90 Miles From Tyranny

Wednesday, September 12, 2018

FLASHBACK: Obama is the greatest enemy to press freedom in a generation

New York Times
WASHINGTON — JIM RISEN is gruff.

The tall slab of a reporter looks like someone who could have played an Irish Marine sergeant in an old World War II movie.

“Editors think I’m a curmudgeon,” the 59-year-old admits, laughing.

Eric Lichtblau, the reporter who sits next to Risen in The Times’s Washington bureau and who won a Pulitzer with him for their remarkable stories about the Bush administration’s illegal warrantless wiretapping, says Risen revels in his prickly, old-school style, acting contrary on everything from newfangled computers to the Bush crew’s fictions about Saddam and W.M.D. to cautious editors.

“He’s pushed to go places that often editors are unwilling to go,” Lichtblau said. “He’s never taken the safe route.”

Once Lichtblau took him to a pick-up basketball game and, naturally, Risen got in a fight with a lobbyist about the rules for being out of bounds.

As Carl Hulse, The Times’s chief Washington correspondent, wryly puts it: “Whether it’s editors or government officials, Jim definitely won’t take no for an answer, but he will certainly give it.”

Over lunch near the White House on Friday, Risen, dressed in his Men’s Wearhouse shirt and khakis and his brown Ecco walking shoes, talked about having the sword of Damocles over his head, as the reluctant star of a searing media-government showdown that could end with him behind bars.

“It’s surreal to be caught up in a news story instead of writing about one,” he said, in his soft voice.

He said he was inspired by the Watergate hearings to get into journalism and that he inherited his skepticism about government from his mom, who grew up in Indiana during the Depression, the daughter of an Irish railway machinist who was often out of work. Every time she saw the pyramids on TV, she would say, “I wonder how many slaves died building that?”

Risen said he’s not afraid that F.B.I. agents will show up one day at the suburban Maryland home he shares with his wife, Penny. (His three sons are grown, and one is a reporter.) But he has exhausted all his legal challenges, including at the Supreme Court, against the Obama administration.

“I was nervous for a long time, but they’ve been after me for six years so now I try to ignore it,” he said, musing that he’s already decided what he’ll take to prison: Civil War books and World War II histories.

The Justice Department is trying to scuttle the reporters’ privilege — ignoring the chilling effect that is having on truth emerging in a jittery post-9/11 world prone to egregious government excesses.

Attorney General Eric Holder wants to force Risen to testify and reveal the identity of his confidential source on...

You have come across a mystery box. But what is inside?

It could be literally anything from the serene to the horrific,

from the beautiful to the repugnant,

from the mysterious to the familiar.

If you decide to open it, you could be disappointed,

you could be inspired, you could be appalled.

This is not for the faint of heart or the easily offended.

You have been warned.

Tuesday, September 11, 2018

LOESCH UNLEASHED: Dana exposes the racist core of leftist gun control

Girls With Guns

Hold your nose and vote straight line Republican.
The time to get bad Republicans out is in the primaries, not when they are running against Communist Democrats.

The Unbearable Whiteness of Being

There can be little doubt that the modern university, in its obsession with race, gender, and sexual orientation under the rubric of "social justice," has violated its core mandate, which, in the words of Matthew Arnold from Culture and Anarchy, is to familiarize readers and students with "the best that has been thought and said." The Academy has turned Arnold's maxim on its head, instructing students in the worst that has been thought and said – and done. The curricular fetish of "social justice," which is destroying the university as an institution of higher learning, continues to metastasize.

Indeed, the university as a social and cultural institution is a slow-motion train wreck picking up speed: equity hiring, affirmative action, anti-conservative and overt leftist politics, the "diversity and inclusion" myth on which the academy prides itself, groupthink, speech codes, snitch lines, trigger warnings, safe spaces, microaggressions, the attack on academic freedom – the list goes on.

The bogus issue that has recently acquired major prominence in the quagmire of campus politics is "whiteness," especially the "hegemony" of straight white males and their champions, guilty, apparently, of every conceivable ill that has bedeviled the world since the first silverback descended from the trees. This is merely a prime manifestation of the reigning hysteria on college campuses, in particular its mephitic obsession with race. "The toxic racial climate of colleges looks to be perpetual," warns Scott Greer in No Campus for White Men; anti-white ferocity "remains established as an unchallenged dogma." There is no campus for some white woman as well. Witness the current vendetta against distinguished University of Chicago medievalist Rachel Fulton Brown.

The author of a blog post "Three Cheers for White Men," a committed Catholic and a lover of Western civilization and its Christian foundations, as her many books confirm, Fulton Brown has been vilified as a Nazi and a hater. For daring to defend Western Christendom as the source of many of our most cherished values of sex equality and respect for individual worth, she has been targeted by a mob of professors of literature, history, and medieval studies who are determined to destroy her professionally, writing an open letter to her university, festooned with 1,500 signatures and stating that she is a disgrace to the history department.

The intent of the open letter is clearly to have Fulton Brown fired or at least disciplined. She is reviled as a white supremacist spreading hetero-patriarchal desecrations. The profanity hurled against her on Twitter by a presumably cultivated professoriate is unprintable, fit only for the lower depths. As Richard Mitchell aptly wrote in The Graves of Academe, "[t]he prodigious monster is down there."

Naturally, the fact that the entire infrastructure these gutter academics take for granted – the electrical grid that lights their libraries and offices, the buildings in which they sit and type their treatises, the roads they drive on and the planes they fly in, the Twitter feeds and Facebook posts that facilitate their frenzied denunciations of those they deem beyond the pale, the medications that keep them going, the food they put on the table, the table they put under the food, the vintage wines they sip in the faculty lounge, the plumbing on which they rely, the physical and technical maintenance that enables them to survive, the...