Category Archives: Media Criticism

Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Office Of Civil RightsWrongs

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Apparently it doesn’t think that free speech is a civil right.

Lukianoff notes that campus definitions of sexual harassment include “humor and jokes about sex in general that make someone feel uncomfortable” (University of California at Berkeley), “unwelcome sexual flirtations and inappropriate put-downs of individual persons or classes of people” (Iowa State University) or “elevator eyes” (Murray State University in Kentucky).

All of which means that just about any student can be hauled before a disciplinary committee. Jokes about sex will almost always make someone uncomfortable, after all, and usually you can’t be sure if flirting will be welcome except after the fact. And how do you define “elevator eyes”?

Given the prevailing attitudes among faculty and university administrators, it’s not hard to guess who will be the target of most such proceedings. You only have to remember how rapidly and readily top administrators and dozens of faculty members were ready to castigate as guilty of rape the Duke lacrosse players who, as North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper concluded, were absolutely innocent.

What the seemingly misnamed Office of Civil Rights is doing here is demanding the setting up of kangaroo courts and the dispensing of what I would call marsupial justice against students who are disfavored by campus denizens because of their gender or race or political attitude. “Alice in Wonderland’s” Red Queen would approve.

I hope that FIRE (which is a great cause to which you should contribute) will take them to court, and demand that they obey the First Amendment.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The ATF Criminals

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More thoughts:

Imagine the DEA telling pharmacists to illegally sell oxycontin to known drug dealers or they would be shut down. Then imagine the DEA using the fact that more oxycontin was on the street (and hundreds of overdose deaths) as a pretext for making it harder for patients to get prescribed narcotics. This is essentially what happened with the ATF and Project Gunwalker

And as for evidence that this was part of a push by the administration on gun control, I should have pointed this out yesterday.

I’ve heard a lot of folks wondering if this is what Obama meant back when he said he was working on gun control under the radar.

Let’s hope that the radar lights this up very brightly. If we can’t get a federal investigation into this, I would suggest that relatives of the victims killed by these weapons file a suit against BATF and the Justice Department, and name Eric Holder. Discovery would be very interesting.

[Update mid afternoon]

You don’t say. This requires a special counsel investigation:

we’ve discovered that the president and Democratic lawmakers have lied, and continue to lie, about the role of American guns and American small businessmen in arming drug cartels south of the border. We’ve watched as they’ve lied, and continue to lie, blaming gun shops for the carnage that has resulted from the depravity of Mexican narco-terrorists.

We’ve watched as ATF special agents and supervisors testified in front of Congress, angry and ashamed, about how the multi-agency task force they were a part of was responsible for arming the cartel gunmen that have killed scores of law enforcement officers and civilians in two countries.

This scandal must come to an end not with graceful and fault-free resignations, but with deliberate and careful prosecutions of those responsible.

There were four federal agencies involved in Gunwalker, including the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Each of these agencies deserves dishonor and a thorough post-mortem review from their own respective inspectors general. But that is simply a start towards righting an unconscionable wrong.

But at least it would be a start.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Timeline For The Gunwalker Crime

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Bob Owens lays it out:

It is only reasonable to believe that knowledge of this operation did not stop with cabinet-level officials. If the directors of so many executive branch agencies were involved in this scandal, as it appears they might have been, it is plausible that knowledge of this scheme — perhaps the origination? — came directly from the White House.

One might ask what our laws demand of officials complicit in a plot that used the power of U.S. law enforcement agencies to pressure gun shops into selling weapons to narco-terrorists. If this is indeed the case, impeachment and resignations are just the beginning of the process of seeking justice. Those who authorized this operation and facilitated what was essentially a gunrunning operation to achieve what appears to be a political goal may very well be guilty of a number of felonies — and wanted for extradition to face justice in Mexican courts as well.

Under Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution, any person who levies war against the United States or adheres to its enemies by giving them aid and comfort is guilty of the act of treason. Gunwalker supplied narco-terrorists on our southern border with thousands of firearms.

As I said, tar and feathers aren’t enough.

[Update late evening]

Evidence points much higher than BATF director:

Former El Paso Intelligence Center (EPIC) director Phil Jordan said he thinks this scandal goes as high as Attorney General Eric Holder. From his decades of law enforcement experience working with Washington-based Justice Department officials, Jordan said he’s sure this kind of program would have needed approval from either the Attorney General or one of his direct deputies.

What a shocking development. Not.