Your weekly report from the world of higher education....
I yearn for my President looking Presidential and SERIOUS right now #ObamaSelfie #PoliticalPanel @FoxNews
— Greta Van Susteren (@greta) February 13, 2015
In an impassioned speech to the assembly, the father of the two slain women implored President Obama and law enforcement to investigate the killings as a hate crime. “Please involve the F.B.I. Please investigate. Please look carefully,” said Dr. Mohammad Yousif Abu-Salha, a psychiatrist in nearby Clayton. “I have talked to lawyers. I have talked to law professors. This has hate crime written all over it!” “It is all about making this country that they loved, where they lived and died, peaceful for everybody else,” Dr. Abu-Salha said. Without uttering his name, Dr. Abu-Salha referred in his eulogy to the Facebook page of Mr. Hicks, the neighbor charged with the murders, where he frequently made clear his disdain for all religions. Dr. Abu-Salha asked people to ignore what he saw as defamatory depictions of Islam in the news media, and specifically in the current movie “American Sniper.”I'm not going to sit here and throw stones at speakers at a memorial where emotions are running high. His child was in the ground. That being said, over the past few days we're learned a little more about Hicks. Neighbors and friends of the victims are coming forward with troubling accounts of the dynamic between Mr. Hicks and his neighbors:
As an initial matter, Defendant’s Motion for a New Trial is so lacking in legal authority and argument, it should be denied on this basis alone. Defendant claims the Court committed nine legal errors, yet fails to cite a single case, statute, rule or other authority supporting her assertion. Defendant did not even include the legal standard for granting new trials. Nor does she develop her arguments in any meaningful way. Moreover, it is not clear why Defendant re-raises numerous arguments already thoroughly considered and rejected by this Court, particularly in light of the fact that she offers no new arguments explaining why this Court’s original conclusions were incorrect.
We are all Ruth Bader Ginsburg now. pic.twitter.com/2FCUGeVxxr #zzzzzzzzz #sotu
— Michelle Malkin (@michellemalkin) January 21, 2015"The audience for the most part is awake because they're bobbing up and down all the time. And we sit there, stone faced, the sober judges," Ginsburg said. "But we're not, at least I was not, 100 percent sober." She explained that the justices have dinner together before the annual speech, which she said Scalia hadn't attended in several years, and that Justice Anthony Kennedy brought along a bottle of California wine that was just too good to resist. "I vowed this year -- just sparkling water, stay away from the wine -- but in the end the dinner was so delicious it needed wine to accompany it."Watch:
Yesterday was the worst Twitter day of all time. Or at least the worst that I remember. Some lady no one had ever heard of and who had about 100 followers at the time sent the Tweet above. The tweet went viral.... Whoever started it, plenty of websites picked up on it and ran with it to feed the mob and not miss out on clicks and eyeballs. By the time I saw it, long after she became a hunted woman, my first impression was similar to that of John Nolte at Breitbart.com: Looks like the type of “white privilege” claptrap we read almost weekly at Salon.com or Slate.com. Some liberal white person coming to grips with her privilege and wanting the whole world to know about it.... Racist? You’d need to know a lot more. Maybe shoot her a tweet back and ask what she meant, or look her up and send her an email before proclaiming her to be a racist. But no one could do that. She was on an airplane to visit her native South Africa. For 11 hours. And in those 11 hours she became a hated and hunted woman.... Greg Gutfeld summed it up best:
This #HasJustineLandedYet proves one thing: humans never change. We love a good bloodbath.
— GregGutfeld (@greggutfeld) December 21, 2013
Perry, who is considering a second run for president, wrapped up a two-day trip to New Hampshire with a speech at the Strafford County Republican Committee's Lincoln Day Dinner. While he repeated his warning that GOP voters shouldn't nominate a "critic in chief," he had plenty of criticism for President Barack Obama, saying his lack of executive experience before becoming president has hurt him and that he hasn't picked up many management skills on the job. The nation is ready, he said, to move beyond "eight years of this years of this young, very attractive, amazing orator, junior U.S. senator." "I don't think they're going to go there," Perry said. "They're going to go to a tested, results-oriented executive who has a record of accomplishment."This isn't the first time Perry has thrown shade at his younger potential opponents. During his interview last week with the Texas Tribune, Perry emphasized his own experience over that of other, untested candidates:
Asked about what separates him from Cruz, Perry never mentioned his potential rival by name. Instead, he downplayed Senate experience and alluded to the fact that Cruz’s tenure in office is the same as then-Sen. Barack Obama's when he ran for president in 2008. “It’s one of the selling points, if you will, to the American people as they decide who’s going to follow Barack Obama,” he said. “I think they’re going to make a rather radical shift, away from a young, untested United States senator whose policies have really failed.”Ba-zing---because it's true.
AACONS sits down with Peter J. Morici and Alex Epstein to discuss the news of the day....
At age 89, Roslyn Joffe left a message about the death of her son, Edward: "I could never get over that and it overshadowed all my joy"...
The Senate easily confirmed Ashton Carter, a former number two at the Pentagon, to be the new Secretary of Defense. The vote was 93 to 5. He will take the helm at DOD as the United States is immersed in several complex national security challenges across the globe, including the widening military campaign against ISIS.
The vice chancellor of Durban University of Technology (DUT) in South Africa on Wednesday rejected the student council’s call to expel Jewish students who do not support the Palestinian cause. University Vice Chancellor Professor Ahmed Bawa released a statement calling the demand “outrageous, preposterous and a deep violation of our National Constitution and every human rights principle.” He added, “No student at DUT will be discriminated against on the basis of religion, race, gender, political affiliation or sexual orientation.” Bawa also told South Africa’s Daily News that the request was “totally unacceptable.” The demand to expel all Jewish students, especially those who do not support the Palestinian agenda, was made by the university’s Students Representative Council and Progressive Youth Alliance.This is the logical progression in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. It's fitting that the vote took place in Durban, the scene of the anti-Semitic 2001 Durban Conference that created the BDS movement. While expulsion of Jews will not happen here, the BDS movement is moving towards a de facto bar on Jews who are not anti-Israel by alleging that taking subsidized trips to Israel or attending conferences and training through major pro-Israel Jewish organizations constitutes a conflict of interest. That standard would exclude a high percentage of pro-Israel Jewish students from participating in student government (not to mention excluding many leading non-Jewish pro-Israel students).
On Wednesday, he said even illegal immigrants who didn’t pay taxes will be able to apply for back-credits once they get Social Security numbers. The EITC is a refundable tax credit, which means those who don’t have any tax liability can still get money back from the government. “Under the new program, if you get a Social Security number and you work, you’ll be eligible to apply for the Earned Income Tax Credit,” Mr. Koskinen said. He said that would apply even “if you did not file” taxes, as long as the illegal immigrant could demonstrate having worked off-the-books during those years. That expands the universe of people eligible for the tax credit by millions. He said only about 700,000 illegal immigrants currently work and pay taxes using an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number, but as many as 4 million illegal immigrants could get a stay of deportation and work permits under the temporary amnesty, which would mean they would be eligible to claim back-refunds if they worked those years.
Just hours before a summit in Minsk that could decide the fate of eastern Europe for a generation, Vladimir Putin had a gift for the president of Egypt: an assault rifle. A photo of the rifle, with its wooden stock and accompanying gun case, along with a smiling President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi, was posted on the website of Egypt’s state-controlled MENA news agency. The rifle was identified as an AK-47, according to the state-run Russia Today’s Arabic website.A video of the exchange, which occurred at the Cairo Aiport shortly after Putin arrived. But the AK-47 isn't the only present in Putin's bag: Last year, the two countries made a $3 billion deal that includes Russian attack helicopters and MiG-29 fighter jets. Additionally, Russian businesses have agreed to proceed with a major grain storage construction project in Egypt.
