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Ruth King

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump Supports Changes to Criminal-Justice System Legislation could give judges more discretion in sentencing and reduce mandatory minimum sentences for some drug-related offenses By Vivian Salama and Kristina Peterson

By on November 15th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-to-support-changes-to-criminal-justice-system-1542222870?cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=cx&cx_artPos=4&cx_tag=contextual&cx_navSource=newsReel#cxrecs_s

WASHINGTON—President Trump endorsed bipartisan criminal-justice overhaul efforts at a White House ceremony on Wednesday, throwing his support behind changes to U.S. sentencing laws that he said also would give federal inmates a second chance when they are released.

“Did I hear the word bipartisan?” he joked during a speech at the White House. “I’m thrilled to announce my support for this bipartisan bill that will make our communities safer and give former inmates a second chance at life after they have served their time—so important.”

A new bill under discussion in the Senate is expected to give judges more discretion in crafting sentences in some cases and could reduce mandatory minimum sentences for some drug-related offenses.

The bill also would seek to reduce some penalties affected by the disparity in crack and cocaine sentencing, which was narrowed in a 2010 law. And it would clarify that the practice of “stacking,” or creating a longer sentence from accumulated charges, was not intended for some first-time offenders.

Among the aims of an overhaul, according to a White House official, is to save money with fewer prisoners and ultimately redirect those funds to help law-enforcement efforts.

In May, the House passed a bill from Reps. Doug Collins (R., Ga.) and Hakeem Jeffries (D., N.Y.) that didn’t overhaul sentencing guidelines. That bipartisan bill would allow some inmates to serve out the final stretch of their sentences in halfway houses or in home confinement, and would add new protections for pregnant and postpartum female prisoners, among other provisions.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) had been reluctant to bring the House bill up in the Senate, but on Wednesday signaled he would be willing to consider the emerging compromise coming from the Senate.

Mr. McConnell said GOP leaders would be assessing how much support the new deal has once it has been finalized and weighed against the Senate’s other must-pass legislation remaining this year.

Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas is among a group of Republicans who have said they would vote against the bill. A White House official said that they “welcome his feedback, but he’s just one vote.”

The latest effort was spearheaded by Mr. Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who has been working with lawmakers on the legislation. CONTINUE AT SITE

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POLITICS Comments turned off

The Ungracious Mr. Gillum The Democrat loses the recount for Florida Governor but still won’t concede.

By on November 15th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-ungracious-mr-gillum-1542329873

Florida finished its machine recount of close election races on Thursday, and Republican candidate for Governor Ron DeSantis retained his lead outside the 0.25% threshold for a hand recount. That should mean the race is over. Yet Democrat Andrew Gillum refused to concede, in a display of ill-grace that won’t help his political future in Florida.

“A vote denied is justice denied—the State of Florida must count every legally cast vote,” Mr. Gillum said in a statement after the state’s 3 p.m. deadline for counties to finish counting had passed. “As today’s unofficial reports and recent court proceedings make clear, there are tens of thousands of votes that have yet to be counted.”

Mr. Gillum didn’t say it, but he’s counting on judicial intervention from the lawsuits filed by Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson to conjure more ballots from somewhere, anywhere to change the outcome. Mr. Nelson trails Republican Rick Scott by 0.154%, so that race will now proceed to a hand recount. But one of those legal Hail Marys failed Thursday when a judge denied a request to count ballots without matching signatures. Neither Democrat is likely to win, but in the name of “counting every vote” they want to overturn normal vote-counting practice.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Dartmouth Lawsuit Says School Allowed ‘Animal House’ Culture Among Professors, Students Seven women allege psychology department was rife with leering, groping and sexual assault By Douglas Belkin

By on November 15th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/dartmouth-lawsuit-says-school-allowed-animal-house-culture-among-professors-students-1542311799?cx_testId=0&cx_testVariant=cx_1&cx_artPos=0#cxrecs_s

Seven current and former Dartmouth College students filed a lawsuit in federal court against the Ivy League school on Thursday, alleging it ignored an “Animal House” atmosphere created by three professors in the school’s department of psychology and brain sciences.

The lawsuit, which seeks $70 million in damages, claims the professors “leered at, groped, sexted, intoxicated and raped female students.” It alleges the professors conducted meetings at bars, invited students to late-night hot tub parties in their homes and invited undergraduate students to use cocaine during class.

The professors involved resigned from the Hanover, N.H., school last summer at Dartmouth’s request. The New Hampshire Attorney General is conducting a separate investigation.

In a press release, Dartmouth said it applauded the women’s courage for coming forward but disagreed with the characterizations of the school’s actions and will respond through court filings.

Due to the misconduct it found earlier this year by the three faculty members, the school said Thursday it took “unprecedented steps toward revoking their tenure and terminating their employment.” The professors “are no longer at Dartmouth and remain banned from our campus and from attending all Dartmouth-sponsored events, no matter where the events are held.”

The suit alleges the behavior started as far back as 2002 and the school “did nothing and ignored” students’ complaints. In April of 2017, a group of female graduate students contacted Dartmouth’s Title IX office and reported in detail the behavior of the professors. The suit alleges the school again did nothing and the sexual harassment continued. Over the next several months, at least 27 complainants came forward, the suit says.

“This lawsuit is the only means these women have to remedy the College’s past wrongs and ensure the institution implements meaningful reforms,” said Deborah Marcuse, an attorney representing the women.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Capitalism: Still Working Karl Marx’s economic forecasts were even worse than Paul Krugman’s. By James Freeman

By on November 15th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/capitalism-still-working-1542308386

So far so good with the ongoing U.S. experiment in expanded economic liberty. Americans are confident about their financial prospects and enjoying a strong jobs market. And it shows. The Journal’s Harriet Torry reports today:

Retail spending by American households rose in October, a sign outlays started on a strong footing headed into the holiday shopping season.

Sales at retail stores and restaurants rose 0.8% from the prior month, the Commerce Department said Thursday. That exceeded the 0.5% increase economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal had expected.

The Journal’s Justin Lahart adds that “while there were some special factors that helped boost the overall number—higher gasoline prices increased service-station sales and hurricane-related sales helped hardware stores—business was generally good all over. Clothing stores and sporting goods stores both registered sales growth of 0.5% on the month, for example, and department store sales were up 1.3%.”

Despite a weakening global economy and concerns about how President Trump’s trade stare-down with Chinese dictator Xi Jinping is going to end, the U.S. economy appears to be logging another solid quarter.

Yet polls find that young adults in the U.S., perhaps scarred by a decade of financial crisis and then sluggish growth, are disturbingly open to socialist central planning of the economy. Vermont’s socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders is the most influential policy maker in the Democratic party, though he’s still not a member. Now, having succeeded in centrally planning Amazon’s warehouse wages, Mr. Sanders wants to do the same to Walmart . Yet history counsels deep skepticism regarding claims that such government coercion will lead to higher living standards.

Modern readers may naturally think of contemporary economists like Paul Krugman when they think of botched economic forecasts. But Mr. Krugman’s errors look rather small compared to those made by the inventor of socialism. Columbia University b-school professor Charles Calomiris writes:

It is worth remembering that Karl Marx regarded socialism as an economic necessity that would emerge out of the ashes of capitalism precisely because capitalism would fail to sustain wealth creation. Marx made many specific, and erroneous, predictions about capitalism, including its declining profitability and rising unemployment. His analysis did not consider permanent economic growth in a capitalist system to be a possibility. And his “historical materialist” view of political choice claimed the rich and powerful would never share power voluntarily with their economic lessers, or create social safety nets. Writing in the mid-19th century, Marx fundamentally failed to understand the huge changes in technology, political suffrage, or social safety net policies that were occurring around him.

Only 135 years after the death of Marx, profits are surging in the world’s largest economy. Lindsey Bell of CFRA Research notes that third-quarter earnings growth of 28.3% for S+P 500 companies is among the best in decades. Ms. Bell adds that “the overall sales growth rate of 9.3% for the S&P 500 in the quarter was impressive as top-line momentum continued for the fourth quarter in a row. In the second quarter, sales were 10.3% higher year-over-year, up from about 9% in the prior two quarters and significantly higher than the average growth rate of 4.0% since the emergence from the Great Recession.”

Marx doesn’t just own the biggest blown earnings call in the history of markets. Prof. Calomiris notes that many of Marx’s other predictions also turned out be catastrophically off target:

Not only has socialist theory been wrong about the economic and political fruits of capitalism, it failed to see the problems that arise in socialist governments. Socialism’s record has been pain, not gain, especially for the poor. Socialism produced mass starvation in eastern Europe and China, as it undermined the ability of farmers to grow and market their crops. In less extreme incarnations, such as the UK in the decades after World War II and before Margaret Thatcher, it stunted growth. In most cases, socialism’s monopoly on economic control also fomented corruption by government officials, as was especially apparent in Latin American and African socialist regimes. The adverse economic consequences of socialism led the Scandinavian countries to dial back their versions of socialism in the past decades. CONTINUE AT SITE

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Obvious Double Standard On Recusals Proves Russia Probe Is About Getting Trump By Adam Mill

By on November 15th, 2018

http://thefederalist.com/2018/11/15/obvious-double-standard-recusals-proves-muller-probe-getting-trump/
Don’t bother reading the underlying rules on conflict of interest, because there’s only one test that matters: Would the recusal help get Trump?

The installation of Matthew Whitaker as the acting attorney general has the recusal pundits barking like shelter dogs in the presence of a trespassing squirrel. In case you’re wondering how the recusal rules work, it’s simply a matter of whether it helps or hurts Trump.

Don’t believe me? See if you can detect a pattern. Since Whitaker might reign in the special counsel, he must be recused, they argue. Similarly, when it appeared former attorney general Jeff Sessions might help Trump, he acceded to demands he recuse himself. But Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein is a proven thorn in the president’s side with an obvious conflict of interest, so no demands for recusal there.

Judge Rudy Contreras’s friendship with disgraced FBI agent Peter Strzok and lawyer Lisa Page at the same time he was reviewing Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant applications from Strzok did not require recusal from considering the application. But the Trump appointee with authority to consider a search warrant of Trump’s lawyer’s private office was recused, leading to the raid to look for evidence that likely could have been obtained by subpoena.

The recusal pundits called for the recusal of newly confirmed Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh because he might side with the president in future cases. Yet when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg calls Trump a “faker” and openly expresses dismay at the prospect of his presidency, she need not recuse. Don’t bother reading the underlying rules on conflict of interest, because there’s only one test that matters: Would the recusal help get Trump?

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MEDIA, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Why I Am No Longer a Canadian Writer By David Solway

By on November 15th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/trending/why-i-am-no-longer-a-canadian-writer/

Long ago, in another life, I belonged to the Union of Canadian Writers and was a member in good standing of PEN Canada. I’m can’t recall why I originally joined these guilds since I generally shun collectives of any sort. I believe I may have responded to an invitation or the urging of friends, not wanting to seem churlish. I never threw in my lot with what would have been my natural home, The League of Canadian Poets, an outfit which arranged for readings across the country and facilitated the distribution of grants and perks to its members.

With respect to the Union, I attended a couple of meetings, which I found somewhat off-putting for all the trade talk, affected posturing and conversational bromides that dominated the proceedings. Literature was the one thing that never seemed to come up. Regarding PEN, I discovered its agenda was pro-Palestinian and perforce anti-Israeli, which I could not accept. In time, I drifted away from these dreary bastions of political correctness.

All this was several years ago but attitudes haven’t changed much in the interim. Canadian writers have for the most part tracked so far left that they have disappeared from the frame of reasoned discourse. An ongoing cause célèbre is the virulent denunciation of Donald Trump and his populist revolution. Most of the poets, novelists, essayists and journalists I know, had they been Americans, would have voted Hillary. Today they would be big fans of Chuck Schumer, Maxine Waters, Cory Booker and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and would certainly have swum a hoped-for Blue Wave in the Congressional elections, as they went Liberal red in Canada.

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BOOKS Comments turned off

David Goldman: A Review of Patricia O’Toole’s “The Moralist”- a Bio of Woodrow Wilson

By on November 15th, 2018

https://www.claremont.org/crb/article/the-great-resenter/

THE GREAT RESENTER

Patricia O’Toole’s The Moralist is yet another hagiographic account of the mission and martyrdom of Woodrow Wilson, the patron saint of American internationalists. With minor variations, O’Toole sticks to the Received Account as told by John Milton Cooper in Woodrow Wilson: A Biography (2009) and by A. Scott Berg in Wilson (2013). In this view, the 28th president came close to ushering in the millennium after World War I, but his prickly self-righteousness lost the great moment. Under the diabolic influence of Republican Henry Cabot Lodge, the story goes, the Senate refused to ratify the League of Nations treaty that Wilson had brought back from the Versailles Peace Conference. Wilson then destroyed his health in a desperate effort to persuade the American public about the League, and the world plunged back into a dark age of atavistic nationalism. O’Toole, whose previous books include biographies of Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Adams, thinks of Wilson as a moralist rather than a politician, and attributes his failure to a combination of excessive high-mindedness and an inadequate blood flow to the brain that ultimately led to his incapacitating stroke in October 1919. She deduces the latter from the translucence of the president’s ears upon his return from Versailles.

It is quite wrong to speak, as this book’s subtitle does, of the world that Woodrow Wilson made, for he made no world at all; he merely signed the Versailles Treaty by which Britain’s David Lloyd George and France’s Georges Clemenceau turned the Great War into the opening salvo of a new Thirty Years’ War. So utterly utopian was Wilson’s vision that it is unfair to characterize the internationalism of Bill Clinton or George W. Bush as “Wilsonian.” Clinton and Bush threw America’s weight around after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but they did not propose—as Wilson did—to replace America’s sovereign decision-making with a global council. Wilson’s League of Nations was closer to the conspiracy theorists’ notion of the United Nations. The commonplace belief that minor concessions on his part would have won ratification of the League of Nations treaty is untenable.

* * *

Wilson was a latecomer to the matter of collective security. William Howard Taft, whom he defeated in the 1912 presidential election, formed the League to Enforce Peace in 1915, which proposed a collective security agreement that pledged members to arbitration and to wield economic and military force against aggressors. Wilson’s nemesis of 1919, Henry Cabot Lodge, endorsed Taft’s League the following year, remarking that “[p]robably it will be impossible to stop all wars, but it certainly will be possible to stop some wars and thus diminish their number.” Wilson at that time still was reluctant to enter World War I, to the frustration of hawks like Theodore Roosevelt.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Ruthie Blum Will restraint be Netanyahu’s downfall? He is an elected official, after all, not a king. The Israeli public is his boss, not the other way around. Ruthie Blum

By on November 15th, 2018

https://www.jns.org/opinion/will-restraint-be-netanyahus-downfall/

Addressing his controversial decision to agree to a ceasefire with Hamas following more than 24 hours of incessant mortar, rocket and missile fire from Gaza into southern Israel, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu explained:

“In normal times, a leader must be attentive to the hearts of the people, and our people are wise. But in times of crisis, when making critical decisions in the field of security, the public cannot always be a partner in the crucial considerations that must be concealed from the enemy. At these moments, leadership is not to do the easy thing; leadership is to do the right thing, even if it is difficult. Leadership is sometimes facing criticism when you know confidential and sensitive information that you cannot share with the citizens of Israel, and in this case with the residents of the south, whom I love and appreciate greatly.”

Netanyahu made these statements on Wednesday at a memorial service for David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, whose tough leadership and party’s 30-year domination kept him at the country’s helm for longer than any of his successors thus far.

Almost simultaneously, Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman announced his resignation, on the grounds that Netanyahu had ignored his objections to the ceasefire and “capitulated to terrorists.”

This is the same Netanyahu who, while in Paris on Sunday—where he joined world leaders in marking the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I—likened Hamas to ISIS and said: “There no diplomatic solution to Gaza.”

The hours following Lieberman’s figurative bombshell were spent more on media analysis of Israel’s internecine political strife and on Netanyahu’s chances for surviving an early election than on the literal explosive havoc wreaked by Hamas on the Jewish communities in rocket range of Gaza.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Brazil’s Exceptional President Srdja Trifkovic

By on November 15th, 2018

https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2018/December/43/12/magazine/article/10845837/

Jair Bolsonaro won the presidential election in Brazil on October 28 with 55 percent of the vote. The former army captain triumphed over Fernando Haddad of the leftist Workers’ Party pledging to fight crime and corruption, to end affirmative action for “disadvantaged minorities,” and to shatter the straitjacketed discourse on race and sexuality. The leader of the fourth-largest democracy has vowed to uphold traditional family, patriotism, Christian faith, and law and order.

From the standpoint of the Western elite, Bolsonaro’s views are beyond the pale.

“I will not fight nor discriminate,” he said in 2002, “but if I see two men kissing in the street, I’ll hit them.”

“I’m homophobic, yes,” he reiterated some years later, “and very proud of it if it is to defend children in schools.”

“I’d rather have my son die in an accident,” he declared in 2010, “than show up with some mustachioed guy!”

“Brazil is a Christian country,” Bolsonaro insists. “God above everyone! It is not this story, this little story of secular state. It is a Christian state, and if a minority is against it, then move!”

What would he do if his son fell in love with a black woman? The question was put to Bolsonaro in 2011. “I do not run that risk as my children were very well raised,” he replied. In 2017, he promised to end all indigenous and slave-descended quota programs. “Has anyone ever seen a Japanese begging for charity?” he asked. Of course not, “because it’s a race that has shame. It’s not like this race that’s down here, or like a minority ruminating here on the side.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Sen. Mike Lee: A conservative case for criminal justice reform

By on November 15th, 2018

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/sen-mike-lee-a-conservative-case-for-criminal-justice-reform

“Government’s first duty,” President Reagan said in 1981 and President Trump recently tweeted, “is to protect the people, not run their lives.” The safety of law-abiding citizens has always been a core principle of conservatism. And it is why we need to take this opportunity to pass real criminal-justice reform now.

Although violent crime rose during the final two years of President Obama’s time in office, it decreased during the first year of Trump’s presidency. We need to keep that momentum going. And criminal justice reform can help us do that in two ways.

First, commonsense sentencing reform can increase trust in the criminal-justice system, thus making it easier for law enforcement personnel to police communities. Right now, federal mandatory-minimum sentences for many drug offenses can lead to outcomes that strike many people as unfair, and thus undermine the public’s faith in our justice system.

For example, when I served as an Assistant United States Attorney in Salt Lake City, Weldon Angelos — a young father of two with no criminal record — was convicted of selling three dime bags of marijuana to a paid informant over a short period of time.

These were not violent crimes. No one was hurt. But because Angelos had been in possession of a gun at the time he sold the drugs (a gun which was neither brandished nor discharged in connection with the offense), the judge was forced by federal law to give him a 55-year prison sentence. The average federal sentence for assault is just two years. The average murderer only gets 15 years. While acknowledging the obvious excessiveness of the sentence, the judge explained that the applicable federal statutes gave him no authority to impose a less-severe prison term, noting that “only Congress can fix this problem.”

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