TOM MAGUIRE: So What Did Hastert Do? “So, my current guess – Hastert is guilty of trying to do the right thing by supporting an illicit child and then was a damn idiot who lied to the FBI about it. The rest is politicized, Chicagoland, Obamaland BS.” Well, stay tuned.
Plus, from the comments: “Hastert should have started a charity and hired this person on at a Blumenthalian pay level.”
CULTURE OF ENTITLEMENT: Bill Clinton: Sure, you can give me an award — but first give $500,000 to my slush fund foundation. “The Clinton Foundation had rejected the Happy Hearts Fund invitation more than once, until there was a thinly veiled solicitation and then the offer of an honorarium.”
Plus: “It is extremely rare for honorees, or their foundations, to be paid from a gala’s proceeds, charity experts said — as it is for the proceeds to be diverted to a different cause.”
Also:
Outside Cipriani, about 100 protesters, mostly Haitian-Americans expressing frustration with the earthquake reconstruction effort, stood behind barricades holding protest signs.
“Clinton, where is the money?” they chanted. “In whose pockets?”
This should happen everywhere Bill or Hillary appear.
DOJ OFFICIAL LINKS BAD POLICING TO JIM CROW LAWS: The Washington Times reports that Ronald Davis, the Community Oriented Policing Services director at DOJ, asserts that Jim Crow laws are at least partially to blame for excessive policing and force:
“We’re still operating on some system that was used to enforce Jim Crow laws, that were used to oppress people,” Ronald Davis, Community Oriented Policing Services director for the Department of Justice, said at an event at the Center for American Progress. “These are operational systems and policies and practices that exist today.”
. . .
Mr. Davis told The Washington Times that he is concerned that the tensions tied to the Jim Crow era still have an impact on “anything from how we incarcerate to how we sentence to why we police and how we police.”
As a result, good officers are sometimes put in positions where they produce bad outcomes simply because the system ” is disparate to incarceration of young men of color,” Mr. Davis said. Mass incarceration and statistical drops in crime “cannot be the priority of public safety or law enforcement,” he said.
There are definitely over-criminalization issues, and yes, the criminal justice system does prosecute a large number of minorities arrested for crimes. But the inflammatory “Jim Crow” label is just a dog-whistle for the same old tired racism charge that permeates everything DOJ does under the Obama Administration. Can we please just address the real issues without resorting to the overplayed racism accusation? Liberals/progressives hurl “racism” so often now, it just sounds like Charlie Brown’s teacher, and I tune it out.
FREE SPEECH UPDATE: Texas student sues after college bans gun rights sign.
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SET YOUR DVRs: I’ll be on John Stossel’s show tonight in the 9 pm hour talking about higher education. Don’t miss it!
ED MORRISSEY: How Hillary And Bill Have Democrats Legally Conned.
UNEXPECTEDLY! U.S. economy shrinks .7 percent in first quarter. “The numbers released Friday were a revision of earlier figures that had showed GDP growing in the first quarter at 0.2 percent. The contraction was the U.S.’s third in the aftermath of the Great Recession.” Maybe we’re not really in an “aftermath.”
HOUSE WAYS & MEANS ASKS DOJ TO INVESTIGATE IRS TARGETING: All Republicans on the House Ways & Means Committee, chaired by Paul Ryan, sent a letter Thursday to Attorney General Loretta Lynch, asking her to answer the committee’s 2014 request for criminal prosecution of IRS officials involved in the targeting of conservative groups. Writes Kimberley Strassel:
It’s now been two full years since a little-known IRS bureaucrat named Lois Lerner admitted that her agency systematically collected the names of conservative groups, harassed them, and denied their right to participate in elections. It’s been two full years since the Justice Department opened an investigation. And it’s been two full years of crickets. . . .
Specifically, the committee provided documents that show three acts by Ms. Lerner that may have violated criminal statutes. One, she helped to target only conservative organizations, thereby robbing them of equal protection and due process. Two, she may have impeded the Treasury inspector general’s investigation of the matter by giving misleading statements. Three, she risked exposing (and may have exposed) confidential taxpayer information by using her personal email address to conduct official business.
And that’s only what we know so far. Congress’s problem is that the IRS has stonewalled it at every turn. The Treasury inspector general, J. Russell George, has become tentative after all the Democratic criticism of his probe. It seems the Justice Department is the only body with the powers to shake loose some answers about what happened.
The Ryan letter asks Ms. Lynch to tell him the status of that referral, and Speaker Boehner chimed in with a statement calling for the new attorney general to prove to Americans that “justice will be served.”
I won’t hold my breath for “justice” coming out of Obama’s DOJ, even now that Eric Holder has departed. But at least the Republicans in the House are following up.
ROGER SIMON: A Mad Voter Looks at the May 28 Presidential Poll.
MICHAEL BARONE: Colleges and universities have grown bloated and dysfunctional.
American colleges and universities, long thought to be the glory of the nation, are in more than a little trouble. I’ve written before of their shameful practices — the racial quotas and preferences at selective schools (Harvard is being sued by Asian-American organizations), the kangaroo courts that try students accused of rape and sexual assault without legal representation or presumption of innocence, and speech codes that make campuses the least rather than the most free venues in American society.
In following these policies, the burgeoning phalanxes of university and college administrators must systematically lie, insisting against all the evidence that they are racially nondiscriminatory, devoted to due process and upholders of free speech. The resulting intellectual corruption would have been understood by George Orwell.
Some people appear to be using Orwell’s work as a handbook.
IT’S ALWAYS NICE to make Twitchy.
SENATOR FROM THE STATE OF HYPOCRISY: The Ironic Tie Between Elizabeth Warren’s Hypocritical Home Flipping and Mitt Romney.
Warren’s public face is contradicted by her private actions – actions that we will soon see are similar in nature to those that made Romney a millionaire.
Warren, like Romney, profited by buying assets at low prices and through either improving said assets or waiting for the market to strengthen, selling them at higher prices.
As Jillian Kay Melchior and Eliana Johnson lay out in a recent National Review exposé, Warren “bought and sold at least five [residential] properties for profit,” generating at least $240,500 before accounting for remodeling costs.
Several of the homes Warren purchased and then flipped had been foreclosed upon.
The focus of the piece is the rank hypocrisy that Warren would execute such profit-seeking transactions, given that she has called the idea of buying and selling properties quickly for profit a “myth” that contributed to our economic woes, and decried the banks that foreclosed on the homes of working class Americans. . . .
What Romney did at the macro level in investing in businesses worth hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, Warren did at the micro level in investing in homes worth thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The difference however is that Romney’s investing in many cases led to the creation of ever-better goods and services at ever-lower prices, with the benefits accruing to not only Romney, Bain’s investors, and the employees of the strengthened companies, but all consumers – that is, you and me.
Certainly Warren’s investments in home remodeling may have created work for construction companies and home suppliers, but those benefits pale in size and scope to the benefits to the public of successful private equity investments.
But, but, Mitt’s garage had an elevator!
REVIEW: I Got My Friends to Try Female Condoms. Here’s What They Thought. “Overall, both testers said that the female condom performed its job perfectly well: insertion was far easier than they’d expected, and they had no problems using it or removing it. But neither of them could see any obvious advantage over a male condom.”
ACE HAS SOME THOUGHTS ON Bernie Sanders’ Rape Fantasies.
Charles C.W. Cooke says that we should not unduly persecute Bernie Sanders for his sexual heresies. . . .
Cooke is arguing for what he conceives of as free speech absolutism — one does not demagogue speech to whip up feeding frenzies of angry lynch mobbers about something merely said.
I agree with this, naturally, except that I don’t. As a tactical matter, there is no way to get the left to stop with its incessant Censorship Crusades except to visit equal pain upon them.
The greatest ethical precept in the world is the do-unto-others-test, which I usually think of as the shoe on the other foot test.
One can discover a lot of moral and ethical rules — and separate out actual rules of good behavior from self-serving rationalizations designed to punish one’s enemies — by always asking, “Would I support this rule if I were forced to live under it?”
The trouble is, of course, the left is almost never asked to wear the shoe on their own foot.
They think censorship, Speechcraft Trials, and mob justice for Thought Heretics is just awesome.
And why shouldn’t they?
These things are almost never visited upon they themselves– they have only the upside of a dark, censorious, paranoid regime. Almost all of the downside falls upon their enemies– just where they’d want it. . . . People don’t like the Tit For Tat regime because it sounds simple-minded, punitive, and awful. Well, it is these things.
It is also, as Steven den Beste persuasively argued, very effective for bringing about a more ethical environment. Meaning that while it may be crude in method, it is enlightened in outcome.
Read the whole thing.
STEPHEN L. CARTER: Hillary Clinton and the New Litmus Test.
<You might have missed the news that John Paul Stevens, the retired U.S. Supreme Court justice, criticized Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton last week for her announcement that she would nominate to the court only individuals committed to overturning the 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission. Stevens doesn’t like the decision any more than she does — his dissent ran to 90 pages — but he likes litmus tests even less.
At a house party in Mason City, Iowa, a few days after offering her promise, Clinton doubled down: “I will do everything I can do to appoint Supreme Court justices who will protect the right to vote and not the right of billionaires to buy elections,” she said.
Stevens, in remarks last week at George Washington University, was unimpressed: “I’m not really sure that that’s wise either for the court or for a presidential candidate to make a litmus test on one particular decision. … I’m surprised at her statement.” The former justice added: “If I were running for president, I don’t think I would make such a litmus test, even though I think the case ought to be overruled.”
Stevens is right. I won’t trouble here to go into the reasons for my own longstanding opposition to litmus tests, other than to note that there is something decidedly peculiar about promising to place on the Supreme Court individuals who have already decided the cases to come before them.
