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December 2018

POLITICS Comments turned off

Incoming Democrat Chairman Makes Definitive Case Against Impeaching Trump Twenty years ago, Jerrold Nadler argued in Congress that impeaching the president based on private, consensual sex was a ‘partisan coup d’etat.’By Ben Weingarten

By on December 17th, 2018

http://thefederalist.com/2018/12/17/incoming-democrat-chairman-makes-definitive-case-impeaching-trump/

Hours after midterm election night 2018, Mollie Hemingway reported that incoming House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) had impeachment on his mind, cavalierly chatting away on his phone on a train to Washington about the prospect of raising it against President Donald Trump. If his recent words are any indication, he may very well make good on that threat.

Following the release of the sentencing memorandum for the president’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, which alleged that Cohen had engaged in campaign finance violations at the behest of then-candidate Trump, Nadler took to the airwaves to lodge his most serious claim yet regarding presidential impeachment. Here’s the relevant exchange from CNN’s “State of the Union” with Jake Tapper:

TAPPER: If it is proven that the president directed or coordinated with Cohen to commit these [two federal campaign finance] felonies…are those impeachable offenses?
NADLER: Well, they would be impeachable offenses…even though they were committed before the president became president, they were committed in the service of fraudulently obtaining the office. That would be the — that would be an impeachable offense.

Nadler was careful to hedge, caveating that “You don’t necessarily launch an impeachment against the president because he committed an impeachable offense.”
Yet Nadler Excused Clinton for the Exact Same Thing

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ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Jews and Muslims Unite to Save Lives How an entrepreneur got EMTs around Israel’s heavy traffic and won Miss Iraq’s support.By Eliora Katz

By on December 17th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/jews-and-muslims-unite-to-save-lives-11545092247

The first Miss Iraq, Renée Dangoor, was a Baghdadi Jew. She was crowned in 1947. Last year Sarah Idan became the first Iraqi in 45 years to compete in the Miss Universe pageant, held in Las Vegas. There Ms. Idan took a selfie with Miss Israel, Adar Gandelsman, and posted it on Instagram.

“Saddam’s regime taught us that Israel and the U.S. are our enemies, and so we need to be at war with them,” Ms. Idan tells me at an Iraqi restaurant near Regent Park. Ms. Gandelsman sits to her left. The two have reunited to host a fundraiser supporting United Hatzalah of Israel.

The Jerusalem-based organization is the Uber of emergency medicine. It trains, equips and deploys 5,000 volunteers to medical emergencies through a smartphone app. When Israel’s 911 receives a call, a GPS-enabled app dispatches the closest and best-suited volunteer before an ambulance arrives, reducing average response time to 90 seconds.

Volunteers wear orange vests and carry medical bags. They sometimes board motorized “ambucycles,” which can traverse heavy traffic more swiftly than a conventional ambulance. The volunteers are Jewish, Muslim, Christian and Druze: “I have people who pray five times a day and people who might be afraid of them,” says founder Eli Beer, 45. The people whose calls they answer are similarly diverse: a fish vendor in Jerusalem’s Mahane Yehuda Market, a man praying in a mosque in the Arab town of Kfar Qara, a rabbi teaching Torah.

“I’m also working to rebuild the relationship between Jews and Muslims,” Ms. Idan says. “So when I learned how so many Muslims who volunteer with Jews in Israel have started to see the Jews in a completely different light, I had to help.” CONTINUE AT SITE

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Houellebecq on Trump

By on December 17th, 2018

https://quadrant.org.au/
Donald Trump Is a Good President One foreigner’s perspectiveBy Michel Houellebecq, John Cullen (Translator) https://harpers.org/archive/2019/01/donald-trump-is-a-good

Those who have read Michel Houellebecq’s memorable Submission, which Douglas Murray reviewed for Quadrant upon its release, will know the author as a remarkably independent thinker — a brave one, too, given his novel tells how France’s elite learns to stop worrying and love the Islamic takeover of their former country. Writing critically of Islam is dangerous, which perhaps explains why feminists in Australia and elsewhere get themselves histrionically upset about tampon taxes but utter not an adverse word about burkas, the veiling of young girls, patriarchal oppression, arranged marriages and genital mutilation.

Houellebecq’s courage turns out to by multi-faceted, as he has just published an essay on Donald Trump (“a good president”) that offers offers a unique perspective on the US president’s virtues, albeit garnished with a full measure of rather more typical Gallic sneers. A taste from Harper‘s:

… Trump is pursuing and amplifying the policy of disengagement initiated by Obama; this is very good news for the rest of the world.

The Americans are getting off our backs.

The Americans are letting us exist.

The Americans have stopped trying to spread democracy to the four corners of the globe. Besides, what democracy? Voting every four years to elect a head of state—is that democracy? In my view, there’s one country in the world (one country, not two) that enjoys partially democratic institutions, and that country isn’t the United States of America; it’s Switzerland. A country otherwise notable for its laudable policy of neutrality.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Only Good Management Can Prevent Forest Fires There’s nothing new about catastrophic blazes. It’s how nature has always dealt with overgrowth. By Tom McClintock

By on December 17th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/only-good-management-can-prevent-forest-fires-11545090601

Representative McClintock, a Republican, represents California’s Fourth Congressional District.

Pundits and politicians have taken to calling the rising incidence of catastrophic wildfire “the new normal.” But California’s experience in the 21st century is neither new nor abnormal. It is, in fact, the old normal. The devastation unfolding today is how nature manages forests. Like an untended garden, an abandoned forest will grow until it chokes itself to death. Nature deals with morbid overcrowding through drought, disease, pestilence and ultimately catastrophic wildfire.

Scientists studying charcoal deposits in California estimate that prehistoric wildfires destroyed between 4.5 million and 11.9 million acres a year. When Juan Cabrillo dropped anchor in San Pedro Bay in October 1542 (the height of the Santa Ana fire season), he promptly named it the “Bay of Smoke.”

Our modern sensitivities reel at the devastation of the Camp Fire, which recently incinerated 153,000 acres, wiped out the entire town of Paradise, and claimed at least 86 lives. Yet in 1910 the “Big Burn” in Idaho and Montana consumed three million acres, wiped out seven towns, and killed 87 among a far smaller and sparser population.

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P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

The Jihad Against ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’ Contemporary feminists aren’t the first to find the 1940s fugue an occasion for moral outrage. By Michael B. Mukasey

By on December 17th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-jihad-against-baby-its-cold-outside-11545090565

The #MeToo movement has caught up with “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” The 1940s fugue between a woman, who has dropped by a man’s home but says she wants to leave, and the man, who persuades her to stay, has become a Christmas-season staple. But “to some modern ears, the lyrics sound like a prelude to date rape,” as one recent news story puts it. Some radio stations have yielded to the demand that they banish it from the airwaves.

That demand rings a bell. In the 1940s, an Egyptian writer and Education Ministry employee harshly criticized the government under King Farouk as insufficiently Islamic. That writer, Sayyid Qutb, was rewarded with a traveling fellowship, apparently to get him out of the country.

Qutb arrived at Colorado State College of Education in Greeley in 1948. He didn’t much like it. “I stayed there six months and never did I see a person or a family actually enjoying themselves,” he wrote. Even gardening drew his contempt: “There is nothing behind this activity in the way of beauty or artistic taste. It is the machinery of organization and arrangement, devoid of spirituality and aesthetic enjoyment.”

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Science Article Castigates ‘Human Supremacy’ By Wesley J. Smith

By on December 17th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/science-article-castigates-human-su

Environmentalism is growing darkly anti-human, a misanthropy that has also seeped into science.

Vivid case in point: Science, one of the world’s most prominent scientific journals, just published an anti-human exceptionalism screed by Eileen Crist. Crist, who has a Ph.D. in sociology and not in any of the natural sciences, writes to warn that the end is nigh — and the reason for the pending catastrophe is “human supremacy.” From “Reimagining the Human:”

This worldview esteems the human as a distinguished entity that is superior to all other life forms and is entitled to use them and the places they live. The belief system of superiority and entitlement—or human supremacy—manifests in a range of anthropocentric commonplace assumptions, linguistic constructs, institutional regimes, and everyday actions of individual, group, nation-state, and corporate actors.

Crist wields the term “human supremacy” to create a mental association in the reader’s mind with the evils of racial supremacists — in much the same way that global-warming activists denigrate skeptics as “climate-change deniers” to associate them with Holocaust doubters.

Crist doesn’t just attack human exceptionalism, but also the West — which she and her publisher seem to forget is the source of so much scientific advancement:

It is crucial to recognize that human supremacy is neither culturally nor individually universal, nor is it derived in any straightforward way from human nature. However, western civilization has elaborated its most forceful, long-standing expression, and through the West’s ascendancy the influence of this worldview has spread across the globe.

And thank goodness for it. Western civilization created unprecedented liberty and general prosperity. The problem in our world is too little of “the West,” not too much.

But nihilism strikes a beat. Crist calls on us to reject “human hegemony” and embrace an “all species commonwealth:”

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

MORALITY AND EVOLUTION: SYDNEY WILLIAMS

By on December 17th, 2018

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

Recently, a granddaughter, a senior in high school, was asked to write an essay on morality and evolution. It was a subject that caught my imagination. Was not Jesus, who lived two thousand years ago, the most moral person ever? Can one argue we are more ethical today? Do our grandchildren have better manners than did our grandparents as children? How did a world that produced the Enlightenment, two hundred years later create a Hitler and a Stalin? Would anyone suggest that Donald Trump, Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton are more respectful of others, have higher ethical standards and are less narcissistic than George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison? It is hard not to conclude we have witnessed a reverse form of evolution, at least when it comes to morality

Evolution is a natural condition. Civilizations evolve, mostly for the better. Consider the buildings we live in, the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the cars we drive. Technology has changed the way we communicate, how we shop and the care we provide the sick. We have sent men into space. We grow more crops on less acreage. Evolutionary forces have reduced poverty and extended life expectancy. Even laws and prisons have become less draconian. Government has evolved – from authoritarianism to democracy. According to the website www.ourworldindata.org/democracy, 13 million people lived in democracies in 1830, while 3.92 billion did in 2012. Additionally, racial segregation has been addressed and government care is provided the elderly and impoverished. There has been a downside. War has become more horrific. A small number of social media companies influence how we think; privacy issues have been raised, and the prospect of cyber-war fare has increased. Still, technology-driven evolutionary forces have given us much, including time. But have they made us more gracious and considerate? Has compassionate government made us more respectful, thoughtful and thankful?

Different people will offer different answers, but one possibility is what William McGurn recently called “The Crisis of Good Intentions,” reminding this reader of Milton Friedman: “One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than results.” In his Wall Street Journal op-ed, Mr. McGurn noted that there are those who claim that capitalism is facing an existential crisis. He cited Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (“wild-west capitalism”), Thomas Pikety (“patrimonial capitalism”) and the Archbishop of Canterbury (the gig economy is “the reincarnation of an ancient evil”). These are people who see capitalism as pernicious and government as the genesis for equality and social good. Yet California, the most socialistic of U.S. states, has the greatest income inequality of any state. It has the highest poverty rate, as measured by the Supplemental Poverty Measure, which allows for differences in cost-of-living; yet, with 12% of the nation’s population, it is home to 24% of the nation’s billionaires. In his op-ed, William McGurn quoted Chapman University’s Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky: “California is creating a feudalized society, characterized by the ultra-rich, a diminishing middl

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

With FBI Misconduct Against Flynn Revealed, Mueller ‘Obstruction’ Probe Evaporates By Robert Romano

By on December 17th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/trending/with-fbi-misconduct-against-flynn-revealed-mueller-obstruction-probe-evaporates/

The FBI set former national security advisor Michael Flynn up.

That is about all we can make of the latest revelation that the FBI made serious breaches of protocol when it set up the Jan. 24, 2017, meeting with Flynn to ask him about his Dec. 2016 conversations with Russian ambassador Sergey Kisylak. We now know the FBI did not go through the White House counsel first, suggest Flynn have a lawyer present, or advise him of his rights prior to the interview. Former FBI director James Comey even appeared on MSNBC to brag about the breach, stating:

[This was] something I probably wouldn’t have done or wouldn’t have gotten away with in a more organized administration. … In the George W. Bush Administration or the Obama Administration, if the FBI wanted to send agents into the White House itself to interview a senior official, you would work through the White House counsel, there would be discussions and approvals and who would be there. And I thought, it’s early enough let’s just send a couple guys over.

The Justice Department and the FBI engaged in misconduct in the questioning of Flynn, and it ought to result in overturning Flynn’s conviction. We’ll see what Judge Emmet Sullivan does for Flynn’s sentencing.

In the meantime, it seems useful to retrace our steps to how we got to this point.

The only reason Flynn was questioned in the first place is because somebody in the Obama administration illegally leaked his conversation with Kislyak to the Washington Post’s David Ignatius on Jan. 12, 2017. Conducting damage control, Vice President Mike Pence appeared on CBS to say sanctions were not discussed. So what crime was the FBI investigating on Jan. 24, 2017? Why question Flynn at all about his conversation with the ambassador — other than to see if he’d lie or had forgotten the substance of the conversation, that is?

The Washington Examiner’s Byron York reported on Dec. 3, 2017:

Former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates has told Congress that the Logan Act was the first reason she intervened in the Flynn case — the reason FBI agents were sent to the White House to interview Flynn.

But it wasn’t the Logan Act, an unenforced ancient U.S. law that — unconstitutionally — forbids private individuals from undermining U.S. foreign policy abroad. Just the day before the interrogation on Jan. 23, the Washington Post published a big report on Flynn’s conversation with the ambassador, stating that the FBI had investigated and found no crime. Were they just trying to lull Flynn into a sense of complacency?

It seems improper for the FBI to interrogate somebody for something the FBI didn’t even believe was a crime. Ultimately, as it is, Flynn was never charged by Mueller with any Logan Act violations — probably because they could not be supported. Americans have First Amendment rights, after all. CONTINUE AT SITE

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Affordable Care Act’s ‘tortured’ history catches up with it. Does it have a future?Jonathan Turley

By on December 17th, 2018

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/12/17/obamacare-individual-mandate-courts-congress-john-roberts-column/2330806002/
Health care law supporters will have to show that the years of arguing it cannot function without the individual mandate were hyperbole or irrelevant.

When federal Judge Reed O’Connor effectively struck down the Affordable Care Act on Friday, there was a chorus of shock and dismay across the country from politicians and pundits alike. However, the decision is in many ways a bill come due for a number of key players in the ACA’s history. Not the least of them is Chief Justice John Roberts. Roberts saved the ACA in 2012 by defining a key provision as a tax. That tax is now gone and, with it, Roberts’ very narrow rationale for preserving the original health care scheme.

The seeds for this decision were planted long before the challenge was filed by Texas and 19 other states. From the outset, the constitutionality of the ACA was questioned by some of us due to the inclusion of the “individual mandate” which required all Americans to purchase health insurance. That provision immediately raised objections under federalism principles. Congress was penalizing individuals and states for the failure to buy a product and then regulating that failure under the claim of Interstate Commerce.

A majority of justices viewed that scheme as a violation of states rights. However, the Obama administration and the Democrats argued that the individual mandate was the thumping heart of the ACA and it could not live without it. This argument was repeated before the Supreme Court, which voted 5-4 to preserve the individual mandate as both constitutional and essential to the ACA.

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BOOKS, HISTORY Comments turned off

Manifest Destiny and President Polk By Howard Tanzman see note please

By on December 17th, 2018

https://www.realclearhistory.com/articles/2018/12/12/manifest_destiny_and_president_polk_394.html

An excellent book on this great but unsung president is:
A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican War and the Conquest of the American Continent (Simon & Schuster America Collection)

A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican War and the Conquest of the American Continent (Simon & Schuster America Collection)
Nov 3, 2009
The area of the United States is about 3.8 million square miles. The country increased its size through several historical events:

1783 Treaty Ending the Revolutionary War (~890,000 square miles)
1803 Louisiana Purchase (President Jefferson ~820,000 square miles)
1845 Texas Annexation (Presidents Tyler and Polk – ~390,000 square miles)
1846 Oregon Treaty (President Polk – ~285,000 square miles)
1848 Mexican Cession (President Polk – ~530,000 square miles)
1867 Alaska Purchase (President Johnson – ~585,000 square miles)

Three of those events occurred under President James Polk, totaling over 1.1 million square miles.

Polk was a protégé of fellow Tennessean President Andrew Jackson. He served in the House of Representatives and as governor of Tennessee. In 1844, Martin Van Buren was the front runner to receive the Democratic presidential nomination, but after coming out against the annexation of Texas he was unable to obtain the then needed two-thirds majority vote at the Democratic convention. On the ninth ballot, Polk, a dark horse candidate was selected. He defeated Senator Henry Clay, who also opposed the Texas annexation, in one of the closest elections in U.S. history.

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