#330426

“He believes he’s building MSNBC and NBC into the next Fox,” a source said.

#330427

We are far too quick to give up freedom for the promise that our compassionate leaders will crush our evil opposition. But every power used to control our political and social enemies can also be used to control us.

#330428

After being shuttered for 10 years, students at Howard University recently reinstated the school’s college Republicans group. And they had some help… from th...

#330429

The University of California will provide lawyers to any of its illegal immigrant students who get detained by agents, system President Janet Napolitano said Friday.

#330430

Anti-Trump Protesters attack Pro Trump protesters from behind at PDX airport 10 on 4 with hundreds in toe. 1/29/2017 Organize Pro Trump Rallies in your town....

#330431

Building on the momentum of historic wins for ranked choice voting in Maine and Benton County, Oregon, lawmakers from Massachusetts to Hawaii have introduced bills that would expand its use in their states.

#330432

Full David Brock confidential memo on fighting Donald Trump obtained by the Washington Free Beacon at the Jan. 19-21, 2017, 'Democracy Matters' Florida donor retreat at Turnberry Isle Resort in Aventura, Fla.

#330433

President Donald Trump signed an order on Monday that will seek to dramatically pare back federal regulations by requiring agencies to cut two existing regulations for every new rule introduced.

#330434

Post-truth politics, alternative facts, fake news: how disdainfully the phrases drop from leftist lips. As the liberal writer Wes Williams puts it, Right-wing media use 'alternative facts' on an almost daily basis. In fact, all human beings subconsciously seek out data that sustain their prejudices. We see what we want to see, even in the most literal sense: In tests where words are slowly illuminated on a screen, we see the nice words before the ugly ones. Think of any contentious situation — for example, a white police officer shooting an unarmed black man. Most people's responses will be subliminally influenced by what they expect. If they start from the proposition that cops are good people doing a hard job, they will likely conclude that the case is one of justifiable self-defense, or at the very least of excusable error. If their assumption is that the police prop up a racist system, they will probably think the cop was guilty.

#330435

President Trump is scheduled to announce his nominee for the vacant US Supreme Court seat Thursday. There should be no illusions about the confirmation battle that will follow. No matter what Senat…

#330436

‘You can’t unlearn,” Ann McElhinney insists, referring to what she and her husband, Phelim McAleer, refer to in the subtitle of their new book, Gosnell: The Untold Story of America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer.
In April 2013, the Irish-born investigative journalists focused their attention on the Kermit Gosnell trial going on in Philadelphia, about the abortions performed at the clinic now known by those who didn’t look away as a “house of horrors.” The evidence prosecutors showed in court was grisly. As McElhinney has put it: “The humanity in all the pictures is unmistakable, the pictures of the babies that were shown as evidence in the Gosnell trial were first-, second-, and third-trimester babies, in all their innocence and perfection.”
Coinciding with the 44th anniversary in January of the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision, Gosnell, their book, is a precursor to a movie they’ve completed production work on. Starring Dean Cain (formerly Superman on the primetime Lois & Clark), the movie is still in need of a distributor. You can imagine how popular such a sell would be in Hollywood — whose stars most recently took the stage in the so-called women’s marches to protest Donald Trump as president and to insist on continued taxpayer funding of Planned Parenthood.
McElhinney’s interest in the trial was not ideological. She wasn’t pro-life, and she’s quick to tell you that she “never trusted or liked pro-life activists.” And she really didn’t like being shown images of abortions. “If the anti-abortion position was so strong, it should be able to argue without resorting to emotionally manipulating its audience with fraudulent horror pictures,” she has written.
But Gosnell changed things for McElhinney. “I got an education on abortion because of researching and investigating this story,” she tells me. In the case of Gosnell, she has focused not only on the unborn who died and the infants born alive and then killed, but also on “two vulnerable women” who died there, one a young African American and one a refugee, she points out, adding:
Hundreds of African-American babies were born alive and then murdered. Where is the outrage for those black lives that matter? Progressive Pennsylvania with all of its government agencies couldn’t have cared less. Where’s the outrage for that?
Gosnell’s clinic was the epitome of what Pope Francis refers to as a “throwaway society.” People cast aside, treated shoddily, because they are poor and desperate and no one cares to pay attention. It can be easier and more ideologically convenient to look away. So many times when pro-life legislation aims at regulating abortion clinics, it’s not a stealth strategy to make abortion illegal law by law; rather these are often attempts to exercise some oversight and ensure that women are not being forced into an abortion, psychologically coerced by circumstances and a culture that seems to point toward abortion, even expecting or preferring it in certain circumstances.
McElhinney and McAleer are the first journalists to visit Gosnell in prison, and McElhinney says that interviewing him has shed light not only on him but also on the culture of the abortion business:
Gosnell can justify anything and does. He’s very greedy, and that comes across, and he likes power, and it’s a powerful, wealthy industry. I can always see#..#the babies he killed. But it’s also a privilege to know them, to witness for their lives. It’s what journalism is all about or at least what it should be about: to speak for the powerless who cannot speak for themselves. In this case, that is as true as it gets. Those children deserved journalists to tell their stories. They were betrayed by the New York Times, the Washington Post, and so many others.
When I ask McElhinney to point to something encouraging she encountered, she names Detective Jim Wood. He is a “a public servant doing all he can every day to bring justice to defend and to protect,” she says. “That he exists makes me hopeful.”
Gosnell’s clinic was the epitome of what Pope Francis refers to as a ‘throwaway society.’
About the movie, McElhinney notes that they have to independently distribute it. She asks: “Investors please be in touch, the movie needs to come out this year. Audiences who have seen it say it’s the best movie ever made about abortion.”
When asked for her advice to the media on abortion and any — God have mercy — future Gosnells, she says:
Just be honest stop being ideological and report the news, even when it makes a lie of their personal beliefs. Do your job, tell the story, and keep your opinions for the opinion pages. . . . Everyone needs to read the book. People think they know what goes on. I thought I knew.
The details are important: what Gosnell did, how he got away with it. The government and the media “betrayed” their responsibilities in the face of “this massive case of mass murder for political reasons.”
Never again, she says, must be the response.
— Kathryn Jean Lopez is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and an editor-at-large of National Review. Sign up for her weekly NRI newsletter here. This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.

#330437

Editor’s Note: The following article is an excerpt from Anthony Esolen’s new book Out of the Ashes.
Any dispassionate observer must conclude that higher education in the United States, and in many other Western nations, is in a bad way. I am not talking about troubles that are easily remedied or errors that require adjustment and reform. I am talking about whether higher education as the West has known it for eight hundred years is any longer possible.
The frieze beneath the rotunda of the state house at Providence, the city where my college is located, proclaims, in the words of Tacitus, the happiness of the times when a man “may think what he will and speak what he thinks.” This may still be true of men sitting at a diner or a bar, drinking beer and arguing about politics. Rational argument and freedom of thought, like the exercise of religion, has retreated into the realm of the private. You may still think what you will, so long as you keep it to yourself. You may not think or speak freely in our political assemblies, our newspapers, and our colleges.
Here the reader may supply plenty of anecdotes about professors, insufficiently “liberal,” who have been driven from their jobs or burdened with legal troubles because they violated the new iron etiquette that governs the public sphere. My favorite, if such it may be called, involved an instructor of composition at the University of Winnipeg who remarked, near the end of a semester, that the most important work that most women do will be to raise their children well. For that remark — which would have struck sensible people alive three cultural minutes ago, both men and women, as a bland truism — the instructor was relieved of his duties forthwith, barred from his office, and forbidden even to administer his final exam.
People who say that such events are rare and therefore not to be taken too seriously are either fools or liars. A thousand public lynchings are expensive and tiresome. Two or three will intimidate your enemies very nicely and save you the sweat and the struggle against your conscience. That is especially true if the victim is powerful and visible, as was Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard who opined that the difference between the numbers of men and women pursuing the natural sciences at the highest level might be due rather to predilection and intellectual inclination than to sexism. Again we are dealing with a bland truism; but the long knives came out, and Summers was dispatched.
This etiquette is related to the cry for “safe spaces,” as college students, a majority of them female, demand to be protected from ideas and utterances that somehow, as they claim, deny their very existence or would cast doubt upon what they claim are their incontestable experiences as members of some historically underprivileged group. Their critics laugh at them and say that such students, “snowflakes,” want to lock our colleges into an orthodoxy that is unenlightened and medieval. These critics are wrong in their diagnosis and inaccurate in their criticism.
It is also something of a mistake to point at the students and laugh at them for being weaklings. The students hold the hammer, and they know it. Yes, it is true that mere teenage boys in decades past — lads who stormed the bluffs of Normandy, sailed on ships cutting through the ice of the Northwest Passage, and slashed their way with explorers through the fever swamps and forests of Borneo — would not be preoccupied with hurtful words, and that a “trigger warning” in those days was the clutch of a rifle being loaded. But in our world of inversions, power is granted to people who claim that they have no power and who resent the greatness of their own forebears. They do not seek “safety.” They seek to destroy. The strong man is bound and gagged, and the pistol is pointed at his head — the seat of reason itself.
In such a world, it is insufficient to say that higher education suffers. Except in the most technical of disciplines, and perhaps even in those, the very possibility of higher education comes to an abrupt halt. If a professor must negotiate an emotional and verbal and political mine field before he opens his mouth, then he is no professor any longer. He is a servile functionary, no matter his title and no matter how well he is paid. He instructs his students not in freedom but in his own servility. That many of the students demand this servility of him and of themselves makes their capitulation all the worse.
The colleges have not abandoned moral considerations utterly. Relativism is an unstable equilibrium — imagine a pyramid upside down, placed delicately upon its apex. It might make you break out into a cold sweat to stand in its shade. The question is not whether some moral vision will prevail, but which moral vision. The colleges are thus committed to a moral inversion. High and noble virtues, especially those that require moral courage, are mocked: gallantry in wartime, sexual purity, scrupulous honesty and plain dealing, piety, and the willingness to subject your thoughts, experiences, and most treasured beliefs to the searching scrutiny of reason. What is valued then? Debauchery, perversion, contempt for your supposedly benighted ancestors, lazy agnosticism, easy and costless pacifism, political maneuvering, and an enforcement of a new orthodoxy that in denying rational analysis seeks to render itself immune to criticism. You sink yourself in debt to discover that your sons and daughters have been severed from their faith, their morals, and their reason. Whorehouses and mental wards would be much cheaper. They might well be healthier, too.
— Anthony Esolen is a professor at Providence College and author of Out of the Ashes.

#330438

Co-founder of the Muslim Reform Movement shares her view

#330439

What's holding the Arab world back? Why, by nearly every measure, are Muslim nations so far behind the West economically, culturally and scientifically? Bret...

#330440

In the electoral strongholds for Trump, residents seemed unmoved over the outrage flashing across their television screens.

#330441

Editor’s Note: The following article is an excerpt from Anthony Esolen’s new book Out of the Ashes.
Any dispassionate observer must conclude that higher education in the United States, and in many other Western nations, is in a bad way. I am not talking about troubles that are easily remedied or errors that require adjustment and reform. I am talking about whether higher education as the West has known it for eight hundred years is any longer possible.
The frieze beneath the rotunda of the state house at Providence, the city where my college is located, proclaims, in the words of Tacitus, the happiness of the times when a man “may think what he will and speak what he thinks.” This may still be true of men sitting at a diner or a bar, drinking beer and arguing about politics. Rational argument and freedom of thought, like the exercise of religion, has retreated into the realm of the private. You may still think what you will, so long as you keep it to yourself. You may not think or speak freely in our political assemblies, our newspapers, and our colleges.
Here the reader may supply plenty of anecdotes about professors, insufficiently “liberal,” who have been driven from their jobs or burdened with legal troubles because they violated the new iron etiquette that governs the public sphere. My favorite, if such it may be called, involved an instructor of composition at the University of Winnipeg who remarked, near the end of a semester, that the most important work that most women do will be to raise their children well. For that remark — which would have struck sensible people alive three cultural minutes ago, both men and women, as a bland truism — the instructor was relieved of his duties forthwith, barred from his office, and forbidden even to administer his final exam.
People who say that such events are rare and therefore not to be taken too seriously are either fools or liars. A thousand public lynchings are expensive and tiresome. Two or three will intimidate your enemies very nicely and save you the sweat and the struggle against your conscience. That is especially true if the victim is powerful and visible, as was Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard who opined that the difference between the numbers of men and women pursuing the natural sciences at the highest level might be due rather to predilection and intellectual inclination than to sexism. Again we are dealing with a bland truism; but the long knives came out, and Summers was dispatched.
This etiquette is related to the cry for “safe spaces,” as college students, a majority of them female, demand to be protected from ideas and utterances that somehow, as they claim, deny their very existence or would cast doubt upon what they claim are their incontestable experiences as members of some historically underprivileged group. Their critics laugh at them and say that such students, “snowflakes,” want to lock our colleges into an orthodoxy that is unenlightened and medieval. These critics are wrong in their diagnosis and inaccurate in their criticism.
It is also something of a mistake to point at the students and laugh at them for being weaklings. The students hold the hammer, and they know it. Yes, it is true that mere teenage boys in decades past — lads who stormed the bluffs of Normandy, sailed on ships cutting through the ice of the Northwest Passage, and slashed their way with explorers through the fever swamps and forests of Borneo — would not be preoccupied with hurtful words, and that a “trigger warning” in those days was the clutch of a rifle being loaded. But in our world of inversions, power is granted to people who claim that they have no power and who resent the greatness of their own forebears. They do not seek “safety.” They seek to destroy. The strong man is bound and gagged, and the pistol is pointed at his head — the seat of reason itself.
In such a world, it is insufficient to say that higher education suffers. Except in the most technical of disciplines, and perhaps even in those, the very possibility of higher education comes to an abrupt halt. If a professor must negotiate an emotional and verbal and political mine field before he opens his mouth, then he is no professor any longer. He is a servile functionary, no matter his title and no matter how well he is paid. He instructs his students not in freedom but in his own servility. That many of the students demand this servility of him and of themselves makes their capitulation all the worse.
The colleges have not abandoned moral considerations utterly. Relativism is an unstable equilibrium — imagine a pyramid upside down, placed delicately upon its apex. It might make you break out into a cold sweat to stand in its shade. The question is not whether some moral vision will prevail, but which moral vision. The colleges are thus committed to a moral inversion. High and noble virtues, especially those that require moral courage, are mocked: gallantry in wartime, sexual purity, scrupulous honesty and plain dealing, piety, and the willingness to subject your thoughts, experiences, and most treasured beliefs to the searching scrutiny of reason. What is valued then? Debauchery, perversion, contempt for your supposedly benighted ancestors, lazy agnosticism, easy and costless pacifism, political maneuvering, and an enforcement of a new orthodoxy that in denying rational analysis seeks to render itself immune to criticism. You sink yourself in debt to discover that your sons and daughters have been severed from their faith, their morals, and their reason. Whorehouses and mental wards would be much cheaper. They might well be healthier, too.
— Anthony Esolen is a professor at Providence College and author of Out of the Ashes.

#330442

Despite today’s outrage over President Donald Trump’s refugee executive order, many liberals in 1975 were part of a chorus of big name Democrats who refused to accept any Vietnamese refugees whe

#330443

The Daily Beast falsely reported Sunday night that a pair of white supremacists had been identified as the perpetrators of the mass shooting at a Quebec City

#330444

False reports identifying the people who supposedly attacked a Quebec-area mosque are circulating online.

#330445

Quebec provincial police say six people are dead and eight were wounded after shots were fired inside a mosque on Sunday night during evening prayers, an act Quebec's premier described as "murderous act directed at a specific community."

#330446

Khan says he prays travel for Pakistani citizens to US is banned "so that we can focus on fixing our country".

#330447

Eliot Cohen: ?To friends still thinking of serving as political appointees in this administration, beware: When you sell your soul to the Devil, he prefers to collect his purchase on the installment plan. Trump’s disregard for either Secretary of Defense [...]

#330448

Democrats Put Japanese-Americans In Camps After A Single Attack With liberals across the United States going crazy because President Trump wants ...

#330449

-- DISCLAIMER! ---- Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, commen...

#330450

Another Brilliant Moment From Bill de Blasio Moronic New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio appeared on CNN on Sunday ...
