The left brought it on itself by insisting on the politicization of judges. For a leftist, nothing can be outside politics, and political power takes precedence over the law. Fortunately, we may still have a chance to restore originalism, and the Constitution.
[Update early afternoon]
If judges want to make laws and bypass the legislature, let them be elected, not appointed for life.
Why “liberals” should be concerned about it.
They’re not concerned about it because they’re not liberals — they’re leftists who are perfectly fine with the government having a monopoly on firearms (as long as they’re in charge of the government).
[Update a couple minutes later]
Nice to see that some commenters at Glenn’s site are making similar comments to mine. Stop calling leftists liberals.
An interview with a Syrian refugee becomes a huge own goal for CNN.
You don’t help out a country (or region) by letting it fall apart, and then draining it of its best people.
Coyote is really pushing this concept. Now he’s got an op-ed at Aviation Week.
Michael Totten isn’t impressed with the Trump administration’s foreign-policy acumen:
…we need to get a couple of things straight here. Bashar al-Assad is not fighting ISIS in Syria. Not really. Nor are the Russians. Assad and the Russians are fighting every rebel army in the country except ISIS. Look at a map of the country. ISIS’s territory is centered on its “capital” in Raqqa in the northeast, but Assad and Russia’s theater of operations is in the west and along the coast. Only the United States has bombed ISIS in Syria, and only Kurdish militias have seriously resisted ISIS on the ground.
Assad did, however, facilitate ISIS’s rise in Syria and Iraq. Thousands of Americans and Iraqis are dead thanks to his sponsorship of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaeda in Iraq—the precursor to ISIS—during the Iraqi insurgency.
This is hardly a secret. “We in Syria intelligence opened all the doors for [the jihadists] to go to Iraq,” Mahmud al-Naser, an intelligence officer who defected to the United States, told the Daily Beast.
Before writing off Syrian malfeasance during the Iraq war as irrelevant history, understand something else: ISIS in its current form is also a creature of the Assad regime. Assad wanted ISIS to rise. He needed ISIS to rise. He made damn sure that ISIS did rise and that it did so inside Syria.
I wish I had some reason to think that Trump has a plan.
Over at PJMedia, I write that the Republicans should have made the Democrats really do it.
This looks like an interesting new book
Bad lip reading of the movie. Some of the dialogue is better, really.
Douthat is right that Trump could use a brain trust. But some of us were told that Pence or Reince Priebus or Paul Ryan would serve that role. Certainly they’ve tried. Moreover, there are countless policy agendas sitting on the shelf for Trump to choose among.
Why so much chaos, then? A common answer you hear from all corners is “the tweeting” — the horrible, horrible tweeting. But when you talk to people with more hands-on experience in, or with, the Trump White House, the better answer is that the tweeting is just a symptom.
Trump brings the same glandular, impulsive style to meetings and interviews as he does to social media. He blurts out ideas or claims that send staff scrambling to see them implemented or defended. His management style is Hobbesian. Rivalries are encouraged. Senior aides panic at the thought of not being part of his movable entourage. He cares more about saving face and “counterpunching” his critics than he does about getting policy victories.
In short, the problem is Trump’s personality. His presidency doesn’t suffer from a failure of ideas, but a failure of character.
Yup. As I said throughout the campaign, Trump is terrible, she’s worse.
It’s been a hundred years since we entered it. Some thoughts on how it changed the world.