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Posted by Leslie Eastman on December 01, 2015 14 Comments
President Obama continued his "Apology Tour" during the Paris UN Climate Conference, by demeaning our nation once again:
Obama sang from the same hymnal on Monday, telling an assembly of world leaders that a future of environmental devastation 'is one that we have the power to change right here right now but only if we rise to this moment,' according to a White House press pool report. 'I've come here personally as the leader of the world's largest economy and the second largest emitter to say that the United States of America … embraces its responsibility to do something about it.
After deriding American productivity and lifestyle choices, he headed out with the other big government elites to a"three-Michelin-starred temple of gastronomie in the Marais neighborhood" for a...working dinner!

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Posted by Vijeta Uniyal on December 01, 2015 1 Comment
A leading British bank has closed the accounts of Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) and several other pro-Palestinian groups amid charges that they might be funnelling funds to terrorist organisations. Manchester-based Co-operative Bank issued a statement saying Palestine Solidarity Campaign's (PSC) accounts failed due diligence checks to ensure that funds were not 'inadvertently funding illegal or other proscribed activities.' The Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) claims to be surprised by the allegations and threatened legal action against the bank, crying foul about “discrimination.” PSC is one of the most influential backer of the anti-Israel boycott campaign (BDS) in UK. Jeremy Corbyn, the newly-elected leader of the Labour Party, has long been a vocal supporter of PSC and other anti-Israel groups championing the "Palestinian cause." The Labour leader enjoys long and close ties to the activist group. PSC's website describes him as “regularly speaks at [its] rallies” and being "tireless in his support for Palestine." The British newspaper The Telegraph reports the latest revelations:
An activist organisation which has Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn as patron has had its accounts closed down over fears that it may be inadvertently funding terrorism.

Posted by Andrew Branca on December 01, 2015 46 Comments
[Correction: An earlier version of this post characterized the defendant, Officer Porter, as the driver of the police van in which Gray was riding. In fact, the driver of the van was Officer Goodson. Porter's role has been corrected, below.] Yesterday jury selection began in the first of the six expected trials over the in-custody death of Freddie Gray. This first case tries 26-year-old Officer William Porter, who like Gray is black. The trial is being presided over by Judge Barry G. Williams, who is also black. (I mention the races of those involved only because the case has been racially-charged from the first riots.) Unfortunately, Maryland does not allow cameras in the court room, and even reporters who are present are permitted to access electronics (and thus tweet, etc.) only on breaks, so we don't expect there will be much of the blow-by-blow coverage we've done in other high-profile trials. (Reporters in the overflow room also cannot use electronics, but are permitted to enter and exit as they please.) Nevertheless, a few general observations can be made based on yesterday's reporting.

Protestors Chants Heard Clearly in Court Room

A major issue in all these trials has been whether, due to the extensive riots and looting that erupted in Baltimore a week after Gray's death and continuing for many days thereafter, it would be in the interests of justice to change the venue of the trial to a location outside of the city. Defense attorneys for the six police officers to be tried have made repeated motions for a change of venue.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 01, 2015 37 Comments
I have warned you for years about the malicious nature of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. There is nothing funny about these people, even if they sometimes act like clowns. And the worst of the worst, we've also documented, are leftist Jews. Whether it's Jewish Voice for Peace, offshoot groups which make sure to use "Jewish" in their names, the "as a Jew" activists or even our own local Ithaca activists, being anti-Israel has become a religion and an obsession. The academic boycott making its way through some faculty organizations has brought that obsession into the realm of education, unilaterally deciding who gets to learn what, and who gets shut out of the flow of information and exchange of ideas. A case broke overnight which epitomizes the evil of the academic boycott movement as much as any case I've seen. Shachar Rabinovitch is a 13-year old girl in Israel who is a big fan of horses. Here she is riding a horse while on vacation in Cyprus during horse jumps competition for juniors in the farm where she rode for a few years, according to her father:

Posted by Mike LaChance on December 01, 2015 7 Comments
Hillary Clinton met with all of the female Democrat senators Monday who happily endorsed her. Well, almost all the female Democrat senators. One rather important Massachusetts lawmaker was missing. Sam Frizell reports at Time:
Warren Absent From Clinton Fundraiser With Female Senators A meeting of female Democratic senators backing Hillary Clinton’s campaign Monday had one glaring omission, but no one mentioned it. In fact, some in the room seemed to suggest that it wasn’t happening. Thirteen of the 14 women from Congress’ upper chamber met for a fundraiser at the Hyatt Regency hotel in downtown Washington. Not joining them was Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who has not yet endorsed Clinton’s campaign.

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Posted by Fuzzy Slippers on December 01, 2015 14 Comments
Jeb's campaign has, by almost all accounts, been a disappointment to donors, to GOP primary voters, to Jeb's campaign team, and to pretty much everyone who cared in the first place. Despite this, he continues to talk as if he is the front runner he never really was and hope that at some point others will believe it, too.  Part of this strategy appears to be relying on the questionable claim that this election cycle mirrors that of 2012. According to the Herald-Tribune, Jeb claims that the current front runners will fall . . . just as Herman Cain did in the 2012 cycle.  They report:
Jeb Bush cited the rise and fall of 2012 GOP presidential hopeful Herman Cain as he sought to reassure supporters at a Longboat Key fundraiser Monday that their faith in him is well placed. By noting that Cain led in the polls at this point in 2012 only to flame out, Bush implied that current GOP front-runners Donald Trump and Ben Carson could follow the same path.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 01, 2015 14 Comments
RebelPundit has newly released video footage from deep within the Black Friday protest in Chicago that provides new insight into the character of, and reception in the grassroots black community to college-based "Black Lives Matter" and other organized groups vying for control of their community. Here is the explanation from Rebel Pundit:
When protesters took to Chicago’s Michigan Avenue last week, grassroots activists at the Black Friday boycott had no interest in sharing the Magnificent Mile with “Black Lives Matter” activists from the University of Chicago, forcing protesters associated with the group off the street. While media coverage from the periphery of the march showed images of protesters lined up in front of the high-end stores and reported on a unified movement for “justice” in the police killing of Laquan McDonald, it was anything but. Our footage from the core of the march reveals the contentious and disunited elements vying for control.

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."
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