Tag: hit&run

Iran’s Foreign Minister: ‘We Do Not Seek Escalation or War’

“All is well!” declared President Donald Trump on Tuesday night, after a barrage of Iranian missiles hit two U.S.-manned military bases in Iraq. Though some prominent Republicans immediately began banging the war drums last night, others fell in line with the president, asserting that the attack⁠—in retaliation for America’s murder of Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani⁠—was not that big of a deal and certainly not a sign that killing Soleimani was a bad plan.

Some downplayed the attack on bases in Ain al-Asad and Irbil, Iraq, on the grounds that no lives (American or Iraqi) were lost. Journalists and pundits have been running with that, too, suggesting that Iran hitting obvious and nearby targets that the U.S. had already cleared was a way to give the appearance of escalating while actually de-escalating.

Others say that’s ridiculously naive and this is just the start of Iran’s revenge.

It is soothing to think of the attack last night as the end of this frightening episode. Could Iran’s no-casualty attack last night really be an attempt at de-escalation? Or was it only the beginning of the country’s payback for Soleimani’s death?

Iranian leaders have indicated both.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, said that last night’s attack was but “a slap in the face” and “not sufficient. What is important is ending the corrupting presence of America in the region.”

And here’s a senior adviser to Iran’s president:

But Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif said “We do not seek escalation or war.”

Zarif told reporters in Tehran this morning that the attack highlighted how Iran was “not the United States” and did not want war. “It is up to the United States to now come to its senses and stop its adventurism in this region,” he said.

President Trump is expected to speak today at 11 a.m.

Shortly after the missile attack, a Boeing 737-800 passenger plane leaving the Tehran airport crashed, killing all 176 people onboard, and initially, many suspected the Ukraine International Airlines crash was related to hostilities between Iran and the U.S.

“At first I thought [the Americans] have hit here with missiles and went in the basement as a shelter,” one man who lives near where the plane crashed told the Associated Press.

Iranian authorities, however, said the plane suffered from a mechanical issue. Ukrainian officials said an investigation will be conducted.

According to the Ukrainian foreign minister, those killed in the crash included mostly Iranian and Canadian passengers and no Americans. He said those on board included 82 people from Iran, 63 from Canada, 11 from Ukraine, 10 from Sweden, four from Afghanistan, three from Germany, and three from the U.K.

“The plane had been delayed from taking off from Imam Khomeini International Airport by almost an hour,” AP reports. “It took off to the west, but never made it above 8,000 feet in the air, according to data from the flight-tracking website FlightRadar24.”

FREE MINDS

Some anti-war responses from members of Congress:

And some reminders for President Trump:

FREE MARKETS

The Trump administration announced last week that flavored vaping products with pre-filled cartridges are to be banned, while exempting flavored nicotine liquids that customers can load into tanks themselves. The former are much more popular, and include all flavored vape pods from the market-dominant Juul. Here’s Kat Timpf at National Review on the stupidity and frustrations of the new vaping restrictions:

Yes: I myself vape, and that’s part of the reason why this news upsets me. What’s more, as a vaper who has tried “open tank” systems—which the administration exempts from the ban—I find absolutely no solace in this fact, as I know from experience how fiddling with these sorts of systems often inevitably results in your hands and furniture and purses and life getting completely soaked with nicotine liquid.

My personal use, however, is far from the only reason that I am upset about this ban. In fact, the main reason I’m opposed to it is that it may, quite frankly, kill people.

See, President Trump insists that the purpose behind the ban is to “protect our families,” but the truth is, anyone who is informed on the facts of the issue would understand how it will only have a negative impact. In case you yourself aren’t informed, here are some of those facts.

More here.

QUICK HITS

  • Last night, Pentagon officials were reportedly hard to reach when the attack started because they had been sent home in anticipation of bad weather in D.C. that never amounted to more than some non-sticking snowfall.
  • A little good news for a change:

(Sorry, sorry.)

  • OK for real on the good news this time:

  • And on to the bad and bizarre: Paul Petersen, Phoenix-area county assessor (an elected office), resigned yesterday “months after being charged with running a human smuggling operation that paid pregnant women from the Marshall Islands to give up their babies in the United States.”
  • Joe Biden “sometimes gets himself in trouble with flat declarations and evolving versions of the same story.” The Washington Post checks out Biden’s recent claims about Bin Laden.
  • The Methodist Church might be breaking up over same-sex marriage:

  • The Goldwater Institute is suing over Arizona’s alleged mishandling of its school choice program:

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Trump’s Soleimani Strike Turns Democratic Hawks into Doves and Republican Doves into Hawks

President Donald Trump’s decision to carry out a targeted assassination of Iran’s top military leader, Gen. Qassem Soleimani, has resurrected a much-needed debate about America’s use of military power in the world. After two decades of occupying and bombing large swaths of the Middle East, most American politicians now treat war-making like any other government action: how they feel about it depends on who’s in the White House, not who it hurts.

It was just nine years ago that the House of Representatives voted on a War Powers resolution to limit former President Barack Obama’s military actions in Libya, which he pursued without congressional oversight. Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.) announced yesterday that she would similarly move to rebuff Trump this week. (It’s worth noting, however, that the resolution may be on hold in the wake of Iran’s attack on two bases holding U.S. military personnel early on Wednesday.) Writing to House Democrats, she said that the resolution “reasserts Congress’s long-established oversight responsibilities by mandating that if no further Congressional action is taken, the Administration’s military hostilities with regard to Iran cease within 30 days.”

Yet when it came to Obama, Pelosi departed from bipartisan consensus and voted in favor of military intervention without approval from Congress.

There are differences, of course, between the two conflicts. The White House wrote in 2011 that U.S. efforts in Libya “do not involve sustained fighting or active exchanges of fire with hostile forces, nor do they involve U.S. ground troops.” That amounts to little more than semantics. The deposition and subsequent killing of Col. Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 sparked chaos in North Africa and the Libyan Civil War, which is still ongoing. (Obama would go on to call his failure to plan for that the “worst mistake” of his presidency.) 

In other words, the major difference between Gaddafi and Soleimani is Trump.

There is a long list of Republican culprits here, as well. The House GOP voted overwhelmingly in 2011 to admonish Obama for participating in NATO combat operations in Libya without congressional approval, despite the fact that Gaddafi had ordered the downing of Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988, which was flying from Frankfurt to Detroit and carrying both American civilians and American government officials. Republicans did not consider that fact—nor Gaddafi’s slaughter of Libyan civilians during a popular uprising in 2011—justification enough for waging war without congressional consent. Yet, conservatives thus far have overwhelmingly supported the assassination of Soleimani.

“As a father, this isn’t complicated: The United States took out an evil terrorist who killed thousands of people so he couldn’t kill more people,” Rep. Steve Scalise (R–La.), the second-ranking member of the House’s Republican minority, tweeted. “Amazing how many on the far left will cover for a terrorist rather than give credit to @realDonaldTrump.” 

Did Scalise vote to rein in Obama’s military interference in Libya in 2011? Reader, he did. 

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R–Calif.) placed some blame on Adam Schiff (D–Calif.), the head of the House Intelligence Committee, telling Fox and Friends that, had the congressman not been so focused on impeachment, he might’ve been able to protect the U.S. from Iranian aggression. “The world is safer today because this president took action,” McCarthy said. “I don’t think it’s a place for them to play politics.”

McCarthy also voted with the majority of his Republican colleagues in 2011 to admonish Obama for waging war without congressional approval. 

Speaking of Schiff: the Democrat recently called for open hearings on Trump’s airstrike. “The president has put us on a path where we may be at war with Iran,” he told The Washington Post. “That requires the Congress to fully engage.”

Schiff sided with the Obama administration in 2011.

Are you sensing a pattern here?

While ideological inconsistency is the norm, there are a few notable exceptions. Just 10 House Republicans sided with Obama in 2011. Of that cohort, only two are still serving: Reps. Louie Gohmert (R–Texas) and David Schweikert (R–Ariz.). Neither member has released a statement in response to Trump’s actions.

Forty-five House Democrats in 2011 voted against their party and in favor of constitutionality, pushing back against Obama’s lack of restraint in Libya. That resolution, although it was non-binding, declared “that the President shall not deploy, establish, or maintain the presence of units and members of the United States Armed Forces on the ground in Libya.” It also requested that Obama give Congress more information on the administration’s military objectives and provide lawmakers with reasons for why the president chose to circumvent them.

Rep. Dave Lipinski (D–Ill.), a pro-life Democrat, formally expressed his desire for congressional oversight and will likely do so again in this week’s vote. Reps. Dave Loebsack (D–Iowa), Paul Tonko (D–N.Y.), and Peter DeFazio (D–Ore.) also voted to constrain Obama’s actions in Libya. DeFazio told the East Oregonian this week that “there is still time to stop this risky escalation, but Congress must assert its constitutionally-granted war powers immediately to do so.”

Rep. Justin Amash (I–Mich.), a Republican in 2011 and now an independent, is also expected to vote with most Democrats.

“When a president engages in war without congressional authorization and Congress does nothing to stop him, the two branches cut the American people out of the process, in violation of our Constitution’s design,” he tweeted. “This undermines both the liberty and the safety of the people.”

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#TwitterLaw IRL @ #AALS2020

I have been quite critical of how academics tweet. Reactions to my post on social media were savage. Indeed, academics routinely assail my work on Twitter. Readers of this blog may assume that this sort of hostility bleeds into real life (IRL, if you will). Thankfully, it doesn’t.

Last weekend I attended the annual conference for the Association for American Law Schools. Law professors from every law school attend. I was happy to catch up with many friends. I also visited with many professors who have been extremely critical of my work on social media, and in the blogosphere. And those interactions were always cordial and friendly. None of us brought up our Twitter tiffs.

As a general matter, academics are well equipped to compartmentalize disagreements, and find common ground during common times.

Do not take social media snips as an indication of how academics interact in the real world.

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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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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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Arizona First Amendment Challenge to Anti-BDS Law Dismissed on Procedural Grounds

From yesterday’s nonprecedential opinion in Jordahl v. Brnovich:

In 2016 the Arizona Legislature enacted, and the Governor signed, House Bill 2617 (“the Act”) which prohibited public entities from contracting with companies that engage in “boycott[s] of Israel.” A certification that the contractor agreed not to boycott Israel was to be included in every contract with state or local governments. When it went into force, the Act applied to all manners of companies, from sole proprietorships to multinational corporations, and to contracts of any value.

Plaintiff-Appellee Mikkel Jordahl is the sole member and director of Mikkel (Mik) Jordahl, P.C. (“the Firm”), a law firm in Arizona. For the past twelve years, the Firm has maintained a series of contracts with the Coconino County Jail District, under which the Firm provides legal services to inmates. The contract is valued at approximately $18,000 annually. Jordahl engages in a personal boycott of Israel by refusing to purchase products from companies that he believes “perpetuat[e] the occupation of the West Bank,” and wishes for his Firm to do so as well. When presented with a certification to not engage in a boycott of Israel as part of the contract renewal with Coconino County in 2016, Jordahl, on behalf of the Firm, signed under protest. In 2017, he refused to sign, and the Firm was not paid for services performed.

Jordahl filed suit …, arguing that the Act violated the First Amendment both on its face and as applied to him …. The district court granted Jordahl’s motion for a preliminary injunction and enjoined the State from enforcing the certification requirement for public contracts.

The defendants appealed, and in 2019, while the appeal was pending, the State amended portions of the Act with Senate Bill 1167 (“the revised Act”). The revised Act made two key changes that exempt Jordahl and the Firm from the revised Act’s provisions: The Act’s anti-boycott certification requirement now applies only to (1) companies with ten or more full-time employees, and (2) contracts valued at $100,000 or more. These changes took effect in August 2019.

Because the Act no longer apples to Jordahl or his Firm, his claims for declaratory and injunctive relief are moot. See Bd. of Trs. of the Glazing Health & Welfare Tr. v. Chambers, 941 F.3d 1195, 1197 (9th Cir. 2019) (en banc). Accordingly, we vacate the preliminary injunction and remand the case to the district court with instructions to dismiss the claims for declaratory and injunctive relief. On remand the district court retains jurisdiction to determine whether an award of attorneys’ fees is appropriate under 42 U.S.C. § 1988(b). See Watson v. County of Riverside, 300 F.3d 1092, 1094-95 (9th Cir. 2002); Williams v. Alioto, 625 F.2d 845, 848 (9th Cir. 1980) (per curiam).

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