also willing to surveil devout Catholics who simply preferred the Latin Mass. Mr Hutchinson would, like the FBI surveilling “radical traditionalist Catholics,” criminalize thoughts. Like the movie Minority Report, they want to lock up potential criminals before they’ve committed any crime.
The two pages of the Congressionally-signed original of the Fourteenth Amendment in the National Archives, written with iron gall ink on parchment. It was last publicly displayed in 2013. As of 2025, it is stored in the research wing of the archives inside a boxed book of Acts of Congress from its 39th session.
Our good friends on the left, who have been so supportive of the Fourteenth Amendment’s provision that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside” must grant automatic citizenship to the “anchor babies” of people in our country illegally, they have not been nearly as thrilled with the Equal Protection Clause, “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,” when that clause says, essentially and throughout dozens of decisions, that Americans may not be treated differently based upon their race. Oh, the left certainly doesn’t want white Americans to be given a legal advantage, but legal “remedies” to “past discrimination” to assist black Americans meet with their approval.
After a Supreme Court ruling that was an affront to history, some states can’t wait to turn back the clock on voting rights | Editorial
After long ago overcoming racist efforts to dilute the power of voters of color, the conservative justices have unreasonably made it more difficult to challenge discriminatory legislative maps.
by The Editorial Board | Monday, May 11, 2026 | 5:01 AM EDT
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. — George Santayana
Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of the U.S. Supreme Court giving its seal of approval to Republican attempts to turn back the clock on voting rights in America is that, after long ago overcoming racist efforts to dilute the power of voters of color, we now see similar vipers slithering past the corroded gates of hell that were supposed to hold them in check.
The court defied reason with an opinion that, in essence, neutered the 1965 Voting Rights Act by ruling government efforts to remedy past racism, which tipped the scales in favor of white political candidates, are also racist — unless those remedies can be tied to specific acts of past discrimination that made them necessary.
The decision has opened the door for states to attempt to invalidate any congressional district lines drawn to favor candidates of color.
Note what appalls The Editorial Board, that they might lose “congressional district lines drawn to favor candidates of color.” The Board are specifically asking for districts which favor non-white candidates. This would be the same Editorial Board which wrote last January:
The president has also successfully lobbied some Republican-controlled states to remake congressional maps to favor the GOP, regardless of their potential illegality. In Texas, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed 2025 redistricting maps to be used for the upcoming election, even as a legal challenge moves forward over racial gerrymandering.
It seems that the Board approve of racial gerrymandering, an attempt to create, again in their words, “congressional district lines drawn to favor candidates of color,” but are diametrically opposed to district boundaries which favor Republicans.
There is a strong bias on the part of the Board. It would seem that black Americans, in their view, can only be represented by black representatives, but if anyone were to suggest that black representatives cannot represent white Americans, they’d be among the first to scream that’s racist. If someone stated that only a white candidate could reasonably represent a majority white district, they’d also claim such was racist.
Conservatives have long fought against the reverse racism which has been used, but electorally, the Louisiana v Callais decision might not be the win they think. Blacks are the Democrats most loyal voting Demographic, frequently giving 90% of their ballots to Democrats. Creating majority black districts had the effect of making neighboring districts safer for Republican candidates. If those majority black districts are phased out, spreading heavily black areas back into other districts, Republican candidates might fare more poorly, and close races more likely to elect the Democratic candidates. The Editorial Board might be appalled if fewer black Democrats were elected, but I’m sure that they’d trade black Democrats for white Democrats if it meant fewer Republicans of any color were in office.
I will admit it; I am at a loss to figure out how people could be this stupid!
Yeah, I get it: some people are simply sexually attracted to minors. But actively trying what this gentleman from the Lone Star State allegedly did, in an environment in which such people are being sought out, prosecuted, and sent to prison for it, is stupid, as in boneheadedly stupid and criminally stupid. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:
Texas man charged with paying 13-year-old Montgomery County girl for child porn
Mitchell Van Dusen, 31, of Magnolia, Texas, was being held at the Montgomery County Correctional Facility in lieu of $500,000 cash bail.
by Robert Moran | Tuesday, April 28, 2026 | 7:40 PM EDT
A 31-year-old Texas man was charged with allegedly paying a 13-year-old girl in Montgomery County to make child pornography, authorities said Tuesday.Mitchell Van Dusen, mugshot via Montgomery County Correctional Facility.
Mitchell Van Dusen was extradited last week and was being held at the Montgomery County Correctional facility in lieu of $500,000 cash bail, Montgomery County District Attorney Kevin R. Steele said.
No, of course the Inquirer didn’t publish the mugshot of the accused, but reporter Robert Moran included a hyperlink which led to the Montgomery County site which included his mugshot, something he has done before.
On July 17, 2025, the girl met with Whitpain Township police to describe online interactions she was having since July 4 of the previous year with an unknown man she met in a chat room on the Discord social platform, according to the affidavit of probable cause.
The girl said she had been receiving money from the man through the Venmo payment app and was exchanging sexually explicit photos and videos with the man, the affidavit said.
There’s more at the newspaper’s original. But if this had been going on for an entire year, it seems to me that there must be more to the story than we have been told. Was this girl smart enough to catch him herself, or was she conned and went to the police after her parents or perhaps a friend found out about it?
We are not told whether Mr Van Dusen is alleged to have shared the child pornography images with anyone else, or whether he was trying to actively make money off of the stuff.
But if he actually did this stuff — and he is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law — he really is as dumb as a box of rocks. He was doing this from Texas, with a girl in Pennsylvania, which means that he is subject to state charges in both Texas and Pennsylvania, as well as federal prosecution.
If he is guilty, if prosecutors have enough information and evidence to win a conviction in a trial, any lenient plea bargain arrangements need to be avoided. He ought to go to prison for many, many years.
