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Protecting the climate by trashing Mother Earth By Ethel C. Fenig

By on May 1st, 2017

Another spring day, another massive temper tantrum, exploding brain meltdown, euphemistically called a “march” protesting “climate change,” by the real liberal-left now that their alt/antifa unwanted one-world, phony-science, no-tolerance-for-diversity has been massively rejected in the U.S. and Europe — not to mention the slaughterhouses of the Middle East and North Korea.

On Saturday, there were so-called marches for the climate across the country. Well, you can’t really be against climate, can you? It is there. If you don’t like the climate where you presently live, move. Or buy some air conditioning and/or heating equipment. But no, that doesn’t work for the climatistas. But yes, all the human hot air expended at these silly gathering certainly changed the immediate climate, unlike the several previous Ice Ages in which the climate-change cold cycle seemed to begin and then end several thousands of years later without any human interference.

But then, during those cold, colder, coldest times renowned environmentalist and climatologist Leonard DiCaprio, in between being paid untold millions for acting gigs, wasn’t around to enlighten the planet. Now he is. Dashing in from one of his many luxurious energy-guzzling homes — or maybe from one of his equally energy-guzzling yachts all well-stocked with nubile under-30 females — he proclaimed, “Climate Change is Real”. Well, who can argue with an authority like a Hollywood star? The gaggle-eyed spineless resisters didn’t.

Afterwards, exhausted and exhilarated from the attention their childish, feel-good behavior, the overgrown climate marching mental two-year-olds departed, leaving behind, as two-year-olds do, their detritus – garbage — for others, the adults who don’t believe in climate change but in cleanliness, to clean up. As happened on Earth Day/March for Science the week before. As on the Women’s March a few months earlier. And the garbage from the March For Life before that. Oh, wait… those marchers cleaned up after themselves. What? Wait? Are the real planet lovers people who want kids and mostly don’t believe in climate change?

Of course, the average reader didn’t read about environmentalist’s casual disregard for garbage on this delicate planet in any respectable Washington-based news outlet because they were busy preparing for the White House Correspondents Association dinner a few hours after the climate march. The self-important correspondents missed the march, so they couldn’t report on it and its trashy aftermath. Instead, at the dinner, they heard trash talk from their master of ceremonies, a son of immigrants of some color, who criticized the president — “the elephant not in the room” — for doing his job of listening to the citizens of the country in person instead of through the warped “reporting” lens of those professionally assigned to the task. Elephants! Oh, the animal cultural appropriation!

Later at the dinner, Bob Woodward reassured the noncorresponding correspondents by addressing the absent Donald Trump (R), “Mr. President, the media is not fake news.” The fake news newsies applauded. Bathed in self-love and desirable victimhood, the correspondents left their gathering, leaving the mainly minimum-wage staff to clean up after them, thus protecting the planet’s climate.

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The Bolton Unmasking Files Democrats give Susan Rice a pass they didn’t give to John Bolton.

By on May 1st, 2017

Democrats and their press allies are going all in to squelch the Susan Rice “unmasking” story, insisting that the decision by Barack Obama’s national security adviser to seek the name of at least one Trump campaign official was routine and no big deal. Tell that to former Bush Administration official John Bolton, whom Democrats pilloried for doing the same with far more justification.

The U.S. routinely eavesdrops on foreign officials, and sometimes U.S. citizens are caught on tape. Intelligence agencies strip the names of those U.S. citizens for privacy. A source confirms that Ms. Rice nonetheless requested the name of a Trump transition official in at least one intelligence summary, and Ms. Rice has all but confirmed that she did.

Democrats and the media have been at pains to call this business as usual. House Intelligence Committee Democrat Adam Schiff released a tutorial on why unmasking is “lawful.” “Susan Rice Did Nothing Wrong,” said an NBC headline, quoting no one on the record.

That’s not what liberals said in 2005 as they opposed Mr. Bolton’s nominate to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Then Senators Joe Biden and Chris Dodd kicked up a fuss that, as Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, Mr. Bolton had 10 times over four years asked for the names of American officials who were swept up in National Security Agency monitoring.

Mr. Bolton and the State Department were clear that he followed procedure and provided intelligence officials with sound national-security reasons for requesting the names. Interpreting intelligence was central to Mr. Bolton’s duties, so unmasking names on rare occasions wouldn’t be unusual.

Critics nonetheless assailed Mr. Bolton for behavior for which they now absolve Mrs. Rice. Mr. Dodd claimed unmasking was “rarely requested” and “infrequently” by “non-career political appointees such as Mr. Bolton.” The New York Times reported that the identifies of Americans are released “only in response to special requests, and these are not common, particularly from policy makers.”

Democrats argued (with no evidence) that Mr. Bolton’s requests were politically motivated and the Los Angeles Times questioned whether Mr. Bolton had requested the names to “intimidate intelligence analysts.” A Times editorial called on Mr. Bolton to “step aside,” noting Mr. Dodd was “rightly inquiring about Bolton’s unusual request to look at [NSA] intercepts and why he asked for the identities of analysts. Why indeed?”

House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes recently stepped aside from his committee’s Russia probe after complaints that he talked publicly about the unmasking. But in 2005 Democrats couldn’t stop talking to the press, mostly complaining that Bush intelligence agencies wouldn’t give Congress the names of those Mr. Bolton had unmasked. “I just think it’s important to remember here that Mr. Bolton himself was able to look at this classified information,” said then Sen. Barack Obama.

The Administration ultimately agreed to show transcripts (with the names redacted) to top members of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Democrats then drew up a list of 36 individuals whom Mr. Bolton had clashed with over the years and called on National Intelligence Director John Negroponte to rule out that these were the people Mr. Bolton had unmasked.

Senator Jay Rockefeller claimed that Mr. Bolton’s decision to share the name of one unmasked citizen with a direct subordinate (who possessed the necessary security clearances) was improper and amounted to the mishandling of classified information. Democrats dug in, and Mr. Bush was forced to name Mr. Bolton to the U.N. as a recess appointment.

Compare all this to the Rice episode. Ms. Rice had no direct intelligence duties in her NSC post, and no Democrat has provided a valid reason that Ms. Rice might have needed to unmask anyone associated with the Trump presidential campaign. Twelve years on, not one of the 10 individuals unmasked by Mr. Bolton has had his or her identity leaked. By contrast, the Washington Post reports that no fewer than nine Obama appointees or career officials leaked or confirmed the identity and conversations of unmasked former Trump adviser Michael Flynn.

If John Bolton’s unmasking was questionable, then Mrs. Rice’s was more so. The House and Senate Intelligence committees should investigate what she did and why.

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See the astonishing reason actor Richard Dreyfuss left Tucker Carlson absolutely speechless

By on May 1st, 2017

THANKS DPS

Actor Richard Dreyfuss, known for roles in “Jaws,” “The Goodbye Girl” and “Mr. Holland’s Opus,” left Fox News host Tucker Carlson utterly speechless on his show Friday night.

Dreyfuss, according to Carlson, emailed the Fox host a few days prior asking to appear on Carlson’s show to talk about a recent issue that Carlson and another guess sparred over: the federal judge’s recent ruling which said that it’s unconstitutional for President Donald Trump to unilaterally withhold federal funds from “sanctuary cities” for not complying with his demands.

Carlson’s point was there was no outcry from Democrats when former President Barack Obama threatened to withhold federal funds from North Carolina last year over the state’s controversial “transgender bathroom law.”

Dreyfuss explained to Carlson that the president and the executive branch, constitutionally speaking, don’t have the right to withhold funds from states. That job, Dreyfuss explained, belongs to Congress.

But Dreyfuss didn’t want his conversation with Carlson to end there.

“I want to mention one thing,” the actor told Carlson. “You were talking about the speakers on university campuses. And I am totally, incontrovertibly on your side about this.”

“I think any intrusion into freedom of speech is an intrusion into freedom of speech. And when one of the presidents of one of the colleges said, ‘this is a school, not a battlefield,’ I said, no, it is a battlefield of ideas and we must have dissonant, dissenting opinions on campuses and I think it’s political correctness taken to a nightmarish point of view,” Dreyfuss explained.

The star actor continued:

I have withdrawn from partisan politics. I am a constitutionalist who believes that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights must be central and the parties must be peripheral. What’s most important for me is what you just mentioned haphazardly, we are over 30. Civics has not been taught in the American public school system since 1970. And that means everyone in Congress never studied the constitution and the bill of rights as you and I might have.

And that is a critical flaw because it’s why we were admired and respected for so long, it gives us our national identity, it tells the world who we are and why we are who we are, and without a frame that gives us values that stand behind the bill of rights, we’re just floating in the air and our sectors of society are not connected.

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Trump and Congress Can Help Restore Campus Free Speech Withdraw the Obama Title IX ‘guidance’ and tie federal funds to respect for the First Amendment. By Harvey Silverglate

By on May 1st, 2017

Mr. Silverglate, a co-author of “The Shadow University,” is a co-founder and board member of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. Samantha Harris, FIRE’s vice president for policy research, contributed to this article.

The culture of censorship within higher education is now legendary. And although the problem is of long standing, the Obama administration made it worse by giving academic bureaucrats a convenient excuse—“the feds made us do it”—for punishing speech. The Trump administration and Congress could help restore academic freedom, without which higher education cannot flourish.

Campus censorship affects faculty as well as students and guest speakers. And conservatives aren’t the only targets. At Louisiana State University, Teresa Buchanan’s tenure didn’t protect her from dismissal in 2015 for occasionally using vulgar language in her education classes. She did so, she said, to prepare future teachers for the language they would encounter from some students. Administrators ignored a unanimous faculty committee recommendation against termination and a report of the American Association of University Professors that found Ms. Buchanan’s academic freedom was violated.

In a statement to the press, LSU claimed it was following “the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights’ advisements.” That would be a 2013 OCR statement, in a settlement with the University of Montana, that in order to comply with federal antidiscrimination laws, universities must ban “unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature,” including “verbal” conduct—in other words, speech. LSU gave these “advisements” weight because of OCR’s power to withhold federal funding. The Obama administration’s overreach in higher education produced many stories like Ms. Buchanan’s.

The new administration has an opportunity to undo this damage. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos should instruct OCR to rescind its “guidance” undermining the right to free speech and guarantee that universities that receive federal dollars return to their role as centers of inquiry and learning, not censorship and indoctrination. Further, OCR’s practice of setting national standards through “guidance”—without seeking comment from academic institutions and the public—should end. Future regulations should be subject to open debate, as mandated by the Administrative Procedure Act. CONTINUE AT SITE

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The Spreading Tentacles of Censorship By Eileen F. Toplansky

By on May 1st, 2017

The list of those who are “disinvited” to forums where free speech should exist keeps getting longer. In some ways, it is a badge of honor to be included in that list; in other aspects, of course, it is the abject failure to respect the right to hold an opinion. Ultimately, it is “campus fascism” on the rise.

Phyllis Chesler is the latest victim after having been “disinvited by the King Fahd Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Arkansas Law School.” In her article titled “Being a Zionist is even worse than being an Islamophobe,” she describes being censored by a state university. She was part of a conference on a subject on which she is an expert, having studied the topic of honor killings for many years and she has a track record as an academic, an author, a human rights activist and women’s rights leader. But none of this mattered since, as so many are learning, “objectivity, true facts, clear reasoning, genuine intellectual diversity and the capacity for self-criticism” are now verboten — gone from centers of academic learning.

Instead they are replaced with vulgarity, incivility, obtuse thinking, censorship, and outright violence.

Bruce Bawer writes a searing appraisal of the hypocrisy of three Center faculty members — Joel Gordon, Ted Swedenburg and Mohja Kahf — who “slammed” Chesler. These three found Chesler’s alleged anti-Muslim bigotry, hate speech and lack of a diversity of views so abhorrent that she needed to be shut down. The fact that Chesler has “spent her career decrying the systematic misogyny in Islamic cultures” while highlighting the refusal of many of her former feminist allies to address this issue was just too much for these intellectual weaklings.

Thus, Phyllis Chesler joins the ranks of other worthy and courageous individuals such as Milo Yiannopoulous, Ann Coulter, Charles Murray, Heather McDonald, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Nonie Darwish, Brigitte Gabriel, and David Horowitz, whose voices are being silenced in institutions of higher learning.

And so the symposium went on without the expertise of Dr. Chesler. In fact, “no one contacted [her]. No one sent a letter of regret or support and no one issued a statement of solidarity.” Consequently, “. . . yet another disgraceful episode in the ever-lengthening chronicle of campus compromise and cowardice on the topic of Islam” occurred.

It is way overdue that every one of these speakers who truly put their lives on the line to uphold the core principle of freedom of speech receives the unwavering support of all Americans.

It is way overdue that parents of students attending schools such as the University of Arkansas, University of California-Berkeley, and Claremont McKenna College to name a few, should remind administrators that such suppression of expression is a “view at odds with the foundation of this country. In fact Frederick Douglass, once said “speech suppression is the equivalent of theft.” And if a university fails to acknowledge this supremely profound idea, then it no longer deserves financial support.

It is high time that administrators publicly explain how they can justify violence on a campus that is supposed to be dedicated to the freedom of thought. Instead what we see are “administrators responding to the intellectual thuggery with sympathy and understanding.” They need to be held personally accountable for the violence and censorship.

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Gorsuch Puts Down the Left’s Serial Rapist In his first vote, Justice Gorsuch stood with us. Daniel Greenfield

By on April 27th, 2017

A few months after lefty activists crowded Washington D.C. for the Women’s March, activists from many of those same organizations went to bat for a serial rapist and murderer.

Ledell Lee’s victims were all women. While he was on trial for the rape and murder of Debra Reese, the testimony of three of his rape victims was presented. Lee had made a habit of knocking on doors and asking to borrow some tools to see whether a woman’s husband might be home.

Debra Reese called her mother and told her that a strange man had tried to borrow some tools. A few minutes later, Ledell Lee had beaten her to death with a tire thumper. Marks on her neck showed that the former baby boutique worker had also been strangled.

Then Lee headed out to spend the $300 he had stolen from her.

Three years earlier, Ledell Lee had attacked a 17-year-old girl while she was rocking her 3-month old niece to sleep. Lee hit her, dragged her out of the house, held her head under water until she lost consciousness and raped her.

A year after that atrocity, Ledell Lee attacked a 50-year-old woman walking home from the grocery store. He strangled her repeatedly, dragged her to the back of a building and raped her.

When Lee was caught after murdering Debra Reese, the evidence tied him to these assaults and two murders. He was convicted of two rapes and sentenced to death for his crimes against Debra Reese. Justice would be done. But first justice had to elbow past the ACLU and the pro-crime lobby.

In a Supreme Court dissent written on April 20, 2017, Justice Breyer whined, “Why now?” “The state is rushing to put him to death,” complained Nina Morrison of the badly misnamed Innocence Project.

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Sharia, Arkansas Style A low block by the Razorbacks. Bruce Bawer

By on April 27th, 2017

On April 13-15, the King Fahd Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Arkansas held a symposium on so-called “honor violence,” as exemplified by honor killings, forced marriage, and other such delightful acts. I’ll get back to this – but first of all, am I the only person who still finds it jarring to see words like “King Fahd Center for Middle East Studies” in the same sentence as words like “University of Arkansas”?

The Center, as its website informs us, “was founded with a $20 million endowment from the Saudi government in the mid-1990s. An initial endowment of $2 million, dedicated toward language, literary translation and publication was followed by a much larger $18 million gift designed to spark the foundation of a comprehensive Middle East Studies program at the undergraduate and graduate levels.”

Of course, this isn’t the only so-called “Middle East Studies” shebang based at a Western university, named for a Saudi royal, and funded by Saudi cash. Georgetown University famously boasts the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding – which, when you stop to think about it, is a strange name for a unit of a university, where you’d imagine that the idea would be not “understanding” in the touchy-feely sense suggested by the phrase “Muslim-Christian Understanding” but, rather, “understanding” in the sense of becoming informed about a subject. But anyway.

Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, the regal moneybags behind Georgetown’s lavish propaganda operation (as of last year he was the 41st richest person in the world) is also responsible for the Alwaleed Centre at the University of Edinburgh, the Alwaleed Bin Talal Islamic Studies Program at Harvard, and the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Islamic Studies at Cambridge, plus centers for American Studies bearing his name in Beirut and Cairo. In addition, according to Wikipedia, he’s “Citigroup’s largest individual shareholder, the second-largest voting shareholder in 21st Century Fox, and owns Paris’ Four Seasons Hotel George V and part of the Plaza Hotel,” presumably the one in New York.

A quick look at the prince: he’s tweeted that he wouldn’t “visit Jerusalem…until its liberation from the Zionist enemy.” He’s the guy who, after fifteen of his fellow Saudis laid down their lives for their God on September 11, 2001, gave then New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani a $10 million check and a lecture about the terrorist attack’s supposed roots in U.S. policies. (Giuliani, to his everlasting credit, turned down the check, in response to which the prince suggested that he’d done so out of fear of “Jewish pressures.”)

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Trump’s Big Tax Reform Plan Will the Left hold it hostage? Matthew Vadum

By on April 27th, 2017

The Trump administration unveiled an ambitious overhaul of federal tax laws yesterday that it is touting as the “largest tax cut for individuals and businesses in U.S. history.

Republicans on Capitol Hill seem cautiously optimistic about the plan even though it was immediately attacked by the hateful class-warfare-mongering Left.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) predictably described the plan as a “wish list for billionaires,” in a statement.

“The same Trickle Down Economics that undermined the middle class are alive and well in the President’s tax plan,” she said, without noting that the bogus concept of “Trickle Down Economics” was invented by the Left to mock market-based economics. “True to form, President Trump’s tax plan is short on details and long on giveaways to big corporations and billionaires.”

One of the House of Representatives’ most acute sufferers of Trump Derangement Syndrome, Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), tweeted that the plan is “Voodoo Economics on steroids. If you believe in magic, unicorns or Batman, this plan is for you.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said the plan would make “life easier for the wealthy and special interests” and “harder for middle class and lower income Americans.”

“This plan will be roundly rejected by taxpayers of all political stripes,” Schumer said. “The American people, once again, are learning that what President Trump promised in his campaign and what he’s doing are totally at odds.”

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), ranking member on the Senate Finance Committee, attacked the plan. “Light on details for people who work for a living, yet very detailed for the elite,” Wyden tweeted. “No estate tax, cut in capital gains and cut in top rate? All an #EliteGiveway. And yet the Trump team couldn’t tell you what the tax plan means for the typical American family. Self-serving & elitist.”

Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said the plan would help big businesses and the affluent. “We have a rigged economy designed to benefit the wealthiest Americans and large corporations,” Sanders huffed on Twitter. “Trump’s tax plan would make that system worse.”

GOP congressional leadership issued a lukewarm, open-ended endorsement of the tax reform plan. “The principles outlined by the Trump administration today will serve as critical guideposts” as lawmakers and the White House work on tax changes, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said.

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A Ruling about Nothing A federal judge suspends Trump’s unenforced ban on funding for sanctuary cities. By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on April 27th, 2017

A showboating federal judge in San Francisco has issued an injunction against President Trump’s executive order cutting off federal funds from so-called sanctuary cities. The ruling distorts the E.O. beyond recognition, accusing the president of usurping legislative authority despite the order’s express adherence to “existing law.” Moreover, undeterred by the inconvenience that the order has not been enforced, the activist court — better to say, the fantasist court — dreams up harms that might befall San Francisco and Santa Clara, the sanctuary jurisdictions behind the suit, if it were enforced. The court thus flouts the standing doctrine, which limits judicial authority to actual controversies involving concrete, non-speculative harms.

Although he vents for 49 pages, Judge William H. Orrick III gives away the game early, on page 4. There, the Obama appointee explains that his ruling is about . . . nothing.

That is, Orrick acknowledges that he is adopting the construction of the E.O. urged by the Trump Justice Department, which maintains that the order does nothing more than call for the enforcement of already existing law. Although that construction is completely consistent with the E.O. as written, Judge Orrick implausibly describes it as “implausible.”

Since Orrick ultimately agrees with the Trump Justice Department, and since no enforcement action has been taken based on the E.O., why not just dismiss the case? Why the judicial theatrics?

There appear to be two reasons.

The first is Orrick’s patent desire to embarrass the White House, which rolled out the E.O. with great fanfare. The court wants it understood that Trump is a pretender: For all the hullaballoo, the E.O. effectively did nothing. Indeed, Orrick rationalizes his repeated misreadings of what the order actually says by feigning disbelief that what it says could possibly be what it means. Were that the case, he suggests, there would have been no reason to issue the order in the first place.

Thus, taking a page from the activist left-wing judges who invalidated Trump’s “travel ban” orders, Orrick harps on stump speeches by Trump and other administration officials. One wonders how well Barack “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan” Obama would have fared under the judiciary’s new Trump Doctrine: The extravagant political rhetoric by which the incumbent president customarily sells his policies relieves a court of the obligation to grapple with the inevitably more modest legal text of the directives that follow.

Of course, the peer branches of government are supposed to presume each other’s good faith in the absence of a patent violation of the law. But let’s put aside the unseemliness of Orrick’s barely concealed contempt for a moment, because he is also wrong. The proper purpose of an executive order is to direct the operations of the executive branch within the proper bounds of the law. There is, therefore, nothing untoward about an E.O. that directs the president’s subordinates to take enforcement action within the confines of congressional statutes. In fact, it is welcome.

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Trump’s 100 Days Have Made a Good Start on Regulation He can take further steps to reduce new regs, repeal old ones, and increase transparency. By Jared Meyer

By on April 27th, 2017

Every new president, dating back to Jimmy Carter, has promised to cut regulations. Even President Obama’s executive orders on improving the regulatory process and cutting red tape sounded impressive when they were issued. That was before six of the seven all-time-high years for pages of federal regulations occurred during his tenure.

Four decades of nonstop growth in federal regulation show that tackling Washington’s bureaucracy is tougher than it sounds. The U.S. Code of Federal Regulations is more than 175,000 pages long, having grown steadily since the 1970s. Federal regulations aren’t just words on a page; these pages contain more than one million commandments from Washington in the form of restrictive words such as “must,” “cannot,” or “shall.”

But based on President Trump’s first 100 days, there is reason for optimism that this trend is about to change.

President Trump has already issued two executive orders on regulatory reform. They sent a message to executive agencies: Regulatory restrictions on businesses will not be able to keep growing on autopilot.

Trump’s hiring freeze will also help lower the rate of new regulations. As research from the Mercatus Center has shown, there is a high correlation between the number of employees at an agency and the number of regulations issued by that agency. President Trump has also taken advantage of the Congressional Review Act, which gives Congress the power to overturn recently finalized regulations through a simple majority vote. So far, he has signed at least 13 such repeals. Previously, this tool had been successfully used only once in its 20-year history.

Though President Trump’s lofty promise to cut regulation by “by 75 percent, maybe more” is likely unattainable, simply halting the growth in federal regulations would be a massive achievement. And the president has many methods available to him to accomplish this.

Moving into the next phase of his first term, there are three main legislative solutions that President Trump can use to follow through on his promises to cut regulation. These solutions address the accumulation of old regulations, the creation of costly new regulations, and the lack of public participation in the regulatory process.

First, the Trump Administration needs to get rid of outdated, ineffective regulations.

If President Trump decides to capitalize on his reputation as a deal maker, an innovative idea from the center-left Progressive Policy Institute would address regulatory accumulation. Both the Regulatory Improvement Act and the SCRUB Act create a “Regulatory Improvement Commission” to come up with a package of older regulations to eliminate that would then go through Congress for an up-or-down vote. Focusing on older regulations would take some of the politics out of regulatory reform, and voting on a large package in this way would limit the ability of established interests to interfere with the process.

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