RUTHFULLY YOURS

WASHINGTON (JTA) — Kenneth Marcus has worked for years inside and outside government to advocate for civil liberties. He has also been involved for years in Jewish community advocacy.

Now Marcus, the founder and president of the Louis S. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, is up for a prestigious job at the Department of Education — assistant secretary for civil rights. On Thursday, the Senate Health and Education Committee approved Marcus along party lines, and now his nomination goes to the full Senate.

In recent weeks, my inbox has been cluttered with statements pushing a narrative that what’s keeping Democrats from backing Marcus is his role in fighting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement targeting Israel.

What’s remarkable is that both sides of the BDS equation — the movement’s supporters and opponents — are colluding unintentionally in advancing the narrative.

Groups that back BDS have argued against Marcus’ nomination, pointing to his aggressive tactics while heading the Brandeis Center to counter anti-Israel activities on campus by defining them as an attack on the civil rights of Jewish students. Two organizations, Palestine Legal and Jewish Voice for Peace, have lobbied hard against Marcus.

“Marcus not only poses a danger to those who advocate for Palestinian human rights, but to all students and to the spirit of the university itself,” Jewish Voice for Peace said in a statement following the committee vote.

Which makes sense — interest groups nudging their issue to the center is not new. What is not immediately clear is why organizations ostensibly committed to making BDS go away are giving their issue oxygen.

A coalition of 60 pro-Israel groups wrote a letter Jan. 15, before the committee vote, urging the panel to approve Marcus across party lines. It included a statement from Jeff Robbins, a Democrat and Clinton-era U.S. delegate to what was then the U.N. Human Rights Commission, noting that the nomination “has been bitterly criticized by the fringe and unhinged groups who operate something of an anti-Semitism lobby. Democrats in the Senate would do well not to fall for it.”

But why bring it up when Democrats in the Senate barely seem to be paying attention to criticism of the nominee’s posture on Israel or anti-Semitism? Notably, no major centrist or liberal group signed on to the letter; the signatories trend conservative and hawkish in Israel, including Americans for a Safe Israel, CAMERA and the Zionist Organization of America. I asked the publicist who is touting the letter why the groups are making Israel a central issue when there is little evidence it is a central issue. She said she would canvas the signatories, but by press time she did not come up with a reply.

On Dec. 5, I logged into the Senate Health and Education Committee website and listened to hours of Marcus being grilled and praised. Not once did BDS come up.

Yet now The New York Times has taken up the narrative, framing Marcus’ Israel advocacy as central to the controversy over his nomination. “An Advocate for Israel Draws Fire as He Nears Confirmation to Civil Rights Post” was the headline Thursday on its website.

Only twice did I hear a reference to Marcus’ Jewish advocacy during his committee appearance. The first time, in introducing Marcus, the committee’s chairman, Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., picked from a pile of endorsements before him a letter from Hillel International describing Marcus as “a longtime champion for civil rights and for college students.”

Hours after Houthi militants in Yemen launched a new missile at Saudi Arabia on December 19, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, took her blue seat at the horseshoe-shaped table of the Security Council. “Thankfully,” she said, “the missile was intercepted before it could hit its intended target,” which apparently was a palace in Riyadh, the Saudi capital. “But the very fact of this attack is a flashing red siren for this council.” Backed by Iran, Haley said, the Houthis have fired missiles at civilians before. “Unless we act,” she warned, the latest one “won’t be the last.”

Haley’s remarks came during the most intense week of her yearlong tenure at Turtle Bay, at a time when most of the rest of the U.N. preferred not to discuss Iranian threats and instead wanted to jabber about Israel — in other words, to ignore literal missiles and instead lob figurative ones at President Trump for his decision to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. On December 18, as the 14 non-American members of the Security Council rushed to approve a resolution condemning Trump’s decision, Haley cast her first veto.

“It was an unfortunate moment but a proud moment, knowing we were in the right,” she said the next day, in an interview with National Review at her office across the street from U.N. headquarters. “Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. Everyone knows this. We have to acknowledge the truth. Once you get the truth out of the way, you can do so much.”

Ambrose Bierce once defined “diplomacy” as “the patriotic art of lying for one’s country.” Haley nevertheless has become America’s great truth-teller, flouting diplomatic conventions to speak plainly and with toughness about the provocations of Iran, the rights of Israel, U.S. sovereignty, and much more. Before Trump tapped her for the United Nations, she was the young and attractive Republican governor of South Carolina with a bright future in domestic politics.

A year later, she has transformed herself into a hero of many foreign-policy conservatives, even drawing comparisons to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, her predecessor who in 1975 famously denounced the U.N.’s efforts to equate Zionism with racism. Moynihan’s moment of moral clarity propelled him to the U.S. Senate, where he served four terms. Haley’s future is anybody’s guess: Will she succeed Rex Tillerson as secretary of state? Does she harbor presidential ambitions? It remains as bright as ever, even as it now appears headed in new and unexpected directions.

Haley’s parents are Sikhs from the Punjab. The birthplaces of her three siblings trace the family’s journey around the globe: India, Canada, and the United States, where her father took a job as a biology professor at Voorhees College in South Carolina. The future ambassador was born in nearby Bamberg in 1972 as Nimrata Randhawa. She soon became known to everyone as “Nikki,” a childhood nickname that means “little one.” Accounts of her youth often mention her participation as a four-year-old in the Wee Miss Bamberg pageant. Traditionally, the town had picked two winners, one black and one white. The judges didn’t know what to do with Nikki, whose father wore a turban and her mother a sari. So they disqualified her.

Is there a “three strikes and you’re out” law for political narratives?

Democrats and their media allies were back at the Collusion Reclamation Project this week. The new and improved version is: The NRA did it.

As we have recently recounted, the first breathless attempt to suggest a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin to subvert the 2016 presidential election centered on Carter Page. A tangential foreign-policy adviser to the Trump campaign, Page featured prominently in the Steele dossier. Anonymous Russian sources reporting to former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele placed him at the core of an espionage enterprise that entailed hacking Democratic-party emails and negotiating a corrupt quid pro quo arrangement with Putin operatives to give Russia sanctions relief.

That storyline appears to have gone by the boards with the revelation that the dossier — already in disrepute as salacious, unverified, and convincingly refuted in key particulars — was actually an opposition-research project funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign. Facing libel lawsuits, Steele himself has taken the position that his third- and fourth-hand hearsay information was “raw” and “unverified,” passed along to American law enforcement because he thought it should be investigated, not because he was vouching for its truthfulness. His collaborator, Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson, has similarly offered nothing meaningful in the way of corroboration in testimony before Senate and House investigators. At the moment, the more pressing question about the dossier involves not the contents of its sensational allegations but whether they were used by the Obama Justice Department and FBI in obtaining a FISA-court warrant to spy on Page and the Trump campaign.

The collapse of the dossier led the media to cobble together a new foundation for their rickety collusion tale. We were treated to gin-mill chatter between an even more obscure Trump-campaign figure, twentysomething climber George Papadopoulos, and an Australian diplomat. Papadopoulos told his companion that he’d heard from Kremlin-connected sources that Russia had emails that could be damaging to the Clinton campaign. Australian intelligence thought so little of the exchange that they waited months to alert their American counterparts, and the FBI thought so little of it that they waited for months — i.e., until after the election — to interview Papadopoulos.

Similarly, Special Counsel Robert Mueller thought so little of it that he let Papadopoulos plead out to a process crime of lying to FBI agents. It is no wonder: While his story is titillating for the media and Democrats because it feeds the Trump-Russia banter, it is a body blow to a prosecutor trying to establish a Trump-Russia espionage conspiracy (which you may vaguely remember as the original “collusion” claim). At best, Papadopoulos’s version of events means the Trump campaign had nothing to do with Russia’s acquisition of Clinton emails. More likely, Papadopoulos’s contacts were bluffing — neither he nor the Trump campaign got emails from Russia and there is, to date, no proof that the Kremlin had them in the first place. There being no actionable collusion evidence, Mueller was in no position to induce Papadopoulos into a collusion-based guilty plea.

Twinkle, twinkle, pussyhat!
How I wonder what you’re at!
Up above the world you fly,
Like a tea tray in the sky.
(With apologies to Lewis Carroll)

The Women’s March and the Pussyhat Project—its sea of pink pussy hats tipped to Donald Trump—has reached its first birthday! But wait . . . instead of wearing party hats to a celebration, this weekend’s events were more like the Mad Hatter’s un-birthday: the Feminist Wonderland has begun to unravel.

After only one year, pussyhats are old hat. Along with the founders of the Pussyhat Project, the organizers of the Women’s March are peddling new wares and new reasons for women to come together in “support and solidarity for women’s rights and political resistance.”

What happened to the pussyhats? The question reminds me of when the Mad Hatter riddles “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” and then we, like the March Hare and Alice, are swallowed whole into the confusion that ensues, with no way to rationally answer a nonsensical question.

The riddle we might ask the Pussy Hatters is “Why are the pussyhats ‘all hat and no cattle?’” It’s difficult to imagine how this weekend’s march in Washington, D.C. could have been anything near last year’s spectacle. Besides, how could it possibly be as inclusive if the women aren’t all wearing their matchy-matchy vulva headgear?

Pussy Hatters must have gotten a real bee in their bonnets when they began to contemplate some of last year’s ridicule: As I said a year ago, “it seems they forgot the lesson of the infamously retired ‘flesh’-colored crayon.” And now, though they still assert that their choice of Barbie-pink represents femininity, their skewed sensibilities tell them the color is not very inclusive of female anatomical diversity.

The Women’s March chapter in Pensacola, Florida posted to its Facebook page that “the Pink Pussy Hat is white-focused and Eurocentric in that it assumes that all vaginas are pink.” Madly enough, not only do they worry that their hats might be mistaken to represent only white women’s vulvas, they state that since “not all women have pussies,” they don’t want to appear they are promoting “Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminism”: you know, the feminist crime of excluding men who identify as women.

Now hold onto your own hats here, because then they literally instruct that women tuck in those vulvic corners, and wear any kind of hat that doesn’t look like a pussy!

Playwright Tennessee Williams said that he found “no refuge but writing” and couldn’t resist gilding even his paintings with words. On one self-portrait, the author scrawled “very flattering”; on another, he signed the canvas on the white undershirt he is wearing.

The pictures—one is from 1939, the other isn’t dated—capture Williams’s face and his bare shoulders, in a simple representational style, against a vivid blue background. They are part of a wide-ranging exhibition on the writer of plays such as “The Glass Menagerie” and “A Streetcar Named Desire,” opening Feb. 2 at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York. Williams started painting as a young man and made it a lifelong hobby. The exhibit also includes an undated oil portrait by Williams of Pancho Rodriguez, his lover at the time he was working on “Streetcar.”

The poems of Hart Crane entranced Williams, but in 1936, a performance of Henrik Ibsen’s dark drama, “Ghosts,” literally propelled the would-be-poet from his seat and into pacing back and forth. The drama “took the top of his brain off,” said Carolyn Vega, an associate curator in the department of literary and historical manuscripts at the Morgan, who organized the exhibition.

The Morgan exhibit focuses on six plays Williams created between 1939 and 1957, from the threshold of fame to the height of his powers. He left behind a prodigious trail of journals, letters, poems, short stories, one-acts and full-length plays. The exhibit also includes first editions, posters, programs and photographs from his plays—including a 1947 image of a then-little-known Marlon Brando and his co-stars on the first day of rehearsals for “A Streetcar Named Desire,” which made Brando’s name. CONTINUE AT SITE

“I’ve had a lot of bad ideas in my life,” former U.N. ambassador Samantha Power tells Politico. “Though none as immortalized as that one.”

Wow. It’s a major concession. And what might “that one” be?

Not standing idly by in the White House while Iranians protested a fixed election in 2009, then advocating a nuclear agreement that bankrolled the theocratic regime’s expansionism and militarism and corruption. Not serving as U.S. representative to an international body that took no effectual action to stop the Syrian civil war, in which more than 400,000 people have been killed, civilians gassed, and millions of refugees gone to Jordan, Turkey, and Europe. Not flacking for a president who, out of fear of reprisal, waited until a month after the 2016 election to punish Russia for interfering in American democracy, who spent years trying to coax Vladimir Putin onto the “off ramp” from the illegal annexation of Crimea, did nothing more than scold Russia after learning it had violated the INF treaty, reduced America’s nuclear deterrent at the very moment our adversaries were building up their armaments, denied Ukrainians lethal defensive aid against Russia-backed separatists, and routinely put up obstacles to domestic extraction industries that undercut Russia’s share of the energy market. She’s not talking about any of that.

What Samantha Power regrets is allowing documentarians to record the election-night party she threw, in the words of Susan Glasser, “for all 37 female ambassadors to the U.N. as well as feminist icon Gloria Steinem and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to celebrate what they all expected to be Hillary Clinton’s inevitable victory.”

The cameras “immortalized” Power and company’s colossal self-regard and misjudgment, thus making the film, “The Final Year,” a fitting send-off for the Obama crew. But back to that party: “As a host, I was kind of hoping it wouldn’t be quite the blowout it was anticipated to be, because I wanted to make sure that people had a chance to interact with Gloria Steinem,” Power tells Glasser. You can see where she’s coming from. Imagine how awkward it would have been for Power if the election were called for Hillary before guests finished the tomato-soup shooters and the delegate from Timor-Leste told Steinem how cool it was to hear her sampled in the video for Jennifer Lopez’s “Ain’t Your Mama.” How would Power’s guests have spent the rest of the evening? Gossiping about Hillary’s pick for secretary of state while dealing hands of “Cards Against Humanity” as “Fight Song” played on a loop? That would have been a letdown. “I wanted to milk the soft power dividend of this moment,” Power goes on, in one of the weirdest and somewhat terrifying mixed metaphors I have ever encountered.

So we’re in for another bit of high-stakes shutdown theatre, as evil moustache-twirling Republicans (it’s always Republicans, even when it’s Democrats) strap the lovely damsel of Big Government to the tracks just as the Friday midnight express is rounding the bend. At his press conference today, however, Mick Mulvaney, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, said that this time round they’d be working to minimize the impact of the shutdown – whereas, last time round, for political reasons, the White House set out to maximize it. Mr Mulvaney called this “weaponizing the shutdown” – which the Obama Administration certainly did, up to the point of seizing and detaining blameless foreigners – which is, oddly, what they now accuse Trump of doing. This 2013 piece is anthologized in my book The [Un]documented Mark Steyn, personally autographed copies of which are exclusively available at the SteynOnline bookstore:

If a government shuts down in the forest and nobody hears it, that’s the sound of liberty dying. The so-called shutdown is, as noted last week, mostly baloney: Eighty-three percent of the supposedly defunded government is carrying on as usual, impervious to whatever restraints the people’s representatives might wish to impose, and the 800,000 soi-disant “non-essential” workers have been assured that, as soon as the government is once again lawfully funded, they will be paid in full for all the days they’ve had at home.

But the one place where a full-scale shutdown is being enforced is in America’s alleged “National Park Service,” a term of art that covers everything from canyons and glaciers to war memorials and historic taverns. The NPS has spent the last two weeks behaving as the paramilitary wing of the DNC, expending more resources in trying to close down open-air, unfenced areas than it would normally do in keeping them open. It began with the war memorials on the National Mall — that’s to say, stone monuments on pieces of grass under blue sky. It’s the equivalent of my New Hampshire town government shutting down and deciding therefore to ring the Civil War statue on the village common with yellow police tape and barricades.

Still, the NPS could at least argue that these monuments were within their jurisdiction — although they shouldn’t be. Not content with that, the NPS shock troops then moved on to insisting that privately run sites such as the Claude Moore Colonial Farm and privately owned sites such as Mount Vernon were also required to shut. When the Pisgah Inn on the Blue Ridge Parkway declined to comply with the government’s order to close (an entirely illegal order, by the way), the “shut down” Park Service sent armed agents and vehicles to blockade the hotel’s driveway.

Even then, the problem with a lot of America’s scenic wonders is that, although they sit on National Park Service land, they’re visible from some distance. So, in South Dakota, having closed Mount Rushmore the NPS storm troopers additionally attempted to close the view of Mount Rushmore — that’s to say a stretch of the highway, where the shoulder widens and you can pull over and admire the stony visages of America’s presidents. Maybe it’s time to blow up Washington, Jefferson & Co. and replace them with a giant, granite sign rising into the heavens bearing the chiseled inscription “DON’T EVEN THINK OF PARKING DOWN THERE.”

Two hundred and seventy years ago this month, aged 42 and weeks from the midpoint of his long life, Benjamin Franklin did something highly unusual. He retired. Specifically, he sat down at a perennially cluttered desk in his cramped Philadelphia print shop and signed an innovative “Co-Partnership” agreement with his foreman, David Hall. The document was a scant two pages in length, but it immediately changed the trajectory of Franklin’s life and career. Not coincidentally, later that year Franklin hired the distinguished Colonial artist Robert Feke to paint his portrait (now held in the Portrait Collection of the Harvard Art Museums) and record this pivotal moment for posterity.

Franklin’s retirement (memorialized in his best-selling autobiography) helped establish the modern concept of a multi-career life and ranks among his great inventions. The transaction gave 50 percent ownership of his firm to Hall. Franklin’s printing business was unlike any other in the Colonies: in the eighteenth century, printing was an inherently local trade focused on small business and government customers, and staple products like stationery, legal notices, currency, invoices, and invitations. Franklin cracked this parochial model open along two dimensions: as publisher of the Pennsylvania Gazette newspaper and the wildly popular Poor Richard’s Almanac, he was a substantial owner of copyrights. He was also a sort of pioneering venture capitalist, providing custom-designed presses to aspiring printers in far-flung places (New York, Newport, Charleston, even Antigua) in return for a share in the profits.

Franklin was anxious to move on to other activities, but in the embryonic economy of mid-eighteenth century Philadelphia, the option of selling his firm did not exist. There were no investment bankers, no Googles or Amazons voraciously looking for acquisitions. The outline of the deal with Hall was based on the template created in his earlier printing investments and was designed to solve this problem by guaranteeing Franklin the next best thing to an outright sale: a long-term passive income.

There is an elegant simplicity about the entire arrangement with Hall. (Two pages! Today’s equivalent would be at least 25 times that length.) In return for the contracts, copyrights, type, and presses, Franklin received 50 percent of the profits for an 18-year period.

Donald Trump spent 90 minutes talking to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer at the White House on Friday trying to avoid a government shutdown, and after he left Mr. Schumer vouchsafed that “we made some progress.” But apparently not enough to stop him and his fellow Democrats from threatening to filibuster a government funding bill as we reached our Friday deadline. This is what Mr. Trump’s life will be like, times about 10, if Democrats retake the House and Senate in November. They’re going to torture him like a dancing bear.

The most important political fact of this latest shutdown melodrama is that Democrats feel they can get away with it. Democrats are essentially doing what GOP Senators Ted Cruz and Mike Lee tried in 2013 over repealing ObamaCare: Refuse to fund the government over an unrelated policy issue.

Democrats pilloried Republicans for that one, and Nancy Pelosi called them “legislative arsonists.” But now Mr. Schumer has rallied Democrats, or perhaps they’ve rallied him, to shut down the government over an immigration deadline that is still six weeks away and has nothing to do with funding the government. The audacity is impressive.

The House has passed its funding bill for 30 days along with some policy priorities Democrats profess to want, such as a six-year extension of the CHIP program for children’s health care. Mr. Trump says he’s waiting to sign it. But Mr. Schumer still wants to hold Mr. Trump and the government hostage to the minority’s political priority on immigration.

Democrats are insisting on their timetable for a deal to legalize the so-called Dreamers even though the two sides have only begun to negotiate in earnest and even though Mr. Trump has said he wants to work something out. Mr. Schumer is showing Mr. Trump who’s really in charge.