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March 2017

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Calif. College Prof Who Called Trump’s Election ‘an Act of Terrorism’ Awarded ‘Faculty of the Year’

By on March 31st, 2017

A California college professor who had one of the more notorious classroom meltdowns following the election of now-President Donald Trump last November has been honored with a Faculty of the Year award, an honor she has declined.

After a student surreptitiously recorded Orange Coast College human-sexuality professor Olga Perez Stable Cox calling Trump a “white supremacist” and his election “an act of terrorism,” his video went viral, sparking a nationwide debate about how much political commentary is appropriate in the classroom.

Caleb O’Neil, the student who videotaped Cox’s rant, shared the recording with the Orange Coast College Republicans club’s president, Joshua Recalde-Martinez, who posted it online. OCC announced it would suspend O’Neil in February for violating rules against recording class discussions without permission, but after the 19-year-old filed an appeal and threatened to sue, the board of trustees announced it would cancel the punishment.

The university had originally planned to suspend O’Neil until at least the fall of 2017, also putting him on disciplinary probation and requiring him to write a letter of apology to Olga Perez-Stable Cox, the professor he recorded. But after convening a special meeting, the board of trustees voted Wednesday to lift O’Neil’s punishment, also saying they would not take action against Cox.

Now the college wants to honor the professor who called Trump’s election “an act of terrorism” with a prestigious award.

Doug Bennett, executive director of the Orange Coast College Foundation, told the Los Angeles Times that Cox was notified of the award last week, “but she declined to accept and did not want to participate in related activities.”

The annual honor is typically received during a public ceremony, and the winner addresses the graduating class during commencement.

The Costa Mesa college didn’t make a formal announcement about Cox winning the award, Bennett said, but students heard rumors about her nomination and began sharing information on Facebook.

OCC’s Professional Development Committee chooses the winner of the award. The committee consists of faculty members, classified staff and past recipients of the award.

Any student or faculty member can recommend a member of the faculty for the honor. The committee then gives nominees credit for their involvement on campus and evaluates their methods of teaching.

The committee does not plan to select another recipient for this year’s award, Bennett said. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Trump declares war on conservatives, cements one-term presidency By Ed Straker

By on March 31st, 2017

President Trump officially declared war on conservatives yesterday. His ostensible target was the House Freedom Caucus, which declined to vote for the “Obamacare Lite” bill that Trump vigorously lobbied for. Trump tweeted:

The Freedom Caucus will hurt the entire Republican agenda if they don’t get on the team, & fast,” he wrote. “We must fight them, & Dems, in 2018!”

Trump doesn’t care about ideology, or principles; he simply wants people to “get on the team.” Having lied to Republican primary voters about repealing Obamacare, he now wants conservative House members to go back on their promises to repeal Obamacare as well.

When Trump was running for president, he promised to repeal Obamacare. He didn’t promise to repeal part of it, and keep the worst half, the half that contained regulations which kept premiums sky-high and subsidies which are bankrupting the federal government, and soon state governments as well. But by embracing the House bill, that is exactly what President Trump has done. He never even tried to push for a full repeal; all he wanted was a “deal” he could take credit for.

Make no mistake, the viciousness of Trump’s attack on conservative House members is a direct attack on conservatives themselves. He used many of you to get elected and now wants you to shut up and toe the line. Whatever Trump says and does is brilliant, you can be sure. His contempt for the voters who nominated him in the primary is breathtaking.

Had they known that Trump never intended to repeal the worst parts of Obamacare, he never would have been nominated; and had they known that his immigration policy was remarkably similar to Jeb Bush’s (certainly when it comes to “Dreamers”), he also never would have secured the nomination. It was only by talking tough and outflanking the other conservatives on the right that Trump won the nomination. Remember when Trump talked about having all illegals go home to reapply for entry, and his repeated promised over and over to investigate Hillary Clinton? All lies.

Trump feels he no longer needs conservatives now, but he is wrong, unless he is committed to being a one-term president. Because the way he is going now, he will get a primary challenge for 2020 from someone who commits to repealing Obamacare and deporting all illegals. Even if he wins the primary challenge, enough conservatives will stay home to give a victory to whatever creature the Democrats put up.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

The Freedom Caucus: Our last line of defense By Earick Ward ****

By on March 31st, 2017

Unless Trump is coordinating an end-around, this is a huge (yuge) mistake. Here’s why.

While Donald Trump drew in countless new, historically Democrat voters, his base was and is the conservatives, formally defined as the Tea Party. The Tea Party came onto the scene at the outset of the Obamacare debate in Congress. They made the case (rightly) that Obamacare would inflate premiums, cause patients to lose their doctors and plans, decrease full-time jobs in favor of part-time employment, and add countless persons to the Medicare rolls. All of these cautions (and more) came to fruition.

“Repeal and replace” has been a rallying call for millions of Americans, including a large majority of those who voted for Donald Trump. Countless congressmen and senators won seats by affirming their support of the repeal and replace efforts.

Nothing, or very little, anyway, of last week’s debate – and, subsequently, the bill being “forced” on the Freedom Caucus – represented what anyone could seriously consider a repeal and replace of Obamacare.

There is an ideological war being waged between liberal progressives (from both parties) and conservatives. This war has been ongoing for at least a couple of decades (if not a century). While we (Republicans) have gained countless state and federal congressional seats, governorships, and now the presidency, at the federal level, we have seen little movement off the progressive agenda advanced by Barack Obama, Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer, and Nancy Pelosi.

The Freedom Caucus’s crime: standing on what they ran on in their districts. The horra.

Here’s Donald’s mistake: while he may truly be concerned about 2018 congressional seats being lost due to not passing a bill “reforming” Obamacare, if we’re not able to unwind dependency on government for health care, we’ll be forever chasing voters who will continue to vote for the Party of Santa Claus.

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Russia: Rubber Ducks and Green Paint by Shoshana Bryen

By on March 31st, 2017

How the United States responds to these protests abroad can determine not only the future of those protesting, but also the future of the governments that find themselves under pressure.

Russia seeks superpower status in the Middle East and Europe, but real superpower status has always required the ability to shoulder burdens abroad without fear of upheaval at home.

Ignoring the Green Movement in Iran was a missed opportunity for the West and a tragedy for the people of Iran. It is not America’s job to create or foment unrest in Russia or anywhere else. But it is in the interest of the West to support and hearten those who have the courage to take on a corrupt and aggressive government.

For all the hyperbole in Washington about Russian hacking, Russian disinformation, Russian influence, and Russian espionage, the really remarkable events in Russia over the weekend appear barely to have registered.

One hundred years after the assassination of the last Czar, and two-and-a-half decades after the fall of the communist regime, Russian people have taken to the streets.

In early March, anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny posted a report on YouTube detailing the corruption of Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. After more than 13 million views in roughly three weeks, people, including a large number of teenagers, answered Navalny’s call for public protest. They flooded the streets of 95 Russian cities, as well as London, Prague, Basel, and Bonn. Many carried rubber ducks — or real ducks — referring to reports of a luxury duck farm on one of Medvedev’s properties.

Navalny is now in jail.

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London Attacker Made Test Run, Security Officials Say Tracking of Khalid Masood’s car GPS showed he drove across Westminster Bridge and approached Parliament only days before attack By Benoit Faucon and Jenny Gross

By on March 31st, 2017

LONDON—Investigators have concluded that the 52-year-old man who killed four people in a car-and-knife attack near Parliament made a test run in the days before, two security officials said Thursday.

U.K. investigators are still trying to piece together the motives and planning behind Khalid Masood’s attack last week, the worst in Britain since a series of coordinated bombings in 2005 killed 52 people.

Two security officials said tracking of his car’s GPS showed he drove across Westminster Bridge and approached Parliament on Saturday, March 18. The following Wednesday he plowed into pedestrians on the crowded bridge before crashing his car outside Parliament and stabbing a policeman. He was shot dead by police.

Masood’s movements show he prepared the attack, rather than making a last-minute decision beforehand, the officials said.

But it also suggests he wasn’t a trained terrorist. In that case, he “would have come on the same day of the week, or at least a weekday, to ensure the security measures and traffic were similar,” one official said.

A London police spokesman said “the investigation is live and ongoing, and we’re not prepared to comment further at this time.”

Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack, saying in a statement that it was a response to U.S.-led coalition strikes against the extremist group. But police said they have found no evidence he was linked to Islamic State or al Qaeda. Investigators have said that they believe he acted alone and was inspired by Islamist terrorism. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Netanyahu Pushes New West Bank Settlement Construction is intended to house families evicted from Amona outpost By Rory Jones and Felicia Schwartz

By on March 31st, 2017

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday proposed the first new settlement in decades in the West Bank as Israeli officials and the White House appear to have reached an understanding on future settlement construction.

The new settlement will be built to accommodate roughly 40 families—about 300 residents— evicted in February from a settlement outpost called Amona, Mr. Netanyahu’s office said. The move needs to be confirmed by the Israeli cabinet, his office said.

The announcement comes as U.S. and Israeli officials in recent weeks have conducted talks on limiting settlement construction in the West Bank after President Donald Trump asked Israel to hold off.

The Trump administration gave the new settlement tacit approval on Thursday, by refraining from condemning the settlement construction, as past Democratic and Republican administrations have done.

A White House official said the Trump administration has made clear that “further unrestrained settlement activity does not help advance peace” and welcomed Israel’s commitments to consider U.S. concerns about settlements in the future.

“With regards to the new settlement for Amona residents, we would note that the Israeli Prime Minister made a commitment to the Amona settlers prior to President Trump laying out his expectations, and has consistently indicated that he intended to move forward with this plan,” the official said.

The talks between the U.S. and Israel have aimed at creating the conditions to get Israelis and Palestinians back to the negotiating table on a future peace deal, according to U.S. and Israeli officials.

The U.S. on Thursday called on Israelis and Palestinians to take “reasonable actions moving forward that create a climate that is conducive to peace” and said it would continue to work with the parties and regional powers. CONTINUE AT SITE

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Does Harvard Consider Oscar Wilde ‘Marginalized’? A new requirement to study authors kept down by ‘racism, patriarchy and heteronormativity.’ By Heather Mac Donald

By on March 31st, 2017

Starting next fall, English majors at Harvard will be required to take a course in authors “marginalized for historical reasons.” Those “reasons” include “racism, patriarchy and heteronormativity,” the English Department’s chairman, James Simpson, told the Harvard Crimson.

Campus agitation for an identity-based curriculum is by now drearily familiar. But Harvard’s recent mandate goes further, creating a new literary typology: On one side are the marginalized authors; on the other, authors who, by implication, may have benefited from “racism, patriarchy and heteronormativity.” Academia has already furnished unlettered students with excuses aplenty to ignore the greatest works of Western civilization. Now they’ve got another one.

The Harvard English major imposes few substantive demands: a one-semester survey spanning the millennium from 700 to 1700; a semester of poetry; a course that serves as a vehicle for immigration and postcolonial themes; and one semester of Shakespeare. After that, students are on their own, free to fill out their credits with random classes in literature, theory, creative writing, or “related courses” outside the English Department.

In other words, Harvard, like virtually every other college today, eschews any responsibility for ensuring that students are systematically exposed to the landmarks of the literary canon and that they understand the evolution of literary forms. For Harvard to add a requirement in “marginalization” signals that the faculty considers it important enough to override the department’s laissez-faire philosophy.

It is unclear, though, how the prestigious status will be conferred. How will the faculty decide whether an author has been marginalized because of “patriarchy,” say, rather than because she wasn’t that good in the first place, or because literary tastes have changed? There were female novelists and pamphleteers in the 19th century who have disappeared from view. Is that sexism, or simply the judgment of time? Does Oscar Wilde qualify as marginalized? “Heteronormativity” may have made his final years miserable, but it had no effect on the boundless success of his plays.

Literary reputations rise and fall—for white men as for everyone else. England’s first poet laureate, John Dryden, was once regarded as the heir to Shakespeare, Donne and Milton. Today, at least in the U.S., he is barely read. Likely explanations are that neoclassical verse has fallen out of favor and that few modern readers have the contextual knowledge to understand his satires. Why do similar explanations not hold for “marginalized” authors?

Moreover, given the historical disparities in educational opportunity, it is wrong to assume that all groups should be proportionally represented in the literary pantheon. For centuries, only European males (with few exceptions) received the rigorous training in the Classics that provided the materials for literary creation.

The reasons to study literature include linguistic beauty and insight into the human condition. Being “marginalized” is not one of those reasons, nor should an author’s sex and race count for or against him. If a great work happens to be unknown, that is another matter, one that has nothing to do with social justice. CONTINUE AT SITE

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What Devin Nunes Knows Team Obama was spying broadly on the incoming administration. Kimberley Strassel

By on March 31st, 2017

California Rep. Adam Schiff may not offer much by way of substance, but give him marks for political flimflam. The ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee was so successful at ginning up fake outrage over his Republican counterpart that he successfully buried this week’s only real (and bombshell) news.

Mr. Schiff and fellow Democrats spent this week accusing Chairman Devin Nunes of carrying water for President Trump, undermining the committee’s Russia investigation, and hiding information. The press dutifully regurgitated the outrage, as well as Mr. Schiff’s calls for Mr. Nunes to recuse himself from the investigation into possible Russian electoral meddling.

All this engineered drama served to deep-six the important information Americans urgently deserve to know. Mr. Nunes has said he has seen proof that the Obama White House surveilled the incoming administration—on subjects that had nothing to do with Russia—and that it further unmasked (identified by name) transition officials. This is goes far beyond a mere scandal. It’s a potential crime.

We’ve known since early February that a call by former national security adviser Mike Flynn to the Russian ambassador was monitored by U.S. intelligence. There’s nothing improper in tapping foreign officials. But it was improper that Mr. Flynn’s name was revealed and leaked to the press, along with the substance of his conversation. The media nonetheless excused all this by claiming one piece of Mr. Flynn’s conversation (sanctions) was relevant to the continuing investigation into Trump-Russia ties. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Senate Republican Suicide A filibuster deal with Democrats over Gorsuch would be a judicial and political disaster.

By on March 31st, 2017

House Republicans immolated themselves over health care last week, and now Democrats are hoping the Senate GOP will perform its own kamikaze turn over Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch. If Republicans blink and tolerate Democratic filibusters of High Court nominees, they should hand over their majority to the Democrats now.

Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s strategy is transparent: Stage-manage an unprecedented filibuster against Judge Gorsuch, and then portray Republicans as radicals if they change Senate rules to break it. The gambit is to coax at least three of the 52 GOP Senators to cut a deal with Democrats that hands the minority political leverage over President Trump’s judicial nominees.

Mr. Schumer and other Democrats are trying to lure those Republicans into a deal by preaching a false institutionalism that claims to be acting for the good of the Senate. They want to scare the GOP into believing that breaking a filibuster would somehow break the Senate as a deliberative body that requires 60 votes and bipartisan consensus to act.

But the real radical act is a Supreme Court filibuster. Mr. Schumer wants to use the filibuster to defeat Judge Gorsuch outright, or negotiate a deal that gives the judge a confirmation pass of 60 votes in return for a guarantee that GOP Senators won’t break a filibuster on future nominees during the Trump Presidency.

Either result would do great harm to the Senate’s advice and consent role under the Constitution, tilt the Supreme Court to the left, reward the most partisan voices in the Senate on the left and right, further inflame grassroots conservative outrage against political elites, and deal a grievous wound to the Republican Party. Other than that, a great day at the office.

Start with the fact that there has never been a partisan filibuster of a Supreme Court nominee. The elevation of Justice Abe Fortas to become Chief Justice in 1968 failed amid bipartisan opposition due to his policy collaboration with the White House while he was a Justice.

The one cloture vote to end debate on that nomination failed 45-43, well short of the 67 votes required at the time. Nineteen Democrats and 24 Republicans voted against cloture in what was the last year of Lyndon Johnson’s Presidency, and Fortas asked LBJ to withdraw his nomination.

Filibusters were mooted against William Rehnquist and Samuel Alito but never materialized. A cloture vote against Rehnquist failed in 1971, 52-42, but he was later confirmed 68-26. Justice Alito easily won a cloture vote and was confirmed 58-42. Republicans never even attempted to filibuster Bill Clinton or Barack Obama’s four nominees.

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WHAT IS DHIMMITUDE? VICTOR SHARPE

By on March 31st, 2017

Editor’s Note: This article was first published by us in 2015. With the state of terrorism and the terrorist attacks that are happening in the streets of our cities around the world, we have decided it was worth repeating.

Ask people in the United States what a dhimmi is and perhaps a handful might know. In Europe, and as far as India and the far east, the number would be higher because of latent memories of battles fought against invading Moslem armies across the span of centuries.

For a while there was the specter of triumphant Islam building a giant mosque mere yards from Ground Zero in New York City where Islamic fanatics, in the name of Allah, destroyed the World Trade Center and brought the two magnificent towers down in a cascade of horror.

The mosque would have risen to thirteen or more stories and overlooked the blasted hole in the ground that was once a symbol of America’s freedom and technical ingenuity.

If this outrage had been built, it would not have been a symbol of Muslim outreach to non-Moslems; it would have been a sickening insult to the victims of Islamic barbarism and a tangible rallying cry to millions more jihadists who would see it as Islam’s victory over a vanquished United States of America.

This would have been the 21st century revenge of resurgent Islam over those who centuries ago beat back the many previous Islamic invasions and attempted Muslim conquests of non-Muslim lands.

In 732, Charles Martel led his Frankish forces at Tours to victory against an Islamic invasion of France, which nearly destroyed Christian Europe. Similarly, Islam was ousted from Spain in 1492 after an occupation of the Iberian Peninsula by the Moslems for hundreds of years.

In Italy, Islamic power was brought to an end when the heavy Turkish galleys were defeated by Venetian galleasses at the great naval battle of Lepanto in 1571. And the Moslem Ottoman power, which at its height again threatened Europe, was barely turned back at the gates of Vienna on 11 September 1683 by a coalition of European armies. A previous 9/11.

These were four major defeats by Europe of Islamic attempts of conquest and subjugation set against a history of victorious Moslem invasions and conquests that has been the hallmark of Islam since its founding in the seventh century.

But what of the peoples and nations that fell under Islamic occupation? For them the story was one of forced conversions to Islam, slavery, death, and the Islamic institution of dhimmitude.

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