Category Archives: Iran

UPDATED: Coequal in Tyranny: The Ninth Circuit’s Rules for Radicals

Constitution, Critique, Donald Trump, Homeland Security, IMMIGRATION, Iran, Justice, Law, Neoconservatism

“Coequal in Tyranny: The Ninth Circuit’s Rules for Radicals” is the current column, now on Townhall.com. An excerpt:

Read the judicial rules for radicals issued by the United States Court Of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in affirmation of the ban on The Ban. It follows the Executive Order issued by President Donald Trump, with the imprimatur of 62 million voters, to protect the nation from foreign terrorists entering into the United States. Two states objected to the president’s undeniably badly written Order, which, while upholding negative rights—and neither denying natural rights nor minting positive ones—was nevertheless replete with administrative errors.

Acting as coequal partners in the administrative tyranny the president is trying to break, the two states issued a temporary restraining order against “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States.” (I can already hear the election midterm ads.)

In the corner for the Deplorables was a government lawyer. August Flentje Esq. had “argued” (if you can call it that) for an emergency stay of the Washington State district court’s temporary restraining order against the president. The three Ninth Circuit jurists who heard the case said no.

CAREER GOVERNMENT LAWYERS. If you’re good at what you do, you look to make it in the private sector (as our president did, before he did us a favor). If not, you seek sheltered employment (as President Trump’s predecessor did). Clearly, clerking for the Supreme Court, as August Flentje had done, doesn’t mean a whole lot.

In presenting the oral arguments for the president and the people, Flentje evinced a level of incompetence that spurred the Bench to the heights of usurpation. For example, when The Court caviled about an alleged lack of evidence for the necessity of the “travel ban,” not only did Flentje fail to provide it, but he failed to question the need for this evidence based on the scope of the president’s constitutional, executive power in matters of nation security.

Mr. President: You promised to hire the best. Alan Dershowitz is champing at the bit. Kris Kobach would kill it in any court. (Jonathan Turley is soft. Don’t touch Fox News’ tele-judges.)

Helped by the poor job stumblebum Flentje did in arguing the president’s prerogative and position, the Ninth Circuit judges usurped President Trump’s constitutional authority, substituting their own judgment for his. The three refused to lift the ban on the ban and reinstate an Executive Order that was never meant to be subjected to judicial review, in the first place.

GEORGE W. BUSH’S LAWYER. Those on the Right who opposed George Bush during his presidency (check) were vindicated yet again. In the nooks-and-crannies of our command-and-control judiciary, Bush had squirreled away a jurist as bad as John G. Roberts Jr.

Recall, Roberts, chief of the country’s legal politburo of proctologists, rewrote Obama’s Affordable Care Act. He then proceeded to provide the fifth vote to uphold the individual mandate undergirding the law, thereby undeniably and obscenely extending Congress’s taxing power. (Lazy government worker Paul Ryan still hasn’t come up with an alternative to ObamaCare, one that’ll prevent the Left from torching the country. Patience. It’s only been eight years.)

The unelected Bush appointee under discussion is from my State of Washington. District Judge James L. Robart, like Bush, would wrestle a crocodile for an illegal immigrant. Or, for potential immigrants, preferably from Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, and Sudan.

Having been granted standing by the Ninth Circuit to appeal President Trump’s Executive Order, Robart, as explained by a Daily Caller contributor, “hinged his entire ruling on a concept called parens patriae, …

… READ THE REST. “Coequal in Tyranny: The Ninth Circuit’s Rules for Radicals” is the current column, now on Townhall.com.

Best tweet:

Best retort to #9thCircuit nutters: US can bomb the 7 Muslim countries. That's constitutional. It can't peacefully disassociate from them. https://t.co/c1JG0qdhgl

Posted by Ilana Mercer, Author on Thursday, February 9, 2017

FACEBOOK:

Noah Purcell, you don’t represent Washington State. You, the tech execs and social justice clientele are having a ‘moment.’ Enjoy! It won’t last! You didn’t even have standing to bring the case. You’re asserting the rights of people who are not even Americans. You’re a joke. The 9th circuit is a joke.

Did Hillary’s Recklessness Lead To The Execution Of An American Asset In Iran?

Ethics, Etiquette, Hillary Clinton, Intelligence, Iran

In August of 2016, when it came to light that Hillary Clinton had flouted state secrecy laws, Iran executed an American asset. The execution of “Shahram Amiri appeared linked as effect to cause to Hillary’s infamous emails. Poor Shahram Amiri had the misfortune of being discussed by the secretary of state’s staff on her insecure server. The correlation between Amiri’s demise might not be as strong as the Iran ransom-release cause-and-effect; but it deserves serious consideration.” Still does. (“The Clinton Media’s Manufactured Reality.”)

All the more so now that the extent of Hillary Clinton’s wayward recklessness with lives entrusted to her has been exposed.

One official said the total number of emails recovered in the investigation into Weiner is close to 650,000, although that reflects many emails that are not related to the Clinton investigation. But officials familiar with the case said that the messages include a significant amount of correspondence associated with Clinton and Abedin. (WaPo)

AND:

“The F.B.I. on Monday began loading a trove of emails belonging to a top aide to Hillary Clinton into a special computer program that would allow bureau analysts to determine whether they contain classified information, law enforcement officials said. …(WaPo)“

Iran: Conservatives Don’t Get That Obama Lies And Steals For His LEGACY

Barack Obama, Conservatism, Foreign Policy, Hillary Clinton, Iran

Providing material support for a state sponsor of terrorism, incentivizing hostage-taking, aiding and abetting Hezbollah: These are some of the angles conservatives have come up with in mustering outrage over the revelation that, as WSJ has reported, “The Obama administration secretly organized an airlift of $400 million worth of cash to Iran that coincided with the January release of four Americans detained in Tehran, according to U.S. and European officials and congressional staff briefed on the operation afterward.”

I support negotiating for the lives of compatriots imperiled by the US government’s policies. (See “AFTER THEIR HEADS ROLL, AMERICA’S DEAD REMAIN FACELESS,” written for antiwar.com, in 2004.)

Obama, however, likely had to bribe the Iranians to release the American prisoners because they harbor no particular good will toward him. He signed the Iran nuclear deal without considering American interests. However, for his legacy to stand, as the president who marked “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal” (Obama as quoted in my new book), he has to portray the Iranians as having been swayed by his diplomacy. For his legacy, Obama has to paint a picture of himself a president who managed to restore comity between America and her Arab adversaries. To that end, Obama has lied and stolen to pacify the Iranians behind the scenes and to make them appear genial toward the US.

The same thinking went into Hillary’s refusal to beef up security in Benghazi. This from a 2012 column, “Standing Armies Commandeered by Cowards,” on the subject:

In the fullness of time, I believe, it will transpire that the woman who cracks the whip at Foggy Bottom had decided to leave the U.S. embassy in Libya undefended.The open community center Hillary was running there was meant to signal that the war on Libya, Hillary’s special project, was a success. (Recall, Libya was “a war of the womb,” a product of the romantic minds of three women who fantasized about an Arab awakening. This estrogen-driven paternalism on steroids began, as in Greek mythology, with the Gorgon sisters. Medusa’s posse included Samantha Power, and U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice. They helped Hillary devise the casus belli for the war.)

‘Shahs of Sunset’ Christiane Amanpoor Mocks ‘Poor Me’ America

Celebrity, Donald Trump, Foreign Policy, Iran, Journalism, Media, Race

In ways intellectual, Christiane Amanpoor is impoverished. The famous CNN anchor, however, is not poor. Amanpoor’s net worth is $12.5 Million. She’s lived, loved and worked among the upper echelons her entire life, in her birth place of Iran, too. Amanpoor is more authentically “Shahs of Sunset” than ordinary America.

Read how Amapoor conflates America (“rich”) with Americans (many of whom are awfully poor).

Via Media Matters comes Christian Amanpoor’s take on Trump’s America. She apparently is unfamiliar with white, working-class demographics:

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: [Donald Trump] always comes back to the dollars and cents. So, America’s broke, therefore, America’s weak. These are not true, right, so everybody else has to pony up. This is a businessman’s view of the world, presumably. But it doesn’t make sense when he talks about, for instance, NATO. NATO is not obsolete. Yes, NATO was created 60-plus years ago in response to the Soviet threat. But still, NATO is the organizing principle by which American and the Western democracies’ security is taken care of. And NATO is not just about the United States putting money in. It’s about all the other countries putting in their two percent of GDP as well. Now, they don’t all, that’s true, and America wants them to put more than they do right now. But a good number, nearly half of the NATO countries, put their two percent of GDP in. And the other countries do certain things that America doesn’t do. Now, America, because it is the most powerful military in the world, does a lot of the heavy lifting. You know, you have a military operation and America will do the troop lifting, for instance. Or it will do, you know, many of those kinds of things. But many of the other countries, whether it’s in Afghanistan or elsewhere, pick up a huge lot of the burden as well.

BROOKE BALDWIN (HOST): What about his point on nukes, how he said specifically he would be open to allowing Japan and South Korea to build their own nuclear arsenals so they can protect themselves from North Korea and China?

AMANPOUR: Well again, that puts on its head decades of the United States and its Pacific allies’ security relationship, and this is one of the first times we’ve heard a serious candidate, if not the first time, who will probably be the nominee for the Republican Party, put that forward, and it’s not a Republican sort of point of view that I’ve ever heard in previous elections. This poor me, America’s weak kind of thing is not the way Republicans generally see their view, and Americans’ view in the world. So one of the reasons why Japan does not have a nuclear arsenal is because of the horror that Japan committed during the Second World War. So Japan has been kind of forced to be a pacifist, pretty much, state. It has a military but it’s not an offensive military capability. And so there was a tradeoff. OK, you trade that off. And if there’s a problem, we’ll come to your rescue. But in the meantime, you’ll help us keep the peace in many other ways in that region. So that’s one of the reasons why Japan doesn’t have nukes. And then of course, well, when it comes to ISIS and all the other things, you need allies to be able to go and help you. [CNN, CNN Newsroom with Brooke Baldwin, 3/28/16]