What the media did not publicize about Pope Francis

Did you know that Pope Francis had a covert meeting with Kentucky clerk Kim Davis last week, in which he presented her with two rosaries and urged her to stay strong and pray for him? Sarah Westwood reports at the Washington Examiner that the U.S. media is "crushed" that he would meet with Kim.

Austin Ruse reports at Breitbart that the meeting was initiated by the Pope, not Davis.

Jim Yardley and Laurie Goodstein report for the Washington Post that the meeting took place in Washington at the Vatican Embassy.

“I put my hand out and he reached and he grabbed it, and I hugged him and he hugged me,” Ms. Davis said Wednesday in an interview with ABC News. ‘Thank you for your courage.’”

“I had tears coming out of my eyes,” she said. “I’m just a nobody, so it was really humbling to think he would want to meet or know me.”

The Pope also met with the Little Sisters of the Poor, which was forced by Obamacare.to provide abortifascients to their employees.

(Courtesy of The Little Sisters of the Poor)

Sarah Pulliam Bailey and Abby Ohlheiser report for the Washington Post,

The Little Sisters of the Poor, which operates homes for the elderly in cities across the country, has been in a battle with the Obama administration over the law’s requirement that they allow their insurers to offer free contraception coverage to employees. The Becket Fund senior counsel Mark Rienzi, lead attorney for the Little Sisters, who spoke with one of the nuns after the meeting, said the pope was at their home for about 15 minutes and shook hands and spoke with each one of them in their chapel.

When there is no law

Victor Davis Hanson writes about America's descent into lawlessness.

Do you remember Lewis “Scooter” Libby?

In 2003, the Department of Justice appointed a special counsel to investigate allegations that Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, unlawfully disclosed the covert status of CIA operative Valerie Plame.

Yet Plame may not have been a covert undercover agent, based on the formal government definition of that role. And even if she were, it was widely known at the time that Secretary of State Colin Powell’s subordinate, Richard Armitage, had most likely disclosed her status earlier.

In other words, Libby was in an Orwellian position of being accused of a crime that may not have existed. But if it had, it was more likely committed by someone else.

Publicity-seeking special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald persuaded a Washington, D.C., jury to find Libby guilty of obstruction of justice, perjury, and making false statements to federal investigators — not the supposed crimes for which he was originally targeted by the media.

Apparently, the very suspicion of improper behavior by high public servants once warranted vigorous legal inquiry — by supposedly independent and autonomous prosecutors.

In the eight-plus years since the Libby trial, the Obama administration has blown up the law as we have known it for centuries.

...After his re-election in 2012 and the midterm elections in 2014, Obama made a mockery of immigration law.

Hundreds of liberal sanctuary cities have announced that federal immigration law does not apply to them. That scary, neo-Confederate idea of legal nullification was sanctioned by the Obama administration — in a way it never would have been if a city had suspended the Endangered Species Act, emissions standards, or gun-control legislation.

As a result, once-detained and later-released immigrants with criminal records have murdered innocent American citizens.

Consider the proposed nuclear deal with Iran. By past custom and practice, the nonproliferation agreement would be treated as what it is — a treaty.

But ratifying treaties constitutionally requires 67 yes votes from the Senate. Obama could never obtain that margin. So he managed to downgrade the treaty into a mere legal agreement. Then he claimed that the Senate required 67 no votes to override his veto.

Obama also was worried about the political impact of his new Obamacare legislation on the 2014 midterm elections. So he simply suspended by executive fiat the employer mandate of the Affordable Care Act. Had another president done that to the laws of Obamacare, the Left would have demanded impeachment.

In Ferguson, Mo., law enforcement eased off and allowed a city to burn. But the cause of the rioting — the supposed improper police killing of criminal suspect Michael Brown — was based on the lie that Brown was shot in the back while fleeing. No matter. The ensuing public outrage seemingly exempted arsonists and looters from arrest.

Just as scary is the application of the law on the basis of the perceived politics of a suspect.

IRS bureaucrat Lois Lerner was exposed as a rank partisan whose office gave particular scrutiny to would-be tax-exempt groups deemed opponents of Obama’s re-election efforts. She invoked the Fifth Amendment and refused to testify before a congressional committee about her actions at the IRS. Lerner has never been indicted.

Almost everything former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has stated about her improper use of a private e-mail account and server has been proven false. A State Department staffer who worked on Clinton’s private server plans to invoke the Fifth Amendment to avoid testifying before a congressional committee about his role in privatizing Clinton’s email.

But like Lerner, Clinton has escaped an indictment or jailing.

Not so Kim Davis. She is a conservative Christian court clerk in Kentucky who apparently thought, given the lawless times, that she could ignore without consequence a Supreme Court decision making gay marriage legal.

Davis was jailed for not enforcing the law. That is a justifiable punishment — if it were applied equally to the progressive mayors of sanctuary cities and all officials who likewise ignore federal law.

In the same manner, rank amateur video maker Nakoula Basseley Nakoula was jailed for violating his probation. Why?

Nakoula made a video insensitive to Muslims and thus was falsely blamed for the riotous 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. The most likely culprit of the preplanned Benghazi attack was not scapegoat Nakoula, but the inconvenient pre-election truth that al-Qaeda was quite alive in Libya and U.S. security quite lax.

America is becoming analogous to the mess in lawless contemporary Venezuela. When the law is suspended or unevenly applied for politically protected individuals and groups, then there is no law.

So we are now seeing the logical descent into the abyss of chaos.

Read more here.

Stop requiring clerks to put their names on marriage licenses

The biggest story here in the United States has been the jailing of Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who does not want her name to be on marriage licenses issued to gay couples. I heard Glenn Beck discussing it with his partners, Pat and Stu, yesterday. They were making a lot of really good points, including questioning why the government has any business being in the marriage business in the first place.

Glenn was explaining the concept of different levels of laws that govern us. He said the highest law is God's law, which atheists might prefer to call Nature's law. He also talked about our inalienable right to practice our religion.

They brought up another point: If Kim Davis is to be thrown in jail for refusing to sign marriage certificates, why are not the mayors of sanctuary cities thrown in jail for refusing to follow federal laws? Why is Barack Obama not thrown in jail for not following federal immigration laws, or even his own health care law? Glenn, Pat and Stu were not advocating those things, but simply putting the whole Kim Davis thing in perspective.

Although I think Glenn, Pat, and Stu spend too much time being sarcastic, I respect Glenn's activism in support of the founding principles of our country and the moral stands he takes for things like #All Lives Matter.

A solution to the Kentucky problem? Stop requiring clerks to put their names on marriage licenses!