The Internet is Killing the Mainstream Media

• I think the train wreck of the 2016 election is the result of a shift in medium from broadcast TV to internet.  Other medium shifts in history were shifts from manuscripts to printing, from printing to broadcast radio and from broadcast radio to broadcast TV.  The shift to the internet from broadcast TV has removed all of the barriers to entry in news and commentary.  This website is an example of how anybody can be a pundit now.  The broadcast networks and, to a lesser extent, the big national daily newspapers, have lost their gate keeper oligopoly.   They used to be able to control what was "news" and what wasn't.  With the onset of the internet, circulation or broadcast audience no longer is fixed by location or logistics.   Your writing is available to anybody on the net, world wide.
  
  The reaction of the former gate keepers to their loss of power has been pretty poor.  It could be characterized as "more cowbell," from the Saturday Night Live Christopher Walken skit.  They have tried to bend the news even further than they used to, so they can prove to themselves that they still have the power, and so that they can push political outcomes in the direction they prefer.  It didn't work in 2016.
  
  After the election, when their scam was known to have failed, the TV networks and big daily newspapers started talking about the unreliability of "fake news" in order to reclaim some of their lost market share and lost political influence.  It backfired when they all started reporting on a dossier that contained demonstrably false "facts."  My favorite was that the dossier said Trump's lawyer, Michael Cohen, had met Russian agents in Prague.  That fell apart when Michael Cohen showed he had never been to Prague in his life.
  
  The traditional mainstream media, or what I call the Pravda Press, is struggling with a loss of influence and a failing business model at the same time.  I think the two are interrelated.  There's only one network, FOX and only one national daily newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, that take a more or less Republican editorial position on news.  Everyone else is competing for the progressive half of the country.  It's really crowded on the left, and there just aren't enough chairs over there when the music stops for all of the Pravda Press to take a seat.
  
  The internet is providing free news on demand.  The expense of offering an internet news article or editorial is very low.  Services like Al Monitor that use local people to report foreign news are beating out competitors that have to pay for foreign news bureaus or traveling reporters.  Competition from low overhead internet sites is killing the high overhead broadcast TV and radio networks and the national daily newspapers.  Their behavior is likely to get more erratic as their death throes continue.

9th Circut Says They Need Proof of Terrorism

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decided not to take any judicial notice of terrorist organizations in Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen. The court insists that these nations must be presumed to have no terrorists until the Trump administration proves otherwise. I believe this presumption of innocence for countries is a judicial first, but it makes sense for the most liberal appeals court in the US. The lack of proof of terrorist activity in these 7 countries is the basis of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upholding the injunction against Trump's immigration ban.  Like the Red Queen in "Through the Looking Glass," sentence first, trial afterwards. They decided on the outcome, then worked backwards to find a justification. Permit me to demoralize these judges by saying that ignoring terrorist presence in these countries destroys their credibility and authority. You really need blinders to come to this conclusion. I would call it a willful suspension of reality.

The facts of the case are that Trump banned entry for citizens of 7 countries.  The countries are Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen.  The countries are not named in the executive order itself.  Instead they are incorporated in the order by reference to a law, "countries referred to in section 217(a)(12) of the INA, 8 U.S.C. 1187(a)(12)."  These nations were all singled out as exceptional security risks in the Terrorist Prevention Act of 2015 and its 2016 extension.   The list came from President Obama's Homeland Security Department.  The order applied to all citizens of these countries.  It did not mention religion. 

http://www.npr.org/2017/01/31/512439121/trumps-executive-order-on-immigration-annotated

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the injunction by saying that the Trump Administration had not presented any evidence that these counties had terrorists in them.  Given that the list of countries was taken from two laws passed by Congress, there should not have been any requirement to prove to the 9^th Circuit that these countries harbor dangerous terrorists.  Congress and the President have both made that finding.  The original judge that issued the injunction did not present any legal reasoning at all to justify his decision in his 7 page opinion.

The law, the Immigration Act of 1924, as amended in 1952, says, "Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate."

http://time.com/4656940/donald-trump-immigration-order-1952/

As far as religion being a qualification for entry, it has been used that way in the past.  It's part of having a well founded fear of persecution.  I know a lot of former Soviet Jews who were granted visas to the US because of their religion, which made it hard for them to live in the Soviet Union.  Nobody thought that was unlawful discrimination. The Lautenberg Amendment, enacted in November 1989, lowered the burden of proof of persecution for Soviet Jews, Evangelical Christians, and members of the Ukrainian Catholic and Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church to obtain refugee status to the United States.⁶ These groups would have "strong likelihood of qualifying for admission to the United States as refugees because their groups have a history of persecution." It required immigration officers to consider whether "historical circumstances" might give refugees a "credible basis for concern," rather than the "well-founded fear" they had been required to prove. Some believed the amendment made every Soviet Jewish emigre a potential refugee.

http://cis.org/RefugeeResettlement-SovietJewry

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has found that foreigners, who have never ever been to the US, have a right to enter, which the President of the US can't take away even though he is authorized by law to do so when he believes they may be a threat to national security.

Perhaps any federal judge in a lower court who has been reversed on three cases (3 strikes) in the final case outcome, whether in the Appellate Courts or the Supreme Court, should be subject to removal by a majority of both Houses of Congress.  This would take a Convention of the States, but it would be a way to check judges who repeatedly ruled on what they would like the law to be, rather than what the law is. I think if the rule were in place today, the 9th Circuit would have very different judges.

Trump's Tweets Don't Top Obama's Arrogant Speeches

Progressives say Trump is a puffed up know it all.  But Trump doesn't sound anything like President Obama. Surely you remember when Obama said this:
“I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.”
http://www.politico.com/.../stories/1012/81895_Page2.html... 

As if that wasn't enough, President Obama sounds like Moses in his one:
"...generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth."
http://obamamessiah.blogspot.com/.../this-was-moment-when...

Trump is a businessman. He is used to hiring advisors who have the guts to tell him what they really think. Rince Priebus and Steve Bannon were not hired to agree with Trump, and they certainly don't agree with each other. He is impetuous, but he adapts to conditions and learns from his mistakes. If he did not, Trump wouldn't have recovered from his first bankruptcy. You can succeed in politics as a one man band surrounded by yes men and women. You can't do that in business. You drown in red ink as your competition steals your market.

I voted for Trump because I thought he was my only chance to restore Constitutional government. Trump's appointment of Judge Gorsuch is a strong indicator that Trump wants to do exactly that. I think a lot of the progressive fear of Trump is the realization that he has all of the pen and phone powers usurped by President Obama. The last 8 years have seen Congress reduced to complete impotence while executive orders, regulatory overreach and rogue courts made the necessary changes to laws like Obamacare to keep the poorly drafted law afloat. The fact that much of Obamacare and Dodd-Frank can be undone the same way scares the fecal fertilizer out of progressives.

At this point it's also quite clear that progressives think the Constitution is a hindrance and they want it subverted and overturned. For example, there's an article in Foreign Policy Magazine that discusses ways to get rid of Trump. The final way mentioned is a military coup that overthrows Trump. The author, Rosa Brooks, is a professor of law at Georgetown University. This kind of dream, combined with the last 8 years of shredding the Constitution to serve the fierce urgency of now is what the fight is really all about. 
http://foreignpolicy.com/.../3-ways-to-get-rid-of.../

Trump's style is abrasive and abusive. In normal times, he would not have come close to winning. However, these aren't normal times. Our system of government as a Constitutional Republic is seriously threatened by unchecked power in the executive branch and its regulatory agencies aided and abetted by judges who decide what they would like the law to be, rather than what the law is. Voting for Trump was a Hail Mary pass. So far, the media have been doing the job of watching Trump 24x7 and complaining about every little detail.   There is very little risk that Trump can get out of control.  The alternative, Hillary Clinton, proved during the campaign that there was nothing she could do that was beyond the pale for her supporters and the Pravda press. The choice was between a slim chance and no chance. 

Why Should We Help the Kurds?

Why should we help the Kurds?   Because the Kurds could easily become another democratic island of stability in the Middle East, like Israel.  The Kurds are a group of people united by their own separate language and culture, split between Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Iran. The Kurds are definitely not trying to turn the clock back to the 7^th century. The Kurds are mostly secular Sunni Muslims who believe in religious tolerance.  They also include Kurdish speaking Yazidis, Shiites and Christians.  During the ISIS advances, they took in Arab refugees without regard for religion, Christians, Shiites and Sunnis.  They helped organize, train and arm Yazidis and Arab Christian militias.  They have women fighters in their militia units, some trained as snipers.  The Kurds even have regular commercial flights from the Kurdish Regional Capital, Erbil, Iraq, to Tel Aviv, Israel.  The Kurds are as close as you can get to democratic tolerant folks outside of Israel.  Iraqi Kurds are extremely pro American.  They believe the US saved them from annihilation when Saddam Hussein was lashing out after the first Gulf War.  They are trying to get as close to us as they can.  

The Kurds have been the most effective military units fighting ISIS.  In Syria, they are so reliable that it’s an embarrassment.  The Kurds have to recruit and train Sunni Arab defense forces to control the Arab villages they capture from ISIS.  While the villagers are happy ISIS is gone, they will not accept a Kurdish occupation.  To keep the villages free of ISIS, the villagers need weapons and training.   ISIS never captured any Kurdish weapons in working condition during their original advances.  When Kurdish militia retreats it's because they're out of ammo or taking horrendous casualties. 

Original Article (May require subscription):

https://www.wsj.com/articles/syrian-kurds-deserve-a-seat-at-the-negotiating-table-1483914439#lf_comment=181780162:632979006