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Ruth King

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Senators Must Keep Scalia’s Legacy Alive and Reject Obama’s Nominee Justice Scalia’s true legacy was fighting for the Constitution. Daniel Greenfield

By on February 15th, 2016

Even in death, he always had the last word. As debate over a possible recess appointment to the Supreme Court by Obama continues, Justice Antonin Scalia had already made the case against it.

“The court’s decision transforms the recess-appointment power from a tool carefully designed to fill a narrow and specific need into a weapon to be wielded by future presidents against future Senates,” Justice Scalia wrote in his usual unsparing language in NLRB v. Noel Canning.

And, as always, he took the side of the Constitution over everything else indicting the court for casting “aside the plain, original meaning of the constitutional text in deference to late-arising historical practices”. In clear and forceful language, he warned that “the Constitution’s core, government-structuring provisions are no less critical to preserving liberty than are the later adopted provisions of the Bill of Rights” in maintaining “the “enduring structure” of constitutional government”.

To Justice Scalia, liberty meant limiting the powers of government by maintaining the Constitution. A recess appointment, the topic revived by his passing, is as grave a threat to liberty as a violation of the First Amendment. He was convinced that government breaking its constitutional chains was the true threat to liberty. Attacks on the First or Second Amendment were symptoms of that larger problem.

Often outnumbered, but never outwitted, Justice Scalia saw government as a monster that the Founders had chained with manacles made of words. His task was reforging them with his voice and pen.

Leftist judges and lawyers love to style themselves as defenders of civil rights, but their idea of civil rights is providing unlimited power to government. Justice Scalia was an actual believer in civil rights. Unlike the activist leftist judges to whom the law is merely a means to a leftist end, dressing up their usurpation of power under the mocking name of “Living Constitution”, he was an Originalist who truly fought for civil rights every time he fought for the truth of the word of the law over the power of men.

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A Message to Republicans By David Solway

By on February 15th, 2016

If the GOP wants to win, it should learn how not to lose.

On the similarities between Canada’s Conservative party and the GOP, I have previously argued that the latter must not repeat the mistakes of the former if it wishes to succeed in November 2016. As I explained, the Conservatives lost the recent Canadian election at least in part because they failed to stick by their central principles, attempting to cater to the voting bloc of the opposition parties by soft-pedaling or even abandoning basic policy decisions or by camouflaging their fundamental ethos so as not, they calculated, to alienate the electorate. The result was predictably twofold: in manifesting as Liberal lite the party made no inroads among a skeptical population and simultaneously lost many of its long-standing supporters, in total dropping 67 of its previous 166 seats.

When a party begins to shed its own constituents by aping the agenda of its competitors or by failing to reframe its image, it has effectively sealed its fate. Greg Richards points out in a cogent article for American Thinker that “The ascendancy of liberalism in America is the cause of the silence of Republicans in Congress since they won the House in 2010. One would think that a solid majority in the electoral body closest to the people would provide a platform for advancing the Republican case. But no.” The Republican establishment is “unwilling to challenge the liberal world view, [which] controls the debate in the public space… Republicans have had neither the skill nor the intestinal fortitude — the courage — to operate outside the culturally dominant liberal paradigm.”

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Hillary Clinton’s Dead-End Campaign By Victor Davis Hanson

By on February 15th, 2016

Hillary Clinton may yet win the Democratic nomination—if she is not indicted. After all, it is hard for a New England spread-the-wealth socialist like rival Bernie Sanders to appeal to working-class southern whites, minorities, or the wealthy Democratic establishment. It is still likely that the Democratic Party will find a way to aid an ailing and scandal-plagued Mrs. Clinton, rather than turn over its future to a 74-year-old scold, who for most of his voting life was not a Democrat and whose redistributionist agendas and Woodstock fables about the 1960s make Obama seem centrist in comparison.

All that said, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign rhetoric is coming up empty—largely because it is at odds with the way she has lived her life and conducted her various careers over the last two decades. Voters, even younger ones, are now sorely aware of those flagrant contradictions.

The so-called Republican war on women was successful Democratic demagoguery in 2008 and 2012. That paranoid mythmaking worked with urban, unmarried young women. They were terrified of old white-guy Republican bogeymen, who would make them pay for their birth control and take away abortion on demand, were indifferent to new expansive definitions of sexual harassment, and seemed hung up on what were seen as roadblocks—religion, marriage, and family—to a young, college-educated woman’s self-expression. Yet Hillary has now lost that long-enshrined wedge issue after only 24 hours of Donald Trump’s withering counter-fire—in stark contrast to past years of failed Republican counter-strategies.

Trump assumed that her problem was not just that Bill Clinton had been a recognized serial womanizer and cheat for over forty years, but involved far greater hypocrisies. First, it was hard to find any sexual liaison of Bill’s that ever had a good word to say about him. The consensual Monica Lewinsky variety all felt used and manipulated. The Juanita Broaddrick-Paula Jones-Kathleen Willey category alleged that they were victims of crude coercion or violent assault.

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Merv Bendle Trumpism and Turnbull

By on February 15th, 2016

The mogul’s rise has shocked the new and arrogantly elitist ruling class, of which Australia’s PM is very much a member. If the frustrations being tapped on the other side of the Pacific are a guide — and there is no reason to imagine they are not — we may well soon see our own pitchfork posses
There’s a world-shaking political showdown approaching, and Donald Trump’s presidential bid is the vanguard. Moreover, the political forces providing momentum for his populist insurgency — the disintegration of America’s national identity driven by a new internationalist ruling class allied with a state-dependent underclass (or lumpenproletariat) — have become so obvious that both the left and the right are in basic agreement about them.

Addressing the question: what makes a person vote for Donald Trump, we find commentary like the following by Ezekiel Kweku on the Gen-X left:

[Trump’s supporters] believe that the United States is decaying from within, its strength sapped by a culture unmoored from the ideals that made America great, and that the source of this rot is immigrants who don’t understand American values, depress the country’s wages, drain government coffers, and increase crime. They believe that in this weakened state, America isn’t strong enough to fight off terrorists abroad or infiltrators within. They are haunted by the amorphous fear that the America they knew is vanishing. And they believe establishment politicians and the press are too cowed, calculated, or corrupted to either voice these truths publicly or act upon them.

Meanwhile, on the libertarian right, we find a similar analysis offered by redoubtable Charles Murray:

Trumpism is an expression of the legitimate anger that many Americans feel about the course that the country has taken, and its appearance was predictable. It is the endgame of a process that has been going on for a half-century: America’s divestment of its historic national identity.

That national identity is based, above all, on American exceptionalism and a commitment to egalitarianism, liberty and individualism, specifically to the values of self-reliance, limited government, free-market economics and decentralized political power, all buttressed by freedom of speech and association, equality before the law and equality of opportunity. In an epochal shift that has lasted now for 50 years that foundational commitment is being fatally undermined:

Today, the creed has lost its authority and its substance. What happened? Many of the dynamics of the reversal can be found in developments across the whole of American society: in the emergence of a new upper class and a new lower class, and in the plight of the working class caught in between. The class structure of American society is coming apart at the top and the bottom, leaving the working and middle classes exposed. As Murray pointed out several years ago:

The new upper class consists of the people who shape the country’s economy, politics and culture. The new lower class consists of people who have dropped out of some of the most basic institutions of American civic culture, especially work and marriage. Both of these new classes have repudiated the American creed in practice, whatever lip service they may still pay to it.

Faced with this disintegration, “Trumpism is the voice of a beleaguered working class telling us that it too is falling away”.

America is shifting swiftly away from the subdued class consciousness that characterised its first 175 years as a nation and, consequently, “American egalitarianism is on its last legs”.

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Daryl McCann Obama’s Bloody, Bumbling Incoherence

By on February 15th, 2016

In the topsy-turvy world as seen from the White House, Islamists such as Erdogan are regarded, incredibly, as the solution to extremist violence. Meanwhile, even as the US abets Shia militias in Iraq, those same fighters become US enemies if they venture into Syria
Last week, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan harangued Barack Obama in a very public tirade, warning that if America continued to support the Kurdish PYD-YPG in Syria it would be responsible for the creation of “a sea of blood”. Almost any president in the history of the United States could be guaranteed to recognise that Erdoğan’s millennialist ideology, not to mention megalomania, has transformed the fellow into a cross between Macbeth and King Lear. Almost any president apart from Obama, that is.

President Obama has, for years, consented to Turkey’s intervention in the Syrian civil war on the side of “moderate terrorists” — Jabhat al-Nusra, Ahrar ash-Sham, Jaysh al-Islam and so on. Erdoğan obviously desires Bashar al-Assad’s regime overthrown and replaced by radical Islamist outfits, à la Libya. How that might serve the interests of America and the rest of the world is another matter altogether. President Obama’s “special friendship” with the Muslim Brotherhood-associated Erdoğan leads some to infer that the current incumbent in the White House might himself be an MB man.

There is certainly a case that Barack Obama pandered to MB bigotry in his 2009 Cairo Speech and praised with faint damns Morsi’s MB government (2012-13). But it’s complicated. Barack Obama might have lamented the dawn of the post-MB era in Egypt, but Saudi Arabia actively embraced it, the Saudi Royal Family’s favoured Islamic fundamentalism, being Wahhabism rather than the Haraki (activist) Salafism of the MB. Nevertheless, President Obama has acquiesced to a very unsavoury alliance with the Saudis in Yemen’s civil war, which mostly involves hitting al-Qaeda units with drone strikes and defending a corrupt government against the Iranian-backed Houthi insurgency.

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Egypt’s “Security Threat”: Churches by Raymond Ibrahim

By on February 15th, 2016

Whenever Christians attempt to repair, renovate, or build a church — all of which contradict Islamic law — the same chain of events follows. Local Muslims riot and rampage, and local (Muslim) officials conclude that the only way to prevent “angry youths” from acts of violence is to ban the church, which is then declared a “threat” to security.

Repeatedly, Christian leaders accuse local officials of inciting Muslim violence against churches. Muslim leaders then point to this violence to deny the church a permit on the grounds that it has attracted violence.

On February 1, Tharwat Bukhit, a Coptic Christian member of Egypt’s parliament, announced “there are approximately 50 churches in Egypt closed for reasons of security.”

When the “Arab Spring” broke out in 2011, Egypt’s Christians compiled a list of 43 churches that had been shut down by local authorities over the years. This list was given to the prime minister of Egypt at the time, Dr. Essam Sharaf, who said that the churches would be opened as soon as possible. Yet since then, according to Bukhit, “Today, the number of closed churches has grown to almost 50.”

Why are Christian churches being “closed for reasons of security”? Whenever Christians attempt to repair, renovate, or build a church — all of which contradict Islamic law[1] — the same chain of events follows. Local Muslims riot and rampage, and local (Muslim) officials conclude that the only way to prevent “angry youths” from acts of violence is to ban the church, which is then declared a “threat” to security.

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‘We Have Slid Into A New Cold War’: Chilling Statement From Russian Prime Minister Medvedev over tensions in Syria further raises the spectre of WWIII as France accuses them of bombing civilians

By on February 15th, 2016

Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said tensions between Russia and the West have sent the world into a ‘new Cold War’, while speaking at the Munich Security Conference today.

‘We have slid into a new period of Cold War,’ he said. ‘Almost every day we are accused of making new horrible threats either against NATO as a whole, against Europe or against the US or other countries.’Amid an escalating war of words, the Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said a lack of trust could return the continent to ‘40 years ago, when a wall was standing in Europe’.

He rejected claims that Russian planes had killed more than 1,000 civilians in Syria, and insisted that Russia was ‘not trying to achieve some secret goals in Syria’ but was ‘trying to protect our national interests’.
He added: ‘Nearly on a daily basis, we are being blamed for the most terrible threat to Nato as a whole, to Europe, to America, to other countries. They make scary movies where Russia starts a nuclear war. I sometimes wonder, are we in 2016 or 1962?’

His comments comes after France’s Prime Minister Manuel Valls called on Russia to stop bombing civilians in Syria, saying this was crucial for achieving peace in the country.France’s Prime Minister Manuel Valls also warned that the European project could ‘disappear’ if policymakers were not careful

‘France respects Russia and its interests … But we know that to find the path to peace again, the Russian bombing of civilians has to stop,’ Valls said in a speech at a security conference in Munich.

‘The European project can go backwards or even disappear if we don’t take care of it,’ he said.

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Nationalism Wreaks Havoc in Divided Europe Confronted by common challenges, national politicians have been unable to adopt a pan-European view By Simon Nixon

By on February 15th, 2016

http://www.wsj.com/articles/nationalism-wreaks-havoc-in-divided-europe-1455477856

There are many different ways the European Union could fall apart in the coming weeks, but all of them have a common thread: the inability of national politicians to adopt a European perspective when confronted by common European challenges.

This is as true of the crisis surrounding the U.K.’s membership of the EU and the migration crisis, which will dominate a crunch EU leaders’ summit this week, as it is true of the eurozone economic crisis, which have burst back on the agenda following recent moves in financial markets.

Take Britain’s EU membership: When Prime Minister David Cameron first said that he wanted a new deal for the U.K. ahead of a referendum he has pledged to hold by the end of 2017, he insisted that the reforms he was seeking would benefit the whole of Europe.

Yet the draft deal that EU leaders will discuss does nothing of the sort. It consists of a series of carve-outs for the U.K. carefully crafted to stop other countries taking advantage of them. Indeed, EU officials are clear that if other member states try to make use of a controversial “emergency brake” that will allow the U.K. to restrict welfare payments to EU migrants for four years, the deal with the U.K. government would fall apart.

The deal may fall apart anyway: European Council President Donald Tusk has warned that the process is “fragile”. Mr. Cameron can’t even be sure he will achieve even his limited objective of persuading key figures in his party to back his deal, complicating his efforts to win the referendum, which he hopes to hold in June.

Either way, the deal looks likely to make the EU harder rather than easier to manage. The price of trying to keep Britain in the EU has been to put in question core EU principles including nondiscrimination against EU citizens, the free movement of workers and the integrity of the single market rule book. That looks like a recipe to embolden nationalists across the continent, showing that unilateral threats can deliver results. CONTINUE READING AT THE SITE

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Antonin Scalia Was Democracy’s Legal Champion He changed the way judges looked at text and law, and he was the best writer the Supreme Court has ever known.By Michael W. McConnell

By on February 15th, 2016

Mr. McConnell, a law professor and the director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School, is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Antonin Scalia, who died Saturday at age 79, was the most influential Supreme Court justice of the past 30 years. Not because he had the votes. He was influential because he had a clear, consistent, persuasive idea of how to interpret the Constitution: It means what it says; it means what those who enacted it meant to enact.

And Justice Scalia was influential because he wrote opinions with verve and good sense, in prose that any American could read and understand. He was the best writer the Supreme Court has ever known—and with justices like John Marshall, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Robert Jackson, that is saying a lot. He was the court’s most withering logician. He showed us what a real judge can be, even on that most political court.

When Justice Scalia arrived at the Supreme Court in 1986, its jurisprudence had become sloppy, results-driven, plagued with fuzzy three-part tests and fuzzier four-part tests, all of them concocted by his predecessors with little basis in constitutional text. Today, the entire court—even the liberal justices—have adopted Justice Scalia’s style: close attention to text, awareness of history, analytical rigor. The Supreme Court has not announced an impressionistic multipart “test” in years. CONTINUE READING AT THE SITE

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Why Islamists and the radical Left loathe the Day of Love. Jamie Glazov

By on February 15th, 2016

Yesterday, February 14, was Valentine’s Day, the sacred day that intimate companions mark to celebrate their love and affection for one another. If you’re thinking about making a study of how couples celebrate this day, the Muslim world and the milieus of the radical Left are not the places you should be spending your time. Indeed, it’s pretty hard to outdo jihadists and “progressives” when it comes to the hatred of Valentine’s Day. And this hatred is precisely the territory on which the contemporary romance between the Left and Islamic fanaticism is formed.

The train is never late: every year that Valentine’s comes around, the Muslim world erupts with ferocious rage, with its leaders doing everything in their power to suffocate the festivity that comes with the celebration of private romance. Imams around the world thunder against Valentine’s every year — and the celebration of the day itself is literally outlawed in Islamist states.

This year, for example, Pakistan banned Valentine’s Day as an “insult” to Islam and warned that “strict” action would be taken against anyone daring to celebrate the day in any part of Islamabad. While in the past, Valentine’s Day activities were disrupted by Jamaat-e-Islami, Pakistan’s main religious party, it was the first time this year that the state actually got involved to ban celebration of the day. In Iran, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia this year, and as always, Valentine’s Day was outlawed. Under the Islamic regime in Iran, for instance, any sale or promotion of Valentine’s Day related items, including the exchange of gifts, flowers and cards, was illegal. The Iranian police warned retailers, as they do every year, against the promotion of Valentine’s Day celebrations.

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