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Mark Levin Tag

I appeared on the Mark Levin radio show on Wednesday night, December 14, 2016, to talk about my post, VIDEO: Activists manipulate third-graders into hating Israel. Video of the event is at the link above, which also has extensive background. The short version is that Ariel Gold from Code Pink and Jewish Voice for Peace arranged for Bassem Tamimi to appear before the third grade classes at an elementary school in Ithaca, NY. Tamimi is best known for using children, including his own, to confront Israeli soldiers in the hope of creating viral photos and videos. Tamimi urged the children to become activists and "freedom fighters for Palestine."

Last week, Louisiana passed a resolution calling for a Convention of States as described in Article V of the U.S. Constitution. The resolution passed on May 25 with a vote of 62-36, making Louisiana the eighth state to call for a meeting of the states for the purpose of proposing constitutional amendments addressing abuses by the U.S. Federal Government. Other states that have called a Convention of States for the same purposes are Florida, Georgia, Alaska, Alabama, Tennessee, Indiana, and Oklahoma. Increased national interest in a Convention of States (COS) is due largely to the government's failure to operate as the Framers envisioned. Having accrued a national debt of over $19 trillion and a debt-to-GDP ratio of 105%, the government's size and scope has grown far beyond anything the Founders could have imagined. Meanwhile, the states, having created the Federal Government, find themselves acting at the mercy of Washington's limitless regulations and outstretched tentacles, lest they lose federal sacred funding.

While looking though the history of Tea Party posts at Legal Insurrection, I saw this post from April 2011, Sound the Trumpet:
There’s not much I can add to Mark Levin’s explanation of why Donald Trump does not represent the conservative or Tea Party movements.  He wasn’t there when we needed him, and he helped those who were against us.
That was at a time Trump was considering running for President in the 2012 cycle. I made the point then, as I do now, that Trump is not a conservative or a smaller-government individual liberty person. He's a big government nationalist. My point with any big government person, be it Trump, Obama or Hillary, is that once you give them the power, it's hard to get it back and you lose control over your own lives. You end up putting your faith that they will not abuse that power. If that's what you want, so be it. The link in the quote is to a post at The Right Scoop, which had an embedded audio, Levin Rips Donald Trump to Shreds:

A reader alerted Professor Jacobson that Legal Insurrection and I got a mention on the Mark Levin Show.  Naturally we tracked down the mention in order to crow about it and share it with you loyal readers (but mostly to crow about it). In fairness, it's probably more accurate to say that Andrew McCarthy mentioned us in his (as always) very good blog post over at National Review about the Freddie Gray prosecutions, The Travesty in Baltimore.  Levin essentially reads McCarthy's post on the air and so includes that mention. Levin does, however, also throw in a bit of a kudos of his own into the mix, interjecting "Legal Insurrection, another great web site." Here's that audio clip.  First there's just the short bit in which we're actually mentioned, then a pause, and then the clip starts playing the entirety of the ~6 1/2 minute segment in which Levin reads McCarthy's post (starting with "I want to address this.").  Enjoy:

I was a guest last night on the Mark Levin Show, the 4th highest rated talk show in the country with over 7 million weekly listeners, regarding our post, ALERT: Faculty Association anti-Israel Boycott season has started. This is the second time I have discussed the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement on Mark's show. This time I discussed not just the problem, but a solution. First, the background:
WAJ: "A combination of left-wing and Islamist-type professors have done at the campus level something which really is unbelievable. They've singled out Israel in their faculty associations, and they are trying, slowly but surely, to get more and more faculty groups to endorse the boycott of Israel, the complete academic boycott of Israel.... This season they're really coming up to a big busy season. The National Women's Studies Association is voting, as we speak, for the next 10 days, the membership is voting on the full boycott of Israel. How insane is that, of all the problems with ISIS attacking in Paris, with all of the problems of women being abused in the Middle East, the Women's Studies Association is singling out Israel....

No one will ever accuse Mark Levin of not getting to the point. The top-tier national radio host has several best selling books, including The Liberty Amendments, which I reviewed in 2013. Levin described his project as follows:
"I undertook this project not because I believe the Constitution, as originally structured, is outdated and outmoded, thereby requiring modernization through amendments, but because of the opposite — that is, the necessity and urgency of restoring constitutional republicanism and preserving the civil society from the growing authoritarianism of a federal Leviathon. This is not doomsaying or fearmongering but an acknowledgment of facgt. The Statists have been successful in their century-long march to disfigure and mangle the constitutional order and undo the social compact."
If The Liberty Amendments framed one answer, Plunder and Deceit clarifies and documents the problem. The problem is a problem Levin has been focused on for years -- Progressive Plunder. In this audio addressing teachers' unions opposition to Scott Walker's public sector union reforms, Levin is blunt: "It's plunder! Plunder! That's what progressivism is." Like I said, Levin doesn't waste time. The very first sentence of Plunder and Deceit asks:
Can we simultaneously love our children but betray their generation and generations yet born?
Mark Levin Plunder and Deceit opening sentence In that seemingly simple question, Levin hits on the essence of what is happening to our country.

King v. Burwell is the case the Supreme Court agreed to hear involving Obamacare subsidies on federal exchange. You will recall that the legal issue is whether the IRS violated the express provisions of Obamacare by issuing rules allowing taxpayers to claims federal subsidies when purchasing on the federal exchange, even though the language of the statute appears not to allow that. In King, the Fourth Circuit ruled that there was possible ambiguity and another potential reading of the law, such that apparently clear language was not that clear, giving the IRS leeway to interpret the statute. In another case, Halbig v. Burwell, a D.C. Circuit panel had ruled that the subsidies were not available on the federal exchange, but that ruling was vacated pending the entire D.C. Circuit Court hearing the case en banc. In a surprise move, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the King case even though there was no split in the Circuits (after the Halbig decision was vacated). King will be one of the biggest decisions of this term, and if the Obama administration loses the case, it could be the death of Obamacare as we know it, because 37 states have refused to create state exchanges. Obamacare is affordable only with subsidies, and if the subsidies are not available to citizens of 37 states, the system likely collapses. One key issue is whether the wording of the statute was a mistake or misstatement, or reflected a logical policy. Obamacare was set up in such a way as to put pressure on states to create state exchanges by providing for federal subsidies in the form of tax credits only for purchases on state exchanges. This was a conscious decision, as explained by none other than Jonathan Gruber: Into the fray leaps Mark Levin and his Landmark Legal Foundation, which just filed a friend of the court, Amicus Curiae Brief. The full Brief is embedded below.

I was in class yesterday during Obama's press conference, in which he announced the obvious: We have no strategy as to ISIS. So I didn't get to watch it live and see the instant reaction. There was Bad, Good and Worse news. The bad news: We have no strategy as to ISIS, or anything else in the Middle East other than reducing American influence. The good news: Obama is telling the truth. The worse news: The truth Obama is telling is a monumental and deliberate failure that will take a decade or more to reverse, if it even can be reversed. Mark Levin summed it up nicely on Hannity the other night, not just as to ISIS but the entire thrust of the administration:

The IRS-Lois Lerner email and hard drive destruction has received a lot of attention. Less so another possible scandal at the EPA, regarding the alleged destruction of documents requested by the Landmark Legal Foundation, with which Mark Levin is affiliated.. Fox News covered it in late June, but most of the mainstream media is absent, More missing emails, crashed hard drives, this time at EPA:
The Internal Revenue Service isn’t the only government agency dealing with missing emails or faulty hard drives. Environmental Protection Agency administrator Gina McCarthy on Wednesday cited a similar cyber snafu during a House Oversight Committee hearing. “Another missing hard drive?” Rep. Mark Meadows, R-NC, asked McCarthy. She responded, “We are having trouble acquiring the data.”
It's not just a problem of Congressional oversight. The Landmark Legal Foundation served a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request on the EPA regarding attempts to influence the 2012 election by delaying damaging environmental regulations until after the election. We reported on that delay in 2013, which concerned not just environmental regulations but Obamacare also. Landmark alleges that it has met stonewalling and missing documents, and now it's seeking sanctions, as described in a press release today, Landmark is seeking sanctions:

I had the pleasure of appearing tonight on The Mark Levin Show. We covered the anti-Israel boycott movement, and why it should matter to conservatives. Thanks to Mark for shining a spotlight on this issue. Thanks also to our friends at The Right Scoop for pulling the audio...

Mark Levin's new book, The Liberty Amendments: Restoring The American Republic is out, and it proposes an ambitious set of Amendments to the Constitution: I undertook this project not because I believe the Constitution, as originally structured, is outdated and outmoded, thereby requiring modernization through amendments,...

My wife repeatedly promises to stop cursing at the television. Completely unrelated to that, we didn't watch the Obama press conference today. Via Common Cents, you can watch it for me: Mark Levin apparently watched it.  Protein Wisdom has the transcript of Levin's comments.  Here's the video: Related: Mark...

Mark Levin (transcript via RCP): MARK LEVIN: He says he was basically in a drug-induced stupor for the last two years of high school and I've asked many times, 'Well how did he get into Occidental? How did he transfer to Columbia? And how did he...

Makes many of the points I made today, including rejecting the delusion that this was a victory: ...

Michael Reagan, in this interview with Mark Levin, shoots down the smears spread by the Romney campaign and its supporters regarding Newt and Ronald Reagan. Meanwhile, Jeffrey Lord has another great piece, Newt Battles Mush From the Wimps (h/t jiminsocal in the Tip Line): The war between conservatives and...