RUTHFULLY YOURS

Senator Mike Lee has just introduced a bill to defund President Obama’s federal takeover of local government via the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) regulation. Lee’s bill is called the “Local Zoning Decisions Protection Act” (it’s too new to have a number). In addition to defunding AFFH, Lee’s bill defunds Obama’s creepy and controlling housing “Assessment Tool,” which could be used as a basis for “disparate impact” suits against your locality. Lee’s bill has a number of co-sponsors, most notably including presidential candidate Marco Rubio. Other co-sponsors are Tom Cotton, Mike Enzi, Jeff Sessions, and David Vitter.

Rubio joining Lee on this bill is, to my knowledge, the first time a presidential candidate has weighed in on AFFH. We’re still waiting for Hillary to declare her position on a battle whose epicenter is now her home town. (Hillary’s Scooby Van was last seen headed as far away from the controversy as possible.)

A new GAO report on last year’s surge of “unaccompanied” “minors” from Central America listed some of the reasons that U.S. government officials had identified for the flow. Among them:

Honduran youth and coordinators of community centers who were interviewed as part of a USAID focus group indicated they believed the United States would allow migrant minors, mothers traveling with minors, and pregnant women to stay for a period of time upon arrival in the United States.

As if to confirm the portion I emphasized above in bold, a federal judge ruled recently that the handful of “mothers traveling with minors” who weren’t released immediately after turning themselves in – i.e., those few held in family detention centers pending the resolution of their cases – must be let go. The judge said the accommodations weren’t up to snuff.

Last week, the New York Times ignited a firestorm when it reported that 2016 Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton was under criminal investigation for sending classified information over the private e-mail server she used as secretary of state. That turned out not to be true. The inspector general (IG) for the intelligence community had indeed referred the case to the FBI and other investigators, but as a “security referral” rather than a “criminal referral.” The candidate, it seemed, could breathe a sigh of relief. According to Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus, Hillary’s e-mail “isn’t . . . even close” to being a criminal matter.

Did Hillary break the law? Maybe, but it’s too soon to say.

The federal statute on mishandling classified information makes it a crime to “knowingly remove[] [classified] documents or materials without authority and with the intent to retain such documents or materials at an unauthorized location.”

Levin concedes that the odds are against him. But Plunder and Deceit, his arresting new book, takes its shot. It is a clarion call to young people: “an appeal to reason and audacity”; an appeal that they “find the personal strength and will to break through the cycle of statist propaganda and manipulation, unrelenting emotional overtures, and the pressure of groupthink” that has atrophied their generation’s capacity to oppose a rapacious government that leaves too many of them broke, unsafe, and ignorant of who and what most threatens them.

In the interest of full disclosure, Mark is a longtime friend of mine. We are both conservative lawyers with fond remembrances of time served in the government, in particular, the Justice Department. Does that make me biased in his favor? Sure it does. But it also gives me an unusual familiarity with his work, which is copious: Though a renowned talk-radio host, Mark is the author of several bestselling books that are as serious and scholarly as they are accessible and popular.

At Connecticut College, the outrage machine claims another victim.

Academics like to think of themselves as autonomous thinkers, and academia—meaning literally the protected realm of free speech—gives professors not only the right to speak their minds but also, via the institution of tenure, protection against losing their livelihoods by displeasing those more powerful than themselves. The fact that civil polities treasure safe spaces for free speech attests to their progressive bona fides. Especially in our times, when new social networks can turn ominously feral, one would hope that academics and their institutions, especially small, face-to-face college communities, could return that investment and resist anonymous, predatory, crowd behavior.

Yet mob rule is precisely what happened this past semester at Connecticut College in New London, Connecticut, along the Thames River. Over the course of the past spring semester, philosophy professor Andrew Pessin was driven from campus based on a malevolent reading of a Facebook post in which he depicted “the situation” in Gaza as one in which the Israelis had confined a “rabid pit bull” to a cage, while animal rights activists protested for the poor beast’s release. Although Pessin didn’t specify in the text, he and a commenter did make clear that this metaphor referred to Hamas terrorists, not to the population generally. But in an attack spearheaded by a Muslim student who in high school had begun a chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, and a Muslim professor, recently appointed head of the new Global Islamic Studies Program, a small group of activists, given the run of the school paper by its editors, accused Pessin of comparing all Palestinians to rabid dogs and calling for them to be “put down.” Pessin, they claimed, “directly condoned the extermination of a people. A member of our community has called for the systematic abuse, killing, and hate of another people.” The editor who arranged for the publication of all three letters did not ask Pessin for a response in the same issue. Shock and horror spread through the community, triggering among many traumatic memories of verbal, racial, dehumanizing abuse, and arousing heretofore silenced “marginal voices.” A great cry went up against racists and hate-speakers of all kinds.

Take ‘refugee advocates’ at their word and it is all so very simple: Australia must admit and support indefinitely all who turn up. As to the cost of those opened borders, not a word. When it comes to actions and consequences, preachy prattle is where their case starts and stops
Do-gooders congregated in the inner cities feel that Australia must house large, unstated, numbers of the world’s dispossessed. Where do they think these refugees will live? Well certainly not in their backyards. One hundred refugees dumped in each of their streets might be salutary.

Competing with the inner-city do-gooders in the bleeding-heart stakes are many conservative commentators. Desperate to establish their empathetic credentials, they use the avoidance of deaths at sea as their moral rationale for stopping boats. It is disingenuous. It won’t do.

Sarah Hanson-Young was exactly right some years ago when she said ‘accidents happen’ after a refugee boat foundered and sank. If refugees are willing to risk their lives on rickety boats, that is up to them.

It is up to them! Clearly, they think the risks are worthwhile.

The rationale for stopping boats has nothing at all to with protecting refugees from their own folly. It is to uphold our national right to control our borders. “We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come,” John Howard rightly said. He didn’t add, “in case they drown”. He placed Australia’s interests ahead of refugees; as he should. Putting Australia first appears to be remote from the thinking of the Labor-Greens left.

http://jamieglazov.com/2015/07/31/choudary-spencer-and-jasser-battle-it-out-on-jihad-in-chattanooga-on-the-glazov-gang/

This special episode of The Glazov Gang was joined by Anjem Choudary, a London Imam, Robert Spencer, the Director of JihadWatch.org, and Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, the Founder and President of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy.

The three guests came on the show to discuss “Jihad in Chattanooga.”

Don’t miss the fireworks:

While President Obama builds a government that does more and more to pry into the lives of ordinary citizens, he does more and more to keep his own government bullies free from scrutiny.

Last week, he went as far as any president since Watergate to make sure that government corruption could go unscrutinized and unchecked.

In a stunningly brazen act of defiance against the very notion that government should be answerable to the public, Obama’s Justice Department issued an order severely limiting the investigative powers of inspectors general — the very officers who are the first line of defense against government corruption and waste.

This is the latest, and the most dangerous, in a long line of Obama attacks against the independence and authority of IGs.

The administration’s war against IGs began in particularly nasty form just four months after Obama took office.First, let’s understand what IGs are and do. The Congressional Research Service last December defined IGs “as permanent, nonpartisan, and independent offices,” tasked by Congress, on behalf of the American people, with fighting “waste, fraud, and abuse … in more than 70 federal agencies.” As Justice Department IG Michael Horowitz told the Washington Times, the law gives IGs the authority to “access ‘all’ documents necessary to conduct effective oversight.”

The principle is similar: faced with an enemy that repeatedly declares its genocidal hatred, acts on it wherever possible, constantly strives to improve its ways and means, you peace process. Why was it successful with Iran and not with the “Palestinians”? Perhaps because the comical P5 + 1 applied the pressure to itself in the case of Iran, leaving no one to resist. The same pressure applied to Israel since 1993 has failed to produce total surrender. Drastic concessions were proposed but the enemy insisted on the right of return of “refugees” down to the third, fourth, and forever generations that would spell the elimination of the Jewish state. There were no significant limits to the concessions made by the P5+1 and no expectation that the deal will yield anything other than itself. The deal is that there’s a deal.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2015/08/richard_baehr_and_caroline_glick_on_the_iran_deal.html#ixzz3hYr4Etr5

AT co-founder Richard Baehr was on Chicago radio legend Milt Rosenberg’s program this week for close to two hours, with Jerusalem Post columnist Caroline Glick, to discuss the Iran deal, the two state solution, and of course Barack Obama.

Here is the link.http://hark.io/podcast/focusing-on-israel-and-the-middle-east-with-caroline-glick-and-richard-baehr/