Displaying posts published in

2016

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

The Democrats’ Mob Rule in the House of Representatives Using Saul Alinskly tactics to “occupy” the House for their gun control agenda. Joseph Klein

By on June 24th, 2016

House Democrats made complete fools of themselves with their sit-in temper tantrum this week. Shouting their demands for an immediate vote on gun control legislation – apparently their only “serious” answer to global Islamic jihad – the Democratic disrupters caused pandemonium on the House floor on Wednesday. They sought to paralyze House proceedings with shouts of “No bill, No break!” Representative Maxine Waters of California proclaimed, “I’m prepared to stand here until hell freezes over.” Civil rights hero Representative John Lewis of Georgia declared, “we have to occupy the floor of the House until there’s action.”

The anarchist spirits of Occupy Wall Street and student campus occupations are alive and well in the House Democratic caucus. They shed their responsibilities by flagrantly violating the rules of the institution to which they were elected, intent on creating a media spectacle. They went so far as to use social media video tools to broadcast their sit-in, after the chamber’s official cameras had been turned off.

Even when the House Republican leadership called it a day and adjourned the House until after the 4th of July weekend, the Democrats pressed on with their occupation. Before that, as the real adult leader in the room, Speaker Paul Ryan had managed, despite the mayhem, to push through a major appropriations bill that included funding for combating the Zika virus. At least one of the House leaders was thinking of the welfare of the American people. It certainly was not the Democratic leader, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, who even refused to leave the House floor temporarily when politely asked to do so by an officer so that the daily security sweep could be conducted.

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Impeachment and the IRS Scandal: Should John Koskinen Face the Music? By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on June 24th, 2016

Note: Yesterday, I testified before the House Judiciary Committee in Part II of a hearing on “Examining the Allegations of Misconduct Against IRS Commissioner John Koskinen.”

The hearing, at which three other lawyers also testified, explored impeachment principles. Below is the written testimony I submitted prior to the hearing.

—————————–

Chairman Goodlatte, Congressman Nadler, members of the committee, my name is Andrew C. McCarthy. For over eighteen years, I was a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, retiring from the Justice Department in 2003 as the chief assistant United States attorney in charge of the Southern District’s satellite office (which oversees federal law enforcement in six counties north of the Bronx).

During my tenure in the office, I investigated, tried and supervised the prosecution of numerous criminal cases, running the gamut from organized crime and narcotics trafficking through political corruption and terrorism. In addition, I held various executive staff positions in the office, including deputy chief of the appellate unit, in which I wrote and edited briefs submitted by the United States to the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and prepared other prosecutors for oral argument (in addition to writing briefs and presenting oral argument in numerous of my own cases).

During my Justice Department service, I was twice awarded the Justice Department’s highest honors: the Attorney General’s Award for Distinguished Service in 1987 for the “Pizza Connection” organized crime and international narcotics trafficking case targeting the Sicilian mafia, and the Attorney General’s Award for Extraordinary Service in 1996 for the terrorism prosecution against the jihadist cell of Omar Abdel Rahman (a/k/a “the Blind Sheikh”) responsible for (among other atrocities) the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and an unsuccessful plot to bomb New York City landmarks.

Since retiring from the Justice Department, I have been a writer, focusing on matters of law enforcement, national security, constitutional law, politics and culture. Concededly, I tend to come at policy matters from a conservative and constitutionalist perspective; nevertheless, I have always believed the application of legal principles and precedent should be a non-partisan endeavor, just as it was when I was a prosecutor. In my post-Justice Department career, I have written several books, including (in 2014), Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment.

In a nutshell, Faithless Execution argues that the Framers saw impeachment as an “indispensable” tool (to quote James Madison) in the constitutional framework of divided authorities, which obliges Congress to police executive overreach. The principal purpose of the Constitution is to limit the power of government to intrude on the liberties and suppress the rights of the American people. Separation of powers is the primary way the Constitution guarantees these liberties and rights. Thus, the Framers were deeply worried that maladministration — including overreach, lawlessness, or incompetence — could inflate the constitutionally-limited executive into an authoritarian rogue who undermines our constitutional order.

Continue reading →
BOOKS Comments turned off

College Profs Investigated for Acknowledging Existence of Other Opinions By Tom Knighton

By on June 24th, 2016

Each generation looks back at the generation behind it and weeps. Surely these children will be the death of our society, they think. Well, people looking at the current crop of American college students — and the administrators who enable them — while thinking such things may very well be right.

On top of the myriad other nonsense on college campuses, it now seems that some professors are being investigated for admitting that the Official Line ™ isn’t the only opinion out there:

Two professors at the University of Northern Colorado were investigated after students complained that they were forced to hear opposing viewpoints.

The complaints were made to Northern Colorado’s “Bias Response Team,” an Orwellian office on campus that asks students to report their peers and professors for anything that upsets or offends them. When the news outlet Heat Street made an open records request for some of the complaints, it discovered that two students had become so upset about having to hear an opinion they disagreed with they filed reports with school administrators.

And rather than telling the students to buck up because they might hear those opinions outside of college or on the news or in the media, the schools told the professors to stop teaching that there’s an alternate viewpoint.

In at least one of the cases, a transgendered student was offended merely because the professor acknowledged the opinion that some believe transgender isn’t a real thing.

He’s not accused of arguing that position, even for the sake of argument. Nope. Just admitting that it exists was too offensive.

Whether transgender is a real thing, a psychological condition, or the result of a science fiction experiment brought to life by a howler monkey on meth is irrelevant. Honestly, the professor not having expressed his personal opinions on the matter is irrelevant. What is relevant is that American college students just can’t handle opinions different from their own.

Continue reading →
BOOKS Comments turned off

How dare Europe applaud a blood-libeler? Ruthie Blum

By on June 24th, 2016

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas lies about Israel not only as a matter of course but as one of policy. It was no surprise, then, when he stood up at the European Parliament on Thursday and regurgitated a claim made this week that rabbinical figures in the Jewish state had urged the government to poison Palestinian wells.

Abbas knew that this classically anti-Semitic blood libel was as false as a similar one, spread last week, that claimed Israel forced Palestinians from a certain village to flee by drying up their water supply during Ramadan. In fact, a pipe had burst, and it was immediately repaired. But not — as media watchdog HonestReporting pointed out — before the “water apartheid” lie, first “reported” by Al Jazeera, was picked up by The Independent, the International Business Times, Radio New Zealand and The Times of London.

In keeping with the tradition of his predecessor, the late PLO chairman Yasser Arafat, Abbas encourages the invention of all kinds of blood libels, which he then states as fact, both to his own people and to the international community. Each libel is more ludicrous than the previous one, and they would be funny if they weren’t reminiscent of Nazi propaganda and didn’t serve the same purpose: to foster the kind of Jew-loathing that enables genocide.

But annihilating Israel and the Jews is not the real reason that Abbas perpetuates utterly insane accusations against the only democracy in the Middle East. More immediate personal concerns preoccupy the PA leader, who knows his days are numbered, literally and figuratively, if he does not remain relevant at home and abroad.

Indeed, Abbas constantly faces the possibility of being ousted by members of his own faction, Fatah, and by Hamas, the terrorist organization that rules Gaza. He manages to survive by enlisting financial and political support from the United States, Europe and the United Nations.

Continue reading →
MEDIA, POLITICS Comments turned off

Is there an editor in the house? Roger Franklin

By on June 24th, 2016

It’s tough for Fairfax’s Paul McGeough, even harder in many ways than for the competent journalists and sub-editors who have been shown the door as their industry collapsed about them. McGeough and his gig as a US-based foreign correspondent have survived, for now at any rate, while the bureaux that once operated in New York, Washington, London and elsewhere have been shuttered. So there he is, sending back copy to the clickbait kiddies who run the Age and SMH websites, with no adults left on the premises to save the poor man from himself.

Take today, for example, which sees the SMH homepage giving pride of place to his latest dispatch. Atop this item is a screen grab reproducing how it was bannered. Click on the link and you get this story purporting to be an accurate account of Donald Trump’s latest address. In the old days, when newsroom children compiled the shipping notices, fetched their elders’ take-away meals and wrote colour stories, if they were lucky, about dogs that wear trousers and other human-interest wotnots, the processing of such a report would have passed through an institution know as the “back bench”. This where seasoned hands, men and women who knew a thing or two about life and the world and, yes, journalism too, would pick through the submitted words, spot the errors and inconsistencies and fire off notes to authors asking for clarifications.

Obviously, going by today’s McGeough offering, if the SMH still has a back bench it must be sitting in the laneway out back and waiting for the next hard-rubbish collection. Forget the one-eyed perspctive, we’ll get to that in a tick. Meanwhile, just look at the headline and blurb reproduced above.

To “wipe the floor” is generally accepted to mean a crushing and undisputed, all-points victory. Yet the lines beneath assert that same alleged victory was nothing but “wild unsubstantiated allegations”. Apparently, along with the back bench, the sort-of-editors who remain at Fairfax are interested in dictionaries only for their potential to be re-cycled into carbon-fighting organic mulch.

As to the story itself, one can only imagine the barrage of questions and queries that would, in better days, have been flying back across the Pacific. Such a note would have gone something like this:

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Supreme Court Upholds Affirmative Action in University Admissions In 4-3 ruling, court advises schools to continuously review race-based policies By Jess Bravin and Brent Kendall

By on June 24th, 2016

WASHINGTON—A divided Supreme Court Thursday upheld racial preferences in public-university admissions, a defeat to a yearslong conservative drive to roll back affirmative action.

Writing for a 4-3 court, Justice Anthony Kennedy found that the University of Texas at Austin’s challenged plan passed constitutional muster because it was designed in a narrow way to improve diversity on campus. The school’s plan considered race as an additional factor when evaluating certain black and Hispanic applicants.

Justice Kennedy, joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor, said universities are defined by “intangible qualities…which make for greatness.”

“Considerable deference is owed to a university in defining those intangible characteristics, like student body diversity, that are central to its identity and educational mission,” Justice Kennedy wrote in a 20-page opinion.

At issue was a long-running lawsuit filed by Abigail Fisher, a white applicant who was denied admission by the University of Texas at Austin in 2008. She alleged that the state’s flagship university violated the Constitution’s equal-protection guarantee by giving an edge in admissions to black and Hispanic students.

​​“I am disappointed that the Supreme Court has ruled that students applying to the University of Texas can be treated differently because of their race or ethnicity,” Ms. Fisher said in a statement issued by the Project on Fair Representation, an organization that financed her case and has sponsored other litigation opposing government programs that benefit minorities. CONTINUE AT SITE

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Britain Declares Independence The Tories should now strive to make the U.K. a pro-growth model.

By on June 24th, 2016

The United Kingdom has always had Europe’s most robust democracy, and with Thursday’s vote to leave the European Union it has given its Continental peers a powerful example of the meaning of popular rule. Now we’ll see if the British have the wisdom to make the best use of their historic choice.

We argued earlier this week that Britain should remain in the Union. But we also acknowledged that it was a close call, and we did so more out of concern for the EU’s future than for Britain’s.

The Brexit vote deprives the EU of its second-biggest—and most dynamic—economy, with the strongest growth rate among Europe’s major economies and a record-setting employment rate of 74%. Government spending as a percentage of GDP has also come down to pre-financial crisis levels, again disproving the Keynesian doomsaying about the perils of fiscal “austerity.”

Brexit may encourage other states—the Netherlands is often mentioned—to debate their membership in the EU, especially if Britain does not suffer the economic and diplomatic catastrophes forecast by the Remain camp, starting with Prime Minister David Cameron and Chancellor George Osborne. Norway and Switzerland have shown it’s possible to have prosperity and security in Europe with less nannying by Brussels.

If the EU wants to prevent other countries from catching the Brexit bug, our advice is to avoid the temptation to punish the U.K. with an arduous renegotiation of terms for its re-entry into the common market. The perception of EU high-handedness is what alienates public opinion across the Continent. Brexit ought to be the wake-up call the EU needs to return to serving as a common market that encourages growth and competition, and not—as it has become since the late 1980s—an innovation-killing superstate obsessed with regulatory harmonization, tax hikes, green-energy dogma and anticompetitive antitrust enforcement.

London will have its own challenges. To adapt a line from Margaret Thatcher’s famous 1988 Bruges speech on Europe, Britain has not voted to free itself of a European superstate to see it return in the form of the nanny state exercising dominance from Westminster. CONTINUE AT SITE

Continue reading →
ANTI-SEMITISM, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

NYC Has a New Bathroom Policy The city council tackles the issue of single-occupancy toilets. By Celina Durgin

By on June 24th, 2016

The New York city council has approved a law requiring all single-occupant restrooms in private establishments to be gender neutral — a relatively simple way, according to the bill’s sponsor, Councilman Daniel Dromm, to make transgender and gender-nonconforming people feel welcome.

Dromm also said the measure honors the LGBT people killed in the Orlando massacre. The council approved the law by a 47–2 vote, and it will go into effect on January 1.

The law follows Mayor Bill DeBlasio’s March executive order requiring city agencies to make clear that people are allowed to use city single-sex facilities matching their gender identities.

Mayor DeBlasio has never explained how the city can possibly accommodate his order, given that proponents of the gender-identity doctrine almost uniformly believe that the gender binary doesn’t fully exhibit the range of gender identities, and therefore certain individuals cannot, strictly speaking, use the facility that matches their gender identity, since no such facility exists.

I give the NYC council members credit on their recent measure for tacitly recognizing that gender-neutral facilities are the only way to accommodate gender-nonconforming individuals, who do not find themselves at home in either the male or the female bathrooms. But this legislation also falls into the nonsensical.

Single-occupant bathrooms are often gender neutral to begin with. (This law would merely make this practice standard in NYC.)

Continue reading →
BOOKS Comments turned off

American higher education sinks deeper into the muck. By Theodore Kupfer

By on June 24th, 2016

A professor at the University of Northern Colorado assigned Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff’s “The Coddling of the American Mind” to his students — and watched as they proved the essay’s point.

According to a report obtained by Heat Street, students filed a complaint with the school’s “Bias Response Team” based on the professor’s lesson. The professor, whose name has been redacted, seems to have assigned the essay as part of a broader lesson about the value of debate: After reading “The Coddling of the American Mind,” students were instructed to chart out competing arguments on topics such as transgenderism, abortion, and global warming.

Doubtless, the professor intended to use those first-order issues as a bridge to the more challenging second-order question: Why does debating controversial subjects provoke so much controversy itself? Instead, he unwittingly gave the world more proof that American higher education has gone off the rails: The mere notion that people disagreed about such issues was, apparently, cause for an investigation. The Bias Response Team was put on the case.

What, precisely, is a Bias Response Team? Around the country, universities are increasingly using them as part of an effort to do . . . something. The University of Northern Colorado describes that something as follows in response to an inquiry: “The intent of the bias-response team is to facilitate discussions between members of the campus community when non-legal concerns of offensive behavior are reported.” UNC offers further assurance that “there’s nothing punitive about” Bias Response hearings, and that “this is about understanding, not punishment.”

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Ideologues Make for Dangerous Politicians Opportunists are at least attuned to public opinion, unlike ideologues. By Victor Davis Hanson

By on June 24th, 2016

Hillary Clinton is a seasoned liberal politician, but one with few core beliefs. Her positions on subjects such as gay marriage, free-trade agreements, the Keystone XL pipeline, the Iraq War, the Assad regime in Syria, and the use of the term “radical Islam” all seem to hinge on what she perceives 51 percent of the public to believe on any given day.

Such politicians believe truth is a relative construct. Things are deemed false by politicians only if they cannot convince the public that they are true — and vice versa. When the majority of Americans no longer believe Clinton’s yarns about her private e-mail server to the point of not wanting to vote for her, then she will change her narrative and create new, convenient truths to reflect the new consensus.

Donald Trump is an amateur politician but a politician nevertheless. He is ostensibly conservative, but he likewise seems to change his positions on a number of issues — from abortion to the Iraq War — depending on what he feels has become the majority position. And as with Clinton, Trump’s idea of truth is defined as what works, while falsity is simply any narrative that proved unusable.

Politicians glad-hand, pander, and kiss babies as they seek to become megaphones for majority opinions. But ideologues are different. They often brood and lecture that their utopian dreams are not shared by the supposedly less informed public.

Continue reading →