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April 2017

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Tony Thomas At the ABC, Fact Phobia Strikes Again

By on April 27th, 2017

Race hatred is soaring in the US and Donald Trump is to blame — that was the gist of a 7.30 report which went to air on March 14, two weeks after the perpetrator of one such attack was arrested. No Trump fan, he was a black, left-wing Muslim journalist. The ABC has not bothered to correct the record.
On March 14, 7.30 ran a fake-news piece whose intent was to stitch up President Donald Trump for inciting a wave of anti-Semitic bomb threats and vandalism of Jewish cemeteries in the US. Compere Leigh Sales intoned: “Some people blame Donald Trump’s incendiary rhetoric for unleashing people’s worst impulses, something Trump backers of course dispute.” You can view the report here.

The show’s US correspondent Conor Duffy then interviewed a conga-line of Democrat activists to ramp up the 7.30 narrative which amounted to ‘the disgusting Trump incites cemetery vandalism, race hate and bomb threats’.

On the ABC news website the same day, under the nakedly-propaganda banner “Trump’s America”, Duffy’s story included pictures of desecrated Jewish headstones and the header, “Shootings, bombings, desecrated cemeteries and racist graffiti — minority groups in the United States say the number of race hate crimes are spiking in President Donald Trump’s America.”

On the evening’s 7.30 report, Sales and Duffy proffered no evidence whatsoever connecting Trump to the anti-Semitic upsurge. As professional journalists, Sales and Duffy must already have been aware that black, Muslim anti-Trumper Juan M. Thompson, 31, had been arrested at least 10 days earlier and charged with making multiple bomb threats against synagogues. His motive was not anti-Semitism but to frame a white ex-girlfriend for the calls, as revenge because she’d ditched him. If neither knew by that stage about Thompson’s arrest, they are incompetent. If they did know, they are liars by omission. You can read the FBI charge sheet hre, and do notice the date — March 1, almost two weeks before 7.30‘s beatup.

As time passes, others parties are now named and charged over the wave of anti-Semitism. They include Andrew King, 54, a Jewish man in Schenectady, N.Y. King claimed on Day 21 of the Trump administration that someone defaced his home with three swastikas. He’s now in the slammer, convicted of having sprayed the swastikas himself and making false reports to police.

And last week US police charged Michael Ron Kadar, 18, an American-Israeli Jewish dual citizen living in Israel, with making 245 threats against Jewish institutions in Florida between January and March.[i] The youth, who may be mentally disturbed, allegedly earned $310,000 in the internet currency bitcoin from his worldwide on-line threats and extortions.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Stars Align for Emmanuel Macron—and France Presidential front-runner is well positioned to tackle economic overhaul, despite challengesBy Simon Nixon

By on April 27th, 2017

Emmanuel Macron’s victory in the first round of the French presidential elections sparked a rally in financial markets and relief across the rest of the European Union. The nightmare scenario of a runoff between the far left and far right that had kept mainstream European politicians awake at night over the previous week was averted. Instead, polls now give Mr. Macron, an independent, pro-European, social and economic liberal, a 20-point lead over his far-right opponent Marine Le Pen in the second round on May 7, a huge gap to overcome in just two weeks.

All the signs suggest that France is on course to stem the anti-EU populist tide that threatened to bring political and economic chaos to the continent.

And yet even on the cusp of Mr. Macron’s expected victory, a new narrative has emerged. It is said that Mr. Macron is an inexperienced empty suit, whose manifesto was short on detailed plans; that he is a creature of the French establishment, a continuity candidate for the failed presidency of François Hollande. Others predict that his victory will be pyrrhic, that he won’t secure a majority in parliamentary elections next month, that he will be left playing an ornamental role at the head of a French state dominated by his opponents. Some argue that even if he secures a majority, France is fundamentally unreformable—and that his failure will open the door to Ms. Le Pen in 2022.

These are legitimate concerns, but some perspective is needed.

First, Mr. Macron is hardly a complete novice. His rise has certainly been meteoric and no doubt came as a shock to those who only tuned into French politics in the past few months. But in reality, he was already well established as one of the most interesting figures on the French political scene.

Even as a staffer for Mr. Hollande, he showed a rare ability to lead the political agenda, driving the internal resistance to his boss’s disastrous early experiment with high taxes and helping to engineer the U-turn in 2014 when Mr. Hollande belatedly embraced a more free-market agenda.

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Explosion Rocks Damascus Airport Israel neither confirms nor denies its involvement but a government minister says the blast is ‘consistent’ with Israel policy By Rory Jones in Tel Aviv and Noam Raydan in Beirut

By on April 27th, 2017

A large explosion rocked the area near Damascus International Airport early Thursday, in what official Syrian state media said was an Israeli missile strike.

Israel neither confirmed nor denied it was behind the attack, in keeping with official government policy. But Israel’s transport and intelligence minister Yisrael Katz told Israel’s Army Radio on Thursday that the incident was “entirely consistent with our policy of preventing smuggling of weapons to Hezbollah.”

Citing an unnamed military source, Syria’s state news agency, SANA, said the target of the Israeli attack was a military position southwest of the airport and that the blast caused “some material damage.”

The U.K.-based opposition monitoring group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the explosion was heard across the capital Damascus and its suburbs. It said the target of the blasts could have been warehouses close to the airport that belong to Hezbollah.

Israel has repeatedly said that it will act to interdict Iranian-supplied weapons transfers in Syria bound for Hezbollah in Lebanon. Syrian state TV said Thursday that there are military bases surrounding the airport used for fighting “terrorists”—a term the regime uses to refer to much of the Syrian opposition.

Iran and Hezbollah have played a major role in maintaining the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in power, as it fights an array of antigovernment and militant groups, including Islamic State.

The comments by Mr. Katz, the Israeli minister, came after Syrian and Lebanese media accused Israeli warplanes of carrying out an airstrike on the airport.

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MEDIA Comments turned off

NYT Op-Ed Argues Rioters Have Been in the Right By Tom Knighton

By on April 27th, 2017

Antifa protesters loves them some violence. From punching people with cameras to rioting because you don’t like who is talking. A few times, apparently. So, leave it to the New York Times to run an op-ed that seems to argue that the rioters who disrupt speech of those they disagree with are the true guardians of free speech.

The recent student demonstrations at Auburn against Spencer’s visit — as well as protests on other campuses against Charles Murray, Milo Yiannopoulos and others — should be understood as an attempt to ensure the conditions of free speech for a greater group of people, rather than censorship. Liberal free-speech advocates rush to point out that the views of these individuals must be heard first to be rejected. But this is not the case. Universities invite speakers not chiefly to present otherwise unavailable discoveries, but to present to the public views they have presented elsewhere. When those views invalidate the humanity of some people, they restrict speech as a public good.

In such cases there is no inherent value to be gained from debating them in public. In today’s age, we also have a simple solution that should appease all those concerned that students are insufficiently exposed to controversial views. It is called the internet, where all kinds of offensive expression flourish unfettered on a vast platform available to nearly all.

The great value and importance of freedom of expression, for higher education and for democracy, is hard to overestimate. But it has been regrettably easy for commentators to create a simple dichotomy between a younger generation’s oversensitivity and free speech as an absolute good that leads to the truth. We would do better to focus on a more sophisticated understanding, such as the one provided by Lyotard, of the necessary conditions for speech to be a common, public good. This requires the realization that in politics, the parameters of public speech must be continually redrawn to accommodate those who previously had no standing. CONTINUE AT SITE

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ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

How Long the Palestinian Subsidies for Terror? By P. David Hornik

By on April 27th, 2017

Judging by the over 12,000 shares (as of this writing) for an article posted by Britain’s Daily Mail on Sunday, many Britons are up in arms. They have good reason to be.

Hannah Bladon, an undergraduate at the University of Birmingham, was living in Jerusalem as an exchange student at the Hebrew University, where she was studying Bible, archaeology, and religion.

On April 14, Hannah—aged 20—was riding on the Jerusalem light rail, and was stabbed to death by a 57-year-old Palestinian man named Jamil Tamimi.

Now in custody, Tamimi, who is described as having mental-health issues, told police that he attacked Hannah in the hope that a soldier would kill him. Based on a psychiatric evaluation, however, an Israeli court has ruled that he’s fit to stand trial.

Tamimi, says the Daily Mail, stands to get a salary of more than £800 (or more than $1000) a month from the Palestinian Authority. What’s irking people is that Britain is currently paying the PA £25,000 annually in foreign aid.

As of last December, the aid money is only supposed to go to education and health. “But,” the Daily Mail notes, “critics point out that when British taxpayers’ cash goes to education and health, it frees up money in other budgets controlled by the PA.”

How likely is Tamimi to get rewarded for his cruel murder?

Itamar Marcus, head of the Israeli watchdog organization Palestinian Media Watch, told the Daily Mail that: “According to PA law, everyone who is imprisoned for ‘resisting the occupation’ receives a PA salary…. In PA practice, 100 per cent of the suicide bombers, stabbers, shooters and car rammers have been included in this category and do receive PA salaries.”

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Obama Bundler Judge Wrong on Sanctuary City Funding By Daniel John Sobieski

By on April 27th, 2017

The fine points of federal Judge William Orrick’s ruling blocking the withholding of federal funds from sanctuary cities must have been lost on the families of Jamiel Shaw, Jr. and Kate Steinle, American citizens murdered by illegal aliens harbored and coddled by the sanctuary cities of Los Angeles and San Francisco, respectively. No doubt they failed to grasp the legal logic which says cities are free to violate federal law while wrapping themselves in the U.S. Constitution.

The notion advanced by Judge Orrick that the Trump administration’s attempt to defund sanctuary cities is unconstitutional because it amounts to changing the rules at halftime is nonsense, both historically and legally. The federal government has long threatened to withhold federal funds to enforce federal policy over states rights from the federal speed limit to transgendered bathrooms. As the New York Times noted, President Obama threatened to cut off federal funds to North Carolina over its transgendered bathroom law:

The Obama administration is considering whether North Carolina’s new law on gay and transgender rights makes the state ineligible for billions of dollars in federal aid for schools, highways and housing, officials said Friday.

Cutting off any federal money — or even simply threatening to do so — would put major new pressure on North Carolina to repeal the law, which eliminated local protections for gay and transgender people and restricted which bathrooms transgender people can use.

Orrick ruled that the Trump administration cannot set new conditions on federal funding approved by Congress. He had no objection to Obama’s proposed defunding of unrelated matters in North Carolina. Implicit in accepting federal funding, one would think, would be the condition of obeying the laws of the United States which sanctuary city officials are sworn to uphold. The laws of the United States give the president control of immigration policy and the Constitution gives the president control of foreign policy and border security.

Title 8 U.S.C. 1324 makes it quite explicit that harboring and concealing from detection illegal aliens is a felony, whether committed by individuals or sanctuary city officials:

Harboring — Subsection 1324(a)(1)(A)(iii) makes it an offense for any person who — knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that an alien has come to, entered, or remains in the United States in violation of law, conceals harbors, or shields from detection, or attempts to conceal, harbor, or shield from detection, such alien in any place, including any building or any means of transportation.

Now it may be argued that the DOJ would be better off legally prosecuting sanctuary city mayors rather than trying to withhold federal funds from their cities, but one is not exclusive of the other. Sanctuary city mayors are in clear violation of federal statute so for Judge Orrick to argue that withholding federal funds from those violating federal law is unconstitutional is, again, nonsense.

Sanctuary city officials could very well be prosecuted for breaking the law and recklessly endangering their citizens by harboring and shielding from scrutiny illegal aliens among whose number may include assorted Islamic State agents, sympathizers and potential lone wolf recruits, along with assorted criminals, like the one charged with the murder of Kate Steinle in the sanctuary city of San Francisco. They are accomplices in crime.

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IMMIGRATION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

A Ruling about Nothing A federal judge suspends Trump’s unenforced ban on funding for sanctuary cities. By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on April 27th, 2017

A showboating federal judge in San Francisco has issued an injunction against President Trump’s executive order cutting off federal funds from so-called sanctuary cities. The ruling distorts the E.O. beyond recognition, accusing the president of usurping legislative authority despite the order’s express adherence to “existing law.” Moreover, undeterred by the inconvenience that the order has not been enforced, the activist court — better to say, the fantasist court — dreams up harms that might befall San Francisco and Santa Clara, the sanctuary jurisdictions behind the suit, if it were enforced. The court thus flouts the standing doctrine, which limits judicial authority to actual controversies involving concrete, non-speculative harms.

Although he vents for 49 pages, Judge William H. Orrick III gives away the game early, on page 4. There, the Obama appointee explains that his ruling is about . . . nothing.

That is, Orrick acknowledges that he is adopting the construction of the E.O. urged by the Trump Justice Department, which maintains that the order does nothing more than call for the enforcement of already existing law. Although that construction is completely consistent with the E.O. as written, Judge Orrick implausibly describes it as “implausible.”

Since Orrick ultimately agrees with the Trump Justice Department, and since no enforcement action has been taken based on the E.O., why not just dismiss the case? Why the judicial theatrics?

There appear to be two reasons.

The first is Orrick’s patent desire to embarrass the White House, which rolled out the E.O. with great fanfare. The court wants it understood that Trump is a pretender: For all the hullaballoo, the E.O. effectively did nothing. Indeed, Orrick rationalizes his repeated misreadings of what the order actually says by feigning disbelief that what it says could possibly be what it means. Were that the case, he suggests, there would have been no reason to issue the order in the first place.

Thus, taking a page from the activist left-wing judges who invalidated Trump’s “travel ban” orders, Orrick harps on stump speeches by Trump and other administration officials. One wonders how well Barack “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan” Obama would have fared under the judiciary’s new Trump Doctrine: The extravagant political rhetoric by which the incumbent president customarily sells his policies relieves a court of the obligation to grapple with the inevitably more modest legal text of the directives that follow.

Of course, the peer branches of government are supposed to presume each other’s good faith in the absence of a patent violation of the law. But let’s put aside the unseemliness of Orrick’s barely concealed contempt for a moment, because he is also wrong. The proper purpose of an executive order is to direct the operations of the executive branch within the proper bounds of the law. There is, therefore, nothing untoward about an E.O. that directs the president’s subordinates to take enforcement action within the confines of congressional statutes. In fact, it is welcome.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Climate Bullies Take to the Streets for ‘People’s Climate March’ Most Americans are unaware of the vicious campaign waged by climate activists against people who do not recite the strictest tenets of the manmade-climate-change creed. By Julie Kelly

By on April 27th, 2017

The People’s Climate March is Saturday, April 29, and it will be the third iteration of an anti-Trump rally just this month. (April has been busy for the perpetually agitated.) It is a day when lefties accomplish little more than exposing their planet-sized hypocrisy on the environment: Eco-celebs such as Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo will walk arm-in-arm to lament the Earth’s destruction by greedy fossil-fuel companies, and then they will jet off to their next fossil-fuel-powered movie set to make millions. Jerry Brown, Andrew Cuomo, and other politicians will lecture us about the dangers of CO2 as they close zero-emission nuclear plants in their own states. Millennials will snap selfies on cellphones that operate off an electric grid powered by natural gas made abundantly available by the fracking they will protest.

According to its website, here is the point of the People’s Climate March:

On the 100th Day of the Trump Administration, we will be in the streets of Washington D.C. to show the world and our leaders that we will resist attacks on our people, our communities and our planet.

Now set aside for a moment the comical idea that angry anti-Trumpers, who have been in attack mode since November 8, are themselves under attack. This statement reveals the height of hypocrisy from the climate crowd; they are the bullies attacking anyone who dares to question climate science or who doubts whether human activity is causing climate change. Most Americans are unaware of the vicious campaign — including character assassination, political witch-hunts, and media propaganda — waged by climate activists against people who do not recite the strictest tenets of the manmade-climate-change creed.

When the New York Times announced a few weeks ago that it had hired Bret Stephens, a former Wall Street Journal columnist, the climate cult went insane. (Stephens has been critical of climate-change dogma.) Joe Romm, the editor of Climate Progress, and others demanded that the Times fire Stephens. Hundreds of people threatened to cancel their subscriptions to protest the hiring of a so-called climate denier, including leading climate scientist Ken Caldeira who accused Stephens of having a “reckless disregard for well-established scientific facts.” Michael Mann, a climate scientist from Penn State University and keynote speaker at the March for Science, tweeted this:

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump’s 100 Days Have Made a Good Start on Regulation He can take further steps to reduce new regs, repeal old ones, and increase transparency. By Jared Meyer

By on April 27th, 2017

Every new president, dating back to Jimmy Carter, has promised to cut regulations. Even President Obama’s executive orders on improving the regulatory process and cutting red tape sounded impressive when they were issued. That was before six of the seven all-time-high years for pages of federal regulations occurred during his tenure.

Four decades of nonstop growth in federal regulation show that tackling Washington’s bureaucracy is tougher than it sounds. The U.S. Code of Federal Regulations is more than 175,000 pages long, having grown steadily since the 1970s. Federal regulations aren’t just words on a page; these pages contain more than one million commandments from Washington in the form of restrictive words such as “must,” “cannot,” or “shall.”

But based on President Trump’s first 100 days, there is reason for optimism that this trend is about to change.

President Trump has already issued two executive orders on regulatory reform. They sent a message to executive agencies: Regulatory restrictions on businesses will not be able to keep growing on autopilot.

Trump’s hiring freeze will also help lower the rate of new regulations. As research from the Mercatus Center has shown, there is a high correlation between the number of employees at an agency and the number of regulations issued by that agency. President Trump has also taken advantage of the Congressional Review Act, which gives Congress the power to overturn recently finalized regulations through a simple majority vote. So far, he has signed at least 13 such repeals. Previously, this tool had been successfully used only once in its 20-year history.

Though President Trump’s lofty promise to cut regulation by “by 75 percent, maybe more” is likely unattainable, simply halting the growth in federal regulations would be a massive achievement. And the president has many methods available to him to accomplish this.

Moving into the next phase of his first term, there are three main legislative solutions that President Trump can use to follow through on his promises to cut regulation. These solutions address the accumulation of old regulations, the creation of costly new regulations, and the lack of public participation in the regulatory process.

First, the Trump Administration needs to get rid of outdated, ineffective regulations.

If President Trump decides to capitalize on his reputation as a deal maker, an innovative idea from the center-left Progressive Policy Institute would address regulatory accumulation. Both the Regulatory Improvement Act and the SCRUB Act create a “Regulatory Improvement Commission” to come up with a package of older regulations to eliminate that would then go through Congress for an up-or-down vote. Focusing on older regulations would take some of the politics out of regulatory reform, and voting on a large package in this way would limit the ability of established interests to interfere with the process.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

Will 2020 Be Another 1972 for Democrats? Going hard to the left was the wrong lesson to learn from their narrow loss in 1968, and they could repeat the mistake. By Victor Davis Hanson

By on April 27th, 2017

Forty-nine years ago, Vice President Hubert Humphrey was the Democratic candidate for president.

The year 1968 was a tumultuous one that saw the assassinations of rival candidate Senator Robert F. Kennedy and civil-rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. Lyndon Johnson’s unpopular lame-duck Democratic administration imploded because of massive protests against the Vietnam War.

Yet Humphrey almost defeated Republican nominee Richard Nixon, losing the election by just over 500,000 votes (43.4 percent to 42.7 percent).

Infighting Democrats could have defeated the unpopular Nixon if not for a few unforeseen developments.

Their convention in Chicago turned into a creepy carnival of televised rioting and radical protests. Hippies and leftists were seen battling police in the streets on prime-time news.

The former Democratic governor of Alabama, George Wallace, ran as a states’ rights third-party candidate and drew 13.5 percent of the vote. Wallace destroyed the Democrats’ traditional hold on the old “solid South” by winning five Southern states outright. He also siphoned off enough traditional Democratic supporters to give Nixon astonishing Republican victories in half a dozen other states in the region.

Nixon won over a few Northern blue-collar states that had often voted Democratic, such as Wisconsin and Ohio — again with help from Wallace, who appealed to fed-up, working-class Democrats.

What was the lesson from 1968?

The Democrats could have recalibrated their message to appeal more to working-class voters.

They should have rebuilt the old Franklin D. Roosevelt–era coalition that had elected Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy, mostly by appealing to paycheck issues and avoiding radical agendas.

Yet despite picking up twelve House seats in the 1970 midterm elections, and instead of attributing the 1968 loss to Wallace’s third-party populism and voter pushback against radicalism, the Democrats went off the rails and veered hard left in 1972.

The lowering of the voting age to age 18 in 1971 also tricked Democrats into wrongly thinking that most new young voters were leftists and would vote in record numbers for leftist candidates.

So the Democrats in 1972 foolishly nominated die-hard left-wing South Dakota senator George McGovern.

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