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Sessions Swats Down Bigotry Charges on Day One of AG Confirmation Hearings By NR Staff

Posted By on January 11th, 2017

Those hoping for fireworks at Tuesday’s confirmation hearing for Alabama senator Jeff Sessions, Donald Trump’s nominee to head the Department of Justice, were treated instead to a slow Southern drawl of a day.

Known for being a particularly strident immigration hawk and an early congressional supporter of Donald Trump, Sessions has been accused variously of racism, sexism, and xenophobia for his legislative stances, and Democrats hope to claim an early scalp in the confirmation battles that will take up much of the Senate’s time over the next several days. However, on Tuesday, Sessions seemed comfortable parrying those accusations, pointing to a long record of prosecuting civil-rights violations (including of KKK members), to a distinguished twenty-year tenure in the Senate, and to plaudits from Senate colleagues, including former Pennsylvania senator Arlen Specter, who late in his career (and after becoming a Democrat) expressed regret for sinking Sessions’ nomination for a federal judgeship in 1986.

Controversies from those hearings have formed the centerpiece of Democrats’ case against Sessions. To accusations, resurrected from the 1980s, that he once called the NAACP “un-American,” Sessions denied the charge, explaining that he thought activities taken up by the organization to promote certain causes in Central America “could be perceived as un-American.” He pushed back, too, on the details of a decades-old voting-rights case (Perry County) that critics have said reveals a troubling attitude toward ballot access: The case, said Sessions, “was in response to pleas from African-American incumbent elected officials who claimed the absentee ballot process involved a situation in which ballots cast for them were stolen, altered and cast for their opponents.” He emphasized that, as attorney general, he would prosecute anyone who sought to violate the integrity of the ballot box. (Albert Turner Jr., whose parents were the defendants in Perry County, recently endorsed Sessions for attorney general, saying, “More than most I am very familiar with him. I believe he will be fair in his application of the law and the Constitution.”)

Sessions also objected to misrepresentations of more recent positions. “It is kind of frustrating to be accused of opposing the Violence Against Women Act when I have voted for it in the past,” he lamented, noting that while he opposed a revision of the law proposed by Vermont senator Patrick Leahy in 2013, a Democrat, he supported an (unsuccessful) alternative version authored by Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley that did not include expanded protections for LGBT persons, Native Americans, and immigrants. Likewise, while Sessions has been criticized for skepticism about the Voting Rights Act, he voted to reauthorize the act in 2006, and only objects to specific provisions that he contends are no longer necessary more than a half-century after the bill originally became law. In this, he is aligned with a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court, which invalidated a portion of the law in its 2013 Shelby County decision.

On other matters, Sessions’s testimony was precisely what one would expect from a Republican attorney-general nominee. On questions ranging from abortion access to the use of the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, the Alabama senator committed to enforcing the laws passed by Congress and to exercising legal judgment independent of the president. In response to questions about Russia’s attempted intervention in the 2016 election, he acknowledged clear evidence of “penetration throughout our government by foreign entities,” and discussed the need for stiff penalties against foreign governments or actors who violate American sovereignty. He also promised to recuse himself from all matters related to the ongoing investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server, acknowledging that his close relationship with the Trump campaign throughout 2016 might create the appearance of a conflict of interest.

The only excitement in the otherwise low-drama affair was periodic outbursts by anti-Sessions and anti-Trump protesters, including members of Code Pink.

EDUCATION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Anti-Trump Derangement in Los Angeles Schools The education establishment there is apoplectic over the election of Donald Trump. By Larry Sand

Posted By on January 11th, 2017

As Inauguration Day nears, “Post-Traumatic Trump Disorder” is ubiquitous. Many of the president-elect’s supporters “suffer” from excessive jubilance, bordering on ecstasy, while many of his detractors are wallowing in angst, panic, and rage, and the latter, PTTD group is making life miserable for children across the country. Los Angeles may be ground zero for the disorder.

The United Teachers of Los Angeles — or, more aptly, the United Trump-Loathers Association — led by its radical, agenda-driven president, Alex Caputo-Pearl, is planning a major demonstration before school on January 19, the day before the new president is sworn in. The demonstrators are being instructed to launch a tweetstorm to Trump (#schooltrump) and hold symbolic shields at school sites, to show that “educators are united with our students and our communities against Trump’s racially charged and anti-immigrant proposals and that we will continue to fight attempts to privatize public education.” The union is urging the public to join “tens of thousands of students, parents, educators, school staff, and community members . . . to shield our public schools from the Trump/DeVos/Broad agenda.” (Betsy DeVos, Trump’s pick for education secretary, is a voucher proponent, while billionaire Eli Broad has donated millions to charter schools. Union involvement in both private and charter schools is minimal.)

Nothing like an early-morning dose of union-led political indoctrination for the kids to digest along with their Froot Loops.

Actually, the early-morning festivities on the 19th are just a kick-off for what Caputo-Pearl sees as a two-year offensive. (“Offensive” in both senses of the word.) The issues that are paramount to the union boss are “green spaces on a campus” and “a plan to achieve strike readiness by February 2018,” as well as fighting charter co-location (in which charter schools occupy space in public-school buildings) and getting union-friendly school-board members elected in March of this year.

The pre–Inauguration Day merrymaking is not limited to Los Angeles, or even California. The Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools, a national network composed mostly of teachers’ unions and groups they fund, is planning a “National Day of Action” on the 19th. AROS insists that the “best way to ensure each and every child has the opportunity to pursue a rich and productive life is through a system of publicly funded, equitable and democratically controlled public schools.” In fact, one of their demands is “billions of dollars for public schools in black and brown communities.” I guess the $670 billion we currently spend nationally on “democratically controlled public schools” isn’t enough for the AROS crowd.

As the teachers’ union goes off the deep end, how have Los Angeles Unified School District officials responded to Trump’s election? Clearly suffering from advanced PTTD, the school board also is in a state of sheer panic. The mandarins who rule over the massive school district have set up a hotline to deal with students’ concerns, which, of course, have been exacerbated by the education establishment’s regnant hysteria. While Trump has indeed made some questionable comments about immigration, certain educators and a compliant mainstream media have blown things way out of proportion and worried many children needlessly. So school-board members should not be the ones counseling frightened children; let their parents do that, please.

The school-board members also spent time at a recent meeting passing resolutions as a hedge against actions that they expect the Trump administration to carry out. Consulting “social-emotional learning experts” and declaring its schools “safe zones” are of paramount importance to the board these days. Actually, if anyone needs a “safe zone” at this time, it’s students who dare to wear “Make America Great Again” hats.

Maybe instead of playing psychologist and engaging in dubious policymaking, the school board should focus on its mandate, which is to educate children and, at the same time, be judicious in spending taxpayers’ money.

As for the education component, LAUSD, not to put too fine a point on it, is doing a rotten job. While California students did not fare well on the recent standardized tests, L.A. kids’ scores were in the toilet. In fact, 56 percent of the district’s 85 ranked middle schools were assigned the lowest overall ranking of 1, based on the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress, a test taken by students this past spring. The “good news” is that just 20 percent of the district’s elementary schools received the lowest rank, as did 31 percent of its high schools. (The latter number would be higher, but many poor-performing eleventh-graders drop out of school before the test is given.)

Fiscally, LAUSD is also failing. As explained in LA School Report earlier this month, the district may not be able to meet its financial obligations in the future because it faces a cumulative deficit of $1.46 billion through the 2018–19 school year. But LAUSD chief financial officer Megan Reilly, maintaining a smiley face, assures us that with just the right combination of smoke and mirrors, the district may be able to winnow the deficit down to a mere $252 million. Don’t bet the mortgage on that, however.

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Where Israel Advocacy Fails, and How It Can Succeed It’s not enough to respond to anti-Israel attacks. To reach the young, pro-Israel activists need to focus on what Israel is, on its human face. Chloe Valdary *****

Posted By on January 11th, 2017

This past November, the student newspaper at McGill University in Montreal responded to accusations that it had been providing a platform for anti-Semitism. While denying the specific charge, the editors emphatically reasserted their core position—namely, that the student paper “maintains an editorial line of not publishing pieces which promote a Zionist worldview, or any other ideology which we consider oppressive.” http://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/2017/01/where-israel-advocacy-fails-and-how-it-can-succeed/

This blunt statement is a reminder that hatred of the Jewish state is rapidly becoming the default position on many college campuses. Meanwhile, Israel’s friends, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, are left to ask what, if anything, can be done to stem the rising tide of anti-Israel venom.

In more than five years of involvement in advocacy for Israel, both as a college student and in a professional capacity, I’ve spoken at hundreds of events, worked with dozens of organizations, designed campus programs and social-media campaigns, and advised members of Congress, donors, and even Israeli government officials on how best to advance the cause of the Jewish state. As a member of the “millennial” generation, I have also been privy to the frustrations and complaints of my activist, pro-Israel peers whose own enchantment with the Jewish state is a driving force in their lives and who believe that too much institutional support is going to forms of advocacy that have outlived their usefulness.

Partially in response to these frustrations, I conducted a year-long study of how pro-Israel groups engage millennials. What works? What doesn’t? How to improve? In addressing those questions, I compared the available survey data about the attitudes of young Americans toward the Jewish state with what pro-Israel groups are currently doing to reach them, and conducted hundreds of interviews with students, professors, essayists, and professional activists.

The conclusion I eventually arrived at, presented below in severely boiled-down form, is that some kinds of Israel advocacy are at best of limited effectiveness and at worst can do more harm than good. Yet I also found some approaches that promise significantly greater success.

Let’s startby looking quickly at current attitudes among all Americans between the ages of eighteen and thirty. According to several polls taken in the past few decades, most members of this age cohort, while nominally pro-Israel, are largely indifferent to the Jewish state or have no interest at all in the Israel-Palestinian conflict. If asked whether they are more sympathetic to Israel or to the Palestinians, a great many will answer “Israel”—according to a Gallup poll conducted last February. Americans in this age range favor Israel over the Palestinians by a margin of 54 to 18 percent—but, when, pressed they make clear their lack of much knowledge about, or devotion to, either side. Evidence suggests, moreover, that this neutral group is the fastest-growing sector of the youth population. Indeed, a survey of California university campuses found that 75 to 95 percent of students fall in this “soft middle.”

These ranks of the unaffiliated and ambivalent are unlikely to be engaged by traditional methods of advocacy; they won’t come to hear a pro-Israel speaker or read a pamphlet about how the peace process is being held back by Palestinian, not Israeli, leaders, or about Hamas’s hate-filled intentions and ideology. Indeed, there’s reason to believe that, among those not already interested in the Israel-Palestinian conflict, discussion of it tends less to inspire curiosity than to induce apathy. To these onlookers, the situation appears too messy and too complicated to lend itself to any obvious solution; the good guys and bad guys aren’t easily identifiable; and meanwhile the rhetoric of partisans on both sides seems angry, obsessive, and overheated.
Not even the most carefully crafted and well-articulated pro-Israel arguments can dispel these impressions. Indeed, among young Jews in particular, the sociologist Theodore Sasson has observed that, when it comes to Israel, they tend to be positively turned off by the compulsive fixation on “the conflict” displayed by most American Jewish institutions.

And yet herein,precisely, lies the challenge: how to encourage support for Israel among those who may tell pollsters they are already pro-Israel but are generally apathetic, and among those who are entirely without an opinion. How to reach them? What, in particular,have Israel-advocacy groups been doing in this regard? Is any of it effective?

For purposes of this brief essay, I’ve divided these pro-Israel groups into two types—builders and defenders—and I’ll cite two or three exemplars of each type.

Birthright, founded in 1999 to “strengthen Jewish identity” and create “solidarity with Israel,” primarily by sending Jews aged eighteen to twenty-six on three-week trips to the Jewish state, is a paradigmatic builder. Its purpose is to foster a sense of affection for Israel, both as an end in itself and, even more, as a means of forging a stronger commitment to Judaism and the Jewish community.

Another builder, of more recent vintage, is the Hasbara Fellowship, which differs from Birthright in recruiting both Jews and non-Jews. Its recent activities, all conceived by students and young professionals, include bringing Israeli technology fairs to campuses where companies can showcase their work and encourage students to apply for jobs and internships. Beyond merely highlighting Israeli technical and entrepreneurial ingenuity, this approach offers something of palpable value to students.

EDUCATION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

University of Maryland Lectures: Trump Won Due to Racism, ‘Spiritual Depravity’ By Tom Knighton

Posted By on January 11th, 2017

The University of Maryland has a new lecture series coming up that makes the claim that Donald Trump won the White House not because his policies spoke to people better, or that his strategy understood the Electoral College better than Hillary Clinton’s did, or that he was running against an arrogant, corrupt, and dismissive candidate. No, the series seeks to illustrate that Donald Trump won because of racism.

I can’t make this crap up, folks:

The University of Maryland is hosting a series of post-election lectures on how a “commitment to white supremacy” fueled the Trump train, blaming “white America’s spiritual depravity” for his unexpected victory.

One talk scheduled for the February 13 “Understanding Race and Class in the 2016 Election” event, set to be delivered by Professor Paula Ioanide from Ithaca College, will apparently discuss the “spiritual degradation of white America in the age of Trump,” during which Ioanide will elaborate on the “spiritual depravity, deadening, and social alienation” of America’s working class.
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“I argue that these collective symptoms are fundamentally rooted in white Americans’ investments in gendered racism, which teaches whites not only to deaden themselves to the suffering of others but to their own humanity,” her abstract for the lecture notes, suggesting that “white America will either reckon with and remedy its collective spiritual degradation, or the chickens will come home to roost.”

Sigh.

She couldn’t give Trump better advertising if he was paying her. Sure looks like something is coming home to roost.

A primary problem with this line of thinking is that it doesn’t require those who buy into it to actually listen to their opponents. Those who stand against the leftist forces at work in this country offer arguments regarding the Constitution, economics, and individual liberty, yet those who think like this just scream racism, cutting themselves off from reality and making dialogue impossible.

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Public Records Suggest Ft. Lauderdale Airport Shooter Converted to Islam By Debra Heine

Posted By on January 11th, 2017

Public records uncovered in the days following the Ft. Lauderdale Airport massacre suggest that the shooter, Esteban Santiago, is a Muslim convert who years ago took on the Islamic name Aashiq Hammad.

According to a Judicial Watch report, Santiago/Hammad downloaded terrorist propaganda and recorded Islamic religious music online, suggesting a serious commitment to Islam years before he joined the U.S. Army.

The public records uncovered in the days after the massacre suggest Santiago (Hammad) is a radical Islamic terrorist that’s seriously committed to Islam. Besides taking on a Muslim name, he recorded three Islamic religious songs, including the Muslim declaration [of] faith (“there is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger”) known as the Shahada. He also posted a thread about downloading propaganda videos from Islamic terrorists on a weapons and explosives forum. The investigative news site that unearthed this disturbing information connected the dots between Santiago, who is of Puerto Rican descent, and Hammad, an identity he created in 2007.

Indeed, it has been several days since the news site “Got News” uncovered the publicly available information, but the official story from authorities is that the gunman is a mentally ill Hispanic Army veteran who was suffering from PTSD after his tour in Iraq.

Only ABC dared to mention the possibility of Santiago’s “jihadist identity,” burying it deep in a piece about New York possibly being his original target.

A paragraph deep in the story mentions that investigators recovered Santiago’s computer from a pawn shop and the FBI is examining it to determine whether he created a “jihadist identity for himself using the name Aashiq Hammad…” The rest of the traditional mainstream media coverage promotes the government rhetoric that omits any ties to terrorism even though early on a photo surfaced of Santiago making an ISIS salute while wearing a keffiyeh, a Palestinian Arab scarf.

The rest of the media, for whatever reason, is sweeping under the rug some major clues about what might have inspired the Orlando shooter. CONTINUE AT SITE

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Peter O’Brien & Roger Franklin Capturing Carbon, Shackling Good Sense

Posted By on January 11th, 2017

CCS stands for ‘carbon capture and storage’ but it might just as easily, and more accurately, be taken as representing another aspect of the Climate Change Scam. The green-left detest it as means to keep the coal fires burning. Conservatives have much better reasons to scorn it.
The other day in The Australian an intriguing op-ed extolled the alleged virtues of carbon capture and storage (CCS) as a means of reconciling the federal government’s pledge, courtesy of Resources Minister Matt Canavan, that coal will remain a core part of the energy-supply mix for the foreseeable future, despite the standing commitment under the Paris agreement to see Australia’s CO2 emissions reduced by a best-case 28% as of 2030. It must have been all very inspiring for those keeping up with the latest talking points in fashionable green mythology, but more acute readers will have noticed the paragraph below and observed a cat making its exit from a bag of enviro-nostrums and rather costly cliches:

Having thrown its support behind domestic coal to the reported tune of $100 billion over the next two decades with the Paris Agreement looming large in the background, the federal government has the opportunity to advance clean coal technologies just as the government’s $2bn Australian Renewable Energy Agency has done for renewable energy.

It is this unexplored middle ground that the Prime Minister must now seize if the political headaches of energy price, reliability and carbon emissions are to be resolved.

If that sounds like of another green snout urging its way into the trough of other people’s money — in this case, energy consumers and taxpayers — go to the top of the class. The absolute confirmation of that suspicion came further into the piece, where we are asked to accept the bland assertion that CCS is poised to become “commercially viable”. Strip away the article’s rent-seeking rhetoric and what remains is the stark fact that this vaunted and as-yet-problematic technology would never have seen the light of day were it not for the market distortions inspired by the UN-sponsored CAGW scam.

Consider the cognitive dissonance of the green-steeped mind: The Global CCS Institute insists on the one hand that “CCS is a proven, safe, reliable and cost-effective technology” yet on the other and on the very same page we see (emphasis added), “policy parity is integral to the widespread adoption of CCS.” As the Institute’s CEO Brad Page further explains, this is a technology that “deserves the same recognition and commercial incentivisation as all clean technologies, particularly renewables.” Put more simply, CCS is right up there with, say, wind power in South Australia. Just keep those subsidies flowing and everything will be fine and dandy.

As Page continues, “the pace of CCS deployment must be accelerated if we are to meet Paris climate targets (we are currently way off target).” Well, he would say that! Like wind-farm consortiums and promoters of other disappointing “renewable technologies” such as tidal power (which even Their ABC admits — surprise, surprise — “is really expensive“) and Tim Flannery’s grant-gobbling “hot rocks”, he knows perfectly well that fossil fuels will be the life’s blood of the world’s energy requirements for many years to come. Where there is blood, expect leeches which, in this case, are dead keen to keep both host and narrative alive.

The Global CCS Institute further tells us:

At the time of launch of this Global Status of CCS: 2016 report, there were 15 large-scale CCS projects in operation around the world, with a CO2 capture capacity of close to 30 million tonnes per annum (Mtpa).

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Think of what we could do with $11.6 billion in useless ‘climate change’ spending By Douglas Herz

Posted By on January 11th, 2017

The U.S. government spent some $11.6 billion in 2014 on climate change research, technology, international assistance, and adaptation, according to the GAO (General Accountability Office). This useless research actually harms Americans by advancing the ridiculous notion that mankind is responsible for the so-called warming of the Earth. In fact, this idea is so foolish, given that the Earth has not warmed over the past approximately twenty years and we are now struggling today with record cold, that its proponents have changed their focus from global warming to extreme weather to climate change…always seeking the most effective way to scare people so as to assure a continued flow of pork.

It has not worked.

Only 36 percent of geoscientists and engineers believe that humans are creating a global warming crisis, according to a survey reported in the peer-reviewed Organization Studies. By contrast, a strong majority of the 1,077 survey respondents believe that nature is the primary cause of recent global warming and/or that future global warming will not be a very serious problem.

Why not re-allocate these “low ROI” climate change funds to other, more desirable causes? Let’s review a list.

Border Wall. There is no reliable price tag on completing construction on the border wall, but the Trump team has estimated the cost at $8 billion. Recent congressional legislation pegged the number at $10 billion, and construction experts say it could be more than double that. Let’s assume they are correct and that the border wall will cost $20 billion and take ten years to finish. No worries…Mexico will be paying long before that.
A 355-Ship Navy. With President-Elect Trump requesting more ships, the Navy is proposing the biggest shipbuilding boom since the end of the Cold War to meet threats from a saber-rattling China and obstreperous Iran. Boosting shipbuilding to meet the Navy’s 355-ship goal could require an additional $5 billion to $5.5 billion in annual spending in the Navy’s 30-year projection, according to an estimate by naval analyst Ronald O’Rourke at the Congressional Research Service. In addition to helping assure national security and the safe passage of global commercial shipping, a larger fleet would be better for both the sailors, who’d enjoy shorter deployments, and for the ships, which would have more down time for maintenance, said Matthew Paxton, president of the Shipbuilders Council of America, which represents most of the major Navy shipbuilders.
Permanent Moon Settlement. NASA has estimated that building a permanent Moon base would cost $10 billion over the next five years. The many benefits to establishing a base on the Moon include providing refueling stations that would save billions from future space missions – especially to Mars, which are planned for the 2030s – plus providing unique opportunities for scientific research and the testing of new technologies.
Trip to Mars. Recently, the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee passed a bipartisan bill authorizing $19.5 billion for NASA to continue work on a future Mars mission, as well as efforts to transport astronauts on commercial rockets to the International Space Station from the U.S., reports USA Today. According to the bill, NASA’s official goal will be to launch a crewed mission to Mars within the next 25 years. While it is unclear when this NASA funding bill will arrive on the floor of the full Senate, it is expected to pass once it does.

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Ignore Anti-Vaccine Hysteria, Mr. Trump Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s conspiracy theories have no place in the White House. By Alex Berezow and Hank Campbell

Posted By on January 11th, 2017

Mr. Berezow is a senior fellow at the American Council on Science and Health, of which Mr. Campbell is president.

The environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic, told reporters Tuesday in the lobby of Trump Tower that the president-elect has asked him to lead a commission “to make sure we have scientific integrity in the vaccine process for efficacy and safety effects.” Mr. Kennedy also suggested that Donald Trump “has some doubts about the current vaccine policies” and that “we ought to be debating the science.” This is insane.

Mr. Kennedy in the past has raised doubts about thimerosal, a mercury-containing preservative used in some vaccines, which has been wrongly accused of causing autism. The notion that vaccines cause autism was decisively rebutted in a 2002 paper published by the New England Journal of Medicine. The study examined data on more than 537,000 children in Denmark, most of whom had been received the vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella. Researchers concluded that it provided “strong evidence against the hypothesis that MMR vaccination causes autism.”

Thimerosal has since been removed from most vaccines, yet autism rates continue to increase. It’s clear that the preservative isn’t to blame.

Anti-vaxxers have also latched onto the idea that children are given too many vaccines at one time. This, too, is bunk. The immune system is capable of handling countless foreign substances. When children stick their dirty fingers into their mouths, they are “vaccinating” themselves against whatever germs are in their environment.

Fifteen years after the New England Journal of Medicine study, the evidence has grown only stronger that vaccines are safe and that autism is caused by something else, such as genetics. But it shouldn’t be surprising that Mr. Kennedy would back strange ideas about vaccines. He has even flirted with conspiracy theories about the assassination of his uncle John F. Kennedy.

After the 2008 presidential election, Mr. Kennedy’s name came up as a potential chief for the Environmental Protection Agency. Yet he was quickly taken out of the running.

Why? Mr. Kennedy had made plenty of controversial statements over the years that would have caused severe blowback for the Obama administration. For instance, he had co-written an article for Rolling Stone magazine and Salon.com purporting that “government health agencies colluded with Big Pharma to hide the risks of thimerosal from the public.” The article contained serious factual errors, and Salon eventually retracted it. Clearly, this would not mesh well with President Obama’s pledge to “restore science to its rightful place.”

Although it is encouraging that Mr. Trump is reaching out to people who did not support him, Mr. Kennedy belongs nowhere near the reins of power. We encourage the incoming president to follow his predecessor’s lead—and stay far away from this nonsense.

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The Real Crime Problem Doesn’t Make Much News The media play up shootings by police. Last year in Chicago, they were less than 1% of the total. Jason Riley

Posted By on January 11th, 2017

The Chicago video that features four black suspects assaulting a white man has sparked another discussion about “hate crimes,” but it also highlights a phenomenon that has been underreported by a liberal media more interested in political correctness.

Crime reporting these days seems more focused on the behavior of the police than on the behavior of criminals. Police shootings of black men are rare, for example, but they get far more media coverage than when black civilians shoot one another, which is much more common. There were 4,368 shootings in Chicago last year, according to the Chicago Tribune’s crime database. Almost all of the shooting victims were black, and more than 99% of the shootings were carried out by civilians, not cops. Obviously, young black men in Chicago don’t roam the streets in fear of getting shot by police.

When the media aren’t indulging liberal activists by pretending that police shootings drive black homicide rates, they’re playing down the very real episodes of black criminality shown in the video. For years, Asian students in public schools have complained of racially motivated harassment and bullying by black students. Surveillance cameras have caught young black men playing the “knockout game,” which involves sucker-punching random white pedestrians. Cities from Los Angeles to Philadelphia to Baltimore have experienced “wilding” incidents, which involve flash mobs of black youths rampaging through a mall or park or convenience store and physically attacking people in the process.

Most violent crimes involve a perpetrator and victim of the same race. But when they don’t, incidents of black-on-white crimes far exceed the reverse scenario. “In 2012, blacks committed 560,600 acts of violence against whites (excluding homicide), and whites committed 99,403 acts of violence (excluding homicide) against blacks,” writes the Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald, citing federal Bureau of Justice Statistics data. “Blacks, in other words, committed 85 percent of the non-homicide interracial crimes of violence between blacks and whites, even though they are less than 13 percent of the population.”

When the mainstream media discuss relations between poor black communities and law enforcement without including data on black crime rates, readers and viewers aren’t getting the full picture. Racially motivated attacks on blacks shouldn’t be ignored or played down, but neither should racially motivated attacks perpetrated by blacks.

Nationwide, crime is down from where it was in the 1990s, but it has ticked up in recent years in some major cities. Chicago’s murder rate in 2016 was the highest in two decades. Violent crime in Los Angeles has increased for three straight years. Liberals are quick to blame poverty or economic downturns or racial bias in policing, but those explanations can’t withstand scrutiny. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Germany Sets Plan to Rein In Extremists Measures would make it easier to monitor, detain and deport suspects by Ruth Bender

Posted By on January 11th, 2017

BERLIN—Germany released a plan to rein in known extremists after authorities failed to prevent a terrorist attack last month by a Tunisian radical on a government watch list.

The proposed overhauls aim to make it easier for police to monitor, detain and deport asylum seekers believed to pose a terror threat, Germany’s interior and justice ministers said on Tuesday.

The plan—which the government plans to implement with legal changes in the weeks to come—reflects efforts to tighten enforcement within the guidelines of constitutional safeguards, informed by abuses committed under the Nazis, that strongly protect personal freedom.

Under current state police laws, for instance, preventive custody doesn’t exceed 14 days. Detentions of foreigners to be expelled also face stringent legal requirements, such as the necessity to obtain proof of identity of a suspect from his or her country of origin.

Under the ministers’ proposals, police would be allowed to detain rejected asylum seekers deemed dangerous for up to 18 months, by lowering some of the current requirements.

German authorities have been seeking ways to improve antiterror enforcement since Anis Amri rammed a truck into a Berlin Christmas market last month, killing 12 people and exposing holes in the country’s security architecture.

The planned overhaul “shows that in difficult times we are capable of finding reasonable solutions that will increase the safety of citizens in Germany without disproportionately constraining the public’s freedoms,” said Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière.

German authorities came under criticism for failing to expel Amri in the months before the attack even though he was on a watch list of extremists, had voiced plans to commit atrocities and was using fake identities.

The target of Tuesday’s proposals are people like Amri who are found to be radical Islamists capable of committing an attack. German authorities are tracking 550 such extremists—known in German as Gefährder—according to security officials. Half of them are believed to be in Germany. Amri was killed by police in Italy several days after the Berlin attack.

Most of these individuals haven’t been determined to have broken laws, leaving German authorities few legal tools to keep them in check. Around 80 are in detention. The others are being watched by police and intelligence services, some more closely than others, security officials said.

The German constitution makes it very hard to detain people who aren’t suspected of committing a crime. That contrasts with the U.S., which allows the detention of terrorism suspects for indefinite periods.

“It’s pretty much impossible to take a Gefährder into custody unless one has a very concrete indication that a person is planning an immediate attack,” said Nikolaos Gazeas, a Cologne-based lawyer and expert on counterterrorism law. “That would mean a complete inversion of our legal system.” CONTINUE AT SITE