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The Conflict That Shaped Our Constitutional Order By Kyle Sammin

Posted By on March 12th, 2018

A new biography explores the long-running rivalry between the Federalist chief justice John Marshall and his Democratic–Republican second cousin, President Thomas Jefferson.

In the American republic’s early days, a seat on the United States Supreme Court was not the coveted plum that it is today. The first three chief justices each served for an average of less than four years, and associate justices were also likely to leave the Court while still in the prime of their working lives. The reason? The Court had limited jurisdiction, heard few cases, and did not pay particularly well. For a talented lawyer, private practice or political office was usually preferable to a judicial backwater convened in an unused committee room in the basement of the Capitol.

In Without Precedent, law professor Joel Richard Paul tells the story of John Marshall, the man who changed all that. Appointed to the court by the last Federalist president in the waning days of his administration, Marshall was seated at a time of his Jeffersonian opponents’ ascendance. He would spend the next 34 years leading a Court that became much closer to a co-equal branch of government than any of the Founders had anticipated. In doing so, Marshall imposed a Federalist vision on often-reluctant Democratic–Republican political branches, cementing his own vision of what the United States should become: one nation, rather than a confederation of disparate sovereignties.

* * *

Paul frames his story as a long-running battle between Marshall and Thomas Jefferson. Both men were Virginians of the founding generation, and both were great-grandsons of William Randolph I, but there the similarities end. While Jefferson grew up rich, surrounded by slaves and powerful family members, Marshall grew up on the frontier, one of 15 children of a father who was a poor farmer, rather than a planter. (Marshall would also come to own slaves, which Paul attempts, without much success, to downplay in comparing him to Jefferson.)

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Report: British Authorities Failed to Address Child-Sex Ring for Fear of Racism Accusations By Jack Crowe

Posted By on March 12th, 2018

An official investigation into the systemic abuse in Telford, U.K. wasn’t launched until roughly a decade after authorities first learned of it, according to the Sunday Mirror.

British authorities failed to meaningfully address an epidemic of child prostitution that claimed as many as 1,000 victims over the past three decades, according to a new report by the Sunday Mirror.

The report reveals that authorities in the town of Telford became aware of the scale of the problem in the 1990s, but failed to prevent the continued drugging, beating, and rape of hundreds of girls, some of whom were as young as eleven, until an official investigation was launched roughly a decade later.

The Sunday Mirror spoke with a dozen victims who named more than 70 abusers collectively. One victim explained that the police tried to prevent her from discovering why her abuser was not jailed because they feared she would share her story with the press. Another victim, just 14 years old, detailed the tactics her abusers employed to compel her cooperation.

“I hated what was happening and my abusers made my skin crawl but I was told that if I said a word to anyone they’d come for my little sisters and tell my mum I was a prostitute,” the second victim said. “I fell pregnant twice and had two abortions. Hours after my second termination, I was taken by one of my abusers to be raped by more men….The worst moment came just after my 16th birthday when I was drugged and gang raped by five men.”

IMMIGRATION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

California’s Reputation for Loony Left Behavior Only Gets Worse By John Fund

Posted By on March 12th, 2018

In Oakland, the mayor warns illegal immigrants of an ICE raid, and a coffee shop refuses service to the police.

Move over, San Francisco. Oakland, the city of 420,000 people just ten miles away on the other side of the Bay Bridge, has shoved you aside for the title of Loony Left Capital of the country.

Hasta Muerte, an Oakland coffee shop whose name means “Toward Death” in Spanish, is refusing to serve police in uniform in order to show concern for the “physical and emotional safety of our customers and ourselves.” All over the country, coffee shops love to serve up coffee and doughnuts to cops knowing that customers appreciate the security their presence represents. But at Hasta Muerte Coffee, an employee-owned co-op, the message to the men and women in blue is: Take a hike.

Local liberals have been remarkably silent over Hasta Muerte’s policy. After all, California laws require businesses to serve the public without regard to race, gender, religion, or sexual orientation. But they are silent about a “suspect” person such as Robert Trevino, a Hispanic sergeant, who was surprised to be refused service last month. Ironically, he happens to be the president of the Latino Police Officers Association of Alameda County.

For their part, Hasta Muerte’s owners are also mum, except for a post on their Instagram account that showed a photo with writing in Spanish that says, “Talk to your neighbors, not the police.” Accompanying the post was an X’d-out police badge.

“We need the support of the actual community to keep this place safe, not police. Especially in an area faced by drug sales and abuse, homelessness, and toxic masculinity as we see here on this block.”

BOOKS, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state by Victor Sharpe Reviewed by Joan Swirsky

Posted By on March 12th, 2018

The word Politicide was first coined by Abba Eban—Israel’s foreign minister in 1967—to describe the attempted murder of the sovereign, independent State of Israel by enemies both within and outside of the fledgling state.

When Victor Sharpe first read the word, he told me how it resonated in “the deepest parts of my heart and soul.”

A passionate student of Jewish history—as well as a prolific writer on contemporary Jewish and geopolitical issues—Sharpe was mobilized into action, believing that his determination to protect and defend Israel and to illuminate the wider public about the tiny state’s chronically imperiled status, demanded that he write a book about…Politicide!

His first Politicide book was published in 2006, with a second book following in 2009, and a third book in 2011. Now he has written his fourth opus: Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state.

In this riveting volume, Sharpe describes in painful detail the annihilating attacks upon the ancient Jewish homeland by the immensely powerful Assyrian, Babylonian, Greek and Roman empires, which, significantly, no longer exist.

He also describes the inexpressible suffering endured by the stateless Jews throughout their 2,000 years of exile in the diaspora, during the Crusades and the Inquisition, and through the cruel expulsion of Jews from various countries including England, Spain and Portugal, the bleak pogroms in Poland and Russia, and to the worst crime in human history, the genocide during the 1940s of six-million Jews in Hitler’s German-occupied Europe.

But to counter this painful history, Sharpe describes in vivid detail the exceptional history of Jewish life from its beginning with Abraham the first Jew—the Holy Convert—who left his idol-making father after discovering the existence of the one-and-only God, thus establishing monotheism for the entire world.

He describes how Abraham and his wife Sarah, along with Isaac and Rebecca and Jacob and Leah and Rachel, became the patriarchs and matriarchs of the Jewish People in the eternal and Covenanted Land of Israel to which God brought them.

And finally, Sharpe tells the story of the miniscule but powerful 14-million Jews who now exist—half of them in the miraculous and flourishing State of Israel—in a world of seven-and-a-half billion people, including over a billion Christians and over a billion Muslims.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Peter Smith : Free Trade at the Bottom of the Garden

Posted By on March 12th, 2018

Pacts such as the TPP find expression in long and complex documents because all parties know the others are predisposed to cheating. And cheat they do. Unlike Donald Trump, those now lambasting his position on tariffs refuse to accept that genuinely free trade is no better than a fairy tale.

When Donald Trump announced the imposition of tariffs on steel and aluminium many conservative commentators – some of whom I suspect have never been within cooee of an economics text – became free-market economists overnight. I heard some bringing Adam Smith into the frame in support of free trade. Now it is true to say that Smith favoured ‘free trade’ but with more nuance than those who casually drop his name.

Like most people who studied economics I read some of Smith’s work but not much of it. The late, great economist Mark Blaug in his book Economic Theory in Retrospect spoofed the notional man who laboured through every word of The Wealth of Nations before revealing his view that there “probably never was any such man.”

That said, it’s a safe bet that Blaug read a lot more of Smith’s magnus opus than most economists of the past and infinitely more than the current breed. He makes the point that Smith supported free trade but also understood that “protectionist measures are justified…in retaliation against foreign tariffs.” There, you see, fair trade. Trump and Smith in furious agreement.

This is my view. Those who spout the free-trade mantra live in fairyland. They simply don’t know what they are talking about. There is no such thing as free trade between independent nations.

Free-trade deals find expression in long and complex documents. They are long and complex because of a litany of carve-outs and also because each side knows that the other is predisposed to cheating. And cheat they do.

Does anyone think that a US vehicle manufacturer setting up shop in Mexico doesn’t get a sweetheart deal from the Mexican government? Does anyone think that China operates in the best traditions of laissez-faire? And where are the purists in arguing for dismantling the plethora of barriers that every country puts around its agricultural sector? Let me repeat for the benefit of so-called free traders: there is no such thing as free trade.

What is the truth about international trade? On the whole, without doubt, it has been enormously beneficial. But, like many beneficial things, it should not be embraced willy-nilly or lauded beyond its potential bounty.

International trade provides scope for all sides to reap gains as specialisation increases the total quantity and quality of the output of goods and services. However, the distribution of these benefits between countries is indeterminate; in the sense that economic theory offers no reliable way of predicting the outcome.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Campus Victim Cult A dialogue about why colleges and universities have become so hostile to freedom of thought Heather Mac Donald, Frank Furedi

Posted By on March 12th, 2018

HEATHER MAC DONALD: The day before I was slated to speak at Claremont McKenna College last April, I got one of those red-flagged “urgent” e-mails from an administrator. She explained that the college had picked up word of a brewing protest, and was considering moving the event to a building with fewer plate-glass windows and better means of egress. This was not exactly reassuring.

After hearing no additional news about a potential disruption, the administration decided to keep the event in the original building, the Athenaeum. But by the time I arrived, a massive mob of protesters had gathered, so a police escort brought me into the building through a secret passageway.

The auditorium was almost completely empty. Some 300 students had blockaded the building, making mincemeat of the police barricades that had been set up to keep the entrances open. The police simply stood down, as is too often true in our Black Lives Matter era. They didn’t want to offend the students, and they certainly didn’t want to be caught on video using force.

But what was most disconcerting was the fact that the few people who were in the room were transfixed by what was happening outside. Students were shouting and pounding on the plate-glass windows. The lectern had been moved, before the speech, away from the windows, so that when the lights went on inside, I would not be visible to the mob outside.

I took two questions via livestreaming, and at that point the police decided that they could no longer guarantee my safety. They quickly devised an escape plan: I was hustled through the kitchen and into a waiting police van, and sped away to the Claremont Police Department.

The incident was not the high point of open-mindedness in academic history.

FRANK FUREDI: We have to remember that the type of horrible experience that Heather had is just the tip of the iceberg. Fortunately, aggressive mobs of students are still relatively rare, but for every mob scene, there are lots of incidents of censorship and intimidation going on in college classrooms, seminars, and cafeterias.

These incidents represent a much larger problem. One set of radical political views dominates our campuses, and students who deviate from those views are being forced to self-censor. Americans tend to think that this trend is the legacy of the 1960s radicalism that played out in this country. Yet the same phenomenon is occurring across the entire Anglosphere. Similar attitudes have emerged on campuses in Canada, Australia, and my home country of England—none of which had quite the same experience with cultural leftism in the 1960s.

In my latest book, Populism and the Culture Wars in Europe, I argue that these struggles on campuses have little or nothing to do with 1960s radicalism. Today’s radicals have certainly adopted some of the rhetoric of old-fashioned leftism, but they’ve reformulated it into a therapeutic identity politics that would be unrecognizable to the antiracists of the 1960s.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

From the Baltics to the Middle East: Russia’s rising threat By Claudia Rosett

Posted By on March 12th, 2018

It’s less than six years since President Obama mocked presidential contender Mitt Romney for warning about the resurgent threat from Russia. In one of the most memorable lines of the 2012 election, Obama scoffed that “the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because, you know, the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.”

Today, there’s plenty of evidence that the Cold War was already on its way back, with a vengeance. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin seized every opening presented by Obama’s policies of “reset,” “flexibility,” appeasement and retreat. During Obama’s second term, Russia made its military reentry via Syria into the conflicts of the Middle East, shored up its ties to Iran, and began reconfiguring the borders of Eastern Europe and the rules of the post-Soviet world order by snatching Crimea from Ukraine. In Washington, American politics has been embroiled since the 2016 election in investigations and bitter quarrels involving allegations of Russian dirty tricks.

By now, the upshot is a global landscape of rising frictions and growing risks of military confrontation between Russia and the United States. For years, Putin’s strategy has been to test the limits of American tolerance — buttressing his projects with a massive military modernization and buildup, while daring the U.S. superpower to stop him. Obama failed this challenge, bequeathing to President Trump the job of redrawing those vanished red lines, and restoring a credible U.S. strategy of deterrence.

That has become far more difficult and dangerous than it might have been a decade ago. As the director of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency testified to Congress just last week, “Although Russia repeatedly emphasizes that is it not interested in a new Cold War with the United States, it has also made clear that it will no longer reconcile with the West through concessions or a policy of appeasement.”

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World Soccer Organization FIFA Turns Its Back on Iranian Women by Ruthie Blum

Posted By on March 12th, 2018

Gianni Infantino is the second FIFA president to visit the Islamic Republic, but neither of them “pushed for letting women inside the stadiums. Iran is the only country in the World Cup that bans women from their stadiums and any attempt to watch the games means risk of getting arrested.” — OpenStadiums, Iranian women’s organization.

Infantino has both the power and the duty to hold Tehran accountable in this literal and figurative arena. That he exercised neither, preferring instead to appease Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, is outrageous. In spite of his being touted falsely in the West as a “moderate,” Rouhani is a key part of the problem in Iran, not a solution to it.

Infantino deserves a swift penalty kick out of his job.

A week before International Women’s Day on March 8, thirty-five women and girls dressed as men were arrested in Iran while attempting to sneak into a popular annual soccer match. The women, the youngest of whom was 13, were forcibly removed from the premises of the Tehran Derby and “transferred to a proper place.”

The ban on women attending any sports event in Iran, other than all-female matches in which the players are required to wear full Islamic dress, is but one of many issues at the root of the current mass protests across the country against the oppressive and repressive ayatollah-led regime, which came to power nearly four decades ago. Over the years, sports have been used by both male and female anti-regime activists as a symbol of freedom, as it was one of the first areas after Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, which ousted the Shah and ushered in the reign of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, to be considered by the ruling mullahs as a dangerous expression of secularism.

The reason that this year’s Tehran Derby was of particular interest – and not only to sports fans — was the attendance of world soccer’s top official, Gianni Infantino. As Infantino is the president of FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association), his arrival at the match was seen by freedom-seeking Iranians as an opportunity to force their government to lift the ban on women spectators.

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Our Military’s Destructive Equality Imperative By Christopher Roach

Posted By on March 12th, 2018

The Obama years did much to undermine the identity and inherent conservatism of the U.S. armed forces. In addition to budget cuts and indifference about the broader mission, Obama and his deputies spent a lot of energy trying to transform its culture, particularly to relieve the military of its alleged sexism. The message was plain: the military’s primary mission would be facilitating social change. Directives to make the military more diverse, particularly for women, were promulgated from on high and gladly endorsed by an officer corps whose first imperative is career advancement. As in other respected institutions—higher education, police departments, business—when equality becomes an organizing principle, it renders excellence and ability secondary.

The cultural transformation appears to have been pretty successful, because these attempts to push women into the combat arms continue, even though Donald Trump is now president. Sadly, the president, and his well respected Defense Secretary James Mattis, have shown little interest in arresting and reversing the direction of this radical change.

Most dramatically, the United States Marine Corps recently has opened up all jobs, including infantry, armor, and artillery, to women. They have also set a goal of having 25 percent of the recruits be women.

In terms of both ability and interest, these goals are misguided. Men and women are quite simply different. Men, particularly young men, are faster, stronger, more aggressive, and more capable of meeting the higher physical standards of the military’s combat arms than women. Before gender integration certain physical standards prevailed. These standards allowed resilience and enhanced ability throughout the entire organization, whose job is physically demanding in spite of the advent of high technology weapons.

In deference to the physically demanding reality of combat, most proponents have suggested that standards should not be reduced and that so long as women meet these standards, they should be allowed to try. This is wrong, naïve even, for at least two reasons that recent experiences should make plain.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

No ‘Fun in Playa del Carmen’ these days By Silvio Canto, Jr.

Posted By on March 12th, 2018

Many years ago, Elvis made a movie Fun in Acapulco. As they say, the movie didn’t have much of a plot but Ursula Andress is worth whatever it costs to watch it online.

We can safely said that no one is making a movie about fun in Playa del Carmen these days.

As you probably know, there is a lot of talk about “el muro” — the border wall — down in Mexico. Sadly, the political class should be talking about the chaos in the country and how this is impacting their economy.

This week we read that the U.S. closed a consulate office indefinitely. This is from news reports:

“The State Department abruptly closed the U.S. consulate in the popular tourist destination of Playa del Carmen late Wednesday evening and ordered U.S. government employees to stay out of the area.

They warn other Americans either in the region or thinking of traveling to it about a “real crime threat” from local drug cartels…”