Displaying posts published in

April 2018

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

TIME FOR MUELLER TO LAY IT ALL OUT: MICHAEL GOODWIN

By on April 10th, 2018

Washington is full of blather, bombast and bullsh-t, but a line about Robert Mueller was the most important thing spoken or written there last week:

“Peter Carr, a spokesman for the special counsel’s office, declined to comment.”

Since Mueller’s office never says anything outside court publicly, who knew he had a spokesman or needed one?

The line was included in a Washington Post story that said Mueller told the White House that President Trump was not a target of the criminal investigation.

The story could be a big deal — if true. But the report is nonetheless remarkable because it was the first leak in memory that carried good news for Trump.

After breathless drip, drip, drip reports that had the president practically being frog-marched to a firing squad at dawn, the fever broke. Every dog has its day, and the Washington media decided this president’s day comes once every 15 months.

True to form, news outlets immediately pivoted back to their regularly scheduled programming of stories saying Trump is in imminent danger. The New York Times and ABC declared that George Nader, a Lebanese-American businessman, though a stranger to readers, is now Mueller’s hottest witness.

Enough.

The violent swings of the leaky pendulum make this an excellent moment to call timeout on the Mueller probe. What does he have, where is he going and when is he going to get there?

Continue reading →
MEDIA Comments turned off

Racist Facebook: Black Conservatives Diamond and Silk ‘Unsafe’ By Daniel John Sobieski

By on April 10th, 2018

In the age before cable, there was an iconic sci-fi program called The Outer Limits whose opening featured a series of test patterns; flickering screens; and a narrator who solemnly intoned, “Do not attempt to adjust your television set. We will control all that you see and hear.” Today, that is a chilling reality as social media giant Facebook censors what fans of social media icons Diamond and Silk, aka Lynette Hardaway and her sister Rochelle Richardson, see and hear from this dynamic pair of black conservative women on Facebook.

Racism is a term too easily bandied about these days, particularly by social progressives seeking to silence conservative thought and opinion which they deemed inherently racist in their chants of “white privilege.” Yet it is precisely the term liberals would use if, say, Michelle Obama or the likes of Maxine Waters were treated this way, their words censored because they were deemed “unsafe” to the community.” Indeed, Diamond and Silk themselves haVE raised the possibility that racism might be afoot here:

You are talking about two people here when you say Diamond and Silk. We are the brand. So, when you say things like we are ‘not safe’ for the community what are you trying to say? What are you trying to do? Are you trying to demonize us into something? Are you stereotyping us? What are you trying to do here? Because this doesn’t feel right. This here feels like racism. The left always cries racism. I see racism right here.

Continue reading →
POLITICS Comments turned off

Elections are Coming:Will Wyoming Get a New Governor – and Conservatives a New Superstar? By Karin McQuillan

By on April 10th, 2018

Harriet Hageman, running for governor of Wyoming, began learning to drive when she was four years old. She would steer the family pickup across open ranchland, avoiding holes, bumps, and ditches, while her dad stood in the back, throwing out bales of hay for the cattle.

Hageman grew up differently from how most Americans did. Her childhood had more freedom, more responsibility, and more hard work. It harks back to an earlier century. These are real Wyoming credentials. They are also values the country needs, and needs badly.

Hageman’s belt is notched with victories fighting the feds on behalf of the little guy. As a land and water rights lawyer going up against EPA and Forest Service overreach, she won precedent-setting victories for embattled ranchers, farmers, and businesses, protecting their rights over their own private property. Now she is aiming for political victory as a principled conservative going up against overspending and overregulation.

Wyoming is a peculiar state. It is one of the largest states in the nation, the emptiest and most wild – and most regulated. Half the state is owned by the federal government – Forest Service, BLM, and national parks. Mining and ranching, the mainstays of the economy, require federal permission of some kind for much of what they do.

Wyoming is the kind of flyover country the elites ignore but couldn’t survive without. It is one of the top ten states crucial for our national prosperity. Wyoming is our number-two energy powerhouse, right behind Texas. It produces more coal than the next six coal-mining states combined. Wyoming’s Powder River Basin is one of the greatest coal fields in the world, but Americans have never heard of it. If Wyoming stopped producing coal, natural gas, and uranium, 30 states would go dark.

America needs Wyoming’s voice. It needs to hear from Wyoming on energy, on how to win free from federal over regulation, on Wyoming’s lived principles of helping neighbors and taking care of one’s own family. America needs more of Wyoming’s old-fashioned individualism. Hageman has the potential to be that voice on the national stage.

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Clinton Supporters Have Some Questions for Comey Why did the FBI wait almost four weeks before examining the emails on Anthony Weiner’s laptop? By Lanny J. Davis

By on April 9th, 2018

James Comey’s book comes out next week. While promoting “A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership” the former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation should face some tough questions. First, will he correct the postelection distortions by “friends and associates” meant to justify his decision to send the Oct. 28, 2016, letter to Congress? That letter—which announced the FBI was reopening its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails—almost certainly handed Donald Trump the presidency.

In an Oct. 29, 2016, internal memo, Mr. Comey claimed he was “obligated” to inform Congress because of a public commitment he had made during a congressional hearing. But that is untrue. On Sept. 28, 2016, Rep. Lamar Smith (R., Texas) had asked what the FBI chief would do if anything new on the Clinton emails issue was discovered. Mr. Comey responded only that “we would certainly look at any new and substantial information.”

The FBI began reviewing emails found on former Rep. Anthony Weiner’s laptop on Oct. 31, 2016, some four weeks after Mr. Comey was made aware of their existence. Agents completed their work on Nov. 5. Since it took less than a week to review the emails, couldn’t Mr. Comey have done so before informing Congress? If Mr. Comey argues he didn’t know how long it would take, the question remains: Why didn’t he look first? This is especially important given the undeserved political damage caused by the letter.

Mr. Comey also falsely claimed that the FBI needed to obtain a warrant before reviewing the Clinton emails on Mr. Weiner’s laptop. In fact, attorneys for Huma Abedin and Mr. Weiner told the New Yorker’s Peter Elkind that they would have “readily acceded” to FBI requests to review the Clinton emails without a warrant. But Mr. Comey and the FBI never asked. Why?

Then there is the still-unexplained delay between Mr. Comey’s being told about the Weiner-Clinton emails and obtaining a warrant. On Oct. 3, 2016, Mr. Comey first learned about the discovery of the new emails. Yet it wasn’t until Oct. 30 that he and the FBI obtained a warrant to look at them. Many conservatives believe Mr. Comey and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe deliberately delayed the review to help Mrs. Clinton, but the opposite is the case.CONTINUE AT SITE

Continue reading →
ISRAEL Comments turned off

U.N. Ignores Atrocities in Syria and Yemen yet Calls for Investigation of Israeli Defensive Measures Against Hamas at Gaza Border See note please

By on April 9th, 2018

Note: 1) There are 22 Muslim countries and only ONE Jewish state. 2) Arab Muslims started all FIVE wars against Israel and lost every one of them. 3) Both the Fatah and Hamas Constitutions call for the destruction of Israel. 4) Israel ceded most of the West Bank and all of Gaza to the Palestinian Authority.

Janet Levy,Los Angeles

U.N. Ignores Chemical Attack on Syrian Civilians

http://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/Defense-minister-Israel-will-likely-have-to-go-it-alone-on-Syria-549149

Israeli Defense Minister, Avigdor Liberman said, “Over the weekend, 48 innocent people were killed in Syria, including 8 children and 6 women.”

“I have not heard the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres speak [of the chemical attack]. We have not seen the UN Security Council and the Arab League convene,” Liberman said.

“Over this weekend hundreds were also killed in Yemen, but that doesn’t interest anyone,” he said, adding that when Israel kills Palestinians in self-defense there is an immediate outcry.

On Friday, Israeli soldiers repelled an assault on its border fence with Gaza, killing nine Palestinians who had participated in the “Great March of Return,” a massive protest along the barrier’s route. Participants in the six-week event that began on March 30 hope to enter Israel by breaking down the fence.

Since the beginning of the march, the IDF has killed 31 Palestinians on the Gaza border, most of which the IDF says were Hamas operatives, while the Palestinians argue that they were peaceful protesters.

Continue reading →
ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel Blamed for Missile Strike on Syrian Air Base By Jack Crowe

By on April 9th, 2018

Russian officials claim the Israeli Air Force is responsible for a missile strike on a Syrian airbase carried out early Monday, just two days after the Assad regime killed 42 civilians in a chemical gas attack that sparked international outrage.

The Russian Defense Ministry told state media that two Israeli F-15 fighter jets fired eight guided missiles at the Tiyas base from Lebanese airspace, while pro-Assad Syrian media reported 20 missiles were fired. Israeli officials refused to comment the strike, which killed 14 military personnel, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Israel previously attacked Tiyas, known as the T-4 base, in February on grounds that an Iranian drone that encroached on Israeli airspace originated there.

he strike on the Tiyas airbase comes in the wake of an alleged chemical gas attack perpetrated by the Assad-regime against civilians in a Rebel-held Damscus suburb late Saturday.

President Donald Trump said the Assad regime would pay “a big price” for the violation of international law and condemned Iran and Russia for facilitating the atrocity through their continued support for government forces.

Continue reading →
EDUCATION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Subversion in the Garb of Social Justice By Sumantra Maitra

By on April 9th, 2018

Lola Olufemi was bitter that she had been targeted. Led by Olufemi, an officer in the Cambridge University Students’ Union (CUSU), a group of activist students had started a petition to “decolonize” the university’s English curriculum, inspired by “support” from the Marxist, post-colonial academic Dr. Priyamvada Gopal. When the Telegraph published Olufemi’s photo on its front page, she and the “decolonize English” campaign met with strong online backlash, and she accused the paper of a “very targeted form of harassment.”

If you’re unaware of this latest row, you’re not alone; it is easy to lose track of individual battles in the unending war on classical education. The death by a thousand cuts of Western academia started with the Rhodes Must Fall campaign at Oxford, fomented by someone who was himself a Rhodes Scholar. The rot has now spread to Cambridge, where over 30 departments are being targeted by students and a certain section of academic commissars who have taken it upon themselves to determine whether courses are too dominated by white, male, Euro-centric perspectives.

Britain usually follows the U.S. in its experience of such unwelcome post-modern phenomena. The Cambridge fiasco naturally comes after Stanford and Yale caved in to student and academic pressure for “decolonization.” At Yale, 160 students petitioned against teaching Shakespeare in an English class. The petition read, in part, “The Major English Poets sequences creates a culture that is especially hostile to students of color. When students are made to feel so alienated that they get up and leave the room, or get up and leave the major, something is wrong.” At Stanford, a petition to reinstate Western History as a course met with student protests last year. Needless to say, the craven professors of these august institutions put up little resistance to their students’ extreme demands.

Putting aside the baffling absurdity of students attempting to decide what is supposed to be taught to them, let’s consider a few aspects of these spats. We’re talking about Stanford, Yale, Oxford, and Cambridge here, not Oberlin or Evergreen State College. The future of the West is shaped in these elite schools. That they, as institutions, refused to fight back with any vigor against those waging war on classical Western education means something, or should. The complete destruction of a pedagogical regime that has served the world admirably for centuries is currently underway in the Western academy, and those best positioned to do something about it are sitting on their hands. This is alarming, to put it mildly.

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

In London, Homicides Spike, and Politicians Do a U-Turn on Stop-and-Search By Douglas Murray

By on April 9th, 2018

During the past week, Londoners have woken to the fact that for the first time in living memory the homicide rate in their capital city has overtaken that of New York. There were 15 homicides in London in February, compared with 14 in New York. In March, there were 22 in London, 21 in New York. In recent weeks in London there has been at least one gang-related stabbing almost every day: often fatal, sometimes not. At least 35 deaths since the start of this year have been gang-related. Doctors talk of the emergency wards in parts of London in the evenings resembling a warzone. Just one of the oddities is that most Londoners remain untouched by this. As Harry Mount wrote at The Spectator last month, it is perfectly possible for a killing to be going on near a smart north-London dinner party.

Nevertheless, given that, among Brits, New York still has a reputation for violence, the comparison has struck a nerve. Apart from focusing the national mind, it has also fired up one of the most subterranean and troubling calculations any political class has to make. How many lives are you willing to sacrifice in pursuit of a political position?

In recent years the subject of stop-and-search has been an exceptionally emotive one in the U.K., as it is in America. Because it was deemed to target young black men disproportionately, police and politicians alike found stop-and-search to be a useful tool — not for targeting those people who were thought most likely to be carrying weapons but for parading their own political virtues by objecting to the practice.

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Comey the Celebrity By Jim Geraghty

By on April 9th, 2018

Some former agents, once defenders of the ousted FBI director, aren’t fans of his current high-profile persona.

When President Trump suddenly fired FBI director James Comey in May 2017, quite a few retired bureau officials eagerly defended Comey’s record as director, and denounced Trump’s abrupt, seemingly self-serving decision. But some of those same retired FBI agents are now turned off by the pugnacious, high-profile persona of the former director as he prepares to launch the book tour for his autobiography, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership.

In 25 years at the FBI, James Gagliano handled a wide variety of duties — criminal investigator, undercover agent, supervisory special agent, SWAT team leader, member of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team, acting legal attaché at the U.S. embassy in Mexico City, and head of a bureau satellite office. He’s currently an adjunct assistant professor at St. John’s University and a CNN contributor. Back in June 2017, when Comey was preparing to testify before the Senate, Gagliano said, “Nobody’s going to question Comey’s honor and his character” and said he was “disgusted” with the way that Trump treated the former director.

Now, Gagliano says he was once a “mild fan” of Comey, but has been unhappy with the former director’s decision to venture into the public eye, writing a tell-all book and promoting it on a highly visible press tour.

“This current effort to meet the president in the public square, at his own game of slinging mud and punching and contributing smugness to the debate, it’s a bad look for him,” Gagliano says. “I think it’s going to diminish the FBI, and I think it’s going to diminish whatever’s left of Comey’s reputation.”

Former special agent Bobby Chacon, who now works in Hollywood as a technical advisor and story consultant, has had a similar change of heart. Back when President Trump didn’t even tell Comey that he was fired in person or by phone, Chacon bristled. “Nobody deserves to be treated like that,” he told the Guardian. But since then, he has come to concur that Comey is burning through the goodwill he accumulated over the course of his career in the bureau.

“I liked him when I worked at the bureau, although who the director was never really impacted my day-to-day life in the bureau too much,” Chacon says now, adding that he began to develop some concerns about Comey beginning with the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails. He wondered why a grand jury wasn’t empaneled in that investigation, a move that he contends would have somewhat insulated the bureau from political controversy by leaving the decision to indict or not indict in others’ hands.

Continue reading →
EDUCATION Comments turned off

School Finds Sex Assault Accuser Not Credible, Still Suspends Accused Student The male student is now suing Syracuse University for gender bias and for failing to provide him due process rights. By Ashe Schow

By on April 9th, 2018

The Board found Jane’s claim that the oral sex wasn’t consensual to be untrue, writing in their decisions that Jane “demonstrated consent through her actions.” The Board could also not determine that anal sex occurred (John says the two did not have anal sex). So even though two-thirds of Jane’s claims were found not credible, they still bought her third claim that she initially consented to vaginal intercourse but withdrew her consent at some point during the act.

The Board claimed that Jane’s “actions throughout the process are consistent with a traumatic event such as she described in her statement,” except they found most of her statement to be not credible, and the only traumatic event she allegedly went through was withdrawing sex after she initiated and consented to that sex (again, a story that she changed during the investigation).

John’s attorney, Andrew Miltenberg of Nesenoff & Miltenberg, told the Federalist that there’s only one explanation for how his client could be indefinitely suspended even with facts like these.

“Having litigated on behalf of dozens of accused males on college campuses throughout the country, and represented dozens of others in campus proceedings, I’m especially struck by the complete absurdity of the Title IX process at Syracuse,” Miltenberg said. “There is no credible explanation for the Conduct Board to dismiss two claims but uphold a third — other than a presumption of guilt that was made at the outset of this investigation.”

John is suing Syracuse for Title IX and due process violations, as well as breach of contract.
Ashe Schow is a senior contributor to the Federalist and senior political columnist for the New York Observer. She also contributes to a weekly segment on the Enough Already podcast. She has previously worked for Watchdog.org, the Washington Examiner and the Heritage Foundation.

Continue reading →