White House Staff Around Trump STILL Don’t Get Islamic Threat

/0 Comments/in , /by

Well, it appears that another campaign promise bit the dust. The Jerusalem embassy move went the way of repealing Obamacare, rescinding Obama’s amnesty, building the wall, undoing the Paris climate accord and Iran nuclear deal, and protecting religious liberty. All for the purpose of preserving the PLO peace process — because nothing says “drain the swamp,” understanding Islam, and “America-first” like the Oslo peace process.

The collapse of this White House administration’s foreign policy under the leadership of National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster stems from one source: the refusal to recognize the insufferable nature of unreformed Islam.

Throughout the presidential election, both President Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, consistently hit Obama and Hillary for refusing to even name the enemy and recognize its threat doctrine. After all, if you refuse to identify who the enemy is, how can you place our soldiers in harm’s way, craft diplomatic relationships, and strategize any outcome in the Middle East?

Donald Trump clearly recognized this point in a seminal foreign policy speech he delivered on Sept. 7, 2016, when he declared, “We now have an administration, and a former secretary of state, who refuse to say ‘Radical Islamic Terrorism.’”

Promising a realist approach recognizing the Middle East and Islam as it exists — and not as we want it to exist — Trump delivered somewhat of a doctrine that night in Philadelphia, which clearly resonated with many of the voters that propelled him to the Oval Office: “In a Trump administration, our actions in the Middle East will be tempered by realism. The current strategy of toppling regimes, with no plan for what to do the day after, only produces power vacuums that are filled by terrorists.”

Trump further promised that a new moral clarity will help us “make new friends, rebuild old alliances, and bring new allies into the fold.”

The recognition that radical Islamists are the source of the problem is what dictates immigration policy, decisions over military action, the so-called “Israeli-Palestinian” conflicts, and our views toward Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and the Muslim Brotherhood. The expectation of many supporters of this president were that he’d move us in the opposite direction of the Obama administration on all aforementioned fronts.

In comes H.R. McMaster, who refuses to even recognize the enemy by adamantly declining to even talk about radical Islamic terrorism, which in itself, “terrorism” is somewhat of a euphemism for the problems endemic in sharia-adherence. Everything else has gone downhill from there, and it was on full display Tuesday.

The consequences of willful blindness on the Islamic threat is the source of McMaster’s desire to get us further entrenched in Syria and Afghanistan, bring in more refugees, kowtow to the Muslim Brotherhood, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Turkey, and throw Israel under the bus. After all, if we are walking on eggshells in the Arab world with our troops strung out precariously throughout the various theaters refereeing Islamic civil wars, we wouldn’t want our support for Israel to harm them.

Consider the following observations:

Throwing Israel under the bus: Both McMaster and White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer refused to affirm that even the Western Wall is part of Israel. This echoes Obama’s policies and comes on the heels of the White House refusing to allow Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu to appear with the president at the Western Wall. It further accentuates the growing push within the administration to embrace the PLO. It doesn’t help that the intel Trump leaked to Russian officials was reportedly from Israeli intelligence services.

Embracing Erdogan: In another throwback to Obama’s policies – embracing enemies and alienating allies – Trump hosted Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. This man is an Islamo-fascist and the Sunni equivalent of the Iranian Mullahs. He stands at the nexus of Sunni Islamic supremacism and is an enemy of the American people. Yet, he has been allowed to fund the construction of the largest Islamic Center in the country just outside Washington, D.C. Rep. David Brat, R-Va., has a bill (H.R. 5824) that would prohibit a foreign national of a country that limits the free exercise of religion in that country from making any expenditure in the U.S. promoting a religion. Yet, I doubt Trump’s meeting was about that.

Meanwhile, Erdogan’s bodyguards beat anti-Erdogan protesters outside of the ambassador’s D.C. home … on American soil!

Further involvement in Afghanistan: There is growing momentum within the administration for McMaster’s plan to further entrench us in the Afghanistan quagmire by sending more troops. The 15 years of utter failure in Afghanistan is not President Trump’s fault. But if he doubles down on the failed strategy without either forging a new path or getting out, he will own it just as much. McMaster is continuing the strategy of “placing our brave soldiers into an Islamic civil war first, ask questions about national security interests and strategy later.”

The question is how can we get our soldiers further involved when we don’t even understand the threat doctrine of the enemy?We have nothing to show for our efforts but over 1,800 military deaths, 20,000 wounded, and the Taliban controlling more territory than ever before – all to establish a sharia-compliant government with a constitution (set up by U.S. officials) which fosters the type of Islamic supremacism we are at war with. If this White House administration is going to saddle up to Erdogan and the PLO, why exactly would we send our troops into another Islamic theater to fight for … what?

According to the recent “Worldwide Threat Assessment” presented to the Senate by Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, the “situation in Afghanistan will very likely continue to deteriorate, even if international support is sustained.” The report further notes that “Kabul’spolitical dysfunction and ineffectiveness will almost certainly be the greatest vulnerability to stability in 2017.” Thus, even if we temporarily beat back the Taliban, for whom will we hold the ground without the need for a substantial troops presence forever?

This Trump administration’s Middle East policy will never succeed until it speaks with one clear voice and identifies the nature of our enemy. That will not happen until H.R. McMaster, Dina Powell, Jared and Ivanka Trump are kept out of the decision-making process. (For more from the author of “White House Staff Around Trump STILL Don’t Get Islamic Threat” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Sheriff David Clarke Says He’s Accepted DHS Job

/0 Comments/in , /by

Sheriff David Clarke of Milwaukee County, Wis., said Wednesday he has accepted a job in the Department of Homeland Security.

Clarke told conservative radio host Vicki McKenna during an interview on 1130 WISN that he will leave his post as sheriff to serve as a deputy secretary of Homeland Security.

“I’m both honored and humbled to be appointed to this position by Secretary Kelly, working for the Trump administration,” he said during the radio show.

Clarke said he will leave his position as sheriff in June to work in the Office of Partnership and Programs as a liaison with state, local and tribal law enforcement.

While the DHS did not confirm Clarke’s reported role, it did note the position in question does not require Senate confirmation. (Read more from “Sheriff David Clarke Says He’s Accepted DHS Job” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Rage at Rubio’s Bible Tweets: More Evidence of Troubling Bias Against Christians

/0 Comments/in , /by

Imagine if some Muslim member of Congress went on Twitter to share some harmless verses from the Quran — from the “happy parts” composed early on in Muhammad’s life, where he calls for peace and mercy.

Or if a Jewish member of Congress plucked some uplifting phrases out of the Talmud.

Or if a Californian member of Congress had offered something from the Dalai Lama.

Would it cause a controversy? I certainly hope not. I’d be especially troubled if Christian journalists raised a ruckus. If they pretended that a legislator doing this on his own Twitter account was a threat to American Christians, I’d consider those journalists idiots or bigots. They’d recall the classic character Gob Bluth on Arrested Development, who heckled a harmless student from India, with “Go home, you terrorist!”

But Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post, and a number of other journalists, have apparently taken Gob Bluth as a role model. They’ve responded with shock and outrage to the following: Yesterday morning Catholic U.S. Senator Marco Rubio posted some phrases from the Bible on Twitter. (In fact, they were from the readings at the day’s daily Mass.) Here’s one:

Pretty ominous, huh? As if that weren’t enough, Sen. Rubio next went full-on Old Testament, posting these blood and thunder lines from Proverbs:

Isn’t your skin just crawling? What kind of moral monster would use his prestige as a U.S. legislator to share sentiments like that? Surely, this is the camel’s nose poking under the tent, making way for a full-on Christian theocracy, just like we saw on Netflix in The Handmaid’s Tale.

The Palm Beach Post helpfully compiled reactions which were almost that hysterical. Here’s The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin:

Esquire politics blogger Charles P. Pierce’s response was even more … fragile:

Leah McElrath writes for leftwing website Shareblue — and pledges in her Twitter profile to “#RESIST Trump, GOP, & global rise of white nationalist authoritarianism.” McElrath found Rubio’s Bible Tweets a positively creepy:

Normally I’d just shrug this off as part of the ordinary friction that comes in a free society when people of different views and beliefs rub up against each other. Sen. Rubio himself, apparently bemused, took to retweeting these crackpot reactions himself, without comment. A canny reaction.

Christians Need Not Apply

But put this in context. For centuries, American Christians were a vast and highly tolerant majority. Now the tenor of culture and laws has changed so drastically, that we are becoming an unpopular minority. Perhaps one not to be tolerated.

We got that message from the campaign of destruction launched against President Trump’s appointee for Army Secretary Mark Green. Green was forced to withdraw after Democrats denounced him as a hatemonger. What had Green said that outraged them?

He took the 6,000-year-old Jewish and Christian position on marriage: that it’s between a man and a woman.

Green stated the simple fact that gender dysphoria (transgenderism) is a mental disorder.

He characterized the Muslim horde that invaded, raped, and pillaged Constantinople in 1453 as a “Muslim horde.” (Maybe he should have been more tactful, and called them a “flow of immigrants.”)

Those positions made him unfit for public office in 2017 America. It’s the same America where the Governor of New Jersey just refused to ban child marriages out of respect for Islam, but Christian bakers and florists are force to service same-sex weddings. The same America where worried conservative Christians gave Donald Trump almost 80 percent of their votes … and couldn’t even get him to overturn Obama’s executive orders targeting them. Where Christian schools have to fight all the way to the Supreme Court to get public funds for playground safety. But public universities like U.C. Berkeley spend millions building “genderless” locker rooms to cater to the tragic pathologies of “transgender” students.

That’s how weak and vulnerable we have become. We don’t have the clout of the transgender lobby.

Scapegoating the Once Powerful

There’s no group that’s easier to get away with hating than one that was once quite powerful, which loses its grip. Think of the fate of noblemen in France after 1789, priests in Russia after 1917, or once-elite Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994.

In cases like those, people in the newly powerful group can indulge in open hatred for members of the now-dethroned minority. They can hide it behind past “abuses” (real or imagined). They can target innocent people, whip up resentment, encourage discrimination, even get the government to persecute helpless people — whose crime is that they belong to the group that fell from power.

This scapegoating has nothing to do with justice. Instead it’s a naked exercise in bullying. (For more from the author of “Rage at Rubio’s Bible Tweets: More Evidence of Troubling Bias Against Christians” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Brain Damage Increases Religious Fundamentalism — or Scientific Arrogance?

/0 Comments/in , /by

You didn’t hear it coming. You didn’t even feel it. Yet there you were on Hamburger Hill, May 12, 1969, praying you’d come through the battle, when a piece of shrapnel dug into your skull.

It’s still there today. Doctors couldn’t, didn’t dare, take it out. Maybe it doesn’t hurt; the doctors said it shouldn’t. But you swear you can feel it in there.

Suppose this wounded Vietnam veteran was you, dear reader. Now I ask you the obvious questions: How does this make you feel? Would this injury — just perhaps — lead you to deepen your religious faith?

If you answered that question — no matter how you answered it — you’re one up on five scientists. Wanting Zhong, Irene Cristofori, and three others studied the religious views of Vietnam vets with brain injuries, and published the results in a peer-reviewed journal. These scientists thought brain injuries caused vets to become more religious. Not, they surmised, because life-threatening experiences might lead some folks to become more religious. No, the scientists thought the injuries themselves caused the vet’s brains to, in effect, misfire and induce these men to become more “fundamentalist” in their religious beliefs.

What’s this about religion? The authors say, “Religious beliefs are socially transmitted mental representations that may include supernatural or supernormal episodes that are assumed to be real.” That they might be real did not enter the authors’ minds. Never mind. The real object is religious fundamentalism, which they say “embodies adherence to a set of firm religious beliefs advocating unassailable truths about human existence.” Unassailable truths like the scientific method?

“Fundamentalism requires a departure from ordinary empirical inquiry: it reflects a rigid cognitive strategy that fixes beliefs and amplifies within-group commitment and out-group bias.” If that’s not bad enough, “Recent studies have linked religious fundamentalism to violence [and] denial of scientific progress.”

These authors assume that the brain causes religious fundamentalism. “Evolutionary psychology explains the appeal of religious fundamentalism in terms of social functional behavior,” they say. Yet the “neurological systems that enable such inflexible, non-disastrous beliefs [such as fundamentalism] remain poorly understood.” So they studied it.

But if the Brain Can’t Be Trusted …

But if evolution made the brain cause religious belief, did evolution cause the authors’ brains to believe religion can be explained by the brain? What part of the brain is responsible for bad science?

It is an old argument, but a good one: If the brain causes our thoughts, then it cannot be trusted. For what guarantee is there that if it misleads us in one area it’s not misleading us in another? There is none. If the brain causes false religious beliefs, it could also cause false science beliefs. And there’s no way to tell the difference.

Now to assess “fundamentalism” our authors asked a few questions to an even smaller group of men. Some of these men had brain injuries and some not. The main concern was with 24 men with ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) injuries and about the same number of men with two other injury types. These were compared against 30 other men with no brain injuries.

Bad Theology

One of the questions was agreement with this claim: “The basic cause of evil in this world is Satan, who is still constantly and ferociously fighting against God.” This, like the other questions, makes little theological sense. You can imagine a devout Christian, who knows that human beings cause of a lot of evil, trying to answer it. The authors of the paper seem to think “the devil made me do it” is the basic way Christians explain their sins.

Still, analyzing the answers led the authors to say that they “found that participants with vmPFC lesions reported greater fundamentalism” than controls.

Bad Stats

But this just is not so. By their own data, the person with the lowest “fundamentalism” had a vmPFC lesion. And a goodly fraction of those with lesions had lower “fundamentalism” scores than did those in the healthy control group. Only two of the 24 veterans with lesions had higher scores than did the highest healthy controls. The variability of scores is high. That’s why the differences in “fundamentalism” scores claimed were small.

As it happens, the vets with injuries “consisted of 2.5% Mormons, 38.8% Protestant, 16.3% Roman Catholic, 10% other affiliations.” 32.5% did not respond. The healthy vets “consisted of 35.3% Protestant, 23.5% Roman Catholic” with 41.2% not responding.

Since there is a lot of variety in views among these groups, the imbalances in group membership are enough to explain the observed differences in “fundamentalism.” It’s odd the authors did not analyze “fundamentalism” by self-reported denomination to answer this obvious criticism.

What’s most disturbing is that they took the result of this tiny group and implicitly extrapolated it to the whole human race (at the end they do admit “larger…samples…are necessary to confirm that our conclusions are applicable to healthy individuals”, but they wave these doubts away throughout the paper and speak of religious beliefs in general). In other words, they used a rude statistical analysis with not even a hint that their results are far, far from certain.

Still, one of the authors was bold enough to insist that “the variation in the nature of religious beliefs are governed by specific brain areas in the anterior parts of the human brain and those brain areas are among the most recently evolved areas of the human brain.”

Which part of the brain caused this man’s over-confidence? (For more from the author of “Brain Damage Increases Religious Fundamentalism — or Scientific Arrogance?” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Shariah Court in Indonesia Sentences Gay Couple to Caning

/0 Comments/in , /by

An Islamic Shariah court in Indonesia’s conservative Aceh province has sentenced two gay men to public caning for the first time, further undermining the country’s moderate image after a top Christian politician was imprisoned for blasphemy.

The court, whose sentencing Wednesday coincided with International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia, said the men, aged 20 and 23, would each be subjected to 85 lashes for having sexual relations. One of the men wept as his sentence was read out and pleaded for leniency.

The chief prosecutor, Gulmaini, who goes by one name, said they will be caned next week, before the holy Muslim month of Ramadan starts about May 25. (Read more from “Shariah Court in Indonesia Sentences Gay Couple to Caning” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Repelling an Alien Idea: Marriage, Life and ‘Gender’ Aren’t Really Real

/0 Comments/in , /by

There’s an old science fiction short story that begins when a human lands on an alien planet and meets an obviously intelligent life form. He points at a rock and says “Rock.” The alien looks at the man, then at the rock; the man points and repeats, “Rock.”

At this point the author tells us what the alien is thinking:

This creature must not be intelligent. He gave it the same name twice. He thinks it’s still the same thing! If he knew anything, he would have recognized how many changes it’s gone through: all its constant subatomic internal changes, and that’s been altered through the heat and chemicals and radiation around it. This stupid creature thinks what was ‘rock’ before is still ‘rock’ now. He’s too dull to notice the differences.

This is an unintelligent life form. Therefore I shall eat it.

Now, I probably got some things wrong in that story. I don’t remember who wrote it, since it’s been at least forty years since I read it. (Maybe someone will recognize it and tell me where to find it again.) It contains a whopper of a logical fallacy,* which might bother you if you caught it, but doesn’t matter. I’m only using it to illustrate a lesson — one that helps explain how a once-familiar world has turned so dramatically alien in the last few decades.

An Alien Idea Taking Root

The fact is we’ve allowed an alien idea to take root among us: that things aren’t what they are; they’re always too busy becoming something else.

For example: marriage isn’t what marriage is. Marriage is one thing today, something different tomorrow and even something else across the state line. Sex isn’t what sex is; it’s “gender,” and gender can be “fluid.” Morality isn’t what it is, it’s whatever people think it should be — which evolves from day to day and is never the same from country to country. Humanness isn’t real, at least as far as the unborn humans are; what matters instead is some abstract idea of “personhood” that magically changes from week to week.

This way of thinking is called “progressive.” Just as the alien thought it was more intelligent than the human, progressives think they’re smarter than conservatives. Here’s the huge problem with that, though: the alien doesn’t know what a rock is. It doesn’t even have a word for it.

Rocks Are Real

That’s a real problem for the alien. Rocks are real. Their reality consists in more than the sum of their protons, neutrons and electrons. Rocks have an enduring, continuing reality of rock-ness to them, despite all the changes going on inside every second. That reality lasts a very long time for rocks, until erosion finally grinds them down to sand.

Granted, there are some philosophers who wonder esoterically if rocks are technically “real.” Even those thinkers’ problems with the reality of rock-ness, though, don’t go so far as denying use the same word for rocks from one moment to the next. And they will agree that rocks are rocks, and that they stay that way (as I’ve already said) for a very long time.

Marriage is Real

Marriage stayed what it was for a very long time, too, until there came a moment in the dark, distant past — almost ten or twenty years ago, if you can imagine that! — when some thought it was time for it to change. Marriage was, well, marriage. Its meaning had been dinged in the late 20th century by the sexual revolution and damaged even more by no-fault divorce, but it still was what it was: the committed union of a man and woman.

Marriage was real. Just as a rock has real rock-ness to it, marriage had a real marriage-ness to it; and any union that didn’t have that marriage-ness couldn’t be called marriage. Now we can call anything marriage. We’re as confused on marriage as the alien was on “rock.”

Human Life Is Real

Human life used to be what human life was, too. To be human is a real thing, or so we once thought. It was easily definable — even for the youngest unborn child — in terms of parental lineage, genetic structure and so on.

But progressives prefer to kick humanness off the table. They want the abortion debate to be about “personhood.” Personhood for them isn’t a matter of being but of somehow becoming. It’s an abstract quality that a fetus gradually acquires along the way — and who knows when it’s really real? Maybe (per Peter Singer) it isn’t even real until sometime after the child is born. So whatever that thing is inside the womb, until some magic event happens to finally make it a “person,” it’s an it, and it’s okay to kill it.

Progressives Have Lost Track of What’s Real

Abortion wouldn’t even be a debate if we could focus on what’s solid and real: the unborn child’s humanness. Obviously, though, progressives have a stake in keeping our eyes on this wispy, changing, indefinable concept of personhood. Just as the alien doesn’t know what a rock is, they’ve lost all knowledge of what a human is. They’ve lost track of what’s real.

I could say similar things about “gender fluidity,” but what I’d have to say about that would be too obvious to spend time on. You can see for yourself how it would go: we know sex well enough when we see it in bonobos and bumblebees, but we don’t even think it’s real in humans. At least that’s the progressive viewpoint; and like the alien, they think they’re more intelligent for thinking that way.

But also like the alien, progressives are confused and stunted in their knowledge. The alien may not know what a rock is, but rocks are still real. (For more from the author of “Repelling an Alien Idea: Marriage, Life and ‘Gender’ Aren’t Really Real” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Former FBI Director Mueller Named to Lead Trump-Russia Probe

/0 Comments/in , /by

The Justice Department on Wednesday appointed former FBI Director Robert Mueller as a special counsel to oversee a federal investigation into potential coordination between Russia and Donald Trump’s campaign during the 2016 presidential election.

The appointment gives Mueller, who led the FBI through the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and served under presidential administrations of both parties, sweeping powers to investigate whether Trump campaign associates colluded with the Kremlin to influence the outcome in his behalf, as well as the authority to prosecute any crimes uncovered during the probe. The broad mandate, beyond any specific Trump-Russia connection, also covers “any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation.”

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, facing scathing criticism for authoring a memo that preceded the firing last week of James Comey as FBI Director, said in a statement that Mueller’s appointment was “necessary in order for the American people to have full confidence in the outcome.” (Read more from “Former FBI Director Mueller Named to Lead Trump-Russia Probe” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Trump Impeachment Proceedings Over Obstruction Charge Unlikely to Go Far, Analysts Say

/0 Comments/in , /by

While Democrats cry for impeachment, legal experts are dubious that President Donald Trump’s reported conversation with FBI Director James Comey about his former national security adviser would be an easy case of obstruction of justice.

“I don’t personally think any prosecutor would bring that case,” Ron Hosko, a former assistant FBI director for the bureau’s Criminal Investigative Division, told The Daily Signal, referring to the report that Trump suggested Comey, whom he later ousted, back off investigating Michael Flynn.

“Any defense attorney could argue the president was wishing out loud,” Hosko said. “There was no killing a witness, no destruction of evidence.”

The New York Times first reported Tuesday on Comey’s purported memo of a February conversation in which Trump told him: “I hope you can let this go … [Flynn] is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”

Trump fired Flynn after six weeks on the job after concluding the national security adviser misled Vice President Mike Pence regarding the content of his contacts with Russian officials before the president’s Jan. 20 inauguration.

The “big however,” Hosko said, is whether Trump’s May 9 firing of Comey could be connected to an effort to stop an FBI investigation.

“The president can fire an FBI director for any reason or no reason,” said Hosko, now president of the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund. “But, if evidence emerges that he fired Comey over the Flynn investigation or over the Russia investigation, now it becomes harder to defend.”

The Justice Department on Wednesday named another former FBI director, Robert Mueller, as a special counsel to investigate Russian interference in the presidential election. The FBI also is investigating Flynn’s contacts with Russia.

Several House Democrats are using Comey’s purported memo on what Trump said to him to demand impeachment of the president—a highly unlikely scenario given Republican majorities in the House and Senate.

Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, delivered a floor speech Wednesday about impeachment, though he didn’t sound convinced the president was guilty. Green noted that it is the Senate’s job to make that determination in a trial after the House adopts articles of impeachment against a president for high crimes and misdemeanors.

“Impeachment does not mean the president will be found guilty,” Green said. “It simply means the House of Representatives will bring charges against the president.”

Democratic leadership in the House and Senate has not taken up the cause of impeachment, although an increasing number of partisan pundits are using the word.

Even if there was a House majority to pass articles of impeachment against Trump, two-thirds of the Senate would have to agree on his removal from office after a trial.

This would be a politically steep hill to climb, one presidential historian notes. Only two presidents, Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, have been impeached by the House, and both survived a Senate trial to serve out their terms.

The cases were quite different, but offer context for any such effort against Trump, said Larry Schweikart, a retired history professor at the University of Dayton who is author of “The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Presidents” and co-author of “How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution.”

“Andrew Johnson, for example, was impeached because he was as unpopular in Washington, as Trump is—but Johnson deliberately and blatantly went out of his way to violate a law so as to provoke impeachment as a test case,” Schweikart told The Daily Signal in an email.

He stressed that Johnson had been Abraham Lincoln’s vice president, assuming office only upon Lincoln’s assassination, and “was a Democrat in a Republican administration that hated him.”

The economy shows signs of improving, Schweikart added, which means that even if Democrats gained a congressional majority, impeachment would be politically difficult.

“The GOP actually opposed Clinton, while his own party supported him rabidly. But a similarity with Trump [is] the economy was booming,” Schweikart said. “Trump’s economy isn’t quite there yet, but it’s very, very hard to even undertake impeachment against a president who has a booming economy. Watergate did not turn [public opinion] against Nixon until the economy turned sour. Had Nixon had Clinton’s economy, he likely would have survived.”

Schweikart said perhaps 20 House Republicans are “committed to the swamp” and might be inclined to join Democrats in impeaching Trump, but he doubts they would take the political risk.

Rep. Justin Amash, R-Mich., in response to a question from a reporter, said that trying to stop an investigation would be an impeachable offense, The Hill reported. But, Amash said, “everybody gets a fair trial.”

The key charge against Johnson was for the controversial firing of War Secretary Edwin Stanton, at the time considered a violation of the Tenure of Office Act. The statute, since invalidated by the Supreme Court, disallowed the firing of high-ranking government officials without Senate approval.

One of the two articles of impeachment against Clinton was obstruction of justice.

Matthew Whitaker, a former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Iowa, has prosecuted obstruction of justice cases, generally in the context of a drug dealer trying to make a witness change his story. Obstruction has a specific definition in the U.S. Code, Whitaker said.

“Obstruction is a very technical crime with important elements to prove,” Whitaker, now executive director of the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust, told The Daily Signal. “We don’t know enough, based on what we’ve seen of the memo.”

In remarks Wednesday to Coast Guard Academy graduates in New London, Connecticut, Trump didn’t directly talk about the obstruction allegation, but he took shots at his political opponents and the media.

“Look at the way I’ve been treated lately, especially by the media. No politician in history, and I say this with great surety, has been treated worse or more unfairly. You can’t let them get you down,” Trump said, getting applause. “You can’t let the critics and the naysayers get in the way of your dreams. … I guess that’s why we won.”

David McIntosh, a lawyer and former House member from Indiana, argued during remarks at a Federalist Society conference Wednesday that Trump had both the authority to talk to Comey about an ongoing investigation and to fire him. McIntosh said:

President Trump acted appropriately if he gave guidance to Director Comey on an investigation. It is important for us to step back and remember that, under the Constitution, the president has the authority and power to enforce the laws. There’s nothing in the Constitution about an FBI director.

The FBI director reports to the president, and it is the president’s decision to delegate authority on investigations. In delegating that authority, presidents have wisely chosen to insulate the FBI from political interference. But the president still has the power and authority to direct the FBI how to do their job.

Congress, in its critiques of the executive branch, should not overstep and try to direct or limit the president’s legitimate exercise of his Article 2 powers.

House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, requested that the FBI provide a physical copy of Comey’s memo to congressional investigators. Someone apparently read from the Comey memo to The New York Times reporter.

Democrats likely know this is not a viable obstruction case, said Jordan Sekulow, executive director of the American Center for Law and Justice.

Even if The Times story is entirely true, he said, “In the words of James Comey: No prosecutor would bring this case.”

Sekulow added:

“Obstruction of justice is a loaded term. It’s political to create an impeachment scenario. The bar is lower, but we have a Republican Congress. This is just political warfare. It was enough to get the Washington media talking about it. … During the Obama years, when people would talk about impeachment, we’d always discourage that talk as no way to get things done.

(For more from the author of “Trump Impeachment Proceedings Over Obstruction Charge Unlikely to Go Far, Analysts Say” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Trump’s Expansion of Mexico City Policy Is a Major Victory in Protecting Life

/0 Comments/in , /by

Someday, future generations of Americans will look back on us and wonder how and why such a rich and seemingly enlightened society, so blessed and endowed with the capacity to protect and enhance vulnerable human life, could have instead so aggressively promoted death to children by abortion—both here and overseas.

They will note that we prided ourselves on our commitment to human rights, while precluding virtually all protection to the most persecuted minority in the world today—unborn children.

And they will demand to know why dismembering a child with sharp knives, pulverizing an infant with powerful suction devices, or chemically poisoning a baby with any number of toxic chemicals failed to elicit in so many so much as a scintilla of empathy, mercy, or compassion for the victims.

Abortion is violence against children, and hurts women.

This week, the Trump administration announced the implementation of the new Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance policy—a significant reiteration and expansion of President Ronald Reagan’s Mexico City policy.

Announced by Reagan at the United Nations Conference on Population Control in Mexico City in 1984—hence its name—the policy was and is designed to ensure that U.S. taxpayer money is not funneled to foreign nongovernmental organizations that perform or promote abortion as a method of family planning.

Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush embraced the policy, while Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama nullified it.

Thirty-two years ago—in July of 1985—I authored the first of several successful annual amendments on the floor of the House of Representatives to preserve the Mexico City policy.

Significantly, the old Mexico City policy only applied to family planning funds—over half a billion dollars.

The new policy establishes pro-child safeguards—benign, humane conditions—on about $8.8 billion in annual global health assistance funding appropriated to the U.S. Agency for International Development and the departments of State and Defense.

This funding includes not only family planning, but other global health assistance such as maternal and child health, malaria, and HIV/AIDs.

Also of significance, the new pro-child, pro-woman safeguards do not reduce funding for global health assistance by so much as a dollar.

According to State Department guidance, the policy only applies to foreign NGOs as grantees or subgrantees. Other potential recipients of global health assistance grant money—including national and subnational governments—are exempt, as are refugee and migration assistance programs.

President Donald Trump’s Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance policy includes three abortion exceptions—for rape, incest, and to save the life of the mother. Nothing in the policy prevents foreign NGOs from treating injuries or illnesses that were caused by any abortion.

For years, pro-abortion organizations have used U.S. taxpayer funds to weaken, undermine, or reverse pro-life laws in other nations and systematically destroy the precious lives of unborn children.

Scores of countries throughout the world have been besieged by aggressive and well-funded campaigns to overturn their pro-life laws and policies.

The Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance policy will significantly mitigate U.S. taxpayer complicity in global abortion.

U.S. foreign policy—and the foreign entities we fund with billions of dollars in grant money—should consistently affirm, care for, and tangibly assist women and children.

We must increase access to maternal and prenatal care, and ensure access to safe blood and better nutrition.

We must also expand essential obstetrical services, including skilled birth attendants, while improving transportation to emergency care facilities to significantly reduce maternal mortality and morbidity—including from obstetric fistula.

Prioritizing programs that ensure adequate nutrition and supplementation for moms and children during the all-important first 1,000 days of life—from conception to the second birthday—are among the most transformative, life-enhancing commitments that can be made.

Expanding these measures make women and children healthier, stronger, and more resilient to disease and disability while reducing death and injury.

No one is expendable or a throwaway. Every human life has infinite value. Birth is merely an event, not the beginning of the life of a child.

The new Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance policy is inclusive of all people, regardless of their age, race, sex, disability, or condition of dependency—especially the weakest and most vulnerable. (For more from the author of “Trump’s Expansion of Mexico City Policy Is a Major Victory in Protecting Life” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Feminism Drives People to Deny Basic Facts

/0 Comments/in , /by

The number of foolish statements made by men and women who consider themselves feminists is essentially equal to the number of people who strongly identify as feminists.

I write “strongly identify” because if asked, “Are you a feminist?” most women will say yes.

They will do so for two reasons.

One is that there is no social price paid for saying that one is a feminist, while there can be a huge price paid—on a college campus, for example—for saying that one is not a feminist.

The other is that a great number of women define feminism as “belief in women’s equality.” And by that definition, who isn’t a feminist? I certainly am.

Intelligence varies among these women and men as much as it does among members of any group of people; there are both brilliant individuals and dummies who say they are feminists.

But the women today—I am not talking about suffragettes in the early 20th century—whose identities are wrapped up in being a feminist are nearly all dummies.

That doesn’t mean they all lack brainpower. There are many people with a fine brain who are fools. Indeed, such individuals dominate our universities.

This realization occurred to me again when reading a CNN column written last week by Jill Filipovic, one of CNN’s feminist writers. (Does CNN employ a non-feminist female writer?)

The column was about Australian Sen. Larissa Waters, who breast-fed her child in the parliamentary chamber while Parliament was in session. The CNN writer, as would be expected, lauded the parliamentarian: What could be more beautiful or natural than breast-feeding in Parliament?

Among the writer’s arguments defending Waters was one in which she said, “Yes, for many people, breasts are sexually alluring or arousing—but so too are lips and hands, and having those out in Parliament doesn’t bring on sexual chaos.”

This was similar to the argument advanced by the highest court in the state of New York in a 1992 ruling that said women could go topless in public because men can, and there is no difference between a man’s chest and a woman’s.

In the court’s words, the law that prevented them from doing so “discriminates against women by prohibiting them from removing their tops and exposing their bare chests in public as men are routinely permitted to do.”

Now back to our feminist at CNN who compared the sexually alluring and arousing nature of visible lips and hands with visible breasts.

It is difficult to overstate the foolishness of that comment.

For one thing, the only inference to be drawn is that women in parliament and all other public spaces should uncover their breasts just as they do their lips and hands.

But what is truly absurd is the equation of seeing women’s breasts with seeing their lips and hands.

Is the author unaware of the fact that men pay to enter “topless” bars in order to look at women’s breasts wherever on Earth it is permitted?

Now, why is that?

Some will say it’s only because women’s hands and lips are visible, while their breasts are covered. If all women were to wear gloves in public, the argument goes, men would pay to see women’s bare hands.

I trust that most readers find such an argument risible.

Men from Saudi Arabia, where women’s lips are regularly covered, go to the West and pay to see women’s breasts, not their lips.

Why?

Because in virtually every society, heterosexual men have found the female breast a particularly sexually alluring part of a woman’s body.

Evolutionary psychologist Carole Jahme, a science columnist for the left-wing pro-feminist publication the Guardian, summarized a whole host of academic studies. She wrote:

The full, plump bosom seen in the human ape is an anomaly. No other primate has a permanent breast. … The sex appeal of rounded female buttocks and plump breasts is both universal and unique to the human primate.

So, then, the sole purpose of women’s breasts is not for nursing babies. It is also to attract and arouse men.

Yet, whoever argues that women’s breasts are there to arouse men, not just to provide a baby with milk, is dismissed by feminists as a sexist heterosexist patriarchal pig, a product of a sexist culture that renders women and their baby-feeding mammary glands sexual objects.

But it turns out that science, not just common sense, rejects the feminist argument.

So, how does a CNN columnist, along with myriad other feminists, not know this? Why did my grandmother, who never went to high school, know this, while a vast number of graduates of our universities do not?

The answer is that today’s universities—especially women’s studies and gender studies departments—generally make people stupid.

The only remaining question is: Did anyone at CNN find this column absurd? I suspect not.

And that’s more than absurd. That’s frightening. (For more from the author of “Feminism Drives People to Deny Basic Facts” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.