A birther lawsuit challenging Ted Cruz’s eligibility was filed today in federal court in Texas. I had previously written that such a lawsuit challenging the eligibility would most certainly lack standing and would be frivolous. The lawyer who filed the complaint, Newton B. Schwartz, Sr., had been suspended from the practice of law by two separate states for disciplinary infractions.
According to the detailed disciplinary ruling against Schwartz in Louisiana, he engaged in legal matters in Louisiana but was never admitted to practice law in the state and never sought temporary admission. (You can read the lengthy disciplinary case against Schwartz here).
Like the vagaries of the weather itself, true believers in man-caused global warming twist with the wind as challenges to their beliefs blow by. For example, I recently pointed out to a graduate of a large, well-respected university that one of the highly credentialed, long-time professors in the university’s atmospheric sciences department was an outspoken skeptic of disastrous anthropogenic global climate change. The graduate promptly responded by informing me that it was well-known that this professor was off medication, literally “nuts,” and this is why the professor was outspoken (even to the point of maintaining a popular contrarian website) regarding their fantasy that humans are not likely to have much culpability for cataclysmic climate change.
So, doing some twisting myself, I suddenly realized how much sense this argument made. Professors who believe that they can confidently predict the global climate decades from now are on medication. When they go off their medication, they start to think differently. Other professors, still medicated, notice this independent thinking and become upset. (After all, settled science must not tolerate unsettled thinkers.) The flustered faculty, finding the uncomfortable situation a tough pill to swallow, cast aspersions on their antiseptic colleague, calling them nuts, off-their-medication, and the like, trying to shame the colleague back on sedation. Ultimately, the true-believer professors simply resort to shunning their loose-cannon colleague and go on with the palliative knowledge that climate will be calamitous as long as humans continue to live comfortably.
In classrooms across the country, high school students are taught the scientific method. It consists of constructing a doubtful hypothesis and designing a series of experiments to test the hypothesis with the observable facts. After a number of tests prove positive. The student can then take the facts and reach a conclusion. When a conclusion is constantly verified, it is enshrined in what might be called “established” science.
There is a second kind of science that uses methods very different from those of “established” science. In fact, this science, if indeed it might be called such, uses the exact opposite method. It consists of constructing a conclusion and then testing that conclusion with a hypothesis that is repeated over and over again using doubtful data to back it up.
The “logic” of this particular scientific method is that the truth of the conclusion is determined by the number of times the hypothesis is affirmed. With enough repetition, even the data starts to take on the appearance of the truth. The secret is to get as many people and media as possible to parrot the great discovery. At a certain point, the conclusion can be enshrined in a special pantheon that might be called “settled” science, and woe betide any “denier” who dare question it.
Like its cousin “settled” law, “settled” science can be useful even outside its field. It can be employed to silence opposition, impose laws and promote political agendas. It respects no rank or positions. August researchers and famous professors can be toppled from their positions if they express the slightest doubts about a “settled” position. Even the strongest evidence is ignored with disdain and disbelief. Meanwhile the hypothesis mantra is just repeated over and over again.
“Settled” science cases abound in today’s politically-correct times. The most obvious one is the dogma of “global warming.” Many old-school scientists have suffered persecution for calling into question the faulty computer models and fudged data associated with this doctrine. They have even shown that the globe is not warming. Flexible “settled” scientists immediately tweaked the hypothesis to speak of “climate change,” and thus cover both sides.
Beware the zeal of the reformer. True, the reform impulse has occupied a long and sometimes necessary place in American politics, going back to Andrew Jackson’s fiery allegation that John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay stole the 1824 presidential election through a “corrupt bargain.” Four years later, Jackson rode to the White House on the wings of the outrage he had summoned. His refrain—that malefactors of power had undermined American democracy by thwarting the will of the people—has probably been the most catalytic recurrent theme in the country’s politics. Even when the flames of populist passion subside, they seem ever-present through a kind of after-burner of latent protest.
Yet the political reforms generated by these passions often go awry, producing unintended consequences. Sometimes they fall victim to the vicissitudes of human nature and the reality that politics is rarely about good guys versus bad guys. Reformers are human, and often when power comes their way their frailties are exposed.
Let The People Rule
By Geoffrey Cowan
Norton, 404 pages, $27.95
A particularly potent period of reformist zeal followed the tumultuous campaign year of 1968, when activist Democrats infuriated by the Vietnam War flooded the early presidential primary states and obliterated President Lyndon Johnson’s hopes for a second full term. For their pains they got, instead, Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, who embraced Johnson’s war policy and cadged his party’s nomination without having entered a single primary. The reformist refrain went up: The party’s nomination process was dominated by backroom bosses who exercised power without regard to voter sentiment.
The reformist answer was to revise party rules in order to encourage states to select national convention delegates through primaries rather than boss-controlled caucuses and state conventions. The result was the nominating system we have today, with generally 80% of national convention delegates selected through primaries.
The nation tuned in to Round Six of the Republican debate mashup Thursday night, and the media is busy micro-covering every last rift between the GOP candidates. In the process reporters are ignoring the far more interesting party crackup going on.
You might not know it, but the Democratic Party is in the middle of an internecine battle that potentially dwarfs that of conservatives. On one side is a real but weakened mainstream Democratic movement that has its roots in Clinton centrism. On the other is a powerful, ascendant wing of impatient and slightly unhinged progressive activists. This split has been building for years, but The Donald has been so entertaining that few have noticed.
Now it’s getting hard to ignore. Polls this week show Bernie Sanders tying or beating Hillary Clinton in Iowa and New Hampshire. Put another way, a self-declared socialist, a man who makes many think of their crazy uncle Bob, is beating a woman who spent eight years planning this run, who is swimming in money, and who oversees the most powerful political machine in operation.
Some of Mrs. Clinton’s struggles are self-imposed. She’s a real-world, political version of Pig-Pen, trailing along her own cloud of scandal dust. Even Democrats who like her don’t trust her. And a lot of voters are weary or unimpressed by the Clinton name. For all the Democratic establishment’s attempts to anoint Mrs. Clinton—to shield her from debates and ignore her liabilities—the rank and file aren’t content to have their nominee dictated.
Shortly after a conservative website on Wednesday posted 2008 footage of Sen. Marco Rubio backing a cap-and-trade program to combat climate change, his campaign roared back with a counterattack that included an entire web page aimed at debunking the video.
Mr. Rubio’s muscular response revealed how toxic the issue of climate change has become in the Republican Party under President Barack Obama, who has sought to make reducing carbon emissions to alleviate global warming one of his signature accomplishments.
As speaker of the Florida House, Mr. Rubio did vote for a 2008 bill authorizing the state to come up with rules for a cap-and-trade plan, though he raised questions about its cost and effectiveness. A press release from the House Majority Office at the time described the bill as a “responsible response to concerns about global climate change.”
But since running for U.S. Senate in 2010 as the conservative alternative to then-Gov. Charlie Crist, Mr. Rubio has questioned whether climate change is man-made, and opposed potential remedies like cap-and-trade that he says would hurt the economy.
Shifts by Mr. Rubio and some of his rivals on the issue recall an inconvenient past that many in the GOP would like to forget: Republicans, not Democrats, first championed market-based systems to control pollution, as a way to avoid more direct regulation.
Until 2008, many Republicans, including then-presidential nominee John McCain, supported cap-and-trade to address climate change. Once Mr. Obama won the White House, Republicans swiftly unified against nearly all of his initiatives, including a cap-and-trade bill that would have set limits on carbon emissions and allowed companies to trade pollution credits to comply.
Language about Islamic history in school textbooks is spurring battles across the nation, with some parents’ groups and lawmakers objecting to what they see as an overly benign portrayal of the religion’s spread and its teachings.
Following recent attacks in the U.S. and abroad by terrorists who claim to espouse Islamic beliefs, more American parent groups have turned attention to what children are taught about the religion. Muslims and their supporters say the opposition to the textbooks amounts to fear-mongering and presents a distorted view of their faith.
Kristen Amundson, executive director of the National Association of State Boards of Education, which represents U.S. state and territorial education boards, said she expects to see more parents pushing to change textbooks and curriculum this year.
“We will see a raft of it,” she said. “It is going to be coming before local boards, state boards and legislatures.”
A bill in Tennessee, backed by a leading Republican legislator, is expected to be the focus of heated debate in that state’s legislative session, which started this past week. The bill, introduced by Rep. Sheila Butt, seeks to exclude any “religious doctrine,” not just Islam, from middle-school textbooks.
Ms. Butt, an author of Christian books, said in an email that she wrote the bill after complaints from “constituents who realized that some religions were more heavily weighted in the standards and that doctrine was being taught to Junior High students.” Republican Gov. Bill Haslam has said the bill is too broad, but Candice McQueen, the state’s education commissioner, has sped up reviews of social-studies standards following the criticism.
Similar battles have gone before state education boards in Texas and Alabama, and there were calls throughout 2015 to revise textbooks in school districts in states including California, Wisconsin and Massachusetts. A group called Truth in Texas Textbooks Coalition won substantial changes—many of them regarding descriptions of Islam—from that state’s board of education in 2014, according to the group’s chairman, Roy White.
The landmark Iranian nuclear deal will go into effect this weekend, Western and Iranian officials said, triggering the lifting of sanctions and reshaping the political and economic landscape in unpredictable ways across the Mideast and beyond.
The United Nations’ nuclear watchdog agency in Vienna was expected to certify by Saturday that Tehran has met its commitments under the July accord with global powers to significantly scale back its nuclear program, according to these officials.
In return, most Western sanctions on Iran will start to be repealed, sending tens of billions of dollars in frozen Iranian oil money back to Tehran and opening world markets to hundreds of thousands of barrels of Iranian petroleum.
The White House says the implementation of the agreement would be a major advance in the U.S. campaign to stop the spread of nuclear weapons. But its also poses major security and diplomatic risks for the U.S. and its close Mideast allies, such as Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, according to regional diplomats and analysts.
The Obama administration in recent days has proclaimed a “milestone” in its efforts to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, after achieving its long-held goal of reducing the remaining population to fewer than 100 detainees. With the expedited release this month of 14 detainees, the total now stands at 93.
This is nothing to celebrate.
In reducing these numbers, the White House has freed dangerous terrorists and set aside military and intelligence assessments warning about the risks of doing so. The Obama administration has deceived recipient countries about the threats posed by the jihadists they’ve accepted. And President Obama has repeatedly misled the American people about Guantanamo, the detainees held there, and the consequences of releasing them.
On Jan. 6, as part of the Obama administration’s accelerated Guantanamo process, Mahmmoud Omar Mohammed Bin Atef was transferred to Ghana, along with another detainee named Khalid Mohammed Salih al Dhuby. Ghana’s government portrayed the deal as an act of “humanitarian assistance,” likening the Yemeni men to nonthreatening refugees from Rwanda and Syria, noting that they “were detained in Guantanamo but have been cleared of any involvement in terrorist activities, and are being released.”
That description isn’t true for either of the men. Mr. Atef, in particular, is a cause for concern. Long before his transfer, the intelligence analysts at Joint Task Force Guantanamo (JTF-GTMO) assessed him as a “high risk” and “likely to pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” (The JTF-GTMO threat assessments of 760 Guantanamo detainees, many written in 2008, were posted online in 2011 by WikiLeaks.) It is easy to understand the analysts’ worry about Mr. Atef. He was, they said, “a fighter in Usama bin Laden’s former 55th Arab Brigade and is an admitted member of the Taliban.” He trained at al Farouq, the infamous al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, “participated in hostilities against US and Coalition forces, and continues to demonstrate his support of UBL and extremism.”
Yes, it’s now gotten to the point where the Muslim student president of the self-described “pro-Israel” J Street U is given the forum of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency to tell Jews to be better pro-Israel advocates by fighting Israel’s “Occupation.”
J Street U gave this University of Maryland student a megaphone which she’s using to attack Israel, and now she’s being given a “Jewish” media outlet to amplify her anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian Arab message.
Amna Farooqi, the J Street U president, seized upon another editorial from another leader of a Jewish organization brought to you by the JTA, David Bernstein of the Jewish Council on Public Affairs.
Bernstein, in turn, was warning Jewish Americans that in order to defeat the BDS (Boycott of, Divestment from and Sanctions against Israel) Movement, Jews should start developing partnerships with various social justice groups “on the mainstream left.”
Bernstein wrote that the BDS movement is teaming up with other “social justice” organizations to together fight against Israel, and so he urged pro-Israel folks to ape this coalition building and thereby fight this “intersectionality” of “other oppressed groups” making alliances with anti-Israel groups.
Farooqi added the next step, which is that the best thing pro-Israel groups can do to defeat this intersectionality dilemma would be to join up with other groups opposing…what, other anti-Israel groups? Nope. Maybe pro-Israel groups should join together with organizations fighting against ISIS? Nope. How about suggesting pro-Israel groups create a coalition with organizations fighting for human rights for persecuted Christians in the Middle East? Nope.
Farooqi suggests the coalition pro-Israel groups should join are those progressives who are attacking Israel for engaging in the “Occupation” of Palestinian Arab land. No joke.
