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Ruth King

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South Korea’s Next President The rule of law prevails in Seoul, even as strategic threats mount.

By on March 11th, 2017

South Korea’s Constitutional Court unanimously decided Friday to remove President Park Geun-hye from office. Her successor, who must be elected in the next 60 days, will likely come from the left-of-center Democratic Party. That raises important policy questions for Seoul, both domestic and international, but it is also an important reminder of the strength of the South’s democratic institutions.

Ms. Park’s dramatic downfall began last October, following allegations of influence-peddling and corruption by her confidante Choi Soon-sil. By December Ms. Park had been impeached by the National Assembly, a decision the court’s ruling confirmed while Acting President Hwang Kyo-ahn governs in her place. Gerald Ford took over from Richard Nixon in 1974 by declaring “our Constitution works,” and South Koreans can now make the same boast.

The challenges for Ms. Park’s successor will be heavy. Pyongyang’s belligerent young dictator has accelerated his nuclear and ballistic missile programs even as he murders his political rivals overseas. One consolation is that the two leading Democrat candidates, Moon Jae-in and Ahn Hee-jung, have moderated their opposition to this week’s deployment of the U.S. Thaad missile defense system in recent months. This reflects the reality that South Korea can’t afford to alienate the Trump Administration when the U.S. remains the guarantor of its security.

The next South Korean administration will also have to act when it comes to its economic system. The scandal that brought down Ms. Park involved the country’s largest conglomerates, known as chaebol. On Monday prosecutors released a report that described how Samsung executives allegedly asked Ms. Park for government favors, and she asked officials to support a Samsung merger.

That merger of two subsidiaries in 2015 epitomizes the corruption at the heart of Korea Inc. Minority shareholders lost an estimated $7 billion in a deal that allowed Chairman Lee Kun-hee to pass control of the chaebol to his son Lee Jae-yong. Government regulators failed to protect shareholder rights, and the Park administration used the National Pension Service to help Samsung win a proxy vote.

The younger Mr. Lee is now on trial for bribery and embezzlement. Samsung will likely have to adopt a more transparent ownership structure, which will benefit shareholders.

That’s a promising outcome, but new laws are needed to extend shareholder capitalism across the economy. The scandal might never have come fully to light had it not been for the muscular shareholder activism of New York-based hedge fund Elliott Associates in opposing the Samsung merger—another example of how the forces of “globalism” can help make national politics more democratic and accountable, not less.

The cases against Ms. Park and Samsung are a reminder of the danger of economic nationalism and industrial policy giving officials discretionary power over business. The next President has an opportunity to create a more entrepreneurial and competitive economy, even while staring down the North Korean threat. In both cases, closer strategic and economic ties to the U.S. strengthen will help.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

We Shouldn’t Always Have Paris The case for pulling out of Obama’s global climate accord.

By on March 11th, 2017

President Trump is expected as soon as next week to order the Environmental Protection Agency to rescind its Clean Power rule that is blocked by the courts. But the President faces another test of political fortitude on whether to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate accord.

That’s suddenly uncertain. Mr. Trump promised to withdraw during the presidential campaign, correctly arguing that the accord gave “foreign bureaucrats control over how much energy we use.” His transition team even explored strategies for short-cutting the cumbersome, four-year process of getting out of the deal.

But the President’s is now getting resistance from his daughter, Ivanka, and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who are fretting about the diplomatic ramifications. No doubt many countries would object, and loudly, but this risk pales compared to the potential damage from staying in the accord.

President Obama committed as part of Paris to cutting U.S. emissions by 26% compared with 2005 levels by 2025. Even Mr. Obama’s climate regulatory programs—all imposed without Congressional votes—would only achieve about half that commitment. Mr. Trump is killing those Obama programs, which means the U.S. may not reach that Paris promise. Why stay in an agreement that the Trump Administration has no interest or plan for honoring?

Another risk is that the U.S. might at some point be coerced into compliance. Mr. Obama joined the accord without congressional assent and endorsed the lengthy withdrawal process precisely to bind future Administrations to his climate priorities. Since Mr. Trump’s election, the international climate lobbies have debated ways to muscle the new Administration to comply.

These include imposing punitive tariffs on U.S. goods or requiring the U.S. to hit targets in return for other international cooperation. Mr. Tillerson might consider that Paris will be used as leverage against him in future international negotiations.

Lawyers and domestic environmental groups are also exploring how to use lawsuits to enforce the deal. Greens are adept at finding judges to require environmental regulations that Congress never intended. Such sympathetic judges today pack the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals and include Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, who in 2007 joined four liberals to redefine the Clean Air Act to cover carbon as a pollutant.

Remaining in the Paris pact will invite litigation to impose the Paris standards and direct the EPA to impose drastic carbon cuts that would hurt the economy. Energy companies are aware of this threat, and despite Exxon’s recent pledge to pour $20 billion into Gulf Coast facilities, other companies remain wary of U.S. regulation. They will be warier if Mr. Trump looks like he’s waffling on his climate positions.

Mr. Trump’s best bet is to exit the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which could be done in a year and would result in a simultaneous withdrawal from Paris. That would quickly end the litigation risk.

Mr. Tillerson said at his confirmation hearing that he believes the U.S. should remain in the Paris pact to have a “seat at the table” for the climate debate. But the U.S. doesn’t need Paris to have a say in global energy policy.

America has already done more to reduce CO 2 emissions with its natural-gas fracking revolution than has most of the world. Many of the Paris signers want to use the pact to diminish any U.S. fossil-fuel production. Mr. Tillerson will also be on the back foot in Paris discussions as he tries to overcome his past as an oil company executive.

The best U.S. insurance against the risks of climate change is to revive economic growth that will drive energy innovation and create the wealth to cope with any future damage—if that day arrives.

Policy details aside, the worst part of Mr. Obama’s climate agenda was its lack of democratic consent. He failed to persuade either a Republican or Democratic Congress to pass his regulation and taxes. So he attempted to impose that agenda at home through the EPA and abroad via Paris to use international pressure against domestic political resistance. One certainty: The diplomats at Turtle Bay and in Brussels didn’t vote for Donald Trump.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

AG Sessions Tells 46 Remaining Obama-Appointed U.S. Attorneys to Hit the Bricks By Debra Heine

By on March 11th, 2017

Attorney General Jeff Sessions has asked the 46 remaining Obama-appointed U.S. attorneys to tender their resignations, the Justice Department announced Friday.

The department described the request as part of an effort to ensure a “uniform transition.” About half of the country’s 93 U.S. attorneys have already left the department.

“Until the new U.S. Attorneys are confirmed, the dedicated career prosecutors in our U.S. Attorney’s Offices will continue the great work of the Department in investigating, prosecuting, and deterring the most violent offenders,” the statement added.

It is customary, though not automatic, for the country’s 93 U.S. attorneys to leave their positions once a new president is in office. Incoming administrations over the past several decades typically have replaced most U.S. attorneys during the first year or two.

The Obama administration allowed political appointees of President George W. Bush to serve until their replacement had been nominated and confirmed. One U.S. attorney appointed by Bush, Rod Rosenstein of Maryland, remained on the job for the entire Obama administration and is the current nominee for deputy attorney general.

The move comes amid increasing calls from conservatives to “drain the swamp,” especially as it applies to Obama holdovers in the Justice Department. Radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt pressed Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway last month on why the attorney general hadn’t yet fired the lot of them.

“Why haven’t we fired the U.S. attorneys?” he asked. “They are all Obama appointees. They’re acting replacements, even if you haven’t got nominees lined up, would-be careerists. Why hasn’t he, a man of will, done that?”

Hewitt said that he wanted to see Obama’s “sleeper cells” “gone yesterday.” It may have taken a few weeks, but Sessions delivered.

Now, the status of Preet Bharara, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, is up in the air. Bharara was appointed by then-President Barack Obama in 2009, but as Fox News pointed out, he “met with Trump in November and said after the meeting that he had agreed to stay on.”

Bharara, the Daily Caller reported last year, was leading the New York-based probe of the Clinton Foundation.

Asked if the move by Sessions was unusual, former DOJ official Thomas Dupre told Fox News that the only thing unusual about it was that it took this long.

“This is something that all presidents do. The president is entitled to fill out his administration, including the top prosecutors in the Justice Department, with people of his own choosing,” he said.

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MEDIA, POLITICS Comments turned off

A case study in media’s declining power: The Chelsea Clinton marketing campaign By Thomas Lifson

By on March 11th, 2017

All of the formidable powers of propaganda have been deployed to help Chelsea Clinton along the path to political power. It won’t work, and the media that lend their credibility to the propaganda only further diminish their influence. As the old Madison Avenue cliché has it, the most brilliant marketing campaign in history won’t sell dog food if the dogs won’t eat it.

The sudden uptick in the long running media campaign to glamorize, promote, and burnish the image of Chelsea Clinton is clear evidence that the Clinton Gang plans to hand power to the heir, and sooner than later. Chelsea obviously is being groomed to step into a safe Democrat constituency, probably in Congress in 2018.

Writing in National Review, Jim Geraghty offers an insightful and rewarding analysis of the futility of the Chelsea marketing campaign.

Chelsea Clinton is not fascinating. But the repeated insistence that Chelsea Clinton is fascinating … is actually rather fascinating. It’s like a giant social experiment, in which everyone who has spent decades building connections to the Clinton political dynasty attempts to make the world see the president’s daughter as someone she isn’t. …

[S]he’s pretty much the worst possible person to be speaking on behalf of Democrats right now. At a time when one of the preeminent problems in American life is a sense of declining economic opportunity and social mobility, she’s the living embodiment of inherited privilege.

After a few years of attempting to work in consulting and at hedge funds, she concluded she “couldn’t care about money on a fundamental level.” Then, with no experience in television journalism, she had her people call up the networks and set up a bidding war for her services as a correspondent. She made $600,000 per year for part-time work at NBC, generating what the Baltimore Sun’s David Zurawik called “a handful of reports that no self-respecting affiliate in a top 20 market would air.”

She was named an “assistant vice provost” at NYU at age 30. She was picked to give the keynote address at South by Southwest, and honored as one of Glamour magazine’s “Women of the Year.” Now she makes $1,083 per minute speaking to public universities. And almost everything she does is decreed to be extraordinary by a pliant, pro-Clinton media. The New York Times even interviewed her about her favorite books.

Read the whole thing, and stay tuned for great amusement as the marketing campaign for dog food that dogs won’t eat continues.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Funniest. Headline. Ever. By Thomas Lifson see note please

By on March 11th, 2017

This is hilarious but the best last year was in The New York Post cover with a picture of Hillary Clinton “Deleter of the Free World”….rsk

“…….Even better, it is factual. And almost inevitably, it’s about a “Florida man.”

Here it is, from NBC News:

Lawyer’s Pants Catch Fire During Florida Arson Trial

It seemed like a set up to a tired joke: A lawyer’s pants caught on fire in court.

But on Wednesday, it was Stephen Gutierrez’s reality when the Florida defense attorney’s pants began smoking during an arson trial, Eleventh Circuit Court Public Relations Director Eunice Sigler confirmed to NBC News Thursday.

Gutierrez, 28, was in the in the Miami-Dade county courtroom defending 49-year-old Claudy Charles, who was accused of setting his car alight.

But During his closing argument, Gutierrez began to feel heat coming from his pocket where he had several electric cigarette batteries, he told NBC News in an email.

As Gutierrez argued Charles’ car had merely spontaneously combusted, the lawyer’s pants seemed to do the same.

Witnesses in the courtroom told the Miami Herald the moment was “surreal,” as Gutierrez rushed out of the courtroom while smoke billowed from his pocket.

Gutierrez said as the heat intensified, he hurried into the bathroom where he tossed the battery in water. He was able to return to the courtroom with a singed pocket.

Because the defense argument was that the car spontaneously combusted, there is reason for suspicion among everyone but children that this was a set-up intended to make the point quite visibly to jurors. Lawyer Gutierez, of course, adamantly denies it.

I don’t really care. I just love the headline, probably because I write headlines on a daily basis and draw inspiration and amusement from the best of them.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Warping the truth about Wilders It’s tough to be Moroccan in the Netherlands. Just ask the BBC. Bruce Bawer

By on March 11th, 2017

Bruce Bawer is the author of “While Europe Slept,” “Surrender” and, most recently, “The Victims’ Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind.”

From the moment it became clear that the ongoing Islamization of the Western world was a potential disaster of historic proportions, the mainstream media – in their perverse effort to defend the indefensible and keep the cart careening downhill – have been making use of shameless sentiment to overcome the plain facts. One of the first examples of this practice that I can recall was way back in 2003, when the big, bad Norwegian government put resident terrorist Mullah Krekar through the first of what would turn out to be many deportation scares. Since Krekar, back in his homeland of Iraq, had been responsible for the violent deaths of innumerable innocents – children included – it wasn’t an easy proposition to try to whip up sympathy for him (although, heaven knows, some media tried).

Instead, many reporters chose the family angle: Krekar might be a bad guy, but what about his poor wife and kids? Repeatedly, the papers ran tearful close-ups of Krekar’s wife and pictures of her and Krekar embracing. VG ran a whole story about the intelligence services’ confiscation of her beloved cookbook, which had been in the family for generations and which contained the recipes of all of Krekar’s favorite foods. Dagbladet, for its part, ran a report whose headline told us that when Krekar’s kids heard on TV that Daddy had been released from custody and was headed home, they kissed the TV screen. It was Dagbladet, too, that published one of the great sob stories of all time. The headline: “My children are waiting every single day to hear from Papa.” The first sentences: “Mullah Krekar’s wife (39) is scared. For her four children, and for the future.”

And so on. You get the idea. If you’re trying to obscure the truth, defend the indefensible, and smear the good guys, go for sheer, unadulterated bathos. So it is that as the clock ticks down to the March 15 parliamentary elections in the Netherlands (which, as it happens, I write about in this week’s National Review), Anna Holligan of the BBC – in an effort to paint Geert Wilders, head of the Freedom Party (PVV), as a racist hatemonger – kicked off a March 7 article from The Hague by focusing on one of the Dutch Moroccans whom Wilders, as she put it, had “accused…of making the streets unsafe.” Needless to say, Holligan didn’t talk to one of the majority of Dutch Moroccan males who have dropped out of school and are living on social welfare benefits; nor did she buttonhole one of the nearly 50% of young Dutch Moroccan males who have rap sheets.

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Trump Immigration Executive Orders are Already Working Illegal border crossings drop an astounding 40% in one month. Joseph Klein

By on March 11th, 2017

A statement issued by Homeland Security Secretary Jack Kelly, concerning data compiled by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, noted that there has been a marked decrease in illegal border crossings at the U.S.-Mexican border this year between January and February, “as measured by apprehensions and the prevention of inadmissible persons at our southern border.” In January there were 31,578 apprehensions, while in February there were 18,762. This 40 percent drop is in contrast to previous year comparisons of January and February, during which there had been a 10-20 percent increase in apprehensions of illegal immigrants.

The trend is in the right direction, even without the border wall already in place that President Trump promised during the campaign. According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data cited by Homeland Security Secretary Kelly, “in the period from Oct 1, 2016 to the Presidential inauguration, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported 157,000 apprehensions of illegal immigrants – a 35 percent increase over the previous fiscal year, with family units increasing by more than 100 percent. However, since President Trump took office on January 20, we have seen a dramatic drop in numbers.”

Some of the decline may be due to seasonal factors. However, more robust enforcement in the wake of President Trump’s issuance of two executive orders intended to boost such enforcement of the nation’s existing immigration laws are clearly having a deterrent effect. Since the Trump administration’s implementation of these executive orders, according to Secretary Kelly, we are seeing apprehensions and the turning away of inadmissible persons at our southern border “trending toward the lowest monthly total in at least the last five years.”

What makes the robust enforcement regime introduced by President Trump’s executive orders even more effective is the termination of the practice commonly known as “catch and release,” whereby illegal immigrants have been routinely released in the United States shortly after their apprehension for violations of immigration law. Thus, illegal immigrant traffic is slowing due to the deterrent effect of more rigorous enforcement, while those caught having entered the country illegally are not allowed to simply roam free pending their immigration hearings.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Sessions’s Firing of 46 Obama-Appointed U.S. Attorneys Isn’t Scandalous It’s only natural that a president will want his power wielded by his own appointees, whom he trusts to carry out his policy program. By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on March 11th, 2017

In March 1993, Janet Reno began her tenure as President Bill Clinton’s attorney general by summarily firing United States attorneys for 93 of the 94 federal districts (one, Michael Chertoff, was retained in New Jersey, at the request of Democratic Senator Bill Bradley). That is more than twice as many as Trump attorney general Jeff Sessions fired on Friday.

Indeed, there were only 46 Obama-appointed U.S. attorneys left for Sessions to relieve because Obama appointees fully understood that this is the way things work. Many of them had already moved on, in the expectation that the president elected in November would replace them — an expectation that became a virtual certainty once it was clear that this change of administrations would be a change of parties, and visions.

It is frequently observed that, to be legitimate, law enforcement must operate independently of politics. It is an oversimplification, coupled with a misunderstanding of politics in its non-pejorative sense.

Of course the conduct of investigations, prosecutions, and their consequent judicial proceedings must be immune from partisanship. It would be intolerable for people to be targeted for, or insulated from, criminal law enforcement based on their political connections. Law enforcement, however, is about more than handling individual cases. It is about making overarching policy choices.

Resources are finite. Administrations must choose how many assets to dedicate to counterterrorism, immigration enforcement, health-care fraud, organized crime, and so on. Should the feds focus on the importation of illegal narcotics and their distribution by interstate criminal syndicates? Or should prosecutors and agents team up with state agencies to tackle street-level trafficking? Are the civil-rights laws an enforcement measure to protect fundamental liberties? Or are they a social-justice tool for transforming nationwide policing practices?

These policy choices are the stuff of politics. They often weigh heavily in presidential campaigns and elections. Law-and-order issues intimately affect people’s lives. When presidents make promises about them, they must expect to be held accountable.

U.S. attorneys are the instruments through which the president exercises his policy discretion. That is why they are political appointees. They do not have power of their own. Under our Constitution, all executive power is reposed in the president alone. Every officer of the executive branch is thus a delegate. The U.S. attorney exercises the president’s power and can be removed at the president’s will.

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MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

The Sense of An Ending: By Marilyn Penn

By on March 11th, 2017

The title of this adaptation of a Julian Barnes novel seemed prophetic as several people in the rows near me could be heard asking each other for clarification of exactly what did happen at the end of the movie. This was not a purposeful device on the part of the director who wished to leave certain information ambiguous – instead, it was the result of a pile-on of too much information crammed too quickly into a tidy ending. It reminded me of what a hostess does when guests are at the front door too early and miscellaneous stuff needs to be collected and tossed into a closet so the entrance way looks neat.

If memory serves, some of the plot points have been added on in order to make the movie more relevant to today’s mores, such as a mid-thirties pregnant lesbian daughter becoming a single mother, played by Downton’s formidable Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery). Though she lights up the screen, this side-plot adds little to the story of a man whose past catches up with him through a surprising bequest of his best friend’s diary and the subsequent unraveling of the differences between memory, longing and some difficult truths. Jim Broadbent plays the aging Tony Webster, a former Oxford student whose life as a divorced, uptight owner of a small camera shop belies the promising future he once imagined. Charlotte Rampling plays the aging woman he once loved who betrayed him with his own best friend, provoking Tony’s mean-spirited letter that contained an ominous curse on that relationship. Unfortunately, Rampling bears no resemblance to the actress playing her younger self, a big casting mistake since it’s hard to see her as anything but a new person in his life. What works better in the novel than the film are the serendipitous off-hand observations and overheard remarks that give this anti-hero his eventual epiphanies into what really happened and what kind of man he actually is.

Besides being confusing, these realizations seem gratuitously forced as opposed to earned and the semblance of a hopeful ending all around is more trite than profound. For a much more satisfying adaptation of a Barnes novel, see the first-class t.v. mini-series of “Arthur & George,” (2015) a fascinating take on a true story concerning Arthur Conan Doyle and a man convicted of a crime he did not commit. The ending will be crystal clear.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The witches’ cauldron of intersectionality : Ruthie Blum

By on March 10th, 2017

If you’re not an American millennial or university professor, you might be confused by the concept of “intersectionality.” First coined in 1989 by race theorist Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, it has become a left-wing buzzword to define the lumping together of all self-described “oppressed” groups under a single umbrella.

According to proponents of this radical fad — which amounts to an elimination of independent critical thought — not only must a person toe a particular ideological line, but he may never slip, even accidentally, into the realm of nuance or distinction. Someone who supports gay marriage, for example, has to oppose Israeli policy, advocate for government-funded abortions and believe that the free market is evil and climate change is man-made.

Though intersectionality has been around since long before anyone other than a handful of academics had heard of it, it has gradually been infecting political discourse in the United States for decades. Given a huge boost during the Obama years, it moved from obscurity to fame — particularly on campus — to such an extent that it is bandied around by students who would be hard put to spell it. Spending more time on the quad waving placards than in the classroom will do that. And it gives new meaning to the adage, taken from Thomas Gray’s 1742 “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College,” that ignorance is bliss.

On Wednesday this week, both intersectionality and blissful ignorance were on full display ahead of and during the International Women’s Strike. Ostensibly a cross-country happening for females to show the men who share their bedrooms and boardrooms what a day would be like in the absence of their (our) enormous contributions, the event was actually a mass whine-fest, organized by a Palestinian terrorist and a handful of other extremist feminists whose real goal was to attack the new U.S. president and the State of Israel.

Judging by the lack of aerial photographs illustrating the kind of crowds that had gathered after inauguration day, the public statement fell flat. Most women were too busy earning an honest living and tending to their children to waste a day on a demonstration that has no meaning in a country like America, where women are at liberty to do as they choose and please.

The truly oppressed women of the world would have been raped, stoned, tortured or executed for daring to whisper what their counterparts in the United States shout from the rooftops of Washington and New York. Indeed, had convicted Palestinian terrorist Rasmea Odeh or Palestinian-American, pro-Shariah and polygamy apologist Linda Sarsour — organizers of this week’s event — genuinely cared about their sisters, they would have been calling out the Palestinian Authority, not Israel, for its human rights violations and abuse of women.

But facts are of little interest to the intersectionalists; what matters to them is ideology — the kind they are able to express, promote and legislate in the land of the free and the brave that they love to denounce.

This is not to say that intersectionality enables smooth sailing for its adherents who — as my son says — long ago saw political correctness in their rear-view mirrors. On the contrary, they regularly run into snags when two or more of the ingredients in their witches’ cauldron clash.

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