HMM: Lawmakers Say Intel Agencies Are Stonewalling Investigations into Surveillance Leaks. “Sources say that Rice was not the one calling the shots.”
What did the former President know, and when did he know it?
Archive for 2017
April 7, 2017
TURKEY’S REFERENDUM: The Dangerous Road to ‘Yes’
Turkey’s plebiscite will ask the electorate to cast a simple Yes/No vote on a slate of 18 proposed amendments to the constitution. Turkey has a long history of constitutional referendums – often heavily politicized – but the amendments proposed in this round are by far the most transformative. If Erdogan and his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) win the Yes vote, the position of prime minister will be abolished and President Erdogan will become both head of state and head of government. He will remain head of the ruling AK Party and will get the power to appoint cabinet ministers.
All this is relatively normal for a presidential system. However, the amendments sought by Erdogan would also grant him the power to issue legislation by decree, to dissolve parliament and to call new elections at will. According to Soner Cagaptay, director of the Turkish Research Program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the amendments would give Erdogan “strong control over Turkish finances and the judiciary branch.” Under the new system, Erdogan would personally appoint half of the judges in Turkey. A parliament controlled by his AKP would appoint the other half.
The proposed changes would give Erdogan unparalleled authority over the military and security apparatus. He would have the power to declare a state of emergency at will. In fact, the upcoming referendum will be held under a state of emergency, declared by Erdogan after the attempted military coup against him last July.
If Turks approve one-man rule, they’ll also lose the peaceful transfer of power enjoyed by democratic republics. So there’s the question of just how bad Erdogan’s dictatorship would be, but there’s also the question of who — or what — would follow Erdogan.
JONATHAN ADLER: Thoughts on the judicial nominations mess and nuclear fallout.
How did we get here?
In my opinion, the story of judicial nominations over the past 30 years is a story of repeated, escalating retaliation. Instead of tit-for-tat, it’s been (tit+X)-for-tat. At each turn, each party has escalated as much as it thought it could get away with, tearing down norms and breaking precedents over again. Put another way, senators from both parties have acted like two kids in the back seat of a car, taking turns hitting each other, with each “punching back twice as hard.” After trading enough blows, how it started is almost irrelevant.
Different people trace the beginnings of this current cycle of retaliation to different points. In my view, it began in the mid-1980s, when Senate Democrats decided that they should do more to oppose President Ronald Reagan’s nominees because they were too ideological — a decision that was reported in The Post at the time. I explain this and discuss what happened since in this post from 2013. Whether Senate Democrats were justified in their action is irrelevant at this point, as it’s been almost all downhill since. There are no clean hands.
2013, of course, is when Reid invoked the so-called nuclear option (a.k.a. the #ReidRule).
And now Republicans are invoking it back. The big problem is that nobody trusts anybody to keep promises made when they’re out of power once they’re back in power, and they’re right not to.
But as Adler notes, this makes it easier for Presidents to pick a wider range of nominees, which is good.
CODE-SHARING: U.S. judge warns Uber in Waymo self-driving car case.
A U.S. judge on Wednesday warned Uber Technologies Inc it could face a court injunction that would bar a key Uber executive from working on its self-driving car project, in a high-profile case filed by Alphabet Inc’s Waymo unit.
The litigation pits two Silicon Valley giants against each other over technology at the heart of a potential revolution in the auto industry.
U.S. District Judge William Alsup said evidence amassed by Waymo to bolster its case of being robbed was extraordinary.
“I’ve never seen a record this strong in 42 years,” Alsup said. A hearing on Waymo’s request for an injunction on Uber’s self-driving program is scheduled for May.
Waymo sued ride services company Uber earlier this year, claiming that former Waymo executive Anthony Levandowski downloaded over 14,000 confidential documents before leaving the company to join Uber. Waymo said Uber benefited from those documents and has sued for damages and to stop Uber from using the technology Levandowski allegedly stole.
Levandowski is one of the most experienced self-driving car engineers in Silicon Valley, and the loss of his expertise would be a major blow to Uber, which has said autonomous vehicles are crucial to future growth.
Crucial enough to steal?
IS THERE ANYTHING HE CAN’T DO? George Washington Law School Applications Jump 9%, Thanks To A ‘Trump Bump’?
PUNCHING BACK TWICE AS HARD: Freedom Watch files ethics complaint against Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA). He must recuse himself immediately. The precedent has already been set. This investigation is too important to be sullied with the involvement of members with an ethics complaint hanging over their heads.
ROGER SIMON: Trump Schools Obama and Democrats with Attack on Assad.
If history is any indication, the spin from the left as this plays out will be astonishing to watch, as these flashbacks from 2013 and the late 1990s illustrate:
FIRST WE TAKE MANHATTAN, THEN WE TAKE SYRIA.
Click on the link to watch the brief video, which I wasn’t able to upload. To be fair, it is a pretty awesome song, with a bitchin’ Stevie Ray Vaughn guitar solo, but the above clip doesn’t do much to repair Williams’ lost, imagined gravitas.
April 6, 2017
ELIMINATIONIST RHETORIC: ‘How dare you work on whites’: Professors under fire for research on white mortality.
Tell those hate-filled racist bigots to buzz off. America doesn’t need their kind.
CINCINNATI LAW UPDATE: Mark Barnes, who was at Yale Law with me, thinks Cincinnati law dean Jennifer Bard deserves the benefit of the doubt: “As far as I know, this situation is what it appears to be – there is a faculty contingent there that wanted no reduction in its privileges and benefits. Jennifer is a great person – I had a death penalty case with her in Miami years ago – she did a great job and we got the sentence commuted to life, and then in the mid 1990s, she worked for me at AIDS Action Council in DC.”
She was two years behind me at Yale Law, but I don’t really remember her, so I have no personal observations to add.
AT AMAZON, Warehouse Deals in Home Improvement.
NO ONE TREATS WOMEN AS BADLY AS FEMINISTS TREAT WOMEN WHO DISAGREE WITH THEM ON, WELL, ANYTHING: Nikki Haley booed at Women in the World summit.
DICK CHENEY: America’s Dark Knight.
SO DEVIN NUNES’ RECUSAL WAS A BAD IDEA. My 1997 book (written with bigshot DC lawyer Peter Morgan), The Appearance of Impropriety: How the Ethics Wars Have Undermined American Government, Business, and Society, deals with how appearance ethics are manipulated — often by wrongdoers to punish those looking into wrongdoing. It is as timely now as it was 20 years ago, and pundits, attorneys, and members of the Administration would be well-advised to give it a read. (Bumped).
THAT ESCALATED QUICKLY: U.S. launches cruise missile strike on Syria after chemical weapons attack. On the one hand, that’s more than Obama did to enforce the “red line.” On the other hand, it’s rather a sharp turnabout for Trump, isn’t it?
On Facebook, a friend comments that half the point of this was doing it while the Chinese president was with him. And Richard Fernandez notes: “The bitter fruit of Obama’s war by executive order is now upon us. Whatever happened to Congress’ war powers?”
Neither Democrats nor Republicans would assert those powers under Obama. Who will do so now? But this does seem more like a continuation of Obama’s mideast policies than a reversal of them. Which, given how they turned out, isn’t promising.
UPDATE: Bibi was right, Obama was wrong: “Benjamin Netanyahu will never be popular in America’s major newsrooms. Or among most of the think-tankers who set the tone and parameters of foreign-policy debate. His name is a curse on college campuses. So it’s worth asking whose vision of the Middle East has held up better under the press of recent events.”
OF COURSE THEY ARE: Study: College No-Platform Protesters Are Mainly Rich and Privileged.
WE HAVE CAMPUS-CARRY LITE IN TENNESSEE (FACULTY-STAFF ONLY), AND IT’S GOING OKAY: Hundreds of Tennessee college employees carry guns on campus. “More than 500 college and university employees across the state are exercising their right to carry guns on public campuses since a new law allowing them to do so went into effect last July. Allowing employees to carry guns on campus has resulted in few, if any, problems on campuses, yet the possibility of expanding the law to part-time employees has raised concerns among college and university officials.” Well, everything raises concerns with them on this issue. They just hate the idea.
WELL, IF SHE IDENTIFIES AS A MERMAID, ONLY A BIGOT WOULD ARGUE WITH HER: Woman walking around naked claims she’s a mermaid.
A woman with webbed toes identified herself as a mermaid named Joanna after she was found mostly naked and walking along a dark road in the middle of the night in Fresno County.
The young brunette was wearing only a black sports bra and had wet hair when cops found her near Millterton Road and Brighton Crest Drive in Friant around 3:15 a.m. Tuesday, the Fresno Bee reported.
She told cops she was a mermaid who’d just been in the water. But she answered “I don’t know” to most of their questions.
“She was wet. She said she had been in the lake, said she needed help and needed to be taken to the hospital,” Fresno Police Lt. Mark Hudson told YourCentralValley.com. “We did go through records after fingerprinting her and we still did not come up with her identity.” . . .
“There are some strange things that happen up here,” said neighbor Karon Renwick. “We’re in the mountains.”
That’s where you usually look for mermaids, the mountains. There’s probably a BLUE HADES reference here somewhere.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Tomorrow is National Beer Day.
Act accordingly.
NUCLEAR THRESHOLD FLASHBACK:
THE STRANGE PERSISTENCE OF GUILT.
Chalk it up to Gramscian Damage and move on.