Paul sees 14th Amendment as shield for preborn

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., is sponsoring a measure that would shield most preborn humans in America.

Paul argues that section 8 of the Constitution's article 1 and the 14th Amendment's section 5 give Congress the power to right legislation to ban almost all abortions nationwide.

Paul addresses Right to Life rally in D.C.
https://www.youtube.com/">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJSk2bbFv90&feature=youtu.be">https://www.youtube.com/

Paul differs from other libertarians on the abortion issue. Some of them see laws restricting abortion as an unacceptable intrusion by the government into personal liberty. Paul, a very dedicated libertarian but also a physician, sees it as the duty of government to protect ALL humans. The 14th Amendment was written with ex-slaves in mind, but the writers generalized the language to assure that everyone in the country was protected under the law.

We point out that the 14th Amendment's Section 1 draws a line between citizen and person. Any U.S. person is obviously a member of a bigger set than is a citizen. (That is, the set of citizens is a proper subset of the set of persons.)

The amendment requires that every state must provide all persons within its borders equal PROTECTION. This amendment does not undefine preborn humans as non-persons, but only as non-citizens. So then, the language of the amendment means federal and state govwernments are required to protect preborn humans.

Specifically Section 1 says that no state may "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."

The only way out of that protection is to deny that preborn humans are persons. Such a denial requires quite a bit of philosophical hair-splitting and sophistry of a type well known among certain politicians and lawyers.

Hence, the Supreme Court erred in Roe v Wade and should have recommended that those who favored decriminalization of abortion seek a constitutional amendment.

Paul's bill, which has a group of co-sponsors, specifies that it should not be interpreted to mean that women must be prosecuted for the abortion death of the unborn.

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The 14th Amendment

Section 1

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. 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.

Section 2

Representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the executive and judicial officers of a state, or the members of the legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such state, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such state.

Section 3

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

Section 4

The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any state shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.

Section 5

The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

U.S. moves to void UN's free press proviso,saying Assange has no such right in America

If British court accepts bizarre theory, any UK journo
could face extradition for publishing U.S. secrets

The U.S. Justice Department is urging a British court to accept a theory that Julian Assange, not being a U.S. person, is not entitled to the Constitution's First Amendment protection of freedom of press, according to the editor of WikiLeaks.

The First Amendment says nothing about U.S. persons -- citizens or aliens residing in the United States -- versus non-U.S. persons. The Amendment says that "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press..." The Amendment says any abridgment of freedom of press is illegal.

U.S. lawyers of course avoided the obvious point that by abridging WikiLeaks' press freedom, the Justice Department also sets a precedent for abridging the press freedom of Americans who wish to read WikiLeaks. Press freedom is not only about freedom to publish. It is also about freedom to consume the product of the press.

The editor, Kristinn Hrafnsson, told Western Advocate that a new affidavit submitted by U.S. government lawyers this week for Assange's upcoming extradition trial takes the position that foreign nationals like Assange are not entitled to press protections under the First Amendment, meaning he is prosecutable for violating the U.S. Espionage Act of 1917 which prohibits dissemination of state secrets. The Justice Department has never prosecuted anyone for publishing secrets, though many have been prosecuted for stealing secrets in order to pass them to a foreign power.

Hrafnsson revealed the development outside Assange's case management hearing at London's Westminster Magistrates Court Thursday, the Advocate said.

"On the one hand they have decided that they can go after journalists wherever they are residing in the world, they have universal jurisdiction, and demand extradition like they are doing by trying to get an Australian national from the UK for publishing that took place outside U.S. borders," he told the Advocate.

The United States was a force behind the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the UN in 1948. The declaration's Article 19 specifies that press freedom is guaranteed regardless of borders.

The declaration says:

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

As the UN press freedom declaration is regarded as the international norm, the U.S. theory that only U.S. persons are assured of press freedom violates a standard of international law. The UK of course was also a promoter of the international press rights declaration.

Hence the U.S. argument is a prima facie admission that international law, to which the UK has acceded, must be waived on behalf of U.S. prosecutors. In other words, the U.S. prosecutors have presented proof that a standard of international law is to be voided in order to "get" one individual who has annoyed powerful politicians with his publications.

U.S. theory voids press freedom for Assange
https://www.westernadvocate.com.au/story/6596140/assange-may-not-get-us-press-protection/?cs=12512

First Assange, now Greenwald:Freedom of the press under fire

U.S. leads the way against liberty
https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/brazil-greenwald-assange.php

Well, anyway, one person doesn't like him

"On a good day, my wife likes me, so let's clear the air on that one," Bernie Sanders told an NBC reporter when asked about Hillary Clinton's assertion that "nobody likes him."

Sen. Bernie Sanders, D-Vt., the socialist candidate for President,
and former Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y. who is still feeling bad about her loss

Pro-Red agenda tied to impeachment push

Diana West interviewed by Epoch Times
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZhDlf7sOaE

Notorious Red led Women's March
Writer Diana West pointed out that the vehemently anti-Trump women's march of 2017 had Red revolutionary Angela Davis as a featured speaker and honorary co-chairperson.

Libertarian journalist Cathy Young wrote that Davis's "long record of support for political violence in the United States and the worst of human rights abusers abroad" undermined the march.

During the 1970s she visited Marxist-Leninist-governed countries and during the 1980s was twice the Communist Party's candidate for Vice President. In 1991, amid the dissolution of the Soviet Union, she left the party and joined the breakaway Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. Also in 1991, she joined the feminist studies department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she became department director before retiring in 2008. Since then she has continued to write and remained active in movements such as Occupy and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign.

In 1970, Davis purchased firearms for people who used them in an armed takeover of a courtroom in Marin County, California, in which four people were killed, including the judge. She was eventually acquitted of involvement in the armed revolutionary action.

In both presidential campaigns, Davis was the running mate of Gus Hall, U.S. Communist Party chairman, for whom President Obama's CIA director, John Brennan voted when he was a student in 1976. Brennan is a vociferous critic of President Trump.

Google is the sinister force behind impeachment drive

In the 2018 midterm elections, Google used subliminal search persuasion to strongly influence the outcomes in Orange County, Cal., flipping the staunchly Republican districts to Democrat, according to findings by a former editor of Psychology Today.

Using special software, Robert Epstein, PhD, "peeked over the shoulders" of cooperative potential voters by examining their politically related search terms and the search results. His previous work had found that, among undecided voters, positive, highly placed search results -- along with auto-suggestions -- have a powerful influence on their  perception of candidates.

Epstein says his statistical results show strong pro-liberal, pro-Democratic bias in the results, as opposed to the Bing and Yahoo search engines, which showed no bias in the ranking of search results. Epstein points out that he is a liberal who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, an election in which he determined that between 2 million and 10 million votes went to Clinton as a consequence of Google's subliminal methods of hidden persuasion.

If Google used its methods to tilt the 2018 result in Orange County and the 2016 vote count, it is virtually certain that Google used such methods nationwide in 2018, which saw the election of a group of pro-impeachment Democrats, who were striving to impeach Trump on any grounds they could find.

Google offered to provide the Clinton campaign with technical support and the campaign's chief technology officer had come over from Google, Epstein observes.

Assange can't have violated secrecy laws -- because the underlying laws don't exist

Julian Assange's personality is irrelevant. The issue is that he did nothing wrong.

The United States has no Official Secrets Act. And there is a multitude of problems in applying the 1917 Espionage Act to him, the biggest of which is freedom of speech and press inside and outside America.

It is very important  that Assange is being charged with violating classification regulations imposed by the Executive Branch, even though  these rubrics are not legally mandated, Only nuclear secrets were given a congressional imprimatur as legally defined.

The authority for all other classification derives from the President, and applies to people under the President's sway -- that is, employees of the Executive Branch and government contractors, all of whom sign secrecy agreements.

Assange never signed a secrecy agreement.

Not only is he not bound by the secrecy agreement, but the Espionage Act is being applied to "violations" that have only a quasi-legal basis. It's true that everyone is used to them and that numerous spies have been imprisoned on account of them. But custom does not make something correct.

How can a person be tried for violating a secrecy classification that has only a quasi-legal basis?

In any case, it is obvious that Mike Pompeo, when head of the CIA, was eager to exact revenge against Assange for publishing a file containing alleged CIA technical secrets. He blasted WikiLeaks as a Russian spy front. Britain's MI5 was also said to have been affronted, as the file had been shared with it, giving the Tories a pretext to continue the witch hunt against Assange.

This is all Deep Swamp bilge. Notice that the file was classified "secret," which in CIA-land is considered a garbage classification. A million or so people are cleared to see "secret" information. "Top secret" and special compartmentalized classifications are the only thing meaningful to the security crowd.

The technical information disclosed various gimmicks for backdoor entry into popular communications devices as well as a TV set that could be used to spy on you. All this had been mentioned in the media before being discussed in that file.

Every intelligence agency on the planet would have assumed that the CIA was looking into such gimmickry. So the "secret" stamp only made sure that the non-technical public was kept unaware of such possibilities. Hence, WikiLeaks was fulfilling the responsibility of the press to alert the public to things the government prefers that the voters not know.

Also, one has to wonder whether Assange was set up. That is, did the CIA leak these not-very-important "secrets" in hopes that he would publish them, which would in turn justify an "everybody against Assange" push?

Though he has not been charged in the CIA case, the charges of publishing U.S. secrets during the Obama years ring hollow. And what was so terrible? We saw a case in which a helicopter gun crew killed a group of journalists. Why shouldn't the public know about that? And the diplomatic papers that were published were so low-level that they were classified "confidential, no foreign." Those papers set off political firestorms, which included giving courage and impetus to the "Arab Spring" uprisings around the Mediterranean. So again, WikiLeaks contributed to the welfare of the average man and woman, whatever their pompous governments favored.

The idea that Assange could spend many years in a U.S. prison is an outrage against liberty everywhere -- especially here in the land of the free.

In any case, it seems unlikely that Assange can get a fair trial because of the CIA's spying on him and his lawyers while he was an asylum guest at the Ecuador embassy in London (see previous post).

Assange's French legal adviser believes that the recording of his conversations with Assange make a fair trial unlikely.

The adviser, Juan Branco, told a World Socialist reporter:

We believe this is a crucial element in our battle to avoid Julian Assange’s extradition. The gross violation of the principles of a fair trial, including the right to a fair defense, are epitomized in this episode.

The lack of secrecy of his exchanges with his lawyers was not only the fruit of covert operations: the dispositives were probably also used to collect evidence that could be used in trial, i.e., that could be legalized. In these conditions, in which the material basis of an indictment is based on illegal spying operations that violate the basic rights of the defense, it seems to us extremely difficult to argue that an extradition to the U.S. would not violate the basic requisites that apply in these circumstances.

Branco said that the secret taping by UC Global on behalf of the CIA violated the legal rights of Assange's defense team.

He said,

The Bar of Paris and I are going to file a complaint in France over the violation of the rights of the defense, professional secrets and the violation of my privacy. What we are trying to do is to fight against the normalization of practices that are devastating the privacy not only of our client, but more broadly of millions of citizens. In our case, the situation was particularly intense, with a few of us being the subject of tailing operations, photo operations, burglaries and so forth.

Socialist report on the attack on Assange's defense rights
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/01/16/bran-j16.html

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https://supportassange.blogspot.com/2020/01/assange-cant-have-violated-secrecy-laws.html

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