Georgetown professor Michael Eric Dyson went on a rant against the president and even suggested that Hillary Clinton won the election during his eulogy at Aretha Franklin’s funeral on Friday.
“Then this orange apparition had the nerve to say she worked for him. You lugubrious leach, you dopey doppelgänger of deceit and deviance, you lethal liar, you dimwitted dictator, you foolish fascist,” Dyson continued. “She [didn’t] work for you, she worked above you. She worked beyond you. Get your preposition right. Then he [has] the nerve to say he’s going to grab it. That’s not what Aretha Franklin said. I’m going to give you something that you can feel.”
MARTHA MACCALLUM’S BURNING QUESTION ON LOUIS Farrakhan AT ARETHA FRANKLIN FUNERAL — ‘WHAT WAS HE DOING THERE?’
Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum on Friday wondered what “unapologetic anti-Semite” Louis Farrakhan was “doing up there” in such a prominent position at Aretha Franklin’s funeral.
The Fox News host told her panel that, despite the “amazing” performances of stars like Jennifer Hudson and Gladys Knight, she was “distracted by Louis Farrakhan who was in every single shot.”
“What was he doing there?” she asked the panel.
Liberal economist Kylie Patterson acknowledged the “mixed” history of Farrakhan but also noted both Franklin’s and Farrakhan’s involvement in the “liberation movement.”
“This is her funeral,” Patterson said. “I mean, it’s her choice, who she wants there, how she wants people sitting.”
“I just wonder how much jockeying there was for prime position,” MacCallum asked. “I saw that he was kind of pushing his website and all of this on Twitter. And I thought, ‘Gee, that’s kind of a little bit unfortunate’ that it was distracting in that way. He, you know, has said awful things about Jewish people, about white people, about gay people and I thought it was never the message that I heard in Aretha Franklin’s music.”
No Matter What Liberals Say Or Do It Is Okay With Their Followers.
Birmingham, AL Mayor Randall L. Woodfin is facing a large amount of scrutiny after he said being a sanctuary city wouldn’t be enough and declared Birmingham a “welcoming city” during an interview with NPR’s “Code Switch.”
“I think ‘sanctuary city’ is narrowly tailored and isolated towards don’t have your police enforce certain things of rounding up and hurting people, which I agree with. We’re not going to do that. But ‘welcoming cities’ is more broadly about, how do we help our immigrant community? And as I go to Birmingham city schools, I can tell you our immigrant community continues to grow. So it’s – for me it has a broader positive impact, whereas sanctuary is don’t do this. Welcoming is, this is what we’re going to do,” said Woodfin during the interview.
Woodfin was also questioned on whether or not he would use the city’s resources for immigration enforcement.
“We’re not going to use our police to do anything around what I call rounding up people,” Woodfin told NPR.
Woodfin added, “We just don’t believe in that. I don’t believe in that as mayor. I’ve had a clear, direct conversation with my police chief. I’ve had a clear and direct conversation with my chief of our city jail. We’re not in that business.”
Woodfin also stated that Birmingham police would not ask for the immigration status of individuals.
Throughout the interview, Mayor Woodfin made it clear that ICE would not be enabled by the local police force in Birmingham.
Republicans across the state have taken to social media to challenge Woodfin’s notion and share their thoughts on the issue, especially Alabama Republican Chair Terry Lathan.
“[T]he Bham mayor condoning the breaking of our laws and demanding our law enforcement to do the same. Didn’t he pledge an oath to uphold the LAWS?” Lathan said in a tweet.
Lathan also shared her displeasure with Mayor Woodfin’s statements by tweeting “Apparently [Woodfin] wants to see government break our laws. That will make for an interesting city brochure.”
Ford Brown of Yellowhammer Radio in Birmingham shared his thoughts on the issue surrounding Woodfin’s comments and said, “I think that the biggest city in this state sets the tone for the rest of the state. What is Gov. Kay Ivey going to do about that?”
Rand Paul continued to make his case for revoking former CIA Director John Brennan’s security clearance in a Thursday Breitbart op-ed, citing a 2012 leak that “helped compromise” an operation in Yemen and risked an agent’s life.
Stating that Brennan is “no stranger” to the problem of “vital, secret details” being leaked by security clearance-holding television commentators, Paul hearkened back to 2012.
The Kentucky Senator claimed that Brennan, then Obama’s top White House adviser on counter-terrorism, gave classified information to a group of former Obama advisers turned TV commentators about a Yemen terror plot that Washington had “inside control” of through a double-agent.
After Brennan’s briefing, one of the call’s participants, Richard Clarke, went on ABC and broadcast the government implying that there was a Western spy inside the Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula bomb-making group.
John Brennan’s careless leak to former intelligence officials turned television commentators helped compromise an operation and risk the life of a double agent, and who knows what other objectives it also hindered or outright prevented. This is exactly why former intelligence officials who are now talking heads on television should not continue to have a security clearance.
Reuters reported in 2012: “At stake was an operation that could not have been more sensitive — the successful penetration by Western spies of AQAP, al Qaeda’s most creative and lethal affiliate. As a result of leaks, the undercover operation had to be shut down.”
Is John Brennan monetizing his security clearance? Is John Brennan making millions of dollars divulging secrets to the mainstream media with his attacks on @realDonaldTrump ?
Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul said Sunday that the U.S. has, like Russia, tried to influence many foreign elections.
Verdict: True
The U.S. attempted to influence over 80 foreign elections from 1946 to 2000, sometimes secretly.
Fact Check:
Paul mentioned the U.S.’s history of attempting to influence other elections in advance of President Donald Trump’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin Monday in Helsinki, Finland. News outlets asked Trump whether he would hold Putin accountable for Russian meddling in the 2016 election by asking him to hand indicted Russians over to the U.S.
“I think really we mistake our response if we think it’s about accountability from the Russians,” Paul said on CNN’s “State Of The Union.” “They are another country. They are going to spy on us. They do spy on us. They are going to interfere in our elections. We also do the same.”
Loch K. Johnson, a professor at the University of Georgia who began his career investigating the CIA as a Senate committee staffer in the 1970s, told The New York Times that the U.S. has certainly tried to influence foreign elections.
“We’ve been doing this kind of thing since the CIA was created in 1947,” Johnson said. “We’ve used posters, pamphlets, mailers, banners — you name it. We’ve planted false information in foreign newspapers. We’ve used what the British call ‘King George’s cavalry’: suitcases of cash.”
Paul cited research from Dov H. Levin, a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Politics and Strategy at Carnegie Mellon University. Levin identified 81 instances in which the U.S. interfered in foreign elections from 1946 to 2000. He could confirm that Russia interfered in 36 elections over the same period.
“One well-known example is in the case of Italy in 1948, the United States was really worried that the Italian Communist Party, the PCI, would come to power in Italy, which was seen as very likely to lead to Italy becoming a communist dictatorship and eventually becoming a Soviet ally,” Levin told The Daily Caller News Foundation. A declassified National Security Council report recommended that the U.S. end economic aid to Italy if it did not combat Communist control.
More recently, the U.S. spent millions of dollars to influence the election in Yugoslavia in 2000 and unseat its socialist leader, Slobodan Milošević.
“We gave them tens of millions of dollars in campaign funding, we sent in a campaigning adviser who basically did the polling for them,” Levin said. “We also trained thousands of campaign personnel in various campaigning methods – how to get out the vote, and so forth.”
The U.S. paid for 2.5 million stickers with the slogan “He’s Finished” and 5,000 cans of spray paint. “One of the techniques of the opposition’s election campaigns in Serbia and Yugoslavia was spraying slogans on peoples’ houses,” Levin said. “So we also gave them 5,000 spray cans to spray campaign slogans throughout Serbia.”
Opposition supporters wave flags and leaflets reading “He is finished” aimed at Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic during a pre election rally by the Democratic Opposition of Serbia’s candidate for upcoming Yugoslav presidential elections Vojislav Kostunica in Nis, some 200km south of Belgrade September 19, 2000. More than 25,000 opposition supporters rallied in the center of Nis in support of the opposition presidential nominee. PEK/FMS via Reuters
“Naturally, the consideration of breaking laws or not when it came to these types of interventions was not a major concern for secret or covert intervention,” Levin said. But he cautioned that instances of U.S. election interference are not directly comparable to Russia’s recent actions. “I do not see any moral equivalence between what Russia has done in 2016 and what we have done in past interventions in elections,” he said.
Steven L. Hall, the former chief of Russian operations for the CIA, told TheNYT that while U.S. actions in recent decades have not been morally equivalent to those of Russia, Russia’s actions were not far outside the norm of expected behavior. “If you ask an intelligence officer, did the Russians break the rules or do something bizarre, the answer is no, not at all,” Hall said.
Levin’s report excluded actions taken independently by private citizens or non-state actors (such as private campaign consultants), instances where the U.S. or Russia tried to delegitimize elections as a whole and policy decisions that could have unintentionally affected the election results in another country.
He does not list any U.S. cyber election intervention methods comparable to Russian cyber hacks in the 2016 election, in part because the report only examines elections before the year 2000. But he said that the U.S. did use pre-internet “analog” methods which were similar in design.
The CIA, for example, planted agents in Japanese socialist youth groups, student groups and labor groups in the 1950s and 1960s. Levin said that informants during the 1958 Japanese election gave “dirt” on people in the Socialist Party to the U.S., and then the U.S. gave that information to the Japanese Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). One LDP leader told TheNYT in 1994 that he had a “deep relationship” with the CIA.
Levin categorized instances of spying on opposing campaigns, spreading damaging information and encouraging the breakup of rival political coalitions as “dirty tricks.” Russia favored influencing elections with these tactics, he said.
He expects that foreign election interference will become more common. “The use of force is becoming more and more expensive for countries while at the same time opportunities to intervene in this way are expanding,” he said.
James Gunn, the powerhouse writer/director behind Marvel’s lucrative Guardians of the Galaxy franchise, was fired by the Walt Disney company Friday.
“The offensive attitudes and statements discovered on James’ Twitter feed are indefensible and inconsistent with our studio’s values, and we have severed our business relationship with him,” Walt Disney Studios chairman Alan Horn said in a statement.
Disney owns Marvel, which means Gunn will not only not be writing or directing Guardians of the Galaxy 3, he is out of the Marvel Cinematic Universe period.
According the Hollywood Reporter, a far-left entertainment site, the now-disgraced Gunn had already begun writing the Guardians 3 script. Shooting was scheduled to begin this fall in Atlanta.
While the establishment media and entertainment media all but ignored the story (probably hoping they could save the Trump-hating Gunn), Twitter sleuths online, the Daily Caller, and (to its credit) TheWrap, all dug up and covered explosive tweets written by Gunn over the past decade — tweets that “joked” about committing child rape, along with disparaging jokes about Mexicans, AIDS, the Holocaust, and rape in general.
One of the more disturbing finds was Gunn bragging about a movie titled 100 Pubescent Girls Touch Themselves that he apparently embedded on his personal website. In an apparent panic, Gunn took his website down Thursday night, but the Wayback Machine reveals that he received the video from a man who was later convicted of pedophilia. In the most vulgar way imaginable, Gunn bragged that the movie gave him an orgasm.
Gunn is a huge loss to the Marvel machine. He had just earned an executive producer credit on Avengers: Infinity War, and was seen as integral to Marvel’s expanding universe, even beyond Guardians.
Gunn was also famous for his Twitter account, which enjoys over a half-million followers. Using this verified account (which vanished for a time on Friday, but is back up now), the far-left Gunn loved to signal his own virtue, regularly blasted President Trump, and Trump supporters.
Gunn issued an apology for his disturbing Tweets Thursday night, but that apology did not and could not explain everything away, especially his sexual fascination with a movie titled 100 Pubescent Girls Touch Themselves andhis association with a convicted pedophile.
Since the moment Justice Kennedy stepped down, an intense, mostly friendly battle has been waged in public and in private over Judge Brett Kavanaugh. Some of the claims are silly. He’s no “squish.” He’s a brilliant jurist who’s written some of the best and most influential appellate-court decisions in the United States. And whisper campaigns that call him the “low-energy Jeb Bush pick” or claim that he’d somehow be a “compromise” nominee are simply wrong.
Let’s put it this way: If Kavanaugh is some sort of deep-cover David Souter, he’s done a remarkably good job of hiding it, building a mountain of stellar originalist jurisprudence. Ed Whelan has been doing yeoman’s work over on National Review’s Bench Memos blog, righteously defending Kavanaugh’s record on religious liberty, the Second Amendment, free speech, immigration, and the administrative state. And Ed isn’t alone. Pieces from former Kavanaugh law clerks at The Federalistand at NRO have ably defended him from attacks and highlighted the best parts of his jurisprudence.
In evaluating Kavanaugh, there’s only one reasonable conclusion to draw: He’d be an excellent Supreme Court justice, and he would make the Court substantially more originalist and rigorous.
But saying that he’s an excellent pick is not the same thing as saying that he’s the best available pick. There’s a difference between a home run and a grand slam. The question — given this unique moment in which the Trump administration is listening to the best conservative legal minds, Republicans control the Senate, and the filibuster is a thing of the past — is whether Kavanaugh represents the grand slam.
I have my concerns, and those concerns are rooted in two cases that have been oft-misrepresented in the debate over Kavanaugh but are consequential nonetheless. The first is Seven-Sky v. Holder(better known as Kavanaugh’s Obamacare case). The second is Priests for Life v. HHS (an Obamacare contraception-mandate case.) In both cases, his reasoning is sharp and his legal decisions are defensible. In both cases, however, I believe he made important errors.
Let’s deal with Seven-Sky first. Judge Kavanaugh wrote an opinion dissenting from the majority’s determination that it had jurisdiction to hear the plaintiff’s challenge to Obamacare. He did not reach an opinion on the underlying merits of the case, which is to say, on the question of whether Obamacare was constitutional.
The legal details matter here. Kavanaugh held that the Anti-Injunction Act applied to bar the plaintiffs’ suit. As he explained, “Under the Anti-Injunction Act, a taxpayer seeking to challenge a tax law must first pay the disputed tax and then bring a refund suit, at which time the courts will consider the taxpayer’s legal arguments. Or a taxpayer may raise legal arguments in defending against an IRS enforcement action. But a taxpayer may not bring a pre-enforcement suit.” The challenge to Obamacare was a “pre-enforcement suit” and was thus barred:
The Anti-Injunction Act applies here because plaintiffs’ pre-enforcement suit, if successful, would prevent the IRS from assessing or collecting tax penalties from citizens who do not have health insurance. To be sure, the Affordable Care Act labels its exaction for failure to have health insurance as a tax “penalty” and not as a “tax.” But the Anti-Injunction Act still applies. That’s because the Affordable Care Act requires that the tax penalty for failure to maintain health insurance “be assessed and collected in the same manner as an assessable penalty under subchapter B of chapter 68” of the Tax Code. 26 U.S.C. § 5000A(g)(1). And penalties under subchapter B of chapter 68 in turn must “be assessed and collected in the same manner as taxes.” 26 U.S.C. § 6671(a) (emphasis added). It follows from those two provisions, taken together, that these Affordable Care Act penalties must be assessed and collected “in the same manner as taxes.”
This is a defensible reading of the relevant Obamacare provisions. Indeed, while the majority in the most consequential Obamacare case to reach SCOTUS, NFIB v. Sebelius et al., did not apply the Anti-Injunction Act, it did hold that the penalty was a tax. That was a reasonable response to the statutory language, but it was wrong. The Obamacare penalty was a penalty, not a tax. Justices Scalia, Alito, Thomas, and Kennedy made the better argument, in their stinging dissent:
In answering that question we must, if “fairly possible,” Crowell v. Benson, 285 U. S. 22, 62 (1932), construe the provision to be a tax rather than a mandate-with-penalty, since that would render it constitutional rather than unconstitutional (ut res magis valeat quam pereat). But we cannot rewrite the statute to be what it is not. “‘“[A]lthough this Court will often strain to construe legislation so as to save it against constitutional attack, it must not and will not carry this to the point of perverting the purpose of a statute . . .” or judicially rewriting it.’” Commodity Futures Trading Comm’n v. Schor, 478 U. S. 833, 841 (1986) (quoting Aptheker v. Secretary of State, 378 U. S. 500, 515 (1964), in turn quoting Scales v. United States, 367 U. S. 203, 211 (1961)). In this case, there is simply no way, “without doing violence to the fair meaning of the words used,” Grenada County Supervisors v. Brogden, 112 U. S. 261, 269 (1884), to escape what Congress enacted: a mandate that individuals maintain minimum essential coverage, enforced by a penalty.
Our cases establish a clear line between a tax and a penalty: “‘[A] tax is an enforced contribution to provide for the support of government; a penalty . . . is an exaction imposed by statute as punishment for an unlawful act.’” United States v. Reorganized CF&I Fabricators of Utah, Inc., 518 U. S. 213, 224 (1996) (quoting United States v. La Franca, 282 U. S. 568, 572 (1931)). In a few cases, this Court has held that a “tax” imposed upon private conduct was so onerous as to be in effect a penalty. But we have never held — never — that a penalty imposed for violation of the law was so trivial as to be in effect a tax. We have never held that any exaction imposed for violation of the law is an exercise of Congress’ taxing power — even when the statute calls it a tax, much less when (as here) the statute repeatedly calls it a penalty. When an act “adopt[s] the criteria of wrongdoing” and then imposes a monetary penalty as the “principal consequence on those who transgress its standard,” it creates a regulatory penalty, not a tax. Child Labor Tax Case, 259 U. S. 20, 38 (1922).
While it is most certainly true that Judge Kavanaugh did not rule on the underlying constitutionality of what he called the “tax penalty” (and he offered a ringing critique of the government’s Commerce Clause justifications for the individual mandate), he got the fundamental question (tax or penalty?) wrong, and Justices Kennedy, Scalia, Alito, and Thomas got it right. That’s a cause for some concern.
There is also cause for concern in his reasoning in Priests for Life. His dissent reached the right result, but his reasoning was dangerously flawed in one key respect: He excessively inflated the government’s interest in facilitating access to contraceptives.
As he explained in his opinion, he had to consider three questions: Did the contraception mandate “substantially burden” Priests for Life’s “exercise of religion”? If so, were the Obama administration’s regulations justified by a “compelling” governmental interest? And, finally, if there was a compelling governmental interest, did those regulations represent the “least restrictive means” of advancing that interest? Here were Judge Kavanaugh’s conclusions:
First, under Hobby Lobby, the regulations substantially burden the religious organizations’ exercise of religion because the regulations require the organizations to take an action contrary to their sincere religious beliefs (submitting the form) or else pay significant monetary penalties.
Second, that said, Hobby Lobby strongly suggests that the Government has a compelling interest in facilitating access to contraception for the employees of these religious organizations.
Third, this case therefore comes down to the least restrictive means question.
Judge Kavanaugh held that the Obama administration had not chosen the least restrictive means to advance its allegedly “compelling” interest, and therefore would have ruled for Priests for Life.
The problem is with his second conclusion. Here’s how he explained it later in his opinion:
Justice Kennedy strongly suggested in his Hobby Lobby concurring opinion — which appears to be controlling de facto if not also de jure on this particular issue — that the Government generally has a compelling interest in facilitating access to contraception for women employees.
Is that correct? And if his summary of Justice Kennedy’s concurrence is correct, then was Judge Kavanaugh actually bound to follow it?
To understand why I believe Judge Kavanaugh’s reasoning is erroneous, it’s important to give a bit of background on Hobby Lobby. The case was a 5–4 decision, with Justice Kennedy filing a separate concurring opinion. Justice Alito’s majority opinion simply assumed (without holding) that the government’s interest in providing the “challenged contraceptive methods” was compelling within the meaning of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
But before making that assumption, Justice Alito wrote these vitally important words: RFRA, he said, “requires the Government to demonstrate that the compelling interest test is satisfied through application of the challenged law ‘to the person’ — the particular claimant whose sincere exercise of religion is being substantially burdened.”
To put it plainly, according to Alito’s reasoning, under RFRA the government would have to establish a compelling governmental interest in facilitating access to contraceptives not just for women generally but as applied to the specific plaintiffs.
Justice Kennedy, in his concurrence, says this:
It is important to confirm that a premise of the Court’s opinion is its assumption that the HHS regulation here at issue furthers a legitimate and compelling interest in the health of female employees.
It’s important to note that an “assumption” is not a holding. Moreover, this “assumption” doesn’t fully grapple with Alito’s statement that the compelling-interest analysis applies to the “particular claimant whose sincere exercise of religion is being substantially burdened” — in this case, Priests for Life.
Yet Kavanaugh glided past Alito’s language and applied the Kennedy “assumption” to the “employees of these religious organizations.” This application was not compelled by Kennedy’s concurrence, and it ultimately fails as a matter of logic and reason when applied to Priests for Life.
While the government may well deem that contraceptives provide many general benefits (and Kavanaugh outlines those benefits in his opinion), that is not the same thing as holding that those general benefits are sufficiently compelling as applied to the employees of a small religious nonprofit. After all, no one is forced to work for Priests for Life, its employees undertake their duties as part of a religious mission, and it would even be within the rights of Priests for Life to bar its employees from using contraceptives.
Where is the compelling governmental interest in facilitating access to drugs that a religious employer may prohibit as a condition of employment?
Again, I outline these concerns not because I believe Judge Kavanaugh is a “squish” or because I believe his opinions were indefensible. I simply think his reasoning was flawed — and flawed in two critically important, high-profile cases. When deciding between excellent candidates (and Trump’s short list includes only excellent candidates), it’s worth considering — as I said above — whether a nominee is a grand slam or “only” a home run. I’m simply not sure that Kavanaugh is the grand slam.
Andrew Jerell Jones@sluggahjells
THE Scott Edwards@MystrE21
