Image 01 Image 03
Sign In or RegisterLogout

January 2018

Posted by William A. Jacobson on January 16, 2018 58 Comments
Arizona Republican Senator Jeff Flake had a very important speech planned for this week. It was so important that he distributed excerpts to the media over the weekend and appeared on ABC News Sunday to build up interest in the speech. The speech was mostly blah blah blah except for the one thing that garnered all the headlines Sunday. That something special part of the speech was simple.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on January 16, 2018 153 Comments
Dick Durbin's claim that Donald Trump referred to "s***hole" non-white countries during a closed door DACA negotiation has lit a fire. It appears to be part of a strategy from Durbin and Democrats to walk away from a DACA deal unless they get what they want (primarily amnesty without any changes in immigration practices or border enforcement), preferring to make this a racial issue. I covered this in my post, Dick Durbin blew up DACA, deliberately:

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on January 16, 2018 27 Comments
Sorry, Trump-haters, but according to Trump's doctor, the president is a picture of health and could live to 200! Turns out a subsisting on Diet Coke, burnt steak, and McDonald's is the way to go.

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on January 16, 2018 46 Comments
Friday, eleven-year-old Khawlah Noman claimed that while she was walking to her school with her ten-year-old brother, a scissor-wielding Asian man in his 20s used scissors in repeated attempts to cut her hijab. Once she got to school, she told school officials who then escalated the complaint up the chain until the girl was sitting in front of a bevy of news cameras and Canada's Prime Minister was issuing statements on the incident.

Posted by Vijeta Uniyal on January 16, 2018 19 Comments
German authorities allowed a top Iranian cleric accused of mass murder to flee the country on Thursday. The decision came despite formal requests from leading exiled Iranian groups calling for the cleric to face justice. Ayatollah Mahmoud Shahroudi, the 69-year-old Mullah touted as the successor to Iran's all-powerful theocratic dictator Ali Khamenei, came to Germany for treatment at the clinic of an Iranian-German neurosurgeon when exiled Iranian dissidents referred him to German prosecutors, citing his record of running Islamic courts, where he presided over the killing of thousands of Iranians. The leading German tabloid Bild Zeitung ran the headline "Death Judge In Iran, Luxury Patient In Germany,"  covering Shahroudi's stay in the country.

Posted by Mike LaChance on January 16, 2018 47 Comments
Election night 2016 was something to behold. The mood on CNN and MSNBC went from delighted anticipation to downright funereal in a matter of hours. Apparently, former ambassador Samantha Power had an election watching party that night. Oh, to be a fly on the wall.

Posted by David Gerstman on January 16, 2018 11 Comments
One of the predicted outcomes of the nuclear deal with Iran, contrary to what President Barack Obama claimed, is that it would strengthen the hands of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the "hardliners" in the regime. (I don't believe there are moderates in the regime. It is a revolutionary regime that seeks to export its ideology across the region. President Hassan Rouhani would not have been allowed to compete or win if he did not subscribe to the same ideologies as the hardliners.) Rather than opening up or liberalizing Iran, the deal was correctly predicted to lead to further repression.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on January 15, 2018 28 Comments
The more cases of campus sexual assault adjudications we cover, the more we see patterns. There frequently is an ongoing consensual sexual relationship in which only some of the interactions were claimed to be non-consensual; a delay in reporting the alleged assault; a process in which the accused is left uncertain as to the charges against him; an inability to be represented by counsel or anyone who could give substantive assistance; a university investigation under pressure to "believe" the accuser; the inability to call a key witnesses, the issue of whether there was sufficient affirmative consent (there being no claim that the female said "No"), and of course, the use of alcohol in varying degrees.

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on January 15, 2018 14 Comments
I look forward to Martin Luther King Jr. Day every year because it affords me the opportunity to post one of my favorite speeches of all time, Dr. King's "Loving Your Enemies" speech. Speaking at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, on 17 November 1957, King implored those in attendance to love their enemies, no matter the cost.
MORE POSTS
Accessibility by WAH