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April 2018

It Would Still Be Foolish for Trump to Talk to Mueller By Andrew C. McCarthy

According to the Washington Post, Robert Mueller says President Trump is not “a criminal target at this point.” The Post’s anonymous sources claim that the special counsel has conveyed that assurance to the president’s private attorneys.

That is good news for Trump. After all, between Mueller’s Gang of 17 alpha-prosecutors and the sundry scores of Justice Department lawyers and federal agents who were at this long before Mueller was appointed, the Russia investigation has been going on for nearly two years. By now, you would think that the focus of that effort would have become the formal “target” if there were any there there.

The president shouldn’t get too giddy, though. It’s nice not to be designated a target, but then there are those three little words, at this point.

Mueller is still investigating.

Let us revisit the “What’s My Client’s Status?” lesson in Investigations 101, the course we took during the Clinton-emails caper — in which no one’s status mattered much since, unlike in Mueller’s probe, no one was ever going to be charged.

In every investigation, a prosecutor drops relevant people in one of three buckets: target, subject, and witness. The two extremes are the easy ones to grasp. A “target” is virtually certain to be charged with a crime. A “witness” has relevant knowledge but is not suspected of any wrongdoing — think of the victim in a robbery. A defense lawyer always hopes the prosecutor will think of his client as a mere witness. While “target” is clearly the worst-case scenario, at least your choices are clear: Either cut a plea deal or fight the case at trial — no target is going to talk his way out of being charged.

“Subject” is the fuzzy category. A “subject” is someone whose behavior is being evaluated by the prosecutor and the grand jury. Usually, there is not enough evidence to charge . . . yet. As long as the investigation continues, a subject can become a target, and then a defendant, at any moment.

‘We can’t just trust’: The thinking behind Trump’s get-tough approach to China : Steve Holland, David Lawder, Jeff Mason

When Liu He, Chinese President Xi Jinping’s top economic adviser, came to Washington in late February, he was expected to make arrangements for restarting trade talks that President Donald Trump had put on ice.

But just as Liu arrived, the Trump administration announced global steel and aluminum tariffs aimed at punishing China for what Washington says is its overproduction of steel that hurts U.S. steel makers. The announcement came a day ahead of a meeting planned with Trump’s economic point men, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and then White House adviser Gary Cohn.

Pessimistic Trump officials had said the Liu meeting would probably go nowhere. “People expect that whatever the Chinese offer it will be insufficient,” a White House official told Reuters just hours ahead of the meeting.

The timing of the announcement, whether deliberately aimed at embarrassing Liu or not, was emblematic of the Trump administration’s more confrontational approach to what the United States has long viewed as China’s unfair trade practices.

It was the opening salvo in a pattern of escalation that continued this week as Trump slapped first $50 billion in tariffs on China and then said he would seek $100 billion more after Beijing struck back.

The rapid tit-for-tat escalation, which has brought the world’s two biggest economies to the edge of a trade war, is being driven by anti-China economist Peter Navarro and U.S trade negotiator Robert Lighthizer, who cut his teeth in trade deals with Japan in the 1980s.

Colleges’ Central Mission Erodes — and Free Speech With It Peter Berkowitz

Only apologists determined to avert their eyes and cover their ears could deny with a straight face that higher education in America today nurses hostility to free speech.

Sporadic eruptions of that hostility have made the headlines. Last year, in early February, violent protests swept across the University of California, Berkeley against right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, causing the university to cancel his speech. In March, Middlebury College students disrupted a talk by the distinguished American Enterprise Institute social scientist Charles Murray and assaulted his host, Professor Allison Stanger, sending her to the hospital. In April, fear of more violence compelled UC-Berkeley to rescind an invitation to the acerbic conservative columnist Ann Coulter. Last fall semester, student efforts to shut down speech on campus skyrocketed.

Less overt forms of hostility to free speech on campus run deeper. Colleges and universities teach students that free speech is merely one among many values. Campus authorities encourage students to expect that schools will silence, or at least cordon off, offensive opinions. In the humanities and social sciences, professors routinely exclude from class discussion, syllabi, and departmental offerings ideas for which a good case can be made but with which they disagree.

Some want to believe that controversies over campus free speech are a tempest in a teapot. While acknowledging that walling off students from disfavored opinions for four or five years may instill bad intellectual habits, the optimists suppose that once these graduates take their place in the real world they’ll quickly discover that the Constitution provides broad protection for speech, including the expression of, say, conservative convictions that university majorities often deem appalling and degrading. The hope is that hostility to free speech nursed on campus stays on campuses.

Trump and the US need Scott Pruitt to stay at EPA By Steve Milloy

“I do,” President Trump said Thursday afternoon when asked by reporters whether he still has confidence in embattled Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt. And well the president should.

Pruitt has been the most effective appointee in implementing the Trump agenda. If Pruitt is forced out of his job because of charges he behaved unethically, America will suffer.

President Trump was elected as the economy was being choked and jobs were being destroyed by record-breaking, excessive and counterproductive regulations issued by the Obama administration.

The regulatory agency leading the charge against a healthy American economy and American job creation was the EPA. Candidate Trump knew this and campaigned on it. Millions of Americans voted for Trump precisely because he came out strongly against regulatory overreach.

When elected, the new president wisely tapped then-Oklahoma Attorney General Pruitt to bring EPA back with the bounds of the law and to end the EPA’s gross overregulation.

Pruitt knew well EPA’s proclivity toward rogue behavior. He had been involved in some dozen lawsuits against the agency.

EPA Administrator Pruitt was specifically directed via presidential executive order to roll back the two most excessive overreaches of the Obama EPA – the Clean Power Plan and the Waters of the United States rule.

The Obama war on coal and coal miners, capped off by the Clean Power Plan, has destroyed 94 percent of the market value of the U.S. coal industry and killed thousands of coal miner jobs – all for no environmental or public health gain.

The Dark Side of the Enlightenment Today’s advocates oversell the benefits of unfettered reason. They dismiss the contributions of tradition, religion and nationalism to human progress. By Yoram Hazony

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-dark-side-of-the-enlightenment-1523050206

A lot of people are selling Enlightenment these days. After the Brexit vote and the election of President Trump, David Brooks published a paean to the “Enlightenment project,” declaring it under attack and calling on readers to “rise up” and save it. Commentary magazine sent me a letter asking for a donation to provide readers “with the enlightenment we all so desperately crave.” And now there’s Steven Pinker’s impressive new book, “Enlightenment Now,” which may be the definitive statement of the neo-Enlightenment movement that is fighting the tide of nationalist thinking in America, Britain and beyond.

Do we all crave enlightenment? I don’t. I like and respect Mr. Pinker, Mr. Brooks and others in their camp. But Enlightenment philosophy didn’t achieve a fraction of the good they claim, and it has done much harm.

Boosters of the Enlightenment make an attractive case. Science, medicine, free political institutions, the market economy—these things have dramatically improved our lives. They are all, Mr. Pinker writes, the result of “a process set in motion by the Enlightenment in the late 18th century,” when philosophers “replaced dogma, tradition and authority with reason, debate and institutions of truth-seeking.” Mr. Brooks concurs, assuring his readers that “the Enlightenment project gave us the modern world.” So give thanks for “thinkers like John Locke and Immanuel Kant who argued that people should stop deferring blindly to authority” and instead “think things through from the ground up.”

As Mr. Pinker sums it up: “Progress is a gift of the ideals of the Enlightenment, and will continue to the extent that we rededicate ourselves to those ideals.”

Very little of this is true. Consider the claim that the U.S. Constitution was a product of Enlightenment thought, derived by throwing out the political traditions of the past and applying unfettered human reason. Disproving this idea requires only reading earlier writers on the English constitution. The widely circulated 15th-century treatise “In Praise of the Laws of England,” written by the jurist John Fortescue, clearly explains due process and the theory now called “checks and balances.” The English constitution, Fortescue wrote, establishes personal liberty and economic prosperity by shielding the individual and his property from the government. The protections that appear in the U.S. Bill of Rights were mostly set down in the 1600s by those drafting England’s constitutional documents—men such as John Selden, Edward Hyde and Matthew Hale.

These statesmen and philosophers articulated the principles of modern Anglo-American constitutionalism centuries before the U.S. was created. Yet they were not Enlightenment men. They were religious, English nationalists and political conservatives. They were familiar with the claim that unfettered reason should remake society, but they rejected it in favor of developing a traditional constitution that had proved itself. When Washington, Jay, Hamilton and Madison initiated a national government for the U.S., they primarily turned to this conservative tradition, adapting it to local conditions.

France: Soon with No Jews? by Guy Millière

Today, France is the only country in the Western world where Jews are murdered simply for being Jews.

Jews may be the main victims, but they are not the only ones. In just five years, 250 people in France have been murdered by Islamic terrorists.

The main problem is the spread of hatred against Jews, France and the Western world. Many Muslim extremists incite murder; and more and more often, murders occur.

A year ago, in Paris, on April 4, 2017, Sarah Halimi, an elderly Jew, was horribly tortured and murdered in her home in Paris, then thrown from her window by a man shouting “Allahu Akbar” (“Allah is the greatest”) . She had reported to the police several times that she was the victim of anti-Semitic threats — in vain.

Less than a year later in Paris, another elderly — and disabled — Jew, Mireille Knoll, was raped, tortured and murdered in her apartment by another Muslim extremist. Mrs. Knoll, a Holocaust survivor, had also contacted the police to say that she had been threatened. Again, the police did nothing.

For months, the French justice system tried to cover-up the anti-Semitic nature of Sarah Halimi’s murder; the judge in charge of Mireille Knoll’s case at least recognized the anti-Semitic nature of her murder at once.

Both women were victims of an anti-Semitic hatred that is rising quickly in France.

French Jews live in constant insecurity. The men who murder them evidently do not hesitate to break into homes and attack elderly women; they seem to know they can threaten their future victims without fear of arrest. More often than not, the police do not even record the complaints of Jews who go to the police station, but simply note in the daybook that a Jew claiming threats came and went.

Why Kevin Williamson Matters By Roger Kimball

Any rational person’s list of the most intelligent and pungent columnists now writing will perforce include the name Kevin Williamson, late of National Review and, as of Thursday, late of The Atlantic as well.

And anyone with a working internet connection knows that Williamson, hired to a chorus of drooling leftoid obloquy by The Atlantic a few weeks ago, was summarily fired by the magazine’s preening, oleaginous editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, after having written only one article, “The Passing of the Libertarian Moment.”

That article was not the problem. The problem (prescinding from Goldberg’s obvious spinelessness in capitulating to the baying mob) was a remark Williamson made about abortion during a podcast with his former NR colleague Charles C. W. Cooke. Like nearly 50 percent of the American public, Kevin believes that abortion is a form of homicide, i.e., murder (“homicide” somehow sounds more antiseptic), and noted he was “absolutely willing to see abortion treated like regular homicide under the criminal code.” When asked how he thought those found guilty of abortion should be punished, he said although he was “kind of squishy on capital punishment in general,” death by hanging might be appropriate.

If you listen to the exchange, it is clear—or so I think—that the bit about hanging was a flip provocation. It was a provocation that Kevin apparently liked, however, for he repeated it in a tweet (since deleted). The weaponized cyber garbage-dispensing service known as Media Matters insinuated its tentacles into the recesses of social media to compile snippets of Kevin’s views about abortion and other matters about which there can be only one opinion, and dumped the lot into the contemporary equivalent of the public square, i.e., much-visited internet sites. Then its politically correct masters sat back and waited for the mob to do its work.

Which it promptly did.

Anti-Trump Appeasers on the Right Empower the Mob By Julie Kelly

Before I get into the firing of Kevin Williamson, let me say this: Williamson is a talented, unique, and compelling writer. I have complimented his work privately to him and publicly on social media. Even when I strongly disagreed with him—particularly with his harsh assessment of Trump supporters—I still envy his way with words. Kevin has a painful personal history that he is not afraid to share, and it clearly shapes his view of the world.

He is also Donald Trump’s harshest critic on the Right. He wrote a book about the president, The Case Against Donald Trump. Williamson has mocked Trump’s business acumen, his family, and his supporters in a vile way. His Twitter timeline—before he deleted his entire account at the behest of his now-former employer—was filled with even more vicious remarks. (He was once a clever, engaging personality on social media, but had recently devolved into a nasty crank.) He is not a sympathetic character.

Conservatives are outraged that Williamson was fired Thursday by Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, after a left-wing media watchdog released audio clips of Williamson supporting capital punishment for women who have abortions. He also referred to illegal immigrants as “peasants” and advocated waterboarding terrorists. But it was his view that women who abort their babies should endure “hanging”—and his dodginess in owning up to the remark—that primarily led to his ouster. (Williamson and his defenders originally downplayed it as an impetuous tweet.) But in an email to employees, Goldberg said:

The language he used in this podcast—and in my conversations with him in recent days—made it clear that the original tweet did, in fact, represent his carefully considered views. The tweet was not merely an impulsive, decontextualized, heat-of-the-moment post, as Kevin had explained it. Furthermore, the language used in the podcast was callous and violent.

The media don’t really care about Scott Pruitt’s ethics — just his reversal of Obama policies By Jack Hellner

The media are going after Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt for traveling first class and only paying $1,500 per month for a condo, pretending it’s all a matter of ethics.

It’s nonsense. They actually are going after him because he dares reverse some of the rules the Environmental Protection Agency implemented without going through Congress. Dissent is just not allowed from Democrat policies and the media are the method of choice for Democrats, using it to go after any Trump administration person they don’t like. Here’s a typical headline:

Scott Pruitt’s job in jeopardy amid expanding ethics issues

Somehow I don’t remember any of Obama’s people fired for massive ethical violations, including Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin for working for the Clinton Foundation, the State Department, and a consulting group at the same time. Clinton aide Cheryl Mills also did work for the Foundation at the same time she was working for the State Department.

That wasn’t even the half of what went down during the Obama administration. The huge donations to the Clinton Foundation from foreign countries doing business with the State Department, along with escalating speech fees for Bill and Chelsea were obvious kickbacks or illegal campaign donations. But nobody’s head was called for when those things made the news.

The media cared so little about all the ethics and actual law violations of Hillary that they almost universally supported putting her, Huma and Cheryl in the White House.

Just look at the flavor of how things were done during the past administration:

A spring 2012 email to Hillary Clinton’s top State Department aide, Huma Abedin, asked for help winning a presidential appointment for a supporter of the Clinton Foundation, according to a chain obtained by POLITICO.

The messages illustrate the relationship between Clinton’s most trusted confidante and the private consulting company that asked for the favor, Teneo — a global firm that later hired Abedin. Abedin signed on with the company while she still held a State Department position, a dual employment that is now being examined by congressional investigators.

Meet the other David Hogg…who’s not like the first one By Monica Showalter ****

It’s said that everyone has a doppelganger. Well, in a weird twist to the saga of the high school shooting survivor-turned-gun control activist, David Hogg, it might just be true.

David Hogg of North Carolina has the same name as the David Hogg of Parkland, Florida; resembles the other teen; and is nearly the same age – he’s actually slightly younger, and he’s already studying engineering at the University of North Carolina.

He’s different from the Parkland David Hogg in two noticeable ways, though: he’s mature, and he favors gun rights.

He’s written a brilliant readable essay in the Wall Street Journal (paywall, unfortunately) on his own experience of being mistaken for the Parkland David Hogg. He wrote of the bad harassment and abuse a lot of trolls have thrown his way (which makes one wonder with a certain sympathy what the other David Hogg must be dealing with,) and how, actually, he’s in favor of gun rights, as well as gun education in schools. He tweets at @David_Hogg16

The South Florida Sun-Sentinel has a good summary of the piece here, noting:

Although he empathizes with the Parkland students and appreciates their use of their First Amendment right, he said gun rights are important, too. This Hogg’s solution is not gun control, but instead mandatory gun education and armed security officers in schools.

Hogg’s op-ed in the Journal is a real gem. He states his views and comes off as kind and empathetic to all sides in the debate, injecting civility into a debate that has long lacked it on multiple sides. Take a look at this passage to his entirely worth reading op-ed: