Judge Rules Against Christopher Columbus Statue Removal in Philadelphia
A Philadelphia, PA judge ruled that a Christopher Columbus statue may remain in place after city officials pushed to have it removed. Judge Paula Patrick said that the push to remove the statue had no legal basis and lacked sufficient evidence.
According to reports from The Washington Examiner:
“It is baffling to this court as to how the City of Philadelphia wants to remove the Statue without any legal basis,” she wrote in her decision. “The city’s entire argument and case is devoid of any legal foundation.”
The city’s Board of License and Inspection Review had initially upheld a July 2020 decision by the Philadelphia Historical Commission to remove the statue.
However, the city did not provide an adequate opportunity for the public to weigh in on the statue’s future, Patrick said.
“While we are very disappointed with the ruling, we’re reviewing it now and exploring all potential options — including a possible appeal,” said a spokesperson for Mayor Jim Kenney. “The statue remains in Marconi Plaza and will continue to be secured in its existing box.”
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In Shift, Israel Quietly Allows Jewish Prayer on Temple Mount
Jewish activists say they are exercising their right to free worship at a site holy to Jews and Muslims
But the change upsets a longstanding compromise aimed at staving off conflict.
The Israeli government has long forbidden Jews to pray on the Temple Mount, a site sacred to Jews and Muslims, yet Rabbi Yehudah Glick made little effort to hide his prayers. In fact, he was livestreaming them.
“Oh Lord!” prayed Rabbi Glick, as he filmed himself on his phone on a recent morning. “Save my soul from false lips and deceitful tongues!”
Since Israel captured the Old City of Jerusalem from Jordan in 1967, it has maintained a fragile religious balance at the Temple Mount, the most divisive site in Jerusalem: Only Muslims can worship there, while Jews can pray at the Western Wall below.
But recently the government has quietly allowed increasing numbers of Jews to pray there, a shift that could aggravate the instability in East Jerusalem and potentially lead to religious conflict.
“It’s a sensitive place,” said Ehud Olmert, a former Israeli prime minister. “And sensitive places such as this, which have an enormous potential for explosion, need to be treated with care.”
Rabbi Glick, an American-born, right-wing former lawmaker, has been leading efforts to change the status quo for decades. He characterizes his effort as a matter of religious freedom: If Muslims can pray there, why not Jews?
“God is the master of all humanity,” he said. “And he wants every one of us to be here to worship, every one in his own style.”
But the prohibition of Jewish prayer on the 37-acre plateau that once held two ancient Jewish temples was part of a longstanding compromise to avoid conflict at a site that has been a frequent flash point in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Under the arrangement, the Jordanian government has retained administrative oversight of the Temple Mount, known to Arabs as the Noble Sanctuary or the Aqsa compound. The Aqsa Mosque and the golden Dome of the Rock, a shrine that Muslim tradition considers to be the spot where the Prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven, are situated on its limestone plaza.
Israel has overall security authority and maintains a small police station there.
The government officially allows non-Muslims to visit the site for several hours each morning on the condition that they not pray there. Though no Israeli law explicitly bars Jewish prayer there, Jewish visitors who attempt to pray there have historically been removed or reprimanded by the police.
When this balance of power has appeared to teeter, it has often led to violence.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/24/world/middleeast/israel-temple-mount-prayer.html
***************************************Eviction Moratorium Likely To Create More Homelessness
Hint: It’s about incentives
In September of 2020, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that they would implement an eviction moratorium that would last through the end of the year. It is now almost a full year since the start of this “temporary” program, and it has recently been renewed, scheduled to expire at the start of October.
After making the decision, the CDC wrote, “The eviction moratorium allows additional time for rent relief to reach renters and to further increase vaccination rates. In the context of a pandemic, eviction moratoria—like quarantine, isolation, and social distancing—can be an effective public health measure utilized to prevent the spread of communicable disease.”
The Self-Defeating Economics Of The Eviction Moratorium
Aside from the shaky (and possibly non-existent) legal basis for the eviction moratorium, it may also have the opposite of its intended effects in the long run. In fact, it could easily lead to more homelessness than there was before it was put in place due to the incentives it creates in the housing market.
According to Pew Research, “more U.S. households are headed by renters than at any point since at least 1965.” Young people and low-income families are the most likely to rent.
For these groups to be housed, there must be adequate supply. To keep up with demand, new housing must continually be put on the market—either through new units being built or existing units being transitioned into rental properties.
But goods generally—and specifically housing in this case—do not simply appear on the market out of nowhere. Individuals or businesses must conclude that it is in their financial self-interest prior to adding units to the market.
In an unhampered market, a landlord and a tenant would make an agreement as to the rent the tenant would pay in exchange for the landlord allowing them to use their private property. If the tenant does not live up to his end of the bargain—by, for example, not paying the agreed-upon rent—then the landlord can evict him. If the landlord does not live up to his end of the bargain—by, for example, failing to perform agreed-upon maintenance—then the tenant can end the lease without an obligation to pay for its remaining duration.
But the eviction moratorium is a sharp move away from this market characterized by a mutually agreed-upon contract that both sides have an obligation to uphold. Under this policy, the tenant has no obligation to live up to his end of the bargain. He can fail to pay rent—meaning he is using and occupying someone else’s private property without paying for that right—and the landlord cannot do anything about it.
As a result, the eviction moratorium sets a dangerous precedent. The policy requires that landlords pay for other people to occupy and use their privately owned land, thus precluding them from earning any money. Even though this is a supposedly “temporary” measure, the incentive to build new housing is diminished when the prospect of the government voiding a voluntary agreement between two people with no real warning becomes a reality. One of the determinants of supply is producer expectations. If there is complete uncertainty—and producers know that government can simply take away their ability to earn money one day—that will clearly inhibit supply growth. People may opt to sell their unit rather than putting it on the rental market, for example.
Sticking it to landlords for the sake of renters is as short-sighted as the fool in the fable who killed the goose that laid the golden eggs to get at the gold inside.
This becomes doubly true when one takes into account the fact that there are over 22.5 million rental units owned by individuals—not businesses. These people are not rich or greedy. They are mostly middle class and just trying to make a little more income. Among single-property landlords, more than half of them did not even originally buy the property in order to rent it out and make money, but rather just to use it as their residence.
For some of these people, the eviction moratorium has put them in financial ruins. As a result, the future incentive for individuals to put housing units on the market has shrunk dramatically—and that, in the end, will cause one of two things to happen. One: it may result in a housing shortage, in which case there are more people who want housing than there are units on the market. This results in homelessness. Or, two: there is no shortage because prices rise to a level that precludes a sizable number of people from renting. This, too, results in homelessness.
Mises’s Lesson: A Tragic Cycle
Other interventionist housing policies have the same flaw of disincentivizing new housing from being put on the market. Rent control, for example, does the same thing through a price ceiling.
Such policies engender a self-perpetuating cycle that leaves ordinary people—especially low-income people—far worse off while awarding the politicians who push the policy with far more clout.
The cycle goes like this: There is first a small population either homeless or at risk of being evicted. As a result, politicians campaign to make housing more “affordable” through price controls, eviction moratoria, and other such policies. But, the policy stifles the profit motive, and therefore the incentive to build new housing. In consequence, there is either a shortage of housing, the price of housing goes up, or both. The result of that is a greater homelessness problem. And the cycle then restarts, with politicians using the bitter fruits of the previous intervention as a justification for further intervention.
The people living on the streets in big cities that have implemented bold rent-control policies such as New York are often seen as the victims of capitalism. But, in truth, they are actually the victims of government intervention into the housing market.
In Ludwig von Mises’s book, Middle-of-the-road Policy Leads to Socialism, he points out that this cycle is endemic to interventionism. And if pursued to the bitter end, the cycle culminates in outright nationalization of the regulated industries and ultimately in a total command economy. As he wrote:
[The policy] produce[s] effects which from the point of view of the government are even worse than the previous state of affairs which the government wanted to alter. If the government, in order to eliminate these inevitable but unwelcome consequences, pursues its course further and further, it finally transforms the system of capitalism and free enterprise into socialism.
As massive government economic interventions—and their disastrous consequences—continue to mount under the cover of COVID-19, this cycle is spinning out of control: not only in housing, but throughout the whole economy. If we are to avoid a totalitarian future, we must break the cycle before it is too late.
https://catalyst.independent.org/2021/08/24/eviction-moratorium-homelessness/?omhide=true
**************************************'Profound abuse': Judge disciplines pro-Trump lawyers over election lawsuit
A U.S. judge on Wednesday sanctioned Sidney Powell and other lawyers who sued in Michigan to overturn Democratic President Joe Biden's election victory over Donald Trump, and suggested they might deserve to lose their law licenses.
In a highly anticipated written ruling, U.S. District Judge Linda Parker in Detroit said the pro-Trump lawyers, including Powell and prominent litigator Lin Wood, should have investigated the Republican former president's voter fraud claims more carefully before filing what Parker called a "frivolous" lawsuit.
Parker, who dismissed the Michigan suit last December, formally requested that disciplinary bodies investigate whether the pro-Trump lawyers should have their law licenses revoked. The judge also ordered the lawyers to attend classes on the ethical and legal requirements for filing legal claims.
"This lawsuit represents a historic and profound abuse of the judicial process," Parker said in her decision, adding that the case "was never about fraud - it was about undermining the People's faith in our democracy and debasing the judicial process to do so."
The judge said Powell, Wood, and other lawyers who worked with them "have scorned their oath, flouted the rules, and attempted to undermine the integrity of the judiciary along the way."
Powell did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Wood said on the social media platform Telegram that he "had nothing to do with" the lawsuit and would appeal.
Powell represented Trump's campaign when he tried to overturn last Nov. 3's presidential election in the courts. His campaign distanced itself from Powell after she claimed without evidence at a Nov. 19 news conference that electronic voting systems had switched millions of ballots to Biden.
In a written decision last December, Parker said Powell's voter fraud claims were "nothing but speculation and conjecture" and that, in any event, the Texas lawyer waited too long to file her lawsuit.
Powell asserted in a court hearing last month that she had carefully vetted her election fraud claims before suing, and that the only way to test them would have been at trial or a hearing on evidence gathered. Her co-counsel repeatedly called for such an evidentiary hearing.
Starting in January, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel and other government lawyers asked the judge to discipline the pro-Trump lawyers, saying they had filed a frivolous lawsuit full of typos and factual errors and should be held accountable.
"I'm pleased to see that the Court has ensured there is accountability for the attorneys who perpetuated meritless arguments in court," Nessel said in a statement on Wednesday.
"I appreciate the unmistakable message (the judge) sends with this ruling - those who vow to uphold the Constitution must answer for abandoning that oath."
Parker on Thursday also ordered the pro-Trump lawyers to reimburse election officials for the cost of defending the lawsuit. The amount will be determined by the judge in the coming months, said David Fink, a lawyer for the City of Detroit who requested sanctions, in an interview.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See 
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