POLITICS Comments turned off

California Removes Arrest Reports From Kamala Years Routine website redesign obscures Democrat’s record on criminal justice Charles Fain Lehman

Posted By on August 2nd, 2019

https://freebeacon.com/politics/california-removes-arrest-reports-from-kamala-years/

A redesign of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation website will make it harder for voters to inspect Sen. Kamala Harris’s controversial record as the state’s top cop.

The department removed public access to a number of reports on incarceration in the state, including when presidential candidate Kamala Harris (D.) was California’s attorney general. Twice a year, the CDCR releases information about the number of new individuals incarcerated in the California prison system as part of its “Offender Data Points” series. These reports provide important information on demographics, sentence length, offense type, and other figures relevant to criminal justice and incarceration.

Until recently, these reports were publicly available at the CDCR’s website. A search using archive.org’s Wayback Machine reveals that as of April 25, 2019—the most recent indexed date—ODP reports were available dating back to the spring of 2009. As of August 2019, the same web page now serves only a single ODP report, the one for Spring 2019. The pre-2019 reports have been removed.

The changes matter in part because the reports contain information about Harris’s entire time as state A.G., 2011 to 2017. Harris has taken fire from multiple opponents for her “tough on crime” record as California’s top cop, an image that she has tried to shed as a far-left senator and presidential candidate.

One particularly brutal attack came Wednesday night when Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D., Hi.) laid into Harris for her record on criminal justice. Gabbard cited a Washington Free Beacon analysis — based in part on the ODP reports — that found that more than 1,500 Californians were sent to prison for marijuana-related offenses while Harris was attorney general.

MEDIA Comments turned off

CNN Host Don Lemon Demonizes Black Pastor Who Won’t Call Trump Racist By Tyler O’Neil

Posted By on August 2nd, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/trending/don-lemon-demonizes-black-pastor-who-wont-call-trump-racist/

CNN Tonight
✔ @CNNTonight

“President Trump does not attack people because of color. He attacks anybody he feels need it.” – Rev. Bill Owens says Trump’s meeting with African American pastors was not an attempt to insulate himself from his recent attacks on Rep. Cummings and his Baltimore district.”

On Tuesday evening, CNN’s Don Lemon spoke with Rev. Bill Owens, founder of the Coalition of African-American Pastors (CAAP). Owens had met with Trump earlier that day. Yet it quickly became clear Lemon had no intention of learning anything about the meeting. Lemon, seemingly obsessed with Trump’s recent tweets attacking Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), pressured the pastor to talk about the Cummings tweets, something Owens considered irrelevant. After Owens resolutely refused to condemn Trump as a racist, Lemon launched into personal attacks against him.

“What did the president say about his attacks against these leaders of color and did any of the faith leaders raise concerns about that?” Lemon began.

“Well, I think something was said in passing. I don’t tune in to negative talk from any side,” Owens responded. “I took the position that we as black pastors should go down to Baltimore and see what we can do to help.” He said he grew up “in a two-room house, no water, no lights … so I know poverty.”

Yet again, the CNN anchor asked, “Did anybody there raise concerns about what he has been saying lately about people like Elijah Cummings or anyone?”

“Well, that was not the purpose of the meeting today. Today, the meeting was how can we help the black community. That is my concern and that was the purpose of the meeting. That was the reason I came to Washington and that is my focus: helping our inner-city young people especially, our children, our young people,” the pastor replied.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump Pulls John Ratcliffe’s Director of National Intelligence Nomination By Jack Crowe

Posted By on August 2nd, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/trump-pulls-john-ratcliffes-director-of-national-intelligence-nomination/

President Trump announced Friday that Representative John Ratcliffe (R., Texas) is withdrawing from contention to be his next director of national intelligence to escape the media scrutiny surrounding the already-contentious confirmation process.

“Our great Republican Congressman John Ratcliffe is being treated very unfairly by the LameStream Media. Rather than going through months of slander and libel, I explained to John how miserable it would be for him and his family to deal with these people….”

Donald J. Trump

✔ @realDonaldTrump

….John has therefore decided to stay in Congress where he has done such an outstanding job representing the people of Texas, and our Country. I will be announcing my nomination for DNI shortly.”

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Senator Josh Hawley Reveals the Nasty Truth Behind Confucius Institutes By Rachelle Peterson

Posted By on August 2nd, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/08/senator-josh-hawley-reveals-the-nasty-truth-behind-confucius-institutes/

They function as organs for dissemination of Chinese Communist propaganda.

Chinese-government-sponsored Confucius Institutes are “a tool for China to spread influence and exercise soft power,” “a known threat to academic freedom,” and “a danger to our national defense and security,” says Senator Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) in a letter sent last week to the University of Missouri and Webster University. Both institutions host Confucius Institutes, campus centers that teach Chinese language and culture and are funded and partly staffed and overseen by the Chinese government. Hawley urges the universities to “reconsider” those relationships.

Hawley’s conclusions aren’t just his own personal notions. He cites FBI director Christopher Wray, who for the last year and a half has publicly warned colleges about Confucius Institutes. Just last week Wray testified, in response to questioning from Hawley, that Confucius Institutes are “part of China’s soft power strategy and influence” because they “offer a platform to disseminate Chinese government or Chinese Communist Party propaganda, to encourage censorship, to restrict academic freedom.”

Hawley cites Li Changchun, a senior member of the Chinese Communist Party, who famously declared Confucius Institutes “an important part of China’s overseas propaganda set-up.” He cites North Carolina State University, which canceled an event with the Dalai Lama under pressure from its Confucius Institute. And he cites the fact that ever-increasing numbers of American colleges and universities — now 24 of them — have cut ties with their Confucius Institutes. (Hawley also cites an article I wrote, based on my 2017 report Outsourced to China: Confucius Institutes and Soft Power in American Higher Education.)

Hawley’s concerns, well grounded and substantial, are nothing surprising. What is surprising are the reactions of Mizzou and Webster. After several years of growing evidence that Confucius Institutes are all-round a bad deal for colleges, they are doubling down in defense of their Confucius Institutes.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Exclusive: Mike Pompeo Says Good Riddance to the INF Treaty By Rich Lowry

Posted By on August 2nd, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/mike-pompeo-us-withdrawal-inf-treaty/

And hits the Russians for their persistent noncompliance.

Bangkok — It’s official: The U.S. is out of the INF Treaty.

Here at the annual conference of ASEAN, the organization of Southeast Asian countries, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told National Review that the U.S. has triggered its formal withdrawal from the treaty. 

President Trump announced the imminent U.S. exit last October, starting the clock ticking toward the official date six months later, or today.

Signed in 1987, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was a key agreement in the late 1980s Reagan–Gorbachev diplomacy that proved the endgame of the Cold War.

After the Soviets deployed intermediate-range SS-20 missiles that could hit NATO countries from bases in the Soviet Union, the U.S. countered with its own intermediate-range missiles in Europe. President Ronald Reagan proposed the “zero option” to eliminate such U.S. and Soviet systems, and the INF Treaty did just that. 

The Russians have been flagrantly violating the treaty for years, and it doesn’t apply to China, which has massively built up its missile program, including intermediate-range systems. 

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

In Defense of Alan Dershowitz by David Oscar Markus

Posted By on August 2nd, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14642/alan-dershowitz-defense

In fact, former FBI Director Louis Freeh studied the allegations and concluded that “the totality of the evidence refutes the allegations against Professor Dershowitz.”

The intent of The New Yorker seems to be to convince folks that Dershowitz is guilty even though there is not enough evidence to charge him, let alone convict…. This is where famed Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz finds himself: accused of a heinous crime without any real recourse or due process protection. As the accusations pop up on screens across the globe, they are assumed to be true even though Dershowitz has not been charged or convicted.

In fact, he has done the unthinkable and asked — in an op-ed with the Wall Street Journal — for the FBI to investigate him.

So what can be done to deter false allegations in the internet era? For starters, if a false accusation is made and proven, the accuser should be prosecuted and punished. There needs to be real consequences for falsely accusing someone of a crime.

Our criminal justice system is built on the notion that the burden is on the prosecution to prove a case beyond a reasonable doubt before one’s liberty, our most valuable asset, can be taken away. And for good reason. We don’t want innocent people in jail.

We are willing to live with some guilty folks going free so that we don’t have the horror of an innocent person behind bars. Our system, with all of its flaws (including the concept that prosecutors who charge people with baseless claims cannot be charged), has clung to this bedrock principle of presumed innocence.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

THE MENACE OF POLITICAL CORRECTNESS- JOSEPH EPSTEIN

Posted By on August 2nd, 2019

https://www.claremont.org/crb/article/the-menace-of-political-correctness/

olitical correctness started out as a minor project of the international firm known as the Good Intentions Paving Company. What, after all, could be better intended than insisting that denigrating ethnic names (“polak,” “kike,” “spic,” “wop,” and worse) and language debasing women be debarred from public discourse and put out of bounds in civilized private conversation? Nothing, surely. But political correctness soon came to be about much more than social decorum. As with so many projects of the Good Intentions Paving Company, things haven’t worked out quite as planned.

Lashed up as it soon became with the campaign for a misguided equalizing in all American institutions, political correctness took a large leap forward in its ambitions. Criticism of any action or attempt to bring equality soon became, ipso facto, politically incorrect. Affirmative action—the rigging of admissions requirements at the country’s most prestigious universities in favor of what were deemed oppressed minority groups—was an early gambit in the campaign for equal outcomes and a boost, too, for political correctness. Criticizing affirmative action carried with it the penalty of being thought racist.

How could one admit minority students, it was felt, without catering to their special interests? So an ample buffet of courses in African-American, Chicano, and other studies were offered at universities. These courses would, naturally, be taught by matching minority-group faculty. To denigrate these courses, to argue that they were largely victimology, and as such that they lowered the standard once in place for the liberal arts in higher education, would in itself of course be politically incorrect, and most people who knew better were hesitant to step forth and say so.

What became known as the women’s movement soon claimed oppressed status, since it could not claim actual minority status. Homosexuals, male and female, were next on board. Hispanic Americans surely qualified, and so others who could construe a history—or, in the cant phrase of the day, a narrative—of inequality forced upon them. The United States began to seem a country of victims—and victimology, the study of victimhood from the point of view of the victims, became a dominant subject in high schools and especially in the social science and humanities departments of universities.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israeli Jets Appear to Have Struck Iraq for the First Time Since 1981 No nation has yet claimed the July air raids against two bases of a Shiite militia backed by Iran. By Jonathan Spyer

Posted By on August 2nd, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/israeli-jets-appear-to-have-struck-iraq-for-the-first-time-since-1981-11564700841

Two airstrikes on Shiite militia targets took place in Iraq last month. No country or organization has taken responsibility, but there are strong reasons to think they were carried out by Israel. If so, these would be the Jewish state’s first air raids on Iraq since the destruction of Saddam Hussein’s Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981.

The first of the raids, on July 19, targeted a militia base near the town of Amerli in Salah al-Din province, north of Baghdad. The second, three days later, struck Camp Ashraf, a former U.S. military base in Iraq’s Diyala Province. Both the Ashraf and Amerli bases are now controlled by the Badr Organization, a Shiite militia cum political party, in apparent cooperation with Iran.

According to Arabic media reports, the second raid was of considerably larger dimensions than the first. Al-Ain, the Emirati news website that broke the news of the Camp Ashraf action, reported about 40 dead Iranian Revolutionary Guard personnel and Iraqi Shiite militiamen.

The Saudi Sharq al Awsat newspaper last week attributed the attacks to Israel. Officials in Jerusalem have remained silent, but their country is the only serious candidate. The only other main enemies of the Shiite militias in Iraq are Islamic State and the U.S. and its coalition. The former lacks the capacity to mount air raids. The latter are engaged in high-stakes diplomacy intended to force an Iranian climbdown on the nuclear issue while avoiding a further deterioration in the relationship; open conflict is the last thing the U.S. and its allies want right now. That leaves Israel.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Palestinians: What Is Wrong With Building a Hospital? by Bassam Tawil

Posted By on August 2nd, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14638/palestinians-gaza-hospital

One would expect Palestinian leaders to have welcomed a new hospital that would serve the two million residents of the Gaza Strip. These leaders, however, have no problem sacrificing the lives of Palestinian patients on the altar of their hatred of the peace plan.

The Palestinian Authority leadership is right about one thing: one party in this conflict is indeed using the dispute for its own ends – but it is not the Trump administration. The only party that deserves blame is Abbas and his associates. They are rejecting a desperately needed medical facility solely in order to be able to continue to lay the blame for the suffering of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip at the doorstep of Israel.

The Palestinian Authority is probably the only government worldwide that views establishing a modern hospital as a “conspiracy.” It now remains to be seen whether the international community will cave in to Abbas’s campaign and ditch the hospital project, or decide actually to help the Palestinian people, whose leaders know only how to help themselves.

It hardly counts as news that Palestinian Authority leaders are obsessed with US President Donald J. Trump and his administration. Yet, these leaders have actually reached a new depth of obsession: they are now seeking to prevent the establishment of a new hospital for their people in the Gaza Strip.

The new field hospital, consisting of 16 departments, is slated to be built near the Erez border crossing between the Gaza Strip and Israel. The hospital was approved by Israel as part of ceasefire understandings reached during the past few weeks with the Hamas rulers of the Gaza Strip under the auspices of the United Nations, Qatar and Egypt.

The 43,000-square foot hospital will rely on the infrastructure, expertise and resources of an international NGO named Friendship and is meant to ensure a significant improvement in medical services to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

Bizarrely, while Israel has approved the project, Palestinian Authority officials are trying to foil it. Palestinian Authority Minister of Health Mai Kaila, during a meeting in her West Bank office in Ramallah, reportedly told the UN Deputy Special Coordinator for Middle East Peace Process Jimmy McGoldrick on July 31 that the field hospital was part of a plan to separate the West Bank from the Gaza Strip and that the Palestinian Authority government considers the plan to build a hospital a “part of the Deal of the Century.”

MEDIA Comments turned off

Social Media’s Transition from Novelty to Malignancy By Andrew I. Fillat and Henry I. Miller

Posted By on August 2nd, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/07/31/social-medias-transition-from-novelty-to-malignancy/

Once Facebook escaped the cloistered world of mere campus life, it’s all been downhill—unless of course, you are one of those who invested in or went to work for the company early on. The company has endured a year of data breaches; privacy scandals; mismanagement; controversy over whether the company responded responsibly to the posting of a doctored video of Nancy Pelosi; and, finally, the largest fine ever imposed by the Federal Trade Commission, a whopping $5 billion. Co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has delivered seemingly endless public mea culpas and pledges to do better.

How did we get here? What made sense as a communications vehicle for a diverse but circumscribed group of people sharing many life experiences on campus and later as a helpful tool for the larger world, has transformed benign to malignant as fast as rapidly improving technology could take it there.

Students moved off the campus into the “real world,” taking Facebook with them. In those early days of social media, many Facebook competitors failed because they had developed neither the necessary campus constituency nor the needed degree of habituation among users, prior to graduation. In any case, as the graduates’ life experiences diverged, the nature of the communications was able to evolve along with them on Facebook.