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April 2016

The Climate Police Escalate A subpoena hits a think tank that resists progressive orthodoxy.

Sometimes we wonder if we’re still living in the land of the free. Witness the subpoena from Claude Walker, attorney general of the U.S. Virgin Islands, demanding that the Competitive Enterprise Institute cough up a decade of emails and policy work, as well as a list of private donors.

Mr. Walker is frustrated that the free-market think tank won’t join the modern church of climatology, so he has joined the rapidly expanding club of Democratic politicians and prosecutors harassing dissenters.

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman started the assault last autumn with a subpoena barrage on Exxon Mobil. His demand for documents followed reports by Inside Climate News and the Los Angeles Times that claimed Exxon scientists had known for years that greenhouse gases cause global warming but hid the truth from the public and shareholders.

Those reports selectively quoted from Exxon documents, which in any case were publicly available and often peer-reviewed in academic journals. Some Exxon scientists changed their views over the years, and several years ago the company even endorsed a carbon tax. CONTINUE AT SITE

The Left’s hatred of Jews chills me to the bone Stephen Pollard

As a young boy, I used to think my grandma very strange. In her bedroom she kept a suitcase, packed and ready for use at a moment’s notice. “Just in case,” she’d tell me when I asked where it was that she was always waiting to go to. “You never know when they’ll turn on the Jews.”

Her house in Northwood was epitome of suburban comfort, and I couldn’t understand what on earth she meant. Until, that is, I learned some history – including the history of the Jews. Which is, in short, that pretty much everywhere, they have turned on the Jews.

From my teens through my twenties and thirties, the fact that I am Jewish meant little to me beyond the Jonathan Miller sense of being Jew-ish. I adored beigels, matzoh balls, Seinfeld and Woody Allen more than your average gentile would think they deserved. And that was about it. If you’d asked me, I’d have told you that after the Holocaust, real, serious anti-Semitism – the sort where Jews were killed for being Jews, rather than the odd nasty comment – was a thing of the past, in civilised Europe, at least.
Then something happened. 9/11, to be specific. I realised something was up that I didn’t really understand. So I read and read and read. And then read some more – especially the words of the terrorists and their fellow Islamists. They were explicit and open. Jews were the enemy. All their “issues” with the West pivoted, in the end, on their Jew hate. So I immersed myself even more in the issues around terrorism and Islamism. Because, you see, it mattered.

It matters, of course, to all of us, because – as we have seen both on 9/11 and ever since, Islamist terrorism is not specific in its targeting. But it matters to me more, I would say, than anything else I can think of. Because although these maniacs will happily kill anyone, they say, andtheir subsequent murders show, that – quite specifically – they want to kill me. A Jew. So on level I am not in the least bit shocked, or even surprised, by the reemergence of Jew hatred as a thing in recent years. By what arrogance would we think that our generation, alone in history, would be free of the oldest hatred?
But on another, more visceral level, it chills me to the bone. And it’s not the terrorists. They threaten me, of course, as they threaten us all. Yet to me, the real chill comes from their fellow travelers – the useful idiots of the terrorists and Jew-murderers who say they do not have a racist bone in their body, but when it comes to Jews, a blind spot emerges. The likes, to be blunt, of the now suspended Ken Livingstone, who claims never to have come across a single example of Anti-semitism in the Labour Party. He clearly has never looked in the mirror. Much has been written – especially by the brilliant Nick Cohen – on the “Red/Green Alliance”; the phenomenon by which a swathe of the Left has linked up with radical Islam, leading to the bizarre spectacle of Leftist feminists supporting Islamists who would cut off the hands of women who read books.

 Why the Left Hates Jews Israel and the Jewish diaspora make progressive pieties look silly. By Kevin D. Williamson

Why does the Left hate the Jews?

The Labour party in the United Kingdom is being convulsed at the moment with a public reckoning of the anti-Semitism of some of its most prominent members, including the former mayor of London, “Red” Ken Livingstone, who has just been suspended from the party for arguing that Adolf Hitler was, effectively, a Zionist. He was trying to explain away the anti-Semitic remarks of MP Naz Shah, who suggested that Israel be liquidated and its population forcibly resettled in the United States.

In the United States, the Harvard Law Record went to some lengths to conceal the identity of a law student who attacked a visiting Israeli dignitary as — in the classic anti-Semitic formulation — “smelly.” That student was Husam El-Qoulaq, a Palestinian leftist. The campus Left has, to no one’s surprise, rallied to his defense. Among those defending him were a number of Jewish law students, who insisted that El-Qoulaq couldn’t possibly have known the anti-Semitic history of “smelly Jew” rhetoric, in spite of his having been reared at the world center of such nonsense.

Others insisted that the Harvard case and the Labour cases are — this, too, will be familiar — not at all about anti-Semitism but about anti-Zionism.

That argument does not stand up to two seconds’ scrutiny, and never has. One of the fundamental stories of history is that people move around and bump into each other. It is true that most of the current Jewish population of Israel descends from people who were not precisely sons of the soil they now inhabit. But then, neither are the so-called Palestinians, who are Arabs. Arabs famously come from Arabia, but they are located all over the world. No one talks about the need to get the Arabs out of Egypt or Libya — or Palestine, for that matter — any more than anybody seriously thinks about returning the Americas to the descendants of the aboriginal population, which, of course, wasn’t aboriginal, either, but merely the first to emigrate. The Irish are descended of people not native to Ireland, as indeed ultimately is every population in the world, including those in the African cradle of humanity.

And it isn’t because the establishment of Israel is, relatively speaking, fresh in the historical memory, and therefore an open wound. Before the end of World War II, there was no Pakistan, and to the extent that there was an “India,” it was a geographical rather than a political term, much like “Palestine.” There was no independent Ireland until the 1920s and no Republic of Ireland until 1948. There was no People’s Republic of China until 1949. There was no Zimbabwe until 1980, no Czech Republic until 1993, and no modern Democratic Republic of the Congo until 1997. Israel is an ancient state compared with geopolitical newcomers such as the 30-odd countries created since 1990.

Yet it is the Jewish state, and the Jewish state alone, that is permanently marked for extermination. No one is throwing a fit about Timor-Leste or Serbia. The old saw about American racial politics was that in the South whites accepted blacks individually but rejected them corporately, whereas in the North it was the opposite, with the Yankees embracing integration and equality in theory while ensuring that they rarely encountered a black American in person. (Senator Bernie Sanders, proud son of diverse Brooklyn, now represents the whitest state in the Union.) And that’s the best that the Left can say for itself: “We don’t hate the Jews individually, just as a nation.”

That’s not much of a defense.

Placing Terror on a Pedestal Granting government honors to ex-CAIR operative Ghazala Salam. Joe Kaufman

Ghazala Salam has embedded her life in groups associated with terror. This year, she left her job with CAIR, an organization that has been linked to terrorist financing and terrorist leaders, for a position with Emerge USA, a radical Muslim outfit attempting to push its way into the political arena. Yet, even with this sinister background, Salam has managed to achieve numerous honors from South Florida government and government-related institutions. Has she pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes or are they intentionally ignoring facts.

On April 12th, Ghazala Salam stood next to Broward County Commissioner Stacy Ritter and accepted a proclamation declaring that day ‘Equal Pay Day,’ “urging all employers in our community to recognize the full value of the skills and contributions of women in the labor force and recommit to making equal pay a reality.” Signing the proclamation was Broward County Mayor Marty Kiar.

On March 25th, Salam received the honor of speaking at the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Citizenship Ceremony, where new US citizens are sworn in. Emblazoned on the podium where she spoke from was a prominent Department of Homeland Security logo.

Photos and information regarding both of these events are found on the Facebook site of Emerge USA, an organization where Salam serves as its Florida State Director.

Emerge USA, despite its patriotic sounding name, has an extremely radical agenda based on terrorism and bigotry shrouded in the guise of political advocacy.

The main individual behind Emerge USA is Khurrum Wahid, a South Florida attorney who has built his name on representing high profile terrorists. They include members of al-Qaeda and financiers of the Taliban. According to the Miami New Times, Wahid himself was placed on a federal terrorist watch list in 2011.

Harvard Law School: Protecting Anti-Semites, Targeting Conservative Students by Ari Lieberman

Harvard employs Gestapo tactics to track right-wing bloggers while shielding leftist hate group leader.

Unless you’ve been in hibernation for the last few days, you’ve almost certainly come across the name Husam El Qoulaq, the rabidly anti-Israeli, third-year Harvard Law School student who hurled an anti-Semitic trope at an Israeli parliamentarian during a question and answer session. What most of you may not be familiar with is the Orwellian-like hypocrisy employed by Harvard Law School to protect the identities of anti-Semitic agitators while at the same time utilizing all tools at their disposal to unmask the identities of bloggers, whose only crime was to expose a hoax committed by self-proclaimed “social justice warriors.”

On April 14, Husam El Qoulaq, whose name is also spelled El-Coolaq and El-Quolaq, asked Israel’s former minister of justice and current co-leader of the Zionist Union party, Tzipy Livni, why she was a “smelly” Jew. He went on to inquire about her “odor” and again referred to her as “very smelly.” The stereotype of the Jew as smelly or filthy is as old and banal as anti-Semitism itself and was also employed by the Nazis as a means to further demean and denigrate the Jewish people. His antics were performed in a packed hall filled with fellow Harvard colleagues. Also present and sitting beside Livni was U.S. diplomat Dennis Ross and Harvard Law professor, Robert Mnookin.

El Qoulaq represents the modern face of campus hate and fascism and embodies all that is wrong with the present state of academia. He is a leader in the hate group, Students for Justice in Palestine and a supporter of the Irvine 11, the group of hooligans and convicted criminals who, in 2010, disrupted a talk given by Israel’s then ambassador, Michael Oren. He is also a defender of Steven Salaita, the disgraced Judeophobic “academic” who was given the boot by the University of Illinois for posting rabidly anti-Semitic rants on Twitter.

El Qoulaq’a April 14 antics were unsurprising given his sordid past and current BDS-SJP affiliations. What is in fact surprising is the length to which Harvard Law School went to protect his identity, shielding it from any form of well-deserved scrutiny. HLS condemned his comments but then inexplicably censored that portion of the video featuring the disgraceful exchange. What’s more, the Harvard Law Record, a student newspaper, joined in this despicable charade, violating basic norms of journalistic integrity. They even went so far as to allow El Qoulaq to submit an anonymous and rather insincere “apology.”

The question on the minds of most rational thinking people is how Harvard Law School would have acted if such a hateful comment were directed at an African American dignitary. Of course, that is a rhetorical question. There would have been an indignant outcry with the culprit publicly shamed, humiliated and disciplined and rightfully so. Xenophobia and racism have no place in institutions of higher learning but at Harvard (as well as other institutions) there is an apparent exception for those who hurl vitriol at Jews.

S-BDS: The Rise of Stealth BDS Daniel Greenfield

By now everyone knows that the three letters BDS stand for an economic boycott of Israel. Some have encountered BDS protesters howling and raging outside Jewish stores and synagogues. The tactic of an anti-Jewish boycott, originally developed by Nazi Germany and then deployed by the Arab League, is controversial outside the grimier corners of the anti-Israel left. And so BDS can never go mainstream.

The next stage of BDS is a stealth boycott. Stealth BDS is BDS without the nasty label and the negative associations that go with it. It’s BDS without the stigma, the three bad letters or the bad aftertaste.

Stealth BDS is targeted at the Jewish community because that is where BDS is most controversial. Its organizations operate by appropriating Jewish names, such as If Not Now, T’ruah or J Street U in order to Jew-wash their tactics by making their hatred appear to be Jewish. They avoid openly endorsing BDS, occasionally they will even claim to oppose it while arguing that their opposition to Israel is the best way to beat BDS.

Their way however is just BDS without the label.

Rather than talking about BDS, Stealth BDS groups will claim that they are just “fighting the occupation”. They recruit young left-wing activists with Jewish last names and claim that they are the “voice of a new generation” being marginalized by the Jewish establishment who would otherwise leave the community and go full BDS. They will insist that by meeting their demands, the Jewish community will defang BDS.

But their demands, when they actually get around to them, usually sound a whole lot like BDS. And these groups, even when they claim to be anti-BDS, have a history of providing platforms to BDS supporters, endorsing them, signing on to their demands and fighting their battles for them.

‘Pervasive Army’ Of Gov’t Lawyers Hits 25,000 Strong, Costs Staggering $26.2 Billion by Ethan Barton

A “pervasive army” of more than 25,000 federal lawyers have raked in $26.2 billion from U.S. taxpayers since 2007, according to a new report by the non-profit government watchdog Open The Books.

“Today’s federal government is protected by a pervasive army of attorneys,” Open The Books founder and the report’s author Adam Andrzejewski told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “At a force size of 25,000, that’s bigger than a conventional combat division.”

Nearly half of the lawyers are based in Washington, according to the report, called “Lawyered Up: Federal Spending On Lawyers, 2007-2014.” Open The Books maintains a database containing 2.6 billion lines of government spending, representing the largest such digital resource in the world.

The federal portion of the database was made possible by the Federal Financial Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006, which was co-sponsored by then-senators Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and Barack Obama of Illinois, and signed into law by President George W. Bush.

“Since 2007, federal spending on attorneys exceeded $26 billion in salaries and bonuses,” the report said. More than 50 salaries exceeded $250,000 and 19 bonuses were for more than $50,000 since 2007. (RELATED: It Pays To Be A Lawyer In DC … A Lot)

“In 2014, the Environmental Protection Agency employed 1,020 attorneys while the Internal Revenue Service employed 1,423 attorneys,” the report said. (RELATED: Justice Department Plans Attorney Hiring Spree To Keep Pace With Obama’s Pardon Push)

Open The Books also found:

In 2014, the top federal lawyer salary was $266,469.

The Feds Lawyer Up — 25,060 Lawyers Cost Taxpayers $26.2 Billion since 2007 Adam Andrzejewski

New counts show the number of federal lawyers now exceed the individual public payrolls of twelve states or the top seven largest private law firms in the USA – combined. It’s Uncle Sam, Esq.

This week, we released our OpenTheBooks.com Snapshot Oversight Report – Lawyered Up, Federal Spending on General Attorneys from FY2007-FY2014. We mapped an army of lawyers larger than a combat division. Yet, in a sense, the lawyers have more firepower. As Mario Puzo cautioned in The Godfather, “A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns.”
OTB_LawyersMap_FB edits

New mapping software allows citizens to track the 25,060 federal lawyers across 200 agencies and the 50 states by employment location.

Many times, those lawyers are out to protect the government’s interests, not the public interest.

Consider the example of North Carolina convenience store owner, Lyndon McLellan. McLellan was accused of making cash bank deposits less than $10,000 to avoid reporting requirements. The feds dropped the case but kept McLellan’s life savings of $107,000 for two more years. Prosecutors even had the gall to warn him not to go to the media.

A couple years ago, Chicago teamed up with the feds to rid itself of the numerous little-entrepreneurial electro-platers on the South and Near West sides. After the regulations, the enforcers moved in and today, there are very few left. In just one case, federal lawyers spent $1 million to shutdown a family owned electro-plater – settling for under $50,000. The business never recovered.

Our study illustrates the extent to which the little guys are outgunned. Here is just a small sample of our findings:
25,060 lawyers on the rank and file federal agency payroll with a job classification of ‘general attorney’ cost taxpayers $3.3 billion last year and $26.2 billion since 2007, plus $130 million in bonuses

The average federal lawyer ‘earned’ $132,817.06 plus bonuses in FY2014.
The number of federal lawyers exceeds the total public payroll headcount of twelve states including Alaska (25,050); Delaware (23,249); Idaho (20,270); Maine (18,602); Maryland (16,877); Nevada (24,524); New Hampshire (14,694); North Dakota (15,742); Rhode Island (17,073); South Dakota (12,774); Vermont (13,289); and Wyoming (8,500).
If the feds were a private-sector law firm, they would exceed the TOP 7 Largest Private Law Firms – combined (24,411): Baker & McKenzie (4,363); Yingke (4,153); DLA Piper (3,702); Dacheng (3,700); Norton Rose Fulbright (3,461); CMS Legal Service (2,522); and Jones Day (2,510).
More than half of the lawyers are located inside the Washington, D.C. beltway.

Most Americans probably assume that Uncle Sam’s lawyers are employed at the IRS, or Department of Justice. Yet, agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are employing nearly as many lawyers as the IRS. The EPA employs 1,020 lawyers with payroll exceeding $1.1 billion since 2007, while the IRS employs over 1,400 lawyers. Last fall, in a piece at Forbes, I covered the EPA’s penchant for lawyers – the agency alone would rank as the 11th largest domestic law firm.

Tom Coburn Tells Congress, ‘America Doesn’t Trust You Anymore’ By Debra Heine

Former U.S. senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) had a somber message for Congress Wednesday when he appeared before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. “America doesn’t trust you anymore,” he told his former colleagues. “That’s the truth.” Coburn was appearing alongside Gene L. Dodaro, the head of the Government Accountability Office, during the hearing to discuss duplicative federal programs.

Via the Washington Free Beacon:

The GAO recently released its annual report, finding the federal government could save hundreds of billions of dollars just by consolidating duplicative programs.

Coburn, making his first appearance before the Senate since his farewell speech when retired in late 2014, pleaded with Congress to take action to reform government, simplify the tax code, and save taxpayers billions of dollars in the process.

Coburn, whose efforts at combating waste, fraud and abuse are legendary, is the man behind the annual government wastebook. Now he is a senior advisor in the Convention of States Project, which aims to force Congress to balance the budget. The Convention of States Project is currently organized in all 50 states, with hundreds of thousands of working volunteers, supporters and advocates committed to stopping the federal government’s abuse of power.

He said 10 of 34 states needed have passed resolutions so far.

“I would just tell you a little of my background this last year in 2015 I spent my time in 21 different states,” Coburn told the committee. “And America doesn’t trust you anymore. That’s the truth. Because they don’t see the actions coming out of Congress that should be coming out.”

“And that doesn’t mean that they’re right all the time, but you’ve lost their confidence,” he said. “And that’s not one party, that’s both. And so when you have hundreds of billions of dollars that could be saved and aren’t, and they know it. You know, they actually read your reports. People online, and then they use social media, pass it around.”

Senator Mike Lee Rages at John Boehner and Peter King on the ‘Mark Levin Show’ By Debra Heine

An impassioned Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) called in to the Mark Levin Show Thursday evening to register his extreme displeasure with John Boehner and Rep. Peter King for making “vile remarks” about his friend, Senator Ted Cruz. Levin gave the angry senator a few minutes of airtime to vent, and Lee really cut loose. “It’s really vile stuff!” he raged, “and what perplexes me about this, Mark, is that these are not words that I hear these gentleman use in response for anyone else.”

I hear John Boeher heaping praise on Bernie Sanders, heaping praise on Hillary Clinton, heaping praise on Donald Trump.

And yet for Ted Cruz? What’s he call him? He calls him the devil! He calls him Satan, he calls him Lucifer. Why? The question is why? Why does he do this? Well, there’s an answer. Ted Cruz actually challenges the system – the very same system that Donald Trump claims to rail against!

This is an insightful moment. First of all, I’m appalled that John Boehner would do this.

I have bit my tongue for years. I’ve held my tongue for years on John Boehner even when I disagreed with him. Because I respected him as a person and respected with his office enough to not call him out on it personally.

I expressed disagreement with his policies, but I’ve never ridiculed him personally. The fact that he has done this is appalling and he should be ashamed of himself and I demand that he apologize!

…This is a wake-up call for people who are supporting Donald Trump thinking that he’s the guy who is going to rail against the establishment. He’s NOT! He is the establishment. He’s the golfing buddy – the texting buddy of John Boehner. The same guy who praises Hillary Clinton — who praises Bernie Sanders. So if you’re out there thinking that Donald Trump is somehow going to be the guy who takes down the establishment, think again because quite the opposite is true.

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard you so angry,” Levin noted. “This has really fired you up.”