Patterico's Pontifications

3/9/2021

GOP Congressman Tweets Out White Nationalist Slogan

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 8:29 am



Remember doofus Paul Gosar, the fellow who was in the middle of his goofy objection to the results of the presidential election in Arizona shortly before the session was disrupted by news that the Capitol mobsters had breached the building?

Now he’s busy tweeting out white nationalist slogans.

“America First Is Inevitable” is a slogan used by Nick Fuentes and other white nationalists.

Fuentes, in addition to being a happy racist and anti-Semite, comes from the school of “hey I am not encouraging violence against the government but what do you expect people to do?” school of rabble-rousing. Gosar recently gave a speech at a white nationalist convention organized by Fuentes. His speech was followed by Fuentes calling the Capitol riot “awesome.”

There is plenty of stupid in the Democrat party, but this kind of stuff makes people like AOC look positively responsible by contrast.

It’s a daily amazement to see what the party has become. This kind of thing only makes a far tougher job for the good people who want to rebuild the party.

2/19/2018

Repeal the Logan Act

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 4:00 pm



As most people following politics know, there’s an obscure law called the Logan Act which makes it a crime for unauthorized people to conduct foreign policy with certain governments under specified circumstances. If someone like Michael Flynn negotiates foreign policy with a Russian ambassador, or Ted Kennedy asks the Rooskies to intervene in a U.S. presidential election, or John Kerry sends a message to Mahmoud Abbas not to yield to Trump’s foreign policy demands . . . well, then in theory, those people should be prosecuted if they were not a) government officials when they took those actions, or b) otherwise authorized to take those actions.

But nobody has ever been successfully prosecuted pursuant to the law, which was passed in 1799. Nobody has even been charged with a violation of the act in over 160 years. As a result, it’s become something of a running joke.

As an example of the way the law is usually discussed, take the piece in Politico titled Confessions of a Russiagate Skeptic, in which a panicky Trump-hater reveals his concern that there might be nothing to the Russia investigation. It’s worth reading for the entertainment value alone (Oh my! what if Trump didn’t do anything!), but for now I am focusing on this passage:

And there are aspects of the Russia scandal, too, that don’t quite add up for me. Take Flynn’s plea bargain. As Preet Bharara, the former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, noted after the deal became public, prosecutors usually prefer to charge participants in a conspiracy with charges related to the underlying crime. But Flynn pleaded guilty only to lying to the FBI, which Bharara surmised suggests might mean Mueller didn’t have much on him. It certainly seems unlikely that any prosecutor would charge Flynn for violating the 219-year-old Logan Act, a constitutionally questionable law that has never been tested in court, for his chats with the Russian ambassador. It’s not even clear if the (stupid) idea of using secure Russian communications gear, as Flynn and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner reportedly considered doing, would have been a crime.

This is typical of the way the law is discussed online. Any mention of it is generally accompanied by a snicker and a dismissive attitude.

That is not good. If we’re not going to enforce a law, we should repeal it. And given how Ted Kennedy and John Kerry and Michael Flynn all skated, it’s obvious we’re not going to enforce it.

So get rid of it already.

And if you think the law makes sense, but needs to be tweaked to meet constitutional standards, then do that. There are those who want the courts to limit its reach — but that’s a job for Congress, not the courts. What Congress should not do is simply leave a law on the books that nobody going to enforce. Because that makes a joke of the rule of law.

The problem is that Congress has no real incentive to repeal bad laws. Glenn Reynolds once proposed a House of Congress devoted to nothing but repealing laws:

If the problem with Congress is that nobody sees repealing laws as job No. 1, why not create a legislative body that can only repeal laws?

The growth of laws and regulation in America has reached the point that pretty much everyone is a felon, whether they know it or not. But nobody in Congress gets much in the way of votes by repealing laws. All the institutional pressures point the other way.

So in a third house of Congress — let’s call it the House of Repeal — the only thing that the elected legislators would have the power to do would be to repeal laws, meaning that for them, all the votes, campaign contributions, media exposure and opportunities for hearings would revolve around paring back the federal behemoth.

It’s a good idea. I bet you could think of some laws to submit for possible repeal.

They could start with the Logan Act. Because it’s a danger to the Rule of Law to have a law on the books that everybody laughs at.

[Cross-posted at RedState and The Jury Talks Back.]

4/12/2012

Obama Campaign Slogan Contest Winners

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 6:46 am



It’s a day late in coming, but wasn’t the wait worth it? The selection was made through a careful selection process by conducting a vote of the readership by me. All judgments are final, no takebacks or returns.

AND NOW . . . the top 10 Obama campaign slogans — written by the staunch Obama supporters here at patterico.com.

10. “Racists.” — Noodles

9. “Be happy we don’t take it all.” — Kevin M

8. “The Audacity of Indifference.” — Col. Haiku

7. “Psst! Romney se reanudarán las deportaciones.” — Sammy Finkelman

6. “All of your bucks stop here.” — Icy

5. (tie) “It’s still Bush’s fault!” — Steve
“I still blame Bush.” — daleyrocks

5. “Do the math.. On second thought, don’t actually do it.” — Sammy Finkelman

4. “Uh…” — Dustin

3. “We’re so boned, does it even matter any more?” — Gazzer

2. “Who will pay for my daughters’ $85 million spring breaks?” — nk

And the top Obama campaign slogan:

1. “Obama 2012: Are you Better Off Now Than You Were 5 Trillion Dollars Ago?” — Colonel Haiku

Colonel Haiku will receive . . . .Turtle Wax.

. . . if he buys Turtle Wax.

What? You thought you’d do better than that?

Welcome to Obama’s America!

4/8/2012

Awwww: Obama Having Trouble Coming Up with a Slogan

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 10:17 pm



It’s a Politico article, and we boycott Politico here, so the link goes to Hot Air Headlines:

Their options, though, are limited: Many of Obama’s biggest achievements — health care reform, financial reform, the stimulus package — are deeply divisive. The ones that are the most widely popular — the killing of Osama bin Laden and the ending of the Iraq War — are foreign policy notches that don’t have much to do with the economy, which polls consistently show is the top concern among voters right now.

I have carefully considered my response to this article, and have decided on the following. Ahem.

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.

Meanwhile, Mitt Romney’s slogan could not be more obvious.

“I am not Barack Obama!”

Sounds like a winner to me.


Submit your Obama campaign slogan below.

Your suggestions for Obama’s campaign slogan are welcome. Consider this a contest. Best one gets a mention in a post on Wednesday.

4/29/2011

“I would have paid more attention to it if I had had any sense of it;” Lara Logan Breaks Her Silence

Filed under: General — Aaron Worthing @ 7:21 am



[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.  Or by Twitter @AaronWorthing.]

About two months ago, on the night the Mubarak regime fell in Egypt, Lara Logan “suffered a brutal and sustained sexual assault and beating before being saved by a group of women and an estimated 20 Egyptian soldiers.”  As I pointed out at the time, that vague description was too sparse.  Well, in yesterday’s New York Times, Mrs. Logan finally spoke out about what happened and plans to talk more on 60 minutes.  I had said—and received a lot of flak for saying—that we should know more than that.  It even led some people to imagine I wanted a pornographic blow-by-blow when all I was looking for was to know generally what the hell happened.  Like was it rape or what?  I think what she says in the Times article is for the most part more than adequate and indeed harrowing.  My only criticism is I would have liked to see her address the claim that the crowd kept shouting “Jew! Jew!” as they did it, either to confirm or deny it.

But what is interesting is how much this article also demonstrates that we were not being told nearly enough about this sort of thing:

(more…)

2/21/2011

The Consequences of CBS’ Cover-Up of Lara Logan’s Assault (Update: Another Account?)

Filed under: General — Aaron Worthing @ 9:57 am



[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.]

My personal position on the Lara Logan assault has been, simply put, we have a right to know the full details of what happened to her.  A serious crime took place on a public street, in a important Middle Eastern capital, on a night of celebration.

By comparison, here is what was happening in America when we defeated tyranny at the end of WWII:

And while the photo looks, well, aggressive in retrospect, apparently she was in the spirit, too:

“Someone grabbed me and kissed me, and I let him because he fought for his country,” Ms. Shain later said. “I closed my eyes when I kissed him. I never saw him.”

(Source.)  But something was broken in Egyptian culture that night and things got uglier—a lot uglier—for Ms. Logan, although how bad things got is a mystery.  And that’s the problem throughout this entire post.

For starters, Big Journalism has revealed that al Jazeera has been lacking in its coverage of the story.  And the reason why?  Oh, because of the privacy of Ms. Logan.  So they aren’t covering it, at all.  Not even to the anemic levels that CBS has informed us.  Heather Allan, head of news gathering for Al Jazeera English, explains:
(more…)

2/20/2011

In A Completely Isolated Incident, Another Female Reporter was Sexually Assaulted in Egypt on the Same Night as Lara Logan

Filed under: General — Aaron Worthing @ 8:51 am



[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.]

Angella Johnson tells us of her harrowing, albeit more mild, experience.

Gee, it’s almost as if CBS should have reported it when it happened.  And to the Daily Mail, you should have reported this, too.  Your job is to report the news, not decide what we have a right to know.  How many more women were attacked that night, but thought they were the only ones and therefore didn’t report it?

And these last paragraphs are depressing:

Some British and U.S. male commentators have suggested that in some way she was responsible for the attack because she’s petite and attractive.

Others have suggested she has ‘form’ for dressing provocatively.

I find such comment offensive. No one ever says a male journalist asked for it if he gets beaten up.  And I could not have covered up more – apart from wearing a burka.

This is precisely how women are terrorized into wearing outfits such as the burka.

[Posted and authored by Aaron Worthing.]

2/17/2011

Updates on Lara Logan and the Revolutions in the Muslim World

Filed under: General — Aaron Worthing @ 11:44 am



[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.]

Yeah, I am kind of sweeping two tangentially related topics together, but I try to keep my posts to only five per day, and I am bucking up against  that ceiling.

Anyway, first we learn that she’s out of the hospital, although still recuperating.  Tomorrow it will have been a full week since the attack, suggesting something of the brutality of it.

At the same link we learn she got a call from Obama.  Ugh.  Nothing against Obama himself—I mean every president in my lifetime would have done the same thing—but why does the President feel like he has to make the call?  We really need to get away from the idea that the President is supposed to be a great moral leader or something like that.

In a related item, Richard Cohen pretty much agrees with me that CBS should not have suppressed this story:

As I’m sure even Logan would admit, the sexual assault of woman by a mob in the middle of a public square is a story. It is particularly a story because the crowd in Tahir Square was almost invariably characterized as friendly and out for nothing but democracy. In fact, some of the television correspondents acted as if they were reporting from Times Square on New Year’s Eve, stopping only at putting on a party hat. In those circumstances, a mass… sexual assault in what amounted to the nighttime version of broad daylight is certainly worth reporting….

Still, the assault and its undertones of pogromist anti-Semitism (Logan is not Jewish) is very troubling and, at the very least, suggests that not everyone in Tahrir Square that night had democracy on their mind. I feel badly for Logan and wish her well. But she’s a newswoman, and what happened to her in Tahir Square was news. CBS should not have withheld that story.

So, I am agreeing with Richard Cohen.  That feels really weird…

And on a similar note Michael Graham goes for the jugular: CBS complicit in news coverup.

I don’t object very strenuously in the ordinary situation where a woman is sexually assaulted and we tell the world what happened to her, but not her name.  But they reversed that exactly, here, telling us who it happened to, and not what happened.  And that is the wrong call.  The first instinct of any news organization is to share more information, not less.

Also the Daily Beast has more about the harassment women face in Egypt.  So it had less to do with the revolution than Egyptian culture, or so Ursula Lindsey claims.

Meanwhile, are you having trouble keeping up with what countries are having protests?  Well, Marian Wang has wrapped it all up and put a bow on it, here.  Or well, got a lot of it.  One interesting wrinkle is from Glenn Reynolds:

Dave Foulk, a Knoxville radio news guy, emails: “I just spoke with a person in Bahrain, and they indicated to me that Saudi tanks and APC’s were coming across the causeway into Bahrain. Says the video of it is on YouTube. This individual was spot-on with warnings of protests the other day.” I couldn’t find the video on YouTube, but stay tuned.

I believe that would be the first time a neighboring country sent troops in to quell unrest in this rash of protests.  The House of Saud must be getting worried.

I feel that we are very close to a real tipping point here.  Hopefully we will tilt toward more freedom.  We can only hope.

[Posted and authored by Aaron Worthing.]

2/16/2011

“Jew! Jew!” Update on Lara Logan (Update: Nir Rosen Resigns! And More Details on the Attack.)

Filed under: General — Aaron Worthing @ 6:21 am



[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.]

Update: See below for a big update. There are reports of a possible anti-Semitic motivation.

Update: The WSJ says that it was “not a rape.” Which is only moderately helpful because we are not sure what they mean by rape. There are several things you can do to a woman that would be legally considered rape, but only sometimes called rape in common discussion. But it’s an encouraging sign that things were not as bad as we feared.

As noted last night, CBS News correspondent Lara Logan had been sexually assaulted last week in a brutal and sustained attack while covering the Egyptian protests.  CBS still has refused to provide more details, and I call on them to tell the entire story. Privacy be damned, this happened on a public street in the middle of an event of global significance and will offer us insight into an important protest movement.  I have been cautiously optimistic about the Egyptian protests and I am hoping for the best outcome in all of this, or at least a less bad one than Mubarak’s rule, but we deserve the unvarnished truth about it.

At the same time, I agree that we should not use this as an occasion to say that women should not be journalists in dangerous parts of the world.  Obviously sexist attitudes are rampant in many parts of the world, including many fundamentalist Muslims who believe that any woman who wears anything less than a burqa is presenting the irresistible temptation of “uncovered meat” and therefore deserves it if she is raped—an attitude that might have played a role, here.  And thus a woman faces a unique danger that a man does not.  But that is not a justification for refusing to let a woman go into those parts of the world.  If a woman, fully cognizant of the danger, wants to take that risk, we shouldn’t stop her.

And as for whether this reflects poorly on the protest movement as a whole, that is unclear.  First, it is not the case that no one helped her.  As CBS said in the its official statement: “She was surrounded and suffered a brutal and sustained sexual assault and beating before being saved by a group of women and an estimated 20 Egyptian soldiers.”  (emphasis added).  And because of the vagueness of CBS’ statement, we do not know how well others would have been able to see what was happening to her.  And I refuse to believe that we can judge a large and probably heterogeneous movement by the actions of a few Neanderthals.  For instance, if you are a good Egyptian who wants freedom and democracy, how exactly are you going to prevent the Muslim Brotherhood from glomming onto your movement?  Still, if there are any leaders in this group—and there might not be—someone needs to stand up and denounce this conduct, as proof of good faith.  But for now, I think it is leaping to conclusions to say this tars the entire movement.

Now if only the American left would be so tolerant of the Tea Party…

Anyway, the good news we learn this morning, via Howard Kurtz, is that Ms. Logan is recovering quickly and is expected to leave the hospital today:

Sources familiar with the situation say Logan has recovered to the point that she was expected to be released from the hospital Wednesday and reunited with her two young children. She is described as being in remarkably good spirits despite her ordeal.

Which on one hand is good news, but it also suggests something of the severity of the attack.  The term “a brutal and sustained sexual assault” can mean several things, but a 4-5 day recovery (depending on when she got back) suggests that the term “brutal” is the operative word.  You have to wonder how she was put on that plane to America—did she walk or get wheeled in on a wheelchair or gurney?

Again, CBS owes us the entire truth on this subject.

Update: Yesterday’s jerk of the day, Nir Rosen, resigned from the NYU’s Center on Law and Security for having said numerous tasteless things about the Logan assault.  Good for them to have gotten rid of this garbage.  The Campaign Spot has full details.

H/t: Scott Jacobs.

Further update: Thanks to Tina Trent in the comments who (with a little help from Google) adds some context to this:

Egyptian women say they are frequently yelled at and touched by groups of men in the streets, but that during the anti-government protests, such behavior was less prevalent. “Men and women … everyone was coming together, and I personally didn’t experience any sexual harassment, which was extremely unusual,” said Yasmine Khalifa, 25, a Cairo teacher.

The mood shifted Friday night, Khalifa said, when thousands of men who had not been part of the protests entered Tahrir Square. Several women reported being harassed, she said.

(Source.)  So on one hand, it wasn’t an isolated incident.  But at least according to Ms. Khalifa, it was only a newly introduced element.  Which sounds plausible enough.  Still, CBS News should release all the facts and then let us sort it out on how much it reflects on the movement as a whole.

And I will add that the first line about being yelled at and touched by men in streets lines up with some anecdotal stories friends have told me, about visiting nearby countries.

Big Update: The New York Post has even more details:

A network source told The Post that her attackers were screaming, “Jew! Jew!” during the assault. And the day before, Logan had told Esquire.com that Egyptian soldiers hassling her and her crew had accused them of “being Israeli spies.” Logan is not Jewish.

In Friday’s attack, she was separated from her colleagues and attacked for between 20 to 30 minutes, The Wall Street Journal said.

Her injuries were described to The Post as “serious.”

CBS went public with the incident only after it became clear that other media outlets were on to it, sources said.

Again, CBS News needs to release the whole story. Tell us everything and let us evaluate what it means. And it is disturbing to me that they thought it was appropriate to hold the story back as long as they did.

Update: Previously, we saw where Egyptian authorities suggested that Mossad caused various shark attacks in Egypt. Its funny, but I had a serious point at the time and I repeat it here:

All of which is silly, but leads me to a serious point. Some liberals are fond of claiming that terrorism is born out of oppression, that they are just striking back against those who have wronged them. But one major flaw in that theory is that a lot of people in that part of the world are so paranoid in their anti-Semitism, that they literally will believe their enemies can and will do anything. Everything is a Jewish conspiracy. The rats in their sewers. A few pigeons crapping on their car. So naturally other things, like the complete state of crap these economies find themselves in is naturally the Jooos’ fault, right? Them and the Americans, naturally. My point is that stories like this demonstrate that their ability to even perceive actual injustice and assign correct blame is seriously compromised by their paranoid hatred of Jews, yet another reason why their violence is a terrible gauge of the justice of their cause.

[Posted and authored by Aaron Worthing.]

4/19/2008

Alton Logan Freed (UPDATE: But Facing Possible Retrial)

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 1:03 pm



Jan Crawford Greenburg reports:

Alton Logan became a free man Friday after an attorney, who knew all along that someone else gunned down a guard on the south side of Chicago, finally broke his silence after 26 years.

. . . .

A month after Logan was arrested, Dale Coventry, a Chicago public defender, stumbled on the real killer, Andrew Wilson, who was one of his clients. . . . Under the rules of attorney-client privilege, Coventry had to keep Wilson’s confession secret.

I wrote about Logan on March 9, in this post.

By the way, I recently discussed the case with a defense attorney I know (but whom I won’t name). He said, without a moment’s hesitation: “Oh, I would have found a way to get the word out.” He said there had to be some back-channel way of letting the cops know who really did it.

It would be interesting to know if Alton Logan’s fate would have been different if Andrew Wilson had been represented by a defense attorney willing to let the cops know what he’d been told. The thing is, armed with nothing more than a rumor of an inadmissible and privileged confession, Logan’s attorney might not have been able to do anything for him after the conviction.

I’m not entirely sure it would have changed a thing.

I’m glad to see Mr. Logan has gotten some of his life back. It’s a tragedy that he was deprived of any of it.

UPDATE: Commenter nk notes that Logan still faces a potential retrial. Hmm. It’s hard to imagine that a retrial would result in a conviction, under the circumstances . . .

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