- A U.S. Marine Corps AV–8B Harrier jet crashed in Djibouti. The pilot ejected and is in stable condition.
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The USS Little Rock finally left Montreal after being stuck in ice for three months.
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The Trump administration filed a lawsuit in a federal district court challenging a California law that requires the federal government to obtain the state’s permission before selling any federally-owned land:
Passed by the California legislature in October 2017, Senate Bill 50 declares that, with limited exceptions, “conveyances of federal public lands in California are void” unless the State Lands Commission is provided a “right of first refusal” or “the right to arrange for the transfer of the federal public land to another entity.” The statute also prohibits purchasers of federal land from recording the deed to the newly acquired property without an accompanying “certificate of compliance” from the state commission and provides for a $5,000 civil penalty for buyers who violate this provision.
In its complaint, filed in a federal district court in Sacramento, the DOJ alleged that SB 50 violates both the supremacy clause and the property clause of the United States Constitution. The supremacy clause declares that the federal Constitution and federal laws are “the supreme Law of the Land,” while the lesser-known property clause provides that “Congress shall have Power to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States.” The DOJ then cites nearly 30 federal statutes that authorize different federal agencies to dispose of federal property and regulate the circumstances under which such sales may take place.
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The Trump administration announced 25% tariffs on $50 billion in imports from China.
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The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear David Daleiden’s appeal of a lower court ruling that prevents the Center for Medical Progress from releasing additional undercover footage of Planned Parenthood officials discussing the sale of baby body parts.
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The Mexican government said it would disband the caravan of Central American immigrants who are trying to reach the U.S. Mexico will allow some of the immigrants to apply for asylum, but the rest will have to go back where they came from.
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Jeffrey Goldberg interviewed Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who acknowledged that Israel has a right to exist (good), but denied the existence of Wahhabism, let alone Saudi Arabia’s role in spreading it around the world (bad).
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Indian security forces conducted a counter-terror operation in Kashmir that killed at least 13 terrorists, three Indian soldiers, and four civilians.
Tag: abortion
Links for 4-2-2018
- The EPA is rolling back the Obama administration’s vehicle emissions standards for cars and light trucks manufactured between 2022 and 2025. The EPA is also re-examining a waiver the Obama administration gave to California that enables the state to set its own vehicle emissions standards.
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Among the red flags in Abid’s background were a $1.1 million bankruptcy; six lawsuits against him or a company he owned; and at least three misdemeanor convictions including for DUI and driving on a suspended license, according to Virginia court records. Public court records show that Imran and Abid operated a car dealership referred to as CIA that took $100,000 from an Iraqi government official who is a fugitive from U.S. authorities. Numerous members of the family were tied to cryptic LLCs such as New Dawn 2001, operated out of Imran’s residence, Virginia corporation records show. Imran was the subject of repeated calls to police by multiple women and had multiple misdemeanor convictions for driving offenses, according to court records.
- Congresswoman Elizabeth Esty (D-CT) won’t run for re-election after she failed to adequately investigate her (former) chief of staff, Tony Baker, who was accused of “harassment, threats and violence against female staffers.”
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A federal district court judge granted the ACLU the right to represent “all pregnant, unaccompanied immigrant minor children who are or will be in the legal custody of the federal government.” The ACLU has been fighting to give pregnant immigrants access to abortions.
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A federal district court judge ruled that Tennessee can’t withdraw from the federal refugee resettlement program. Tennessee argued that the program imposes unconstitutional unfunded mandates on the state: “The lawsuit focused specifically on the requirement for the state to pay exorbitant Medicaid costs or risk losing up to $7 billion in federal Medicaid reimbursements, an amount equal to 20 percent of the entire state budget.”
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Kevin Williamson’s first article for The Atlantic is on the passing of the libertarian moment:
The GOP’s political situation is absurd: Having rallied to the banner of an erratic and authoritarian game-show host, evangelical leaders such as Jerry Falwell Jr. are reduced to comparing Donald Trump to King David as they try to explain away his entanglement with pornographic performer Stormy Daniels. Those who celebrated Trump the businessman clutch their heads as his preposterous economic policies produce terror in the stock markets and chaos for the blue-collar workers in construction firms and manufacturers scrambling to stay ahead of the coming tariffs on steel and aluminum. The Chinese retaliation is sure to fall hardest on the heartland farmers who were among Trump’s most dedicated supporters.
On the libertarian side of the Republican coalition, the situation is even more depressing: Republicans such as former Texas Governor Rick Perry, who once offered important support for criminal-justice reform, are lined up behind the atavistic drug-war policies of the president and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, whose big idea on opiate abuse is more death sentences for drug traffickers. Deficits are moving in the wrong direction. And, in spite of the best hopes of the “America First” gang, Trump’s foreign policy has not moved in the direction of Rand Paul’s mild non-interventionism or the more uncompromising non-interventionism of his father, Ron Paul. Instead, the current GOP foreign-policy position combines the self-assured assertiveness of the George W. Bush administration (and many familiar faces and mustaches from that administration) with the indiscipline and amateurism characteristic of Trump.
Some libertarian moment.
- Dr. Patricia Daugherty attended a national conference for college administrators and found herself in a social justice warrior indoctrination camp:
The day I arrived at this convention moored in the principles of tolerance and inclusion, I was greeted by a large, laminated poster at the registration tables touting the “ACPA Convention Equity and Inclusion Information Booth.” At this booth one could report any “bias incident … believed to have a negative impact on ACPA members, particularly across marginalized social identity group membership.” So if I asked a question that violated the thought police regulations, I might be reported? Welcome to Communist China.
It didn’t get any better. Just before the welcoming video and keynote speaker began, a trigger warning flashed up on the screen that there might be “disturbing scenes of activism” in the video. Duly warned, we then listened to Keala Settle’s “This is Me” (a great song, by the way) as pictures were shown, not of happy college students of every background experiencing the many different aspects of life on a university campus, but Planned Parenthood, Black Lives Matter, and the Women’s March on Washington. I could have been at an Service Employees International Union convention.
- Louis Farrakhan personally receives a commission on the money that Nation of Islam members pay to Scientology.
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The Washington Free Beacon obtained a Communist Party of China Central Committee document ordering stepped-up theft of technical information from American companies beginning in late 2016.
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Turkey ordered the arrest of Fethullah Gulen and seven other people over the 2016 assassination of Russia’s ambassador to Turkey.
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Turkey is holding two Greek border guards without charge or trial. The two guards crossed a heavily forested area of the border during bad weather and have been detained for a month. Greece claims Turkey is holding the border guards for political purposes.
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Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi won re-election with 97% of the vote:
The election featured only one other candidate – himself an ardent Sisi supporter – after all serious opposition contenders halted their campaigns in January. The main challenger was arrested and his campaign manager beaten up, while other presidential hopefuls pulled out, citing intimidation.
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Carlos Alvarado Quesada won the election to be Costa Rica’s next president by promising to legalize gay marriage.
Links for 3-20-2018
- A school cop shot and killed a student gunman on the campus of a high school in Maryland. Two students were wounded, one of them critically.
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Andrew Malcolm writes that while the Trump White House may be dysfunctional, the two political parties are in worse shape:
Trump is basically leading his own Party of Trump, based on his own ego and millions of disaffected Americans sick of the ineffectiveness and unresponsiveness of both two-faced parties. The lack of substantial legislative results last year revealed both deep rifts within the me-first GOP congressional factions and Trump’s inability or unwillingness to act as a real party leader.
Hard to blame wary GOP members on the Hill given their president’s mercurial temperament, political double-crosses and Twitter attacks on his own would-be allies.
When Trump does venture out to campaign for party picks — in the Alabama Senate and Pennsylvania House races, for instance — staunchly Republican voters ignore his urgings and elect Democrats. Another ominous November sign for the GOP.
- The latest iteration of the ObamaCare bailout bill transfers more than $60 billion to insurance companies.
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Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant signed a bill banning abortions after 15 weeks; this is the earliest abortion ban in the U.S. Of course a federal district court judge blocked the law the day after it was signed, since that’s all federal district court judges seem to do these days.
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Paul Allen located the wreck of the USS Juneau off the Solomon Islands. The famous five Sullivan brothers from Waterloo, Iowa died when the Juneau sank.
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The U.S. and South Korea will launch a large-scale military exercise soon; it was delayed for the benefit of the Winter Olympics.
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A Minneapolis police officer who shot and killed a woman from Australia was charged with second degree manslaughter and third degree murder. The woman, Justine Ruszczyk Damond, called 911 to report a possible sexual assault outside her home only to be shot by the responding officer, Mohamed Noor.
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An Iranian man, Ali Sadr Hashemi Nejad, was charged with funneling $115 million to Iran in violation of sanctions:
An Iranian who chairs a Maltese bank has been arrested on U.S. charges he participated in a scheme to evade U.S. sanctions and funnel more than $115 million paid under a Venezuelan construction contract through the U.S. financial system, prosecutors said on Tuesday.
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The U.K. negotiated a draft agreement on its transition out of the E.U., but the border between Northern Ireland and Ireland wasn’t settled. The U.K. accepted limitations on immigration and control over fishing in its own waters.
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A British woman fighting for the Kurdish YPJ in Afrin, Syria died, apparently the victim of a Turkish air strike.
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Turkey released drone footage of Afrin’s main hospital to defend its claim that it didn’t attack the building. If you look closely at the footage, however, it does show that part of the hospital was hit.
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Norwegian Justice Minister Sylvi Listhaug quit to avoid a parliamentary no-confidence vote that would have brought down the country’s government.
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French police arrested former Prime Minister Nicolas Sarkozy as part of an investigation into illegal campaign contributions paid by former Libyan leader Moammar Qaddafi.
Links for 2-19-2018
- Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court imposed a new U.S. House of Representatives district map that will probably cost Republicans four or five seats. Arguably the new map is more generous to Democrats than the one proposed by the state’s Democratic Party.
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Criminals are engaging in complex scams where they hack tax preparation companies, file phony refund requests in their customers’ names, wait for the refunds to appear in their bank accounts, then pose as collection agents demanding that the money be “returned.”
In one version of the scam, criminals are pretending to be debt collection agency officials acting on behalf of the IRS. They’ll call taxpayers who’ve had fraudulent tax refunds deposited into their bank accounts, claim the refund was deposited in error, and threaten recipients with criminal charges if they fail to forward the money to the collection agency.
- Congressman Tom Rooney (R-FL) won’t run for re-election.
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Victor Davis Hanson writes on “Understanding the California Mind”:
The postmodern 21st-century state media in its various manifestations is committed to social justice, not necessarily to disinterested reporting. Few read about environmental lawsuits over the planned pathway of a disruptive high-speed rail project; not so in the case of planned state nullification of offshore drilling.
In many news accounts, the race and ethnicity of a violent criminal are deduced in the cynical (and often quite illiberal) reader comments that follow. Is the newspaper deliberately suppressing news information to incite readership, who, in turn, through their commentaries flesh out the news that is not reported and simultaneously spike online viewership by their lurid outrage?
Folk wisdom in California translates into something along the following lines: an unidentified “suspect” in a drunk driving accident that leaves two dead on the side of the road can for some time remains unidentified; a local accountant of the wrong profile who is indicted by the IRS has his name and picture blared.
- Joel Kotkin writes on Silicon Valley dystopias:
What is occurring in Silicon Valley, being proposed in Toronto, and now implemented in China all points toward efforts by tech companies and governments to create new dense and data-driven cities that shape what the British academic David Lyon calls a “surveillance society,” where all of our data is shared with the governments and companies that use it to control us (PDF). In many ways these “cities” will be the opposite of the real thing, driven by a technological culture that, as David Byrne has suggested, substitutes spontaneous human interaction—the glory of the traditional city—with machine-driven interfaces.
- Syrian government forces reportedly plan to enter the fight in Afrin on the side of the Kurdish YPG, which prompted Turkey to threaten Syria’s government and call Vladimir Putin for help.
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Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan advances his political career by promoting anti-Americanism and anti-Kurdish sentiment.
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ISIS killed 27 pro-Iraqi government militiamen during an ambush near Kirkuk.
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Israeli police arrested more people in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s inner circle:
Seven Israelis were arrested on Sunday in what the police call “Case 4000,” a new investigation in which members of Netanyahu’s innermost circle are suspected of intervening with regulators to help the Bezeq group, an Israeli communications giant then run by a close friend of the prime minister, in exchange for favorable coverage of Netanyahu and his wife, Sara, on a news portal owned by the company.
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Lila Rose for PragerU on “What You Need to Know About Planned Parenthood”:
Links for 2-10-2018
- Israel shot down an Iranian drone that flew into its airspace, then dispatched planes to attack Iranian positions in Syria to discourage future drone operations. An Israeli F–16 was shot down during that operation; the plane made it back to Israel and the pilots ejected, but one of the two pilots is badly injured. The F–16 incident prompted Israel to follow up with its largest operation against Syria since 1982.
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The Kurdish YPG shot down a Turkish helicopter near Afrin, Syria. Two soldiers on board the helicopter died.
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Ken White explains why Donald Trump has no business talking to Robert Mueller or any other federal investigator:
In the old westerns, rather than take the trouble of hauling mustachioed miscreants to desultory trials, lawmen would often provoke them into drawing first, thus justifying shooting them down where they stood. A modern federal interview of a subject or target is like that. One purpose, arguably the primary purpose, is to provoke the foolish interviewee into lying, thus committing a new, fresh federal crime that is easily prosecuted, rendering the original investigation irrelevant. Title 18, United States Code, Section 1001, which makes it a felony to lie to the feds, is their shiny quick-draw sidearm. This result not an exception; it is the rule. It happens again and again.
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Andrew McCarthy goes through the Grassley-Graham memo that suggests prosecution of Christopher Steele for lying to the FBI, and finds evidence that the FBI lied to and withheld information from the FISA court, thereby confirming an assertion of Devin Nunes’ memo.
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The Trump administration notified Congress that it can’t declassify the Democratic response to Devin Nunes’ memo because it contains classified information. The Democrats wrote the memo with the intent of obtaining this result, giving them the opportunity to publicly blame Donald Trump for silencing them. The Trump administration offered to work with Democrats to redact the classified passages of their memo.
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Planned Parenthood’s funding is safe under the new bipartisan spending deal. Republicans did manage to kill ObamaCare’s “death panel,” the Independent Payment Advisory Board.
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Someone hacked the computers of the Pyeongchang Olympics during the opening ceremonies.
Links for 2-9-2018
- The head of the FBI’s office of public affairs, Michael Kortan, is retiring. The head of the Department of Justice’s Counterintelligence and Export Control Section, David Laufman, resigned. The number three person at the Department of Justice, Rachel Brand, is also leaving.
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State Department official Jonathan Winer acknowledged exchanging many documents with Christoper Steele, some of which (including the Trump dossier) he shared with other State Department employees. Winer also passed documents from Clinton operative Cody Shearer to Steele.
The details from Winer provide more insight into how well connected Steele was at one time with U.S. government figures — and how unverified information about then-candidate Donald Trump circulated at very high levels in 2016 with his involvement.
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Congressman Rick Nolan (D-MN) won’t run for re-election.
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California’s legislature is considering a bill requiring state-funded universities to dispense RU–486, a drug that induces abortion.
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Uber settled a lawsuit brought by Alphabet’s self-driving car business, Waymo. Uber will give Waymo $245 million worth of its stock and issued an apology to settle the suit, which charged Uber with stealing trade secrets from Waymo.
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Iranian-backed Shiite militias used American M1A1 Abrams tanks against Kurdish forces in northern Iraq last fall. The tanks were originally delivered to the Iraqi government, but ISIS captured them; Shiite militias later captured them from ISIS and turned them against the Kurds.
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Egypt launched an offensive against militants in the Sinai Peninsula. The offensive will also hit the Nile Delta and the Western Desert.
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Mike Lee explains his vote against a continuing resolution that will incur more than $1 trillion in debt over ten years. Interestingly the Senate decided to attach this continuing resolution to the “Honoring Hometown Heroes Act,” which deals with lowering the U.S. flag in the event a first responder is killed in the line of duty. The vote roll call is here — it passed 71–28.
Links for 2-1-2018
- Andrew McCarthy writes on the FBI’s objections to the release of Devin Nunes’ memo:
Since before the Republican-led committee voted (along partisan lines) to seek the memo’s declassification and publication, the FBI has been complaining that it was not permitted to review the memo. As I explained last week, this was a very unpersuasive complaint. Having stonewalled the committee’s information requests for several months, the Bureau and Justice Department are hardly well positioned to complain about being denied access; the committee, by contrast, has every reason to believe they would have slow-walked any review in order to delay matters further.
All that aside, the FBI was guaranteed access to the memo before its publication because of the rules of the process. Once the committee voted to disclose, that gave the president five days to object. During that five days, Trump’s own appointees at the FBI and DOJ would have the chance to pore over the memo and make their objections and policy arguments to their principal, the president, and to the rest of the Trump national-security team. This tells us the real objection was not that they were barred from reviewing the memo; it is that they were barred from reviewing it on a schedule that would make it more difficult to derail publication.
Angelo Codevilla offers a more partisan take:
The FBI’s top leadership — whose careers, business dealings, politics, marriages and extramarital affairs intertwine — invested itself incompetently and illegally into the 2016 election campaign against Donald Trump. In part to cover itself, it launched the so-called “Russia probe.” Its members are personally, deeply interested in keeping the public from seeing the documents concerning these activities. They raised the familiar shield: release would compromise the sources and methods of national security.
The House of Representatives’ Republican majority wanted the documents made public, issued a subpoena for them, and was prepared to jail senior FBI for contempt had they not complied with it. The House compromised, being satisfied by viewing them and making a summary, which it has voted to make public. The FBI and the Justice Department’s bureaucracy, being out of options for saving their reputations, their pensions, and perhaps for keeping themselves out of jail, urge President Trump to advise the House to guard the secrecy of the summary, of the activities that it describes, and hence to save their bacon.
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The U.S. Marine Corps relieved the commander of one of Okinawa’s two MF–22 Osprey squadrons of duty. Lt. Col. Bryan Swenson lost his job due to a “loss of trust and confidence in his ability to lead his command.” Six months ago an Osprey crashed off Okinawa’s coast.
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Fourteen Catholic senators voted against cloture for the “Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act,” a.k.a. the 20 week abortion ban. Father Dwight Longenecker provides the name of each senator’s bishop so you know who to complain to.
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The Trump administration designated Harakat as-Sabirin Li-Nasran Filastin as a terrorist group. As-Sabirin is a Shiite group that operates in Gaza and is funded by Iran. The Trump administration also designated two Muslim Brotherhood offshoots in Egypt as terrorist groups — Harakat Sawa’id Misr and Liwa al-Thawra.
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The Syrian government reportedly used chlorine rockets again in Douma.
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Reuters provided some backstory for Ji Seong-ho, the North Korean defector who appeared at Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech this week.
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A cybersecurity company based in the United Arab Emirates, DarkMatter, started revealing some information about its operations and customers. DarkMatter is tight with the UAE’s government, and hires a lot of ex-CIA and ex-NSA people.
