RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/disparate-impact-analysis

A federal commission on school safety has repudiated the use of disparate-impact analysis in evaluating whether school discipline is racially biased. The Trump administration should go further, and extirpate such analysis from the entirety of the federal code of regulations, as well as from informal government practice.

Disparate-impact analysis holds that if a facially-neutral policy negatively affects blacks and Hispanics at a higher rate than whites and Asians, it is discriminatory. Noticing the behavioral differences that lead to those disparate effects is forbidden. In the area of school discipline, disparate-impact analysis results in the conclusion that racially neutral rules must nevertheless contain bias, since black students nationally are suspended at nearly three times the rate of white students. In 2014, the Obama administration relied on this methodology to announce that schools that suspended or expelled black students at higher rates than white students were violating anti-discrimination laws.

To understand how counterfactual such an analysis is, consider Duval County, Florida, which has Florida’s highest juvenile homicide rate. Seventy-three children, some as young as 11, have been arrested for murder and manslaughter over the last decade, according to the Florida Times-Union. Black juveniles made up 87.6 percent of those arrests and whites 8 percent. The black population in Duval County—which includes Jacksonville—was 28.9 percent in 2010 and the white population 56.6 percent, making black youngsters 21.6 times more likely to be arrested for homicide than white youngsters. Nationally, black males between the ages of 14 and 17 commit homicide at ten times the rate of white and Hispanic male teens combined; if Hispanics were removed from the equation, the black-white disparity would be much greater.

Beneath those homicide numbers is a larger juvenile crime wave. “The reason so many kids commit murder in Jacksonville is not because they are murderers, but because they are everything else: drug dealers, robbers, thieves, rapists and a bunch of other types of criminals whose crimes of choice has a great likelihood of leading to a murder,” a teen murder convict, Aaron Wright, told the Florida Times-Union. Fifty-nine percent of juvenile murder convicts from Duval County who responded to the paper’s inmate survey reported that they were committing another crime such as robbery or burglary when they or their co-defendant killed their victim. Wright himself was robbing a woman when his fellow robber shot and killed her, making Wright guilty of felony murder.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/womens-march-sponsors-silent-on-anti-semitism-allegations/his is how toxic the far Left has become.

It has been a week and a half since Tablet magazine detailed extensive allegations of anti-Semitism and financial corruption on the part of the Women’s March leadership.

The organization, which since November 2016 has organized grassroots efforts across the country to demonstrate and vote against the Trump administration, has yet to offer a formal statement on the exposé. And so far, not one of the more than 100 partners and sponsors of the Women’s March has raised a fuss over the story — including more than 20 high-profile groups that National Review contacted directly seeking comment.

As of this morning, the Women’s March website still featured a November 20 statement from co-chair Linda Sarsour side-stepping demands from the group’s founder that the current co-chairs resign over their support for anti-Semitic Nation of Islam (NOI) leader Louis Farrakhan.

The Tablet essay, by Leah McSweeney and Jacob Siegel, from earlier this month added fuel to that fire. Several sources told the magazine that at the leaders’ first meeting in November 2016, Carmen Perez and Tamika Mallory, now co-chairs along with Sarsour, “first asserted that Jewish people bore a special collective responsibility as exploiters of black and brown people — and even, according to a close secondhand source, claimed that Jews were proven to have been leaders of the American slave trade.”

Later, Mallory and Perez allegedly “berated” one of the group’s leaders over the fact that she was Jewish, saying, “Your people this, your people that” and “Your people hold all the wealth.” The co-chairs have also been accused by former group leaders of reshaping the financial structure of the organization for their personal benefit and of employing members of the NOI security team for Women’s March events.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/alan-dershowitz-michael-flynn-now-has-three-options-to-stay-out-of-prison

U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan’s handling of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s sentencing hearing Tuesday on Flynn’s guilty plea to lying to the FBI was anything but exemplary. The judge – who has a well-deserved reputation as both tough and fair – made several fundamental errors right at the outset.

First, Sullivan suggested that Flynn might be guilty of treason. This reflects an abysmal ignorance of the governing case law. Nothing Flynn did comes even close to satisfying the strict definition of treason.

The U.S. Constitution states: “Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same Overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.”

Flynn admitted he represented Turkey – America’s NATO ally – before he became a federal employee as President Trump’s national security adviser, but said he failed to register until later under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller did not charge Flynn for failing to register – let alone with the far more serious crime of treason.

But Sullivan blundered by accusing Flynn of having been an unregistered foreign agent while he was serving in the White House, thereby having “sold your country out.” This was flat out wrong, since Flynn stopped working for any foreign government before he became President Trump’s national security adviser when Trump took office on Jan. 20, 2017.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/the-barr-memo-is-a-commendable-piece-of-lawyering/

Trump’s attorney-general nominee would help Mueller conclude his work within DOJ guidelines.

It is exactly what we need and should want in an attorney general of the United States: the ability to reason through complex legal questions in a rigorously academic way. Not to bloviate from the cheap seats, but to think these issues through the way a properly functioning Justice Department does: considering them against jurisprudence, statutes, rules, regulations, and Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) opinions, with a healthy respect for facts that we do not know or about which we could be wrong — facts that could alter the analysis.

That is precisely what Bill Barr did in June, when he penned an unsolicited memorandum to top Justice Department officials on a matter of immense national significance: the obstruction aspect of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of President Trump.

Barr, whom President Trump has nominated to be the next attorney general, was not prejudging the facts. He was addressing the law and Justice Department policy. With great persuasive force, the 19-page memo posits two contentions. First, based on what is publicly known, the special counsel’s theory of obstruction is legally flawed. Second, if a Justice Department investigation is going to be used to take down a democratically elected president, the social cohesion of our body politic demands that it be over a clear, very serious crime, not a novel and aggressive theory of prosecution.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/12/19/the-eagle-and

Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s recent congressional testimony capped a deservedly rough year for the embattled search giant. While Pichai largely avoided any major missteps in his testimony—thanks mostly to the technological illiteracy of the questioners—even Google-friendly sources couldn’t help noticing his evasiveness on one key point: the infamous proposed partnership between Google and the Chinese government to build a censored search engine in line with Chinese government ideology—a project ominously code-named “Project Dragonfly.”

Most notably, Pichai absolutely refused to rule out making such a product, instead devolving to corporate doublespeak about being “committed to engagement,” whatever that means. He also tried to downplay Project Dragonfly, characterizing it merely as an “internal product,” rather than something under serious development.

This was wise of him, considering that the reports on what Dragonfly allegedly is being designed to do. According to a suppressed Google internal memo, Dragonfly is being built not only to limit search results, but also to enable the Chinese government to track what every single citizen searches for on the app. In other words, it’s a surveillance tool disguised as a search engine.