CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Trump Warrant Had No Legal Basis A former president’s rights under the Presidential Records Act trump the statutes the FBI cited to justify the Mar-a-Lago raid. By David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey

Posted By on August 24th, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-trump-warrant-had-no-legal-basis-mar-a-lago-affidavit-presidential-records-act-archivist-custody-classified-fbi-garland-11661170684

Was the Federal Bureau of Investigation justified in searching Donald Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago? The judge who issued the warrant for Mar-a-Lago has signaled that he is likely to release a redacted version of the affidavit supporting it. But the warrant itself suggests the answer is likely no—the FBI had no legally valid cause for the raid.

The warrant authorized the FBI to seize “all physical documents and records constituting evidence, contraband, fruits of crime, or other items illegally possessed in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§793, 2071, or 1519” (emphasis added). These three criminal statutes all address the possession and handling of materials that contain national-security information, public records or material relevant to an investigation or other matters properly before a federal agency or the courts.

The materials to be seized included “any government and/or Presidential Records created between January 20, 2017, and January 20, 2021”—i.e., during Mr. Trump’s term of office. Virtually all the materials at Mar-a-Lago are likely to fall within this category. Federal law gives Mr. Trump a right of access to them. His possession of them is entirely consistent with that right, and therefore lawful, regardless of the statutes the FBI cites in its warrant.

Those statutes are general in their text and application. But Mr. Trump’s documents are covered by a specific statute, the Presidential Records Act of 1978. It has long been the Supreme Court position, as stated in Morton v. Mancari (1974), that “where there is no clear intention otherwise, a specific statute will not be controlled or nullified by a general one, regardless of the priority of enactment.” The former president’s rights under the PRA trump any application of the laws the FBI warrant cites.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Palestinian Authority’s stealth attempt to take over Judea and Samaria David Isaac

Posted By on August 23rd, 2022

(The Palestinian Authority’s stealth attempt to take over Judea and Samaria – JNS.org)

“The illegal building that’s taking place by the Arabs has increased so dramatically in the last year that it’s out of control. If we judge according to where these activities are happening, they’re definitely in places which you can see they’re trying to create facts on the ground,” says Efrat Mayor Oded Revivi. Diligently following a master plan worked out over 10 years ago, the Palestinian Authority is laying claim to large tracts of Israeli state land through illegal building. Resembling Potemkin villages, many structures stand empty, hollow, windowless, alone or clumped together. The land grab has been hugely successful because Israeli countermeasures have been so feeble, Jews living in the area tell JNS.

“Their side is focused, determined and has a well-developed plan. Our side is unfocused, indecisive and in many cases not even aware of what’s going on,” said Michael Sperber, a family lawyer who lives in Efrat, a city of 15,000 about a half-hour’s drive south of Jerusalem in the Judean hills.

Sperber, a long-time resident of Efrat (he served as deputy mayor 15 years ago) has taken it upon himself to document illegal Arab construction in the area. From Dagan, the city’s northernmost neighborhood, Sperber has a window seat onto Arab buildings advancing from Bethlehem across the narrow valley below and up toward Efrat.

Efrat Mayor Oded Revivi told JNS that, “The illegal building that’s taking place by the Arabs has increased so dramatically in the last year that it’s out of control. If we judge according to where these activities are happening, they’re definitely in places which you can see they’re trying to create facts on the ground.”

Revivi noted that if the illegal structures are not hooked up to the sewage system this could lead to pollution of underground reservoirs, and if they are erected too close to roads then this could prevent the widening of lanes in the future.

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Liz Cheney’s Agony By Richard McDonough

Posted By on August 23rd, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/08/liz_cheneys_agony.html

EXCERPT

Liz Cheney, who sits on the Jan. 6th Committee, has made her political agenda clear from the beginning.  Although an “investigation” is supposed to be a search for the truth, Liz Cheney made agonizingly clear many times that she didn’t need to wait for the results of the investigation.  From the beginning her stated aim was “make sure that Trump never gets near the White House again.”  Permanent Washington also made their aim clear.  The Jan. 6th Committee “investigation” was for her, and many others, mere political theatre to achieve a predetermined political agenda.

Had Cheney been interested in the truth, she might have insisted that the committee seat the appropriate number and type of Republicans to cross-examine the prosecutorial witnesses.  She did not do so.  At every turn she interpreted any testimony in the worst way possible for Trump, e.g., she has recently stated that Trump “commanded” a “heavily armed mob” to try to stop the counting of electoral votes.  She and her Jan. 6th Committee have, however, given no evidence whatsoever that Trump “commanded” an armed mob to use violence to stop the counting of electoral votes.  Her very strong statement requires that she prove both causality and intent.  However, the committee has only demonstrated a degree (even that not clear) of correlation between Trump’s remarks and the riot, namely, that Trump made some remarks and some people went to the Capitol and rioted.  The committee has not proved that Trump’s remarks caused the mob to riot at the Capitol or that Trump intended that his remarks cause the mob to riot at the Capitol.  Demonstrating causality or intent is never easy in social situations: “Since intent is a mental state. it is one of the most difficult things to prove.” It is certainly not easy given the very murky events surrounding Jan. 6th, events that the committee in their “Star Chamber” has conspired to keep murky.  For Liz Cheney, however, everything about Jan. 6th is as clear to her as her seething hatred of Donald Trump.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Are Green Pet Projects Delaying the Next Energy Breakthrough?

Posted By on August 23rd, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/08/are-green-pet-projects-delaying-the-next

Biden’s latest green boondoggle funnels money to known energy losers, while curbing the technologies that could prove truly transformative.

Joe Biden’s latest spending binge doubles down on decades of failed government policies, propping up the wind and solar industries while entirely ignoring vast areas ripe for potential energy breakthroughs.

Biden’s so-called Inflation Reduction Act pledged to invest $369 billion in so-called “green” energy sources such as wind and solar power over the next decade, giving a windfall of cash to energy types favored by environmentalists. The IRA aims to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 40 percent by 2030.

America already poured almost $450 billion, even more than the amount provided by Biden’s legislation, into “green” energy between 2010 and 2019. Yet solar and wind power provided only 1.5 and 3.4 percent, respectively, of the energy produced in the U.S. in 2021, according to the Energy Information Administration. The use of solar and wind power has either temporarily increased carbon dioxide emissions or, at best, been responsible for about 1 percent of the decline in emissions, a process much more attributable to the switch from coal power to natural gas.

Pumping vast sums of money into solar and wind isn’t a new phenomenon. In fact, it has been going on for almost half a century, as government favoritism towards these technologies goes right back to the origins of the technologies. (In 1974, an economical solar-power device was the object that drove the plot in the then-near-future James Bond movie The Man with the Golden Gun.) The solar-energy backers were wrong, and their boondoggle has cost American taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars. Today, solar and wind power get, respectively, 250 and 160 times the subsidies per unit of energy generated that nuclear-fission power does, according to Forbes.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Liz Peek: Democrats’ spin Biden success and wish upon a star for midterm magic but don’t you believe it

Posted By on August 23rd, 2022

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/democrats-spin-biden-success-wish-upon-star-midterm-magic

Are Republicans really about to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory? 

That’s what the liberal media would have you believe. For the past few weeks the New York Times, Washington Post et al – the usual message boards for the Democratic National Committee – have been celebrating Joe Biden’s slightly rising poll numbers and legislative “accomplishments.”

“Biden is on a roll” trumpeted the Times recently, quoting White House aides claiming the president has enjoyed a “string of victories [that] compares favorably to the two-year legislative record of most any other modern president.” 

According to the Times, Biden recently descended from Air Force One with a “jaunty step, a playful manner and a huge grin” – that’s how reinvigorated the 79-year old president is. Once again, the Times reports, within the halls of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Biden is being likened to LBJ or FDR.

Politico ran a piece under the headline, “Wait, Is Biden a Better President Than People Thought?

The simple answer is: no. Biden is still an unpopular, ineffective president whose recent promise to get out on the campaign trail (now that he has recovered from COVID) must have Democrat candidates shaking in their boots. 

Few want the president at their side when they are trying to explain to Americans why egg prices are up 38% in the past year and why Covid-19 still haunts the land despite Biden’s promise that the vaccine would kill off the virus. They can’t imagine Biden’s response when voters ask how our booming economy fell into recession, or why Democrats are allowing some 2 million people to enter the U.S. illegally this year. Or when Americans ask how the president plans to make our cities’ streets safe again. 

EDUCATION Comments turned off

‘Anti-Racism’ and Common Sense:By Peter Kirsanow

Posted By on August 23rd, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/anti-racism-and-common-sense/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=blog-post&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=fourth

A  short time ago, the National Museum of African American History sported a poster that most normal adults would describe as moronic if not blatantly racist. The poster purported to list indicies of “Whiteness,” such as hard work, individualism, objectivity, nuclear family, respect for authority, and delayed gratification. These weren’t presented as universal qualities to strive for regardless of race. Rather, these were  tools of oppression,  contributors to unfairness, and characteristics of white supremacy.

CRT/anti-racism training tells little white kids that they’re privileged and/or oppressors by virtue of their race. Common sense counsels that such training will almost necessarily yield negative outcomes, some of them severe.

There was a time in the recent past when the vast majority of adults — regardless of race, educational attainment, or economic background — intuitively grasped that such instruction is galactically stupid, immoral, toxic, false, and destructive. A majority might still think so, even if they’re too cowed to say it.

But that doesn’t appear to include a majority of today’s so-called “elites,” many of whom support and promote such instruction. This portends ill for our society, which seems to be sprouting ruptures in social cohesion by the minute. Indeed, less than 20 years ago, before the germination of anti-racism  training, Gallup reported that 74 percent of white Americans and 68 percent of black Americans thought race relations were good. By July 2021, those numbers had cratered to 43 percent and 33 percent, respectively. Some of that decline may be attributable to discrete events such as the Michael Brown and George Floyd incidents and the media narratives surrounding them.  But the steady harangue of idiotic — and sometimes evil — CRT/anti-racism/DEI training surely contributes.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Arizona’s Campus Disaster Can Be Stopped Stanley Kurtz

Posted By on August 23rd, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/arizonas-campus-disaster-can-be-stopped/

The woke rebellion against America’s founding principles continues to advance on all fronts. Nowhere is this truer than at America’s universities, the source and stronghold of the cultural revolution. The pushback against the illiberalism of our universities — their betrayal of their own first principles — has so far been a paltry thing. Supposedly, this is because higher education is shielded by academic freedom in a way that K–12 education is not. But that is not the reason we have failed. The truth is, opponents of the woke revolution have barely begun to do what they can to restore liberal education to America’s academy.

The greatest abdication of all is our failure to reform universities by way of trustees (also called regents or governors). University boards of regents can do almost anything. Yet most often they do nothing but rubber-stamp the decisions of administrators. That has to change right now, and it needs to change first in Arizona.

Boards of regents at public universities are responsible to the people of their state. Regents are appointed by governors, and sometimes by legislatures, too. In a few states, regents are selected by popular vote. Yet almost never do we see the appointment of university trustees become an election issue. Well, trustee selection needs to be an election issue right now in Arizona. Here’s why.

Arizona’s public universities have turned themselves into leaders in the national movement to indoctrinate students in the tenets of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI). The showpiece of this campaign is Northern Arizona University’s (NAU) move to require four — count ’em, four — diversity courses for graduation, all of which must be grounded in “critical theory,” the neo-Marxist system that produced critical race theory, critical legal theory, and still more entries in the grand campaign to neo-Marxitize pretty much everything.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Where Is Steven D’Antuono? The head of the FBI’s field office in Washington, D.C., has a lot of explaining to do. By Julie Kelly

Posted By on August 23rd, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/22/where-is-steven-dantuono/

A few days after the Capitol protest on January 6, 2021, a tough-talking FBI chief with a Boston accent promised the American people that the bureau would spare no resource in hunting down everyone and anyone involved in the four-hour disturbance that day. 

Steven M. D’Antuono, the newly appointed head of the Washington, D.C. FBI field office, gave the public a stern warning. “The FBI will leave no stone unturned. This is a 24/7, full bore, extensive operation,” D’Antuono explained during a January 12, 2021 press conference at the Department of Justice. “As Director Wray says, the FBI does not do easy.”

His agency, D’Antuono bragged, has a “long memory and a broad reach.” Agents from 56 FBI field offices across the country “will be knocking on your door if we find out you were part of the criminal activity at the Capitol.” He urged people to turn in their co-workers, neighbors, and relatives if they had information that could help the FBI in its dragnet.

Turns out, his comments weren’t just Beantown-style braggadocio. More than 850 Americans since then have been investigated, arrested, and charged for mostly nonviolent offenses related to the January 6 protest. Armed FBI agents have conducted early morning raids at homes across the country, using military style vehicles to batter in front doors while traumatizing families, children, and neighbors in the process. It is a crusade of fear and terror meant to reinforce D’Antuono’s threats that those who dared to demonstrate against the fraudulent election of Joe Biden that day will pay a hefty price. 

Nearly 20 months later, D’Antuono’s office continues to announce new arrests.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Rushdie Stabbing and the World’s Leading Terror State The real point of the Islamic Republic’s fatwa. David Harsanyi

Posted By on August 23rd, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/rushdie-stabbing-reminds-us-iran-still-worlds-david-harsanyi/

Last week, a man stormed the stage at the Chautauqua Institution and stabbed British author Salman Rushdie in the neck as he was being introduced. The topic under discussion was “the United States as asylum for writers and other artists in exile and as a home for freedom of creative expression.” Chances are exceptionally high that this was the work of a jihadi.

The story attracted shamefully fleeting attention. For those too young to remember, “The Satanic Verses” was published back in September 1988. And because of the book’s purportedly impertinent treatment of the prophet Muhammad, it was banned in Rushdie’s native India and dozens of other nations — including virtually every Muslim-majority country in the world. Though Rushdie would later become a powerful advocate of free expression, he initially turned on his own book, apologizing numerous times for its contents. “I profoundly regret the distress that publication has occasioned to sincere followers of Islam,” he said in one statement, asking his publisher to hold back release of the paperback edition of the book. As a matter of self-preservation, his position was understandable.

And, still, it was all to no avail. Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against Rushdie, contending that even if the author “became the most pious man of all time” it was the duty of every Muslim to “employ everything he has got” to murder the writer.

For the first time in postwar history, terrorism was aimed at suppressing free expression in the liberal Western world. In the United States, two bookstores in Berkeley, California, were attacked. The Riverdale Press in New York was firebombed after publishing an editorial defending the right to read the novel and criticizing the bookstores that pulled it from their shelves. Rushdie’s Japanese translator Hitoshi Igarashi was fatally stabbed. In Europe, the Italian translator of “The Satanic Verses,” Ettore Capriolo, was also stabbed in his apartment in Milan, and the Norwegian publisher of Rushdie’s book, William Nygaard, was shot three times, but both survived. In Belgium, an imam and his aide were murdered after expressing moderate positions on the affair. Big booksellers in London were firebombed in April 1989, and there were two more explosions connected to the selling of the book and a handful of unexploded devices in other bookstores. Rushdie, author of the masterpiece “Midnight’s Children” among many other fantastic works, was forced to employ round-the-clock protection by bodyguards, compelled to spend the next decade in hiding.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Fauci flees his office, fearing Republicans taking control in Congress and holding him to account By Thomas Lifson

Posted By on August 23rd, 2022

Yesterday, in a statement posted on the website of the federal agency he runs, Dr. Anthony Fauci announced his retirement in December, one month before Republicans are expected to take control of the House of Representatives and maybe the Senate.

I am announcing today that I will be stepping down from the positions of Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and Chief of the NIAID Laboratory of Immunoregulation, as well as the position of Chief Medical Advisor to President Joe Biden. I will be leaving these positions in December of this year to pursue the next chapter of my career.

As Sister Toldjah notes at RedState:

Apparently, the “next phase” of Fauci’s career will include collecting a sweet pension and possibly avoiding having to answer before Congress under oath as to what he knew about the origins of COVID-19 and U.S. gain of research funding: