SEN. ALEXANDER GRILLS DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION ABOUT POWER GRAB – In a congressional hearing on Wednesday, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) challenged Department of Education Deputy Assistant Secretary Amy McIntosh about past statements made by her colleague Catherine Lhamon, the assistant secretary for the Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR). Lhamon had claimed that colleges and universities were expected to comply with OCR’s Title IX guidance, despite the fact that federal guidance is not binding.
FIRE has been saying for years that a lot of what OCR does violates the Administrative Procedure Act. We applaud Senator Alexander for challenging OCR’s abuse of power. You can watch the back-and-forth between Senator Alexander and Deputy Assistant Secretary McIntosh in the video below and the video of the full hearing on the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs’ website.
FRONTIERS IN MEDIA MANIPULATION: Immigration group planned girl’s pope encounter for a year. “Sophie Cruz’s brief encounter with Pope Francis during his parade in Washington this week appeared to be the kind of spontaneous moment that is so endearing about this pope: an initially hesitant young child wrapping an arm around his neck as he offers a kiss and a blessing. But for 5-year-old Sophie, the moment unfolded as perfectly as it was scripted by members of a coalition of Los Angeles-based immigration rights groups. They had been preparing for nearly a year for the young girl from suburban Los Angeles to make a dash for the popemobile to deliver a message about the plight of immigrant parents living in the country illegally. They had even pulled off a similar public-relations coup a year ago in Rome using a 10-year-old girl with the pope.”
It’s Potemkin villages all the way down.
JUSTICE WILLETT for Supreme Court? I’m for it, but you have to elect a GOP President and keep a GOP Senate. Eyes on the prize, folks.
Boehner’s resignation is most likely the product of political pressure from a GOP establishment that hopes to dampen grassroots’ interest in “outsider” candidates such as Trump, Carson and Fiorina. Replacing him with McCarthy won’t do the trick. The GOP base is angry at the establishment–precisely because of what that establishment has and has not done–and McCarthy is a part of it. Now is the time for real, not cosmetic, change.
Peter Hitchens’ 1999 book The Abolition of Britain really reads today as a chilling preview of America’s own descent into the madness of political correctness.
YOU WON’T HAVE JOHN BOEHNER TO KICK AROUND ANYMORE: Boehner Will Resign From Congress. This is a sign, I think, that the GOP establishment has finally figured out that the root of Trumpmania is the failure of the Boehner-McConnell Congress to deliver despite the big electoral wins of 2014. But is it too late?
THE CANDIDATE WHO DIDN’T KNOW WHAT AUSCHWITZ WAS: “Alex Johnstone, an education official who is running for Canada’s parliament, made a penis joke about Auschwitz and then apologized — saying she wasn’t aware it was a concentration camp:”
Alex Johnstone, who is running for a parliamentary seat in Canada [as a member of the socialist New Democratic Party], has drawn heat for not knowing about the past this week. Specifically, not knowing about very noteworthy facts about the Holocaust. The candidate, who is also a vice chairwoman of a school board in Hamilton, Ontario, made a phallic joke about a picture from the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.
“Ahh, the infamous Pollish, phallic hydro posts….of course you took pictures of this!” she wrote on a friend’s Facebook wall in 2008 beneath a picture of a barbed-wire gate at the concentration camp. “It expresses the how the curve is normal, natural and healthy right!”
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Adding insult to injury [in her botched joke apology], Johnstone stated that she didn’t know what Auschwitz even was.
“Well, I didn’t know what Auschwitz was, or I didn’t up until today,” she said in an interview Tuesday night. Johnstone, who appears to be in her thirties, said she had “heard about concentration camps.”
Johnstone is vice chair of the local school board and regional vice chair on the Ontario Public School Board Association. She has served as a school trustee since 2010.
“While never intending any malice, this comment was clearly inappropriate,” she posted on her Facebook page Wednesday. “I would like to offer my unreserved apology for this comment.”
The Huffington Post Canada found Johnstone participated in school board meetings where prizes were awarded to teachers for “excellence in Holocaust education.”
Shades of this 2013 video in which Philadelphia-area college freshmen demonstrated their cluelessness about the topic; as I wrote when I linked to it back then, “Oh, That Present-Tense Culture:”
If politics don’t work out for Johnstone, she’ll have a great career ahead of her in television journalism.
The civil rights of accusers — this right to an education in an environment where they don’t have to see men they accuse — can probably be protected without trampling the civil, legal and constitutional rights of accused students. Unfortunately, that’s not how things are currently done.
One way to accomplish this would be to let police and prosecutors handle the issue, as many in the criminal justice system have advocated. The justice system ensures that those found guilty of rape are removed from society, instead of just kicked off campus and left to prey on other victims. If police and prosecutors handle these cases, the real-world court system will protect accused student’s rights. It will also mete out punishments that are appropriately severe. Sexual assault is, after all, a crime. Perpetrators need to be held legally accountable.
But this logic falls apart if the real reason for the current ad hoc campus court system is to expel more students for political reasons rather than to actually combat a crime.
Maatz testified that by using a lower standard of evidence than at criminal trials — a preponderance of evidence, allowing administrators under federal pressure to be just 50.01 percent sure an assault was committed — is acceptable, because that’s the standard used in civil trials. But what Maatz failed to note is that civil trials also provide rules of evidence, discovery, right to effective counsel (not just a lawyer sitting silently in the background), subpoena power and sworn testimony. In civil court, there are safeguards against wrongful accusations. But such safeguards make it more difficult to convict without evidence, and so the activists are not fans of that system, either.
BAD POLL QUESTIONS ON DISPLAY, BLOOMBERG NATIONAL POLITICS EDITION: From Moe Lane, with a video assist from Yes, Prime Minister.
UNSAFE AT ANY EID: “The number of people killed by Volkswagen’s diesel trickery: zero. The number of people killed at this year’s Hajj pilgrimage: more than 700,” notes Tim Blair, along with a brilliant headline.
Meanwhile, Kevin Williamson notes that the implications of the VW scandal should serve as a wake-up call for the gullible left — but of course, won’t — far beyond the emissions of the diesel Passat. “Executives cheat. Politicians cheat. Ayatollahs, too, for that matter, if you’re concerned about emissions a few orders of magnitude more worrisome than the stuff that comes out of your nose.”
THE REAL REASON WE NEED TO STOP TRYING TO PROTECT EVERYONE’S FEELINGS: In the New York Observer, Ryan Holiday writes that when it comes to Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and its legendary cautionary tale of firemen burning books, “if you’d asked me why on earth they did that, I would have answered just as confidently: ‘Because a tyrannical government wanted them to.’”
“It didn’t come from the government down,” [a veteran fireman tells Montag, Bradbury’s protagonist]. “There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no!”
In fact, it was something rather simple—something that should sound very familiar. It was a desire not to offend—of an earnest notion to literally have “everyone made equal.” And it’s at the end of this speech that we get the killer passage:
“You must understand that our civilization is so vast that we can’t have our minorities upset and stirred. Ask yourself, What do we want in this country above all? People want to be happy, isn’t that right?…Colored people don’t like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Burn it. Someone’s written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book. Serenity, Montag. Peace, Montag. Take your fight outside. Better yet, to the incinerator.”
And before you get offended, let’s clarify what Bradbury means by minorities. He’s not talking about race. He’s talking about it in the same way that Madison and Hamilton did in the Federalist Papers. He’s speaking about small, interested groups who try to force the rest of the majority to adhere to the minority’s set of beliefs.
I don’t mean to cherry pick. I see no need to one to pile on college students as being particularly responsible for the “coddling of the American mind.” (Great piece, read it.) Though I do find it ironic that we require kids to read this book in high school and just a few years (or months) later, they’re leading the charge on exactly the kind of well-intentioned censorship Bradbury was talking about. I don’t mean to say that these examples come close to the kind of overt censorship that every reasonable person dreads. But I do mean to say that they come from the same place—and very alarmingly—ultimately end together in a much worse place.
As John Podhoretz tweets in response, “Who needs satire?”
(McCarthy sounds like she’d need a fainting couch merely at the notion of Bullets & Bourbon in Texas. They have very big ones at Rough Creek Lodge, but they’re covered in rich, soft leather, alas.)
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