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Downstream From a Slippery EPA In the aftermath of the Gold King spill, the agency is holding itself to a lower standard than polluters.By Ryan Flynn

Posted By on March 1st, 2016

Mr. Flynn is New Mexico’s secretary of environment.
The bright yellow water that gushed from Colorado’s Gold King mine and into the Animas River last summer has dissipated, but the environmental disaster continues downstream. An estimated 880,000 pounds of lead and other metals poured out of the Gold King in August when the Environmental Protection Agency fumbled a construction project and blew out the mine’s plug.

This water raced down the Animas River in mountainous Colorado, and then meandered gradually through my state of New Mexico, the territory of the Navajo Nation and Utah, before dumping into Lake Powell. Geography is important here: The slower the flow, the more that heavy metals drop out of the water and into the riverbed.

From the start, the EPA bungled its response to the spill. The first call alerting New Mexico that contaminated water was on its way didn’t even come from the agency. The water-quality manager of the Southern Ute Tribe, who live in Colorado right on the border with New Mexico, contacted my department with a warning on Aug. 6.

The New Mexico Environment Department quickly dispatched technical staff to take advance water samples, to establish a water-quality baseline. The Animas River is much more than a kayaking spot or a fishing hole for New Mexicans. The drinking water of eight communities—about 90,000 people—is drawn directly from the river, which also sustains crops and livestock, and supports thousands of people’s livelihoods.

After failing to alert New Mexico promptly, the EPA to a large extent left the states and tribes downstream to fend for themselves. No one from the EPA’s regional office in Dallas showed up in New Mexico for nearly a week, by which time the plume had passed. New Mexico’s representative to the EPA’s Incident Command Center in Colorado reported that she was shut out of closed-door meetings where decisions were made.

When EPA staff did finally arrive in New Mexico on Aug. 9, they were rotated out of the state every few days. This led to redundant briefings and inconsistent execution. One EPA communications officer arrived in New Mexico with no capability to text, email or dispatch photos from the field.

As the spill wound its way downstream, EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy repeatedly went on camera to say that the agency would hold itself to a “higher standard.” Instead it engaged in a careful campaign of minimization and misdirection. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Staring at the Conservative Gutter Donald Trump gives credence to the left’s caricature of bigoted conservatives. By Bret Stephens

Posted By on March 1st, 2016

In the late 1950s, Bill Buckley decreed that nobody whose name appeared on the masthead of the American Mercury magazine would be published in the pages of National Review. The once-illustrious Mercury of H.L. Mencken had become a gutter of far-right anti-Semites. Buckley would not allow his magazine to be tainted by them.

The word for Buckley’s act is “lustration,” and for two generations it upheld the honor of the mainstream conservative movement. Liberals may have been fond of claiming that Republicans were all closet bigots and that tax cuts were a form of racial prejudice, but the accusation rang hollow because the evidence for it was so tendentious.
Not anymore. The candidacy of Donald Trump is the open sewer of American conservatism. This Super Tuesday, polls show a plurality of GOP voters intend to dive right into it, like the boy in the “Slumdog Millionaire” toilet scene. And they’re not even holding their noses.

In recent weeks, Mr. Trump has endorsed the Code Pink view of the Iraq War (Bush lied; people died). He has cited and embraced an aphorism of Benito Mussolini. (“It’s a very good quote,” Mr. Trump told NBC’s Chuck Todd.) He has refused to release his “very beautiful” tax returns. And he has taken his time disavowing the endorsement of onetime Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke—offering, by way of a transparently dishonest excuse, that “I know nothing about David Duke.” Mr. Trump left the Reform Party in 2000 after Mr. Duke joined it.

None of this seems to have made the slightest dent in Mr. Trump’s popularity. If anything it has enhanced it. In the species of political pornography in which Mr. Trump trafficks, the naughtier the better. The more respectable opinion is scandalized by whatever pops out of the Donald’s mouth, the more his supporters cheer him for sticking it to the snobs and the scolds. The more Mr. Trump traduces the old established lines of decency, the more he affirms his supporters’ most shameless ideological instincts. CONTINUE AT SITE

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U.S. Veteran Accused of Trying to Join ISIS Uses Free-Speech Defense Lawyer says veteran’s interest in terrorist group is protected by First Amendment By Nicole Hong

Posted By on March 1st, 2016

“Prosecutors on Monday said Mr. Pugh, who served as an Air Force mechanic from 1986 to 1990, became increasingly radical after he watched Islamic State’s beheading and training videos online. He allegedly posted comments on Facebook supporting the terrorist group, connected with other sympathizers online and told his co-workers that Islamic State needed airplane mechanics.”

NEW YORK—The government’s case against a U.S. Air Force veteran accused of trying to join Islamic State could hinge on whether jurors believe his interest in the terrorist group amounts to criminal activity or is instead protected by his free-speech rights.Tairod Pugh, a 48-year-old U.S. citizen, may have watched Islamic State propaganda, expressed offensive views and shown interest in the terrorist group, but “none of this is illegal,” his lawyer said to 12 jurors Monday during opening statements.

“In this country, we don’t punish a person for his thoughts,” Mr. Pugh’s lawyer Eric Creizman said.

Mr. Pugh, who on Monday was wearing a shirt and tie with a black cardigan and khaki pants, faces one charge of attempting to provide material support to terrorists and one charge of obstruction of justice. If convicted, Mr. Pugh faces​up to 35 years in prison. Mr. Pugh has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
Mr. Pugh’s trial kicked off Monday to a packed courtroom in Brooklyn federal court. Mr. Pugh is among the first two suspected Islamic State sympathizers in the country to go to trial; another trial has been ongoing in Phoenix for two weeks. In total, more than 80 Americans have been arrested since early 2014 on charges related to Islamic State.

Legal and national security experts are closely watching these cases to see how U.S. counterterrorism efforts have adapted to the threat of Islamic State, which has distinguished itself from terrorist groups like al Qaeda by heavily recruiting members through social media. Mr. Pugh’s trial is expected to last two weeks. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Republican Divide About Trump Grows Former party chairman, Nebraska senator among those who say they won’t vote for him if he is nominee By Reid J. Epstein

Posted By on March 1st, 2016

A divisive battle is brewing in the Republican Party over the potential nomination of Donald Trump, as some party leaders warn they won’t back him and could support third-party or write-in candidates.Most party leaders still say they will back the party’s nominee, and until recent days even Mr. Trump’s loudest critics maintained they would back him in the general election if he wins the nomination.

That is beginning to change—even as Mr. Trump is poised to win a string of Super Tuesday contests, and likely take the lion’s share of the 595 delegates up for grabs.“I would not vote for Trump, clearly” said Mel Martinez, a former Republican National Committee chairman who served one term in the Senate from Florida. “If there is any, any, any other choice, a living, breathing person with a pulse, I would be there.”Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse has said he would seek a third-party or alternate conservative candidate. The party’s 2012 nominee, Mitt Romney, said Mr. Trump’s hesitation to disavow support from David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, in a CNN interview was a “disqualifying” response. And former New Jersey Gov. Christie Todd Whitman has said she would vote for Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton if Mr. Trump is the GOP nominee.

In contrast, Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie have recently endorsed Mr. Trump. And the vast majority of senior Republicans, including House Speaker Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.), have said they’ll back the GOP nominee.

Former RNC Chairman Jim Nicholson, who had backed Jeb Bush’s candidacy, said even with his flaws, Mr. Trump would be superior to Mrs. Clinton and her Democratic rival Bernie Sanders.

“If he is successful in winning the nomination, I think it’s going to be very important that people coalesce around him because many of the things he’s talking about are very important to our country,” Mr. Nicholson said. “I think the country has a much better chance of healing itself under him that it does under the Democrats.”

Mr. Trump, whose path to the nomination could be unstoppable after Tuesday, has made no secret of his disdain for the party’s past leaders, and has broken with GOP orthodoxy on crucial issues such as trade. His campaign didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Many of the party’s core conservatives believe he isn’t one of them, and the conservative Club for Growth has begun an advertising campaign to try to discredit him. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Trump, the Insult Comic Candidate Why Donald Trump’s political rhetoric will not go quietly into the night By Michael Taube

Posted By on February 29th, 2016

Donald Trump has run a nasty, vicious, and loathsome campaign. His views, ideas, and policies are, for the most part, the complete antithesis of what small-c conservatism represents, or should represent, in a modern democratic society.

There’s no denying, however, that he has been incredibly successful.

Trump’s personal appeal, tough stances, and populist positions have clearly resonated with voters. He’s won three states (New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada) and finished second in Iowa. If current poll numbers are accurate, he’s easily going to win most of the states on Super Tuesday.

Unless Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz get together before, say, March 1 — and bring John Kasich and Ben Carson along for the ride — this contest could almost be mathematically over within a few weeks’ time. (Just a thought, gentlemen.)

Win or lose, the brash billionaire businessman has certainly had a huge impact on modern-day American politics. In fact, his tactics could ultimately be emulated by like-minded political candidates down the road. Here’s something I firmly believe will survive well past Trump’s candidacy.

RELATED: Stop Defending Trump’s Poisonous ‘Middle-Finger Politics’

Trump has thrown out the traditional political playbook so many times on the campaign trail, it could make your head spin. At the same time, he has used ideas, concepts, and lines (both written and speaking) that are completely foreign to most political strategists, communicators, and speechwriters.

Here’s a small sampling of Trumpisms that we’ve had to endure the past few months:

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‘It’s Trump’s world. We’re all just enabling it.’ By John Fund —

Posted By on February 29th, 2016

There’s a case against the argument that the media has helped Donald Trump dominate the GOP presidential race up to now with relatively little scrutiny. Bob Schieffer, the former host of CBS’s Face the Nation, told Fox News last May (just before the Rise of Trump) that it’s the role of opponents to “make the campaign” and question the records of candidate. “As journalists, basically what we do is watch the campaign and report what the two sides are doing.”

But that’s not what has happened this campaign season.

Until recently, Trump averaged about 75 percent of the cable-news coverage of the GOP race. Take last Thursday’s GOP debate. Two minutes after the debate ended, CNN gave Trump a softball eight-minute post-game interview and then another ten-minute interview a mere half hour later. “Nice of CNN to throw Trump an after party like that,” tweeted David Folkenflik of NPR.

“Basically the debates are the opening acts for Trump to then go on cable TV and do interviews where he frames what happened,” Jon Ralston, a veteran Nevada journalist, tweeted. “It’s Trump’s world. We’re all just enabling it.”

RELATED: ’Trump Blocked the Sun’

If Barack Obama benefited in 2008 from the media’s fascination with him, Trump benefits today from the media’s enthrallment with his antics. “Trump isn’t the first rich guy to run for office,” Matt Taibbi wrote last week in Rolling Stone. “But he is the first to realize the weakness in the system, which is that the watchdogs in the political media can’t resist a car wreck. . . . Trump found the flaw in the American Death Star. It doesn’t know how to turn the cameras off, even when it’s filming its own demise.”

And because all eyes are turned on Trump, he doesn’t have to spend anything close to what his rivals do. His mix of outrage, bluster, and insults has brought him 6.5 million Twitter followers, and he is a master of social media. He has effectively drafted broadcast news to amplify his campaign. Carrying Trump’s 40-minute news conference live on February 15 was the equivalent of $2.8 million in cable-news coverage, according to the data analytics firm Optimus, which does some work with the Marco Rubio campaign.

Then there are his logistical advantages. Presidential candidates aren’t normally allowed to phone in their interviews with news shows, but Trump’s ratings power have induced anchors to make an exception for him. Betsy Fischer Martin, a former executive producer of Meet the Press, told the Huffington Post last year that call-ins are normally used for breaking news or overseas reports where a guest can’t appear on camera. With the advent of Skype, even those exceptions are becoming rarer.

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Trump, the Would-Be Tyrant By Ellen Carmichael —

Posted By on February 29th, 2016

In his 1644 work Areopagitica, John Milton proclaimed, “Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.”

Indeed, there is no greater cause of liberty than the sanctity of a free mind and the faculty to act according to it. In fact, without free thinking, no other rights matter or make sense.

Our conscience exalts us over, as the Bible puts its, “the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” (That’s from the Book of Genesis, found in the Old Testament, Mr. Trump). Nothing makes us more human than the ability to reason according to our ethics and our experiences.

When we lose our right to think freely, we lose our very humanity. Look no further than the Soviet Union and North Korea, just two of the most recent examples of regimes crushing their people so brutally that they no longer could safeguard their natural right to autonomy. These regimes’ victims could not defend themselves against the state. They could not provide for themselves. They could not advocate for themselves. They could not protect their basic human dignity. And they certainly couldn’t pursue happiness as they saw it.

America’s Founders understood quite clearly that only free minds could secure a free society. President James Madison, who authored the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, insisted, “Conscience is the most sacred of all property.”

John Jay, the first chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, agreed. “Security under our constitution is given to the rights of conscience and private judgment,” he explained. “They are by nature subject to no control but that of Deity, and in that free situation they are now left.”

President Thomas Jefferson reaffirmed this principle, arguing, “No provision in our Constitution ought to be dearer to man than that which protects the rights of conscience against the enterprise of the civil authority.”

For 21st-century Americans, there is no greater threat to this innate human right than Donald Trump. Time and time again, he has sought to silence those who dare disagree with him. He has meted out swift retribution to those who have acted in opposition to his aims or desires. And he promises to continue in this vein as president.

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Engagement with Cuba has Failed—Time for Something New A short history of how Cuba’s “revolutionaries” respond to American diplomacy. Humberto Fontova

Posted By on February 29th, 2016

I trust that anyone that even glances at the fruits of Obama’s 16-month engagement with the Castro-Family-Crime-Syndicate (euphemized as “Cuba” by the media and the Obama administration) marvels.

Because never in the course of U.S. diplomacy has so much been surrendered by so many to so few for so little.

Not a penny of the $7 billion Castro stole at gunpoint from Americans (while torturing and murdering a few Americans who resisted) has been compensated—or even acknowledged. Some of the FBI’s most wanted terrorists still live like celebrities in Cuba. All this after Castro promptly got his murdering (of Americans) terrorists back as a bonus to an economic lifeline from Obama—in the nick of time and much of it at the expense of the U.S. taxpayer.

Oh, and by the way: repression in Cuba–involving everything from thousands, upon thousands of arbitrary arrests by KGB-trained secret police to machete attacks by regime-paid mobs against peaceful women dissidents—has cranked up to a recent record, which is really saying something.

In fact, since Obama began his “opening” to Cuba (which actually commenced the minute he took office in 2009) 6 peaceful Cuban dissident have “mysteriously died” (i.e. been murdered by the KGB-founded and mentored regime.) As usual, the world took no notice of these blatant murders.

This is the same “world,” by the way, that wailed in horror and indignation every time Nelson Mandela complained of a lumpy mattress in his country club prison cell in Apartheid South Africa. Sounds “insensitive,” I know. So have a look at his cell. By Cuban standards, Nelson Mandela’s cell looked like a suite at Motel 6. Naturally President Obama is prominent among those who honor Mandela and demonize his jailers.

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The Next Syrian Refugee Crisis: Child Brides Why not make a problem worse by ignoring it? Abigail R. Esman

Posted By on February 29th, 2016

While the West debates the humanitarian problem of Syrian refugees flooding across its borders, the discussions repeatedly turn to the dangers they might pose: what if there are terrorists among them? How can we be sure? How can we save those in need of saving and still be safe ourselves?

Yet for many of these refugees, married off against their will, the terror has already begun. They are 11 and 13 and 14 years old. Some of them are pregnant. Some are already mothers at 14. Their husbands are 25 or 38 or 40. And there is no escape.

“Child marriage existed in Syria before the start of the conflict,” reports Girls Not Brides, a global partnership aimed at ending child marriage worldwide, “but the onset of war and the mass displacement of millions of refugees has led to a dramatic rise in the number of girls married as children.”

Indeed, since the start of the refugee crisis, UNICEF reports, as many as “one-third of registered marriages among Syrian refugees in Jordan between January and March 2014 involved girls under 18,” with some as young as 11.

In many cases, these marriages are set up by well-meaning parents who believe their daughters would be safer in the asylum centers if married and so, less likely to be approached sexually by strange men. In other instances, the daughters are sold off by parents who can no longer afford to keep them, or given in marriage to men already planning to leave Syria in the hopes that, once the couple arrives in the West, the parents can then legally join them.

But girls married in their early teens and younger face dark futures, according to Girls Not Brides. They are more likely to live in poverty, often are physically and emotionally abused, are at higher risk for sexually transmitted diseases, and are vulnerable to complications during childbirth – some of them fatal.

The plight of refugee child brides, which some authorities now call a crisis, first came to light in October last year, when 14-year old Fatema Alkasem vanished from a refugee center in the Netherlands along with her husband. She was nine months pregnant at the time.

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What the Campus Crybully Wars Are Really About The end of education as we know it. Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on February 29th, 2016

The campus wars aren’t really about race. Race and the rest of the identity politics roster are the engine for transforming an academic environment into an activist environment.

The average campus already skews left, but it maintains the pretense of serving an educational purpose. The demands put forward on various campuses begin with racial privileges, but do not end there. These demands call for politicizing every department, the mandatory political indoctrination of all students and faculty, and the submission of non-political academic departments to activist political ones.

The campus wars are a declaration that activist non-academic departments that offer identity politics analysis while contributing nothing and which often owe their existence to campus clashes from a previous generation, should dominate all areas of life and thought at every university.

Imagine if physics majors rioted and demanded that every single area of study on campus had to incorporate theoretical physics and hire physics majors. That is exactly what is happening with identity politics studies. It’s a naked power grab that has the potential to redefine academia as we know it.

While black students are the public face of the campaign, behind them are embedded faculty radicals like Melissa Click whose abuses recently led to her firing from the University of Missouri. Click’s body of work, gender, race and sexuality analyses of popular culture, is fairly typical of the activist faculty behind the power grab. Media studies is often confused with journalism, but the two have little in common. Media studies has become a guide to politicizing culture by viewing it through the intersectional lens.