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A Few Thoughts on Law and Justice by Alan M. Dershowitz

Posted By on July 23rd, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16266/law-and-justice

For me, the real enemies of America are the extremists on both sides: the hard left that would bring America down, the hard right white supremacists and neo‑Nazis…. People from the hard left do not even want to hear from people on the center left.

I think the last thing The New York Times wants is for people to come to their own conclusion, because The New York Times bars dissenting points of view and fired editors who authorize them to be published on its pages…. The Times has taken the “op” out of “op-ed.”

The combination of elected prosecutors and elected judges has made our legal system far too political. Too many decisions are made by people, crowds, and pressure groups. When you combine four aspects of our system — prosecutors are elected, judges are elected, juries are ordinary, lay people, and the judges who control the juries are often subject to re‑election — the risks of our justice system being turned over to the masses, to the mobs, to the crowds, to the chanters, becomes all too real, and our system of checks and balances becomes weaker.

Remember that when America was founded at the end of the 18th century, the greatest fear was of the mob. We were watching what was happening a little later on in France with the revolution, and with the killing of so many innocent people in the name of the revolution.

In China, some years ago, I was invited to go to a trial, a man who was accused of stealing some items. After the evidence came in — you had evidence from the prosecution, the defendant testified — and then the judge ordered the doors opened. Hundreds of people poured in from the streets. The judge said, “Now we’ll hear from the masses.” The masses started yelling, “Convict! Convict! Convict!” Of course, the judge convicted, because the masses were the ones in a communist country who had control over the justice system. I never want to see that happen in the United States of America

It is very hard to be a dissenter today. If you are a dissenter today, you risk being canceled. If you are an editor who is willing to publish dissenting material, you risk being fired. If you are a dissenter today in a crowd, you risk being beaten up.

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Iran’s Sprint to the Bomb by Peter Huessy

Posted By on July 23rd, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16262/iran-buclear-bomb-sprint

It cannot… be a surprise that Iran is still sprinting toward deliverable nuclear weapons with the very uranium enrichment technology permitted by the 2015 agreement. While the U.S. Senate was told the deal would halt Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weaponry, the deal only camouflaged the mullahs’ ambitions to acquire it.

Worse, when the deal’s provisions were to sunset this decade, Iran would have been free to acquire full nuclear capability without pretending it was not.

China is buying time for Iran. Perhaps China believes that its presence in the region will persuade the United States to show “restraint.” The United States should not take the bait.

The prospects ahead are possibly dark. A change in US administration may likely see a return to the JCPOA, an end to sanctions and maximum pressure, and an Iranian sense of having won a major struggle with the “Great Satan.” That is not a prospect America’s allies want to accept. The United States should not risk waiting, either.

In 2013, Danny Danon, Israel’s Deputy Defense Minister, warned that Iran was speedily moving to develop advanced centrifuges that will enable it to enrich uranium needed for nuclear weapons within one month. “We have made it crystal clear ,” Danon said, “Israel will not stand by and watch Iran develop weaponry that will put us, the entire Middle East and eventually the world, under an Iranian umbrella of terror.”

This concern was shared by the United States and thus, in 2015, a nuclear agreement — the Joint Comprehensive Program of Action (JCPOA) — was made between the United States, along with Russia, China, France, Great Britain and Germany, and supposedly Iran, which never signed the deal. Ostensibly Iran would give up its pursuit of nuclear weapons and the U.S. would withdraw its economic sanctions.

Iran, of course, had no intention of giving up its pursuit of nuclear weapons; contrary to what JCPOA supporters claimed, the Iranians, even under the JCPOA deal, could continue pursuing their quest for nuclear capability. This “loophole” was clear especially after it was revealed the Obama administration had conceded that Iran had a right to enrich uranium, which is not required for “peaceful” nuclear energy.

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President Trump’s Case For Excluding Illegal Aliens From The Census Is Stronger Than You Think Robert Romano

Posted By on July 23rd, 2020

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/07/23/president-trumps-case-for-excluding-illegal-aliens-from-the-census-is-stronger-than-you-think/

President Donald Trump has issued an executive memorandum to Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross to discount illegal aliens who are subject to legal removal from the U.S. Census.

Here, the president is invoking the Fourteenth Amendment, Section 2 of the Constitution, which states, “Representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state, excluding Indians not taxed.”

From the president’s memorandum: “The Constitution does not specifically define which persons must be included in the apportionment base.  Although the Constitution requires the ‘persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed,’ to be enumerated in the census, that requirement has never been understood to include in the apportionment base every individual physically present within a State’s boundaries at the time of the census. Instead, the term ‘persons in each State’ has been interpreted to mean that only the ‘inhabitants’ of each State should be included.”

So, who are the inhabitants of each state? The president’s memorandum says it “requires the exercise of judgment.  For example, aliens who are only temporarily in the United States, such as for business or tourism, and certain foreign diplomatic personnel are ‘persons’ who have been excluded from the apportionment base in past censuses.”

Which, raises the question, if tourists — whose travel visas have certain expiration dates — can and have been excluded from the census, then why not illegal immigrants who are subject to removal upon discovery by federal authorities?

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The Climate Virus: Hysteria Needs To Shelter In Place

Posted By on July 23rd, 2020

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/07/23/the-climate-virus-hysteria-needs-to-shelter-in-place/

Give the global warming alarmists credit. They never let circumstances distract them. Even amidst a pandemic, they continue to pump fear and fanaticism. It doesn’t matter to them if their fearmongering produces grave human costs.

Take a look at these headlines from just the last few days:

“Climate change: Summers could become ‘too hot for humans.’” — BBC
“Climate change: Polar bears could be lost by 2100” — BBC
“Climate Change Poses ‘Systemic Threat’ to the Economy, Big Investors Warn” — New York Times
“Major new climate study rules out less severe global warming scenarios” — Washington Post
“Why the next president should establish a Department of Climate” — Vox

That’s a heavy load of mania for the public to bear. So we’d like to present a single headline in rebuttal:

“Climate-change hysteria costs lives – but activists want to keep panic alive.”

It tops an op-ed in the New York Post written by Michael Shellenberger, who last month apologized, “on behalf of environmentalists,” for being part of the “climate scare we created over the last 30 years.”

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Biden Says Trump Is America’s First ‘Racist’ President By Brittany Bernstein

Posted By on July 23rd, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/biden-says-trump-is-americas-first-racist-president/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=

SITTING ON HIS BRAIN TAKES A TOLL ON JOE….RSK

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden called President Trump the country’s first racist president during a virtual town hall Wednesday.

“The way he deals with people based on the color of their skin, their national origin, where they’re from, is absolutely sickening,” Biden said at the virtual event organized by the Service Employees International Union when a healthcare worker brought up Trump’s habit of blaming Asians for the coronavirus pandemic. Trump has regularly referred to COVID-19 as the “China virus,” the “Wuhan virus” and the “Kung Flu.”

“No sitting president has ever done this,” Biden said. “Never, never, never. No Republican president has done this. No Democratic president. We’ve had racists, and they’ve existed, they’ve tried to get elected president. He’s the first one that has.”

Last year, when asked by the Washington Post if it was wrong to describe Trump as “a racist with a white supremacist policy agenda,” Biden said no, but did not want to go so far as to label Trump a racist, saying instead that the president was promoting “racist policies.”

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President Trump Announces a Federal ‘Surge’ against Violent-Crime Wave in Cities By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on July 23rd, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/trump-announces-federal-surge-against-violent-crime-wave/

‘Operation Legend,’ named after a four-year-old shot to death in his sleep, relies on longstanding cooperation between federal, state, and local authorities.

President Trump announced this afternoon a “surge” in the federal effort to quell the violent crime that is spiking in major American cities.

The effort is along the lines of what Rich Lowry and I discussed on The McCarthy Report podcast last week, and in a column I wrote earlier this month about potential federal approaches to violent crime.

As we’ve noted, there was no need to re-create the wheel here. There is abundant law that gives federal agencies jurisdiction to investigate and prosecute violent crime. Just as significantly, the federal government (the U.S. attorneys’ offices, the FBI, DEA, other federal agencies, and the U.S. courts) not only has a longstanding presence in our nation’s biggest cities. For decades, we’ve also had federal-state task forces, which are joint investigative efforts involving the police and prosecution agencies of the federal, state, and municipal governments to combat gang crime and its staples — street-level narcotics trafficking and gun crimes.

The president, with elaboration from Attorney General Bill Barr, explained that the new effort is called “Operation Legend,” in honor of LeGend Taliferro, a four-year-old boy who was senselessly shot to death in his sleep last month when a still-unidentified gunman opened fire on his family’s apartment in Kansas City.

Barr detailed that Operation Legend had already commenced with a ramp-up of federal agents in Kansas City, where 200 arrests were made in a two-week period. The initiative is now being expanded to two other cities with soaring crime, Chicago and Albuquerque. Amid a litany of bloody statistics, Trump noted that 23 people were shot in Chicago just yesterday — 15 of them at a funeral home, where respects were being paid to a man who’d been killed in an earlier drive-by shooting.

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Progressives to Cities: Drop Dead The ruin of major liberal cities by progressive policies is a significant political event. Daniel Henninger

Posted By on July 23rd, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/progressives-to-cities-drop-dead-11595458490?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

On Tuesday the New York City sky was clear, blue and filled with sunshine. That’s it for this week’s good news. We turn now to Portland, Ore.; Seattle, Chicago, San Francisco and all of America’s other seemingly Godforsaken cities.

President Trump watches a lot of television, so he’s seeing the same daily urban nightmares we’re seeing. It’s hard not to sympathize with his instinct to send in federal authorities to restore civil order to cities like Portland, as he proposed Wednesday with the expansion of an urban anticrime initiative called Operation Legend to Chicago and Albuquerque.

It’s equally hard to disagree that, other than protecting federal facilities, Mr. Trump should let all of these smug Portlandia American cities stew in their own juices.

I loved it when Portland’s mayor, Ted Wheeler, said the federal presence “is actually leading to more violence and more vandalism.” Where’s Groucho Marx when we need him to make sense of nonsense?

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A Vaccine Progress Report Private innovation and public money are betting on multiple candidates.

Posted By on July 23rd, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-vaccine-progress-report-11595461075?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Life probably won’t return to normal until we have a widely distributed Covid-19 vaccine, and the good news is this may happen sooner than expected thanks to years of private investment and new cooperation between the U.S. government and drug companies.

On Wednesday the Trump Administration announced a $1.95 billion advance order for 100 million doses of a promising vaccine candidate by Pfizer and Germany-based BioNTech that could be available by the end of the year. Dare to dream. The drug makers plan to begin the final phase of their clinical trials this month and seek regulatory approval as soon as October.

***

The Administration’s Operation Warp Speed is accelerating vaccine development as well as the manufacturing of ingredients and equipment with the aim of delivering 300 million doses by January 2021. That’s an ambitious target, but the Administration is placing several bets with vaccine makers with the hope that at least one or two will pay off.

Evidence from early-stage clinical trials so far has been promising. Pfizer and BioNTech this month reported preliminary results from 45 volunteers showing that their mRNA vaccine candidate generated levels of neutralizing antibodies 1.8- to 2.8-times higher than those in recovered patients. The vaccine programs cells to produce a viral protein that stimulates an immune response.

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Brown University Goes All in for Palestine by A.J. Caschetta

Posted By on July 23rd, 2020

https://spectator.org/brown-university-palestine-studies-chair-mahmoud-darwish/?u

They’ve created America’s first-ever chair in Palestinian Studies.

Brown University, the Ivy League college founded in 1764, is the latest high-profile academic institution to go all in for Palestine, a country that does not exist. Columbia University’s Center for Palestine Studies, a Ramallah on the Hudson, still occupies first place in excusing Palestinian violence, exaggerating Israeli responses to Palestinian terrorism, and inculcating new generations of BDS ideologues. But Brown has just upped the ante by endowing America’s first-ever chair in Palestinian Studies.

This is not merely a symbolic gesture, but a significant commitment, hailed in the press as a “milestone” and proclaimed as Palestinians “Finally getting a place at the academic table.” Brown’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, its Center for Middle East Studies, and its New Directions in Palestinian Studies research initiative will now collaborate in a synergistic venture, spending money and hiring teachers to indoctrinate students and “inform the community” about the evils of Israeli colonialism, while stamping its imprimatur on the virtues of the Palestinian cause. Call it the Providence Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

The new position is named for Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, whom Brown University calls “a towering and beloved figure of Palestinian and Arab literature and humanistic values.” Humanistic values?  Mahmoud Darwish was many things, but a humanist he was not. As a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), he wrote and edited its monthly journal and served as director of its research center. He was also the author of the Palestinian Declaration of Independence. In the picture below he is seated between two of the Palestinians’ arch-terrorists, Yasser Arafat, leader of the PLO, and George Habash, co-founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

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Hopes Are Rising For No-Deal Brexit As Europe Dithers By Stephen MacLean

Posted By on July 23rd, 2020

https://www.nysun.com/foreign/hopes-are-rising-for-no-deal-brexit-as-europe/91198/

With weeks before the United Kingdom meets its self-imposed deadline to reach a midsummer trade deal with the European Union, Britain is on course for a “clean break” Brexit. “UK Close to Abandoning Brexit-EU Deal, Will Likely Leave Bloc Fully in December,” booms Breitbart London. “No deal Brexit likely,” begins a headline in the Express. “EU can’t even agree with themselves!” concludes a headline in the EuroWeekly.

It’s unlikely, though, that purist Brexiteers will be dancing in the streets just yet — never mind that government restrictions to prevent spreading the coronavirus curtail such public celebrations. Once bitten, twice shy. Prime Minister Theresa May and her supplicatory approach to Brussels disabused freedom-loving Conservatives that their party was with them. Even Boris Johnson, with better bonafides than Mrs. May on the Brexit file, has been known to wobble on the imperative of independence.

Even now, with Brexit the law of the land, our breath is bated. Britain, after all, remains under EU jurisdiction until the end of the year — paying membership dues and subject to the European Court of Justice until either a UK-EU trade deal is inked or the UK severs all links and trades with the EU according to World Trade Organization rules.

Still, there is light at the end of the tunnel. While the British negotiating team assembled following the 2016 referendum had a chequered reputation (seemingly taking its orders from Brussels and laying down the law to London), the current contingent is less in thrall to EU bureaucrats. Thus the chances are waxing for a “clean break.”

UK negotiator Oliver Lewis refuses to be played and is not afraid to speak out for his country’s sovereign rights, several times clashing with his EU counterpart, Michel Barnier. Likewise, Dominic Cummings, the PM’s principal advisor deep in Downing Street, cannot be cowed. At least not on the Brexit file. Mr. Cummings was a chief strategist for the successful “Vote Leave” campaign and has lost none of his combative spirit.