NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump’s in the Right in CFPB Tiff The law gives him the authority to appoint an acting director. By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on November 29th, 2017

Some legal questions are tough. The question of who should lawfully be considered the acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is not one of them. President Trump unquestionably has the power to name Mick Mulvaney (his Senate-confirmed budget director) to the position, and he has done so. The lawsuit seeking to block this appointment, filed by the CFPB’s deputy director Leandra English — who hopes to take the job herself — is frivolous and offensive.

The CFPB is an unconstitutional monstrosity that ought to be abolished. Indeed, the current tiff is but a symptom of the underlying disease: The political progressives who created the CFPB sought to make it an “independent” agency, beyond political accountability and inter-branch checks and balances. It would be a boon if the dust-up over the acting leadership of the agency would spur a case that could invalidate the entire enterprise.

That is unlikely, though, so let’s stick to the narrow, easy question before us.

The CFPB, brainchild of former Harvard law professor (now senator) Elizabeth Warren, was rammed through by the Democrat-dominated Congress in 2010. Under the statute creating the CFPB (section 5491 of Title 12, U.S. Code), the director is appointed by the president with the advice and consent of the Senate, and the deputy is appointed by the director.

There was partisan infighting over leadership of the agency. Finally, in January 2012, President Obama unconstitutionally installed Cordray as a “recess appointment” despite the fact that the Senate was not actually in recess. Cordray was nevertheless confirmed in 2013, and he failed to fill the deputy position after it became vacant in August 2015. The acting deputy was David Silberman. Leandra English was Cordray’s chief of staff. On his last day in office, Cordray abruptly appointed English as deputy.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Carr: OK, Fake Indian, time to either give up the claim or prove it

Posted By on November 29th, 2017

How much longer do we have to pretend that Elizabeth Warren is anything but a Fake Indian?

It happened again yesterday — President Trump referred to the senior senator from Massachusetts as “Pocahontas,” and the alt-left media went into paroxysms of fake outrage, as if it’s somehow “racism” to call out a fraud like the Fake Indian.

Isn’t the left supposed to despise “cultural appropriation?” What greater cultural appropriation could there be than for Elizabeth Warren to have falsely claimed an ethnic heritage in order to win not one, but two tenured Ivy League law professorships she had absolutely no shot of ever getting until she checked the box?

All of the alt-left pajama boys and trust-funders who were hyperventilating about this yesterday, let me ask you a question:

How come Pocahontas won’t take a DNA test so that we can find out, once and for all, how much Indian blood she really has, if any? Why has she refused my multiple generous offers to pay for her DNA test?

We know she has no card from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, because if she had one, we would have damn well seen it five years ago, when the questions were first raised.

Here’s some other stuff we know:

The New England Historic Genealogical Society can find zero — repeat, zero — evidence of any Native American “ancestors.” We do know that one of her forebears was in the Tennessee militia that forced the Cherokee west toward Oklahoma, and that another ancestor shot a drunken Native American off a horse in the Indian Territory at the turn of the 20th century.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

A Post ISIS Middle East Without A Strategy By Herbert London

Posted By on November 29th, 2017

The much discussed “Shiite Crescent” or an Iranian land corridor from Tehran to the Mediterranean may be a reality. To make matters even more complicated, U.S. policy or the lack thereof may have contributed to Iran’s regional hegemony.

After President Trump assumed office, he indicated a primary policy of defeating ISIS. Uniting U.S. Special Forces with Iraqi troops and Qud Revolutionary soldiers, the caliphate was destroyed including the stronghold in Raqqa and its last foothold in Syria’s Dair Ezzor province. The problem in the aftermath of these battles is that a plan for the future has not been forthcoming. In fact, the Iranian role in the defeat of ISIS elevated its stature and influence.

If the U.S. is serious about countering Iranian aggression, steps must be taken across this regional battle space. Should the Trump administration do nothing – a likely response – the Iranian Revolutionary Forces will assert political and economic dominance over the entire northern tier of the Middle East.

The last remaining obstacle to the realization of Iranian goals is a coalition of Syrian Kurds and Arabs known as the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). Kept apart at present by a U.S. Russian confliction channel, both sides are securing critical territory. The question that remains about Trump’s Syria policy is whether it was designed to defeat the Islamic state or whether it is informed by the larger strategic view of Iran’s regional dominance. If the latter, President Trump must decide how and when he will deploy American troops as a counterweight to the Iranian surge. United States air power and Special Forces remain at the center of a capable combat force. Using these assets effectively Washington can assure SDF partners that it will remain in Syria even after Islamic State is defeated.

Finally, the U.S. and allies in Europe and the Gulf hold tens of billions of dollars in international assistance that Syria will need to recover from the Civil War. The U.S. also contends Assad must go and the basic rights of minorities, especially the Kurds, must be guaranteed. In order for these aims to be achieved the Iranian and Shia proxies in Syria must be displaced.

Surely this will not be easy since it involves new risks and costs. But doing nothing is costly as well. President Trump should articulate a strategy that boldly announces the U.S. opposition to the Shia Crescent with a ground game that consciously works to block Iranian hegemony in Iraq and Syria. To do less is to invite a war between Israel and Hezbollah – a proxy of Iran – and to cede vast control of strategic positions to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Sexual Power Dynamics: Examining the Missing Part of the Story To resolve the wave of sexual-assault allegations, it will be necessary to have a discussion that is capable of raising inconvenient, even unpleasant, facets of this whole business. By Douglas Murray

Posted By on November 28th, 2017

My essay last week on the worrying elision of the criminal and the minimal in the current wave of sexual-assault allegations seems to have stirred some colleagues. So at the risk of being accused of never taking “no” for an answer, let me jump straight back on in. For as Jonah Goldberg mentioned in his recent column, this whole realm is in flux, and debate is going to be needed if this panic is going to be resolved in a sensible manner.

In a column yesterday, Christina Hoff Sommers brilliantly dissected as well as lampooned some recent heights of the present frenzy, such as Farhad Manjoo at the New York Times who recently asked: “I seriously, sincerely wonder how all women don’t regard all men as monsters to be constantly feared.”

To which Sommers rightly responded by asking: “Does Manjoo include himself? Are his female colleagues at the Times suddenly in constant fear of him?”

Of course not. Manjoo is simply engaging in male posturing of the most prostrate and supplicant variety. If we are going to get beyond such posturing, it will also be necessary to have a discussion that is capable of raising inconvenient, even unpleasant, facets of this whole business.

To that end, there is still one aspect of all this that seems cordoned off. That is the whole issue of “power”: Who has it, who gives it, and who wields it. Given that it is almost impossible for a man to write about a woman’s experience in this area without being flayed alive, let me relay the story of somebody I once met some years ago.

The man was an acquaintance of a friend, was fairly attractive, and as such had decided to become an actor. Since acting is not, alas, an art in which talent will always out, a degree of networking is usually necessary for someone to succeed. Though heterosexual himself, this young man had come within the circle of an actor who was known to be gay. And since acting, like sport, is one of the few areas left where being gay is still thought to be a vast career drawback, the celebrated actor had kept the whole gay thing an open-ish secret.

Anyhow — the straight, aspiring actor mentioned in passing that he had been out on a couple of dates with this actor, though added that things had ended cooly. The cause was that a couple of dates in, the aspirant actor guessed that it might be time to drop into the conversation the fact that he happened to have a girlfriend. I recall that he explained the need to make this admission with a certain regret, for relations with the gay actor had, understandably, wound down after that. The older actor had not been back in touch, and the younger actor seemed slightly resentful that he had spoilt what could have been an ongoing bit of career-furthering by not continuing to play along with the whole gay-date thing.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump’s Fate Plenty of people in ‘flyover’ country like not only Trump’s message — and actions — but also Trump, the loudmouth messenger. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on November 28th, 2017

The political verdict seems out on Trump’s current political future.

His supporters have won four special congressional elections. Yet, more recently, Republicans lost more local and state offices. Pundits argue about the degree to which these surrogate campaigns are referenda on Trump’s future.

Trump still polls between 39 percent and 42 percent approval, occasionally higher in supposed outlier surveys. Yet most concede that such polls did not in the past, and do not in the present, fully account for the “Trump Embarrassment Factor.” That is the strange phenomenon of a sizable minority of Trump voters — including Democrats and independents — proving reluctant to express support even to anonymous pollsters. Ask independent or moderate Republican voters whether they really voted for Trump: If they hesitate for more than three seconds before they answer, they probably did.

Registering dissatisfaction with Trump, the person, is also not the same as stating a preference for Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, or Kamala Harris in a two-way presidential poll. Trump may be off the ballot in 2018, but in 2020 he will be opposed one-on-one by a real, progressive candidate.

Trump’s fate in the 2018 midterms — aside from the fact that first-term presidents always seem to lose congressional seats after about two years of exposure — and his reelection in 2020 supposedly hinge on whether Trump’s popular message trumps the unpopular messenger (more on that below).

If the economy grows at over 3 percent or even more from the last quarter of 2017 to November 2018, if unemployment dips below 4 percent, if the stock market holds at its record levels, if business, consumer, and corporate confidence keeps soaring, if illegal immigration continues to plummet, if construction and manufacturing stay on the upswing, if Trump’s national-security team brings a new deterrence to foreign policy without a war with North Korea or Iran, and if energy production reaches ever-record levels, then voters will put up with a lot of Trump’s downsides.

And that “lot” supposedly can include mercurial firings, continuous tweeting that results about every three weeks in a detour spat with some obnoxious nonentity, some ungracious comment about a rival, or an indiscretion that is perceived to be another embarrassing straw on Trump’s sagging camel’s back.

Or Trump’s message may overshadow the hemorrhaging from Robert Mueller’s leaky “collusion” charges. (The Javert investigation unfortunately will end only when the police are policed and Congress learns exactly what Mueller was or was not doing during his tenure in the Obama administration when the Clintons, with assumed exemption, finessed special-favor deals with foreign interests, including and especially Russian uranium concerns, and exactly what the complex relationships were between the self-righteous James Comey, the FBI and intelligence communities, the FISA courts, the unmasking and leaking of classified intercepts of private-citizen communications, and the Steele smear dossier.)

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Denzel Washington speaks out: Don’t ‘blame the system’ for black incarceration, ‘it starts at home’

Posted By on November 28th, 2017

Legendary actor Denzel Washington says a recent movie role hasn’t changed his views on America’s criminal justice system and that black incarceration finds its roots in fatherless homes.

Washington, who plays a young, ambitious lawyer in the new movie “Roman J. Israel, Esq,” told reporters at the film’s premiere that his role didn’t make him more cynical about the criminal justice system but reinforced what he already believed.

“It starts at the home. It starts at home. It starts with how you raise your children. If a young man doesn’t have a father figure, he’ll go find a father figure,” Washington said, according to the New York Daily News.

“So you know, I can’t blame the system. It’s unfortunate that we make such easy work for them,” the Academy Award-winning actor added.

Washington explained that he has personal experience growing up around fatherless homes in the black community.

“I grew up with guys who did decades [in prison] and it had as much to do with their fathers not being in their lives as it did to do with any system,” he said in an earlier interview with Reuters.

“By the time we got to 13, 14, different things happened,” Washington explained. “Now I was doing just as much as they were, but they went further … I just didn’t get caught, but they kept going down that road and then they were in the hands of the system. But it’s about the formative years. You’re not born a criminal.”
Is Washington’s position widely accepted in the black community?

No. Just as the movie’s director, Dan Gilroy, told Reuters, many people in the black community believe there still exists a disparity in American society between black and white people.

“Our prison system needs reform at a fundamental level. We have the highest incarceration rate of any place in the Western world. … It’s not racially equal, it’s not socio-economically equal,” Gilroy said.

While there have been reforms in American history, some argue that Jim Crow still exists in the form of a mass incarceration prison system.

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Robert Mueller, Agent of Willful Ignorance It was Mueller who made sure that the U.S. government would ignore and deny the motivating ideology behind the jihad threat. Robert Spencer

Posted By on November 28th, 2017

It has come to light that as director of the FBI, Robert Mueller, who is currently the special counsel looking for any dirt he can find on Donald Trump, presided over the 2012 removal of all counterterror training materials of any mention of Islam and jihad in connection with terrorism. Since then, our law enforcement and intelligence officials have been blundering along in self-imposed darkness about the motivating ideology behind the jihad threat. This, it turns out, was Mueller’s doing.

In February 2012, the Obama Administration purged more than one thousand documents and presentations from counter-terror training material for the FBI and other agencies. This material was discarded at the demand of Muslim groups, which had deemed it inaccurate or offensive to Muslims.

This purge was several years in the making, and I was – inadvertently – the one who touched it off. In August 2010, when I gave a talk on Islam and jihad to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force — one of many such talks I gave to government agencies and military groups in those years. While some had counseled me to keep these talks quiet so as to avoid attracting the ire of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the possibility of that pressure seemed to me to make it all the more important to announce my appearances publicly, so as to show that the U.S. government was not going to take dictation from a group linked to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Those who had urged silence were proven correct, however, for the Obama administration was indeed disposed to take dictation from CAIR. CAIR sent a series of letters to Mueller and others demanding that I be dropped as a counter-terror trainer; the organization even started a “coalition” echoing this demand, and Jesse Jackson and other Leftist luminaries joined it.

At the FBI, Mueller made no public comment on CAIR’s demand, and so it initially appeared that CAIR’s effort had failed. But I was never again invited to provide counter-terror training for any government agency, after having done so fairly regularly for the previous five years. CAIR’s campaign to keep me from taking part in counter-terror training was, of course, not personal. They targeted me simply because I told the truth, just as they would target anyone else who dared do so.

Although Mueller was publicly silent, now we know that he was not unresponsive. And the Islamic supremacists and their Leftist allies didn’t give up. In the summer and fall of 2011, the online tech journal Wired published several “exposés” by far-Left journalist Spencer Ackerman, who took the FBI to task for training material that spoke forthrightly and truthfully about the nature and magnitude of the jihad threat.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Trump Brings Foreign Policy Back to Earth The goal now is less to make dreams come true than to keep nightmares at bay. By Walter Russell Mead

Posted By on November 28th, 2017

Forget the tweets, the gaffes and the undiplomatic asides. The most trenchant criticism of President Trump’s foreign policy is that it risks forfeiting America’s hard-won position of global leadership.

It’s a compelling indictment: Mr. Trump is withdrawing from the Paris Accord, “restructuring” the State Department with a chain saw, dumping the Pacific trade deal, and abdicating on human rights while cozying up to authoritarians. The whole of the damage being done to America’s standing is greater than the sum of his tweets.

On the other hand, those hardy souls who defend the administration argue Mr. Trump is so smart that his critics can’t fathom the method to his apparent madness. The naysayers, as this theory has it, are playing checkers, while Mr. Trump is winning at chess.

The truth, as always, is more complicated. Mr. Trump is not the second coming of Bismarck, and his temperament, education and experience have not prepared him to steer American foreign policy at a difficult time. But there is a pattern if not a method to his moves. Moreover, Mr. Trump’s mix of ideas, instincts and impulses is not as ill-suited to the country’s needs as his most fervid detractors believe.

What gives Mr. Trump his opening is something many foreign-policy experts have yet to grasp: that America’s post-Cold War national strategy has run out of gas. During the period of confidence and giddy optimism that followed the Soviet Union’s fall, the list of “important” American foreign-policy goals expanded dramatically.

Promoting democracy in the Middle East; protecting the rights of religious and sexual minorities; building successful states from Niger to Ukraine; advancing global gender equality; fighting climate change: This is only a partial list of objectives recent administrations pursued, sometimes under pressure from congressional mandates. Foreign policy has become as complex and unwieldy as the tax code, even as public support for this vast, misshapen edifice has withered.

Change had to come, and the failure of Mr. Trump’s 2016 rivals—both Republican and Democratic—to offer a less disruptive alternative to gassy globalism helped put him in the White House. Although the president’s antiglobalist and mercantilist instincts blind him to some realities, they enable him to grasp three significant truths.

First, Mr. Trump knows that the post-Cold War policies can no longer be politically sustained. Second, he knows that China poses a new and dangerous challenge to American interests. Third, he sees that foreign policy must change in response. The old approach—on everything from trade and development, to military deployments and readiness, to religious freedom and women’s issues—must be reassessed in the light of today’s dangerous world.

For years foreign-policy thinking was dominated by the idea that the end of the Cold War meant the “end of history”—the inevitable triumph of the so-called liberal world order. This belief shaped a generation of intellectuals and practitioners.

But history isn’t over, and American foreign policy needs to come back to earth. The U.S. isn’t putting the finishing touches on a peaceful global system that is fated to endure for the ages. For the foreseeable future, foreign policy is going to be less about making dreams come true and more about keeping nightmares at bay. CONTINUE AT SITE

FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Laundering Iran’s Nukes – Again by A.J. Caschetta

Posted By on November 28th, 2017

While President Obama was busy concocting the fiction that “moderates” in the Iranian regime were worthy of our trust, he knew full well that he was offering concessions to co-conspirators in the 9/11 attacks. The Obama administration had evidence that Iran facilitated Al-Qaeda in numerous ways, but Congress and the American people were in the dark.

Obama gets to boast about his deal, but the people of the U.S. got almost nothing. Everyone knows that Iran will spend the money in ways contrary to American interests. Even John Kerry acknowledged that much of it would go towards supporting Iran’s terrorist proxies. Furthermore,

The result is an emboldened Iran, with the “right to enrich” uranium.

Days away from the inauguration of U.S. President Donald Trump, outgoing Secretary of State John Kerry boasted about the success of the Obama administration’s signature foreign policy achievement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), on putatively “preventing” Iran’s nuclear capability. “In reaching and implementing this deal,” Kerry said, “we took a major security threat off the table without firing a single shot.”

On the contrary, anyone who examines the JCPOA closely and honestly will come to the conclusion that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the mullahs got just about everything they wanted, while the U.S. got a dubious promise of good behavior that expires after 10 years.

Anyone who closely and honestly examines the JCPOA “nuclear deal” with Iran will conclude that the Islamic Republic got just about everything they wanted, while the U.S. got a dubious promise of good behavior that expires after 10 years. Pictured: Then Secretary of State John Kerry meets with Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif in Geneva on January 14, 2015 for negotiations. (Image source: U.S. Mission Geneva/Flickr)

It has long been known that what Michael Doran called “Obama’s Secret Iran Strategy” required the administration to exaggerate the “spirit of reform” in Iran and to keep details about the agreement secret from both Congress and the American public. Recently, however, two seemingly unrelated events demonstrated just how duplicitous the Obama administration was with the American public over its dealings with the Islamic Republic.

The first event occurred on October 31, at the “World Without Terrorism” convention held in Iran. At a press conference, Mohammad Ali Jafari, Commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), reminded the world that Iran’s ballistic missiles, though limited to a range of 2,000 km, are still sufficient to target U.S. bases in the region, saying:

“Even though we have the capability to increase this range, in the meantime this range is enough for us, because the Americans are sufficiently situated within a 2,000 km radius around Iran. We will respond to them if they attack us.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Erdogan’s Interesting New Top Mayors by Burak Bekdil

Posted By on November 28th, 2017

Istanbul’s new mayor had been one of the lawyers defending Islamist arsonists in what is known as the “Sivas case”.

They set the hotel alight, while policemen allegedly stood by and watched as 37 people were killed. The city’s Islamist mayor refused to send firefighters to put out the blaze. The assault took eight hours, without any intervention from the police, military or fire department.

Ankara, Turkey’s capital, has a population of about five million. Istanbul, the country’s biggest city and commercial capital, has more than 15 million inhabitants. Turkey’s top two cities have since 1994 been uninterruptedly run by elected mayors who feature various blends of religious conservatism, nationalism and Islamism. Recently, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan thought it was time for a changing of the guard in both cities; but the change looks more like old wine in a new bottle.

Melih Gokcek, the eccentric nationalist and Islamist mayor of Ankara, a loyal devotee of Erdogan, has run the capital for 23 years. During his reign, he did not miss a single opportunity to get into verbal fights with half the Turkish nation in addition to “Turkey’s foreign enemies.” In 2014, during Israel’s Operation Protective Edge, when large crowds of Turks regularly attacked Israel’s diplomatic missions in Ankara and Istanbul — with hundreds of angry Turks throwing rocks and trying to break into the diplomatic compounds — Gokcek was quoted as saying: “We will conquer the despicable murderers’ consulate”.

In a television debate in 2015, Gokcek claimed that if he gets killed, Israel’s Mossad should be held responsible. In August 2016, he claimed that the United States had subcontracted Israel to perform seismic tests to cause earthquakes in and around Turkey. In October 2016, he once again claimed that the earthquakes in Turkey were the work of the U.S. and Israel — conspiracies plotted against Turkey by foreign powers.

In February 2017 Gokcek claimed that the mild earthquake off Canakkale province on Turkey’s northern Aegean coast was the work of foreign powers who wanted to topple Erdogan’s government. He called on the Turkish Armed Forces to take measures on the Aegean Sea. “At the moment,” he said, “The planned conspiracy against Turkey is to cause economic collapse by means of an earthquake in Istanbul”. Recently, in September, Gokcek, in his Twitter account, called on Muslim believers to pray that disasters worse “than the Irma and Harvey hurricanes” take place.

All that usual “more royalist than the royals” behavior did not help him keep his seat. Erdogan pressed for the resignation of a number of mayors in his party, including the mayors of Ankara and Istanbul, and Gokcek grudgingly had to step down. Who ideally should replace the man loved by religious fanatics but hated by liberals and seculars?