CIVIL RIGHTS COMMISSION HIT WITH FOIA SUIT: Writing at Liberty Unyielding, Hans Bader reports the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (CCR) resorted to a ridiculous justification for refusing to fulfill a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from the Bader Family Foundation.
The FOIA sought email records for a six-month period for two CCR members, Chairman Catherine Lhamon and Katherine Culliton-Gonzalez, the director of its Office of Civil Rights Evaluation. The CCR denied the request, claiming it “fails to describe the information sought.” Typical bureaucratic hair-splitting to avoid accountability and transparency.
Bader explains that “the commission claimed that ‘the request failed to ‘contain a sufficiently specific description of the record requested with respect to names, dates, and subject matter … as required by’ its FOIA regulation.’ But that regulation only requires a FOIA request to ‘contain a sufficiently specific description of the record requested with respect to names, dates, and subject matter to permit such record to be identified and located.'” [Italics added]
The emails could be extremely useful in determining whether Lhamon should be confirmed by the Senate after being nominated by President Joe Biden to be the next Director of the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.
That is one of those jobs in the federal bureaucracy that is obscure but tremendously powerful because if confirmed Lhamon would have tremendous power over the daily activities in America’s public school system classrooms. Bader quotes Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) saying “Ms. Lhamon has a history of using inflammatory rhetoric, violating students’ constitutionally based right to due process, and abusing regulatory power.”
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: MSM Aided and Abetted Biden’s Afghanistan Failure. “While this summer barbecue spat among loved ones has been fun to watch, we can’t let it distract us from the fact that the MSM has been almost criminally complicit in all of the damage that Joe Biden has done, is doing now, and most certainly will continue doing to this country.”
UH OH: The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is apparently being sued for “illegally refusing to comply with the Freedom of Information Act.” The plaintiff is seeking documents that arguably could relate to President Biden’s nomination of Catherine Lhamon to be Assistant Secretary of Education for Civil Rights. The Commission has allegedly been uncooperative.
(No, the lawsuit is not against me. Alas, I’m not exactly in charge at the Commission. I’m just one of eight commissioners.)
CHRISTIAN TOTO: Spike Lee: Oscar Winner, Fake News Spreader. “His new project, the four-part HBO docuseries ‘New York Epicenters: 9/11 – 2021 1/2,’ finds Lee giving airtime, and legitimacy, to 9/11 truthers. Even the liberal Slate called out both Lee and HBO for including the extensive material in the series.”
The little girl put her hands on my cheeks and turned my face toward hers. Looking directly into my eyes, she asked, “Will you be my daddy, too?”
Now I was on the verge of tears. I couldn’t say anything.
Seconds later the boy said, “Put me down now.” I complied, lowering both of them to the ground. They ran off to my left. I tried to refocus on the news conference, with difficulty.
Today, each of those children would be in their early 40s. What’s clear is that as small children, they didn’t care if the man holding them was white: They just wanted a daddy.
About 20 years later, while working with an attorney on a complex legal case’s public relations and communications issues, we got into a discussion about poverty. We agreed that data show children do better, even in poor families, when a mother and father are in the home.
I mentioned that in Tennessee, 62% of Black children were born to unwed mothers. The attorney, a political liberal, said that such a number couldn’t be true, and that I was sharing false information. I got on my computer, conducted a search, and said she was right: In Tennessee, it wasn’t 62%; instead, it was (at that time) 72%.
The percentage of unwed births among white women is growing as well. The Philadelphia Inquirer explored the subject in 2018, beginning its report with, “Rate of births to white single moms accelerates; Research shows that while unwed motherhood contributes to poverty, poverty itself is a cause of unwed motherhood.”
Several years ago, when working on communications projects at a large organization, I asked a young white woman about her goals, and her answer was that she planned to get pregnant, seek a public housing apartment, and collect welfare payments. Sometime later, noticing she was no longer at the organization, I asked where she’d gone, and was told she’d fulfilled her ambition.
It’s always “sharing false information” if it’s something they don’t want to hear.
It would be easy to attribute the disaster of leaving Afghanistan, both human and strategic, to the incompetence of President Biden and his administration. After all, human incompetence normally explains a lot. But the affairs of a great nation like ours and its military are not the work of one man. There are generals, well-credentialed foreign policy experts, and senior intelligence officials who have devised how best to leave Afghanistan in order to achieve certain strategic and political objectives. The notion that there was a single incompetent decision made to abandon Afghanistan defies both logic and common sense. It was a matter of high government policy that the United States depart Afghanistan, abandon military equipment, and leave both Americans and our allies to the tender mercies of the radical Islamic Taliban.
The exit from Afghanistan, then, appears designed to accomplish two things: first, to demoralize the American military and the American people. Over 22,000 American service personnel have been killed or injured in Afghanistan. Every American knows someone who served there. Knowing full well that the Afghan military would not defend the country, there could be little doubt that the United States was turning the country over to the Taliban. Moreover, the US did so with the appearance of being run out of the country in shame and defeat. One can only assume this was meant to demonstrate to American servicemen that their sacrifice had been in vain, and to the American people that our cause of defending America from the scourge of radical Islam was not just.
How else are sensible people to view the footage of killings, chaos, desperation, harassment, and contempt for the US and our citizens in Kabul? Taken together these images are far more effective tools of propaganda than nearly anything Al-Qaeda and ISIS has employed over the past two decades. Their message is clear: America is weak and resistance to Islam is futile. That is the lesson the Biden Administration has made possible. It is one for which radicals such as Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar have signaled their approval throughout their tenure in Congress.
The second purpose of the Afghan debacle was to signal to the world that the United States has no interest in defending a liberal world order and that from here on out we will not defend either human freedom or our own self-interest, however bizarre that may sound. Even the most serious isolationist would not have left Afghanistan the way we have. A minimum requirement would be to preserve the prestige and credibility of the United States with our allies and to ensure that our enemies would not be emboldened by our fecklessness.
Which makes a grimly appropriate sequel to his former boss: As Bill McGurn noted in the Wall Street Journal on the day of Obama’s inauguration in 2009, “Bush’s Real Sin Was Winning in Iraq.” To the point where shortly thereafter, Obama and Biden were bragging about what a success Iraq was, before, as Dexter Filkins of the New Yorker noted, Obama unilaterally withdrew all American troops for a reelection talking point, thus throwing it all away and giving rise to ISIS.
This is now the third time over the last half century we’ve seen this movie, and Biden has been in DC throughout it all:
Classy stuff. Given the media’s vaunted layers and layers of fact-checkers and editors, I assume a senior editor at the Pensacola News Journal signed off on this cartoon. As Pushaw notes, “So-called feminist liberal men are, in fact, the most sexist and misogynistic of all. [Marlette] is a prime example.”
UPDATE: Gannett says political cartoon of DeSantis press secretary ‘being reviewed’ after critics accuse it of sexism. “‘The fact that Andy Marlette is employed by a Gannett company while Dr. Seuss has been canceled is a vivid illustration of the Left’s double standard,’ Pushaw told Fox News. ‘Will Gannett make an exception to its anti-bigotry stance for Andy Marlette because he hates Governor DeSantis? Consequence culture. They wanted it,’ Pushaw added.”
Since Engel can’t blame the Afghanistan debacle on the Bad Orange Republican Man, it’s a collective shame. (See also: response from American leftists over Roosevelt’s decision to intern Japanese-Americans during World War II.)
But does Engel view America’s humiliation on the world stage as a bad thing? Flashback to 2003: “In that April 12 CyberAlert I astutely observed that ‘Engel may be the only non-Arab reporter in Baghdad to have managed to find both universal love for Saddam Hussein up until early this week [when Baghdad fell] and universal hatred of the U.S. since his regime fell.’”
Actually, what it’s missing are successful launches to orbit. It’s also getting some slopover from Jeff Bezos’ bad publicity regarding his marriage and business behavior, but the real problem is that there are no real achievements to offset that. And substituting lawfare for hardware hasn’t done anything for its reputation.
