NO POSTING UNTIL MONDAY MARCH 26
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19511/national-lawyers-guild-stanford-law
Let us understand what the National Lawyers Guild is.
The Guild, in addition, refused to support Soviet or Cuban dissidents.
The Guild has never abandoned its Marxist-Leninist provenance. It supports Antifa, which also employs violence to disrupt speakers.
The National Lawyers Guild is not a liberal organization. It does not support civil liberties, due process or freedom of speech. It is the epitome of “free speech for me but not for thee.”
Many decent people question whether hateful, offensive and even speech deemed “dangerous” by some, should be protected. The answer resides in history. Whenever governments are empowered to ban such expression, they use that power expansively, to censor speech critical of their leaders or partisans. The appetite of the censor is voracious. What are seen as legitimate opinions by dissenters are deemed by others — especially those in power — as hateful, offensive or dangerous. Freedom of speech for all is anything but free. It can be hurtful and risky. But in the end, it is worth the costs.
It deplores capitalism and the free market: “don’t fund capitalism, fund the groups working to dismantle it.” And it opposes due process for those with whom it disagrees, for instance, declaring of a “Mass Defense Program” that sends out “legal workers, law students, and lawyers providing legal support for protests”: “We will only show up to actions and in support of movements that directly align with our values.”
Since its inception, the National Lawyers Guild has relied on “useful idiots” – well-meaning left-wingers and liberals who have no idea what the Guild really represents. It disguises its most extreme positions when presenting itself to the public, but advertises them to its members. It also hides from the public the fact that despite its name, the membership Guild consists primarily of non-lawyers. When it was truly a lawyers’ organization, it was slightly more centrist. And then in the 1970s, the Guild opened its membership to “jailhouse lawyers” (who are not lawyers), legal workers (who are not lawyers), law students (who are not yet lawyers) and anyone else who works with or for lawyers or law firms.
The Guild has more than 100 chapters in American law schools. Its membership includes many law professors. It apparently plans to organize nationwide disruptions of the kind we have seen at Stanford. The Guild creates the illusion that these disruptions are spontaneous reactions to conservative provocations. They are anything but.
As the late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall observed: “The freedom to speak and the freedom to hear are inseparable; they are two sides of the same coin.” These disrupters violated both rights.
Thus far disruptions have occurred at Yale, Stanford and Georgetown law schools. But you can be sure that they are coming to a law school near you. The NLG will not be satisfied until no conservative speaker is allowed to speak at any law school. That is its objective, and it may well succeed, because cowardly administrators — especially deans of diversity, in order to avoid the embarrassment of what happened at Stanford, Yale and Georgetown — will try to make sure that conservative speakers are not invited. They understand that it is much harder to object to the less visible non-invitation of conservative speakers than to publicly disrupting them.
We who support freedom of speech for all sides must organize as well. We cannot count on the American Civil Liberties Union anymore: its silence supports the censorship of the National Lawyers Guild. Our voices must be heard against censorship-by-disruption, by non-invitation or by any other improper means.
It turns out that the disruption by several dozen Stanford University law school students of a speech to be given by federal judge Kyle Duncan was not a spontaneous exercise of freedom to protest.
https://www.thefp.com/p/from-slavery-in-north-korea-to-jeff
Nothing I have ever read about the slave state of North Korea has affected me more than Yeonmi Park’s bestselling book, “In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom.” Her account makes it clear that that phrase—slave state—is not hyperbole.
Park grew up believing that Kim Jong-il was so powerful that he could read her mind. (“Even when you think you’re alone,” her mother warned her, “the birds and mice can hear you whisper.”) She survived a famine that killed nearly three million people. (She ate dragonflies to survive). At nine years old, Park witnessed the public execution of her friend’s mother. (The woman was put to death for the crime of watching a Hollywood movie.)
Almost no one escapes the Hermit Kingdom. Yeonmi Park did.
At 13, she fled to China with her mother. The two endured unspeakable things—rape by human traffickers; sexual servitude. Ultimately, they broke free again, crossing the freezing Gobi Desert at night to Mongolia, then onto South Korea and, finally, to America.
Last year, as she wrote in The Free Press, Park became a U.S. citizen.
Now, she has published a new book, “While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector’s Search for Freedom in America.” In the excerpt we are publishing below Park writes about her experience among America’s most celebrated, wealthy elites—and the moral corruption she found at their conferences and on their Gulfstreams.
https://www.axios.com/2023/03/21/drug-shortages-upend-cancer-treatments
Supplies of some essential drugs used in hospitals are hitting 10-year lows, forcing rationing and pharmacy workarounds.
Driving the news: Drug shortages are the worst they’ve been in a decade, according to the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists — a sign of how much we rely on low-margin manufacturers with limited capacity for basics like the inhalation drug albuterol and some common cancer treatments.
What they’re saying: Quality control issues, selected plant closures and other manufacturing woes have added up, Michael Ganio, senior director of pharmacy, practice and quality at ASHP told Axios.
Between the lines: Oncology drugs have been hit particularly hard in recent months, putting experts on high alert.
Those in short supply include methotrexate, an injectable chemotherapy drug, and one of several generics produced by Illinois-based Akorn Pharmaceuticals, which shuttered operations last month due to bankruptcy.
Manufacturing delays and increased demand have also led to shortages of the cancer treatments cisplatin, and fluorouracil, per ASHP.
Pluvicto — used to extend survival among patients with metastatic prostate cancer — will take months to be made available to patients again, the Wall Street Journal reports.
“People will die from this shortage, for sure,” Jonathan McConathy, director of the division of molecular imaging and therapeutics at the University of Alabama, told WSJ.
A survey of health systems conducted by the group End Drug Shortages Alliance found the injectable Bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG), used for treating bladder cancer, was being rationed or was not available for use at all.
“This is a terrible crisis. We should be doing everything we can to give every single one of these patients the best chance of survival,” Laura Bray, a board member of the alliance, told CNN.
Between the lines: Manufacturing delays and quality problems are blamed for the shortages. But that’s often because there aren’t many alternative sites to pick up the slack in the system due to the challenging economics of the market, experts say.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/as-china-war-looms-navys-priority-is-going-green/
The “age of American naval dominance is over”, Jerry Hendix, a former Navy Captain warned in a high-profile article in The Atlantic.
Hendrix’s article imagines a scenario in which China or other enemy nations seize control of what are now international waters and the cargo that moves across them. “The great container ships and tankers of today would disappear, replaced by smaller, faster cargo vessels capable of moving rare and valuable goods past pirates and corrupt officials.” A handful of nations would end up controlling the chokepoints of international trade and America would not be one of them.
Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro has already conceded China’s naval supremacy.
Last month, the Biden appointee stated that China has “got a larger fleet now so they’re deploying that fleet globally.”
The People’s Liberation Army Navy topped the US Navy in 2020. By 2025, it will have an estimated 400 ships. We’re still below 300.
Biden’s current defense plan is to have 350 by 2045. And by then we will have lost.
“They have 13 shipyards, in some cases their shipyard has more capacity — one shipyard has more capacity than all of our shipyards combined. That presents a real threat,” Del Toro conceded. “They’re a communist country, they don’t have rules by which they abide by.”
https://www.frontpagemag.com/auditing-bidens-victory/
I’ve never heard of Joseph Fried before, and it was only a few days ago that I became aware of his four-month-old book Debunked: A Professional Auditor Reviews the 2020 Election. But it turns out that this veteran MBA and CPA, who recently retired from his own auditing firm and now writes at Substack, has given us what must surely be the definitive work on the topic. Having “professionally conducted and reviewed hundreds of audits,” he brings his decades of experience in that field to bear on the administration of the 2020 presidential election in each of the six swing states that were awarded to our current dotard-in-chief, Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. Throughout the book, Fried’s objective is to “analyze the major claims of fraud or irregularity, the credibility of those claims, the available evidence, and the threshold audit standards the states applied, or should have applied, relative to those claims.”
I don’t know the first thing about the work of an auditor. But Fried is a very good teacher. Among much else, he explains that a recount is not an audit – the latter must be performed by independent professionals – and that a mere recount doesn’t preclude the need for an audit. Nor does a court’s ruling on procedural grounds negate an auditor’s findings.
In some cases, an election result cries out for an audit. One test is statistical likelihood. The 2020 election, as it turns out, failed this test spectacularly. A few examples: for almost sixty years, the winner of the electoral votes from Ohio and Florida has also won the nationwide election – but in 2020, no.
https://amgreatness.com/2023/03/22/can-we-call-it-an-invasion-now/
By almost any significant metric, this is not America’s finest hour. We do not appear to be respected or feared economically, militarily, or in any other way by rival nations. Americans do not feel confident about the future, and we are seemingly more polarized along partisan lines than ever before.
Adding to our collective sense of dread is the sight of our nation’s geographic integrity slipping away. Almost daily we see untold numbers of foreign nationals trampling what used to be our southern border, demanding rights and privileges that previously were reserved for citizens and legal residents.
Rather than protect our nation’s sovereignty, the temporary caretakers of the executive branch are actively encouraging its decline. At this point, a credible case can be made that this is not a well-intentioned asylum program spun out of control, but every bit the invasion the images and data tell us it is.
Saying the “I-word” today seems to trigger those who barely follow the news as well as dogmatic anti-borders activists. “It’s not an armed force, so it can’t be an invasion!” is the most common retort.
A Google definition search of the word “invasion” produces three meanings, only one of which refers to an armed force. The others refer to “an incursion by a large number of people or things into a place or sphere of activity,” and “an unwelcome intrusion into another’s domain.”
Either definition seems to fit our current predicament.
https://amgreatness.com/2023/03/22/questions-without-answers-about-ukraine/
Ukrainians, and many Europeans and Americans, are defining an envisioned Ukrainian victory as the complete expulsion of all Russians from its 2013 borders. Or, as a Ukrainian national security chief put it, the war ends with Ukrainian tanks in Red Square.
But mysteries remain about such ambitious agendas.
What would that goal entail?
Giving Ukraine American F-16s to strike bases and depots in Mother Russia? The gifting of 1,000 M1 Abrams tanks? Using American Harpoon missiles to sink the Russian Black Sea Fleet?
A huge arsenal that would guarantee total victory rather than not losing?
Russia’s cruel strategy is to grind down Ukraine and turn its eastern regions into a Verdun-like deathscape.
So is a brave Ukraine really winning the war when it loses about 0.6 soldiers for every Russian it kills?
Russia plans to leverage its extra 100 million people, its 10-times larger economy, and its 30-times larger territory to pulverize Ukraine and tire its Western patrons—whatever the costs to Russia.
Yet why were only a few in past administrations calling for a joint Western effort to expel Putin’s forces from the borderlands and Crimea captured in 2014?
Why are Putin’s 2014 invasions now seen as urgent rectifiable crimes of aggression in 2022, but were not regarded as reparable during the prior eight years?
Is the United States economically capable or politically unified or socially stable enough to wage a huge proxy war on the frontiers of a nuclear Russia?
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2023/03/22/breaking-trump-grand-jury-session-abruptly-canceled-n1680507
On Wednesday morning, Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that Bragg was having problems with the grand jury. “The Rogue prosecutor, who is having a hard time with the Grand Jury, especially after the powerful testimony against him by Felon Cohen’s highly respected former lawyer, is attempting to build a case that has NEVER BEEN BROUGHT BEFORE AND ACTUALLY, CAN’T BE BROUGHT,” he claimed. “If he spent this time, effort, and money on fighting VIOLENT CRIME, which is destroying NYC, our once beautiful and safe Manhattan, which has become an absolute HELLHOLE, would be a much better place to live!”
Trump was clearly on to something. The Wednesday session of the grand jury has been canceled, according to a report from Business Insider.
Two law enforcement officers have informed Insider that the grand jury in the Trump case has been instructed not to report for duty on Wednesday — the day previous reports suggested there would be a possible indictment vote against former President Donald Trump. Although there is no confirmed schedule beyond Wednesday, one of the sources, speaking anonymously, indicated that it is doubtful the grand jury will convene at all this week. The grand jury typically meets on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, and Fox News reports that the grand jury is on standby for Thursday.
https://issuesinsights.com/2023/03/22/democrats-republicans-show-split-on-ukraine-war-aid-ii-tipp-poll/
The Russia-Ukraine conflict has dominated the news for a year, and has led to yet another sharp political split in the U.S. as fears grow that the conflict could spiral out of control and lead to a wider war in Europe with Russia. Average Americans are deeply concerned, the latest I&I/TIPP Poll shows.
In this month’s online I&I/TIPP Poll, taken from March 1-3 of 1,370 adults, we asked Americans a number of questions to gauge their opinions and feelings about the Russia-Ukraine war, and the U.S.’ role in supporting Ukraine.
The first question asked: “How concerned are you that the U.S. and Russia will fight a war over Ukraine?” A lot, it turns out.
Of those responding, 69% said they were either “very concerned” (35%) or “somewhat concerned” (34%). Just 23% answered they were not concerned, with 16% saying “not very concerned” and 7% saying “not at all concerned.” Another 8% said they were “not sure.”
Concern wasn’t just among members of one political party. Democrats were most concerned at 75%, but Republicans weren’t far behind at 67% and independents at 63%. All other major demographic groups were at 60% or higher.
The next question asked participants “How concerned are you that the conflict between Russia and Ukraine will lead to the use of nuclear weapons?”
Not surprisingly, the answers were a bit stronger, with 72% answering “very concerned” (36%) or “somewhat concerned” (36%), while just 21% responded they were “not concerned,” with 14% saying “not very” concerned and 7% “not at all” concerned.
Once again, the consensus across political parties was fairly strong, with Democrats at 78% “concerned,” Republicans at 71%, and independents at 65%.
