The letter, sent by Clinton's Communications Director Jennifer Palmieri to the Times' executive editor, Dean Baquet, said the campaign was “perplexed by the Times' slowness to acknowledge its errors after the fact, and some of the shaky justifications that Times' editors have made.”
“I feel obliged to put into context just how egregious an error this story was,” the letter continued. “The New York Times is arguably the most important news outlet in the world and it rushed to put an erroneous story on the front page charging that a major candidate for President of the United States was the target of a criminal referral to federal law enforcement. Literally hundreds of outlets followed your story, creating a firestorm that had a deep impact that cannot be unwound. This problem was compounded by the fact that the Times took an inexplicable, let alone indefensible, delay in correcting the story and removing 'criminal' from the headline and text of the story.”
The Times' story, first published on July 23, was originally headlined "Criminal Inquiry Sought in Hillary Clinton's Use of Email," and relied on information from unnamed sources. Serious problems with the story became apparent shortly after publication. The inquiry being called for was not a criminal investigation but a “security referral,” and Clinton was not its focus.
On July 24, all of the players in the story -- the Justice Department, the inspectors general and Clinton's campaign -- released public statements saying that the investigation being called for was not criminal. According to Politico's On Media blog, the Times neither removed the word from its headline and its story, nor did it issue a correction, until the following day.
Palmieri's letter lists three other complaints that the campaign has about the story. It stated that the “seriousness of the allegations ... demanded far more care and due diligence,” that the story “relied on questionable sourcing and went ahead without bothering to seek corroborating evidence,” and that “even after the Times' reporting was revealed to be false, the Times incomprehensibly delayed the issuance of a full and true correction.”
The Times' Public Editor Margaret Sullivan tackled the problems with the story in a lengthy blog post, in which she said that competitive pressure had led reporters and editors to move with too much speed and not enough caution.
Sullivan adds that she spoke with the reporters who wrote the story and a top editor who worked on it. While none of those involved in writing and editing the story were willing to reveal their sources to her, she said that she had a sense that the “final confirmation came from the same person more than once.”
Baquet defended his editorial staff to Sullivan. “You had the government confirming that it was a criminal referral,” Baquet said. “I’m not sure what they could have done differently on that.”
Politico reported that a Clinton campaign staffer said that the letter was made public after Baquet refused to publish it in the Times.
(Frederic J. Brown//AFP/Getty ImagesDonald Trump shares an important characteristic with President Ronald Reagan — and it could serve him well in next Thursday's first GOP debate of presidential candidates, commentator Michael Reagan tells Newsmax TV.
In an interview Friday with "Newsmax Prime" host J.D. Hayworth, the son of the late president says the surging Trump speaks with the kind of "passion" his father so brilliantly conveyed.
"The best thing that these candidates can do is be themselves," Reagan said. "America wants to see who they are and what they represent and where they want to take America."
Reagan added "consultants get rich from these campaigns and meanwhile they give us losers."
"I want to see, and America wants to see, that campaign that says 'you know something, this is where I want to take America. I am passionate about it. These are my issues. This is what I want to do,'" Reagan said.
"That's why America right now has surrounded Trump, in this case, because he's off the cuff and he speaks from his own passion."
Reagan recalled a 1980 debate in which his father showed a rare flash of anger over the order of speakers, exclaiming, "I am paying for this microphone" — and helped turn the tide of his campaign in New Hampshire.
"[T]hat night my [late] sister Maureen and I… looked at each other … and said 'it's about damn time you lost your temper' because we had never seen our dad ever lose his temper — ever raise his voice at all to the children, to anybody — and then all of a sudden he comes up with that one and we said 'bravo Dad. It's about time. You deserve to be able to, in fact, do that,'" he recalled.
Reagan also teed off on Hillary Clinton's email scandal, asserting it won't topple her from the top of the Democratic heap in the presidential primary because of "the power that is wheeled by the Clintons" in the party — but that it might "eat her alive" in the general election.
"We've seen over the years that nothing really sticks to Bill [Clinton] but everything sticks to Hillary Clinton," he said. "The one thing that Bill has that Hillary Clinton has never had is likability. She is not likable and she certainly isn't relatable."
"Bill Clinton would get elected today again if he were the nominee of the Democrat Party and we had nobody run against him… she's hoping that just simply being a woman and selling that will bring the women to her table, but I don't think that's ever going to happen."
"I hope these emails eat her alive but [that] she stays at the top of the heap for the Democrats," he said. "[A]nyone of our possible candidates out there can beat Hillary Clinton in November of 2016."
Fueled by legal advocacy groups, cries of Not In My Backyard are quietly costing the United States economy trillions. The ability of America to flourish is at stake.
By Christopher Helman and Daniel Fisher
For more than 50 years Onyx Specialty Papers of South Lee, Mass. has carved out a niche selling unusual, high-value products like the Kevlar-reinforced paper used in automobile clutch plates. The company’s twin 100-foot-long paper machines sit in a 150-year-old brick building on the Housatonic River, churning out 12,000 tons of paper a year.
Pat Begrowicz and a business partner bought Onyx from industry giant Mead Westvaco in 2009. She cashed in her kids’ college funds to do so. Now she’s wondering whether that was such a great idea. The problem isn’t labor (starting pay for manufacturing jobs at her 155-employee company is $20 an hour) or even raw materials costs or markets. It’s energy.
A new report by a government watchdog group claims the EPA broke federal law by secretly colluding with environmental activists to push the Obama administration’s global warming agenda, and urges the agency to go back to the drawing board on its pending carbon dioxide rule.
A report by the Environment & Energy Legal Institute unveils “records showing illegal activities by EPA staff, colluding with certain environmental group lobbyists to draft EPA’s greenhouse gas (GHG) rules behind the scenes and outside of public view.”
“These emails, which EPA forced us to litigate to obtain, prove beyond any doubt that EPA conducted its campaign to impose the global warming agenda unlawfully, making the rules themselves unlawful,” Chris Horner, an E&E Legal senior attorney, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
Horner says the EPA’s rules are unlawful because they were made in collusion with environmental groups, effectively shutting out the public from the process and violating federal law. E&E Legal says the Clean Power Plan and other agency rules were written with an “unalterably closed mind” because it revolved around pushing an anti-fossil fuel agenda.
E&E Legal’s latest report builds off one the group released last year which produced emails obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request showing coordination between environmentalists and EPA officials. This included emails between environmentalists and EPA employees discussing the Keystone XL pipeline and the technological feasibility of clean coal technology.
Now E&E Legal says FOIA records show “the influence on EPA by pressure groups, the same groups from which EPA obtained numerous senior officials.” These activists were instrumental in crafting the EPA’s “Clean Power Plan” — which regulates carbon dioxide emissions from existing power plants.
The EPA is expected to finalize the Clean Power Plan as early as Monday, and the White house said it would be “stronger” than the proposed rule that was published last year. Already states have sued to get the rule struck down by the courts, and Republicans are urging governors not to enforce it.
Adopting a tactic common in the Jim Crow South, the registrar subjected Frye to what election officials called a literacy test. In 1900, North Carolina voters amended the state’s Constitution to require that all new voters “be able to read and write any section of the Constitution in the English language,” but for decades some registrars had been applying that already broad mandate even more aggressively, targeting perfectly literate black registrants with arbitrary and obscure queries, like which president served when or who had the ultimate power to adjourn Congress. “I said, ‘Well, I don’t know why are you asking me all of these questions,’ ” Frye, now 83, recalled. “We went around and around, and he said, ‘Are you going to answer these questions?’ and I said, ‘No, I’m not going to try.’ And he said, ‘Well, then, you’re not going to register today.’ ”
This article is the first in a series examining the ongoing effort to roll back the protections of the Voting Rights Act.
Sitting with me on the enclosed porch of his red-brick ranch house in Greensboro, drinking his wife’s sweet tea, Frye could joke about the exchange now, but at the time it left him upset and determined. When he met Shirley at the altar, the first thing he said was: “You know they wouldn’t let me register?”
“Can we talk about this later?” she replied.
After a few weeks, Frye drove over to the Board of Elections in Rockingham, the county seat, to complain. An official told him to go back and try again. This time a different registrar, after asking if he was the fellow who had gone over to the election board, handed him a paragraph to copy from the Constitution. He copied it, and with that, he became a voter.
But in the American South in 1956, not every would-be black voter was an Air Force officer with the wherewithal to call on the local election board; for decades, most had found it effectively impossible to attain the most elemental rights of citizenship. Only about one-quarter of eligible black voters in the South were registered that year, according to the limited records available. By 1959, when Frye went on to become one of the first black graduates of the University of North Carolina law school, that number had changed little. When Frye became a legal adviser to the students running the antisegregation sit-ins at the Greensboro Woolworth’s in 1960, the number remained roughly the same. And when Frye became a deputy United States attorney in the Kennedy administration, it had grown only slightly. By law, the franchise extended to black voters; in practice, it often did not.
What changed this state of affairs was the passage, 50 years ago this month, of the Voting Rights Act. Signed on Aug. 6, 1965, it was meant to correct “a clear and simple wrong,” as Lyndon Johnson said. “Millions of Americans are denied the right to vote because of their color. This law will ensure them the right to vote.” It eliminated literacy tests and other Jim Crow tactics, and — in a key provision called Section 5 — required North Carolina and six other states with histories of black disenfranchisement to submit any future change in statewide voting law, no matter how small, for approval by federal authorities in Washington. No longer would the states be able to invent clever new ways to suppress the vote. Johnson called the legislation “one of the most monumental laws in the entire history of American freedom,” and not without justification. By 1968, just three years after the Voting Rights Act became law, black registration had increased substantially across the South, to 62 percent. Frye himself became a beneficiary of the act that same year when, after a close election, he became the first black state representative to serve in the North Carolina General Assembly since Reconstruction.
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Henry Frye | The first black chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, Frye, 83, was prevented by a Jim Crow literacy test from registering to vote on his wedding day in 1956.
In the decades that followed, Frye and hundreds of other new black legislators built on the promise of the Voting Rights Act, not just easing access to the ballot but finding ways to actively encourage voting, with new state laws allowing people to register at the Department of Motor Vehicles and public-assistance offices; to register and vote on the same day; to have ballots count even when filed in the wrong precinct; to vote by mail; and, perhaps most significant, to vote weeks before Election Day. All of those advances were protected by the Voting Rights Act, and they helped black registration increase steadily. In 2008, for the first time, black turnout was nearly equal to white turnout, and Barack Obama was elected the nation’s first black president.
Since then, however, the legal trend has abruptly reversed. In 2010, Republicans flipped control of 11 state legislatures and, raising the specter of voter fraud, began undoing much of the work of Frye and subsequent generations of state legislators. They rolled back early voting, eliminated same-day registration, disqualified ballots filed outside home precincts and created new demands for photo ID at polling places. In 2013, the Supreme Court, in the case of Shelby County v. Holder, directly countermanded the Section 5 authority of the Justice Department to dispute any of these changes in the states Section 5 covered. Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., writing for the majority, declared that the Voting Rights Act had done its job, and it was time to move on. Republican state legislators proceeded with a new round of even more restrictive voting laws.
All of these seemingly sudden changes were a result of a little-known part of the American civil rights story. It involves a largely Republican countermovement of ideologues and partisan operatives who, from the moment the Voting Rights Act became law, methodically set out to undercut or dismantle its most important requirements. The story of that decades-long battle over the iconic law’s tenets and effects has rarely been told, but in July many of its veteran warriors met in a North Carolina courthouse to argue the legality of a new state voting law that the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University Law School has called one of the “most restrictive since the Jim Crow era.” The decision, which is expected later this year, could determine whether the civil rights movement’s signature achievement is still justified 50 years after its signing, or if the movement itself is finished.
The fundamental promise of American democracy is that every citizen gets a vote, but delivering the franchise from on high and in the face of violent local opposition has always been a complicated legal proposition. The 13th Amendment freed the slaves, and the 14th Amendment gave them citizenship. But the key to Reconstruction was the 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, which did something far more radical, not just guaranteeing (male) former slaves the right to vote but giving Congress the authority to enforce that right state by state, an authority that to this day many legislators see as a drastic intrusion into local affairs.
The new laws immediately enfranchised more than 700,000 black Southerners. Although blacks made up just 13 percent of the overall United States population, they made up 36 percent of the South’s population and a much higher percentage in some states, including a majority in Mississippi and South Carolina. Their enfranchisement was a shock to the political system that almost exclusively benefited Republicans, the party of Lincoln.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE BLACK VOTE (UP TO THE VOTING RIGHTS ACT)
1870
As part of the Republican-led Reconstruction after the Civil War, the 15th Amendment bars states from denying the franchise based on race.
1870
Hiram Rhodes Revels, a Republican, begins his first term as United States senator from Mississippi, which was then majority black, becoming the first black man to serve in Congress.
1877
President Rutherford B. Hayes recalls United States troops from the former Confederate states, ending Reconstruction.
1900
North Carolina amends its Constitution to require a literacy test and a poll tax.
1965
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. leads the last of three marches for voting rights from Selma, Ala., to Montgomery.
1965
The Voting Rights Act is signed into law by Lyndon Johnson.
Like its former Confederate neighbors, North Carolina sent several black Republicans to Congress. In the state’s General Assembly, legislators with the support of black Republicans wrote a new state Constitution in 1868 that created state-supported public schools; apportioned state representation based on population rather than wealth — a setback for the 1 percent of that era, the plantation owners; and, eventually, instituted a property tax.
Democrats throughout the South responded to the growing influence of black legislators with a brutal effort to suppress the black vote, enforced by the Ku Klux Klan and its many paramilitary imitators, who kept blacks from election polls at gunpoint and whipped or lynched many who resisted. The Southern Democrats ran on an open message of white supremacy and quickly retook statehouses, city halls and courthouses throughout the South. Within 15 years of the Civil War’s end, Reconstruction was just a memory. What followed was deconstruction: the era of Jim Crow, the poll tax, the literacy test, double primaries and a host of other mechanisms that blocked the black vote. For decades, most black citizens in the South had no practical right to vote.
Beginning in the 1950s, propelled by the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education to desegregate schools, by modern media portrayals of anti-black violence and by the growing nonviolent resistance movement led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Congress began to assert its electoral authority with a series of legislative fixes. With the bipartisan Civil Rights Act of 1957, it created a separate Department of Justice civil rights division and the United States Commission on Civil Rights to monitor and investigate civil rights abuses. The fight over the law’s passage was bitter. In a party split, Southern Democrats attacked it relentlessly as a violation of “states’ rights,” a justification their predecessors used to resist abolition. The law survived the longest filibuster in Senate history, by Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, but it was considerably weakened in the process.
Congress tried again with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a more powerful bill that ended legal segregation. But again, the segregationist Democrats who had for many years controlled the South watered down its voting provisions, leaving the poll tax and the literacy test in place. Thurmond, in a sign of things to come, left the Democratic Party entirely, switching his allegiance to the Republicans.
It took the Voting Rights Act, with its considerably stronger protections, to finally deliver the black franchise, 100 years after it was first promised. Its most extraordinary measure, the one that rankled Southern politicians the most, was Section 5. By naming specific states as bad actors that fell under special federal scrutiny, it was the ultimate affront to states’ rights. But under intense pressure, Lyndon Johnson was able to shepherd the bill into law. Its tough approach to knocking down barriers to voting, combined with a phasing in overseen by federal registrars who signed up voters throughout the South, brought about a sudden and significant increase in black voter registration — in Mississippi, black registration increased to 54 percent from 7 percent within three years. This second Reconstruction, with its second surge of Southern black voters, precipitated a second realignment of the parties, and with it an even more complex legal effort to undermine and ultimately undo the most powerful provisions of the Voting Rights Act.
2. “EVIDENCE OF NATURAL RACIAL DISTINCTIONS”
“It all goes back to winning elections,” Carter Wrenn, a longtime North Carolina Republican strategist, told me in June. Wrenn fits the prototype of the Southern Political Strategist: He’s 63, round-faced, round-waisted and always seems to be on the verge of telling another too-good story from the bygone days of American politics. Sitting behind the wide desk in his Raleigh office, wearing sweats and puffing on a cigar, Wrenn explained the existential dilemma that confronted Southern Democrats back in the ’70s, when Wrenn started working in the mighty North Carolina political operation of Senator Jesse Helms.
After Reconstruction, Wrenn explained, the South reverted to complete Democratic control. Elections were decided in the Democratic primaries, which were often fought between the conservative wing and a more moderate wing. The passage of the Voting Rights Act upset that status quo. “What the Voting Rights Act did was brought very quickly a group of African-American voters into those primaries, and it tilted the balance to the progressives,” Wrenn said. “It tilted the playing field so much that by the ’70s, it was very unlikely a conservative was going to win a Democratic primary.”
Helms, a former Raleigh city councilman, had seen it coming. After the Democratic candidate he was supporting for governor lost the primary to a pro-integration opponent in 1960, he moved full-time into a new political realm — television punditry. Owl-eyed, balding and fiery, Helms became a popular on-air commentator for WRAL-TV, where he inveighed against a civil rights movement that was infested with “moral degenerates” and willfully blind to what he called “the purely scientific, statistical evidence of natural racial distinctions in group intellect.” In 1971, he registered as a Republican. Tom Ellis, a lawyer and close political adviser, suggested that he run for the United States Senate.
The electoral path for Southern Republicans was not at all clear back then. In 1966, 18 percent of North Carolina voters were registered Republicans. In 1972, the number was still just 22 percent. At the same time, Democrat registrations were hanging in at around 75 percent. To win, Helms would need to reach and convert a lot of unhappy Democrats.
This week’s Friday night document drop included the Clintons’ tax returns, as summarized by CNN:
Hillary and Bill Clinton earned nearly $141 million over the course of eight years and paid $43 million in federal taxes, according to tax returns her campaign released Friday.
In a lengthy statement and on her campaign website, Clinton detailed that she and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, paid more than $43 million in federal taxes from 2007 to 2014, over $13 million in state taxes and donated nearly $15 million to charity over the same period.
The couple earned a total of $140.9 million, with an adjusted gross income of $139.1 million, the returns show.
Not bad for a couple that produces nothing, adds nothing to the economy, and gets all of their money based solely on political connections. Many of us are old enough to remember when liberals were very, very upset at the thought of rich people running for President – three years ago, to be exact.
“We’ve come a long way from my days going door-to-door for the Children’s Defense Fund and earning $16,450 as a young law professor in Arkansas – and we owe it to the opportunities America provides,” Hillary Clinton humorously humble-bragged in a statement accompanying the tax info. Or is it possible she’s being serious? She really thinks the millions raked in by a political couple paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to give empty speeches, by powerful special interests who wish to take advantage of their connections, has even the slightest relationship to the “opportunities America provides” for the vast majority of its citizens?
Oh, and about those charitable donations…
From 2007 to 2014, nearly 99% of the Clintons’ charitable giving went to their foundation, “The Clinton Family Foundation,” which is used to distribute the family’s philanthropic giving to different charities.
In total, the Clintons donated $14,959,450.00 to charity over that period, with $14,769,000 of that going to the foundation.
And most of the 1% of donations that didn’t go to their foundation went to Clinton associated groups. In 2013, the Clintons donated $57,000 to the Clinton Global Initiative and $21,000 to the Humana Challenge, a Clinton Foundation-sponsored golf tournament. In 2012, the couple donated $25,000 to the same golf tournament.
In the Nineties we got to enjoy the Clintons writing off their underwear as tax deductions. Now they make charitable donations to the organizations that keep their political operatives well-paid until they’re needed for campaigns.
And, of course, Hillary postures as the scourge of the Evil Rich and their rotten tax “loopholes.”
“I want more Americans to have the chance to work hard and get ahead, just like we did. And reforming the tax code can help,” said Clinton, before criticizing the tax reform proposals of Republican opponents. Good Lord, she really is serious about pretending she got filthy rich by “working hard” and pursuing the same American dream available to middle class voters. Keep voting Democrat, folks, and maybe one day you, too, will be paid vast sums of money by oil sheikhs and Russian oligarchs to give canned speeches!
Attorneys for the NFL and Tom Brady want a federal judge to pick a winner in the ongoing Deflategate saga before the season begins in September — but that judge is urging both sides to come to a settlement.
Jeffrey Kessler, Brady’s union-appointed attorney, and lawyers for the NFL together asked U.S. District Court Judge Richard Berman yesterday to issue a “final resolution” in the case before Sept. 4. The New England Patriots’ superstar quarterback wants the New York judge to set aside the four-game suspension handed down by NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell.
“(T)he parties met and conferred and have agreed that a final resolution of this matter prior to the commencement of the 2015 NFL regular season would be in everyone’s best interest,” Kessler wrote in a letter to Berman.
Berman, meanwhile, asked the two sides to work together and come to a settlement, according to an order he filed later. He scheduled a “status/settlement conference” for Aug. 12 and another for Aug. 19. If no settlement is reached by the 19th, there could be oral arguments that day.
He wants Brady and Goodell on hand for both days. The Patriots will likely not have a full practice on Aug. 12, with the Packers coming to town for the preseason opener the next day. On Aug. 19, the Patriots are scheduled to be in West Virginia for joint workouts with the Saints.
“I request that you all engage in comprehensive, good-faith settlement discussions prior to the conference on August 12,” he wrote.
In the earlier letter, Kessler said he won’t be looking for an injunction that would allow Brady to play while the litigation panned out. Instead, he wants the entire case resolved so no legal proceedings linger throughout the season.
Brady’s lawyers also filed an answer and counterclaim in the lawsuit yesterday and attempted to poke holes in Goodell’s Tuesday decision. Kessler wrote that the arbitration proceedings had a “circus-like atmosphere.”
He argued that Goodell was a biased arbitrator and effectively served as judge, jury and executioner in Brady’s case. Brady’s attorneys noted that they tried to get Goodell to recuse himself in favor of an independent arbitrator, but he declined.
“It is hard to imagine any person in Goodell’s position even attempting to serve as arbitrator under these circumstances, but that is exactly what he did,” Kessler wrote. “He denied the NFLPA’s Recusal Motion and simultaneously (and summarily) rejected the delegation argument — trying to pave his own path to stay on as arbitrator of Brady’s appeal.
“This conduct shows not merely evident partiality but actual bias, rendering Goodell unfit to serve as arbitrator under any standard.”
STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN — The small Swedish Jewish Museum is tucked away on a side street. Discreet signage instructs would-be visitors to push a button which activates a camera, so they can be screened before they are granted entry. The museum’s permanent exhibition fills one fairly small room. Most of the objects on display are Jewish ritual items with some connection to Sweden, amid descriptions of the relatively short history of the Jews in Sweden (Jews have a longer history of permanent residence in the U.S. than in Sweden). There is also a small section devoted to World War II, where one item stands out from all the rest.
Compact, commonplace and simple, one everyday item is the museum’s most extraordinary exhibit. Raoul Wallenberg’s small, well-worn, personal telephone book in his own handwriting is displayed, with the page open to Adolf Eichmann’s phone number. Yes, Adolf Eichmann. It’s just one page. And as much as that one page sends one’s train of thought in all sorts of directions, who knows how many other secrets are hidden within the phone book’s pages? Each number has its own story to tell. It’s simply incredible how such a small item can manage to open itself and the viewer to such a wide, horrible swath of the world’s recent history.
At the top of the display case with Wallenberg’s phone book, there is a quote from the Talmud: “Whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world.” This quotation gained some currency with the movie Schindler’s List, which used it as a kind of tag line. Poetic and true in a multitude of ways, the quotation is also a fitting tribute to Raoul Wallenberg.
When I got home that evening, I read about California Attorney General Kamala Harris, who is preparing for her coronation as Senator Barbara Boxer’s successor, and a comment she made about the recent murder of Kathryn Steinle. Kathryn Steinle was allegedly murdered earlier this month by Jose Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, who was in the U.S. illegally, having been convicted of multiple felonies and having already been deported five times. He had been in the custody of the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department, who had ignored an ICE request to turn him over to their agents for deportation.
Harris said: “Let’s not react to one specific case, when we are looking at a national problem. Let’s react to that specific case in prosecuting that specific murder, and making sure he faces very swift consequences and accountability. On the issue of immigration policy, let’s be smarter.”
Not exactly Talmudic wisdom. Not exactly: “Whoever saves a life, it is as if she has saved the entire world.”
Wouldn’t the converse also be true? Indeed, the first part of the passage from the Talmud suggests, “Whoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world.”
For Kathryn Steinle’s family, an entire world was destroyed. One minute she was strolling through San Francisco with her father, the next minute she was dead. Her last words were a plea to her father for help, much like Kelly Thomas, the unarmed, mentally ill homeless man, who, as he was being beaten to death by six Fullerton police officers some four years ago, cried out in vain to his father to save him. Neither Kathryn Steinle nor Kelly Thomas’s fathers could do anything to save their children, and worlds were brutally, murderously and unnecessarily destroyed.
Kamala Harris: “Our policy should not be informed by our collective outrage about one man’s conduct.”
Can we really, seriously suggest that individual cases can’t and shouldn’t influence our thinking on larger policy considerations, whether it be police brutality or immigration? Can’t individual cases, individual actions, individual situations be the catalyst for positive changes? Shouldn’t this be our goal as policymakers, or will the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Kelly Thomas and Kathryn Steinle remain senseless?
Individuals can and do make a difference, whether it be a courageous individual like Raoul Wallenberg, Rosa Parks or Jackie Robinson. But can’t we also learn from the victims? Isn’t it our sacred duty to give some kind of meaning to their lives in the face of senseless actions?
And yet Kamala Harris is effectively saying that while Kathryn Steinle’s murderer should be punished, we shouldn’t draw policy conclusions from the circumstances of her murder.
People who are suggesting that Kathryn Steinle’s murder shouldn’t be “politicized” need to look themselves in the mirror and consider how failing to draw the right conclusions from the circumstances of her murder is in itself the worst kind of opportunistic, cynical political hay-making. I doubt Harris suggested after Newtown, Aurora, Columbine, Charleston or Chattanooga that we shouldn’t inform our policies by our collective sadness and outrage at those tragedies. Neither should we fail to take into account the context of Kathryn Steinle’s murder, as well as how it could have been reasonably avoided, in setting policy, even if it means standing up to special interest groups who feel that the context and conclusions may harm their own, narrow agendas.
It’s fairly simple. Jose Francisco Lopez-Sanchez should never have been in the U.S. He had been convicted multiple times of felonies. He had already been deported five times. He himself says that he chose to return to San Francisco because he felt San Francisco’s current sanctuary city policies protected him from deportation. He was right.
And yet, had he not been in the country, Kathryn Steinle would be alive today. Why is it so hard for Ms. Harris, as well as other politicians, to acknowledge this simple, clear, logical truth?
And this from the highest law-enforcement official in the state.
Instead of pandering and trying to connect the murder to a lack of “comprehensive immigration reform,” it would be fitting if Ms. Harris would accept the simple truth that Lopez-Sanchez should not have been in the U.S. — and then try to figure out solutions to avoid any more senseless murders. Accept responsibility. Acknowledge the fact that had Lopez-Sanchez not been released by the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department, Steinle’s murder wouldn’t have happened, couldn’t have happened. Do your job. Work on ways to make sure that felons who are in this country illegally are deported and that “sanctuary city” policies aren’t allowed to protect felons like Lopez-Sanchez. Do the right thing.
In the meantime, all we seem to get is double-talk, sidestepping and excuses.
It’s not only both sad and insulting to us as voters, but until and unless our political leaders are willing to step up and take action to fix the problem, we can only expect more of the same. And it’s just a matter of time until another world, senselessly, is destroyed.
John Mirisch currently serves on the City Council of Beverly Hills. As mayor, he created the Sunshine Task Force to work toward a more open, transparent and participatory local government.
WASHINGTON, DC – House Republican Conference Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) will deliver the Weekly Republican Address on Saturday, August 1. She will discuss the progress that the new Congress is making on the people’s priorities, from the first real entitlement reform in nearly two decades to a plan that advances free trade and promotes American jobs.
“Our focus is the people’s priorities, and our goal is an opportunity economy built on good-paying jobs and the freedom to innovate,” McMorris Rodgers said. “We have a long way to go, but we are making progress and getting things done for the American people.”
McMorris Rodgers represents Eastern Washington, and as Chair of the House Republican Conference, she is the fourth highest-ranking Republican in the House and the highest-ranking woman in Congress. To learn more, visit her official website, and follow her on Facebook and Twitter.
The Weekly Republican Address will be available nationwide starting tomorrow at 6:00 am ET on Speaker.gov and gop.gov.
The letter, sent by Clinton's Communications Director Jennifer Palmieri to the Times' executive editor, Dean Baquet, said the campaign was “perplexed by the Times' slowness to acknowledge its errors after the fact, and some of the shaky justifications that Times' editors have made.”
