THE SOFT BIGOTRY OF LOW EXPECTATIONS: The Shameful Character Assassination of Trayon White. This “shameful character assassination,” mind you, consists of calling out an anti-Semitic member of the D.C. City Council who happens to be African American. There’s certainly an argument for presuming ignorance rather than malice when someone says something as stupid as “the Rothchilds control the weather,” but not based on the race of the speaker.

NEW YORK TIMES CALLS THE TRUTH “FAR-RIGHT CONSPIRACY PROGRAMMING.” Leil Leibovitz in The Tablet:

On Saturday, Nellie Bowles, a technology reporter for The New York Times, wrote a piece about Campbell Brown, the former news anchor recently hired by Facebook to help the social media giant improve its relationship with the news media. One obvious problem is Facebook’s contribution to the dissemination of fake news, which Brown is now fighting. How? Let the Paper of Record tell you all about it.

“Ms. Brown,” wrote Bowles, “wants to use Facebook’s existing Watch product — a service introduced in 2017 as a premium product with more curation that has nonetheless been flooded with far-right conspiracy programming like ‘Palestinians Pay $400 million Pensions For Terrorist Families.’”

As those of us who are in the reality based community know, the Palestinian Authority’s financial support of terrorists and their families is very, very far from a conspiracy, far-right or otherwise. Reading Bowles’s report, for example, Lahav Harkov, the Knesset reporter for The Jerusalem Post, took to Twitter to share some of her meticulous reporting on the Palestinian pay-for-slay program with Bowles: Read the real news, and you’ll learn that, in 2017, the PA doled out more than $347 million to families of terrorists who had murdered Jews, increasing the amount to $403 million this year.

REVISITING 2016 MEDIA BIAS: With the elite media increasingly suggesting that they were too harsh on Clinton and not hostile enough to Trump in 2016, it’s perhaps time to revisit just how biased elite media outlets were in 2016. Consider, for example, this NPR interview with the executive editor of the New York Times, Dean Baquet. Baquet explains why the newspaper decided to use the word “lie” when referring to what seems like ordinary campaign obfuscation: “I think the moment for me was the birther story, where he has repeated for years his belief that President Obama was not born in the United States.” This, for some reason, justifies using the word “lie” more generally with regard to Trump and his campaign, but not with regard to any false statements by Clinton: “I don’t think Hillary Clinton, to be honest, has crossed the line the way Donald Trump did with the birther issue.” Thus, in NewYorkTimesworld Clinton merely obfuscates and exaggerates, while Trump lies. You can’t make this stuff up.

My guess is that Clinton lost far more votes because they resented the elites were shoving Clinton down their throats than because of the “Russian interference” the elites now want to blame for Clinton’s defeat. The response, apparently, is for the elite media to double-down on its strategy of overtly favoring whomever runs against Trump, which, I suspect, is how we get more Trump in 2020.

STOCKHOLM SYNDROME?: CUNY Law Fed Soc co-president: Disruption of Blackman can be a “learning moment”

NOT THE ONION: Democratic Party files suit alleging Russia, the Trump campaign, and WikiLeaks conspired to disrupt the 2016 election. Someone must think this is good for fundraising.

IF YOU DON’T LIKE BIG MONEY IN POLITICS THEN YOU SHOULD OPPOSE BIG GOVERNMENT IN OUR LIVES: Judge James Ho of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, a Trump appointee:

To be sure, many Americans of good faith bemoan the amount of money spent on campaign contributions and political speech. But if you don’t like big money in politics, then you should oppose big government in our lives. Because the former is a necessary consequence of the latter. When government grows larger, when regulators pick more and more economic winners and losers, participation in the political process ceases to be merely a citizen’s prerogative—it becomes a human necessity. This is the inevitable result of a government that would be unrecognizable to our Founders. See, e.g., NFIB v. Sebelius, 567 U.S. 519 (2012).

So if there is too much money in politics, it’s because there’s too much government. The size and scope of government makes such spending essential. See, e.g., EMILY’s List v. FEC, 581 F.3d 1, 33 (D.C. Cir. 2009) (Brown, J., concurring) (“The more power is at stake, the more money will be used to shield, deflect, or co-opt it. So long as the government can take and redistribute a man’s livelihood, there will always be money in politics.”).

But whatever size government we choose, the Constitution requires that it comply with our cherished First Amendment right to speak and to participate in our own governance. If we’re going to ask taxpayers to devote a substantial percentage of their hard-earned income to fund the innumerable activities of federal, state, and local government, we should at the very least allow citizens to spend a fraction of that amount to speak out about how the government should spend their money.

H/T Josh Blackman via Twitter

DON’T FLY SUN COUNTRY: Sun Country Airlines Strands Hundreds of Passengers in Mexico.

Gary Leff: “The airline acknowledged that no one was staffing the airline’s counters and that phone lines were just disconnecting callers because of volume. And they say they hope providing a refund for the cancelled flight ‘will more than compensate for the cost of making alternative arrangements home.’… However they should have chartered a plane. Or they should have covered the cost of each passenger’s tickets home on another carrier. Without interline agreements that means they’d be paying retail. The airline took money and agreed to provide transportation, not strand passengers.”

CUNY LAW SCHOOL NEEDS TO FIRE ITS DEAN: Inside Higher Ed reports that there will be no sanctions, nor even an investigation, of the students who disrupted Josh Blackman’s talk:

Via email on Sunday, Mary Lu Bilek, dean of the law school, said that the protest was reasonable because the disruptions ended relatively early in the time frame of the appearance.

“For the first eight minutes of the 70-minute event, the protesting students voiced their disagreements. The speaker engaged with them. The protesting students then filed out of the room, and the event proceeded to its conclusion without incident,” Bilek said.

“This non-violent, limited protest was a reasonable exercise of protected free speech, and it did not violate any university policy,” she added. “CUNY Law students are encouraged to develop their own perspectives on the law in order to be prepared to confront our most difficult legal and social issues as lawyers promoting the values of fairness, justice, and equality.”

Some free-speech provocateurs should consider disrupting the first eight minutes of each of CUNY law school’s classes this week, including by forcing the professor to run a gauntlet of protesters threatening to block entry into their classrooms. After all, we now know that the law school’s official position is that eight minutes of disruption is “a reasonable exercise of free speech.” Meanwhile, Dean Bilek should be fired, and the Department of Education should investigate whether CUNY, a public institution, is violating the First Amendment rights of its guest speakers and students by giving disrupting students carte blanche, at least for eight minutes. The joke is that Dean Bilek is an ABA site visit team member, helping determine whether other law schools should get or keep the necessary accreditation, something she clearly is not competent to do.

Note that I’m not advocating any particular punishment of the students. But surely it can’t be consistent with free speech and university policy to disrupt a speaker. Indeed, that was the law school’s position before the talk. As IHE reports: “The law school sent a campuswide email stating that Blackman had a right to speak, and that protests were welcome, but not if they disrupted his appearance. At the beginning of his lecture, a law school official came to the event, repeated that message and then left.”

UPDATE: Let’s take a look at page 85 of the law school’s student handbook: “II. Rules of the university (1-11) and law school (12). 1. A member of the academic community shall not intentionally obstruct and/or forcibly prevent others from the exercise of their rights. Nor shall she/he interfere with the institution’s educational process or facilities, or the rights
of those who wish to avail themselves of any of the institution’s instructional, personal, administrative, recreational, and community services.” Also this: “5. Each member of the academic community or an invited guest has the right to advocate his position without having to fear abuse—physical, verbal, or otherwise from others supporting conflicting points of view.” The disruption didn’t violate any university policy, Dean Bilek? Have your read the student handbook?

SENTENCE FIRST, TRIAL AFTERWARDS: Linda Greenhouse on the recently-deceased Judge Stephen Reinhardt: “Doctrinal purity mattered less to him than extracting even the most gossamer claim to a favorable result.” Greenhouse comes not to bury Reinhardt, but to praise him, but I don’t find the notion that judges should reason backward from the result they want generally praiseworthy. I don’t think Greenhouse would, either, if it had been a conservative doing so.

IRAN IS ON THE BRINK OF HYPERINFLATION: The Iranian rial is in free fall. Still seem like a good idea for President Obama to provide the regime with hard currency that will help it weather a crisis? Did it ever?

NLPD: NON-LIBERTARIAN POLICE DEPARTMENT: Enjoy that New Yorker parody of hypothetical libertarian policing from a few years ago, that’s once again making the rounds of social media? Consider the absurdities of actual non-libertarian policing, which aren’t very funny.

THE MOST USEFUL LAW SCHOOL RANKINGS FOR PROSPECTIVE LAW STUDENTS: The 2018 Revealed-Preferences Ranking of Law Schools

As I noted way back in 2004: A huge amount of information is encapsulated in the actual revealed preferences of students who decide to attend or not to attend a law school, because most of these students will have done some research before choosing a school. Such information includes desirability of geographic location (clearly a big factor if one compares, e.g., U.S. News rankings to LSAT rankings), local reputation, job placement, quality of life, tuition costs, bar passage, faculty quality and commitment to teaching, student satisfaction, national reputation, and, of course, U.S. News ranking.

A notable winner in this rankings system is Brigham Young University, which takes the 18th spot, as opposed to being tied for 41st in U.S. News. A notable loser is Washington & Lee, which falls from 26th in U.S. News to 55th in revealed preference.

ONE OF MANY REASONS ERIC HOLDER SHOULD NOT BE PRESIDENT: Flashback: Eric Holder defends using Justice Department airplane for 27 personal trips

WHAT TRUMP LEARNED FROM OBAMA: President Obama embraced base-first politics. President Trump is taking a page from his predecessor’s playbook. One strange phenomenon of the Obama years is my progressive friends insisting, to this day, that Obama, who oozed (admitted generally polite) supercilious contempt for anyone to his right, bent over backwards to accommodate Republicans. If you know people like that, send them this article

REGARDLESS OF TRUMP, LIBERALISM IS IN TROUBLE: After noting that the liberalism of the rule of law and skepticism of government power and foreign adventurism and so forth was abandoned during the Obama years, Oliver Traldi writes: “Perhaps the most interesting dynamic post-Trump is that there has been no reassessment this time. Instead, there’s been an acceleration. Just as a terrorist attack can be spun to support counterterrorism policy — it’s not that the policy didn’t work; it’s that we need more of it! — the 2016 election seems to have proven to liberals not that their shift in principles was wrong, but that they didn’t shift enough, because they didn’t realize just how powerful the hateful, mystical forces arrayed against them really were.”

I have seen virtually no soul-searching among progressives about what they might have done differently that might have prevented the Trump counter-reaction. Instead, it’s all about how to seize power back and crush the enemy.

WE DON’T HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT HILLARY BECOMING PRESIDENT IN 2020:

AN OFFER TO DUKE UNIVERSITY HISTORIAN NANCY MACLEAN: I’m not exactly holding my breath waiting for her to take me up on this offer, but maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised.

MUELLER’S FORTHCOMING ASSAULT ON THE SEPARATION OF POWERS? Bloomberg: “When it comes to the obstruction portion of the investigation, Mueller is said to be focused on three main episodes: Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey last May; the drafting of a misleading statement about the purpose of a June 2016 meeting between Don Jr., Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and a group of Russians at Trump Tower; and the disclosure that Trump considered firing Mueller last June.”

The first and third of these are part of the Executive’s constitutional authority to hire and fire whomever he wants who works for him. It’s hard to imagine that the Supreme Court would ultimately uphold obstruction of justice charges against a president for firing his underlings, unless perhaps the president knew that the individual in question was literally just about to indict him. The view of the executive branch that Comey seems to be operating under, that the FBI director and special prosecutor are not the president’s agents but are instead somehow independent officials not subject to presidential authority is quite wrong, constitutionally.

(Bumped, by Glenn).

I’M GLAD PERSIAN JEWS DID MORE THAN BAKE COOKIES: The Jewish holiday of Purim starts next Wednesday. According to the Book of Esther, the evil Haman persuaded the Persian king to allow him to murder the Jews of the Persian empire, with the Jews not allowed to defend themselves. Thanks to the heroic intervention of Mordechai and Esther, the King issued a new order permitting self-defense, and the Jews slew seventy-five thousand of those who had planned to kill them.

The actual Purim story apparently didn’t make much of an impression on one young woman, the daughter of a liberal Congressman, who is organizing people to sell traditional Purim cookies called Hamantaschen to raise money for gun control: “I think it’s a holiday that within the Jewish world, at least within more liberal Jewish circles, people take a lot of messages of social justice from, so I think with that in mind it made sense to use it,” she said.

It’s both sad and infuriating to see a three thousand year old religious tradition consistently reduced to “supports whatever the SJW cause of the moment is.” Raise money for gun control if that’s what floats your boat, but leave Purim out of it, ok?

IT’S COME TO THIS: Washington Post opinion piece defends Peron, compares him favorably to Trump, because “Peronism led a process of expanding economic equality, collective organization and political enfranchisement. Trumpism, by contrast, builds upon American tendencies toward inequality, individualism and political disengagement.” Left-wing fascism, in other words, is superior to American democracy. Breaking eggs to make omelettes and all that.

POWERLESS ON THE BENCH: A powerful speech by Kevin Sharp, a former federal district judge, who resigned from the bench because he could no longer be complicit in crazy jail sentences caused by a combination of Congressional malfeasance and prosecutorial overzealousness.

THE AL CAPONE’S VAULT OF AMERICAN HISTORY: “When people embarrass themselves, I tend to cringe and look away. I turn off talk radio when callers make a stupid point. I feel queasy when a colleague misspeaks in a public forum. And when reading Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains, which was one of five finalists for the National Book Award for nonfiction, I felt nauseated. I was embarrassed for the author, embarrassed for Duke University and MacLean’s colleagues in its history department, embarrassed for the liberal reviewers who lauded such obviously shoddy and dishonest work, and most of all embarrassed for the prestigious National Book Award for having given it their imprimatur…. Throughout Democracy in Chains I kept waiting for the big reveal that would show the secret details of Buchanan and Koch’s far right takeover—and was left disappointed. The book is the historian’s equivalent of Geraldo Rivera opening Al Capone’s vault.”

SINCE WHEN ARE LIBERTARIANS PRO-“TERROR” AND AGAINST “FAIR PLAY”?  How the Right Co-Opts Frederick Douglass.

Yale History Professor David Blight:

[Frederick] Douglass did preach self-reliance for his fellow blacks: He argued that the freed slaves should be given their rights, protected and then “let alone.” But he never employed that “let alone” dictum without also demanding “fair play,” and security against terror and discrimination. Conservatives have cherry-picked his words to advance their narrow visions of libertarianism.

Put this in the ongoing series of liberal academics who don’t understand libertarianism writing critiques of it. Among other things, Blight confuses “individualism,” i.e., favoring freedom of action for individuals over collective or state control, with being unconcerned with the welfare of the community. Hopefully, though, the op-ed will spark interest in Tim Sandefur’s new biography of Douglass, which inspired Blight’s rant.

ABOUT THAT LOGAN ACT: Kerry to Abbas Confidante: ‘Stay Strong and do not given in to Trump’. Remember how many progressives wanted to prosecute members of the Trump transition team under the Logan Act for warning U.S. allies that the U.S. would not look kindly upon them if they voted for a pending anti-Israel UN resolution? Strangely enough, those same progressives have been silent about Kerry’s much more egregious interference in U.S. foreign policy.

YOU CAN’T HAVE IT BOTH WAYS: Former acting AG Sally Yates criticizes Trump for referring to career Justice Department officials as the “Deep State” You can’t go around trying to organize anti-Trump “resistance” in the federal civil service–or in Yates’ case actually engaging in real resistance by refusing to carry out your duties when you disagree with the president–and then squawk when the president suggests that the civil service may not be exactly neutral on the issues of the day. Trump’s best allies are the Obama administration veterans who live up to all his worst rhetoric.

(Bumped, by Glenn).