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2016

Polish Democracy Is In Excellent Health: Matthew Tyrmand

The reports of the death of Polish democracy, to paraphrase the oft told line of the eminent American writer, satirist, and political critic Mark Twain, have been greatly exaggerated.

Contrary to the alarmist media reports emanating from the media mandarins of the mainstream Western press, most Poles on the ground, constituting a silent majority as clearly indicated by the recent Presidential and Parliamentary elections, want to reassure those in the West that in Poland today the threats to democracy being “spun” by the global media complex are grossly mischaracterized and even wholly manufactured.

Democracy in Poland is the healthiest it has ever been in the post-1989, modern era.

The mainstream Western press apparatus however, taking its cues from the Polish mainstream press and those connected to the last government – freshly ejected from office due to its brazen, systemic corruption and its agenda of deeper EU integration – continues to criticise the recently and democratically elected new government and to deliver egregiously incomplete accounts of the actions on the ground; well parsed to ensure no inconvenient truths make it to the Western reader.

This active “spin” is meant to obfuscate the truth about the last eight years as well as to “poison the well” for those elected with the largest democratic mandate in modern Polish history, the former opposition party, Law and Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc– PiS).

Undeniably, this is the first government elected in the post-Communist period with a unilateral imprimatur to govern without coalition partners, but that rarely gets disclosed in recent printed “analysis” as that would undermine the “fascist coup” narrative being vociferously peddled by media, foreign and domestic, and unelected EU apparatchiks who are seeing widespread European rejection of their policies and control.

David Singer: France Signals Surrender to PLO and Muslim Pressure

1. Abject surrender to PLO demands for unilateral recognition of a Palestinian State outside the parameters defined by Security Council resolutions 242 and 338, the Oslo Accords and the Bush Roadmap.

2. A desperate attempt to appease France’s 4.7 million Muslims as they protest against the continuing state of emergency declared after the series of co-ordinated attacks by Islamic State in Paris last November that saw 130 people murdered and 368 wounded.

France made its intentions clear in the following statement released on 30 January by Foreign Affairs Minister Laurent Fabius:

“France will engage in the coming weeks in the preparation of an international conference bringing together the parties and their main partners, American, European, Arab, notably to preserve and make happen the two-state solution”

Mr Fabius issued this veiled threat on France 24:

“If this attempt to achieve a negotiated solution reaches a dead end, we will take responsibility and recognize the Palestinian state”

Respected commentator Aaron David Miller has already delivered his verdict on the proposed International conference in a scathing tweet:

“Another bone headed French play.Convene a peace conference doomed to fail; then recognize a faux Palestinian state”

In its Spring 2015 Global Attitudes Survey the Pew Research Centre found that 76 per cent of France’s population had favourable views of France’s Muslim population whilst 24 per cent had unfavourable views.

France no doubt hopes that calling this pro-Arab international conference will stem any growth in the anti-Muslim view in the next Pew Survey. Given the violent ongoing Muslim demonstrations such hope is doomed.

The Framers Made the Appointment Process Explicitly Political Justice Scalia’s 2014 opinion explains the rancorous battle to replace him. By Josh Blackman

In October 2013, a reporter asked Justice Antonin Scalia what he thought about the government shutdown. The gregarious justice replied, “I have a deal with the Congress. I leave them alone. They leave me alone.” He was exactly right. The monastic Supreme Court is formally isolated from the political process in all respects, but one — the appointment process. Long before they enter the marble palace, judicial nominees must run a political gauntlet that the Constitution itself has erected. The president has the duty to appoint officials — he “shall nominate . . . judges of the Supreme Court.” But the executive has this power only “by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate.” Critically, the Senate is under no obligation to give the authority to the president.

This disjunction — the president shall nominate, but the Senate does not have to confirm — activates the very sort of structural bulwarks that the Framers hardwired into the Constitution. The Supreme Court’s unanimous 2014 decision in National Labor Relations Board v. Noel Canning reaffirmed this foundational lesson: When there is inter-branch disagreement that cannot be resolved through the political process, no nominee can be confirmed. Justice Scalia’s prescient concurring opinion in that case reminds us that senatorial refusal to confirm is not an unforeseen flaw but an intentionally designed feature of the Constitution. This is true even where it frustrates the orderly functioning of the federal government.

The case began in 2011 when Senate Republicans blocked a vote on President Obama’s nominees to the National Labor Relations Board. Without new appointees, the NLRB would lose its quorum and its ability to issue decisions. Faced with a political problem that called for a political solution, the president turned to an unconstitutional shortcut: Although the Senate had not gone on recess, Obama acted as if it had. During a 72-hour window between pro forma sessions on January 3 and January 6, 2012, the president deemed the Senate in recess and made three appointments to the NLRB.

The Supreme Court unanimously rejected the president’s legal defense of his action and found that the recess appointments were unconstitutional. But all nine justices went even further than that, specifically refuting the president’s argument that gridlock justified his breach of the separation of powers. During oral arguments, Solicitor General Donald H. Verrilli, the administration’s top lawyer, argued that the president’s decision to disregard the pro forma sessions was justified as a “safety valve” in response to “congressional intransigence.” If the president did not make the recess appointees, “the NLRB was going to go dark,” Verrilli said. “It was going to lose its quorum.”

Obama Invites Enemy Spies to U.S. Military Brainstorming Sessions One catastrophic intelligence flap after the next. Humberto Fontova

This very week General James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, testified that Castro’s spies remain a serious security threat to the U.S.:

“The threat from foreign intelligence entities…is persistent, complex, and evolving. Targeting and collection of US political, military, economic, and technical information by foreign intelligence services continues unabated. Russia and China pose the greatest threat, followed by Iran and Cuba…” (General James Clapper, Washington D.C. Feb 9, 2016.)

But two weeks ago (Jan. 26-29th) when the U.S. military’s Southern Command held its annual “Caribbean regional security conference,” senior members of Castro’s KGB-trained spy agency were kindly invited to participate.

“Aw come on, Humberto,” you say! “All nations embed spies in their diplomatic corps, for crying out loud. Let’s give Obama’s people a break on this one. How are they supposed to know which Cubans are the spies? It’s a jungle out there, amigo!”

Good point. Very true. In fact, U.S. intelligence services, regardless of the president they served, do not have an exactly stellar record with regards to Castro. To wit:

“We’ve infiltrated Castro’s guerrilla group in the Sierra Mountains. The Castro brothers and Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara have no affiliations with any Communists whatsoever.” (In Nov. 1958 Havana CIA station Chief Jim Noel, was reacting to warnings from “tacky right-wing Mc Carthyite!” Cubans.)

JUSTICE SCALIA ON RECESS APPOITNMENTS” DANIEL GREENFIELD

There’s talk of Obama making a recess appointment to the Supreme Court if the Senate doesn’t act. Here though is what Justice Scalia thought of Obama’s abuse of recess appointments on the NLRB.

And as usual, he didn’t mince words.

“The Court’s decision transforms the recess-appointment power from a tool carefully designed to fill a narrow and specific need into a weapon to be wielded by future Presidents against future Senates,” Justice Scalia wrote.

“What does all this amount to? In short: Intra-session recess appointments were virtually unheard of for the first 130 years of the Republic, were deemed unconstitutional by the first Attorney General to address them, were not openly defended by the Executive until 1921, were not made in significant numbers until after World War II, and have been repeatedly criticized as unconstitutional by Senators of both parties.”

“Moreover, the majority’s insistence that the Senate gainsay an executive practice “as a body” in order to prevent the Executive from acquiring power by adverse possession, ante, at 14, will systematically favor the expansion of executive power at the expense of Congress.”

“In 1792, Attorney General Edmund Randolph, who had been a leading member of the Constitutional Convention, provided the Executive Branch’s first formal interpretation of the Clause. He advised President Washington that the Constitution did not authorize a recess appointment to fill the office of Chief Coiner of the United States Mint, which had been created by Congress on April 2, 1792, during the Senate’s session.”

“A statute passed by the First Congress authorized the President to appoint customs inspectors “with the advice and consent of the Senate” and provided that “if the appointment . . . shall not be made during the present session of Congress, the President . . . is hereby empowered to make such appointments during the recess of the Senate, by granting commissions which shall expire at the end of their next session.” That authorization would have been superfluous if the Recess Appointments Clause had been understood to apply to pre-existing vacancies.”

“More fundamentally, Wirt and the majority are mistaken to say that the Constitution’s “ ‘substantial purpose’ ” is to “ ‘keep . . . offices filled.’ ”. The Constitution is not a road map for maximally efficient government, but a system of “carefully crafted restraints” designed to “protect the people from the improvident exercise of power.”

“There are many circumstances other than a vacancy that can produce similar inconveniences if they arise late in the session: For example, a natural disaster might occur to which the Executive cannot respond effectively without a supplemental appropriation. But in those circumstances, the Constitution would not permit the President to appropriate funds himself. Congress must either anticipate such eventualities or be prepared to be haled back into session. The troublesome need to do so is not a bug to be fixed by this Court, but a calculated feature of the constitutional framework. As we have recognized, while the Constitution’s government-structuring provisions can seem “clumsy” and “inefficient,” they reflect “hard choices . . . consciously made by men who had lived under a form of government that permitted arbitrary governmental acts to go unchecked.”

Senators Must Keep Scalia’s Legacy Alive and Reject Obama’s Nominee Justice Scalia’s true legacy was fighting for the Constitution. Daniel Greenfield

Even in death, he always had the last word. As debate over a possible recess appointment to the Supreme Court by Obama continues, Justice Antonin Scalia had already made the case against it.

“The court’s decision transforms the recess-appointment power from a tool carefully designed to fill a narrow and specific need into a weapon to be wielded by future presidents against future Senates,” Justice Scalia wrote in his usual unsparing language in NLRB v. Noel Canning.

And, as always, he took the side of the Constitution over everything else indicting the court for casting “aside the plain, original meaning of the constitutional text in deference to late-arising historical practices”. In clear and forceful language, he warned that “the Constitution’s core, government-structuring provisions are no less critical to preserving liberty than are the later adopted provisions of the Bill of Rights” in maintaining “the “enduring structure” of constitutional government”.

To Justice Scalia, liberty meant limiting the powers of government by maintaining the Constitution. A recess appointment, the topic revived by his passing, is as grave a threat to liberty as a violation of the First Amendment. He was convinced that government breaking its constitutional chains was the true threat to liberty. Attacks on the First or Second Amendment were symptoms of that larger problem.

Often outnumbered, but never outwitted, Justice Scalia saw government as a monster that the Founders had chained with manacles made of words. His task was reforging them with his voice and pen.

Leftist judges and lawyers love to style themselves as defenders of civil rights, but their idea of civil rights is providing unlimited power to government. Justice Scalia was an actual believer in civil rights. Unlike the activist leftist judges to whom the law is merely a means to a leftist end, dressing up their usurpation of power under the mocking name of “Living Constitution”, he was an Originalist who truly fought for civil rights every time he fought for the truth of the word of the law over the power of men.

A Message to Republicans By David Solway

If the GOP wants to win, it should learn how not to lose.

On the similarities between Canada’s Conservative party and the GOP, I have previously argued that the latter must not repeat the mistakes of the former if it wishes to succeed in November 2016. As I explained, the Conservatives lost the recent Canadian election at least in part because they failed to stick by their central principles, attempting to cater to the voting bloc of the opposition parties by soft-pedaling or even abandoning basic policy decisions or by camouflaging their fundamental ethos so as not, they calculated, to alienate the electorate. The result was predictably twofold: in manifesting as Liberal lite the party made no inroads among a skeptical population and simultaneously lost many of its long-standing supporters, in total dropping 67 of its previous 166 seats.

When a party begins to shed its own constituents by aping the agenda of its competitors or by failing to reframe its image, it has effectively sealed its fate. Greg Richards points out in a cogent article for American Thinker that “The ascendancy of liberalism in America is the cause of the silence of Republicans in Congress since they won the House in 2010. One would think that a solid majority in the electoral body closest to the people would provide a platform for advancing the Republican case. But no.” The Republican establishment is “unwilling to challenge the liberal world view, [which] controls the debate in the public space… Republicans have had neither the skill nor the intestinal fortitude — the courage — to operate outside the culturally dominant liberal paradigm.”

Hillary Clinton’s Dead-End Campaign By Victor Davis Hanson

Hillary Clinton may yet win the Democratic nomination—if she is not indicted. After all, it is hard for a New England spread-the-wealth socialist like rival Bernie Sanders to appeal to working-class southern whites, minorities, or the wealthy Democratic establishment. It is still likely that the Democratic Party will find a way to aid an ailing and scandal-plagued Mrs. Clinton, rather than turn over its future to a 74-year-old scold, who for most of his voting life was not a Democrat and whose redistributionist agendas and Woodstock fables about the 1960s make Obama seem centrist in comparison.

All that said, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign rhetoric is coming up empty—largely because it is at odds with the way she has lived her life and conducted her various careers over the last two decades. Voters, even younger ones, are now sorely aware of those flagrant contradictions.

The so-called Republican war on women was successful Democratic demagoguery in 2008 and 2012. That paranoid mythmaking worked with urban, unmarried young women. They were terrified of old white-guy Republican bogeymen, who would make them pay for their birth control and take away abortion on demand, were indifferent to new expansive definitions of sexual harassment, and seemed hung up on what were seen as roadblocks—religion, marriage, and family—to a young, college-educated woman’s self-expression. Yet Hillary has now lost that long-enshrined wedge issue after only 24 hours of Donald Trump’s withering counter-fire—in stark contrast to past years of failed Republican counter-strategies.

Trump assumed that her problem was not just that Bill Clinton had been a recognized serial womanizer and cheat for over forty years, but involved far greater hypocrisies. First, it was hard to find any sexual liaison of Bill’s that ever had a good word to say about him. The consensual Monica Lewinsky variety all felt used and manipulated. The Juanita Broaddrick-Paula Jones-Kathleen Willey category alleged that they were victims of crude coercion or violent assault.

Merv Bendle Trumpism and Turnbull

The mogul’s rise has shocked the new and arrogantly elitist ruling class, of which Australia’s PM is very much a member. If the frustrations being tapped on the other side of the Pacific are a guide — and there is no reason to imagine they are not — we may well soon see our own pitchfork posses
There’s a world-shaking political showdown approaching, and Donald Trump’s presidential bid is the vanguard. Moreover, the political forces providing momentum for his populist insurgency — the disintegration of America’s national identity driven by a new internationalist ruling class allied with a state-dependent underclass (or lumpenproletariat) — have become so obvious that both the left and the right are in basic agreement about them.

Addressing the question: what makes a person vote for Donald Trump, we find commentary like the following by Ezekiel Kweku on the Gen-X left:

[Trump’s supporters] believe that the United States is decaying from within, its strength sapped by a culture unmoored from the ideals that made America great, and that the source of this rot is immigrants who don’t understand American values, depress the country’s wages, drain government coffers, and increase crime. They believe that in this weakened state, America isn’t strong enough to fight off terrorists abroad or infiltrators within. They are haunted by the amorphous fear that the America they knew is vanishing. And they believe establishment politicians and the press are too cowed, calculated, or corrupted to either voice these truths publicly or act upon them.

Meanwhile, on the libertarian right, we find a similar analysis offered by redoubtable Charles Murray:

Trumpism is an expression of the legitimate anger that many Americans feel about the course that the country has taken, and its appearance was predictable. It is the endgame of a process that has been going on for a half-century: America’s divestment of its historic national identity.

That national identity is based, above all, on American exceptionalism and a commitment to egalitarianism, liberty and individualism, specifically to the values of self-reliance, limited government, free-market economics and decentralized political power, all buttressed by freedom of speech and association, equality before the law and equality of opportunity. In an epochal shift that has lasted now for 50 years that foundational commitment is being fatally undermined:

Today, the creed has lost its authority and its substance. What happened? Many of the dynamics of the reversal can be found in developments across the whole of American society: in the emergence of a new upper class and a new lower class, and in the plight of the working class caught in between. The class structure of American society is coming apart at the top and the bottom, leaving the working and middle classes exposed. As Murray pointed out several years ago:

The new upper class consists of the people who shape the country’s economy, politics and culture. The new lower class consists of people who have dropped out of some of the most basic institutions of American civic culture, especially work and marriage. Both of these new classes have repudiated the American creed in practice, whatever lip service they may still pay to it.

Faced with this disintegration, “Trumpism is the voice of a beleaguered working class telling us that it too is falling away”.

America is shifting swiftly away from the subdued class consciousness that characterised its first 175 years as a nation and, consequently, “American egalitarianism is on its last legs”.

Daryl McCann Obama’s Bloody, Bumbling Incoherence

In the topsy-turvy world as seen from the White House, Islamists such as Erdogan are regarded, incredibly, as the solution to extremist violence. Meanwhile, even as the US abets Shia militias in Iraq, those same fighters become US enemies if they venture into Syria
Last week, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan harangued Barack Obama in a very public tirade, warning that if America continued to support the Kurdish PYD-YPG in Syria it would be responsible for the creation of “a sea of blood”. Almost any president in the history of the United States could be guaranteed to recognise that Erdoğan’s millennialist ideology, not to mention megalomania, has transformed the fellow into a cross between Macbeth and King Lear. Almost any president apart from Obama, that is.

President Obama has, for years, consented to Turkey’s intervention in the Syrian civil war on the side of “moderate terrorists” — Jabhat al-Nusra, Ahrar ash-Sham, Jaysh al-Islam and so on. Erdoğan obviously desires Bashar al-Assad’s regime overthrown and replaced by radical Islamist outfits, à la Libya. How that might serve the interests of America and the rest of the world is another matter altogether. President Obama’s “special friendship” with the Muslim Brotherhood-associated Erdoğan leads some to infer that the current incumbent in the White House might himself be an MB man.

There is certainly a case that Barack Obama pandered to MB bigotry in his 2009 Cairo Speech and praised with faint damns Morsi’s MB government (2012-13). But it’s complicated. Barack Obama might have lamented the dawn of the post-MB era in Egypt, but Saudi Arabia actively embraced it, the Saudi Royal Family’s favoured Islamic fundamentalism, being Wahhabism rather than the Haraki (activist) Salafism of the MB. Nevertheless, President Obama has acquiesced to a very unsavoury alliance with the Saudis in Yemen’s civil war, which mostly involves hitting al-Qaeda units with drone strikes and defending a corrupt government against the Iranian-backed Houthi insurgency.