In the wake of the Brussels attacks, Sen. Ted Cruz says we need to "empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized." Remember this, the next time you're tempted to think of Ted Cruz as a civil libertarian. And he has the cojones to blame "political correctness" for the attacks! Where was his hysteria after the two Ankara bombings in February and March of this year, the Burkina Faso attack and Istanbul bombing in January, and the Bamako hotel attack of November 2015? Nowhere, that's where -- because only foreigners died in these tragedies. Only getting hysterical when Americans get hurt? Now that's politically correct!
Julian Sanchez seems awfully skeptical that the FBI just discovered a "new" way to crack the San Bernardino shooter's iPhone. The Department of Justice, you recall, served that up as its excuse for asking for a postponement of a hearing it hoped would force Apple to build a "back door" into its iPhone encryption. But, as Mr. Sanchez notes, the FBI has had upwards of two ways to get into the iPhone without needing a master key to get into all iPhones, neither of which you or I would know off the top of our heads, but both of which the FBI would know about, being, you know, in the business of detection and law enforcement. At least nominally, that is.
Ain't nothin' North Carolina can't do that Kansas can't do worse: a pair of "bathroom bills" under consideration in that state would actually allow students to sue their schools for up to $2,500 every time a transgendered student shows up in a bathroom with them. They're calling this a "bounty," but why not also call it a boon for frivolous lawsuits? And when one of the bills talks about the "potential embarrassment, shame, and psychological injury" to the students who are "forced" to "share" a bathroom with transgendered students, right-wingers reveal themselves to be precisely the politically correct weaklings they so often accuse liberals of being.
Wharton County, Texas prosecutor says that county's District Attorney "told him to keep black residents off juries in criminal trials in order to improve the prosecution's chances of winning the case." So they could beat black defendants, you understand. Whether the DA gave "instructions" or "advice," he's broken the law. Boy, it sure is a good thing racism is dead.
Finally, speaking of the non-death of racism, Dan Baum, writing at Harper's, recounts a 20-plus-year-old conversation with former Watergate co-conspirator John Ehrlichmann where Mr. Ehrlichmann why President Nixon embarked on the first "war on drugs": "The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did." Nice to have first-person testimony, I suppose, and sadly, it makes sense: Mr. Nixon didn't touch the safety net while President precisely because so many folks were in the streets, so a long-term strategy for discrediting them would be important to the Presidents who would dismantle the safety net. (This covers only the first few paragraphs of Mr. Baum's article, by the way; the rest is a lengthy and thoughtful argument favoring drug legalization.)
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