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November 2015

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on November 30, 2015 12 Comments
The State Department published another batch of Hillary's emails Monday as part of their rolling release thanks to a court order. The emails are a portion of the chunk Hillary turned over to the State Department from her personal server. She or her legal counsel (Clinton has been opaque here) determined what emails were worthy of State Department record. Pilfering through the emails, readers have found all kinds of fun stuff. Evidently, everyone loved Hillary's glasses. And Blumenthal thought he had a huge scoop:

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on November 30, 2015 19 Comments
Monday, Robert Dear, the 57-year-old suspect in the Colorado Springs clinic shooting attended an advisement hearing alongside his public defender. Dear will be represented by the same public defender who defended the Aurora theater shooter some months back. The hearing contained no discussion of motives. Colorado local news reported:

Posted by Amy Miller on November 30, 2015 45 Comments
Will the battle between Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz come down to the support of their colleagues in Congress? Those colleagues hope so. An article out today in Politico details how the rise of Ted Cruz in the polls (especially in Iowa) has prompted some prominent members of Congress to start leaning toward Marco Rubio as the preferred candidate of cross-spectrum Republicans. This lean in itself could be construed as a momentary win for Cruz, whose supporters couldn't care less what Mitch McConnell has to say about much of anything these days, but it could spell trouble in the long run for the firebrand candidate. The hesitance (and in some cases, outright refusal) to support Ted Cruz springs from a long history of various floor fights and back hall disputes over policies. Now, congressional Republicans are coming out in force against the possibility of a Cruz nomination, not because they agree with him on principle, but because they see Marco Rubio as the candidate who can win over new supporters in numbers that will place the GOP back in the White House. From Politico:
Mainstream elected Republicans now see Cruz as a bigger threat than Donald Trump or Ben Carson to clinch the nomination — but equally damaging to their party’s chances of winning the White House and keeping the Senate next fall. Rubio would be a much stronger general election standard bearer, they believe.

Posted by Amy Miller on November 30, 2015 6 Comments
One of the favorite opposition tactics of operatives on both sides of the aisle is to present the actions of a politician in an out-of-context format. It's effective; you want that first public reaction to your enemy's various foibles and power plays to sprout from a place of distrust. This is why, even in 2015 when we have candidates like Donald Trump and Ted Cruz who, at least on the surface, don't give a damn what the opposition has to say, operatives are so careful to advise their clients about how this looks. It's not fair, but it's important. Hillary Clinton, by and large, has broken every rule in the book covering how this looks. The woman has spent a great deal of valuable campaign time defending her tenure as Secretary of State as it relates to the Benghazi attacks, defending her use of a private, unsecured email server, and defending the Clinton Foundation's financial practices, when she could have saved herself a lot of trouble if she would have bothered to care about public perception from the get-go. The Associated Press has obtained calendars used during Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State that show she opened her office to Democratic party fundraisers, former Clinton administration and campaign allies, and corporate donors to the family's Foundation. According to the AP, these meetings were "formally scheduled" and many of them occurred between Clinton and power players seeking to influence Obama Administration policy. What she did was not out of the ordinary, but it does fall into her pattern of doing exactly as she pleases while assuming a zero-consequences end game.

Posted by Amy Miller on November 30, 2015 15 Comments
Trigger Warning: "BACK IN MY DAY" rant in 3...2... I don't harbor many memories from undergrad that are related to social justice or student protests. At one point, one guy (it was the mid-oughts, so we can assume he was one of three hippies at Purdue University) went on a hunger strike, but I can't for the life of me remember why; all I remember is walking by his little encampment on the way to class and racking my brain for the reason why this person was slowly starving himself. It wasn't a very effective protest. We had the usual pro-life vs. pro-choice protesters, and a campus crier (I refuse to call him a "pastor"), and at one point a sizable demonstration popped up against a panel discussion featuring Cindy Sheehan, but nothing particularly noteworthy happened. Oh, how the times have changed. The uproar coming from Mizzou, Amherst, UT-Austin, and other campuses across America has devolved into full-fledged lunacy. Students fed up with real and perceived microaggressions, macroaggressions, poop swastikas (both real and imagined), and racially-motivated sideeye glances are demanding action on the part of their universities. Some enterprising individual collected those demands all in one place.

Posted by David Gerstman on November 30, 2015 13 Comments
Last week saw a very important piece of news about the nuclear deal with Iran. And it was covered by neither The New York Times nor The Washington Post. International Atomic Energy Agency Director-General Yukiya Amano said that Iran, instead of coming clean about its past nuclear work, has continued to stonewall. Amano, too much the bureaucrat to use those actual words, said that his agency's report will not be "black and white." But Iran was obligated to come clean by the interim Joint Plan of Action (JPOA) from two years ago "to facilitate resolution of past and present issues of concern." That obligation to come clean also was required by this summer's Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) to "fully implement the 'Roadmap for Clarification of Past and Present Outstanding Issues' agreed with the IAEA, containing arrangements to address past and present issues of concern relating to its nuclear programme." Since Amano did not say that Iran "fully" addressed questions about its past nuclear work, he's acknowledging that Iran did not comply with its obligations.

Posted by Mike LaChance on November 30, 2015 21 Comments
New Jersey governor Chris Christie is still pretty low in the polls. In fact, the Real Clear Politics average has him at 2.7 percent. Christie has picked up an important endorsement, however, from the conservative leaning New Hampshire newspaper, the Union Leader. The paper's publisher, Joseph W. McQuaid writes:
For our safety, our future: Chris Christie for President Thanksgiving is just past. Christmas is ahead. We doubt that too many people across New Hampshire have politics front and center right now. But in just 10 weeks, New Hampshire will make a choice that will profoundly affect our country and the world. We better get it right. Our choice is Gov. Chris Christie. As a U.S. attorney and then a big-state governor, he is the one candidate who has the range and type of experience the nation desperately needs.

Posted by Amy Miller on November 30, 2015 26 Comments
It's been a great year and a half for me here at Legal Insurrection---but it's time to say goodbye. I've accepted a position in a law firm, which means its back to the real world, and away from the wonderfully bizarre world of full-time conservative journalism. I say "wonderfully bizarre," and I truly mean it. The internet is a weird place, but I like to think that Legal Insurrection kicks up its political commentary more than a few notches above the rest. Of course, with a great platform comes great responsibility...and exposure...and criticism. On more than one occasion, Taylor Swift served as a terribly relevant addition to my workday playlist.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 29, 2015 18 Comments
We haven't written about the shooting at the Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado yet, because the facts as to the shooting and shooter seem so in flux. As is usually the case, there is a large-scale media operation underway to tie the shooter to the anti-abortion movement and specifically the undercover videos about Planned Parenthood's sale of unborn children parts and tissue. The problem is, there are precious few facts proving such a connection. There are reports based on anonymous sources that the shooter mentioned "baby parts" to police, but we don't know that for sure or in what context. It's also curious that the shooter does not appear to have shot people in the clinic, but did kill people, including a policeman, while shooting from the clinic. Carly Fiorina was on Fox News this morning, and hit out at the attempts to tie the pro-life movement to the shooting as a "typical left-wing tactic."

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 29, 2015 4 Comments
On November 13, 2015, the UT-Austin Palestine Solidarity Committee disrupted an Israel Studies Dept. event hosted by Prof. Ami Pedahzur, and featuring a visiting scholar from Stanford University. They refused to either participate or leave, and instead hurled insults and chants of "Long Live the Intifada." The PSC protesters were led by law student Mohammed Nabulsi, former graduate student Patrick Higgins, and sociology graduate student Katie Jensen. Whether they violated the UT-Austin campus code remains to be seen. From this video obtained by Legal Insurrection taken by someone outside the room, you can hear how loud the chants were and how Prof. Pedahzur urged the students to participate, only to be met with more chants.

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on November 29, 2015 12 Comments
Republican presidential hopeful Marco Rubio was asked if he goes to God for counsel when encountering difficult decisions. Rubio took the opportunity to elaborate on his relationship with faith and peace. "You know, I'd love to tell you absolutely all the time. I should and I often do. I think none of us do that enough," said Rubio. "About two months ago, somebody asked me, "do you ever doubt your faith?" I think people think doubting faith means you wake up in the morning and you say I wonder if there's really a God. I think we all doubt our faith. Let me tell you when you doubt your faith," he continued. "You doubt your faith when you're confronted with a challenge or a problem and you start to have deep anxiety."

Posted by Fuzzy Slippers on November 29, 2015 24 Comments
For many years, progressives and assorted leftists have been threatening (and pursuing) law suits against schools, cities and towns, and cemeteries and memorials in an attempt to remove all evidence of religious faith from the public sphere. The result has been a series of knee-jerk reactions by scared administrators who've preemptively banned prayer at senior centers or who've barricaded a mall Santa in a "glacier display."  The list is long (and silly, note the ban on the colors red and green). The right has been slow to respond, but there are groups who are fighting fire with fire.  According to the Cap Times, a local publication in Madison, Wisconsin, a school has canceled the reading of a transgender book to elementary school students.  This decision was taken after the Liberty Counsel weighed in and threatened to take action.

Posted by Leslie Eastman on November 29, 2015 7 Comments
Despite the Paris massacre earlier this month, the United Nations Climate Change Conference scheduled for that city is going on as planned, despite the significant security concerns given the number of world leaders participating. But the climate change leaders don't want everyone to participate, and environmental justice warriors have been placed under house arrest:
Public demonstrations are banned in France under the state of emergency that was declared after the Paris terrorist attacks two week ago, in which 130 people were killed. Green groups have described the move as "an abuse of power" but the French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said the activists were suspected of planning violent protests.

Posted by Amy Miller on November 29, 2015 12 Comments
Yesterday, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree imposing sanctions against Turkey in retaliation over last week's downing of a Russian jet that crossed into Turkish airspace near the Syrian border. The decree went into effect immediately, and places a stranglehold both on Turkish businesses operating in Russia and on Russians who planned on traveling to or doing business with Turkey. Via Reuters:
The decree, posted on the Kremlin's website, spoke of the need to protect Russia's national security and Russian citizens "from criminal and other illegal activities". In it, Putin ordered the government to prepare a list of goods, firms and jobs that would be affected. Some of the measures announced have already been informally introduced.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 29, 2015 12 Comments

Pronounced \ˈthēf\...

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