- Those workers in Bar Harbor, Maine who were hired for tourism jobs because the H–2B foreign guest worker visa program hit its annual quota were just screwed over by the Trump administration — the Department of Homeland Security is issuing an additional 15,000 new H–2B visas. This happened on the same day that Donald Trump held a “Made in America” celebration at the White House. The administration could also be paying off Senator Thom Tillis, who was holding up a nominee over this issue.
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Senator Ted Cruz’s “Consumer Freedom Amendment” to the Senate’s health care bill was watered down to the point of uselessness when Mitch McConnell incorporated it into the bill (the “Better Care Reconciliation Act”), which prompted Mike Lee to publicly oppose the bill. Senator Jerry Moran also announced that he opposes the bill, which means McConnell doesn’t have the votes to pass it.
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Someone taped a note to Senator Dean Heller’s district office threatening his life if he votes for the Senate health care bill.
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Now would be a good time for Congressional Republicans to defund Planned Parenthood, independently of the Senate health care bill (which currently defunds Planned Parenthood for only a year).
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American intelligence sources told The Washington Post that the United Arab Emirates arranged for Qatari government news and social media sites to be hacked, where they posted false quotes attributed to Qatar’s emir.
Officials became aware last week that newly analyzed information gathered by U.S. intelligence agencies confirmed that on May 23, senior members of the UAE government discussed the plan and its implementation. The officials said it remains unclear whether the UAE carried out the hacks itself or contracted to have them done. The false reports said that the emir, among other things, had called Iran an “Islamic power” and praised Hamas.
The hacks and posting took place on May 24, shortly after President Trump completed a lengthy counterterrorism meeting with Persian Gulf leaders in neighboring Saudi Arabia and declared them unified.
Citing the emir’s reported comments, the Saudis, the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt immediately banned all Qatari media. They then broke relations with Qatar and declared a trade and diplomatic boycott, sending the region into a political and diplomatic tailspin that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has warned could undermine U.S. counterterrorism efforts against the Islamic State.
- Russia appears to have used a Bermuda-based shell company to transfer millions of dollars to anti-fracking activists in the U.S. They’re also using state-owned media company RT to accomplish the same ends: “The fracking revelations dovetail with a recently declassified report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that concluded that Russia’s state-owned media outlet Russia Today, or RT, also engaged in a vigorous anti-fracking campaign to benefit the leading Russian state-owned energy firm Gazprom.” The more successful American fracking companies are, the lower global natural gas prices, which is bad for Gazprom.
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Iran sentenced a Chinese-born American graduate student to 10 years in prison, accusing him of spying for the U.S. government. Xiyue Wang, a student at Princeton, was in Iran doing research for his Ph.D. dissertation.
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A U.S. district court judge held David Daleiden and his lawyers in contempt of court for releasing additional undercover Planned Parenthood videos. Daleiden’s lawyers argued that since the videos were entered into evidence in a separate criminal case against Daleiden, the judge in this case couldn’t block their release.
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A Minneapolis cop shot and killed an unarmed immigrant from Australia who reported suspicious noises near her home. The officer’s body camera was turned off at the time of the shooting.
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A Jordanian military court sentenced a soldier to life imprisonment with hard labor for killing three U.S. military trainers at the Jafr airbase in southern Jordan.
Jordanian authorities at first said the U.S. trainers were shot because they failed to stop their car as they drove up to the gate of a large air base.
Washington rejected that account and said it could not rule out a political motive for the killings, which occurred in November.
Jordan then changed its position and charged the soldier, Sergeant Marek Sami Salem, with premeditated murder. He had pleaded not guilty, the source said.
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Pakistan’s Supreme Court started hearings to decide the fate of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. An official investigation questioned the sources of Sharif’s wealth, and the Supreme Court could put Sharif on trial or disqualify him from office.
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Turkey’s government extended its state of emergency another three months. The state of emergency started a year ago, after the failed military coup.
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Fighters backed by Turkey attacked Syrian Democratic Forces troops in northern Syria.
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A roadside bomb in the Sinai Peninsula killed five Egyptian police officers. A second roadside bomb targeted the people who came to the rescue of the officers.
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Yazidis in northern Iraq now have a political party and are planning to run candidates in next year’s parliamentary elections.
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PragerU: The government can’t fix healthcare:
Tag: abortion
Links for 7-13-2017
- Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo died of liver cancer. U.S. Ambassador to China Terry Branstad said of Liu, “China has lost a deeply principled role model who deserved our respect and adulation, not the prison sentences to which he was subjected.” Liu’s friends and supporters are trying to prevent the Chinese government from dropping him down the memory hole. I’m betting on the government, since most people in China don’t know what happened in Tiananmen Square — the government is good at memory holes.
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Department of Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly told members of Congress that he couldn’t promise to defend DACA in court if Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sues to stop the program. Donald Trump told reporters he wants a “comprehensive immigration plan” but that the country isn’t ready for one.
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The editors at National Review wrote about Oregon’s new abortion bill:
Oregon may have one of the most liberal abortion regimes in the country — the state has no informed-consent laws, no waiting periods, and no parental-notification requirements for minors, and conducts virtually no supervision of abortion clinics — but even so, the new bill is radical. Almost every state accepts the consensus represented by the Hyde Amendment, the budget rider attached to federal spending that steers most taxpayer money away from funding abortion procedures: namely, that abortion is a uniquely sensitive issue, and no one should be coerced into supporting it against his or her conscience. Oregon’s bill is a middle finger to that longstanding consensus.
- A new law in Hawaii requires pro-life pregnancy centers to advertise free abortions at other facilities. California passed a similar law that’s been challenged in court.
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ABC News published a story calling Alliance Defending Freedom a “hate group.” ADL is demanding that ABC News retract the story and issue an apology.
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The U.S. State Department wants other countries to provide more information on visa applicants so it can better determine whether a traveler presents a terrorist threat.
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The Department of Justice charged 412 people with health care fraud costing $1.3 billion:
Facing charges are 412 people across 41 federal districts, who the DOJ alleges have extracted $1.3 billion in false billings through a variety of unconnected schemes. The defendants include 115 doctors, nurses, and other licensed medical professionals. HHS has also initiated suspension proceedings against 295 providers, including doctors, nurses, and pharmacists.
- The Trump administration opposes a Kurdish independence referendum, which is disappointing.
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The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and other newspapers are asking for an anti-trust exemption so they can bargain collectively with Facebook and Google:
As Stoll goes on to point out, it’s fairly well established court precedent that anti-trust laws (whether you approve of such laws or not) are in place to protect the consumer from runaway high prices which can spiral out of control in a marketplace with no competition. They aren’t there to protect one group of billionaires from the predatory moves of another group of billionaires competing against them.
- The National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities is giving millions in taxpayer dollars to nonprofit groups with more than $1 billion in assets.
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Two more power generating gas turbines appeared in Crimea in defiance of sanctions.
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A Russian court sentenced five people for murdering Boris Nemtsov, a prominent critic of Vladimir Putin, in 2015. The court sentenced the trigger man to 20 years and four accomplices to terms varying from 11 to 19 years.
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Someone who used to manage North Korea’s finances before escaping to South Korea and the U.S., Ri Jong Ho, explains why it’s difficult to financially isolate the North Korean regime:
He described being able to send millions of U.S. dollars to North Korea simply by handing a bag of cash to the captain of a ship leaving from the Chinese port city of Dalian, where he was based, to the North Korean port of Nampo, or by giving it to someone to take on the train across the border.
In first the nine months of 2014 — he defected in October that year — Ri said he sent about $10 million to Pyongyang this way.
Links for 7-12-2017
- Reuters interviewed Donald Trump and asked him about Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a Russian lawyer who promised dirt on Hillary Clinton. Trump said, “I think many people would have held that meeting.” The wrong sort of people would have held that meeting, which is the problem.
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The Associated Press believes Donald Trump has a made-up friend in Paris named Jim:
The way Trump tells it — Jim is a friend who loves Paris and used to visit every year. Yet when Trump travels to the city Thursday for his first time as president, it’s unlikely that Jim will tag along. Jim doesn’t go to Paris anymore. Trump says that’s because the city has been infiltrated by foreign extremists.
Whether Jim exists is unclear. Trump has never given his last name. The White House has not responded to a request for comment about who Jim is or whether he will be on the trip.
- The Senate parliamentarian ruled in Republicans’ favor on using reconciliation to pass the House’s ObamaCare “reform” bill.
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The State Department approved the sale of seven Patriot missile systems to Romania.
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Oregon’s legislature passed a bill making abortion free, both for residents and non-residents. Governor Kate Brown is expected to sign the bill — she’s a former abortion lobbyist.
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A Dallas County, Texas grand jury indicted Miguel Hernandez on a charge of illegal voting during May’s election:
He’s accused of visiting a woman in April and collecting her blank absentee ballot, then filling it out and forging her signature before mailing it to the county. Dozens of senior citizens in West Dallas and Grand Prairie filed complaints about receiving mail-in ballots they had not requested.
- Helen Raleigh explains why China’s government is afraid of dissident Liu Xiaobo even though he’s on his deathbed from liver cancer:
Since 1989, Chinese authorities have punished Liu for his various pro-democracy activities by putting him in prison several times. In 2008, modeled after Czechoslovakia’s Charter 77, Liu co-authored Charter 08, a manifesto calling for Chinese government to implement things Americans have taken for granted, such as freedom of expression, an independent judiciary, and freedom of association. Liu was promptly arrested and later sentenced to 11 years in prison. He has been in prison ever since.
What China didn’t expect was that its repression probably helped turn Liu into an internationally renowned political activist. In 2010, Norway’s Nobel committee awarded Liu the Nobel Peace Prize. Beijing was so furious, it froze diplomatic ties with Norway and heavily censored any Nobel-related news that year.
Liu was the first Chinese citizen to win a Nobel Prize, but he wasn’t allowed to claim it and his wife has since been put under house arrest. The picture of an empty chair representing him at the Nobel Prize ceremony is as iconic an image as the photo of the “tank man.” Both symbolize the Chinese people’s struggle for freedom.
Later:
The news of Liu’s illness has renewed people’s interest in him and brought back discussions of his work, his struggle, and the part of China’s history that the government still eagerly suppresses. Liu’s ailing picture has cast a long shadow on China’s painstakingly crafted image of a benevolent and progressive global leader. Liu said before that he hoped he “will be the last victim of China’s endless literary inquisitions and that from now on no one will be incriminated because of speech.” Unfortunately, Liu won’t be China’s last sacrificial lamb. China today is less free than back in the 1980s, and the fight for freedom goes on, only becoming more difficult.
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China dispatched troops to its first overseas naval base, which is in Djibouti.
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Former Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was convicted of corruption charges and sentenced to nine and a half years in prison. He’ll appeal the conviction.
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The New York Times published photos of what’s left of Mosul after ISIS was (largely) driven from the city.
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Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan won’t end the state of emergency that’s been in place since last year’s failed coup. Five Swedish members of parliament filed a lawsuit calling for Erdogan to be charged with genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.
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Self-immolation is now the second most common form of suicide in Tunisia. The self-immolation of a Tunisian street vendor triggered the Arab Spring uprisings.
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The EU trained and funded Libya’s coast guard to help with the flow of refugees crossing the Mediterranean Sea, but now that warlord-led coast guard is accused of beating up refugees, stealing from them, housing them in squalid detention camps, and engaging in human trafficking.
Links for 7-5-2017
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U.S. Army Pfc. Hansen B. Kirkpatrick died in Afghanistan’s Helmand province after he was hit by a mortar. Two other American soldiers were wounded in the attack.
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Nikki Haley addressed North Korea’s ICBM launch during a U.N. Security Council meeting:
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North Korea claims its ICBM is capable of carrying a nuclear warhead, and the design of its nose cone is nearly identical to that of a Pakistani missile that can carry conventional or nuclear warheads. China has quietly supplied missile and warhead technology to both Pakistan, North Korea, and Iran, and it could be the source for this design.
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Mark Bowden interviewed national security experts and former American military officers, asking them about options for dealing with North Korea. As you’d expect, there are no good options.
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CNN threatened to dox a Redditor who supposedly created a video that showed a World Wrestling Federation-era Donald Trump beating up a man with a CNN logo superimposed over his head; Trump posted the video on his Twitter feed. Ted Cruz thinks CNN may have violated the law by doing this. BuzzFeed argues that CNN fingered the wrong source for the video. In other news, we’re facing a nuclear threat from North Korea.
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The Trump administration authorized the U.S. military to respond with force to threats from Iranian-backed groups in Syria, including Hezbollah.
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A New York City police officer was shot and killed while she sat in a marked vehicle. Other officers chased the suspect down, shot, and killed him. That suspect, Alexander Bonds, was on parole for robbery. The officer, Miosotis Familia, was 48 and the mother of three kids.
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Austin Petersen is running for U.S. Senate from Missouri as a Republican. Last year he ran for president as a member of the Libertarian Party.
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Michigan Governor Rick Snyder vetoed a bill that would have allowed people in his state to buy “choose life” license plates. The money from the plates would have gone to crisis pregnancy centers, suicide prevention, and campaigns promoting adoption.
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Two electricity turbines manufactured by Siemens appeared in Crimea despite sanctions intended to prevent that from happening. The turbines are likely destined for two power stations that are under construction. Siemens claims it’s complying with export control regulations.
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Ukrainian police seized the servers of an accounting software company that spread the Petya malware via an infected software update.
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American aircraft bombed a hole in the wall surrounding Raqqa, Syria’s Old City area, enabling Syrian Democratic Forces troops to storm ISIS positions.
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The YPG claims Turkey is preparing for a military campaign around Aleppo and Afrin, Syria.
Links for 6-28-2017
- The Office of U.S. Special Counsel is investigating whether FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe violated the Hatch Act when he supported his wife’s campaign for Virginia’s state senate.
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Ben Shapiro writes that Washington politicians are avoiding the hard policy issues related to health insurance and are fiercely debating useless details instead:
Government has become a faculty lounge: Never have so many fought so hard and so viciously over so little. Because politics has become a series of statements of passion, disconnected from policy — and because the media make a mint from magnifying passions in order to create the entertaining feeling of emotional involvement in some great moral conflict — we’re now at each other’s throats over matters that by any objective yardstick are small potatoes. Our politicians aren’t debating civil rights. They’re not debating slavery. They’re not even debating abortion or health care.
In fact, our politicians generally elide the most important policy questions of the day — the ones that would implicate central principles. That’s because so long as they stick to the center of the road and then act as though they’re facing threats for doing so, they don’t have to alienate anyone — and they can rake in money.
- The Harry Potter books aren’t doing millennials any favors as stand-ins for religious belief:
Thus, though many millennials would never admit it, their love for “Harry Potter” is more like veneration than it is mere fandom. It’s a secular stand-in for the meaning and community that religion would have provided them in a bygone era. The books have become a means of interpreting current events and conundrums, just as religion would have in times past. Perhaps we would have compared our world’s more detestable dictators—the Kim Jong Uns and Bashar al-Assads of our world—to the Nebuchadnezzars or Neros of yesteryear. Acts of betrayal and utmost vice would have brought forth comparisons to Judas, not Peter Pettigrew.
- Twitter told pro-life group Live Action that it can’t advertise on the site unless it deletes tweets the company considers offensive:
Included under this vast, subjective umbrella are all tweets calling for the federal government to remove Planned Parenthood’s taxpayer funding, all tweets reporting on Live Action’s undercover investigations into Planned Parenthood’s clinics, and any ultrasound images of unborn children.
Planned Parenthood advertises on Twitter.
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Jason Chaffetz is going to work for Fox News after he leaves the House of Representatives on Friday.
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ABC settled a $1.9 billion lawsuit filed by Beef Products. An ABC report called one of the company’s products “pink slime.” The terms of the settlement weren’t disclosed.
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So far this year, seven Mexican journalists covering the drug cartels or the government have been murdered.
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Remy’s “People Will Die!”:
Links for 6-21-2017
- A U.S. Air Force F–16 crashed on takeoff near Houston. The pilot safely ejected.
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A F–16 intercepted a jet carrying the Russian defense minister over the Baltic Sea. Sergei Shoigu was flying to Kaliningrad and the two Su–27s accompanying his plane refused to identify themselves, so the F–16 was sent to check on them.
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U.S. Marines will continue training rotations in Norway through 2018.
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Democrats wasted more than $20 million trying to get Jon Ossoff elected in Georgia’s sixth Congressional district — Republican Karen Handel won by nearly 4%, a larger margin than Donald Trump managed in the district last year.
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The Trump administration may scrap a “foreign entrepreneur” visa that the Obama administration created in its final days. The linked article only hints at the likely reason for killing it: the Obama administration didn’t have the legal authority to create it.
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A Canadian man yelled “Allahu Akbar” before stabbing a police officer in Flint, Michigan’s airport. The police officer was badly wounded but is recovering.
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David French writes on the Minnesota traffic stop that cost Philando Castile his life and resulted in an acquittal for the police officer:
If you watch carefully, two salient facts should emerge. First, Philando Castile was quite literally following the police officer’s instructions when he was shot. The officer asked for his license and told him not to reach for his gun. Castile reached for his license while verbally assuring the officer that he was not reaching for his gun. The officer shot him anyway.
The second fact overwhelmed the first. The officer panicked. His terror is palpable. The man went from conducting a relatively routine traffic stop to shrieking and firing in a matter of seconds. Part of this is understandable. Life can change in a flash, and when we’re in a state of ultimate distress, few of us can be as composed as SEAL Team Six.
When I saw that palpable panic, I immediately knew why he was acquitted. The unwritten law trumped the statutes on the books. The unwritten law is simple: When an officer is afraid, he’s permitted to shoot. Juries tend to believe that proof of fear equals proof of innocence.
- The San Francisco Superior Court dismissed 14 of 15 criminal charges against David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt of the Center for Medical Progress. The remaining charge is conspiracy to evade privacy.
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There were 464 earthquakes in Yellowstone National Park over the seven day period beginning on June 12. That’s the largest earthquake swarm in the area in five years.
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Five of Uber’s largest investors pushed CEO Travis Kalanick out of his job. Kalanick will remain on the board of directors.
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Honda shut down production at a plant in Japan after discovering the WannaCry ransomware on computers connected to its network.
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Saudi Arabia’s King Salman changed the line of succession, placing his son Mohammed bin Salman next in line. Salman’s nephew, Mohammed bin Nayef, was the crown prince before the change.
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Robert Nicholson writes that partition is the best solution for Syria:
The choices in Syria are really only two: 1) keep Syria unified, depose Assad, and let the people draft a new constitution and elect a new government; or 2) move Syria toward federalism or full partition, keep Assad in place as the head of an Alawite province or state along the coast, and empower the other demographic regions of Syria to become self-governing provinces or states of their own.
Choice number one leads to an Islamist state with a sizeable non-Muslim minority, and number two leads to a collection of provinces or states, each governing its own affairs and securing its own borders. Only the latter allows the Sunni Arab majority to establish their hoped-for Islamist society and allows Alawites, Kurds, and Christians to establish the kinds of societies that they have been longing for, too.
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ISIS blew up the Grand al-Nuri Mosque of Mosul, which is where Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared a caliphate three years ago.
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Romanian Prime Minister Sorin Grindeanu lost a no-confidence vote in parliament. The ruling Social Democrats and a coalition partner will nominate a candidate to replace Grindeanu.
Links for 5-30-2017
- The Department of Defense reported that it successfully intercepted a mock ICBM over the Pacific Ocean.
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During a podcast Senator Ben Sasse was asked what the Republican Party stands for, and he replied, “I don’t know.” I don’t know, either.
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Planned Parenthood published its 2015–2016 annual report, and while the number of women it served went down, the number of abortions it performed went up, to 328,348. Governments paid Planned Parenthood $554,600,000 during that year.
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Richard Epstein argues that Donald Trump should withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement:
There is, therefore, no good reason to think that carbon dioxide could bring about any short-term crisis in temperature, let alone a crisis that can only be abated by instituting very costly (and likely ineffective) changes through the Paris Accords. The agreement could easily result in trillions of dollars in wasteful expenditures. What’s worse, the agreement seems to set its targets on autopilot, without accounting for new data that might require revisions to the initial figures. Right now there is little reason to believe that putting all the accord’s provisions into place would lower global temperatures by even a fraction of a degree.
I see no gain in having the United States participate in a treaty that combines bad science with bad economics. In the long run, the United States will gain in both wealth and influence if it adopts a more restrained approach to climate change. President Trump should not let himself be scolded to move in a fashionable but unsound direction.
- Kyle Sammin explains why the Supreme Court’s liberal faction flip-flopped on race-based gerrymandering in North Carolina.
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Glenn Reynolds argues that the Obama administration’s illegal use of the NSA to spy on the Trump campaign and transition team may have been worse than Watergate.
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Axis diagrammed the web of relationships among companies developing self-driving car technology. Uber fired its head of self-driving car technology, Anthony Levandowski, who is at the center of a lawsuit filed by Alphabet’s Waymo unit. Waymo accused Levandowski of stealing trade secrets when he left the company to start a self-driving truck company, which Uber acquired.
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The Manchester bomber, Salman Abedi, used a student loan and public benefits to bankroll his terror plot: “Salman Abedi is understood to have received thousands of pounds in state funding in the run up to Monday’s atrocity even while he was overseas receiving bomb-making training.”
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Mark Steyn writes on “The Ruin of England”:
As Orwell said, he who controls the past controls the future. Isis and Boko Haram and the Taliban obliterate the past in order to eliminate any possibility of a future other than theirs. They smash all evidence of the pre-Islamic past so that there remains not even the dimmest sense of any alternative to them. That was the project Salman Abedi was embarked on in Manchester last Monday. It must all go: Palmyra, and L S Lowry, and Ariana Grande.
And then across a vast wasteland we can finally have a society entirely without “division”.
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Nolan Peterson’s latest article for The Daily Signal is “Ukraine’s Forever War.”
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South Korean President Moon Jae-in was “shocked” to learn that the U.S. installed four more launchers for the THAAD missile defense system. The system was initially installed with only two of its maximum six launchers.
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ISIS claimed responsibility for two suicide bombings in Baghdad that killed more than 30 people.
