RUTHFULLY YOURS

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.

Why do black lives only seem to matter when white people take them? Why does the president of the United States think it’s proper to take a horrible racial tragedy in Charleston South Carolina as an excuse to bash America as the violence capital of the “advanced” world, and a prop for Democrats’ lust for gun control legislation in a state that already has it?

Last year 82 people were shot over the Fourth of July weekend in Chicago. 16 of them died [2]. The victims and the shooters were black.

Clarence Thomas isn’t often the Supreme Court’s swing Justice, but he was on Thursday as the Court ruled on two cases that illuminate when the government can restrict speech. His answer is that the government has more power to do so when the speech belongs to the government.

The High Court issued a welcome verdict in Reed v. Town of Gilbert, ruling unanimously that the Arizona town’s limits on signs announcing church services violated the First Amendment. Gilbert said that Pastor Clyde Reed’s signs directing people to his church could be no larger than six square feet and displayed only 12 hours before and one hour after an event. The town put no such limits on political and ideological signs, and the Court ruled that this amounted to content discrimination against Rev. Reed.

“Innocent motives do not eliminate the danger of censorship presented by a facially content-based statute, as future government officials may one day wield such statutes to suppress disfavored speech,” wrote Justice Thomas, who was joined by the four conservatives and Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

AMEN TO THAT….RSK

If the Republicans make the mistake of nominating a pro-Common Core candidate to run for president in 2016, they’ll be positioning themselves to lose. It will be disastrous for the Republican Party and for the country, because we could very likely end up with Hillary Clinton as our next president. Both Jeb Bush and John Kasich – enthusiastic supporters of the top-down, federally influenced state education standards – are destined to go down with the Common Core ship and they’ll take the GOP with them if either one is at the top of the ticket in 2016.

Does that sound extreme? I think the numbers and the anecdotal evidence are on my side. Consider that there are some 50 million children enrolled in public schools in the United States, plus another 5 million who attend private schools, most of which are following the Common Core standards. A Gallup survey of parents with kids in public schools found that 35% view the standards unfavorably — and 18% have a “very negative” view of them. Even allowing that many families have more than one child in school, it’s still likely that a million parents think the standards are bad and probably at least half a million think they’re really bad. Add to that the grandparents and friends of the family who are hearing about it second hand and you’ve got a giant pool of Americans — all potential voters — who don’t like Common Core.

Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) said the federal government is “choking innovation” instead of creating an environment for it to flourish.

Booker, the former mayor of Newark, N.J., also said federal government rules and regulations on drones are blocking technological advances.He recommended the government open up datasets to fuel innovation.

“In New York, you can get an app, go to any restaurant and get any health data. Why should that health data be the privy of government alone? So I come to the United States Senate and I’m like, ‘wait a minute, the reason why we empower lobbyists in the Senate in the first place is because it’s so opaque, you can’t get data.’ We literally, if you want documents from the Senate, they are on a format that’s not readable, not XML, you have to get PDF files. Imagine if we, just in the Senate, did what industry is doing, what local governments are doing, opening up and making it more transparent,” Booker said at the Techonomy Policy conference.

These days major reports are coming out on the Gaza war last summer. The main issue of contention: did Israel go on a rampage in Gaza, killing civilians recklessly or even intentionally, or did it try to minimize civilian casualties as much as possible?

The report of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva should be out any day. The UNHRC is a notorious Israel-bashing body, 80% of whose resolutions [1] have condemned Israel. Prof. William Schabas, previous head of its current “fact-finding commission” on Gaza, had to step down when it turned out he’d been in the pay of the Palestinians [2]. This commission’s report is, of course, expected to hit Israel hard.

Few on Capitol Hill didn’t have an opinion on Pope Francis’ environmental encyclical today, which urged people to preserve God’s creation instead of turning Earth into an “immense pile of filth.”

“It is not enough to balance, in the medium term, the protection of nature with financial gain, or the preservation of the environment with progress,” the pope wrote. “Halfway measures simply delay the inevitable disaster. Put simply, it is a matter of redefining our notion of progress.”

“…Nobody is suggesting a return to the Stone Age, but we do need to slow down and look at reality in a different way, to appropriate the positive and sustainable progress which has been made, but also to recover the values and the great goals swept away by our unrestrained delusions of grandeur.”

This image provided by the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles shows the design of a proposed Sons of Confederate Veterans license plate. The Supreme Court has upheld Texas’ refusal to issue a license plate bearing the Confederate battle flag, rejecting a free-speech challenge. The court said Thursday that Texas can limit the content of license plates because they are state property and not the equivalent of a bumper sticker. (AP photo and caption.)

The Supreme Court today accelerated the dangerous erosion of First Amendment protection, making way for government censorship of expression that does not conform to its preferences. In Walker v. Sons of Confederate Veterans, the sharply divided Court ruled that the state of Texas could constitutionally engage in viewpoint discrimination by prohibiting a specialty license plate that depicted the Confederate flag.

You’re thinking, “What’s the harm?” After all, that flag is deemed by many – perhaps most (though I’ve done no research on the matter) – to be an offensive symbol of racism and slavery. Even if everyone doesn’t see it that way, enough do, and passionately so; thus, why should the state not ban the flag’s appearance on property that is issued by the government itself?

This, indeed, was the rationale of the five-justice majority — an interesting mix of the Court’s four consistent liberals (Justice Stephen Breyer, who wrote the opinion, and Justices Ruth Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan) with one of its staunchest conservatives, Justice Clarence Thomas. Reasoning that license plates — specialty or not — are “government speech,” Justice Breyer concluded that the state has the power, unregulated by the First Amendment, to express its views on matters of policy.

But is it really “government speech”? In dissent, Justice Samuel Alito (joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy) pointed out that the state has licensed some 350 specialty plates, some of which cannot conceivably be statements of government policy (e.g., “Rather Be Golfing”; “NASCAR – 24 Jeff Gordon”; Young Lawyers”; “Get It Sold With Remax”; and “University of Oklahoma” – a major football rival of Texas schools – as well as several other out-of-state institutions). In fact, the dissent pointed out, the state has also authorized a plate honoring “Buffalo Soldiers,” African American soldiers originally of the Army’s post-Civil War 20th Cavalry Regiment. While that outfit would be broadly popular no doubt, the plate offends at least some Native Americans, who protested that they felt the same way about the cavalry as African Americans did about the Confederacy.

The point, of course, is that although the state is the issuer of the license plates (which it requires all automobiles registered in Texas to display), the speech expressed on the specialty plates is associated with the private parties who propose, select, and exhibit the plates. Therefore, it is not reasonably understood as government speech; it is private speech that the government is regulating – and government has no business using its regulatory authority to favor or disfavor competing points of view.

Thus, at least in the narrow context of license plates, the Court has given its imprimatur to a government power to discriminate, to promote expression it approves of and suppress expression it does not. This is alarmingly inconsistent with the Constitution’s protection of private opinion or expression from government intrusion, suppression, or editing.

The decision is obnoxious even if it is truly confined to license plates. Concededly, the license plate is not a traditional speech medium, but today it functions like millions of small, mobile billboards. The disturbing thing, however, is that the consequences of this ruling could be far-reaching over time. It could come to stand for the proposition that essentially private speech morphs into government speech if the government is involved, however tangentially, in the funding or regulation of the format in which the speech is conveyed.

A recent NOAA article is just what Doctor Doom ordered. It claims the 18-year “hiatus” in rising planetary temperatures isn’t really happening. (The “pause” followed a 20-year modest temperature increase, which followed a prolonged cooling period.) The article states:

“Here we present an updated global surface temperature analysis that reveals that global trends are higher than reported by the IPCC, especially in recent decades, and that the central estimate for the rate of warming during the first 15 years of the 21st century is at least as great as the last half of the 20th century. These results do not support the notion of a ‘slowdown’ in the increase of global surface temperature.”

Published in Science magazine to ensure extensive news coverage before critics could expose its flaws, the report was indeed featured prominently in the national print, television, radio and electronic media.

An African-American millionaire can buy a home in any expensive suburb. Color is no longer a barrier. Despite this progress, President Obama’s Department of Housing and Urban Development is accusing expensive towns of racism, simply because most minorities can’t afford to live there.

Westchester County, N.Y., has struggled since 2009 under a plan by a federal monitor to compel the county to comply with HUD’s demands for multiunit affordable housing in expensive areas. Hillary Clinton claims to be a warrior against inequality.

But her adopted hometown of Chappaqua, an upscale Westchester village that one resident describes as “a little piece of heaven,” is battling HUD’s demands. The legal war in Hillary’s backyard is a preview.

GOP candidates clearly recognize the growing threat to the nation, in marked contrast with Hillary Clinton.
The high moments were few in Hillary Clinton’s kickoff campaign speech Saturday, though her tirade describing Republicans as the forces of “yesterday,” singing the same old song, was indisputably a crowd-pleaser. It was also conspicuous in its familiarity, as was Mrs. Clinton’s accompanying litany of accusations, each in its old-song way the quintessence of Obama-age social wisdom.

“I’ll fight back,” she declared, “against Republican efforts to disempower and disenfranchise young people, poor people, people with disabilities and people of color.” There was more of the kind about the oppression of women and gay people who love each other, and transgender people and their families—her encyclopedia of the victimized is long—and dark references to “CEOs and hedge-fund managers” and “billionaires and corporations.”