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Why Is It Bad to Threaten Supreme Court Justices? Threatening judges is a challenge not only to judicial independence, but to America’s constitutional order. Charles Lipson

Posted By on March 6th, 2020

https://www.mercatus.org/bridge/commentary/why-it-bad-threaten-supreme-court-justices

The bipartisan shredding of America’s established constitutional norms continues apace. The latest culprit is Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY). Standing on the steps of the Supreme Court, he issued a chilling, direct threat to two sitting justices, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. He deserves broad condemnation. He received it only from Republicans. Save for some prominent lawyers, Democrats remained silent.

Schumer told a cheering crowd, “I want to tell you Gorsuch. I want to tell you Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price!” The crowd was rallying for abortion rights as the Supreme Court heard a case on that issue. The minority leader was there to support them, a perfectly legitimate political act. What’s illegitimate is his call to arms, his over-the-top threats. Schumer concluded by saying the two justices “won’t know what hit them” if they decide the wrong way.

Could a US politician’s behavior get much worse? Actually, it could. Schumer doubled down when he was rebuked. It took him a full day, some tongue-lashing on the Senate floor, and doubtless some phone calls behind the scenes for him to admit he was wrong.

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Primary Results Indicate Republicans Could Flip 6 California Districts

Posted By on March 6th, 2020

https://www.theepochtimes.com/republicans-poised-to-flip-6-california-districts-primary-results-indicate_3261593.html?ref=brief_News&utm_source=Epoch+Times+

Republicans could flip six congressional seats in California in November, based on primary results. Four additional seats are enough to make GOP candidates competitive.

Democrats, on the other hand, don’t seem to have an easy path open to even one seat currently held by a Republican.

California as a whole leans left, with Democrats holding 45 of the 53 congressional districts (two are vacant). The March 3 primary results, however, suggest the GOP may heal its losses from the 2018 midterms, where Democrats flipped seven seats.

The state holds “jungle primaries,” which means both Democrats and Republicans show up on the same ballot, and the two candidates with the most votes face each other in the general election.

Voters who didn’t get their primary pick could still be generally expected to go for the winning candidate of their party. Thus, by adding up the votes for all Democrats and all Republicans on the ballot, one can get a rough idea of how many voters may show up for the candidate of each party in the general election.

In addition, there was only one statewide measure on the ballot this time—one for bonds to fund public school facilities (voted down). That means Democrats may have had a stronger motivation to show up, since they were deciding on their presidential candidate, while the Republican presidential primary was a largely symbolic exercise of confirming President Donald Trump as the nominee of choice. Trump received 92.5 percent of the vote.

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Conan: Political Pilgrim of Our Time Romancing tyranny and terror. Bruce Bawer

Posted By on March 6th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/conan-political-pilgrim-our-time-bruce-bawer/

It all started with Jon Stewart, whose sixteen-year hosting stint on the Daily Show (1999-2015) marked a sea change from the Johnny Carson era, when late-night entertainment was pretty much free of drastic political slant (at least on the part of the hosts). Stewart’s show, sold as a comic take on the news, was in reality a nightly dose of blatant left-wing propaganda – and was, alarmingly, many young people’s main source of news. Taped interviews with conservatives and libertarians were routinely edited to make them look stupid. Alas, Stewart’s show, not Carson’s, became the template for every one of the current late-night talk shows on American broadcast TV.

One talk-show host who likes to think that he’s different from the rest of the herd is Conan O’Brien. In a recent Oxford Union appearance, he faulted other talk shows for being “all about politics” and for constantly attacking Trump, and declared that he, by contrast, tries to do “silly” and “crazy” comedy that won’t date after a day or two. Well, that sounded refreshing, so I decided to catch up on Conan’s work, which I hadn’t checked out in years. From the Oxford Union gig – which demonstrated that, twenty-seven years into his career as a talk-show host, Conan is still big with young people – I learned that in addition to his nightly TBS show and tons of show clips on YouTube, he has a podcast, plus Conan without Borders, a Netflix series (originally aired in prime time on TBS) on which he travels to various countries around the world.

Admittedly, Conan’s YouTube channel proved to contain some genuinely amusing bits – for example, take-offs on Northern Ireland’s first same-sex marriage and on the Scandinavian “hygge” craze. But the political bias is unmistakable. In a monologue posted on February 28, Conan mocked the fact that Mike Pence had been put in charge of combating the Coronavirus. When Conan does spoof Democrats, it’s for innocuous stuff, such as the presidential candidates talking on top of one another at the February 25 Charleston debate. A recent bit about Bernie Sanders zinged him not for his radical policy positions (au contraire) but because he’s a “grumpy old white guy.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Schumer, the Supreme Court, and the Mob By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on March 6th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/schumer-the-supreme-court-and-the-mob/The senator treats the Court like a political body — which it is.

Should Chuck Schumer be censured? Of course he should, in the sense that the rule of law, were it actually our cynosure, would cry out for it.

On Wednesday morning, the Democrats’ Senate minority leader stirred up the mob outside the Supreme Court, unabashedly threatening Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh: “I want to tell you, Gorsuch. I want to tell you, Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price,” Schumer inveighed. “You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”

Inside, the justices were then hearing argument on what ought to be a straightforward abortion case (i.e., one in which the “right” invented in Roe v. Wade is not up for consideration). When called on his menacing remarks, rather than apologize, Schumer brazenly lied about what he had done. This morning, he was still lying — a tepid apology, offered under pressure while insisting that “in no way was I making a threat.”

In a rule-of-law society, that should rate censure. Case closed.

Except it’s not closed, because we are not a rule-of-law society. We just pretend to be. In a rule-of-law society, a mob would not gather on the steps of the courthouse in the first place.

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Trump Admin. Reverses Obama-Era Regulation Blocking Coronavirus Testing Liz Shield

Posted By on March 6th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/05/morning-greatness-trump-admin-reverses-obama-era-regulation-blocking-coronavirus-testing/

The House passed an $8.3B measure for emergency funding to combat coronavirus and now it will go to the Senate. Meanwhile, we have some more cruise ship trouble.

Two shiploads of passengers may have been exposed. State and federal officials are scurrying to contact 2,500-plus passengers who disembarked Feb. 21 from the San Francisco-Mexico cruise at the same time as the man who died, Gov. Gavin Newsom said Wednesday.

California is also keeping Grand Princess passengers on the current San Francisco-Hawaii trip in the Pacific Ocean indefinitely until state and federal officials can assess how many passengers and crew have coronavirus or have been exposed.

Twenty-one people on the Grand Princess are showing signs of possible infection.

The Trump Administration has rolled back an Obama FDA rule that required “state-run laboratories to only run medical tests pre-approved by the F.D.A.”

“The Obama administration made a decision on testing that turned out to be very detrimental to what we’re doing, and we undid that decision a few days ago so that the testing can take place at a much more accurate and rapid fashion,” Trump stated. “That was a decision we disagreed with. I don’t think we would have made it, but for some reason it was made. But we’ve undone that decision.”

Keep calm, wash your hands and don’t panic. People are freaking out that they can’t get tested for the virus, but does it matter if you aren’t showing life threatening symptoms in this time of crisis? If you go to the ER, and you aren’t sick you will be when you leave because that is where the sick people are. If you do have the virus but aren’t dangerously sick, they are going to send you home to self-quarantine, you won’t be admitted because hospitals are saving space for really sick people like the elderly and immuno-compromised.

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Without Consequences or Penalties, FISA Should Expire Julie Kelly

Posted By on March 6th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/05/without-consequences-or-penalties-fisa-should-expire/

Most Americans no longer have faith in the government and political apparatus that fortifies the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Republican lawmakers shouldn’t either.

Two years ago, a controversial memo first alerted the public to the politicized use of a secret court to spy on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. At the time, most Americans—myself included—knew next to nothing about the clandestine workings of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

Most Americans trusted that the law enforcement, intelligence, and judicial “experts” involved in the process took the utmost care with their duties and sought a diligent application of the law to protect cherished constitutional rights while keeping us safe.

After all, most Americans had defended these surveillance tools as necessary weapons in the war on terror after the attacks on September 11, 2001. The notion that such a powerful, intrusive means of collecting information from suspected foreign terrorists instead would be weaponized against a volunteer for the wrong political campaign—a private U.S. citizen—was so far fetched that it would have bordered on tinfoil hat conspiracy nonsense conceived by the deepest corners of the far Left or Right had anyone said it out loud.

That’s why, when then-House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) issued his February 2018 memo detailing how Barack Obama’s Justice Department presented unproven political opposition research—the “Steele dossier”—as evidence to the FISA court in order to spy on Trump campaign aide Carter Page, many detractors accused Nunes of acting as a “deep state” conspiracy theorist. (The FBI, by the way, objected to the memo’s release.)

Journalists and pundits on the Left howled that Nunes was promoting a Fox News-manufactured conspiracy theory lacking veracity. “Instead of evidence, the memo engages in the same dark and misleading conspiracy theories that have characterized other efforts by President Trump’s allies to discredit the Russia investigation,” wrote New York Times columnist David Leonhardt in January 2018.

Nunes’s intelligence committee counterpart, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), prepared his own memo to denounce the majority’s work, an official congressional document filled with distortions and outright lies. Schiff, too, accused his colleague of peddling right-wing quackery.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Europe Must Not Fall Victim to Erdoğan’s Blackmail by Burak Bekdil

Posted By on March 6th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15682/europe-erdogan-blackmail

Turkey would apparently like to see more progress in the talks to grant it admission as a full member of the European Union…. Erdoğan would most certainly like the West overlook his massive democratic deficit, and to help Turkey secure even more dominance over the Greek islands off its coast, as well as its claims on the gas fields beneath the eastern Mediterranean.

Erdoğan needed to find a non-Russian adversary to attack, to distract Turkish anger away from him and toward a different chosen target. What better target than the EU, with which most Turks have a love-hate relationship? Opening Turkey’s border gates and flooding Europe with migrants would be sure to please the average Turk….

Europe, unfortunately, to protect its liberty and sovereignty, needs to fight back. It must refuse to accept Erdoğan’s hostages…. If the first groups in this mini-exodus from Turkey face a serious blockade rather than warm and welcoming locals, potential migrants would be discouraged from taking such a perilous trip. What Greece alone could achieve, without help from the EU, would be limited….

Turkey’s Islamist strongman, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has threatened Europe several times with “sending millions of refugees your way.” Turkey would apparently like to see more progress in the talks to grant it admission as a full member of the European Union. At the moment, these membership negotiations have stalled. He may also wish for Western support — from the EU, the United States and all of NATO — for his ideal architecture to install Turkey in northwest Syria.

As Turkish servicemen were recently killed in Syria, with direct Russian military involvement, it is probably safe to assume that the support Erdoğan is seeking, both directly and indirectly, is “support for a NATO ally against Russian aggression”. In addition, Erdoğan would also most certainly like the West overlook his massive democratic deficit, and to help Turkey secure even more dominance over the Greek islands off its coast, as well as its claims on the gas fields beneath the eastern Mediterranean.

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Some people take tranquilizers for anxiety, but not Bill Clinton By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on March 6th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/03/some_people_take_tranquilizers_for_anxiety_but_not_bill_clinton.html

In an upcoming Hulu production about Hillary, Bill Clinton reveals the reason he used the Oval Office for unseemly conduct with Monica Lewinsky.

Many of us vividly remember 1998, when Bill Clinton shook his finger at Americans while earnestly declaiming, “I didn’t have sexual relations with that woman” (commonly remembered as, “I did not have sex with that woman”). That statement was a lie. Although stopping short of actual sexual intercourse, Bill Clinton had all sorts of sexual relations with the much-younger Monica Lewinsky. It was inexcusably sordid and, worse, Clinton used the Oval Office for these escapades.

Twenty-two years later, Bill is finally explaining what drove him to defile the Oval Office in this way, and his explanation is a doozy: He was stressed.

Bill Clinton claims that his affair with Monica Lewinsky was one of the ‘things I did to manage my anxieties’. 

The former President suggests, in an explosive documentary seen by DailyMailTV,  that he had the fling with the ex-White House intern while he was in office because it helped with his own issues.

Bill reveals that at the time he met Lewinsky the pressure of the job made him feel like a boxer who had done 30 rounds and he looked at Lewinsky as ‘something that will take your mind off it for a while’.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Fighting the Muslim Re-Conquest of Europe on the Greece-Turkey Border By Jared Peterson

Posted By on March 6th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/03/fighting_the_muslim_reconquest_of_europe_on_the_greeceturkey_border.html

As Americans remain riveted to the corona virus and the nauseating vicissitudes of the Democrats’ battle to choose a presidential nominee — a choice now apparently winnowed down to the Marxist or the moron — this writer’s thoughts once again are drawn to events in Europe. The critical situation now unfolding day by day on the Greek-Turkish border may at first seem of minor concern to America, but in fact it’s a critical part of the overall struggle by patriots on both sides of the Atlantic to preserve Western Civilization.

The same forces working here to dissolve American civilization through mass migration and deliberately inculcated cultural self-loathing are busy in Europe pursuing the same goal by identical means. And the same traditional, patriotic segment of the population, guilty of the crime of loving their civilization and wanting to preserve it, resists cultural dissolution in both Europe and America. The commonality of the struggle is striking.

European patriots, however, face worse odds. Their governments are more ruthless in condemning patriotism and love of country (who knew those feelings made one a Nazi?), and Europeans’ history of submission to authority, and consequent ingrained passivity, make them less inclined to risk social condemnation to save themselves.

Consider the events unfolding on Europe’s eastern border with Islam:  

Over the last week to ten days, the Islamist 21st century Sultan on the Bosporus, Recep Erdogan, has abrogated Turkey’s 2016 Agreement with the European Union, under which the Turks committed to preventing a repetition of the 2015 mass migration of Muslim migrants into Western Europe. During the 2015 fiasco, welcomed by German Chancellor Merkel, at least one million “refugees” (read “economic migrants”) from the Middle East and elsewhere streamed into Germany (hence, into all of Europe), following a route that crossed Turkey, the Greek-Turkish border, the Balkans and Austria. By today, the number in of Muslim newcomers in Germany has metastasized, through “family reunification” and continuing migration, to at least two million, with all the vast increases in criminality and sexual assaults, widespread overt loathing of European culture and traditions, and massive social welfare costs, all of which any even casual student of Islamic history would have predicted.

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It’s All in the Stars By David Solway

Posted By on March 6th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/03/its_all_in_the_stars.html
There is no material evidence to substantiate the case against Harvey Weinstein

As I have previously argued at some length, moral ignominy does not fall within the purview of legal jurisprudence, and personal allegations do not constitute evidentiary certitude. Because a man is a scoundrel with predatory inclinations does not mean we have license to clap him in irons. It means we avoid him like the plague. It means we do not succumb to his blandishments. It means we refuse to accept the gifts and advantages he offers in exchange for our surrender to his wiles and demands. It means, as the theological lore has it, that we do not sell our souls to the devil — or, in Harvey Weinstein’s case, our bodies as well.

It also means that in a court of blind justice deriving from Magna Carta and established over a long evolution, predicated on the concept of “beyond a reasonable doubt” and grounded on factual evidence, Weinstein could not have been found guilty. What we have is a narrative of the acts and machinations of an obviously despicable person; hearsay, revelation, memory, tearful indignation and sundry testimonials do not constitute tangible and objective evidence. Criminal guilt cannot be established on the basis of the statements of the plaintiffs.

In addition, when one reckons that those who claim to have been assaulted or raped by Weinstein did not go to the police immediately after their ordeal when forensic evidence was fresh and may still have been gathered, and that many of these plaintiffs continued to seek out Weinstein’s company with letters of affection and adulation years after the events in question, the issue begins to grow clouded.

As The Washington Free Beacon reports in considerable detail, these prodigies of adoration were legion and, for that matter, were not confined only to women. Men also liked to flaunt their brotherly admiration for their great friend and benefactor. They too have conveniently joined the chorus of denunciation against their former patron and promoter, or have tactfully remained silent.

But in a culture obsessed with sex and the myth of female guilelessness, it is the women who are regarded as oracles. Their charges resonate in the courtroom, yet these consist of circumstantial depositions that are seriously compromised. Moreover, multiple attestations and what is called similar fact evidence  (or “criminal propensity” arguments) provided by corroborative witnesses who are not part of the actual criminal case are, at best, only differentially admissible and do not rise to the level of “beyond a reasonable doubt.”  Indeed, “similar fact” (sometimes known as “similar act”) remains controversial and is highly problematic. Spencer v. Texas (1967) established that such evidence “would violate the Due Process Clause.”