Saturday, January 21, 2012
Newt Gingrich Storms To Victory In South Carolina Primary
The AP reports that "Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich stormed to an upset victory in the South Carolina primary Saturday night, dealing a sharp setback to former front-runner Mitt Romney and suddenly scrambling the race for the Republican presidential nomination." CBS News reports that Newt recieved 40% of the vote, with Mitt in second place recieving only 27%. Tweet
Friday, January 20, 2012
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Rick Santorum Actually Won Iowa, Government And Media Make Fools Of Themselves At Santorum's Expense
Rick Santorum won the Iowa caucuses Thursday — 16 days after the last vote was cast — when the state Republican Party said a final count showed him 34 votes ahead of Mitt Romney.
That was a shift from the preliminary results the party announced after the Jan. 3 caucuses, which showed the former Massachusetts governor winning Iowa by eight votes. Iowa Republican leaders said that they had still not received results from eight of the state’s 1,774 precincts.
Mark Steyn put it best in his response in National Review Online:
As I think about it, the inability of the boobs who run the Iowa caucuses to declare reliably a winner until over two weeks after voting is not a small thing. Obviously, a couple of dozen votes one way or another is statistically insignificant, but then so, in Iowa, are the total votes: 121,000-and-something Iowans participated in the Republican caucuses and they have more say over the presidential nominating process than all 37 million Californians. So they could at least get it right, and in a timely manner.Tweet
The horse-race headlines matter. Just nine days ago, the bigfoot media line on primary night in the Granite State was that Mitt Romney was the first non-incumbent in the history of the planet to win both Iowa and New Hampshire. Wow! Unprecedented! One for the record books! Next question: Will the history-making and increasingly inevitable “Big Mo” Mitt make it three-in-a-row in the Palmetto State?
But this entire narrative rested on nothing more substantial than an incompetent count in a state where votes in eight precincts had gone missing. On the eve of South Carolina, it turns out that Mister Inevitable, Mister Run-The-Board, Mister Sweep-The-Nation has done no more than win one state in which he keeps a vacation home.
If I were Rick Santorum, I’d be feeling mighty irked by the two-week switcheroo. Had he been pronounced the winner of Iowa back when it mattered, who knows the difference it might have made to his fundraising, or to a meaningful surge in New Hampshire, or to the ability to buy airtime in Florida. What First World jurisdiction needs over a fortnight to count a hundred thousand votes?
Senior Al Qaeda Figure Killed In Drone Strike In Pakistan
[A] senior operations organizer for al Qaeda was targeted and killed in one of two U.S. drone strikes launched against targets inside Pakistan last week, a U.S. official said.Tweet
U.S. and Pakistani sources told Reuters that the target of the attack was Aslam Awan, a Pakistani national from Abbottabad, the same town where Osama bin Laden was killed last May by a U.S. commando team. They said he was targeted in a strike by a U.S.-operated drone on January 10 directed at what news reports said was a compound near the town of Miranshah in the border province of North Waziristan.
That strike broke an undeclared eight-week hiatus in attacks by the armed, unmanned drones that patrol Pakistan's tribal areas and are a key weapon in U.S. President Barack Obama's counter-terrorism strategy.
The sources described Awan, who also was known by the nom-de-guerre Abdullah Khorasani, as a significant figure in the remaining core leadership of al Qaeda, which U.S. officials say has been sharply reduced by the drone campaign. Most of the drone attacks are conducted as part of a clandestine CIA operation.
High School Article Against Homosexuality Labeled "Bullying" By School
UCLA Law Professor Eugene Volokh reports:The Shawano High School newspaper decided to run dueling student opinion pieces on whether same-sex couples should be able to adopt children; the student article that answered the question “no” said, among other things, quotes Leviticus 20:13 (“If there is a man who lies with a male as those who lie with a woman, both of of them have committed a detestable act; they shall surely be put to death. Their bloodguiltiness is upon them.”). The school district then publicly apologized for the column, as an “[o]ffensive article[] cultivating a negative environment of disrespect,” and said that it is “taking steps to prevent items of this nature from happening in the future.” And in a Fox interview, the school superintendent labeled the column a form of “bullying.”
Visit http://volokh.com/2012/01/19/article-in-high-school-newspaper-criticizing-homosexuality-bullying/ to read the rest of Professor Volokh's perspective on this story.
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Herman Cain Endorses "The People"
Isn't the question which candidate best represents the American people? What kind of wacky endorsement is this?
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Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Iran Mocks Obama: Teheran To Return A Miniature, Pink Plastic Replica Of U.S. Drone That Landed In Iran
For the American government, the crash of the RQ-170 drone in Iran was an embarrassment. For the Iranian government, it was a propaganda victory.Tweet
And for at least one company, according to state radio, it could be a windfall.
An Iranian firm, seeking to capitalize on the frenzy that followed the crash of the drone — and American calls to have it returned — is now producing miniaturized toy versions of the craft. Most of the toys, which come in several colors and are made of Iranian plastic, have already been snapped up by Iranian government organizations, according to the group that manufactures them.
At least one model — a pink one — has been reserved for President Obama.
“He said he wanted it back, and we will send him one,” said Reza Kioumarsi, the head of cultural production at the Ayeh Art group...
Monday, January 16, 2012
Egypt's Next Parliament To Be Led By Islamists
Liberals and Islamists in Egypt announced a temporary agreement Monday on a power-sharing plan that would install a Muslim Brotherhood leader as speaker of the country’s newly elected parliament.Tweet
The agreement among six political parties all but guarantees that the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party will lead Egypt’s first elected parliament since the ouster of Hosni Mubarak in February, with the Islamist party expected to control as many as half the seats.
Under the power-sharing agreement, the ultraconservative Salafist Nour party and the liberal al-Wafd party would also claim top positions, with their representatives serving as deputy speakers, the parties announced during a news conference Monday at the Freedom and Justice Party’s headquarters...
Final results of the elections are expected this week, but party projections and early returns show that Islamists are expected to take about two-thirds of the seats, most of which will go to the political wing of the historic Muslim Brotherhood organization.
Stanford Professor (And Former Federal Circuit Judge) Michael McConnell On Unconstitutionality Of Obama's "Recess" Appointments
From the Advancing a Free Society blog:
[T]he [Obama administration] Opinion places enormous weight on the fact that the Senate’s resolution providing for pro forma sessions declared that there would be “no business conducted.” There are two problems with this, as a legal matter. First, as the Opinion concedes, the important question is whether at these sessions the Senate is “capable” of exercising its constitutional functions — not whether, on any particular occasion, it has chosen not to do so. Second, in actual fact the Senate has conducted major business during these sessions, including passing the payroll tax holiday extension during a pro forma session on December 23. The Opinion weakly responds that, notwithstanding this evidence of actual practice, the President “may properly rely on the public pronouncements of the Senate that it will not conduct business.” It is hard to see why the Senate’s stated intention not to do business takes legal and constitutional precedence over its manifest ability to do so. The President is well aware the Senate is doing business on these days, because he has signed two pieces of legislation passed during them.Tweet
More fundamentally, the Opinion creates an implausible distinction between the legal efficacy of pro forma sessions for various constitutional purposes. According to the Opinion, a pro forma session is not sufficient to interrupt a recess for purposes of the Recess Appointments Clause, but it is sufficient to satisfy the constitutional command that neither branch adjourn for more than three days without the consent of the other (Art. I, §cl. 4) and that Congress convene on January 3 unless a law has provided for a different day. There is longstanding precedent that pro forma sessions are sufficient to satisfy these constitutional requirements. Why a pro forma session would count for some purposes and not others is a mystery. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that OLC is simply fashioning rules to reach to the outcomes it wishes.
Finally, it bears mention that a great deal of the authority OLC cites in support of the President’s authority to make recess appointments during intrasession recesses in the first place — wholly apart from the pro forma issue — consists of prior executive branch pronouncements that are at odds with both the language and the history of the constitutional text. It would not be surprising if the judiciary were to reject these self-serving executive interpretations in favor of more straightforward ones. In particular, courts might rule that the Recess Appointments Clause applies only when a vacancy “happens” during a recess, as the text of Att. II, § 2, cl. 3, says, and that “the recess” of the Senate occurs only between sessions, and not (as here) in the midst of a session. The OLC Opinion acknowledges as much, when it says that the appointments face “some litigation risk.” But the Obama Administration cannot be faulted for following longstanding executive precedent, which has been used by past Presidents both Republican and Democrat. It is only the novel arguments that I criticize here. It seems to me that the Administration is under special obligation to provide a bullet-proof legal argument when it declares invalid a strategy devised by Majority Leader Harry Reid in 2007, supported by then-Senator Barack Obama, and successfully used by them to stymie President George W. Bush’s recess appointment power. The law cannot change just because the shoe is on the other foot.
Martin Luther King, Jr. On Israel
“When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You're talking anti-Semitism.” - Martin Luther King, Jr.
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