OF COURSE — DOUBLEPLUS UNGOOD CRIMETHINK ALWAYS LEADS STRAIGHT TO THE MINISTRY OF LOVE, COMRADE! Proposed California Bill: One Year in Jail for Using Wrong Transgender Pronoun.
Archive for 2017
August 18, 2017
“THERE’S A REASON STEVE BANNON LOVES THIS ISSUE:” Poll: Strong majority opposes removing Confederate monuments.
IT’S ALMOST LIKE THEY’RE MORE FASCIST THAN “ANTI-FASCIST:” Jake Tapper: Antifa protesters have attacked several journalists.
Note that although the Tea Party movement was treated much worse by mainstream media than Antifa has been, Tea Partiers never physically attacked journalists, or anyone. Note also that this didn’t get the Tea Party any credit, or even spare it from being compared to Nazis and the Klan.
MATTHEW CONTINETTI: America’s new, combustible four-party system.
Trump’s emphasis on social issues broadly construed—on abortion, guns, judges, crime, drugs, immigration, terrorism—and his rejection of orthodox GOP support for free trade and entitlement reform transformed the Republican makeup. What Drutman describes as a “split in the Republican Party between populists and conservatives” can also be interpreted as a division between the party of Trump and the Grand Old Party. The two parties may agree on some issues, but they differ in tone and outlook and on crucial policy questions. It is difficult for them to function as a coalition government. Trump’s health care reform is stalled in Congress, his tax reform is inchoate, and his infrastructure plan is nonexistent. The two parties are able to unite against the left, but have trouble finding common legislative ground.
Making things more complicated is the fact that there are more than these two parties. Drutman also found divisions within the Democrats. “To the extent that the Democratic Party is divided, these divisions are more about faith in the political system and general disaffection than they are about issue positions.” The Democratic Party of Barack Obama and Bill and Hillary Clinton is satisfied with the status quo, and uses identity politics as a veneer for economic policies that benefit Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and multinational corporations. What we might call the party of Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, is both more radical on questions of political correctness and identity and hostile to the established order. The party of Sanders wants radical change. Beginning with Medicare for all.
Recent events have brought to light the distinction between the party of Trump and the GOP. But it would be foolish for Democrats to believe that they are out of the woods, that America has settled, for the moment, on a three-party system. What we have are four parties: The mainstream Republicans, the party of Trump, the mainstream Democrats, and the party of Sanders.
The old two-party system had failed — failed to pursue its constituents’ interests, failed at basic governance, and worst of all, failed to protect America’s institutions, both formal and informal. “Worst political class ever,” as Glenn as noted here more than once.
So the current mess might not be an improvement (at least not yet), but it was certainly inevitable. And it will likely be years before the dust settles — if then.
QUESTIONS NOBODY IS ASKING. Wolf Blitzer: People will ask, was the Barcelona terror attack a copycat of Charlottesville?
As Allahpundit writes, “after eight jihadi car-ramming terror attacks this year alone, I think it’s more likely people will ask whether Wolf ate paint chips as a kid.”
FOLLOW-UP: U.S. Hiding Key Details of Mystery Attacks on American Diplomats in Cuba.
U.S. officials disclosed earlier this month that six Americans were struck by a mystery illness believed to be caused by a covert sonic device in what many think was a clandestine operation targeting U.S. personnel stationed in the communist country.
The number of Americans impacted is greater than previously disclosed, according to multiple U.S. officials who told the Free Beacon that those suffering from symptoms of sonic damage appears to be more than 10.
“It’s definitely in the double digits,” one source told the Free Beacon.
The mysterious incident has roiled the relationship between the United States and Cuba and has raised more questions than answers in Congress, where lawmakers are finding their inquiries about the situation stymied.
Why is the Trump Administration continuing the Obama Administration’s stonewalling?
NOAM CHOMSKY: Antifa is a ‘major gift to the Right.’
UPDATE: China and India are dangerously close to military conflict in the Himalayas.
For the past two months, Indian and Chinese troops have faced off on a plateau in the Himalayas in tense proximity, in a dispute prompted by moves by the Chinese military to build a road into territory claimed by India’s close ally, Bhutan.
India has suggested that both sides withdraw, and its foreign minister said in Parliament that the dispute can be resolved only by dialogue.
Yet China has vociferously defended the right it claims to build a road in the Doklam area, territory it also claims.
Since the dispute began, the Chinese Foreign Ministry has issued an angry stream of almost daily denunciations of India and its “illegal trespass” and “recklessness,” along with demands that New Delhi withdraw its troops “if it cherishes peace.”
WEDNESDAY: “This week’s scuffle might just be a preview of a bigger and badder sequel to the ’62 war.”
EUGENE VOLOKH: Can private employers fire employees for going to a white supremacist rally?
A substantial minority of states, though, do ban discrimination based on political activity, especially off-the-job political activity; some cities and counties do as well. I cataloged them in 2012 in my article “Private Employees’ Speech and Political Activity: Statutory Protection Against Employer Retaliation“; since then, Utah has enacted a similar statute as well.
a. Some statutes ban employers from firing employees for “political activity,” including ideological advocacy generally and not just election-related politics. California, Colorado, Louisiana, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, South Carolina, Utah and West Virginia seem to fall in this category; there are similar ordinances in Seattle and Madison, and a New Mexico statute may also fit here, though it’s a bit more ambiguous.
b. Connecticut protects employees from retaliation for their speech more broadly.
c. Colorado and North Dakota ban employers from firing employees for any off-duty lawful activity; that would cover speech as well.
Even “at will” states are not always truly “at will.”
Ironically, of course, these protections were mostly put into place by lefties.
LINK-O-RAMA: Liz Sheld’s Friday morning brief is short but data-packed.
Plus, Latest Updates on the Barcelona Terror Attack from Patrick Poole.
FIRST AMENDMENT ICON BURT NEUBORNE: From cross burning to funeral protests, hate speech enjoys broad protection.
The First Amendment, the justices have said, protected a Ku Klux Klan member decrying Jews and blacks in Ohio in 1969. It protected neo-Nazis seeking to march through heavily Jewish Skokie, Ill., in 1977. It protected a U.S. flag burner from Texas in 1989, three cross burners from Virginia in 2003 and homophobic funeral protesters in 2011.
Just two months ago, the high court ruled unanimously that even derogatory trademarks deserve First Amendment protection — a victory for an Asian-American rock band dubbed The Slants as well as the Washington Redskins.
You wouldn’t know it from the public condemnation that has followed the events in Charlottesville, which led to the death of a 32-year-old female counter-protester and two state troopers.
Faced with the racist and anti-Semitic speeches and symbols of the marchers, the violence that resulted and President Trump’s equivocal denunciation of “all sides,” Republican as well as Democratic officials have said the groups should not be welcomed anywhere.
Ah, but they are — by virtue of Supreme Court precedent.
“I don’t quarrel with the president’s recognition that people had a right to march,” said Burt Neuborne, a professor of civil liberties at New York University School of Law who represented Ku Klux Klan members and others as an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer. “This is a time to distinguish legal rights from moral condemnation.”
Indeed.
SPACE TO DESTROY, THE FINAL FRONTIER: Here’s A List Of All The Monuments Liberals Want To Tear Down So Far.
You’re gonna need a bigger blog.
Related: “CNN posted a map on August 17 showing the location of approximately 1,500 Confederate monuments and/or official symbols in the U.S. The map will, no-doubt, serve as a hit-list for the frenzied Workers World Party members and others seeking the removal and destruction of Confederate statues in city after city across America.”
HAVE YOU HUGGED A FRACKER TODAY? OPEC’s Oil-Glut Fight Could Last Years.
The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and its partners plan to wrap up their production cuts next spring, already nine months later than originally expected. Yet oil prices are faltering again as data from the International Energy Agency show world inventories could remain oversupplied even after the end of 2018. ESAI Energy LLC predicts that, rather than months, draining the surplus may take years.
“They’re going to have to dig in for the long haul,” Neil Atkinson, head of the IEA’s oil markets and industry division, said in a Bloomberg television interview. “Re-balancing is a stubborn process.”
Have they factored in the cheating?
WITH THE ACADEMIC YEAR BEGINNING, IT’S A GOOD TIME TO REVISIT THIS EXCELLENT PIECE FROM HEATHER GERKEN: Dean of Yale Law School: Campus Free Speech Is Not Up for Debate.
In this, the summer of our discontent, many college presidents are breathing a sigh of relief that they made it through a politically fraught spring without their campuses erupting. Nobody wants to be the next Middlebury or Claremont McKenna, where demonstrations disrupted controversial speakers.
Law deans, in sharp contrast, have reason to be cheery. Their campuses have been largely exempt from ugly free-speech incidents like these. Charles Murray, the controversial scholar whose speech drew violent reaction at Middlebury, has spoken at Yale Law School twice during the past few years. Students and faculty engaged with him, and students held a separate event to protest and discuss the implications of his work. But he spoke without interruption. That’s exactly how a university is supposed to work.
There may be a reason why law students haven’t resorted to the extreme tactics we’ve seen on college campuses: their training. Law school conditions you to know the difference between righteousness and self-righteousness. That’s why lawyers know how to go to war without turning the other side into an enemy. People love to tell lawyer jokes, but maybe it’s time for the rest of the country to take a lesson from the profession they love to hate.
In law schools we don’t just teach our students to know the weaknesses in their own arguments. We demand that they imaginatively and sympathetically reconstruct the best argument on the other side. From the first day in class, students must defend an argument they don’t believe or pretend to be a judge whose values they dislike. Every professor I know assigns cases that vindicate the side she favors–then brutally dismantles their reasoning. Lawyers learn to see the world as their opponents do, and nothing is more humbling than that. We teach students that even the grandest principles have limits. The day you really become a lawyer is the day you realize that the law doesn’t–and shouldn’t–match everything you believe. The litigation system is premised on the hope that truth will emerge if we ensure that everyone has a chance to have her say.
The rituals of respect shown inside and outside the courtroom come from this training. Those rituals are so powerful that they can trump even the deepest divides. As Kenneth Mack recounts in his book Representing the Race: The Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer, Thurgood Marshall was able to do things in court that a black man could never do in any other forum, like subjecting a white woman to cross-examination. Marshall was able to practice even in small, segregated towns in rural Maryland during the early days of the civil rights movement. The reason was simple: despite their bigotry, members of the Maryland bar had decided to treat Marshall as a lawyer, first and foremost.
She makes excellent points, though I wonder if a contemporary equivalent of Marshall would do as well today, when the personal is political and when “protesters” scrawl “Fuck Law” on the Lincoln Memorial. Marshall, after all, benefited from the bourgeois conventions of dignity that a latter generation of activists rejected.
IF IT’S A CHOICE BETWEEN POLITICAL EXPEDIENCE AND ITS CORE MISSION, I EXPECT THE ACLU TO PICK THE FORMER: Odd statement from the ACLU: ‘White Supremacist Violence is Not Free Speech.’ They’re going to take the position that some speech is so inflammatory it counts as violence. Because ultimately they’re driven by their wealthy Democrat donor base.
I’d like to be wrong about this, but I don’t think I am. I’ve seen one institution after another abandon its stated purpose and mission to support the party line.
LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: Venezuela’s Maduro Regime Steps Up Crackdown on Dissidents.
The raid came just as a so-called truth commission established by the constituyente announced investigations into Julio Borges, president of the opposition-controlled National Assembly, and Freddy Guevara, the assembly’s vice president, claiming that they promoted violent anti-government protests that have left more than 100 dead.
The campaign of repression is already well advanced. The Venezuelan chapter of Transparency International says that 40 of 77 opposition mayors have been threatened or punished by the government since 2013, with some removed and jailed, some having their powers curtailed and some barred from leaving the country.
“This is an atrocity,” said Ramon Muchacho, the former mayor of the Chacao district in Caracas, an opposition hotbed, who has fled to Miami. “The truth commission is little more than a firing squad.”
“Unexpectedly” now feels far too flip for stories coming out of Venezuela.
ENFORCING THE LAW? JUST A PASSING FAD: ‘Not One More Dollar’ for Immigration ‘Enforcement Craze,’ Gutierrez Vows.
BYRON YORK: Measuring, and mismeasuring, the Trump conundrum.
Perhaps the most astonishing thing about Donald Trump’s victory last November was that, according to exit polls, 60 percent of the voters had an unfavorable impression of Trump on the day he was elected president of the United States.
Now, it’s remarkable that after all that has happened, Trump’s favorable and unfavorable rating — not his job approval, but whether people hold a favorable or unfavorable view of him — is virtually the same as it was on election day.
A new Marist poll, released Wednesday, found that 60 percent of those surveyed have an unfavorable view of the president, versus 34 percent who have a favorable view and six percent who don’t know.
In the RealClearPolitics average of all polls on the favorable/unfavorable question, Trump is now at 55.6 percent unfavorable versus 39.0 percent favorable. That is little changed from his average on Nov. 8: 58.5 percent unfavorable, versus 37.5 percent favorable. Among the unfavorables, that is just 1.5 points difference from then to now; among the favorables, 2.9 points.
Considering all that has gone on in the Trump presidency — it’s too much to recount in a sentence or two — the stability of the Trump favorable/unfavorable rating is notable.
It’s almost as if people have tuned out the media chatter.
Meanwhile, if you care about making a difference in politics, you should focus on the 2018 elections and ignore the daily drama around Trump.
MARCO, POSING:Moral Courage and Moral Arbitrage.
AND VIOLENCE IS NOT SPEECH: Words Aren’t Violence.
IF THEY DON’T DESTROY ALL PAST ICONS, HOW CAN THE POOR SHRIVELED LITTLE THINGS SHINE? Social Justice Warriors Go After Elvis Presley, Forty Years After His Death.
IT’S TIME TO STOP THE NONSENSE:VICE Magazine Tweet Calls for Blowing Up Mount Rushmore.