Displaying posts published in

September 2022

Poll: Majority of Americans Disapprove of Affirmative Action in College Admissions By Caroline Downey

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/poll-majority-of-americans-disapprove-of-affirmative-action-in-college-admissions/

With the Supreme Court scheduled to hear oral arguments in a pair of landmark affirmative-action cases this fall, a majority of Americans say they disapprove of racial preferences and still favor a meritocratic system in college admissions.

An 85 Fund poll conducted by CRC Research found that 59 percent of respondents disapprove of colleges and universities considering a prospective student’s race or ethnicity when making admissions decisions. Only 29 percent approve, and 12 percent are unsure. Respondents were selected randomly from opt-in panel participants for the September 14–18 polling.

Most Americans, 58 percent, still want colleges and universities to judge applications based on credentials, test scores, and other qualifications rather than racial identification, even if it means that fewer minority students are represented in the student body.

One of the affirmative-action cases on the Supreme Court docket, Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College, involves a complaint against Harvard for its alleged discrimination against Asian candidates, who typically submit statistically very high test scores and academic records. The plaintiffs have asked the justices to ban the consideration of race in college admissions, arguing that it disadvantages Asian applicants and violates federal law. Recently confirmed justice Ketanji Brown Jackson recused herself from the case due to her past role on the school’s board of overseers.

Asked to speak to the Harvard situation specifically, 72 percent of conservatives, 58 percent of moderates, and 47 percent of liberals oppose the school’s consideration of race and ethnicity in admissions, the poll shows. Harvard acknowledged in its brief that if it “abandoned consideration of race as one among many factors, representation of African-American and Hispanic students would significantly decline.” It also said that the “lower courts found Harvard uses race . . . only ‘as a plus factor in the context of individualized consideration of each and every applicant,’” seemingly conceding that race can elevate an application of certain individuals but not others.

Importing Even More Crime By Peter Kirsanow

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/importing-even-more-crime/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=corner&utm_term=second

The record increase in illegal-alien encounters at the southern border due to Biden administration misfeasance, malfeasance, and nonfeasance portends significant and persistent increases in crime.

In fiscal year 2020, the Border Patrol recorded 458,088 encounters with illegal immigrants at the southern border. That figure has spiked to approximately 2 million in fiscal year 2021.

In 2020, 2,438 of the illegal immigrants encountered at the southern border already had criminal records at the time of entry. In 2021, 10,763 illegal immigrants encountered had criminal records.

It’s troubling enough that lax border policy permits thousands of convicts (and scores of suspected terrorists) to enter the country illegally. The evidence shows, however, that tens of thousands more illegal immigrants will commit crimes while in the United States (not counting the hundreds of thousands of  crimes related to facilitating illegal immigration such as crimes related  to identity theft, obtaining false driver’s licenses, improperly accessing public benefits, using fraudulent green cards, etc.).

Biden’s Depletion of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve Could Be Catastrophic Soon By Matt Margolis

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2022/09/27/bidens-depletion-of-the-strategic-petroleum-reserve-could-be-catastrophic-soon-n1632699

Biden’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan may have tanked his approval ratings, but record inflation and soaring gas prices kept them underwater.

As fuel prices reached historic highs, Biden stubbornly refused to do anything that would increase domestic supply, opting instead to buy fuel from overseas before eventually raiding the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. It was a foolish thing to do, and while gas prices have gone down, the impact of raiding the reserves is debatable. But one thing is for sure: Biden depleted the reserves, which are now at a 37-year low, to boost his poll numbers.

Now that Hurricane Ian is headed for Florida, the folly of Biden’s tactic is on full display.

That’s not to say he shouldn’t have seen this coming. Jeffrey Lord predicted this exact scenario back in July.

“The Biden administration, for political purposes with an eye on the November election, is using the SPR to lower the price of gas. And just where is the SPR getting its crude in the first place? That would be the Gulf of Mexico — which is exactly where so many hurricanes wind up in the United States,” Lord wrote at The American Spectator. “All of which means Biden is lowering U.S. reserves — and taking the chance that no hurricane will hit the gulf in this coming hurricane season that will halt the ability of the U.S. to refill the reserves it has used for the purely political purpose of lowering the price of gas at the pump.”

FBI Seized $86 Million In Raid On Innocent Americans’ Safe Boxes After Duping Judge For Warrant By: Evita Duffy

https://thefederalist.com/2022/09/27/fbi-seized-86-million-in-raid-on-innocent-americans-safe-boxes-after-duping-judge-for-warrant/

‘The government’s theory is that having cash makes you a presumptive criminal, and I think every American should be worried about that.’

There is no denying anymore that our federal agencies have weaponized their power against the political adversaries of the left. But if you think the feds’ abandonment of all standards only affects outspoken critics of the regime, think again. More allegations of FBI corruption and hubris are coming to light after a lawsuit last week revealed FBI agents misled a judge so they could illegally seize and withhold property from innocent American citizens.

Agents took more than $86 million in cash, jewelry, and gold from 1,400 safe deposit boxes during the raid of a Beverly Hills vault company in March 2021. Lawyers representing a group of deposit box owners claim their items were illegally taken and not returned to them more than a year after the raid of the Beverly Hills, California, branch of U.S. Private Vaults.

Seizing Innocent Americans’ Assets

This past March, a year after the raid, the owners of U.S. Private Vaults pleaded guilty to conspiracy to launder drug money. However, the hundreds of citizens whose assets were seized by the FBI are not suspected of any crimes, according to court documents.

Deposit box holders whose property was taken sued the bureau for violating their rights. Robert Frommer, a lawyer with the Institute for Justice, the libertarian, nonprofit law firm that filed the suit, said in the court papers: “We brought suit on behalf of seven clients, but we were representing a class of at least 400 people. What we’ve been trying to show for the past several months is that the government’s actions violated the search-and-seizure protections of the US Constitution in the Fourth Amendment.” 

Did the FBI Finally Go Too Far? By Jack Cashill

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/09/did_the_fbi_finally_go_too_far.html

On reading about the Saturday arrest of pro-life activist Mark Houck, I thought the author at this alternative site had to be exaggerating. It struck me as beyond belief that two dozen or so armed FBI agents would swarm the house of a Catholic father of seven, rifles drawn, and arrest him in front of his weeping children for anything short of murder.

I have had to recalibrate my belief system. The “crime” fell quite a bit short of murder. On October 13, 2021, Houck brought his 12-year-old son with him for his weekly sidewalk counseling outside of a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic in Philadelphia. A volunteer escort at the abortion clinic reportedly called Houck’s son a “fag” among other insults and threatened him. Houck pushed the man away from his son, and the man fell. Houck, the founder of an organization that promotes Christian virtue among men, was not charged with a crime.

However petty the incident, U.S. Attorney’s Office, Eastern District of Pennsylvania, had Houck seized at gunpoint nearly a year later and bragged about the arrest. Said PR hack Jennifer Crandall in a press release, Houck “assaulted a man because he was a volunteer reproductive health care clinic escort.”

Before proceeding, this sentence needs parsing. The most problematic word is “because.” Houck has had hundreds of opportunities to assault escorts if their offense in his eyes was to be an escort. Although the press release claims two incidents on that same day with the man, Houck had no prior or subsequent altercations.

Then there is the Orwellian phrase “reproductive health care clinic escort.” Ms. Crandall is somehow fusing the “reproductive rights” euphemism favored by abortion activists with the function of the escort, whose mission, of course, is to assure that no reproduction takes place on his watch.

The Islamic Republic: Shaken to Its Core by Hugh Fitzgerald

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-islamic-republic-shaken-to-its-core/

On September 13, in Tehran, Iran, the Morality Police took Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, into custody for incorrectly tying her hijab. Eyewitnesses said they saw her being beaten with a baton as she was shoved into a van. Three days later, she was dead. The police announced that she had died of a heart attack; her family was quick to say that Amini was in perfect health. At once protests prompted by her death began in Tehran and in the Kurdish cities, led by women who pulled off, and then ripped up or burned, their hated hijabs, and symbolically cut off their hair. And the protests that began with fury over the Morality Police have spread, and new grievances have been added.

Those protests quickly spread to more than two dozen other cities, including Mashhad and Isfahan, in twenty provinces across the country. The police have tried to quell them, deploying at first tear gas and water cannon, and then birdshot and metal pellets, but for several days now they have been using live fire. Nearly 80 people, among the protesters, have now been killed by the police. And there are reports that dozens of police, too, have been killed or wounded. The protesters have become increasingly violent, burning cars, busses, and fire engines, and destroying billboards showing the Supreme Leader. They have set fire to a base of the feared Basij militia on Ferdowsi Street in downtown Tehran. A police commander has been killed by the protesters, and dozens of other police wounded by them.

The government has ended Internet service in parts in Tehran, and ended access to WhatsApp and Telegram. Despite this, the protesters still manage somehow to meet up and come out in force, and in ever larger numbers, across the country.

The “Poverty” Crisis Dems Will Never Let Go to Waste The progressive redistributionist regime grows more tyrannical. by Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-poverty-crisis-dems-will-never-let-go-to-waste/

Whether hard or soft, the Left operates through a few core tactics. One is “by any means necessary.” Double standards, “big lies,” violence, censorship––all are justified by the alleged nobility of their goals like “equity” and “social justice.” The other is the precept “You never want to let a serious crisis go to waste,” as Barack Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel put it, since a crisis is “an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.”

And if there isn’t a “serious crisis”? Manufacture one by employing the tactics of “any means necessary.” If statistical data tell us that unarmed black men are not disproportionately and wantonly being gunned down by the police, just keep yelling the “big lie” that they are, while violently rioting, assaulting, and looting and burning businesses for the television and iPhone cameras. Shake down corporate hegemons for danegeld, intimidate mayors and governors into defunding police departments, demonize cops into retirement, and soon you can do things you “could not do before,” like hiring prosecutors who release violent criminals back on the streets to keep on killing and maiming.

Not wasting manufactured “crises” has been the progressives’ most successful methods for expanding and concentrating the power of the federal Leviathan.

One of the oldest “crises” the progressive technocrats have exploited for over half a century is “poverty,” especially “child poverty.” Last year, for example, Democrat Congressional leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer promised that expanding the tax credit for children would “cut child poverty in half,” and Biden repeated that promise.

In fact, as Phil Gramm and John Early pointed out recently, the poverty rate barely budged from 2020’, and remained higher than 2019’s, “even though government spent an extra $2.6 trillion on transfer payments in 2020-21.” And don’t forget, this largesse is added to the $23 trillion tab run up since Lyndon Johnson’s “war on poverty” legislation of 1964. Worse, all that money has lowered official poverty rates by only a few points at best from 1964’s rate. So why do we continue this dysfunctional approach?

This Month’s Second Electoral Earthquake in Europe A disciple of Roger Scruton is about to become Italy’s prime minister. by Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/this-months-second-electoral-earthquake-in-europe/

EXCERPT

Like the Sweden Democrats (SD), who triumphed at the polls on September 11, the Brothers of Italy, who won big last Sunday, have been described in the international media as “far-right,” “hard right,” “extremist,” and even “fascist.” Party boss Giorgia Meloni, warned the New York Times after the election, is “poised to be the country’s first far-right leader since Mussolini.” Or, as the Guardian put it, “Italy will now have its most rightwing prime minister since 1945.”

The day before the Italian election, anxious journalists sought comment from Ursula von der Leyen, head of the European Commission, who reassured them that if things didn’t go “in the right direction” in Italy, she had “tools” with which to respond. In other words, an unelected technocrat – a woman whose extraordinary power over the lives of 450 million people has never been subjected to the vote of a single ordinary citizen – was threatening reprisal if the citizens of a sovereign country chose leaders she didn’t like.

Of course, von der Leyen’s idea of “the right direction” means rule by globalists – the greatest menace to which is government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Hence the need to smear champions of liberty as fascists. (Just ask Hillary Clinton, who the other day, apparently having decided that “deplorables” wasn’t quite strong enough, likened Trump supporters to Nazis.)

To be sure, like SD, the Brothers of Italy have dicey roots. That’s not uncommon in Europe. Meloni herself, when she started her career, was pretty far to the right; she’s since moderated her views. Yet many in the media pretend otherwise. For example, although she fervently supports Ukraine in the current war (“a proud nation that is teaching the world what it is to fight for freedom”), she’s routinely depicted as being cozy with Putin.

Then again, Trump got painted with the same brush. And just as he boiled his cause down to “America First” and SD’s platform essentially amounts to “Sweden First,” Meloni, if you listen to her speeches, is obviously all in for “Italy First.” Like SD, her party is pro-NATO and anti-EU. Like SD, it firmly opposes mass Muslim immigration. After Sunday’s election, an Italian voter explained his support for Meloni to a CBS News reporter in three words: “Too many immigrants.” (Which was followed immediately, on the evening news broadcast, with clips of Mussolini –  who, the reporter told us, originated Meloni’s motto, “God, Fatherland, and Family.”)

Hooray, a Student Loan Forgiveness Plaintiff A man hurt by Biden’s illegal write-off sues to block it. He has a good case.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/huzzah-a-student-loan-plaintiff-frank-garrison-lawsuit-biden-pacific-legal-foundation-11664311394?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The Biden Administration has to know it lacks the authority to unilaterally cancel a half-trillion dollars in student debt, but it may have calculated that no one could demonstrate the injury needed to bring a legal challenge. Well, maybe someone can.

An Indiana borrower on Tuesday filed a federal lawsuit to block the President’s student loan write-off. He makes a strong case that he is harmed by the loan cancellation and that it’s illegal. Federal courts only hear cases and controversies. As a threshold matter, plaintiffs must show that they have suffered a concrete and particular injury.

Individual taxpayers aren’t directly harmed by the write-off, even if they will ultimately bear the cost. The cancellation is unfair to Americans who repaid their loans or didn’t go to college, but they haven’t suffered a concrete injury. Frank Garrison argues he will be harmed owing to quirks in federal loan repayment plans and Indiana tax law.

Mr. Garrison is enrolled in the federal Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which limits his monthly payments to a share of his income and discharges the remaining debt after 10 years of payments. The President’s loan forgiveness will immediately cancel $20,000 in debt. But this won’t reduce his monthly payments since they are already capped.

However, it will require him to pay more than $1,000 in state tax on the canceled debt this year. Indiana doesn’t tax Public Service Loan Forgiveness, so he wouldn’t face a state tax liability several years from now. Thus he won’t receive an “additional benefit from the cancellation—just a one-time additional penalty,” according to his suit.