It was laughable from the start, but the fact that it was taken seriously is troubling. The ethics apparatus of the United States judiciary moves slowly. It seems also to move truly. It did both on February 19, when it cleared Judge Edith Jones of all the misconduct accusations lodged against her after she delivered a lecture titled “Federal Death Penalty Review” at the University of Pennsylvania. That lecture took place on February 20, 2013.
In it Jones defended the death penalty, mainly by dismantling some leading arguments against it. Three months later, 13 individuals and public-interest groups formally complained that, in her talk, Judge Jones violated several norms of judicial conduct, chiefly by manifesting “bias” against some minority groups. The plaintiffs’ roster indicates some of these groups. Among them were the NAACP and a couple of Latino organizations. Judge Jones unequivocally denied the allegations. The Committee on Judicial Conduct agreed: It concluded that none of the charges was supported by even a “preponderance” of the proof, which is the lowest of evidentiary standards. This is tantamount to a total vindication of Judge Jones.
Can we finally—finally!—be done with the Clintons? As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton schemed to subvert record-keeping and transparency rules for reasons that are probably more or less communicated by her surname: The Clintons are creeps and liars and scoundrels and misfits, always have been, always will be. They are the penicillin-resistant syphilis of American politics. The Democrats’ response to Herself’s trouble has taken three main forms:
1) What she did wasn’t technically illegal, says David Brock and other slavish Clinton retainers, even hauling out that old Al Gore classic, “no controlling legal authority”;
2) What about Scott Walker, huh? say the Democratic-party operators, pointing out that as a county executive Walker also used a private email system — and, to be honest, Walker’s response to the terrorist assault on Milwaukee County’s consulate in Benghazi has never been explained to my satisfaction; and
3) the president repeats his favorite mantra: Wuddint me!
Chairman Trey Gowdy knew about Clinton’s secret server six months ago, and that too is a scandal. In assessing the Benghazi select committee headed up by Chairman Trey Gowdy (R., S.C.), there are two possibilities, and they are not mutually exclusive: (1) The committee is just a Potemkin probe erected by the Republican establishment to get restive conservatives to pipe down, and (2) the committee is incompetent. The panel, of course, was commissioned by the Republican-controlled House to investigate the circumstances surrounding the September 11, 2012, attack in which al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorists killed Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, and three other Americans — information-management officer Sean Smith and two former Navy SEALs, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods, contract employees whose valor saved dozens of lives during the siege.
Netanyahu’s powerful new language. At last.
Those were strong words that came from Benjamin Netanyahu when he finally got to speak before Congress.
Just as strong were three words he left unspoken.
Israel’s war is everybody’s war. It’s Jihad, silly. It’s ISIS, stupid.
The Israeli prime minister did not even whisper that hallucinatory nonsense about a “two state solution” so favored by the Left.
If the Left still thinks whoring for peace is the way to go, as appears to be the case from the Labor Party’s most recent effort at appeasement (turning the “West Bank” judenrein and into the next Gaza-type hellhole) Netanyahu offers something else entirely – a war to be won on the frontline of words.
Washington: Saudi Arabia’s King Salman has awarded a prestigious prize to Zakir Naik, a televangelist and religious scholar from India, heralding him as “one of the most renowned non-Arabic-speaking promulgators of Islam”. Naik, a trained doctor, founded the Peace TV channel, which supposedly reaches an audience of 100 million English-speaking Muslims. His popular YouTube stream includes videos titled “Who is deceived by the Satan, Christians or Muslims?” and “Does eating non-vegetarian food have any effect on the mind?”
Naik’s creed is an expansive one. “Islam is the only religion that can bring peace to the whole of humanity,” he said in a video biography aired at the ceremony.
It’s a Tuesday night three weeks before election day, and Naftali Bennett, the head of one of Israel’s oldest religious parties, is speaking in English to 1,000 mostly young, secular Israelis. For Bennett, 42, an ambitious, talented, American-style politician seeking to catapult his Jewish Home faction to third place among Israel’s parties, this isn’t all that surprising.
The contest is widely seen here as a referendum on Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s second-longest-serving prime minister and a lightning rod for criticism across the political spectrum. The yard signs and billboards of the opposition declare “It’s us or him,” and an American-style PAC, reportedly funded, indirectly and in part, by the U.S. State Department, has launched ubiquitous anti-“Bibi” ads urging Israelis to “Just change.” Netanyahu’s highly controversial address to Congress about the Iranian nuclear threat only added fuel to the fire.
