“We Know Who And What Was Done”: Son Of 9/11 Victim Slams Ilhan Omar During Ground Zero Memorial
The son of an elderly 9/11 victim slammed Rep. Ilhan Omar during Wednesday’s memorial ceremony at Ground Zero over her description that the perpetrators of the attacks – the deadliest attacks ever on American soil – were “some people [who] did something.”
Let’s not forget it wasn’t just some people did something! @IlhanMN@nytimes airplanes did not just fly into buildings! Remember 911🇺🇸 and God bless all lost or devastated by the attacks of islamic terrorists on that day! pic.twitter.com/dhiUwIhDXV
Nicholas Haros Jr. addressed the service while wearing a black T-shirt with the words “Some people did something?” emblazoned across his chest.
That phrase was infamously uttered by Rep. Ilhan Omar to describe the 9/11 attacks during remarks to a Council on American-Islamic Relations banquet in California back in March. A few weeks later, her fellow Congressman Dan Crenshaw, who described her remarks as “unbelievable,” tweeted a clip of Omar’s speech, bringing national and international attention to her remarks.
First Member of Congress to ever describe terrorists who killed thousands of Americans on 9/11 as “some people who did something”.
After the names of 9/11 victims, including his mother, Frances Haros, were read aloud, Haros spoke and turned his ire on Omar and her fellow members of “the Squad.”
After being interrupted by applause, Haros continued, saying “today I am here to respond to you exactly who did what to whom.”
“‘Some people did something,’ said a freshman congresswoman from Minnesota,” Haros said.
“Madam, objectively speaking, we know who and what was done. There is no uncertainty about that. Why your confusion?” Haros asked.
“On that day, 19 Islamic terrorist members of al Qaeda killed over 3,000 people and caused billions of dollars of economic damage. Is that clear?”
“But as to whom,” Haros added, “I was attacked, your relatives and friends were attacked, our constitutional freedoms were attacked and our nation’s founding on Judeo-Christian principles were attacked.”
“That’s what some people did,” Haros railed. Got that now?”
He continued: “We are here today, Congresswoman, to tell you and the Squad just who did what to whom. Show respect in honoring them, please. American patriotism in your position demand it.”
Haros’s mother died during the attacks at the age of 76. “Mom, we always miss you and love you very much,” Haros said.
During last year’s 9/11 memorial ceremony, Haros also targeted politicians, pleading that they stop using victims of the attacks “as props.”
Should Americans be prohibited by law from belonging to pro-gun rights organizations like the NRA?
“Among all likely voters, 23% favor declaring the NRA a terrorist organization in their home community, while 18% think it should be against the law to belong to pro-gun rights groups like the NRA.” On the other hand, 50% of voters have “a favorable impression of the NRA; 44% do not,” virtually the same numbers as in March 2018.
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Ilya Shapiro and I filed an amicus brief on behalf of the Cato Institute and Professor Jeremy Rabkin in DHS v. Regents of the University of California. We filed the brief “in support of DACA as a matter of policy but [the government] as a matter of law.” The caption caused quite a kerfuffle on social media. You should not judge a brief by its cover, we explained in a new SCOTUSBlog symposium essay:
Most Supreme Court amicus briefs are predictable. Groups that favor outcome A argue that the law supports outcome A. Groups that favor outcome B argue that the law supports outcome B. Occasionally, groups file cross-ideological briefs in which people of opposite political stripes unite to support a specific cause. But even these briefs fall into the same pattern: Regardless of ostensible ideological labels, all the groups on the brief support the policy outcome that the brief’s legal theory advances. . . .
We affirmatively support as a matter of policy normalizing the immigration status of individuals who were brought to this country as children and have no criminal records. (See Cato’s immigration work if you have any doubts.) Moreover, as a matter of first principle, people shouldn’t need government permission to work. But the president cannot unilaterally make such a fundamental change to our immigration policy — not even when Congress refuses to act.
Inside the brief, we advance an argument that was not presented, directly at least, by the government’s briefing in this case.
The attorney general reasonably determined that DACA is inconsistent with the president’s duty of faithful execution. Admittedly, the attorney general’s letter justifying the rescission is not a model of clarity. But it need not be. This executive-branch communication provides, at a minimum, a reasonable constitutional objection to justify DACA rescission. Specifically, it invokes the “major questions” doctrine – outlined by Justice Neil Gorsuch in dissent in Gundy v. United States – which is used “in service of the constitutional rule” that Congress cannot delegate legislative power to the executive branch.
Much to our pleasant surprise, after we filed the brief, President Trump addressed our position in his own inimitable way:
….President Obama never had the legal right to sign DACA, and he indicated so at the time of signing. But In any event, how can he have the right to sign and I don’t have the right to “unsigned.” Totally illegal document which would actually give the President new powers.
To be sure, the tweet has factual mistakes. For example, President Obama didn’t sign the “totally illegal document.” The Secretary of Homeland Security implemented DACA. But for once, the President’s social media account actual bolsters his case in court. He wrote that DACA “would actually give the President new powers.” In other words, DACA relied on a reading of the INA that would delegate legislative powers to the executive that he lacks. Stripped of all legal formalities, the presidential tweet concisely explains why DACA was inconsistent with the president’s duty of faithful execution. And it comes right from the commander in chief.
Candidly, this tweet is far more descriptive than the attorney general’s letter, which dances around the issue of what DACA’ “constitutional defects” are. In our brief, we offer a suggestion to the Court:
Here, the executive branch is on the same page: the previous administration’s reading of federal law that supports DACA would render parts of the INA unconstitutional. For that reason, the attorney general recommended, and the secretary decided, to rescind DACA. The Court should hesitate before reaching an alternate holding, in which the attorney general and the secretary of homeland security, as well as the solicitor general, were simply mistaken about the executive’s faithful execution. The better understanding is that the reference to DACA’s “constitutional defects” was framed in terms of the major questions and non-delegation doctrines, as Justice Gorsuch recognized in Gundy. But if there is any doubt about this important question, the government should be asked to represent its position about DACA’s “constitutional defects.”
With, or without the tweet, the record amply provides enough ground to justify the rescission of DACA.
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President Donald Trump tweeted this morning that “The Federal Reserve should get our interest rates down to ZERO, or less, and we should then start to refinance our debt. INTEREST COST COULD BE BROUGHT WAY DOWN, while at the same time substantially lengthening the term. We have the great currency, power, and balance sheet………The USA should always be paying the lowest rate. No Inflation! It is only the naïveté of Jay Powell and the Federal Reserve that doesn’t allow us to do what other countries are already doing. A once in a lifetime opportunity that we are missing because of ‘Boneheads.'” (The president has long made it clear that obedience to his whims is the most important quality he seeks in members of the Federal Reserve Board.)
Those who approach monetary policy from a free market perspective mistrust—and see as inherently artificial and manipulative—using Federal Reserve interest rate policy to satisfy short-term political goals.
George Selgin, director of the Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives at the Cato Institute, said in an email this morning that Trump’s “repeated badgering of Fed officials, calling for them to ease monetary policy despite near-target inflation, robust spending growth, and low unemployment, has one thing to be said in its favor: assuming that these statistics don’t change dramatically, it offers the Fed a unique opportunity to prove that its much-ballyhooed independence is, after all, not just a fairy tale.”
Selgin further writes that, contra Trump’s implication, “it simply isn’t true that there is no risk of inflation, or that the Fed isn’t capable of generating it. It’s true that rate settings consistent with the Fed’s 2 percent inflation target are much lower than they would have been some time ago. But the Fed can still go too low; and every usual indicator suggests that setting rates at zero, let alone below, would be setting them way too low.”
“Although U.S. inflation numbers have tended to be slightly below 2 percent,” Selgin adds, “‘slightly’ is the operative word. A difference of a few tenths of a percentage point from target is hardly enough to call statistically significant, let alone enough to justify a policy rate setting change of two or more percentage points!”
Robert Murphy, a senior fellow with the Mises Institute, says in an email this morning that, from his Austrian perspective, in which “interest rates are market prices with an important job to do,” Trump is playing with fire: “It was artificially low interest rates that helped blow up the housing bubble and led to the financial crisis in 2008. President Trump’s call for zero or even negative (!) interest rates would not be medicine, but in fact poison, for the long-term health of the economy.”
Murphy is not persuaded by folks who point to other countries that have tried or are trying what Trump proposes. “Some are pointing to Japan as a country that’s had large deficit spending and aggressive monetary stimulus for decades without a breakout of price inflation,” Murphy says. “Even on its own terms, at best this is saying, ‘We too could have a stalled economy for 30 years here in the U.S., let’s follow their model.'”
(For some insights from a market-oriented economist on how policies such as the one Trump is advocating played out in Japan in past decades, see Benjamin Powell’s “Explaining Japan’s Recession.”)
If the Fed cuts rates dramatically when the economy is still sturdy, consumers and businesses likely would view the move as a sign of trouble, prompting many to pull back spending and possibly leading to the growth slowdown they fear.
“I think that’s a panic move to (lower rates) that severely,” says Jacob Oubina, senior economist at RBC Capital Markets, who thinks the Fed should continue to cut at a moderate pace to shift the yield curve to a traditional status with short-term rates below long-term ones. Investors “will think the Fed knows something the market doesn’t know.”
CNBC reminds us that such a move would throw under the bus those who dare to merely save and not speculate. The Washington Post, meanwhile, wonders how much debt-riddled businessman Trump could save if he pressures the “boneheads” at the Fed into doing his whim.
The New York Times gives the larger global economic context: “The European Central Bank is expected to cut a key interest rate to a record-low negative 0.5 percent and roll out additional stimulus measures at its meeting on Thursday, in a bid to shore up very-low inflation and waning growth in important economies like Germany. Central banks around the world have been lowering their policy rates, partly because Mr. Trump’s trade war is combining with Brexit jitters and a global manufacturing slowdown to threaten growth in many nations.”
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What you are about to read in this article is likely to make you very angry. Once upon a time, the primary mission of our hospitals was to help people, but today they have become vicious financial predators. Many Americans try very hard to avoid visiting the hospital because of what it might cost, but if an emergency happens there is no choice.
They often get us when we are at our most vulnerable, and they never explain to us in advance how much their services will actually cost. And then eventually when the bills start arriving we discover that they have charged us 30 dollars for a single aspirin or “$2,000 for a $20 feeding tube”. It is a giant scam, but they have been getting away with it for decades, and so they just keep on doing it. And many hospitals go after those that are not able to pay their ridiculous bills extremely aggressively. Just consider the following example which comes to us from USA Today…
Heather Waldron and John Hawley are losing their four-bedroom house in the hills above Blacksburg, Virginia. A teenage daughter, one of their five children, sold her clothes for spending money. They worried about paying the electric bill. Financial disaster, they said, contributed to their divorce, finalized in April.
Their money problems began when the University of Virginia Health System pursued the couple with a lawsuit and a lien on their home to recoup $164,000 in charges for Waldron’s emergency surgery in 2017.
I can’t imagine any surgery that should ever cost $164,000. You can buy an entire house for that amount of money. It is highway robbery, and those that are engaged in this sort of predatory pricing are literally crooks.
Sadly, Heather Waldron and John Hawley have a lot of company. Over the past six years, the University of Virginia Health System has sued 36,000 patients…
The family has lots of company: Over six years ending in June 2018, the health system and its doctors filed 36,000 lawsuits against patients, seeking a total of more than $106 million, seizing wages and bank accounts, putting liens on property and homes and forcing families into bankruptcy, a Kaiser Health News analysis found.
Yes, the University of Virginia Health System saves lives every single day, but the way that they are running their operation is bringing great shame to the entire state of Virginia.
Of course there are many other hospitals all across the country that are behaving in a similar manner. This next example comes from CNN…
When Donna Hernandez had the flu last year, she went to her local emergency room in New Mexico, where she received two IV bags of saline, a dose of antiviral medication and a drug to help with her nausea.
She says after about two and a half hours, she was on her way.
Hernandez recovered from the flu, but still hasn’t recovered from the shock of the bill she received afterward. It was for more than $6,000.
Are you kidding me?
Hernandez didn’t stay overnight and she didn’t have any surgery.
How in the world can that hospital possibly justify a bill for more than $6,000?
Like I said, they are a bunch of crooks.
But their racket is completely legal, and those participating are becoming exceedingly wealthy at our expense. If you can believe it, the University of Virginia Health System has made a profit of $554 million over the past six years, and the CEO brings in an exceedingly bloated salary…
UVA Medical Center, the flagship of UVA Health System, earned $554 million in profit over the six years ending in June 2018 and holds stocks, bonds and other investments worth $1 billion, according to financial statements. CEO Sutton-Wallace earns a salary of $750,000, with bonus incentives that could push her annual pay close to $1 million, according to a copy of her employment contract, obtained under public information law.
Our “healthcare system” is deeply, deeply broken, and it is destroying lives all across America.
A single trip to the hospital can ruin you financially for the rest of your life, and one recent survey found that health costs are “the main financial worry” for Americans aged 25 to 45…
According to a survey of 1,000 Americans aged 25-45, financial stress and worries are quite literally making people sick. Respondents listed health care as the main financial worry of their lives, and three in four admitted to having a “negative experience” due to financial stress. Ironically, 39% said that financial stress has had a negative impact on their health; indicating a troubling cycle of financial stress brought on by health care costs, which in turn leads to more health problems.
And that same survey discovered that a substantial percentage of respondents have actually been avoiding the “healthcare system” because of what it might cost…
In fact, three in four surveyed young adults reported taking “risky” actions to save money on medical expenses. More specifically, 33% delayed seeking medical help in the hope that their condition would just go away, 27% considered avoiding medical attention due to high deductibles, and 22% scheduled a medical appointment but never showed after considering the bill.
In America today, 66.5 percent of all bankruptcies are related to medical bills, and most of those that go bankrupt actually have health insurance.
Those that follow my work regularly know that I have been writing about these things for a long time, and I am deeply frustrated that things just seem to get worse with each passing year.
At one time, the medical profession was a noble path, and those that sacrificed so much to help others were greatly admired.
But now the “healthcare system” in America has become a cesspool of greed, and for many of those that are attracted to it the main goal is to make as much money as possible.
Just because it is currently legal, that does not mean that the predatory behavior of the industry is moral.
President Donald Trump tweeted this morning that “The Federal Reserve should get our interest rates down to ZERO, or less, and we should then start to refinance our debt. INTEREST COST COULD BE BROUGHT WAY DOWN, while at the same time substantially lengthening the term. We have the great currency, power, and balance sheet………The USA should always be paying the lowest rate. No Inflation! It is only the naïveté of Jay Powell and the Federal Reserve that doesn’t allow us to do what other countries are already doing. A once in a lifetime opportunity that we are missing because of ‘Boneheads.'” (The president has long made it clear that obedience to his whims is the most important quality he seeks in members of the Federal Reserve Board.)
Those who approach monetary policy from a free market perspective mistrust—and see as inherently artificial and manipulative—using Federal Reserve interest rate policy to satisfy short-term political goals.
George Selgin, director of the Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives at the Cato Institute, said in an email this morning that Trump’s “repeated badgering of Fed officials, calling for them to ease monetary policy despite near-target inflation, robust spending growth, and low unemployment, has one thing to be said in its favor: assuming that these statistics don’t change dramatically, it offers the Fed a unique opportunity to prove that its much-ballyhooed independence is, after all, not just a fairy tale.”
Selgin further writes that, contra Trump’s implication, “it simply isn’t true that there is no risk of inflation, or that the Fed isn’t capable of generating it. It’s true that rate settings consistent with the Fed’s 2 percent inflation target are much lower than they would have been some time ago. But the Fed can still go too low; and every usual indicator suggests that setting rates at zero, let alone below, would be setting them way too low.”
“Although U.S. inflation numbers have tended to be slightly below 2 percent,” Selgin adds, “‘slightly’ is the operative word. A difference of a few tenths of a percentage point from target is hardly enough to call statistically significant, let alone enough to justify a policy rate setting change of two or more percentage points!”
Robert Murphy, a senior fellow with the Mises Institute, says in an email this morning that, from his Austrian perspective, in which “interest rates are market prices with an important job to do,” Trump is playing with fire: “It was artificially low interest rates that helped blow up the housing bubble and led to the financial crisis in 2008. President Trump’s call for zero or even negative (!) interest rates would not be medicine, but in fact poison, for the long-term health of the economy.”
Murphy is not persuaded by folks who point to other countries that have tried or are trying what Trump proposes. “Some are pointing to Japan as a country that’s had large deficit spending and aggressive monetary stimulus for decades without a breakout of price inflation,” Murphy says. “Even on its own terms, at best this is saying, ‘We too could have a stalled economy for 30 years here in the U.S., let’s follow their model.'”
(For some insights from a market-oriented economist on how policies such as the one Trump is advocating played out in Japan in past decades, see Benjamin Powell’s “Explaining Japan’s Recession.”)
If the Fed cuts rates dramatically when the economy is still sturdy, consumers and businesses likely would view the move as a sign of trouble, prompting many to pull back spending and possibly leading to the growth slowdown they fear.
“I think that’s a panic move to (lower rates) that severely,” says Jacob Oubina, senior economist at RBC Capital Markets, who thinks the Fed should continue to cut at a moderate pace to shift the yield curve to a traditional status with short-term rates below long-term ones. Investors “will think the Fed knows something the market doesn’t know.”
CNBC reminds us that such a move would throw under the bus those who dare to merely save and not speculate. The Washington Post, meanwhile, wonders how much debt-riddled businessman Trump could save if he pressures the “boneheads” at the Fed into doing his whim.
The New York Times gives the larger global economic context: “The European Central Bank is expected to cut a key interest rate to a record-low negative 0.5 percent and roll out additional stimulus measures at its meeting on Thursday, in a bid to shore up very-low inflation and waning growth in important economies like Germany. Central banks around the world have been lowering their policy rates, partly because Mr. Trump’s trade war is combining with Brexit jitters and a global manufacturing slowdown to threaten growth in many nations.”
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Uber Finds Legal Loophole To Ignore New California Ridesharing Law
Uber announced on Wednesday that it will ignore new California legislation which requires companies to reclassify contract workers as employees – a measure which may affect up to one million residents who work as contractors.
The San Francisco-based company’s chief legal officer, Tony West, said in a news conference that its drivers’ work is “outside the usual course of Uber’s business,” which is serving as a technology platform for several types of marketplaces.
Uber counsel Tony West had pointed to legal rulings in making this argument. “In fact, several previous rulings have found that drivers’ work is outside the usual course of Uber’s business, which is serving as a technology platform for several different types of” marketplaces.
California’s passage of Assembly Bill 5 earlier Wednesday requires companies treat workers as employees, not contractors, if they control how the workers’ tasks are performed and/or if their job falls within part of an employer’s regular business. Governor Gavin Newsom has endorsed the bill and is expected to sign it.
The bill has implications for app-based services such as Uber, Lyft and DoorDash, which have built themselves into large businesses with independent and inexpensive workers who do not receive the benefits or minimum pay guaranteed to employees. California has at least one million people who work as contractors and who may be affected by the measure. Apart from ride-hailing and food-delivery drivers, those include nail salon workers, janitors, construction workers and others.
Under the bill, companies must consider a three-prong test when classifying a worker. That includes weighing how much a company directs the worker’s tasks and how much of the work is part of the company’s main business. –NYT
“Just because the test is hard doesn’t mean that we will not be able to pass it” says West.
All of America’s bubbles will pop, and sooner rather than later.
Financial bubbles manifest three dynamics: the one we’re most familiar with is human greed, the desire to exploit a windfall and catch a work-free ride to riches.
The second dynamic gets much less attention: financial manias arise when there is no other more productive, profitable use for capital, and these periods occur when there is an abundance of credit available to inflate the bubbles.
Humans respond to the incentives the system presents: if dealing illegal drugs can net $20,000 a month compared to $2,000 a month from a regular job, then a certain percentage of the work force is going to pursue that asymmetry.
In our current economy, corporations have sunk $2.5 trillion in buying back their own stocks because this generates the highest work-free return. This reflects two realities:
1. Corporations can’t find any other more productive, profitable use for their capital than buying back their own shares (enriching the managers via stock options and the 10% of American households who own 93% of the stocks)
2. Thanks to the Federal Reserve and other central banks injecting trillions of dollars of nearly-free credit into the financial sector, corporations can borrow billions of dollars to play with at near-zero rates that are historically unprecedented.
So borrow billions at 2.5%, pour it all into buying back your own stock and reap the gains as your stock rises 10%. Recall the basic mechanism of stock buy-backs: by reducing the number of shares outstanding, sales and profits go up on a per share basis–not because the company generated more revenues and profits, but because the number of shares has been reduced by the buy-backs.
(Note to New Green Deal advocates: if corporations reckoned they could earn more by investing the $2.5 trillion in alternative energy projects rather than stock buy-backs, they would have done so.)
As various sources have outlined, corporate stock buy-backs have been the primary driver of higher stock prices. This is driving the third dynamic of bubbles:
As the bubble continues inflating beyond any rational valuation, rational investors throw in the towel and join the frenzy. Once again, this willingness to abandon rationality is partly fueled by greed and also by a dearth of other more attractive investments.
A bubble economy is a sick economy, for bubbles are proof there is too much capital chasing too few productive uses for that capital. The Fed and other central banks have created trillions of dollars, yuan, euros and yen for corporations and financiers to play with, and to a lesser degree, for home buyers to play with via low mortgage rates and federal guarantees on mortgages.
As a result, the housing bubble is the one regular folks can play. And despite claims that it’s not a bubble because of organic demand, housing is definitely in a bubble, along with stocks and bonds, art, etc.
When you create trillions of dollars, yuan, euros and yen out of thin air, you create the incentives to inflate bubbles. When your real economy is sick and offers few productive uses for all this excess capital, that only adds fuel to the speculative fire.
Here’s the problem: all bubbles burst, regardless of other conditions. Creating more trillions won’t change this, adding more gamblers to the casino won’t change this, claiming a bubble economy is healthy won’t change this and promising a trade deal with China won’t change this.
All of America’s bubbles will pop, and sooner rather than later. The stock market moves a bit faster than the housing and bond markets, but the bubbles that are visible in every market will all burst, much to everyone’s dismay.
We can add a fourth dynamic of bubbles: nobody believes bubbles can burst until it’s too late to get out unscathed.
Al-Qaeda Chief Issues 9/11 Video Urging New Attacks On US, Europe, Russia, & Israel
Perhaps trying to stay relevant and feared after eighteen years in hiding following the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, 68-year old Egyptian cleric and al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahri has released a new video message urging his followers to attack the US, Europe, Russia and Israel.
Multiple jihad monitoring and analysis sites, including SITE Intelligence Group, reported Wednesday the new video was released as al-Qaeda’s own “positive” commemoration of the 9/11 anniversary wherein the terror leader touted and celebrated “severe blows dealt to America”.
Zawahri, who alongside ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi remains one of the two most wanted terrorists in the world, and has a bounty of up to $25 million offered by US authorities for information leading to his capture.
The al-Qaeda chief, who took up the mantle of the group’s leadership after the 2011 death of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, further condemned ‘backsliding’ and ‘backtracker’ jihadists who had softened in their stance on jihad.
He also addressed and decried supposed statements by some jihadists voicing regret for all the civilians killed on 9/11, saying they should keep up the fight against the “crusaders”.
The video message entitled, “And They Shall Continue to Fight You,” also details how the terror group hopes to first use attacks on Israel as a launchpad for further offensive operations against American, French, British, and other western allies.
He also repeated the usual jihadist line that the US military was still waging “a global crusader campaign against Muslims everywhere” and further that America only “understands the language of force.”
The video was released just as President Trump spoke at the Pentagon to commemorate 9/11 victims.
“If anyone dares to strike our land, we will respond with the full measure of American power and the iron will of the American spirit and that spirit is unbreakable,” President Trump said.
Interestingly, the only place on the planet where al-Qaeda actually has a sizable presence and influence is Idlib province in northwest Syria, where in 2015 the US and its allies actually helped al-Qaeda aligned groups capture Idlib city as part of regime change efforts targeting Syria’s Assad.
Plaintiff Eric Wedgewood sued Defendant The Daily Beast Co., LLC (“TDB”) in Illinois circuit court, alleging that TDB published a defamatory article about him on its website. TDB removed the action to federal court, asserting diversity jurisdiction …. Wedgewood has now moved to remand the action back to the Illinois courts…. Wedgewood’s motion is denied….
TDB is a media company headquartered in New York; its members are citizens of Delaware and New York. Wedgewood is a citizen of Illinois.
TDB posted an article on its website on April 24, 2018, entitled “‘He Started Messaging Me When I Was 16’: Female Members Slam ‘Content Zone’s’ Creator.” In the article, Wedgewood alleges, journalist Taylor Lorenz “makes a variety of unsupported and defaming allegations” about him. In particular, the article cites anonymous sources who claim to have been “hit on” by Wedgewood while they were underage. Wedgewood claims that Lorenz did nothing to confirm the veracity of these anonymous accounts and did not interview him for his side of the story. In fact, Wedgewood alleges, the article cites an anonymous Instagram account that had been created to harass him and that Instagram disabled for violating the site’s terms of service on April 22, 2019. Still, despite what Wedgewood characterizes as the obvious falsity of TDB’s article, it has been “widely disseminated and is currently indexed on the first page of several search engine results.” …
Federal courts are courts of limited jurisdiction…. One basis for federal jurisdiction is diversity jurisdiction, which gives federal courts authority to adjudicate civil actions “where the matter in controversy exceeds the sum or value of $75,000 … and is between citizens of different States.” … When a plaintiff files a civil action in state court, the defendant may remove the action to federal court as long as the federal court would have had jurisdiction to hear the case at the time it was filed…. If a federal court lacks jurisdiction over a case removed from state court, the case must be remanded….
Wedgewood argues that the amount in controversy does not exceed $75,000. In support of this assertion, he submits an affidavit in which he declares: “In order to remain in state court, which would be a more efficient venue to resolve this present matter, I hereby affirm that damages will not exceed seventy-five thousand dollars ($75,000) It is my understanding that with my clarification of damages, this present matter does not qualify for diversity jurisdiction, and it should be removed back to state court.” …
Wedgewood cannot, through an affidavit filed after removal, limit the amount in controversy to a sum below the jurisdictional threshold. As TDB recognizes, “[a] plaintiff in Illinois can limit the relief to an amount less than the jurisdictional minimum, and thus prevent removal, by filing a binding stipulation or affidavit with the complaint.” … But, at the same time, “events after the date of removal do not affect jurisdiction, and this means in particular that a declaration by the plaintiff following removal does not permit remand.” … “[T]he amount in controversy is evaluated as of the time of removal,” and once the jurisdictional amount has been satisfied, “jurisdiction will be defeated only if it appears to a legal certainty that the stakes of the lawsuit do not exceed $75,000.” Accordingly, the only relevant question is whether, based on the allegations of Wedgewood’s complaint at the time of removal, it is legally impossible for him to recover more than $75,000 in this suit.
As to that question, TDB points out that Wedgewood seeks punitive damages in the amount of $50,000 for each of his five claims, as well as compensatory damages for loss of income, loss of reputation, and emotional harm. The Court is not limited to assessing the amount in controversy for each individual claim; rather, “[i]t is the case, rather than the claim, to which the $75,000 minimum applies.” …
TDB concedes that Count III, Wedgewood’s claim for intentional infliction of emotional distress, cannot support punitive damages under Illinois law. The Court further notes the oddity of Wedgewood’s request for punitive damages within Counts IV and V, which seek declaratory and injunctive relief.
But TDB points out that Wedgewood also requests $50,000 in punitive damages for each of his claims for defamation and false light (Counts I & II). Punitive damages are available for these causes of action under Illinois law. Accordingly, aggregated together, Wedgewood’s claims seek at least $100,000 in punitive damages. Wedgewood cannot point to any reason it would be legally impossible for him to obtain such damages, particularly where he also seeks compensatory damages for, among other things, loss of income. Accordingly, the Court concludes that the jurisdictional threshold is satisfied…. [T]he Court [therefore] denies Wedgewood’s motion to remand….
In his Complaint, Wedgewood also asked for “a seal of this present matter,” but I expect he won’t succeed on that score, either.
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