ActRight

‘What would the gator be thinking?’

The word “rape” brings to mind a scenario that is unlike the case of most rapes: A woman walks down a desolate city street or into a darkened house, a stranger steps out of the shadows with a knife or a revolver. In reality, most rapists and victims are acquainted, there is no weapon, and the element of coercion is neither dramatic nor physically overt. It is for this reason that the sterile expression “sexual assault” has partly displaced “rape” in our criminal lexicon and that while all sensible people recoil from the likes of Whoopi Goldberg and her “rape but not rape-rape” account of Roman Polanski — who drugged and sodomized a 13-year-old girl — there is a kind of queasy recognition of what it is she meant. As a more practical consideration, this speaks to why rape cases often are so damnably difficult to prove. We know that sex acts a, b, and c took place, perhaps after consumption of x units of vodka, and often none of that is in dispute. What is in dispute is the psychological state of the parties as regards the issue of consent. Because consent is so difficult to get at as a matter of legal evidence, we often take an indirect approach to preventing rape. We try to persuade young men to take a positive rather than a purely negative attitude toward the question of consent, and we try, in our gingerly way, to persuade young women that they can make themselves less vulnerable by taking certain defensive measures. Feminists complain that the latter savors of blaming the victim, and about that they are not entirely wrong, though of course being feminists they are innocent of any mature sense of proportionality, failing to understand that we can lock our doors at night without effectively countenancing “burglary culture.” One need not be a batty feminist or hostage to the sad delusions of our sexual liberationists to appreciate that this indirect approach is after all indirect, that while by limiting sexual scenarios we might limit the rape scenarios as well, the problem is not people’s acting on sexual opportunities but their acting on rape opportunities. While some feminists object to the implicit prudery and sexuality-policing of such prudential measures as sexually segregated dorms, others, particularly on college campuses, would see us press ahead in the opposite neo-Victorian direction, with ever-more-demanding rules for the documentation of consent. That these contradictions exist comfortably in the same minds and within the same cultural currents speaks to the Whitmanesque contradictions of the American psyche. I hope you will forgive that long and unpleasant prologue to my intended subject, which is what we euphemistically call “campaign-finance reform.” There are instructive parallels. Just as sex is not the problem with rape, “money in politics,” or “big money in politics,” or whatever you want to call it, is not the underlying question with campaign-finance law. The underlying question is bribery. If you are at all familiar with the history of U.S. campaign-finance regulation and the jurisprudence related to it, this is obvious. If not, here is the short version: Just as rape can be very difficult to prove because it requires a judgment about the psychological question of consent, bribery can be very difficult to prove because it requires a similar assessment of the internal state of the involved actors regarding the question of quid pro quo. If I offer Senator Snout a $100,000 donation to a friendly PAC in exchange for his voting my way on the Let’s Subsidize Small Political Magazines the Way We Do Marco Rubio’s Sugar-Baron Sugar Daddies Act of 2017, and Senator Snout takes me up on my offer, that’s bribery. If, of his own volition, Senator Snout votes my way on my bill, I think to myself, “Snout’s a good fellow,” and make a donation to SnoutPAC, that isn’t bribery. If I wisely judge Senator Snout to be the sort of man who is solid on wildly irresponsible and inappropriate federal subsidies for the producers of small political magazines and send a check his way based on that assumption, that isn’t bribery either. No quid pro quo, no bribery. You can see the problem here: Quid pro quo is difficult to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. But that is the relevant standard. Nobody actually objects to “money in politics.” The New York Times spends a great deal of money trying to influence our political discourse and election outcomes: Professor Krugman does not work for free — no, sir! — and you have higher hopes of hearing him fart the Princeton fight song (“The Princeton Cannon”) in the key of E-flat than of seeing him strain his spinal extensors to bend over and pick up anything less than $10,000. Martin Sheen and Elizabeth Warren’s Wall Street law-firm patrons and the New York Bar Association and EMILY’s List are not opponents of “big money in politics,” not even a little. Bribery can be very difficult to prove or to police. Historically, we have finessed that in part by placing limits on how much money people can donate to political campaigns per se — which is to say, to political operations under the direct control of the candidates themselves — as well as by prohibiting campaign donations from corporations, whether for-profit or nonprofit. That is also why we limit what individuals and corporations can donate to PACs, party committees, and the like. The idea is that we prevent bribery and the appearance of bribery by setting the limits below what any self-respecting politician (ho, ho!) would peddle himself for. The theory is imperfect but not indefensible. What we should not limit — and, under the First Amendment, do not limit — is how individuals, nonprofits, corporations, or other groups spend their own money to communicate their own political messages. That is because, as Anthony Kennedy put it in Citizens United, these “independent expenditures do not lead to, or create the appearance of, quid pro quo corruption.” One need not accept the validity or prudence of the existing limits to understand the rationale for them. And that rationale, properly understood, is not broad enough to cover private parties spending their own money on their own political ideas. No quid pro quo, no bribery. We are not going to abolish sex, or restrict it to every other Thursday between the hours of 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. subject to the approval of the dean of students at Bryn Mawr College, even though prosecuting rape cases is difficult. Likewise, we are not (Supreme Court willing) going to gut the First Amendment’s protections of political speech because bribery is hard to prosecute. And understanding campaign-finance law in its proper context — bribery — is both liberating and illuminating: You may disagree with Ted Cruz on gun control, but only a fool thinks he holds his position because the National Rifle Association pays him to. Never mind, for the moment, that Senator Cruz has held his Second Amendment views since long before he was a big enough fish to be worth bribing: The NRA is not anywhere near the top ten campaign contributors in this country, or the top 100, or the top 200, or even the top 300. It is in the top 400, at No. 383, and senators cannot be bought, or even rented, at that price. And Citizens United wasn’t paying congressmen to vote for ethanol subsidies or to end the Iraq War: It spent its money producing a terrible documentary called “Hillary: The Movie.” Say what you will about that, it isn’t anything like bribery. You cannot police a crime, or prosecute it, or prevent it, until you understand what it is. That is as true for crimes that are heinous and personal as it is for those that are heinous and political. – Kevin D. Williamson is National Review’s roving correspondent.

The former president, who is an elector for New York, reiterated his claim that FBI Director James Comey lost the election for his wife. “I never cast a vote I was prouder of,” the former president

It’s one of the greatest examples of “careful what you wish for” in political history: President Obama is going to be replaced by the kind of Republican he’s always said he wanted. For the entirety of his presidency, Obama has insisted that he is a pragmatist, not an ideologue. Indeed, he seems to think that ideology is a dirty word. “What is required,” Obama declared the day before his first inauguration, “is a new declaration of independence, not just in our nation, but in our own lives — from ideology and small thinking, prejudice, and bigotry — an appeal not to our easy instincts but to our better angels.” As a confessed ideologue, I’ve always taken offense at the suggestion that ideology — i.e., a fixed set of principles — deserves to be listed alongside prejudice, bigotry, and small thinking. Moreover, as a conservative, I’ve always found laughable the idea that Obama is not an ideologue. But when Donald Trump says he’s a pragmatist, it’s no laughing matter. Not since Richard Nixon have we had a president (or president-elect) less committed, or beholden, to a fixed ideological program. Going into the GOP primaries, the conventional wisdom held that the winner of the contest would be the candidate who displayed the most ideological purity. Instead the brass ring went to the contender with the least. “No, it’s not going to be the Trump doctrine,” Trump said in April. “Because in life, you have to be flexible. You have to have flexibility. You have to change. You know, you may say one thing and then the following year you want to change it, because circumstances are different.” A few days later, he told his supporters in California, “Folks, I’m a conservative, but at this point, who cares? We got to straighten out the country.” The closest Trump comes to a rigid set of political principles is on the issue of trade. His surrogates echoed the sentiment. Investor Carl Icahn assured voters that “Donald is a pragmatist. He’s going to do what’s needed for this economy.” Hedge fund mogul Anthony Scaramucci wrote in the Wall Street Journal: “What elitists misinterpret as uneven principles, entrepreneurs understand as adaptability. . . . Mr. Trump would be the greatest pragmatist and deal maker Washington has ever seen.” The closest Trump comes to a rigid set of political principles is on the issue of trade. He has been making the same protectionist arguments about trade for more than 30 years. And despite the fact that the GOP has, at least rhetorically, been a party of free trade since Ronald Reagan, Trump seems to have won that argument in a rout. No doubt there are Republicans who disagree with Trump on trade, but for the most part they’re keeping their opposition to themselves. Obama came into office wanting to be a transformative president. He almost certainly failed — many of his prize accomplishments likely won’t survive the next GOP Congress. And even as he argued against partisanship, and advanced the idea that a president can, nay must, decide every issue on a case-by-case basis, he always pushed a liberal agenda. #related#Trump, though, really might try the case-by-case approach, which we’ll soon find is more disorienting than refreshing. His “flexibility” on numerous issues — infrastructure, entitlements, industrial policy, daycare, and who knows what else in the years to come — means we won’t know what to expect. For good or ill, then, Trump could be the “transformative” president Obama always wanted to be — the president who gets us past partisan ideology by doing away with principle. One can already hear the ideological supports of both parties groaning under the weight of Trump’s pragmatism. If one party collapses as a result, both will likely topple over. What replaces them is anyone’s guess, but no one will deny that a transformation took place. — Jonah Goldberg is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior editor of National Review. © 2016 Tribune Content Agency, LLC

President Obama will likely leave office failing to fulfill his promise to close the prison facility in Guantanamo Bay for good. But that doesn’t mean he’s going down without a fight.  The outgoing president plans on releasing 17 or 18 of the remaining 59 Gitmo detainees before President-elect Donald Trump takes the oath of office in January.

There have been at least three attack plots by underage Germans this year so far, authorities say.

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Where are the tears for Aleppo’s Christians and Jews?

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Do you remember the New York Daily News reporter that claimed to have PTSD from firing an AR15?  Here's a reminder: You can read his full story here.  This foolishness spawned countless memes and hilarious video responses mocking him.

Here's how we can restore each state's control over its own budget.

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This week in regressive identity politics... MTV News is a progressive, inclusive and tolerant news source, that is unless you're white male. SIDE NOTE: I kn...

Colorado State University’s administration has agreed to provide counselors for students who may be struggling with “racial battle fatigue.”

We've been here before. We'll find our way forward eventually. I hope.

North Carolina Transgender Deal Lets Judges Decide Whether Men Are Women

Poll: Democratic Women Most Likely to Block or Unfriend Someone over Politics

Philip Davies challenges the sexist pro-feminist agenda bill that only protects women from domestic violence and ignores men and boys!

As their ratings continue to decline, MTV continues its left-wing politics by releasing a short video entitled "2017 Resolutions for White Guys."

Canada welcomes Syrian refugees like no other country. But for one 10-year-old’s parents, is she leaving too much behind?

Tucker Carlson vs Tariq Nasheed On Trump Hiring White Supremacists In Cabinet 12/20/16

The interview from there for Nasheed got torpedoed when Tucker held him accountable for his own words even in a book that he wrote about lying about his sex book