“They can’t even frame anybody right”

The New Neo Posted on by

Another show I sometimes watch, especially late at night while at my computer, is “Forensic Files.”

Each episode is short, only a half-hour. But it’s amazing the tales they manage to tell in just 30 minutes, minus quite a few minutes for the frequent ads. The episodes are all pretty fascinating, although they’re usually depressing because they tell how many murderous people there are in the world—including a fair number of conscienceless psychopaths who seem to have no trouble whatsoever killing spouses or girlfriends of boyfriends, for money or for trivialities, and then acting as though nothing whatsoever has happened.

But every now and then a story is extra-interesting, and that’s where the Roy Brown case comes in. It wasn’t just the story of injustice righted, although there’s that. It’s a tale that’s nearly Biblical in its trajectory of a life on a bad path that is redeemed in the unlikeliest of ways by the unlikeliest of people, an uneducated, angry, and aimless man who showed intelligence and grit under extremely trying circumstances. It features a Crime and Punishment-like ending for the real murderer, and wheels of justice that grind, not just slowly, but (as Roy Brown says in the clip): “I don’t know who said ‘the wheels of justice turn slowly,’ but they are flat. And I’m fixin to jack em up, change the tires, and throw a new spare in the trunk.”

And here’s the aftermath:

Why isn’t the Iran deal a treaty? Please listen to this

The New Neo Posted on by

There doesn’t seem to be a way to embed the audio I’m asking you to listen to, but please go to the link. The important part of the audio starts at minute 17:25 goes to minute 27:12, and another part begins around minute 37:00 and goes to about 48:30. If you only have time to listen to one of those segments, I’d suggest the first one. But I strongly urge you to hear both.

The interview is with Elizabeth Chryst, who is a former elected officer of the U.S. Senate and is an expert on how Congress works in terms of rules and procedures. I had never heard of her before this, but she seems to be a conservative and is speaking on the subject of the Corker-Menendez bill, and why conservatives are dreaming if they think there was ever any chance of blocking the Iran deal as a treaty. That’s not a reality that she likes, and she knows that her fellow conservatives are unhappy to hear it. But she thinks it’s a reality they need to face.

Basically, her point is that ever since the FDR administration the power to accomplish a treaty-like international “deal” by using executive action instead of the official treaty power, and to bypass Congress by so doing, has expanded greatly and become fairly commonplace and approved by courts. As I’ve said elsewhere, most of us never quite realized how much of a gentleman’s agreement our government was until now. That goodwill has been evaporating, and not just with the Obama presidency either. But Obama took the disintegration further for political gain.

So here we are.

Please listen. The Republicans are the villains sometimes, but they are not the villains here.

So why is so much ire being directed at Corker-Menendez? Because people are very very frustrated and angry. I understand their frustration and anger and share it. But—as Chryst says—facts are facts. There are plenty of reasons for ire at Republicans in Congress. But this doesn’t happen to be one of them.

[NOTE: I am pretty certain that a lot of you will disagree. I plan to write a much longer post on this subject some time next week, but right now I’m about to go outside and actually try to have some fun today.]

Khamenei the “conservative” weighs in, post-Iran-deal

The New Neo Posted on by

Ah, it’s just a bunch of blustering hot air, right? He doesn’t mean a word of it, and he’s not in charge anyway (and yes, that’s sarcasm on my part):

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei withheld his verdict on Iran’s nuclear deal on Saturday but in a fiery address vowed enduring opposition to the United States and its Middle East policies, saying Washington sought Iran’s ‘surrender’.

In an speech at a Tehran mosque punctuated by chants of “Death to America” and “Death to Israel”, Khamenei said he wanted politicians to examine the agreement to ensure national interests were preserved, as Iran would not allow the disruption of its revolutionary principles or defensive abilities…

Khamenei maintained that the Islamic Republic’s policies in the region would continue to defy the United States, and the nuclear deal was an exceptional instance of dialogue.

“We have repeatedly said we don’t negotiate with the U.S. on regional or international affairs; not even on bilateral issues. There are some exceptions like the nuclear program that we negotiated with the Americans to serve our interests.”

This is as expected, and was telegraphed all along as the negotiations continued. He’s not even paying lip service to anything else.

The Reuters article I linked to has an interesting way of describing Khamenei that caught my attention: “An arch conservative with the last word on high matters of state…”

What is “conservative” about Khamenei? Well, he wants to “conserve” the radical Islamist republic that got established in 1979. And that government, when it was newly formed, harked back to a much earlier time (and a more fundamentalist version of Islam), which to my way of thinking made people like Khamenei “reactionaries” in 1979 rather than conservatives. Of course, Reuters is British, and Brits and Europeans define “conservative” in ways that are different than in the US and which I don’t quite understand, although they tend to be further to the left than our own “conservative.”

In calling Khameini and his ilk “conservatives” in this article, I think Reuters’ intent was the intent I’ve seen a lot on the left, which is to tarnish as many bad governments as possible with the “conservative” or “on the right” brush (for example, Nazis, although they had the word “Socialist” in their name). All such governments are more correctly defined as statist however, which puts them squarely in the same territory in which the left resides, if you use the collectivist/individualist or statist/libertarian dimensions favored by many US conservatives when categorizing these things. There is absolutely nothing about someone like Khameini that is libertarian or human rights focused or small government promoting, and there is no question he does not favor the separation of church and state.

Just a conservative at heart, though.

Obama and leadership

The New Neo Posted on by

For a long time, people said one of the problems with Obama was that he wasn’t a leader.

But he is. The thing is, those people who said that were thinking about a different sort of leadership than he offers.

Imagine if a deal like the one just negotiated with Iran had been announced as Obama’s goal in 2008. That is, not a vague “I want to negotiate a deal with Iran to stop them from getting nuclear weapons.” That wouldn’t have stirred any controversy. No, I mean one exactly like the one announced the other day, with all its provisions.

What would have been the reactions, before Obama had prepared us for it? Even some Democrats would probably have been shocked, and denounced it (as long as they didn’t know it came from him, that is). It was too extreme, the capitulation too obvious.

Or had Obama announced his intentions to refuse to defend DOMA, which had been passed by Congress in 1996, would as many people have accepted that, back in 2008 when he was first running? Same for his executive amnesty for large groups of illegal immigrants. Or any number of other things Obama has done.

But now? People (I don’t mean leftists, who would have always approved, but what I call “garden-variety liberals”) have gotten used to all these things, and that’s a reflection of his leadership. His is a slowly-boiling-frog sort of leadership. Step by step, he has accustomed Americans to overbearing executive power, to ignoring the law when a president wants to, to undermining America’s strength in the world. He’s done it through charm (a charm completely elusive to me, but apparently it exists and is powerful), through rhetoric, through a series of strawmen, though accusations at the opposition, through audacious challenges, through threats to those who would oppose him even in his party or in the MSM.

Obama is a very, very bold guy, with a very very strong sense of his own power and abilities. He conveys that to people—and to some he is a leader they have no problem following.

More good news on the court front

The New Neo Posted on by

It may seem like a small thing compared to the other news we’ve been reading in recent days, but to the wrongly accused it’s a big deal. I think that this US District Court ruling could begin to turn the tide of kangaroo campus quasi-courts and make them a bit more afraid of the repercussions of their failure to afford minimal protections to those students accused of sexual misconduct.

From the ruling of the San Diego Superior Court:

In his ruling, Superior Court Judge Joel M. Pressman cited the fact that Doe was prevented from fully confronting his accuser in the trial, as well as insufficient evidence that sexual encounters occurred without Roe’s consent. Pressman also ordered the school to drop its suspension against Doe.

Pressman based his decision on the following: Roe filed the complaint four months after the sexual encounter, alleged there were two cases of sexual activity without her consent and one instance of retaliation. She told a campus investigator that the alleged assault had greatly impacted her, but text messages and testimony showed that she continued to spend time with Doe. She also told the investigator that she was too drunk to give consent before the encounters, but statements from 14 witnesses said otherwise.

These cases are all too common, and it has been way too easy to make false charges stick in the extra-judicial proceedings on college campuses.

Abdulazeez: playing the victim card

The New Neo Posted on by

It strikes me that Chattanooga shooter Abdulazeez probably got quite a bit of mileage, starting at least in high school and perhaps earlier, from playing the victim card.

Witness his high school photo comment:

My name causes national security alerts. What does yours do? —“Hijabman.”

Note how clever this is. First, it is meant to engender sympathy and outrage on his behalf: Oh, the poor guy, his very name triggers an alert! How bigoted of us; what discriminatory profiling! Next up, we have guilt: My goodness, my name doesn’t trigger anything. How unfair! And lastly, apparently “Hijabman” (the name he signed with in the yearbook) was “a blog created to chronicle [Abdulazeez’s] ‘struggles as a first-generation American Muslim.’”

Such a struggle that it caused him to kill four Marines because he couldn’t take their terrible persecution of him any more.

So remind me: why are we increasing immigration from Muslim countries?

The New Neo Posted on by

Actually, even though I asked that question, I understand that part of the increase is to accommodate bona fide refugees from tyranny, and particularly people who sided with and trusted us in Iraq and Afghanistan and are fleeing the current regimes that would kill them for giving us that help. But that’s a very small percentage of the whole (and we’re not even accepting all of them).

As for the rest, I’d really like to know, for example, why terrorist shooter Abdulazeez’s family came here from Kuwait. Were they refugees? Were they highly skilled? How were they vetted? I’d also like to know whether they are citizens now.

One other thought—it was only about two weeks ago that Donald Trump made his famous statement about immigration, the one he’s gotten so much flak for and that I wrote about here. In that brief time we’ve had the shooting of Kathryn Steinle in San Francisco, illustrating in graphic and dreadful form the danger of which he was speaking, and now the Chattanooga killings demonstrate the same thing.

You might ask what I’m talking about. For example, although I can’t find the link now, I noticed some leftist in the comments section of another blog mocking Trump after Chattanooga by saying something like this: “Hey Donald, here’s another murder by those terrible Hispanics you demonized, right? While you were busy talking about Mexicans, look what happened!”

But let’s look at Trump’s actual quote from two weeks ago, right after his famous “rapists” comment:

But it’s not just Mexico that’s dumping all of it’s problems in the U.S., Trump continued. “It’s coming from all over South and Latin America and it’s coming probably, probably, from the Middle East. We don’t know.

Indeed. And it’s going to keep coming, if our government has anything to say about it. We don’t seem to be able to monitor immigrants (even legal ones) properly once they’re here, so we need to vet them at time of entry far better than we do, and be very very careful about who we let in, and in what numbers.

Four Marines killed at Chattanooga Naval and Marine Reserve Center

The New Neo Posted on by

The circumstances are as follows, as far as we know up to now:

The attacks, which happened minutes apart, began when a single shooter, identified as 24-year-old Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez, drove a silver Ford Mustang convertible to a Lee Highway recruiting center at 10:45 a.m and fired more than a dozen rounds into the building. After his initial barrage, he led responding police officers on a high-speed chase down Amnicola Highway to a second military installation, where he opened fire again and was killed after a gun battle that one witness estimated lasted 20 minutes.

Three victims were rushed to Erlanger’s Trauma Center, including a Chattanooga police officer and two members of the military. One of those patients was discharged from Erlanger this afternoon; the other two are still being treated. Including the victim, the violence claimed five lives, with three more wounded.

Officials have said the shooter died during the attack, though they did not say how he died. During the attack on Amnicola Highway, numerous Chattanooga and Hamilton County officers “actively and enthusiastically” engaged the suspect, said Chattanooga Police Chief Fred Fletcher.

The motive behind the attack, which the FBI said came without warning, is still under investigation. A U.S. official said there was no indication Abdulazeez was on the radar of federal law enforcement before the shootings, according to the Associated Press.

So, I think we can safely say that this is almost certainly a case of Islamic terrorism. How hooked into terror networks Abdulazeez was is unknown; he could be a lone wolf who was merely inspired by their propaganda, or more closely connected. He was born in Kuwait, and no one seems to know whether he was a US citizen or not, although one would think that would be easy enough to determine. He has an engineering degree from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, was on his high school (in Chattanooga) wrestling team, and is said to have been popular with his classmates.

Interesting how well this fits the profile of another US Islamic terrorist born in an Muslim country, on the wrestling team, and popular: that would be Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. I wonder whether Abdulazeez was also an affable stoner.

We also know that Abdulazeez was “was a student intern a few years ago at the authority, a federally owned utility that operates power plants and dams across the South.” Interesting. It’s also not surprising that he was an engineering student; for some reason this particular background is very very common among more well-educated jihadis.

It would also be interesting to know how long ago his family came here, and why. An almost laughable (if the topic weren’t so very serious) Onion-esque article on Yahoo features an interview with a high school classmate of Abdulazeez’s who is quoted as saying, “”They were your average Chattanooga family.”

Right.

[NOTE: A related issue is why on earth places like the venue of the shooting still are required to be gun-free zones. You might as well call them “sitting-duck zones.” It’s a topic I wrote about before here.]

From 2010: Obama’s irreversible damage

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: I first published this in March of 2010, over five years ago, in response to the question, “Has Obama does any irreversible damage so far?”

I think it’s time to repeat it.]

I believe the answer is “yes.”

But the reason I say this may surprise you. It’s not any one action or decision, or even several. It’s not even whether health care reform, if passed, can be reversed. It’s not the terrible precedent set by using reconciliation for a bill that is unpopular, not a budget or deficit measure, and has no bipartisan support. It’s not even Obama’s foreign policy, that insults our allies and emboldens dictators and fails to scare Iran in the least, although all of the above matter very much and they are all very bad.

I think the worst damage Obama has done is that, until now, America has always been a solid and somewhat predictable commodity, both domestically and internationally. There have been many fluctuations, of course. Presidents came and presidents went. Some were Republicans and some Democrats, some conservative and some liberal. But there remained a certain commonality and dependability that Americans and the rest of the world—our allies and our enemies—could depend on.

Allies would remain allies, and when the chips were down we would defend them. Enemies would remain enemies, even if we sometimes got closer to them and sometimes backed away from contact. We would get into debt, but not too much. Our economy was solid. And so on and so forth. But Obama has become a loose cannon, and American is suddenly not the rock it used to be. And I wonder if we ever again will be regarded in the same way.

That was where the post ended in 2010. The only thing I would amend is that the notion that “our economy was solid” was threatened during the 30s by the Great Depression, but we recovered and the Depression was seen as an anomaly and not as a purely American phenomenon by any means.

However, I would add that I don’t wonder any more. I’m relatively certain that will be considered undependable long into the future, and that the world will reflect that instability. Right now the strongest are jockeying for position, and does anyone on earth believe that the end result will be a safer, better world?

Wisconsin Supreme Court rules John Doe investigations must cease

The New Neo Posted on by

The Wisconsin Supreme Court has ruled that the John Doe investigations, in which Democratic district attorneys used a vague law to go on an epic fishing expedition to intimidate and threaten Republican groups in their state, must end.

It’s one of those rulings that all Americans ought to applaud, because it preserves our liberty for at least another day, at least in Wisconsin. That’s not a partisan issue, or it shouldn’t be. But of course the reactions to the ruling break down along partisan lines, although most Americans probably have never heard of it and haven’t a clue about the significance of the threat that was just averted in Wisconsin.

And just to make myself clear, I don’t mean the threat to the Scott Walker campaign. I mean the threat to liberty.

Why have most Americans not heard of this case? Well, it’s not a sexy issue, like Caitlyn Jenner’s transformation. And I don’t think it’s being covered all that heavily in the MSM. When it is covered, you get something like today’s NY Times article on the subject, which is worth studying because it’s written in such a clever manner. You could read the entire thing from beginning to end without realizing what the prosecutors actually did in the investigations, or why it was so dangerous. To the Times, this was just a case in which conservative justices decided to protect Scott Walker—or, they seem to want their readers to think that.

You can read their article yourself if you still have access to the Times. The headline is written to remind the reader that Scott Walker was somehow implicated in the investigation, “Scott Walker 2012 Campaign Inquiry Ended by Wisconsin Court,” although by most accounts he actually was not. These are the first two paragraphs:

The Wisconsin Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that a criminal investigation into allegations of coordination between conservative groups and Gov. Scott Walker’s 2012 campaign cannot continue.

The decision of the court, which was divided, ends the specter of a criminal investigation as Mr. Walker pursues the Republican nomination for president. Mr. Walker, who has won three elections for governor over the last five years including a recall challenge in 2012, officially announced his bid on Monday.

The article quotes the decision briefly (just saying that the investigation is closed because the “special prosecutor’s legal theory is unsupported in either reason or law”) but leaves out anything that would actually give the reader an idea of what happened and why. The article goes on to describe the accusations against the Walker supporters, rather than what the accusers themselves had done to the John Doe targets of the investigation—although the latter is central to the lawsuit and the ruling.

In fact, amazingly enough, the words “John Doe” are mentioned only briefly in the fairly lengthy article, and the powers given by the John Doe statute in Wisconsin are never explained, except to say that the act requires secrecy. The investigation is alluded to in extremely vague terms with no details at all, but the charges against the John Doe targets are detailed, and things like this are aired: “legal experts say they suspect that the court’s four conservatives have been asked to step aside because some of the same conservative groups involved in the case spent money in support of some of the justices’ own elections.” A reader could read the entire piece without having a clue what happened here, or why the investigations were so offensive and outrageous, or that this was a case involving issues of liberty and freedom of speech.

So let’s leave the Times behind and turn to the court ruling. You can find good summaries and discussions at Hot Air and Legal Insurrection.

This is what the court actually said:

The special prosecutor has disregarded the vital principle that in our nation and our state political speech is a fundamental right and is afforded the highest level of protection. The special prosecutor’s theories, rather than “assur[ing] [the] unfettered interchange of ideas for the bringing about of political and social changes desired by the people,” Roth, 354 U.S. at 484, instead would assure that such political speech will be investigated with paramilitary-style home invasions conducted in the pre-dawn hours and then prosecuted and punished. In short, the special prosecutor completely ignores the command that, when seeking to regulate issue advocacy groups, such regulation must be done with “narrow specificity.” Barland II, 751 F.3d at 811 (quotations omitted).

A Times reader would have no idea what the court was talking about, if he/she did ever happen to come across those words, words that the Times did not feel the need to print or even allude to: “paramilitary-style home invasions conducted in the pre-dawn hours.” And then there’s also this from the court ruling:

It is utterly clear that the special prosecutor has employed theories of law that do not exist in order to investigate citizens who were wholly innocent of any wrongdoing. In other words, the special prosecutor was the instigator of a “perfect storm” of wrongs that was visited upon the innocent Unnamed Movants and those who dared to associate with them. It is fortunate, indeed, for every other citizen of this great State who is interested in the protection of fundamental liberties that the special prosecutor chose as his targets innocent citizens who had both the will and the means to fight the unlimited resources of an unjust prosecution. Further, these brave individuals played a crucial role in presenting this court with an opportunity to re-endorse its commitment to upholding the fundamental right of each and every citizen to engage in lawful political activity and to do so free from the fear of the tyrannical retribution of arbitrary or capricious governmental prosecution. Let one point be clear: our conclusion today ends this unconstitutional John Doe investigation.

Fortunately.

[NOTE: If the Wisconsin Supreme Court had not had a majority of conservatives on the bench, it is virtually certain that the result would have been the opposite. And remember that Supreme Court justices in Wisconsin are elected. I find that interesting, because until recently Wisconsin has tended to be a blue state.]