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2016

Obama Nominates Stealth Leftist for the Supreme Court How Judge Garland’s deciding vote would reverse key decisions protecting Americans’ constitutional freedoms. Joseph Klein

President Barack Obama nominated Merrick B. Garland, who currently serves as Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia. The White House’s strategy was to pick someone whom they believe will be politically difficult for Republican senators to simply ignore – a stealth leftist recast as a “centrist.” The White House even created a new Twitter handle, @SCOTUSnom, to rev up activists seeking to pressure Senate Republicans into giving President Obama’s nominee, in Obama’s words, “a fair hearing and an up-or-down vote.”

The Democratic Party has lost no time making Obama’s nomination a highly charged partisan issue. All the Republicans want to do is to let the voters have their say this fall in choosing the next president before a lifetime position on the Supreme Court is filled. But Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Chair of the Democratic National Committee, insists that lame duck Obama must have his way and change the entire ideological balance of the Supreme Court for possibly decades to come. “Frankly, I’ve grown a little sick of Republicans in Congress and their antics that have ranged from simply unproductive to downright offensive,” she complained in a letter to Democrats. Somehow, in Wasserman Schultz’s fevered imagination, it is “offensive” and “obstructionism” to defer to the will of the voters in a presidential election year before making such a consequential decision.

The left’s propaganda machine will argue that Judge Garland is a centrist whom all fair-minded senators should support. The New York Times is already quoting Utah Senator Orin Hatch, who said back in 2010, when Judge Garland was being considered to fill another Supreme Court vacancy, “I know Merrick Garland very well. He would be very well supported by all sides.”

However, Senator Hatch made that statement when President Obama was looking to replace Justice John Paul Stevens’ seat. President Obama refused to take Senator Hatch’s “advice” and rejected Judge Garland. He nominated the more left-wing Justice Elena Kagan instead, whom the Senate confirmed. The ideological balance of the Supreme Court was not in jeopardy with Elena Kagan’s confirmation because she was replacing one of the more left-wing justices at that time. Judge Garland today, by contrast, would be replacing the intellectual leader of the Supreme Court’s more conservative members.

Obama Meets with Emilio Estefan, Other Cubans to Prep for Havana Trip By Bridget Johnson

President Obama met with musician Emilio Estefan and other Cuban-Americans invited to the White House in advance of his trip to the communist island next week.

Congress has still not lifted the embargo on Cuba, but the Obama administration on Tuesday relaxed travel and currency restrictions as he prepares for the visit.

Others at the White House meeting included Department of Homeland Security Deputy Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Export-Import Bank General Counsel Angela Freyre, and Father Fernando Heriao of St. Brendan Catholic Church in Miami. There were also leaders of groups that have supported Obama’s calls to lift the embargo, such as #CubaNow and the Cuba Study Group.

“The president met today with Cuban-American leaders at the White House, including civil society advocates, faith leaders, and representatives from the private sector, in advance of his trip to Cuba,” press secretary Josh Earnest said in a readout of the meeting. “From the beginning of his administration, President Obama has consulted closely with the Cuban-American community about his Cuba policy, and wanted to hear directly from community leaders about his upcoming trip to Cuba.”

“The president reviewed our ongoing efforts to normalize relations with Cuba. The president highlighted the recent regulatory changes made by the Departments of the Treasury and Commerce, and the impact those changes would have on the ability of Americans to travel to Cuba and engage directly with the Cuban people,” Earnest continued.

Cruz vs. Trump, Math vs. Momentum By Roger Kimball

Or perhaps I should say “momentum” in scare quotes. For that, I suspect, is what Donald Trump has now: “momentum,” in quotes.

More on that in a moment. First, a word or two about the math. According to the current RCP delegate count, Trump now has 661 delegates, a little more than half the 1237 delegates he needs to clinch the nomination. Cruz has 406.

661 – 406 = 255

Hmmm. But note that Rubio, who finally dropped out last night after his humiliating defeat in his home state of Florida, has 169. Tigger, aka John Kasich, has 142. John Kasich apparently hasn’t yet acknowledged it, but this is now (and has been for a while) a two-man race. More math.

406 + 169+ 142 = 717

Which leads us to:

717 > 661

i.e., hope for Ted Cruz.

At least, that’s how I see it, and how the Cruz campaign also is reported to see it.

“Throughout this race,” Daniel Horowitz writes at Conservative Review, “the polls and exit polls have consistently shown that Cruz would beat Trump head-to-head in almost every state, winning by wide margins in many of them. In most states Trump has a floor of about 35-38%, but he has an impervious ceiling in the low 40s.” Which means, Horowitz continues, that in a two-man race, “Cruz should be able to catch Trump in delegates and very likely come close to the magic number of 1,237.”

The Top Five Most Vulnerable GOP Senate Seats By Rich Baehr

The current election cycle was shaping up as a difficult one for Republican senators even before Donald Trump became the leader in the battle for the GOP presidential nomination.

Just as Democrats were exposed in 2014 and lost nine Senate seats and their majority, Republicans have 24 seats to defend in 2016 versus only 10 for Democrats. And this is a presidential year, when Democratic turnout is usually far stronger than for midterms. In 2008 and 2012, the last two presidential election years, Democrats picked up Senate seats (a net of 10), while Republicans had substantial gains from the last two midterms in 2010 and 2014 (a net of 15).

In 2014 Republicans had many targets, as Democrats were defending seats in seven states Mitt Romney won in 2012: North Carolina, Louisiana, Arkansas, West Virginia, South Dakota, Montana, and Alaska. Republicans also picked up an open seat in Iowa and won Colorado, two Obama states from 2012.

In 2016, the picture is almost reversed. Republicans are defending seats in seven states Obama won in 2012: New Hampshire, Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Iowa. One big difference between 2014 and 2016 is that six of the Democratic seats Republicans won in 2014 were in states Romney had won by 14% or more (only North Carolina had been a narrow Romney victory by 2%). In 2016, only one of the Republican seats — Mark Kirk’s in Illinois — is in a state that is deeply blue, a 17-point Obama win in 2012. In the other six states, Obama won by 7% or less.

Which are the five most endangered Republican-held Senate seats? Most of the serious political analysts have rated Kirk’s and Ron Johnson’s in Wisconsin as the two most vulnerable in 2016, and regard both as, at best, toss-ups or as races leaning to the Democrats.

Plea Bargaining with Merrick Garland By Geoffrey P. Hunt

President Obama has nominated Merrick Garland, chief judge on the federal DC circuit court of appeals, as a U.S. Supreme Court justice to replace the late Antonin Scalia.

Few would describe Garland a flaming liberal, in the mold of current Justice Ruth Bader-Ginsberg, or former Justice John Paul Stevens. More likely a less flamboyant liberal, but liberal just the same, as his mentor Justice William Brennan, for whom Garland clerked in 1978-79.

Brennan was a champion of the First Amendment, perhaps Garland will follow suit.

Yet Brennan was both the ghostwriter for Justice Blackmun’s majority opinion in Roe v Wade, and as at least one commentator asserts, the author of the three worst liberal SCOTUS opinions ever.

The most notorious was Plyler v Doe in 1982, ruling that children of illegal immigrants have a right to free public education. It is hard not to see Garland’s alignment here to Brennan.

On his own, Garland has gold-plated his liberal credentials by denying the 2nd Amendment, most egregiously voting to rehear a case in which a DC ban on handguns for personal protection was overturned.

Russia Leaves Syria: Not Every War is a Quagmire By Shoshana Bryen

The American public tends to see military action as binary: all in or not in at all. Mostly we’re not in — as befits a country that is not aggressive or acquisitive. But if we’re in it, win it. In this age of transnational enemies and vacuums of governance, however, the Obama administration has created a series of half-in, half-out military and political situations that have brought chaos to the Middle East, confusing our friends and comforting our adversaries. In Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and Somalia, fear of a Vietnam-like quagmire still drives American leadership.

Afghanistan was called “Russia’s Vietnam” for a reason, but Vladimir Putin appears to have learned a different lesson about quagmires. Setting achievable aims — both military and political — and stopping when they have been met as much as practical, is key to being able to leave third countries while maintaining influence.

The apparent beginning of a Russian pullout of some forces from Syria should not be mistaken for the end of the Syrian civil war — or for a moral foreign policy. What it suggests, rather, is that Russia has achieved its military goals there and is now content to let both the political and military processes proceed with less direct Russian intervention.

Russia’s primary goals in Syria were:

To secure its hold on the bases at Latakia and Tartus, which requires a friendly government in Damascus, and
To damage Sunni jihadist rebels, whether ISIS, al Qaeda, or simply anti-Assad.

A secondary goal was to allow the Russians to test and show off new generation military equipment and tactics, including sustained bombing and the MiG-31M aircraft. Another was to provide diplomatic achievements including opening conversations — and discussing arms sales — with American allies/clients Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan, and deepening the information exchange with Israel.

Merv Bendle :Your Kids, Their Lab Rats

Safe Schools advocates shriek ‘Homophobia!’ at the suggestion their crusade to introduce young minds to cross-dressing and the like is anything other the ‘anti-bullying campaign’ they claim it to be. Let us hope there are still some politicians prepared to wear such abuse as a badge of honour.
As expected, the so-called independent review of the Safe Schools Coalition program has proved to be a whitewash that opens the way for the compulsory application of the program in schools around Australia. The academic chosen to conduct the two-week review, University of Western Australia Emeritus Professor Bill Louden, has confirmed that only schools in moderate Melbourne suburbs were reviewed, leaving unexplored the mass of highly controversial material both contained in, and associated with, the program that drew widespread criticism in the first place. The only ray of hope, it seems, is that a remnant of the conservative and responsible wing of the Coalition will intervene at the last moment to defund the program before any further damage is done.

Meanwhile, it has been alleged in federal Parliament that Gary Dowsett, the deputy director of the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society at LaTrobe University, where the Safe Schools program originated, advocated a favourable view of paedophilia in an article published in 1982, when Dowsett was a school teacher (“Irate MPs plan Safe Schools rumble”, The Australian, 17/3). The article, published in Gay Information, identified three principal political objectives for paedophiles: winning custody rights over children for gay men and lesbians; ensuring the legal “rights” of paedophiles and their young lovers; and establishing the sexual rights of children. It sought to draw a comparison between the “sexual responses” of parents for their children and “the love of a paedophile and his/her [young] lover”. The article declared that

the current paedophilia debate then is crucial to the political processes of the gay movement; paedophiles need our support, and we need to construct the child/adult sex issue on our terms.

It appears to be little doubt that the Safe Schools program has succeeded in doing just that, presenting a radical LGBTI propaganda campaign as an innocuous ‘anti-bullying’ initiative. In doing so, they have achieved an objective first articulated nearly 40 years ago.

In the mid-1970s, the infamous North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) was established (provoking Anita Bryant’s 1977 ‘Save Our Children’ campaign). At its height it attracted many supporters in Australia, especially on the far-left. NAMBLA denounced “the extreme oppression of men and boys in mutually consensual relationships” and its chief objective was to abolish age-of-consent laws that criminalized adult sexual involvement with minors. It sought to align itself with the gay and lesbian movement and waged a vigorous propaganda campaign to associate paedophilia with leftist notions of liberation.

NAMBLA’s co-founder was David Thorstad, a self-described bisexual pederast and atheist. An historian and far-left American political activist, Thorstad was a member of the Socialist Workers Party and president of New York’s Gay Activists Alliance. He played a major role in convincing the far-left that advocacy for homosexuality and paedophilia was a legitimate area of political activism. He was the author or translator of many works promoting gay rights and revolutionary politics. These include Man/Boy Love and the American Gay Movement; Gay Liberation and Socialism; Pederasty and Homosexuality; Homosexuality and the American Left; The Early Homosexual Rights Movement; and The Leninist Theory of Organization.

Thorstad saw himself as a member of an oppressed minority and compared his experience as a pederast in America to being “a Jew in Nazi Germany”. He also denounced “child-

Timothy Cootes The Joy of Submission

More than a year after its publication, the worth of novelist Michel Houellebecq’s “Submission” shines ever brighter, its synthesis of cynicism, seriousness and sadness a jaded reminder that fiction remains stranger than fact, but only just
In 2014, Sydney’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas almost lived up to its name. The speaking schedule featured the fearsomely hirsute Uthman Badar, media representative of the radical Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir. The title of his lecture: Honour Killings Are Morally Justified. Twitter outrage ensued, the festival organisers bleated and cancelled the lecture, and Uthman Badar’s mouth remained uncharacteristically closed.

His silence disappointed me. I’ve been unable to decide whether Badar’s topic and those who see merit in it are best described as risible or contemptible. Maybe it’s a combination of the two. His speech could have been a clarifying moment, perhaps even a useful one. If one wished to make an easy case for women’s rights and liberal democracy, one could simply call attention to the theocratic-minded alternatives put forward by the likes of Badar and Hizb ut-Tahrir.

The cancellation provided an easy task for columnists. Their safe chatter prompted a reprise of well-worn thoughts about ardent Islam, our murky conception of free speech, and the relative tameness of The Festival of Dangerous Ideas. All sides claimed victory, the next topic trended, and everyone moved on.

One aspect of the affair escaped notice, though, and this was the lecture Badar had initially proposed: The West Needs Saving By Islam. A rather dangerous idea, yes, as well as a fascinating, frightening and thought-provoking one. It finds expression in myriad ways, but we rarely encounter it in such direct language. Rather, it is a sentiment that lurks quietly behind other ideas. Islam, as its most confident adherents claim, is the solution, not merely to philosophical problems but to all human inquiry. And so, the Islamist movement’s fantastical and totalitarian goal of world domination offers a form of salvation for the West, even if salvation looks more like destruction. Here, the certainty and vibrancy of Islam compare favourably to a soulless and etiolated West, where Christianity scarcely seems sure of itself, nihilism reigns, and the promise of even minimal economic stability is continually and casually broken.

With Historic Trip to Cuba, Obama Aims to Accelerate a Policy Shift Crowded schedule is designed to showcase president’s engagement approachBy Carol E. Lee and Felicia Schwartz

WASHINGTON—President Barack Obama will take a bulging schedule with him on his history-making trip to Cuba, planning to meet President Raúl Castro, tour Old Havana, meet with dissidents and deliver a speech on U.S.-Cuba relations, senior officials said, all steps designed to showcase his policy of engagement.

Mr. Obama is scheduled to arrive in Cuba on Sunday evening, accompanied by his daughters, Sasha and Malia, first lady Michelle Obama and her mother, Marian Robinson, the officials told reporters Wednesday.

He will meet with staff members of the U.S. embassy and visit the sites of Old Havana, including the cathedral, where he will be greeted by Cardinal Jaime Ortega who, along with Pope Francis, helped facilitate the president’s secret talks with the Cuban government about restoring relations.

Mr. Obama won’t see Mr. Castro until the second day of his trip. The two leaders will meet at the Palace of the Revolution after Mr. Obama and the first lady lay a wreath at the Jose Martí Memorial to honor the 19th century Cuban national hero. Mr. Castro will also host Mr. Obama for a state dinner Monday evening.

Mr. Obama’s schedule includes an event with entrepreneurs, and before moving on to Argentina, he will deliver a speech at the opulent Gran Teatro. He’ll also meet with Cuban dissidents and attend a baseball game at Estadio Latinoamericano.

The trip is part of the Obama administration’s bid to make the policy shift permanent, Ben Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser to Mr. Obama who helped negotiate the Cuba opening, said. The U.S. will discuss cooperation in agriculture, health care and educational exchange and will urge economic progress and contacts between the two countries. CONTINUE AT SITE

Andrea Thomas :Germany Bans Far-Right Group Weisse Wölfe Terrorcrew, Conducts Raids Interior ministry searches, seizes evidence against leading members of group

BERLIN—German authorities banned a far-right extremist group called Weisse Wölfe Terrorcrew and conducted raids in 10 states, moves the government said were aimed at people who want to create fear and panic among migrants.

The interior ministry said it searched and seized evidence against 16 leading members of the group, whose name translates to the White Wolves Terror Crew. The group, which has at least 50 members across Germany, includes neo-Nazis and former members of the skinhead scene, according to officials.

“Right-wing extremist groups such as WWT have no place in Germany,” Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière said. “WWT is acting openly and aggressively against our state and our society, against migrants and anybody who doesn’t follow its line.”

Mr. de Maizière said the group had sought violent confrontations with political opponents, migrants and police. Two members were arrested last year, accused of planning attacks on refugee shelters, but it wasn’t clear if they had been carried out. The government didn’t provide full names for any of the group’s members.
The move against the fringe group highlights the German government’s efforts to deal with rising xenophobic sentiment since the arrival of roughly one million migrants in 2015. Before last year’s migrant influx, support for far-right groups had been declining for years. CONTINUE AT SITE