April 20, 2024

NEWSWEEK SPOTS REPUBLICANS POUNCING AND SEIZING! Teen Suspended for Saying ‘Illegal Alien’ Sparks Republican Outrage.

“Because of his question, our son was disciplined and given THREE days OUT of school suspension for ‘racism,'” Leah McGhee said in the email, per the Carolina Journal. “He is devastated and concerned that the racism label on his school record will harm his future goal of receiving a track scholarship. We are concerned that he will fall behind in his classes due to being absent for three consecutive days.”

On Tuesday, Leah McGhee appeared on The Pete Kaliner Show, which airs on the radio station WBT, and discussed the matter in more detail. She said the family had once lived in England, and Christian mentioned how people from that country also need green cards to reside in the U.S.

McGhee said she and her husband met with the school’s assistant principal and told him “illegal alien” is a term their son can look up in the dictionary.

“It is a term used as federal code, and it is a term that is heard frequently on many news broadcasts,” she said. “I feel that if this was handled properly in the classroom, it could have easily been used as a teachable moment for everyone.”

The Carolina Journal reported that Republican state Senator Steve Jarvis contacted the school district’s superintendent for information on the incident. He told the newspaper he asked school officials to seek a fair outcome but declined to state a position without knowing more about what happened.

“I do not see [how] that would be an offensive statement, just in getting clarification,” Jarvis said to the Journal. “But there again, I don’t know. I don’t know the situation of this particular incident.”

How bipartisan was Newsweek’s reporting?

Posted at 8:45 am by Ed Driscoll

A RARE MOMENT OF SANITY AT GOOGLE: Google Fires 28 Employees over Anti-Israel Office Sit-Ins.

On Tuesday, pro-Palestinian protesters occupied offices in New York, California, and Washington demanding that Google cancel Project Nimbus, a joint contract with Amazon that provides cloud-computing and artificial-intelligence services to the Israeli government and military. Notably, one of the occupied offices belonged to Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian; his office is based in Sunnyvale, Calif. Police arrested nine protesters across the country after the coordinated sit-in lasted ten hours.

It was unclear if the nine detained demonstrators were among those who were fired.

“Behavior like this has no place in our workplace and we will not tolerate it. It clearly violates multiple policies that all employees must adhere to – including our Code of Conduct and Policy on Harassment, Discrimination, Retaliation, Standards of Conduct, and Workplace Concerns,” Rackow said.

The companywide memo adds that Google “takes this extremely seriously” and will continue enforcing its “longstanding policies to take action against disruptive behavior – up to and including termination.”

Tuesday’s protests were organized by a group of tech workers known as No Tech for Apartheid, which boasts over 200 members. Though it has protested against Project Nimbus since the contract was announced three years ago, the group’s criticisms of the Google-Amazon contract with Israel have ratcheted up since October 7.

Related: Google Employee and Hamas Rape Apologist Fired After Protests Whines ‘McCarthyism Is Alive and Well.’

Yesterday, we told you about Google employees who were forcibly removed from Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian’s office after staging a ‘protest’ demanding the company end business with Israel.

One of those employees had an interesting take on Israeli women who said they were raped by the terrorists (and the many witnesses who said the same):

More great moments in moral equivalence here:

Exit question: “If I decided to protest any cause by occupying my employer’s office, I would be fired. Most employers would do the same. How is this remotely close to ‘McCarthyism?'”

Posted at 8:45 am by Ed Driscoll

WELL, GOOD: Aspiring Maryland Trans Shooter Thwarted.

Andrea Ye was clearly a fan of Audrey Hale and referenced her in her writings. She had been researching instructions for bombmaking and fantasized about murdering elementary school students because she “might get tackled” if she shot up a high school. This sounds like a textbook definition of a monster if I’ve ever heard one.

Plenty of outlets picked up the news of the arrest, but there was one curious commonality among many of them. The majority of headlines I came across completely failed to mention the fact that she was trans. The BBC only described the aspiring shooter as a “teen.” The Independent similarly went with “teenager.” WTOP News in Washington described Ye as a “Montgomery County Student.” WHIO News in Ohio went with “Maryland Teen.”

Back in Montgomery County, officials didn’t seem to want to talk about the suspect’s trans identity either. Watch as County Executive Marc Elrich explodes when being asked why the trans angle is being covered up and why he is “burying the lede.”

They’re devoted to the narrative, under which only white males and conservatives can be demonized based on their identity.

Posted at 8:39 am by Glenn Reynolds

WE WERE SOMEWHERE AROUND CAPITOL HILL ON THE EDGE OF THE SENATE SUBCOMMITTEE WHEN THE DRUGS BEGAN TO TAKE HOLD: Mark Judge: A Hallucinogenic and Unrepentant Rant.

While reading One Way Back, the new “memoir” by Christine Blasey Ford, the accuser of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during the 2018 confirmation hearings, I was reminded of a frequently reoccurring scene on the show Cops: A perpetrator has been caught red-handed doing something wrong—let us say he’s got drugs in his car. As the police question and arrest him, the suspect proceeds to talk about everything in the world except the drugs. He was at his brother’s house. His dog is missing. He works afternoons at his job. He talks, incessantly, about absolutely anything but the bag of cocaine in his trunk.

So, it is with One Way Back. Christine Blasey Ford is an expert at not answering basic questions about the singular thing that made her famous while going on mindlessly about other things: surfing, her family, and what it’s like to stay in Oprah’s house.

Of course, how could Ford respond to basic questions regarding her attempted upheaval of the American political system? Doing so would require her to unmask herself and the plot in which she was involved.

Ford is, of course, the woman behind the allegations that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her at a high school party in 1982. Ford also claimed that I was in the room when it happened. Brett was confirmed, but the allegation upended Washington and caused serious trauma to many of us involved. As Kathleen Parker recently noted in the Washington Post of all places,  Ford couldn’t care less about the lives she has damaged. So it’s no surprise that One Way Back and her ongoing book tour reveal Ford to be a petulant narcissist.

Ford mentions me only once in this new book, and this time it is cautiously and only in the context of official government transcripts and records. The reason for her caution is obvious. As my lawyer put it, “liberals don’t want Mark Judge owning St. Martin’s Press.” Ford already ran over me, a private citizen, once. To do so again would be not only indecent, but enough to risk her reputation and litigation.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 8:14 am by Ed Driscoll

VDH: Are Iran’s Nine Lives Nearing an End?

Iran’s only hope is to get a bomb and, with it, nuclear deterrence to prevent retaliation when it increases its terrorist surrogate attacks on Israel, the West, and international commerce.

Yet now Iran may have jumped the shark by attacking the Israeli homeland for the first time. It is learning that it has almost no sympathetic allies.

Does even the Lebanese Hezbollah really want to take revenge against Israel on behalf of Persian Iran, only to see its Shiite neighborhoods in Lebanon reduced to rubble?

Do all the pro-Hamas protestors on American campuses and in the streets really want to show Americans they celebrate Iranian attacks and a potential Iranian war against the United States?

Does Iran really believe 99 percent of any future Israel barrage against Iranian targets would fail to hit targets in the fashion that its own recent launches failed?

Does Iran really believe that its sheer incompetence in attacking Israel warrants them a pardon — as if they should be excused for trying, but not succeeding, to kill thousands of Jews?

In sum, by unleashing a terrorist war in the Middle East and targeting the Israeli homeland, Iran may wake up soon and learn Israel, or America, or both might retaliate for a half-century of its terrorist aggression — and mostly to the indifference or even the delight of most of the world.

But where will all those leftist Americans on their New York Times “holidays in hell” tourist junket visit instead?

Related: Soviet-era tech and 1970s American jets: inside Iran’s ageing air defenses.

Iran’s air force is a particularly weak point in any potential conflict with Israel. Tehran is believed to only have a few dozen working strike aircraft, including Russian jets and US-made F-4s and F-5s that were acquired before the 1979 revolution.

[The International Institute for Strategic Studies] has reported that it has a squadron of nine F-4 and F-5 fighter jets, one squadron of Russian-made Sukhoi-24 jets, and some MiG-29s, F7 and F14 aircraft.

The Sukhoi-24 jets were first developed in the 1960s. Amir Vahedi, Iran’s air force commander, said this week they were in their “best state of preparedness” to counter any Israeli strikes.

Israel has hundreds of F-15, F-16 and F-35 jets, which all played a role in counter-mining Iranian drones.

Iran’s strength is believed to lie in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ stockpiles of ballistic and cruise missiles.

At least half of the missiles that Iran fired at the weekend were said to have failed before reaching Israel, raising doubts over the claimed ability of its domestically built air defenses.

No wonder the Iranian mullahs lust after owning the bomb: The Growing Biden Incentive to Go Nuclear. “Everyone who watched that 2011 operation understood that the US and EU would have never attacked Qaddafi if he had nukes. That includes Iran.”

And they could be very close to getting it: “Iran is now enriching uranium to up to 60% purity and has enough material enriched to that level, if enriched further, for two nuclear weapons, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency’s theoretical definition. That means Iran’s so-called ‘breakout time’ — the time it would need to produce enough weapons-grade uranium for a nuclear bomb — is close to zero, likely a matter of weeks or days,” Reuters reported on Thursday.

Posted at 8:14 am by Ed Driscoll

DOINGS IN THE DARK: Senate passes reauthorization of key US surveillance program after midnight deadline.

After its midnight deadline, the Senate voted early Saturday to reauthorize a key U.S. surveillance law after divisions over whether the FBI should be restricted from using the program to search for Americans’ data nearly forced the statute to lapse.

The legislation approved 60-34 with bipartisan support would extend for two years the program known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. It now goes to President Joe Biden’s desk to become law. White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said Biden “will swiftly sign the bill.”

“In the nick of time, we are reauthorizing FISA right before it expires at midnight,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said when voting on final passage began 15 minutes before the deadline. “All day long, we persisted and we persisted in trying to reach a breakthrough and in the end, we have succeeded.”

I didn’t trust them to use this fairly when it passed originally, and I trust them much, much less now.

Posted at 8:07 am by Glenn Reynolds

COLUMBIA: Columbia Students Call on President Shafik To Restore Order on Campus: ‘We do not feel safe walking to nor around campus.’

Related: Arab-Israeli Journalist Assaulted at Columbia University, Forced To Cancel Speech: ‘Instead of a lecture, I went to file a police complaint,’ Yoseph Haddad said.

Plus:

When people make threats like that, believe them, and act accordingly.

Posted at 8:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

ALAN DERSHOWITZ: Universities like Columbia must end the double standard and stop tolerating campus antisemitism.

Columbia University’s president and other college administrators have stated that the chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is permissible political speech.

On an abstract level, they are correct.

It is also permissible for white supremacists to demand all blacks be sent back to Africa and all Muslims to Saudi Arabia.

The First Amendment protects homophobic, sexist and transphobic speech too.

But would any school permit such bigoted chants?

Imagine what would happen if a group of white-supremacist students demanded South Africa be returned to white apartheid control: “From the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, South Africa should be free of BLACKS and returned to WHITE control!”

Would it take action against such racists?

Of course it would.

The racist diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucracy and its bigoted brother “intersectionality” would demand it, and the school would comply.

So the issue is not one of abstract free speech.

It is whether the school applies the same standard to Jews, blacks, gays and other minorities.

And, of course, it doesn’t. “Free speech” is just a slogan to it, not a commitment.

Posted at 7:50 am by Glenn Reynolds

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: It’s time to retire the laziest cliché in election polling.

Opinion polling has no lazier cliché than “snapshot in time.”

The aphorism is intended to suggest impermanence — that polls taken weeks or months before an election have limited predictive value. The phrase has been repeatedly invoked as the 2024 presidential election race has unfolded. It will be heard many times before the campaign ends.

All too often, “snapshot in time” is a convenient tactic for commentators and politicians to scoff at or dismiss poll results that contradict their partisan preferences.

More commonly, the phrase is a refuge or metaphoric shield for pollsters when their pre-election surveys misfire. In such cases, “snapshot in time” is cited in attempting to defend or rationalize polls that careen well off-target, as many of them did in the 2020 presidential election.

Joe Biden was elected to the presidency four years ago by margins well short of the double-digit blowout suggested by the polls of CNN, Quinnipiac University, Economist/YouGuv and NBC/Wall Street Journal.  Those polls estimated Biden’s end-of-campaign lead at 10 to 12 percentage points over then-President Donald Trump.

Biden won the popular vote by 4.5 points.

The discrepancy in 2020 between election results and polls overall was the most pronounced in 40 years, and prompted characterizations that the outcome was a “train wreck” and “a disaster for the polling industry,” as David A. Graham wrote in the Atlantic.

But if the goal was demoralize potential Trump voters to believe there was no use in even going out to the voting booth, then 2020’s wonky polls certainly their job as far as the DNC-MSM is concerned! Read the whole thing.

 

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll

BUNKERTIME: NPR’s Katherine Maher Is Not Taking Questions About Her Tweets.

[Uri] Berliner’s tell-all mostly took aim at specific examples of NPR being led astray by its deference to progressive shibboleths: the Hunter Biden laptop, COVID-19, etc. He implored his new boss—Maher’s tenure as CEO had only begun about four weeks ago—to correct NPR’s lack of viewpoint diversity. That’s probably a tall order, since Maher had once tweeted that ideological diversity is “often a dog whistle for anti-feminist, anti-POC stories.”

* * * * * * * *

When asked by event organizer Jon Bateman, a Carnegie senior fellow, to address the Berliner controversy, she said that she had never met him and was not responsible for the editorial policies of the newsroom.

“The newsroom is entirely independent,” she said. “My responsibility is to ensure that we have the resources to do this work. We have a mandate to serve all Americans.”

She repeated these lines over and over again. When asked more specifically about whether she thinks NPR is succeeding or failing at making different viewpoints welcome, she pointed to the audience and said that her mission was to expand the outlet’s reach.

“Are we growing our audiences?” she asked. “That is so much more representative of how we are doing our job, because I am not in the newsroom.”

We’ve all seen veteran newspaper columnists who swear up and down that they’re totally objective, and then, when bumped up or transferred over to write opinion columns, invariably start producing nothing but cant that’s so far to the left it would make Che Guevara blush. Maher has simply reversed the process — after more than a decade of being a Titania McGrath clone, now she wants us to believe that her radio network is totally objective and “serving all Americans.”

One person who isn’t buying her shtick: Larry Sanger Speaks Out. The Wikipedia co-founder discusses Katherine Maher and the corruption of the Internet.

Christopher Rufo: What are you thinking as you’re watching these statements from former Wikipedia CEO Katherine Maher, who is now the CEO of NPR?

Larry Sanger: I’ve been following your tweets. You’ve kind of shocked me. The bias of Wikipedia, the fact that certain points of view have been systematically silenced, is nothing new. I’ve written about it myself. But I did not know just how radical-sounding Katherine Maher is. For the ex-CEO of Wikipedia to say that it was somehow a mistake for Wikipedia to be “free and open,” that it led to bad consequences—my jaw is on the floor. I can