Category Archives: culture

Climate and Race

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From a piece quoted by What’s Up With That:

Police arrest seven of nine people chained to tripod on runway in protest against impact of air pollution on black people.

Flights have been cancelled at London’s City airport after nine protesters from Black Lives Matter UK got on to the runway and chained themselves together.

And [emphasis in the original]

The group issued a video that said the reason for the protest was that the climate crisis was a “racist crisis”.

The Black Lives Matter movement will manufacture a racism beef out of anything.  They’re projecting, again.

Obamatalk

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Here’s an example, through President Barack Obama’s (D) former advisor, Dan Pfeiffer, from a podcast he does with Jon Favreau, Obama’s former speech writer, via The Wall Street Journal‘s Notable & Quotable.

Pfeiffer: The press gets bored of writing the same story over and over again, and they almost start to feel guilty about writing s—ty stories about the same person all the time, and they want to do something different. So it’s a classic move to do two things: One, fire someone. Press doesn’t even care who, right?  …  “Huge problem in the VA, oh, someone got fired? OK, that’s fine then, we don’t worry about that anymore.”

Or, stand in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue, wave your arms in the air and say “we’re pivoting.” It’s a total bulls—t thing. You and I have been a part of many bulls—t pivots.

Remind you of anything?

Our Dishonest Department of Justice

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The Obama Department of Justice has been caught again.  This time, it advised the Supreme Court—13 years after the DoJ’s misbehavior—that it had lied made “several significant errors” in the 2003 case Demore v Kim, a case concerning excessive detention times for aliens with criminal records who were being held without bail.  DoJ had “mistakenly” argued at the time—and convinced the Supremes with the argument—that the detention periods involved were four months or less and so not excessive.  From this, the Supremes upheld a blanket policy of bail denial to immigrants jailed while appealing deportation orders.

DoJ’s lately confession admits that the detention periods actually were longer than 12 months.

And this incident:

In 2012, the Justice Department told the court that it had inaccurately asserted in a 2009 case, Nken v Holder, that officials routinely “facilitate” the return to the US of deported aliens who later win their immigration appeals.

It turns out that DoJ hardly lifts a finger to speed such returns.

Unfortunately,

In both instances, more accurate information emerged through Freedom of Information Act requests filed by immigrant advocates who were skeptical of the government’s claims.

Clearly, DoJ knew these things and have been trying to hide the fact of their “mistakes.”  They knew they were lying “providing inaccurate information” at the time; they deliberately withheld accurate information from the Supreme Court.  That’s why it took FOIA requests to expose these facts.

Recall, too, the DoJ having been caught out overtly and deliberately lying in another immigration case in 2015, and that judge ordered DoJ’s lawyers to undergo ethics training.  President Barack Obama’s (D) Attorney General Loretta Lynch has refused to have her lawyers undergo that training.

Of course she has.  Lying is too deeply embedded in the culture of the DoJ.

This is a mess, spanning administrations, and it can be cleaned up only with a wholesale removal of DoJ leadership down to middle management and the discharge of the lawyers ordered to undergo ethics training and who have not yet done so.  But that won’t happen in a potential Clinton administration led by a candidate who has promised to continue and extend Obama’s policies.

Free Speech and Disruptions

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Do high school football fans have a constitutional right to display the American flag at games?

That question headlined Jacob Gershman’s piece in a recent Wall Street Journal law blog.  A North Carolina high school principal, Travelers Rest High School’s Lou Lavely, answered that question in the negative, justifying his ban of the American flag from the school’s home football games with the excuse that students had

used the US flag, in conjunction with verbal taunts, to target Hispanic members of the Berea community in a manner that was both unsportsmanlike and also a misuse of our flag[.]

Lavely’s move also was consistent with an earlier 9th Circuit ruling on the other side of the country that

a California high school didn’t infringe on the constitutional rights of white students who were told they couldn’t wear shirts displaying the American flag in an effort, the school said, to defuse a potential fight with Mexican students

a ruling that the Supreme Court then declined to review.

In the face of public outrage over the flag ban, Lavely reversed his position and “allowed” our flag to be displayed after all.  However, that doesn’t cure the misunderstanding, both by Lavely and our courts, underlying such bans of our flag or of shirts with our flag imprinted on them or of any other such display.

The misunderstanding is in the cause of disruptions and how to deal with those disruptions.

Banning the American flag because its display might cause disruption is wrong-headed.  The American flag, or displaying our flag—free speech generally—doesn’t cause disruptions.  The disrupters cause disruptions, and they’re the ones who need to be dealt with.

Full stop.

Update: Clarified a sentence to say what I actually meant rather than the opposite.  Also clarified a later paragraph.

Speaking of Hiding Things

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From Rick Moran, of PJMedia, came this bit.  He quoted from The Daily Caller:

DCLeaks, a website that releases information on powerful political figures, has had its Twitter account suspended and part of its website taken offline after releasing a cache of documents on billionaire donor George Soros.

The website had previously released 2,500 internal Open Society Foundation (OSF) documents in order to “shed light on one of the most influential networks operating worldwide.” OSF is one of Soros’ networks of organizations.

Moran added his own critique to this:

This was a surgical operation, taking down one specific part of a website and leaning on Twitter to suspend the account. For someone with the resources of George Soros, it was a piece of cake.

Despite the fact that the documents leaked were sheer dynamite, there was a curious lack of, well, curiosity on the part of the media to dig into them.

Now we know why.

Indeed, but frankly, the press doesn’t need much persuasion from the Soroses of the world.  The press already is in the bag for Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and the stuff DCLeaks exposed would be very damaging to Clinton as well as to Soros’ OSF were the press to pursue these leads rather than spiking them.

The question remains, though: what is it that George Soros, funder of Progressives and Big Government Mavens, is trying to hide?