Displaying the most recent of 91299 posts written by

Ruth King

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Anti-Kavanaugh Mob Chases Sen. Ted Cruz And Wife From Restaurant By Joy Pullmann

By on September 25th, 2018

http://thefederalist.com/2018/09/25/anti-kavanaugh-mob-chases-sen-ted-cruz-wife-restaurant/

A mob of people calling themselves democratic socialists, LGBT activists, anarchists, anti-fascists, and anti-racists descended upon Sen. Ted Cruz and his wife while they were out to dinner last night. They chanted “We believe survivors,” surrounded the Cruzes, blocked their exit, and screamed in their faces, show videos of the altercation. Cruz can be heard saying “Let my wife through.”

The hecklers also shouted “[Cruz’s Senate opponent] Beto is way hotter than you, dude.” After the Cruzes exited through an side door, protesters can be heard shouting “Ted Cruz and Brett Kavanaugh are best friends!” and “Cancel Kavanaugh for women’s rights!”

“This is a message to Ted Cruz, Bret Kavanaugh, Donald Trump, and the rest of the racist, sexist, transphobic, and homophobic right-wing scum,” wrote Smash Racism DC in a statement taking responsibility for the harassment. “You are not safe. We will find you. We will expose you. We will take from you the peace you have taken from so many others.”

The incident appears to begin with a woman walking up to the Cruzes in the restaurant, calling herself a constituent and victim of sexual assault, and demanding to know how Cruz plans to vote on Kavanaugh’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court. “Do you believe survivors, sir?” she demands, as her mob chants “We believe survivors” in the background.Democrats are charging, based purely on hazy and uncorroborated claims of alcohol-fueled sexual encounters nearly 40 years ago, that Kavanaugh is a vicious pervert. Cruz sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee that is slated to receive testimony Thursday from one woman making such accusations. But her legal team has already caused the testimony to be rescheduled six times. Such testimony would put Christine Blasey Ford under oath and liable to perjury charges.

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Rosenstein guided by politics, not a pursuit of justice Andrew McCarthy

By on September 25th, 2018

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/408250-rosenstein-guided-by-politics-not-a-pursuit-of-justice

The New York Times’s blockbuster report that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein broached the subject of seeking President Trump’s ouster cannot be separated from his appointment of a special counsel.

From the start of the Trump administration, politics has overwhelmed law enforcement. It was the political uproar stoked by the May 9, 2017, firing of FBI Director James Comey that induced Rosenstein to appoint a special counsel, Robert Mueller, to investigate President Trump. There was insufficient basis in law to do this. But that turned out to be of no more moment than the complete absence of any basis to remove the president under the 25th Amendment, the harebrained proposal the Times reports Rosenstein was floating at exactly the same time.

To be clear, the special counsel regulations require the existence of a factual basis for a criminal investigation — a crime — before a prosecutor is assigned. Moreover, a special counsel, who by regulation is recruited from outside the government, is not supposed to be assigned absent a Department of Justice (DOJ) conflict of interest so profound that the department is ethically barred from investigating the crime in question.

Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein could satisfy neither of these conditions. To this day, he has never specified a crime the president is suspected of committing. And there is no conflict; Mueller not only recruited prosecutors from the Justice Department, he has transitioned the two Russia indictments he’s brought to Justice Department components.

Both of these actions would be improper if there were an actual conflict. But, of course, there isn’t one because, again, Rosenstein has not specified a crime. It is the crime allegedly committed by a president that creates a conflict for the president’s Justice Department and calls for an outside prosecutor.

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

We Are Living Nineteen Eighty-Four By Victor Davis Hanson

By on September 25th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/kavanaugh-nomination-battle-like-orwells-1984/

Truth, due process, evidence, rights of the accused: All are swept aside in pursuit of the progressive agenda.

George Orwell’s 1949 dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four is no longer fiction. We are living it right now.

Google techies planned to massage Internet searches to emphasize correct thinking. A member of the so-called deep state, in an anonymous op-ed, brags that its “resistance” is undermining an elected president. The FBI, CIA, DOJ, and NSC were all weaponized in 2016 to ensure that the proper president would be elected — the choice adjudicated by properly progressive ideology. Wearing a wire is now redefined as simply flipping on an iPhone and recording your boss, boy- or girlfriend, or co-workers.

But never has the reality that we are living in a surreal age been clearer than during the strange cycles of Christine Blasey Ford’s accusations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

In Orwell’s world of 1984 Oceania, there is no longer a sense of due process, free inquiry, rules of evidence and cross examination, much less a presumption of innocence until proven guilty. Instead, regimented ideology — the supremacy of state power to control all aspects of one’s life to enforce a fossilized idea of mandated quality — warps everything from the use of language to private life.

Oceania’s Rules

Senator Diane Feinstein and the other Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee had long sought to destroy the Brett Kavanaugh nomination. Much of their paradoxical furor over his nomination arises from the boomeranging of their own past political blunders, such as when Democrats ended the filibuster on judicial nominations, in 2013. They also canonized the so-called 1992 Biden Rule, which holds that the Senate should not consider confirming the Supreme Court nomination of a lame-duck president (e.g., George H. W. Bush) in an election year.

Continue reading →
BOOKS, IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Strangers and Citizens By Reihan Salam

By on September 25th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/immigration-debate-melting-pot-or-civil-war-reihan-salam/Immigration will only benefit our country if we’re committed to assimilating new arrivals.

Editor’s Note: The following excerpt is adapted from Reihan Salam’s new book, Melting Pot or Civil War: A Son of Immigrants Makes the Case against Open Borders. It appears here with permission.

‘Scripture tells us that we shall not oppress a stranger,” said President Barack Obama, “for we know the heart of a stranger — for we were strangers once too. . . . And whether our forebears were strangers who crossed the Atlantic or the Pacific or the Rio Grande, we are here only because this country welcomed them in, and taught them that to be an American is about something more than what we look like, or what our last names are, or how we worship. What makes us Americans is our shared commitment to an ideal — that all of us are created equal, and all of us have the chance to make of our lives what we will.

One of Obama’s great talents was his unsurpassed ability to stack the rhetorical deck. Here he was announcing his executive order for deportation relief in 2014. To disagree with him was not just to reject his take on the costs and benefits of a particular policy, it was to oppress a stranger, which no less an authority than Scripture tells us is a very bad thing to do. Yet there was a small wrinkle in the former president’s remarks. While calling on his fellow citizens to welcome the millions of strangers who make their way to our country to better their lives, he also insisted that his executive action would shield only those who’d been in the country unlawfully for five years or more. Moreover, it did not extend to those who might settle in the United States unlawfully in the future.

But surely those who’ve been in the country for, say, four years are strangers who deserve our compassion, too. Having praised unauthorized immigrants who work hard in low-paying jobs and who worship in our churches, the president must understand that there are tens of millions of people around the world who would gladly do the same, even if it meant risking their lives. According to one survey, there are roughly 700 million people around the world who would like to move permanently to another country, and 165 million of them say that their first choice would be to move to the United States. My guess is that the vast majority of these aspiring immigrants are decent people who mean us no harm. If the Biblical injunction against oppressing a stranger is to serve as the lodestar of our immigration policy, why on Earth would we set any limits at all?

Obama’s expansive language gave succor to open-borders romantics— and to the most demagogic voices on the other side of the debate, up to and including the man who succeeded him in the White House. Together, these forces are making it all but impossible to craft a durable immigration compromise. The irony is that Obama had a different and more potent argument at his disposal, namely, that the young people to whom he was offering deportation relief weren’t strangers at all. Because of our decades-long failure to enforce our immigration laws, an arrangement that suited unscrupulous low-wage employers just fine, they had become part of our communities. There was a perfectly good case for doing right by them while also embracing resolute enforcement, a case Obama gestured toward early in his presidency, yet which open-borders activists came to angrily reject in its waning days. The result is that immigration polices championed by liberals and centrists as recently as the 2000s are now routinely denounced as unacceptably extreme.

Continue reading →
ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Feminist Narcissism The effort to destroy Brett Kavanaugh looks like a revenge attack on a civilization deemed too male. Heather Mac Donald

By on September 25th, 2018

https://www.city-journal.org/kavanaugh-feminist-narcissism-16188.html

If Supreme Court Justice William Brennan were posthumously discovered to have aggressively groped a girl once in high school, should that fact discredit his landmark opinions expanding press freedom, legal protections for criminal defendants, and voting and welfare rights? Would it have been better for the country, from a liberal perspective, if Brennan’s judicial career had been derailed from the start? What about Justice John Marshall Harlan, whose groundbreaking 1896 dissent from the majority opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson declared that the Constitution was “color-blind” and rejected state-sponsored segregation? If Harlan had once jumped on a girl as a 17-year-old, should that one-time outbreak of boorish adolescent male hormones efface his contributions as a public thinker?

The Democratic response to the allegation that three and a half decades ago, Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh assaulted a girl during a pool party bears many hallmarks of campus culture, from the admonition that “survivors” should always be believed to the claim that the veracity of the accusation matters less than the history of white-male privilege. But the most significant import from academic feminism is the idea that a long-ago, never-repeated incident of adolescent sexual misbehavior (assuming that the assault happened as described, which Kavanaugh has categorically denied) should trump a lifetime record of serious legal thought and government service. (Now, a new allegation, reported by The New Yorker, that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted a Yale classmate at a party—though the New York Times regarded the evidence as too flimsy to publish—has ramped up outrage to the point that feminists are demanding that the Ford hearings they had called for be cancelled.) The feminist nostrum that the personal is political is being weaponized to subordinate the public realm of ideas to the private realm of sexual relations—all, ironically, in the service of a highly political end: preventing a judicial conservative from being seated on the high court. The domain of Eros and the domain of public action are, however, in most cases distinct. If it turned out that James Madison had groped his domestics, it would be absurd to discard the constitutional separation of powers on that ground. Madison’s political insights are more important to civilization than any hypothetical chauvinist indiscretions.

(The ongoing eclipse of political and diplomatic history follows a similar impulse: supplanting what is seen as a too-male realm of ideas and action in favor of the history of identity-based, “marginalized” groups, defined above all by race and sex, whose direct contributions to the evolution of political thought was until recently modest at best.)

But the demand to derail the Kavanaugh nomination is particularly ab

Continue reading →
ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Due Process for Judge Kavanaugh Senators eager to destroy his nomination must be restrained by the rule of law. Adam Freedman

By on September 25th, 2018

https://www.city-journal.org/due-process-for-brett-kavanaugh-16192.html

Nobody in the United States Senate knows whether Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s accusers are telling the truth. And yet, quite a few of its members—all Democrats—have already decided that they are telling the truth. Connecticut’s Richard Blumenthal and New York’s Kirsten Gillibrand, for example, have declared that they believe the allegations of Professor Christine Blasey Ford, though she has yet to testify. Senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaii insists that Ford “needs to be believed,” and that men need to “just shut up and step up.”

Oddly enough, the same Democratic politicians who seem to have made up their minds about the matter are the very ones calling for a “full investigation” into Ford’s accusations, as well as those of Kavanaugh’s former Yale classmate Deborah Ramirez. This should set off alarms for anyone concerned about the old-fashioned notion of due process—that is, the procedural fairness that Anglo-American law guarantees to those accused of crimes.

The hallmark of due process is the presumption of innocence. Imagine a judge who announces—before the trial even begins—that he thinks that the accused is lying. Defense counsel would rightly demand that the judge recuse himself. But no recusal has been offered by those senators who would sit in judgment on the Supreme Court nominee.

Because every defendant is presumed innocent, due process also requires that one’s accusers bear the burden of proof. Today, however, this tradition has been turned on its head, with politicians and commentators on the left asserting that the burden is on Kavanaugh—and any other man accused of sexual misconduct—to disprove the accusations against them. Blumenthal, for example, tweets that Kavanaugh has “a responsibility to come forward with evidence to rebut” Ramirez’s accusations of sexual assault. Anita Hill, the law school professor who accused Justice Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment during Thomas’s 1991 confirmation hearings, has argued that Kavanaugh bears the burden of disproving Ford’s allegations.

Continue reading →
MEDIA Comments turned off

A Shameful Season for American Journalism The Nation, the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books all run scared from criticism. By Christopher M. Finan

By on September 25th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-shameful-season-for-american-journalism-1537830679

Ian Buruma was forced out last week as editor of the New York Review of Books after publishing an essay by a man who admitted that he has abused women. Mr. Buruma’s sudden departure caps a shameful season of American journalism.

In July, the Nation apologized for a poem for the first time in its 153-year history. In August, the New Yorker canceled a conversation at its annual festival between editor David Remnick and former White House aide Steve Bannon. All three publications were responding to outrage that they had dared provide a platform for views—or people—seen by a certain segment of the population as offensive, even dangerous.

The U.S. is deeply polarized, with divisions over race, class and sexuality widening under a president who exploits them. Social media brings out the worst in us. But good journalism has traditionally helped society find balance in unsettled times by giving voice to all sides of the debate, by helping people talk through their differences and seek compromise.

These three august institutions failed to do that. To put it plainly: They caved in.

In “How-To,” the poem published by the Nation, a street hustler offers advice on how to panhandle. The use of dialect suggests that the hustler is black, drawing complaints that the poem is racist. Because the hustler suggests faking a disability, it was condemned as “ableist.” The poet, Anders Carlson-Wee, who is white, was also accused of “cultural appropriation.” “We are sorry for the pain we have caused to the many communities affected by this poem,” wrote the magazine’s poetry editors, Stephanie Burt and Carmen Gimenez Smith. They said they were “revising our process for solicited and unsolicited submissions.” The New Yorker’s change of heart occurred after many liberals expressed outrage that Mr. Bannon had been invited to its festival and several celebrity speakers threatened to withdraw.

Continue reading →
MEDIA Comments turned off

Peter Schweizer: ‘Google and Facebook Brought’ AG Anti-Trust Meeting ‘on Themselves’ By Tyler O’Neil

By on September 25th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/trending/peter-schweizer-google-and-facebook-brought-ag-anti-trust-meeting-on-themselves/

On Tuesday, state attorneys general met with Attorney General Jeff Sessions to discuss strategies to rein in Big Tech companies like Google and Facebook, using anti-trust laws. The team behind “The Creepy Line,” a new documentary about Big Tech, praised the meeting as vital, and argued that Google and Facebook brought this meeting on themselves.

“Google and Facebook have brought this meeting between the Department of Justice and several attorneys general on themselves,” New York Times bestselling author Peter Schweizer, writer and producer of “The Creepy Line,” said in a statement Tuesday. “With documented bias that has harmed consumers, Google’s abuse of the public trust has impacted users of all political stripes, and the recent leaked emails show them considering putting their finger on the scale on important national debates.”

Schweizer was referring to one email revealing a Google executive bragging about helping to increase the Latino vote, assuming Latinos would vote for Hillary Clinton, and another series of emails showing Google employees scheming about how to tweak he search engine function to harm Trump’s travel ban.

“Because of these documented problems, Google, Facebook, and other Internet platforms warrant closer scrutiny from government and non-government organizations,” Schweizer declared.

He further warned about an earlier leaked video in which “Google leadership and employees expressed their desire to use their platform to ‘spread our company’s values.’ With control over 90% of searches, they have the ability to do it.”

Finally, Schweizer cited the work of Ph.D. psychologist Robert Epstein, revealing that “Google and Facebook have the ability to manipulate and bias the information we see without us even knowing it. This is not only creepy, it’s dangerous. And, it’s time all of us took a closer look at these companies, their capabilities, and their goals.”

Epstein, senior research psychologist at the nonpartisan American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, and author of 15 books and more than 300 articles on Internet influence and other topics, also emphasized the importance of the meeting.

“Randomized, controlled, peer-reviewed research I have been conducting since 2013 has repeatedly demonstrated the unprecedented power that Big Tech companies — Google, in particular — have to shift opinions and votes on a massive scale,” Epstein said in a statement. “My research suggests, for example, that Big Tech companies can shift upwards of 12 million votes in the November, 2018, election without people knowing they are being manipulated.”

CONTINUE AT SITE

Continue reading →
MEDIA Comments turned off

Quick Roundup of the Latest Anti-Kavanaugh Lunacy By Jim Treacher

By on September 25th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/trending/quick-roundup-of-the-latest-anti-kavanaugh-lunacy/

“If I didn’t know better, I’d think the unbiased liberal media can’t find any proof for the stuff they really want to believe. But hey, rumor and innuendo and wild conjecture will do in a pinch. Who cares? It’s not as if Kavanaugh was nominated by a Democrat.”

Sorry to turn my humble blog into All Kavanaugh All the Time, but I have a keen interest in liberal insanity, and right now this story is where all the action is.

All this stuff is happening really fast, and it’s only going to get crazier until Christine Blasey Ford fails to appear testifies before the Senate on Thursday. We already know that Brett Kavanaugh is probably a rapist because a couple of women have made completely unsupported accusations against him. But wait, there’s more! Here’s the latest proof that he’s probably a rapist, and even if not, he still stinks:

Exhibit A: Kavanaugh claims he was a virgin in high school, as if that exonerates him from rape.

On Monday Kavanaugh was interviewed by Martha MacCallum from Fox News (boo, hiss!), and he defended himself from a very serious claim by not-a-creepy-porn-lawyer Michael Avenatti. The claim is that Kavanaugh participated in a gang rape ring in high school. That sounds plausible, right? Kavanaugh’s rebuttal is that he was a virgin in high school, and for quite some time after. So I can add that to my list of Things I Didn’t Particularly Want Nor Need to Know.

But Kavanaugh’s claim of youthful sexlessness may have been a fatal mistake! It has now been thoroughly debunked by, um, a tweet from a guy who claims to have gone to Yale with him:
Steve Kantrowitz @skantrow

Perhaps Brett Kavanaugh was a virgin for many years after high school. But he claimed otherwise in a conversation with me during our freshman year in Lawrance Hall at Yale, in the living room of my suite.

I have questions.

How can a fact-checker ascertain whether a decades-old recollection of a college classmate’s sexual boast actually happened?
If somehow the fact of Kavanaugh’s boast is proven, via time travel or astral projection or some other unspecified means, how can a fact-checker determine if the boast was true or false?
How does any of this prove the so-far-unproven allegations against Kavanaugh?

I know, I know. I’m just nitpicking.

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Senate Republicans Eye Monday or Tuesday Floor Vote on Kavanaugh Schedule assumes Judiciary Committee hearing, markup does not alter GOP plans by Jacob Fischler

By on September 25th, 2018

http://www.rollcall.com/news/politics/senate-republicans-eye-monday-tuesday-floor-vote-kavanaugh

Senate Republican leaders want to schedule a floor vote for Monday or Tuesday on the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court “unless something derailed it along the way,” according to Senate Republican Conference Chairman John Thune of South Dakota.

Thune told reporters at the Capitol on Tuesday that if all goes according to plan, Republicans could get the procedural gears turning over the weekend. That assumes Thursday’s hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee featuring Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford, who has accused him of sexual assault, does not alter the current trajectory that Senate GOP leaders have set.

When asked if that meant floor debate on Kavanaugh could take place Monday or Tuesday, he said, “I would think so, if things were to stay on schedule, unless something derailed it along the way.”

“Again, we’ll see what happens on Thursday. But at this point, if nothing changes, my assumption would be from a timing standpoint that we could begin that process Friday, Saturday timeframe and wrap it up next week sometime,” the Republican Conference chairman said

Under that timeline, a Judiciary Committee markup might take place Friday, allowing Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to file a cloture to cut off debate on the nominee as early as Saturday, which would set up a Monday vote to limit the debate on the Supreme Court nominee.

Continue reading →