A little more than 30 Walt Disney World employees gathered outside the complex’s shopping center in Lake Buena Vista, Florida, on Friday afternoon to protest the company’s vaccine mandate.
The protest’s organizer, 16-year cast member Nick Caturano, told the Miami Herald he hopes the demonstration will spark a nationwide discussion about constitutional rights and medical privacy.
“People are free to get this vaccine if they feel it’s going to be the best thing for them,” he said, “but to force people to get the vaccine, that’s another story.”
Caturano told the newspaper he has heard from thousands of Disney employees, both in the U.S. and around the world, who have said they oppose the brand’s mandate but are fearful of losing their jobs if they speak up.
“I don’t want to lose my job,” he said. “I love my job, but I’m also more afraid that, if I don’t speak up now, where does it stop?”
Although he’s considered immunocompromised, Caturano said he is hesitant about taking a COVID-19 inoculation due to his natural immunity as well as his religious beliefs.
He said this week he’s “not comfortable” taking the shots.
“I just can’t see putting it in my body,” the Disney employee explained.
In a separate interview with WOFL-TV, Caturano said he and his Disney colleagues “understand that COVID-19 is a very real health concern that we all have to take seriously, but many cast members have a legitimate basis for refusing vaccination.”
“So many cast member felt alone and felt like they were the only ones who thought this was wrong,” he said of why he organized the protest. “I think we were made to feel that way on purpose. But we have connected now, and we are pushing back.”
The Friday march comes a little less than a month after Walt Disney World reached an agreement with unions to require COVID-19 vaccines for unionized cast members. About a month before that, Disney mandated all its salaried and non-union hourly staffers in the U.S. be fully inoculated against the virus.
Union workers and salaried employees have until Oct. 22 to be totally vaccinated.
As for Caturano, he is hoping the pressure he and his fellow cast members are putting on Disney will be enough for the company to reconsider its vaccine mandate.
Earlier this week, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) announced his administration will fine state and local officials $5,000 if they fire employees for not being vaccinated.
“I believe that the reason that they’re limiting drone usage is because they don’t want the American public to know, and I think this is illegal,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) said on “Fox & Friends.”
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) also questioned the drone ban, which he said has grounded drones that were being used by news organizations to cover the border crisis.
“Any government stifling of First Amendment activities is unacceptable,” Johnson wrote to Troy Miller, acting commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
The ban was imposed on the same day that Fox News flew a drone in the area and captured aerial footage of the immigrants.
The FAA said in announcing the ban that it was driven by “special security reasons.” Johnson asked what those reasons were. The agency told The Epoch Times in an email that Border Patrol requested the restrictions “due to drones interfering with law enforcement flights on the border.” Johnson asked for more details on the alleged interference.
Illegal immigrants board a bus to be transported to a Border Patrol station for processing, under the international bridge, in Del Rio, Texas, on Sept. 16, 2021. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)
Other Republicans also questioned the ban, including Reps. Diana Harshbarger (R-Tenn.), Brian Babin (R-Texas), and Jim Jordan (R-Ohio.).
“The FAA’s conveniently placed a ban on drones flying over the international bridge where [10,000 plus] illegal aliens are waiting to be processed—preventing media from covering the scene,” Babin wrote on Twitter.
President Joe Biden “doesn’t want you to see what a disaster he’s created,” he added.
CBP and the White House did not respond to early morning requests for comment. The FAA declined to say under what authority the agency issued the flight zone restrictions.
The White House did not hold a briefing on Friday and Biden traveled to Rehoboth Beach, Delaware for the weekend without speaking to reporters. He has no public events scheduled.
The FAA said Friday in a statement that Fox applied for and received clearance to operate drones in the restricted airspace and directed any other media organizations wanting to apply for exemptions to the restrictions to its website.
“As with any temporary flight restriction, media is able to call the FAA to make requests to see if it is possible to safely operate in the area,” the agency told The Epoch Times.
While Fox’s drones were still grounded, correspondent Bill Melugin went up in a helicopter with the Texas Department of Public Safety and recorded fresh aerial video footage and photographs.
Claimed they were mainly centered around the use of “spray paint.”
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, tried to downplay the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots in an effort to prevent Donald Trump from invoking the Insurrection Act, arguing that they were mainly centered around the use of “spray paint.”
That’s according to the new book, ‘Peril’, written by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa.
Despite the violent demonstrations quickly spreading across the country, Milley continued to insist that they had only impacted two cities and were relatively sedate, echoing CNN’s ludicrous “fiery, but most peaceful” description of the riots.
“They used spray paint, Mr President, that’s not an insurrection. […] We’re a country of 330 million people. You’ve got these penny packet protests,” Milley allegedly told Trump.
Milley apparently told Trump that most of the riots only involved around 300 people and that they paled in significance to the 1968 Washington riots caused by the assassination of MLK and the Battle of Fort Sumter in 1861, which started the Civil War.
The riots took mere days to spread to virtually every major city in the country, with looting, arson and violent attacks becoming commonplace, eventually causing around $2 billion dollars in property damage as well as at least 19 deaths and over 17,000 arrests.
At one point, demonstrators took over an entire area of downtown Seattle, completely obliterating official law and order for a number of weeks.
Trump’s failure to act strongly and decisively led to him looking weak, derailing a lot of momentum he would have had going into the election.
According to other reports, Trump wanted to invoke the Insurrection Act and put Milley in charge of National Guard troops to end the unrest, leading the two to have a shouting match where Milley refused to take charge.
Back in June, Milley appeared to side with the kind of ‘woke’ rhetoric spewed by far-left groups like BLM when he told the House Armed Services Committee that he was concerned about “white rage” in the United States.
As we highlighted earlier this week, Milley was also accused of treason by Trump after it emerged that he had promised to warn China ahead of any military operations.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson labeled the revelation, “One of the scariest things that has ever happened in this country.”
One of the murder convictions against former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin is likely to be thrown out after a decision last week by the Minnesota Supreme Court.
Chauvin was found guilty of killing alleged counterfeiter George Floyd in 2020, an incident that spawned massive violent protests in Minneapolis and nationwide. Chauvin’s conviction came against a backdrop of activists saying they planned to riot if Chauvin were acquitted.
According to KMSP-TV, Minnesota has defined third-degree murder as killing a victim without intent while acting in a dangerous way to other people while showing “a depraved mind.”
The Minnesota high court’s ruling said that the element of a depraved mind is not applicable if the person being charged was only focused on one victim, KMSP reported.
The ruling came in the case of former Minneapolis police officer Mohamed Noor, who was convicted of second-degree manslaughter and third-degree murder in the 2017 shooting death of Justine Ruszczyk Damond.
However, the ruling is likely to set a precedent that could be applied to the Chauvin case.
“It’s crystal clear now that Derek Chauvin cannot be convicted of murder three,” said Joseph Daly, emeritus professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
Susan Gaertner, former county attorney in Ramsey County, Minnesota, told the Star Tribune she expects Eric Nelson, Chauvin’s attorney, to try to use the argument that having the charge against him hurt Chauvin’s chances during his trial.
However, she did not give it a very good chance of winning.
“Do I think that argument will be successful?” said Gaertner. “No.”
Daly said Nelson could argue that the charge impacted the jury, but also downplayed its chances for success.
“By having that charge, it so confused the jurors it violated his due process rights,” Daly said an argument could claim. “I think that’s a valid argument. Whether the court will [buy] it, I doubt it, because [jurors] did find him guilty of the higher crime.”
University of St. Thomas law professor Rachel Moran said the ruling clarifies state law, according to KARE-TV.
“The Supreme Court has to address legal issues that apply to a variety of cases, not just one, and sometimes, really their decision wasn’t so much about when should Mr. Noor get out of prison as it was, how should this third-degree murder statute be defined in anybody’s case?” Moran said.
Moran said the law is murky as written.
“It contains outdated language that frankly is not very well written, and the court actually said if you want to focus on rewriting the statute that’s a task for the legislature,” Moran said.
“It’s absolutely true none of these laws were written with police officers specifically in mind, so when the government does decide to prosecute a police officer, they’re trying to figure out which of these ordinarily applicable statutes fit with the officer’s conduct.”
“In a practical way, it does not affect Mr. Chauvin at all,” Moran said. “He will probably get his third-degree murder conviction vacated, just like Mr. Noor did, because his conduct was also recklessly indifferent as to one person: George Floyd.”
Chauvin was sentenced to more than 22 years in prison on the second-degree murder charge. The sentence was based on the second-degree murder charge only, according to the Star Tribune. Unless Chauvin’s attorney can successfully argue that the third-degree charge hurt his chances at trial, it was unlikely his sentence on that charge would be affected.
Caitlinrose Fisher, one of Noor’s attorneys, said the ruling was important for her client, according to NPR.
“Mohamed Noor did not act with a depraved mind. Mohamed Noor was not indifferent to human life,” Fisher said during oral arguments over the case earlier this year. “With the benefit of hindsight, we now know that Mr. Noor made a tragic split-second mistake. But if there is to be any meaningful difference between murder and manslaughter, that mistake is not sufficient to sustain Mr. Noor’s conviction for third-degree murder.”
She said Noor “really believed that he was saving his partner’s life that night, and instead he tragically caused the loss of an innocent life. Of course that is incredibly challenging, but I think just having reaffirmation that a mistake like that isn’t murder will mean more than words can say.”
“‘Are you undercover?’ the officers asked the masked man, who gave them a badge.”
Capitol Police surrounded a mask man at the “Justice for J6” rally that was reportedly armed with a firearm. The man told police where the gun was and they pulled out his law enforcement badge.
He identified himself as undercover law enforcement. The man replied “I’m just here” when asked if he was an undercover law enforcement. There is no confirmation that this man was on-duty law enforcement. Capitol Police extracted the masked man from the event without disarming or handcuffing him. (READ MORE: Penn State University Professor Calls for Unmasked Students to be Suspended)
Journalist Ford Fischer and other protesters armed with smartphones recorded images and videos of the police questioning the man.
"Are you undercover?" the officers asked the masked man, who gave them a badge.
The ‘Justice for J6’ event was hosted by Look Ahead America. The organization is run by former Republican analyst Matt Braynard. Their stated mission is “to register, educate, and enfranchise these disaffected citizens and ensure that their voices are not just heard but heeded and that the American Dream becomes their dream again.” The event was created in response to hundred of Trump supporters in prison awaiting their trial date for walking through the U.S. Capitol on January 6th. There were more press and law enforcement at this event than protestors.
A week before Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom beat back a recall election, Vice President Kamala Harris returned to California to rally voters to his side. United in victory for now, Democrats suspect Harris and Newsom will soon find themselves on a collision course.
The two California Democrats were molded by the “same political machine, same political family,” said Mike Madrid, a Republican California political operative, referring to the San Francisco-based team that helped jump-start their careers. A longtime Newsom adviser said that as the governor gains momentum from his win, “they could end up both wanting the same thing, which is the White House.”
Gil Duran, a former aide to Harris when she was California attorney general, said this could pose a challenge for the advisers who led both her 2020 presidential bid and Newsom’s successful campaign against the recall. Rumors of backroom negotiations brokered by the firm swirled when California Sen. Barbara Boxer announced her retirement in 2015. The seat ultimately went to Harris.
“The real question is if Newsom emerges from this recall with a lot of strength and tries to start building a narrative toward a presidential run of his own, you get to a crossroads where it’s Kamala and Newsom,” Duran said. “Which client do you pick?”
Whether Harris would turn to Bearstar Strategies to run her next presidential bid is an open question.The firm is the latest iteration of the powerhouse California Democratic campaign shop formerly known as SCN Strategies, and later SCRB Strategies, known for securing victories on local and statewide tickets. Hillary Clinton’s California primary victory over then-Sen. Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential race is credited to the firm’s founder, who also led her campaign in Texas and North Carolina.
The team was in attendance for Harris’s San Leandro rally with Newsom, where the vice president snapped pictures with former staffers away from the press. This person said the moment was all for show.
“They are persona non grata with Kamala,” one Democratic strategist said. “They are not welcomed or allowed to communicate with the vice president in any meaningful way.”
Photos circulated from the event showing the consultants and Harris chatting and smiling, but he said this wasn’t an accurate depiction of the relationship. “That’s not the reality,” he said. “That was for Instagram.”
Last week, in Oakland, California, Harris took to the stage before some 200 supporters urging voters to reject the recall motion. President Joe Biden campaigned for Newsom the day before the election.
Much has changed since Harris launched her presidential bid 12 miles away in 2019 before 20,000 people — not least, a bruising first eight months in office.
Before teaming up with Biden, Californians said they saw Harris as risk-averse and pointed to her stance on healthcare during the race. Her prosecutorial skills were previously her selling point, showing up in confirmation hearings for Jeff Sessions and Brett Kavanaugh or on the debate stage with Biden, but she sought to distance herself from her years as a prosecutor amid a national reckoning on law enforcement and race.
Some blamed her advisers. The firm’s clients, with an eye on the national stage, took “politically cautious” stands, a San Francisco Democrat said.
“That’s a trait shared by Newsom and Kamala, and that’s a trait that their consultants push,” this person argued, stating that Newsom’s agenda-setting moves on same-sex marriage, or executions, while ground-breaking, were few.
It’s the effect of being guided by a famed opposition researcher, Bearstar Strategies founder Averill “Ace” Smith, who puts opponents on edge simply by entering the room , the San Francisco Democrat said.
“His job is to find faults in people and to punish and ruin them for it,” this person said. “He’s going to give you advice to knock off all the edges.”
One Los Angeles operative said that Harris, as a black and South Asian woman, faces a level of scrutiny and pushback that her counterpart avoids. “Because of who Gavin is, he can take more chances,” he argued.
While Harris remains the heir apparent to succeed Biden in leading a future Democratic ticket, whether that is in 2024 or beyond, sources in California politics wondered how she would advance her case for the top slot.
“It will be fascinating to see if Kamala can put together the kind of coalition and campaign and finally build an apparatus that can win,” said another California Democrat.
Her presidential run “burned really hot for a very short amount of time,” he added. “I don’t know where you go to correct that.”
By Wednesday, Newsom got what he wanted, a sweeping victory that Biden said cemented his and the governor’s mandates.
Political strategists credited Newsom’s political muscle for engineering an early coup by boxing out other prominent Democrats from the ballot.
This meant pushing aside the “panicky agitations” of concerned Democrats who wanted a viable second-option candidate, Duran said. “You had Chicken Littles saying, ‘We’ve got to have a Democrat on the ballot, just in case,’ and the Bearstar team very wisely said no.”
Chris Lehman, a political adviser to NextGen Policy, an advocacy group founded by billionaire environmental activist and former presidential primary candidate Tom Steyer, said the race was over when the candidate filing deadline passed and no credible Democrat filed to replace Newsom. “That’s when I, as a Democrat, started popping my champagne cork,” he said.
This “high risk, high reward” tactic, as a strategist called it, came into its own as Newsom’s most prominent rival began gaining steam.
With conservative radio host Larry Elder surging ahead of other recall candidates, Newsom succeeded in turning the race from a referendum on his leadership over the last 18 months into a head-to-head battle, posing the question: Did California’s deep-blue voters want a MAGA-aligned governor?
About one-quarter of signatories to the recall petition were registered Democrats, a feat that spooked party officials.
Frustrating voters was a willingness some saw in Newsom to breach his own COVID-19 rules, even as Californians struggled under strict lockdowns.
According to a pre-election poll from the Los Angeles Times and the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, 56% of voters agreed with the statement that “through his own actions, Newsom has demonstrated that the strict policies and behaviors that he wants others to follow during the pandemic don’t apply to him.”
A video shared to Instagram by Jennifer Siebel Newsom, California’s “first partner” and Newsom’s wife, seemed to capture the essence of this complaint. Wagging her finger at the camera, Jennifer Siebel Newsom instructed Californians to conserve water, to turn the tap off while brushing their teeth, and wait to run the dishwasher until full. But viewers spied a second dishwasher, undercutting the water conservation message she was pushing.
“[Newsom], in her two-dishwasher home, is telling people who are living three families to home, with homeless people out in the street, ‘Don’t use your dishwasher,’” one Sacramento Democrat said. “The theme of that was just, ‘Wow, these people, they’re so out of touch.’”
Parents grew irate on learning that Newsom’s children were back in their private school classrooms while public schools stayed shuttered.
“I think any one of [his advisers] would have thrown their body under the wheels of the governor’s SUV to keep him from going to French Laundry that night,” Duran said, pointing to the evening that effectively lit a match under the recall effort. While the outdoor, three-walled setting where Newsom was seen dining followed the letter of the state’s coronavirus rules, it flouted the spirit, for which the governor later apologized.
Newsom shifted his strategy, advocating for reopening schools and supporting businesses, a pivot that Joe Rodota, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s policy chief during his run for California governor in 2003, said made the challenge of countering the Democrat more difficult.
Newsom leaned into statewide concerns around the coronavirus and touted his vaccine mandate for health and school workers. In a campaign advertisement, the governor argued the race was “a matter of life and death ,” taking aim at Elder’s “deadly conspiracies” that he said threatened school closures.
The downside to capitalizing on Elder as a foil, one strategist said, was that Newsom’s team “never really sold Gavin.”
Californians saw the “same thing we’ve been seeing since 2016,” this person said — a referendum on MAGA politics. “If Democrats can only run against Trump, what are we for?”
Aurora James, the woman who designed Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (NY) “Tax The Rich” dress that AOC wore to the recent Met Gala, reportedly owes a significant amount in back taxes.
The New York Post reported that the 37-year-old was a “notorious tax deadbeat with unpaid debts dogging her in multiple states,” most of which center around a company she created in 2011, Cultural Brokerage Agency, which serves as the parent company to her fashion company.
The company racked up three open tax warrants in New York state for failing to withhold income taxes from employees’ paychecks totaling $14,798, the state Department of Taxation and Finance told The Post. The debts — which were incurred before the pandemic — stem from 2018 and 2019. The company has been hit with 15 warrants in total since 2015. The company got into a deeper hole with the feds. Between April 2018 and April 2019, the Internal Revenue Service placed six federal liens on Cultural Brokerage Agency totaling $103,220. The liens specifically cite the company’s failure to remit employee payroll taxes.
The Post reports that James’ company has received $41,666 in pandemic relief aid; her company owes a $62,722 in matters related to workers’ compensation; and her company has allegedly relied heavily on “legions of unpaid interns working full-time jobs.” The report added that James bought a $1.6 million property in California last year and that it is already listed as “delinquent” by L.A. County, which told the newspaper that she owes more than $2,500 in property taxes.
AOC received instant mockery and criticism over her decision to attend the expensive elitist event, with critics branding her a “fraud.”
“Individual tickets are reportedly priced at $30,000 a piece, a far cry from when [Vogue editor-in-chief Anna] Wintour first took over the running of the event in 1995 when they were just $1,000,” Newsweek reported. “Then there are the tables, typically bought by brands and fashion houses. These reportedly start at $275,000.”
Ej Dickson, senior writer at Rolling Stone, tweeted: “Am I the only one who thinks this is really f***ing stupid[?] 1) The dress is ugly, 2) She’s at a $35k per person event and this isn’t nearly the own she thinks it is. 3) The dress is ugly. I mean I love her but come on this is so dumb. Peak girl boss s**t.”
Glenn Greenwald, a progressive blogger, tweeted: “Lots of people commenting snidely on the lack of masks and social distancing in this opulent indoor event in the middle of a pandemic but — as was true of Obama’s indoor bash — COVID wasn’t invited to the #MetGala and these are the sophisticated people who aren’t in danger.”
Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX)tweeted: “I’m not even mad at the lack of self awareness or hypocrisy anymore. At this point it’s just hilarious. These people are a giant joke.”
Donald Trump Jr.tweeted: “What makes @AOC a bigger fraud: The “tax the rich” dress while she’s hanging out with a bunch of wealthy leftwing elites or the lack of masks after spending the past 18 months as one of the biggest authoritarian mask Karens in the country?”
Batya Ungar-Sargon, Newsweek editor, tweeted: If you spent your whole life trying, you couldn’t come up with a better illustration of woke progressivism as smokescreen for class that perpetuates inequality than the progressive avatar at the pinnacle of conspicuous consumption being feted with a cheeky slogan across her back.
Dan McLaughlin, National Review senior writer, tweeted: “Whatever AOC is doing, it is not populism.”
Population 2/3 that of the U.S. completely free of COVID despite having low vaccination rate of 5.8%.
America’s vaccination rate at 54% but cases still rising and restrictions still imposed.
The state of Uttar Pradesh in India, which has the equivalent of two-thirds of the United States population, has been declared COVID-free, the state government announced last week.
There are no more active cases of coronavirus in the 33 districts of Uttar Pradesh, which has a population of 241 million people.
“Overall, the state has a total of 199 active cases, while the positivity rate came down to less than 0.01 per cent. The recovery rate, meanwhile, has improved to 98.7 per cent,” Hindustan Timesreported.
“Uttar Pradesh was the first state in the country to introduce large-scale prophylactic and therapeutic use of Ivermectin. In May-June 2020, a team at Agra, led by Dr. Anshul Pareek, administered Ivermectin to all RRT team members in the district on an experimental basis. It was observed that none of them developed Covid-19 despite being in daily contact with patients who had tested positive for the virus,” Uttar Pradesh State Surveillance Officer Vikssendu Agrawal said.
He added that based on the findings from Agra, the state government sanctioned the use of Ivermectin as a prophylactic for all the contacts of Covid patients and later cleared the administration of therapeutic doses for the treatment of such patients.
Claiming that timely introduction of Ivermectin since the first wave has helped the state maintain a relatively low positivity rate despite its high population density, he said, “Despite being the state with the largest population base and a high population density, we have maintained a relatively low positivity rate and cases per million of population.”
He said that apart from aggressive contact tracing and surveillance, the lower positivity and fatality rates may be attributed to the large-scale use of Ivermectin use in the state, adding that the drug has recently been introduced in the National Protocol for Covid treatment and management. “Once the second wave subsides, we would conduct our own study as there has been an emerging body of evidence to substantiate our timely use of Ivermectin from the first wave itself,” Vikasendu told The Indian Express.”
One would think the World Health Organization, Big Pharma, the mainstream media, and Dr. Anthony Fauci would be overjoyed by this development that ivermectin is undoubtedly saving lives.
But don’t count on them celebrating that, because that would hurt their bottom lines of profit and power from their experimental and ineffective vaccines.
Biden will need to convince the country, and thus the Court, that we are still in a real crisis.
The history of the United States, insofar as concerns the vitality of civil rights in times of crisis, can be summed up succinctly. While a crisis ensues, when there is a real perception of threat to our security, the courts give the executive a wide berth.
They don’t exactly turn a blind eye. It’s more like slow-walking. Cases claiming infringement of fundamental liberties may be rushed into the justice system during a crisis, but courts will proceed cautiously.
Sometimes they’ll wait to issue rulings until the security threat has passed. In the heat of the Civil War, for example, when President Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus and authorized detainees to be tried by military commission, the Supreme Court initially ducked the issue, claiming to lack jurisdiction (Ex Parte Vallandingham). Only after the war ended, only when the crisis had ebbed, did the Court hold, in Ex Parte Milligan, that Americans may not be subjected to courts-martial if the civilian courts are open and functioning. While it did not dispositively rule that Lincoln’s suspension of the writ was unconstitutional, the Court took pains to note that, to the extent such an action appeared to require congressional authorization, Congress had in fact affirmed the president’s action.
Other times, when crises rage, the Court is derelict. The classic case is Korematsu v. United States, during the height of World War II, when the justices upheld President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s internment of American citizens of Japanese descent, rationalizing that this was a reasonable measure to counter the threat of espionage. The ruling ranks with the lowest chapters in the Court’s history, as Justice Robert Jackson rued at the time in dissent.
Just three years ago (in Trump v. Hawaii), Chief Justice John Roberts, on behalf of the Court, quoted Jackson in observing that Korematsu “has no place in law under the Constitution.” It was, Roberts added, “gravely wrong the day it was decided, [and] has been overruled in the court of history.” That would be cold comfort to Fred Korematsu, who died in 2005, 13 years before Roberts’s declamation. By then, President Gerald Ford had formally apologized in 1976 for the internment, and a federal court in 1983 had overturned Korematsu’s conviction for evading internment.
Still, systematically speaking, a High Court mea culpa about justice delayed is not justice denied. When the Supremes finally do correct error, it establishes norms for future cases.
That doesn’t mean the Court will be eager to jump into the next fray, but it does mean that presidents have bright civil-rights lines to heed when that next fray comes along. There is a steep political cost to ignoring them: A Supreme Court precedent is a powerful weapon for a president’s congressional opposition to invoke. Indeed, the Biden administration just got a taste of that. When the president rationalized that the COVID-19 pandemic gave him license to extend his patently lawless eviction moratorium, congressional Republicans hammered him by invoking an opinion by Justice Kavanaugh (a concurrence and thus not technically a precedent, but close enough under the circumstances).
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) pledges to “work like hell” to ensure his constituents have access to monoclonal antibodies to fight COVID-19. The statement on Thursday was in response to the Biden administration clamping down on shipments of the antibodies to the Sunshine State.
Health and Human Services seized control of the supply lines this week and limited Florida’s deliveries by half. DeSantis claimed such sudden disruption would cause patients to suffer.
The Biden administration has experienced a lot of pushback from Republican governors, including DeSantis. “We’re facing a massive, massive cut in monoclonal antibody treatments abruptly,” said the governor. He added how Biden said there would be a 50 percent increase, however now they’re seeing more than a 50 percent cut in Florida.
I will fight like hell to overcome Biden’s cruel decision to drastically reduce lifesaving monoclonal antibody treatments for Floridians. We've seen steep reductions in hospital admissions due to early treatment efforts. It’s wrong to penalize Florida for his partisan bitterness. pic.twitter.com/24APj0r50K
‘This Is Illegal’: Republicans Question Biden Administration’s Ban of Drones at Epicenter of Border Crisis
The Biden administration ban on drones at the new epicenter of the border crisis may not be legal, according to Senate Republicans.
The Federal Aviation Administration, or FAA, imposed on Thursday the no-fly-zone for drones and other unmanned aircraft in Del Rio, Texas, where thousands of illegal immigrants have amassed.
“I believe that the reason that they’re limiting drone usage is because they don’t want the American public to know, and I think this is illegal,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) said on “Fox & Friends.”
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) also questioned the drone ban, which he said has grounded drones that were being used by news organizations to cover the border crisis.
“Any government stifling of First Amendment activities is unacceptable,” Johnson wrote to Troy Miller, acting commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
The ban was imposed on the same day that Fox News flew a drone in the area and captured aerial footage of the immigrants.
The FAA said in announcing the ban that it was driven by “special security reasons.” Johnson asked what those reasons were. The agency told The Epoch Times in an email that Border Patrol requested the restrictions “due to drones interfering with law enforcement flights on the border.” Johnson asked for more details on the alleged interference.
Other Republicans also questioned the ban, including Reps. Diana Harshbarger (R-Tenn.), Brian Babin (R-Texas), and Jim Jordan (R-Ohio.).
“The FAA’s conveniently placed a ban on drones flying over the international bridge where [10,000 plus] illegal aliens are waiting to be processed—preventing media from covering the scene,” Babin wrote on Twitter.
President Joe Biden “doesn’t want you to see what a disaster he’s created,” he added.
CBP and the White House did not respond to early morning requests for comment. The FAA declined to say under what authority the agency issued the flight zone restrictions.
The White House did not hold a briefing on Friday and Biden traveled to Rehoboth Beach, Delaware for the weekend without speaking to reporters. He has no public events scheduled.
The FAA said Friday in a statement that Fox applied for and received clearance to operate drones in the restricted airspace and directed any other media organizations wanting to apply for exemptions to the restrictions to its website.
“As with any temporary flight restriction, media is able to call the FAA to make requests to see if it is possible to safely operate in the area,” the agency told The Epoch Times.
While Fox’s drones were still grounded, correspondent Bill Melugin went up in a helicopter with the Texas Department of Public Safety and recorded fresh aerial video footage and photographs.