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April 2016

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Trump and the First Stone There are many reasons to oppose Trump. But those aren’t the reasons being cited. By Victor Davis Hanson

By on April 26th, 2016

Count the reasons to oppose Donald Trump’s candidacy for the Republican nomination for president. His conservative credentials are thin, recent, and often haphazard. His brash style will likely alienate more voters than it will attract. What he calls being “direct” translates as gratuitously mean-spirited, rude, and even cruel. His knowledge of the issues, at least in traditional terms or compared with that of his Republican rivals, varies from spotty to nonexistent. And Trump often, like Hillary Clinton (e.g., dodging bullets in the Balkans) or Barack Obama (cf. the mythoi of his “memoir”), seems to make up details about his long business career.

All that said, there are two strains of opposition to Trump that seem incoherent. First is the suggestion that the majority of his supporters, the “Trumpsters,” are deluded — the naïve fooled by a buffoon. The second is the suggestion that the Trump candidacy marks a new low in American politics, in terms of decency and competence.

Let us quickly dispense with the second writ. Trump is a reflection of, not a catalyst for, a dishonest age. To illustrate my point, take a few of our contemporary public figures who are running for office on their assumed superior character and ethics. There is no need to dwell on the inveterate dissembler Hillary Clinton, with her labyrinth of e-mail, Benghazi, Clinton Foundation, and Wall Street speaking-fees deceit. Bernie Sanders, the archetypal socialist, calls for the wealthy to pay exorbitant income-tax rates. Yet Sanders himself paid an effective rate of about 13 percent, after taking thousands of dollars of itemized deductions, including a mortgage-interest deduction on a second home — all legal, and all just the sort of self-interested tax planning routinely embraced by Americans in the upper brackets, whose resulting reduced taxes the socialist Sanders is on record as abhorring. In recent interviews, the supposedly cerebral Sanders proved himself a veritable dunce, clueless about the U.S. banking system, current U.S. financial statutes, and the basics of how the U.S. criminal- and civil-justice systems work. I suppose if he were Trump, Sanders would argue that he was too busy making “huge” profits to sweat such details, but what is Sanders’s excuse for being so ill-informed? That he was too occupied as a U.S. senator to learn anything about the nation’s banking and legal systems?

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American Jewry Will No Longer Be the Center of the Jewish World : Elliott Abrams

By on April 26th, 2016

In the 20th century the American Jewish community was the world’s largest and strongest, and helped establish and protect the Jewish state. The 21st century will be different.

In late fall 1940, as World War II raged in Europe and despite the parlous situation of the Jews in British-Mandate Palestine, their leader David Ben-Gurion spent three and a half months in the United States, returning again in November 1941 for a far longer stay of more than nine months. The wartime route from Palestine to the U.S. was lengthy and dangerous, but Ben-Gurion keenly understood not only the prime importance of relations with America but also the fact that the American Jewish community had now become the center of world Jewry.

Indeed, soon enough—and for decades to come—that same Jewish community, the world’s largest and strongest, would play a critical role in the establishment and subsequent support and protection of the first Jewish state in 2,000 years.

But that was the 20th century; the 21st will be different. That is the conclusion of my essay in Mosaic, “If American Jews and Israel are Drifting Apart, What’s the Reason?”

I’m grateful to Daniel Gordis, Martin Kramer, and Jack Wertheimerfor their kind words about the essay itself and especially for their thoughtful comments on its thesis. Taken together, those comments affirm but also broaden and deepen my argument.

All three of my respondents note the remarkable change in the relationship between Israel and American Jewry since 1948, some of which is due to sheer demographics. At the time of Israel’s founding, as Martin Kramer explains, its Jewish population was one-ninth the size of American Jewry, and was also largely poor and needy. Today, the population ratio is one to one, Israel’s economic situation has improved immeasurably, and its population is growing—even as our numbers in America are being reduced by low birth rates and intermarriage.

As Daniel Gordis puts it, “Israeli Jews have worked out a successful survival strategy,” while, by contrast, the “American Jewish survival strategy is struggling.” The trend lines are clear—which is why I suggested in my essay that we American Jews may end up needing what amounts to foreign aid, with the Israelis trying to rescue us, or anyway some of us, as best they can.

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How “Rules of Engagement” Get U.S. Soldiers Killed — on The Glazov Gang. Stephen Coughlin unveils the disgraceful and deadly cost America pays for obeying Islamic laws in Afghanistan.

By on April 26th, 2016

This special edition of The Glazov Gang was joined by Stephen Coughlin, the co-founder of UnconstrainedAnalytics.org and the author of the new book, Catastrophic Failure.

He came on the show to discuss How “Rules of Engagement” Get U.S. Soldiers Killed, unveiling the disgraceful and deadly cost America pays for obeying Islamic laws in Afghanistan.

Don’t miss it!http://jamieglazov.com/2016/04/26/how-rules-of-engagement-get-u-s-soldiers-killed-on-the-glazov-gang-2/

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The Criminal Constituency McAuliffe is a lawless governor in a party of felons. By Kevin D. Williamson

By on April 26th, 2016

Terry McAuliffe was a Clinton henchman before he was governor of Virginia. He would be a Clinton henchman afterward, too, which means that he must be one during his governorship, to which end he has ordered — without legal authority — the automatic re-enfranchisement of felons stripped of their voting rights. Virginia is a swing state, Mrs. Clinton needs it, and Governor McAuliffe is therefore determined to deliver it to her.

It is difficult to say which is more woeful: McAuliffe’s cynical political calculation or the fact that it is entirely accurate.

McAuliffe is here following the example of Barack Obama, another chief executive who has attempted to use particularistic powers entrusted him in a categorical rather than discrete fashion, thereby transforming exercises in executive privilege into policy changes that would normally require changes in the law. In the case of our ever-more-imperial president, the issue was illegal immigration: The federal government is under no particular obligation to prosecute every instance of illegal immigration — prosecutorial discretion is an ordinary feature of the law — but President Obama’s general application of that discrete power amounted to a change in the law (an executive amnesty) and a usurpation of legislative authority. The matter is going to the Supreme Court; so far, the lower courts have looked upon the Obama administration’s policy adventuring with skepticism.

McAuliffe may believe that the Commonwealth of Virginia should change its law and automatically reinstate the civil rights (some of them, anyway) of felons who have completed their sentences and whatever probation or parole conditions were attached to them. He might even be right. But the Commonwealth of Virginia has not done that. Doing so would require a bill to be introduced in its state legislature, passed, and signed by the governor. No such thing has happened. The governor’s executive privileges including granting clemency in certain criminal cases and restoring the civil rights (some of them, anyway) of rehabilitated criminals on a case-by-case basis. The ability to restore a felon’s voting rights does not grant the governor the power to do so universally any more than his ability to pardon a convicted murderer empowers him to legalize murder.

Voting rights are not the only rights that felons lose, and some of their civil rights — prominently, those guaranteed under the Second Amendment — are forfeited for life with no particular controversy. But it isn’t only gun rights: Those who commit sex offenses, especially offenses against children, may find their privacy compromised and their ability to move about freely restricted indefinitely, or until such a time as their mode of transport is a pine box carried by six strong men.

We restrict the gun rights of violent criminals, including those who have (in the inescapable cliché) “paid their debt to society” because they have proved themselves to be dangerous, and therefore not to be trusted with instruments of violence. They should not be trusted with firearms, or with the ultimate instrument of violence: political power.

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President Obama: Accessory to the Crimes Committed By Illegal Aliens? The grim findings unveiled by a House congressional hearing. Michael Cutler

By on April 26th, 2016

On Tuesday, April 19, 2016, the House Subcommittee on Immigration and Border Security conducted a hearing on the topic, “The Real Victims of a Reckless and Lawless Immigration Policy: Families and Survivors Speak Out on the Real Cost of This Administration’s Policies.”

I urge you to watch the entire video of that important hearing. And then I recommend that you provide information about that hearing to as many folks as possible.

The witnesses at this hearing were: Sheriff Charles Jenkins of Frederick County, Maryland; Michelle Root, the mother of Sarah Root; Laura Wilkerson, the mother of Joshua Wilkerson; and Bishop Minerva Carcaño of the United Methodist Church.

The timing of the hearing could not have been better because the day before, on Monday, April 18th, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on the administration’s implementation of the DAPA program (Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents). A CNN news report, “Supreme Court divided on Obama’s immigration actions,” focused on this program, which is a follow-on to the DACA program (Deferred Action, Childhood Arrival), which largely paralleled the failed DREAM Act.

To provide my perspectives on the use (or, rather, misuse) of prosecutorial discretion, I wrote an op-ed for Fox News Latino, “Obama Invokes Prosecutorial Discretion to Circumvent Constitution and Congress” that was published on June 17, 2012 — two days after President Obama stood in the White House Rose Garden to proclaim that “since Congress failed to act” he was going to take action. Of course to Obama, his concept of a “failure of Congress to act” was the refusal of Congress to pass bad legislation. When Congress votes down bad legislation, they most certainly are acting.

Obama also deceptively said that this was about children, kids and young people, even though illegal aliens as old as 31 years of age could apply for this program, provided that they claimed that they entered the United States prior to their 16thbirthdays. Without any interviews or field investigations being conducted, fraud likely permeates this program that has an approval rate of more than 95%.

In my Fox News Latino piece, I noted that what Mr. Obama referred to as “Prosecutorial Discretion” should be more properly referred to as “Prosecutorial Deception.” Incidentally, I cannot pass up the opportunity to note that while the term “alien” has come under attack by Obama and his supporters, the open borders anarchists, the term “DREAMers” is derived from the acronym for the “Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors” Act.

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The Laws Of Human Nature How the Left rejected an ancient wisdom — to our detriment. Bruce Thornton

By on April 26th, 2016

Reprinted from Hoover.org.

The sudden death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has reminded us of the great divide in opinion over how the Constitution should be interpreted. Scalia was the most influential and consequential adherent of “originalism” or “textualism.” In Planned Parenthood vs. Casey (1992), he succinctly defined this approach: “Texts and traditions are facts to study, not convictions to demonstrate about.” Since the Constitution is a written text, a judge has the obligation to discern “the plain, original meaning of the constitutional text,” as he said later in NLRB vs. Canning (2014). The alternative is to substitute “freewheeling interpretations” that serve politics and ideology rather than the Constitution’s precepts and principles, and the traditional understanding of its words. “The Constitution,” Scalia said in a speech in 2012, “is not a living organism. It’s a legal document, and it says what it says and doesn’t say what it doesn’t say.”

Scalia was a foe of the idea of the “living Constitution,” as his phrase “living organism” shows. Progressive President Woodrow Wilson was one of the first to espouse the view Scalia rejects. The Founders’ Constitution, with its balance of powers, Wilson said, was a “variety of mechanics” founded on the “law of gravitation.” But a government is a “living thing” that falls under “the theory of organic life” and so is “modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, [and] shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life.” Thus, according to the influential progressive writer Herbert Croly, to better govern and improve the nation, the people had to discard the “strong, almost dominant tendency to regard the existing Constitution with superstitious awe, and to shrink with horror from modifying it even in the smallest degree.” The assumption is that the Founders could never have anticipated the novel technological and social changes in America that had rendered the Constitution an anachronism.

That same assumption underlies much “living Constitution” jurisprudence today. Changing social mores have led Supreme Court justices to tease out of the Constitution “rights” it never mentions. In Griswold vs. Connecticut (1965), Justice William O. Douglas discovered a right to privacy in the Constitution’s “emanations” and “penumbras,” and in Casey vs. Planned Parenthood (1992), Anthony Kennedy found “the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” Subsequent decisions on issues like abortion and same-sex marriage have followed the same imperative to “plug the gaps,” as Judge Richard Posner has put it, left in the Constitution by changes in technology and progress in social habits, values, and beliefs.

This conflict between how the Constitution should be interpreted, however, is the result of a deeper, more ancient clash of ideas––how we understand human nature. Are core human attributes––particularly the destructive appetites and passions––permanent aspects of the human condition? Or is human nature “plastic” and able to be improved once environmental obstacles like poverty or ignorance are removed, and after better political, economic, and social institutions are created?

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Virginia’s Massive Voter Drive for Felons Terry McAuliffe fulfills his mission of delivering the battleground state for Hillary. Matthew Vadum

By on April 26th, 2016

To clear the way for fellow Democrat Hillary Clinton to capture the White House this year, Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe unilaterally acted to restore the voting rights of 206,000 convicted violent and nonviolent felons in his important battleground state last week.

The move, which critics say violates the state constitution, is without precedent in Virginia’s history and is particularly noxious and authoritarian coming as it did two days after the state’s General Assembly adjourned.

The push to mainstream felons comes as Barack Obama, the most radical left-wing American president in history, is defining deviancy down by attempting to de-stigmatize criminality. The Left views criminals — especially minorities — as victims of society, oppressed for mere nonconformism. Because it needs their votes, the Left is pressing for the restoration of felons’ voting rights. And it also supports legislation “banning the box,” that is, banning employment applications that ask if the applicant has a criminal record.

And like President Obama, McAuliffe apparently revels in signing executive orders to accomplish what lawmakers would never approve. McAuliffe’s order also classified all drug-related convictions as “non-violent, shortening the application for more serious offenders from 13 pages to one page, [and] removing a requirement that individuals pay their court costs before they can have their rights restored,” his office indicated.

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Mr. Obama, you should have stayed home. Your trip to Saudi Arabia, Europe signals weakness : Fred Fleitz

By on April 26th, 2016

President Obama faces contentious meetings with European and Gulf state leaders during his trip this week to Europe and Saudi Arabia. Why? Because of his continuing refusal to adopt a serious strategy to defeat ISIS, confront Iran’s increasingly belligerent behavior, and his inexplicable comments published in an April 2016 Atlantic article that blamed Europe and Gulf states for his administration’s growing list of foreign policy failures.

The Atlantic article will lead to some awkward questions for Mr. Obama from the leaders of America’s closest allies.

For example, the president will undoubtably be asked by European and Gulf state leaders to explain how, after his administration ignored the growing crisis in Libya for the past four years and his 2011 “leading from behind” strategy during the Libyan civil war, he can criticize European and Gulf states of being “free riders” and not having “skin in the game” in the Libyan situation.

I imagine British Prime Minister Cameron will say to the president, “But Mr. Obama, France and the United Kingdom took the lead in fighting that war because you refused to.”

Saudi leaders are more concerned about Obama’s comment in the Atlantic article that Saudi Arabia needs to find a way to “share the neighborhood” with Iran and “institute some sort of cold peace.” These incoherent remarks must have enraged Saudi officials in light of the July 2015 nuclear deal with Iran which they strongly oppose and a recent surge in Iranian missile tests.

Obama’s tin-eared comments about Saudi Arabia may be why Saudi King Salman was not there to greet him when the president’s plane landed in Riyadh Wednesday. The King did greet other heads of state when they arrived, according to Reuters.

Given the way he has ignored Saudi security concerns and tilted toward Iran during his presidency, I assume the Saudis have written off Mr. Obama and recognize that most experts in Washington – Republican and Democrat – do not share his radical and disjointed foreign policy views. The Saudis know their strong relationship with the United States will survive Barack Obama’s presidency. But even if they do understand this, Saudi leaders also know that this president’s failed Middle East policies did enormous damage to Middle East security that they will have to live with for many years to come.

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Frank Gaffney :Muslim Brotherhood Day on Capitol Hill

By on April 26th, 2016

On Monday, April 18, legislators’ offices were visited by individuals associated with a group unknown to most lawmakers: The United States Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO). In the interest of helping members of the U.S. Congress understand precisely who their interlocutors are, permit a brief introduction: The USCMO is the latest in a long series of front organizations associated with, and working to advance, the agenda of the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States.

Members of Congress should be clear about the true nature of that agenda. It is laid out most authoritatively in a document introduced into evidence by federal prosecutors in the course of the largest terrorism financing trial in the nation’s history, U.S. v. Holy Land Foundation et al. Written in 1991 by a top Muslim Brotherhood operative, Mohamed Akram, and entitled “The Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal of the Group in North America,” this internal correspondence was meant for the eyes only of the organization’s leadership in Egypt. So, the document is direct and to the point: It explicitly states that the mission of the Muslim Brotherhood in North America is “destroying Western civilization from within … by [the infidels’] hands and the hands of the believers so that Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”

There are two other important facts legislators should know about Akram’s memo.

First, the document helpfully attaches a list of 29 groups under the heading “Our organizations and organizations of our friends: Imagine if they all march according to one plan!” A number of the identified Muslim Brotherhood fronts – and many others that have come into being since 1991 – are members of the U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations. Representatives and associates of such fronts will be among the Islamists in congressional offices on Monday.

Second, the memo describes in detail the Muslim Brotherhood’s favored technique for accomplishing its stated goal of “destroying Western civilization” – at least until such time as they are strong enough to use violence decisively: “civilization jihad.” This sort of jihad involves employing stealthy, subversive means like influence operations to penetrate and subvert our government and civil society institutions. (The successful application of these means have been chronicled extensively in the Center for Security Policy’s “Civilization Jihad Reader Series.”)

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Obama Appointee: White House ‘Aggressively Engaged’ in Transgender Fight By Debra Heine

By on April 26th, 2016

The Obama White House is “aggressively engaged” in the push to allow transgender students to use whichever bathroom they wish at school, according to a top Obama appointee in the Department of Education. DOE Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Catherine Lhamon made the point last Thursday during her keynote address at an LGBT summit in Michigan which was co-hosted by the White House.

Via the Daily Caller:

The event was co-sponsored by activist group Equality Michigan, which has led a statewide charge to allow schoolchildren to choose their name, gender and bathroom, all without parental knowledge or input. Officials from seven different federal agencies attended the event, according to the Equality Michigan website.

Equality Michigan executive director Steph White blasted out a giddy email to supporters after the event, which she called “a great catalyst that will propel our collective work forward.” The email included an excerpt from Lhamon’s remarks, which White called “refreshingly clear.”
Speaking about the Obama administration, Lhamon told attendees: “We are serious. We are aggressively engaged. We will enforce Title IX.” The Daily Caller has filed a FOIA request with the Department of Education for Lhamon’s full remarks.

Under Lhamon’s guidance, the DOE’s Office of Civil Rights has ruled that schools will be in violation of Title IX if they do not permit transgender students to use the bathroom and locker rooms of their choice. The administration has made clear that giving private, single-user bathrooms is not a sufficient accommodation. That is: schools must allow boys who think they’re girls to shower and change alongside actual girls.

On April 19, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled that a biological female who identifies as a male may bring a claim under Title IX against a school for not allowing her to use the men’s restrooms and locker room facilities.

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