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March 2018

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Furor Over The Citizenship Question On The Latest Census Is Ignorant Fearmongering By Kyle Sammin

By on March 29th, 2018

The Commerce Department announced Monday that the 2020 Census will include a question about whether the people being counted are citizens. This seemingly uncontroversial inquiry has sent many activists on the Left into a tailspin as they prophesy discrimination against immigrants, especially those who immigrated here illegally. California announced the state would sue to stop the change.

Everyone should take a deep breath and relax. Questions about citizenship and national origin have been a part of the United States Census for more than a century without any negative effects on the non-citizens it surveys. Of all the questions the government asks on the census, this one — which merely confirms information the government already has or should have — is the least problematic, and is completely in line with the Census Bureau’s historical practices.
It’s Not A New Question

The Constitution requires the federal government to take a census every ten years, but it does not require them to collect very much information. The grant of power is specific, but also contains a degree of flexibility: “The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct.”

For the first five censuses, the government stuck very narrowly to this remit. From 1790 to 1840, they listed only the name of the head of the household and the number of people living there. These numbers were divided by age group, sex, race, and (because of the Constitution’s three-fifths clause) condition of servitude. The slavery question was the only one strictly necessary, since the apportionment of representatives did not vary based on the sex or age ratios within a given congressional district.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Tony Thomas Warmism Gets a Courtroom Thrashing

By on March 29th, 2018

While professed journalists were taking dutiful dictation from local alarmists keen to blame bushfires on global warming, a telling court case has been unfolding in California, where catastropharians set out to sue Big Oil for wrecking the planet. It hasn’t gone as planned.

The current tactic of global-warming catastrophists is to sue major oil companies for wrecking the planet — never mind that fossil-fuel energy has lifted billions from squalor and back-breaking toil during the past 150 years and continues to do so. The most advanced of these cases is now playing out in a US federal court in San Francisco before Judge William Alsup. Because he’s insisting on evidence about human causation of warming, the case has tested the soundness of orthodox climate science and so far found it wanting.

Leading sceptic scientists have also submitted briefs, opening up a climate debate warmists have been desperate to avoid for the past decade. This article will look at the court case and then at the history of climate debates.

In the US there’s a rash of lawsuits by green/liberal plaintiffs against the federal government and oil majors, with one echoing the ‘children’s crusade’ of 1212. The plaintiffs, 21 kids the youngest no more than ten, have been marshalled to sue the US government for allegedly fostering climate warmth and degrading the kids’ “rights to life, liberty and property”.[1] One plaintiff, 19-year-old Sophie Kivlehan, is the granddaughter of James Hansen, godfather of the global anti-CO2 jihad and a man who has obscenely compared coal trains with those that transported Jews to Nazi extermination camps.[2] [3]

But the big excitement last week was the so-called “Exxon knew” lawsuit brought by the cities of San Francisco and neighbouring Oakland against five oil majors.[4] The two plaintiffs claim the oil producers conspired Big Tobacco-style to conceal the climate harm of their products. The majors are supposedly responsible for the local sea level rise and should therefore pay billions of dollars for sea walls, dykes, whatever.

Well, yes, it’s all ridiculous. The San Francisco tide gauge (1854-2016) shows an upward trend complicated by some sinking of the land — the city is, after all, in an earthquake zone, and has been rocked repeatedly — but the “rise” is still a mere eight inches over the past 100 years. The plaintiffs’ lawyers are nevertheless making their song and dance about the rise, savouring a reported 23% of any damages to be paid by Big Oil. Their case relies by necessity on future sea-damage forecasts by the shaky CMIP5 suite of climate computer-models, and then they need to demonstrate that the oil majors are responsible, as distinct from, say, car and truck drivers who actually pump out the emissions. Another six Californian counties and cities are trying to run similar cases and in New York, the city wants $US20 billion restitution from the oil majors (less, of course, a hefty cut for the lawyers).

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

I’ve edited a conservative paper on a very liberal campus for a year. Here’s what I’ve learned. Matthew Reade – Pomona College

By on March 29th, 2018

A powerful conservative perspective is essential to ensuring students, including liberals and progressives, obtain the greatest benefit from their education https://www.thecollegefix.com/post/43408/

In the late 1990s, a group of conservative students convened at Claremont McKenna College to create a new political journal at the Claremont Colleges. They aspired to inculcate an “appreciation for the privileges and obligations of citizenship in a free society,” and to mount a full-throated defense of conservatism both on campus and beyond. Thus was born the Claremont Independent.

Today, more than 20 years since our founding, it is striking to reflect upon how far the Independent has come since those quiet beginnings. We started as a print publication—the internet era was yet to arise—circulating copies on our campus in the shadow of the San Gabriel Mountains.

Today, the Independent is an award-winning national media outlet with tens of thousands of online readers; and we cover a Claremont campus that is now a raging hotbed of progressive activism.

Our independence—we take no money from any of the Claremont Colleges—has permitted us to hold administrators and campus activists accountable through tough reportage and sharp opinion editorials. We have taken Title IX coordinators to task for serious alleged violations of the rights of students to impartial adjudication of sexual assault cases; have uncovered sexist and anti-gay tweets from, ironically enough, the (now-former) director of the Claremont Colleges’ LGBTQ center; and have covered the shutdown of conservative speakers on campus, including, most notably, pro-police scholar and Black Lives Matter critic Heather Mac Donald last April.

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HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Atlanta Still on Its Knees, a Week After Ransomware Attack Crippled City’s Computers By Chris Queen

By on March 29th, 2018

One week ago, the City of Atlanta’s computer system took a hit from a ransomware attack that has left the city still struggling to operate normally. The city was caught off guard on March 22 when the attack took place, and the city is still experiencing issues that are at best an inconvenience and at worst an ordeal.

Details about the attack are still a little cloudy. City authorities did confirm that the attack on their network took place and that a ransom note followed. Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms stated that the attacker demanded $51,000, though no one else has confirmed the amount.

Bottoms spoke out on the nature of a ransomware attack on her city, as CNN reported:

“I just want to make the point that this is much bigger than a ransomware attack,” she said. “This is really an attack on our government, which means it’s an attack on all of us.”

Ransomware is malicious software that blocks users from accessing some or all of their computer systems by locking them out until a ransom is paid. Officials haven’t said whether the city was going to pay the ransom

“Everything is up for discussion,” was the Mayor’s reply when asked directly by reporters whether the city would pay up.

How has the cyber attack affected the daily lives of Atlantans? Fortunately, the city’s 911 system, law enforcement, and public safety systems did not suffer, nor did Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (though the airport didn’t recover its public wi-fi until Monday). But for the run-of-the-mill citizen attempting to interact with the city, life is certainly not normal.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Stormy Daniels: The Crime and the Cover-Up By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on March 29th, 2018

Would a $130,000 payment to buy a porn star’s silence violate campaign-finance laws?

Greetings from beautiful Orange County. We’re getting ready for the second of two Golden State events (we were in San Francisco yesterday), part of National Review Institute’s celebration of Bill Buckley’s legacy a decade after his passing.

For me, the road trip is tacked on to a longer-than-usual vacation. It has ended up being the longest break I have taken from writing in many years — maybe since I started writing full time 15 years ago. I am grateful for the time to think at length about things rather than trying to analyze them on the fly.

Even before detaching, I had mostly stopped watching television news, since there doesn’t seem to be much effort at straight news anymore. When the mainstream media fawned over the Obama administration, I was glad to have the conservative media as an alternative because much of the criticism was pointed and thoughtful. But now that we have an administration I usually agree with on policy led by a president who is, at best, a deeply flawed man, I find the cable coverage almost completely useless. Much of the opposition to Trump is unhinged — though, having had some time to reflect on it, the natural impulse of Trump critics to conflate policy disagreements with personal revulsion over Trump’s character is, if not excusable, at least understandable. Even Trump fans (and there are many we’ve visited with in California) tend to temper their praise with grumbling over the president’s antics. Meanwhile, much of conservative media sounds eerily like the mainstream media during the administration of Bill Clinton, even as comparisons to that deeply flawed man have become the leitmotif of Trump apologia.

On vacation, I contented myself with flipping through news sites and reading books — the best of which were Yuval Levin’s The Fractured Republic and David Bahnsen’s Crisis of Responsibility (and in the making-up-for-lost-time category, I’ve even almost finished Anna Karenina!). Sunday night’s 60 Minutes episode featuring the Stormy Daniels interview was the first news program I’ve watched in a while (mainly because it came on right after the Kansas–Duke thriller). I’ve been on the road ever since, so maybe the snippets of reactive coverage I’ve seen are not fully representative, but they have been awful.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Report: Israeli stealth fighters fly over Iran Two IAF F-35 Adir fighter jets entered Iranian airspace undetected, according to the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Jarida.

By on March 29th, 2018

Two Israeli F-35 fighter jets entered Iranian airspace over the past month, Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Jarida reported on Thursday. The act is a signal of heightened regional tensions, especially in light of recent Israeli military attacks in Syria, including against Iranian bases in the country.

Sources quoted in Al-Jarida stated that two stealth fighters flew over Syrian and Iraqi airspace to reach Iran, and even targeted locations in the Iranian cities Bandar Abbas, Esfahan and Shiraz.
The report states that the two fighter jets, among the most advanced in the world, circled at high altitude above Persian Gulf sites suspected of being associated with the Iranian nuclear program.

It also states that the two jets went undetected by radar, including by the Russian radar system located in Syria. The source refused to confirm if the operation was undertaken in coordination with the US army, which has recently conducted joint exercises with the IDF.

The source added that the seven F-35 fighters in active service in the IAF have conducted a number of missions in Syria and on the Lebanese-Syrian border. He underlined that the fighter jets can travel from Israel to Iran twice without refueling.

Israel has admitted to launching about 100 air strikes on Syria over the past five years, targeting Hezbollah terrorists, weapons convoys and infrastructure, and it is believed to be behind dozens more.On March 21, the IDF cleared for publication that Israel was behind the 2007 destruction of a nuclear reactor that was under construction in northern Syria.

In February, Israeli F-16 fighter jets entered Syrian airspace, striking 12 Iranian targets in Syria in response to an Iranian drone that was shot down over Israel. Two Israeli crew members were wounded when they ejected from their jet before it crashed, which was later determined to be caused by pilot error.

In response to the Iranian drone, a senior Israeli official warned that Israel will react with force to Iran’s efforts to entrench itself further in Syria.

“…the Iranians are determined to continue to establish themselves in Syria, and the next incident is only a matter of time,” he said, warning that Israel does not rule out that that the Islamic Republic will continue to try to attack Israel.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Russia to Expel 60 U.S. Diplomats By Jack Crowe

By on March 29th, 2018

Russia will expel 60 U.S. diplomats and close the American consulate in St. Petersburg in response to the Trump administration’s expulsion of the same number of Russian diplomats earlier this week, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov announced Thursday.

An additional 90 diplomats representing western countries that joined the U.S. in expelling Russian diplomats will also be sent home. Lavrov said the number of diplomats expelled from each country will be equal to the number of Russians each of those countries expelled.

The expulsion of Russian diplomats, which was accompanied by the closure of the Russian embassy in Seattle, was prompted by a Kremlin-linked nerve-gas attack against a former Russian spy living in London.

Numerous other acts of Russian aggression have escalated tensions between western allies and Russia to levels unseen since the Cold War. The Trump administration announced a new round of sanctions against Russian entities and individuals this month in response to cyber attacks against American utility companies and interference in the 2016 presidential election. U.S. officials are also reportedly in the process of drafting a proposal that would increase NATO military readiness in response to Russia’s provocations.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

What Frightens the Left Most? The Constitution By Michael Walsh

By on March 29th, 2018

As we’ve long since learned, the Left always tells us what they fear most, by reacting to political developments or policy proposals like scalded vipers, hissing and spitting as they writhe around in agonized hysteria. Not for nothing is the word “catastrophic” one of their favorite descriptive adjectives, since it pretty much describes just about anything they don’t agree with and thus keeps them forever on the edge.

To rational people, their collection of tics, neuroses, and phobias may seem at first to lack a certain consistency, other than a tendency to go from zero to obscenities on Twitter in no time flat. They can easily be against gay marriage (Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, et al.) before they were for it; against illegal immigration (Bill Clinton) before they were for it; and for the Russians (the entire Democratic Party) before they were against them.

Do they contradict themselves? Very well, then, they contradict themselves—after all, they contain multitudes. The only song they really know is Whitman’s “Song of Myself.”

Their latest conniption fit has come over two apparently unrelated things. The first, of course, is guns and by extension the right to one’s own personal self-defense in a dangerous and (thanks to the second thing, about which more in a bit) rapidly destabilizing world. The American frontier of the late 18th century was similarly fraught, as the young country began both to deal with the mature, and often hostile nation-states of old Europe, and to push west, across 2,000 and more miles of unknown territory; the success of the American experiment was far from certain. Accordingly, the Framers bequeathed us the Bill of Rights, which although numbered as amendments are as much a part of the Constitution as the main document.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Revenge of NeverTrump: Mr. Murphy Makes a War Room By Julie Kelly

By on March 29th, 2018

President Trump should be afraid. Very afraid.

No, not of the flailing Robert Mueller investigation or the latest accusations by porn star Stormy Daniels. He shouldn’t fear a trade war with China or the prospect of another government shutdown weeks before the crucial midterms elections. This threat is far more insidious, far more dangerous to the legitimacy of his presidency and the possibility he will win a second term.

It is: The NeverTrump War Room.

The mere thought likely sends chills down the steely spines of Trump supporters everywhere. I mean, it’s one thing to stare down Senator Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) or Kim Jong-un. It takes a whole different level of gamesmanship to go toe-to-toe with Senator Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) and shrewd GOP “consultants” such as Mike Murphy. How will Trump ever prevail over these masterminds, these cunning masseurs of the Republican electorate?

Talk about big button versus small button.

The NeverTrump War Room is the brainchild of Murphy, who—at least according to him—is “one of the Republican Party’s most successful political media consultants.” He’s a diehard NeverTrumper who worked for Jeb Bush in 2016. But despite raising $119 million for the former Florida governor’s amazing presidential campaign, Murphy couldn’t get his candidate past the March 2016 South Carolina primary, where Bush came in fourth place. (After that humiliating loss, Murphy defended himself, telling the Los Angeles Times without a hint of irony, “There are a lot of people in the cheap seats with a lot of opinions. What have they done?”) That wasn’t even Murphy’s most expensive defeat: He helped Meg Whitman spend $150 million of her own money to lose the California governor’s race in 2010.

So who better to offer crack advice about how to beat Trump in a Republican primary in 2020? In a menacing column for Politico Magazine that must have Team Trump in a full-blown panic, Murphy claims “plenty of exhausted Republican elected officials” are asking him whether Trump will face a primary opponent in 2020. Murphy’s weary imaginary pals allegedly pray another Republican will take on a president with approval ratings in the low-to-mid 80s among his fellow partisans.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Secret World of the Palestinian Authority by Bassam Tawil

By on March 29th, 2018

The failure of the donors — mainly the US and the EU — to demand accountability and transparency from the Palestinian Authority has deprived Palestinians of a significant part of the funds.

It has also encouraged Palestinian leaders to continue pocketing millions of dollars, enriching their private and hidden bank accounts.

The Palestinians, of course, are the primary victims in this story.

A report published this week offers a rare glance into the secret world of the Palestinian Authority (PA), which was established in 1994 in accordance with the Oslo Accords signed between Israel and the PLO.

Headed by Mahmoud Abbas, the PA has since received billions of dollars in aid from the US, EU and several other donor countries.

However, the failure of the donors to demand accountability and transparency from the Palestinian Authority has deprived Palestinians of a significant part of the funds. It has also encouraged Palestinian leaders to continue pocketing millions of dollars, enriching their private and hidden bank accounts.

One would have expected the Western donors to have woken up and noticed that Palestinian leaders are misusing the taxpayer money they send.

One would have expected the Americans and Europeans to come to Abbas and his cronies, bang on the table, and demand that they start using and investing money for the welfare of their people, and not for their friends and family members.

The report, published by the Coalition For Accountability And Integrity (AMAN), established in 2000 by a number of civil society organizations working in the field of democracy, human rights, and good governance, shows that the Western donors have learned nothing from their past mistakes.

The report also shows that the Palestinian Authority remains the same corrupt body it has been since its inception more than twenty years ago.

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