Thomas Sowell asks, Where Are We?

Thomas Sowell

"We are now in a kind of political no-­man's­-land between an administration on its way out and a new administration taking shape. Predictions are always risky ­­ and nowhere more so than in times like these.

"What we can do, however, is assess where we are, and what some of the opportunities and dangers are. 

"The opportunities are many, which is to say that many things are in desperate need of changing, beginning with rebuilding our dangerously neglected and undermined military forces. The monstrosity of ObamaCare needs to be gotten rid of, not just cosmetically adjusted. 

"Our fundamental freedoms under the Constitution are at stake in the choice of the next nominee to become a Justice of the closely divided Supreme Court. We need someone with both the depth and the strength to resist the pressures and the temptations that have seduced too many supposedly "conservative" justices, over the years, into betraying Constitutional principles. " . . .

Islamic Jew-hatred has made a treacherous alliance with Western academics and activists- and the US campuses are on fire

Phyllis Chesler  "Hate Spaces: The Politics of Intolerance on Campus," an important new film, brought to us by Americans for Peace and Tolerance on Campus (Charles Jacobs and executive Producer and Director, Avi Goldwasser), is about another kind of Jihad arson: the way in which the American campuses have been set ablaze by a well-choreographed and well-funded propaganda campaign against Jews and the Jewish state.

Once such propaganda takes hold, actual, physical, murderous Jihad is not far behind. The cognitive war, as my colleagues Richard Landes and Charles Jacobs know, is very hot; it, too, is on fire.

The accumulated footage of increasingly aggressive and menacing keffiyeh-and hijab-draped mobs utterly disrupting peaceful pro-Israel or truth-telling lectures; the omnipresent swastikas, anti-Jewish graffiti ("Kill all the Jews," ""I hate Jews," Kike", "Dirty Jew," ), the frightening hate speech ("Jews, your days are numbered," "Long live the Intifada," "From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free," "You are child murderers," ), the prominent mock Apartheid Walls, the mock eviction notices, the dorm storming, the bullying, etc.--document what I first called the Brownshirt phenomenon on campus way back in 2003.

By now, the Brownshirts have come into their own. They rule the American campuses from coast to coast, on the subjects of Israel, Islam, Palestine, Jews, and "Amerika." 

Russia challenges US to prove campaign hacking claims or shut up

CNN  "The United States must either stop accusing Russia of meddling in its elections or prove it, a spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin said Friday.
"Presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said it was "indecent" of the United States to "groundlessly" accuse Russia of intervention in the US election campaign, Russian state news agency Tass reported.  

" 'They should either stop talking about that or produce some proof at last. Otherwise it all begins to look unseemly," Peskov reportedly said about the latest accusations that Russia was responsible for hacker attacks." . . .

Claimed to be the best election map yet

John Cardillo

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Michelle Obama: ‘Now we’re feeling what not having hope feels like’

Legal Insurrection

"Actually, more Americans feel hopeful now that Trump has been elected"

 

"Michelle Obama had her final White House interview with Oprah Winfrey and bemoaned President-elect Trump’s victory with a series of silly, solipsistic observations.

"Despite her husband’s naive and childish approach to the presidency, she wants a “grown up” in charge, and despite the horrific results of Obama’s failed policies, she claims that she now understands what it’s like to have no hope.

"Fox News reports:

The First Lady used her final interview in the White House to tell Oprah Winfrey that a ‘grown up’ should be in charge of the country.

Looking forward to president-elect Trump’s looming inauguration, she said even though hope was lost, it was necessary to move on.

‘Now we’re feeling what not having hope feels like. Hope is necessary,’ she said in her first direct response to the November 9 election result.

Hillary: Attack on Her Campaign is An Attack On Our Country

By J. Marsolo in American Thinker . . .

"This is not just an attack on me and my campaign, although that may have added fuel to it. This is an attack against our country. We are well beyond normal political concerns here. This is about the integrity of our democracy and the security of our nation."

"Hillary, Obama, and the Democrats view the release of the Podesta and DNC emails as an attack on our country. The truth is that if she and Obama had not lied, and if she had not sold access to the State Department, then there would have been nothing to hack and release.  The release of the emails is an attack on Hillary for her lying and corruption.  It is not an attack on our country.  It benefitted(sp) our country that we had the documentation of Hillary’s lying and corruption.

" Hillary is following the lead of Harry Reid who said the hacking and release of the emails is the same as the September 11, 2001 attack."

. . . 

"Obama is finished but continues to divide the country, as he has done for the past eight years, before he left for his last taxpayer-funded vacation in Hawaii."

A college under siege; Losers want to trash the Electoral College, but reality says they can’t

. . . Alexander Hamilton, one of the Founders . . . defended the Electoral College because it would be a source of stability, and that “an intermediate body of electors will be much less apt to convulse the community with any extraordinary or violent movements, than the choice of one who was himself to be the final object of the public wishes.”

Washington Times 

 . . . "The Founding Fathers, federalists all, were determined that the president should be elected by the states. The states, as Ronald Reagan reminded us in his first inaugural address, established the federal government, not the other way around. The Electoral College is the way the Founders preserved the primacy of the states. Though every state now selects its electors by popular vote, the states are free to choose another method, such as enabling their legislatures to select the electors.

"The losers this year are leading the charge for change, such as it is. Sen. Barbara Boxer of California, which voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton, has introduced a constitutional amendment to eliminate the college, and hundreds of thousands of Americans — some of them voters and many who no doubt are not — have signed online petitions in behalf of Mrs. Boxer’s amendment.

"Al Gore, who lost the Electoral College but won the national popular vote in 2000, supported the college when late in that campaign it appeared briefly that he might lose the popular vote and win the electoral votes, has changed his tune." . . .

Prof. Mike Adams on what is "racism" and what is not.

Two related columns by Criminology Prof. Mike Adams of UNC Wilmington (NC).  . . ."In addition to lecturing on the First Amendment, Mike Adams is actively involved in legal challenges to campus censorship. Represented by the ADF, he won a landmark First Amendment case before the 4th Circuit in Richmond, VA. Decided in 2011, Adams v UNCW held that professors publishing columns and giving speeches have the full protection of the First Amendment when discussing matters of public concern. Hence, when professors report such activities as part of their annual review, tenure, or promotion materials the university does not have license to discriminate on the basis of the professor's viewpoint.

How to Answer a False Accusation of Racism

"Yesterday, a student contacted me with a concern that is common among those taking courses in the social sciences and humanities. This particular student is enrolled in an online criminology class taught by a leftist professor. During a discussion of the Black Lives Matter movement, one of the more conservative students in her class used the phrase “all lives matter.” Predictably, the leftist professor objected. But he went even further by repeatedly accusing the student of racism. To make matters worse, the ad hominem attacks were made in front of all the students enrolled in the course. It was part of an online class “discussion.' ” . . .

Silencing Whitey

"As a free speech advocate, I can say without equivocation that I have never witnessed a more consistently censorious group than Black Lives Matter. Disrupting speech is not just a sideshow for them. It is the principal political tactic of the notorious uncivil wrongs group. It is their primary method of drawing attention to their cause because they lack the intellectual fortitude to persuade people to listen based on the content of their arguments." 

So electors will decide who is fit to be president?

" 'Well, the "let's make excuses for Hillary's loss" crowd have now gone from the silly to the insane.  They are now asking electors to vote their conscience – a rather bizarre suggestion, since I voted for Mr. Trump rather than a specific elector in Texas."

Silvio Canto, Jr.  "Let me take you back eight years, to the eve of the electors voting for then-senator Obama. 
  

"My guess is that many of you agreed with me that Mr. Obama was unfit to be president.  In fact, we knew nothing about him other than that he was over 35 years old and had lived in Illinois for the last 14 years.  He met the U.S. Constitution's requirements to be president, as outlined in Article 2:

No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

"It did not occur to me that we should go out and hire a bunch of spokesmen to call on electors to say Senator Obama was unfit to be president.

"We could have argued that the Founding Fathers wanted only serious people to serve as president – not a bad argument, considering that Mr. Obama ran a campaign of slogans with very little substance.  We could have added that Mr. Obama's citizenship was an open question and made reference to the Clinton campaign's charges that he was not born in the U.S.

"Again, I would have rejected any such efforts on the grounds that Mr. Obama had won the election.     

"Well, the "let's make excuses for Hillary's loss" crowd have now gone from the silly to the insane.  They are now asking electors to vote their conscience – a rather bizarre suggestion, since I voted for Mr. Trump rather than a specific elector in Texas.

"It gets even more bizarre to hear these "spokesmen" talk about the intent of the Founding Fathers.  Will they join us and say the Founding Fathers did not intend to have abortion and marriage decided by the Supreme Court?   

"In the end, this is nothing but more whining by a pack of sore losers.   

"I am not a psychiatrist, but maybe this is one of the stages of grief, as my friendMark Davis wrote in Dallas:

The stages of grief defined by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross in 1969 have a final destination that would be of great value to those still struggling with the election: acceptance.

"Yes, acceptance is right.  Mr. Trump won, and Mrs. Clinton lost.  It's time to move on and let the next team get ready for the many challenges awaiting them, from Aleppo to Obamacare."

Report: ‘Faithless Elector’ Lied About Being A 9/11 First Responder

Daily Caller

"The Texas elector who cited his experience as a 9/11 first responder for his refusal to vote for President-elect Donald Trump appears to have fabricated the entire thing, according to an investigation by local news outlet WFAA.

"Chris Suprun said he responded with the Manassas Park, Va., fire department after the third plane hit the Pentagon during the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. But WFAA’s investigation reveals that the department wasn’t among those responding to the attacks. What’s more, Suprun didn’t even join the fire department until October 2001 — a month . . .  after the attacks." . . .

The Trump Cabinet: Bonfire of the agencies

"Pruitt has been deemed unfit to serve because he fails liberalism’s modern-day religious test: belief in anthropogenic climate change. They would love to turn his confirmation hearing into a Scopes monkey trial. Republicans should decline the invitation. It doesn’t matter whether the man believes the moon is made of green cheese. "

Charles Krauthammer

"Hypocrisy aside, it is true that, as head of Exxon Mobil, Tillerson made major deals with Russia, received Russia’s Order of Friendship and opposed U.S. sanctions. That’s troubling but not necessarily disqualifying. At the time, after all, Tillerson was acting as an agent of Exxon Mobil, whose interest it is to extract oil and make money.

"We don’t know. We shall soon find out. That’s what confirmation hearings are for.

"The left has been in equally high dudgeon that other Cabinet picks appear not to share the mission of the agency which they have been nominated to head. The horror! As if these agency missions are somehow divinely ordained. Why, they aren’t even constitutionally ordained. The Department of Education, for example, was created by President Carter in 1979 as a payoff to the teachers’ unions for their political support." . . .

"It doesn’t matter whether the man believes the moon is made of green cheese. The challenges to EPA actions are based not on meteorology or theology, but on the Constitution. The issue is that the EPA has egregiously exceeded its authority and acted as a rogue agency unilaterally creating rules unmoored from legislation."

Charles Krauthammer is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated columnist, political commentator, and physician. He is a contributing editor to the Weekly Standard, a weekly panelist on the PBS news program Inside Washington, and a nightly panelist on Fox News.

The wealthy Democrats who helped pump over $1 billion into Hillary Clinton’s losing effort want answers.

Politico  . . . "The call for a deep and detailed accounting of how Clinton lost a race that she and her donors were absolutely certain she’d win didn’t begin immediately after the election — there was too much shock over her defeat by Donald Trump, and overwhelming grief. Her initial conference call with top backers, which came just days after the outcome, focused primarily on FBI Director Jim Comey’s late campaign-season intervention. 

"But in the weeks since, the wealthy Democrats who helped pump over $1 billion into Clinton’s losing effort have been urging their local finance staffers, state party officials, and campaign aides to provide a more thorough explanation of what went wrong. With no dispassionate, centralized analysis of how Clinton failed so spectacularly, they insist, how can they be expected to keep contributing to the party? " . . .