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April 2014

Posted by Andrew Branca on April 28, 2014 75 Comments
Yesterday I promised an update on the key self-defense trials coming our way over the course of this summer, and so here I am to keep that promise. Before I get into that, however, I'd like to share a couple of items that have been brought to my attention in the last 24 hours.

"Law of Self Defense" Ranked #1 by Amazon in Sports Shooting Category

"The Law of Self Defense, 2nd Edition," has been ranked by Amazon.com as it's #1 seller in the Sports Shooting category. Law of Self Defense #1 in Amazon Sport Shooting Category Now, I'm not sure how self-defense has much to do with sports shooting, but you take the #1's where you find them. Two critical keys to achieving this #1 status have certainly been the Twitter campaign launched against me by the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, and the uproarious kerfuffle generated by the antics of CNN legal analyst Sunny Hostin. So, before proceeding to substantive matters, I'd like to thank @CSGV, @SunnyHostin, and the UC Berkeley School of Law--I couldn't have done it without you guys.

CNN Legal Analyst Sunny Hostin has Wikipedia Page Updated to Reflect Reality

Last night somebody brought to my attention that the Wikipedia page for CNN Legal Analyst Sunny Hostin had been updated to reflect her losing debate performance as well as her welshing on our wager. I feel obliged to note that I had nothing whatever to do with this entry, but also that it is entirely factually correct. Sunny Hostin Wiki with debate welch OK, now onto the self-defense cases coming up in 2014.

Posted by Bryan Jacoutot on April 28, 2014 33 Comments
Yesterday, Chris Wallace featured two panelists to debate the outcome of a recent United States Supreme Court ruling on Affirmative Action and the use of race in the admissions process. The case upheld a Michigan voter referendum banning the use of race or gender based Affirmative Action programs in the public university admissions process, among other things. One panelist was a successful litigant from a prior Affirmative Action Supreme Court case, Jennifer Gratz. Gratz is also the CEO of XIV Foundation, an organization "dedicated to the principle that equal treatment is the essence of civil rights and that all people are entitled to civil rights." The other panelist was civil rights attorney, Shanta Driver. As I watched the debate unfold, one thing I could not help but notice was the use of the word "equality," in each opposing side's rationale for their position. Gratz, who advocated for upholding the Michigan referendum to end race preferences cited "equal treatment under law," regardless of race. Likewise Driver, advocated for the continuation of federally protected race preferences in the admissions, also citing the need for equality. In fact, Driver went so far as to compare this decision by the Supreme Court as a revival of Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 Supreme Court case that brought about the concept of "separate but equal" segregation.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on April 28, 2014 14 Comments
We have written about Mark Witaschek many times before. Witashek was aggressively prosecuted the same D.C. Office of Attorney General that refused to prosecute David Gregory for a clear gun law violation, all because Witaschek was found in possession of an inoperable shotgun shell and "muzzle loader" bullets, Someone who’s not David Gregory convicted of stupid DC gun law violation:
Yesterday, a D.C. Judge found Mark Witaschek guilty of “attempted possession of unlawful ammunition” for possessing an antique replica muzzleloader bullet. Emily Miller at the Washington Times has thoroughly chronicled Mr. Witaschek’s court proceedings, which to date have spanned nearly two years and now appear likely to continue into the appellate stage. In brief, the case centered on a single inert piece of ammunition, which rested on Mr. Witascheck’s desk in the District, and which he did not know was illegal.
William F. Vanderpool, a retired supervisory special agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, [explained] to the judge that the saboted lead balls have no powder or propellant attached, so are not “live…” The primer on the shotgun shell had already been struck by the firing pin. Mr. Witaschek kept the misfired shell on his home office desk as a memento from a hunt.
Ultimately, Mr. Witaschek was sentenced to time served, a $50 fine, and is required to enroll with the Metropolitan Police Department’s firearm offenders’ registry within 48 hours.
That wasn't the end of the story. As Emily Miller further writes, the D.C. Office of Tax and Reveue now is investigating Witashek's employment payroll records:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on April 28, 2014 17 Comments
Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day. A two minute siren is sounded in Israel and everything comes to a stop. On this day we remember not only the 6 million Jews, but the millions of non-Jews killed by the Nazis, the "righteous gentiles" who risked their lives and the lives of their families to hide and shelter Jews, and the soldiers who liberated the camps. Like Vernon Tott and others, about whom we wrote in 2009:
When I think of the exceptional nature of this country, I also think of the rows upon rows of white crosses in cemetaries above the beaches of Normandy, of thousands of mostly Christian soldiers floating on the shores of islands in the Pacific, and the mostly Christian American soldiers who liberated numerous concentration camps. I think of Christian Americans like Vernon Tott of Iowa who not only liberated concentration camps, but took the time thereafter to bear witness to what he saw (and decades later to reunite with one of the prisoners he liberated):

Posted by A.F. Branco on April 28, 2014 2 Comments

Note: You may reprint this cartoon provided you link back to this source.  To see more Legal Insurrection Branco cartoons, click here. Branco’s page is Cartoonist A.F.Branco...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on April 27, 2014 4 Comments
The video below is causing quite a stir, as reported by The Times of Israel:
The video, titled “Christy a Palestinian Christian’s plea to Dr. Saeb Erekat,” was posted to YouTube on Saturday, featuring clips from separate events. In the first, Christy Anastas directs questions at Erekat, a senior Palestinian negotiator, and the second, longer segment, shows Anastas giving a presentation in which she talks about life as a Christian in Bethlehem. “I believe God has given this land to the Jews as an everlasting covenant,” Anastas said. Anastas said that Palestinian children are encouraged to violently confront Israel Defense Forces soldiers in order to die as martyrs, and that incentives included payoffs by former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and the Palestinian Authority, given to the families of Palestinians that were killed. “How many Muslim countries do we have in the world?” she said. “Why can’t the Jews have one country?”
After that last quoted statement about Jews having one country, she details how a family member threatened to put a bullet in her head (at 22:35). She also has been threatened in England. (at 25:25) Pay special attention to the video starting at 3:25 when she details how children were used as fighters during the Second Intifada, and how the wall built by the Israelis separating Bethlehem from Israel has stopped "my people from killing themselves, blowing themselves up." (at 13:45) Not surprisingly, her family is abandoning her, as further reported by The Times of Israel:

Posted by Mandy Nagy on April 27, 2014 2 Comments
One monitor was freed Sunday after pro-Russian separatists seized a group of eight European monitors with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in eastern Ukraine earlier this weekend. From CNN:
Pro-Russian separatists holding a European military observer team in eastern Ukraine released one of the observers for medical reasons Sunday, shortly after parading them before cameras, officials on both sides of the dispute said. At least seven of the inspectors from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe appeared at a news conference staged by the self-declared mayor of Slavyansk, Vyacheslav Ponomarev, who referred to them as "prisoners of war." The freed observer was from Sweden and had been suffering from diabetes, Ponomarev spokeswoman Stella Khorosheva told CNN. And Michael Bociurkiw, an OSCE spokesman in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, called it "a welcome development." Holger Schmuck, one of the German members of the team, said earlier that their captors had ensured the ailing observer had all the water and sugar he needed and were taking particular care of him. The monitors were seized Friday outside Slavyansk, one of the flashpoints in the standoff between Ukraine's interim government and pro-Russian factions challenging its authority in the east. They said that although they have diplomatic status, they went along with Sunday's news conference because the mayor asked them to.
The bus on which the group was traveling earlier was reportedly commandeered and driven to the headquarters of the separatists in Slovyansk, according to a Wall Street Journal report earlier this weekend. Reuters reported Saturday that the separatists suspected the monitors of spying, and offered to release them in exchange for prisoners.

Posted by Laurel Conrad on April 27, 2014 17 Comments
Welcome to the age of Hashtag Diplomacy. For those unfamiliar with the concept, this is what it looks like: Jen Psaki The above tweet is U.S. State Department Spokeswoman Jen Psaki giving a thumbs-up to Ukraine. It illustrates the State Department's latest foreign policy strategy, a twitter campaign for #UnitedForUkraine. However, this Twitter campaign must not be a very formidable or convincing strategy, because it did not take long before the hashtag was "hijacked" by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation. Below is just one example of the various MFA Russia taunts at the Obama Administration:

MFA tweet

On Thursday,  Jen Psaki responded to the MFA by tweeting:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on April 27, 2014 13 Comments
One of the beauties -- and sometimes nightmares -- of Twitter is that sometimes people tell you how they really feel without filters. Such as the NYU Dorm Stormers at Students for Justice in Palestine, who sent out the tweet in the featured image above. That tweet puts the lie to the claims of SJP and similar anti-Israel groups on campus that they do not seek the destruction of Israel, and merely want to have Israel leave Judea and Samaria (aka the West Bank). http://youtu.be/TQxzojmhWW0?t=53s There are naïve followers of these groups who actually believe that spin, but that's not what the groups are about. When they say "Justice in Palestine," what they really mean is that Israel has no right even to exist. NYU SJP was called out on the tweet at Truth Revolt: Truth Revolt NYU SJP denies Israel's right to exist A funny thing then happened. The tweet was deleted, rendering this image at the Truth Revolt post:

Posted by Andrew Branca on April 27, 2014 19 Comments
The past several days I've been attending the National Rifle Associations's Annual Meeting in Indianapolis, having been invited to speak at the NRA's 17th Annual Firearms Law Symposium as part of the larger gathering. The Annual Meeting is a massive event, with something on the order of 70,000 people attending, hundreds of exhibiting vendors covering more than 9 acres of exhibit space, and talks by pro-2nd Amendment Senators, Governors, and television/radio personalities. Given that context, my own little talk on Stand-Your-Ground ranks perhaps among the most modest of the Annual Meeting's constituent components. Even taken just within the context of the other Firearms Law Symposium--which included such well-known civil rights scholars as Stephen Halbrook and David Kopel, as well as Indiana Supreme Court Justice Stephen David (whose talk was particularly outstanding)--I was a small fish, indeed. Nevertheless, I've received repeated requests for video of my small talk, and I aim to please. Much of the substantive content of the talk--and, really, I talk substantively only for about 25 minutes--will be familiar to those who have previously seen my Stand-Your-Ground commentary from the pro-SYG victory at the UC Berkeley debate, from my posts here and elsewhere, or from my book and seminars. In the interests of avoiding a straight-forward droning delivery of the law, I've interlaced what humor I could into the talk, and in particular the last four minutes or so consists of the "Downfall" parody that was prepared following CNN legal analyst Sunny Hostin's refusal to honor her "Zimmerman wager" with me following the Berkeley debate, as covered at length here: CNN analyst welches on bet after Andrew Branca wins “Stand-Your-Ground” Debate.

Posted by Mandy Nagy on April 27, 2014 5 Comments

A roundup of links for your Sunday morning reading. As the NRA has its annual meeting, Piers Morgan couldn't help himself...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on April 26, 2014 7 Comments
We mentioned before how Christian Zionist college student Chloe Valdary has come under highly racialized attack from anti-Israel Jewish leftists like Richard Silverstein, The ugly, repugnant attack on a pro-Israel black American student: https://twitter.com/richards1052/status/437086594546536448 She also is a frequent target of other anti-Zionist fanatics who find a unique threat in a black American female Zionist, because dividing people along racial lines is a key anti-Israel boycott tactic. In this interview at the AIPAC conference, Valdary explains how she has dealt with the attacks, how her Zionism is consistent with that of the great civil rights leaders of the 1960s and why (at 2:20):
"As a free woman of color, of course I would be a Zionist, it's only natural"
Valdary also discussed her own experiences in Israel, and the modern blood libel that Israel is an Apartheid state (at 8:45):
"There is no Apartheid in Israeli society ... it's an insult to the people who suffered from Apartheid in South Africa"
(Via CiFWatch) Valdary goes into even more depth about the racism of the anti-Israel left in this interview:

Posted by Mike LaChance on April 26, 2014 17 Comments
Democrats in politics and media are still beating a constant drum about the GOP's supposed war on women. I wonder if any of the Democrats making the rounds on the Sunday news shows this week will be asked to comment on Gurbaksh Chahal, the California high-tech mogul who likes to give Democrats large amounts of money when he isn't busy beating up his girlfriend. The Washington Free Beacon reported...
Major Obama Donor Avoids Jail Time After Brutally Beating Girlfriend A high-dollar Obama donor who was caught on video brutally beating his girlfriend got off with 25 hours of community service last week after he pled guilty to domestic battery charges. CCTV footage caught Gurbaksh Chahal, the CEO of San Francisco tech startup RadiumOne, kicking his girlfriend 117 times, including blows to the head, and trying to smother her with a pillow during a vicious 30-minute assault. He faced 45 felony charges until the footage was deemed inadmissible. As a result, Chahal has managed to avoid jail time, the Daily Mail reported on Thursday. According to police reports, Chahal also threated to kill his girlfriend several times...

Posted by Mike LaChance on April 26, 2014 3 Comments

The Obama administration's relationship with the media is hardly and adversarial one. In fact, at times it has seemed more like a partnership and there's a logical explanation for that. A surprisingly high number of people have moved back and forth from the media to the...

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