Crime expert: The Left’s Blindness on Terrorism
The Left responded to the Manchester bombing with “feckless calls for resisting hate, pledges of renewed diversity and little else,” laments Heather Mac Donald at City Journal. Yet “nothing that an Islamic terrorist can do will ever shake the left-wing commitment to open borders.” Indeed, it seems “the real threat that radical Islam poses . . . must be disregarded in order to transform the West by Third World immigration.” As for improved anti-terror intelligence, “the Left still decries the modest expansions of surveillance power under the 2001 Patriot Act as the work of totalitarianism.” But terrorists “don’t care” if an attack “is met with candlelight vigils — they care if border restrictions and law enforcement make it impossible to destroy lives.” They will only have failed when “they can no longer slaughter children.”
Ex-attorney: Kushner’s Getting Media Mugged
Today’s mainstream news media have turned into “the mob as a ruling class,” charges Fox News’ Greg Jarrett. And “the latest victim” is White House counselor Jared Kushner, whose “crime appears to be no crime at all.” The fact that he met with two Russian officials has produced “mass hysteria in both print and television” with “no attempts at reasoned analysis, no context of historical precedence.” Nearly every single president, he notes, “has established and relied on similar back channel contacts” and “had discussions with foreign governments before taking office, including President Obama.” As for Kushner being a “focus” of the FBI’s Russia probe, that simply means “the Bureau would like to speak with him.”
Reporter: Albany Won’t Even Fake Ethics Reform
Ever since President Trump fired US Attorney Preet Bharara, Albany lawmakers “have breathed a sigh of relief — and seemingly stopped pretending to care about ethics reform,” notes Ashley Hupfl at City State. This year, Gov. Cuomo “proposed the usual ethics reforms he has included for the past few years, but little was done to include them in the state budget.” He blames the Legislature, saying its members “have no appetite for more.” Yet “allegations of corruption have continued to dog lawmakers,” most recently in the controversy over leadership stipends paid to legislators who don’t actually chair their committees. But given Cuomo’s “stance that virtually everything got done in the budget, it appears unlikely there will be any ethics reforms toward the end of the session.”
Conservative take: Should Insecure Dems Be Coddled?
“What do Democrats want?” asks Noah Rothman at Commentary. The answer: “Nothing so much as to have their assumptions validated.” Which is why “telling liberals what they want to hear can be a materially rewarding enterprise.” Indeed, “committed liberal activists do not want to change to meet the moment. Rather, they want an excuse to view their opponents as dangerously outside the mainstream, deserving only of exile.” That’s the message Hillary Clinton, for one, is delivering. But “not every Democrat is giving in to their party’s darkest, most self-destructive impulses.” Like Sen. Cory Booker, whose “refusal to leap to the firm conclusion that the presidency has been sold to Moscow and that all that’s preventing impeachment proceedings is the congressional GOP’s cowardice is, in a way, an act of courage.”
From the right: Sad Decline of the Shopping Mall
Time was, recalls Kevin Williamson at National Review, when “the American shopping mall was the reincarnation of the downtown business district, moved indoors where it could be air-conditioned” and “efficiently policed.” Yet now this “new downtown is dying” — we’re down to 1,100 malls (400 of which are soon set to close) from the high-water mark of 5,000. But “shops and jobs go together: One in ten employed Americans works in retail,” and they tend to be “workers who for various reasons — sometimes lack of skill and education, but also things such as the need for flexible scheduling or physical limitations — often do not have a great many desirable options.” The real crisis is “not so much a matter of jobs lost in the present but of jobs that never come into being in the future.”
— Compiled by Eric Fettmann
