Brickbat: Waving Goodbye

West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice says an entire class of correctional officer cadets, some 30 people, will be fired after they posed for a class photo giving a Nazi salute. A report found the class began using the salute as a sign of respect for someone identified as “Inspector Byrd.” Byrd told investigators she was unaware of the “historical or racial implications of the gesture” and reported it was “simply a greeting,” But others contradicted that, including a secretary who says Byrd told her the students use the salute “because I’m a hard-ass like Hitler” and instructed her to caption the picture “Hail Byrd.” Two corrections academy staff members have also been fired and the report calls for the termination or suspension of additional staff members who were aware of the photo and did not report it.

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Brickbat: Waving Goodbye

West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice says an entire class of correctional officer cadets, some 30 people, will be fired after they posed for a class photo giving a Nazi salute. A report found the class began using the salute as a sign of respect for someone identified as “Inspector Byrd.” Byrd told investigators she was unaware of the “historical or racial implications of the gesture” and reported it was “simply a greeting,” But others contradicted that, including a secretary who says Byrd told her the students use the salute “because I’m a hard-ass like Hitler” and instructed her to caption the picture “Hail Byrd.” Two corrections academy staff members have also been fired and the report calls for the termination or suspension of additional staff members who were aware of the photo and did not report it.

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Can We Stop with All the Congressional Grandstanding?

Congressional hearings were created to educate lawmakers so they have knowledge before they pass bills or impeach a president.

Not today. Today, hardly any education happens.

During the President Trump impeachment “testimony,” legislators tried to score points. At least five times, Rep. Adam Schiff (D–Calif.) shut down criticism by shouting, “Gentleman is not recognized!”

I get that politicians are eager for “face time” in front of a larger audience, but I assumed they would at least try to learn things. Nope.

Maybe they don’t want to ask real questions because they fear looking as dumb as then-Sen. Orrin Hatch (R–Utah) did at a hearing on Facebook. He asked Mark Zuckerberg, “How do you sustain a business model in which users don’t pay for your service?”

“We run ads,” smirked Zuckerberg. “I see,” said Hatch.

What’s obvious to most people somehow eludes the oblivious “experts” in Congress.
At another Facebook hearing, Congress grilled Zuckerberg about his plan to launch an electronic currency called Libra. Zuckerberg said, “I actually don’t know if Libra is going to work, but I believe it’s important to try new things.”

He was right. But instead of asking about technological or economic implications of the idea, Rep. Al Green (D–Texas) asked Zuckerberg, of the companies partnering with him, “how many are headed by women?”

“Congressman, I do not know the answer,” replied Zuckerberg.

“How many of them are minorities?” asked Green. “Are there any members of the LGBTQ+ community?”

Green doesn’t want to learn anything. He wants to sneer and score points.

Politicians’ sloppy ignorance is extraordinary. Rep. Steve King (R–Iowa) grilled Google CEO Sundar Pichai about iPhones, citing a story about his granddaughter using one, leading Pichai to explain, “Congressman, iPhone is made by a different company.”

Today’s posturing is not what the founders had in mind when they invented hearings in 1789. George Mason said members of Congress “possess inquisitorial powers” to “inspect the Conduct of public offices.”

Yes! Investigate government.

But today, they are more likely to threaten CEOs and bully opponents.

“Are you stupid?” then-Rep. Darrell Issa (R–Calif.) said to one witness. They want to showboat, not learn. Often, they ask questions even when they know the answers.

“Ms. DeVos, have you ever taken out a student loan?” asked Sen. Elizabeth Warren, (D–Mass.) of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. “Have any of your children had to borrow money?”

Warren knows that DeVos is a billionaire, but she wanted to score points with her fans.

One of the louder showboaters today is self-proclaimed socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.). She asked Wells Fargo boss Tim Sloan, “Why was the bank involved in the caging of children?”

“We weren’t,” replied Sloan.

Some of today’s hearings are useful in that we get to see how absurd and ignorant our representatives can be.

During a hearing on military personnel being stationed on the island of Guam, Rep. Hank Johnson (D–Georgia) said, “My fear is that the whole island will become so overly populated that it would tip over and capsize.” Really. He said that.

Then there was the time Rep. Maxine Waters, (D–Calif.) chair of the House Financial Services Committee, summoned bank CEOs to Washington and demanded, “What are you guys doing to help us with this student loan debt?!”

“We stopped making student loans in 2007,” Bank of America’s Brian Moynihan told her.

“We actually ended student lending in 2009,” added Citigroup’s Michael Corbat.

“When the government took over student lending in 2010 … we stopped doing all student lending,” explained Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase.

The Chair of the Financial Services Committee didn’t even know that her own party kicked bankers out of the student loan business, insisting that government take over?!

Apparently not. She is so eager to blame business for government’s mistakes that she didn’t research her own topic.

The more I watch politicians, the more I hate them. Let’s give them less power.

Watch more below:

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Are We Experiencing a Nationwide ‘Anti-Semitism Crisis’?

“We’re facing an anti-Semitism crisis, and not just in this city,” New York Mayor Bill de Blasio declared on Sunday. “It’s happening across our country and planet.”

De Blasio’s warning, which came on the same day that thousands of people responded to recent anti-Jewish crimes in the New York area by joining a solidarity march in Manhattan, was more sweeping than the evidence justifies. While New York City has seen a substantial increase in reports of anti-Semitic crimes during the last two years, the story in the rest of the country is more complicated and less alarming.

According to the New York Police Department, reports of hate crimes against Jews in that city rose 26 percent last year, from 186 in 2018 to 234 in 2019, after rising nearly as much (23 percent) in the previous year. According to Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, the 2019 total was the highest seen in New York City since the FBI began reporting hate crime data in 1992.

Nationwide, however, the FBI’s tally indicates that the number of anti-Jewish criminal incidents (each of which may include more than one offense) fell from 938 in 2017 to 835 in 2018—an 11 percent drop. The total in 2018, the most recent year for which national data are available, was lower than the totals in 21 out of the previous 26 years.

The number of anti-Jewish incidents counted by the FBI has fallen by 18 percent since 1992. That drop is especially striking because both the number of law enforcement agencies participating in the FBI’s program and the population served by them more than doubled between 1992 and 2018.

Furthermore, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, based on data from its National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), says the share of hate crimes reported to police—the ones that potentially would be counted by the FBI—was 55 percent in 2017, up from 40 percent in 2009. The reporting rates in the 1990s, when the FBI’s annual count of anti-Jewish incidents exceeded 1,000 in every year but one, may have been even lower.

The NCVS, which covers unreported offenses as well as offenses that police may not have classified as bias-motivated even though the victims perceived them that way, generates much higher estimates of hate crimes than the FBI’s tallies. That survey nevertheless shows a 30 percent decline in all hate crimes from 2004 to 2017.

In addition to reporting rates, the information collected by the FBI is affected by local policies and practices. Los Angeles, for instance, saw a startling 100 percent increase in anti-Jewish crimes between 2018 and 2019, 83 percent of which was caused by a change in the way police classified hate symbols in public places.

It is also important to keep in mind the typical nature of the hate crimes reported to the FBI. While deadly or life-threatening crimes such as last month’s machete attack on Hasidim in Monsey, New York, understandably get the most attention, the vast majority of hate crime incidents in 2018 involved vandalism (26 percent), intimidation (29 percent), or simple assault (23 percent), while 12 percent involved aggravated assault or homicide.

Similarly, the Anti-Defamation League’s annual audit of “anti-Semitic incidents,” which is based mainly on direct reports to the organization and includes noncriminal conduct, consists almost entirely of “harassment,” which accounted for 57 percent of the incidents in 2018, and vandalism, which accounted for 41 percent. The ADL says the 2018 total (1,879) was the third-highest since 1979, although it was down 5 percent from 2017.

Like the FBI’s numbers, the ADL tally is influenced by the likelihood that people will report anti-Jewish incidents, which may in turn be influenced by publicity regarding anti-Semitism, including the audit itself. In trying to figure out whether we are actually experiencing a nationwide “anti-Semitism crisis,” we should not conflate that concern with the underlying reality.

© Copyright 2020 by Creators Syndicate Inc.

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Can We Stop with All the Congressional Grandstanding?

Congressional hearings were created to educate lawmakers so they have knowledge before they pass bills or impeach a president.

Not today. Today, hardly any education happens.

During the President Trump impeachment “testimony,” legislators tried to score points. At least five times, Rep. Adam Schiff (D–Calif.) shut down criticism by shouting, “Gentleman is not recognized!”

I get that politicians are eager for “face time” in front of a larger audience, but I assumed they would at least try to learn things. Nope.

Maybe they don’t want to ask real questions because they fear looking as dumb as then-Sen. Orrin Hatch (R–Utah) did at a hearing on Facebook. He asked Mark Zuckerberg, “How do you sustain a business model in which users don’t pay for your service?”

“We run ads,” smirked Zuckerberg. “I see,” said Hatch.

What’s obvious to most people somehow eludes the oblivious “experts” in Congress.
At another Facebook hearing, Congress grilled Zuckerberg about his plan to launch an electronic currency called Libra. Zuckerberg said, “I actually don’t know if Libra is going to work, but I believe it’s important to try new things.”

He was right. But instead of asking about technological or economic implications of the idea, Rep. Al Green (D–Texas) asked Zuckerberg, of the companies partnering with him, “how many are headed by women?”

“Congressman, I do not know the answer,” replied Zuckerberg.

“How many of them are minorities?” asked Green. “Are there any members of the LGBTQ+ community?”

Green doesn’t want to learn anything. He wants to sneer and score points.

Politicians’ sloppy ignorance is extraordinary. Rep. Steve King (R–Iowa) grilled Google CEO Sundar Pichai about iPhones, citing a story about his granddaughter using one, leading Pichai to explain, “Congressman, iPhone is made by a different company.”

Today’s posturing is not what the founders had in mind when they invented hearings in 1789. George Mason said members of Congress “possess inquisitorial powers” to “inspect the Conduct of public offices.”

Yes! Investigate government.

But today, they are more likely to threaten CEOs and bully opponents.

“Are you stupid?” then-Rep. Darrell Issa (R–Calif.) said to one witness. They want to showboat, not learn. Often, they ask questions even when they know the answers.

“Ms. DeVos, have you ever taken out a student loan?” asked Sen. Elizabeth Warren, (D–Mass.) of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. “Have any of your children had to borrow money?”

Warren knows that DeVos is a billionaire, but she wanted to score points with her fans.

One of the louder showboaters today is self-proclaimed socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.). She asked Wells Fargo boss Tim Sloan, “Why was the bank involved in the caging of children?”

“We weren’t,” replied Sloan.

Some of today’s hearings are useful in that we get to see how absurd and ignorant our representatives can be.

During a hearing on military personnel being stationed on the island of Guam, Rep. Hank Johnson (D–Georgia) said, “My fear is that the whole island will become so overly populated that it would tip over and capsize.” Really. He said that.

Then there was the time Rep. Maxine Waters, (D–Calif.) chair of the House Financial Services Committee, summoned bank CEOs to Washington and demanded, “What are you guys doing to help us with this student loan debt?!”

“We stopped making student loans in 2007,” Bank of America’s Brian Moynihan told her.

“We actually ended student lending in 2009,” added Citigroup’s Michael Corbat.

“When the government took over student lending in 2010 … we stopped doing all student lending,” explained Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase.

The Chair of the Financial Services Committee didn’t even know that her own party kicked bankers out of the student loan business, insisting that government take over?!

Apparently not. She is so eager to blame business for government’s mistakes that she didn’t research her own topic.

The more I watch politicians, the more I hate them. Let’s give them less power.

Watch more below:

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/39ROKif
via IFTTT

Are We Experiencing a Nationwide ‘Anti-Semitism Crisis’?

“We’re facing an anti-Semitism crisis, and not just in this city,” New York Mayor Bill de Blasio declared on Sunday. “It’s happening across our country and planet.”

De Blasio’s warning, which came on the same day that thousands of people responded to recent anti-Jewish crimes in the New York area by joining a solidarity march in Manhattan, was more sweeping than the evidence justifies. While New York City has seen a substantial increase in reports of anti-Semitic crimes during the last two years, the story in the rest of the country is more complicated and less alarming.

According to the New York Police Department, reports of hate crimes against Jews in that city rose 26 percent last year, from 186 in 2018 to 234 in 2019, after rising nearly as much (23 percent) in the previous year. According to Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, the 2019 total was the highest seen in New York City since the FBI began reporting hate crime data in 1992.

Nationwide, however, the FBI’s tally indicates that the number of anti-Jewish criminal incidents (each of which may include more than one offense) fell from 938 in 2017 to 835 in 2018—an 11 percent drop. The total in 2018, the most recent year for which national data are available, was lower than the totals in 21 out of the previous 26 years.

The number of anti-Jewish incidents counted by the FBI has fallen by 18 percent since 1992. That drop is especially striking because both the number of law enforcement agencies participating in the FBI’s program and the population served by them more than doubled between 1992 and 2018.

Furthermore, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, based on data from its National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), says the share of hate crimes reported to police—the ones that potentially would be counted by the FBI—was 55 percent in 2017, up from 40 percent in 2009. The reporting rates in the 1990s, when the FBI’s annual count of anti-Jewish incidents exceeded 1,000 in every year but one, may have been even lower.

The NCVS, which covers unreported offenses as well as offenses that police may not have classified as bias-motivated even though the victims perceived them that way, generates much higher estimates of hate crimes than the FBI’s tallies. That survey nevertheless shows a 30 percent decline in all hate crimes from 2004 to 2017.

In addition to reporting rates, the information collected by the FBI is affected by local policies and practices. Los Angeles, for instance, saw a startling 100 percent increase in anti-Jewish crimes between 2018 and 2019, 83 percent of which was caused by a change in the way police classified hate symbols in public places.

It is also important to keep in mind the typical nature of the hate crimes reported to the FBI. While deadly or life-threatening crimes such as last month’s machete attack on Hasidim in Monsey, New York, understandably get the most attention, the vast majority of hate crime incidents in 2018 involved vandalism (26 percent), intimidation (29 percent), or simple assault (23 percent), while 12 percent involved aggravated assault or homicide.

Similarly, the Anti-Defamation League’s annual audit of “anti-Semitic incidents,” which is based mainly on direct reports to the organization and includes noncriminal conduct, consists almost entirely of “harassment,” which accounted for 57 percent of the incidents in 2018, and vandalism, which accounted for 41 percent. The ADL says the 2018 total (1,879) was the third-highest since 1979, although it was down 5 percent from 2017.

Like the FBI’s numbers, the ADL tally is influenced by the likelihood that people will report anti-Jewish incidents, which may in turn be influenced by publicity regarding anti-Semitism, including the audit itself. In trying to figure out whether we are actually experiencing a nationwide “anti-Semitism crisis,” we should not conflate that concern with the underlying reality.

© Copyright 2020 by Creators Syndicate Inc.

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Iranian Missiles Rain on Bases in Iraq

Bases holding U.S. military personnel were hit today by multiple missiles from Iran, the Pentagon has confirmed. A base in Al-Asad in Iraq’s Anbar province and a base in Irbil, Iraq, were both attacked.

Casualties, if any, have not been confirmed as of now. This is a fog-of-war situation in which the agreed-on facts will likely shift; for example, The New York Times reports that earlier today it had been believed “that rockets had been fired on Taji Air Base, an Iraqi military base where American troops are deployed,” but now officials say “the reports of an attack there appeared to be false.”

The Pentagon is reporting “more than dozen ballistic missiles” fired at the two bases, while the Iranians claim more than 30 were sent just to the Asad base.

According to the Times, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps says its “fierce revenge” for the U.S. assassination of Corps chief Qassem Soleimani “has begun.”

Fox is reporting that the

latest U.S. intelligence assessment showed Iran had more than 2,000 ballistic missiles, Pentagon officials told Fox News.

The USS Harry Truman aircraft carrier strike group has been in the Gulf of Oman along with guided-missile destroyers, a guided-missile cruiser and at least one submarine. The Navy warships and submarine together had hundreds of Tomahawk cruise missiles with pre-planned targets locked into the missiles.

The ships would be ready to fire if given the order, two senior Pentagon officials told Fox News.

We’re now closer to an all-out shooting war with Iran, with costs and consequences likely to be as wasteful and horrific as the previous Middle Eastern interventions that President Donald Trump has criticized in the past.

 

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Iranian Missiles Rain on Bases in Iraq

Bases holding U.S. military personnel were hit today by multiple missiles from Iran, the Pentagon has confirmed. A base in Al-Asad in Iraq’s Anbar province and a base in Irbil, Iraq, were both attacked.

Casualties, if any, have not been confirmed as of now. This is a fog-of-war situation in which the agreed-on facts will likely shift; for example, The New York Times reports that earlier today it had been believed “that rockets had been fired on Taji Air Base, an Iraqi military base where American troops are deployed,” but now officials say “the reports of an attack there appeared to be false.”

The Pentagon is reporting “more than dozen ballistic missiles” fired at the two bases, while the Iranians claim more than 30 were sent just to the Asad base.

According to the Times, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps says its “fierce revenge” for the U.S. assassination of Corps chief Qassem Soleimani “has begun.”

Fox is reporting that the

latest U.S. intelligence assessment showed Iran had more than 2,000 ballistic missiles, Pentagon officials told Fox News.

The USS Harry Truman aircraft carrier strike group has been in the Gulf of Oman along with guided-missile destroyers, a guided-missile cruiser and at least one submarine. The Navy warships and submarine together had hundreds of Tomahawk cruise missiles with pre-planned targets locked into the missiles.

The ships would be ready to fire if given the order, two senior Pentagon officials told Fox News.

We’re now closer to an all-out shooting war with Iran, with costs and consequences likely to be as wasteful and horrific as the previous Middle Eastern interventions that President Donald Trump has criticized in the past.

 

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CNN Settles Lawsuit With Covington Catholic Student Nick Sandmann

CNN has reached a settlement agreement with Nick Sandmann, the Covington Catholic High School student who was wrongly portrayed in the media as having racially harassed toward a Native American man on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 2019.

The incident was caught on video and widely circulated. The media’s collective condemnation of Sandmann and his classmates was deafening, but subsequent video footage showed that the Native American man, Nathan Phillips, had misrepresented the situation in his public statements to news outlets. Reason was among the first to criticize the media’s rush to judgment.

Sandmann has sued CNN, The Washington Post, and NBC Universal for $800 million, and his lawyers have promised that additional suits are forthcoming. They had asked for $250 million from CNN: The amount of the settlement was not disclosed.

Sandmann’s lawyers stressed that the massive amount of money they are asking for is intended to deter future media misbehavior. Indeed, it would be a good thing if more journalists refrained from tweeting knee-jerk reactions to news developments they don’t fully understand, and were slightly more reluctant to escalate small moments involving non-notable people into major national firestorms.

That said, the lawsuits raise free speech concerns. As Reason‘s Jacob Sullum has observed, there’s a difference between unfair press coverage and libel. The media undoubtedly treated the Covington kids unfairly, but the main culprit here was not CNN or The Washington Post, but Phillips. He was the one who provided bad information to the press. If journalists have to fear massive libel lawsuits for reporting bad information supplied to them by sources they had no reason to distrust, it might make them wary of covering important stories. If successful, Sandmann’s suits could have a chilling effect on necessary and consequential journalism.

In any case, the Covington incident was a debacle for the media, and showed that the tendency of social media to inspire quick reactions is the Achilles’ heel of journalism in the digital age.

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