One woman earned several offers after handing her resumé out on the street http://t.co/a7lDMawpNz pic.twitter.com/1D9qX0MyS5
— People magazine (@people) August 23, 2015
Joe Biden games out presidential run with circle of advisers http://t.co/8c6ivflXmd Hillary's on the rocks. Vultures circling. #OhHillNo
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) August 23, 2015Historical context is a great asset. But is history always an accurate guide? Does past performance always give us the best predictor of future outcomes?Keep reading.
This election season provides a fascinating frame to see if the polarization in politics, from Washington to the states to the public, is no different than what we have seen in the past; if the angry populism evident especially on the right but also to some degree on the left, is no different from the populism that has emerged following every economic setback; if the surge for an insurgent, non-establishment candidate that has always petered out well before the primary process is over will follow the same arc; if the Republican Party will once again flirt with outside-the-box candidates before settling on an establishment figure; if the fact that every major-party convention since 1952 has been over before a ballot is cast will hold true again. Or, perhaps, if this time might be different.
Almost all the commentary from the political-pundit class has insisted that history will repeat itself. That the Trump phenomenon is just like the Herman Cain phenomenon four years ago, or many others before it; that early enthusiasm for a candidate, like the early surge of support for Rudy Giuliani in 2008, is no predictor of long-term success; and that the usual winnowing-out process for candidates will be repeated this time, if on a slightly different timetable, given 17 GOP candidates.
Of course, they may be entirely right. Or not entirely; after all, the stories and commentaries over the past two months saying Trump has peaked, Trumpmania is over, this horrific comment or that is the death knell for Trump, have been embarrassingly wrong. But Trump’s staying power notwithstanding, there are strong reasons to respect history and resist the urge to believe that everything is different now.
Still, I am more skeptical of the usual historical skepticism than I have been in a long time. A part of my skepticism flows from my decades inside the belly of the congressional beast. I have seen the Republican Party go from being a center-right party, with a solid minority of true centrists, to a right-right party, with a dwindling share of center-rightists, to a right-radical party, with no centrists in the House and a handful in the Senate. There is a party center that two decades ago would have been considered the bedrock right, and a new right that is off the old charts. And I have seen a GOP Congress in which the establishment, itself very conservative, has lost the battle to co-opt the Tea Party radicals, and itself has been largely co-opted or, at minimum, cowed by them.
As the congressional party has transformed, so has the activist component of the party outside Washington. In state legislatures, state party apparatuses, and state party platforms, there are regular statements or positions that make the most extreme lawmakers in Washington seem mild.
Egged on by talk radio, cable news, right-wing blogs, and social media, the activist voters who make up the primary and caucus electorates have become angrier and angrier, not just at the Kenyan Socialist president but also at their own leaders. Promised that Obamacare would be repealed, the government would be radically reduced, immigration would be halted, and illegals punished, they see themselves as euchred and scorned by politicians of all stripes, especially on their own side of the aisle.
Of course, this phenomenon is not new in 2015. It was there in 1964, building over decades in which insurgent conservative forces led by Robert Taft were repeatedly thwarted by moderates like Tom Dewey and Wendell Wilkie, until they prevailed behind the banner of Barry Goldwater. It was present in 1976, when insurgent conservative Ronald Reagan almost knocked off Gerald Ford before prevailing in 1980 (and then governing more as a pragmatist than an ideologue). It built to 1994, when Newt Gingrich led a huge class of insurgents to victory in mid-term elections, but then they had to accept pragmatist-establishment leader Bob Dole as their presidential candidate in 1996. And while John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012 were establishment figures, each had to veer sharply to the radical right side to win nominations; McCain, facing a possible revolt at his nominating convention if he went with his first choice for running mate, Joe Lieberman, instead bowed to the new right and picked Sarah Palin.
So is anything really different this time? I think so...
It's getting bitter out there. My criticism of tRump has resulted in losing around two dozen followers on Twitter this week alone. And now even this staunch post-Garland follower has had it, unfollowing me. But as I've put it, losing followers over someone like tRump is a gain.
If you're not losing followers on Twitter, you're not tweeting anything worth tweeting.
— Bosch Fawstin (@BoschFawstin) August 22, 2015
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As historians begin to assess Barack Obama’s record as president, there’s at least one legacy he’ll leave that will indeed be historic—but not in the way he would have hoped. Even as Democrats look favorably ahead to the presidential landscape of 2016, the strength in the Electoral College belies huge losses across much of the country. In fact, no president in modern times has presided over so disastrous a stretch for his party, at almost every level of politics.Heh, the party of old white people. Well, James Clyburn's black, but he's old and decrepit, definitely not the image of a young vigorous political titan. A bunch of hacks and losers, that's what they are. The Depends Gang.
Legacies are often tough to measure. If you want to see just how tricky they can be, consider the campaign to get Andrew Jackson off the $20 bill 178 years after he left the White House. Working class hero? How about slave owner and champion of Native American genocide? Or watch how JFK went from beloved martyr to the man whose imperial overreach entrapped us in Vietnam, and then back to the president whose prudence kept the Cuban Missile Crisis from turning into World War III.
Yet when you move from policy to politics, the task is a lot simpler—just measure the clout of the president’s party when he took office and when he left it. By that measure, Obama’s six years have been terrible.
Under Obama, the party started strong. “When Obama was elected in 2008, Democrats were at a high water mark,” says David Axelrod, who served as one of Obama’s top strategists. “Driven by antipathy to George W. Bush and then the Obama wave, Democrats had enjoyed two banner elections in ’06 and ’08. We won dozens of improbable congressional elections in states and districts that normally would tack Republican, and that effect trickled down to other offices. You add to that the fact that we would take office in the midst of the worst recession since the Great Depression, and it was apparent, from Day One, that we had nowhere to go but down.”
The first signs of the slowly unfolding debacle that has meant the decimation of the Democratic Party nationally began early—with the special election of Scott Brown to Ted Kennedy’s empty Senate seat in Massachusetts. That early loss, even though the seat was won back eventually by Elizabeth Warren, presaged the 2010 midterms, which saw the loss of 63 House and six Senate seats. It was disaster that came as no surprise to the White House, but also proved a signal of what was to come.
The party’s record over the past six years has made clear that when Barack Obama leaves office in January 2017 the Democratic Party will have ceded vast sections of the country to Republicans, and will be left with a weak bench of high-level elected officials. It is, in fact, so bleak a record that even if the Democrats hold the White House and retake the Senate in 2016, the party’s wounds will remain deep and enduring, threatening the enactment of anything like a “progressive” agenda across much of the nation and eliminating nearly a decade’s worth of rising stars who might help strengthen the party in elections ahead.
When Obama came into the White House, it seemed like the Democrats had turned a corner generationally; at just 47, he was one of the youngest men to be elected as president. But the party has struggled to build a new generation of leaders around him. Eight years later, when he leaves office in 2017 at 55, he’ll actually be one of the party’s only leaders not eligible for Social Security. Even as the party has recently captured more young voters at the ballot box in presidential elections, its leaders are increasingly of an entirely different generation; most of the party’s leaders will fade from the national scene in the years ahead. Its two leading presidential candidates, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are 67 and 73. The sitting vice president, Joe Biden, is 72. The Democratic House leader, Nancy Pelosi, is 75; House Whip Steny Hoyer is 76 and caucus Chair James Clyburn is 75, as is Harry Reid, the Senate Democratic leader, who will retire next year. It’s a party that will be turning to a new generation of leaders in the coming years—and yet, there are precious few looking around the nation’s state houses, U.S. House or Senate seats...
You can see why Obama and Kerry wanted to wrap up negotiations with Iran as quickly as possible to avoid giving Congress enough time to consider all this information. Every day the Iran deal looks worse and worse.Keep reading.
Remember Obama talking up sanctions snapback? Remember the time he promised that you could keep your doctor? The two have a lot in common, except that, as far as we know, the administration didn't write a whole bunch of letters to foreign governments telling them they were lying about ObamaCare.
But the country's number one traitor did just that on sanctions snapback.
Sens. Mark Kirk (R., Ill.) and Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) disclosed in the letter to the State Department that U.S. lawmakers have been shown copies of several letters sent by the Obama administration to the Chinese, German, French, and British governments assuring them that companies doing business with Iran will not come under penalty.
The Obama administration is purportedly promising the foreign governments that if Iran violates the parameters of a recently inked nuclear accord, European companies will not be penalized, according to the secret letters.
Congress became aware of these promises during closed-door briefings with the Obama administration and through documents filed by the administration under a law requiring full disclosure of all information pertaining to the accord.
“We therefore request the Administration to publicly release these letters, which are not classified, so that the full extent of the Administration’s non-public assurances to European and Chinese governments can be discussed openly by Congress and analyzed by impartial outside experts,” they write...
G.Y.: One of your newest books is entitled “Black Prophetic Fire.” Define what you mean by “black prophetic fire.”Today's younger generation's being hoodwinked by New Left communists.
C.W.: Black prophetic fire is the hypersensitivity to the suffering of others that generates a righteous indignation that results in the willingness to live and die for freedom.
I think in many ways we have to begin with the younger generation, the generation of Ferguson, Baltimore, Staten Island and Oakland. There is not just a rekindling, but a re-invigoration taking place among the younger generation that enacts and enables prophetic fire. We’ve been in an ice age. If you go from the 1960s and 1970s — that’s my generation. But there was also an ice age called the neoliberal epoch, an ice age where it was no longer a beautiful thing to be on fire. It was a beautiful thing to have money. It was a beautiful thing to have status. It was a beautiful thing to have public reputation without a whole lot of commitment to social justice, whereas the younger generation is now catching the fire of the generation of the 1960s and 1970s.
Earlier this month, when writers at Vice Media were emailing about the potential benefits of unionizing, one employee brought up company co-founder Shane Smith’s purchase of a $23 million mansion in Santa Monica, Calif., a house featured in “Beverly Hills Cop” and the HBO show “Entourage.”I suspect unionization's a really bad idea. But then, most of these outlets are on the far-left. We'll see.
“For next time [management] says they can’t afford to give us raises,” the employee wrote, posting a link to an article about the real-estate deal.
Two days later, on Aug. 7, the writers voted to join the Writers Guild of America, East.
The move at Vice is part of a broader unionization push in the digital media world. This summer, the WGA and another union, News Guild-CWA, have also signed up writers at Gawker Media and Salon.com, and say they’re actively trying to make inroads elsewhere.
As online media outlets grow in heft—generating significant revenue and earning eye-popping valuations in investment rounds—their workers are beginning to argue they deserve better compensation and employment protections. Vice, whose edgy brand of online content and TV has caught on with young audiences, is a new-media powerhouse that was valued at $2.5 billion in its last investment round.
But the labor organizing movement is happening at what is arguably the most inopportune moment for the industry, just as it is attracting attention from strategic investors who can inject a huge amount of capital into their fledgling businesses. Big media companies are scouting the space aggressively as they chase young audiences, and while unions won’t necessarily be a hang-up in deals, they won’t be a selling point.
Skeptics say collective bargaining may not make sense for these companies, and could counter some of the advantages they have over traditional newsrooms, such as nimble decision-making, flexible work roles, and, in some cases, a lower wage scale.
“It raises questions about the extent to which a union contract might encumber a company from being able to make rapid decisions,” said Iliya Rybchin, the director of the media and entertainment practice at venture capital firm Highnote Foundry, which isn’t an investor in any of the unionized companies. “With unions you also often have strong delineations about roles, and in young companies you usually want a lot of fluidity.”
Management at all of the new-media companies that have voted to unionize have recognized and accepted the decisions of their workers.
One investor who has been on the board of several digital media companies—none that have unionized—said the collective bargaining movement is a bad idea. “For a fast-changing, dynamic, tech-led industry the last thing you want are barriers to growth,” he said, adding that unions have “been a weight” on traditional newsrooms...
"Trump is a walking, talking wake-up call for the GOP and media elite” http://t.co/VlKYMgliSZ pic.twitter.com/dbBubFMPmq
— TIME.com (@TIME) August 21, 2015The Donald has landed back on the cover of TIME magazine http://t.co/c5vCgYGE6G pic.twitter.com/d6BDweSsaD
— Zap2it (@Zap2it) August 20, 2015In an appearance on a Russian-owned news channel in 2014, the Labour leadership contender Jeremy Corbyn compared the actions of US forces during the Iraq war to those of Islamic State militants.
U.S. law enforcement officials are investigating how classified material found its way into messages that members of Hillary Clinton’s State Department staff sent to her private e-mail address, according to a U.S. official with knowledge of the inquiry.Still more.
The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an investigation still in its early stages, said there is some indication that Clinton aides drew upon a variety of messages in classified information systems to produce summaries and updates of events in Libya and elsewhere and then sent them to Clinton or her aides using a private server.
The official didn’t identify the aides.
This transfer of classified information onto a server not approved to handle sensitive material is a focus of the investigation and could form the basis for a criminal probe to determine just how much classified material was sent - and who prepared and sent it.
A spokesman for the State Department didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Anybody who knowingly e-mailed classified material to Clinton or her top aides when she was secretary of state could face criminal prosecution, according to current and former U.S. national security officials. Clinton, the leading Democratic presidential candidate, isn’t the target of the investigation.
“There’s a responsibility to safeguard classified information,” Michael Hayden, former director of the National Security Agency and CIA, said in a phone interview. Failing to protect such data “could get to a level of negligence that criminal penalties would kick in.”
Inspector General
The probe comes after the inspector general for U.S. intelligence agencies determined that four e-mails on Clinton’s server contained classified information at the time they were sent. The State Department and intelligence agencies now are trying to determine if other material in the e-mails was classified when sent, and whether the data should be classified at all.
Clinton and her aides have said material in her e-mails wasn’t marked as being classified at the time it was sent and received through her server. Law enforcement officials, however, are examining e-mails that contained material known to be classified when sent.
Clinton used a private e-mail system in her home in Chappaqua, New York, while she was secretary of state from 2009 until February 2013. E-mails sent and received by her and top aides that used the system were stored on a server. The Federal Bureau of Investigation took possession of the server on Aug. 12 as part of its investigation.
30,490 E-Mails
Clinton said she turned over paper copies of 30,490 e-mails relating to government business from her tenure. Government screeners have flagged 305 of those documents for further review by U.S. intelligence agencies to see if they contained classified material.
There are several scenarios in which known classified material could have been improperly transferred, according to Hayden and an intelligence official who asked to remain anonymous to speak about a current investigation.
The most egregious way would be to knowingly strip classification markings from documents or other data, a move that would clearly be a criminal act.
Another, and possibly more probable, scenario is that those sending e-mails blended data from multiple sources that ultimately included or referenced some classified content.
“What you’re probably talking about is someone typing a message based on multiple sources in their head,” Hayden said.
ATHENS—Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras resigned in a bid to trigger snap elections and return to power stronger, plunging his country into weeks of political paralysis just as it seemed to have scraped through a summer of fraught bailout talks and near-bankruptcy.More.
Mr. Tsipras’s gambit, announced in a short televised address late on Thursday, is expected to lead to his re-election in September, thanks to his popularity and the absence of strong challengers. But whether elections bolster his grip on Parliament, as he hopes, hinges on his ability to persuade Greeks that the €86 billion ($96 billion) bailout he negotiated with Europe is the only path out of the country’s long crisis.
Greece’s head of state, President Prokopis Pavlopoulos, was expected to accept Mr. Tsipras’s proposal to hold the vote on Sept. 20.
The election will effectively be a referendum on the 41-year-old Mr. Tsipras and his bailout agreement with the rest of the eurozone.
The deal commits Greece to further years of stringent economic retrenchment, including tax increases and cuts to pension entitlements. Greeks elected Mr. Tsipras and his left-wing Syriza party only in January this year to put an end to five years of unpopular austerity measures, which the country’s creditors demanded in exchange for bailout loans.
Mr. Tsipras’s acceptance in July of creditors’ policy demands followed months of diplomatic confrontation. The standoff ultimately led to Greece defaulting on its debts to the International Monetary Fund and imposing capital controls, further battering Greece’s depressed economy.
The premier’s U-turn has split Syriza. Dozens of his lawmakers have withheld support for legislation needed to clinch the bailout package. Mr. Tsipras has had to rely on the votes of opposition parties, but they have warned they won’t prop him up for long...
Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Thursday that he would consider removing the pedestrian plazas from Times Square in a bid to restore order in the crowded streets of the Manhattan crossroads.More.
The move, which the mayor described as one of several options to be considered by a task force of New York City officials, would undo a signature accomplishment of Mr. de Blasio’s predecessor, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, whose decision to close part of Times Square to vehicular traffic has been hailed as an influential innovation in urban design.
The plazas, which replaced portions of Broadway and Seventh Avenue, are popular with tourists, theatergoers and Midtown office workers.
But conditions in Times Square have recently come under scrutiny, with some New Yorkers complaining about the proliferation of street performers — including, most notably, topless women wearing body paint — who are said to be accosting pedestrians for tips for posing for photographs.
Mr. de Blasio has been keen to demonstrate that he is addressing the concerns, and on Thursday he announced a task force to consider ideas on how to better prevent activities that the city deems illegal or harmful to the area’s quality of life.
But the mayor, at a news conference in Queens, surprised many urban planners when he said he would give “a fresh look” to whether the pedestrian plazas should remain...
A Cruella de Ville moment for Queen Helena #TheRoyals @TheRoyalsOnE @LionsgateTV pic.twitter.com/zlsRkQc7Nn
— Elizabeth Hurley (@ElizabethHurley) August 19, 2015Unleash the #= http://t.co/5j8YvaFaNv
— Michelle Malkin (@michellemalkin) August 20, 2015Watch how hard @JillFilipovic ignores, and thereby sanctions, the left’s horrific harassment of conservative women daily. #FeministFraud
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) August 20, 2015#FeministFrauds tolerate harassment of conservative women because they think conservative women are asking for it.
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) August 20, 2015#FeministFrauds act like victims because that’s how they empower themselves. It’s easier than real effort.
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) August 20, 2015If what @JillFilipovic is retweeting right now is what she considers “harassment,” she’s more delicate than I thought.
— Ashe Schow (@AsheSchow) August 20, 2015Seriously, people need to buck up. Words are not violence. Name-calling is childish but not life-threatening.
Move on!
— Ashe Schow (@AsheSchow) August 20, 2015Up to 600 people arrive each night on the Greek island of Kos, fleeing wars, oppression and hunger. When they arrive, they are often made to sleep outside with not sanitation facilities available. Greek authorities seem uninterested in improving the situation.Keep reading.
Along the beach promenade on the island of Kos, a small settlement of tents has sprung up. Colorful clothing flaps in the breeze, hanging from a palm tree after having been washed in the sea. In the shade beneath the tree sits a 14-person family from the war-torn Syrian city of Aleppo. Children, the 65-year-old grandmother, the pregnant aunt: They're all there.
The women don't want to give their names or be photographed. But they do have something they want to share. "Will you just look at that!" says the grandmother, pointing to the broad, black overcoat that covers her body. It is covered in light-colored dust -- the product of having to spend the night outside, sleeping on a patch of dried-out grass.
The family's home back in Aleppo was destroyed just a few days ago after fighting in their neighborhood flared up again. Now, they are camped under a palm tree on a Greek vacation island with nothing to eat or drink. There is no toilet nearby, much less bathing facilities.
The grandmother once again points accusingly at the spot on her overcoat. Up until 10 hours ago, before her first night under the stars on the island of Kos, she was a proud woman. After leaving Aleppo with her children and grandchildren, she found hotel rooms in Turkey for the family and paid traffickers for the trip across the small strip of the Aegean Sea that separates Turkey's west coast from Greece's easternmost islands. Once they arrived, the family did what they could to find a hotel room on Kos, but nobody wanted to rent a room to them.
Suddenly, on the Greek island, the 65-year-old matron is someone who is unwelcome in the homes of respectable people, someone who the police drive out of the city center at night, someone who is beginning to smell due to a lack of facilities to wash. Someone whose clothes are dirty. "Are we really in Europe here?" she asks. She had expected respect and human dignity.
Like other Greek islands near the Turkish coastline, Kos has for months been experiencing a huge number of new arrivals. Around 600 people land on the shores of the island every day, says the Greek coast guard, in addition to those arriving on Chios, Samos, Lesbos and other nearby islands. The European Union's border agency, Frontex, announced last week that nearly 50,000 migrants arrived in Greece in July. That would be an enormous challenge for any country. But one gets the impression that Greece isn't even trying...
PARIS— Marine Le Pen’s quest to transform the far-right National Front party from a fringe movement into a dominant force in European politics is hitting a fundamental obstacle: her own father.Who knows, maybe the old man will buy the farm?
The clash erupted during a closed-door meeting in early May when Ms. Le Pen attempted to muzzle the 87-year-old Jean-Marie, who had recently outraged the public by repeating his claim that Nazi gas chambers were a mere “detail” of history.
“Either you stop talking in the name of the National Front, or you stop making such statements,” Ms. Le Pen said, according to people in the room.
The response from Mr. Le Pen—the firebrand who had put the National Front on Europe’s political map decades before handing the torch to his daughter—was unequivocal.
“Never,” Mr. Le Pen said.
Months later, Ms. Le Pen finds herself locked in a political and legal battle to oust Mr. Le Pen from the party he helped found. In his defiance, the octogenarian is standing in the way of his daughter’s carefully laid plans to seize power in the heart of Europe.
Ms. Le Pen has tapped a groundswell of anti-European Union sentiment in France to position herself as a front-runner for French president in 2017—a prospect that sends shivers through the European establishment.
Currently a member of the European Parliament, Ms. Le Pen espouses pulling France out of the euro—with rhetoric more extreme than that of the far-left Syriza party in Greece, whose antiausterity platform contributed to the latest euro-membership crisis. She also campaigns to roll back key tenets of the EU, which she blames for the surge in immigration.
Ms. Le Pen’s success at the polls, however, ultimately hinges on whether the National Front can broaden its appeal to mainstream voters by removing the stain of World War II-era recriminations that have long made far-right parties taboo in Europe’s highest offices. That struggle is embodied in Ms. Le Pen’s tug of war with her father, a hero of Europe’s far right.
“She needs the votes of those who today are still uncomfortable with the National Front’s affiliation to right-wing extremist parties,” said Emmanuel Rivière, director at French polling agency TNS Sofres.
Ms. Le Pen has punished her father by suspending his membership in the party and excluding him from a caucus she forged inside the European Parliament with other anti-EU forces. She tried to have the party’s rank-and-file vote on whether Mr. Le Pen should be stripped of his role as National Front’s honorary chairman, but a French court suspended the ballot. Ms. Le Pen released the results of the voided vote, which showed 94% of those voting wanted Mr. Le Pen out of the National Front.
On Thursday, Mr. Le Pen will appear before a National Front disciplinary hearing to decide whether he should be expelled from the party.
“Marine Le Pen killed the father,” said Wallerand de Saint Just, a former lawyer of Mr. Le Pen who currently serves as the party’s treasurer, adding: “Freud didn’t have it all wrong.”
Do we want to encourage drug dealers, violent gang members and serial rapists to come into this country? If not, why is that exactly what the Obama administration is doing? Thanks to very foolish U.S. government policies, it is incredibly difficult to immigrate to this country legally, but it is incredibly easy to immigrate to this country illegally. So we are keeping out large numbers of good, honest, hard working people at the same time that we have given a giant green light to criminals and lawbreakers. Does that make any sense at all? We need an immigration system that forces everyone to come in through the front door.Keep reading.
Instead, we have made the process of getting in through the front door a complete and total nightmare and yet we have left the back door totally wide open. And if the millions upon millions of lawbreakers that are coming in to this country illegally just took our jobs and drained our welfare system, perhaps it wouldn’t be that bad. Unfortunately, that is not the case. In fact, illegal immigration has greatly contributed to rising violent crime rates all over the nation. Gang membership is exploding, Mexican drug cartels are operating in more of our communities than ever before, and identity theft by illegal immigrants is at epidemic levels. Something desperately needs to be done.
But instead, the Obama administration is trying to ram amnesty for illegal immigrants through Congress as quickly as possible. According to the Congressional Budget Office, this bill will cause unemployment to go up and wages to go down for many years. And by rewarding illegal immigration, the federal government will just encourage much more of it. But our politicians don’t really seem concerned with the consequences. In fact, the Senate is going to vote on the immigration bill without even reading it.
Instead of focusing on what we “owe” to those that have broken our laws by entering this country illegally, perhaps we should be talking about some of the horrible crimes that they have been committing while they have been living here...
Khaled al-Asaad, 82, was interrogated by militants for a month before he was murdered in the ancient city.
The brutal murder of Khaled al-Asaad, 82, is the latest atrocity perpetrated by the jihadi group, which has captured a third of Syria and neighbouring Iraq and declared a “caliphate” on the territory it controls. It has also highlighted Isis’s habit of looting and selling antiquities to fund its activities – as well as destroying them.Keep reading.
Syrian state antiquities chief Maamoun Abdulkarim said Asaad’s family had informed him that the scholar, who worked for more than 50 years as head of antiquities in Palmyra, was killed by Isis on Tuesday.
Asaad had been held for more than a month before being murdered. Chris Doyle, director of the Council for Arab-British Understanding, said he had learned from a Syrian source that the archaeologist had been interrogated by Isis about the location of treasures from Palmyra and had been executed when he refused to cooperate.
Isis captured the city from government forces in May but is not known to have damaged its monumental Roman-era ruins despite a reputation for destroying artefacts it views as idolatrous.
“Just imagine that such a scholar who gave such memorable services to the place and to history would be beheaded … and his corpse still hanging from one of the ancient columns in the centre of a square in Palmyra,” Abdulkarim said. “The continued presence of these criminals in this city is a curse and bad omen on [Palmyra] and every column and every archaeological piece in it.”
There’s a very real possibility that people could be hurt or killed – before, during, and after the event. This, together with the fact that our venue had indicated it wanted to pull out citing security and insurance concerns, and given the fear that people were feeling generally, the only responsible thing to do was to pull back and try to learn some lessons. I have not learned lessons as much as I have had my suspicions confirmed. There are two major messages to take on board from this episode: 1) Britain is a frightened nation, and 2) our freedom is not going away, it has gone.Yes, cowering before Islamic jihad, right on the home soil. Amazing.
For the last four years, a little-known civil rights office in the U.S. Department of Education has forced far-reaching changes in how the nation’s colleges and universities police, prosecute and punish sexual assaults on campus.What a disaster.
With a strong mandate from President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, the office's lawyers have redefined campus sexual assault as a federal civil rights issue, changed the standard by which allegations must be judged and publicized the names of a growing number of schools under investigation for allegedly failing to respond properly to complaints of sexual misconduct.
"This is the first administration to call sexual violence a civil rights issue," said Catherine E. Lhamon, a former ACLU lawyer in Los Angeles who, as assistant secretary of Education, heads the Office for Civil Rights and has brought the style of an aggressive litigator to the once-staid education post.
"We don’t treat rape and sexual assault as seriously as we should," she said, citing surveys that found one-in-five women say they were victims of sexual assault or unwanted sexual contact in college. There is "a need to push the country forward."
Members of Congress and activists who fight unwanted sexual incidents on campus have praised the effort. College administrators grudgingly admit that the ratcheting up of pressure has changed a status quo in which some schools allowed perpetrators to go unpunished while failing to provide safety or support for victims.
But what some faculty, administrators and judges call an unyielding and one-sided approach by the government has provoked a backlash. Two weeks ago, a judge in San Diego rebuked the UC campus there for trampling the rights of an accused student.
"Some schools see OCR as a bully with enforcement powers," said Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president at the American Council on Education, the lobby group for higher education.
"Universities are desperately trying to do the right thing, but these cases can be really difficult to resolve fairly. Often, you have two conflicting stories, no evidence, no witnesses, and it’s all combined with substance abuse."
University officials, many of whom will speak about the subject only on condition of anonymity, complain of heavy-handed pressure from Washington and a growing bureaucracy.
Janet Napolitano, president of the University of California and a former prosecutor and secretary of Homeland Security, warned in an article in the Yale Law & Policy Review published online this month that "a cottage industry is being created" on campuses dedicated to handling tasks that fall outside the expertise of colleges and universities.
"Rather than pushing institutions to become surrogates for the criminal justice system," she said, policymakers should ask if "more work should be done to improve that system’s handling and prosecution of sexual assault cases."
Under pressure from the Office for Civil Rights, campuses are rushing to set up a parallel legal system to investigate and rule upon murky encounters that often involve inebriated students. They must decide within 60 days whether it is "more likely than not" that an alleged perpetrator was guilty. And they make those decisions without many of the legal protections associated with a criminal trial.
The new procedures vary from school to school, but according to Harvard Law School professor Janet Halley and other critics, many do not allow the accused to know details of accusations against them, to question accusers, or to have lawyers participate in hearings. Many also allow only limited appeals of rulings by a campus administrator or outside expert.
The punishments can be a expulsion and a permanent notation on a student’s transcript, potentially life-altering penalties.
Critics call those moves dangerous procedural short circuits that have resulted in serious injustice.
"It’s tragic what the federal government has done," said Elizabeth Bartholet, a civil rights activist and professor at Harvard Law School. "They are creating a backlash against the very cause they are fighting for."
Bartholet and 27 other members of the Harvard law faculty objected publicly in October to a new university policy on sexual harassment and violence, adopted in the face of an investigation by the Office for Civil Rights...
America’s status as the greatest and most influential nation on earth comes with certain inescapable realities. Among these are an abundance of enemies wishing to undermine us, numerous allies dependent on our strength and constancy, and the burden of knowing that every choice we make in exercising our power—even when we choose not to exercise it at all—has tremendous human and geopolitical consequences.I like it. I just wonder how Rubio's going to differentiate himself from the rest of the pack. With the exception of Rand Paul, pretty much all the GOP candidates will be hammering Obama's withdrawal from the world stage, and his appeasement of America's traditional adversaries.
This has been true for at least 70 years, but never more so than today. As the world has grown more interconnected, American leadership has grown more critical to maintaining global order and defending our people’s interests, and as our economy has turned from national to international, domestic policy and foreign policy have become inseparable.
President Barack Obama has failed to recognize this. He entered office believing the United States was too engaged in too many places and that globalization had diminished the need for American power. He set to work peeling back the protective cover of American influence, stranding our allies, and deferring to the whims of nefarious regional powers. He has vacillated between leading recklessly and not leading at all, which has left the world more dangerous and America’s interests less secure.
It will take years for our next president to confront the residual effects of President Obama’s foreign and defense policies. Countering the spread of the self-declared Islamic State, for example, will require a broadened coalition of regional partners, increased U.S. involvement in the fight, and steady action to prevent the group’s expansion to other failed and failing states. Halting Iran’s regional expansionism and preventing its acquisition of a nuclear weapon will demand equal urgency and care.
The Middle East, however, is far from the only region with crises. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Beijing’s attempts to dominate the South China Sea, resurgent despotism in South America, and the rise of new threats—from devastating cyberattacks to challenges in space — will all require the careful attention of America’s next president.
Each challenge will be made more difficult by President Obama’s slashing of hundreds of billions of dollars from the defense budget, which has left the U.S. Army on track to be at pre–World War II levels, the U.S. Navy at pre–World War I levels, and the U.S. Air Force with the smallest and oldest combat force in its history. Our next president must act immediately on entering office to begin rebuilding these capabilities.
The first and most important pillar of my foreign policy will be a renewal of American strength. This is an idea based on a simple truth: the world is at its safest when America is at its strongest. Physical strength and an active foreign policy to back it up are a means of preserving peace, not promoting conflict. Foreign involvement has never been a binary choice between perpetual war and passive indifference. The president has many tools to advance U.S. interests, and when used in proper balance, they will make it less likely that force will ever be required and will thus save lives rather than cost them.
My foreign policy would restore the post-1945 bipartisan presidential tradition of a strong and engaged America while adjusting it to meet the new realities of a globalized world. The foreign policy I propose has three pillars. Each can be best described through an example of a challenge we face in this new century, but they all reveal the need for all elements of American power—for a dynamic foreign policy that restores strength, promotes prosperity, and steers the world toward freedom.
Here in my adopted home state of Colorado, orange is the new Animas River thanks to the blithering idiots working under President Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency.More.
It’s just the latest man-caused disaster from an out-of-control bureaucracy whose primary mission is not the Earth’s preservation, but self-preservation.
As always, the government cover-up compounds the crime — which is why the agency’s promise this week to investigate itself has residents across the Rocky Mountains in stitches. Or tears.
After the EPA and officials and their contract workers accidentally spilled three million gallons of pent-up toxic sludge on August 5 from a defunct mine in San Juan County that hadn’t operated since 1923, EPA apparatchiks delayed notifying residents for more than 24 hours. They vastly underestimated the volume and spill rate of gunk. Then, while refusing to release data, EPA head Gina McCarthy flew to the glowing river to fecklessly declare that the water “seems to be restoring itself.”
The cleanup costs for the Colorado spill alone are estimated at $30 billion. Small farmers, ranchers and tourist-related businesses will be reeling for years to come — yet the EPA is simultaneously pushing forward with Draconian ozone regulations (based on cherry-picked junk science) that will punish the state’s residents with no discernible health benefits.
If only Mother Nature could help wash away the institutionalized corruption that has been leaching from Obama’s EPA headquarters since Day One:
–BP oil spill data doctoring. Former White House Director of the Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy Carol Browner and the EPA suffered no consequences after they repeatedly lied and cooked the books in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon spill in 2010. Browner, who pulled the puppet strings of then-EPA head Lisa Jackson, misled the public about the scope of the disaster by falsely claiming that 75 percent of the spill was “completely gone from the system.” Then she falsely claimed that the administration’s initial report on the disaster was “peer-reviewed.”
The Interior Department inspector general also singled out Browner for misrepresenting the White House’s blue-ribbon science panel, which opposed a six-month drilling moratorium, and exposed how she butchered their conclusions to justify the administration’s preordained policy agenda.
Browner, an inveterate left-wing crony lobbyist/activist, left office without so much as a wrist slap. Brazen data doctoring and destruction are her fortes. As EPA head during the Clinton administration in the 1990s, she was held in contempt by a federal judge after ordering a staffer to purge and delete her computer files. Browner had sought to evade a public disclosure lawsuit by conservative lawyer and author Mark Levin’s Landmark Legal Foundation.
–Email evasion and transparency trouncing. While Browner was doing her dirty work as Obama’s unaccountable eco-czar, Jackson busied herself creating sock-puppet email personalities to circumvent public disclosure rules as the agency crafted radical climate-change policies in secret. She learned the tricks of the trade from Browner. Jackson admitted to using the pseudonym “Richard Windsor” on one of at least two separate secret government accounts. Competitive Enterprise Institute fellow Christopher Horner discovered the elaborate ruses in 2012. The agency had stonewalled Horner’s FOIA requests on the use of alias accounts at the agency; CEI sued to force the administration to comply.
In December 2012, Jackson resigned amid multiple investigations. Not a wrist slap. Not a scratch. In March of this year, a federal judge blasted the agency for avoiding a separate FOIA request by Levin’s Landmark Legal Foundation related to sock-puppet email accounts created by Jackson and others “who may have delayed the release dates for hot-button environmental regulations until after the Nov. 6, 2012, presidential election.”
Apple Computer hired Jackson in 2013 (and all of her multiple personalities). Two months ago, the company proudly announced that it was promoting Jackson to “vice president of Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives” and head of the company’s “global government affairs and public policy teams.”
–Enabling sex predators and porn addicts. Last month, the EPA inspector general finally testified on Capitol Hill about the agency’s chronic mismanagement of alleged sexual perverts on the payroll. One employee “engaged in offensive and inappropriate behavior toward at least 16 women, most of whom were EPA co-workers,” the IG reported. Supervisors “were made aware of many of these actions and yet did nothing.”
Well, not exactly “nothing.” The employee was actually promoted to assistant administrator for the EPA’s Office of Homeland Security — a position he used to harass six more women...
Parts of Donald Trump’s immigration plan may raise serious constitutional questions, but the part that launched a media firestorm—ending birthright citizenship for the children of illegal aliens—does not.Still more.
The Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment does not confer citizenship on the children of foreigners, whether legal or illegal.
Media commentators have gotten this issue dead wrong. Fox News’s Judge Andrew Napolitano says the Fourteenth Amendment is “very clear” that its Citizenship Clause commands that any child born in America is automatically an American citizen.
That’s not the law. It has never been the law.
Under current immigration law—found at 8 U.S.C. § 1401(a)—a baby born on American soil to a (1) foreign ambassador, (2) head of state, or (3) foreign military prisoner is not an American citizen.
How is that possible? This is from the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1952 (INA), as it has been amended over the years. Is this federal law unconstitutional?
No. The Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment provides: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Today’s debate turns on the six words, “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”
As captured in the movie Lincoln, the Thirteenth Amendment—which ended slavery—barely passed Congress because many Democrats supported slavery, and it was only through the political genius and resolve of Republican President Abraham Lincoln that the proposed amendment passed Congress in 1865, sending it to the states for ratification.
In 1866, Congress passed a Civil Rights Act to guarantee black Americans their constitutional rights as citizens, claiming that the Constitution’s Thirteenth Amendment gave Congress the power to pass such laws. But many voted against the Civil Rights Act because they thought it exceeded Congress’s powers, and even many of its supporters doubted its legality.
The Civil Rights Act included a definition for national citizenship, to guarantee that former slaves would forever be free of the infamous Dred Scott decision which declared black people were not American citizens. That provision read, “All persons born in the United States, and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States.”
That was the original meaning of the jurisdiction language in the Fourteenth Amendment. A person who is “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States is a person who is “not subject to any foreign power”—that is, a person who was entirely native to the United States, not the citizen or subject of any foreign government. The same members of Congress who voted for the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 then voted to define citizenship for freed slaves in a federal law in 1866, then voted again months later in 1866—using only slightly different language—to put that definition of citizenship in the Constitution, language that was ultimately ratified by the states in 1868 as the Fourteenth Amendment.
In 1884, the Supreme Court in Elk v. Wilkins noted that the language of the Civil Rights Act was condensed and rephrased in the Fourteenth Amendment and that courts can therefore look to the Civil Rights Act to understand better the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court reasoned that if a person is a foreign citizen, then their children are likewise not constitutionally under the jurisdiction of the United States, and therefore not entitled to citizenship. In fact, the Court specifically then added that this rule is why the children of foreign ambassadors are not American citizens.
That is why Congress can specify that the children of foreign diplomats and foreign soldiers are not Americans by birth. They’re not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States. Congress’s INA does not grant them citizenship; federal law never has.
So why is a child born on American soil to foreign parents an American citizen by birth? Because the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause is a floor, not a ceiling. Under Article I, Section 8, Clause 4 of the Constitution, Congress has absolute power to make laws for immigration and for granting citizenship to foreigners. Congress’s current INA is far more generous than the Constitution requires. Congress could expand it to grant citizenship to every human being on earth, or narrow it to its constitutional minimum.
Media confusion on this issue is puzzling, because the greatest legal minds in this country have discussed the issue. (Just none of them were put on camera to explain it.) Scholars including Dr. John Eastman of Chapman University, and even Attorney General Edwin Meese—the godfather of constitutional conservatism in the law—reject the myth of birthright citizenship...
As a conservative who has advocated for criminal justice reform, I have a lot of admiration for the #BlackLivesMatter movement, which has been remarkably effective at raising awareness of the myriad ways that black Americans are treated differently — or, put more bluntly, treated worse — by law enforcement. Although I haven’t always agreed with their tactics or rhetoric, I have appreciated the movement’s tenacity and unwillingness to be mollified by platitudes and talking points from politicians who’ve attempted to co-opt them.Keep reading.
That’s why I think #BlackLivesMatter is wasting its time pressing Democrats for answers, or action. The party of big government can’t meet their demands.
For starters, the Democratic presidential contenders have done an infamously bad job of responding to #BlackLivesMatter protesters who’ve attended their events. Sen. Bernie Sanders and former governor Martin O’Malley were practically heckled off the stage at the Netroots Nation conference after they were unable to effectively articulate, let alone posit, concrete solutions to protesters’ concerns. Former secretary of state and Democratic front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign has been similarly panned by #BlackLivesMatter leaders.
The relationship has arguably worsened in recent days. There’s video this week of a tense meeting between Clinton and #BlackLivesMatter activists in New Hampshire that shows her responding to a difficult question with: “Respectfully, if that is your position, then I will talk only to white people about how we are going to deal with the very real problems.” After being disrupted twice at recent speaking events by #BlackLivesMatter protesters, in an appearance on “Meet The Press” this Sunday, Sanders appeared to disavow an apology one of his staffers e-mailed to #BlackLivesMatter activists.
The effort to hold these politicians accountable is understandable when you consider that African Americans overwhelmingly vote Democratic. But from another perspective, it seems clear that #BlackLivesMatter is looking for real answers in all the wrong places, and is in danger of being taken for granted in the long term by the Democratic Party...
Islamic State (IS) militants beheaded an antiquities scholar in the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra and hung his body on a column in a main square of the historic site, Syria's antiquities chief said on Tuesday.I'd link the video, since we know there's a video of the beheading, but I don't see it posted anywhere, even at the hardcore uncensored jihadi terror porn sites. Maybe it's not out yet. No matter. We're inured to it. ISIS could blow up whole cities with nuclear weapons, major metropolitan areas, and that wouldn't cross any red lines. It's all pretty fucked up.
