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July 2017

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Investigate Hillary’s Uranium One Collusion with Russia By Daniel John Sobieski

By on July 15th, 2017

Even if, as the likes of Charles Krauthammer insist, Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a Russian lawyer invited in bt President Barack Hussein Obama and his Attorney General Loretta Lynch is “empirical evidence” of collusion between Team Trump and Russia, the correct answer is so what?

Collusion in not a crime. Exchanging government favors for donations would be a crime, and neither Dr. Krauthammer nor anyone else has provided any evidence that any favor was granted as a result of that meeting, or that the Trump campaign benefited in any way from the meeting.

One cannot say the same thing about Hillary Clinton and her role in the Uranium One deal with Russia. Clinton played a pivotal role in the Uranium One deal which ended up giving Russian interests control of 20 percent of our uranium supply in exchange for donations of $145 million to the Clinton Foundation. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a federal crime. As “Clinton Cash” author Peter Schweitzer has noted:

Tuesday on Fox Business Network, “Lou Dobbs Tonight,” Breitbart editor at large and the author of “Clinton Cash,” Peter Schweizer said there needs to be a federal investigation into the Russian uranium deal then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s State Department approved after the Clinton Foundation receiving $145 million from the shareholders of Uranium One….

Discussing the Clinton Foundation receiving $145 million from the shareholders of Uranium One, he continued, “Look there are couple of things that are extremely troubling about the deal we touched on. number one is the amount of money $145 million. We are not talking about a super PAC giving a million dollars to support a candidate. We are not talking about campaign donations. We are talking about $145 million which by the way is 75 percent or more of the annual budget of the Clinton Foundation itself so it’s a huge sum of money. Second of all we are talking about a fundamental issue of national security which is uranium — it’s not like oil and gas that you can find all sorts of places. They are precious few places you can mine for uranium, in the United States is one of those areas. And number three we are talking about the Russian government. A lot of people don’t realize it now, in parts of the Midwest American soil is owned by Vladimir Putin’s government because this deal went through. And in addition to the $145 million Bill Clinton got half a billion dollars, $500,000 for a 20-minute speech from a Russian investment bank tied to the Kremlin, two months before the State Department signed off on this deal. It just stinks to high heaven and I think it requires a major investigation by the federal government.”

Yet seemingly the only thing warranting a major federal investigation is a wasted 20 minutes of Donald Trump Jr.s life that he will never get back. Democrats and the media and, again, apologies for the redundancy, had no problem with Bill and Hillary Clinton brokering deals giving Russia and Putin 20 percent of our uranium supply to benefit Clinton Foundation donors, including Canadian billionaire Frank Giustra.

Giustra earlier had a cozy relationship with Bill Clinton and participated in and benefitted from his involvement in a scam run by the Clinton Foundation in Colombia.

Clinton donor Giustra benefited significantly from his association, even if the people of Columbia didn’t:

When we met him (Senator Jorge Enrique Robledo) in his wood-paneled office in Colombia’s Capitol building in May, his desk was stacked high with papers related to Pacific Rubiales’s labor practices, the result of years of investigative work by his staff. He did not see the Clinton Foundation and its partnership with Giustra’s Pacific Rubiales as either progressive or positive. “The territory where Pacific Rubiales operated,” he said, thumbing through pages of alleged human-rights violations, “was a type of concentration camp for workers.”…

In September 2005, Giustra and Clinton flew to Kazakhstan together to meet the Central Asian nation’s president. Shortly thereafter, Giustra secured a lucrative concession to mine Kazakh uranium, despite his company’s lack of experience with the radioactive ore. As Bill Clinton opened doors for Giustra, the financier gave generously to Clinton’s foundation.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

An A for Activism on Campus The latest trend in college grade inflation.

By on July 15th, 2017

Political agitation on campus can be hard work, and its rigors deserve to be recognized when professors are handing out student grades. Believe it or not, that’s a new theme at several schools of supposedly higher education where students have erupted.

Take Evergreen State College, where biology professor Bret Weinstein was harassed and advised by police to stay home after he opposed a racially segregated “Day of Absence” in which whites were told to stay off campus. The student haranguing was extreme enough that Evergreen president George Bridges was “apparently not free to go to the restroom on his own,” as Evergreen facilities engineer Rich Davis put it in an email obtained by these pages through a public records request.

But far from punishing students for such behavior, interim Evergreen provost Kenneth Tabbutt wrote in a May 25 email that “student protestors have diverted time and energy from their academic work to promote institutional change and social justice.” Professors have discretion on student evaluations, he added, so “I am asking that you consider the physical and emotional commitment the students have made and consider accommodations for that effort, including the learning that is going on outside of your program.” This is a novel spin on the old school of hard knocks.

In recent years administrators at Columbia, the New School and elsewhere have also encouraged grading concessions for students who chose protests over mere book learning. At Oberlin some 1,300 students unsuccessfully petitioned the school president for no failing grades for activists. Oberlin’s Black Student Union has also demanded an $8.20-per-hour stipend for student protesters’ “continuous organizing efforts.”

Today’s millennial activists aren’t likely to behave better if the punishment for antisocial or violent behavior is a higher GPA.

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They’re Not All Crazy Center-left intellectuals blow the whistle on a Duke professor.

By on July 15th, 2017

Could we be approaching the end of the Bernie Sanders era in liberal political thought? The pendulum has been swinging so fast and so far in the direction of radical leftism that even mainstream publications have become comfortable dismissing endorsements of western civilization itself as “alt-right” nativism. But a new book from a chaired history professor at Duke University could represent the end of the cycle.

In “Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America,” Duke’s Nancy MacLean argues that Nobel Prize-winning economist James Buchanan was not simply a pioneer in “public choice” theory, which holds that government officials act out of self-interest just like everyone else. In Ms. MacLean’s view, Buchanan was also the author of a plan to subvert democracy and favor rich white people.

Your humble correspondent has not read the book. And some readers of this column will say that a university professor flinging outlandish accusations at a critic of big government is not news. But what is news here is that Ms. MacLean’s book is not finding the public reception she might have expected. Yes, certain far-left pundits have praised the work, but the trade publication Inside Higher Ed writes that the “story keeps unfolding, with MacLean’s critics alleging inaccuracies and other problems with her book,” and “MacLean in turn alleging a coordinated attack against her by libertarian scholars.”

Many libertarian scholars have criticized her book. George Mason law professor David Bernstein is among those who have posted critiques on the Washington Post website.

But it’s not just libertarians who cite problems with the MacLean rendering of history. At Vox of all places, two academics who describe themselves as “on the center left” have written a piece entitled, “Even the intellectual left is drawn to conspiracy theories about the right. Resist them.” The authors write:

In language better suited to a Dan Brown novel than a serious nonfiction book, she describes Buchanan as an “evil genius,” and suggests he had a “diabolical” plan to permanently “shackle” democracy, so that the will of the majority would no longer influence government in core areas of the economy. In MacLean’s account, Buchanan, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on the contractual and constitutional bases of decision-making but is nearly unknown to the public, prepared the plan that the Koch brothers and other conservative funders and activists have been carrying out ever since.

The Vox contributors conclude: “MacLean is not only wrong in detail but mistaken in the fundamentals of her account.” Could it be that progressives have been moving left so quickly that the young adults at Vox have already become—at least in relative terms—the moderate elder statesmen of the movement? Perhaps the pendulum is starting to swing back. Regardless, it’s refreshing to see that at least one progressive website intends to help serve as a reality check on Duke’s history department.

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MEDIA Comments turned off

On Don Jr., the Media Can’t Help Itself The Trump-Russia conspiracy meme is a farce, not a scandal. By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

By on July 15th, 2017

We’ll admit to being gobsmacked by the latest revelation. We always assumed that it would be somebody like Carter Page who’d eventually be discovered to have participated in an ill-advised email chain showing that even Team Trump noticed the Hindenburg-size fact of Russian delight in the Trump phenomenon.

Now the press has its gotcha, and it’s Donald Trump Jr. Golly.

Yet, after the first flush of hysteria, Don Jr. may be only half a rube for not being more sensitive to the Russian connection, which would explode in Hindenburg fashion only with the DNC email hack a few days later.

Bloomberg News suggests that Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya wasn’t bringing secrets gleaned from Russia’s “crown prosecutor,” but news she read in the Russian press. Not the Russians but a Russian was trying to peddle this info to Trump Tower, as a pretext to lobby on behalf of a wealthy Russian client.

And it wasn’t any Russian but a tubby British music publicist who babbled fourth-hand, or perhaps was apple polishing all on his own, in claiming “Russian government support” for the Trump effort.

The farcical element continues to predominate in Russiagate, including with the mostly ignored Russian influence on FBI chief James Comey’s actions.

But real trouble can flow even from a farce. Thinkers for whom Russia was just one problem in a world full of problems, who previously did not identify Moscow as the No. 1 enemy, now do so, vociferously, for fear of being lumped in with Mr. Trump as a traitor to America or some such.

A mob is a machine for mass-producing cowards and bullies. That’s where we are now. Just turn on cable TV.

Even the estimable Anne Applebaum, author of a book on the Soviet gulag, fulminates in the Washington Post against every recent president for failing to heed Russia’s “peculiar dangers.” With all due respect, U.S. presidents are better informed than anybody about the nature of the Russian regime. They read the intelligence. George W. Bush looked in Mr. Putin’s eyes and didn’t see his soul. He saw a potential nightmare that would have to be managed somehow. Ditto President Obama.

But neither are U.S. presidents equipped with magical powers to make such facts go away. The world is stuck with Mr. Putin, an authoritarian who cannot afford to modernize, whose quest for survival inevitably drives him down a funnel of deepening hostility toward a superpower where the rule of law prevails.

In the U.S. election, what began as Mr. Putin’s vendetta against Hillary morphed into his cynical promotion of Mr. Trump, and now is coming up roses a third time as a way to discredit the U.S. government and its new president.

A respected Russian journalist, Mikhail Zygar, in the New Yorker, dismisses the idea of some Putin “master plan. . . . There is no plan—it’s chaos.”

Another, Roman Shleinov, apropos of supposed payoffs to Mr. Trump via his real-estate business, explains that it has nothing to do with Trump: “Money is fleeing Russia in all directions, people are trying to invest anywhere they can, to get their assets out.”

If there was a conspiracy to put a Trump in the White House, let’s face it, Don Jr. would never have been fielding a blind email about it in June 2016 from a Miss Universe hanger-on.

Here’s another secret: Most U.S. reporters know they are overplaying the Trump-Russia connection, even as they revel in the Don Jr. gotcha moment, even as they play up the circus of legal and political jeopardy the administration has created for itself. CONTINUE AT SITE

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Truth Is Just a Detail Pundits invested in climate-change alarmism praise even shoddy work—as long as it comes to the right conclusions. Oren Cass

By on July 15th, 2017

Thirty-nine percent of Americans give at least 50-50 odds that “global warming will cause humans to become extinct,” according to a poll released last week by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. This extreme view, unsupported by mainstream climate science, is more widely held than the belief that climate change either is “caused mostly by natural changes in the environment” rather than human activity (30 percent), or else “isn’t happening” at all (6 percent). As if on cue, New York published a cover story on Monday entitled, “The Uninhabitable Earth,” with this grim subtitle: “Famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: What climate change could wreak—sooner than you think.” David Wallace-Wells’s 7,000-word article is so disconnected from reality that debunking loses its thrill within a few paragraphs. Even Michael Mann, among the most strident climate scientists, wrote on Facebook that “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The article fails to produce it.”

Mann notes that, in his first section alone, Wallace-Wells “exaggerates” the threat of melting permafrost, while his claim about satellite data is “just not true.” The story next intones ominously about “a crack in an ice shelf [that] grew 11 miles in six days, then kept going.” But the Guardian (no climate-change denier), covering the ice-shelf crack last month, explained it differently: “What looks like an enormous loss is just ordinary housekeeping for this part of Antarctica.”

Wallace-Wells’s article is a quintessential illustration of what I have described in Foreign Affairs as “climate catastrophism.” He ignores humanity’s capacity for adapting to changes that will occur slowly over decades or centuries, inserting the classic catastrophist disclaimer in his introduction: “absent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their lives . . .” But humanity will obviously make significant adjustments in the coming century, especially if faced with the catastrophes he posits. The qualifier undermines everything that follows, just as it did the Population Bomb and Peak Oil prognosticators of the past.

Likewise, Wallace-Wells seems not to understand that the world of future centuries will look vastly different from today’s, and that climate impacts must be understood in this context. Thus, he takes a particularly extreme warning that climate change might reduce global output 50 percent by 2100 and invites readers to “imagin[e] what the world would look like today with an economy half as big.” But the study in question is producing estimates for the world of 2100, not 2017—the loss is “relative to scenarios without climate change.” Even growing at only 2.5% annually, the global economy of 2100 would be seven times larger than today’s. Cutting that in half is a catastrophe, comparatively speaking—but still yields a dramatically wealthier world than we have today. Wallace-Wells claims to have conducted “dozens of interviews and exchanges with climatologists and researchers in related fields,” but he seemingly could not find any to go on the record validating any of his claims. He even acknowledges that the three whom he does quote—one on mitigating climate impacts, one on the history of climate science, and one on past extinctions—are all optimists about humanity’s ability to “forestall radical warming.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Columbia Law Professor Richard Briffault Explains To MSNBC Why Donald Trump Jr. Can Not Be Guilty Of “Treason,” “Perjury,” Or “Collusion” Posted By Tim Hains

By on July 15th, 2017

Columbia University Law School professor of legislative studies Richard Briffault explained the actual laws regarding treason, perjury, and collusion to MSNBC hosts Ali Velshi and Stephanie Ruhle on Thursday afternoon.

Several prominent Democrats have accused the president’s son of “treason” with regard to a meeting he had with a Russian lawyer in 2016. The details of this meeting were published by the New York Times on Monday, but before that accusations of perjury and collusion with the Russians have also flown at Trump Jr., and many other members of the Trump campaign, from many elected Democrats and prominent media figures.

About allegations of treason against Trump Jr., the law professor explained: “Treason is a little extreme for this… [Russia] may not be our friend, but it is not clear they are our enemy. We are not at war.”

About allegations of perjury against President Trump, his son, or members of his administration, the law professor explained: “I’m not sure any of this has been under oath yet… but you would have to prove [one] was knowingly and maliciously misleading, and [their] claim is to say he just forgot. So we’re in a gray area there. ”

About collusion, the law professor explained: “Collusion isn’t really a crime, I think we are getting at things like conspiracy to commit a crime, or coordination of campaign finance stuff. Collusion is more of a political term than a legal term.”

About the final alegation, that Jared Kushner might have forgotten something on his security clearance form, but added it later, the law professor explained: “That’s irrelevant… The thing was that he was at the meeting and he didn’t report having been at the meeting –as I understand it– in his intial filing to get the security clearance. So, at the very least, he has corrected that, but there is still some question about how knowing that was. So, perjury no, lying to the government maybe.”

(Previous allegations of ‘obstruction of justice’ with regard to the firing of FBI director James Comey appear to have been forgotten.)

Transcript:

RICHARD BRIFFAULT, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LAW SCHOOL: Treason is a little extreme for this, I mean it is not clear — [Russia] may not be our friend, but it is not clear they are our enemy. We are not at war. It is not clear this violates — it is against the U.S. government. So I am not up to treason yet.

STEPHANIE RUHLE, MSNBC: So take ‘T’ off the table. What about the ‘P’? Perjury definition: ‘A person under oath states any material which he does not believe to be true.’ Would be constituted as perjury.

BRIEFAULT: Well, with the possible exception of Jared Kushner and the forms he filled out to get his security clearance, I’m not sure any of this has been under oath yet. On those, maybe it is not perjury, but there is a crime of lying to the U.S. government, but you would have to prove he was knowingly and maliciously misleading, and his claim is to say he just forgot. So we’re in a gray area there.

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Who’s Colluding With Whom?Scott McKay

By on July 15th, 2017

Depending on whom you wish to believe, the recent revelations that last June Donald Trump Jr. had a meeting with one Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Moscow attorney advertised to have brought destructive opposition research on Hillary Clinton, prove there is finally meat on the “Trump and the Russians” bones being served to the public.

From this quarter, the story seems to have far more questions than answers to it.

The proposition those damning the president based on this latest revelation are offering involves the fact that Trump Junior is found on an email thread which he voluntarily disclosed on Twitter saying “I love it” in reaction to being told of the information on Clinton, that information having been characterized by its presenter, an English music publicist named Rob Goldstone, as part and parcel of a desire by the Russian government to help his father win.

This, we’re told, is evidence of collusion between Trump père and The Russians, and based on a timeline which included the Wikileaks disclosures of “hacked” Democratic National Committee emails and Trump’s request that The Russians make public the 30,000 emails Clinton had supposedly deleted from her illegal private server, it’s a smoking gun that Trump was the beneficiary of the Putin regime’s intelligence arm “hacking” the 2016 election.

Which is an awful lot of mileage on not quite so much fuel.

Veselnitskaya’s presence in the United States alone ought to be the source of suspicion that not only is the Trump-Russian collusion narrative suspect in this case but that the real inquiry ought to be into whether the encounter was a small part of a larger attempt to trap the Trump campaign.

The Russian lawyer wasn’t even supposed to be here. She had been denied a visa for entry into the United States in late 2015, but given a rather extraordinary “parole” by the federal government to assist preparation for a client subject to an asset forfeiture by the Justice Department. That was in January. The client was Prevezon Holdings, a Russian company suspected of having been paid some portion of $230 million stolen by Russian mobsters. When Sergey Magnitsky a Russian lawyer representing a company that had been the victim of the theft, reported it to authorities in Moscow he was promptly jailed and beaten to death. The American response to this atrocity was the 2012 Magnitsky Act, which sanctioned several individuals connected to human rights abuses. The Russian government retaliated by preventing American adoptions of Russian children.

But in June, she was permitted to fly back to the U.S., have the meeting with Trump Junior — at Trump Tower, no less — and then end up in the front row for a congressional hearing involving testimony from a former U.S. ambassador to Russia, then turning up at a D.C. showing of a documentary film on the negative effects of the Magnitsky Act, and later appearing at a dinner involving Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) and former Rep. Ron Dellums (D-CA) who is now a lobbyist for the Russians. The repeal of that legislation is a priority item for the Russians and a personal project of Veselnitskaya’s; it, rather than any Clinton dirt, was reportedly the primary subject brought forth at the meeting with Donald Trump Jr.

All of this without a visa! Not to mention Veselnitskaya didn’t file a FARA (Foreign Agents Registration Act) document before acting as a lobbyist for a foreign entity, as required by law. Neither, apparently, did Dellums. Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) wrote a fascinating letter Tuesday to Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson asking them to please find out what in the hell Veselnitskaya was doing in this country last June.

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