Supreme Court confounding its partisan critics By Jonathan Turley

https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/558050-supreme-court-confounding-its-partisan-critics

The Supreme Court this week continued to disappoint congressional Democrats and activists with a long line of embarrassingly unanimous, nonideological rulings. After all, the court is supposedly (to use President Biden’s words) “out of whack” due to its irreconcilable ideological divisions. Indeed, the court is allegedly so dysfunctionally divided that many, including Democratic leaders, have called for sweeping changes — from packing the court with new justices to changing its voting rules or even creating an alternative court.

That is why these weeks have so frustrated those who insist the court is a hopeless case of rigid ideologues. While next week could well bring some welcomed ideological divisions, the court is not making it easy on its critics.

Liberal Justice Stephen Breyer recently chafed at the claim that the court is “conservative” and condemned the calls to pack it with a liberal majority. A liberal group, “Demand Justice,” responded with billboard ads calling for Breyer’s resignation and warned him that he was risking his legacy. However, Breyer appears undeterred in ruling with his conservative colleagues when he considers that to be appropriate.

In the latest decision, Borden v. United States, the lineup of justices was strikingly nonideological. Justice Elena Kagan wrote the opinion for Justices Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Neil Gorsuch, with a concurrence from Justice Clarence Thomas — three liberal justices and two conservatives agreeing to limit the meaning of a “violent felony” for purposes of the Armed Career Criminal Act.

Last week, the decision in Van Buren v. United States was a majority of three liberals and three conservatives. In that case, the most senior justice was Breyer; he assigned it to his conservative colleague Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who wrote for Justices Breyer, Sotomayor, Gorsuch, Kagan and Brett Kavanaugh. Although he was on the other side in Van Buren, Justice Thomas joined his liberal colleagues in Borden.

These decisions follow a litany of unanimous decisions from the court, which seems to be sending a message in the timing of the release of its opinions: The justices do not rule on cases to send messages to Congress, but they do control what cases are accepted and when those decisions are released. It is hard not to view the last few weeks as a type of judicial “harrumph” to the continuing calls for court packing. While we expect more ideological splits in a few upcoming cases, these cases reaffirm that they are not so rigid or “hopelessly divided” as Democratic leaders and other critics have suggested. 

Civic Action, Civil Discourse & the Dogma of Systemic Racism By Peter Berkowitz

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/06/13/civic_action_civil_discourse__the_dogma_of_systemic_racism_145919.html

In a classic example of civic action, conservatives have undertaken a variety of initiatives to counter the upsurge in progressive efforts to enlist American schools, U.S. corporations, and all levels of government in the promotion of the doctrine that the United States is systemically racist. Progressives, who generally favor civic action, have responded with indignation, derision, and calumny. The vituperation they direct at conservatives suggests that progressives either think the campaign to entrench systemic racism as the conventional wisdom stands above all criticism or suspect that it is fatally vulnerable to scrutiny.

Progressives greet the conservative defense of old-fashioned liberal ideas like toleration, individual merit, and equal treatment for all with ad hominin attacks. They reproach conservatives for daring to question the tenets of critical race theory, Ibram X. Kendi’s “antiracism” catechism, and Robin DiAngelo’s pronouncements on “white fragility” — a body of controversial opinions that many progressives believe prove racism is latent in the American spirit and woven into nation’s institutions. And, as is common on both sides of the political spectrum these days, they divide the world into Us and Them, seeing theirs as the party of compassion and benevolence while casting conservatives as the party of the benighted and the bigoted.

Consider New Yorker staff writer Jelani Cobb’s recent denunciation of South Carolina Republican Sen. Tim Scott.

On April 28, Scott gave a forceful but measured response to President Biden’s address to Congress earlier that evening. Scott said that Biden “seems like a good man,” and “[h]is speech was full of good words.” Scott commended the president’s goals: “He promised to unite a nation. To lower the temperature. To govern for all Americans, no matter how we voted.” But the senator criticized the president and the Democrats he leads for betraying that promise. Instead of adopting “policies and progress that bring us closer together,” according to Scott, “the actions of the president and his party are pulling us further apart.”

Scott noted that in 2020 “under Republican leadership, we passed five bipartisan COVID packages.” But under the Biden administration, the senator lamented, the Democrats eschewed cooperation: “They spent almost $2 trillion on a partisan bill that the White House bragged was the most liberal bill in American history!”

What Happens if the Election Audits Go Trump’s Way? Andrew W. Coy

What will the military, the Supreme Court, and the people eventually do?  How will the military, the Supreme Court, and the masses react to the outcome?  How will the military move, how will the Supreme Court rule, and eventually do the masses rise up and take to the streets…if it becomes clear that the presidential election of 2020 was compromised, was stolen, or at the very least had way too many abnormalities and illegalities and thus the wrong person is possibly sitting in the White House?  What happens if it becomes clear that President Trump was re-elected and the Progressives actually stole the election?  What happens if we find out that the election was manipulated?  What happens if?

We might find out these answers in the coming months.  Maybe.  What about the forensic audits of the popular votes in the contested key states?

Before the actual election in November, President Trump predicted cheating as you’ve never seen before.  President Trump said there would be voter fraud like never before in U.S. history.  Many people throughout the White House believed and were certain that something felonious was about to happen.  At 10:30 on Election Night, President Trump was up by good margins in the key states.  Then the key states shut down the election tabulations of votes “for the night.”  (By the way, the stopping of counting votes for the night had never happened before in presidential history.)  And then when we woke up in the morning, after the tallying of votes was supposedly shut down “for the night,” Joe Biden had pulled ahead, stayed ahead, and assumed the White House.  As of this writing, Biden has 306 Electoral College votes, and President Trump has 232 votes.  Two hundred seventy votes is the magic number to win the presidency.

But what about the forensic audits in the key contested states?  Starting with Arizona, then Georgia, then Pennsylvania, then…

The collective insanity that’s rapidly erasing America Frank Liberato

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/06/the_collective_insanity_thats_rapidly_erasing_america.html

Many of us older than half a century no longer recognize the country we grew up in.  We have a hard time reconciling that past America with what we see happening today.  America, to our view, was predominantly a place of light, freedom, and joy.  Now, as we witness a massing storm of iniquity, we either don’t understand what we’re seeing or choke back the language to describe it because the words all sound too harsh or politically incorrect.  We look for other demons to blame such as socialism and Marxism, and while they are definitely part of the problem, what now haunts us is even darker than those malignancies.

This baleful presence has been gathering over the American landscape for some time and the pandemic provided just the right catalyst for it to become a clear and present danger.  It would now take an act of will to ignore its existence, but we still, too often, turn our faces away.

The individuals who make up the component parts of this devilry may believe that they act out of good intentions, but the sum of those parts empowers an evil system of racism, corruption, and violence.  It is an evil that is largely driven by a lust for absolute political power and complete control over the individual.  The modern world has seen this storm before, and we ignore it to our great peril.

China and Iran: Join Up the Dots The whole is much more than the sum of the parts by Gwythian Prins

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17465/china-iran

Sheikh Jarrah, the ostensible cause of the latest conflict in the Middle East, is not so complicated. It is a private rent dispute, caused by squatters and by Palestinian tenants who acquired protected tenancies (not ownership) during the period of Jordanian occupation in 1948-1967, when Jordan illegally sequestrated the property rights of Jewish landowners. The Palestinian tenants and squatters are refusing to pay their Israeli landlords rent for properties that have been in undisputed Jewish ownership since the middle of the 19th century….

The Ayatollahs have, since Iran’s Revolution of 1979, like their proxies, vowed the total destruction of Israel… This goal is also inscribed in the charters of Hamas, Hezbollah and the current Palestinian Authority under Mahmoud Abbas….

This agreement between China and Iran strengthened the hands of both countries to test the resolve of a Biden administration filled with Obama era appointees committed to two of his signature foreign policy errors, the Iran Nuclear Deal, and a dogmatic prioritisation of the so-called “Two State Solution” that is now dead and buried. With people such as Hady Amr, now the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for “Israel-Palestine,” who implausibly Biden sent to “mediate” what cannot be mediated, hope dies. Amr is parti pris: someone who once said that he was “inspired by the Palestinian intifada.” He has in the past wrongly accused Israel of ethnic cleansing and apartheid….

Obama’s third signature error in foreign policy forms a bridge to the other set of dots to be joined up. Fifteen years ago, the many small islands and reefs in the South China Sea which are now China’s military bases with runways and ports, were uninhabited, many of them tidally submerged and marked with metal poles (which confer no territorial rights under UNCLOS – the United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea). It was mainly on Obama’s watch that this militarisation proceeded, unchallenged, when it could and should have been nipped in the bud… If the militarisation of the South China Sea is left intact, Communist China’s navy — the Peoples’ Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) — will soon have a second and secure southern approach to Taiwan for the invasion which it has threatened for so long….

Declaratory PLAN doctrine states that in the event of war, it holds at risk US assets from Guam to the far side of Hokkaido: hence US bases in Japan. The PLA has also threatened missile attacks on Australia, where key Five Eyes intelligence assets are situated. PLA planners must be aware that these are red lines as much as an attempt to invade Taiwan. Any such actions would trigger US escalation, as recent speeches by senior USN officers have confirmed. It appears that the Communist Chinese are throwing down a gauntlet to test our resolve….

But Communist China is not ten feet tall. As the recent failure of the PRC space station suggests, we should not automatically assume technological omnipotence. In any event, equipment does not equal capability. We should also remember, as Sun Tzu’s Art of War and the Thirty Six Stratagems of the Warring States/Three Kingdoms period both observe, that perception of power has a power of its own and that the most elegant defeat is the one incurred by the moral disarmament of the enemy….

Over recent months, the US Department of Defence has been engaged in a series of technical moves of significance… They have not been much remarked… but all can be found in the professional military literature, as they should be if they are to compose a credible deterrent to make Xi Jinping think again and stay his hand….

Iran… needs little encouragement to attack Israel, especially via its proxies, where it can claim “plausible deniability”. The current bout of violence and its sequel suit Xi Jinping’s command group well as a “Dead Cat” tactic: a misdirection so that eyes are off the prime area of interest for the PRC. That area is…. the recent illegal occupation of the South China Sea by this untraditional maritime power [and] the “continentalisation” of this sea-space…..

In short Xi Jinping’s command group must be aware that many windows are closing for it and that time is not on their side unless they can persuade the Free World to self-harm sufficiently that we disarm morally. For this, there is evidence of intent and, unfortunately, of current success….

Therefore the Free World must not fall for the Dead Cat gambit. We must firmly support Israel, the window of the west in the middle east, and we must maintain the Abraham Accords as the best road to normalisation in that region. If we ensure that we are all awake but not woke, we thereby can resist cultural subversion and moral disarmament through the PRC Ministry of State Security… ‘make friends for China’ strategy within our body politic. In these ways, the threat posed to us by the most patient, intelligent, malign and formidable enemy that we have faced, can be defeated….

By preference, a Free World united front of firm deterrence and ostracism may cause the Mandate of Heaven to move from Xi Jinping’s communist dictatorship, as it has from over-reaching Chinese leaders many times before…. We have a duty to the betrayed democrats of Hong Kong and by extension to all decent Chinese people to help them to liberate themselves. But for 20 years we have averted our eyes and so the hour is now late. Many in the Western establishments who were defeatist or complicit over the last two decades have much to answer for. Therefore, to prevail, the Free World may have to use force if needs be; and if force must be used, then sooner is safer than later.

Politics of guilt: Why does the Left oppose ‘occupation’ – opinion Although many in the international community promote a two-state-solution and ending the occupation, they are oblivious to the danger this poses to Israel. Moshe Dann

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/politics-of-guilt-why-does-the-left-oppose-occupation-opinion-670831

Why do leftists oppose “the occupation,” extending Israeli sovereignty to areas of Judea and Samaria under Israeli control, and support a Palestinian state, the “two-state-solution?” They argue that the presence of Jews in what they mistakenly call the “Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT)” – all areas conquered by the IDF in 1967 Six Day War – is “illegal according to international law” and a “violation of Palestinian humanitarian rights.”

Presenting ethical and moral concerns – that Israel should not control “another people,” Arab Palestinians – they argue that “the occupation” prevents Palestinians from “controlling their own fate” in their own state. The occupation, they argue, also contradicts Israel’s definition as a “Jewish and democratic state.” As long as Israel restricts their movements (in order to prevent terrorism), determines their ability to export and import (weapons), and prevents them from exercising sovereignty, the occupation is immoral and should end. They argue that preventing or restricting Jews from building in settlements will “keep options open” to the possibility of making peace – however unrealistic – and will encourage Palestinian moderates.

It seems to make sense.

There is no indication, however, that this has worked, or is realistic. It ignores the fact that the PLO (Palestinian Authority) and Hamas already control the areas under their brutal, authoritarian rule, and actively promote incitement and terrorism. It ignores the fact that Palestinians do not want to be Israeli citizens; they identify as Palestinians. Most Israeli Arabs (including those who are citizens) reject Israel and support Palestinianism. These suggestions, therefore, have no practical, or reasonable application. They endanger Israel and support efforts to demonize and vilify Israel and promote antisemitism.

Pushing Through the Decadence The forces of decadence that Jacques Barzun described are formidably potent. But decadence is no more inevitable than progress. By Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/12/pushing-through-the-decadence/

When the historian and cultural critic Jacques Barzun died at 104 in 2012, he was not only full of years but full of honors. The honors started early. 

Born in Créteil, a suburb outside Paris, in 1907, Barzun came to the United States with his parents in 1920. His father, a cultivated man who welcomed such celebrated figures as Guillaume Apollinaire, Marcel Duchamp, Edgard Varèse, and Stefan Zweig to his home, determined that young Jacques should be educated in America. In 1927, he graduated with honors from Columbia University, where was valedictorian and president of Philolexian Society, one of the oldest university literary and debate societies in the United States. He went on to take a Ph.D. at Columbia and was a distinguished professor and administrator there for decades. (Together with the critic Lionel Trilling, he also presided over the once-celebrated course in Western civilization there.)

As the years and the books accumulated—Barzun was the author of more than 40 books on subjects ranging from history, education, and music to poetry, detective stories, and baseball—he scooped up all the recognitions: the Légion d’Honneur from his native country, the Presidential Medal of Freedom (bestowed by President George W. Bush), National Humanities Medal (Obama), and on and on. 

I believe the first thing that I read by Jacques Barzun was a short book called On Writing, Editing, and Publishing (1971). I cannot lay my hands on it at the moment, but I remember from it a good piece of advice for those young ’uns (and their name is legion) who think they want to be writers. 

It is important, Barzun noted, to decide whether you want to write or to have written. A little honest self-scrutiny on that point can save a world of heartache. Obviously, the point can be generalized for all the arts. (How many self-identifying waiters or waitresses have you met in trendy New York restaurants? They scarcely exist. But there are plenty of novelists, painters, and actors who just happen to be waiting tables until their genius is acknowledged.)

Jacques Barzun was a type of public intellectual that is rare in any age and is more or less extinct today. He was in but not of the academy. He wrote beautifully, for one thing, cared passionately about the life of the mind, and never succumbed to the dead end of what is sometimes called “specialization” but really should be denominated arid irrelevancy. Barzun wrote for the general educated reader about the things that matter most: truth, beauty, the perennial challenges to the human spirit with which life confronts us. 

Barzun always had a teacher’s gift of dramatizing ideas and championing what, in Darwin, Marx, Wagner (1941), he called “the pluralism of the world of experience.” Although deeply immersed in intellectual matters himself, he seems never to have succumbed to the intellectual’s chief occupational temptation of mistaking abstractions for the realities they adumbrate. This resistance had stylistic as well as substantive consequences. Barzun once noted that “Intellect watches particularly over language because language is so far the only device for keeping ideas clear and emotions memorable.” 

Biden and Putin in G7 and a Half by Amir Taheri

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17464/biden-putin-g7

[Putin] wants a return to the good or bad old days, when the USSR and the United States were regarded as arbiters of world affairs on an equal footing.

Today, thanks to the Obama era, that vast region [Central Asia] is morphing into a race course between China and Russia, with the US as a distant observer.

The summit with Biden would be an opportunity for Putin to impose a number of “events” as faits-accomplis, notably the annexation of the Crimean Peninsula, South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

Putin has exploited Obama’s numerous mistakes in the Middle East. He has built bridgeheads to a number of countries that were once in the Soviet orbit, notably Egypt and Iraq, while casting itself as the arbiter of Syria’s fate. Using the Islamic Republic in Iran as his Trojan horse, Putin is also gaining a foothold in Lebanon.

What Putin wants from Biden with regard to Iran is the lifting of sanctions against Iran…. With sanctions lifted, Russia could gain control of Iran’s immense energy resources. That would enable Russia to control Iran’s market share, thus heightening its own profile as the key source of supply for Europe and, in time, for China. In exchange, Iran would be helped to secure enough money to keep the regime in place….

Putin also hopes that Iran will quickly ratify the so-called Caspian Convention, which would turn the world’s largest lake into a Russia pond and shut Western powers out.

By excluding itself from Afghanistan, the US leaves the field open for new players in the latest version of the “Great Game”. China, using Pakistan as its local “fixer”, is already courting the Taliban as Islamabad’s surrogate to rule Afghanistan.

For its part, Russia is developing an axis with India and Iran to counter the Beijing-Islamabad duo. Here, too, the US will be distant spectator.

Putin will cast several skillfully baited hooks for Biden. He would talk of stabilizing Europe, containing China, keeping the North Koreans within the red lines, not allowing the mad mullahs of Tehran to go beyond certain limits in their pretended “Jihad” against Israel, and preventing the Taliban from seizing control of Afghanistan and undoing all that has been done with blood and money from the US and its Afghan and Western allies.

The question that Biden needs to ponder is this: Is Putin turning Russia into a mere competitor for power and prestige for the US or is he, as some of his barely concealed misdeeds indicate, an enemy of the democratic world, formerly known as “The Free World”?

By holding a tete-a-tete with Vladimir Putin just after the G7 summit in Cornwall, US President Joe Biden may signal a move towards a G7 and a half arrangement in which Russia, once a full member of the club, secures a side chair in its ante-chamber. The arrangement suits Putin just fine. For his strategy has always aimed at taking the Western democracies one by one and not as a bloc such as NATO, the European Union or the G7.

But what does Putin want?

Trump may not be in the White House but at least he’s being vindicated By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/06/trump_may_not_be_in_the_white_house_but_at_least_hes_being_vindicated.html

I continue to believe that Donald Trump would be in the White House but for massive election fraud. It is an example of how unfair life can be that he is not. However, there is some compensation coming Trump’s way. Day after day, on issue after issue, he’s proven to be correct, whether it was that he pursued policies that worked well for Americans, made predictions that were accurate, or did not do the heinous things that Democrats claimed he’d done. Of course, being Trump, he’s not shy about trumpeting that vindication. Speaking via satellite link to a Frank Speech MAGA rally in Wisconsin that Mike Lindell sponsored, Trump shared his victories with the cheering crowd.

Trump opened his speech by stating that he actually won the election, and noting that he did so despite the Washington Post/ABC that tried to suppress the vote by claiming Trump was 17 points down. He’s still his ebullient self but he definitely feels that he was treated very, very badly.

Trump applauded the patriotism of Mike Lindell, as well as named attendees there: Diamond & Silk, Charlie Kirk, Chris Cox and the Bikers for Trump, Dinesh D’Souza, Sheriff David Clarke. He then spoke about the way he was being silenced because of the election:

Because they know the results; they know what really happened. That’s why if you go to anyplace, you see the kind of fight that the Democrats put up. They don’t want recounts; they don’t want forensic audits in particular. They don’t want it. But in Arizona, you have incredible people. *** These are incredible American patriots and let’s see what they do.

Trump added that it’s incredibly unhealthy if voters cannot understand how and why an election turned out as it did. In other words, true democracy requires these audits.

ARUNA KHILANANI – THE INMATE WHO TOOK OVER THE ASYLUM – AN OPEN LETTER TO PETER SALOVEY, PH.D., THE 23RD PRESIDENT OF YALE UNIVERSITY Terry A. Hurlbut M.D. *****

https://www.conservativenewsandviews.com/2021/06/09/accountability/aruna-khilanani-inmate-asylum/

Dear Sir:

I write today to express my outrage over the “Continuing Medical Educational” talk by Aruna Khilanani, M.D., M.A. As you know, that talk took place by Zoom teleconference on 6 April 2021. She titled her talk, “The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind.” Incredibly, one Rosemary Serra booked this talk for Grand Rounds at the Yale Child Study Center. Sir, Ms. Serra, as Senior Administrative Assistant, and the faculty of the Psychiatry Department either exploited a very troubled woman or else lent her a platform for a dangerous political manifesto. That manifesto arises out of her paranoid ideation of which I find ample history from a simple Internet engine search.

In the language to which I became accustomed in the course of my training, I find this exercise totally inappropriate. At best, someone exploited a sufferer from chronic post-traumatic stress disorder who presents with paranoid ideation from an unfortunate episode. And at worst someone gave her a platform to start a race war. And what you cannot excuse, is that this happened on your watch.

A glossary

Before I begin, Dr. Salovey, I will share a glossary of terms you might or might not recognize. Your academic background is in social psychology, not in psychiatry or other medical practice. Besides, my readers need to understand these terms to grasp the context of this letter.

Attending – a physician having admitting privileges at a hospital. The term also applies to any physician who has served on a hospital medical staff for, say, three years. Pathologists, radiologists, and anesthesiologists do not normally admit patients. But after they have their three years in (as a “courtesy physician”), a hospital will still call them “attendings.” And in a teaching hospital, the attendings are the professors. (Teaching hospitals also often credential new attending physicians as part of granting them faculty appointments. This does not happen in community hospitals.)
Resident – a member of the “house staff” of a teaching hospital. These are the trainees, who have their medical degrees. In most programs, one chief resident in each department gives orders to all other house staff in that department.
Extern(e) – a senior medical student taking advanced training in patient management but not a member of the house staff. One distinguishes such a person from an intern(e), or a first-year resident.
Clinical clerk – a junior medical student gaining his/her first exposure to patient management.
Rounds – the practice of visiting each patient one is following, to check on clinical progress.
Grand rounds – a lecture for the benefit of medical staff and students.