Democrats Immediately Reject Trump’s Offer to End Shutdown

Kimberly Ross:

“…What began as a response to President Trump’s election and his questionable behavior toward women has morphed into a symbol of another sickness, that of toxic femininity. The organizers of the Women’s March insist they promote equality, diversity, and freedom — while contradicting these values with their words and actions. Included on their page of unity principles are the terms human rights, gender justice/gender norms, racial justice, and reproductive freedom. Meanwhile, women directly associated with the campaign’s very formulation, Tamika Mallory and Sharia law-loving Linda Sarsour, are unabashed anti-Semites. Mallory, who reveres the blatantly racist Louis Farrakhan, refused to publicly condemn his words of hate during a recent exchange on “The View” with Meghan McCain. Mallory even tried to cover up her clear endorsement of hate by making it a gender issue and stating that she “should never be judged through the lens of a man.”…”

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“…Former top FBI attorney James Baker admitted to House lawmakers in October last year that the investigation into alleged collusion between the Trump 2016 presidential campaign and Russia was riddled with abnormalities.

Confronted with a damning summary of abnormalities, bias, and omissions, which transpired during the investigation, Baker told Congress that the investigation indeed was “highly unusual.” . . .

As general counsel, Baker advised senior FBI leaders on the legal aspects of key investigations and served as the liaison with the Department of Justice (DOJ). In testimony, he detailed a series of unusual steps he took in the Trump-Russia investigation, including serving as the conduit between Perkins Coie—the firm working for the Clinton 2016 presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC)—and the FBI.

Baker left his position as general counsel in early January 2018 and then resigned from the FBI in early May 2018.

Baker testified that it was Michael Sussman, a partner at Perkins Coie, who shared with him information that detailed alleged communications between servers in Trump Tower and servers located in Russia at Alfa Bank, which were eventually debunked. Sussmann was also the lawyer who spearheaded the handling of the alleged hack of the DNC servers. Baker admitted that it was highly unusual to interact with an outside counsel…”

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Gail Heriot:

“…I can’t help it. Yesterday morning when I ran across the shutdown notice on the web site of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (of which I am a member), I smiled so much I spilled my coffee. So far, I am enjoying the break from writing dissents.

If you’d like to get a sense of how the Commission works, check out my dissent on immigration detention centers or on environmental justice. My guess is that after reading them you won’t shed any tears over the Commission’s failure to issue reports over the last few weeks.

While I am waiting for things to start up again maybe I’ll have some time to tend to my cactus garden.  Dealing with prickly plants is good practice for Commission work…”

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KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL:

“…Everybody knew. Everybody of consequence at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Justice Department understood fully in the middle of 2016—as the FBI embarked on its counterintelligence probe of Donald Trump—that it was doing so based on disinformation provided by Hillary Clinton’s campaign. That’s the big revelation from the transcript of the testimony Justice Department official Bruce Ohr gave Congress in August. The transcripts haven’t been released, but parts were confirmed for me by congressional sources.

Mr. Ohr testified that he sat down with dossier author Christopher Steele on July 30, 2016, and received salacious information the opposition researcher had compiled on Mr. Trump. Mr. Ohr immediately took that to the FBI’s then-Deputy Director Andy McCabe and lawyer Lisa Page. In August he took it to Peter Strzok, the bureau’s lead investigator. In the same month, Mr. Ohr believes, he briefed senior personnel in the Justice Department’s criminal division: Deputy Assistant Attorney General Bruce Swartz, lawyer Zainab Ahmad and fraud unit head Andrew Weissman. The last two now work for special counsel Robert Mueller.

More important, Mr. Ohr told this team the information came from the Clinton camp and warned that it was likely biased, certainly unproven. “When I provided [the Steele information] to the FBI, I tried to be clear that this is source information,” he testified. “I don’t know how reliable it is. You’re going to have to check it out and be aware. These guys were hired by somebody relating to—who’s related to the Clinton campaign, and be aware.”

He said he told them that Mr. Steele was “desperate that Donald Trump not get elected,” and that his own wife, Nellie Ohr, worked for Fusion GPS, which compiled the dossier. He confirmed sounding all these warnings before the FBI filed its October application for a surveillance warrant against Carter Page. We broke some of this in August, though the transcript provides new detail.

The FBI and Justice Department have gone to extraordinary lengths to muddy these details, with cover from Democrats and friendly journalists. A January 2017 memo from Adam Schiff, the House Intelligence Committee’s top Democrat, flatly (and incorrectly) insisted “the FBI’s closely-held investigative team only received Steele’s reporting in mid-September.” A May 2018 New York Times report repeated that claim, saying Mr. Steele’s reports didn’t reach the “Crossfire Hurricane team,” which ran the counterintelligence investigation, until “mid-September.”

This line was essential for upholding the claim that the dossier played no role in the unprecedented July 31, 2016, decision to investigate a presidential campaign. Former officials have insisted they rushed to take this dramatic step on the basis of a conversation involving a low-level campaign aide, George Papadopoulos, which took place in May, before the dossier officially came into the picture. And maybe that is the case. Yet now Mr. Ohr has testified that top personnel had dossier details around the time they opened the probe.

The Ohr testimony is also further evidence that the FBI misled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in its Page warrant application. We already knew the bureau failed to inform the court it knew the dossier had come from a rival campaign. But the FISA application additionally claimed the FBI was “unaware of any derogatory information pertaining” to Mr. Steele, that he was “reliable,” that his “reporting” in this case was “credible.” and that the FBI only “speculates” that Mr. Steele’s bosses “likely” wanted to “discredit” Mr. Trump.

Speculates? Likely? Mr. Ohr makes clear FBI and Justice officials knew from the earliest days that Mr. Steele was working for the Clinton campaign, which had an obvious desire to discredit Mr. Trump. And Mr. Ohr specifically told investigators that they had every reason to worry Mr. Steele’s work product was tainted.

This testimony has two other implications. First, it further demonstrates the accuracy of the House Intelligence Committee Republicans’ memo of 2018—which noted Mr. Ohr’s role and pointed out that the FBI had not been honest about its knowledge of the dossier and failed to inform the court of Mrs. Ohr’s employment at Fusion GPS. The testimony also destroys any remaining credibility of the Democratic response, in which Mr. Schiff and his colleagues claimed Mr. Ohr hadn’t met with the FBI or told them anything about his wife or about Mr. Steele’s bias until after the election.

Second, the testimony raises new concerns about Mr. Mueller’s team. Critics have noted Mr. Weissman’s donations to Mrs. Clinton and his unseemly support of former acting Attorney General Sally Yates’s obstruction of Trump orders. It now turns out that senior Mueller players were central to the dossier scandal. The conflicts of interest boggle the mind.

The Ohr testimony is evidence the FBI itself knows how seriously it erred. The FBI has been hiding and twisting facts from the start…”

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Max Eden:

“…Last week, the first randomized control trial study of “restorative justice” in a major urban district, Pittsburgh Public Schools, was published by the RAND Corporation.

The results were curiously mixed. Suspensions went down in elementary but not middle schools. Teachers reported improved school safety, professional environment, and classroom management ability. But students disagreed. They thought their teachers’ classroom management deteriorated, and that students in class were less respectful and supportive of each other; at a lower confidence interval, they reported bullying and more instructional time lost to disruption. And although restorative justice is billed as a way to fight the “school-to-prison pipeline,” it had no impact on student arrests.

The most troubling thing: There were significant and substantial negative effects on math achievement for middle school students, black students, and students in schools that are predominantly black.

What are we to make of these results? For education journalists like U.S. News and World Report’s Lauren Camera, there’s an easy solution: Don’t report the negative findings and write an article titled “Study Contradicts Betsy DeVos’ Reason for Eliminating School Discipline Guidance.”

When asked why she left her readers in the dark regarding the negative effects on black student achievement, Camera said that it “wasn’t intentional,” explaining that “it wasn’t meant to be a deep dive into the study. And we linked to it, so readers who wanted to follow up could.”

Chalkbeat’s Matt Barnum is somewhat unique among education journalists for his practice of reading academic studies in full before writing about them. Barnum commented, “Well, I will say that the researchers didn’t do any favors in framing the results for reporters. The negative test for effect for black kids is buried on like page eighty with no mention (that I saw) until then…. [T]he research itself is excellent; their choice in framing is…notable.”

Unfortunately, the vast majority of the education policy community will not read this study in sufficient depth to share their disappointment in RAND’s unmistakably slanted editorial emphases. They will read of mostly positive results, and of negative results framed by the RAND researchers as likely attributable to bad implementation of good policy.

It is very sad that the so-called “evidence-based policymaking” community has rendered itself immune to the intellectual breakthrough that enabled the scientific revolution: accepting the falsification of a hypothesis. When it comes to studies of ideologically-preferred policies like restorative justice, the logic all too often is: “Heads, I win. Tails, I would have won if it were implemented correctly.”…”

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Kurt Schlichter:

“…Don’t be fooled by the “toxic” qualifier – all masculinity is toxic to these human weebles. What they call “toxic” is really the essence of freedom. It’s toxic all right, but to their goals, not ours. Masculinity means freedom from them and the puffy, non-binary utopia they dreamed up because that’s the only world in which such losers could be anything more than a sorry punchline.

It’s a War on Testosterone, and we’re culturally surrounded. But that’s awesome. As Toxic Male Icon and Army hero, General Anthony McAuliffe of the 101st Airborne put it at Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge, “Men, we are surrounded by the enemy. We have the greatest opportunity ever presented an army. We can attack in any direction.” And Marine legend and Toxic Male “Chesty” Puller said something similar: “We’re surrounded. That simplifies our problem of getting to these people and killing them.” . . .

The answer to the attack on toxic masculinity is to recommit to what they label “toxicity,” because what they call “toxic masculinity” is not about criminality or being a jerk. It’s about the basic premise of being a man, the role of builder and destroyer, engineer and warrior. They want to take what makes you special from you, so all you have are the scraps they choose to give you. And then they will own you.

Do you want to be owned?

Cue the SJWs liars to hop in to say that praising masculinity means celebrating rape and abuse and mindless criminality and mayhem. But everything leftists say is a lie, and so is this. The answer to rape and abuse and mindless criminality and mayhem is, of course, more masculinity – the confrontation of evil, and its destruction, by righteous force. And righteous force is a masculine notion…”

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This applies to the administrative state in general

Professor Gary Lawson:

“…The Commission promulgates substantive rules of conduct. The Commission then considers whether to authorize investigations into whether the Commission’s rules have been violated. If the Commission authorizes an investigation, the investigation is conducted by the Commission, which reports its findings to the Commission. If the Commission thinks that the Commission’s findings warrant an enforcement action, the Commission issues a complaint. The Commission’s complaint that a Commission rule has been violated is then prosecuted by the Commission and adjudicated by the Commission. This Commission adjudication can either take place before the full Commission or before a semi-autonomous Commission administrative law judge. If the Commission chooses to adjudicate before an administrative law judge rather than before the Commission and the decision is adverse to the Commission, the Commission can appeal to the Commission. If the Commission ultimately finds a violation, then, and only then, the affected private party can appeal to an Article III court. But the agency decision, even before the bona fide Article III tribunal, possesses a very strong presumption of correctness on matters both of fact and of law…”

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“…On the issue of Huawei, China realizes that the United States has enlisted its allies to collectively encircle the Chinese high-tech company. This sets a precedent for the United States to gather allies to suppress China in other areas in the future.

The Chinese official media Global Times published a particularly stern editorial entitled “Let the country that is invading China’s interests pay the price” on December 16, 2018. saying that “for countries which do not care about China’s interests and have extraordinary behavior, China should resolutely fight back, let it pay the price, and even suffer huge losses.” Doing so, to article reasoned, “also allows other countries to understand that China is principled”:

There is a high risk in following the U.S. to harm China’s interests. This time Canada helped the United States to detain a Huawei executive, which broke the bottom line. China needs to clearly express our attitude that we do not accept Canada’s doing so. If Canada finally extradites Meng Wanzhou to the United States, Canada will certainly pay the price of the retrogression of Canada-China relations. China needs to use practical actions to show the world the consequences of Canada’s doing so.

The commentary added, “We need to select counter-targets and make those countries be beaten very painfully. We argue that in this complex game, China should focus on the Five Eye alliance countries, especially Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. They follow the United States to harm China’s interests, especially in a step-by-step manner. Their performance is radical, and they are some of the targets that China should first hit.”…”

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Gross mismanagement.

Andrew Moran:

“…Let’s begin with the makeup of the school district: It boasts a $7.52 billion budget and more than 60,000 employees, including about 26,000 teachers, with the average annual salary being $73,000. While employment has gone up 16% since 2004, enrollment has dropped 10% in the same period.

According to the latest available data, California school funding surged by nearly 10% from 2015 to 2016. If you examine a five-year period (2011 to 2016), school funding in the state is up a whopping 26%. Governor Gavin Newsom (D-CA) has further proposed the “largest ever investment” in the LAUSD.

Plus, the district already offered LAUSD educators a pay raise of 3% this year and another 3% in 2020. It was rejected.

But the school district can’t afford another pay hike. Next year, LAUSD will have a $422 million budget deficit, mainly because employee pension and health care costs represent a great portion of the budget – they will account for more than half within 10 years. Overall, it has $5.1 billion more in liabilities than in assets and another $15 billion in unfunded health care benefit liabilities for retirees and current workers…”

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Gail Heriot:

“…THE 1969 GUNFIGHT AT UCLA: Fifty years ago today, rival gangs, made up in part of “High Potential Program” students, fought it out on campus, leaving two dead.

The tiny “High Potential Program” was UCLA’s early, experimental form of affirmative action. Unlike today’s affirmative action programs, which primarily benefit middle- and upper-middle-class students, this was a real effort to benefit young people born on the wrong side of the tracks. As one might expect, UCLA relaxed the academic qualifications for this project. One of the founders of the program put it this way:   “A high school diploma was not a requisite. We recruited people who were active in their community and who had the ability to lead.”

Here’s the crazy part: In practice, the leadership requirement meant that UCLA wanted—and actively recruited–leaders of street gangs, especially those involved in black nationalism. A history of violence was no barrier to admission.

Not a lot of learning went on in the special classes conducted for the program. Linda Chavez, a UCLA grad student at the time, wrote about her experiences in teaching classes for Chicano High Potential students in An Unlikely Conservative: The Transformation of an Ex-Liberal. I won’t spoil her story here. Suffice it to say it wasn’t pretty.

Among the students recruited for the program was Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter. Carter was the former leader of the Slauson gang, a mega-gang in South Central Los Angeles, and was known as “Mayor of the Ghetto.” Shortly before registering at UCLA he had spent four years in Soledad prison for armed robbery, where he had become a disciple of Malcolm X. In 1967, after meeting Black Panther Minister of Defense Huey Newton, he formed the Southern California chapter of the Black Panther Party, mostly out of members of the Slauson gang.

John Jerome Huggins was Carter’s right-hand man; it was only natural that they would attend UCLA together. Huggins’ apartment was a meeting place for Black Panthers. A cache of weapons, including rifles, shotguns, handguns and homemade bombs, was kept there.

Carter and Huggins never made it thorough their freshman year. They were gunned down in UCLA’s Campbell Hall in the course of a feud between the Panthers and a rival Black Nationalist group, the US Organization (also known as United Slaves), several of whose members were also UCLA High Potential Program students. These broad daylight murders sent shock waves through colleges and universities across the country.

The US Organization bore some similarity to the Black Panthers in that its membership was derived in large part from ordinary L.A. street gangs of the early 1960s. And like the Panthers, its veneer of Black Nationalism was thin. But the two groups despised each other (as rival gangs tend to do).

UCLA administrators never understood what hit them. They thought they were introducing young street toughs to a whole new world. And, of course, they were right. But the reverse was also true. Just as UCLA wanted to turn gang members into college students, gang members wanted to turn UCLA into a part of their protection racket.

Shortly before the gun battle, student activists pressured UCLA Chancellor Charles Young to create a Center for African American Studies—complete with an executive director and staff, office space and a generous budget. The Panthers and US were simply vying to control those resources, knowing that whoever controlled the executive director’s position would control the center. The Panthers backed one candidate for director and US another. The situation got out of hand. Two brothers, George and Larry Stiner, members of US, were convicted of murder.

The High Potential Program experiment was quietly terminated (though it is still celebrated in some quarters). After that, affirmative action programs took more conventional forms…”

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“…The 2019 Women’s March doesn’t kick off until Saturday, but what was once the left’s favorite anti-Trump fest is already stumbling.

The Democratic National Committee delivered a devastating blow Tuesday by dropping its affiliation with the third annual Women’s March on Washington, D.C., joining a growing list of liberal groups that have severed ties with the organization amid allegations of anti-Semitism, which the leaders deny.

The fall has been dramatic. In 2017, more than 560 progressive advocacy groups were listed on the Women’s March website as partners. As of Tuesday, there were fewer than 200.

The DNC released a statement saying that it “stands in solidarity with all those fighting for women’s rights,” but offered no explanation for the decision. Nor did Sens. Kamala Harris of California and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, who are not planning to attend this year’s march, according to BuzzFeed.

Mercy Morganfield, who headed the Women’s March D.C. organization for two years before leaving in December in part over conflicts with the national leadership, had a theory for the departures: self-preservation.

“I’m glad to see that they’re saying, ‘This is not something we want to associate with,’ not necessarily because they have some sort of moral ground, although I’m hoping they do,” said Ms. Morganfield, whose chapter folded when she left. “I think people are starting to jump ship because they want to protect themselves.”…”

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Marc Sheppard:

“…Chuck Todd opened last year’s final Meet the Press show, which focused its entire hour on climate change, with a pompous, long-winded speech blaming human activity for a disastrously overheating Planet Earth.  The NBC News host made news himself by declaring that “climate deniers” aren’t welcome to the discussion because “the science is settled.”

It was an awful show, even by NBC standards – a Sunday news and discussion program that not only deliberately invited only one point of view to the table, but proudly proclaimed as much in its opening statement.  As promised, what followed was as one-sided and alarmist-biased a presentation on the subject as you’re likely to see anywhere.  And yet, even in the absence of opposition opinion, Todd somehow seemed to lose the debate.

One member of the silenced opposition, Dr. Roy Spencer, principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, was quick to point out Todd’s mistake.  Addressing the “settled science” canard from his excellent blog:

The belief in human-caused warming exceeding a level that what would be relatively benign, and maybe even beneficial, is just that – a belief.  It is not based upon known, established, and quantified scientific principles.  It is based upon the assumption that natural climate change does not exist.

Having attended numerous lectures by Richard Lindzen, the American atmospheric physicist Lord Monckton referred to as “the greatest climatologist of his age,” I couldn’t help hearing his words in my mind’s ear:

Virtually by definition, nothing in science is ‘incontrovertible’ – especially in a primitive and complex field as climate.  ‘Incontrovertibility’ belongs to religion where it is referred to as dogma.

And remembering Prof. Robert M. Carter:

As to “the science is settled”; or, there is a “consensus” on the issue. … [S]cience is about facts, experiments and testing hypotheses, not consensus; and science is never “settled.”  Indeed, Einstein’s relativity theories are still being tested; e.g.”Lorentz invariance.”

Incidentally – of course no science is ever settled, nor would we want it to be.  Suppose computer science had been “settled” back in 1946, when the IBM 603 was developed.  Can you imagine cramming all those big, bulky vacuum tubes and relays into a smartphone?

Fortunately, just as are the sciences of semiconductors, sensors, mobile processors, and image capture tools (to name just a few), climate science is in a constant state of flux, as is the climate itself, and neither will likely ever be “settled.”…”

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CNN Analyst Calls Out Fox News’ David Webb On-Air For ‘White Privilege’. Webb Informs Her He’s Black.