What’s interesting in the news today?
Open Thread
1. The FBI is rounding up ISIS sympathizers.
From BloombergView “The FBI has been rounding up more potential “lone wolf” terrorists, Congressional leaders and the Justice Department say, in response to the perception of a mounting threat of domestic attacks inspired by the Islamic State.
Since the thwarted attack on a “Draw Muhammad” conference in Garland, Texas, on May 3, the Justice Department has announced the arrests of 10 individuals it says were inspired by and supporting the Islamic State. The lawmakers say there have been more arrests that have not yet been announced.
They say the FBI has shifted its approach toward arrests rather than keeping suspects under surveillance, and is also targeting individuals thought to be planning attacks in the U.S., unlike the bureau’s past focus on volunteers preparing to join ISIS’s fight abroad.
“Lately, we have seen an uptick in the number of arrests of ISIL followers who were planning violent acts in our homeland,” said John Carlin, the assistant attorney general for national security. “ISIL, differing from some other foreign terrorist organizations, has demonstrated that they see value in mobilizing sympathizers anywhere in the world.”
The spate of arrests comes in response to what Congressional leaders and the Justice Department say is a mounting threat that radicalized Americans will attempt low-tech, lone wolf attacks in the near future. Lawmakers see the changes as necessary because the Islamic State uses social media so effectively to radicalize Americans and because the group is getting better at using encryption to shield its communications with new recruits.
The shift has downsides. An emphasis on arrests rather than surveillance limits intelligence gathering. Arresting suspected recruits before they’ve acted makes prosecuting them more difficult. It could also violate the First Amendment right to free expression, if terrorist sympathizers are treated as terrorist supporters.“
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2. The Confederate flag has an unlikely ally, the former head of the N.C. NAACP.
From WYHH “Hours after “Black Lives Matter” was spray-painted on monument for “North Carolina’s Civil War Governor,” H.K. Edgerton stood with a Confederate flag, telling those passing by why he wanted it to continue to fly.”
“Edgerton, one of few African-American members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, was outside the monument waving the Confederate flag soon after the graffiti was removed.
He said the graffiti artist protested incorrectly.
“I’m not going to blame it on a Yankee because I’ve seen some southern folk around here that are real questionable too that don’t know anything about who they are and their families and the honorable people in the southland of America, red, yellow, black, white and brown,” Edgerton said.
He said the Confederate flag needs to continue to wave.”
More here from WISTV
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3. Words mean nothing anymore.
From TheNYTimes “The Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that President Obama’s health care law allows the federal government to provide nationwide tax subsidies to help poor and middle-class people buy health insurance, a sweeping vindication that endorsed the larger purpose of Mr. Obama’s signature legislative achievement.
The 6-to-3 ruling means that it is all but certain that the Affordable Care Act will survive after Mr. Obama leaves office in 2017. For the second time in three years, the law survived an encounter with the Supreme Court. But the court’s tone was different this time. The first decision, in 2012, was fractured and grudging, while Thursday’s ruling was more assertive.”
“In dissent on Thursday, Justice Antonin Scalia called the majority’s reasoning “quite absurd” and “interpretive jiggery-pokery.”
He announced his dissent from the bench, a sign of bitter disagreement. His summary was laced with notes of incredulity and sarcasm, sometimes drawing amused murmurs in the courtroom as he described the “interpretive somersaults” he said the majority had performed to reach the decision.
“We really should start calling this law Scotus-care,” Justice Scalia said, to laughter from the audience.”
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4. It. Just. Keeps. Getting. Worse.
From TheDailyBeast “Infidelity. Sexual fetishes. Drug abuse. Crushing debt. They’re the most intimate secrets of U.S. government workers. And now they’re in the hands of foreign hackers.
It was already being described as the worst hack of the U.S. government in history. And it just got much worse.
A senior U.S. official has confirmed that foreign hackers compromised the intimate personal details of an untold number of government workers. Likely included in the hackers’ haul: information about workers’ sexual partners, drug and alcohol abuse, debts, gambling compulsions, marital troubles, and any criminal activity.
Those details, which are now presumed to be in the hands of Chinese spies, are found in the so-called “adjudication information” that U.S. investigators compile on government employees and contractors who are applying for security clearances. The exposure suggests that the massive computer breach at the Office of Personnel Management is more significant and potentially damaging to national security than officials have previously said.
Three former U.S. intelligence officials told The Daily Beast that the adjudication information would effectively provide dossiers on current and former government employees, as well as contractors. It gives foreign intelligence agencies a roadmap for finding people with access to the government’s most highly classified secrets.”
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5. Anyone shocked?
From TheWashingtonTimes “Homeland Security will begin releasing more illegal immigrant families from detention, Secretary Jeh Johnson announced Wednesday as he bowed to political pressure from activists and members of Congress who’d called the conditions inhumane for families.
Despite offering amenities for the illegal immigrants ranging from flat-screen televisions in every suite, classrooms and ball fields at their disposal and 24-hour access to snacks and sodas, Mr. Johnson said he’s concluded things are still too harsh in the three facilities designed to hold families.
He said illegal immigrant parents and children who claim they fear for their lives back home will now have the chance to post a “reasonable and realistic” bond that will earn them the right to be released into the U.S., with the hope that they eventually return for their deportation hearings.”
“It’s a major reversal for Mr. Johnson, who just a year ago pointed to detaining families as one of the key steps he was taking to push back against the surge of illegal immigrant children and families from Central America.
It also comes as new data shows those released from detention almost never show up for their court hearings or to be deported, meaning that any of those families later deemed deportable will likely be difficult to round up.”
90+% aren’t showing up for their hearings now, and they do nothing about it.
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Wandering Views 
Those of us in the Confederate community have great respect for Mr. Edgerton.
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You all know about the Dilbert cartoons.
Well, the ongoing theme of the present cartoons is that Dilbert has written and app, in his spare time, to prohibit the Chinese and others from hacking into our data.
Today’s cartoon: A guy talking to Dilbert: “The app you wrote in your spare time stopped the worst cyber attack our nation has seen. The President has authorized me to kill you and steal the app so no other country can get it.”
Dilbert says, “The government will never find me”
The guy says: “We chipped you during your colonoscopy”.
REALLY? I thought of that long ago. They should have done that to all the Gitmo prisoners they released. It’s criminal to turn those guys loose on the world without a means of tracking them.
“That’s inhumane” You say.
The other sensible alternative is to kill them.
But we did the worst thing of all.
We released them.
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Of course. I don’t know they weren’t chipped. That is not something you tell the world.
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Well you knew it was coming….
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/supreme-court-rules-that-us-constitution-gives-gay-people-the-right-to-marry/ar-AAcaBM5?ocid=U142DHP
“The Supreme Court ruled on Friday that the U.S. Constitution provides same-sex couples the right to marry in a historic triumph for the American gay rights movement.
The court ruled 5-4 that the Constitution’s guarantees of due process and equal protection under the law mean that states cannot ban same-sex marriages. With the ruling, gay marriage will become legal in all 50 states.
Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing on behalf of the court, said that the hope of gay people intending to marry “is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.””
No word yet on which way the vote went other than it being a 5-4 decision.
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More
http://washington.cbslocal.com/2015/06/26/supreme-court-rules-same-sex-couples-have-right-to-marry-nationwide/
“Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas dissented.
Alito wrote, “Today’s decision usurps the constitutional right of the people to decide whether to keep or alter the traditional understanding of marriage.”
Roberts said gay marriage supporters should celebrate, but don’t celebrate the Constitution.
“If you are among the many Americans—of whatever sexual orientation—who favor expanding same-sex marriage, by all means celebrate today’s decision. Celebrate the achievement of a desired goal. Celebrate the opportunity for a new expression of commitment to a partner. Celebrate the availability of new benefits. But do not celebrate the Constitution. It had nothing to do with it,” Roberts wrote.
Scalia wrote his dissent “to call attention to this Court’s threat to American democracy.”
“Today’s decree says that my Ruler, and the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court. The opinion in these cases is the furthest extension in fact—and the furthest extension one can even imagine—of the Court’s claimed power to create “liberties” that the Constitution and its Amendments neglect to mention. This practice of constitutional revision by an unelected committee of nine, always accompanied (as it is today) by extravagant praise of liberty, robs the People of the most important liberty they asserted in the Declaration of Independence and won in the Revolution of 1776: the freedom to govern themselves,” Scalia wrote.””
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May God make us shine as lights for Him in a dark and dying world: “and [God] delivered righteous Lot, who was oppressed by the filthy conduct of the wicked (for that righteous man, dwelling among them, tormented his righteous soul from day to day by seeing and hearing their lawless deeds)” (2 Peter 2:7-8).
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Chaos and falsehood can only reign for so long. I am sorry for all the children who will be deprived of a mother or a father. Like all sin, the ripples go out and touch many. Jesus found a way to walk and talk with both truth and love. God help us do the same.
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Olasky:
http://www.worldmag.com/2015/06/be_on_guard
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Critical to all of this is thinking through what compassion means. Former lesbian Rosaria Butterfield (see “Journey of grace,” March 23, 2013) emailed me: “The idea that a church cannot be welcoming without being gay-affirming on membership issues runs exactly counter to my experience. … Welcoming people to sin—and twisting the meaning and purpose of church membership in the process—does not welcome anyone to Christ. When my gay-affirming friends ask me why I do not support gay ‘marriage,’ I tell them that Christians are called to be good neighbors and good neighbors who never put a stumbling block between a fellow image bearer and the God who made us.”
Butterfield noted a critique from one of her readers who “said my orthodox Christian apologetics lacked ‘relevance’ to gay people. This was someone that I know well, so I wrote back and said, ‘Hard is the new relevant.’” As Matt Chandler pointed out, it’s not cruel when Jesus points out sin: “That’s gracious. What would be cruel is if God went, ‘Do you know what? You’re right. That’s what you desire. Go.’”
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I keep seeing links to the Texas pastor who (supposedly) wants to set himself on fire in protest of gay marriage. Or something.
My guess is it’s bogus. But one of my FB (and real) friends, whom I really like, posted this personal comment along with the link: Maybe all the haters should follow this jerk’s example. Then we wont have to deal with their bigotry. I’ll bring the matches and the marshmallows.
It’s so hard when you know these people and then read their worlds that are so, um, well, hateful.
😦 😦
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Donna
Though we certainly disagree, my experience with you here tells me that you are not a hater.
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Thanks coyote, and welcome back.
I wish we could not always, automatically, and heatedly assume the worst motives in others.
Compassion, charity, grace, listening and patience need to be lifted up again as ideals we (especially as Christians) need to strive for.
I have resolved to strike these themes more often in my own social media posts — and to continue to “scroll on past” the loud, rude and intentionally provocative (& thoughtless, frankly) slogans, ridicule and mockery of those who disagree that inhabit FB posts all too often. 😦
These people do not want to be engaged or even gently challenged. Some will mercilessly beat you up if you try (I found that out the hard way once a couple years ago). 🙄
And then I ended up apologizing to her
(At least it made her stop already 🙂 )
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