NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Gunning for Judge Kavanaugh By Daniel John Sobieski

Posted By on July 12th, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/07/gunning_for_judge_kavanaugh.html

It’s not just the wrongly decided Roe V. Wade decision that liberals fear is in jeopardy with the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh. They also fear their crusade against “semi-automatic” weapons may be exposed as the semantic, visual, and judicial fraud that it is:

“If you care about common sense gun violence protection, Judge Kavanaugh is your worst nightmare. If you want background checks, a ban on assault weapons, or any of the other common sense measures that we have in Connecticut, or California or New York, Judge Kavanaugh will strike them down.” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Connecticut, who used to clerk on the court. “That’s in his record, it’s indisputable.”

“Give him a seat on this court, and you can say good-bye to the common sense measures in Connecticut, California and New York that have helped save lives,” he added.

President Trump may very well have picked Brett Kavanaugh to be his second nomination to the Supreme Court based on his clear-thinking opinion that there is no asterisk next the phrase “right to keep and bear arms” that says it is okay for that right to be infringed based on a “scary” appearance or advancements in technology:

Kavanaugh, who has served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit since 2006, dissented from a 2011 decision in which a three-judge panel upheld the District of Columbia’s ban on so-called assault weapons and its requirement that all guns be registered. Kavanaugh disagreed with the majority’s use of “intermediate scrutiny,” saying an analysis “based on text, history, and tradition” is more consistent with the Supreme Court’s Second Amendment precedents.

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Jeffrey Toobin’s Clueless Supreme Court Meltdowns Should Embarrass CNN ‘When the Constitution was written, people were expected to die in their 50s. The framers never contemplated that these terms would regularly go to 30-plus years as they do now.’

Posted By on July 11th, 2018

http://thefederalist.com/2018/07/11/jeffrey-toobins-clueless-supreme-court-meltdowns-embarrass-cnn/

Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement has ignited a competition in Big Media for apocalyptic hot-takes on how a marginally more conservative Supreme Court will destroy America. CNN’s senior legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin seems bent on taking home the trophy for the most molten meltdown.

Toobin’s most recent rave, to the network’s Anderson Cooper, was that the stakes are higher on judicial confirmations today because “[w]hen the Constitution was written in the late eighteenth century, people were expected to die in their 50s. The framers never contemplated that these terms would regularly go to 30-plus years as they do now.”Toobin is as ill-informed about statistics as he is about the framers’ view on de facto life tenure for federal judges.

Toobin, like many people in the media, seems to have little idea about the difference between life expectancy—a figure including infant mortality—and life span. It also appears he may not grasp the difference between the mean and the median in considering what an “average” number is.
About Life Expectancy in the Eighteenth Century

Modern medicine has greatly decreased infant mortality and thereby increased average life expectancy in America and elsewhere. But after infant mortality is accounted for, the human life span has not changed nearly as much over time. During the late 1700s, males who reached age 20 could be expected on average to live to age 63-66. At age 30, they could be expected to live to age 65-68. At age 50—when Toobin thinks men were being wiped out—they could be expected to live to age 71-73.

Moreover, infant mortality will affect both the mean—which is what most people think of as an average—and the median, the number at which half the population will be above and half below. The median still provides the opportunity for half the population to live well beyond the average.

Of course, the framers were no more expert on these subjects than Toobin is. But James Madison lived to age 85. Ben Franklin lived to age 84. Paul Revere made it to age 83, while John Adams lived until age 90. Thomas Jefferson, while technically not a framer of the Constitution, lived to 83. The first Supreme Court chief justice, John Jay, lived to 83. They likely noticed that their contemporaries were not all keeling over in their 50s.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Poll: Voters Oppose Abolishing ICE By Mairead McArdle

Posted By on July 11th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/poll-voters-oppose-abolishing-ice/

Most voters oppose abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to a new Politico/Morning Consult poll, after some congressional Democrats called for scrapping or reimagining it.

Over half, 54 percent, believe the government should keep the border enforcement agency, while only 1 in 4 voters think it should be abolished.

The remaining 21 percent of voters were undecided.

ICE has become more controversial lately as the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy for illegal border crossers resulted in as many as 3,000 minors being separated from their parents as the adults were prosecuted.

Protests against the agency have erupted across the nation, with demonstrators adopting slogans like “No person is illegal” and “Crush ICE.”

Several high-profile Democrats have added their voices to the chorus calling for the agency’s elimination.

Potential 2020 presidential candidates Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Kamala Harris have called for ICE to be scrapped or replaced.

Socialist upstart Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who last month beat out veteran Representative Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary for his New York City district House seat, has called the “draconian” ICE to be abolished.

POLITICS Comments turned off

ELECTIONS ARE COMING: ELIZABETH HENG FOR CONGRESS CALIFORNIA DISTRICT 16

Posted By on July 11th, 2018

A Fresh-Faced Political Outsider Tries to Turn Her Blue California District Red By Alexandra DeSanctis

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/elizabeth-heng-campaign-brings-conservative-values-to-california-race/

In the central San Joaquin Valley, 32-year-old Stanford grad Elizabeth Heng is standing up for conservative values against an entrenched Democratic incumbent.

Over the last several months, a host of Republican congressmen have announced that they won’t seek reelection this cycle, leaving their House seats open and vulnerable to Democratic pickup.

While polling data remain far from uniform on the chances of a “blue wave” sweeping Democrats into Washington in November, Republican politicians are right to be concerned. But in California’s 16th district, a young Republican woman is rising to the challenge, opposing Democratic congressman Jim Costa, who has held the seat since 2013 (and represented a somewhat different district for the previous four terms before redistricting).

The 16th district is located in California’s central San Joaquin Valley. It includes the western half of Fresno as well as the cities of Los Banos, Madera, and Merced, and it hasn’t been represented by a Republican in Congress since the mid 1970s, before redistricting gave it its current shape.

But 32-year-old Elizabeth Heng hopes to change that.

Heng’s parents immigrated to the United States to escape violence in Cambodia. About a decade ago, after she graduated from Stanford University, where she had served as student-body president, she returned to the Central Valley and opened a series of cell-phone stores with her brothers. Eventually, she found herself responsible for managing about 75 employees. “That was when I saw firsthand how government regulations impacted businesses negatively,” she says. “I constantly felt that from Washington, D.C., and Sacramento, they were saying that I was everything wrong with our country, when all I was doing was creating jobs.”

She subsequently decided to leave California to work in Washington, D.C., not expecting to stay long. “But it takes a long time to understand how to get legislation across the finish line,” she explains. Before she knew it, she had been in the nation’s capital for about six years, on and off. At one point, she worked on the House Foreign Affairs Committee with congressman Ed Royce (R., Calif.). At another, she aided Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign in Nevada.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Human Cost of Sweden’s Welfare State A group of women berated my friend in a public park because her 2-year-old son wasn’t in day care. By Erica Komisar

Posted By on July 11th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-human-cost-of-swedens-welfare-state-1531346908

American liberals sometimes hold up Sweden as a model of social order, equality of the sexes, and respect for parental responsibilities. Its welfare state offers excellent free or subsidized prenatal care, 480 days of paid leave for both natural and adoptive parents, and additional leave for moms who work in physically strenuous jobs. Swedish parents have the option to reduce their normal hours (and pay) up to 25% until a child turns 8.

But all this assistance comes at a steep cost. At 61.85%, Sweden has the highest personal income tax rate in the world. That money pays for the kind of support many American women would welcome, but it comes with pressure on women to return to the workforce on the government’s schedule, not their own. The Swedish government also supports and subsidizes institutionalized day care (they call it preschool), promoting the belief that professional care-givers are better for children than their own mothers.

If a mother decides she wants to stay at home with her child beyond the state-sanctioned maternity leave, she receives no additional allowance. That creates an extreme financial burden on those families, and the pressure is social as well. A 32-year-old friend told me that she was in the park with her 2-year-old son, when she was surrounded by a group of women who berated her for not having the boy in day care.

The Swedish government attempts to provide equal work opportunities for both sexes, which is laudable. But toward that end, it promotes the false idea that mothers are not uniquely important to babies. Women who prefer to stay home with very young children are stigmatized as regressive and antifeminist. The Feminist Initiative, a radical political party, touts day care as a way to “liberate women from their maternal instincts.”

Sweden’s maternity policies may be good for economic growth and egalitarian ideals, but not for the social or emotional health of young children. Ample scientific research shows that institutionalized day care is bad for very young children. The ratio of staff to children is too low, and the environment is confusing, overly stimulating and potentially harmful to a child’s developing brain.

Ninety percent of Swedish children under 5 are in day care. This likely contributes to mental-health problems. In 2012 roughly 20% of Swedish adolescents reported at least five instances of self-harming behavior, and the teen suicide rate hit a 25-year high in 2013. CONTINUE AT SITE

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Trump and the Russia Pipeline He’s right about Berlin’s energy dependence on Vladimir Putin.

Posted By on July 11th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-and-the-russia-pipeline-1531349924

President Trump is so prone to rhetorical excess that he sometimes hurts his own case even when he’s right. A case in point is his shellacking of Germany Wednesday for supporting a new Russian gas pipeline.

“Well, I have to say, I think it’s very sad when Germany makes a massive oil and gas deal with Russia, where you’re supposed to be guarding against Russia, and Germany goes out and pays billions and billions of dollars a year to Russia,” Mr. Trump said during a breakfast with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.

“And the former Chancellor of Germany is the head of the pipeline company that’s supplying the gas. . . . So you tell me, is that appropriate? [B]ecause I think it’s not, and I think it’s a very bad thing for NATO and I don’t think it should have happened. And I think we have to talk to Germany about it.”

While he then went over the top in saying “Germany is totally controlled by Russia,” Mr. Trump’s rant is an accurate summary of Berlin’s role in the Nord Stream 2 project. The pipeline would link Russia and Germany via the Baltic Sea, doubling the capacity of the existing pipeline in that corridor, and bypassing other pipelines through Ukraine and central and eastern Europe.

The Kremlin hopes to increase the dependence of Germany and Western Europe on Russian gas while depriving Ukraine and other inconvenient states of the transit fees Russia must pay to use current pipelines. Moscow could then also shut off the gas at will to states Russia still considers its satellites.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Pruitt Leaves a Proud Legacy at the EPA His political offense wasn’t ethics but his forthright challenge to the myth of renewable energy. By George Melloan

Posted By on July 11th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/pruitt-leaves-a-proud-legacy-at-the-epa-1531347048

Scott Pruitt wasn’t chased out of the EPA because of his ethical lapses but because he was derailing the environmental left’s radical effort to tighten its grip on the U.S. economy. Mr. Pruitt was implementing President Trump’s executive order to scuttle Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which would have forced sharp cutbacks in the use of fossil fuels, at great cost to consumers and with little purpose.

Under President Obama, the EPA’s bureaucrats became the shock troops of a new “green revolution”—quite different from the one that revolutionized agriculture. Mr. Trump chose Mr. Pruitt to lead the counterrevolution. Accordingly, Mr. Pruitt scotched the agency’s encouragement of “sue and settle” litigation that effectively gave outside lobbyists the power to set EPA policies.

Further horror of horrors, the president pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement, ending the longstanding collaboration between the EPA and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Governments throughout the world have already spent hundreds of billions of dollars to meet U.N. goals for reducing emissions of carbon dioxide. Last July, Danish scholar Bjorn Lomborg predicted the cost of implementing the Paris Climate Accord would hit $2 trillion by 2030.

CO2 is a natural component of the air we breathe and without it there would be no life on earth. The U.N.’s alarms about a CO2 “greenhouse” causing global warming are based on dubious computer models. As the Cato Institute’s Pat Michaels and Ryan Maue observed on this page last month, global surface temperature hasn’t risen significantly since 2000.

The stakes are high. Government restrictions on carbon emissions have spawned a large renewable-energy industry specializing in solar panels and windmills. In places where those industries have best thrived, such as Germany and Australia, the result has been unreliable power at sharply higher cost. Germans pay roughly three times what Americans pay for electricity, according to the International Energy Agency.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Did FBI get bamboozled by multiple versions of Trump dossier?By John Solomon

Posted By on July 11th, 2018

http://thehill.com/hilltv/rising/396307-Did-FBI-get-bamboozled-by-multiple-versions-of-Trump-dossier%3F

Like dandelions in an untreated lawn, the now infamous Russian dossier apparently multiplied in numbers — and emissaries delivering it to the FBI — the closer Donald Trump got to the White House.

We know from public testimony that dossier author and former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele shared his findings with the FBI in summer and fall 2016 before he was terminated as a confidential source for inappropriate media contacts.

And we learned that Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) provided a copy to the FBI after the November 2016 election — out of a sense of duty, his office says.

Now, memos the FBI is turning over to Congress show the bureau possessed at least three versions of the dossier and its mostly unverified allegations of collusion.

Each arrived from a different messenger: McCain, Mother Jones reporter David Corn, Fusion GPS founder (and Steele boss) Glenn Simpson.

That revelation is in an email that disgraced FBI counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok wrote to FBI executives around the time BuzzFeed published a version of the dossier on Jan. 10, 2017.

MEDIA Comments turned off

What If Jonathan Chait Has Been a Useful Idiot Since 2013? by Diana West

Posted By on July 11th, 2018

Jonathan Chait has now spun up an East-Germany-style vision of Donald Trump as Putin’s Honecker, a traitor to the USA since 1987.

Titled “What If Trump Has Been a Russian Asset Since 1987?,” the Chait piece does not even rise to the level of “conspiracy theory,” Chait having presented no conspiracy to theorize about. His technique is to raise, magnify and connect doubts. “How do you even think about the small but real chance — 10 percent? 20 percent? — that the president of the United States has been covertly influenced or personally compromised by a hostile foreign power for decades?” he asks. One answer is, you write a few thousand pointless words.

But only about Trump. Chait takes everything back to Trump’s July 1987 visit to Moscow. That’s because in September of that same year Trump took out a series of full-page ads in prominent newspapers noting that “Japan and other nations have been taking advantage of the United States.″ In his open letter to the American people, Trump asked, ″Why are these nations not paying the United States for the human lives and billions of dollars we are losing to protect their interests?”

Classic Trump — or was it really Gorbachev in disguise? As Chait notes, it is the Kremlin’s propensity to seek splits between the US and its allies. He writes: “The safest assumption is that it’s entirely coincidental that Trump launched a national campaign, with himself as spokesman, built around themes that dovetailed closely with Soviet foreign-policy goals shortly after his Moscow stay. Indeed, it seems slightly insane to contemplate the possibility that a secret relationship between Trump and Russia dates back this far. But it can’t be dismissed completely.” (Emphasis added.)

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Trump vs. NATO Sec: We’re Supposed To Protect You While Germany Sends Billions To Russians, “Very Sad” Posted By Ian Schwartz

Posted By on July 11th, 2018

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/07/11/trump_vs_nato_sec_were_suppose

President Trump and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg had a riveting exchange Wednesday morning at a table featuring representatives from both the U.S. and NATO at a meeting in Brussels. Trump came out swinging on the hypocrisy of NATO’s goal to protect countries from Russia while at the same time making energy deals with the nation.

“So we’re supposed to protect you against Russia but they’re paying billions of dollars to Russia and I think that’s very in inappropriate,” Trump said. “And the former Chancellor of Germany is the head of the pipeline company that is supplying the gas. Ultimately, Germany will have almost 70% of their country controlled by Russia with natural gas. So you tell me, is that appropriate? I’ve been complaining about this from the time I got in.”

The U.S. president said Germany is “totally controlled” by Russia through its oil and gas deals with the country, also calling it “very sad.” Trump said NATO is essentially protecting Russia also. He called it a bad deal for NATO and asked if the NATO Secretary General if he thought that was appropriate.
“They’ll say wait a minute we’re supposed to be protecting you from Russia but why are you paying billions of dollars to Russia for energy? Why are countries in NATO, namely Germany having a large percentage of their energy needs paid to Russia and taken care of by Russia?” Trump asked.