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March 2019

Targeting the Electoral College Democrats tee up another constitutional norm for a rewrite.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/targeting-the-electoral-college-11553036512

Like the Supreme Court, the Electoral College sometimes frustrates the will of political majorities. That makes it an easy target in this populist age. But while “majority rules” has always been an appealing slogan, it’s an insufficient principle for structuring an electoral system in the U.S.

Presidential elections often do not produce popular majorities. In 2016 neither Hillary Clinton nor Donald Trump won 50%. “Plurality rules” doesn’t have the same ring to it. In the absence of the Electoral College, the winner’s vote share would likely be significantly smaller than is common today. Third-party candidates who can’t realistically win a majority in any state would have a greater incentive to enter the race.

Like the Supreme Court, the Electoral College sometimes frustrates the will of political majorities. That makes it an easy target in this populist age. But while “majority rules” has always been an appealing slogan, it’s an insufficient principle for structuring an electoral system in the U.S.

Presidential elections often do not produce popular majorities. In 2016 neither Hillary Clinton nor Donald Trump won 50%. “Plurality rules” doesn’t have the same ring to it. In the absence of the Electoral College, the winner’s vote share would likely be significantly smaller than is common today. Third-party candidates who can’t realistically win a majority in any state would have a greater incentive to enter the race.

New York prosecutors throw out Constitution to charge Manafort By Jonathan Turley,

https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/434711-new-york-prosecutors-throw-out-constitution-to-charge-manafort

This month, the greatest off Broadway production should be titled “The Prosecutors,” starring Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. and New York Attorney General Letitia James. As in another dramatic comedy, “The Producers,” the state case against former Donald Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort seems designed to fail, leaving its prosecutors with the convenient windfall of public support and none of the burden.

The New York state charges that Vance filed against Manafort appear to run afoul of state and federal protections against double jeopardy, or being prosecuted twice for the same underlying conduct. The timing of the charges alone seemed right out of the playbook of “The Producers” character Max Bialystock, the corrupt Broadway figure who insisted that in New York the rule is “if you got it, flaunt it, flaunt it.” Accordingly, Vance waited just minutes after the Manafort sentencing to hit him with state charges, guaranteeing the maximum exposure and credit for his effort.

The problem is that the case appears not only constitutionally flawed but ethically challenged, coming right out of the Max Bialystock School of Prosecution. I have long been one of the longest and loudest critics of Manafort. He is a corrupt and despicable person who deserves the two sentences that could keep him in jail for the rest of his life. However, it is not his crimes but his association with President Trump that has driven the manic effort to charge him in New York. In this current age of rage over Trump, Manafort is a readily available surrogate for selective prosecution.

New Zealand: the barbarism of identity politics The relentless reduction of people to cultural beings is unleashing terrible conflict. Brendan O’Neill

https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/03/15/new-zealand-the-barbarism-of-identity-politics/
EXCERPT

As we offer our solidarity, we also want to try to understand why things like this happen. Understandably, there has been a rush to locate this barbaric act within a broader political framework. Sadly, this has given rise to a speedy and ghoulish exploitation of the atrocity to make political mileage. Already observers are pinning the blame on certain right-wing commentators, or on the Western media more broadly, claiming that criticism of Muslim immigration or of Islam generates this kind of violent hatred. Already some are calling for clampdowns on Islamophobia and for the expunging from the internet of certain hard-right voices. It will strike many of us, especially those of us who are humanists, as perverse and disturbing that people would so swiftly use a bloody act to further their own narrow agendas of social control and censorship; that they would use a massacre almost as an exclamation point to their already existing demands for the demonisation and punishment of particular opinions. It is cynical and inhuman.

Furthermore, it feels wrong. To fold this barbarism into a narrative about a surging threat of white supremacy or even Islamophobia overlooks what feels terrifyingly mainstream about the ideas that appear to have energised and inspired this racist mass murderer – namely, the politics of identity. To read the killer’s alleged manifesto, as currently being covered by CNN, the New York Times and others, is to gain a horrible glimpse into the cultural fragmentation and racial paranoia unleashed by the relentless rise of identitarianism.

Increasingly, it feels like the New Zealand atrocity is what happens when the politics of identity, the reduction of everyone to cultural or racial creatures whose relationship with other cultural and racial cultures must be monitored and managed, comes to be the only game in public life.

The Only Option They Had as Pseudo-Conservatives By Sebastian Gorka

https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/19/the-only-option-they-had-as-pseudo-conservatives/

“As if by prophecy, the next article the Bulwark posted was: “Is Socialism Really that Big of a Threat?”

It’s been a tough two years if you’re a post-Reagan era, Bush-flunky fake conservative.

Between America winning the Cold War and the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, the RINO-gravy-train had treated you well. Even if you were a former leftist, the “elite” of New York and Washington were happy to let you make a phony Damascene conversion to the side that won the ideological war of the 20th century, drop your questionable political past down the memory hole, and reinvent yourself as a lifelong Buckleyite.

You believed the rest of your life could consist of your collecting fat honoraria checks from both sides of the uniparty establishment. From AEI to Brookings, from CATO to the Council on Foreign Relations, you also milked a handful of gullible right-wing donors and bloviated your pedestrian “analysis” for the hosts of the cable shows you cared for the most—naturally, on CNN. This despite the fact that America really didn’t seem to care. At least not if we judge by the viewing statistics.

How anyone still talks about CNN at all is a question that continues to mystify me. Even CNN‘s “hottest” shows are mostly ignored by more than 99 percent of the U.S. population. On a good night, Anderson Cooper, can only garner 800,000 real viewers (as opposed to people trapped at an airport waiting to board a plane). That’s 0.25 percent of the population of our republic. Seriously guys, can’t we just ignore them? Back to the fakers.

For decades they planted themselves at publications such as National Review and the Weekly Standard which lost their viability as market products but nevertheless chugged along, read by a smaller and smaller group of believers and fellow-travelers, funded as they were by the same handful of well-meaning but credulous sugar-daddies. You know their names: Bill Kristol, Stephen Hays, Jennifer Rubin, Tom Nichols, to name but a few. Then on November 8, 2016, America fired them all.

Stuyvesant High School In New York City-An American Dilemma By Jay Nordlinger

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/an-american-dilemma-stuyvesant-high-school/

This article in the New York Times is getting attention, understandably. It highlights an old, painful issue, involving “merit,” race, and ethnicity. The headline over the article is “Only 7 Black Students Got Into N.Y.’s Most Selective High School, Out of 895 Spots.”

That high school is Stuyvesant. As the Times reports, students get into such schools “by acing a single high-stakes exam that tests their mastery of math and English.” This leads to racial and ethnic outcomes that are deemed undesirable. At Stuyvesant, 74 percent of freshmen next year — call it three-quarters — will be Asian.

New York mayor Bill de Blasio, among others, has called for the scrapping of the entrance exam and the overhaul of the admissions process. I have a memory, from 2001. Indeed, via the power of Google, I will quote the Times:

Contending that standardized college tests have distorted the way young people learn and worsened educational inequities, the president of the University of California is proposing an end to the use of SAT’s as a requirement for admission to the state university system he oversees, one of the largest and most prestigious.

Ivy-League Schools Wither By Victor Davis Hanson

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/elite-universities-ignore-merit-advance-progressive-agenda/

Higher-ed institutions have long ignored merit and squelched freedom, all while failing to educate.

A number of liberal bastions are daily being hammered — especially the elite university and Silicon Valley.

A Yale and a Stanford, or Facebook and Google, assume — for the most part rightly — that each is so loudly progressive that the public, federal and state regulators, and politicians would of course turn a blind eye to anything questionable that these social-justice institutions did.

And they have done a lot of quite questionable things — cynically (and in medieval fashion) using their progressive veneer to exempt themselves from the consequences of their actions, so that they may do what otherwise would earn scrutiny and worse for most other American institutions.

Our nation’s marquee universities, such as Yale, Stanford, and Georgetown — with dozens more no doubt to be named — recently got caught selling admittances. Or rather a few of their employees somehow freelanced under administration noses and sold entrances for cash. That is apparently our modern version of crooked 14th-century clerics putting out to bid penances to thieves and fornicators who wished to buy their way into heaven.

At some of our “best” universities, renegade coaches in minor sports took bribes in exchange for lies claiming that otherwise likely unqualified students were actually “athletes” and thereby could be greased into their colleges by middlemen who helped doctor résumés and test scores.

The irony is rich. The offenders were not the children in Dayton or Great Falls of Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” and “irredeemables,” or of the late John McCain’s “crazies,” or of Barack Obama’s “clingers” — it was not they who were using their “white privilege” to break the law as they virtue-signaled their racialist disdain of the working classes (who were without white privilege). What a strange psychological mechanism: Wealthy white liberals apparently squared the circle of their own private and insider privilege by fobbing “white privilege” off on those who don’t have it — as they used their privilege cynically for their own children.

Triggered by Weinstein’s Harvard Lawyer A law professor agrees to represent an unpopular client, and undergrads say they’re traumatized. By Heather Mac Donald

https://www.wsj.com/articles/triggered-by-weinsteins-harvard-lawyer-11552950103

Harvard has opened an investigation into law professor Ronald Sullivan, who earlier this year joined Harvey Weinstein’s criminal-defense team. Some undergraduates complained that Mr. Sullivan’s decision to represent Mr. Weinstein, who is charged with rape in New York, puts them at risk. By taking the complaint seriously, Harvard puts its commitment to identity politics above the core tenets of due process.

Student backlash was immediate when the New York Post reported in late January that Mr. Sullivan would be representing Mr. Weinstein. A visual and environmental studies major started an online petition to remove Mr. Sullivan from his position as faculty dean of Winthrop House, one of Harvard’s 12 undergraduate residential houses. Mr. Sullivan’s choice of client was “deeply trauma-inducing,” and shows that Mr. Sullivan doesn’t “value the safety of students,” the petition announced. Would Winthrop residents “really want to one day accept [a] Diploma,” the petition asked, from someone who “believes it is okay to defend” Mr. Weinstein?

Six Harvard dorms held “listening sessions” attended by emissaries from the university’s Office for Sexual Assault Prevention and Response, whose website urged traumatized students to seek mental-health services and other help from Harvard’s massive Title IX bureaucracy. Harvard’s dean of students and its lead Title IX coordinator attended a student protest outside the main administration building, where the ubiquitous Office for Sexual Assault Prevention and Response doled out hot chocolate.

Still-unidentified vandals spray-painted #MeToo slogans such as “your silence is violence” on Winthrop House. The record reveals no condemnation from Harvard officials and requests for comment were not returned at press time. The Association of Black Harvard Women complained that Mr. Sullivan (who is black) had “failed” female African-Americans at Harvard and had compromised his ability to support “survivors . . . as they deal with their trauma.”

China’s Rise Means Trouble in Paradise Fiji and other tiny South Pacific states will be flashpoints of global competition.By Walter Russell Mead

https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-rise-means-trouble-in-paradise-11552950243

Viti Levu, Fiji

On a recent visit to Fiji I was able to confirm that the majestic islands of the South Pacific remain as close to paradise as one can get in this world. But alongside the sparkling crystal waters and coral gardens, I saw something darker at work in the region.

As U.S.-China competition intensifies, the thinly settled islands scattered across Oceania will become geopolitical flashpoints. The contest has already begun to impose strains on fragile societies. These strains will intensify as strategists in Washington, Beijing and Canberra seek to further influence political developments in tiny, almost inaccessible island-states.

U.S. interests in the South Pacific run deep. The American naval presence in the region, originally dispatched to protect U.S. whalers, is 200 years old. American statesmen have long believed that the country’s security depends on U.S. power in the Pacific. President John Tyler extended the Monroe Doctrine to Hawaii in 1842; a century later the importance of the region was driven home by the brutal island warfare of World War II. Even in an era when many Americans want to limit the nation’s overseas commitments, voters and Washington strategists alike will remain focused on maintaining security and stability in the South Pacific.

For many years, the main diplomatic drama in the region revolved around the bidding war between Taipei and Beijing for diplomatic recognition. In exchange for aid packages, island-states would agree to recognize either Taiwan or the mainland. For small states without many goods to sell, diplomatic recognition turned out to be good business. Of the 17 countries world-wide that maintain diplomatic relations with Taiwan, six are in the South or Central Pacific.

Houston Library Features Convicted Child Molester Reading Trans Books To Children State records say the 200-pound, 5-foot-11 man was convicted of aggravated sexual assault of a child and is at a ‘moderate’ risk for reoffending. His YouTube channel shows him becoming transgender.By Joy Pullmann

http://thefederalist.com/2019/03/19/houston-library-features-convicted-child-molester-reading-trans-books-children/

This article contains information and images not fit for children.

The Houston Public Library has apologized for featuring a convicted child molester last fall during its “Drag Queen Storytime” series. It has not, however, announced it will end the program that featured the male sex offender dressed up as a woman reading LGBT books to children as young as babies.

“A media spokesperson for the library confirmed one of the program’s drag queens, Tatiana Mala Nina, is Alberto Garza, a 32-year-old child sex offender,” reports local TV station KHOU. “In 2008, he was convicted of assaulting an 8-year-old boy.”

State records say the 200-pound, 5-foot-11 man was convicted of aggravated sexual assault of a child, is at a “moderate” risk for reoffending, and must report his whereabouts to police annually for the rest of his life. Garza’s YouTube channel showed he was in the process of transgendering himself, according to Rod Dreher (videos since removed; screenshot of Garza in drag captured here).

Drag Queen Storytime is spreading to libraries across the country, mostly but not exclusively in deeply Democratic locales. It even has a national PR webpage featuring an image of a scared toddler staring at a man dressed up in drag while the child’s mother encourages the child to get over the apprehension.

Did Peter Strzok Lie, Or Was There A Spy Targeting The Trump Campaign? And Lisa Page’s testimony creates yet a bigger problem since her statement contradicts DOJ lawyer Bruce Ohr’s testimony to the House committee. Margot Cleveland

http://thefederalist.com/2019/03/19/peter-strzok-lie-spy-targeting-trump-campaign/

Last Thursday, Doug Collins, the ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, released the committee’s transcript of its interview of disgraced former FBI agent Peter Strzok. During the day-long questioning, Strzok sought to explain away the more deleterious text messages he sent to his mistress and former FBI lawyer Lisa Page.

When one considers Strzok’s explanation of his reference to an “insurance policy” in light of Page’s testimony, which Collins also released last week, and other previously known facts, there seem to be only two possibilities: Strzok was lying or an unknown spy was targeting the Trump campaign.

Strzok sent the “insurance policy” text to Page on August 15, 2016, just two weeks after the FBI’s launch of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation of the Trump campaign: “I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s office—that there’s no way he gets elected—but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40,” the former deputy assistant director wrote to Page.
Strzok’s Answer

When questioned on the meaning of this text by members of the House Judiciary Committee, Strzok testified that “we had received information from a very sensitive source alleging collusion between the Government of Russia and members of the Trump campaign.”

“As is frequently the case in counterintelligence investigations and any national security investigations,” Strzok added, “there’s a tension between the protection of a sensitive source and method of pursuing the investigation related to that information.”