Clinton Sex Scandals and the Election

Hillary, Crime, Race and Policing

From Heather MacDonald at City Journal, written the day after the presidential debate: a fine grained debunking of the standard liberal cant on crime, race and policing. Some selected points (but read the whole thing):

Hillary Clinton repeated her incessant lie last night that the criminal justice system is infected with “systemic racism.” Race “determines” how people are “treated in the criminal justice system,” she said. Blacks are “more likely [than whites] to be arrested, charged, convicted and incarcerated” for “doing the same thing.” Such a dangerous falsehood, should Clinton act on it as president, would result not just in misguided policies but in the continued delegitimation of the criminal justice system. That delegitimation, with its attendant hostility and aggression toward police officers, has already produced the largest one-year surge in homicides in urban areas in nearly a half-century.

Criminologists have tried for decades to prove that the overrepresentation of blacks in prison is due to criminal-justice racism. They have always come up short. They have been forced to the same conclusion as Michael Tonry in his book, Malign Neglect: “Racial differences in patterns of offending, not racial bias by police and other officials, are the principal reason that such greater proportions of blacks than whites are arrested, prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned,” Tonry wrote. In 1997, criminologists Robert Sampson and Janet Lauritsen reviewed the massive literature on charging and sentencing. They found overwhelming evidence establishing that “large racial differences in criminal offending,” not racism, explained why more blacks were in prison proportionately than whites and for longer terms.

To say, as Clinton did last night, that blacks are more likely to be incarcerated for doing the same thing as whites ignores the relevance of a defendant’s criminal history in determining his sentence, among other crucial sentencing factors. Just last week, an analysis of Delaware’s prison population presented to the Delaware Access to Justice Commission’s Committee on Fairness in the Criminal Justice System revealed that when juvenile and adult criminal records are taken into account, along with arrest charges and age, racial disparities in sentencing decisions are negligible to nonexistent.

Clinton claimed that “stop-and-frisk was found to be unconstitutional.” No federal judge would have the power to declare pedestrian stops unconstitutional, because the Supreme Court put its constitutional imprimatur on the practice in 1965. Stop-and-frisk remains a lawful and essential police tactic. Criminologist David Weisburd examined the practice in New York City and found that it reduced crime in shooting hot spots. Federal district court judge Shira Scheindlin did rule that the New York Police Department’s practice of stops was racially biased, but her ruling applied only to the New York Police Department. That ruling was wholly unjustified and would likely have been reversed on appeal, had newly elected New York City mayor Bill de Blasio not dropped the appeal. Judge Scheindlin used a population benchmark for measuring the lawfulness of police actions: if police stops didn’t match population ratios, they were unconstitutional, in Scheindlin’s view. Such a methodology ignores the massive disparities in criminal offending in New York City. Blacks commit over three-quarters of all shootings, though they are 23 percent of the city’s population. Add Hispanic shootings to black shootings and you account for 98 percent of all shootings in New York City. Whites are 34 percent of the city’s population; they commit less than 2 percent of all shootings. Such disparities in gun violence mean that virtually every time the police are called out on a gun run—meaning that someone has been shot—they are called to minority neighborhoods on behalf of minority victims, and, if any witness or victim is cooperating with the police, being given a description of a minority suspect. The reality of crime, not phantom police racism, determines the incidence of police activity, including pedestrian stops.

Homicides and shootings in New York City rose 20 percent in the first half of 2015, thanks to the Scheindlin-induced drop in pedestrian stops. Then-police commissioner William Bratton responded with a massive deployment of overtime manpower to high-crime corners; officers used “command presence”—i.e., their mere presence on the street—to deter criminal behavior. This roll-out of manpower resources quelled the shooting spike and New York City ended 2015 with a 6 percent homicide increase. Other departments do not have the personnel available to them to make up for a drop in proactive policing.

Donald Trump is right to warn about depolicing and what I have called the Ferguson Effect. “Right now, our police, in many cases, are afraid to do anything,” he said. The result is a massive loss of black lives in places like Chicago and Baltimore. Law and order are breaking down in inner cities; officers are surrounded by hostile, jeering crowds when they get out of their squad cars to conduct an investigation. Resistance to arrest is up, increasing the chances of an officer’s own use of force. And race riots are returning to American cities. The current mendacious narrative about policing and race has to change or we can expect to see further violent-crime increases and further racial violence. It is clear, however, that Hillary Clinton will continue to enflame racial tensions through a set of lies about the criminal-justice system.

Jumping to Conclusions

Warrior Blogger Awarded for Being “Unintimidated”

On Wisconsin Watchdog, an article about an award we will be getting Friday night. Some selected quotes:

Embattled Marquette University Professor John McAdams will be receiving the inaugural “Unintimidated Award” at the annual RightWisconsin dinner Friday for standing up to the administration at Marquette University and refusing to apologize for criticizing another instructor’s shutting down of free speech.

“Well, it’s nice,” McAdams said in an interview. “I’d rather be back teaching at Marquette than getting an award, but it’s nice.”

. . .

“I’m actually there with important people,” McAdams said, “while I’m getting an award for offending Marquette administrators.”

. . .

“The secular people always said, Catholic institutions are very parochial. I think there is a kind of parochialism. But it’s parochialism in the service of a secular politically correct agenda, not a Catholic agenda,” McAdams said.

And he took issue with the university president’s conception of the university’s purpose.

“Michael Lovell said I have done something contrary to Marquette’s guiding principles. I think he really believes that,” McAdams said. “I think he believes the guiding value is everything is nice and cozy, and no one criticizes anyone. That is a tremendously parochial notion of what a university should be.”

We are looking forward to it. We even have the tux ordered.

Racist Cops Wildly Gunning Down Innocent Blacks?

Being a Nobody

Yet Another Bogus Claim of a Campus Racial Attack

We are slow getting this posted, but it’s significant, and we want to record it. From NBC News:

Three university students who claimed they were victims of a racially-motivated attack on a bus in Albany, New York, will now face charges for assault and misleading police about the alleged incident.

The three black, female students at the State University of New York in Albany told authorities they were called racial slurs and “harassed and assaulted” by a group of 10 to 12 white men and women on a city bus just after 1:00 a.m. on Jan. 30, according to a statement from SUNY Albany President Robert J. Jones released at the time.

All three said they were injured during the alleged attack and one of the students was transported to a local hospital with unidentified injuries, according to NBC affiliate WNYT.

But the University Police Department announced plans to charge the women —Ariel Agudio, 20, Alexis Briggs, 20, and Asha Burwell, 20 — on Thursday with assaulting a passenger on the bus and falsely reporting an incident.

Police said in a statement that evidence gathered during their three-week investigation showed the students’ initial claims “that they were victimized, were false” and that the women themselves allegedly assaulted a 19-year-old female passenger.

The charges against the women were supported by interviews with the 35 passengers on board the bus at the time of the incident, security camera footage from the bus and four videos taken by passengers on their mobile phones, according to the police statement.

So we have yet another bogus racial incident. Not only were the black women not victimized, they were the aggressors.

But what was the initial campus reaction?

The three female students reported being “harassed and assaulted” by a group of 10 to 12 white men and women, University President Robert J. Jones said in a statement Saturday, adding that “racial slurs were used by the perpetrators.”

“I am deeply concerned, saddened and angry about this incident,” Jones said. “There is no place in the UAlbany community for violence, no place for racial intolerance and no place for gender violence.”

[. . .]

On Monday afternoon, many of the hundreds who attended a rally in support of the victims chanted “black girls matter,” WNYT reported.

“It’s heartbreaking to hear something like that is happening in such a fine institution, in such a diverse community in 2016,” Darius Fair, a junior at the school, told the station earlier Monday.

More on the reaction here.

Interpretation

So what we have is another case of a knee jerk, politically correct response to a supposed racial incident. Since blacks are a supposed “marginalized group,” any claims of an offense against blacks are to be taken at face value. Indeed, they are an excuse for a lot of self-righteous hand wringing.

The politically correct atmosphere on college campuses thus victimizes black students. They learn that claims of grievance are rewarded. They learn that they can escape the consequences of their own bad behavior by claiming victimization.

But it only works up to a point. When the claims come under scrutiny of professional investigators outside the university, they get trashed.

This is much like claims of sexual assault. Campus kangaroo courts convict males with evidence that would not pass muster in a real criminal proceeding. Often, these males sue, and universities are forced to settle on terms favorable to the accused. The system outside the hot house atmosphere of the campus produces a very different outcome.

Which is to say, life on politically correct campuses is a poor preparation for the real world.

Student Affairs Jumps the Gun, Announces Suspension of Pi Beta Phi Based on Questionable Report

It sounds like yet another abuse from a Greek organization on a college campus. From the Marquette Wire:

The Marquette chapter of Pi Beta Phi could be facing a suspension.

The Division of Student Affairs called a hearing to review the apparent infractions made by the sorority and determine if punishment is necessary.

University spokesman Brian Dorrington released a statement regarding the current proceedings.

“The sorority went through a formal hearing, but no final decision has been made,” Dorrington said in an email. “Leaders within our Division of Student Affairs team meet regularly with our Greek communities and we emphasize that we expect all of our students to uphold Marquette’s Catholic and Jesuit values.”

The university has yet to reveal what these infractions are.

Pi Beta Phi declined to comment.

In reality, what happened was this: a prospective pledge of the sorority complained to Student Affairs that a member of the sorority had forced her to drink an entire bottle of tequila. Without seeking corroboration, Student Affairs proceeded to suspend Pi Beta Phi.

The sorority appealed. It turns out that the claim of forced drinking was questionable. The prospective pledge who made the claim has a history of alcohol abuse, including multiple trips to the emergency room for excessive drinking. Witnesses contradict her account of being forced to drink a bottle of tequila. The suspension was revoked, but the sorority did have to pay a fine of $500 for allowing underage drinking.

Thus the chapter was not blameless, but they were not guilty of the very serious claimed infraction that led to their suspension.

Corey Lansing, the Student Affairs staffer who handled the case, responded to our query saying he was referring it to Marquette’s Office of Marketing and Communication. Neither the national office of Phi Beta Phi, nor the president of the local chapter (Sara Matloub), responded to a request for comment.

This case looks like a blunder on the part of Student Affairs, which acted precipitously and besmirched the reputation of a campus organization unjustly.

Alcohol abuse on colleges is a serious problem, but this may be a case (like sexual assault) were a moral panic over the issue has trumped notions of fairness and due process. Rather than an abuse from a Greek organization, it appears to be an abuse of a Greek organization.

[Note: updated 7:17 p.m. to reflect the fact that the suspension has been lifted, and that the fine was for underage drinking.] 

Electoral College Tie?

Not likely, especially if the current Trump surge in the polls recedes. And the least plausible thing we see here is New Hampshire colored red. But not impossible. If it happens, you saw it here first (unless you follow Dan O’Donnell’s Twitter feed).

Think the 2016 election couldn’t get any crazier? There’s a very realistic chance of an Electoral College tie: pic.twitter.com/nX4sVLr7ny

— Dan O’Donnell (@DanODradio) September 15, 2016

Hillary Clinton: Elitist Snob Demeans Lots of People

It was the id of elitist liberals showing itself, the now famous comment by Hillary Clinton about how Donald Trump’s backers belong to a “basket of deplorables.”

But Clinton has a long history of demeaning people whom she stereotypes as not sharing her elitist liberal views. From Front Page Magazine:

Hillary Clinton’s infamous “basket of deplorables” remark revealed her utter contempt for ordinary Americans, which stretches back decades. Before an adoring audience of wealthy elites, Hillary dismissed millions of American citizens, who happen to support her opponent Donald Trump, as being “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic.” She said they are “irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.”

Hillary Clinton had no compunctions about branding millions of her fellow citizens “irredeemable” and “not America,” while saying on another occasion that we must show “respect” to our enemies and “empathize with their perspective and point of view.” Moreover, she wants to vastly enlarge the basket for “refugees” admitted from the Middle East, without sufficiently robust vetting in place first to make sure that jihadist terrorists don’t find their way into that basket.

After coming under withering attack for insulting so many hardworking, patriotic Americans, Hillary half-apologized: “I regret saying ‘half’ – that was wrong.” What is really wrong is Hillary’s 100 percent condescending attitude towards ordinary Americans who do not inhabit her insular bubble of self-righteous snobs. And her condescension is a deeply ingrained character trait she has evidenced for years in her attitude towards stay-at-home moms, working people, parents who do not want government interference in how they raise their children and people with religious beliefs that are not in accord with her secular progressive ideology.

Stay-at-home moms, for example, are not worthy of Hillary’s respect. During her husband’s 1992 presidential campaign, she strutted her status as a career woman while putting down those women who regard being a mother a full-time job.

“I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas,” Hillary declared, “but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession which I entered before my husband was in public life.”

The truth is that Hillary rode her husband Bill’s coattails in Arkansas and Washington to promote her own career as a partner in the Rose law firm and then onto the national stage.

“You know, I’m not sitting here like some little woman standing by my man, like Tammy Wynette,” Hillary remarked during a joint 60 Minutes interview with her husband.

The only problem is that Hillary not only stood by her man while he was carrying on multiple affairs. She ran interference for Bill, demeaning and allegedly intimidating those women who had dared to come forward to tell the truth. Demeaning ordinary women who were exploited by her husband gave Hillary no pause as long as it helped advance the Clintons’ political fortunes.

Working people in industries that do not fit Hillary’s progressive ideology, such as combating climate change at all cost, are also disposable. In March 2016, Hillary added to her disposable basket the coal miners, who have risked their lives to help provide the fuel that powers this country. “We are going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business,” she vowed.

Parents who want to be left alone to raise their children according to their deeply held moral values are also not worthy of Hillary’s respect.

Commenting in “Harper’s Magazine” in October 1992, Christopher Lasch, professor of history at the University of Rochester, pointed out that Hillary Clinton’s writings demonstrate how “from her perspective the ‘traditional’ family is, for the most part, an institution in need of therapy, an institution that stands in the way of children’s rights—and an obstacle to enlightened progress.”

Consistent with her “It Takes a Village” collectivist philosophy, Hillary enthusiastically supported the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which her husband signed as president. This treaty potentially pits children against their parents. Irrespective of the child’s age, parents would not have the final say on their child’s access to materials the parents find to be morally offensive.

Article 12(1) provides that “States Parties shall assure to the child who is capable of forming his or her own views the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting the child, the views of the child being given due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the child.”

Article 13 of the Convention guarantees each child the legal right “to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of the child's choice.” (Emphasis added)

Article 37 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child provides for free legal services and access to the courts for any child who thinks that his or her “liberty” has been violated by a parent.

The United Nations, through an unaccountable committee of experts, would have the power to monitor each State Party’s compliance with the Convention’s provisions and to establish norms in implementing the Convention that may become part of customary international law.

Thus, if a child does not want to accompany his or her family to the family’s house of worship, the parents risk being dragged into court by the resisting child if the parents do not submit to the child’s wishes. The parents are responsible for keeping a roof over the child’s head and making sure the child is well taken care of. But when it comes to matters of faith while the child is in the parents’ care, the rules of the global UN village put the ultimate decision-making power into the hands of the child and the state.

Indeed, Hillary wants to change ordinary Americans’ religious beliefs that get in the way of her progressive globalist agenda. At the Women in the World Summit last year, Hillary said that in order to fully secure the reproductive rights of women, “deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed.” Hillary demeaned the sincerely held religious belief in the sanctity of life held by millions of Americans, reminiscent of President Obama’s contemptuous ‘clinging to religion’ quote back in 2008. People with such beliefs belong in Hillary’s basket of “deplorable sexists,” as far as she is concerned.

Hillary Clinton’s contempt for the beliefs, livelihoods and concerns of ordinary Americans is deplorable, not the millions who were targets of her invective.

What Real Allies of Black People Would Look Like

Race Riots, Journalists and Academics

From a syndicated column by Walter Williams:

Some are puzzled by the dishonesty, lack of character, and sheer stupidity of many people in the media. But seeing as most of them are college graduates, they don’t bear the full blame. They are taught by dishonest and irresponsible academics. Let’s look at it.

“A Clash of Police Policies,” a column written by Thomas Sowell, presents some readily available statistics:

Homicide rates among black males went down by 18 percent in the 1940s and by 22 percent in the 1950s. It was in the 1960s, when the ideas of Chief Justice [Earl] Warren and others triumphed, that this long decline in homicide rates among black males reversed and skyrocketed by 89 percent, wiping out all the progress of the previous 20 years.

Academics and the media blame poverty and discrimination for today’s crime. No one bothers to ask why crime was falling in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, when blacks faced far greater poverty and discrimination.

The 1960s riots were blamed on poverty and discrimination. Poverty and discrimination were worse in the South than in the rest of the country, but riots were not nearly so common there. Detroit’s deadliest riot occurred at a time when the median income of black families in Detroit was 95 percent of their white counterparts, plus the black unemployment rate was 3.4 percent and black homeownership was higher than in other major cities.

Academics teach that the breakdown of the black family is the legacy of slavery and discrimination. They ignore the following facts.

In 1950, 72 percent of black men and 81 percent of black women had been married. Also, only 17 percent of black children lived in single-parent households; today it’s close to 70 percent. Every census from 1890 to 1950 showed that black labor force participation rates exceeded those of whites. During the late 1940s, the unemployment rate for black 16- and 17-year-olds was less than that for white teens.

According to the 1938 Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, that year 11 percent of black children and 3 percent of white children were born to unwed mothers. Before 1960, the number of teenage pregnancies had been decreasing; both poverty and dependency were declining; and black income was rising in both absolute and relative terms to white income. As late as 1965, 75 percent of black children were born to married women. Today, over 73 percent of black babies are born to unwed mothers. Again, so much for the “legacy of slavery” argument.

Academics teach that school integration is a necessary condition for black academic excellence. Blacks, their logic implies, cannot achieve academic excellence unless they go out and capture a white kid to sit next to their kids. Public charter schools such as those in the Knowledge Is Power Program, or KIPP, and Success Academy Charter Schools are having some successes without race mixing.

Sowell points out that only 39 percent of students in New York state schools who were tested recently scored at the “proficient” level in math, but 100 percent of the students at the Crown Heights Success Academy scored at that level in math. Blacks and Hispanics are 90 percent of the students in the Crown Heights Success Academy.

More than 43,000 families are on waiting lists to get their children into charter schools. Teachers unions are opposed to any alternative to public education and contribute to politicians who place obstacles and restrictions on the expansion of charter schools. The NAACP, at its 2016 national convention in Cincinnati, voted to support “a moratorium on the proliferation of privately managed charter schools.”

It’s easy to understand why the NAACP is against any alternative to public schools. Many of its members work in public education. However, many of those people do want alternatives for themselves.

In Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, 25 percent of public school teachers send their children to private schools. In Philadelphia, 44 percent of teachers send their children to private schools. The percentages are similar in several other cities: Cincinnati, 41 percent; Chicago, 39 percent; and Rochester, New York, 38 percent. This demonstrates the dishonesty, hypocrisy, and arrogance of the elite. They effectively say, “One thing for thee and another for me.”

Doing Good?

GLENN MCCOY © Belleville News-Democrat. Dist. By UNIVERSAL UCLICK. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

Occidental College: Leftists Vandalize 9/11 Memorial

On many college campuses, any demonstration that the campus left doesn’t like is likely to be torn up, torn down, or vandalized. So it is not surprising to find this:


More on the vandalism can be found here.

The vandals left the following poster:



Yes, the leftist social justice warriors hate America. They instinctively blame America for any evil in the world, and instinctively make excuses for America’s enemies.

Postscript

Happily, a similar memorial at Marquette was left alone.