Jeff Shafer, Ukrainian atrocities, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and an Oberlin College court dcision… and more on today’s CrossPolitic Daily News Brief. This is Toby Sumpter. Today is Tuesday, April 5, 2022. 

Hale Institute Director Jeff Shafer on Sunday Special
https://fb.watch/cb7NOUgWIo/
11:03-13:00
 
The courts repudiating and severing rulings from created reality, and moving toward statist conceptions of all things… 
 
Idaho Family Policy Center: 
I wanted to let you all know about Idaho Family Policy Center. IFPC is currently the only explicitly Christian policy organization in Idaho politics. Toby Sumpter and Israel Waitman serve on the board, and the president is Blaine Conzatti, a member of our sister CREC church, Kings Congregation down in Meridian. Blaine and IFPC have been leading the efforts to defund Planned Parenthood, end abortion in Idaho, and protect children from the transgender agenda. Basically, Blaine is a really strategic voice in Idaho politics, and he represents many of our biblical and constitutional concerns in Boise. IFPC is a brand new ministry and as such is in significant need of donations to help fund it. I know we all have many commitments to other good ministries, but if you are particularly concerned about Idaho politics, this is one way you can have a very direct impact. Go to www.idahofamily.orgto learn more and make a donation.

Atrocities Emerging from Ukraine
https://www.thebulwark.com/the-bucha-atrocities-and-the-kremlin-apologists/
 
From the Bulwark: The gruesome discoveries in Bucha, Troyanets, and other Kyiv suburbs newly freed from Russian occupation have shifted the discourse on Russia’s war in Ukraine, putting the focus on Russian atrocities against the civilian population. By now the horrific photos and videos—bodies buried in mass graves or lying by the roadside, some victims with hands tied execution-style behind their backs—have been seen and shocked many around the world. Survivors’ harrowing accounts of rape, torture, looting and other war crimes by Russian forces are also emerging. Inevitably, there are also the skeptics warning about propaganda, fakes, and emotional reactions – of which there have been some. 
 
This is not the first time that atrocities and war crimes have been reported since Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine on February 23. On March 16, the Donetsk Regional Theater of Drama in Mariupol, where over a thousand people were sheltering—and “children” was written in large letters in the front and the back of the building—was bombed, leaving as many as 300 dead. The Russian state-owned media blamed Ukrainian extremists from Ukraine’s supposedly “neo-Nazi” Azov Regiment. 
 
The photos and videos of dead people lying in the road, or slumped at the wheels of the cars where they were shot. The mass graves, reportedly containing more than 400 bodies. Victims of mass executions, some with tied hands, strewn in the yard of an office building amidst garbage. A man’s half-naked bloodied body dumped into a cistern. More bodies in the basements of homes. An old woman in the front yard of her house showing journalists the body of her middle-aged daughter who’d been gunned down from a passing Russian tank, the unburied dead woman’s legs sticking out from under plastic sheeting after the boards that had covered the body were lifted to allow visiting officials to examine it. Accounts of four weeks of living hell that included rape at gunpoint, followed by beatings the marks of which could still be seen on the victim. It makes for almost unbearable reading and viewing. A man shot dead for being out past the 3 p.m. curfew because he was running to the hospital after his wife had gone into labor. A 60-year-old veteran of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, shot dead because he refused to vacate his home.
 
Russia’s conduct in Ukraine fits its own definitions of terrorism. As originally enacted in 1994, Russia’s criminal code defined terrorism as “bombings, arson, and other acts causin